Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category
Monday, April 26th, 2010
Perhaps the most ambitious campaign of start-ups, Y Combinator is a hybrid venture capital fund and business school that invests in, advises, and literally, feeds 40 or so early-stage businesses a year. Paul Graham, it’s fearless and optimistic leader, supplements his nominally sized investments of under $25,000 with lots of smart advice, technical help, and sense of community. The model has produced 145 companies to date, a few sizable acquisitions, and copycat funds in cities across the country and around the world.
For all the pain of nurturing a start-up, Graham believes that founding a company is the most efficient way to create wealth — for investors, for founders, for society at large. “There’s this classic pattern that has happened over and over again throughout history in which something is made one at a time, very expensively and unreliably by hand, and then someone comes along and figures out how to make large numbers of them cheaply and reliably,” Graham says. “We’re pulling this kind of transformation with venture funding. We’re mass-producing the start-up.”
Graham is something of a folk hero to a generation of ambitious techies, who debate his essays, read his books, and pitch him start-ups by the hundreds. His philosophies are simple: founders should live as cheaply as possible so that they can first become cash-flow positive. Wealth will follow.
Indeed, there’s something exhilarating about Graham’s optimism, especially at a time when so many once-great companies are sitting on the verge of bankruptcy. Graham believes, deeply, that start-ups are the answer to the world’s problems; that they are easy to make if you are determined enough and cheap enough; and that it’s getting a lot easier to start one.
Tags: creating wealth, san diego internet marketing, start up business success, start up fund, venture capital, webitmd start up
Posted in Internet Marketing Fundamentals, Marketing, SEO, Starting Up | No Comments »
Thursday, April 15th, 2010
Search engine marketing spending is expected to be up 14% to $16.6 billion in North America in 2010. While growth in this marketing channel, which includes paid search, search engine optimization, and other search engine marketing technologies, slowed in 2008 and 2009, it still proved to relatively recession-resistant. As we progress into 2010, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) projects steady growth to return.
In a recent survey, SEMPO found that a majority of marketers planned to shift marketing budgets away from other channels such as direct mail and spend more on paid search and search optimization. Marketers see search optimization as a valuable means for increasing Website traffic and generating leads. In turn, site traffic metrics could measure the success of campaigns, such as conversation rate.
Respondents, however, are concerned about measuring return on investment, effectively optimizing their sites, and choosing the best keywords. Further, markets were also daunted with the challenge of integrating paid search and search optimization with other online and offline marketing strategies.
Tags: conversation rate, conversion optimization consulting, lead generation, paid search, san diego internet marketing, san diego online marketing, search engine optimization spending, SEMPO, seo growth, seo spending
Posted in Internet Marketing News, Marketing, SEO, Starting Up | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010
The new iPad brings with it exciting opportunities for advertisers and publishers to present their content on a larger and more vibrant iPhone-esqe display.
According to comScore, a digital marketing analysis firm, consumers are intending to purchase the iPad over all other e-readers, such as Amazon’s Kindle or Sony’s Reader. This is most likely due to the fact that iPads can do much more than simply display black-and-white text. comScore’s surveyed respondents intend to use the iPad for Web browsing, music, and e-mail over reading books and newspapers.
While many respondents stated that they would probably not purchase apps for the iPad, a majority intended to purchase specially formatted content for it. Current iPhone and iPod touch users were over two times more likely to purchase newspaper and magazine content for the iPad than those without an iPhone or iPod.
“The tablet and e-reader market is developing at a breakneck pace right now, and Apple’s entry into the market is sure to accelerate mainstream consumer adoption,” said Serge Matta, comScore executive vice president, in a statement. “These devices have the potential to be incredibly disruptive to the way consumers currently access digital content.
Tags: apple ipad advertising, comScore, ereader, ipad advertising, ipad content device, ipad marketing
Posted in Internet Marketing News, Mobile Marketing, SEO | No Comments »
Monday, March 29th, 2010
As Internet Marketers, we pay attention to every opportunity to capitalize on the changes made in the online industry to gain a competitive advantage over our competitors. SEO is undoubtedly always changing as innovations affect how content is discovered, indexed, and sorted in search results. In 2007, major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo have made some of the most significant changes ever by including images, maps, books, video, and news for certain search results.
Every marketer is forced to develop digital asset optimization strategies, while not forgetting about the basic search engine optimization components, for their clients through an integrated approach. Every approach must now include structured data in the form of microformats and rich snippets, as well as feeds and sitemaps, that all play an increasingly important role in uploading content for the Google index. Google says its mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
Because of this, it is now becoming absolutely essential that companies develop a plethora of digital assets that must include not only links and sitemaps, but a variety of real-time feeds from social media sites, videos, pictures, and blog posts. By developing these assets, marketers can deploy a better more holistic SEO strategy, which realizes the benefit of inclusion and visibility where customers are looking.
Many search marketers already optimize holistically under the premise of, “What can be searched on can be optimized.” Until recently, most companies avoided entering the content marketing business. SEO consultants have typically been left to deal with whatever content they could to optimize and promote for link building.
In essence, the weight given to content optimization versus digital asset optimization should clearly match the opportunities presented by an ever-changing search results page.
As long as there are search engines, there will be some kind of optimization for improving search engine visibility for your clients! What companies need to consider are all the digital assets they have to work with to give both search engines and customers the information they’re looking for in the formats they’ll respond to. Stay competitive and offer what assets you have against your competitors!
Information Provided By: Lee Odden, ClickZ
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders
Tags: holistic internet marketing, holistic seo, online marketing holistic, Online Marketing San Diego, san diego internet marketing, seo innovations google
Posted in SEO | No Comments »
Monday, March 15th, 2010
The one thing that makes social media marketing so attractive lies in four words: word-of-mouth marketing. This is one of the most effective and credible forms of marketing a product or service and is the reason why so many companies feel the need to have a presence on many social networking sites. However, these social media users prefer a different type of interaction to help them inspire or prompt an online search…
According to a recent survey, conducted by BIGresearch for the Retail Advertising & Marketing Association (RAMA), they found that in-person, face-to-face communication was a social media users’ top reason to start an online search for a specific product or service.
The study revealed that social media users were even more influenced by face-to-face word-of-mouth than an average adult’ opinion found online.
This preference of face-to-face communication held across all age groups within the survey, and the only difference among any age group was that 18- to 34-year-olds were more likely to search online because of something they had seen on cable television, which was a smaller force among older users.
The study also demonstrated that online communities, such as MySpace and Facebook, influenced less than one-quarter of social media users to search for a product or service which is still a notable percentage. When it came to gender differences, men were marginally more likely than women to report such an influence from a social networking site and age had an even larger effect. Among the 18-to-34 group, nearly three in 10 searched because of social networks, compared with less than 20% of 35- to 54-year-olds and 15.3% of those 55 and older.
More than 71% of the respondents communicated about a service, product or brand in person after an online search, compared with only 21.6% who spread the word via sites such as MySpace or Facebook. Not all digital communication was shunned, however; about one-half used e-mail to tell others what they had found.
Social media users are particularly attractive to marketers because they are more likely to both look for and give purchase advice than the general population. Word-of-moth marketing continues to be one of the most valuable marketing tools available to companies so they should be focusing a lot, but not all of, of time in the online arena, especially in social media.
Information Provided By: eMarketer
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders
Tags: facebook marketing, medical internet marketing, medical online marketing, online search marketing, san diego internet marketing, san diego online marketing, social media marketing
Posted in Behavioral Marketing, Internet Marketing Fundamentals, Internet Marketing News, SEO | No Comments »
Monday, February 8th, 2010
Looking for some free tools to help you improve your website’s SEO? Get familiar with the following 5 tools that can help improve your website’s visibility online and increase your conversions!
1. SEO Analyzer: You submit your website’s URL into this SEO Analyzer and it will provide you some feedback regarding your SEO and conversion strategies. It actually gives your website a rating on a point scale between 1-100 on how you are currently optimizing your website for search engines and optimization. It also gives you a report on every aspect of your website, including inline styles, obsolete HTML, and download time. For being a free tool, it is worth taking a look at!
2. Website Grader: This free tool is one like that of the SEO Analyzer. Instead of giving you a grade on a point scale between 1-100, it actually gives you a letter grade. Website Grader provides a great deal of information in a short amount of time and tells you all you need to know about optimizing your site, making your SEO efforts easier, and in less time. This tool also tells you how many del.ici.ous bookmarks you have, as well as grading both on-site and off-site SEO.
3. AWStats: This tool is also free and is mostly helpful when researching who is visiting your site, what search engines visitors use, and when visitors are actually showing up on your site. This is more of a log analyzer than an analytics tool but still provides free and useful information.
4. Crazy Egg: The basic version of this tool is free, but can also be upgraded if you pay a little extra. Crazy Egg allows you to see what visitors do when they get to your website, as in where there mouse is actually moving and what they are clicking on. It even has a heatmap to show you the exact mouse movements made by your visitors! Very easy to use and great free information!
5. Mint: Mint is a tool that provides great information regarding unique referrers, popular pages, and number of visits. This tool is around $30 dollars, which is not bad when the pay-off will hopefully be increased site traffic.
One should of course use web analytics tools first to receive most of their information like Google Analystics and Google Webmaster Tools. However, yo should be using the free and inexpensive tools that are available out there to find out more information about what your website is doing right, wrong, and to find out more information your analytics tools don’t tell you. In this economy, any beneficial information you can receive on a tight budget can only help your website grow, so get out there and start utilizing these tools!
Information Provided By: Moe Tamani
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders
Tags: conversion optimization tools, Free Conversion Tools, Free SEO Tools, Inexpensive SEO Tools, internet marketing tools, Search Engine Optimization Free Tools, Tools for Improving Your Website
Posted in Internet Marketing News, Marketing, SEO, Web Development | 2 Comments »
Thursday, February 4th, 2010
It was bound to happen- some person writing about the death of SEO. There are a few reasons for this speculation, try searching for “is seo dead.”
Reasons why people think SEO is dying are as follows:
First, people do not really know what SEO is. Even among marketers, people continue to believe that SEO is the “process of tricking search engines to rank a site for search queries for which it isn’t one of the better matches. With this viewpoint, it’s easy to see why people would want to conclude that SEO is a dying medium. Google and Microsoft make billions of dollars in revenue from their search engines, and protecting that revenue stream is a critical activity for them.”
If people are not using SEO correctly, they will ruin the search engine system. This is why Google has invested so much in WebSpam. When consumers receive poor search results they become dissatisfied and turn to different search engines.
Second, other people believe that social media will soon replace SEO. “These people argue that inbound links are an elitist system of voting for Web sites (you have to own a Web site to vote), and that social media will provide a much broader array of signals, because anyone with an Internet connection can sign up for a social media service and start making their opinions known. Further, they argue, more people will rely on social media for opinions on things because people love to learn from the experience of others.”
Social media sites have not been adopted broadly across the population, making the data lumpy and inconsistent- and it is easily spammed. In creating an account, no real investment is needed; all you have to do is sign up and begin posting your opinions and thoughts.
Authority is another issue here. We can assume those with tens of thousands of followers on Twitter have some authority on a topic, but the most they can offer is their own opinions. “Someone with a Web site has made a significant investment in building that site, and here the stamp of authority is likewise relatively easy to measure. However, it’s much more meaningful to receive an authoritative link than an authoritative Tweet.”
So is SEO dying?
“Not a chance. Defined properly, but still somewhat narrowly, SEO is the practice of helping publishers bring new traffic and customers to their Web site, by building and promoting high quality Web sites using technology that the search engines can parse. That need isn’t going away anytime soon.”
Make the most out of available opportunities. For example, Microsoft’s Bing. SEO can and will evolve with the changing times. The advent of universal search resulted in some changes, and created new opportunities for SEOs. The rising prominence of local search did as well. Increasing personalization will create yet more opportunities.
“For the SEO professional, staying abreast of the changing market environment is part of the price of being in this business. While change is constant, publishers use SEO as a means for obtaining new customers from search engines. As long as search is around, there will be a need for people who know how to make that happen.”
Information provided by: searchenginewatch.com
Written by: Samantha J Stephan
Tags: internet marketing seo, san diego internet marketing, SEO, SEO San Diego, seo vs. social media, social media, social media rising, webitmd internet marketing
Posted in Internet Marketing Fundamentals, Internet Marketing News, Marketing, SEO, Social Media Networking, Web Development | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
It probably hasn’t even crossed your mind that submitting videos to Youtube or other channels should be an essential part of any SEO campaign for you or your company. Well, new statistics gathered from various studies may make you consider video SEO a little more seriously.
Forrester Research claims that videos, properly submitted to an online site of course, are 53 times more likely to generate the first page Google ranking than traditional SEO techniques!
Other statistics provided by Treepodia, claim that by simply having a video on a product’s webpage assists in attaining conversions. This boost to conversions is often motivated regardless of whether visitors watch the video or not!
Video SEO also has two distinct advantages over traditional SEO techniques.
These being:
1. Search engines over the internet aim to providing its searchers blended search results that contains video, social networking feeds, and various others rather than just providing links. For this reason, they give a higher ranking to other forms of web content, like videos, in order to make sure search results are displaying a variety of content.
2. The majority of the millions of videos posted daily on various video sites are improperly submitted to search engines and their indexes. This leaves a wide open area for marketers to upload their videos and have them ranking over others before everyone else catches on.
Now, how do you submit your videos to search engines?
There are two main ways of doing so. The first way is in the form of an XML feed. Many search engines allow today allow sites to submit videos in the form of an XML feed but it is important that when considering which search engines to target, that you consider their guidelines for doing so. The majority of the guidelines provided online for the search engines are outdated or not useful, so one should contact that specific search engine to find out their policies and formats they prefer.
The second way would be to submit a page of yours with a video on it. The sites you submit should submit a permalink sitemap that mirrors their video XML feed. The title tags in particular should be identical to the video title to achieve the highest pagerank scoring to help you climb the ranks for certain keywords.
These stats provided here, whether true on a large scale or not, show us marketers the great potential for using videos as an effective SEO tool.
Information Provided By: Benjamin Wayne, Search Engine Watch
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders
Tags: google video seo, how to use video seo, san diego seo video, seo san diego webitmd, seo video strategies, submitting a video to search engines, video seo, video seo webitmd
Posted in SEO, Starting Up | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
Out with the old and in with the new! A new year has begun and keeping up with SEO trends should be at the top of your to-do list. So for 2010 here is a list of trends to keep an eye out for:
- Site Speed – Site speed may be used as a new ranking factor in 2010. Make sure your pages load quickly by decreasing load time. “The order of things on your page will affect its load time, so make sure you’re using proper HTML, and cleaning up your CSS and JavaScript so that users aren’t left waiting when they try to access your site.”
- Mobile – Research done by Neilson shows that there are now 56.9 million people looking for information on mobile web sites, which is up 34% from last year. First you should find out how your site performs on small devices. There are paid services which provide feedback for this. Then, once it is functional, take advantage of Google’s new mobile services and free online coupons.
- Online Video - YouTube was made the second largest search engine last year. With larger companies dropping out, more space is available for small to medium sized companies which could use the attention. So make a video and post it soon!
- Reputation Management Meets Real-Time Search – “When Google put real-time search updates into the SERPs they unleashed a potential online reputation problem of epic proportions. They essentially opened the floodgates to give angry customers immediate power in the search results. You no longer have a window to reach out to an angry tweeter to ask them to amend their update or tone down that Blog post. Google is pulling from tweets, from Blogs, from news, from articles and other Web content and throwing it immediately into your search results, often right above your own site. All of this means that you need to be even more vigilant about monitoring the conversation in an attempt to protect your brand. For a small business owner, your best line of defense is to build a listening station that will help keep you abreast of conversations as they happen.”
- Increased Awareness of Local – “If you haven’t tied up all your local listings and profiles, it is beyond time to do that. The search engines, especially Google, are looking at the consistency and completeness of your local listings in order to rank you for relevant queries. That’s a huge ranking factor that is 100 percent in your control. Take advantage of it!”
Information Provided by: Smallbiztrends.com
Written by: Samantha J Stephan
Tags: 2010 trends, internet marketing san diego, internet marketing trends, internet marketing trends 2010, san diego internet marketing, seo trends for 2010, top new trends 2010, webitmd internet marketing, webitmd san diego
Posted in Behavioral Marketing, Marketing, Mobile Marketing, SEO, Social Media Networking, Starting Up | No Comments »
Monday, December 21st, 2009
When a new website is initially released on the internet, Google may give it a high rank in the Google search index. Usually this is between 24 and 48 hours after production. On average, the page will rank particularly high, then it will drop back to whatever is normal for the website.
One theory, calling this period the “honeymoon,” suggests that Google initially ranks new pages high, so that it can collect data on how relevant the page is for particular keywords. “If during the honeymoon your pages are clicked often and the visitor hangs around for a while (doesn’t click back and choose another option from the search results) then your drop after the honeymoon isn’t significant. The logic being that your page offers a good answer to the question being asked. If your page doesn’t get many clicks or people don’t stay around then after the honeymoon you can expect your page to drop further in the index.”
It is always exciting to see your website rank well on Google’s search index, but keep in mind that once a few weeks have passed, the site may drop back to its real position.
Information Provided by: Entrepreneurs-journey.com
Written by: Samantha J. Stephan
Tags: google search, google search index, google website launch, internet marketing san diego, Online Marketing San Diego, san diego internet marketing, SEO San Diego, WebitMD SEO, website launch
Posted in Internet Marketing Fundamentals, Marketing, SEO, Starting Up, Web Development | No Comments »
Monday, December 14th, 2009
If you do a “view source” command from your browser and look at the code of someone’s website, you may find the above tag at the top of the source full of keywords relevant to the page you are looking at. These relevant keywords are called Meta Tags and are commonly used to distinguish the keywords that are relevant to a page’s content that you would like search engine’s to pick up.
You will see countless articles still instructing webmasters to make the importance of Meta Tags a priority but that has proven to be out-dated information. That is because in the early days of pre-Google, Meta Tag keywords were reasonably powerful tools for SEO. Meta Tags, combined with the keywords within a page, made up the main driving forces that dictated how high up a page would show up in search results.
The reality nowadays is that Meta Tag keywords are considered far from crucial for good SEO and if abused can even be bad for it. It is often seen that many websites really “keyword stuff” their source codes so that they have a higher ranking for more keywords under Google and other search engines. Many of these “keyword stuffing” sites hide more Meta-Tags within the site’s content with advanced coding or by using a text color the same as the background color. This strategy is frowned upon by search engines and if found, the site will be banned from all of the search engines all together.
The question still remains: Should I even worry about Meta Tags now?
The answer to that is yes and no. Do not prioritize using good Meta Tags when you have other larger SEO subjects to worry about. Your title tags, heading tags, and content play a much more important role. If you have time to spare to work on SEO, you should be writing great new content that people would link to rather than cramming your pages with redundant keywords.
If you insist on using Meta Tags, use them sparingly! You should only have about 10-keyword phrases maximum and make sure they are relevant to the page’s content.
Information Provided By: Entrepreneurs-Journey.com
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders
Tags: google metadata, importance of meta tags, internet marketing meta tags, meta tag, meta tag seo, san diego internet marketing, seo meta tags
Posted in Internet Marketing News, SEO | 3 Comments »
Thursday, December 10th, 2009
One of the simplest ways you can improve your search engine optimization is to actually see what you named your files on your website or blog posts. You want to send your visitors to the pages of what they are actually searching for on your site and by offering keywords in the links to those pages; it will not only help them find it, but also offer more keywords for SEO.
Here is an example:
A tennis ball company offers these current links to sell their Slazenger, Wimbledon, and Wilson tennis balls in their online store:
www.bigballsintennis.com/product1
www.bigballsintennis.com/product2
www.bigballsintennis.com/product3
This is only telling the search engines that you sell products, not tennis balls. Use keywords for those specific products so that these items are more visible to your customers
Here is what they should look like:
www.bigballsintennis.com/slazenger-tennis-balls
www.bigballsintennis.com/wimbledon-tennis-balls
www.bigballsintennis.com/wilson-tennis-balls
Information Provided by: www.entrepreneurs-journey.com
Written by: Kent Seiders
Tags: file naming structure, san diego internet marketing, san diego webitmd iphone application, seo file naming, seo naming structure, SEO San Diego, url file naming, url file structure, url internet marketing, url structure internet marketing, webitmd blog
Posted in Conversion Optimization, Marketing, SEO, Web Development | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
Mobile devices are the future of SEO
As research proves that everyday more people are obtaining cellular devices, the cyber population realizes they need to target those individuals immediately. Thus, SEO is going mobile. Remember when the only way to observe websites was from a computer?
Today, marketers are looking for bigger and better ways to specifically target their client’s segmented audiences and mobile SEO seems to be the answer. Consumers want websites to appear on their mobile devices as they view them on their computer screens- unscrambled and organized. Mobile SEO professionals need to make sure the website is clear and easy to see in order for the marketing to be effective.
The near future holds a plethora of options for mobile SEO and research marketers. Mobile SEO will become the norm for consumers to be exposed to new product and service marketing campaigns. Mobile marketing rules and regulations are far from being solidified at this point in time, but with more companies pursuing this new marketing scheme, the closer it will be. In addition, when many companies participate in this option, mobile SEO will become more ordinary to consumers.
The security of mobile SEO is a risk today. Rules and regulations must be known in order to create healthy competition among companies.
Information provided by: Visibility Magazine
Written by: Samantha J. Stephan
Tags: future of SEO, Internet Marketing, mobile marketing san diego, mobile network ads, san diego internet marketing, san diego seo webitmd, search engine marketing san diego, webitmd seo san diego
Posted in Internet Marketing News, Mobile Marketing, SEO | No Comments »
Friday, November 6th, 2009
You might think that the most attractive and eye-catching websites available online are the most popular to visitors. Although the aesthetic your site is important, search engines and unique visitors favor sites where the quality of layout and content of your pages is very high. By keeping your site simple, with informative and interesting content, you can increase your SEO significantly and can keep visitors on your pages longer.
Here are the top 5 tips for making your website more search engine friendly while making it more accessible for its users:
1. Improve the layout of your webpage. You want to make sure your homepage is clear and in a simple layout. You should make all of your links and navigation tools easy to find showing visitors, at a first glance, where they can go and how to find out what they are looking for. Make sure to use bullets, tables, bars, white spaces, and margins appropriately to make your website seems less cluttered. Always put your most important information at the top of the webpage so your visitors can see it without scrolling and your paragraphs should be less than 100 words for easy scans of the content.
2. Keep your webpage short in length. Physically longer websites take more time to load and also require your visitors to scroll for your information. Allow your visitors to find what they are looking for on your site without scrolling if possible. If scrolling does become necessary, make sure you add easy navigation buttons to enable visitors to jump directly to all of your pages. Recommendations include: keeping your pages fewer than 32K and making sure your pages load within 8-10 seconds.
3. Keep navigation tools a priority. Navigation tools should be located in plain sight and on top of your webpage. Navigation links should be on every page and should always provide an easy link back to your homepage. If you do have a complex website, make sure to add a search function at the top of the site.
4. Keep your fonts simple! Having fonts on your site that are too complex, too large or too small for your visitors will just make it more difficult for them to read. Fonts that are great to use are default fonts like Arial, Times New Roman, and Verdana because they are legible and load on any computer, anywhere. Making sure font colors, styles, and backgrounds are clear for your visitors is essential. Use underlining and bold texts to highlight the more important texts on your site.
5. Improve your site’s content. Your content should be informative but with some uniqueness to keep visitors interested. Avoid grammatical and spelling mistakes and offer many hyperlinks to allow your visitors to pursue a topic in more detail. Search engines scan your content so keep it in plain text and offer a variety of topics concerning your website’s goals.
These tips can help take your existing website and make it more user-friendly. Visitors and search engines are more concerned about the content your site offers and how to navigate through the content rather than how attractive it is. So, it is important to utilize these tips and keep your site consistent throughout.
Content provided by: www.emarketer.com
Blog Post written by: Kent Seiders
Tags: Improving website SEO, san diego seo, san diego seo webitmd, Search Engine Optimization Tips, SEO San Diego, SEO WebitMD, Tips on SEO, top 5 seo tips, WebitMD SEO, Website SEO Improvement
Posted in SEO | No Comments »
