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Best Social Media Programs to suit your Business

Craig — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 00:10:09 +0000

At StudioIMI, we know there are plenty of social media programs on the market that claim to quickly make your business more successful, but StudioIMI is careful to choose the best approach for each business. Social Media phenomenon is currently the hottest topic with significant impact in the online environment – and it can be confusing to qualify the most effective services out there.

Consumers socialize online and they talk about positive or negative experiences they have with brands and companies. The power of influence and the consumer opinions posted online is very important in establishing your brand. It is exceeded only slightly by direct recommendations from friends and business associates.

Many companies are just on the verge of effectively integrating the social media programs into their on-line strategy. StudioIMI can clarify what your business may need most and help you decide what approach will be most effective for you. Here are some tips on how to minimize the risk of crisis communication, negative feedback and how to maximize the benefits of your Social Media programs by strengthening brand indicators, creating communities and influencing purchasing decisions. Products like StudioIMI’s Social Central make it easy to make all the right moves.

The most recommended way for Social Media programs to be useful is by giving value to the conversation, either by presenting others products or services and talk about them.
How to build effective Social Media programs:

Be visible online and keep yourself abreast with other professionals.
Interact with people who are experts in your field, and if possible, keep constant communication with them.
Learn to participate in business events, conferences, seminars announced in social media.
You can get cooperation proposals, partnerships, invitations to events from people in your network.
Make sure that you use auto responders and social submission tools like Onlywire to boost your traffic, leads and sales.
Consider giving free gifts to build a good mailing list of repeat clients.

In the last two years more companies have allocated special budgets for social networks, sensing their potential. Whether you’re employed or you own a company, it is absolutely necessary to build strong and effective Social Media programs if you want to be known and recognized as an expert or professional in a field.

Social Central is an example of a service that is easy to use and create effective social media exposure. Simply by using your weekly Blogs and interacting them with up to 50 social media outlets, StudioIMI provides the tools to inexpensively handle the social media aspect of your marketing.

Search Engine Optimization

Todd — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 15:55:59 +0000

Search engine optimization can be simply defined as the practice of improving a website’s visibility in major search engines so that web users seeking information can use those same search engines to find that information.
The experience among web design and SEO companies like StudioIMI who provide services for clients using this technique, indicates that without a doubt, a properly search engine optimized website appears more frequently in Google searches, leading to increased traffic from visitors and other sources who are interested in what that business has to offer. The information being offered may be from images, videos, academic material, news, entertainment, etc, all of which are capable of undergoing search engine optimization. Internet marketers like StudioIMI consider the algorithms of a search engine to produce natural results that have not been influenced by external factors such as PPC or pay-per-click for visibility improvement. They will align the website’s content to the main key-words through strategies including editing of the website code to enable a quick correlation between results and searches.
Some of the main methods used are: indexing, crawling prevention and promotion of visibility.

· Indexing involves ensuring that a website is linked to other websites that are already appearing within a search engine. When the crawlers from major search engines start examining a website, they will easily find the indexed pages that result from the professional set-up by StudioIMI to ease access and proximity.
· Crawling Prevention involves webmasters preventing indexing of superfluous search results such as login pages, so that crawlers do not waste time on them. This enables the crawlers to focus only on the indexed pages and improve a website’s visibility so that unnecessary material does not appear in user search results.
· Lastly, promotion of visibility involves a number of tactics that ensure a website improves its prominence. The most popular methods are cross-linking of pages within the site to create more links for the best content; maintaining pages that contain the most popular keywords and regularly updating content to keep crawlers coming back.

These practices all combine to create the practice of search engine optimization. StudioIMI has years of experience with search engine optimization and search engine marketing of your site. The difference between an expert approach and using some simplistic plug-ins can have an enormous impact on your search engine results.

Take Advantage of Search Engine Page Design

Craig — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 13:59:31 +0000

One rational reason a business needs a website is to help market their business when they aren’t there to handle propective clients’ questions. Of course, going hand in hand with this is the concept that people actually are searching for information on your product or service. The major source of traffic for websites is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing and others. StudioIMI designs search engine friendly sites which help you rank more easily with search engines and ulimately capture the attention of more visitors who in turn may become customers.

The major search engines use software programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. These crawlers follow links to a page and then read the content on the page, while recording it in their dedicated database. As visitors search for the company or product, they find it using their particular search engine of choice.

In order to make your website indexed easily, StudioIMI stays away from using things like frames in the design of your website. Frames tend to confuse search engine crawlers or robots who may even blackball your site because of frames. Frames make it difficult for visitors to your website to bookmark your site without using long and quite complicated scripts.

Search engine robots can only read the text in your source code and it’s very important to make sure to present your critical content in a text form and not in Flash or as images. Your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically and unfortunately some less experienced web design firms only understand using frames. Of course this is why content is king and effectively changing content regularily has an impact on your ranking.

Meta tags should be used accordingly on every page of your website to insure search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. The use of meta tags also makes certain the search engine robot’s job is easier so they tend to crawl and index your site more frequently.

An experienced web design firm like StudioIMI wouldn’t use HTML tags like to style your page. We use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead. This approach is more effective and efficient. Using CSS eliminates redundant HTML tags and makes your pages much faster loading.

While these are technical terms for your website and the designer, it is important to pick a design company with experience who has a good portfolio and has been designing webistes for many years. StudioIMI is one of those organizations.

Website strategies you don’t need

Craig — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 16:32:14 +0000

The majority of successful business owners StudioIMI works with realize the best sites provide visitors with ease of navigation, a clear message(s), a great first impression and a good first impression. If you have a fantastic product or service to sell on-line, it means very little if your website is poorly designed. Its difficult convincing visitors to buy from you if your website looks unprofessional. New visitors to your site are statistically known to evaluate your site in about ten seconds – so you need to capture their interest immediately.

Think in terms of television commercials – the ones that capture your eye, do so within seconds and you may give them your attention for another minute. If the ad turns you off, you likely mute the volume and ignore the ad. Websites can work the same way. A visitor develops an opinion within a few seconds. If navigation isn’t clear or links are slow – its “see ya later dude!”

There are several key elements to your website – not just the graphical design. Professional web designs done by a company like StudioIMI will represent your company in the most effective way. The user experience that results from a proper design should leave the visitor with a clear and straightforward understanding.

Items your website should not include:
Popup windows as we all know are simply put – obnoxious and invasive. Even if you have an important message to convey, doing so with a popup is a bad idea and your website loses credibility and likely the visitor!
Flash sites that take time to load, are more sizzle than steak may work for large corporations with huge budgets and well-known brands. For most small businesses though, these can be the downfall. These sites can damage search engine marketing programs and cause your site to lose points with the larger search engines.
Background music, is a no-no unless the audience is looking for specific music or a band that your website is promoting. Even if you give visitors the ability to stop the music, the damage may be done already. Repetitious lyrics or tunes can become annoying to prospects who return to your site more than once. Imagine the overhead needed to download music regularly on a busy site. You may be adding precious seconds to site download time and this can be a critical killer in retaining and ultimately converting clients.

StudioIMI can advise you in more detail on these and related issues without obligation. We are always willing to provide suggestions and clarify any confusion about the best approach to your web design.

Targeting Your Audience

Craig — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 18:19:34 +0000

To have a better understanding of the characteristics of people who visit your site, put yourself in their shoes. What are the main reasons clients are looking for your services? At StudioIMI, we spend time with business owners listening to what they want their brand to be. This helps to focus on the “right” prospects and use that information to enhance your content, to attract and convert. This insures that visitors are more likely to contact your business to start that all important ongoing relationship.

What is their age group, their knowledge and what specifically are looking for? StudioIMI advises on the most effective content to make your website stand out. After all, content is key and focusing your message on the right audience works. If the content is too complex, you may damage the relationship you hoped to gain. StudioIMI recommends writing a list of characteristics of the perfect client. Be honest and stick to exactly what you believe are the most important. Once you know what those are, you can build the site more effectively.

If this is a quick decision kind of product that fills a more immediate need – perhaps a more aggressive “buy now” approach would work. If it requires comparison and longer term consideration – a “softer sell” provides basic information to help the client make a decision.

Depending on the characteristics of your client, you can customize your website design, layout, navigation and call to action accordingly. StudioIMI spends time getting to understand what your goals are before starting.

What is your unique business proposition? Do you make it clear for visitors to your site to see your product or service as better than most? We understand how this works at StudioIMI. We have designed well over 300 websites and deployed many on-line marketing programs and have the experience. Easy to find phone numbers, contact information and even pricing means you have a better chance of retaining the visitor and closing the sale.

StudioIMI is based in Victoria, BC with clients across Canada and the USA. Our focus is on web design, search engine optimization and ranking, social media programs, e-newsletters, hosting and content copywriting. www.studioimi.com

Building a more effective Search Engine Marketing Program

Rob — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 15:55:45 +0000

Some things for businesses to consider when they start to build or rebuild a website is how to attract visitors to the site. An important source of traffic for most websites on the Internet is through search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. When you begin your search engine marketing approach you have to design search engine friendly pages and content, in order to be able to rank easily in search engines and attract more visitors. This is the crux of any search engine marketing program.

The most important search engines use software programs that we know as crawlers and robots and these index websites and list them on their search result pages. These crawlers follow links to a page and then read the content of the page and record it in their massive databases which in turn help searches to pull up the listing as people search a service or product.

Flash movies and certain images do not play nice with the search engines and will hurt your search engine marketing programs. Search engine robots read the text in your source code and as a result, flash and images instead of text formats will also negatively impact your search engine marketing dramatically.

Proper use of meta tags on every page of your website help the search engine robots know when they are on your site what a particular page is about and how to index it. An effective website using meta tags help to make the search engine robot’s job easier so they perform their proper duties when indexing your site and do so more frequently. Thus again your search engine marketing has the best chance of successfully engaging the robots.

Another couple of things to consider are HTML tags and also Frames. Both of these dated approaches negatively impact the success of search engine marketing and may cause your site to actually lose ranking. In fact using Frames may even result in your SEM program failing completely and the robots stop visiting your website. If you have a professional designer set up your site, she or he will most certainly be aware of this and take the proper steps to give your site the best chance for success. It is an ever changing approach and if you have the right technical people set up your search engine marketing, you will see results a lot faster and that is what this is all about. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the right way to go.

So give your search engine marketing program the best chance to help draw visitors to your site by working with the algorithms of the crawlers or robots and it will pay off in the long run.

Good and Bad Websites – How does yours compare?

Rob — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:13:41 +0000

Most business owners are aware that a website today should be the cornerstone of their marketing budget and strategy. It is the foundation of both the online presence and the bricks and mortar location. This virtual representation of your company legitimizes your business regardless of the market you are in. Clients expect you to have a www. url even if you run your company entirely from a physical location. An effective on-line web presence is a key success factor for your business. Professional looking websites help new clients find and then educate them during the hours you are closed. When customers are searching for a store late at night or when you are closed – your website shows you are “open for business” and can lead them to your store the next day.

How much impact in retaining visitors does a professional looking, secure and easy-to-navigate website? A great deal! At StudioIMI, we surmise that more than half of the websites we review are actually hurting the businesses they are meant to represent. Unattractive style, poor navigation, fuzzy images, slow loading, low ranking – if your site has any of these characteristics, you are turning away the very customer who was searching to find your store on-line.

Websites represent a business the same way your in-store sales people do. If you stop to think of your employees for a moment, you can draw a parallel to how you would expect your website to behave. Well dressed, professional and knowledgeable employees make or break your business. When a customer opens the door and is greeted with a smile and an offer of help, they feel comfortable and stay in the store longer. Your website works the same way. You don’t even have to be selling anything on-line – just make it comfortable for the new visitor to stick around a bit and you’ve turned that visitor into a buyer.

If a website is put together by inexperienced web designers, your visitors will see in the first 10 seconds that your website isn’t professional and that quality is not a high priority for your business. Ever had a client walk in your store and exit a few seconds later? We’ve likely all done that at least once. An on-line web presence works the same way.

A completely professional looking website layout that has great navigation, a unique look and gives the perception of attention to every detail and high quality – wins people over. If reflects the fact that your business is organized, focused and you want to make them a new and/or repeat customer.

So if time is taken to build the best website to represent your product and service you will see the return on investment from the site. All this matters in business and you want to be one that survives in the long term and it is about doing the right thing.

If you’d like a free website assessment, please contact us.

Company Capital Inc – In the Business of Small Business Cash Advances

Rob — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 00:19:16 +0000

We’d like to congratulate our newest client, Company Capital Inc – who launched their website today!

Here’s a brief introduction about Company Capital Inc.

Company Capital Inc of Victoria, British Columbia provides instant, easy small business advances by turning your future ATM surcharges and Credit/Debit card sales into cash – TODAY!

Company Capital Inc is a small-business friendly service that converts or “advances” future sales into immediate cash quickly and easily. Our loans are designed to help your business grow without the need for bank financing. Company Capital Inc financing is not at all like a bank loan. There are no complex requirements of business plans, financial statements or collateral. Company Capital Inc makes it simple for Western Canada businesses:

NO credit checks
NO application fees or closing costs
NO fixed payments – based on ebbs and flows
NO financial statements required
NO collateral or asset guarantees
FAST and EASY to apply

Company Capital Inc can advance your business from $5,000 -$150,000 in financing for your everyday uses including: computers and equipment, inventory, renovations, furniture, expansion, marketing and most anything you need to help your small business in Western Canada.

All you have to provide us at Company Capital is your fixed location and lease, 12 months of previous credit/debit card sales, bank statements and you qualify for the loan.

Visit www.companycapitalinc.com for more information.

5 Important Rules in Website Design

Rob — Tue, 24 May 2011 20:19:27 +0000

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are five important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

If you would like us to perform a free, no obligation assessment of your website, please contact us.

How to Get More From your Website

Rob — Wed, 11 May 2011 20:14:25 +0000

This is an interesting article I was reading and found it to be quite helpful. The writer makes some good points. Basically what he’s saying is you first need a strong foundation (website, web hosting) in order to succeed with your other efforts (marketing, promtion, social media).

The Web has grown into a real jungle, and finding cool new sites nowadays isn’t always the easiest thing in the world. If you have a Website yourself, you’re dealing with the other end of this issue. How do you get noticed online, and is there anything you can do to increase your popularity?

There certainly is! Here are the top five ways you can strengthen your site and increase your online visibility.

1. Strong Hosting

This first point is mostly important for those who don’t have their own Website yet but eagerly want to create one. After you have selected your domain name, the next step is to choose a hosting plan. There are many good, affordable alternatives, but what professionals usually recommend is specialized blog hosting. This form of Web hosting allows you to set up a professional-looking Website in no time at all. Why is this important to mention when it comes to making your site more popular? Well, without strong hosting, you won’t be able to handle a traffic to your new Website, which means you’ll have no chance at all of becoming well liked.

Of course, finding strong hosting is often easier said than done. The hosting industry has grown very popular in recent years, and this has lead to large numbers of companies offering various hosting services. But don’t be fooled by their tricky ways of making it sound as if they are the best in the industry. We would recommend you partner up with a company that has a strong reputation and experience in the business. You might start at Web Hosting Search for reviews and other information to help you find the right fit.

When it comes to hosting, you should compare the different features included with the plan. Make sure you are guaranteed at least 99.9% uptime and that customer support is easy to get hold of. You never know when you could need them. Likewise, it is also good to know exactly what kind of numbers in terms of disc space and bandwidth will you be allowed to use and manage. Some providers also forbid their clients to upload music or video files to their servers even if it is for personal use. It’s important to ask customer support to resolve such issues before purchasing a plan. Some other things you might consider asking are whether your domain name registry information will be protected and how many different e-mail accounts will you be allowed to use as part of the hosting agreement.

More about web hosting

2. Optimize Your Website

In order to be truly successful online, you will have to get a high ranking in search engines. To succeed in this, you should learn as much as you possibly can about search engine optimization (SEO). The subject of SEO is vast and can be quite daunting at first, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to see the benefits immediately and will probably wonder why you didn’t get started with it earlier. A few things you can do to get started are to make sure you’re using the proper keywords and to write for your visitors as well as for search engines. Writing for search engines is important, since you want to get high rankings, and writing for visitors is of the essence because you want them to stick around and return to your Website.

When you are satisfied with the keywords and content on your site, it is time to start working with link building. Search engines determine much of the value of a certain page/site by looking at the number of inbound links. Link exchange is one of the most popular and successful ways to get a good rank on search engines, and it’s really easy to do. Simply visit a Website that you like and ask the Webmaster if they are interested in a link exchange – it doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.

Having something interesting and distinctive on your page is a great way to attract potential link partners. For example, if you are running a Website about domain names, why not add a domain name availability checker to your homepage? It will most likely attract links from other sites related to the niche, and people will tend to come back again if they want to know whether a domain is available or not. Try to be extra creative to set yourself apart from competitors.

More about Search Engine Optimization

3. Take Advantage of Social Media Optimization

Even though SEO should be a big part of your site optimization, it shouldn’t end there. Social Media Optimization is probably just as important, since it’s one of the strongest marketing tools available today. A social media optimization campaign should include a few different things. First, make sure the content on your site or blog is relevant to your topic and not out of date. Visit similar sites and join the discussion in leaving comments on posts/articles – don’t be afraid to say what’s on your mind. Make yourself visible on Facebook and MySpace. Three other sites that can be useful for social media optimization are Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.

Ask about our Social Media Marketing

4. Get Your Visitors Involved

A crucial point to make your site grow in the number of visitors is by getting them involved. Try to write in a personal style, and don’t be afraid to leave an open question. If this shouldn’t do it, why not hold a contest? This will most likely get people talking about your site. The prize doesn’t have to cost a fortune, since people like to compete regardless of what the award is – it’s human nature.

Other easy ways of getting your visitors involved is by including a forum on your site or the possibility to comment on your posts/articles. Everyone wants to express their own personal ideas and thoughts on topics, and by allowing them doing so, you also increase the chance of visitors returning to see how was their feedback appreciated. As an added bonus, if the topic is extra popular, the discussion could attract interest from other Websites as well!

5. Emphasize Usability in Your Design

Investing in a good design is more important than some people seem to think. With a beautiful design, you will grow in trust among your readers/visitors. An important fact to remember is not over-designing the Website. It doesn’t matter how many hours you’ve put into designing the site if no one understands how to use it. Let some non-Internet-savvy friends navigate through your Website before launching it at a full scale. If they find it easy, so will the rest of your visitors.

It is difficult to say exactly what makes a beautiful and functional design. What looks good to one person might seem terrible for another. However, there are basic trends in Web design, and if you follow these, you can be sure to please most of your visitors. A few popular Web design trends are multi-column layouts, large illustrations, and lots of white space.

If you wish to stay on the safe side, then it is a good call to make the layout and design features on the page easily accessible and simple to understand. Try to use standard coding and avoid over-the-top Flash animations. Some people may have browser settings that prevent them from viewing Flash, which means you might lose valuable visitors. Try to think how the visitor thinks, and your Website will grow more popular and respected day after day.

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