Local Search Optimization
Jun 8th
As we all know, more competition means more challenging and so does broader coverage. Therefore local search optimization is not as challenging as broader categories – but it still has its own challenges. Many of the same SEO rules still apply to local search engine optimization, but because of the improvements done on the search engines for the past 3 years with the interaction of social, it has become far simpler than we thought.
Basics of Local Search Optimization
Be Everywhere That Matters: From Google Places to local directories, local links and user citations are the primary influencers of high rankings for geo-specific terms. Local users go deep for information, so even small, low-volume destinations can result in quality links. They may not deliver that much traffic individually, but a few links from relevant blogs can get your business name and website address a long way on the search result pages including local community pages.
Ask for Reviews: If you’re a local business and are not collecting reviews, you should start considering to ask your customers to write reviews for your business since a lot of locals count on reviews and so do search engines especially for local search listings. After all, search engines More >
SEO Content Writing Tips after Google’s Panda Update
May 9th
SEO Content Writing Tips
Writing plays a large roll in Internet marketing and SEO campaigns. Despite the recent algorithm changes from the Google Panda Update, content is still the No. 1 determining factor in getting your site to rank.
The principles of good writing are as much of a skill as an art form, and when you or your Internet marketing company view content creation from both perspectives, you stand to achieve maximum gain from your efforts.
Despite the changes that occurred from the Panda Update, the following tips are still great to hold onto whenever you find yourself generating content as a part of your web design or online marketing campaigns.
Content Does Matter Content matters to your users and it always will. Just because you can fool a search engine robot doesn’t mean you can fool a customer. Whatever it is you’re writing, be sure it has some inherent value. Writing for the customer first and using technical SEO principles second will always help you optimize your content.
Keep Keywords in your Headlines While a headline should always be compelling, it needs to be discovered in order to be able to compel. Titles are the first thing that grab your readers’ attention – and the first thing More >
Internet Marketing Company Tips: Spring Cleaning your Marketing Strategy
May 2nd
Spring is here, and while we’re doing some actual office Spring cleaning inside our Internet marketing company and web design firm, we started thinking of the concept as a great marketing analogy.
As we all would agree, Spring is a great time to start fresh with a clean slate. Google recently did some Spring cleaning of their own in the form of changes to their search algorithm with the Panda Update, (or Farm Update as it’s been nicknamed) so there’s no better time then now to revisit your page ranking, evaluate your business for the remainder of 2011 and do some metaphorical Spring cleaning as well.
That said, here are a few friendly tips for Spring cleaning your business and marketing efforts:
Dust Off Your Physical Office or Storefront
We usually keep things pretty neat around our Internet marketing company offices, but when you deal with proposals, print materials, sales pamphlets and business cards daily, it’s easy for things to get cluttered quick.
Get rid of that clutter around your desk, change up the furniture setup in your office and revisit your New Years resolutions. A new setup always brings new life to your office, rearranging displays in your storefront always shifts sales a bit and More >
Google Panda Update Says Goodbye to Low-Quality Links
May 2nd
Google has made major changes to its algorithm to target spammy sites, followed by the larger Panda update that targeted “low quality” sites. This all started when Google penalized JCPenney, Forbes, and Overstock.com for “shady” linking practices.
What’s it all mean for link builders? It means we say goodbye to low quality link building.
If your competitors are still highly ranked on Google and you find that they have low quality link built around their search marketing campaign, then there are two things you must consider about finding low quality, high volume links in your analysis:
- Maybe it isn’t the links that got your competitors where they are today. Maybe they are a big enough brand with a good enough reputation to be where they are for that particular keyword.
- If the above doesn’t apply, then maybe it’s just a matter of time before Google cracks down even further, giving no weight to those spammy backlinks.
Lets face it, non of us here at Trimark Marketing Group want to be the Internet Marketing company behind the next Overstock or JCPenney link building gone wrong story!
How to Determine a Valuable Backlink Opportunity How can you determine whether a site you’re trying to gain a link from is More >
Web Terms and Definitions
Apr 9th
Web Terms and Definitions
We have been asked many times during meetings with clients to explain more in details about the web terms we use in the industry. So i have decided to post common web terms with definitions in to our blog so we can have you all check it out anytime you may have questions or if you are not sure of the terminology what it means.
And if we have missed anything, please feel free to ask us in the comments portion and we will be more then happy to add in to the article for future readers.
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Web Terms—————————————————————————————————————————————————–
Analytics: Software that monitors every website visitorʼs actions and saves that information to be organized and utilized for decision making.
Black Hat SEO: Describes unacceptable and unethical methods of improving website rankings on search engines. Any misrepresentation of your website to search engines is usually considered to be “black hat”.
Bot: An automated program that reads the text and hidden coding on websites. The information is then stored in a database oture reference. The rankings of websites on search engines are determined by relevance, which is based on the information gathered by the bot. Also known as a spider, crawler or robot.
Bounce Rate: The percentage More >
Jump in to 2011: We’ve Got Your Back LIke Verizon’s Got the iPhone
Jan 12th
Many of us have been waiting… we’ve all heard the rumors…
Yesterday Verizon made headlines with the news of officially securing the iPhone! With campaigns touting better reception and fewer dropped calls sure to come, this gives all iPhone users the choice of what service provider is best for them.
When it comes to your creative and marketing needs, Trimark Marketing Group wants to be your choice provider. Our team’s speed and efficiency, along with the best talent available, can help you with everything that a successful business needs to survive in this day and age. Give us a call, tell us your needs, and we’ll get to work!
To get a taste of our work, visit our marketing portfolio at http://trimarkfirm.com/
Also, call or email anytime if you’d like to set up an appointment.
Trimark Marketing Group 1-800-420-4254 info@trimarkfirm.com
Planning Your Companys Internet Marketing Future: 2010 Recap and 2011 Strategy
Dec 29th
As 2010 winds down to its last week, I can’t help but go back and look at my 2009 recap and 2010 outlook. Boy did it look bleak…the economy was in a rut, clients were cutting back on everything—including their marketing budgets.
Really, marketing should be the last thing you choose to downsize—after all, isn’t Marketing helping your business stay afloat and driving more sales? (But that is a subject to be covered on another day.)
Nonetheless, since many customers were scaling back, we went into 2010 making a conscious decision to concentrate on our current customers and introduce more innovation and marketing strategies to drive more customers to their websites and businesses.
Well the strategy worked.
On average, all of our customers grew their customer base by a margin of 25% to 45%, and one of our customers grew their online visitor and reservation numbers by 100%.
Imagine doubling your call rates in a matter of 12 months—well word travels fast and Trimark was able to pull out one of its best years yet.
Now looking back on 2010, I’m thinking about how our readers, customers, friends and family take advantage of our strategy and apply it to themselves. Simplifying the concept, here are couple More >
Implementing Exclusive Content On Facebook For Fans
Nov 10th
Trying to boost the number of people that like your Facebook page? Try giving users a reason to like you by offering a special only to those that actually ‘like’ you. Facebook allows for you to deliver different content on FMBL Custom tabs between users that are already connected to your page and users that aren’t.
Facebook offers the “visible-to-connection’ tag that shows the contents within the tag to those who like a page, and can show completely different code to those who haven’t liked your page. This allows you to make your FBML Custom tab exclusive to those who are a fan and great for marketing the following:
- coupons
- trials
- samples
- exclusive events
- sneak previews
- sales
Here is a great example of how you can use the ‘visible-to-connection’ tag on your Facebook tab with a sale/coupon code offering:
Go to the actual Facebook Page to see the code in action.
Early this year, we recapped a an example of a promotion that ski shop featured the “visible-to-connection” code to leak their new skis for the 2010 season. Those users that were not fans were shown a blurred out image of the skis and those that were fans were shown a micro-site with all of the new skis for the season.
Here More >
Internet Audibles: Search Engine Optimization and Making Adjustments
Oct 11th
If you work for an Internet marketing company or in any facet of search engine optimization, chances are you recognize the enormous value that patience and persistence have in making online marketing services successful for your clients.
There are many angles to search engine optimization and the most popular search engines employ extremely complex algorithms to determine keyword-based page rankings. It’s this nature of the industry that makes SEO services anything but an exact science.
If you’re a business owner paying for search engine optimization services, however, odds are you don’t share quite the same reverence for letting nature take its course! Though many clients understand the general principles behind SEO services, many are hoping for—and oftentimes depend on—quick results that drive traffic and ultimately business to their websites.
In many businesses, however, especially those that are saturated with online companies, it’s not uncommon for thousands—even millions—of websites and SEO service providers to be craftily employing strategies and competing against each other to earn page-one rankings for the same keywords and phrases.
When this is the case, the question becomes: How long is too long to focus your energies on one keyword or phrase?
Though there’s no cut and dry answer to this question, it’s More >
Social Media Marketing: A Step-Ladder for SEO Services
Oct 1st
One of the latest weapons in the arsenal of online marketers is social media marketing. Many Internet marketing companies will offer social media marketing services, but as a client and business owner, what does that really mean? Most business owners and people in general know social media as just that—an avenue for interacting with friends online—so what’s the benefit for the business?
While there are a few obvious answers (and many that are not so obvious), there is one particularly useful benefit of social media marketing for businesses that have just launched their website: It serves as an excellent step-ladder to your search engine optimization services and can win you instant customers while you’re waiting out their effectiveness.
To illustrate this, let’s first sum up the basic value of a social media presence to a growing or start-up business. Having social media accounts for your business on avenues like Facebook and Twitter basically allows a free method of developing a mailing list of interested customers and also lets you communicate with them.
Plus, your profile page serves as an appealing extra web presence for your business that requires little to no graphic design efforts. It also serves as a large online business card that More >
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Winemaking
Sep 28th
Online Marketing and California Winemakers One of the pleasantries of living in coastal California includes having access to some of the finest wineries and vineyards in the world. The lush country and landscape has attracted some of the world’s best winemakers—the climate is perfect for growing different grape varietals and the beautiful landscape and greenery pairs perfectly with a relaxing day of wine-tasting.
A good friend of mine is a winemaker at a small vineyard in a town called Lompoc, just outside the city of Santa Barbara. He recently bottled a pinot noir that Wine Spectator awarded a 96 to—something only 12 other pinots have ever scored equal to or better.
As we were chatting about this delicious and magnanimous achievement, it occurred to me that online marketing—particularly web development and SEO—are a lot like making wine.
Notice I didn’t say a “fine wine;” this analogy can work both ways! There are plenty of SEO “tricks” out there—and to a certain extent, even natural circumstances—that can spoil your harvest and ultimately ruin your page ranking and the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts.
But if done properly, with continued attention, a little patience, and the right amount of aging, you could create a web presence that More >
Marketing Concept: Don’t Rent Your Marketing, OWN IT! Search Engine Results (Part 2)
Aug 31st
We’ve already introduced the concept of “rent marketing” vs. “own marketing,” relating online marketing services and traditional advertising methods to the real estate market and the benefits each can have.
This concept can be extrapolated upon in relation to search engine optimization.
If you’ve noticed the results you see after searching for something on Google, there are three parts to each search results page that yield different information: sponsored links, Google Maps listings, and organic results.
Sponsored links and listings are marked as such—displayed with a yellow background on the first three results and also in white along the side bar. The next portion is the Maps portion of Google, you know, the map that pops up on top and showcases local businesses in a Google maps window, kind of like a directory listing. The third are organic listings that yield ten results per page.—in other words, the regular search results that appear based on what keywords you’ve searched.
Of those three divisions of results, one is falls into “rent marketing,” while the other two definitely classify as “own marketing.”
The advertised sponsored listings are exactly that—essentially businesses are paying to be listed on the top of the page based on certain keywords. You can put More >