Foundations For Your Powerful Online Presence
Thursday, July 15th, 2010
Lunarpages, through our strategic partner, LocalDirective, is dedicated to helping you build a powerful online presence that accelerates your business growth. Your most important goal is to establish a firm foundation from which to grow your online presence. Even though it may seem overwhelming with all of the apparent choices, there are only three things you must focus on to achieve online success:
1) A Comprehensive Website that supports pre-defined objectives. This means your first step in developing a new site is to determine what it is you want to accomplish. For many businesses, it is to grow sales online through e-commerce, drive traffic to physical locations, or for phone or form lead generation. But other purposes might be to build deeper brand loyalty or even to help people self-serve customer service functions. Once you have your objective, then you can proceed to methodically follow best-practice guidelines for site development. If you already have a website, you may want to consider a ‘Revitalization’ effort if your site is not delivering the results it should.
2) Once you have established your online destination, the next step is to drive traffic to it. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) in the major national and (potentially local or vertical) search engines enables you to choose to whom your advertising will show, presents a message you want to share, and delivers visitors to the website or landing page destination of your choosing. SEM marketing is immediate, and you can expect results to begin within days from starting your program. It is the ultimate form of directional advertising, boldly replacing the Yellow Pages in that function. Search engine marketing is sometimes called Pay-Per-Click, Sponsored Search or Paid Search. Google says that up to thousands can be earned for each dollar spent in search. Many advertisers report a high ROI as compared to most (if not all) other forms of advertising. What is great about SEM is that it is very controllable – everything from where and when your ads show to how much is spent each day.
3) The third element of your powerful online foundation is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that builds a strong organic presence for a handful of your most important and highly trafficked keywords. Since the search engines determine your placement for keyword searches, a solid program will attend to both ‘On-Page’ factors (how your website is designed and the content) and ‘Off-Page’ factors that increase your ‘popularity’ for the best placement on search results pages. SEO is a longer process than SEM, and Google suggests expecting up to a year for full optimization. Note that many Social Media Marketing (SMM) opportunities serve as SEO techniques, including use of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, as well as on-site and off-site blog posting. A good approach is to begin developing your SEO strategy a bit after the start of your SEM program, so you can use what you’ve learned to develop the most effective SEO approach.
Be sure to check out our website for information about our search engine marketing programs and learn more about how to build your powerful online presence.
We have a special offer for those with VPS, Dedicated or Business Hosting Plans. You can get either our SEO Kick-Start Program ($249 value) with any custom Search Engine Marketing (SEM) package or $100 off your SEM strategy development cost. If you are not a VPS, Dedicated or Business Hosting customer, but would like to participate in this special offer, contact LocalDirective at 1.888.613.7174 or CustomLP@LocalDirective.com today!
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Original post by Amy
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