While there are many web developers, bloggers, email marketers, SEO, social media professionals etc. out there, these practices in themselves are not the solution to marketing a company, product or service on the web. Members of this group understand that a successful online strategy encompasses all aspects of these online channels to achieve the marketing objective. Different levels of each aspect are required depending on industry and audience. Named “Internet Marketing Source”, the group aims to bring professionals together in these marketing fields, to learn from each other, exchange ideas and share real life success stories from the field. Join today to broaden your knowledge of internet marketing, and contribute your expertise.

Follow this link to join the “Internet Marketing Source”! http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=2475645

Contact us to learn more about how Internet Marketing techniques that will grow your business.

To determine the best fit for you you should first look at the frequency of that you will be sending your newsletters AND number of recipients on the list. You can then figure out the most cost effective option. My preference, however, would be to use a license based software and not have to worry about paying ever again. You pay a couple of hundred dollars up front for the license (a little more if you want it installed on your server for you) and you are ready to go, unlimited email addresses and frequency etc. The only downside that I can forsee is the fact that you are using your own server resources for the software and mailing. Depending on the amount of site traffic and email use you currently have, this may or may not be a key factor. It has never caused me any problems in the past 5 years of using this type of software.

Ask us today about setting up an email marketing system for you.

Blogging has become so popular…

It now extends far beyond the “online diary of my cat”, and into the business world. Blogging has become a great knowledgebase resource for business, both to educate the world on your products or services, and to establish your presence as an expert in your industry.

While these advantages are useful and of great benefit to every business, the SEO benefit of Blogging for your corporate website should not to be overlooked. This article will differentiate Blogs from websites and talk about how owning a Blog as well as contributing to other Blogs “Blogging” can increase your web traffic, thus lead flow and sales should also increase.

Note: For the remainder of this article, when referring to Blogs, I am talking about Blogs for business. Although these points could apply to personal online spaces also.

Your Blog

To own and operate an active Blog in your industry means another “channel” to talk about and market your business products and services. It is effectively like having another website. However, a Blog and a website serve two different purposes.

What’s the difference?

The difference between a Blog and a website mainly involves two criteria; content and functionality. Your website can hold a lot more information and more sophisticated functionality, such as complex searches, account login and control panel interface and inventory management. The list could go on, but you get the point.

Blogs are article-based

A Blog is more related to article posting that can include text, images and video. Blogs are informal writings about your business and industry. The intention is to build an audience that is interested in what you are writing and having them “subscribe” to be notified when you add more content.

The Bloggers Goal

The ultimate goal for your readers, is to turn them into leads and finally, paying customers. Blogs are also interactive, which means that your readers can interact with you through posting comments and questions directly on the Blog, these of course can be moderated prior to inclusion on your live Blog.

Many of the SEO techniques that can be applied to your website can also be implemented on your Blog.

Your Blog, however, already has the advantage of being updated regularly (we hope) so that it is already showing Google (and other search engines) that your Blog is current and therefore worth ranking to some degree, in search results for relative keywords.

So, what more SEO can be incorporated?

With any SEO strategy a keyword list should first be created, based on industry keywords and phrases used by prospects or customers to search for your product. Creating a keyword list is a whole other article. So lets assume you have a list of around 10 common keywords and phrases already. The process now is simple, make sure that your articles and posts use these keywords often.

Don’t overdo it!

That could backfire, and count as point(s) against you! Intersperse your words throughout your Blog, sometimes your Blog post might be specifically relating to one or some of your keywords. Great. You shouldn’t have a problem using them here.

Use your posts, articles and images to direct traffic to your website

Of course it goes without saying that your posts, articles and images should be directing traffic to your corporate site, through obvious links, links from images or “for more information” comments and even the headings. Again, don’t over do it as you may deter readers as well as search engines noting your content as possible spam.

Host it yourself

One key point to mention when setting up your Blog is to host it yourself. Don’t use a free Blog url e.g. http://myblog.wordpress.com. Doing so helps Google see that you are not a serious player in the industry and may discredit you because of it. Sure, you can use free Blogging software like WordPress or Blogger, but make sure you register a domain name and install the Blog on your own server space. This will effectively “add SEO value” to your online space.

Blogging on other Blogs

So you have a Blog in place and its generating a decent amount of traffic for your brand and your corporate site, is there anything else? Yes, now that you have become familiar with the concept of Blogging and writing Blog posts, its time to start Blogging on other industry related Blogs.

There are millions of Blogs to choose from

As I mentioned in the first paragraph, there are millions of Blogs out there. That said, there stands a strong chance that there are already Blogs out there in your industry, regardless of how small a niche your business operates in. Try this, run a Google search for your keywords and include the word “Blog” in the search term. You’ll probably come up with a list of other Blogs in your industry. Check them out, look at the types of articles they are writing. Not only will this give you some ideas for your own Blog, it will probably present topics that you feel you can add something too, and maybe even comment about.

Don’t be shy, scroll to the bottom of the post and add your thoughts or comments about the Blog post

Always be sure to include a link to your own Blog and website in your response. Now, when other readers of their Blog look at the comments and read what others have said, they will come across your comment and links to your website.

Click-throughs

You already know that the reader is interested in your subject matter because they are reading a similar industry-related Blog to yours. Because of this, they are more likely to click your link to read more. This is called a “click-through” to your website. Great news. Best of all its a free source of traffic generation!

Get Google to vote for you

This benefit extends one step further in that now you have a link back to your website from a different website to one owned by you. Google counts this “backlink” as a “vote”. The more votes you get, the more reputable your website becomes in the eyes of Google. Get backlinks on popular and important websites, and your website becomes even more important to Google.

Don’t be tempted to SPAM

Be careful though, simply visiting Blogs and posting links to your website without contributing to the Blog with valued comments is seen as spam, both to the Blog host as well as Google. Doing this will work against your SEO efforts. Regular posting of quality comments and input to other Blogs will help you establish yourself as a “key player” in your industry, help build a reputation online and links back to your website. The results are increased leads and sales from a growth in web traffic.

Using these Blogging methods will generate traffic to your site

Use them wisely though, SEO is a sensitive piece of your online marketing efforts. Overdoing one aspect can work against you, not for you. By consistently publishing relevant Blog content using your keyword list WILL increase traffic to your website. How much traffic directly correlates to the amount of effort you put in. The more posts, articles and comments you submit, the more traffic you will generate to your website.

Ask us about setting up a blog for you or developing a custom SEO strategy and start increasing your web traffic today.

1. Real time detailed tracking
2. On the fly adjustment, tweaking
3. Split testing between ads and keywords
4. Simple ROI metrics

Once you have established a series of ads and keywords and started to see results, assess again if the print advertising should be cut back further to make room for more online advertising.

Ask us about structuring and implementing your online or offline advertising strategies, (612) 6695985.

There’s a lot of choice.

Lets get simple

Let me simplify the choice for you. There are essentially two approaches for email blasting software.

Option 1: A pay-per-use, per month or per email format

Option 2: A license-based email software format

I’m going to talk a little about each option and help you decide which format is best for you.

Option 1: Pay per usage email software

Pay-per-use email software will provide you with an online application/website where you can log in, upload email lists, create email templates and messages and blast them off. You can monitor your open rates and click-throughs (depending on package purchased) etc.

Fees for using such a system varies depending on the provider and which package you purchase.

Some examples are as follows:

1cent per email address on your list

OR

$49.95 per month with unlimited email addresses and frequency limits

OR

$9.99 per email sent, regardless or how many recipients there are

Positives

• You pay a minimal fee to use the system (maybe nothing unless you use it)
• The provider is responsible for system uptime and the general technical aspects of your online account.

Negatives

• Although generally a low cost solution, if you have thousands of email addresses on your account this could get expensive.
• In many cases you will have a mandatory icon, link or logo placed on your messages by the vendor, which effectively advertises their software and somewhat discredits your internal email credibility.

Option 2: License-based email software

License-based email software is just that, you effectively buy the software to use as and when you please with no additional fees. This type of software is installed on your server and it is your responsibility to ensure that it is maintained should there be a problem. This type of software usually includes a more comprehensive set of email tools for sending, managing and tracking email newsletters.

Positives

• You only pay once.
• The features and add-ons are generally more in depth, providing more tracking and managing capabilities.
• There are no logos or links to the email manufacturer included in your mailings.

Negatives

• The license and setup fees are more expensive than the pay per use option. Around $300 would be an appropriate estimate of cost for this.
• The software will draw on your web hosting services as and when you send mailings, at times this may exceed storage or bandwidth limits on your hosting account. Check with your hosting provider for details

We’re here to help you choose which type of email newsletter approach is right for you

Choosing the type of email newsletter software may be more involved than you first thought. There are many providers for each of the categories talked about in this article. We’re here to help. Contact us today for further information about email marketing and to determine which email solution is right for your organization. Reach us at info@beamondcreative.com or (612) 669-5985.

1. Use a catchy, funny, or interesting subject line

Your email open rates start with the subject line. Here you have a few valuable characters to entice your recipients to open you email. If you are stuck for ideas, try browsing news websites or magazines and take note of some of their titles or headers. You may be able to take these story headlines and modify them for your own product or service. For example: “Discover Obama’s secret past” could be used as “Discover our secret recipe for success”.

2. Write in short paragraphs and use headers

This applies to your website content as well as eNewsletters. Readers tend to skim content when reading. By writing in short paragraphs and including headers that highlight the key points of your article will help break up long text and enable you to get the point across to the reader even if they don’t read it all.

3. Use images but not too many

Images again help break up long portions of text and are visually engaging (if you use them appropriately). Do not use too many images though, they could become cluttered and have adverse effects on the reader.

4. HTML is nice but include a text version

Many web users and email accounts have images and html content enabled, which is great to display your high impact email. However, do not leave out those that have only text-based email capabilities. This could be a large portion of your readers that will miss out on your message if you do not include a text-only version. Most good email software applications have the feature to include a text-only version. If you do not send the text version, these readers will simply see the html code and not be able to read your content.

5. Provide a call to action

The whole point of your newsletter is to try to make a sale, generate a lead or traffic to your website. That said be sure to include links to your landing page or conversion form. These pages should be pre built and ready to link to before sending your email message. I would suggest including more that one references to your website and especially at the end of your message include a call to action. Examples are, “Click here to get your free widget” or “View more photos in our online album”. Note: Don’t include too many links here if you want to avoid the SPAM box.

6. Test your frequency

The number of emails you send per week, month or year will depend entirely on your audience. For those in a not technical field, once per month maybe sufficient. If you are dealing with a particularly savvy audience such as the software industry, you may have better conversions and customer retention with a weekly newsletter. To know for sure, run some tests with your list and monitor the results. Once you have found an optimal frequency, be consistent and meet your readers’ expectations.

7. Write content for your specific audience

Don’t blanket email. Many companies serve several industries niches. In these cases, your contact lists and newsletters should be kept separate. For example, an electronics manufacturer may have a customer list for TV’s, Hair Dryers and Dishwashers. It would be pretty pointless having these all on one mailing list, sending special offers for dishwasher maintenance to a list that included hair dryer and TV customers would not only yield minimal open rates and click throughs, but you would also be doing yourself a disservice to your customer base and may end up with losing email newsletter subscribers. In certain circumstances an email to all lists may be necessary, for example an office move notification or store-wide discount coupon. In these situations go ahead and mail them all. But keep your lists separate for specific newsletters.

8. Establish the optimal day and time for email sending

As with “frequency” of email sending, an optimal day and time is also an area for testing and different depending on your industry. Try sending your emails on different days of the week and different times day, then monitor the open rates. You’ll be surprised at the difference. As a general rule of thumb, we have found that sending emails either Monday or Friday are generally less effective than mid-week. Monday emails get lost in a full inbox from over the weekend. Friday emails are ignored as being the end of the week. That said, we suggest experimenting with Tuesday through Thursday and monitoring the results.

9. How to or tip related get a higher open rates

In general terms we have found that “How To” or “Tip” related content gets more attention than any sales-related information. Readers see more value in learning how to do something, learn to use their product better for example, than are put off by an intimidating sales pitch. Get readers to your site first and strategically place, offers and more sales related content around the how-to article and try to generate leads that way.

10. Track campaigns and act on the metrics

Finally, all of this email writing and testing is pointless unless you are tracking how effective your efforts are. Therefore, take note of which types of campaigns, days sent, time of year, number of links, images etc are in the newsletters. When you find a “winning” combination for open rates and click-throughs try to mimic the email with new information and present it in a similar way. This will not be a quick solution, it may take several emails before you start to notice winning trends.

We believe that by following these tips you will be well on your way to creating some winning email newsletters that will help you grow your business.

For more tips, ideas or suggestions for your particular organization, or for a price quote on a custom eNewsletter campaign and configuration, contact us at info@beamondcreative.com or (612) 669-5985.

The ultimate goal of every web site is to attract visitors in the effort to showcase a product, generate interest and ultimately sell a product or service. This maybe directly through an online shopping portal or indirectly via a lead generated from the web site. Either way, the goal is to use the site as a sales tool. What value is that if nobody is looking at your site?

With 10’s of billions of web sites currently on the internet “How do you make your web site visible?”. The answer is by employing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to help lift your web sites ranking. This means, to place your site higher than other related web sites for web searches on your type of product or services.

Strategy: How do I Make My Website Visible to Search Engines?

Unfortunately there is no straightforward answer to this question. There is no “magic” formula that can be applied to your site to make you come out on top of the search results page. If there were such a formula, the person who conjured up the methodology would be a worldwide known “magician” and VERY rich. Instead we have to focus on what we do know about Google and other search engines and the protocol they use (called an algorithm) to prioritize one web site over another for specific keywords and terms. As we learn about these algorithms we can start to apply them to web sites and monitor the results for effectiveness. Many businesses are set on wanting to achieve number one placement in search engine results, not realizing that there are literally hundreds of variables that have to be considered and implemented in the “correct” priority order that the search engine specifies to have a chance at meeting this high goal. In other words, it is impossible to make that guarantee. Note, be wary of any company that claims to get you number one placement on Google. They are making a guarantee that he cannot follow through on and will probably take your money and disappear.

Strategy: On-site and Off-site SEO

There are two main categories within the SEO world “Onsite” and “Offsite” SEO. Lets talk about Onsite a little.

Onsite SEO refers to optimization techniques that are applied directly to your web site. Some examples include: head tags, meta descriptions, CSS coding, and keyword integration. It is important to make sure that the basics are covered here first, since this is where your visitors will be directed to and your sites relevancy to keywords and search terms are Google’s high priority. Look at it this way, Google as high street store obviously wants its customers to be happy with its service. For this reason, Google will want to make sure that the search results it presents to its customers are the most relevant to the keywords entered into the search box. Here’s an example: Lets say your company sells clothing, men’s, women’s, children’s and baby clothing. Although you sell clothes for both genders and different ages, your forte is the women’s division as you carry designer brands that are popular with today’s fashion trends. You have several competitors that you would like to appear above in search results for “women’s clothing”. However, your competitors ONLY sell women’s clothing, and a lot of it. Which site do you think Google will see as more relevant to the term “women’s clothing”?? Of course it is the site that only sells women’s clothing. Yours, while containing many ladies items, becomes somewhat neutralized by the fact that there is a lot of other items that would fit into other categories than the search term in question, like “men’s clothing” or “babies clothing”.

The second SEO category is “off site” SEO. This term refers to optimizing yourself on web sites that are not owned or controlled by you. Google looks at the number of web sites that link to yours as a key factor in ranking your site. These types of links are called “backlinks”. The reason for the importance here placed by Google is that you cannot generally control the content of other companies’ web sites, therefore you cannot easily put your web link all over the net. Instead the web site owner has to be willing to put your link on their site, they are only going to list your URL if they like or approve of you. It works like a referral, you are not likely to refer your kitchen remodeller to a friend if you think they did a bad job on your own kitchen are you? To take this practice one step further, Google will look at your web site more favorably if your link appears on an already highly reputable web site. As easy way to get your link on another site is to create yourself a FaceBook business page and list it there. But what if you write an article that gets published on the New York Times official web site? The difference is huge. Our focus for offsite SEO is to achieve a large quantity of backlinks to your site with as many as possible being a part of existing reputable sites. Although backlinks play a big part in offsite SEO, they are not the only practice that make up this SEO category. Creating profiles optimized with your chosen keywords on other sites, as well as additional techniques are also valuable pieces of the puzzle.

Strategy: Our Approach

So then, although our SEO techniques will help increase your search engine ranking for your identified keywords, a guaranteed number one search results placement, as previously described, is not an achievable goal. Instead, our approach is to work in terms of increasing traffic to your web site and employing multiple SEO techniques to achieve this goal. We start by focusing on those SEO techniques that we have found to be most important factors to top search engines. In particular we focus on Google, as it is the most popular search engine on the internet today.

To help you understand here’s an example scenario. Say you have 2,500 unique visits to your site each month. From those visits you manage to convert 2% into leads, either by information request through the web site or emails, phone calls etc. Of those 50 leads, 5 convert into a sale. Maybe your product is several thousand dollars.

Now, you hire us to increase your traffic. You retain us to double your monthly visitors to 5,000. It would be fair to say that this will in turn double your lead quantity, correct? So you may get 100 leads and 10 sales. The question becomes, will the increased profit from the doubled sales justify the cost of the SEO to double you traffic? I’m sure that the answer would be yes.

Conclusion

With billions and billions of web sites currently on the internet (and growing rapidly by the day), SEO is needed by every business who’s goal is to sell or generate leads through their web site. There are many, many variables and techniques that can be applied on and off your web site to help increase search engine visibility. Our past experiences and expertise can be applied here to focus on those techniques which are most relevant and important to the Google search engine. Our techniques will guarantee a lift in your search ranking, however, specific search result placement guarantees cannot be made BY ANYONE.

Let us increase your search ranking and watch your sales rise.

Contact us today!

There’s a popular saying that most have heard, “Never judge a book by its cover.” Although these words of wisdom are well known through the generations, I would not hesitate to place a bet that more often than not readers judge a book exactly by the cover (or at least it plays a large part in the decision process). I know that I am just as guilty as most.

In a similar way, web users (and that’s approximately 1,086,250,903 users

worldwide according to www.internetworldstats.com) tend to judge a company by its web site. That is because today, web sites have become the first point of contact for many customers, whether they are researching an industry, shopping for products or searching for news. In the case of the die cutting industry, the customer is likely to learn about your company from the Internet; thus creating a positive first impression is essential. Recent studies show that a web user is likely to make a judgement about the company based on the web site appearance within 50 milliseconds of loading a web site. Here they will make a decision if to stay on this site and learn about the products and services offered, or move on.

A recent client of Beamond Creative, LLC had minimal content and a very basic layout. We had the opportunity to revamp the site and turn it into an information resource on their industry as well as a showcase of their products and features. Word about the new web site soon spread. Coupled with several ongoing public relation efforts, the client saw a growth in online traffic of 1000% + over the following 24months.

So does your web site provide an accurate first impression of your business as a whole? Will a web user hat finds your site perceive you as a start-up company or a multi-million dollar business?

The answers to these questions depend on a number of elements: overall design, functionality and content.

Web design

Today, web sites can be created with many different types of software applications, each providing pros and cons (in some instances only cons) for the features integrated into the software. These determine the complexity of the web site you are able, (with the appropriate skills) to create. Unless you are a computer whiz or have experience with building web sites, it is not the kind of business tool that is a simple point and click application to get set up. For this reason, there are many web design companies that will provide you with the service. Again, different companies will provide you with a web site at different rates. Some “template” orientated design companies will allow you to choose from several templates, a web layout to which they will add your given content. This may be a low cost option but is best kept away from unless you are looking for a standard web site that may turn out to be the same as the guy down the street. To define yourself and stand your ground in this highly competitive industry, it pays to seek a design company that has experience in your industry and will provide you with a completely unique web site. However, be warned, you will always get what you pay for!

Functionality

When functionality is added to a web site, it enables the user to become engaged in the site. By this I mean that the user will have the ability to interact with your company through your web site. Maybe they will be providing feedback through an easily accessible simple form, inquiring more about your product or searching a database of information specific to your business. Users could sign up to create an account, profile or similar feature and log in to gain access to “their” area. Whatever functionality you include in your site, you can be sure of positive results by engaging your users and allowing them to become more familiar with your product or service.

Content

There’s no point having a web site that looks great and works well, if when the user starts to browse around, they realize that there is nothing, or little, worth looking at. Well-written content that focuses on the customers’ needs will draw them in to your site. However, written text alone is not appealing to the viewer and should be broken up accordingly to maintain your users interest.

Web sites vary dramatically in appearance, content and functionality, with several pros and cons for each aspect. I would place all web sites into the following three main categories:

Static web sites are more of a brochure-based web site, showcasing the company’s products or services, maybe includes a contact form or two.

Pros: Low cost, quick set up, easy updates, will perform on all computers, all hosts support this kind of site.

Cons: Lacks functionality. Serves little more purpose than an online brochure.

Dynamic web sites feature all that is included with the static site, as well as a lot more programming that allows for database integration, online shopping store, username and password login features and more.

Pros: Great amount of depth to engage with the user, functionality, generate revenue from selling products and/or services online, simple updates with a content management system (CMS), register users and track usage (regional, national interest), automated functions.

Cons: Web host will need to be compatible, more advanced programming requires a company who knows what they are doing, more expensive for initial setup.

The third and final category is for Flash web sites. These sites can include all of the above and much more. The purpose of a flash web site is to provide visual appeal “eye candy” and is graphically superior to other types of web site and usually includes audio, animation and flowing imagery.

Pros: Slick and smooth looking site, all functionality can be included and displayed more attractively, include animation, audio, custom games and gimmicks, makes your site stand out from the rest.

Cons: Sometimes difficult to establish presence on search engines. Users are required to have flash player installed (although 97.5% of web users have the ability to view flash content). Updates need to be made by your designer, longer page load times with intense animated content.

In summary…

Creating a stunning first impression online highly relies on how quickly your site loads and how visually appealing it is to the user. However, there is much more to your web site than how it looks or just simply having an online presence. You need to fully evaluate your web site goals and establish exactly what and how you want to be perceived by web users. Remember, these users are potential customers, who in this advancing Internet age, will more than likely first learn about you through the internet. Show them, engage them, learn about them, and sell them.

Make your first impression an eye-opener!

Take a look at a few web design samples in our portfolio

I recently answered a question on LinkedIn regarding this subject. Based on my recent experiences I felt that I had adequate information to answer this effectively. Time and again, I receive calls from online sales divisions wanting me to advertise on their site or email blasts, be it banner ads, text links etc. Many times they cannot answer my questions that, in my opinion are required information when making a decision to buy.

Questions like:

“Can i track my click throughs?”

“What are the average click throughs for this banner ad placement?”

“What are the estimated clicks i can expect to receive based on comparable industry advertisers”.

It really is amazing to know that a lot of people selling banner ads or email blast ads, do not know the answers to these questions. This leaves little hope as to the rest of the support and success of signing with them. Without answers to questions like these, you cannot fairly determine the value of advertising with them.

Connect with me on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/sbeamond ]]> http://www.beamondcreative.com/2009/07/what-to-ask-a-digital-sales-person/feed/ 0 http://www.beamondcreative.com/2009/06/the-truth-about-seo/ http://www.beamondcreative.com/2009/06/the-truth-about-seo/#comments Thu, 18 Jun 2009 02:08:00 +0000 Sam Beamond http://www.beamondcreative.com/?p=19 If I was to run a poll on whether or not you had been approached via email, on the web or maybe even by phone, by a company guaranteeing that they can get your business to the top of search engine rankings, then the results would probably show 99.9% YES.

The truth is – They cannot!

Why can’t these companies “Guarantee” your web sites’ search engine placement?

Getting your business web site to the top of search engine rankings is becoming increasingly difficult as technology and the internet advances.

For Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to take place, there are numerous variables that must be considered to help increase your ranking on internet search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN (A.K.A “The Big Three”). I’m going to outline those which I believe are five important examples that have proven to be successful in increasing search engine rankings, although I personally or as a company cannot guarantee any specific ranking.

1. Meta tags are sections of code that appear within the “head” tags of your web site. These are only visible in “source code” view and describe the web site or company in certain categories. This code is visible by search engines and is regularly used by them as one means for determining page rankings.

An example of source code for my company web site is as follows:

and enter your web site to see just how many links there are on the web that point to your site. From here you can gauge whether or not you need to focus on this part of your SEO campaign. If you feel that link popularity is an area you are lacking, start contacting web sites relative to your business and ask them if they would mind placing a link to your web site on theirs. Association membership web sites are a great place to get listed as a member you will more than likely be already on there, just check to see that your information is up-to-date. As an example, the Foil Stamping and Embossing Association has a web site that lists its members (www.fsea.com)

To break it down, the three main meta tags (highlighted in bold) that should be used are: ‘title’, ‘keywords’ and ‘description’. The “title” tag is probably the most important and is representative of the text that appears in the blue bar at the top of your browser window. For example the www.beamondcreative.com head tag is “Web Design and Strategic B2B marketing communications – Beamond Creative”. Your head tag should be descriptive of what your company does as well as the company name. Use terms that you think users will put in search engines to find you. Web spiders will look at the head tag to discern relevance to the topic being searched. Be sure not to make your title tag too long that it extends off the screen when visible in the blue browser bar! “Keywords”, these keywords or phrases should be separated by commas and again should be relevant to your industry and ideally should match some of those included in your head tag, thereby increasing your relevance to the subject but don’t make the list too extensive, around 20 words should be sufficient, an extensive list may be looked at as a deterrent rather than an advantage. Finally, the “Description” is a brief overview of your company and/or services, again incorporate into this as many relevant keywords as you can to build your credibility. Search engine spiders tend to stop reading after 25 to 30 words so don’t make it too long else this may work against you.

2. Link popularity is another method that search engines use to rank your credibility on the web. If you have hundreds of web sites linking to yours then surely your web site is one of high credibility and one that web users would find useful when seeking information on your industry. On the other hand, if there are few sites that link to yours then maybe your web site is not worth paying too much attention to. To start your link popularity building project go to

3. As your link popularity is an important factor in SEO, so also is links from your web site to other relative sites. If you have a directory or listing of other relevant web sites on your own, this tells search engines that your site is a great resource to web users. If the web user cannot find what he is looking for on your site or wants more information he has a resource of similar sites that he can try looking at to find what he needs. I would advise editing any “external” links to have them open in a “new window”, this ensures that the user does not completely navigate away from your site and will be able to use it as a resource reference point. We successfully put this practice into action for a print finishing equipment manufacturer by including links to hot foil suppliers and die makers enabling users to find out where they can buy the consumable products for their equipment.

4. Build web credibility by including your keywords throughout your web site. This point may require you to rewrite the content for your entire web site or may be to at least modify the key areas of content. Think about it this way, if your ‘keywords’ or ‘key phrases’ (see above), are used repeatedly in textual content throughout your complete web site, don’t you think that search engines are going to be more convinced that your site is valuable to that particular industry rather than mentioning those terms just once, if at all in addition to your meta tags? Of course they will, start work now on re writing your web site to include the main keywords and phrases that are listed in your meta tags. Don’t just randomly list keywords on pages, as well as portraying an amateurish company, this is not the kind of QUALITY content that search engines look for. Instead spend time to (or hire a company that will do this for you) formulate constructive and informative paragraphs that include your keywords or phrases and show search engines that your content is indeed relevant to the industry that is researched through their engines.

5. My fifth and final SEO tip would be to update your web content regularly. Regularly updated, current, content spells actively in business to search engines, and is commonly a top variable that engines use when ranking web sites positions. A great example of this is the use of a blog (or Weblog). These journal entry-type of web sites are constantly updated by their owners, sometimes several times a day or maybe once per week or per month. Blogs time and time again rank high up on search engines because of this very reason. Now I’m not telling you to go ahead and create a blog (although that would not harm you SEO efforts). However, I strongly suggest that your web site is updated regularly to show the “big three” that you are actively in business and your site contains current up-to-date content, therefore more valuable to web users.

A couple of general points

Although there are many variables involved when optimizing your web site for the web, search engines change their ranking protocol regularly and may use some or all of the optimizing techniques described here and vary the order of priority constantly. Furthermore, each search engine uses its own methodology to determine web site placement, so even if you did have the correct ‘formula’ it may be correct for Yahoo but not for Google.

This is why there is no guarantee of where your web site will appear in the rankings when your keywords are entered into search engines.

It helps in general, to look at search engines as companies that want to provide their customers (web users) with the most current, up-to-date, quality and relevant content they can. You just have to structure your site and content in such a way that you SHOUT OUT your relevancy to your industry.

For questions on SEO (more variables, suggestions etc) and other marketing or web related topics, contact Beamond Creative, LLC directly at info@beamondcreative.com.