Posted May 18, 2010, by Mary Killelea 

Wednesday, June 16, 2010 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM (PST)
Online Marketing Summit
The Online Marketing Summit (OMS) is coming to Portland on June 16! This is your chance to learn best practices and actionable strategies from the nation’s best online marketing professionals and practitioners from organizations like Intel, REI and Web Analytics Demystified. Connect with hundreds of your local marketing peers to learn, network and share ideas.

Learn all about NEW B2B and B2C case studies and social media integration tracks, unparalleled networking opportunities, and an exclusive Social Media and Content Marketing Workshop and Breakfast, brought to you by the Online Marketing Institute and the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative.

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by Mary Killelea, Dec. 8, 2009 

The Criteria the search engines use to rank pages can be categorized into two groups:

On page factors:  You control this

Off site factors:  This is where a internet marketing strategy is crucial

Onsite SEO:

Factors:

• Title Tag
• Words on your page
• Domain Name
• HTML design
• URLS

Offsite SEO:

Factors:

• Incoming Links
• Anchor text links
• Page rank of sites
• Authority Sites

Your marketing mix should consist of both .. first your onsite has to be addressed and then off site has strategies need to be implemented.

– Call for a quote 503-997-6935

by Mary Killelea Dec 8, 2009

1. Decide on the one search phrase you want your page to rank for.
2. Title your page with a variation of the phrase you want it to rank for.
3. Create a headline on your page that re-enforces the title of your page
4. Write your page content for consumers, but do also keep in mind it’s important to give the search engines what they need to rank you correctly for the terms you are targeting, so use the key word term phrases you are targeting in your content.
5. Create links to your page using link text that contains variation of your search phrase.
6. Get external links to your page that also use variations of your search phrase.
7. Continue to do this through out your site on each and ever page, targeting a unique key word phrase on each of the pages.

Good Luck!

by Mary Killelea August 24, 2009 

Whether you are concentrating your seo on Local Search or not it is a very important segment of SEO that every business owner with or without a website should pay attention to if you want customers to find you.

Here is a link to David Mimh’s recent survey of several experts that gauged the factors most helpful for ranking well in the Google and Yahoo Local algorithms, as well as techniques to be avoided.  He has done a great job summarizing the survey and it’s a must read for anyone interested in gaining ranking in the local playing field. http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml#results

When reading his article there were a few terms that I felt needed to be better explained for those not in the local search market trenches.  

survey glossary:

HCard Microformat – hCard is a simple, open, distributed format for representing people, companies, organizations, and places, using a 1:1 representation of vCard (RFC2426) properties and values in semantic HTML or XHTML. hCard is one of several open microformat standards suitable for embedding in HTML, XHTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML.   Want to get started with writing an hCard? Use the hCard creator to write up some contact information and publish it, or follow the hCard authoring tips to add hCard markup to your current contact page.

KML File - You can create KML files with the Google Earth user interface, or you can use an XML or simple text editor to enter “raw” KML from scratch. KML files and their related images (if any) can be compressed using the ZIP format into KMZ archives. To share your KML and KMZ files, you can e-mail them, host them locally for sharing within a private internet, or host them publicly on a web server. Just as web browsers display HTML files, Earth browsers such as Google Earth display KML files. Once you’ve properly configured your server and shared the URL (address) of your KML files, anyone who’s installed Google Earth can view the KML files hosted on your public web server.

If you’re new to KML, begin by browsing the KML Tutorial, which presents short samples of KML code that you can view in Google Earth and Google Maps. The KML Reference provides detailed syntax for all KML elements, with explanations and diagrams of how to specify them.  The Developer’s Guide contains in-depth conceptual material and examples.

Citations: a short note recognizing a source of information or of a quoted passage; “the student’s essay failed to list several important citations”; “the acknowledgments are usually printed at the front of a book”; “the article includes mention of similar clinical cases”  Or in the case of online Citations are mentions from other online sources.

UGC - user generated content

LBC - local business center

IYP - internet yellow pages

LBL - local business listings

Great resources to have handy: 

Most Important Data Providers + IYP Sites

1. infoUSA
2. Superpages
3. Localeze
4. YellowPages
5. Yelp
6. InsiderPages
7. Niche Industry Sites (BBB, Vertical Directories)
8. Acxiom
9. Yahoo
10. Citysearch

Other sites receiving significant votes: Niche Civic/Municipal Sites (Chamber of Commerce, Local Directories), Merchant Circle, UniversalBusinessListing, Yellowbot.

Most Important Review Engines

1. Yelp
2. InsiderPages
3. Yahoo
4. CitySearch
5. Google
6. Superpages
7. Niche Industry Sites (BBB, Vertical Directories)
8. TripAdvisor
9. Judysbook
10. Kudzu

Other sites receiving significant votes: Yellowpages, Merchant Circle, AngiesList. 

Also if you don’t know about it check out your site’s local listing on www.getlisted.org

By Mary Killelea August 13, 2009 

My new internet marketing tool is  Hootsuite ( http://hootsuite.com ) The great thing about Hootsuite is it allows you to streamline your internet marketing efforts. It allows you to still be broad in your reach but saves you precious time!  And it’s FREE.  We are truly living in amazing times with the amount of new technology we are seeing every day and it’s amazing the rate of new technology and services being offered and developed.  It certainly  can be overwhelming if you don’t use tools like this to help you stay on top of your field.  Here is a list of the what Hootiesuite offers as part of it’s service:

Multiple Accounts - Save your time and save your sanity. Continue managing all of your Twitter profiles through one client: HootSuite

Team Workflow - Have a company or organization with more than one contributor? HootSuite is still making it easy to manage multiple users over various Twitter accounts.

Track Statistics - Impress your friends, your boss or just yourself with our improved visualizations link statistics. Graphs show not only a summary but also individual tweet statistics!

Multi-Column View (like tweetdeck) - Never miss a tweet with HootSuite 2.0 multiple columns feature. Organize your Twitter stream into friends, news, search terms, keyword tracking - whatever you like! Our drag and drop feature allows you to easily move individuals into group columns.

Tabbed Layout - The new tabbed layout takes Twitter categories to new heights. Organize and customize your Tweeting experience. Within each tab, you are able to create up to 6 columns. Drag and drop your tabs for easy organizing.

Create Groups - Now you can create customizable columns for your friends, groups or topics of interest! Add users through their @username or drag and drop them from other columns! Hoot

Embed Columns - Want to feed the chatter from a customized Twitter column somewhere else? Now you can grab code from HootSuite to easily embed Twitter search columns in your blog or website.

Feed Your RSS  -Like to feed your blog or website through Twitter? Tis easy! Automatically feed your RSS to your Twitter stream with HootSuite!

Ping.fm Integration - Update all of your social networks with a single update! HootSuite with Ping.FM allows you to update your Facebook, Wordpress, MySpace, LinkedIn and more.  What’s Ping.fm? Think of it as your social network glue.  A Ping.fm account lets you send a single update to multiple networks simultaneously: Facebook, Wordpress, MySpace, LinkedIn, and more. And now you’re able to send those updates through HootSuite to take advantage of scheduling, clickthrough stats, and all the other cool features HootSuite has to offer. 

Schedule Tweets - Provide rich, nourishing content to your followers at any time of day using the HootSuite tweet scheduler. Pre-schedule anything you like, from radio programming to birthday well-wishes. Or, tweet live!

Quick Search - Located directly on the dashboard, click the search bar to see current trending topics, to search keywords, or monitor your brand. Like what you see? Save the search as a column!

View User Info - Easily view users’ details without being taken to a separate window! Click on their username or avatar to view an in-screen popup to view their detailed bio, follow them, or add them to one of your groups

And a host of other standard features like notifications and alerts etc. 

I am currently working on putting together an Internet marketing strategy for one of my clients.  There are a lot of standard points to follow but it is important to treat each customer uniquely as their goals are unique to their own business goals.  So use your tool box of knowledge to customize specific marketing strategies for each of your clients.

Having an Internet Marketing Strategy (which is a term that has grown quite popular in recent months) can be beneficial in many ways.

The goal is to get more traffic, enhance your branding, and sell more products  |  The solution and approach is all in the strategy.

Below is a list of 10 things to help you get started:

1. Start with an effective web design and development strategy. Have a good website that people trust, is easy to navigate, they like it and they can gain beneficial information from it or at they can be entertained by it.  Give them a reason to visit and a reason to stay!
2. Get ranked at the top in major search engines, and practice good Search Optimization Techniques.  — INVEST IN THIS!! You can have the best site ever but if you don’t get eyes on it .. you wont do any business.
3. Learn to use Email Marketing Effectively - there are some very successful techniques and strategies around email marketing to emulate.
4. Dominate your marketing niche with affiliate, reseller, and associate programs. (Make extra passive income as well)
5. Request an analysis from an Internet marketing coach or Internet marketing consultant. — Sometimes you are too close the forest that you can’t see the trees!
6. Build a responsive opt-in email list. - Worth GOLD! Don’t ever abuse it and become a spammer or sell lists.
7. Publish articles or get listed in news stories.  -  Worth the time or worth the cost of outsourcing it.
8. Write and publish online press releases. - Worth the time or worth the cost of outsourcing it.
9. Facilitate and run contests and giveaways via your web site. - Give reasons for customers to come back and interact with you. Everyone Loves the thought of winning something FREE.
10. Blog and interact with your visitors. - Create and Build relationships with your customers!

by Mary Killelea, July 1, 2009

Here are some facebook marketing tips, guidelines and facebook facts that I share with my clients:

(1) Create a profile -People cannot befriend someone who doesn’t have a profile. Create a profile today and use your own photo and be real.   You can create multiple levels of privacy restrictions on your information. Facebook facilitates social networking because it enables you to share who you are and what you like. It is not the place for blatant advertising.

Facebook enables you to create friends with whom you can share as much as you want through your posts, profile, applications and RSS feeds. You get to accept or reject friend requests. Friends enable you to share more about what you are doing and what you are interested in.  You can develop strong support relationships and even joint ventures through your friends. You will be amazed with the people you find or who find you.

Facebook only allows you one profile but you can create as many business pages as you like. So I encourge you to create a business page which essentially a separate profile for your business.  But pages allow you more flexibility for marketing masses of people vs. personal profiles.  I like to have a main profile I tend to keep more personal and friend oriented and then on my business page I put links to articles that I’ve written, you can add your LinkedIn profile, and links to any articles about you. Talk about successes and specific goals. 

There are over 2,000 Facebook applications that enable you to share information, have fun and learn about other people’s likes and dislikes. Choosing the right applications can have a BIG impact on your effectiveness in marketing on Facebook.

(2) Utilize your status update - This is a short line keep it 141 characters or smaller to state what you are doing but be specific and smart about your status update. You could say “I’m shopping” << but that’s boring & no-one will care. or you could say “I’m buying the new flip camera to capture tonight’s Smart Event www.smartevent.com“ Now that’s interesting and I may just click on the event and bingo you have just marketed without being a pitch man! I recommend you update your status 1-2 times a day.

(3) Go thru the search feature and find personal friends and invite them to be your friends. Accept friend invitations. If your goal is to strictly use Facebook as a marketing avenue accept all friends but just don’t reveal personal info. Stick to surface stuff about you and keep it focused on what you can contribute to the social network thru your experience and expertise.

(4) Join a Facebook Group
You can create or join groups on Facebook and share information with others. After you join a group, you can text-message other members, send them emails, comment on their profiles or contact them. You’d be surprised at the range of types of groups there are.

(5) Buy Advertising Space

• You can buy an ad on Facebook. It’s called Facebook Flyers Basic so you can create banner-like advertising on networks. This is a great way to target advertising to a specific demographic.
• Facebook also has Flyers Pro — a cost-per-click advertising program that’s triggered by keyword searches (like Google AdWords). The article has more in-depth tips on how to do this and I’d be interested if anyone reading this has tried either advertising method.

On your business Page (business profile)

•  Host an event and post it — a promotion or event you have coming up.
•  Create a contest - your fans become a great test market for your products.
•  Ask for Input from fans - ASK them for their opinions. People love to be included!!
•  Share business videos or product pictures
•  Post pictures -These could include candid shots of products, people, or other silly related items. If Facebook users are in these photos, either they or their friends can tag them, and these tags can show up on the news feed.
• Post news articles -Offbeat news involving a person or organization is a great item to share.
• Write a note - make yourself come across sincere, and contribute worthwhile information. Maybe share something that happened in your business day that you found frustrating, or rewarding the point is it’s unique and you are sharing this with others.

Now a lot of these principals apply for marketing on other social media sites as well.

Two important things to get out of this article:

1. Be real, be human, and make your contributions worthwhile and people will follow you and your posts will begin to have power.
2. Stay focused. Facebook can be a big time suck if you allow it to be. Train yourself to check it twice daily once in the morning and once in the evening. Respond to others quickly and move on.  Do not let it distract you from your daily objectives. Participate & Contribute and move on.

As of today July 1st, 2009 Statistics for Facebook that are incredible!!

General Growth

• More than 200 million active users
• More than 100 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day
• More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older

User Engagement

• Average user has 120 friends on the site
• More than 5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
• More than 30 million users update their statuses at least once each day
• More than 8 million users become fans of Pages each day

Applications

• More than 900 million photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 10 million videos uploaded each month
• More than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week
• More than 2.5 million events created each month
• More than 35 million active user groups exist on the site

International Growth

• More than 50 translations available on the site, with more than 40 in development
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States

Platform

• More than 950,000 developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
• Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
• More than 52,000 applications currently available in the Facebook Application Directory
• More than 100 applications have more than one million monthly active users
• More than 10,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008

Mobile

• There are more than 30 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
• There are more than 150 mobile operators in 50 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

So once again the gold rush begins with marketers rushing to take advantage of this opportunity to select your unique keyword rich username for your facebook url.  I selected www.facebook.com/onlinemarketingservice and I have to say I wish I had selected another one so please choose wisely.

Before you login into facebook and click on the FB announcement that will be on your home page to update your username url read the questions and answers below.

These are some very popular question and answers surrounding this latest offering from Facebook.

What is a Facebook username?

You can personalize your Facebook URL (web address) by selecting a unique username. It will appear in the location bar of your browser after “http://www.facebook.com/” when you view your profile.

Where can I claim a username?

Starting at 12:01 a.m. (EDT) on Saturday, June 13, 2009, you will be able to select a username at http://www.facebook.com/username.

You can select a username that Facebook suggests or create your own. Select “Check availability” to check for available usernames. If the desired username is available, click “Confirm” in order to confirm your choice.

How many usernames does each person get?

Users can only have one username for their personal profile. Similarly, Facebook Page administrators can only have one username for each Page.

Can I edit my username, or transfer it to another account?

Once you have claimed a username by clicking the “Confirm” button after checking for a username’s availability, it is not possible to edit it, or to transfer your username to a different account on Facebook. Additionally, when an account is removed from the site, its username will not be made available. Facebook does this for security reasons.

You should make sure it is something you like and that it’s appropriate for friends, family, co-workers, and anyone else who might use it to find you

My username was not available.

You may not be able to claim a username for several reasons. Usernames can only contain alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9) or a period (”.”), for example — john.smith55. Usernames also must be at least 5 characters long. Usernames are not case sensitive. Facebook also prevents certain words from being included in usernames. It is not possible to copy a username that someone else has already claimed.

If Facebook has indicated that your username cannot be claimed, you will need to select a different one. You will see a green checkmark indicating that a potential username is available before you actually claim it.

Will usernames be for Facebook Pages and personal profiles?

Yes. People can set one and only one username for their personal profile. Similarly, Facebook Page administrators can only have one and only one username for each Page they administer. But right now, Only Pages with 1,000 fans as of May 31, 2009 are eligible for usernames. You will not be able to edit or transfer this username once you set it. 

What if I misspell my username?

People have to click on the “Confirm” button to finalize their selection. After that time, it cannot be changed.

What if people want to release their username in lieu of another?

To prevent username squatting and other activities that would limit options for other users, we have a strict no transferability policy.

See complete list of facebook user name question and answers.

Okay so you have a twitter account and you tweet often and have people you follow and others who follow you.  Really, whether you are a marketer or not, the idea of finding others who tweet about the same stuff you like is of interest.  Now if you are a marketer you definately want to get in on this!

As defined on www.hashmarks.org  Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag. 

Twitter Fan Wiki explains, “Hashtags were developed as a means to create ”groupings” on Twitter, without having to change the basic service. The hash symbol is a convention borrowed primarily from IRC channels, and later from Jaiku’s channels. ”

hashtags.org provides real-time tracking of Twitter hashtags. Opt-in by following @hashtags to have your hashtags tracked.  Similarly, Twemes offers real-time tracking without the necessity of following a specific Twitter account.  Also, with their purchase of Summize, Twitter itself now offers some support of hashtags at their search engine: http://search.twitter.com

How To Use Hashtags

First, follow @hashtags on Twitter. They will follow you back automatically, and your hashtags will be tracked.

Next, start using hashtags in your tweets, preceding key words. It can be helpful to do a little research first, to find out if the subject you’re tweeting already has an established hashtag. Also, check Suggestions and Tips and Example Uses below for ettiquette and general usage.

Finally, track other tweets on the subjects you’re interested in (ie: those containing the appropriate hashtags) by browsing/searching at Hashtags.org or TwitterGroups. You can set it up with RSS feeds as well.

Origin and interesting fact: Hashtags were popularized during the San Diego forest fires in 2007 when Nate Ritter used the hashtag “#sandiegofire” to identify his updates related to the disaster. 

Fantastic resource and origin of most of this content came from http://twitter.pbworks.com/Hashtags  Essential for any avid user of twitter.   Now beware there are some who frown on adding Hashtags but I personally don’t think they see the true value of the idea and the over all benefits as a user and as a person sharing truly something of value.  Only time will tell.

So one of the most important things you can do when it comes to the success of your site is to first do KEYWORD RESEARCH!Why is Keyword Research so important? Because you can waste a lot of time and money designing your site, writing copy for your site, and optimizing your site for the wrong keywords or keywords that are basically ones that wont get you much traffic.

Keyword research if done properly, can be time consuming because you are looking into many factors that make these the worthy choices to go after. Working Web Solutions can take the broad terms you provide and then drill them down looking at more long tail keywords and run them against the following qualifiers:

Qualifiers for keywords: 
SEOT (SEO Daily Traffic) minimum of 100 searches a day.
SEOC (SEO Competition) – less than 100,000 competing results
SEOTC (Title Competition) set to less than 10,000 results for the title tag

Then we proceed and look at the SEO off page factors that are considered

• look at the domain age of other sites on the first page of Google going for the same keyword terms
• look at the page rank of others sites on the first page of Google going for the same keyword terms
• look at the # of backlinks to those sites that are coming up in Google on the first page for those keyword terms
• look at the # of backlinks to the domain to those sites that are coming up in Google on the first page for those keyword terms
• look at the # of links to the competitors page from a .edu/.gov site
• look at whether the top results for that term are listed in DMOZ
• look at whether the top results for that term are listed in Yahoo Directory

Then we proceed and look at the SEO on page factors that are considered

• look at the results and see if the top sites contain the keyword term in their title tag
• look at the results and see if the keyword is used in the competitions url
• look at the results and see if the competitors sites contain the key term in their description tag
• look at the results and see if the competitors sites contain the key term in their header tags <h1> or <h2> tags
• check the number of days its been since Google has last indexed the top sites.

Based on these qualifying factors we then compile a list of top 10 terms for the niche and provide those so you that you can build a site using keyword terms that will generate traffic.

If you want us to provide you a quote for a strategy of how best to use these keywords we are happy to.  Realize though, having the keywords wont be enough, you will need to know how to strategically use them to your benefit.

It is important to realize that doing good keyword research will save you time and money in the long run because you are now going to be targeting terms that will generate higher traffic and get you better results for your efforts in the natural rankings. 

Contact us today for help with targeting the correct keywords for your business!
Mary@workingwebsolutions.com