National and International Blog Websites:

• seobook
• google
• dmoz blog
• best of the web
• blog carnival
• bloghub
• bloggernity
• blogarama
• blog search engine
• blog catalog
• globe of blogs
• bloggapedia
• blog flux
• blog listing
• blog explosion
• blogger
• blog digger
• technorati
• bloglines
• bloggeries
• blogged
• bigger blogger
• blog toplist
• search 4 blogs
• bloghop

When you compose an email for marketing purposes, keep these points in mind:

• Create a title for the email that will cause readers to want to open your email. People glance at the first few words of the email title to even decide if they are going to open it or delete it.
• Write interesting headlines. So you’ve gotten the reader to open your email, now give them a reason to read on. Glancing at the headlines should make you want to read the news item.
• Keep main articles concise, interesting and to the point. Get to your point quickly, whether it is an offer of some sort, or any other call to action. People’s attention spans are very short, especially in email.
• Create links back to your website when possible.  Readers will click on the links if they want more information.

There are many places you can source an email list for marketing purposes. Most of the time you must buy a list and the prices and quality of the lists you purchase may vary. A good place to start is by exporting the contacts from your email or address book.  They are most likely current clients, business associates and friends. The first time I exported my address book years ago, I was surprised to end up with a list of over 400 email addresses.  If you would like to purchase a list of email addresses, there are many options available to you. Remember to decide upon a target market for your purchased email list. For example, are you trying to source a list in Las Vegas of Small Business owners on the west side of town or specific to zip codes or is your target a national audience of dog owners let’s say.

Websites you can purchase email marketing lists from:

The process is fairly simple. You need to find an online company, set up an account, pay a monthly fee depending on how big your list is and how many times a month you email your list. They will have instructions on how to import email addresses from your address book or the list you’ve purchased.

What is search engine marketing (SEM)?

Search Engine Optimization is the biggest buzzword right now especially when you talk of promoting yourc company’s website. But did you know that Search Engine Marketing is another important spoke in the business marketing wheel? The first thing you should know is that Search Engine Marketing, SEM is quite different from Search Engine Optimization or SEO. With this being said, you will find a lot of business people treating SEM the same as SEO.

The first thing that differs between SEO and SEM is the perception of Search Engine Marketing. Search Engine Optimization works on the key words and key phrases and content of your website’s pages and how the pages need to be designed keeping Search Engines in mind and how they will rank on a search. Search Engine Marketing on the other hand deals exclusively with how you promote your website with search engines. It could be said that a Search Engine Optimization effort could be a subset of a Search Engine Marketing campaign.

Search Engine Marketing Techniques

Basically, any technique by which the visibility of a website improves with search engines is covered under the umbrella of Search Engine Marketing. Thus, from an aggregate perspective, you could look at techniques like Blogging, Search Engine Submissions, Social Networking, Viral Marketing and other techniques. You could also look at methods like Contextual Advertising and Paid Inclusion being subsets of Search Engine Marketing.

Contextual Advertising

Not many are aware of the complete workings of contextual advertising. Here’s an example to illustrate the concept. Assume you have visited a website A, which is in the Sports niche. When you visit the website, you could see some ads popping up from the site that deals with sports accessories or memorabilia dealers. Basically, you see an ad which is relevant to the context and the content of that particular website. This is how contextual advertising works.

Now, how does the business owner benefit from these ads appearing on their website? Simple, the ad appearing on the webpage would have a revenue basis tied onto it depending on certain actions being performed by the users. For example, a webmaster could get paid if 100 users click on the ad, and so on.

Paid Inclusion and Pay-Per-Click Placement

There are some search engines on the internet that are very popular (google, aol, msn, yahoo), so popular that business owners and webmasters are inclined to invest some money to get into the directory of these resources just so that they have the opportunity to get ranked on the first page as a “sponsored listing” so they can get the traffic and recognition of coming up on the first page of a google search, let’s say. This is where Paid Inclusion or Pay-Per-Click placement comes into play.

A web master or web developer can set up a paid inclusion or pay-per-click campaign to help promote your website (or if you are so technically inclined, you could do it yourself as well). You choose the key words you’d like to rank for, set a budget and run your campaign. The main objective of this is to have some traffic through search engines.

With the above knowledge, you should be in a position to understand that Search Engine Marketing is separate from Search Engine Optimization. One of the best examples of SEM at work would be to see the working of Google AdWords, which best symbolizes Contextual Advertising.

At the end of the day, both the techniques increase the visibility and page rankings of your company’s website within the search engines.

Why should you hire a professional Las Vegas SEO company?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is critical in promoting and marketing your Las Vegas website. Business should reserve a budget to have Search Engine Optimization performed on their website to increase their organic search engine rankings. Despite its importance, many local Las Vegas companies ignore SEO for their website.

Here are some reasons why you should hire a professional local Las Vegas SEO company (like Perkolate):

• Do you know what constitutes a good SEO strategy? – To the naked eye, SEO seems simple. All you have to do is to optimize your website, and it’s done. Build some links and you are on your way to getting some traffic to your website. But there is more to it than what meets the eye.

You could attempt to do some research on SEO and do it yourself, but most newcomers to SEO face a daunting task in trying to manage the different activities of a good SEO effort. Hire a professional SEO firm, and you would be able to get all of these done in no time at all and by a professional that can help you get results.

• Do you know how broad SEO is? – Not long ago, SEO was thought of as an activity where all you did was put some keywords on the webpage, and allow the search engines to index them. Though that remains a basic SEO principle, a lot of other techniques have come up in the past some years, which has completely revolutionized the concept of SEO and how well you rank on an organic search engine result.

Concepts like Pay-Per-Click campaigns, Social Networking and Marketing, Link Building and others have changed the strategy of SEO completely. Most professional SEO firms would know how to implement each of these techniques effectively.

• Time consuming – Any good SEO professional would tell you that SEO efforts would give results only after a period of time and a lot of time and effort. You should realize this before taking on the task yourself. It is most time and cost effective to leave it to a professional company like Perkolate.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is not a difficult set of strategies and tactics, but it needs skilled people to do the job. As a relative newcomer, you would still be able to do justice to basic of aspects of SEO, but mastering the entire gamut of SEO related activities would require you to be skilled to another level.

Cost and time constrains force a lot of business owners to outsource SEO works to professional SEO firms. It must be said here that these business owners have in fact gained a lot by the professional services offered by these firms that focus on Las Vegas SEO services, like Perkolate! ]]> http://marketinginlasvegas.com/2011/11/06/why-you-should-hire-a-professional-local-las-vegas-seo-company/feed/ 0 http://marketinginlasvegas.com/2011/09/15/las-vegas-seo-free-directory-submission-for-your-website/ http://marketinginlasvegas.com/2011/09/15/las-vegas-seo-free-directory-submission-for-your-website/#comments Thu, 15 Sep 2011 08:14:10 +0000 Michael Gazzano http://marketinginlasvegas.com/?p=543 Looking to gain links to your Las Vegas web site and increase traffice. I’ve compiled a list of links to websites with some of the best free directory submission for your Las Vegas website. Remember, directory submission is great for your website as once you submit, you automatically have links out on the internet back to your website.  Most are free, many require registration for submission, and some require reciprocal links.

Free Tools and Directories to Submit Your Las Vegas Website to:

• Top Free Web Directories
• ExactSeek.com
• Add Me – Search Engine Submission Optimization & Free Website Promotion
• Free Web Submissions – Free Search Engine Submission and Site Promotion
• SubmitExpress.com – Free Website URL Submission – Submit to Google, Yahoo, MSN
• Add URL.nu – Add Your URL to FREE SEO Friendly Directories
• Submit to dmoz.org – The Open Directory Project
• Submit Website to Google
• Submit Website to Yahoo
• MSN Live Search URL Submission