Just blog it

Most business owners know that they need a website. What most of them don’t know, however, is that they need at least two websites; one that is specific to their business, product or service, and another that is specific to the benefits of their business, product or service.

While the first website is a point of reference for a business, the second is an educational website that offers users information about topics related to their business: a weblog or blog.

Internet users don’t surf the Internet for businesses, they surf for information or for solutions to their problems. Your second website will provide them with these solutions, and will direct them to your first website to purchase from. It really doesn’t matter what business you’re; this same principle always applies.

Major search engines prefer to index information rather than businesses; therefore, a website about your real estate company and its properties will not be as successful as a website about life in Spain and its benefits.

Obviously, a second website doesn’t come cheap. However  Smart Media offers a package that makes promoting your website with  a blog afffordable.

Ask for details:
wolfgang@smartmediaspain.com

Regards

Wolfgang Brand

A letter to Santa Claus

A letter to Santa Claus:

Dear Santa Claus (Google)

I am the owner of a website selling property in Spain. My website helps people to fulfil their dream of living in the sun. I never cheated anyone and my employees love me. I think I deserve a present this christmas.

My problem is that that I haven’t got the foggiest idea what Internet Marketing is all about. Also I simply do not have the time and money to contract somebody who knows how this stuff works. I am also far too lazy to learn it.

However, my website has an outstanding design, lots of pictures and only the most important information. The ‘about us’ section provides the user with a detailed explanation about what a great company we are, including pictures of all these great people working for us (including mine of course). The colours are my favourites: blue and yellow and I hardly left any white space. I also included some very catchy animations and I am especially proud of this flashy intro playing my favourite song in the background.

Hence forth this Christmas one thing really would make me happy: List my website in Google under the words listed hereunder. I provide the list in a format easy to read for you:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”property in spain, properties in spain, costa del sol property, villas, townhouses, apartments, penthouses, buying property, investments, buying off plan, developments, real estate, rentals, legal advice, mortgages, estate agents, real estate agents, marbella, malaga, commercial property, residential property, fincas, country property, inmobilaria, casas, propriedades, immobilien in Spanien”>

Merry Christmas

Tony Naive
Best Properties S.C.

email marketing

In short: email marketing is much more effective and more convenient.

Telephone cold calling means: Constantly looking for new staff, training, salaries and / or commissions , the premises for a call center,  budget  for warnings, equipment … a lot of money, a lot of work, lots of stress.

Email marketing means: correct list can be found by the agency, creating a landing page, find a copywriters ,  create the art work – done.

I will illustrate with an example.

Let’s say you sell print products , like my client Vistaprint in Barcelona.

They produce such stuff as flyers, business cards, letterhead, brochures, catalogs, etc.   I’ve got a list in the portfolio, with about 500,000 German entrepreneurs, self-employed and those that want to start a business.

Hurray your favorite prey!

This list is generated by multiple newsletters, which are send to these people.  The content of those newsletters is about changes to tax,  laws, marketing and sales – exactly the issues an entrepreneur has to deal with.

Now you pick out one or two of your products and offer a special deal. Discount or other advantage to valid for a certain period of time . Then  create a “landing page”.

This is something like this:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landing_Page

Then you find a good writer, for both  the text of the  email as well as the text of your landing page.

You can  afford that as you just got rid of a call center.

Then send the completed art work to your online marketing agency (<<us >>) and we  take care of the shipment. The shipment is done within three days, then comes the bill and detailed statistics – for the fine tuning of the next campaign.

Well, now you just wait for the inquiries and commissions. Easy isn’t it?

This list has an opening rate of about 15 to 18%. If the subject line is well written, this may also be higher. But let’s assume 15%. This means you have presented your product to  75,000 people in a few days.

Suppose further that only 1% of them order something from you, then you have won 750 new customers in three days. Each of these new customers did  cost about 35 to 40 euros. Let’s assume however , only 0.5% turn into new customers , then the new customer can cost 70 to 80 Euro.

Of course it depends on how well or poorly selling your mail + landing page, the product quality and the price . Thereforeit is essential to contract a professional copywriter and to offer a special deal, a bargain,  inthis campaign.

The whole thing you do once a month.

As your online marketing agency we  are constantly on the look for such lists  We are looking for publishers all over Europe and  can currently offer potential in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, UK and Poland.

So, now ask yourself this question:

How many semi-legal, annoying phone calls do you need to make to get the same results? What would it cost? How long does it take?

Regards

Wolfgang Brand

Google Caffeine

A couple of weeks ago, Google announced a major update in the way they index websites. This does happen from time to time. Those updates are most of the time given names like “big daddy” in 2005 or “jagger”. Just like hurricanes are given names.

Most previous updates did cause big changes in rankings, simply because the changes were about the way Google ranks sites. This update however seams to be about how Google will index sites in the future.

What is the difference?

When Google changes an algorithm, then it implements or changes stuff that determines how your website ranks. This could be the way the value certain links, or like in “jagger” evaluating reciprocal links. Changes about how they INDEX a site is entirely different: It means how the get the data and how fast and in what way they process such data to be shown in results.

This changes could actually have an impact on search results. Why? because if data a collected and processed faster then before, more data is available in the results and as a consequence rankings might vary. Matt Cutts from Google said in an interview that they try to keep the search results the same or at least similar like before.

Now, that was the theory

Google actually provides a testing version to the new system and asks users and developers for feedback.  You can find it here:

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

I did some testing on the sites I am optimising. I did find some minor changes in the rankings for which I have no explanation as yet. I will have to dig deeper into this. My first thought was about anchor text being used more as exact phrase match, but I have not evidence yet to support that.

The site that has lost a little under generic phrases ( bars fuengirola)  is www.fuengirolascout.net and on the winning side are www.arribaestates.com and www.fiestaproperty.com. The later much to my surprise.  I have not done jack shit on the site since ages. The opposite is the case: I actually removed links to that site.

Any observations?

If anybody made observations about changes in your own rankings, please post them here. I also would love to hear theories about why certain sites rankings change.

Here some questions that I have seen people asking:

• Will content get indexed faster then before?
• Did they change the way the rank sites as well or is it just a matter of time until things settle? Or is caffeine just a structural change?
• Will fresh content, like on blogs, will get even more favoured and indexed faster, not only on wordpress but across all blogging platforms?
• Will loading time effect ranking after caffeine?
• Will user behaviour be a factor?

I don’t have the answers yet and would welcome  discussion about it.

Regards

Wolfgang Brand
Smart Media Spain
SEO & Media Consultant

The Fuengirola Scout

The Internet develops faster then any other media on the planet. Every now and then you hear of the “next big thing” on the web. Social networks, facebook, second life, and so on. The amount of Internet users worldwide outnumbers the people watching TV already.

But you might say: What has it got to do with me? I am just a small business owner in Marbella! What can the Internet do for me?

Here are your options:

1. Google Local Search

Google invented a system that displays local businesses in the search results and on Google maps. Your business can be listed on those local business listings , displaying the name of your business, your contact details, a link to your website and a spot on the map to tell your costumers how to find you.

Local search results always appear at the top of the main search results whenever the algorythm detects a search for a local business.

The major search engines often have partnerships with local information providers, such as Ask Jeeves’ partnership with Citysearch.  Professional SEMs can utilize listings from local search providers so that they get greater search engine visibility and branding impact on the major web search engines.

Lets say for example, you own a Restaurant in Marbella.

Did you know that in average 1700 people search for “restaurant in marbella” including several similar phrases per month?  The word “marbella”  is actually searched for 550.000 times in a single month. That is 6.600.000 searches per year.

Here is how the search result for “restaurants in fuengirola” looks like:

Restaurants in Fuengirola

You can see on the very top of the search results the “local business results” . Which consist of a the map and the first ten results of the businesses listed in Google local search. Under the listings is a link to all local businesses listed.

Do you need a website to be listed in Google local search?
No , you need to give Google a valid domain to information about your business but its highly recomendable .  If you don’t have one, Smart Media can design you a small but professional website for as little as 500 Euro.

2. Local media

Smart media is building at the moment local blogs, called the souts. There will be a individual blog for each of the bigger towns on the Costa del Sol. Blogs are becoming the the most popular social media on the web.

Record numbers of people are now visiting blogs, proving that blog visitation is now part of mainstream online behavior for many Internet users.

Once bastions for the tech elite, blogs are now as ubiquitous to the web as reality shows are to television. Blogs are redefining how people experience the web and, in many ways, have helped precipitate the shift towards user-generated content on the Internet (otherwise known as the Web 2.0 movement).

Our first local blogs  are:
http://www.marbellascout.net
http://www.fuengirolascout.net

The blogs will be promoted using Adwords, back links from other blogs,  online advertising in other local media ( www.surinenglish.com ) and on the sites of the local puplisher we work with.  Most importantly, we will use our skills in search engine optimization to assure the blog does get listed well in the Google search results.

You own a restaurant in Fuengirola

You can have a full page article about your restaurant on this blog. The page will include as much text as you want, a picture gallery with up to 12 pictures, your contact details and a map for people to find your restaurant.

Here an example:
Restaurant Old Swiss house in Fuengirola

Your advert on the scout in Google local search

What really makes marbellascout.net unique is this:  You do not have to have a website to advertise your business in Google local search! We simple create a sub domain for you like this:

http://yourrestaurant.fuengirolascout.net

Then we submitt this address to Google for inclusion into Google local search and Google maps. This is probably the most effective way for you as a small business owner to advertise your restaurant to thousands of people that are actually searching for what you have to offer.

Matt Cutts and small business owners

This video is an interview with one of Google’s senior managers. He gives tips to website owners about how to increase the visibility of your website and explains Google local search. Matt Cutts actually recommands the use of blogs and social media for small local businesses.

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In this Interview he gives tips to small business owners. He again insists on creating blogs and recommends wordpress.com as being seo friendly blog software. Smart Media uses exclusively the wordpress.com software to run our blogs.

For a limited period of time Smart Media offers small business owners in Marbella an entry on marbellascout.net for as little as 200 Euro for a whole year!

The entry includes:

• A full page advertorial artikel about your business
• A picture gallery of up to 12 pictures
• All your contact details
• Link to your website if applicable
• Sub domain pointing to your advert
• Inclusion in Google local search

Interessted?
Call us today under +(34) 665 841 138
Or email: info@smartmediaspain.com

Second Life

Smart Media , are teaming up with a premier provider of open source solutions to provide clients with development services in Second Life. We will use the Puerto Banus based company to realise developments in Second Life for our clients.

White Feather Technologies SL has already a lot of experience in developing complex projects in the Second Life environment for clients all over Europe. One rather impressive example is the rebuild of Puerto Banus in Second Life.

Serving its clients in Spain, the United Kingdom and the Middle East, White Feather Technologies SL (WFTSL) has been providing web solutions and cutting edge web design since its inception in 2002. In addition to its web and eCommerce solutions, White Feather Technologies SL has, in recent years, also positioned itself as a 3D web developer. White Feather Technologies SL has worked with global corporations and institutions on pioneering web projects.

White Feather Technologies SL has exceptional talents in web development, animation, digital design and project management. The company works with talent from around the world and as such, uses web based project management tools with all its clients, in order to ensure efficiency, transparency and timely project completion.

White Feather Technologies SL

Puerto Banus in Second Life

Regards

Wolfgang Brand

SEO for Google

Search engine submission services promise to submit clients’ websites to thousands of search engines for one low price. But should you trust them?

Emails such as this often appear in my inbox:

“Submitting your website to search engines may increase your online sales dramatically. lf you invest time and money into your website, you simply must submit your website to search engines, otherwise it will be virtually invisible to prospective customers. If you want people to know about your website and boost your sales, the only way to do that is to make your website visible in places where people search for information, such as search engines”.

What you aren’t told in these misleading emails is that submitting your website to search engines has very little to do with search engine rankings. In fact, submitting your website to search engines doesn’t even guarantee it gets indexed. Most traffic to your website is generated from the main search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

Therefore, submitting your website to thousands of search engines will be a waste of time and money. Even worse is that your website might get accidentally submitted to AFF websites, which almost certainly guarantees that it will be banned from search engines. Rather than push you up the rankings, thousands of these search engines use your information for future promotions – meaning more pesky spam crammed in your inbox.

Ways to submit your pages

1. Don’t submit your pages at all. Instead, allow the search engines to find your pages through links on other websites. Ironically, non-submitting is by far the most effective way of submitting your pages – and the least stressful!

2. Submit your pages through the free add URL pages of the search engines. The downside with this, however, is that search engines claim that over 90% of all submissions through free add URL pages is spam. And you don’t want your website lost with all that lot!

3. Use Overture’s Site Match to submit your pages to Yahoo!’s family of search engines. Site Match is a paid inclusion-and cost-per-click program that ensures your pages are highly visible by including them in search engines such as Yahoo!, FAST, AltaVista, HotBot and more. Site Match can get expensive though if you have a number of pages to submit.

4. If your website is new list it in a directory such as Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) or the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org). Then find some websites that will agree to put links from theirs to yours. Visit the Search Engine Guide (www.searchengineguide.com) to see if there are any search engines and directories that cover your website’s topic area.

Take the stress-free approach to search engine submissions and:

• link to all of your important pages from another page on your website
• get inbound links from another website to yours
• let the major search engines find your pages by themselves
• monitor your progress

Please note: You may be using an SEO company like Smart Media to handle your search engine submissions. Does this mean you’re paying too much for these SEO services? No. SEO work is extremely complex and time-consuming, and a good search engine optimiser will help make your online business a success.

In conclusion

So many website owners and SEOs make search engine submissions look much harder than they are. Don’t let them pull the wool over your eyes!

Regards

Wolfgang Brand

SEO for Google

Before Google came on the market , link popularity was being used by one or two search engines as part of their algorithm to  determine the rankings for given search term. Then when Google arrived with their link-based PageRank, link popularity took off and became an absolute essential ingredient in achieving top rankings.

Some engines simply counted the number of links coming into a page (inbound links), but Google took the idea further. Each inbound link comes comes from a page which itself has inbound links. The more inbound links on the linking page, the more important that page is and, therefore, the more important the link to our page is.  So Google gives more weight to inbound links from important pages that it does to inbound links from lesser pages.

Google is the world’s number one search engine, and currently provides the results for around 80% of all the searches done in the world. Because of that, it is vitally important for any website that relies on search engine traffic to do well in Google. Ranking  well in Google means making the site ‘important’ in Google’s eyes and, to do that, the site must have good inbound links – as many of them as possible, and preferably from important pages (pages with medium to high PageRank values).

Regards

Wolfgang Brand

Controversial Article

I sometimes wonder why website owners pay so little attention to this page. Nobody comes up with something different. Isn’t this the page that is supposed to establish a USP – a unique selling proposition? The page that should market your company and tell everyone what makes your company different from others?

These types of pages are all the same, that’s what makes them boring. If you read 100 about us- pages you will possibly read 100 times the following:

• We are the best in what we are doing and possibly in everything we will ever do
• We really care about our clients even about the ones we don’t like
• We think the client is always right
• We have the best  customer service all day everyday
• We offer inexpensive solutions, or we are less expensive then the competition
• We are different – don’t know what it is that makes us different but we are!

I actually wonder, when Google will start filtering all about us pages as duplicate content.  It wouldn’t surprise me.  At the risk of being called insane, but with the hope of baiting some inbound links, we try here a totally different approach:

What you think about this?

I’ll go through each and every one of the points above and show you why
WE are INDEED different. When reading this you might well think I am joking, no I don’t, believe me I really mean it!

1. So you we are the best in what you do and in everything else?

Well here at Smart Media we do exactly what it says on the tin:  Smart Advertising.  We market your company and services to the biggest audience and fastest growing media on the planet: the World Wide Web.  In simple terms:  We make websites sell something.

Apart from that we are a bunch of completely useless www – geeks.  Never ask us to do something else than online marketing,  like repairing a car, changing tires, washing up, software installation, fixing your network problems,  or (god beware): hardware support.  We just don’t know this stuff and to be honest we are not bothered either.

It does what it says on the tin:  Smart Media

2. So you think we really should care about every client?

Well at Smart Media  we don’t. We are totally selfish and only care about client’s that make us money. Yes, right we are in this business to make money not to stroke your EGO. Does this one really make us different? Does that come as a surprise? No. Everybody else is in business for the exact same reason – we just happen to admit it.

Here is what does make us different: If we don’t like you we get rid of you,  if you don’t make us money we don’t take you on, as simple as that. That gives us more time to focus on projects we really enjoy doing and to work with client’s that appreciate our efforts.

We care about good clients and we choose them!

3. The client is always right?

At Smart Media  we think the client can not be right! Think about it, if what you are doing with your website was right, why would you talk to an online marketing consultant? You have a problem; your website does not sell anything or does not sell enough, that’s why you are talking to us. You are doing something wrong  so how can you be right?

The definition of insanity is doing the same things all over again and expecting different results!!

4. We have the best customer service?

No we don’t. Actually our customer service is almost non existent. We don’t serve customers – we serve websites. Customers are actually a nuisance, distracting us from our job with endless meetings and discussions about pretty pictures and how a website should look like,  in their clueless opinion.

Every minute we spend with a customer is taken away from the  job we are getting paid for: to  increase the performance of your website!

5. We have competitive prices?

If you are looking for a cheap SEO solution we are not the right partner for you. Good SEO and online marketing can not be done cheap, it’s just not possible. We pride ourselves in being the leading Internet marketing consultants in Spain. We play premier league and we charge prime money.

We are very expensive!

You’ll get what you pay for, no more no less!

6. Now you know what makes us different:

We allow ourselves the luxury of being slightly arrogant and direct to the point. We don’t believe in wasting time and our only concern is the performance of your website.

….and we do get results!

Regards

Wolfgang Brand

SEM in Google

Advertising is important. Advertising is expensive. Good advertising makes your business more successful. Bad advertising will ruin your business sooner or later. You will hardly ever find companies creating and producing their own TV-spots, it’s usually done using the services of a professional advertising agency. However when doing Online Marketing campaigns like Google Advertising, an amazingly high number of people opt to manage their campaign themselves.

It seems quite simple. It actually is, if you know how it works, like everything in life. Do you have enough time and money to finance the learning curve?

You want to manage the campaign besides your daily business routine or want to entrust your apprentice with managing an adwords account, because he is doing so well with computers? Great idea. Your competitors will love you and Google will also be happy. The worse your campaign is, the more money it will cost.

Maybe you ask yourself what you may have done wrongly. Here a list of common mistakes:

• Keywords  too generic
• Not enough keywords
• Too many keywords
• Wrong keywords
• Advertising positions too high
• Advertising positions too low
• Bad landing pages
• Landing page does not fit to keywords
• Landing page does not fit to advertising text
• Landing page does not work
• Boring advertising text
• Exaggerating advertising text
• Too general advertising text
• Advertising text does not fit to keywords
• No controll of figures
• 16. No permanent monitoring and optimising of the campaign

This list of possible mistakes is not complete. It should only show you, that this has become a science for itself over time. With every single new advertiser, targeting the same potential customers, mistakes will have a greater negative impact on your campaign such as:

• Little amount of clicks (wasting time)
• too many or wrong clicks in relation to sales (wasting money)
• bad or wrong keywords, adverts or landing pages (ruins company image)

Is one of the above your case? Now you may ask yourself whether or not contracting a professional would get you better results. A bad one will ruin you totally and a good one must be quite expensive.

In classic advertising its hard to control which means where more successful then other but with a PPC (PayPerClick) campaign you can exactly compare input and output of your campaign. These permanent control and optimisation will get much better results than old school advertising. Who ever you get to manage your campaign always remember: Trust is good – control is better!

What can you expect from us?

Better results for less money. We will not tell you to spend aditional money. Generally our services are financed by a fixed monthly amount out of the saved budget and a performance based commission out of additional sales as a result of our work. After an analysis of the status quo we will individually agree on a performance target. We do have that much confidence in our work and this way ensuring a long lasting and profitable cooperation profitable for all parts involve – except your competitors…

Regards

Wolfgang Brand