Internet Marketing New Orleans Style!

Strategy for Finding the Best Keywords

phlash2k1 — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 17:57:03 +0000

Our strategy for finding the best keyword tutorial is geared towards the average business owner with little to no knowledge of internet marketing, but wanting to learn SEO. This is not for E-Commerce or selling products online. I will write on that in the coming weeks! Enjoy!

1. Use Your Major City and State as a Keyword Strategy

Obviously, every business in the US is located in some city and state. This is a great starting point for for your list. You might want to grab a pen and paper and jot them down! For example, “Denver”,”Denver CO”, Denver Colorado”, etc…

2. Your Business Keywords are the most important

Just like above, every business can be put in some category. This is the most important part of keyword strategy so you should use a tool to gather data. Word Tracker is a good program to use. They have a free trial version too. An example for the Internet Marketing Industry would be: “SEO”, “Search Marketing”, “Internet Marketing”, “Web Marketing”, etc…

3. Put Them All Together

Now mix the local (city/state) keywords with the business keywords in sensible combinations. As you can see in examples below, reversing keywords are completely different keywords. For example: “Denver SEO”, “SEO Denver”, “Marketing Denver”, “Internet Marketing Denver”, etc…

Now you should have a decent size list of keywords and you can start submitting to free online directories!

Come check us out in the next few days for Directory Submission Tips!

How Does Forwarding One Domain To Another Domain Affect SEO?

phlash2k1 — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 01:47:41 +0000

How does forwarding a domain affect search engine optimization (SEO)? I asked that same question a few months ago when decided to run a test and forward one of my keyword rich domains to my main website http://www.phlashwebsitedesign.com . A few years ago, I bought the domain http://www.web-design-new-orleans.com . I did the normal optimization to web-design-new-orleans by gaining backlinks etc… and my goal was to transfer the “link juice” to my main website. I did some research and found out that this was very possible and fairly simple to do. This is what needs to be done.

1. If you do not have one, create a htaccess file
2. Open the htaccess file and insert the following command:

RedirectMatch 301 (.*) http://www.phlashwebsitedesign.com (replace the URL with the domain you are forwarding to).

3. Save htaccess file
4. Upload htaccess file to the root of of the server you want to forward.

If you already have a htaccess file, just open it and add the above command then save and upload.

That’s it! You just forwarded a domain to another domain and transferred all the backlinks to one domain!

Spyfu vs KeywordSpy - Spy on your Competition

phlash2k1 — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 05:20:18 +0000

For those who do not know, Spyfu and KeywordSpy are tools to allow you to spy on your competitions Pay Per Click advertisements. Both give data such as how much your competition is paying per click, how much they are spending monthly and most importantly which keywords they are using in their PPC campaigns. They have more features, but this is what I mainly use these handy little tools for.
Before I begin, I am NOT affiliated with either one of these companies. These are just my personal observations. So Lets get started! I began my venture with Spyfu.com because you can try their tool for free right from their homepage. The first thing I noticed is that Spyfu is inaccurate with some of its data. I noticed that how much a website spends per month is inaccurate on some of the queries I ran for my PPC clients. This kinda disappointed me, but the tool is still very useful. Now, the first thing I noticed with KeywordSpy is that the monthy subscription is very high. They price is around $90.00 bucks per month while Spyfu is only around $40.00 bucks. The upside is that their data is pretty accurate and they have a much better looking visual interface, nice charts and graphs, and seems to be better organized than SpyFu.

Overall, I went with SpyFu because I am a cheap SOB and I really just wanted to gather data on which keywords my competition is using and how much they are spending per click. Spyfu does that job just fine.

Pay Per Click, Reach Local, Search Engine Optimization

phlash2k1 — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:58:07 +0000

Any smart business is looking for the cheapest alternative to market their website. The purpose of this article is to compare prices and results between a few different companies with slightly different goals.

1. Google and Yahoo pay per click can range anywhere from $200.00 per month and up to see decent results. More competitive industries is much much higher prices. The advantage is that you can achieve instant results once you start the campaign. The disadvantage is that you usually have to pay someone to manage the campaign because of the technical learning curve or just plain time consuming.

2. Using companies like Reach Local, is usually $1000.00 per month and up. Reach Local manages Pay Per Click campaigns using their own automated system that interacts with the search engines. The advantage is that you achieve decent results with their system. The disadvantages is that it only works with certain industries because their pricing is so high.

3. This leaves us with a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies. SEO uses the free listing in the search engines to drive traffic. There are no pay per click fees and the results are nearly the same (if not better). For the small business, this is the must way to go. SEO prices range from $50.00 monthly - $250.00 month depending on the industry. The disadvantage is that there are no instant results. It could take anywhere from 4 - 12 months to achieve good results. The wait is definately worth it!

Our overall review is that SEO should be used with or without PPC campaigns. It’s cheap and effective and is a major player in the marketing world today!

What is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?

admin — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 15:44:10 +0000

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is used very loosely in the marketing world, but is usually associated with pay per click (PPC) campaigns. These are the sponsored listings located at the top and right sections of the search engines. Each time someone clicks on a sponsored ad, a cost is billed to the account. The prices vary depending on the competition for those keywords.

Read about the advantages and disadvantages of Search Engine Marketing.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

admin — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 02:01:41 +0000

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a internet marketing strategy to gain traffic by targeting specific keywords in the free listings of search engines like Google or Yahoo. It is important to know that SEO is a long term strategy. It could take months to gain results.