A couple Mercedes guys stopped by the other day and left a baby on our doorstep. That would be the baby Benz, the fourth generation of the Mercedes C-class, a car whose lineage dates to 1983. At first it was called the 190—the C designation came along for model year 1994—but the idea was to produce a small car that would bring Benz cachet into a more affordable realm and, oh, yeah, give the BMW 3-series a little competition, an idea that’s still operative. (more…)
South Africa might seem a strange place to launch a 200-mph exotic sports-GT car that will find owners mainly in the U.S. and western Europe. More so when you consider that the most significant achievement by an SLR model was in Italy, at the Mille Miglia event of
1955.
But Mercedes-Benz has conducted operations in South Africa for more than 45 years, including complete vehicle assembly. More important, the weather in mid-November is fabulous. (more…)
:: Local search engine marketing has become a vital part of any marketing campaign for local businesses everywhere. This is mainly due to the changes in the way people go searching for things. It used to be that when people needed to find something they would look in the Yellow Pages. This is no longer true, as now the norm for most people is to go looking for what they need online. You want your business to appear first on the list when someone searches for anything related to what your business offers. This is precisely why you need local search engine marketing.
The main aspect of this type of marketing is search engine optimization. This is when your page is optimized in such a way that it will appear higher in the rankings of the search engine results pages. The best thing for a local business to do is to hire a programmer who is familiar with search engine optimization to build the page completely optimized from the start. Then you will need to maintain the optimization, of course. If you do not succeed in doing this, you will end up getting outranked by all of your competition very quickly.
The biggest part of search engine optimization is keyword choice. You will need relevant keywords that are going to draw the most traffic to your page. The trick is to know which keywords are the most popular, and what is being searched for the most in your area. Again, it may be necessary to hire an expert for this, as a lot of detail goes into choosing the exact winning keywords. You don\’t want to use words with too much competition, or it will be hard to get to the top of the rankings, yet you want words that are popular enough to get a lot of searches. There is a fine balance there.
Additionally, when the ingoing and outgoing links are being created, you need to keep certain things in mind, such as relevance. If you worry more about keywords than relevance, you will have people ending up on your page that were not looking for anything close to what you are offering. This is bad for your conversion rate, which is bad for your rankings. You want to get what is considered to be targeted traffic. The best way to do this is by using words that are relevant to what your site is really about. Do not focus so much on getting visitors that you forget to focus on who you are targeting in the first place. This is not going to get you anywhere, and you will just end up spinning your wheels.
There is so much that goes into this that many local business owners simply do not have the time or the knowledge to do it themselves. However, there are many highly qualified experts out there who can easily get the job done for you. When it comes to your business, any money you spend on local search engine marketing is going to be well worth it in the end.
