Anyone who is business savvy knows that the difference between the death and survival of a company is its marketing strategy. Without a comprehensive, strategic marketing strategy, the chances that a business will survive are quite low. This continues to be true to this day, although marketing tactics have changed with technology. Traditional marketing tactics such as print, radio and television advertising are no longer considered to be of the utmost importance, and have instead been eclipsed by internet marketing. Given the fact that the internet has changed the way the world turns, it is crucially important for your business to not only have a high quality website but to market it effectively so as to drive sufficient traffic. Internet marketing is the wave of the future, and will soon determine a business’s lifespan completely.

Building an online presence doesn’t have to be hard, and can basically be boiled down to four different internet marketing tactics: email marketing, Search Engine Optimization (or SEO), Social Media and Paid Ads. By taking advantage of all of these marketing strategies, you will inevitably drive far more traffic to your site than you would otherwise be able to.

Email marketing is an excellent way to drive traffic to your website. Think of email marketing as technology’s answer to direct mail, and you’ll understand how important it can be to boosting your online presence. In fact, email marketing has the highest return on investment among all internet marketing strategies; the bottom line is that it works. However, building a list can take quite a bit of time and resources, which makes email marketing a difficult option for those with limited resources to consider. Nevertheless, email marketing is an important, highly successful form of internet marketing.

SEO, or “Search Engine Optimization” is the new buzzword among businesses looking to improve their internet presence. Optimizing your website for search engines by including back-links and relative keywords in the source code will help Google to better index your site, increasing the chances that your site will grab an early spot on Google’s search lists. Since much of the world navigates the web via search engines, SEO is crucially important to a well-planned internet marketing strategy. However, it needs to be ongoing to be effective, and can take some time before results become apparent. Regardless, SEO is a very important part of effective internet marketing.

Social Media is by far the most popular concept to hit the internet in the last decade, and continues to gain steam and popularity amongst its users. The popularity of social media makes it a perfect breeding ground for marketing your website. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter rely on ads to stay in business, and placing an ad for your website or business will likely result in quite a bit of extra exposure. Social media is especially effective for those who own retail businesses, as it can enhance the brick and mortar feel of your online presence.

Paid advertising is another option. For those who are willing to invest the money, Adwords is an extremely effective service that will result in top rankings on Google. The downside is, your rank disappears as soon as your budget does. If your company has the money, it can be wise to invest in Google Adwords.

One of the well known facts of marketing is that higher visibility always results in better business. This is the reason why most organizations are concerned about the location of their offices and workshops. The same is true for the virtual world and companies that have websites listed on the first page of a search engine will definitely get more hits and subsequently more business as compared to websites that are languishing on the 20th page. This rank on a search engine is not something you can purchase and it is almost completely dependent on Search Engine Optimization commonly known as SEO.
The following are the main criteria that a search engine considers when it decides the rank of a particular website from among the thousands and millions that are pulled up with a particular keyword:

1. The most important thing is the quality of content as this is something that the spiders of the search engine recognize instantly and easily. A website with relevant and unique content will almost always be placed above a website that has concentrated more on the outlay of the site and less on the original content. Search engines reward good content and display these sites above older sites from more reputed organizations. Hence, take care of your content and update it as frequently as possible and the search engines will take care of the page rank of your website.
2. Age of the website is also another key factor as the spiders crawl through older websites more often than they do through the newer ones. Hence, older websites automatically get a higher rank. This can be explained by an analogy from the real world. When you are engaged in business and have to give credit, you are much more comfortable giving credit to someone who has been working with you for years as against someone who has just started to work for you. The same is true for search engines and hence they place priority on an older website over the comparatively newer ones.
3. Other factors that impact the page rank are the frequency of updating the site, value of incoming links and the internal linking structure. Most search engines use a mathematical formula to display more relevant sites over the less relevant options.

The biggest issue is that most search engines take between one to three months to update the results and hence a change that you make today will not immediately impact the rank of your website. SEO is basically a continuous process that involves tweaking various factors and continuously adding quality content. You have to invest a lot of time, effort and money to get the desired results. Moreover, the type of keywords being targeted also makes a huge difference as a common and much used word like “diet” would require longer and more intensive optimization as there are thousands of entries that will be pulled up with this word. The bottom line is that SEO is not a 100 meter dash but a long and continuous marathon and the only winners are those who keep at it for prolonged periods of time and do not give up hope and stop.

Do you thing an optimized website will get good amount of traffic or that if a site ranks on the first page of search engine listings, it will get high traffic? It’s a good start, you also need to promote your site to get the targeted traffic.

There are websites that rank on page 1 for numerous keywords and still have minimal traffic. The bottom line is that high search engine rankings is no guarantee of getting high traffic. It is true that rankings are important for driving traffic, but that is not the only factor. There are many other factors that ensure you get many qualified visitors on your website. Let’s find out what entails ideal website design and promotion.

1. Website Design

The design is the first thing your visitor will see when landing on your site. Design tells them whether the company is professional and serious about its business. Instantly the visitor forms an impression. We provide you great looking, SEO friendly and user friendly website designs customized to your needs. If you need a content management system, we can do that also for you.

2. Search Engine Optimization

When your site is being designed, make sure SEO guidelines are being followed during the design stage. Otherwise, it will lead to rework later. All “on page” optimization activities can be done along with design. This ensures that your website will be found by those who are looking for products and services you offer. Typically when you hire a web design firm, that’s all they do is design the website. There is no SEO or even planning for SEO involved. A website should be optimized during the design stage. If you would like a website optimized after the design stage, it will be more costly because it may involve a redesign. When you choose us as your website design company, we also ensure that optimization techniques are implemented at the onset to maximize your return on investment.

3. Internet Marketing

Next comes Internet marketing to promote your site so that your target audience knows that you exist. Being found by the search engines is a good start, but search engines don’t buy from you.  After a thorough analysis of your online business and competition, we will determine the online niches where your potential traffic hangs around and devise a website promotion plan accordingly. Our web promotion techniques include email marketing, Pay Per Click advertising, Social Media Marketing, Blog set up and more.

For a customized Internet Marketing Plan, get in touch with Shanna Korby at 218-422-0000.

Over the period of a few years the importance of having a Meta Descriptions Tag has changed. In the very beginning it help web pages rank high search engine results as search engines would give websites with certain keywords preference. However that is no longer the case as things in the SEO world have changed. However the importance of the Meta Description is not to be taken lightly since it still plays a vital role in search engine results page. Today its not going to get you top position but it will be the deciding factor for people who go though search engine results in order to find what they are looking for. A good keyword rich Meta description will get more people to click.

With search engines like Google the snippet you see when you get your search results actually comes from your index page, however in many instances Google will also pull out keywords from your Meta Description Tag. This is why it’s so important to write good Meta Descriptions as well as good copy for your website. When people scan search results your website should some how make them stop and click. The snippet is something that will mean the difference between them clicking or just going over it. What you write needs to be short, sweet and to the point so that the person scanning though finds your website useful.

If you watch Matt Cutts video on Meta Descriptions you will get a fair idea of how to correctly use meta descriptions on your website. The video briefly describes the importance of using Meta Descriptions as well as how to write good keyword rich Meta descriptions. It is definitely worth a look for any webmaster and business that is looking to raise the number of visitors coming to their website.

There are many reasons why any business should have a blog. There are many benefits of web 2.0 and the biggest one being that it gets people involved and it helps you get your word out about yourself and your business.

SEO benefits of a blog

Out of the many benefits of a blog for business SEO seems to be the one taking over all others. The reason being that search engines such as Google, Yahoo and now Bing have a soft spot for blogs. Blogs seem to get more visibility because they are so content rich. This is why almost every business you see nowadays has a blog.

Communication is business

Communication is the lifeblood of any business whether its email, chat or a blog. However the advantage of having a blog is it can be used to keep your clients both previous and present informed of the latest updates to your business. You also get to communicate with more people which increases your chances of converting and eventually doing more business.

Establish yourself as an authority

A blog is sort of like a one way dialog where you talk about yourself and various aspects of your business. Its also a great way to establish yourself as an authority by providing expert views and tips. The information you present should be helpful because the more helpful it is the more people will begin to take your word for it.

Don’t turn comments off

When people comment you should reply. Unlike many blogs you need to focus on communicating with the people who take the time out to leave a comment on your post. This helps establish a relationship with your subscribers. You should also give your readers a chance to communicate about what they think about your post. So your post needs to be written in a way that attracts attention and entices them to comment on it.

Today blogging is something that everyone seems to be getting into. Businesses mainly blog because it helps them increase traffic coming to their website, but how does blogging increase traffic? How it exactly works needs to be fully understood before you start blogging. Some experts believe that regular blogging can increase traffic to your website by as much as 250% while others people that you can experience a boost of 500% depending on how effective your blogs are.

Establishes credibility

One of the first things a blog does is it increases and establishes credibility of both you and your business. When you blog about things such as your business, offer useful tips and tricks etc it gives people a feeling that you are someone who really knows what he or she is talking about. This makes it easy for you to sell to them your products and services, because you have already managed to achieve the biggest hurdle in sales i.e. establishing trust.

Makes it easy for people to find you

Even with the millions of blogs out there it’s still easy to get good organic search engine traffic to your blog. With the right set of tools and the right articles you should have no problem getting lots of traffic to your blog which can then be sent towards your website.

Starts a dialog with potential clients

When you have a blog its like a one way dialog where you are saying something in the hopes that someone will hear it. When people do hear and like what you have said they will leave comments, in addition to that they will also check out what you are recommending. However you need to ensure that your blog posts are fresh, useful and thought provoking so that people get involved in it.

Over the past few years search engines have begun to detect duplicate content. Duplicate content is a term which refers to two or more web pages that have the same or similar content. Today emphasis is placed on unique content and what’s more is the fact that the more unique content you have the better a search engine is going to consider you. You also need to take into consideration that unique content also brings in a lot of loyal visitors to your blog. Today just simply copy and pasting what you see on other websites is not going to help your cause. You need to be able to come up with unique content that both interesting and search engine optimized.

How to avoid duplicate content on your blog?

One of the best ways to avoid duplicate content on your blog is to write your own content. If you are getting inspiration from another source make sure that you pass your articles and blog posts via copyscape.com. Copyscape is an excellent service which will prompt you with every instance of your article that can be found on the internet. So in other words if your post comes up clean it means that its 100% unique.

Another way to avoid duplicate content is never to rewrite stuff you find on article directories or other websites. Copy and pasting stuff is not good and can get you into lots of trouble if you put up copyright material on your website or blog without permission.

Copying content will get you penalized.

Search engines such as Google tend to penalize websites if duplicate content is found on them. The reason is that search spiders don’t really know which instance of your content they should include in search results so if there is already an instance of your blog post on the internet the search spider will simply not index it. In extreme cases Google might also ban your webiste which means that your site will never show up in search results.

The keyword meta tag is good to put the keywords you are targeting into. This makes it easier for search engines to know exactly what types of keywords you are targeting. However the value of the keyword meta tag really varies among search engines. It also depends upon the value that a search engine gives to the keyword meta tag.

An example of the keyword meta tag:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”web tips, seo, web design, graphic design, email marketing” />

What is the keyword meta tag and why is it important? The simple answer is, this is what tells the search engines what this particular web page is about. The complex answer? The search algorithm has changed because of abuse of the meta keywords tag. The keyword tag still has its uses, they just have changed over the past few years.

Why is excessive keywording bad? If you use too many keywords in the keyword tag, Google and other search engines will not only disregard the keywords, but disregard the entire page as spam. When your pages start getting dropped from search results, how long do you think the rest of your site will stay ranked? All SEO consultants and experts will agree that the keyword meta tag tool if used correctly gives your website a great edge over others.  There was a time when the keyword meta tag really mattered when it came to search engines ranking a website. Today however the impact is not as much to say the least. Today a larger emphasis is not paid on these tags because every one is using them and its impossible to rank every website in the top ten that uses the keyword ‘web design’ or ‘SEO services’.

When webmasters began overusing these tags it is at that point where all the trouble started. Search today place little or no importance on these tags and those websites that use keywords excessively or abuse it might find the search engines that do use the keyword meta tags to rank websites ignoring your website.  Search engines such as Google or Yahoo! will simply ignore your keyword altogether rendering your effort to include the keyword meta tag all but useless.

When using the keyword meta tag is pays to follow guidelines. Proper usage of keyword meta tag will work in your favor by helping your website rank better by making it search engine friendly.

Many content management systems are configured with errors which cause duplicate or exceptionally similar content to get indexed under multiple URLs. Many webmasters use inconsistent link structures throughout their site that cause the exact same content to get indexed under multiple URLs. The canonical version of any URL is the single most authoritative version indexed by major search engines. Search engines typically use PageRank or a similar measure to determine which version of a URL is the canonical URL.

Webmasters should use consistent linking structures throughout their sites to ensure that they funnel the maximum amount of PageRank at the URLs they want indexed. When linking to the root level of a site or a folder index it is best to end the link location at a / instead of placing the index.html or default.asp filename in the URL.

Examples of URLs which may contain the same information in spite of being at different web addresses:

* http://www.korbyimagery.com/
* http://www.korbyimagery.com/index.php
* http://korbyimagery.com/
* http://korbyimagery.com/index.php

Matt Cutts explains how Google identifies canonical URLs.