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As the internet marketplace has exploded in popularity and revenue, businesses are gradually moving more and more of their marketing and advertising budgets into online marketing. To effectively use that money, business owners need to understand advertising on the internet – what it is, what it isn’t, what it can and can’t do, and especially what forms of advertising are most effective for reaching their target audience.

We can subdivide online advertising into many particular categories – search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), email marketing, local online marketing, banner ads, social media optimization (SMO), online video marketing, pay per clicks ads (PPC) like Google Adwords, and others. So here is a brief touch on many of the different marketing types available for your business to attract customers online:

Online Marketing Categories

– we’ve already looked at the basics of SEO in two articles here on our blog (here and here)

– email marketing is a great online marketing method, with tons of research showing effectiveness, and many resources showing how to best use email marketing in your industry. We plan to do an article on this in the near future, but until then, a good resource to get started with is this Search Engine Watch article.

– local online advertising is more important than ever before because of people using their mobile devices for search, and the up and coming semantic web. A good article on this can be found at Search Engine Land here.

– banner ads, though considered by many to be fading in effectiveness, can still be used successfully by many businesses. A good resource to get started thinking about them is this Resource Nation article.

– SMO, social media optimization, is a great way to advertise online, and falls outside of the ‘norms’ that most companies focus on, so it has even more potential as a largely untapped resource. SMO will help get traffic to your website, but you have to be sure you have good landing pages ready to make the conversion, turning your ads into dollars. We’ll be looking at this more in depth in another article, but here’s a good place to begin getting your head around SMO in this Social Media Today article.

– Online Video Marketing is a great way to boost traffic for one simple reason: people love videos! Figure out a way to use video in your marketing campaigns, and you’ll immediately have the upper hand on many of your competitors. This Social Media Examiner article gives great advice for using online video marketing.

Pay Per Click

And finally, pay per click (PPC) advertising. PPC is an outstanding way of bringing in clients and customers for your business. PPC is scalable, allowing you to spend just as much money as you can afford to spend. You simply set up your ads, set your budgets, and let the software handle the rest. Then, as revenue grows, you can increase both your budget and your business.

We’ll be discussing PPC more in depth in our next post, so stay tuned!

As we saw in our last blog post, the internet is moving quickly to personalize data for the end user with the shift toward semantic search. With any new feature, businesses want to position themselves to make good use of technology, and this is no different. Taking advantage of the semantic web for your business takes a lot of effort, but as our examples last time showed, that work pays off with big dividends at the end of the business day.

Businesses with little to no web presence can still show up in semantic search, but to really compete with other businesses in your industry, you need a strong web presence that is enhanced with optimization specifically geared toward semantic search. Things as simple as local listings and online reviews can boost your showing in semantic search – these things let Google know who you are, which helps them match you to an individual’s needs or wants.

 

Building Relationships

A company’s reputation, trust, and authority are all crucial to performing well in the semantic web. Companies can build these things using something like Google Authorship, which is designed specifically to connect a person with their content, thereby helping establish reputation, trust, and authority. Companies should also focus on producing quality content that is interesting, helpful, and sharable with others. This type of content is valuable, because it allows others to see the expertise and knowledge that your company brings to the proverbial table. Content like this will get people to naturally interact with it, which will drive online traffic to your business, which also helps build your authority and reputation as a business.

With the semantic web now in play, social signals have never been more important to your business being found online. Since the semantic web is personalized, the way that people interact with your social sites (shares, comments, likes, etc) will then go on to potentially influence the type of semantic search results that their other social friends might receive. If my friends are commenting on a particular restaurant and I then go to search for a place to eat, there’s a good chance this restaurant will show up in my search, since my friends have established it as a place they also enjoy going to eat.

 

Getting Personal Again

Because of various forms of communication – web, email, cell phones – much of human communication has been de-personalized over the last 10+ years. Semantic search is bringing personalization back. With this crashing return of the personal, businesses now need to be a trusted face in the mass of other faces so that people will recognize and choose them time after time. The local business owner has a distinct advantage already, since his relationship with his customers is personal by nature. He can then carry over this relationship and simply be himself online, bringing reality into the semantic web. Small businesses also have an advantage right now, since they are typically more adaptable and can change more easily to embrace this new focus in their online marketing.

Tying it all together

There are real ways that companies can now position themselves to take advantage of all that the semantic web is now offering them and the people they serve – but this also requires a bit of change in tactics for many companies. Areas are of increasing importance that perhaps have not had much focus for many businesses lately – online reviews, Google Authorship, and a strong social presence – these things are now not only nice additions to SEO, but vital to semantic search success. Helpful, valuable, and sharable content will also continue to be important – so if content writing isn’t something your business can do well on its own, there are many professional content writers available who can help you take better advantage of the semantic web.

 

Semantic Web and Semantic Search are both terms which are getting a lot of attention in the online world, and particularly in advertising. At their essence, both of these terms refer to the notion of an individual’s online experience being tailored, or personalized, particularly for them. The web is moving from being a place of generic information to a place of answers, where who you are plays a central role.

Semantic Search is Personalized Search

So, Semantic Search is a personalized form of search – semantic search tries to understand exactly the information you’re looking for so that the search can answer your question. This differs from the traditional search operations of the past, which primarily sought to match your keywords with keywords in web content, thereby giving you a list of sites that you might be interested in. Everyone who typed in the same keywords would see the same results in this older search model. Semantic Search is now providing us with meaningful, personalized results that have the goal of actually answering the questions we ask. The author of Google Semantic Search, David Amerland, says of the semantic web, “It marks the transition into a new phase of the Web, where we stop searching and start finding.” (http://www.forbes.com/sites/netapp/2013/07/23/semantic-web-big-data/)

What does this semantic search actually look like in practice? Let’s say a person searches: “What’s the best Sushi restaurant in New York?” A semantic result to this question would take into account information about what the searcher’s friends consider to be the best Sushi restaurant, what the best reviews are saying, and what the critics have said. The result would be tailored for the searcher. The results may not contain the keyword, “best Sushi restaurant in New York,” but given Google’s understanding of the intent behind the search, the answers given would better answer the question asked. Depending on other factors like the time of day and the searcher’s exact location, the results may change from information about Sushi restaurants to perhaps reservation numbers for places close by.

Understanding the Semantic Web

Because of factors like those we saw in the example above, it’s very important for business to understand the semantic web, how it functions, and what their place is in it. Any business can show up in these searches, regardless of whether they have a website, how old they are, or if they are ready to be seen by everyone. Even with very little or no online presence, the semantic web can drive new customers to any business. The data on every business is constantly growing, so one big thing businesses can all do to ensure best results in the semantic web is making sure the information about them online is current and accurate.

The web is becoming increasingly personalized every day – by understanding the semantic web, businesses will ensure they are positioned to make the most out of this development cycle. However, understanding is only half the battle. To really engage the semantic web, businesses need to know how they can take advantage of the semantic web.

Check out our next post! We outline exactly how businesses can take advantage of all that the semantic web has to offer.

Extending your SEO

Many websites use WordPress, and if your company is we recommend installing the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. This plugin does an outstanding job helping you remember all the key points of SEO by giving you detailed alerts and an overall page SEO rating for each page. For example another key component to successful SEO are links both outbound and internal. The Yoast plugin will remind you to add links to your content if you’ve forgotten. Links help improve the overall quality of your content by lending credibility, and helping readers know where to find further information on the subject at hand. Google is very open about its commitment to ranking high quality content, and when your company provides it your content will rank better.

Another reminder that the SEO plugin will give you is to include images in your content. Images provide visual breaks for your reader making your content more readable. There are also more opportunities for your keyword placement in the alt, title and description. Google also provides image search where your images will be indexed. Google image search provides another channel for search traffic to your site.

The Plugin will also remind you to fill out your meta description, and will provide a text entry box for you to do so. Here is yet another opportunity to use your keyword, and supportive keywords. Where possible place your keyword as early in the meta description as possible. If you’re considering meta keywords don’t. Given the amount of abuse this property saw early on search engines ignore them, and so should you.

Social and Google Authorship: The Basics Plus

Google uses over 200 factors when considering how to rank content, and 1 of them is social signals. We don’t know exactly what these social signals are, but there is evidence to suggest that comments, +1s and reshares of your content on Google+ are seen as positive social signals which will improve overall ranking. Also keep in mind that YouTube is social, and comments on your videos are seen as positive social signals as well. For local SEO reviews are very important, and highly weighted by Google.

Google has an Authorship program where authors are officially connected with the content they produce through a Google+ profile. There is a lot of debate over whether Google is actively ranking content produced by high authority authors, but Google has openly said that this is not the case. Google’s John Mueller confirmed that Authorship is not a ranking signal in this Webmaster Central video from late September 2013.

There are a lot of indications that Google would like to become better at understanding authority, and then begin to rank content accordingly. Google’s Matt Cutts has stated that Google is getting better at understanding authority, and will continue to do so. However there are current benefits to authorship. For one you are future proofing your search rankings, and building an Authorship history on which to stake your authority reputation. For another, and more immediate benefit, your search results will appear with your image next to them. Studies have proven that links with images next to them receive more clicks than those without.

In conclusion the best SEO advice given by the experts time and time again is to produce high quality content. We wrote a blog post, Content Marketing for Small Business, on using high quality consistent content to drive traffic, and increase search rankings. Google has made it clear in its Webmaster Tools Ranking article, “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.” Put your users experience first, and your SEO will be on the right track.

Given the major changes we’ve recently seen Google take with it’s upgrade to Hummingbird (see this article for a more complete description of Hummingbird), we thought it wise not to forget the basics of search engine optimization (SEO). Many have said that because of Hummingbird and the semantic web, that SEO is dead. However, given the fact that Hummingbird has been in effect for well over a month, and we’re not seeing any major ranking changes occurring, traditional SEO is not dead.

Why should businesses care about SEO?

Search engines can drive a lot of valuable traffic to your website. If your company is monetizing with paid advertising, search engine traffic tends to be more likely to click ads. For companies monetizing by selling goods and services, search engine traffic is highly qualified. This means that the people who find your website through search engines are arriving already wanting to see what you’re offering.

Foundations of SEO

Keywords and keyword research are one of the fundamental foundations of SEO. A keyword is the word or phrase entered into a search engine, and is where search begins. When writing content, determine which keywords you are intending to target. Start by doing some research into which keywords are actually being searched. Google offers a free tool called the Keyword Planner, which allows companies to perform very targeted keyword research. See this post for a short tutorial on using the Keyword Planner.

Once you’ve chosen your keywords, and done your research, it’s time to incorporate them into your content naturally. Be careful not to overuse keywords. A good rule of thumb is to use 1 keyword for every 100 words of content you have. Also use synonyms and supportive, also called secondary, keywords. Here is a list of the key places you should include your keyword:

-Post Title
-Post Permalink
-Alt text for images
-In your post content (about 1 in 100 words of content)
-In Sub-headings

Choose a main focus keyword for your content. This focus keyword is generally different than the focus keyword of your homepage. A lot of search traffic will be coming directly to your content pages, and not to your homepage, so make sure to target each content page to a specific set of unique keywords. The title of your content is considered a very important element to SEO, and should contain your keyword as close to the beginning as possible.

Where to Go From Here

By following the above guidelines you will position your content well for high ranking in Google search. There is no magic to this process just simple, actionable steps. However simply following the above steps won’t get you to page 1 of the search results. That kind of ranking takes dedication, and a willingness to work very hard. Your content will have to be outstanding, and you will have to produce it consistently.

Stay tuned for the second installment of this two part basic SEO series in our next blog post!

Native Advertising

There are so many new buzzwords in business and advertising – content marketing, SMO, inbound marketing, B2C – and today we’ll take a look at another of the quickly rising stars in advertising : Native Advertising. This is a particular approach that we have used here at Think Webstore since the beginning, and now it is apparently catching on in the larger advertising world.

What Is Native Advertising

The principle behind Native Advertising is actually quite simple – write a story about your industry or product (or your client’s industry), and use this story not only to inform the public, but also to advertise your particular product or services. The term ‘Native Advertising’ signifies that these ads seem like part of the usual content of the publication, hence native, but they also work as subtle yet effective ads for business. These stories can certainly be used online, but often are most effective in actual publications, in magazines or newspapers. Native Advertising is catching on nationally, but we have found that it is particularly useful on a local level.

What Native Advertising is Not

There are a few distinctions to make when thinking of Native Advertising – it’s not exactly the same thing as Inbound Marketing, and it’s definitely not Advertorial. Inbound Marketing has the main purpose of driving the potential client to contact with the business, whether through website, phone calls, etc. While all advertising has that as a general goal, the finer point of Native Advertising is the attempt to connect with potential consumers by providing them with true and useful information in the context of a publication that they know and trust; to become an expert for your reader.

Any articles written for such publications not only have to be helpful, but they also have to pass editorial muster to make it into print – the articles have to be real. Native Advertising is also not Advertorial writing. Advertorials are thinly veiled ads that purport to be articles – these types of “articles” would never be published in the types of quality places that businesses would want Native Advertising to appear.

How It’s Done

The success of Native Advertising lies wholly in the article you write. There are some ‘rules’ that we follow here at Think Webstore to help ensure that our articles work for our clients:

1) The article must be true. Native Advertising ties into a company’s content marketing here – you must provide your audience with information that is both true and valuable. This gives people a reason to read your article, and to share it with others. An article that’s not true and valuable will fail every single time.

2) The article must tell a story. People need a story, something to give shape to the article. Popular storylines include things like ‘David vs Goliath,’ the little guy taking on the big guy and winning, or if you are operating locally, then the ‘local success’ story is always a twist that works.

3) The article must then subtly incorporate the company for which it is being written. This can typically take the form of an ‘expert quote;’ the company (or company rep) is quoted within the context of the article as an expert on the topic. Immediately this gives credibility, and as people read the article, they have an expert at hand to go to. This is one of the reasons that Native Advertising works particularly well on a local level.

Now It’s Your Turn

Not everyone is equipped to do their own Native Advertising, but it is an approach that works for just about any business in just about any industry. Perhaps you have someone in the office who can give article writing a shot? Let them do a bit of research, and see what they come up with. But be very careful – a bad article can do much more damage than good! There are also companies out there who specialize in exactly this type of advertising, and your best bet (for most companies) is to find someone to help you strategize and carry out some Native Advertising for your business.

Native Advertising is like getting an advertisement in front of a potential consumer, and having that consumer read all about you, and they don’t even realize that ‘advertising’ has just happened! You become their go-to expert in your field, and there’s no greater achievement than becoming the expert for your public. In our over-saturated media culture, there’s no better way to get yourself in front of potential customers.

What does Google Hummingbird mean for business? Google Hummingbird is the most significant upgrade to Google search in over a decade. This is not your typical Panda or Penguin update to the already existing algorithm. Rather Hummingbird is a complete overhaul, and actually replaces Google’s previous algorithm.

Google Hummingbird is based on the idea of semantic search. Previously search relied only on keyword match, which would bring up webpages containing the keywords in your search query. With the Hummingbird upgrade, Google has gone from strings to things. That is, your search queries aren’t treated only as a group of keywords, but rather Google attempts to understand the meaning of your query. Hummingbird is trying to answer questions and not simply match keywords with documents.

Google Hummingbird for Business

So what does the Google Hummingbird upgrade mean for business? Actually, according to Google, Hummingbird has been in effect for about a month now. Although it was officially announced on September 26th, 2013 in conjunction with Google’s 15th Birthday. Most businesses have been engaging in the recommended best practice of producing helpful high quality content, and for these businesses Hummingbird will have a mostly neutral effect on traffic.

Google Hummingbird, because of it’s semantic nature, presents businesses with the opportunity to display expertise or authority in a particular field. This kind of expertise is what Google is positioning itself to understand with semantic upgrades like Hummingbird. Expert content will perform better, that is gain better exposure, than content with low expertise. Part of this is because highly authoritative content will perform better in the social web which is an integral aspect to the semantic web.

As part of Google’s move toward the semantic web they have removed access to keyword data. This is a signal to businesses that keywords are taking a back seat, and this provides opportunity to businesses. Using Google Hummingbird for business, companies will have to become more involved on social media to find out what their customers are interested in. Building trust between businesses and potential customers becomes key to Online success.

How Different is Google Hummingbird

Because of the significance of this upgrade, many SEOs are asking just how different is Google Hummingbird? This upgrade is certainly different, but Google has not thrown the baby out with the bathwater completely. There are still significant similarities between this upgrade, and the previous Google search algorithm.

Page Rank (PR) is still a major factor Google takes into account when ranking content. That is the number of authoritative links to a particular site will continue to be a big part of why a website ranks well. The more authoritative links you have to your website, the better chance your content will have of ranking. Now, however, Google is taking into account all of the words in your search query, and not only paying attention to the keywords.

Google has given some specific examples of how search results look different now after the Hummingbird upgrade. For example, a search for “acid reflux prescription” used to return a list of drugs, but now you’ll see informational results. Another example given is that previously a search for “pizza hut calories per slice” would return results from third party sites. With Hummingbird, Google is smart enough to know that Pizza Hut will have the most authoritative information, and will show you results from that website.

Google Hummingbird for Business: Where Does it Leave Us?

Given that the Hummingbird upgrade has been active for about a month now you’ll likely know already if your business has seen any negative effects. Generally speaking, most websites with good practices will continue to rank as they always have. Google continues to give the same guidance for ranking well that is to produce high quality helpful content, and provide a great user experience. You can find more information here on Google’s search blog.

This video will help you better understand the relationship between your business and Hummingbird, which is semantic search. Semantic search must be understood as an integral part of business, and no longer can search engine optimization simply be outsourced.

Building an Online reputation, building trust and authority are at the heart of semantic search. For your business to succeed with the new Hummingbird upgrade it will have to build this reputation as well as trust and authority.

“Content Marketing” has recently become a major focus for companies working to most effectively use online marketing for their business. The first question is the most obvious: what is meant by the phrase ‘content marketing’? Basically, this means that you use your online content not simply to convey information to your reader, but you also shape and mold this content to make it a major factor in the marketing of your goods or services – and a major part of what content marketers are after are more prominent rankings in Google.

There are some simple rules and suggestions that we can follow to help our content work most effectively for our businesses.

The Content Marketing Quality Factor

Quality content is needed for several related reasons. High quality content is helpful to your reader, which means that they will spend the time it takes to actually read and understand what you’ve written. Having readers stay on your site to read your content also reduces your bounce rate, which is good for page rank in Google.

Quality content is not something that you can just throw together at a moment’s notice. The quality comes from deep research, wide expertise, and is presented in a way which is both authoritative and instructional. If any of the pieces are missing, the quality value of the content, even if very high, begins to be reduced.

The Quantity Factor

New content is regularly needed to continue helping search rankings. Google has a “freshness bias” within their search algorithm, which simply means that new content tends to rank well. If you are constantly putting out new, quality content for your business, then you’ll be doing a great deal of content marketing correctly just in that.

User Experience

We all want our readers to have positive experiences when interacting with our material. This serves both to help develop continuing relationships with consumers of our materials, and Google also positively weights sites and pages that seem to provide users a good experience.

Making Content Work for You

Once you have quality content ready to share with the world, now it’s time to make sure that content works to its maximum potential. Do good keyword research, know the keywords that people are searching for, and make sure to pepper your content with these specific keywords. Try not to only mention important keywords, but make sure that your content gives people answers and information about those topics; if you fail to do this, people will begin ignoring your material as essentially useless.

Time

Making content marketing work for you and your business requires determination and dedication. Throwing out a bit of sloppy material a few times a year will do nothing positive for your marketing efforts. Rather, you need to be consistent in putting out quality material, and following the guidelines above to make sure your content works for you. An editorial calendar can help you stay on target, and spreading out the writing among several good writers can also help keep you on goal.

Content writing is work; there are many people out there who do nothing other than write this type of content marketing material. But you know your business and your industry – so who better to put together content than the experts!

As we’ve seen, all of the pieces come together in content marketing. If you create quality content then that is good for your reader; what is good for the reader then becomes good for you again; and all of this interaction is good for marketing, especially rankings in the dominate search of our day, Google.

Go – create good content!

It’s time for Think Webstore to start blogging! We have touted the benefits of blogging for your business, some of our own employees run very nice blogs, and now we’ll begin our own ‘blogging campaign.’ These new, twice weekly postings will (we hope) have three effects:

Blogging for Results

1 – we’ll make use of blogging, as do many, for Search Engine Optimization/Social Media Optimization (SEO/SMO), just like we suggest others do.

2 – to provide a small study on the effect of regular blogging for traffic to the website of a local business.

3 – the more important point for most of our readers, we’ll begin sharing from the wealth of information that we have gathered from years of our own experience, research, and individual specializations.

Our Approach

To track the success of this campaign, we’ll be gathering some basic metrics up front, and watching these metrics in the coming months. Here’s what we’ll be tracking:

• Website Traffic Increase (overall traffic)
• Search Traffic Increase
• Referral Traffic Increase
• Direct Traffic Increase

This is something of an experiment to see if a local, small business can increase website traffic by blogging twice a week. There have been a couple recent studies of a similar nature, but these took a more radical approach.

The first of these studies consisted of writing 50 posts in 25 days, so not twice a week, but twice a day. The second study, predicated on the first, decided to up the game even further by posting 150 times in 50 days. That’s a staggering 3 posts per day.

We decided to take a less radical approach, one that we think most small businesses can manage with a little organization, and some persistent work. Our 2 post per week goal will be supported by two writers, and an editorial calendar. Obviously we’re not expecting to see the dramatic traffic increases seen in these other two studies, but we would like to provide a base metric for others wishing to understand the effect consistent content production can have on traffic.

Topics

Some of our posts will be one-offs, like this one, and others will grow to be parts of series on various subjects that might interest our readers. We plan to look at topics from Content Marketing to Branding, Social to SEO, and Responsive Design to Business Strategy. We offer quite an array of services here at Think Webstore, so our topic choices promise to be varied and interesting.

Please feel free to leave us comments on Facebook or Google+. Especially valuable would be this – what topics would YOU like to see us blog on?

See you with another post on Tuesday – Topic 1: Content Marketing.