Following are some resources that I can personally recommend!

Esther C. Kane
Eckweb Designs, Inc.

One of the BEST ways to market your web site is to show the Internet audience that you KNOW your stuff!

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Editorial

Hello Everyone!

You may have noticed that I had a website re-design of my own website, Eckweb Designs, Inc.

I'm extremely happy with the design and the results from this design change.

You see, this website was created in CSS and part of that design included a CSS positioning trick that allows the designer to place the body of text at the top of the website page. But, to the Internet viewer, the body of text looks as if it's in the usual place.

This little "advantage" has allowed my website to get into the top of the first page for a new selected keyword phrase in less than 1 month. I'm also ranking higher for the other pages within my website and all because of the design change through CSS.

It's been such a dramatic increase in traffic and search engine placement that I've added the service of re-writing websites in CSS with the purpose of forcing the body of text first for the search engines as part of my proposal fees.

In my honest opinion, it's the easiest, most logical first step towards optimizing websites.

If you haven't already done this to your website, don't wait. It's an excellent technique!


Sincerely,
Esther C. Kane
Eckweb Designs, Inc.
678.765.0120
Search Engine Optimization Services

Cool Tools

I receive so many questions about the types of tools that I use not only for Internet Marketing but also for business that I decided I should add a section to the newsletter about them. So, each month (or so) I'll try to add a new tool to this section. Of course, if you have any tools you would like to recommend, please let me know!

Avenue A | Razorfish Appoints Shiv Singh to Lead Global Social Media Efforts

Agency believes that Social Influence Marketing can transform the way customers purchase online

AUSTIN, Texas & NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Avenue A | Razorfish, one of the largest interactive services firms in the world, has appointed Shiv Singh as its director of Strategic Initiatives. Singh will lead the agency’s social media efforts, helping industry leaders like Carnival Cruise Lines, Levi Strauss & Co. and L’Oreal’s Garnier Fructis use social media tools to build their brands. Singh will help the agency introduce its clients to social influence marketing – or applying social media throughout a client’s entire marketing lifecycle to build stronger customer relationships. His role also includes developing strategic partnerships, creating thought leadership and encouraging experimentation with social media across the agency.

“Practically every client project we work on has some social media component,” said Darin Brown, chief strategy officer, Avenue A | Razorfish. “Shiv understands social media instinctively having participated, consulted and researched in the social space for several years. Naturally, he is the perfect choice to lead our efforts in social media and to help our clients better understand consumer needs, desires and behavioral patterns.”

Avenue A | Razorfish has long been a part of the social media phenomenon, having helped Carnival Cruise Lines introduce the travel industry’s first social media site CarnivalConnections.com, in 2006. Recent social media experiences include the recently concluded Levi’s® Project 501® Design Challenge, a unique marketing campaign that enabled consumers to submit their own clothing designs to a community of their peers to judge – and have the winning idea produced by Levi Strauss & Co. The agency also recently helped L’Oreal’s Garnier Fructis Style brand launch The Harry Situation Blog campaign for its men’s “Bold It” line disguised as 1980s popular television series.

“We’re only just beginning to understand how consumers are influencing each others’ purchasing decisions online and what role brands should play in this,” commented Singh. “The web has finally caught up with human behavior. It’s not about connecting people to information or to products anymore. It’s about connecting people to each other and enabling them to interact with brands and products online where they want to and how they want to. It’s not the destination that matters, it’s the conversation.”

Singh added that the Avenue A | Razorfish international network also possesses wide-ranging client experiences around the world and that employees will use Avenue A | Razorfish social media platforms, like the agency’s own wiki, to become stronger global social media practitioners of social influence marketing.

“We believe that using social media to build a stronger relationship with consumers will evolve beyond experimenting with a Facebook application or a MySpace page,” said Singh. “Successful marketers will embrace social influence marketing, and Avenue A | Razorfish intends to help them do that.”

Singh’s work history has given him a unique perspective and insight into the consumer wants and needs that continue to fuel the growth of social media. He also maintains a blog called Going Social Now, which covers all aspects of social media from the businesses and the applications to the users, behavioral patterns and cultural effects. He has been a speaker at conferences such as SXSW, the Direct Marketing Association’s Leader’s Forum and on the Social Computing Panel at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, CA. He has also published several articles and academic papers on social influence marketing, online community development, social media and collaboration; most recently, “Social Influence Marketing: Strategies & Tactics to Win Customers” and “Think Social Influence Marketing in 2008,” published in the agency’s 2008 Digital Outlook Report.

Previously Singh worked for nine years in the Boston, New York, San Francisco and London Avenue A | Razorfish offices. In 2005, he founded and led the agency’s Enterprise Solutions practice, which helps organizations empower their employees and partners with the information they need to do their jobs efficiently and effectively. He returned to Avenue A | Razorfish full time last fall, after having completed graduate research in social networks at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

About Avenue A | Razorfish

Avenue A | Razorfish is one of the largest interactive marketing and technology services agencies in the world. The company helps industry leaders such as Starwood Hotels, Kraft, Ford Motor Company and Carnival Cruise Lines use digital channels to acquire and service customers. Avenue A | Razorfish’s full suite of digital offerings includes online advertising, Web site design and development, email and search engine marketing, emerging media strategies, and enterprise portal development. Its award-winning client teams have a great understanding of customer needs and provide solutions through distinct business disciplines, which include: analytics, strategy, technology, media, creative design and user experience. Avenue A | Razorfish has offices in markets across the United States, and global operations in Australia, China, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom. Please visit www.avenuea-razorfish.com for more information.

Using an SEO Company vs. Hiring an In-House Expert:
The True Dollar Cost

It's a common question that companies who are considering hiring a search engine optimization company often face – is this something that we can do in-house?   More importantly, can we do this in-house and get the same results that an expert search engine optimization company would provide?

As this article will demonstrate, clearly the answer is "yes" to both questions.  However, as this article will also demonstrate, getting the types of results that an expert at search engine optimization can provide will cost you – often more than outsourcing.

For the purpose of this article, I'm ignoring the multitudes of companies that decide to dump the job on somebody already in their organization (usually an IT person who already has too much to do) rather than hiring a search engine optimization company.  It has been my experience that while some of these people eventually provide decent results, they are the exception.  More often than not, the project never leaves the ground, or the effort is halfhearted at best.  In a worst case scenario, your internal person may embrace tactics that no expert search engine optimization company would ever use because they can put your site at risk of penalization or outright removal from the engine indexes.

My company often works with firms after they have used non-expert internal talent to optimize their website, and most of the time we are actually doing more work because much of what has been done is ineffective or dangerous. We have to take everything apart and put it all back together, often while making requests to the search engines to have penalties lifted.

The real goal of this article, however, is to assume that a business has decided to embark on a search engine optimization campaign, and that it is also committed to using a proven expert in search engine optimization.  The choice then is simple - does the business hire an experienced resource to work in-house or should it instead go with an outsourced search engine optimization company?

A recent study by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, published in the January 2008 edition of DM News ("Healthy SEM Salaries Rule: SEMPO Survey"), points out that experience in search engine marketing carries a high price tag.  For instance, if you were looking to hire someone with more than five years of experience in search engine marketing, you could expect to pay between $100,000 and $200,000 per year.  For somebody with experience but not five or more years, you can expect to pay anywhere from $60,000 to $100,000 per year.

If nothing else, these real world figures should convince discerning companies that expert search engine optimization and marketing is not something that you should dump off on an existing employee without any experience in the field.  The free market has determined that expert search engine optimization and marketing is worth at least $60,000 per year for a full time position, and up to $200,000 per year.

On the other hand, most reputable search agencies have many more than five years of collective experience in the search engine marketing industry.  In addition, a high percentage of these agencies offer SEO services that cost considerably less than $60,000 per year, to say nothing of $200,000 per year.  It should also be noted that this figure neglects to include any of the additional costs associated with hiring – benefits, training, and so on.  In addition, an expert search engine optimization company will have a broad range of sites from which to draw knowledge, while your in-house expert will likely only have one, or a handful at best.

To be fair, there are certain advantages to hiring an in-house expert.  First of all, experts will have their feet to the fire, so to speak.  A search engine optimization company isn't likely to go out of business if it underperforms on your site, but an in-house expert in search engine optimization is likely to lose his or her job.  It's also much easier to get the whole team together to discuss your SEO initiatives at any time you choose when you are working with someone in-house. And hey, when you're paying someone $200,000 per year, you can be pretty certain that you're going to get top-notch work. But can an expert search engine optimization company give you that same level of work for a lot less money? Probably.

Conclusion

There are many compelling reasons why your business should hire an expert search engine optimization company rather than bring in an SEO expert internally or simply give the SEO project to an existing team member. Financially, it makes sense. But more so, you're more likely to get the results over the short and long term with an outsourced company for all of the reasons noted above. I'm not saying you have to hire an SEO company – at first. I'm saying eventually you'll probably want to.

About the author:
Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue, which was recently named the number one search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld. Scott has contributed content to many publications including Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DS Waters, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Visit MediumBlue.com to request a custom SEO guarantee based on your goals and your data.

Original Article at WebProNews

Not Your Usual Marketing Tips

Visit Joel's new blog!

Joel Kweskin
JDK Marketing Communications Management
704.846.4835, office
704.575.8850, cell
704.841.2746, fax
www.jdkmarketing.biz

Girls and young woman are now the most prolific web users

The internet began as an almost exclusively male preserve. Now young women, from primary school age upwards, are now making it their own

When 12-year-old Clover Reshad gets home from school, she will have something to eat and say hello to her dog Hector. She might shout at her annoying brother and watch some television, then she will head upstairs to her bedroom to do her homework. This is when the computer goes on.

“I use the computer a lot. At least a couple of days a week to help with my homework and I keep an eye on [the social networking sites] Bebo and Facebook every day to see who’s on it,” she said. “I’ll check shops to see if I can buy things I want cheaper online or to make sure they have something in my size.

“I MSN [instant message] my friends. The computer also makes it easy to stay in touch with my dad because he lives in Los Angeles.”

Reshad sees her activity as no different from using a mobile phone or television. It is intrinsic to her life and friendships. “There are a few girls at school who don’t use Bebo and Facebook but it’s not because they don’t want to - it’s because their parents won’t let them,” she said. “I do feel sorry for them.”

Reshad’s activity in her bedroom in Godalming, Surrey, echoes that of millions of girls around the world. New research suggests it is time to rethink the stereotypical net user as a pasty-faced male geek in Joe 90 specs, or the furtive spotty teen looking for zeppelin breasts online. The most prolific net users are now girls and young women.

A recent study by the Pew Internet Project in America on teens in social media found that blogging growth among teenagers is almost entirely fuelled by girls, whom it describe as a new breed of “super-communicators”. Some 35% of girls, compared with 20% of boys, have blogs; 32% of girls have their own websites, against 22% of boys.

Girls have embraced social networking sites on a massive scale, with 70% of American girls aged 15-17 having built and regularly worked on a profile page on websites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook, as opposed to 57% of boys of the same age.

John Horrigan of the Pew Internet Project says these figures are likely to be echoed throughout the West. “The internet is a very expressive medium and you’re looking at times in a girl’s life when they are very socially expressive; the internet, and social networking particularly, enables that need,” he said.

Figures from the UK back up Horrigan’s hunch. A survey done by Hitwise, an internet research company, in January found that almost 55% of all British users of social networking websites were women. Similar research by Nielsen Online shows that women aged 18-24 account for 17% of all users of the social sites, while men in the same age group account for 12%.

What has caused a phenomenon that one academic has hailed as “the feminisation of the internet”? Are girls really the new cyberpioneers? THERE is widespread agreement that the prime driver behind the enthusiastic uptake of the internet by young girls is their desire to gossip. Activity that used to take place on the telephone, to the frustration of many parents who were often hit with painful phone bills, now happens online.

“If you look at young girls, they do more communicating than young boys and that’s what they are doing on the web,” said Professor Anthony White, a lecturer in the school of computing science at Middlesex University. “It’s just natural for them.”

Few would disagree. Yet to stereotype these girls’ activity as all gossip and fluff would be unfair.

Anna McCleary is the editor of Slink, the BBC’s popular website for 13 to 16-year-old girls which receives 1m hits a day. She is constantly surprised by what catches her readers’ attention.

“I don’t dare to assume anything about the girls that visit the site,” she said. “Their interests are amazingly diverse – from dinosaurs to the Foals [a popular indie band]. We’ve had 1,000 unsolicited responses to a piece on first-choice schools in the past three days alone.

“What I do know is that we are part of their real lives.”

In this there is an observable difference between the sexes. Even at 12 Reshad has noticed it.

“Girls use the internet for gossiping and finding things out about friends and people you know. Boys use it more for useful things like games,” she said.

Matthew Bagwell edits a website for girls called My Kinda Place and Monkey Slum, a similar magazine site aimed at teenage boys.

“Girls consume online very differently to boys,” he said. “Monkey Slum forums are just dead; on My Kinda Place the forums are extremely popular. Girls will browse, take a real journey around the site. Social networking has really captured a young female audience.

“I put this down to girls being open to communicating, having longer attention spans and more widespread interests. We have to be inventive and diverse in our female content. Boys are easier, they will download pictures from galleries, viral ads and videos, but they’re in and out again.”

Indeed, the YouTube phenomenon, where users share video material, is still used more by boys than girls – the Pew report found that they were twice as likely to post videos online.

Yet women are starting slowly to make inroads. One of the top 50 most popular contributors to YouTube is Bryony Matthewman, 24, the British artist and graphic designer who is better known to her millions of fans as Paperlilies. Her video sketches of impressions of damaged celebrity fodder such as Amy Winehouse and Britney Spears have brought a celebrated female face to the site.

“It is still quite awkward to admit to making videos online as a woman,” said Matthewman.

“People’s immediate thought of a girl in an online video is ‘porn!’ so it’s taking a while to get away from that stereotype.”

However, stereotypes are being thrown away every day in different digital areas. A recent poll by Game-Vision showed that 30% more women bought computer games in the six months to July 31, 2007, than in the same period in 2006. The survey also found that there were more female owners of Nin-tendo’s handheld DS console in the UK than men (54% against 46%).

Blogging used to be the preserve of men with obsessive interests in particular subjects, notably sport, cars and politics, but young women are increasingly entering this arena.

Kelly Needham, 21, a student in Newcastle, started posting her thoughts online in her teens. She said that for her, as for many other young women, the blog was a means of getting her opinions heard more easily. “It’s a way of publishing who you are. In the real world a lot of people are inhibited. They can be more confident online with their opinions,” she said.

“My personal blog gave me a lot more of a chance to express myself. It was the most freedom I ever had.” YET while they are becoming the primary consumers and producers of the internet world, young women are not yet translating this dominance into financial gains.

“The majority of people behind the web, who programme sites and create the new technologies, tend to be men for whatever reason,” said Matthewman. “Those are the people at the back end of the web, who control it and who stand to make money from it. More women may be using it now but they aren’t making the money from it.”

There are, of course, exceptions. In Britain, Martha Lane Fox, the co-founder of Lastminute.com, and Natalie Massenet, who set up the popular shopping site Net-a-Porter, have both become multi-million-aires through their web-savvyness. But many new internet opportunities in the current so-called Web 2.0 era require real IT expertise and in this area women still lag behind their male contemporaries.

Figures for female enrolment in IT degree courses remain low. While not as pitiful as admissions for engineering, in the 2005-6 academic year there were 75,360 British male home students on computing courses at university, compared with 23,370 women, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency.

This is a figure that depresses Sarah Blow, a 26-year-old software engineer who is better known for her popular Girly Geekdom website and blog.

“Even though both my parents worked in IT I was told to look at marketing and law by my school careers adviser,” she said. “[But] the message is slowly getting across to girls that the industry isn’t all about that clapped-out stereotype of geeky guys with glasses.”

Among the youngest girls there are signs that the message is working. A recent survey by Tesco, which has a voucher scheme to provide computers for schools, found that from as early as seven years old, girls are beating boys when it comes to using computers. The research found that 44% of girls aged 7-16 were able to create a networking profile on the internet compared with 35% of boys; and 52% of girls knew how to download photographs from the internet, compared with 44% of boys.

On the computer courses that he teaches at Middlesex University, White says that women are beginning to outperform men.

“In actual fact [the courses] are oriented towards what women like doing. They just don’t know that before they enrol. The last time I checked the figures, female students were doing better than men in the courses,” he said.

He also noted that the proportion of female student numbers was improving as well. “There would not have been any female students doing computing 20-30 years ago,” he said. WITH a new generation of young women who have grown up with computers these figures will surely continue to rise. Yet still there are entrenched attitudes to be overcome.

Back upstairs in Reshad’s bedroom she is giving her Bebo page another makeover and uploading more photographs for her father to check out in LA. She says she feels comfortable with technology.

“I understand a lot about computers because I spend a lot of time on them,” she said.

However, this does not translate into an ambition to generate the software that is so essential to her life: “Girls are creative, they are more into history, English and art – it’s the boys who are more into the techie things.”

Google Shopping

Here's another free advertising tool from Google.

It's Google's Base program which is their list of products being sold through the Internet.

If you go to Google and look at the top left of their site you'll see links to "Web", "Images", "Maps", "News", "Shopping", etc. Go ahead and click on the "Shopping" link and you'll be taken to their Google Base program.

Type in a product, "bath towels", with or without the quotes. You'll then receive a list of websites that are marketing their products through Google Base.

It costs nothing to get onto this search engine. Well, it doesn't cost any money, it may cost you some time, but no money.

If you haven't already signed up for a Google account, do so and then sign up for the Google Base program. Create your spread sheet of products and submit that spreadsheet to Google weekly. That's how you work the Google Base program.

If you don't have time to do this work, contact your SEO provider and they will do it for you. Eckweb Designs creates the spreadsheet for a fee of $51.00 per 30 products and we maintain the entire account for a mere $10.00/month. That means we submit the spreadsheet to Google weekly and if there are any errors on the spreadsheet we make the necessary corrections.

As a shopper, it's an invaluable tool when shopping on the Internet.

It's The Little Things That Count

A few months ago, I got a call from a web designer about working on a website for a Lee County Florida Attorney. The website owner wanted to market the website and the design company, PickMeAndMoore wanted to incorporate as much SEO into the design as possible.

So, we worked together to create the website and as it turns out, with great success.

It's only been a few months and the website is already bringing in so much business for the website owner that he has referred several other clients to us. Now that's a testimonial!

So, what did we do?

1) PickMeAndMoore made sure to allow me to work on the keyword research before she began creating the website pages. Why? Because once the keyword phrases were chosen then she had a plan on what to name the pages and how to structure the website.

2) PickMeAndMoore also made sure to create the website pages using CSS which allowed them to create extremely clean and 100% validated coding AND, to create a navigation menu which "appears" to be on the top left corner of the website where in reality, it is actually sitting near the bottom of the pages. The positioning tricks by CSS allow the body of text to be read FIRST by the search engines. This, in my opinion, is extremely helpful in ranking higher in the search engines.

3) The website was created with a balanced combination of SEO and web design aspects so that the website is not only visually appealing but also technically appealing to the search engines. This website owner is not just getting traffic, he's getting business. Which means that the words and the design on his website are not only bringing in visitors, but they are converting them to customers. This is the best of both worlds.

4) PickMeAndMoore and I continue to work together with the website owner to research more keyword phrases and add more content to the website. At this point, there is no need to "convince" him of the benefit of the website. His investment has been returned many fold.

So, if you're a website designer and you want your customers to come back for more and to refer others to you regularly and enthusiastically, hook up with a reliable SEO firm. You and your clients will never look back!

Esther C. Kane
Eckweb Designs, Inc.
Small Business SEO Services