Your home page is the single most important landing page on your site. If it has a weak message, loads too slowly or is poorly organized, your visitors will just leave. You have less than 3 seconds to engage a prospect. Your home page is where you convince arriving visitors that you have what they are seeking.

Broadband connections may be getting faster but visitor attention spans are getting shorter.

1. Load time: A 2009 study by Forrester shows 47% of consumers expect a Web page to load in 2 seconds or less. 40% of consumers would leave if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Slow load times can be caused by invalid code, media heavy pages, improper use of widgets/scripts or slow hosting.
2. Simplicity: An ornate design will hide your message and it slows your web page load time. A talented designer may want to show off their skill, but message clarity is more important in making the sale. You do need a professional look and feel with clear navigation.
3. First Impression: Place your important information and your call to action clearly “above the fold.” This is what your visitors see without scrolling. Start with a clear page headline because everyone reads them. Entice the visitor to read further into the body text. Your layout should take advantage of eye scanning patterns.
4. Message: Your headline should grab your reader’s attention and the body text should stimulate interest and assure your reader they are in the right place. Are you clearly addressing the “burning question” that your ideal buyer will have? Write in a customer focused style.
5. Navigation: Is your navigation clear and easy to understand? This is not a place to use creative wording. You want instant understanding to encourage visitors to move around your site. Arrange your navigation to form your ideal selling sequence.

Your home page is by far the most important page on your entire website. Plan your message and test to make sure it gets arriving visitors to take action and that it is interesting enough to draw people deeper into your website.

Social media is like having a conversation over the back fence with a neighbor. It’s like getting an unexpected phone call from an old high school friend and catching up. It is laid back and conversational. Yet many companies who enter this arena don’t get it and try too hard. Here are the common mistakes marketers make when entering social media marketing.

1. Self Promoting: Promoting yourself and not providing value is a huge mistake. As you enter into the social media world it is about participation and entering into the conversations. We all see companies that enter into Twitter, blogging and social networking that spend their energy marketing themselves. This is a sure way to get people to run the other direction.
2. Not Listening: Social media is supposed to be conversational. This means two or more people listening and then interacting. If your focus is on broadcasting, then you are not engaging at a social level. Building relationships requires listening to understand the other person’s point of view.
3. Not Conversational: Don’t try and control and force your point of view. Your goal is to listen, build trust and understand the other person’s viewpoint. Yes, you want to voice your point of view, but avoid criticizing and offending. Avoid being too formal, boring and proper. Interact and let your personality show.
4. Too much participation: If you try and participate in too many forms of social media your participation becomes spotty and inconsistent. You may experiment with a wide range of tools. Find the few areas you really enjoy and are good at. Settle in on your favorites and focus. You will enjoy it more and build better relationships.
5. Giving up after a short time: Social media marketing is about creating and sustaining lasting relationships. It takes time and many conversations. Social media is not the instant solution. Be prepared for a long term commitment or don’t do it at all.

Businesses will continuing moving away from traditional marketing and toward Internet marketing. Many more traditional brick and mortar companies will begin tapping into web marketing. I have dusted off my crystal ball and am looking ahead to 2010 and how the web will change these small businesses.

1. More local websites: 53% of Small Businesses will have a website by December 2010. The number of small businesses that have a website has grown from 36% (November 2007) to 45% (August 2009) according to a studies by Discover Business card and Rasmussen Reports. This trend will accelerate as small businesses watch the increasing trend of local search from handheld mobile devices such as Smart Phones. This same report says that 47 percent of consumers say they are more likely to use a business if they have a web site.
2. Video will continue to grow: The website YouTube has 35% more video searches than the #2 search engine Yahoo has total searches (October 2009). 84.4% percent of online visitors watch web videos with the average viewer  (October 2009). The price of producing a video production continues to decrease. The price of Flip video cameras are under $200 making video cheap and easy to make. The standard video will be about 4 minutes and will be used in social media marketing and to visually demonstrate products in action.
3. Blog websites to increase: More companies will move their primary website to blog platforms such as Wordpress.org. RSS feeds are a powerful SEO tool and the search engine friendly structure makes these blog websites a natural. Blogs lend themselves better to social media marketing. Adding Wordpress plugins such as Sociable or reTweet make integration into social media easy.
4. Relationship Marketing: On the web, size doesn’t matter, relationships matter. How marketing is done is changing at an ever increasing rate. Traditional marketing broadcasts a message. Businesses will move more into social media marketing where they can engage their targeted customer and interact with them. Blog marketing will continue to grow but will become more integrated with other forms of social media.
5. Polarization in Social Media: The over 40 crowd will settle in on just a few forms of social media to interact and get their information. This older crowd will try and distance themselves from the “noise” and chatter that comes with many forms of social media like Twitter. The younger consumers will increase their use of social media on all fronts. Businesses marketing to younger consumers will have to step up their entry into social media marketing.

Google has two payment models for your Adwords advertising on Google’s content network. The more popular method of CPC is where you pay each time your ad is clicked on. With CPM advertising you pay for each 1000 impressions your ad receives. You are not charged extra for click-through.

CPC: The Adwords cost-per click or pay-per-click model is where you pay when your ad receives a click. These ads appear on both the search engine results pages (SERPs) and on independent web pages (content network).

CPM: The Adwords cost-per-thousand-impressions model only appears on web pages that allow Google Adsense advertising (Content Network). A CPM ad is larger. It is an expanded text ad or image ad and it occupies the entire ad space.

CPM advertising is effective as a branding ad where you are trying to create awareness for your company, brand or products. Google allows advertisers to target which websites they want to be included in (or excluded from). CPM ads use competitive bidding with minimums starting at $.25 per M impressions. Focusing on ad design is critical with CPM to encourage a higher click through rate.

CPC advertising is pure performance based advertising where you only pay when someone clicks through to your website or landing page. Results are very trackable with analytics. CPC ads are the only option available if you want your ad to appear along with Google’s search results. CPC ads require a bid of at least US$0.01 per click.

Advertisers should test out both methods and see which gives the lowest cost per conversion. Many CPM advertisers are able to lower advertising costs and increase their sales revenue with well optimized ads.

Do you need to switch to a new domain name because of branding or a change in corporate name? This can be extra tough when your old website has top rankings and is an older established domain name. There is a recommended way to do this and Google even provides instructions on how to do it with their Best Practices When Moving Your Site.

1. Measure: Start by documenting your websites current rankings. This will give you a baseline to measure any change in rankings before and after the change. If something goes wrong, you will have “evidence” of the rankings loss. Ideally you will accumulate three months of rankings data for your specific keyword phrases.
2. Notify: Go onto Google Webmaster Central Forum and publicly state your intention of moving your website from your old domain to your new one. State the reason for the move. This helps Google know the new domain is legitimate and gives you a basis to complain if things go wrong.
3. Test: Copy your site or part of your site over to your new domain and temporarily block indexing with a robots.txt file on every page. This prevents the new site being detected as duplicate content. Apply a 301 redirect to permanently redirect your “test pages” from the old site to the new site. Now remove the robots.txt file on these test pages so indexing can happen. Use a page-to-page redirect method instead of a blanket redirect. Update all links on both sites to be correct.
4. Verify: Pages from the new site are appearing in Google’s search results. Once you are certain the move is working correctly, you are ready to move the rest of the site.
5. Move: Finish the move of the rest of the website. Test all links to make sure they all are pointing to the new website. Use a broken link checker like Xenu for this. Fix all broken links.
6. Webmaster Tools: Add your new site to your webmaster tools account. Verify ownership and submit a sitemap.
7. Linking: Launch an online marketing blitz with press releases or social media linking for your new website. Contact webmasters that are linking to your old site and request link updates. The goal is to build the link authority of the new website.
8. Maintain: Maintain control of your old site for at least 6 months. Regularly review both sites for crawl errors and any 404 errors. Fix these immediately as they are found.
9. Measure: Monitor search rankings and report loss of rankings and request assistance on Google Webmaster Central Forum. If your site rankings dip and do not rebound in two weeks, post an update to your original thread.
10. Redesign: Ideally you will postpone any redesign initiatives and new content until the rankings for the moved website rebounds and stabilizes. It is best not to introduce too many changes at one time.

When people do an online search, they “Google it”. Perhaps you own a restaurant or a law firm, a hair salon or computer repair company. Perhaps you’re a locksmith, a plumber, a florist or you fix cars. If yours is a local business, then you need to be found in a local search. Google, Yahoo! and Bing all offer local search listings for businesses.

We are offering Google 7-Pack Optimization Service for $297 as a year-end promotion. Our normal price is $497. We are also offering all three major search engines local listings for $597.

1. Google Local Business (Google 7-Pack)
2. Yahoo! Local
3. Bing Local Listings

What this includes

1. Initial discussion: We start with a brief phone discussion to gather background information on your business. We will need to know things such as your business name, your business address, business phone number(s), business email, your website URL (You do not need a website for a 7-Pack listing) and a description of the goods/services you offer. Other things we like to include in your listing are the hours you are open, customer payment options, your logo, photos and any specials you are offering.
2. Keyword research: We perform keyword research to discover how people are using local search engines to look for the things you offer. You will be encouraged to use these phrases in your website if you have one.
3. Create / Modify listing: We will create a new listing or modify (optimize) your current listing.
4. Claim: We will help you claim your business local search listing. This verifies to Google that you are the appropriate person to modify the listing for that particular business location.
5. Reviews: You will want to encourage your customers to review your business. Business listings that have reviews will rank higher that companies that have no reviews. Search engines are increasingly pulling in data from social media sites like Yelp.

This local map optimization works for companies by making their business more visible to web surfers on Google, Yahoo! and Bing local maps.

This process takes two business days once we receive your information. Check out our listing. Please contact us using our quote form or by calling our office at (360) 695-8100.

Your website should answer your visitor’s questions and solve their most urgent problem or need. Writing web content is the most time consuming part of creating your website. There is an easier way. I call it the questions method for writing web content.

If you develop questions and then answer them, it makes writing web page content much easier. I don’t mean having your website look one continuous FAQ page. I mean weaving together your answers into an interesting story.

Purpose: Start with the reason you are creating your website. What is the purpose for your website? Are there specific products or services you want to promote? What action do you want visitors to take? This could be to buy, sign-up, request a quote, or call.

Problem: What is the problem your visitors are trying to solve? What questions do they need answered before they decide to buy? What is your best selling sequence? Use this to plan your site map and the order of your navigation.

Home Page: You will want to use your most important keywords on this page. What is your value proposition? Use this in your page headline. If I came to this site, what would I most want to know or find out? What advantages do you offer over your competition? How is what you offer better? How will what you offer benefit your customer? What makes your service convenient to use (faster, easier)?

About-us: This is the page that humanizes your business and is the second most read page on your website. What do your visitors want to know about you? What is your expertise and how does it address their problem? What is the history of your business? What caused you to start this business? What special certifications or affiliations do you have? How many employees, volunteers or students do you have?

Products or Services: This is where you get specific about your offering. You may want to create a separate page for each product or service. What problem or need do you solve? How will your product or service benefit them? What are the important features and specifications? What options are available? How does someone buy or obtain more information? Provide details, pictures and illustrations to explain your offering.

When writing, make your content scannable and concise. Brevity and clarity are important. Write as if you were answering someone’s questions on the phone. Use simple words and write with shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs.

Video search is growing fast. The website YouTube has more video searches than the #2 search engine Yahoo has total searches. YouTube had 3.7 billion video searches (October 2009) while Yahoo had only 2.7 billion searches. 84.4% percent of online visitors watch web videos with the average viewer watching 10.8 hours in a single month. (October 2009)

Video is a powerful communication medium that helps convert visitors into customers. People watch video at an increasing rate and search engines want to include video in their search results. There are video SEO methods that help search engines to index and include your videos.

1. Start by developing videos with compelling content. Videos must be good quality and worth the effort of optimizing for searchers. Competition for online viewers is growing.
2. Research your keywords carefully and they should be highly relevant to your video. Use the keywords in the video title, video descriptions and any associated text. Keywords are more effective if used in the beginning of any text.
3. Keep your videos short and to the point. The average video watched (October 2009) was 3.9 minutes. Edit out unnecessary text to best communicate your message.
4. Brand yourself with a digital watermark on your video. Include the watermark of your logo or URL in the introduction and conclusion of the video.
5. Provide embedding codes so your video can easily move virally through the web. Bloggers will include your video if it helps them communicate to their viewers. Your watermark will bring viewers back to your website from all over the web.
6. Flash formats give the greatest compatibility with both Mac and PC users. Almost all users can view it without downloading additional software. Other popular formats are .wmv, .avi and .mov.

A landing page is the web page a visitor reaches after clicking on an online ad or link. This is your customized sales pitch. It provides detailed information on your offer and should be designed to get your visitor to trust you and to take action.

A well crafted landing page will convert a higher percentage of your visitors into leads or into buyers. What makes a great landing page? It should clearly answer the following.

1. What problem are you solving?
2. What solution are you offering?
3. Who is this for?
4. What is your offer?
5. How do I get started?

Landing Page Best Practices

1. Relevance: Make you online ad and your landing page highly relevant to each other. Repeat your ad text in the headline of your page. What you offer should match your online ad. Avoid any perception of “bait and switch” by your visitor.
2. Simplify what actions a visitor can take. Don’t provide multiple options and offers on a landing page. This will confuse the visitor and they will leave without taking any action at all. Eliminate all page navigation except toward the action you want them to take. Organize your content into a simple visual format that is quick to scan and understand.
3. Action: Make the call to action clear, visible and above the fold. Provide a short easy path for visitors to buy or request information. Make sure your call to action button stands out from the rest of your content.
4. Minimum information: For forms and purchases, request only the minimum amount of information that you require. If you require too much “non-essential” customer information, many people will abandon your form and leave your page. Do you really need their phone number or physical address?
5. Trust: Answer the question “Why should I trust you?” Offer a 100% unconditional money back guarantee. Have a simple returns policy. Include real testimonials from real customers. Include trust logos from organizations you belong to such as BBB and Truste. Reassure visitors that their information will remain private. Have a phone number and physical address on the page.

Many people are confused because these two phrases are often used interchangeably. There is actually a big difference. SEM or Search Engine Marketing is the broader term; it includes all strategies for promoting your website on the search engines. SEO or search engine optimization is a method of getting a website ranked in the natural or organic search results.

3 Types of Search Engine Marketing

1. Organic SEO: This is a process for improving your website’s rankings. Optimizing is part science and part art. It prepares a web page to be found for certain key search phrases. Organic SEO uses keyword phrases prominently on the web page itself (headings, body text, hyperlinks, etc.). This is usually coupled with a link popularity strategy.
2. Local Search: This uses organic SEO methods mixed with city, state and zip codes. These “geo modifiers” bring in searchers looking for local businesses. This also includes Google 7-pack listings and other local directories.
3. Pay per Click: This is advertising on Google and other search engines. These ads come up based on the keyword query and appears under the sponsored results. You only pay for visitors that click through to your website. This includes Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Bing (Microsoft adCenter).

There are other types of Internet marketing (an even broader term then SEM) that can be used to promote your businesses with the search engines.

Social Media Marketing: This includes blog marketing, social networking, Twitter and more. You can set up profiles on popular social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace , etc. You can publish your own blog or participate in online forums as an expert.

Article Marketing: Write and publish educational articles and place them on article syndication sites. Other web site owners can publish them on their web sites. Links in the bottom resource box will lead interested people to your website.

Best results are achieved when multiple SEM methods are used. Traffic strategies need to be devised when a website is being planned. SEO works best when it is planned into the website structure rather than added on later.