Today I had the pleasure of meeting Frank Burke, if you’re from Chattanooga you may recognize him as the owner of the Chattanooga Lookouts baseball team.

You may be wondering what this has to do with marketing so sit back and I’ll tell you right now.

Frank is a good speaker and seems to have a true passion for what he is doing, but he says he is always looking for ways to get people out to the baseball game.

Give People A Reason To Do Business With You

He has had many attractions such as camels in the outfield, and a guy that is about 3-1/2 feet tall to get his three and a half inning stretch. (An idea that is a little out there but people come to see it).The point here is, he’s giving people a reason to come out and ultimately hand him their money for their ticket.

Do you offer people a reason to do business with you? If not you may give this some thought and come up with your own ideas or gimmicks.

Treat People Like You Want To Be Treated

Of course, no business will go on long without sales which should be your number one priority, but running in second and almost as important as sales is how you treat your customers once they decide to do business with you.

His (Franks) thing that he reportedly tells his employees before every home game is that there may be someone out there attending their first game and he wants it to be the best experience they can have. This boils down to customer service.

Does your company have great customer service? If you’ve ever done business with me, you know I will go to great lengths to make sure my customers are happy. If that means answering questions, helping load a lead capture form on a website, copywriting tips, whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. The customer must be happy!

If you’re not taking care of your customers they will go somewhere else. I don’t want to go on a tangent here, But I bet you’ve had a similar situation. While talking with my brother last night we brought up the television services. I have DirectTV and was showing him why I am so displeased with that service, (It takes way to long to respond to my commands given through the remote control) and telling him that DirectTV doesn’t seem the smallest bit concerned that I am so unhappy.

He said yeah, once they’ve got you they don’t care at all anymore, you have to become a customer of someone else before they will care about you again.

That is absolutely ludicrous in my mind, yet still seems to be true. You can be sure on the day my contract with them is up I’ll be a customer of someone else’s. Everyone has encountered bad customer service, what did you do? Tell everyone you could not to do business with the nightmarish business? Just quit doing business with them? Whatever it was I’m sure it wasn’t good for the company you were unhappy with.

Sorry that is a hot button. I’ll digress.

Ask People To Do Business With You

The other thing that Frank does to get people to the baseball game is, drum roll please… He ask’s them to come. We all should be actively asking people to become our customers, it’s simple, easy and works.

Anyway the point here is about three things:

1. Give the people a reason to do business with you
2. Ask them to do business with you
3. Treat them like you’d like to be treated when they do business with you.

I’d like to thank Frank Burke for his time and his thoughts that really wrap up the essence of a successful business.

Have you been struggling with getting your website to the first page of Google? (also called Search Engine Optimization). I have some advice for you here. There are a few ways you can get your website to rank higher on the search engines.

1. Pay attention to your “on page factors”

• • Description in meta tags
  • Keywords in meta tags
  • Headline in H1 tags
  • Keyword on your url.
  • Make sure your keyword is sprinkled into the content on your website.

2. Treat each webpage as if it were its own site, just there to help people with whatever topic you are building the web page for.

3. Have links to other pages within your website, don’t go overboard, 1-3 on a page is plenty.

4. Give your website visitors the best value you can. Good value to your customers and visitors keeps them coming back, google see’s when people return and I believe puts more trust in your website.

5. Keep adding content, the more content on your site the better. Content creation should never stop.

6. Do the off page optimization.

• • Back-links – most everyone agrees that back-links are a major part of getting your website to rank high with the search engines.
  • Social Networking – while this is more of a good way to drive traffic to your website, any links you add to social networking sites, like facebook are counted as back-links. Also social sites like digg and delicious, anything on those sites counts as a back-link.

Now while there are many other things that come into play when building a great website, such as keyword research, advertising, knowing what your competition is doing, email capture and of course conversion and sales.

These are the things that need your attention once your website is up and running.

One key thing that should definitely be done before you start your website is keyword research. (here is a great tool for keyword research”I can’t stress this enough, so many people decide they need a website and whether they build it themselves or have someone else build it, no thought, or more importantly, research, goes into the keywords for that website.

Keywords are everything. These are the words people are using to search for you in the search engines and will be the foundation of your website. Knowing your keywords and how many people are searching for those keywords is a must, it is the only way to form a real plan your website.

If you aren’t targeting keywords you essentially have no plan and chances of failure are really high.

On the other hand, with your keywords in hand and the knowledge of how many people are searching for those keywords you can plan for potential traffic to your website, (typically the first site listed on the first page of the search engines receive’s about 41% of the available traffic.)

Something else to keep in mind is not to have your website to flashy, most of the time all the fancy little flashing gizmo’s on a website are good for nothing more than distracting your potential client from the message you are trying to share with them.

There is a website language actually named “Flash” it looks good but the search engines are not able to decipher it very well, so web sites using flash typically do not rank very well, I recommend staying away from “Flash” it just doesn’t work.

If you’d like to get a plan and get your website ranked on the first page of Google, give us a call today or contact us online here.

Call us at (423) 364-6261

Is your website capable of bringing you more business than you have now.

I can honestly say every business should have a website, no matter what product or service you offer, you can bet people are looking for you online.

And your website should be out there working for you 24 hours a day, it even works weekends.

Most of the time websites are not seen and therefore do not perform their intended task of bringing you more business. Are you and your website in that position now?

So, the question is how do you get more website traffic?

The answer to getting more traffic and more sales from your website equals search engine optimization.

So what should you expect from a search engine optimization agency like Marketing Velocity.

Research.

We research your keywords and find the best one’s for your company. This is the foundation of your website, if this is done wrong you can pretty much give up any hope of your website showing up when and where it needs to.

Proof.

From there we will show you exactly how many future customers you can expect to visit your website as well as how many extra sales you can expect to make as a direct result of your website.

Results.

After your website is ranking highly and you are making money with it we can add other marketing techniques to further build your brand and increase your piece of the pie.

Investment.

We believe the budget for your website should be an investment, not an expense. Once we have you making money with your website adding more is completely up to you, it really depends on how large you want to build your business.

Guarantee!

We guarantee to have your website ranking on page one of a Google search in 90 days or less, if not we work for free!

Call us today to get your website on track to start making you the money you originally intended it to.

Call 423.364.6261

Or you can request an estimate through our contact form here.

These seem to be a dime a dozen anymore, I just did a search on Google for the term and came up with 19,300,000 results. Can you imagine your website being ranked at the 19,300,000 spot,

no one is ever going to see you.

In this search the companies are selling themselves as someone to help others with their Search engine placement, they should not be the last one listed, not a good scenario for their customers.

So what should a Search engine placement company (I’ll refer to these as SEPC for the rest of this article) do for you?

That’s easy, get you to the number one ranked spot in the search engines right? Right! Well, kind of.

There are many ways a company will work to get your ranking up high, I won’t go into all of them here just because it would take way to long and frankly would make for some pretty boring reading.

Do you have an active role in getting your website to the top?

Yes you do, the Search Engine Placement company most likely doesn’t know your business like you do, so it is your job to tell them what people might type into the search engines to find you, as well as who your target customer is.

This really isn’t to hard, here’s an example, if you have a mortgage company, your customers will probably be searching, mortgages, loans, refinance and so on, but if your company does reverse mortgages that is probably something you should make sure your SEPC knows.

And I’m assuming you know who your target customer is, you know, the 42 year old mom with 2 kids that has a job where she makes around $40,000 that drives a minivan shops at target and doesn’t like to cook.

Did you know she likes to search the internet before she decides to buy from you? Of course you do, that is why you are here reading this right?

Most of the time your SEPC will find these things about your company, but if you know what customers you really want to target, make sure they know it.

How long will it take to get your company to the top spots?

Well, the answer is, it varies, I’ve had sites rank high in a week and then had others that took a month and even up to two and a half months. I guarantee to get my clients website to the first page in Google in 90 days or less otherwise I work for free.

I think it is only fair, anyway when talking to your SEPC, ask them how long this will take. Of course I am bias but if they answer with anything over 90 days you should definitely find out why?

By the way, I say top spots earlier because no one can guarantee to get you to the number one ranked spot. I guarantee first page rankings in 90 days and then keep building from there to get that top spot.

If you’d like your website to get to the top spots and would like to know exactly how get it there, you should get our free website marketing analysis. If you do what it says, you will have a website on the first page of google. Guaranteed!

]]> http://www.marketing-velocity.com/search-engine-placement-companies/feed 1 http://www.marketing-velocity.com/website-lingo http://www.marketing-velocity.com/website-lingo#comments Sat, 20 Mar 2010 11:53:08 +0000 David Hawke http://www.marketing-velocity.com/?p=116

When speaking about websites the language can be a bit confusing, You’ve probably heard about HTML, H1 tags, Meta tags, keywords, landing pages, email marketing and 100 others,

I’ll use this article to explain some of the most common.

Ready? Here goes…

HTML

HTML which stands for “Hyper Text Markup Language” which is the language commonly used to build websites.

Tags or Headline tags

This tag tells the search engines (I’ll refer to search engines as SE’s from now on) how important the word or phrase is, if you want the SE’s to put greater emphasis on a word or phrase you assign it an H1 tag, you can tag all the way to H6, but honestly I’ve never gone that far with them.

H1 tags are written in HTML which stands for “Hyper Text Markup Language” which is the language commonly used to build websites. The tag in HTML looks like this, <h1>this is an HTML tag</h1>, when viewed on a website you would only see the words “this is an HTML tag”

Keywords

Keywords are critical to your website and if you don’t choose them the SE’s will. Keywords are simply a word or phrase that someone uses to find information on the internet.

For instance if I were going to look for a good restaurant I would type into Google or another search engine “restaurants chattanooga” so, restaurants chattanooga is the keyword.

There are tools that will tell you how many people actually search for a specific keyword as well as suggest others for you too. The one I use most is free and is provided by Google, who better to tell you how many people are searching for a specific term?

Click here to go to the Google keyword tool. Oh yeah, it is free but you will need a Google account to use it.

Another one is Wordtracker, click to see it.

Meta Tags

Are tags used within the HTML of a webpage and are used to specify the page description and keywords.

Back-Links

An example of a back-link is if I put your domain name on my website and make it so people can click the link to go to your website. That is considered a back-link for you and is very powerful in helping your website get ranked well in the SE’s.

The same holds true if you put a link to my website, that is a back-link for me, however if we trade links and each of us put the others link on our website, the SE’s ranking power is diminished.

People used to “trade links” and still do somewhat to get high SE’s rankings and it worked until the SE’s saw what they were doing and it no longer works very well if you just trade. The back-link I described first is a one way back-link and those are really what you need for ranking purposes.

Banner Ad

A banner ad is similar to a billboard on the side of the highway except that it is used on a website and can vary in size.

Click Through Rate – CTR

This is the percentage of people that see your ad and actually click on it to visit your website.

Pay Per Click – PPC

PPC is exactly what it sounds like, you place an ad on someone else”s website or with the search engines (you’ve probably heard of Google adwords) and every time someone clicks on your ad you pay a small amount for that click. Click Through Rate becomes extremely important when using PPC.

Impression

How many times your ad was viewed online. This is used typically to determine your click through rates.

Opt-in

Mostly used with email marketing, any time someone gives you there email address it is referred to as an opt-in.

FTP – File Transfer Protocol

The method used to upload most websites to the host server.

Website Host

This is the server that stores your webpages on the internet.

Server

This is the equipment a website host uses to store your website pages on the internet.

If you have any questions and I’m sure you will, please send me your question here and I’ll be happy to explain anything I can.

Search engine placement and optimization can be very confusing. You know your website would work wonders for you if you could only get it seen by your potential customers, right?

I know I was there with you a couple of years ago, and then after incessant study I finally figured out how to get a website ranked and successfully have done so multiple times now.

Since you’ve come all the way here I’m assuming you have similar issues as I did. So, I’ll explain some of the mysteries about it here.

Here are the steps I’ve found you need for a top ranked website.

• Honest, truthful and have value – Google knows their success is based on their customers coming back, so they search out the content they think is most relevant and valuable for their user.

• Research – Know what your customers are searching for and how many of them there are. I’m talking about keywords here, a great tool to help you with this is supplied by none other than Google, click here to check it out, it’s free.

• Content – Adding content is the single most important thing you can do on your website to get it ranking highly. As they say “Content is King”. Your content should also be based around the keywords you found that your customers are searching.

• Tell the search engines what your content is about, here’s how…
  • Add a title in H1 tags to your web page – if you don’t know what H1 tags are don’t worry, I’ll write an article shortly explaining H1 tags and the other elements I am getting ready to tell you about here.
  • Add a description that includes your keyword.
  • Add you keyword to the meta tag’s
  • And don’t run your keyword in the ground, having it listed in the body copy of your webpage 1 – 3 times is plenty!

• Now, and this one is the biggie, start getting back-links, when a website puts a link to your website on one of their pages, that is a back-link. The more of these you can get the better. In fact it is probably the single most important thing you can do to get your website placed high on the search engines.

You may not know some of the lingo listed above so I’m going to go right now and write another article for you about that. Click here for that.

If you have a website already and it isn’t ranking on page one of Google search click here, and sign up for a website analysis of your site and your keyword, it will tell you what you need to do to get your website to the first page of Google and best of all it doesn’t cost anything

This just confirms why local online marketing is so important to your business.

This article tells about 90% of internet users search online for nearby businesses before they go shopping.

Also 46% of of those searchers contacted those businesses by phone and 37 % visited in person.

The implications of this are huge for local businesses, just think about all the people you could be attracting to your business if you had a top ranked website. If you’d like to see how your website ranks for your desired search terms, get your free website analysis here.

To read more click here

We are completely starting from scratch and renovating this website, it is a lot of work but necessary. Please bear with us as we work to make this site better and more user friendly for you!

Thank you for understanding.

David