Which Search Engine to Focus On?
From an Information Management Strategy perspective, it serves Internet Marketing professionals well to understand what kind of Search Tools are available and typically leveraged to find their clients' digital assets.
Check out this post on
Search Engine Information Management.
Labels: search information-management
Welcome From the Neighborhood
Even the big dogs can't ignore SEO/SEM (i.e. "Publishing 2.0") for hyperlocal marketing...
Washington Post's LoudounExtra suffers...
Labels: newspapers
Loudoun and Fairfax Omni-Media Marketing Alliance
KME Internet Marketing (KME) of South Riding, Virginia announces a strategic Washington DC region Internet Marketing and Communications alliance with
Trivision Studios of Chantilly, Virginia. This partnership enables end-to-end delivery of coordinated, integrated and highly-effective omnimedia marketing and communications for our clients, including powerful and creative marketing, entertainment and multi-media campaigns on the Internet, in print, with distributed electronic media, and broadcast via TV and radio. This Northern Virginia partnership also creates the most targeted, flexible, relevant and comprehensive opportunities for local businesses and organizations to promote their own brand, products, services or events to audiences in the Metropolitan Washington, DC region or anywhere in the world.
This alliance is an especially powerful and relevant business event in the DC area, originating in Northern Virginia's Dulles South area of western Fairfax, western Prince William and eastern Loudoun Counties. With the rapid growth and expansion of local businesses, national and international commercial interests in this area, this partnership provides very critical, focused and coordinated business services in an otherwise segmented and difficult-to-negotiate regional advertising market. This alliance also showcases the availability and advanced capabilities of two leading representatives of Northern Virginia's world-class Internet technology, new media and professional services community, and in particular highlights the effectiveness of regional collaboration between Fairfax and Loudoun County technology leaders.
Read more about this
Washington DC Marketing and Communications Announcement...
Labels: dc-media-communications, virginia-internet-marketing
It's not "Search in English Optimization" (SEO)
We recently had an interesting case with a client who produces a print product that reflects a very culturally-diverse reader base. The target audience and demographics come from all over - India, Turkey, Germany, Italy, Indonesia, China - you name it. Not surprisingly, the advertisements and reviews of local service providers also reflect some cultural influence and bias, both in the actual business names and descriptions of products. It turns out that a very helpful skill for SEO practitioners (at least in the US) is rudimentary knowledge, or perhaps simple acknowledgement, that keywords and phrases in foreign languages are obviously as important to get correct as those in English.
In this case, the business name of some copy we saw (in French) was misspelled. Now we don't claim to be the Loudoun County Spelling Bee Champs, but it only took some high-school level mastery of the language to recognize a possible problem. Some quick research revealed that, yes, the business name wasn't taking some sort of artistic liberties with the language of Napolean. What was concerning, however, was that this was noticed only by the person with the French language background, and not for others without.
Copywriting, editing and proofing methods do dictate that all proper names be checked and double-checked, especially if these names end up as keywords to be bid upon (with Google pay-per-click, for example). But this obviously doesn't always happen, and may we be so heretic as to suggest that most English-centric proofers (especially on the web) tend to gloss over foreign-phrases and names with some sort of assumption that, if they're in another language, they're either irrelevant or simply not to be taken seriously?
It becomes very apparent to us, especially in local and regional SEO/SEM practices (where cultural diversity is prominent), that talent must be retained for a minimum level of copy-proofing in different languages. This is obviously pretty difficult in areas like Washington, DC, with so many countries and cultures represented, but at least some effort should be made. I suppose we're lucky that our existing staff has background in Spanish, German, French, Latin (!), English and various dialects of the areas near Exit 14 off the New Jersey Turnpike - but it simply might not be enough. We certainly plan to be extra careful with any word or phrase that looks like it wasn't used on the Mayflower...
Labels: northern virginia seo
Virginia Internet Marketing Training - Ask Kelly & Ted - A Separate Franchise Website?
Here's a good question we've had from several clients -
"It seems like we're getting a fair amount of clicks to our Corporate-hosted website (we're a franchise owner) and then a subset of goal conversions. However, we're not seeing over 50% of those goal conversions actually come through. I'm concerned that our website content is not driving people to follow-through. A couple thoughts on why are 1) our website content isn't being kept updated by Corporate, and 2) our actual homepage template doesn't really allow for customization, is pretty mundane and the graphics aren't pretty.
The website is not a priority for the Franchise HQ, however, I believe that our local consumer has a high expectation for the "website experience" and so I'm contemplating creating our own website, so that we can really customize it to our needs. I would like to get your thoughts on whether this is a good idea?"
Here's our first message back:
Yes, a major part of search engine marketing success is the attention given to the "landing page", or basically where customers are funneled to convert. Many online advertising campaigns establish specific landing pages (i.e. not always the home page) for particular campaigns. As a franchise owner, the "corporate" website may be helpful because you don't have to maintain or design it, it has a bunch of built-in backlinks from other corporate pages, and it also may be the only way you can actually advertise your "corporate brand" (i.e. you can't use the "official" logo on non-corporate generated material, for example).
We have another client with a similar situation, whose "corporate" professional services site doesn't do much for him - so we set up a few other sites for his business, but without using the "Corporate" name (it's not allowed). We used other names, terms and phrases to spell out the product and association. It's been pretty successful from a page ranking and conversion perspective, and we obviously can do what we want to it for design. We also worked with some real estate agents, whose brokers established their initial web presence; but they wanted their own site, for custom control of current listings and messages. So the situation is fairly common.
For your own website, there's basically three routes to take (for a static, html/css-only site).
1) Free - set up a blog (blogger or wordpress), a myspace or facebook page, merchantcircle, 5minutesite.com, etc. - it's free, and fairly easy. There's drawbacks (like it's not your own domain), but it's quick and easy. (Though professional SEO services should still be obtained).
2) Inexpensive - a reasonable site can be created using a free template, and shared hosting services - this requires some web programming, but not a lot - $300 (to a web programmer), and $10-20 per month hosting will usually get you a decent 1-5 page site using a free template (or just copying someone else's design, being careful to avoid copyright infringement).
3) Custom site - the sky's the limit, especially if you want a unique, custom design - expect to pay at least $1500 and up (unless the "customization" is really limited).
We've dealt with all of the above - it really depends (1) on your budget, (2) the sophistication and uniqueness of the functions and design of your site, and (3) how "big" your site is. But go for it - the more presence you have on the Internet, that you're in control of, the better for your business - especially if "Corporate" just isn't coming through for you.
Virginia Internet Marketing Training - Ask Kelly & Ted - More Traffic?
Here's a recent question that came to us - while it's a question we obviously hear a lot, there aren't a lot of places to go that succinctly summarize the steps to take (at least from our Internet Marketing, Media and Communications perspective):
"What are your recommendations to generate more traffic, etc? When do you guys get involved - during the page designs, build or post build?"
Our answer:
"Generating more traffic" is a big part of our business - but it's not the "end-game" of your business or our relationship. The "end-game" is more business for you, meaning more sales, referrals, publicity, etc. So, "generating more traffic" is a large and necessary piece of the puzzle, but there are also many things to do before and after the traffic is generated.
To actually generate more traffic, it's going to involve AT LEAST the following activities, each of which requires research, content design and generation, monitoring and updating. (Note - many businesses do just some of the following - determined by their budget, marketing plan and particular competitive positioning).
1 - SEO (search engine optimization) - optimization of the website; there's a long list of things to do, many of which may be peculiar to the specific site. Things like the right metatags, keyword density, html optimization, anchor and alt text, etc. Note that optimization for search engines needs to be balanced against optimization (i.e. usability) for people - the end game is not just traffic, but conversion of landing pages (i.e. people actually take action).
2 - SEM (search engine marketing) - distribution of optimized content and backlinks to sites and directories on the web - the specific form of the content (includes multimedia) and where it's placed will be specific to the site, its business and reputation, and the marketing plan. Note that "marketing" means both "free" placement, and "paid" placement (like Google Adwords). Creating and maintaining Adwords campaigns is a real science - that's why you should only hire "certified" professionals. These campaigns can range from $30 to many tens of thousands of dollars a month in pay-per-click charges - it's serious business.
3 - Social Media Marketing - this is like SEM, but much more "conversational", and there's a certain amount of reputation and community building that needs to happen, among the "right" sites, and very carefully (i.e. you need to play nice in the sandbox). Marketing formats include everything from text comments to videos. Think Facebook, stumbleupon, delicious, etc.
4 - Plain 'ol Online Marketing - this is not necessarily targeted at search engines (but should always consider copywriting that's optimized for keywords) - this includes email campaigns (with associated "opt-in" harvesting), classifieds, banner ad placement, and affiliate marketing (which presumes some digital content has been produced to offer or sell). This also implies some degree of digital content management - meaning, the various content and digital assets are managed and coordinated as they're created, distributed and tracked for performance.
5 - Online/Offline coordination - Northern Virginia media advertising and communications (and elsewhere, obviously) happens with flyers, by mail, broadcast on the tv and radio, on billboards (print and electronic), and at in-person meetups - a coordinated campaign on and off the Internet should be leveraging the same copywriting and graphic themes and messages.
6 - "Communications" - the broad industry we represent is called "Marketing AND Communications"; not all digital or physical content generated for broadcast or individual consumption is for advertising purposes. Much is simply for business communications purposes, whether to simply inform existing customers or to let broader audiences know what you're up to. Like press releases. Press release in particular, however, should be well-coordinated with your marketing campaign, in terms of keywords and backlinks. Other communications might be for individuals and organizations in non-profit activities - like creating an online social media resume.
"When do you guys get involved?"
It's always better to get started on the marketing campaign, and translating it into web content, as soon as possible - so that a new website has "built-in" SEO and SEM features, and so that the search indexes can get started indexing the site and building up the page rank. The answer is, therefore, "as soon as possible, even long before your website or digital content is created".
Labels: generating traffic
I Am Modern Magazine for Moms
Just a quick
press release for I Am Modern Magazine for Moms - one of our great partners and a fantastic Northern Virginia business.
Labels: modern-moms moms
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