All local and regional businesspeople interested in staying on top of the latest internet marketing trends and strategies are welcome to attend. Our Internet Marketing Workshops will be presented by members of the Ecreativeworks team, who will share their knowledge and experiences in the world of internet marketing to help you make the most of your company’s online presence.

Our first Free Internet Marketing Workshop will take place next Tuesday, September 13, and will continue for four more installments through December 6. The full schedule is as follows: 

• Tuesday, September 13: Facebook Basics for Your Business
• Wednesday, October 5: Google AdWords Workshop
• Thursday, October 27: Social Media Workshop
• Tuesday, November 8: Google Analytics & Measuring ROI
• Tuesday, December 6: Advanced SEO Tactics

All workshops will take place at our offices in Plymouth, Minnesota. Click here for further information and to sign up for any or all workshops that interest you. RSVPs are required, so don’t forget to complete the form on the page linked above. We hope to see you here!

Failure to collect sales tax where applicable can lead to fines or a tax audit. Even if you do collect sales tax, but don’t get every decimal or tenth of a percent in the right place, you can be in trouble. Tax rates and codes change frequently, and keeping up with the newest laws and what-have-yous is nearly impossible, especially if your online business has customers all across the country. To further complicate matters, there’s also been talk of a nationwide online sales tax, and some states have already made similar moves at a state level.

Many ecommerce sites with proprietary shopping carts have some sort of system in place to ensure that they apply and collect the appropriate sales tax for all their transactions. But what about smaller online businesses, those without the budget or manpower to constantly update and manage the tax codes in their shopping cart programs?

Businesses in that boat should check out AvaTax. It works with most cart systems, including Open Source carts that many small online retailers use to run their businesses. Unfortunately, Zen Cart, one of the most popular Open Source cart programs, doesn’t independently support AvaTax. Ecreativeworks offers AvaTax for sales tax automation with all of our website development services, and can set it up for you on your site, even if it uses Zen Cart. It’s fast, easy, accurate, and gives your site complete PCI compliance.

There are plenty of other sales tax programs out there—even some free ones. But few if any offer the level of coverage that AvaTax does. Running your business is hard enough without having to worry about sales tax calculations for every transaction. Give AvaTax a try—Ecreativeworks will be glad to help—and make your business a little easier.

Our Trackable Social Share Icons plugin adds two important and incredibly useful features to your blog:

1)       It adds social media icons, for Facebook, Twitter, etc, to the bottom of your blog posts, pages, and excerpts. You can choose which icons you want to appear, what order they’re in, and what size they are. You can also pick from 12 different icon styles.
2)       Using your site’s Google Analytics, the Trackable Social Share Icons plugin tracks all clicks on those icons. None of the tracking information is shared with Ecreativeworks or any third party. Only those with access to your Google Analytics can see this information.

We created the Trackable Social Share Icons plugin for Ecreativeworks clients who are utilizing our custom WordPress blog services. There are a plethora of social media sharing plugins already available for WordPress, but none of them offered all three of the features that our new plugin does: Google Analytics tracking, customizable looks, and no third party information sharing.

Ecreativeworks’ new WordPress plugin works like a charm. Just install it on your WordPress blog, and that’s it. The default setting will add icons for Facebook, Twitter, and email to the bottom of your posts and pages. You can fiddle with the setup to include whichever icons you want, in any of the dozen available styles. There are additional icons for Digg, Reddit, and other popular social media outlets, as well.

The Google Analytics tracking is even easier to use. Once the Trackable Social Share Icons plugin is installed, it will sync with your site’s Google Analytics, and…Shazam! Instant, automatic click tracking for all your icons. It really is that simple.

We decided that our new WordPress plugin is just too good to keep only for ourselves and our clients, so we’ve made it available FOR FREE. Download the Trackable Social Share Icons plugin from WordPress.org today and see for yourself just how swell it is.

Kudos to Mike, the Ecreativeworks developer who built the plugin. Well done, good sir, well done.

Black Hat SEO: This is the first SEO term that I found really intriguing, and is sort of the catalyst for this post. “Black Hat SEO” is, unfortunately, not related to “Black Tie SEO,” which is guys in tuxedos and top hats creating fancy, elegant, high-class search engine optimization, including special content for viewing through a monocle. No, Black Hat SEO is the use of unethical practices to create high page rankings. While a lot of what Black Hat SEOers do isn’t technically against the rules, per se, most of their techniques are frowned-upon^† and can give good SEO (White Hat SEO) a bad name, as well as getting the Black Hatted site blacklisted from search engines. Why I Like This Term: It’s fairly simple, and it really just boils down to the name. Black Hat SEO sounds exactly like what you’d expect—the bad guys doing bad things. It’s like the Dark Side of the Force, but without lightsabers.

Bot: “Bot” is short for “robot,” but can also be called a “crawler” or “spider.” In internet jargon, these are automated programs that search engines use to find and add websites/pages to their index. These are, in a way, the thing that SEO is trying to target so that your page will achieve a better rank in search. Most search engines have their own, customized bots to bring them results (Googlebot, for example). Why I Like This Term: The way I see it, computers are basically robots, although not exactly the most interesting ones. The internet is essentially a supergiant, non-existent robot that works with computers through technological magic^♠. Also, I love the practice of adding “-bot” onto the end of words to name an automaton after what it does (a robot that makes sandwiches: Sandwichbot. A robot that takes you places: Gobot. A robot that moves at a brisk canter like a horse: Trotbot. Etc, etc.)

Google Juice: This basically means the level of trust or authority your page has built up with Google. If your site is popular, has plenty of good content and solid backlinks, etc., you’ve got Google Juice. This is really what you’re trying to achieve with SEO. Though there are other search engines that you want to have juice with as well, I’ve never heard the term Bing Juice (at least not yet). Why I Like This Term: Mostly because it’s fun to say. Or sing in a loud falsetto while sitting at your desk, apropos of nothing.**

Those are just a few of the greatest hits, and are pretty broad simplifications.^†† There are plenty of weird words associated with SEO, like there are with almost anything.^♠♠ If anyone else out there is a word nerd like me, you can check out http://www.seoglossary.com/ for more SEO terms and definitions, and read more of the odds and bodkins that we use on a daily basis. It seems strange that, as part of an industry that relies so heavily on getting every last letter exactly right,*** SEO would use such bizarre terminology. Human language is truly a peculiar thing. ^†††

* I hope!
^† Like walking over the pitcher’s mound on the way back to first, A-Rod, you bum!
^♠ Non-existent, because can you actually go to the internet? No. It’s not really a real thing. Nothing on the internet is actually anywhere. It’s just a bunch of ones and zeroes. Magic, because is it’s easier than trying to explain how it actually works.
** Try it. Everyone in your office will love it.
^†† Like I said, it’s Friday.
^♠♠ Why the heck are three strikes in a row in bowling called a “turkey”?
*** Ever written computer code? Even one space in the wrong spot can cause huge problems.
^††† Lemur language, however, makes perfect sense.

On a more relevant note, copywriting is one of the most interesting English-language based jobs out there, but I’ve found it’s fairly unknown to many folks. When I was an English major in college, not once did any of my professors or advisors mention anything like copywriting as a job possibility, but I’ve found it to be a great occupation from my few years in the game. So, if anybody reading this knows an English major who can’t find a job, steer them toward copywriting (as long as they don’t take my job–I am the new guy, after all). Also, when telling people what I do for a living, a surprisingly large (to me!) amount of people have asked what a copywriter does. After I explain it, they almost always say they’d never really thought of such a thing before (apparently a lot of people think that the words on websites and in catalogs and such just appear out of the ether). But, as I said, copywriting is a really interesting (and quite enjoyable) job, whether people know it exists or not.

This whole thing has gotten way out of hand and off topic, so I’ll close by saying I’m glad to be here at Ecreativeworks, and am looking forward to working with the rest of the team to make sure those words on the Interwebs keep magically appearing out of nowhere. Thanks for reading (if you made it this far), have a great holiday season, and be careful driving on these caliginous winter nights.

Lee

I am thankful for youtube that they are able to bring B2B videos to the entire world, so that they can be educated by the products they have to offer.  I am also thankful that they are owned by Google, thus bringing these videos to the SERP’s  and helping the rankings and conversion for many of my clients.

I am thankful for the social networking sites like facebook and linkedin as they are making our world smaller and smaller and easier for businesses to engage their customers online.  They have really become a part of our culture and everyday life.

I am also very thankful to the online SEO community that is very open and helpful to those that have questions on how to make their businesses successful in a world that is changing and growing every minute.  You not only help your clients, you love to educate anyone who will listen and that type of  peer to peer network is priceless.

So with a short and obvious plug for myself and my company, from Ecreativeworks.  I give Thanks for all of my clients and colleagues.

To simply be a resource for buyers, suppliers or distributors?

To be a place for the end user to buy your products?

To be a place for buyers, distributors to request quotes from you?

To be a contact point of access, whether it be email, phone number, address,  etc.?

To replace the point of sale from your physical location to online?

To increase the amount of sales you already have?

There are probably many more goals that you can have for your site, but this is a pretty good list to get you started.  Before you start building your website, be sure that you are thinking about what you want it to do for you and make sure that it is being built with that end goal in mind.   This is important not only from the design aspect, but  from the SEO also.  As always remember that Search Engine Optimization should be built into your site from the very beginning, don’t wait until after it is up to start.   SEO work at the start of a Website project will save you time and money in the long run and you will be much happier with your ROI every time.

First:  You need to run a report on the # of incoming links to your site, as well as your competition’s sites.  You will need to make a list of all the links that you and each of your competitors sites.  There are many tools out there that can help out with this, for example yahoo site explorer tool.  This will give you a good idea of the # of links that are coming to each of the sites.

Second:  You need to look at the Authority (google page rank) of each of those links to determine the quality of them.  This is important, as a link from a PR 5 site is many times more valuable than a link from a PR 0 site.  One link from a PR 5  site can be more valuable than 100 links from a PR 0 site.

Third:  The Anchor text from those links is also an important factor to look over.  The more anchor text links you have that use the keywords you want to rank for the better for you.  You can also see what your competition has for Anchor text and adjust your strategy as needed.

Fourth:  You will need to gather the domain age of all of these sites.  Google uses this a factor in their Page Rank that we discussed in previous steps.  If your competition is older, it may be harder to compete, while if it is younger there may be more opportunity.

Fifth: The index count or the number of pages on the sites also needs to be calculated.  This can be done by typing in site:www.website.com in the google search box.  This will tell you how many pages that google has indexed for each site.  This is important as google looks at the indexed page count as part of the PR and SERP ranking in their algorthims.

The above five steps will give you the off page factors in determining your SEO competition.  The On-opage factors that you will need to find are:  Keyword used in title, Keyword used in URL, Keyword used in description and Keyword used in H1 heading tags.

As you can see and not say “I told you so”, this is a very time consuming and tedious task to get all this information compiled.  There are tools to help you with this, but wouldn’t it just be easier to let your SEO team handle this for you.  They will also be able to analyze this information to determine if there are opportunities in the market you are trying to break into.  Take my advice, hire a professional SEO team and sleep better at night.

The First step will be to choose the right keywords.   The SEO team will ask you what your priorities are and which terms that are very important to your business.  They will then do their “magic” ( that is “white hat” magic if you hire the right SEO team to research these and other terms from your existing website, competitors, etc.   Once these terms are decided on by both the Website owner and the SEO professional it is time for Step 2.

Next, you need to take a close look at your navigation.  When you combine the SEO, usability and technical skills of the developers and designers you will come out with a navigation that is easy to use, easy to manage, and the search engines really like.  Within this process you will also  have to match your keyword phrases to those new navigation pages that you have just created.  Again with some help from the SEO and development teams this will be a breeze.

After all this is done it is time to work on the content of the site.  This is the most important step to have the SEO team involved.  They will ensure that your on and off page content is optimized for the search engines and give you a much better shot at  hitting that first page in google.

If you are reading this and thinking:  I am going to need some help with this.  You are in luck, I happen to know a team of designers, developers, and SEO professionals that will walk you through each step with professionalism you will not find anywhere else.  Feel free to contact them when you are ready to redesign your site:  www.ecreativeworks.com.

First of all you need to take a step back from your internal workings of your company and try to think like your customers.  This is a good time to bring in your sales staff and brainstorm a little.  It is also not a bad idea to bring in a customer service rep or receptionist at this point also.    What you need to find out in this brainstorming session is what your customers search for when they want to find your product.  You may discover a term that you use is not even close to the terms your customers are using, this is a good thing to know for Search Engine Optimization of your website.

Second you need to discuss in depth which products or categories of your business are the most important to you, wouldn’t be a bad idea to write these down for other uses as well.  For example if product A is very important to you and you sell a lot of them we should definitely have some variation of that as a focus keyword phrase on your site.  Most of all be sure that you are listening to your customers, just because you call your product by the “brand” name your customer may be calling it by another name.

Third you need to demonstrate focus on your keyword phrases.  There should be a theme to where you are focusing on the site and as a business as a whole.    You don’t want to spread your focus across too many differing areas, as this will be harder to get rankings and conversions than if you are focused on a common goal.

Always remember that you are building and optimizing your website for your customers and not yourself.  Make sure that everything, including your focus keyword phrases are for your customers ease of use, this will always give you a better ROI both online and offline.