What if you could control and monitor your image across all social media? What if you could sign up for all the important social media sites out there and hear all the conversations being made about your business or brand? It sounds like a lot of work, but not if you’ve heard of KnowEm. A few months back we wrote a post that focused on this extremely useful social media service, which, as a kind of username detective, basically helps small business owners, startups, or even enterprises and larger companies check for the use of their brand, product, trademark, personal name, or username instantly on over 400 popular and emerging social networks or social media sites – including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Multiply, WordPress, MySpace, Formspring, Blogger, Posterous, and many more. KnowEm is a great brand management tool, too. You can grab your name and secure your brand before someone else does – someone who doesn’t have the authority for – Read the full article
The explosion of mobile over the last several years is well documented. However, issues with the usability (or lack thereof) of mobile devices, websites and applications seem to be getting little play in the midst of all the hype. The still-very-venerable Jakob Nielsen, though, has warned that usability of mobile devices and websites is horrifyingly similar to the bad old early days of personal computing. Reviewing usability tests of mobile devices just last summer (2009), Nielsen wrote: “Observing user suffering during our sessions reminded us of the very first usability studies we did with traditional websites in 1994.” He summarizes his findings: “the mobile user experience is miserable.” Indeed, most of us seem to expect spotty service, ridiculously scrolly pages, multiple clicks to accomplish one step in a process, and limited functionality all around. Why? And for how long are people going to put up with this? Recently the Toronto usability company Interpix Design worked with a major Canadian company, – Read the full article
When researching or choosing a product or service, visitors typically follow a keyword path. This keyword path can be used to help inform your SEO campaigns. For example, let’s imagine we have an imaginary visitor who is trying to choose a digital camera. Our visitor might start off by researching digital cameras. In Google, they will search upon the keywords “digital cameras”. They might complete some research, read some reviews, and decide upon a make of camera – let’s say they have decided upon a Nikon. Let’s now imagine that our visitor will now carry out a search for “Nikon digital cameras” and following further research, eventually decides upon a Nikon P100. Finally, at this stage, the visitor will carry out searches for “Nikon P100 prices”, which now indicates they are ready to buy and are carrying out price checks online. This keyword path will typically apply in most sectors, and your job as a website owner is to figure – 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
When looking for targeted search traffic for your website, there are two popular ways in which to get these results – Organic search, which we believe is the best SEO ever, and PPC, which stands for pay per click advertising – in our case we talk about Google ads. In order to choose which is best for your website you must first understand the advantages and disadvantages of each. PPC is all those ads you see on right column Google, Yahoo and Bing. Webmasters pay a specific amount of money for each click to their website from the various search results or ads placed on websites. With Google, you will find these ads on the right side, at the top of the searches or on web pages. Of course, in order to get the best location on the search page, you will have to pay a higher per click amount. On the good side, you will only pay if someone – Read the full article
Something big is going to happen this October 14 to 16 in Las Vegas. It’s called the BlogWorld & New Media Expo, the first and only tradeshow, conference, and media event created for the rapidly growing industry of blogging and new media. We here at Lakeshore Branding are going to attend the event, but if that’s not enough to convince you to come and join us (it should be more than enough to convince you, though!) then here are the top six reasons why BlogWorld & New Media Expo is a can’t-miss. Money? Influence? Or both?: If you’re a small business owner, Internet marketer, e-Commerce store owner, corporate executive, online journalist, podcaster, broadcaster, or personal or professional blogger who has some form of stake in the web, then surely you’ll have plenty to gain by attending the event and learning more about the top strategies, tools, and technologies used in developing content for the web today. BlogWorld 2010 is where – Read the full article
Webinar – a neologism for “web-based seminar” – is a presentation, lecture, workshop, or seminar that is transmitted over the Web. It can be conducted for different purposes, like lead generation or marketing or training or product demonstration, but one key aspect of any webinar is that it’s interactive. As opposed to webcasts, which are pretty much a one-way thing, webinars usually let attendees comment, ask questions, and share their personal opinions to the host as well as to the other members of the audience. Webinars: who knew that technology would grow this fast and allow us to leverage these neat video conferencing tools today? Yes, it all sounds pretty remarkable. If you’re a small business owner and Internet marketer, we’ll certainly understand if you’re fascinated about what webinars can bring to the business. The question is: do webinars actually work? And will they work for any business or enterprise, regardless of size? Here are several thoughts on webinars as – Read the full article
