Archives : 2011 : October
Internet Marketing Tools for Your Business
There is a wide variety of internet marketing tools for your SEO and social media needs. Some internet marketing tools are free, some are paid. So how do you pick the best internet marketing tool for your business?
At the Bend WebCAM 2011 conference, Taylor Pratt from Raven Tools presented Tools of the Trade, which covers an array of paid and free internet marketing tools. The key features of any tool should help you with the following:
- Save Time: If a paid tool saves you several hours per day, sometimes paying $150 per month might well be worth it.
- Centralize Data: Some internet marketing tools provide the ability to keep all your information in one location, in an organized manner.
- Collaborate: A good internet marketing tool would allow the ability for users to collaborate.
- Reliable: This would possibly be the most important aspect. Your internet marketing tool needs to be reliable.
There are the traditional tools that help with keyword research, content management, social media management, link management and link research. However, there are also the non-traditional tools that people need to look out for. These non-traditional tools help with microdata, monitoring, usability, and technical analysis.
Microdata
Microdata help search engines and spiders understand the information on the website. It is important to have clean code so that information can be processed quicker and better.
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Online and Social Media Monitoring
The online and social media monitoring tools help you keep track of what is being said about your business, online—good or bad. By keeping track of the positive and negative, you know what your customers like or dislike about your business, and what can be done to improve.
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Usability Testing Tools
Websites have to be user friendly and provides information within reach of visitors. If visitors do not know where to click or find it hard to navigate, it really defeats the purpose of having a website. There are some usability testing tools that help you with increasing the usability of your website.
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Technical Analysis
A good technical analysis tool would help with evaluating code, determine if a website has a search-friendly design, and helps with IA setup.
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Writing SEO Content for Your Website
Writing for the Internet can be difficult. Writing SEO content is even harder. Readers are getting more demanding—speed, ease and informative. Studies have shown that readers skim. When skim readers read an article, they expect content to be short and straight to the point. Don’t expect the reader to stay long if you beat around the bush. Now, the challenge is to balance good content with SEO.
Writing for the Web
It is important for your website to be informative. If you don’t offer readers what they want, they can leave quickly with a simple click of the mouse. How do you get readers to stay?
Short and Sweet: Don’t use fancy words to try to sound more profound when a simple word will do. If readers get confused, they will not read your content. Allow your content to flow smoothly so readers enjoy reading and stay longer on your website.
Paragraphs: I have seen websites that have pages and pages of information with no paragraphs. Paragraphs help readers understand your writing better through organized thoughts. When there is a new paragraph, it is a signal to the reader that the topic is either being developed or that the writer is moving onto another discussion.
Active vs Passive: The active voice is shorter, more assertive and easier to understand. Passive usually requires more cognitive effort from the reader—this stresses the reader and forces them to leave. For example, take a look at “My hard work was appreciated by my boss” (passive) and “My boss appreciated my hard work” (active). Which requires less effort to understand?
Scannable text: As I mentioned earlier, many are skim readers. Readers scan a page to find answers to their questions. It also helps them understand the topic better. When writing for the web, create text that is scannable—headers, bold, and bullet points.
SEO Copywriting
It is important to create search engine friendly content to allow your website to rank well on SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). To rank well, you need to have the following:
Well-researched keywords: You need to understand keyword research and select the ones that can help you rank. By ranking well, visitors can find your site, leading to conversions. Keywords need to be relevant to the content on your page—search engines look at this when ranking your website. This also helps readers understand your content better.
Keyword rich content: Through the effective use of keywords throughout your content, search engines can rank you better. However, a website that is covered with nothing but keywords does not provide readers with the information that they need. You are merely optimizing your site for robots—this defeats the purpose of having a website. Good SEO copywriting involves the proper use of keywords that flow with content.
URLs, titles, descriptions and headers: Your URLs, titles and descriptions have to be well used as search engines use these when figuring out the content of your website. A good SEO copywriter will be able to integrate keywords into them and the content.
Characteristics of a Good SEO Copywriter
Good SEO copywriters are a unique bunch of people and they tend to have the following characteristics:
- Deep understanding of keywords
- Inquisitive
- Able to tell stories
- Adventurous
- Deep digger
- Solves problems
- Able to surprise and delight
- Enjoys research
Smart Solutions’ SEO Content Writing Services
At Smart Solutions, our SEO team is able to balance good content with SEO. We have the right people with the right characteristics that can create great content for your website. Our experienced SEO content writers that can help you with the following:
Contact us now to find out how we can write SEO content for you.
YouTube Video Marketing – Part 2
Google offers ‘AdWords,’ Facebook has ‘Facebook Ads,’ Twitter has ‘Promoted Tweets’ and Linkedin gives us ‘Ads by Linkedin Members.’ While we take advantage of these search and social media sites offering ad programs—why not look to YouTube for ad space as well?
If you’ve ever watched a video on YouTube, you might have noticed the different types of YouTube ads on the site through your experience.
- Arrive at YouTube and you will see the masthead ad.
- Search for a YouTube video and you will see the featured videos along the side.
- Click through to the YouTube video you want and you might get the 15-second ad before the video with promoted videos on the right.
- After your video finally starts, you will get pop-ups throughout your time watching.
Although these advertisements can be intrusive at some times, they are also strategically placed. No matter where you go on the YouTube site, you are sure to find one business or another trying to get brand recognition and clicks.
While you’re deciding what aspect of YouTube advertising would be best for your business, it would be a good idea to keep in mind what we talked about in YouTube Video Marketing Part 1—knowing who you are advertising to. YouTube allows you to choose your target demographic—whether based on age, gender or both. You can also target by keyword, interests or individual channels. YouTube offers such a wide range of targeting techniques that will ensure your success in your YouTube video advertising.
As with Facebook, YouTube offers Insights as well. After you have started your YouTube advertising campaign, you will be able to track the data for every aspect of your promotion and improve on it, so that each subsequent one will be better than the last.
YouTube grows its viewers every day, and is only going to get more popular as time goes on. After all, YouTube is the second most popular search engine, after Google. Don’t hesitate to get started with marketing on YouTube, whether it is through your own channel or YouTube advertising.
For more social media tips and techniques, follow Smart Solutions on Twitter and Facebook!
Social Media Marketing for Business
People are social animals. We like to connect with people in a way that’s conversational and communal. This is the reason for the popularity of social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter—each of them is highly reliant on the social aspect, being able to communicate with your all of your friends in a single place. But it isn’t just friends in social media—it’s also businesses.
There is only one thing that stops businesses from using social media consistently; it isn’t that people don’t realize the significance of using social networking—it’s that they just don’t have the time.
The Smartz Social Pak – Social Media Packages
Smart Solutions has eliminated that barrier with the all-new SocialPak. This social media package comes in different varieties, depending on what your business requires for social networking.
We cover three different social media sites for our customers—Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. We chose these three because they are each the top in their own field. Facebook is the all-time largest social networking site; Twitter is the most popular micro-blogging platform; and Foursquare is the top location-based service provider.
Each of the websites offers its own value to a business, and that’s why we offer them both individually and as a group—not every business will need all three.
SocialPak – Social Media Monitoring and Social Media Set-Up
In our LocalPak, there are two different options for you to choose from: The Social Media Monitoring packages or the Social Media Set-Up packages. Again, the choice of which package to use depends on what you’re looking for in your business. We outline some ideas below:
You might want SocialPak Monitoring if…
- You need regular posting on your social media
- You don’t have enough human resources
- You want all your monitoring compiled in one place
- You want weekly reporting
You might want Set-Up SocialPak if…
- You don’t understand how to optimize keywords
- You need a headstart
- You want to stand out right away
- You need to remodel your social media accounts
Give us a call today, if you’re interested in learning more about the Smartz SocialPak. Don’t fall behind in social media marketing. Get Started Now!
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