Search Marketing Answers

Google is a great place to allocate a portion of your online advertising budget.  They’re the #1 search engine, and they do a great job at helping site owners get exposure to people who would otherwise never learn about a site.  Paid listings (Google AdWords) can help bring you high quality new business prospects.  But let’s be real - Google is in the business of making money, and if you’re not using AdWords best practices, you could very well be throwing good money out the window…

One of the ways Google makes a lion’s share of it’s revenue is that by default when you set up a Google AdWords account, there’s a default setting to include your ads in their “Content Network”.

If your account is set up this way, your ads will show up both in Google’s search results on the Google site itself, and they will be displayed in hundreds or thousands of other web sites.  You DO want your ads to show up at Google itself.  That’s the whole idea - to get your paid (sponsored) listings coming up when someone does a search.

What you most definitely do NOT want, is for your ads to show up in the Content Network.

What the Content Network is:
As you surf the web, I am sure you’ve seen many web sites where somewhere on a web page, there’s a box labeled “Ads by Google”.  In that box, you’ll see one, three or several text ads that may or may not be related to the actual content on that page.  For example - go to www.CNN.com - scroll down -  on the right side, about 3/4 of the way down, you’ll see that “Ads by Google” box.

While having an ad show up on the CNN home page might seem like a great marketing strategy, the fact is that 90% of the sites in the Content Network are essentially web sites that have nothing to do with your specific market focus, and there is no way for you to specify the type of sites you want to be on.

In my years of experience with managing both Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing accounts, I have consistently seen where clients who are in the Content Network have expended on average 50 - 80% of their ad dollars for clicks that come through that network.  From a sales conversion perspective, I have also observed that on average, Content Network generated clicks result in less than 5% of actual conversions.  So it’s literally like throwing money out the window.

If you have ever heard of AdSense, it’s Google’s program that allows anyone with a web site to display Google’s ads on their site - and that’s the “Ads by Google” box.  There are literally millions of people who have web sites with the AdSense program running - and many of those have web sites that are completely created for the sake of displaying dozens of Ads by Google.  They do this because every time someone clicks on one of those ads, that site owner gets a small slice of the AdWords click fee.

It’s a terribly inefficient place to advertise and I urge you to opt OUT of the Content Network.  Doing so will ensure a much higher quality click-rate for your ad dollars.

HOW TO OPT OUT OF THE GOOGLE CONTENT NETWORK

1. Log into your AdWords account
2. Click into the “Campaign Summary” link.
3. Click the title of an individual campaign
4. Click “Edit Campaign Settings”
5. The third section down on that page is “Networks and Bidding”
6. UnCheck the box next to “The Content Network”

Repeat this for each campaign you are running.

If you are maintaining a Yahoo Search Marketing account the same issue exists and you’ll want to take the same action, because every dollar you spend on advertising needs to be put to use in the most cost-efficient way possible.

So you want to start a mailing list - or you have one already but you’ve just been guessing as to what works best.  Here’s eight key points to successful  use of email mailing lists and lead generation through email campaigns

1.  Opt In by Default

Everyone on the list needs to have chosen to join - the sign-up form can be stand-alone (just the sign-up info by itself) or as part of a contact form - if it’s part of a contact form, provide a check-box - Yes I want to receive your newsletter / be on the mailing list / etc. -  have the check-box checked as the default setting (studies show people are more likely to approve being on a list if they don’t have to physically click an extra box).

2.  Frequency and timing matters

Send out mailings on average once a week maximum, once a month minimum.  If your mailing focus is business, Monday mornings or Tuesday mornings are usually the best times to send the mailing.

 3.  Grab their attention right away

Make the subject line interesting - communicating a unique opportunity instead of the cliche’ - and don’t use all capital letters or lots of exclamation points

4. Provide extra value to keep them wanting more

Provide some extra value information in each mailing - some interesting fact or resource knowledge that will help empower your recipients - give them value for it’s own sake in each mailing that is not your direct pitch.  This will get more people to read more of the time and remember your list.

5. The first few seconds matters

Have the key points to your mailing listed in bullet points at the top of the email if you’re communicating several things in a mostly or all text based list so people can get a quick view of what the complete mailing contains - make sure at least one or more of those list items refers to that extra value content.

6. Visual Design Vs. Content Rich

If you are selling products, a really high quality design with click to buy action buttons is the most successful - (sign up for Borders Books mailing list to see a truly world class design).  If you’re not up to the task of maintaining a high end custom designed visual mailing each time, it’s best to keep graphics to a reasonable minimum but in that case your content needs to be high quality with headings in bold and a paragraph or maybe two at most for each heading.  If you have more to say or communicate, this is a perfect opportunity to provide links from each section to a related news article or information page on your web site, or blog article…

7. Track email campaign statistics for fine tuning

Absolutely use a service such as ConstantContact.com or VerticalResponse.com - their systems allow you to embed links in your mailings, and you can see statistics on how many people received the mailing, how many bounced, how many people opted out, how many opened it, how many clicked on each link.  Invaluable for refining future mailings! (and they’re the most cost effective solutions for maintaining a mailing list that will also ensure you’re not going to get your mailings blanket flagged as spam by the major email service providers!)

8. Set yourself apart

If your mailings are more content than visual - make it creative and fun, in a professional way.  The more recipients enjoy the content the more they’ll be looking forward to each subsequent mailing.   It will be one more thing to help set your mailings apart from the rest.

Alan

Blogging is all the rage - and it’s become a great way for business owners to help promote products or services beyond a standard otherwise static web site.  But what good is a blog if nobody finds it?   Search engine optimization for blogs requires proper planning.  Here are eight key steps to help you optimize your blog for SEO.
Step 1.  Category Naming

Most blogs allow you to create your own categories so that you can group your blog articles.  One of the first steps to optimizing a blog for search engine position value is to name your categories using your most important keyword phrases.

Step 2.  Article Name Seeding

Be sure to have an individual article’s top two phrases as part of the article name This is vital because the article’s name becomes the page Title and the URL for that article.  Of course if you make your article titles too long this will make it more difficult to capture your audience’s attention and if you attempt to abuse this technique purely for stuffing keywords in every article, you may eventually find your site penalized by the search engines.  So always try to find a balance in how far you go.

Step 3.  Content Content Content

Make sure each article has at least two or three paragraphs of content where you mix up the use of each individual word from your Article title keyword phrases. The more content, the more you can seed your phrases in a natural way and the more value is thus given those phrases. So five paragraphs is better than two, and eight is better than five.
Step 4.  Mix It Up

It’s okay to have one or two uses of each phrase in it’s original syntactical order, but it’s just as important to then use the individual words from a phrase either in reverse order if intelligently possible or split up.
Step 5.  Cross Link Articles

For more value on individual blog articles, provide links to them from other articles where the links are embedded in the article content, and where they are inside paragraphs where that paragraph discusses the contents of that article
Step 6.  Build Authority Relationships

Create other links within articles where those links go to 3rd party web sites – the more authoritative those 3rd party sites, the more your article will be seen as helpful, relevant and trustworthy for the specific keyword phrases related to the article.
Step 7.  Link Titles

Each link you embed in your site - either a link to another page on your site or a link out to another site should have a title in the link tag.  Most blog software allows you to add a title to the link from within your blog’s rich text editor and you need to take advantage of the opportunity.  Title’s should be appropriate to describing the page the link points to while incorporating at least one keyword phrase relevant to the landing page but the most value comes when that phrase is relevant to the page you’ve go the link on as well.

Step 8.  Build Inbound Authority

Link to individual articles in the blog or at the very least, the blog home page from other web sites, including your business web page, your LinkedIn profile page, etc…  Any sites you own should of course have a main link to your blog - so that link appears on every page of that web site.  Subit your link to the search engines and any web directory related to your business as well.  Consider sending out a press release through a web service such as PRWeb.com - where their SEO level or higher release service allows you to optimize that press release for SEO value - and embed at least one link to the blog in the release.  For $200 (current price as of 07/2008), it’s a bargain for obtaining high quality links back to your blog!

So there you have it - 8 steps to optimize your blog for SEO.  Now this is by no means the only 8 steps you’ll need to implement - distributing your blog through RSS, incorporating a sitemap.xml file, and all the other essential tasks for search engine optimization you can read about on my White Hat SEO Fundamentals page….  But if all you do is follow the above 8 steps, you’re at least starting on the right foot!

So Adobe and Google have announced that Google is now crawling and Indexing Flash content.  You can read Vanessa Fox’s write up with details here at search engine land.  This is yet the latest attempt by Adobe to snow-job designers and developers.  Ever since they first claimed to add “SEO friendly” capabilities several versions ago, I’ve laughed at such nonsense.  But now that Google is on the marketing hype bandwagon with this, I’m dismayed because I know most people won’t bother to investigate the limits and the implications of those limits and I’m appalled at Google’s complicit behavior…

Even though they state the limitations if you look closely enough, the marketing juggernaut has already taken it’s toll in countless news sites and tech sites reporting only the spin, or glossing over the limits.

Here are just a few of the most important reasons why it’s still a bad idea to try and create any deep content rich web site in Flash if you care about search engine optimization through on-site methods.

• 1.  No Meta Data
• 2.  No capacity to distinguish text formatting (so no h1, no bold, or strong, or italics, no bullet points, none of it.)
• 3.  You have to create your flash file in a way that results in having a separate URL associated with every major piece of content in the Flash file.
• 4.  You can only have one page Title if the entire site is in Flash so how are you supposed to optimize a 50 page site built entirely in Flash when you only have ONE page title?
• This is now leaving the door wide open for black hat hacks to stuff text into their Flash file for search engine indexing purposes and where a site visitor will NOT be able to tell such text is there, and where through the use of FLV and images, they can present you with whatever BS they want, and Google will have NO WAY to know.

 Do I really need to go on here people?

Google’s response to such concerns is essentially “this is the same issue with PDF documents, and we index those, so what’s the problem?”

OH MY GOD.

How many web sites that do really well in the search engine results are made up of 50 pages that are all PDF documents?

Sure,  if you have a sufficiently optimized HTML page that happens to link to a PDF document, and where that PDF document’s focus is related to the page from which it is linked, a search may bring that PDF back in the results.

But we’re not talking about one page content here, we’re talking about entire web sites.  That need to have dozens or hundreds of keyword phrases, grouped into tiny bite-size chunk groups of three or four phrases per page.  And where every page’s connection from an optimization perspective to each other page’s relevance relationship matter.

So Adobe and Google, as much as I love you both, do everyone who is less intuitive and visionary as I am (having known every time they have claimed Flash is a viable solution for SEO that they were full of it) a favor and be more forthcoming about the severity of these still existing limitations.