Dec 30, 2010

What's OUT for 2011 Internet Marketing

Getting your website's value proposition in front of your best prospects at just the right time is the key to success for many businesses. Promise Productions focuses on the right communications strategy to do just that!

While technology continues to evolve, communication savvy and human motivation know-how are skills we bring to each client's desire for more profits and market domination.

As things continue to evolve, the customer adapts and some things perish. In this light we will cover what is IN for 2011 Marketing and what is OUT!

This post covers 5 passé internet marketing approaches that are definitely OUT. These are either methods that are over-used and now filled with bogus offers, or they are cheap short-cuts for gaining quick untargeted "traffic" but not actual qualified prospects ready to take action.




Too many scammers are cashing in on a person's desire to get to the top of the search engine visibility without much effort by offering some really useless website marketing techniques that could actually kill their legitimate search engine rankings. The fact is that these are nothing more than "Marketing Fads", that, like cotton candy, may produce some sweet results in the beginning, but when the newness wears off their effectiveness will fade away and drop you lower than before.

Remember when pop-ups and pop-under advertising came out years ago? This was the hottest marketing tool since the time of placing fliers on cars in parking lots. However, when people around the world started using pop-ups to promote their websites there were windows popping up every time you visited and exited a website. Internet users worldwide got so sick of all those pop-up windows that someone invented pop-up killer software. The search engines even started penalizing websites that were using pop-up scripts and soon after that method of website promotion faded away.

I will identify some of these useless website promotion techniques that should be avoided at all cost! Using some of these bad website marketing techniques could certainly damage your search engine rankings.



1. Automatic Search Engine Submission Services


These free search engine submission websites allow you to put in your URL, keywords and a description of your website. You then click Submit believing that your website is on its way to being indexed on thousands of search engines. Not so! First of all, the major search engines require manual submission by hand and even implement coding script to prevent auto submission. Secondly, when you click on that Submit button you have no idea where your website link will end up going. Your website link could be automatically posted to illegal or international directory websites that are nothing but a colony of spam links.

If Google crawls your website and finds out that you have links to your website coming from other websites with rotten content, then your website will pay the price in low rankings.

There is absolutely no substitute for manually forwarding your websites to the search engines. You will have complete control over where your link is going, and the search engines will automatically crawl your website to get your title and description. These days you want to submit to Google, Yahoo, Bing and DMOZ. The rest are pretty meaningless.



2. Auto Submission to Directories and FFA sites

You may have seen those places that claim you can blast your website to over 2 million websites and directories. As a general rule, please stay away from anyone that uses the word 'Blast' because this is just another way of saying Spam. It sounds like you are literally placing your link on millions of other websites and getting tons of instant backlinks to your website.

In reality, those FFA or "Free For All" websites are nothing but a link farm containing links from sites with bad or irrelevant content. The search engines won't ever see your website as being respectable enough to rank high in the search results if it is affiliated with that type of environment.



3. Lead Generation Software


 I once got an email that said, "Hello Webmaster, My name is John. I have been searching the Internet for some business opportunities and came across your website. I just wanted to know if you are still in business today. Please email me at this_email@emailaddress.com and let me know. Thank you."


This is the work of lead generation software that extracts website links and email addresses from the Internet for any category. You just type the keyword in the search box and the software literally pulls in millions of email addresses. The software even allows you to email all those addresses. On the surface it appears to be the perfect way to put your website link in front of millions of people in the same industry as you.



These unsolicited emails are annoying and ineffective. This marketing technique is too lame to even call "marketing", not very effective because the email is generic, impersonal and did not give the reader a reason to respond.

Your emails should speak TO a person's needs and not just AT them. Readers respond to emails if you find a way to reach their interests, giving them a reason to take action.



4. Backlink Generating Software


Google loves websites that have lots of quality backlinks, considering such links weighs heavily on the importance of those sites in the search engine's eyes. The idea is that if your website really does have relevant content that is valuable and meaningful to many others, then they will reference your information by linking to it. That is a measure of the value of the website in the community's eyes and the search engine rewards you with higher rankings.

Somebody got this shortcut idea to automate the link building that Google loves, hoping to get huge numbers of valuable links and move to the top of the search engine results. It did work momentarily.
However, Google has now gotten smart and has found to way to detect how you are getting your backlinks and even the speed at which you are getting them. So, if you are still buying links or using software to get instant backlinks, then chances are Google will find out and penalize your website. Nothing can substitute for writing valuable content that will automatically attract quality backlinks.



5. Automated Article Submission and Article Spinning


Writing high quality articles is a great way to attract targeted visitors to your website. Again, someone invented a way to automate this process as well. They came out with article submission software that they claim will automatically send your written articles to hundreds or even thousands of directories. There is even software that will take an article, switch ("spin") the title and words around, and send them to more directories.

This software sells to those who don't want to do the labor-intensive work of writing their own articles and sending them manually to article directories.

The real, authentic article directories that can syndicate your articles are getting smart and have installed a special code that disallows auto submission of articles. They have also installed a special script that can detect articles that have been spun off from the original. Most of them manually approve articles before they are published in their directory and can easily detect duplicate and spinned content.



Conclusion


Widespread use of these "automated" website promotion techniques is not real marketing and lowers the quality of the content. It annoys more than benefits the recipient.

Looking for shortcuts to real marketing communications has tried to take away the need to apply really genuine website promotion that gets real results and replaced it with "push-button internet marketing."

The Problem is, we're not slot machines; we're humans. And all effective marketing is actually human-to-human marketing regardless of whatever technologies are involved.

With the above gimmicks, you may see some quick and "positive" results, but only for a brief period of time.

Those truly interested in growing their profits through smarter strategies to target, captivate and engage with their prospects enjoy the lion's share of the profits. Let Promise Productions refine and present your value proposition in a compelling way to attract optimum profits - call our Dallas headquarters at 877-858-0071.

Dec 29, 2010

How To Use Twitter To Improve Your SEO

When you have a social media site with over 190 million users and 65 million daily posts (and growing),  turn it into a website promotion tool!

When you tweet, you have the ability to put a link in that tweet to your website. All Twitter links are "nofollow" (meaning they don't count towards your Link Popularity score), but that doesn't mean that you can't use Twitter to improve your website ranking.

While some SEO experts say that Twitter isn't a ranking factor, the fact is that Twitter pages directly INFLUENCE Google's SERPs and thus may provide a major force in search engine visibility. Google looks at what people search for on Twitter, both to observe trends and to display directly in their "realtime" section of their search engine.




Whether or not Twitter directly affects the SERPs, here are Twitter SEO tactics that are worth checking out.



The Twitter Website Traffic Benefit


After creating new posts on your blog or business website, it only makes sense to tweet about it. Many users search Twitter for useful information or tips they're interested in right at that moment and Twitter puts the latest tweets at the top.

You can't expect to receive hordes website visitors simply by posting a link to your site. Choose interesting text for better website promotion. A boring title wont get you anywhere. Something like "10 Tips to Maximize Your Twitter Followers" may generate more clicks.

 This doesn't really affect your search engine rankings, but it's an effective Twitter website traffic strategy.



Using Twitter for Link Building


By having a large group of Twitter followers, more will see your new posts and announcements. You're speaking to a larger audience, meaning increased likelihood of someone ready to take action. Here's how to do your Twitter SEO:



First off, for effective website promotion it's imperative that you have a large group of followers. Follow people who share the same interests as you and those within your niche. Roughly 30% of the users you follow will follow back. Those who are convinced that you should be followed on Twitter are surely interested in your latest updates. Yes, when done right, Twitter is really a great PR and website promotion tool.

Furthermore, it's highly likely that your followers will write about your new content in their blogs. This translates to link building. Plus, did you know that, in blogs, Google doesn't index shortened URLs? Instead, they index the actual URLs. Thus, you get even more website promotion opportunities.

There are useful Twitter tools such as TweetMeme and HootSuite Pro that let you check the number of users that have posted tweets with a link to your site. They can also tell which of your posts have been picked up and re-tweeted by the general public.



Important Things to Remember


When doing your Twitter SEO strategies, remember that all your tweets shouldn't be about your own website and content. This is bad for your website promotion and would turn people off. No one wants to follow a conceited, I'm-so-great prima donna. Besides, if your tweets would be all about your products and services, they would look like spam. Post engaging and useful information, answer and ask questions, tweet interesting facts, and send messages that your followers will find valuable.



Optimize Your Twitter Page


This is another Twitter SEO tactic that'll help increase your followers and improve your brand reputation. The major search engines all include Twitter account pages on their SERPs. Here are website promotion tips on how to get your profile on the front page of search engine results.


  1.  Consider a username that's relevant to your niche or your business. Your username can affect your website promotion since its part of your page's URL and title tag.


  2. Choose a relevant account name. This will further boost your Twitter website traffic, since the account name is also part of the page title. The account name should be different from the username.
  3. Promote your Twitter profile page by building links to it. Link to it from your company website and from the company blog. 
  4. Since your bio serves as the meta description tag, choose your text wisely and keep website promotion in mind.


More importantly, Twitter provides benefits that are far different from the advantages of search engine optimization. So, before building your SEO campaign via this social network, make sure to achieve Twitter SEO benefits first.



Tweet Optimization


Optimizing your tweets also helps in website promotion. Your tweets help your profile, content and brand gain more exposure.

A tweet's title tag is made up of the username of the account sending out the tweet and the first 30 characters. For that reason, for best SEO value, place your keywords in the post's first few words.

That also means, when retweeting, its better to place the "RT@username" at the end of the tweet so that you'll have plenty of room to place the keywords in the tweet. Also, limit your tweets to 120 characters so that there will be space when other users add the RT@username. Otherwise, some parts of your post might get chopped off.

Twitter SEO tactics are pretty easy to implement. Twitter continues to evolve and has a lot of potential for search engine optimization. Explore its website promotion benefits, discover new website promotion methods, and make your own experiments.

Dallas Marketing and Social Media Marketing Company

For professional Social Media Strategy and Social Media Marketing that maximizes your results through smarter strategies that reinforce all other communications, advertising and marketing efforts, simply call Promise Productions at 877-858-0071.