Thursday 25 September 2014

Search Engine Optimization For Beginner's

SEO is the practice of improving and promoting a web site in order to increase the number of visitors the site receives from search engines. There are many aspects to SEO, from the words on your page to the way other sites link to you on the web. Sometimes SEO is simply a matter of making sure your site is structured in a way that search engines understand.

Search Engine Optimization isn't just about "engines." It's about making your site better for people too.

The majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines - Google, Bing and Yahoo!. Although social media and other types of traffic can generate visits to your website, search engines are the primary method of navigation for most Internet users. This is true whether your site provides content, services, products, information or just about anything else.

Search engines are unique in that they provide targeted traffic - people looking for what you offer. Search engines are the roadways that makes this happen. If your site cannot be found by search engines or your content cannot be put into their databases, you miss out on incredible opportunities available to websites provided via search.

Search queries, the words that users type into the search box, carry extraordinary value. Experience has shown that search engine traffic can make (or break) an organization's success. Targeted visitors to a website can provide publicity, revenue, and exposure like no other channel of marketing. Investing in SEO, whether through time or finances, can have an exceptional rate of return compared to other types of marketing and promotion.

Why can't the search engines figure out my site without SEO?

Search engines are smart, but they still need help. The major engines are always working towards improving their technology to crawl the web more deeply and return better results to users. However, there is a limit to how search engines can operate. Whereas the right SEO can net you thousands of visitors and attention, the wrong moves can hide or bury your site deep in the search results where visibility is minimal.

In addition to making content available to search engines, SEO also helps boost rankings so that content will be placed where searchers will more readily find it. The Internet is becoming increasingly competitive, and those companies who perform SEO will have a decided advantage in visitors and customers.
Can I do SEO for myself?

The world of SEO is complex, but most people can easily understand the basics. Even a small amount of knowledge can make a big difference. For the most part, SEO education is free and available on the web, including guides like this. Combine this with a little practice and you are well on your way to becoming a guru.

Depending on your time commitment, willingness to learn, and complexity of your website(s), you may decide you need an expert to handle things for you. Firms that practice SEO can vary; some have a highly specialized focus, while others take a more broad and general approach. Optimizing a web site for search engines can require looking at so many unique elements that many practitioners of SEO (SEOs) consider themselves to be in the broad field of optimization and website strategy.

Still, even in this case, it's good to have a firm grasp of the core concepts.

How much of this article do I need to read?

If you are serious about improving search traffic and are unfamiliar with SEO, we recommend reading this guide front-to-back. It's short and easy to understand.

Wednesday 24 September 2014

HTML Tags

HTML are initials that stand for Hyper Text Markup Language:

    Hyper is the opposite of linear. It used to be that computer programs had to move in a linear fashion. This before this, this before this, and so on. HTML does not hold to that pattern and allows the person viewing the World Wide Web page to go anywhere, any time they want.
    Text is what you will use. English letters, just like you use everyday..
    Markup is what you will do. You will write in plain English and then mark up what you wrote.
    Language. Some may argue that technically html is a code, but you write html in plain, everyday English language.

HTML is the code behind your webpage and is what your browser looks for to display a webpage, the way the webdesigner intended it to look, and is a series of tags <tags> that tells the browser where to display what. It is really a series of simple commands that you give to the browser, just like telling your dog to sit, and because it is in plain English it is easy to learn. For example, if you want your text to show in a bold type, you command it <bold> to be bold text </bold>, it really is that easy.

Keep this in mind: HTML documents must be text only.
When you save a HTML document, you must save only the text, nothing else. HTML browsers can only read text. Look at your keyboard. See the letters and numbers and little signs like % and @ and *? There are 128 in all (read upper- and lowercase letters as two). That's text. That's what the browser reads. It simply doesn't understand anything else.

Remember that if you are using Notepad, Wordpad, or Simple Text, the document will be saved as text with no extra prompting. Just choose SAVE.

If you are going to start learning to write HTML, it is a good idea to learn to look at other authors' HTML pages. The actual html potion of the page behind the pretty page you see in front of you now.

Looking at another's html code helps you learn how things are done and you can copy the style of pages that you like. Please do not just steal and copy the pages, but no one will be upset if you make the style in much the same way. For example, if you were going to build a house, you would look around to see what styles you like before deciding on your own design. Same thing here, look around the web and see what styles you like and apply them to your own ideas.

Here's how you look at an HTML document (known as the "source code")

    When you find a page you like, click on VIEW at the top of the screen.
    Choose SOURCE from the menu.
    The HTML document will appear on the screen.

Try it with this page. Click on VIEW and then choose the SOURCE.
It will look like mumbo jumbo right now, but soon it'll be readable and you'll be able to find exactly how a certain HTML presentation was performed.


What are HTML Tags?

HTML works in a very simple, very logical, format. It reads like you do, top to bottom, left to right. HTML is written with TEXT. What you use to set certain sections apart as bigger text, smaller text, bold text, underlined text, is a series of tags.

Think of tags as commands. For example if you want a line of text to be bold. You will put a tag at the exact point you want the bold lettering to start <bold>and another tag where you want the bold lettering to stop.</bold> There you have an example of how tags make commands and tell the browser how to display the text. Just like telling a dog to sit. You give the command.

All tags that are opened must correspondingly be closed, just as if you are writing a quoted statement with those "inverted commas". A tag is closed this way </tag> therefore we open a new tag <bold> and close the tag </bold>

Monday 22 September 2014

E-Marketing Solution

Online marketing has changed dramatically in the past few years. When Google released search their Panda and Penguin algorithm updates , many website owners were sent scrambling as they watched their site’s rank slip.

But not all online marketers found Google’s updates to be devastating. Those who built a strong foundation in solid, white hat online marketing practices weren’t affected like marketers who cut corners and tried to game the system. These sites found their rankings plummet, and deservedly so.

Unfortunately, there were also those website owners who were stuck in the middle. Companies and individuals without a dedicated marketing team to test and tweak their strategies also saw their rankings dive.  Most of the websites in this category were run by business owners focused on day to day operations. Marketing is only a small fraction of daily operations, which means they didn’t have the time to understand the practices and testing that goes into online marketing. Instead, these business owners picked up techniques here and there, but were often unaware of how and when to use different practices. If this sounds like you, this overview can help you understand basic online marketing practices and how to use them.

Understanding the Basics of Building an Online Marketing Strategy

Building a successful online marketing strategy is just like building anything – it starts with a solid foundation. That foundation comes from understanding three basics of online marketing:

    Search Engine Optimization
    Content Marketing
    Social Media Marketing

But knowing what each facet does for your website isn’t enough. As many people discovered after the recent Google updates, applying even well-established marketing techniques incorrectly way can hurt your ranking. To maximize their benefits, you also need to understand their shortcomings.

Search Engine Optimization

When people think of online marketing and the search engines, SEO is usually the first thing that comes to mind. SEO is used to create a site that the search engines will rank as one of the most relevant pages for a given term. The fact is, 95 percent of searchers click on a page that appears on the first page results for Google, Yahoo! or Bing. You can see that search rank is a big deal!

Building a solid SEO strategy consists primarily of selecting relevant keywords and providing valuable content related to those keywords. In the past, SEO was driven by factors like keyword placement, keywords density, and even how many times a keyword was used to link to that page.

But the search engines quickly discovered that keywords could be easily manipulated. A page that had nothing to do with a keyword could be ranked in top three, just by optimizing the page. Today, this means that sites who rely solely on keywords are often ignored by the search engines.

Instead, SEO should include:

    Relevant Keywords
    Valuable Content that is Shared
    A Website that Loads Quickly
    Both Images & Content
    Backlinks from Respected Websites

Content Marketing

Content marketing is not a new concept. In fact, John Deere started the trend in 1895 when they released The Furrow, an agricultural magazine. Other companies like Jell-O and Michelin followed suit with recipe books and automotive tips. Content marketing is important because it helps build your brand and inspire confidence in your company. In fact, six out of ten consumers say that after reading a custom publication, they feel better about the company.

Online content marketing has expanded the field to include blogs, training videos, podcasts, and even video games. But like every other online strategy, content marketing has its downsides. Low quality content is the most common mistake and can affect your rankings and damage your brand. For example, content riddled with grammar and spelling errors makes you look careless and unprofessional. Providing statements without verifying the facts can make you look foolish. Remember that the content you put on your site might be the first impression a prospective client gets of your company.

Another mistake many businesses make is to pull away from content marketing all together. This likely results from a trend against guest blogging prior to the recent Google updates. Aggressive marketers were creating guest blog posts, and then submit them to anyone who would publish them in return for a backlink to their site. These backlinks were thought to be the perfect marriage of content marketing and good SEO.

Google, however, thought differently. They saw poor quality content of no value used for nothing more than backlinks. So Google took action against these aggressive marketers, and online marketers became concerned. Many dropped guest blogging and content marketing entirely, worried that their ranks would fall.

But Google never said guest blogging would result in poor rankings. They said marketers should provide valuable content and host it on reputable sites. Which should have been the plan for most marketers to being with.

Social Media Marketing

For some, social media is nothing more than a way to stay in touch with old friends. But for businesses, social media is a way to tie SEO and content marketing together. Search engines take into consideration the number of shares a page receives when it ranks that particular piece of content.

Social media is also quickly becoming the primary way content is shared. Sites like Twitter, Google+, Stumble Upon, and Facebook all allow consumers to share valuable content with others in their network. Research shows people are more likely to trust content shared from people they know, so a share is akin to a 4 star rating!

A common mistake in social media marketing is thinking a large number of followers is all you need. In fact, many businesses have sprouted up offering to sell you 100 or 1000 ‘real’ friends or fans. Keep in mind that friends and fans are not enough – you need to build engagement. Friends that are purchased are often not your target demographic or are fake accounts. Neither will help you accomplish your goals.

In order to make the most of a social media marketing strategy, you need to interact with your fans and create a true community. Show that you are accessible by allowing people to ask questions, voice concerns, and even complain. Then address these issues in a professional manner. Provide them with content that interesting, not just promotional. Remember, social media is first of all social!

Conclusion

These three components are just the foundation of building a successful online marketing strategy. But without an understanding of how these three areas lay the groundwork for your overall strategy, you could find your efforts wasted. By building a solid online marketing foundation, you can begin to build a successful strategy that works for your business.

Tuesday 16 September 2014

Email Marketing Services



Running your own business is complicated when it comes to creating the right advertising campaign that gives you the best return on investment. Among the glut of marketing options, you should consider email marketing. It allows you to reach out to current and prospective customers and keep them updated on the latest deals and news about your company. Bulk email services have the benefit of being able to test customer retention and loyalty with intensive reporting.

Email marketing services enable you to create specific marketing for each segment of your audience. These services let you spread news about your company and bring in new customers in an efficient and reportable way. The best email marketing services are iContact, Benchmark Email and Pinpointe. If you'd like some tips on running better campaigns, check out our articles on bulk email marketing.

Email Marketing Services: What to Look For

Creating an email campaign can be as simple as adding names to a database, customizing an easy-to-use template, and looking at how effective your emails are via simple pie charts and bar graphs. Look for services that offer intuitive tools to help you quickly upload your list of contacts. You'll also want the flexibility to adjust the designs on your email marketing messages so that they reflect your company's image.

In addition to finding up-to-date designs, focus on products that are easy to learn and use so you can spend your time with your customers instead of with tech support. Below are the criteria we used to rank the best email marketing software.

Contact Management
It's important that you choose a service that is easy to use. The appearance and simplicity of the dashboard are going to determine how often you access the program to create campaigns. The ability to import existing mailing lists from other services, whether they are social media or email providers, is a big plus. The best email advertising services allow you to create custom demographic segments so you can reach the right customers with the most applicable message.

Email Creation
Before choosing a service, you'll want to make sure you can upload images, type your text, manipulate how your text displays, and add links and a social media share bar, among several other features. An effective email marketing company offers the professional features you need to create customer surveys, newsletters and other event emails.

Many email marketing solutions offer the flexibility to work either in a design format or directly with HTML. With most products, you can create an email message from scratch or choose from a large list of creative templates.

Sending & Reporting Features
Email marketing services provide reports, graphs and statistics that show you how your email campaign is doing. You can see how many customers open your emails and even which links they click on. You can see how many people unsubscribe and how many forward your emails to others. These reports also let you know how many emails bounce, meaning they didn't reach their intended destination, and you can tell how many are still unopened.

Some email services work with Google Analytics to give you even more data you can use to increase the success of your campaign. Most email marketing services help you maintain your list of contacts by automatically deleting email addresses that bounce.

Help & Support
A top-notch email marketing service provides help options to get you started, including a user manual, a wizard to walk you through the creation and monitoring of your email campaign, FAQs, a blog, tutorials and articles that explain how to create effective campaigns. Support should include the ability to contact the company by email, phone or live chat.

The reasons to invest in an email marketing service are easy to see. You can save money and have online reporting keep track of new and returning customers. Once you use it, you'll never be able to go back to outdated options like direct mail advertisements.

Friday 12 September 2014

Organic Web Marketing

Organic Marketing - Organic Marketing is a generic term. If you go for definition, then Organic Marketing is same as Inbound Marketing. 

This can also be termed as C2B or Consumer to Business Marketing. In this type of marketing, the marketers try to brand themselves in all available and/or workable media to ensure that the consumers come to their business.

This differs from Advertising, Direct Marketing, and Point of Sales (PoS) Marketing:

Direct Marketing
When the business invests time and effort for communicating with individual customers and motivate people that are not highly or slightly interested.

Advertising
It is similar to C2B Marketing, since the consumer comes to business. Moreover, it deals with a large population of customers. But, there is some investment involved in making awareness about product and service.

Point of Sales (PoS) Marketing
This type of marketing is sometimes confused as sales activity, since it is closely related to sales and sales happen immediately when marketing is successful. However, in this case, businesses deal with individual customers.

Apart from these type of marketing there are situations like:

    You can bring customers without directly communicating with them (e.g. Yellow Pages),
    Your customers are already aware about the available products and brand in your industry. So, advertising does not influence him/her much,
    You can make mass communication to a lot of interested customers and not be confined to individual communication, before any lead happens,
    Leads come in because you have reputation, authority, goodwill brand or any other sort of auto lead generation factors (e.g. if you are SEMPO president and you own a SEO Agency).

In such case, the marketing process will be called Organic Marketing. And SEO is the Web Version of Organic Marketing. I hope this sounds good to you.

Wednesday 10 September 2014

Content Marketing



With the increasing importance of content to commercial success online, content is not something to leave to an intern; it needs a strategy to ensure it really supports marketing.

For us, these are the reasons why content marketing is central to success online. So, to be successful, you need a plan for how content marketing can support your goals. We explain how in our 7 Step Guide to content marketing guide

Shareable content drives creates awareness for your brand. If your content engages readers they will share it via their social accounts, email or word-of-mouth as a recom- mendation. Everyone is an influencer today!
Content drives results from SEO. Google has made this important since 1998 when it launched. Content became, and still is, king since websites are content and being found relies on content.
Content drives purchases. We base our decisions on online content when shopping online or researching for offline purchases.
Syndicated content drives purchases. Content marketing strategy is much broader than your site though, and includes content on social networks, online publishers, com- parison sites, blogs and many other types of site which help engagement and influence sales.
User generated content drives purchases. Buyer behaviour has changed, we now want to reference wider opinion from others like us about products and services, whether rat- ing sites, blogs or social networks – buyers dig out content to help their decision making.
Content on a range of platforms drives purchases. The importance of the internet continues to increase as technology (especially smart phones and tablets) evolve and we evolve with them.

Email marketing strategy

Email marketing began as a serious marketing discipline in the late 1990s. Since then, there has been a major seismatic shift in the entire email marketing industry. The standard approach to email marketing—“batch and blast”-- is serious trouble. It simply no longer performs. Subscriber inboxes are overflowing with irrelevant permission-based emails that only annoy. Research shows that 60% of subscribers simply ignore the emails. There are two basic ways to approach email marketing today. First is the traditional way—“fishing”: massive numbers of identical emails—and dozens of campaigns handled the same way--are sent to relatively unknown subscribers…and analyzed by opens, clicks, conversions, and unsubscribes. Second is “farming”: personalized, relevant email communications to individual subscribers based on a database of demographic and behavioral information. It is possible today to send a different promotional email to every single customer tailored to customer’s preferences, behavior and lifestyle. Furthermore, marketing emails can be interactive. This book goes deeply into the entire business of email marketing based on farming of subscribers. It covers triggered messages, interactivity, retention and loyalty building, relevance, lifetime value, segmentation, viral marketing and testing. It shows how you can combine offline and online purchasing history into a single database to create a 360-degree picture of each individual subscriber in order to speak to him or her with personal knowledge. The methods present here are both very old and very new. Email marketing based on farming brings to today’s electronic age marketing methods that worked when the world was much smaller, and personal loyalty was important in marketing. Email marketing based on farming makes it possible to build and maintain one-on-one relationships with thousands of customers that create bonds of loyalty that keep customers buying for a lifetime. This book shows how to do it profitably.

Monday 8 September 2014

Online Promotion Through Bookmarks

Using bookmarks for your business is one way to get noticed by your target market and gain savings for your company. These creative cards are not expensive to produce especially when you go for a trusted online bookmark printing service.

Although printing bookmarks then giving these out to people can be a simple task, there are still some things you need to consider for your marketing strategy to be effective.

Here are some ideas about printing and promotion to help you decide on how you can make these work for you and your customers.

What Your Printing Should Do For You

Using promotional tools should benefit you in reaching your business goals. As much as possible, business owners would prefer spending on something that would yield greater outcome for their business in the long term, if not the short. This is why you should decide whether or not to go for the ideal printing.

You may want to take time in selecting the online printing company to help you in this task. This way, you won’t have to worry about the quality and savings that you want to get from your printing. Aside from the quality, some printing companies offer additional free services such as free design services and proofing to increase your experience as a customer and guarantee to receive professional prints.

What Your Promotion Should Do to Customers

Bookmarks are made for book readers or anyone who simply wants to mark the page they last read on their reading materials. This is why you should always picture the reaction and impression that you want to gain from people with your design.

Would customers put your items into good use by actually using them? Would the design help you build brand exposure? These are the question you need to ask yourself to avoid giving out unimpressive bookmarks if you want to be recognized.

You should also be able to perk the interest of your clients since this is what promoting your business using print materials is all about. Avoid wasting their time and be sure to hit the right direction.

If you’ll think about the ideas shared here, it won’t be difficult for you to invest on the ideal printing and promotion. After all, you would be able to get your desired results if you just carefully plan every part of your marketing project.

Sunday 7 September 2014

Optimize Your Email Marketing Campaign



Don't miss out on potential sales because you failed to optimize your mailings - here are seven strategies that will help you to get the most out of your email marketing campaigns.

Pinterest might be flashy and Twitter might be trendy, but old-school email is still the best in the business when it comes to generating customer interaction and sales. When you send an email to a list of customers or clients, you're reaching targeted individuals who opted-in to receive your content. That means they're already primed and ready to follow through on whatever you're offering.
However, your email campaign is only as good as the follow-through you give it. Don't miss out on potential sales because you failed to optimize your mailings.
1. Use a Newsletter Service
If you're not already signed up for an email marketing service provider, such as MailChimp or AWeber, you're doing yourself a disservice. These companies make it easy to create beautiful, mobile-optimized emails - a hugely important factor considering almost 40 percent of users access email from mobile devices.
The benefits don't end there, though. You can also manage email lists, integrate forms and sign-ups on your website, and track email analytics. If you've been trying to manage every aspect of your newsletters in-house, it's time to free up some manpower and let a cloud service take some of the work off your hands.
2. Test Your Subject Lines
According to stats compiled by Impact Branding & Design, 33 percent of email recipients open their email based on the subject line alone. Your subjects should be concise and informative, giving the reader a reason to click through. This is no easy task. That's why many email marketing services allow you to send out two versions of the same email, each with a different subject line - enabling you to test which one garners more opens from readers.
3. Personalize Your Message
Readers understand that email campaigns are sent out to the masses, but that doesn't mean they want to feel like just another name on a list. When collecting emails from customers and clients, try to harvest as much additional information as you can, such as their names, ages, addresses, interests, and social media information. Be sure to leave these fields optional, though, as many people navigate away from a page if it requires too much work.
When composing your email campaigns, use customizable fields to personalize each message. For instance, if you customize the "To" field, the reader can receive a message that says, "Dear John," instead of an impersonal, "Dear Customer." It's little details like this that go a long way toward engaging your audience and encouraging follow-through.
4. Segment Your Emails
To personalize your message further, segment your email lists into smaller, niche customer groups. Email marketing services make it easy to set up this type of list, creating groupings based on location, gender, past purchases, and more. The goal here is to provide a particular customer group with deals and updates likely to resonate with them.
For instance, if you own a sporting goods line that markets primarily to coaches and teams, you could segment your list into groups based on sport - football, basketball, baseball. Then, when you're running a deal on football helmets, you could send out an email targeted only to football coaches, rather than to your entire list. Not only is this likely to make the football coaches happy, but you're less likely to annoy the other coaches on your list by sending them information they don't care about.
5. Reduce Text and Optimize Calls to Action
Customers and clients want to spend as little time as possible reading through their emails, so they're likely to open up your campaign, give it a quick scan, and decide within just a few seconds whether to delete it or click through. That's why you want your message to be short, sweet, and to the point. Cut down on long-form text, and focus on short messages that call the reader to action. Be a little bossy (in a nice way), and tell them what they need to do next.
For instance, if you run an office supply company and you want to increase printing supply sales, focus your entire email on one single call to action - buying more printing supplies. You could do this by offering a quick tip on getting more out of your toner, and including a coupon for a discount on paper, but the overall message and all links you provide should be focused on a single call to action, "View our hot printing deals now!" Your call to action should be obvious and visually appealing, leaving no room for doubt about what the reader should do next.
6. Provide Visually Interesting Campaigns
Many email recipients prefer viewing email marketing in HTML, fully optimized with images, custom fonts, and styles. Because you only have a few seconds to generate a response from your reader, the more visually interesting your campaign is, the more likely the reader is to stick around. Include images and graphics that support your overall message - and avoid generic stock images and choose ones that "tell the story" of your email. For instance, if you're providing a coupon to readers, go ahead and put an image of it in the email with a clear call to action, "Click for your coupon," below it.
7. Provide Means for Social Sharing
According to statistics provided by Impact Branding and Design, emails that have social sharing buttons generate a 158 percent higher click-through rate than those that don't. If your goal is to initiate action from your reader, then you absolutely must include a means for the reader to share your newsletter with their own social following, as well as a means for the reader to follow you on your social networks. Many email marketing service providers make this step incredibly easy - all you have to do is add the social widgets and include any appropriate links.
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