Internet Marketing New Year’s Resolutions for 2012

by John Eberhard

Now is the time to make New Year’s resolutions on how to improve your Internet marketing for 2012. Here are my suggestions for you.

Google Maps: I resolve to take steps to get a Google Maps/Places listing online for my business and work to get that listing onto the first page of results by getting lots of positive online reviews about my business and putting up lots of listings about my business, all of which pushes my Google listing towards page one.

Web Site: I resolve to make sure my web site gets fully re-designed in 2012 if it has not been re-designed since the Civil War, and to update the content of the site regularly so it is current and fresh. (I hear my web designer can convert my site into Wordpress so I can make revisions to the site myself.)

Identity Capture: I resolve to offer items on my site such as free email newsletter subscriptions, and free reports and eBooks, to capture the identities and email addresses of people visiting my site. I know that this is one of the best ways to grow my email list.

Video: I resolve to get a video made for my business in 2012 if I don’t yet have one, or to create more video content in 2012 if I already have some, knowing that online video marketing is one of the best ways to present my business and sell it.

Posting to the Blog: I resolve to post new content to my blog at least once a week in 2012, realizing that search engines give more weight or importance to blogs specifically because they usually have fresh content added regularly. I realize that a blog post can be just a comment and link to some other content on the web, or posting a video of interest from YouTube. I realize that putting up a blog, but not posting anything to it in 2011 (you know who you are) doesn’t help my online efforts.

Web Statistics: I resolve to ensure my site has some sort of good web statistics program such as Google Analytics, and to regularly check the stats so I know how many people are coming to the site, what pages they are visiting, what sites are referring me traffic, and what keywords people are typing in on search engines to find me. I know that most free web stats programs that come with a hosting plan are total crap, and that Google Analytics is free and very good.

SEO and Keyword Research: I resolve to get search engine optimization done for my web site is 2012 if it has not been done in the last two years, knowing that the Google Panda update makes this even more important than before. I know that I should be targeting keywords that have high traffic, but a low number of competing sites. I know that with a local business I should be targeting local oriented keywords.  

Email Newsletter: I resolve to create an email newsletter if I don’t have one already, and to ensure I get a new one out at least once a month. I resolve to offer the newsletter subscription on my site and build my email list.

Link Building: I resolve to greatly increase the number of links to my site from other sites, knowing that Google says that the number of links is the most important criteria they use to determine how high my site will rank for my targeted keywords.

Social Media: I resolve to use social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn more often in 2012 to market my business. But I know that I also have to be engaged with my friends and followers, respond to their posts, and to sometimes post things about my personal life, not just hammer people with “buy my products” type messages. I resolve to significantly increase my number of friends and followers on social media sites in 2012.

Leads/Sales: I resolve to get my web site really producing leads and/or sales in 2012, so that the site is a real contributing force towards the success of my business and not just a source of frustration and embarrassment.

Google: I resolve not to give Google god-like status like some people do. They’re just a business for cryin out loud. I resolve not to freak out about the Panda update but to make appropriate changes in my actions at the appropriate time.

RealWebMarketing.net Fun Game: I resolve to respond to the little jokes in the RealWeb Newsletter, and build up points so I can win a Real Web Marketing T-shirt and be the envy of all my friends.

Consultant: I resolve to respect and take the sagely advice of my marketing consultant, and to pay him on time.

I wish you the best in keeping your New Year’s resolutions, and I feel confident that 2012 will be the best year ever for all of us.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Wordpress.com Shuts Down Sites

by John Eberhard

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Wordpress.com has started doing something that I consider idiotic. They are taking down any blog on their system if they discover you have been (gasp!) linking to commercial web sites in your blog posts. Another example of the misguided "anti marketing" attitudes you see around in various places on the Internet and in the IT world.

They have taken down my blog on there and several that we made for clients. So I am going around them. I am creating sub-folders on one of my domains and creating Wordpress blogs for clients there.

I remember running into this "anti Marketing" attitude when I worked at Executive Software and at Panda Software. I wonder if those people would have pause to consider where their paychecks come from and the fact that marketing to a large extent makes it possible for commerce to take place and for them to earn a living.

Here is exactly what they said in response to an email:

“You agreed to the WordPress.com Terms of Service when you signed up.

”WordPress.com does not allow blogs that are created for the purpose of directing traffic or creating backlinks to commercial web sites, affiliate/ptc programs or multi-level marketing campaigns. Your site has been suspended and will not be returned to you.”

It's amazing how many of these sites are like this. HubPages.com has a very similar anti marketing policy. You can have one link on each page you make and not any more.

My plan is to not use Wordpress.com any more.

 

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Internet Marketing in 2012

by John Eberhard

At this time of year, going back for several years, I usually do an article about what we can expect from Internet marketing in the coming year.

a. Pay Per Click Advertising: PPC is still a very dominant force and very effective, though its use is pretty much limited to high ticket items because of its cost. PPC is an excellent way to drive traffic to your site on an immediate basis, and due to the excellent statistical and monitoring tools, in skilled hands it can be very effective. It’s just not viable for selling books and CDs.

b. Social Media: Social media will continue to be an important avenue in online marketing, with Facebook being the big player, then YouTube, then Twitter, then LinkedIn. I think social media is a great vehicle for marketing small businesses with limited budgets and for low cost items. A little over a year ago Facebook made changes allowing you to customize the look of your fan pages, with one screen that visitors would see before they “liked” you and a different one afterwards. MySpace really crashed in the last year in terms of usage, and was sold for peanuts, after having been the biggest thing in social media just a few years ago. With Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, the key is to get lots of friends/followers/connections, so that whatever communications you send out get seen by lots of people. Google+ is Google’s entry into the social media universe (similar to Facebook), and will start to become more popular in the coming year.

c. SEO: Search Engine Optimization has always been a vital part of website marketing and that will not change in the coming year. The term refers to doing research to find the best keywords to use, then inputting those keywords into specific places on your website, then building up links to your site from other sites around the web.

The major techniques Real Web Marketing Inc. has used for link building for the past few years have been:

1. Submitting articles to article directories
2. Writing press releases and submitting these to online PR sites
3. Creating multiple blogs and posting articles and releases to these, including links back to the client’s main site

Google came out with a new algorithm update in February 2011 called “Panda,” and has come out with minor updates every couple of weeks since then. The major purpose of the update appears to be to stop people from building up links to their sites via article directories. We are still doing link building using the techniques listed above, and I am closely watching the statistics for these clients to see if Panda is defeating our efforts. The above program is still working fine as measured by statistics. But we can probably figure that sometime in the next year, the effectiveness of article marketing will diminish, and we will have to come up with another method of developing links.

d. Local SEO: I should explain that there are two significantly different approaches to SEO. It depends on whether your company is local, i.e. only delivering products or services to a specific geographical area, or regional or national. This distinction has become much more important in the last year.

For local companies, it is much more important to go for local oriented keywords, i.e. keywords that mention the city or cities where the company does business. In other words, a dentist would not try to target or rank for general keywords like “dentist” or “root canals,” because he would be competing with basically every other dentist on the face of the earth. Instead he would target keywords like “dentist Glendale” or “dentist Pasadena,” or “root canal Glendale.” You still have to do keyword research to find keywords that have traffic coming to them, because it doesn’t do any good to target a keyword and rank number one for it when nobody searches for it. If you’re in a major metro area like Los Angeles it is smart to include research on keywords relating to names of suburbs or neighborhoods.

Once you find local oriented keywords that have search traffic, you put those keywords into your site the same way as you do for national SEO. Another technique is to select the largest traffic keywords on your list and register some domain names that contain those keywords in the name. Then put up a micro-site on those domains, i.e. a small site. Make sure you don’t make that site identical to your main site as Google frowns on multiple identical sites.

Once you complete keyword research, input those keywords into your main site, and put up one or more microsites, then you still have to do link building, to get your site ranking for those keywords.

e. Local Marketing: This has been the biggest change in the last year. Google has completely changed the search landscape with the introduction of Google Maps/Places. When someone enters a search that Google determines is local in nature, they put up a map in the right hand column showing businesses near you. And then you will see listings in the left hand column related to the red dots on that map. Google keeps changing the way the listings are displayed. Right now there is a special section in the left hand column with all the Google Maps listings. Both Yahoo and Bing have introduced a similar feature.

The first thing to do is to make sure there is a listing on Google Maps/Places for your business. Google gas created thousands of listings for businesses, but not all of course. So you have to see if you have a listing and if so, claim it. If not put one up.

Then in order to get your listing to appear at or near the top, you have to put up listings (called “citations” in Google parlance) on other local listings sites, and ensure you get online reviews from your customers. So this is an ongoing action and is very important, especially in competitive industries, because getting your Google Maps/Places listing on page one of the results will drive a lot of traffic to you.

f. Email Marketing: The most effective use of email marketing today is to build up a large in-house email list by offering an email newsletter or offering other items such as white papers or special reports, then sending newsletters and other offerings to that list. Many companies neglect this completely and are leaving money on the table. Just make sure you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.

g. Blogs: I have written extensively about the effectiveness of blogs. They are one of the best things you can do, and it’s free. I have several blogs and for the last several years they have been the biggest source of traffic to my main site. But once you start a blog you have to post to it regularly for it to do any good.

h. Video: Video is a great way to effectively communicate the benefits of your products or services, and posting on YouTube and other video sharing sites can give you lots of exposure.

Best wishes for 2012 and may it be your most prosperous year ever. There is no question that the economy is affecting us all, but with smart and effective marketing we can overcome it and be successful.

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SEO Today

by John Eberhard

SEO stands for search engine optimization. The purpose of SEO is to get your web site to rank well for certain specific keywords on search engines, so that you get more traffic to the site from those search engines.

It used to be that SEO meant taking actions to the site itself to make it more likely to rank for your keywords, which is called “on-page optimization.” It still means that, but now the term has taken on the additional meaning of actions you take to build up links to your site, which is called “off-page optimization.”

Local or National?

The first thing to do when considering embarking on search engine optimization is to determine whether your business is local or national in nature. Do you sell products or services to people only in one local area, or nationally or internationally?

If yours is a local company, then your efforts should be directed towards ranking well on Google Maps, Yahoo Local and Bing Local, as well as doing SEO specifically for local oriented keywords, i.e. keywords that contain the name of the cities or towns where you do business. See my recent articles on local businesses and Google Maps.

National

If you have a national business like mine (I do business with companies all across the U.S.) then you need to do regular SEO. This consists of:

1. Keyword Research: This means to come up with a list of possible keywords and then finding out the amount of traffic they are getting (how many people are searching for them), and the number of sites that are competing for them. You want to find keywords that have a low number of sites competing for them, because if the number is too high, you just won’t be able to compete for those keywords, at least not in the short term. I consider the number of competing sites to be more important than the traffic per keyword, and I sort the keywords and group them by the number of competing sites. Most single word keywords are too competitive.

1. On-Page Optimization: Isn’t that a fancy word? That’s at least a $10 word I think. Anyway, this means to take the keywords that you select, and to put them into the various pages of your site. You have to write titles and descriptions for each individual page of your site, then put those into the meta-tags, or invisible code of your web page. Those titles and descriptions are then what appears on Google or other search engines when your listing comes up. Usually it works best to select 3 primary keywords for each page, that are most relevant to that particular page, then write titles and descriptions using those keywords. You can also put keywords into what are called “alt tags,” which are tags associated with pictures on your page.

1. Link Building: Next it is important to build up links to your web site coming from other web sites. Google has said for years that they consider the number of links to your site to be the most important criteria in determining how well it ranks for any given keyword. I have been engaged in link building in various forms for about 7 years. Here are the most effective forms of link building that I have found:

1.  
   1. Press Releases: Write press releases about your company and then submit these to online PR sites, and post them to your blog or blogs. When you post them to a blog, include text links in the blog post that point to pages on your main site.
   2. Blogs: Post items regularly to your blog or blogs, and include text links linking to various pages on your main web site.
   3. Article Marketing: Write articles about your company topic and post these to article directories.

SEO people used to do what is called reciprocal linking, contacting other web site owners and offering to link to them if they’ll link to you. Google took steps to discount these types of links several year ago, so it is typically not done anymore, though I occasionally see companies still offering this or software being offered that is geared to this.

Panda

There has been a lot of discussion recently about Google’s algorithm update called “Panda,” which began in February, and there have been regular additions to it every couple weeks since then.

It appears that the intention of Panda is to make it so web site owners can’t do anything to improve their search engine rankings, and specifically to target article marketing, where you submit the same article to multiple article directories.

I have been silent on Panda up until now, other than discussing it with colleagues. First of all I will say that I don’t agree with the overall apparent intention to make it so web site owners can’t improve their rankings. I think this objective is something that is good for Google or makes things easier for them, but is bad for web site owners. Thus I will condemn it here in the strongest terms.

Second I’ll discuss whether this affects link building. I think it will affect link building in the coming year. But since I am doing link building for a number of clients using the actions listed above, I have closely monitored the effects, in terms of the only statistics that matter, namely number of links, keyword rankings and web site traffic.

For the clients that I am monitoring, I am seeing no adverse effects due to Panda, in terms of links, rankings and traffic. The above link building program is still working well and getting good results. Will we have to change it eventually? Yes probably. When the statistics indicate it. But in my opinion we have not reached that point yet.

With an overwhelming market share in terms of online searches, I believe Google has too much power. They hate people finding ways to “game” their system as they put it. But from my perspective, if, as a small business owner, you can’t find a way to be proactive or “cause” over your rankings situation, then you just have to sit there as total “effect.” Their philosophy seems to benefit entities that are already well established and known, but small companies that are just now starting to do SEO are just out of luck.

I don’t agree with that, and will continue to find the best ways for companies to be able to improve their rankings and be “cause” over their situations.

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