Because your customers can come from anywhere at anytime — and because a web address is easier to remember than a phone number — it’s important to put your URL on everything. After all, the Internet never closes. Letterhead, invoices, hold messages, bus benches, packaging, shipping labels, signage and, of course, ads are all opportunities to promote your URL and drive business to your site.
When a search engine crawls the Web for sites, it uses a spider. Of course, this is not a fuzzy arachnid, but an application that searches through the Web, cataloging the content on pages and the links between them. However, the important keywords and links displayed on your web page may not be visible to search engine spiders. That is why it is essential that you run a spider simulator against your site. This tool allows you to see your website through a spider’s eyes and get an idea of how the search engines see your site.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.