Posts Tagged ‘inbound marketing’
InfiniteTolerance.com Goes LIVE!
As creative individuals it’s natural for us to want to surround ourselves with creative people. So you can imagine our level of exciment when first presented with the opportunity to design and develop a website for Stephen Murphy and the Infinite Tolerance Band. From our very first meeting we had the sense that the pairing of Down by The River, LLC. an Infinite Tolerance was somehow written in the stars. I will never forget when following a run through of the services we would be providing, Stephen leaned forward out of his seat and said, “You guys are totally hacking the planet, which is cool, cause I’m totally hacking the universe.” From that moment I had the sense we were on the verge of creating something GREAT and so we set out to do exactly that.
InfiniteTolerance.com is truly a marriage of form, function and soul. It bleeds creative energy from it’s very core and that core is rock solid. Built on a modified bleeding edge WordPress 3x platform, InfiniteTolerance.com provides a complete Content Management Solution. The unique backend interface was designed with a series of custom applications to provide a full suite of tools tailored to meet the needs of a musician. Some of the highlighted features include:
- Upcoming Gigs / Event Manager
- Streaming Twitter @Anywhere Integration
- GeoLocation Reporting with Real-Time IP Skip Tracing.
- Complete Traffic Analytics Suite: Traffic Reporting and Referral Logging
- Advanced WYSIWYG Publishing Interface
- and more…
While this site offers a complete suite of advanced backend features, it is also highly intuitive and simple to use. We began the development process by evaluating the steps involved in SEO friendly online publishing using WordPress and breaking it down into individual steps. Doing this allowed us to identify and eliminate wasteful and confusing steps in the publishing process. This was accomplished by strategically deploying a handful of, both existing and custom written plugins. The plugins were written primarily in PHP in order to ensure a more seamless integration with WordPress’s own core source code. The end result was a complete Content Management Solution tailor fitted to fit Infinite Tolerance’s unique industry needs.
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Page One SEO Graphic Design 32940
Our SEO efforts continue to pay dividends as our web presence continues to grow. Our SEO campaigns have successfully increased our organic traffic by an average of one hundred and sixty-eight percent per month since our site relaunched on it’s new platform just three months ago. Our advanced SEO strategies continue to produce page one results for our targeted keywords, most recently adding “Graphic Design 32940″ to that list. (Click on the image to the right fo an expanded view) And unlike some SEO companies that represent Business Listings as page one results, we are referring to pure algorithmic results provided by organic searches.
Today’s market is flooded with SEO service companies making incredibly bold claims like, “First page results for any keyword of your choice GUARANTEED!”. Of course this is a promise that short of millions of dollars in infrastructure and paid for marketing investments, is simply not possible.
Quoted from: “Google Webmaster Tools Help: [Search Engine Optimization (SEO)]“
No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.
Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.
It is reasonable to assume that if anyone were to start selling “Number One Placements” for keyword results, it would be Google themselves. After all they and they alone control the formulas that determine those placements.
Let’s take a look at GoDaddy for the purpose of a working example in terms of organic search results. While GoDaddy’s placement may be excellent when it comes to top level keywords like “Web Hosting”, a more specific or second layer keyword search of say, “cloud server hosting” produces a completely different and not so positive result. Here is an example of an excellent opportunity that smaller competing companies could capitalize on. One of the weaknesses associated with large scale SEO deployments is that they focus on saturating the web with top level keywords based on statistical value. Often completely overlooking the opportunities presented by the second tier of keywords for that specific industry.
As I’m writing this article I can feel my sales department cringing at the thought of us educating the competition. There is in my opinion a greater responsibility to inform the consumer in an effort to prevent them from falling victim to these con artists. Our market is flooded with these con artists boasting false claims based on out dated Web 1.0 principals. Designing sites with deprecated HTML values and extensive META descriptions does not guarantee top placement on Google. Even Web 2.0 strategies are beginning to fail the proverbial acid test of today’s market. This is another prime example of why it is so important to choose a professional web designer when developing a website to promote your service, message or products.
Fact is that in many cases developing a website poorly the first time can be rather detrimental to a business. Take for example the website below: (Note: We removed anything identifying to protect their identity.) 
The clutter of the site is overwhelming and the color selection is a horrible choice for publishing on the web. Did you know that nearly 10 percent of the population is color blind and that the majority of those individuals specifically have difficulty seeing the color red? Certainly being color blind shouldn’t exclude them from being potential customers. However, in this example, this is precisely what has happened. They’ve effectively excluded 10% of their market for no reason other than poor web design. Poor design decisions like these can be costly. Take for example a recent article published by the practical ecommerce titled, “SEO Report Card: Poor SEO Choices Cost Worthy Charity“. The article identifies some of the design issues affecting the SEO of the site and how those design related issues are adversely affecting their ability to raise money for a worthy cause. Another issue to consider is because it is an existing site, repairing the PR damage associated with failed first impressions can be a challenging task for even professional designers. Studies show that less than 20% of consumers will revisit a website that they perceive as poorly designed or containing less than relevant content. Often these repair projects involve a re-branding campaign and or a new market offering in terms of a new look and a steady source of fresh topic relevant content. Just as media providers have become more effective at presenting advertisements to their audiences in less than conventional ways. Media viewers are growing ever resistance to even their most subtle methods. These issues are all to often overlooked by less than informed consumers and ultimately can lead to a greater loss in terms of their time and money.
To learn more about our advanced SEO methods and how we can assist you in improving your sites organic traffic results, call us at 877-328-7552.
Request an SEO Report Card Using The Form Below:
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Overcoming Economic Trends: Marketing
In our last article “Overcoming Economic Trends” we began the process of identifying some of the new obstacles facing Graphic Designers as a result of today’s unstable markets. We focused primarily on the seemingly endless influx of “Self Proclaimed Graphic Designers” (aka. the unemployed plumber who once used Microsoft Frontpage to publish a picture of the family dog wearing a Santa hat). However, perhaps even more dangerous to the consumer than even these individuals, are the ones that are somewhat capable with Adobe Photoshop. Because of their ability to produce somewhat attractive/creative designs, this is often enough to mislead consumers into believing that a great design spells success on the internet. When in fact an attractive website alone does not make for a successful website. The reality is design is only a portion of the process.
A website is comprised of a variety of components ranging from design to server/platform choice. It is a tool that when deployed properly will exponentially increase the publishers exposure and in turn grow their potential market. When developing a clients web real estate far more than aesthetics need to be considered. CMS, SEO, CRM and GeoTargeting are just a few of the hundreds of factors to be considered when planning the development of a clients web real estate. Let’s discuss that term for just a moment. What exactly do we mean when we refer to “Web Real Estate”. Web real estate is a term used to describe the virtual property / primary domain or URL used to access the website, ie. http://www.Example.com. Much like physical real estate, these virtual properties can increase in monetary value. For example some appraisers have estimated google.com to be worth as much as $2.41 Billion US dollars for the domain alone without the search engine or database associated with it. The value is defined by the amount of traffic, as well as the potential return in terms of daily ad revenue . Which in the case of Google.com accounts for roughly 45 percent of all internet users globally on a daily basis. Now obviously these numbers are well beyond what most publishers could ever aspire to see. However, for the purpose of demonstrating the monetary potential of web real estate, Google.com serves as a perfect example. While 2.41Billion dollars may be a stretch for most, it is not uncommon for virtual property owners to sell their web real estate for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. This goes back to what we were discussing in our previous article and that is the need to educate the consumer. Web real estate is an investment not just a purchase. A purchase costs money, while an investment has the potential to earn money. The fact remains though, in order to educate the consumer, you must first garner their attention.
There are several methods to increasing traffic to a website. However, these methods typically fall under one of two categories, either Inbound or Outbound Marketing. Inbound marketing focuses on being found by potential customers. Sometimes referred to as Relationship marketing, it is a process where marketers use less than traditional or unconventional means to “publish their message”, ie. via blogs, facebook, youtube, wiki and other social / viral networking methods. This process draws perspective customers into your business as opposed to pushing an outbound message to them. Traditional marketing (outbound marketing) is where marketers deliver their messages via more traditional “paid for” advertising channels. While there is much debate as to which method offers the publisher the greatest value in terms of potential return from either or. It has been our experience that a blend of the two methods when deployed in a strategic manner and supported by SEO hosting solutions provides an extremely effective means of increasing traffic.
The bottom line is successfully launching a website requires a great deal of know how, experience and resources. This reinforces the importance of working with a “Professional Design Firm” vs. a “Self Proclaimed Graphic Designer”. Not to many out of work plumbers own data farms with huge blocks of Class C IPs. In the end, educating the consumer is the only means of establishing these huge differences.
Social Marketing: Share Your MessageSocial media marketing is a term that describes use of social networks, online communities, blogs, wikis or any other online collaborative media for marketing, sales, public relations and customer service. Common social media marketing tools include Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube. Social Level Marketing, is an advertising method that makes use of social network service and to increase their web presence. This ranges from simply advertising directly on social networking sites, viral marketing that spreads throughout the web, email, and word of mouth, or providing niche social networking sites focused around the item being advertised. |