Keyword phrases are the words that you focus on either in your website pages or in your online advertising and the ones that you wish to be found for when you attract visitors to your site.

Keyword phrases are key to two elements of working with Search Engines: optimising a website and using Search Advertising effectively. Effectively these are the phrases that best represent the content of your site and that you wish people to type into their Search Engine in order to find you , your website and your products.

Some ways of identifying the best keyword phrases for your website:

• think about what your product or service does or more importantly what benefits it offers;
• talk to clients and ask them what words sum up what you do;
• use some of the tools available to help find what words are commonly searched on and what other words and phrases are similar to them;
• examine your direct competitors sites and their online campaigns and see what words they are focusing on.

Remember: it is how you are perceived by others that is the important point to remember and not necessarily how you believe that you are perceived.

How you use the keyword phrases is important but finding the right ones is critical or else all the time that you spend using them after that point will be time wasted.

Email has revolutionised business communications over recent years and has rightly earned the label of the Killer Application of the Internet. The use of email marketing has had a similar and profound impact for companies looking to promote their products and services.

It has been especially powerful for small and medium sized businesses (SMEs). Without the marketing budgets of larger organisations, SMEs nevertheless have the same requirements for a cost effective, successful and measurable method of communicating with their customers. Email marketing offers not only this but can be used in every element of the marketing process, from building your brand, driving traffic to your website or marketing special offers, to providing customer service or technical support.

But just why does email marketing offer such possibilities to small business and, indeed, organisations of all sizes? Below are outlined 8 reasons why email marketing has to sit right at the top of every SME’s marketing activities checklist.

1. Successful

First and foremost, email marketing produces results! A well designed campaign using a properly managed mailing list will give response rates which are much higher than other direct marketing methods.

While there are many variables that contribute to response rates, indications are that overall email marketing gains a response rate about 5 times higher than direct mail. By getting a much larger percentage of people interested in what you are offering, immediately you are massively increasing the number of potential sales. Added to this, the quick response methods allow a much faster turnaround of questions and objections thus clearing a way through to closing the sale.

Even though the unacceptable rise in Spam has had a detrimental effect on the proper commercial use of emails in marketing, the success levels of well run, targeted and fully compliant campaigns using full opt-in lists continue to advance in leaps and bounds. Effectively, whatever your goal, email marketing delivers in a way that few , if any, direct marketing methods can match.

2. Targeted

The more targeted your marketing message is, the more likely it is to be successful. Email marketing provides the means of customising each message which is sent out, so that the information, promotion or offer can be individually personalised and targeted.

Effectively, using targeted HTML emails gives you the opportunity to quickly and easily tailor the message to directly respond to each prospect’s own needs and interests. Results consistently also show that the more you can personalise your messages, the higher your response and conversion rates will be.

In many respects, a well run email campaign makes the concept of “one to one marketing” available to all, because of the way that it is perfectly suited to segmentation and personalisation. Whereas printed mailers are created, printed and fixed, with email marketing you remain in control of the process for longer giving you more flexibility both in the overall approach and offering.

3. Economic and Cost Effective

Email marketing eliminates the significant time and expense of full graphic design, printing, postage, handling and so on which is associated with printing and processing traditional direct mail campaigns. Yet with graphic html emails, you are able to create the same imagery and provoke the same responses with the added benefit of having follow up information instantly available via your website.

Perhaps just as importantly, with the correct maintenance of an email list, the cost benefits increase as does the ROI through the closer relationship established with the recipients. Coupled with the higher response rates that email marketing attracts, you therefore get more positive responses, more quickly and at a lower unit cost! Win – win situation!

4. Trackable

When using email marketing, you can track the results of your campaign in real time thus providing you with instant feedback on its success. This allows you to respond to developments as they happen and to follow up while the campaign is still in progress.

For each message, you can see whether:

• it was received successfully;
• it was opened and read;
• the recipient used the links in it to reach your site.

There are two immediate benefits of this level of information: firstly, it puts you in a position to be able to make changes to a campaign already underway to improve its response rate; secondly, when sending out follow up messages, you have the possibility to segment your mail list according to the action taken on receipt of the initial one. This allows you to respond immediately to any issues which arise and to complete the feedback loop quickly and effectively.

Moving forward, you also have a complete record of those elements and links which worked best for you and those which require changes to improve their performance. The experiences taken from the campaign can then be applied to future campaigns with a high degree of accuracy.

5. Measurable

As the adage goes, “If you can’t measure it, then you can’t manage it” and measuring the success of your marketing spend is more important today than ever. To make best use of your budget, it is essential to keep track of not only the costs but also the results and the revenue that the campaign specifically generates. This will allow you to focus your activities with the most appropriate methods in future.

In addition to tracking the recipients’ reaction to the email, you can also follow their subsequent path through your website, with the appropriate software. This allows excellent visibility as to the success of the landing page and the anticipated route through to the purchase or sign-up page, according to your campaign’s objectives.

Together, this information is invaluable when planning future campaigns or being able to precisely calculate the costs and sales generated by any email marketing activity that you undertake. Hopefully, the ROI (Return on Investment) you achieve will be as good as the campaigns run by companies which have reported ROI rates 40 times higher than those achieved with direct mail!

6. Testable

To achieve the best possible response rates, it is common practice to send any intended piece of marketing material to sample groups to test its effectiveness before starting the main campaign. With traditional direct marketing, this process can be time consuming and costly.

However, with email marketing, this process is fast and effective with results available almost immediately, thanks to the instant measuring of the results. Additionally, as there is no printed material involved, the turnaround for any changes in layout or wording required as a result can be incorporated into the main mailing quickly and easily.

7. Immediate

The speed at which business happens is constantly increasing. Email marketing allows you not only to keep pace with these changes but stay ahead of them, not only in terms of the speed of response to the campaign but also the creation of the campaign itself.

Firstly, the “Call to Action” can be immediate and ideally handled through the website. When you read a compelling offer in an email you can respond using the links in the message itself, usually taking you to a specially created page with additional information and recommendations. Responding to a direct mail piece, on the other hand, requires a much more active response, such as completing and sending off a form or even just picking up the phone. Just as importantly, the responses start to come back immediately! On average, 80% of the responses happen within 3 days as opposed to the weeks which is more normal for traditional direct mail.

Secondly, the creation and distribution of the email campaign is also much quicker. Carefully constructing, producing and sending a good html email which is going to bring the top level results, need only take a matter of days (or indeed hours if you are working with a supportive partner!) rather than weeks for a printed mailer.

8. Flexible & Adaptable

Email marketing is adaptable enough to support your business in many different ways and can help to achieve a variety of different goals. While email marketing is often considered stronger when you are looking to maintain customer relationships rather than forge new ones, it is in fact able to fulfil a variety of different purposes for your business. Some of these are:

• Increase the number of visitors to your website
• Attract new clients, leads or registrations
• Build stronger relationships with existing clients
• Provide improved levels of company, product or service information
• Build brand awareness

These goals can be achieved through the use of emails to distribute different items, each offering different opportunities for strengthening the relationship with the company’s customers. Some of the more common ones include:

• Sales promotions / vouchers
• Account statements
• Company Newsletters
• Press Releases
• Product Announcements

Summary

Email marketing is in itself an excellent method of communicating and distributing information and an essential part of an integrated marketing strategy. Like all marketing methods, it is most influential when used in conjunction with other media with the result that the sum of the parts being more powerful than the individual parts themselves.

With the use of RSS feeds and blogs gaining greater acceptance as corporate communications media, there will undoubtedly prophets of doom announcing the imminent demise of the use of email marketing as a tool for the future. The astute marketer will, however, develop these up and coming channels alongside their email marketing program and so be ideally placed to offer our customers the information they require by the method they prefer.

Well, this isn’t something that I have tried myself but this article claims to show through tests carried out that by using drop capitals on your webpage that you can help to encourage people to read your page and hence buy from you!

The tests quoted don’t show any visitor numbers so it’s difficult to tell if the statistics are significant and, as you might expect, there is a product attached to the trials, however, you just never know. I pass this on as is and as a bit of a curiosity but if you have had any experience with this (positive or negative) then do let me know and I’ll update this piece.

Google’s latest way of extending their index is an interesting one and one which should help webmasters to get a faster turnaround with the initial indexing of their website and getting updates included more quickly. As ever, there is no guarantee that the site will be indexed but this will supplement the Googlebots crawling the sites so should improve turnaround.

So how does it work: webmasters need to create a special format of sitemap in the form of an XML file which is then stored on their site. Google provides a tool to do this at Google Sitemap Generator, but there are some others which are available online and make the job a little easier such as Auto Sitemap or XML Sitemaps to name but two.

You can now tell Google about your sitemap file which you should do at the Google Sitemaps page - you’ll need to create a Google Account if you don’t already have one but there is no charge. Once logged in, select ‘Add a Sitemap’ and then type in the address where you put the sitemap, which will normally be something like “http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml”. Then click on ‘Submit URL’.

And what’s the benefit? Well, it gives you a little more control over making more certain that all of your pages are indexed which is a plus and there is an element allowing for “hints” which should permit specifying how often updates occur. Also according to a Q&A session with Shiva Shivakumar, engineering director and the technical lead for Google Sitemaps, posted on Search Engine Watch, there is support for auto-notification which will help keep more pages on your site up to date in the index.

Verdict: well worth the effort - anything which adds to the speed in which updates on your website gets into the index is worth it. Only when they’re indexed can we work on improving their focus and ranking in the Search Engine Results.

One of the fundamental ways of refining a campaign within Google AdWords is by using the 3 special forms available to target your adverts at the people that you wish to view them - specifically those people who you can be fairly certain are looking for what you can supply.

Why are these different forms important? Well, they can help us not only to create very targeted campaigns which will bring the right people to our websites but also help to improve our bid position in AdWords which is calculated on the level of bid and the Click through Rate (CTR) of the campaign. We also need to remember that AdWords campaigns can have differing goals including creating awareness, brand re-inforcement as well as traffic generation - in teh first two cases greater visibility (albeit less targeted) may be preferable.

The generic match is called Broad Match in AdWords terms - here you would simply enter the keywords as they are such as internet marketing advice and then your advert would be shown whenever these terms are searched on, in any order and with any mixture of other words. As they say, a VERY broad match which will give you the possibility of being found across a wide range of searches.

However, in most cases you will want to be able to focus much more specifically on the areas that you deal with so will want to use the other options available. These are:

Phrase Match - using quotation marks around the phrase such as “internet marketing advice” means that your adverts will appear when these keywords are searched for in this order, although they can appear with other search terms. So searches for good internet marketing advice or internet marketing advice newsletter would mean that your advert would appear.

Exact Match - using square brackets around the phrase such as [internet marketing advice] means that this exact phrase and only this phrase has to be serached for if you want your advert to appear. Anything else, including misspellings, and it won’t.

Negative Match - by using a hyphen in front of the phrase (think ‘minus’ sign) such as -bad you make sure that you add will NOT appear if that word or phrase appears anywhere in the search. So in this example, a search on bad internet marketing advice will not make your advert appear. Thankfully …!

Google have added another couple of facilities to allow webmasters slightly different ways to advertise using Google AdWords.

In addition to the traditional bidding with costs calculated on a “per click” basis (CPC), there is now also the option to choose a selection of sites where their advert can appear and have costs calculated on the number of impressions (CPM), that is the number of times the advert appears, rather than on the number of clicks it attracts. The second change allows the selection of sites which gives webmasters the opportunity to target certain types of sites.

To make best use of this, webmasters should look to apply a different approach to their adverts when they are targeting certain sites - it is still important to make an impact but with a better indication of the type of visitor that you are looking to appeal to.

The same is also true for contextual adverts in a normal campaign which, in some cases, it may be better to run as a separate campaign. Again, this is a way to ensure that the targeting is carried out correctly.

So what is emarketing and how does it differ from internet marketing that we see and hear so much of in today’s online society.

Emarketing encompasses much more than just internet marketing and more than just website promotion, although it does include both of those. So while internet marketing will tend to include Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Search Advertising (or Pay Per Click), Link Development, Banner advertising etc., emarketing takes the reach a step further. Emarketing extends to cover all methods of communicating with your customers electronically, not just through the internet but also through email marketing, business blogging, mobile messaging, podcasting and the like.

Emarketing has so far managed to stay clear of some of the negative press that Internet Marketing has become associated with due to the alleged mal practice particularly in SEO where companies have spent thousands with no visible improvements to their Search Engine rankings. The term internet marketing has also been taken over to some extent by the sellers of infoproducts with their “special never to be repeated offers” - something akin to the photocopier or door to door salesmen.

As for website promotion, well that is only part of the goal at the end of the day. A company’s website is at the core of all emarketing activity and provides a focal point for it and the sales opportunities that it must provide. However, this neglects the fact that these elements in themselves can work strongly in branding an organisation and its activities, can strengthen customer and business relationships as well as develop trust which influences far more than simply the desire to visit a company website.

Emarketing is certainly a powerful business builder, particularly integrated emarketing which links with offline marketing efforts. However, it goes much further than that and offers the marketers of today opportunities to take the process several steps further as well.