Smart Internet Marketing Blog

Search Engine Marketing, Internet Advertising Services and more!

Ethical Online Marketing

online marketingEvery good SEO company has a few tricks up its sleeve to help businesses with their online marketing. Learning these trade tips can be a valuable way to increase traffic to your site. However, while every company wants an optimized site, there are some naughty tricks that cheat the system that you should avoid at all costs. Don’t be a cheapskate, earn your rank the good ol’ fashioned way! Stay away from:

1. Webpage Flooding – Using script that instantly creates 100s of pages with keyword stuffed content. Google will find you and punish you.

2. Invisible Text – Placing white keyword loaded text on a white background. Your visitors can’t see it, but search engines can. Bad!

3. Cloaking – Showing one page to your visitors and another to the Googlebot…classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

4. Keyword Stuffing – Come on, you’ve gotta earn it! Google wants to read a natural page and rank it according to its own merits, not one with overloaded keyword gibberish.

Don’t be the bad guy, play fair and earn your ranking with real content and honesty. It’s worth it to practice ethical online marketing!

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Business Marketing with a Company Facebook Page

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Search engine marketing has evolved beyond conventional blogging and on-site linking to include social networking on services like Facebook and Twitter. Let’s take a look at some tips for creating a successful Facebook page for your business:

1. Design: Your Facebook page might not look like much when you first create it, but trust us — it can. Major companies like Starbucks and Skittles have set a standard among businesses by creating visually stunning designs. To truly excell here, you’ll probably need the help of professional graphic designer, but here are a few tips to get you started:

2. Interaction: It’s called social networking for a reason, so start being social! Host contests, ask questions, friend new users — do whatever it takes to get people interested in your page.

Follow this advice, and you’ll be well on your way to business marketing with a Facebook page for your company.

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TWITTER: Dont advertise. Start a conversation!

Just about everything people say on Twitter is public, offering marketers a rare chance to listen in on what folks are saying about their brands, and to trumpet their messages to the masses.

Unfortunately for the marketers, Twitter users fail spectacularly when it comes to disseminating branding messages to each other –- the stuff of which advertisers’ dreams are made. After all, word of mouth can make or break a company’s sales, and Twitter is nothing if not “word of mouth.”

Read more after the jump!

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May-Day for some A Day for others!

Google has announced via it’s haloed king, Matt Cutts, that it has has tweaked it’s search results algorithm for long-tail search results. Relevant “quality content” is king. Don’t believe it, listen to the king. Fast forward to 1:38!

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Internet Marketing News: Bing Webmaster Tools Has Arrived!

internet marketingBing! The search engine’s trademark sound never sounded so sweet — not to the internet marketing community, anyway. Yesterday saw the debut of the revamped Bing Webmaster Tools, revealing a three-pronged focus on crawling, indexing, and traffic.

New features include:

Also, Bing is going to roll-out additional tools all the time. Watch your back, Google!

Now for the bad news: The main downside to Bing’s new set of tools is that they require you to first download Microsoft’s Silverlight 4, a development platform most of us would rather get to… in our own time. You can’t even watch the new Bing Webmaster Tools’ introductory video without getting Silverlight.

Overall, though, Bing Webmaster Tools is an exciting addition to the world of business marketing. We look forward to seeing new features, and otherwise reaping the benefits of the ongoing Google-Bing rivalry.

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Social Business Marketing – Consider the Logo

business marketingWhen it comes to planning your business website, it’s important to remember one thing: everything. Every single detail — from font to slogan to color pallet — can help your business stand out from the crowd. Because internet marketing is about more than just SEO or PPC (or, OMG, any of the other acronyms we use). It’s about branding your site to match your business.

Today, we’re here to talk about logos. Not yours, necessarily, but the logos you can place on your blog and website to link to your Facebook or Twitter pages, or encourage readers to bookmark your content on Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit, etc.

The standard approach here is to include each service’s standard icon, as in the group of pictures shown above. This presents your business as in-the-know, well connected, sleek, and modern, but it is not the most creative approach. Let’s take a look at some of our favorite specialty sets — all of which are available free from their creators:

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Woven Fabric icons by Dawghouse Design Studio — Perfect for clothing and fabric shops, organic food stores, maybe even garden supply retailers.
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Hand Drawn Doodle icons by Spoon Graphics — Any sort of office supply company would be write right at home with these, don’t you think?

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Old Bottle Crowns icons (also) by Dawghouse Design Studio — Vending machine manufacturers? Soda distributors? The business marketing possibilities are endless!

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What is Ajax? Getting to Know Your Marketing Company

marketing companyWhat is Ajax? A figure in Greek mythology? A household cleaner? A programming technique? Yes, yes, and yes. But at the Ajax Union marketing company, we’re mostly concerned with the latter definition.

Short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, Ajax is a family of development methods designed to turn regular websites into online applications. With Ajax, the content and design of a website can update live without requiring new information from the server. That means no more reloading, no more hourglasses, no more pinwheels.

Google Maps is a good example. Thanks to Ajax, Google’s mapping software can update its information without constant reloading. Users toggle between various routes and forms of transportation (driving, biking, walking, public transit) and see live updates on the page as the highlighted route and accompanying directions change the match the new settings.

Can you imagine how tedious Google Maps would be if you had to wait for the page to reload every time you made an adjustment? There’d be a lot more aimless drivers and walkers roaming around, that’s for sure.

A potent force in business marketing and online development, Ajax is likewise a great reminder of the internet’s vast capabilities, and how far we’ve seen it grow since the days of dialup.

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Matt Cutts – How to rank for Keywords!

Permalink | | Posted in Blogging for Internet Marketing, Business Development, Google, Google blog, Google search, business marketing, internet marketing strategy | No Comments

Small Business Advertising: Local SEO

small business advertisingOne of the great things about the internet is that it makes it possible for a blogger in Cleveland to swap links with a e-commerce maverick in Tokyo. It’s global. It’s uniting.

But despite the web’s ride reach, it’s often better to target a smaller radius of customers, using a process called local internet marketing. Local marketing can help companies of all shapes and sizes, but it is particularly useful for small business advertising.

Let’s take a look at some quick steps for a successful local internet marketing campaign:

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Google Caffeine and Internet Marketing

internet marketing

Google Caffeine, the search engine’s revamped indexing system, launched a little over a week ago — and in that time, the internet marketing community has gone from so worried to “So what?”

Instead of layers — the foundation of Google’s previous indexing technique — Google Caffeine indexes a bunch of small chunks of the web simultaneously. Before, certain layers were being updated more frequently than others. But now content will be indexed much more frequently (and evenly), allowing for results “50 percent fresher” (according to Google).

In an industry like SEO, change is usually bad. All of our methods are built around The Way Things Are, not The Way Things Might Be After Google Updates Something.

But since Google Caffeine was created to deliver “fresh” search results, we can all breathe a sigh of relief. After all, it’s one of the tenants of internet marketing — and the web in general — that pages, blogs, profiles, Twitters, and so on should be frequently updated. If we wanted static content, we’d read a book.

The bottom line — business marketing companies haven’t reported any change in rankings since the launch of Google Caffeine. It hasn’t hurt us yet, and eventually, it might even help.

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