Archive for the ‘Search Engine Marketing’ Category

3 kinds of Internet marketing customers (continued)

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

In our previous post we talked about customer A and how they will likely not succeed at their Internet marketing unless they become more like customer B or C. In this post we will talk about customer B.

Customer B recognizes that having a website isn’t about “Build it and they will come.” They understand it will take some effort to build the site towards success. Customer B understands the principle of “At least a little bit of something is better than a whole lot of nothing.” They don’t have a lot of money but they invest regularly in their site to keep it in motion. They recognize that a successful website is like a river, it must be in constant motion to stay fresh and alive and when it sits still it stagnates.

Customer B has identified the steps necessary for success.

They know they must constantly monitor their traffic to determine if their site pages are reaching their target customer appropriately. This process teaches them better ways to reach their customer and more effective ways to communicate with them. As they learn they adapt and modify their website accordingly.

They’ve learned that in order to be successful they must achieve top representation in the major search engines for the keywords and phrases integral to their success. They understand that to do this requires a process of evolution for their website, that each page must be continuously optimized until it achieves successful representation. If they do not have the time and inclination to learn how to do this themselves they budget and employ a search engine marketing company such as Adtastic Hostings’s company web-sem, that will work with small businesses in an affordable manner and assist them with this process.

Customer B doesn’t have a huge budget but they recognize the importance of ongoing and long-term marketing for their site to be successful. They set asided a small amount of money, usually a few hundred dollars monthly towards the ongoing maintenance and marketing of their website. They find a web company like Adtastic Hosting that offers affordable ongoing professional marketing services and they stick with them. Over time they find that the site grows, traffic increases, sales begin to occur and it all pays off. This is the difference between them and a customer that simply does nothing and wonders why their site is not successful.

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The Power of Web Analytics

Monday, October 27th, 2008
Most small businesses on the Internet today don’t really understand the power of web analytics. They’ll spend $300 running an advertisement in the newspaper each month which has limited exposure and is time-sensitive on its return but when it comes to
marketing and promoting their website they spend nothing at all or next to nothing.
In our experience as a hosting company, most small businesses are more concerned with purchasing the cheapest hosting package we have available than they are about understanding the benefits of a hosting package which incorporates web analytics and Internet marketing. In most cases it has taken us over a year to convince our average small business hosting customer of the advantages of a hosting plan with built-in internet marketing and web analytics. When they finally decide to try one of our marketing programs they are absolutely amazed as they see website traffic increase by 400% or better on the average and website sales go up exponentially.
And just what is the advantage of web analytics? Web analytics is like having a two-way mirror into your website. Without it, you are really working in the dark when it comes to understanding your web traffic or knowing how to make your website profitable.
Having a good statistics program is a start but only true web analytics will provide the in-depth view of your website necessary and needed to really grow your site to major success. You need to know how long a visitor stays on a webpage, the path they take through your site, where they came from, what search engine they used, what search term they used and so much more that can be provided with web analytics.
Web analytics will provide you with the data to adapt your website according to what your visitors really want and expect from you which is something you will never know without it and this in turn will help you to be more successful. Without web analytics you might as well be working in the dark.

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Link building and Page rank

Friday, October 17th, 2008

There are all types of schemes and arguments for link building and page rank. I am not going to get into them here but will impart a little bit of our professional philosophy regarding the two.

Link building (aka backlinks) is when you get other websites to link to yours. Page rank is a number from 0 to 10 Google attaches to every page on the Internet that it indexes. Page rank is like a vote for your site. It is extremely difficult to rank much higher than about 7 unless you are a huge corporation then you should rank that higher or higher. (Although I run across many that aren’t doing there job well because they don’t).

If you are a small business having a page rank of 4, 5, 6 or 7 is excellent. Basically, the higher the page rank the more authority Google is saying your page has according to them and the better chance of you ranking more highly. Page ranking is mathematically configured for your page based upon, amongst other factors, how many sites link to your page. So, theoretically, the more sites you can get to link to the page, the higher your page rank will be. And if some or many of those sites have a higher page rank than your page, the greater chance your page rank will move up accordingly.

However, we have shown and argued time and again that page rank is not really all that important. This is because we have frequently taken a page with a 0 page rank to the top of Google right over the top of high page rank pages. This proves that page rank is not all that important, all the time.

What is most important is relevant content. Content is king when it comes to getting to the top of search engines. Knowing how to write and optimize content that gets to the top of search engines is critical. And this is where a search engine professional comes in because a true professional knows how to achieve this.

Don’t get me wrong, having good quality backlinks is important too and a site should devote some of its efforts and time in slowly building up the backlinks. And it is important that they have a good mix of relevant content known as “anchor text”. The information in the link leading to the page should have a few of the relevant keywords or a phrase related to what the page is about and this should be mixed up a little bit so not every backlink says the same thing.

If you do employ a backlink campaign be certain you use a true professional and be careful as too much could actually harm your site more than help it.

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