- Search results will be based on your prior search history, so everybody will end up with different results.
- Search results will depend on the intent of your search. Based on your IP, Google can figure out where you're located and guess the intent of your search (shopping, research, entertainment…).
- Traffic is not everything. Bounce rates, conversion rates, navigation summaries and other KPIs will become increasingly more important with implementation of behavior and intent-based.
- Everything will be searchable. Google will be able to convert audios into text, scan sites for images and ‘jump’ into the middle of videos. How engaging your site is will affect its search engine ranking.
- Spammers will have to work harder. Using just text won’t be enough to rank high on search engines. In addition, the value of linking will be diminished.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
IS SEO DEAD?
Is SEO the way we know it dead? According to Bruce Clay, it’s not too long till search engines evolve into more modern and personalized ranking methods based on behavior and intent. On November 11, the president of the Internet marketing company Bruce Clay, Inc., Clay spoke at a session entitled "Top-Shelf Organic SEO" in which he discussed personal search. Here’s what’s coming:
Friday, November 14, 2008
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING - MEASURING ROI
When it comes to social media, tracking ROI can be tricky. In his new video, David Meerman Scott discusses measuring ROI for social media marketing campaigns. According to Scott “you can’t measure everything in actual dollars-and-cents ROI.” But here’s what you CAN measure:
FREE STUFF
Google Alerts – “email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.” You can get Google Alerts based on the name of your company, products and names of the top executives. Now, if your CEO’s name is Chris Brown and your sell a product called “Gentle Hand Soup,” you might be in trouble.
Technorati – “Real-time search engine for blogs that tracks what is current and popular.” Not only will Technorati help you find best blogs that are relevant to your company, products anD industry, it will also show you how many people like and are linking to YOUR blog (you do have to register your blog with Technorati to get this info, though)
Google Analytics – “Learn more about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site.” I love Google Analytics. It provides all the info you need to know about your site visitors, traffic sources, referring sites, keywords, visitor’s behavior and more. It also lets you monitor Goals. Let’s say you have a contact-us form on your site. Google analytics will help you see how any visitors come to the page and how many of them actually fill out the form. How cool is that?
PAID SERVICES
Salesforce – There’s so much more to Salesforce than I can ever imagine. But using it to launch and monitor marketing campaigns, track email open rates, create reports and manage customer relationships makes it easier to evaluate and improve your marketing efforts AND estimate ROI.
HubSpot – the best thing about HubSpot is that it lets you measure your online marketing performance against your competition. It is a great tool to use if you want to improve your website’s SEO. HubSpot can also be integrated with Salesforce for better understanding and evaluation of your marketing efforts.
- How many people are exposed to your ideas (how many people read your blog, receive your blog feeds/newsletters, are in your social network or attend your webinar)
- How many people have downloaded something from your website (a white paper, e-book, client story a podcast)
- How many people have shared your content with others
- How many people are talking about your products/services, company or people that work for you (on their blogs, websites, Twitter, social networking sites). Also, measure this against your competition
- How many people are saying something positive
- You can even measure how many people are buying your products
- And, I would like to add, look at your website stats. Has the traffic increased? Are people spending more time on your site and visiting more pages. Do you see a decrease in bounce rates? Do more people fill out a contact-us form or request a demo? Does your site appear higher on search engines?
FREE STUFF
Google Alerts – “email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.” You can get Google Alerts based on the name of your company, products and names of the top executives. Now, if your CEO’s name is Chris Brown and your sell a product called “Gentle Hand Soup,” you might be in trouble.
Technorati – “Real-time search engine for blogs that tracks what is current and popular.” Not only will Technorati help you find best blogs that are relevant to your company, products anD industry, it will also show you how many people like and are linking to YOUR blog (you do have to register your blog with Technorati to get this info, though)
Google Analytics – “Learn more about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site.” I love Google Analytics. It provides all the info you need to know about your site visitors, traffic sources, referring sites, keywords, visitor’s behavior and more. It also lets you monitor Goals. Let’s say you have a contact-us form on your site. Google analytics will help you see how any visitors come to the page and how many of them actually fill out the form. How cool is that?
PAID SERVICES
Salesforce – There’s so much more to Salesforce than I can ever imagine. But using it to launch and monitor marketing campaigns, track email open rates, create reports and manage customer relationships makes it easier to evaluate and improve your marketing efforts AND estimate ROI.
HubSpot – the best thing about HubSpot is that it lets you measure your online marketing performance against your competition. It is a great tool to use if you want to improve your website’s SEO. HubSpot can also be integrated with Salesforce for better understanding and evaluation of your marketing efforts.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
FACEBOOK'S SOCIAL ADS GO INTERACTIVE... BUT ARE THEY REALLY GONNA WORK
Facebook is rolling out a new ad format called "engagement ads" which takes advertising on social networks one step further. The new ads are more interactive than current "social ads." They will appear on the main screen when a user first logs into Facebook and engage this user by asking him or her to take a certain action (like commenting on a movie or adding an event to his or her calendar). After the user takes action, Facebook will share a notice about this action with his or her friends. This new ad format is certainly an improvement, but as my friend once said "People go to Facebook to get in touch with other people. They don't care about ads."
And if you are going to use Facebook for your marketing initiatives, get a little creative. Here are a couple of examples from Matthew Pollock's article Is YouTube the right pipeline for you?
"Fiserv, a leading provider of information technology services to the financial industry, recognized Gen Y consumers as desirable prospects for many credit unions. To connect the two sides, Fiserv launched a Facebook application called MyMoney, which lets users search, join and manage funds from their credit union account from their profile pages. To leverage Facebook's viral capabilities, every person who adds the MyMoney widget then alerts their friends, which creates a powerful, self-propelled ripple effect that will ultimately continue to drive adoption. It's a very simple concept but has been a huge success, as the average user spends about 20 minutes on their Facebook page daily and 36 credit unions now support the application."
And, "Coca-Cola recently released a Facebook application for its brand Burn. The application allows users to create a customizable virtual avatar and then "go out," either with existing friends or new ones. The next day, users can check their avatar's blog to see what went down the night before, and view images that show both avatars hanging out. The end result replicates a real-life night out at the club, and users come away with a shared virtual experience that faithfully delivers on the brand promise of the night-extending Burn energy drink. Again, it' a concept that most marketers might not have considered, but when you find out the application recently crossed 150,000 installs with more than 85,000 users active on a monthly basis, you might wish you had."
And if you are going to use Facebook for your marketing initiatives, get a little creative. Here are a couple of examples from Matthew Pollock's article Is YouTube the right pipeline for you?
"Fiserv, a leading provider of information technology services to the financial industry, recognized Gen Y consumers as desirable prospects for many credit unions. To connect the two sides, Fiserv launched a Facebook application called MyMoney, which lets users search, join and manage funds from their credit union account from their profile pages. To leverage Facebook's viral capabilities, every person who adds the MyMoney widget then alerts their friends, which creates a powerful, self-propelled ripple effect that will ultimately continue to drive adoption. It's a very simple concept but has been a huge success, as the average user spends about 20 minutes on their Facebook page daily and 36 credit unions now support the application."
And, "Coca-Cola recently released a Facebook application for its brand Burn. The application allows users to create a customizable virtual avatar and then "go out," either with existing friends or new ones. The next day, users can check their avatar's blog to see what went down the night before, and view images that show both avatars hanging out. The end result replicates a real-life night out at the club, and users come away with a shared virtual experience that faithfully delivers on the brand promise of the night-extending Burn energy drink. Again, it' a concept that most marketers might not have considered, but when you find out the application recently crossed 150,000 installs with more than 85,000 users active on a monthly basis, you might wish you had."
Thursday, November 6, 2008
QUICK SEO TIPS: Give Your Site a Facelift
These days, SEO is a hot topic among marketing professionals. Some of them "get it," but the majority is still confused. So, I've come up with 6 quick SEO tips that will help you boost your site's Google ranking. Here they are:
1.Get rid of that flash banner at the top of your home page. I know it's sexy, I know it's hot, but it is not good for your SEO. Google reads approximately 125 lines of text AND CODE at the top of each page, and if it doesn't find any relevant information in those lines, it moves on. That flash banner has a lot of code associated with it, so it pushes all the important keyword rich text down to the bottom of the page where a search engine can’t “reach” it.
2. Optimize URLs. Your URLs should include the keywords that are important to you. Let's say you sell cars to college students in Tampa Bay and your site is called www.TampaRide.com. Then, you would want to create pages that will be rich with keywords like "budget cars," "preowned cars," "fuel efficient cars," "cars for college students,""auto finance for college students" and so on. You would also want to include those same keywords into URLs corresponding to the relevant pages. So, a page about auto finance for college students will have a URL of "www.TampaRide.com/auto-finance-for-college-students"
Also remember that using hyphens in URLs is better for SEO then using underscores (www.TampaRide.com/auto_finance_for_college_students) or not separating the words in the URLs at all (www.TampaRide.com/autofinanceforcollegestudents).
3. Start a blog. Google loooves fresh content. And when you have a blog on your site, you can update it as much as you want. Plus, a blog gives you an opportunity to stuff your site with keywords (just make sure to not overdo it) and include some keywords that you wouldn't normally mention on your site (like "cheap cars" instead of "budget cars" or "used cars" instead of "preowned cars"). Another benefit of having a blog is linking. Linking is very-very important for your SEO. The more INBOUND links coming from RELEVANT terms your site gets, the better. (I'll talk about blogs in more details in my next post)
4. SEO press releases. Using services like MarketWire, BusinessWire or PRNewsWire to distribute a few SEO press releases will help you boost your search engine ranking as well. Include 4-5 keywords (or 1-3 keywords 2 times each) into each press release and link them to the relevant pages on your site. So, let's say you are sending out a press release about an upcoming sale. Then, write something like "[YOUR COMPANY NAME] is a place for college students looking for budget cars, fuel efficients cars and preowned cars. Need to finance? No problem..." then link "budget cars" to www.TampaRide.com/budget-cars, "fuel efficient cars" www.TampaRide.com/fuel-efficient-cars and so on.
When your press release gets picked up by online news publications or blogs, it creates a number of inbound links which, as I have previously mentioned, helps with your SEO.
5. Use meta tags. This is where SEO gets a little more technical. If your webmaster has provided you with the tools that allow you to easily create meta tags in the back end of your site (you should see "title tag," "meta keywords" and "meta description" fields when editing a page in the content management tool), then you are probably already using meta tags. A piece of advice: use your keywords as meta tags. So, a page about fuel efficient cars, should be titled "Fuel Efficient Cars," you get the idea. If you can't meta tag your pages through the content management tool, below is a link to an article that will provide you with HTML code for creating meta tags.
http://www.sun.com/webdesign/guidelines/metatags.html
Using meta tags will help optimize your site by "telling" search engines the "names" (titles) of the pages, providing short descriptions of each page and attaching keywords to those pages. Also, don't forget to tag all the images with relevant keywords. Meta tags include, page description tag, meta keywords tag, title tags and image tags.
6. Give some TLC to headlines. Like your site visitors, search engines recognize headlines. They also know that a headline is supposed to describe what a page is about. When headlines on your site contain keywords, your site has better chances of getting higher search engine ranking.
1.Get rid of that flash banner at the top of your home page. I know it's sexy, I know it's hot, but it is not good for your SEO. Google reads approximately 125 lines of text AND CODE at the top of each page, and if it doesn't find any relevant information in those lines, it moves on. That flash banner has a lot of code associated with it, so it pushes all the important keyword rich text down to the bottom of the page where a search engine can’t “reach” it.
2. Optimize URLs. Your URLs should include the keywords that are important to you. Let's say you sell cars to college students in Tampa Bay and your site is called www.TampaRide.com. Then, you would want to create pages that will be rich with keywords like "budget cars," "preowned cars," "fuel efficient cars," "cars for college students,""auto finance for college students" and so on. You would also want to include those same keywords into URLs corresponding to the relevant pages. So, a page about auto finance for college students will have a URL of "www.TampaRide.com/auto-finance-for-college-students"
Also remember that using hyphens in URLs is better for SEO then using underscores (www.TampaRide.com/auto_finance_for_college_students) or not separating the words in the URLs at all (www.TampaRide.com/autofinanceforcollegestudents).
3. Start a blog. Google loooves fresh content. And when you have a blog on your site, you can update it as much as you want. Plus, a blog gives you an opportunity to stuff your site with keywords (just make sure to not overdo it) and include some keywords that you wouldn't normally mention on your site (like "cheap cars" instead of "budget cars" or "used cars" instead of "preowned cars"). Another benefit of having a blog is linking. Linking is very-very important for your SEO. The more INBOUND links coming from RELEVANT terms your site gets, the better. (I'll talk about blogs in more details in my next post)
4. SEO press releases. Using services like MarketWire, BusinessWire or PRNewsWire to distribute a few SEO press releases will help you boost your search engine ranking as well. Include 4-5 keywords (or 1-3 keywords 2 times each) into each press release and link them to the relevant pages on your site. So, let's say you are sending out a press release about an upcoming sale. Then, write something like "[YOUR COMPANY NAME] is a place for college students looking for budget cars, fuel efficients cars and preowned cars. Need to finance? No problem..." then link "budget cars" to www.TampaRide.com/budget-cars, "fuel efficient cars" www.TampaRide.com/fuel-efficient-cars and so on.
When your press release gets picked up by online news publications or blogs, it creates a number of inbound links which, as I have previously mentioned, helps with your SEO.
5. Use meta tags. This is where SEO gets a little more technical. If your webmaster has provided you with the tools that allow you to easily create meta tags in the back end of your site (you should see "title tag," "meta keywords" and "meta description" fields when editing a page in the content management tool), then you are probably already using meta tags. A piece of advice: use your keywords as meta tags. So, a page about fuel efficient cars, should be titled "Fuel Efficient Cars," you get the idea. If you can't meta tag your pages through the content management tool, below is a link to an article that will provide you with HTML code for creating meta tags.
http://www.sun.com/webdesign/guidelines/metatags.html
Using meta tags will help optimize your site by "telling" search engines the "names" (titles) of the pages, providing short descriptions of each page and attaching keywords to those pages. Also, don't forget to tag all the images with relevant keywords. Meta tags include, page description tag, meta keywords tag, title tags and image tags.
6. Give some TLC to headlines. Like your site visitors, search engines recognize headlines. They also know that a headline is supposed to describe what a page is about. When headlines on your site contain keywords, your site has better chances of getting higher search engine ranking.
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