First2Search Blog | Website Promotion

Calendar
September 2010

M T W T F S S

« Jul

1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30
Upcoming Events
- No events.

September 2010
M	T	W	T	F	S	S
« Jul
	1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30

Targeting Website Traffic

Posted By Sara Bergeron in Uncategorized, Website Promotion on July 19, 2010
	1 Comment	Email	Print	View Posts by Sara Bergeron
1 2 3 4 5 0 votes

Think of it this way: If you own a fishing tackle store, is it better to have 200 people that have no interest in fishing walk through your door or 50 people that regular fishers and need new tackle? The answer is pretty obvious: You want people that have an interest in what you are selling and are likely to buy.

The same is true on the Internet. Yes, it’s always nice to watch your website traffic grow, but it’s not always the best thing for business. The best way to grow your business is by drawing targeted visitors to your site.

There are a couple of great ways to do this. The first way is to choose the right keywords for your website and to build your site around those keywords. Make sure you select keywords that match your product or service, not just keywords that receive a large number of services of do not have much competition.

Another great way to deliver targeted traffic is through pay-per-click ads. These ads are displayed beside regular search results on Google and other search engines. Users searching for a product or service online are more likely to become customers than those passively searching online. Again, it’s important to choose relevant search terms to focus on. When done properly, pay-per-click advertising campaigns can be a great way to deliver targeted traffic to your website. First2Search offers pay-per-click advertising services that can help you out.

If you operate a local business or operate primarily in one geographic region, you may want to focus your marketing, advertising and search engine optimization efforts on that region. There are several ways to do this. There are many local business directories that you can become a member of. Both Google and Bing offer local business listings.

Advertise within your niche. Using the fishing tackle store from the beginning of the post as an example, the owner of the store could spend some time on fishing message boards and forums. He could join social networking groups focused on fishing and fishing tackle. Developing connections online is a great way to grow your website. Just be careful not to spam and annoy people.

Once you start getting more targeted, relevant traffic, you will definitely see an increase in sales.

Online Marketing is Cost Effective

Posted By Sara Bergeron in Pay Per Click, Website Promotion on February 20, 2010
	5 Comments	Email	Print	View Posts by Sara Bergeron
1 2 3 4 5 1 votes

The most important aspect to any marketing campaign is your return on investment. If you’re spending money to market your product or service you want to get as much of a return back as possible. The good thing is that online marketing is incredibly cost effective. The ROI from an Internet marketing campaign exceeds that of many other forms of marketing.

With pay-per-click marketing campaigns, you only pay when someone actually visits your website. Unlike print, radio, television or direct mail advertisements, you don’t pay when people ignore your ad or simply glance at it. You don’t pay for unrelated traffic either. When you participate in a pay-per-click advertising campaign, your ad is only displayed when someone searches for terms related to your website. You’re getting targeted traffic.

Pay-per-click advertising campaigns only reach customers that are actually searching for your industry. Rather than telling people what they want, you are approaching people that are already interested in your industry. Once someone types a related phrase into a search engine, they are already much more likely to be interested in your website than a passive user looking at an unrelated ad. People searching online are actively looking for information and those searching for products and services are likely doing so with the intent to purchase. This is the best possible time to advertise.

What you end up with are qualified customers that are willing to spend and you only pay when one of those customers makes the decision to visit your website. The visitors you end up paying for are much, much more likely to be interested in your company and your chance of making a sale will be much greater.

Another positive aspect of online marketing is that it is very easy to monitor your return on investment. If you mail out fliers, there really isn’t any way to know how many people throw them away. There also isn’t a way to know exactly how many people read your print ad or pay attention to your television or radio commercial. Yes, you can estimate the effectiveness of a marketing campaign by watching for any increases in business following one, but there is now way to know with 100% certainty.

With pay-per-click online advertising, you know exactly how many people click your ads and visit your site. Using website analytics in conjunction with advertising, you know how many of those visitors stay on your site and for how long. You can figure out exactly which keywords are performing well and which are not. This sort of specific tracking isn’t possible with other forms of advertising.

Being able to track your website promotion and fine tune your efforts based on the data you receive is just another reason why online advertising is so cost effective and important.

Turning Visitors Into Customers

Posted By Sara Bergeron in Pay Per Click, SEO, Website Design, Website Promotion on February 12, 2010
	1 Comment	Email	Print	View Posts by Sara Bergeron
1 2 3 4 5 1 votes

Webmasters spend a lot of their time trying to increase traffic to their websites. So do SEO professionals, PPC marketers, social media marketers and website copywriters. And it’s obvious why.

You can’t sell a product or service without people knowing your company exists. In order to get noticed, in order to spread your message to as many people as possible, you need to increase traffic. There aren’t many website owners that can honestly say the don’t want more traffic and there are even fewer than would say they want less traffic.

But you don’t just need traffic, you need to convert that traffic into sales. If you run a website that makes money off of ad revenue, having a lot of traffic could be good enough. But if you’re selling a product or a service, you want to increase your sales.

So how do you turn casual visitors into paying customers?

There are a few ways. First of all, having a clear call to action on your website is important. You may want your visitors to fill out a contact form, or call you on the phone ,or purchase a product ,or request a quote or something else entirely. The bottom line is that you have to make this easy to do and you have to make the link that starts this process stand out.

A good call to action is obvious. It is the most obvious link on the page. It should be larger than the rest of the links on the site or use a different font or text colour. It should be positioned in a place where it is easily seen. A visitor’s eye is naturally drawn to certain areas of the screen and your call to action should be placed in one of those areas.

Another way to convert visitors into customers is through well-written website content. Your content should be persuasive and informative. It should give the user the information that they are looking for and it should also sell your company and promote the products or services you offer.

A well-designed website with quality content and good calls to action will convert more visitors into customers than a badly designed one that does not clearly point the user in the right direction. Sometimes the best way to test this is through trial and error. Move elements around the screen until you’ve found one that converts well. You’ll be happy you did.

Tips For Launching A New Website

Posted By Nathan Hughes in Pay Per Click, Website Promotion on February 10, 2010
	58 Comments	Email	Print	View Posts by Nathan Hughes
1 2 3 4 5 1 votes

Launching a new website is a difficult and stressful thing to do. There are so many factors, so many little nuances and so many challenges that the task can sometimes seem overwhelming. Today we have a few tips for people that have decided to launch a new website.
First of all, there are a two different definitions of “a new website.” The first is the most literal: a brand new website from scratch. The second is a newly designed website. The tips below will help you when launching a brand new site and many of them will help when you want to launch an updated site as well.

Launching A Brand New Site

A ridiculous amount of work goes into a new website launch, far more than most people assume. There are many, many aspects that must be taken into consideration. Here is a helpful list that should make the process run a bit smoother.

Do your keyword research.

◦ This step is vital. The keywords you choose will affect your domain name, the URLs and names of the pages of your site, your title tags and descriptions as well as the direction that your written content goes. Keyword research is a crucial step.

Come up with an easy-to-navigate, scalable site structure

◦ Your web page shouldn’t be convoluted or difficult to use. Make sure all pages are easily accessible and it’s a good idea to think ahead at this point. What pages might you add later on? Where will they fit into your structure? This will help avoid problems in the future.

Create unique, relevant page titles and descriptions for each page

◦ Don’t use the same page title and description for each page and it’s a good idea to incorporate your keywords into your titles and descriptions.

Test, test, test

◦ Before you announce the site to the world, make sure it works. Check all of your links to make sure they work. Proofread all of your written content and eliminate typos or anything that is difficult to understand. If possible, have someone else go through the site and let you know if they have any issues.

Promote the page

◦ Once the site is launched, you’ll need to let people know it’s there. There are several ways to do this. You could start a blog and share your posts with others. You could create a profile on Facebook or Twitter and use that to promote your website. You could issue a press release about your company. Do whatever you think will get the word out.

Consider a PPC campaign

◦ Pay-per-click campaigns are very valuable for new websites. Since the site it is new, it will likely not rank very highly on the major search engines for a while. Instead, you can use PPC ads in order to bring visitors to your site.

Internet Marketing During a Recession

Posted By Meagan Mills in Internet Marketing, SEO, Website Promotion on January 28, 2010
	8 Comments	Email	Print	View Posts by Meagan Mills
1 2 3 4 5 1 votes

Unfortunately many companies are still hurting and feeling the effects of the recession. Naturally, this usually means cost cutting and tightened spending. There are some things companies just cannot justify paying for during hard times.

Online marketing is NOT one of those things.

In fact, Internet marketing is one of the best possible ways to spend your money during tough economic periods. Why? It’s simple. When compared to traditional forms of marketing such as print ads, television, radio and direct mail, online marketing has a much higher return on investment. When there isn’t much money to go around, you need to spend what you have in a way that sees the highest possible return. That way is Internet marketing and promotion.

Possibly the most cost-effective form of online marketing is pay per click advertising. These ads are proven to deliver. First of all, they are only displayed when a potential customer searches for a particular, related term in a major search engine or visits a related website. This ensures that every person that sees your ad is a targeted customer that is interested in the product or service you provide. This sort of efficiency makes pay per click advertising incredibly affordable and cost-effective.

Secondly, pay per click companies only charge you when someone clicks on your ad. If you have a direct mail campaign, you will be charged for each flyer or catalogue you send out, even if the recipient immediately throws it away. With pay per click ads, you only pay when targeted customers choose to visit your website. This is definitely an economical way to spend your marketing budget. Why pay for ads that aren’t performing? Pay per click advertising allows you to only pay when a customer is delivered to your site. It just makes financial sense.

Finally, pay per click and Internet advertising can be tracked quite accurately. Using website analytics, you can determine exactly which terms your visitors are searching for in order to land on your site, which pages of your website are the most popular and exactly how affective your advertising campaigns are. This allows you to modify your efforts in order to attract the highest number of targeted customers for the lowest possible price.

This sort of focused, direct advertising will offer you much higher returns on your initial investment and is an intelligent way to spend your marketing budget, especially during a recession.

During troubling economic times, many people are turning to the Internet as a form of communication and entertainment even more than before. Advertising online is the best way to reach a wide audience at an affordable rate as quickly as possible.

Website Promotion through Social Media: The Do’s & Don’ts

Posted By Meagan Mills in Social Media Advertising, Social Media Marketing, Website Promotion on January 22, 2010
	119 Comments	Email	Print	View Posts by Meagan Mills
1 2 3 4 5 1 votes

Social media is huge. Almost everyone has some sort of social media account, whether it be Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Digg or something else. Social media is a great tool to use to build relationships, share content and discuss ideas. That also means it is a great tool for Internet promotion.

However, there are certain guidelines to follow when promoting your website through social media. If you do it right, social media is a great way to gain exposure and credibility. When done wrong however, you can cause serious damage to your reputation online.

First, the Don’ts:

Don’t spam

◦ Nothing is more annoying than someone on Twitter, Facebook or Digg that constantly sends out their website link to everyone they know. Sure, sometimes it makes sense to share your link with someone, but if everything you post is nothing but a link to your site, people will not be very receptive.

Don’t trick people

◦ People do not like being lied to. Never send out your website’s link under false pretenses. If you describe your link as anything other than a link to your own website, you’re trying to trick people into visiting your website. No one likes that and it’s a good way to build a bad reputation for yourself online.

Don’t only promote yourself

◦ No one signs up for a social networking site solely to receive ads. You’ll need to give something of value in addition to promoting yourself. Sharing unique, relevant content from your site is a good idea. Sending your link to people for unrelated reasons is not.

And now the Dos:

Do participate

◦ Many social networking forums such as Twitter and Facebook are set up to facilitate conversations. If you have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed, make sure you participate in those discussions. Talk to other people and form relationships. They’ll be more likely to support your website if you do.

Do brand yourself

◦ Social networking is another way to develop a brand for yourself. Chose a username that matches your business if possible. Make yourself an expert in your field by discussing current trends and providing answers to those who need them. This will go a long way to branding yourself and your website as a market leader.

Do join

◦ Social networking is here to stay. The individual websites may change with trends, but the concept is not going anywhere. If you’re not using social media to promote yourself, you’re going to fall behind.

What the new Google Caffeine Means for Search

Posted By Meagan Mills in Internet Marketing, Pay Per Click, SEO, Website Promotion on January 19, 2010
	10 Comments	Email	Print	View Posts by Meagan Mills
1 2 3 4 5 0 votes

Google is close to releasing a new version of its search engine, called “Google Caffeine.” The main new feature is the speed of search (hence the name “Caffeine) but that’s not the only difference. Google search results are going to change and the search algorithm will change.

The look and feel of Google will remain the same. It’s not a drastic change that will make Google completely different, but there is a change. For some searches things will look exactly the same. In other searches there will be slight differences that most people will not notice. Overall, Google will be faster and, hopefully, deliver more relevant results than ever before.

So what does this mean for website designers and those involved in search engine optimization? A few things.

First of all, it seems that Google will now give more weight to news and social media sites. This is especially true for generic search terms like “dog,” “cat,” “shoes” and others. When you search for a generic, broad term you will more than likely be presented with current news and social media conversations on that topic. Google now assumes that people searching for generic terms online want the latest information first. For specific terms, web pages will come up.

Google will also index more pages in an attempt to provide more information. The page is also structured slightly different, with news and video moving around depending on the terms searched.

So how should you change your website to fit the new Google? First of all, the point that you should not structure your site solely for Google remains true. Ultimately real users are going to be the people that decide to spend time on your site, use your services and pay for your products, so you always need to have real people in mind and not just search engines.

It seems as though Google will be relying on current, up-to-date information more than ever. Depending on the topic, websites that deliver frequently updated content will be ranked higher. This makes it more important than ever to focus on delivering fresh, related content on your website.

The new Google be being launched partially due to Bing’s partnership with Yahoo. Google wants its users to find the most relevant results faster. If people are consistently finding better results on Bing, there is a chance that they may switch and use that search engine as their default. Google does not want this and so it will strive to deliver the best results. The bottom line here is, to continue to be ranked highly on Google or Bing, you need to have a good quality website. If you only use underhanded techniques to drive visitors to a sub par page, you will eventually be found out and punished in the rankings.

Using Content to Draw in Visitors

Posted By Nathan Hughes in SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Website Promotion on January 17, 2010
	Post comment	Email	Print	View Posts by Nathan Hughes
1 2 3 4 5 1 votes

One of the most important aspects of running a website is to have unique, interesting content. Well-written content draws in visitors, keeps them on your site longer and converts them into customers.

How does content do this? By making your website more than an advertisement online.

People are overwhelmed by ads in their lives. While advertising is important to promote your website, quality content is just as crucial. After all, if someone clicks on one of your ads, visits your site and leaves without giving your company much thought, you’ve just wasted money. What you need is interesting content that will keep visitors surfing your page longer.

A good website design will incorporate content into every aspect of the site. You should have detailed descriptions of the products or services you offer. You should have an “About Us” page that provides your visitors with important information about your company. You definitely need “call to action” language that will make people want to do business with you.

But that’s not all.

Informative content is important, but you can go further. If your content is entertaining – if it is interesting to your visitors – they will stay on your site longer in order to read it. Having articles or a blog filled with useful information is a great way to turn casual visitors into repeat traffic. Repeat traffic equals more business.

Unique, interesting content is not only useful for keeping visitors on your page longer, it’s also a great way to bring them to your site in the first place. First of all, you can include specific keywords in your content. Search engines will pick up these keywords and index them. Then, when a potential customer is searching for a specific term, your website is more likely to come up.

Secondly, interesting content is more likely to be linked to. If you write an interesting blog post on a subject related to your business, other related sites are likely to link to it. If you write a really great post, that link could be forwarded around the Internet to many, many people. This leads to increased exposure for your website. Add this to the fact that most search engines take the number of sites that link to you as a part of their search ranking algorithm, and you’ll definitely see more traffic coming your way.

Interesting, entertaining content is a great way to draw visitors into your site, keep them there longer and turn them into customers. You can get the leg up on your competition by having this content on your site and you’ll soon see your business grow.

How Not to Promote Your Website

Posted By Nathan Hughes in Website Design, Website Promotion on January 15, 2010
	Post comment	Email	Print	View Posts by Nathan Hughes
1 2 3 4 5 1 votes

So you have a great new website design and you want the entire world to know about it. What do you do? You’ll likely need to do some website promotion and online marketing in order to get people to visit. There are a lot of good ways to get people to visit your website. Search engine optimization, pay per click campaigns, online marketing and organic site optimization are all great ways to get visitors.

However, there are also some really terrible ways to promote your website online.

The first one is spam. Spam email is annoying. You’ve no doubt received spam email messages before. Not only are these messages incredibly annoying, but they also make the websites involved look very amateur. You can permanently ruin your brand image by spamming people through email, instant messenger, web forums or social networking sites. There is nothing wrong with sending a brief, personalized email, Facebook message or tweet to a few people to let them know you have a new website. It becomes a problem when it gets excessive.

And that brings up our second point: Don’t annoy people. Participating in forums and commenting on blog posts are sometimes good ways to give your website some extra exposure. However, don’t go overboard. Interrupting an existing conversation online to throw out your completely unrelated link will only serve to annoy people. Annoying someone is a great way to ensure that they will never, ever visit your website.

Another website promotion tactic that you should avoid is any website offering to mass submit your link to hundreds of websites online. First of all, these services usually charge money for a service that is essentially useless. Secondly, modern search engines frequently punish website that associate with “bad areas” of the Internet. If your site is linked to hundreds of unknown websites, there is probably a very good chance that it has been wandering into some rather unsavoury areas of the web. Doing this may get you punished or even blacklisted from one or more major search engines. It’s simply not worth the risk.

When coming up with an online marketing or website promotion plan, think about how you would promote yourself in real life and apply those lessons to the Internet. Most people would ignore someone standing on the street corner randomly screaming a store name into a crowd, so don’t enter a message board and start plastering your URL everywhere. If someone walked up to you and promised that they could make your restaurant the most popular place in town in one month for the low cost of $9.99, you probably wouldn’t believe them, so don’t believe someone who guarantees the top spot on Google for the same price.

Ultimately, a well thought out, respectful, carefully planned website marketing strategy will offer much more success than spam or annoying strangers.

Website Promotion and Online Marketing Methods

Posted By Meagan Mills in Pay Per Click, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Website Promotion on January 12, 2010
	Post comment	Email	Print	View Posts by Meagan Mills
1 2 3 4 5 1 votes

There are many different ways, and here are a few of them:

Organic Search Engine Optimization

Organic search engine optimization (or SEO) aims to improve the traffic coming to a website via search engines. By adding quality website content, selectively using appropriate keywords within site copy and correctly structuring websites, traffic can be increased and the quality of the incoming traffic will improve. Search engine optimization is used on almost all web pages and is important to any website promotion campaign.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay per click (PPC) campaigns are a paid form of Internet advertising. With this method webmasters only pay when their ad is clicked on. Pay per click ads can either be placed on search engines (so that they display alongside organic search results) or on other websites. Typically search engine pay per click campaigns work on a bid method. Advertisers bid on certain keywords and the highest bid receives the top spot in the ad results. A popular PPC program is Google AdWords.

Other Paid Online Advertising

This method is used less frequently than it once was. Advertisers can pay to place static banner ads on a specific website for a specific amount of time. The advertiser pays a fixed amount and usually pays on a monthly basis. Note: this does not include “link buying.” The process of buying links (paying another website to link to your site) is prohibited by many major search engines and should be avoided.

Subscription Services

Using an RSS feed, a visitor can subscribe to a website’s content. They can then use an RSS reader to view the content as it is published. RSS feeds are great for visitor loyalty and can be used for marketing purposes as well. Special offers can be plugged to those who subscribe to the feed. Another form of subscription-based marketing is the email newsletter. These are becoming less common today, but are still in relatively wide use. An email newsletter can be a great way to advertise your business online. You can use the newsletter to inform your clients of special offers or sales that they would not otherwise be aware of.

Viral and Social Marketing

Social marketing involves promoting your website through social media. Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and social news websites such as Digg can be used to promote a web page. The ultimate goal of many social marketing campaigns is to “go viral.” Viral marketing is a form of word-of-mouth marketing where an article, video, game or other online message is shared very rapidly throughout social networks. An example of this form of marketing would be creating a YouTube video that is shared by many users on Twitter.