Showing posts with label emarketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label emarketing. Show all posts

Sunday, December 17, 2006

5 Myths about SEO

When you size up the search marketing industry, you really have to marvel at all the different information sources, many of them conflicting, and how search marketers are able to stay on top of what’s current and relevant compared to noise and malarkey.

In the course of talking to prospective clients, prospective business partners, attending conferences and events, reading blogs, books, discussion threads, forums, newsletters and industry publications, you can get exposure to an amazing variety of observations about SEO. Many of them are spot-on. Some of them are tales of a mythical nature. A few are just plain bunk.

For some context on this post, I think it is important to note the distinction in intent for most search engine optimization efforts: SEO for publishers, blog networks and affiliates is a different thing than SEO for lead generation and on-site transactions/sales. Many tactics are the same, but the intentions and outcomes are very different.

The myths outlined below are more concerned with SEO for lead/sales generation that we work with at TopRank.

1. “Search Engine Optimization is a collection of tricks to fool search engines“.

If you’re “fooling” the search engines, then you’re probably fooling users too. Guess how well that kind of activity converts? “Real” SEO involves a lot more than optimizing content, getting links and using disposable marketing “tricks”. Tricks and tactics may be a matter of semantics depending on who you talk to, but many of the tactics we associate with productive and long term SEO include:

Search Marketing Strategy
Benchmarks
Competitive Analysis
Keyword Analysis
Creative Copy Writing
Web Design & User Experience
Information Architecture
Server Side Issues
Code Optimization
Other channel marketing that affects SEO (social media, news search, blog search, etc)
Ongoing Content Development
Ongoing Link Building
Web Analytics
Conversion Analysis
2. “People in our market don’t use search engines.”

I actually used to keep my laughter to myself when people would say this. You don’t have to do too much research to find out if a market is viable for marketing via search engines.

According to a study by comScore qSearch, there are 4.9 billion internet searches per month and 133 million unique searchers. Those numbers have actually gone up a bit since the study. It is certainly true that in some market categories in the developed world that search usage is minimal, but I have a hard time thinking of any.

A quick way to start investigating a market is to search and find out if how much relevant content is out there. If your market is brand new, then you may have an easier time dominating it on search engines by becoming an authority on the topic earlier than your competition.

3. “SEO is a single event”

This one is still pervasive and indicative of what search engine optimization used to be. Sort of like “SEO circa 1999″ when all you had to do was update Meta tags, add keywords to web pages and submit. Those are the Model T days of SEO.

Search engines like Google look at 100-200 factors or “signals” to determine relevancy and to decide how to sort search results. Add in the increasing numbers of competing documents from various media, blogs and web site along with more savvy search marketers and it’s easy to realize that effective SEO requires ongoing attention. “Attention to what?”, you might ask. How about: creative link building, creation and promotion of new content, integration with other online/offline marketing, social media, analytics and optimization refinements.

4. “SEO is a function of IT”

Search engine optimization started out in the cubicles of IT, but has moved it’s way into the executive offices for many companies. I believe the most recent SEMPO state of the search industry research shows that companies are no longer borrowing from other cost centers to fund their search marketing initiatives. It’s a business decision line item like any other marketing expenditure.

However, IT and Web Design/Development “buy-in” are critical for proper implementation and it’s important to understand that in larger organizations, SEO is multi-departmental. Marketing, IT, Public Relations, Legal, Creative and possibly operations might all be involved in some way with a strategic initiative to help reach business goals through improved organic search performance.

Regardless of the size of the company, SEO initiatives should be managed strategically by the business like any other major marketing initiative

5. “Our site doesn’t get a lot of visitors, so SEO wouldn’t work for us.”

With comments/myths like this, you must be wondering, “Who in the world is Lee talking to?” You would be surprised how many intelligent, accomplished corporate marketers have said the above. It appears to be the classic “chicken before the egg” type of thinking.

The reality is that comments like this are an indication of insecurity about search as a discipline or about search as a viable marketing channel for a particular business. Smart people say things like this because they are not confident about the solution being presented and want to get out of or avoid the conversation. Anyone else who uses such logic just doesn’t understand marketing.

Either way, I always recommend to companies that if they’re considering search engine optimization, regardless of who helps them, they need to look at it long term. SEO is not push button marketing and it is not for the impatient. The minimum amount of time we recommend is 6 months after implementation before evaluating whether SEO has promise as a profitable marketing channel. Anything less than that is not worth starting.

I can’t let you go without a few Bonus Myths:

Flash is bad - No, it’s the absence of text and complete reliance on Flash that is bad.
Database generated urls are bad - The major search engines are very good at indexing complex urls. Stay away from session ids though.
Keywords in meta tags is optimization - Just say no.
Extra domain names boost rankings - Pure malarkey. Make sure you redirect them properly. See Bruce Clay’s explanation on this.
Multiple copies of my site helps rankings - Can you say “duplicate content”? Don’t do it.
My competitors get away with spam techniques, so I can too - I can hear my mom now, “And if your friends told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?”. If a competitor is “getting away” with blatant search spam, you have a few decisions to make. One of them is how to be more creative and more aggressive (within guidelines) at becoming the authority for your category and topics.
Are there more myths and misconceptions, misunderstandings and pure bull$#@! out there about SEO? Sure there is. And the fact that, in some ways, keeping up to date with search marketing best practices is like putting a puzzle together when the picture likes to change from time to time, makes it even more challenging.

It’s all the more reason to find trusted resources that you can rely on and to build a network of people to bounce ideas off of so you can separate the facts from the myths. There is no substitute for firsthand experience.

25 Simple Blog SEO and Traffic Tips

This is a nice concise list of 25 ways to greatly increase your blog’s traffic and search rankings.

1) Content is king!

2) Submit your site to as many search engines as possible. After the initial indexing I would recommend resubmitting every 6 months.

3) Comment on as many blogs as possible. Make your comments thoughtful and not spammy.

4) Link up with popular blogs - trackbacks can be good for SEO as well as your traffic.

5) Write a good article and post it on a site like http://www.digg.com, although this won’t help as far as traffic goes (you will get a HUGE boost for a few hours, then it will tone back down, you probably won’t get any permanent readers from Digg) and it sure doesn’t help with your relationship with your web host, it can create some new inbound links.

6) Use http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ . Instead of the GoogleBot searching for your pages you can tell it where your pages are. This is a great way to get your whole site indexed.

7) Content is king!

Get listed on web directories like http://www.dmoz.com/. Although many SEO “experts” think it is overrated no one disagrees that it can help boost your site’s rankings.

9) Add some links for feed readers and blog aggregators like http://www.bloglines.com/, http://www.google.com/reader/, and http://myweb.yahoo.com/.

10) Add some social bookmarking links at the bottom of each post

11) Make it easy for your users to find your RSS feed

12) Add a “E-mail This!” link either on the header or the footer of each post

13) Content is king! (see a pattern?)

14) If you write a really good post try e-mailing the URL to some big-name bloggers with a short personalized message. You never know, they might like it and link to it.

15) Try asking some big sites who are in your niche if they would like to trade links. More often than not they will say “no”, but at least give it a try.

16) Don’t obsess over “get rich quick” schemes.

17) Don’t obsess over “get lots of traffic really quick” schemes.

18) Submit your RSS feed to a bunch of RSS directories, http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-directory.htm has a large list of popular directories.

19) Use http://pingomatic.com/ to notify a ton of aggregators that your site has been updated.

20) Don’t obsess over the numbers - it takes time to build up a good reader base.

21) Make your posts as keyword rich as possible. Whenever you can use a word that has to do with your niche, use it!

22) Use lists, especially if your site is targeted towards more tech-savvy users

23) If you have a MySpace page or a home page on a similar service put up a link to your blog.

24) Tag important keywords, using this site ( http://www.richardrodger.com/tags.htm ) you can tag keywords.

25) Last but not least, offer free stuff. Everyone loves free stuff!

The really important thing you have to remember is, just have fun. If your blog is causing you to become stressed out then it probably is not a good idea to continue blogging.

If your readers can tell you are having fun while providing good content they will become permanent readers.

by: Jeremy Steele

Saturday, December 16, 2006

8 Quick Ways to Fix Your Search Engine

Over the past year, I’ve evaluated the search experiences on a number of popular content sites.
I picked apart the search and result designs from sites like
Apple.com, NASA.gov, SchwabFoundation.org, and a variety of others. We focused on content sites, rather than e-commerce or Web applications, and we avoided general Web search engines entirely.

Our finding, not surprisingly, is that almost every site’s search engine could use improvement. We also found that most organizations’ Web teams couldn’t really affect the quality of their search results — they were stuck tweaking search technologies that had already been purchased and installed. Often, the most dramatic change they could make was in the design of the search and results interfaces. In some cases, as the old saying goes, this was like putting lipstick on a pig. But cleaning things up does help users find answers to their queries.
Through our research, we discovered eight quick fixes that will improve your site’s search experience:


1. Question search engine defaults.
Before turning on your search software, evaluate every option the software provides in terms of user needs. For example, do they really need to hide or show the result summaries? Take away as much as you can; it will simplify your results page.


2. Relevance is relative.
Ranking results based on their relevance is a subjective practice at best. Every piece of search software has its own algorithm for determining which documents best match which queries. Make sure the default ranking you select matches your user needs.


3. Help users avoid mistakes.
Check your search logs. One of the top queries will inevitably be an empty submission. While we’re not sure why this happens so frequently, users often accidently submit forms before filling them out. One of the simplest usability enhancements you can make to your site’s search experience is a single line of JavaScript. Make sure the search field has something in it before allowing the form to be submitted.


4. Roll your own results.
Even if you can’t change your search engine’s algorithm to be more relevant for your users, don’t give up hope. Frankly, one of the best ways to improve your results is to do them by hand. Get a report of the top search queries on your site. Take the top ten and find three to five pages that satisfy those queries. Then, create a simple script to match them up on your results page. When you have time, do the next 20 most popular. Stop when you get to 50. That will likely cover the majority of your users’ queries. Check the report once a month and adjust the canned results as necessary.


5. Simplify your page layout.
Almost every search engine can be more effective with a simple layout.
Include a wide text box with the user’s search query and a submit button labeled “Search again.”
Use a header that displays the total number of results and a control for displaying the next 10 (preferably an arrow pointing to the right).
List 10 results with ranking numbers hanging in the column.
Repeat the navigation controls at the bottom of the results.


6. Offer help for zero results.
If a query doesn’t find any matches, display the following:

  • A text box showing the user’s query that allows them to edit it.
  • Possible spelling alternatives, presented with the phrase, “Did you mean [alternative]?”
  • A couple of other tips as a bulleted list. “Try a broader search term.” or “Try using a synonym.”
  • Include a link to search help, a site map, and contact page.

7. Use categories if you’ve got them.
If your search software offers different search categories (often called catalogs or indices), use them to organize your results in a similar structure to your site’s architecture. Then include links at the top of the results page that show how many results match each category. This will help users narrow their search to a more manageable list.


8. Advanced search and help should be the same thing.
If you link to a page that offers usage instructions for the many features of your search engine, include interfaces for those features so they can be used without switching back and forth. See the advanced search page at HotBot for an example.


Jeffrey Veen is the Director of Product Design and a founding partner of Adaptive Path. In conjunction with author Darcy DiNucci, Jeff has just released our latest report: “Site Content Search : User Experience Analysis.” Full of real-world examples, this report provides a feature-by-feature best-practices guide to use as a design reference when developing the search experience on your site. When implementing a feature, you can easily reference how others have used it across a range of sites.
Jeff will also be speaking on this and related topics at our User Experience Week
in Washington, D.C. from August 16-19, as well as our “Beyond Usability” workshop in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on September 28 and 29.

Saturday, December 2, 2006

Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days

The following post was submitted by Adrian W Kingsley-Hughes.
I started the PC Doctor blog in May of 2005 and for the first few months my traffic was really low - down in the few hundreds of visitors a day. It was pretty depressing I can tell you and there were times when I thought about quitting. I knew that the site was in the Google ’sandbox’ and so I either had to keep on plugging at it until it was out or I had to give up.
Fortunately, I decided to keep on posting but in the interim I decided that I was also going to do my utmost to drive traffic to my site manually until Google kicked in. I took a look around at what some of the successful blogs were doing and came up with three tactics that helped to double my website traffic in a month.
First, I made the most of Technorati tags. I tagged every key word in each of my posts. Initially I did this manually but them I discovered a WordPress plugin called SimpleTags that made the job a whole lot easier.
I found that by tagging my post effectively they were getting a lot more attention then their untagged counterparts, and as an added advantage I was getting focused, quality traffic to the site!
I leveraged my existing website. I’ve been running my business website for a few years and that was getting modest levels of traffic that was relevant to my blog - so why not try to drive some of that to my new blog! I placed a few FeedBurner headline animator blocks on some of my most popular pages and after a day or so I noticed a significant increase in traffic for 5 minutes worth of work on my part.
Finally, I made effective use of trackback links to popular sites. If I commented on a post on another site I would make sure that I set up the appropriate trackback for it. The results from this are varied depending on the site and post that you are linking to but since I liked to comment and interact with the wider blogosphere anyway, it was free traffic!
Using these three simple techniques, I took The PC Doctor blog from a few hundred hits a day into the thousands in less than 30 days. This kept my interest in the site until it came out of the Google sandbox and I started to receiver some serious traffic. However, I’m convinced that these actions I took at the early stages have helped me create a loyal and targeted readership that continues to benefit my blog today.

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