Tag: website | Page 3

How Internet Marketing is Like a Marathon

If you’re going to engage in internet marketing to promote your company’s products and services, you need commitment, flexibility and patience. Characteristics that also come in handy if you’re training for a marathon. I speak from experience. Last Sunday, I completed the 2014 Walt Disney World Marathon.

I didn’t finish in the top ten. Heck, I didn’t even finish in the top 1,000. I was out on that course for over 8 hours (counting the 45 minutes waiting in the corral to start the race!) but I finished. And more importantly, I raised more than $1700 for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, got my Mickey Mouse medal, and basked in the pain and glory of joining an elite group of people who have completed multiple marathons. (Yep, I’m a glutton for punishment. This was my 2nd marathon.)

Why You Need an Online Marketing Plan Before a Website

By Gloria Rand

Launching a new business and need a website? Don’t spend a dime until you decide how you’re going to market your business. Online marketing needs a combination of SEO, social media and email to be successful.

Questions to consider are:

►Who is our target audience?
►Are they in our local area, or national?
►Do our prospects use social media? If so, which network(s)?
►How will our prospects contact us? Phone? Email?
►Who will design the web site?
►Who will write copy and optimize the site?

What is Inbound Marketing and Why Should I Care?

By Gloria Rand

Ask a landscape lighting contractor or massage therapist what inbound marketing is, and chances are, you may get a blank stare. They may not know the term. But the two small business owners are likely using inbound marketing to promote their businesses.

Inbound marketing is any marketing tactic that involves earning someone’s interest in your product or service, rather than buying their interest. Prime examples include SEO (search engine optimization), social media, blogs, and ebooks. Traditional “outbound marketing,” (the opposite of inbound marketing) involves activities like direct mail advertising, TV and radio ads, banner advertising and cold calls.

Why You Should Avoid Building Poor Quality Backlinks

One common SEO mistake small business owners and solopreneurs fall victim to is building poor quality backlinks. Often times, these business people maintain their own websites, yet they don’t fully understand what backlinks are.

3 Common SEO Mistakes and How to Fix Them

By Gloria Rand
Worrying about the latest algorithm change from Google won’t make a difference to your website’s search ranking if you’ve made a common SEO mistake like optimizing for common words or using your company name as the title tag for every page on your website. Here are three other SEO mistakes to avoid, and how to fix them:

1. Building poor quality backlinks – Link building is an important part of online marketing, but it’s not the “be all and end all” as my mother used to say. Some unscrupulous SEO firms tout the importance of backlinks, but they charge you a fortune to acquire poor quality links from spam websites, irrelevant sites or sites built solely for the purpose of exchanging links. The problem with this strategy is that it can do more harm to your business website than good, especially in the post-Google Penguin era.

SEO Value of Blog Comments

by Gloria Rand

Ever get stuck for blog article ideas? Client questions are a great resource. In fact, that’s exactly what sparked the topic for today’s article!

One of my clients recently asked me, “Can comments on web-based articles help with rankings in Google as far as SEO is concerned?” The reason for his question is because he had just received this comment from his webhost: “Content” does influence SEO but it’s only the content inside an article or post. Google, Bing, and Yahoo do not look at the comments to determine any type of SEO ranking.”

4 Ways to Grow Your Prospect List

One of the challenges of growing any business is to …

GoDaddy Outage Affects Millions – Time for a Change?

Was your website down Monday? If so, you were not …

Why it Pays to Spend Money on Website Content

When will people learn that good writing is NOT a commodity, especially when it comes to website content? You can’t expect to get good quality content and only pay a penny a word!

Ok, let me explain what prompted this rant….

I’m a member of the American Writers & Artists copywriting group on LinkedIn. I received one of my regular emails from LinkedIn today with the latest discussions and comments from the group. One of the new discussions caught my eye. The headline read: SEO Friendly Content Writing – Only $1 / 100 words!!! Try now.