One way small and medium businesses can survive the recession is to drive more revenue by getting an online presence. Design and Search engine optimisation (SEO) specialist, Eamonn Murray, has many years experience in the industry and now aims to help businesses get on the right track when it comes to the internet.

„There are a lot of myths surrounding optimisation for the web,“ says Eamonn. „The real skill in website optimisation is to make sure the basics right and knowledge of how to set up a website such that the major search engines can ‚know‘ what your site is all about“.

Atlantic Technology plans to offer it’s services to businesses wanting to expand their base and drive more revenue from the internet. Eamonn explains the processes of optimisation for a website.

First – evaluate the customers goals and produce a plan to target clients on the web. From this, a targeted keyword list is drawn up and agreed upon.

Second stage is on-site optimisation. This requires skilled coders and optimisers going through a website and ensuring the site meets quality optimisation standards. The search engines will love your site for it.

Next comes link building. Inbound links are essential to how your site ranks in the major search engines like google who see inbound links like a vote of confidence. Atlantic technology use many techniques to develop quality and relevant inbound links to the website.

What can you expect having your site optimised? More traffic to your website which will increase sales of your products or services. The beauty is as your site becomes more popular, it will also rank better for your industry keywords.

Niche marketing gets to the heart of your customer base. Instead of wasting time and energy marketing to the masses you are focusing on the group of people who are the most likely to buy your product. You are cutting down on the work you have to do, but getting the best results.

Niche marketing is very effective. You do need to, however, understand how to do it effectively. You have to learn how to get the most from niche marketing in order to make it effective for your business.

One of the main keys about niche marketing is being able to find your niche market. This doesn’t mean defining them, but finding them so you can advertise to them. This is very important because part of the reason for niche marketing is so you do not waste resources marketing to people who may or may not buy your product. So, you have to figure out where your niche market is so you can advertise to them.

If you know your niche market as good as you should then you should be able to figure out some places where they would likely frequent. You will want to use places where your niche market is going to be hanging out. It is here they would likely pay attention to your advertising.

Another main key to niche marketing is connecting with your niche market. As mentioned, you should know your niche market very well. You have to speak to them on their level. You have to communicate with them in a way that is natural and comfortable with them.

You want to make your advertisements something they would be interested in and something that would speak to them and their needs. You want them to pay attention and understand your advertisements. Your advertising should never speak down to your niche market, but just be on the same level as them and be something they can relate to.

The secret to niche marketing is really just knowing your customers and knowing how to sell to them. It is likely that your niche market is going to buy from you because that is why they are your niche market, but they can not buy from you if they do not know about you. You need to connect with them through your advertising and you have to make sure your advertising is effective.

An online business is is worthless without visitors who can easily find your site. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the most important element for your business to thrive.

SEO has the potential of bringing millions of visitors anywhere in the world to your site. They all have the potential to purchase your goods and services once there and bring in a tidy profit for you hard earned efforts.

Of course, if ranking no. 1 in Googe was easy, then everyone would making a fortune. So, you have to be clever with your SEO strategy to beat the competition. Knowing your business customers is what it is all about.

Use keyword tools like google adwords tool or wordtracker to generate a list of relevant keywords. These tools can tell you what people are searching for on the internet and how many searches there are approx every day.

On site optimization – this means going through all the pages of your site and optimizing each one with keywords discovered from the last step. Link every page with a keyword chosen form the last step and make sure this keyword is in your page titles, H1, H2, H3 tags as well as in the alt descriptions of your pictures.

Try to make the text as natural as possible. Use the keywords naturally and don’t stuff your text with them. Search engine robots may notice this and penalise you if they detect spamming.

Link Building – This is probably the most difficult task you will have to do when optimising your website. The search engines see relevant incoming links pointing to your site as a vote of confidence in your website.

The best way to get links is to create great content for your site that people will link to. Directory and article submissions are other methods people use to gain links, as well as direct solicitations to website owners who share a common goal as you do.

SEO is a black art that takes time and patience. The first aim of your new site should be to create a site that people will like. This is the surest way to be successful in the long run.

Sites that draw attention to or highlight the most talked about topics on the Web involve buzz.yahoo.com/, 50.lycos.com/, and google.com/press/zeitgeist.html. Sites shown are selected by user submissions and further featured based on ratings. This presents a amazing opportunity for marketers to get traffic to their sites.

Freebie seekers are, um, freebie seekers. They want everything for free. Free-Press-Release.com disclaims that any right and accountability for the information or data go to the customer who submit the press release. Some press release may be bewildering or confusing without additional clarification.

Seth Godin produced a very big list of 952 sites – also showing the traffic that each one receives. Seth Godin’s list shows only companies, but not trends. As the first step, we labeled each company with a category such as Video or Social Networking. Content has to be revitalized every week if not more frequently; in order to make that an easier chore, it is sufficient to change some of the content, even if you dont change it all. With the great number of applications accessible with Web 2.0, you should set or place a Google search box straightforwardly on the site, so that any consumer may find it comfortable to carryout any extra search directly from your blog page.

Blogs are great traffic generators that you can utilize to grow up your business! Some ways to generate traffic through blogs include pinging, search engine optimization and social bookmarking. A Blog is a web application where you can write your thought, opinion or suggestion in a matter of minutes not like the old static website. What becomes the attraction of blog is its plainness.

Google might then outweigh Site B over Site A based on how credible its crawler deems the area or domain and then drop the unique or original page from Site A from the engine. If the original publication is already on a very credible site there’s probably little threat. Google in particular seems to love blogs. On occasion my articles will be indexed within an hour of being published. Google will look to ensure that you have linked topics.

Being able to setup a performance-based, direct response marketing campaigns that will produce ten fold results is one of the hardest business functions today. Every CMO is asked to do more with less and the best answer to such hard challenges is „Tag IT“! This marketing software application sets up, manages, tracks, organizes and ensures that a direct response marketing campaign is not only ready to launch when needed, it cuts the time down from hours of tedious labor to literally minutes.

The 4 universal challenges a marketing practitioner must overcome when setting up a direct response marketing campaign are:

1) Customer calls a toll free number that is not working or the customer is pitched the wrong product because the call center received the wrong script

2) Prospects MISDIRECTED to the wrong landing page because the wrong one was printed on the creative;

3) Performance reporting is compromised because all of the marketing campaigns are colliding into 1(one) toll free numbers or 800 number; and

4) no tools to prevent 1,2, or 3 because the marketing professional has no control over the process of assigning 800#s, landing pages, coupon codes or affiliated codes.

Generally, a marketing channel administrator expends two to four hours sending e-mails and placing phone calls to call centers and the web group in order to set up one response channel. Tag IT automatically streamlines the workflow process by allowing marketing professional to become self reliant. No more e-mails, no more phone calls. In fact larger organizations with billion dollar marketing spend budgets have saved thousands of hours from the marketing department to the call center.

Marketing budget from thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousand is being invested. Each marketing department wants to squeeze every potential penny out of every campaign they launch. So it is paramount that every facet of the campaign is set up properly.

With UQube TagIt in about 2 minute a marketing practitioner can be finished assigning all their 800 numbers, tracking tags, landing pages.

Tag IT has been unbundled from the Enterprise Application UQube.

Proven and battle tested TagIT, formerly part of the enterprise edition of UQube, is certain to lower marketing costs, increase a marketing departments efficiencies and eliminate common human oversights. By systematically managing 800 numbers, toll free numbers, landing pages, URLs and promo codes a marketing professional can complete their work in minutes from what used to take hours or even weeks.

Commence placing links to your site in high detectable areas, if at all possible the top half of your profile page. Start-ups these days rely to a great point on being capable to catch fire speedily. America has a big population and a built in global infrastructure that lets them to drive their products on more. Start using the tools for your business and take it to a higher level!

Social networking is a truly is a fun thing. To be able to remain in contact with a group of people and to gather/meet new friends is fun. On the other hand, companies that intend social media for marketing or advertising and product promotion dont really bring anything to the table. Social networking, tagging and community sharing or giving out are really the foundation of Web 2.0. Although this may appear far-fetched for some, efficiently embracing these Web 2.0 concepts is the solution or key to business success on today web. Social sites such as the Facebook and MySpace are so popular that they can send you massive traffic.

Social networks were intended to permit the users to share sites they like with each other. Posting too often or posting content unrelated will mark you as spamer and get you barred. Make entirely certain that you contribute your own posts and also other sites related to your niche.

Guest who visits your copyrighted article know that you have the precise information they are looking for and are then persuaded to visit your website for extra data or to order to your product. Visitors on digg.com, can ‚digg‘ your site if they like it or ‚bury‘ your site if they don’t. The more ‚diggs‘ you have, the more traffic you will get.

Internet marketing has become obligatory thing for most of the businesses who intend to strike it big and enlarge their business globally. It implies online marketing of products/services of a company on internet. Internet technology and marketing jobs now command new skill sets and experience. Some positions must be in-house while others should be contracted-out.

Part-1 Essentially, indexing the feed of updates would allow engines like Google to tap into the collective conscious of Twitter users and as a result a microcosm of the webs user base, with instant results. Although all the talk has been speculation, and its been downplayed by Twitter to just a conversation about products and search, the service is certainly on the block. Basically search engines should be able to clearly read through the context of the website and through the key content elements of the website. This link should give you an idea about some of the basics that need to be done.

Word press Goldmine is not some fluffy blah-blah-blah? It stays up to date? Word Press is an Open Source plan or project and there are hundreds of people that are effectively running it and ceaselessly improving and developing it. Most of all, it is free for anyone to download and use.

Video Egg is the ground-breaking video ad network for online communities. We join or connect brands to customers with video and rich media across a network of more than 200 leading video and gaming sites, social networks and applications. Video sharing sites like such as YouTube are too big a marketing opportunity to ignore therefore go out of your way to produce short videos and post them to YouTube and other video-sharing sites. The search engines will give you prize or reward you with good rankings, and your message will be seen by a probable audience of millions.

Face book adds 100-250K new audience each day. Face book is still the lead of the fast growing sites among the extra or other social media sites. This year nonetheless provide a number of sites of social networking and offer a new trend dissimilar to the other sites.

MySpace is an online community that permits you to get together with your friends‘ friends. These are well-liked sites especially among youths. My space is a great way to spread the word about your business.

Experts in the field of marketing often say that strategic thinking is important in every venture. And yet, not everyone engaged in business has a solid idea of what strategic thinking is. To start, strategic thinking focuses on discovering and improving unique opportunities to create value. This is possible through facilitating a challenging and ingenious dialogue among people who can influence the direction that a company takes. Strategic thinking is an input to strategic planning. It is a way of recognizing the basic drivers of a business, and a way of thoroughly challenging conservative beliefs about them.

There are several factors that must be considered when thinking strategically: competencies and skills, products and offerings, environment and industry, markets and customers, competitors and substitutes, and suppliers and buyers.

When thinking of competencies and skills, it would be helpful to ask the following questions: What are the strengths of the company? How can these strengths be utilized to bring about unique competitive advantage? If the company has strengths, it must also have weaknesses; what are these weaknesses that can make the company vulnerable?

Next are the products and offerings. A company must have a defined set of market offerings. It is also important to analyze the gaps or overlaps in what the company offers, as well as the basis or reasons for such offerings. What makes an offering unique and what associates it to other brands or lines must also be delved upon. Strategic thinking often comes into play when a company is able to establish how these offerings fit in with the company’s image.

When thinking strategically, it is also crucial to take into account the environment and industry in which the business exists. Having a solid idea of the overall economic milieu in which the business competes, the regulatory or governmental environment and how they affect the company, the structure of the industry, where the industry is moving to and where you want your business to be, the position of the business in the industry and where you want it to be, how the industry relates with others, and the effect of all these factors in the positioning of the business plays a significant role in strategy formulation.

Then, a business must consider the markets and customers, and the competitors and substitutes available. Knowing the target customers for the offerings of the business, the needs of the customers, how the business is distinctively capable of meeting such needs, nature of competition in the industry, what other businesses have offerings that can satisfy the same needs, how these businesses are similar or different to your own, how they might respond to your strategies, possibility of other businesses that might choose to enter the market, their strengths and strategies, and the market conditions that compel them to take action would give businesses an edge in understanding the dynamics of their internal and external environments.

Lastly, suppliers and buyers must not be neglected. They are the driving forces that can help in the production or marketing of a business‘ offerings. Understanding their dynamics also helps a business foresee any potential threat they might pose.

With the incredible rapid growth that online video sharing and video search sites are realizing, more and more advertisers are pumping money into video advertising. According to the latest research, online video advertising revenues in the US are expected to reach $7.1 billion by 2012 which is a 72 percent compound annual growth rate for the next five years. In 2008, the projections are just shy of $1billion.

Since video sites have been realizing more and more traffic growth, they have had a unique opportunity to innovate and test various different online video ad formats. And the advertisers as well are more than happy to experiment as they are looking to these leaders to develop the most effective online video advertising formats. Traditionally, pre-roll, mid-roll, or post-roll ad formats (aka in-stream ads) have been favored by advertisers due to the availability of inventory and prominence of the advertisement itself.

Pre-Roll Video Ads: Pre roll advertisements start before the video begins and the viewer has to sit through the entire advertisement, if he does not want to rely on chances, rather wants to ensure that ha can watch every single second of the video from its beginning.

Post-roll Format – In post-roll, just like the other in-stream ad formats, a short clip is played and streamed within the player at the end of the video stream itself. This is not as desired by advertisers as they know that many users never watch a video all the way until the end.

Mid-Roll Format – With mid-rolls, a short clip is streamed in the middle (sometimes every X minutes) of video content that is playing. This tends to be less annoying to users as they are acustomed to this format in television advertising.

Some of the video sites have started experimenting with different formats like, in-player banners: In-player ads sometimes include relevant text or image advertisements in the space available in video player between the outer margin of the video and the inner margin of the video player.

The buzz in the past year has been with regard to a newer method of video ad delivery that attempts to match relevance by choosing video ads to run with only video that is similar in subject. This is known as contextual video advertising and it can take on a range of different formats with images or text being displayed within a portion of the video window, only being activated when clicked on.

Some of the video sites like to go through the video and include only relevant in-video text advertisements, which match the contents of the video and at the same time it does not disturb the process of video watching by the viewer. Youtube was one of the first sites to adopt this format as a standard and it is called Overlay Video Ads.

Although there are a few other formats that are being tested and utilized, the formats that I covered are the most commonly used formats at the moment. That being said, with the attention on this sector as it is, we will likely continue to see rapid innovation and will keep our eye out for the next best online video ad format.