Just a Few Days to Secure Online Domination

The last few places at our Online Domination Workshop will probably be snapped up this week, especially as we'll be advertising more widely over the next few days.

That means, if you want to learn how online domination works for your business and how to take control of your market with highly cost-effective (mostly free) methods, you need to book your place right away.

Controlling your market is so much more than merely advertising. Controlling your market means you get seen and noticed by your potential customers far more than any of your competitors do, including the big spenders. All you have to do then is deliver the goods, and we know you can do that.

When you have control of your market your biggest challenge could be keeping up with the demand for your goods or services. Not a bad problem to have!

Learn all about Online Domination (that's Search Engine Domination plus a bit more...) at our workshop on 9th June at The Self Centre in Kempson Way, Bury St Edmunds.

You can book directly through our agents, Eventbrite, or via our Cinnamon Edge website.

Your Online Domination might be just days away...

Roy

Google Places' Latest Guidelines

Google Places has seen some 'interesting' changes lately, as you'll see from previous posts. So here, for your information and straight from the horse's mouth, are Google's latest guidelines (read 'rules') for Google Places:

Your Google Places Account
Ownership: Only business owners or authorized representatives may verify their business listings on Google Places.

Account Email Address: Use a shared business email account, if multiple users will be updating your business listing. If possible, use an email account under your business domain. For example, if your business website is www.google.com, a matching email address would be you@google.com.

Your Business Listing
Business Name: Represent your business exactly as it appears in the offline world.

Do not include marketing taglines in your business name.
Do not include phone numbers or URLs in the business name field, unless they are part of your business name.
Do not attempt to manipulate search results by adding extraneous keywords or a description of your business in the business name field.

Business Location: Use a precise, accurate address to describe your business location.

Do not create listings at locations where the business does not physically exist. P.O. Boxes are not considered accurate physical locations. Listings submitted with P.O. Box addresses will be removed.
Use the precise address for the business in place of broad city names or cross-streets.
Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts.
Businesses that operate in a service area, as opposed to a single location, should not create a listing for every city they service. Businesses that operate in a service area should create one listing for the central office or location and designate service areas. Learn how to add service areas to your listing.
Businesses with multiple specializations, such as law firms and doctors, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties. You may create one listing per practitioner, and one listing for the office.
Do not include information in address lines that does not pertain your business’s physical location (e.g. URLs, keywords).

Website & Phone: Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible, and provide one website that represents your individual business location.

Use a local phone number instead of a call center number whenever possible.
Do not provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or “refer” users to landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.

Categories: Provide at least one category from the suggestions provided in the form as you type. Aim for categories that are specific, but brief.

Categories should say what your business is (e.g. Hospital), not on what it does (e.g. Vaccinations) or things it sells (e.g. Sony products or printer paper). This information can be added in your description or as custom attributes.
Categories should not contain location-based information (for example, Dog Walker Los Angeles is not permitted).
Only one category is permitted per entry field. Do not “stuff” entry fields with multiple categories.

Custom Attributes & Description: Use the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing. Learn more about acceptable custom attributes.

Other Items of Note
Ineligible Business Models: Only businesses that make in-person contact with customers qualify for a Google Places listing.
Businesses that are under construction or that have not yet opened to the public are not eligible for a listing on Google Places.
Rental properties, such as vacation homes or vacant apartments, are not eligible for a listing on Google Places. Create a listing for the central office that processes the rentals, rather than the individual rental properties. If you'd like, you can then add your real estate properties to Google Maps so that they are available on our Real Estate layer.

Disclaimer: Google reserves the right to suspend access to Google Places or other Google Services to individuals or businesses that violate these guidelines, and may work with law enforcement in the event that the violation is unlawful.

So there you have it. The guidelines aren't actually that complex or difficult to comply with, but we are getting reports of people adjusting their listings to meet the new guidelines and being penalised as a result - listings are being demoted or are disappearing altogether.

I suggest you stick rigidly to the new guidelines for any new listings you create (and use a new account for each listing). Meanwhile, you might want to watch and wait as we are with any existing listings - I'll let you know how that works out!

Roy

PS. There's more about Google Places Anomalies on our Marketing Manual Blog

The Importance of Link Building For Your Website

Hello again

While it’s usually very important to optimise your website for the key phrases your clients use, only part of that optimisation can take place on the website itself.

On site optimisation can also help to make PPC campaigns more cost-effective, but the most important part of search engine optimisation is incoming links from other websites. That means a link building campaign is crucially important for your website if you want people to find it on the first page or two of the search engine results.

Search engines like Google use the number and quality of inbound links to a site as an indication of the authority or value of that site. If lots of other sites link to a particular website, the theory goes, that site must be important or useful.

Also, the value of inbound links depends on the ‘authority’ of the website they come from and whether the links are ‘follow’ or ‘no follow’ links. A lot of websites that seem to offer good back-linking opportunities actually have ‘no follow’ links that don’t really add much ‘link juice’, as it’s known, to your website.

A ‘no follow’ link is one where the search engine spiders are actively instructed by the coding in the link not to follow the link (for example, to your site), so your site doesn’t gain the extra authority that inbound links would give it.

For example, links from YouTube are now mostly ‘no follow’, and most blogs and WordPress-based websites are ‘no follow’ by default.

Many people, even the website and blog owners themselves, aren’t aware of that and might offer to exchange links with you in all good faith. Others will have modified the coding of their website so that links from them are worth getting, and these are the ones you should consider getting links from.

Other good sites for linking are directories, news release and article sharing websites, some video sites, forums, and popular blogs where the links are of the ‘follow’ type. How you add your links will vary with each type of website.

Tracking down these worthwhile sites and building links from them all can be very time-consuming and even tedious, but it’s very important to the wellbeing of your own website.

Finally, remember that the search engines are trying to give human viewers the best possible experience, so to satisfy the search engines your link building strategy needs to look as natural as possible. That means you need to build links steadily and not all at once, and you need to keep building new backlinks to your site throughout its life.

Old links become ‘stale’ or even disappear as the other sites are updated, so an ongoing strategy of continuing link building and refreshment is also needed to keep your site as high in the search engine results as possible.

Roy

Online Marketing Tip Helps a Bury St Edmunds Business

A recent module of our online marketing course dealt with the issue of getting indexed by Google.

Google themselves say there's little point now in submitting your site for indexing and they'll get to your site eventually. That's true, but with millions of new sites being built every month, you could be waiting a while.

One local business owner couldn't find his site on Google and wondered what was wrong. When he typed the address into the address window his site came up, no problem. But when he typed it into the search window, Google came back with 'Page not found'.

One thing you can rely on Google to do is visit established and popular sites, like social media and bookmarking sites. When they visit, they tend to follow the links. So a good way to get Google to visit your site and index it is to create backlinks from some of these sites.

I posted a link to his site Bouches Bonanza on Digg. Within an hour, Google had indexed his site. The site's not well optimised and it's not likely to reach page one, but at least you can find it now.

Roy

Online Marketing Demo in Bury St Edmunds

We're currently running a one-week demonstration of some basic online marketing techniques for some of our fellow business owners in Bury St Edmunds.

Consisting of a squeeze page with an ebook incentive to sign up, an OTO and some follow up emails, the simple test is still proving confusing for some newcomers.

It's a reminder to us that what we now find familiar and obvious was once new and maybe even a bit scary - a reminder that what we think of as straightforward Internet marketing is something a lot of business owners still need help with.

Email list building and marketing is just one of the many tools the Internet makes available to businesses. We can cover them all, but our experience here confirms why we need to label ourselves as 'consultants and trainers': online marketing in Bury St Edmunds is almost as much about education as it is about providing the services.

Roy

Busy Times at Cinnamon Edge

While Roy was dreaming of far off lands and offering local companies a great opportunity for loads of cheap publicity on his Be stronger Tomorrow blog, Jacqui has been busily updating the website.

There will be a totally new version of the site soon, but you can still grab the first of several free ebooks from the existing site at http://www.cinnamonedge.co.uk

Roy's trip is a bike ride from Paris to Venice, which he'll be doing in September, and you can find out more about that, and the opportunities for sponsorship, at Be Stronger Tomorrow, his blog about cycling and life.

Meanwhile, part six of the online marketing course has some surprising news about changes in Google and how they affect your website's search engine optimisation. That's on the Marketing Manual blog. If you're one of our clients for online marketing in Bury St Edmunds, you can relax - we've got it covered!

Finally, on our remaining blog, for Niche Seminar Secrets, you'll see some useful videos about public speaking for your business, from Joanna Martin.

Oh, and we'll be doing a ten-minute presentation on Friday, for the Pay it Forward networking group. We'll prepare for that in our spare time!

Roy and Jacqui
Online marketing in Bury St Edmunds with Cinnamon Edge.

Online Marketing and SEO Services

Visitors to our online Marketing Manual blog will hopefully have found the recent posts useful and informative, whether they hail from Bury St Edmunds or beyond.

So far, we've covered keyword research, the essentials of website content and starting a blog. This amounts to the beginnings of search engine optimisation, or SEO, and as a company we of course offer SEO services to our clients.

So, whether you have a website and no visitors or you have no website at all, your first priority if you want to make proper use of free online marketing is to make sure you have an effective website and visitors coming to see it.

The selection of a target keyword phrase is the first essential step with SEO, but the continued, consistent use of that phrase and related terms is the key to making it work for you in the longer term.

Part four of the course will appear soon, but meanwhile you can get up to speed with parts one to three, at http://marketing-manual.blogspot.com/.

Roy

Online Marketing Tips

If you've been following our recent test for online marketing in Bury St Edmunds you'll know we had amazing success with the trial - bagging all ten spots on page one of Google.

So we know how online marketing works. We also know you might like to do it yourself and a bit of free advice won't go amiss.

That's why we're running a series of articles on our Marketing Manual blog explaining the basics and some of the finer points of online marketing for your business.

So if you like the idea of promoting your business effectively online for minimal expense, using mainly free resources, head over to our Marketing Manual blog.

Roy