We here at WSI ePro Marketing, your Thousand Oaks Internet Marketing Company, are proud to announce that we will be doing a session at the Greater Conejo Valley Chamber of Commerce Small Business Symposium. The ePro Marketing session is on Thursday, April 5th from 1:15-2:45 and is under the “Track 2 Marketing” sessions:
Session Three: 1:15 – 2:45 p.m. SoLoMo: How Social, Local and Mobile are Revolutionizing Internet Marketing
Can Social, Local and Mobile be used to boost your business?
Learn the changes in social marketing—how Google+ is challenging Facebook and affecting search engine optimization (SEO). Look at the changing nature of SEO for companies that have a local client/customer base. Discuss why, or whether, you need a mobile website. A hands-on session with Constant Contact will examine how the email giant is using email marketing to enter the social marketing arena.
Presenter: Don Phillipson, WSI ePro Marketing
Here are some more details about the event:
About the Symposium:
The Small Business Symposium offers three educational tracks: Procurement, Marketing and 2012 Business Trends. Each track features three interactive break-out sessions. Create a customized menu. Mix and match: You select sessions from any track. This business education opportunity brings you face-to-face with local experts to discuss new and relevant business information, to learn better business practices, and to continue your professional development in an intimate, productive setting. Free Wi-Fi available; please bring your laptop or tablet.
I’m sure we here at WSI ePro Marketing, the best internet marketing company in Thousand Oaks, aren’t the only ones that feel like the last month has gone by way too fast. Now that November is over and December and the holiday season is blowing by, it’s time to look back at the past month.
So here’s a roundup of what you may have missed at our internet marketing blog, Internet Marketing 101:
Directing People and Customers to the Right Place. Part of our ongoing series, “Internet Marketing Basics,” this post talks about where you are sending your customers online. If you advertise, online or offline, are you sending customers and links to your homepage? Do you have a landing page? Where are they going and what do they see when they get there? So here’s a few steps and some advice about getting people to the right place on your website. (Read More)
Is Your Website Mobile Friendly? Do you know how your website looks on a phone? On an iPad? Do you know how to check? In this guide, we run you through how to check if you site is mobile friendly, how to see how many people view your site on a mobile device and whether it’s worth it to create a mobile friendly version of your site.
If you’re a business owner with a nationwide company, or just a local business here in Thousand Oaks, CA, you may have heard the term “display advertising.” You may not have known exactly what it is, but know that it has something to do with online advertising. But I’m willing to bet you’ve seen a banner ad while surfing the internet. That right there is the most common form of display advertising online.
So for those of you new to online or just a business owner looking to know more about online marketing, you’ve come to the right place. In this post, we will help you understand what display advertising is. If you have any questions, or would like to set up a personal, free consultation, call Don at 805-262-2518. No automated tellers here, just personal, professional consulting based in Thousand Oaks, CA.
So What is Display Advertising?
The Internet Advertising Bureau has this definition for it: it is “a form of online advertising where an advertiser’s message is shown on a destination web page, generally set off in a box at the top or bottom or to one side of the content of the page.”
Display advertising originated in print, mainly in newspapers and periodicals. What does that mean? It means those banners that appeared in newspapers were the first form of display advertising. We won’t bore you with the history of all this print ads, but know that once the internet became more prominent, this meant there was more space for advertising. So basically, display advertising is just a form of online ads. The most common of course, is the banner ad.
Banner Ads: Friend or Foe?
Anyone that has spent any time online has probably (more…)
Now that one big holiday is over, and everyone is still digesting their turkey … let’s take a look at some fun search results and terms. The search engine geeks here at WSI ePro Marketing (flat out, the best Thousand Oaks internet marketing company), love to see how things like holidays affect search results and how people browse online and use search engines.
So with some help from the folks over at the Bing Search Blog, let’s take a look at some of the most used search terms and words over the Thanksgiving Holiday. And more importantly, those two crazy shopping days known as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday – Bing Search Spikes
I think you’ll find most of these make perfect sense, and some of them are laugh-out-loud funny.
Names of Retail Stores – Like Target and Best Buy (naturally)
Consumer Electronics including digital cameras and “electronics under $50″ (everyone loves a deal)
Anything related to Toys like “learning toys” and “radio-controlled toys”
Fashion related searches including “heeled clogs” and “little black dresses” (!!!)
Shipping related searches like UPS and Fedex (gotta send those gifts somehow!)
People also were prepping for Cyber Monday on Black Friday, with lots of searches about the Monday deals
On the Darker Side:
One search that spiked was “pepper sprayed shoppers.”
On the Lighter Side: Thanksgiving Bing Searches
There was a lot of Thanksgiving search spikes, but not the ones you’d think. Terms like “Adam Sandler SNL Turkey Song” and “Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade” were hot, showing people wanted to show their families something fun online.
A lot of local businesses these days, perhaps even in our stomping grounds of Thousand Oaks, are wondering the same thing. Is my website mobile friendly? What does mobile friendly mean? Does my website show up on a phone or tablet/notepad?
Let’s say you’ve got a website (hopefully you do, if not, let’s talk). People find your website and/or business online through search engines. If you are in local search, they click your map link. If you are running an Adwords campaign, they click your ad.
Once they follow your link they go …. where? Nope, not a trick question. The answer is your website!
Now here’s the twist. What are they looking at your site on? A desktop computer? A mobile device? An iPhone? A tablet or iPad?
Right Now They Are More Than 5 Times As Many Mobile Devices As Desktop Computers
Did you know there are 400,000 Google Android activations a day? Pretty crazy right?
So yes, your business is online and can probably be viewed on a mobile device. But is your website user friendly? Don’t stress, we here at WSI ePro Marketing (The best internet marketing company in all of Thousand Oaks) are ready to help.
Here’s How To Check If Your Site is Mobile Friendly
The brilliant minds over at Google have just posted an great look at the evolution of the Internet search, search engines and how Google evolved from an idea into the giant it is today. Search engines, the basis of nearly all internet marketing, play such a big part in everyone’s internet experience, it’s a great look at how things of changed.
In the video, you’ll see:
Screenshots of the first Google search engine (It looked much different!)
Information about how Google incorporated Ads into what became Adwords
How Google incorporated other types of information besides web pages (like images, colors, etc.)
News Updates added into the search engine
Where in the search results do things like image results, etc. go
Quick Answers in Google
We here at WSI ePro Marketing (the #1 Internet Marketing Company in Thousand Oaks) find all things search to be endlessly interesting. So this video was an especially great look at all things search.
If you ever have questions about internet search, search engine marketing, SEO, Adwords or anything else related to online marketing or just plain ol’ questions about the internet in general, we’re here to help.
1. Google is cracking down on duplicating content. Keep your content fresh and original and it will do you wonders. Both for SEO and for viewers.
2. Google uses over 200 “signals” in their search engine. Optimize your page but the best advice? Focus on quality content. No one wants to search or read keyword stuffed articles.
3. Have you tried writing for another site or blog? Write an article and submit it to different sites. Include a short bio with some keywords and a link to your site.
4. Use a strong call to action! But it doesn’t always have to be for selling something. Offer something valuable and people will come back to your site. Quality. Content.
5. Track your progress. When you start an SEO campaign, track everything. Establish a benchmark, then you can see how your site and SEO is working.
So you may have seen a strange or weird bar code in various forms of advertising. Maybe in a magazine ad, or a billboard, a sign or somewhere printed on something. You may be wondering what the heck is going on with that? Well, we here at your Thousand Oaks Internet Marketing company, WSI ePro Marketing, are here to help, as those are part of an online, internet marketing campaign.
They look like this:
Those bar codes are called QR codes
QR stands for “quick response” code. They are a bar code that you can scan with your phone, tablet or other mobile device. Once scanned, you are directed to a webpage or some other landing page online.
Over at the official Google Search Blog, Matt Cutts, one of Google’s engineers, has a new post about recent changes to the Google search algorithm. What does that mean? It means that Google has updated the way their search engine works. This can have some effects on the way your SEO or internet marketing campaign works.
These can have some big affects to how websites appear in the Google search engine and where they rank. Read the full post and we can give you a better understanding of the big picture.
So without further ado, we here at WSI ePro Marketing (your Thousand Oaksinternet marketing company), will run you through the changes and what they mean:
Cross-language information retrieval updates: Google will translate webpages for languages where there is not a lot of online content. A link to the translated pages will appear below the English titles.
Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: Google is improving their “snippets” that appear in a search. They will now use more page content in the snippet, rather than just header and menu content.
Better page titles in search results be de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: Google uses a number of factors in generating a page’s title in a search. One of those is the “anchor text” of links going to a page. Google is now putting less emphasis on all the anchor text is duplicated to try to get a better idea of what a page’s content is.
Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian: Probably not going to affect a lot of businesses in Westlake Village or Thousand Oaks, but just in case … (more…)
