Onsite Search Optimization Tips

Here are some tips for what NOT to do on your website if you want to attract customers. Never use Flash splash screens. Google and the search engines cannot read it, so Flash is not good for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) results. Embedded Flash is OK to use, but if your home page is a Flash splash screen with no text, the search engines simply won't see it.

As a Los Angeles search engine optimization consultants, we see everything, and mostly we see that website designers do more harm than good when they say they know how to SEO a website. Usually this is just not the case. Good SEO is also all about content... content... content. Make sure there is plenty of content on your website. Nice designs, photos and no content will not help your SEO results, period.

Meta, Title and Description tags are very important. You may have seen some websites where it says "new page" in the browser? That is because the website designer did not put a title tag on the page. 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 potential customers see your site's listing.

Never use repeat Title and Description tags. Website pages should each be unique with a theme for key words or phrases for each page. Make your Title and Description tags match the content for one of the keywords per page. You can't optimize one single page for many different key words.

Do not 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. If a search engine can't find any searchable text, you will not get SEO results. Also don't make any headlines into gif images, because they should be text with a key word in it.

Local businesses don't need national SEO. A cigar store in Pasadena does not need to optimize for the national or global market. Customers must live nearby. 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.

For those of you who need some more help with your search engine optimization visit our website at http://www.marcomnewmedia.com/

eMarketer's Online Predictions for 2009: Multicultural Ramp Up

This just out ... According to eMarketer, traditional media will suffer in 2009, with more print media going out of business, while online media's future looks bright, including search engine optimization, online video, and social media marketing.

They also mentioned something called multicultural initiatives - which will gain intensity. What is this? "Since white Americans make up about 70 percent of the US Internet population, more and more African-Americans and Hispanics are going online through their PCs and their mobile phones, therefore marketers will follow, targeting these segments with language and culture-specific messages, which will evolve from their general-market campaigns." (Source: eMarketer)
Aside from that, today's Internet is a buyer's market with search engine marketing remaining recession-proof, at an estimated growth of 14.9 percent in 2009 up to $12.3 billion.

Key trends include video advertising spending which is projected to go up 45 percent to $850 million. Just watch the escalation of videos online. MarCom is set up to do our next video campaign for the Wiley Protocol this Sunday. We're interviewing doctors attending her Two Days Back on Earth CME seminar on environmental endocrinology.

Web 2.0 from all our sources is on shaky ground, and MarCom's online guru, Mike Keesling, says it will not go away, but it's reached its peak potential insofar as SEO factors. This is where the youth market is and the referral value is still here.

The main issues this year for businesses with websites are twofold: Are you optimized and do you have good original content? What does that mean per Google's manifesto? You need the correct tags on your Web pages, plus 300 to 400 words of original (and optimized) content on each page.

We can show you how to do do this consistently, how to optimize your tags and do off site optimization and link back strategies. We can teach you how to do it yourself, or we can do it. It is not rocket science but in 2009 you have to do it. Most vulnerable are those who use CMS programs, which for the most part are terrible for SEO.

Online Marketing in the New Year

People are always asking us if we do viral advertising, or online advertising. People often think of this as a separate entity ... separate from traditional advertising. But in reality it is all one and the same -- lead generation. That is truly what MarCom New Media is in the business to do. We help get our clients leads that turn into new customers and revenues. It's what marketing and advertising has always been all about.

Today, we just use new technologies like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to make your website show up on the first pages of the engines like Google when people search for what they want. MarCom does SEO basically in two ways: onsite optimization on your website, and offsite via links BACK to your website. This isn't all that different from direct marketing. The direct mail piece was targeted to you, and if you called the company who mailed it, that was a lead generated.

Customers are more sophisticated and demanding these days. We all like to go online and chat about things. And in order to find you online, we now use what is called Social Media Marketing where we target and interact with other people, share ideas and opinions. It is really just like to oldfashioned "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval." Social media is the online technologies and practices that we use to share ideas, opinions insights, experiences and perspectives with other people. There are online social networks for communities of people who share interests and activities, while social media technology includes an assorted array of online communications hubs driven by users: Internet forums, message boards, blogs, podcasts, wikis, and videos. And there’s also picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, and music-sharing.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) includes offsite optimization strategies with the intent of distributed content across multiple social media networks. Tools for this include adding links to services such as Digg, Del.icio.us or Readdit. This includes writing unique content embedded with your key words and phrases, so when people search online, there’s a better chance of finding your content via the search engines.

MarCom, a Los Angeles Internet marketing company, has been testing social media marketing strategies in this space for many years, and it all started with forum posting, back around 2000. Now we ghostwrite blogs for clients, shoot video shorts, manage podcasts and conduct creative viral email campaigns.

SMM is about being social so this offsite work includes research, and a social media strategy with specific tactics for getting involved and having two way conversations with target audiences. We want to create pages that provide links back to your website, for inbound traffic and links. We also want these pages to rank well in the search engines under your key words and phrases. This ultimately will build traffic, and bring you return on investment (ROI.)

Social Media Marketing Comes of Age

After attending a Social Media Marketing "Agency Bootcamp" luncheon yesterday, it has come to my attention that very few marketers are doing what MarCom is doing. In a room filled with Los Angeles advertising agency staffers and consultants, I can honestly say that very few knew social media marketing to the depth that we do. In fact, I have read that we are in the top ten percent nationwide and the other 90 percent are just starting to try to catch up.

We regularly update our website with relevant searchable content and post new search engine optimization (SEO) tags, descriptions and links on the pages as needed. We have set up multiple RSS feeds - one for press releases, another for articles, and I am about to set up a third one for newsletters. we use http://www.press-feed.com/. I have joined a few more social networks and niche communities to mine customers -- places like FaceBook, and I will be updating LinkedIn and MySpace regularly now.

We added a new social media blog on our homepage, so now there are two - each with a seperate focus. I have started conversations online by stepping up my blogging, added more blogrolls, updated MySpace. Next I need to begin Friending in Facebook, then Twitter about current happenings to my growing list of followers.

MarCom has been writing a number of articles that can be social bookmarked at DIGG, but I want to create a Google map mashup and then start a white paper for people to StumbleUpon or find at Squidoo.

My associates and I have been brainstorming ideas for podcasts and videos to post on YouTube, and we have even thought about doing a virtual B-2-B seminar at Second Life. I plan to research and sign up for some new measurement and conversation mining tools to listen to what people are saying online, although everyone in the social media marketing industry agrees, the tools are still not there yet.

We have started conversations with our own clients to update their social media marketing strategies. MarCom New Media is looking forward to continuing to lead the transformation from old school marketing to building relationships in online communities, and we are already celebrating the results.

Oh BTW if you have no clue what I am talking about…you need to read Paul Gillin’s book, The New Influencers, and of course, hire us as your Los Angeles social media marketing firm.

The True Value of Social Media

Finally, advertisers are beginning to realize how valuable social media marketing can be. This is truely exciting because now more than before, our clients are starting to understand the value when we recommend social media campaigns.

Just yesterday at the doctor seminar, Two Days Back on Earth, on environmental endocrinology for our client T.S. Wiley and The Wiley Protocol (http://www.thewileyprotocol.com/), Wiley's book publisher talked about the importance of social media to the traditional publishing industry today. She said they now strategize books that have websites for reference materials and more information, and places where people can host e-books and chapters that are bookmarked pages from new book releases.

This means we can strategize longer term social media campaigns for MarCom New Media clients -- and just like any marketing campaign, it takes hard work, tracking, which the Internet makes easy, as well as maintenance.

We can easily blend direct-response and branding. It is about the objective for the campaign, then fine tuning the right strategy. The good news is that the Web is ideal for measurment.

Today, 70 percent of the ad dollars online are going toward direct-response advertising, but the shift toward brand-building campaigns is starting to happen. Check the following interesting stats from a recent research report. (Source: Awareness, Inc.)

• The number of organizations that allow employees to use social networks for business purposes has increased dramatically to 69% in 2008 from 37% last year.
• More than six in 10 companies are using social media to build and promote their brands, improve communication and increase consumer engagement.
• There has been a fivefold increase in the percentage of employees who use popular social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn for business purposes, from 15% in 2007 to 75% this year.
• Some 37% of organizations plan to focus communities on specialty areas where they can provide focused business value.
• More than 40% of respondents report using one or more of the following tools: user groups, tags, communities, blogs, social networking and videos.
• The most popular internal tools are social networks, blogs and wikis, with adoption rates of between 50% and 55%.

Popular Social Media Marketing Terms

Have you heard of an “RSS feed” or a “mashup?” You know what a“wiki” is, right? If not, you are not alone. In fact, many people are still clueless about social media marketing (SMM), which is defined as the use of the Internet technology tools for the purpose of sharing and discussing information with others. In other words, it is all about going on websites like Facebook, My Space, Twitter, or You Tube and sharing ideas, interests and “gossip” with other people of like mind ... or not. (People do disagree online of course.) But more important is to understand is how marketers use social media in our marketing efforts.

We can control messages and market your products and services online with well thought out SMM strategies, and clever tactics. For example, one such social media site is known as "del.icio.us” which is a social bookmarking website. These sites allow users to store and share your bookmarks online. You can access these bookmarks from any computer anywhere, anytime. Another SMM site is called “DIGG,” where users submit content and then other Digg users read your submission and Digg what they like. In this case popularity rules, and the more diggs you get the better it is for your brand.

Much of what MarCom New Media does is search engine optimization, combined with online public relations and marketing that all ties together. We do keyword analysis to see what terms folks use to search for your company online, then come up with a strategy to use those words in blogs, articles, releases, and on SMM websites, linking back to your website. It builds traffic so you can prosper online.

SMM Definitions:
RSS - Really Simple Syndication. This is the primary way people can syndicate content from Web sites, blogs and social networking sites to be read online by other people in what are known as RSS readers. RSS is very important for a company and its website because it allows people to track current news via their RSS Feeds.

RSS Tags. Simple technology that allows you to bookmark specific Web pages and sites of interest. It is how Digg and del.icio.us work.

Mashups. This brings multiple sources of data together and creates a single application, or Web service which helps manage events, etc. Content used in mashups usually comes from a third party via a public interface that combines data from more than one source into a single tool. One new example is Earthquake! A Google Maps mashup – thanks to the recent worldwide earthquakes.

Wikis. A collection of Web pages allowing anyone to add or edit content. This tool can help company employees, for example, in their collaboration efforts for projects or clients.
Internet marketing tactics continue to change on a frequent basis thanks to the search engines like Google, and new technologies. As marketers, we must learn fast, adapt, and then tweak strategies for what works best.