Online Marketing Trends: Virtual Learning via Second Life

Apparently there's a group at Second Life called 'Real Life Education in Second Life.' It is made up of people who are interested in the educational possibilities of Second Life. According to them, there are more than 400 universities and 4,500 educators participating in the Second Life Educators List (SLED). And this group is studying how to leverage the benefits of learning in a virtual world in order to assist the students of today.



Caption: From Second Life, students role-play a courtroom scene in Ramapo, Suffern (N.Y.) Middle School’s virtual world campus hosted by Peggy Sheehy in Teen Second Life.

In an article written by a professor of computer science at Colorado Technical University named Cynthia M. Calonge, she notes, "the benefits outweigh the risks associated with venturing into a virtual world educational platform. For me, the virtual world is my preferred learning and teaching environment."

What does this have to do with what our Los Angeles marketing firm can do for our clients? It means is that more and more of our clients need to set up social media networks, to engage with customers, teach them, and share knowledge. And it means that websites need to be filled with content to educate people about what they do and optimized properly with the search engines so that they will come up first on the search engines. And blogs are becomming a way of life.

Imagine the magnitude of virtual classrooms? Futurists like James Canton and author of The Extreme Future, have already said that one of the top ten industries of the innovation economy is, "8. Education and Learning. The creation of immediate, portable, transferable, on-demand knowledge sources on a scale equivalent to the Library of Congress."

Don't Let Do-it-Yourself SEO Programs Fool You

Lately it seems we have had some new business clients who contacted us for online marketing or PR services, but when we talk to them about their search engine optimization (SEO), they seem to think that they already know how to do SEO in-house. One prospect even said they know there are all kinds of keyword software programs out there for free, that can tell you what your keywords are, etc.

Here's the thing. Would you tell your optometrist, for example, how to fit you in a pair of glasses? Or, would you feel confident about being able to design your own website in html? And do you even want to learn how to do it and then take all the time required to continue monitoring and doing it? Unless a company has hired a true SEO expert, who has years of experience, it is unlikely that the job will be done properly.

Much of what we do as marketers can always be done by the small business owner "in-house"-- but when a company starts learning and then implementing things like SEO, or PR, it takes vast amounts of time away from what they do. That said, it is often best to leave SEO up to the experts who have been doing it as a career for awhile - like Mike Keesling, our resident Los Angeles SEO expert. He has been doing SEO for more than ten years with excellent results for our MarCom New Media clients. Check out our SEO case histories. As Mike always says, it's best to look for long term results rather than short term instant gratification.

In fact last year we had a client who promised their web development team could be "taught" how to do the website SEO meta-tagging, etc. Mike trained them and we charged our standard training fee. Several months later, their site was still not tagged properly, and Mike had to actually do the job we should have done in the first place. That said we wasted three good months of possibly better search engine optimization results. And yes, in the end we charged more for it than it cost them to be trained. But with this being only a one-time fee, it was worth it because after the SEO started working, their revenues from new leads made up the difference fairly quickly.

Why B2B Companies Need SEO

One of the biggest problems facing companies with business to business (B2B) as opposed to Business to Consumer (B2C) solutions is the fact that many B2B sites don’t have sufficient content on their websites to respond to desired search terms that folks are using to find them. What does this mean? Simply put, while consumer driven websites may get more daily searches from prospective customers, B2B sites get their fair share of their own niche of potential businesses or strategic partners, and in some cases shareholders who are on the Internet searching, using certain key words to find the B2B solution they are seeking.

Following are just a few of the steps that MarCom takes as SEO consultants to ensure that our B2B client websites are organized into the most logical, user-friendly architecture that responds to organic searches (e.g. comes up on the first page of Google).

1) Benefits of SEO Sooner- Not Later. Today, with so many companies and individuals swarming the Internet and putting up websites, blogs, and posting to social media sites, the search engines are running out of bandwidth for indexing websites fast and efficiently. What used to take a company just two to three months to be ranked by Google and other search engines for keywords that people are using, may now take eight months or longer. The longer you wait to do the proper SEO for your B2B site, the longer it will take to become ranked. The proof is that we can take a look at your competitors today, and in 3 or 6 months, we'll tell you how ahead or behind your SEO is while they become better and better ranked each month.

2) Keyword Analysis. No matter whether you’re are a B2C or B2B company, the first step is still a keyword analysis. BUT the differences are that a B2B company should not make keyword judgments, but rather create the gross list that is as inclusive as possible of the potential terms their actual prospects might use – and this would include vertical markets, potential strategic partners, the government in some cases, and even shareholders. As SEO experts, we then focus on generic keywords based on what these potential customers call things. You also need to think about whether or not searches will be about a problem they’re experiencing, or the type of company potentially offering solutions? And often times geography may play a role in what people are searching for.

3) Determine Relative Popularity of B2B Keywords. Once you’ve created the gross list of potential keywords, we will determine the relative popularity of these search terms to give us some idea of which search terms are used more often than others. The actual raw number of searches for a given search term doesn’t matter as much.

4) The Value Website Optimization. You can now figure out the search terms by which your site will be optimized. For each B2B solution, there will be one or two relevant search terms that rank highly, three to five more that place as seconds, and many others that also have good potential. You can include terms with lower search volume because in B2B , these may yield less search volume or not as much traffic, but more likely it will yield a more serious potential partner or investor. Website optimization is where most webmasters make their biggest mistakes such as universal tagging, repeating the company name, or NOT using key words in Meta, Alt and Description tagging. This requires a true and experienced SEO consultant for the best results.

5) Building Content to Accommodate Extra SearchTerms. B2B companies often have sparse website content, so they will need to find a home for all of their search terms. As always, each page of content should focus on a specific term. In other words, where else on your site can you create a credible landing page that is going to respond well to organic search for each of these terms?

6) Internal and External Link Building Strategy. Some of the pages might be directly accessible through your site's primary navigation, other pages may be in the sub-navigation, and others may only be accessible through text links in the body copy of pages. Always keep the landing pages for the most popular search terms closest to the home page. Never go more than three layers deep, or the engines won’t look there. Go for the least amount of clicks possible to get to the landing pages with the best key words. Landing pages related to less popular, more obscure terms (also known as longtail keywords) can reside deeper on the site.

7) Inter link Between Related Search Terms. If there are three landing pages for a given product page, a case study page, and a blog posting-make sure that the site visitor can easily get from the landing page to the other “related” pages.

8) Create Content and External Inbound Links. Articles, blog posts from external blogs, videos posted to YouTube or Google and the hundreds of other video sites, and bookmarks on Social Media websites must be created so there is activity generated TO your website from other places on the Internet. And this does NOT mean recripricol links, but just one way inbound links. This will help get your site ranked faster than anything. AND while we build these links, we can also add other versions of this same content with your keywords to pages of your website, so the search engines have a better chance of finding your B2B company among all of your competitors.

In summary, the faster you accomplish all of the above steps, and do them right, while continuing to build content and links, the better your ranking will be in the search engines. MarCom shoots for all of our clients to become ranked on ALL of their keywords, and then STAY in the first page of Google, Yahoo and other search engines. As things change, MarCom New Media will make sure we continue to stay up on all the latest SEO trends.

Engaging in Social Media Optimization (SMO)

Finally we are seeing that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of websites is being taken seriously. Although many companies have been perfecting this for years, including our expert, Mike Keesling, today's best practices have been defined and now companies are competing for visibility within the organic search listings on the Internet. So much so, in fact, that while three years ago it took a couple of months to be optimized, today it is closer to six to eight months. Why? Because so many companies are finally trying to get optimized, and the search engines need time to put them in place.

As always, when it comes to new marketing practices, Social Media Optimization (SMO) is the latest new practice that is gaining visibility and ground. SMO is primarily a link building strategy providing links to a site from other sites so the search engines will give the site a higher ranking, and so people using search terms and phrases will be more likely to find your site. As SMO practitioners, we include links to your site in relevant blog posts, vlogs, forums, etc. Last, SMO is the tool by which Social Media Marketing (SMM) thrives. What is SMM? It is the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with one another.

What does all this mean? Many websites are static. In fact when MarCom posted our new Los Angeles SEO consultants website, our old website known as MarCom Broadband was static, rarely updated and nothing more than a portfolio of our work. So the first rule (after your site has been optimized) is that you want to increase your links, the most important priority for websites. In order to increase the likability of content on our new website, the first thing we did was to start this blog with links back to our website. And it is important to reward those who read your blog. Mention them, allow them to post comments, and send a quick note of appreciation to them. I also mention other bloggers or authors in our space. Note Paul Gillin, Expansion Plus, etc. in our blog roll on this blog.

Next, we started doing PRWeb or MarketWire releases, and then posted articles on the Internet each with a keyword strategy that includes three key words or phrases. Every blog, article, press release and newsletter links those three key phrases back to the MarCom New Media website. There are other strategies including white papers, form posts, and and bookmarking on social media networks, all of which provide linking opportunities.

Tagging or bookmarking means adding content via buttons, for example, to "add to del.icio.us." You can also submit white papers, or relevant articles to other relevant sites to get your content out there. What's more, if you have short videos, these can be added to YouTube, plus syndicated to hundreds of other video sites via RSS feeds. This way others can create what the industry has dubbed "mashups" to drive traffic back to your website. Wikipedia defines this as "a digital media file containing any or all of text, graphics, audio, video, and animation, which recombines and modifies existing digital works to create a derivative work."

This new era of social media marketing is different than push marketing of the past. It is all about truth, and sharing of ideas. And more and more marketers are realizing the value of having a good social media marketing strategy in place.

Most important -- on the Internet -- it is critical to just be authentic.

Los Angeles SEO Consutants

We have been Los Angeles SEO consultants for quite some time - way before most people even knew what search engine optimization, or SEO, was all about. I remember starting about ten years ago writing forum posts for a client. Next I got involved doing articles, then ghostwriting blogs, and following that, reputation management for a fallen executive.

I met Mike Keesling about four years ago. His background is multi-dimensional, which is one of the reasons he is such a good marketer. He not only does SEO, but he helps our clients with their business strategies online so they can earn more revenues.

Mike produced the first Energizer website campaign for Chiat\Day advertising. After that, he started doing SEO, and one of his clients has maintained a top five ranking for their primary keyword phrase “oahu vacation rentals.” Just go to Google and type that phrase in. The results say it all.

One big lesson that he has taught me, is that because of Google, things are always changing and you must be patient. For instance, during what has come to be know as Google’s Florida Dance --which dropped 97 websites out of the top 100 in fifty different categories -- his client was dropped under their key word "oahu vacation rentals." Mike gave his best SEO advice ever, which was to do nothing. He recommended that they just wait and ride it out and he was proved correct about 23 days later.

MarCom used to be strictly a Los Angeles Public Relations firm. Then we realized, during the high tech and dot com era, that many of our clients actually needed it all - marketing, advertising and PR. Today, thanks to the emergence of the Internet, there's been a paradigm shift in marketing. Now I can't do PR without an SEO program in place. Why? Because the media are out there searching for stories online too! And if our clients are optimized with links on the Internet back to their website, they rank well in the search engines, and the press can validate the company.

One thing many people don't realize is that you not only need patience, but you also need an SEO and a social media marketing strategy. With more companies joining the marketing rush on the Internet, it is taking longer to rank on the first pages of Google.

As one example, I have been writing optimized press releases and articles for our client Peternity.com for about a year now. Her key word strategy was to optimized pet urn, and pet urns, then pet memorials. So every article or release that I write, links those key words back to her site. Her sales on pet urns have increased substantially. And now we are ready to choose a new key word to optimize. Again, patience is the key, and it is an ongoing marketing project.

MarCom's New Website - SEO Tips for Launching

Thanks to our strategic partner, Rigney Graphics, we just launched our new MarCom New Media website. The reason we changed our name from MarCom Broadband to MarCom New Media, is because today Internet marketing is all about the new media. The term has settled in, and we believe people understand what it means. But what many people still need guidance on, is what MarCom does - search engine optimization (SEO), online PR and social media marketing (SMM) strategies and tactics.

In designing a new website, there are a few rules we thought we'd share based on client experience, and our knowledge:

Be prepared. Have your navigation and content map ready before you meet with a web designer or web design firm. If you have tracking analytics on your old site, then take a look at where people come from and how they get around on your site. This is a good tool for what to do and what NOT to do on the new website.

Talk with an SEO expert early on. Many web designers don't know the details about SEO. They design, and you should not expect them to know what has taken us a decade to learn. So bring in an SEO expert team, like MarCom, to advise and work closely with your design team before it is too late. One client of ours decided to have a new firm redesign three of his sites into one master website. Despite having guidance from Mike Keesling, our resident SEO expert, they didn't listen. They used Flash, and they initially did not have the old websites redirect to the new one. This risked losing all the last year's SEO efforts. Now only time will tell what damage has been done.

Look for a good web design firm. Check their references, and look at sample sites. Do not expect miracles overnight. Our site took about 6 weeks. And any good site will take time. Rigney Graphics is one of our strategic partners, and they design excellent websites - including ours. Also make sure the copy you write and prepare for them is letter perfect before you have them add it to the design, or it will waste their time, and your money with revisions.

Tagging website Pages. This is the magic of what excellent SEO can do for your website so customers can find you. Typically you want your page content to each have focus for one keyword or key phrase in three places per page. Each page then gets meta tagged with that same keyword, so the engines will be able to find relevant content as people in Google look for what they want.

If you have a Flash website - note the search engines can't read it. But the good news is that Adobe Systems Incorporated just announced today that they have teamed up with search industry leaders to to improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs), which is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. It may take up to a year though, so keep an eye on the developments...

Embedded flash will work. Our client The Wiley Protocol uses this in their site with embedded Flash movies. The search engines read content, so the more content with your key words, the better your chances of being ranked on the first pages of the engines, so customers can find you. A trick is that you can post a blog on your home page as long as it is on your site and not on Blogger or WordPress. This will have an RSS function that can help Flash sites until later.

Make sure you have a tracking analytics program. There are free programs like Google Analytics, but others like HitsLink are better at tracking your website traffic. This will allow your SEO team to tweak key words, site content and link building strategies so your optimization will improve month to month.

You need a keyword analysis. Do you know what words your customers use to find you? For MarCom New Media as an example, people may search using Los Angeles Internet marketing firm, or search engine optimization firm in Los Angeles. Note how I have linked to this key word, and it goes to our website page about search engine optimization. That is called a link back to our site. You want many legitimate links to your new site.

Put up a Press Room and post articles and a newsletter. We find that Press-feed offers the best tool for a press room, that includes an excellent RSS feed built right in. Plus it is easy to post releases, newsletter or articles, that are then stored so people can review them later, and that offer excellent content with your relevant key words, which the search engines like. Check out our MarCom Press-feed.

Include an interactive function to get people's names. For future marketing, the best way to build your own opt in list is to have options for people to safely fill out a marketing survey, like we have on our MarCom home page, or an interactive newsletter sign up.

Re-skinning your website. This is a term for re-designing your site without disrupting its SEO. One of our other current clients is about ready to re-skin their three websites - so by the end of July, check back and you can see the before and after: http://www.film-connection.com/; http://www.recordingconnection.com/ and http://www.radioconnection.com/.

Ghostwriting Blogs for Clients for Link Building and Social Media

I have been writing blogs for quite some time. Blogs are a great link building tool, and they are also great for customer relationship building, reputation management, and a good survey tool to get a feel for what people think about new products and services. In order for a blog to be a good search engine optimization (SEO) link building tool, however, one must use linking strategies that are acceptable and effective with the engines like Google and Yahoo. Right now, one of my blogs is for our client Entertainment Career Connection.

Blogs are great for customer relations if done properly. And remember that anything you post on the Internet can come back and bite you later on. It will stay up for a long time. So be very careful what you say. Authenticity is very important, and starting conversations with your readers is what works today, and in fact, it is the shift in marketing all together.

I have a blog for one of our clients and as part of his campaign for reputation management we do an educational blog that talks about his activities on the Boards of two charities, and also serves as a research and information tool for trends in education, and enables link backs to his website. I use every single blog topic that I write to also revise it into a longer article for submission to article websites. But you cannot submit duplicate copy or the search engines will not count it.

There's one aspect of blog writing that people often do not understand - and that is the search engine optimization and PR value. Take for instance, Rocco's blog above. I post one to two times per week in his blog. Basically you can type in Rocco Basile on Google, and note that many of the items in the ranking list are now positive posts, and include both his official website as well as blog posts, some PR Web listings, and articles. Inside his blog posts I always provide links back to his website. And the linking strategy can be to specific pages in his website that are related about my topic - not just to the home page. There are times when we have seen blog posts get picked up by other bloggers, who link to the blog.

Blogging requires a goal, and they are a lot of work. But the beauty of blogging is that it provides a marketing vehicle that does NOT rely on a third party, such as an editor writing an article about you. Corporate blogs provide you with an opportunity to tell your company's story. Various executives in your company, large or small, can post to a corporate blog, so you can create a strategy ahead of time, then assign folks to write.

Blogs are a great "Crisis Management" tool. Just look at how popular Martha Stuart's blog was during her court battle. And blogs are a great way to build a database of interested people, users, etc. Just shoot folks over to a sign up form from your blog, and you are certain to get some opt ins.

And as for the return on investment for blog writing, it costs very little - you can set up a blog at blogger.com, for free. So it costs you in time - your time, the time of your employees, or the writing fees to hire someone like MarCom to ghostwrite your blogs. You can check to see if your blog is building website traffic, because of course, the better your blog's linking strategies are, the more folks will visit your website. Once a visitor comes in to your website from your blog, what path do they go down? do they ultimately get funneled to a sale? These things must be tracked on your website by programs like Google Analytics, which is free, or HitsLink, which is the one we like. And of course, you need the experience to be able to read and analyze the reports once they are generated on HitsLink, to track successes over a period of time.


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Website Search Engine Optimization Tips

We have been meeting with many new clients lately, and in doing so, realize that most of their websites are NOT properly optimized. This is in part because today's website designers and web master's have not yet caught up with SEO tactics, knowledge and practices.

MarCom's Mike Keesling, who has been doing SEO since the beginning, says the most important element of website optimization is NO SPLASH SCREENS AND NO FLASH! Next is if you are going to opt for an open source solution for a database driven site (such as Big media USA) make sure you can do individual title tags.

It is unfortunate because most companies would be realizing much improved traffic to their sites if they were optimized. These skills have taken our MarCom SEO experts years to develop and hone, so it's not likely that a company can do it alone - or if they do it will take longer than if they hire SEO specialist teams like MarCom.

The first tip is that you can never use Flash on your home page. It may look nice, but Flash blocks the search engines from reading a web page. Embedded Flash is OK. Remember the more content that has been optimized in your pages the better. Most designers hate this, because white space in design has long been preferred. But when it comes to website optimization, make the pages above the fold or middle pretty, then add more optimized content below the fold.

By optimized content we mean that it has your key words and phrases embedded in the copy. Take for example MarCom. Our key words are website optimization, search engine optimization, social media marketing, online marketing, SEO, social media marketing strategy and so forth. NOTE how I linked the main key word pertaining to this article to our website? I would typically link it to a page on our site with focus to website optimization. Once our new MarCom New Media website is up I will do that.

The Best Link Building Practices

One of, if not the most important element in getting high search engine rankings for your Website is what is called link building. The search engines analyze and count links to your website - and they take a look at patterns for linking, linking profiles, deep-linking, and if you have used one-way versus the now old school reciprocal link building strategies.

As we have said many times before, content is king on your site. But right up there in importance is the quality of each link. That is more important than how many links you have.

Here are ten tips from our MarCom SEO expert, Mike Keesling's tips for link building.

1) Make your links inbound one-way links with anchor text that is related to your site.
2) Links should be from a site that’s related to the theme and content of your Website.
3) You need to vary the anchor text of your keywords and keyphrases when getting links from other sites.
4) Find your competition’s links at Yahoo.com -- type linkdomain:competition.com.
5) Do NOT do reciprocol links, but IF you do, create a special link swapping page on your site.
6) Don't use link farms, which are sites that host a large array of spam links.
7) There are some good directories for link building but most are worthless.
8) Links from social media websites like DIGG are fantastic. Getting an article on the front page might even cause your server to crash!
9)Electronic press releases are good links. Use PRweb.com.
10) Do NOT purchase links.

Basically, anyone can do these link building SEO strategies, however, those of us who have been doing SEO and social media for as long as we have, use other special tricks, and we know how to get the best links because we also link using your key words and phrases.

Website Optimization and other Search Engine Tactics

The last year has been particularly interesting. Having been in this space now being called social media marketing, since before it even started, means that we have been able to test many of the practices that PR professionals are just now learning to use as mainstream. In fact, my associate Mike Keesling was doing Search Engine Optimization in Los Angeles for Pacific Island Reservations, a Hawaii Vacation Rentals site, back in 1996, when they only had one website. Today they have 12 websites, and for more than a decade he has helped them maintain a top ten ranking in Google, MSN and Yahoo. In fact - check it out if you are looking for a place to stay in Hawaii for vacation this summer! It'll save you money.

Onsite Search Engine Optimization (SEO) defines your website and targets your visitors. Whether you are a small business or a corporation you need an Internet marketing strategy that includes a website with interactive content that to attract your customers who are online using the search engines to find what they want. Then when your potential customers type in the keywords associated with your products and services, your website will come up within the first page of the search engines.

We call this Website Optimization – and just FYI, most web designers (no offense) do not install Meta, Title or Alt tags properly, and in fact they can cause more damage than good. For example, Flash websites cannot be SEOd, and this is critical to the search engines and your customers finding your website.

Another tip - with the right keywords we will make sure every page on your website is optimized properly with those words. More subject-specific content means better qualified traffic. This text is optimized if the search engines can find it via keyword-density. And your site should also be a good read.

Sitemaps are another thing you should consider. There are two types of sitemaps: 1) An HTML page listing the pages on your site by section so users can find the information they seek. 2) XML sitemaps, a way for Google to find all the pages on your site, and that includes URLs that may not be discoverable by their standard Web crawling processes.

Website Analytics –This tells us the behavior of your website visitors, allowing us to use data collected to determine which aspects of the website are working, such as which landing pages encourage people to take an action. We can use it to track visitors, sales or measure month-to-month SEO results and tweak online strategies.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) content syndication feeds are also a social media and Internet marketing must these days for better search engine visibility and better qualified traffic to your site.

And my favorite, being a PR professional, electronic press rooms and optimized releases are a must. Our eco-friendly electronic press kits are also optimized for the search engines making it easier for the media and your customers to find you. Here is another one of our client's online press kits that has been getting alot of attention lately. A company with a Los Angeles recording school, plus film schools and a radio DJ school known as the Entertainment Career Connection.

The Social Media Marketing Press Release and Wire Services

MarCom has been using various forms of the new social media marketing press release for our clients for the last few years. In fact a press release just went out yesterday for our client Acutrack, Inc. regarding their new eco-friendly consultation services to help other businesses learn how they can leave behind a smaller carbon footprint while remaining profitable. Acutrack has been helping ease the burdens their clients are placing on the world a number of ways, including environmentally friendly CD and DVD manufacturing. We distributed this release via PR Web, for several reasons. It was a longer than normal release because we added some of the customer testimonials, and PR Web's costs for distribution can often be more modest than MarketWire. Although we use both company's wire services. Each has various methods and distribution cost rates -- PR Web's premium one is $360. The release cannot be more than 800 words basically.

Acutrack's release was already picked up by a couple of newswires -- Acutrack, Inc. Announces Eco-Friendly CD and DVD Manufacturing and Packaging Solutions. There is also PR Newswire, which I have used for years for traditional press release dissemination to the media. Most all of the wires today are doing search engine optimization -- so, right now, I believe it is a matter of client budgets and experimentation for preference as to who gets you the best results.

Oh and BTW I just noticed this MarketWire press release regarding the fact that the inventor of the new social media press release format (now on version 1.5) PR agency Shift Communications, just won the Holmes Report "New Media Agency of the Year." Well done.

SEO RAP -- No Nos from Los Angeles SEO Firm

We are all used to the tips for how to do search engine optimization (SEO) but what about the no nos that you never knew about? We'd like to offer some help by offering you ten steps for what not do do on your website if you want to attract customers.

1. Throw Flash and Splash screens in the trash. Do not use Flash and expect to get good SEO results. You know the websites were you see a pretty picture or animation on the home page and have to click enter her to go beyond? No text on your home page means the search engines won't read it. Good SEO is all about content... content... content.
2. Don't forget to add Title and Description tags on pages. You may have seen some websites where it says "new page" in the browser? That is probably because the website designer did not put a title tag on the page. It is really important to the search engines.A site without a Description tag is meaningless. A short message with a key word that describes your site in the Description tag is essential so your customers will click through to your site when they see your site's listing.
3. Don't use repeat Title and Description tags. Your website pages should each be unique and contain a theme for key words or phrases for each page, so make your Title and Description tags match the content for one of the keywords per page of the same topic. You can't optimize one single page for many key words.
4. Don't use text as an image. Some sites have text and images combined into a jpg or gif image, so you can't select the text with your cursor. Search engines cannot find any searchable text, so you get no SEO results. Also don't make any headlines into gif images, because they should be text with a key word in it.
5. Local Business do not need national SEO. It won't do a cigar store in Pasadena any good to optimize for the national or global marketplace, because their customers can't come in and buy a cigar unless they live near Pasadena. MarCom had a client like this, so we optimized them for Pasadena Cigar stores. It worked. Now it would have been different if they had an online cigar store.
6. Redesign your site with caution. Don't lose optimized URLs. Once a website's pages have been indexed by the search engines and people are finding you, you do not want to lose the SEO traffic you have already established, and the search engines will be sending your potential customers to pages, or URLs that no longer exist. To redesign your site you need to have your web master use a similar structure of the old site had and retain the same URL addresses for the new pages.

And for those of you who need some more help with your search engine optimization feel free to check out our website at www.marcombroadband.com

Our Small Business SEO and Social Media Teleseminar

Last week our MarCom associate Carole Hodges hosted a free teleseminar where I focused on small business websites, SEO and social media marketing. Carole's latest venture is The Yes Connection at http://www.carolehodges.com where she assists business partners and individuals with their start-ups and small business decisions.

There is a lot of confusion these days about what is needed on the Internet to market new and existing websites. So our teleseminar addressed the questions that the non-techie business owner may have.

The free teleseminar is about 40 minutes long, but in the end has some really good tips and information. To listen online: go to http://www.audioacrobat.com/play/WXcl1C3s

In summary, some of the points we covered included how you should spend your marketing dollars wisely insofar as the complexity of web marketing. We answered questions including:

Does every business need a website? Are there times when an inexpensive “Website Tonight” type product from GoDaddy is an appropriate choice? If you don’t have a lot of money, is a free Blog a good starting place? How do you differentiate between the types of websites? For example: Brochure – e-commerce – Membership Site – Services (online purchase and not.) Do you NEED to be selling something online to benefit from a website? What brings traffic to a website? Why do I care about SEO – Couldn’t I just pay for clicks to my site? What are traffic statistics? What are keywords? How do I know what keywords are right for my business? How do I determine how much traffic I really want on my site? What makes people STAY on your website and look around? Why should I look for competitors on the web? What if I have BIG plans for growth... is there a way to structure my website so that I start out simple and later add product sales or a membership site? What advice do you give to someone who is starting out and does not yet have a website? What advice do you give to someone who has spent a lot of money on their website but it is not giving them the results that they want?

Tough Times Require SEO and Social Media Marketing

Most of us over 40 years of age have all been though tough economic times in our careers, and having just done my taxes, and reading the Wall Street Journal every day, plus watching the news ... I can now admit, times are getting a bit tough. It's an election year.

Many folks have been talking to MarCom about doing search engine optimization and social media marketing -- and my associate Mike and I agree on this one -- the worse thing companies can do is stop marketing altogether. This is a huge mistake, because while you stop marketing, your worse nightmare of a competitor is ramping things up.

The reality these days is that in order to keep your small to medium sized business afloat - you need to do a minimum of a limited amount of marketing and advertising. But then what does that mean today? Many folks are just realizing that SEO and social media are party of the marketing mix, therefore they had just started to get serious about hiring experts like us to help them.

The bottom line? Do it. Here's why. If you have a company with products and services, and you rely on website traffic for sales, if you don't appear on the Page One of Google and other search engines, chances are people will not find you. And many folks are already optimized. We have a dentist client - as an example - Wilshire Dental Care. Just as fast as our client's website increases in its ranking with Google, his competition is working just as hard or harder and paying their SEO specialists allot to keep them on top! So our client really should increase our SEO and social media marketing efforts so that he stays on top and ahead of his competition. The bad news is IF he were to stop, his rankings will diminish, and six months from now? His competitors will be on page one of Google, and he will not.

Also the crazy thing is that right now, many SEO specialists are charging more than we do. I just did an analysis of Los Angeles SEO experts -- and we came across others who do what we do but who charge triple what we charge.

Here are some pointers you may want to keep in mind when considering SEO and social media marketing.
• There should be a compelling reason for you to look at it, read it, listen to it, watch it, like it, interact with it, and ultimately buy it!
•Today, people use search engines, like Google, to get what they want, how they want it - fast.
•The biggest challenge now is how to communicate your story over multiple channels, including the Internet.
•Becoming an “Authority Website” is the gold rush of the Internet.
•Authority = Attention
•Attention = Money

Ten Steps: Defining Social Media Marketing

The Internet is not just a different advertising channel, but an entirely new and unique culture with a multitude of online communities. Although there are many folks that think social media marketing is just the latest fad, it is not. The reality is, it is changing how we do business.

Although traditional marketing and new media strategies continue to morph, the Internet has emerged into a tremendous platform for direct and open communications among the media, businesses, and individuals worldwide.

Many of our new clients need some basic education on what we recommend, why and how we do what we do. We have been using these ten steps in most of our proposals for quite some time now.

Search engine optimization, social media marketing and online PR tactics include:
1) Fully analyze your situation, including competition, market, etc.
2) Conduct keyword research to determine the keywords associated with your name most likely to achieve high search-engine rankings and create a keyword strategy to map the keywords to specific website pages.
3) Optimize the pages of the website, www.meridianlasercare.com.
4) Create a blog and ghostwrite apx. -1 to 2 posts per week recommended.
5) Social Media Marketing: Create additional site content through writing and publishing articles to disseminate over the Internet
6.) Post and distribute electronic press releases (Using wires such as MarketWire or PRWeb)
7.) Create bookmarked posts to social media sites. (DIGG, Del.ic.ious, Stumble Upon, etc.)
8.) Optimize existing and new content over the next three months and execute the social media PR plan.
9.) Acquire reciprocal links and incoming links via article submissions, electronic press releases and a blog.
10.) Purchase directory listings for your new website to provide additional, high page rank links. Directories include Yahoo! Directory, Superpages as well as any industry specific directories with high page rank. (Yahoo is $299/Year Superpages runs $22/month)

The real truth is that although these basic steps are usually recommended, there is no single template for every client, because every client's situation, website, and place among thier competition is unique. MarCom's Social Media Marketing proposals are customized for each new client, and then throughout the yearly campaign tweak their strategies based on results we are seeing from the tracking results.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Versus Pay per Click (PPC)

We had a new business opportunity this week with a medical professional client who is completely confused about search engine optimization (SEO), versus Pay per Click (PPC) advertising. And she is not the only potential new client who doesn't get it. Some of my most sophisticated professional friends are having a hard time grasping the new media tactics that we do required for getting their websites onto the first pages of Google and the search engines.

This gal asked about her PPC campaign, and why it isn't getting any results after three weeks... so my associate Mike spelled it out. First he did her competitive landscape, and determined that she only had three other real competitors in her geographical area. One of the three was getting 15,000 visitors per month. But they also had more than 300 pages of content on their website. Her site had very few in comparison. He researched and noted that the competitor was spending about $700 in PPC advertising. The lesser known competitor got about 570 visitors per month, and did not have a PPC campaign. Both of her competitors have press rooms which means she will need one too and they are a great place for linkable content. The more content on your site with relevant keywords the better.

If your goal is to book five clients per week initially, and then eventually in a year, you want to have ten clients per week, think about these numbers. Typically conversion rates for Internet customers are a three to five percent lead generation per visitor to your website. Out of 100 visits per site, you should get three to five leads, and out of those, one percent will buy. Basically it takes 20 leads for one customer. You need a minimum of 100 visitors per day to get business, or about 500 visitors to get a sale. It's compounded as well, so the more visitors, the better the chances for sales.

But here is the deal insofar as PPC. It's important to remember that PPC may be beneficial when launching a company and its products and services online, but ultimately PPC and offline advertising benefits will disappear as soon as you stop spending money, while SEO keeps on working long after the money is spent. We actually helped wean another client off of spending thousands on PPC ads, while increasing their SEO results. The Entertainment Connection, who offer film schools for audio engineers and radio professionals - people who want to learn how to be a DJ for instance. One of the tactics I worked on was to get their press room up and running with press releases and a press kit. Next I will be writing articles and blog content for them to provide links back to their website, while Mike will continue adding website content and track their optimization, tweaking their site for increasing their customer leads via SEO.

That said, our goal for clients is to evaluate their needs, by asking these six questions:
1) What is your URL or website address?
2) When people search for your product or service on Google, where does your website appear?
3) Do you have a tracking or measurement program for your website?
4) Who are your top five competitors (National/Regional/Local)
5) How much traffic do you think your website can get by this time next year?
6) How many customers from your website would you like per month?

For a free analysis feel free to email us - check out http://marcombroadband.com/

Internet Growth Projections: 6.6%

I was doing research for our client the Entertainment Connection and found a Hollywood Reporter article written by Georg Szalai siting an annual study from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in June of 2006 predicting that a surge in growth in the online sector, global entertainment and media will expand into a $1.83 trillion industry in 2010, up from an estimated $1.33 trillion in 2005.

The report also indicated that the biggest global industry engines during that time frame will be Internet advertising and access spending, for which PwC projects a compound annual growth rate of 12.9 percent. The Internet sector, the report said, would be set for a five-year compound boost of 8.4 percent -- driven by online ads, radio/out-of-home media.

The article also said, "Internet advertising will see the largest five-year surge -- at an 18.1% compound rate -- from an estimated $22.45 billion last year to $51.6 billion in 2010... TV network ad revenue will increase to $51.95 billion in 2010, and online ads to $25.5 billion."

These figures are interesting, especially when we note other research that talks about declines in other media. In our MarCom social media marketing powerpoint presentation I have mentioned the following stats:

Decline in traditional media
–Box office is down 7%
–Newspaper circulation peaked in ‘87
–Down another 2.6% in 2006
–Radio was down 4% in 2006
–TV viewership is rising; audience is fragmenting and show ratings are declining
–Magazine ad revenues are up a bit; number of ad pages is flat; women’s magazine circulation is down
–Celebrity magazines continue to grow …

Ask any student where they hear the news -- as did at Cal State Northridge where I lectured a couple of weeks ago -- and they will tell you, "on the Internet."

The bottom line here is that marketers are realizing that the budgets they set for the future must include good white hat search engine optimization and social media strategies.

Social Media Marketing and Revising Websites

Given the fact that folks are beginning to notice some changes in business and the economy, MarCom Broadband is getting lots of new business referrals. I think it is because we have little experienced competition out there. Few companies have been doing search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing as long as we have, which is basically since it all started.

I got a call today from a prospect who is planning on revising his website. This often happens. We even had one client who refused to listen to us a couple of years ago, and they redid their website, ditched half the content and lost traction with their rankings on Google, even though we warned them!

Point is that you do not want to change the name of your url if you don't have to, but if you do, then certain SEO tactics must be put in place. My associate Mike Keesling often works very closely with website design firms, like Rigney Graphics, right from the start of a client's redesign on their site to make sure their site SEO is done right. Their newsletter, called LunchMeat" is pretty fun BTW.

As an example, MarCom is about to change our company name from MarCom Broadband to MarCom New Media -- and we have a new url, so we will be redesigning our own website. The only way we can salvage our current ranking with Google is to point the old site to the new site. And we need to salvage much of the old site content and rework it with our key words on the new website.

Also what many people do not understand is that the Meta tags on each website page must correspond to content and keywords inside that particular page. There are many other little intricate tactics that we have learned to use to improve client rankings.

Pitching New Business: An Integrative Approach with Social Media Marketing

Once again it's that time of year when my associate Jeff asks me and my colleagues to do a guest lecture at his class of PR and communications students at Cal State Northridge. Our MarCom Broadband creative director, Brad Stone, is heading there today. And I will talk on Friday.

When I was chatting with Brad this morning about his presentation, it came up that now, with the press and the Internet, media don't need PR folks as much because they can research whatever they need online. And to get the media to respond to a pitch is becoming more and more difficult. Nowadays we wrap video right along with website links inside email pitches.

Having been in marketing and advertising for several decades, it's easier to see trends, and as the saying goes what comes around goes around, because patterns tend to duplicate. What I mean is that many years ago when we pitched new business, we gave a killer presentation, provided our creative ideas and often won the account (whether advertising or PR) based on the creative ideas within. We had to start getting the potential clients to sign and promise not to steal our ideas and use them without hiring us. Then along came technology and the dot com world, where that went out the window. We never gave any creative ideas away UNTIL we were hired. Our proposals where based on case histories and results for prior clients.

Today we are back in the place where with social media marketing and search engine optimization being wrapped into our presentation, and with competition out there, we are doing more presentations with creative ideas inside. Now back to a place where we need client signatures again.

Social media marketing is becoming a part of all of MarCom's new business pitches -- even though many clients still request just one thing - like PR. We must incorporate it into all of our marketing, advertising, PR and social media marketing strategies these days.

Is Social Media Marketing Revolutionary?

I read another blog post today that said that social media marketing is the biggest shift that has taken place in marketing since television. That's a pretty big claim. Hat Tip to Karl Long and FutureLab. His blog references the same study I referenced in my last blog on Feb. 28. about the TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony study that polled more than 60 marketers and discovered that social network marketing is still a puzzle, and agencies don't seem equipped to help clients "get it."

There was and always will be shifts in marketing. That's why the term "new media" was coined. It wraps all the new marketing strategies and tactics into one term. And again, it is why we will soon be changing the name of our company from MarCom Broadband to MarCom New Media. (Our new website will be up soon.) Our business has shifted entirely in the last two years from marketing and PR, to marketing, branding SEO and social media marketing. We started out with the concept of helping companies go to market faster in today's world, i.e. the Internet, which has the potential to reach millions of people in quantum time. Ergo the broadband in MarCom Broadband. But people understand new media more than broadband.

There is still much confusion about new Internet driven marketing strategies. The Web has changed everything, yet it in reality is merely another channel in which to market through -- a channel with worldwide reach. The television, as Karl said, changed everything. And I do believe he is right about the revolutionaries, who are "participating in the conversation" and building deeper relationships with their customers, versus those who are "waiting to see."

We hear questions like this all the time. What's the best way to design a website? Is Flash in or out? I know I need Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but just exactly what does that mean? How is Search Engine Marketing different from SEO? If I invest in doing business over the Internet, what marketing strategies will guarantee sales results? My company works with consultants who are in some cases virtual, so what's the best way to manage them? I see other companies getting excellent PR stories, so why can't I? Do people really read email or pay per click ads? Do web banners work? What is social media?

The bottom line is that the most important thing we can understand as marketers is our need to first "get inside the client's challenge." Once the challenges are identified, we can put a strategic plan together that will allow our clients to "go to market" and get measurable results with a return on their investment. The thing is - it's hard to measure television commercials. SEO measurement is easy.

Skills + knowledge + thought + creativity + channels = positive energy and results.