Seth Godin Will Deliver the SES Toronto Keynote
May 22, 2007 | Leave a Comment
SES Toronto (Search Engine Strategies) features presentations and panel discussions that cover all aspects of search engine related promotion. Marketers show up to do a bit of networking and to learn the ins and outs of search engine marketing from the top search experts in the world.
Here is a quick recap of what will be going on:
- How search engines list websites for free and through paid placements
- How to get free organic traffic (search engine optimization (seo))
- How to efficiently purchase listings guaranteed to rank your company at the top of search engine results
- How to calulate the ROI of your search marketing efforts
- Whats coming next!
For additional information about the Toronto event and other conferences in the series, visit www.searchenginestrategies.com.
Search Engine Marketing Tips and Tricks
May 21, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Search Engine Marketing can be highly profitable if you attack it correctly. That doesn’t mean you set a daily ad budget of $20.00 with 150 keywords and let it run unmonitored. You have to refine the process and improve using the data that the SEM program is giving you.
Below you will find some tips and tricks of the SEM industry. These are things we do on a repeated basis, but you should be aware of them in your personal ad campaigns too.
- First step - use all the keywords that are justifiable for your product or target market. Keep your bids low to see what terms are search most.
- Take mispellings and domain names into account. Also include your product names.
- Make your ads clickable with a call to action.
- Once you are familiar with ad placement and keywords, split it up into individual campaigns.
- Do some research on dynamic keyword insertion. This will put the keyword that the user searched for in your ad automatically.
- Don’t waste your money trying to be in the top position.
- Make sure you apply the right metrics to account for the end result. In essence, if you are trying to sell something, make sure the SEM program is tracking it.
- Start with $5.00 a day and increase as you refine.
- If you only offer a product to a local area, don’t market to the whole world.
- Make sure to check out the tutorials the SEM agency provides. It will help with conversion.
If you can think of anything else, let me know!
Search Engine Friendly vs Search Engine Optimization
May 18, 2007 | Leave a Comment
SearchEngineLand brought up a great point, Search Engine Friendly does not equal Search Engine Optimization.
Search Engine Friendly is a great marketing technique when selling your software online. A customer wants search engine to be able to crawl through the content with little to no resistence. That’s the only way that they will get natural traffic! But Search Engine Friendly isn’t a save-all for seo.
Generally speaking, the term “search engine friendly” describes design elements, menus, URLs, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize, while search engine optimization is all about improving the volume and quality of search-referred traffic to a website.
When a piece of software is regarded as search engine friendly, it points to the features, not the effectiveness. It takes a webmaster to be effective. It takes someone who knows what the hell they are doing, and not someone just publishing content the is relatively meaningless.
For more great information, check out search engine land. The article is very well written and informative.
SEO Tips Part 2- Using The Right Keywords
May 17, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Now you have some great keywords for your site. Things that show exactly what your website provides, but aren’t so competitive that you can’t rank for them.
I probably don’t have to tell you - this is where most people fail. Well, one of the areas. A lot of people don’t go forward with getting backlinks either, but that is besides the point. We will handle that a bit later. We are going to work in top down fashion though, starting with the domain name.Some schools of thought say that a keyword rich domain name is important for overall search ranking. I advise against that, though. Having keywords in the domain name are nice, but not essential. The highest PR ranking site on the Internet don’t have keywords in them, but they are brand names (which you could argue are keywords in a sense).
The title of the web page is important though. You want a couple of your keywords in the title. If you don’t know where to find it or how to change it, you have to look in the <title>YOUR KEYWORDS HERE< /title> part of the html coding. Change that tag, and it changes the title of your web page.
Next is the name of your webpage, or site (depending on how your are setting it up). Make sure the keywords are there, and the font is big, like <h1> big. Then you generally have a subtitle. Once again, put your keywords in there and make sure it has a <h2> tag.
From here, you have to play it by ear. You want the title of your article to have keywords in it, because it is generally in bigger font and has bold faced type. Google looks at both things as a factor for page rank. You want your keywords to be spread through the text often, but now so often it is unreadable. After all, you are writing for a client or a customer, not for Google.
You want to use variations of text; such as the key term ‘promotional marketing’ can be interchanged with marketing promotion. Yahoo like variations like this.
A couple other considerations are with your categories or tags, as is popular in blogs. Tags are one more spot that help your rank for a keyword. Sometimes, it will even give you two extra placements in the text. Categories are another. The little tag that says, this article is in ’seo’ is crucial to add some forgotten keywords to your copy.
Tomorrow, we are going to discuss linking. Hopefully, I gave you a good 50,000 foot view of search engine optimization keywords. There will be more detailed articles to come, but I thought this is a nice way to familiarize you with some terms and thoughts.
SEO Tips Part 1- Choosing the Right Keywords
May 15, 2007 | Leave a Comment
A huge part of search engine optimization is keywords, we all know that. But where do you find them? How do you use them? That is the mystery.
This also marks the beginning of article series dedicated to improving your site’s SEO, or search engine rankings. The first topic we are going to discuss is Choosing the right keywords.
Choosing Keywords
The absolute first step in search engine optimization, well after the actual web page build, is the find your keywords. These keywords are search terms users put into search engines to find you. Picking the right keywords can be tricky though.
My favorite tool to use is the Keyword Selector Tool found at overture.com. Truthfully, it has gotten a little slow over the years because almost every seo expert uses it, but it is worthwhile nonetheless.
Imagine you are a visitor, looking for a service like yours. What would you type in? Think of two or three word search terms because it is easier to rank for those. Take for example, “Online Transcription Service.” It describes a would-be business and would be semi easy to rank for in the search results.
Now, when you type something into overture, say “business” and see it is searched 14,000 times a day, don’t even try to optimize for it. How many sites on the Internet are already there? Countless. There isn’t a chance that you would be able to surpass them.
Take a lesser typed in phrase, such as “online business opportunity.” That phrase will be easier to target and easier to rank for. It isn’t that the keyword phrase is less important, just that it is lesser known. That way when someone types “online business opportunity” into Google, the chances of you being on the front page are a lot greater.
Tomorrow, we are going to talk about actually using the information you found today in your site!
SEO Tips - Promote One Page At A Time
May 9, 2007 | Leave a Comment
An article at PromotionWorld.com brings up an interesting point, “SEO success can come from promoting a single page or a few pages at most to search engines.”
This is completely true. We have done it in the past for some of our smaller clients who are still building content. Search Engine Optimization can be effective if for only one, good, targetted web page.
It is important to go back to that page and update the content accordingly, though. Take notice of some of the competitors keywords, evaluate them through various keyword research tools, and look for keyword phrases that may be beneficial. Clean up the title a bit, as well. Then link to that article from your home page and with any other sites that you operate.
One good tip in the article is to select something that is not too competitive in regards to keywords. Don’t select a keyword phrase from the top of the list. Try for something that you have a good chance of ranking well in Google or Yahoo with.
The other tip from promotionworld.com is that it is beneficial to comment on forums and blogs. Being a blogger, I can tell you this is one of the best methods to both get traffic and linkbacks. Oftentimes, bloggers have a plugin that will show on the front page the recent comment entries or the person with the most comments in a given month (or other period of time). This is nice for a quick Google spider spike and will help with getting visitors to your site.
So the next time you are looking to promote your site, but have minimal time or money, seo a couple pages and monitor the results. Then start commenting on sites in the same niche. It is a surefire way to increase traffic a bit.
The Importance of Landing Pages
May 8, 2007 | Leave a Comment
If you are paying for each and every click that comes to your website, as is the case in Search Engine Marketing systems like Adwords and MSNadcenter, you need focused results page. These results pages are also called landing pages. If you don’t have a landing page, you are wasting your money.
Recently, Cabelas learned a valuable lesson. They transitioned from a generic landing page, to one that you can actually buy something from. The Press Release says this:
With the earlier system, he says, “If I’m a user searching for boat trailer parts, I can’t buy from that page, I have to make another click to go into the web site to make a purchase. With the GravityStream proxy, if I find what I want I can place the order right there.â€
Fortna says he also likes the ability to add text to the version of the web site maintained by Netconcepts without changing anything on the native web site.
This change alone positively affected their bottom line. So the next time you think of sinking some money into online advertising, make sure it is supported by a landing page.
Source: webpronews.com
Semantic Search Engine Marketing
May 7, 2007 | Leave a Comment
DesktopMoney LTD team has just finished a pretty extensive comparison between two very different types of search engines; traditional and semantic.
The traditional ones are the kind that we have been dancing around for the past 10 years, such as Google, Yahoo, etc. All of them look at content the way a viewer would. The spiders sift through keywords and links and so on.
Semantic search engines are a bit different. They interpret the machine language of the website. In fact, various contant management systems have plugins that allow for this sort of indexing. But machine language is something that humans can’t make out. It is wrought with code and weird symbols, etc.
The actual comparison research conducted by DesktopMoney LTD was done between Google and Hakia, a semantic search engine. And as far as the extensiveness, each phrase was queried and searches went up to 3 pages in, typical user activity.
The results are interesting though. It turned out that Google served product oriented site for the same phrase that Hakia served content sites. Hakia, in fact, made it rather difficult to get to the real sellers of products.
When thinking about the future of the internet, this is a interesting development because pretty much everyone agrees the web is going semantic. It will be able to take action for you without you even clicking a button. But it still raises the question of why the semantic search results yielded non product related pages. Maybe the commercial sites haven’t applied semantic technology. Or maybe the page structure is such that a Hakia crawler couldn’t get through it as well.
I don’t know, buy we will have to see when the time comes.
Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Strategy
May 4, 2007 | Leave a Comment
We, at Tech Solution, are shifting our business strategy a bit. More so, where this blog and website are concerned.
This blog is going to be devoted to hands on search engine optimization and marketing. We also have our first Tech Solution book coming out regarding the same topics. Our focus is going to be empower small businesses in regards to online success.
Old marketing rules are out. As evidenced everyday. It is becoming more and more clear that if you can’t market on the web, then you can’t win. This doesn’t necessarily apply to the small, mom and pop grocery store or the privately owned garage, but you get the picture.
So, from this point forward, you are going to get SEO and SEM news, startup consultation, and entire pages devoted to making your business more profitable online!