Herrington Web Creations

At one time, in the not so distant past, computers were not commonly found in homes. Computers served as a time saving device for businesses and offices and they were big, heavy, unattractive and very expensive. Over time computers, have become smaller, lighter, operate faster and have price significantly dropped in price. Thus many more of us have incorporated computers into our daily lives and homes. Today, most of us would be lost without our computers, electronic devices and the Internet!

Before the age of computers, the only way to correspond with others at a distance was through letters written by hand or on a typewriter. There was no spell check or grammar check to make life easy. People had to rely on their own proof reading and language skills in order to be understood.

In the 1990’s when computers began popping up in homes all over the world and the Internet became readily available, chatting programs such as ICQ, MSN, and AOL Instant Messenger made their debut. With these developments, communicating through writing was forever changed, and the English language has never been the same.

The development of instant messaging programs has resulted in the use of a new ‘spin-off English’ and has quickly become the de facto means by which many young people communicate. The most common spinoff would have to be using short forms and it is common to see entire phrases abbreviated. This new language is often referred to as “Internet slang”. Examples include:

• lol = laugh out loud
• ur = you are, your, or you’re
• h2gtw – have to go to the washroom
• cmitm – call me in the morning
• btw = by the way
• b4n = bye for now
• l8er = see you later
• teotwawki – the end of the world as we know it
• p911 – parent emergency / parent near

Internet slang is a form of chat room shorthand that should only be used informally. However, this slang has spilled over the chat room wall and has made it into e-mails, written correspondence, and yes, it has even found its way into research papers and the homework of schoolchildren and college students.

When writing formally, important points such as capitalization, punctuation, and grammar structure should always be used. Writing English is a craft, and this craft should be practised regularly in order to train and engrain proper techniques. Unfortunately, the use of chat rooms and slang has begun to replace reading and letter writing as primary forms of communication, ultimately harming our language skills.

The use of Internet slang has undeniably affected grammar, punctuation and spelling. Grammar is the foundation of the English language. Punctuation sets the tone and the overall meaning of a sentence – without tone, meaning can be easily misconstrued. There are often many mixed-messages in chatroom slang and e-mails!

Today many people spend more time conversing over the Internet than they do face-to-face. The Internet (including instant massaging and e-mail) is quickly becoming the most prevalent form of written correspondence. It is therefore easy to understand how the use of Internet slang for hours a day can lead to the development of poor English habits. People even belting out “LOL” in the middle of a conversation instead of laughing when speaking to a friend or colleague!

So what can be done to keep slang out of formal writing such as research papers and homework? Upon finding slang in homework and test, are deducting are more pints than they would for the usual grammar mistake. This makes the student more mindful of what they are writing and for whom.
Replacing the use of chat rooms and slang with regular reading and writing with a conscious effort to observe proper English grammar, punctuation and spelling will go a long way. Practice certainly makes perfect where the English language is concerned.

The vast majority of economically active people are Internet savvy today and are using the Net to research products and services before they buy. Your web site has to be an effective marketing and PR tool and without an Internet marketing strategy you will simply be cut out of the picture. The rules of the marketing game have changed big time.

Over 80% of all web traffic is coming via search engines. The Internet has reversed the flow of communication in the marketing cycle. It used to be:

A company (wanting to get publicity) sends a message (called a “news release”) to the media (newspapers, magazines, radio & TV) who may or may not publish anything to a passive target audience who hopefully will reach for your product or service and eventually result in a sale.

Now we have networked communication lines (a.k.a. the Internet) and the prospect controls what they see or read. Now we have:

An active prospect searching on the Internet for a product or service, finding a company, reaching for the product — resulting in the sale.

You also have customers talking directly to each other about the company. Companies are no longer in complete control of their communication and their messages.

However, there is nothing better than a hot prospect who is actively looking for your product or service. This levels the playing field. You just have to be there when they are looking, with the right offering in the right place.

Here is the sequence that has to occur for success on the Net:

1. Know Who Is Online Searching For What

This takes keyword research and an understanding of how the search engines work. Once you find where the viable online market is, you can use this to create your website so it fits what they are looking for.

2. Get Found On The Search Engines

When your market goes online to do a search on these keywords, you have to come up high in the search results–preferably on the first page. And the best possible result would be that you come up in the first three on the first page of the search results.

Research shows that searchers regard good placing in the natural search results (as opposed to pay per click or sponsored links) as an indicator of a company who is tops in their field. 80% of all business on the Internet goes to the first three on the first page of a search result. The design, content and programming of your site all influence your search rankings.

3. Get Picked Out Of All The Names On The Search Page Results

So you are on the first page. That means you are displayed along with 10 – 20 other companies. Your description of your website on the search result page has to be carefully crafted so it appeals to the searcher. I have seen companies who have achieved a Number 1 status on their chosen key phrase, yet the description of their website does not say anything about the service, is totally boring or missing some other key data. So they still don’t get the traffic.

Example:
Would you pick this one?
Lavender Baby Soap
… Business Hours: Monday – Friday 7:30 am – 3:30 pm Mountain Time.

Or this one?
Baby Soaps – Specialty Soaps – Hills of Galillee
Your baby’s tender skin deserves the tenderest care, doesn’t it? Protect your baby’s health with our three specialty Baby Soaps. No chemicals or harsh ingredients, all natural.

4. Set Up Your Home Page To Receive This Traffic

Now that you have got through the hurdles of being found and picked, your home page has to speak immediately to why they searched on that word or phrase–they have to know right away that they are in the right place and you can help them.
It has to entice them to come right into the website. Otherwise you have spent time and effort getting traffic all the way to your front door only to have then turn around and leave. Stats show that, on average, business sites lose 60% of their traffic off the home page and 80% within three clicks.

The home page has to be intuitive — easy to use and understand.

5. You Need Good Content To Keep Their Attention And Keep Them Coming Back To The Website

People are still skeptical of doing business with someone they don’t know and so several interactions on the Internet are necessary. Research shows that it takes 7 – 10 visits to a website before a prospect calls or buys.

How do you keep them coming back? Gathering names and emails is vital to your internet marketing strategy.. You can then get their permission to communicate with them. Send them a newsletter so you can become a source of useful and valid info on your industry or subject. Send them notifications that your content has been updated.

6. Make Sure Your Site Can Easily Deliver The Buying, Booking Or Contact Process.

Recent research shows that making a booking online, for airlines or hotels, costs about 5 cents. A call to a toll free number at a call center costs $5 and booking at the actual hotel or airline costs $14. The same applies to getting customers. The cost of a lead coming via the Net is low, but using other advertising and marketing methods is costly. One of our clients who supplies business phone systems just got their first lead off their website after it was optimized. No marketing or sales dollars spent – the prospect sent an email requesting a sales person call her. And she is actively looking for a phone system! Far better than trying to persuade someone they need a phone system.

Conversion rates are a low 2 – 5% on the average business website. When it is too hard or confusing to take an action, they won’t take the action.

7. Update Your Content

You want to constantly update your web content based on the key words found in #1. This keeps you high on the search results and also keeps visitors interested and coming back to the site.
Get a full review of your website to find any reasons why it is not performing. This will result in an effective internet marketing strategy to get the site doing well. This could include a new layout for the home page according to best practices that get results. Get the Home Page text written to the researched keywords (on average this action alone can raise results by 150%).

8. Start a blog

A blog (slang for weB LOG) is a ‘journal’ that is available on the web. Its purpose is to attract interest in your company and to get the reader to come to your web site.

Blogs are like a personal web site that is easily updated and are an important marketing and public relations tool. Many news stories in newspapers or magazines started with a blog. A blog that uses key in the text along with links is a winning combination.

Another very important plus is that search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo love blogs. (A picture may be worth a thousand words but not to a search engine.) The media are watching blogs and may start their research for a story there. A good blog includes news feeds that were set up for targeted journalists in the media.

The result should be more traffic to your business, which should increase your prospects and sales.

9. Issue Optimized Press Releases

Since people are searching directly into the News and Search Engines today, it is vital to have your press releases go directly into these channels based on your keywords. An optimized press release can also be fully tracked and show you the exact results of your online campaigns. This also helps your targeted journalists find your press releases, which would also be posted on your web site.

10. Create An Online Media Room

Once you create this buzz of interest journalists will visit your website. If you don’t service them correctly they go elsewhere. Studies done with journalists show conclusively that those companies with a good media room, one that is set up with the content they want, get more coverage than those who don’t cater to the media.

Everyone knows the Internet is growing exponentially and continually evolving. The major players in the continual evolution of the Internet are the major search engines and consumer generated media such as blogs. Because of the continual changes, a well rounded Internet marketing strategy must include a variety of proven marketing options to ensure success. I will outline 3 of the most effective Internet marketing solutions available and how they relate to your marketing strategy.

SEO Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the first because the free advertising afforded by the search engines is partly determined by on-page optimization techniques. With thousands of new Websites being created daily, the competition for a listing on the first search result page is increasingly saturated for the popular keywords. Statistics show better than 75% of people only look at the first search result page, and a similar percentage only click on the top search listing.

In order to compete effectively, a Web page must be designed around a keyword or more effectively, a keyword phrase. The keywords should be included in the page’s title, keyword META tag, page’s description, the first heading (using the H1 HTML tag), throughout the body of the page and within the last 25 words on the page. These are just a few of the basic SEO on-page options that although will not guarantee a first page listing, are definitely required as a starting point in an effective Internet marketing strategy.

In most cases, there is too much competition for certain keywords such as “golf clubs”. A better strategy would be to use “golf clubs Chicago” or “handcrafted golf clubs”. The more specific you make your keyword phrase the better. A number of free tools are available that will show the popularity of keywords and how often they are used in the search engines on a monthly basis. These will allow you to customize your Web page knowing the keyword phrase’s popularity. If you get the first page listing for a keyword with less than 100 searches per month for instance, then it doesn’t matter because your traffic will be very limited.

Link Exchanges

Once the on-page optimizations are complete, the off-page optimization options need to be addressed. Link exchanges are perhaps the best off-page SEO technique available. Google uses an algorithm to determine a page’s rank, which is determined by the number of other sites linking to it; and the QUALITY of the link is a major consideration. Pages are ranked from 1 to 10. The higher the PageRank of the site linking to yours, the better. Sites with a PR7 and above are considered as authority sites and a back link from them will send Google’s spider to your page on a regular basis.

There are a number of ways to get a back link to your site. You can email a request to the Webmaster for a link exchange. If they agree, you would return the favor by placing a link to their site on your page. You can also purchase the link. A number of sites offer this service for a monthly fee. So if you want to quickly get your site listed by Google and the major search engines, then paying for a PR8 back link for a month or two might be well worth the investment in the long run; as new sites are placed in a “sand box” by Google for several months until they prove their longevity.

One back link from a PR8 site is worth hundreds of back links from PR2 or less sites. As a matter of fact, numerous links from low ranking sites will actually be detrimental to your site. Each back link is like a vote for your site. If you have too many low ranking sites voting for yours, Google will be reluctant to reward your site with a higher PR. You have to do your research on the site that offers to link to yours because if they were blacklisted by Google, your site will receive the same fate and you probably will never recover from this.

A PR 4 or 5 is relatively easy to attain. So your best bet is to limit your back links to PR5 and above for the best results. And by all means avoid link farms. Before Google upgraded its algorithm, just the number of back links was considered. But now the actual PageRank of your back link is considered AND the PageRank of the sites linking to THAT page. Links from link farms are now looked upon as basically spam links. You would be better off purchasing a listing in a major link directory like Yahoo or DMOZ. It’s definitely worth the investment as these are authority sites and are a major vote for your site!

Blogs

As previously indicated, consumer generated media is a major factor in the evolution of the Internet. Case in point is the enormous effect blogs had on the last Presidential campaign. A very large percentage of most searches will include blogs on the first page listing. Over 50% of purchases, online and offline are preceded by an online search for more information. And a large percentage of the information is offered by blogs. People are very interested in the opinions of others on their topic of interest.