Archive for the ‘web-design’ Category

3 Ways to Use Data to Advance Your Search Performance

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Search marketers are lucky. Really, we are. We get to work in a medium where we have access to real-time data and can adjust our strategies and execution nearly as quickly.

No matter how much we may gripe about the engines’ “black box” algorithms, we can’t argue with performance and a lot of deep data that we can get our hands on.

For some, that might be a curse. Like a paella-laden Estelle Costanza might say, “what are we supposed to do with all this data?”

Use it. And keep using it. Then find more data, and use that too.

Test, implement, analyze.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

1. Expand Your Keyword Lists

Building out and refining your keyword lists is a good example. Everyone knows the value of the long tail in helping lower CPCs.  And yet we all know the tendency to throw everything in there and come up with a list that’s unwieldy and impossible to manage.

When it comes to finding the right keywords for your account, there are lots of tools available, whether free options from Google, a third-party system, or an agency’s own proprietary tool. But there’s a lot of value in pouring through search query reports to find long tail and negative recommendations.

By matching the query to the credited keyword and then analyzing the return on that query, you can identify where to find lower CPCs or reduce waste by adding negatives for non-converters.

A more refined approach is to leverage the conversion rate, cost and revenue to come up with a projected contribution margin for typed keywords.  Then match those with what’s currently in your account. Missing keywords with high CMs go into your long tail; negative CMs go into your negatives.

For example, if you have a keyword “Acme brown widgets” and find that Google is matching up the query “extra large Acme brown widgets” to it, look at the performance of that keyword for each time it’s matched to that query.  Subtract cost from revenue to find the contribution margin (or divide if you prefer to organize by ROAS) telling you how profitable that query is.

If it’s high, add the longer tail “extra large Acme brown widgets” to your keyword lists and the ensuing lower CPCs will bring even greater margin. If it’s lower, “extra large” may be a good negative keyword for this campaign.

acmechart

Just be sure to run a similar report after these new keywords have garnered traffic and refine as necessary.

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SEO & Website Redesign: Relaunching Without Losing Sleep

Monday, May 16th, 2011

It should go without saying, but SEOs, developers and designers must work together cohesively during the site redesign process.

Too often, companies look to refresh the look of their site, and in the end, destroy their search engine presence. How? This can come from a myriad of reasons from coding errors, SEO unfriendly design practices, to even more disastrous practices (e.g., content duplication, URL rewriting without redirection, information architecture changes away from search engine friendly techniques).

Starting the redesign process with a collaborative call between the SEO team, designer, developer, and company decision maker(s) is always the best first step.

Often there are two attitudes present. Either, “We are redesigning our site and are not open to your ideas…but don’t let us do anything wrong,” or the other attitude (and my favorite), “Let’s work together to achieve a refreshed look and functionality and instill any missing SEO opportunities if possible.”

To satisfy both scenarios, your information delivery as the SEO should be to inform designers and developers of the mistakes you shouldn’t make and also to announce to all parties what SEO revisions should be made to the site along with what search engines have recently been paying attention to.

Page Load Time

A site redesign gives you the opportunity to re-code, condense externally referenced files, and achieve faster load times.

Don’t let the designer use the word “Flash” during your call(s). In an attempt to make a new site look pretty, the reliance on multimedia usage can have a negative effect on site speed. Ignoring this is bad, as Google has stated in the last year that site speed is a ranking consideration – also, slower sites annoy users.

Content Duplication

Ensure that your development environment or beta sections of the site are excluded from search engine’s view. Relaunching your site when these elements have been indexed by the engines means your cool new site is a duplicate and you will be in a mad dash trying to redirect the development environment that was leaked. Also, make sure there are no live copies on other servers that have visibility with the search engines.

Another form of content duplication is the creation of new URLs without properly redirecting old URLs via a 301 permanent redirect. This will leave search engines wondering which page should be ranked.

It’s also worth mentioning that 301s are a must and that 302 temporary redirects should not be used. Make it commonplace in the redesign process that no one used the word delete in reference to site content. You should never delete any pages, these should be permanently redirected to the most relevant launching page.

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5 Tips on Building Brand Loyalty via Twitter

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

A social platform like Twitter isn’t a sales driver; it’s a far subtler marketing tool.

The public doesn’t like to be harangued with sales messages when they’re socializing. They don’t want it in the pub and they don’t want it online.

But Twitter still has an immense value, even if it’s hard to measure. It’s superb for building brand loyalty, as long as you approach it in the right spirit.

Last year, a U.S. study by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate found that 79 percent of consumers who follow a brand on Twitter are more likely to recommend that brand compared to before they followed them.

It’s hard to put a price on that kind of word-of-mouth publicity and shows the value of having a popular Twitter identity.

So, here are my five top tips for building brand loyalty through Twitter.

Tweet Something Worthwhile

This is a basic tip, but it’s sadly often overlooked. What will your corporate Twitter account actually say and will it be anything that people want to read?

You’ll never follow a brand that relentlessly churns out marketing messages, even if you like the actual product or service. Who would?

Some brands also retweet every favorable mention of themselves, which is fine in small doses but gets a bit tiring if they are constantly bringing these tweets to your attention (price comparison websites are particularly bad for this).

Every message you post should provide some value for the reader, unless it is such good publicity that you simply have to share it.

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The Top 10 Things to Consider When Searching for a Professional SEO Company

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

Nowadays, it seems that everyone does search engine optimization, or at least make the claim. But it’s more than just developing good content and slapping on a few meta tags. True SEO takes a lot of research, implementation, monitoring, and time. It truly is its own service. I suggest seeking out a company that specializes in SEO for the best results possible.

When it comes to shopping around for a quality SEO company, many are not sure where to begin. There are multitudes of SEO companies out there offering different services at different rates. That being said, I have put together a list of what I believe to be the “top 10 things to consider” when looking for the right Search Marketing agency – A guide to finding your diamond in the rough.

1. Guarantees specific rankings

No reputable SEO company will ever make such a claim! It states within the Google Webmaster Guidelines,”No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” And no companies run Google or have any “insider secrets” to their complex ranking algorithm. Google does not just hand out #1 rankings. If they did, I would be out of a job.

2. Offers instant results

Rankings take time. It can take weeks to months for a page to increase in Google search results. Plus, your site will be competing against other sites for relevancy and popularity.

3. Guarantees an amount of Inbound links

The important thing to focus on is your content – keep it fresh and relevant. It can take time, but you want your links to be valuable. Quality inbound links are created by humans and can be born and die at any time, so they cannot be guaranteed – be sure the company does NOT buy the links.

4. Does not offer understandable reports

You want to know where all your money is going, right? And wouldn’t it be great to be informed on what keywords have risen and dropped in rankings? If they cannot offer concrete results, there is something wrong.

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Are Your PPC Ads Converting?

Monday, February 14th, 2011

To convert you need to understand the basic of choosing your keywords for your ads and crafting your landing page.

The more specific is your keywords in your PPC ads, the more targeted it is because you will not be competing against a broad term where millions webpage will be using the same word, for example, the word “fashion”. To cut off the competition use long tail keywords phrase like “teens fashion boots” instead if that is what you are promoting.

Make sure that your ads are designed to target for your landing page. In other words, your keywords in your landing page are the same ones as that of your ads. So, like in the above example, your landing page must contain the keyword phrase “teens fashion boots”.

The reason why people click on the PPC ads was because of certain keywords that have attracted them towards the ads. Perhaps they saw something very familiar to what they have in mind when they first started out searching for something?

How to have a successful PPC campaign? First, you find a product you will be promoting for a sale or to generate a lead. It is the same principle that applies to all marketing campaign if you want to make a sale or a lead out of it.

Then you have your lending page to generate leads or sell. If it has only feature and less benefit, you will have lower conversion rate if you cannot provide to your visitors the expectations of your products and services.

Read more here!

Facebook Fan Pages – 5 Essentials for a Fan Page

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

Increasingly, companies, TV shows, including Internet sites use Facebook pages to air their products or services, as well as gain more users and interact with them more directly.

Facebook Fan Page 5 Essentials:

1. Create custom tabs Custom Ads.

Tips on Facebook pages.

Promote your trade name page is very important. One of the major features of the new pages of Facebook is that you can link directly to specific tabs. That means you have the possibility of setting up what pages users access based on default Ad in which they have clicked. For example, perhaps you would like to point to two groups of users in different geographic locations. Could you show an advertisement to citizenries in Buenos Aires and those users will land on the user’s specific page of Buenos Aires. A Different page will show for those who come from elsewhere.

While this system is not necessarily the most scalable (for example, have 50 flaps does not make sense), can positively determine the conversion of some visitants into fans. This method also commands dropping a little more customization, but I think it is necessary for brands and small companies.
2. Do not let the users fall in the Wall.

Facebook pages.

Why is that? Well, I think the most likely to encounter things that interest you. It is a good opportunity to present good info to these new users, although the information provided by the existing fans can be interesting, you have no control over it. So it is better than new visitants from entering an area moderated info and then proceed to pilot the rest of the most dysfunctional.

Yes, the wall may be very valuable to allow users to intercommunicate with you, your brand, but unfiltered waters are the last place you should let the new user to navigate. Give them a safe entering into the murky waters we call “social media” and will thank you.


READ MORE HERE!

Is Link Relevance as Effective as Anchor Text?

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

Recently, I’ve been writing a lot about getting away from repeatedly using the same keyword-based anchor text (which may lead to a hop into the Google penalty box) and steering toward a larger variety of keywords and brand building with company names as the anchor text instead.

So if you quit obsessing on anchor text with the keywords you want to rank for, how will you be able to rank for those terms?

Where to Find Relevant Links

Don’t focus on where you can get keyword anchor text. Instead, focus on where you can get links on pages with strong relevance to the keywords for which you want to rank, or links that use other ways to correlate to the keyword aside from anchor text.

For example, if your website’s main keyword is “web design,” you could get a variety of links on pages that are relevant to web design using your business name as anchor text on sites such as:

Read more here!

Get Your SEO Firm Involved Before the Redesign

Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

Redesigns are difficult, time intensive, frequently expensive, and often frustrating. Religious wars can be waged over anything and everything (the messaging, style, imaging, layout, and infrastructure, etc).

These wars can create the kind of hostility and hard feelings that can last for years within an organization.

Redesigns can become contentious because the dedicated actors within organizations frequently have very different beliefs about the makeup and future of a company. The worst thing that can happen is that subject opinion blossoms into a vision that won’t be compromised under any circumstance.

There are a couple important reasons you should never wait until after the redesign to get your search engine optimization firm involved:

  • A sound SEO strategy can help swing internal debates such as choosing the right platform, programming language, and layout.
  • Getting an SEO involved early in the process will remove the possibility of additional development work after the launch.

If you don’t have an SEO firm, select one that can effectively communicate and coexist with your development firm. Try asking bidding development firms to recommend a search company with whom they’ve already had successful engagements.

While some might consider this a conflict of interest, copacetic agency coexistence can reduce petty sniping and encourage cooperative collaboration. This will reduce the cost of the project, mitigate risk, and assist in meeting the launch date.

Click here to read full story.


Does Your Website Make Customers Cringe?

Monday, September 13th, 2010

The trick to a successful e-commerce site is making transactions easy and enjoyable for customers.

If you design a gorgeous website, use search engine optimization to generate steady traffic, and add a shopping cart and store, your online sales will manage themselves, right?

Well, despite the plethora of easy-to-use web tools available for running a business online, it turns out you’ve got to keep a close eye on your e-commerce game. If sales are flat or declining, don’t just question the quality of your product offerings and pricing.

Consider something more basic: Your website might be turning away customers.

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Aol logos fail the fax test

Friday, August 6th, 2010

In December AOL released a number of logos as part of their rebranding. Here are of the logos:

aol logo designs

Not really to my taste but we can see they’re trying to be more creative and take advantage of wider colour palettes available online. Unfortunately, they fail the fax test.

The Logo Fax Test is really just taking your prospective logo and changing it into 1 channel colour. That will simulate how it will look when you fax it through a standard machine.

It is important to apply the logo fax test as it will show you how it appears via fax, but also shows you how transferable your logo is in different scenarios. Will your logo look good on a t shirt, mug, or ball cap. What about as a temporary tattoo? Any logo that passes the fax test will also look good in other forms of media.

Not the AOL Logos – they all fail the Logo Fax Test:

AOL Fails the logo fax test