Search Engine Tigers

Ron Paul has by far been the most popular politician on the web for this political cycle. For some reason his message has resonated with the Digg crowd, and the like. Mike Huckabee has seen this and obviously decided to compete for this demographic. To that aim he’s tapped into the popular Chuck Norris Facts that have been floating around for a year or so, and backed by the man himself, he’s put out this video on YouTube.

Thanks to Paul for the heads up.

I’m currently sitting (ok, leaning against the bar holding my blackberry in my hands and a pint of cider between my teeth) in a sports bar in London. London isn’t my city, despite numerous Americans, upon finding out that I’m English saying ‘oh, you’re from London’, it’s not somewhere I’ve spent much time. So tonight was fun.

I had decided to attend a Toastmaster club in London, and had prepped by going to mapquest.co.uk to find my 3.2 mile route. After about 1.2 miles I was lost. So I did what any guy would do… I continued walking in what I assumed was the general direction, turning down any street that is featured on a standard UK monopoly board. Hey, it was a plan, in hindsight not a good one, but it still qualified as one.

Eventually I found a taxi with his light on, and was deposited at the meeting place (a pub) 5 minutes late, but the meeting hadn’t started yet, so all was fine.

After the meeting, one of the toastmasters walked me back to the underground. I was confronted with a ticket machine that asked me whether I was going to stay in zone 1 or go to another zone. I had no idea, it was a completely different system to that I am used to in DC, where the fees are based on your starting and end point. Eventually I figured it out, and made it back to the hotel, and the warmth of this bar (although at 11pm I still haven’t had my evening meal yet, and I doubt I will).

So what does this all have to do with Search Marketing? 5 points if you guessed by now that today’s topic was usability. Every now and again you should step back fron your site and think about how a user that hasn’t been to your site before will react when they land there. Will they be able to navigate how you expect? Will they understand your terminology? Will they flow through the funnels that you anticipate they will?

Analytics and usability studies can work hand in hand to help you identify any concerns that you may not realise that you have…  So every now and again, take a step back.  Look at your site through the eyes of a new visitor to your ‘city’, remove your preconceptions, and you may surprise yourself…

What a wonderful email I received from Expedia this morning. They’re following up on a hotel stay that I booked through them. They’ve given it a week so as not to pressure me, and have now sent me an email asking me to take a survey on my stay at Unknown…

What a shame that they don’t know where they booked me in, and by the solitary comma up at the top, it looks like they believe that my name is blank. This really is a case where they’ve obviously not fully tested their email system to ensure that it’s sending out the appropriate messages, similar to this issue that Jeff Herrity talked about recently. Testing and usability are 2 pieces of the online puzzle that, for some reason, seem to be an afterthought, if even that, which is a shame because if the functionality isn’t right and the site isn’t easy to work with, you’re going to leak customers when there’s no need to.

One of the best ways to plug your blog is to go away from it. Go and comment on other people’s blogs, or better yet, go and write for their blog. You may think that you want to keep all of the great content for your own blog, but what good does that do you if you don’t have people reading it? Put it on another blog, and if people like it, they’ll follow you to yours.

So am I following my own advice?

Well, over the last few months, I’ve commented frequently on different blogs and forums, and I’ve put out some content for others.

SearchEngineLand

SEOmoz

MarketingPilgrim

RBDRodeo (ok, this one is actually my work blog, but still, it’s getting content out there under my name on a different platform, to a slightly different audience)

Has it helped this blog? Well, it’s pulled some people over here, not as many as I would maybe like, but yes it’s helped. So if you want to improve your blog, go off and help someone else improve theirs.

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.

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

One of the first ways to improve your click through rate is to make sure that your ad is compelling (I’m not going to write too much on this topic for reasons that I’ll reveal later on this week). I’ve recently added AdSense to this blog, and I noticed this entry pop up.

The ad on the right is absolutely fine, although I’m sure Google wouldn’t like you to click it (or at least click it and actually use the service). The one on the left though… what’s it about? The title is Search Engine #. I have no idea what that means, are they talking about increasing your traffic? Your SE exposure? There’s no information, and there’s no call to action. Maybe in the 2 lines of text? Top 6 websites for Search Engine # is the first line, and the second line isn’t even used. Are they hoping for people to click through to clear the confusion? If so, one would think that that would lead to a very poor conversion rate, which makes the campaign rather costly. I would have loved to have clicked on it to find out exactly who the company was, but unfortunately under the AdSense TOS I can’t click on ads on my own site. However, searching for the term in Google – Search Engine # – showed them at #1, so I clicked there. It’s one of those spammy arbitrage site, which means that they’re most likely auto-generating the ads. So actually I’m kind of happy that their copy sucks, hopefully it’ll not make them much money…

This week there’s been a lot of talk about Topix.net purchasing the domain topix.com for $1 million in order for them to have the ‘proper’ url, and for them to grab the traffic that they were missing as people, real or imagined, automatically type .com for every url. People have discussed this backwards and forwards, talking about whether this was a good deal, or a bad deal, whether they should have kept the .net as their main domain and redirected the .com over there, or whether we should all just wait a month and see if everything sorts itself out (the crux is that since the shift to the .com domain, they’ve had a drop in traffic / rankings). But this wasn’t the only big domain purchasing story this week…

One blog reported on Tate & Lyle, and Johnson & Johnson, the co-developers of the artificial sweetner Splenda, purchasing 200-300 negative domain names, such as the lovely splendaisnotsafe.com, the divine victimsofsplenda.info, and the succinct splendapoison.org. It’s not a bad idea to attempt to control the story by taking domains off the shelf, but if they really expect that someone would purchase splendatoxicitycenter.com, then I’ve got to really wonder whether they know something about Splenda that we all should know…

So what’s the commonality here? Well, both companies have gone out and purchased domains that they think should be under their control in order for them to succeed in business. The lesson is that while you can you should get as many permutations of, at least, your company name as you can, and if there’s a chance that one of your products may have a particular defect that you’re aware of, maybe you should look into controlling that story by buying those domains too. Maybe another lesson is that you should stick with real sugar…

So you want to put a website up for your business, or you already have one up, and you know enough to know that to make your website work for you, you have to do some Search Engine Marketing. But where do you start? Well, I’ve put together some links below to resources that will at least explain what you didn’t know you didn’t know, and get you moving in the right direction. These links are not the be-all and end all of information on these topics out there, but they’re good enough to get you thinking and point you in the right direction, too many links may make you feel overwhelmed.

Education

The first step is Education. Before you start running, you need to know how many legs you have. Attending a conference, reading a good book, and taking certification courses all help. The link here is a poll, which gives you an idea of how some of these courses and conferences rank, but it also gives you links to their websites.

Best Conferences and Certification Courses

Keyword Research

Keyword research is vital for your site. If you don’t do it correctly you have no idea as to whether your site is visible to as many potential customers as possible. The right keyword research can lower costs for pay per click, and just generally increase your sales. The article linked here has a full discussion on keyword research from Lisa (“The Lisa”) Barone at Bruce Clay.

The 5 steps of Keyword Research

Page Optimization

So now you know what to target, the next question is how to target. If you can incorporate them into your URL i.e. nashvillebuggywhips.com, then that’s great, but more likely than not you’ll want to go with your brand as the name. So what’s the first element on your website that you want to target? The title tag. This article describes everything you want to know about the title tag.

All about Title Tags

Next you want to work with your meta tags. Remembering that while these elements may not have the power they once had, they’re still worth looking at and getting right (especially the ROBOTS tag, which can impact indexing on your whole site).

The Meta Tag primer

Next, you want to make sure that you have good content on your site. The search engines love good, unique, relevant content. If you have plenty to say about your company and it’s products / services, do it. While you want to weave the keywords into your content, just remember that all of the text on the page will be indexed and so you may pick up searches for a long tail search such as “premier buggy whip supplier in nashville”. These searches don’t happen too often, but they’re much more likely to convert into a sale for your company. This next article talks about using your content to help your site

Content is King

Link Building
Now that you have your site up, the next step is to make sure that people know about it. Just building a site and optimizing it does not mean that it will rank well in the Search Engines. Their current algorithms are based largely on trust, and one of the ways that that trust is generated is through links to your site. The more high quality, relevant links that come to your site, the better. How do you get links? Well there are several ways. You can contact other site owners and get them to link to you (you may have to link back to them though), there are directories, both free and paid that accept links, there are paid linking services, and then there is linkbaiting, where you write an article / put out a video / do something different, that spreads virally, and results in them linking to the site. There are many companies out there now that specialize in linkbaiting services, especially to the relatively new phenomenon of Social Media sites such as Digg. The first link below is to a running section of SearchEngineLand that deals specifically with link building topics. The second is an example of a linkbaiting campaign from SEOmoz.

Link Week

The Super Digg

Analytics & Reporting
So you have a site, it has incoming links, the search engines have indexed it. How do you know how well it’s doing? You need to have an analytics solution in place. Are they expensive? Well, it depends on the level of analysis, and whether you need real time analysis, or you can afford to wait until the next day. The link below discusses six packages that can provide analytics data for your site without costing you a penny.

Analytics on the cheap – six free stats packages

Alternatives

What else might you want to look into? Well, there’s blogging, podcasting, and social media sites, the number of which seems to grow fairly regularly. Here are the final 2 links, the first addresses how you may want to use podcasting in promoting your business, and gives you a list of resources, the other describes using one off the social media sites – Flickr.

Podcasting for small businesses

Marketing on Flickr

Recently Sony and Walmart have hit trouble when they’ve been found out for generating reviews of their sites / products / stores that were not actually user generated, but were instead paid for by the respective companies. In the EU legislation has now been passed that declares this practice illegal. Will it only be a matter of time before that happens here in the US? Will this affect your linking / self promotion strategy?

“Businesses that write fake blog entries or create whole wesbites purporting to be created by customers will fall foul of a European directive banning them from ‘falsely representing oneself as a consumer.’ From December 31, when the change becomes law in the UK, they can be named and shamed by trading standards or taken to court. The Times has learnt that the new regulations also will apply to authors who praise their own books under a fake identity on websites such as Amazon.”