MrWebMarketing

Reasons Your Website May Have Been Affected By Google’s Penguin Update

MrWeb — Wed, 09 May 2012 20:52:13 +0000

Over the past few weeks, Google has been rolling out their anti-web spam update known as “Penguin.” Since this update has rolled out, several websites have seen their search engine rankings plummet, but why? If your website’s rankings have dropped in Google and you can no longer find your website in the search results, here are a few reasons why this may have happened:

Your website gained too many backlinks (links from other websites pointing to your website) over a short period of time
Using the same anchor text in too many backlinks
Lack of backlink diversity
Keyword stuffing
Using hidden text
You paid for links back to your website that pass pagerank
Using spam in blog or website comments to get links back to your website
A lot of backlinks in articles or content on low quality websites
Backlinks from websites that have been deemed dangerous

Optimizing your website for the search engines isn’t a harmful act to take part in, but when website owners or webmasters decide to take part in tactics that are considered spam, that’s when problems can arise. A lot of these issues are issues that Google has been combatting for a long time, but the Penguin update caught a lot of websites who had managed to skate by before.

It’s important to remember that if your website was dinged by the Penguin update, it doesn’t mean that you were intentionally doing something wrong. For example using hidden text used to be a common practice so if you purchased a website that’s been around awhile, there might be issues with it that you weren’t aware of.

If your website has been affected by Google’s Penguin update, the best thing that you can do is remove the problems and then inform Google that you’ve corrected the issues. If your website was completely removed from the search results, once you remove the problems and ask for reconsideration, your website will be reviewed to make sure all issues have been dealt with.

Promote Your Business Online With Videos

MrWeb — Sun, 06 May 2012 20:51:26 +0000

When you promote your business on the Internet, there are several different options for interacting with your customers or potential customers. You can use social media, blogging and pictures to name a few, but have you ever considered using videos to promote your business online?

For some businesses, the decision to use videos in their online marketing plan is simple, but for others, deciding whether or not to use videos isn’t as easy. Will videos really help my marketing strategy? Can I use videos with the type of business that I own? What about the expense of having a video made? Those are all questions that business owners often ask themselves before deciding to use videos to help them promote online.

Let’s go more in-depth with these questions one by one:

Will Videos Help My Marketing Strategy?

There are several determining factors that go into whether or not using videos will help your online marketing strategy. What’s in the videos, the quality of the videos and if Internet users are looking for the information that’s contained in the videos are just a few of the factors that go into determining whether or not videos will help. While every business’ marketing strategy is different, here are a few ways that videos can potentially help your strategy:

Videos sometimes appear in the search engine results near or at the top of the results page.
Videos provide a way for customers or potential customers to interact with your business.
If you sell products, videos give people a way to see the products in more detail, including how they work.

Can Videos Be Used With The Type Of Business You Own?

One thing that makes a lot of businesses hesitate when it comes to using videos is wondering whether or not videos are a good fit for the type of business that they own. However, you don’t need to be selling a product in order to promote your business using videos. For example, if you’re a writer, you can make a video that shows other businesses how helpful it is to use your services. If you’re a graphic designer, you can make videos that show tips on how to use certain design methods. If you do sell products though, a product demonstration is a great way to connect with people and show them how useful your products are.

What About Expenses?

Every business has to be concerned with their budget and one of the first things that come to mind when thinking about videos is the money that it’s going to cost to have one made. While professional videos can be quite pricey, most inexpensive handheld video camera, cell phone cameras and even web cams can take high quality video and audio. Videos are best when they’re done with quality in mind, but if you know how to work your camera or you keep video recording in mind when searching for a new device, the costs don’t have to be extreme. If you’re not familiar with taking videos, you can always check around your office or business to see if there are other employees who have experience.

If you decide to use videos for promoting your business online, you then need to decide what to do once your video is done. There are several places to post your videos online: Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, your blog, your website, Google Plus and so on. Videos are a fun and exciting way to step up your game when promoting your business online.

Google Plus Gets New Look, Will You Use It More For Your Business?

MrWeb — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 14:23:57 +0000

Ever since Google Plus was opened to the public, the online social network has received mixed reviews. Some people love it, while others feel it’s too much like Facebook and that they don’t have a use for two similar applications. Google Plus recently got a new look and while the new look is good, will it entice people and businesses to use it more? Let’s check out the new look and then you can decide if you’ll be using it more for business.

One of the more notable changes is the sidebar area that’s on the left side of the screen when you’re logged into your Google Plus account. At first it just looks like any old sidebar such as the sidebar area on Facebook, but once you start messing around with it, you’ll see that it’s quite different. It’s different because you can edit what you see there by simply dragging and dropping the icons. Don’t use Google Hangouts very often? Simply drop it into the “more” section at the bottom and you won’t have to look at it. It’s nice that a user is able to display what they use the most and that they can hide the things that they don’t use often. This makes using the platform efficient. A nice feature for businesses who often don’t have time to go in and take the time to find what they need to use.

Another thing to mention is that when you upload photos, you can make simple edits to the pictures from within Google Plus. This is a great tool if you don’t have a basic photo editor or for example, if you upload mobile images and you want to make a few corrections on them.

You can also use a cover photo on Google Plus now too. While this will strike everyone as a copy of Facebook, it is set up a little different. Rather than the cover photo being large like it is on Facebook, it’s more like a ribbon that runs behind your profile picture, which still remains quite on the large side.

These changes are nice, but will they make more people want to use Google Plus to help them promote their business online? It is a nice and clean interface that’s simple to use. Making updates and changes is quite efficient and everything that you want to use can be put right at your fingertips in the sidebar area. What do you think? Will these changes make you use Google Plus for your business more?

Facebook Timeline Cover Photo Ideas For Businesses

MrWeb — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:48:44 +0000

Facebook’s Timeline for business pages went live on March 30th, 2012. How is your company adjusting to using timeline? It’s definitely different, but it seems like everyone has been getting the hang of it. As we touched on before, one of the biggest changes to Facebook business pages once Timeline came around is the use of the cover photo. If you haven’t added your cover photo yet, simply log into Facebook and then navigate to your business page or pages. Once on your business page, scroll down until you see a gray button that says “add a cover” on the right side of the page. You can choose from an image that you’ve already uploaded or you can upload a new image.

Once you click the button, you’re also going to be given a message that tells you to refrain from using any promotional material or an image with a lot of text etc. It seems quite contradicting in a way- you’re using your page to promote your business but you’re not allowed to use a cover photo that promotes your business. This has left a lot of business owners wondering what kind of picture they should be using for their Facebook Timeline cover photo. To help you out, check out a few of the Facebook Timeline cover photo ideas below.

Use An Image That Relates To Your Business

If your business sells jewelry, use a picture of jewelry. If your business sells beads, take a picture of the beads. If your business sells surfing equipment, take and use a picture of the ocean. You get the idea! Take a great photo of something that relates to your business. Be creative with it and have fun. Remember, it’s the first thing that users are going to see when they land on your business’s Facebook page and you want to make it stand out.

Integrate Your Profile Picture Into The Cover

With Timeline, you can actually use two photos on your business page. You can use a profile picture and the cover photo. The profile picture is a small square and it lays over the bottom left side of the cover photo. So for example, if your business offers writing services, your profile picture could be a pencil and the cover photo could be a sheet of paper. If your business sells computer equipment, your cover photo could be a computer and your profile picture could be a mouse.

Make a Collage

Have a lot of images that you want to use? Why not make a collage and post it as your cover photo? Simply use a photo editing program to crop images to the shape and size that you want and then put them all together as one photo.

Use Pictures Of Your Employees

Customers and potential customers like it when a business shows transparency online. What better way to let users see into how your company operates than to post an image of your employees or team? It gives that personal connection that Internet users are looking for.

Just because there are restrictions regarding what you can and cannot use for your Facebook cover photo doesn’t mean that there aren’t creative ways to portray your business. Try out a few of the ideas and find which one fits your company image and how you want to brand yourself online.

Promote Your Business With Email Marketing On The Go

MrWeb — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:48:21 +0000

As a business owner, you’re often tied up in meetings or for one reason or another, there are times that you need to leave your office. Promoting your online business behind a computer screen is one thing, promoting your online business while you’re on the go provides some challenges. Whether you’re on vacation or you have an appointment that you can’t miss, you need tools that enable you to market your business on the go. Luckily, if you have a smartphone, marketing on the go isn’t very difficult and today we’re going to share with you a few tools that allow you to email market even when you’re not in your office.

Many email marketing companies have applications that you can download and use on your smartphone so that you can still control your email marketing campaigns no matter where you are. Below, you can find information pertaining to some of the most popular email marketing companies and what applications that they have available. If you don’t see your email marketing company listed here, it’s always a good idea to check their website to see if they offer an app for you to use on the go.

Constant Contact

The email marketing company Constant Contact doesn’t have their own app, but they do offer several mobile solutions with their partners that can help you track and manage your email marketing campaign from the road.

Vertical Response

Vertical Response provides their customers a way to access and manage their email marketing campaigns via Google Apps. The App can be found under “Vertical Response for AppExchange.” You can send both emails and postcards from the app and you’re also given social sharing tools.

GetResponse

GetResponse recently launched an Andoid app which allows monitoring and management of email campaigns.

The above companies are just a few of the email marketing companies which offer smartphone applications that can be used on the go. If you already use email marketing, there’s a good chance that the company that you use has an app. If you’re looking for your first email marketing company and being able to access your campaigns and manage them on the go is important to you, make sure to check out whether or not the company offers an app or any mobile features.

Is Your Business Able To Promote Itself On The Go?

MrWeb — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 17:01:22 +0000

When you’re out in public, it’s hard to ignore the mass number of people who you’ll see chatting away, texting or using the Internet on their mobile phones. Mobile phones have become so popular that it’s hard to walk out of your front door without seeing someone using one. What may not be known though is that people don’t just use their mobile phones when they’re on the go; they also use them at home for browsing the Internet quickly or for making a fast purchase online. If your use the Internet to help promote your business, making sure that you have a presence on mobile devices is essential.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, as of a few short months ago, 4 out 5 websites in Australia weren’t optimised to be used on mobile. How does your website stack up? With so many people using smartphones to browse the Internet, having a mobile friendly website is important. If a person tries to view your website on their mobile phone or device and they either can’t view it or the site doesn’t display correctly, it will have a negative effect on your online promotion efforts. Online promotion is only going to work if people can find your website and properly view it.

To properly optimise your website for mobile, there are a few things that you can do. The first thing is to find out how your website looks on each different type of mobile phone or device. For example, you can see how it looks on an iPhone, an iPad, Andriod based devices and so on. Of course you don’t own all of these devices but you probably know people who do. Once you spot a problem with how your website displays or functions on mobile, you can then take that information to your web designer or web developer.

If you happen to use WordPress, the process may be a little easier. There are quite a few plugins for WordPress that will make your website mobile friendly. All you need to do is find the one that you want to use, install the plugin and you’re ready to go. For custom mobile features, you may still have to set up a meeting with a web developer but installing a plugin can quickly at least fix some of the issues that your website is having on mobile.

Remember, one of the most important things about promoting your business online is being able to be found and allowing users to access the information that you want them to be able to access. If your website isn’t properly optimised for mobile, you could potentially be missing out on customers.

Using Pinterest To Promote Products

MrWeb — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 16:30:52 +0000

If you haven’t heard of Pinterest yet, you’ve been missing out! Pinterest is the new social media craze that’s unique and works completely different than other social media platforms. If you sell products online, you can easily use Pinterest to promote those products and what’s better is that your website visitors and customers can do half of the work for you! But before you learn how to promote products using Pinterest, you need to know what it is and how to use it.

Essentially, Pinterest is an online networking platform where users have pin boards. These virtual pin boards can have items “pinned” to them and users can have multiple boards. The items that get pinned to the boards are items that users find online and can range from photographs to products and just about everything in between. A user may have a pin board called “spring” and on that board, they pin things that they find online that relate to the spring season (umbrellas, rain boots, pictures of flowers etc.). On another board, they may have “Things I Want” with pins of vacation scenes, clothing, electronics and so on. It’s a really cool way for Internet users to share the items that they find online.

If you own an e-commerce shop, what’s really neat is that you can have a Pinterest “pin” icon on your product pages so that users and shoppers of your website can pin your products to their Pinterest boards. This means that your customers are help promoting your business online without you having to do anything except put the Pinterest sharing button on your website! If you’re a photographer, the same set up can be used to help you promote your pictures.

The second way that you can use Pinterest to help promote your business is to set up your own account and start pinning things that you like. When you start pinning, don’t only include items that your business offers. Excessive promotion won’t work and on top of that, it’s not allowed. However, by pinning things that you’re interested in, it helps people get to know you better and it creates a level of transparency which will be beneficial to your business.

5 Considerations Before Your Website Is Built

MrWeb — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 14:59:03 +0000

When you need to promote your business online, one of your best assets is going to be your website. If you sell products in an e-commerce shop, your website is where people will purchase your products. If your plan is to promote the services that your business offers, your website is going to be the place that people go to find out more about those services. Your website should be treated like the online face of your business, because that’s exactly what it is. In order for your website to be effective at promoting your business though, it needs to be set up properly. Problems can arise when a business has a website built without taking SEO (search engine optimization into consideration and it’s always more difficult to change things after the fact than it is before your website is even built. If you want to promote your business online, here are 5 considerations to take into account before your website is built:

1. Your Website’s Design

If you’re without an online presence, it’s common to want to get online as quickly as possible. With that said, putting up a website that’s lacking in design just for the sake of getting one up quickly can do more harm than good. Since your website is the online face of your business, it needs to look professional and taken care of. If it looks incomplete, outdated or poorly designed, it’s going to directly reflect on your business’s professionalism. A little attention to detail can make a whole world of difference when it comes to promoting your business online and on your website.

2. Your Website’s Domain Name

Your domain name should relate to your business in one way or another. If you can’t get your business name as your domain name, then at least make sure that the domain name relates to your niche. Too often, business owners find that they pick a name for their domain that sounds catchy, only to realize that it doesn’t make sense when combined with what their business is about. When it comes to online promotion, it’s all about branding. If your domain name relates to your business, it’ll help brand your business online.

3. Your Website’s Content

Touching again on how important it is to have a complete website when you make it go “live,” content needs to be present and plentiful. What escapes a lot of people is that they can write content for their website before it goes live so that when the search engines start indexing it, the content is already present. If you wait to start writing content until your website is live, it’s going to look empty and the search engines aren’t going to have much to index.

4. The Title Tag

The title tag of your website is the most important tag. It tells the search engines and users what your website is about and it’s not something that should change. When taking the title tag into consideration before your website is built, think about keywords, what your business is about and how users might search for your products or services. This will help you write a more effective title tag for SEO.

5. Accessibility

The navigation on your website is how visitors access your website’s different areas. When making considerations for your new website, it’s helpful to have a simple navigation that’s easy to follow and that’s also highly visible. Along with the navigation, it’s also important to include alt text tags on your images so that users who use screen reading programs are able to determine what your website’s pictures are about.

There are dozens of things to take into consideration before your website is built, but the 5 listed above will help with usability and search engine optimisation. If you can make the search engines and your website visitors happy, promoting your business online through your website will be less of a challenge.

2 Ways Google’s New Updates Can Help Your Business

MrWeb — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 00:16:25 +0000

Over the past few weeks, most of the attention that Google has been getting has been in regards to their new privacy policy. Google has taken a lot of heat for the changes that they made to their privacy policy and in the meantime, some very important Google algorithm updates have gone unnoticed by some. If you haven’t heard about these Google updates, there are dozens of them; some of which will help businesses better promote themselves online. Rather than focus on all of the changes that Google has made, let’s instead focus on 2 ways that Google’s new updates can help you promote your business online better.

Both changes center around local online marketing. Google has seemed to realise that it’s very important for businesses to be able to reach local customers. Most businesses aren’t large national or international companies that market around the world; many online businesses are small and are just coming online in order to reach out to their local audience better. Since Google has realised how important it is for businesses to be able to reach people in their local towns and regions, they’ve made updates that help business owners promote themselves locally. Here’s two ways that these updates can help you:

AdWords

If you use pay per click ads (AdWords) in Google to help promote your business, the latest round of updates will help local PPC ads show up when a user from your area searches for keywords related to your business. Now of course there are numerous factors that are taken into account in regards to what PPC ads show up in Google’s search results. Therefore, there’s no guarantee that your ads will show up to local customers, but being able to target people in your local area is one element that’s trying to be improved upon by Google.

YouTube

Another improvement that Google has recently made is improving the local results returned when people search for YouTube videos. For example, if you’re selling a certain product locally and a user searches on YouTube for that product and they’re in your local area, the improvement is supposed to allow a better chance for local videos on the subject matter to show up. If you use YouTube to market your products and services, this improvement will help you reach your local area easier.

If you’re not worried about people in your local market, then these updates probably don’t mean much to you, but if you place an emphasis on local customers, these updates can really help you promote your business online better. If local people are able to find your business, products and services more easily in the search engine and on YouTube, it’s going to help expose your business on the local level.

Facebook Timeline For Business Pages Coming Soon

MrWeb — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 23:14:45 +0000

If you’ve anxiously been waiting to be able to use Facebook’s Timeline for your business pages, you won’t have to wait too much longer! If you haven’t noticed yet, when you log into your Facebook account and go to your business page or pages, most people are being notified that on March 31st, their business page or pages will have the new timeline format. If you haven’t received this message yet, chances are that Facebook is rolling Timeline for business pages out in your local region on a different date, but it should come soon. Now that you know that Facebook Timeline for business pages is coming soon, what can you do to help promote your business using the new layout?

The most prominent and important layout change that’ll help you promote your business online using Facebook is the cover photo area (also being referred to as the header image in some circles). This is the large photo that’s at the top of the profile page that stretches the whole way across. Just think of all of the things that you could put there! You can put your business logo, which will help with online brand identity, important information about your business (in photo form of course), a picture of your physical store or shop location, an image of a product you’ve recently released or anything else that’ll help you promote your business. The options are nearly endless and it’ll be fun to come up with creative things to put in the cover photo area.

Another great thing about Facebook Timeline for business pages is that you can have more control over what the user sees when they visit your business page. With the current format, it’s easy for important information to be lost or buried down below new content that you’ve placed or new status updates. Timeline will help businesses let users see the most relevant and up to date information, which is great for promotional reasons. One of the many ways that you can help users see important content is to use the “star” feature. You can also use the pencil tool to make a status “sticky’ which means it’ll stay at the top until you elect to remove it from it’s stationary position.

It wasn’t too long ago that we weren’t sure when Facebook’s Timeline for business pages would be an option or if it would be an option, so the latest round of information is great news if you’re looking forward to using Timeline to promote your business on Facebook.