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Wichita Internet Marketing — Exciting Times Ahead!

Friday, August 5th, 2011 at 4:46 pm  
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My goal with Wichita Internet Marketing is to help local businesses here in the Wichita, Kansas area to acquire new customers and regularly engage their existing customers through internet marketing.

Things are Changing!

Over the past 10 years, advertising has changed drastically! While the phone book was once the undisputed king of “local search”, Google now rules. Consumers rarely turn to the phone book anymore unless they just can’t find what they’re looking for online. So if you’re not online, your competitors are getting your business! Advertising campaigns are increasingly driving people to a business’ online presence — it’s what people are coming to expect.

Newspaper ads, television and radio advertising — all are losing market share. People use Tivo or DVR to skip TV commercials and listen to ad-free satellite radio. And when was the last time YOU responded to a newspaper ad?

Changes Mean More Opportunity

For business owners still sticking to 20th century marketing, this recent turn of events can be frightening! But the good news is there’s a HUGE potential for getting and KEEPING customers through online media. And that’s what Wichita Internet Marketing is all about.

Search engine marketing for local keyword phrases is not rocket science — since you’re not competing with the big national companies and their deep pockets, you actually have a great chance of getting listed at the top of the search engine results for the products and services you offer.

Facebook marketing can easily go viral — it’s a great way to build a community around YOUR business.

Email marketing is still one of the surest ways to increase business.

Mobile advertising and text broadcasting — FAST to implement with huge potential for repeat sales on demand.

Video marketing is exploding. Did you know there are more than 2 BILLIION searches on YouTube every day? Did you know videos that link to your website will help push your site up in the rankings? You need to get YOUR videos uploaded and linked to your web site! Just simple videos, nothing fancy. You don’t even need to be in them yourself if you don’t want — a slideshow video works just fine.

Just Start

This large array of new marketing technologies can be overwhelming at times, if you’re trying to do everything yourself. Just start with one thing, get it going and then go to the next. Naturally, I’d love to help — just give me a call at 316-540-3434 to discuss your next step.

Eventually your marketing machine will be firing on all cylinders and will be nigh impossible to stop — you’ll be a freight train barreling down the business tracks, daring anyone to get in your way!

I hope you’ll return often to Wichita Internet Marketing to learn more about the exciting possibilities in 21st century marketing!

 

Filed under: Wichita Internet Marketing

Search Engine Optimization — What Does Google Look For When Ranking Your Site?

Friday, August 5th, 2011 at 3:59 pm  
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Let’s face it — if you’re not in the first 3 positions on the first page of Google for your targeted keyword phrase, you’re out in the cold. Search engine experts have estimated that the first 3 links in the search results get 85% of the clicks. The remaining links have to fight over the scraps of the last 15% . . .

So what makes the difference in ranking? How does your page get top billing? There are dozens of factors that affect this and to try and cover it all would be WAY beyond the scope of this article.

But if you’re trying to rank for a local keyword phrase (like “wichita plumbing supply”), just applying the fundamentals can go a long way towards getting you to the top. The two biggest factors are on-page optimization and off-site references (“backlinks”). Let’s take a look at these . . .
1. On-page optimization

Note that I’m talking about PAGE optimization. Any given page on your site can actually rank higher for a specific keyword phrase than your home page. This makes sense, because a home page is more general in nature.

For instance, if your site is “wichitaplumbingsupply.com”, and you have an article on your site with a title of “Should I use copper or PVC pipe”, that page will most likely rank higher than your home page for the search phrase “copper or PVC”.

Make sure the targeted keyword phrase is:

in the title of the page
in a H1 heading
in the body of the page (in the first and last paragraphs at a minimum)
in the URL (e.g. “wichitaplumbingsupply.com/copper-or-pvc”
in the meta keywords and description fields

If your article has images, use your keyword phrase in the “alt” property of at least one of them.

But don’t get too carried away and “keyword stuff” your article . . . if it looks like you’re trying too hard, Google will penalize you.

2. Backlinks

With on-page optimization you are telling the search engines what YOU think the page is about. But they want to know what OTHER sites think your page is about. They also want to know if other sites think your page is any good. They use links to your page (from outside sites) as an indicator of your page’s topic and value.

Now, not all backlinks are the same. Links to your site from a blog comment don’t have near the value as a link in the body of a page on a top-ranked authority site. For instance, a link in a news story on cnn.com is going to carry a lot more weight than in a comment or profile at blogger.com

Google also looks at the words that are used when linking to your page — this is called the “anchor text”. These words should be related to your keyword search phrase. SOME links should have the exact search phrase in them, but not ALL links — this would be seen as “unnatural”.

And that’s key — Google wants things to look natural. If you have zero links to your page one day and 5000 the next day, they’re going to know there are some kind of shenanigans going on. Likewise, if all the incoming links to your page have the same anchor text, that’s indicative of a calculated campaign to get ranked for that keyword phrase.

So mix things up. Get links from all different kinds of sites (directories, blogs, video sites, review sites, article sites, and so on) and change up the anchor text. Don’t get too many at once (250 or less/month is a rule of thumb I’ve heard bandied about) — just go slow and steady. If you’re focusing on getting links from quality sites, it doesn’t really take that many to get ranked for a local search phrase.

 

Filed under: SEO

Are You Making These Mistakes With Your Small Business Website?

Thursday, August 4th, 2011 at 6:35 pm  
Comments (482)

For small business owners, a website should have one supreme purpose — increasing their revenue. This increase comes in the form of new customers and increasing the value of existing customers — getting them to spend more, and more often. With that purpose in mind, let’s examine some of the more glaring (yet all too common) mistakes made by small business owners.

1. Not having a website at all.

It’s astounding to me how many businesses still don’t have a website! If YOU don’t have a website, then at LEAST go claim your business listing at Google — this will give you some exposure when you need it most — when people are looking for your type of business. While you’re at it, go make yourself a basic Facebook business (fan) page . . . it’s free, so there’s no excuse not to.

2. Not building your list.

With all the static out there, the chances of someone coming back to your site after an initial visit are slim. So rather than waiting for them to come back of their own accord, give them a reason to. And to do that, you need a way to get hold of them.

For the first ten years of the commercial internet, the main way of doing this was email. It’s still a good way. Get a subscription form on your site, and give people a compelling reason to sign up!

Getting people to “Like” you on Facebook gives you another way to get your message to them on a regular basis. As with the email list, you can “bribe” them with some downloadable content, a coupon code, and so on. They’re not going to do it for the honor of being on your list!

Another way is to use a text messaging service and get them to subscribe to your text message updates. Again, give them a good reason to do it.

3. No call to action

If you want people to DO something, you have to TELL them.  If you’re site is just pretty, they may “ooh and aah”, but they won’t do anything. Command them . . . use phrases like “click here”, “Join Now”, “call 555-8888 now” — you’re goal when designing your site should be to get people MOVING where you want them to go.

4. Poor on-site search engine optimization.

On-site optimization should be a significant part of your ranking strategy. At the very least make sure your keywords and description tags have been updated and keep optimization in mind when setting your page names, titles and headlines. This will help the placement of your “Google Places” link as well. And if your home page is done entirely in Flash, you should reconsider — unless being found on Google is of no concern to you.

5. Sloooooow loading pages

If your website page loads slowly, people will leave. It’s as simple as that. When I’m browsing, it’s very common to see pages that take 10 seconds or more before I see any of the content — that’s far too long. Optimize your images and check your site frequently. Often the culprit is tracking or ad-serving javascript code. If you have code like that slowing down your page, find an alternative or see if it’s feasible to delay the loading of that code until after the rest of the page has loaded.

 

Filed under: Website Design