Our company does a fair amount of work with law firms, and reading an article that one of our clients sent us to post to its website really got me thinking about something. The article was about how insurance companies have started using social media as a way to investigate people who have made disability claims. They will devote a LOT of time to looking at your social media activity, going so far as to make up fake accounts that they use to befriend the subject of investigation to get a better look at their updates. In other words, if a guy who says he is down in his back posts pictures of himself on Facebook lifting something heavy, then that is damaging evidence to his disability claim.

What does this have to do with you? Beyond the obvious (if you file a disability claim, stay off the social media sites!), I think the lesson is that your social media image needs to be congruent with the image you present to prospective clients and referral sources. If you represent yourself one way, but then a prospective client sees you another way online, then you create the impression of dishonesty.

Example: let’s say your public image is one of a church-attending, God-fearing Christian, but then you use profanity or post links to obscene material, then your actions belie your image. That is an extreme example, but you get the point.

I am not saying that your social media updates need to sterile and empty of personality. Social media is most successful when you do display a personality and talk about things happening in your world beyond just business affairs. BUT…when you do an update, you need to think: Are the words I am using here contrary to how I present myself to potential clients?

Unless it is related to your business or expected of you based on what you do, avoid heavy use of profanity. Avoid linking to photos containing nudity. Avoid linking to anything spammy. What you link to, and the words you use, are a reflection of who you are. You want that reflection to jive with how you purposely try to portray yourself.

The reason this is so important is that it is highly likely someone considering hiring you or purchasing your product/service will research you online. That is the nature of business these days. There are no secrets, and there is nowhere to hide. Unless you just don’t do any online marketing, but then you’re just cutting off your nose to spite your face, as the old saying goes. Social media is a very important part of your Internet marketing toolbox, so you need to use it. But use it wisely, lest you risk doing more harm than good.

This applies to the real word as well. An associate in our office tells of a dental practice he knows of in which the dentist is an avid gun collector (nothing wrong with that) who often has shady-looking characters coming into his practice during business hours to deliver a gun he has purchased. You don’t want shady characters walking into your business carrying guns, unless you are in the business of dealing guns.

Congruency is the key here. Don’t try to be someone you’re not, and if you do, make sure you pretend to be that same person when you get online. If you could use some assistance in your online marketing, Work Media is here to help. We are a full-service firm offering an array of services to help companies engage in online commerce, including SEO, paid search, and yes, social media management.

The post Social Media Congruency – Watch What You Say! appeared first on Internet Marketing | Local Search | Pay Per Click | SEO .

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Squidoo, WordPress, Delicious, YouTube…dang! There are a lot of websites you have to deal with if you are trying to promote a website! Social media has been on a tear the last few years, with various marketing experts saying you’ve got to be on Facebook, or you’ve got to be on Twitter, or you’ve got to be on the latest and greatest social media platform. But I have to tell ya, I have yet to see much ROI from any time spent on Facebook or Twitter. Google+, however, may be a different story. It’s too early to tell what kind of long-term impact Google+ will have on business, but Google made one shrewd move that has moved Google+ to the front of my list of social media platforms: it let Google+ start affecting search rankings! Google+ is now a critical part of the search engine optimization toolbox.

Being on Google+ can help my rankings? Now you’ve got my attention.

But just being on Google+ is not enough. You’ve got to work it. What you want to happen is for lots of other people who are also using Google+ to plus your web pages. Just promoting your business and doing updates with links to your own site ain’t gonna do it. I hate to say it…but you’ve got to interact! You’ve got to be social!

The first thing you have to do is decide who you want to be in your circles, so that they will hopefully put you in theirs. Who do you think that should be? People who are possible sources of business or referrals! Whatever type of business you have, find people who may be interested in that, or interested in other things somehow related to your business, and add them to your circles. Some of them will add you to their own circles by default. However, many will have to be prodded into it by seeing that you are interacting with their updates.

For instance, if someone in your circles says something interesting or publishes a link that is interesting, plus the comment or link, and then add your own comment. You want them to see you! Sometimes it is difficult to comment on someone else’s post. Don’t just fake it if you really can’t comment intelligently. Just keep your eyes open for those opportunities when you can.

So as people in your circles see you responding to their updates, they will be much more likely to add you to their circles. That’s when you can expose them to your own content and hopefully get them plusing and commenting on your own updates. Now here is where the real value comes in. As people in your circles plus your website, your website will appear more prominently to them, as well as people in their circles, when they do a search related to your business. Not only that, it can affect search engine visibility outside of the Google+ network, as Google identifies that people in Google+ are plusing your links.

You need to be systematic with your use of Google+. You want people who have you in their circles to see your name often, if not every day. Through your updates, they will know what it is that you are selling, and when the time comes that they need your product or service, they will think of you. All the while, you will be using your updates (and links to content you publish) to establish your authority in your area.

The ranking effect is one very good reason to be using Google+. That is the thing that can draw a straight line from using social media to generating a positive return on your time invested, unlike just about every other social media platform. That is why it has become the social media site of choice for Work Media.

The post Improving Search Engine Rankings with Google+ appeared first on Internet Marketing | Local Search | Pay Per Click | SEO .

Remarketing is not really a new concept, but it is one that most online advertisers still do not take advantage, probably because of confusion about how it works. It is a very simple concept. Remarketing refers to the intentional display of ads to those who have previously visited your website. Ideally, you would want to concentrate this type of Internet marketing on those who visited your website but did not purchase from you or contact you. The Google AdWords interface makes it easy to set up remarketing ads, including setting up your remarketing campaign so that it only displays to non-converters.

To try remarketing for yourself, do the following:

• Log into your AdWords account. That should be obvious.
• Create a new content campaign, or click on an already existing content campaign.
• Click the Display Network tab.
• Click the Interests & Remarketing link.
• Click the + Change display targeting button.
• In the dropdown list, select an ad group.
• In the Change display targeting section, find Interests & Remarketing and click Remarketing lists.
• Click Create and manage lists.
• Click New audience/remarketing list.
• Supply a name and description, as well as a duration for the cookie that Google will use to track the visitors to your website to whom your site should be remarketed.
• Click Save.
• Click the link underneath the Tags/Definitions column in the table below.
• Copy the code to whatever page of your website should trigger remarketing.

After doing this, whenever someone visits your website, he will then begin to see ads for your website on other Google content network sites. Easy, right?

A couple of things: first off, if it has been more than a few months (or maybe even a few days) since this post was written, then chances are excellent that Google has already changed the interface so that the above instructions are not entirely accurate. It should still be easy to figure out, but if you have trouble just Google how to do it.

Second, you really don’t want to continue showing your ads to someone who has already purchased from you or contacted you. Luckily, you can account for this by creating what Google calls a custom combination. This is basically combining two remarketing lists. For example, if you have one remarketing rule set up for anyone visits your website, but another remarketing rule set up for anyone who completes your contact form, you could create a custom combination so that you can tell Google to only show your ads to those who visited but did NOT complete your contact form. This way you are only remarketing to those who did convert.

It is a good habit to get into to only use remarketing for non-converters. Otherwise, you will waste impressions (and possibly money) showing ads to those who have already signed up with you, and you will be less likely to annoy your converters. Remarketing can give a bad impression if someone continually sees your ad everywhere she goes. So don’t overuse. Limit the number of times a remarketing ad is shown to the same person.

Remarketing is a fantastic marketing technique because it lines up nicely with the direct marketing concept of showing your ad X number of times to the same prospect. But use it wisely, or it could get you into some trouble.

The post Google Adwords – Getting Started with Remarketing appeared first on Internet Marketing | Local Search | Pay Per Click | SEO .

At Work Media, what we do can be broadly classified as “Internet marketing,” and underneath the Internet marketing umbrella it breaks down into a few more specific areas such as search engine optimization (“SEO”), social media management, and paid search. Over on the SEO side, things are pretty chaotic these days. Google is whacking websites left and right, causing people in our line of work to scramble to make adjustments to how we do things to salvage our clients’ (and our own) rankings. However, while Google continues making it harder and harder to figure out how to get high organic search engine rankings, the company continues to make improvements to its paid search platform that make it easier and more efficient to manage paid search campaigns (you don’t think it could be that Google REALLY wants you to spend money with them to get your site to appear, do you?). Certain policies notwithstanding (a subject for another day), from a technological standpoint, the Google AdWords platform is more robust and powerful than ever. So let’s talk about some of the newer features that Google has implemented, or will soon be implementing, that make your life as an advertiser easier.

Improved exact and phrase match. Soon, Google will display your ad for an exact match or phrase match keyword even if there is a slight variation in the search query if it is clear that the person was searching for the same thing. These include misspellings, singular and plural forms, acronyms, stem variants and abbreviations. For example, if the keyword is “personal injury lawyer,” but the actual search query is “personel (note the misspelling) injury lawyer” or “personal injury lawyers (plural),” then it will display. Google was even considerate enough to program the system so that only exact, exact matches affect your keyword quality score.

Improved ad rotation. This is one of the things that has always bugged me about AdWords, and I am thrilled that Google has improved this. Google has always encouraged advertisers to use ad rotation that automatically displays the ads that have the highest click-through rates. But that mechanism always kicked in way too early. A like to see LOTS of data to know FOR SURE that one ad is a better performer than the other, yet Google would always start choking ads before they had been exposed to enough impressions. So now Google is about to unveil an improved ad rotation that first gives equal rotation to all ads for 30 days, and then begins making adjustments based on click-through rates. Major improvement.

Mobile app links in mobile ads. If you have a mobile app, you can link to it from ads that appear on mobile devices. This is a great opportunity to increase your prospective customers’ level of involvement with your company. If you can get them using your app, they could see your company name every day, or at least when the right occasion arises.

Smarter keyword research. The Google keyword tool will now automatically build out distinct sets of keywords to use as the foundation of ad groups based on the keywords returned from your query. While I would certainly look at the suggested ad groups with a critical eye, this is a way to quickly split out your keywords into appropriate ad groups, or just to get a campaign built out if you are short on time.

Google seems to be making changes to their AdWords platform at an increasingly rapid rate. The best way to keep up with new features is to check out the AdWords blog at http://adwords.blogspot.com/. Most of the newest changes coming out are very smart features designed to help you use the platform more effectively, so stay informed about what is possible and take advantage of any new feature that makes sense for your situation.

The post Recent Google AdWords Improvements that Make Advertisers' Lives Easier appeared first on Internet Marketing | Local Search | Pay Per Click | SEO .

Last night I saw a commercial on TV for a child’s toy called Fuzzoodles. It’s basically a set of little fuzzy pipes and pieces that you put together to make crazy looking characters. I’m pretty sure I have actually bought some of these in the past when I saw them at Wal-Mart. It’s a cute product, and the fact that it is on the shelves of Wal-Mart is proof they know how to sell it. However, watching this commercial last night, I was appalled at what, in my opinion, is a bad marketing mistake.

The point of the commercial was to get you to call or go online to order a special set of Fuzzoodles. The website address shown in the commercial was www.poof-slinky.com

Say what? What does “poof-slinky” have to do with Fuzzoodles?

A URL used in an ad for a product should be tightly linked with the name of the product.

It should also be easy to remember.

This URL uses two words, joined with a hyphen, that don’t seem to have any connection to the product. The only reason I made note of the URL in the commercial was because of how shocked I was at what a poor choice it was for a URL. And even then, I still had to rewind and pause the TV so that I could write it down. Otherwise, I never would have remembered it!

A URL in an ad is another opportunity to reinforce the name of the product in the consumer’s mind, and hopefully convince him to visit your website. If the URL is completely disconnected from the product name, then you’re forcing the consumer to have to remember multiple pieces of disparate information. Keep it simple!

This, in my opinion, is bad marketing for what I think is a reasonably good product.

Contact Work Media at info@workmedia.net to avoid making these types of Internet marketing mistakes with your business.

The post Fuzzoodles – A Lesson in Bad Marketing appeared first on Internet Marketing | Local Search | Pay Per Click | SEO .

There are many factors that go into how Google or any other search engine will choose to rank your website. If you’ve ever read much about SEO, then you probably already know the importance of optimizing the pages of your website and creating links to your website. If not, feel free to read any of the hundreds of blog posts on this site to learn more about that stuff. What I want to talk to you about today are two little things that you probably haven’t spent much time thinking about that can greatly damage your search rankings. They are:

Bad hosting

and

Bad pages

By bad hosting, I mean hosting that goes down often. Here is the problem: if Google visits your website and it is down, that is a black mark against you. The first time it happens, it may not hurt you. But if it happens repeatedly, Google is going to greatly downgrade its opinion of your website. As a result, your rankings in Google will plummet. If you have no idea if and when your website goes down, you should use a website monitoring service that will tell you when your site goes down. One that we have used is www.freewebmonitoring.com. There are many other services that do the same thing. Some are paid, so they may be more advanced, but a free service will do you just fine.

If you find that your website goes down often, my advice is to change hosting companies. It is a pain moving your website, especially if it is connected to a database, but the short-term pain will be your long-term gain in terms of improved search engine rankings. And I hate to say it, but with hosting, sometimes you get what you pay for. That cheap $6 per month hosting plan may work just fine, but there is just as good a chance that it will be a piece of crap. Work Media uses cloud hosting. We like it because it is as reliable as having our own server, but as easy to use as shared hosting (well, almost as easy). It is more expensive than shared hosting, but you will find that your website almost never goes down. Another similar consideration is how quickly your website loads. If you find that your site loads very slowly, that is another ready to upgrade to something better.

By bad pages, I really mean missing pages. If your website has gone through various changes over the years (especially as related to changing content management systems or platforms) then the URLs to your pages may have changed, or some pages just may not exist at all any more. This is a problem because Google HATES it when pages that it has indexed disappear. What you need to do is set up 301 permanent redirects from old pages to their newer counter parts (or even just to your home page). This is a pretty simple thing to do, but exactly how to do it depends on your Web server, what technology your website uses, and things of that nature. If you’re not sure how to go about it, contact someone (like us, for example) who can help you with it.

Work Media is here to take care of all your problems. If your search engine rankings are poor and you just don’t know what the problem is, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email info@workmedia.net.

The post Two Little Things that Can Ruin Your Search Rankings appeared first on Internet Marketing | Local Search | Pay Per Click | SEO .

If you do Facebook, or keep up at all with what is going on with the world of social media, you probably know about Pinterest. Right now, it is the hottest thing going. Pinterest lets you set up virtual boards on which you pin images you collect by visiting Web pages, or by re-pinning items that other Pinterest users have already pinned. It’s a lot of fun, but our question here is: Does it have value from an Internet marketing standpoint? The answer is yes, although certain types of business may be a more natural fit for the Pinterest concept.

Pinterest is visual. It’s pictures. Therefore, any type of business that sells visually interesting products is a natural. For instance, I am somewhat of a collector of guitars and amps (much to my wife’s chagrin), so I have a board with pictures of items that are in my collection. If I had some kind of business related to guitars, such as selling vintage guitars, I could do this same thing to actually display what I had for sale. Sure, there are lots of places where you could display my inventory online, but why not go where the people are? Anything related to visual arts or crafts is also a natural fit for Pinterest.

As soon as I created my Pinterest account, I noticed that people started following me. Many were people that I knew from Facebook. Some were people that I had never heard of. I would advise that before you use Pinterest, you begin maintaining a Facebook account and build up a nice friend list. Then segue into Pinterest.

The trick to getting material into your Pinterest account is to install the Pin It button from the Pinterest interface on your bookmarks menu. Then you are on a page you would like to pin, you just click the button. Before you start pinning, you should set up your boards. Going back to our vintage guitar dealer example, maybe he has a Fender board, a Gibson board, and a Peavey board. Or maybe he just has one board for everything. Either way, he needs to have a board on which to place his pins. When he selects something to pin, he will choose a board on which to place it.

Like most of the social media sites, you should follow others as well as having people follow you. And you should pin interesting things from others’ boards onto your own. The more social you make it, the more exposure you will get.

If you are a service business, you may wonder if you have any use for Pinterest. The answer is yes. You don’t just have to pin “things.” You can pin content as well (the pin itself will still be a picture, but it will link to the content). But if you pin something like that, it should be interesting.

We’ve just skimmed the surface, but if you are the type that like to look for every advantage, you should give Pinterest a try. But my advice is to not just approach it from the standpoint of a way to promote your business, but really get into it. Have fun with it.

The post The Latest and Greatest: Getting Started with Pinterest appeared first on Internet Marketing | Local Search | Pay Per Click | SEO .

Experienced search engine marketing companies like us have a pretty well-defined formula for how to do what we do. On-page optimization, link building, local search optimization…whatever it is, we have a good idea of how to do it within the confines of how Google and other search engines like to work.

However…

Sometimes playing by the strict rules just doesn’t get it done. If you find yourself in a situation where you just can’t seem to get the kind of visibility you are after for one or more particular keywords, then it might be time to take a hard look at what the top-ranked websites for those keywords are doing. You may be surprised.

We have a client in a very specific segment of the jewelry industry who wanted to get on the first page of Google for one specific keyword. Now, depending on the keyword, that can be a very tough situation. We like to spread things out and target a bucket of keywords. In a given week, some will go up and some will go down, but we always see a general rise in rankings overall. But when you are dealing with a single keyword, it’s either up or down, and that’s all there is to it.

We had optimized our client’s site in such a way as to not disturb the existing design (which is quite attractive) and went to work creating a ton of links. Our client’s site started bouncing around Google for the keyword, which is normal, but it just wouldn’t crack the first page. After a while, we decided to take a step back and take a hard look at what our client’s top-ranked competitors were doing. What we saw surprised us…sort-of. Many of them were quite ugly sites, filled with text. No surprises there. But what we noticed was a LOT of repetition of our target keyword. Much more than we like to use.

What this told us was that in this instance we were being too conservative. We needed to increase the frequency of our keyword in the text on our client’s website home page. Even though this was going to result in a keyword density that we are not really all that comfortable with, in this instance that is what Google wants to see.

The process of examining what your top-ranked competitors are doing is a very valuable exercise. You may be shocked at some of the things they are doing. Now, I should advise some caution here. If your clients are doing things that border on ban-worthy, then do not follow them over the cliff. But if it’s something like we are talking about in this case, where you just need more instances of your keyword, then do what they are doing…and then improve it!

The post What Are Your Competitors Doing? Using Emulation to Improve Search Rankings appeared first on Internet Marketing | Local Search | Pay Per Click | SEO .

Wiki’s are basically like online encyclopedias that are publicly edited. It’s a collective knowledge tool. You’ve probably heard of the most famous once, Wikipedia. If you can get your business listed in Wikipedia, then that is very, very helpful. But it’s also very difficult to get a listing devoted to a business unless you are a big, nationwide company.

However, Wikipedia is only one wiki-style website. There are LOTS of those things. If you research your competitions’ back links and notice that they have lots of wiki links, then chances are they are working with an internet marketing company that is setting up wiki’s as a source of links. Many of these wiki’s are open, meaning anyone can edit them. So you know what you can do? You can change those links to point to your website. In cases where a marketing company is setting up lots of those things for links, they are probably not going to bother ever working on them again. Chances of your link staying intact are quite good.

This is somewhat of a borderline tactic because we’re not dealing with real high quality link sources in most cases. But if you see that these links are helping drive up your competition’s rankings, and they are open wiki’s, you have an opportunity to literally steal links from your competition.

Don’t spend all your time trying to hunt down these types of links. I’m really talking about a very specific situation where your competitors are driving up their ranking by using low quality wiki’s as a source of links. These sites really aren’t benefiting society at large, so you’re not hurting anyone…except your competition.

The post The Dirty Little Wiki Secret appeared first on Internet Marketing | Local Search | Pay Per Click | SEO .

Following are twenty of the top article directories, roughly ranked by recent Alexa ratings. These directories all have a reasonably high PageRank, a low Alexa rating (lower is better), and allow Do Follow links. This is a good list to use for your SEO campaign.

1. Ezinearticles.com. The king of article directories.
2. Buzzle.com.
3. Goarticles.com.
4. Gather.com.
5. Ezinemark.com.
6. Infobarrel.com.
7. Ideamarketers.com.
8. Thefreelibrary.com.
9. Amazines.com.
10. Sooperarticles.com.
11. Pubarticles.com.
12. Articlerich.com.
13. Triond.com.
14. Articledashboard.com.
15. Articlecity.com.
16. Isnare.com.
17. Submityourarticle.com.
18. Articletrader.com.
19. Articleblast.com.
20. Articleclick.com.

The post 20 Top Article Directories to Target for Your SEO Campaign appeared first on Internet Marketing | Local Search | Pay Per Click | SEO .