The Netrafic.com Blog offers a mix of “lowdown” and “hoedown” about the Search Marketing Industry. Articles from our monthly newsletter, tips, highlights and "news you can use" will be found here. Thanks for stopping by, Chris and Dave.
SEO, SEM, SMM… What is the right online marketing strategy for you? How do you pick one over the other? Is one better than the other? Should I try to learn it myself or hire it out? Where am I going to find the time to figure out what I need to do for my business? These are the things that keep small and medium sized business owners and marketing managers awake at night.
The brave new world of the internet is over 15 years old now. But still, many businesses are operating in the dark ages, mainly because they don’t really know what to do.
The old days were pretty cut and dry; yellow pages, classifieds, display advertising, direct mail, radio…tv. Today, it’s all about positioning and building relationships. If you aren’t in a “wired” position you will miss the opportunity to build a relationship. In the old days it was hard to figure out how to harness mass marketing. Today, we distill mass marketing down to individual relationships. This can’t be done hap-hazardly. There is a defined process for gaining a presence that allows you to build relationships. Continue Reading »
QUESTION: If we launch a Help Section for our various products within a short period of time, will that throw any red flags with Google since we would be adding so much new content at once? Just wanted to ask about this in case we need to space the content release out a bit. Let me know what you think.
ANSWER: There is no reason that Google would penalize any website for adding legitimate content. The only potential impact (Google) will be the redistribution of Page Rank. It’s possible that a large amount of new content will bleed off some of the sites accumulated PR causing the sites home-page to drop. This is of little concern when it comes to ranking for organic search terms. The content is much more important than Google Page Rank. Your site has almost 2,000 pages indexed already, so the impact of adding additional content will only be positive. There is some SEO benefit to adding the content slowly (spacing it out,) however – with critical content like a Help Section the visitor & customer need to access the content far outweighs any SEO considerations.
Blogging is enjoying a resurgence in popularity now that it is the darling of SEO strategies. And that’s just it. An SEO strategy “Aint worth a hill of beans” without a plan. Businesses have a hard time allocating staff time for blogging and there generally is some wide-spread fear of publishing written words! Even if you do farm out the writing, you are going to need to be helping the writer write about your business to be sure. Even at a minimum, some regular involvement is going to be necessary.
We do a lot of blog editing around here as well as client coaching. The primary challenge is creating a focus for blogging in a direction that will help the SEO effort. It’s so easy and inevitable to fall out of focus. From these efforts, I’ve developed the following checklist to help stay on the SEO success path: Continue Reading »
Have you ever wanted to send a quick email to someones cell phone but did not want to take the time to peck out the message on your phone? Me too! I may be the last person on earth to know this – You can send an email to cell phone directly from any computer.
You need to know two bits of information; first the recipients cell phone number, second the cell phones service provider. If you don’t know what cellular company provides the service then just type the phone number into the Reverse Phone Directory and it will list the cell phone service provider. If you don’t know the cell number then why would you want to send an email to text message anyway? Continue Reading »
We frequently receive calls from panicked individuals that have just discovered negative information about their product, service, brand, or name on the Internet. Reviews are often left anonymously, with no evident recourse, or way to remove them. Websites that accept reviews are under no obligation to erase a post, even if the content or claim is untrue. Legal action is often ineffective, as web site owners hide behind The Communications Decency Act which states that, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” – 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1) Basically, the website owner can not be held liable for the content placed by an outside source.
Negative Internet reviews that hold a prominent position in the search engines for your name or brand will have a destructive impact on your bottom line. A business or service provider can expect that at least 30% of their potential clients will search for them directly by name, brand, or business name.
It is important to understand the difference between Reputation Management and Reputation Damage Control campaigns. The goal is the same – to populate the search engine results with positive content when people search for you. The process, cost, and urgency are very different however. Potential clients that call us for Reputation Management services are in reality almost always looking for Damage Control. Continue Reading »
Yea, you know the rest of that coined phrase… But let me get to the point. As we march towards 20 years of the internet it’s easy to point at the remarkable changes shaping the way we use this resource. For us in the SEO trenches, perhaps the biggest difference between then and now is the shear magnitude of competition. Back then 1 in 100 websites might have a form of SEO that helped the search engines deliver relevant results. Now its probably 1 in 10. Nowadays, you can’t tinker at it and you need to seriously employ a variety of strategies.
Fifteen years ago it was very hard to find a firm that could build a web site in what we call a search engine friendly way. Today, more programmers are sensitive to the short comings of a search engine spider and are capable of building to the specifications of a set of search goals layed out before them. But that doesn’t guarantee your next web site will be a search engine friendly site unless you have an “advocate” consultant making sure. We work with a variety of very large and sophisticated web development companies as well as small shops all around the country. When we tell them what we want, the answer 99% of the time is, oh sure we can do it like that. You have to understand that there are limitless ways to have a page display. But only some of them work well with search engines.
