Blogging is definitely an important way to help others with tips and tutorials.  It's also a great platform for expressing yourself.

When choosing a blogging platform, these are some important features to keep in mind:

• Linux Hosting is preferred
• Fantastico or Simple Scripts Installation
• Posts and Pages – content Area
• WordPress Themes – the template of the blog
• Categories – categories for the blog posts
• BlogRoll – links to other places
• Widgets -  weather widget, banner, etc… a small application box on the blog which adds a function
• Plugins -    an application or tool that adds functionality or performance to the blog

Enjoy building your audience!

Wow, great class today with over 50 people (seemed like it anyways)!

We discussed:

• Linux Hosting is preferred
• Fantastico or Simple Scripts Installation
• Posts and Pages – content Area
• Wordpress Themes – the template of the blog
• Categories – categories for the blog posts
• BlogRoll – links to other places
• Widgets - weather widget, banner, etc… a small application box on the blog which adds a function
• Plugins - an application or tool that adds functionality or performance to the blog

Contact us to find out when we are teaching our next round of classes: Houston Web Design

Actually, the term Internet Marketing is a broad term.  It covers, well, any marketing activity on the internet. It could mean:

• Search Engine Optimization
• Pay Per Click
• Email Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Mobile Media Marketing

Building and Promoting your business on the Internet can be a tough job for a business owner.  Knowing what to consider or where to start is often the main issues.   Even if you have a good marketing budget, how to use it carefully?  The following Internet marketing plan can help clear things up.

At a high level, here are the points to consider:
Stage I: Build your Internet Assets

• There will be plenty of things on your current website that need building up and enhancing
• If you do not have any Social Media site, it is time to create them
• You need at least one Blog
• Assemble and upload Videos

In today’s day and age, people check out the website before trusting a company. If a website seems legitimate enough then there is a big chance for you to close deals and grow your business through internet leads and sales.

To get those leads and sales on the internet, there are 2 simple but firm requirements. They are:
1. A website needs to get a response.
and
2. The website needs to get targeted traffic.

We all know instinctively that if you are selling offline, you could sell and grow your business even more with a solid online presence. But what helps to make an online business successful?  Here are 3 pointers from Houston Web Company offering Professional Website Designs.

Tags, tags tags.  What?  What's a tag?  Header tags, title tags, and description tags to name a few.

1.  Header tags are the large headlines used on a website page.  H1 is the largest, H2 and H3 are smaller in font size.  These header tags allow website visitors to quickly take in important information on a webpage. Yes, it makes it simpler for a reader to scan and grab information, and makes them stay or "stick" on the website a little longer.  Also, the search engines also take a look at what is being emphasized on the webpage.

So, the "header tag" is one of the places to perform SEO and can help boost a website's search engine placement, while at the same time keeping the visitor interested in "stick"ing around.

Creating your SEO plan and working through the details is very important. However, just avoiding some of the most common mistakes helps get things off to the right start.
Here's a list of 5:

1. Flash.  In spite of how cool that sparkle and glitter seems, Flash is not optimized to be understood by Google when indexing your site.
2. Image ALT tags.  Remember to describe your website images with optimized words in the ALT description tag.  This helps give keyword information that helps search engines index your site.  Remember, Google actually allows images to be searched all on their own.
3. Don't keyword spam.  Repeating the keywords too often in your website content can be seen as keyword spamming, and actually hurt your sites ranking for those keywords.
4. Create unique content on your website.  In an effort to reduce the machines needed to store website index information, search engines like to ignore webpages and even entire websites that have duplicate content.
5. Learn how to fill in the TITLE and DESCRIPTION tags of your website.  And, it's usually not enough to fill in your company name since this is usually not the way people are searching for your product or service.

Hope these short tips help you in your efforts.  For more information you can check our Houston Small Business SEO Agency Website.

Small Businesses need marketing and advertising.  One of the strategies of marketing and advertising on the internet is through Search Engine Marketing.  This internet technique describes Search Engine Marketing and Pay Per Click Advertising.

The SEO process involves "best practices" for getting your website or other internet asset to appear high in the search results for relevant keywords to your business.

Google Adwords is the most popular way for Houston business owners to get onto the first page of Google in a very short amount of time... often the same day if the advertising campaign is designed correctly.

Our Houston web site marketing agency has long made use of Social Media to promote clients’ businesses. We consider Social Media Marketing as one of the top 5 web marketing strategies.   Social Media Optimization – or SMO – is the term coined for website or social media site marketing strategies using Social Media techniques.

Social media optimization describes the use of Social Web 2.0  techniques by a web site marketing agency to make a website or social media site popular across the internet. Of course we are all familiar with SEO, but SMO means more than that. It means:

• Making your content more shareable to people and to communities across the social networks of the internet

• Making your SMO site more easily linked to

What does this mean more specifically?
1. Buttons, Badges and Widgets. Adding a widget to your content allows people to more easily bookmark or tag. RSS feed icons on your blogs, AddThis buttons.
2. Content Sharing. Think Facebook’s “Share This” button. Twitter’s “Retweet” functionality. Also, downloadable PDFs, video or audio files help your content to travel and become popular.
3. Social Commenting. Commenting, Voting, Rating, approving, “Liking,” voting up in StumbleUpon.

Of course, anything posted on the internet can and should be optimized for the search engines. But now, it is as important to be “optimized” to be found across social networks and communities. This means, the voting and rating can help your content rise to the top of searches done on social sites. Sites like Technorati, StumbleUpon, YouTube and more. Now, going “viral” can be more powerful in getting visitors than showing up in search engine results.

What kind of internet sites can be optimized for Social Media?

• Facebook sites

• Blogs on your website or off your website

• Website content

• Videos on YouTube or other video sites

• Web 2.0 sites like Hubpages, Squidoo

• Blog aggregation sites like Technorati

• Article marketing sites

• and more...

It’s important to remember the difference in SEO and SMO is this:   SEO is about becoming highly visible according to a search engine’s “algorithm,” while SMO is about becoming highly visible from votes and interest shown by people and communities.

Social Media Optimization is an efficient tool for website marketing and promotion, and there are many tools and techniques to help you spread the word about your brand and offerings.  Learn more at Houston Web Site Internet Marketing Agency