OBSESSED WITH RESULTS

Isn’t it great you don’t have to rely solely on TV or print to advertise anymore?!  After watching Don throw his client out of the door on Madmen’s premiere episode of season 4, I thought, poor Jantzen for not having other advertising options.   If you didn’t see the episode, Don presented a provocative swimwear layout to Jantzen.  A black bar covers the model’s top. “So well built, we can’t show you the second floor,” was the slogan.   Jantzen, a family oriented and conservative company didn’t like the risqué idea, thus making Don so mad he threw them out.   Can you imagine throwing your client out if they don’t like your idea?

Today, there are more opportunities than ever to advertise, anywhere really.  It made me thankful that I work at Ionic Media, in the advertising industry today, because we can be more creative than ever.  There are so many ways to reach the consumer…  iPhones, iPads, Blackberrys, portable TVs, Facebook, Wi-Fi everywhere (even on airplanes now!)!  How much you want to spend or who you want to reach is a good way to start.  You could advertise on TV or why not put the commercials on the web?   Utilize paid search or optimize your current website?  The key is to not depend solely on one element, which will in turn be more efficient and effective.   The trick will be to coordinate all elements to send a consistent message.

Wow, what a relief to advertise today where you truly can run with your imagination.

Well its been 18 months since Google started its Caffeine project and about 2 months since its been widely talked about.  I bet you are wondering “What now?”.   There are so many changes in the digital media and advertising industry that its hard to keep up with.  So, our team at Ionic Media would like to give you a quick update on what it all means in 5 quick points:

1. From months to seconds

September 11, 2001 marked a crucial turning point in Google history.  Because many news sites had a problem keeping up with demand and their sites were going down, Google’s team found that when they could cache the site, they could actually take some of the demand off of those sites and meet the needs of the spikes on the internet for real-time information.  This led to the creation of “Google News”.  This is where Google’s path began to change and they became aware that 30 days was not enough for larger sites and its standard of 4 months prior to that was even worse.   With the advent of social media (Twitter updates every half a second and Facebook about every minute), then Google really had no choice but to update its systems to accommodate these new “influential” sources of media.

2. Analysis in small pieces 24/7

Caffeine lets Google analyze the web in small portions and then updates their search index on a continuous basis (i.e. 24/7).  The goal is so that you (and your customers) “can find fresher information than ever before – matter where it was published”.  Google says that if “Caffeine” was a pile of paper, “it would grow three miles taller every second”!

3. Google Caffeine’s Effects on SEO

Page Load Time – Make sure your page loads fast.  If its too heavy, Caffeine will more likely index it faster if your pages are simple, fast and constantly updated (think Twitter)

Keywords and Phrases – The relevancy and quality of keywords is more important than its has been in the past.  Google is connecting the relevancy of pages based on the content more than it has in the past.  This update is about one thing – INFORMATION QUALITY AND RELEVANCY.  This means stop relying on any spammy links.

Ads – Caffeine puts more emphasis on organic search results rather than paid advertisements.  This means that your PPC Quality Scores are being affected for AdWords.

4. The response to Bing

Google Caffeine is also partially a response to Bing which is focusing on 4 areas: 1) Speed, 2) Relevancy, 3) Accuracy and 4) Index Volume.  To see more about some early testing of these 4 items regarding Google Caffeine, see http://mashable.com/2009/08/10/google-caffeine.

5. What Bruce Clay and Matt Cuts Say

We all internally talk here at Ionic about “blogger experts”.  But these thoughts from Bruce Clay and Matt Cutts do summarize my experience of Caffeine and Mayday (Google’s previous release) since January 2009.  Here are the highlights:

1) Caffeine Infrastructure:

• Get fresh
• Be engaging
• Lower your bounce rates
• Be relevant
• Spread your content around (think YouTube, Google Buzz, Feedburner, Google News, Google Blogger)
• Update your site maps
• Make sure your site’s speed is up to par

2) Mayday and the Long Tail Keyword

From Matt Cutts of Google, “We’re trying to find the best sites that match up to long-tailed queries.  It’s an algorithmic change that changes how we assess which sites are the best match for long-tail queries”.  Here are the suggestions that Bruce Clay makes which I agree with:

• Pick one: Select one page to act as a landing page for terms and long-tail qualifiers.
• Get focused: Concentrate link popularity on category landing pages. This will help maximize category relevance from the top down.
• Be first to publish: The first to publish will garner the maximum inbound links.
• Don’t forget the old school: Archive old content within the silo as category support.
• Share it up: Make content easily shareable among major link equity sites (links will point to the top silo page.) First to publish is moot if no one knows about it.
• Be social: There are strong indications that Google is reviewing a wide host of sites to observe users’ behavior and interaction with the brand. Domain reputation relies on more than site age and whois information.

Hope this helps!  As you know, we are always here for you if you get lost!

Marie Smith
Manager, SEO and Social Media

So, you have an advertising budget for your product and have done all the research to figure out where to run your advertisements, how to disburse between Search, Display, etc.  Now how do you make these ads convert?

The Advertisement:

1. Text and Tone:  Create a strong CALL TO ACTION (this is the #1 most important detail).
   1. Use strong call to action phrases and words.  Examples include:
      1. i.      Free “ex. Get your free copy by clicking here…”
      2. ii.      __% off  “ex. Get 25% off your online purchase…”
      3. iii.      Make the offer time sensitive…”for a limited time only…”
      4. iv.      List cost – example – only $19.99 in bolded text and eye catching color.
      5. v.      New, Premium, etc.
      6. Graphics:
         1. Use graphics that catch the users eye.  Keep in mind that your advertisement is competing for the user’s eye.  If it is text heavy and not appealing to the eye it will be overlooked.
         2. Make sure ads load quickly.
         3. Keep the ad simple to read (i.e. average sized text), no shaky banners (most sites will not accept these and you may not want to be responsible for an epileptic seizure…seriously they become annoying more than anything else and don’t convert into a true sale.)
         4. Adding the touch of human faces to an advertisement also helps the user ‘connect’ with the offer on a personal level.  Remember – many people out there on the web are visual and the competition is fierce to capture their attention and lead them into action.

The Sales Process:

1. You have a click…now what?
   1. The same practice should be applied to your landing page and purchase process as it is to your advertisement.  The key points to focus on are:
      1. i.      Reiterating your offer.  The landing page content/offer should match the advertisement.  If it doesn’t, your messaging will not be clear and the user may think he/she  has landed on the wrong site or that the offer was bogus.
      2. ii.      Strong CALL TO ACTION! Keep that call to action in every step.  What does the user need to do?  Keep it simple, snappy and easy to do.
      3. iii.      Keep the collection of data fields above the fold of each page.  This reduces drop-off rates.  The easier you can make a process for a user the more likely they are to complete the process and not drop off.
      4. iv.      Short transaction process (shorten the amount of pages a user needs to go through in order to hit that oh so important ‘submit‘ button.
      5. v.      Provide a safe transaction zone for the consumer. (i.e. secured shopping).  If you intend to use any  user information for future promotions you need to be up front and let them opt in to this.  Transparency gains trust and hopefully this consumer will not be a one-time shopper but become a loyal customer, fan on Facebook, etc.

Andrea Cravitz
Client Account Manager
Ionic Media

There are many ways to market your website online through various forms of search engine optimisation. Now days with the innovation to social media networks, blogs, forums and social bookmarking, sites it is very easy to do a successful campaign and get down loads of prize backlinks to your website, thus increasing your page rank.

So what were going to do is set up an Internet presence for your new site / company. Here is a list of SN (social networking) sites that we could use to advance our site / business enterprise, consider social networking is not the same as social bookmarking, which we will cover a little later in the article – but each point raised here are simply different forms of search engine optimisation.

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Digg
• StumbleUpon
• Squidoo
• Creamaid
• Yedda
• Tweako
• Xanga

So now to make this process a little easier for you to follow, this is a basic run through of what I would do with the above list.

• Submit my site / business to Facebook. Create page, ask for friends, start posting.
• Create a twitter account (if you don’t already have one) and start a little tweeting – 4 or 5 tweets should do it.
• Create a page on Squidoo – general write up on your new site.
• Digg and StumbleUpon your Squidoo write up and twitter tweets.
• Submit to more SN’s

See more at: http://googlekeywordsoftware.com/using-seo-to-generate-traffic-through-social-media-networks-and-blogs

Posted by reggiedon | Posted in Link Baiting | Posted on 23-06-2010

If you have a business website, then search engine marketing (SEM) should always be part of your business strategy. By implementing the correct search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, your website could enjoy increased online exposure.

Online marketing primarily uses the platforms of major search companies like Google and Bing. Business owners will try to get their websites as high up as possible on the search results of Google and Yahoo/Bing. So if your website lands on the top pages of search results, it could mean more traffic or web visitors. In the online industry, getting more traffic generally means more business opportunities.

There are several options available for you when conducting SEM/SEO. You may hire a professional SEO expert to make your website more competitive on the search engines. This requires investment but you will get the guarantee of faster improvement of search position.

Another approach is to do self-help SEO. There are simple techniques that you can follow just to start your search marketing drive. So here are the top tips on internet marketing that could increase your website’s search engine position within a few weeks.

Know Your Current Position

Knowing where you stand on the search results will enable you to set realistic goals. You can download Google’s Toolbar to get useful SEO tools to monitor your search standing and page rank. Alexa is also a good site that can give you an overview of the performance of your website on the search engines.

Based on the data that you can get from these resources, you can make a plan on how to improve your search engine position. Creating a concrete plan of action and goal setting are two very crucial tasks in any form of marketing.

See more at: http://makingmoneywithablog.makingmoney-101.com/site-promotion/link-baiting/online-marketing-top-tips-on-search-engine-marketing-3-easy-ways-to-increase/

Affordable small business SEO not o nly uses the same old business and marketing basics, but also leverages the depth of accessible metrics for creating increased o nline traffic and better web site ROI.

Don’t put the cart before the horse.

You can’t do SEO (optimize your web site for search engines) until you’ve researched keywords. You can’t research keywords without a clear view of your target market, your prospect types, and how your offerings fill their needs.

Affordable Small Business SEO

Affordable small business SEO not o nly uses the same old business and marketing basics, but also leverages the depth of accessible metrics for creating increased o nline traffic and better web site ROI.

When small business people ask me how their web site could be improved by SEO, I give them some version of the following list of questions. When you know the answers to these questions, you’re much less likely to waste money o n SEO efforts, and more likely to succeed o nline. You might even pull off some of this stuff yourself- and that’ll save you big in consultant fees!

To find the right keywords to target with SEO and/or PPC, consider the following…

Goals: How much monthly traffic and sales do you get now? Where would you like these numbers to be? What are your most wanted responses- what do you want your ideal prospects to do o n your site? (e.g. buy something, sign up for your ezine, etc.)

Market Segmentation: Who’s your ideal customer or target market? If there is more than o ne group, characterize each.

Keywords that work: How do people find your site? What search phrases show up in your web logs?

PPC Metrics: Do you already use pay per click (PPC) advertising? What are your conversion rates? Are your bids profiting, or at least breaking even?

Getting more traffic is pointless if  your site isn’t an efficient sales machine

Profit Margin: What is your o nline profit margin for each offering?

Conversion Rate: What percentage of your offline prospects make the purchase? (to gauge expected conversion rate for your services and find disparity in o nline results)

Customer Loyalty: How many people are o n your ezine list? How often do you email them? What do you send them?

5 Common Critical Website Errors and How to Fix Them

About 75% of the web sites I’ve seen make all of these mistakes. As a result, their rankings and traffic suffer, and they lose potential sales revenues.

See more at: http://eden.boseviews.com/2010/06/13/affordable-small-business-seo-5-common-website-errors-and-how-to-fix-them/

There’s so many reasons why PageRank shouldn’t be a primary metric for SEO:

• Infrequently updated – Google updates the PR scores in the toolbar 2-4X each year on an unpredictable and unpublished schedule. The PageRank score you see today could be dramatically different than the PageRank Google’s using in ranking/crawling calculations.
• 1 of 200+ ranking signals – Google’s representatives have continually repeated that PageRank is just one of “more than two hundred” signals the engine applies to the rankings equation.
• Applies to pages, not sites – The PR score is based on individual URLs, not domains. Technically, there’s no such thing as a “PR 5″ website, just a website with a homepage URL that has displays “5″ in the toolbar.
• Imprecise – PageRank is a logarithmic score when fitted to a 0-10 value in the toolbar. We’ve estimated the log base around 8-10, meaning that a PR5 URL has 8-10X more PageRank than a PR4. Yet, there’s no granularity between values. One PR4 page might have 5 times more PageRank than another PR4 page, but the Google score won’t tell you until the log base threshold has crossed the next value marker.
• Intentionally Inaccurate - Google has been using toolbar PageRank to visually penalize pages and sites for buying/selling links for many years, but they readily admit they use this filter intermitently so as not to tip off spammers. Thus, we’re never sure when looking at PageRank whether a page/site has or hasn’t had its PageRank reduced and whether that does or doesn’t impact rankings (or the value passed by the non-manipulative links)

See more at: http://stracciafabrizio.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/pagerank-la-scienza-del-ranking-correlations/

Search engine optimization (SEO) should be considered an important component of any Net promoting plan. This is often necessary as a result of there is so a lot of which will be gained from SEO in terms of Web marketing . Failure to optimize your web site for search engines can lead to a substantial loss in terms of complimentary marketing which is basically gained from ranking well with search engines. This text will give insight into what SEO is and will justify why Internet marketing requires at least a point of SEO.

SEO optimization may be a plan in that a web site is intended to get approving search engine rankings from standard search engines. This may be achieved in a selection of different ways and optimal SEO ways combine a variety of different ways to complete one well orchestrated SEO campaign. There are many elements to contemplate when trying to optimize your web site for search engines. This could embody keyword density, prominence, META tags, titles and inbound links. Keyword density is one of the most common SEO methods and essentially involves via relevant keywords often within the content of a website to display the relevance of these keywords to the website. This can be necessary as a result of search engines are possible to prize websites with optimal keyword densities with favorable search engine rankings in an endeavor to produce Internet users with the foremost relevant websites for explicit search terms.

The prominence of keywords ought to additionally be measured. This includes how close the keywords are placed to the start of the website. The general fault with this strategy is to believe the first chance to incorporate keywords is in the first line of visible text on the webpage. This can be not true because search engines crawl the code of a web site as opposed to the detectable content on the website. This implies there are multiple opportunities to include relevant keywords long before the actual visible content on the website. This might embrace the code for the title yet because the META tags. Business house owners who understand the possible for incorporating keyword into the code gain a bonus over competitors who only incorporate keywords into the content on their website.

See more at: http://kristin.mybloglover.com/2010/06/11/does-internet-marketing-do-work-without-seo/

By John Greer, Search Engine Watch, Jun 7, 2010

If you own a website, you’re already doing SEO. The e-commerce platform you choose, information architecture of your site, product marketing copy, meta data, and more all affect your organic listings in search engines from day one.

As you continue managing the site, you’re constantly changing your search engine visibility, so it’s important to know if things are on the right track. It takes a combination of several quantitative and qualitative measurements to get a good grasp on the state of your SEO.

Quantitative Factors

• Rankings on a set of keywords used to be the method of choice for SEO measurement. If you want to rank for “tickets” and you move from the bottom of page one to the top of page one, then you’ve met a goal. However, this mindset is limited to the keywords you focus on — users will come up with tons you didn’t consider. Additionally, what you see in Google isn’t necessarily what everyone else sees, due to several factors such as personalization and geography. Not to mention the fact that rankings don’t equal clicks — someone has to choose your listing over those around it.
• Natural search traffic is the next logical spot to consider. Pulling this data from your web analytics package will give you traffic trends, allowing you to compare them to SEO project dates. Assuming your numbers aren’t inaccurate, a common problem, you also need to put these in context of the whole site.
• Percent share of total traffic helps with context. Perhaps traffic is down a little, but is the whole site down? It may be a seasonal issue or a brand issue reducing traffic.
• Some final metrics on traffic are often overlooked in SEO. What does your traffic do on your site? Take one look at the page and run away screaming? Or do they actually stick around and buy something? Ensuring people are landing on the right pages, targeting the right terms, and even creating compelling landing pages are part of SEO. Keep track of things like bounce rates, goal conversion rates, revenue, and orders sold for natural search. Ideally, you have attribution set up to have an idea of how natural search revenue fits in with other sources.

See more at: http://searchenginewatch.com/3640565