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I have had the pleasure recently of being a part of a call with Internet Marketing Guru Dr. Glenn Livingston. I wanted to share the conversation with you. It is a little long but there is some amazing information in there. Turn it on, and just work away, if you have any questions please feel free to email me at support@indieresults.com.

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Learn how to list your local business on Google local business center. Listing in Local Business Center will help give your business instant visibility online whether you have a physical address or not. There are a lot of things you can do once you have submitted your business to make sure it ranks well within the Google Local results. Whenever people search for a business in your area they are likely to be served Google Local results and having your business there is huge. Here is how.

This is a little more advanced than our typical blog posts but it a concept anyone running a website should always keep in mind as they design their overall site structure or add additional pages to their current structure. To get the maximum about of bang for your buck so to speak when you create web pages there is a very specific formula you need to follow. We will use our orange website for an example and also remind you before taking on any web project it is a really a good idea to chart out your pages, keywords, and title tags before hand. We will include a nice little excel spreadsheet you can use to help stay organized.

We will use a little more complicated example other than a home page, let’s say this is an inner page selling t-shirts made from oranges. (Yes I know that’s crazy)

Best Example:

Title Tag:
T-Shirts Made From 100% Oranges Best Selection Online | Site Name

URL:
www.sitename.com/t-shirts-made-from-oranges.html

On Page Content:
Lots of great content about orange made t-shirts, and important keywords relating to searches on that topic

Meta Description:
Come See The Nations Best Selection Of Orange Made T-Shirts. 100% shirts made from oranges. Special Internet

Use this format whenever you create web pages on your website and you will tend to rank much better than those who choose to not be so diligent. Google really appreciates a nice quality flow of information from beginning to end, and really so do the web surfers. If they see a listing in the search engine results that makes sense, has a great message, and communicates well is always far more likely to get the click over one that doesn’t.

Making your message clear and easy to follow is a good practice for your potential clients as well as any search engine spiders. We as people like everything to be neat and clean.

If you have ever done any Pay Per Click advertising, or even considered it you know there are a lot of things that can affect what you pay per click. It isn’t all about who offers to pay the most. Google and others want to see continuity on your ad copy, your sites URL, and the on page copy. For many pay per click advertisers this is a afterthought, or something they passively work on. For our clients that start out on the right path for SEO find their cost per click drastically reduced, their cost per acquisition as much as 50% less, and their overall conversion ratio higher. The point is an early commitment to SEO whoever small will help your website greatly when you want to add some pay per click advertising for a couple of reasons it will also save you a lot of money in development costs since you will have to redo very little work. We will list a few of them below.

Relevant URL Structure

One of the early steps in search engine optimization is creating a nice clean relevant URL structure. It should be inline with the content on the page. If it is a page selling discount widgets naturally the site address should be something like www.yoursite.com/discount-widgets. The reason having this already done helps is that Google likes to see a nice relevant URL on your website especially on landing pages. If you have already make a commitment to this it can save you loads of time and money with it comes to launching a Pay Per Click campaign.

Good on Page Content

Another basic exercise of traditional search engine optimization is having relevant on page content. If your website is about selling oranges, you would have content on your page about oranges not apples. Now while this seems sort of obvious when put to an example like this we see it all the time when taking on SEO clients. The problem isn’t so much on the index or home page but on the inner pages. If your orange website has sub pages about say mandarin oranges don’t make the content about oranges alone make sure it is specific. This is the basic fundamental behind getting a great quality score with Google’s Adwords program as well as ranking well in traditional search results. Making a commitment to this early will groom you in the future when you start doing PPC.

Good Meta Descriptions & Title Tags

Another beneficial step on all organic search engine optimization plans is having relevant title tags and Meta descriptions on each and every single page of your website. When it comes time to start running pay per click advertising you will already be trained to produce top quality title tags, and meta descriptions further helping you when you have to develop landing pages and increasing your quality score.

Just these three items are only a small part of what is important in pay per click advertising but we can guarantee they will have a big effect on your websites quality score according to Google and reduce you cost per click significantly. As always any questions feel free to comment or submit an email to support@indieresults.com

While everyone knows search engine optimization is no easy task regardless of what niche or vertical you are in, there is something important to note about businesses with a physical location. On Most SEO jobs we take projects for businesses that have a physical location, and also target the area around that location have achieve a very dominating position online with a few simple tasks. While we understand sharing these with our blog readers might cost us a little work that’s fine by us. Other than servicing our clients accounts we also like to keep everyone informed on some of the little things they can do on their own to help their business grow online. The point of this post is simply to bring light to an untapped resource many of the sites we audit have.

Local Identifiers Multiply the Effect of Your Efforts

You may be first wondering what a local identifier is. Basically someone looking for a shoe store may type into Google or another search engine “shoe store” but what is far more likely is they would type in “shoe store city”. For example, if they lived in Dallas Texas, they might type something like “shoe store Dallas” or “shoe store Dallas TX”. When they type is local information this is when Google and other search engines tune into their local maps, and local links, content, and listings for the results they serve the person searching. The point is, if your business serves a particular area, and you are located in that area, scream it from the rooftops!

How to Scream It from The Rooftops (and search engines)!

There are a few easy steps most businesses can do to can a competitive advantage over their local competitors.

*Have a Nice 5-10 Page Website (more content is better)
*List the Physical Address of Your Company on Every Page (Use The Footer)
*List Your Business on Google Yahoo and MSN Local (this is free)
*Write On Page Content to Include Local City Name & Surrounding Ones
*Find Local Business Directories to List Your Site & Physical Address
*List Your City Area in Title Tags & Meta Descriptions

Obviously this is just a short list but it is unlikely many of your competitors are doing even the simple entry level things like this. These steps are some of the first things we do with any account local or otherwise and they show some of the quickest and deadliest results. If you run a local business regardless of size local SEO should be part of your marketing plan no matter what and many of our clients fit right into this mold and find themselves at the top of the search engines within a few months of focusing on local search engine optimization. If you have any questions please comment below or email us at support@indieresults.com

Learn just a few of the amazing services we can offer. The video is a little long but we wanted to cover as much as we could about our services. We can help your business with everything including but not limited to search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, email marketing, website design, custom wordpress and CRM themes and much more.

Everyone in the SEO community understands page rank can be greatly over rated. While there are many different opinions of page ranks value the fact remains arbitrary or not it is a measuring stick used by Google to rate the quality of your website. Essentially PageRank is a measure of connectivity. It is a rough approximation of the odds that a random web surfer will cross your page. PageRank is calculated by following links throughout the web, and placing more weight on links from pages and sites that many quality pages link at.

The Google Toolbar provides a 0-10 logarithmic scale to mimic the link popularity of pages. PageRank provides a quick glance how important Google thinks a page is. Google would like you to believe that their PageRank algorithm is the core of their search technology, but they also use many other technologies to improve their search relevancy.

This all said many website lack even the smallest amount of page rank, and it should be used to gauge your online efforts at least as a guide but perhaps not the be all end all of a sites quality. There are many other things that are calculated by Google when deciding how to rank certain websites, but you would be hard pressed to find someone to say having a good page rank is bad.

So here is my little experiment I took a clients website which was about a year old had 0 back links, and very little content to a page rank 3 website and more than tripled his organic traffic by doing 3 little easy things.

• Spent $600.00 on high quality high relevancy links from directories
• Added roughly 20 pages of useful content
• Optimized All Title Tags
• Optimized All Meta Descriptions

That is it! In September the site received just 50 organic referrals, and in October it rocketed up to 150, and last month (December) was well over 250 and had achieved a page rank of 3. SEO has a snowball effect, it takes time to build some momentum but once you have it growth can be astounding. If you make a commitment to quality and content the rest falls into place, which is what we do here at Indie Results. If you would like us to take a look at your meta descriptions and title tags we would love to just email us at support@indieresults.com

This Saturday we take a look at what exactly are title tags and meta descriptions. We also talk a little about how your business can leverage high quality title tags and meta descriptions so that when your webpage shows up in the search engine results it attracts the most amount of clicks.

The Effects Of Good Meta Tags & Title Tags from Indie Results on Vimeo.

Even for a beginner there is a lot to know about email marketing. Knowing what to say in your emails, how to avoid spam filters, and even how often you should email your customers. This post will address just three of the many things you need to know about email marketing for your business, but covers the basics you will need to get headed in the right direction.

What To Say In Your Emails:

If you are just sending an email to a few clients or sending it out to a list of 70,000 people the message is the most important thing to consider. Spend time before hand really thinking about what you plan to say, have several people read it before you send it, and make sure you get the message across. Avoid being to promotional, and focus on being informational. People do not want to spend 30 minutes reading your email so be short, concise, and clear. Avoid having to send follow up emails or answer obvious questions by planning ahead of time every time you email anyone. If you practice this with your marketing emails, take it to your everyday emails too. You will be surprised how much more effective your communication is. It is easy to get informal with emails or to use slang, fight this urge, write professional, and succeed no matter the size of your email list.

How To Avoid Spam Filters:
This is a very important step to any email marketing campaign. Make sure and avoid obviously spammy words like “limited time offer” or “buy now”. Also avoid using too much bold or including too many images. Many spammers use images to hide their promotional language, and you can too just practice it in moderation. Below I will list a couple of words commonly flagged for spam. Obviously, many of them may seem strange to you, or outside something you would normally write but keep it in mind anyway. The bolded words are big no no’s. Click here to view the list.

How Often To Email Your List:
There are a lot of opinions on this topic and we generally choose to err on the side of caution. The last thing you want to do is have your potential or current customers start to see your emails as noise. The first step is tracking your emails key statistics, your open rate, your spam filter levels and your read times. This will tell you how many of your people are reading the message you spent hours writing. Don’t put too much weight on any one mailer that you send out rather keep the whole picture in mind. Watch your spam filter numbers because almost nobody is going to dig into their spam folder looking for your email. When to email your customers sort of depends on them. If they are at their computers during the day, email them then. If they don’t log on to the web until the evening send it then. The main point here is that you should always track the emails you send as to maximize the effectiveness of each email you send.

CPC:
This is short for “cost per click” this is the amount you pay each and every time someone clicks on your ad that is running. There are several things that can affect the price you pay. Some of them are quality score, this is basically Google’s score of your landing page. It means with the ad’s you are running how in line is your website. If you are selling toothpaste you had better make sure the page you are sending people to is very much about tooth paste, right down to the url, title tags, and meta descriptions. The higher your quality score the lower your cost per click. Another way you can manage the cost you pay each time someone clicks is by having a better click through rate. You can control this by having great ad copy and bidding on the correct keywords.

CPA:
This is short for cost per acquisition. This is the real number, the one that means the most. It can tell you if any PPC campaign is profitable or not. Basically it means what did it cost you to make a sale. Now, sale can mean whatever you want it to, it really depends on what the goal of your campaign is. If you are simply wanting people to sign up for a mailer that can mean a sale too. You have to know what each sale costs you and how profitable each sale is. The goal is to be in the black of course, sometimes that takes a little while and most pay per click campaigns start out losing money. The key is to be patient and let the natural progression of testing, and refining take place to work towards profitability.

CTR:
This is the short way of saying click through rate. This is basically the number of clicks over the number of impressions. Say for example your ad showed 100 time and received 10 clicks. That would give you a CTR of 10%. The better the CTR the better the price you will pay per click and you can increase this by working on your ad copy as well as bid on better terms. It is tough to say what a good CTR is, it really varies by market and vertical. The short way of looking at it is whatever percent is profitable for you is what you should shoot for as a baseline, and then always try improving.

Conversion Ratio:
Now conversion ratio is often confused with your cost per acquisition. The truth is it really is just the percentage of clicks that turn into sales, leads, or basically do whatever you had intended them. If you had 100 clicks and 8 people filled out your form for more information you would have a 8% conversion ratio. Again, like CPA a good conversion ratio is strictly tied to return on investment. At whatever percentage you are profitable is the baseline you should shoot for. There are a lot of ways to improve your conversion ratio with different ad copy, bidding on more targeted terms, and using things like split testing.

ROI:
Most business owners know this one by heart return on investment. This is what drives every single marketing decision, or at least should. The only advice we have on this is to take the long view, and not get too excited by really high or really low points. Pay Per Click advertising is a battlefield that can often change, your competitive landscape will change often and you have to allow yourself time to adjust as new competition joins the fight or as others drop out. Let the overall return on investment drive all your marketing decisions, but give them time to level out.