Want to learn about one simple SEO strategy that takes only about five minutes to implement and will have a very positive result in search engine rankings? If this interests you then get ready to change the footer on your website.

The footer on most websites usually contains a copyright statement and occasionally links. Several websites have a two-line footer where one line is devoted to links and the second one contains the copyright. Adding a company one sentence description to your footer is an easy way to develop one SEO strategy that is simple and doesn’t take much time. Here is an example to clarify:

Old footer: © 2007 Twelve Horses

Newer SEO Friendly Footer: © Copyright 2007 Twelve Horses - A Web Design, Development & Search Engine Optimization Company in Reno & Utah

It generally is better when you have the text footer (non-link footer) fit within one line. Here are some key issues that this new style of the footer accomplishes:

1. Our website or company is focused on providing web design, web development, SEO or search engine optimization, email marketing, and social marketing services to our clients. Since that is a long list of services sometimes you may have to pick and choose what you can fit on one line. The above example makes sure that every page on the website contains the keyword phrases of ‘web design, development, and search engine optimization’. This helps the search engines realize that this website is related to those keywords since they appear on every web page. This strategy helps search engines know what services you provide as well as doing the same for human website visitors. If a web visitor can’t determine what the website is about they general do one of two options: either leave or look in the footer for an ‘about us’ link. Having this information in the footer ensures that if they do look at the footer they will know what the website is about without having to go to another page.

2. The above example also contains ‘Reno and Utah’ in the footer. Twelve Horses has headquarters in Reno, Nevada with another main branch in Salt Lake City, Utah. Having these terms in the footer lets search engines know what geographic area our company provides web services in. You may question why the footer contains Reno, a city, and Utah, a state. Through a keyword analysis we discovered that people in Salt Lake City generally search for ‘utah [keyword]‘ rather than ’salt lake city [keyword]‘, possibly because Salt Lake City is too long to type and “Utah” only has one major metropolitan area which is the Wasatch front. Since Nevada contains several metropolitan areas such as Reno, Las Vegas, etc. which are distant from each other users tend to search by city. Through keyword research we discovered people in Nevada are more likely to type in the major metropolitan area they are near instead of ‘Nevada [keyword]‘. As with the services we provide, this also provides web visitors the geographic area our company is based in by looking at the footer.

3. This simple and effective SEO strategy should only take 5 to 10 minutes to implement on your website and will have a very positive effective on your SEO campaign when comparing it to the investment of time that is required.
If you enjoyed this SEO strategy tip and would like us to post more please let us know and we will be happy to share our knowledge with you.

One of the most important aspects of marketing for a business is building your brand.  Making sure that when people think about your products or services, that the appropriate mental, and even emotional tie-ins pop into their minds.

When discussing branding however, it is important to also recognize the value of “personal branding” and how closely tied it is to corporate branding.  So much of business is based on relationships.  How many of the companies that you deal with deal with you because of who you are, not just because of who your company is?

In building your personal brand, Social tools, social networking sites, social marketing, and the like can be of huge value.  But if you’re not careful they can also be a huge waste of time.  Twitter may be great for the types of relationships you maintain, or it could just be a nuisance.  The same can be said of MySpace, Facebook (although with the API for Facebook now we should be seeing some really interesting things develop), and a plethora of others (heck, there are even applications now that let you drag and drop components to create your own social networking applications in just minutes.)

A couple of social applications that have gain a lot of traction with business professionals, but are just lacking in too many features for the more aggressive social networker are Plaxo and Linked-In.  Linked in is great for finding people, and leveraging personal networks to find skill-sets and ask some questions.  Plaxo is nice for keeping my address book up to date.  But these ponies are going to have to learn some new tricks to stay relevant in comparison to the newer, cooler tools out there.

Enter Plaxo Pulse.  I read a wonderful, very detailed writeup today about Pulse.  It looks like Plaxo has made some real strides forward:

•  Allows you to store information about the contacts, rather than just what they provide (unlike linked-in)
• Categories (Family, Friends, Co-workers, People to keep track of so I can avoid them, etc)
• Can sync with your linked in data
• Ability to comment on other people’s updates “congrats on the promotion,” etc.

And lots, lots more.  Go read the full post by Dan Sweet to see even more exciting features, as well as a few short comings you should be aware of.

Twitter is a great medium for sending free SMS (mobile text) messages. For those reading this not involved in the mobile industry, SMS is expensive, both in terms of cost, and time to set up.

We here at TwelveHorses.com consult to businesses about mobile messaging, Twitter, and how to integrate with these technologies. Here are some ideas that we’ve seen, and some that we’ve pitched to clients.

In your Restaurant, you have a “For coupons and info, send Follow MyRestaurant to 40404 from your cell phone” Then on Tuesday evenings about 5:30, when things are slow around dinner time, you Tweet “Free desert with dinner tonight if you mention this coupon.” In this respect, you hit all your interested customers, right at the dinner hour, wherever they are.

You’re a ski resort. You want to inform your skiers at the time they specify when fresh powder has reached x inches deep. To facilitate this, you build an application to send mobile messages to your interested skiers when snow reaches a certain depth. They sign up to follow your ski resort’s twitter with their phone, and you use the Twitter API to send them direct messages at the time they specify when the fresh snow is the depth they want.

You’re an online auction company, and you want to send out tweets for items that are undervalued 30 minutes before the auction ends to drive up prices. You integrate the Twitter API with your application to send those alerts out as public tweets, and invite people to join that twitter for killer deals.

You’re an airline. You have flights that have known empty seats. You integrate with the Twitter API to send out tweets 4 hours before a flight with empty seats and the heavily discounted price you’re willing to sell those seats for.

You’re a stock broker. You want to very quickly inform your clients about great stock deals. You have them sign up to follow your tweet, and as deals come through that you think they need to know about, you tweet them, and your clients receive the results.

You want to generate buzz about a new TV show on network XYZ. You announce prior to the show how to sign up for the show’s Twitter, and during the show, you have the director tweet the inside scoop on what’s really happening, almost like a directors commentary, but live with the broadcast of the show.

Really, the possibilities like this are endless, and can be tuned to your specific business model.

With Twitter, your message gets to the customer wherever they are, and with information that they want to know.

Clint Goudie-Nice
Architect / Senior Software Engineer

I like the commercials being put out by Apple. I like them well enough that I watch them rather than changing channels. I’m not in the market for a Mac. But due to the fact that I am willing to watch their commercials, it is more likely that I will hear something at some point that is compelling to me.

So how do you ensure that I hear a message about your product when I need to? By being sure that I am willing to listen to your message even when I don’t need it.

Want to know some sites that I read regularly, and derive value from? Well, let me through out some of the less obvious ones:
Jason Alba at Jibber Jobber

Rob Merrill at UtahTechJobs

Yahoo

There are lots of others, but I wanted to throw these three out. Looking at these you might ask yourself why I am interested in help finding a job… I’m not. But that’s the key… I am reading the sites because I derive value and enjoyment from them… even though I am not in the market for their products or services. Both Jibber Jobber and Utah Tech Jobs talk about relationships, and their importance, and say it in unique ways that resonate.

What about Yahoo? Everyone is all about Google now. Don’t get me wrong, I love google, and I use Google… but everyone now and then I like to search on Yahoo because it shows me other cool stuff. I derive other value than just searching.

That’s the key to keep people coming back again and again. Sure, you want them to hear you or see you when they are looking for exactly the value proposition that you are calling out. But give them more than that. Build relationships with people, even if they are not your target. One day they might be, or they might know someone who is.

This is true in every industry. If you develop materials use to build buildings, then put on free events once or twice a year where local builders can come and hear all of the cool news tips/tricks/products about building. Make it an event that people will want to come to even if they are not in the market for your product. Give them value and they will keep coming back. Then, they will already be there, and know you when they are in the market for what you offer.

Marketing need to do more than just shove their value points down my throat. They need to make me smile, or think. Otherwise I have already hit another webpage, deleted the email, or changed channels.

When putting together Marketing content, the brass ring we all reach for is the real connection.  Something that grabs the reader/watcher/consumer, and sucks them in.  One of the hardest parts of trying to do this can be realizing what you are really selling.

That may sound odd, but think for a moment.  What do Mountain Dew commercials sell?  If your answer was soda pop you would be wrong.  The commercials are selling hip, and young, and edgy.  They are selling risk taking.  you will never see a Mountain Dew commercial do a taste test against another soda because they are not selling great taste.  They know that their consumer wants to feel a little cooler, a little freer, and when they grab a Dew instead of a Sprite they do.

Similarly, if your product is high quality pasta dinners in freezer bags that you can pull out and warm up in minutes you have to ask yourself what you are really selling.  It’s not pasta, peas or baby carrots.  The real reasons people buy, the real deliverable is a happy family, a happy spouse, the appearance of being on top of things.  That is the message your adds and pictures should convey.

Don’t be too wordy in your message.  Make the pictures, the colors, the flow, and the mood of your add invoke an empathic response from the consumer as much as you can.

Ask yourself the normal marketing questions: What are my key value propositions; what differentiates me from my competitors; but also ask yourself:  What does the consumer of this content like to believe about them self.  If you have a product for sales and marketing people make it look professional if appropriate, but also make it look aggressive, edgy, hip, energetic.  Sales and Marketing people love to believe this about themselves.  It’s what they want to feel, what they want to convey.

Who is your market?  What are you really selling?  What should your customers feel like after they benefit from you and what you have to offer?

Your brand is your livelihood.  As such, we all strive so hard to ensure that our messaging supports our brand, and that our brand inspires at an emotional level.  Are we using the right colors?  The right pictures?  What does our website convey?  How do people feel when they read it?  It seems that to really stay consistent to our brand, we need to evaluate every aspect of our company and ask ourselves how it relates to our marketing, to the message we are trying to send.

As such, what could possibly be more important than who we employ?

Every interaction with customers is reinforcement of your brand.  What image are you trying to convey  about your company?  Guru’s?  Cutting edge?  Savvy and seasoned?  Or just barely good enough not to get fired, inexpensive, and quite frankly not very pleased to be dealing with you?

With unemployment as low as it is it takes an extra effort to find the right people.  No longer will an ad in the paper yield hundreds of resumes, any one of which would be a great fit.  But don’t give in to the temptation to hire “good enough”, or to save a few bucks, since the person you really wanted is more expensive than they were a few years ago.  If the people on your team have a fire in their belly your customers will see it when they meet them, and hear it when they deal with them.

Make your brand infectious.  It’s the smartest marketing you can do.

There are lots of ways to market your products and services, but one that I want to touch on today is Mobile. When does it make sense to use mobile devices form marketing, and when is it too much hassle, and too much money for little return?

A while back we wrote up a White Paper on SMS and some of its applications. But for those in the mood for a more “bite-sized” read, let me sum up my thoughts here.

The real value of Mobile (other than being hip and cool), come down to TLR:

Time
Location
Relevance

Mobile allows you to leverage the ability to deliver content right now, regardless of location (or more often times, due to location) and thus be more relevant. Let’s look at a few examples:

Retail Stores

As a large retailer, I can have a sign at the entrance to my store that states “To get info on great deals today, text the department number to 12345″ followed by a list of department numbers. Now, as I walk into my favorite store, I can send a text, and get back info, or even coupons to my phone that tell me of great deals in the electronics department, or whatever department I am interested in. This allows a store to leverage location, and deliver content right now, which is the appropriate time, in order to make in relevant. Sure an emailed coupon during the weekend is nice, but will I remember it when I go to the store next?

Stadiums

Okay, so imagine you own a stadium (or maybe you do, in which case, give me a call )
At one of the game you run a contest on the Jumbotron that allows people to text in to a number for a chance to win an ipod during the game. You reply to all local numbers, and ask them if they would like to receive discounts to future games. For those that agree, you record the numbers.
Next game, if ticket sales are slow, you send a text out to the local fans, who want to hear from you, and offer them 20% a ticket for the next three hours until the game starts. This allows you to leverage the time factor of a game starting in three hours, and location of local residents to deliver very relevant data, and fill up your stadium, or your show, or your event.

Resorts

Ski resorts. By leveraging real-time data, and pushing it to people first thing in the morning, regardless of location (but targeting locals), you can tell everyone that you just had three feet of fresh powder. Then you can ask them if the want a 10% of coupon for a lift pass. Furthermore, ask them if they plan to ski today. If so, then you can further use their phones throughout the day to drive traffic into the clubhouse when it’s slow with discounts on drinks and food.

Mobile is definitely a much more specialized marketing medium, and doesn’t work for everything. But if you can leverage the TLR of your consumers, the payoff can be worth it.

I have heard a lot of different people give ideas on what a web site needs to look like. Often times this advice comes in the form of “If I can’t tell what you do in 6 seconds”, or “If I can’t tell what you do from six feet away form the screen” when I look at the site, then it is wrong. I would put forth however that these types of generalizations stem form the same mindset that asks “who is your target?”

It is important to remember that the way the web is consumed gives you the ability to do two things that may seem contradictory: 1- To reach a broader audience, and 2- to have a more intimate relationship with them. This is due tot he fact that traditional communications, on the phone, through printed collateral, etc. Is a one-size-fits-all. If a web presence is managed correctly it allows it to be consumed in a variety of ways… which can feel more intimate to a variety of audiences.

There are at least four key consumption types to consider when you are working on your web site:

Company Researcher

Many people want to find out about your company quickly. The internet has allowed many small, or smoke-and-mirrors companies to seem bigger than they are. Many people who are considering doing business with you will hit your site and quickly go to two key areas:

1- Press releases / news. You better have new content here at least every few months or it looks like you are not doing anything. Don’t wait six months to put it up either. If you had lots of activity, and then have alull, it looks like your company has fallen on hard times.

2- Management team. People want to see good people with experience.

Product / Service Researcher

Make sure these people can quickly find product details on your site. Don’t overwhelm them initially with data, but have a way for them to get to more information. Give the an overview, but give them a way to get some real meat. To many companies force you to call to really understand what their products and services do.

Snackers

Some of the best ways to get traffic to your site will also product the least patient viewers. Someone who came to you through adwords, Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, or similar high traffic social mechanisms have little patience. Hook them instantly, give them a quick call to action or you will lose them. This can be accomplished with landing pages that then lead people into other parts of your site as needed.

Bloggers

Rather you choose to blog or not, you cannot ignore that there is a growing community out there that really wants to get to “know” the company and products they deal with. They want to see that there are real people involved, and see what other real people are saying. You may choose as a company not to blog, but know that you will not be connecting at the intimate level for some of your potential consumers.

So who is your target? If the answer to that is “My targets are…” you will find yourself able to leverage the reach, the realtime feedback, the low costs, and the ability to quickly react that the Web brings. But you also be able to build a more intimate relationship that makes so many of the Web’s social aspects so powerful.

Many of you may not know, but Twelve Horses has a few locations. One of which, our Reno location (about 28 35 folks (oops, I blinked)), just knocked the ball out of the park at their local ADDY’s, taking home 3 Gold and 3 Silvers, they then advanced to the District competition. District 14 is comprised of the:

Ad Club of Silicon Valley
AdMark, the Bay Area Advertising & Marketing Association
Advertising Association of Northern Nevada
Fresno Advertising Federation
Sacramento Ad Club

As you can see from this list of groups, there was some stiff competition coming out of California.

In the Interactive Media category our Nevadan Cohorts took home 4 ADDY Silver Awards ”For Excellence in Creativity and Execution” for the following entries:

1. Heavenly Mountain Resort
2. Madrone Empire Ranch, Pacific West Companies
3. Mountain Sports International
4. Tanamera

So needless to say we’re a bit excited.

When people think about marketing they tend to think about getting out the good word, about telling the world how good they’ve done, or what neat stuff they cna bring to bear.

So what about when things are not going so well. What about the angry customer that feels you haven’t delivered?

Jet Blue did a great job of this earlier this year after stranding passengers for several days. So much so, that when Business Week dropped them from the list of “Customer Service Champs” due to the event, the reader comments consisted of statements like:

• “Perhaps I should cancel my subscription for BusinessWeek for being so shortsided.”

• “Everyone makes mistakes — hopefully Jet Blue has learned — and the other airlines as well. If it happens again — then consider moving them. Geez–give them a chance!”

The feedback goes on and on. Why? Two reasons: 1- Because Jet Blue had put sufficient “money in the bank” with clients in the past, which is to say that they had provided such good service that people were willing to cut them some slack. 2- Because they came clean. No spin. No justification. They apologized, offered to try to make things right, and laid out what they would do different in the future.

I have to tell you, this rings true in my experience as well. I can recall two specific customers that I have worked with (at different times). Both of them escalated up to me, and went into the meetings looking for their pound of flesh. When we went into the meetings we did not get defensive, or deny the situations. Quite the contrary, we laid out exactly what the issue was, and why. We set realistic expectations for where things could go from here, and how we would help to get them there. Furthermore, we let them know that they were important enough to us that if what we had laid out was not a sufficient resolution, that we would work closely with them to find a vendor who could fulfill those needs.

Both companies are still customers of our, and we have very strong relationships with them both.