Archive for June, 2010
Happy 4th of July from the Marion Group!
Posted by admin in Entertainment on June 30, 2010
In honor of the upcoming July 4th holiday, we would like to showcase our president and CEO, Aaron Ellisor as he plays some patriotic music to help kick-start the festivities.
E-learning Pocket Brochure with Stepped Inserts
Posted by admin in Brochure Design on June 29, 2010
Recently, Marion developed an impressive, custom designed capabilities pocket brochure for K Alliance, an e-learning company. Marion worked with the company to develop the content and our design team did a tremendous job on the layout and graphics. The brochure has four pages plus a cover measuring 9”x12” and included four stair-stepped inserts in the back pocket. The inserts provided information on four of K Alliance’s most prominent product and service offerings, such as information technology training, soft skill training, desktop applications training, and the enterprise server library. K Alliance ordered 1500 copies of the brochure for their sales team and to be mailed as part of a larger mail campaign to prospective clients.
K Alliance is an e-learning corporation, specializing in the most comprehensive educational solutions available on the market. Their mission is to continually provide a superior level of creating and delivering high quality, instructional, educational content.
For more information on our brochure design services and how we can help create them for your company, please contact The Marion Group at 713-623-6444 or email us at info2@marion.com.
Social Media Marketing is on the Marketing Menu
Posted by admin in Internet Marketing, Social Networking on June 28, 2010
Social media marketing is becoming increasingly crucial to the growth of businesses. This has become evident for our friends at Weslayan Café, a great little restaurant owned and operated by good people that serves tasty food that is close to Marion. They have recently asked their customers to partake in the social media scene by asking them to post reviews on many dining directories.
“To Our Loyal and Appreciated Customers:
We love having you here at Weslayan Café, and your continued support is what keeps our doors open; however, word of mouth, mail flyers, etc., don’t do much for business growth. The advent of smartphone growth and computer usage make dining ‘social networking’ not only a helpful but extremely powerful tool in increasing our customer base and subsequently being able to do things like add more variety to our menu, extend our hours, hire more employees to expedite order speed, etc.
That’s why we would love if you could take 10 minutes or so to take advantage of websites like citysearch.com, yelp.com, 29-95.com, or b4-u-eat.com to post reviews of our restaurant so others can hear about our great food!
Thanks,
The obvious purpose of these sites is for current customers to share their opinions and experiences and for potential customers to see the reviews for a restaurant (or other products and services) and, hopefully, make a decision to dine there. Business owners also benefit from these sites. Much like comment cards, online review sites help businesses learn what their customers think about the products and services they receive and can use the reviews to improve many aspects of the businesses.
General directories, such as yelp and citysearch, provide reviews and information about businesses around various cities in different categories. Sites such as b4-u-eat.com and 29-95 are specifically targeted to restaurants and businesses in Houston. To get listed, businesses submit their information and usually pay a small fee. Because the directories verify the information, they are considered ‘authoritative’ in the eyes of the Google bots. However, since general interest directories like yelp hold a broad range of interests, they may not hold as much authority as the more specialized directories focusing on a narrower field of interest.
For more information on social media marketing for your company, contact The Marion Group at 713.623.6444 or email us at info2@marion.com.
RSS Feeds are Simply Great for Syndication
Posted by admin in Internet Marketing, RSS Feed, Search Engine Optimization on June 25, 2010
A goal that marketers have when building their websites is to keep customers and prospects informed with the latest news about their business and keep them coming back for more. One online tool that helps is an RSS feed. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, blogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever is interested.
RSS feeds solve problems for people who regularly use the web by allowing them to easily stay informed by having the latest content get taken from the sites they are interested in. People save time by not having to visit each site individually. An RSS feed is a great addition to blogs for people on the go and many blogging tools have built-in RSS feed features. Users can subscribe to a feed by clicking on the ‘Subscribe’ link on the feed’s page. To view the subscribed feeds, users can choose to use their browser’s ‘Favorites’ tab or their iGoogle or My Yahoo accounts.
The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing. RSS feeds provide many features and benefits for both the publishers and viewers of the feed including.
- Individuals opt-in to feeds for sites of interest and control the flow of information that they receive.
- RSS does not burden the publisher with maintaining opt-in lists or following strict privacy guidelines.
- You have direct access to your subscribers and guaranteed delivery of your content
- RSS feeds can improve your internal content syndication for corporate communications and provide information to remote employees and sales teams
- Publishers are able to create keyword-rich content. Syndicating your content builds up inbound links and positively affects your search engine rankings
For more information on RSS feeds and how Marion can help you with them and other internet marketing tools, please email or call 713-623-6444.
Floating on Top of an Ocean of Search Engine Results
Posted by admin in Search Engine Optimization on June 17, 2010
Yesterday your company’s website appeared at the top of the first page of Google’s search result. Now it’s lower down or on a different page. Your company has done everything to maximize its SEO potential and the page ranking has dropped. The trick to solving this problem is keeping up with Google’s frequent changes.
A recent article published in Internet Retailing explains the ever-changing page-ranking system:
- Google is continually modifying their search algorithm which changes the rules of the game quickly. The site is now making results more personalized and local.
- Up to 50% of the variables used to rank pages involve linking, up from about 25% to 30% in 2008.
- Google has recently put emphasis on real-time search results that incorporate feeds from social media and include video results.
The article also provides some helpful tips for your site to keep your site at the top:
- Create a blog that offers details about products. The idea is to persuade bloggers and informational web sites to link back to your site. Google urges natural links—operators of other sites should be legitimately attracted to the content.
- One way to boost your profile is by gaining prominence on social networks appropriate for your business. Last year, Google began offering real-time search results that include blog posts and tweets.
- Post videos on your site that cover topics related to your products or services such as product demonstrations and instructions, and tips and advice. Because of the relative small number of video compared to text across the web, providing videos is 50 times more likely to move a site to the first page of search results than adding a page of text.
Although the exact number difficult is to measure, the number of new sites published each day is huge – some days’ new sites totals amount in the 100,000s (source). Because of this, companies are upgrading their sites and implementing better SEO strategies, including keeping up with Google’s search improvements.
You can read the entire article at Internet Retailing.
At The Marion Group, our customers rank consistently high on searches on Google. Let us do the same for you. Call us at 713.623.6444 or email us info2@marion.com.
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