Help Ajax Union Win Mission: Small Business

Hello, all you beautiful SEO fans, Ajax Union has some exciting news! We have entered Chase and LivingSocial’s Mission: Small Business. The project is part of their commitment to provide outstanding support to small businesses nationally.

Through their sponsorship, 12 lucky winners get a $250,000 grant to help their small business to expand on their goals and continue to provide quality work. But we cannot do this alone, we need your support. What you do when you visit the project’s website, www.missionsmallbusiness.com, is click on the Support button. You will be asked to log in, then search for the business (that’d be us, Ajax Union). You click vote and voila! We are one step closer to our goals.

So help us out and show your commitment to SEO and Internet marketing today. With your support we can continue to provide you as fellow small and local businesses with our best efforts and expertise.

Consider Facebook Advertisements

online marketing companiesIt’s easier to think about the people you know who are not on Facebook rather than the people who are. Millions of people around the world use the social network. So why would you ever hesitate to place advertisements on the website? Ads are a great way to promote your business, inform users of sales, and drive traffic to your website. They’re easy to set up and you can target the right audience with a few simple clicks too. This way only people who would be interested in your business are shown the ads. It’s a smart choice for small business internet marketing.

You can target an audience multiple ways, including location, language, education, likes & interests, age, and much more. After choosing your audience, design an effective and engaging ad that will encourage clicks. Ads should be clear and concise, informative and attractive. Just like Google AdWords, you can manage your budget and choose either cost-per-click or cost-per-impression. Then all you need to do is set your daily budgets and bid prices. It’s as simple as that! After some time, review your ads, view how each campaign is doing, and make adjustments for improvements.

With so many people spending hours a day on Facebook, you can gain a wider audience, drive traffic, and gain sales. You’re probably on it right now, might as well set up an ad!

Quality Content For Company Bloggers

The internet is an ever changing beast of a thing. It’s kind of like fighting a hydra. You cut off one head and three more grow in it’s place. So it is with SEO and small business internet marketing. Just when you find out how to maximize your use of the system, it changes and what you’ve been doing seems pointless. Recently Google updated it’s system to put more emphasis on the quality of content associated with your company blog. It’s caused a lot of online marketing companies to stop and take stock of their blogging practices.

You don’t want to write a blog post around fitting in keywords. While you do want to get the keywords into your post, you don’t want that to be your only goal. People find your blog for a reason, whether they find the subject fascinating or they need help with a problem, they come for answers. If your blog does not provide quality content for your reader, they’ll eventually stop coming. Fill a need with your blog and you will find that more and more traffic will be directed there. Your SEO benefits will skyrocket.

For example, if you own a deodorant company, don’t just blog about the different types of deodorant you sell. Your blog will read like a really long infomercial. People on the internet don’t have time for long infomercials. Instead, fill a need. Write blog posts about how to stop sweating on hot days or why you should wear antiperspirant even in the winter. This will benefit your readers and your business.

Characteristics of Good SEO

SEO companyIn a nutshell, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is used to improve the placement of a website or web page in a search engine’s “natural” or “un-paid” (also called “organic”) search results.  Type in any product, name, or word for that matter into your search engine of choice – Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. – and you will see a website or page on the very top of the natural search results.  That particular website is #1 for a reason and odds are it is because their SEO strategies are placing them at the very top.  And odds also are that an SEO company helped that website get optimized.

If you are a company with a website of your own but having trouble getting people to visit your website, check out the websites of any competitors that may be above you in the search results.  Look at how their website is designed; is it user friendly, are links easy to find?  What keywords are they using for their website?  How often do they mention their services or products using said keywords?  Do they have a Twitter or Facebook account attached to their website?

These are but a number of things to look out for and an SEO company can help you in this regard.  The techniques used in other websites to rocket them to the number 1 spot can be used on your website.  Just contact an internet marketing agency today!

Internet Marketing Solutions: How To Use Titles And Headers Effectively On Blogs

Ever notice how newspapers use titles to capture readers? They are specific, direct, and sometimes clever. People forget that common practice in the writing field translates to beneficial internet marketing strategies. You should be doing the same thing with online writing, except with the knowledge that you’re grabbing the attention of search engines as well as readers. Therefore your blog must have more than valuable content, it must be well labeled.

Google works in such a way now, especially with Penguin updates, that it will check to see if your blog content matches your title and first paragraph. It will check websites to see if headers are relevant to the page information. Basically, don’t write titles and headers that veer off topic just to keyword stuff them. It is always best to follow good writing practice and select the most appropriate titles for your posts and on-page content. This isn’t just for marketing solutions, this is overall smart writing.

Also, after mentioning keywords in the previous paragraph– use the same keywords, or at least related keywords to those used in the title, throughout the blog posts. Post titles should also be used as the URL of the post. When Google and other search engines scan the page, it will find that the URL matches the title, and that the content is relevant to the title. This will give you an edge in the rankings.

Consider your title the first impression that the world wide web gets of your material. You want to leave a good impression, don’t you?

 

Online Marketing and Avoiding Duplicate Content

Often when it comes to online marketing, you hear a lot about how duplicate content can hurt you, rather than help. And you might feel like you need to be worried and constantly on top of avoiding it. But it’s actually much easier to manage than you may think.  It takes less real concentration and more just understanding where your content is coming from.

So, you write up a description for a page of your website. It has to do with the kind of products you sell and the deals you offer. While that information is perfect as it is and it sounds like a good idea to just copy and paste it on to other pages or even your about page of your blog, it can really hurt you. So what you’ll want to do is take that information and give it a twist.  Write it up in a new light, see what you can do to make the content more unique.

It is also important that you never directly copy information from other websites when writing about certain topics. Attributing a quote is just fine, but it’ll be bad for your reputation if it looks like your blogging content is plagiarized.

 

Better Keyword Use With SEO Company Writers

Using keywords in text on social media sites, in text on throughout your website, and especially in blogging can be a difficult thing to do in a comfortable way. You want to keep keywords focused while offering content that feels natural to a customer and does not read like it was written by a robot. It is very easy to drop awkward localized keywords into sentences in ways that seems uncomfortable.

Finding a way to use your keywords effectively in your content is difficult for many businesses to do on their own. The strength of an SEO company is that they have teams of people focused on working out the right keywords and then blending them seamlessly into the content of your website.

Building a sentence around words that incorporate both a product or service and a location can be difficult. You want to fit the words in cleanly without adding conjunctions that might cloud up the phrases in search engine terms. To manage this process in a way that serves the customer’s interest while also serving the SEO needs of the company, an online marketing company hires writers focused on smart uses of your keywords.

Putting the management of these keywords in the hands and minds of actual writers is a great way to keep your business website relevant to your customers.

Google Local – No 5 Star Rating Here

It used to be that when you searched on Google for a restaurant online you would come up with a great list of places in your area and you could easily weed out those that were rated sub par by those who had visited there. Internet users could quickly choose the best restaurants by checking the amount of stars under the establishment’s name. No one, save for loyal patrons, is going to willingly take a date to a one star rated restaurant.

However, now Google+ local has changed their policy on rating restaurants and other venues around your area. Now they are using the 30 point Zagat rating system which rates restaurants on many different levels from food to service to decor. This may not seem like a big change but is actually a huge switch from a local internet marketing standpoint.

So, now instead of the easy to read and understand starring system, Google is using a number system and a complex one at that. Food might be great at 28/30 but the decor could rank at 8/30. So, should you take a date there or not? You’re going to have to spend a lot more time doing research on your phone to figure that out.

It’s not the cleanest looking or the easiest system but it seems we may be stuck with it for now. How do you feel about the new Zagat style rating system? How do you think this will effect small business internet marketing for mom and pop restaurants with less reviews?

Blogging For SEO Purposes

seo companyWhen most people set up a blog to write in, they are mostly doing it for the fun of being able to share their thoughts, ideas, and even images with the rest of the world.  Depending on what they write about, the quality of what they write, they can amass a respectable following that will visit their blog as often as every week or day.  And it is not only individual people who can set up a blog but businesses as well.  Blogs are a perfect way to advertise the services or products a company has to offer the world.  Setting up a blog and writing for it is one just one of the ways in which an SEO company can assist you with your online marketing strategies.

Blogs are great way to showcase whatever products and/or services you provide to customers.  Blogs are also an excellent way to reach out to both old and new customers who are interested in what you offer.  With a blog you can answer questions and interact with the consumer base.  You will be able to actively promote your company.  Using a strong set of keywords your blog might be one of top-most search result – if it is not at the very top already!

Consult with a SEO company today to see how blogging can help you!

Tracking Your Social Influence and Boosting Efforts In Online Marketing

As a company you’re going to create online buzz. At some point in time you will want to market a new product and/or service or you will want to tell customers about your amazing deals. But in order to really get your message across you must have a sphere of influence. Developing an online voice is part social media, part blogging and content management, and part website management. And once you start using different interfaces and platforms for spreading the news about your company you need to maintain it.

If you look at any of the major brand name companies you will notice they have content rich blogs. They post small but new things every week, sometimes every day, and oftentimes it’s just some news clip about their store or company, a new item for sale, or a mention in some magazine. They also manage fiery twitter campaigns, making sure the blog gets noticed and their most updated website pages get views. Linking on twitter is very effective for your sphere of influence. Online marketing benefits with uniform efforts– use social media and social bookmarking to promote the content and sales.

You can track the effectiveness of content and twitter using online tools– check the value of the keywords you use and check websites like Klout, Google adwords, and Spyfu consistently to see your ranking status compared with other “influencers.”  You could also sign on with an SEO company to get monthly reports on your site’s rank.