So how do you choose the right keywords for your enterprise’s website? Depending on whom you ask, there are many ways to go about it, many online tools—Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery—that you can use, and a number of places to get started. But the important thing to remember is that no online tool or SEO expert knows your business as well as you do.

That’s why a brainstorming session should be a part of beginning an SEO or PPC campaign. Bring in everyone who’s important to your business and start talking; write down as many phrases as you can and don’t worry about repeating yourself or weeding things out just yet. Make a big, long list of all the ways people might try to find your site online.

Now you’re ready to turn to the tools, the online wizards, the keyword experts. They’ll help you figure out which keywords are most natural, most relevant, most specific, and most often searched. From there, you really can begin to realize the extent of keyword power.

These hints (with some liberties taken, of course) are excerpted from our white paper, Keyword Power: Optimize with Attention-Grabbing Keywords. To download this and other whitepapers, stop here and drop us a line.

Today, consumers typically begin their research for a product or service online, even if they plan to make the actual purchase in person or by phone. Local online searches are fast replacing other means of finding local companies, such as the phone book, newspapers, or other directories.

To grow your clientele, you must adjust with the times. Local search marketing offers the power of the major search engines with local directories, known as the Internet yellow pages. The search is targeted for geo-specific keywords related to your business and your community, such as “caterers in St. Louis,” or “St. Louis catering.” Many of your potential customers will use key words such as these to find area businesses and then drive to the location or make a phone call to secure the service or make the purchase.

Local search visibility is a simple and cost effective way to reach this large customer base. Because it can be time consuming, you may want to secure the help of a local search marketing expert to make sure your company is targeting the right keywords and getting included in the right locations. Another benefit is that you can take advantage of the local search marketing techniques with or without a website.

To find out more, Network Solutions offers an educational resource covering the pros and cons of local search marketing, titled, “Search Engine Optimization: Local Search Visibility Solutions Guide.” This paper will explain in greater detail how to get started, how to get help, and why this should be an important aspect of your marketing efforts.

I think that happens a lot. Whether it’s someone new to online marketing or search engine optimization or anything else—a lack of familiarity can make it more difficult to begin anything. I can’t help but think that if my friend just knew more about the potential and the basics, she would at least entertain the option. How many people who now thrive online once felt confused by terms like organic search, search engine spiders, keywords, optimized content, meta tags, title tags and quality links?

In my opinion, familiarity breeds empowerment. It starts with having access to experts or resources that make it easy to understand new terms, new industries, strange practices, technical complexities.

Maybe my friend will find ways to build her dream business without going online. If so, more power to her. But I would love for her to be able to choose a broader target market if she wants to. There are lots of great resources that explain the basics about getting online and what you can do to get an online business found. Maybe I’ll just be the pest she’ll thank later and send a few resources her way. You never know!

If you know someone—or are someone—who is thinking about building an online business, you can familiarize yourself with some basic terms and concepts with this free white paper. Select the link below and get more empowered.

Getting Found Online - SEO Guide (more)

Focus on search engine optimization (SEO) results and get essential tips to help you make your website more naturally visible to search engines like Google® and Yahoo®.

Scheduled for 30 minute intervals, the website analysis with Network Solutions web consultants and advisors will enable businesses to better understand why their website might be ranked higher by Google® and other search engines. The web consultants will offer suggestions for each site they review.

This event takes place at the following time and place:
Office Suites Plus
2050 Marconi Drive
Suite 300
Alpharetta, GA 20005
770-777-8202

Map to the event:

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Whether you’re a new entrepreneur, an established small business or someone who dabbles on the internet, each of these seminars will prove worthwhile. While “Getting More from Your Website” was designed to demonstrate trends that businesses have found for generating more revenues from the web, “Search Engine Optimization” enables business owners to better understand what Google® and other search engines look for in their websites, and what to do to get noticed.

Free Wifi for everyone!

In previous years, attendees at the Gwinnett Chamber’s Big Expo and Job Fair have found it necessary to pay for internet access. This year the Gwinnett Chamber extended an offer to Network Solutions to sponsor the wireless internet, which Network Solutions gladly accepted. As a result, all attendees and exhibitors attending the event this year will have free access to the wireless internet at the Gwinnett Civic Center.

This event will occur at the following time and place:
Gwinnett Civic Center
6400 Sugarloaf Parkway
Duluth, Georgia 30097
770-813-7500

Map to the Event:

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On Online Advertising. In an eMarketer.com study conducted during 2008, $13.5 billion was spent on online advertising with a bulk of it spent on search engine marketing. Just how much? Well based on the research, 88% of money spent went to paid search and 11% went towards organic search (SEO). Should these things change in the future, especially during a recession? With budgets being tightened and everyone trying to save some money, I would imagine that while search marketing efforts are going to increase, the focus shouldn’t be on throwing out paid search ads, but on your content and truly understanding how your site is being noticed by search engines.

As part of an integrated campaign, search marketing should play a crucial role, especially now during the recession. With more people getting online and using search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN Live Search, having your site appear near the top of the page when certain keyword phrases are typed can generate tremendous traffic to your website and can often lead to conversions/purchases. So what steps can you take in order to make the most out of this?

One of the first things that you should probably do to help avoid firing blindly into the Internet world is to have someone come in and conduct a search engine audit on your website. Based on my past experiences in working with a consultant, they review your site and let you know what’s good and what’s bad about it – from a search engine perspective. Then they go about and take a look at what keywords will work for your site and the competitiveness of each of them. They will generate statistics, trends, reports, etc. that will help you moving forward. There are a few companies that would conduct this audit for you so look them up. The beauty is that these keywords can be used both for SEO and SEM placements.

But let’s look at search engine optimization for a second. This is probably the first place you should look when trying to promote your site versus jumping over to search engine marketing and essentially “spraying and praying” that your text ads will strike a chord with someone and have them click on your site. It is a debateable topic whether paid search garners more traffic/conversion than organic search, but it would make sense to make sure that your “house is in order” before promoting it. By this I mean make sure that your content is exactly the way you want it? Is it specific enough that if someone types in a certain keyword, that the page will have enough information for them or will it result in them clicking further which is a bad thing? Does your site adhere to search engine optimization best practices? The more care you put into your content and your website design/development overall, the better your search results will be.

However, search engine advertising/marketing should not be overlooked. In fact, the technology behind it has grown over the past few years and there are ways to make sure that you are getting your money’s worth. Perhaps the greatest asset to SEM is the geo-targeting approach. If you are only wishing to reach folks in the west coast of the United States, then you can have your text ads show up for those people with IP addresses located in one of the several states in that region. This will help avoid your text ads showing up for people who might convert but you weren’t targeting – thus avoiding wasting money. Something else to think about when you’re managing your campaign is the time and effort (and possibly cost) associated with managing this SEM campaign. Unfortunately you can’t simply choose a keyword, insert your ad and let it run for the duration. Why? Because the keywords are done through an auction-like process. The higher you are willing to bid on a moment’s notice, the greater your frequency of being seen (impressions). It’s always a state of constant monitoring, but you don’t want to break the bank to be seen all the time. That would cost thousands of dollars (depending on the keyword). One option is to check out a web marketing management solution that may wind up saving you some money overall – like Yield Software. These companies will help you monitor your campaigns and allow you to manage it on your own. So they give you the tools, you shape its path.

It should be important to note that when you’re looking at the keywords and the bidding price, if you have enough content on your site relating to that keyword, you should focus on doing organic search or SEO. The less competitive the word or phrase you’re targeting, the more you should go with SEM. I once heard an analogy “SEM is like renting your home while SEO is owning your home”. This definitely holds true. With a strong SEO strategy, your website/landing page can be the leading “authority” on certain keywords but if you’re only focusing on a temporary campaign or not sure about the effectiveness on a specific page, then you might want to also consider SEM. However, do NOT think that these are mutually exclusive. These should be woven together to help form a cohesive strategy in driving traffic to your site and when done correctly, can help bring you success during these times.

What followed was an exercise in search engine optimization, personal branding, and reputation management, and the field of battle was Google search results (although the SEO techniques she used should work for other search engines, as well).

I’m not going to go into a long, drawn-out recap of what exactly she did, particularly because Susan Mernit already did one, including useful links: “Google link makeover: What Julia Angwin did, in plain English.”

It’s interesting to note, though, that this is, perhaps, not the standard SEO scenario, in that Ms. Angwin wasn’t competing with someone else — she was competing with herself. And she’s a pretty prolific writer, with a lot of her bylines coming from high-profile and well-linked publications.

Even so, her experience and advice should be useful to regular folks and businesses.

Ms. Angwin’s article was linked to from a bunch of high-profile sites, and there wasn’t anyone she could appeal to or bribe to quash that article, so the only alternative was to come up with better, more representative content that had better positioning on search results pages. (It’s kind of how some free speech activists say that the way to counter hate speech isn’t censorship — it’s with more speech.)

One thing she did was develop presences (using her name) on social networking and profile services like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, and interlink those profiles. These established sites do carry some good link weight, so they’re good resources. And they’re all free, requiring just an investment of your time.

Another thing she did was build out her personal Web site, on her own personal domain (juliaangwin.com), including her blog. (Even now, search engines tend to like blogs, because they’re usually highly linked and update relatively frequently.)

Again, Ms. Angwin is kind of a special case, since she writes for the WSJ and has a lot of high-profile content continually coming out. And if you’ve got a common name, you do face a lot more competition, especially when trying to find a domain. Looking at us NetSol bloggers, this isn’t a problem for Shashi, and not really one for me; on the other hand, Steve has a bit more of a challenge [though his Twitter profile is a top 5 result], as does Jill [she's competing with a soap opera character, though her.name domain comes up #2]. There’s always a way.

Anyway, managing and optimizing your personal search results is an ongoing process that you should stay on top of, so check out the article and Susan’s guide to it.

How does your name do in search results? Leave a comment below and tell us your own personal experience with personal branding on search results pages.

This means that you must be on top of your game to make your web site accessible by search engines of all types so your Search Engine Marketing strategy must be a solid part of your overall marketing plan.

Many people talk about Search Engine Marketing in very loose terms but it is essentially separated into two parts – Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click Advertising.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the free part of Search Engine Marketing. The goal is to earn top rankings in free search engines which are called “natural” listings. In this instance you work to optimize your site giving the search engines what they’re looking for so that it is listed properly improving your ranking and hopefully making the front page. There are a few tricks to making this work and I recommend hiring a consultant or service provider that can optimize your site properly. Trust me, it will be money well spent. Here is a well accepted process to maximize your SEO:

- Find the most relevant keywords for your market
- Plug those keywords into the headlines, subheads and body copy of your web pages but use them sparingly
- Get inbound links to your site through things like blogs. It is what the spiders love the most because it is “natural”.
- Keep the search engine “spiders” coming back with frequent new content. Blogs are a good example of this.
- Use a site map because the spiders take a top level link and dive deep into your web page indexing all of your web pages
- Don’t be dense with keywords or the search engine spyders will see right though it

It is important to note that while this is the most cost effective approach to getting your site traffic, it will take time. If you need traffic immediately, you will have to add Pay-Per-Click (PPC) to your strategy.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

If you have used a search engine, and I am sure you have, you have seen results that are up at the top or off to the side and colored differently than the standard results. That is because someone paid to get there. The way it generally works is that the search engine company has keywords set at a certain price for a level of “clickthroughs” or when people actually click on the link to get to your site. You can also use various web site provider packages to help you manage this effort. There are some advantages and disadvantages to this strategy.

Advantages

- Your web site shows up immediately in search engines which is great when you are really trying to do time sensitive campaigns

- It is a great way to test keyword effectiveness that you will want to integrate into your natural SEO strategy

- You only pay for the clickthroughs to your site

Disadvantages

- It can be costly because you might pick expensive keywords that are so hot your marketing budget could get blown right out the window

- Competitors can intentially clickthrough to your site making your costs go up, although this has been fixed by search engine providers to prevent fraud

Combining Strategies is the Best Way to Go

As time goes on, a strategy utilizing both approaches is the way to go. Over time, your site will increase its ranking in search results and you can reduce your PPC for direct and general keyword hits. This will allow you to use PPC for more targeted efforts like product launches and specific campaigns. Lastly, it is important to note that you should not rest on what you have done and keep your site fresh and relevant. Techniques and search engine algorithms are updated all the time as more people learn to “game” a certain aspect of the system.