By now you have probably heard of Social Media.  If you have not heard of it yet, now is a good time to learn more about it, what it does, what it can mean for your business, and your branding efforts.

Social Media is what the industry commonly refers to web applications, tools, software, or websites that connect people to one another.  Famous among these are the likes of facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit,  Xanga, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, and many, many more.  These  allow people to connect to one another in one form or another, to read the opinions of one another, and to base their own decisions on what the “communities” of these sites say.  But, that is not all that Social Media is excellent for.  In fact, it is becoming an increasingly important part of a company’s arsenal of marketing, messaging, and customer interaction.

To understand why Social Media Optimization (a.k.a. SMO) is an ever increasing crucial part of a company’s marketing strategy, one only needs to look at the success that Alltop (Guy Kawasaki’s company) has had by looking at their Twitter efforts. According to Guy Kawasaki, 6% (http://bit.ly/HeGOs ) of all traffic to Alltop comes directly from one source alone – namely Twitter.  Alltop is not the only example, and it may not be the best tool for your customer either.  In fact, here at IMI we decided to run a test a pilot run for one of our high end customers with a niche market – the highly affluent people (in other words, rich!).

We decided to do this test on one site only.  We posted a forum on investments begininning at $5mm on aSmallWorld.net.  The response was astounding, because witin 5 minutes of posting we had our very first interested potential investor. This was social media at its finest.  Our poster already had a following on ASW, had been an active member, and with their post they were able to prove the model – social media optimization works.  SMO does not only work, but it is absolutely crucial for companies wanting to build branding, obtain customers, and expand, and pinpoint demographics for their product, services, or brand.  Without SMO, you may very well be giving up the edge for your competitors to run with.

Everyone wants to know more about social media marketing and how to use it cost effectively to improve online brand exposure and develop creative marketing strategies.  Social media optimization can also be a powerful tool for improving natural/organic search engine results through continually creating more inbound links.

Here are some great examples of current social media campaigns we are doing and how simple efforts can have a huge impact.

Twitter Campaign

Services Performed:

• Ongoing campaign on Twitter.com
• Building brand identity
• Building “followers”
• Post comments and offerings on a regular basis

Social Media Marketing Example Result:

• IMI posted a comment on Twitter.com about the website and provided a link
• The comment prompted a Twitter.com user to follow the link and purchase flowers
• The customer was so satisfied with the experience they then posted a comment about the website
• The complimentary review spurred others to follow the link and purchase items!

“A Small World” Campaign

Services Performed:

• Website development
• Organic SEO
• Running campaign on “A Small World”

Social Media Marketing Example Result:

• IMI developed a profile and gained user following
• IMI posted a comment on ASmallWorld.net about the new homes for sale
• The comment spurred multiple inquiries from investment groups and buyers
• The leads were sent to the client
• Interested investors flew from Europe to Mexico to visit the property

Social media marketing can of course be much more in depth than this as well as include very creative/specific marketing strategies.  These examples are meant to show how social marketing efforts can foster viral results that lead to actual sales!

Internet Marketing Inc. is now proud to announce the formal opening of our New York office at 25th and Broadway!  Internet Marketing Inc. is growing fast and setting up new office across the globe to continue our personal touch approach to online marketing.

Our new office will offer all of the same great cost effective services as provide a direct line of communication to our current and new clients in the Northeast.  IMI can now officially call ourselves an Internet marketing company in Manhattan!

Stay tuned…more to come!

Internet Marketing Inc. is pround to announce the formal opening of our Las Vegas office.  The Las Vegas Internet marketing division will be focusing on the entertainment and hospitality industries.  We have brought on great management and a team with 25 combined years in online marketing for hotels, casinos, and entertainment related businesses. 

Like all other industries, the hospitality industry is seeking more cost effective ways to market and moving large portions of their budgets online.  Due to current market conditions, the hotel industry has certainly taken a hit but that has spurred many great travel deals for those seeking inexpensive vacation options.

Internet Marketing Inc., (a San Diego Internet marketing company), now has offices in Las Vegas, New York, Minneapolis, Miami, New Delhi, and Manila.  We offer website design, SEO, PPC, social media, email marketing, and online media buying!

A very important part of our SEO strategy is linking. The inbound links play an important role too but these are definitely not the only important links. Wikipedia defines an internal link as: a hyperlink that is a reference or navigation element in a document to another section of the same document or to another document that may be on or part of the same website or domain of the internet. Why not take it directly from the best source out there – Wikipedia the epitome of internal linking.

Here are some of the reasons why internal linking is so important:

• To insure that your website gets properly crawled these links make it easy for the search engines to crawl a website and this also makes sure that all pages can be correctly found and identified by the search engines.
• Adding a text link builds the relevancy of a page to a specific keyword phrase. For instance tying the keyword chocolate chip cookie to a page that contains a recipe for chocolate chip cookies.
• Inner linking all pages on your website will increase the probability that these pages internal pages get ranked in the search engines and will increase the PageRank of an internal pages

Linking your pages makes sure that every page of your website is able to be found by the search engine spiders. Internal linking is very easy to do through a CMS editor so this is an easy step you can take to optimize your website. Internal Linking if done correctly can increase the number of pages that a search engine ranks your site for, it can also increase the number of keyword phrases that your website can rank for in the search engines.  Internal linking sets the proper foundation for a good orgain search engine optimization campaign.

Don’t blindly add links to each page!

There is a process that you need to follow when you are optimizing your website, so don’t just start adding links to all of your internal pages.

First and foremost: You need to add title tags, meta descriptions and meta keywords to each and every one of your pages. All of this information that you are adding to each page has to be specific to that particular page. For instance on a page talking about how to bake chocolate chip cookies you need to add metadata coherent to chocolate chip cookies and not about roasting chickens. Adding the correct meta data to each and every page will tell the search engines to rank that specific page about chocolate chip cookies for the keywords chocolate chip cookies. To build upon this and to validate this keyword to that specific page you want to create internal links from other pages to the chocolate chip cookie page. For example on the roasting chicken page you can have a paragraph about how chocolate chip cookies are a great dessert after such a great chicken meal. Here is where you will hyperlink this text “chocolate chip cookie” to the page about how to cook these. This gives a point or vote to this particular page for that particular keyword.

For the most part your homepage will target your most competitive keywords and phrases and your internal pages will focus on targeting less competitive phrases. When creating internal link on your homepage you will want to keep in mind which keywords you want to rank for first because the links on your homepage are seen as more relevant the closer you are to your homepage. Be careful to not overload all of your pages with internal linking and try to keep it to 3-4 per page.

Google just keeps getting smarter and smarter, don’t they?  Well, with there newest algorithm updates it is rumored that Google is making some judgements for rankings based on “brand”.  Naturally, the first question that come to mind is how Google defines a quality and trusted brand through the Internet.  I would assume that some of the factors include:

• age of domain
• number of mentions on the web (Web 2.0)
• overall traffic (maybe)

Many of Google’s algorithm updates make sense but this one seems much more subjective.  The question then remains…how does a hard working company build a brand on the web if it doesn’t know what Google is really looking for.  The best answer to all this mystery is always to follow the best practices, stay on top of Google Guidelines, and keep your ear to the grindstone.  Providing users with great content and a valuable experience will always lay a good foundation for rankings.  Of course, you must have a good SEO company or search engine optimization consultant working with you to ensure best practices are followed. 

You will most certainly not be able to build your brand online for long term results if your site is not following at least the basic rules of SEO.  Often times, people wonder why their site isn’t ranking even after they have been working with an Internet marketing company for months.  There could be many reasons for this of course including the competitiveness of the key terms, ability of the SEO company, etc.  However, a good firm can look at a site for 30 seconds and see if the bascis are being performed.  It is sad to see companies  spending money on SEO when the firm implementing the campaign is either using black hat tactics…or no tactics at all.  Many firms out there play on the assumed ignorance of the client and just tell them to “stay the course”.  In the mean time they are doing virtually nothing to the website or performing any on page or off page SEO.

So my advice to any company out there seeking to improve orgainc rankings…make sure the company you hire knows what they are doing.  Make sure they are transparent about their methods and ask for references, past clients, and of course…look at how well their own site ranks.  If they do not even appear in the SERPs, you may want to think twice.

It certainly should be!  I will start by saying this…if you have a website design company or website development firm building you a site but they do not know anything about organic search engine optimization (SEO), your site will not be set up properly for achieving natural rankings.  It is often a tough pill to swallow when someone just spent $50,000 on a website but then find out that it is invisible to Google.  There are many important steps that should be taken during the website design phase of an Internet marketing campaign that will ensure long term visibility in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

So what does this have to do with keyword research?  Let’s first define keyword research and then apply that definition to help answer this question.  Keyword research is a process used by search engine optimization professionals to determine what key terms and phrases best apply to a given website or online marketing campaign.  For example, if a company that sells shoes on their website, they would first want to begin by defining their exact goals and brand niche.  Keywords associated with “shoes” are going to be very competitive so the company would want to narrow the focus and generate a list of terms directly associated with their products. 

Here are some steps to take when starting keyword research:

• Determine the business goals you want to achieve through your online platform
• Define your brand, products, and services
• Start an initial list of terms you would want your site to appear for
• Use both broad terms and very specific terms (and combinations of them)

A good Internet marketing company will use your initial list to begin research but will also do extensive research on your industry as it applies to online searches.  Many times the terms and keywords a company thinks they should appear for may not be the most appropriate terms for traffic and conversions.  For example, a company owner may want to appear for terms more associated with their brand.  During the research process though it might be discovered that those terms are never searched.  This of course means that the terms are not competitive but there may not be a need to use resources to focus on them if they won’t drive targeted traffic.

The difference between broad/generic terms and “long tail” terms:  Broad terms are generally defined as the more competitive and less specific keywords associated with a search.  For example, if you sell used cars in downtown Philidelphia, you may not want to try to focus on just the term “used cars”.  Broad terms like this are very competitive and some sites will not have the ability to reach page one of Google.  Many experts believe the broad terms are useless for conversions anyway.  If your site appears for broad terms like this it will drive large amounts of traffic and be great for brand exposure, but in the long run it will be the more specific terms that will convert. 

Using this example, someone who types in “used car dealer downtown Philidelphia” will be much more likely to convert than someone just searching the terms “used cars”.  This is why using a mix of long tail keywords is so important too.  Long tail terms are the more specific and often geographically targeted keyword phrases.  Another example would be to compare a broad term like “Manhattan apartments” and a long tail term like “Manhattan highrise apartments near Central Park”.  The long tail terms like this generally have a higher conversion rate for obvious reasons…they are more specific and will drive more targeted quality traffic.

We won’t go into the intricate details of developing a good keyword list right now because I want to get into the discussion of how important it is for website development.  Why spend time and money building a site if it will never have the ability to appear in the natural search engine placements.  Makes sense right?  Unfortunately, this is where many website design firms fall short.  It is imperative to understand at least the basics of SEO in order to build the proper framework for a website. 

A good Internet marketing company will build a website keeping the following things in mind:

• Proper keywords associated with each page
• On page content – ensuring those keywords are used
• Title tags – using most relevant keywords associtaed with each page
• Meta descriptions – the source code must contain a description that uses the keywords associated with the page
• Keywords – the source code will also show a list of the most relevant keywords for each page
• H1, H2 tags – these must be embedded in each page as well to support the title tags and content on the page – again, keywords must be used
• Site map – I don’t know how many times I have seen fancy websites that do not even include a site map; without this the search engines can not properly index your pages and you will not rank

All of the elements above can of course be handled during an orgainc search engine optimization campaign but they really should be handled during the development process…otherwise, you will just have to spend more time and money having an SEO company or online marketing company redo the work!  Save yourself time and energy and hire a website development company that knows SEO!

We have talked a lot about conversion optimization and improving ROI for your marketing investments.  This of course has never been more important.  Most companies (though everyone is negotiating the waters of the rough economy) still undertsand they need to find cost effective and creative ways to market their products and services to their target audiences.  Understanding that marketing is essential is just the first step…spending your budget wisely is a whole new ball game.

There is no point is spending a a bunch of time and money building a fancy website if it is not optimized for the search engines.  Additionally, there is no point is spending time and resources driving traffic to a website or web page that is not set up to convert traffic into business.  A good Internet marketing company will help a client define their business goals (from an online prespective) and work backwards from there.  Defining these goals first is essential so that your website can be designed to reflect the conversion fatcors that will support these goals.

Remember that your website, and pages within your website should be designed to support all outside marketing efforts including online marketing like organic search engine optimization and pay per click advertising, as well as offline marketing like print ad or direct mail.  Let’s assume a website itself is set up well for basic conversions and has the proper calls to action necessary to take people through the sales cycle.  Even if this is the case, it does not mean that your PPC ads or print ads should be directing visitors to the home page of your site.  This is where landing pages come into play. 

A good landing page strategy has multiple advantages:

• Helps you focus on the ad campaign rather than redeveloping the actual website
• Gives you the opportunity to test multiple landing pages for optimial conversions
• Gives you the ability to constantly change just one page based on goals and conversions
• Can increase conversion by up to 40%
• Helps you focus on a specific message and call to action
• Can be used to capture business leads without any extra steps

What are the main components for landing pages:

• Clean, simple, but compelling design
• Very specific call to action (i.e. 7 day FREE Trial – REGISTER NOW) – in more than one place
• Simple content (short paragraphs or bullet points are best)
• The use of a Multi Step Process Guide (i.e. 3 Step Process)
• A registration form is necessary
• Trust Factors (i.e. certifications, testimonials, etc.)
• The use of the same keywords used in your advertisements

Here is an example of a landing page we designed for a client running a PPC campaign for their new Loft condos in San Francisco, CA.  Notice the simpe design, bullet pointed info, clear call to action, and short registration form on the right side of the page: 

The goal for this client is of course to capture registrations from interested potential buyers for their property.  This helps them build a database and get their sales teams involved in building relationships directly with the customer.

So remember, when launching new marketing efforts, even if you have just redesigned your website, consider using landing pages to support the campaign.  It will help you target the customer better and improve ROI.

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