Whatever your business: real estate, dining, travel or retail, the economy is certainly making itself known to you in one form or another. Managing your internet marketing budget during this time is a challenge, no doubt about it – you definitely want to get the most from your online advertising dollar. So…how do you decide what to focus on and what gets put on hold?

 Search engine optimization is often considered a soft marketing tool that can be paused, delayed or done away with entirely, then pulled back out as a stop-gap measure when the going gets rough.  Not so! Although SEO does lend itself to both short and long-term goals, when it comes to budgeting your marketing dollars, you’ll want to give careful consideration to where you’ll get the most bang for your buck.
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So you’re doing the right thing… You’re creating non-spam e-campaigns and sending to a list of subscribers who have given you permission to send to them… Then why are your messages getting caught up in spam filters?

The most common culprit would be the words that you are using in the subject line of your e-campaigns. There are actually certain spam filter “trigger” words, which are words and combinations of words that are identified as being most commonly used in spam messages. These add spam points to your email when being received by your subscribers, and if your points are too high, your message will get blocked. In other words, if your e-campaign “looks” like a spam message, it could get caught in spam filters, even if you are following all the rules.

So… wondering which words and phrases to avoid? Have a look… (more…)

Are you running out of optimization ideas for your website? Looking for a little bit of inspiration to get you back on track? (we know you’re not, but just in case there’s a brain freeze today we thought we’d ask)

Then we’d like to recommend that you take a look at the PDFs on your site to make sure that they are optimized. One of the items we find when looking at websites is that the PDFs have been completely ignored. Now to be fair, some of this is probably because up until a few years ago many people were told that PDFs couldn’t or shouldn’t be optimized; that any work done to them would not help the page’s or the website’s ranking. Let’s put this argument to bed right now: (more…)

I feel bad for display advertising. It gets a bad reputation for being an underperformer. In reality, however, it is a secret marketing gem that has proven itself a team player helping to boost web traffic, brand recognition, conversions, and sales. (more…)

The 404 error page. What is it and how can you maximize it as an opportunity to promote your business?

A 404 error (“Page Not Found”) occurs when a page no longer exists on your website … or never existed. This could be a result of restructuring your website, renaming or deleting pages without a 301 redirect (naughty) or it could be due to a searcher’s typo. Basically, you are trying to retrieve something from the server that does not exist. When this happens, if a custom page is not created, the following default page shows up:

Default 404 Error Page

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