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Google search engine placement depends on literally hundreds of interdependent factors. In order to derive a sound understanding and achieve better search engine placement, you need to first understand some of Google’s basic workings.

Here’s a good summary of how Google evaluates web pages:

1.) It looks for pages with the exact keywords first.

2.) It looks for pages that have the keywords close together second.

3.) It looks for pages that have the keywords scattered around
the pages third.

4.) It looks for word stems.

5.) It looks for links pointing at the pages with the keywords listed in the links.

6.) Pages with links to them with the words in them but not necessarily close together.

When considering ranking order, Google considers all the following items (in addition to literally thousands of other secret criteria that are also part of the Google algorithm).

1.) A word in a certain position is worth more than a word in another position (title vs. text body, etc).

2.) A word in a certain format is worth more than a word
in another format (Bold, italicized, larger size, regular text, etc).

3.) Heading text ( H1, H2, etc, tags)

Stay tuned for more information that will assist you with Google search engine placement.

Popularity: 33% [?]

If you’ve read some of my posts in the “Internet Marketing – The Basics” section, you should have a reasonable handle on what search engine optimization is all about at this point. You may remember that search engine optimization is broken down into two seperate parts called “one page optimization” and “off page optimization”.

“On page optimization”  of course, seeks to improve the ability of your site to rank on search engines by making your site’s design more “friendly” to search engines.

What are some of the components that are of huge importance to making your site friendly to search engines? (and by “friendly” I mean that search engines can find, index, and properly rank your website’s pages).

First of all you have make it easy for search engines to find you.

How do you do this?

You have to build your site with a technology that search engines can actually read. Among the technologies that search engines have a high degree of difficulty in reading are flash (which is used to create website animation), javascript, and the use of frames on your website. Plain HTML on the other hand, is easy for search engines to read. Use the technologies that search engines cannot read very judiciously, or better yet, not at all. If you currently use them in excessive amounts, replacing them is a must for best results. Especially if they’re being used in menu systems.

Once you’ve made any necessary changes to the technology of the site, you need to make sure that your site’s menu structure is simple. Experts generally agree that no more than two levels should exist in your site’s navigation structure…this way search engines will have quick access to all your pages. We don’t want the search engines to have to dig deep to find the pages you want ranked, do we?

With #1 and #2 checked off your list, I also highly recommened that you submit a sitemap of your website to the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN). That way you won’t be relying on their the search engine “crawlers’ or “robots” to find your website on their own from links to your site from other sites. They’ll effectively have a “table of contents” of your site on file – and this will improve the odds of your site’s pages being indexed in search engines and the list of pages you have indexed will be more complete.

Stay tuned for more on page optimization tips in the future.

Popularity: 28% [?]

There’s no one form of marketing throughout the social media channel that you can say works “best”.  It really depends on the type of business that you’re in.

To start things off, it’s important to understand what types of marketing are actually available through social media channels.

1.) Social media paid advertising opportunities: Most all social media sites offer paid advertising opportunities through vehicles such as banner ads. Some more targeted than others. For instance, instance, Facebook’s advertising system will actually allow you to target your ad by country, age ranges, male or female, with certain hobbies or interests appearing on their profiles, etc. This gives you the added benefit of having only the exact group of individuals you’ve specified able to see your advertisement when logged on to Facebook. This contrasts with other social media sites such as MySpace and Bebo, who don’t offer the same ability to “drill down” into your exact target audience.

2.) Social media pages or groups for businesses: Another popular method of advertising on social media websites includes starting a page (for a business) or a group. This gives your business the ability to post relevant details about your product or service, post news about your company, updates, solicit user feedback through surveys, etc. You can even engage your customers by means of a blog, and have them contribute content to it. Pages and Groups often allow you to invite people who may be interested in what your business has to offer, to join your page or group….and the more members the better!

The KEY is to offer something of VALUE to your audience.

You’ll quickly find that if you don’t offer anything of value, they won’t stick around and your social media strategy will not succeed.

Furthermore, if your group or page screams “I WANT TO SELL YOU SOMETHING”, your visitors will run for the hills.

Groups and pages are used to engage users and provide them with something of value. Period.

If they like what you’re up to, provide them with an outlet to get more information, and develop a deeper relationship with your company.

3.) Create a social media application. By creating an application that truly has the ability to both engage and maintain the interest levels of users businesses are now able to engage users in new and exciting ways. The key again, is the entertain and engage your target audience in new and exciting ways. Brainstorm with colleagues, family and friends – and try to come up with an idea for an application that will really resonate with your target audience and have them engage with your brand in different ways.

Applications on Facebook (using Facebook once again as an example) include games, educational applications, and applications to help people communicate and express themselves in new and different ways.

The “Facebook Marketing Bible” states that building an application is often the most powerful way to interact with your audience on Facebook (and social media in general in my opinion).

Application developers must proceed with caution however. At one point last year, there were over 40,000 applications on Facebook alone, and that number grows steadily all the time. It’s true that the vast majority of inferior quality and get very little attention, however, so if you’re able to lauch a quality application that can truly excite people – you still have a nice window of opportunity to engage a new audience throughout social media.

My recommendation for any company that is planning a social media campaign is this:

1.) Try some paid advertising on some of the more well known social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Test these sites out in small dollar amounts and test your return on investment. (Make sure you’ve got some tracking in place before embarking on your campaign). The more targeted you’re able to make your advertising the better, but realize you’ll be paying a premium for the targeting ability.

2.) Set up a group on some of the above sites and include as many interesting features on your group page as possible, geared to your target audience. Attract users through events (very important) and through invitation (make sure you’ve qualified who you’re inviting as someone who will most likely be interested in your group). When you’ve done these two things, provide a mechanism for users to provide you with ongoing feedback on your business via your page. (Note: This works particularly well if you’re in the midst of developing a product/service and you’re looking for rapid product feedback). 

3.) After performing steps #1 & #2 decide whether it is appropriate for your company to launch an application on social media websites. As a general rule of thumb, if you’re business sells or markets a product/service to other businesses, you may not want to invest much time on social media marketing- particularly application development, as you’re dealing with a consumer based audience in social media vs. a business audience.

On the other hand…if you sell your products/services to consumers AND you have brainstormed what you think is a great idea for a social media application AND you have someone who can produce a high quality application for you, I’d advise you to proceed.

Often, applications can be produced at low cost, and if people find them interesting, they will spread virally throughout Facebook, accumulating more and more users in the process. (assuming you’ve designed the application to take advantage of Facebook’s viral capabilities…more on that later).

 

Popularity: 16% [?]

Similar to traditional marketing methods, Internet marketing can take many forms.

When starting out, it is often a difficult task for businesses to navigate this confusing terrain and get some clear cut answers on what forms of Internet marketing will work best for their business. Often a search for information on Internet marketing can leave people more confused than when they began their research – and authors tend to use technical jargon to explain themselves – assuming that the average business person knows what they’re referring to.

This blog was created to solve that problem.

In plain English then, here are some of the important types of Internet marketing methods to evaluate for your business:

1.) Your website: Owning a website (by itself) will not get you the results you’re looking for…but it’s the foundation upon which most businesses build their Internet marketing strategy.  Important considerations for your website include user friendliness, professional, match your industry, match your brand identity, reliable (you must have a reliable hosting company in place to host your site), secure (if processing online payments or dealing with confidential information), grammatically sound, search engine friendly and engaging.

2.) Email: An email marketing list can be an online marketer’s single largest asset. There are many excellent programs available for sale that help businesses to store and organize email contact information for a company’s clients and prospects. These email programs include a variety of different functions including standardized email templates (so you don’t have to design your own), email tracking options (who has opened your email, etc), broadcast email options and so forth.

3.) Paid advertising: Paid advertising can come in a variety of forms online. Some of the most common methods are banner ads, text ads, and Google Adwords advertising.  In the case of Google Adwords advertising, they are viewable on the right hand column of the page when you do a Google search for a particular keyword or string of keywords. Through Google’s program you can bid on having your business information in the form of a website link -placed in the right column search results screen when someone does a search on Google. An example would be having your flower shop’s website brief text advertisement and link appear on the page when somebody does a search for “Flower orders”. Charges for Google Adwords work on a bid basis (supply and demand driven) and usually range from $.05-$1.00 per click that your website attracts, but can also run a lot more for very competitive keywords. The exact charges will depend on how competitive the bidding is on the keywords you wish to bid on.

4.) Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Search engine optimization is commonly referred to as ”organic” search, versus the pay-per-click, which is referred to as ”paid” search results advertising. In a nutshell, search engine optimization is the act of achieving high rankings within popular search engines for your website, or web page. Google and Yahoo! own the lion’s share of Internet traffic, (about 80%) with smaller market share held by MSN and a few other players. Search engine optimization is broken down into “on site optimization” or “on page optimization” and “off page optimization”. On page optimization consists of making your website search engine friendly so that search engines can find it and index your pages in their search results while off page optimization focusses on how to gain higher rankings through activities such as building inbound links to your website. (the more relevant the website and more popular it is, the better).

5.) Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing is essentially the act of deriving traffic for your website through referrals from other websites that have in interest in promoting your product or service. For instance, if you sell running shoes, you could cultivate online partnerships with a blogger who runs a blog about running. By asking that individual to install a link on his website to promote your brand of shoes, the blogger might receive a fee of $1.00 for every qualified visitor who visits your website, wanting to learn more about your shoes. Affiliate marketing can be a highly effective way of marketing a product over the web, especially if the commission you are willing to pay provides significant motivation for affliates. Like pay-per-click, affiliate marketing tends to be most effective in promoting with higher ticket, higher margin products, as commission payments can be more generous (increasing affiliate partner motivation levels to refer leads to your business) and once commission is paid to affiliates, you’ll have ample profit left over for yourself to make the arrangement worthwhile.

Another way to think of affiliate marketing – to use a tradional analogy – is to view them as commission based salespeople who can sell your products or services.

6. ) Press Releases: The Internet is a great vehicle for press release distribution. Many businesses have shown significant success in distributing press releases over the Internet through Internet - based wire services – and by building their own list of writers, reporters, editors and bloggers and distributing newsworthy articles that they might be interested in posting, directly to them. Often, press releases are used within the off page portion of a website’s search engine optimization strategy, as search engines like PDF files, and planting links back to your website at the end of articles are a powerful way of generating higher rankings for your website for desired keywords.

To learn more about the various types of Internet marketing availble, along with additional details on the methods listed, sign up for our free newsletter.

Popularity: 18% [?]

There’s a lot of buzz surrounding social media in marketing circles these days. 

Social media marketing, quite simply, is marketing through the social media “channel”.  Some of the largest social media websites include Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Orkut and Friendster. The purpose of these websites is generally to allow users to communicate with each other (often across the globe) while allowing them to share their interests and hobbies with friends and family quickly and easily.

Another category of social media sites include social bookmarking sites such as Digg.com - where users can effectively vote on the most popular site posts, with the ones getting the most votes, appearing at the top of the page.

The general theme that tends to encapsulate all social media sites, is that the experience offered by the social media site is very much user-driven.

Social media websites have become so popular in recent years, that the once thought of “killer application” for the Internet- email – is now seeing it’s popularity supplanted by Facebook’s internet email and messaging service. After all…if all your contacts are within Facebook, and the site offers other benefits apart from just messaging, maybe it’s easier to use it Facebook to communicate instead of email!

Popularity: 3% [?]

Hi All,

In these turbulent times, many companies seek to cut back their marketing efforts to save a buck.

Depending on what type of financial position you’re in, a cutback may be a necessity for your company. In most cases however, cutting back marketing isn’t essential….and it isn’t necessarily wise.

Let me elaborate on this point a little bit further.

The most successful businesses and individuals, although seemingly conventional in their methods (herd mentality) are most often actually unconventional.

Take Warren Buffet for example.

While most think of Warrent Buffet as a relatively conservative blue chip investor, who uses a buy and hold strategy and invests for the long term in businesses that he understands back-to-front, he’s actually more contrarian than we think. For recent back up evidence I can point to his multi billion dollar investment in Goldman Sacks and GE. A recent investment in late 2008 totalled about 6 billion. That’s a huge chunk of his net worth, seeing as he recently signed over roughly half of his net worth (estimated at about 30 billion) to Bill Gates’ global charity.

While most people were cashing out of the markets, Buffet was moving in. Big.

After all, you can’t achieve the returns that he’s achieved by being like the rest of us. You have to work from a lower cost base and allow yourself significantly more upside.

Shrewd businesses also see this market downturn as a land grab opportunity. While their competitor’s businesses slash marketing budgets and cocoon themselves into a quasi hybernation, street smart marketers are engaging in a veritable land grab. And they’re topping up on Internet Marketing.  

Internet Marketing offers several advantages over traditional marketing. Some of which are:

1.) Generally much more cost effective than traditional marketing methods.

2.) Internet marketing is can be tracked and tested quickly and easily.

3.) Investing in a strategy often presents a long term payoff, in contrast to traditional marketing methods. (ex: SEO and Affiliate Marketing partnerships often carry long term residual payouts vs. campaigns in radio, television or print which carry short term payouts – and spending must continue heavily to draw additional payoff).

4.) It’s flexible and easy to update.

I could go ON and ON….

All that being said, I would encourage small businesses to keep Warren Buffet’s strategy in mind. I invite you to apply a contrarian philosophy to your business.

Mike.

Popularity: 3% [?]