The Final Four is coming to Indianapolis. It's important for your web based strategy to be prepared for the influx of patrons coming to witness the finish to a wild tournament. This week it is important to be involved in your social media community and focus on your email marketing strategy to attract the vast sea of potential customers.

If you haven't done these things yet - don't worry! You have two more days before the first two games. Get out there and let everyone know your specials. Update your website and address your corporate blog. You have a chance to increase your business' visibility.

After we have some lunch, I will try and answer all those questions for you plus many more. We will talk a little about Business Blogging, SEO, and how to incorporate winning search into your web based strategy. 

We have made it very easy to sign up. Just click on the link below, fill out a few questions and you are good to go. 

We look forward to seeing you next Friday, March 5 at the Rutter Communications building in Muncie from 11:30am-1:00pm.

With regards to business blogging and organic search engine optimization, they always say, "Content is King." You need content, content and lots more content to rank high in the search engines. The more pages you have, the better you will probably do.

However, does the quality of the content matter? You want your posts to be well written, interesting, add value and make readers come back for more. But does that matter to the search engines? Not really.

The search engines care much more about who is linking to you, versus the brilliant idea in that blog post you spent three hours revising. Yes, it's a little sad that Google doesn't love your idea and place your blog post at the top of the search results. But as SEO expert Rand Fish pointed out in his recent article, "Great Content Equals Great Rankings, Right? Wrong.," that's how marketing has always worked. The best restaurant is usually the local hole in the wall that no one has heard of, and sometimes the worst eateries are the chain restaurants who advertise and get virtual back links from commercials.

With this in mind, it's probably not a good idea to start writing tons of blog posts with sloppy content and little value. However, keep it in mind when you are stressing for hours over one little blog post. Of course you want your customers to like your corporate blog, but organic search engine optimization should be at the focus. Write more content, have an Internet marketing strategy to get links to your content, and don't worry as much about what you write. You can write blog posts until your nose bleeds, but if no one is linking to them, Google won't care.

This is not only huge for organic search engine optimization, but also for your social media optimization. Google just announced a real-time search feature integrated near the top of every Google search results page. It features the latest news from major newspaper websites, popular blogs and even Twitter. If you search for "tigers mistress," you will currently see a link to a news site, a link to Perez Hilton's blog and random Tweets from people talking about the recent Tiger Woods scandal on Twitter.

Imagine if someone searched your company name and found an interesting Tweet near the top of Google from you, and decided to follow you? Getting followers from search engines, pretty cool right? But what if someone mentioned your company name in a negative light on Twitter, and it showed up on the first page of Google?! 

Social media is real folks; you just can't ignore it anymore. Google has also worked out deals with Facebook and MySpace to include public feeds in the real-time search results. If your corporate Internet marketing strategy does not include social media, maybe you should consider working with a social media marketing company. You need to advertise. You need to monitor your brand reputation, and you can make new relationships all at the same time.

Are you spending a lot of money on PPC Marketing? Why not throw a few of those dollars towards a social media marketing optimization plan and get even more search engine results in the top area of Google.

People can now find live information about you on Google. Does this sound scary? Maybe, but should you put your head in the sand and ignore it? No way! Take advantage of this new form of search engine marketing and free social media advertising in the place everyone wants to be - the top of Google!

Fusework Studios recently held an event for a local chapter of Business Networking International (BNI) at our office in Muncie, Indiana.  The event was designed to be an educational session on organic search engine optimization and business blogging.  The attendees were all local business owners and general managers that are typically not involved in the day-to-day management of their organic search engine optimization strategy.  Understanding this, we did not want to go into technical detail with all of the behind-the-scenes elements that search engines are seeking.  Instead, we focused on simple adjustments that can help make a big difference in organic search.  Often times the simple things are easily overlooked, and by pointing these things out, we were able to raise a few eyebrows and spark interest in our services.

The feedback from our session was great, and it was incredible to see the reaction from the attendees when we uncovered some basic things their website had been missing.  I'd like to share just three pointers from the meeting that are often overlooked.

• Domain Name - The value of a great keyword domain name is huge.  Consider registering a domain name that includes keywords for the services you provide and putting a microsite behind that domain name.  We recently employed this strategy with one of our microsites which can be found at InternetMarketingIndianapolis.com.
  
   
• Title Tags - The page title or title tag absolutely cannot be overlooked.  This is a chance to include keywords relevant to the content on that specific page in one of the areas that search engines are looking at as a top priority.  Using the same title tag for every page or only including one word (such as "About") is not going to help.  Take some time when assigning a title to your new page.  We recently changed our title tag on the Fusework Studios TV website and are now ranking very high for Indiana film and video production.   
  
   
• Headings - Pay attention to the headings used at the top of your web pages.  Avoid the standard "Welcome" to our website trap.  Instead, use this heading to include keywords related to your services.  When launching our new Fuseworkstudios.com website, we were able to include Internet marketing within our heading.  This is much better than "Welcome to our new web site."
  
   

I had the good fortune this week to attend the 2009 Masters of Business Online conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. This event is hosted by one of our peers in the industry, Evereffect. The President of Evereffect, Jim Brown, did a tremendous job of scheduling outstanding speakers and visionaries from the Indianapolis area to speak. If you haven't attended MBO in the past, make sure to do so next year.

Over the course of the day, I watched a great presentation from the CEO of Brandswag, Kyle Lacy, on the importance of social media. I had the opportunity to hear Jon DiGregory, Founding Partner of Cantaloupe, talk about video production and how it is evolving for the web. Another particularly interesting presentation was from the Founder of Slingshot SEO, Jeremy Dearringer, on how creating inbound links to your site is so important to your search ranking.

While each presentation during the day was about a different area, all of them had one particular theme that stood out time and time again...COMMITMENT.

You see, when you talk about organic search engine optimization, social media marketing or your overall Internet marketing strategy, one thing is always consistent; you need commitment.

I have blogged about this in the past. We have witnessed this over and over again with our clients. The more they commit, the better success they have. We can create the best Internet marketing plan for you, but if you don't commit to it, you will ultimately limit your own success.

If you think about this scenario, it is the same with so many things in life. Take for instance, weight loss. You can hire the best trainer to create a fantastic workout plan for you, however if you don't commit to the program, you will have little chance for success.

Even though each of my fellow Internet marketers had their own stories and products, each of them continually preached about one ever important thing...commitment.

Before you are ready to dive into your next web project make sure you ask yourself one important question.

Are you ready to commit?

Internet Marketing Indiana has to be one of my favorite keyword phrases ever. We just added it to our corporate blog yesterday, and with zero content, we are already ranking fourth on the first page of Google for "Internet Marketing Indiana." Of course, that high search engine ranking won't last for long without good quality content.

When writing content and blog posts to target a keyword phrase, there are several steps you can take for search engine optimization purposes.

1. Begin the title of the article with the keyword phrase. The keyword should have a headline tag if the website is set up correctly.
2. Begin the article with the keyword phrase and use it again in the first paragraph if you can get away with it.
3. The keyword should also appear as the title of the web page by using the <title> meta tag. Your company name should be listed after the keyword phrase.
4. Although Yahoo is supposedly the only search engine paying attention, it is still a good idea to use the keyword phrase in your description and keyword meta tags.
5. Highlighting the keyword in bold can help improve search engine optimization.
6. Insert an image into the article with a keyword rich file name, alt tag and description.

We'll stop there and keep it simple for now, but these rules apply when writing content for a website, business blogging or even when using social media sites that are indexed by the search engines. So for now, the organic search engine optimization tips end, and the monitoring of the "Internet Marketing Indiana" keyword ranking begins.

Search Engine Optimization has become a widely known term and may be mentioned over a few dinner tables in Indianapolis. Search Engine Optimization has become so popular that I am now receiving several emails every week from Search Engine Optimization companies.  These are very well written emails with clear calls to action and convincing case studies. Here is one such email marketing example:

Email marketing at its finest! In all honesty, I receive this exact same email marketing ploy several times a week. Whenever I hear "first page of Google" or "we will get you on top of Google," it causes me to stop and run the other way. There are so many factors with organic Search Engine Optimization and high search engine ranking that you can never promise to get a potential client the number one spot on Google, especially if you didn't even bother to ask what the desired keywords are! (That's a tip for all of you SEO spammers out there!)

If your prospective Search Engine Optimization company does not ask a lot of questions and do a lot of research before identifying if the return on investment will be worthwhile, stop and run the other way! There are agencies in Indianapolis with Search Engine Optimization experience and successful SEO case studies to prove their expertise.

My advice: Don't get help from a spammer.