Online marketing can be the key to offline sales and small business success. Leading search engine industry journal, SearchEngineLand ran a “Small is Beautiful” column by Matt McGee this week detailing the lessons that small business owners have learned taking their advertising and marketing campaigns online. Key amongst their findings from the anecdotal evidence of small business owners who have made a concerted and successful effort to market their businesses over the Internet were:

The Internet can be your business’ primary source for generating new customers and leads.

A consistent effort must be made to keep abreast of the latest trends and techniques in online marketing.

Local search matters, so market to the audience where you do business.

The visual impact of your web page is crucial.

The more you can differentiate your products and services from your competitors to carve out a niche market, the more you will stand out.

“Listening to the experiences of others can be a great learning tool,” McGee notes, “especially when those small business owners have gone down paths you’ve been hesitant to try, or maybe didn’t even know existed.”

In the 1700’s signs with the letters “T.I.P” began to appear on signs in English pubs. Standing for the phrase, “To Insure Promptness”, the practice of giving gratuities for prompt, efficient service, or ‘tipping’ began. Flash forward: What are the best ‘TIP’s for medium-sized or small businesses ‘to insure people’, or even better ‘purchasers’, entering local search terms on Google or Yahoo! will visit your website and ultimately buy your products or services?

1. Make sure your website’s main page (your “landing” or “splash” page) is optimized so the “spiders”, “robots” or “web crawlers” – programs from the search engines that visit individual websites – are able to visit your site and know what it is about. (Focusing on what keywords describe your business is essential.)
2. Make sure the search engine spiders can navigate your site once they are there. (Having a site directory on your landing page will ensure searchability, not just for the web crawlers but for your potential customers as well, ensuring they can easily find what they need on your site.)
3. Make sure you regularly add new pages and content to your website. ‘Spiders’ prefer to eat the new ‘flies’ they catch in their webs rather than flies that have been stuck there, drying out for weeks or months. (Remember: ‘Content is King.’)
4. Make sure you content is useful and interesting for your ultimate reader – the potential customer who visits your site. Optimize your site all you like to obtain top rankings on Google, but you’ve wasted your time if the person who reaches your site finds nothing interesting or relevant on it. (Another site where the reader can look for more relevant content is just one click away!)
5. Make sure the ideas and content on your website are spread over a range of different pages. Try to restrict yourself to one idea, one product per page. (Each time you put new content or pages on your website, you are training the search engine spider to revisit your site more often – hopefully increasing your search engine page ranking each time with fresh, relevant content.)

Working with a knowledgable and experienced SEO company (search-engine optimization) that specializes in local search capabilities for small business or mid-size companies, and/or attending a search optimization seminar, may prove invaluable in building and improving your local search capabilities driving more traffic and potential customers to your website.

Kudos (and thanks) to John Alexander of Search Engines Workshops for the detailed insight and knowledge he shared with the author and others in the recent Toronto-area SEO training seminar held in conjunction with Barry Byers and Greg Mate Search Engine Academy.

Basically, property is divided equally between two people who have cohabited over the course of their relationship. The process includes taking the following into consideration:

• Assessing the value of property
• Determining what may be included such as property acquired through an inheritance.
• Totaling assets and debts
• Subtracting the total debt from the total value of the property.
• Calculating the “net family property”
• Equalizing the property between the partners or spouses

Property division is not provided for under the Divorce Act (Canada). When you start divorce proceedings you will have to add property division to the process. Luckily, this is easy to do.

Contact your local Toronto divorce lawyer for more information.

We are proud to announce that we have reached a working arrangement with a Toronto estate lawyer who will be reaping the benefits of one of Sesimi’s online business profiles.

Every year your YellowPages™ rep calls and you are so busy with your business or fed up with the costs of placing even a bold listing that you tell him/her to renew the ad. Then one day you are searching your keywords on Google local and guess what? You’re not there!

Since Google and Yahoo! and MSN (Sympatico) draw their Canadian business listings from the YellowPages™, the heading you choose when placing your ad or free listing with YellowPages™ has gained importance.

Here are a 3 tips for using YellowPages™ in your local search efforts.

1. Make sure the heading you choose when placing your ad or listing relates to a highly searched keyword term.
2. Add you keywords to your company name. Instead of Oliva Services, use Oliva Carpet Cleaning Services.
3. Ask your YellowPages™ rep if you can provide him with a keyword list. Several types of ads
   come with a keyword form that allows you to provide a keyword list so customers can find you with keywords, not just under a specific heading.
4. Make sure your keywords are in your print YellowPages™ ad. Most YellowPages™ companies can add your print ad online. Your print ads are digitized and will appear when a user uses a keyword search and the keywords are in you ad.
5. Don’t get carried away by jamming keywords in your ad. You still need a good tag line, list of benefits and a call to action if you want a potential customer to call or visit your website.

Day one of the first local and mobile search expo proved to be an interesting day. Highlights included presentations from Michael Jones, chief technology officer, Google maps and Google earth and Chris Smith , lead strategist, Netconcepts.

Michael Jones gave us a vision of the new local search, including, not only building geographically organized information but creating “a sense of place” around the image it presents.

Chris Smith, of NaturalSearchBlog discussed the difficulties surrounding mobile search and PPC options for mobile.

webpronews reports that MSN has combined with Atlas AdManager to create a video ad serving platform that will enable customer websites to serve up local advertising with local content.

Online videos that are relevant to the geographic area will help build viewer loyalty.

The Yellow Pages™ Association announced that David Swanson ahs been named board chairman. Swanson is the CEO of R.H. Donnelley Corporation.

While the announcement may seem like just another PR move by a large association, this one will be interesting to watch. I have followed Donnelley for a dozen years and I can tell you whenever someone asked me where the YP publishers were going, I always answered, “Watch Donnelley”.

Donnelley has been a leader in the industry for years and by a leader, I mean a visionary. They recently bought business.com and have a terrific local business profile company in locallaunch.com. Let’s see if he can set a fire under the seats of his YP board members.

Check out our local business profiles on Sesimi.com

TechCrunch reports that Yelp Inc, a local review site, has released an API to allow third parties to access much of the content and features of the service.

You can review our latest business profile, Brampton Kitchens, on Google Canada maps.

A PR-GM.com article indicates that in a recent poll, 50% of the surfers do not use the local version of Google to find local results. Read the full article.