1. CONTENT – well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

2. LINKS – Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

3. TITLE TAGS – Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

4. NEW CONTENT – Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

5. KEYWORD LINKS – Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.

6. GEO SEARCH PHRASES – Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

7. ALT TEXT – Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

8. WWW or NOT – Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.

9. INDEX.HTML – Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

10. URL EXTENSIONS – Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

11. SPIDERS – Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

12. BLOG – If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

13. QUALITY LINKS – When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

14. KEYWORD STUFFING – Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work.

15. BLACK LIST SERVER- If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.

16. DOMAIN OWNERSHIP – Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

17. BLOG POST TITLE TAGS – When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.

18. QUALITY AND UNIQUE Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.

19. ONE KEYWORD PER PAGE – Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.

20. CALL TO ACTION – SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.

21. DAILY JOB – SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.

22. PAGE RANK – Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.

23. GET SOCIAL Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.

24. VIDEO – To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.

25. DUPLICATE CONTENT – If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps

1. Start a company blog

Investment:  Free with open source CMS such as WordPress, Movable Type or free hosted services such as Tumblr or Posterous

How it works:  Building an active blog into your company website has many marketing benefits, from helping you establish credibility to search engine
recognition and ranking of your corporate site. Through a blog, you can  talk to your customers and prospects every day about company events, product/service releases, industry insights, and company specials.  You can also gain valuable feedback from your customers through comments they leave on your articles.

2. Send email marketing campaigns

Investment:  Software costs around $20/mo or you can pay as you go.

How It Works: Through marketing only with your existing customers or those who sign-up to receive your emails. Still, marketing to this group can go a long way toward building customer loyalty and introducing new products and services.  If you’re still sending out printed newsletters, you could cut your marketing spending drastically by moving to email delivery. We offer a pay-per-recipient email marketing software

3. Provide demonstrations online

Investment:  Paid software such as Glance ($20/mo ) or free messaging application Skype

How it works:  You can cut down on travel costs and let your customers experience your product and service as fast as possible by using online demonstrations.  When using these types of software, you can instantly follow up with customers and walk them through your business web sites, give them a guided Powerpoint presentation, or view secure documents/images, all without leaving your offices.

4. Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Investment: $25+ per month

How it works:   Is it worth five cents to have a prospect look at your website and see what you have to offer?  If o, it’s time to think about Internet marketing. Dollar
for dollar, nothing matches the return on investment that Internet Marketing can offer.  Search Engine Advertising bring visitors that are searching for what you offer to your website. Statistics track where they came from, what they searched for, what pages they looked at, and how long they stayed.  Plus, goal tracking allows you to pinpoint the results generated by every dollar you spend.

5. Offer A Free Resource

Investment: $0, only your time

How it works:  Your business or organization has value.  Share it!  The blog post you you’re reading is one example of this approach.  We’ve benefitted greatly from implementing cost effective online marketing strategies and now we’re sharing those ideas with you. Of course, most items on this list tie directly to what we
offer, and we hope you’ll allow us to partner with you to accomplish these ideas. However, we’ve also given you recommendations of software or services from other
companies and  hopefully you’ve found this to be of more value than a simple sales brochure. We’ve had great success sharing free resources like these. Perhaps you can find ways to share what works for you. It not only provides a valuable resource to your customers and prospects, it also helps to build trust as you demonstrate your willingness to invest in your clients beyond the sale.

6. Keep Your Site Updated

Investment:  A professional content management system (CMS) costs close to the same as the monthly hosting fee you’re already paying.

How it works:  Now it’s time to get back to the basics. Your website is arguably the most important piece of marketing your company has. What’s on your site? Is it
current and can your visitors find what they need? Is there a clear action you want your visitors to take to purchase something or get in contact with you?
Creating a successful website is much easier when you use a professional cms system. A CMS allows you to edit your own content instead of relying on a web developer to do it for you. A CMS makes it much more likely your website will stay current, engaging and effective. We offer our clients NetSet CMS to keep their web sites updated.

If you’re not familiar with social media, check out YouTube, Twitter, or any blog — these publishing and broadcasting destination sites involve hundreds of millions of people. While most of these services were originally conceived for consumers, social media allows businesses to engage in many- 1-on-1 conversations with customers, accelerating their learning and building trust. This is not marketing that you’ve been used to. The consumer is getting smarter and answers are available in seconds, causing businesses to be completely transparent in their communications.

Here are ten basic rules for what to do and not do:

DON’T

1. Don’t get started if you have significant product weaknesses or customer support issues. Engaging in social media makes good products more successful, and bad products… dead. But don’t delay for long; address the issues and then jump in.
2. Don’t use social media to overtly market or sell. Instead educate, enlighten, inform, and entertain your audience. In this way, you’ll position yourself and your company as an expert in your field and benefit from the “media halo.”
3. Don’t “set it and forget it.” This makes you look worse than not showing up at all. Once you get started, sustain your participation and interaction.
4. Don’t go negative. Emphasize your strengths and advantages rather than making claims about a competitor’s weakness.
5. Don’t mix personal and business accounts/personas, etc.
6. Don’t expect to fully control the conversation. Social media is not an advertisement, product brochure, newsletter, email blast, or one-way monologue; it’s a conversation. Conversations are bi-directional and can have rough edges. Even if you don’t want to participate, your customers and prospects are already talking. Join them.
7. Don’t worry about some negativity for online users. Studies show that a little negativity increases credibility and empathy. Paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln: “You can’t please all of the people all of the time.” Be responsive to the negative.
8. Don’t feel the need to disclose everything. Not everyone who likes sausage wants to see exactly how it’s made. Be open and honest and use discretion.
9. Don’t be a generalist. With literally hundreds of millions of blogs, videos and podcasts to choose from, every individual can precisely tailor their consumption to their interests. Focus on one topic and do it well (the narrower the better).
10. Don’t overwhelm your followers with too much information, or too frequently. Everybody’s got a busy life and nobody enjoys getting “Twitter-ria”. Focus on the highest value information and content.

DO

1. Do the same up-front planning you would for any important business initiative. Define your target audience. Detail how you intend to create value for them. Map out how you expect them to create value for you. Document your approach and objectives per medium (blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).
2. Listen and learn from others for a few weeks before responding. In general, spend twice as much time listening as responding.
3. Display your Personality, and keep the content Interesting and Entertaining (the old radio adage “PIE”). Remember, people buy from people; show your professional self.
4. Be authentic. Never before has a medium and its participants been more skilled at smelling a rat and turning against the perpetrator.
5. Remember that social media is about two-way conversation (see “Don’t try to control” above). Conversation builds trust; trust leads to more sales.
6. Favor timeless content over time-sensitive content (note: this varies based on the medium and there are exceptions). We live in a time-shifted “Tivo” world and there’s wonderful leverage in creating a blog post (for example) that will have value to new readers weeks, months, or even years from now.
7. Remember that “push” is out and “pull” is in. Direct mail, traditional advertising, and unsolicited email are forms of “push” — the content producer chooses who to target. “Following” on Twitter, “subscribing” to a blog or podcast, or viewing a video your friends “liked” on Facebook are forms of “pull” — the content consumer decides what to listen to. In today’s information-rich world, people want to opt-in, choosing where to spend their valuable time. Give them a reason to choose your content.
8. Keep your eyes open. Use Google Alerts, search.twitter.com, relevant Linkedin Groups, Ning networks, and other sites to monitor or “listen in” on conversations about your company, your competitors, and the best practices in your industry.
9. Show patience. As the party with more power (a business relative to a customer/prospect), attacking or being critical will frequently backfire and word will propagate quickly.
10. Learn from your audience (as they will learn from you). Be prepared to rapidly evolve your products and services to meet their needs. They’ll suggest valuable ideas you never thought of.

In the next few years, social media will become a primary vehicle for interacting with your customers, partners, suppliers, and even employees. By getting started today, your company can adapt to a changing world more quickly than your competitors. What are you waiting for?

Effective local online advertising involves a professionally built website, a local search engine marketing campaign, and someone that can manage both of these efforts.

A report titled ‘Ad Spending from SMBs’ by Melinda Gipson from Burrell Associates states: “In the last three years, Internet spending by SMBs has nearly tripled from 4 percent of sales to 11 percent. So says the latest Borrell Associates report “Main Street Goes Interactive.” But, while the collective heft of such businesses, numbering more than 14.6 million in the U.S., has tantalized numerous locally-targeted Internet marketing services who are deluging them with offers, Borrell warns, “the SMBs in any market are less like a two-ton gorilla and more like 1,000 four-pound monkeys – difficult to chase down and impossible to corral.”

The good news: such offers have this market’s attention. The bad news, they’re much less receptive to buying banner advertising (now 54 percent of their Internet spend, but declining in share), and more amenable to search engine advertising, online directory listings and streaming video. Rather than spend more on what publishers might define as advertising, they’re upping their budgets on site design, search engine optimization and customer databases.

“SMBs are collectively poised to plow billions of dollars into their own Web sites,” but they appear to be extremely results oriented and have grown leery of Internet products that are “oversold and under-perform.” The report is chock-full of insights on what kinds of SMBs are spending more online than their peers, by category of business (hint: general merchandise stores, auto marketing and Real Estate Services together account for 70 percent of all local online ad spending.) Pure-plays like Yahoo and Google control almost half of all local interactive ad spending by SMBs, irrespective of their size. Newspaper-owned interactive units follow in rank with a 28 percent share. In 2004, newspapers’ share was 50 percent and portals hovered around 20 percent, so these marketers’ roles are nearly reversed, even as the competition for attention heats up. “All in all, our interactive Main Street may look quiet, but when it comes to local interactive ad spending, it’s where the action is.”