The keywords people search for the most on search engines in your niche or industry are not always the most profitable keywords to focus on for your business. This is at the heart of Chris Anderson’s concept of ”the Long Tail” from his groundbreaking 2004 Wired article and his book of the same title released in 2006. The Long Tail was originally meant to discuss an emerging trend where online retailers like Amazon, Netflix & Rhapsody found success increasing the depth of their inventory and selling less of more in an internet driven environment but it has had implications far beyond its initial insight. Nowhere was this more apparent than with Search Engine Marketing. Understanding “the long tail” and applying strategies to leverage it for SEO has proven time and again over the last few years to be one of the highest value activities in search marketing. To many this is not something new, but it is surely worth revisiting. – Read the full article
LinkedIn is not Facebook. It’s not Twitter, either. You don’t use LinkedIn to post 140-character statuses about your business or to officially like someone’s new online video. What you can do, however, is use LinkedIn to grow your small business and make it more profitable. And isn’t that your priority? As a business-oriented social networking site with more than 50 million registered users spanning 170 industries, LinkedIn is an online real estate for professionals big and small. It is truly a business networking site with the average user having $109K in income and 41 years old. If you’re unsure how to use your LinkedIn profile to gain a business advantage, you can follow these tips below: Brand your profile: As a small business professional, you want to be easily found by the people who matter – as well as by the most frequently used search engines. Make sure that you customize your LinkedIn profile by changing the default link into – Read the full article
When I come across articles like the one posted on TheStreet.com last week, I can’t help but get excited. Titled “Business Owners Question Social Networking” the article quotes some research that finds that a majority of small business owners haven’t seen value from social media, and that most don’t even use it themselves. A key section of the article reads: Among the 500 small-business executives surveyed, 76% said social networking hasn’t help them generate leads or expand their companies in the past year. And 86% said they don’t turn to these Web sites for business advice or other information. The majority, 61%, depend on big search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, for business advice and information. Only 13% use social networking sites and only 10% rely on expert blogs. So why on earth would I be excited that small businesses don’t use social media and haven’t seen value from it yet? Opportunity. Plain and simple. For me, there is – Read the full article
For as simple as twitter is, the complexity of using it is nothing short of astounding. Many people strictly update twitter via the web with nothing more than an account of their daily activities. Some “power users” have people that tweet for them, and some even have bots set up that removes the human aspect altogether. Then there’s the issue of the auto-dm. Many users rely on scripted messages to be sent when someone new follows them. Often impersonal and down right cheesy, the auto-dm makes many of us cringe upon receiving them. An extension of this inhuman activity is the use of TwitterFeed, a service that connects RSS feeds to twitter accounts. Users can pull feeds related to their interests and audience and auto-post them on Twitter. TwitterFeed is great when used to pull in your company’s blog posts or entries from your personal site. The problem is that many users rely on this entirely too much and will – Read the full article
Internet marketing is generally broken into three areas- Research, Implementation and Tracking. Research includes using tools such as wordtracker, SEO Book or Google Adwords Keyword Tool. There are dozens of keyword tools to choose from but we like these because they are very easy to use and they supply the information that help us make good keyword decisions. These tools help you analyze what you believe the keyword list to be and modify it to maximize the potential website traffic. Simple things like making keywords plural has have significant increases in traffic or variations in phrases such as “online marketing” vs “Internet marketing.” While you may think that both phrases sound the same, you may think that maybe one or the other has a higher search volume- but you may be surprised to learn that “Internet marketing” has about 2.5 times the search volume of “online marketing.” Based on your objectives you would target the word that converts better for – Read the full article
“Chris is a brilliant and innovative marketer. He understands the industry on a strategic level and yet has the acumen to grasp technical tactics. Chris has developed key relationships in the industry and has an impressive network. He has the business savvy to identify new market opportunities and the discipline to deliver results. I highly recommend Chris without reservation.” – Ryan Evans, President, Rand Media Group “Chris Campbell has generously volunteered his marketing expertise for our not-for-profit organization for the last four years. He has been willing to share his skill in online marketing with both our organization and with the high school students we serve as a workshop presenter and as a consultant to new businesses. I am always impressed with his willingness to share his knowledge with our state wide organization and with other businesses. He is energetic, creative, fast on his feet, thoughtful, a great net worker and he follows through on his commitments. We love having – Read the full article
St. Louis Internet Marketing Company The most effective websites don’t just bring in a lot of visitors; they also deliver the results that matter. At Lakeshore Branding, we build your website with more than just pretty graphics and increased hits in mind. We also focus on things like higher search rankings, more targeted traffic, increased conversions, and better opportunities. In short, we focus on results. If you want to make the most of your presence on the Internet, you’re at the right place. Lakeshore Branding’s team of web designers, SEO consultants, and Internet marketing experts understand more than what makes good design; we understand, more importantly, what makes a great website. To address that, we’ve catered our web design and development solutions for all kinds of client needs. Contact us for the project that you have in mind. Simply fill in the form below. (Please complete all the fields marked *) Your name please. * Your Company / Organization – Read the full article
The last few days I utilized the new search engine Bing. I was skeptical at first of the new Microsoft product but was quickly impressed with the raw power of this new “decision” engine as they are branding it. I took notes in search results compared to yahoo and Google and I am going to share some of my insights into what I discovered (and opinions) 1. Bing has a better image search, I like the pop out feature to see the image a bit larger as well as the amount of images that are returned on the first page. It looks like they use “citations” to determine the image and do not have as much focus on alt and title tags. As webmasters have used images as an opportunity to put more keywords into the meta data, Google images has become less relevant. 2. Bing is showing favor to major websites, they are not showing site links except for – Read the full article
