Website Marketing for Local Business and Local Search

“My website has been online for six months, but I can’t find my site in Google!“

As a website and internet marketing professional, I hear this often.  Most of the time, when I speak to small business owners about their existing website, I hear stories about how that website  does not get the traffic that they were expecting.  The small business sector (those businesses who have less than 10 employees and that serve a local market) are becoming more sophisticated, and realize that they need a website as part of their every day marketing efforts.  However, too many of these business owners do not know how to get their website to rank in search engines.

There is a difference in strategy when marketing a website that serves a local market (i.e. restaurant, local contractor, a hotel, etc) than there is marketing a site that targets a National audience (i.e. online retail).  The basic strategies are the same. But the difference is that there are a number of things that a website owner can do FOR THEMSELVES that will greatly help the search engine rankings.

This article  is written for the small business owner with a website. Listed are some items that can really help a website gain ranking, and are things that can be done without a webmaster’s help. All it takes is some time and patience. These are things that our company, AIM – Arizona Internet Marketing, does as part of a larger search engine marketing effort on many websites.

Open House and Ribbon Cutting Ceremony on October 13th

Come to our office on October 13th and celebrate the opening of our new office! We are holding a ribbon cutting ceremony at 3:30, and immediately afterward will be an open house. A dinner buffet will be catered by a local restaurant, and we will have live music.

The ribbon cutting ceremony will be attended by members of the Chino Valley Chamber of Commerce, Prescott Chamber of Commerce and many local business leaders.

The invitation is open to all Quad-City area business owners and employees! Come on out and join us!

Please RSVP to: Trish Fay at 928-776-0181. You may also RSVP via email here.

Click here for address, map and directions.

Search Engine Marketing – The Basics

AIM – Arizona Internet Marketing is an Arizona search engine optimization company and we understand what is required to implement and maintain a long-term search engine positioning approach. This article is provided to you as a primer with regard to search engine optimization and search engine marketing of a website.

Search engine optimization is a very dynamic and ever changing practice. As Search Engines change their ranking algorithms and new pages are added to the Internet on a daily basis, ongoing maintenance is necessary to provide stability and deep rooted positioning.

You can have the fanciest website in the world created – but you MAY be wasting your money! When it comes to web design and the Internet you need to be aware of what search engines can read – and cannot.  It is important to know….

Hits vs. Visitors : Website Traffic Monitoring

Has your business ever been approached to advertise on a website? Were you offered a claim that said something like “Our website gets “60,000 hits per month?”  If so, I suggest being suspicious of that sales pitch.

A “HIT” is not the same as a “Visitor.”  A hit is counted when an individual element of a webpage is accessed. A popular news web page that has many graphics, news feeds, pictures and other elements might have 75 elements on it. One visitor coming to this page would then count as 75 hits.

You may find that a claim of 60,000 hits may equate to only 16 visitors per day on that website. It can equate to any number of visitor counts, depending on each web page and its content and construction, but you get the idea.

What is a Hit?

A web page is typically made up of a number of individual elements. An element is a photo, a graphic, a javascript, a css stylesheet, etc. When a web page is viewed, each of these elements is requested by the web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc) from the web server, and each file request increases the hit-count for the website.

A “Hit” is counted each time one of these individual elements are accessed.

Business Yellow Pages vs. Web Marketing – A Comparison

Post courtesy of Ed Kohler, president and founder of Haystack In A Needle

Here’s a quick question for you: Why are you using the web to find out more about Yellow Page Advertising?

Based on our experience with web marketing, and as web searchers, here are a few common answers to that question:

For consumer products:

• It’s convenient.
• I don’t know where my yellow page book is.
• I’m looking for something very specific.
• I like to research my needs before talking to a sales person.
• I’m shopping from work – it’s easier to use the web than a phone from cube land.
• I can’t find out about the product/service I’m interested in through the phone book and
• Nobody would help me if I called a company to find out more about this product/service (aka. Phone-tree black hole)

For Business to Business products and services