Friday Mar 23,2012 By blogging ·
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It’s important to go over the basics of search engine optimization. Once you develop the foundation of good SEO work, you will see a significant difference in your results through your website’s analytics.
One key tip to remember is your website’s page titles. It’s important that your website’s page titles are both unique and accurately represent that page’s content.
The
title tag is placed within the head tag of your HTML document that makes up your website.
Title tags are used to tell search engines what the topic of a certain page is, so it is important to use a unique title tag for unique pages on your site. The contents of page titles are displayed in your search engine listings, so it is important that this information is accurate, brief and descriptive.
This helps your customer recognize what they want from your Google (or other search engine) listing, and makes them more likely to find and click on your website.
You want to avoid anything that is vague or unrelated to the content of the page. You also want to avoid things like “New Page” or “Page 1.”
It’s also important to remember that Google will only show a portion of the title tag in the search result so it’s not a good idea to stuff a bunch of keywords into your title tag or make your title tag overly long. It will be cut off.

Wednesday Mar 21,2012 By blogging ·
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Search engine giant Google provides a few resources for website owners just getting started with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for their site. They offer an SEO Starter Guide with basics for Search Engine Optimization that is worth reviewing, as well as some general guidelines in their webmaster guideline tools that will aid you in either starting from the ground up with a new website or with revising an existing website.
They review what services an SEO provider can offer your company, which include things like training and content development. They also give you some key questions to ask and a metric for critically reviewing claims and results.
Some of the key questions to ask anyone who you are considering have use SEO techniques on your site is what results they expect to see, in what timeframe and how they measure success. This is an important question to ask yourself, as well, because it enables you to have a more realistic approach to the goals you are trying to accomplish for your website and/or business.
It’s important to develop these realistic goals because if your goals are unrealistic, you are more likely to fail and give up, instead of accomplishing what you set out to do.

Monday Mar 19,2012 By blogging ·
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When gathering data about your audience, you need to first decide what questions you need answered. In general, the questions will hew fairly close to the following:
Who are you tryng to attract and why?
Who of your customers are your favorite? The kinds of customers you wish you had more of?
What characteristics do they all have in common? Age, income level, location, family status, etc…
What are their lives like and how do you fit into their lives?
What problem are you solving for them?
What do you want them to hear from you?
Once you answer those questions, you can determine how to find out this information. You can use email marketing, online surveys, Facebook, Twitter or your blog to begin to ask and answer these questions that will help you serve your audience more effectively.

Friday Mar 16,2012 By blogging ·
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Marketing means understanding who your customers are.
Advertising means being able to clearly articulate the promises your business is making to your customers.
You can use social media to learn more about your customers, who they are, what they are interested in and what they want. Sites like Facebook and Twitter promote conversations that can act as focus groups for your business. It’s also useful to use tools like survey sites to go deeper into what your customer base or audience is looking for. What are they gaining from interacting with your company online?
With advertising, you can now tell your customers you’ve heard their feedback, understand their needs, and you are there to provide them what they want. It’s your opportunity to showcase the knowledge that you’ve gained from them.

Wednesday Mar 14,2012 By blogging ·
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Email marketing is still an effective tool for small businesses, however there are some effective tips and tricks that can make using it more productive.
Make sure you’re not “spamming” your email list. If you send out multiple emails, without targeting your audience, you’ll risk being marked as spam. However, if you divide your list and target your audience with useful information, you’ll often get a response. There are a lot of programs available that maintain email databases and allow you to easily customize email blasts.
It’s also important to consider how you develop the email list you use. Having a link on your website to sign up for an email list or using your social networking sites to collect people’s email addresses are both options. If you have an online business, it can often be a part of the checkout process. The important thing is that the emails are periodically checked to make sure that they are accurate.
