Over the past few weeks we’ve laid a good foundation for an effective Internet marketing strategy. We’ve discussed the basic elements for search engine marketing including page optimization, best practices for metadata and how to quickly get traffic to your site through paid search marketing (pay per click, or PPC). Today we’re going to talk about how to go about forming that perfect list of keywords for both your website and your PPC campaigns to make sure you’re getting the type of traffic you need and not wasting advertising dollars on traffic that will never convert to dollars.
After you’ve built your PPC ads it’s time to select the search terms you want your ads to be displayed next to.  Effective keyword research is essential to ensure your PPC campaigns will be a success. There are a few key points to keep in mind when conducting your research and several ways to determine what your best keywords.
Target – Have a clear [...]

At the end of every year I put together a list of goals. Not a list of resolutions, but goals I want to accomplish during the upcoming year. (great article on those differences here and why resolutions tend to be forgotten here). One of my goals for 2012 is to improve the ROI of ShuBee's Internet marketing efforts.
My first step towards accomplishing this goal was to establish benchmarks of where we are currently as well as document what helped us achieve that success. From there it was on to numbers crunching so I could establish a budget for 2012, then on to growth projections and finally planning some new strategies.
It was at this point in the process that I remembered an article I had written for theBuzz in 2009 about getting found online. As often as Google keeps changing the game when it comes to businesses getting found online, keeping first page rankings and determining what they feel is most [...]