Archive for the ‘Marketing Tips’ Category

In the past, when your customer wanted to find a product or service, they would go to the yellow pages.

These days your customer is more likely to Google search a long list of websites, including your competitors. We can make your website rank higher on that list.

Just like a car, every website needs a little maintenance now and then. Why not let us pop your hood and check things out?

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Discover Shasta Consulting & Web Design’s excellence as Redding’s web design professionals.

What to expect with Search Engine Optimization

Tuesday, 13th November, 2007

What to expect? Great question. What we do with our organic SEO services called www.mrsearchwrench.com is not so much about what is seen on the surface of your website, but what the search engines are picking up from your internal code. When we “optimize” your site, we do many things such as make sure the program coding contains no dead end links etc. Over time, links to external sites may have changed. We fix those, and add a few more for good measure. Now for example, if you have a real estate site, you could also email your industry contacts like title companies, lenders, inspectors, and ask them to add a link to their own site, that points to yours. That could help too. These are rather minor details in the scheme of things though.

The search engines frequently change the way they look at and evaluate a website for the purpose of “ranking”. A higher ranking is what we are aiming for with your site. To achieve that, we may try various search phrases embedded in your site to correspond with what people are searching for. An un-targeted search term like “house” or “land” would produce a gazillion results due to the general nature of those words. Not much help there. Now for instance if we plug in “luxury home redding ca”, or “fixer-upper redding ca”, those phrases might yield more targeted results. Again, this is not necessarily what would be shown on the face of your site, but the words behind the scenes.

So, we do all this work in the background, then submit the “altered” site to all the top search engines. We benchmark the current rankings, then let it all “bake” for about 3 months. At that time, we generate an advanced web ranking report showing how your target phrases fared in the top 7 engines. Interestingly, those top 7 account for about 97% of all searches. Here is a link to our web marketing page that goes into things in a little more detail. http://www.shastaconsulting.com/internetmarketing.htm but I don’t want to swamp you with a lot of techie talk.

Now you may ask if all this is worth the effort for a single agent, when the big boys are pounding away with pay-per-click ads and spending thousands per month on similar organic efforts. The answer is this… Yes. It is worth trying. It does take patience and the investment of several hundred dollars over the course of a year. With newspaper ads, there is no reporting, no accountability, ever. People from out of town will surely search the heck out of everything on the net when they are considering moving here. Same goes for folks who want to sell. Point is, they use the internet and search engines to do their research.

To keep your site out there with more exposure, it is necessary to constantly poke the engines with new content every quarter. The changes don’t necessary need to be sweeping, but regularity is key. Regular re-submission is also important. Some would like to shoot it out there every month. That would be a mistake. Google does not like to be pushed like that. They will actually penalize some sites for being too ’spammy”.

Bottom line…. we plant this organic tree together and give it some time (like a year) to see if we can get it to grow. When someone calls you from the out of town and says they found you in Google, then you get the appointment, then you sell a luxury home, I will be your new best friend! Until then, this is prospecting by computer, pure and simple.

Internet years are like dog years.

Friday, 7th September, 2007

Total information has grown by leaps and bounds in recent times. Internet years are like dog years.  Things change so often and so quickly, you really do need to lead, follow or get out of the way! My initial exposure to the Internet was way back in the early 70’s when it was still a gleam in the eye of a young Bill Gates. When I brought home my first personal computer, my wife asked “what the heck is that thing?”  I told her it was a solution looking for a problem. I mean there was zero software packed with it, just a booklet describing all the great capabilities of a brand new technology.

These days we are literally overrun with hardware and software to address some of the most obscure problems one might imagine. The power of the Internet has created incredible economic opportunity for millions of people. Even the smallest business can promote their products and services 24 hours a day with an effective website. It has been said that over half the population now uses the Internet to find things they need. Half of those have Google as their home page! This is no small development in the scheme of things. If you have a website (your competitors probably do) it is important that it be “Google friendly”.

Today there are so many ways for businesses to take advantage of the Internet, but it would be a mistake to assume an “automatic” success solution. Things still take time and effort. One very effective approach is to create a blog, otherwise known as a web log or online journal. Google likes them. You get the opportunity to interact with your customers and actually find out what they want! There is great value in having such an open forum, and the rewards can be immense. Running a blog comes with responsibilities too. You should update it regularly with current useful information about your business.

So, go ahead and give it a try! Do a little research about blogs on Google (what else?) Send me a link to your new blog when you get it all up and running. I promise to be nice.

4 ways to market your business online

Sunday, 5th August, 2007

Does your Web site describe your product or service in a succinct, compelling and visual fashion? Does it answer potential customers’ needs in, say, less than 10 seconds?

Entrepreneurs who blog can reach a new audience by writing in a conversational way and showing the human and personal side of their business.

Podcasting is a relatively simple technology that is being taken quite seriously by some Fortune 500 companies.

YouTube is not just for classic media clips, cute pet tricks and bizarre dorm antics anymore. With a YouTube link on your Web site and vice versa, you have a new marketing tool.

Just follow this link for the complete article at money.com