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Facebook is widely acknowledged as the website its users spend more time on than any other. Unlike search, email or even news sites; Facebook users spend hours at a time engaged and interacting with the social networking website. This level of engagement presents advertisers with a Golden Opportunity to wow potential fans with their product or service. Advertisers on Facebook have unprecedented access to unheard of amounts of information about their targeted demographic; enabling them to construct ad campaigns that appeal strongly to their audience. They are able to show an individual which of their friends have interacted with this product or service; adding social context and increasing the likelihood of a sale, exponentially.

While this may sound like an internet advertiser’s dream, there is a catch. A hefty one. Roughly half of Facebook’s 800 million users access the site via mobile app; currently, there is no advertising on this application. That means that the 400 million mobile users will never see a brand’s paid ad. Facebook acknowledged its inability to fully capitalize on its mobile platform in its present state when it submitted its IPO. The obstacles faced by the social networking giant in regards to mobile advertising are extensive. From the challenges of competing with the very operating system which allows users to access the Facebook app to a user’s level of tolerance for being shown ads on a screen whose size makes space a premium commodity; bridging the mobile advertising gap does not promise to be easy.

Despite rumors regarding an anticipated mobile ad implementation program, Facebook has not commented lately on an expected launch date. Instead, it held a conference today in Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History to introduce its new Timeline layout for businesses. Touting the new format as a way for brands to better connect with their customers, the hours-long presentation made no mention of any plan on the part of Facebook to broach its mobile advertising chasm. This leaves many industry experts wondering if Facebook will resolve its mobile issues before going public. We’ll just have to wait and see.

There are few people who would argue the importance of establishing an online presence in local listings for a brick and mortar store. Local listings have become king in terms of mobile search. This is statistically evident according to numerous reputable sources. But what drives search engines like Google to position one business over another in this type of listing? For two businesses which are roughly the same distance from the spot where the search has originated, how does Google determine which gets listed first? If both businesses have optimized listings, the answer is unclear.

Speculation in the SEO community regarding what factors Google is taking into consideration when listing one business over another is rampant. Having stated that Relevance, Prominence and Distance are the quantifying elements utilized by the determining algorithm; some of what Google is drawing on is fairly obvious. The Distance of a business from a search location is what it is. Nothing can be done on the part of the business to affect it. Relevancy is established through site optimization; once your website and other online pages are properly categorized and keyword rich, maximum relevancy has likely been achieved. This just leaves Prominence.

What arbitrates a listing’s prominence? Despite documented complaints by Google regarding its inability to effectively crawl the pages of social networking giant, Facebook; it seems as though Google has overcome that hurdle and is in fact, counting a given listing’s popularity on that platform. Another component which appears to bear weight is the number of check-ins accrued by a location. This includes user interaction on programs like foursquare and other check-in services. It’s not surprising that Google would look favorably on this kind of data; being that it’s nearly impossible to manufacture. While only Google knows for sure, industry experts suggest that both the number of people who check-in and the number of check-ins themselves carry weight in the area of Prominence.

No one thing in and of itself is enough to catapult your business to the top position on the local search engine results page; rather, it is a number of things which indicate to Google that your business is relevant and popular. If you haven’t provided special offers and promotions for those customers who frequent check-in service platforms, now is the time to start. Granted, there’s no guarantee that doing so will boost your position in local listings; but incentives like these are likely to attract new customers to your store. Since garnering new clientele is the goal of any internet marketing campaign, the addition of these small perks is well worth the effort.

Local search is becoming increasingly popular; this year, it promises to be more prominent than ever. And not just for smart phone users. Local listings have begun to occupy a larger space on the desktop search engine results page (SERP). It’s become clear that a large percentage of people depend on search to provide them with all kinds of local information for everyday use. Whether they are looking for an area drycleaner or need to know the name of the Indian restaurant their friend had mentioned last weekend; users have integrated search into their daily lives to the point where it is as necessary as their morning coffee.

In case there remains any doubt as to the popularity of local search, a recently announced Google product underlines the incredible demand for local information. Slated for release by the end of 2012, Google has created a line of glasses which will show the wearer pertinent information about their surroundings in real-time. According to multiple sources close to the project, the glasses will contain a low-resolution camera which will assess an individual’s location and use that assessment to provide real-time information relevant to the user’s vicinity. The glasses are not expected to be worn continuously; instead, Google predicts they will be used much the same way as smart phones.

Whether Google’s newest gadget holds any appeal for you or not; the search giant’s creation of hardware dedicated to local search is a pretty strong indicator of local search’s ever-increasing popularity. Because the glasses will utilize social media context in addition to location-based advertising, their success will call for amplified effort in both platforms. Encourage your happy customers to write reviews on local directories like Google Places and Yelp. Engage your social media fans with special offers and promotions; the friends of your fans will likely be shown that interaction when they search for products or services offered by your company.

Marketing your business online requires dedication and persistence. Success demands you tailor your campaign today for the trends of tomorrow. An experienced, qualified internet marketing agency will make sure you stay ahead of the curve. Stop playing catch-up with your competitors. Call Exults today.

More and more people are seeking out video content online. The recent surge in tablet use has boosted this trend. We’ve discussed the importance of video search engine optimization (VSEO) in the past; outlining the best way to get your video a higher position on the search engine results page (SERP). While tailoring your video’s meta data, promoting it on popular sites like YouTube, and surrounding it with relevant content is still important; there’s some new methodology in town and it’s being uniformly embraced by the Big Three: Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Video content is included on Google’s SERP under both “Video” and “Everything” categories. In order to provide better structure for indexing this type of content; Google, along with the other major search engines, is encouraging site administrators to utilize a new on-page markup format which can be found on the schema.org site. This format is the result of a concerted effort on the parts of Google, Bing and Yahoo to provide a more effective and uniform way of indexing of video content.

Additionally, Google has an extension available which allows you to create a site map for your video containing pertinent information and submit it using Webmaster Tools. The use of this extension enables your video to be found by Google without first waiting for it to be crawled. In order to garner maximum search engine recognition for your video content, it must occupy a publicly-available webpage. You must also include a title, description and thumbnail if you want your video to be properly indexed.

It’s crucial for the position of your video on the SERP that you follow the guidelines provided by Google and its competitors; however, it’s important to remember that doing so does not guarantee your video will be promoted on the results page. The value of your video content is still paramount when it comes to determining where it falls in search results. The most relevant content will always be favored by search engines. When you combine current, useful video content with on-point SEO, there’s a good chance your video will achieve a high rank on the SERP…no matter what changes Google may make to its algorithms.

There is a wealth of information available for any business owner interested in launching their own internet marketing campaign. From PPC Management to SEO, there is no shortage of blogs, tutorials and software outlining the very best way to succeed online. On the surface, many of these sources make it seem like a successful internet presence is as easy as 1-2-3. They tell you how to do your own keyword research for your Pay-Per-Click account; manage your many social media pages; provide a list of ways to optimize your website and push its position up on the search engine results page.

You think to yourself, “Well, this doesn’t look so hard. What’s the big deal?” You take your newfound knowledge and hit the ground running. You establish a PPC account and are delighted to learn that Google will manage it for you; free of charge! You ask your Facebook-savvy nephew to oversee your social media pages and are pleased to see that he is diligently posting content to your wall; almost hourly. You stay up all night re-tooling the content on your website to include a keyword in every sentence and have the new content implemented immediately. Pleased with your now Expert understanding of internet marketing; you sit back and wait for the cash to start rolling in.

A month or so goes by and you hit a snag. Your website, which had been lost somewhere in the middle of the fourth page of results for your industry, has seemingly dropped off the search results altogether. Despite your nephew’s frequent posting, your social media pages are a ghost-town; even the occasional fan-interaction of before has disappeared…along with many of your fans. You check on the progress of your PPC account and are dismayed to find that not only has your budget disappeared (with no noticeable returns); but you are spending ten-times what you intended to; bidding on keywords which have nothing to do with your brand’s sector of your industry. What happened?

Unfortunately, you’ve discovered the hard way that do-it-yourself internet marketing can be as disastrous as any other professional service you may try to do on your own. Anyone who has ever unsuccessfully tried to save money on a plumber by fixing the leak themselves can tell you that your efforts may hurt more than they help. You could wind up spending more money cleaning up the supplemental damage you caused than you would have if you had just called a plumber in the first place.

The same holds true for internet marketing.

Don’t flood your basement trying to save a few dollars; call Exults today.

When it comes to staying on top of emerging trends, internet marketing bears some striking similarities to the technological hardware which drives it. Most people know that the dazzling, new device of this morning will be yesterday’s news by this afternoon. Innovations in manufacturing have allowed companies like Apple and Motorola to release the Next Big Thing almost as quickly as their engineers can design it. These advancements have not only made the latest gadget available; they’ve made it affordable.

When creating your company’s mobile marketing plan, you will miss out on potential sales if you do not take into consideration the different types of mobile devices your customers are using. The implementation of analytics which disclose the type of device being used by a visitor to your site is crucial for the success of your mobile marketing strategy. Tablets’ current affordability has caused an explosion in its sales; doubling and in some cases, tripling the percentage of users who access the internet that way. This faction of user is looking for a site which has been modified for mobile access, but provides more content than a mobile site intended for use on smart phones.

Trends like these happen seemingly overnight. Video that users found too small for smartphone viewing is gaining popularity in the tablet online marketplace. Without a tablet-specific landing page, you will miss a valuable opportunity to further engage potential customers with creative video content. People are using their tablets to visit their favorite websites on-the-go and at home; it would be foolish not to market specifically to such a large segment of user.

As recently as December 2011, many industry experts would have advised against creating a mobile site specifically for tablets; they made up only a small portion of users and targeting them categorically would have been viewed as a waste of time. However, in the span of the 2011 Holiday Season, tablet sales surged to the point where iPad and tablet owners now occupy a significant chunk of the mobile marketplace. Without a qualified internet marketing team on your side, it’s almost impossible to stay ahead of emerging trends and technology. Don’t divide your time needlessly; let Exults keep you ahead of the advertising curve so you can focus on what’s important: keeping all of your new customers happy!

Email marketing is a great way to connect with your current customers and attract new ones. It allows you to customize your message, depending on your audience. Email marketing also presents a unique opportunity to track the success of a given campaign. Done correctly, email marketing will grab the attention of the reader and inspire them to click through to your site; generating traffic and revenue.

There are several ways to assure the success of your email campaign. One way to entice potential clientele is to provide snippets of highly engaging information. These snippets secure the client’s attention and makes them curious about the article or promotion as a whole. They are drawn to click through to your site to satisfy that curiosity. Once they are on your site, you have an opportunity to create a lasting relationship with these users. Strategic email marketing will get your site the traffic you’re looking for; whether that traffic converts to sales is up to you!

If you want your email to get the highest level of engagement; timing is everything. For example, studies have shown that mobile internet usage spikes first thing in the morning and then again before people go to bed at night. If you are launching a mobile campaign, you need to pay careful attention to this time-frame. Sending your email message in the middle of the day or night could mean it will get lost in the sea of emails in the recipients inbox. Getting your message out right before people wake up guarantees that it will be one of the first your potential customer sees; greatly increasing the likelihood of consumer interaction.

Email marketing is just one of the many ways of attracting valuable traffic to your company’s website. Creating a user-friendly site that’s easy to navigate is essential if you are going to take advantage of your successful email marketing campaign. Call Exults today and invest in the future of your business!

Linking is an important tool for any organic SEO campaign. Linking to your site from highly-ranked, credible websites reinforces your site’s relevancy in the eyes of major search engines. It would be unwise; however, to think that all links are created equal (they’re not). The value of a link depends on several different factors; Page Rank, context, even how the link was created (was it ‘earned’?). It’s important; too, to realize that an earned link on a site with a high Page Rank will not immediately catapult your website to the top of the search engine results page (SERP); it may take weeks or even months for your site to be affected organically.

The methodology utilized by major search engines like Google when determining the impact a link has on a given page is complex and ever-evolving. The amount of time it takes for Google to register the link depends on the page where the link is posted (bots recognize how often sites are usually updated and crawl accordingly). The site’s Page Rank factors heavily into the value associated with the link; a link from a site with a high Page Rank is far more beneficial than one from a site with a low rank or none at all. And Google recognizes when sites are in cahoots to help boost each other’s position on the SERP. Linking to a site which is linking back to you does nothing to promote either site organically. Those links cancel each other out and may even negatively impact your site’s results ranking in the future.

As the sophistication of Google’s algorithms continues to develop, external linking remains an important variable in the SEO equation. However, like most elements of search engine optimization, there are a slew of outside factors which ultimately determine the variable’s overall organic benefit. Effective SEO requires an expert skill-set and extreme patience; when done correctly, it can grow your business exponentially!

Search engine optimization can propel your company’s website to one of the top positions on the search engine results page (SERP). The new traffic garnered by your highly-positioned result is just what you were hoping for; but you quickly discover that these new visitors are not accessing many of your site’s pages and missing a large portion of your published content. You’ve already done your keyword research and are ranking well for your targeted terms; what else can you do?

The first thing you should do is dive into your analytics program and figure out exactly what people are searching for. Let’s say that a baking company’s website has informational videos providing users with tips about rolling dough; the videos feature the head chef, Bertram Parker and are tagged with his name. Unless Bertram is so well-known that people are searching for his content by name, it’s unlikely that his videos will get much traffic. The best way to channel some of that traffic to Bertram’s videos is to figure out what relevant terms people are searching for. If users are searching “dough rolling tips”, then include that phrase in the title. A link on your home page will get more clicks if it says “Dough Rolling Tips by Bertram Parker” than it will if it just says “Tips from Bertram Parker”.

Content can be optimized just like web pages and it’s imperative that you optimize what’s on your website if you want that content to get any traffic. The best video or blog in the world is practically useless if no one is clicking through to it. The same goes for other types of content like press releases, statistics, news, images; basically anything you have on your site.

While high levels of traffic on your company’s website is great; engaging those potential customers by channeling them to relevant content is even better!

Now that the Big Game is over and the dust has begun to settle; statistics relating to who watched what, where and when have begun to make their way through the internet marketing community. Not surprisingly, searches relating to different aspects of the Super Bowl skyrocketed during the game. People were searching for details relating to the game, the performers, the commercials and the players themselves. They were searching on their desktops, tablets and smart phones; more so while the game was being aired than any other time!

While sports fans searching for sports related information during a game is not surprising, the number of searches done for halftime performer, Madonna was. Searches for her dominated game time searches. Coming in second were searches done for Super Bowl commercials. This clearly demonstrates the necessity of having all of your marketing bases covered. While forking over 3.5 million dollars will buy you 30 seconds in front of the year’s largest audience; your online presence makes it possible to prolong that engagement. A business advertising during the Super Bowl without dedicating any resources to their online presence is wasting an invaluable opportunity to continue interacting with a new fan-base.

The way that people searched shifted greatly during the game. According to Google, Super Bowl-related searches before the game split with 25% of related searches on mobile devices and the remaining 75% on a desktop. During the game, the number of people utilizing mobile search jumped up to 41%, the remaining 59% on their desktops. This means that integrating a mobile version of your brand’s website is imperative for continuing fan-engagement beyond first impressions.

And Super Bowl-related searches are still coming! People are heading to sites like YouTube in droves; watching their favorite new commercials again and again. Without securing a presence for themselves online, these brands would have spent millions of dollars for thirty seconds of exposure. Because they made sure to invest in VSEO, mobile-friendly versions of their sites and other major facets of internet marketing; they are able to turn that thirty second impression into unlimited engagement.