AZ marketing companies need to keep websites fresh and efficient.  This article is the second of two parts on how to get the very most from your company’s internet marketing efforts.  The first article, “Website Redesign: An Investment You Cannot Afford to Pass Up” discussed the importance of keeping your website updated and fresh and how to get the most out of your website.  This article discusses the three greatest areas of concern for website redesign success. (more…)

Thrive Marketing celebrates five years this month. “As an Employee, I was an Entrepreneur. I worked for businesses, both large and small, public and private, and treated them like they were my own business. They grew quickly and that’s why I founded Thrive Marketing in 2004 – to help companies gain market share rapidly,” remarks company president, Christie Turley. Read more about why we started Thrive.

Website Redesign: An Investment You Can’t Afford To Pass Up

Arizona marketing companies number almost like the stars in the sky.  However, not all those Arizona marketing companies are really all about marketing.  Good marketing is something everyone thinks they can do but for you, it is not too long before new ideas can run out.  What do you do when your promotion efforts start to get a little stale?  Arizona marketing companies like ThriveMarketing, LLC know what to do. (more…)

An online advertising agency is an important and integral portion of your website efforts.  Without a knowledgeable online advertising agency, there are many wrong turns and pitfalls you may not even be aware of, and following 9 simple rules can make a lot of difference in getting the right people on your website. (more…)

Here’s a creative little music video that demonstrates how socializing and dating has changed since the Social Media Revolution (did you know that 1 in 8 people found love online last year?!).

The movie, He’s Just Not That Into You, also speaks to  this phenomenon of dating online in 2009. Drew Barrymore’s character laments to her friends (paraphrasing):

“He MySpaced me and then messaged my BlackBerry, so I texted his cell and then he emailed my home account and I left a voicemail…I remember the days when there was one home line and one answering machine and inside that answering machine was one cassette tape where he did or didn’t leave you a message. Now you have to go around checking all these different portals just so you can be rejected by seven kinds of technology.”

Ok, now for the oh-so-very-hokey hoedown video parody:

Are social media and networking sites (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc) just a fad that will go out of style, just as quickly as it came in? Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? Watch the video and decide for yourself.

Think Twitter is just a Teenage thing?

Surprise, only 5% of Twitter users are teens. They’re even less likely to use Twitter than Baby Boomers who are over the age of 65! (more…)

An internet advertising consultant needs to provide enhancements

For a successful internet advertising consultant, the style of the copy has to be as important as the words it contains. Internet advertising consultants, contrary to popular belief, are just as much about making technical enhancements to a website, but must result in a click-through that results in sales.  Services need to include web design and layout and usability in addition to copy content that is a cut above the competition.  Good copy is a basic requirement.  If the quality of the copy is not good, then it does not matter what it says; it is not enticing to read.  In addition to good organization–in order to draw the customer/reader into the website–optimized website copy must be creative, informative, and technically helpful. (more…)

The August issue of Entrepreneur Magazine highlights the top 10 places for starting a business, according to its editors.

Phoenix, Arizona is Number 5 on the list and nicknamed “The Expander” because it has grown by 50% over the last twenty years. This quick growth rate means that the city has all the basic services a company needs to get started.  The article also mentions Phoenix’s strengths in the tech industry. (more…)

Search engine marketing consultant firms can be found everywhere, but they may not have the mix of experiences and skills that you need to improve the visibility of your website.  Take into consideration additional experiences, such as marketing and customer service, as well as a successful track record when making your final selection of a search engine marketing consultant.

Search engine marketing consultants are not all alike

Search Engine Optimization is not a myth

A search engine marketing consultant can show you how SEO can work for your website.

In our last article, the second of this series of three “Internet marketing firms can guide proper search term analysis that will increase your business – dramatically” we discussed the importance of how the words on your website and the format in which they are presented can make a great difference to the website’s popularity in the search engines.  In the first article of the series, “An Internet advertising agency can vastly improve your visibility on the internet,” we discussed what search engines do and how they are programmed to decide who appears first in the search results list.  In this article, we will focus on understanding the overall concepts of search engine optimization, how to find an agency who can actually make a difference, and the importance of maintaining your website after the initial optimization.

Believing in SEO

There are people around who will be quick to tell you that as far as SEO goes, there is nothing one can do; it’s hopeless; it doesn’t work; it is a sham and rip-off.  Primarily, those people are the ones who have had no experience (or a bad experience) with search engine optimization. All this negativity about it only indicates one thing: many do not have experience with how the competition’s website was able to move ahead of them through search engine optimization.  Not only does SEO work, it may be the most efficient and cost-effective marketing dollar spend a company can make toward its internet selling strategies.

SEO works and surprisingly well.  Still, expectations must be set properly with orientation and education about what happens to the website listings and when they are likely to occur.

With SEO, there’s no such thing as instant success

SEO modifications take time.  As discussed in the “Internet marketing firms can guide proper search term analysis that will increase your business – dramatically,” websites information searches are searched within the search engine’s database – not on the internet.  The way the search engine database is indexed is complicated.  The efforts you make to optimize your site can be neutralized or negated by other conditions on your website.  It is possible to carry out a search engine optimization process on your site only to see it be ineffective.  That certainly doesn’t mean SEO doesn’t work; but it can mean the person doing it really didn’t understand all the things he or she needs to correct on the website to avoid negative search impacts.

Finding the right SEO marketing firm

Our personal prejudice at Thrive Marketing, built through our own experiences, is that among the primary skills a search engine marketing consultant must include is an expertise in marketing and customer service. Search engine optimization is a complicated process involving not too well understood methods of searching, but the end result must be to improve the marketing and customer service presence on your website.  Website success is about finding you and leaving with a happy buyer.

Some copy development skills are vital

The second most important characteristic of a search engine marketing consultant is to have a great enough skill in writing that the SEO copy reads as seamlessly as any other piece of informative copy, but contains all the necessary keywords and keyword placement.  Ideally, a reader should not be able to determine the keywords in use just by reading the article.  The article should be informational (as this is also a search criterion).

SEO Copy structure is important

As mentioned in the last article, page content should usually be between about 500 and 800 words but the keyword should not appear any more than about six to ten times, divided between body copy, headers, links, HTML descriptions, and meta-title.  If done properly, the search term being optimized should not be obvious to the reader.

Maintaining optimal optimization

Believe it or not, websites get stale.  Even a top scoring website, if left without changes and updates for a while, will start to fall in the preferred search results.  The reason is that the search engines recognize stale sites and downgrade them.  Second, search engine parameters change from time to time.  To keep a site optimized, it needs to be checked for optimization every few months and the content modified on a regular basis.  Third, websites containing informational content will rate higher than those without it.

Remember, good marketing sense is important, too

Websites should be freshened from time to time–not just for search engine optimization–but because it makes good marketing sense.  When requesting estimates on website work, and researching the cost of SEO processing, be sure to include maintenance in the scope of work.  As said before, SEO and SEO maintenance are some of the most efficient spends in internet marketing.

Having an understanding of SEO and how it works, finding a search engine marketing consultant, and maintaining your website with fresh copy that matches current search criteria are all important parts of internet marketing.  A good search engine marketing consultant with marketing and customer service experience can work wonders with your website in the search engine results.  SEO really works; it is no myth.  However, you still have to be realistic about what you put into your site and the time and effort it takes to keep it fresh.

For more information on how ThriveMarketing can help you with your Search Marketing:

• Request a proposal
• Call Toll-Free: 1 (866) 521-0827
• Call Locally:   1 (480) 704-4563