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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.

There is a a great way to get your local business to the top of the search engine results pages. It will take you about 15 minutes of your time, and at most 10 minutes of planning, but the amazing amount of instant value it provides makes it one thing every single business owner should do regardless of their size. If you have a physical address, adding your business to Google, Yahoo, & MSN local will help your current and potential customers easily find your companies information regardless of if you even have a website.

How To List Your Business On Local Business Centers

Google Local Business:
Start by setting up your Google account
here. Then make sure to be as descriptive as possible about your business can be. This will help increase the odds of your local business ad showing up when people are searching. Make sure and include all hours and payment information. Google local business ad’s will have the most power of the three and can really generate a lot of results within Google. Many times it will simple be people searching for your specific business but there is a lot to be said for making things easy on them. The easier you are to find the better.

MSN Local Business:
To add your local business to the MSN local business center you will follow a similar procedure except it’s a little quicker. Start by heading over to this link and start signing up. As with Google local business you will want to be as detailed as possible and take the time to list everything right. Going back to make changes later can be very difficult especially on the MSN Local Business Center.

Yahoo Local Business:
Yahoo Local Business can also send your company lot’s of great traffic. The first step to doing that is heading over to this link. Like the other 2 take enough time to be very specific in your business listing. Going back to edit these listings later can be a total pain. That said, once you have completed the yahoo local business center ad you will be complete. The entire process will take you less than one hour and drive tons of phone calls and website traffic.

We realize that this method of online advertising certainly isn’t groundbreaking. That said, it is free and pretty much the most effective free advertising you could possibly do online. Before listing your website on any of these sites make sure to place your companies address clearly on your website, usually in the footer. This will also help your website get more local traffic.