Savvy Marketing Tips - September 2010
Hello <<First Name>>
Welcome to the latest Savvy Marketing Tips. For those of you’ve who’ve been on holiday over the last month, we hope you’ve had a chance to recharge your batteries and are motivated try out new things on your site! The run up to Christmas is the most important time of the year for retailers so if your online marketing needs a push, now’s the time to start if you haven’t already! 
With growing interest in marketing online, we hope our newsletter articles and blog posts really help you to understand how you can make your website work harder for your business!
Each month we bring you easy to implement tools and tips, so you can take advantage of the many brilliant low-cost ways of marketing your business via the internet. We hope you find our newsletter a welcome and useful addition to your inbox. If you do, please tell others about it so we can reach more people!
This month we explain why your rankings may drop and what you can do about it, and we introduce a new member of staff!
Best wishes,
the Savvy Marketers
PS Don't forget to register for our latest free teleseminar on Thursday 9 September - a Q&A Session on all things internet marketing related. Find out more and register.
Help! My Rankings Have Plummeted!
I expect many of you reading this have been there – one minute your site is riding high in the rankings and the next time you check, your site has disappeared for your targeted keywords. This will happen to most websites at some point, so what causes these changes and what can you do about it?
One of the first things you should check is your website itself. Have you been updating the pages and having any technical work done on your site? Has the structure of  your site changed at all? Sometimes what you think may be insignificant changes to your site can cause all sorts of knock on effects in the search engines, so bear this in mind when updating your website.
Have you been neglecting your website entirely? The search engines, particularly Google, like to see website owners proactively working on their site, so putting it up and forgetting about it really isn’t going to do much for rankings. Web marketing is an ongoing process and one thing the search engines look at it freshness of content. It’s in your interests to keep your site updated with interesting information about what you do to keep visitors interest as well as the search engines. A blog attached to your site can go a long way to helping with this.
Who is linking to your website? Have you found out if anyone links to it and what type of sites link to your site? Your link popularity will go a long way to influencing rankings, particularly on Google. It’s not the quantity of links, but the quality of those links, so firstly find out where your links are coming from. Next do some work on improving your link popularity by linking with sites within your industry sector, sites offering complementary products and services. Press releases, articles, social networking will all influence your link popularity, so you need to make sure this is included in your online marketing activities.
Is there a new kid on the block? Perhaps you’re suddenly finding some new businesses popping up in your industry sector who are being very proactive at promoting themselves. This can cause rankings to drop as they move up. If this is the case, you may need to step up your game. Find out what marketing activities they’re doing. Take a look at your own and see where improvements could be made. There’s nothing better than new competition to keep you on your toes!
Changes to search engine algorithms. The search engines are constantly updating the way they rank sites, mostly to weed out the spammers out there, but they also update the results to keep them fresh and to help the sites who are actively promoting themselves and deserve a lift as a result. You can’t control the search results but you can make sure your site is the best it can be and you’re proactive with your online marketing. Google recently did a major algorithm update (called ‘Mayday’), which affected rankings on many sites, particularly for niche keywords on e-commerce sites. If your rankings have dropped in recent months, this could be a cause. I’ve written about what you can do about this in a Savvy marketers blog post.
Finally, and one thing that happened to me earlier this year, is ensuring your site hasn’t been hacked. Sometimes website owners don’t even know if their site has been hacked, but if it has, it can affect your rankings. Ask your webmaster to ensure your site is secure from hackers and if you manage your site yourself, read up about what you need to do to keep it hacker proof!
If you’re struggling with your rankings, please let us know and we’ll do our best to answer your question in a blog post.
© Savvy Marketers, 2010
Latest Events
Open Q&A Teleseminar - Thursday 9 September at 3.30pm
Have your search engine rankings gone awry? Is your Adwords campaign atrocious? Has your blog gone to pot?
Please join us for a free Open Q&A session on all things internet marketing and we will do our best to solve your problems, throw some ideas around and discuss best practices.
Find out more and register on the Savvy Marketers website.
Introducing Spike the Office Manager!
This part of the newsletter is a new regular spot by our new office manager, Spike, so over to him! 
Having been made redundant earlier this year by Sam from her previous newsletter, Marketing Karma, I decided to take a few months off. Now that the summer is over, I’ve decided I need a new challenge, and am now employed by Savvy Marketers on a healthy salary of biscuits. I like walkies, lots of attention, and looking after the post! Stay tuned for updates on life at Savvy Marketers HQ!
We'd Like to Recommend .....
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Pssst...Pass It On!
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Savvy Marketing Tips are brought to you by the Savvy Marketers, who are Sam McArthur and Louise Barnes-Johnston. We offer no-fluff, low cost, extremely valuable how-to information about marketing via the internet for the small business owner who has little or no prior experience.
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