Rachel Howe | Social Media | SEO Blog

December 28, 2011

Why Should I do Business With You?

I have 2 thought provoking questions for you to ask yourself:

1.) Why should I do business with you?

2.) What can you offer me that other businesses similar to yours can’t?

Too many website’s are just white noise, therefore making their business seem like another commodity. People want to know what sets you apart. Don’t lose website visitors because you forgot to communicate your value clearly.

Think about these questions and make it obvious on your website if it isn’t already. I guarantee it will increase conversions.

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Filed under Internet Marketing

December 18, 2011

Create an Online Form With Wufoo

Are you looking for a simple solution to have people send you information over your website?

Wufoo is a great way to allow people to fill out information about themselves with a form on your website.

You can use Wufoo’s online form builder to:

Create a “contact me” form
Create a “Book an appointment” form
Create a Survey/questionnaire
(Insert form idea here

The nice thing about Wufoo is that you can view your form activity with their analytics feature, as well have an email and/or text message sent to you once a form is filled out, and create reports.

There is a free account option, which is great if you want just a basic account to create one or two forms. If you choose to upgrade your account you will have the ability to add a logo to your form, more form submittable allowances, among a variety of other features.

I currently use Wufoo for all of my forms I use on my website and find it easy to use, and you don’t need to know anything about code!

You can integrate your form code a number of ways:

Create a link to the form
Pop up form
Embed form on your site
On Facebook
Send form over email

If you need any help with creating a Wufoo account, or help with creating a form, fill out the form below!

-Rachel

Click here to contact Rachel with questions on Wufoo

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Filed under Internet Marketing

Tagged as online form builder, wufoo

December 11, 2011

Are 301 Redirects on Your Web Developer’s Check List?

If you know how websites operate fairly well, you may be reading this thinking, “duh.” But, I assume you are reading this as my implied target audience as a small business owner that may not think of this obvious implementation a web developer or SEO professional might do when updating an old website to a new website.

The reason I bring this up is because there are some lazy web developers that actually do not do this, and therefore the website owner goes on with their business not knowing this critical implementation hasn’t been addressed. This is very rare, but it does happen and being the knowledgeable business owner that your are reading my blog, you will equip yourself with even more knowledge on why implementing a 301 redirect when you have a new website launched is very important.

As a search engine marketer, I cannot tell you how imperative it is to have what is called a “301 Redirect” put in place as soon as your new website is about to go live. Continue reading below to find out what a 301 redirect does and why it’s important.

This post isn’t a “how to” giving detailed information on how implement one step by step with instructions, rather, it is meant to give a general overview of a 301 redirect and to highlight the importance of it.

What does a 301 redirect do?

Simply put, a 301 redirect takes all the old URL’s and re-directs them to your new website’s URL’s. Implementing them is considered to be standard and follows best practices.

There are multiple reasons why this is done:

Getting rid of Old URL’s in the Search Engines – A 301 redirect helps you to get rid of all of the old URL’s that are cached in the search engines to alleviate 404 errors. They need to be taken care of so the search engine visitor that clicks on the old URL will not go to a website page that does not exist (also called a 404 “page not found” error).

Saving Your Website Links – By doing this, you are also saving the links that people have used to link to your old website, and passing it onto the new website and therefore not losing any valuable links people have created to your website. From and SEO perspective, this is very critical on the new website, “go live” list of to-do’s.

Why is a 301 redirect important?

Whenever a URL is ever changed in a website, the URL must be redirected to ensure that your old URL’s are not hanging around in the search engine results pages and taking the visitor that clicks on the URL to a “404 – page not found” page.

How do I implement a 301 redirect?

Ensure that the old pages are redirected to the new page names in the .HTACCESS file, or with a content management (CMS) plugin, such as WordPress for example. An important thing you must do after implementing them, is to also test that the redirect has worked.

Then, the new URL should be submitted to Google Webmaster Tools by doing the following:

Go to Diagnostics
Fetch as Googlebot
Refresh your computer
Then choose “submit to index”

You can also submit your new URL’s to Bing Webmaster Tools as well:

Go to Webmaster
Index
Submit URL’s

Submitting your URL changes to Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools helps you alert Google and Bing that there are some URL changes that you’ve made and allows you to see if their are any issues on the backend of your website. This will help your URL’s get indexed by the search engines more quickly and help knock down your old URL’s from the search engine results pages as your new website pages start to get indexed.

I hope this information was helpful to help you understand why 301 redirects are important from a web usability and SEO perspective. As always, if you have any questions or something to add, please leave your thoughts in the comment section below.

-Rachel

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Filed under SEO and Link Building

Tagged as 301 redirect, technical SEO

November 10, 2011

How to Become a Search Operator Master

I’m working on an awesome post that will be posted by Friday on the Get Busy Media blog on search operators. This post will help you find out some information about your website quickly and easily by utilizing search operators to look up information about your domain in the search engines.

Search operators are universally known “operators” that you can use in each search engine to pull up some quick info on your website and on others sites, such as all indexed pages, websites with only certain keywords in the website content, websites with certain keywords in the URL…and more!

Stop by the Get Busy Media blog on Friday and don’t miss this post!

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Tagged as search operators, seo

November 3, 2011

My Top Video Blogs on Successful Entrepreneurs – by Internet Entrepreneurs

Part of being involved in the online community means that you will come across a lot of new websites and blogs…perhaps more than your Google Reader can handle!

I’ve come across some great video blogs recently that I thought would really benefit to share with my readers that could help their existing small business, as well as some aspiring entrepreneurs. The best thing about these blogs is that you can consume an episode in 30 minutes or less.

Below are some great video blogs on entrepreneurs, by Internet entrepreneurs that you need to check out:

The Rise to the Top – The blog for “mediapreneurs” hosted by the very enthusiastic David Siteman Garland. He interviews a ton of great entrepreneurs and has been throwing a lot of fitness entrepreneurs too, which is an interesting spin here and there if you’re into fitness as well.

Mixergy – Great Interviews on successful entrepreneurs by Andrew Warner. He interviews many entrepreneurs to gain insight and advice on how they became successful to help other business owners and entrepreneurs utilize this information to build a better business.

Gary Vaynerchuk – Always fun to watch. Gary “Vee” is an extremely successful (and very enthusiastic) entrepreneur. He posts short video posts about every other day or so. Also author of two great books, “Crush it!” and “The Thank you Economy”.

Smart Passive Income – Now, I’m not a fan of “get rich quick” themed websites/blogs, but I assure you that this is a quality site that offers excellent tips on Internet entrepreneurship by a very laid back Internet entrepreneur, Pat Flynn.

This is a pretty short list, but these are some of my favorites that I visit on an almost daily basis that I highly recommend you check out if you’re interested in entepreneurship, or just to get better at building your small business from experienced and successful business owners.

If you have any great websites/blogs that you know about and want to share, please tell us about them in the comment section below.

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Filed under Entrepreneurship

Tagged as internet entrepreneurship

October 5, 2011

Get Found Online During the Holiday Season – Guest Post by Jim Armstrong

Are you a small biz gearing up for the holiday season? If you’re Ricky’s…well you have your model down fairly well. This one stop super-shop garners 20% of its annual sales in a mere two months due in large part to the success of its pop-up stores. Pop-up stores are temporary stores in New York City that Ricky’s leases, decorates and stocks with temp employees prior to Halloween.

For those without the means and resources to fund 30 pop-up stores at a time in New York City, this post is for you

Below I will walk you through five digital pain points of small businesses and how you can excel in each of these areas to make your business shine during this busy time of year. Here’s to driving sales, keeping customers happy, and most importantly, leaving them with an unforgettable experience.

SEO – Is your site optimized for the season and your product?

Have you examined your company’s website recently? Does the layout, design, and content match what you are selling when you are selling your product? If you’re a local shoe shop, you want to ensure you are capturing qualified traffic online for those users searching for your shoes. To begin, you will want to ensure that you understand SEO, or Search Engine Optimization for Small Businesses. Google ranks websites on a variety of factors including landing page quality, keyword density, inbound links, quality of inbound links, age of site, and frequency of updated content (Google wants to ensure that your site is an active site).

Creating content around your holiday offers and around long-tail keywords are good places to start. You want to ensure that you rank high in Google and Bing for searches around, “Clarks holiday discount shoes,” if your store has a huge selection of Clarks shoes. You need to show up for these types of searches. The tool that will help you find long-tail, low competition keywords that you will rank for is the Google Keyword Tool. For more information on how to use this tool, see Part I of my 4-part series on SEM: Get Found Online: SEM for Your Small Business. This brings me to my next point…

SEM for Small Businesses

Having a robust presence online is essential to running a successful business today. If a consumer can’t find you online, forget about it, she will go to the numerous other competitors that are competing for real estate at the top of Google.

Setting up a campaign in Google with relevant keywords and ad groups takes mere minutes. With SEM, you will again leverage Google’s Keyword Tool to help you identify keywords around your product that resonate with your customers. Within Google Adwords, you can have your text ads run continuously throughout the day or you can day-part. In other words, you can exclude certain low volume days while allocating more of your budget towards high volume days. You can even day-part by hour.

For example, if you are promoting a huge holiday sale for the weekend of October 28^th and you have a limited budget, you may want to consider weighting your Adwords budget more towards the week leading up to the sale and save money during the weeks where Halloween is not as much top of mind.

For a deep dive into the nuances of SEM for Small Businesses, see my 4-part series on Google Adwords for Get Busy Media.

Get Active on Social Media

Yeah, yeah doesn’t everyone say this? I can tweet at my customers through Twitter and post to my Facebook Fan Page every once in a while, right? Wrong. Social Media is not throwing darts in the dark hoping to hit your target. Social Media Marketing takes a commitment to understanding your customers’ desires, complaints and needs. This means listening and interacting with your customers on a daily basis.

Michael Stelzner, Founder of SocialMediaExaminer.com, generates amazing daily content on social media and how to leverage social networks to reach and engage with your customers.

Need to figure out Facebook and how to get more out of this amazing platform. Check out this recent post from Social Media Examiner, 9 Facebook Marketing Success Stories You Should Model.

Here are just a few of my favorite resources for social media news, strategies and updates:

- SocialMediaExaminer.com – Great How To’s, Contrarian articles, Interviews & Case Studies

- SocialMediaExplorer.com – More of a Contrarian Blog, takes a deeper dive, peeling back the layers of social media

- Mashable.com – #1 Social Media news site on the planet

- Chrisbrogan.com – Chris Brogan is the master of relationships and all-world marketer

- Searchengineland.com – Breaking news in the search space

- Hubspot Internet Marketing Blog – Amazing whitepapers and eBooks on internet marketing

Start Blogging…and Start Blogging Regularly

Blogging may be the most effective way to drive engagement on your site and provides you with a platform where you are able to position yourself as a thought leader within your industry. Blogging generates discussion, raises questions and helps to further refine and develop your company’s brand (as well as your personal brand).

Are you blogging but not gaining any traction? Having trouble engaging readers and encouraging comments? Social Media Examiner put out a great article about a month ago on how to increase your blog comments.

The part about blogging regularly is no joke. If you’re going to gain any traction with your blog and reach a critical mass of customers you need to be blogging regularly. Whether this is 3 days a week, 5 days a week, twice a month…the frequency is up to you. More importantly, you need to be consistent and punctual with your posts. Your readers will keep coming back if you have fresh, relevant, interesting content on your site to present to them at the same time each week.

Nearly as important as content is layout and design. At Get Busy Media, we love WordPress and its hundreds of customized themes that make any WordPress sites look beautiful and clean. Through Studiopress.com and pagelines.com, you can create customized themes that require no programming knowledge – simple drag and drop solutions! You can have a site up in no time with access to hundreds of plug-ins to help add a little extra zest.

Set Up Geo-Location Promotions via Foursquare

This is the last feather in the cap but this is a big one. Once you have customers in your store or at least interested in your store, offering them an incentive to show up is the ultimate deal-maker.

Our recommendation: use your blog, Facebook fan page and/or Twitter to broadcast this promotion, “first 50 people to arrive at x store receives 15% off total purchase.” Not only are you promoting a sale in your store but you are encouraging fans to interact with you on Facebook and Twitter. Furthermore, you are generating buzz for your store…buzz that is self-sustaining.

For small businesses, this is the ultimate sign of success: marketing campaigns that run themselves and put customers in your store.

Here’s a great post to Get Busy Media’s Blog on Foursquare Tips for Your Small Business.

We hope this overview of the digital landscape was helpful and that this will help you jump start your internet marketing efforts. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to Rachel or reach out to myself at jim@getbusymedia.com.

Author’s Bio: Jim Armstrong is the Co-Founder of Get Busy Media and a paid search specialist. Since 2008, Jim has built his knowledge around emerging media and leveraged several experiences to develop a keen understanding of internet marketing. His core competencies include search marketing, SEO, email marketing, social media marketing and online reputation management. Jim currently works for Ogilvy & Mather, in their digital arm, Neo@Ogilvy, as a search planner. When not diving headfirst into his next project, Jim enjoys spending time with his family, fishing and writing.

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Filed under Guest Posts

Tagged as ecommerce seo, internet marketing, online marketing

September 26, 2011

New Guest Post

Look out for a new guest post in the next week or two. A fellow search marketer will be contributing their thoughts on tweaking your internet marketing campaigns for the holidays to kick off my series of posts on E-Commerce SEO for the holiday season.

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Filed under Twitter

Tagged as guest post

July 15, 2011

“The Web Analytics Movement”

So, it’s 12am and I’m on my computer. I tend to check my analytics at that time since Google analytics updates at 12am with the previous days’ data.

Every once in a while, I check the keywords people type to get to my site. This is the most fun part of web analytics to me because you will likely find some strange search phrases people have typed to arrive at your site. Overall, you don’t want this to happen too often, because that may mean you have to analyze the keywords you are using in your posts/pages. But every so often, keywords you have used will end up bringing in some random traffic.

For example, I wrote a post: The Bootstrappers Guide to Cheap Marketing a few months back, and just today received traffic from the keyword phrase, “burn bootstrapper.” I had to chuckle. Who on earth would type something like that? I don’t even want to know. Anyways, I got to thinking…I need to A.) Come up with a special day each week highlighting each weeks funniest keyword phrases from my analytics data, or B.) Create a user generated site focused solely on poking fun at funny analytics data.

My point in this is to encourage people (more specifically, small business owners) to check their web analytics data on a regular basis, but also have fun time doing it. For fun, let’s just call it, “The Web Analytics Movement.”

With the digital revolution we are going through (shout out to Google Plus), its important to actively stay on top of your online presence. Small business owners especially. Many people may try and argue this, but for most small businesses, internet marketing is the most cost effective and efficient way to market their business. I won’t go into detail on all the benefits now, perhaps in a later post.

So, what do you think? Do you think I should go with A or B? I’m thinking B because it would make more sense for my whole movement idea. Perhaps both?..

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Filed under Analytics