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
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
Missing more than hitting in your E-mail marketing campaign? Don’t give up on it just yet. First of all, before you continue reading, you may want to check out our previous post on how to start an E-mail campaign. We hope you’ll enjoy applying the great tips we’ve listed in there. After the tips come the tools. We’ll let you in on a little secret: here at Lakeshore Branding we use something called MailChimp. So MailChimp is basically this cool new E-mail marketing service that’s simple and easy to use. It’s fairly new, but the service has grown to have more than 400,000 users (including us!) and 20 million emails served daily. If you’ve never launched a marketing campaign through E-mail before, then you might want to consider using MailChimp to make the whole process easier for you. Yeah, sure, the name sounds kind of quirky, but don’t be deceived: MailChimp has a powerful, developer-friendly product that definitely makes E-mail – Read the full article
It can be tough to measure in tangible terms the impact of the Internet on the environment, but this doesn’t mean there isn’t any. As we continue to enhance our presence online and live and work towards the digital, it’s important to note that the environmental costs of using the Web will inevitably rise, too. The heavier the burden will get. If you have a website or blog, you can be sure that it takes plenty of energy to keep that up and running. The infrastructure needed, the electricity used, the data servers and power plants required to keep all the information online 24/7 are only some of the things through which our online goings-on can affect the environment. Start “greening” your own little place on the Web and minimize the Internet’s environment footprint in your own way. Here’s a list of great tips to help you do just that. Go for green web hosting These days there are plenty – 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
A Content Management System (CMS) is a Web-based tool that makes it easy to change and manage the web copy, imagery, and layout of your website using a Web-based backend. Easy – meaning you no longer have to worry about managing multiple versions of HTML/ Dreamweaver templates (remember those?), since everything’s stored online. Lakeshore Branding leverages the power of two open-source content management systems that have been designed to create, edit, manage, control, and store all the materials you’ll be using for your website. Our recommended systems make the complex a lot simpler and the Internet a lot friendlier. Why open-source? It’s all a matter of opportunity: for lower costs, greater flexibility, better reliability, improved security, smoother collaboration, and more innovation. Because more developers and more programmers can work on open-source projects – compared to the limited few who create proprietary software – the possibilities become limitless. With open-source, Lakeshore Branding continues to develop unique, sophisticated website, the kind you – Read the full article
Coupons still work. Consumers may not find them as often as they used to in the Sunday paper or in magazine inserts, but this doesn’t mean that coupons are no longer popular or effective – because they still are. Just do a quick check on the Web and immediately you’ll find tens of thousands of online coupon sites – like RetailMeNot and CouponSaver – offering discounts, special deals, free shipping offers, and other similar privileges to consumers. If, as a small business owner, online retailer, merchant, or Internet marketer, you still haven’t tried using coupons as an online sales tool, then you might want to start doing so – especially at a time when the world is still trying to recover from the financial crisis. According to recent studies, over 76 percent of the shopping population use coupons, which continue to gain such popularity that the number of people searching for them on the Web has grown to thrice as – Read the full article
