Internet – Page 2

The Internet has dramatically transformed the way people learn about and shop for products and services. Just ten years ago, companies reached their consumers through trade shows, print advertising, and other traditional marketing methods. Today, consumers start their shopping by looking on the Internet first, using search engines, blogs, and social media sites. For companies to remain competitive, businesses’ websites need to be found online by their customers already searching for the products and services that you are selling. Today it is now possible for a small business to actually compete with larger companies if you create the correct SEO for your Website.

Businesses must get found online by the customers searching for their products and services in the three main areas.

Search Engines – Google, Yahoo, Bing, and MSN
Blogs – Blogger and Digg fro example.
Social Media – Technorati, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

Search Engines

Customers most frequently go to the search engines to research and purchase products and services. Is your website getting found by consumers looking for you?

Please Note: Organic Search is Best!

In the example below; If you look at the Search results, you can see that there are 3 parts to the search. Next to the RED lines is Paid Search Results and the Green represents Organic Search Results.

Paid Search Results are those listings that require a fee for the search engines to list their link for particular keywords. The most widely used form of paid listing is Pay Per Click (PPC), where you pay each time someone clicks on the link in your advertisement. The price increases with the competitiveness of the keyword.

Organic Search Results are gathered by search engines’ web crawlers and ranked according to relevance to search terms. This relevance is calculated by criteria such as extent of keyword match and number of links into that website. Ranking in the organic search results is better because not only is it free, but research demonstrates that people click on the organic results 75% of the time and paid results only 25% of the time.

How Does Google Decide

Google and the other search engines rank websites in search engine results pages according to the relevance of to the search terms. This relevance is calculated by looking at both on-page factors such as the content on your site and off-page factors in the form of inbound links to your website. Off-page factors are some of the biggest influencers in your website’s ranking in search engine results.

How To Use Search Engines

1. Find Keywords

Search Volume – Given two different keyword phrases, optimize for the one with the larger number of searches.
Relevance – Choose keywords that your target market is using to describe and search for your products and services.
Difficulty or Competition – Consider your chances for ranking on the first page of Google for that keyword phrase. Look at the sites ranked in those first 10 slots, their authority and relevance to search terms, and then create a strategy to overtake them so you can secure a spot on that first page.

2. Use On-Page SEO

Place keywords in the page title, URL, headings, and • page text.
Optimize your page description for maximum click-through-rate when your site ranks in Google searches.
Place keywords in other “invisible” places on your site, • including meta-keyword tags and alt-text on images.

3. Use Off-Page SEO

Build more inbound links from other sites into yours.
Each link serves as a recommendation or a reference to tell the search engines that your site is a quality site.
Build more links within context, i.e. those with • valuable keywords in the link anchor text (the text that is hyperlinked to your site). Link anchor text provides context for the search engines to understand what your site is about.

Build more links from trusted websites. Just as references from well-respected friends and experts offer more value, so do links from trusted and well-respected websites.

Link-building tips

Submit your website to directories like Google Yahoo , Bing, and Business.com
Communicate with others in your industry through blogs and other social media

Create compelling tools (such as an interesting Software Application) or A Blog.

4. Always Measure & Analyze

Track the number of inbound links, keyword rank over time and compared to competition. You can use Alexa Rankings to do so!
Measure real business results: number of visitors, leads, and customers using tools like Google Analytics

Get Found Online By Using Social Media

What is social media? Media (content that is published) with a social (anyone can add to and share it) component. Social media is like a business networking reception without the constraints of time and space.

Social Media is Inbound Marketing
Social media helps with SEO
Social media promotes your blog
Social media is permission centric
Since the conversation has started it’s time that you’re aware of it and develop a strategy for engaging in it and using it for marketing your products and services

Use Social Media

1. Some Guidelines for Engagement

Try to meet people and start conversations, become a active member of the community and don’t just join to advertise your products or services
Add value to the community – answer questions and help others.
Ask questions – trust experienced users advice

2. Publish, Share, and Network

Publish: Everyone can publish anything for everyone
Publish everything you have anywhere you can
Monitor what others publish and promote it
Empower your customers to publish and share with others

If you are new to internet marketing it is essential to seek the advice of experienced Internet Marketers that can help you get started and succeed! Feel free to contact me and I will be happy to consult with you!

William

Understanding URL’s

Creating descriptive categories and file-names for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site better organized, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by search engines. This creates easier, “friendlier” URLs for those that want to link to your content. Visitors may be intimidated by extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words.

URLs can be confusing and unfriendly. Users would have a hard time reciting complex URL’s from memory or creating a link to it. In addition, users may believe that a portion of the URL is unnecessary, especially if the URL shows many unrecognizable parameters. They might leave off a part, breaking the link.

Some users might link to your page using the URL of that page as the anchor text. If your URL contains relevant words, this provides users and search engines with more information about the page than an ID using numbers or an oddly named parameter would present.

URLs are displayed in search results

Finally, remember that the URL to a document is displayed as part of a search result in Google, below the document’s title and snippet. Like the title and snippet, words in the URL on the search result appear in bold if they appear in the user’s query. Note: to avoid Google from creating a snippet, use a well constructed Meta Description to enhance the title description.

Google is very adept at crawling all types of URL structures, even if they’re quite complex, but spending the time to make your URLs as simple as possible for both users and search engines can help. Some webmasters try to achieve this by rewriting their dynamic URLs to static ones; while Google is fine with this, we’d like to note that this is an advanced procedure and if done incorrectly, could cause crawling issues with your site. To learn even more about good URL structure, we recommend this Webmaster Help Center page on creating Google-friendly URLs.

Use words in URLs

URLs that contain words which are relevant to your site’s content and structure provide a much friendlier environment for visitors navigating your site. Visitors remember them better and might be more willing to link to them.

Avoid:

Using lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs
Choosing generic page names like “page1.html”
Using excessive keywords like “football-cards-football-cards-footballcards.htm”

Create a simple directory structure

Use a directory structure that organizes your content clearly and makes it easy for visitors to know where they’re at on your site. Try using your directory structure to indicate the type of content found at that URL.

Avoid:

Having deep nesting of sub-directories like “…/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/page.html”
Using directory names that have no relation to the content in them

Provide one version of a URL to reach a document

To prevent users from linking to one version of a URL and others linking to a different version (this could split the reputation of that content between the URLs), focus on using and referring to one URL in the structure and internal linking of your pages. If you do find that people are accessing the same content through multiple URLs, setting up a “301 redirect” from non-preferred URLs to the dominant URL is a good solution for this. You may also use canonical URL or use the rel=”canonical”link element if you cannot redirect.

Avoid:

Having pages from subdomains and the root directory access the same content

– e.g. “domain.com/page.htm” and “sub.domain.com/page.htm”

Using odd capitalization of URLs

-many users expect lower-case URLs and remember them better

Summary

Website development is greatly enhanced when developers adhere to Google’s rules for understanding URL’s.

William