Search Engine Tigers

Yes! After all your work, that site has started to take off. It’s been trending up nicely, and suddenly it’s made a nice jump. What’s the first thing that you should do? Obviously it’s to go to your boss or client and show them the proof of the great job that you’ve been doing. Well, maybe not. The first thing you should do is to understand the reasons for the jump, and verify that you actually are the cause of it.

Indexing
Check your indexed page numbers, and see if you’ve had a jump there that may explain the increase If you’ve recently made optimization changes to your site, then you may be able to take the credit for the jump. Has new content recently been released to the site? Have pages moved from the supplemental index to the main index on Google? Check your link numbers, have they increased?

Rankings
Check your rankings, have they moved dramatically? If your main entry pages are now coming up even a few positions higher, that can be the difference.

Referrers
See where the traffic is coming from. Has your site been linked to by a major traffic site? Has something that you’ve done been written about, or just simply picked up a really nice link? Have you done any viral campaigns that may be pulling in the traffic?

Offline Marketing
Make sure that you’re aware of any offline marketing campaigns that may be running. If there’s a tv, radio, or print ad that’s running, that could very well be the source of the new traffic.

Just remember that if you take the credit for an increase in the traffic levels for a site, without truly understanding the reasons for it, and if the traffic drop back down to the previous levels, you’re going to have to be ready with an explanation and to take the blame…

I’ve been watching the SEM meet-ups in Denver, Philadelphia, Seattle, etc with envious eyes. Why wasn’t there a group out here, right by the nation’s capital? That’s right Virginia deserves to have a place for Search Engine Marketers to network, chat, exchange tips & tricks, or just laugh about some horribly spammy linking method that was just discovered, with other people who’d get the joke. So I contacted Debra Mastaler, as the closest big name SEM that I knew of, to ask her if she was aware of such a group. She wasn’t, and thanked me for volunteering to set something up… that’ll teach me.

So, tonight, I went ahead and set up a Virginia SEM meetup group (apparently there are 8 people on meetup.com that have been waiting for this group to be created, I guess they just didn’t want the hassle of setting it up… thanks again Debra) I haven’t set a date/location for a first meeting, as I’d like to see how many people sign up, and where they’re located. More likely than not, it’ll be somewhere in Fairfax county, or down towards Richmond in the first 1/2 of May. If you’re from the area (heck we’ll even take people from DC, Southern Maryland, and West Virginia) pop on over and sign up, and see you soon.

On Friday SEMPO sent out logo’s for all who have passed their certification program, for them to post to their websites. Curious as to what it looks like? Here you go…

The clock struck thirteen…

No, I’m not saying that MSN is watching everything that you do, I’m referring to the part of the book where they happily announce that the chocolate ration has been increased to 20 grams, despite it previously being 30 grams. A week or so ago I received an email from MSN letting me know how excited they were to let me know that I’d been selected to participate in their new beta program, where all of my ads would now automatically be displayed on their content network. How sweet of them to be excited for me, I felt special… but wait a minute, what if I didn’t want to be on their content network? Well, there’s a way to opt out they say. So here’s the way to opt out. Go to your account, click on a campaign, click on an ad group. Then look for the text to “Select ad distribution”.

Clicking on the actual text expands your options.

…and after a few seconds there it is. All you then have to do is hit save, and wait for the save dialog to pop up. Then repeat for each of the other 500 ad groups that you have live in their system. Or alternatively you can do as we did, and email MSN support, giving them your account details, and they’ll take care of it for you in 2-3 days (fingers crossed).

So having had an account migrate to the new MSN adCenter Beta, I decided to take a look at what they’d improved. After my last post on their geo-targeting solution I’d hoped that they’d made improvements, then again it couldn’t get much worse unless they’d decided to only display lat & long co-ordinates and have you guess on the city names. So how have they improved it? Have they leap-frogged the competition, or at least pulled level with the best solution – Yahoo Panama? Nope, but they have at least pulled level with the Google solution. They now group the cities by state, sounds simple, but it obviously wasn’t as they’ve taken this long to actually implement it.

So why do I like the Yahoo solution better? Is it just because it’s got pretty pictures? Heck, yes. When I’m geotargeting a location that I’m not familiar with, I want to be damn sure that I’m hitting my target markets. With Yahoo, you pick the DMA and you get the instant gratification of seeing the area of the market on the image shade in. With this MSN solution, despite me working and living in the area, I have no idea what the heck the difference is between selecting Alexandria and Arlington… which one covers Fairfax? Vienna? Manassas? You can’t tell. Come on Google & MSN, get with the program and steal borrow from Yahoo.

Google Webmaster Tools were originally released as Google Sitemaps, and were the place to manage your XML sitemap. Since then, they’ve evolved to such a point that you no longer need have an XML sitemap on your site for you to take advantage of the tools available. So what does it give you?

• View any errors on your site (missing pages, pages excluded from indexing by your robots.txt, etc).
• Validate your robots.txt file (a file used to tell the spiders what not to index, as well as other special commands).
• Manage your site verification (so the webmater tools know to give you access to the data).
• View your crawl rate stats, and change the frequency that the engines spider your site (if the spiders crawl you so much that they bog your servers down, you can tell them to slow down the speed of their indexing).
• Set your canonicalization preference (do you want the site indexed with a www or not?).
• Authorize Google to label and display your images through Google Images.
• View the page rank of your pages (not the actual numbers, just high, medium, low or not ranked).
• See which page has the highest page rank (not always your home page).

• See what searches on Google one of your pages showed up for, and what position you ranked (handy for finding long tail searches that you may not have realized people were searching for – i.e. this site shows up 5th for the search term “different tigers and maps“).
• A list of the words that occur on your site (shows you what Google is seeing).
• A list of the anchor text that people are linking to your site with (handy for quickly seeing any negative or positive news about your company that you need to be aware of).
• A list of external links into your site, by each page on your site, with the ability to drill down by page, and see the actual URLs that point to each page, along with their Google Page Rank.
• A list of internal links on your site (helpful to validate that the internal site structure that you believe should work great, is actually seen to do so by the Google spider).
• Sitemaps, any XML sitemap that’s been created and validated for the site (a sitemap for your site created in a format specifically for the spiders to read and digest).

So this tool has evolved over time into a very useful tool for anyone with their own site. Simply log in and validate your site, then you can get in and play with all of the tools / data above, not bad for for a tool that you get for free…

This is one of those times when the picture says everything…

As I alluded to the other day, I’ve written an article on the Ways to improve the Conversion Rate for your Website, this is my entry for the Marketing Pilgrim Scholarship Contest. The article talks about using Dynamic Keyword Insertion, Geotargeting, and making sure that you send people to the Right Landing Page. Take a look, and feel free to leave comments here or there.

In July of 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp purchased MySpace for $580 million, so that they could gain access to the, at that time, 22 million registered users. Since that time, News Corp. has done a great job of leveraging synergies between their properties, driving traffic from MySpace to it’s other sites, from new movie releases, to Fox sports sites, to American Idol. So, given the demographic breakdown of Digg, wouldn’t it make sense for the Dirty Digger (as he’s been referred to by the British press, although mostly lately by the satirical magazine Private Eye, since around 1968) to make a play to add Digg to the News Corp. portfolio?

Well, what would it cost him? Well, investment in Digg is $11.5 million, and VC’s typically want 10-20x return on an investment, so a price of $150 to $200 million would probably be expected given the hype around Digg. Since Digg recently reported that they have 1 million registered users, that would make each registered user worth $150 at the lower end of the spectrum, way higher than the $26 per user paid for MySpace, but it still might be worth it, after all Mr. Murdoch’s own mySpace page does state that his hobby is global domination…