By Bob Speyer, Web Success Team

Is Your Brand Being “Heard”?

There’s a new marketing tool in town you should know about. It’s in Beta testing but it is not only free but produces mountains of great marketing information to help you improve your website. It’s called “Heardable.com,” and quite simple it is the easiest and most efficient way to measure how your online brand is perceived, performs and stacks up against your competition.

Just enter your URL in the free tool and you get a Heardable Score in return. The six measurable sub-scores that will help you determine you brand’s success against your competition are:

1) Portable: Is your site optimized for mobile search? The better positioned you brand is to take advantage of mobile, the higher your ranking and site’s effectiveness. Portability is determined by detecting auto redirects for the four top mobile device platforms; iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile.

2) Shareable: Sharing is a reciprocal exchange, giving and getting. Heardable scans for RSS feeds with the more feeds the more you are likely to share content and thus more engaged in social activity. The more you share, the more you will be picked up and shared as well. Social media is all about engagement.

3) Measurable: Does your website have analytics that track, monitor and optimize site activity, including on-page performance, ecommerce and online advertising? A low score would indicate you need to set up more tracking indicators for your marketing efforts.

4) Actionable: Does your website interact with your visitors and connect with them using visitor focused words? A higher ranking is achieved if your website speaks in personal tones to customers, using ‘you’ or ‘your’ as ways to connect with them. A low ranking focuses more on brand information and corporate policy.

5) Sociable: Word of mouth marketing is becoming a major player in brand image and how consumers react through the power of the purse. Make sure you have a brand blog set up with at least a few employees making regular contributions. Set up social accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg and YouTube immediately and participate on a daily basis.

6) Searchable: Ranking in this category depends on search engine visibility, number of inbound links, and local search determinants. Keywords, original content and linkage to your site will improve your site’s performance and searchability.

Facing Down the Competition

Business is all about competing and the goal is gaining market share and customers. Heardable can give you a powerful tool to find the answers about improving your business and achieve web success. It provides you with real time data that you can use to make better marketing decisions, and turn them into an action-based plan backed by indisputable metrics. Your boss wants proof, well show them the stats!

Brand Comparisons

Heardable’s extensive research of category brand leaders mirrors a Heardable Score. This means you can now get the statistical intelligence to help you dramatically improve your site’s performance and take the lead of your chosen category of business. Heardable Category Overviews factor in over one million URLs covering seven critical areas of analysis.

Learn from the Best Brands

The Heardable 100 is a sort of gold standard of online branding. They share with you the best of the best and what makes them tick. Heardable takes the features and functions that these 100 online brand leaders have in common. There are plenty of take-a-way lessons in this batch to give your site that needed marketing boost.

Make Your Website Heard!

In today’s competitive environment, online branding is critical to building your business online. Getting qualified visitors is a marketing imperative. Tools like Heardable are critical in understanding your site’s performance and visibility. The Web Success Team can analyze and optimize your website, increase your Heardable Score to make it ‘Heard’ throughout the Internet. Contact us today for an complimentary analysis of your website and the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts.

Images: from Heardable, Inc.

The Web Success Team specializes in developing and marketing direct response websites that take full advantage of the latest developments on the Internet. The Team has an arsenal of effective web strategies, online marketing tools and proven customized social media techniques to promote your products and services. And we’ll show you ways to increase the amount of qualified traffic to your site.

For more tips, tools and articles of interest, become a fan of the WebSuccessTeam Facebook page and learn more about online marketing, SEO and social media. Visit us at http://www.facebook.com/WebSuccessTeam. Contact the Team today for a complimentary consultation to your web success!

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By Bob Speyer, Web Success Team

The New York Times is making news instead of just delivering it to its readers. Times have been hard on newspapers across the country. As the size of your daily newspaper dwindles, so have their profits. The NY Times operated at a $35 million loss in the third quarter of 2009.

To shore up its bottom line, the Times will now charge consumers for its web content. By increasing online revenue, it hopes to offset print advertising losses and utilize the digital press to build your business online. Let’s face it, we need our news organizations to be profitable. They provide a valuable service. As the “Fourth Estate” they act as our eyes and ears around the nation and world to keep watch on government while keeping us informed.

The New York Times’ “metered model” will permit visitors to read a fixed number of articles before charging a monthly fee. Any subscriber will have free unlimited access. It’s their way to boost readership and flip visitors into paid customers. They may even have to be more aggressive and use some online direct response marketing tactics and take advantage of social media marketing using Facebook and Twitter. Incidentally, the Wall Street Journal already charges for their online subscriptions.

So What’s Next? Our Predictions

We predict that charging for blog content will be the next online reality — and its coming to a computer screen near you! We have all been weaned on free web content, but most analysts conclude that newspapers and magazines will have to charge customers to remain in the news business.

With the explosion of smart phones, like the Apple’s iphone, delivering content to mobile devices will be the next big revenue source for providers of news and blog-worthy content. Content providers will be offering you subscriptions to news, sports, finance and more. And it may not stop there. Popular blogs may also charge a premium to be part of the “inner circle” to receive cutting edge content, such as proprietary information, insider tips and strategies.

We anticipate the pricing to be very modest but increase over time as the consumer gets use to paying for content. Paid value always is perceived to be better than “free advice.” In the end, the marketplace will decide and determine your web success.

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By Bob Speyer, President, Web Success Team

Duplicate content is pervasive on the web. It’s so easy to take someone’s article or text and place it on your website or blog. “Everybody does it, so why shouldn’t I?” There are a great many reasons why you shouldn’t and this article will address them and make a good case for putting in the extra effort and develop original content. I will also discuss how you can eliminate duplicate content and therefore improve your search engine rankings and visibility.

How Search Engine Spiders Find Duplicated Content?
Duplicate content is when the search engine spiders detect content that has the same correlation and scoring with two or more web pages. They detect “edit distance,” in which the spiders determine how many changes are made to make it look like another document. Another determinant is they first identify and then eliminate items such as Nav Bars, Footers and Headers before comparing the documents in question. On a larger scale, they sort documents in similar categories and compare those groups to detect the duplications.

Detecting and Eliminating Duplicate Content on Your Website
If sites are determined to run duplicate content, then those questionable pages are barred from the search engine results pages (SERPs) and they will not appear in a search. However, there are tools that can help you identify the offending content in a website and help you restore the page in the SERPs.

Fortunately, there are tools out there that can help to identify Duplicate Content within a Website and assist in restoring the Webpage in the SERPs. Select a tool that will identify the exact correlation between a multiple number of documents and between your website pages; and not ones that just compare two pages. Once you make the corrective changes, run the tool again to see the results.

Of course there are things you shouldn’t do, such as: not writing content that is placed in a common area and shared (like the Header, Navigation and Footer). Also avoid changing words to their synonyms, like car and automobile or switching word order. And make sure you have enough content on each page, the less content the greater possibility of duplication detection.

Be Original, It Pays Off
Play it straight. If you develop content that is original you will greatly benefit. For starters, you position yourself as an authority on your subject matter. You site will get better rankings and hence more visibility. You will attract more authority links or inbound links that also help with search engine ranking. If you don’t have the time to write content consider hiring a ghostwriter. You can do the research and give them the direction. And remember to add content to your website at least once a week. And anything your write should have your keywords embedded for search. Take the time, it will pay off and you won’t have to worry about not being searched. Remember the spiders aren’t human and do not hold grudges. They simply go tirelessly around the clock searching for ways to knock you down on the rankings. Don’t give them the satisfaction, be original!

The Web Success Team

SPECIAL: Solopreneur Package – Jump Start Your Business
The Web Success Team’s Solopreneur Package includes a 5-page custom direct response website fully branded and optimized for Search Engines with 6-months of online marketing, social networking, blogging, article marketing and much more. Lock in your special pricing now before the rate goes up! Contact the Web Success Team at 818-222-5643 or email bob@websuccessteam.com. To your web success!

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