Lewis Talbert Austin, Texas Information

By Christopher W Smith

Everyone seems to be jumping on the internet marketing bandwagon lately. In the race to get their business online, many successful businesses forget to ask themselves some tough questions about what they are doing, what their expectations are and what their plan is to meet those expectations.

The internet can be a powerful tool that can put you on solid footing with bigger companies. On the other hand, the other companies may have more money to pay for advertising. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind as you analyze your internet marketing strategy.

Advantage of Internet Marketing

- your store is open, 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week. Further, your customers are worldwide in reach, and can shop anytime that they want to

- the cost of spreading your message is next to nothing. Emailing your subscription base is more oftne cheaper than sending a letter through the mail

- updating your subscribers can be done almost instantly through email. Visitors to your website can get up to the minute information on each visit. If you are having a sale, your customers can start shopping at the discounted prices literally as soon as they open their email

- if you have an information sensitive business, such as a law firm, newspaper or online magazine, you can deliver your products directly to your customers without having to use a courier

Disadvantages of Internet Marketing

- online marketing is not free. The cost of software, hardware, wed site design, maintenance of your site, online distribution costs and of course, time, all must be factored into the cost of providing your service or product.

- slightly over 50% of households shop online. While that number will continue to grow, you are reaching less than two out of three households.

- the internet is still regarded as a source of information gathering for the majority of your customers. Of the number of visitors to your site, the vast majority of visitors who are motivated to buy will do so in person. Many people prefer the live interaction when they buy. If you have a small business with one location, this may deter customers from buying.

- easier to have outdated information on your site, thus timing of updates is critical

- there is no replacement for good old fashioned customer service. The majority of internet marketers lack customer service and inquiry response programs. As a result, many online visitors to your site will already have painted your site as poor service before they have even contacted you. The majority of websites also have poor navigation, which makes it difficult for your visitor to find what they are looking for. Many sites were created with a marketing view, not a customer service point of view.

- is your site secure? Does your customer know this? There are many incorrect stereotypes about the security of the internet out there. As a result, many of your visitors will not want to use their credit card to make a purchase. The fear of having their credit card info stolen is a clear and present danger in the minds of your visitors

- there is a lot of competition for your product already out there. By the time your visitor finds you, they have already been clicking many links. Unless they can find what they are looking for quickly, they are gone.

- many web visitors expect something for free. What do you have to offer them?

There are many other pros and cons of internet marketing. Its important for you to consider each when creating your internet marketing strategy.

By Jeff Finkelstein

With the global economy struggling, acquiring new customers is top of mind for most organizations.

Did you know that 50-70% of consumer and business purchasers start with a search engine like Google? If your website doesn’t appear at the top of a search engine results page (sponsored ads or organic search results), you’re losing potential customers to companies that do rank higher.

What can you do? I’ll share with you my top strategies and tactics that can help you acquire new customers via search engine optimization and advertising.

1. Local Search Engine Advertising. For businesses that serve specific geographic regions (i.e. Denver, Colorado), you can create search engine ads in Google and Yahoo that only appear to people in your area.

How does this work? A search engine like Google uses a computer’s IP address and other information to discover where someone is searching (including city and state).

Why does Google care where a person is located? Google’s mission is to give their end users the best search results possible. So if I need a someone to walk my dog in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, it does me little good to receive a paid search result from Arizona. This is a real example - my brother has a petsitting business, and I’ve used local Google search engine advertising to drive new clients to his organization.

Thus Google (and the others) tries to match search results to the geographic location of the person searching.

How does Google make money? Google gives businesses and organizations the ability to display paid advertisements (sponsored results) on search results pages. These ads are triggered by keywords you choose (more on this in a different strategy).

You don’t have to pay for your ad to display; you pay Google only when someone clicks on your ad. The technical term is Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising. The more relevant your ad (more on this later), the less you have to pay for specific keywords, and the higher up you will appear in the sponsored advertising results.

Local Search CPC Ads. In Google Adwords, you can create an advertising campaign that will target someone in a specific city or state. You can even specify a 5, 10 or 25 mile radius from a specific location (like your retail showroom or office). Below your local ad, Google will place the name of your local area (i.e. Denver, Colorado)… making it more likely that someone searching in your area will choose your organization vs. an out-of-town competitor.

Local CPC Ads are usually a more cost effective option than a national search engine advertising campaign. As a general rule of thumb, the more geographically targeted and specific you can be, the less money you’ll need to pay to acquire new customers. And make sure you have conversion tracking code placed on your site, so you can measure and track how much you’re paying for each new customer via local search engine advertising.

2. Don’t Confuse The Search Engines With Graphics. Search engines are really good at reading text. But they’ve very easily confused. And if Google gets confused when it crawls through your site, you won’t rank very high in search results.

Search engines, for example, can’t read words that are contained in graphics or flash animation. So if your company’s name is only contained in a graphic on your site, this content is ‘invisible’ to a search engine. Same thing goes for product or service names.

The root of the problem lies with graphic designers. Graphic designers are really good at building graphics. And don’t take this to mean I don’t like graphic designers. (I employ a bunch of them, but they know how to do SEO-friendly design.)

Author: Arman Logan

Recently, when I was browsing the Internet looking for some SEO tips, I found out that you should never create urls that end with “.0″ if you want that page to get indexed in Google. That was really something new for me, and I have never heard about it before. As far as I know, Google has never announced this thing anywhere, and webmasters, whos urls ends with “.0″ probably has no idea why their page is not indexed in Google. They simply don’t index ANY page, that has got “.0″ in the url.

I was really surprised with this discovery, and I wanted to go a bit deeper and find out, whether it works on any website or not. So I went to Wikipedia, and tried to find some terms which end with dot 0.

Look at my results:

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1.0
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Hard_4.0
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_8.0
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_10.0

All these pages of Wikipedia are not indexed in Google, because their urls end with “.0″ However, they all do appear in Yahoo. Such a silly thing, but it removes your whole page from Google.

If you want to avoid having this problem with Google, try to write “dot” instead of “.” or add something after you have put “.0″ so it doesn’t end with it and you should be fine.

By M. Wali

The U.K. search engine marketing statistics state that the predicted growth in search engine marketing spends this year shall rise by 58% this year to £2.22bn as compared with the figures in 2006. Similarly the U.S. search market is also estimated to rise steadily in all SEM services in a couple of years from now. The paid search is estimated to rise to 33.0 ($ Billions) in the year 2010, whereas, search marketing shall rise to 11.1 as given in a consolidated report compiled by econsultancy.

Considering the fact that the concept of search engine marketing in India is comparatively newer than to the UK and US the growth percentage in search engine marketing spends here is believed to be much higher. More and more Indian businesses are now realizing the potential of SEM and are gradually diverting to that front. But before they actually plunge into the market there are a few understandings that thee businesses must have about search engine marketing. Listed below are a few points that will make the concept of marketing your business through search engines easier.

Most of the internet users use the search engines to look for information or products. When they search for a particular info, product or service on the search engines that type in the required keywords. It is then that the most relevant of your website pages appears in the search results. Note, that the search engines do not rank the whole website, but only a few page of the website which they find relevant. The higher your webpage ranks in the SERP (search engine result pages) the greater are the chances of people clicking on your website and going through your webpage.

The two major services of search engine marketing are search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search. Search engine optimization is optimizing each page of the website with the aim of making them appear in the SERPs. This is also known as “on” page optimization. There are a few “off” optimizations too that are part of SEO services. They too help in the ranking of the web pages.

Author: Aisha Danna

Be it search engine optimization or pay per click ads, keywords play a major role in search engine marketing. It is because of the relevancy of your keywords that your website is included in the search engines and is reflected on the resulting pages. Just in case your website was not optimized with the right keywords, it would neither appear in the search engine nor, would it attract visitors. There are a number of things that you need to keep in mind before you begin optimizing your search engine marketing strategy.

Survey Your Industry

When considering optimization of keywords in your SEM plans, it is advised that you first do a complete research of your industry. Find out the different keywords that can be used and are currently in practice in your industry. It is important that your search engine marketing be apt to your industry demands, so that it is easy to track your website when doing a search on your industry type websites.

Discover Niche Areas

While finding logically based search results, it is important that you concentrate on the niche market as well. It is hard to attract traffic from high demand keywords, as there is already too much of rush on these keywords. On the other hand if you have a niche keyword, which is unique to the industry and supports your site content as well, it will be easier to call for traffic from these sites.

Do a Dummy Test

While you are researching on the keywords, one thing that you should always remember is the average count of traffic you can expect. When you select a keyword, do a dummy test of the keyword on various search engines like Yahoo, MSN, Google etc. to check the popularity of the keywords. This will give you a fair idea of the kind of traffic you can expect from these sites. The numbers do not really match always but it does give you an approximate which, helps in drawing the framework of your search engine marketing plan.

Check Ad Content

Content matters. It is not important to have the top position in the search engines only. Along with the top keywords and a high rank it is the content of your keywords advertisement in the search engines that also affects search engine marketing.