Marketing Training in Bury St Edmunds

The good news is Cinnamon Edge is busy. The bad news is we've been too busy lately to schedule any marketing workshops or courses for Bury St Edmunds businesses.

But there's one thing that all successful businesses do, especially when they're being successful - they keep on marketing and promoting themselves. It's very easy to be too busy working in your business to even think about finding more customers or promoting more to existing customers. It's easy but it's dangerous, because it's all too easy for those customers to go elsewhere, cut back or just change their buying strategy - leaving you high and dry and with nothing in the pipeline.

So, on that basis, and taking our own advice, we're actively looking for a couple more clients for our marketing services. While we've started work for several new clients in the last few weeks, we still have the capacity for two more, and short-term work or one-off jobs can always be fitted in.

This week we've been building and optimising two websites, running social media campaigns for several clients, designing squeeze pages, making videos, writing articles and blogs and more.

But while you might be happy with business at the moment, or too busy to look for more, we're not too busy to take that job off your hands and help you attract more clients, more sales and a more secure future.

In business, you should always be marketing and selling. And if you can't find time yourself you need to think about hiring someone who can!

Roy

Go to www.cinnamonedge.co.uk and follow us on Facebook and Twitter

Quick Results Our Speciality!

One thing we teach our workshop attendees and our clients is that online marketing is about more than your website.

While we would expect to help you get your website well placed, with certain reservations about results not always being what they seem, a major part of any online strategy these days is to make it multi-faceted.

By creating social media accounts as well as a temporary blogger-based website for Flatpack Suffolk, a new local business that assembles flat pack furniture, equipment and garden buildings, we've been able to get the business onto page one in less than a week. In fact, today's search has three mentions on page one, headed by the business' Facebook Page.

The website will be climbing the rankings too, but meanwhile the business has a page one presence that includes details of what it offers and full contact details, visible directly from the results pages.

That's the kind of online marketing we teach, too - not just SEO or website design but effective promotion of your business online.

Roy

Google Places Update

At our recent Google Places workshops we emphasised how much (and how rapidly) Google likes to change things in local search, including Places, but that it was still important to include as much information about your business as possible. This helps Google to verify the legitimacy of your business and its location as well as its postition in the marketplace.

Well, they've changed things again since then, and a lot of the data you enter in your Places listing is not currently being displayed. However, it DOES still matter, as Google themselves confirmed this week:

"The following info you provide may not appear on your Place page, but it’s all still used to help us understand more about your business:


• Email address
• Menu
• Reservations
• Optional attributes / Additional details
• Service area toggle “Show service area”


So just because we’re not showing it, doesn’t mean it’s not helpful for us to have — it helps our system ensure that your organic listing appears and ranks appropriately on Google and Google Maps when potential customers perform searches related to your service."

So there you have it, from Google themselves: they still use all this data, even if they don't always display it. Keep adding data, videos, images and more to your Google Places page to keep your business in the forefront of your local market. 

And if you need any more help with any aspect of local business marketing you know who to ask.


Roy

PS. Incidentally, Google say that the absence of business descriptions that you might have noticed on some Places pages is a bug that they're working on fixing, not part of their planned changes for Places pages.

Google Places - Another Alarming Anomaly?

Google is still sorting out local search - or at least some local businesses should hope they are.

Here's what happened when I tested Google's idea of 'local' today - bearing in mind that I'm in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. Google clearly thinks that local for me (and for local plumbers) includes most of Southeast England:



None of the businesses listed near the top of the page are actually local, despite the fact I've entered my location (on the left) as Bury St Edmunds.

What's more, the map on the right does appear to show one plumber actually in Bury St Edmunds, but it's the one ranked lowest (on the first page) of the Places results (H).

This means that businesses with a more 'effective' Places listing are actually less visible than one with a worse Places page.

Click on that 'H' listing and you do get a 'proper' Bury map with the other local plumbers ranked correctly, but anyone just looking at Google's first page as I did could be forgiven for thinking that there is only one plumber in the town.

Incidentally, you will also see different results if you use the location in the 'search string' - by entering 'plumber bury st edmunds' in this example.

Google's local search updates have had a lot of publicity, not least from ourselves, but they clearly have some way to go before they're a genuinely reliable source of information for UK searchers.

Roy

PS. You can get more help with local search via our Cinnamon Edge website.

Why Leak Link Juice?

I've written several times on this blog and the Cinnamon Edge blog about the importance of link juice for your websites and blogs.

Getting inbound links from respected and relevant sites is really helpful in boosting your own sites in the search engine results, and you can create some of these yourself by setting up blogs like this one.

There are some SEO 'experts' who say that you shouldn't put outbound links on your websites because they 'leak' the very link juice you've been getting from elsewhere with your inbound links. But it isn't quite that simple.

If it was, authority sites would have no authority, because all their link juice would leak away through all the miriad links to other sites. In fact, outbound links help your website, too, and they do it in two ways:

1. Google likes websites to be helpful and to give a good experience to their visitors. Links to useful information on other sites is one very easy but effective way of being useful. You don't have to rewrite the useful information on your own site and you can never be accused of plagiarising another site's content.


2. Your website's visitors will have an enjoyable and helpful experience when they visit your site so they're more likely to come back, suggest it to friends, and so on. They'll probably forget that a lot of what they learned was actually on another site entirely!

There are a couple of things you must do to make outbound links work for you.

1. Make sure you get any links to open in a new page or new tab so your visitor never actually leaves your site unless they actively decide to. When they close the new website (that you linked to) your website will still be showing.


2. Use the relevant anchor text in your outbound links, just as you would in your inbound ones. This tells Google that you're giving people a clear path to relevant information.

Finally, another benefit of linking to other people's sites is that they're much more likely to link to yours or find other ways to tell people about your site.

It's not quite clear how powerful outbound links are compared to inbound ones, and Google isn't going to tell us, but there's no doubt they do contribute.

And being a good citizen by giving your visitors the best possible experience can only help your business in the long run.

I'll talk about the myths and mysteries of 'no-follow' and 'do-follow' links and their possible impact on SEO another time!

Roy

Google's Googly

Google threw everyone a googly last week when they changed the way local search results are displayed. It's fair to say that most people were wrong-footed!

From now on, it seems, local results will be a mixture of Google Places and organic listings, with no clear answer as to which will get priority, although a picture is emerging.

Google's changes have probably made hundreds of 'How-To' info products obsolete overnight, but fortunately our big products - all part of a joint venture that's been over a year in the making - hadn't gone to press yet.

So we've been able to include the very latest advice on how to optimise both Places and your main website (and other web 'properties') in the first new product before it launches.

That's along with all the hundreds of other pages of information, actionable tips and advice and straightforward strategies to grow your business.

In some ways it's a real nuisance for us. But it's pure gain for the people who will get their hands on the very latest on local search almost at the moment it emerges from Google.

Watch this space for the live links to the new product!

Roy

Online Marketing Course Bonus

Here's a great free tool that I was recently pointed to that helps you find good backlinks for your website.

As you know, creating relevant backlinks to your website is vital to search engine optimisation. Getting links that are at least as good as your competitors means that any extra you can add will give you a real advantage, so a tool that helps you find out who links to them is priceless.

You can do the job manually, but here's a tool that finds those 'citations' for you:

http://www.whitespark.ca/tools/local-citation-finder/

Just sign up (for free) then enter any local search term (eg, 'solicitor bury st edmunds') and you're done.

It works on Google.com or .co.uk (and even Google.ca) and you'll be emailed a list of results, plus a list of your top competitors and another list of potential backlinks (that no one is using), usually within a few minutes.

It's very impressive! Again, it's at http://www.whitespark.ca/tools/local-citation-finder/

Roy

Now Get Your Online Marketing Course Live!

Here's how to get access to our online marketing expertise ive and in person without paying us a consultancy fee!

Join us at our first Challenge Workshop in the week commencing 16 August, and you'll get three hours' worth of priceless online marketing training in exchange for a modest donation to St Nicholas Hospice Care.

It's all part of our contribution to the Towergate Accumulator Challenge, and you'll get more details right now on the Fifty Quid Challenge blog.

Roy

PS More details about The Fifty Quid Challenge are at http://www.thefiftyquidchallenge.co.uk

Online Marketing Tip

Hello again

If you've posted any videos on YouTube or maybe watched other people's you'll know you can usually get an 'embed code' to add the video to your own site or blog.

This is a great way to add useful content and a bit more visual interest to a plain website. We use quite a lot of videos on our site http://www.cinnamonedge.co.uk/ as well as on our blogs. You'll see if you decide to embed a video that you have a choice of sizes to fit most websites and uses.

But sometimes even the smallest available size is too wide for your site. Blogs almost always have two or sometimes three collumns and this means limitations on the width of any one collumn.

But you might not know that you can always reduce the size of a YouTube video by editing the embed code. The important thing is to keep the aspect ratio (proportions) of the video the same. So, if you reduce the width by, say, ten percent, you should reduce the height by the same percentage, rather than the same number of pixels. But as long as you're within a few pixels the video will still look okay.

Copy and paste the code in its original dimensions into the html of your site, then you need to edit it to size.

Edit the code in two places, where the code reads something like 'width="640" height=385"', which you'll find in the first line and the last line of the code, and of course the changes have to be the same in both lines. So now these might read 'width="460" height="275"' in both places. As I said, within a few pixels is fine. In the example I've quoted I reduced the video width by just over twenty-five percent and I've rounded the width to the nearest five pixels.

And here's what that looks like:

Roy

Online Marketing in Bury St Edmunds - 13

I hope no one reading this is supertitious, because this time we're going to be looking at an area of online marketing where 'luck' seems to play a bigger than usual part - Pay Per Click.

In fact, PPC is more of a science than some people would have you believe. Those who tell you otherwise probably just haven't dived deeply enough into the subject to make it work for their business, and there's no doubt that people have spent and wasted a lot of money on Google Adwords and the Bing (MSN) and Yahoo equivalents.

PPC is actually a very good way to quickly check the other components of your online marketing system - your landing page, your offer, your payment process, your sign up mechanism, and so on. Used that way, you just have to look at your PPC budget as an investment in research for your business. But it does mean you can buy traffic to your site and measure what happens when it gets there.

Otherwise, handle PPC with care, control your spending until you can see a positive ROI and above all test, test and test again until that happens.

PPC needs more than an eye-catching ad. You will also need:

• A well chosen set of keywords
• A campaign and ad group optimised for each of those keywords
• A clear idea of what you want to achieve
• An optimised landing page for each keyword
• A call to action with an irresistible offer
• A sign up form and autoresponder sequence or a clear and simple payment process
• A system for analysing the results
• The ability to deliver on your promise

You will also need a fair bit of patience, persistence and clear thinking to split test and analyse your PPC campaign in real time, as far as possible, to get the maximum benefit from PPC's ability to deliver traffic in minutes from the moment you press 'Go'.

Set yourself a daily budget. When PPC works and starts making you money you can reinvest the profits in more clicks and make even more money. But you will need to keep testing, tweaking and honing every aspect of your campaign, from ads to product delivery, to get the best results from Pay Per Click.

Be careful, be thorough, and PPC can work for your business.

Roy

Find out more about online marketing methods at Cinnamon Edge, the home of online marketing in Bury St Edmunds

Online Marketing Part 12

So far we've talked mainly about your website in our online marketing course. That makes sense - after all, websites are probably the first thing you think of when someone mentions 'online' or the Internet.

But there are other ways to get your business online and onto page one. Rather than talk about that here, we've brought you a video to show you.

As you can see, there are countless ways to get your business onto page one of Google (and push your competitors off at the same time).

Use a few of these methods, optimised for your keywords as we've already discussed, and you could be all over page one, too.

Roy

Online Marketing Part 11 - Using Consultants

A slight change of direction this time, as we look at the bigger picture beyond online marketing.

Because marketing is something that should be woven into the fabric of every business, carrying out a full audit of your business will inevitably reveal failures, weaknesses and profit leaks.

Looking at your business from a purely marketing perspective will highlight other problems, too. So it pays to spend some time with a business and marketing specialist who's up to date with latest methods and has the sense and intelligence to listen to you while you explain your unique business, and its strengths and challenges.

If your business isn't making the money it used to, or bringing you the lifestyle you hoped for, getting an outsider's view of things is a great idea.

Some words of warning, though: don't use a consultant or expert who offers you the perfect solution (or any solution) on your first meeting. It takes time to learn about a business and consider the possible options to make it better and you owe it to yourself and your company to find someone who will take that time.

That's why we reckon on spending at least an hour and a half (and usually more than two hours) just asking questions and noting down the answers. We NEVER offer to sell you a service at this first meeting. In fact, we won't even quote you a price or accept a deposit to secure our services.

Instead, we'll come back to you in a few days to a week or so with a list of ideas and suggestions that, if implemented properly, are guaranteed to improve your business' results.

Some of our suggestions are likely to be for online marketing of one sort or another, but not all. Some will almost certainly be minor tweaks or improvements on what you're doing already, or new ways to maximise the resources you have. Others may be 'offline' marketing methods you haven't tried before or haven't been able to make work for you.

It's not 'one size fits all' - we know every business is different, especially yours!

Being part of a very powerful mastermind group, we have access to information and ideas far beyond what any single company could normally offer. Which is a great resource to have available for your business.

But even if you don't hire us, or any other consultant, to help you with your business, it's well worth carrying out an 'audit' of your own, to see where those profit leaks and missed opportunities are. Only then can you do something to fix them.

Roy

PS. You can contact us via our Cinnamon Edge website or email roy@cinnamonedge.co.uk or jacqui@cinnamonedge.co.uk

Online Marketing Part 10

Last time we looked at creating a list of interested people - potential customers - from those people that visit your website.

More information on how to do that are in our free ebook on email marketing, 'Automated Customer Collector' that you can download from our Cinnamon Edge Website.

But how valuable is that list of names to a business?

Well, if you don't use it to stay in touch it's probably worthless, but if you do - well, anything can happen.

With an active list you can

1. Remind people who you are and what you do

2. Make people offers and announce new products and services

3. Offer them an enhanced service or an 'upsell' on what they've bought from you already

4. Tell them about complementary products and services in exchange for a share of the profits or for a fee

5. Enhance your reputation as an expert in your field or a trusted supplier of your goods or services by giving away useful information

6. Give customers instructions on how to use your product safely or get the best results from it

Etc, etc.

By contacting people regularly you stay in the front of their minds rather than the back. When you use the messages to clarify your marketing message and unique selling proposition (USP) or irresistable offer, it will be you they think of when an opportunity to do business arises.

This means potential customers and clients start contacting you for help, which is a much better position to be in than when you're chasing them.

So even if your email marketing doesn't include 'selling' as such, it is still a valuable part of your marketing.

First step, though, is to start building that list. Second step is to remember to use it!

Roy

Online Marketing in Bury St Edmunds Bonus

In the previous part of the course we looked at getting visitors to take action when they get to your website.

We concluded that the most valuable thing a visitor can give you is their contact details, because that enables you to begin and continue a relationship with them - which means you can build trust and create more opportunities to promote your goods and services.

We will look at the mechanics of email marketing soon, but I wanted to break in at this point with a look at what is probably the most powerful email subject line I've ever seen.

It will also be a great headline or sub headline on a sales latter, in the right context.

It's powerful because it not only hits an emotional hot button but also pre-qualifies readers, so only those who are really in the market for the product will read on. For anyone else, the headline will probably tell them they needn't read on, although it will still produce a visceral reaction if they used to be in the specific situation it addresses.

So, this headline isn't suitable for every business or every product, but if you can stir anything like this reaction with your services or products, you might like to adapt it.

The heart-stopping headline is:

Re: Your Unpaid Bill

Now, most of us have been in debt at some point. Even if we haven't, most of us have forgotten to pay an important bill at some time or another. But if debt has been a major issue of yours for any length of time, the memory of those unpaid bills will still be all too vivid.

The content of this email isn't important, but of course it was promoting a way to make money fast - the primary concern of anyone in serious debt. And the subject line stopped me in my tracks and it's just four words long.

Notice it uses the singular 'Bill'. This makes it more authentic, since one company wouldn't normally refer to money you owe to anyone else - they just want you to pay their bill, and soon.

Not many situations in life are as stressful as being in serious debt, and I won't offend anyone here by refering to events or situations that are even more traumatic, but whatever matters to your clients, whatever problem you help them overcome, must be an important issue for them, so stating it as starkly as this example could be all you need to do to get their attention.

We'll get back to normal with the next part, Part 10, of the online marketing course very soon.

Roy

Online Marketing 7 - Link Building

The most important thing for your website is to get it noticed by the search engines. So you certainly won't hurt your cause by submitting your new site to Google, Yahoo and Bing. Most of the smaller search engines take their info from one of those big three, so that will help anyway.

Then there's YouTube and the other video sites like Vimeo and Google Video, which we'll look at another time. YouTube, by the way, is now the second most popular 'search engine' after Google, at least in the UK...

But submitting your site doesn't guarantee that Google will even index it (add it to its list of billions of sites), let alone give it a good ranking and a high position in the search results.

So you need another strategy to make the Google spiders find your site, and that's linking from sites that Google already visits. The more popular and dynamic a site, the more often Google will visit it. That equates pretty closely to the site's PageRank and that gives increased value to any relevant links from that site.

So, build your links from sites that Google already likes and visits often. You can see when a spider last visited a site by clicking on the 'cached' link for that site in the search results. The more recent that cache is, the more often Google probably visits.

But just linking once, even to a very popular and active site isn't enough. Google has now publicly stated that recent links count far more tan older ones. Indeed, very old links are pretty much ignored. Which means you need to keep adding new links and renewing or replacing old ones to show them that your site is highly sought-after and that people are still keen to link to it (even though it's you who actually adds the links).

On that subject, it's likely that links added within the content of another site - ie, by the site owner - will one day count for more than those added by visitors or users, but I haven't seen Google say that yet. It probably isn't easy to discriminate between 'owner added' and 'user added' links but I wouldn't put anything beyond the geeks at Google!

So, it's probably going to be worth actually talking to website owners and negotiating an embedded link, but for now, keep building your links from any relevant site you can.

There is software available to automate much of the link-building process and we'll look at that in the near future. Meanwhile, try to add a few backlinks each week, as a minimum.

Roy

Online Marketing 6 - Some Changes

The world of Search Engine Optimisation and online marketing in general is constantly changing, although our Bury St Edmunds online customers needn't worry - that's what we're here for...

But if you're following SEO advice from even six months ago you might be doing a few things you needn't bother with and damaging your website's ranking by ignoring some important issues.

For example, metatags. If you're not familiar with these, they're a kind of labelling system that website designers use in the coding of a site. Human readers don't see them but search engine spiders do, and they use them to assess a website's 'relevancy'. One of the most obvious ways to start optimising a site, apart from the web copy itself, is by inserting as many keywords as possible in the 'keyword tags'.

But, back in November 2009, Google confirmed they no longer took any notice of keyword tags in assessing a website's relevance and ranking. They don't count at all any more. That's a pretty big change and one that not all SEO 'experts' have spotted yet.

It won't hurt to add keywords to the keyword tags, and it's not yet clear if Bing and Yahoo spiders still use them, or if Google will start attaching some weight to them in the future, but for now, Google ignores them.

A second example is speed of loading. Google is committed to giving users the best possible experience, and that includes not having to wait too long while a page loads. Now, it's always been a bad idea to keep your prospects waiting and we all know by now that people have even shorter attention spans online than they do with their TV remote, but now Google is taking action , too.

So now, if your web pages are slow to load, Google will punish you by reducing your site's PageRank accordingly. That will mean a lower position in the results if your competitors' sites load more quickly than yours.

This means you won't just lose customers through boredom, you could miss out on them visiting your site at all.

So if your website designer wants to include loads of slow to load features like flash and huge image files, because they 'look good', just say 'No!'

It's important that you keep up to date with SEO and remember to keep building those links - there's some vitally important information now emerging about linking strategies that I'll bring you next time.

Roy

Online Marketing 5 - Optimised Listings

In our experiment for online marketing in Bury St Edmunds we spent a lot of time researching directories and building links as we went. It paid off, as you probably know.

We found that there are probably hundreds of directories and similar sites where you can list your company or service, so obviously I can't go into detail about exactly what to put in each field on every one of them!

What I can do here is give you some general advice and a few tips on the finer points of using directories to build backlinks to your site.

First of all, a directory that doesn't let you include backlinks is probably a waste of your time. A few of them might have enough traffic to justify listing your company with them, because they might bring some customers to your site, but generally, if you can't include a backlink, move on.

Secondly, a 'deep link' to the optimised page on your site is worth more than a link to your index page, unless they are one and the same. That should really only happen if you have a one-page site (or maybe one content page and some about us info on another page). So if you can add a deep link, always do so. Some directories even allow you several links, and you should definitely take full advantage of those.

Where you can include embedded links in your company description, use anchor text (the actual words highlighted as a link) that includes your target key phrase. Where you can add tags or labels, use your key phrase there as well. Use the key phrase in the rest of your description and heading if there is one.

Link building should be a continuing process. Adding loads of links very quickly is probably worse than adding the same number over a week or two. Worse still is adding plenty of links and then just stopping as though your work is done. This gives the wrong kind of signal to the search engines. In fact it's a sure sign you were trying to work the system, so you need to be consistent and keep adding or getting links to make your list-building look as natural and 'organic' as possible.

There are plenty of sites you can link from, so there's no reason to stop, even if you just add one link a week from now on. Keep at it and you should be able to keep your website where it belongs!

Incidentally, there's some new research just out that shows the relative importance of various factors in optimisation, especially in relation to Google. There are a few surprises and maybe a bit of controversy, too, and I'll look at that next time.

Roy

Online Marketing 4 - More Backlinks

So far in this online marketing course, we've covered keyword research, on site optimisation for your key phrase and building your first SEO backlinks by starting a blog.

There are lots of other ways of building backlinks, and also increasing your online presence. Ultimately, you could even take over most of page one of Google for your target key phrase, but that looks a lot more impressive if your website is number one. For that you need more backlinks from high ranking websites.

The easiest places to get high ranking links are directories and social media sites. Two directories we've had excellent results with are Free Index and Touch Local. While the easiest social media site yet invented has to be Twitter. We've also had good and very rapid results with free ads posted on Gumtree and Craigslist.

Facebook may not be free for much longer, but it's also worth using for driving traffic to your site and for SEO backlinks.

You can get a free listing on almost all directory websites, and most of those will give you at least one backlink. Some will only allow you to link to your website's front (index) page, but you should link to your optimised page, like this one to our online marketing Bury St Edmunds page if you can.

With some directories it might be worth paying for an enhanced listing, but there are so many free ones that you probably don't need to. Of course, you may get a few calls from directory owners trying to persuade you otherwise!

With social media, you can include a backlink in every post if you want, as well as the link to your website that you'll include in your profile. One of the benefits of posting links on social media sites is that they actually bring you traffic, not just search engine spiders, and traffic itself helps to improve your website's ranking, as well as bringing you potential customers, of course!

You can easily get ten good backlinks leading to your optimised webpage, or at least to your site, just by spending an hour or so adding yourself to directories and social media sites.

With some sites, that will be a very basic listing, but others allow you to optimise your listing quite a lot, too, and we'll look at that next time.

Until then, get linking!

Roy

Cinnamon Edge - Online Marketing and SEO in Bury St Edmunds

Online Marketing Step Three

We've already looked at choosing your target key phrase (search term) and optimising your website for that phrase, in parts one and two.

Now for the next stage in search engine optimisation, or SEO, which is off-site SEO. This is where you begin to build backlinks to your website. The important thing here is to use your key phrase, and variations of it, for the anchor text of your backlinks.

The anchor text is the words people actually see, but which are a clickable link to your website. For example, we concentrated on the phrase 'online marketing Bury St Edmunds' for our test, which ended with us bagging eleven spots on page one of google for that term. If you click on that link you'll see it goes to the page on our site optimised for that phrase.

Now, the easiest place to put a backlink is on a site you control, like a blog. If you don't have a blog yet, go to Blogger.com, open a Google account if you don't have one already, and create a blog. Ideally, name that blog after your key phrase, but certainly use that phrase for the blog name and for the title of your first post.

Creating a blog takes seconds and costs nothing and it's live straight away.

Add a permanent link to your site (in the links you'll see in the sidebar - just copy the format of one of the existing links) using that phrase as well, and include a text link in your first blog post that uses the same term. Your first post can just be a welcome message and an explanation of what you do, with your key phrase and related words sprinkled in it.

This Marketing Manual blog has been established for some time, but we also have another that uses the phrase 'Online Marketing in Bury St Edmunds' in the title. Naturally, we post keyword rich content on that one, too, with backlinks to our website.

That's it - by starting a blog you've started your link-building strategy. Next time we'll look at where else you can easily add free backlinks and how to start building a brand online.

Roy

PS. I've tried to keep this mini-course simple, but for more help or more detail, just email me roy@cinnamonedge.co.uk or contact me via Twitter http://www.twitter.com/Roy_Everitt

Online Marketing Step Two

Part two of your online marketing course from Cinnamon Edge, Bury St Edmunds.

In the first lesson I talked about how to choose a target key phrase or search term for your business. I've updated that today with more detail on how to use Google's keyword tool.

You can target as many key phrases as you want, especially if your business has a range of products or services.

For our purposes, though, let's assume you've settled on a particular key phrase or search term to target.

Now you need to use that phrase, and variations on it, in various parts of your online marketing strategy, starting with your website.

If you possibly can, get a domain name that includes your key phrase. Next, create a page on your website that uses your target key phrase in its title and description. Do this whether or not your website's domain includes the phrase. Add the key phrase to the metatags as well.

Don't use the website's front ('index') page for this - always create an extra page and link to it from the other pages on the site, using the key phrase for the link text.

On the new page, use the key phrase in the headline, near the beginning of the web page copy and again near the end. There are a few more things you can do, but essentially you now have a page optimised for your target key phrase, making it much easier to find via the search engines.

Your optimised page will also be a perfect landing page for inbound links, and we'll look at a key aspect of that next time.

Bookmark this page (Ctrl+D) to build a complete 'how-to' tutorial on marketing your business online.

Part three will follow in a couple of days.

Roy