WSI Marketing, Surf, Search and Social

Search Engines evaluate who is linking to your website to determine how relevant your website is within your industry. Pages that are linked to more frequently are weighted higher by search engines and are more likely to be visited.

Inbound links or “back links” are considered a vote of confidence for your website. Therefore getting “quality links” is an integral part of ranking higher than your competitors on the search engines.

Quality Links:

* Come from popular websites in a related industry.
* Links from higher ranking pages are worth more than miscellaneous links.
* Links that appear higher up in a page are more valuable than links that appear on the bottom of the page in the footer.
* Pages that have large numbers of links may be diluted and less authoritative.
* “Anchor Text” matters. The actual words that link to your webpage are important. For example, linking the phrase “internet marketing Carleton place” to my website is more effective for me than linking the words “Click Here”.

Where do Quality Links come from?
Sadly there is no silver bullet. A certain amount of links will develop naturally over time, but unless you have a very popular site to begin with, playing the waiting game won’t work. Buying links for a link farm typically doesn’t work well either. Those links are typically low quality and can get you into trouble over the long run due to their dubious source.


The first step (the only step I’m going to cover in this post) is to locate sources of quality links. I want to focus on the low hanging fruit:

* Websites that already link to you
* Websites that link to your competitors

In each case it is safe to assume that websites that link to you or your competitors probably link to sites that are relevant to you. Because those sites are relevant to your market, it is safe to assume that sites that link to THEM are also relevant to you and are probably also good link prospects.


There are a variety of methods for tracking down specific links to your site and to the sites of your competitors. The most efficient method is to use professional software that is designed for that specific task. Two that we user are Wordtracker and Web CEO. Keep in mind that there is a learning curve to use them correctly. There is also the associated expense of purchasing the tools, and the time to follow through with the results. I’ll cover that on an upcoming post.

Seeing as how we’re right at the beginning of a new year, we thought it fitting to have our first free webinar of 2011 dedicated to starting the year off right. Coming up on Wednesday, February 2nd 2011, you can join us for a free webinar entitled “Online Reputation Management: 3 Steps to Balance Risk and Reward!”

This particular webinar is specially geared to ensuring that your online brand is ready to effectively leverage the digital marketing realm this year. After all, expert planning and a strategically implemented social media strategy can drastically transform any company’s online presence. It has the capacity to launch a local, small-scale business into an international brand name!

However, on the other hand, a company who chooses to ignore its online presence and what customers are saying about them online can be equally damaging. As many online advantages as there are for your brand, there are just as many disadvantages and risks as well!

So, on February 2nd join us for a webinar, where we’re set to discuss:

* 3 steps to effective ORM
* What “ORM” really means – the ins and outs of online reputation management
* How to protect your brand against trademark / company name violations
* Crisis management strategies

There are 2 free sessions available!

Here are the registration details:

Session One

Date: Wednesday February 2nd, 2011

Time: 1:00PM – 2:00PM EST

REGISTER NOW!

Session Two

Date: Wednesday February 2nd, 2011

Time: 1:00PM – 2:00PM GMT

REGISTER NOW!

In just about a week, we’ll be hosting our annual WSI Global Convention! From September 24^th to the 26^th, WSI franchisees will be traveling from all around the globe to converge in Miami, USA, for 3 days full of workshops, case study presentations and endless collaboration opportunities to exchange world-class digital marketing methods and strategies. Put simply, we’re literally forming an international “Think Tank.”

Just as impressive, perhaps, is the keynote address that’s we’ve lined up. In fact, we have two keynote speakers for this convention: Avinash Kaushik and Scott Klososky!

Day 1 Keynote Speaker: Avinash Kaushik

As many already know, Avinash Kaushik is a best-selling author, entrepreneur, and public speaker for a topic that is at the very core of the WSI community: how to reinvent your digital existence.  He has championed the evolution of countless organizations’ online strategies to a more customer and data driven approach. As an established authority on leveraging data analytics, an essential addition to everyone’s reading list should be Avinash’s blog Occam’s Razor, and of course his best-selling books Web Analytics: Hour a Day and Web Analytics 2.0.

Day 2 Keynote Speaker: Scott Klososky

Next up we have social technology expert Scott Klososky as the keynote for day 2. He’s a former CEO and has worked with a number of large corporations assisting them with the latest media technologies and how to leverage such tools to boost their profitability. Having already heard Scott speak, he is undeniably a thought leader in this continually evolving field. Like WSI, Scott shares in the vision to recognize and utilize emerging fields to help businesses thrive and prosper.

I can safely say that the whole WSI community is looking forward to hearing both these gentlemen speak. It’ll be a pleasure to have them join us for this year’s Global Convention!

Read more about how WSI leverages the latest and most innovative digital marketing tools to deliver practical, revenue-building solutions for businesses.

Analytics Data & PPC Optimization

Analytics Data & PPC Optimization to Achieve Meaningful Results:
Using a Network of Tools and a Data-Driven Approach to Optimize PPC Marketing

Download this pay per click advertising and  Guaranteed you will walk away with incredible information to help your internet advertising and internet marketing campaigns.

Think about it, a great website that few people see will not get the marketing results you desire, and with the explosion of online marketing activity, capturing your place online has never been more important.  As the internet becomes the dominant vehicle for marketing, an internet marketing plan including; pay per click advertising, search engine marketing, and social media marketing is essential to compete in the years to come. Too many businesses are failing to fully capture the potential from online marketing, and this is due primarily to a lack of knowledge about the tools available to be successful.

Google has made enhancements to their Adwords platform. Paid search marketing or pay per click advertising, sponsored link marketing, and PPC are all terms that describe the process of paid online advertising with Adwords as the platform to manage paid search marketing. Also, Google has made free to the marketplace its Google Analytics tool, which captures all kinds of data about how people are using your website, where visitors are coming from, and what keywords people are typing to find you. The combination of free Google Analytics and pay per click advertising, Adwords, bring forth opportunities for businesses large and small to succeed online advertising. After all, the more business are successful advertising and marketing online, the more they will spend doing it. In this case, everyone wins – the business and the search engines.

Download Pay Per Click and Website Analytics Whitepaper.

The easiest websites to optimize are the horrible ones. In fact, the hardest part about optimizing a site that has a million and one problems is deciding which ones to go after first. However, where do you begin if you have a beautiful, clean, profitable website? If there are no clear issues – if the calls to action are visible and the page uncluttered and the buttons big and shiny – then what can be done short of remaking the entire site (an idea as scary as it is unnecessary)?

Sometimes, all you need is a change in perspective. We, the web savvy, see the Internet through big, clear monitors and 11 point font. We look at our site and we can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t be able to perform whatever task the site is designed to do. Well, to that end, Google Labs has created Browser Size. This nifty little tool allows you to see how much of your web page is immediately visible to your visitor depending on the size of their monitor and resolution settings.

The concept of “the fold” of a web page (as in “above the fold”, i.e., what can be seen upon landing on a webpage without any scrolling) is not a solid line that snips the bottom off every page, but rather a subjective experience. The notion of having important links, buttons and messages above the fold is taken for granted as a good policy, so what if you found out that 20% of your visitors couldn’t immediately see what you thought they could?

Plug your site into Browser Size and you’ll get that perspective. Each band of color represents approximately how many visitors will see that section immediately upon landing (the seemingly shaky lines are actually a true representation of the visible area excluding the title bar, toolbars, etc). If you have important information or buttons in the 70% range, that means 30% of your visitors are forced to scroll to see that information and convert.

Take a look at this example from the Website Optimizer homepage:

As you can see, most people can see our primary call to action, the “Start testing now” button. However, some of our educational content like Benefits and Testing 101 sections is below the fold for 50% of viewers.

Think the numbers are different for your site? Browser Size bases its data on a sample of visitors to Google.com, but you can check out your screen resolutions report in your web analytics tool to see the most common visitor screen resolutions for your own site. For most sites the list of dimensions is quite long, and the ones we in the industry tend to use – 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024 – typically only represent about 50% of the visitors at best.

So get back to the optimization grindstone, squeeze another percentage point or two into your conversion rate, and give all of your visitors the experience they deserve. You can start using Browser Size at http://browsersize.googlelabs.com