Many small business owners these days are looking for a one stop shop to service as many of their needs as possible. If you do not offer a certain product or service, your clients will use a company who does.

By allowing this to happen, not only have you lost the business of that new service they were seeking, but you may also lose the current business you have with that client as they may opt to move more of their business to one provider.

Online marketing is the only form of marketing which is continuously growing, while all other marketing mediums are shrinking. For example, the NAA reports that print advertising sales fell by about 30% in the 2009 second quarter.

Whether you have a print shop, marketing agency or interact with small businesses some other way, it makes sense to have some sort of online marketing offering.

Many online marketing companies offer reseller programs to provide business owners with an incentive to use them. But what should you look out for when selecting a partner in this field? Below are some questions you may want answered during this process:

• Is the provider reputable?
• Do they have a good product range?
• What are their commission levels and terms of payment?
• Are you rewarded for repeat sales or first time orders only?
• Is there an expiration on the term you are rewarded?
• Do they provide an account/reseller management area?
• Do they provide you with collateral and support?
• Do they give you the ability to private label reports if you wish and charge a premium for your services?

ineedhits offers a variety of reseller programs which you may want to use as a basis for your research when comparing providers.

I am constantly amazed why many businesses go to the trouble of putting up a web site, yet do not provide the right type of information to use it as an effective selling tool.

Countless small business websites, for example, will provide photos of their products and services, yet won’t list details or provide pricing. If I wanted to see a photo of a product I would use Google images, wouldn’t I?

Businesses with a retail store don’t just compete on price, however visitors need to see the full package on offer in order to “get interested” in purchasing the product or service.

These type of businesses either:

1. Didn’t have the information ready when the site was designed.
2. Don’t want to pay the hundreds of dollars web designers charge to update the information on the website.
3. Think that visitors will call them to ask for a price. Many visitors will simply use the browsers’ “back” button or choose another supplier.
4. Are simply lazy

If you would like visitors to call to find out more about your products, then you need to make it as easy as possible. The simplest solution is to have your phone number clearly visible at the top of every page on your site. Visitors don’t want to have to click through to a “contact us” page to simply find your telephone number.

If you ask your visitors to leave an enquiry via a contact form, don’t put 10 compulsory fields. Is it really necessary to ask for the visitors address, home, work and mobile numbers, date of birth, star sign and even blood type (ok, I am exaggerating now but you get my point). Ultimately, you won’t use this information, when all you need is my enquiry and ONE phone number or email address to get back to them.

Small business owners, I’d suggest you have a think about the content and flow of your website (or invest in a website with a Content Management System) before contacting a web designer. It’s not beneficial to anyone if they build you a web site which will provide little value to your visitors or your business.

Although we optimize many websites which have already been constructed, we often get asked for tips on what a business owner should be requesting from their web designer, if they are redesigning their website. Below are the top 7 features to ask for which will help your website become SEO friendly from day 1.

1) Ensure your URL’s are keyword rich and avoid dynamic URL’s which normally contain characters such as “?, % or =”. The URL of a Nike shoe model for example should look something like www.xyzstore.com/shoes/sports/nike/model-xyz

2) Ensure your copy and navigation is text based and not an image. An easy way to check this is by trying to highlight the text on your web page and copy/paste it into an editor such as word. If you can edit the word that you have pasted in your editor, it means the search engine can also read it and index that content accordingly.

3) Ensure your images have ALT Tags. This is basically an explanation of what the image is as Search Engine crawlers can not easily recognize images.

4) Ensure a sitemap is included in your web design and linked from your homepage. This enables search engines to navigate your whole site. XML sitemaps are also a great way to inform search engines of all of your web pages.

5) Avoid websites with frames. Search engine crawlers have trouble navigating these and hence don’t give you the SEO power from your content.

6) Avoid an over reliance on flash in websites. Search engines cannot adequately categorize the flash content. If you really can’t do without flash, ensure you create a html version of your website also.

7) If buying a website with a CMS, make sure you have access to altering the Title and Meta Tags, as well as adding text on the web page itself. You would be surprised how many CMS systems don’t even allow these features which can help with the ranking of your website.

By having as many of the above features readily available, it will ensure that you have built a solid foundation which can allow an SEO company to optimize your website for much better results. For top 20 guaranteed results I suggest the ineedhits Premium SEO service.

]]> http://blog.ineedhits.com/search-news/seo-tips-for-new-website-design-11596102.html/feed 5 http://blog.ineedhits.com/tips-advice/claiming-a-top-google-local-spot-08595815.html http://blog.ineedhits.com/tips-advice/claiming-a-top-google-local-spot-08595815.html#comments Thu, 09 Apr 2009 04:59:14 +0000 Peter Gavalas http://blog.ineedhits.com/?p=5815

With Google now displaying local results for businesses where the search query does not include the location, Google Local has become an even stronger short cut to the top of the organic results. There are some things you can do to aid in obtaining a high Google local ranking.

Keyword Rich Business Name
Businesses…

With Google now displaying local results for businesses where the search query does not include the location, Google Local has become an even stronger short cut to the top of the organic results. There are some things you can do to aid in obtaining a high Google local ranking.

Keyword Rich Business Name
Businesses with their business type in their names are recommended from a ranking perspective. For example if you are a wedding photographer, it is in your interest to have the term “wedding photographer” in your business name. Adding the location in it would also be of benefit, however this is not often possible for practical reasons. e.g. when comparing wedding photographers in the New York area, the business name “New York Wedding Photographer” will usually rank better than “Gold Wedding Photographer” which will in turn rank higher than “Premium Pics”

Business Type Keyword Rich URL
Similar to ranking in the organic area, a keyword rich URL with your business type can also be beneficial. Businesses with established business names often see this as a problem as they have an existing customer base which may know them by their non keyword rich business name and URL. If this is an issue, consider building a different website with its sole purpose being its ability to generate leads from. As long as your content is unique to your main website, this practice can be a good way to rank well for your chosen keywords without having to change your main URL.

Enhance your Local Business Listing
Most business listings contain only basic data. Enhancing your listing provides additional information to Google which will in turn help you with your ranking. Fields you can provide to Google include products you sell, payment options, opening hours, areas you service etc. The more descriptive you are, the better the chance Google will elevate your listing when someone is searching for a specific query. For example the search query for “Vermont 24 hour Vet accepting Visa card” will promote the listing which contains that information.

Add Testimonials
Have a happy customer? Ask them to submit a testimonial through on your Local Listing. This is quite easy to do by your customer yet can provide some good ranking benefits. Never forge testimonials as Google can look at factors such as which IP lodged the recommendation, frequency of growth etc.

Getting into Google Maps can be easy. Ensuring you gain great ranking from it involves many factors as can be seen above. We recommend using a professional to help you get the most out of Google Local Listings

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I was reviewing the performance of some of our Google Advertising clients recently and noticed some extraordinary results. One of our clients had achieved an ROI of over 500% on their advertising within their first month.

Looking at these web sites closer, I noticed that the thing they had in common was that they served niche markets. Advertising using Google AdWords, allows you to create your own category, without having to compete with the general industry that you’re business may sit under.

Furthermore, being in a niche market; you also have less competition, which means cheaper prices on relevant keywords. This makes it much easier to get affordable, targeted traffic to your web site and drives better ROI on your advertising.

Take for example the business of a high rise window cleaner. In the yellow pages they would be stuck amongst hundreds of other window cleaners in that general category. Bid on words such as “high rise window cleaner” on Adwords and presto they are now sitting in their own type of category, without much competition at all!

Do you run a business servicing a niche industry? Sponsored Listing Advertising may also help connect you with potential customers for less than you think.

With the major search engines making significant progress on “local search” this year, there are many ways you can make the most of this local focus.

Whilst the search engines are driving the “local” movement via their paid listings (pay-per-click), you can capitalize on the increased searcher awareness of geo-search through your organic search engine optimization efforts.

Let’s face it, if you own a bricks and mortar business, chances are local customers are going to be one of your core target markets. Therefore it makes sense to address this geographical area in your optimization efforts.

A search engine can only categorize your website according to the information your web pages provide. It amazes me that so many businesses with clearly defined local markets ignore this, even in their basic web page copy.

In order to encourage the major search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo! to categorize your business within your locality, you must include specific local information on your web pages, such as your address and phone number, so that it is clear to the search engines which area your business services.

As customers begin to expect the local search functionality, capitalize on these expectations with your organic listings. While it all sounds obvious, we all know that optimization is not an overnight success, so start embracing the local search prospect now!

If you are looking for instant results from local search, Clicks4Sure is a form of paid advertising that provides guaranteed clicks from potential customers in your area for affordable set cost – starting at only $39.95 per month.

Seems like Google Analytics was more popular than the folk over at Google had originally forecasted with Google temporarily suspending any new sign ups to their new free web analytics service.

The announcement which initially threw the web analytics market into disarray seems to have its impact slightly softened by this temporary suspension of new sign ups. Also, many existing web analytics providers will want to investigate the Google Analytics service further to compare the features with their existing service.

If you have an e-commerce site for example, data can take up to 6 hours to flow into your account and for someone which looks at their web analytics data several times/day, this lag can be quite irritating.

For this reason if you do spend hundreds or thousand of dollars per month on Google Adwords, it may not be a bad idea to have an independent company providing the results of how those ads perform at a comparatively small cost. HitsLink for example can provide such a service and offers real time reporting so you know within seconds from which campaign a sale had originated from.

If you want to begin measuring what is and is not working for you, you may register for a free 30 day trial here.