According to a recent report, enthusiasm for internet purchases slipped by 3% last year.

Call it the recession or have some other “deep” opinion, things are slipping a bit for internet only businesses.

Unless internet marketers can do something to correct this trend, their businesses could go under the heading of unlikely sequels.

The ironic thing is that internet sites with brick and mortar presence actually are gaining momentum.

This goes along with my advice to small business owners to get their business online and take advantage, of this growing trend, of people searching online to locate brick and mortar businesses.

You can see the complete article here.

Last year, 2008, online searches for local goods and services actually surpassed physical Yellow Page searches.

Some internet marketing consultants are telling people they should pull out of YP because of this.  I don’t agree at all.

If an advertising medium is making you money you never want to abandon it…just add to it.

The actual figures for this were like 31% used online search and 30% used physical YP to search.  This tells you that you might be able to double your sales by adding a well planned internet campaign to your ad arsenal.

One thing to note is that people using the internet for search tend to be more responsive and spend more when the purchase.

If you’re a small business with a brick and mortar presence, you might want to consider the implications of these survey results.

In the previous post, we researched and wrote down the keywords for your most profitable products and/or services.

Now that you’ve identified the keywords for your most profitable products or services, you want to create a title for the page, on your website, where that product or service is located.

Use those keywords in your title tags.

Ideally, you want to optimize one page for each keyword so in your title tag, you would use that keyword or keyword phrase.

You should place the keyword as close to the beginning of the title tag as you can to give it more prominence.

In our example, drain cleaning services reno, your title should begin with that phrase.

Notice, in the video,  entitled “title tags“, I added a couple more related terms to the title.

Make the title clear, so that the search engines know exactly what this page is about, then make sure you write the content on that page to include those keyword terms.

The title tag isn’t a META tag, but it is extremely important and should be just behind the “head” tag.

We’ll talk more about how often and where to place your keywords in the content of your pages in future posts.

If you know other small business owners who might enjoy this information, please feel free to bookmark or email this blog for them.

Keywords are the beginning.

Before you can begin with optimizing your website, you need to know the most common words people will use when typing into Google or another search engine to find you or your products and services.

I’ve found many business owners who were shown, by there web designers, that typing the URL of their business into a search engine leads right to their website.

If you think about it, that would be like people looking in the white pages of the phone book to find you.

Those people already know you exist, right?

What we’re talking about, here, is getting people to your website who don’t know you exist.

This is more like people going to the yellow pages, because they don’t know the name of the shoe store, plumber, dentist or other business they are looking for…

so they go to the type of business they want to find, by Yellow Page listings.

Think of what someone might type into a search engine to find one of the products or services you provide.

Maybe you’re a plumber. People might type in “plumbers in (your city)”

But, less obvious, they might just type in “drain cleaning services (your city)”

With this in mind, jot down a few of the most likely terms you think they would use to find your most profitable products or services.

Hold that thought untiol next time when we discuss how to use those keywords in optimizing your website.

Hi, and welcome to Internet Marketing 1-2-3.  This is a place where you’ll gain insight into the huge profits available to small business owners who “get it” about growing their brick and mortar business with an online presence.

If your small business website hasn’t been bringing in leads and sales, you’ve got a problem and that’s why this blog exists.

If you don’t have a website, you really need to pay attention to the free information contained within these “walls.”

We’ll show you how to become profitable with a small business website that ranks highly on the search engines using SEO, email marketing, pay per click and lots of other strategies all designed to get you into massive profits.

The best part is that it’s all Free!

If you have a small business website, the first step is to optimize each page of your site for SEO or search engine optimization.

We’ll be giving you step by step instructions for doing that as the first 10 lessons coming over a 2-1/2 week period so bookmark us and stay tuned to begin your online adventure.

After the SEO session, we’ll tackle another topic, getting your website seen on local search.

If you hang in there and follow our lead, you’ll start to see noticeable increases in traffic and profits.

Thanks for