Customized Web Design Makes Better Business Impression

Written on 11/25/2010 07:16:00 PM by Martha Ballesteros

A customized site gives the image of yourself or your business. It showcases proper and relevant content matched with well-thought and creative web design.

Customizing your site or blog makes it stand out because its aesthetic uniqueness. For business sites, it gives your company an identity in the corporate world. Customized sites make the visitor feel that you have put time and effort to it and makes them browse through it to find more about you, what you have to offer, and other interesting features.

For business sites or blogs, graphics or pictures also play a major role to project your company's work. Most site visitors give little time and, most of the time avoid, reading all the written content and focus on figures or visual representations. Relevant graphics will give the proper idea about your business and its work and can influence a lot in their decision making.

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Affordable Search Engine Optimization

Written on 4/25/2010 05:33:00 PM by Martha Ballesteros

According to recent research reports, 42% of internet users click on the first or top-ranking link of search results. With the increasing number of internet users focusing their attention on first search results page, businesses and website owners have increased, if not added, SEO and web marketing budget allocations in the hope of improving site traffic and visibility and soon landing, if not on the top spot, at least on the first page of search engine results.

As the demand for web marketing techniques increased, quite a number search engine positioning firms have now created a niche in the marketing industry. The growing web marketing trend has brought an influx of SEO gurus, consultants, and positioning firms that claim that they have broken the Google algorithm and known the secret to Yahoo’s page ranking strategy. These are appealing yet, appalling. With the ever changing algorithm of search engines, search engine optimization has never been so unpredictable. As well as the endless page rank fluctuations, it’s now anybody’s ballgame.

Search engine positioning firms as well as consultants offer affordable SEO softwares and services to aid in web development, content, and link building strategies. These softwares and services not only help one’s website to increase page rank across all search engines but also keep it up-to-date with the latest developments and web marketing techniques. Affordable SEO helps small- and medium-sized businesses that are on a tight budget to promote their website and market their services. Search engine positioning firms provide different cost-saving options and packages that can suit anyone’s needs and budget constraints. However, the downside of affordable or relatively cheap SEO is that the packages and options offer only limited phases of the whole optimization process or small scale promotion which only increase as the package costs get higher. In addition, one should also keep in mind that not all affordable SEO services and softwares work for one’s website. It may work for others, but not for you. It is still best to have a customized approach in marketing and optimizing one’s website as time goes by and as site traffic and page rank changes. Time and money is invested in web marketing, which is why one should be careful and vigilant enough in choosing an affordable search engine optimization program.


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The Risk and Return of Social Media Marketing

Written on 4/08/2010 06:40:00 PM by Martha Ballesteros

I initially intended this post to be finance-related. I'm currently taking Financial Management classes under my MBA program. At the beginning of this term, our professor challenged us to describe financial management in the way that we understand it and not just a sentence or two picked up verbatim from a book. At the end of the class, I realized that it's just a matter cost-benefit analysis or rather gauging risk and returns. With most of the people taking MBA from the Ateneo coming from the financial sector, particularly bankers, accountants, and financial analyysts, I realized that I haven't met anyone that can relate and knows how I do what I do. Knowing this, I have to make my own analysis, come up with my own metrics, and relate it to social media marketing.

Obtaining high search engine ranking is definitely one of the most cost-effective methods of online marketing however, there’s more to it than just marketing and advertising. Businesses get many benefits from increased visibility and higher search engine ranking, some more obvious than others.

Cost-effective Customer Acquisition
Businesses and individuals need not to pay search engines for their websites to be indexed. This is significantly important for businesses and search engine optimization specialists who are working on optimizing and marketing a website to have higher search engine ranking. Most of the time, high volume and low intent phrases which can be expensive in paid-search, can also be useful for directing visitors on the long tail of search. Quite a number of businesses bid on key phrases or long tail keywords through paid-search, giving opportunity to those who use a different high search engine ranking strategy and technique.

Paid-search, or pay-per-click (PPC), as other’s call it, is like a modern variation of the practice of paying finder's-fees for the introduction of new clients to a business. The payment is based on a certain value for each new visitor or a commission for each sale or a commission for each lead. Though PPC is one of the SEM techniques advertisers and businesses invest in, for it generates site traffic, it may not always lead to high search engine positioning.

Fixed Costs
The cost of having a relatively high ranking website is relatively fixed, independent of click volume. Effectively, the cost per click from high page rank websites decline through time after initial optimization costs and lower ongoing optimization costs. On the other hand, paid-search, or pay-per-click campaigns are essentially a variable cost.

Brand Visibility
Research studies suggests that 62% of internet users click on the first page of search results. With this expected amount of traffic from internet users all over the world, what business wouldn't want their website to have a higher search engine ranking? Businesses and individuals, with the help of SEO professionals and specialists, consider the various factors to set the cost and time requirement to optimize their website to improve site visibility and gain higher search engine ranking. It can be noted that about 80% of an average site’s traffic comes from a organic search engine listings. A strong presence on organic listings is seen as complementary to Paid Search - or even an alternative in earning high search engine rankings.

The increased site traffic as well as improved brand visibility of websites not only help the business itself but also its prospects and clients because of its value-added accessibility and popularity.


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