If you have a limited marketing or advertising budget – say less than $10K – don’t waste your money on traditional forms of advertising: the newspaper ads, the television and radio spots, the direct mail pieces. Those forms of advertising are dead. At the least I can hear their ugly gurgling death rattle with each canceled newspaper subscription and with each because-I-don’t-want-to-have-to-listen-to-the-stupid-commercials TiVo purchase.

What’s more, these ad venues are very expensive. Extremely so. A small ad in the daily paper can cost a couple of hundred dollars. And that’s just for a one-day run. If you’ve ever priced out a tv or radio spot, I’m sure you asked the rep not for a pen to sign the contract, but for some antacid to calm you stomach. Read the rest of this entry »

Optimizing a website for search engines is a smart decision for any business — but do you really know all the benefits of a full-service, organic, search engine optimization campaign? If you are a seasoned veteran in the industry, you might, but most people in the industry still don’t understand all the benefits.

I’ll lay them out for you here. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a business in Pittsburgh and your products or services are really just geared to a local market – you’re a plumber or a real estate agent, for example – you may be wondering if you should do a little web marketing. After all, you say to yourself, the Internet reaches people worldwide. You don’t need to find people in New Delhi who need a plumber, you tell yourself. You’re not looking for home buyers hoping to purchase a house in Seattle.

But don’t rule out a web marketing campaign just yet – it can be extremely cost effective to market and advertise online, even if your target market truly is Pittsburgh only. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re working on a Web site with the intention of strengthening your company’s brand and improving its search presence on major Internet engines, you’re working on an SEO project.

The content, title, and meta-data of any SEO project is what will determine the relative success or failure of that project. Shoddy content, especially writing obviously stuffed with buzzwords or irrelevant drivel, will cause your page to be penalized by Google’s search algorithm. Tight, creative content conversely will help you to build a Web brand, which should cause subsequent spikes in traffic – algorithms will recognize your site as reputable, based on content, and reward it. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve probably heard of the benefits of getting one way links in to your site; but that is like telling someone to get more money and they will be rich. We all know links are a primary factor to dominating search engine rankings, but how do you get quality websites to link to your site? In this tutorial, we will go over the basics of how to get more links to your site. As a bonus, I will even show you how to get a FREE, one way, .edu link to your site Read the rest of this entry »