Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization

Thanks to the internet, marketing your small business can now be less expensive, further reaching, and more targeted than at any time in history. It is estimated that there are over 2 billion people using the World Wide Web on a regular basis. If you are not harnessing this relatively inexpensive, but certainly powerful, tool for advertising your business, you are leaving money on the table.

Small businesses can be competitive on a shoe-string budget using the many creative methods available online. The nicest benefit, aside from cost-efficiency, is that advertising can be targeted to specific people, based on their interests, the sites they visit, the things they are searching for and so on. In other words, you are marketing towards the people most likely to buy your product or service, and not wasting your time with people who aren’t interested in what you have to offer. This was difficult or impossible to achieve in the pre-internet days!

At the Web Dude, we are constantly tracking the latest internet trends, determining how to get the greatest Return-On-Investement for your marketing budget. Here are the marketing packages we currently offer. Click on the link for more information and prices.

On-Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO): This is the process of optimizing the content (seen and unseen) of a website in ways that the search engines can find, and then prioritize, the site. It largely refers to code built within the computer program that makes up a website, but also includes aspects of the visible parts of the site as well. We offer two levels of on-page SEO. The first is the technical part described above. The second level adds on some research that, although technically not on-page SEO, we group together because the information we find will affect how we perform the on-page SEO, as well as how we handle off-page SEO.

Off-Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Off-Page search engine optimization is a set of marketing techniques performed to help rank your website’s keywords higher among the search engines. Unlike on-page SEO, these techniques involve other websites with the goal of providing more exposure to your site. Generally, these are time-consuming activities that must be constantly monitored and kept up in order to maximize the result. These off-page SEO strategies account for at least 80% of search engine optimization (possibly much more, according to many SEO analysts).

Social Network Marketing and Subscription Email Services: In times past, small businesses relied on word-of-mouth as their greatest form of advertising. In the internet age word-of-mouth is even more critical to success. It’s just that it is now done on the internet using many different social network websites. Most have heard of, if not use, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and many others. If your business isn’t harnessing these powerful methods of marketing, you are ‘leaving money on the table’. If you depend on repeat business, you should consider an email newsletter service. It is the best way to keep customers informed of news and specials, and generally reminding them about your company's offerings.

Paid Internet Advertising: The Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing techniques discussed above are the most current, effective, and powerful methods of online exposure available. What is nice about them is that they are either free or very inexpensive. The downside of these methods is that they require constant up-to-date information about search engine ranking algorithms and how to accomplish them. Furthermore, they are time consuming and they take a while to start producing results. If you need faster results, there are many options for paid internet advertising. As with most things, some are better than others. Looking primarily at return-on-investment, we have opted to offer only the two most successful pay-per-click options for our clients. Pay-per-click works because impressions are targeted to a user’s search query matching your keywords. In other words, if you are selling dog training sessions, your ad will show up if somebody searched for “dog training”, but won’t if they searched for “local dentists”. More importantly, you only pay when somebody clicks through to your website or landing page. Finally, you get to select how much you want to invest in your advertising each month.