Do You Need a Blog on Your Website

You’ve heard that one of the ways to improve the traffic to your website is to incorporate a blog. Before you pull out the pen and paper and start penning your first words of wisdom or share your latest piece of knowledge, take a moment and determine just what it is that you are hoping to accomplish and what you have to put in place to for your blog to achieve the results that your looking for.

Let’s start with a question does a blog attached to a company website improve the websites search rankings?

The answer is “Yes” if the blog is done right, and addresses these four issues that will improve a sites ranking whether it be additions through a blog or other parts of the site.

1. The blog provides you a place to regularly add relevant content to your website, and search engines love fresh content and fresh content keeps visitors coming back.


2. A blog provides you and opportunity to encourage back links.


3. A blog will help you build a community around your website. Thorough your blog you will come in contact with other people in your industry, you’ll exchange ideas, you’ll build your reputation, and you’ll develop a following of people who’ll spread the word about your posts through Linked In, Face Book, and Twitter.


4. Through your blog you can set up RSS feeds that will multiply your exposure which often leads to more links, which leads to higher rankings, which leads to more clients.

So, all in all a blog is an excellent part of turning a website into a marketing tool, but there are more decisions that need to be made before you start bloging.

Are you going to host your new blog on the company site or at another domain line Blogspot or Word Press?

I recommend that you host your blog on your company site, that way all the benefits tie directly to your company site; the back-links, the RSS feeds and any email addresses left behind are tied directly to your company site. Besides any blog visitor are only clicks away from where you’re doing business.

Now that the blog is on-site how where does it go and how should it be structured? You have a choice of setting up in its own folder (www.bestofus.com/blog), or a separate subdomain (www.blog.bestofus.com/).

My advice…option#1…in its own folder. This will give you better results with Google search.
Now you need bloging software to write your blog in. I currently have twelve blogs, 10 with Word Press and 2 with Blogspot. I find that I am more comfortable in Word Press and that I can add more features through their plug-ins that help be optimize my blog and build traffic.

Hold on don’t start bloging yet, here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your blog. Most these can be achieved through the plug-ins offered through Word Press.

Proper structure of your URLs/Permalinks. Each post has its own identity, some use numbers in sequence. It should look like this: (www.bestofus.com/blog/DoYouNeedaBlogOnYourWebsite)

Optimize your description, title, and Alt tags. Treat each post as another web page so that it can be easily categorized and ranked by the search crawlers.

Create a Sitemap. You need to build this and you’ll find a plug-in to help you get it in place.
Directory of your best posts. Place this directory on your Side Bar so the readers can easily find the best you have to offer.

Link to your Social Media. You should have a snippet of any new posts appear on your Linked In, and Face book pages there are a number of services that can do this for you.

You should now be ready to start bloging. You’ll want to adapt the same promotional, link building, visitor to client conversion and SEO strategies that you have in place for your company site into your blog.

Hopefully you’ll enjoy bloging, the blog will build traffic to your website and you’ll have to turn new clients away. Remember the Internet is relatively new and it is growing each day, it you jump in now you’ll be light years ahead of your competition and as it changes you’ll be in a position to adapt. The Internet is the best marketing tool you have ever been presented, don’t ignore it any longer.

How to Compare Your Online Success with Your Competition

The internet is a level playing field. This means that every company has an equal opportunity to get their message found by potential customers online. In the retail world if you’re located in the ‘big mall’ you have a competitive advantage over your competition, not true on the Internet. But that also means that your site is competing head to head with your business competitors for traffic in search engines and social media. Your competitors might be generating a lot of traffic from keywords, linking sites and Search Engine Optimization that you haven't implemented. It’s easy enough, through Google Keywords, to find out how many people are searching for businesses like yours in your city every month, and you know how much business is coming in through your website. So if your website isn’t bringing you new business each month what do you have to change to get your website working for you? In this article I’m going to tell you how to find out how your website is performing compared to your competition.

How does your page ranking, inbound links & search engine rank compare to your competitors' websites?

What keywords is your competitor using to optimize his pages and achieve better results?

How does your Internet penetration compare to your competitors?

How does your page ranking, inbound links & search engine rank compare to your competitors' websites?
You need to first install a Google page rank bar onto your browser. This is a free tool provided by Google that allows you to see the page ranking of every website that you visit. It also allows you to see how many relevant links Google recognizes and when the page was last audited by Google. Follow the instructions at this link to install the Google Rank Bar. (http://www.google.com/toolbar/ie/index.html)

Once you have it installed it will show you a Page Ranking of NR (not rated) to 10. Click on the arrow to the right of the bar to find relevant links and when the page was last Cached or audited. This will give you an easy way to see how your site compares in the basics.

To compare Search Engine rankings go to www.seocentro.com. In the second box on the left side, SEO Tools, click on Rank Checker. Now enter your keyword (your profession and your city), and your domain name and your top competitors domain name. Submit

This will give you your search page rank on Google, Yahoo and Bing for the key words that you entered. The first listings will be for the map insert which Google offers, followed by the rankings of the WebPages.

What keywords is competitor using to optimize his pages and achieving better results?

Now you know who’s beating you at Internet marketing, now let’s find out how their doing it. Staying in SEOCentro, in the SEO Tools box go to Keyword Analyzer. Enter the same Keywords you used above and your domain name. These results will show you how efficiently you are using these keywords.

Now do the same thing with your competitors’ domain name.

This exercise should tell you whether your website is optimized or not; you can have a well optimized website and still not appear in the top of search if the competition has established a better penetration on the Internet. But you can’t get to the top of search no matter what your Internet penetration without good SEO.

How does your Internet penetration compare to your competitors?

Internet penetration is all about back-links and text links. Still on SEOCentro, click on Link Popularity. Enter your information and Submit. This is humbling, here your going to see all the work that goes into making a top producing website. You’ll see how many links you have over the Internet and how many the various services recognize as relevant.

If you’ve entered your competitor’s domain you’ll see how many relevant links you’re going to have to produce to compete with them for top search rankings.

Let’s look at the real world to see if getting to the top of search is worth the cost and effort. Let’s assume you’re a Personal Injury Lawyer in Boston; Google Keywords tells me that Google had 3,280 matching searches in July. Based on Google doing 67% of all search we can assume that there were 4,895 total searches last month for Personal Injury Lawyer in Boston.

Joel H. Schwartz’s website appears on the top of Google Search, he has a Page Rank of 3 and he has 85 relevant links. Joel had 4,378 visitors to his website in July; 3,333 unique visits (up from 221 in February). 34% of his search visits came from the keywords personal injury lawyer, 21.75% from car accident and 16.89% from slip and fall. Joel also got some of his traffic from his links and direct traffic.

If you’re really interested run the comparison on www.alicata.com . Arthur F. Licata’s site has a page rank of 3 and 141 relevant links (56 more then Joel) but appears on page 9 of Google Search. Do you know why?

Compare this to your business; where do you appear on search and how long does it take you get your message in front of 3,333 interested prospects?

If you’re a professional and you’d like to turn your website into a marketing tool, maybe we should talk.


Kerry J. Grinkmeyer
kj@bestofus.com
205 956 4329

How to Set and Monitor Website Goals

To often businesses build a website with no real goals and objectives thought out for the site. Good goals and objectives add to the value of your business, are based on reality, and can be measured. The measuring part is the part that is most often overlooked, yet how can you know if your site is adding value to your business if you have no means of measuring its productivity and you have no one monitoring it. Here are some possible objectives for a well designed website:



• Generate names and contact information of potential clients or patients.
• Provide information for existing clients or patients.
• Disseminate timely information about your business and or industry while establishing you as an expert in your field.
• Distribute our Newsletter over the Internet thus eliminate the cost of printing and postage.
• Generate referrals by providing our Newsletter readers a means of forwarding it to a friend.


A website that doesn’t have specific objectives that are measurable suggests that the site was not well planed during its development process. This often happens when the parties involved in the development process do not have a full understanding of Internet Marketing.

Once you have a clear understand of how your website fits into your overall business plan you will need to incorporate these objectives into your site. It normally doesn’t mean a full rework of the site. Much of what needs to be added is software off the shelf that can be incorporated into your existing site.

With the objectives in place it’s important that you have a means of measuring the level of success that each objective is having. This is where you will turn to your website analytics. Your analytics watches over your website and tells you how many visitors your site had over a specified period of time, how they arrived at your site, and what they did while they were at your site.

As an example your site had 200 visitors last week; here’s some of the data your analytics will give you.


• 56% arrived from search, 20% direct (typed in your URL) and 24% by referral (from a link that you established with another website).
• The average time spent on your site was 2 minutes 43 seconds
• Your bounce rate was 33% (came and went didn’t spend any time)
• 20% of your visitors were return visitors and 80% were first time visitors.
• 23 visitors followed the link to your latest Newsletter, 3 became new registrants
• 15 visitors looked at the informational brochure you're offering, 6 visitors signed up to have it sent to them
• 12 visitors looked at the information on your upcoming seminar, 5 signed up to attend.

This is just a sampling of some of the information that is available; so what does this tell you.


• Your site is well Search Engine Optimized, your getting decent search traffic; you have a good link base that is feeding you traffic; you need to work on getting your website top of mind with your existing clients or patients. You need to build a mailing list.
• You need to beef-up your current content to get your onsite time higher.
• 33% of your visitors didn’t find what they were looking for; you need to dig deeper, did they come from Search, Direct, or Referral. The answerer will tell you what you need to change.
• You need to give your Newsletter, Brochure and Seminar better billing

A well structured website with specific measurable objectives that is properly monitored and maintained can be the most valuable marketing tool that you posses, but the truth is most small and medium businesses spend a lot of money building a pretty website get it up and running then basically forget about it because it doesn’t bring client through the door or make the phone ring. If this sounds like you, go to www.wealthenhancement.com; it’s a site with clear measurable objective, they offer you five opportunities to make connection with them on the landing page. Their website objective is “to generate new business”. Type Financial Advisor Minneapolis in your Google Search Bar, and see if you can find them. This is not by accident.

If you need help turning your website into a marketing tool we should talk.

Kerry Grinkmeyer
The Best of the US
kj@BestofUS.com
205 956 4329

How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Website

Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.

In other words who's coming to your site, how did they get there, what did they do while they were there? Is your website achieving its goals?

The ultimate goal of web analytics is to improve the structure and layout of your site and its functioning as a marketing tool. To do this, you need to know what's working on your site and what's not. And if something isn't working, you need to understand why not and how you should begin optimizing it. In other words, you need to come away from your analysis with a list of to-do's.

Most users of website analytics read the reports without knowing what to do with them. For most people, reports seem to satisfy curiosity, "How many visitors did the site have yesterday?", more than provoke any kind of action.

Having clean data and actionable reports is one thing, but it is another matter altogether to know how to read them and respond. This articles will help you determine what to look for in your reports and how to relate what you find to your on site goals.

Start with a blank piece of paper and your computer down. Now, ask yourself, "Why did I have my website built?" "What do I want my website to add to my business plan?" "What has to happen for a site visit to be successful?" "What constitutes a visit a failure?"

Starting from this point, begin to create a list of questions. Don't even think about what reports are available yet. Just list the questions you need answers to.

Questions should be focused on your business goals and customer experiences. Rather than asking "How many visitors did we have last week?", ask "How long did the average visitor spend on the site and what pages did they view?" The first question will give you a single metric, the second will take into account the context of the pages, the keywords used to get to the page, the goals of the site, etc. In most cases your goal will be for the visitor to leave his contact information behind. Analytics should tell you what you need to change in order to improve your conversion ratio. You'll find that worthwhile questions will probably require multiple reports to answer.

Your list of questions might be short. That's okay. Your questions will change and grow in complexity as you realize the potential of your site as a marketing tool and the power of the analytics.

In practice, you should be creating lists of questions regularly. Maybe weekly. And as you answer questions, make changes and improve results you will likely replace them with other, more refined questions.

As you complete your list of questions, you still should be logged out of your analytics site. Now comes the important part, and you shouldn't let the graphs and available reports sidetrack you yet.

Now it's time to look at that list of questions and think about what elements would provide answers or clues.

It may be best to think about it anecdotally. For example, if you want to know which conversion (visitor to prospect) strategies are not performing well enough, you might imagine a potential visitor clicking on your Newsletter sign-up page. If they leave immediately,(time on page) that probably means something went wrong. It could be a disconnect between what you were offering and what your were asking for, (too much contact information). If they stay on the site but go to a different area than you expected, it may represent a failure of the conversion strategy to communicate the intended message. Think of all the scenarios that would indicate a failure.

It's important to remember here what is the goal: "To get the visitor to leave his or her contact information."

Now is the time to start matching up indicators with reports. This will vary with each site. You may decide for your site that a mixture of time on site, time on page, bounce rate and conversion rate give you an indication of the success of a particular strategy. Determining how to weight these metrics will depend on the site and the marketing goals.

As an example you might find that by beefing up current content you get more repeat visitors who are using your site as a library but your conversion ratio is going down, thus you may want to only offer snippets of content in a newsletter format and require a sign-up for a full read. You'll see this strategy used by the Wall Street Journal.

After analyzing your reports and building your strategies in this manner, you should be able to create a to-do list. If you can't, it wasn't a very useful exercise. The to-do list could include items like "Perform Brochure Mailing testing on landing page", "Offer a luncheon seminar on a hot topic", "Use more current topics on email newsletters", etc.

As you optimize your site and strategies, your questions will change. They will become more refined. As one area is perfected, other areas in need of your attention will surface. This should be a cycle of asking, optimizing and testing until your site is finally so perfect that every visitor who comes to your site can't help but ask to become your client or patient.

You are probably saying to yourself, "I don't have the time to do all this." If that's the case we may need to talk about your website and the goals that you that you would like to achieve with your website.

Kerry J. Grinkmeyer
The Best of the US
kj@BestofUS.com

How Do You Market Your Business on the Internet

If you want to turn your website into a Marketing Tool these are questions that you need to be addressing, but before you do that it’s important that you gain some understanding of how the Internet works.

Imagine a huge spider crawling through out the Internet; its job is to determine what each website is all about and which are the most important. After a while this spider figures out that with over 300 billion websites he’s going to have to organize them in some manner. He decides to create categories; Financial, Medical, Shopping, etc. The spider looks for keywords, examines the site title, it’s description and its page content.

Once he gets his 300 million sites categorized he has to come up with a system of determining which of the sites in each category are the most important to the category and to the Internet overall. So he decides to give a site points for other sites linking back to it, more points for having other sites referring back to it in its content, and more points if the content on the original is updated on a regular basis thus keeping current on the subject matter of the category.

Those sites with the current content, and most relevant back links are then ranked highest and appear highest in search. That’s a simple explanation of how Internet search works.

If you build a beautiful website to promote your business and it’s not appearing on the first page of search, it’s like building a beautiful billboard and keeping it in your basement.

To find out where your website is living, type your business and location in your search bar (Orthodontist Omaha), just like someone who needed your services would do. There are usually ten listings on each page; are you on the first page? Now ask yourself, when you’re searching how deep do you go? If you’re not on the first page 80% of the searchers will not find you.

If you’re an Orthodontist in Omaha there were 1290 searches last month that you could be just what the searcher was looking for; that’s over 15,000 information searchers a year. How important to your business is it that you’re on the first page? You could pay for one of those “Sponsored Ads” on the top and right hand side of the page, which would put you on the top.

Did you see that map on the top of the page with pinpoints showing where your competitions offices are located; are you in that picture?

Do you currently know how many visitors come to your website each day and how they found you and how long they stayed? If someone does come to your website is it easy for them to get information from you? You know, get on your newsletter mailing list, or sign up for your next seminar; or do you offer anything like that on your website? Have you considered using your website to market your business?

If you could hire or train an employee to get you to the top of the page and keep you there, as well as help you turn your website into a marketing tool what would you be willing to pay them a year?

It’s all about Return on Investment (ROI); what is a new client or patient worth to you a year? How many new clients would your website have to bring on to justify a full time employee? Would you be better hiring a professional to do the work for you?

It’s easy to find out how many searches there were last month for your profession in your city, and a professional in the field of Search Engine Optimization can help you get your website to the top of the page. Today you’re probably going to find national companies, local listings, and general information site competing for first page positions. It’s not hard to displace them on a local level. If you do find one of your competitors up there you’re behind in the fastest growing segment of business marketing. Check their Google Page Ranking if it’s 5 or above you’ve got a steep hill to climb, if it’s 2 or below you can challenge them in short order.

As you’re a professional in your field you need a professional if you want to add Internet Marketing as an effective tool to market your business. Building a website is step one, build traffic to your website is step two, converting that traffic into prospect is step three, and converting those prospects into client is step four.

If you'd like to learn how I built a product and marketed it over the internet, I writing a blog on how I wrote, illustrated, manufactured and marketed a children's book, The Christmas Web - A Family Tradition.


Kerry Grinkmeyer founded BestofUS.com a web listing of the best of ten professions in the United States. He works with his listed professional to assist them in marketing their business over the Internet. You can apply to be listed on BestofUS.com at Apply To Be Listed