Archive for the ‘Search Marketing Testing’ Category

Top 10 Search Optimization Tips for the General Public

Sunday, September 20th, 2009

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I’ve performed a few Internet Marketing presentations for local business organizations recently. While I went into them with a bit of  trepidation (public speaking is not on MY top ten list), they turned out to be great experiences: the more the audience responds to the content, the more fun!

The main content of the presentation is a list of  Top 10 Search Optimization Tips. The tips are geared towards both people who manage their own search programs AND people who have their search programs managed for them.  This article is a “hub” with links to expanded discussions for each of the tips. Also, while we speak of Google in these articles, the same thoughts can be utilized for Yahoo and (what is now) Bing.

Tip #1 - Patience – Nothing happens instantaneously on search engines (except payments, of course) Read More…

Tip #2 - Persistence – A persistent strategy of ongoing regular improvements to your website and search activities is important to gain upper placements.  Read More…

Tip #3 – Paranoia – Don’t for a second think your competition rests on their laurels at any time. Read More…

Tip #4 – Do Something, Anything - At the very least, populate Title and Description tags. Read More…

Tip #5 – Always Be Testing – Just like any other marketing effort, your competition is always working to get their share – and that share is coming from your pie! Read More…

Tip #6 – Four Seconds – The amount of time spent reading top search results. Read More…

Tip #7 – The Long Tail – Highly targeted customers are gold! Gold! Read More…

Tip #8 – Links – Unabashed and shameless self promotion gets your website noticed. Read More…

Tip #9 – Do What Google Recommends – The guidance is typically accurate. Read More…

Tip #10 – Market, Market, Market! - Just like traditional marketing is a never-ending cycle, so goes internet marketing. Read More…

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Top 10 Search Tips – Tip #10 – Market, Market, Market!

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Some of you are sighing in relief. The last entry to the Top Ten Search Tips. Tip #10! I’ll keep this short: I’ve provided these search tips during some recent presentations and they were well-received by the participants. I thought it would be beneficial to post them here. I hope they’re able to help you in your search efforts.Search Engine Optimization

Top 10 Search Tips – Tip #10 – Market, Market, Market – When all is said and done with respects to making a website as shiny as possible, there’s still work to be done in order to promote it. Just like traditional marketing is a never-ending cycle, so goes internet marketing. It has rapidly become an integrated and necessary channel of an organization’s overall marketing plan.

Every opportunity to promote a company’s URL – just like handing out a business card – should be taken advantage of. Basic opportunities are:

  • Email Marketing – Generating a regular and readable newsletter keeps the company and the company’s website top-of-mind. If it’s the regular writing that gets in the way of publishing a newsletter, find someone to do it. Shameless plug – Alpine Technical Group is managing more and more internet marketing campaigns including the writing of regular newsletter articles.
  • Blog – The same content created for the email newsletter can be published on a blog.
  • Facebook – Create a group on Facebook for your company and publish the first snippet of the newsletter content. Entice readers to “read more”.
  • Twitter – Tweet the substance of your Blog article and point to it. Actually when set up correctly, Twitter will feed your Facebook page.
  • Yelp – We mentioned this before. Ensure your organization is well represented on Yelp. If it’s appropriate, beg customers to provide reviews on Yelp, Google, Bing etc. Remember though, it’s inappropriate (and usually apparent) for companies to review themselves.

All of these activities are work. But the dividends paid include keeping you top-of-mind with clients and prospects AND establishing you as a subject matter expert (SME) in your field. All of those links back to your website are great for achieving Tip #9

Measurement is difficult to come by in terms of ROI for internet marketing as well. One of the best ways to measure is to see what kind of website activity is generated before and after a particular event. Success comes from website visitors actually performing a task on your site. If it’s visiting a thank-you page after purchasing a product or filling out a form, those activities can be measured and attributable to internet marketing activities.

Also, the ever-pervasive “How did you hear about us?” is a perfect and immediate way to get marketing feedback.

Hopefully everyone has gained some sort of insight from these tips. Granted, they are pretty basic instructions but, if followed, they can produce great results.

Good Luck and Happy Webbing!

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Posted in Content Management Systems, Joomla, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Marketing, Search Marketing Testing, Top Ten List, Top Ten Search Marketing Tips, Web Search | No Comments »

Top 10 Search Tips – Tip #9 – Do What Google Recommends

Monday, August 10th, 2009

OMG – this article is the next to last in the Top 10 Search Tips! I’ll keep this short: I’ve provided these search tips during some recent presentations and they were well-received by the participants. I thought it would be beneficial to post them here. I hope they’re able to help you in your search efforts.arrowtargetsm

Top 10 Search Tips – Tip #9 – Do What Google Recommends. Sorry if that sounds too apparent but it’s true. I’ve been on consulting engagements where the client regularly tests, adjusts, measures, budjets, uses analysis websites and utilizes all the scientific and advanced forms of SEO while their image tags remain blank and the titles to all of their pages are exactly the same. I’m not saying they’re anything less than great people and do an awesome job at their work. It’s just that sometimes, in the rush to the finish line, some of the basics can get overlooked.

Relevance – Again, not to beat one word into anyone’s head but the relevance of your website in relation to your keywords is important. This might also sound pretty basic but keep it top of mind whenever there’s copy to be written for the web. Keyword inclusion should come right after grammar and getting the point across.

Sitemap – Submit a sitemap for your website and update it regularly. There are a slew of free sitemap generators out there – just google “sitemap generator” and voila, choices galore. Make sure the sitemap is in XML format, upload to the root of your website and let the search engines know it’s there (google “submit sitemap google“, “submit sitemap bing“, “submit sitemap yahoo” for instructions).

Web Page Structure – This may be over the technical heads of some people in terms of remedying this issue but the basics remain the same:

  • Make sure title, description, keyword and image tags are populated
  • Ensure title and description are at the top of the page and definitely above any scripting
  • Keep words per page between 300 and 600
  • Make sure all links are active and point to something real (Googlebots HATE 404 errors)
  • Make sure each page links back to your main menu pages (home, about, contact us, products, services)

Submit Website – All search engines have a way to submit your site for crawling. Chances are excellent they will find your site anyway but this is a good excercise to ensure they find it sooner than later. Each time you update your sitemap is a good time to resubmit.

Analytics – Take your pick but Google is the 800 pound Gorilla as of this writing. Unless there’s a serious upheaval in the search world, this trend should continue for the foreseeable future. If it’s not installed already, get it. If it’s installed, it doesn’t work unless it’s checked regularly and analyzed.

404 Pages – Don’t let your browser take control when there’s a broken link – incoming or from within your site. Make sure the site has it’s own 404 page and that it works.

Google happily suggests about a billion other areas to attend to in order to keep site structure up to par. It’s a never ending job but one that pays dividends when done right.

Good Luck and Happy Webbing.

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Marketing, Search Marketing Testing, Top Ten List, Top Ten Search Marketing Tips, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Top Ten Search Tips – #5 – Always be Testing.

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Swarming ahead in my top 10 search tips, here’s #5! In brief, again, once more, to re-reiterate, I’ve provided these search tips during some recent presentations and they were well-received by the participants. I thought it would be beneficial to post them here. I hope they’re able to help you with your search efforts.

Top 10 Search Tips – Tip #5 – Always be Testing. This tip dovetails with tip #3: Paranoia. If you think you’re by youself competing for specific popular search terms, think again. Just like any other marketing effort, your competition is always working to get their share – and that share is coming from your pie! The competition for eyes is fierce – especially in popular markets.

Part of “always be testing” has to do with split ads. There’s still debate whether split ads are really effective but anytime you can get measurable response to ad copy, I say do it. Split ads provide the ability to test two different ad copies for the same search term. Such as:

Sample Split Ad

Sample Split Ad

These two ads discuss the same theme but are relatively different. By tracking these two ads over time – say a month – you can get an idea of which ad gets clicked on more. Even though Google/Bing might not display them equally, you can still get the clickthrough ratio and determine which ad is performing better.

Once you have an idea of the better performing ad, split that ad, suspend the other one and modify the new ad slightly. Maybe a stronger call to action or a more compelling pitch. I always find that the current state of affairs helps with my ad copy. Whether it’s the econonmy, the weather or something related to your field, keeping ads current always helps. Rinse and repeat this exercise once a month (or more frequently for high traffic sites) for the rest of your website’s life.

Another area to tune-up is landing page copy. Once eyes get to your website, you still need them to pick up the phone or fill out the form. Make sure it resonates with the reader and gets them to do something. AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire & Action – the four states your reader should go through while reading your copy.

Onward!

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Top Ten Search Tips – #2 – Persistence

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

Moving on with my Top Ten Search Tips Series. In brief, I’ve provided these tips during some recent presentations and they were well-received by the participants. I thought it would be beneficial to post them here. I hope they’re able to help you with your search efforts.

Top 10 Search Tips – Tip #2 – Persistence

Persistence - Tip Number 2

Persistence - Tip Number 2

My second tip, Persistence, builds on the first tip in that, along with patience, a persistent strategy of ongoing regular improvements to your website and search activities is important to gain upper placements. An important piece of advice to remember is DON’T, PLEASE DON’T whitewash your search efforts if you don’t see results in the first weeks of a strategy. By “whitewash” I mean completely remove or radically change your titles, descriptions, adwords etc. This radical type of change can very well place you back in rankings the same as a new website starts out low in results. There is a lot of debate around the “sandbox” effect but it makes sense in terms of relevance.

And remember, it’s all about relevance. Suppose a brand new website is created, perfect in every way, with pristine descriptions and title pages, all SEO is performed to the maximus and there are even inboud links created in order to bump Page Rank. Why should  Google / Bing promote this site to the top of the results when there’s no track record of the website? Of course no search engine worth it’s salt is going to divulge a sandbox algorithm, it makes sense that there would be a “cooling off” period to ensure the relevance and assurdness of such a new website.

To coin a phrase: slow and steady wins the race. With persistence comes reward, especially in the search results arena.

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Top Ten Search Tips – #1 – Patience

Monday, June 1st, 2009

I’ve performed a few Internet Marketing presentations for local business organizations recently. While I went into them with a bit of  trepidation (public speaking is not on MY top ten list), they turned out to be great experiences: the more the audience responds to whats being presented, the more fun it is! There were lots of nodding heads at the presentations.

The main content of the presentation is a list of my Top 10 Search Optimization Tips. The tips are geared towards both people who manage their own search programs AND people who have their search programs managed for them. Since people seem to get so much out of the presentations, I thought I would post the list here. Without further ado: (Oh Yeah, real quick, while I speak of Google in my presentations, the same thoughts can be utilized for Yahoo and (what is now) Bing) NOW, without any further ado:

Top 10 Search Tips – Tip #1 – Patiencesmallwomanmeditating

My first tip, Patience, speaks to the fact that, although you have done all the right things to make the search engines happy and should be receiving top-of-first-page results in response to your perfect search efforts, search engines take more into account than just a perfectly-tuned website. Nothing happens instantaneously on search engines (except payments, of course) RELEVANCE plays a huge role in search results and, to an extent, the tenure of a website is factored into it’s relevance. This doesn’t mean that new websites can’t rank as well as old websites, it means that a site needs to “season” a little before results start to appear. When speaking of Google, it’s called the “sandbox”: a site, after being newly created or undergoing a major change, sits in a sandbox for a while (up to 2 months?) before real results start to appear.

Again, relevance: just because a brand new site is set up perfectly doesn’t mean it’s relevant. People get caught up in programmatic response – the idea that since Search is an application or program, results should happen instantaneously as a result of the input. Google’s algorithms take into account longevity as a factor of relevance – and not just “time online”. Good activity, ongoing site improvements, backward links (factoring Page Rank) and patience are all required to make for good search results. A lot of frustration on the part of search program managers (and clients) can be thwarted if patience is taken into account. It’s difficult to wait – and some people even think it’s not true, even after it’s proven!

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