Tag: small business

Announcing a New Blog and Personal Focus

As I mention in the short video below, I have started a new blog and personal focus working with main street businesses in the Minneapolis – St. Paul Twin cities metro area.

I will continue to post here about internet marketing topics, affiliate marketing opportunities and related topics. After all much of what I will be bringing to my home town business friends is merely the local adaptation of these very topics.

As I learned with my home stagers and others, most small business people are just too busy getting their day to day product out the door to spend time learning and implementing the internet marketing techniques we discuss here. I hope to be the vehicle whereby many of them will grow.

As I look at the market, it’s clear to me that there is a very real opportunity for many businesses to absolutely dominate their local markets. It will take three things. A quality offering in the first place, effective internet marketing and the ability to manage their own growth.

I am satisfied that I can bring the middle element to many, I just need to find the right firms that also have the other two characteristics as well.

My new blog is a bit thread bare so far, but it will develop and grow over time. Check it out at http://MinneapolisInternetMarketingConsultant.com

[tags]main street marketing, video, small business[/tags]

Local Business Marketing SEO Tips: Title Tags

The single easiest and quickest thing most local based businesses can do to positively impact the value of their web site is to change their title tags. This is particularly true for small businesses serving a local market.

The title tag is the text that appears in the uppermost left corner of your computer screen when you go to any page on your web site. This is the title of your page which was set up when your web page was first designed. It can be changed at any time.  You should do so as soon as you finish reading this article if any of my suggestions apply to you and your business.

Your title tag is set up in the header code of your website in what are called the Meta Tags.  There are several key things a business needs to know about meta tags, but we will focus in this article on the Title Tag.

Each page of your web site should have a different title tag. Many small business web sites have a home page and a handful of other pages. If you got a simple web site built for your business, your home page may well be called, “HOME.”

If this is the case you definitely want to change it.

Another common title tag many businesses use is their name. Such as “ABC Co.”  This is almost always a poor choice.

A far better idea is to use the dominant term your customers are likely to use when doing a search to find you. Thus if you are primarily involved in installing replacement windows, you want our title tag to be “Replacement Windows.”

That tells the search engines that your web site and your business are about replacement windows.  Then, when someone does a computer search for “replacement windows”, the search engines will consider your site as a possible result to display for them.

Since people from around the entire world wide web might be searching for replacement windows, they will want to narrow their search down a bit.  If they live in Atlanta, Ga  they probably want to find a contractor somewhere near Atlanta, no matter how superior the skills of your installers in Minneapolis may be.  So while they may initially search for the term, once they see the millions of results, they will instinctively add a modifier to narrow their search to their local area.

Thus if your business serves the Atlanta area, you want to put “Replacement Windows Atlanta” as your title tag.  In Minneapolis the same, “Replacement Windows, Minneapolis – St. Paul or something similar.

This geographical add on, is the secret weapon of Search Engine Optimizers the world over.  As simple an idea as it is, there are tens of thousands of small business web sites that still have “Home” as their title tag, and it’s costing them lost business.

Now your business may have more than one main product or service.  In that case you should have a separate page to your web site for each of these functions.  Every page has a title tag, and so your page on “Vinyl Siding” should read “Vinyl Siding Minneapolis St. Paul.”

This change can be accomplished in mere seconds, by your computer person or even yourself if you have access to the c-panel of your web site.  In some smaller markets, this alone may be enough to move you to the first page of results and help you generate new business.  It is a powerful tool, but only one of several steps you need to take as part of your business marketing strategy in more competitive markets.

Far too many businesses have given up hope on their web sites.  Mostly because they never see any real business as a result of them.  Many small business web sites were originally set up people who knew how to do the graphics and such but did not understand how to effectively market the sites.

While title tags are an easy start, you want to find a knowledgeable search engine optimization resource who can help you transform your business’ web site into a marketing tool and not just an internet placeholder.  The surprising news is that local businesses are the easiest to apply these business marketing strategies to. Now go and get your title tags fixed.

There are several other changes you may want to make to your Meta Tags and the actual pages of your web site. To learn more about these you may want to purchase my ebook on the topic, Main Street Rises to the Top of the Search Engines,

[tags]local based business,small business,marketing your business,business marketing strategy,local business marketing,business marketing online,title tags,SEO tips,meta tags,[/tags]

Article Writing is the Key to Building Google Ranking

If you are in a competitive field, and are unable to use my geographical long tail keyword approach to gain top ranking on Google, you need to bring out the big guns. And the best way to do that is with Article marketing.

There is an art to article marketing. You need to focus on your keywords in your article title and in the body of your article. But as important, you need to write a worthwhile article that a blog or ezine editor will want to share with their readership.

You also need to pay attention to your resource box. This is particularly important to you, for this is where your payoff rests.

Finally, you need to get your article launched on as many article directories as you can with a special effort to get it to targeted directories that serve your niche.

I have just acquired rights to a new eBook called Winning the Article Marketing Game. In addition to the eBook, I have acquired master resale rights, which means that not only can I sell you a copy of the eBook, I can transfer to you the rights to sell it yourself.

If you decide to buy it, you will not only get the download, but also a sales page you can use to market the book as well.

This is a great way to get good information that you can profit from and the ability to profit from reselling the book.

To See the Sales Page, Click on the Image of the Book Below!

Most Business Web Pages StinK! Free Download Now

I just completed my newest report, called “Most Business Web Pages StinK!” subtitled, Web Sites are like Trade Shows.  Readers of this blog will soon realize this is a recompilation of five previous blog posts on the Trade Show theme. The current version is number 1.2, I am working on 1.3 which will be revisions after my wife gets done proof reading it, and a resources section at the end.

I intend to use this as an eye opener for hopefully thousands of small business people. In these tough economic times it only makes sense to better utilize all of our existing resources such as our web sites.

And since upgrading them is not difficult or expensive, it makes even more sense.

Let me know if you need my help.

Is your web page a billboard on a deserted highway?

A decade ago, small businesses flocked to the internet.  It was going to transform the way business is done and they wanted to be part of it.  And many are today quite disappointed and perhaps philosopical about how their web pages didn’t do didly squat.

While there is no doubt the internet has changed how business is done today, for most businesses all that changed is they now have an internet Yellow Pages add in addition to there actual listing.

The only people that go to their web site are people who already know about their business, and are jsut checking for a phone number or the times we are open.

While that’s certainly not true of all businesses, it is true for a good many, how about you?

I’ve been preaching on three major topics here about why I think most business web sites stink.

  • Most aren’t using their ability to list their business in multiple categories.
  • Most have just a billboard, or an electronic brochure and not an interactive site
  • Why most web sites are so bad, even when you paid good money for them.

In my prior posts on this blog, I have tried to use the trade show as a metaphor as to what the role of your web pages should be. I encourage you to look back at my past postings and read them.

In the last few days, I have been focusing on how most web sites I’ve reviewed lately have poor and often no keywords.

If you were able to afford it, and were in the wall paper business, you might buy a yellow pages ad under wall paper, and maybe under decorating or a number of other yellow page headings.  Most businesses don’t as its very expensive to do so, even with multiple category discounts.

With your web pages, you don’t need to pay extra to be listed in multiple categories. You just need to do a systematic listing of all relevant keywords that your possible customers might use in an effort to find you.

This may take a little time and effort, but once done, it will pay tremendous rewards in additional traffic and potential new business.

You may have thought your web designer would have done this for you. But unfortunately most web designers are not marketers. They tend to be graphic artists or techno geeks.  Great at creating web pages, but not necessarily at getting your web site to generate the business you had hoped it would.

Keywords: Missing in Most Small Business Web Sites

So far, I haven’t found a single home staging web site with good keywords in the meta tags of their web site. In my search of web sites in South Minneapolis, I have found fewer than 1 in 20 that was even close to having effective keywords. In general, that’s true of most small businesses.

This is a big mistake, as the keyword placed in your web pages meta tags are what almost all the search engines other than Google uses to find web sites to display. And while Google may have the largest chunk of web search, they certainly don’t have it all.

That’s because most people are likely to use the search tool that comes with their computer. My wife for example has Yahoo on hers. While she may say she is going to “Google” something, she actually uses Yahoo. Yahoo uses meta tags. So does MSN, ASK and virtually everybody but Google.

I have been focusing on the Home Staging Industry for the last half year or so. As part of that effort I am trying to help these small businesses improve their web sites to first draw more traffic, and then get more of those people who do visit to do something.

I have created a base list of some ten dozen key words people often use to search for home stagers in their market. I add or subtract a few depending on the scope of service of the individual home stager, and then incorporate geographical elements to come up with a comprehensive set of what I call, “geographical long tail keywords.” These are the phrases people actually use to search for to find a business in their neighborhood. For a recent client in Virginia, I ended up with 599 keyword phrases. In time this should more than double the amount of traffic her web site receives.

Every locally based business should have a comprehensive set of geographically relevant keywords in their meta tags. This is the hidden code that the search engine “bots” see, but no one else does. Unfortunately most web site developers are techies, and not marketers, and they often don’t have a clue as to what they should put in there.

Depending on the industry sector, I can create a set of geographically tied keywords for as little as $75. I will review your web site for free, in advance to determine whether or not it’s needed in the first place. email me at enetwal@gmail.com with any questions.