I thought I’d share a good article I read recently on timesonline.
I once was lost, now I’m found on the web
If anyone is interested in learning about how to market their business using search engines, social media and other forms of internet marketing you can book for a free 1 day Internet Marketing Training Course
At our last Internet Marketing Training Course one of the delegates asked as to why when they searched in Google on their company name that under the main listing it bought up various other links to internal sections.
Muraspec Google listing
They also queried as to why this only happened after some searches, that bought up their website in the results, and not others. Although at the time I was pretty sure as to why i thought I’d carry out a bit of research and post it here on our blog.
Why does it happen in some searches and not others?
Google will only return thes type of results when the search criteria is specific enough – in this case the company name. When the search criteria is this specific then Google realises that it can go a bit overboard and give a type of menu to internal pages to save the user some time. In this case the company’s name was unique so there is little doubt as to what they needed. If the user searches for what the company does it doesn’t bring up these results when the company name is listed.
Why does this not happen when I search on my company name – even though I’m top?
This gets back to one of the central points of our Internet Marketing courses – A well structured website. In this case Google obviously thinks it knows enough about the site to give this mini menu. From a quick scan of the site it seems that its showing the values that are either text links or Alt Tags from image buttons – so whatever you do make text links on your site and make sure you have Alt Tags on any image menus.
In conclusion
At the end of the day a website owner has to make it easy for search engines to go through its site and find information. Although you can’t force Google to provide a listing like this you have to give it what it wants – which is information:
Another important note to remember – you can also give extra information on text links (within the code) using the Title tag.
Credit – some of the information included in this blog article was found at http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/092509-google-adds-links-to-web.html?hpg1=bn
Stuart Brant
Todays post comes via Mashable, the authority on social media. Ive reproduced the post in its entiriety here to save you a click, but this is their original content and I would highly reccommend subscribing to their blog.
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Creating a blog for your small business isn’t easy; it requires hard work and the ability to think creatively about your work. But if you avoid the five big mistakes laid out in this post, your chances of building a successful business blog will be much better.
How to Avoid: First, don’t ever put out a press release on your blog. You can use your blog to make product or other business announcements, but do so with original writing and in a more casual voice. Second, do use your blog to write about things other than your core business. Share your thoughts on your industry, share insights into the day-to-day work life and processes at your company, and provide tips and tricks you have learned during your time in business.
How to Avoid: Blogging regularly isn’t easy, so to avoid burning out, brainstorm editorial ideas ahead of time. If you plan to put out new posts every Tuesday and Friday, for example, try not to start writing Tuesday’s post on Tuesday morning. Get other people at your company involved so that one person isn’t shouldering the entire blogging load, and even consider sourcing content from your customers. Remember that anything can provide fodder for a good blog post, so pay attention to the things you read or see on other blogs, newspapers, magazines, or television.
How to Avoid: Obviously the first thing you need to do is enable commenting on your business blog. But beyond that, you need to remember that the conversation is two-way. Get in there and respond to the comments readers leave on your blog and you’ll be more likely to develop a community around your writing that can help turn your customers into fans who will evangelize your products and services and provide you with quality feedback. You should also participate in the conversation on other blogs in your industry by leaving comments on posts elsewhere around the blogosphere. That will help you to establish your “blogging brand” and bring new readers your way.
How to Avoid: There are a few ways to make sure your blog content is more easily discovered.
- Make your blog easy to find by linking to it prominently from your company’s web site and including your blog’s URL in your email signature, on your business cards, and in sales and marketing collateral.
- Use a full RSS feed (because the goal with most business blogs should be to get read, not boost page views) and make it easy for your readers to find and subscribe to.
- Embrace social media technologies like Twitter and Facebook as a way to notify your fans and followers of new blog content, and make it easy for your readers to share content with each other through social media channels and via email.
- Optimize for search engines by putting relevant keywords in post titles and URL slugs and write about the things that your customers are most likely to be searching for — but avoid sounding artificial simply so you can stuff some more keywords into a post.
How to Avoid: Set attainable goals and realize that you’re in it for the long haul. Don’t cancel your blogging efforts after three months — give it at least a year of regularly putting out quality, original content. And make sure that your blog is easy to find, and that your readers are able to easily comment and share posts with others.
So, hopefully, you are getting traffic to your website – whether its through pay per click, natural searches, email marketing, social media or any other form of marketing, offline or online.
We come to this point at the end of our Internet Marketing Workshops and to be honest its not normally something our delegates even think about – but its crucial in turning website visitors into customers. So I thought I’d discuss a few things we try to get over to people attending our internet marketing courses. The question you need to ask is:
What do you want them to do?
When you go to IKEA on a Saturday afternoon you enter the store and then, whether you want to or not, you have to walk through virtually every section and past every product (2 floors worth in the Croydon store) before you enter the scrum of the checkout area and are able to leave the store. This is not by accident – IKEA have sat down and asked themselves – What do we want them to do? The answer is probably “We want them to see every product we sell so they buy more products”.
So as the owner of a website you need to ask the question “What do we want them to do”
If you have an e-commerce site then the answer would normally be:
If you haven’t got an e-commerce site then the answer could be any of the following:
Of course some of you may have more specific answers and these may change depending on your business circumstances or may even be seasonal.
So you have identified what you want your website visitors to do – now how do you get them to do it.
Well the simple answer is use the landing page to lead them to it – depending on your on your objectives:
Its all pretty logical but by sticking to a this simple theory you will be able to convert browsers into customers – once you have got them there. Like IKEA won’t let you leave their store until you’ve seen every product – you should follow the same approach.
I will be expanding on this in forthcoming blog articles and also on ezine.com.
Forthcoming articles:
Assume your customers are idiots!
Mental Recoginition and SEO
Stuart Brant
When I was sitting in on one of our 1 day Internet Marketing Courses in London, UK last week there was a penny dropping moment mid way through the afternoon when one of the delegates said “when you think about it this is simple, its common sense”. At this point I was happy as I knew we had 12 satisfied customers who would leave the course knowing what Google was looking for on their websites.
The guy doing the training, John, was talking about SEO and in particularly how Google decides which sites to rank for different keywords. In our training courses we take the view that:
If you give a man a fish he can eat for a day
If you teach a man to fish he can eat for a lifetime
If the delegates understand the principles then the rest will follow.
He had all the delegates completely hooked by talking about the 2 things that Google wanted to see:
Relevance and Authority
Although I own the training company this was the first time we had used this trainer and I was anxious to see his approach. The course is aimed at business owners and marketing managers and covers all forms of internet marketing from Social Media, PPC, SEO through to email marketing.
Although I knew the course content well, the way he delivered it had me completely rapt and it was such a great way of explaining it to an audience of relative newcomers to internet marketing that I thought I’d share it with you.
So what is the Relevance and Authority that Google desperately wants to see?
Well the relevance is the content and tags. How can Google possibly rank your web page high for a keyword phrase if you don’t mention it on the page? If the page titles, meta tags, heading and content contain the keyword the Google can’t fail to realise its relevance. So if you follow this rule then you can tick the box marked Relevance.
Where does the Authority come from?
The Authority is when other websites link to yours. Rather cleverly Google has realised that only time it can pick up from a website a vote in another websites favour is through a hyperlink. Surely if a website page links to another website page it’s a vote in the recipients favour. Google obviously thinks so and they try and concentrate on natural links rather than directories and paid links.
To paraphrase one of our delegates – This is simple, its common sense.
I know a lot of Internet Marketing experts will say – everyone knows that but trust me a lot of website owners don’t.
Future First Technologies offer Internet Marketing Training Courses, consultancy and fully managed marketing solutions.
Stuart Brant
Tumblr the half micro-blogging, half bookmarking site looks set to rise from relative obscurity and along with Posterous and others become the blogging platform of choice for busy people.
Put simply, Tumblr is a cross-content sharing utility.
That’s not very simple, but nevermind.
You can post images, videos, quotes, text, links (pretty much all types of media) to a blog-style page with a range of delicious themes, but as per usual, there is a wealth of community functionality.
Its wonderful, it really is. With very little effort, you can create professional and engaging content stream.
Although, having sung the praises of this new platform, its not all that in terms of marketing;
But for some companies, this could work; video production companies, for example. But it is important to realise, when creating an online presence, that you should be thoughtful about the location of your content, and not simply distribute as far and wide as possible.
Joe New
Many people who dont believe in the power of new media for business simply dont get what it can do. Similar to the dot com boom, where companies knew that they needed a website but still weren’t sure what it was for, people arent harnessing the power of social media because they dont know what to do with it. People with smartphones will understand me here: piles of features, you know it can make your life better, but you arent inclined to do the digging in the menus to reap the benefits.
This diagram illustrates simply and easily how to use social media. Cant get better than that.
using social media in an organisation
Joe New
Everyone knows that the best promotion of a product comes from recommendations by the end consumer, and a new age of global interconnectivity allows the recommendation and sharing of products to happen faster and more efficiently.
Well, tis old news for those who have already begun to harness the power of facebook. Courtesy of Mashable, here are the definitive top 5 best facebook advertising campaigns for consumer products. All hail.
These all have several main facts in common:
So now you know.
Joe New
According to some movers and shakers in the twittersphere, there will be a y2k style bug where the time codes of tweets will exceed the value that 3rd party twitter programs can handle.
And this is going to happen, as we are informed by http://www.twitpocalypse.com/ on the 14th of June at 10:24 and 21 seconds, which is actually stupidly precise.
At any rate, this bug is unlikely to cause any real problems: twitter.com will remain unaffected and 3rd party apps will probably undated in due course, so this is little more than a curiosity and a hint at what could go wrong…
Also not a bad demonstration of what we have said about online marketing so far, the only web service you can rely on is your own site. If this is up to date, well coded and properly optimised, it will give you greater success that thousands of social media accounts.
Joe New
