Be sure to listen in if you are here in Phoenix.  If you are near a computer, visit http://1100kfnx.com

With the recent reports showing Google search results picking up Facebook comments, it is now a great way to link to articles on your website with a Facebook plugin.   Here is a quick example so this will make sense to everyone.

I write this blog post, don’t forget to leave a comment at the bottom of the page you see an area you can leave a comment with your Facebook login.  Now every time someone leaves a comment using the facebook extension, that text is indexed to my blog page.  So if you leave a comment saying “SEO is as crazy as purple dragons.” In theory, you could search that exact phrase within a few days on Google and see our blog post pop up.

This is very exciting due to the power of adding searchable content to a page.  If you are able to add a blog post which results on lots of talk through comments, all of this text is indexed and will help with your ranking authority.

We hope this helps, and be sure to leave a quick comment!   Let us know if you need help syncing your facebook account to your website.

1. Content, Content , Content- Social media sites have a massive amount of traffic. The key is obviously getting the traffic to your social media page, right? All content on social media sites is searchable one way or another. Take the time to write meaningful content relating to your industry. When someone in need of advice or your service searches, you’ll be at the right place at the right time.

2. Don’t Measure Success By Numbers- Although this is completely cliché to any business owners out there, let me explain. Social media can be the death of you. You will catch yourself spending countless hours trying to increase your popularity. Don’t worry about how many followers you have, rather focus on targeting the” right” audience. Who cares if you have 1 million fans, if they all live in India and you are a local plumber!

3. Social Media Does Not Equal Self-Promotion- Too many companies get so passionate about sharing about themselves…yawn. Who cares?! What people care about on social media is offering advice and information that can help one another. One in ten posts on social media sites should promote your company. The other nine posts should be focused on positive interaction and transparency to help others. Offer some insight for free about your trade. If you are a mechanic, show some love by telling your friends how to save money by doing a quick oil change themselves. In reality…if they haven’t done it before, I don’t think your post will convince them to start. It shows some social love though.

The internet is exploding with new online subscribers every day and this means if you have an online business you can see your potential customer base increase by millions of people every week.  I say “potential customer base” because they aren’t your customers if they don’t know you exist.  Getting your name out in front of people is how you make them a customer and this is true of both the online and the offline world.  If you have a storefront in Seattle, Washington, the chances of someone in Miami, Florida becoming your customer are virtually non-existent.  How could they be, these people don’t even know you exist.

Historically the way this problem has been approached was by advertising.  If you were trying to expand your sales into Florida from your store in Seattle you would have to find some way to bring your sales message to the people in the Sunshine State.  You could buy magazine advertisements, radio spots, TV ads, or targeted newspaper placements.  All of these cost money and you were really never sure if the people you were reaching had any interest in your product anyway.

With SEO this is no longer a problem.  SEO, Search Engine Optimization, works because you are only attracting the people who have a desire to learn more about your product or even buy it.  Your online business opportunity can grow because you are targeting just the people who are most likely to buy what you have to sell.

The theory behind search engine optimization is really quite simple, but a little harder to implement.  When a person searches online for a product or service you want them to find your website.  You do this by getting listed at the top of the search pages.  If you are selling dog collars with a site The Best Dog Collars, you want the person who searches for “dog collars” to go to your site.  The way to do this is to be the top listing in the search page.

The great thing about these customers is they are free.  You do not have to advertise, you don’t have to spend any money acquiring leads.  All you have to do is get your site placed at the top of the page when a person searches for dog collars.

If you would like to find out more detailed information about Phoenix SEO, and get a free consultation, please give us a call 623.266.2726

Myspace started out as one of the first premier social media websites.  It blew up over night.  Myspace was the perfect place to stay connected with your friends through a common website.  No more emailing each other, or chat rooms.  It took being “social” to new levels on the internet.  As fast paced as Myspace became, there as a lack of organizing your social groups.  There was no common feature to send messages to just one set of friends, or be able to create a business account and link it with your personal one.  With that lack of functionality, facebook was born.

Facebook has taken over the Myspace world.  With an much easier-to-use layout, group creating abilities…it trumped the big name that started the social media phenomenon.  Myspace began to see sharp drops in user numbers, while facebook could not believe the amount of new users created daily it was seeing.

Here is a great Youtube clip that was created to show how popular social media has become.  It is baring the influence for the next generation of human interaction.

Internet marketing is more than just some links on a couple of web pages.  It has become a way of life.  Make sure that your Phoenix internet marketing strategies are consulted by a professional that knows how to attack your target market.

Google had this to say in regards to the importance of site speed, “Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”

This only makes perfect sense.  Think about it…how many of you absolutely hate slow websites?  “Oh my gosh…this is taking FOREVER!”  We are all guilty of yelling this at the monitor.  Google just understands that its users want quality results.  There are a few factors that you might want to look into if you have a slow website.  First, your media.  Make sure that you aren’t loading pictures that are a billion megapixels large.  Each major picture that you have on your site has to load individually and it can take awhile for the page to load.  If you are using a picture for a thumbnail pic, take the time to minimize the resolution to 72 dpi, and size the pixel ratio to the exact size that you will need it for on your website.

Video clips.  Storing video on your site can take up a tremendous about of bandwidth from your pages.  As we just learned, this is going to now hurt you.   One way I suggest to get around this, Youtube people! Use it.  Google owns it and it will do nothing but help you.  Make the title of the clip the same as what your top keywords are.  Once this is uploaded, take the Free embedded code and load that onto your site.  It takes that bandwidth from Youtube, plus it helps you.

Here are some links that Google suggests to use when trying to rank how fast your site is running.

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about site performance.

In closing…don’t freak out if your site is getting a bad score from some of these page speed sources.  Google does say that the importance of this factor is not high.  However, if you owned a business and wanted to bring forward only quality products and services, wouldn’t you only recommend the best of the best??? In my opinion, this is going to grow as a priority.  Don’t wait…get your site optimized.

Keep up the good internet marketing!

To help you make sure that you are getting you moneys worth, we have listed our Top 5 Internet Marketing Firms Must Dos…These factors must never be over looked.

1. Link Building- Understanding that website priority is similar to a high school popularity contest is important.  Being popular in high school includes being well liked on many different levels.  You had to find the balance between the Jocks, Skaters, Choral, Band, and Tech kids.  Being well liked in just one group wasn’t enough.  You also had to make sure that other popular kids in school enjoyed your company and liked you back.  Same thing with your website.  It isn’t enough to have a bunch of back links from some nobody websites.  You need to have links from well liked and “authority” websites in your same genre.  Recognize other well liked and popular sites (sites with high page rank) and aggressively work out a back link deal with them.
2. Keyword Research- I was just visiting this week with a business owner that has been paying for SEO to the same company for 2 years.  He had a very solid level of trust with them, but has been dissapointed that he never gets calls.  I had him sit down with me and make a list of the top 10 keywords that his SEO company is helping him rank for.  Sure enough, his site was on the first page of Google for all 10! Way to go! However, we did some research on what the Google search volume for those terms.  If you added up the total searches per month for all 10 words, it was less than 50 times per month.  He was in shock! You can be on the first page of a lot of search terms, but if they aren’t being searched, you are just throwing your money away!
3. Blog- In sports you have to be active in order to win.  In just about any sport that I think of, there is no substitute for an athlete with speed.  If you are not reactive, you are going to lose.  Same thing with the internet.  You need to show that your website is active and current with market trends and information.  Google and other power search engines want to see a site that is continually putting up fresh content and good information.  A blog is a must to show that you are writing information relating to your product or service that you are trying to promote.
4. Content- In the internet marketing world, the saying “Content is King!” holds true every day.  A site with good information (hopefully you agree this is good content) will win out 10 out of 10 times with a site that lacks information.  You need to make sure that quality content is being created and updated on the website.  If you get traffic to your site, but see a high bounce rate, that means you need to put up some better content.  Keep people interested in what you have to say.  Show some love and benefit your readers, it will always come back to benefit you with back links (hint hint) and more desire to read other information on your site.
5. Title Tags- Have you ever noticed on Google search results the blue words on each result don’t match the URL domain name?  That is the website page title that you are seeing.  You will see that the search term you are looking for has those same words darker and bolder.  Google has put high priority in matching the page title with your search term.  You have to take what I have taught you above and implement the right keywords in the title, with the right content.

Following these 5 simple steps will help you understand what you must do to take your website to the next level.  For more information regarding phoenix internet marketing, give us a call or just post a comment and we will answer.

Now that we have agreed that the internet is the way of the future, and growing daily, you need to understand what different trends are when beginning your internet marketing.  Every person out there has a different perception of what internet marketing is.  To some it might include paying google to list a advertisement for their website when people search a certain term.  To others a logo on a friends website that promotes your new business venture.  Both are internet marketing, due to the fact that you are trying to expose to internet viewers your service or product.

Marketing on the internet can be so much more than just a listing here or there.  It can be a game of monopoly that leaves your hungry to dominate a search term that is growing.  That is where we come in.  We want to give you advice on how you can make your website visible to the most amount of people, in the shortest amount of time.  I am not saying it is a short term effort, because you will see that big efforts at the beginning will have a large compounding effect as your site becomes popular and stronger relevancy in the search engines eyes.

Internet marketing in Phoenix has not been a priority as compared to bigger cities around the US.  In fact it has been one of the last states to really see the importance to getting exposure on the internet.  As internet marketing grows, watch out for the new industry leaders.  The first companies in each industry that jump on internet marketing first will have the strongest presence which leads to more sales than the past big dawgs of old marketing ways.

Local Phoenix Web Marketing vs National Web Marketing

Often the case for seo clutter is the lack of understanding between local SEO and National SEO.  Search engines operate by showing you the most relevant information possible to your search terms.  If you search for fitness trainer, you’ll see afaa.com pop up as number one.  Why? You have no interest in Aerobics Association of America? I didn’t think so… but the Google engine sure thought it was applicable to you.  This is because their content on their website is formatted around the terms “fitness trainer” and gets a ton of traffic.

So how can we find a local version?  Well, we just need to add “Phoenix” in front of our search, and bam…local results.  This is important because if you are a personal fitness trainer located in Phoenix, you shouldn’t be spending your time trying to rank your website for national search terms.  Although the numbers look very convincing to rank nationally, it won’t help your business.  You personally can’t fly all over the country for each client.

Take a look at the Phoenix SEO Agency proposal.  Are you paying for a bunch of national ranking that won’t get your business anywhere, or are you ranking locally.  Rank local first!

Social Media: Bust or Brilliant?

I have written several times about social media and the power behind it.  I am not a fan so much of small businesses spending outrageous amounts of time on Twitter.  It can become the biggest bust of time.  However, facebook seems to have a more powerful local feel.  Take the time to automate your facebook posts to link on your twitter account.  This is a good way of killing two birds with one stone.

If you are looking for a Phoenix SEO Agency or Social Media Agency, feel free to contact us at Local Work Marketing to give you some free advice.  Our phone number is 602.283.5684.

Power Lines Fall on Crashed Vehicle, Driver Trapped: MyFoxPHOENIX.com

Telling your story the most compelling way will always get you attention.  We could draw up some sappy analogies about how important it is to do this on your website to get more business, but you get the point.  At the end of the day… do it like George!