If you’re reaching for an answer right now instead of having one on the tip of your tongue, chances are you haven’t given much thought to the actual writing portion of your email campaigns, but it’s by far the most important part. Companies like aWeber and Constant Contact can automate the sending of emails, but what exactly are you trying to say to your customers? The message contained in your targeted email marketing should either inform the reader or sell a service, preferably both.

If you’ve been running an automated campaign for a while, have you reviewed your email selections recently? If you or one of your employees wrote that email string a while back, it may not even apply to what you’re doing anymore. There’s a strong possibility that customers are simply deleting your emails or marking them as spam because they have no value to them. Refreshing the message regularly is a good idea. If you haven’t made any changes recently it’s probably a good time to do that now.

Some email services allow you to connect your email marketing campaign to your blog. This is one of the best ways to ensure your emails to your customers are current. When you’re blog posting about a new product or service they’ll get it right away in as an email. Those emails will create a response in the form of more visits to your website, the ultimate goal of any internet marketing campaign and a boost to our organic SEO efforts. Contact us today to learn more.

Long tail keywords are the catalyst to local internet marketing success. If you optimize your content with strictly short-tail keywords, you’ll be buried deep inside search results on pages no one ever looks at. How many times have you gone past Page One when you’re searching for something? If your website isn’t on the first page, your chances of scoring some business off of search are non-existent. You might get a hit or two off Page Two, but if you’re using broad keywords you won’t even show up that high.

Here at First Page Placement, our objective when doing local internet marketing is to drive local traffic to your website. We do that by submitting you to local directories and map sites like Google Places, but we also optimize your content with local long tail keywords. When someone in your area does a search for a specific service, the companies that are listed as local and use local keywords in their content are the ones that come up first. How do we know it works? We’ve used the strategy on our own company website and we are comfortably present on Page One for all Los Angeles SEO keywords. Isn’t that where you found us?

Google changed the rules last year when they adopted the Google Panda change in their search algorithm, but one thing remained constant. Content is the number one variable in the equation. They rate it higher than link count and ahead of your gross traffic number. Content is the element they consider first when assigning the quality score that determines your rank and page position. If you’re using the same keywords everyone else in your industry uses, you’ll rank low. Be different with long tail keywords and you’ll rank high. It’s as simple as that.

Not only does your blog help you with search engine optimization; it’s also the first introduction to your company for many of your visitors. They may glance at your home page, but most of them will go to interior pages to find out what you have to say. Will they be rewarded or are you just regurgitating the same old industry line wrapped up in some targeted keywords? Far too many companies do that. Be different and you’ll reap the rewards. Great headlines and informative articles do work. Just ask Rupert Murdoch. He became a billionaire using them.

As a company that specializes in small business SEO, no one knows better than us how important the blog portion of your website is. Content development is a key variable in the algorithmic calculations used to determine your page rank, but it’s not the only variable. Google tracks unique visitors, time on site, return visitors, and relevance. They assign a quality score to each of the sites they index, and a good percentage of that overall score is based on the content you are displaying.

That content is critical to your success on the internet. Search marketing and SEO are processes that require the performance of a number of different time-consuming tasks. One of the most important of those is blog posting. If your website doesn’t have a blog, you will watch it slowly slip down the page rank ladder into search engine oblivion. Search engine spiders look for relevant, dynamic content that is posted regularly. Do you qualify? If you’re one of our clients you do.

But I digress. One of the most requested services we offer at First Page Placement is our custom blog creation service. The reason is simple: it’s easy to make a blog, but it’s tough to make a blog that’s truly SEO friendly. The default construction of most WordPress, Tumblr, Blogspot, and other such blogs is pretty awful in terms of SEO.

Custom blog creation means that an SEO company — in this case, us — goes in an sets up your blog so that it’s not only naturally SEO friendly, but so that it has automated tools that even further improve the SEO value of every blog post you make.

If there’s almost no content on a vlog, can it benefit from a custom blog creation operation like ours? Of course it can!

A large part of what we do when we modify a blog to make it more SEO friendly involves elements that vlogs take full advantage of, too — elements like categories, tags, usernames, and other things that are common to all blogs. It’s one thing to have categories that are relevant to your content — but if you find categories that are keywords in addition to being relevant, every time you select a category, you’re improving your blog’s (or vlog’s!) standing for those keywords on Google.

That’s just one part of the operation, as well. Many of the same SEO-friendly tools that blogs use can benefit a vlog as well. Don’t think that just because you’re not writing words that there aren’t plenty of useful and abusable words on your vlog!

But what if you’re anti-social? What if you don’t particularly want to spend hours and hours each day out there connecting with your peeps? Can you still make it in a world that has gone entirely social?

The answer is a resounding YES, but you have to take the social phenomenon into account even if you don’t want to participate in it directly. There are a couple of ways you can do this:

Use social buttons passively
You can always use social buttons without actually spending a lot of time using the media that they link to. For example, you can stick “Tweet” buttons on everything you put up on the Internet without actually ever logging onto Twitter except once to create an account that you ignore eternally. Of course, this is a pretty lame option when you could…

Hire someone else to be social for you
The real way to win in a social world to do what all of the bigwigs do — outsource everything including your “social life”. Having someone intelligent and charismatic out there Tweeting in your name and posting clever Facebook updates for you will have a huge impact on your online reputation, and the followers never have to know that it isn’t actually you at the helm.

The simple fact is, you’re not going to make it in the modern internet marketing world without paying for good organic SEO, and you’re not going to make it unless you manage your online reputation. That means being social in some respect, even if it’s not actually YOU being social. Don’t leave the social market behind, or you’ll regret it in the end!

The result is that there’s essentially one confirmed “best strategy” for getting your small business ranked highly on Google for your local area. You have an SEO company do some local internet marketing for you. They find some top-tier keywords for your industry, figure out which ones are low-competition in your particular area, and do some SEO to get those words associated with your site in Google’s ‘mind’. Bam, done, you call me, you know where I am.

Of course, sometimes the standard “best strategy” isn’t enough — what do you do then? There are a number of options. You could do more SEO with slightly less-optimal keywords. You could just do more SEO with what you already have and home to unseat your competitor. Or you could engage in a bit of mobile website design.

When you do mobile website design, you’re essentially making a new website for your business — one that can only be seen by mobile devices. It’s a vastly undertapped market, especially among American small businesses. It’s almost a certainty that few if any of your competitors have mobile-friendly sites, so if you get one made, anyone searching on a mobile device will see your site — and no one else’s. It’s like having a large portion of the population on lockdown.

Just as important, people who are searching from mobile devices are on the road. They’re searching for you because they want to walk in the door. Mobile visits lead to foot-in-the-door visits, and “IRL” customers convert around 50% instead of around 5% like a very good website will get you. That’s nothing to sneeze at.

So when you look around and ask yourself how your web department can turn a better profit, start by consulting your SEO guru about a mobile-friendly website — they go a long way.

There’s also the little thing of a video game score being an arbitrary number reflecting an abstract accomplishment, and your SEO ‘score’ being something that makes traffic flow into your website where you can turn it into money in your pocket. That’s kind of important, too.

The point, though, is that SEO isn’t a game you can stop playing if you expect to make the most of your investment. Every day that you don’t have someone continuing to do SEO for your business, you’re devaluing each and every dollar you’ve already spent on your SEO. “Affordable SEO” isn’t measured in terms of value-per-dollar, it’s measured in terms of dollar-per-dollar. If you stop doing SEO, your income-per-dollar spent drops — if you keep doing SEO, it improves. (There is no “at rest” for your “SEO score”. If you’re not improving, you’re falling behind.)

Fortunately, there are a lot of different things that qualify as SEO. Even if you don’t have someone out there doing directory submission and writing Squidoo lenses for you, just updating your company blog with a new post totally counts toward your SEO for the day. So does Tweeting if you do it correctly.

SEO doesn’t have to be a mind-numbing repetition of the same six activities in an endless cycle. There are an infinite number of ways to get backlinks flowing to your business. The important part isn’t always what you’re doing, but rather that you’re doing something in the first place. Affordable SEO is SEO that doesn’t ever quit.

Non-PPC Text Ads
This is stuff like posting digital classified ads, paying for links in the back ‘pages’ of zines, and so forth. Non-PPC text ads account for some paltry half a percent of all website visitors worldwide. The simple fact is that even the ones that convert well only see like twelve visitors every day, so no one cares.

Banner Ads
Banner ads are next, accounting for just under two percent of all website visitors. To be honest, most of those are kids clicking on pretty pictures. Banner ads haven’t been a functional method of advertising since before the year started with a “2″. Some exceptional exceptions can be found, but they’re the ones that prove the rule.

Social Marketing
Social marketing is big — something like five percent of all visitors to all websites worldwide come from Facebook, Twitter, or something like them. And that’s nothing to sneeze at — it’s just not nearly the amount that the next two items bring in.

PPC Marketing
Pay Per Click marketing is even huger. Around sixteen percent of all website visitors come in through “sponsored listings” on Google, Bing, and similar sites. On the other hand, about eighty percent of all money spent on online advertising is spent on PPC, which should tell you that it might be mildly overpriced. Also, without a special PPC management firm to run your PPC campaigns for you, you’re not likely to get a lot out of it.

Organic SEO
Organic SEO is and always has been the Holy Grail of online marketing. Get your website into the top 3 of a keyword that sees any significant number of searches, and you’re golden, end of story. Organic SEO brings in the remaining 77% of all website traffic worldwide — and that’s worth a lot more money than it takes to rank with it.

For example, Google AdSense used to be a great way to monetize a site. Not anymore! Now if you interrupt your content with something like AdSense, you’ll end up devaluing your website and your rankings will plummet. On the other hand, social media buttons are on Google’s ‘whitelist’. Those little Facebook, Twitter, social bookmarking, and recently Google Plus buttons are beloved of the Goog.

There’s a good reason for that — because social marketing has turned into a massive, market-shaping phenomenon. Take two businesses that both spend the same amount on SEO every month, and give one the ability to split their budget between normal SEO and social marketing alongside, and you’ll see that one of those two businesses has a HUGE advantage in online competition — the social one.

It might not seem like that should be the case, but it turns out that social marketing, if you do it well, creates it’s own SEO. Fans of what you do will talk about what you do, link back to you, and drive traffic to your site directly on top of it. Get enough followers and the simple number of followers you have will mark you as worth paying attention to, and the effect will snowball.

You’ll end up with more — and better — backlinks than you’d get from SEO alone, and that’s worth it’s weight in gold. So don’t shirk away from putting those cute little social sharing buttons on everything you do. Not only does Google love them, but as long as you pay the community some attention, you bottom line will, too.

When you watch one of them land on a website, you can see it in their eyes: they skip from one item to the next in a rapid-fire assimilation of what the page is about and whether or not they care. A glance at the icon, the headlines, the column structure, any major pictures, and they’re moving on.

What they do pay attention to, however, is anything that moves. They grew up with the television as a constant companion, after all — moving pictures are innately friendly. So when you talk about getting a sale out of a modern web surfer, something like a web presenter or a Flash banner is just as important as organic SEO.

A web presenter, if you don’t know, is basically a pop-up video of a human being that loads a few seconds after the rest of the page and starts talking about the website to the surfer. A web presenter offers a crucial opportunity for a webmaster to force his message into the ears and eyes of the surfer — because it’s opt-OUT, not opt-IN like an embedded YouTube video or some other click-to-activate script. The web presenter starts delivering it’s message, and the surfer has to choose to stop it and put in the effort to do so.

If the presenter’s message is captivating enough, they’ll never reach that part of the process. They’ll be engrossed by the words, start following the little person’s gestures and expressions, and they’ll stick around long enough to hear them out.

If all goes well, that single addition can turn a stale, static website into something that converts traffic at a huge rate. Just make sure to turn down the ‘salesiness’ of the presenter, or you’ll just drive people away that much faster.