Q: Why is marketing important to a business?

A: Good marketing is the key to a successful business! Marketing produces sales and leads and if done correctly, happy customers that will help to brand your business name.

For years, the best way to market was in print, radio or through television…and today they are still popular choices. But unfortunately, they can be very expensive! Another valuable avenue you should consider is internet marketing. Why? Because you and I and over 2 billion people are using the internet and many are looking for products they want to buy!

If you have a new business and realize your products are not selling, you need to look at your goal and plan.

• How do you get customers?
• Do potential customers walk away without a purchase? Why?
• Are you driving the people who are searching for your product to your business?

Don’t become a company that goes under. In today’s economy, it’s important to market well. But be wise and make sure you monetize in marketing.  There are many different variables of internet marketing, so be careful! You don’t want to spend a large amount of money on marketing and not get a good return of investment. (ROI)

If you have not used marketing and have maintained your business in the black, here is something to think about.  Why is marketing important to your business? Adding online marketing will give you an opportunity to grow your business and build a better foundation that can have endless results. What can you lose?

If you want free Christian internet marketing consultation, contact us today! Let us help your business move forward for a better future!

What is search engine optimization? The definition of search engine optimization (also known as SEO) is the technique and process of helping your website become visible in search engine results. (Such as Google, Yahoo or Bing)

Search Engine Optimization considers how a search engine works then examines what phrases or keywords people are searching for and helps your website gain better presence in those search results! When you target a specific audience, you will see better results with your website.  Another practice with search engine optimization is working to remove any known errors on your website.  (e.g. bad links or 404’s) Promoting your website through internet marketing will help increase your website ranking in natural search results.

The definition of natural results is not referring to paid advertising that you see on the top or side of search engine results. This visiblity is noticed within the 10 main results. Obviously the better the optimization,  conveys viewing your website on the first page. Ask yourself this question, how often do you scroll through all of the results? It’s rare people look at websites past the first page!

Because search engines (such as Google) were created in the late 1990’s, search engine optimization is an area that is constantly being analyzed, developed and improved. Unfortunately, this also opens the door of opportunity for some SEO people to put effort to find methods  that are unethical. The definition of this type of search engine optimization is known as Black Hat SEO.  If these tactics are used, your website will eventually get kicked out of search engines.  Stick to ethical principles and have a successful business that is captured in search results!

Read our basic SEO blog posts or contact us with your SEO questions!

Everyone has heard of Facebook! If you own a business, you probably know you need a social media presence with a Facebook strategy for business!

Is your organization or business…

• promoting your brand name?
• developing customer relationships?
• selling a product?
• sharing blog posts?
• getting name acquisitions?
• solving customers’ complaints?

Do you have a goal or strategy? Have you had successful conversions?

Take these 10 steps in Facebook

1. Create and use good keywords for your business page
2. Add your full website address  to help optimize your website.
3. Make sure to use keywords in the url once you have 25 “likes”
4. Complete the description and company information with relevant keywords that helps optimize your Facebook business page.
5. If possible, add the business owner so those who “like” you know who is behind the Facebook posts.
6. Turn on the feature to be emailed when you get a response.
7. Add photos, videos and links to interesting information your group would appreciate. People are visually stimulated and will be more likely to interact.
8. Create interactive questions, polls and contents to increase your group and responses.
9. Post comments and “listen” to how people respond and interact.
10. Follow through on customer service and address complaints and concerns. Your responses are important to  the long term relationships of your clients.

 

Determine your Facebook strategy for business!

Here are my top ten SEO tips:

10. Use structured format to create your website – Believe it or not, the foundation of your website is important for good search engine optimization. The depth of each page should not be more then three layers (3 clicks) deep. If you try to repair this after a website is built, good SEO can be difficult to achieve.

9. Create XML sitemaps – Tell search engines what pages you have to help get all of your pages indexed.

8. Use a robot.txt file – Tell search engines what to do and add it to the root of your structured website.

7. Use Title Tags and Alt Tags – Any time you create a link or graphic, tag them with good words and descriptions. This helps search engines know more about your website.

6. Use Meta Tags – Title tags and description tags should always be used on every web page. Use unique meta tags for each and every page.

5. Analyse your website – Look at reports at a minimum of every month to understand: who is coming to your website, why they are coming and leaving and what keywords are working and not working. Fix broken pages and any other errors. Adjust your site accordingly for maximum traffic growth.

4. Connect with Social Media Websites – Take advantage of social and video sites by create a profile. Linking from these sites are very valuable.

3. Get backlinks – Backlinks need to be from good websites that are relevant to your site.  Don’t link to sites or from sites that might be part of a link farm or you might get banned from search engines.

2. Find the best keywords for your site – Find keywords people are searching for and exclude keywords with high levels of website competition.

1. Add good relevant content – Content is still king. Search engines love content relevent to your website. Content should not be copied from another website. Content needs to inspire your readers with calls-to-action.

If you have questions about these top ten seo tips, contact SEO Does Matter today. If you enjoyed these SEO tips, read more of our basic SEO blog post entries and develop a successful and higher ranking website!

Have you seen the Google “Like” button in search results? It’s officially called Google +1. It appears and works something like Facebook’s “Like” button. You can see your friend’s approval of sites and it might impact your decision to make a purchase or view a website.

From the official Google blog, Google’s statement about this button is: “Our goal at Google is to get you the most relevant results as quickly as possible. But relevance is about relationships as well as words on webpages.”

Adding social searches to Google is nothing new. Finding Twitter and Facebook comments is part of the normal organic search. But now Google is taking the social aspect one step further. If your friends, family or co-w0rkers like the website and click on the “like” button, there will be a greater chance you will view the same website or purchase the product.

In order to use this Google “Like” button, you will need to have a Google profile. Don’t think Google doesn’t know the science in marketing. 🙂  Right now, Google has your button ratings viewable on your Google profile. Not only is this button seen in organic searches, Google +1 is also available on Google’s paid ads.

Now what does this mean to the website owner? I’m not sure at this point but you want to be sure you have a Gmail account and a Google profile for yourself and your business. Google is planning to have a gadget to add this button to your own website but it isn’t available yet! Let’s see what direction Google goes with this button and begin by watching this video created by Google about this “Like” button called Google+1.

Google+1 is still in it’s early stages and will probably be tweaked regarding how much emphesis these ratings have on search results. Will this change search engine optimization? Perhaps, but social media has already started that. And if your business isn’t represented on sites such as Facebook, Linkedin, or Merchant Circle, now is the time to start. You don’t want to be left behind from this great method of internet marketing!

Do you  want to know how to find links to your website? You might have recently read about the problem with JCPenney and their SEO company. If you haven’t, here is a link to the New York Times article.

If you understand the basics of SEO, you grasp the significance of links to your website. Because of the importance of linking, people can go to great measures to get better results with more links! These mis-happenings occur every day with websites. JCPenney is a well known retail store so it hit the news quickly! So let’s examine link building a little closer.

There is much more of a fine line between good and bad SEO in reference to linking.  Google approves of SEO but is much more vague about the SEO rules then people understand. Let’s create two hypothetical scenarios:

Here are two examples:

1. You write and place a great article on a website and the following week 100K people link to your article.

2. JCPenney pays an SEO company to get links and in one week 100K links appear.

 

The power of linking is incredible! At one time if you searched for “failure” in Google you got Michael Moore’s site and George Bush’s bio. This happened only because people from each side linked to each of those sites with the word “failure” in the link. Google fixed this, but search for “failure” now and you will see references to it.

All good SEO companies encourage linking but the difference between good and bad (according to Google) is that it should be slow and natural (sincere) vs. instant, paid or unrelated links.  SEO Does Matter declines linking requests all the time because they are not relevant to what our clients’ content is about. JCPenney was being linked to, from any website possible.

So does pursuing links imply bad SEO strategies? No, it doesn’t. You should work hard to follow what Google wants and recommends. (When you have some time, read about it in Google Webmaster Guidelines.) Referring back to my second example, imagine you wrote that article and had a bunch of people linked to it and none of their sites were relevant to the website that you placed your article on. This lack of relevancy could cause this site to be penalized from this innocent action.

Here are 5 ways to find links to your website!

1. Use theme based relevant links
2. Manually add each link instead of paying for automated links
3. Find websites that have good page rank and appear in good standing
4. Use permanent links from websites that are relevant to your website
5. Use links that are search engine friendly (based off of Google Webmaster Guidelines)

Use quality link building techniques! Keep good standards with Google and all search engines. Then, continue to work hard and enjoy SEO benefits from your search engine results!

This post is for the younger generation! Here is a rapper that preforms and raps some SEO tips! I thought he did a pretty good job and I was “down” with this video! This is for teens and young people interested in SEO.  Watch this video and follow these steps for SEO that this rapper raps about, all translated below for those who can’t understand the rapping rapper! 🙂

Steps for SEO:

• Page rank – If you want your listing in the top position, you should pay attention and increase your website’s  page rank. (This can be seen in Google’s toolbar)
• Content – Add lots of unique content to your website with at least 250 words per post or page. The more often, the better! (Use  content relevant to your site.)
• Headers or Titles – Add the H1 to the title on your web page
• Cross Links – Make sure to use links within your site. (Also known as internal linking)
• List items – Use bullet points to make it easier to read. (As I am doing here!)
• Keywords – Use good keywords and make sure to use the keyword(s) approximately every 100 words (Also known as keyword density) Don’t use the keywords too many times. (Also known as keyword stuffing)
• Navigation – Make sure the navigation of your web pages are done well without errors. (Also called on-page optimization)
• Link Sculpting – Make sure your links work and don’t have errors. (This can be seen in Google Webmaster Tools)
• Meta Tags – Use unique meta tags on each page.
• Text Links – Use good keywords in links and put the link in the middle of content. (also known as anchor text)
• Inbound Links – Get people to link to your web pages. This helps search engines know your website is valuable. Constantly work to increase links to your website. Use clients, distributors, manufactures and other related sites. Note: Link quality in better then link quantity. (This rapper doesn’t trade or buy links which can develop into bad SEO tactics and be expensive.)
• Directories – Add your website to directories. (The rapper mentions Yahoo directory and states it costs $300.) You can find numerous good directories that are free!

I hope this rapper’s video and the summary helps you take some initial steps for SEO!

FINAL NOTE: If any of the rapper’s words are confusing, you can get the definitions in our SEO glossary. After watching this rapper’s video dealing with steps to SEO, search our SEO blog for more valuable information!

The other day I talked to a clerk who worked at a Blockbuster DVD retail store.  The store looked like it might be closing and I asked him if it was. His answer reflects online services vs. retail stores.

The employee stated that a lot of the retail stores were closing. As I listened, he stated that today most people purchase their DVD’s from online services such as Netflix or several other online websites.

This made me think about online internet marketing and search engine optimization. The fact is most people today use the internet to purchase products. Some people don’t even go to retail stores because of the good prices, search ability with search engines and websites and the ease of buying what you need from the comfort of your home.

So what does that mean to you? It means if you own a business or are self-employed, owning a website is essential to your small business! More importantly, the competition of websites is HUGE. There are millions of websites on the internet. If you want to win the sale from your competition you MUST be prepared to have better search optimization than the other websites selling the same product you have.

How do you optimize your  website and have better results than your competition? It’s called search engine optimization. SEO services are necessary for your website to be successful.  The same is true if you owned a sub shop and never marketed it from the other restaurants that surrounded your store. You would be out of business very soon!

If you want help or internet marketing consultation, contact us today!

If you know about search engine optimization, you are probably aware there are a lot of different aspects to getting your website optimized for Google and other search engines. I want to give you a SEO best practices checklist to use with your website!

SEO Best Practices Checklist

1. Look for errors – Search engines don’t like to return to a website that has a bunch of errors.  This task is a little more technical to do but it needs to be done correctly. Use Google Webmaster and correct errors such as broken links, duplicate content or status errors such as 404’s,403’s or 301 redirects.  If you just got lost on this one, I’m sure you have seen websites and clicked on a link that took you to a broken web page. You got a error message or read a message that was very technical that only web developers can understand. The bottom line is this – search engine robots do not like these type of errors either!
2. Use meta tags and keywords – This is a very important aspect of SEO. There are many ways to research for keywords. I won’t get into this because there are many books on this one! To generalize this task, make sure each web page and title tags and descriptions and apply specific keywords related to your niche. If you are lost, contact us! Sometimes it is easier to hire a good SEO company (like us! 🙂 )
3. Use reports to analyze your progress – As any good business or organization does, follow monthly reports such as Google Analytics, to see what relevant keywords are working. There are numerous reports that you can utilize to improve your website!

Use this SEO best practices checklist throughout the year. Continue to correct errors, adding content with keywords. Then look at reports on a monthly basis. Always remember that content is king but it only works if it is unique and is beautifully tied together for the content people are searching for!