EPIC states BUZZ and Google is being “deceptive” and this violates consumer protection laws. “Twitter is a social networking site and people know what they are signing up for. With Gmail, users signed up for an e-mail service not a social networking service,” said Ms. Nguyen in an interview with the BBC

The complaint has asked the FTC to force Google to provide Gmail users with opt-in consent to the Google Buzz service  as well as provide notice and require consent from Gmail users before making changes to their privacy policy in the future.

I know it must seem like I am on an anti-Google tirade as of late but not only did Google automatically sign you up for BUZZ, they also created your circle of friends based on who you have emailed.

I am sorry Google, but don’t you think that should be my choice? Seems Google wanted to have an instant “Facebook” style platform to serve it’s ads and because you have a Gmail account, they signed you up for BUZZ without your permission.

Picture this, your automatic circle of friends just included all of your business contacts and your competitors because you have exchanged email with them in the past. Perhaps you are in talks with a new employer and your boss and the HR dept. of the new company are among your friends for all to see??

Are you being faithful in your relationship??

So what did Google have to say?

Google has apologized and said it has acted quickly to address concerns and introduced a new option to disable the service.

“If it becomes clear that people don’t think we’ve done enough, we’ll make more changes,” Todd Jackson, product manager for Google Buzz told BBC News.

He also stated that “tens of millions” of users were “rightfully upset” and that the firm was “very, very sorry”.

What I want to know is: If  Google agrees that I am “rightfully upset” why did they violate my privacy in the first place?

In an interview with BBC News, Mr Jackson admitted that testing of the service had been inadequate and that it was not opened up to a big enough group of people to try out.

“We’ve been testing Buzz internally at Google for a while. Of course, getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn’t quite the same as letting Gmail users play with Buzz in the wild.”

This example of blatant disregard of privacy totally debunks Google’s stance or the protection of, and right to privacy they expressed with China over the hacking of a few Gmail accounts said to be owned by human rights activists. There obviously is no need for any hacking, Google is more than willing to hand your list of contacts over to anyone and do what it sees fit with your personal information.

As an owner of a marketing company, if I sign you up for a Gmail account (which is required for an Adwords account) and your privacy rights are violated, I could be held liable!

“This case illustrates a lot about Google’s corporate culture where a company is run by computer scientists whose operating method is don’t ask for permission when you can always ask for forgiveness,” said John Simpson from EPIC. This statement could not be any closer to the truth.

If you have read my last article, you will see this exact mentality represented in the administration of Adwords accounts. It is becoming more and more obvious Google is taking it upon themselves to dictate who can be found in search results and what features your are being subscribed to. Top that off with the inability to cancel an Adwords account or remove your financial information from it… I think you can see why we our opinion of Google has soured.

Unfortunately dealing with them and doing what is required to get good organic rankings has become a necessary evil.

My company firmly believes in the sacred right to privacy of all our clients and we will not jeopardize that without your written consent when providing you with services offered by Google as they are clearly demonstrating time and time again violations of the rights you have to protect you private information.

For a long time Google has been preaching it’s strive to “return relevant results” to searchers and for the most part, compared to past search engines, it has delivered on that promise. Where Google has fallen short is in the realm of local search. Google “maps” and “local business results” were to be a search miracle for small, local business, but proved to be one of the company’s biggest embarrassments with the ease in which the local business results can be “spammed”. Since Bing was launched, Microsoft has delivered on its promise of more relevant results and has demonstrated the superior ability for small businesses to be found locally on the Internet and that ability is resulting in more conversions from a search engine with a smaller market share.

In my 6 months of testing Bing and Google side by side the results are much different than I expected. Using our company website, www.mymarketingcompany.com, and its many interior pages, I created a comprehensive list of the keywords used in the company pages and with the help of a tool from SEO Book called “Rank Checker”, I was able to compare the indexing and search results ranking of my company’s web pages side by side between the three major players in the search arena.

The overall goal in website development is to have the pages of the website indexed by the search engines for the keywords they are optimized for, and to have those pages rank well in search results of searches using those keywords. If a search engine delivers on its stated goal, to deliver the most relevant search results for keyword search queries and your web pages are relevant to that search query, they will be displayed in the search results. The more relevant the information on the page, the higher it will rank.

Well, in theory anyway but unfortunately for Google results, this has not been the case.

So who is doing a better job? Google supporters will be quick to bang the gong for Google and Microsoft supporters will be quick to cheer for Bing as you would expect, but the proof is in the results and the results of my study were quite interesting to say the least. Due to the disparity in the search results I need to separate them into two categories, local search and national search.

Local search is defined as any search query that a searcher will expect a result for a business located in his/her metro area. For example: Searching for landscaping company.

National search is defined as any search query that a searcher will not expect a result in any geographical location. For example: Searching for deals on airline tickets.

Local Search

For most small business in America this is the search category they are most concerned with as is our company. I optimize our company web pages for the service and geographical location we wish to provide a particular service in. Within those locations I have competitors so I would expect to see their web pages along side mine in search results.

What I used for my criteria as a means to “grade” a search engines ability to return relevant results was its ability to filter irrelevant web pages that contain the words that are used in the search query but the context of the web page is blatantly irrelevant to the intended search context. A search for “Sarasota Billboard Advertising” (which is only one of the 55 search terms used in the study) should display relevant results for companies that provide billboard advertising in the Sarasota area.

It would seem to be a simple exercise, right? Well the results will amaze you.

Let’s start with the 600 pound gorilla – Google. With 70 percent of searches being performed on Google, and as long as they have been providing Internet search services, you would expect them to be the master of search. Unfortunately the study proved otherwise. Google’s local results were, to put it bluntly, surprisingly pathetic. So pathetic in fact that our page dedicated to copywriting ranked number two in the search results of “Sarasota billboard advertising”.  On the copywriting page the only instance of the keywords “billboard advertising” was a link to the billboard advertising page. There was no other mention of the word “billboard” anywhere in the title, description, headers, or anywhere else on the page yet it ranked number two. Our web page on billboard advertising, which is loaded with variants of the keywords “billboard advertising” as well as “billboard advertising” being occurring in the URL extension, ranked 59. Our web page on billboard advertising also has more external one-way links to it than our copywriting page and backlinks are supposedly how Google measures the “importance” of a webpage.

Our competition did not rank any better, the number one billboard vendor did not even rank in Google, but their AdWords ad did… Seems rather easy to optimize a small add for correct keyword placement so then why does Google have such a hard time with a webpage?? I also found it highly peculiar that the website for the national media company, CBS, whom is the owner of the billboards in our area, was nowhere to be found in search results unless you performed the search inside quotation marks.

There are only 8 “local” companies providing billboard advertising in our community yet only 3 out of the top 11 search results were company web pages developed specifically for promoting billboard advertising services of some kind and I am stretching credit being given. Two were for mobile billboard ads, and one was for an aerial tow-behind-a-biplane banner company. The rest were just pages that contained the search keywords but not necessarily the context you would expect in a search for billboard advertising.

When you look at the data collected in the study, you are left to make an assumption as to the reason the most relevant pages of keyword search terms are being buried so far in search results. The study suggests this burial of relevancy is a means for Google to force the owners of the most relevant pages to either pony up and pay the “ransom” for an AdWords campaign or not be seen in search results. Of all the web pages we randomly examined, only 10 percent of those pages actually ranked in a position that would have a good chance of being seen, well, appeared within the first 3 pages of search results. This was not only endemic to our company pages, but also the pages of our competitors and other product and service providers.

Bing results were miles more impressive and much more relevant to the search query. Five of the top 10 search results were links to company pages intended to promote billboard advertising services in Sarasota, the remaining 4 out 5 were secondary links by online advertising services pointing to the same landing pages of the companies in Sarasota providing billboard advertising services.

Of our 55 keyword terms used in the study, we found Microsoft’s Bing to consistently display more relevant local business search results for a search query than Google. Google only indexed the correct page for the correct keyword term 27% of the time compared to correct indexing by Bing 76% of the time.

Accurate indexing of local content equals relevant and accurate results for search queries. It would appear that Bing’s indexing relevancy for local content is 3 times more accurate than Google’s.

National search relevancy

For national search terms we used 40 keywords and found there to be no major difference in overall search relevancy. For example the word “oyster” returned the results we expected for a single keyword. The results were quite evenly spread out among the most popular uses of the word oyster. From the edible bi-valve, to Oyster yachts, to Oyster hotels, the results were nearly identical.

However for our study Google performed slightly better in our relevancy standards of indexing and returning pages where content matched the keyword context 73 percent of the time compared to Bing’s 69 percent.

In Summary

Though it is not as obvious in highly competitive search terms, It has become extremely apparent Google is monetizing local search to its benefit. Relevancy on a local level seems to be second seat to selling pay per click ads. Google clearly has a better ability to match context relevancy to its search results than it is currently providing but instead has tweaked the algorithms to bury a large percentage of relevant pages so far in the search results that many local business owners must opt of an AdWords ad to be seen by consumers interested in their services. When you add that to the SEO circus Google has turned the Internet into, it is hard to maintain that warm and fuzzy feeling Google once provided its users. This writer firmly believes the game is rigged at the expense of local small business owners who can not afford an expensive AdWords campaign.

Google maps may have helped some businesses but with the ease of ability to spam the local map results it can not be deemed reliable in terms of relevancy or very reassuring that you are actually finding a local business rather than a referral service. The more “reviews” and the higher your “ratings” the higher you will place in the local search map. It really is as easy as getting all your friends to write a review for your business and you will be at the top of the list. I am sure many of you have heard of the locksmith referral examples that have swept the media, it was a referral service that had spammed the results and the same service was coming up in multiple metro areas nationwide and often had 20+ listings in each city.

Obviously Google and Matt Cutts’ war against spam has proved to be a complete joke when it comes to local search. They have done more to hurt the small local business owner than any large Internet company has ever done in the past by allowing the abuse to continue and remain in their search results. At one point in time the Internet held significant promise for affordable local business advertising only to be taken away by typical corporate greed. Google AdWords has gone from an opt-in form of advertising on the internet if you wanted more traffic, to nearly a required one if you want any traffic at all.

What is particularly perplexing is the fact that Google is aware of the problem with local search yet they do nothing to remedy the situation. It seems this further supports the monetization theory. If Google created something that was too good at returning relevant results to service and product seekers, the vendors of those products and services would have no reason to participate in an AdWords campaign.

An interesting side note; Microsoft physically mailed a letter to my company for us to confirm our location and business “existence” by sending us a pin number to verify our listing within Bing’s webmaster tools. Obviously Microsoft is determined to deliver a more relevant local search result and spam free user experience to the users of the new Bing search engine. Though I have never been a big fan of Microsoft or it’s products due largely to its “bully” mentality while Gates was in control, it would seem the “new” Microsoft is seriously working on its image and starting to produce the products computing consumers expect with its introduction of Bing, Windows 7, their push to a more standards compliant web browser, as well as working with the W3c in development of the next web standards.

Since July, my business has received roughly 80 percent of its Internet leads from a search engine that only occupies 10 percent of all searches conducted on the Internet.

And best of all, all those leads from Bing were free.

Be thankful Bing is replacing Yahoo. Perhaps then many of us local business owners will no longer be held for ransom as we are now and we will actually be able to be found on the Internet more readily. That is of course, until Microsoft follows Google’s lead…

September 11, 2009

MyMarketingCompany.com

There are some pretty vast differences between writing copy for print articles and writing copy for the Internet. When writing copy for magazines, newspapers, etc., you focus on conveying compelling information to the reader through the introduction of an idea and a follow through of support. When writing copy for the Internet, you have two “viewers” you need to consider, the person who will be reading your website, and the robot that has been sent by the search engines.

Writing copy for your Internet searchers is all well and good if they can find the information you are publishing. If you do not consider how that information is found, your website and its information will be lost somewhere in the Internet abyss never to be seem by anyone.

There are two very distinct styles of writing between print media and website. Think of a pyramid, print copywriting begins at the top of the pyramid. An idea is conveyed and as you progress through the article more substance supporting the idea is revealed and ends with a summary.

Internet copywriting is completely opposite. Invert the pyramid. Cover the most important information first and work your way down to a basic subject. Website readers form an opinion of your website is a matter of seconds, if you can not grasp their attention immediately with the information that is relevant to their search, they will navigate away for your page and find one that will.

Search robots “read” the information the same way. The subject of your website is mined in the first few lines of text in your HTML code. If you do not effectively describe the content of your website in the first few lines, your website will not be indexed the way you hope it is.

HTML copywriting structure follows this hierarchy:

• The page title: This is the information described between the <title> </title> tags found between the <head></head> section of your website. It is also the first line of the search results. You have a limit of 80 characters, including spaces, for your title. You need to include the most important keywords that describe your website content as well as a location if your services are limited to a certain city or state. For example here is the title of the homepage for our company website:  <title>Sarasota and Tampa Florida Business Advertising and Internet Marketing Services</title>

• The page description: This is the information contained in the meta description tag of the <head></head> section of your website. You have 160 characters and spaces to give a little more of a broad keyword phrase description of the content of your page. Here is the meta description for my website: <meta content=”Our company based in Sarasota and Tampa can help your business maximize its marketing efforts through a professional partnership of marketing consultants ” />.

• The heading tag or “headline”: This is typically the first text your viewer will see on your web page and it begins in the <body></body> section of your website. Here is our company headline tag: <h1> Advertising and Internet Marketing Services for Sarasota and Tampa Florida Businesses</h1>.

• Paragraphs: <p>The first paragraph plays a critical role in the optimization of your website. <b>The keyword phrase content, and elements used to display the text are essential</b> to optimizing your copy for the search engines. The first 160 characters of the first paragraph are the most important real-estate on your website and I will often use the same text that is in my “Meta Description” as the beginning sentence of my first paragraph</p>.

If you properly imbed the most relevant keyword terms of your website within those four sections, you will begin to ensure your website will be indexed properly for the terms most relevant to the content of your site. These four sections will be the make or break difference of you being found in search results by people most interested in the information on your page.

In part two of this Internet copywriting series I will discuss keyword optimization and proper placement of keywords throughout your website.

www.MyMarketingCompany.com

I have written a few articles about the specifics of SEO techniques but I still get a lot of emails from people asking me what all the things are they can do to get their Internet website  to rank higher in search results and become a more effective marketing tool, so I created this list of “tips” to be a guide for someone taking a hands on approach to optimizing and promoting their website.

I would suggest you “grade” your site before you begin and try these tips, you can follow your progress toward improvement of your sites SEO by using the web site grading tool found at websitegrader.com.

Assuming of course you have created a good website with useful information and unique content, these are your next steps.

1.  Verify the code in your page using the W3c validation tool and fix the errors.

If a crawler can not easily navigate through your site due to errors in the code you could have some problems. A few errors are probably OK, but if you have 10 or more, you are probably asking for trouble. W3c also has a link checking tool so while you are there, verify your internal links to make sure everything functions properly. A broken link will stop a search engine crawler in its tracks and return an error to the search engine.

2.  Optimize your keywords for the most popular keyword terms if you feel you can compete, if not, optimize for the “mid level” keywords or the ones used some of the time by searchers looking for your goods and services.

Keywords are very important, these are the search terms that people are going to use to find you. Optimize your keywords in your title, H1 and H2 tags and have a variant or two mentioned in your first paragraph as well as the “meta title” and “meta description” in the HTML code. The “mid level” terms will be the middle-ranked keywords using the Google keyword tool. If your main keywords are very competitive, it is better to be seen by some, then not seen at all. You can use an Adwords campaign to be seen in the difficult keyword categories.

3.  Create a blog so you have something to submit to Digg, Blog Catalog, Technorati, EzineArticles, etc. Wordpress is best for the platform, make sure to use the SEO plugin for Wordpress and fill out all the SEO options for an article. (tags, keywords, descriptions, etc.)

Blogs are a good way to be found. The more sites you submit to the better your chances are that you are going to be found and get your site linked to. The more quality links you can create, the better.

4. Submit a sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and Bing (search “sitemap generator” for a free online tool that will create one for you)

With new websites, submitting a sitemap to the search engines helps to expedite the indexing process. Rather than just submitting a site, show the search engines your sites structure.

5.  Write another article for your blog.

The more content you create, the better your chances are of getting linked to.

6.  Participate in forums where the links in the posts have been tagged “index” in the metadata of the forum page.  Post comments and questions and make sure you include links to your website so people and search engines can see you outside your web page. Your posts will help to create vital links to your website which will help with your page rank value over time.

7.  Write another article for your blog

The more content you create, the better your chances are of getting linked to.

8.  Build a Squidoo lens for your website

Squidoo is a neat little site for creating a mini web page and this also helps your website get linked to.

9.  Advertise your business in local magazines.

Most local magazines will also publish links to their advertisers websites on their own page. Not only is the local publicity good, you also get a link the search engines live to see, a one way link from a quality site.

10.  Submit your website to the DMOZ directory.

Though the quality of the DMOZ directory has gone down hill a bit as it is maintained by volunteers, it is free to submit to and if you get in the directory, it certainly will not hurt. Others to consider are:  JoAnt, AboutUs.org, and the Yahoo directory.

11.  Comment on some blog articles related to your business.

Go where your target market hangs out and you will be seen. Don’t forget to hyperlink your name to your website. Don’t just post an http link, use your company name and hyperlink your name to your website. Your company name will give some relevance to the link, create brand awareness, and Google will find the link by the hyperlink you created with your business name.

12.  Get all your friends to bookmark your site in Google Bookmarks and in Yahoo’s Delicious, at least 20 of them.

But make sure you tell them to tag the bookmark with a keyword. For example if you have a jewelry store tell them to tag the bookmark with the word jewelry. This will help other bookmark searchers find you and if you get enough bookmarks it is possible to end up on the popular bookmarks page and this will drive more traffic to your site.

13.  Promote your website on Twitter and Facebook.

Try to get people that run businesses similar to yours to follow you. Tweet your URL on Friday as that is the day most people follow their tweets. It is possible to get a good link this way. Facebook has groups that will be made up of people in your target market.

14.  Write another article for your blog

The more content you create, the better your chances are of getting linked to.

15.  Make sure you have updated all your accounts in Technorati, Digg, Blog Catalog, and EzineArticles

Pretty self explanatory, you need to keep your sites updated for the most impact.

16.  Make some more comments in forums.

Again, hang out where your target market does. It is possible to get some good links this way.

17.  Write another article for your blog

The more content you create, the better your chances are of getting linked to.

18.  Pay PR web for a press release

One of the good things with PRweb is your news release is guaranteed to be shown in yahoo news. A good chance for someone in your market to find you. If you are curious how good your press release is, there is a handy tool located at:  Press Release Grader it will give you some tips on creating a good press release for your business.

19.  Make sure you get a listing on the Yellowpages or Superpages website.

These sites place high in search results so it makes it easier for your customers to find you. It is free to submit your business, though I would opt to spring for their basic package. You can find them here: Superpages and Yellowpages

20.  Pay Yahoo to be listed in their directory

Yahoo is being purchased by Microsoft so it is anyone’s guess what will happen to the directory, for the time being a listing in the Yahoo directory gets you in the yahoo search results. At $299 it is a little pricey but it will get you seen and create another link to your website.

21.  Build a web page on MerchantCircle

I think this is one of the best things a new company can do to be found at the top of the search results. Keep focus on optimizing the keywords in your MerchantCirle site as this is what will determine where your MC listing will be found in search results. I would not invest in their Pay-Per-Click advertising, 80% of the money you pay will go to promoting the MerchantCircle website, not yours. Send connection invitations to the local businesses in your area, you will be able to send coupons to the businesses that accept you invitation.

22.  Write another article for your blog

The more content you create, the better your chances are of getting linked to.

23.  Submit your website to the ZoomInfo  directory.

24. Did I mention you need to write another article for your blog?

25. Include your domain name in any advertising you do. Also, if your domain name is hard to remember, this will hurt you in the long run, a good domain that is easy to remember can be much easier to brand and it also will have some SEO benefit. For example my company domain; www.MyMarketingCompany.com, is much easier for a business owner to remember than the name my company.

A great domain name can become a big part of your website and company “brand awareness”, a business owner that can remember your website domain name will contact you first when they require your goods and services.

___________

Different businesses will have different SEO and marketing requirements, this list of tips will be a good place to start and steer your business in the right direction.

One thing so many business owners forget, in order for your website to be an effective marketing tool, you need to market your website. Focus on getting as many people as you can to see your website, if they like it, they will link to it. The more links to your website you have, the higher your website will place in search results.

If you are looking for a new forum to participate that is new which is a good place for you to be the topic creator rather than a reply poster, you can find it here:  Free Marketing Forum with “follow links”

I created this tool specifically to help people just like you so please take advantage of it, it was a lot of work!

If you are looking for links to business development information (probably the biggest directory of its kind) you can find it here: Business Development Directory

It is also something our company created to help you as a business owner.

You can start your SEO process this very second by posting a comment to this blog. Looking for other articles you can reply to that relate to to this subject? You can find them here: Florida Marketing Consultants Blog

So go ahead, what are you waiting for! Promote your website!

Florida Marketing Consultants

August 2, 2009

http://www.mymarketingcompany.com

OK, so you built this fantastic website, published it, signed up for Google Analytics, check it each day and nothing is happening. Reminds me of a comment I made in previous article how so many people think if you build it they will come… Unless you are McDonald’s, Wall Mart, Home Depot… It just isn’t going to happen.

In that previous article I gave an example of how you can be creative when increasing your content to drive traffic to your website as a means of increasing your ranking in the Search Engine Result Pages or SERP’s for short.

That article can be found here: http://www.mymarketingcompany.com/wordpress/?p=18

In this article I am going to discuss another hands on approach.

The first thing you have to understand is generating traffic takes time. You should be devoting at least 3 hours a week to optimizing your new website, increasing the content by adding additional pages, writing blog articles, and chasing the people you want to look at your new website.

A fantastic way to drive traffic to your website is to write a blog. No matter what you do for business, I am sure there is something you can say about it. For example; you have a dog products business. You sell everything from collars to doggie strollers. You don’t think you can write anything about dog stuff? Sure you can, write an article about your newest product lines, mention some of the outrageous toys you have for sale. Do you sell dog training aids? Pick one and write an article how the aid is best used and what your professional opinion is about it.

Not only does a person that does not own the training aid get to see how it is used,  (which can persuade the buying decision) someone that just purchased one will also find your article informative if they are not sure how to use it.

People who are not your customers, who own dogs, are going to find your articles by searching for information on dog products on the Internet. If they do a search for “training aid reviews” and they find your blog on that training aid, they may become new customers when they discover you sell the product.

If you write an article about any product, mention you sell product in your store. Suddenly you are gaining customers that were not looking for your store, they were looking for information about a certain training aid they want to buy. They found your article, which led them to your store, and now they are your customer. It really is that easy and it works.

Another good way to find customers is by participating in online forums. Business forums about small business development and marketing are fantastic, not only can you learn something but you can promote your business at the same time. Every time you post a question or make a comment in a forum, put a link to your business in your signature. Talk about your business in your replies. Tell everyone “I have a dog product business and this is something that worked for me” or “I have a dog product business, can anyone give me advice how to”…

I am sure you get the idea.

Readers of those forums will own dogs. When they see a post from you and discover you have a dog business and the link is in your signature, they are going to look out of curiosity. If they see something they like, they are going to buy it.

There are a lot of interesting ways you can find customers, the main thing, be creative, get the word out. Someone will see your page and like what you are offering.

My marketing company exists to help people promote their business. That is what we do and nothing else. I write articles to give you, the reader, ideas how to promote your business. On our website we give you free tools to develop and promote your business.

We have over 3000 links to information essential to business and marketing development. It is a virtual library at your fingertips. I would encourage you to look at the directory, it is quite impressive. It is the same information I often use for my clients.

You can find it here http://www.mymarketingcompany.com/links.html

I have also recently added a marketing forum. It is a place where you can get free help and more ideas on marketing strategies, AS WELL AS PROMOTE YOUR BUSINESS! But to promote it you have to participate.

You can find the forum here: http://www.mymarketingcompany.com/forum/

I can not do everything for you unless you are willing to pay me a lot of money to do it. All I can do is give you ideas and some tools to use so you can do it yourself. It is up to you to either do the work or pay someone to do it. If you want your website to be seen, those are the only two choices you have. The internet is a VERY competitive place and you can not hit a home run unless you step up to the plate.

I get a lot of inquiries about web page ranking in search engine results by a lot of my clients so I thought it would be helpful to write a quick article on the subject.

We have all heard the term, build it and they will come. That might work for McDonald’s, however, just having a web page on the internet these days simply is not enough to get the customers you need. If you are representing your business with a single web page that only contains a minimum of information, chances are pretty good it will not be seen in the organic search results of most search engines. Then you find yourself forced to rely on pay-per-click advertising if you want to have your site appear on the first page of relevant search results for the goods or services you provide -  and this can get expensive.

What most business owners think is a simple task of getting their business offerings seen, creating an effective web page that is a highly useful tool for marketing of goods and services is much more complex than it seems.

You have to market your marketing.

Not only do you need to market your business offerings, you also have to effectively market what you are using to market your business.

This is where so many business fall short of achieving an effective internet marketing strategy.

I ask my clients, “Why should consumers do business with you?” and they begin to tell me how good their customer service is, how unique their products are, about the quality of their work, how affordable it is to use their service, how good their food is…

Then I ask them “Why should someone look at your web page?” So they can see what we do. What are you doing to make them want to see what you do? That is usually where I am responded with silence and confusion.

What a lot of business owners do not understand is they are often not the only business offering the goods and services they provide. Search results often display 10 results per page for a search query. For example, if you are a Mexican restaurant in a very large metropolitan area such as Dallas Texas there may be 200 Mexican restaurants for local residents to choose from.

What are the first ten Mexican restaurants in the search results doing to be ranked in the top ten? How did they get there?

They are offering viewers a reason to look at their website, they are offering more than one web page as a point of entry to their website, and they are using search keywords other than “Mexican Restaurant Dallas” to do it.

There is one basic principle that needs to be kept in mind to understand why a web page is in the top 10 search results, POPULARITY. They are the websites that viewers like the best, go to the most often, and can get there the easiest.

Don’t think about marketing the business, market the website.

I don’t know how many times I have said this to a client and had them look at me like I was crazy. “We want the website to market the business!”

First things first. A website is not going to market your business if it can not be found and offers no reason for viewers to look at it. It will not be popular as a result, and it will not come up in the top 10 search results.

What will make viewers want to view your website? CONTENT, VARIETY, and INFORMATION!

If you can create content for your website, it is like waiving a magic wand over it and viewers will come.

This article is a little too short for me to go into a lot of different ways of creating content for various businesses. I am going to stick to the Mexican restaurant example and show a few ways content can be created that is specifically designed to boost the popularity of a website, which eventually will increase it’s placement in search results, so the real customers you are interested in finding – can find you.

Consider interests that are related to what you sell and produce content based on that interest. What is common to a Mexican restaurant? Mexico. If you are from Mexico create a page on your website about the area you are from, some local pictures, points of interest, things to do, great hotels in that area, how to travel there, the favorite local cuisine…

Do you have a recipe that you are willing to share with a viewer? Create a page specifically for that.

What you are doing is creating web page’s within your website that someone looking for information on traveling to Mexico, or a new Mexican dish to try at home will find. They may be located in Colorado and your business is in Texas, but you are creating popularity for your website through content, which will boost the search ranking of your website for the viewers in Dallas Texas.

Multiple Points of Entry

If you are focusing on a few search words for people to find you and drive them to a single web page page for your business, you are limiting who can find you, the search words used to find you, and how many people will find you.

If I enter the search term “Restaurant specials in Dallas” I expect to see in the search results the Dallas restaurants that are offering specials through their website. If I see a Mexican restaurant is offering a free margarita with every dinner and I like margaritas and Mexican food, I am going to look at that website.

Having a web page within your website that is devoted to your restaurant specials, you are creating a side door for viewers to find you based on different search terms and interest. They may not be specifically looking for a Mexican restaurant, they are more interested in specials being offered by restaurants, and because you have a page dedicated to specials, you just found a new customer.

What side doors can you offer your customers? What can you do to make your website popular?

Marketing a website is a complex task, it takes time, effort, and content. The results are not immediate. A local marketing consultant in your area can be a wealth of assistance in proper website development and show you the best ways to market your marketing website.

If you want to see a good example of a website optimized for multiple points of entry, look at our company website located HERE. As you browse through our links you will see that every page has the same header, footer, and link table. If you were not directed to our home page and you entered our site through any of our other link pages, you would think you had found our main page. We have 9 categories of marketing listed in our link table, every page has been optimized for each specific category. If a searcher is looking for internet marketing, the Internet marketing page is what will come up in their search results.

That is a lot of categories which includes a lot of keywords.  How many does your website have?

Looking for free marketing advice? Join our free marketing forum and post your questions HERE.

Roy Hunter

http://www.mymarketingcompany.com

Internet marketing is vastly becoming a mandatory choice for businesses wanting to market their goods and services. Through development of a company website and everything else that is required to get your information in front of the customers that matter the most, the solution to internet marketing has become an increasingly complex one.

For many businesses the days of being located on Main Street and having customers that just walk in the front door are gone. Brick and mortar stores are being replaced by cyber-storefronts of companies whose customers will never know where they are located.

The most basic level of internet marketing is your company’s website. It is your Internet storefront and it alone represents your company, its goods and services, to customers you hope, and need, to get. But how do these potential customers find you?

Having a good website is not enough. It could be the best looking site on the Internet but if your customers don’t see it, they don’t see your company. Not only does a company need to market what it is they are selling, now they also need to market their website.

Several options exist for website marketing. They include:

• Placement in organic search results
• Paid placement in search results
• Paid placement on other websites
• Social site networking
• Direct email marketing

For the moment I want to focus on the topics of paid placement in web results and paid placement on other websites.

The paid placement model in search results works like this; if you are the owner of the Widget Manufacturing Company, you can bid for placement at the top of the search results in the sponsored ad section. Your placement in that section, and how close to number one on the list your ad resides, depends on what you are willing to pay the search engine company each time your ad has been clicked by viewers of your ad that are interested in purchasing your widgets. The ad has a limited life depending on how much per month you are willing to spend and how many users click your ad.

For example; if you have an advertising budget for pay-per-click placement of $200 per month and you bid $5 per click to get the number one spot in the paid results, your add can be clicked 40 times that month before it disappears until the next placement cycle begins. If you receive all 40 clicks in the first 3 days of the month, the other 27 days you can not be seen by your customers. In order for you to be seen all 30 days of the month, you will need to increase your ad budget ten fold to maintain that exposure. Suddenly your add budget has increased to an amount that is more than what you are willing to spend each month to acquire customers. Can your business survive when it can only be seen 3 days a month?

Another alarming statistic by Burlingame market researcher Outsell Inc. suggests that click fraud cost merchants $800 million last year and is a significant enough threat that 27% of merchants are cutting back on click-based advertising.

What is click fraud? Click fraud is when a phantom user, which has no interest in your business, clicks on your ad to generate revenue for the ad host or its affiliate. Many affiliate websites that host pay-per-click advertising get a share of the pay-per-click fee your company is charged each time a user clicks your ad. It’s free money to them, your ad budget gets blown, and you still do not have the customers your business needs to survive.

Though pay-per-click advertising is still a very reliable way of getting customers, business owners that opt for this method need to be aware that the potential for fraud is extreme, and an ever increasing problem within that ad placement model exists if your ad is displayed on affiliate sites.

What I recommend to the clients of my marketing company is a mix of pay-per-click advertising,  fixed placement using a paid-to-perform model, and paid subscription ad.

The paid-to-perform model is simple. Your business info is listed on multiple sites free of charge until a user clicks your ad and completes a transaction of which you agree to a fixed or variable commission only if a sale was completed. Most companies offer a commission from 3% to 15% of the sale to the owner of the host website which hosted the ad that generated the sale. The downfall to this model is the lack of a cap you can place on your monthly ad budget, but if every completed transaction resulted in a profitable sale to your business, the ad budget can be built into your margins to cover the cost of the commissions.

If your ad budget is still a concern and prefer your budget be fixed, you can also opt for a subscription placement. Subscription placement works like this; you pay a website a monthly fee to host your advertisement. They are paid upfront and your ad will be displayed constantly, or randomly, to every viewer of that page during the subscription period. Regardless if you get one sale or fifty, you still pay the same price for the placement of that ad.

Needless to say, marketing your website is a complicated matter especially when the survival of your company depends on it. I advise my clients to diversify their online ad budgets to include a mix of all three. It has proven to be the best solution for marketing your company’s website as well as the goods and services your business provides.

Would you like some free marketing help? Post your questions in our forum HERE.