There's lots of speculation on why that is. My own guess, it's a combination of factors:
1. People have less time for aimless wandering around the Net.
2. People have found sites that work for a lot of things, and have them bookmarked.
3. Google has gotten smarter so people are taking fewer searches to find what they are looking for.
4. People have gotten smarter in their searches so take fewer searches to find what they are looking for.
5. Alternatives to search are rising (such as mobile apps).
I've put them in order of what I think are the biggest to smallest factor.
In any case, pat yourself on the back, if your website is getting found as much or more through searches as it was a year ago.
More and more, they are tending to show a wider variety of results.
It's all about ensuring they hit what you are looking for - even when your search may mean several things.
If you are searching for "mister" are you looking for a male person, or for a device for spraying little droplets of water?
If you search for plumber, are you looking for a plumber in your local area (probably), or maybe you just want to know more about the profession?
Are you looking for a web page, video or images? Information? A site where you can buy something online?
One way Google has dealt with this: It has been a firm rule for about a year, they will not serve up more than two pages from the same website.
That way there are eight other chances (not counting Places and Sponsored listings) to hit a home run with the searcher.
You see this where the second listing is indented slightly indicating it is another page from the same domain. Usually one is the home page.
Now Google has announced another tweak. Under certain circumstances, they will again show more than two pages for a domain.
For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site:
Note that in the example given, they still show only 7 results from the amnh.org website. This puts three other listings on the first page of results. Google still hedges their bets.
There are three things on a web page, all of which can go by the name "title."
They are about the three most important elements of a web page.
Most CMS (Content Management Systems) use the same content (and name) for all three.
And yet, and yet, they are NOT the same thing and you don't necessarily want them to be identical.
1. Page Title. This is the line of copy at the VERY top of the screen (above the browser menu / tool bars and everything). It is determined by the "title tag" code. It is the single most important thing Google looks at to determine what your page is about. And Google usually picks it up for the first line of your listing on a search results page.
Because of its location, most people aren't aware of the page title on their screen. So Google can downgrade or even ignore the page title if it doesn't match the other content of the page.
2. Page Name. This is the URL (address) of the page, such as "marketing.html." Again, search engines consider this an important clue to what the page is about. So page names like "page37.php" are not going to buy you any rankings. Also you can lose people with completely unfriendly page names like "z132503577.asp" - page names should say what they are, and they should be as short as is realistic. Use a "-" or an "_" to separate words, for example, "tampa-marketing.html/"
3. Heading or Headline. The first, large copy in the main content of the page, could also be called its title, just as it would if were a scientific paper or perhaps newspaper article.
Again, it is a big clue to Google what the page is about. Oh yes, and to the visitors.
Let's call it the headline and make it say something. "Welcome" not only doesn't buy you any search engine rankings. It doesn't give the notoriously skittish website visitor any reason to stick around.
We have shot a website up from obscurity to excellent search rankings just by editing the home page title tag.
Like I said, three of the MOST important things on a page. So worth paying attention to.
(Link is to a good article about the change and what it means, on Search Engine Watch.)
"MicroHoo" = Microsoft + Yahoo, and yes it is a bit derogatory. The combined market share is now somewhere around 25% of all U.S. search, compared to pushing 70% for Google. Will this change make them a viable challenger? No.
But one big change will be not having to run Bing and Yahoo click ad campaigns separately (starting probably in about a month). Possibly, it will drive Ask and the other miscellaneous search engines even further down into the weeds.
The description meta tag remains one of the most important "behind-the-scenes" aspects of a website.
A website visitor doesn't see it when he views a page. For that reason, Google gives it little importance in determining search engine rankings.
However, when a description tag is present on a page, Google will normally use it for the "snippet" of your listing - the two lines that follow the title line - on a search engine results page.
Your page title usually becomes the lead line - call it the headline - of your listing. It either grabs someone's attention and resonates or it doesn't.
Think of the snippet then as the body of an ad. THIS is your opportunity to tell the searcher who you are and what you do.
And it is almost completely under your control.
If you aren't paying attention to this, you are missing a hugely important aspect of your Internet marketing.
If you hire an SEO company and they don't test and edit description meta tags, well then, they are skipping a factor that could easily double or triple the amount of traffic to your site.
The term "SEM" is short for Search Engine Marketing. It usually refers to paid ads, such as "click ads" - the sponsored links on Google and other search engines, where you pay a certain amount every time someone clicks on your listing.
SEO is Search Engine Optimization which refers to what has come to be called ORGANIC search engine listings - the listings you get because Google or other search engine evaluates your website as important for the search term.
Usually companies specialize in one or the other of these.
What's odd about that is they are not completely independent subjects. If you are doing a good job of SEO for a website, you will know probably 50% of what you need to know to do effective SEM.
Likewise, if you are running an efficient, effective pay-per-click campaign for a website, you probably now know half of what you need to optimize the site for organic search engine rankings.
That is, if you are experts at both subjects, which few companies are
And yes, at FastF we are experts at both. And more.
What no one talks about is the huge, vital areas of Internet marketing that aren't covered by EITHER of these terms.
Like what we call the Visitor Experience. In short, what happens once someone actually arrives onto your site? Most sites do a poor job of it and waste most of their visitors.
Then there's the various aspects of Market Research, Directory Listings and Reviews, and so on.
There's a lot to do to maximize your potential on-line. A LOT.
Here's a search engine strategy that long since passed its sell-by date. Have pages on your site which are duplicates of each other except for different keywords in the heading and page name.
The theory is it bulks up the site (gives you more pages) plus gives you individual pages for important keywords.
I saw this the other day: A 100 page website, but the content was all clone (duplicates) except for 9 pages. They had multiple copies of a page, one would be for Largo, one for Clearwater, one for Tampa, etc. Or one for water damage, one for flood damage, and so on. Most of these pages were linked only from a site map, on which the background and text color were nearly identical (why they did that, I have no idea).
Remember, Google has hundreds, maybe thousands of full-time researchers devoted to improving Search. The goal is serving up what the people are looking for.
So what do you think their algorithms made of this? Do you really think Google hasn't long since figured this one out?
On rankings, that website is having its butt kicked by a 13 page website.
The secret is out. It's a myth that the AdWords keyword tool suggests keywords to use. (I'm being sarcastic... it's been no secret at all in the Internet Marketing community.)
As Google puts it:
Fact: The keyword tool doesn’t make any kind of recommendations about which keywords you should be using. The keyword tool just analyzes related queries that might be of benefit to you and displays them. It's up to you to decide which keywords you want to include in your account.
Oh yes, the numbers it puts up also need to be taken with a VERY large grain of salt.
There's a new version of the tool coming out. It's nicer. That doesn't make it more accurate.
The only thing we use it for is to suggest POSSIBLE areas of search terms we might otherwise miss.
If someone can't get you high rankings, volume traffic to your website and increased business from the Internet - or any marketing for that matter - then they are either incompetent, con artists, or both.
If someone promises to achieve these overnight, then they are either ignorant, con artists, or both.
Sometimes it goes quickly, when all the pieces are already in place. Usually it takes time. But someone who knows what they are doing and has nothing to hide, should be able to show you regular (monthly) progress.
There is one other point: You need to do what the expert says, or let them do their work. Why decide someone is an expert, pay them for their expertise, then second-guess them or fail to help them do their job?
We told one client it would take six months to a year to achieve what they wanted. They hired and paid us monthly, but wouldn't let us do what we said needed to be done, failed to provide us material we needed, and gave us specific instructions on what to do. At the end of five months they pulled the plug for lack of results.
Why didn't they just take the money and run it through a shredder?
While a lot has been written about this, I don't believe most people are actually aware how big a deal your site structure can be to your search engine rankings.
We recently saw Google go from indexing 100 to 450 pages of a website, overnight, because of a slight change in the site structure - which hardly anyone would even have noticed.
What was this about? A site search function linked to individual pages under many different URLs - plus it was turning out bad links in some cases.
The net result? The site was confusing to Google. Google thinks it will be confusing to the visitor and downgrades it. We found and fixed the error. Within days, Google showed its appreciation. Consider it a sigh of relief on behalf of site visitors.
Tools such as the "canonical tag" can help in an instance like this.
But many sites are built on funky Content Management Systems, or are built like a rabbit warren without any logic, rhyme or reason. They've long since outgrown the original planning and have had rooms, rooms and whole wings tacked on wherever they fit.
Don't think Google isn't aware of this.
Google is interested to serve up the most relevant results for searches. The larger the site, the more likely your site will have what they are looking for. But, also, the more confusing the site, the less likely people will find it.
Many times there is no cure but rebuilding the entire site on a better platform and with a structure thought out from the beginning and that makes more sense.
It is entirely another question whether this is a useful strategy. Our tests indicate that in most situations, it will generate very little traffic. People looking for a particular brand or company are looking for that brand or company. Even if they find themselves on your website, chances are they'll just think they made a mistake (or you did) and hit their back button.
It may help build awareness of your name amongst prospects who have heard of a competitor only. That is more of a long-term strategy, but it doesn't cost much to include it in your program. Just don't count on it as a major player.
Video is more and more common on the Web. For over a year now, Google has been selectively including videos in search results - even if you aren't specifically searching for video, which is one of the options in the left column of Google's search screen now.
But how does Google know what videos you have and what they are about? It isn't as easy as with most content where the text can be read by Google's robots.
Google has a recommended way of dealing with this. Here's their short introduction to the subject of video sitemaps.
A/B testing goes back to the early days of market research, 100 years ago. The idea is to test two different ads, markets, or other variables, and see which works better.
Originally it was applied only in direct mail, where it was easy to measure results by how many people sent in their money order to purchase the item.
If you tested too small a number, normal variations could drown out actual differences.
And you had to control for conditions, since a change in weather or a difference in income levels or other factors could affect results.
Fast forward to the 21st century, when Google AdWords (click ads) make A/B testing easy. You simply run two ads to the same search terms at the same time and see which produces a better response.
Run it long enough to produce a clear-cut difference. Then throw away the lower producing ad. The higher producing ad is the new "A". Write a new "B" ad and test that to see if it produces better.
Over time you can usually more than double the effectiveness of the ad. You'll also improve your quality score with Google. Both of these will reduce your cost per click.
One caution: Sometimes a higher click-through-rate (CTR) doesn't mean a better response, if you are getting more "garbage" clicks. So ideally you have conversion tracking set up (not only how many click, but how many of those buy or fill out your contact form).
Now you know what your market will respond to and you can use that same copy in your website, sales pitches and other marketing material.
This is so slick that one big-time marketer I know uses click ads to develop copy for his infomercials. He doesn't even try and sell anything through the click ads, it is for research purposes only.
How can you improve your quality score for key search terms?
Start by understanding how Google determines quality scores.
The higher the click-through-rate (CTR), the higher the quality score is going to be.
There are two ways to improve CTR. Improve the ad, or improve the keywords.
It's difficult to get a high CTR for a search term that is very general. Most searchers are going to be looking for something else.
Regardless, you can use negative keywords to reduce useless searches (and useless clicks!). You can run your ads in a more targeted geographical area, to a more precise demographic, run only at certain times, or fine-tune the networks it is running to (sometimes we turn off Google's search partners, for example).
You can also narrow the match type from broad to modified broad, phrase or exact match.
All that is well and good but a badly worded ad can waste a high percentage of your impressions.
ALL the rules of advertising apply to your click ads. They need to be noticed, to interest the prospective customer and to create enough curiosity and trust so they click on YOUR ad.
One of the great things about Click Ads is you can test and measure and improve your ads over time. And not much time at that.
There is no venue where you can fine-tune an ad faster and better than with click ads. That's so true we use them as a research tool with the results then used in our organic search work and other marketing efforts.
I recently mentioned but did not explain "Quality Score" as a factor in reducing the effectiveness of click ads.
When you buy a click ad you are bidding on position. If you are willing to pay $3 a click your ad is going to be higher on the page than someone who will only pay up to $2.50 per click.
Maybe.
Because if you think about it, what about if your ad is really bad and no one clicks on it? Then Google will make less money than if they put the other guy's ad above yours. Even though he is paying less per click, if he is going to get a lot more clicks, Google makes more money that way.
PLUS it means they are delivering a better visitor experience. People want to see what they are looking for appear first, not something disrelated that shouldn't be there.
Google handles this by factoring in a quality score number (from 1 to 10) in with the bid amount on the keyword, so a lower quality score means a lower position despite how much you are willing to pay per click.
You still pay as much per click, you just appear lower on the page where fewer people will see and click on your ad.
So one way to reduce your cost per click - or in reverse, increase the number of clicks you get for your daily budget dollars, is to improve your quality score for important (high search volume) keywords.
Where previously the choices were exact, phrase and broad match, they have now added a modified broad match option.
To implement the modifier, just put a plus symbol (+) directly in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword. Each word preceded by a + has to appear in your potential customer's search exactly or as a close variant. Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings (like “floor” and “flooring”). Synonyms (like “quick” and “fast”) and related searches (like “flowers” and “tulips”) aren't considered close variants.
I think this will find wide use in fine tuning the fairly common situation where negative keywords aren't useful for rejecting unwanted searches, but exact or phrase matches are really narrower than you want to go.
If you are signed in to a Google account when you search, Google knows more about where you are and your search patterns and can take that into account in personalizing your search results. Sign out and your results will probably be different.
You may not even be aware you are signed in since this is done using "cookies". If you look at the upper right corner of a Google page, it'll show if you are signed in to a Google account.
Also realize that Google is constantly updating its index and is doing so faster than ever. Don't be surprised if results are different one day than they were the day before or even an hour ago.
Of course this is going to be true for so-called "real-time" search subjects such as current news. But it is still true of more static subjects. The number of pages Google indexes for our own website (FastF.com) changes daily.
There are at least six reasons why search results may vary depending on when and where you search from. And that's just on Google, not talking about other search engines.
Usually the differences are small. The biggest variations come from geographical location, and that is something Google is doing a lot more about than it used to.
In any search, Google tries to figure out if you are looking for someone locally, even if you don't put in a location. So if you search for "plumbers" it can pretty well assume you are looking for a plumber in your area. On the other hand if your search phrase is "how to bake a cake" you probably aren't (as opposed to a search for "cake bakery").
Sometimes Google isn't sure and will serve up a mixture of local and worldwide results.
But how does Google know where you are?
Probably it doesn't know exactly where you are. But by your IP address (your Internet connection location code) it usually has a pretty good idea. For example, if you are on Roadrunner in Tampa Bay, it knows the IP address Roadrunner has assigned you (which you share with others). So Google certainly knows you are in Tampa Bay, and probably knows your location down to at least what city you are in.
It's all part of Google's ongoing effort to serve up exactly what you are looking for, and to make it as easy as possible on you. So that even a sloppy search is more and more likely to hit the nail on the head.
So-called "heat map" studies have demonstrated their success in this. An amazing percentage of the time, people now find what they are looking for in the first 1 or 2 results on the page.
And that's why Google remains the 600 pound gorilla of search, despite massive and expensive efforts on the part of competition.
If you are used to print design and traditional advertising, marketing online can be a bit of a rude shock.
You are not in control.
At least not as much as you are in the off-line world, where you can control exactly what your marketing piece looks like.
Did you know that when someone goes to a web page, their computer doesn't receive a copy of that page? It receives instructions on how to build that page on their screen. And that means how it looks on their screen is dependent on the computer, browser, and monitor.
We have repeatedly shocked print designers and artists by making them look at a page on different computers. It is amazing how different it can look on different screens.
Here are some of the biggest, most common differences:
1. Fonts. Any text on the page can only be displayed in fonts which are installed on the computer. The page may look great in Garamond, but if the computer doesn't have it, the browser will use a different font.
2. Monitor size and resolution. The larger the monitor size, the larger the page will display. The higher the monitor resolution, the smaller the page will display. The horizontal resolution determines how wide or narrow the page displays. The vertical resolution determines how much of the page displays without having to scroll down.
3. Color accuracy. There is no universal standard to guarantee that a monitor will faithfully display the color you intended. While this has improved over the years, it is still an issue, particularly between Apple computers and PC's.
4. Browsers. Theoretically, all browsers such as Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari, should display a page exactly the same. Theoretically. In practice differences can be significant. This is particularly true with older versions of a browser such as Internet Explorer 6, which does not correct display the preferred image file type (.png file) if it has a transparent background.
4. Software. Many web pages require add-ons such as Flash or Javascript. Not all computers have them or have the latest versions. This is most dramatic with the iPhone - which won't display Flash files, by far the most common format for anything that moves (youTube videos are in Flash, for example).
The usual answer to all this is compromise. For example, we'll use Flash for menus, slideshows, motion effects and videos, because 98% of all computers have it installed, and Flash videos load quickly, especially in recent versions of most browsers. But we also include text links in the site footer so iPhone users will still be able to navigate the website.
More about this tomorrow, in regards to monitor size and resolution.
If you are running a Click Ad campaign (Pay-Per-Click, such as Google AdWords), a key question is, are you budget limited?
If you have a daily budget and it is running out before end of the day, you are spending too much per click.
Period.
This can be very dramatic. We've seen people pay more than three times what they needed to per click.
The main reasons and remedies are:
1. Too high a maximum cost-per-click bid. Why pay for a high position only to have your daily spend run out before noon? Spend less, get a lower position, and get more clicks.
2. Poor ads reducing click through rate so you spend more to get the clicks, or waste money on garbage clicks.
3. Low quality score, so you spend more per click.
4. Poor choice of campaign settings such as areas where your ads run.
5. Not using negative keywords to minimize garbage clicks.
Sometimes you are trying to spend as much as possible - usually in a situation where you are selling a high end item to a limited public. In all other cases, the ideal scene is for your daily budget to run out at one second to midnight every day.
Did you know you can do a Google search two times and get different results, one right after the other?
Google handles such a huge volume of searches that they have multiple data centers around the U.S. and across the world.
These data centers don't always get the same updates at the same time. And sometimes one or more of them might be testing a new version of their software.
If you're curious just how much difference this can make, here's a nice tool that will query 10 Google data centers and show you all of their results. We ran a few tests and it never happened that all of them agreed.
I've written frequently about the value of video on your website.
It isn't just for the visitors. It can be a decided plus for search too.
For some time now, Google has been including videos in its search engine results pages. Whether it shows none, one or a few videos is going to vary wildly. But if you have videos online, Google can index them and you have at least the chance that they will show up on page one - as a possibly additional listing to the page itself. And videos are POPULAR. People love to click on them.
No surprise, Google will prefer to show videos from youTube (which they own), so make sure you put your videos up there as well as on your own website.
Name them and tag them descriptively using your search terms.
It's not helpful in every case, and it's not a guaranteed winner, but it can generate traffic to your site, and on occasion, it can be a big winner.
It is widely known that for Google, Content Is King. In short, the more website you have, the better you are likely to rank.
The crudest manifestation of this is the more pages to the site, the higher it is likely to rank.
But not all content is equal.
Especially in their latest changes, Google has put more emphasis on the QUALITY of the content. Google isn't hiding this fact either, Matt Cutts has said so in no uncertain words.
One aspect of this: Google has become more reluctant to index a page just because it is there. Instead, it is picking and choosing and may index only a fraction of your pages.
It has become clear that one of the major clues Google is using to determine this is the STRUCTURE of your website. So, for example, it is much less likely to index all of a blog.
This is something to pay attention to. I know of no hard-and-fast rules and it is certainly going to vary from site to site. So look at which pages Google is and isn't indexing on your site, and experiment.
Some businesses by their nature are national or international - most online stores for example. But the majority of businesses operate locally or at most state-wide or regionally.
How does that change things?
For one, you need to ensure you are listed correctly in Google Places (what they called Maps and before that Local). And also in Bing's and Yahoo's versions of the same thing.
Plus in Yellow Pages sites such as SuperPages, plus the variety of local directory websites out there such as Kudzu, MerchantCircle, etc.
If you have more than one location, make sure all your locations are listed.
If you service areas in which you don't have a location, consider getting a virtual location - with a mailbox address and forwarding phone number for the area.
GoDaddy seems to have become the default choice for domain registration and website hosting. In my opinion they are the latest incarnation of AOL - their target is people that don't know much about the Internet.
They spend their money on advertising and Danica Patrick instead of on tech support and customer service.
Their do-it-yourself website builder, Website Tonight, is the worst such program I've seen yet.
If you register a domain with them and don't put up a website on it, they will advertise on and make money off your domain. You are paying them to make money off of your domain.
Their account interface is hard to navigate and hard to figure out (it isn't as bad as Network Solutions, I'll give them that).
Should I go on?
Their services are cheap, so they do have something going for them.
Google as of June 8th, officially announced the rollout of Caffeine (their new, faster, more efficient software) is complete.
That was no new news to members of the SEO community. It is nice to get the official word.
Bigger news is Matt Cutts, Google's more-or-less official spokesman, talking about some of the recent changes they have made in their search algorithm (how they rank pages). Even he is referring to it as "Mayday" (the unofficial name SEO's gave it):
As I've pointed out, Google has been making changes both visible and under the hood, at a mad rate.
The latest change people have been able to distinguish is being called "Mayday" because it occurred on or about May 1st - and because it badly affected some websites rankings and traffic.
Drops in traffic as much as 90% have been reported. Other sites have noticed modest improvements in ranking and traffic.
Smaller sites don't seem to be much affected by this. We have noticed some affects on larger sites and VERY large sites (tens of thousands of pages) can be majorly affected by it.
This article has a good summary and links on the subject.
The problem with companies that specialize only in getting good search engine rankings, is that what they do can be bad for your overall marketing.
We see instances of this daily. For example, home pages loaded up with menu items that overwhelm and confuse visitors to the site. What good is it generating traffic to your site if they all immediately leave?
Another trick is to use a URL that contains keywords but mobs you up with a bunch of other companies to a point where you all look the same.
The problem of course is most SEOs (Search Engine Optimization companies) are not marketers. They are technicians who know something about how Google works.
Any effort to get high search engine rankings should really be part of, and integrated with, a complete marketing program.
In case you didn't know it, Google AdWords offers ads for smart phones, with click to call buttons (link is about expanding this option to Content ads - those that appear on other websites).
For certain types of businesses, such as restaurants, this type of ad can be a big plus.
When you search on https://www.google.com, an encrypted connection is created between your browser and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network.
Here's another new feature that Google has now rolled out for Search.
They call it "Direct Answers". Quite a lot of searches are looking for a specific answer or fact such as "how old is Barack Obama" or "what time is it in Denver."
If you do a search for these, you'll get the answer displayed on the search results page so you don't have to click further.. But one of them actually displays separately at the very top of the page. That is what Google means by "Direct Answers". And it is a nice addition to Search.
I think you will see this appearing more over time as Google improves their recognition - when is someone looking for a fact and what is the answer.
DMOZ - www.DMOZ.org, the Open Directory Project, was once upon a time the most influential site on the web for search engine rankings. A suitable listing on DMOZ was a ticket to high rankings because every submission was reviewed by volunteers for appropriateness and accuracy - meaning listings could be trusted, at least theoretically. In that way it is a lot like Wikipedia (though DMOZ came first).
Over the years, it has become less and less useful, for several reasons. First of all, Google doesn't have to depend on any single source for evaluating a website. Secondly, DMOZ itself has gone downhill, mostly because it became nearly impossible to get your site into it - no matter how important or legitimate you were.
This article gives Google's comments on the current value of DMOZ (and read some of the comments to get the idea about what happened to it!).
I've blogged about one of the rarely mentioned secrets of Internet Marketing - the size of your site is the single biggest factor in search engine rankings.
The larger the better.
But Google doesn't necessarily index every page in your website. If you count up the number of pages you have, then do a "site:" you will usually find Google isn't showing all of your site.
This makes sense. Even Google has limited resources. And why clutter up search results with pages that are of very limited interest?
But it means you need to know something about how Google decides whether to index a page or not.
First of all, any pages which are way off topic are not likely to be indexed. This is one reason why bulking up your software sales website, with weather reports and financial news, is not likely to be helpful.
Secondly, there are certain types of pages Google is going to be less interested in by their nature. A good example of this is a blog that is part of a site. Google is probably only going to include a portion of the pages in its index, no matter how relevant.
If you are in an industry that is highly competitive in the online world, this is worth paying attention to.
For years, Internet Marketing has been to a very large part, a battle between the search engines and people trying to trick them into ranking their sites high ("Black Hat" SEO's). "White Hat" SEO means working WITH Google and the other search engines, how they think and what they are trying to do. It means delivering great content on-subject because that is what the search engines are trying to help people find.
Sure, it also means understanding the cues that Google uses to identify what your site and page are about, and how important they are. But that is something you do in addition to - not instead of - providing the visitor experience people are seeking.
Of course it is easier if you can just do some simple gimmick that shoots you to the top of the rankings.
"Black Hat" techniques have evolved over the years. In the early days it meant repeating keywords lots of times. Then there were so-called "link farms" where people would build pages with zillions of links to each other. Invisible text. The tricks go on and on.
Every time someone thought of a way to beat Google, Google responded by improving their algorithms.
But it has been a battle, a back-and-forth.
Until now.
This may be a bit of an exaggeration, but not greatly so. Thanks to Caffeine, the Black Hats have lost the war.
It is no longer possible to invent a trick that Google can't respond to even before it becomes well known.
Google doesn't even have to really work at this. They are continuing to work at improving the search experience. Rolling out significant changes two or three in a week.
Searches are getting so localized and personalized, some people are saying "search engine ranking" doesn't mean anything anymore.
Of course that IS an exaggeration. But it points out the only real test of SEO: Not what a rankings report says, but how much quality traffic is actually delivered to a site. And, more than that: The subject is Internet Marketing. It is really about the volume of leads or sales generated through a website, and how much that costs.
Who cares how much traffic comes to a site if it is all wasted by the site itself?
So what does it all mean?
It means the Good Guys win. The guys in White Hats.
Thanks to "Caffeine", their new software, Google is capable of introducing changes faster than ever - and they are doing exactly that.
What are they trying to accomplish?
Their basic business model is much like that of a TV station: Give away the content, sell the eyeballs to advertisers.
Anyone can search on Google for free.
Because they do a great job of providing the best visitor experience, they own around 2/3 of the U.S. search market. Then they sell their ad space for billions of dollars in the form of AdWords - their pay-per-click or "sponsored links".
Staying on top means continuing to improve the searcher's experience. Delivering faster results that are more exactly what people are looking for. Eye-tracking studies show they are doing exactly that. These days, people find what they are looking for much more in the first couple of listings, compared to five years ago.
That means staying ahead of the competition. So Microsoft ("Live" and now "Bing") can spend tens of millions of dollars to very little result. Google also unashamedly picks up what other search engines do right, and includes them into their own search page and methods.
Thanks to Caffeine, Bing can do something today - and within days or weeks, Google is doing it to - if it works.
There is one more huge consequence of this rapidity of change. "Black Hat" SEO is becoming a hopeless task. I'll explain tomorrow.
Google on Wednesday rolled out their new interface. The left column options they have been testing for the last year are now a permanent fixture. They've rolled them all out, but what they serve up in the results page depends on the search and Google's judgment of what you are looking for. But you can rapidly modify it to suit.
By mid-day yesterday we were seeing the new interface in all searches.
At the same time without announcing it they no longer are offering full access to their keywords suggestions tool unless you access it through an AdWords (click ads) account.
These are dramatic changes when viewed from the perspective of the Internet Marketing community. They are probably a lot less dramatic, more incremental to the typical searcher - which is off course what Google is going for. They don't want to startle people. They want to continue to improve their search experience. And they are doing exactly that.
You are seeing one of the major effects of "Caffeine" (their new software). One of the reasons for doing a complete redesign of their programming was to make it easier and faster to make, test, and roll out changes.
Continuing to better the search experience is one result. Tomorrow, I'm going to explain the two other major consequences. And they are major - industry shaking.
Probably of greatest interest are the roll-out of a couple of features which enhance certain types of searches -
1. "Suggested brands":
Sometimes when searching for product information on Google, you may not know some of the brand names relevant to your particular search.
2. "Similar sites":
Now, for queries where we think sites similar to the first search result might be helpful, a small block of similar sites will appear at the bottom of the results page.
One type of "social media" is actually about the oldest public use for the Internet: Forums (or as they were and still sometimes known, Bulletin Boards).
Of course like everything else they've grown up and can now support almost any functionality you would want. Probably the two most widely used platforms (programs) are phpBB and vBulletin.
The basic idea of a forum is a way for a group to interact in a selective manner amongst themselves.
The content is in "threads" much like email, except instead of getting bombarded with an email every time someone in the group adds a posting, you can go to the forum whenever you want, or not, search or browse what you are interested in. You can also set it up to notify you by email on a selective basis.
A forum can be open (anyone can see content, join, and add to the forum), partially open (anyone can see content), or closed (you can only see content if you are a member and only join on approval).
Forums are extremely useful in specific situations. One is if you sell software, or anything for which you have a users group, a closed forum for the users to interact and build a treasure chest of questions and answers about the product or service. This can build up a knowledge base far more complete than staff could ever create, and with far less work on their part. And users can really get into this (much like some people live to post on Wikipedia).
Staff can also answer questions and use the forum to inform users. It can be a way for users to request features, and it can be a way for management to see what the clientele think of the company, its services, new offerings, and so on.
There are many other ways forums can be used. People into Greek cooking trading recipes. People who are into online vampire games. And so on.
If you can conceive of a situation involving online interaction within a group, probably a forum is the answer.
Somehow I've managed to never write a full post about one of the most useful Internet Marketing tricks.
If you run click ads (pay-per-click such as Google AdWords), and you get the campaign more-or-less running well, you can test different ad wordings to see what works best.
This is not just a test to get the maximum click-through-rate, but you also need to track conversions (phone calls, emails, purchases, newsletter sign-ups - whatever action you are trying to accomplish) - as that shows not just the quantity but also the quality of the traffic you generate to your website.
When you've worked this over and have a good response rate, with good quality, you now know the highest percentage appeal - what should be the basis of all other marketing efforts, such as appearing in ad headlines, your website home page, in sales materials, and so on.
You don't have to do a huge spend on the click ads to work this out - you just need enough clicks to be sure it isn't random variation that is causing the difference.
"SSL" stands for "Secure Socket Layer" - this is the technology for securing connections when you transmit confidential information to a website. As when a purchase is made online. Any time the website address you are looking at starts with "https" rather than "http", you are looking at a secure, encrypted connection. The "s" stands for secure.
Typically your browser indicates this by a lock symbol in the lower right corner of the screen.
Part of the process is the website having an "SSL certificate" - which is an electronic certification that the company is who it says it is.
There are usually two ways you can get an SSL cert for your website. Most website hosting services will provide a "shared" certificate as part of your hosting fee (or may charge a small yearly fee for this).
The difference is on secured screens (https) during the checkout process, with a shared cert, the URL would not be your own domain, but is based on the hosting company's domain, for example, frogsales.hostingcompany.com. instead of www.frogsales.com.
This has nothing to do with the look of the site, it is just the page address.
Most hosting companies will sell you your own cert, but there are other certificate authorities you can buy a cert from. The most well known (and expensive) is Verisign.
SSL certs vary in features and vary widely in cost. If you do get your own cert, part of the process is varying degrees of proof of who you are. More expensive certs also usually involve more definite proof of your company's legal existence and physical location.
In most cases there is little value in purchasing a high end cert.
At the same time millions are jumping on the social media bandwagon (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) for marketing purposes, their value is dropping like a stone. From Search Engine Land blog:
"In Edelman's annual Trust Barometer survey, it was revealed that consumers are losing trust in each other when it comes to providing credible information about products or companies. Confidence has dropped by nearly half since 2008 leading to only about 25% of people trusting their peers and friends online for information.
"While the dip in trust was across the board, there was a large emphasis on social media."
So the net result of the huge rise of social media, especially over the last year, has been to invalidate these media.
Well, they are still great for connecting and having fun.
Who do people trust the most now? Experts, especially if they hear the same thing from multiple sources.
After denying the rumors that Google was taking site speed into account in rankings, it has now (April 9th) been officially announced that they ARE in fact considering site speed.
They also clarify that less than 1% of search queries are affected by this. So you can safely assume unless your site is REALLY slow, you don't have to worry about it.
Google search is currently going through the largest change we've seen in probably two years.
Some people ascribe this to the rollout of "Caffeine" which is a software change promoted as being done to improve efficiency of Google's computers. Supposedly this wasn't going to much affect search results, and, as is common, Google isn't talking. But in the last few weeks we've seen unusually large swings in rankings (up and down) not connected to any apparent change.
Some of the other things we've seen include clear evidence that Google has gotten smarter. For example, we are seeing more variation in from where Google is picking the content for its listing of a page.
We've also now seen a one page site with no copy, ranked #1 on organic search for a city in which the company had no presence. It made sense; the page was a portal to three sites for individual stores in locations that ringed the city in question. But Google would never have figured that out before.
We've seen Google greatly devalue blog pages on a site over the last few months. Now it seems to be going back in the other direction, at least some.
This is just another example of how you have to stay alert to stay on top of Search Engine Optimization.
'On January 12, we announced on this blog that Google and more than twenty other U.S. companies had been the victims of a sophisticated cyber attack originating from China, and that during our investigation into these attacks we had uncovered evidence to suggest that the Gmail accounts of dozens of human rights activists connected with China were being routinely accessed by third parties, most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on their computers. We also made clear that these attacks and the surveillance they uncovered?combined with attempts over the last year to further limit free speech on the web in China including the persistent blocking of websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Docs and Blogger?had led us to conclude that we could no longer continue censoring our results on Google.cn."
High marks to Google for this action which will undoubtedly cost them billions in profit from business in China.
Over the centuries, many private companies have influenced the course of a nation, as often negatively as positively. China has been the adverse effect of such in the past - for example the British East India Company's opium trade, leading to the Opium Wars whereby China's sovereignty was severely compromised.
Now perhaps we'll see - over time - a very positive influence on China from this courageous action.
Is Your Website Compliant with the New Google Algorithm?
A client forwarded an email with this subject line. This was from a well-known local online marketing company.
The email is full of statements that are either false, not new, or deceptive, like these:
Google "Caffeine" is their most significant application change since 2006.
True but very misleading, since "Caffeine" is a rewrite of their software for better efficiency and is not supposed to majorly affect rankings.
Faster sites will show up higher in search results and slower sites will find it harder to rank.
False. This was a rumor that Google has specifically stated is untrue.
Fresh Content - If a site does not have this, it is perceived as out-of-date or abandoned.
Misleading. This mainly affects how often Google returns to your site to adjust rankings, not what are your rankings.
Quality Links - in and out - are a must. And they Must be Relevant.
Per Google, inbound links are at most 20% of your ranking, so that is seriously an exaggeration. Outbound links are almost irrelevant.
Real-time results for Integrated Social Media content will have prime position on search pages - similar to a live RSS feed as seen on social sites such as Twitter.
Many social media sites are now being picked up in real-time by Google. In most categories they don't have any advantage over other websites. If you're looking for a plumber, why would a Tweet be more important than a plumber's website?
Relevant Content Rules, as always.
Well they got that much right.
So if a reputable company with a big name can put out such misinformation, no question about it, when it comes to Internet Marketing: Let the Buyer Beware.
I thought I'd say this again since it keeps coming up.
There are certain techniques which once upon a time could shoot up your rankings very rapidly but which involve tricking Google. They violate Google's rules and will crash your rankings and possibly get your site completely blacklisted by Google.
These are called "black hat SEO" as opposed to "white hat SEO" which works with what Google is trying to do and follows their rules.
One of these tricks is to put a lot of keywords at the bottom of the page, possibly repeated multiple times, in the same color as the background so that they are invisible to the person visiting the website.
That was a very popular technique 4 or 5 years ago. Now it's a quick route to ranking disaster.
Since its start, the great innovation of Google was "Page Rank" - a way of measuring a website's importance by what other sites linked to it.
Over the years other factors have increased in importance - and it was never the all-encompassing factor many thought it to be - to a point where best estimates are it is now about 20% of what goes into search engine rankings.
Norvig said at SMX today that PageRank is still one thing that is "overhyped," and that Google never felt that it was such a big factor. They have always looked at all available data, combining every available signal and trying to figure out the best way to combine them.
It possesses the seemingly magical ability to interpret searchers' requests no matter how awkward or misspelled. Google refers to that ability as search quality, and for years the company has closely guarded the process by which it delivers such accurate results.
Once a visitor has satisfied themselves you sell what they are looking for, the inevitable next question is:
Will they sell to me and in a way I'm comfortable purchasing?
The fact that you sell women's clothes does not answer:
1. Do you sell retail (or wholesale or are you a manufacturer, if that is what they are looking for)
2. Do you sell in their geographical area.
3. Can they purchase online, or where are stores located, or how do I purchase?
If you think about it, a visitor is not going to bother checking on your pricing, features or selection, let alone your testimonials, unique selling proposition, etc., if they aren't going to be able to purchase from you.
So get this information up front and communicated in the first few seconds a visitor is on your site - whether by words or images or both. THEN you can get down to business: Showing and telling your visitor what you got and why they should buy from you.
Let's go further into the subject of website headlines which I introduced yesterday.
The first thing people look for is "what are you selling?" because people know that search engine listings can be deceiving. So they are poised and ready to hit their back button - like a nervous cat. Ready to bolt on anything scary, or merely a lack of reassurance.
So sublety is not an option. Just flat out tell people in your home page headline:
Natural Facial Care Products at Wholesale Prices
Family and Cosmetic Dentistry in Sarasota Florida
Rug and Art Tent Sales Coming To Your Area Soon
A second benefit, it also tells the search engines what you are about.
There is a lot of skill to writing an ad headline. And there is a great deal known about it - there are whole books on the subject.
Your website has headlines too.
What are the first, largest words on your home page, if not a headline? The same is true, to a lesser degree, on interior pages, where they function more like sub-heads in most cases.
BUT there is one huge difference between headlines in an ad, and headlines on a website.
The headline in an ad has to be a stopper, as it is the first clue to what you are selling.
Whereas a website headline is never the first stop on the marketing chain. The person already knows you exist, either because they heard of you offline, or they clicked on a link in a search or from another website.
By the time someone reaches your website, they are thinking you MAY be what they are looking for.
What then must a website headline do? The VERY first thing a website home page must do is to CONFIRM that you are what they are looking for. That means you must in the fewest, most common words, tell them:
1. What you sell.
2. Who you sell it to.
3. In what geographical area you sell.
If this isn't immediately clear, the average visitor is not going to read on to find out. They are likely to figure they made a mistake, hit their back button and try another site.
You do have more than the headline words to work with. Your main image, and any prominent navigation buttons, will help. But you MUST accomplish 1-2-3 above, in about 2 seconds flat, and without the visitor having to scroll down to try and figure it out.
Otherwise all your efforts to get someone to your website are a waste.
I am often asked if there is any point in doing Search Engine Optimization or other Internet Marketing for companies that sell to other businesses.
People wonder, do people actually search online for business services and products? Even ones that are high-end, highly specialized?
The answer is an emphatic "YES!"
Here's an example. Our client, Crystal Lake Beverage, is a beverage consultant. I bet you didn't even know such a thing existed. Let's say you're Coca-Cola and you want to come up with a new flavor. Crystal Lake will design the flavor for you, including ingredients and manufacturing process.
Now is that specialized or what.
And he is getting almost a lead a week from his website.
So I don't care if you are selling bandaids to banks or advice to airlines, people are searching online for what you sell or do.
If you don't have a great website and a superb Internet Presence, you're missing out.
A year ago I wrote a post about the hottest Content Management System that everyone was using to build websites, WordPress.
I could take that article and change "WordPress" to "Joomla" and it would be 99% accurate, today. For Joomla is the CMS du Jour - the Content Management System of the Day.
Probably in another year it'll be something else.
Anyway, at the risk of incurring the wrath of people who are in love with their Joomla, you should know the facts:
Joomla, with the addition of a plug-in, sh404SEF, can be SEO'd. It takes twice as long to do everything, but you can do it.
It has the liabilities of other CMS systems: it is hard to make your site look really good and layout issues are common. You can easily change things you shouldn't really be changing all the time (like the menu). You have a dynamically generated site, meaning, you are making the server work a lot harder.
Yes, I have seen really good, professionally done Joomla sites, though they are rare. I have seen a Joomla site with decent SEO. One.
In an earlier writeup on website hosting, I said we recommended Unix hosting but didn't say why.
The biggest reason is security. Unix servers are inherently more secure against hacking, than Windows servers. We've had exactly one instance of a website being hacked in the years we've been offering hosting services. It is also the only website that we hosted on a Windows server. No coincidence. We no longer offer Windows hosting.
The other reason is that some things are just easier to do on a Unix server, in the typical setup called "LAMP" for Linux - Apache - MySQL - PHP. Linux is a version of Unix. Apache is the widely used web server software. MySQL is the type of data base and PHP is a programming language. All of these are very widely used and there are lots of people who know how to do things with them. Furthermore, they are free and open-source (open to development and additions by anyone who wants to help).
So they aren't subject to the kinds of changes that Microsoft products are - where the pressure to develop new salable products leads to jumps from one version to another.
To give one example, when we are redesigning a website, and the client hosts on Windows, there are four different versions of the code possible for generating emails from the website (as when someone fills out a contact form). Usually there is no way to find out which will work on their server other than by trial and error.
In the case of Unix hosting, there is only one version, and it always works.
Since the Internet started to go commercial in a big way back around 1997, it has been a rapidly changing medium. In fact, from a marketing viewpoint, easily the fastest changing medium since advertising was in its infancy.
Is that still true?
Look at all that's happened in the last year alone - Twitter, the ascendancy of Facebook, real-time search, Bing, Caffeine (Google's latest major change, now in the works), the popularity of Joomla, etc. etc. etc.
Two years ago we wouldn't have thought of putting video on a website. Now we try to put video on every website we do.
All media eventually become mature. They don't stop changing, they just change more slowly.
The Internet hasn't reached that point.
Sure, there are a lot of things about the Internet that you can count on. What Google is generally looking for. What, fundamentally, makes a website effective or not. Many other things.
But it still takes, and will in the foreseeable future take, a considerable amount of time to stay on top of what's happening online.
I've often commented on how rapidly things change on the Internet.
This animation is just another example. It shows the changes in browser usage over the last 8 years (statistics don't accurately represent usage across the entire Internet, this is for one website whose users heavily slant towards Firefox):
I probably shouldn't tell you this. Giving away secrets.
If you want to show up high on the search engines, your website has to be large enough. The bigger a website, the more important it is to Google.
There are fields where your website needs to be thousands of pages to rank on page one with Google.
But how do you know how large your site needs to be? It's easy.
1. Do a search for a few key search terms.
2. Find the top ranking competitor sites, a few for each search term.
3. Type "site:{name of the domain} - like site:www.fastf.com (no spaces) - into a Google search box. This will tell you how many pages Google has in its index for that site. Do this for each competitor site.
You'll quickly see the pattern.
There's lots more to it than this, of course.
But no matter what else you do, if you don't know what size your site needs to be, you're not going to get there.
I just did an analysis of Bing (Microsoft's third and no-doubt final effort to make it in the world of Search).
Accompanied by tens of millions of dollars of advertising, and massive efforts to build strategic alliances, Bing has increased the MS market share considerably in the months since its release. So, a success?
Actually, looked at closely, the biggest reason for the increase in market share is Microsoft's massive push to get users of older versions of Internet Explorer onto version 8.
MS has pushed IE8 out twice via automatic updates. If you avoid that, every time you install a patch, the first time you run Internet Explorer, they take you to a page to explain why you should download IE8 and to make it easy for you to do so. Just click.
That has resulted in some 10% of Internet Users switching from IE6 to IE8. And when they do that, MS of course wants to use Bing as your default search engine. You have to go out of your way to switch to anything else.
You'd expect Bing to increase their market share by 10% from that alone. Yet the MS share of the search market has increased by less than that.
So people in massive numbers are taking the time and effort to go back to using Google.
I'm not talking about highways. I'm using traffic in the sense of visitors to your website.
If you're going to make Internet Marketing work for you, it is critical to identify who is coming to your website, how they are finding you, and what they are doing once they get there.
A conversation with a prospect yesterday pointed out one of the pitfalls. He was running an ad with a coupon in a local paper. It seemed to be generating business - but no one ever brought in the coupon. Yet when he ran the ad he got more visitors from the area where that paper was distributed. When he stopped running the ad, he got less business from that area.
My point is it takes more than a guess-and-by-golly (using a combination of guesswork and reliance on luck) to understand what is going on. Sometimes you have to really dig. And it is VERY worth it.
I've spoken repeatedly of what I like to call "the visitor experience" - what happens when someone visits a website, and most definitely from their viewpoint. How THEY experience the website.
That really breaks down into three key factors:
1. Interest
2. Trust
3. Usability
If a website doesn't build interest from the first moment, and on every page - your visitor is gone.
If it doesn't build trust in the visitor, he will never take action. And that, after all, is why the website is there, one way or another, to bring about or facilitate action.
But all that will come to nothing unless the site is designed, built, and adjusted to maximize USABILITY.
What is usability? It is anything and everything that make the site easy to use and easy for the visitor to do what the visitor wants to do. I've written many blog posts on this but now let's tie them all in a neat little bundle and put a label on it: Usability.
Clarity and simplicity in your main menu. Telling the visitor simply, directly and immediately on your home page what you are about. Provide alternate methods of navigating a website, including internal text links so visitors can follow their interest. Page layout that is basically the same throughout the site.
These and many other aspects of your site contribute to - or detract from - its usability.
To evaluate your site's usability, imagine yourself someone who has never been to your site, and (perhaps) is a bit of a novice on the Internet.
How easy will it be for them to use your site. USE your site. That's what you want the visitor to do, to use your site to accomplish THEIR purposes.
One of the best articles I've seen in a long time.
These guys spent a year compiling a huge database of information and using it to compare Google's rankings to various factors long known or believed to be used (or not) by Google.
There are always lots of buzz words - and technologies with buzz - around the Internet. And they are constantly changing and new things are coming out.
How is one to keep up? Or even to know what to pay attention to?
Web 2.0 and Social Network Marketing, generally speaking, both refer to highly interactive Internet applications.
Facebook and Twitter are just two of many.
I'm currently reading a book "Groundswell" that gives a great framework for evaluating these technologies so you don't get completely overwhelmed, ignore them all or spend too much time trying to sort it out.
In short, they divide web audiences into a few categories - creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and "inactives". Then they divide ways a business can operate towards these publics into
1. listening - using interactivity as a research tool.
2. talking - any method such as blogs of getting your message out.
3. energizing - getting your audience to help spread the word.
4. supporting - customer support forums and the like.
5. embracing - visitor participation even in product development.
Determine where your public fits into the behavior categories. Then you need clarity on your company's overall objectives and strategy, to identify what type of ineractive online objectives make sense for you.
Only then can you start to evaluate what of these new technologies to use.
People are justifiably nervous when shopping online.
There is no scarcity of criminals and no scarcity of scams out there.
The two huge barriers that have to be overcome by anyone planning on getting rich through an online store:
1. Getting traffic to the site. For a store to succeed - any store, whether online or bricks-and-mortar - you must have a realistic way of generating visitors - a method you can afford and which will pay for itself in return sales. Realize with online stores a much smaller fraction will buy, because it is so easy to shop multiple web stores.
2. Building confidence. It becomes mandatory to do anything and everything you can to reassure the visitor that their credit card information is safe and the goods will be what they expected and wanted.
That can be guarantees, your physical address and photos of your store or warehouse, a contact phone number that is not an 800 number and is located in the U.S., testimonials. Photos of staff. Even the appearance of the site itself, if professional, is reassuring.
Think these things through before you dive into the online store world.
There are several levels of solution for accepting payments online.
The best solution varies depending on budget. Ideally you accept all major credit cards, plus PayPal. Taking major credit cards gives you credibility, makes you look big. Accepting PayPal gives people an easy solution who may not have a credit or debit card, or who feel uncomfortable giving their card information to someone unknown, no matter how good they look.
If you accept only PayPal you look like a small operation and are less trusted to that degree. But in that case you don't need a full blown shopping cart as part of your site, if you are only selling one or a couple different items you can just use PayPal "buy now" buttons - very easy and fast to set up, and with no monthly fees to you.
Google's latest initiative, just launched officially September 23rd, is something anyone with a website needs to pay attention to.
Sidewiki allows anyone with a Google account and a Google toolbar to comment on any web page - and have it be visible to others.
It can also show up in searches.
Multiply the negative potential of Wikipedia by 100x, and you picture the concern.
Of course all may turn out well. But I wouldn't count on it. After all, it enables your competitors to make negative comments anyone can see about you!
It's experimental and I think there's a fair chance it won't pan out because there's no good way to control abuse. The mechanisms which mainly keep Wikipedia from going too far off the rails, won't work with this set up.
Definitely you should be checking regularly to see if anyone is posting entries for your website.
I think everyone in the marketing world would like to know the future of the Internet and especially what is the Next Big Thing.
If you were hoping for the answer, sorry to disappoint.
BUT there are some things I can say that are very clear:
1. Change will be incremental. Yes, things change faster on the Internet than any other marketing environment in the history of planet earth.... but they still take time. You'll have time to figure it out.
2. One of the drivers of change will continue to be the move towards faster connections and computers, larger and cheaper storage (the rise of online video being a perfect example of this).
3. The vast majority of things touted as The Next Big Thing, won't be.
4. What works now will continue to work - such as good website design, content, "white hat" site optimization, good click ad campaign management.
5. Some things may decline in importance, but again, it won't be overnight. Banner ad response rates are a mere whisper of what they were some years ago. But the decline has been gradual over that time.
6. Nothing will come along that will turn basic marketing principles on their ear.
7. People will continue to spend lots of marketing money doing dumb things online. Many of these will be Fortune 500 companies.
Well, that won't make headlines in the New York Times tomorrow... but maybe it'll provide a little perspective.
When doing Internet Marketing for a client we use it for exactly one thing: we look at competitor websites keyword tags to see what they think are important search terms.
There are two ways I know of, to start a marketing campaign today and be getting new customers tomorrow.
Both require that you have a website to send people to.
One is click ads (pay-per-click, Google AdWords).
The other is with local listings. I have literally set up a client on Google Maps one day and had them get a call from a prospective customer the next day.
So Microsoft and Yahoo finally worked out a partnership to take on Google together. Not that it'll do them much good. But it's good for some jokes. Do we call them YahSoft or MicroHoo?
I've restrained myself from commenting on Twitter until I had something I thought would be useful to say about it.
For those who may have heard the term but not know what it is, Twitter is a free "microblogging" service for posting text+links messages of up to 140 characters only. Each post is called a "tweet". Subscribers are called "followers." Because of the short messages, sending and receiving tweets from cell phones is popular. It also makes it a friendly medium for rapid updates.
Initially it was used by teens and twenty-somethings to stay in touch with all their friends at once. Like telling everyone you are now at the grocery store.
When it exploded earlier this year, and people started raving about it as a marketing tool, my first question was "What percentage of this is pure hype?" And the next question is how would it be actually useful to a business.
Answer to the first question is "a lot of it is hype."
But on the second, there are a couple of ways it can be VERY useful:
1. As a way of keeping customers and other interested persons informed, if you are in a fast-moving business.
We have a client who has two large fishing boats, and this is a huge town for fishing. In fact, Tampa Bay is really the fishing capital of the U.S. So there are zillions of people who would like to know where the fish are biting - TODAY.
Twitter is perfect for that kind of thing.
2. As a way of developing business.
This is of course what people really are hoping to gain from Twitter as a business tool. And it certainly has potential that way, depending on the type of business you are in, and how creative you can be.
Developing business using Twitter is totally dependent on getting followers. I'm not going to get into how to get followers, but I am going to point out one important fact:
The fact that someone is following you doesn't mean they are a potential prospect - or even that they are interested in you.
This stems from the fact that people follow others as a marketing action. If you log into Twitter and click on "followers", you'll see recent tweets from your followers. So, many people follow thousands of others in hopes those people will see their tweets and be interested in what they offer.
It's the same as with visitors to a website. You can get thousands of visitors to a website who are never going to turn into customers.
And, as with all marketing methods or channels that are new - brand new, or just new to you - no matter how good they sound, they are experimental until proven out - FOR YOU.
So tweet away - just don't put all your eggs in one basket and count on it to save the bacon or make you rich. Maybe it will - so give it an honest try - but put the emphasis on the "maybe."
Most websites are on "shared hosting plans" meaning you share a web server with dozens, maybe hundreds of other websites. That's cheaper, but it also limits the amount of visitors your site can handle. Plus it's like living in an apartment building; you can be badly affected by what the neighbors are doing.
You get up to a certain point and you need a whole server to yourself.
You can stick a server in your closet - that's easy enough - but not a good idea. You probably don't have a fast enough connection, plus, what do you do if your connection goes down? And what about backups?
So the best solutions are either "co-location" where you own the server, but it is located on premises of a hosting company, or "dedicated server" where they own the server, but rent it to you. That's more expensive but if it dies, the hosting company plugs in a replacement, restores your site from backups, and you are off and running.
Dedicated servers can be "managed" or not. Managed hosting means that pretty much all the services you expect in a shared hosting plan are also provided. Backups, technical support, etc. etc.
You see where I'm going here. Unless you have lots of expertise in-house, when you get to a point where a shared server won't do (often in the 5000 to 15000 visitors a day range), then usually the best best is a managed dedicated server hosting.
As with any hosting plan, prices vary widely.
There is also another option called "cloud hosting" which is still rather new. In cloud hosting, your website isn't on a particular server. It is on a group of servers, possibly not even in the same data center. This has a couple of advantages. If one server goes down, there is no down-time at all. Also if you exceed the capacity of a dedicated server, it usually takes a few hours to add capacity, so if you get a sudden huge increase of traffic to your site - you may lose a lot of it. Cloud computing takes up the volume seamlessly.
I've written at length about how the disadvantages of Content Management Systems (CMS) usually out-weigh the benefits.
The latest, hottest CMS is WordPress. People are building websites using it and touting it as the greatest thing since sliced bread.
The first thing to know about WordPress is it is blogging software. So why are people using it to build websites? Yes, you can do it, but it isn't designed for that.
It is, however, free, and for free software, it is pretty good. It may well be the best free CMS for rapidly and easily building a website.
Of course, saying something is the best free software is like saying "the best car manufactured in Croatia."
We've done a website in Wordpress ourselves - but it was a situation where the website was mainly a blog, and the person couldn't afford the professional grade software we normally use for blogs (Movable Type). And guess what, it was harder to work with and there were things you couldn't do or that didn't quite work right. About what you expect for free software.
Claims that WordPress is great for SEO are exaggerated. In contrast to many CMS, it doesn't make it very difficult or impossible to do SEO.
I've said more than once that website navigation needs to be simple and obvious.
Otherwise you lose people because they can't figure out how to get where they want to go, or maybe even if you are offering what they are looking for.
Errors on this aren't restricted to small business websites. I've written of the horror of trying to navigate the Verizon website. They've improved their site since, but it is still in the "pretty bad" category.
It's amazing how many of the world's largest retailers, when you go to their website it's hard to find the "store locator" link.
So what are some of the basic rules of website navigation?
The first is that you shouldn't depart much from expectations.
There is a lot of room for creativity and uniqueness in website design, but think about this: If your navigation is out-of-the-ordinary, people are going to be looking for it in the wrong places, or not understanding how it works!
That goes for the main menu, which should usually be in a horizontal bar somewhere near the top of the page. Why? That's where most main menus are, so that's where people look for them!
Our own main menu is about as far from the ordinary as it's safe to get. It is across the top. It's also not in a bar, and the main buttons move a bit when you roll over them. People really like the whimsy factor on this. Yet, if we pushed it a bit further, we would have upset and lost visitors.
Secondary menus in a column down one side are common, especially in stores, so that is a very acceptable solution if needed.
We also always provide multiple ways of navigation, including a series of text links in the footer (bottom of page) and text links within the body of content on many pages. That's because different people have different preferred ways to navigate or have different expectations. These, along with "site search" functions, comprise a safety net so the vast majority of visitors can get around without getting frustrated.
This is one of the factors that needs to be carefully worked out when designing a site.
Flash is a plug-in (add-on) available on some 98% of all website browsers. As such it is the tool of choice for "special effects."
I'm using "special effects" for the variety of multi-media and motion effects which can add a big chunk of pizzazz, interest, and attention-grabbing to a website.
These include:
audio (music or voiceover)
video (YouTube style)
walk-on-screen video
slideshows
morph effects
other animations
exotic menu effects
We love these kinds of effects but there's always a balance between impingement (getting someone's attention) and creating interest, versus being distracting or too over-the-top.
We almost always avoid "splash screens" (the introductory screen before you get to the home page).
In most cases sound or video should not start automatically but should be under the control of the visitor. If automatic they should be brief, and ideally the website should recognize and not offer it up on repeat visits.
Flash animations in many cases should play once through, then stop.
This is a matter of judgment and sometimes you don't know until you've tried it where that balance is. And, of course, there's no absolute answer for every visitor.
I've written many times on the fact that search engines generally consider a larger site more important than a smaller one, and rank it higher.
A larger site means more material for a visitor to be interested in, and makes it easier to be well ranked for a larger variety of search terms.
But how big is big?
Our site, FastF.com, dominates in many categories for local searches (Tampa, Tampa Bay, Clearwater, etc.). It has 300 pages in the Google index.
Our client Electronic Search, a national recruiting company specializing in the wireless (cell phones and radio communications) industry, has top rankings for a wide variety of terms. The site has over 500 pages indexed.
Our client Through The Woods, a high-end hardwood flooring completely, completely dominates for Tampa Bay area searches in their industry, on page 1 for nearly 300 important search terms. The site has over 200 pages indexed.
All three of these sites also are very effective in generating leads from visitors. All three businesses have had their bacon saved in this down economy through Internet leads.
Of course, there are many industries where so large a site isn't necessary. But, for example, sites with thousands of pages aren't rare in sites attempting high rankings in national health care rankings.
The point is, if you really want to make it with Internet Marketing, a 5 or 10 page site probably isn't going to cut it. And you really need a plan as to how you are going to build a huge site.
It doesn't have to be done all at once - in many cases it isn't practical to do so. But have a plan, one that is workable in terms of time, expense and content.
Another of our Internet Marketing clients has come up nowon the national rankings radar screen. This is a recruiting company, so you know they are in a highly competitive field to say the least. I mean when you are competing against the likes of Monster.com and the New York Times classifieds....
Outside of the brag - they've gone from 2 to 11 #1 rankings, from 7 to 48 page 1 rankings for key search terms - the other point is that national search engine rankings are a very different game from local rankings.
It took the better part of a year to get there with this client, and that is typical dealing with competitive national ranking territory. It takes a commitment. You need a LOT of pages (their site is now over 1000 pages), you need to know what you are doing, and you need TIME. Time put in on the project, and time to work your way up the rankings.
Needless to say, we monitor closely how the economy is affecting our clients' marketing, so we can make necessary adjustments.
The latest trend, over the last couple of weeks: cost per click is decreasing and average position is improving, without any other change (such as maximum bid amount).
This is operating broadly across many industries.
Our analysis is that the economy is now affecting enough businesses so there is less competition - at least in this particular marketing arena. The same is probably true in other marketing channels, but I don't have any statistical data to back it up - though there is LOTS in the advertising industry trade publications about how TV networks, magazines, newspapers, etc. are having a harder time filling their ad space and in maintaining their rates.
With organic search, where you aren't paying every time someone clicks, it doesn't much matter why someone is coming to your site. If they are looking for something else, well, they'll just leave.
Sometimes even in organic search we try to reduce unwanted clicks, just because they can make it hard to read what is actually going on with your Internet Marketing. We had that situation where an article on our site about salesmanship was number one world-wide on a common Google search. Wonderful, except it didn't generate any business or even leads. Not the business we're in. In that case we took the page down.
With click ads it does matter, of course, because every click that doesn't result in action on the part of the visitor, costs you money.
Fine if they are looking for someone like you, but just decide to go elsewhere after viewing your site.
But it is common to find searchers clicking on your ad (for which you are paying!) on searches that have nothing to do with what you are selling or offering.
There's no perfect solution to this problem but there are three main ways to limit it:
1. Using negative keywords. Usually there will be certain searches you can distinguish by their search terms, as not who you're looking for (you have to have good web analytics that give you all the actual search terms). If you're renting condos on Clearwater Beach, a search with the words "Destin" or "Texas" in it is not going to get you a customer. So you add these as "negative keywords" to block such searches.
2. Get rid of search terms with low CTR's and lots of clicks. This is the problem with very general terms like "vacation" for a company that rents beachfront condos. There are huge numbers of searches on "vacation" so your ad is being served up in huge quantities. Your term is so general that only the tiniest fraction of searchers on that term are actually looking for what you sell. Even with a very low CTR, you can get lots of clicks - and use up your budget causing you to miss clicks on much more specific search terms.
But, if you have a CTR something like 0.1% on a keyword, chances are MOST of the clicks on your ad are accidental, malicious, made out of confusion, or just someone looking for something else. Maybe they are just looking for a picture of a sunset!
So a basic action in running a click ad campaign is to look at the CTR of your keywords and investigate those which are low (there can be several reasons for a low CTR).
3. Limit where your ad is being served - geographically or what part of Google (or other search engine's) network.
Geographically, sometimes you are selling goods or services that are only of interest locally. If you're in Milwaukee, why run your ad in Spokane? Any clicks, whether accidental or not, are not going to result in business.
Then, frequently Google's "AdSense" network generates leads of very poor quality. This is where Google serves up your ad on other websites (mostly news sites and portals) when it thinks your ad is relevant to what else is on the site. You can now select which of these your ad shows on, but a lot of the time it isn't worth running your ads on AdSense at all.
Finally, Google has many partner search engines who run Google click ads. A lot of them, however, are way less careful than Google about when they serve up your ad, resulting in lots of garbage clicks from people searching for something else. That may not be possible to handle with negative keywords, but you can completely opt out of the partner networks.
Optimizing a click ad campaign very definitely includes addressing all three of these, and revisiting them from time to time (On the Internet, things change).
Running an effective click ad campaign is quite a skill. There's a lot to know, because there are so many possibilities.
There are a few top level considerations though.
The first is, what's your daily budget? Everything else is driven by how much you're going to spend per day. In the ideal campaign, on the average day, you meet your daily spend limit just as the clock strikes midnight. If you hit your limit before that, you've spent more per click than you needed to, or, you are shooting too broadly (spending on lower quality clicks than you need to).
Given the budget, the next question is the balance between cost per click and quality of click. Generally speaking, you can increase the quality of your clicks (how likely they are to turn into an action on the part of a website visitor) by a thoughtful increase in your average cost per click.
The best way to increase the effectiveness of a click ad campaign is by improving the quality of your ads. Here at Fast Forward we are always trying ad variations to see if we can improve ads. That way you can increase the quality of your clicks AND reduce your cost per click at the same time.
That's usually measured by the CTR (click-through-rate, the percentage of those seeing a page with your ad on it, who click through to your website). However, sometimes increasing the CTR just means that you are getting lower quality clicks. That is one of the more difficult to estimate factors.
The real lesson here is designing and building a website and doing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) aren't completely separate tasks. There's an enormous wasted effort if the website developers don't know and understand SEO. In fact, you may have to throw out the entire site construction and start over to get search engine rankings!
It is true that we don't usually start a major SEO project on a website until it's been up online for at least a month or two. There's a couple of reasons for this. One is the sandbox effect. The other is the simple fact that until a site has been up for a while, you won't have enough statistical track on the site to be able to do intelligent SEO.
Nevertheless, when a site is built there are two important targets relating to SEO:
1. The site should be search engine friendly. That means it should be built so that the search engines can find it, will be able to read all the copy, tell what the site is about, and will index the whole site.
2. The site should be SEO friendly. That means the site isn't going to require restructuring or other major changes to get SEO done.
A good example of the difference is sites built using some Content Management Systems (CMS). They are search engine friendly - but impossible to do SEO on. In other words, yes, Google can see and will index the site, but the system doesn't, for example, allow you to set individual title tags for each page.
A website designer who doesn't know SEO is likely to violate one or both of these targets.
Since it takes no more work to do basic SEO on a site, any website designer who doesn't know SEO well enough to deliver that when he designs and builds a site, is ripping off his clients.
With the current economic scene, many businesses of all sizes are shifting in the direction of online marketing. Most other methods of getting new business are decreasingly effective (such as Yellow Pages, direct mail and ads in magazines / newspapers) and often require big budgets to work.
Click ads and other paid online advertising is one route.
Publicity and links to your site are another route.
The third (and most basic program that nearly any company should be doing) includes three or four main key elements which all work together to create traffic to your site and RESULTS (meaning leads, contacts or sales). Links to blog postings on each of these follow:
2. Organic SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Organic SEO
Both of these so people find your site.
3. Controlling what displays on the search results pages so people click on YOUR link. Snippets Google Search Options
4. Fixing "leaks" on your website so it does a better job of handling visitors, so more of them contact you and become new patients. My Website Leaks
This kind of program takes a while (usually at least a month before you seen any results) but that's true of most new business development efforts.
The potential upside for many businesses is large. And the gains persist. Once you get high rankings you tend to keep them. That's different than a Yellow Pages ad or direct mail you have to keep paying for to get any results.
Reviews, like many things, can be forces for good or for evil.
They can be used by competitors or just plain troublemakers to attack your reputation.
Or they can be used by you to help people find you online, and to get an idea of what great service and products you have.
Best you harness them for good.
Thanks to Google, it's now easy to find out how you look in the universe of reviews. Just search on your company, product or service name, then click on "search options" and select "reviews" from the left column. It'll bring up ONLY websites with reviews.
If other things than your company are showing up, just narrow the search using "" quote marks for an exact phrase match, add additional words or use "-" a minus sign for a negative search term (eliminate that from the results).
You'll probably see such as the following:
Google Maps (Local)
Yahoo Local
Switchboard.com
YellowPages.com
SuperPages.com
RealPages.com
All of these are versions of online Yellow Pages. Depending on the business and locale you are in, you may see other sites as well.
Now the trick is to get happy customer / client / patient reviews added to these sites.
Check back from time to time and see how you are looking.
As your online reputation improves, watch your web traffic (and leads) increase!
The latest is something called "WolframAlpha" which is getting massive exposure in the press as the newest thing that is going to render Google obsolete.
Yet it is nothing more than an experimental tool from an academic researcher in Germany. And oh yeah, it doesn't work all that well and is certainly nowhere near ready for primetime.
Meanwhile, Google has rolled out its new search options panel which is the greatest improvement in actual practical search in at least a year.
Google, after much testing, has launched a new "seach options" panel, which you can see by clicking on "show options" just below your main search window.
Among the options are time-sensitive (how recently was the page updated?), show images from the page, and longer text.
We feel this is a very significant upgrade of Google's search capabilities and will help continue their dominance in search. More importantly, if you are doing Internet Marketing, it will greatly help searchers sort out the sites they are looking for, before they even visit the site.
For example, a client of ours is a high-end hardwood flooring contractor. If you search for "hardwood flooring Tampa", two of their pages show up in the top ten organic search listings. However, it isn't that easy to distinguish amongst the listings, who is a professional hardwood floor contractor and who is something else.
If you click on the option to show images from the site, most of the others immediately show as being lower-level companies, general flooring contractors (not specializing in hardwood), or directories.
Why is this important? It is one thing to show up in searches. You still need to get the searcher to click selectively on the link to your site, as opposed to others.
This is the equivalent of having your ad in a magazine amongst 9 other ads for competitors. How do you get them to select yours?
I will make two predictions:
1. This will be VERY popular with searchers.
2. It will reward the company with a professional website.
We'll be monitoring statistics over the next weeks to see how this change affects things. It should be gradual (as not everyone will discover or try the new features immediately). I'll report in on it later.
Here's a video from Google explaining the new features:
Google has announced a change in their policy on use of trademarks in Click Ads. It's a liberalization in that there will be more situations where you CAN use someone else's trademark. But there are serious limitations:
Those that won't be able to use brand names include sites that sell counterfeit goods, retailers that primarily sell a competitor's products, advertisers that criticize the trademarked brand and those that do not refer to a landing page with a purchase option.
Nevertheless, there are situations where this will be very useful, as to promote a tradmarked brand that you are selling online.
When you see ads that say "Guaranteed Page 1 Google in 15 Minutes!!!!! Not click ads!!!!!" you know to keep your hand on your wallet. Ads like that should carry mandatory notices "Danger. Thief at work."
It takes time to improve search engine rankings because Google and other search engines don't revisit and re-index your page instantly when a change is made. Google does keep speeding up their cycle. Currently they take about three weeks to completely re-index the average website.
And It typically takes several rounds of changes to get all the way there. It takes a while to get inbound links working for you. Plus the "sandbox effect" can delay the full effect of your SEO.
However, that doesn't mean results can't start appearing rapidly.
I've been tracking rankings for a new SEO client of ours. After the initial round of changes, many search terms had risen in the rankings after 17 days and further improved after a total of 26 days. We've seen similar results in other cases.
One reason is Google doesn't re-index a whole site all at once; they may visit one page one day and another the next. As soon as they've visited a page, any rankings for that page are updated.
Another point is that if you are looking for a most immediate "bang for your buck" on search engine rankings, you strategize what changes are easiest to make with the biggest result.
That doesn't change the fact that SEO is more of a marathon than a sprint. More than once we've seen it take a year to get a site to the top on nationally competitive search terms. Results usually come much faster for localized searches.
So you can get good results within days, but plan on many months work, if you are planning to get to the top of all your important search terms.
Here's another subject I've talked lots about without ever devoting a whole posting to it.
"Inbound links" means links from someone else's website to yours.
These are extremely important to your search engine rankings. IF someone links to you AND their website is considered important by the search engine AND the link says the same things about your site that yours does.
That's three big ifs.
1. Someone links to you. Some sites collect inbound links without working at it. We've a client with hundreds of them. They are in a niche market (classic Lincoln automobiles) with a very loyal and interested following and after over 20 years in business, are extremely well known.
Most businesses starting out aren't in that position. So you have to work to get links to your site.
You work at it bit by bit over time. Seeking out sites, blogs, directories, portals that would be interested in linking to you and getting them to add a link.
2. Their website is considered important by the search engines. The most valuable links are from sites with high Page Rank or so-called "trusted sites" such as educational institutions and major media sites.
Any inbound link is good. But links from these kinds of sites can rapidly make an enormous difference in your rankings.
3. Links say the same things about your site that your site says about it. To make this clear, if your site is about Florida condo rental, and you've optimized the site for "Florida condo rentals" and related search terms, then the best links are ones where the so-called "anchor text" or adjacent text says "Florida condo rentals." "Anchor text" is the words which if you click on them take someone to your site.
You don't always have that much control over how the links read, but again, even if it just has the URL or name of the site, that is much better than nothing.
Even a small number of less-than-ideal links can make a big difference in your rankings.
Of course, inbound links can also generate traffic to your site, but in most situation, the biggest upside is from improving your rankings and generating valuable traffic that way.
Here's one great way to do video. You've probably seen them. You go to a website and a figure walks onto your screen and starts talking - usually the owner of the business or a pretty model.
It's one of the hottest pieces of technology for websites because it's an instant grabber. It's interesting and more alive than anything you usually find on a website.
Of course it doesn't always make sense for every website. But what you probably don't know is that it is neither difficult nor very expensive to do.
The hardest part is shooting the video. It has to be done in front of a "green screen" so the background can be subtracted out. If the person moves around at all, it needs to be planned out where exactly the person is going to walk when the video is shot so it ends up with the desired effect on the screen.
One reason this has to be well-planned: You can't have any clickable links on that part of the screen the person walks through. At least they won't be clickable while the person is on the screen, even if you can see a link.
It also needs to be well scripted. And if it is the owner or president or someone else not used to being on camera, they need to be drilled to relax! There's nothing worse than someone looking uncomfortable on screen.
If that makes it seem difficult, it's not, and the effect on your website can be outstanding.
As promised, here is a guest blog from Vanessa Steele of Eon Systems, who runs very successful webinars for her company:
Webinars are a very good way to get known on the Internet. To let your potential customers know that you exist. It is the opportunity to build credibilty. But there are some rules that should be followed.
If you are going to do what I call a Public Service or Free Information Webinar, be sure to give information that the person attending can use, whether they use your service or not. Everyone that attends the webinar should leave with information they can use right now. They do not get stories of how your company fixed this problem or that.
Only at the end of the Webinar should you invite the attendees to your website or to some kind of action.
I can't tell you how many Webinars I leave before they are done because the entire thing is set up to promote how that company has fixed whatever. If I am going to spend time out of my day to go to a Webinar I want information that I can use or that I find helpful.
If I want to know what your company does I'll go to your website. If you website is not getting you sales you should look at having it redesigned.
You should have some type of survey at the end of the webinar giving the attendees the ability to give you feedback ON THE WEBINAR. Not on your company or about your company. Yes at least one of the questions should be something about "Would you like to know more about how we can help" or something like that.
Also pick a Webinar Service that will track the attendance and the interest of the attendees during the Webinar. I like gotomeeting.com They have a very good reports system.
You need to look at why you want to do a Webinar. Is it because you want to collect prospect contact information? Personally I find this to be dishonest as they don't give me anything I can use from the webinar and then send a bunch of junk emails.
The basic point is: If you give something valuable people will remember that and even if they are not ready to buy right now they will remember you later when they are, because you gave without expecting back.
Several companies including Google and Symantec (the Norton Anti-Virus people) have launched efforts recently to detect and inform people when a site is safe or not for browsing.
This is a great idea actually since there are an enormous number of bad-hat websites out there and it is easy to get your computer infected unless you are quite watchful of where you go and what you click on.
One of these initiative is Norton's "Safe Web". If you have recent Norton products installed on your computer, when you do a search on engines such as Google and Yahoo, you'll see a little symbol out to the right of the link - a green check mark if they've deemed that site to be safe, for example.
The problem with this is if your site hasn't been checked out by Safe Web yet, and your competitors have, people are going to want to click on their site rather than yours. Since by default this service is turned on now with many Norton products, this is going to be seen by a large and increasing number of surfers.
So if your site doesn't have the green check yet, it would be wise to take action.
That's easy, just click on the link above, you can submit your site for review.
If the term is new to you, "Webinar" is short for "web seminar". It's an online workshop and it is being used by thousands of businesses to interest prospective new customers / clients and to start to get them acquainted with the company and its products or services.
There are many subscription services that make delivering webinars easy, notably GoToMeeting/GoToWebinar and WebEx.
The formula for successful webinars is straightforward:
1. Sign up with a service.
2. Find something to talk about or show people that is related to your products/services and in which your prospects would be interested!
3. Prepare materials and script for delivery. Practice using the service and practice delivering the webinar so you'll be polished the first time you deliver it!
4. Schedule your first webinar. Get the word out about it (minimally by promoting it on your website) and get sign-ups! Realize probably only half the sign-ups will actually show for it.
5. Deliver the webinar. Make notes of ways to improve delivery and effectiveness.
6. Followup on the leads the webinar generates!
7. Repeat, working out over time how often and when (day/time) the webinar should be delivered, how best to promote and how best to take advantage of it to generate new business.
Of course there are tons of details this omits. The main point is that there are many, many types of businesses for which webinars work great. Perhaps yours is one?
In the next few days, we'll have a guest blog from one of our clients who is successfully using webinars.
If you are going to run a click ad campaign, one of the decisions you will have to make is whether to run your ads on Google (or whomever's) content network. That means your ad will appear on (mostly) news sites along with articles on related subjects.
Google is promoting the effectiveness of these as being higher than that of search ads (the ones that appear along with organic results when you do a Google search).
This completely neglects the relative quality of these clicks, which in many situations is poor.
Our default choice is not to run on the Content Network.
Here's a good example of why. Want to grill like an expert?
An excellent article summarizes how to go about structuring a website. That site by the way is a good source of information on Internet marketing.
The article makes the point, as I've said many times, that the best place to go for input on what to put on your website is your salesmen. They know the questions people have, what's important and what's not, what prospects want to hear.
(One big flaw in the article: It says to put ALL the answers on your website. True, if it is an online store. But most websites you want the prospect to have a reason to contact you. If your site tells them EVERYTHING, even pricing, your salesmen are out of a job. And no website can fully replace a live, competent salesperson.)
Nearly everyone wants their website to make money for them and one of the models for doing this is by running ads on your website.
There are a few problems with this:
1. Space on your website is only as valuable as you have visitors to your site. If you can get a lot of traffic to your site, there are usually other ways to make money from it.
2. With most types of sites, having another company's ads running just makes you look small and ruins your branding. The only exceptions are types of sites where advertising is traditional, such as directories / portals, news and magazine sites and blogs.
3. There's always the chance, if you are also selling things on your site, that the ads will promote a competitor of yours!
Video on websites has become very commonplace. It is easy to do and very effective.
For perhaps $700 you can have a totally workable do-it-yourself setup for doing your own videos.
Of course we aren't talking about anything fancy. But for the most common videos - testimonials or brief talks by the owner - it is totally adequate. The person being video'd isn't moving around. The camera isn't moving, at most it is zooming in or out some.
You don't need a very expensive camera. $300 or less buys a digital camcorder that'll do the job. It needs an external clip-on microphone for adequate audio.
But you must have a good tripod, and a decent set of lights. Hand-held video or poor lighting make for a disaster. But you can also buy light kits and tripods inexpensively online.
You are probably also going to want a green screen - a green background you can shoot against. This is how special effects are done. Video editing software can easily subtract the green background and insert another background of your choice. Again, you can get an inexpensive green screen online - essentially a wide roll of green construction paper.
You will want to have the video professionally edited, titled and converted to the correct format for your website, but that's an easy and inexpensive job as well.
There is no substitute for understanding when using website statistics.
You have to get the reality behind the numbers.
I've noted that a 1% response or conversion rate for website visitors is typical. Of course that is a very rough rule of thumb and any given site could be doing great with a lower percentage or lousy with a higher one, depending on all sorts of things.
Let's take the example of a site that suddenly gets a lot more traffic and the conversion ratio goes out the roof, hitting 10%, even 15%.
Maybe what happened is the site or product got some publicity and lots of people are going to the site specifically with buying the product in mind. Conversion ratios from publicity are often way higher.
They can also be way lower if the publicity isn't really catching potential buyers! A great example was the huge viral marketing campaign successfully built around the movie "Snakes on a Plane". You went to a website and entered some information and an automatic dialer called a friend of yours with a personalized voice recorded message in Samuel Jackson's voice.
That was HOT. People loved it.
But it didn't translate into moviegoers, because the viral marketing appealed to lots of people who would never go see a movie like that.
Again, the point is, you have to get the reality behind the numbers. Then you can gloat over the real triumphs, glower over the failures, and work out what to do next.
Businesses trying to get traffic from searches fall generally into two groups:
Those whose customers could be anywhere in the U.S. or in the world.
Businesses whose customers are primarily local.
These make for a very different job getting high search engine rankings. In the one case you are competing against every other business in the same category in the entire country or world.
In the other case, you are only competing against other businesses in your area. A much easier job, unless you are in an extreme niche business with not much competition.
Or, as in some cases, others in the business are still in the Twentieth Century and not taking any effective measures to market themselves online.
In any case, what makes a company's potential customers local in nature are several:
1. Delivery of the product or service requires physical presence at the customer's location (carpet cleaning, limousine service).
2. Business by its nature usually involves customer coming into your store or office or place of business (lawyers, sporting events).
3. Business by its nature involves familiarity with things about your local area (TV and radio advertising).
4. Customers prefer to deal with someone local. This applies to our marketing business. Even though we can conduct our business exclusively by phone, email, etc. And we do have many clients scattered around Florida and the U.S. and Canada.
Yet the majority of clientele are in Tampa Bay. Why? Many people feel more comfortable buying marketing services from someone nearby.
If your business is primarily local, you have to determine not only the search terms that are important, but what "geographical localizers" people use in searching. And then optimizing the site with those as well as the search terms.
This is not always obvious, research and testing are necessary. For example, in Tampa Bay, by far the most used localizer is "Tampa". Not "Tampa Bay" and not the name of one's own town, even if it is "St. Petersburg" or "Clearwater" (themselves good sized cities located across the Bay from Tampa itself).
Why? Because people living in any town in Tampa Bay, other than Tampa, are within at most 15 minutes drive of the next town over. So rather than search for one town, then another, then another, they search on "Tampa" then look for the ones closer to where they are which sound good. They've learned a search on "Tampa" will turn up businesses all across Tampa Bay. And because savvy marketers realized people were doing this, started working heavily on optimizing their sites for "Tampa" as well as "Tampa Bay" and the actual town in which the business was located.
We learned this first because of our research uncovering that people across many industries were searching disproportionately on "Tampa". AFTER that we figured out why. And that then helped us figure out how to word snippets and click ads to take advantage of people's search patterns.
Every day when I sit down at my computer in the morning, one of the first things I do is to blog.The Internet is constantly changing, fueled by technology advances and the hope of getting rich.
Some things work. Some don't.
Remember Internet grocery stores? How about "telnet" and "finger" (if you've been around the Internet that long..... like 15 years).
Websites, search engines, email, those have places no more likely to disappear than TV and radio. Like TV and radio, no doubt they'll change. But they fill a need.
Blogs are in that category.
Twitter may or may not be around or a big deal a year or two from now. I think it safe to say that blogging will be.
Why?
Blogs are the 21st century version of the letter presses and broadsheets of the 1700's. That was the means many people could afford to do their own publishing. Hundreds of them operating in the Colonies helped supply the real fuel of the American Revolution - ideas.
Today, anyone who wants to communicate broadly can afford to blog. All you need is some time and something to say.
Sure, most blogs don't get much readership. But what do you have to lose? At least it'll be fun.
Now there's another reason to go elsewhere for your website statistics.
Google Analytics is going to start sending your website visitors to competitors.
Why and how? Any site that uses GA for tracking is also providing Google information it can use to identify the interests of individual browsers and to show them ads in their interest areas.
As this article points out (disclaimer: Hitslink is a competitor of GA), there's a reason why GA is free. Google's income comes from the ads it sells.
You've heard the expression TANSTAAFL? There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch (courtesy Robert A. Heinlein)? Think about it.
The more likely that someone searching finds you, the more traffic your site will get. That's the whole rationale behind high search engine rankings.
To really work, you really need to be on page one on Google for your key search terms. Most people don't go past page one in a search, page two or three at most. And Google is the 600 pound gorilla, with over 70% of all searches.
But do you know what the number two search engine is? YouTube. Video won't work for every business, far from it, but it's something you need to look at.
There are a lot of ways someone could find you besides through your own high search engine rankings.
A lot of that is through searches that find other sites that then refer or link to you. Google won't usually give you more than 2 out of the first 10 positions for your site, no matter how relevant to the search. But we've had situations where 8 of the 10 first page organic listings were either the client's site or referred to it in some way. You know those searchers are going to end up on your site in a situation like that.
The various Internet Yellow Pages, as well as the many other directories, both specialized and general, generate a lot of traffic. Sometimes paid listings make sense. Minimally, you need to be in the Google and Yahoo local listings if you are in a local product or service business at all.
Blogs, Twitter, and Social Networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, generate huge amounts of traffic to sites when they "catch on" - spread by word-of-mouth. If you aren't up on these and utilizing them, chances are you are missing out on a lot of potential.
Fan, hobbyist and association sites can be huge for traffic generation as well as improving your search engine rankings. One of our clients restores, repairs and sells parts to classic Lincoln autos. Every Lincoln enthusiast on the net, it seems, has a link to the client's site - hundreds of them.
Of course various kinds of paid ads give you instant presence and can work very well depending. Sponsored links on search engines, ads on blogs, banner ads on news sites, affiliate programs and paid links on portal sites are most common.
The short version is an intelligent exploration of all the possibilities will pay off. I just read of someone who used Twitter to generate up to 1000 visits a day - and they accomplished that in a few weeks.
Not every way of increasing your Online Presence makes sense for every business. But you can pretty well count on it that one or more of them will.
In my last post I gave a formula for visits to a website and listed out five general categories of actions to improve it.
I've written a lot about various aspects of this in the past, but some of them are pretty specific.
So I wanted to do a series of posts to summarize each of these five categories. I'll try to link to other articles on the subject within.
This first one is on probably the hardest to influence factor, and yet, the one with the most potential:
1. Get more people looking for "rubber duckies" (usually accomplished through publicity or offline promotion).
Of course using offline promotion to increase searches isn't difficult, but it tends to be expensive and is somewhat limited. What I am really talking about here is raising awareness of and interest in a whole category or type of product, service or company.
In the history of marketing this has been done over and over again. How much demand was there for wearable cassette players before the Walkman?
The reason this is such a huge subject comes down to one of the basics of marketing. It is much harder to create a demand (or desire or want or need) for something than it is to just fulfill that demand. Yet the potential for sales is always going to be limited by the amount of demand. 100% market share of zero is still zero.
The greatest and largest marketing companies in the world are great and huge because of their capability of creating demand. Disney and Apple are fabulous at this. What was the demand for Miley Cyrus, the iPod or iPhone before they were created? It was only a potential.
Companies like these also have a huge advantage. They can spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create a demand. They also have the ears of all the right people when it comes to publicity.
This is the huge flaw in every one who invents a better mousetrap and is going to get the world beating a path to their door. It isn't that it can't be done. But the kind of people great at inventing products or services are rarely the people who can come up with a way to get on the world's radar screen with it.
The business and marketing world know this is the key to Fort Knox. The competition is huge and many of them are well-funded or have an "in."
So how about your product or service or company? Start with a realistic assessment of the scene. Who are your potential prospects or customers? What are their interests, likes and dislikes? What communication channels have the potential of reaching them.
It helps if you aren't trying to create a demand but only to increase one - a much easier job.
In the end though, there is one thing and one thing only that is going to make the difference.
A big case of the clevers.
Think about it.
If you examine every case where someone succeeded creating or majorly increasing a demand, you'll find at the heart of it, a clever idea brilliantly executed.
The Model T Ford
Apple computers
7-Up soda
The story is the same even with social movements, political campaigns and non-profit organizations:
Mothers Against Drunk Driving
54 Forty or Fight
Tom Thumb's Cabin
It's been said that at IBM, the employees with the parking spots closest to the entrance aren't the engineers but the marketing guys.
This article is about one of the most important and fundamental concepts in Internet Marketing.
It is often called "web presence" or "Internet presence" but more often isn't called anything at all. Despite its importance, many in the Internet Marketing business have never heard of it.
Internet Presence is how visible you are on the Internet.
If 100 people look for someone like you online, what percentage of them will find you?
Let's say you are selling rubber duckies, you have an online store. There are many ways someone might find you - searches on various search engines, directory listings, blog ads, etc. Some get used more than others. With some of them you might show up, with others not.
Let's say 34% of those looking for rubber duckies search on Google and don't go past page one. If you show up on Google page one, your Internet Presence is at 34% just from that. And If you don't, that's 34% of potential visitors you've lost out on.
There is a quality aspect to this as well. It is the overall impression someone would get about you from what's on the web - good or bad. Because just being aware of you isn't enough. They also need to get the right message about you.
So what percentage of those who find you on the Internet, those who are actual potential prospects, click on the link and go to your site? That's the quality of your online presence and is reflective of your online reputation, how well worded your listings are, etc. etc.
Internet Presence reflects directly in the volume of visits to your website. The concept provides a framework for understanding where your Internet marketing is or isn't working.
The formula is this:
Number of people looking for "rubber duckies" X
Internet Presence X
Quality of Presence =
Visitors to your website (not including "direct / bookmark").
That tells you immediately there are five ways to increase traffic to your website:
1. Get more people looking for "rubber duckies" (usually accomplished through publicity or offline promotion).
2. Increase your presence.
3. Improve your presence (quality).
4. Get more people to your site through off-line or email promotion (shows as direct / bookmark).
5. Get more people to return to your site (shows as direct / bookmark).
ANY increase or decrease in your visits CAN be analyzed down to which of these factor or factors are affecting traffic.
You may not be able to come up with exact percentage numbers for Internet Presence (quantity and quality). But you can, with adequate web analytics (website statistics) and other tools, find out what you need to know.
This is one of the great pluses of the Internet. The ability to get good numerical information.
Any sort of paid directory / ad / listing service is supposed to use tags that tell Google to ignore the pages as a source of Page Rank.
Now someone could ignore that, but at their own peril. Google has a mechanism for people to report on violations. You could then find your rankings drop suddenly.
So paid listings can generate traffic but don't DEPEND on them for search engine rankings.
That's the problem with any so-called "black hat" SEO techniques. You can't depend on them. Whereas "white hat" methods deliver stable rankings not likely to suddenly drop off the map.
There's a slightly different situation with WIkipedia. It's Wikipedia's policy to tag the whole site to not grant Page Rank. That is to keep people from spamming the site to build up their SEO. But that is Wikipedia's policy, not Google's. Google's Matt Cutts has stated that Google wouldn't be opposed to Wikipedia changing that. So perhaps at some point, Wikipedia articles from certain trusted people will generate PR.
Wikipedia is supposed to be completely non-commercial. You can put up articles about yourself or with links to your website, and those are legitimate, so long as they don't turn into advertisements. So again, Wikipedia can help generate Internet Presence and traffic, but it is not going to get you search engine rankings.
Your web statistics program should be able to show you the paths people take through a website. Where do they go from a certain page? How do they get to a certain page?
Where do people go from the home page? is always a critical question.
We have a great tool with our program that displays this visually. You can call up a copy of a page that shows the number of clicks on each link on the page. You can see not only the volume but how the arrangement on the page affects this.
In one experiment we moved the "contact" button to the top of the menu bar and tripled the amount of contact forms being filled out.
Marketing is all about being able to get inside the heads of your prospects.
Anything that gives you a better understanding of visitor behavior on your website, helps.
One really important set of statistics is "Sources" - how do people find your website?
Generally speaking, these break down into the following categories:
1. Direct / bookmark. That is any way someone reached your website other than by clicking on a link on a website.
It is a bit too general as, for example, it includes people clicking on links in emails (unless they are viewing the email in a browser). So if you are doing email broadcasting, you need to find a way to measure how many people are getting to your website from each different broadcast.
2. Searches. How many visitors came from searches? And from what search engines and what search terms did they use? If you are running click ads (paid search listings), how many were paid versus organic (free)?
3. Directory listings. There are several types of directory listings including the various online yellow pages, directories specific to a particular business category or geographical area, free and paid listings. Some of these can be major sources of traffic to your site as well as helping your search engine rankings (but only the free listings help SEO).
4. Online ads. If you're running online ads such as on blogs or Facebook or elsewhere, how much traffic are these producing?
5. Publicity. Links from newspaper, radio, TV or magazine websites and blogs can generate huge amounts of traffic. They may not have a link so may show as coming from searches, in which case you have to use other data to figure out where the traffic is coming from or how much traffic it is.
The classic is a huge spike in traffic from one geographical area that lasts a day or so. Traces to an article in that area's major daily newspaper.
6. Other links. A site can be so popular that it accumulates hundreds or even thousands of links from other websites, just people who like your site and are recommending it. This can be from blogs, social networking sites like Facebook, hobbyist or fan sites, etc. etc. And they can generate lots of traffic and improve your PR (Page Rank) and increase your search engine rankings.
You can see that telling where your traffic is coming from is not necessarily a simple exercise. With a good web statistics program, you can get the raw data you need to figure it out. Over time, you can get a good command of what is happening, and that is the key to making improvements.
This is not just something "nice to do". It is essential to making a success of Internet Marketing.
Getting high search engine rankings is a key step to success for many websites.
But it is only the first of several steps, any one of which can make high rankings useless:
1. Are these search terms important? High rankings for search terms no one searches for, or where the searchers are looking for something completely different than you offer, are just numbers.
2. What does your listing say? The title, snippet (description) and website address displayed all influence how likely someone is to click on your link. Your listing is the exact equivalent of an advertisement. It is also competing against 9 or more other listings.
3. What PAGE has the highest ranking for the search term? If it isn't the best page for these searchers, a high percentage of them will immediately leave even if they do click through to your website.
4. How well does the page then handle your visitors? The first barrier to overcome is getting someone to click through to another page in the site.
5. How well does the rest of the site handle your visitors?
6. Do you provide sufficient and smooth opportunities for the visitor to take action (contact you, sign-up for something or make a purchase)? A poor contact form or clumsy checkout process can all by itself waste most of your efforts.
Every one of these points is vital to success. Every one of them should be carefully examined and worked on regularly to improve.
Google is constantly refining their search functions and results. They've now announced two changes of interest:
1. More useful related searches:
Starting today, we're deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).
2. Longer "snippets" (the description in the results listing):
When you enter a longer query, with more than three words, regular-length snippets may not give you enough information and context. In these situations, we now increase the number of lines in the snippet to provide more information and show more of the words you typed in the context of the page.
One of the FIRST things you need to know in order to do effective Internet Marketing is how to view and use web analytics (website statistics) to see how you are doing and where / what improvements are needed.
One VERY useful tool is "bounce rate" which is usually defined as the percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page.
That definition is very applicable to what is called "landing pages" - a page which is intended to be the entry point to your site of certain traffic, such as visitors who click on a particular email ad, or who are looking for a certain product.
There is another definition of bounce rate which is more generally useful. That is simply the percentage of "exits" from a page versus the number of page views. In other words, what percentage of the time is this the last page viewed by a visitor.
The more pages someone visits on your site, the more likely they are to turn into a lead or a sale.
So any page that is leaking too many visitors is worth looking at.
Our first target is any page with a bounce rate of 40% or higher.
There are several reasons why you could have such a high bounce rate:
I've commented more than once on the importance of having a good website statistics program and I've talked about the advantages and disadvantages of a few different programs.
I've never written about specific statistics and how to use them. So here are a few tips.
One of the most important uses is to monitor increases and decreases in visits to your website over time, and generally where they come from.
This is best viewed on a monthly basis. Daily or even weekly stats don't mean much. There's too much variation. Weekly stats are useful for monitoring the effects of intermittent events (you can see the weekly spike from the once a month email broadcast).
If your efforts aren't increasing total visits to your website, you need to change something. That is the broadest possible measure of the success of your promotional efforts.
Total visits breaks down two ways. The first is "unique visitors" versus "monthly uniques" or "new visitors" or "repeat visitors." Most good stats programs count "unique visitors" rather than just "visits". This doesn't count twice if someone visits your site twice in the same day.
In most cases, the more important breakdown is by how they found your site: "Bookmark or direct" (meaning they got to your website some other way than by clicking on a link on another website), "Organic search", "Paid search", "Links/Directories" (meaning they clicked on a link other than a search engine), and "Other" are the main categories we use. You can see where your increases or decreases are coming from and take action.
We're also interested in page views per visit. The more pages someone views on your site, the more likely the visit will turn into a lead or sale. Amount of time (seconds or minutes) spent on site doesn't mean much as visitors could have left a window open on your website for hours and never looked at it.
These are the broadest statistics. There is a great deal more detail a good statistic program provides, that can help you improve your website and your marketing.
SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) are the pages displayed by a search engine such as Google when you do a search.
These days they combine several things. Here's a brief explanation of what you see after a Google search (Yahoo is very similar):
1. At the top and on the right you'll usually see "sponsored links". These are the "pay-per-click" or "cost per click" ads, what Google calls AdWords. Advertisers bid on position against other advertisers for different search terms and their maximum bid amount, plus a quality rating Google assigns, determines the ad position. This is the main source of revenue for Google. Most people skip the click ads though and use the organic search results (70% or more), in part because the amount of information in these ads is very limited. Plus people know the advertisers are buying, not earning their position.
2. Below that, if you are doing a search which Google recognizes as "local" (such as "plumbers Tampa") it will you show you a small map and listings of local businesses in that category. This is Google's version of an online Yellow Pages, which they call Google Maps. The listings give only contact information about the business and there's no real way to control how high you show up in these listings. Also Google can't always tell if you are doing a local search or not.
3. Below that are the "natural" or "organic" search engine results, the top 10 most important most relevant sites to your search according to Google. These are the most used and most valued results on the page, in part because they display the most information about the web page to help them pick out what they are looking for.
4. Google now includes some other types of material such as videos in with the organic search results. This is new, within the last year, and we are likely to see more of this type of thing as time goes on.
In some ways, Google is like a TV network. The viewers (searchers) don't pay the TV network. The advertisers do. With Google, it's "sponsored links" - the paid listings along the top and right side of the page.
But the advertisers are willing to pay only based on the TV network (or Google) bringing viewers to the screen (page).
And that means providing a visitor experience that brings people back to the network (search engine).
So Google's major effort is to provide searchers the best possible experience. And that means trying to serve up to them exactly what they are looking for - no matter what and how they search. Google has gotten very good at this - distinguishing sites with real content, the important from the unimportant and figuring out on a totally automated basis what a page is about.
There are technical details as to how Google does this, that we are aware of and utilize to ensure a site gets its just rankings.
So what determines your rankings when someone does a search? It comes down to two things:
1. Relevance.
2. Importance.
When Google examines a page, it is looking for what that page is about. It decides this based on a large number of factors, primarily based on the content of that page. If the page talks about apples, than it is about apples. It is not about oranges and no matter how important the page is, it is not going to come up in a search for oranges.
But, importance also matters. Again, Google bases its evaluation of importance on a wide variety of factors, including the size of the website (number of pages), how long it has been around, and what other websites have to say about it. Google calls this "Page Rank".
How then, does Google work?
Google (and other search engines) maintain computers with huge data bases (called "indexes") that are queried when you do a search. So they aren't searching the Internet in real time. Instead, they have "spiders" - automated programs - that scour the net, updating their indexes periodically.
Currently, Google reindexes the average site about every three weeks. It doesn't necessarily do the whole site all at once but might do one page one day and another the next. Some sites might be indexed much more often, even within minutes of changes being made.
There's a lot more to it, but those are the basics.
Now and then, a lousy visitor experience sends me on a rant. Yesterday, I attempted to pay my Verizon phone bill online. I ultimately succeeded, no thanks to Verizon.
A website should be user friendly.
Things should be easy and obvious.
Apparently Verizon has other priorities.
First of all, if you go to Verizon.net, you are invited to log-in. This does NOT allow access to bill payment. You have two different logins, one for account, another for email administration. This one only allows handling of your email.
I never have found the login for bill payment from their main site. I had to do a Google search on "Verizon bill payment" to find it! You have to go to www22.verizon.com. The login is then hidden amongst a number of text links.
If you click on "login" rather than "pay my bill", you're take to a screen where it is again difficult even to find the "pay my bill" link, hidden in the middle of a list of minor functions.
In logging in, I was told current billing information wasn't available. Presumably that meant I couldn't pay the bill right now. On a chance, I clicked on "pay bill" anyway (once I finally found it) and discovered that the reason current billing information wasn't available was because before it would display it, it was going to make me choose a secret question.
I then had to validate my login by email, not just by clicking on a link but entering a 3 digit code and reentering login and password information.
Finally I get to bills payment, where it displays not the current amount due but amount as of the last billing date THEN warns you if you are now paying a different amount than you owed at that time (but describes it as "amount due").
I believe the Bush administration could have used this as an effective "enhanced interrogation technique."
Getting your website designed and built, of course.
Then you have to launch it. Put on the Internet so people can actually see it.
To do that, your website has to be placed on a special computer called a hosting server which connects to the Internet and serves up your website when someone types in the URL.
The service that provides this is called "hosting" or "website hosting" and is usually provided on a rental basis with a monthly fee anywhere from free to hundreds of dollars per month.
Unless you have a LOT of visitors (thousands a day), you'll want a "shared hosting service" where you are on a computer with many other websites. This is as opposed to a "dedicated server" where yours is the only website on that machine, which is of course a lot more expensive.
The other basic question is Windows versus Unix hosting - the two types of operating systems found on hosting servers. We recommend Unix.
But with literally thousands of hosting services out there, how do you choose one? Generally, you get what you pay for. There are usually reasons why a service is cheap. These are some of the key questions to ask:
As discussed yesterday, it is no longer true that you have to do something - "submit your site to the search engines" - to get indexed or re-indexed by Google and others.
Nevertheless there are situations where you want Google to index or re-index your website or a new page sooner rather than later.
This is true when you do a whole new site. Also if you have a blog you may want to make sure your new postings get indexed as soon as possible, particularly where postings are time sensitive.
What can you do about this?
Submitting a site map is the usual solution for a new or completely redone site. Google, MSN and Yahoo (the big three of search engines) have established a common protocol. You can read about how to do this at www.sitemaps.org.
Many blogging programs such as Movable Type and WordPress have facilities for "pinging" search engines - notifying them of updates to your blog.
If your blog is on Blogspot, all you need to do is check the options to allow "site feeds" and "allow search engines to index."
Also weblogs.com and Technorati are services you can use to inform search engines manually or by setting up to automatically ping them when you make changes to your blog.
I thought i saw on a previous posting (I could not find it again) that you said when one makes a blog post that they should ping the search engines right away. I thought i heard that that was not necessary with a Blogger blog. Is that true? If not, how would you recommend pinging the search engines? Thanks!
Actually, I said I was going to talk about making sure your blog gets into the search engines. I never did, so let me rectify the error.
You don't have to do anything to get your blog postings into the indexes. These days, the major search engines will pick you up and index and periodically reindex your blog.
The only question is how fast your new postings get picked up. Google reindexes the typical site about every three weeks. It can be a lot more often, there are pages Google re-indexes within minutes after changes are made.
The speed of re-indexing is based on Google's judgment of how often a page changes and how important it is.
Definitely, Google is moving more and more in the direction of faster updates for the whole Internet.
So, the only question is really, what if you want to get a page indexed or re-indexed faster? Answers to that tomorrow.
There are a wide range of solutions to running an online store.
These range from not really having a store of your own at all (such as selling things on eBay, or through Amazon.com), to a fully customized website and online store which takes credit cards and looks and functions exactly the way you want it to.
There are many inexpensive to moderately-priced solutions in between these.
The more professional the store, the better it will work. Meaning the higher percentage of visitors who end up buying.
But, almost always, the biggest issue is getting visitors to your site in sufficient number.
Across a wide range of industries and products, we have seen a rough rule of thumb of 1%. In other words, maybe 1 in every hundred visitors will make a purchase. That is very rough, it can be considerably higher or lower.
The point is that it takes a LOT of visitors to make a viable online store.
If you want to have a successful online business, the first thing you should do is work out a REALISTIC plan for getting a lot of visitors to your site.
One sure way to make your business look small or technologically challenged is to use email addresses at an ISP rather than your own personalized domain.
Worst is email addresses at free ISPs like Hotmail, AOL, Gmail and Yahoo.
One reason for having a website is the image you present to the world. And part of that is your email address.
Virtually all hosting services provide email accounts for free. Make sure you utilize them.
There are actually FOUR completely different skill sets needed to build a good, effective website.
1. Computer Programming.
2. Graphic Design.
3. Marketing Know-How.
4. Internet Marketing.
Without all four, your website will be at best a partial success. Let me explain:
First, a website is really a sort-of computer program, so your website designer needs to know the technical aspects of making sure your website functions correctly. These days, that is less of a problem than it once was. Way back in the ancient Internet days around 1997, someone had to be an expert computer programmer to produce a website. Of course, since expert computer programmers are rarely good artists, that made for some really ugly websites, some of which are still around.
These days “authoring tools” handle most of the technical aspects. One way to tell if you have a professional web designer is, does he use professional web design tools? Probably over 90% of all professionals use a program called Dreamweaver.
Even with Dreamweaver, someone ignorant of the technical aspects of the web and web design, can easily turn out a technically incompetent website. For example, it isn’t difficult to produce a website that is invisible to search engines – depending on how it is built. Meanwhile, a site that looks identical might be very search engine friendly.
The second vital talent is graphic design. A website should look good – it should even be a work of art in and of itself, that makes a visitor go "ooh" and "ah". That artistic appeal is a function of the designer’s artistic sense and training and his skill in using the modern day tools of graphic design – highly complex and sophisticated programs such as Photoshop. Most professional web designers started out as graphic artists.
Unfortunately, far from all graphic artists are competent in the technical aspects. Every web designer claims to be an expert in search engine optimization (SEO). Few actually are, with many designers knowing only a few things about how to build a site for optimum SEO – and those often wrong or out-of-date. There’s lots of bad information out there.
The third piece of know-how is the one most designers are weakest in: Marketing. Websites usually have a marketing purpose – to sell a potential buyer, to create interest in your product or service, to build trust to a point where someone will pick up the phone. Confusing navigation, poorly written home page copy - there are many ways to waste your visitors. If marketing skill isn’t applied to the creation of a website, at best you end up with a pretty site that works properly – but doesn’t make the phone ring.
And that puts them in the same category as all the memorable, award-winning TV commercials that never sold a single car, beer or got someone to go see a movie. The fact that giant corporations can waste millions of marketing dollars isn’t much of a consolation when you find your website isn’t bringing in the customers. At least if you are a General Motors you know the US Government won't let you go bankrupt without bailing you out (or maybe it will....).
Finally, when you have a great site, you still have to drive traffic to it. For most sites, that takes expert Internet marketing, which includes SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as the most important aspect, but also can include "click ads" (paid ads on Google and the like), publicity, etc. It can be summarized under the term "Internet Presence." In short, if someone is looking for you, or someone like you, how likely are they to find your website?
Your best guarantee of a successful website is making sure that whoever and however they are supplied, that all four of these areas of know-how are well executed.
These days, every business needs a successful website.
Having seen every possible error in domain registration and management, it's worth listing out the errors and best practices.
1. Register the domain yourself. You need to be the owner of record of the domain. Otherwise, you don't own it. Period.
2. Use only registrars directly licensed by ICANN (you can look this up if any question). Otherwise you really don't know WHO you are registering your domain with.
3. Make sure that your correct email address is listed. Registrars will notify you, usually multiple times starting 90 days before a domain expires, so you know to pay for another year.
4. Register for one year at a time. You can pay for multiple years but I don't recommend it. Are you sure you'll have the same email address 10 years from now? Remember your password or where you wrote it down?
5. Have another notification email going to someone else you can trust. With our clients we make sure we are the "admin" contact. We also get notified when a URL registration is up for renewal. That's enabled us many times to prevent a registration from expiring.
6. That your URL is up for renewal is publicly available information, so you can expect to get emails and letters from OTHER domain registrars pretending to be your registrar to try to get you to switch your registration to them.
So know who you are actually registered with.
7. If your registration does expire, your website will be taken down, usually immediately. You will, however, have a grace period of 45 days or less before anyone else can buy the domain name and during which you can still renew it.
There are a few important rules for picking a URL:
1. It should be as short as possible.
2. It should be memorable.
3. It should NOT be a generic description of what you do. "Yahoo" or "Google" is better than "searchengine.com"
4. In almost all cases, ".com" is better than another TLD. Exceptions: Non-profit organizations (or businesses that want to look like one) should use ".org".
5. Don't use a variation on the URL you want because it isn't available. If "fredhouse.com" isn't available, don't use "fredhouse.net", "fred-house.com" or "myfredhouse.com". Why? You'll send traffic to the other site and confuse people.
6. In most cases, don't even bother trying to purchase the already-registered URL you want. The owner probably wants a ridiculous amount for it.
7. A good rule of thumb for any naming, not just URL: check and make sure it isn't easily distorted and made fun of. Names one sound different than an obscenity or something disgusting are a bad idea.
It's worthwhile spending a little time figuring this out. After all, you are going to live with that URL for a long time.
You "purchase" a URL by registering it with a Domain Registrar.
This is any one of thousands of companies which are licensed directly or indirectly by ICANN - the International organization that runs the Internet naming system.
Registration fees are typically paid yearly and often run in the $10 to $15 a year range.
Whoever has registered a URL, controls it. So never let someone else register a domain name for you.
We recommend using a company that is directly licensed by ICANN. We use 000Domains because it is inexpensive, their control panel is easy to navigate, and they provide all the services someone might need from a domain registrar.
One thing you can typically do with a domain registrar is to find out if a URL is available or not. Just typing in the address won't do, as someone might own the address but not have a website up for it.
The core service provided by your domain registrar is to tell the whole Internet WHERE your website is located. A website has to be hosted - meaning somewhere it is on a special kind of computer called a hosting server, which connects to the Internet. It is your domain registrar which sends out the information world-wide as to where that is. But you have to tell it, which you can normally do from a control panel by changing the "name servers."
The other services your domain registrar should offer are Domain (URL) forwarding - if someone types in one website address, it brings up the second URL; and Email forwarding - same, but for email addresses.
We frequently get called on to help a client pick a URL or URLs for their website.
Here are the basics.
"URL" is short for "Uniform Resource Locator" which is a silly enough name. All it is, is your website's address. It is how computers all over the world can find your website.
A website address usually starts with "www" for world-wide web but these days you never have to type that. Your browser will fill it in automatically if needed.
It ends (after a ".") with 2, 3 or 4 letters which are the "TLD" or "Top Level Domain", such as ".com". Every country has its own TLD, like ".ca" for Canada. In addition, there are TLD's more oriented to what you do or are - most famously ".com" - for commercial, ".org" - for organization, and ".net" for Network.
There are no limitations on the use of .com, .org and .net. However, in most cases .com is your best choice because people in the U.S. usually assume that is what your website address ends in - and if you use something else, probably a lot of people are going to try to go to the wrong place.
Now that we've got that out of the way, how do you go about picking the best URL for your business? Tune in tomorrow for the answers.
When you're getting a website built, make sure you have planned ahead. Because getting a website built is only the start.
AFTER the site is built and launched, what then? Because the launch of a site is only the beginning. If you're serious about making your website work, work as well as possible, and to continue to work well for you, there are going to be changes.
Here are a few of the questions you should ask and answer to your satisfaction in deciding who will build your site and where it will be hosted:
3. Will it be easy or even possible to make changes to the look, navigation or other common elements?
4. Will it be easy to add pages?
5. How do I get email accounts added or changed?
Perhaps not all of these questions are important to you - but I wouldn't bet against it.
There are many solutions to getting a website built that don't serve these needs well. And there are many people peddling solutions which they claim are great for SEO, etc. etc.
It's usually easy to find out. Google it!
But you've got to start out being curious.
I don't mind. I know our work stands up to the test.
There is a lot of misinformation going around - some of it being peddled around - about Google and Yahoo local listings. Here are the facts:
1. Getting your business into the listings is easy. Just set up an account, submit your business and put in the information. You'll show up.
2. Making your business show up first, or high, is impossible. This is not like Search Engine Optimization where Google is trying to serve up the most relevant most important page for your search.
No one knows how Google decides where your listing will show up. There are hints of possibilities of ways to influence it. These are unconfirmed.
Definitely do not pay someone to get you "high local listings positions." For one thing, it certainly depends on where the person doing the searching is located.
And you could show up one time and not the next.
3. As in Organic Search, whether your listing shows up on certain searches or not depends on what Google or Yahoo thinks your business is about. Unlike normal SEO, you can directly tell them by what categories you put your business in. Like the print Yellow Pages, the categorizations tend to be confusing and it can be hard to find what is most appropriate. So spend some time looking at what companies show up in your key searches, and what categories they've put themselves in, how they describe themselves etc. And spend some time exploring the possibilities.
4. It's one thing to get into the listings. It's another to get someone to look at your listing. Unlike organic search or sponsored links (pay-per-click) your initial listing has no ad. It's just name and contact info. And REVIEWS. So get happy customers to write reviews.
5. Then well-worded descriptions, pictures, videos, etc. all contribute to the likelihood of someone acting on your listing - picking up the phone, going to your website, etc. So work on it.
6. The number of people who see and look at your listing is going to be relatively small, compared to your organic listings or perhaps click ads. But a very high percentage of them are going to be serious prospects. So it is well worth while putting some effort into your local listings.
If you are selling goods or services locally, one of the places you need to be is in Google and Yahoo's Local Listings. Google calls this Google Maps.
These are Google and Yahoo's version of online Yellow Pages. When you do a search that includes a geographical location, such as "Dentists Largo" you will usually see a little map and some brief listings for up to 10 local businesses in that category and location.
This is in addition and completely independent to the "organic search results" just based on Google's indexing of your website.
To show up - and show up CORRECTLY in these local listings, you need to set up an account for that purpose.
For Google that is their "Local Business Center" accessible through "Google Business Solutions" from Google's home page or via www.google.com/services.
For Yahoo go to http://listings.local.yahoo.com to set up an account. You can ignore their efforts to get you to pay for a listing. Just use the free option.
In both cases one of the most important steps is to choose the best categories to list your business under. So spend some time figuring this out.
What are they and what do they have to do with search engine rankings?
Websites are written in a programming language called HTML. Basically, these are instructions to browsers for how to display a page. HTML is written in the form of "tags" which start with a < and end with a >. For example a "b" enclosed in <> means display the text that comes after in bold.
Metatags are tags which instead of telling the browser how to display the website, provide information ABOUT the website. For example, the title tag says what the title of the page is.
There are many metatags but only a handful of them are of importance. The title tag is one of these, it actually does display on the screen when you view a page - all the way at the very top of the screen.
The description metatag let's you write a description of the page which will usually be picked up by Google and displayed when the page shows up in a search.
The keywords metatag lets you tell the search engines what the page is about. However, these days, Google and other search engines all but ignore this tag as it is too subject to abuse.
Other metatags tend to be rather technical and of much less importance.
The fastest changing environment in the history of marketing - the Internet - is also the one most loaded with B.S., smoke-and-mirrors, and overblown promises.
There's a saying that goes all the way back to Roman times: "Caveat Emptor" - "Let the Buyer Beware."
In these tough economic times, many people are desperately searching for solutions to preserve their living standards or to manage at all.
If you're in that category, don't let desperation or hope overcome your common sense:
1. If it sounds too good to be true, it is.
2. If it involves getting rich without hard work, smarts, and time, it's a scam.
3. If you can reasonably ask the question "If this is true, how come everyone isn't rich"? it's a hustle.
4. If it doesn't involve actual production of something valuable which is then sold for a fair price, stay away.
5. If it is a ground floor opportunity you need to get in on right now.... it probably won't bear up to close inspection.
I'm not trying to burst your balloon. It is very possible to get rich on the Internet. Many thousands of people are doing so.
Unfortunately, some of them are getting rich by taking advantage of others' gullibility.
There's another famous saying (attributed to P.T. Barnum): "There's a sucker born every minute."
This is a little technical, but I like to let you know when Google does something important.
Actually, this is Google, Yahoo and Msn - the three largest search engines, responsible for close to 90% of all searches - agreeing on a new "tag". A metatag is a behind-the-scenes piece of information ABOUT the website or a page in it, such as its title, description, keywords, etc.
Tags are usually invisible to someone viewing the site. They are communications or instructions to search engines or web browsers.
One issue the search engines have is that the same page may be reachable in a number of different ways, actually resulting in different page names. Search engines hate this because they don't want to clutter up their indexes. But they have (until now) had no way of knowing which is the preferred page name.
The canonical tag provides a way to tell the search engines what name a page should be indexed under.
First of all, making changes to your website is a GOOD thing. A website that never gets changed gets stale, dead, out-of-date. Since we have web designers on staff, that makes it easy for us to make changes. In fact, we re-design our website about twice a year.
But what's the typical business to do?
That depends on the type and frequency of changes needed.
A nice tool we've been including into all our larger sites, is a site search function.
This is like Google for your site only.
It provides one more way for someone to navigate a site.
If it is prominent on every page, it provides a kind of "safety valve" for visitors. Getting frustrated trying to find something, instead of giving up, they search.
One search engine strategy is to buy sponsored links for misspelled words, or to optimize the website for misspellings. Even though only a small percentage of searches may be misspelled, it also may be far easier to get top rankings for the misspelled version.
A client of ours accidentally misspelled a word "Cumaru" (a kind of wood) on their website and got visitors from searchers all over the world who misspelled it the same way they did, "Cumuru".
The White House website includes misspellings of President Obama's first and last name.
3. Is navigation confusing, or simple and clear with multiple ways of getting around the site for those with different expectations?
4. Can the visitor easily find out if you are offering or selling what he is looking for?
5. If so can he easily and rapidly FIND what he is looking for?
6. Does the website make it easy for the visitor to contact you (and provide multiple methods of doing so to service different needs and different levels of interest)?
7. Does the website build confidence, trust in you?
8. Does the website build interest and desire for your products or services?
9. If an online store, is the shopping process well-suited to the type of visitor and products/services you are selling?
I'm sure you can think of more questions. The main point is to realize that your website needs to be examined from the viewpoint of the prospective customer, client or patient. Only then will you know how to improve the Visitor Experience.
Some of the answers come from just imagining yourself a prospect and browsing your site as though you've never seen it before. And good web analytics (website statistics) provide invaluable objective information on how visitors navigate it.
Working on your site's Visitor Experience pays off.
Byrd's Law #28: A Better Visitor Experience Means More Leads or Sales.
Content Management Systems (CMS) have become popular. These allow a person, without knowledge of HTML (web coding language), to build or make changes in a website themselves.
There are cases where this is important. Usually online stores have a CMS so the owner of the store can add, delete and change items and categories, put items on sales, and so on.
A blog is a kind of CMS.
Beyond that, many people have bought into the idea of a CMS because it puts them in control of their website. They are also usually cheap.
Unfortunately, the result is very rarely professional or effective. One reason is - contrary to how they are often promoted - most CMS are at best mediocre for the search engines.
There are many solutions that don't require a CMS, and yet allow necessary updates to be done.
There are no cheap, easy solutions to getting a great website that's effective and has top search engine rankings.
If you think of every visitor to your website as a drop of water, and the whole website as a hose, then water coming out the end of the hose is prospects calling, emailing, buying online or walking into your store.
Every drop that doesn't make it out the end of the hose is a leak. And every place where your hose (website) leaks is something to be isolated and the leaks plugged!
Of course, you can never convert 100% of your website visitors to customers. But every step you take to reduce the leaks means that many more visitors who DO become customers.
How do you do it? I'm glad you asked....
FIRST, you have to have a way of detecting where the leaks are!
Rather obvious but it means having a good PAID web analytics (stats) program. There is no free program - including Google Analytics - that provides enough, accurate information for this.
If you have a good program, you can for each page in your website, isolate how visitors arrived there (whether entering the site or coming from another page), how many times the page was viewed, and how many people exited the site from that page.
If you are losing half or more of the visitors to a page, by having them exit the site - rather than click through to another page - THAT is a leak.
Then you can take action to improve the percentage. That can be by improving copy or visual imagery, adding links or re-routing traffic.
A good website - to launch into a completely different metaphor - is like a pinball machine. It just keeps bouncing pinballs (visitors) around the site and flips them back up into it if they think about leaving.
Byrd's Law #18: The longer someone stays on your website, the more likely they are to turn into a customer.
In tennis, the "sweet spot" is the spot on the racket that has the greatest bounce to it.
Internet Marketing has its "sweet spots" as well.
There may be a lot of search terms which relate to your products or services.
Some of these may have hundreds or thousands of times as many searches as others. For example, in hardwood flooring, searches for "Armstrong Floors" as opposed to a small, lesser known brand.
BUT some terms which get a lot of searches may be not be relevant to your business. Something like 99% of all searches for "Amstrong floors" are NOT for hardwood but for tile or other Armstrong products.
This combination of search volume and relevance determines the value of a search term to you.
Finally, the amount of competition for some valuable terms may be intense, to a point where getting high search engine rankings is very difficult. This isn't true in every industry and situation by any means. It's far more common where you are fighting over national rankings than when you are selling local goods or services.
What we call the "sweet spot" consists of the search terms with the most volume and relevance with the least amount of competition.
This is why research should be a part of every search engine project. Otherwise you can end up with #1 rankings for search terms that result in no visits or no sales.
That, after all, is why you are trying to get high rankings in the first place.
"Web Analytics" is the fancy name for statistics programs.
If you're serious about making the Web work for you, a good analytics program is essential. One great advantage of Internet Marketing is measurability. However that is only as true as you have accurate statistics.
Nearly every hosting plan comes with a free statistics program, usualy AWStats or Webalyzer. These are very rudimentary. They aren't very accurate and they provide a limited amount of information.
The best of the free programs is Google Analytics. It provides a lot of information, but has serious inadequacies.
Some important things are hard to do with it. A major problem is that it does a lousy job of detecting and not counting robot visits.
A typical website may get hundreds of visits during the course of a month from automated computer programs - called robots. Some of these are legitimate - like Google and other search engines "spidering" your site in order to update their indexes with any changes.
Many of them are hackers or spammers searching your site for vulnerabilities.
If these robot visits aren't detected and ignored, it'll seriously distort the statistics and may result in incorrect analysis on your part.
There's also no easy way in Google Analytics to set the program to ignore visits by yourself and your staff. Again, that can distort statistics.
All paid web analytics programs solve these problems. There is a considerable range of sophistication (and cost) amongst them. Some programs are designed for the big business site getting tens of thousands or millions of visits per month, with a hefty fee for each site tracked.
Others, like Hitslink, the program we use, are moderately priced subscription services with a fee based on number of websites and number of pages viewed per month. There are limitations on its capabilities but it is well-suited to sites getting hundreds to several thousand visits per month.
There are many options in the online store sales process, such as how (or if) you charge for shipping, whether it takes one or several screens to checkout, etc. etc.
The optimum process is not the same for all stores, it is going to depend on what you are selling, who you are selling to, and so on.
You can't necessarily get the right answer to every question in advance.
Part of making an online store successful is testing. Plan on making changes and then seeing how that affects the visitor experience.
To evaluate this you have to have a good "web analytics" (stats) program.
"Snippets" is the term Google uses for the two lines of description about a website that it displays on a search engine results page (SERP).
This is one of the most neglected and most important aspects of Internet marketing. Everyone knows about the importance of high search engine rankings.
If you think of this in terms of traditional marketing, the title, snippet and URL listing - the complete display on the results page - that is your advertisement!
What would you say to someone who put all their effort into making sure their ad reached as many people as possible and just threw together the ad?
It is actually worse than that since if you don't make a conscious and competent effort to control your snippet as well as the title and also what page it is that shows up in the search results - then you aren't creating your ad at all!
The results are likely to be less than spectacular.
Your listing has to compete with as many as 9 other natural listings, 10 paid (click ad) listings and possibly several local search results.
You're standing in line at the checkout counter in the grocery store, and spy that rack of batteries. You know that some of your favorite gadgets are going to quit running because their batteries are running low. So you grab a pack of batteries and add it to your collection of groceries. It was a quick, impulse sale.
Or you're shopping in the mall, and you walk by a kiosk that has the most fascinating costume watches on display. On impulse you walk over, try one or two on, and out comes your purse and you now are the proud owner of an eye-catching accessory item – one that may or may not tell the time all that well, but sure looks cool.
Does this apply to the Internet as well?
It certainly does.
But If an item in an online store is going to work as an impulse sale, it is going to be on one of two bases:
1. It is an "upsell" or add-on - some item a person can add to their shopping cart when they are buying something else. An online flower shop will have balloons and stuffed animals, for example.
2. It is so cute and interesting that it goes "viral" and articles, blog postings, TV talk shows and the like send traffic to the site just to buy that item. The Hillary Clinton nutcracker is a good example.
In either case only a lower priced item is going to get impulse sales, usually under $20 before tax and shipping.
If you have or are thinking of opening an online store, it is worth considering if you have or can add such items to your inventory. They can be a huge addition to your bottom line as by their very nature they are high profit margin.
Marketing them has its own rules. You don't spend a lot of time explaining features and benefits. Use high impact imagery (and possibly audio) and make it really easy to complete the purchase.
The premier use of most websites is as a sales tool.
In short, the FIRST use of the majority of websites is not as a lead generator. It is there to reinforce interest but to function as a sort of online catalog, gallery or brochure to assist Sales in closing a prospective buyer.
This immediately tells you what to put on a site: Everything you find yourself repeatedly telling or showing sales prospects.
If you do this you will automatically have an effective website. First of all, it will answer unasked questions from people you haven't even heard of - thereby increasing the likelihood they will call you.
Secondly, you'll save enormous amounts of time on the sales cycle because when they do talk to you, they'll already know a lot of the answers. And if not - if they haven't visited your site yet - you can send them to the site or walk them through the site as a part of the sales cycle.
How long a website's been around is a factor in search engine rankings. This is known as "the sandbox effect." The idea is Google sticks your website out of the way ("in a sandbox") until it has been around long enough for it to look like you're for real.
It isn't just on-or-off, all or nothing. Google will index your website (have it show up in searches) almost immediately. But without any other changes, your rankings will still tend to rise over time. This is very evident in the first few months but we've seen clear evidence that a site that has been around for many years is likely to rank higher than one that has only been around for a year or two.
That doesn't mean you can't rapidly show up high in rankings:
Just to be contrary, we've had clients tell us that they received phone calls from searchers who found their site while we were still in the process of building it! (As we create sites, we often put up some of the pages where only the respective clients knows where they are so they can see how things are progressing, give their input and so on.)
In other words, the site wasn't even finished, yet it was already showing up for a specific search query, resulting directly in online orders for the client. True!
Sandbox or no sandbox, if your site is rich in the type of content people are looking for, and it's properly optimized, you are going to show up. Especially if you aren't trying to compete head on for the same keywords that a million other sites are using. Finding and testing the right keywords for YOUR site is part of good SEO work.
But, the sandbox effect is real, and one of the reasons we often recommend for new sites a combination of organic SEO and click-ad campaigns.
By the way, if a site isn't new, but is being moved or rebuilt, there are ways to ensure you don't lose the credibility (and links and rankings) you've gained over time.
I said in my last post that organic SEO and click ads were the two main ways to show up in searches. There are several others. They all involve getting in someone else's website or directory or listing which then shows up high in search results.
Most of these are of greatest value when selling a local product or service, All can be extremely valuable - or a waste of time and money, depending on what you are selling as well as pricing, competition and other factors.
Here's the list (I'll be blogging on each of these in the days and weeks to come):
Organic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay-Per-Click) are the two main ways to show up in searches.
Pay-Per-Click is also known as Click Ads, CPC or "Cost Per Click", Search Engine Marketing or SEM, or (as Google calls them) AdWords. That's a lot of names for the "sponsored links" you see usually to the top and right when you do a search!
Anyway, these two are key parts of most Internet Marketing campaigns. A smart strategy is often to use both of them in a coordinated action:
I haven't written on this topic in quite a while (2 years actually, I looked it up) and just mentioned it the other day as a way of getting traffic to a website: Publicity.
IF you can create a buzz about you, your product, service or company, whether through press releases or PR capers or sheer luck, a tidal wave of publicity can send a huge amount of traffic to your website.
HOW you do that is another story. One client of ours had a line of talking dolls and pens. He sent samples to TV and radio shows, newspapers and magazines. People thought they were really cool and he got on national TV multiple times, major market radio stations and newspapers that generated as much as 3,000 visitors a day.
Of course the competition for those kind of venues is intense. So to get that kind of attention you better have something really unique and INTERESTING, or you better have great connections.
This can also occur in slow motion - becoming well known in a particular industry or niche, perhaps over a period of years.
Either way, you will often get an additional benefit from having other websites linking to your website. Search engines consider incoming links to a website as a popularity vote for that website. That can improve your search engine rankings and generate more traffic.
Organic or Natural SEO refers to optimization of a website so it comes up high in searches.
That is as opposed to click ads (pay-per-click, AdWords as Google calls them) where you buy "sponsored links" and you can show up as high as you are willing to pay for it.
The advantage of organic SEO is of course, you don't pay every time someone clicks to go to your site.
We are seeing with the economic downturn more interest in organic SEO. That's smart.
It can be a lot of work, it can take months to a year, but it can sure pay off.
Everyone wants to get rich online. The holy grail of the Internet is traffic. If you don't get a lot of visitors to your website, you aren't going to get rich off it.
It can be done. But you have to do it in a way that you can afford, and you have to do it in a way that pays for itself.
The least expensive and most effective ways to do it are usually:
1. "Organic" or "natural" SEO - optimization of your website so you get high search engine rankings.
2. Publicity that creates a buzz on your product, service or company that sends a wave of visitors to your site.
3. In many cases, "click ads" - sponsored links on search engines - are cost effective. And you can control exactly the amount you spend to suit your budget.
4. A lot of traffic can be generated by links and listings from other sites. Depending on what you do, this can be very important, and, links can improve your search engine rankings and bring you more traffic that way as well.
Byrd's Law #92: Search Engine Optimization is a Marathon, not a Sprint.
After we complete a major SEO project for a client, they normally go on a maintenance contract where monthly we review their rankings and traffic and make adjustments.
Why? There are four big reasons why this is important.
When we do a website we always include what we call "Basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization."
Almost everyone wants their website to be found through searches. It is part of the whole "get rich online" thing but also a very sensible idea! The fact is, companies big and small are putting more of their marketing budgets into online efforts, a trend that has been going on for years and with no signs of a change anytime soon.
Why? Because every year, more people are looking more online for products, services and information, less to Yellow Pages, magazine and newspaper ads, TV commercials, etc.
Websites are often designed to look good whereas they should be designed to accomplish a purpose. Aesthetics can help accomplish that purpose but that isn't automatic.
This article gives a great example of a website that couldn't be plainer - and prettying it up wouldn't be a good idea. Note: I don't agree with everything in the article, but the main point is valid.
Since I mentioned it and didn't completely cover the subject, here's the full story on "the other Web PR" - "Page Rank."
For those who don't know the history of Google, there were other search engines and ways of navigating the web such as directories that were important in 1996 when two Stanford graduate students - now billionaires of course - came up with the idea that became Google.
"Page Rank" is at the heart of that. Those two geniuses - and geniuses they were - reasoned that a search engine needed to be able to figure out what a web page was about - which basically comes from its content - but also how IMPORTANT it was. They decided that the best judge of a page's importance is what other people thought of it.
If other websites link to a page, and those links agree with page content - and if those links are from web pages which are themselves important - well then, that page is IMPORTANT.
That idea is implemented in part through "PR", "Page Rank", a number from 0 to 10 assigned to each page that Google indexes. A page with a PR of 10 is of the highest importance. A PR of 0 is the lowest.
Google then uses these PR values as part of its overall formula ("algorithm") for determining search engine rankings. In short, the higher your PR, the higher your search engine rankings are likely to be.
Different pages in a website will have different PR's. Usually the home page has the highest PR.
How do you increase your PR? You get links - but not just any links (see above).
To give you an idea of the scale of PR, Microsoft's home page is a 9, as is Yahoo.com and the home page of the New York Times. The Drudge Report is an 8. United Airlines is a 7. Tampa Florida's website is a 5.
For mere mortals, 0 to 3 is easy and not worth much. A 4 is not bad (our home page is a 4). If you can get a 5 or a 6, you are really cranking.
"PR" has two completely different meanings in relation to the Internet and websites. There's "Page Rank" which is a number from 0 to 10 Google assigns to each page of a website, as to how important that page is in the scheme of things. 10 is the highest, 0 lowest. It is one of the important elements to achieving high search engine rankings.
But that is not what I'm talking about today. I'm talking about "PR" as in "Public Relations" as in what does the world think of you?
If you are successful, people are going to start talking about you on the Internet, and if people start talking about you, some people are going to say BAD things about you. Maybe even lies.
The choice of font (typeface) in a website or print or video piece can make a BIG difference in the impact or effectiveness. Fonts communicate emotion and style, are easier or more difficult to read, stand out or not.
But you're limited in the use of fonts in websites because of the way websites work.
One of our favorite "tricks" for Internet marketing is to work "click ads" (paid search ads) and website search engine optimization back and forth.
Click ads can be great but every time someone clicks through to your website, you're paying maybe $1.50. That can get expensive fast. In a lot of cases it can be a big winner. It also is a way to generate immediate traffic to your website since it usually takes a while to build up your "natural" search engine rankings.
Google, Yahoo and other companies that sell click ads give you a lot of feedback that tells you how many searches are occuring for the various search terms, how many click through to your site. If you also track how many of those turn into prospects or sales, you REALLY know what search terms to push in optimizing your site.
Similarly you can use how people are finding your site through natural (free) searches to suggest key words you may want to buy clicks for. And, as your natural search traffic volume increases, you may want to or be able to cut down on your click ad budget.
Think of natural and paid searches as integrated parts of your overall Internet marketing effort - along with publicity, and free and paid directory listings.
More and more, businesses are using video on their websites.
Why? Because they can.
There are several developments over the last two years or so that have made it extremely practical to add video to your website.
First is the very high percentage of people who now have broadband Internet connections. Video isn't practical with a dial-up connection, but when 80 to 90% of one's visitors are on high-speed connections, that isn't much of a concern.
That trend was followed by the explosive appearance of YouTube which made video commonplace on the Internet. People are used to clicking on those arrows and watching a video, so it isn't anything weird or unusual to them.
The ability to embed a video in Flash (YouTube videos are in this format) means that nearly everyone has the capability of watching them on their computers. Also the video starts right away (so-called "streaming video") rather than having to wait for the whole video to load. And the video file size isn't excessive, so the hosting service's bandwidth limitations aren't strained.
All these factors make it extremely practical and useful to put video on your website. But the real point is what this gains you. The immediacy, impact and "aliveness" of a video can contribute greatly to the effectiveness of your site in achieving its marketing purpose. Just consider the difference between a written testimonial, a copy of a testimonial on a customer's letterhead, an audio (sound recording) testimonial, and a video testimonial. Each of these is more real and impactful and effective.
The same goes for the words of the Owner or President of your business.
We certainly live in a fast changing world. Nowhere is that more true than marketing on the Internet.
Google, the 600 pound gorilla of searches, makes MAJOR changes in how they determiine search rankings, as often as five or six times a year.
Four years ago, banner ads and email blasts dominated Internet marketing.
Now email blasts are almost completely limited to your own compiled list of customers or prospects. And the click-through rate for banner ads is a tiny fraction of what it once was.
Three years ago people were figuring out how to do more and clever popups. Now everyone blocks popups on their computers.
Methods of Internet marketing that were huge a year ago are already disappearing from the scene.
The moral of the story is, if you are going to do successful Internet marketing, you need to stay on top of the changes. Otherwise you can suddenly find yourself "left in the dust."
When you do a search on Google or other search engines, "Organic Search Results" are the ones down and on the left - based on the search engine's evaluation of the importance and relevance of the page. "Click ads" are the sponsored links at top and right which people are paying for.
A new word that has captured a lot of attention recently is "googleganger" - from "Google" plus "doppelganger." A Googleganger is someone else with the same name as you who shows up in Google searches.
Google search engine grabs more market share from Yahoo and MSN
According to information posted by Bambi Francisco at Market Watch, Google Inc. remains the public's favorite place to find answers online as the pace of its search-query volume more than doubled the growth rate for overall search-query volume in February.
Google's search-query volume rose 29.4% last month, nearly three times as fast as the 11% growth for the industry, according to comScore Networks. The rise in searches enabled Google to capture 42.3% of the market for all searches, up from a third a year ago.
Importantly, Google appears to be gaining ground at the expense of juggernauts Yahoo and MSN.Yahoo's market share dipped to 27.6% from 31%, and MSN dropped to 13.5% from 16.3%.
If you can generate some publicity for your business through press releases and PR capers, you will often get an additional benefit from having other websites putting links to your website. Search engines tend to "view" incoming links to a website as a popularity vote for that website, which can help improve your rankings in the search engines results pages (SERPS). Serps are the list of websites you see coming up when you type in a search term at, say, Google.com or Yahoo, etc.
In business you have to attract attention. Publicity helps you do that. The links are an additional benefit. Some of the incoming links will be short-lived (newspapers, mags, etc.). But links from other sites (other businesses, blogs, etc.) can stay around for a long time. Use publicity to help create more incoming links to your site, in addition to the other obvious benefits gained from getting good publicity.
Results from Google Base are now showing up in some of the results pages when internet surfers type in certain "keywords" (search terms) in the search box at google.com. Are you in Google Base? You should be if you depend on internet traffic for a portion of your leads or sales. Local businesses should definitely be uploading their basic business info to Google Base. Known as Google Local business locations bulk uploads, these files contain addresses, phone numbers, and operating hours for physical business locations. This makes it easy and handy for people in your area to find your busness when they are looking for the goods or services you have to offer.
You can find Google Base quickly simply by typing in "google base" in the search box on Google's home page.
An effective cost-per-click campaign (CPC) can help bring more traffic to your website, assist in your branding, and generate more online sales if you sell online.
Good online marketing requires a well-designed website that creates want and creates sales and is properly optimized for the search engines. In other words, it must be people-friendly (easy to navigate and functions well) and search engine friendly. With those two things in place you can now add cost-per-click campaigns to bring even more traffic and generate more sales.
We like to work with Google and Yahoo primarily. There are many other smaller search engines usually not worth messing with. Google's Adwords is well designed for creating a good online ad campaign and testing it on a continuing basis.
There is quite a bit to know in running a good CPC campaign. You can't just stick some ads up and hope for the best. That's a good way to waste money.
You need to research out the best search terms for your needs, create ads that pull, continue to test your ads and monitor your keywords and the amounts you are bidding for those terms.
But if you have something worthwhile to sell (including ideas), a good website that is properly optimized for the search engines, a solid CPC campaign and some effective online PR, you could take your internet marketing out the top!
