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:

  1. How search engines list websites for free and through paid placements
  2. How to get free organic traffic (search engine optimization (seo))
  3. How to efficiently purchase listings guaranteed to rank your company at the top of search engine results
  4. How to calulate the ROI of your search marketing efforts
  5. Whats coming next!

For additional information about the Toronto event and other conferences in the series, visit www.searchenginestrategies.com.

Posted by Jason | Filed Under SEM 

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.

  1. 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.
  2. Take mispellings and domain names into account.  Also include your product names.
  3. Make your ads clickable with a call to action.
  4. Once you are familiar with ad placement and keywords, split it up into individual campaigns.
  5. Do some research on dynamic keyword insertion.  This will put the keyword that the user searched for in your ad automatically.
  6. Don’t waste your money trying to be in the top position.
  7. 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.
  8. Start with $5.00 a day and increase as you refine.
  9. If you only offer a product to a local area, don’t market to the whole world.
  10. 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!

Posted by Jason | Filed Under SEM 

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.”

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

Posted by Jason | Filed Under SEM 

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.

Posted by Jason | Filed Under SEM 

Search Engine Marketing and You

March 28, 2007 | Leave a Comment

I was reading the SEM guru’s site, Shoemoney.com, when I came across this link, “Search Engine Marketing And You.”

Apparently, Shoemoney is speaking at is, and there are a couple available slots if you are interested.

For those of you who don’t know who Shoemoney is, take a look around his site. He makes some incredible money on the web.

Posted by Jason | Filed Under PPC, Pay Per Click, SEM