Smart design means smart internet marketing

It’s important to focus on links and keywords in your SEO and smart internet marketing strategies – but don’t forget site design in the process. Smart site design will help your website achieve good rankings in search results.

First of all, it’s important to have good, readable text on your website’s homepage; this helps a search engine find your site. A site designed entirely in Flash is not good because text in Flash files often become embedded in images, which are not read by search engines. That means a search engine won’t be able to recognize your all-important links and keywords.

You want to create a website with a logical and well-organized hierarchy – that means a home page with clear categories and sub-categories. Hierarchies are essential for websites with lots of pages and can be achieved by using breadcrumbs, HTML site maps, and logical directory and URL structures.

Make sure you give your web pages unique titles which show that your site has varied content. If you start every page with your company’s name, your site will be penalized in search results.

Finally, keep the content on your website fresh by performing regular updates. Don’t just create a site and forget about it. After a while, a search engine will pay less attention to your site and give fresher sites priority in the search rankings.

Smart internet marketing companies can provide advice on the design of your website and help you achieve better results.

Search Engine Marketing Ethics- Google Yourself?

Search marketing is all about doing what you can to bring your name and your brand in front of prospects to increase sales. People use keywords, pay-per-click, sponsored links and a myriad of other ways to move their links to the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages.) All's fair in love and business, right?

It seems game is changing, according to the gang at Google, anyway. Google has long been known as the king of search engines by many people and they offer some great services to help anyone doing business online. Some people are taking umbrage with Google's efforts into marketing oneself, however. Google is offering reputation management services. Google suggests if you don't like what you find when you "Google yourself," well, simply create some information you do like and load it up with keywords and other search engine friendly fare.

The specific phrase used on Google blog is "proactively publish information." The blog talks about publishing blog posts with flattering photos to try to overcome negative photos or asking people to write positive reviews about your company to compensate for some that may not paint such a pretty picture. Reputation management is nothing new in search marketing- people have been doing it since the dawn of the Internet age. Somehow, Google advising it seems a bit unseemly, though, doesn't it? Maybe they will publish some other blog posts to knock this one off the first page of the SERPs. After all, whose reputation should they be managing- yours and mine- or their own?

Will Google Wave Change Internet Marketing?

With the launch of Google Wave, marketers and online businesses have been wondering...will this new application change everything for me? Will it allow me to get closer to potential customers or make them harder to find. Will it expose hidden marketing agendas that have been effective, or will it cause a new wave to opportunities?

Our verdict? We believe Google Wave will allow marketers and businesses who are doing their own marketing, to work more effectively. The pros definitely outweigh the cons. For those of you who are just hearing about Google Wave, Google Wave is "a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking." (Source: Wikipedia)

The main reason we believe The Wave is going to change marketing of the past to a new effective future is the implementation of cloud computing. Cloud computing allows for a laptop users to use applications and programs from a hub instead of having to download it to a computer. The idea here is the ability to take "real-time" to the next level. Marketers can utilize this real-time component to interact and communicate with customers in real time.

Just imagine, releasing a email offer that immediately allows customers to engage, communicate and ask others about an offer that they also received...and even ask you questions about the offer..in real-time. Something that email has yet to do.

Learning to utilize this powerful tool now by interacting with developers and testing the product out now is imperative to the success of any marketing campaign going forward.

Want to learn more? Visit our previous post on What Exactly is Google Wave..