Saturday, December 29, 2012

What Is Google+ Local and How Can Your Company Benefit From It?

Formerly Google Places, Google+ Local is an incredibly powerful resource for any business looking to drive traffic to their online properties. In a nutshell, it allows businesses to create a listing (via a Google+ page) which will appear next to relevant, especially local, search results. Google+ Local is to business on the internet what the Yellow Pages used to be to companies who wanted to be available by phone. If you are marketing your business to customers in your local area, you will want to make sure that your company is properly listed.

[ Related: Is Social Media Good for Your Business? ]
When a customer is looking to solve a problem or purchase a product or service, they typically use the Google search engine to find one that might help them. For example, if a potential customer needs a personal injury attorney they will look to the search engines to find a lawyer in their local area. Google gives that person a highly visible and convenient listing of personal injury lawyers in their local area to choose from.

How Can My Company Benefit From Google+ Local?

If you have a lawn care business, you would definitely want to be one of those first listings that showed up when people were doing a Google search. A Google+ Local listing will show potential customers your location, contact information, web address, photos, reviews and any other information that you choose to share.

Making sure that your company can be found when somebody is looking for a service that your company provides will help you to see an increase in calls and traffic to your business. One of the keys in making sure that this happens is to claim your listing and write your descriptions using the keywords that customers would use to find your company. You’ll also want to make sure that you have tied together your other promotional tools like coupons, videos, website and pictures. A complete Google+ Local listing is vital to making sure that local customers find you.

What Does Google+ Local Mean for SEO?

Unlike the older Google Place Pages, your Local+ business profile WILL be indexed and show up in the search results. That means you will have to think about how you’re going to optimize your Local+ page for search to gain higher visibility.

[ More: 5 Ways To Generate Website Traffic ]

Google +1 buttons are used to gauge how good a product or service is based on strangers’ experiences. However, the +1 button goes beyond “Likes” and “Retweets” because it takes recommendations from impersonal to personal, and ultimately, enhances users’ searches. When Google+ users are signed into their account and run a search with Google’s search engine, friends’ and contacts’ +1 endorsements show up in their search results.

To make it simple, a well optimized Google+ Local page combined with good & relevant content should lead to better search engine rankings.

If you having trouble claiming you Google+ Local listing or need some help optimizing it, don’t hesitate to contact us today!

What Is Google+ Local and How Can Your Company Benefit From It?

Thursday, October 25, 2012

5 Twitter Marketing Tips

5 TWITTER MARKETING TIPS

Twitter is one of the most personal ways to target potential customers and spread your message. While some companies languish with only a few hundred followers, others gain a huge following because of how they run their twitter marketing campaigns. They ultimately find that twitter has helped them achieve substantial success in their industry.

[ more: 5 Ways To Make Money using Pinterest ]

But twitter marketing isn’t easy – certainly not as easy as many social media experts will have you believe. Not every company that uses twitter is going to achieve instant success. So here are 5 twitter marketing tips that you can use to help you succeed and potentially help you business thrive:

Tweet Regularly – You should have someone in charge of your twitter account that is ready and able to make updates. These days, your followers follow thousands of other people at once, and your presence is often lost in a sea of other tweets being made every second. Only if you’re able to regularly update your twitter account will it have any chance of being noticed, so don’t start a twitter campaign unless you plan on committing to it.

Be Interesting – Don’t even bother with a twitter account if the best you can do is describe your lunch or the magazine you read on your latest flight. “I’m tired” is not an exciting tweet by anyones standards, and if your presence is too boring you’ll either lose your followers or develop a negative image of your brand. You want to be interesting, so people associate your account with excitement.

Market Your Twitter – For some reason many people join twitter and expect the followers to come rolling in. But there are thousands of businesses already on twitter and millions of people that use it regularly, and no one is going to follow you simply because you are (or think you are) an interesting person/business. You have to go one step further and market your twitter account – on your website, your blog, your other social media accounts and more.

Have Special Offers/Insider Info – Depending on your type of business, you should consider having special offers exclusive to your twitter followers or inside information that isn’t available elsewhere. This will give people a reason to follow you, hoping to find out more about what you have to say or offer. Special offers can also be a great way to create a buzz about your business.

Listen and Respond – Finally, you’re going to have people communicating with you on your twitter account. The best way to make sure you develop a positive image is by tweeting back to them, and engaging in conversations. This creates loyalty with potential customers and shows that your twitter account isn’t just for marketing.

Succeeding with twitter isn’t as easy as people claim it is. Thousands of companies launch new twitter campaigns everyday and they crash and burn. If you really want to have a successful twitter account, you need to make sure you follow these 5 twitter marketing tips and run your twitter the right way!

5 Twitter Marketing Tips

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

What Is Video Marketing?

Internet Marketing is growing in popularity amongst small business owners who no longer want to spend large amounts of money and time on print, radio, and television advertising. Video marketing is a particularly beneficial alternative because it does not require renting advertising space or air time, and each video can be created relatively simply on a small budget.

While video marketing is not yet widely used by local businesses, in the future this is likely to change. YouTube, Vimeo and other video-sharing websites create a huge market place which can now be used to target a local audience.

[ Atlanta SEO ]

Video marketing is an ideal method to quickly explain your products, services, or brand to your customers. By creating and distributing videos across a range of different news and media-sharing websites you can bring detailed information to a large audience in a fun and entertaining way.

Although video technology has been available for a long time, the ability to share and watch video on pcs, laptops and smartphones has given the media format more advertising potential. YouTube alone gets 5 billion views every day, and there are thousands of other video-sharing websites to choose from.

What Is Video Marketing?

Monday, October 22, 2012

6 Web Design Essentials

Web Design Essentials

When people think of web design, they often think of things like graphics, page layout, and attention-grabbing fonts. While these elements are certainly part of web design, the truth is that web design encompasses much more than just aesthetics. Sites that are beautifully designed, well organized and informative typically attract the most traffic in the long term because they are directed to and meet the readers’ needs.

The following six web design essentials can help you design an attractive, user-friendly website with the potential to succeed:

Navigation. This pertains to how people will get around on your site. Most web users are on a quest to find information. The most successful and popular websites are straightforward and easy to use, so the design of your website should be as simple and intuitive as possible without being bland. Good navigation is the answer. Use primary navigation, secondary navigation, text menus, internal links, search boxes and breadcrumbs wisely throughout your site to ensure your site visitors can easily find what they are looking for. You should also make sure that your website’s navigation bar is located in the same place on every page, whether it is along the top of the screen, down the left side of the screen or elsewhere. Websites with a navigation bar that is located in a different place on different pages are more complicated to navigate and generally have less traffic as a result.

[ more: 4 Things You Should Know Before Hiring A Web Designer]

Leading the eye. In addition to navigating through the site, you must also help visitors determine how to focus their attention on each page. You must “lead the eye,” so to speak, by strategically applying weighting, placement, positioning, spacing, and highlighting techniques to guide your visitors from areas of primary importance to supporting, or secondary, areas. Create headings or bolded topic sentences to make it easier for your readers to locate specific information. Include bullets and numbered lists where appropriate.

Typography. The type and size of font you use will greatly impact the user experience, and will go a long way in creating the impression you want (or even one you don’t want, if you are not careful). Consider using sans-serif fonts such as Verdana. Instead of selecting a particular font size, choose a relative size such as large, normal or small so that your readers can adjust the size if they need to in order to read it. Additionally, you must consider line spacing, text effects, line length, paragraph size, and emphasis (italics and bold) when placing your typography. Stay away from busy backgrounds or those with gradients because they can make portions of the text difficult to distinguish.

Clarity. While it may be tempting to pack your website with all the neat graphics and informative content you can, it is more important that your site visitors can easily ascertain what is on your page. Keep in mind that simplicity is almost always preferable over complexity when it comes to web design, and that too many visuals (and/or too much information) could end up looking like nothing more than a jumbled mess to your site visitors.

Search engine optimization (SEO). You can create the most stunning website ever, but what good is it if know one can find you? Quality content attracts the attention of search engines such as Google. As a web designer, you should create content that has wisely chosen keywords with an appropriate keyword density in relation to the word count. When you create your web pages, consider which keywords your readers might use to find the information they’re looking for that you provide on your site. When it comes to website design, good SEO practices include using alt text for images, no-following outbound links that are irrelevant to the site, and labeling page titles and headers effectively.

Compatability. Compatibility is an important web design benchmark. In simple terms it’s the ability for users to access your website. Browser compatibility, page loading speed, mobile compatibility and screen resolution all play an important part in compatibility.

Making a beautiful and well-performing website that draws traffic is a lofty but achievable goal with many rewards. You can learn the skills you need to create a beautiful website by earning a degree in graphic design or you can hire professional like The Kool Source to handle all of your logo and web design needs. We can be reached by phone, at 404-953-5665, or email: info@thekoolsource.net

6 Web Design Essentials

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Test Post from THE KOOL SOURCE

Test Post from THE KOOL SOURCE http://thekoolsource.net

Thursday, October 11, 2012

4 Things You Should Know Before Hiring A Web Designer

4 Things You Should Know Before Hiring A Web Designer

These days, it’s not enough to have a business website. Your website must be designed in a way to attract attention, keep attention, convert visitors into customers, and inspire them to

Atlanta Web Design

8 Ways to Use Mobile Marketing for Event Promotion

This early spring heat wave has got me thinking about all the great upcoming festivals and outdoor events hosted in Atlanta. With multiple events in every part of the city going on almost every weekend during the spring and summer, how does one

Atlanta Marketing Company