Posts Tagged ‘Search Engine Marketing’
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
How does Social Media utilization help search engine optimization (SEO) also known as organic ranking? Keep in mind that the goal is getting traffic to your website via page one search engine listings for keyword searches important to your business. The search listings provide the linkage to your web pages.
Classic SEO relies on getting your web pages optimized better than competing web pages which over time will hopefully result in page one listings in search engines. This process takes considerable optimization skills and usually months of effort.
But Search Engine Result Pages no longer just list web pages and their URL. Google etc now shows Social Media and local search elements in their search result pages such as: Images / Videos / Social Network Postings / Bookmarks / News Articles / Blog Pages / Local Maps
Content in the above elements often changes frequently and is often viewed by large audiences which are things that search engines use to measure topic and web page popularity. Consequently search spiders monitor social media elements constantly and index new content fast, sometimes in minutes.
There can be references or links in the above elements that direct traffic to your web pages. So using social media elements and local maps function can get your web pages traffic from page one in search engines much faster and easier than by classic SEO methods. And utilization of multiple social media elements can allow you to dominate page one listings.
But the social media page one listings can disappear fast unless they are constantly supported with traffic to the videos, news article, etc or if bookmarking slows down. Today’s hot thing and news can become yesterday’s old news fast. So social media page one listings can be unstable. Sustained page one listings are still best accomplished with classic SEO tactics.
So use social media for fast results in search engines, to obtain a domination affect, and to supplement classic SEO efforts over time.
Tags: Add new tag, Digital Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Marketing, SEO, Socail Media, social networks
Posted in Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, SEO, Social Media Optimization | 1 Comment »
Monday, November 9th, 2009
Business web success is enabled by technology, but is accomplished with marketing.
Many businesses still think that just having a pretty website is sufficient. But a website is just a bunch of software that enables publication of text, graphics, and media on the Internet. That does not guarantee anyone finds the website or if they find it that visitors do anything you find useful for your business.
Web success comes from getting a targeted audience to your website and persuading them to do something worthwhile (convert) after they arrive. Both traffic and conversion success factors are about marketing, not technology.
There’s an old saying: “Don’t use just a knife in a gunfight.” Similarly ‘don’t use just technology in a marketing battle.’ Having website technology without marketing to generate website traffic and without website ‘salesmanship’ via persuasion architecture is like building a pretty store in a hidden location without a sales staff on site.
Of course you need a website; you can’t be in the ball game without a place to play and the right equipment to play the game. That is what a website is – a place to play the game with the needed technical equipment. However, to get spectators to your website takes promotional marketing and pleasing them after they arrive takes marketing/sales skills within your website.
To get spectators to your website takes Digital Marketing to create an easy to find location in search engines. Converting them to fans takes Website Persuasion Architecture because it is a tough crowd out their on the Internet. People demand clear info about products & services; an easy, pleasant experience on your website; interactive customer service; a sense of security while visiting your site; and smooth, user friendly online communications.
All of that is enabled by technology, but accomplished via Target Marketing and Persuasion Marketing. So don’t use just technology in an Internet marketing battle.
Tags: Conversion Marketing, Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Marketing, SEO
Posted in Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, PPC, SEO, Social Media Optimization | Comments Off
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
Digital Marketing is the promotion of products, services, & brand using digital technologies available in interactive distribution channels including most Internet methods along with other new media sources like mobile phones (SMS/MMS), digital outdoors, and various digital TV & audio/visual media. Internet Marketing is the most common form of digital marketing, but the other channels are emerging, especially Mobile Marketing.
Like all marketing, digital marketing is often categorized as push, pull, or display types.
Push Marketing involves the marketer sending (pushing) messages to a select group of people. Email and SMS are examples of Digital Push Marketing. The messages are typically targeted to a subscription list based upon geographic, topical, or demographic characteristics. Detailed tracking, reporting and ROI can be obtained. Messages are subject to rules and regulations, require effective delivery technology, and can be blocked by users.
Pull Marketing involves people independently obtaining (pulling) information from published sources. Web searches to relevant web pages, blog posts, and streaming media are examples of Digital Pull Marketing. Marketers need not deal with send methods and opt-in rules, only with storage & display methods. Considerable effort is needed to assure users find content (via SEO, PPC, etc); tracking capability is extensive, but not usually user specific; and personalization is not possible.
Display Marketing involves the presentation (display) of text, images, logos, etc to quasi targeted or random viewers via an advertisement. On the Internet, Display is in the form of banner ads on website or blog pages, etc. Ads are static or animated with hyperlink capability to direct users to interactive web pages. Good for brand building and offers. Results can be tracked, but not with user specifics. Targeting depends on website user demographics where the ad appears and personalization is impossible.
Some or all of the above Digital Marketing new media methods are must have tactics within the marketing mix of all companies.
Tags: Add new tag, Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, PPC, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Marketing, SEO
Posted in Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, PPC, SEO, Social Media Optimization | Comments Off
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
Digital Marketing / Advertising now provides great opportunities in well established digital multi-media channels because eyes and ears spend a lot of time in the digital world.
Thus Digital Marketing is supplementing or in some cases replacing traditional marketing methods.
- Search Engine Marketing, via the bedrocks of website search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click ads (PPC), is displacing expensive Yellow Page ads.
- Social Media Optimization (SMO), via interaction with user controlled content, is the modern way for achieving word-of-mouth referrals, endorsements, and customer relationship management.
- Email Marketing is the modern equivalent of expensive postal direct mail marketing.
- Display Ads (banner ads) in large online publishing networks are the equivalent of ads in newspapers and magazines.
- Mobile Text Ads are the up-and-coming replacement for telemarketing.
Digital marketing offers lower cost, higher effectiveness, and is measureable for accountability yet many businesses have not jumped in. What are you waiting for? Reply to this blog if you want more info or want to get going.
Tags: Banner Ads, Digital Marketing, Display Ads, Internet Marketing, PPC, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Marketing, SEO
Posted in Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, PPC, SEO, Social Media Optimization | 8 Comments »
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
Realistically, the majority of companies do not attempt SEO on a do-it-yourself basis because of the lack of expertise to do it right and keep up with the dynamics. Companies usually either ignore SEO or outsource SEO development.
So it is more important to understand why SEO is needed than understanding the details of how to do it. Here are the top reasons why SEO is important.
- The top method that people use to research purchases and select suppliers is the Internet. Therefore making sure it is easy for prospects to find your website is critical.
- Search Engines are how people find your website when researching/hunting.
- Search Engines will facilitate finding your website without heavy SEO setup if people search using very specific keywords like your company name along with your city location. These are people who already know about you and are just looking for your location or phone number – like someone using the White Pages in a phone book.
- But for people who don’t know you, but are looking for general sources for your type of products and services, will not likely find you via search engines without SEO setup. These are people looking for options – like people using the Yellow Pages in a phone book.
- But search engines do not list company websites in categories in alphabetical order like in the Yellow Pages. Search engines list websites by merit and merit is determined by SEO setup tactics. If your site is not on page 1, you are loosing prospects.
So that is why SEO is important. Without SEO new prospects in particular will not find your website. If new prospects can’t find you, then you are left with just existing customers who can find your website – maybe.
A website without SEO is like building a place of business in a secret location that only your friends and relatives know about. And this aha! moment is why it is more important for you to understand why SEO is important – you can always find someone who knows how to do SEO once you understand why it is needed.
Tags: Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
Posted in Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, SEO | Comments Off
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
What affect do PPC ads (sponsored links) have on SEO results (organic listings)? There are a lot of opinions about the answer to this question.
My two cents worth is that PPC ads have little or no direct affect on SEO results. i.e. Search Engine algorithms don’t reward or punish organic ranking based on the use or non-use of PPC ads. But… there are some interactive benefits.
PPC may help SEO via your site’s popularity score from things like the AdWords Quality Score affect & overall higher traffic site volume, especially with a new website.
And there is evidence that when PPC ads run along side high organic ranked listings for the same company, about the same product or service, that click rates go up and conversions go up. Speculation is that people find you more credible if they see your page showing up in multiple locations on page one of the search engines.
And the keyword data gleaned from PPC ads can be used to improve SEO results. PPC ads can be run for a much broader number and variety of keywords than you can possibly optimize around for SEO. User behavioral feedback about high use keywords in PPC campaigns can be used to fine tune SEO optimization efforts.
What I tell my clients is use both PPC and SEO, especially for new websites or recently revamped sites. PPC will bring immediate lead results and invaluable data about search behavior in your marketplace. As organic results improve over time and lessons learned from PPC are fed back into the SEO efforts, then you can throttle back on PPC ads.
The bottom line is this: If you are generating a return-on-investment with both SEO and PPC ads, then keep going with both until the PPC well runs dry.
Tags: Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, PPC, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Marketing, SEO
Posted in Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, SEO | Comments Off
Friday, October 30th, 2009
If you have followed my posts, especially the recent ones, you understand that:
- The best way to get a large volume of targeted website traffic is via SEO
- Without targeted traffic your website is useless
- Social Media participation is a must out of self-defense and Social Media enhances SEO results
- Controlling information about your business is not possible, even when your web pages are viewed (reference Sidewiki)
Overwhelmed or maybe annoyed by what is going on and its impact on your business ? Take a deep breadth and sometimes counting to ten allows people to calm down so let’s count.
1 – About 5,600 people just searched for something in search engines plus another 1,400 searched in Social Media & Networking portals
2 – 7000 more just searched
3 - 7000 more just searched
4 - 7000 more just searched
5 - 7000 more just searched
6 - 7000 more just searched
7 - 7000 more just searched
8 - 7000 more just searched
9 - 7000 more just searched
10 – 7000 more just searched
That’s 70,000 searches in ten seconds which is an opportunity, not a problem. So if you have not already embraced SEO, get with it. And if you have been ignoring Social Media, join the conversation.
Tags: Digital Marketing, Digital Media, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Marketing, SEO
Posted in Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, SEO | Comments Off
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
Two for one post today! In my last post, who’s in charge here, I talked about the disruptor nature of digital media including many beneficial aspects. And because websites are a sub-set of digital media this means SEO is important to your website’s web success in the new media order of things.
Another sub-set of digital media is social media including things like blogs and portals like Facebook. These tools can be used to engage with customers and enhance SEO results. But many managers ignore social media as irrelevant or they are reluctant to change with the times. Well, you can try to ignore social media, but you can’t hide from it.
Business manager’s reactions to social media range from extreme enthusiasm to total denial. However you feel about social media, know this: even if you consider social media tools inane and a waste of time, a large number of your customers do not. That means you should at least monitor the conversation in social media channels for possible signs of trouble. But if you won’t go to social media channels, a new channel will be coming to your website if it has not already arrived.
There are now tools available that will drag everyone into social media. These tools include things like Google Sidewiki (http://www.google.com/sidewiki/intl/en/index.html). This is a new, free, easy add-on for Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers. Once installed, it can be used to open a side panel where visitors to your website pages are able to enter comments about any page of your website – any page. Future visitors who have Sidewiki installed can then read the posts and add their own comments. And Sidewiki has an easy linkage system to other social media portals like Facebook.
Every web page now can be commented about at will by anyone if they install Sidewiki. Your customers, new prospects, your competitors, friends, relatives, and enemies can now comment on your company and its products and services – good and bad. If you avoided adding to your website things like a forum, message board, or blog or have a blog but turned off comments, now your website visitors have access to a public blog appearing alongside your web pages.
As I said in the last post on this blog, with digital media you can no longer control the conversation and that now includes within the broad boundaries of your own website. The best strategy is to join the conversation for the benefits of engaging with visitors or if for no other reason, out of self-defense. Because with the Sidewiki tool, every site is a social-media site so you can run, but you can not hide.
Tags: Digital Marketing, Digital Media, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Marketing, SEO, Social Media
Posted in Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing | Comments Off
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
In review, SEO is the elephant of Internet Marketing because SEO is the primary provider of traffic to a website. Without targeted traffic your website is useless because your message or offer or cause goes unseen and unheard.
Commercially, interaction with consumers via the new, digital media channels like websites, email, and social networks has gone from a nice-to-have to need-to-have because consumer eyes and ears are migrating to digital media. Consumers expect and even demand to interact with companies via digital media.
But who is really in charge here? It is important to understand that digital media has turned the communication channels upside down. With digital media has come a shift in who is in control of distribution of information.
Information is now de-centralized & democratized. No longer are information sources limited to a small number of centrally controlled news outlets. Nor must we rely on ‘commercial push information’ about products and services from business and industry. We can pull information on-demand from a variety of sources via digital media to research our decisions & choices.
Technology has facilitated the interaction of commercial, economic, and social forces in a way never before possible on such a large scale. Digital media provides an era where ordinary citizens can participate in an informed, non-hierarchical discussion & debate about products, services, news, events, politics, and social issues.
Digital media created an interconnected network of text, audio, and video communications that blurs the distinction between interpersonal and mass communication. Each website, each email, and each social media post turns the author into a publicist and it doesn’t matter if the author is a single individual or a representative from the establishment of corporate, news, or government entitles – everyone has the same reach.
Digital media has…
- Provided the opportunity for everyone to be a publicist
- Made geographic distance irrelevant
- Allowed the creation of an unlimited volume of communication
- Provided a huge increase in the speed of communication
- Facilitated interactive communication between friends and strangers alike
- Merged formerly stand-alone forms of communication by overlapping and interconnecting them
But if people can’t find your website, then your message in that channel goes to waste. That is why SEO is important to your business.
Tags: Internet Marketing, sear, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Marketing, SEO
Posted in Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing | Comments Off
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
If your company’s market is local or regional, but not national, can you still benefit from SEO? Answer = Yes.
Of course, for example, a retailer located in City X does not benefit from a visitor to his website located in City Y that is hundreds or thousands of miles away unless the retailer is engaged in eCommerce. But all retailers want everyone in their area to find their website. Useful traffic is obtained via geo-targeting.
Search Marketing has two pathways, SEO & PPC. SEO is the merit based or so-called organic ranking pathway. PPC is the fee based so-called sponsored link pathway which is fee based.
Both pathways can be geo-targeted to get in front of local or regional traffic. This is accomplished with SEO by optimizing around geo-keywords and by utilization of local search utilities like Google Maps. PPC ads can be easily geo-targeted via the choice of keywords bid on. And via setup techniques when starting a PPC ad campaign that signals the search publisher who to show your ad to based on a user’s PC IP ‘locational’ address.
If you need national search marketing reach, that is accomplished via the same methods (minus the Google Maps type approach), but with non-geo specific keywords for optimization and/or ad setup. National search marketing is more competitive for SEO and needs a higher ad budget for PPC – just like tradional ads cost more to run nationally than locally.
International SEO and PPC is another matter. SEO and PPC almost always needs to be accomplished via indivual utilization of the search publishers specific to the nation or global region of interest.
Tags: Internet Marketing, PPC, Searc Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Marketing, SEO
Posted in Internet Marketing | Comments Off
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
Search Engines have displaced all other methods as the most popular way consumers and business people (AKA customers) find goods and services and select providers. That is why it amazes me that so many businesses still just launch a website and pay little or no attention to SEO. That’s like building a store in a secret location and hoping customers somehow find you – finding a website is worse than finding a needle in a hay stack without SEO.
Approximate U.S. search engine keyword search activity is:
14,500,000,000 (14.5 billion) searches / month
which is – 483,300,000 (483.3 million) searches / day
which is – 20,140,000 (20.1 million) searches / hour
which is – 335,650 (335.6 thousand) searches / minute
which is – 5,600 (5.6 thousand) searches / second
The above core searches are provided approximately by:
Google 65% / Yahoo 20% / Bing 8% / ASK 4% / AOL 3%
IN ADDITON to the above core searches – YouTube video searches are now the #2 search activity ahead of Yahoo’s keyword search volume. And by the way, Google owns YouTube. YouTube searches now account for about 30% of all searches done in Google properties.
That is why SEO is important to your business and why Social Media is important to your business.
Did your business get its fair share of the 335.6 thousand keyword search inquires plus all those YouTube searches done in the about 1 minute it took you to read this post ?
Tags: Internet Marketing, Searc Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Marketing, SEO
Posted in Internet Marketing | Comments Off
Monday, October 26th, 2009
Several business gurus have stated that if you are not measuring a business activity, you won’t be able to mange that activity. Likewise, SEO needs to be measured to be managed.
SEO analytics is how you measure & manage SEO results. You need to measure website traffic behavior and search engine performance results. That takes two different types of software tools; an analytics service and a ranking positon measurement service.
An important advantage of the Internet over traditional marketing media is that Internet activities are totally measurable and transparent. You know what happened, why, and how to improve things if you take the time and effort to do it.
There are many SEO analytics & ranking position services. Some are free and more comprehensive services are fee based. Some are installed on your website and others work from data collected from the host server or from search engine data. You can interpret the data yourself or hire an SEO pro to interpret and recommend continuous improvement activities.
All of the above choices have advantages and disadvantages. SEO set-up, measurement, and maintenance takes time and specialized knowledge. It all comes down to how thorough you want to be, how much time you can put into the effort, and how much you want to spend. The payoff is high organic search rankings.
Google offers a free analytics package that you can install in your website: http://www.google.com/analytics/. Or do a search using the terms ‘SEO analytics’ and ‘search ranking’ to find a large number of free and fee based choices. If you hire an SEO pro, they will provide the tools needed.
However you do it, measure or else you will not be able to manage your SEO activities and achieve continuous search engine ranking improvement.
Tags: Add new tag, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Marketing, SEO
Posted in Internet Marketing | 1 Comment »
