So you’ve e-Commerce’d your site up. (Hopefully with Magento, our favorite.) And you’re ready to roll. The homepage is ready. The product shots have been Photoshopped to perfection. The design and the color schemes look very cool (ahem, an aesthetic term) and you’ve set up your checkout process with a secure third-party payment gateway. That’s it, right? Well – not if you haven’t dedicated as much effort as you already have to your product pages. Here’s a list of awesome tips for turning your product pages into awesome sales magnets: Optimize it. This, really, is a given, since you want the search engines to find you as easily and as often as the human visitors do. Great ways to make your product page SEO-friendly include: avoiding duplicate content and duplicate URLs; writing up unique and compelling text descriptions for each product (don’t just copy the manufacturers’ descriptions); and editing this content in a way that makes it relevant to your – Read the full article
I recently entered a contest to win a free ticket to the BlueGlass conference and I got really excited with the opportunity. As part of the comment I made a photoshopped image which shows Google telling them that I should be selected was the winner. So who deserves that ticket to the upcoming Blueglass TPA? I think I do and I want to tell you why and a little about myself. I met the AL team just a few months ago at Gangplank in Chandler, while in town for Startup Weekend. Chase sat down with for at least an hour to explain all the cool stuff the AL team was working on, explain how they were able to get accurate rankings and the fact that I have been a customer for a year, will make me a great brand ambassador while I am down in Florida. I would love the rep the AL while I am down there. I am – Read the full article
In mid-March, Google launched a social sharing tool called “+1.” Similar to the Facebook “Like”, +1 was added to search results to improve social relevance for users. It was noted last week that +1 will make its way across the Web in addition to (simply) search, with a widget that allows Web pages to allow +1 sharing. This will link Google profiles to content and websites, and the +1 now aims to put Google in a space where they have strived to be in for the past 5 years: social. Now, what exactly is +1? And why does it even matter? Essentially the +1 button is Google’s version of the “Like.” With hopes to capture a bit of Facebook market share, Google looks to take the world’s information and make it publicly available (according to their mission statement). So what does this mean for you? Well, besides the fact that it’s another way to draw traffic to your blog, the – Read the full article
There are tons of ways to get more followers on Twitter. Don’t believe us? Do a quick search on Google. Countless articles, blog posts, and presentations will show you how to do just that – and subsequently win support for your business and brand through the popular microblogging / social media service. But if you’re looking for unconventional ways to increase your Twitter follower count, it might not be worth your while to sift through so much online content, only to find the same tips and strategies. So we came up with this list, which we hope differentiates your Twitter social media marketing efforts from that of others – and will just as successfully prompt users to click that green Follow button. 1. Join tweetups. These face-to-face meetings between a local community of Twitter users can help you meet new contacts, find new partners and clients, establish your industry expertise, gain more followers, and say something without a 140-character limit. – Read the full article
Blogging doesn’t involve just writing: it involves promoting your content and making it rank for relevant search terms, too. Don’t worry if you’re not a technical expert or SEO rock star: like in most areas of Internet marketing, there are tons of ways to improve your performance in SEO-focused blogging, and it sounds a lot easier than it actually is. If you’re not quite convinced that you should have anything to do with SEO when blogging, just remember that getting people to your site who are already interested is much easier than the kind of cold, hard sell tactic used by most traditional outbound marketers. So drive those visitors to your site. Here are 4 tips to improve your inbound Internet marketing tactics with a blog: Write Creative Headlines Write blog headlines that will drive clicks on Twitter. Think from a user perspective; there are 60 million tweets sent out each day. Getting people to click on your URL from – Read the full article
The following are some simple web marketing integration ideas that can accelerate your campaign efforts – and business. Share messages on several channels The first step in integrating all your Internet marketing efforts is to tell a message repeatedly across various channels. Let’s say you have a new product to announce. Make sure the news is on your website’s news page as a link to media coverage or as a press release. Re-communicate the message in your blog (in a conversational tone) and have it posted on your Facebook page, tweeted on Twitter, and E-mailed to the opt-in e-mail / subscriber list. In addition, you might want to showcase the news in your website’s home page, as a form of attention-catching headline or ticker. The truth is that customers will not get access to your information in the same way. They all have their own preferences, after all. By amplifying your message on several online marketing channels, it makes it – Read the full article
Do you know that it takes just 24 seconds to improve your SEO ranking performance? Well, not really. We made that number up because the number catches attention. But catch your attention we certainly hope we did, because this SEO tip we’re about to give you can definitely go a long way in getting you more – and more relevant – search engine traffic. And yeah, they might take about 24 seconds or less to complete. What are title tags? To put it simply, title tags are the document titles required in all HTML/ XHTML documents. The term “documents” includes your website or blog. Ideally, your title tags will be used to help identify the contents of the pages of your website or blog. The HTML code that defines the title of your HTML documents follows a certain format. Let’s take the Lakeshore Branding blog – http://www.lakeshorebranding.com/company/blog – as an example. <head> <title>Chicago Marketing Blog | Internet Marketng | SEO – Read the full article
In lieu of the recent news about the Facebook smear campaign against Google, it seems that Google may be poised to remain the top dog in online ad spend this year. Last week, the story regarding Facebook hiring PR firm Burson Marsteller to spread lies about Google’s new “Social Circle” went viral. The war over the social graph, a data set of information about the social networks users are connected to, is in full force. However, Google isn’t even flinching. According to Fortune, Google’s Eric Schmidt insisted that Microsoft, not Facebook, was the true competitor to Google. He said, “Facebook users tend to use Google Search. Facebook’s ads business does not displace our advertising. I’m somewhat perplexed by the obsession because I don’t think the facts support it. Things are going great for Google.” The facts may support that businesses prefer to use Facebook and Google simultaneously; however, the percentage in which they invest their marketing budgets may be a – Read the full article
