The Internet Marketing Tree

Many companies measure the success of online advertising or social media simply by the increase in web traffic versus their usual traffic volume. Defining your goals is the ideal place to start for online advertising, search marketing, online branding, or social media. Some of the goals you might pursue for these are;

Search Engine Rankings – when your SEO strategy is moving in the right direction, you should see your site improve in the search results pages (SERPs) for predetermined phrases that you have chosen to pursue. The end result is an increase in both web traffic and leads.

Online Branding – while this includes an SEO component, an online branding strategy also includes internet marketing and social media. Online branding is not just ranking to have your website become synonymous with certain searched phrases, it also involves advertising online within the right circles to create that top of mind awareness with your brand. Additionally, it also employs social media tactics to develop your online brand essence and assist with online reputation management. Another way to measure is noting an increase in mentions on other websites, hopefully for the better.

Increase Sales – SEO can drive leads to your site, and if you’ve optimized for conversion, those leads should result in an increase in sales. This is a more common metric that is preferred, but not always the right one. If you’re running a pay per click (PPC) campain, then it might make sense, but if you’re campaign is social media or SEO, more suitable metrics might be followers or ranking.

Original article and graphic courtesy reactorr.com.

55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love

Everyone loves a good tip, right? Here are 55 quick tips for search engine optimization that even your mother could use to get cooking. Well, not my mother, but you get my point. Most folks with some web design and beginner SEO knowledge should be able to take these to the bank without any problem. 

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

11. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.

Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.

19. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.

20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.

21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.

23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.

24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.

25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.

26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.

27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.

28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.

29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.

30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.

31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.

32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.

33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.

34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.

35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.

36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!

37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.

38. Use captions with your images. As with newspaper photos, place keyword rich captions with your images.

39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.

40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.

41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:

(1) Log out of Google

(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar

42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.

43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.

44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.

45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.

46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.

47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.

48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.

49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.

50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.

51. Add viral components to your web site or blog – reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.

52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.

53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.

54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.

55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

Richard V. Burckhardt, also known as The Web Optimist, is an SEO trainer based in Palm Springs, CA with over 10 years experience in search engine optimization, web development and marketing.

Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/55-quick-seo-tips-even-your-mother-would-love/6760/#ixzz1KyIPHIkU

8 Easy Wins for On-page SEO

Even the best advice is useless if you can’t put it into play. As a consultant who started his professional life as a coder, I always try to consider the effort and cost of implementing any changes I advise. Don’t get me wrong – some difficult changes have to be made, despite the pain. Usually, though, there are a few easy wins that won’t take days of development or thousands of dollars to put into play. I’m going to give you 8 fixes to on-page SEO problems that I see pop up regularly…

“Easy” Isn’t Always Easy

A quick disclaimer – what’s “easy” for one person or on one platform might not be so easy on another. Sitewide changes (TITLE tags, for example) can be tricky, but they’re generally a lot easier than a complete redesign or a switch to a new platform. One area I won’t mention in this list is improving your URLs. Although that can be a powerful tactic, I’m seeing too many people who want to make relatively minor changes to URLs for SEO purposes. Sitewide URL changes are risky and often difficult to do correctly – they aren’t worth it to go from “good” to “slightly better”. The changes I’m proposing here are generally low-risk.

1. Canonicalize Internal Duplicates

While there may not be a duplicate content penalty (with a Capital “P”), there can be serious consequences to letting your indexed pages run wild, especially in a post-Panda world. Google often does a poor job of choosing the right version of a page, and low-authority sites can end up diluting your site’s index and pushing out deeper, more important pages (like product pages).

There are three common varieties of internal duplicates, in my experience:

1. Duplicates caused by session variables and tracking parameters
2. Duplicates caused by search sorts and filters
3. Duplicates caused by alternate URL paths to the same page

If search spiders see a new URL for the same content (whether that URL appears static or dynamic), they’ll see a new page. It’s important to canonicalize these pages. When the duplicates really are identical, using the canonical tag or a 301-redirect is often the best bet. In some cases, like search sorts or pagination, the situation can get more complicated.

2. Write Unique TITLE Tags

The TITLE tag is still a powerful ranking factor, and it’s still far too often either abused or neglected. Pages that you want to rank need unique, descriptive, and keyword-targeted TITLE tags, plain and simple. You can easily track duplicate page TITLEs through the SEOmoz PRO Campaign Manager, including historical data:

This data is available from multiple locations, including the Campaign Dashboard and “Crawl Diagnostics” tab. You can also track exact duplicates in Google Webmaster Tools. You can find it under “Diagnostics” > “HTML Suggestions”.

The solution here is simple: write unique TITLE tags. If you have a huge site, there are plenty of ways to populate TITLE tags systematically from data. Writing some decent code is well worth it to fix this problem.

3. Write Unique META Descriptions

While the META Description tag has little or no direct impact on ranking these days, it does have 2 important indirect impacts:

1. It (usually) determines your search snippet and impacts click-through rate (CTR).
2. It’s another uniqueness factor that makes pages look more valuable.

Again, there are plenty of ways to generate META descriptions from data, including just using snippets of product descriptions. Try to make descriptions meaningful and attractive to visitors, not just pseudo-sentences loaded with keywords.

4. Shorten Your TITLE Tags

Long TITLE tags tend to weaken the SEO impact of any given keyword, and can also turn off search visitors (who tend to skim results). The most common culprit I see is when someone adds their home-page TITLE to the end of every other page. Let’s say your home-page TITLE is:

“The Best Bacon Since 1983 | Bob’s Bacon Barn”

Then, for every product page, you have something like this:

“50-pound Mega-sack of Bacon | The Best Bacon Since 1983 | Bob’s Bacon Barn”

It may not look excessive, but you’re diluting the first few (and most important) keywords for the page, and you’re making every page on the site compete with your home-page unnecessarily. It’s fine to use your company name (or a shortened version, like “Bob’s Bacon”) at the end of all of your TITLE tags, but don’t repeat core keywords on a massive scale. I’ve seen this go to extreme, once you factor in long product names, categories, and sub-categories.

5. Re-order Your TITLE Tags

On larger, e-commerce sites, it’s common to list category and sub-category information in TITLE tags. That’s fine up to a point, but I often see a configuration that looks something like this:

“Bob’s Bacon | Bulk Products | Bacon Sacks | 50-pound Mega-sack of Bacon”

Not only does every TITLE tag on the site end up looking very similar, but the most important and unique keywords for the page are pushed to the very back. This is an issue for search usability, too, as research has demonstrated that the first few words in a title or headline are the most critical (possibly as few as the first two). If you’ve got a structure like the one above, flip it around:

“50-pound Mega-sack of Bacon | Bacon Sacks | Bulk Products | Bob’s Bacon”

It’s a relatively easy change, and it’ll put the most important keywords up front, where they belong. It will very likely also increase your search CTR.

6. Add Direct Product Links

On sites with 100s or 1000s of pages, a “flat” architecture isn’t possible or even desirable. So, you naturally end up taking a hierarchical approach where products are 3+ levels deep. I think that’s often fine, if the paths are clear to crawlers and visitors, but it can leave critical pages with very little ranking power. One solution is to pull some of your top sellers to the home-page and link directly – this effectively flattens the architecture and pours more link-juice where it’s needed. Don’t go overboard, but a “Featured Products” or “Top 10 Sellers” list on the home-page can really help boost important deep pages.

7. Re-write Internal Anchor Text

I’m amazed how often I see internal links, even main navigation links, given cryptic, vague, or jargon-loaded labels. If you’re trying to rank your category page for “kid’s clothing”, don’t label the button “Apparel (K-12)” – it’s a bad signal to search engines, and it probably doesn’t make much sense to visitors. Your internal anchor text should reflect your keyword strategy, and your keyword strategy should reflect common usage. Use labels people understand and don’t be afraid to be specific.

8. Remove 10 Low-Value Links

There’s an old adage in copywriting – say what you need to say in as few words as possible, and then, when you’re done, try to say it in half that many words. I think the same goes for internal linking. If most of your inbound links are coming to the home-page, then your site architecture is the single biggest factor in flowing link-juice to deeper pages. It’s natural to want to link to everything, but if you prioritize everything, you effectively prioritize nothing. Find 10 links on your home-page that are either low priority for search or that visitors never click on (a click-mapping tool like Crazy Egg is a great way to test this), and remove them. Focusing your remaining link-juice is an easy way to boost your most important pages.

I’d love to hear any tips you may have for easy wins on-page. I’d also recommend Rand’s post on building aperfectly optimized page. While link-building is critical, fixing on-page issues is often a lot easier and can have an immediate impact, so it’s important not to ignore either front of the SEO battle.

Pay Per Click Search Engines

Today, more and more businesses and small business owners are looking into the internet as the cost effective way to boost their income. Majority of them consider search engines to be the most effective targeted traffic generators. However, getting top rankings for chosen keywords can be quite difficult. As a matter of fact, it can take up to a year or more for a website to get top placement in major search engines. But there’s another way to get listed in search engines, fast.

It’s called pay-per-click search engines. PPC search engines can put your website next to other search listings and start bringing you quality and targeted traffic within minutes.

How Pay Per Click Search Engines Work?

You have probably seen ads on the right side of Google search engine listings, or top and bottom of Yahoo search listings. These ads are called “sponsored search listings” or simply PPC ads. They appear whenever advertisers bid on the keywords that visitors are searching for.

Let’s say you’ve decided to advertise on PPC search engine. The first step you do is keyword research. You make a list of keywords that represent your website or product. Later, see how many times people search for these keywords. And then bid on those keywords. Depending on a search engine, bids may vary from 1 cent per click to $100 per click.

If you bid too high, you might run out of funds very quickly. If you bid too low, you may never receive any traffic at all or receive only few clicks. So you have to choose the best cost-per-click for you if you want to get decent traffic and positive ROI (Return on investment).

After bidding on keywords, you also have to write an ad message that will be displayed when a visitor searches for the information relevant to your ad. Then your message is reviewed by staff members. If approved, your ads start running immediately.

So when a visitor enters a keyword or keyphrase that you are bidding on, your message appears next to the search results. If a visitor decides that your message is relevant to his search and attractive enough, he will click on your ad. When he clicks your sponsored listings, the amount of money you choose to bid on that keyword, will be deducted from your account. You have to be careful though, cause you can run out of funds very quickly if you bid too high.

Conversion Tracking and ROI

One more step before jumping into the PPC game is to determine your ROI. For example, you sell a product that costs $100. We’ll assume your conversion ratio (CR – number of people who buy compared to the number of people who visited your site) is 1%. That means 1 out of 100 people buy your product. You bid $1 per click and you get 100 visitors. So you pay $100 in PPC marketing and you make $100 from the sales (no return on investment).

If you have additional expenses, like the shipment of your product, then you’ll lose more money than you’ll make. In this case you should bid less that $1 per click. However, if your conversion ration is 10%, then you can make some nice profit. CR is different in every industry. It also depends on your website (how it converts), your ad message and the keywords you select to bid on.

The Best Pay Per Click Search Engines?

Many people ask the same question: “Which is the best PPC search engine?”

Majority of advertisers will tell you that Google Adwords and Yahoo are the best PPC search engines. They are the largest in the industry, they offer professional support and they receive quality and targeted search traffic. As people claim, they bring the best ROI compared to the other engines.

However, smaller PPC search engines can also be very profitable. As said before, it depends on many factors. Some niches might bring better ROI using smaller PPC’s than the large ones.

Let’s say on Google, to be listed in position 1 or 2, you would have to bid .50 (50 cents) a click for a selected term. Then you would have to spend $50 to get 100 visitors. We’ll assume you sell a product that costs $10. If you have 5% CR, then you sell your product to 5 customers and get $50. Again, you have no ROI. But, smaller PPC’s might be a better idea. Here’s why:

You sell the same product for $10. But your conversion is lower, 1% instead of 5%. As long as the PPC search engine is smaller, you now pay only 0.01 (1 cent) a click. Now with 1% CR, 1 out of 100 people buy your product. You spend $1 to get 100 visitors and make $10 per sale. You spend $5 and make $50. As you can see the smaller PPC brings you much better profit in this case. However, it’s just a theory. You need to test and track every keyword and every campaign in order to discover how it actually converts in your case.

In Conclusion

PPC search engines can be risky. You might guess how many visitors you’ll bring, how much money you’ll make, but the reality is usually very different than your calculations. You may not receive so many clicks in the beginning, so you’ll have to bid higher. If you bid higher, you might spend more money than you were planning to. So you better have good funds in your account in the beginning, because you’ll probably have to spend a lot of money upfront, before you make a sale.

Some people are making thousands of dollars a week from pay per click search engines. So try it out, and if you master the art of PPC’s, you can make some serious money online, from the comfort of your home.