Social Media Buttons Are The New Affordable SEO

Affordable SEO is a tricky thing to pin down, because — like almost every other aspect of internet marketing — if too many people jump on any one bandwagon, it stops being effective, which is the same thing as saying it stops being affordable. This has happened to banner ads, PPC marketing, PCA shenanigans, BUM marketing, and even vanilla SEO. SEO companies are generally really good at finding the variations on the SEO theme that are still working, but sometimes something new and different is even better.

Lately, some of the most effective backlinking you can get is the kind that you don’t do — and the SEO company doesn’t do, either. It’s the kind that your social media followers do for you, and a decent part of today’s SEO efforts ought to be devoted to allowing your followers to do just that. That includes, among other things, adding social media buttons (i.e. Facebook’s “Like” button, Pinterest’s “Pin” button, Google+’s “+1” button, and all of the various social bookmarking buttons like Digg and so forth.) to pretty much every single piece of content that your company puts on the internet.

Blog posts, web pages, emails, tweets, press releases, marketing articles — with a bit of care, almost every digital communication you make can be branded and have social media buttons. That opens up the opportunity for people to link from their social media profiles to the communication they clicked from — which is free, automatic, and valuable SEO. All you had to do was put a button on your blog post (or whatever).

Of course, the value of this trick is multiplied tenfold if you have a professional social marketer out there using YOUR social profiles and generally treating your clients in a personal, friendly fashion while talking about your area of business. A social marketing engineer can start a significantly-sized crowd chatting about your product or service (forums are great for this kind of thing) — and social buttons can expand the SEO value of those crowds hugely.

Social media buttons won’t ever completely replace traditional SEO efforts — but they can expand on them inexpensively and effectively, and that’s what everyone wants most, right?

Is Mobile Website Design The Future of Business Internet Marketing?

Mobile website design — that is to say, the conscious (re)designing of a business website so that it can be easily accessed from mobile devices — is a very commonplace option for small businesses who want to get the most from their internet marketing. Why? Because mobile searchers are generally speaking on the road, which means if they’re searching for a business in your vertical, they’re likely to go there once they find it. That means mobile traffic is synonymous with foot traffic, which is in turn synonymous with sales.

On the internet, you’re doing really well if you convert 4% of your surfers into customers. If you can get them in the door of a brick-and-mortar store, that conversion rate jumps into the 80%s instantly. Thus, mobile website design.

But are businesses that advertise on the internet really best off paying for a mobile website? Or is there a more ‘affordable’ SEO activity they could be pursuing? The answer depends on a lot of factors, including your geography, your vertical, and the content of your website.

In short, the more densely populated (and tech-savvy) your locale, the more you’ll benefit from mobile website design. The more tech-oriented or tech-friendly your vertical, the more you’ll benefit from mobile website design. The more ‘immediate’ your vertical (in other words, the more likely someone is to realize they need your stuff right now), the more you’ll benefit from mobile website design. And the more complex your normal website, the more you’ll benefit from mobile website design.

If you happen to combine a few of those factors — say, you sell batteries for gizmos from a store in the San Fernando Valley — you’ll see the benefits of a mobile website (and a touch of local business SEO) almost immediately.

For the majority of businesses with an online presence, mobile website design is a darn good idea. Is it the future of business internet marketing as a whole? Let’s ask again once you can get an iPhone for under a hundred bucks — because as the capacity to do mobile searches improves (and it just keeps improving) mobile websites become a better and better deal.

Social Marketing Takes So Long – Can It Be Affordable? SEO Companies Say ‘Yes!’

When you talk about affordable SEO, you have to talk about it in terms of effect per time spent. You generally pay an SEO company for a block of time, after all, and they do whatever they can in that timeframe (according to the plans that they draw up at the interview) to get your site ranked. Almost all of a standard SEO company’s arsenal is custom-picked because the techniques they apply give the best boom for the least amount of strokes on the keyboard.

So what do you make, then, of social marketing? It’s certainly not anything like backlink building — social networking, social bookmarking, social gaming, all of them are designed not to elicit a specific link (though some do), but rather to elicit a response from a nebulous crowd of Internet onlookers. You socially market and you hope that you do it well enough that people plus/like/thumbs-up you en masse.

But it takes a lot of attention, content, and sheer time in order to get the Internet’s attention. There’s almost no way a small business can keep up with all of the ideas, requests, complaints, compliments, and other fanmail you’ll get if you go social. So who does have the time to do social marketing?

Your SEO company, of course. They’re already out there marketing for you passively — creating content with your name on it, putting your company’s face in places you’d never think of, and so on. Social marketing is nothing more than a logical extension of traditional SEO. Just instead of building your company’s reputation in the eyes of Google, they’re building it in the eyes of the people that matter most — your customer base.

So how do you know if social marketing is worth your investment? The same way you do with SEO. There’s no really solid RoI measurement for organic SEO, either — you put in the money, and through a very complex and chaotic process, that investment turns into traffic that you turn into money. Social marketing is exactly the same way, except the chaotic part is a different process.

In short, it becomes ‘affordable’ at the point when it starts to produce sales — and it will.

Social Media Buttons Are The New Affordable SEO, Even If You’re Not ‘Social’

Social marketing is an important part of organic SEO marketing and it’s not going to be going away soon. In the beginning Digg was developed and since then Twitter and Facebook have come along and changed Internet marketing for everybody. A true SEO program will include social bookmarking as part of its overall strategic plan.

If you’re not a social butterfly and don’t have hours to spend on these social sites, how can you compete with other websites that are doing this effectively and moving up the ranks in Google? How do you handle the situation if you’re simply not social and don’t enjoy spending hours on the Internet just talking to people?

The answer is to hire somebody else to do the work for you. This is, in fact, what your competition is doing right now. They don’t have time either to talk to people on the net so they outsource the project. There are people working for affordable SEO companies that have the charisma to update your Facebook and make Tweets for you. Nobody needs to know that you aren’t the one doing them and your reputation will begin to soar.

The fact is that social sites attract too many visitors to simply ignore. Millions of people every day visit Twitter and Facebook to stay updated on the latest happenings. People are just waiting on the edge of their seats for new information being passed along this way. Millions and millions of people are out there right now having conversations and passing along news. If you aren’t one of the ones giving it to them, you can rest assured that your competitors are.

There is no way you can play the Internet marketing game these days without including social sites. You have to make your online presence known to those that are waiting to hear from you. Even if you’re not a social person, you need to have someone be social for you. This is the only way you’ll be able to make a lasting impression on the Internet to your customers.

First Page Placement: It Means EVERYTHING

If you have a web based business and you don’t have a first page placement on Google for at least a few high-traffic keywords relevant to your product or service, you are losing the game. End of story. In fact, if you’re not in the top 3 listings for your keywords of choice, you’re losing.

Here’s why.

When you look at the behavior of people on Google, a very reliable set of statistics shows up over and over again: people don’t click any further down the list than they have to. The first big split is between people who click on the Sponsored Links (25% of all searchers) and people who skip them and go to the organic results (the other 75%.)

So if you have a search term that gets 1000 hits/day, you’re losing 250 of them to pay-per-click marketers right off the bat. Of the remaining 750 hits, 50% of them click on the first link. Another 15% click on the second link, and another 10% click on the third link. That’s 75% of the remaining 750 that vanish into the top 3.

That leaves only 187 people left to continue on down the page. A few percent veer off at each stop along the way until you get to the last link on the page, which steals about 1.5% of the traffic, leaving only 2.5% of surfers who ever click onto the second page. That’s 25 of your 1000 searches per day that reach Page 2, and then the cycle starts all over again. Half of that 2.5% click on the top link on page 2, and so on.

Let me put that in a different perspective: it’s better to be 3rd place for a keyword that only gets 400 searches per day than it is to be on the top of page 2 for a keyword that gets a massive 3,200 searches per day.

Of course, it’s a hell of a lot more affordable SEO-wise to get a ranking on a less competitive search term, as well. So not only do you end up paying less, but you end up getting more traffic out of the deal as well. That’s why, even if it means targeting “less valuable” keywords, it should be first page placement or bust.

Affordable SEO Means Doing It Right The First Time

Every single novice webmaster in the world learns a pretty harsh lesson about SEO early in his career. That lesson is this: if you don’t do your website SEO correctly, you’ve not only wasted yesterday’s time and money getting nothing done, but you might have to waste tomorrow’s time and money fixing the mistakes you made.

Here’s a classic scenario: a guy gets fired and decides he’s going to be his own boss. He goes online and learns about microsites or affiliate blogging or something, and learns about this thing called SEO. He hears he’s supposed to get backlinks, so he goes out and starts building them. He’s a smart guy and he wants to save himself some work, so he gets a bookmarking daemon and starts submitting 400 bookmarks per day, targeting a different page on his website every day.

At the end of the week, he looks up the phrase he’s submitted as his anchor text, confident he’ll be on the first page — and instead learns that he’s been sandboxed. His backlinks were obviously mechanically created, spam links with negative SEO value. Of course, he didn’t know that — how could he?

Now he’s got to start over with a new URL as well as coming up with a new, more successful SEO strategy. He’s out everything he spent, and he’s still spending just to get back to the starting line.

Contrast that to another guy who got fired and decided to start a website. This guy, however, decided to hand his SEO tasks over to the experts. He hired an SEO company. He paid a hundred bucks more than the other guy (who didn’t pay anything up front!) — but then, all of his startup time and effort wasn’t wasted. He’s taking huge strides down the road to top placements for his keywords, and hasn’t looked back.

Which of those do YOU think is the more ‘affordable’ SEO?

The simple fact is that 49 times out of 50, SEO done by someone that doesn’t do it for a living is going to result in net improvement of nothing. Don’t let that be you — a little money down will save you days of work and heartache in the future.

Ultimate Conversions: Targeted Email Marketing From The Outside In

Targeted Email Marketing (TEM) is NOT typically part of the services offered by a website SEO company. That’s because it’s not actually SEO — there is nothing about TEM that will get your website ranked any higher for anything anywhere.

What TEM is, however, is a way of improving the effectiveness of any SEO you’ve already done. That’s because of a simple calculation:

Traffic * Conversion Rate = Sales

What that means is that if you have 200 visitors, and you convert 3% of them, you’ve just made 6 sales. You can improve your number of sales by getting more traffic, or you can do it by improving your conversion rate. SEO is designed to get you more traffic — but at some point, you’ll make more money by improving your conversion rate than you will by adding another 4 or 5 visitors per day.

So, Targeted Email Marketing. Have you ever seen a website that offers you something for free, but asks you to put in your name and Email address in order to get it? That’s TEM in action. If you’ve ever done this, you know that the next step is to receive an Email that says “hey, is it cool that you continue to receive Email from this website?”, and you have to say “yes” in order to get the free thing.

What you’ve just done is confirm via Email that any further Emails the webmaster of that site sends you aren’t spam and you accept his right to send them to you. From his perspective, he now has a ‘hook’ in you. He can send you an Email whenever he has a new sale, a new product, or even just because he wants to impress you with how knowledgeable and competent he is in his field.

As you can imagine, it’s a killer way to turn visitors into buyers, because you can remind them of your product and your offer every week…forever! You can keep trying different angles until you find one that sticks. Every time you throw an Email out to your TEM list, you get a bunch of them back on your website for another chance at that 3% conversion rate.

That’s the kind of tool that SEO companies typically overlook because they’re focused on traffic, but if you find an SEO company that offers TEM as a service, you know you’ve got someone who is focused on improving your profits from every possible angle — a great find.

Social Bookmarking Is a Sucker’s Game — Isn’t It?

There’s been a lot of changes to the social bookmarking game in the past few years. Even as far back as Google’s addition of the nofollow tag, social bookmarking pages have been declared ‘dead’ over and over again by various SEO gurus. Yet somehow, it keeps coming back like a zombie in a B-grade horror movie. The fact is that social bookmarking might not be the utterly amazing backlink that it was when Digg and del.ici.ous first invented the term, but they’re not going anywhere anytime soon.

The reasons why are several, but the big ones are very big.

Control
A social bookmark gives you control over two things that are very important: the context around your link (what many organic SEO experts like to call “Latent Semantic Indexing” or “LSI”), and the actual anchor text of the link itself. Every time you get a link to your site, Google looks at the anchor text and the LSI to determine how relevant the linking page is to your website, and modified the link’s strength based on the relevance. That makes controllable links much stronger than uncontrollable ones.

Persistence
There’s nothing like investing a few thousand dollars in a massive and complex link building campaign and then discovering six months later than half of the sites you linked from have either disappeared or at least eliminated your links. That’s a lot of money and time down the drain. Mercifully, social bookmarking sites don’t do that. They are persistent, which means every well-controlled link you build on a social bookmarking site is here to stay.

Panda
Yes, I said Panda. Panda is the latest Google toy, and it’s designed to make sites more ‘user-friendly’. One of the things that the Goog decided when they built Panda was that social bookmarking buttons are totally cool to have featured prominently on a website (as opposed to, say, AdWords blocks or banner ads.) That means that, as the Web adapts to the latest twist Google has for us, social bookmarking is only going to get more and more used, which means social bookmarks will get more authority. What more do you need to know?

Who Else Should Be Looking Into Custom Blog Creation?

Custom blog creation is the name of a service that SEO companies have been selling to small businesses for years. It’s a very dependable way to improve a website’s rankings for particular keywords, which is exactly why it’s used — but it’s also relatively easy and inexpensive, which is why it’s marketed as a regular component of small business SEO.

A customized blog allows you to have content pages (which attract surfers) that then link back to your main site with controllable context and controllable anchor text. That, in turn, makes the site more likely to rank for the keywords that you use as anchor text. Thus, blogs serve as both an SEO tool and as part of your sales funnel — exactly the kind of multipurpose power that small businesses need in their tools. But there are other entities who should be looking into custom blog creation as well.

Individuals
If you’re a freelancer looking to make a name for yourself, one of the biggest steps you can take on the road to stable success is to build yourself a website. People who want to learn about you — to decide whether to hire you — are going to Google you; that’s just a fact of life. You can let them find your Facebook page with your drunken college pictures, or you can present them a professional face.

Having a blog attached to that professional face is a great way to show your potential employers that you know your game. Write about what you do, about your challenges and your victories, and about the details of whatever skill you apply on a regular basis. As before, not only do you get to show off, but you can optimize your website for killer keywords at the same time.

Public Entities
It’s one thing to be in business, but the public sector is another area entirely. One thing that both groups seem to consistently need, however, is more attention. If you happen to be a hospital director, a college principal, or the head of any other public institution, you might not be aware of just how easy it is to focus the right eyes on your Web presence: all you need is a blog. Everything said above applies just as well to an .edu or an .org than it does to a .com — don’t hesitate!

When and Why To Put All You’ve Got into Article Writing and Submission

There is ample evidence for anyone out there looking that article writing and submission is a killer SEO tactic. The reasons are pretty simple: content is king, control is key, and article directories are heavyweights.

Content is King
Google loves content. If you write an article that talks intelligently about facts that aren’t already discussed to death elsewhere on the Internet, Google will love you. You’ll rank well for quite a few keywords, and people will see your words. Put a decent call to action at the bottom with a link to your site, and you’re likely to get quite a few clickthroughs.

Control is Key
When you create a backlink to your site, Google uses it to decide what your site is about. Having a backlink to a site about golf from a site about pit bulls confuses Google. When you write an article, you control the context of your backlink perfectly, giving Google a strong signal about what your site is about. Strong signals mean better ranking.

Article Directories are Heavyweights
Article directories are classic examples of what Google called “authority sites” — their pages are considered pretty trustworthy. What that means is that every link you get from a respected article directory gives your site a lot of ‘juice’.

So the question is When and Why to put your effort into writing articles (as opposed to building backlinks by doing some other form of website SEO)? The answer isn’t what you might think. The thing about article writing and distribution is that it takes a lot of time and effort per article. Articles should be high on your priority list if and when your ‘SEO basics’ are already taken care of. Before you get heavy into articles, make sure you’ve got a natural link profile consisting of:

• • Social bookmarks
  • Forum posts
  • Blog posts
  • Blog comments
  • Web 2.0 properties
  • Directory entries
  • RSS aggregations
  • Link exchanges
  • and Videos

Once your backlink structure has the low-effort, high-rankings-impact backlinks above built, then and only then should you invest significant money into getting articles written and submitted Getting there might take a month or three, but the effect of good articles backed up by a solid link profile is pure gold.

First Page Placement Doesn’t Mean Automatic Success

There’s a lot of emphasis put on first page placement by SEO companies. Like many industries, they have a strong motivation to sell you on the idea that they can solve all of your problems. In the Web Wide World, “all your problems” seem to spring from a single source: not enough traffic.

So long as X% of visitors convert into sales, then more traffic equals more money. It seems pretty simple. If only it really were. But it’s easily possible — in the case of someone unfamiliar with the basics of marketing, even downright probable — that you can get a site listed on the first page of a decent keyword and get nothing for it.

There are a few ways that can happen. The first is if you go the ‘sponsored placement’ route. That is, pay-per-click (or PPC) marketing. With PPC, every time a surfer clicks on your advertisement, you pay a few cents. They end up on your page. But if they don’t buy anything from your page, you lose those few cents. Over hundreds of clicks per day, that can add up pretty fast.

That’s why, if you’re going to go the PPC route, it makes sense to hire a PPC management team that knows their stuff. They can keep costs down and traffic high at the same time — something that’s virtually impossible for a webmaster working alone.

Another way that you can waste a valuable first page placement is by having a page that simply doesn’t convert well. If you manage to do enough organic SEO to get real regular search traffic to your site on a regular basis (virtually the only functional alternative to PPC), you still need them to buy stuff.

There are a lot of ways to encourage them to convert. Learning sales language and call-to-action prompts are good. Belcher buttons (look up) are virtually mandatory. Using a gimmick like a web presenter or a focus video can work well in the right fields. Regardless of how you do it, you have to pay attention to conversions as well as traffic. Only then will your first page placement really mean what the marketers want you to believe it will.

Go Local! Internet Marketing for Brick and Mortar Businesses

Local internet marketing isn’t a new phenomenon if you’re familiar with online marketing in general — but if you’re a brick and mortar business just starting to build your online presence, you might be curious what the hoopla is about. There’s a lot of people out there talking in a lot of very excited voices about online marketing; this is the straight scoop.

“Reach audiences worldwide! Have an online storefront open 24/7/265!”
You’ll hear this one a lot. The truth couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, a website could potentially get hits from Pak Gwak Kai or Orniok, but the fact is that Google knows where you live. Google isn’t going to show your trading-card store to someone searching for rookie Chesbro if that person is searching from Latvia. They’re going to show that guy a store in Latvia. Google isn’t dumb.

On the other hand, if you deliberately include your location in all of your marketing strategies — what we call local internet marketing — you’ll end up showing up high on the results pages whenever anyone searches for “trading cards in Los Angeles”. SEO gets a lot easier when you keep it local.

“All you need to make money is a website and some traffic! It just runs itself!”
Yeah. That’s kind of like saying all you need to run the United States is an Oval Office and the title of President. It’s easy to say, but actually getting those things isn’t terribly easy. I mean, putting up a website is pretty easy, but then you also have to have a website that people will buy stuff from. That’s harder.

Also, getting traffic to come to that site isn’t all that easy, either. The best way to go about it is to get your site ranked on various relevant Google searches, but that means paying for someone to optimize your site for those keywords. Because local keywords are much lower competition than broad keywords, they’re much quicker and much cheaper to rank for — making local internet marketing a much smarter option.

What It Mean to Be Affordable? SEO and Cashflow Economics

Let’s just get one thing clear: the economy ain’t recovering. It’s not a matter of time, it doesn’t matter who’s in office — the economy isn’t going to recover for decades. That means that every single entrepreneur who tries to get started online is looking for the same thing: affordable SEO.

But what is affordable SEO? Affordable means a lot of things to a lot of different people. If you’ve got a J.O.B., affordable means it’s within your monthly budget. If you’re rich, affordable means it’s purchasable. If you’re an entrepreneur, however, affordable means it fits within your cashflow.

That’s because an entrepreneur has to deal with invoices — both incoming and outgoing –that are much less reliable than a paycheck. Sometimes, all of an entrepreneur’s money comes in at once; sometimes, it trickles in bit by bit every day. The question for an entrepreneur isn’t whether something is affordable overall; it’s whether the payment can be spread over a long enough time that there’s never a cashflow issue generated when the payment comes due.

In that way, most forms of organic SEO are still affordable to most entrepreneurs. Sure, there are always SEO companies who want you to pay three large on the first of every month to get their ultra-platinum superservice, but they’re dying if not dead. Real SEO companies have options.

Of course, you still need to have a bit of an idea what your cashflow needs will be — but the beauty of SEO is that it’s cumulative. From a cashflow perspective, that means you can get a little bit done when you have a little money, or if you catch a lucky break, you can buy a better service for a month or two. SEO isn’t a startup cost, that must be paid all at once — it’s not even like a bill that has to be paid every month.

What SEO is is a marketing expense — and any business guru will tell you what when money is tight, the best place to put your money is in advertising. How else are you supposed to start bringing money in? Especially online, SEO is the key to traffic which is the key to sales.

In the end, then, SEO is affordable when it doesn’t ruin your cashflow, and that’s the only consideration, because every ‘unit’ of SEO you purchase promises future income. The ‘right’ move, then, is to buy what you can afford when you can afford it, consistently.

Google’s Games: Is Organic SEO Still Viable?

I just heard the worst words an SEO guy could ever hope to hear: a client told me on the phone that “organic SEO just isn’t working anymore.” He was talking, as you might have guessed from the title, about Panda.

If you’ve never heard of Panda, here’s the story. A Google software engineer named SomethingLongAndIndian Panda came up with a learning algorithm that keys off of the “user-friendliness” of a webpage. The Goog did a bunch of research into what pisses users off about websites, and turned it into a bunch of “do-nots”, taught the Panda algorithm about them, and then let Panda inform the Google main algorithm about website rankings.

The end result? If your webpage isn’t easy to use — and that means easy on the eyes, not just easy to find the “buy now” button — it won’t rank well, period. There are a few things that Panda takes a look at that aren’t on the traditional list of website SEO rules:

Readability
In other words, is your content interrupted by crap? Adwords, banners, even poorly-located navigation bars are considered ‘no-go’ by Panda. If you want an example of a website that reoptimized to Panda’s standards, go look at any article on EZineArticles.com. There’s an author pic, an unobtrusive info panel with social buttons, and that’s it until after all of the content. All of the crap that the reader might consider unimportant comes at the bottom.

Fat Content
It used to be that a 200 word article was adequate for SEO purposes — not anymore. Panda hates thin content. You’d better have at least 400-600 words on a webpage if you expect Panda to consider it quality enough to get a decent ranking, straight up.

Broad Quality
Panda also knows your sister. Or rather, your webpage’s sister. While Panda gives a quality score to every page, it also gives a quality score to an entire site, and the two modify each other. So if you have one Panda-perfect page on an otherwise horrible site, you can’t expect it to rank. Quality has to be across all pages.

In the end, I told that client of mine that he had no idea what he was talking about. The truth of the matter is this: Panda isn’t a whole new set of rules — all of the old rules are still there, and they still work. We just have a few more points to take into consideration, that’s all.

PPC Management And The Power of Sponsored Placement

Pay per click marketing is an incredibly powerful tool under a limited set of circumstances — you need to have a decent starting budget, a site that converts like gangbusters, and a strong PPC management team on your side. Basically, if you’re a starting webmaster and you’re canny enough to be utilizing conversion tools like targeted Email marketing, quality Flash banners, a Web Presenter, and the like, you’re probably in the right place to make the most of PPC advertising.

The thing about pay per click is that there is very little middle ground. Few people break even on Google Adwords or it’s various competitors. They either have a PPC management team that knows how to pick the right bids and (more importantly) the right keywords, or they don’t — and the difference is like investing with Warren Buffett versus investing in lottery tickets. Because there are a lot of losers in that equation, PPC has gotten a bad rap in recent years, but think for a second about what it does.

You set up an ad, and you attach it to a keyword. Anytime someone searches for that keyword, your ad appears on the first page, right next to the first organic results. If they click that ad, you pay a few cents or a few bucks if it’s a popular keyword. If they don’t, you pay nothing.

That’s pretty much the definition of targeted traffic, and if you do a decent job of choosing your keywords — making sure that you’re not paying in the dollars for traffic of the tire-kicking variety rather than the purchasing variety — you can assure a pretty good conversion rate from it.

There’s not many other tools out there that can get your website in front of that many people who are sure to be interested in your site — and all of them will make you pay per exposure, not per person who actually visits your site. That’s a lot of impact from a single tool — which makes it very worth it to accept the risks, especially if you can find some talented PPC management to mitigate those risks for you.

5 Reasons Targeted Email Marketing Makes Good Money

Targeted Email marketing might seem like it’s outside of the range of a typical organic SEO company — after all, it’s not SEO. There’s nothing about Email marketing that makes you rank higher for a keyword, or improves the amount or quality of traffic to your website. What it does do, however, is make phat money. Here’s why.

Targeted Email Marketing lures customers in. They give you their Email address in exchange for something — usually relevant information. From the moment they do that, you have their permission to Email them, which means you can remind them that you exist and that they have a problem you can solve.

Targeted Email Marketing establishes your expertise. A good Email marketer knows that if they hit the customer with a call-to-action right away, they’ll bail. That’s why they spend a few to several emails just plying them with information. Not only does it give them a sense of security, but it convinces them that you know your stuff.

Targeted Email Marketing hits them where it hurts. People don’t sign up for emailing lists because it’s fun — they do it because they have a problem that needs solving. By continuously but softly needling that need, you bring it to prominence in their lives. That way, when you hit the call-to-action button, they’re ready.

Targeted Email Marketing brings them back over and over again. As soon as someone has purchased your product, they get added to a special, second Emailing list for “proven customers”. What that means to you is that they’ve proven they’re willing to give you money — and in all likelihood, they’ll be wiling to do it again if you hit them up with another call to action.

Targeted Email Marketing doesn’t ever end. Unless you irritate someone enough that they unsubscribe from your list — or you run out of Emails to send them — people will stay on your list for years. You never know what will hit their button and make them get out their wallets, but with this tool, you’ll never stop giving them good reasons.

Targeted Email marketing is amazing, and if you’re not using it, you need to talk to your organic SEO company about it today.

Leveraging The Incredible Power of Article Writing and Distribution

Of all of the services that most typical affordable SEO companies offer these days, few have the potential of a talented article writing and distribution crew. Such a group of people — a combination of researchers, writers, submission experts, and sometimes spinners or other specialists — can turn the slow but powerful process of SEO into something that can generate traffic and sales from day one.

A well written article is almost perfect SEO entity. It offers control over the anchor text, control over the link’s environment in terms of latent semantic indexing, an authoritative page (the article directory) on an established site, and of course it links to exactly where you want it to link to. That’s not insignificant in any way, and yet the effort required to write a really good article scares many people away. That’s too bad, because if all they’re considering is the SEO factor, they’re missing out on a large part of the power of article writing and distribution.

Part of the story comes from the potential of a given article to rank higher than your page on the search engines. Google “article writing and distribution”, for example, and you’ll find that several entries on the first page are blogs that point at other pages — the pages that are actually trying to rank for that particular keyword. That’s only one example, of course, there are literally millions of keywords for which an EzineArticle or some other directory page or blog is sourcing traffic to its linked page.

Another aspect of the power of article writing is in the strength of building a personal brand. One of the things that Internet customers are very ready to do is distrust. In order to overcome the basic assumption that you’re a marketer rather than someone who really knows about Betta fish, you have to display that knowledge. Getting a few dozen articles written about the little fishies and getting your name attached to them on some very public sites goes a long way toward giving yourself an air of credibility.

A Three Step Plan to First Page Placement

First page placement isn’t some lofty goal that you should hold yourself to attaining ‘someday’ — though for many a novice webmaster, it certainly seems that way. Rather, first page placement is something that can and should be obtained immediately and held onto through a variety of different methods as time goes by.

Step one: Pay Per Click advertising
Pay per click (PPC) advertising can sound like a very scary investment for anyone not talented in the arena. Indeed, thousands of webmasters who have done solo into the realm of PPC have lost everything — but the smart ones who hire a good PPC management team have found that the profits to be gained from the instant ‘sponsored’ placement it provides more than make up for the cost.

PPC gets you onto the first page on day one — and yes, it costs money to get there, but the money you make when you have a PPC manager working the game for you is more than it costs to pay the manager and the bid costs.

Step two: Indirect Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization takes some significant amount of time to kick in, so it can’t do what PPC does for you. The first result of your Search Engine Optimization will be that pages that aren’t actually yours will rank for certain keywords. For example, it’s not uncommon for an article that you turn in to EzineArticles to rank higher for your chosen keyword than your own page does at first. You’ll still get considerable traffic and sales from these indirect rankings, but it’s only the beginning.

Step three: Direct Search Engine Optimization
Give it six or twelve months, and you’ll find that your SEO starts to pull in a lot of organic traffic, because YOUR page is achieving first page placements for a variety of your keywords. Even while you’re exploiting the benefits of PPC, you’ll feel the power of the SEO adding more and more to your business over time. Eventually, you’ll reach a point where your business comes more from your SEO efforts than it does from your PPC campaign.

Is Mobile Website Design Going The Way of Hidden Text?

You might remember the days of hidden text on the Internet — it was one of the earliest forms of black hat website SEO. Webmasters would want their site to rank highly for a pile of keywords, so they’d just copy the keyword and several similar phrases dozens of times each and make the text color the same as the background color, so human eyes never saw it (unless you hit Control A). The search engines of a decade ago ate that stuff up. Then along came Google and they killed it as swiftly and surely as Seal Team Six killed Osama Bin Laden.

So what does this have to do with mobile website design? Simple — some experts are starting to think that mobile website design will soon be a dead art, like speaking in Latin or giving your own car a tune-up.

Mobile website design exploded with the creation of the iPhone and other similar web-capable smartphones. Such devices couldn’t quite handle a normal website, so a special language was developed that displayed the mobile version of a page if it was informed that the page was being accessed by a mobile device. The mobile version of the page had fewer pictures, less media to load, and was generally stripped down.

(In a comedic twist, at one point the web browser Opera was being used in so many devices that many webpages always showed Opera users the mobile version of a page, even if they were actually on a standard computer. That caused a lot of chaos until it got sorted out.)

The problem, of course, is that now as we move boldly forward into the realm of the 5G phone networks and mobile devices that can handle all of the pictures and media of a normal webpage, the need for special mobile pages is fading quickly. On the other hand, however, there are a lot of people who don’t have one of these new omnicapable devices — heck, there are people out there who are still fighting getting even one of those super cheap Jitterbug cell phones. So it’s safe to say that while mobile website design might be losing a little bit of importance, it will still have a place for years to come.

Small Business SEO Isn’t Like Corporate SEO

There are a few layers of activity in the SEO world: there’s novice SEO, marketer SEO, small business SEO, and big business, or corporate SEO. Each of these is marked by a different kind of activity.

Novice SEO generally consists of some poor sod writing a Squidoo page or an EZA article every night after work, desperately hoping that his new site all about the wonders of Betta fish will hit it big. Marketer SEO is similar, but generally involves outsourcing a bunch of one-off backlinks to a poor Filipino sod who would be doing what the novice SEO guy is doing, but has figured out that he can make better money off of the back of an American marketer who has a bit more money.

Then, you hit small business SEO. Small business SEO covers a lot of ground, but in general it’s separated from marketer SEO by three elements: a bigger budget, a commitment to victory, and dependence on outside experts. A small business who decides to go to war on the Internet front will hire a group of experts — usually, but not always, in the form of an Organic SEO company — to do their work for them. They will spend the money to get the online presence built quickly, and they won’t back down simply because it didn’t happen as quickly or overpoweringly as they wanted.

That’s what most SEO companies do for a living — they focus on small businesses. That’s because the rules of corporate SEO are completely different. On a corporate level, you don’t hire an SEO company — you buy one and make it part of your staff. You don’t pay for a certain number of links or a specific result on Google — you pay a paycheck, and your experts build links by the hour, not by the link.

The lesson here is obvious: if you’re a small business, no matter how determined you are to succeed, you’re never going to be able to take on the corporations on their own turf. Don’t go after the keyword ‘Jiffy Lube’ or the keyword ‘Blockbuster’ — it’s just not going to happen. Focus on the keywords you can win — your SEO company already has a list that’s plenty long — and leave the big boys to their big boy games.