Ten years ago, companies and businesses in Las Vegas asked themselves if a website could really truly help their businesses. Back then, business owners didn’t quite realize the importance of a website to a business or company. Today, there is absolutely no argument about just how important a web site is to a business here in Las Vegas. According to a research conducted by Forrester – a leading research firm – more than 65% of companies are now looking to migrate their offline marketing efforts to online marketing.

Just How Does a Web Site Help My Business?

Brand Awareness For Your Company

The primary benefit of a website for your business is it opens your company’s products and services up to a potentially huge audience on the internet. With a website you could be telling literally hundreds of people at one time about your products and services, all without a meeting or a conference call.  All without spending virtually a dime after the initial cost of developing a website.  The investment is small compared to the benefits your business gains by having a professional web site out on the internet.

Increases Your Sales

Companies with websites gain more business just by having a website. Newspapers and yellow pages are not the mediums that newer generations are searching for your products and services through any longer. Most people are online every day, searching for your products and services – the web is quick, convenient and easy to use.

Furthermore, Search Engine optimization will help your website find visitors on a search engine (like google.com), visitors gain sales leads, and leads equal new business. By targeting the appropriate key words and phrases when your website is build by a professional web design company, people will be able to find your website when searching.  Hey, what business owner does not want more sales?

Improves the Credibility of Your Company’s Brand

A website is just as important in gaining credibility as a business card nowadays… without one, there’s an automatic distrust of your company.  You don’t want to appear as if you’re running your business out of your car, do you?

Having a professionally designed, informative, and sharply written web site is instant credibility for your business, especially in Las Vegas, where the transient rate is still very high.  It gives your business an image that increases the chance that a potential customer or client will contact you for your products and services.

If your company doesn’t have a website in 2009, it should! For more information on professional website services, visit www.perkolate.com.

Many Las Vegas business owners are just finding out about Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and how it can benefit their Las Vegas website and while it is a relatively new way of marketing, the principles have been around for a long time.

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.

Internet Marketing can really encompass several different concepts or terms – online marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), website marketing, to name a few. Whichever terms you’ve heard before is not too important; the important take-away is that you need to promote your business online, grow traffic to your website, create an awareness and brand your business online, improve your search engine result rankings and make the Las Vegas community aware that your company even exists.

Many companies and businesses in Las Vegas make the mistake of launching a website and thinking that drones of visitors will magically arrive each day. Not true. Just like a business card that sits in your pocket if you don’t hand it out to people, most of the time a website can sit out on the internet and if you don’t market that web site, people may not even know you or your business exists.

Here are some ways you or a professional internet marketing company can help market your business online:

• Launch a Website – if you don’t already have a web site you are WAY behind the curve.  Get one up right away.
• Search Engine Optimization – research keywords and key phrases that people would find your website during a search on a search engine and put those words and phrases into the copy on your website, make those same words links between your website pages and place those same words into your website’s site map.
• Online PR – There are many opportunities for online PR and Press Releases. For more information see my article on Press Releases for Your Las Vegas Business.
• Google’s Free Online Marketing Tools – here’s a list from wikipedia.org. Very helpful and mostly free.
• Pay-Per-Click Campaign – ever wonder what those Sponsored Listings are when you search on google, yahoo, msn or aol? That’s right, they pay. You can set up your own campaign, choose they keywords, set your monthly budget and start coming up right along side your competitors by setting a pay-per-click campaign.
• Email Marketing – Use a company like Constant Contact to set up an email marketing campaign. You can upload your list of contacts, choose a template and write your email newsletter, it’s easy and fun.
• Launch a Blog – Do you have a lot to say about your particular area of expertise or industry (like I do, hee)? Then launch a blog and tell visitors what you’re thinking and let them find out who you are and what your business specializes in.
• Banner Advertising – Consider buying space on a targeted web site that promotes your products and services. Set up a special landing page so you can track the results

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