I just had a “Bing!” Moment with Bing. I had not used the Bing Search Engine for a few days and for some reason today I was writing some new material this afternoon and publishing it.  I wrote for a few hours, published a couple of blog articles and then went off to go swimming and play with the grand kids for a few hours.  When I got back to my desk, I typed the title of the blog post into my Google toolbar and got a bunch of results, but nothing very useful and certainly nothing like the article I wrote with that exact title.  Even searching the title in quotes, there was nothing there but spam and commercial Made for Adsense (MFA) pages.

On a whim, I pasted the title into Bing without quotes and there it was after only a few hours, #4 in the Bing Search Results.  I just tried the same search again on Google with quotes around the title and the page comes up at #39 in the Google Search Results.

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Technorati Tags: Bing, Bing Moment, Bing Search, Bing Search Engine, Moment, Search Engine, Search Engines

“Claim Your Name” is the name of a social networking experiment being run by Bill Austin for some of the Job Seekers of the Scottsdale Job Network.

We have found that almost all employers use some aspects of social networking, although most of them do not recognize it as such. Recruiters, hiring managers and staffing professionals use online search engines and social networking sites to locate potential candidates (sourcing) and to research job candidates and their backgrounds.

Claim Your Name is actually a social network for job seekers to enable them to take charge of their online identity and make it much easier for recruiters and employers to find them online.

Imagine if you were out of work and were a job seeker and imagine that your name just happened to be

Britney Spears

or

Lindsey Lohan

or

Michael Moore

…

Without a strong social network, you are pretty much out of luck.

No one would ever find you online.

This online program called “Claim Your Name” lets you take charge of your name online and tell your story to recruiters, hiring managers and the rest of the world.

If you need help  to take charge of your online reputation, whether for a job search or for your company or personal online reputation management, you can call Bill Austin at 1-480-998-0246 for short consulting assignments or major reputation management engagements.

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Technorati Tags: Arizona SEO, Bill Austin, Business, Internet Marketing, Online Reputation Management, Reputation Management

Local businesses can show up in local search results on various search engines by submitting a business listing to East Valley Living, Yahoo Local, Google Local, MSN Local, and others.

For more information on each of these opportunities visit the following links or call us at (480) 998-0246.

Submit your Business to East Valley Living Business Directory

Submit your Business to Google Local Business Directory

Submit your Business to Yahoo Local Business Directory

Submit your Business to MSN Local Business Directory

BONUS: This is not free ($40 – Regular or $60 per year – Featured) but if you have a Blog, you should submit it to the blog directory listed below:

Blog Directory

• Directory Home
• Log In
• Compare
• FAQ
• Submit Business

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Technorati Tags: Business Directory, business listings, directory listings, Google, Google Local, Local, Local Business, Local Business Directory, Local Marketing, MSN, Phoenix Arizona, Search Engine, Submit Business, Windows Live, Windows Live Local, Yahoo, Yahoo Local

Your professional responsibility is to serve your clients.

How about growing your practice?

If you spent all your time on marketing, networking, referrals and developing qualified prospects, you’d have little time to meet client needs.

Chances are that you probably spend a good deal of your time using ineffective methods trying to find clients.

Does your law firm website generate all the leads, clients and billable hours that your partners and associates can handle? Marketing of service professionals is quite different than marketing a product. Services are largely intangible and the consumer cannot touch, taste, feel, test drive or observe them in action. Evaluation of the services attorneys provide tends to happen only after the service has been performed.

Referrals, while generally reported as an attorney’s top source of business, rely on a third party to provide prospects with information that can be of little relevance to your knowledge and expertise.

Networking groups are time-consuming and require constant attention.

Marketing must be a major priority for your business, but marketing must not be a major priority for you.

Concentrate on what makes you money.

Be a Lawyer, not an Internet Marketing Expert. You bill substantially more on an hourly basis than the most effective and competent legal firm marketing consultants around.

Stop wasting your valuable time!

Traditional marketing methods no longer work and reliance on a single source of new clients can be disastrous.

Let us help you generate leads, in-bound calls, appointments and other sources of effective relevant clients that can grow your business and build your practice on a continuous and consistent basis.

Whether your law office specializes in criminal law, dui, tax, family law, labor law, business law, employment law, bankruptcy law, real estate law, or any other multitude of other areas of focus, there are legal marketing strategies available to grow your practice.

A multi-media, multi-pronged marketing effort is required these days in order to break through the “Media Attention Deficit Disorder” that plagues marketing efforts in all industries today.

AZhttp, Inc. is an integrated marketing solutions company. The leadership team has over 90 years combined experience in business development, sales, marketing and public relations. AZhttp provides integrated solutions for online media, print, radio, TV, and direct mail. We combine systems engineering principles with unique traditional and non-traditional marketing and advertising methodologies to help clients reach and exceed their sales and marketing goals.

Get started today with our series of small business products. They are reasonably priced and can have a major impact on your client pipeline. For law firms with substantial marketing budgets, we can customize and execute a strategic marketing plan to grow your firm. By driving a steady stream of potential new clients to your law firm’s website, your business can be increased. Whether you need legal website development, legal blog design and maintenance services, search engine optimization targeted to your main practice areas and geographic locations we specialize in using internet marketing bring clients to you!

We can develop a marketing plan that includes business development, advertising, networking, referrals, public relations, media TV, radio, print, direct mail and Internet marketing as appropriate for your growth goals.

Call Us Toll Free Now!

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Technorati Tags: advertising, Attorneys, Law Firms, lawyers, Marketing, Public Relations

Can anyone find your company on the Internet if they don’t know your company name?

If your company website, products and services cannot be found using product, service or industry related search terms, you do not exist. No one can buy from you if when they are searching on the common Internet search engines they do not find your site.

Most small business marketing managers and small business owners find that our SME4 – Mega Tune-Up is an exceptional way to get their small business website marketing campaign started or augment an existing campaign.

This SME Internet Marketing campaign package is designed to tune up your website for improved findability and to boost your Internet marketing efforts to the next level. This package includes research, competitive analysis, optimization of up to five pages of your website, directory submissions, search engine submission, as well as recommendations for further improvements, additional marketing, advertising and public relations opportunities.

For companies with small marketing budgets, we recommend this package as a starting point to begin increasing leads, sales, revenues and profits so that they can afford to increase their marketing budget in order to compete with major corporations and their multi-billion dollar advertising campaigns.

For extremely small marketing budgets we have smaller packages that are highly affordable and will give even the smallest company an opportunity to compete.

We frequently design and implement custom marketing campaigns to meet requirements that exceed the levels of our SME clients. These campaigns may be for large companies, or may be for small businesses that want to grow their business substantially.

One client grew from number five to number two in their industry within 18 months using our Internet marketing services. Another client began in a store front in one city, selling only in that city and now sells their product in 47 states over the Internet. We built a dealer network of about 150 dealers in the United States and Canada for a manufacturing client using a combination of television, print advertising, search engine optimization and search engine marketing. A client who was relying heavily on television advertising was able to reduce their TV ad budget by 75% by applying about 10% of that amount to our Internet marketing services. As a full service marketing agency we often begin by performing Internet marketing and the move the client into radio, TV, promotional products and print advertising when we can justify it based on reach and frequency effectiveness.

This is the first level package that could actually be called an Internet Marketing Campaign. The lower level starter products are just that. They get you started moving towards the goal of being able to market your website for a variety of search terms related to your products, services and industry. Without doing that basic work, you do not have the ability to effectively compete against the millions of other websites marketing the same product, services and industries. This package starts with comprehensive analysis of the website, the competition and the industry. Search terms relevant to the site are identified, expanded and ranked according to popularity based on searchers, advertisers and competitors. Current search engine rankings and traffic patterns for existing websites are investigated and documented to develop a baseline to be used later in refining the campaign. Recommendations of opportunities to exploit additional marketing techniques in Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Television, Radio, Direct Mail and Video solutions may be identified during this research and analysis process or later in the campaign. Revisions of website pages will incorporate appropriate structural and content changes required to improve the ability of those pages to rank well for a variety of search engine queries as well as to improve the readability, usability and navigability so that human visitors find the site and individual pages more friendly, useful, and compelling.

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Technorati Tags: Internet Marketing, Small Business

During a recent Internet Marketing presentation, I was asked the following question:

How do you determine if your website needs professional help?

The determination that a particular company website marketing team is not doing well on their own and needs to hire professional Internet Marketing help is fairly easy. Convincing the company to actually take the action needed to get the help hired is much more difficult.To determine if your company is doing a dismal job of online marketing, perform the following searches:

1. Search for the company name on all three major search engines. (Google, Yahoo and MSN are the only search engines that provide any meaningful level of traffic.)

• Is the company website ranked #1 on all three search engines?
• Are there any negative references (reputation management problems) in the first 30 results?

2. Search for the name of the company principals on all three major search engines.

• Are positive references to the company principals listed #1 on all three major search engines?
• Are there any negative references in the first 30 results?

3. Search for the company’s main products and services and industries on all three major search engines.

• Are they listed on the first page (top 10) of results ?
• Are there any negative references to the company in the first 30 results for those search terms?

A recent Wall Street Journal article notes the importance to many people of their name Googling well. The same applies to a company name. Although that article primarily dealt with people’s personal names rather than business names, within that article there were a couple of relevant quotes.

The author of the Wall Street Journal article stated that Professional networking site LinkedIn Corp. says its members profile pages often turn up high in Google search results when the users opt to make the pages accessible to the public. This example of the LinkedIn.com Profile of Bill Austin bears this out since it currently ranks #8 on Google for Bill Austin and #3 on Yahoo for Bill Austin.

The other relevant quotation in the article comes from Matt Cutts, a Google software engineer, who was quoted as saying “Any time you can distinguish yourself with a distinctive name or a distinctive characteristic that sticks out in people’s minds, that’s going to be the best solution.” This applies to company names and branding just as it applies to your own name.

Another excellent example of name branding comes from a local Scottsdale Arizona business called Go Daddy Group where CEO and Owner Bob Parsons has cornered the market on his name on Google, Yahoo and MSN with his “Hot Points” Blog and a lot of high powered Public Relations and Marketing.

If your company website, company principals and company products and services are not listed high in the search results common search terms that an ordinary person would use to find and/or research your company, then you do need professional help to move your website from relative obscurity to the prominence it deserves in terms of search engine rankings. Hiring Professional Internet Marketing help could be the most important product or service you ever purchase.

Whether your online reputation is suffering from the impact of negative articles and reviews or is suffering from irrelevant website traffic due to use of last century’s technology in your web site design, structure and environment or lack of attention by your marketing or IT staff, a professional Internet Marketing Firm can cut through the political chaff strangling your company and fix your small business online presence.

Our goal is to educate clients on the importance of clean results for Internet searches for their company names, principals, products and services. With the advent of the Internet, more and more individuals and companies are relying on information contained in search results as part of their due diligence in researching companies before they consider doing business with them. Negative results impact sales. Positive results bring the potential for more business. AZhttp has the expertise to bring positive results to the forefront for searches for the company name, principals, products and services while causing negative search results to more to obscurity in the search results over time.

Successfully marketing and branding companies for their niche market can be an expensive proposition. Small businesses spend thousands of dollars annually in advertising, marketing and Information Technology (IT) and large businesses spend millions of dollars each month on those activities. Internet Marketing can level the playing field.

AZhttp’s premier Small Medium Enterprise product, Mega Tune Up, provides businesses with a low-cost solution to learn the steps they need to take to effectively market their website should they want to market their company, products and services internally. Stellar Tune Up trains your staff how to use state of the art search engine marketing principles and web 2.0 technology to market the business website internally. For companies with no internal marketing and IT staff, AZhttp, Inc. can serve in the capacity of these departments and work remotely to brand, market and grow businesses online.

Call us today at (480) 998-0246 for details or contact us by EMail.

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Biotechnology companies have a unique opportunity to promote their products and services and to increase brand awareness by utilizing the services available from AZhttp, Inc.  Whether you are a bio or pharma marketing executive looking for the best way to get your Biotech News message out to the public, investors and researchers, a venture capital manager looking for the next big thing to invest in, or a city, county or state economic development department official trying to create interest and buzz around your latest biotechnology development efforts and initiatives, we can tailor a program to fit your needs and to get the word out to the people who need to know.

Your goals may include:

• Promote biotechnology growth in a state or region.
• Identify and influence technical researchers to consider your company or region as a positive career move.
• Promote a particular product.
• Promote awareness of your company.
• Promote awareness of the industry as a whole
• Help improve the Biotech Workforce of a region or state.
• Raise awareness of biotechnology related opportunities among High School and college students.
• Raise awareness of biotechnology related opportunities among the transitional workforce.

We take a particular interest in promoting Arizona Biotech companies and initiatives such as the Translational Genomics Consortium (TGEN) but we have done work for companies all over the world and are always willing to review requirements and see how we can help.

Call us now at (480) 998-0246 or send an e-mail  for more information or to discuss your needs.

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Technorati Tags: Biotech, Biotech Marketing, Biotechnology, Biotechnology Marketing

The following story was displayed on the eBay Affiliate site for over three years but has been removed due to a site re-design.

Learn from successful eBay affiliates and read how these businesses have become eBay Affiliate Program leaders!

Bill Austin & Kathee Austin (Business Model: Natural Search)

Bill Austin & Kathee Austin won a Hawaiian vacation for their rapid growth and great success on the eBay Affiliate Program. eBay ran a Hawaiian contest in 2003 that rewarded top affiliates in three different categories – Bill and Kathee’s reward was, as they described, “a trip of a lifetime!”

Bill Austin and Kathee Austin had a “fabulous vacation” that was well deserved. Their integrated marketing services company is highly successful in growing traffic to their web sites and increasing eBay registrations and bids during the contest period.

Using Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization techniques, they were able to increase website traffic by several hundred thousand impressions per day.Having already achieved great success with the eBay Affiliate Program, Bill and Kathee excitedly explain, “We’re looking forward to meeting future challenges through eBay’s affiliate programs. Thanks again, eBay!”

Screen Shot of the Original Story on the eBay site:

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Searches on Your Hard Drive
If you have ever utilized a search feature on your computer or word processing software, you know the process is fairly simple; you enter a word or phrase at the prompt and the software looks throughout the hard drive or the document for the word or phrase you entered.

Searches on a Search Engine
Using a search engine such as All the Web, Alta Vista, Google, or Yahoo, among others, you can get similar search results as you did searching documents on your own computer, but the results that contain your search criteria are for web pages on the Internet.

Search Engines Defined
Essentially, a search engine is a set of computer programs used by search engine companies to generate an index or database of websites that likely match the search criteria entered.

How Search Engines Work
Simply put, search engines use computer programs, commonly referred to as ?spiders? or web crawlers that literally ?crawl? throughout the complex circuit of web pages across the entire Internet, logging the content on each page and following the links associated with those pages.

The information is then placed into databases. When queried on the search engine, they will generate a list, index or ?library? of relevant websites, based on the search term and the search engine company?s algorithms. The algorithms created by the individual search engine companies rate each web page?s importance by its content and relevance. The value they place on the various words and phrases contained on a page determine where that page will show up in the ranked results.

What are Links?
A hypertext link is a link on a website which identifies a website address and enables a direct connection from that webpage to another. In most cases, the link?s address is highlighted or underlined, so website visitors will know to click or follow the link to another page on that site, or another site altogether. Photos oftentimes have links associated with them.

Link Relevance
With the advent of the Internet, computers branched out and linked to related computers in the network. The original concept of the World Wide Web was that web pages connected via hyperlinks to one another would be related in some way. For example, on a website about ?speech writing?, there could be links leading to relevant websites containing books on writing or public speaking, or the site might provide links to various speaking schools, associations, or a speakers bureau, etc.

One important factor in determining relevance is the number and quality of related web sites that link to a particular web site. Over time, many unscrupulous websites created ?link farms? whereby anyone could post a series of unrelated links to a website, hoping to cross-link their sites en mass to add perceived value in search engine rankings. This resulted in corruption of the library of information that the search engine spiders had gleaned.

After link farms came ?familiar link listings? for all of a website owner?s friends, family, et al. Businesses did favors for business associates, linking to their associates? unrelated business sites from their own business sites. The links to other sites then became less relevant in search engine rankings.

Following came abusers, who basically generated websites that would fare well in search results only because of repetitive keyword usage throughout the pages. Visitors to those types of sites saw only keywords sprinkled unnecessarily throughout the page, but no relevant content, further corrupting the relevance of the search queries. In the end, links to other sites then became less relevant in search engine rankings.

To provide better quality search results, most of the search engines have incorporated complex subroutines or filters into their algorithms that filter out sites with link farms, non-relevant links, duplicate content, hidden text, hidden links, gateway or doorway pages and use many other factors, which detract from the quality of their search results.

Search engines must constantly adjust their algorithms in order to rank websites by perceived authority, relevance and validity to weed out the sites that do not contain relevant information based on the search criteria. As a result, search engine optimization is a constantly changing and rapidly evolving area.

SEO = Search Engine Optimization
Simply defined, SEO is the process of determining relevant keywords and phrases as they relate to a website, crafting the visible content of a web page to highlight those words and phrases in search engine friendly ways, and adding those specific words and phrases to the title, keywords and descriptions in a website?s metatags which the search engines read and in turn, add to their databases.

What is Internet Marketing?
Internet marketing firms promote websites in a variety of ways including advertising, link building, press releases, registering the website in various directories or in second and third tier search engines. Their ultimate goal is to ensure that the website places well in the search results for related keywords and phrases for that website, just like an SEO firm does.

What to Look for in an SEO or Internet Marketing Firm
There is a growing niche of consultants and firms who specialize in search engine optimization but not all SEO?s have the same level of expertise, specialties or standards of service.

If a company offers to “submit your site to 8000 search engines for $xxx.xx” be sure to run in the opposite direction as fast as you can. If they discuss their expertise at ?fooling? the search engines, creating doorway pages, cloaking, etc., you should quickly lose their phone number. If they guarantee you any position in the search engines, it is likely that plan on using an obscure four-word phrase that no one searches for. The major search engines advise that no company can guarantee placement. If they do, they are not providing acceptable services.

Some SEO companies will simply market client websites to a variety of search engines, charging the website owner a monthly fee to ensure that the website is found in search engine databases. Most of the ?work? by these SEO firms simply consists of utilizing an automated mass marketing software tool to repeatedly register a site to a number of search engines. Use of the program ensures the SEO?s ?marketing efforts? will produce evidence of placement on search engines for a limited search term and for an extremely limited time. They then report proof of search engine placement to the client who then justifies the expense based on that ?factual? report of the SEO?s marketing efforts. The SEO in essence does not provide optimization services to the client and lets the computer do all the ?work.? This type of SEO does not serve the client?s best interest and will seldom produce favorable results.

Be aware that search engine spiders will eventually find every website on the Internet, even poorly designed, non-optimized and those lacking in relevant keywords compared to their site content. The key to effective SEO does not lie entirely on search engine listings, to the surprise of many. If mass-marketing tools were all that was needed to effectively market a website, SEO’s would be out of business in a heartbeat. Fortunately for the successful SEO and Internet Marketing companies, there is more to SEO than meets the eye and their jobs will be secure long into the future.

Remember this: A non-optimized website that shows up ?somewhere? in search results may never be found due to its unfavorable ranking. In that case, ranking “somewhere? may as well equate to ranking nowhere.

On Google, for instance, the search term ?speech writing? yielded 26,400,000 results as of this posting. The list of web page results displays ten related sites per page.

If a site is poorly optimized for the phrase speech writing, it may actually show up in the results ?somewhere?, but could be buried among those 26 million results and could even be listed last! The likelihood of anyone weeding through all of those results to find a poorly optimized website is nil and if relevant results are not found on the first couple of pages, most people will refine their searches anyway.

Most search engine users will find precisely what they are looking for on the first page, even though there may be extremely relevant pages on the first three to five pages or 50 listings.

Reputable SEO’s will research the client’s industry, analyze their competitors and keyword relevance, create a shopping list of relevant, highly targeted key words, phrases and descriptions to focus on, make recommendations for revisions to meta tags and page content, and may advise on a site redesign for ease of navigation by the search engines and site visitors. Additionally, they will make recommendations for advertising as necessary, and provide ongoing analysis and reports to the client. Advertising may bring direct traffic results to your site and may also have a branding effect.

SEO experts should have extensive technical experience as well as project management, system design, and systems integration experience. (Some people say that SEO is not rocket science but several of AZhttp’s staff associates have related experience just in case!)

There are many criteria which should be taken into careful consideration in choosing an SEO firm for Internet marketing and planning efforts. Consulting with an expert or specialist SEO consultant might be the best investment you will ever make.

Internet Marketing Services and SEO Overview

Define Objectives
Define Goals
Identify the Current State of Site or Sites
Identify the Target Audience for each Site
Identify and Select Strategies
Research
Site design recommendations
Search engine placement campaigns
SEO Monitoring and Reporting

Choose an SEO expert to ensure a successful SEO campaign to improve your online sales and Internet marketing efforts and to aggressively promote your products and brands using acceptable practices as outlined by the major search engines.

Oftentimes, a commercial website has an extreme number of competitors. All websites cannot be listed first, therefore an SEO company might focus on other products to increase his client’s results, or focus advertising on a specific product or target a region or city in order to get a segment of the market for their client’s services or products. Search engine results are ever-changing, so analysis should be ongoing. Lastly, the SEO should be heavily involved in monitoring the client?s advertising campaigns or they could put a company out of business by mismanagement.

AZhttp has seen a multitude of poorly rated, badly designed client websites with extensive sloppy or careless use of html coding,or those that do not even have meta tags such as title, description or keywords. Additionally, we’ve seen code that actually sends search engines away from the site rather than code that encourages the search engines to visit and follow links.

Following is one example of how the source code below the header of a properly constructed page should appear. To view the source code, visit the website, place your cursor in the body of the?page (where there is content), right click and select ?view source? from the menu:

<title>INSERT THE TITLE OF THE PAGE HERE</title>
<META NAME=”Description”CONTENT=”DESCRIBE THE?PAGE HERE, INCORPORATING TEXT FROM THE BODY OF THE WEB PAGE”>
<META NAME=”KeyWords” CONTENT=”LIST INDIVIDUAL KEYWORDS AS THEY RELATE TO AND APPEAR ON THE WEBPAGE, USING COMMAS AS SEPARATORS”>
<META NAME=”robots”CONTENT=”index,follow”>THIS CODE TELLS SEARCH ENGINE WEBCRAWLERS TO INCLUDE THE PAGE IN THEIR DATABASE AND TO FOLLOW THE LINKS ON THE PAGE

Arizona High Tech Talent Partnership is an integrated marketing solutions marketing agency that specializes in search engine optimization. Please browse through the entire Internet marketing services website for additional information about our complete line of services including search engine optimization, SEO, search engine marketing, SEM, Internet marketing, lead generation, brand awareness, and public relations.

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