Search Marketing Answers

Sending out email to thousands, tens or even hundreds of thousands of recipients can be a very effective way to get new business, keep existing clients thinking about you, and bringing repeat business back. Before you can even consider what your mailing should say or look like, what offer(s) you want to make to recipients, how often to send them out, or any of the other “time of mailing” issues, you need to first find the most cost-efficient way to send the email out. Then you need to know how you’re supposed to determine the effectiveness of the mailing.

In the age of spam, there are definitely right and wrong ways, as well as very efficient and also very costly ways as well.

Bulk Email - A Brief History

When the concept of sending out large amounts of email to lists of recipients first emerged in the early days of the Internet, the earliest solutions came from software that allowed you to set up and send your mailings from the comfort of your own computer. There were no limits on the size of the lists, what should or should not have been included, or any rules about what qualified as spam.

That was because spam didn’t exist as a concept until those first solutions really gained in popularity. Combine software that lets you send out tens or hundreds of thousands of email messages at one time with mailing lists provided to you where you personally had no prior contact with the recipient, let alone knew whether they had any desire to receive your mailing, and spam was born.

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Government Regulation

As the problem grew severe, the U.S. Government stepped in and in 2003 issued the CAN SPAM act. This regulation stipulates several requirements that email must follow in order to not be deemed as spam.

The problem with this of course, is one of enforcement and compliance oversight. There are just too many originators of email, and too little willingness on the part of mailers or too little knowledge of the rules.

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Industry Self Regulation

So in recent years, the major service providers including Microsoft, Google, AOL, Yahoo and others, stepped it up and began writing software to specifically look for email that would potentially be considered spam according to their own corporate view. Smaller mail server owners also got into it as well. And if any of them deem that an email coming from your mail server is spam, you can now see your mail server “black listed”. Meaning that from that point forward, either temporarily, or permanently, any email from that same source would be blocked. Regardless of whether it is spam or not.

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Why Not Manage The Service Yourself?

Why not just get your own mail servers? Or pay your current Web Hosting or Web Site Developer to let you use their servers? Or use one of the top ten Free Email Providers services?

Setup, Maintenance and Compliance Costs

Setting up your own mail servers is proably not the most cost efficient means of sending out regular mailings to large volumes of recipients any more. Between the costs of the hardware, software and IT infrastructure both in initial costs as well as ongoing, plus having to set your system up so that every mailing complies with the CAN-SPAM act as well as the ever changing rules of the major ISPs, it’s too cost-inefficient.

Outgoing Email Limits To GMail, MSN, Yahoo Mai, AOL Mail, Comcast, RoadRunner…

Every major service provider allows you to set up mailing lists, but they all now “meter” or “throttle” your alloted mailing capacity. This means that if you try to send one email to more than 10 or 15 or 25 recipients at one time, their systems will often obliterate the email after the first X recipients.

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The Answer - Compliance Based Mass Mailing Solution Providers

In order to help resolve the problem of legitimate business owners having their mailings trigger blacklisting flags, service providers have cropped up recently where their sole or primary function is to give you the ability to set up mailings, maintain mailing lists, and send out mass email, while ensuring your mailings comply with the CAN SPAM act regulations as well as the anti-spam policies of the major service providers.

Two of these that I routinely recommend to my clients are Constant Contact and Vertical Response.

I manage many of these accounts on behalf of my clients, and have trained several others in a very short time-frame how to manage it themselves.

Constant Contact, among other similar service providers, does one thing as their primary business. Mass Email Campaigns. Some of my clients have upwards of 50,000 to 60,000 subscribers. With Constant contact and Vertical Response, these top clients send out as many as one or two mailings every week, without problems.

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They Do All The Heavy Lifting For very low fees

Constant Contact does all the work - and when you send out a mailing, their system sends it out in batches. Every mailing implements every single requirement to comply with the CAN SPAM act and meets all the top providers guidelines. When those guidelines change, it’s seamless to you, and you don’t have to do anything different.

So for one small monthly fee, you can send out as many mailings as you’d like. (Although it is not wise to ever send out more than perhaps two mailings a week - one a week being ideal from both safe-best practices as well as ideal brand building)

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Effortless List and Campaign Management

You can split your list into multiple groups, and every time a mailing goes out you can not only see how many people got the email, but how many opened it, how many clicked on each link in the email itself, anyone that unsubscribes does so from within the email and the lists are updated automatically. You can see how many formerly good email addresses are now bad, and so much more…

It’s infinitely more cost effective and prudent to use such services.

Constant Contact and Vertical Response have different pricing models, but otherwise both are highly effective and offer both pre-designed mailing wizards as well as the ability to create completely custom email.

As a member of the web site optimization and internet marketing profession, I am constantly helping clients avoid scams. They come in all shapes and sizes. Some even make me sick. Their deceptive, manipulative methods are a blight on our profession. Tonight I was on LinkedIn, where I look to answer legitimate questions regarding areas I specialize in. I saw a question entitled

Get 1 Million Real Visitors For Free!

Of course, I knew it for what it was without having to read the “question”, but of course, I love seeing the newest spin on the oldest scams… Here’s what the person who sumbitted it wrote as the details to the “question”:

The operative words here as far as I am concerned are “REAL visitors to your site”.

So just to confirm my intuition, I went to the site listed. Before I did, I made sure my McAfee SiteAdvisor browser tool was operating properly (a great free tool that shows the status of a site you’re visiting on your browser’s status bar - green is safe, yellow is questionable and red is dangerous. In this case, the site was “safe”, but only because they don’t have hidden software ready to automatically download without your knowledge…

And here’s what this site says about “how it works”:

So is this really a scam? Or should I get sued for even putting this up on my blog?

Now why would I slam this guy’s posting at LinkedIn, and why would I label it as a scam, deceptive and manipulative? After all, I have no desire to be slapped with a lawsuit for libel or slander right?

Well let’s consider the posting. It was at LinkedIn, and the category was in the Internet Marketing category. I suppose if there was a category for “Click fraud” or “Shady ways to get millions of visitors that don’t really come to your site for any other reason than to build your traffic statistics”, I wouldn’t have a problem here.

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So if all you want is to get people to show up at your web site for 15 seconds then leave, then I suppose you can if you want to. but obviously if you want people who are going to come to your site to buy your products or hire you for your services or read your blog or participate in your social network in an interactive and return-visit way, then the offer is most definitely in my opinion, deceptive and manipulative.

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 Update:  when I saw this question posted and did my research, I felt obligated to supply an “answer”, to help warn potentially unsuspecting small business owners who might see it and out of desperation, think they should participate.  I essentially said what I say here, but in a synopsis.  I also flagged the question to alert LinkedIn staff to this issue.

It’s now two hours after the original question was posted and I am happy to report that that question is “no longer available”.

Do you want to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in revenue? How much would you spend to pay for a single display ad in a newspaper for just one day? Or for an ad in a magazine that may or may not be seen by some fraction of your prospective market? A lot more over time than it costs to use PPC if you use it wisely.

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You see them every time you do a search.

Sponsored Ads.

You know - those ads at the top of most search engine results pages and/or down the right side of those pages.

“Sponsored” meaning that someone is paying Google (AdWords) or Yahoo (Yahoo Search Marketing) or Microsoft (MSN Live) money for their ad to come up in such a prominent location on the search engine. Above millions of other listings.

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So what does it cost, and is it worth it?

Well, the cost is “Per click”. You pay the search engine company only if someone actually clicks on that link to go to your web site. And it’s on a “bid” process - whereby three, five, fifty or several hundred companies all want to be listed for a particular search phrase. Some are willing to pay more than others. Others just want to be found, even if it means their ad comes up on the 2nd page or the 3rd page. So they pay less.

In all my years of managing pay per click advertising accounts for clients, whether they be luggage retailers, artists, lawyers, jewelry makers, personal coaches.. I have seen the cost per click for being in the top results of sponsored ads range anywhere from a few cents per click all the way up to $97 per click. The more fiercely competitive the industry, the more money that is at stake to get just one customer or client, the higher the cost per click.

So in an industry like luggage, the cost could typically be anywhere from $1 per click up to $6 or $10, depending on the particular search phrase or the time of year. (Winter holidays the cost goes up of course).
For attorneys where one client can generate millions of dollars in jury awards, it’s in the $60 to $100 range usually. For a personal coach or event planner, it can be 25 cents a click up to a couple dollars or so.

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Can I afford this?

Okay - so if I advertise in the sponsored listings, and if each click through to my site costs me $1, will this cost me thousands of dollars every month? The good news is that you can set a maximum you are willing to spend on any single click, or as a total within a day or month.

Actually it’s not such a cut and dried thing.Just because someone comes to your web site doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed that they’ll buy. First, was your selection of keyword phrases and your ad copy chosen to target your ideal prospective client or customer? And once they were at your web site, is your site so compelling that more people than not actually stay long enough and feel motivated enough to convert to a sale?

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So how do I succeed with PPC advertising?

The process of creating a successful advertising campaign with PPC advertising is a vast and potentially all consuming one, and there are not specific hard and fast rules that fit every situation.

But generally, there are some pretty common factors, a little of which I have already touched on above. Rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive book-length answer here, I’ll instead provide a bit more clarity here, and leave it up to you to choose to find out more if you’re still intrigued by the possibility.

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AD CAMPAIGN QUALITY

Choose the absolute best keyword phrases.

Sometimes this means choosing a phrase that is searched less often than others, but where there is less competition among advertisers, and thus the cost is less to get you higher up in the positioning of your ad.

Fewer high quality phrases is sometimes better than scattershot low quality phrases

If you know of fifty possible phrases people use to search for your offerings, it may be better to only put your cost per click dollars into the higher performing or the more common phrases to one degree or another, rather than trying to spread your limited budget too thin. Alternatively, you might try and experiment for a couple months only going with less popular or less expensive phrases but more of them. Only your actual results will tell you how to proceed and what really works for your needs.

Ad Variations

Create a variety of ads, experimenting with the wording. And sometimes, changing the wording on an ad makes sense just because of the change of a season, or special promotions you run, or because of something happening in the news that relates to your products or services that your ad can speak to… Over time, you will be able to see which performs better as related to which keyword phrases.

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Google or Yahoo or MSN

I will say this but it’s just my opinion- while Yahoo has it’s place, in my experience managing countless campaigns for clients all across the country, Google’s results far outshine those at Yahoo over and over again. Yahoo is actually much better suited to display advertising. But by all means, if you have a large enough marketing budget, put some money into both - building brands is always a good thing if you can aford it. MSN of course can possibly help, simply because of the eyeballs it reaches, but when dealing with percentages, most of my clients find the most success with Google.

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How Big A Budget?

It’s also about having the ability to devote enough budget. For example, if you have less than $500 a month or $1,000 a month, or $5,000 a month, depending on the cost per click, if the daily portion gets used up early in the day, that means your ads may not be seen by the vast majority of people who might actually be your best prospects. So then you have to address that.

If your offering is geographically located, and you are trying to reach a specific market on the physical map, you’ll need to also work in geo-location techniques for more refined targeting.

Then there’s the issue of needing to be able to stay with it long enough to experiment with variations on phrases, variations on ad copy…

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It’s as much an art as a science.

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Determining success

Having the conversion code from Google or Yahoo on your site - on the confirmation page or the thank you for contacting us page is really one of the only ways to know what the ultimate cost is per conversion.

Having a site visitor trending solution such as Google Analytics on your site is also paramount to helping you refine things along the way as well. And you can tie Google Analytics in with conversion tracking for even more clarity.

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Combine PPC and Organic for Best Results

On a final note, the absolute best success comes when you have PPC ads AND you rank very high on the first page of Google or Yahoo. People conducting a search that see your ad in both the sponsored area and organic listings does a great deal to build your brand identity and motivate more people to click on either based on whether they don’t mind clicking on a sponsored ad or they only click on organic listings…

It’s definitely possible to find success with enough footwork, but also only if once someone gets to your web site they stay and are drawn into your actual product or service offerings!

In the early days of the web it was a good policy to hold multiple domain names for one web site for copyright, or domain branding purposes, that’s no longer the case - multiple domain names pointing to the same content is now a negative because it causes perceived duplicate content.

Google determines content and it’s related ranking based upon the unique domain name that information resides within. If two domain names have the same content Google tries to determine which of the two domains is either more authoritative,  or more established. It will then give a higher rank to whichever domain meets their criteria.

The reason for this process is Google’s desire to provide only the most relevant and most authoritative information possible to someone searching for that information.

So when two domain names point at the exact same content in the same location, chaos can ensue. It’s not unusual for some or most of the content to show up in Google under one domain, but have other portions of that content show up under the other domain.

When this occurs, the content and pages that show up under the second domain’s name, that content is discounted at the first, and thus the page ranking and authoritative weight of that first domain is negatively impacted - less content is associated with that domain, less pages.

This holds true whether you have to unique and different domains, such as www.site1.com and www.site2.com or you have site1.mysite.com and site2.mysite.com - Google sees these all as unique domains.

And to a lesser degree, the same problem can occur when you syndicate content - even just one page of information from your site out onto the web at other web sites. Vanessa Fox has a great blog post at her web site that specifically discusses duplicate content issues with syndication, and how you can avoid that problem.

If you have the need to own more than one domain name for copyright or branding ownership reasons, then only one domain name should be the primary. All other domain names should be set up so that they are configured with a 301 permanent redirect applied, pointing toward the primary domain. This allows you to have several domain names, but tells the search engine that only one is the currently accurate location of your content, and thus the authority domain.

Sitemap.xml files - the best way to get into the search engines

CAVEAT - This is a VERY long blog article. You may want to go grab a cup of coffee, your favorite chai tea or a venti sugar free vanilla latte before you sit down to read this article!

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For those of you who don’t know what these are, they are NOT the “old school” Site Maps - a page on your web site that lists links to all the other pages on the site in one place. Instead, a sitemap.xml file is a plain text file that sits next to your site’s viewable pages on the web server, but it’s only seen and used by the search engines. It tells the search engines what pages on your site you want indexed, and it lets them know their order of importance as well as the general frequency by which to re-index those pages.

The great debate

One of the many debated topics in the SEO world is whether a web site even needs a sitemap.xml file, let alone whether you should use this in submitting your site, or that you even need to submit it at all. Some people believe that free site submission is all you need to do - without a sitemap.xml file - leave the work to the search engines and their automated indexing “bots”. Others believe that the web is so prolific (which it is) and search engine indexing “bots” are so good (which they are are not) that if you simply create your web site, eventually it will be found and indexed (which it may, if other sites link to you and if those links don’t have a “no-follow” tag, and if you don’t mind waiting upwards of FOREVER to be indexed!)

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Directly Submitting Your Site - The Options

Currently Google, Yahoo and MSN (as well as all the other search engines) allow you to submit your site for inclusion by one or more various methods

• Search Submit Basic
• Paid Search Inclusion
• Sitemap Submit

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Search Submit Basic

The free search submit systems - where you simply go to a web page at that search engine, and enter the URL of your home page, has been around forever (in Internet Search Engine time). Submitting a site this way means that Google or Yahoo’s, MSN’s or Asks or “Joes Generic Search engine” systems will “eventually” get around to going to that web address and automatically poking around - navigating through the various links you have on the site, trying to determine what pages there are and what to index.

It’s a hit and miss method, and can usually take weeks. Once it’s done, if that automated poking misses some links (for a number of reasons) or scans and indexes pages you may not want indexed, you end up with shoddy results.

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No Guarantee!

Sadly, if you have ever read the fine print at the top search engines (I have as part of my work) you’ll discover that NONE of the top search engines actually guarantee that you’ll be listed, if they ever do get to scanning your site this way.

The following statement can be found at Google’s free search submit page:

“We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.“

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Site Submit Tools

At this point I need to mention the plethora of tools, software and services (some free, some for a fee) that claim they’ll do the submit work for you. There are many such offerings - Submit Express, FreeWebSubmission, IBusinessPromoter, BlastEngine, INeedHits, and on and on and on…

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Site Submit Tools - Worth the effort?

There’s a couple fundamental reasons that I do not use nor do I trust such solutions. First, every search engine has it’s own rules about how much to include in Page titles, Meta keyword and Meta description fields - many of these submit services try to force only one set within that service’s rules, to everywhere. Others make you fill out two, three or more sets of fields. Well what about my client’s 50 page web site - the one where I or my team spent 30 hours coming up with unique titles, keyword sets and desccriptions foe every page on the site? Do I have to submit all 50 pages separately now through your “we’ll submit it for you” system? Please - save me the agony!

In my experience (yours may vary), I would prefer that the search engines come to my client’s sites and take what they need, and leave the rest.

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Site Submit Tools - Submit your site to 5,000 search engines for free!

Next, many of these solution providers claim they’ll submit your site to 100, 1,000 or even 5,000 search engines and directories. WOW - you’ll send my site info to 5,000 places, for free? That’s GREAT! I don’t have to do a thing and my site will become famous overnight! YAY!

NOT.

Now, I don’t have any problems with “Jacinda Jones Search Engine” or “Petey’s little Web Directory” wanting to exist or even maybe some day overtaking Google as the number one source for web site listings. Really - this is what the Internet should be all about. Except I happen to know for a fact that many web sites that claim to be search engines or web directories are really cloaked money machines - set up really for the purpose of loading their site up with AdSense ads or so they can charge for inclusion. If a web site’s primary purpose is either of these, that’s a BAD thing - Google may even penalize your web site for being listed there!

SO again, personally, I would prefer to avoid the aggravation and the potential harm. You are, of course, free to use such services, at your own peril. I don’t have that luxury because I have a responsibility to my business web clients - legitimate business owners who desperately need to do all the positive things they can to compete in today’s Internet, without the risks that come with such services.

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Paid Search Inclusion -Guaranteed

Some search engines, like Yahoo, offer you the ability to pay them for the privilege of being found in their search engine. Yes, that’s right - pay a one-time fee (or a one-time set up fee and an annual inclusion fee) and they might scan your site sooner, or maybe even actually index your site sooner.

HUH? Maybe? Might? Yes that’s correct. Yahoo “guarantees” that if you pay them, you’ll be indexed AND included. Except.

Except if your site doesn’t meet one or more of their twenty three (23) guidelines for non-inclusion. That’s right, they want to ensure that only worthwhile sites get indexed. A lofty goal. Except it’s murky - a gray area issue - and open to interpretation. So what if you are 100% sure you have a valid, legitimate site worthy of inclusion (based on your beliefs)? You don’t have to worry then - right?

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Wrong.

I manage hundreds of web sites. Through my and my teams efforts, many of them come up on the first page of organic rankings at Google. Most of those same sites also come up on the first page at Yahoo and MSN as well. Except one site. That one site comes up on the first page of Google for over three dozen keyword phrases (we’ve done a LOT of work to get those results). So where does it come up in Yahoo? No-where. (The site IS indexed, but it does NOT come up in a search for ANY of those phrases. - Hasn’t for over a year.) Why? Because before I inherited the site, it was banned from Yahoo. One or more of those guidelines had been violated, apparently. I wrote email after email, made phone call after phone call, re-worked the entire site top to bottom to try and comply with those “gray” guidelines. (No, it’s not a porn site - no adult content at all actually - no profanity, no defamation of anyone, etc etc etc)…

The last paragraph on the Yahoo Search Submit page states:

Treatment of Paid Content

Yahoo! designed its Search Submit programs to improve the quality of its search databases and thereby enhance the search user experience. Therefore, URLs submitted via such programs are subject to these guidelines and any other additional guidelines or policies adopted by Yahoo! from time to time.

Note in that last sentence: “and any other additional guidelines or policies adapted by Yahoo! from time to time.”

That means that just because Yahoo offers a “Guaranteed” result, even their own Paid Submission page states that they can not guarantee they will place your site in the search engine. And that they can make up the rules as they go! So why pay for a service when you can get the work done without paying a fee - that way, if your site is acceptable it will be listed - and you’ve saved $49 per page submitted (yes they are willing to charge you for every page you want them to list!)

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Sitemap Submit - The best approach

So let’s say you have a web site - legitimate, professional, and well designed. Before you built the site or had it built, you read all my articles on SEO and you read (and implemented) all the guidelines from my white hat SEO fundamentals page.

Once the site is complete, I highly recommend you create a sitemap.xml file. Don’t worry if you’ve never created an XML file in your life - it’s not really difficult if you follow the method I show below. Or, there are many programs and web sites that will generate a sitemap.xml file for you for free or a fee.

I personally prefer not to use such services because they can sometimes generate entries to pages you don’t want to include (like links to 3rd party web sites, which should never be included!), or I’ve even seen a situation where one service actually generated a sitemap.xml file using improper coding. As an example of this, I ran my own blog site through one of these generators, and it listed one page five times!

So for me, as important as this step in the process is, if you just follow the sample I provide, you’ll be set.

If you’re still not sure about how to do it, or completely confused, you can hire a professional, but don’t be surprised if that “professional” uses one of those web based services or programs, or charges you an arm and a leg. If you’ve got a 50 page web site that’s three layers deep, it might be worth the fee - a choice you’ll need to make. We generate sitemap.xml files for our clients all the time - and it typically takes anywhere from 10 minutes upwards of a half hour at most.

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Creating a sitemap.xml file

First, like any HTML type page, this has to be created in a plain text editor. Don’t try to use MS Word or another word processing program - they stick odd hidden formatting code in files that causes problems on the web! So SimpleText, or NotePad, will work fine. If you know DreamWeaver, you can create the file as long as you use DreamWeaver’s Code view.

Here’s the structure:

The first line of code informs the search engines that this is an XML file and how to read it.

The next line is the opening of the “URLSET” - meaning that from this point forward, until this tag is closed (with the </urlset> line), everything in between is information about one group of URLs - or one web site.

Note then how I have four web pages listed. Each one is within it’s own “url” tag.

The actual web address (url) for each page is identified between the “location” (loc) tags.

The “changefreq” line informs the search engine how often this page is expected to change. (Don’t worry - this is only an approximation - if your pages change more frequently or less, it’s not a bad thing - not all search engines will make use of this information, and those that do (for now) will use it as a general guide).

The “priority” reference is supposed to inform the search engine how relatively important this page is compared to a search someone does. So for example, if you want to list your Contact page in the file, but would prefer people find your home page, then the home page would have a priority of 1.0 and the contact page would perhaps be given a priority of 0.5

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Again though, this is all as a general guideline. And you can always come back at a later date and revise the file. But it’s more important to perform thorough SEO work on the pages, than it is to worry whether you should rate a page at 0.7 or 0.9 for priority. If you’re not sure, just rate them all at 1.0 and let the search engines do the rest.

So the above code image is just an example. Your site might have five entries, or it might have fifty.

How do you know how many it will need? Simple. Go to your web site. When you get to the home page, that’s the first entry. Then click on every link on your site that you want to be sure will be indexed at the search engines. Copy the web address that comes up in the web address field of your browser for each one.

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CUSTOM URL’s - Shopping Carts, Member Areas, and odd information in the URL line..

What if you own a web store - a shopping cart system? And let’s say that if you click on the category link, then click down into an individual product. The URL might end up looking like this:

http://www.mysite.com/shop/cat=3&pid=908394&la=de&da=whatnot

The search engines used to choke on this kind of web page reference (and some still do!) The good news is that Google knows how to handle that - so if you really feel that you have to have that page indexed at Google, then go ahead and put that page in the sitemap.xml file.

Of course, if you build (or have the site built) properly, and if all you do is include the top five pages in your sitemap.xml file, when the search engines do go about their automated indexing, those other pages will eventually end up being indexed anyhow. So it’s most vital that at the very least, you include the top pages for your site.

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Checking the validity of the file

Okay so once you think you’ve got the file created. Save the file as a plain text file and be sure that you name it exactly as sitemap.xml

Once you’ve saved it, open the file in Firefox or Internet Explorer on the PC or Firefox on a Mac. If you’ve done your work properly, it will look something like this:

Ignore that gray box - a sitemap.xml file is not supposed to have any style information associated with it!

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If you made a mistake - like leaving out that </urlset> tag, you will see something like this:

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or that same bad file seen in Firefox

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So the goal is to actually be able to see the file from inside your browser and have it look like it does in your text editor.

If you need more information, or if you really want to get into the nitty gritty of what can go into a sitemap.xml file, and if you’re really geeky, check out Google’s in depth sitemap.xml instruction page on the sitemap protocol.

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OK - NOW WHAT?- Time to post the file to your web site.

Once you’re pretty sure you did it right, you need to get the file up on your web server - the computer where your web site is located. And it has to be placed in the same location (folder) as your site’s home page.

If you have file transfer access (FTP) to your web site, you can upload the file yourself. - It should go in the same place as your site index (index.html or index.php or index.cfm or whatever the main site index is).

If you do not have FTP access, contact your web host and explain that you need them to put it there for you. If they tell you your site already HAS a sitemap.xml file - GREAT! - but don’t believe them! I have personally dealt with professional web hosting companies that claimed this and when I checked I found they were lying!

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How do you check to be sure the file is there?

Go to http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml - in Firefox or Internet Explorer. If it’s there, you will see it exactly as I showed you how you’d see it if you looked at it in your web browser on your local computer!

If you get a “404 page not found” error, or if you simply get “redirected” to your site’s home page, or anywhere but that file, it’s not in the right place.

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Okay - so I have the file there, now how do I tell Google it’s there?

I could write sixteen articles on how to use Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer - so I’ll leave the details for those to another few lessons. For the purposes of this article, I’ll provide the links to those sites.

Whatever you do though, if you’ve come this far, you can definitely get through the Google Webmaster Tools environment and the Yahoo Site Explorer environment - just be patient and take your time! (or send me an email asking for help!)

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The most important thing here is that if you do this properly, once you submit your sitemap.xml file to Google and Yahoo for inclusion (at no charge!) you can expect to see your site indexed within anywhere from a couple days to up to a week, at most! That’s weeks or months faster than any other free method, and less expensive than the slew of fee based services that aren’t so great anyhow!

Google Webmaster Tools

Note - With Google, you should first sign up for their webmaster tools program then submit your site. You get a lot more services along with it, it’s all free, and it’s great (although lately their site verify service has been having major glitches. - note that you do NOT have to verify your site to submit the sitemap.xml file - verifying your site lets them show you statistics and report errors on your site to you but if their own verify system isn’t working it can be very annoying and confusing! - so initially just use their system to submit the sitemap.xml file. Then if you want later, you can experiment and explore the verify service.

Yahoo Site Explorer Program

Note - with Yahoo - on the link above, you’ll see a bot on the right side for submitting your url or “feed” in this case, the “Feed” is your sitemap.xml file - so put your link in there (http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml)

As soon as you click the button to “add my site” you’ll have to sign into Yahoo (or create an account). It can be quite annoying if you’re not paying attention but well worth the few minutes it takes.

Again, if you get lost on any of this, please contact me and I’ll be happy to do what I can to help!

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A word about robots.txt files

I will devote another article to the importance of robots.txt files (another plain text file that sits at your web site next to the index page and your sitemap.xml file) - but need to mention that all web sites should definitely have robots.txt files as well. If you want more info on them now, check out the wiki entry for them at wikipedia.

Alan

One of the more challenging aspects of building your web site’s search engine ranking is the process of obtaining enough links back to your site that Google and the other top search engines deem valuable.

Quality vs. Quantity

The more high quality links back to your site from other sites, the more your site is considered important, authoritative, and relevant. Why does it matter how many other people link back to my site? Well let’s say you have a site that has the exact same quality content as your biggest competitor, they were built around the same time, and they’ve both got world class SEO implemented throughout, using identical keyword phrases in all the right ways - how is Google supposed to determine whether your site is more relevant then your competitors?

They do it by looking to see the links back - if there are 1,000 web sites that have links coming back to your competitor’s site but only five coming back to yours, Google sees this as an indication that more people consider your competitor’s site as important and valuable, thus more relevant to someone searching for what you offer.

Even though back-links are not the number one most important criteria for quality results in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), they can have so much weight when achieved properly that some of the on-site SEO work you might have otherwise needed to perform becomes less important.

Unfortunately, it can often take years and countless hours finding ways to get other web site owners to provide a link back to your site. Or your competitor might have an “in” with a really popular web site and can get links back from them but you can’t (and this is a problem then because having one link back from a hugely popular web site can result in much more value than having links back from dozens of less popular web sites!).

Another factor - if you have a link back from CNN.com, that’s worth more than a link back from “Mary’s personal page of links”.  Because CNN.com itself is considered an authoritative site.

Also, if a link comes back from a web site that is related to your site in some significant way (similar market focus, similar keyword phrases) the more weight that link will be than if it comes from a site where the focus is completely different than yours.

So what’s an honest small or mid-size business owner left to do? How do we overcome the time and cost factors?

The Power of PR -The Fastest Way to a potential Plethora of links

Traditional media marketing experts pretty much all agree that good PR is worth ten times its weight in advertising. Public Relations (PR) in the traditional sense, consists of a whole host of methods, strategies and techniques for getting your brand, your offerings in front of your target market. Web PR can be boiled down to just a few key strategies, the most direct and potentially most valuable being Press Releases.

PR for Web 2.0

Press Releases traditionally involve hiring a PR specialist, having a well written release created, and paying them to distribute your release to all the “right” media outlets. Then it’s a matter of sitting back and hoping - waiting and hoping that the powers that be in those media outlets think your story is worthy of their ability to get your release out into the world.

Well, I’ve got news for you! PR is no longer the sacred cow (no offense to anyone who views cows as being sacred) that it once was. Thanks to the evolution of the Internet, there are a number of Press Release distribution services that offer the same or even more powerful services - and the best by far, in my experience, is PRWeb.

PRWeb.com offers four levels of press release submission:

• Standard visibility
• Social Media visibility
• SEO visibility
• Media visibility

Because this blog is about search engine optimization, and because my primary role in consulting with web clients regarding site promotion relates to online marketing as it relates to SEO, I always recommend clients go with either the SEO visibility (currently $200) or Media visibility (currently $360) levels. While you may think $200 - $360 is a lot of money, if you use the PRWeb release submission service and properly seed your release for SEO value, both in accordance with white hat SEO fundamentals as well as through the plethora of SEO related options they offer, within just a couple days of submitting your release you can potentially see hundreds of new links back to your web site!

If you don’t have the time or energy to submit the release yourself and do so while implementing proper SEO techniques, you can pay the PRWeb staff to do the work for you. Personally I always do all the work, but that’s because my clients pay us for our time and expertise.

The Link Building Magic of Press Releases

So how can a press release get you all those links back to your site? Well, at the top Media Visibility level, your release is going to be submitted on your behalf to all the top news services that matter - the AP Wire service, google Alerts, and Yahoo Alerts for example. And just think of how many news related web sites automatically display content that comes from the AP wire service? How many blogs and topic-specific web sites have news feeds built into them that display those press releases? A LOT! So every time a web site pulls news feeds within the topic or topics you designate in the release submission process, it’s going to get your press releases!

Going Stale - Long Term Repetition

While some web sites will retain news feeds indefinitely, many will automatically archive or delete older feeds from time to time. In my experience, I’ve seen the value of a press release maintain itself with the majority of links for several months, then begin to taper off, and ultimately, most of those links will disappear. So it’s important to submit a new press release every few months at the very least

Results will vary

Exactly how many back links you obtain as a result of this method will depend greatly on several factors. How “hot” are the topics or categories you associate to that release? How news worthy is your message? There’s really no way in advance to know exactly how many links you’ll get regardless of the categories (always associate your release with as many categories as you can legitimately do) that your release fits. Yet it’s definitely worth the effort.

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At WebSight Design, Inc., we manage the search engine optimization and search marketing initiatives for many clients, big and small. Quite often we inherit web sites built by someone else, and most of the time when that happens, I almost cringe at the keywords and page titles used. Too often someone didn’t understand the importance of properly selecting the best possible keywords or properly seeding page titles and meta tags for search optimization.

LESSON 1
PAGE TITLES AND META TAGS

Keyword selection is VERY important nowadays - how you choose the keywords, and how you apply them on the site needs to be done in accordance with the current methods by which Google and Yahoo evaluate the importance of those keywords as they relate to the descriptions and the text on the page they are embedded, as all are then related to the actual search phrase used to find the information.

Here’s some very important rules to go by when choosing keywords and implementing them:

1.THE BEST KEYWORD PHRASES
The most frequently searched phrase is not always the best. For example, if 25,000 people searched using the word “map” and only 500 people searched using the words “map of Houston” then you are much better off using “map of Houston” because it’s a more refined qualifier - just getting tens of thousands of site visitors is not the goal - getting qualified visitors is. (See my page on White Hat SEO to learn more about how to choose the best key word phrases.)

2. SEEDING KEYEWORDS IN THE META TAGS AND TITLE

a) PAGE TITLE
the most important “off-page” element is the page title. You should always include the company name in the page title, followed by the top three, four or five keyword phrases FOR THAT PAGE. This is very important to understand - just stuffing any keywords in the title tag is useless if those same phrases are not the primary focus for that page. Never have any single word repeated more than THREE times in the page title. SO if you have Houston Map | Texas Map | Harris County Map then you have the word “Map” three times.

The best way to put a title on a page is to have the company name, followed by the top phrases for that page, separated by the “pipe” symbol like this:
Key Maps, Inc. | Houston Map | Texas Map | Harris County Map

Note how the word Map appears 3 times and the word Maps appears 1 time in my example - this is okay.

The reason we use the pipe symbol is commas and other special characters can confuse some search engines and the pipe symbol gives visual clarity to someone looking at your listing in the search engines.

There are some people who say the Title should never be more than 65 characters long, or less. This is not true, however some search engines will only display the first 65 characters.

For some of my sites, Google displays up to 68 including spaces.

And Yahoo displays up to 118

So the most important phrases are all that should be in the title, but you can go up to 100 characters or more if you need to (the tail end just won’t show up to a search results page).

b) META KEYWORDS FIELD
Google no longer uses this field, but Yahoo and other search engines do! My policy is to just take the exact words in their exact order from the page title, and put that into the Meta keywords field but replace that “pipe” symbol with commas. That’s all there is to it. Never put a comma between two or more words in a single phrase - so the phrase Houston Maps should not be “Houston,Maps” because this tells the search engines that these are two separate phrases!

c) META DESCRIPTION
This should be a descriptive paragraph up to 200 characters including spaces.  Some search engines will only display the first 150 characters so you may want to stick to that limit, or at least get the most important content in that portion.

You can have your keywords for that page in the description, however it is most important to remember what this element is for…

When someone does a search, and they see your listing in the results, you’ll see either that page’s Meta Description field, or just what appears to be some text that’s extracted from the page itself.  If you write a well formatted natural sounding Meta description, it’s more likely that this is what you’ll see on the search results page.  So the best practice here is to write something that will motivate that person to click on your link instead of someone elses…

If you do include any of the keyword phrases in your description, they don’t have to be in the same sequence as the Title tag - again - it’s about what sounds the most natural and enticing, or what you think will draw that click.

(Personal admission - for a long time, I insisted in the practice of getting every phrase into a description field.  And many of my client sites still have those.  Google sometimes shows those, and sometimes not.  Since the description field apparently doesn’t affect our client’s rankings at Google, and those clients all have great click-through rates, I haven’t gone back to change those just for the sake of doing it…)

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Having a web site redesigned from time to time can be a good thing.  Maybe your visitors will see a fresh look and think they should spend more time on the site.  Maybe you’ve come up with a way to better organize the flow of information, or make the site experience more intuitive to use.

The biggest problem with this from a search engine optimization perspective is whether you seriously consider how much time, energy and work went into optimizing your site the last time - you know - all those hours you or your search optimization consultant put into properly seeding every one of the fifty pages on your site….

It simply boggles my mind that clients come to us from time to time and say how they hired someone to give the site a completely new look and feel, only to have me discover that no consideration was given to search engine optimization in that process, and where the results are 50 or 60 hours of SEO work are trashed.

Meta tags are gone.  Image alt tags and HREF link titles are gone.  Div, table and section labels are gone.  On-page in-links, bolding, italics, and lists are gone…

All the things we do on a site’s pages are trashed.

Fortunately, some of these clients are willing to pay us to do the work all over again.  And some of them even have no problem with the fact that we now have to apply 301 redirects to all the pages from the previous version of the site, now that those fifty pages are no longer going to be valid in the search engine indexes.

Yet they don’t seem to get the fact that the process can cause massive drops in search ranking.  Some of which might not be re-gained for months….

What really gets me is when they have the design changes made without giving us the ability to do the re-optimizing, have the changed site go live, and months later come to us and say “how come my site doesn’t come up on the first page at Google anymore…”

So if you are going to do a major overhaul to your web site - check with your SEO consultant first okay?