Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Holiday Marketing Promotion

The holidays are here and we will welcome the new year soon. It is time to look at what we have achieved so far, but also to find new opportunities for better ROI.

With the boom in Internet technologies and social media websites, online marketing is becoming a-must-have strategy for every business.

To get results, you need more than a pre-defined suite of marketing tactics. Proceed Innovative will consult with you on your Internet marketing objectives, analyze your website design and search engine optimization goals, help define successful web metrics and analytics, and provide a complete set of integrated marketing tactics to accomplish your business objectives.

Holiday Marketing Promotion: Contact us for customized FREE analysis of your Internet marketing opportunities or register for our FREE Internet Marketing Seminar - "Get Noticed on Google!".

Thursday, October 29, 2009

What do we do with all this traffic from Google?

We recently optimized a website for a new client. After the high rankings and website traffic kicked in, they sent us this question:

“How do we take all this traffic and start converting them to clients?”

Here are a few ways to improve web usability and accomplish this:
  • Go through every page and make sure it has a well-written call to action. Something on the page ought to urge visitors to click. Putting the call to action at the top of each page helps people understand where to click next. Move the traffic where you want it to go.
  • Create a blog, e-zine, and/or free white papers. Analyze which perform best at persuading visitors to convert to clients.
  • See how long it takes your main pages to load. Nobody wants to wait around for a page to load when they can just hit the back button.
  • Add a live chat representative. “She” can help visitors throughout their visit to your website, offer customer service and improve conversions.
These are only a few suggestions…please let us know what you’ve tried.

Monday, October 26, 2009

Video Marketing

With the boom in Internet technologies and social media websites, video marketing is becoming more and more popular. However, simply shooting a video and posting it online will not guarantee results. The key to a successful video campaign is compelling content and optimization.

The first and most important step is to produce a high quality original. Then the goal is to load the video as quickly as possible, grab the viewers' attention, and leave them wanting more. Publish the video content on your website and on popular video sharing websites.

The next very important step is the VIDEO SEM (Search Engine Marketing)!
Read our 8 Web Video Marketing Tips.

Friday, October 23, 2009

Approaches to Your Online SEM Budget

1) Fixed budget – a simple approach when an organization will set up a budget for a fixed amount for a certain period of time.

2) Modified fixed budget – a fixed budget for a certain period of time and adjusted periodically based on ROI or other factors.

3) Many e-commerce advertisers adjust their budget based on sales to revenue percentage. For example on each $1000 in sales they will reinvest 10-15% back in SEM (search engine marketing).

4) Seasonality plays a big role especially in the paid campaigns (like PPC). Companies will set up different budgets to meet the number of searches and get exposure during different time periods.

5) Lastly many large organizations use a percentage of their marketing budgets for SEM.

For more informatibon contact Proceed Innovative. We will provide you with customized online marketing data based on your industry and competitors analysis.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

If my competitors are using many of the same keywords, how does one website get ranked in Google over the others?

In our search term/keyword research period we find fresh search terms for SEO. The best way to find them is with research tools that let us put in words, and collect many combinations and extra usages of those words. We also learn general information concerning how frequently each search term is used.

When choosing which of these search terms to use, we bear in mind that the more common it is, the harder it will be in obtaining top placement in Google. However if we choose terms with minimal searches we won’t acquire much traffic, so we choose terms in the middle.

There are so many different combinations of search terms, so usually our clients don't have just one website they're competing with. Don’t believe it? Look at your last ranking report and see how many different websites rank number one for each of your search terms. We recently did this for a potential client and found that for 25 search terms there are 20 websites that ranked number one. So websites aren't all going after the same keywords.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

PageRank

PageRank is an algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine to assign a numerical weighting to each web page. It is a trademark of Google. PageRank results from a "ballot" among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. PageRank is a number between 0 and 10. The most popular web pages have a PageRank of 10. The higher the PageRank the better chances this page has for appearing on the first SERP. Google has not disclosed the exact method for determining the PageRank value but it is based on links to the webpage. A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. The Google Toolbar displays the current page's PageRank. See the example:

Interesting fact is that PageRank has been named after one of the two Google founders, Larry Page.

PageRank and SERP are related but different terms. SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page and consists of a list of links to web pages displayed as a result of search query. The order of the listed links is determined by their SERP rank. The SERP rank of a web page depends on a relatively large and continuously adjusted set of factors including PageRank.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is aimed at achieving high SERP ranks for a website.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Google Closing In

What Percent of Your Traffic is From Google?

Last month, Hitwise reported that Google comprised 72.4 percent of all U.S. searches carried out in the four weeks concluding April 25, 2009. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com picked up 16.3 percent, 5.78 percent and 4.0 percent, respectively. For Google that represents a 7% year over year change.
The other 49 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for only 1.4 percent of U.S. searches.

In April 2008, 14% of the traffic to our website - ProceedInnovative.com - was from Google organic searches.
In April 2009 it was 34%! In that same month only 4% was from Yahoo.

What else did Hitwise say about April ’09 compared to April ‘08?
- Lengthier search terms, averaging five to more than eight words long, have risen 7 percent.
- Business and Finance, Sports and Online Video categories displayed double-digit escalations in their share of traffic arriving directly from search engines.

What does this mean for my website marketing?
Three things:
- It’s all about Google.
- Go for the long tail.
- If you can get your site to come up in Google for long tail search terms, it could become a goldmine.

How about you? What percent of your traffic is from Google?

Do you optimize for the short tail or the long tail? Send us your comments.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

What is SERP?

SERP is the search engine results page that displays the listings of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword search. The results normally include listings of web pages with titles, descriptions and a link to each page. It is important to provide compelling titles and descriptions in order to have the visitors click on the displayed links. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is aimed at achieving high SERP ranks for a website.

What is a search engine spider?

The search engine spider is also known as a bot or crawler. It is a program that follows web links and crawls web pages on behalf of search engines. Spiders process and index the content of a web page based on the search engine algorithm and store the pages in the search engine's database. Googlebot is the name of Google’s spider program.

Having many crawlable (or available for the spider) web pages is the first step to a successful search engine marketing program.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

How creating a blog can help my business?

Yes, a blog can help your business in many ways. Blogs are big part of social media marketing these days. For example you can create and use a corporate blog to "talk" to your customers. Encourage them to write questions or comments on your products and services, and the product features they like or wish to have. A blog is easy to create and maintain. If well optimized it can help your main web site get better rankings on the search engines.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Online Competitive Intelligence

One of the best things about search engine optimization is the intelligence you can obtain from it on your competitors.

For websites, the battle for clicks from Googlers is brutal.
Rankings go up and down throughout the week. Every day more and more web pages appear. Google changes its algorithms all the time.

If you can't keep track of your competitors, how do you expect to out-rank them in Google’s search results? Explore who your competitors are in the online world and what they're doing to promote themselves.

"Competitive Intelligence is defined as the process of obtaining and analyzing competitive information from publicly available sources to help achieve the objectives of the organization." Source: Wikipedia

Your online competitors may or may not be the same as your offline competitors. First you need to find out who your competition is. Do a search in Google for a term or terms that you want to rank for – the top spots (disregard sponsored links) are your competitors.

How you can gather online competitive intelligence
  • Read their websites thoroughly
  • See who is linking to them
  • Find out how much traffic they are getting
  • Identify their key phrases
  • Find out their Google PageRank
Apply what you discover from your competitive intelligence. Use this new knowledge to increase your online marketing success and your profits.

Friday, May 8, 2009

How Competitive Is Your Brand

Search trends can be interesting for all sorts of reasons. Use Google Trends to check the popularity of your or your competitor's products and brands, or to predict the outcome of your promotions.
Here is an example of how popular some abbreviations for our search marketing services are:

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Google and Yahoo Local Listings

Get listed at Google and Yahoo! Local to see some extra, qualified traffic. You'll need location information for your offices, a phone number to list, a description of what you do or sell, an email address and website. For Google, you'll have to verify your location by phone or mail. Basic Local Yahoo listings are free of charge just like Google Local.
Local search is becoming more important to any business and having optimized local listings is essential part of your online presence. Contact us for more information regarding local search engine submissions.

Monday, March 9, 2009

301 Redirect

When to use a 301 redirect?
When you are launching a new website and the actual URL structure of your site changes. For example: current page is www.mywebsite.com/about.html and the new page is www.mywebsite.com/about.php. If the current page has prominent position in search engine results and/or back links - you'll want to pass on this credit to the new page. 301 redirect is the way to go!

301 redirects are search engine friendly and the ultimate way to pass on credit from an old page to a new one. Even if you are deleting a page - first use a 301 redirect to forward it to your home page or your site map page.

301 redirects are implemented differently based on the type of your web host. Contact Proceed Innovative if you need more information.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Social Media is Part of Your Search Engine Marketing Plan

As the social media becomes an important part of any company's marketing plan many marketers are not sure where to start from. There are so many tools and platforms, what is the best start someone would ask. Social Media as part of Search Engine Optimization has three main parts or phases: monitor, participate, measure the results.
Monitor is the first step. Your start could be a very simple step: Get subscribed for "Google Alerts" and monitor the information Google has indexed for your business name and perhaps your competitors’ names. It is easy, flexible and free. Get subscribed for "Google Alerts".
This is the start. There are lot more tools to help you. Check this blog often or contact Proceed Innovative for more information. Our Office is in Schaumburg. Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing are our primary services. Call 800-933-2402 or register for a free seminar at www.proceedinnovative.com/google

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Search Engine Spider Simulator

It is very important to create user-friendly web pages. But it is also important to check how the SE spiders see your content.

This tool Simulates a Search Engine by displaying the contents of a webpage exactly how a Search Engine would see it. It also displays the hyperlinks that will be followed (crawled) by a Search Engine when it visits the specified webpage.
Enter URL to Spider