From an SEO perspective, the title of the webpage is very important. These are the words that describe what your page is about and are the first words that a search engine sees when it crawls your webpage looking for content to add to its index.

The page title is also what the searcher sees in a search result – so the page title is very important in describing what the page is about and if the title meets the searcher’s criteria, then it is more likely to be clicked on and your page opened.

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Google announced Enhanced CPC, a new bidding feature for AdWords, earlier this week. This conversion-oriented feature is just the latest in a string of bidding tools introduced by Google. What better time than now to cover each of the available bidding features available in AdWords so that you can make an informed decision on which is right for your campaigns.

Focus on Clicks: Manual Bidding

Manual bidding is the format all of us advertisers know and love. You set ad group and/or keyword-level maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bids and adjust them up or down depending on your performance.

There is absolutely zero automation here — the bids only change when you say they do, providing the ultimate level of control of your campaigns. Advertisers who are willing and able to put in the reporting necessary to make manual bid adjustments can and will get the most out of manual CPC bidding in AdWords.

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How can a business that is already successful in reaching their local market extend their marketing reach online? The good news is that the traditional offline marketing that has always worked so well will still work at least as effectively to promote your online presence. The other side of the coin is that to promote your business online, the old traditions need some updating to keep up with online marketing best practices.

Any business should already have a marketing plan and objectives from their offline initiatives, so let’s jump straight into the technology aspects of online marketing. I generally look at the following things first, because they can be done at very low or no initial cost, and also because subsequent specialist marketing won’t be as successful without these things in place. Of course there is a huge amount more to online marketing, the extent of which could easily be justified as a full-time university course. This is the pre-school notes, to help get your site to a starting point on a low budget if you can’t quite afford to be calling in the big guns to market your site for you professionally just yet.
1. Site optimization

This is always the place to start, because the effectiveness of everything which follows is often dependent on this being done up front. When I say this, I include great content and intuitive navigation as the basis for everything. Only once your site has been optimized for intelligent visitors should you tweak it for search engines, but never at the expense of the former.

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Think AdWords is the be-all and end-all of search engine marketing? Think again.

If pay-per-click advertising makes sense for your business (and it does for most), then you’re probably already using Google AdWords. But chances are you’ve only dabbled with Yahoo! and Bing advertising. If that’s the case, it may be time to take a closer look at your options. The partnership between Yahoo! and Bing–announced last July–is about to become a reality this fall in the form of a combined pay-per-click platform that will give small-business advertisers an alternative to Google.

Microsoft hopes the partnership will lead to increased search volume, which in turn will attract advertisers to its ad platform. “You need a lot of advertisers to provide the most relevant advertising experience. You don’t want to show an ad for ‘Tacoma plumber’ when a visitor is searching for a plumber in Seattle. The only way to create a market to attract more advertisers is to have a product with a high volume of searchers using it,” says Matt Lydon, general manager of Microsoft advertising.

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With one of every five Google searches now related to location-specific queries–translating to more than 20 billion searches per month worldwide–it’s no surprise the digital services kingpin continues to channel more of its energies into solutions optimized for local businesses. Chief among them: Place Pages, a Yelp rival that provides information on local retailers, restaurants, landmarks, transit stations and related points of interest.

In April, Google changed the name of its Local Business Center to Google Places to underscore its tighter integration with Place Pages. According to Google, more than 4 million businesses have claimed their Place Pages, posting contact information, hours, photos, video clips and coupons. Business owners can use Place Pages to get customer feedback and communicate with patrons, and a personalized dashboard compiles data including how many times people have found your firm on Google and what keywords they used to sniff it out.

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9 strategies for generating word-of-mouth publicity and marketing success

The following is an edited excerpt from Blogging All-in-One for Dummies by Susan Gunelius (Wiley, 2010).

The most powerful aspect of business blogging is the potential to generate word-of-mouth marketing from the content you publish. If you can engage your audience members and get them talking about your business, products and services outside of your website, you’ve hit marketing gold. Blogs are a perfect tool to achieve that goal because they’re conversational in nature. They’re also filled with personality (at least the good ones are) that encourages readers to participate and build relationships with the bloggers and businesses behind them. Relationships drive customer loyalty and create vocal brand advocates who want to talk about the brands they love and are willing to defend those brands from criticism. When that conversation moves from your business blog and turns into online buzz, you’ve achieved a goal that marketing managers dream of.

The power of the social web comes from the conversations and buzz that occur on it. With a business blog, you have a chance to start those conversations, nurture them and let them grow. As a marketer by profession, I think we live in the most incredible time because the power of the social web and blogging provides more opportunities for businesses to connect with consumers and drive word-of-mouth marketing wider and louder than ever.

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Simple things you can do today that will show results almost immediately

You started a business blog, created a Twitter profile and developed a Facebook page–now what? Sure, you can start publishing updates and sending friend and follow requests, but those communications are just the preliminary steps to social media marketing success.

Here are five tips that anyone can apply to their social media marketing efforts today and start seeing positive results almost immediately.

1. Make it easy and non-threatening for your audience to participate.
   Not only does your content matter on the social web but your personality matters, too. In other words, you need to be accessible and approachable in all of your social media marketing communications. Don’t talk at people, talk with them, and do so in a manner that makes it clear that you want them to join the conversation.

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Timing is at the core of Twitter. How current is this? How new is this? What’s going on right now?

A tweet’s 140 characters take no time to read and little time to write. And tweets stay visible in the Twitter search results only until they’re buried by newer tweets. So Twitter’s recently announced “promoted tweets” as a way to beat the clock–and to be seen in a search engine that caters to the most impatient searchers on the planet.

But these are not ads. They’re tweets–with one difference: A promoted tweet will stay out there as long as people are engaging with it, and only when they’ve stopped will it disappear.

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I may get more value out of Twitter than anyone else on the planet because I use Twitter as a tool—specifically as a marketing tool—for my website Alltop and my book, Reality Check. If the concept of using Twitter in a commercial manner interests you, keep reading. If it doesn’t, then you can continue to send and receive tweets about how cats are rolling over and the line at Starbucks.

1. Forget the “influentials.” You must buy into the theory that products and services reach critical mass because mere mortals spread the word for you. This defies the common wisdom that a handful of “influentials” shape what the rest of us try and what we adopt. In the online world, these influentials include Mike “I can go a week without Twitter” Arrington, Robert Scoble, Seth Godin, and to some extent me.

Reliance on influentials is flawed because the Internet has flattened and democratized information. Influentials don’t have as much special access, special knowledge, and distribution as you might think because of the growth of websites, blogs, and, of course, Twitter.

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Why joining online conversations isn’t enough

Remember back when a marketer’s primary goal was to catch the attention of consumers in any possible way? The content of the ad, brochure or sign seemed to take a backseat to the need for catching a consumer’s attention for just a split second. The methods used to grab attention became more and more extreme as shock advertising, sexual innuendos and outrageous imagery took center stage in marketing.

However, with the growth of social media, marketers have learned that simply interrupting the online conversation doesn’t always lead to sales, nor does it lead to positive word-of-mouth marketing. Now the goal of marketing is engagement. Consumers want to know, what are you going to tell them after you interrupt them?

Marketers have discovered that there is tremendous value in building brands and relationships through long-term social media strategy vs. short-term direct-marketing tactics on social websites.

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