Symetri Internet Marketing

15 Tips For A Successful Facebook Ads Program

2011-06-17T08:34:00.003-04:00

15 Great Tips for Developing Facebook Ads by Adam Riff from Search Engine Land

1. Automate Your Creative Refresh & Rotate Ads Often
Like Google, Facebook makes its money when a user clicks an ad. As such, it’s in their interest to drive CTR. Since Facebook users can easily get banner blindness, the social network values ad freshness above all else.

It is arguably the most critical factor in a successful Facebook paid social campaign. Make sure you rotate your ads often and if possible automate this rotation so it’s constantly changing every week.

2. Segment ‘Bins’ & Micro-target
The beauty of Facebook targeting is it allows you to get super-granular. And, as we know, segmentation in any marketing program leads to efficiency. Paid social advertisers should take advantage of this by targeting as many relevant demographic bins as possible and creating ads that specifically speak to those demographics.

3. Use Automated Bid Optimization Based On Conversion Events
With dozens, hundreds or even thousands of bins and ads, it’s important to leverage automated bid technology. There are several platforms specifically designed for Facebook ads. Do your homework to determine the best one to help you achieve your campaign goals.

4. Don’t Stop At Solely Tracking Engagement, Track Conversions
Some companies and agencies make the mistake of only tracking front-end engagement KPI’s, namely Facebook Likes and LinkedIn connections. It is important to track all KPI’s including:

5. Leverage Your PPC/SEO Data To Help You Target New Bins
If you’re running a paid social account you’re probably also running PPC campaigns or managing organic SEO. Don’t look at them in silos because the data you have through those channels can translate into paid social gold.

To start, take the keywords that you know drive conversions for your client via PPC and/or SEO and test-target those keywords as an interest. If it shows sufficient reach, create a bin and a targeted ad and you’ll see results.

6. Test ‘Friends Of Connections’ Targeting
There is a little known targeting option in Facebook that allows you to target users whose friends are connected to a page, event, group or application:

Think about the potential on this one. The average Facebook user has 130 friends. If you find a page that has 1,000 fans and you target friends of connections to that page, you’re going to reach 130,000 users.

7. Test Occupation Targeting
A very powerful but underutilized way to reach specific consumers is through Facebook occupation targeting. CEO of aimClear Marty Weintraub spoke about this at SMX Advanced and touched on this recently in Search Engine Watch.

When discussing the proper ways to conduct occupation targeting, he pointed out that selecting job titles within the Precise Interests and then entering a keyword like ‘Marketing Manager’ would result in the following bin:

You can extrapolate this data to any number of job titles depending on your client’s product.

8. Target Decision Makers On LinkedIn
Facebook isn’t the only paid social platform that allows you to do occupation targeting. LinkedIn is making a great run at the B2B market and allows for some really sophisticated targeting.
Similar to the powerful testing capabilities recently highlighted by Marty Weintraub, LinkedIn was shown to drive comparable results not only test-targeting job titles but high-level decision makers with a presence on the social network.

9. Test Leading Consumers To Your Fan Page vs. Website
Don’t just lead users to your Facebook page. You should test results by rotating your ads to drive users to every part of your online presence. A completely optimized paid program is essential.
Whether you place a higher premium on your social fan page or website, giving your users more choices will encourage brand awareness, loyalty and conversions.

10. Test Leading Users To Multiple Page Landing Tabs
An update launched this past February now directs users to any location on your Facebook page, i.e. wall, info, etc. Rotate your ads to drive users to these various pages and optimize based on the conversion rate.

11. Try Embedding Your Lead Capture Form Within Your Facebook Page
Get the best of both worlds by embedding the same lead capture form on your website within your fan page. Here’s an example:

As always, conduct continuous testing to measure which approach is most effective.

12. Don’t Use The CPM Option
Facebook CTR’s are traditionally very low, even with a great program. As such, don’t pay Facebook a CPM to simply show your ads, which in tests have not resulted in any lift in impressions, cost savings, click-throughs or conversion rate.
Always select the CPC pricing option.

13. Try Geo-targeting ‘Affluent’ Areas & Luxury Interests
Have a client selling luxury goods or big ticket items? Try cross-targeting affluent areas of the country with luxury interests. For example, target users in Beverly Hills that like cosmetic enhancement brands or users in New York City that like investor services.
You can also go further by digging into the Facebook interest tool. There, you can target relevant ads to ‘owners clubs’ across a wide range of luxury verticals.

14. Leverage Your Facebook Data To Do Other Media Buys
The great thing about Facebook data is that it can give you insights about your consumer base that you might not have otherwise known. Leveraging, among other things, a user’s gender, age and interests can help you make smarter buys across television, display, search and other media channels.

15. Track Every Path To Conversion
If you can get your hands on technology that allows you to conduct cross-channel tracking, its resulting data can be hugely beneficial. It can influence budgeting decisions and help you identify channels that assist the buying process.

10 Tips to Get the Twitter Conversation Started

2011-06-16T22:45:00.000-04:00

1. Have a purpose.
Know what you’re doing and why. Set goals and objectives. Develop and execute an integrated plan that supports your business goals and objectives. Although social media is often referred to as “one big conversation”, you can’t lose sight that you’re looking to get a return out of your investment. The only difference is that the game has changed. It’s no longer a broadcast. Instead of investing in broadcast media alone, you now are investing in people.

2. Know who you’re talking to. Who are your followers? Are they the right followers who are going to help you meet your business goals and objectives? Are they people who bring you joy and that you can genuinely connect with? What makes them tick? What tone are they using to communicate online vs offline? What type of content are they consuming, sharing, commenting on? How frequently are they engaging? Get in the head of your followers and target markets. The more you can understand how you can help them the better results you will have. Leverage polls, surveys, Q&A on LinkedIn or on a blog post to learn more about your followers. You’ll be surprised how many answers you’ll get back by sending a tweet that asks a simple question. People love to answer simple questions in social media.

3. Know what they want to talk about. Getting followers is the easy part. Getting them to talk to you is a bit more of a challenge. The easiest way to get them to talk to you is if you talk about something they care about. What information are they seeking? What information are they sharing that you could leverage and start a conversation with?

4. Know what you want to talk about. Many people get carried away with the conversation and lose sight of why they are on Twitter in the first place. It’s important that you stick to your plan and keep focused on your goals and objectives. The last thing you want to do is spend months on a fly by night tweet chat conversation with no purpose, plan or return on investment. Those of you who follow me know I despise Random Acts of Marketing (RAMs). Same goes for Random Acts of Tweeting (RATs). Don’t do it. Be real in your conversations and building relationships. However, don’t go over board and lose your mind talking about Saturday night parties more than you talk about something of value that inspires people to talk to you about more than the best pub in town.

5. Give them a reason to have a conversation. Although this may be the first month you start to have a real conversation on Twitter, millions have been doing it for years. You’re going to need to do something to grab attention, to connect. Give them a reason to talk to you. What can you offer them that is different than the billions of other tweets streaming by? What can you do to spark a conversation and help them realize you are human, that you are more than a robot sending off automated tweet links to your blog?

6. Inspire them to connect further by helping them achieve their goals. Remember it’s not about you. It’s not about your links. Not about your logos or even your fancy photo on your Twitter profile. It’s about them. It’s about connecting with your followers in a way that inspires them to further engage with you. Inspire them to do more than follow you and never visit again. Inspire them to add you to a Twitter list, to do the double click onto your blog link that is in your Twitter profile. Be positive, be engaging. Be somebody that you would want to hang out with!

7. Share yourself. Don’t hide behind the logo or the avatar. Show the real you. Share a photo. Tell stories. Share a life experience that spans a few days, weeks or months. Share the journey into the social media ecosystem. You’d be surprised how many people can learn from you even if you’re only 30 days into it.

8. Earn the right to tweet the link. Engage on their turf. Double click their blog links. Actually read the blogs, comment on them. Prove that you are in the social game for the right reasons. The more that you give and help others the more people will be interested in seeing what you got too!

9. Organize your social house. Take the time for organization. Leverage the lists within Twitter. Keep your integrated marketing, business and social media plan in printed form in a binder at your tweet space. Create an editorial calendar that will help you organize content for various social networks you engage such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and your blog.

10. Don’t beat the tweets with over think. Remember, it’s just a Tweet. Yes, it’s important you don’t tweet like a moron. However, the worst thing you can do is over think the tweets. As long as you are engaging in social media within a plan that supports your business goals and objectives, go with it. Trust the work you did on the plan and don’t over analyze every tweet. It doesn’t matter if you lose a few followers. Tweets happen and followers leave. It won’t ruin your business, your reputation or your life. Head up and have fun.

3 Tips to Maximize Offline Advertising Conversions with Call Tracking

2011-06-16T22:29:00.000-04:00

1. Use Strong Calls to Action

Depending on the medium, your audience may only be exposed to an ad for a brief moment, such as, the time it takes to drive by a highway billboard, listen to a :15 second radio commercial, or watch a :30 second TV spot.

In addition, your audience is not sitting in front of a computer, so ads and calls to action need to be highly motivating and memorable.
For this reason, when integrating a tracking number into your ad, make sure it is combined with a strong call to action.

• Make it Directive: Eliminate any unnecessary wording and simply tell them what you want them to do — “Call Today [Tracking Number].”
• Make it Valuable: Clearly explain what the prospect is going to get in return for calling — “Get 50% off your first month.”
• Create a Sense of Urgency: Make them feel like they will be missing out on an opportunity if they don’t act fast — “For a limited time only.”

2. Account for Geographic Location

When integrating tracking numbers into offline advertisements, make sure to take into account for the geographic locations of your audience:

• If you’re running an ad in a different part of the country than where your business is physically located, provide a toll-free call tracking number.
• Conversely, if your business is local, it’s probably better to display a local area call tracking number to show your community presence.

3. Tag Call Tracking Numbers and Integrate with CRM

For effective reporting, in your call tracking platform, tag tracking numbers with the corresponding medium (i.e. billboard, radio, TV, etc.), ad, messaging, call to action and any other details you feel are important to capture.

Next, feed these conversion details into your CRM software. This allows:
• Sales professionals to prioritize and customize lead follow-up communications.
• Tracking of which offline advertisements generate leads that convert into customers.
How have you used call tracking to improve offline advertising campaign performance?

5 Simple Steps to Selecting Your Keywords

2011-06-16T12:21:00.003-04:00

Nice keyword tips from Erez Barak from Search Engine Watch

1. Own Your Brand Terms
The first thing you want to be sure you rank for is your brand name. As a first step, search for your brand name and see where you rank.

If you don’t rank for your brand name, this is the first thing to go after. In most cases, this is a very easy step; you’re probably already there. If you have competitors ranking on Page 1 for your brand, you want to force them out and own this space (the search engine algorithms are now allowing a brand to own the full first page of results).

In addition to your brand name, make sure you own all terms associated with your brand name, like your brand-specific product names, as well as your management team’s names.

2. Get Keyword Suggestions
Add your URL, relevant keywords and competitors’ URLs to a keyword suggestion tool and get a list of recommended keywords. When adding keywords relevant to your brand to the suggestion tool, make sure to include a range of head terms, mid-terms and long-tail keywords.

Head terms = >1,000 monthly searches
Mid-terms = 100-1,000 monthly searches
Long-tail keywords =

3. Beat Your Competitors
Identify your competitors’ target keywords by adding their homepage URL to your keyword suggestion tool. Validate your own keyword list against your competitors. Are there any major keywords that you missed?

4. Narrow Down Your Keyword List
Compare your resulting keyword list by relevancy, competition, search volume and current status. The goal is to ultimately pick 10 keywords per SEO campaign – your brand name and four additional keywords.
Start by narrowing your keyword list to only the relevant ones. Check to see which keywords you’re already ranking for. It will be easier to start where you’re already in the running.
Look at global monthly searches and competition; ideally, you’re looking for low competition and up to 1,000 monthly searches. Think about conversion. Try to imagine people searching on these terms, seeing your site and whether they would actually convert.

5. Build a Plan to Rank for These Target Keywords
Take these top target keywords and build an SEO campaign around them. Monitor the keywords over time by tracking the trends of ranks and by measuring what kind of traffic you’re getting from them.

7 Ways to Gain Leads Through Social Media Networking

2011-06-15T11:44:00.000-04:00

Here are 7 great methods to increase your business lead generation through social media:

Have a presence – Simply put, if your business does not have a presence on major social media channels, you are losing an opportunity to connect with your audience.
Monitor – By monitoring your brand, products and primary business keywords, you will be able to find and filter through thousands of online users and have the opportunity to reach out and engage with them.
Listen – Many companies are so corporate driven that they don’t stop to take the time and actually listen to their customers. You will be surprised on what they have to say, their questions, suggestions and feedback that can help build a better brand and product line.
Engage with users – If you were to break down the term social media, ‘social’ is the aspect of interacting with a specific audience, while ‘media’ is providing consumers with information such as forms of content, promotions and new business information.
Provide value – Rather than hitting the customer over the head to notice your business/products, provide them with information that will benefit them and get them interested in wanting to know more.
Run promotions – Some companies do not have the ability to do this. Or they may not be in the right industry to run promotions but it can be a very strong way to gain leads. Users are prompted to submit contact information and more (similar to a shopping cart). This is a great way to find out who your target audience really is. The results may surprise you.
Post frequent updates – Staying active, weekly at the very least – will help your business stay ahead of others who are not actively promoting through social channels. It is always best to perform regular updates, preferably with a clear ‘call to action’ within the update to help the engagement level of your consumers and other targeted online users.

6 Steps in Developing a Social Media Strategy

2011-05-06T12:21:00.000-04:00

Social media is around us more and more and many companies are starting to see the value in add it to their marketing mix. However many are simply unsure where to start or how to develop a plan. By using social media correctly you can engage your audience in new ways, be more personable, develop new connections and maintain the ones they have. So I will outline the development of a social media strategy with these 6 steps:

1. Listen - Conversation Mining

The first step in this process is to get online and listen to what is being said. How are people feeling about you and your brand? What are their points of views? Identify the key people who influence others and which ones should you cooperate with? What are the various topics? Is the tone of the conversation heated? Do people favor one point of view over the other, or is it mixed?

Determine your audience and where they are online. Blogs are a great place to start looking. Technorati (http://technorati.com) is a good tool to help you search for blogs and blog posts that have content related to your niche. Twitter and the twitter network is another great place to gain insight in to conversations that are happening in real time. The advance twitter search (http:search.twitter.com/advanced) is one of many tools that will let you isolate specific conversations and monitor them.

Once you have identified where your audience is then listen to what they are saying. What are their issues, opinions and needs? How does this information fit with your value proposition? Understanding this information will help you determine how to best contribute to the conversation and how best to make a contribution.

Next find out who is driving the conversation or those that have a strong influence? These people are called “Influentials” because they possess the authority, respect or experience to shape people’s opinions. A good example is Lance Armstrong. Since I am a cyclist I follow what he has to say. If he endorses a product you can be sure I will check it out. Find these people who influence your industry or niche and listen what they are talking about. One source to get you started on finding these Influentials is to look at WeFollow (www.wefollow.com which breaks down Influentials by category and list them by the number of followers.

2. Identify Goals and Objectives

You should now be in a better position to establish your goals now that you have had a chance to “listen” to your audience. Some goals might be to drive a certain amount of traffic to your website. Or you want to increase the number of followers by 15% in 6 months. Maybe you just want to extend you brand presence on the social web.

Remember you need to consider not only your company goals but the goals of your audience. What are their needs and wants? You will get much farther with social media marketing if you offer something of value to them. I see many people who are just simply promoting themselves all of the time hoping they will attract new customers or site traffic. This really doesn’t work well with social media.

Once you have given people something of value you have earned the right to plug yourself a little. I recommend that you spend about 90% of your time providing valuable content and 10% promoting yourself. You will find you can build more influence and trust with the value you provide your followers.

3. Develop Your Plan and Time Your Content

Map out your approach to delivering content to your audience. Will you reach out and leverage Influentials? Will you provide free material or samples? How will it be delivered? Maybe you have products that are environmentally friendly. Will you moderate and lead a conversation about environmental issues? There are many creative ways to approach your audience. Be innovative.

Next develop a timeline, preferably 12 months in advance, to identify any events, promotions or product launches that you are aware of. Now identify the content ideas you want to deliver that can supplement those events. It is like developing a media plan where you are timing your efforts so they are consistent and relevant to other events your business or customers participate in. You will find that it will be much easier to manage content creation efforts and allow you to plan ahead.

Now identify the social platforms you should use to deliver your content. Is Facebook the right platform for you? Is it a combination of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn? If so you should develop a mini plan for each site and how you will consistently use each tool to accomplish your goals and objectives. Be careful not to go after too many sites too quickly. I would make sure you start with one or two sites at a time and develop them so they are solid before moving on to another social media site.

4. Develop Your Content

The next step is to develop the content you have outlined from the timeline you have built. The timeline will help you know what order to start building your content. This is where you really need to understand your audience and your brand. You need to be highly creative and much of what you say within social media channels should sound like your brand.

This is a great place to optimize your content with your targeted keywords. Armed with a solid keyword research report with relative categories you should be able to derive some great ideas for content that is relevant and will resonate well with your audience. This content can come in various forms. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Promotions with deals to participants - daily deals
Tips or how to’s
Little known facts or factoids
White papers
Relevant and timely statistics
Ask your community - take polls and share results
Invite guest authors
Top 10 list
Case studies
Guides to help educate
Interview
Live events
News
Opinions
Photos
Gift ideas

5. Engage - Implement Your Plan

Armed with smart objectives, a solid timeline, great content and the right social media sites you are now ready to post your content. Engage in the conversation and express your point of view. Remember to keep to your schedule and be constituent. Have the resources on hand to respond to comments and feedback so you can keep the conversation going. This is not an “if you build it they will come” type of scenario. You have to keep at it.

6. Measuring Success

As you know the ability to measure the effectiveness of marketing activities is imperative to any company’s marketing strategy. Social Media Marketing isn’t as easy to measure as other online channels but it can be done. If you identified your success metrics in step 2 then you are already ahead of the game.

Depending on your success metrics you might look at content consumption. Who is reading your content and where are they coming from. You can also look at how much or little is being contributed and the number of visitors who are interacting with your content. Here are some variables to include in your measuring process:

Share of Voice
Awareness
Engagement
Influence
Popularity

I will discuss these in more detail in a future post. Feel free to send me any success metrics that have worked for you and that you found to be effective.

Having a solid social media strategy can really help make a difference in the success of your campaigns. You will come off more polished and organized and viewed as being a real player in the social media space.

Universal Search Optimization 101

2010-02-14T14:40:00.001-05:00

Now that we've covered the fundamentals of universal search, it's time to look at how to optimize for this new search experience.

Universal (or blended) search refers to the non-traditional results we see in the SERPs. The results could be video, images, local search, news, shopping, or other rich content. Let's look at specific things you should do to optimize these areas.

Optimize for Image Search
You've probably heard the adage that a picture speaks a thousand words. Well why not use that to your advantage?

Web sites are often too text heavy. Choosing the right images to help tell the story without a lot of text can provide a better user experience if done correctly. Sometimes images help create an emotional attachment to the products or services you offer.

To optimize for universal or blended search:

Incorporate rich ALT text for each image. Remember to intuitively describe the image using targeted keywords. The more descriptive the better.

Include your keywords in the image file names.

Make sure that the content that surrounds the image is highly relevant. Relevancy is always a key factor in optimization.

imize for Video Search
Video has become one of the best tools for optimization because it serves multiple purposes. It helps engage visitors, keeps them on your site longer, and reduces your bounce rate.

One of the best ideas for developing video content is to add instructional or how-to videos. Try keeping them between two to three minutes in length.

Don't forget the crucial step of tagging your video with the right keywords. Upload your video to popular video sites like YouTube to help get more exposure and increase popularity.

Optimize for Local Search
Whether your business has a single location or multiple locations, you should optimize your site for local search. In addition to registering your site with local search engines, consider having a page on your site that includes all of your local information. For instance, you could have a listing of all of your branches or store locations with current addresses. This will help ensure they show up correctly and accurately.

Optimize for News
Do you have any newsworthy content about your company or organization? Publishing press releases and other newsworthy information is a great way to get listed in blended results, especially if the news is timely and relevant.

Notice in this search for "iPad" that news results came first in the SERP and right after it come the real-time results. So get your news releases published and you might end up at the top of the list.

Optimize for Social Media and Blogs
If you haven't participated in social media yet, you should give it a try. Many social media sites and blogs are indexed by the search engines, especially real time posts from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites and blogs.

As you can see in the image above, real time results are usually given a top spot on the SERPs. Additionally, social media gives people more touch points to your brand and increases awareness.

Optimize for Shopping
Many people like to go online to shop for products, even if they plan to purchase from a brick and mortar store. They like to gather compare features and pricing.
Shopping results are an important factor in blended search. If you have a product, consider registering it with Google Base. Sign in to their merchant center and upload your product feeds and other info.

Notice in the example above how images play a role in the shopping experience. As with most SEO best practices, make sure you have relevant and targeted keywords in your product title and description. Also, keep your feeds updated regularly with any new product information.

It's best if you can holistically repurpose your content into each of these media types so they all work together in concert. Each of these are extensions to your site and its content.
When searchers finally make it to your site, there should be a commonality and cohesiveness from one media type to the other. This takes planning and preparation.

What has worked for you in the past? Please share your experiences with the rest of us in the comments below.

Universal Search 101

2010-01-22T14:32:00.001-05:00

During your SEO studies, you might have come across the term universal search or blended search. Not sure what it means or how it works? Then this article is for you.

Universal search has been around since 2007 when Google announced a significant change to its search engine. Soon after, Ask announced their Ask 3D platform and Microsoft Live announced their new Live Search. Yahoo followed up with what they called the new Yahoo Search.

Now all the major search engines use a new form of search results designed to bring a better user experience to searchers. So what is universal or blended search?

What is Universal Search?
These upgraded search engines return more than the just the traditional text results. Now they bring back images, news, local listings, shopping, video, blog posts, etc.

For example, go to Google and type in "iPad" and see what shows up in the SERP. You'll see news, real time posts, images, and the usual text results. All of this blended together is what universal search is all about -- trying to provide a richer experience to the searcher who may be looking for more than just a site to visit.

Try this out yourself. Go to each of the major search engines and see if you can identify how each attempt to provide this experience.

What Does Universal Search Mean to Search Marketers?
New rules mean new challenges for search marketers. No longer are you trying to just optimize for certain textual content, but now you need to optimize for video, images, local, news, and blog results. Plus, you may have enjoyed good rankings in the past but now they have been pushed down by each of these new data sources.

If you don't have any of these data sources on your Web site, achieving the rankings you desire might be harder. The process of optimization just became more complex.

Look at your approach to universal search holistically. Don't look at optimizing for just video, then images, then news, for instance. Look at all of your digital assets and see how they all fit together and relate to one another.

In some cases, you may need to create new content. This isn't a bad thing. You really need to have more than just text content to compete in today's marketplace. You need to have all of the other media types as well.

How to Optimize for Universal Search
If you plan to launch a new product and put it on your Web site, don't just add the usual picture and text about the product. Take it much further. Add a press release and post to PR sites for promotion. Then add a blog post. Produce a short video about the product and post accordingly. Go beyond your Web site and push this content into various social media channels.

Do you see where this is going? Again, if you think of this with a holistic perspective and from the beginning it will be a lot easier to manage.

There are many other aspects of optimizing for universal search. This chart, with comments from some industry experts, does a good job of showing specific things you can do to optimize for universal search.

Hopefully you understand that you need to produce, optimize, and promote all of the media types that your customers/visitors and search engines will respond to.

Be optimistic. Don't look at this as more work on your part, but as a new opportunity to develop richer content and explore new marketing channels. As you create new content in different media types you will be setting yourself up for the long term and building a sustainable, searchable infrastructure that will keep you going way into the future.

Googles Dominance of Mobile Search

2009-05-11T10:51:00.003-04:00

We all know that Google dominates the search market, with 64% of all searches, Yahoo with 20% is in second place. But what is not know as well is that they also dominate the Mobile Phone "search" market. In a new report from Internet Marketing firm Net Applications, Google has 97.5% of all mobile searches. Now that is dominance.

A new Social Media Marketing Tool

2009-04-29T06:27:00.005-04:00

Another powerful PR tool has emerged: PitchEngine , which lets you create and share social media releases for free.
As they describe it:

With PitchEngine, users can easily create and share Social Media Releases (SMRs). Unlike the rigid, printed press release of old, SMRs offer both creator and reader far more flexibility. Users can incorporate embedded video, images, powerpoints and more into a hosted “microsite” or SMR, that can easily be shared via the social web using apps like Facebook, Twitter and more. A dynamic blend of traditional PR and a more progressive, conversational method, the SMR opens doors and engages readers. Those readers include not just media, but investors and consumers (friends, fans and followers) alike.

New Tools are Great, But You Still Need to Make Your Content Really Findable

Even if you are sending your news release to a wider audience by using a great online PR tools such as PitchEngine you are still making a mistake if you don’t optimize your release for the search engines. Be sure to keep these essential content marketing elements in mind as you craft your social media release—and your broader strategy:

Use a pithy descriptive headline with important keywords and repeat those keywords in your lead. And don’t use jargon!
Link keywords to relevant landing pages on your site–that is where many of those keywords will be found.
Don’t think of your release is a “media relations tool.” Think of it as a mini web page that covers the news item or topic about which you are writing.
You release should act as a portal to more information on the topic.
If you have audio or video content be sure to include them with your release.

In the end, social media is still all about content that is relevant and compelling. Bells and whistles don’t substitute for substance. Don’t let the social media tail wag the content marketing dog. But, do put leading edge tools like PitchEngine to work in becoming a social media PR powerhouse.

10 Twitter Tools for Success

2009-03-09T15:18:00.001-04:00

Trying to figure out what Twitter is and how it can be useful? There are many tools that are dedicated to making Twitter a better world. One tool I use is TweetDeck. This makes tweeting much easier than using the site at Twitter.com.

If you are looking for new tools that will help you work smarter you might want to read this article on 10 top tools to help you work smarter. Once you get started with Twitter you will wonder how you have survived without it.

10 Ways to Measure Social Media

2009-03-06T15:11:00.001-05:00

Social Media is becoming a a popular online advertising vehicle. Measuring performance can be a bit challenging. Tracking all of your followers, friends and the many conversations can be tricky. I came across a good article that outlines 10 ways to measure social media. If you have more to add please drop us a line.

Google Analytics Launches Individual Qualification Program

2009-03-03T11:05:00.003-05:00

Google announced today the launch of an individual qualification program. Although it is a qualification course it is designed more to help educate people on how web analytics works. I think that it is a great opportunity to take advantage of this free course.

The course can be found at Google's Conversion University. The more you know about web analytics the better internet marketer you will become. Even if you don't use a web analytics tool it will help you to better understand the basic elements of human behavior and how that knowledge factors into your Web strategy.

Link Building 101, Part 2

2009-02-09T16:10:00.001-05:00

In Part 1, we reviewed some basic definitions and learned about the importance of on-site SEO and the sometimes overlooked art of internal linking. Today, we'll look at off-page factors, with five methods you can start using right now to build links.

First, I need to stress a very important point. You should identify the keywords you want to be ranked for and use those keywords in your copy, and especially in the anchor text of your links.

How many of you have used this phrase: "to learn more about Acme Widgets click here," where the link is on the word "here." If Acme Widgets is the keyword phrase you want to optimize, then make sure it's the phrase that has the link. If you need a primer on identifying the right keywords for your site, see my keyword research article.

Directory Submissions

Directory submissions are still one of the most powerful and safest link building strategies. However, you need to be careful to find the quality directories that will benefit you the most. They're becoming more difficult to find.

DMOZ should be one of your first stops. Get your site listed there for free. DMOZ is also a great resource for mining other directories to submit to by drilling down by specify categories or geographic regions.

Directory Critic is another great resource that focuses on providing comprehensive lists of directories both paid and free and includes a points rating. Many of these directories are new, so spend most of your time on the general and niche lists.

Blogging

Do you have a blog on your site? If not, you may want to consider adding one. Search engines love new, fresh content, so blogging is a great and easy way to keep your Web site up-to-date.

Google's Blogger or WordPress are good places to start. If you plan to create a blog, block out time on your calendar so you remember to make frequent updates. No one likes a blog that only has a few posts here and there.

Writing Articles and Press Releases

If you're an authority on a topic, or have a passion for what you do, consider writing an article about a specific topic on your site. By writing these articles, you'll have the opportunity to place a quality, relevant link back to your site. Ezine Articles is a good (free) place to get started.

If you or your public relations agency writes press releases, make sure to submit them online. Several companies still send them out via fax. You're missing a great opportunity for some good relevant links.

Try to find sites like PR Newswire that let you submit your article with links back to your site. Once your release goes out, it will be picked up by other feeds and land on other news sites -- netting you more links.

Social Posting

Social media sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Technorati are great bookmarking sites to help others with similar interests find you. Your site visitors will then have the opportunity to "rank" your site or page. Socially bookmarking your site may net you many good backlinks if your niche is popular.

Video Submissions

People enjoy watching video. The available technology has enabled almost anyone to capture video and post it online. Take advantage of sites like YouTube by creating relevant videos and posting them, where you can once again point a link back to your Web site.

These, of course, are just some of the basic places to start your link building campaign. There are many other places and methods for placing links.

As you come across some of these methods, be careful of placing links just anywhere. It could be considered spam.

Set a goal to start placing one or two links back to your site per day. In time, you'll start seeing your rankings rise and the traffic to your site increase.

For ongoing linking advice, be sure to check out the weekly Promotion & Link Building column by Justilen Gaspard and Sage Lewis.

Link Building 101, Part 1

2009-02-02T16:03:00.000-05:00

We've all heard of link building. But what is it, and how does it work? More importantly, how can you use it to increase your rankings in the search engines?

In this two-part article, we'll first explore some general terms and then dive into some practical tips. In addition to this article, you should also regularly visit Search Engine Watch's Promotion and Link Building section for more in-depth articles on this subject.

Link Popularity

Let's start by defining some terms. Link popularity is a measurement of all the links coming into your site (or backlinks), as well as a determination of the quality of those links.

Basically, search engines are saying that if your site is any good, other sites should link to it. If nobody links to your site then it has little relevance. The more links you have, the more "votes" you have on how popular your site it. Thus, the act of link building can be likened to campaigning.

All search engines factor link popularity into their algorithms, but they calculate it differently. As a general rule, Google is more interested in the quality of the links, while Yahoo is more interested in the total number of links to your site.

A good way to check this out is by going to Marketleap. Click on "link popularity check," type in your site address (and maybe your competitor's site), and see the results.

PageRank

Google uses PageRank to determine the quality of a given site measured on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the highest. To see this number, you can install the Google Toolbar or use any of several browser add-ons. From Google's perspective, having one link from a site that has a large PageRank counts more than many sites that have a lower rank.

A page that Google has already rewarded with a decent PageRank (or PR for short) is sometimes called an authority page. Once you have a PR of 1, your site has some power. When your pages achieve a PR of 3, 4, or 5, you have "link juice" to pass on to other pages.

On-site SEO

The allocation of PageRank from one page to another within your site is sometimes called on-site SEO. An advanced form of the discipline is known as "PageRank siloing," or "PageRank sculpting." If you have a Web page with good PR, you can use that page to get other pages higher in the search engine rankings for specific keyword phrases.

While off-site optimization plays a larger role in gaining natural organic traffic, you can still see between 20 and 30 percent boosts in rankings by properly optimizing your pages with on-page factors. We'll cover off-site optimization in Part 2.

Internal Linking Structure

Start with your title and header tags (for more info on this, refer to "Site Structure 101, Part 1"). What I didn't go into detail in site structure is looking at your internal linking structure. Basically, you want to link stronger pages to weaker pages of your site.

This concept of getting backlinks to a page internally is sometimes overshadowed by trying to acquire backlinks from external pages. Why not use the same concept and apply it to your internal linking structure and reap the rewards?

Nofollow Tag

Now, let's say you have a shopping cart or link on your site that leads to a page that you don't care to send link juice to. You can add a nofollow tag to the end of the link in your HTML code. This conserves your link authority and applies it to the links where you want to pass authority. A link using the nofollow tag looks like this: a no-followed link. This may be a bit on the advanced side but certainly something to consider for on page factors. Another way to handle this is with robots.txt file.

Web Analytics 101, Part 2

2009-01-26T15:54:00.002-05:00

Before we look at specific tools, I want to cover a couple more principles I didn't get to in "Web Analytics 101, Part 1." When using Web analytics, it's easy to get caught up in all the numbers and statistics and lose sight of the overall goal -- getting the intelligence you need to make effective adjustments to your Web site and online marketing strategies to increase the ROI your site delivers. It doesn't do any good to use Web analytics to produce cool charts and reports but then fail to make adjustments to improve your site's performance!

To illustrate how Web analytics can be used to make decisions to improve the effectiveness of an online marketing strategy and the performance of a Web site, consider the following examples:

* Analysis: Site visitors are abandoning a sale during a particular step in your site's checkout process. Strategy: Look for ways to improve or eliminate that step in the checkout process.
* Analysis: A particular e-mail campaign produces a lot of traffic to the landing page but very few sales/conversions. Strategy: Look for ways to improve the campaign landing page and/or e-mail content to encourage more conversions.
* Analysis: Several different PPC campaigns are producing mixed results. Strategy: Eliminate or focus on improving less effective campaigns and continue with effective campaigns.

Measuring Your Site's ROI

Entire books have been written about this topic, so don't expect to understand this in detail at first. The basic idea is fairly simple and I've summarized it below:

1. Set trackable goals/conversions for your site (emphasis on the word trackable).
2. Assign a value to each goal/conversion.
3. Use analytics to track the number of conversions and the associated source (e.g. sales revenue from natural SEO, paid search, e-mail campaigns, etc.).
4. Compare the cost of each traffic source against the total conversions/benefit generated by that source.
5. Use ROI data to make adjustments to your site and online marketing strategy.

Two Flavors of Web Analytics: Log Analyzers vs. Tag-Based Analytics

Web analytics tools come in two basic flavors: log file analyzers and tag-based tools. Log analyzers don't require any changes to Web site code -- they use the log files that your site generates automatically and analyze this data to produce reports and charts.

On the other hand, tag-based tools require the addition of some (small) code to each page of your site you want to track. These tags send information to a database/server, which then uses the data for generating analytics reports. In general, log analyzers tend to be software that is purchased and installed, while tag-based analytics programs tend to be hosted on another site and accessed via a Web browser.

Neither of these flavors is fundamentally better than the other. Tag-based tools, like Google Analytics, seem more popular recently. If you don't have much control over your site code, however, a log analyzer might work better.

It's important to understand the difference and what needs to be done to implement each type. In the end, this shouldn't be a huge determining factor in picking a Web analytics tool.

Let's look as some basic and advanced tools.

Basic Tools

Basic Web analytics tools are ideal for personal or small sites. I'll quickly review three of the most popular ones: Webalizer, StatCounter, and Mint.

* Webalizer: A good free solution for anyone who wants to control the data and keep it on their end. However, Webalizer is rather data intensive. It displays some graphs but is mainly tables of data. Basic stats include number of visitors, referral, search term, entry and exit pages, hourly traffic, and basic geographic information.
* StatCounter: This tool has similar stats, but provides more detailed information, including visitor paths, returning visitors, browser data, operating system, and IP. StatCounter is a hosted solution, which means you have to paste a line of code into every Web page you wish to track. StatCounter has more graphs than Webalizer and allows you to export your data into an Excel file.
* Mint: Like Webalizer, Mint must be installed locally and only works with Linux servers. It's a little more robust and easier to use than Webalizer. A unique feature of Mint is "peppers," which allow you to plug-in features that other developers have created, like conversion funnels. It also allows you to view your stats through RSS instead of logging into Mint each time. The downside: a $30 one-time fee to use. Overall, Mint is great balance of general, yet detailed statistics.

Advanced

Many advanced analytics solutions allow you to track conversions, goals, revenue, expenses, etc. These solutions aren't for the faint of heart; they're designed to provide detailed metrics to make decisions on the best way to make improvements. For space reasons I'll cover only two: Google Analytics (formally Urchin) and Omniture.

* Google Analytics: This is the most robust solution for its price, which is free. It can track campaign conversions, goals, visitor performance, basic ad A/B testing, and content performance. It's a tag-based solution that boasts all the features that basic providers have, as well as a site overlay and flexible dashboards.
* Omniture Sitecatalyst: If you spend a lot of money on online advertisements and are in a competitive industry, SiteCatalyst may be your solution. SiteCatalyst is great if you're looking for more flexibility and need go beyond what Google Analytics can provide, but with a price. SiteCatalyst starts around $1,500 to $2,000, but the data it provides can be easily justified. One great feature is comparison, which allows you to compare different campaigns and groups to see how they're doing against each other, so that campaigns can be optimized.

There are many other options, which also vary in price. Consider HBX, WebTrends, and Lyris (formerly ClickTracks).

Take a close look at what your needs are and find a tool that's good match. Let me reemphasize the importance of first establishing goals and then using these tools to help measure against those goals. A good analytics strategy is very well worth it.

Web Analytics 101, Part 1

2009-01-19T15:51:00.000-05:00

I'm still amazed when I run into prospective clients who are considering a Web site redesign, or some form of Internet marketing, without utilizing the essential power of Web analytics. These people are like doctors who assume they know what's going on with a patient and start writing prescriptions before bothering to examine or diagnose. Without looking under the hood to see how your Web site is performing, and learning more about the people visiting your site, you're throwing away a huge opportunity.

Set a Goal

A couple years ago, we helped a client with a redesign of their e-commerce site. We developed a strategy that funneled visitors from entry pages all the way to the page where they purchased.

The goal of having visitors do something you want on your site is commonly referred to as a conversion. Through monitoring our site analytics, we observed that visitors weren't making it to our conversion page. We went back, made some minor adjustments, and increased sales by 578 percent. Can you feel the power?

I can't overemphasize the importance of identifying site goals and having an overall strategy. Use your analytics tool to see if you're achieving your goals. Make the necessary course corrections based on your observations. Lather, rinse, repeat.

If you don't set proper goals and observe the progress toward those goals with Web analytics, you're throwing huge opportunities out the window.

Hits, Visits, and Conversions

I was recently asked to do a Web analysis for a prospective client. I was told the site gets about 200,000 hits weekly. While this number sounds impressive, there's a big difference between a hit and a visit, and an even bigger difference between a visit and a conversion.

A hit is generally defined as a server request for each item on a specific Web page. This includes images, animations, and downloads. In addition, when a browser loads a page, it also loads any components that page uses, such as style sheets, JavaScript files, or rollover images.

Opening one page of your Web site can result in many hits. You might be surprised to find out how many items it takes for a browser to render each page of your Web site.

People who use the word "hits" are often thinking about the amount of traffic to their site. The number of visitors and/or visits is a much better metric.

A visit is defined as a person who lands on a page of your Web site, navigates to other pages, and eventually leaves. This whole process is counted as one visit. This metric makes more sense because you can report how many visitors you had to your Web site and how many items were requested by the server from each page of your site.

Other metrics to track related to visits: new visitors and returning visitors. These metrics help us analyze how many "new" visitors you have compared to those who are returning for another visit.

Finally, conversions represent the number of visitors to your Web site who completed a pre-defined goal or action. If you sell widgets on your Web site, then conversions could be defined as the number of visitors who made a purchase.

This is the most important metric to understand because it tells you how much value and overall benefit your Web site is actually delivering. For more basic definitions, check out Frank Watson's article on "Tracking and Analytics 101."

Page Views and Time on Site

Visits can also be broken down into parts that help us learn more about visitor behavior. During each visit, you can see how many pages of your site were viewed and how much time the visitor spent on them.

Time on site is sometimes referred to as "stickiness." In general, you want visitors to stick to your site and stay as long as possible (and visit as many pages as possible). With the right setup and analytics program, you can see which pages the visitor looked at and in what order.

Hopefully you're beginning to see what a Web analytics strategy can offer you. These simple metrics should teach you a lot about what your visitors are doing, so you can make the necessary course corrections on your site to help increase visitors, pages views, and time spent on the site.

These basics of Web analytics should set you on the right path. For more information on Web analytics, check out the Web Analytics Association.

Search Ad Quality Score 101, Part 2

2009-01-12T15:47:00.000-05:00

In "part 1," we discussed what quality score is. Now let's explore methods and tips for achieving a better quality score. In simple terms, getting a good quality score requires that you create relevance and continuity from beginning to end of the search experience.

Smaller Ad Groups and Ad Copy

Look at your Ad Groups and see how they're organized. You should have lots of ad groups with targeted keywords. I suggest on average about 15 to 20 keywords per ad group. This keeps your keywords and ad copy very tight and specific.

If you have hundreds of keywords per ad group, then you're diluting the overall relevance. It's a lot of work creating and managing more ad groups, but it's worth it in the long run. Try using the Google AdWords Editor to help with this process. It's free.

For your ad copy, try to create copy that includes the keyword in the title, ad copy, and display URL. Next, create multiple ads with a variation of verbs and calls to action.

You'll need to turn ad-serving optimization off so you can then test each of your ads. Run the ads for five to seven days and see which is the best performing and delete the others. Continue making small adjustments for improved performance.

Matching Options

Most people use the default broad match option, and neglect to branch out to try the other matching options. Try adding exact match and phrase match keywords to each ad group and choose which one has the best quality score and lower minimum CPC. You'll be surprised to find that most of the time, the best performing is exact match. Once you've determined the best performers, delete the others.

SEO and Quality Score

Consider applying SEO best practices on your destination site or landing page. Make sure you embed the keywords in your ad group to the tags and copy of each page of your site.

As you've probably figured out, this helps bridge the ad campaign to your site. Try using the best performing creative in your meta description and the best performing keyword in your title tag.

Put yourself in the shoes of the searcher. If we do a keyword search, then click an ad with the same keyword and then land on the page that doesn't contain the keyword anywhere, what are we going to do? That's right: leave.

SEO helps to make sure there is continuity between your ad campaign and your site, not to mention SEO has a lot of value in and of itself.

Landing Page Testing

Developing top-notch landing pages is of paramount importance. This is one of the key factors Google looks at to determine quality score.

Again, you should consider A/B testing, which means creating multiple landing pages and testing to see which has the best performance.

You can also try multivariate testing. Multivariate testing lets you test multiple components of your page at the same time so you can move things around on the page and see the results. Google's Website Optimizer is a great tool to help with your testing process.

The main result you're looking for is conversion. Driving traffic to your site is one thing, but driving the right traffic should be your goal.

My good friend Tim Ash has a book on landing page testing and tuning that is worth reading. He gets into more detail on each of these testing situations. Also, Google has some good advice on developing landing pages for a conversion.

The key takeaways from this article can be summed up in three words: relevance, continuity, and testing.

Create as much relevance and continuity as possible, starting with your keywords and ad copy all the way to your landing page. Then you need to test, test, test. Did I mention you need to test?

Search Ad Quality Score 101, Part 1

2009-01-05T15:45:00.002-05:00

Happy New Year! Hopefully, one of your resolutions is to increase your quality score for your paid search campaigns. This will help you save money on your bid and increase your rank position. A good goal, huh?

It's been about two years since Google and Yahoo implemented their quality score algorithms. Well, Google actually started their quality score program back in 2005 -- they just didn't tell advertisers. It wasn't until 2007 that advertisers were provided information on what their quality score was and how to make it better.

Prior to that, the old bid-to-position model was used: whoever had the most money secured the top position. While this proved lucrative, it also affected reputation and trust. Just because an advertiser has more money to spend doesn't mean they're the best choice for the top spot.

Search engines decided to factor in the quality of the landing pages that ads send users to, as well as the relevance and quality of ads. Let's take a closer look at what affects the quality score.

What is Quality Score?

Google says, "Quality Score is a dynamic variable calculated for each of your keywords. It combines a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query."
Quality score affects your keywords minimum CPC and position in the search results. It could even affect whether or not your ad even shows up. A great quality score will net you a low minimum bid and higher ad placement.

Where is my Quality Score?

In Google, your quality score can be found in the Ad Group level and in "keywords" tab. The quality score column should be next to the keyword status column. If you don't see it, then find the pull-down menu (show/hide columns) and select "Show Quality Score." The three indicators that are visible are "Poor," "OK," or "Great."

In Yahoo Panama, the quality score also appears in the ad group level and is called "Quality Index." Yahoo's indicators are five bars. Your goal is to fill all those bars.

Microsoft doesn't yet have quality score information in their AdCenter, but I understand they're close.

Minimum Bid

We all want to spend as little as possible on our keywords. Let's look at factors that affect minimum bid.

One factor is the historical CTR of each keyword. If you've had poor performance historically, then it may take some good performance time to have this work in your favor.

Keyword relevance to the ads in the ad group is another factor. If your keywords don't relate well to your ads, you get a lower quality score.

Similarly, if the landing page you're pointing to has little or no relevance to the keyword and your ad, you'll wind up with a poor quality score. This is one of the most important factors, which we'll cover next time in Part 2.

Other historical factors include the account history or the CTR of all ads and keywords in your account, and the display URLs in the ad group.

Keyword Position

The factors that will help you to increase your keyword position are similar to those for the minimum bid. Relevance again is vitally important. In this case, it's the relevance of the keyword and ad to the search query.

If you type in a search query and see ads with your query or one that is similar, which one will you click on? Making this match will help your score and create a better experience for the searcher.

Finally, as with the minimum bid factors, your account history will also affect your score positively or negatively. Keep an eye on your historical CTR for all of your keywords.

Quality score isn't just a new gimmick for the search engines. Search engines want to provide users with a good experience and trust. It's also designed to help advertisers drive quality, qualified traffic, to a site.

Assuming you also have a relevant landing page that provides great content that complements the keywords and ads that your visitor used to find you, you'll provide a great experience for your new potential customers. We'll talk more about the importance of developing quality landing pages in Part 2 next week.

SEO Site Structure 101, Part 2

2008-12-29T15:38:00.002-05:00

In SEO Site Structure 101, Part 1, we began discussing the basics of search engine friendly design. In this installment, we'll continue our discussion. But before I move on, I'd like to highlight the importance of Information Architecture or User Experience Design. This is a whole discipline in and of itself which we will not go into detail here.

The general idea here is that time is taken to interview or otherwise get to know the visitors that will be coming to your site and anticipate their needs and integrate this knowledge into the design and structure of your site. Search engines love sites that provide a great user experience. So as you consider your site structure please do not leave this out. You will reap great dividends by doing so.

Keyword Optimization

Hopefully you have taken the time to go through a keyword research project and have come up with keywords that you feel will perform to your liking. If not, please take a look at my article on Keyword Discovery 101 for ideas on how best to do this. Armed with a set of 1 to 3 keywords per page, you will embed these keywords on the page to help emphasize what the page is all about. In part 1 of this article, I discussed the proper use of meta tags. Now we will look at the other, more important tags that will help you do this.

Title Tag

The Web page title tag is one of the most important places to put your keyword phrases. Many Web sites suffer poor rankings simply because they miss this step. This is crucial to search engines and how they may decide to rank your site. Whatever text you place in the title tag (between the <Title> and </Title>) will appear in the top bar of someone's browser when they view the web page. It will also be the "headline" of the page when it appears in the SERPs.

Keyword Emphasis

Just like the title of a document, header tags contain the main message of what your page is all about. In the html code you can use

your heading here

. You can also use h2, h3, etc., representing other headlines on the page. But h1 is always the best to place for your most important keywords, since that tells the search engines that this is the most important headline. Bolding or italicizing your fonts is another way to place emphasis on keywords. This again works for the search engines and visitors of your site.

URL Structure

When setting up your folder structure, focus on creating descriptive folders and filenames for the documents on your Web site. Not only will this help search engine spiders crawl and understand your site better, it will also create URLs that are easier for others that want to link to your site. For example, if you were a user (or a search engine spider) which of these URLs would you be most likely to link to:

http://www.myreallycoolwebsiteimademyself.com/pages/01bde3assef/x2/1234dse33sew.htm

or

http://www.my-website.com/movie-reviews/Ironman-2008.htm

The content of these pages might be identical, but the second one is obviously better for search engines and Web site visitors, who will both have an idea of the page content from the URL itself. This will lead to better search engine rankings as well as potentially more incoming links.
Site Navigation & Internal Links

One of the most important aspects of SEO-friendly site design is the structure of your navigation and internal links. Make sure that there are easy to follow links to every page of your site that you want the search engines to see. A site map can help improve the ability of the search engines to crawl your Web site. Avoid embedding your site navigation in Javascript, Flash or other code that the search engines typically ignore or can't interpret. Include key search terms in your link text and focus on making your site easy to navigate for both users and search engines.

Finally, consider adding an XML sitemap to your site, which can be submitted to search engines to provide "hints" about the content and pages of your site. To get started with XML sitemaps, see: XML-sitemaps.com.

Armed with these basic guidelines and tips, you will be on your way to developing a great site that will bring you in good standing with search engines and also to your visitors. Talk about killing two birds with one stone.

SEO Site Structure 101, Part 1

2008-12-22T15:22:00.004-05:00

Before we dive into site structure in detail, we need to first understand why site structure is important for natural SEO. A common misconception is that when you perform a search that the search engine goes out and quickly searches the Internet and brings you the results.

A search engine sends out agents (a.k.a. spiders, robots, crawlers) to surf the Internet and bring back what they find and deposit that information in the search engine's databases. So when you search, you're actually searching a database that has collected and stored information on the Internet.

Why is this important? Making friends with these agents or robots is a vital part of SEO.

Much of how you structure your Web site will be to befriend these robots, welcome them into your site, offer them something to drink and load them up with "relevant" information that they can take back to their home database. This type of site structure is commonly referred to as "Search Engine Friendly Design."

Search Engine Friendly Design

Developing your site to be "search engine friendly" is one aspect of SEO best practices. The idea is to simply design your site so that the visiting robot can read and take notes (or index) all relevant aspects of each page of your site.

If your site is designed poorly or doesn't have links to all of your pages, then the robot will bypass those pages and only report on what it sees. Designing your entire site with Flash or using images in place of text are great ways to be mostly "invisible" to search engines, because the robots can't accurately read Flash content or text embedded in an image (yet).

One Page at a Time (No SEO Shortcuts)

The first principle to understand in designing your site is that you don't optimize your whole site all at once. You're optimizing each and every page of your site individually.

Many people think they only need to optimize their home page and then they're done. Many times when you click on a link from a SERP, it will take you to a specific page on your site. Thus, SEO is a very time-consuming and tedious ongoing process that needs to be carefully thought out and executed.

Page Structure

So let's look at the most important elements on each page that will require attention. To understand these concepts, it helps to have some basic understanding of HTML. HTML is the language that Web browsers and search engine spiders read and interpret.

The first set of tags to look at are meta tags, which often have the mystique of being the magic solution to get top rankings in search engines. Not. The best value you will get is the ability to control to some degree how Web pages are described by some search engines. So let's take a closer look.

Meta Keywords and Description Tags

The meta keyword and description tags allow you to influence the keywords and description of your page in some of the search engines. These tags are typically located in the section of an HTML page and look something like this:

<head>

<title>Search Engine Marketing Tips & Search Engine News - Search Engine Watch (SEW)</title>

<meta name="keywords" content="search engine marketing, meta tags, top search engines, search engine submission, searchenginewatch" />

<meta name="description" content="Search Engine Watch is the authoritative guide to search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO), offering the latest news about search engines." />

</head>

The meta keywords tag is sometimes useful as a way to reinforce the terms you think a page is important only for the search engines that support it. That's it.

The main benefit is to help reinforce what your page is about. I recommend no more than two to three keywords in each tag for each page of your site. It's also important that any keywords listed are directly related to the content on that particular Web page.

For the meta description tag, the text you want to be shown as your Web page description goes between the quotation marks after the "content=" portion of the tag. Generally, 200 to 250 characters may be indexed, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed. Again, the idea of good meta keywords and description tags is simply to give the search engine some "help" in determining what a particular Web page is about.

In Part 2, we'll look at the other content and tags on your Web page that are more important, including some tips on organizing your content and links. One of the most important aspects of your site for SEO is your navigation and linking structure, as well as the proper use of page titles, header tags, font weight/color, etc.

Keyword Discovery 101 - Part 2

2008-12-15T22:03:00.003-05:00

Our keyword discovery quest continues, with a focus on analyzing and refining your initial keyword list, which we began developing in Part 1. You should now have a sizable list of keywords and, preferably, have them organized in a spreadsheet. Our goal now is to analyze this list and begin a refining process to find the top performing keywords.

Fee-Based Keyword Tools

First, let's look at some of the keyword tools on the Internet, some of which might help you with this process.

Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker are the two most popular fee-based keyword tools. These tools show you a keyword's popularity, including the number of searches per keyword and search history.

One note: each of these tools has their own proprietary database that pulls information that represents the major search engines. You may get different results if you look up a keyword in both tools.

Free Keyword Tools

Google is an obvious choice with their set of free tools. Let's start with their keyword tool. This will allow you to either point to a Web site or type in keywords and get a list of keywords with monthly stats.

Google Trends allows you to type in one or more keywords to view up to five years of trend data on searcher behavior. The Google Traffic Estimator toolprovides insight into the amount of traffic and predicted CPC for a given keyword.

Remember: all of Google's tools only pull data from Google's database. But they're the biggest and free, so it's a great place to start.

To generate local keywords, you might like 5minutesite.com's tool. If you like a tool that puts it all together, check out SEO Book's Keyword Suggestion Tool, where you type in your keyword and get data from several sources at once with links to those sources.

Scoring Your Keywords

Now that you have access to some great keyword tools, let's dive into the refining process. At this point, I recommend creating three columns in your spreadsheet next to your list of keywords. For your three titles, use "Relevance," "Specificity," and "Popularity."

* Relevance: Go through your list and score each keyword on how relevant that keyword is to your business. To make it simple, use a scale from 1-10, 10 being the highest. Don't spend more than two seconds per keyword and give out 9s and 10s sparingly. You want to identify which keywords are most relevant to your business, your site, or a specific landing page depending on what kind of campaign you're running.
* Specificity: You'll want to go through the same scoring process. What you're looking for is how specific or how general each keyword is. Remember the long tail principle from Part 1. A keyword like "bike" for instance would score a 1 or a 2 where "Trek 2008 5.9 Madone" would score a 9 or 10.
* Popularity: Use some of the tools mentioned above to get a feel for how many searches there are for each keyword and rank them accordingly.

Now that you have scores for each keyword, set up one more column, titled "Overall Score." Average the scores for each keyword and then sort the keywords based on the overall score column. The keywords that will likely be your best performers will be near the top, while the keywords that will be your least performing will be near the bottom.

Test, Test, Test

Now it's time to test your keywords for performance measurement. A PPC campaign will likely get you some quick performance results.

If you're using these keywords for a SEO campaign, you don't want to wait months to find out you're using the wrong keywords. Set up a regular procedure to test performance and make course corrections along the way.

This process can definitely be expanded upon, but hopefully you can pick up the principles at work and use them in context to your specific needs. Feel free to ping me with questions or success stories.

Keyword Discovery 101 - part 1

2008-12-08T21:53:00.003-05:00

Developing proficiency for identifying and refining your keywords crosses many disciplines. Keyword discovery is important for PPC and SEO campaigns, link building, even as it relates to general marketing like writing press releases, product and service descriptions, or even your positioning statement.

The general steps for approaching a keyword discovery project are:

Define your keyword strategy, business goals and objectives.
Identify and build your initial set of keywords.
Refine those keywords and sort them into meaningful groups or themes.
Identify your top performing keywords, test them, and put them into action.

Strategy

It's important to think about a strategy for your campaign and what goals you wish to accomplish before you begin. Are you leaning for more of a branding campaign where you're more interested in being seen in the search results, or are you more interested in driving traffic to your site and, ultimately, a user conversion? This will affect the type of keywords you ultimately go with.

For example, someone who is at the beginning of the buying cycle may start their searching with general terms like "digital camera." Conversely, someone who uses "Canon EOS 1000D Digital Rebel XS" is probably toward the end of the buying cycle. They've done enough research to know which model of digital camera they want and are probably now searching for a good deal.

If you sell digital cameras and have relevant content (and a good price), you're likely to close this sale, assuming you rank high enough in the SERPs through PPC or SEO. This principle is sometimes referred to as the "long tail." Chasing the long tail leads to more customer acquisition and conversions, but fewer impressions.

Identify and Build Your Initial Set of Keywords

Spreadsheets are a great tool for capturing the keywords you identify as you go along. The key here is to take the blinders off and look at all possibilities -- don't rule anything out yet. We'll do that in the refining stage.

Two of the most popular keyword tools are Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker. We'll discuss these more in Part 2, but you may want to check them out as you work on developing your initial set of keywords.

Within Your Company

Find information that has already been compiled on your products and services. Your company's Web site, press releases, marketing materials, etc., are all good sources.

Your company Web site keeps a log of all visitor activity in "log files," or you may already have your site tagged to work with an analytics tool. If not, you may need the help of a computer engineer (or your kids, if you work from home) to locate your log files or have your site tagged.

Free analytics programs like Google Analytics, AWStats, or StatCounter are a great place to start. There are also commercial applications like Omniture, ClickTracks, and WebTrends that offer more features, but for a price. These tools are great for studying user behavior. You can even get glimpses at the keywords visitors are typing into a search engine to find your Web site.

Another area of your company's Web site is its search engine. If you have a search function on your Web site, you may want to look at what keywords visitors are using.

This is a good indicator of what they're most interested in on your site. Or it could indicate what they can't find on your site. Again, you might need professional help to get at this information.

Outside Your Company

Take a good look at your competition. Chances are, they may have already gone through the keyword discovery process. Visit their Web site. Learn what terms they seem to be optimizing for.

A good way to do this: view their source code. All browsers have a feature that lets you do this. The source code will give you a glimpse of their H1 tags, meta description, and meta keywords. Remember: each page of their site might have different information.

Also, consider looking at industry publications, blogs, forums, and other online communities. Get a feel for what people are talking about. What words are they using to describe products and services you may offer?

In Part 2, I'll discuss methods to expand this list further using some other nifty tools. I'll then explore ways to refine your list and identify the keywords that are most likely to perform for you.

Build Your SEM Network -- Get LinkedIn

2008-11-10T16:17:00.001-05:00

In response to my column on SEM career development, several readers asked what they could do to get a job or enhance their career as a search professional. A partial answer to this question is to use a social networking tool like LinkedIn, where professionals link to one another's resume-like profiles. This tool can offer a lot, regardless of where you are in your career.

What is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is an online network of more than 30 million professionals enabling you to create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments. You can then find, or be found by, other professionals.

I recently looked up an old friend I worked with about 16 years ago. Within minutes, I found my friend and sent him a request to link up. He now works at a firm that might need my services. We plan to have lunch the next time I'm in New York.

Just recently, LinkedIn received $22.7 million in new funding, even during this time of economic turmoil. That should say something to the relevancy of this tool in today's overcast climate.

Another article from TIME, "LinkedIn: the Site that Likes a Bad Economy," says it all. People tend to consider self-preservation in a bad economy and wish to reach out to others for help, to educate themselves, or to make new connections to further their career and enhance their resumes.

And it's as easy as opening an e-mail account. You sign up for an account, fill out your profile, search for your business associates, clients, and anyone else in your professional world.

As your linked network grows, so do your opportunities. The recent launch of their application platform gives you even more options for enriching your home page and your profile similar to that of Facebook.

LinkedIn Answers

Like the sometimes-questionable Yahoo Answers, but without the "sometimes-questionable" part, LinkedIn has an answers section to the site where one person can post a question and get feedback from your linked network. Because LinkedIn is primarily a professional site, the answers and conversations are mature and business-oriented.

For example, Chad M.'s answers post is being used to research education, asking "How has your formal education prepared you to be a more successful small business owner or entrepreneur? Did your choice of college major matter?"

LinkedIn Groups

One of the other great aspects of being a part of LinkedIn is joining groups. You can join professional groups, alumni organizations, industry conferences, and corporate alumni groups.

As a member of these groups you can post questions, read answers, and generally stay on top of the "goings on" with other members who have similar interests in common. You can search their new directory for groups that you would like to join.

For instance, I searched for "SEO" and found about 241 groups, including one for Search Engine Watch, one for Search Engine Watch Forums, and one for Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo. Go ahead and get an account and sign up.

Join Me

Of course, I wouldn't be writing this without being part of the first-hand experience. Feel free to send me an invitation to your linked network, and I'll see you in the groups. As always, feel free to drop me a line here or there if you have any other LinkedIn insights. Your experiences are important to us.

Facebook: Get Educated on the Hottest Social Media Platform

2008-10-23T16:22:00.000-04:00

As we continue our study of social media and how it's being used to educate, we turn our focus to Facebook. Facebook was founded by a student at Harvard University and then spread to all Ivy League Universities, then of course to the whole world, with more than 100 millions users worldwide.

It was first used as a tool to help students, faculty, and staff to get to know other people on campus. Now it's used to do the same on the Internet campus. Users create a profile and publish it to other friends, add them, and send creative messages to one another.

Teaching and Learning on Facebook

Even as a purely social activity, Facebook has the potential to teach students about appropriate citizenship in the online world. Similar to other social media applications, Facebook highlights the importance of creating content over simply consuming it. By encouraging the student to build creative profiles, Facebook allows them to express themselves, communicate, and highlight their talents and experience.

Facebook has become popular with millions of college students, drawing them into an online world where they spend hours browsing profiles, meeting new people, and exploring relationships. This creates an opportunity for educators to better understand the compelling elements of social networking and incorporate those elements into teaching and learning.

Facebook at School

Dr. Jen Golbeck from Maryland's iSchool uses Facebook in her classes to help students to get to know one another better. She first creates a group for all of her students to join. She has discovered that faculty gets a chance to learn the names of students quickly and can get better insight on their major and general interests. She feels that this form of communication has helped students to feel more comfortable engaging in discussion with professors.

Over at Bucknell University, Alf Siewers, assistant professor of English, also uses Facebook in the classroom. He uses Facebook for his course pages instead of Blackboard. He found that his students felt more engaged and the content to be more intuitive.

He creates a Facebook group for each course and uses the News feature to post assignments. He also uses the discussion boards, which allow students to post reading responses and comment on each other's thoughts. As the groups are set up to be private, only those who enrolled in the class can see what is posted.

Facebook Caveats

As with any online social networking site, Facebook has its problems. Some educational professionals look at Facebook as a tool of isolationism. Can students really integrate into a real-life social structure, especially when entering college, if the majority of their past interactions have been online, with very little personal interaction? Then again, this is the same argument posited as online gaming becomes more realistic, when Second Life came out, and when every new generation of video game console is released.

The other negative aspect is also ubiquitous concerning social networking. Many kids -- as well as adults -- don't pay that much attention to the information they post online. Depending on the information, this can lead to classroom or workplace embarrassment, climb the ladder to loss of a job or scholarship, and even lead to identity theft and victimization of minors. To avoid these pitfalls, adults must be responsible for their kids and use common sense themselves when posting.

I'm sure many of you use Facebook to help educate either at school or in the workplace. How do you use Facebook? Are there successes or failures you'd like to share? We'd love to hear from you.