Regardless of the type of business you have, your presence needs to be online. You now know that you need your SEO to be up to par and whenever anyone searches for you on Google, you must be one of the first page results. You also should know by now that you cannot in any way shape or form pay Google to have this done, so now you must solely rely on keywords to get you where you want to be. But where do you start?

Well, in any good online marketing plan your website first must be excellent. That goes without saying because it acts as your homebase, and a functional, well thought out page will make or break your whole initiative. But then what?

Well there’s Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, You Tube, just to start and a dozen other places that your business probably fits into. Get yourself a Facebook fan page first. It’s an easy enough service to set up that you can plug in your information and start a small Facebook ad campaign to amass some people to “Like” your product. Simply update a status everyday to remain relevant, and as a bare minimum.

And/Or go to Twitter. Twitter is NOT a place for you to advertise. It is a place for you to connect with your customers or clients and build relationships. Think of it as a sophisticated customer service center. It’s a place where you can monitor what’s being said about your company or industry. Interact… do NOT send automated messages.

LinkedIn is for your professional base. Create a company page – add a career page tab onto your career profile to enhance it and add videos of corporate culture, or to talk about your employees doing excellent work. The key to LinkedIn is joining and participating in groups.

YouTube is an excellent place to post your videos – especially if you have any kind of How-To’s involved in what you do. YouTube needs to be broadcast to other platforms though, so make sure your presence is already set up and functioning elsewhere.

So your website might be the first place to go, but you must follow up everywhere else. And make sure to search out those niche sites that will be oh so important to you!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an internet marketing strategy that helps your website rankings on search engines. With search engine optimization, you can manipulate your web design content by using keywords or phrases that search engine spiders can find. This will allow your website to rank higher on search engines and thus drive more traffic to your page, positioning your website and business among the top rank of searches.

Keywords
Placing keywords and phrases into your website is one of the main strategies of SEO. A good tool to figure out proper keywords is theGoogle Adwords Keyword Tool. This tool gives you data on monthly search volumes per keyword variations to give you an idea of the best keyword to use. Make sure to place your keyword frequently throughout your website or web article. At least ten times per 500 word article is a good basic amount for search engine optimization.

Meta Tags
Meta tags exist within the html of a website and provides a meta description and meta keywords hidden within the html tag of your website. Search engine crawlers can see this information and optimize your website based on your description and keywords. This can help your SEO by giving information about the content of your website that search engine spiders and crawlers can find.

Text Links
If your website has image links, flash or javascript navigation, be sure to add text links within your website for search engines. Text links, and text in general, are how search engine spiders find your site. Deep links are hypertext links that link to a specific page of a website, rather than the main page itself. Deep links from a high ranking site are sure to help your SEO.

Fresh Content
It’s important to keep your website fresh with content, keeping your website relevant to search engines. A great way to offer fresh content is by starting a blog on your website. This provides a simple way to update your website, as well as provide keywords for SEO. Quality and unique content is important for search engine optimization so it might be a good idea to hire a copywriter or SEO specialist. Contact Tempo Creative for your internet marketing and SEO needs and we can help get the job done.

No doubt, it’s a lot easier to create an online business than it is to build a bricks-and-mortar storefront. No building inspections, remodels, fixtures, signage or utility bills with your web biz. No months of planning and waiting and budgeting. You can hatch an idea one Friday night and be in business by Monday morning on the web!

Let’s look a little closer at this. What do these steps in real-life business building do for your operation?

Building Inspections
Bricks-and-Mortar: Your architecture is sound, safe and reliable, and meets the highest standards.
Web:  Your web site is coded correctly to ensure reliability, up-to-date techniques, and online security standards are met for payment gateways.

Remodels
Bricks-and-Mortar: Your storefront is lively, interesting and current to attract customers who want to shop somewhere that understands their “vibe.”
Web: Your online business is attractive, well-written, always fresh, and cleanly designed; clients and visitors feel confident that you know your stuff.

Fixtures
Bricks-and-Mortar: Your business space is uncluttered and organization makes it easy to find the product they need.
Web: You minimize gizmos and distractions; your website is easy to navigate.

Signage
Bricks-and-Mortar: Signage is quickly spotted, easy to read, and portrays a powerful message.
Web: Your site is coded and written—optimized—for search engines so potential customers find you with ease.

Utility Bills
Bricks-and-Mortar: You can’t avoid these, but you can make your building efficient and take advantage of the bonuses of being a “green” business.
Web: Reliability and service are critical to keeping your business running 24-7. Ensure you have the best hosting service available.

Careful planning, attention to details, and keeping your customers needs in mind are key to success!

There are very few businesses today that do not maintain some kind of web presence and most are doing everything they can to increase that presence as best they can.  Whether through SEO, PPC, or other methods the goal is to drive as much qualified traffic as possible to your website. But, what do you do once you get the traffic to the site. This is where well defined conversions play an important role.

When you plan your website or website upgrade you should think about what points of conversion you are looking for from visitors to the page.  In other words, once you get them there – what do you want them to do.  If its a simple sales site where a visitor can purchase and item and have it shipped or just download it, then an obvious point of conversion would be the completion of the sales transaction.  However, these sites would be short sighted to only utilize this one action as a conversion goal. A satisfied client is likely to return for future purchases, but life can be very distracting. If only you had an email list for newsletters or sign-up list for special offers. Then you send periodic emails or updates to clients to make them aware of happenings with your site such as sales or new products etc…  These types of sign-ups are excellent conversion goals with almost as much value as a purchase. Many visitors will visit a site several times before actually commiting to a purchase. These other points of conversion on your webpage will help encourage this process while gathering important information about your marketplace.

There are many types of conversions that can be of benefit to different businesses.  Here are few that may be of use to your business:

• Newsletter Sign-Ups
• Creation of  a User Profile
• Filling out a Contact Form
• Registering for a Course or Seminar (free or paid)
• Purchasing a Product or Service
• Request a Quote
• Forward Info From Your Site to a Friend
• Tagging Content To a Social Bookmarking Site (Digg, Delicious, Reddit etc…)
• Posting Comments to your Blog
• Downloading Coupons
• Clicking on Ad Sense Content

These are just some possible points of conversion. They are many more that can be very useful to doing business on the web. Think about what would help grow your online business and see if you can implement additional point of conversions to your page to help accomplish those goals.

E-mail marketing is a cost effective way to build your business leads and get prospective customers to your small business. Adhering to ethical standards and making sure you are not spamming by allowing potential customers to actively sign up for the e-mail marketing newsletter is important and necessary. The trick to increasing your subscribers is to make your newsletter sign-up prominent on your website. Do this by adding repetition. Make sure the subscribe feature can be found on various pages throughout your website. For example, you can place the feature on a prominent section of the site and make sure it is eye catching enough for user interface to guarantee the reader takes notice, and then reiterate it on the footer section of your site for added effect. Some websites even have pop-ups that automatically appear once a site loads but be careful with this tactic as people often find pop-ups to be aggressive or annoying.

Another way to increase your e-mail marketing list is by offering something of value. People will be more willing to join a list if they get something out of it that they feel benefits them. Offering contests, discounts, or even a link to a free e-book is a great way to give back to a potential customer by letting them know you appreciate them. In doing so, you also give the positive impression that you give valuable information that will help entice and bring trust to your subscribers. A great relationship builder all around.

Make your content interesting. Your goal is to garner and keep people’s interest so that they will stick around. Content is king. Provide good content and success will be inevitable. Many services offer great e-mail marketing software including Constant Contact, Aweber, Graphic Mail, etc. Decide what you want to focus on for your e-mail marketing campaign to get a better idea of which service will best work for you.

A friend recently gifted me an item that I mistakenly called “antique.” It’s properly termed “vintage,” and indeed, that one word makes all the difference. You can never be too up on what’s out. Antique is a relic; vintage – that’s hip. Tip #1: Clever marketers keep abreast of the language, the presentation style and minute-by-minute evolution of what – or who – is popular.

Recently, when reviewing a body of ads purchased by a client for “good will”, I was struck by the way the client’s business was slapped into these publications without apparent regard to appropriateness. “But we need to reach the locals, and be supportive of the community.” But you also are paying precious marketing dollars for your ad. Don’t consider it charity. Consider it marketing. Place an ad in the senior citizens’ activity newsletter if you must, but be cognizant of the reader. If you sell running shoes, don’t run an ad that says, “Hey, we sell sneakers in downtown Akron.” Say “10% off all phone orders and free gift shipping in December!” Tip #2: Don’t dismiss the potential of any audience. Adapt.

Just as the words, “But we need to have this in the left-hand navigation” are leaving my mouth, data is coming in that says, web visitors don’t really read the menus. They scan – this we’ve known for years now – and even more surprisingly, they click. And click, and click. That vital piece of information isn’t right there on the menu bar? Not to worry. The trend is to embed the most important information in links within the body text. This enable the search engines to scour the site, from link to link, more effectively cataloging the references of key words that your potential audience will type into a search engine. Tip #3: You can never know much about web marketing; be alert to the data.

We’ve all got one, had one, or encountered one: the next generation of world leaders, current household opinion leaders, and affluent spenders. You got it: the American teenager.

Who is this stranger and how can you get their attention? Teens today are more affluent than ever. Responsible parenting has given them access to cash – through their own savings and checking accounts meant to teach them fiscal responsibility. Teens are more technically savvy and discriminating than ever. They are not as brand loyal as they used to be. They care about the environment; they look for companies with social conscience.

The teen population is most likely to go online and research a company before making purchase. Teens are influential in their parents’ purchases, too. Your web site design, email marketing and web marketing campaigns should have teen appeal, even if your product is aimed at the head of household. Here are a couple tips:

• Be sure your web site is rich with key words that will be indexed, so when teens Google a product, your site will hit their radar. Think like a fourteen-year-old. What words would they use?
• Add a blog that speaks their language. If you are selling a product that a teen would want (clothing, jewelry, music, entertainment, for example) help them out with compelling reasons that will persuade their parents, too. Even better: hire a teen to blog for you.
• Teens are bombarded with email. Add an irresistible offer to your email marketing campaigns to grab their attention. Be sure to keep in touch with teens who have purchased before and keep making offers that will get them back.
• Personalize! Know your teen customers and what’s important to them. Let them customize their offers!
• Play up your social responsibility. Whatever you do to help the world, be sure you let your teen market know.

Be sure you know the fastest growing, most culturally diverse group of consumers in the United States. 

The main function of the web is to provide information and connections among human beings – what a perfect scenario for marketing! One of the best things about the web is how it serves as an incubator for new ideas and applications. Just as quickly as we become accustomed to applications for grabbing attention, like Twitter, a new service comes along to bolster the benefit and make it more effective. Blogs, like this one, and social networking services like Twitter, Facebook, and so many more are loaded with conversations and feedback about everything you can imagine.

If you could only aggregate the comments by topic and get a look at today’s buzz on your favorite topic – say, your product. How valuable would that be?

You guessed it – someone already thought of that. Amidst the onslaught of marketing messages now flying in all directions, people are creating applications to sort out the stuff they actually care about. One such application is Backtype. This is a nifty, simple tool that allows you to track conversations through more than a dozen (yes, there are more than that!) applications including Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, Blogger and WordPress. Backtype is basically a search engine that crawls social media networks and offers a simple interface. Enter a search term, like “social media marketing” and you’ll see, in this case, over 500 comments, which you can filter by date to get the freshest perspective.

Another spinoff of the social media frenzy –- use it to understand your audience, your product appeal, and enhance your web site marketing strategy.

Today’s major search engines such as Google and Yahoo continually refine their search algorithms to deliver more accurate results for their users. With this in mind, today’s SEO campaigns should spend no small amount of their time making sure that the website they are working on deserve top rankings. It can be extremely difficult and sometimes impossible to achieve top rankings for a website with lackluster content.

Here are a couple of seemingly obvious tips, that get over looked all the time, that can affect how search engines perceive the authority of the content on your website and thus your rankings. These two simple things can help ensure your SEO campaign has as strong a starting point as possible.

• Spelling – You won’t believe how many sites we have worked on that have spelling errors. You would think that with all the spell checking tools available this would not be as prevalent a problem as it is. The negative impact of poor spelling can be fairly severe. It may cause a search engine to misunderstand your intent or damage the credibility of the content. Remember even spell checker isn’t always right. Double check your work carefully and make sure you don’t have mistake that a spell checker will miss such as “there” spelled “their” or other words that sound the same but are spelled differently.

• Grammar – yes we all may have hated our junior high school English classes but see if you can remember back to when your teacher was discussing sentence fragments or incomplete sentences. Sometimes when we speak we will use these, but when you are writing content that is supposed to be recognized as an authority then they are a big no-no. Sentence fragments can be easy to spot if you take the time to proof read your work. When in doubt, see if your sentence has a subject and a verb. Ask yourself if the statement makes sense on it’s own. If not, then it needs to be rewritten properly.

There are many grammar rules to writing a proper paper and they should be followed as best as possible. Try to avoid mistakes of this nature within your websites content before they go up on your page. However, if you happen to notice an error later on, you should address it as soon as you are able.

There are many platforms for which a website can be built apon such as Flash, Dreamweaver, Drupal, Straight HTML/CSS, WordPress, Zen Cart etc.. The list goes on and on with new platforms becoming available all the time. With the exception of Dreamweaver, any of these platforms could be used for a great website that can have a successfull SEO campaign. OK, yes you can even make it work with Dreamweaver, as lame a design crutch as it is.

A good search engine optimization company will know the strengths and weaknesses of the platform of a website and make sure to adjust the campaign to the specific site. Let’s take Drupal for an example. This is a platform that we happen to really like. We have worked on several successful SEO campaigns utilizing this platform. However, the “out of the box” Drupal package is not a very search engine friendly platform. This does not mean that Drupal is a poor choice for building a successful website. It just means that specific methods will have to be utilized to make sure that search engines can properly interpret the sites content.

The point is this, if you are launching a new site, it may be worth researching the cost, coding timeline, search engine friendliness and over all usability of your web design platform before moving forward. But, if you have an existing website, you can still greatly benefit from a properly planned and executed search engine optimization effort no matter what platform your site was built on. (Let’s just hope it is better than Dreamweaver.)