Local Internet Marketing Power
By Elijah Jordan Kim

It sounds incompatible to utilize local internet marketing and use internet technology to reach a huge number of customers around the globe. It seems an illogical premise to think that the internet can only have an impact on a local level for local companies rather than a global level, but this is much nearer to the truth than anyone would think.

The truth is SEO (search engine optimization) can be targeted to local internet marketing. In fact, SEO can be very much effective and productive when it is done that way. Local SEO is a preferred method of many giant companies nowadays. It’s less expensive due to its ability to filter more relevant and targeted visitors rather than general audiences and have so little conversion at all.

Currently, there are innumerable online consumers that use search engines to look for products sold in local shops and businesses. Because of this trend, Google itself is constantly shifting to local search services. Local internet marketing is continually growing by utilizing the local search features from popular search engines. What’s in the mind of most consumers is that they are more inclined to look for the most convenient stores, restaurants, and businesses that offer quality products and services, which are close enough from their residences and places of work. Of course price is still an important factor in buying preferences and consumers want to get the best price for every item they purchase.

Nowadays, printed Yellow Pages are not a popular resource in finding business and stores. These thick tomes are gathering dust and would disappear all together in the future. These are now being replaced with accessible, high-speed internet which can be found in homes or even accessed via 3G phones. Direct internet connections to gadgets have an exponential effect to the efficiency of local internet marketing. People can now get information for the best Italian restaurant in Sydney, for example, in their finger tips in seconds.

Local internet search gives results to customers with an accurate match for their information they need. Local Google, Yahoo Local, and Bing provide the best local search engine results. Local internet marketing strategies must be carefully planned before getting into the game of local internet advertising, otherwise the campaign will fail.

Small business owners who wish to reach customers from their local community through local internet marketing should design a highly targeted and locally integrated SEO plan so that their website will show up every time a local prospect searches using their target keywords. One example is if you have plumbing business near Avalon Beach, then you can include the keywords, Plumbing Services Avalon Beach, to make sure you have the right visitors.

There is a lot of potential profits for local small businesses if they will only tap the power of local internet marketing. Local internet marketing can boost your business leads with target clients for high conversions. Anyone could be reading this article now, and getting ideas, but you can get ahead of your competitors if you act now!

The author is a local internet marketing specialist located in Sydney, Australia.

Elocalise.com specializes in helping local businesses to expand their potential customer base by placing their business online strategically through local online advertising. This involves consulting with the local business on their current offline and online marketing methods to formulate a strategy with proven internet marketing methods, to eventually convert a potential online querying customer into a buying customer.

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For the business owners and marketing professionals out there, it is not news that there has been a major change in the buying routine of people. This revolution really got started in the mid to late 90′s and has continued to amplify over the last 20 years. At present, according to research done by the Kelsey Group, it is expected that about 83% of consumers now spend time on the internet researching previous to making their buying decisions. This has led many in the business world to be aware of how significant internet marketing is to their income. Nonetheless, most have ignored an incredible occasion that is right under their nose.

For the firm, whose market is local and depends on conventional marketing for survival this can be a problem. The internet is the first stop for most people before making their decisions. That denotes a company needs first-rate coverage on the first page of a Google search and then they must give the consumer with great information. When all that is in order the company has scored a most important prospect.

Why are people now inclined to the Internet?

Shopping the internet is so pleasant because people can find a lot of information about a company and their services, but in fact, it goes further even than that. A establishment that offers the best information and in more places that relates to their wishes is the business that customers are going to gravitate to. This is because they get the message this particular business as an expert, which means they will be more prone to buy from the company.

One website will not give your business the spotlight it needs

If you merely have one website that is feebly placed on the internet it will not produce any traffic of significance. In some cases, even a website well placed on the front page of Google will not drive the volume of traffic you require if you are targeting a local market. It of course depends to a large extent on how much search volume there is for the keywords being used in their internet marketing campaign.

Marketing Strategies That Center Only On Pay Per Click Campaigns Neglect 80% Of Traffic

You have probably tried pay per click marketing to market your company and if so you know, the outcome can be dismal. At least 80% of traffic is being missed. Research has revealed that 70-85% of traffic will click on the natural search and Google local search returns. These two percentages vary depending on the type business you are marketing. Why? Customers want compelling information ahead of making a acquisition. This is the attractiveness of the internet.

Your Company Needs to Dominate the Local Natural Search have High Visibility and Authority

Information about the products and service they desire and an authority on the subject is what most customers are looking for when they search online. Because of stiff competition on the internet, just having a good-looking site that ranks well on Google will not make you succeed.

As the business owner you should be thinking about the three types of internet exposure

1. Visibility – How many times will they find you on the front page.
2. Authority – Have you established your company as the THE company to do business with online (Authority). When the potential customer returns ready to buy your service or product, are you the one they return to? You better be!
3. Dominance. Have you chased most of your competition off the front page of Google in the local, natural search. You need too!

The internet marketing opportunity that was staring me in the face finally came to my attention and I jumped all over it!

I personally own a home improvement corporation that fell victim to the huge shift in buyer habits. Off line advertising that use to work great in the 1990′s either was legislated away, and or just quite working well because of the huge buyer shift to the internet. I shifted my efforts to internet marketing.

After recognizing the huge opportunity that evidently few were seeing, I created a local internet marketing business that I not only used to liberate my struggling home improvement corporation, but other companies as well. Using the Visibility, Authority, and Dominance pillars of promotion, we have produced remarkable results. Of course a lot of work and time goes into a local internet marketing campaign of this size. Most internet marketing firms do not possess the organizational composition to pull off a operation like this and still make money. Yet, when properly organized with the correct systems in place, it is possible. We do it every day.

If your company has selected or will select an SEO vendor to optimize your corporate website for natural search, I offer you kudos for embarking on a process that can generate tremendous revenue for your business. Now, the fun part begins. You’ll need to oversee and evaluate a process that is hard to comprehend, has somewhat intangible deliverables, and where the “timing of results” can’t be precisely defined. Given this scenario, how can you best work with an SEO to achieve the best outcome for your website?

Make SEO a Marketing Priority. On some engagements, the SEO is almost entirely self-sufficient. On others, he or she might depend on the director of marketing, the president, the web designer or IT support to help facilitate the SEO effort. Some of these folks might not see the value of the optimization and don’t view SEO related efforts as a priority. If you can let your team know the critical nature of the work (and your SEO should be willing to help in this effort), the expected results should be achieved that much faster.

Learn enough about SEO in order to ask good questions. Over time, the talented stable of Search Engine Marketing writers at Search Engine Guide have produced a large number of articles covering almost every aspect of the SEO process. Read up. Become familiar with the terminology and concepts. At minimum, you need to be conversant enough to evaluate the metrics of the campaign.

But don’t tell your SEO how to do the work. Too much knowledge can be a dangerous thing for some clients because they lack the experience to place their knowledge within the context of the whole SEO process. Such clients may even feel empowered enough to tell their SEO vendor to take a course of action that will damage their efforts to obtain targeted natural search traffic. But if you have done proper due diligence in choosing a knowledgeable and ethical SEO expert, you shouldn’t have any trouble staying on the right track. Your chosen professional will probably be appreciative that you’ve educated yourself about the process and will be glad to answer your “tough” questions. All reputable SEO vendors should be open and transparent about their methods and work process…don’t work with any that aren’t. And if you are comfortable with your SEO expert, the value of his or her experience should be easily discernible.

Good SEO advice can smell funny. Bad SEO advice stinks. Sometimes it has been a challenge explaining the merits of link-exchange or RSS feeds to SEO novices. Many marketing professionals have cringed when I’ve recommended having at least 250 words on the website home page. Fortunately, I’ve been able to rely upon my own SEO experiences to demonstrate the value of my advice and, if necessary, I can seek out the authority of other experts in the field to support my views. But, “rogue SEO’s” have damaged many websites by convincing site owners to allow them to engage in practices such as link farms, hidden text, and cloaking that violate search engine guidelines. If you have educated yourself enough about SEO to be conversant in the terminology and techniques, you should be able to smell the odor before you step in the poop.

Well-run SEO campaigns still have hiccups. Search engines periodically change their algorithms which can be a boon or a bust for clients. Most recently, Google’s “Jagger” update hurt many websites that followed SEO best practices. I have a client who had an 18-month-old domain that lost excellent Google rankings that I helped achieve in a very competitive field. I explained that based upon my research (and reported by many other SEO’s through articles and forums) that Google has algorithmically implemented the following precepts: 1) It is very difficult for new domains to rank well for competitive terms and 2) Many inbound links must age for 6-12 months before they become effective. Now, it is incumbent upon me to chart a new course to help the client regain what was lost. Conversely, Jagger gave some of my clients excellent results far more quickly than I could have expected.

Measure results. A high-level web analytics solution like Clicktracks 6 (which I use and highly recommend) is essential to measure the success of your campaign. If you are spending thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on SEO, don’t rely on a $10 per month web stats package. Your SEO vendor should offer advanced web analytics as part of the service…shy away from an SEO who doesn’t use advanced analytics because the optimization decisions on your website will be made based upon incomplete information.

As a client, you need to view SEO as a long-term strategy that has peaks and valleys. Educating yourself about the SEO process will eliminate the “surprises” that are inherent in the process and will make for a far more efficient and productive vendor/client relationship.

Todd Mintz is the Director of Internet Marketing & Information Systems for S.R. Clarke Inc., a [http://www.srclarke.com]Real Estate Development and Residential / Commercial Construction Executive Search / Recruiting Firm headquartered in Fairfax, VA with offices nationwide.  He is also a Director & Founding Member of [http://www.semportland.com]SEMpdx:  Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association.

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Your Website Pagerank Depends on Backlinks
By Jack Murphy

Your website pagerank depends to a very great extent on inbound links, also known as backlinks. Your page content is also very important but these backlinks are an absolute necessity of search engine positioning. In order that a website can appear in the top rank of search engines like Google without your having to pay a lot of money for advertising, the website has to have a large number of backlinks.

Let’s get the definition right so that we understand what these website pagerank links are. Backlinks are links on one website that lead back to another (your) website, so it is indeed correct to refer to them as “inbound” links in relation to your own site.

The better established, the higher the quality and the higher the PageRank of the website that contains the links, the greater the power it has to assist your linked website with its search engine position. If the website that is receiving the inbound links gets many high quality, high PR backlinks, the better the likelihood of it being in a high ranking on the search engines and of having a higher pagerank itself.

So, how do we obtain backlinks of high quality pointing to our websites?

Submitting your website to various Internet directories can be useful and seocompany.ca list on their site the top forty in terms of inbound link quality. Number one is DMOZ, the Open Directory which has a pagerank of 8. DMOZ is the directory getting the most respect online today, especially as the websites it lists have all been positioned by human editors, not an algorithm. There is no automation with this directory, though it takes a long time to have a website included.

However, with a PR 8 it has to be worth the wait because the inbound link to your site will have such value. The main reason that DMOZ takes so long is because it is free, whereas most of the other directories levy a fee. Number two in the list is Yahoo with PR 7 with a charge of $299 per year. Lii at number 3 with a PR 7 is also free and there are four more in the top forty that are without charge too.

There are numerous other methods of creating high quality backlinks. Some experts encourage the writing and submission of articles in particular. Others recommend posting on forums and making comments on blogs. PageRank is also of importance when using what has become known as article marketing. There are hundreds of article directories that you can submit your article to but the sheer number of backlinks is not what it’s all about; it’s the quality.

EzineArticles.com with a PR 6 is the obvious place to start because of the value of that inbound link. Before you go out and buy an article submitter tool, do some research online and determine which directories have the best PR and use them. Do not submit the same article to each one as the search engine spiders will identify your articles as duplicate content and ignore them. Take the trouble to “spin” your articles by making subtle changes to please the spiders and thereby get better rankings.

The use of Social Bookmarking websites is another way that you can build backlinks for your website. Social Bookmark sites almost invariably have a popular ‘community’ aspect to them. Members join up and create profiles that include photographs and information about them. Then the new member is able to save bookmarks of favourite websites that can be itemized by tags. These tags are one or two word descriptions of what the sites contain and these bookmarks can be saved to a list that can be shown publicly, so that it is available to all. You will find a list of the top ten, headed by del.icio.us which is owned by Yahoo, at about.com

With the arrival of the phenomenon that is Web 2.0, obtaining backlinks is easier now than at any time since the Internet began. Many sites, especially blogs, have an interactive aspect to them, allowing visitors to sign in and create profiles. Then they are often permitted to post comments on the articles or stories on the website or blog which include a link back to their own site. In turn, the website or blog owner will respond to the comments, making this section of the website or blog a conversation piece.

Backlinking strategies can be great fun and the webmaster who is involved in getting more website pagerank backlinks for his/her website will have the added enjoyment of learning new information and meeting new friends, doing something that was once regarded as an onerous task.

Jack (John) Murphy is a Pagerank enthusiast who delights in looking for new ways to improve website pagerank. You are invited to visit his find pagerank site to grab the first chapter of “PageRank 5 in 90 Days” for free.

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