Latest Posts

Put your website on the map with DMOZ

Not long ago, if you remember, the Yahoo! search engine was organized by categories, allowing Web users to search for a website in a linear way. A person would start with the general category of “Health” and narrow down their search to eventually reach a list of “Nutrition Supplement” websites, for example.

Yahoo! still maintains the Yahoo! Directory. Likewise, the Open Directory Project (ODP), based at www.dmoz.org, maintains the largest most comprehensive user-edited directory of the World Wide Web. It is a means for the Internet to organize itself, as well as an unbiased, non-promotional, non-sponsored resource of websites. And by “non-sponsored,” I mean free. And by “free,” I mean there’s no reason your website should not be listed on DMOZ. In fact, there’s one big reason to be listed.

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Paid inclusion is always a sure thing

Appearing on the first page of a search engine is like reaching the city of Eldorado. It’s an amazing feat and not easily achieved. So take a shortcut and buy your way into the natural search results of Yahoo! While Search Engine Optimization is a long-term strategy, paid inclusion offers almost instantaneous results. Basically, you will pay Yahoo! to ensure that your search result ends up on the first page of that keyword’s search engine results page (SERP), in the “Natural/Organic” (vs. the paid search area). To end users, they are clicking on the natural results, as they cannot tell the difference between these results and the truly “organic” listings. Yahoo! calls it Search Submit, but it is also known in the industry as Paid Inclusion.

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Diversify your search engine marketing

Yahoo!, Bing and Ask — respectfully known as “the other three” — may not be monopolizing the current online advertising industry like Google, but they do offer other significant benefits. Since there is less competition, your company may have a better likelihood of ranking higher. Also, consumers coming from Yahoo!, Bing and Ask may convert at higher rates. As you may remember from an earlier post, it’s not just higher traffic that counts, but the traffic that converts the best. By focusing on the smaller search engines, your marketing dollars may just go farther.

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Market to search engines with an XML sitemap

Invite Google and Yahoo! to get better acquainted with your website or blog through an XML sitemap. Also called a “search engine sitemap,” an XML sitemap is a document that lists all the different pages on your website that you want the search engines to crawl, and which most major search engines can read and look for to correctly index your website, including URLs that may not be discoverable by their normal crawling process.

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South Florida Young Pros Get Philanthropic with a Child Is Missing Holiday Fundraiser at Starmark

A Child Is Missing (ACIM), a Fort Lauderdale-based, national non- profit organization dedicated to helping law enforcement agencies locate missing children and the elderly during the first critical hours of their disappearance, gathered support from local business leaders and young professionals alike during its Holiday Fundraising and Networking event held Wednesday, December 17th at Starmark International’s StarBar Networking Center.

“We are excited that so many young professionals took the time out of their busy schedules to show such strong support of our mission, and we are grateful to Starmark for making this networking event happen at Starmark,” said Sherry Friedlander, President and Founder of A Child Is Missing. (more…)

Starmark Advertising Wins Winterfest Award

Starmark Advertising, a Fort Lauderdale-based, full-service integrated marketing communications agency participated for the first time in the annual Winterfest 2008 boat parade and won the “Best In Lights for Showboat” award.

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PR Opportunities Ahead: Social Media is here to stay

The emergence of social media has changed the way businesses develop, communicate and position their key messages. In a time when traditional press kits are outdated as soon as they are printed, the Web has changed the way public relations is practiced in recent years, and the trend continues to grow exponentially. From myriads of blogs, message boards, to social networks and viral messaging popping up all over the Internet, the challenge remains for businesses to break through the clutter and successfully deliver their message to the right audience.

But, where there is challenge, there is also opportunity. By determining the right social media to participate, and engage in will pay dividends from a public relations standpoint.

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Bluetooth Marketing: Marketing based on a users proximity?

In the movie Minority Report, Earth in the not-so-distant future offered advertisements custom tailored to the individual. Walls and windows of videos offered goodies that matched the buying preferences of each person, an effective way to lure consumers into the nearby retail locations.

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Track ROI across all channels (online and offline)

Nowadays, marketing budgets are hitting a plateau, if not careening downhill. Everyone has to closely watch where their money goes – and hope it comes back bringing customers. When it comes to any type of marketing, it’s important to track ROI (Return on Investment). And with what is happening to budgets, it’s even more important to track all campaigns across both online and offline channels in order to know which tactics are working and which are not. Then, ramp up the good efforts and shut off the bad ones.

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Anchor Text: Link building done right

Anchor text is the visible text of a link. Although it may consist of just one or two words, what your anchor text says when linking back to your site is a very big deal. A huge deal. Colossal. But also very easy to do right.

The power of anchor text lies in how high your website will rank in search engine results. And this is based on the hyperlinks that connect to you from other people’s sites, not your own. This is called link building. Link building starts with choosing the best keywords that relate to your business. Then, whether you are requesting links from other sites, submitting to directories or buying links (and be careful who you buy from), you have to choose the right anchor text.

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Long tail keywords: a smart SEM strategy

Why should you pay for every search a consumer types as he or she decides between a “red sports car,” a “blue sports car” and “a tan minivan”? When paying for clicks, businesses tend to focus on the perceived top 10-20 search terms in order to bring consumer traffic to their site. However, how often are these consumers ready to buy? The terms that are most popular and most managed by site owners are rarely those that provide the most business. Translation: They’re just browsing.

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Keyword-rich press releases, and why they are important

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, keywords are like gold. However, it’s not enough to optimize your website content and stop there because even the press releases your company distributes on Internet newswires could benefit from a good SEO makeover.

PR Web, for example, can host your searchable press release on prweb.com and provide visibility on Yahoo! News and Google. But whether or not your press release comes up on a search depends on whether or not it’s keyword-rich.

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