Cobra and Brass Monkey.  Those two items may not mean much to most of you. In just the last 2 weeks, the world has lost a couple great people (in my eyes, anyway). I have never driven a Cobra, but I still admire Carroll Shelby for creating something that is still entertaining to watch and listen to. Speaking of listening…I’ve always been a Beastie Boys fan, and and the recent passing of MCA at age 47 hit me a little hard.  It’s time to get ill with this Sabotage tribute. Well done lads.

Okay, now we can move on…

An online marketing campaign is a necessity these days, oftentimes making it crucial to hire an effective Internet marketing company to help your business achieve the online results you are looking for. Since the advent of the World Wide Web, there have been many new evolutions to online marketing. No surprisingly, there are many Internet marketing companies that can show you the ropes about the industry so that you can capitalize with your online venture.

There is a wide variety of items that a quality Internet marketing company can provide to your business. One of the main sources of online marketing is in search engine optimization, commonly referred to as SEO. This process simply refers to the act of ensuring that your website appears in the top of the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. This is achieved by submitting articles and keyword phrases all over the Internet because the more links that your website has on the web, the higher your search engine ranking will be. Since most customers will choose to use the services of a company that is among the top ten in the search engines, SEO can work wonders for your online efforts.

However, an Internet marketing company also has many other services that can benefit your business. Many of these particular companies also provide website design and graphic design services that will make your website much more appealing to the public. If you search hard enough, you will be able to find a quality company that will produce your website from the ground up and then use SEO to ensure that your site gets the recognition it deserves.

Apart from SEO and graphic design work, there are marketing companies that can also help your business with an ever expanding array of services. Press release marketing has become a very wide-reaching online service that can create thousands of visitors to your site while continuously boosting your online search engine potential. A prominent Internet marketing company will be able to submit your press release to thousands of established syndication outlets and thousands of directories so that countless websites can pick them up and place them on their sites.

Blogs, which is a shortened term for web logs, is another great way to ensure maximum return on your investment with an Internet marketing company. You can have search engine optimized blogs that use the articles that were previously written for your online marketing campaign. Some companies will simply write the blog for you. However, many companies will not only write the blog for you but also maximize it to incredible search engine potential. This will increase the readership of your blog, in order to maximize both your online potential as well as your customer base.

The biggest part of most any Internet marketing companies is article marketing. This has proved to be the single most effective way of keyword optimization that has come available in recent years. Article marketing encompasses a wide array of services. Keyword research, analysis, submissions to syndications and custom articles are just a few of the things that a successful Internet marketing company can offer you. The Internet has become perhaps the fastest, cheapest and most effective way to advertise your business.

Now that you know what an effective internet marketing company has to offer, we hope you will be encouraged to contact Atlanta marketing firm Grafique with any internet, branding or graphic design questions you may have.

Green Elephant, LLC came to us looking for a website promoting their Touch Screen Hearing Kiosk product. We began by customizing a WordPress theme that we thought would be the perfect fit for what they are trying to accomplish.Now that everything is in place, the SEO fun begins. Primary search term being ‘free hearing test‘.

The Touch Screen Hearing Kiosks provide the following:

• Reach new patients earlier in earlier stages of their hearing loss
• Build awareness about hearing loss, hearing solutions, as well as your services
• Builds a qualified database of potentially high-value clients and patients
• Offers the lowest client acquisition costs of any marketing strategy available to hearing care providers

Free Hearing Test

We have been busy the past couple months working with a wonderful non-profit organization. Men Stopping Violence works locally, nationally, and internationally to dismantle belief systems, social structures, and institutional practices that oppress women and children and dehumanize men themselves. They came to us with the vision of improving the visual appeal and readability of their website which was accomplished through the use of a sleeker, more contemporary layout and more inviting and softer colors. Because the original design was not built on a CMS platform, updating or adding new information was no easy task.

Before:

After:

With updating their website to WordPress, we made it easy for them to post news, articles, upcoming training seminars or anything else that comes their way.

We think the updated design speaks for itself. What do you think?

Promoting your small business on the internet is crucial in today’s world. The entrepreneur who ignores this gold mine of potential opportunity does so at his or her own peril. There is too much to be gained through marketing on the internet, and little to be lost. If your company is internet based to begin with, this is a no-brainer, of course. But things are rapidly changing on the Web, and those marketing strategies that worked a few years ago may not work as well today. Here are a few things you can do to expose your business to potential new customers that work today, but may not in a few years.

SEO. Search engine optimization.

For the internet entrepreneur who wants their website to be a success, this is the first step toward ensuring that success. Unless you have unlimited funds with which to advertise your product, this is a step you cannot afford to skip. Optimizing your website is the equivalent of building your brick-and-mortar store in a major shopping district as opposed to halfway down a dirt road with an old rusty sign pointing in the other direction. Its importance cannot be overstated. There are many facets to SEO, and not enough room in this article to get into them. Fortunately, few topics have been as exhaustively written about. Do a Google search of your own, and you will find plenty to read.

Pay Per Click.

This is another fine way to get your internet business off and running. This service is offered by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, to name a few. With Google AdWords, you’re going to have the most potential traffic, but you may also have the most competition for the best keywords. What does this mean? Well, AdWords (and the others) work by letting you create an advertisement (usually a headline and a couple of sentences). You then must choose the keywords that will activate your ad. Then you place a bid on how much you’re willing to pay per click of your ad, depending on each keyword. It all sounds a lot more confusing than it is. The benefit of this type of advertising (as opposed to, say, banner advertising), is you only pay when you have been ensured of a visitor. Of course, what you do with that visitor is up to you and your own marketing skills.

Articles and inbound links.

Next to SEO, this is the most powerful section of strategy for the up and coming internet business owner. In order to move up in the search engine rankings, you must have incoming links (backlinks, as they’re called in the SEO world). When the search engines see a website with a lot of natural inbound links, they begin to see the website as an authority on whatever subject the site is about. Thus, the site’s ranking begins to improve. There are many ways to go about getting backlinks, but one of the best ways is through writing articles. There are article “farms” on the internet, which host your articles for free and then sell them or give them away to other website owners, who are hungry for content. This benefits you because at the end of the article you will have included your name and a link to your website. Every time someone grabs your article to put on their website, you get another important link.

There are a million successful strategies for marketing on the internet, but these are the three building blocks. Go and research them, and your business will be the better for it.

Fact: Your website needs search engine optimization (SEO) to help your website achieve more.

Many try and go it alone in the search engine optimization process and, in the majority of cases, they never see the results they would have achieved if they had enlisted the services of a professional SEO firm Atlanta consultant.

If you are seriously looking at doing your own website optimization, you need to ask yourself the following questions:

1. How precious is your time?

As a business owner your time is very precious and likely better spent on actually conducting your business rather than constantly tending to your website. Many small businesses believe that they will save money by optimizing their own website but this rarely turns out to be the case. Search engine optimization is a time consuming and complex process and should not be underestimated, and after all if you are investing all of this time trying to be a seo consultant, who’s running your business?

2. Do you have the skills?

Optimizing a website is a complicated process and not something that can just be picked up and learned in 5 minutes. There are hundreds of criteria that the search engines will use to analyze websites and a good SEO consultant will be familiar with all of them.

3. Can you get it right?

This is where most DIY’ers get it wrong… there are certain pitfalls that must be avoided at all costs. If you don’t know what you are doing, then your website can go from hero to zero or worse yet… end up banned from the search engines.

4. Are you biased?

Most website owners are understandably biased and believe they know best when it comes to their website. This often leads to many problems including the age old problem of not being able to see the forest for the trees. One of the main issues comes when choosing keywords as the keywords people generally search for are not typically the keywords website owners believe them to be. An SEO consultant knows this and will ensure the right keywords are used and not ignored.

5. Can you keep it up?

Search engine optimization is an ongoing process of testing, measuring and making constant adjustments. It is not something that can be done once and left alone so you need to ensure you are in it for the long term. The bottom line is if you are serious about your business and your search marketing campaign then you need an experienced Atlanta SEO company.

Have you ever wondered how companies like McDonalds, Coca-cola, Microsoft, Apple, Intel, Motorola, Sony and UPS came up with their names? Just think, if these companies have some lame or forgettable brand name, would they be as big as they are now? Every company starts out by thinking of a name. A law firm, for example, commonly uses the names of its associates, like Smith, Johnson and Brown Law Firm. The name of a woman’s specialty shop should be something sensual and exciting, like Victoria’s Secret or Bare Essentials. A clothing line should boast the popular designer’s name. Corporate branding does not just involve the company name. It also includes the corporate logo design and the overall company image. More importantly, it conveys your corporate identity. When you think of computers, Microsoft comes to mind. Instead of photocopier, you think of Xerox. Toothpaste equals Colgate. Coming up with the perfect brand name that will stick to the consumer’s mind is as important as coming up with the finances to start a company – be it big or small.

1. First Impressions Last

Remember the days of beige PCs, Netscape, Geocities and Tripod?

The mid-late 1990s were the playful childhood of the worldwide web, a time of great expectations for the future and pretty low standards for the present. Those were the days when doing a web search meant poring through several pages of listings rather than glancing at the first three results–but at least relatively few of those websites were unabashedly profit-driven.

Hallmarks of 1990s Atlanta Web Design

Of course, when someone says that a website looks like it came from 1996, it’s no compliment. You start to imagine loud background images, and little “email me” mailboxes with letters going in and out in an endless loop. Amateurish, silly, unprofessional, conceited, and unusable are all adjectives that pretty well describe how most websites were made just ten years ago.

Why were websites so bad back then?

Knowledge. Few people knew how to build a good website back then, before authorities like Jakob Nielsen starting evangelizing their studies of web user behavior.

Difficulty. In those days, there weren’t abundant software and templates that could produce a visually pleasing, easy-to-use website in 10 minutes. Instead, you either hand-coded your site in Notepad or used FrontPage.

Giddiness. When a new toy came out, whether it was JavaScript, Java, Frames, animated Gifs, or Flash, it was simply crammed into an already overstuffed toy box of a website, regardless of whether it served any purpose.

Browsing through the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine, it’s hard not to feel a twinge of nostalgia for a simpler time when we were all beginners at this. Still, one of the best reasons for looking at 90s website design is to avoid repeating history’s web design mistakes. This would be a useful exercise for the tragic number of today’s personal homepages and even small business websites that are accidentally retro.

Splash Pages

Sometime around 1998, websites all over the internet discovered Flash, the software that allowed for easy animation of images on a website. Suddenly you could no longer visit half the pages on the web without sitting through at least thirty seconds of a logo revolving, glinting, sliding, or bouncing across the screen.

Flash “splash pages,” as these opening animations were called, became the internet’s version of vacation pictures. Everyone loved to display Flash on their site, and everyone hated to have to sit through someone else’s Flash presentation.

Of all the thousands of splash pages made in the 1990s and the few still made today, hardly any ever communicated any useful information or provided any entertainment. They were monuments to the egos of the websites’ owners. Still, today, when so many business website owners are working so hard to wring every last bit of effectiveness out of their sites, it’s almost charming to think of a business owner actually putting ego well ahead of the profit to have been derived from all the visitors who hit the “back” button rather than sit through an animated logo.

Text Troubles

“Welcome toÖ” Every single website homepage in 1996 had to have the word “welcome” somewhere, often in the largest headline. After all, isn’t saying “welcome” more vital than saying what the web page is all about in the first place?

Background images. Remember all those people who had their kids’ pictures tiled in the background of every page? Remember how much fun it was trying to guess what the words were in the sections where the font color and the color of the image were the same?

Dark background, light text. My favorite was orange font on purple background, though the ubiquitous yellow white text on blue, green or red was nice, too. Of course, anyone who will make their text harder to read with a silly gimmick is just paying you the courtesy of letting you know they couldn’t possibly have written anything worth reading.

Entire paragraphs of text centered. After all, haven’t millennia of flush-left margins just made our eyes lazy?

“This Site Is Best Viewed in Netscape 4.666, 1,000×3300 resolution.” It was always so cute when site owners actually imagined anyone but their mothers would care enough to change their browser set up to look at some random person’s website.

All-image no-text publishing. Some of the worst websites would actually do the world the service of putting all their text in image format so that no search engine would ever find them. What sacrifice!

Hyperactive Pages

TV-envy was a common psychological malady in 1990s web design. Since streaming video and even Flash were still in their infancy, web designers settled for simply making the elements on their pages move like Mexican jumping beans.

Animated Gifs

In 1996, just before the dawn of Flash, animated gifs were in full swing, dancing, sliding, and scrolling their way across the retinas of web surfers trying to read the text on the page.

Scrolling Text

Just in case you were having a too easy time tuning out all the dancing graphics on the page, an ambitious mid-1990s web designer had a simple but powerful trick for giving you a headache: scrolling text. Through the magic of JavaScript, website owners could achieve the perfect combination of too fast to read comfortably and too slow to read quickly.

For a while, a business owner could even separate the serious from the wannabe prospects based just on how (un)professional their business websites looked. Sadly, the development of template-based website authoring software means that even someone with no taste or sense whatsoever can make websites that look as good as the most biggest-budget design of five years ago.

Of course, there are still some websites whose owners seem to be trying to spark a resurgence in animated gifs, background images, and ugly text. ‘ll just have to trust that everyone is laughing with them, not at them.

To everything there is a season. That thought was driven home last weekend when it was decided to take a quick trip up the road to visit the nearby apple orchard and stock up some local flavor, as it were. This has become a traditional pilgrimage to usher in the autumnal season and this year the weather was cooperating (or conspiring) to make the “short” trip a memorable one. I am not naive… I knew there would be crowds. I was, however, awestruck at the shuffling, corpulent horde that had descended on the orchard’s shop to clear the shelves of apple bread, fried pies and cinnamon-apple donuts. To be fair, there were some actual apples being purchased with the promised intentions of fresh apple pie or “cook ‘em up like them fried apples at the Cracker Barrel”

Where is this going? Well, it occurred to me that few of these folks had ventured north from Atlanta because of any grand internet marketing program. Most of them came out simply because it is fall, the weather was fine and the apples are in season.

Steve Jobs passed away today at age 56. Fortune looks back at how he changed the way we think about and use technology forever, putting his own stamp on everything from the personal computer to the music industry.

Grafique  |  Atlanta web design

It’s easy to get complacent and do nothing… to simply stand there and let things go how they will.  Think of it like just riding the escalator (we won’t EVEN get into how you should be taking the stairs). Sure, you will get to the next level eventually, but you will get there much faster if you start moving!

So get a move on. Let Atlanta internet marketing firm Grafique help you get your business headed in the right direction.