Web Marketing Strategy Update

Whether you’re a webmaster or work for an SEO firm, it doesn’t always occur to those involved in SEO to check out Chrome extensions for helpful applications. We’ve made a list of the top five SEO extensions you should consider adding onto your Chrome browser to make life easier.

SEO for Chrome

The SEO for Chrome extension is the most widely used SEO extension on Chrome today. It provides both tools and statistics that are meant to help with SEO tasks ranging from backlink and pagerank checks to keyword research. It can also indicate to you the number of pages indexed for a particular site, and provides a variety of different stats for both social media and traffic a site receives.

The extension can also help you analyze your competition, acting as an aid to find their search traffic, PPC budget and keywords.

Majestic SEO

This extension provides a quick way to see the SEO strength of a page using its backlink information. Majestic itself crawls the entire web, so the data is original unlike some other extensions which need a third party to take data from. A summary bar tells you everything you need to know, from referring domains and URLs linking to a page of interest to Majestic’s trademark Trust and Citation flow indicators.

Users receive a broad range of information for free, including everything from link profile charts and a score for the page generated by Majestic. Link counts in this extension also go a step further by including three separate levels (ie. URL, subdomain, and root). Majestic also offers backlink detail, indicating to you the strongest backlinks to the page in elaborate detail. These characteristics, along with the anchor text analysis showing you the top 10 anchor texts on a page, make Majestic a valuable SEO extension to have.

SEO Quake

The SEO Quake extension functions as a toolbar in Chrome. It can display everything to you from Page and Alexa Rank to a plethora of other SEO parameters. The extension also works on search engine result pages (SERP). The parameters are listed by the extension, and are a combination of different indexes (i.e. Google Index, Bing Index, Alexa Rank, etc.).

SEO Site Tools

The SEO site tools extension pulls a broad scope of metrics from sources and this includes social media reactions. For example it will keep track of how many comments, shares or upvotes your content got on sites such as Facebook and Reddit. Along with expected features such as providing page ranks and providing link’s anchor texts, it highlights nofollow links as well. It uses similar parameters as other extensions such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. It even uses data from Majestic SEO. This extension is desirable especially to those who keep track of their social media outlets.

Mozbar

Mozbar offers similar features as most other extensions, but there are a few features that make it stand out. It allows for metric comparison between for a particular search engine (i.e. Google etc.) with the SERP overlay. It also provides for custom searches based off where your location. The extension also offer’s Mozbar’s personal rankings (mozRank) as well as how trusted the site and domain is (mozTrust).

It also offers features for page analysis. Elements include everything from the country and IP address to title or header tags and meta-descriptions. It also offers an SRP overlay that allows for evaluation of all the hits in a SERP.

Ricardo Casas is the CEO of Fahrenheit Marketing in Austin, Texas. Fahrenheit marketing offer a wide range of marketing services from web development and SEO to online PR, phone tracking and social media marketing.

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Changes in Industrial Marketing Online

In 2012 Google introduced some major algorithm changes which shook up the organic rankings for almost every industry and major market. With many months of observations and industry analyst discussions we’ve learned what to do and what to avoid. This article will help business owners and managers make better decisions on strategies and tactics and has two main sections.

The first discusses significant changes and opportunities in industrial website design practices. The second discusses various types of search engine marketing practices. It is worth commenting that your particular industry and internal matters such as budgeting need to be considered when creating your overall internet marketing strategy. If you prefer to self manage your online marketing you may still want to consider paying for a few hours of consulting with an expert. Proper planning and execution can keep you from making serious mistakes and are essential for getting the most from your invested time and money.

Industrial Website Design

Business website design has really improved over the last few years. The old style small and cluttered look has been replaced with sites that have clean styling and user enhancements. Because industrial website users are typically very busy people it is important to develop a site architecture that makes it easy for a user to navigate your site. My personal recommendation for larger sites is to use silo website architecture. This form of site structure can enhance your on-page optimization and presents a very logical path to information. It can also eliminate or reduce the need for extensive drop down menus which can be problematic for certain browsers or users that may have javascript disabled.

To get the best possible site your web design and development company should now be basing all coding on HTML5 and CSS3. Not to downplay their importance through over simplifying, HTML5 and CSS3 allow for professional styling options and streamlined code for better loading sites.

Special features are used on many sites. Live Chat is a common feature and is especially useful on ecommerce sites. Live Chat on an ecommerce website is proven to reduce cart abandonment rates, present opportunities for add-on sales and improve customer satisfaction by assuring that buyers get the correct item.

Interested in saving money? Companies such as ThomasNet offer template websites which although appearing to offer value, carry an expensive “technology fee” every year and you never truly own the whole site. Your company is effectively locked in to this arrangement without end. And these sites are usually built using HTML tables which is very outdated technolgy. Using a table-less design with CSS (cascading style sheets) is the way to go.

There are internet marketing companies who will build you a custom industrial website and hand you the keys. Your only annual costs are to renew your domain name and hosting, often for as little as $150 per year. If you have an ecommerce website you will need to add on the cost of an SSL certificate.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design is relatively new and offers tremendous benefits. Essentially, a responsive website is built using percentages instead of fixed dimensions. This allows the layout to be responsive to the device on which it is displayed. As such, responsive website design eliminates the need for a separate mobile website. Responsive websites also have exceptionally good page load times which search engines strongly prefer.

A large percentage of web design companies do not understand how to develop code for a responsive web design, so it is important for you to find a company that has proven experience in this area. A small but important example of what many ordinary web design companies fail to consider, is that your phone number needs to be “tap to call” enabled for mobile users to call you with ease.

Searchable Catalogs

Searchable catalogs are a mainstay component for many manufacturing websites, especially those with a large number of products to sell. Often these searchable catalogs are also ecommerce enabled. Improving the user experience is proven to increase conversion actions so it may be time to redesign and launch a better online catalog. Old style catalog pages typically have very small text and thumbnail images that make it challenging for users to see important product details. Modern catalogs can provide expandable product images and new ideas on content placement help users to better evaluate your products.

Search Engine Marketing

There are many ways to market your business online. What works for one business may not work as well for another. If your company has a very small marketing budget it may make sense to exclude certain services or use them in only a limited and strategic manner. When you create an internet marketing strategy you need to carefully weigh how each element will interface with the other. You need to understand the purpose of each element and use it accordingly.

Advertising in Industrial Directories

Industrial directory advertising is a dead-end for most companies. The average person conducts an internet search from a search engine and then selects a company from the first search results page. Typically 65% of people do not venture past page one, and most contact one or more of the top five ranked listings. If you do searches for your type of products or services and no online directory sites are shown it’s hard to believe that they are going to deliver much traffic to your site. It’s also important for you to know that Google announced earlier this year a dislike of certain directory sites.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

SEO, or search engine optimization, is how you get your site ranked well in the top part of a search engine results page (SERP). To achieve high organic rankings you must be very precise and deliberate in what you do and how you do it. Google in particular carefully measures metrics such as bounce rates, time on page/site, number and quality of internal and external links, page load times and content quality. There are numerous other factors which need to be managed and all kept within certain bounds.

Far and away, strong organic rankings are how an industrial company can get the best return for their internet marketing investment. It is extremely important to understand that the internet is full of organizations promising all sorts of miracle guaranteed results. The truth is probably less than 10% of self-proclaimed “SEO companies” really know what they are doing. Be careful who you choose to help you — employing the wrong methods can lead to penalties and serious long-term losses.

Pay Per Click Advertising

PPC, or Pay Per Click advertising can be highly effective for generating leads and building brand awareness. I believe Google Adwords is the best PPC advertising option. There are others such as Bing Ads and Yahoo Search Marketing; however utilizing only one PPC program makes it easy to manage and measure results.

There are some complex strategies and campaign refinements that can improve your PPC advertising ROI. Use of negative keywords can dramatically reduce irrelevant or low quality clicks. Clustering your keywords into small ad groups can improve Quality Scores. Implementing only phrase searches that indicate favorable user intent is yet another way to improve PPC results.

PPC advertising is a perfect option for having a presence where you lack organic ranking. Even with good organic ranking PPC is known to deliver additional leads for the same terms. PPC advertising is a good tool for testing new markets before you invest in organic SEO work. A great feature of PPC advertising is that you can turn-on or turn-off your ads whenever you like which gives you great cost control.

Social Media Marketing

How many times have we heard “my customers don’t use those social media sites”? I could argue the point; however let’s instead focus on verifiable facts. Search engine ranking algorithms consider “social signals” meaning they measure how real people interact with your brand. Your social media business pages are not designed to be a playground for hyper marketing people to pitch specials and such. Social media sites are venues to develop your brand identity and give consumers information that they will find useful. Social media interaction can include sharing funny commercials, discussing your company’s charitable or community involvement, announcing special events and generally making customers feel like part of your organization. The best social media sites for an industrial company are Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus. You need to make certain that you create “business pages” and take time to style them in a way that reinforces your brand message and visual style.

Industrial Internet Marketing Recap

Your company should be using the internet to find more customers. A well developed internet presence can bring you customers from virtually anywhere in the world. There are many ways to improve online visibility. With careful strategic planning and precise implementation your marketing efforts can deliver incredible results. Whether you manage this in-house or hire an industrial internet marketing company you need to make this work every day for your industrial business.

James Hobson is a published author and owner of an Atlanta internet marketing company. He specializes in helping small to medium businesses improve their internet marketing strategies, practices and results.

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Technology continues to be developed every day to help SEO companies to perform their job more effectively. There have been a plethora of excellent SEO software suites to come on the market in the past couple of years. Each one has its own unique advantages. The following five SEO suites are the best ones that are free:

Dropbox

Dropbox has helped to change the way that many people stay organized with their various marketing tasks. It is important to have a place to keep all of your scraped content, usernames, passwords, blog pictures, ad campaign HTML, keyword lists and backlinking texts. If a person is not properly organized, things can tend to get very confusing. It would be surprising to most people how often they can drop data across a network that can be used on various systems. Dropbox also enables you to have all all of your information on your laptop, so you can take it with you anywhere.

Traffic Travis

Traffic Travis can help you to look at your competition, do keyword searches and optimize all of your blog posts. There is also a paid version of this Traffic Travis. The free version will optimize all of your blog posts 100 percent. However, you will only receive trial results that will only be listed for all of the remaining options.

Sick Marketing Link Index Checker

This is an extremely useful tool. It is currently one of the best tools on the market if you want to see if the backlinks that you have are being properly indexed. This particular tool will look for all of your links on Google and Bing. All you need to do is make one click. It also enables you to control the number of threads that are currently running. This will enable the process to go much faster. If you discover that there are large amounts of backlinks that have yet to be indexed, you are able to place all of them in one file and send them together to a pinger or Linklicious. The Sick Marketing Link Index Checker is a critical tool to have at your disposal if you are a marketer who regularly uses RankBuilder NEO, SENuke XCR, Sick Submitter, Magic Submitter or any of the other various submission tools currently available on the market.

SecurityKiss

Do you want to avoid paying your hard-earned money for a VPN service? Are you having trouble finding quality proxies? If you answered yes to both of these questions, you might want to consider giving SecurityKiss a try. It is an excellent way to help you avoid many of the common annoyances that are rampant in the world of Internet marketing. IP banning is one of the biggest problems. When SecurityKiss is activated, it will provide you with a fresh IP address from a completely new location on the planet. You will be provided with a new IP every time you disconnect and reconnect. This is ideal if you are currently utilizing software like SENuke. This is because all of the backlinks you are using will have different IP addresses associated with each of them. SecurityKiss gives you 300MB each day. This is an adequate amount of bandwidth for a person to do a day’s worth of blasting. However, you must always remember to disconnect before you begin the process of verifying all of your email accounts.

WonderWare Sitemap Generator

The WonderWare Sitemap Generator is considered by many to be one of the most outstanding SEO software tools that is currently available. It has so many features that it is hard for people to believe that it is completely free. It enables you to crawl any website that you want to. You can then extract every URL that is located on that particular blog or site. You can use it to create sitemaps and extract URLs on various tiered linking sites. If you want to do a SENuke blast from your Tumblr account, WonderWare is capable of extracting all of the URLs in a matter of seconds.

Kyle Sanders is an internet marketing consultant for Complete Web Resources, a digital marketing refinery that provides professional search engine optimization to local and national businesses.

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I don’t consider myself a natural salesman, but I am a people person by nature. I enjoy contradicting societal norms that tell me that I need to puff myself up in order to be cool or popular.

I like who I am, and I have learned that I form deeper, longer-lasting relationships when I just lay it all out there and act like myself instead of some guy from a movie.

In the new age of Internet marketing that dawned this year, selling SEO requires less flashy technique and more of a relationship built on trust. Email solicitations do not build relationships.

@Gmail? Are You Kidding Me?

Yesterday, I received this email…

Hello Sir/Madam,

I am a Marketing Manager and would like to take few minutes of your valuable time for introducing our affordable SEO services.

Our assured monthly task and responsibilities will definitely give a boom to your online business.

Our packages for 15 keywords are mentioned below:

1. Keywords Analysis & Research

[...yada, yada, yada...]

24. Monthly Full Detailed SEO Work Report in Excel

We send weekly report to each of our clients so that they can have regular updates on their website. We truly care you and so ensure to work regularly on the website elegantly. We use white hat SEO techniques for each website to give new boom to your online business.

We are available for your services here so please do let us know in case you are interested.

Thanks & Regards,

Marketing Manager

Now, this isn’t necessarily a great case study because this nameless “Marketing Manager” obviously isn’t from the United States and doesn’t realize that he is soliciting his SEO services to an SEO company, but I see these emails all the time sent through my clients’ websites from people who seem to be competent SEO who can speak and write in fluent English.

As much as we’re all interested in “new boom”, effective SEO sales starts with building a relationship based on credibility and trust. If you’re trying to sell your expertise as an SEO professional, poney of up the dough for a domain name with email hosting and a nice-looking website. Your email address and website are going to act as reinforcements to show you’re legit. If you use a templated website, be sure to fully customize it. Don’t cut corners. Once you’ve done all that, throw out any notion of using mass email marketing to sell your services.

I talked with my client, Rod Strickland, about what kind of email solicitations he gets and what he thinks of them. “I’m thinking, this is probably someone who is in China, being paid a very low wage, and they’re just surfing the Internet, finding websites to reply on,” he said. “We have the security code on there, so I know it’s not a robot. It’s got to be a live person doing it, and it’s just shocking to think that they’re spending so much time to find just a random site and type it in there and send it. It’s such a waste of time.”

Rod is a dentist. He’s well-educated, tech-savvy, and highly intelligent. He’s even an inventor and has been published. He’s also willing to invest in something if he knows it’s going to give him a return, but it’s a waste of time to spam Rod’s site because he’s already very well ranked on Google for the terms that he cares about. That doesn’t stop some people from just spamming away with the same sloppy sales message.

I asked Rod if he’d ever followed up on an email solicitation, and he said, “No, never. Unless it’s CE that I’m aware of, I’m always wary of anything unsolicited. I hit the DELETE button ten times more on my keyboard than any other button.”

Do You Want A Spam Client?

This is just Rod’s take on the spam messages that he DOES receive. I’m sure there are tons of messages that he is blissfully unaware of in his Spam folder, but even if your unsolicited email happens to get through to a prospective client’s inbox, chances are that it just isn’t going to be read. So why bother?

Rod had a theory, “I suppose there’s some unsophisticated people with businesses on the web that fall for it. It’s obviously working for people to pay someone to do that, but for us, we can see right through it.”

Are clients who “fall for” an unsolicited spam email going to make for good clients? They’re obviously not very savvy, which means that it’s going to be an uphill battle for you to:

• educate the client on what you’re proposing to do for them.
• convince them that they probably need a new website.
• help them to see the value in what you’re doing if they’re not seeing immediate results.
• retain the client when they get the next spam email.

What Valuable Clients Value

As Rod puts it, SEO today from a client’s perspective is very “airy fairy”. What used to seem like voodoo to prospective clients before, now looks like voodoo performed by someone who forgets their name every 5 minutes. They don’t feel like they can trust anyone who claims to know what they’re doing.

“It’s very difficult to see that something someone is doing works, or is it just a random event that we happen to be first in Google?” Rod says, “It’s difficult to know the ongoing work that’s put in. We could pay you X number of dollars to work on our website, and then ‘Boom’, we’re at the top of the first page for all these different searches and then a year from now, [what was] all the work that I believe you have to do throughout the year to maintain that result, or did you set it up one time and it’s done, and we’re continuing to pay month after month after month, you know?”

Clients who are willing to pay top dollar for quality SEO work want to know what it is that they’re paying for, and they want to have a relationship with the person who’s doing that work. Clients want to know what you’ve done via some type of report, but if they don’t trust you, even those reports aren’t going to save you if the phone doesn’t start ringing in the first month that you start working for them.

Relationship Building SEO Sales Tactics

The bottom line is that not everyone is cut out to be a salesperson, and mass email solicitation is a sales crutch that just isn’t worth employing. We are told by marketing gurus that UX is to key to conversions, and we tell our clients that social media is key to building a relationship with a target audience, so why aren’t we focusing our sales efforts to improve the experience and relationship that our target audience has with us and our businesses? Here are some techniques that may be harder to implement than a spam email campaign, but are likely to yield more responses from quality clients:

• Get published (online or offline) in industry publications for the niches where you see the most opportunity
• Score speaking engagements to speak to industry groups in these niches
• Focus on building relationships with your current clients that go beyond a basic vendor/client relationship. Go above and beyond for your clients if you expect to get referrals from them. The first step to this is more regular, proactive communication with your clients.
• Be the expert whenever a client asks a question, do everything you can to answer their question in an authoritative way or at least to point them in the right direction. As Rand Fishkin pointed out in a SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday not too long ago, if you’re asking yourself whether or not this is really part of SEO, it’s time to look at your goals and motives.
• Get involved in networking groups and industry organizations in your niche.

If you’re thinking, “That sounds really hard,” or, “I’m not really a people person,” then it’s probably time to look at who can do these things on your behalf. If you’re a one-man show, and you’re an SEO wiz, but you hate dealing with customers, it may be time to look at partnering with someone who can do a better job at relationship-building than you can.

The SEO world is constantly changing whether you like it or not. In the Darwinian evolutionary sense, if you can’t grow your business through relationship building, you’re probably not the fittest, and you’re probably not going to survive. Are you going to adapt or die?

Jonathan Fashbaugh is the president of Pro Impressions Marketing Group, an agency specializing in online marketing for dentists. He’s written for numerous industry publications and been interviewed by the Academy of General Dentistry’s AGD Impact magazine for his marketing expertise.

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