While this all seems straightforward on the surface, the downside to this trend for using local search to find a local business is that Google also turns up every single mention that has been posted online about your business at the same time. Worse yet, your Google Places listing uses the number of reviews of your business to determine where it will place your listing in the SERPs, and displays the latest reviews regardless of whether they are positive or negative. If one unhappy customer goes online and posts a couple of dozen bad reviews of your business, these complaints might be all that potential customers see when your Google Places listing pops up in their search results.

The internet has had a significant influence on the way that people choose to make a purchase, with 58%3 of people indicating that they first do online research on the products that they are thinking of purchasing. When they do go online, only 24%4 of users go to a company website for their information, and the remaining 76% look in the search engines or ask their friends on social media. The ease with which we can now leave a highly visible opinion about a business that we have dealt with has seen 24%3 of internet users saying that they have left a review of a product or service that they have purchased, and 80%4 of internet shoppers have said that they have changed their mind about making a purchase or dealing with a business after reading bad reviews online. All of this indicates that people are willing to take the time to post a review and that others are reading them and paying attention.

For a small business this can be a double edged sword, especially if you aren’t aware of what is written about you online. If it turns out that you do have a number of bad reviews online they can be difficult, if not impossible to remove, and the first step to turning your online reputation around could be to contact InfintechDesigns.com about internet reputation management strategies for your business. Even if you have good reviews for your business online, it is important to keep them fresh in order to keep your ranking as high as possible in the SERPs, as the crawlers that index the Google Places listings value new reviews more highly than old ones.

Testimonials are a well established marketing tool, and online business reviews fill a similar role for online shoppers. Collecting good reviews for your business should be a part of your long term internet marketing strategy, and encouraging your satisfied customers to leave a positive comment on one of the internet business directories to bolster your online reputation is a constructive way to build your ranking in the SERPs. InfintechDesigns.com can help you to structure a search engine marketing campaign with the focus on your local customers that takes advantage of all of the online opportunities that are available to small local businesses.

References:
1. http://adwords.blogspot.com.au/2011/10/ads-are-just-answers.html

2.http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2012/2/comScore_Releases_January_2012_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings

3. http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Online-Product-Research.aspx

4.http://www.inc.com/news/articles/201102/half-of-consumers-combine-search-and-social-media-for-help-buying.html

In technical terms WordPress is a free, open source dynamic CMS that uses PHP and MySQL to create an almost endless variety of web pages. It is based on an intuitive interface that is very similar to many word processing applications and works exactly the same way. This makes WordPress the easiest of the major blogging tools; it also has several other advantages that make it the premium choice.

WordPress pages are based on transferrable themes that handle the look and functionality of the website across all of its pages. The advantage that comes with using WordPress themes is that changes to the theme being used for a website are made across the board automatically, allowing users to easily switch between themes as they optimize the design of their site without having to deal with individual pages. There are hundreds of free themes available from WordPress for free and hundreds more that are available for a nominal fee. As open source software these themes are also able to be modified by users that have the ability to do so, and therefore, they can be further adapted to meet users’ exact needs.

The most useful feature of WordPress is the ability to use plug-ins to modify the site to suit your purposes. There are over 18,000 plug-ins available2, usually for free, that can modify the base WordPress installation to create any sort of website that can be imagined. The plug-ins add a wide range of functionality to WordPress themes, from monitoring SEO, to creating pages for forums, or adding extra widgets to the page. The combination of the variety of themes and the huge number of plug-ins makes it possible to create an almost endless number of unique and practical web pages using the WordPress script.

Almost all blog design scripts use some types of widgets to add extra features to the side bar of web pages. With the huge number of widgets available online, many of them through WordPress.com, it is possible to find a widget to add almost any sort of content that you would like to the side bars of your website. From simple text, to images, visitor counters, like buttons, blogrolls and every other kind of feature that can be imagined, someone somewhere has created a widget to do it for you.

On top of these features WordPress also makes it very easy to create stand-alone pages, like an ‘About Me’ page or a blogroll. This not only adds depth to the page for the reader, it also creates greater depth for the search engine crawlers. Perhaps the feature that makes WordPress most stand out from the rest is the one that can’t be seen on the dashboard at all – the clean permalink structure that makes WordPress pages highly visible in the search engine results pages. In fact, because WordPress doesn’t use tables to create its pages, the search engine’s spiderbots really like WordPress pages, which have all of their tags and keywords lined up to make it easy for them to be accurately indexed. This alone gives it an advantage in the web design game.

References:
1. http://en.wordpress.com/stats/
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress

In the update announcement on Google’s Webmaster Central blog1, Matt Cutts from Google’s webspam department indicated that over use of keywords and links that were only intended to improve page rank were in the spotlight. The use of keyword stuffing has been in decline recently and the real thrust of Penguin is to find the unnatural links that point to a website. If yours has been one of the websites that has been demoted recently then it is very likely that Google has classed some of your links as unnatural and penalized you for it in the SERPs.

The websites that Google is targeting are the ones that use Black Hat SEO practices like buying backlinks to their website to improve its SEO; however, there was a huge gray area in regard to which links were Black Hat and which sorts of links were White Hat. The area that Google wants to really eliminate is the use of link schemes where backlinks are bought to raise the ranking of a site but which add no value for the user of that site. Since August 2011, excessive numbers of links can be a flag for Google, and the official line from them is; “It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links.2”

There are several kinds of links that are considered by the crawlers and the changes to the algorithm have turned some practices which were once good SEO into page rank liabilities. Internal links are important for the crawlers to be able to easily navigate a website but Google is now considering too many of them to be unnatural and an indicator of a webspam page. Similarly, too many inward and outward pointing links have become a red flag for Google and, as with internal links, Google is looking for an amount that is organic.

While this is still a bit vague, the general indication is that organic links are the kind that are produced naturally by someone that is creating original high quality content with an ordinary amount of references to outside sources. The key to SEO is to find the right balance of links for the content that is being used; too few and they won’t help the page rank, while too many will attract a penalty. In many cases it is best to have an SEO professional like InfintechDesigns.com look over your links to determine which ones may be harming your rank in the SERPs.

Websites that have a lot of links should take a good look at whether they fall under the general umbrella of Google’s unnatural links. There are several kinds of links that are deemed to be unnatural and should be avoided to ensure that they don’t influence page ranking in the SERPs.

Links to Semantically Unconnected Sites
Links that connect a website to a page of totally unconnected information indicate that they point to a link scheme. Quality content will naturally attract links on pages that are concerned with the same niche, and Google’s shift towards a more semantic based search is now looking at the sources of links to a page more contextually.

Too Many Links to Top Level Domains
Most organic links will point to a specific page in a website rather than to the top level of the domains like the home page. If your page is predominantly using general links to websites it may be a good idea to edit them so that they point inside those domains rather than just at them.

Excessive Amounts of Links Pointing to a Limited Number of Sites
In the normal course of running a website like a blog, a lot of links to different websites will naturally accrue as they are organically included in the content, so a site with a lot of links pointing to only a few websites indicates a link scheme and Google will penalize it.

Links Pointing to Content or Link Farms
Link farms are websites that have little or no valuable content but which post a huge amount of links to other sites to improve those sites page rank. Of course these link farm pages aren’t going to climb the SERPs, but their influence can cause the recipients of their links to rank much higher than they deserve to, skewing the SERPs in the process. These are the link schemes that Google is most focused on in its latest algorithm updates.

Thin or Mechanical Content with Excessive Links
Pages like this are almost the opposite of link farm pages. Thin content has already been the object of much scrutiny by Google. These sorts of websites are usually simple hard sell marketing pages that have used a lot of links to make the page look like it has collected valuable information in one place, which the search engines really like. In reality, none of the links point to anything related to the page and it is just a Black Hat SEO ploy.

Too Many Links on Web 2.0 Sites like PR Sites and Article Directories
Links on reputable Web 2.0 sites can be beneficial but the explosion of bookmarking sites has made it easy to mechanically produce large numbers of links on dubious or webspam sites which don’t point to anything of value. Using an organic amount of PR and article directory links is still good SEO if you don’t over use it.

Links to Unstable or Constantly Changing Websites
Pages that are constantly making radical changes to their content are usually webspam sites that are doing it to post another lot of bogus links. If the links that point to you come from them, then your site will be painted with the same brush by Google and you will be penalized.

A lot of what used to be White Hat SEO is now either disputable or has become downright Black Hat in the eyes of Google. If you really want to be sure that your links aren’t working against you, contact Brian Hong at InfintechDesigns.com to talk about an analysis of your links to weed out the unnatural ones. Brian can also help you with coming up with the steady supply of fresh, informative content that will really benefit your SEO in the long term.

References:
1. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.nz/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html

2. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356

Worldwide, more people have mobile phones than have toothbrushes2. With the development of 4G wireless technology that has given mobile internet users greater web access, Google predicts that this year 1 billion people will use their mobile device for their primary internet access point3. The convenience of having the internet at your fingertips makes mobile devices the perfect way to look for local solutions, and 92% of smart phone users are using their devices to access local information4. There has been a 200% growth in local search5 over the past five years, so it doesn’t look like this trend is going to wane in the near future.

The fact that smart phones are always on and usually in the possession of their owners makes them the perfect tool for comparison shopping between products and the businesses that sell them. One third of all mobile internet users use local search sites and internet yellow pages once a week, while the same number use local search on social media sites daily5. These searches result in sales with over 80% of local information seekers taking action based on the results of their search4. Mobile local searchers want the relevant information about businesses on the spot, such as the address, phone numbers and hours of business, to enable them to make a purchasing decision while the businesses that supply these details will make the sales.

The other side to mobile web connectivity is the immediate access that it gives users to social media networks where they can discuss your business with their friends. Consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a business that is recommended by someone that they know and so having a social media page that is connected to your business location is becoming vital. 61% of mobile web users have said that they take online reviews into account when they are making a purchase although only 29% indicated that they had used that information to make their decision. The reason for the discrepancy is the large number of incomplete business profiles and the lack of reviews for many businesses online5.

Just taking advantage of the opportunity that sites like Yellow Pages Online and Google Places offer to present a complete online business profile on their sites can go a long way towards optimizing your website to be more visible to mobile web users. The importance of ratings and reviews to local web users’ purchasing decisions indicates that the businesses that encourage locals to rate them online will attract more local patronage. It is also obvious that to take advantage of all of this, your company website needs to be configured to be mobile friendly in order to be able to accommodate the new wave of local searchers when they do look for you. Making sure that your business is visible to local mobile surfers is now vital to small business, and a free consultation with Infintech Designs will reveal how your corporate website can be optimized to take advantage of this growth in mobile search.

References:
1.https://sites.google.com/a/pressatgoogle.com/googleplaces/metrics
2.http://60secondmarketer.com/blog/2011/10/18/more-mobile-phones-than-toothbrushes/
3.http://googlemobileads.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/consumers-love-their-smartphones-now.html
4.Our Mobile Planet: Global Smartphone Users. Google, February 2012
5.5th Annual 15miles/Localeze Local Search Usage Study, comScore, 2012

Mobile Marketing’s Popularity
Every year seems to be the year for mobile marketing. Maybe that’s why you’ve heard so much about mobile marketing for over a decade without actually seeing a surge. Why was there a delay in the marketing’s popularity? Well, there were a couple of reasons. Bandwidth limitation stymied the growth and created problems with the websites and content. With the lack of speed, developers didn’t want to engage potentially frustrated users. Also, without the demand, infrastructure development slowed.

Finally, 2012 is really the year for mobile marketing! The infrastructure is ready and the demand is here. For example, social media websites such as Facebook have shown an interest in using mobile marketing. Tablet sales have outperformed the most positive sales projections.

Mobile Bedlam
Although the increase of mobile couldn’t be better for SEO and social media marketing agencies, it may be challenging for small business owners and the general public. For instance, there are some basic differences in devices. Tablets and cell phones aren’t the same. So each compelling mobile marketing campaign must include properly formatted content to solicit interaction with users. OK, you’re thinking, if each device connects to online content, there can’t be that much of a difference!

Yes, there’s a Big Difference in How Internet Users Connect
At the end of 2012’s first quarter, statistics show that approximately 92 percent of Internet users connect using a computer. The rest of the users connect via a cell phone or tablet. Once users are connected, three notable facts standout: users’ behavior, intended use and type of content. The three factors have strong implications for both firms, focusing in social media and small business owners.

Users’ Behavior

Let’s look at tablets and smartphones separately.

• Smartphones: These are on-the-go devices. People use smartphones to look up information such as restaurants, compare shops and find directions.
• Tablets: Although tablets are like smartphones (they can go anywhere with users), they are typically used at home. Internet users log on via WiFi networks and work on them during their leisure time, such as watching television.

What does all that mean for marketing? Keep in mind smartphones are heavily SEO dependent. So, optimize on-the-go, or “need-to-know,” information such as maps and contact forms for cell phone Internet users. Optimize traditional Internet activities such as viewing movies, social media and online research for tablet users.

Making a Profit per Click
As a savvy small business owner, you’re probably way ahead of us and already wondering who spends more money: mobile or desktop Internet users. Research, as recent as February 2012, shows that per click revenue is about the same for both. This is actually a surprise given how new the tablets are. Another surprising fact is how much is spent. For example, tablets and desktop users generated $2.50 per click revenue verses $2.00 for mobile users.

Strategy
In the near future, making a strong social investment will help your small business become successful. For now, you need another social marketing and mobile strategy. Optimization is the key to reach smartphone users. Websites need to be in the top one or two search results to cater to the on-the-go users. If catering to tablet users, it’s safe to go lower in the search results.

Social Media Management Software (SMMS) is generally sold as an online service by sites like Hootsuite and SocialOomph. The average cost ranges from free on sites like Ping.fm, $5.99 per month on Hootsuite, and up to tens of thousands of dollars a year for some of the big corporations’ social media management programs that deal with thousands of accounts across several locations. These services allow users to make all of their social media posts from a single dashboard saving a lot of time that was once spent going from site to site and repeating posts. Apart from streamlining the posting of status updates and tweets, social media management software platforms usually also offer a range of social media marketing functions like SMS and E-mail marketing.

If more than one person is making posts to social media, SMMS will allow them to coordinate their posts and will track comments so that they are answered by the right person. Brand pages almost never answer the comments left on them, so taking full advantage of the people that do leave their comments can give you a competitive edge. It is also possible to schedule posts to take advantage of the peak audience times for your targeted demographic. This means that a number of posts can be made at one time; SMMS will make them automatically at the appointed time. Not having to constantly log in and out of social sites to make a scheduled post could reduce the time spent on social media marketing tasks considerably. Some of the SMMS services also monitor the tone of posts, making them suitable for regulated industries like finance and insurance. This is especially important if there are a lot of people contributing to your social media stream to make sure that the general tone is representative of the image of your business.

SMMS services usually include analytical tools for tracking all of the social media marketing that you are doing. This automatically tracks the growth in followers and the brand sentiment using keyword filtering to judge whether user content such as comments is positive, negative or neutral. Sites like Hootsuite also incorporate Facebook Insights and Google Analytics to give users the big picture of where their online marketing is most effective, and where it still needs work.

The analytical tools offered by most SMMS services can also be used to track your competitors’ social media activity, thereby allowing you to see gaps in the market that they might not be exploiting and giving you a yardstick to measure your own success against. Although it has been shown that automatic posts attract less likes and comments on Facebook, if SMMS is used intelligently it should both enhance and streamline your social media marketing and generally improve the quality of engagement with your customers.

The main quality that separates a good image from a poor image is clarity. A good image will be instantly recognizable for what it is and a great picture will show it off well enough so that you will want to buy one. So many websites have a great design but the mediocre product photography detracts from it. Just as with print catalogs, it is worth the investment to have good photographs and quality artwork to show off your products in their best light. Good quality images not only help to create an attractive website, they also contribute to improving SEO when they are used to their fullest potential. Part of what search engines consider when ranking an image in the SERPs is how many links and shares it has generated, because it takes a human eye to separate the quality of different images; in many instances, a good image will rank higher on this basis alone.

When you have chosen your best set of images, there are a couple of things to consider when you are ready to use them. The size and the resolution of the image will affect how well they will work on the web. An image may look great when it is displayed largely on the screen, but when it is reduced to the size that it will be shown on your web page, all of the detail might become unclear. If your image isn’t clear when it is displayed as a thumbnail that is 160×120 or 160×160 pixels, then it may not be the best shot to use because it won’t look right on Facebook or Digg. Resolution, though related to size, is more about the size in bytes of the image. In short, the higher the resolution, the greater the number of dots per inch, or pixels, and the image can hold more detail. On the internet, images are viewed on a screen with a resolution of 72dpi, so images exceeding that resolution are adding to their number of bytes without gaining anything for it. Because the iPad has a screen resolution of 132 dpi, it is becoming common to use that as a new benchmark for image resolution on the web, but the visual difference is negligible.

Part of the value of having good, legible images on your website is the positive effect that they have on SEO. Because spiderbots can’t actually look at an image, Google Images ranks pictures in its SERPs by evaluating some of their related qualities. Make sure that the file name and the title of the picture both mention your keyword. Add descriptive Alt text to the image, making it crystal clear to the crawlers what the picture is of. It can also be good to link the image to some anchor text in the website to create an internal link and it is important to link it to text that describes the picture well. Because images are commonly shared on social media sites and recycled on other websites make sure to embed links to your website in the image so that when it is shared on Facebook or added to someone’s Pinterest boards it is still a direct link to your website.

Landing Page
If your links in PPC ads and social network posts takes your visitors directly to the product or article that attracted their interest then you are missing the best opportunity available for turning them into long term customers. Landing or Squeeze Pages have been around for as long as the web and they remain as useful now as ever before. The landing page is an opportunity to collect information from your visitors usually at least their name and their e-mail address but often much more. Landing pages also give the visitor an idea of what the central theme of the site is and should be enticing enough to encourage them to look further. An essential feature of every landing page is a clear and compelling call to action and it is best to avoid clichés like ‘buy now’ which may flag Google’s spam filters.

The Company Blog
Blogs used to be the realm of so-called computer nerds, but with the development of software like WordPress and the introduction of Web 2.0, more businesses are including a blog on their website. Blogs generate positive SEO because they are constantly adding fresh information and give you an authoritive voice in your niche. Blogs also give your visitors a chance to interact with you on the internet and perhaps build a professional relationship, and are often the first point of contact for customers. Company blogs don’t have to be a journal of everything that is happening in your business or industry. Choose a topic that you can specialize in, start a conversation and encourage visitors to comment. Posting links on social media websites to your latest corporate blog post is also a good way to attract new visitors and potential customers.

About Us Page
You are proud of your business, so use your website to express this. Internet marketing is driven by cultivating relationships with customers over the web. People are more likely to make an online purchase from someone that they feel that they know, and your website is a chance to show them who you are and what you can do for them.

Social Sharing Buttons
When someone likes your business you want them to tell their friends about it, so the best thing to do is to make the process easy for them. Facebook says that 10,000 people are adding a like button to their website everyday1 which means that by now there could be 5 or 6 million websites with the like button. Out of the 555 million2 website now on the internet, that represents around 1% with Facebook integration.

Shopping Cart
It seems obvious that a business website should have a dedicated shopping cart feature, but even now a lot of sites send their customers to third party sites for any actual transactions. Not only does this take longer, but it takes visitors away from the trusted familiarity of your site and decreases the chance of more sales.

References:
1.http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150238854211729
2.at the end of 2011- http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/01/17/internet-2011-in-numbers/

Ideally, new business start ups should incorporate a strategy to build a positive reputation into their business plans from the start. It is much easier to build a good reputation online than it is to fix one that is preventing you from doing good business. Adopting simple practices like soliciting positive reviews of your business by satisfied customers on various user review sites like Yelp! and Local.com is a way to create a good reputation. Often it is helpful to offer an incentive, like a discount or a free sample, to encourage people to leave reviews for you online. This has the added benefit of attracting more positive information about your business.

It is likely that you will find an already established reputation for yourself on the internet, so the first step, even before hoping to improve it, is to see what it actually is. Start by looking for yourself in all of the major search engines, remembering to specifically include ‘reviews’ as one of the search parameters to ensure that you find as many comments about you as possible. Visit the user review sites and look carefully, on as many as possible, for what has been said about your business. Often it will be the case that one dissatisfied customer will have visited several of these sites to leave the same bad review, making it the one that everyone sees when they check out your business via the search engines. It is impossible to remove comments like these from the internet (unless they are offensive in some demonstrable way), but it is relatively easy to bury them once you know where they are. If you find that there are unpleasant reviews on one of the sites ask your satisfied customers to go there and add their own comments to push the bad reviews down the list and out of sight.

Contributing valuable information to the internet is another proven method of building and improving an online reputation. Publishing e-books or a blog, commenting on forums and social media threads in your niche, and generally promoting a professional image of your business all go a long way towards having a good reputation in cyberspace just as they would in the real world. Taking ownership of your business listings in the many online directories is also important. It gives you a voice in the forum while keeping you in touch with what people are saying about you and helps identify problem areas before they get out of control.

Google Maps is especially significant now with the increase in the use of mobile devices being used to find the products and services that consumers are looking for in real time. Because Google Maps automatically generates business listings and collects information like ratings and reviews from across the web, taking ownership of your listing and making sure that it represents you in exactly the way that you want it to can give you the edge on your competitors. Online reviews of businesses are often unfairly skewed by a small number of bad reviews, but by taking charge of your internet presence it is possible to manage even the worst online reputation.

Big data is generally defined as data sets that are so large that they are awkward to handle using current database management tools. To put this into perspective, big data is currently being measured in exabytes, or blocks of 1,000,000,000 gigabytes, and with the amount of data that is accessible online doubling every three years there would be close to 1 zettabyte (1 billion terabytes) of data currently on the internet. Because of the rapid growth of these data sets there are a number of difficulties in collecting and analyzing it, but the benefits that examining big data offers makes it an area of IT that offers great potential.

While a lot of the applications of big data are concerned with scientific research, especially in the fields of astronomy and physics, they also have many industrial applications and provide marketers with some very interesting statistics that they can use to improve their promotional efforts. One of the main sources of big data on the internet is the social media sites with their huge daily flow of information, much of which is valuable. The use of big data sets to examine how people are connected on social media sites, and what sort of information that they are commonly sharing therein, reveals a lot about how to structure social media marketing. Big data allows the stream of information to be analyzed to show emerging trends, gauge the general sentiment about an issue or product, and understand what conversations stand out statistically and have more weight in social cyberspace in ways that statistics based on smaller, less contemporary samples don’t.

Big data is a study that is still in the earliest stages of development, but even so, it has already made significant contributions to our understanding of how we are using the internet. The real value of social marketing was being questioned by traditional analysts, but big data has since revealed the importance of its influence on raising brand awareness and has shifted internet marketers’ focus from last click to first click models for attributing conversions to their online marketing. As big data analysis continues to develop, it will certainly show other trends and patterns that will make online marketing techniques even more efficient and cost effective.

Facebook looks set to amass 1 billion users in the near future and other social media sites, while still far behind these sorts of numbers, are also contributing a huge amount of data to the information already online. This means that the data sets are only going to get larger, and will continue to give a more holistic view of how the internet is evolving and the ways that our use of the web is shifting to take advantage of that development. To stay ahead of this rapidly changing environment, it is going to be increasingly important to understand what big data is telling us about cyberspace in order to be someone that is starting the conversation, and not just another one that is joining it.

References:
1. http://mashable.com/2012/03/06/one-day-internet-data-traffic/
2. http://www-01.ibm.com/software/au/data/bigdata/