Louisville SEO

If you have not yet jumped on the bandwagon that is social media marketing, or you have only just begun, then you can hopefully avoid these 5 common errors committed in social media, or else get a better understanding of why you’re just not getting it.

1. Trying to do too much too soon. It will play to your best advantage to focus on one thing (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) at a time and put in 100% of your time and effort to learn and use it effectively.

2. Expecting immediate results. It is important to understand that relationship-building is a process that takes time, patience, and passion.

3. No time-management or consistency. You must make time to be successful. You need to post/maintain your social networking site on a regular basis or may lose the followers you have gathered.

4. Spamming. It is not just about advertising. Marketing is all about building relationships, so that people in your community will come to know you and trust you, then come to you for whatever it is that you have to offer.

5. Appearing unauthentic. Social media is all about being real, authentic, genuine, and transparent. It is important for newcomers to understand that they need to be themselves in order to find real success on social media platforms.

Have you ever sent an email to a friend that included a link to a website you thought they might find interesting?  If you answered yes, then you have participated in social bookmarking.

With that, social bookmarking allows you to save links to web pages that you want to remember and/or share. This is made possible by simply tagging a website and saving it for later. However, instead of saving the websites to your web browsers, you are saving them to the actual web.

Not only can you save your favorite websites and send them to friends, but you can also look at what other people have found interesting enough to tag. This is made possible as many social bookmarking sites provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. As a result, subscribers are enabled to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.

Click here to learn more about the benefits of social bookmarking.

Bebo, a social networking site owned by AOL, has been a hit on the web since 2005.  Standing for blog early, blog often, Bebo contains profiles and messaging similiar to Facebook, but does offer a few tricks of its own.  It allows users to view friend’s activities from MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, and other online sites.  Bebo continues to add new features, including pages for bands and music, and video boxes.  Currently available in several countries, and has added a mobile site to make quick work of updates on the go.  Learn more at www.bebo.com, or find out more about social networking sites for your business from Media Venue.

A company advertising to a niche market seeks to meet the needs not being addressed by the mainstream market. What’s the upside of this type of focus? There is significant identification that develops when a product is meeting a select need. Monogrammed stationary, team or city themed merchandise, haircare products that exactly target your frizz… What’s the downside to this focus? It can be expensive, especially in advertising and marketing, and especially in the vastness of the Internet.

There are two great ways your company can consider targeting a niche market online- social advertising and search engine optimization. Social advertising is all about niches, groups of people meeting on networking sites, blogs, and forums to discuss topics and share ideas. Search Engine Optimization makes your site ready, so when someone is searching for just what you have to sell, they will find it fast. You can learn more about these two services, and others that we offer on our website, www.mediavenue.com

Happy Niche Marketing!

Photo: Fieldstone Alliance

Smart business owners and decision makers know, to reach your customers, you must go where they go.  There’s a reason beer instead of Barbie dolls is advertised at football games.  Even the movie theaters understand the rules, go to a chick flick-see other chick flick trailers, go to an action film-see other action trailers.  The same rules apply to Internet advertising.  With the majority of the US population online every day, Internet advertising isn’t just for companies targeting teens and computer geeks, it is for everyone.  Take time to think about your prospective customer, are they looking at news websites, home and garden, blogs, social networking, HGTV, ESPN, travel sites? The list can go on and on, and so can your advertising dollar if applied correctly to your target audience.

Don’t know where your audience is? We do, drop us a line to learn more about finding your niche.

With the new president in office come new policies and policy changes. The question is how this will impact us and our daily tasks. According to, Dan Dimit, several of Obama’s new policies are going to directly affect internet marketers.

• Deploy a modern communications infrastructure:

Obama and Biden believe we can get true broadband to every community in America.

This policy allows for everyone in America readily available access to the internet. What does this mean for internet marketing? Americans that cannot currently access the internet will have the means to do so. This new policy will permit more consumers contact with e-Commerce.

• A $1,000 “Making Work Pay” Tax Credit:

“Making Work Pay” credit will provide a refundable tax cut of $500 for workers or
$1,000 for working couples.

The economy is partly in the state it is in currently because Americans have lost the knowledge and will to save their money. This refundable tax cut gives Americans more money, and instead of saving the money or paying their Christmas bills, they will be spending it. For internet marketers this is great. More money in Americans pocket means more products bought through e-Commerce.

• Eliminating Capital Gains Taxes for Entrepreneurs and Investors in Small Business.

“Another positive in Obama’s plan is the tax relief for small businesses and start-up companies. Obama wants to eliminate all capital gains taxes for these businesses in order to encourage the creation of more jobs. Since we work online, most of us don’t owe capital gains taxes, but some of us might.”

While this does not cover the majority of Obama’s tax plan or whether anyone agrees that his tax plan will help or hurt the economy more. Internet Marketers can foresee an upcoming improvement in business if his policies are implemented.

post inspired:

Is Barack Obama’s Presidency Going to be Good or Bad for Internet Marketers? by Dan Dimit

1. If you’re building a new site, expect to spend 2X that amount again in the year after the site launches. Unless you want it to sit there, all alone, with no traffic.
2. If you want a site built by a single untrained individual who ‘learned how to use Dreamweaver’, expect to spend less than $2000. Also, expect to build a new site within 3 months.
3. If you want a site built by a 5-10 person, boutique-style agency, expect to spend, at an absolute minimum, $10,000. These are experts, and they deserve to be paid as experts.
4. If you find a 5-10 person, boutique-style agency that’ll build you a site for $2000 or less, expect something that looks like they had a sneezing fit during the design phase.
5. If you expect to get a #1 ranking on Google for $99, you’re insane.
6. If you hire a smart individual with a proven track record to optimize your site for search engines, expect to pay at least $5000, one time. Unless they’re your friend, or they’re willing to work hourly.
7. If you hire a big agency with all sorts of fancy tools, an army of copywriters and other expertise for search engine optimization, expect to pay, at an absolute minimum, $50,000 for a one-year engagement.
8. If you want to double your sales this year, you are going to have to pay more than $1000 to do it.
9. Reliable hosting costs more than $9.95 a month.
10. If you’re spending $250,000 to build your product and get it to market, don’t tell me you can’t spend $15,000 to give it a decent web site, unless you want to watch my eyes bug out like I’ve been suddenly depressurized.

post courtesy of Ian Lurie: http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2008/09/setting-your-internet-marketing-budget.htm

I just took my dog to the pet spa while I left town for the weekend, leaving my business card for emergency contact info.  When I picked her up, the owner and I were discussing how to get the most from his website when I told him I would be glad to help if he ever has problems.  He had read my business card, and knew that I did SEO, to which he said that he had SEO, the Yellow Pages.  I have heard it a thousand times, but it still gets to me…the Yellow Page listings are not search engine optimization services.

So here is the difference between SEO services and Yellow Pages listings:

Louisville SEO

Maybe you could have guessed this, but those of us that work in online jobs are online tons of hours a week.  Because of this, we have the inside scoop on new Internet trends, the latest products, and a lot of cool news from around the world.  The good news is…we are going to give it to you, free of charge.  We are the Media Venue Interactive team, specializing in Internet advertising, search engine optimization, affialite marketing, pay-per-click, social advertising, and everything else Internet based.

This  blog will consist of interesting SEO and Internet news, as well as cool tips for your company and your presence on the world wide web.

Steps to On-site Optimization

Though the biggest key to a nice ranking site is good copy, a good quick check on a site to how well the optimization is, is as follows.

1. Does the page title target the most important terms? Not only should the page titles have the key terms included, they should be repeated in varying combinations when possible. Only the first 10 words or so will show up in Google so don’t worry about what the rest will look like… just make it useful. Try to eliminate “stop” words, or words that don’t matter, like instead of “SEO in Louisville Kentucky” just say “SEO Louisville Kentucky”

2. Are all Meta Tags included and targeted correctly? The keyword and description tags should be included and set up to target that page’s specific keywords. Some engines still use Meta tags as a ranking criteria and the description is what will show in the search results. Make this inviting yet focused. It’s OK to use full sentences here, they need to read well in the search results.

3. Are the keywords distributed properly throughout the site? The most effective sites will be set up with individual pages to highlight specific products or services. This allows you to focus a smaller amount of keywords per page instead of trying to stuff a lot onto one. This makes for long boring pages that won’t convert even if you can drive traffic to it. The titles and tags should be different for each page and all keywords for that page should be included in the content.

4. Are all pictures, buttons, and video labeled with proper Alt and Title tags? Though they don’t carry huge weight, alts and titles on pictures can make quite a difference on pages where it is hard to fit in your words. Even on pages with plenty of content, there’s never a reason to let a picture slide without some text attached to it.

5. Is the architecture of the site correct and is there a sitemap? A hierarchal site is best with defined “levels” of importance. i.e. homepage -> categories -> specific produce. Along with this you have to make sure that all links within the site point to the right pages and more importantly, that they all point to something. If a bot runs into a dead link it might just leave the site. On this same note, sites should always have a sitemap so that engines know how many pages there are and what the url for each is.

6. Is the code for the site cumbersome? A quick glance at the structure of the code can be beneficial. You want the code as clean as possible both for load times, browser compatibility, and ease of scour by the bots. Easiest way is to load the index and one inner page into Dreamweaver and scan for highlighted or emboldened text. If you see a lot of useless code (tags with no content), you should probably go through the entire site and remove as much as you can.