During the dot com bubble, there was a standing joke about businesses moving on “internet time”, usually played out by hipsters in bluejeans and tee shirts mocking old fuddy duddies in suits running “old economy” businesses.

A decade after the bubble has burst, the joke is more or less on them, but not entirely. The internet is a disruptive technology in the classic sense; it provides more ways for people to connect to information than ever before.

The three most lucrative sites on the internet are Amazon.com, eBay.com and Google.com. Indeed, the last two have become so ubiquitous that they’ve become verbs. “I eBayed my level 65 WoW healer on my cell phone.” “Oooh, you like that house? We should Google it.”. Linguistic drift aside, the key thing those three sites have in common is that they’re places where people shop. Shopping is the “killer app” of the internet.

It’s also a killer app that can be applied to businesses in any niche, and which favors small businesses over large ones. If you’re a small to medium sized business, you still need a web site. But you’ll also need something much more important. You’ll need an internet marketing plan.

First, we’re going to talk about what Internet Marketing isn’t. It is NOT a “magic recipe”. You can’t just stuff keywords in a static web page and expect it to reach the top of the page rankings; that might have been possible around the turn of the century, but the way the internet has grown as a social and entertainment medium means that those techniques don’t work.

Instead, if you want people to buy your products and services off the internet, you need to think in terms of an integrated strategy. This strategy will boil down to internal choices and optimizations and external choices and optimizations, and the particular elements are constantly changing. For example, places like GeoCities allowed people to make personal web sites for free back in the ’90s, but never reached the critical mass that Facebook and Myspace.com have. And by 2010, the odds are good that social networking sites as we know them now will seem hopelessly quaint.

Your internet strategy needs to be part of an integrated strategy. Internet marketing has some huge advantages; by carefully choosing which elements you do, you can ensure that the people who hit your site are pre-qualified as buyers, rather than window shoppers. By designing your site appropriately, you can remove the barriers between their desire for something and their ability to pay you for it. By using the interactive and social aspects of the internet, you can build something vastly more important than page ranks.

You can build credibility, and get your customers to drive new business to you.

The first steps of an Internet marketing plan are search engine analysis and optimization, coupled with web site optimization. Web site optimization is a balance between making it friendly for search engine robots and maintaining it as something a human would read. This means adopting a journalistic writing style, where you follow the classic newspaper article inverted pyramid with a good, descriptive headline, the most important information in the first sentence or paragraph, and then working your way to the more detailed or obscure information as the page progresses.

One of the simplest forms of web site optimization is having your business name in the web site URL; most people who hit a specific company web site get there either by searching for the company’s name in a search engine, or by entering the company’s name in their URL bar in a browser. There are other techniques, many of which are peddled by search engine marketing firms, but for the most part, the stuff that works for search engines should not impede the human-readable portion of your web site.

The second part of an internet marketing strategy boils down to external considerations. For example, hand submitting your web site to search engines will give it a higher initial page ranking than it would have otherwise. Maintaining your page rank means having contextually appropriate back links to your site. (There are still web marketing companies that, sadly, charge an arm and a leg to run a link farm, which most search engines have deliberately downrated since 2002.)

If direct submission to search engines isn’t sufficient, the next part of getting placement is buying advertising. Google’s business model has made the banner ad (or the skyscraper ad) nearly obsolete, but only Google can get away with listing paid links next to search items and make it work. This kind of advertising is based on buying link backs for search engine optimized keywords, and as search engine marketing and internet marketing has matured, this type of program has gotten more and more competitive. The wildcat days of internet marketing of 2006 are long gone; you’re now better off trying to do multi-word keyword phrases. The aim is to ensure that you get qualified buyers in rather than window shoppers, and the more specific the keyword search is that someone uses to find your site, the closer they are to making that buying decision.

Maintaining your search rank, and promoting your web site are related topics and they both stem from a similar modus of operation: You want people referring to your site in their content, be it blog posts, article directories, or other sites. There’s a fine line to be trod here, and a lot of less than ethical marketing companies use that line as a place to plant the pole and vault, but in a nutshell, all of the search engines count links back to your site, when the text of the link shows up in a grammatical context, and all of them will weight more recent mentions higher than older mentions. This is one reason why a lot of internet marketing companies perform “Astroturf” grass roots advertising with a “shill blog”. A better way to do this is to simply run articles covering subjects of interest to the people who purchase or use your products in article directories. Articles can be expensive to get – writing is difficult work, and writing well requires more than diligence, it requires a bit of talent and an ear for the language.

All of these are pieces for an integrated internet marketing strategy, and should be considered in light of what your core business is…and whether or not there’s going to be a fundamental shift in how people buy your product or service in the near future. (For example, the real estate listings in most news papers have all but been obliterated as more people have taken to researching property and house purchases online.)

You May Also Download This Internet Marketing Whitepaper in .pdf format Here

Myrtle Beach Foreclosures

The real estate market is in crisis, there is no denying it. A disastrous coupling of mortgage companies making bad loans and people who couldn’t repay them has resulted in an excess of homes and condominiums sitting empty all over the country. One place that is definitely no exception is Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

What you probably think of when you think of Myrtle Beach is of course, the beach, the ocean, and the wonderful vacations that thousands of people enjoy there every year. Another thing you must now consider is the property available there. The mortgage crisis has resulted in dozens of beautiful condos sitting empty all over Myrtle Beach. Now is the time to buy.

If you are considering an investment property, there is no better place to consider than Myrtle Beach. Myrtle Beach has ever been popular as a place to vacation and live and shows no signs of slowing down. Right now, you can swoop in and scoop up a property that a few years ago you may not have been able to consider. Prices on these condos have dropped as much as 50% in some areas, yet many investors are still a bit “gun shy” when it comes to purchasing property. Now is your chance.

The market will pick up again, it is inevitable. Most economists agree that the market is cyclical and that things will return to how they were before the “mortgage boom.” Whenever that happens, be it next month or next year, you can be assured that your return on investment, or ROI, will be considerable should you invest in a Myrtle Beach foreclosure property. All you really need to do is maintain the property until then and you can then sell it for a major profit.

Even if you aren’t looking for an investment property, Myrtle Beach condos make for great retirement locations. Many retirees are looking for a nice, warm place to retire where they and their spouse can make the most of their time together. Maybe you’ve vacationed there in the past and thought “What must it be like to live here?” Well, now you can affordably find out. Myrtle Beach is one of the most beautiful places in the world to live, why not take advantage of the current low prices and find out for yourself? Maybe you’re simply searching for a great summer home. Once again, you can do no better than a condo at Myrtle Beach.

If you’ve ever considered purchasing an investment property, now is a time like no other to get involved. Myrtle Beach condos in particular are a virtually untapped resource that is just sitting there, waiting for the perfect investor to come by and make a huge profit. When the market picks back up again, the ROI on any Myrtle Beach foreclosure property is sure to be tremendous. Even if you are simply looking for a place to live or a summer property, Myrtle Beach condos are some of the best deals you will ever find.

What Is Destination Marketing?

I ran across a respected website where they were talking about “Destination Marketing” where by implementing a model where the website that a person lands on when clicking through a search result becomes the end of their search - in other words, a resource that fits all of their needs and is essentially the first and last website they will need to surf to in order to get their questions answered and their problems solved.

In the past it has been all about attaining the top 10 positions on generalized keywords and keyword phrases in a particular niche. While the content was there, it wasn’t the total package because webmasters and companies were more interested in getting on the first page of the major search engines rather than wondering what would happen once that desired flood of traffic arrived.

One thing I realized was that our firm had always built Destination pages and used the idea of destination marketing to not only get our clients great results in the search engines, but also have the pages where visitors arrived ready to be a one-stop solution package that the company could offer as both a resource and a platform for selling products and services.

Getting high rankings we have long known is only half of the equation. In order to attain and maintain high rankings as well as the tops in customer satisfaction required that we develop marketing strategies that took into account both search engine optimization for landing pages always delivered with a focus on providing exactly what the arriving and prospective customer needs.

In a way, the definition of Destination Search Engine Marketing is a desired destination point. In order to attain this status every marketing campaign needs to achieve top rankings and go that much further to meet the needs and desires of a specific target audience. When a site becomes a resource that people tell others about and point and return to, it has become a destination website. In a way, it is like having a resource booklet with links, sources, materials, products and services that are aligned with the search engine message and always in total sync with why a customer clicked on the SERPs results.

When one looks at SEO, rankings are at the top. Getting good ranking is what it’s all about. Knowing that is the start and not the end all to search engine marketing, many companies are now going beyond the traditional search engine optimization techniques offering clients the ability to create exceptional webpages that are tightly focussed and designed to satisfy arriving web traffic.

By taking the focus off of just getting high rankings in the search engines and looking and dealing with the total presentation, this new term Destination Marketing is in many instances like our firm already at the forefront and on the cutting edge of this marketplace.

Having a name for this methodology is great and the article went further to back up what we’ve said all along. Destination SEM is developing a website that is a cut above the mediocre SEO only sites. It attains high search engine rankings because it is not only optimized but highly deserving of those search engine results. When visitors arrive at websites they will always feel that they have arrived at a site with the complete answer to their problems.

Clients, as a result, can offer products and services, rapidly build and maintain credibility and increase ROI at faster rates. Going at it from the idea that by building an incredibly good and useful site and as a result gaining high rankings is a concept that is building in popularity and one that we’ve used successfully for our clients for quite a while.

The big picture of utilizing a destination marketing approach comes in the form of additional exposure and positive company branding that a client will receive when they shift paradigms from getting high search engine rankings alone. Not only will traffic arriving be more satisfied, it is a known fact that people drive the Internet.

One satisfied customer will tell another one who will tell another. The flipside to that which many firms have suffered is that if they are only optimized to get a visitor to their site, their credibility will suffer and trust will decrease based upon what the site offers to an arriving web surfer. What that means is that conversion rates and sales profits will decrease according to the level of professionalism, friendliness and amount of useful information provided when visitors arrive.

Destination marketing is about asking yourself a question every time you start out to build a page or pages for your site: Do you simply want an average/mediocre site that only half delivers? Or, do you want a site that goes viral, where the amount of good, useful information transforms it into a resource that everyone is looking for, will bookmark and return to again and again.

Answering that question is what makes the difference between having a good site and a great site. Destination marketing is all about making fantastic, useful resource sites that are authorities in specific niches.

Need Search Engine Marketing Services? Call me, 843-685-4675 I can help you!

Search engine optimization is the killer buzz word (and has been) ever since the commercial Internet came into being in the 1990s.  But it’s really only one tool in the box for an integrated search engine marketing campaign.

Search engine optimization is all about letting the search engines find (and hopefully rank) your pages – and there are several optimization strategies.  Some are built around techniques on the page itself, and some are about external strategies.  We’ll cover a bit of both and you’ll see how they complement each other, and how the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

On page techniques include keyword placement and “good housekeeping” tips for your HTML code.  Things like putting in META tags (which quickly got bombed into uselessness), and an internal link structure that’s robot friendly.  (Robots are the names for the search engine programs that go tag and link text into search engine indexes).  It’s also the point where you do content optimization.

Many search engine optimization outfits do just on-page techniques. After all, it’s easy enough to run them as “recipes” and make concrete statements that you’ve improved their web site in some way.

However, the external strategies are also important.  Marketing is more than just being ranked high on the search engines, it’s also an integrated process of building strategic awareness of your brand.  You need to make sure that pages link back to yours, and that those pages aren’t obvious link farms.  Social networking sites are now an important marketing tool, but they only work if what you’re doing on them is NOT obvious marketing.

Articles remain an excellent method of marketing your site, but there’s more to writing an article than keyword stuffing – you need to have an article that is informative and entertaining…and all of these are pieces of the puzzle of an overall marketing strategy.

Doing an effective search engine marketing campaign takes work, it also takes follow through.  You’re going to see a jump in your page’s page rankings, and a surge in your traffic and leads, but it’s important to both act on those leads, and be proactive in thinking about where your next marketing push is going to be.  In an information bazaar as crowded and as dynamic as the internet, there’s a constant evolution of marketing and socialization.

Randy Zlobec has been doing search engine marketing since just about when the field was invented, and because it’s a new and evolving field, he has had to constantly stay on my toes, expanding our range of services and products.  He has progressed from the days when you could pack META tags with keywords and grab page rankings for static pages that are so old they have moss growing out of the code to the internet of today, and strives to maintain my nimbleness to handle the internet of tomorrow as well.

What excites me about internet marketing is the incredible potential.  A number of my clients have seen their business volume triple within a week of a well done internet marketing campaign, and this wasn’t for just new startups.  My biggest success story in this field was designing sites for selling real estate; while those hyperbolic growth curves aren’t likely to happen again – you can only be the first company doing a particular thing once, it was indicative of a sea change in how people shop.  For example, most people look for information on big purchases (cars and houses) online, rather than doing it in person or by reading print ads, and that’s a trend that doesn’t look to stop any time soon.

Internet marketing can only situationally replace other kinds of marketing.  Print marketing still has a place in the current industry.  So does radio advertising…but some things are going away completely.  For example, the concept of newspapers making their revenue off of classified ads has more or less been blown out of the water as sites like craigslist and freecycle have kicked in.  And as more companies have acknowledged the effectiveness of internet marketing, the field has grown crowded, and it’s harder and harder to get the top ranked keywords.

Which is why My Company, Myrtle Beach Site Design gives you a free search engine optimization analysis as part of signing up with us.  We’ll try to find keywords that haven’t been done to death and show you how to make a campaign for them.   Think of it as spreading your bets –rather than bid for a keyword good for 200 visits in a month, we can show you how to cover 10 keywords that each get 20 visits a month, and will do a better job of pre-qualifying the interest levels of those visitors.  It’s a more nuanced, and flexible method of bringing traffic to your visit.

We offer the entire package, and can help your company really take off.  If you’re serious about your marketing effort, and serious about saving money while doing so, give me a call at 843 685 4675…

Hey All -

As many of you are aware, I spend a lot of time working with Real Estate SEO. A unique website called Dig Myrtle Beach is one of my most recent success stories. Dig Myrtle Beach specializes in providing residential homes for sale throughout both Myrtle Beach and its surrounding areas. It took us some time to cook up a domain name, but we finally arrived at Dig Myrtle Beach, and after the website was put together it was my job to get it ranked for the keyword term “Myrtle Beach Real Estate”.

The website was officially launched on March 29 of 2008, and the target date that I gave the owner for a page one listing for this keyword was six months. Today, on July 25, 2008, we achieved a page one rank in the fourth position for the keyword term Myrtle Beach Real Estate! This is a brand new domain name with no history, and it took less than three months for us to give these guys the page rank that they were looking for. Now their most important keyword term is delivering results for them, and it only took 3 months!

I thought that this success story was well worth sharing with you, because it shows how easily you can rank for vital keywords and search terms. Most people are under the impression that it will never take less than a year for competitive terms and brand new domain names. However, the success story I described above is proof positive that when you couple determination, hard work and the right Search Engine Optimization expert, you can take the search engine listings by storm by ranking a brand new domain name in far less than a year.

If you find yourself speaking with an SEO consultant or company that claims that it is impossible to rank for such a term with a new domain in less than a year’s time, just send them a link to this post and maybe you will change their mind. It can be done, and I have proved it!

You can see the results here:
Myrtle Beach Real Estate
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=myrtle+beach+real+estate&btnG=Search
Site: http://www.digmyrtlebeach.com

I will continue to rank that site for many other Myrtle Beach Real Estate related terms however, not only was this was the most important key term, but it also is receiving the most traffic.If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a comment!

Ok, Update! August 4, 2008 I managed to get the domain back to the first page! I have included a screenshot this time…. I will keep you all posted..

Click To View Full Size Image