Let’s talk news. As in press releases.

As I wrote earlier, optimized press releases can go a long way toward helping people find your company and/or the services you offer.

And what’s really terrific about the Internet – you can write a press release, submit it to online release distribution service such as PRWeb,  PRNewswire and others and then watch the inquiries to your website roll in – even if you never receive one phone call from a reporter.

I kid you not. Once your optimized press release hits the World Wide Web, it will show up in search engines such as Google and Yahoo. It will. Particularly if you have had it search engine optimized for the keywords people use when searching for the things your company sells or the services you offer.

Let’s say you’re a mortgage firm in Houston, TX. When people search for “Mortgages Houston” or “Houston Mortgages,” and if you’ve optimized your news release for those keywords, your optimized press release will show up in their keyword search for months, if not years. You easily could receive hundreds of inquires over time from just one press release – not just the one-shot instance when a reporter from your local paper calls to interview you and subsequently runs the article in the paper.

Submit a press release to the online PR distribution companies, and people will continue to find you. You spent the time (or perhaps the money if you asked GOiMarketing to write the press release for you), but that release still works for you.

Can an article in your local rag do that for you? Probably not. Nope, the newsprint that article was printed on was sent to the recycling bin long ago. The chances of someone finding that article in that newspaper months or years later is virtually nil. (That said, however, almost all newspapers place many – but not all – of their articles on their website. But what were the chances that that print reporter wrote that article with optimized keywords in mind? None, more than likely.)

So I recommend you spend your PR money wisely. By all means, send your release to your local and regional newspapers, but I would spend the bulk of my time putting together an Search Engine Optimized Press Release and submitting it the online distribution companies. You’ll get a lot more return on your investment (of time and money) online.

And one final note (and, yes, you bet this is a shameless plug!), all the SEO press releases we write here at GOiMarketing are written also to catch the eyes of journalists. So don’t be surprised if that optimized press release we wrote for you does garner you some ink in your local newspaper.

Local Business Marketing: The NEW search engine marketing solution for Professionals and Companies!

Until recently there have been two main areas to get placed on Google, Yahoo and MSN: Organic Search Results and ads on the search engines.

Advertising on the Search Engines:

Everyone knows that placing the ads has it’s drawbacks:

• It’s Expensive: It’s usually quite expensive, sometimes costing thousands of dollars per month to have an effective program.
• Limited Market:Google Adwords ONLY appear on Google and it’s subsidiaries. So you get no placement on Yahoo or MSN and their subsidiaries. If you want ads on Yahoo or MSN, you have to create programs on them and pay them too for the ads to run., again, this is expensive.
• Limited Time:Google, Yahoo and MSN ads are only displayed as long as you have budget to pay for each and every click. Once your daily or monthly budget is exhausted: YOUR ADS ARE REMOVED!

So if you run ads on Google only, you are advertising on only PART of the market, and when the budget is used up, you are off the market. At best you are on Part of the Market, Part of the Time.

 Organic Search Results: The Holy Grail

The first few pages of organic results on the major search engines is where everyone wants to be. Being on the first page of Google and not paying per click and disappearing when a budget is exhausted is the best of all worlds. Being on a top page organically means you will be getting about ten times (10X) the clicks as the guy posting the ads on that page.

With that said, there are a couple of drawbacks:

It’s Expensive:(sound familiar?) The cost is caused by the amount of SEO specialist time it takes to update your website in such a way as to attract the search engines to your site, and subsequently, display your site higher and higher on the search engines.

I takes TIME:While a PPC, or Adword can go online in one day, a good SEO program may take six months or more to get you were you need to go.

Local Business Marketing: The New Kid in Town

Now you have a third choice that is both FAST AND CHEAP! Not only that, it is very very effective in driving people to your phone number, address, and website (IF, you have one! If you don’t have a website, IT STILL WORKS!)

This program will get you on ALL of the Search Engines, ALL of the time, both FAST and Affordable!

SEO Engineers can create your local account and optimize it and have you show up on the Google mini map you’ve seen on the search results (on Yahoo too!).  What’s more you can get a cheap ‘video’ presentation of your company and that video will quickly result in a top placement as well.

Business professionals like Lawyers, Doctors, Accountants, Dentists and Insurance Agents can greatly benifit form this service!

You can learn more abut Local Business Marketing and the costs here:  GOiMarketing Local Business Marketing.

The new kid in town is awesome! Take advantage and be an early adopter today!

Example, go to Google, type in:   Agoura Hills Porsche Repair   

Notice the results for Revolution Motorsports: the company is listed FOUR (4) times on the FIRST PAGE OF GOOGLE Organically! The program is only a month old so the company will appear on the map section in the near future, but now they are the TOP THREE LISTINGS!!!!  All this for Less than $150/month!!!

Richard Uzelac, CEO, GOiMarketing.

Writing an effective press release and optimizing it, can expose your company, products or services more powerfully on the search engines such as Google and Yahoo and MSN.

 A journalist, with their educational background in the Associated Press Style-book for writing are natural SEO writers. After all, being a good journalist is based on getting the who, what, where, when and sometimes why of a story out to the public quickly, and clearly.  

 Journalists also employ the ‘inverted pyramid’ style of writing a hard news story.  This simply means they put the most import facts up front in the story, usually in the first three to five paragraphs, and expand on them later in the copy.  The logic behind this is when a reader gets their morning paper, they have just so much time to read the paper, understand the stories and move on or go to work.

 What’s this have to do with search engine optimization? Lots!  If you can write your press release in an inverted pyramid style, you are on your way to having the story actually read by your target audience!

 So here are some points to remember when writing a Press Release:

1. Less is more!  Stay on topic and allow only one topic per release if at all possible.2. Keep your title to ten words or less. Make sure the proper keywords for the story are in the title.3. Drop drop the most important keywords of the story in the first paragraph.

One of the tough things in the SEO business is learning the business you are trying to Optimize for. In the beginning we concentrated on Real Estate Websites. Since we own a company like that ourselves, we know the business inside and out. But with the growth of GOiMarketing , we have found that we really need to study the industries and services that our new clients are in.

Recently we were hired by a microwave switch and matrix company that dealt with the airline industry and the defense industry. What did we know about DowKey and their products? Nothing!

While we know the SEO world and it’s tools, we didn’t know who or what the client was.

 In the past six months we have discovered that our jobs are much more than SEO, we are truely providing internet consulting and business consulting to our Internet Marketing Clients.

In the last few years, Conversions of leads has surpassed Traffic and eyeballs as the key metric for Search Engine Marketing success.

 As consultants, we need to study our Client’s business, not merely their website.

For Dow-Key, we studied who the target audience was, in this case purchasers and engineers looking for components to finish projects. We marketed directly to them.

The results have been fabulous, not only are they on the top of Google, Yahoo and MSN, last week they signed a $1.2 million contract from a lead where a firm found them on Google because of our program!

I recently had a minor medical issue. I snore like the start of Armagedon, at least my lovely little wife thinks so. Long story short, I tried the CPap Machine (Seems I have what’s called Sleep Apnea, a.k.a: I forget to breath and start to die so I take a big loud breath to save my life, but it scares the cats and the said wife.).

If you haven’t the pleasure of using a CPap machine, just picture a canister vaccum with it’s hose stuck on your face with a face mask and it BLOWS air into your mouth and nose, instead of sucking your nose off.   As charming and fetching as this sounds, it failed to do the job because in the middle of the night, I’d tear that mask off because I thought I was choking or suffocating. The little woman, you guessed it, hated it! She said it sounds like a vacuum on reverse, how astute was she? Amazing woman.

 So, one fine Sunday, I see these cheesy ads depicting a man wear a big Cpap mask and a big international circle with a slash through it stating, “Are you Cpap Intolerent?”. I found the ad in the LA Times right next to the Hair Transplant and Erectile Dysfunction ads (those two really work! but that’s another story…).

 So, wife begs me to give it a try or continue sleeping in the guest room with the cats. So I say’s, “O.K..”

I meet the doctor, Dr. Keropian of the Center for Snoring and CPAP Intolerance. Fifty-something Dr K arrives with the air of that kid in high school that aced all his math and science tests and enjoyed doing it. He has a twinkle in his eye and a spring in his step. He’s a scientist, doctor, inventor and lover of all things human.

 Dr. K gets me on his invention, a mouthguard like no other and after a few weeks of adjustment, voila, I do not snore, I’m back in my own bed with my wife and the cats don’t fear me! On top of that my energy level is much higher.

So what does all this have to do with search engine optimization and keywords and marketing and ‘Reputation Management?”   Well, a lot, I tell you!  You see, I wanted to see how this good Doctor was doing on the search engines (after all, it is my job.) and one of the first things I read is:

 ”I don’t think this thing works, it’s a big scam, just a mouth piece and they charge so much money, blah , blah, blah.”

 That got me to thinking, I wonder how many people suffering wit Sleep Apnea saw that comment from some forum and discounted what this guy offers? Sleep Apnea is dangerous, very dangerous, many people die of heart attacks and from strokes caused by Sleep Apnea! This is a serious disease and a cure for at least some people is out there. It’s a shame that one off-handed comment on a forum could keep a patient from a better life.

 At GOiMarketing, that’s what we want, people to have a better life and a better business. In this case above, we would go to work addressing the issue directly on the forum and hope that our response get’s posted with equal or better footing as the original. We’d also publish positive testimonials and feedback on the website, forums and blogs.

 Not all negative comments or postings are really negative. Sometimes these comments can spark a conversation that can lead to better understanding for all.

Dow-Key Microwave is a subsidiary of Dover Corporation. Dow-Key Specializes in RF Switches for the aeronautics and defence industries. The company has been around for over fifty years. Dover Corporation is an $11 Billion entity.

In August, GOiMarketing was hired to increase DowKey’s positioning against it’s competiors on major search engines.

Our goal was to attract a specific clientele: Procurement Engineers that need RF Switches and Matrix’s for the defence and aeronautics industries.

GOiMarketing’s team has worked closely to enhance the site for both search engine optimization and for usability.

 As of this posting the project is still in its early stages. Even so, the results so far are powerful. In the last month traffic to the site has grown over 22% for unique visitors.

 The total number of visits are even better. The total number of visits has doubled in two months! The increase in visits means that the users that come to the site are returning much more often than before. They are getting their needs met better now than before GOiMarketing started the SEO program and redesign measures.

Please stay tune as this success story continues in the following months!  On tap are programs to grow Dow-Key’s positioning and brand in the european marketplace.

Getting to the top of the result pages on the major search engines like Google, Live, and Yahoo can dramatically increase business. This cannot be done overnight, achieving high placement on search engines organically takes time and effort but it pays off well. High Search Engine placement leads to more traffic which leads to more business. Keep in mind that when consumers get to your website you want to keep them there. Website enhancements and user interaction is just as important as good placement. If you are just starting out the first step in search engine optimization (SEO) is selecting the right keywords. Then it’s getting links to your website, and optimizing your content. The final step is waiting. If you are patient and you use the correct optimization techniques you will be placed well on the search engine’s natural results. There is a lot more detail that goes into the steps above but it should give you an idea.

Arlene was a new real estate agent.
She had great energy and no business.
She lived in a waterfront community in Ventura County California.
She came to RealtyTech for a Website and IDX MLS Real Estate Search.
She loved her site and search, but not visitors found her website.
She wanted to compete in her farm market area, but there were to guys, the ‘Kings’ of the neighborhood that seemed to control the market for listings and sales.

She hired GOiMarketing to get more traffic and leads from her website.
GOiMarketing modified her site monthly to have it totally cover her market for information, listings and content.
Six months later, she started to get traffic, from 400 visitors per month to over 2,000!
Ten months later, she is on the first page of Google, Yahoo, and MSN in organic placement!
Six months after that, and $20,000,000 worth of listings and sales later, Arlene is now the ‘Queen’ of the neighborhood and she dominates the former ‘Kings’.

Long live the Queen!

And that Virginia, is what we do.

Real Estate Agents have a lot of competition online. In California’s San Fernando Valley Real Estate Market, over 15,000 agents ply the streets. About 60% of them, 9,000, have websites, and about 5% of those around 450 are engaged in online marketing. All of these California Real Estate Agents want top placing on Google, Yahoo and MSN.  Alas, only ten of them can make it to page one at any one time.

 How do San Fernando Valley Real Estate Agents and Offices beat the odds? It’s simple, the winners pick a small area or one or at the most two cities and market to those areas online.

 While most agents like to say they sell ‘the entire valley,’ the smart agents specialize in that one area and optimize their sites, or have their websites optimized by GOiMarketing to beat the odds.

 So if you want to win online in real estate anywhere in the nation, it is best to pick just one or two realatively small areas that you know well and optimize for them.  Agents can still sell in other areas, but for online success, the committed specialists fair the best.

So what’s the difference? Many say they are the same and some say they are totally different. They are two seperate methods but they go hand in hand. Search Engine Marketing or SEM is more broad in a sense that SEO can be included in the method. Although generally SEM deals with paid inclusions, pay per click, sponsored ads, and other services in which usually you see quick results but your website is in the sponsored ads section which doesn’t get as many clicks as natural results.  Also it can get expensive depending on how many people click on your ad and even if they do, they might just look for a second and click the back button.

Search Engine Optimization on the other hand takes longer to show results but your website will be found in the natual or organic search engine result pages. These natural results get way more clicks than the sponsored ads but they take more time to show up.

However you look at it, both SEO and SEM are powerful methods that increase traffic to your website and make your website visible in the search engine results pages. Many claim to start optimizing your website first and then start paying for ads and pay per click, but doing them together is even more powerful. Of course your budget plays a big part on how much SEM you can do but you can start by optimizing your site.  Tell us what you think the difference between Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimizing is….