Increase web traffic with inbound marketing

by Deb Kirby

The classic marketing model was outbound oriented and generally consisting of an inside sales force calling on prospects and customers, telemarketing, tradeshows, seminars, trade publication advertising and publicity and broadcast advertising. Over the past few years, electronic marketing has become an essential part of the marketing mix. Marketing efforts for even the most traditional companies is shape shifting into an inbound marketing model consisting of search engine optimization, pay-per-click ads, blogging, social media and targeted landing pages.

As electronic marketing increases in sophistication, more can be done to attract prospects with less money in more creative ways. Here are just five inbound marketing techniques geared toward increasing your web traffic and revenue:

· Search engine optimization (SEO): the foundational piece of inbound marketing is search engine optimization—the process of organically growing a site’s popularity with search engines through link building, strong keyword content, search site submissions and other tactics. For more on SEO, check out these articles: In the dark about search engine optimization?, How well is your website performing?, Create an SEO blueprint to improve your website.

A good SEO strategy will boost your organic search engine result rankings for keywords, which is a key to being found by the right prospects.

· Pay-Per-Click (PPC): a complement to SEO is search marketing, which includes PPC ads. Unlike organic rankings and, as the name suggests, this is where you put out cash to attract web visitors. These ads are listed above and to the right of the organic search results and are often labeled as “sponsored” link or “sponsored” results. With PPC, you bid on keywords and create ads. PPC is a pay as you go plan where you can establish a maximum number of clicks each day to help you stay on budget. You are charged only for the number of times someone clicks on your ad.

· Blogging: a good blog is topical and posted to often and, like it or not, is here to stay. The complexity of your blog depends on how many people will contribute and the rules you put in place for content management. For some companies, a blog can represent a logistical and legal quagmire. For an individual, it is time consuming, but more manageable to handle. In any event, an interesting blog where people logon frequently can direct many new visitors to your website.

· Social media: social media optimization (SMO) is a marketing tactic to generate web traffic by participating on sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Digg and many others. Like blogging, it can be time consuming, but done well, it is worth the effort. Effective use of social networking can help create buzz for your company or a product and have the messages go viral. It has the potential to substantially increase web traffic and increase the number of inbound links to your site.

· Targeted Landing Pages: the big payoff when you start generating more web traffic is the landing page—a targeted and well constructed page either on your website or acting as a standalone mini website. When someone finds your organic listing, clicks through on a PPC ad, visits your site after reading your blog or finds you via social networking, a landing page is where they should be sent. Your home page is probably well done, but you have few chances to capture the attention of your prospects. Don’t waste it by sending them to the home page. Instead, construct specific pages that are keyword oriented, interesting and persuasive. The goal of a landing page is move the prospect to action.

Do you see what’s happening here? Inbound marketing is very much a building process just like outbound marketing, where all parts align to create a unified marketing strategy. Inbound marketing relies on the building block principle as well where SEO is complemented by PPC, blogs and social media with visitors being directed to action on targeted landing pages. If your marketing strategy hasn’t yet included all electronic marketing has to offer, then start with these five techniques to build even greater web traffic and revenue.

Search Engine Optimization at the Top

by Denver SEO

US Web Central, also Called Denver SEO, Presents a "Family of Case Studies" Regarding Website Reconstruction and SEO Work for 3 Different Websites for 3 Different Companies, all Within One Extended Family. SEO is a Hot Topic These Days; it's all About Being #1 or Being on Page 1. This is the Information Age and This is About How to Get Noticed. ----US Web Central, Denver, Colorado, USA.

It's called SEO: Search Engine Optimization. From the perspective of US Web Central, a Denver SEO (http://www.uswebcentral.com/seo.html) company, it's their Job to get you noticed; their mantra, their sacred mission to get you ranked higher. Or rather, to have your company be listed as high as possible in search engine listings. Becoming the #1 listing on Google in your keywords, is considered the Holy Grail; that lofty position from high on the mountaintop, looking down on the vast plain of the Internet's millions of other listings far below you, or getting onto Page 1. This is important, because people looking for what you do may only be interested in what they perceive to be the best, most popular or top listings. Being on Page 27 just doesn't inspire as much interest in you and what it is that you are trying to sell. And if being noticed and becoming #1 and on Page 1 interests you, please read on...

What does this mean? When you call up your browser, there are various search engine softwares that, for free, find and organize listings matching, as closely as possible, what you typed into your browser search box. After you press Go or Find or Search, or hit your return bar on your keyboard, these services try to find what it is their software believes you are trying to find, then lists it in order, from the highest match to the lowest.

When you run a business, you want people who use their computers to find goods and services to find you at the top of the list presented by their web browsers.

What are these free services?

Google and Yahoo are the reigning champions and there are hounds at their heels, for instance, Microsoft recently launched its own search engine: Bing. Okay, so why would any company down in the trenches, just going about their business, trying to stay alive in this economy, care about all of this?

Well, in this complex day and age, filled with so many diverse interests, it is easy to be overlooked. That's not a good thing if you are trying to sell goods and services, as most business wish. So, if there is something that can be done to have people notice your company on the Internet; that is what you want to happen.

The first thing you must do is create a website for your company. That's exactly what these 3 companies did when they employed our Denver Web Company (http://www.uswebcentral.com) Company: Rand Soellner Architect, CashiersNCLand, and Chisholm's Trail Leather. Only, when they guided the development of their websites at US Web Central, Denver Search Engine Optimization (http://www.uswebcentral.com), something was added to each of their company names: ".com" So, the 3 companies are now: RandArch.com, CashiersNCLand.com, and ChisholmsTrailLeather.com. Some abbreviations were made to make it easier for people to remember their website addresses. You don't want that too complicated, which is part of the advice and cousel rendered by US Web Central, which is: Denver SEO Company (http://www.USWebCentral.com) online.

Each of these companies actually had existing websites before they approached USWebCentral. So why did they come to them seeking help? Simple answer: they did not have personal control over their websites and did not know how to accomplish this and the updates they wanted to have happen were not happening swiftly enough. "I felt like I needed to be running and I wasn't even walking," said Rand Soellner, "It was frustrating, like trying to swim through molasses in a big swimming pool, knowing that your business life depended on you getting to the other side and things just were not getting done efficiently."

Becoming #1, or at least on the first page of a search is the dream of most companies who have an Internet presence. Rand Soellner Architect is the #1 Mountain Home Architect in the World on most search engines.

Case Study #1: www.RandArch.com Rand Soellner Architect, one of the leading residential architects in the United States, wanted his website transformed. He performed a national search, looking for a website design company with an added "X " ingredient: "Something that distinguished a particular website design company ahead of others, a company that set the height of the bar higher than the others," added Soellner, "When I saw US Web Central's own website and reviewed their pages and listened to their video spokespeople, I figured I had found the right company. Not many people were doing these things. They appeared to be highly advanced technologically and philosophically." Rand wanted a company that knew more than he did about websites, after all Rand Soellner is an architect, not a computer programmer.

"During my first conversation with Scott Carvin, USWebCentral's owner, he made me feel at ease. He talked like a regular guy and educated me about my options," said Soellner. Rand mentioned being told about Blogs and SEO, about which he knew nothing at that time. Scott Carvin mentioned that he felt the need to share with Rand what the latest techniques were to help Rand's business look good, on an improved website, one which Scott offered to transform into a software type that would allow Rand to edit it himself, if he wished, or USWebCentral could do this for him, on a pay as you go basis. Rand opted to pay USWebCentral to convert his website into an editable format.

USWebCentral is as much a Knowledge-Transfer/Education company as it is a Denver web design (http://www.uswebcentral.com) company. Their SEO is the X factor Rand Soellner was looking for.

Case Study #2: www.CashiersNCLand.com. The story of Rand's wife: Merry Soellner, who is a western North Carolina real estate broker, parallels her husband's. "I really needed to be able to enter my new listings within a certain period of hours, in order to be in compliance with local realtor board requirements, as well as to begin marketing my clients' properties, homes and businesses. After US Web Central transcribed my website, now, I can get into my website on my own and upload digital photos I have taken just minutes before, and add text describing my listings; this is wonderful," said Merry Soellner. www.CashiersNCLand.com is Merry's website.

Case Study #3: www.ChisholmsTrailLeather.com . The story of Rand's brother, Alan Soellner and his wife, Donna, has similarities with the two case studies above. ChisholmsTrailLeather is the leading custom authentic Old West Leather holster, belt and accessory maker in the United States. He and his brother are the classic over-achievers. They have to be the best at what they do. They make historically accurate holsters for major movies, like Val Kilmer's holsters for his new upcoming movie about Doc Holiday, Miley Cyrus' holsters and belts for her new World tour, Sam Elliot's knife sheath, the "bad guys" holsters and belts on the "3:10 to Yuma," and others, in addition to selling their goods to any interested parties who happen to see their goods on their website.

Needless to say, all 3 of the above mentioned clients took advantage of USWebCentral.com's video spokesperson (http://www.uswebcentral.com/videohost.html).

Search engine optimization and gaming the system

by Thom Stratton

How high a company's website is ranked on search engines like Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft Bing can make a significant difference in revenues, so it's no surprise that a business has grown up around helping companies improve that ranking. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is becoming a big business, but beware. Some SEO companies may try to cheat the system, and it will be you that is punished if they are caught.

Just how search engines rank web page listings in response to queries is each company's closely-guarded secret. Yet, as George Seybold, president of Seybold Scientific, an SEO company in Boise, Idaho, will tell you, most of them are more than willing to give you guidelines. "Google will tell you exactly to how to get into Google," he pointed out. "Microsoft will tell you exactly how to get into Bing. They don’t want you to game their system. That wastes their cycles trying to fend off the people who are gaming their system."

Yet because there are enough people out there trying to game the system, most search engine companies employ staff to figure out what tricks they are using and shut them down. "There are nefarious ways to game the system," says Seybold. "Some of the older ways were to put white text on a white background. You can’t see it, but it’s visible to the search engines. Well, Google saw through that."

Hiding text is one way less scrupulous SEO specialists try to achieve higher rankings on web pages. By hiding repeated keywords they can actually make a page look more important to a search engine than it really is. One of the latest techniques is to hide text behind images on the page. Google and Microsoft are both working out methods to screen for this technique.

Trying to cheat the system comes with a high measure of risk. If caught, a search engine may choose to not list a website in their listings at all. "They’ll punish you," Seybold admits. "They’ll blacklist you, and literally you have to file an appeal with them and say 'please include me again'." The biggest problem here is that the company that is blacklisted may be innocent. Their only fault may be hiring an SEO "expert" who tries to game the system on their behalf and gets caught. But if blacklisted from a search engine, the only customers that will find you are those who already know about you.

The best approach is to hire a reputable SEO business. They know there are no short-cuts, and will focus on tried and true principles. The best way to get a high ranking on a search engine is to build a site that is truly valuable to those who are seeking the information or products you offer. It literally is a case of "if you build it (well) they will come."

Seybold admits that those who are willing to invest the time and effort into learning how to optimize websites can do it themselves and be successful. But not everyone has the time or the desire to first learn the techniques and then stay on top of the rapid changes in the field. SEO companies have a vested interest in keeping current on the latest advances in search technology.

Not every business relies on the Internet to attract customers. For those companies SEO may not be necessary. But for those who rely on the Internet, gaining a high ranking on search engines should be a key part of their strategy. Knowing what to do and what not to do can make all the difference