Perspectives and tools to expand your experiences

Friday, February 8, 2013

Stop Procrastinating: 10 FREE SEO Actions To Take To Jump Start Your Web Presence: Internet Marketing For Your Web Site

Stop Procrastinating: 10 FREE SEO Actions To Take To Jump Start Your Web Presence: Internet Marketing For Your Web Site

The way of the future for almost any business is online marketing. Sure the older generation is more accustomed to using the yellow pages but even that is changing.

"For the first time, half of American adults ages 65 and older are online.' PEW, Jun, 2012

"These are the most popular online activities across all generations .....

Email
Search engine use
Seeking health information
Getting news
Buying products
Making travel reservations or purchases
Doing online banking
Looking for religious information
Rating products, services, or people
Making online charitable donations
Downloading podcasts"

PEW, 2012

Ready to get your marketing effort in full swing?

Here are ten PROVEN SEO TECHNIQUES to boost your web reputation. And, don't forget, this doesn't happen overnight ... it takes time. For example, don't setup your blog and expect to be receiveing instant feedback or 5,000 visitors a month.

... you have to work it the old fashion way - sweat equity.

1. The most obvious - setup a free blog and make start posting - at least - once a week. If you are serious about marketing then do one post a day.

2. When you produce a blog post use the labels to accent your marketing slogans, product/service features.

3. Distribute your blog to your social networks: Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter at a bare minimum. This can be done freely or you can use a paid service to do the distribution automatically when you publish your post.

4. Produce a wikipedia page for your organization. Keep n mind this is not a sales page. It is an information page to give you street cred.

5. Join social networks and make new friends - expand your sphere of influence. Click here to see 10 most popular, or a listing, or as an info graphic.

6. Find a forum that is related to your product or service and join it. Answer some questions and get your name established. Meet new friends. Click here for a list. Or google/bing your interest plus the word "forum." For example, if you were selling red wagons you would google or bing "red wagon forum" or "kid toys forum" or "wagon wheel forum" .... you get the idea.

7. Add your web site to your email signature. If you don't know how then google or bing this phrase "how to set up email signature in xxx" and fill in "xxx" with your email service - gmail, hotmail, yahoo .... you get the idea.

8. Get a customer testimonial and add it to your web site. Better yet, add that testimonial to your email signature.

9. Make a video and put it on youtube. Then embed or link that video into your blog or web page. Not sure how to do that? Google or bing this phrase "how to embed youtube video on web site." Youtube has a high pagerank so connecting that video to your stuff will help improve your pagerank - guaranteed. The higher your pagerank the more visibility in search engines you will have.

10. Complete a request to Google Local Places and Bing Local Places to add your business. This will get your biz displayed in the search results with a thumb tack in the local map on searches that match your key words.

Folks there you go - then FREE steps to jump start your marketing. Get'er done and have some fun too!

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Steu Mann is an SEO Specialist. He has been successfully working with online technology since 1997. Follow him on Twitter at @EzWebManifest. If you enjoyed this article, you can subscribe to receive Free Web Site Tune Up Tips in the future. He can be reached at 406.285.1778.

People want privacy - finally a service to protect your privacy on calls, texts, and email

People want privacy - finally an app to protect your privacy on calls, texts, and email

Surveying consumers in 11 countries around the world, the research firm said 68 per cent of respondents said they would select a 'do not track' feature if this was easily available.

Mark Little, a principal analyst at Ovum, said Internet users were increasingly getting more access to new tools to 'monitor, control and secure their personal data as never before'.

The recent scandal involving privacy breaches by mobile messaging service WhatsApp and lingering concerns over data use policies on Facebook and Google are prompting Internet users to be more guarded, Ovum added.

A new app promises to encrypt all your smartphone communications to make them look and sound like gibberish to anyone trying to listen in.

Startup tech firm Silent Circle say their system is 'a secure information service' which can allow users to communicate via voice, text message, email and even video without fear of being tapped.

The app is already available on both iPhone and Android, and its functionality has recently been broadened to allow users to not only communicate securely but also easily send encrypted files.

The team behind Silent Circle includes Phil Zimmerman, inventor of PGP ecryption, which is still considered the standard for email security, and Phil Zimmerman, former chief scientist at PGP corporation and the developer of Apple's whole-disk encryption.

In an interview with MailOnline, Mr Callas, now chief technology officer at Silent Circle, described it as a 'secure information service.'

‘It’s a subscription service that lets you do secure voice, video and email using a standard mobile device,' he said.

‘Let’s say you are in a war zone, or you are a business traveller in China,’ he said. ‘You might want to talk to someone back home and talk to them about what you are doing there that might be of interest to the local wiretapping environment.’

Silent Circle’s kind of customers, Mr Zimmermann says, ‘see the hacking that’s going on internationally, they know that a lot of services they use collect information and use it to target ads’.

‘People say I’m being watched all the time now. It’s not a Big Brother thing, it’s a little brother thing; it’s all these little things that are eroding our basic privacy.’

Is your email at gmail really private and confidential? The short answer is ^#@%^ No.

It's no secret that Google goes through every Gmail that’s sent or received, looking for keywords so they can target Gmail users with paid ads. Before you ask, there is no way to opt of this this. So, yes, gmail is scanning every email you send and receive.

Although I haven't read it, they are probably selling that information to other companies but I need to do some more research. It's the same ole rule, follow the money.

Here are some recent quotes from Google's Exec Chairman Eric Schmidt....

"... if you have something you don't want anyone to know about then you shouldn't be doing it anyway."

"We don't need you to type. we know where you are, with your permission. We know where you have been, with your permission. We can - more or less - know what you are thinking about."

According to data from a survey by Mozaic group published on the Scroogled micro-site, 71 per cent of people don't know that Gmail and some email services scan the texts of the messages they send and receive to target advertising.

That same survey showed that 87 per cent of Gmail users feel that using the content of their messages in this was is 'an invasion of their privacy. And if you’re not a Gmail user but have at some point sent an email to someone that uses Gmail, Google has scanned your message, extracted keywords, and used that data to serve ads to the recipient of your email.

SEO: No business can afford to be missing out on potential customers, a case study on a real business

No business can afford to be missing out on potential customers. The power of exposing your business to a receptive audience on the internet just keeps expanding. It has been proven in many ways that performing search engine optimization (SEO) and integrating internet marketing strategies are best practices for any business web site, but do they work and how? This article covers a real business that implemented these practices and the results achieved in a specific timeframe.

The Business

Pristine Detailing Services, www.pristinedetailingservices.com, is a family owned business in Souther Oregon thats been around for several years. They are professional vehicle detailers with an actual brick and mortar shop where they get ‘er done. Their comprehensive services are unmatched in the local area and they have an excellent reputation from their clients. They offer more that just “wash and polish” services as they remove minor scratches and paint buildup, rejuvenate headlights, do steam cleaning, and a whole lot more to revitalize any vehicle. Pristine Detailing in Ashland is recognized nationally as they qualified to be members of the Air Force One Detailing Crew. Additionally, they were selected to participate on the detailing team for the Museum of Flight in Washington to detail a B-29 Super Fortress. Your get the picture, theses folks are no ordinary detailing shop.

Before Implementation

Pristine had a static web site of a few ages which they put together in their spare time. Suffice it to say that their old site was never indexed with the search engines so it cannot be found at the internet archive web site.

On that current site the best practices were invisible. They had no social marketing links. The content was not capturing the attention of visitors which was evidenced by a pagerank of zero and only five backlinks. There were no invitations or opportunities to visitors that allowed a free connection, i.e. subscription. Lastly, there was no e-commerce ability in place.

When checking the search engines the web site of Pristine Detailing was invisible. They could not be found by their biz name or any key phrase on the first two pages of search results. A recent report found that 93% of all internet traffic comes from a search engine (Forrester 2006).

Mark and Travis had one saving grace working for them in the search engines, which demonstrates the power of social marketing. In this case they didn’t do that marketing, one of their customers did it for them. Nicole was so satisfied with the work on her family car by Pristine that she went out to YELP, www.yelp.com, and put in a five star review about them. Her review was the first entry on the first result page in Google for their two key phrases: auto detailing ashland and pristine detailing. Unfortunately, clicking that YELP link took the user to YELP and not to the Pristine Detailing Services site.

“42% of users studied selected the topmost search listing from the results. This was far and away the most-clicked single link position in the study. However, it is still interesting to note that the majority (58 percent) of all users studied did not select the top search result.” Nielsen Norman Group, 2005

Building A Web Presence

Mark and Travis have a couple of CDs packed with photos displaying the before/after look of their work but no where to put ‘em. They decided the best approach was using the web site as a show case using those photos. And, they wanted to get on the first page of the search results. At that time when you googled “pristine detailing” they were not even listed in the addresses with a thumbtack on the map that Google displays for matching search results.

Summary

The current web site content is designed around photos of the vehicles they have serviced. The site design uses colors and textures that represent a quality, subtle look. Today, site visitors get educational information starting at the home page where there are several videos to choose from. To satisfy social networking, buttons for FaceBook, Linkedin, Twitter, YouTube, and a Blog were added Their blog is connected to the Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter accounts to insure every post is distributed automatically. With their upgraded site they now have an assortment of features available:

Gift certificate sales can be purchased
Testimonials are available from every page
There are two galleries:videos and pictures
Educational articles are available: FAQ, Odor and Germ Control
Ability to receive payments on line is in place

SEO best practices were built into their new web pages and standard internet marketing techniques were implemented. A major result was they obtained search engine results ranking on the first page - in Goolge, Bing, and Yahoo -within 90 days of publishing the new site on their two key phrases.

I don’t suggest measuring search engine results by googling a business name because potential customers don’t know your business name; they are more likely to find you by your services, products, or marketing slogans. However, it’s worth noting that pristine is a common key word with auto detailers across the country. Even so, today they are easy to find found by “pristine.” For example, when you google or bing “pristine ashland” they are the first result.