Search Marketing by Charles Grimm

eBusiness Productivity Tools

by Charles Grimm on December 29, 2011

It’s that time of year again where we have the annual gathering of kith and kin. Besides the festivities it always seems to be a time for learning. If you are a business owner its also a time for reflection and planning for the next year. The great thing about this time of year is that you are somewhat forced to get out of the box, routines, comfort zones etc. while you are engage more with friends and family that have different perspectives.

I have noticed over the last years that it has been a time for sharing and trying new productivity tools and systems.

This year I came across an iPad app that I have found very useful right out the gate.

It is a writing/ drawing tool. You can draw write or make notes, with you finger, or for best results, using an iPad pen.

Since I use a white board and notepads (the organic type) frequently this has been a handy tool because I can email those notes or drawings immediately. No scanning or typing into word necessary. Awesome!

These 3 iPad Drawing Apps are convenient and save you time

1. Pen Ultimate – Lite Version .99 – email shareable

2. Whiteboard – Lite Version is Free – Pro Version .99

3. UPad – Lite Version is Free – email shareable

One of the most important features of these tools was being able to share the note or drawing immediately via email. While most app b-models want you to share, (that’s the point, especially of the free ones) many of them want you to do so on Facebook or other social media.

Bottom line, Pen ultimate was the best tool (it had good user rating numbers), with the most intuitive user interface. It is well thought out in its layout as a notebook and even the lite version has a number of options.

I like the organic process of using the old fashion pen and paper and while note apps won’t completely replace this process these are very useful tools to be able to use in client meetings for quickly and easily mind mapping, drawing ideas and doing methodology charting.

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Rebranding your Online Startup

by Charles Grimm on December 28, 2011

I guess this is an appropriate title for our own company startup rebrand.

After years of development, marketing and client work we realized that we weren’t a media focused company. Rather we didn’t offer advertising and typical media services as we briefly did several years ago, when we decided on the name MediaWright. While MediaWright still remains our corporate name, from back in 05 when we were just a DBA, we have decided to rebrand our stuffy corporate site to the name Grimmster. Whoooaa! What a step out from the conservative corporate blue I was raised and trained by.

While rebranding is not without its hassles, 301 redirects, systems and design changes aside, its part of new age entrepreneurial-ism. Since businesses are moving a bit quicker and changes are more immediate it often means that your business or brand needs to shift in order to be true to your purpose or re-purpose. We have been fortunate and continue to be a profitable startup. Yet as with many small startups we have grappled the challenge of growth and decided to take on more responsibility and new grimmsters, with new opportunities.

This may cut into the surfing time even a bit more. However its a good thing and something we are all looking forward to in 2012 as we have some fun promoting the grimmster emarketing brand. We still have yet to further develop our logo and graphics etc. around the soul of our business but rest assured we will have some adventurous new elements to inject into the business. If you care to share any ideas regarding mascots please let us know at info (at)grimmster,com. Cheers, C

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Top 11 SEO Tools for 2011

by Charles Grimm on November 21, 2011

1. Web Developer - FireFox Addon

The Web Developer extension adds lots of web developer tools to a browser for analyzing all sorts of site related technical data.

2. FireBug – FireFox Addon

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. The Firebug is another tool we use daily. You can edit, CSS, HTML , and more live in any web page…great for testing before you dig into any real code changes.

3. Search Status – FireFox Addon

A useful quick rank-checking tool. Displays Google PageRank, Alexa rank, Compete rank and MozRank anywhere in your browser, It analyses keyword density, nofollow, backlinks, robots and again much more.

4. ySlow - FireFox Addon

YSlow analyzes web pages and provides information on why they are slow. It is based on Yahoos rules for best-optimized web sites.

5. FlagFox – FireFox Addon

Very cool tool if you want to know some background information of a site. This tool shows a country flag which links you to information on a map of the site and server location as well giving site security info, whois, and much more.

6. Copyscape – Content Tool

This tool checks for duplicate pages of your content on the web. Very useful if you are working with any freelancers or outsource writers. Also good to use as a quick check for external duplicate content, if you are doing an SEO Audit.

7. Google Webmaster Tools

Still free and a great tool for tracking and analyzing your website traffic.

8. Google – AdSense Key Word Tool

Google’s keyword tool that gives you monthly search traffic results for specific and related keywords. Make sure you click exact match.

9. Wayback Machine (Archive.org)

Domain History. I have used this for years. Very usefully especially if you are going to build out a brand domain and want to see if there are any negative vibes or history associated with who ever owned it before you. Also a great tool if you are buying domains as part of your link building strategy.

10. Into DNS – Domain and Server Information

Gives you lots of information about a domain, IP and Nameserver, MX records. If you are running servers it’s a quick an easy tool to use for checking the status of many things. This information is really important especially for those few SEO’s that do run there own servers, (especially cloud) and really want to generate the best Search performance.

11. SeoMoz – Professional Seo Tools

* SEO Tools, Campaign monitoring, Community Support and much more. Known as a leader in SEO amongst Seo’s Marketers, Webmasters and Enterprise companies alike. There is a free and paid account. If you are going to have one reliable comprehensive set of tools and resources you can depend on, this is the one. But I am bias because I am a Pro Member.

Well that’s the list. These are a few of the ones we use at eMediaWright. There are a lot of tools on the web now. After years of trying many of the free ones we started to opt for the paid tools mostly because of reliability, accuracy and time. If you are relatively new to seo in the last couple of years, I would go straight to the paid ones. The reason is simple, these companies have had many years now of beta testing, getting feed back and refining. You will save your self time (which is money in most cases) Cheers. C

If you have some quality Seo Tools that you find invaluable for seo analysis, please let me know in the comments or on twitter.com/mediawright

*denotes an Affiliate Link – thought I would let you know

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Online Business Blog

by Charles Grimm on October 25, 2011

A Lean and Steady Startup for Online Business

Picture of a Pomalift - The innovation that lead ski lift technology. A Steady Ride to the Top.

It s been a while since writing about anything other than web development or online marketing so I thought I would throw a quick post in about a new online business blog & solution our company is launching. See Pomalift Online Business Solutions.

To round out our online products and services program we thought that it was important to provide a vehicle to discuss Online Business. After talking with and consulting many small business owners over the years it was fairly obvious that people were not just interested in all the new trendy internet marketing toys but really more interested in how they could make some money with all this new knowledge. (this may seem obvious) So when a friend of mine from Vietnam contacted me to partner with him offering eCommerce solutions, I started thinking.

Ok, makes sense. While not all people I talk to have a full understanding of using the web for business, there is usually somewhere, tucked away, a goal to attract awareness to their site for the purposes of promoting something. Whether that thing is an idea, tangible product or service, the end result somehow has some commerce attached to it.

The actually commerce part may not be the drive such as the case of non profits. It may be just the fact that people want to have more autonomy on how they earn their income. With all the people skilled and qualified, out of jobs today, it seems to make sense that there are more ways these days to earn an income than to just put your resume out there the old fashioned way.

Beside the fact that my overseas friend has about 150 employees now and developing ecommerce clients worldwide may have also caused some intrigue.

Being a fact that we are still a small company there is a trade off of course with growing a business. When you start to take on large enterprise clients you can end up losing a certain amount of autonomy and control over things.

Having worked for some large companies in the past and knowing some of the dynamics, its prompted me to take a different approach to expanding our business.

Instead of just jumping on board the ecommerce partner wagon and getting caught up in the melee of activities I thought we would start out with a separate web blog geared to online business startups and enterprise ecommerce clients alike. While the two seem on completely different spectrums of ebusiness they are also not so different.

Both sides have an objective to build revenue. In fact it is probably more of a challenge and accomplishment in some cases to work with startups as they are unprecedented in their growth worldwide today.

Startups are fun and the great thing about startups they usually offer lots new insight into generating business online. They are usually operating leaner and the team often has fewer creative or operational constraints. On the other hand the enterprise business has greater budgets and knowledge resources.

Together we decided these two core business types would provide a good balance to giving insight and getting feedback for building online business revenue.

In the spirit of new age internet entrepreneurs… that’s what we aim for. See the book The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

If you have any comments to add positive or other wise please let us know either here at CG Blog or over at Pomalift Online Business. I will be launching our own Steady Startup Circle meeting mid December 15, 2011. For those interested in being part of the group send us a tweet. We will be offering some neat tech perks for any persons doing a startup and want to provide feedback during the process.

Cheers, C

What is a Steady Startup?

My contention is that startups do not have to be boom or bust rocket ships blasting out a product or service on angel or venture funds. We agree that startups should be lean. Further, the solid and successful ones are steady in their, diligence, team building, offering, and systems over time. Growth evolving through a course of testing, feedback, experience and value through innovation and reliability.

Does this sound boring and lofty? Let us know at Steady Startup.

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SEO revisited – Search Engine Basics

by Charles Grimm on September 14, 2011

What are some of the current core search engine optimization and online marketing elements?

While major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! don’t reveal all their algorithms for SEO we do know a few basics for good search engine optimization, partly because, in the case of google, they tell us. Here are a few:

Keyword Usage – There is a myth that the more a certain keyword is used in the content of the website the more it can help bring traffic to a website. Not true. However keywords do “dominate our search intent and interactions with the engines“. A keyword is a particular word or phrase the user is likely to type and search for, during the search process for a relevant return of content. In order for a website to develop a better ranking it should have relevant keyword in titles, text and meta data.
Page titles- The page titles of the websites also hold significant relevance for search engine optimization. The title of a page is one of the first things a user and a search engine will check before going through the website. Hence a page title with the particular keyword is of great help for search engine optimization.
Relevant content- The most effective way to get a better SEO positioning will be to write content in your website which is relevant to a user. The fact that “content is king” cannot be emphasized more and hence website developers should pay particular attention to the content of their website. It also makes it easier for search engines to crawl pages where content matches the users search.
Site Structure- The site structure of any website has to be properly constructed so that a ‘search bot’ may easily find and crawl your website. Major search engine robots look for easily accessible websites to present their results of a search. While building your website make sure that you put what you want the search engine to see, at the top of the page and remember Robots read words not pictures.
Link Building- Links are like recommendations from other websites which guide the user to your website. Or like my 17 year old nephew says…”That’s kind of like Cred building online right.” Yeh thats about it! It helps you create better awareness of your website, higher traffic and a much needed competitive edge over other websites in your market. It is one of the most important and difficult tasks of search engine optimization.
Social Networking Sites- Adding social media widgets and follow us links to your site is a great way to allow people, Visitors, to pass on information that they found interesting or useful to their network while at the same time building your connections and site awareness.
Site maps- Search engines like Google go through a page’s site map before presenting it as a potential result to the user. Basically an XML code guides the the search bots to the desired content of the users search without having to go through graphic menus.
Local Search- Because much business happens on a local level it makes good sense to add your business and site information in lots of local search directories. i.e yellow pages, yelp etc. Localized searches have taken precedence over normal searches. Your search results will be giving you results according to the place where you live. Location based search. This makes your search more relevant and also helps local business.

These are just a few basic key points to keep in mind while building and planning for SEO.

What are your thoughts regarding the more core aspects of Search Marketing and search engine optimization? Let us know your comments below or post it on Twitter/MediaWright. Cheers.

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