SEM

Sure. There are search engine optimization practices out there that you coordinate: targeting keywords in your industry, optimizing web pages and title descriptions, but let’s face it, the internet is big… real BIG, over one trillion pages. What if you don’t have the budget for an SEO strategy, you aren’t a big player in the industry or you have a small niche market that you want to advertise to?

The Google Local Business Center is a must visit for your business then. In general, it’s good to add any business to it, but certainly for businesses attempting to attract customers in their local community. As you may know, Google allows you to add your business to a directory and then enhance your profile with all kinds of information about your business, products, and services. This is a free listing and every small business should take advantage of it.

Google shows these listings when someone makes what is a geographic based search, for example “Dayton banks“. The results show in what is called the “Google 10-Box” above other listings. When someone clicks on one of these results they are taken to the profile through Google Maps. Check out Bing Design’s google listing.

Here’s a short clip showing the features Google Local Business Center added recently that can greatly benefit your small business, helping you to effectively promote, analyze trends, and cater to your niche.

Need some more advice? Check out a recent post for some simple tips you can do to improve your search results.

The majority of web traffic is driven by major commercial search engines.

Need some help populating at the top of search engine results?

Here are 10 quick techniques you can do to improve your search engine optimization. Now, these may not be the TOP 10 things to do, but they are certainly 10 EASY things you can do. And let’s face it, you need to start somewhere.

1. Create a website title (title tag) – Make it specific, relevant and include keywords … but keep it under 66 characters (that’s all Google will display).
2. Create page titles – Create different Title and Meta tags for every page of your website. Different tags are essential to get highly targeted traffic. Think about how a visitor will search for your site. Incorporate the keywords your would input into their Google search bar in your Meta tags.
3. Use headings – Not only does it organize content and help readers, using headings also helps search engines find what your page is about and convey the importance of the text inside of the header tag.
4. Publish Content – Make sure your web pages are content rich, and that your copy includes the keywords you want to be searched/found for. SEO experts like Steve Wiideman recommend having at least 400 words per page. Updating content frequently will also help your search results.
5. Tag your Assets – If you’re using images and video on your site, make sure the media files are named and that the titles are relevant to your site. If you use a photo sharing site like Flickr, take it one step further – upload the images to Flickr, tag them with keywords and descriptions, and then link to the images hosted on Flickr for your site. You can also describe your images by using alt tags. This attribute provides value in the same manner as meta tags.
6. Check Your Links – Use a free site like Link Checker to make sure you don’t have broken links in your site. Also ensure web pages are W3C Compliant to see if you have any bad HTML coding throughout your website.
7. Add Links – Create a web of links between your pages, connecting related content. Search engines will be able to provide visitors the relevant pages they are looking for in their search – and that can help convert them from a visitor to a customer. Also add links to other websites that include relevant, related content.
8. Submit your site to Google – Enter your URL at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. You only need to do it once!
9. Things to avoid: Flash based openings or “text as images” – these can’t be searched by Google.
10. Call Bing. We can conduct a free site analysis to help get you started.

If you have additional EASY tips, please add them in the comment sections.

Joe Gauder is a contributing author to this post.

One thing that helps to unify a team of professionals at any business is maintaining a consistent level of understanding. When there are many subject matter experts throughout all levels of a business, it can often be difficult for every department to be keen to the terminology being used.

This is especially true of newer online media. There are often terms and technology that we float around, that many of our peers only partially understand, or don’t at all.

At Bing, we organize team building meetings to help cross-train each other in aspects of our work that can be a bit fuzzy. This past Friday, I gathered a group to discuss Web and Internet Marketing Terms. We looked at words and phrases we often use, and better defined them with real examples online.

We broke the meeting down into three parts:

1. User Experience
2. Internet Marketing
3. Search

For User Experience, we talked about a few popular topics such as:

• Above the Fold – CNN.com is a good example of how all significant content on the page is placed so that it is above the bottom of the browser.
• Content Management Systems (CMS) – WordPress sites are great for content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML.
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) – CSS Zen Garden where you can see the same HTML change dramatically with CSS.
• Rich Media/Web 2.0 – as you can see on CBS’s website with episodes of CSI provides examples of Social Media; Usabillity; and Viral Marketing.

For Internet Marketing, we covered keywords related to Analytics – Conversion Rates; Cookies; Cost Per Click (CPC) – as with Google Ad Words; Cost Per Impression (CPM); Impressions; Mobile Marketing; Paid Listings; and Pay Per Click (PPC).

For Search, terms such as Algothrims – discussing the “Golden Triangle” that web analysts use to define user tendencies, Crawlers/Bots/Spiders, Ranking, Search Engine Markeing (SEM), and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Being better informed helps a company to be more versatile and aware of opportunities to help clients and business partners achieve greater success. Need a consultation? We’d like to hear from you!