SEO優化基本要素

Easy AdSenser by Unreal

我在科隆的阿姨和叔叔電話問我，如何讓他們的新站獲取google上的成功，我就將自己的一些秘訣告訴他們-如果你已經瞭解了SEO(搜索引擎優化)，那 麼你可以不看；如果沒有，有3個步驟會讓你在搜索引擎獲得好的排名。第一，創建好的內容。第二，讓內容更方便閱讀。第三，將你的內容告訴給別人。

1. 創建好的內容

你想獲取好的Google排名，但你應該先問問自己：你的網站為什麼排名靠前？面對激烈的網路競爭，那一個才是你想排名靠前的主要原因；你需要更多的來訪 者，你想傳播你個人認為非常重要的東西，你想要改變世界，或者你只是想賣點東西。你的網站為什麼排名靠前？在Google和其他的搜索引擎眼中，你不過是 另一個站長—而搜索引擎將重要的部分提供給搜索者。所以最好堅信自己應該在Google排名靠前,而且是你自己在向搜索者提供著什麼. 只要你做到這點你就可以執行第二步驟和第三步驟了,那麼如何做呢:

• 搜索引擎主要是去理解文本的.所以你要努力創建有趣的、有深度的文本形式的內容。使用Flash動作、視頻或者一些圖片不會起反作用，但也不會很好的幫助 搜索引擎。一個最好檢測搜索引擎是否能夠理解網頁的方法就是看網頁的源代碼(右擊選擇“查看原始檔案”，其他流覽器可能不這麼稱呼)看看顯示的文本情況。
• 隨後，可能會有大量的搜索查詢會鏈結到你的網站。這時候一定要果斷的放棄去優化每一個查詢系列，最現實的策略是讓你的網站擁有更多的相關內容。如果你的網 站是和狗的用品相關的，那麼你就寫和狗、狗糧、狗的衣服款式、製作狗鞋的心得等內容；同時也可以放一到兩篇的文藝復興時期的養狗心得(儘量的多翻譯出不同 的語言版本)。
• 我們假設你真的出售狗的用品，而你的競爭對手與你一樣，在那個網站也有很多相關內容。這時候你要的只有一件事，不僅僅創建相關內容，還要努力創建原創內 容；創建和狗名字相關的遊戲；製作狗的增量圖；提供給愛狗者有特色的壁紙下載。你應該明白—做一些別人沒有想到的事情。有特色意味著線民有理由來你的網站 不是你競爭對手的網站。
• 創建大量的原始內容是比較容易的工作。那麼難的呢？哪就是建立在該領域的權威性，這沒有什麼捷徑。當然，很可能你已經是專家了，這非常好，那麼我建議你共 享你的專家知識。人們會喜愛你的網站，是因為他們能夠獲得一些知識，很明顯，這會改變他們的生活，雖然改變可能很少(可能是你帶給他們的是做事情的有效方 式，或者你解決了他們某個問題)。相反，如果你不是既定領域的專家，我建議你創建一個博客,每天花費1個小時或再多點時間去研究相關的知識和新聞，邊學邊 寫。大概半年以後，你應該會成為博客專題的專家。

2. 讓你的內容更方便閱讀

我們現在離開你關心的領域—狗的用品，或者其他你正在做的—轉移到技巧方面來，以此讓你的內容更方便閱讀。和人類訪問者希望看到的圖片、文本內容不同，搜 索機器人看到的都是素材，比如HTML標籤、網頁標題、鏈結、粗體字標籤等等。HTML的變更並不是很快，但你也許會做錯事情的。所以你不要想著親自按照 別人的想法去做，明瞭一個事物的雙面性是必要的:

• 每個頁面只做一件理想的事.(這應該可以做好的).如果你有一個出售狗衣服的頁面,那麼這個頁面應該有:包含了 “狗衣服“這三個字的加粗部分;有狗衣服的圖片;你出售狗衣服的文章;該衣服屬性的描述.另外,還要有一些網站相關內容的引導鏈結,例如狗所有用品的鏈 接;描述你公司的鏈結(其中至少應該有公司的地址、你的郵件等聯繫資訊)；一個返回主頁的鏈結；等等。
• 每個頁面的標題應該是唯一的，並且確保它能夠正確及令人信服的描述了該頁的內容。如果你的頁面是狗的藍色服裝，那麼這個頁面的標題就應該包含“狗的藍色服 裝“，比如說“來某某網站給狗買件藍色的衣服“，而不應該是“某某網站“或者“某某網站銷售貓、狗的流行款式的內外衣” 。
• 謹慎使用帶有類如h1和h2這樣的粗體標籤、p這樣的段落、a這樣的鏈結形式組成的 markup滾動，確保網站符合HTML4或者XHTML1的官方標準。有許多方式來顯示網站的導航條，例如，使用動態的Flash、使用多層、使用下拉 框、或其他的JS腳本。這都可能犯錯誤，保持HTML的簡單，只有在必要的時候才使用JS腳本，Frame框架，使用CSS來佈置頁面是最好的。
• 確保每一個頁面簡單、穩定而且快速的讀取。例如，不要使用不同的URL，不要創建重定向 (redirects),不要使用過長且複雜的URL。簡單而穩定的網頁即方便人們收藏或者引用，也會讓搜索引擎，比如Google，做出可信任 “Trust”的評價。如果你的網頁是和狗的紅色服裝相關的，那麼它的 URL就應該是“網站名/衣服/紅色” 或者“網站名/產品/狗的紅色服裝.html”。

想做好這些要點不是很容易而且有時會犯錯，但你也不需要一次把所有事情都做好。理想的說，啟用一個你或者你的網站開發者能夠完全控制的CMS系統，並且制 作一個模版不失為一個好辦法。但在啟用前，最好做一定的測試，比如增加新的產品或者文章、調整所有的粗體字的大小、或者替換所有頁面的底部，如果你為此而 頭痛，那麼就證明系統選錯了。

3. 將你的內容告訴別人
在以前，人們為了優化他們的網頁，總是加入很多很多關鍵字。但今天的搜索引擎—對於搜索者來說非常幸運—已經不是那麼好騙的了。Google和其他的搜索 引擎除了關注你的網站，會更關注其他的網站來判斷你的網站的可信度…尤其是檢查鏈結到你網站的站點。因此你的網站的可信度越高，那麼在查詢的時候它的排名 就越高。那麼如何獲得其他網站的鏈結呢？你已經建立了優秀的內容(第一步驟)，你也讓你的網站可讀性更強而且容易去鏈結(第二步驟)，那麼剩下的工作就是 讓別人以鏈結你為榮，不是出於憐憫、也不是因為你保證交換鏈結、更不是因為你買下這些鏈結，只是因為你的內容能夠滿足自己的訪問者。

• 線下活動：去會議中心、交易會，任何人們可能產生興趣並希望瞭解網站的地方。
• 線上活動：製作網站內容的郵寄列表、參與新聞討論組和相關的論壇，尋找相關的分類目錄(比如Dmoz)並且提交自己的站點，和相關的管理員或者博客聯繫。 但是千萬不要過渡吹噓，這種自私自利會被認做是作弊“spam”。相反，你應該花點時間去幫助別人，例如，你可以給另一個網站寫篇文章。千萬不要象扔垃圾 似的到處亂貼你網站的URL，那樣你一定會被人家當垃圾清理出去的。
• 其他活動：電視臺是不是正在討論網站呢？好的，寫封信給他們，介紹下自己的網站，這沒什麼壞處的。努力的去挖掘對網站感興趣的人，比如報紙、電臺、雜誌或 者其他方式。也有一些其他的方式能夠有所幫助，比如做點滑稽的事(在背上塗好網站的名字然後去足球場上裸奔)或者在值得簽名的地方簽名(寫本書、拍照，無 論是否裸照)。對於狗的用品這個標題來說，你甚至可以訓練你的狗，讓它喊你的網站名，然後把整段視頻上傳到Youtube上，估計你肯定是頭條。
• 如果你有多餘的錢，那麼不妨在搜索引擎上做廣告，例如Google AdWords。但這並不等同於真正的排名結果，只是在網站的幼年期幫助你的網站更突出一些。
  另外，還要做什麼？

假如你完成了上面的工作—創建好的內容、讓內容更方便閱讀、將內容告訴給別人—那麼你可以歇息一會了，然後回來繼續完善你的網站。在起初的一兩個月不需要 擔心Google的收錄，事實上，根本別在意Google的收錄。在起步階段也許你的網站根本不會出現在搜索引擎中，也許會一直都不出現，而你的競爭對手 卻排名很好…別忘記這需要時間。(不要忘記自問下想排名更好的原因，除此之外還應該做什麼—如果你的競爭對手是一家大型的、廣為人知的、運轉良好的而且是 可信任的網站，那麼它的排名理應在你之前)。
在幾個月後，該幹什麼呢？就是去監督和審查你的網站，去發現人們發現你網站的各種關鍵字。不妨使用網站統計程式，比如 Google Analytics來協助你完成這個工作。這些統計程式需要你在網站中插入跟蹤的代碼，數天後，你就可以發現你哪一個頁面最優秀，哪一個頁面受到了搜索者 的青睞。然後在後面的工作中根據這些資料進行調整。
例如，當你發現非常青睞“製作狗鞋的心得“的頁面，那麼你就可以多創作這樣的內容，並且在“製作狗鞋的心得“的頁面加入一個看得見的鏈結，如“買狗鞋“。
另一個例子，當你發現總有一群人每天通過搜索“狗的藍色衣服”進入你的網站，而他們離開的頁面是出售“狗的藍色衣服”和“狗的紅色衣服”的頁面—換句話 說，也就是你的資料流程程讓人產生了“誤解”。但是呢，你提供的“狗的藍色衣服”的頁面一定存在的網站其他的地方，當你理解了這種情況，你就應該在人們進入 網站的地方加上一個鏈結，指向銷售“狗的藍色衣服”和“狗的紅色衣服”的頁面。
當然，一旦這些搜索引擎優化的基本工作完成後，你可以搜索更多的優化知識、閱讀更多的搜索博客、或者雇用一個搜索引擎優化的顧問。然而，一定要當心，你閱 讀的一些高級的秘笈可能會讓你後院起火、或者你雇錯了搜索引擎優化的顧問。下面是一個快速審查“優化“的列表，你應該盡力避免：

• 不要在不相關的地方堆積大量關鍵字
• 不要犧牲來訪者而專優化搜索引擎；如果有人建議你增加幾個功能變數名稱來協助排名，而你認為過多的功能變數名稱會誤導你的顧客，那就別加。
• 不要相信那些保證”快速排名第一”，”保證進入前10″之類的鬼話
• 不要鏈結那些許諾反鏈回來的網站
• 不要鏈結那些許諾付費的網站，除非你清楚知道你正在幹什麼(例如，你瞭解”壞鄰居”,”nofollow的屬性”,”PageRank”,”JS廣告和文本鏈結的區別”,”遭遇Google懲罰意味著什麼？”)

不要創建多份內容一樣的頁面

不要讓別人在你的網站留下垃圾的URL；如果你有一個論壇，堅持與Spam作戰

不要在別人的網站亂丟你的URL

不要使用廉價的伺服器，他們大多不能為你統計流量、建立相應的管理工具—如果你想擁有好的網站和伺服器，你應該付錢

不要過度擔心頁面的Meta標籤、Meta關鍵字或者其他。你的時間應該用在創建好的內容上

不要使用那些自動提交到分類目錄、搜索引擎等等的工具

不要向搜索引擎和用戶提交不同的內容；尤其是隱藏文本

不要過度優化，如果搜索引擎認定網站過度優化，那麼他們肯定會懲罰你的

簡單的說，不要自以為自己比搜索引擎更聰明(除非你決定花費畢生精力與之奮鬥)；搜索引擎已經有償的獎賞那些舉報作弊的站長，從長遠的眼光來看，作弊成功的機會很小

不管怎麼說，祝好運。

作者：Philipp Lenssen
文章：The Basics of Search Engine Optimization

Outsourcing Search Marketing

By Julie Batten, ClickZ, Apr 13, 2009

It’s the age-old question: should a business do everything in-house or should it outsource certain activities? Obviously there are advantages to each alternative, but in this time of economic uncertainty, more and more companies are looking to outsource non-core services and functions in hopes of saving money and improving operating efficiencies.

Currently, outsourcing is a pretty common practice for many information technology services. But when it comes to marketing, some companies seem hesitant to jump on the outsourcing bandwagon. Many maintain that they have in-house marketing departments that should be able to do anything a third-party specialist can do.

But what about online marketing, and search marketing in particular? Should companies be outsourcing these activities?

I say "absolutely" but I suppose I’m a little biased. However, there are some compelling reasons for doing so.

Rationale for Outsourcing Search Marketing Efforts

The top reason for considering outsourcing is that effective search marketing requires very specialized skills.

Not only does search marketing require a depth of understanding and experience in the field, it’s rarely successfully accomplished on the shoulders of one single person.

In actuality, it takes a whole team of people to execute a search marketing strategy:

• The marketing strategist to understand the brand and Web site business objectives and requirements, and communicate these to the team.
• The user experience specialist to make sure the Web site is optimized for conversions, there is clear path for visitors, and there are no roadblocks or abandonment points in the site.
• The search engine optimization specialist to undertake on-page and off-page SEO, including keyword research, selection and integration, and link building.
• The paid search specialist to develop, execute, and manage the paid search or PPC campaigns.
• The copywriter to ensure the site copy is tailored to the organic and paid keywords, as well as presents a strong call to action.
• The Web developer to implement changes recommend by the usability and SEO specialists.
• The Web administrator to ensure the Web site is fully functional, so that search engines are able to consistently access and crawl the site.
• The Web analytics manager to implement tracking on the search campaign and to report on key metrics.

Still think you have the required skills to do everything in-house?

If you don’t have all the above roles, it might necessitate some new hires or internal training to get where you need to be.

If you happen to have all of the above roles in your organization chart, congratulations! You may be among the few companies well positioned to do search in-house.

That said, there are often organizational constraints or barriers that encourage the use of outside assistance.

Because large organizations can often be multi-layered, they can sometimes face significant internal challenges for making search happen quickly and efficiently.

First, there may be internal disputes between functions regarding the importance of the search marketing initiative and it may be given lower priority, resulting in launch delays. For a search marketing vendor, search projects are their core business, so all of these projects are treated as priorities. These vendors can help you build a business case for search and champion the project within the organization.

Second, with the speed of change in search, a quick reaction time is vital. With search engine algorithms sometimes changing overnight and new advertisers entering the market place daily, successful search marketers must able to respond almost instantly.

As agencies don’t tend to experience the same level of bureaucracy that a larger client-side organization might, they tend to be more flexible to meet tight deadlines or respond quickly to environmental changes.

Finally, one of the most important reasons to consider outsourcing search marketing is the potential for improved return on investment! Since seasoned search marketers have a wealth of experience to draw from, as well as industry tools and resources at their disposal, they stand to produce better results than a company doing it itself. Although the upfront investment to work with a pro might be hard to swallow, the end results will more than likely pay off.

Biography

As the e-marketing manager at Klick Communications, Julie Batten is responsible for developing and managing online marketing campaigns for world-class brands. With a strong emphasis on search marketing activities, Julie conceptualizes digital marketing strategies to enhance clients’ online presences. She previously headed up the SEM practice at Non-linear Creations, where she managed the search marketing team to deliver exceptional results by means of both organic and paid search campaigns. Having written several whitepapers and articles, instructed online courses, and spoken at various seminars on the topic, Julie is well versed in all things search.

Extortion SEO Sanctioned by Google

By Frank Watson, Search Engine Watch, Apr 10, 2009

OK, forget arbitraging Google ads and link building. There’s a much more successful way to play Google these days — just build a site that can rank for companies or individuals and write crap about them. Once the posts start appearing in the search results, these entities will get in touch with you to remove them and you can charge them for it.

The king of these programs is Ripoff Report — the darling of Google. Matt Cutts has defended them and their right to publish defaming information — and he has two reports in there himself.

Inclusion of information like this makes me agree that the search engine results are "cesspools" — though Yahoo, Microsoft, and the other engines seem to be wise to Ed Magedson, the site’s founder.

Thanks Matt and Ed, I now know what to do.

The government has given the sites a pass with the enacting of The Communications Decency Act — the ruling that buffers sites from being held accountable for what others write on it.

"The Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, attempted to restrict Internet porn — and, at the same time, give Web sites special immunity. Under the act, Goldman says, ‘you can be aware of bad content, do nothing about it, and still not be liable for it,’" Eric Goldman, an assistant professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law and director of the High Tech Law Institute, told the the Phoenix New Times.

"Ironically, the Supreme Court struck down the porn part of the law soon after it was passed. But the exemption for Internet publishers stands. The U.S. Supreme Court has shown zero interest in entertaining a challenge to it, Goldman says, much less overturning it."

Hey, they’ve created an entire industry: reputation management. There’s money in helping people push such sites off the search results. But should sites that publish unsubstantiated stuff get the listings in Google, the engine concerned with the user experience?

Here are some views I received via Twitter about Ripoff Report:

• Jerry Nordstrom, founder of Lead Discovery: "Ripoff Report is a joke. Used by all sales reps to trash the competing company, then they point their prospects there."
• Ryan Sammy of Search and Social: "Its amazing Google allows a scammy website like that to be in their index. I’m a little surprised at Google."
• David Snyder, CEO, Search and Social: "It is a website that instead of helping the consumer, only further hurts the consumer as well as the business it is targeting. It is a game of extortion, that Google is not taking a stance against."

Most of the major industry blogs have written about this and yet Google has taken no action. What does that tell you? Google likes how they have 567 complaints against the Google profiteer companies?

OK, Matt. You’ve convinced me. I’m starting a site tomorrow and the first complaint will be about AdSense accounts closed with large sums of money owed. Or should it be about Google Analytics killing an entire industry.

One wonders if Magedson was one of the early pre-IPO investors in Google, the company has helped him get rich.

"He revels in his role as a true-blue advocate. But with at least 30 companies now paying him to mitigate bad reports on his Web site, Magedson is facing sticky ethical questions," the Phoenix News noted.

True, the law says it’s OK. But gambling advertising outside the U.S. was legal and Google pulled it. There are times when common sense should step in. That time is now.

Biography

Frank Watson has been involved with the Web since it started. For the past five years, he headed SEM for FXCM — at one time one of the top 25 spenders with AdWords. He has worked with most of the major analytics companies and pioneered the ability to tie online marketing with offline conversion.

He has now started his own marketing agency, Kangamurra Media. This new venture will keep him busy when he is not editing the Search Engine Watch forums, blogging at a number of authoritative sites, and developing some interesting online community sites.

He was one of the first 100 AdWords Professionals, a Yahoo and Overture Ambassador, and a member or mod of many of the industry forums. He is also on the Click Quality Council and has worked hard to diminish click fraud.

Operating Web Sites in Multiple Countries

By Eric Enge, Search Engine Watch, Apr 8, 2009

Setting up Web sites for multiple countries is a common problem for multinational businesses that want to have separate sites for each country where they do business.

For example, let’s say a U.K.-based business wants to operate Web sites in the U.S. and Australia. There are many reasons to do this. Two of the most important reasons:

1. Even though our example relates to three countries with the same language, there are still local differences in language. Adapting the site to deal with those differences creates a superior user experience.
2. The way people think about your products and services can also differ from country to country. As a result, the positioning of the products may need to be tweaked to adapt to those differences.

However, because these Web sites are all likely to be extremely similar to one another, there’s a real risk that the search engines will see them as duplicate content. Search engines don’t like it when people create new sites that are substantially copies of one another.

Intent Drives the Search Engine’s Objectives

We need to step back and take a clear look at the intent of the publisher. This is important because the publisher’s intent is what drives the search engine’s desired response.

In our example, the intent is to have one Web site for U.K. visitors, one site for Australian visitors, and another for U.S. visitors. The key here is that the intent isn’t to have the U.K., Australian, and U.S. sites ranking in all three countries, but to have each Web site ranking in one. Based on this intent, this doesn’t represent a duplicate content scenario.

As a result, the search engine’s objective will be to permit the intended behavior. After all, the publisher is trying to offer a better experience for users through local tailoring of the versions of the Web site. This is exactly in line with the search engine’s objectives.

A lot of publishers worry that search engines don’t support these publisher goals, and will try to block this approach, or that they don’t care. This isn’t the issue. Search engines want to support improved user experiences, as this makes their search engine better.

The real challenge is a technical one. Search engines don’t have humans reviewing every Web site to determine quality, or intent. They use dumb software programs (crawlers or spiders) that cruise the Web and try to figure out what’s going on. This is an extremely challenging process that’s prone to error.

To successfully get a multi-national Web site structure treated the way we want, we need to reduce the risk of that error. How? By giving the search engine as many clues as possible.

Help the Search Engines Help You

You can provide a variety of clues, and I recommend using them all if you can. Sometimes this may not be possible, but each one you don’t use increases the risk that the search engines will misunderstand what you’re trying to do. So let’s take a look at the best practices for getting your Web site to rank in different countries:

1. Host locally. The search engines can easily process the IP address of the Web site and recognize that it is "in-country."
2. Obtain a ccTLD. Use a .co.uk domain for the UK, a .co.fr for France, .com.au for Australia, and so forth.
3. Get local links. Get links from other Japanese sites to your Japanese Web site, links from other Hungarian Web sites to your Hungarian site, etc.
4. Geo-targeting with Google Webmaster Tools. Use the geo-targeting option in Google Webmaster Tools to tell Google where your intended market is for the site.
5. Language. Use local language variations. For example, "color" for the U.S. and "colour" for the U.K. In addition, if you can make other tweaks on the pages for local preferences as well, it’s a good idea to do so.
6. Provide local address information all your pages. For example, have your U.S. pages show a different address than your Brazilian pages.

Sadly, doing everything right doesn’t guarantee success, but these steps should result in success for the vast majority of publishers. If you run into problems, try posting a question in Google’s Webmaster Help Forum, and they may be able to help you out. Just remember, as long as you have the right intent, the search engines want you to succeed.

Biography

Eric Enge

Eric Enge is the president of Stone Temple Consulting, an SEO consultancy outside of Boston. Eric is also co-founder of Moving Traffic Inc., the publisher of City Town Info and Custom Search Guide.

Local Search 101, Part 2

By Ron Jones, Search Engine Watch, Mar 9, 2009

As a quick follow up to "Local Search 101, Part 1," I’d like to add that there’s a growing list of sites to get listed on. Keith Hagen, who commented on the article, posted this link to his site that keeps a list of local search engines and directories. It’s a good idea to check this list for more providers to get listed on, as the list will continue growing.

More Local Search Tactics

When it comes to local search SEO, it’s important to study your competition and find out where they have local link groupings. A local link grouping is a page on the Internet where all, or most of, your competitors get incoming links. Then focus on bundling your site into that grouping of local links.

Address citations are another way to build the quantity of references around your site. These references should contain a variation of your business name, address, phone, and Web site. Video is another factor you should consider, both as a good content and as a citation. Having a thumbnail and a local listing on the same search result will really help drive traffic.

Local Search Industry on Twitter

Do you use Twitter? If not, you should consider it. One nice thing about Twitter is that it gives you the ability to follow anyone who has set up an account and is posting mini articles, 140 characters or less (sometimes called microblogging). If you’re looking for a great site with a growing list of Twitter profiles that you can follow if you want to keep up with people or companies who are talking about local search, check out Matt McGee’s The List: Local Search Industry on Twitter.

While we’re on the subject of social media, it’s a good idea to not only link your corresponding location page to your Web site, but also your Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter page. These are just some of the ways to leverage social media for local SEO.

Mobile Search on the Rise

While traveling, have you ever found yourself needing to find a local restaurant or something specific at a store nearby? What do you do? Pick up your mobile phone and start searching for stores that are nearby that have what you want, right?

Well, that’s mobile search. It’s that simple. You aren’t concerned about which Web pages have the best links, PageRank or SEO.

Do you see the close correlation between mobile and local? This is a marketing vehicle you can’t ignore if you’re optimizing for local search.

The Kelsey Group recently published statistics on U.S. Mobile Local Search, which was also covered by ClickZ’s Enid Burns in "U.S. Mobile Ad Revenue to Grow Significantly through 2013":

• The percentage of mobile searches that have local intent will increase from 28 percent in 2008 to 35 percent in 2013.
• There are 54.5 million mobile Internet users in the United States, representing 25 percent of online users.
• Approximately 15 percent of iPhone applications are local.

As this industry grows, you’ll probably see more tools and applications that will help users search locally, especially for the iPhone. Google is also a major factor with Google Mobile and Google Mobile Ads. These are all great resources and tools for businesses that need to be found locally.

Join us for Search Engine Strategies New York March 23-27 at the Hilton New York. The only major search marketing conference and expo on the East Coast, SES New York will be packed with more than 70 sessions, plus more than 150 exhibitors, networking events, parties, and training days.

 

Biography

Ron Jones
Ron is President/CEO of Symetri Internet Marketing, which provides strategic SEM consulting and training. Ron is actively involved in the SEM community and speaks at conferences and seminars, as well as hosting regional SEM events where he provides participants SEM training and education best practices. Ron also serves on the Board of Directors for SEMPO and is also one of the authors for the SEMPO Institute Fundamentals and Advanced courses.

Local Search 101, Part 1

By Ron Jones, Search Engine Watch, Mar 2, 2009

As the economy opens the door of opportunity for many people who have lost their jobs, more small businesses are on the rise — and so is the demand for local search. Are you looking to venture beyond the printed yellow pages? You should be.

According to a SBI+M article, 54 percent of Americans have substituted the Internet and local search for phone books. Ninety percent of online commercial searches result in a local offline purchase and 61 percent of all local searches results in a transaction. Do I have your attention?

On-Page Factors: Make Sure Your Location is Visible

Your contact information should be on every page of your Web site. It can be frustrating for users visiting a site when they come to the point where they’re ready to buy, but they have to search around for a phone number or a local address.

Also, make sure the location of your store or office is on each page. Have multiple locations? List those as well. Place this information at the bottom of your pages or get creative and maybe develop a tagline that includes each location.

Optimizing each page for SEO is next. Make sure the various HTML tags on your page include your location info where appropriate. For more info see "Site Structure 101" or Search Engine Watch’s Search Engine Optimization section.

Solicit Local Links

Submit to directories and get your company listed. Look at directories that cater to your local market. Reach out to your local chamber of commerce and other Web directories local to your area, and ask them to link to your Web site.

Submit to Directories — It’s Free

Get listed with some specific sites that are designed just for local listings. For each business listing, make sure that your information is complete and correct and that it uses the same keywords you use on your Web site.

Here are the most notable ones:

• Superpages
• TrueLocal
• Local.com
• YellowPages.com
• Localeze
• MerchantCircle
• Hot Frog
• InfoUSA

Instead of taking you to the home page, I found links that will take you directly to the free submission. Most of these services allow you to upgrade to better features for a fee — in fact, they’re rather proactive at helping you upgrade, so beware.

Update or Add your Site on Local Search Engines

Just in case you’d like to do these one at a time, here are the links to the search engines where you can place your local listings:

• Google’s Local Business Center. You’ll need to set up a Gmail account prior to filling out the form.
• Yahoo’s Local Search. You’ll need to set up an account before you proceed with the listing.
• Live Search Local Listing Center. Yes, you guessed it. You’ll need to set up a Microsoft Live account.

You can also take advantage of a cool new tool, GetListed.org. That’s a one-stop shop for generating multiple listings. What a great idea!

Now that you’ve taken the time to set up your business listings, you’re on your way, but there’s still work to do. Reach out to your satisfied customers and ask them to come and rate your business and/or write a review. When people find you, they’ll likely find your competitors as well. Positive reviews will add more credibility and help you stand out in the crowd.

Next time: more tips on local search tactics, and the impact of mobile search and what you need to know about this growing market.

Join us for Search Engine Strategies New York March 23-27 at the Hilton New York. The only major search marketing conference and expo on the East Coast, SES New York will be packed with more than 70 sessions, plus more than 150 exhibitors, networking events, parties, and training days.

 

Biography

Ron Jones
Ron is President/CEO of Symetri Internet Marketing, which provides strategic SEM consulting and training. Ron is actively involved in the SEM community and speaks at conferences and seminars, as well as hosting regional SEM events where he provides participants SEM training and education best practices. Ron also serves on the Board of Directors for SEMPO and is also one of the authors for the SEMPO Institute Fundamentals and Advanced courses.

Is There Such a Thing as the Perfect SEO?

 

By Mark Jackson, Search Engine Watch, Mar 24, 2009

 

Wanted: A highly-skilled technical mind with the ability to write effective, usable Web content, and has years of experience in modifying Web sites to consistently rank for competitive keywords in Google. This Webmaster/SEO must have experience in domain acquisition, front-end development, usability expertise, analytics measurement and reporting and server maintenance skills. Also, must have years of experience with public relations/press release copywriting and distribution, blogging, RSS feed optimization, social media marketing, mobile marketing, and…

You get the picture.

I recently moderated a session at PubCon in Austin, Texas, about the intersection of SEO and PR. When I surveyed the audience, I found that one person in the room was in PR and most of the others were SEOs. Granted, this was a PubCon event and it’s not really known for bringing out the PR people.

However, it made me realize that SEOs are being asked to do an awful lot. And, I honestly don’t know how those folks who are the only SEO in-house keep up with this stuff. Companies seem to be demanding a lot from one person. Agencies even have a difficult time rounding up experts in each of these areas.

To me, a person who is technically-minded may not be the best person to handle writing your title tags, editing copy, or writing a press release. But, I’d never consider handling a SEO effort without that technical guy around. Conversely, I wouldn’t want my copywriter telling me how to set up our servers.

But, today, many companies are doing just that. They expect their SEO to be a jack-of-all-trades.

I asked Jessica Bowman, a well-known expert in in-house SEO, about this to see what her experience has been.

"Companies now have to be more selective in their needs; understand what they truly need from an in-house SEO," she said. "What makes a successful technical SEO isn’t always the same talent as what makes someone successful at PR, copywriting, and marketing strategies.

"When I go into companies to assess what they truly need to hire, oftentimes it’s different than what they expected — because SEO now needs to be intertwined with many different disciplines across the organization. Companies need to make sure that the person has the finesse, position, and rapport to interact with all of these different areas (IT, marketing, copywriting, and PR) and influence changes from the current way of doing things."

What about the SEO who is being asked to be the PR person? Bowman said she doesn’t see that happening.

"What I see more of is a PR or marketer or copywriter being asked to be the SEO person," she said. "When this happens, unless you use an agency to tell you what to do, you get minimal results because SEO is its own discipline, and the person assigned to SEO doesn’t get it, it’s a small percentage of their job, they cannot influence IT and, as a result, SEO sits on the back burner.

"We see a lot of non-SEO job descriptions that say ‘and must know SEO,’ which isn’t going to cut it these days, especially if your competitors are using a professional SEO and/or agency — and in search engines your competitors can also include sites such as universities, Amazon, Shopzilla, etc., who may want to also rank for your keywords and are doing SEO very well.

So, some companies are trying to make the SEO into a PR person and others are trying to make the PR person into an SEO. To me, you should have a mix of folks to adequately staff for SEO:

• Marketing-minded On-Page Person: This person is a fantastic communicator who "gets" your business and your objectives. They love research, and are able to use their findings from keyword research and competitive analysis to draft a content and marketing strategy. These people will help you to write your revised information architecture for your Web site, addressing any "holes" in your content, should they find that keywords that you should target have no content to optimize for those keywords. They will also be prolific in editing copy, and have years of experience in organic search, or multiple successful SEO projects under their belts (nothing beats experience). Many times, you can find folks in this area who are actually good copywriters.
• Technically-minded SEO Person: This person knows all of the technical pitfalls of a Web site. They probably read the Google patents and have a litany of tools that they use to analyze a Web site. They’re very comfortable with code, but may have communication issues.
• Social Media/Link Building Person: This person is all about driving authority for the Web site through link generation. They have built up an extensive network of "friends" and are able to parlay this into solid promotion of blogs and/or other promotions for your company.
• Project Manager: I’ve written before about SEOs having ADD. Some of the brightest people in this industry can get carried away with analysis paralysis (there’s so much to take in). Solid project management is key if you expect any work to get done and any results to be achieved.

Certainly, depending on the size of your efforts, you could hire a much more extensive team (copywriters, Web designers, Web developers, analytics experts, etc.).

But sometimes it makes sense to outsource this to a good SEO agency. You get a full complement of a team with varied expertise for about the cost of a very good in-house employee. But, unlike the in-house SEO expert, they aren’t completely dedicated to your business (they have other clients to serve).

If you happen to be a freak of nature who happens to be good at all of this, I’d love to hear from you.

 

Biography

Mark Jackson

Mark Jackson, President and CEO of Vizion Interactive, a search engine optimization company. Mark joined the interactive marketing fray in early 2000. His journey began with Lycos/Wired Digital and then AOL/Time Warner. After having witnessed the bubble burst and its lingering effects on stability on the job front (learning that working for a "large company" does not guarantee you a position, no matter your job performance), Mark established an interactive marketing agency and has cultivated it into one of the most respected search engine optimization firms in the United States.

Vizion Interactive was founded on the premise that honesty, integrity, and transparency forge the pillars that strong partnerships should be based upon. Vizion Interactive is a full service interactive marketing agency, specializing in search engine optimization, search engine marketing/PPC management, SEO friendly Web design/development, social media marketing, and other leading edge interactive marketing services, including being one of the first 50 beta testers of Google TV.

Mark is a board member of the Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association (DFWSEM) and a member of the Dallas/Fort Worth Interactive Marketing Association (DFWIMA) and is a regular speaker at the Search Engine Strategies and Pubcon conferences.

Mark received a BA in Journalism/Advertising from The University of Texas at Arlington in 1993 and spent several years in traditional marketing (radio, television, and print) prior to venturing into all things "Web."

Choose the Right SEO Project Goals

By Eric Enge, Search Engine Watch, Mar 25, 2009

Picking the right goals is key to the success of any SEO effort. A surprising number of companies focus on what they think are the right goals, but end up being dead wrong.

When the wrong goal is selected, SEO energy gets invested in the wrong ways and the ROI on the SEO project ends up being lower. Let’s look at a few examples of non-optimal goals.

Rankings

This remains a very popular goal for many businesses. People frequently contact us and let us know that their goal is to rank number one for a particular search term. The problem with this goal: new businesses generally don’t get top rankings.

Imagine that they succeed at their goal of ranking number one for their term. Perhaps they increase their Web site sales by 10 percent as a result. This is indeed a good result, right?

But, what if they could have taken the same SEO energy and increased relevant traffic to the site by 20 percent, and grown sales by 20 percent? With 70 percent of the relevant traffic to a site generally coming from long tail terms, this scenario is actually pretty likely.

The SEO strategy to drive relevant long tail traffic isn’t the same as it is to drive a single term to the number one position. So would you prefer a 20 percent increase in business or a 10 percent increase? Granted, we shouldn’t discount the branding value of being number one, but most businesses would rather get the extra cash.

Traffic

A lot of companies focus on increasing their traffic. This is closer to the right goal, but many companies can also run into problems here. The problems with it were outlined very nicely by Market Motive’s John Marshall in "Don’t Buy Traffic, Buy Intent."

Imagine that you could double the traffic to your Web site. Sounds good, right?

Well, if the traffic isn’t relevant, it might not be so good. Maybe you end up with only a 10 percent increase in sales. Whereas if you bring in 20 percent more traffic that has strong buying intent, you might be able to increase sales by 20 percent. Which would you choose?

"X" New Links Per Month

This is a popular goal. Some people believe that they need 50 new links per month. The cousin of this is seeking out a target cost per link, which I covered in "Cost Per Link is a Bad Metric."

If someone tells me that they will be happy if we give them 50 links per month, I can contract that work out to India for $500 or so, give them 100 links per month, do no work at all (because our contractors doubled their goal), and look like a hero (for a while).

The problem is that those 100 links may have marginal results on their business, and really do little to grow it. Also bear in mind that in the world of link building that one link can easily be worth 10,000 times more than another link, if it’s from an authoritative and relevant site.

The other danger to this metric is that it can push you mentally down the path of buying links. That is a dangerous game to play, and one you should avoid.

Summary

The problem with poorly selected goals is that it focuses your energy in the wrong directions. Sadly, we have a grim example unfolding in front of us of how a poorly selected set of goals can come back haunt you. I’m referring to the current recession, which was clearly driven by sales-at-any-cost goals, resulting in a lot of financial institutions taking on bad debt (because it increased sales), which looked great until they couldn’t collect on the debt.

This idea of picking the right goals applies almost anywhere you look in life. In the world of SEO, you need to tie your SEO goals as tightly as you can to the broader goals of your business.

If your goal is to increase sales, leads, or impressions (for advertising-based sites), tie your SEO goals to those metrics. You’ll be glad that you did.

 

Biography

Eric Enge
Eric Enge is the president of Stone Temple Consulting, an SEO consultancy outside of Boston. Eric is also co-founder of Moving Traffic Inc., the publisher of City Town Info and Custom Search Guide.

The Decision-Making Funnel, Stage 1: Awareness

 

By Tim Ash, Search Engine Watch, Mar 18, 2009

In "Landing Pages and the Decision-Making Process," I described the well-known AIDA conversion sales funnel and how it governs all Web conversions. The AIDA stages are:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

Let’s examine the first of these in more detail.

Awareness, and its close cousin attention, are scarce commodities in our fast-paced world. We’re constantly bombarded by information and strong sensory impressions. Unceasing advertisements haunt us from our first waking moments to our exhausted slumber at the end of the day.

The pace of change keeps increasing and threatens to overwhelm us. The Internet has given us access to a vast wealth of information, but hasn’t helped us to organize or make sense of it.

There’s only one possible response: build walls. People learn to tune everything out.

You can call them cynical, jaded, or media savvy. But it really boils down to the same thing: they have to get desensitized to survive. So it takes more effort for an advertiser to break through the clutter and noise to reach their target audience.

Permission Marketing

As Seth Godin points out in his excellent book "Permission Marketing," this type of interruption advertising may still be necessary to make initial contact, but it should only be followed up with voluntary permission marketing once a visitor lands on your site. Permission marketing is a selfish and voluntary activity on the part of your Web visitor. Over time you can trade things of greater value to the visitor in exchange for more information and a deeper level of relationship with them.

Permission marketing has three key attributes:

• Anticipated: Your prospects actually want to hear from you.
• Personal: Your messages are tailored to each person.
• Relevant: Your messages relate directly to visitors’ needs.

Let’s look at the mindset of visitors during the awareness stage. They have just arrived at your site. Their level of commitment is very low and they may click away at any moment.

They’re looking for reassurance, recognition of their needs, and a clear path to follow. If something catches their eye, they may stay and explore further.

The Rules of Web Awareness

• If the visitor can’t find something easily, it doesn’t exist.
• If you emphasize too many items, all of them lose importance.
• Any delay increases frustration.

Unfortunately, instead of going into a permission marketing mindset, most companies stay in interruption marketing mode on their landing pages. The elements of the landing page continue to scream, shout, and demand the visitor’s attention. This is done through the use of bold color blocks, bright images and graphics, and large font headlines — all trumpeting different items to click on.

Banner Ads

A big awareness thief is the third-party (or in-house) ad on your own landing pages. It’s an invitation to throw away your visitors’ attention and transport them to another Web site. Ads are specifically designed to grab awareness.

Banner ads in particular are known for using bright, dramatic colors and provocative headlines. Many banner ads include animation and flashing colors to get noticed.

Because most Web sites don’t control the exact ads that will run on their pages, this is an invitation for disaster. A single banner ad can radically shift the attention away from your intended conversion action. Unless your primary business model is advertising supported, ads should be eliminated from your site, or at least radically deemphasized.

Entry Pop-ups

The absolute best way to destroy someone’s attention is the use of entry pop-ups. These are floating windows that appear in front of your landing page as soon as it loads into the visitor’s browser. Such pop-ups typically include a call-to-action, such as filling out a form or clicking on a link leading to a special offer. Regardless of how they are technically implemented, they require an interaction by the visitor in order to deal with them.

This means that the visitor must complete the intended action, or at least click on the pop-up in order to close and dismiss it from your computer screen. In effect, entry pop-ups prevent you from getting to the content of the landing page and are seen as an unwelcome surprise by most Web users.

Entry pop-ups represent the most blatant kind of in-your-face interruption advertising. They will anger, annoy, frustrate, and distract your visitors before they even see your landing page. Worst of all, using entry pop-ups shows really poor thinking on the part of the marketer responsible for their creation.

If the pop-up’s desired conversion action is your most important one, then it properly belongs on the landing page itself. If the conversion action on the landing page is different than the one in the pop-up, then the two can be displayed on the landing page side by side, instead of resorting to use of the pop-up. By emphasizing one or the other through the use of visual cues on the landing page, you can control their relative importance and steer people toward the more desirable one.

Entry pop-ups are an indication that your ability to prioritize is severely impaired and that you don’t trust your actual landing page to get the job done on its own. It’s absolutely unnecessary to compete with your own landing page, and in the process alienate the vast majority of your visitors.

Exit Pop-ups

The effect of exit pop-ups isn’t as clear. These are similar to entry pop-ups but appear only when someone is clicking away from your landing page or Web site. Exit pop-ups may try to entice you with a last-minute promotion, ask you to sign up for an e-mail newsletter in exchange for your contact information, or gather survey information about your reason for leaving.

All of these can be seen as secondary conversion actions that have value to you. Because your primary conversion action didn’t happen, you can at least try to extract a little extra value from your visitor stream (especially if you’re paying to get them there).

This may seem to contradict what I wrote earlier about competing for attention with your own landing pages. But it doesn’t — you’re competing for attention with your Web visitors’ next destination. They have already made the decision to move on, and in a sense you have nothing to lose. A final dose of interruption marketing may salvage a tiny fraction of these people.

Of course, taken to an extreme this may frustrate people and leave them with a negative impression of your company. So be judicious in your use of exit pop-ups.

Home Page Awareness

Single-purpose landing pages are relatively easy to streamline for attention. By contrast, home pages are hard. Home pages are often burdened with demands put on them by every functional department within a company.

One of their many duties is to serve as a landing page (for type-in traffic, SEO traffic, some PPC traffic, and inbound links from other Web sites). Because of their many other legitimate functions, they are often severely compromised as landing pages.

Next time, we’ll examine the interest stage.

Biography

Tim Ash
Tim Ash is the president of SiteTuners.com, a performance-based landing page optimization company. During his Internet career, Tim has worked with companies like American Express, Sony Music, Black&Decker, eBags, American Honda, and McAfee (HackerSafe). He has chaired Internet conferences and spoken internationally at such industry events as Search Engine Strategies, PC Expo, the Affiliate Summit, eComXpo, and Internet World. Tim is a frequent columnist and writer on conversion improvement, and is the author of Amazon’s e-commerce bestseller book Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions (John Wiley & Sons Press, 2008).

How to Use Search to Calculate the ROI of Awareness Advertising

By Augustine Fou, ClickZ, Mar 12, 2009

What is the return on investment of search, social marketing, or digital marketing or advertising in general? To me, ROI had always been calculated from sales. And I was curious why advertisers and marketers were not constantly asking for ROI for television, print, and radio campaigns while they kept harping on it with digital and social marketing. Then, it occurred to me that advertisers and marketers could have very different definitions for the term ROI. Perhaps there is indeed a way to reach common ground on the definition of ROI and use it to compare campaigns that run in different media or channels.

The ROI of Traditional Media? You Kidding Me?

To some, return on investment meant the reach and frequency they achieved (e.g. on television); to others it was the number of impressions of display ads that were delivered; to others it meant the number of clicks through to a Web site, unique visitors per month, time spent on-site, or even number of fans on their Facebook page. And they would perceive that they got a better ROI if subsequent campaigns achieved greater reach and frequency, impressions, unique visitors, etc. or they achieved the same level at lower cost.

More often than not, these parameters cannot be directly related to sales. For example, a television ad reaches incredible numbers of people — perhaps even the right people. And, studies will even show greater brand recall or affinity. But no one knows for sure whether the customer recalled the message sometime in the future when they were actually about to buy whatever was being advertised. The standing joke in the advertising industry, attributed to department store merchant John Wanamaker decades ago, goes, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half."

Well, that’s just not good enough. And to imply that "half" the advertising does work is probably 50x too generous. There are some sandpaper approximations (i.e. very rough) that use surveys ("did you end up buying the product") or panels ("what percent of the panel ended up buying the product") to attempt to correlate the above metrics to sales. For example ComScore requires a brand to have at least 80 million display-ad impressions before it can even give an approximation of sales using their panels. Why? Because the intersection of people on their panel with people who may have seen a display ad is so minuscule, they can’t find enough people to ask "did you buy the product?"

These rough approximations also fail to take into account real life. The difference of a few people saying they did end up buying (versus not buying) out of the small number of people on the panel, extrapolated to tens or hundreds of millions of impressions will lead to massively different answers in the approximation of ROI. These methods do not account for outside forces like:

• I saw the ad, I liked the ad, I recalled the ad — but I just bought a car and won’t buy another one no matter how much I liked the ad.
• I saw the ad, I remembered it, I went online to do more research — but I could not find the answer to how this quad-core microprocessor was different than another quad-core microprocessor that was half the price so I just bought the cheaper one instead
• Or, I saw the ad and recalled it, but I don’t need a new insurance policy until next year when my current one expires.

Relating Awareness Advertising to Online Consumer Actions

Many advertisers still use the approximations of reach and frequency as a measure of success or ROI for campaigns. Others are starting to use more precise measurable online metrics such as banner ad impressions, unique visitors to a site, page views, or time-on-site as campaign goals or key performance indicators, or KPIs (define). But these metrics are still not great indicators of program success, especially if ROI is calculated from "sales."

In the column, "Social Intensity: A New Measure for Campaign Success?" we propose search volume or social intensity as better indicators of not only recall, but also interest and intent — e.g., people search heavily just prior to a purchase and they ask friends for input about the impending purchase. But how do we know who is searching and when? We don’t (ahead of time). But the point is, when they do search, that’s the best time to provide consumers with the information they need to make an informed purchase decision and help move them expeditiously toward the purchase. This is why search advertising is rising and display advertising is waning — search simply maps better to modern consumers’ well-demonstrated behaviors. This even applies to low-consideration, low-cost, and impulse products — modern consumers will even search for nutritional information for canned soup or pouch tuna.

In fact, there is finally evidence of TV advertising’s effectiveness. The Super Bowl ads of Denny’s, GoDaddy, Vizio, and Hyundai drove detectable lift in search volume around those terms for the day of the Super Bowl and the following two days. There is also lift in search volume upon launch of a new product, especially noticeable when a made-up word is used — e.g. Subway "Footlongs." There was no search volume on "footlongs" before the ad campaign and there is a spike in search volume when the campaign is running. In each example, the viewer not only saw the commercial, but they recalled it, and they made the effort to go perform a search online. People who are not considering a purchase are unlikely to have taken the trouble to do so.

Using Search to Relate Awareness Advertising to ROI

So, once you can correlate awareness advertising to an indication of interest and intent — search volume during the time the ads were being aired — then you can correlate the lift in search volume to the lift in a site’s unique users, again during the same time period.

Assume the site is well SEO-ed (search engine optimized) and assume that certain search results map to specific pages of the site that are specifically useful to the person searching. Then, there’s a way to correlate that visitor or group of visitors to a sale (e.g. e-commerce on the site) or a proxy for offline sales like printing a coupon, whose subsequent redemption rate is well known from the advertisers’ own historical data.

With this correlation, you have a pathway that leads to sales that are attributable to specific campaigns, and hence a way to calculate ROI. This pathway may even corroborate other methodologies that used rough approximations to calculate ROI, and thus lead to greater confidence in the resulting ROI number for any campaign.

Tips for Running Awareness Campaigns to Calculate ROI

• Ensure that online destinations are set up prior to launching paid awareness campaigns. So when people go online to search and do research after being inspired by the awareness campaign, they will find you and the specific information they are looking for.
• Use made-up words when possible, so lift in search is detectable. Brand names that are also generic words like axe, tag, open, etc. will not be detectable about the noise of unrelated searches containing the same word.
• Search-engine optimize your site and online assets, so specific information can be found and is mapped specifically to the "missing link" the potential customer is trying to solve.
• Have detailed analytics in place to measure the "conversion funnel" that can end in a sale or another action and is a known proxy for sales (e.g. advertiser knows X percent of coupons printed online get redeemed with a purchase offline.)

Biography
Dr. Augustine Fou helps clients develop digital marketing programs or improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness existing campaigns via advanced analytics, social marketing, and digital strategy. You can follow him on Twitter: @acfou. He has over 12 years of Internet strategy consulting experience and client service. He is an expert in data mining, analytics, and consumer insights research, with specific knowledge in the consumer payments, packaged goods, food/beverage, retail/apparel, and healthcare sectors. Fou completed his PhD at MIT at the age of 23 and served with the New York office of McKinsey & Company. He is an adjunct professor at New York University in the Integrated Marketing Department of the School for Continuing and Professional Studies.