Online Shopping Guide

Optimizing A Campaign

www.411webinteractive.com gives online companies everything they need to extend the reach of their online businesses through its internet marketing solution services. Trusted resources for search engine optimization, search engine marketing services, affiliate internet marketing programs, online marketing promotions, web marketing, search friendly content writing, and campaign management, make 411webinteractive the top choice among site owners seeking to increase sales through higher online traffic.

411webinteractive has the successful track record of applying proven SEO content and design strategies to get better placement on search engines. Its SEO application was developed for maximum effectiveness without sacrificing design. It also ensures that your website shows up on today’s most popular search engines.

411webinteractive’s search engine marketing services consist of elements like keyword bid management, advertising purchases and trusted feed generation. By combining the correct pieces of the internet marketing puzzle, 411webinteractive helps clients build campaigns designed to produce results.

Affiliate internet marketing programs, web marketing strategies, and online marketing promotions offered by 411webinteractive give you the tools you need to reach out to your target audience. Its advanced email marketing solutions give you valuable insight and reports about the preferences of your customers.

411webinteractive’s professional content writing can help your website gain exposure through search engine friendly content. Here you’ll have access to professional content writers who specialize in search engine optimized content for your websites. Copywriters also produce e-newsletters, mailers, banners and slogans that attract visitors and keep them clicking around your site.

411webinteractive’s campaign management through tracking and reporting help you to analyze which pieces of your campaign are working and which aren’t. By pinpointing the areas of your campaign that are producing the best results, you can apply more focus to specific areas and grow your business without guesswork. Using statistics, you can quantify how often the site is being displayed in the list by search engines and which placement each page holds. By understanding your baseline, you will then develop individual strategies designed to achieve your overall goal.

The engine tracker offers invaluable statistics on the general behavior of your visitors on the internet. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to design your site and your strategy around your customer’s already established behavior instead of guessing until you find what works.

You’ll gain an understanding of your potential customer’s search frequency, number of visits and the words and phrases they use most when searching. The tracker also analyzes the ever-changing criteria that search engines use to rank web pages.

411webinetractive uses the latest technology to achieve results. With its proven track record and cutting edge tools, 411web interactive boasts more than 100,000 active marketers in its network and about 1,200 syndication partners.

By optimizing your website, you can rank top among the results of the most popular search engines. Reaching the top spots of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft naturally leads to increased traffic. With more targeted traffic comes more sales and higher profits. Websites that rank high on the leading search engines don’t end up there on accident. If you’re ready to grow your online business, explore your options a www.411webinteractive.com.

Optimizing A Campaign / Lee Traupel

Lee Traupel is a well known author who writes for 411webinteractive.com. Please visit the site for more details.

 

Online Directories: The Real Direction of the Internet

Back in the early days of the Internet, there were only human-edited directories. These were found primarily in specialized browsers like the Archie or Veronica systems. Later, Yahoo! used the same basic idea to create a descriptive listing of websites. This was the birth of the first major online directory for the public World Wide Web.

Online directories have been around since the first days of the Internet, and without them and search engines we’d have no simple way of navigating through the sites. Today, there are thousands of directories online, which can make it very confusing to determine which are giving you the best quality information.

In fact, many online directories are no better than junk. Unfortunately, with Google’s AdSense program, it has become very profitable in some cases to put together a directory just so you can run ads on it. These sites are automated and certainly no better than you might think.

The best directories are the ones edited by dedicated humans, not dedicated servers. That’s because a human being knows what you really need to know, while a computer doesn’t care. Examples of these are Yahoo!, which has a search engine component, but still maintains its directory content; and Dmoz, an open directory run by volunteers that also has pretty good quality content. These directories, and the many quality paid directories that exist, will be around for a very long time.

Search Engines or Directories: What’s The Difference?

To understand why directories may be the future of online searching, you should understand the difference between a search engine and a directory.

Search engines catalogue the full text of a web site. This text is stored in a database and made fully searchable. The information appearing next to a link is dependent upon the metatag information in the web page, or upon the section of the text where the search term first appears. There is no human intervention, and no guarantee of quality.

A directory is quite different. Human editors place each site in the directory. They’ve gone out and examined the sites in question, put data together to clarify what the site’s really about, and ranked it more fairly than a search engine could. And the new generation of directories includes wiki technologies and content that helps define a topic as well as show you where to go for further information.

What About Wikis?

Wikis are community-edited informational sites, and they’re showing up all over the place. The first was Wikipedia, recently known for an act of vandalism that made up one person’s background. This incident was heavily covered in the media, and may have coloured the opinions of many people. However, this incident was atypical of wikis. Nature magazine and other science editors recently did a quick review of Wikipedia’s science content, and determined that it was at least as accurate and up to date as the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Wikis are proving themselves to be both valuable and accurate. They are also a great place to go for directory-style and in-text links to sites to deepen your information. Pretty soon, a wiki is going to be a natural place to go to search for information on just about anything.

Paid Versus Unpaid Directories

There are both paid and unpaid directories as well. Some of these directories are basically clones of Dmoz and other popular directory sites; this means the owner licensed with the directory to duplicate it, and then sold advertising on it. The site owner gets directory content with little or no work on his part, as well as the advertising revenue.

Not all unpaid directories are like that, of course, but you do get what you pay for. A paid directory is both original and human edited. It can also afford to pay for extras like advertising and marketing, ensuring the directory is known by the public. Paid directories can also employ SEO experts who can work toward raising the search engine rating of the site, and traffic experts who can monitor and increase the traffic to the website.

In the long run, listing with all the unpaid directories is okay, but listing with paid directories gives you an edge. And in today’s marketplace, you need every edge you can get.

Online Directories: The Real Direction of the Internet / Adrian Lawrence

Adrian Lawrence is the webmaster of Indexplex a leading web directory. Please feel free to republish this article provided this resource box remains together with a working hyperlink.

Submitting to Online Directories

A Secret Way of Getting Traffic: Submitting to Online Directories

If you are reading this article, more likely than not you own a website that you would like to see be a success. To achieve that level, you need traffic to your site. But where does traffic come from?

One of the better ways to get traffic for your site is to submit your site to the many directories that exist online. Online directories are similar to your phone book yellow pages: These directories are categorized (education, entertainment, health, etc.), and when you submit your website, you suggest a category for your website. Often, you will even be able to submit to a sub-category within a major category. For example, suppose your website is about aromatherapy. In your submission request, you would suggest “Health” as your main category, “Alternative Medicine” as your sub-category, and “Aromatherapy” as a further sub-category.

Some of the leading online directories are Yahoo!, MSN Small Business, and the DMOZ directory. Unlike search engines, however, listings in online directories are usually not free. As of this writing, you can submit for free to the Yahoo! Directory (http://dir.yahoo.com), but there is not guarantee on how quickly your website will be reviewed for listing. If you need your site reviewed faster, you can pay Yahoo! $299 US for “expedited” service and they will review your site within seven days. However, this fee is a yearly recurring fee. Your website is subject to a yearly review, and is guaranteed neither initial inclusion or to remain listed year after year.

The MSN service is $49 US, and it functions more like a search engine submit service. Their submission service includes inclusion in their own small business directory. DMOZ, on the other hand, is free, but because it is operated by volunteers, it could be awhile before your site is included. Your best options are to submit to DMOZ and pay for the MSN and Yahoo! services.

But why should you spend money? Can’t you just optimize your site for the search engines? You can, but not everyone goes to a search engine for what they are looking for. For example, if someone is searching for gourmet dog treats, they may not use a search engine. Instead, they might go to one of the online directories and look at the listings, much like someone would use the yellow pages in their phone book. Your investment in gaining inclusion in the online directories will pay off for you in a multitude of ways.

   1. You will increase traffic to your site. Your site will be included in the online directories, as well as the search engines, and this will help you gain traffic as people search directory listings and find your website.

   2. You will increase the number of backlinks to your site. If the directory pages are listed in search engines, the link they provide for your site will be listed in the search engines. This benefits you by creating more ways for people to find your site. Ultimately, this will provide more traffic for you.

   3. Submitting to directories is a quick way to gain links. Optimizing your site for the search engines is very difficult and time-consuming. It can take a lot of time to learn how to write for the search engines. In the meantime, any links you can get will help you with the search engines, and submitting to directories will get you links.

   4.  Submitting to directories is relatively inexpensive, and a good investment. As stated earlier, you can submit to Yahoo! and MSN for less than $350. DMOZ is free. If you run a search for online directories, you will find many more where you could submit inexpensively, or even for free.

In short, submitting to online directories is one of the best ways for you to build traffic to your website. In the end, you need traffic to survive online. So get started!

Submitting to Online Directories / Adrian Lawrence

Forget Conventional Marketing Embrace the Web!

Tactical marketing processes are once again undergoing fundamental shifts from traditional to web-based processes. Many traditional marketing firms/agencies are still touting the tried and true to their clients; i.e. Tradeshow attendance, Print, Traditional PR, TV and Radio. However, these conventional marketing processes work best for broad market awareness and/or branding, especially for a Fortune 1K company with significant resources to spend on demographic analysis, test marketing and more test marketing. It’s much more difficult for a smaller company (startup to $50M per annum) to leverage the economies of scale that are typically available for a larger company for the media buy and operational efficiencies.

It’s obvious that lifestyle and business processes are shifting towards a much greater dependence on digital media – people are traveling less due to cost issues and the ever-increasing speed of business is underscoring the usage of the Internet for information and research. If you’re a small to medium sized business the chances are that you’ve probably cut your marketing budget significantly – by eliminating or scaling back tradeshow attendance, trade magazine advertising and/or direct mail in favor of response driven marketing on the web that can be deployed faster and more cost-effectively than traditional marketing methods.

Capturing leads from a web site generated by opt-in e-mail, newsletter inserts, text link advertising and/or other forms of pay per click marketing is still the absolute best way to generate leads that are quantifiable as soon as they are generated. You have the ability to easily track where the lead came from and via what interactive advertising process; assuming this has been setup for you by your interactive ad agency or with the online publisher. And, there are typically no lead times like more traditional marketing processes – we’ve created and deployed campaigns (creative, media buy, testing, ROI analysis, etc.) for our clients in 3-5 working days in some cases.

There are some pitfalls to web-based lead generation and follow through that you need to be aware of as you deploy an interactive campaign. Here are five of the most important “gotchas” that you need to think about as you build an interactive lead generation program around your web site:

   1.Don’t make it difficult for people to contact your company – make sure your web site really communicates with your prospects – by “communicating” I mean by providing telephone contacts, e-mail address and/or a lead capture form that is short. Note: this form has to be supported by a published Privacy Policy (“we won’t divulge your info to a third party under any circumstances”) and it absolutely must be short; i.e. don’t request any more than baseline information, name, phone, e-mail and address, augmented with a comment box.

   2.Your marketing objectives have to be supported by your sales team – the sales team has to be incentivized to respond to inbound e-mails and requests for information via a contact form in a timely manner, within 24 hours or sooner. If you have a geographically dispersed sales team then make this clear on the web site by providing specific contact points for states, regions and countries.

   3.Make sure you IT person/department attends your marketing planning meetings with your sales team – your web site will need some type of a lead capture setup that redistributes leads based on function and/or geographical responsibility. Your IT staff has to create a database solution that captures, stores and distributes leads – this does not need to be done in-house, products like Act (the market leader in contact management software) are now web-enabled, you can capture leads via a web server and share leads with others via a browser and very inexpensively.

   4.We don’t advocate popup advertising for most of our client’s advertising campaigns. But, we have “crossed over to the other side” and we do (highly) recommend using popups on our clients’ web sites to present opportunities that in turn capture leads. Studies have shown effective popup lead captures increase lead generation by 40-85% depending on the market segment. Popups can be set so they only launch on a frequency basis per session (visit to a web site) or a number of times for a specific visitor – they don’t have to setup so they are intrusive and annoying.

   5. Last but not least (drum roll) – make the customer’s usability experience the most important aspect of yourweb site. Create a user interface (“experience”) that is pleasant for your visitors; i.e. use standard universal (top of page and local page left) menus, utilize 2-3 sentence paragraphs with lots of white space, don’t overload your pages with graphics that slow down load times and make sure your contact points (phone, e-mail) are readily available from every page.

So, to summarize; advertising is shifting from traditional to web-based or interactive if you will – so, to get on board this tsunami build a web site that communicates with your prospects/customers, provide contact points via telephone and e-mail via the site, involve your IT and Sales staff with the lead capture process so they are all stakeholders and utilize popups to accelerate your lead capturing.

Forget Conventional Marketing Embrace the Web! / Lee Traupel

Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of marketing experience. He is the co-founder of a Northern California and Brussels Belgium based, privately held, Marketing Services and Software Company, Intelective Communications, Inc., http://www.intelective.com. Intelective focuses exclusively on providing services to small-to-medium-sized companies that need strategic and tactical marketing services. He can be reached at Lee@intelective.com.

Is Your Site in the Google Sandbox

The Widget Corporation is a highly successful business that specializes in designing and manufacturing office widgets, namely customized stress balls and ergonomically designed footrests.

The owner Jason Widget collaborated with a web design company to create a beautiful web site with strong content, numerous incoming links, an online catalog and ordering system.

Even after the site was featured in the industry’s most popular trade publication six weeks after the site launch, Mr. Widget was confounded when he went to Google and searched for his web site using intuitive keyword combinations, including ”Widget Corporation,” ”office widgets,” ”custom stress balls,” etc.

Nothing.

His searches kept yielding pages of results, but the Widget Corp’s site was nowhere to be found in the first two pages of listings.

Then he typed in the keyword combo ”ergonomic footrests,” and his site popped up #1.

Sound familiar?

Mr. Widget’s web site, although optimized well for search engines, is likely one of the many web sites launched after March 2004 that are experiencing the Google Sandbox effect. While the existence of the Sandbox as a new site filter is a subject of debate among search engine experts, Google has reportedly all but admitted that the Sandbox filter is real.

What exactly is the Google Sandbox?

According to Wayne Hurlbert, a contributor to Blog Business World for successful entrepreneurs, the Sandbox ”is very similar to a new web site being placed on probation, and kept lower than expected in searches, prior to being given full value for its incoming links and content.”

With the onslaught of spam-related web sites coming online, the Sandbox theoretically weeds out from results pages those spammers who supplement weak content with purchased links to garner high rankings and sales before getting banned.

If a new web site has strong, relevant content, abundant incoming links, favorable search results for secondary keyword phrases and yet does not appear for the most important searches, then it has probably been earmarked to do its obligatory Sandbox time. Time in the Sandbox can range from one to six months, but the average duration is three to four months.

A site’s duration in the Sandbox is directly proportionate to the competitiveness of the keywords and key phrases it targets. The more competitive the site’s search terms, the longer the site stays buried in the Sandbox.

While time is the only real solution to getting out of the Sandbox, Hurlbert offers some helpful tips for making the best out of the unavoidable:

1. Register a domain, set up hosting and publish a web site prior to official launch time to start the clock ticking on the Sandbox duration period 2. Continue to add as many incoming links as possible 3. Keep building relevant content to your site 4. Consider buying an already existing domain

Hurlbert claims that proper time management can help a site avoid the Sandbox altogether. Even if you’re not ready to build a web site just yet, procure a domain name and put up a splash page at the very least.

Contact staff@vulcancreative.com to get started today and avoid the Sandbox. Your widget sales just might skyrocket.

Read Hurlbert’s entire blog entry on the Sandbox here: http://blogbusinessworld.blogspot.com/2005/04/google-sandbox-theo ry-validated-by.html. Send your comments or questions to jeannette@vulcancreative.com

Is Your Site in the Google Sandbox / Jeannette Balleza

Jeannette Balleza is Co-Owner of Vulcan Creative, a creative agency specializing in identity with integrity. Vulcan Creative consults with clients on communication strategy and concept development and refinement for graphic design and web site development projects. Go to http://www.vulcancreative.com for more information and to request a free initial consultation.