Marketing has always been a necessity for businesses.  Without marketing, there can be no sales.  Without sales, there can be no business. This same cycle holds true on the Internet.  However, how do you market online?  What does Internet marketing have to do with the success or failure of your business?  Internet marketing is very different from other forms of marketing, but for all of those differences, there are a lot of similarities as well.  Do you actually need Internet marketing, though?

In this modern world, ensuring that your company has the right online marketing strategy is not only important, it is essential.  More and more consumers are coming to feel that if your company does not have an online presence, you are somehow less viable than are other companies.  This holds true for local businesses, as well as for national and even international companies.  In short, if you do not have a web presence, and you do not know what your company is doing to market itself online, then you need to get busy.

Internet marketing can be done in a number of different ways.  Banner ads provide considerable benefits, as do Flash widgets.  You’ll also find static text advertisements such as PPC ads that are targeted to consumers’ searches through online search engines like Google and Yahoo.  Affiliate marketing is yet another form of Internet marketing, which actually harnesses other people to do your marketing for you.  The beauty of this form is that if those marketers do not perform, they do not get paid.

SEO (search engine optimization) is yet another manner in which you can market online.  This is actually a series of techniques, more so than a single procedure.  It relies on using a particular density of a specific keyword within text on the Internet and goes hand in hand with article marketing, custom content development and many other aspects of Internet marketing.

As you can see, the world of Internet marketing has come a long way, indeed.  It is just as viable (or more) as traditional marketing in print, on the radio or through television.  In fact, some experts expect online marketing to dethrone traditional print promotional methods as the methodology of choice, simply because Internet marketing lets your ad be seen by millions of people, as opposed to the few who flip the page in that magazine, or tune into that particular station on the TV.

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‘Join us on Twitter’, Join us on Facebook etc. –These are some of the commonly seen expressions and integral components of every organization’s marketing strategy. Almost every company is aware of the power of social media marketing but confused about the ways to leverage its power for building network & get maximized gains from the same.

Well, the answers to these concerns lie in clear understanding of the importance of social media networks, which paves way for social media marketing (SMM). As perComScore reports, today 734.2 million or two-thirds of the world’s 1.1 billion Internet users, 15 & older visited at least one social networking site in May, 2009.

To gain success in SMM, you must be able to clearly define the primary objectives of your SMM campaign. Here is a list of some common goals, valid for most businesses. However, you need to decide what suits you the best as a short-term objective, to be achieved first. 

• Brand visibility & promotion
• Customer Relationship Management
• Community Involvement with your Product
• Lead & Sales generation
• Polls & Surveys
• Hiring

Now How to execute it?

• To best leverage the power of different Web-based SMM platforms, it’s vital for you to align your core business objectives with the appropriate SMM strategy. Your strategy must be a product of your business goals and target market. For instance, if your niche target audience comprises of professionals then it’s recommended that you concentrate largely on platforms such as LinkedIn, Ecademy, Xing etc.
• Choose the most appropriate goals listed above and then the right channels to use the power of social media networks. Once you’re done with that, you can now start thinking on the lines of leveraging the power of each selected channel.
• Spread the right message about your brand on different chosen platforms on a consistent basis.
• Clearly segregating the short & long-term SMM objectives as SMM offers both short as well as long-term returns.
• Concentrate on quality, not the quantity of implementation of your SMM campaign.

We, at LimeDomains, also understand the profound significance of social media marketing, and therefore have created our groups on some prominent social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter.

Join us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter!

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If you are a website owner that allows Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising on your site, but there doesn’t seem to be much return this article will try to explain a few reasons why.

First, let’s review what PPC is for those who may be unfamiliar with the term. PPC is a type of advertising that businesses purchase when they want focused advertising that has potential to bring traffic to their website.

The PPC ad itself is rather small and may feature less than fifteen words with no graphics. Part of the ad is in a separate color and underlined. This is the location visitors will click to visit the business link featuring a product they may be interested in. It can appear like all links within your page design.

Many businesses will use PPC ads on their website as a means of offsetting costs associated with site upkeep. Certainly websites with lots of content enjoy the premise behind PPC advertising.

The idea is simple; sign up for a PPC account and allow ads to be placed on your site. When someone clicks the ad you get some money in your account.

However, there is a problem with this concept. The predominate dilemma is if your site has relatively few visitors PPC companies may not credit your account even if someone clicks on the PPC ads. If your website is new and hasn’t really taken off yet you may not experience much benefit from placing PPC ads on your site.

Another problem some websites have with PPC is in ad placement. If visitors see your ads in the typical ad locations they are likely to ignore them. This is why you see major website experimenting with alternate ad locations. They also use this idea on those little notice that allows you to skip an ad screen that many websites use to start your online visit (you’ll notice that skip welcome screen never seems to be in a standard location, nor do they feature standard color or font size).

You should consider making the PPC advertising part of your content. Adjust the font and color of the PPC ads to match the color and fonts of your text. In many cases readers will simply assume this is extra information about whatever it is you are talking about. If you’ve focuses well enough on your keywords the PPC ad will directly relate to the text.

The last tip for PPC ad placement is related to the previous tip. Work to blend your PPC ads with your site design. In many cases PPC ads stick out like a sore thumb in site design. They should blend – not clash.

I have never been a big fan of PPC ads for use by a business that will likely get great results from solid Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies. However, for those who accept PPC ads it can be a positive financial experience. You just need to remember to market your site well to bring in substantial site visitors and then work to make PPC ads look like they are part of your content and less a part of standard web based advertising.

If need help with Google advertising or Toronto Internet Marketing, feel free to contact us today.

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It takes more than wishful thinking in order to land one of your pages in the top 10 of Google, but once you understand the criteria of what is involved, you can increase the likelihood for each of your pages if you start with the goal in mind.

Rankings are based on algorithms, therefore if you are operating within the guidelines of the formula, certain results are produced consistently as a by-product of what comprises your pages.

Outlined below are a few examples of Seo Web Design including clearly defined on-page SEO principles known for producing top 10 search engine results. The first component to ranking in the top 10 results in major search engines is:

Meta Tag Optimization

Keyword stuffing (adding all of your keywords in the title, description and on the page) is a thing of the past. Not only will it blatantly get your red flagged from search engines, the human readers will have such a difficult time attempting to get the gist of your topic, you may as well say “please click the back button and leave my site” to save them the hassle.

Don’t stuff your keywords in the meta tags, keep your title on topic and short and sweet succinct title always works better than trying to stuff every possible keyword under the sun in one long / truncated title.

There is nothing more unattractive than words getting cut off in mid sentence, or even worse having to look at the dreaded pipes keyword stuffing stuffing even more keywords even more ridiculous keyword stuffing, etc. No name calling here, but if you are using still using this technique for search engine optimization, it’s time to cut the mullet and move into 2007 where things have changed a bit and people actually click on the title based on the emotional response they receive from the message.

In this way, it’s not always having to be first on the page that matters (despite popular opinion), it’s who’s title is the most compelling that gets the click.

The Description Tag

Depending on the strength of your website, you can rank for a keyword that is (a) in the title of the page (b) on your pages (in the body text or links) or (c) in the description tag alone. It’s more about the overall combination of these on-page factors that determine the ranking potential within each search engine, as they all have their own criteria for awarding relevance and relative positioning when a query is executed.

Your web page description should be concise and try to use actual search terms in your description (something most SEO companies won’t divulge). Any SEO worth their salt knows, that if you want to rank for a specific term, having the “exact match form” of that key phrase in your title and description increases your ranking potential for that term.

Keep the keywords with a higher priority closer to the front of the sentence and try not to go over 250 characters. This keeps your pages focused as well as makes each of the words more potent for ranking. The more words you use, the less potent they become. So once again, the short and sweet version works wonders for a two-fold purpose (1) the visitor, because it indicates to them what they can expect once they arrive and (2) the web bots and search engine spiders, that place a great deal of emphasis on the words in the title or in description data.

Optimizing your Hyper links

First of all a hyper link for those who are unfamiliar with the term is a fancy way to say link that includes the URL (universal resource locater) otherwise known as website or web address inside. Links can be used for internal purposes (within your site otherwise known as navigation i.e. link architecture) or for external purposes such as linking to another website you enjoy or endorse.

If the links are leaving you website and going to another site they are considered forward links or if your website receives a link from another site they are called back links. In either capacity the way that the strength of a link is assessed is from the anchor text or text comprising the link states. So, instead of using click here for a forward link an optimized version of that would contain a keyword which carries tremendous weight in search engines when referencing what the topic of the page the link leads to, as well as add addition ranking potential to the page that the link is located on.

Hyper link optimization plays a major role in SEO. By understanding the role that links play in search engine optimization, you can understand how to improve the rankings on each of your respective pages, by following a few simple guidelines.

If you can envision your website as an island, the only thing bringing in traffic are the bridges that connect it to the surrounding land masses. Without those bridges (inbound links) to connect it then then how fruitful can you expect it to be?

If you have links coming into a page, say 20 for example and 30 links leaving that page, you are in essence dispersing the link juice or ranking power for that page to the 30 pages you link to. Having a good internal to external link ratio is one of the foremost aspect of SEO, but realizing that you should try to keep your links on topic and use keywords you wish to rank for in the text of the link to make the most of each link on your pages.

Optimization of Alt Tags Alternative Text Tags

Since web bots and spiders can not parse the data in an image or flash to determine what the image is, Alt tags allow webmasters to create a clear description of what the contents of the image are. If you have an image showcasing your company headquarters an ideal way to utilize the alt tag from this image would be a company name headquarters, city, state. This way you could obtain the maximum value for this image as a contributing factor to your overall rankings with regional references as well as using the company name to reinforce your brand.

In the past, this was one of the most abused forms or search engine optimization and fell more along the lines of search engine manipulation. Companies would stuff every keyword possible in the alt tags in over inflate relevance for their keywords instead of simply creating content with value. Filters have been added to search engines to eliminate websites utilizing such tactics, but you would be surprised to note how many webmasters still use this technique. Fortunate for us and unfortunately for them, it nearly results in penalties in rankings every time pushing them lower on the totem pole for achieving top 10 rankings if even top 100 results.

Optimization of your Website Content

Optimization of your website copy otherwise known as content or words is the most important factor for ranking. Without going into too much detail, it is safe to say that the higher quality of content your pages have, the better they rank in search engines.

The reason is simple, think of the web spider as your friendly neighborhood reporter who is always looking to be the Johny on the spot to report the latest and greatest headlines to the web at large. These programs are more than just reporters, they have been designed to emulate human behavior and crawl through your pages much like a real human would. They follow links, take notes and even more so, if they like your content they come around more often to see if you have refreshed your data.

Knowing this it is important to write your pages for humans, since they actually pay the bills, but also to understand that you can create compelling text for the search engines to index as well. This is accomplished through word density, which is another fancy pants way of saying how many times a word appears on a page, and how close it is to other keywords that you have outlined as important within the document (using your links, titles and descriptions).

To add even more emphasis to a group of words for on page optimization, you can employ the header tags h1, h2, h3, and so on to reference the priority for those phrases or keywords on your pages. We explore specific uses of header tags at a later time, but the purpose for now is just to provide an overview of the basic elements involved in SEO Web Design.

Content truly is king, so the best way to grab the attention of the Google bot is to write world class content and sprinkle in optimization tactics for optimal effectiveness.

Site maps – What they are and how to use them.

A site map is essentially an index of the pages comprising your website. There are two different types of site maps;

(1) An HTML site map that is used for human visitors to find relevant pages and (2) an XML site map that is designed for spiders to connect the dots and find your entire website when it is performing indexing to create a snapshot of the contents.

Every page on your site should have 2 things in order to be taken seriously from the major search engines. Your site map and your privacy policy. Another thing you might wish to note, that if your physical street address is missing in action (in your contact page) on your website, your listings will probably have the same effect from Yahoo and some of the other engines. Penalties come in different shapes and sizes, so to avoid them it is better to be proactive and incorporate these three elements right from the start.

An HTML site map is nothing more than the link to your page with a brief description following it. This alone can affect where and how your page is ranked in the grand scheme of things. An XML site map on the other hand is something which is placed at the server level that spiders and web bots access (much like your robots.txt file) when looking for data to report back to the web.

I think that about wraps it up for this overview of the basics fundamentals of SEO Web Design, stay tuned in the future when we outline specific ranking strategies and methods that you can apply to your pages to optimize them using the principles that search engines are keen to respond to. The last thing you want to do is omit creating engaging content, after all, what good is SEO if after they arrive they just click and run as a result of lackluster content. But that is another article in it’s entirety.

If you are interested in Toronto Freelance Web Design, please feel free to contact us.

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