Website Promotion is not Voodoo

Your Google listing and its Google Place page is a great central depository for all information about your business.  It is the compilation of business owner provided data as well as user-generated reviews. The Place page is an incredibly valuable tool for a small or medium size business owner.  The Places page URL is friendly to users, easy to share, and easy to find …

You will want to search for your company + geo modifier.

For example, “Search Influence, New Orleans, LA” will get me here:

Our colleauge Mat Siltala of Dream Systems Media (Mat was Social before Social was cool) has a nice video tutorial with some great screen shots on how to set up your LinkedIn Company Profile

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Among the benefits are:

• One more positive reference for your brand (reputation management)
• Ability to show your depth with automatic pickup of employees
• Rich text opportunities

• Once Upon a Time in Mexico movies

Mat put together a nice video and has many more screen shots of building the LinkedIn business page on the DSM internet marketing blog. Definitely worth a quick review.

Shall We Dance ipod

Friends from Flickr user: woodleywonderworks

Twitter, a popular microblogging service and social media platform, can be an extremely valuable asset when conducting your internet marketing campaign.

Through Twitter, your company can find and build relationships with prospective clients, promote your products and services or quickly draw traffic back to your website by adding links in the twitter stream.

On the other hand, Twitter can be an absolute waste of time if you aren’t following the right people or engaging enough people.

At the risk of repeating myself, Miriam of Solas Web Design in her SEO Igloo blog has been engaged for a few weeks in an investigation of Local SEO culminating with a series of interviews. Miriam was nice to include me and most recently asked me to respond to some questions from the comments on one of her recent posts.

This is an answer both to Miriam and to current and future clients wondering about our process.

What this post will not cover:

• Managing offline conversion (I’m working on a case study for this)

How do you plan to be found? If your business were on a deserted farm road in the middle of nowhere, how would you be found? Chances are, you wouldn’t be.

Your web site and the pages within are the same way. Just because you’ve published a web site doesn’t mean it will get found. And even if it has been, just because you have a page on your site doesn’t mean it will be too.

This is why it’s so important to have links, coming into your site and between the pages on your site. If you have a page to which nothing links, there is no way for the search engines to find it!

A big part of the way a search engine decides how to give you a good response is by looking at how closely what you type in to their search box matches the words they have in their database of web sites.

For this reason, it’s critically important you use enough text on the page to assure your web site is seen as a reasonable match to those phrases people really type. And of course, it’s not just as simple as creating compelling copy on the page, you have to also be sure that when you describe items in the code of your pages such as links to other pages and images that they too have text versions for the search engines to adequately understand what they mean.

Perhaps THE most important part of any search engine marketing campaign is key phrase selection. You can have the most optimized, organized, accessible web site on the planet, but unless you can be found for the key phrases for which people are searching you’re out of luck.

In my opinion, for small and medium businesses the best way to develop key phrases for your web site is by brainstorming with your staff and customers – particularly those staff who are in direct contact with customers. Unless you know what language your customers use when talking about what you do you won’t be able to effectively get found.

In addition to being text deficient, a web site that relies too heavily on images or flash has another very serious problem to overcome.

There are billions of web sites on the Internet and the search engine spiders (the pieces of software that crawl the web in search of new information) only have so much time to spare.

In short, if your web site loads slowly when you are looking at it in a web browser, it probably loads that way for the search engine spiders. This means that in a world of limited resources you’ve used up much of yours before they even get to the important stuff – your text-based content.Raising Helen trailer