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Archive for Online Marketing Advice

Are You a Warrior?

I admit that I’ve always been a “hermit SEO”. I do most of my work alone and figure out what works and what doesn’t through trial and error rather than taking other people’s word for it. As of late, I’ve been hanging out on the Warrior Forum more often to offer advice to beginners and read the heated debate among the SEO experts.

I’ve picked up several unique ideas and had a chance to mentor some up-and-comers. All in all being an active member of the discussion forum has been quite positive. If you are following this blog to improve your own SEO skills, I’d highly encourage you to join the conversation.

One word of warning…be careful to set a timer for yourself when you first enter the forum. The conversations and debate is so engaging you can easily lose an entire day and not have made any progress.

My username on Warrior Forum is NumbersJunkie. Hope to see some of you there!

Categories Online Marketing Advice
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I just started working with a new chiropractic clinic building some backlinks and had a chance to give some feedback to the owner about a website he had had constructed by another company. One of the things that struck me was the fact that most of his URL names used underscores and not hyphens. I knew from experience that hyphens were IN and underscores were OUT, but I had never really investigated why. Here is a quick synopsis of what I found…

Take a look at the URL for this page. If you are viewing it on the original post page then the URL is http://andreakropp.com/underscores-versus-hyphens-in-webpage-urls. Why not http://andreakropp.com/underscores_versus_hyphens_in_webpage_urls? It seems just as legible, so is this a matter of personal preference?

No. Search engines actually treat them differently.

The hyphen is viewed as a space between words, while the underscore is its own character such as the letter U.

When the search engine sees http://andreakropp.com/underscores-versus-hyphens-in-webpage-urls, it sees the distinct words “underscore”, “versus”, “hyphen”, “webpages” and “urls”. “In” is ingored. (Sorry Indiana).

When the search engine sees http://andreakropp.com/underscores_versus_hyphens_in_webpage_urls it is as if it sees “underscoresUversusUhyphensUinUwebpageUurls”. The underscore is treated like a text character that mashes the words into a indecipherable mess.

Google and other search engines have release statements about this and seem to working toward making the underscore on par with the hyphen, but it hasn’t happened yet. You only need to look at the actual search results for the queries “little_red_riding_hood” vs “little-red-riding-hood” vs “little red riding hood”. The version with underscores has only about 1/10th the number of results returned.

The final verdict…when in doubt hypenate!

Categories Copywriting
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Links, links and more links. There isn’t an SEO expert, manual or guru alive that isn’t recommending that you get more quality backlinks for your website. But what exactly is the definition of a quality backlink? How will you know one when you see one? This video explains exactly what to look for when judging link quality…

If you learned something from this video, pay it forward to someone else by sharing it…

Categories Search Engine Optimization
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What is a Citation?

Anyone trying to optimize a local business website has probably run across the them citation. But what exactly is a citation and what makes it different from a link? The simple answer is that a citation is a full or partial match for your Business Name, Address or Phone mentioned on another webpage. Confused? Watch the video…

If you learned something from this video, pay it forward to someone else by sharing it…

Categories Search Engine Optimization
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I was having lunch yesterday with a great local dentist buddy and we were discussing his website. During a napkin drawing of backlinking we talked about getting links from high page rank pages. That’s when the question “how do I check the page rank of my website or blog?” came up. Great question. This is how it’s done…

If you learned something from this video, pay it forward to someone else by sharing it…

Categories Search Engine Optimization
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Have you ever looked at the images on your website the way a search engine does? They don’t see smiling faces, the see only text. Text is the heart of on-page SEO…so your image names can gives you a boost.

  1. You must describe what is in the picture. No keyword stuffing.
  2. Use hyphens between words
  3. Keep search terms in mind
  4. Keep relative search volumes in mind
  5. At most, add 1 geographic modifier or other tangential keyword term. Make sure you vary this if there are a lot of images on a page

If you learned something new, please pay it forward using any of the share buttons.

Categories Search Engine Optimization
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grim_reaperIf you are in a B2B industry and have ever bought a prospect list from a list broker, then this post is for you.

For the past week I have been testing out a piece of software called Google Maps Scrapper that pulls business records directly out of Google Places. So far I have a list of over 17,000 prospects including business names, mailing addresses and emails and I’ve only run it against a fraction of the cities I plan to market to. Total cost = $99 one time. I don’t see why I would ever need to buy a marketing list again, ever. Allow me to explain.

Google is currently making a major push to educate business owners about the importance and value of creating and/or claiming their business profile on Google Places. It is in the business owners’ best interest to provide accurate and complete information so that potential customers can find them online and offline. This is the exact database that the Google Maps Scraper pulls from!

Do you see the beauty? No more middleman. Now any B2B marketer can get quality contact information directly out of Google Places.

You could get the data by assigning the data collection task to an assistant or outsourcing it to a freelancer on oDesk. But, why do that, when you can pay $99 one time for a piece of software that pulls the data directly into a spreadsheet. (My 17,000+ rows thus far would have been hundreds of outsourcer or assistant hours!)

There is only one thing that could make this even better… a free trial download. The  free trial version disguises the data so its not useful for marketing, but you’ll get to see the software run on your machine before you buy. You’ll be able to tell from the free trial whether it is a good fit for your prospect list needs or not.

Here’s that link again => Google Maps Scrapper

Categories E-mail Marketing
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What if everywhere you went on the internet you kept seeing the same ad…all day…everywhere…over and over again. Its called retargetting and its a small business owner’s dream come true.

I fully except 90% of you reading this post will have no idea what retargetting is. Frankly, neither did I until the concept was introduce to me a few months ago. If you spend $50 or more on pay-per-click marketing of any kind (Google, Facebook, etc…) you need to know about this.

Retargetting is the process of following your web site visitors around the web and bringing them back to your site for a second visit. Its a way to bring the PPC visitors you paid good money for back for a second look. Anyone that does paid internet advertising hates the fact that ~50-95% of your web site visitors don’t buy and don’t leave any contact information. You paid for them to come, but have no idea who they are! That sucks.

There must have been something about your initial ad that appealed to them or they would not have clicked, right? Generally if you write clear ads, your paid traffic will be a good fit for your offer. So why not bring them back again for a second look? Maybe they were rushed, maybe they wanted to do more research first.

Retargetting companies like FetchBack allow you to place a tracker in your paid ad and then show that same person banners ads of yours on other sites they visit that day day, week or month. Can you imagine having a prospect leave your website, head over to the NYTimes.com and see an ad of yours there? Then they go to a favorite sports site and see your ad again. Later that day they see your ad on green energy blog? Your ads are following them around the internet!!!! (Scary yes, but very, very cool don’t you think?)

They start thinking…”These people are everywhere. This must be a big, successful company. Maybe I should check it out again.”

That is exactly what retargetting is intended to accomplish. To bring your paid visitors back for a second visit. I can’t tell you exactly how it works, but FetchBack has a free white paper that will give you more details.

Categories Pay per Click and AdWords
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Little bit of a rant here…bear with me.

I took a walk with a dear friend today to admire the snow on Mt. Hood, Mt. Adams and Mt. St. Helens on one of the rare days that no rain clouds we blocking the view. So spectacular. The air was crisp and clear and the mountains seemed so close that you could reach out an touch them. I was calm. Very much at peace and enjoying the day. And then…

We got to talking about small business websites. Forgive me realtors, florists, plumbers, dentists…but most of your websites are butt ugly. Why does this happen when clean and simple website is less than $500?

I think its because that type of product for that kind of price is only known to those of us in the Internet Marketing world. We know about beautiful WordPress themes for under $50. We know about hiring professional graphic designers for headers on Odesk for under $50. We know about hiring native English speakers to write well-researched blog content at $10 for 500 words. We know how to add free contact forms or create ‘lead magnets’ to attract names and email. We know about free plugins to integrate your social media. The list goes on…

What most small business owners know is what they hear from solicitors.

Those solicitors have every incentive to make the web sound imposing and difficult so that they can justify their high fees and ongoing maintenance plans. Truth is, the need the huge profit margin to continue to pay an army of cold callers. (OK, so not every web company is only out to get your money…if you have found a good one congrats…I warned you at the beginning this was a rant.)

If you are a small business owner whose site is butt ugly, I want you to know that a little knowledge and $500 can fix that. You just need to know the basics so you can ask for the right things and smell when you are being overcharged.

OK. End of rant.

Categories Web Site Design
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Getting your business ranking well in the local Google Maps has several underlying factors. One of those factors is the number of citations for your business elsewhere on the internet. A citation is different from a link in that the citation doesn’t need to link to your website. A citation is generally a text reference to your business name, street address and phone number that validates the existence and popularity of your business.

When creating citations be sure that you use the EXACT SAME business name, address and phone everywhere. Be anal about abbreviations and punctuation. Make the citations EXACTLY the same. Here are several place to submit free citations. Some of these will be posted immediately and others have other requirements you must fulfill or go through a manual review process first.

  • Google
  • Yahoo
  • Bing
  • Angie’s list
  • Business.Intuit.com
  • DiscouverOurTown.com
  • HotFrog.com
  • Yext.com
  • JumptoYourCity.com (example JumptoSeattle.com)
  • Resourcelinks.net
  • Yelp.com
  • Yodle.com
  • Localeze.com
  • AskYP.com
  • SmartGuy.com
  • Bridgat.com
  • Flicker.com
  • Panaramio.com
  • Yellowbot.com
  • InsiderPages
  • SuperPages
Categories Search Engine Optimization
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