Archive for April, 2009

Dolphins in Destin

Apr 7, 2009 travel sites

That water color is real, we didn’t add any coloring or anything:-) This is a video shot by a couple visiting Destin recently. If you would like to find out more about Destin, Panama City or Fort Walton Beach, please visit our travel websites.

Local businesses looking to expand their advertising reach, are headed in the right direction by finding out more about our travel and destination websites.

If you are visiting Destin for the first time, we are certain, we will be hearing from you when you come back! Enjoy your stay in Destin Beach:-)

-The Staff at EmeraldCoast.com

Tags: , , , , ,

Google Search Term Realities

Apr 7, 2009 pay per click

Here’s a test. Go to Google and find out how best to advertise on the internet…

OK. How did you do your search? Did you type in “advertise on the internet”, “online advertising”, “internet advertising”, “internet + advertising”, “how best to advertise on the internet?”, “advertise + media + internet”? Any of those?

No matter what the subject, it’s very unlikely that any given 2 people will search for a subject in the same way. Why? Because we are all individuals and we are all human.

Our point is this. You do not know how someone is going to find your business or website on the internet. It is fascinating to see our PPC reports that tell us what search terms people use to land on one of our client sites. The truth is no one knows how someone is going to find your website. Don’t limit yourself to “Flowers in Destin” if you’re a florist. Our PPC experts can help you expand that search of keyword terms and optimize your campaign as you go. You only pay for “clicked” keywords (Cost per Click - CPC), so go wild, have your PPC guy or gal test different keywords, get the results, throw out what’s not working and try new ones. This is called A/B testing where you have different batches of keywords. After a few days the “losers” get tossed and you try new ones. Eventually, your new terms “beat” your winners, so you toss those and try some new ones. The key is testing, testing, testing and we here at EmeraldCoast.com look forward to finding those keywords that will take your business to the next level of sales!

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Email Advertising Tip - Call To Action

Apr 7, 2009 email advertising

Here is a great email advertising tip that has lessons that every online advertiser can draw from. Have a call to action in the very beginning of the message that is “click-able”. Why? Because this link will show up in the window of software programs like Microsoft Outlook. The most impulsive of your target audience will click on the link even before they open the email! Think about it, have you ever watched someone in sales read email or browse a website? They just click on whatever is click-able! They are in a hurry and just want to find out what the “prize” is or what the “deal” is! (I can’t wait to see the reaction to this blog is from the sales team at EmeraldCoast.com … They’ll deny, deny, deny of course :-)

The lesson is clear though, many of us are impulsive, so whether it be email or a website, provide a quick call to action in the beginning or at the top of the page. By doing this, you’ll be able to harvest those impulsive buyers!

Tags: , , , ,

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Apr 7, 2009 seo

Search Engine Optimization gets a bad rep. There are all kinds of slick sales people trying to sell the latest trick, the latest gimmick that will guarantee you that coveted number 1 spot on Google. There are legitimate methods of getting you to the top of search engines within days. These methods are somewhat more expensive. A professional web developer can use Search Engine Optimization methods to get you to the top of Google over time. Once you are there, you’ll pretty much “stay” there as long as you have your website “maintained” properly by someone who knows how.

Another reason SEO gets a bum rep is just the name itself. Search Engine Optimization… somehow the name implies that you can “optimize” the search engines. The reality is the search engines just “are”. They crawl each website exactly the same way giving no preferential treatment to certain companies or striking secret deals. No, you can not manipulate the search engines, but here is what you can do. A professional web developer codes your site in a way that the search engines finds “friendly”. Do you have great content, yet low Alexa rankings? Chances are the way your content is “shown” to the search engines is not optimized. Our web developers at emeraldcoast.com will gladly analyze your website to see if this is the case.

Tags: , , , ,

Google Likes Directories Named “Descriptively”

Apr 7, 2009 seo

OK, you have a golf country club website and your boss wants you to have a section of the website devoted to the 2009 Masters Golf Tournament so you have your web developer throw up a few pages. The developer puts them in a directory called “mastersgolf”. That’s all well and good, but if you go live and serve pages from the directory called “mastersgolf”, you’ve missed out on a huge opportunity to score major points with Google. You could have called that directory “2009-masters-golf-tournament”. Why does this help? Simple, people who search for information about The Masters Golf Tournament don’t punch in “mastersgolf”, they punch in things like “Masters Golf Tournament”! The names of your files and directories are a huge factor in how Google “sees” your content. That is why we have directories like “destin-online-advertising” at www.emeraldcoastdesign.com. Simple see! No more work for the web developer, yet many search engine points scored :-)

Tags: , , , , ,

Local Advertising Videos

Apr 7, 2009 video advertising

Almost all savvy buyers nowadays have broadband internet access and video advertising is becoming increasingly popular.

When viewing our local Destin and Panama City video promotions for small businesses and organizations, you’ll note some of the options that are available. We can provide your business name logo or name in text in the forefront of the video while it is playing and we can also do professional voice-overs for you.

Users have more access than ever to multimedia content. Users will “stick” to a web page that is entertaining them. The internet is not only about information, it’s about being entertained. Your business name or message being displayed while the user is being entertained allows the advertiser to gain a deeper connection with potential clients.

Whether you have an event to advertise or simply need to beef up your branding efforts, allow EmeraldCoast.com to help you with your video advertising efforts.

“This is the age of access, not just information,” Sweet explained He went on to explain how more website visitors have broadband access, which enables them to access more multimedia content. “Visitors access deeper into a website and review more pages because they are being entertained,” he said.

Tags: , , , , ,

Secret SEO Tip - Don’t Tell Anyone!

Apr 7, 2009 seo

Website owners…

Want more people to find your site on Google?

Want Google to crawl your site more often?

Want to rise quickly in your target audience demographic?

Here’s a top SEO secret that almost no one actually does. It’s incredible. I can’t believe we’re giving this information away for free. Are you ready? Are you sure you’re ready?

OK, here’s the secret to SEO…

Create original content

No tricks, no gimmicks.

Now, of course you are going to want to make sure that you have well formatted, well laid out code that is professionally done to make sure that each one of your web pages will benefit from your great content. The web developers at EmeraldCoast.com can help you with the source code side of things, so that you can focus on your core business.

It’s important, as a business owner to view your website as an outsider would. If you came to your web site, would you “stay”? Or would you quickly go elsewhere to another website because this isn’t the content that you were looking for in your Google search? If you would go elsewhere, then you need more pages on your website with more content in order to build credibility with your customers so there is a level of confidence to purchase from you.

Tags: , , , ,

Sponsor Text Links - Effective?

Apr 7, 2009 text links

On EmeraldCoast.com, our text links have a very high Click Through Rate (CTR)

What are Sponsor Text Links?
These are the hypertext links that you see in the upper right hand corner (in the “Sponsor Links” box) of the EmeraldCoast.com, Destin.com or PanamaCity.com websites.

Are they effective?
People click on these mainly because they do not look like advertisements. And, basically they really aren’t. They’re simply hyperlinks that take you to the sponsor’s website or splash page that we have created for them. Also, no matter what page the user is on within EmeraldCoast.com, those links will always appear in the upper right hand corner of the site, in plain view.

Still not convinced that text links work?
There is a young company called Google on the Internet. (If you can’t find them, you can “google” them at www.google.com :-) Google brings in several billions of revenue each quarter. A large chunk of that revenue is from their Adwords and Adsense programs. Adwords is the program for online advertisers and Adsense is for the website owners wishing to monetize their website.

How much do you text links cost?
On our website, you will find a list of our Sponsor Text Link prices.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Effective Pay Per Click Campaigns

Apr 7, 2009 pay per click

When running a Pay Per Click Campaign on the web, one of the biggest factors of success is the landing page. Landing Page Optimization is a whole discipline with itself and beyond the scope of this blog post but here are 2 common mistakes many people make.

Making your homepage, the landing page.
There may be times where this is acceptable (branding efforts for example) but think about it. You have spent your advertising dollars with Google or elsewhere to acquire that specific customer and you bring him into a generic wide-scope web page that has things like “About Us” or visual/graphic distraction. Great graphics are important for the professionalism of your site but don’t distract your buyer and tempt him to not follow through with his reasons for clicking on your Google ad. Bring him to a very detailed, specific keyword-rich product or service web page that fills his need or reason that he clicked on your ad in the first place!

There is no call to action.
This is somewhat related to the first issue. If you are going to spend marketing dollars to acquire this customer, give him a “Buy” button. Give him a “Sign Up Here” button to request more information. Give him a discount on your product or service for requesting more info. Give him an “RSS Subscription” option. Give him something! In the end, it’s important to think about what, ideally, would I want a potential customer to do on this page. Then say, OK if he doesn’t do the first action, then I’d at least want her to do this, etc.

Of course, you’ll want to “track” these options using Google Analytics or some other form of tracking software. More about the importance of tracking in a later blog post.

Local search and PPC help is only a click away at Emerald Coast.com

Tags: , , , , ,

SEO Tip - Importance of the Anchor Tag

Apr 6, 2009 seo

Try this experiment. Go to Google and type in “click here”. You’ll get adobe.com or apple.com or doubleclick.com. Why? It all has to do with the importance of the text that you put in your “anchor” tag. The reason, sites like these come up first in the Google search results page is because, all over the internet, on all kinds of websites, users are given the opportunity to “click here” to download their software.

The text that goes between your “anchor” tag is often the most overlooked SEO “trick”. It is important to note the only real SEO “trick” is clean disciplined source code, but more about that in a later blog.)

Let’s look at an example. You have a business here in Destin. When you place a hyperlink on your web page, rather then saying “To find out more about Online Advertising in Destin, click here“. Google would prefer you to code it like this. “Find out more about Online Advertising in Destin.”

By creating the link in this manner, you are “describing” your link to the search engines. The search engines see this as a link about “Online Advertising in Destin” which is a much more descriptive than “click here”.

There is no one magic bullet when it comes to search engine optimization, but this is another example of how to “please” Google.

Find out more about how our web developers code our websites.

Tags: , , , , ,