Launching a new product? Opening a new branch or office? Headlining an event? Just won an industry award? Take advantage of the fact that you’re making news – go write a press release. Not only does this classic PR strategy earn you an opportunity to gain free publicity (so you won’t have to pay $15,000 for advertising placements); a press release also allows you to reach a wide audience through the media. You get to keep the brand fresh in their minds, and you’re able to enhance the visibility of your business, too. A press release is your opportunity to get a message through – without having to use hard-sell techniques, sales pitches, and marketing buzzwords. These days, it’s a best practice to optimize your press release for the Web. Why? Well, there are a bunch of reasons why – like reaching potential customers who don’t necessarily keep an eye out for items in traditional news media (newspapers, radio, TV), – Read the full article
Establishing – or enhancing – the presence of your business online will require a lot of text. Let’s see: website copy (with multiple pages), product and service descriptions, blog entries, tweets, Facebook wall posts, E-mail newsletters, pay-per-click ads, etc. So who’s going to do all that writing? Hire a web content writer. That’s the simplest solution, right? It’s also one of the most efficient. You hire the writer for a specific content creation project, maybe even an outsourced writer from offshore. It’s cost-effective, and you’re also able to free up a lot of time for yourself – time that you can spend focusing on running and growing your business, as opposed to playing the role of a copywriter or communication agency. Before you handpick a writer, though, you have to make sure that he or she is your best candidate. An interview may even be necessary. The most important thing, of course, is that the writer has what it takes – Read the full article
Link building is often said to be the hardest part of an search engine marketing campaign by many industry leading experts – but it doesn’t necessarily have to be so difficult. If you’re working on an SEO campaign for a client, or are a business owner looking to improve the number of back links you have, it may be better to focus your efforts closer to home, as opposed to actively hunting for links. The links you attract naturally are often the most high quality, and can help improve your search engine rankings more so than other link building techniques. Here are some tips to make your website naturally “linkable”: Great Content is Delicious! Although “content is king” is an adage that is so overused in the SEO industry it is beginning to lose it’s true meaning – it is actually still completely true. Creating good quality, relevant and engaging content is much more likely to attract visitors, links, and – Read the full article
Search engine optimization may be difficult to effectively utilize, but it can be crucial to staying competitive in the Internet age. Your business is competing against other companies who are using search engine optimization techniques to increase their presence on the Internet and boost their brand recognition. It is important to ensure that people are visiting your website if you want to succeed as an Internet business, especially for ecommerce sites. If nobody visits your site, how do you expect to sell anything? To avoid this problem, here are some SEO tips to help get you started on your path to a larger web presence. Keywords are a key factor in your website’s ranking. In order to ensure that people are able to find your business, you should invest some time in figuring out the optimal keywords for your website. Work with a local search engine marketing company to find what keywords will work best for you. The keywords should – Read the full article
It’s kind of stressful trying to figure out ways on how to rank better in search engines. Just figuring out where your website stands, in terms of relevant keywords, is like rocket science. Like, “Where does my culinary website appear on Google’s search results pages whenever someone searches for ‘easy homemade recipes’?” Sure, there are plenty of web-based apps and tools that promise to help you do just that. But sometimes, these apps and tools are still too expensive. Or too complicated. Their interface makes you want to squint, or hide under a desk. Enter AuthorityLabs. It’s a super simple search engine monitoring service, founded in Arizona by a guy named Chase Granberry. Basically what it does is give you the data or the feedback that you need in order to rank better. It doesn’t matter if you’re a small business, an enterprise, an Internet marketing company, or an interactive communications agency; AuthorityLabs is pretty scalable – and extremely easy – Read the full article
Open source content management systems offer a variety of benefits that proprietary CMS fail to deliver. Lower costs, more flexibility and control over your website, community support and other advantages make WordPress a better platform for hosting a website than a proprietary CMS. No Licensing Fees Because the content and design is not proprietary, initial fees when building a website on WordPress are minimal. Downloading and upgrading the software is free, and although some plugins and add-ons cost extra, these fees are generally relatively small. With proprietary CMS websites, there are typically only a few extensions that come standard and adding additional extensions can often involve high licensing and customization costs. Although there may be development costs associated with adding non-standard WordPress capabilities that aren’t available through plugins, these costs are probably much less than what you would pay for a proprietary CMS to develop the same capabilities, and offer the additional benefit of freedom to choose any developer to – Read the full article
Do you find yourself always on the go, having to work – literally – from your Apple iPhone? Don’t worry. Running around doesn’t mean you cannot accomplish the tasks needed to manage your SEO campaign – as long, of course, as you have one of today’s most sought-after mobile gadgets. We’ve talked before of great apps for small business owners. Now it’s time to list down great iPhone apps for those looking to continue working on optimizing their site, even while out of the office. Ego Ego for iPhone is a stat-tracking application that lets you check out the numbers and figures that are relevant to your SEO and search engine marketing (SEM) campaign. With support for Ember, Feedburner, Google Analytics, Mint, Squarespace, Tumblr, Twitter, and Vimeo, the Ego app lets iPhone users view things like daily, hourly, monthly site visits, subscriber count, number of Twitter followers, and even feed subscription totals. Ego is particularly useful if you’re managing multiple – Read the full article
Design is one thing. Development is another. The best and biggest in the ecommerce industry know the difference between the two, and so do we. That’s why here at Lakeshore Branding we focus on delivering the expertise, creative talent, technology, and savvy needed to make your ecommerce site not only look good, but drive your business. We bring value not just in terms of awesome color schemes, shiny new logos, and inspired designs, but also in terms of higher traffic, cost-efficient management, and increased revenue. We use Magento eCommerce as our platform for growth: the leading ecommerce content management system today. By leveraging the flexibility, scalability, and robust features of Magento, we are able to provide you with full-service solutions and technologies attuned to the trends and demands of the growing ecommerce industry. Why Magento? Our expertise in Magento, simply put, increases your presence online and grows your sales. Using this powerful ecommerce solution, we can develop your website with – Read the full article
