Focusing on ranking for the  “top 10-20 keywords” for your industry is too often the only strategy used to increase and maintain Internet traffic, but that can be a huge mistake. Sure, keeping your site on the radar by focusing on the top keywords of your industry may help customers find your site, but this doesn’t always translate into referrals, sales and leads. By managing only the top keywords, you may be missing out on a substantial amount of business.

Keywords and phrases outside of the “top 20,” known as Long Tail keywords tend to be longer, more specialized, and are searched by users who are looking for something more specific.

For example, let’s say you’re a retail store specializing in women’s footwear. In terms of searching for a new pair of shoes, the keyword “shoes” may be considered a head keyword. But when looking for a specific kind of shoe, using a string of key words like “black patent leather red heel shoes” is more effective in helping customers find exactly what they are looking for.

This is the basis of the Long Tail theory. The heart of it is that traffic drawn in by the Long Tail keywords is higher quality and more promising than traffic generated by the top 10-20.

Industry research and the results we have experienced with our customers supports this, yet many businesses are unaware of the Long Tail theory potential. For example, 57% of Amazon’s sales result from searches outside of what is “popular”.

The key to using a Long Tail strategy is utilizing your own website data. This information is your best source of Long Tail keywords, being more personalized, relevant to your business and descriptive of what defines you from your competition.

So which customers is your business missing out on? It may be time to reevaluate the keywords and terms you focus on. Our team at Infinite Communications can help you develop more effective SEO strategies that will get you in touch with the right customers who were looking for you all along.

This is Part 2 of our blog post, “Capture Your Audience with ‘Sticky’ Content”, (Read Part 1). In this post you will learn 3 easy ways to create content that captures your audience’s attention.

#4 Use Authoritative Sources

This principle is used to build immediate credibility with your audience.

Let’s say you’re in the market to buy a book to help strengthen your sales skills. You might have never heard about the book “The Ultimate Sales Machine” – but as soon as you see that sticker that say “NY Times Best Seller” and “Amazon.com Bestseller” you know it’s worth checking out. This is referred to as an “authoritative statement.”

You are more likely to trust that product because an authority on that field says it is worth reading. Other similar examples are “As Seen on TV”, and “Featured in Inc Magazine.”

Celebrity endorsements are the second way to prove credibility. Don’t worry if Oprah didn’t pick your product for her favorites before her show ended. You can still creatively use celebrity endorsements.

For example, if you are a financial planner you could gain credibility by writing a blog post that references Alan Greenspan.

#5 Strike An Emotional Chord

The “emotional” principle focuses on answering the question, “How do we make people care about our message?”

One of the best ways you can implement this principle is to create an association between your topic and something your audience can relate with.

We recently gave a presentation on “What Makes A Website Great?” Our goal was to make the audience understand the downfalls of a bad website and how it reflects poorly on their business. Instead of diving into our morning PowerPoint presentation, we first asked the room full of 30 people “How many of you have ever been into a store, where you can’t find what you’re looking for and the first thing the store employee does is come up to you and try to sell you something?” Every one raised their hands – with a groan, looking at each other, hating that exact situation.

“Well sorry to say it, but that’s how most of you are making people feel when they come to your website.” It struck an emotional chord. People could relate to the feeling, and it was much easier for them to understand the importance of having a website with great navigation and informative content.

#6 Tell A Story

“If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at one, I will” Mother Teresa once said. That is why we recommend creating your content to focus on one person’s specific story and telling their struggle, show their worry & pain, and then highlight what you did to help.

In 2000, Subway first ran their TV ads that went something like this:

“This is Jared,” the announcer said. “He used to weight 425 pounds” – we see a photo of Jared in his old 60-ince waist pants – “but today he weighs 180 thanks to what he calls the Subway diet.” The announcers describes Jared’s meal plan, and how when combined with a lot of walking – overtime it lead to his extreme weight loss.”

Subways sales immediately picked up, and since then Jared has made it easier for all of us to remember where we can go to eat, when we are trying to watch our figure.

Instead of telling you to eat Subway because it’s healthy, they highlighted Jared’s story and showed you an image of him standing in his old big pants that you will never forget.

Remember, you can extract a moral from a story, but you can’t extract a story from a moral.

People will always remember your stories and not the facts in your content. That is because stories ignite feelings. People forget facts, but not how you make them feel.

We get this question asked a lot, and the truth is pricing search engine optimization and Internet marketing, in general are not a one-size fits all campaign. Before we give you a price, we conduct research to determine just how much work your campaign will need and we base the price on these factors.

These factors may include;

• Competitiveness of your industry/keywords
Some industries/businesses are extremely competitive on the web and that will mean we will need to do more work for a longer period of time and for those businesses the amount of time and tactics needed to obtain an increase of quality traffic and gain rankings for keywords are significantly higher.

• Website redesign – if necessary
Visual presentation and proper messaging are known to have an impact on a website visitor’s decision to use your services or buy your product, call your business, or fill out an online form. Our firm’s philosophy is that your website needs to make a perfect first impression and be easy to use. That way you will have a higher chance of converting website visitors into new customers, when they find you via search engines from the search engine optimization efforts.

• Local, national, or international?
The wider the geographic area the more tactics and greater time investment is needed for your campaign.

These are just a few of the most important factors.

After we conduct the discovery phase which includes an analysis of your current website, industry, and competition, we develop a proposal with a couple of pricing options. Pricing Options can include a setup fee and discounts for longer commitments. Usually we recommend a minimum of 6 months because Search Engine Optimization is ongoing and any lapse in the campaign not only damages your website organic rankings, it adversely affects the SEO efforts made in the past.

To get more information about Search Engine Optimization or other Internet marketing tactics you can call (818) 990-9843.

Word on the street is that blogging helps with your search engine optimization efforts, and yes that’s true, however the main idea you should keep in mind is that blogging is a “value-added deliverable” that differentiates you from competitors and helps create the perception that you are the absolute expert in your field. By educating and informing visitors of your blog, you are building trust with each one of them. And as you should know by now, all things being equal, people will do business with those they like and trust!

What Are Others Writing About?

Your first step is to determine if your audience is using the Internet, (nowadays, I think it is safe to say they are) and to find out what other people in your industry are blogging about / and getting responses for.

You can always start the researching process by searching your business category (i.e. “business law”) combined with the word “blog.”

What Should You Write About?

As with any marketing or communications material, a blog post has to be tailored to your customer base. That means the blog posts have to be timely, useful and easy to comprehend. Some ways to accomplish this are to write:

• How To’s: How-To articles have been popular since the invention of the magazine.

• Product/Service descriptions: People may not be familiar with some of your products or services, so writing a thorough and easy-to-comprehend description can save you time. Your prospects will use it as reference to become more educated instead having you answer their million and one questions.

• Comparisons: Your business might offer services/products that compete with each other or other services. For example, if you do financial planning you can write about Roth IRAs vs. Traditional IRAs.

• Success Stories: Here’s a chance for you to brag and be informative at the same time. If your company has success stories which I hope you do, writing a blog post can be a great way to publicize it and get people excited about what kinds of results they can expect when working with you.

• Statistics, Day-to-Day examples, Valuable Resources, etc can also make great blog posts.

The only approach I would avoid is making your blog a Public Relations tactic/newsroom. However, we do recommend mixing news about your company and valuable posts for your customers.

If you would like any specific blog ideas for your business, please leave a comment about our blog and we’ll message you some Great Ideas.

Here are a few tips when looking for how to
pick the right internet marketing firm:

So do your research and be patient because SEO takes time. Feel free to contact us to see what we can do for you.

Earning and converting web traffic

Your site has to be viewed as a resource of information for whatever you do and has to clearly communicate what you can do for people interested in your services. A very important question to ask yourself — Is your website engaging enough to convert this new influx of traffic generated from SEO? What’s the point of increasing traffic if visitors are unimpressed with your site, and fail to take the next step? Keep an eye on your bounce rate; if you don’t have an analytics tools in place there is no point of doing SEO, because you wont be able to measure performance and how you can improve results.

SEO is an ongoing process; your site has to earn high rankings. Rankings should not be your primary concern, converting your traffic into sales should! You have to work on building more traffic and doing so takes time. New content should be optimized and added to your website on an ongoing basis. Otherwise, you will loose traffic and rankings to your competitors who are implementing ongoing SEO!

Incremental growth is good growth.

After a couple years of continued attention to your website, you will see that your growth in traffic has increased exponentially. Some keywords you optimize for can rank within a few weeks if your site has already been indexed, but it all depends on the level of competition for any given keyword.

Consistent results can take 3-6 months, and even longer for more competitive terms. You should optimize for long tail keywords as well because it is unreasonable to expect you will be one page 1 of Google for a broad competitive keyword any time soon. There are sites that have been optimized for years and are considered authority sites that have earned their spot on the first page. A small 10-20 page site cannot come close to competing with sites that have 100′s to 1000′s of pages and that have been optimizing for the same broad competitive keyword you expect to show up on the first page for.

Get Creative.

You have to get creative with the way you optimize your keywords. The time it takes also depends on if you are doing local optimization – where you are targeting local customers within a geographical vicinity – or if you are targeting nationwide or world wide. You can compare this to offline marketing… it’s quicker and cheaper to disseminate flyers out to your local area, versus sending more flyers across the entire nation.

In conclusion, you have to ask yourself if you want to take this on yourself and try to learn SEO or do you want to focus on your business and hire an Internet Marketing Firm that specializes in SEO?

NEXT WEEK WE HELP YOU DECIDE –  “How To Pick the Right Internet Marketing Firm.”

Feel free to contact us to see what we can do for you.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of increasing quality traffic to a web site from search engines’ organic (natural) search results.  Search engines such as Google have computerized “spiders” that index and analyze your website every couple of weeks, determining the relevant keywords of your website. Search engine optimization is not an over night process, it’s a long term and ever-changing strategy. You not only need years of experience and developed skills to implement SEO strategies, you also need to practice patience.

SEO is a long-term solution, and unlike pay per click (see Pay-Per-Click VS. SEO), your search engine listing can be clicked all day with no incurred click cost. Case studies have proven that organic listings tend to receive more clicks than the sponsored ads.

Elements of Successful SEO

Here are just a few of the things that go into making your SEO campaign a success:

• Keyword Research – researching and determining the relevant keywords people are searching.
• HTML Optimization - Most websites are developed using HTML code, and successfully optimized sites start with optimized HTML. Optimized HTML takes longer and requires advanced knowledge to program compared with a non-optimized website.
• Optimized Title Tags - Title tags are the words that appear as the clickable link on the search engines, these need to include appropriate keywords.
• Optimized Meta Tags – The information that describes what your website is about – it is inserted in the beginning section of the site code.
• SEO Friendly
 Coding – Ensuring that the method your site is programmed does not hinder search engines reading your website.
• Ongoing content creation – A properly optimized website starts with quality content that includes relevant keywords, and is updated on a consistent basis.
• Link Building - Your site should receives links on older and highly reputable websites.
• Local Online Optimization - This is including your local area on your site and making sure your business location is registered with search engines and directories.
• Off-site optimization - Embedding video on video sites and having a social media presence as well as many more off-site tactics will improve your search engine rankings.
• Blogging (see the Power of an Optimized Blog)
• the list goes on…

Why does SEO take time?

There is no way that all of the tactics listed above and the ones not listed can be executed appropriately if it is done quickly. Even if some of these methods are completed quickly you still have to wait for the search engines to crawl and re-crawl your site and position it for a given search result. Search engines typically crawl a website every couple weeks to a month. The more incoming links you have the process will speed up a bit but they have to be quality links from relative sites.

Your focus should be building your content, optimizing that content correctly to show Google, Bing and others that your site is worth better placement for a variety of your targeted keywords. You have probably heard “content is king” for search engines, and when you optimize original quality content you will start seeing a rise in targeted traffic….. search engines are smarter than you think!

NEXT – SEO Takes Time Part II: Earning and converting web traffic, incremental growth is good growth, and how to pick the right Internet marketing company.

Purchasing domain names is usually the first step to take when launching a website. If you are one of those people who purchased dozens of domain names “just in case“, it is time to go through them and decide which ones are the most valuable. We are going to help you decide.

Search engines consider domain names as an important factor in their ranking algorithm, meaning a “good domain” name can help search engines find your website. So, what do search engines consider when it comes to domain names?

The 2 biggest factors: Domain Age AND The Length of Registration

• Domain Age – the longer you had a domain name, usually the better. You can even buy previously used domains that already have some weight.

• Registration Length – buying a domain for as many years as offered is recommended.

If you purchase a domain name for only one year, a search engine may devalue it thinking that this website will only be around 1 year (maybe for spamming purposes); so right off the bat, purchasing the domain for multiple years shows your site is here to stay and that you are not trying to clutter the web with a “get rich quick type of site.”

These are other factors to consider when it comes to choosing a Domain Name:

• Easy & Relevant – Choose one that’s easy to remember, pertains to your service or product, and keep one domain as the primary (The Mothership Website). If you already have a domain or multiple domains, stick with one that will be the primary one and try obtaining links to it.
• Extensions – Start with .com or .net (or .org if you are part of an organization). Try to stay away from .biz,.us, .info or any of the newly added extensions. These are often used for spam or advertising purposes and are rarely ranked by search engines.
• Keywords – If possible, use keywords in your domain (these should be targeted keywords that you want visitors to find your website with).

With that said, choose your Domain Name wisely!