Internet Marketing Toronto - Ignite!

Google Now Interprets Underscores As Word Separators!

Recently Matt Cutts announced that Google is going to interpret the “_” as a word separator in URL file naming. So what you ask? Well up until now a file on your website named “sun_screen_awnings.html” looked like this too Google “sunscreenawnings” and you did not get any credit for it because that word means nothing. Yahoo! and other search engines read your file as “sun screen awnings” and you get credit for this as a keyword. Of course not a lot of credit, but some indeed. Now that Google is interpreting the underscore as a word separator you don’t need to worry about renaming and 301 redirecting all of your files!

Microsoft Wins 3 Year Advertising Deal With Digg.com

Microsoft recently won a 3 Year Advertising deal with Digg.com. This added revenue will allow Digg.com to pursue additional development efforts and improve on their integration strategy with Microsoft. For more on this topic see this article on Seeking Alpha.

The Power of Landing Pages As Explained By Jeremy Schoemaker and Tom Fuller

Our last post was about some recent success we’ve seen with one of our clients regarding landing pages. To continue on this theme, I thought I’d bring to your attention a particulary interesting interview with Matt Fuller - an expert on developing landing pages in the Ring Tone affiliate marketing industry. In this podcast episode of Net Income - host Jeremy Schoemaker interviews Tom and asks some terrific questions about the power and influence of landing pages, and how to create effective ones.

Listen to this episode of Net Income and see for yourself!

Famous Last Words… “I Don’t Need a Landing Page… My Site Sells Fine!”

It is always exciting to see a client increase sales as a result of your efforts. In fact, that is one of the highlights of my job and a reason I keep doing what I do.

About 3 months ago we began work with a client who sells sports education videos online. They had never used pay-per-click marketing before but did rank organically for some important terms in their industry. We created a PPC campaign which directed traffic to their home page, granted this isn’t always the best strategy but in this situation, it was the best landing page to use. After one month of PPC marketing, their sales hadn’t picked up as dramatically as hoped. It was time to develop a custom landing page.

A simple, yet effective landing page was created which included testimonials, a short sample video, a brief product description and an engaging headline that matched the PPC advertisements. The page was launched along with an experiment using the Google Web Optimizer to test the effectiveness of the copy on the landing page.

It has almost been a month and the early sales results are staggering! Sales this month have increased 5 times, cost per acquisition has been cut in half. All of this has been accomplished with a very low ad spend budget.

It just goes to show the power of a good landing page and a complete integration of some of the great tools that exist to help online marketers. This is also a testiment to why PPC works best with proper landing pages.

“When Deals Go Bad” - Michelle Nichols Speaks with Dan Seidman on the Savvy Selling Podcast

One of my favorite podcasts to listen to is the Savvy Selling podcast from Business Week. I was catching up on some back episodes and caught this one about Deals Gone Bad. The host Michelle Nichols speaks with Dan Seidman who has a collected over 600 examples of when sales deals have gone bad. They don’t review them all of course, but the few gems that Dan gives in the episode are worth listening to.

Not only are these situations funny - and we all like to laugh at ourselves, of course, but they are also spectacular examples to learn from. Believe me - you’ll learn from them! Have a listen to this episode and see if you can put this valuable advice to work with your sales team.

When Deals Go Bad - A Savvy Selling Podcast from Business Week

Using the 301 Redirect for Search Engine Optimization

Alas, you have to change files on your site, but a) your worried about links to these pages, and b) you don’t want to lose the page rank associated with them. What do you do? Use a 301 redirect of course!

A 301 Redirect is a server side means of redirecting the request for a page to a new location. This can be an entire domain, directory, or specific file. There are several different ways of implementing a 301 Redirect and it depends on your flavor of webserver, Microsoft IIS, or Apache, and whether you have access to the web server settings or just your files.

Why do we care about the 301 Redirect? Well, for the two reasons mentioned above of course. In the process of optimizing sites for the search engines we often times have to change the file names and directory structures of a site. We’ll use a 301 redirect to make sure we don’t lose any page rank or break any links to these pages.

If you want to know more about how to do a 301 Redirect, here is some reading material for you:

• http://www.internetbasedmoms.com/seo/301-redirect.html
• http://www.stevenhargrove.com/redirect-web-pages
• http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

Search Engine Optimization and Good Design Are Not Mutually Exclusive!

This morning I read an article from the EntireWeb newsletter titled “Web Design and SEO: The Eternal Debate”. The author Mihaela Lica makes the point in the article that Search Engine Optimization is all about vast amounts of content, keyword saturation and no images. Read this bit:

Web design focuses on appearance and aesthetics. SEO focuses on text quality and quantity. Web designers don’t really like to clutter their designs with text. They prefer to see the images stand out on their own. SEOs on the other hand don’t like images that much. Sure, an image can be optimized for the search engines by adding relevant alt attributes and titles, but this is not enough for a site to be properly optimized. Page copy still plays the most important role in website optimization for SEO.

and a bit more:

As a business owner you are caught in the middle of this conflict. For your website to convert you need both design and optimization. There is no middle way. You cannot have a little bit of this and a little bit of that and still be competitive.

Unfortunately this article is completely wrong. Perhaps in the early days this were true, but not now. CSS and great designers coupled with seasoned seo’s create the most beautifully stunning websites, which are search engine optimized. Our clients are no exceptions.

Please don’t be fooled by mis information like this. If you’re in the market for a new website, and you need it search engine optimized, you don’t have to make any compromises. You just need to get the right team aboard - and that’s us!

Sales 101 - Return a Prospects Call!

So this posting does not really have anything to do with search engine optimization or internet marketing. However, it is all about basic sales skills and these are necessary after you get the lead from your on line marketing. Recently, we have had a few calls from prospects looking for internet marketing services who were so thrilled that we called them back after they completed our contact forms. Did you get that - they were thrilled that we called them back! Apparently other SEO firms out there are collecting leads, but not returning calls. What a disasterous thing to be doing. So there you have it. A basic sales skill. When some one wants to purchase your services - you have to call them back.

Why is this important beyond the basic reason of collecting their business? If you start off by treating them properly and service them well - they will likely be a good source of referals for you!

Please, the next time you get a lead, be sure to follow up on it completely and in a timely fashion.

A New Addition to the Spark Internet Marketing Family!

This past weekend, our President Clive Lobo and his lovely wife Marlies had their first baby boy! Clive Jr. (As of yet to be officially named) is very healthy, and handsome to boot. We’re very proud to have this new addition to the family - and we’re looking forward to training him up on Internet Marketing techniques in the not too distant future. Besides, he’s likely going to be a heavy digger, and user of Sphinn in a few weeks anyway!

Here are two pics of this handsome young man!

The Use of Authority in Project Management and Search Engine Optimization

We treat all of our search engine optimization efforts as projects. As such all of our internet marketing consultants apply strict project management processes to ensure we deliver our work in a timely fashion and within our quality standards. Recently. the PM Podcast released an episode on the subject of Authority. I thought it was quite interesing and of universal value to almost any business. As such, I thought I’d share it with you. You can listen to the episode on your computer by following this link:

The PM Podcast Episode 072 - Authority