aloa’s site

There are two main reasons your site doesn’t rank well on the search engines:

Your business model is flawed or ill-conceived. And your Web site is garbage.

The ranking problem is just as simple as that in so many cases. It’s not about the code or crawling or server issues. Fact is, you’re probably not being honest with yourself and hoping some technical miracle can help.

I frequently find myself in the awkward situation of trying to keep my client happy while having to tell her that her baby is ugly and unpopular.

I spent last week in New Orleans at the WebmasterWorld conference, I discovered something very strange going on. Not only is black hat SEO (define) alive and well, it’s actually producing some pretty good business models.

It’s easy to believe the average spammer is some back-bedroom coder pummelling search engines with worthless pages in a brute-force effort to rank on a given term. However, I found myself discussing the dark side of the industry with one very smart guy in particular. He now controls an entire business sector online. Search engines may not approve of the type of tactics we discussed, but, fundamentally, the business model he strategically developed is as slick as it gets online.

So it’s quite astonishing when I discuss genuine reasons a client’s pages aren’t ranking, and she just doesn’t get the fact the answer is not in the code. It’s in the business model and the way she promotes herself online.

I ask clients to be very honest about whether they believe they have a business concern online or just a Web site. If we discover they truly have a genuine business that can differentiate itself, we look at the Web site.

This process hurts a lot of the time. The most important aspect of ranking at search engines is about getting good, solid links around your Web pages. You can only achieve that if your content is strong enough to induce it.

Ask yourself, “Why would anyone want to link to my site?” Be brutal. Write down as many reasons as you can about why other sites should link to you. If you can’t convince yourself another site would want to link to you, you seriously need to question what your value proposition is and how your site promotes it (or not, as the case may be).

There’s a lot of clever technical stuff you can do to Web pages to make crawling and indexing them easier. But it’s fruitless if you can’t convince yourself that anyone would want to link to them.

The other important part of link building relies heavily on whether other site owners know you exist in the first place. This seems like a chicken-or-the-egg thing when applied to search marketing. There’s a method to get around this: advertising.

Since about 1999, I’ve been buying text ads in newsletters in just about every niche vertical you can imagine. Not only have those ads generated much needed awareness and traffic, those that are archived online still provide excellent, mature link equity.

Having said that, although buying text ads in hundreds of newsletters and e-zines isn’t usually that expensive, there’s not much point it if your baby really is ugly and unpopular.

From: clickZ.com by Mike Grehan

Isn’t it frustrating when you call a professional repairman to your home and he can’t complete a task for you? He roots around in his toolbox, goes out to his truck and roots around some more, scratches his head, makes a call back to the office, and then finally tells you he doesn’t have the part or tool he needs to make the repair today.

Well, that’s just how frustrating natural SEO (define) can be if you don’t go at a fix-up project with the right tools in your toolbox. When you’re completing a site audit to measure how well your site is performing on the search engines, you have to dip into your toolbox to figure out the problems before you can make proper adjustments.

The same process holds true whether you’re completing keyword research, preparing to initiate a link building campaign, or producing a competitive analysis of online rival sites. You must get your tools and start taking things apart.

In past columns, I’ve addressed what tools can be used to help you on your way to building a better SEO toolbox. They include:

• Basic organizational tools for SEO in “SEO Toolbox Tips.”
• My favorite tools for tactical link building when finding reliable directories.
• Tools for finding pertinent link targets.

But those are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the tools I use every day.

My old PC recently died, although I suspect it committed suicide from one too many Xenu runs, and I had to rebuild my toolbox on a brand spanking new computer. While being a bit painful in terms of personal productivity, it was still a good time to sort through which tools I use all the time, toss out some tools that have been replaced by better devices, and check out a couple of new tools I’ve been meaning to add to my toolbox.

In between downloading plug-ins and reclaiming passwords, I realized how many different tools I count on each day to get the job done. And I was reminded of the fact that some of the best tools are those that the search engines provide free of charge — if you know how to use them.

Completing a site audit and competitive analysis is the first step I usually take when initiating a natural search program. A natural SEO program can take up to 12 months to complete, depending on the objectives of the programs, so evaluating a site’s performance is a continuous process. To measure the performance of each program over time, a good old-fashioned spreadsheet is an invaluable tool to track details the search engines provide when using advanced query strings.

Once organized for a date range it’s easy to start collecting details about how a site is performing and could potentially perform in the search engines. One of the fundamental advanced search queries that can be used in Google, Yahoo, and MSN, among others, is the [site:domain.com] command string.

Granted, Yahoo will default to its Site Explorer functionality, but you’ll get a good idea about just how many pages of a site are indexed in the engines. If you know exactly how many pages exist in the site, then you can see how the search engines operate when different site dynamics are in play.

It’s also easy to use the same query string to see how well a site is canonicalized by shifting between [site:www.domain.com] and [site:domain.com] queries. Sometimes Webmasters only canonicalize the home page and not pages deep within the site, so an http://domain.com default check might not give you all the information you need. Header checkers belong in any optimizer’s toolbox. There are many to choose from, but I still prefer Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer.

Find all the site’s pages that have a particular keyword in a file path. If all your product pages have the word [item] or [product] in them, then an advanced search query for [inurl:item inurl:domain or company name] and [allinurl:product company name] is very helpful toward understanding how a site’s product pages are performing.

Google allows users to combine the [site:domain.com inurl:product] search functionality, which can provide additional insight into just how your product pages are performing in Google, at least when it comes to measuring indexation levels, once you get past the omitted results click path. The same process holds true for tooling around print-only pages, blogs, reviews, or comments, etc.

The search engines will also help you discover particular file types. This can come in particularly handy when determining how well engines are picking up SWF objects or PDF files. Complete a [domain name filetype:pdf] or [filetype:swf company name] search to see what’s what.

Of course, you can add a link in your tracking spreadsheet for each query string used for your research. This will greatly simplify future updates and ensure that you’re consistently monitoring the same details with each review.

You learn something new about a site’s performance in the search engines every time you grab another tool. Remember: when search results need to get fixed, some of the best tools you can use are the search engines themselves.

The central focus of many SEO efforts is reaching the right people with the right information at the right time. Third-party search engine marketing firms, many of whom work tirelessly helping clients consume information in the highly dynamic world of SEO, face many challenges.

Third-party vendors or agencies are often forced into difficult situations in helping disjointed entities, such as design and programming departments, communicate effectively and achieve compromise to procreate sound discipline and ultimately achieve victory over hypocrisy.

What if you were the one on the inside, making the moves? I talked to in-house SEO folks about their daily frustrations in order to come up with a few best practices and identify problematic personalities. Here’s a discussion mash of that dialogue.

Megalomaniac Entitlement Syndrome (MES)

The MES (pronounced “mess”) brand of evil is easily identified as the “noob” with a passion for screwing up otherwise well-intentioned plans. The “noob” is not to be confused with the other form of new player, “newb,” in a particular arena who actually has intentions of getting better in a particular discipline.

A “noob” is just in the game to create chaos for the sake of his or her ego. The megalomaniac usually carries a senior management title (hence the entitlement) and can be identified by making unusually arrogant requests of the in-house search specialist.

Such requests can be identified very easily and will include irrational, ego-driven demands. For example, having just received one’s massage license, MES afflicted will demand to be number one in search results for said term and feel entitled to that position. The problem here: someone may actually promise the MES afflicted said position.

In-house SEO folks say the best way to counteract the effects of MES is to identify it early and treat it with a barrage of rational ideas. Sadly, many of the untreated MES afflicted end up either driving themselves or their staffs into a padded room.

Ill-informed Executive Decision Maker (IEDM)

Similar to the MES entry, the IEDM (pronounced “I-idiom”) is identified by making nutty decisions armed with enough information to be dangerous. For example, the IEDM may say something like, “My brother-in-law knows all about that search stuff, and I hired him to help you.”

According to many of the experts I spoke with, said brother-in-law is so poorly equipped to handle anything search related, he often causes nearly irreparable damage with his “advice,” and the in-house SEO practitioner spends more time doing damage control than achieving results.

The IEDM is a massive delegator that has yet to learn the delicate art of delegating to competence, as opposed to incompetence.

Counteracting the effects on an IEDM can be pretty simple. Many accept the nepotism or favoritism as a part of doing business and simply ignore the advice of said consultant while implementing their own strategic plan.

Screwball Consultant Meltdown (SCM)

The SCM (pronounced “scum”) is an affliction of the highest order that affects many in-house SEO folks who are either duped by consultants with a great sales pitch or have consultants forced upon them by IEDM’s.

SCM is a progressive disorder that usually can’t be treated with early detection. Those affected by the SCM often don’t see it coming. The consultants often bypass the in-house SEO practitioner and consistently attempt to undermine their efforts by abandoning contact protocols. They reach out to senior management directly and pile on unrealistic expectations, armed with misinformation.

There are few effective treatments for SCM, though the disorder has been linked to causative factors associated with the creation of IEDMs. Many have applied the IEDM treatment to SCM, though once meltdown has been realized, some never return from the abyss.

Matt Cutts Hater/Manipulator (MCHMr)

The MCHMr (pronounced M-C-hammer) spends all of his time reading Matt Cutts’ blog and attempts to counter-engineer or circumvent the efforts of Googlers everywhere. The MCHMr views everything Google does as evil, and this psychosis has bled into other areas of his or her life.

You can identify the MCHMr by intermittent but consistent negative references to either Matt Cutts or other Google representatives. They will attempt to dissuade senior management from listening to logic and reason by suggesting that Google is simply furthering its own evil agenda.

To date, the best way to counter the MCHMr is to stay on top of the information produced by the Google team, cross referencing the information with your own logical conclusions, and citing that information in each tactical execution.

And Yet, It Still Happens

The world is changing, but not as quickly as we’d like it to. Believe it or not, I still get calls from brand marketers and site owners (names withheld to protect the desperately naive) asking for advice on the best “SEO software.”

“SEO software?” Nice one. While I’m at it, I usually also pass along Batman’s phone number and contact information for the Green Lantern, just in case.

At the end of the day, whether you’re in the house or outside it, fighting the good fight is never easy. Though we don’t do it enough, hat’s off to the in-house SEO practitioners everywhere.

From: searchenginewatch.com by Kevin Ryan

There I was, sitting on a plane in Portugal reading the newspaper as we took off. Nothing new for me. Thirty minutes later, I’m sitting with a doctor who’s administering oxygen. Very new for me. Forty minutes after that, following an emergency landing in a small town in northern Spain, I’m in the accident and emergency department of the local hospital.

Still, I live to tell the tale. And after a brief rest-up in the U.K., I’m back at my desk in New York. Never a dull moment.

As you’re probably aware, if you can’t keep on top of your e-mail due to illness, when you do get around to it, it’s an avalanche!

Like everyone else, I receive ridiculous link requests on a regular basis. Most times I just delete and carry on. However, when you have to go through almost a week’s worth of e-mail, you suddenly realize just how many of these stupid requests you get. Especially if you have a lot of e-mail accounts.

Are you one of the people who sends those link requests?

Then you should be horsewhipped!

For starters, these guys send their spammy link requests to an e-mail address harvested on the Web by some mindless bot; it starts with “Dear Webmaster.” With quality companies that own quality Web sites (the kind you really want to link to you), the Webmaster is probably the last person with the authority to place a link. In fact, without specific instruction, usually the Webmaster has no authority to place links. Not only that, the kind of company and Web site where the Webmaster is able to give you a link probably needs links even more than you do.

I’m not poking at reciprocal linking, as such. Anyone who understands how that works doesn’t send an e-mail to a competitor saying, “Your site and mine have the same theme, so it will be beneficial for us to link to each other.”

Here’s the thing. Don’t be a link collector, be a business developer. You don’t need links. You need business relationships. Think about all the stuff you can do offline with your marketing, then apply it online. Advertising, PR, co-promotion, sponsorships, charitable events, business in the community, ad infinitum.

With a good online marketing and PR plan, quality links will become a by-product of simply doing good business. When that happens, you’ll find that you don’t need to turn up, like the afore mentioned e-mail misfits, with a link-begging bowl.

I can’t understand why so many people are still living under the misty purple veil of SEO (define) 1999. Ten years ago, Google announced that linkage data was a major factor in its ranking algorithm. Ten years ago!

Surely it’s inconceivable for anyone in this industry to imagine there’s been no progress in information retrieval on the Web since then.

Yes, linkage data is still a good signal. But these days, it’s only one signal. In 10 years, search engines have picked up so many other strong signals, including end-user behavior, toolbar data, online bookmarking, tagging, and rating.

SEO 1999ers (or textbook SEO professionals) still have tunnel vision when it comes to search engine rankings. And perhaps that’s why they are stuck with this whole “links, links, I gotta have links, I have to be number one at Google” approach. But search engine rankings (and ranking reports) are so passé in 2008.

While competing for the most popular keywords, it’s about quality of links, not quantity. And where really popular queries are concerned, you might need to factor in the Britney Spears problem.

But think about this: even micro businesses now have the opportunity to hit the top spot at Google without so much as a Web site, let alone links. Take a look at the results for “bed and breakfast New York.” Notice the number one listing, after the paid results?

It’s a listing directly from Google’s Local Business Center, sitting right above the organic results. And no spammy e-mail required.

Plus, universal search and blended results mean there are so many more opportunities to get in front of your potential customers via search engines. I’ve talked so much at conferences about the need to shift from the 56k dial-up-modem style, 10-blue-links result set to a much richer broadband experience for the end user.

And earlier this month, Google’s Marissa Mayer alluded to the shift from this static, guesswork approach in her Future of Search column. “We’ve barely scratched the surface with universal search, but it’s an important first step to exploring the full range of what we can do with rich media,” she writes. “For the past year, our goal has been to take advantage of these new types of results and evolve the interface design and user experience in response. You’ll see the fruits of this experimentation in the coming months, but even these changes are just the beginning.”

In July, comScore stated that over 11 billion videos were viewed on the Web. And of those, Google accounted for about 5 billion views. In one month!

If you haven’t noticed, it’s an election year, and all of the ceremony and pomp has me thinking about the power of endorsements. The right connections can provide the bump you need, and the wrong connections can prove calamitous. In the words of Lt. Theo Kojak, “Who loves you, baby?”

This is true of Web sites and linking as well. Each link you receive is an endorsement of your site and can catapult you up the rankings or throw you out with the spammers. It’s your job to attract — and, dare I say, vet — the right type of link endorsements.

Think of link building as running for president of your SERPs. The candidate is your Web site, and you need all the support you can muster to get there.

Formational Links: Reaching Your Core Constituents

First, let’s target your base. These are formational links, and they’re your core audience — your party’s registrants if you will. If you’re looking to establish a new Web site, these are the connections you turn to first to get the ball rolling.

Formational links include links from directories and relevant niche links, among others. Some argue that these links aren’t vital, or that they may influence a search engine’s initial view of a site. While having spammy or irrelevant links is never a good idea, relevant formational links can help you get a site in the search index, provided they’re part of natural and diverse link mix (links of all different types and categories).

Formational links are only meant to build traction. You should always have your eye on the bigger and better linking opportunities, but know that you may have to play a little politics to get the job done.

Brokered Links: Trading on Your Political Capital

Now you must head to the negotiation table. Brokered links secured through one-on-one agreements can often produce some pretty significant linking relationships.

Brokered links often come about as a result of direct analysis of opportunities found through backlink research, which often makes them hyper-relevant. They can involve a good deal of individual negotiation and must be addressed on a site-by-site basis, which may be time consuming.

Many brokered link opportunities are bartered arrangements between sites that, if done correctly, can elevate your site out of obscurity.

Buying Links: Pork Barrel Politics

As with dirty politics, there is a dark side to link brokering, which comes in the form of payoffs and shady backroom deals. If you become too comfortable with link brokered links, you may be swayed to the controversial practice of link buying.

Several services offer bulk link placement as a method to increase the number of search-friendly backlinks for specific keywords. Google penalizes for explicit link buys intended to pass PageRank, and the risk associated with this tactic is significant. If you’re thinking about buying links for SEO purposes, do so sparingly and slowly. Link buys may boost search visibility in the short-term but will require the use of other tactics to sustain ranking.

So ask yourself if it’s worth risking your own “Linkgate.”

Community Links: Grassroots Movements

This election season’s “money bombs” and savvy Web fundraising techniques have shown us all the value of galvanizing an online community. Your most enthusiastic supporters are willing to spread your message and help build your base.

Community links reflect much of the Web 2.0 landscape, referring to blogs, social media, and user-generated media. These links may be gained by engaging community participants on their terms through link bait, relevant content, and social opportunity.

These links can snowball, if done correctly, generating a natural stream of backlinks. Tactics such as link baiting may result in a traffic spike that raises the search visibility of a page, but direct community involvement can foster long-term benefits.

Authoritative Links: Winning Over the Establishment

Whether you want to top the polls in an election, or in the search results, you’ll need to win over the big boys, the trusted elder statesmen. In the SERPs, these connections are authoritative links, or high-value inbound links from popular sites with a high PageRank.

Authoritative sites include trusted news sites, .edu pages, and other sites regarded highly by search engines. They transfer the most link popularity per link and should be the main focus of your link campaign.

A site should examine its online and offline relationships to develop any high-quality linking opportunities. Though the most likely to remain active, the one downside of authoritative links is that they commonly target to the domain of a site and not individual pages. However, shrewd planning and smart internal linking can usually balance out this issue.

Naturally Generated Links: The Growth of the Party

In any campaign, you need to keep an eye to the future. Link campaigns need to secure links now and ensure they keep coming in later. To do so, you need to build a foundation conducive to new links. This will help net you naturally generated links — links secured without direct pursuit.

These links can be news articles referring to the site, scrapers of quality “nofollow” sites such as Wikipedia, links from press release circulation and links from sites monitoring RSS feeds. Naturally generated links are the end goal of a link development campaign, as they reflect continued link stability, diversification and freshness. A healthy influx of natural links will help keep a Web site competitive indefinitely.

The goal of link development is to increase the quantity and quality of a client’s backlinks. It’s great to have the support of a mayor’s aide, but backing from the governor may push you over the top.

We must also step away from the quantity fallacy of link building. It’s better to be connected to one trusted advocate than to a million suspicious grifters. In both linking and political campaigns, one must constantly strive to remain above scandal and beyond reproach.

We live in an age of instant conversation. Feedback occurs between hundreds of millions of people at any given moment. Many of those conversations are discovered via search. Site owners and commerce generators have become obsessed with their position in search.

The SES San Jose session SEO Rehab sparked quite a bit of discussion on this topic in the search space. Last week, we looked at SEO addiction and took the first step: admitting there might be a problem. Clearly some help is in order.

Today, we’ll take a closer look at how to maximize time and efficiency while avoiding some common search pitfalls.

Time Wasters

Every generation of Internet tools and technologies have to pass through “time-waster adolescence.” That’s the phase in between, “hey, this is cool,” and “wow, this is useful.” New applications that appear on the scene usually have no way to generate revenue. The consuming public adopts the apps because it’s the cool thing to do; later, someone has to figure out how to make money with them.

Search guru and SEO Rehab panelist David Naylor offers tips to avoid time-wasters and avoid some of the traps search marketers can fall into. SEOs can spend entirely too much time heading in the wrong direction, a fact that is the epitome of counter-productivity.

Naylor suggests avoiding spending endless hours counting backlinks, pages indexed, and obsessing over rankings. Instead, focus on tools to help save time.

Naylor’s list of tools is here. A simple query for SEO tools brings back a list of great tools. Additionally, dare I say, checking out Google’s Webmaster Tools, a great resource for optimizing your time.

The Right Stuff

For example, say 74,327 keywords brought people to your Web site. Which ones actually made you money? Why waste time looking for, optimizing, and obsessing over every keyword? Naylor used an example of his site bringing more than 100,000 total site visits with more than 45,000 keywords.

Isolating which terms bring in the cash is critical for saving your time and sanity in this realm. Any number of analytics tools and providers allow one to manage time and efficiency in selecting keywords that make money.

Several variables come into play when selecting the right areas of focus, including content relevance, usability, and matching searcher intent with the desired landing page. Investing time in evaluating the right tools for you can still make the difference between critical balance and a padded room.

Take it to Task

Naylor wound down his discussion with more tips for saving time. Looking at SEO from a macro or high level to determine big shifts before getting into specifics is great advice. Also (and I know we said this last week), setting up the appropriate e-mail alerts will push the right information your way.

If you passed through a wormhole in space from another galaxy and encountered the Internet for the first time, what would your first look at the Web tell you? You’d likely head to a search engine to try and find tools for survival and get acquainted with your new world.

If you’re new to the search world, spending some time on efficiency and approaching SEO with a level head is the way to go. If you think you already have a problem with SEO addiction, consider spending some time separating hype from reality and time waster from time waster.

From: searchenginewatch.com by Kevin Ryan

UPLINK WEB DESIGNS & MARKETING

Energizing voters to cast their ballots for a presidential candidate is similar to motivating consumers to purchase your product. The Democratic and Republican National Conventions are doing their best to rally and unify their parties and launch their prospective candidates into the final leg of the race for president. As these big-budget presidential marketing campaigns kick into high gear, online marketers can learn important segmentation lessons that cut across party lines.

Three Major Segmentation Dimensions

While U.S. presidential elections are basically about getting the vote out for your candidate, the reality is that electoral voting, like your customer base, is more complex. Recent political polls and primary election results highlight three critical segmentation dimensions that online marketers should consider:

• Demographic traits. This year’s hotly contested political races have highlighted certain demographic dimensions, many of which can be applied to analyzing your customer base:
  • Geographic location. Because elections are based on state and county, where people live is an important consideration. Marketers should assess whether customers behave differently based on their location.
  • Gender. Sen. Hillary Clinton mobilized the women’s vote, particularly among older population segments. Consider whether women use and purchase your products differently than men.
  • Age. Sen. Barrack Obama motivated younger, first-time voters to register and vote. This has brought new voters onto registration rolls, the electoral equivalent of new customers. Does age have an impact on your product’s purchase or use? If so, how can you ascertain this information? What can you use as a proxy for age if prospects are reluctant to share this information?
  • Ethnic background. Obama also rallied African-American support. In this election, other ethnic groups will be important, most notably Hispanics. As a marketer, do your products resonate with different ethnic segments?
  • Net worth. This is often a critical factor in a weak economic market.
• Psychographic characteristics. These attributes relate to how voters think and feel about specific issues, such as the economy, the Iraq war, universal healthcare, and immigration. These factors are particularly important because people’s feelings on critical issues can override demographic dimensions in influencing their ultimate vote. In terms of product purchase, the importance of personal preferences may override financial indicators. For online marketers, psychographics translate to the following characteristics:
  • Interests/hobbies. In political campaigns, voters often decide based on one or more issues they hold dear. Customers make similar tradeoffs. As an online marketer, understand what your target market is passionate about. For example, consumers may spend more on their hobby in lieu of a more expensive vacation.
  • Aspirational. Voters, like consumers, may make their selection based on how they want to be perceived. When assessing your customer base, think about whether your products fall into this category. For example, for a major, one-time purchase like an engagement ring, customers may choose to associate with a top brand like Tiffany’s.
  • Self-assessment. Voters and consumers make decisions to feel good about themselves. Obama’s “change we can believe in” campaign focuses on hope.
• Behavioral actions. Regardless of what voters say, how do you ensure they actually go to their polling location and pull the lever for your candidate? As an online marketer, among the types of behavior you can use as predictors are:
  • On-site actions. This includes a variety of activities, such as pages visited and items placed in shopping carts. While these actions show interest, they may be difficult for marketers to act on because prospects may want to remain anonymous.
  • Hand-raisers. This can take several forms, including e-mail registrations, RSS feeds, forward to a friend, customer service contacts, and catalog requests. It can also include social media engagement, contest participants, and reviewers.
  • Purchases. Purchasing is most important attribute, regardless of which channel is used, because customers have voted for your product.
  • Advocacy. Political campaigns always look for evangelists. For marketers, this translates to participation in social media, word-of-mouth referrals, and ratings and reviews.

After segmenting your customer base, tailor your marketing to make it more effective at attracting prospects, generating sales, and retaining customers. Customizing your content and product offering to meet your segment’s needs should increase sales.

Three Metrics to Monitor

To evaluate your segmentation’s success, look at a combination of measures. The goal of a successful segmentation strategy is creating groups that enable more effective marketing efforts that lead to improved profitability, so evaluate the following:

• Customers. Look at the number of submarkets you’ve created and the relative size of each. The issue is your ability to cost-effectively develop targeted marketing communications that convey how your offering meets the needs of each group. Among the factors to bear in mind are:
  • Have you created easily defined, addressable segments?
  • Does tailoring your marketing to this group have the potential to yield increased profit?
• Revenues. Monitor revenues by segment, in total, and per customer marketed. Further, examine your various marketing programs, such as search and e-mail, by segment to ensure you’re maximizing sales.
• Expenses. Track marketing costs by segment, in total, and per customer marketed to monitor your change in costs. Given that each target requires tailored programs, costs should increase, but it’s critical they result in incremental revenues.

Once you’ve calculated these trends, analyze the results in relationship to each other. Lifetime value is a good way to assess your progress. If the incremental cost of customizing your marketing to a given segment exceeds the incremental lifetime value of those customers, it isn’t cost-effective.

As with political campaigns, segmentation is a good way to effectively market to smaller groups within your customer base, and it becomes more important as the online market matures. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. You must figure out what works best for your customers and your offering.

From: clickZ.com by Heidi Cohe

Search Engine Optimization is a crucial job today right from the inception of any business online. It has got its enormous advantages to small-scale as well as established businessmen. But to achieve good search engine ranking is definitely not a child’s play. One has to be consistent in the efforts to have high ranked web pages on popular search engines. That’s why copywriting has achieved a prominent role in achieving the desired search engine ranking.

What is copywriting for SEO?

The SEO copywriting is a well-grounded technique that involves placing keyword-oriented content on your web page to facilitate search engines to find your site for the interested users. Use of specific target keywords is meant for different search engines. No doubt search engines want genuine web pages for its viewers and this is why a good copy definitely serves a great purpose for a website. Placing the right terms at right places naturally and evenly scattered throughout the copy help one get high search engine rankings.

How does a good copy help one gain high search engine rankings?

There are definitive strengths of a good copy in enabling the best search engines to find your pages with ease. Let’s see how a good copy is useful-

• A good copy always has optimum keyword density in the content. Because of seo optimized content, the search engine algorithms measurement allows them to select the copies that are appropriately rich in targeted keywords.

• Strategic positioning of keywords also helps the search engines to identify them easily. When you place a good keyword in header or page title, it is crawled quickly by search engine and your ranking goes up.

• Along with search engine ranking, what increases is traffic to your website and thus, your business prospers. To have your website frequently visited over long term, professional copywriting is mandatory nowadays. Not to mention, search engines are always hungry for fresh content, so the visitors. Regular updating your website with new copywriting that is SEO oriented is the crux of having new visitors over long run.

But you also need to take care of few things before considering copywriting as a means to improve your SEO ranking. What are those points? Let’s see-

• Try putting keyword in first 200 words so that your chance of higher ranking increases.

• While enriching your website content with SEO keywords and phrases, you should avoid repetition as far as possible.

• Always remember that many other websites of your category will keep on updating their web copies and therefore there is tough competition for your SEO ranking. Though this issue cannot be solved completely, hiring professional copywriters definitely improve performance of your site.

• Avoid placing too many and heavy images on your site as it affects the loading speed of site.
  

No wonder many website owners hire professional copywriting and marketing company to maintain high ranking for long term benefits. Well, starting a new website for your product or service is not enough. It has to be SEO optimized with the best copy so that you prosper miraculously!

From: promotionworld.com by Sunita Biddu

Black Hat/White Hat: Playing Dirty with SEO
Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2008
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
4:15p - 5:30p

Speakers:
Jill Whalen, HighRankings.com
Bruce Clay, BruceClay.com
Dave Naylor, Bronco.co.uk
Todd Friesen, “on sabbatical”
Greg Boser, 3 Dog Media

Moderator: Matt Bailey

(Town hall style debate. The initials preceding the comment indicate who is speaking.)

MB: Apparently, no one wants to be labeled, so let’s start out by defining what “black hat” and “white hat”. So let’s start out by having Bruce and Jill define black hat and then let Greg and Todd define white hat.

BC: I think that black hat vs white hat are labels defined and applied by the search engines moreso than by the people in Search. The white hats tend to play in the middle of the acceptable area, the gray hats play near the edge of what is acceptable, and the people who are truly black hat are the people who consistently play in the truly unacceptable area. I think that if the only person you’re hurting is yourself, you can be black hat all you want; however, people who do pain to their paying clients — those are truly evil people.

JW: Black hat techniques are those methods that seek to decieve the search engines. There is spam and there are also “tricks” to make the engines believe your site is more releveant than it really is, or relevant to keywords that it’s actually not. Those “tricks” are definitely black hat.

TF: White hat people are those who print out and laminate the Google Webmaster Guidelines, hang them on their wall and worship them every night.

GB: White hat is a euphemism for “SEOs with no game”

DN: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a white hat site rank really really well in truly competitive verticals.

MB: It’s come up a couple of times that black hat techniques can get you in trouble, so we know there is risk there. However, is there any risk associated with white hat techniques?

JW: White hat is making your site the best it can be, so really that’s it, there’s no risk with having the best site you can have.

BC: The way I look at it, if you’re sitting at your laptop working on your website and Matt Cutts walks up behind you and your first inclination is to close your laptop — quickly — then you’re probably not playing by the rules. I think that if you’re doing things that are defendable in the face of inquiry and with the best of intentions, you can call yourself white hat.

TF: Look at cloaking, is it good? Is it evil? No, it’s agnostic. It’s a neutral technology that can be used properly or improperly.

GB: The crowd I run in, let’s face it, we do some stuff that is “pushing the envelope” for our own personal sites and we look at it as R&D that sometimes pays us lots of money. Those learning experiences help us be better SEOs in general.

JW: Let’s face it, there are white hats and black hats and then there are just plain old incompetent SEOs.

GB: There are a lot of people in this industry who just aren’t qualified to do the work. They take jobs they don’t have the experience or knowledge to handle properly and make promises they can’t keep. Then they’re in a position where they end up doing things they shouldn’t to make good on their unrealistic promises.

DN: You know what’s a big problem, it’s when yer working yer nuts off on a site and then you find out that yer not the only SEO who’s working on the site, and you start looking at it, and someone’s been buying links in an uncontrolled fashion and thinking it’s not leaving a footprint, when it’s really leaving a big footprint. Most of the big mistakes come from someone within the organization who makes a decision to “help” and they don’t really know what they’re doing and they’re doing more harm than good.

BC: People are looking at things like “should I invest the time building my site, making it expert, and building it into an authority site” or “should I just spend the money to buy 10,000 links and save all that time working on developing my site”. If you

JW: I’d like to say something about “rules”. You don’t need to read the Google rules, because it’s common sense. What’s within the lines and outside of the lines is all known. We’re all adults and you know what’s right and what’s wrong.

TF: I absolutely disagree that is common sense. If it were common sense, we wouldn’t have an industry that’s growing as fast as it is.

GB: Bruce is saying 3.5 years out versus 30 days out… I mean first of all I don’t see buying links as bad or evil. The approach we talk with clients is this… if the client comes to me and I tell them it’s going to take 3 years to get them to the top, that’s just unacceptable, so we split the difference. We’re always working with them to build a quality site so that when Google can actually accurately track and nuke the “bad guys” we will be the sole standing survivor, but until then we’re simultaneously using “quicker” methods to stay competitive to not only start realizing gains sooner, but to also get the client on board to start incorporating *all* of the SEO recommendations.

MB: So is black hat SEO appropriate for every site?

DN: No! There are verticals that do not need it. I mean if you’re in for the long haul and your industry isn’t full of people that are buying links and stuff then you can go and be white hat all you want.

Audience Question: If you build a widget and it links back to you but it’s on people’s Facebook pages (behind their logins) do those links count?

Panel: No!

DN: I’d make a Wordpress plugin or widget and that would be great, but Facebook, no.

[Random questions...]

BC: I don’t think buying links is essentially evil. It’s commerce.

TF: The goal of buying links is essentially link acquisition. Buying links just jumpstarts the process.

MB: In other words, Todd, you’re advocating “marketing”.

JW: Yeah, go hire a traditional PR firm.

BC: I don’t think a major, established brand should ever black hat.

GB: Yeah, you know, BMW did it and it totally burned them… for less than 48 hours. I disagree. I even wrote a blog post about it and said that big brands totally should spam search engines because they don’t suffer any repercussions like little people do. Look at BMW specifically, no one ever went into a BMW dealer and said “You’re cloaking! I’m going to go get a Mercedes!”

Matt Cutts: Ok, I just want to add a little disclaimer. I know the sites we take out, and not everyone outside of Google always knows who we take out. We don’t always make announcements. We absolutely take action on big sites, we just don’t always call them out.

GB: What about Forbes?

Matt Cutts: You’ll notice they no longer have pre-sell pages. There’s not always a need to call people out and pick on them. I think the question is, do you want to take that risk?

GB: Here’s the deal, the BMW work was so amateur. They did it sloppy and they got caught.

DN: I know Google is holding back some companies in the UK that ought to be topping the SERPs for link buying and it’s all hush hush.

Audience Question: So if we don’t buy links, what DO we do?

DN: Content (obviously, I mean I don’t want to say Content is King because that’s so cliche at this point)

JW: There’s public relations, there’s social…

GB: Yeah but even with social if you don’t pay someone to get it going on Digg it gets no traction anyway, so in the end it’s all paid.

JW: and also, just because Google says it’s evil doesn’t mean it really is “evil”.

seroundtable.com by Carolyn Shelby

Checking your rankings just got more difficult. Now what?

If you could hear grumbling sweeping over the landscape this week, it was likely the voices of professional and self made SEO types reacting to Google’s most recent maneuver to put an end to automated tools hitting their servers. For those of you not in the know, there are a handful of tools (WebPosition being among the most prominent) that allow users to type in a list of keywords and check them against search results for Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, AOL, etc. Historically, this has been a tool used by SEO firms and others with online marketing responsibility to gauge the effectiveness of their organic optimization (and on occasion paid search management) efforts.

With Google being the primary search player (accounting for roughly 60 percent of all searches in the United States and even greater numbers overseas), this would seem to greatly decrease the value of these automated tools. How are the world’s SEO practitioners to impress their clients now? The neatly automated monthly report that shows the fruits of our labor are now devoid of what the clients want to see most - Google rankings! Alas, these reports are no more. From Google’s standpoint, they have two arguments. First, Google claims that automated traffic are a burden on their systems and slow things down for Joe Searcher. Fair enough. Secondly, by making it more difficult to track and test results, those of us “manipulating” the search engines with our efforts will likely have a slightly more difficult time figuring out Google’s secret recipe.

I have used these tools in the past, and I will admit I was a little miffed at Google’s seeming power play, though they’ve been threatening this for years. But more importantly, as I sifted through blogs and forums gauging the reaction of the general SEO populace, I found myself agreeing with a few voices in the minority. Several individuals spoke out loudly and defiantly that these reports are, for the most part, a waste of time. The truth is, there are far more important things to worry about than your reported rankings.

For example, as Google has gotten more sophisticated, they’ve added additional variables to the mix. Call your friend across the country and have them search for the same term as you. The results may be the same, or they may simply be similar. I have ran this experiment several times when I’m on the road by using remote desktop on my home computers. Google will continue to find ways to increase relevancy of searches, and this will most likely have a continued move towards localized results. As such, what’s the point of a report you run for a client when they will run it on their own and see different results? Likewise, if you’re selling a product nationally, but your report is not all that reflective of your positioning nationally?

Yes, increasing rankings will bring you in more traffic. I’m not dumb enough to say otherwise. However, it’s been our focus at Netvantage to improve our company’s bottom line. Period. So when we engage in paid search management, search engine optimization or web analytics with clients, we make it clear that the goals are business oriented, not rankings oriented. And, let’s be honest, SEO practitioners are a resourceful lot, so those obsessed with mulling over rankings will likely have another way to do it soon. In the meantime, you are at the mercy of manual reporting and/or Google Webmaster Tools. Rather than dig through those reports, I think I will choose to spend my time on more value added activities. The author is a Managing Partner of Netvantage Marketing, a Michigan SEO, ppc management and web analytics consulting company.

From: promotionworld.com by Adam Henige