Content is king, we have always keep saying it. Keep your website updated with great content, Google and other search engines will send you a cheque (in terms of visitors & customers). Believe it or not, check this infographic on why well written content for your website, can do help you in SEO, generating website traffic and sales! Can't write your own content, does'nt matter, get a content writer, but do it.

This is the second part of our earlier post on Email Marketing and SEO. Read the first part here

So if he is not going to buy, then why bother to target such visitors is what you may ask! The catch lies in the fact that customers never really buy a product unless they believe in the product, brand or company.  One of these factors definitely makes an impact in the buying decision. So if a business does not have a brand name or a 'hot-selling product, then how does he get the prospect to buy from him somewhere down the line.

Business owners can think of generating newsletter content that dishes out relevant articles, whitepapers, technical videos and graphs that can interest a visitor to hit the newsletter signup button. A sample newsletter can be provided as bait, so that he can preview before signing up. Thereafter, the mailer sent out should be a pure information oriented mailer with no straight forward marketing messages. A subtle way to reach out to your prospects would be to maybe include some of your customer case studies with videos, which would put your product/service in front without really making him think that you are hard selling him something. As this strategy evolves over a period of time, and you make efforts to increase your subscriber list, you can also ensure that your content becomes more appealing, powerful and something of immense value to your audience.

The end result is your target audience is a ready and target market where you can roll out your product demos, collect feedback, create subtle marketing campaigns, to this audience which readily believes in the company and its products & services. This audience would like to hear more about your company and its products. And would not hesitate to promote your company with word-of-mouth marketing. All this will ultimately lead to that one thing which every business owner wants – more sales and satisfied customers. So next time if you are planning on a SEO campaign, try not to make it with the intention to generate sales, but to generate long time prospects by having them hooked on to a email campaign, giving away relevant and useful information ultimately having them become paying customers to just prospects.

Email marketing has been around for some time now, and has proved itself beyond doubt, when it comes to building customer relations and generating new leads. Search engine optimisation as we know can generate a targeted audience for your website, who may visit your site, but may just click around and ultimately leave without giving you as much as a chance to know more about  them. If we can combine email marketing with SEO, it can possibly lead to building long-term relations with your visitors who may have come to your website, maybe with no buying decisions, but to identify possible companies from whom they would like to deal with in the future.

Consider this - your prospective target audience surfing the internet, looking for the’ real’ stuff in terms of information, literature, and 'guru' knowledge, at the same time avoiding sites that only have  marketing messages and sales talk. They want to hear from companies who can give them information that is new and 'breaking' in their respective fields. They want companies which can satisfy their quest for knowledge and have the right answers to their questions.

Coming down to ways in which you can attract that audience, your website content can be optimised with keywords and phrases that do not include any 'business-like' keywords like 'buy my product' or 'product available here'. Instead your keywords and phrases can be 'how to use xyz techniques' or 'technical whitepapers for download' etc. The keywords are more aligned towards searches that are targeting people researching information in the specified field, with no current intention to buy.  (To be continued)

Attending SMS India 2011 currently being held at the MVT hall at ISKCON temple. Great speakers including Gillian Muessig of SEOMOZ, Eric Weaver of Ants Eye View media. There is a live video of Randy Fishkin from SEOMOZ Headquarters USA.

Plenty of updates to follow, as we live blog this event.

Keep reading...

Official site - http://www.searchmarketingsummit.in/

A very interactive session with Mani karthik, on Social media and its influence on search engines. It turned out to be more like a Q&A session, with a lot of questions by the audience. 

Another interesting session was by Ian McAnerin of McAnerin Consulting & John Barron, Director Marketing of Gravity Free, USA.

SMS India 2011 is being held currently in Bangalore in aid of 'Akshaya Patra' foundation.

Web Designing and SEO, both are different processes but yet depend a lot on each other. We can say both help each other for the betterment of a website. You have a website which has a nice charming design, but do you know how many people are visiting it? Or is it just you and your employees who know about your site.

This is where SEO becomes that much important. So if you are planning to make a website, it would be better for you to start with a design that is search engine friendly and optimized to bring in the traffic. The advantage would be two fold- first it would be less costly and second it would save you a lot more time. Let’s try and further understand how web designing and SEO are related to each other.

As I mentioned earlier web design and SEO both are different process, but still depend on each other. We can say if you want to improve your website usability, you have to use SEO for your website and vice versa.  We can say SEO makes a website more user and search engine friendly. Moreover websites that make it easier for user to browse and read content, they would have to work lesser on their SEO.

Meaning, if your content is well laid out with bold headings, important phrases that are underlined, links to inner pages and a decent and well planned layout, then you are making your website appealing to both search engines & your prospective customers who come visiting. So we can conclude that both web designing and SEO focus on one common goal, to make the website more user- friendly.

Going a bit deeper, what do I mean by a ‘user friendly website’?  A website which is easy to navigate, has well written content, good background color, loads fast in different browsers, well structured URL, and has a site map etc. -  is what I call a user friendly web site. To know more about user friendly web designing, you can read our previous post on web designing tips.

Since SEO is an ongoing process and depends on lots of factors and algorithm. We can say SEO is an art and science and website usability tips can make a difference in SEO process. So whenever you plan to choose a web company for web designing, web development, web maintenance etc.  Make sure they know about SEO or offer the SEO Services as part of their service portfolio.

If you are planning to promote your products or services in online marketing, there are two most popular way to do this, and these are SEO & PPC. In our previous post we have given brief detail of PPC and why you should go for PPC Campaign?  In this post we will discuss about the SEO, why you have to choose SEO Services for online marketing of your business, what are the benefits of SEO in internet marketing? 

First try to understand what SEO is and what it does? SEO is known as Search Engine Optimization and it is process of making your website in top pages of search engine results when someone searches for product or services related to your business. Means your customers can easily find you in search engines, which results in more leads, more traffic, more query, brand building and online presence of your business in internet.

So in online marketing or internet marketing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a major role in bringing the more customers to your website. Take a look on some studies and researches why SEO is important for your online business?

•    Search Engines are the biggest source of collecting the information in internet and trustable too. Never fail in giving the right information.
•    More than 8 out of 10 internet users use the search engine to find the products, information, services etc.
•    More than 500 million people use the search engines each and every day in order to locate the products, services internationally and locally.
•    If your website is on 1st page, then conversion of traffic to sales is more. Very few people will look beyond page 2 of the search results returned.

With the help of SEO you can increase the total revenue of your company. The main benefits of SEO in your business are

Benefits of SEO
•    The biggest benefit of SEO is that it helps you to gain online presence for your business.
•    SEO helps you in cost effective customer acquisition, SEO can be really helpful in diverting traffic from the search engines to your website.
•    Other benefits of SEO include increasing your business benefits, sales and investment returns.
•    Brand Visibility, your products or service brand gets an online recognition if it comes up in the top positions of first page listed by search engines.
•    Recent surveys and studies have shown that nowadays more and more people take the help of search engines when they are interested to know or purchase a product or service.

If your website gets SEO enabled then chances of a customer tracking you down for the business or service you provide are higher. Moreover once you will do SEO for your website it will remain in top positions or top pages for a longer period of time. So we can say SEO is economical and high result oriented.

Search engine ranking of your web site depends on a lot of factors, Keywords and Keyword phrases being one them. Whenever you have to search in search engine you type some keywords related to your search in search engines. Instead of typing everything or an entire line in the search engine you type in the main keywords related to the search query. For example if you are looking for some gifts for your friend’s marriage, you    would search for marriage gifts stores in Bangalore or marriage gifts showroom in a particular location like 'near MG Road'.”Marriage gifts stores Bangalore, MG Road" are the Keywords in above search query. So by typing the keywords in search engines you can find the search results of your query. So keywords are responsible for showing the results in search engines.

Let’s understand this in more detail, again let’s tak e the example of marriage gifts. Suppose you have business of various types of gifts and also you have a web site of your business. Now if someone is looking or searching for the keywords related to your business in search engines, then your web site has to come in top or 1st page for these keywords. If this is not happening, then there can be two reasons behind this

Your website design has not being optimised for Search engines, or in other words, is website is not search engine friendly.

OR

Your website has been optimised, but not for major keywords & phrases, which your customers use when searching for your business / products

The second reason mentioned can be a very serious problem, since your website does not rank in the in the first page of search engines even after doing search engine optimization. This can happen when proper research has not been done on your web site. We can say that Keyword Research has been lacking as part of your website design strategy. Keywords research plays an important role in selecting the keywords for your web site. Keyword research tells you about the main keywords of your site or your business. Moreover keywords research helps you in finding the keywords people are searching for locally as well as globally. For keyword research there are various type of tools are available, some of the important keywords tools are word tracker, Google keyword research tool, SEO Book's Keyword suggestion tool etc.

After doing all these things make the lists of your primary and secondary keywords and use them according to search engines algorithm. 

The important places where your keyword & phrases need to appear are:

1. Web page title
2. In your Web site URL (www.yoursite.com/your-product-keyword.html)
3. In the H1 Tag of your webpage
4. Images used in your site need to be named with one or more of your primary keywords (Eg. product-keyword.jpg)
5. Alt-Tag of your images need to contain keyword phrases

If you follow these simple techniques and have relevant and informative content in your webpage, then there is not doubt that your website would start bringing in visitors and business.

Search engine marketing and website promotion consists of SEO (search engine optimization) also known as Organic search optimization and PPC (Pay per Click) or Inorganic Search Optimization. If you search for products and services in search engines you will notice that some search results displayed on the top and right hand side of the page.

These results are mentioned as “Sponsored results” in Yahoo, “Sponsored links” in Google and “Sponsored sites” in Bing. These entire search results are inorganic search results, meant to say is that all these results are not natural search results. You are seeing these search results by virtue of companies advertising on the Internet using PPC campaigns. In Google PPC campaign is known as Google AdWords, Yahoo PPC is known as Yahoo search marketing and in Bing it’s known as Microsoft Ad Centre. PPC campaign helps in finding the more customers to your business, in bringing more traffic to your site.
 
In PPC campaign you have to create your business ads and within few minutes your ad will start showing in search results.You use your business or service related keywords in you PPC ads. For better results you can take the help of keywords research tools, these tools will tell you what the people are searching in internet. So when people will search the keywords related to your business, your ad will come in search engines. PPC campaign has lots of benefits in your business promotion, a few of them are:

Your ad will be shown to only those people who are searching for product or services related to your business. Means you’re and getting clicks or visits from only those people who are actually looking for services.

You can reach out to more customers, you add will be shown thousands no. of quality and high traffic site.

In PPC campaign, there is no guess work; you can measure the click through rate, cost per acquisition and no. of leads you have generated through PPC campaign.
Moreover PPC campaigns are totally controllable; you can set the total budget and can stop the PPC campaign at any time.

You will pay only when someone clicks on your ads, you don’t have to pay for displaying the ad

In Google PPC campaign you can even set the city or particular region for ad campaign, so you can promote your ad on particular city. If you are not confident of running the campaign, or just don’t have the time, you can look for professional Internet Marketing companies who can help manage your advertisement campaigns for a small fee.

Google had put out a secret project code named 'caffeine', way back in August 2009. This project was about, Google showcasing its next generation search technology, which promises quicker search results, and focuses on 'real-time' search, namely twitter, facebook, myspace feeds start showing up in search results. There are rumours, that Google which was testing its new technology, has since completed it, and should preview its new search technology sometime during January 2010.

Google has informed beta (test) users of this project that all these changes will more or less not be visible to regular folks who use Google to search for information, but the new changes would definitely be visible to power-searchers and SEO people (from the search engine optimisation business). All the new technology would be buried under the hood of Google's trademark clean and crisp home page.

Why did Google, bother to bring in new enhancements to its search technology? The answer is increased competition from Microsoft Bing and Yahoo. To retain and build on market share, Google has decided to bring in these new features. A major update in this to-be launched avatar of Google search, is that they would be incorporating search results from social media - such as Twitter, facebook, myspace etc. Your tweets on Twitter or updates on Facebook, Myspace will show up for related key-word searches and that to in real-time. So people who tweet with relevant and informative tweets should start getting a lot of positive web traffic from Google.

This brings us to the importance of Social media, as a SEO strategy. Companies, who hitherto, never bothered to look at a presence on Social media, will need to re-think on their plans, if they want to generate web traffic, sales and enquiries.

We are also keenly awaiting the impact of the new changes brought about by Google, and how it would affect website design and search engine optimisation. There were rumours, that Google would put out the new version immediatly after the new year - but it seems that it is live only at a few of its data centers in the US, and not across all its centers.

So till then, we await with bated breath!