Posts Tagged ‘free seo tips’

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Yahoo Microsoft Search Alliance Good or Bad for Search Marketing?

Friday, March 25th, 2011

Earlier this week, Microsoft shared some numbers from the Microsoft-Yahoo Search Alliance (search and advertising deal), which saw Bing powering the back-end of Yahoo Search, and the merger of Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter.

“The data showed that from August 2010 to December 2010 Search Market Query Share for Bing rose 7.25%,” wrote Microsoft’s Paul Greenwood. “During this same period Google gained .61%. Impressions for adCenter advertisers was up 4%, clicks up 2%, and costs roughly flat. CPC was consistently below Google.”

Microsoft has now posted the following bullet points from a Search Engine Strategies NY session led by Dr. Niraj Shah on the Microsoft Advertising Blog:

Stats of Paid Search Performance Relative to Google

- CTR was roughly equivalent to Google but declined from November
- CPC was consistency below Google; trending downward trend post-transition

Stats Search Conversion Rate and CPA

- Conversion rates dipped during transition but ended 2010 13% higher
- Cost per action (CPA) increased during transition but finished 17% lower

How do we wrap this up? Where do advertisers go with this information?

- Early movers can gain an edge.
- Instead of now having to manage across three engines you can narrow down. – Saving time and becoming more efficient.
- Favorable CPC’s and cheaper clicks and conversions.
- Improved reach and volume drivers greater consistency and manageability
- Favorable CPC and conversion environment (for now)
- Strong performance characteristics imply a higher ROAS than before

Best practices for search alliance success

- Identify coverage gaps between Microsoft Advertising adCenter and Adwords
- Pay attention to geo-targeting and match type settings when transitioning campaigns
- Bid adCenter keywords at the Match-type Level
- Adjust budgets to account for increased volumes
- Set alerts to identify and expand high performing terms

Bing Director Stefan Weitz said, “Because we’re actually powering Yahoo, and not necessarily being Yahoo, Yahoo has the ability (and are doing a great job) innovating on the front-end user experience. So they take our great core results, and on top they can apply their secret sauce…For consumers, what it gives them, is two really different experiences, and depending on which one you like for a particular query, you get to have those experiences. It’s great for consumers.”

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5 Steps for Crafting an Effective B2B SEO Blogging Strategy

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

Search engine marketers frequently recommend blogging as a tactic for achieving search engine optimization (SEO) goals. B2B marketers have consistently recommended blogging as a communication vehicle and brand awareness tool for the company, but developing a strategy that accomplishes both of these goals isn’t always easy.

The Argument for B2B Blogging

Some may argue blogging is a “dying initiative.” A study conducted in 2010 would position blogging as such, and even a “blog post” written in The New York Times highlighted the point. Before jumping on that bandwagon, consider two points.

  1. While writers were quick to identify how millennials (ages 18 to 33) are moving away from blogs, most older generations were gravitating to them. As a result, from 2008 to 2010, blogging actually rose 3 percent as an Internet activity among all adults.
  2. Consider what is taking the place of the blog: social sites like Facebook and Twitter. I wouldn’t advocate ignoring platforms at the expense of a blog. Remember this: with a company blog strategy, the organization owns (and controls) the content and discussion (assuming the organization isn’t using a hosted solution like Blogger or a WordPress hosted blog).

Proper organization is important to an effective B2B blogging strategy. Here are five organizational methods that help B2B companies achieve success with their blogging strategies.

1. Define Objectives

This is the most critical step. Defining objectives helps the organization create a focused content strategy, including topics that will be developed, tone, and helping with the identification of the appropriate writing personnel.

Objectives differ. Examples include:

  • Support for their SEO strategy.
  • Industry thought leadership.
  • Support customer service and/or sales initiatives in the field.

These objectives have potentially different audiences that will need to be considered. With multiple stakeholders potentially in the mix, the layout and agreement on objectives is imperative.

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How to Configure Analytics for Your Small Business Website

Monday, February 21st, 2011

Being able to measure the performance of your web site is of critical importance if you’re doing any marketing at all. Although the accuracy and transparency of measuring the performance of advertising campaigns on the web has never quite lived up to its promise, it’s still infinitely better than anything marketers have had available in the past.

But before you can start reaping the rewards of the vast amounts of data available at your fingertips, you must have 100 percent solid tracking set up on your web site.

Even if you aren’t planning on getting into detailed stats any time soon, making sure everything is set up now will give you a wealth of historical information in the future. (Web developers: it’s a good idea to install Google Analytics on new client websites by default. They’ll thank you later.)

The Basics

Many tracking packages are available, ranging from the free to the very expensive. Your web server almost certainly has something basic installed already.

However, for most small business web sites, Google Analytics is a good fit. It’s fast, reliable, powerful, and free. We’ll assume you’re using Google Analytics for the rest of this column, but most of the advice will be the same for whichever package you use.

If you haven’t done so already, start by signing up. Grab the tracking code and follow Google’s instructions on how to install it on every page of your website (or ask your web developer to do so).

That may sound obvious, but some websites only place the code on the home page or a handful of other pages. It has to be on every page!

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How To Optimize Your Website for Local Search

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

Local search engine optimization can be just as time consuming and competitive as “regular” SEO. The same rules apply — you need to have good content and quality links. However, the tactics are slightly different in specific areas.

Local search is essential to small businesses. In 2010, Google revealed that the proportion of Google result pages that show a map is one in 13. A few months later, Google changed from its Local Business Center (LBC) to Google Places, which enables businesses to communicate with customers as well as supplement their Google profile information to include hours of operation, photos, videos, coupons and product offerings. We assume Google is serving maps more than 1 billion times a month.

With all of this in mind, here’s what you need to know to successfully tap into local markets.

Where to Begin
List your business in Google Places — it’s free. Watch a number of training videos and explore the features, including tools like tracking of actions (meaning how many times users showed interest in your business listing), clicks for more information on maps, driving directions or direct clicks, as well as impressions (how many times users saw your business listing as a local search result). As you’ll see, it will be important to get ratings and references, too.

While much focus is placed on Google Places, don’t forget to also register at:

  • Yahoo! Local
  • Bing Local

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SEO Factors for 2011

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

The year 2010 can be summed up as a year of many new things in the world of search marketing.

We saw the introduction of Google Instant, Google Caffeine, Google SERP revisions to marry organic and local listings, and the Bing/Yahoo index merger to name a few. We listened and paid heed to the wise words of Google when they said page load time would be the new ranking factor taken into consideration in 2010.

Now, we’re ramping up for 2011 and many are probably beginning to scratch their heads and wonder what to focus on this year for Google. We shouldn’t ignore Bing or Yahoo, but with Google’s current market share, it’s a good idea to adjust fire for Google and hope that Bing lends a favorable eye.

The easiest way to get a jumpstart on what Google wants us to do is to take into consideration the subliminal messages they’re sending us.

Google doesn’t provide cool new features in Webmaster Tools, Analytics, and the SERPs because they want to make a webmaster’s day. This is for their benefit as well.

Let’s look at what Google is giving us now and what we should take from it.

Links to Your Site (Google Webmaster Tools)

Google has added elements to this data field over the past year, such as “your most linked content,” “who links to your content the most,” and “how your data is linked.”

What does this tell us?

Remember to deep link to internal pages and not just your homepage. Continue to anchor links appropriately. Additionally, the linking domain info also shows that they are counting links per domain, so quit buying run-of-site links.

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After the Transition: How to Get the Most Out of Bing/Yahoo

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

Beginning in mid-July, Yahoo and Bing began the transition of their systems and completed the transition last week. There are some interesting data points regarding Yahoo and Bing which marketers should understand as they manage their campaigns in the fourth quarter:

  • Historically, Bing has proven to have higher ROI than Yahoo, driven by similar CPCs but higher conversion rates.
  • Google now stands at more than 80 percent of PPC ad spend in the U.S., up nearly two percentage points from just last quarter, and taking the most dominant market share lead since SearchIgnite began tracking spend share among the engines (2007). Yahoo/Bing will need to work hard to reverse this momentum.
  • Paid search spend in Q3 increased 5.8 percent year-over-year compared with flat growth a year ago and exhibited positive momentum month-over-month, with July growing 4.9 percent, August 5.8 percent, and September 6.7 percent. The growth throughout the quarter bodes well for a strong Q4.

Search Alliance Numbers: Troubling Trend?

Although we saw some encouraging performance numbers from the combined platform during the initial stages of the transition, these have regressed a bit. If you look at overall performance of Yahoo and Bing separately before the transition and combined for the first week after the transition, we see the following trends:

  • The average eCPM differential (SearchIgnite’s measure of effective cost per thousand impressions) between Yahoo/Bing and Google has increased from -5.33 to -6.19, reflecting a 14 percent decline in the relative efficiency of turning impressions into dollars. This is mostly due to a decline in relative CPCs.
  • Impression share has dropped on the combined platform from 29.6 percent to 25.3 percent, resulting in less relative money being spent on the combined platform (21.9 percent to 17.5 percent).

While it’s too early to give more meaningful statistical insights on performance, the trend doesn’t bode well for the Yahoo/Bing search alliance. The gains by Google could be caused by the uncertainty of the transition, so the fourth quarter will be especially important for the search alliance and for search marketers.

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How to Get Actionable Insights From Social Media Measurement and Monitoring Tools

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

Social media has enabled advertisers, marketers, and public/investor relations professionals to engage communities, not audiences, in real-time. Putting down the traditional media bullhorn has enabled social media-savvy businesses to forge deeper and more meaningful relationships than ever before.

Add the glory of social media measurement to the mix, and you have a recipe for going beyond mindless repetitive tactical execution, and establishing a social media data-driven revenue-making machine. Although opportunities are ripe and plentiful if you know where to look, determining and prioritizing actionable insights from an enormous data store of information is a constant challenge.

Brand Management

One of the first things you do as a social media marketing manager is set up alerts related to mentions of your brand, products, partners, or affiliations. Social media is less about who yells loudest, and more about engaging in conversation.

If you’re just starting out, one of your first duties is to assume the identity of “online spokesperson” for your brand. The easiest place to start engaging with your community is on your home turf: speaking about your company.

  • Take action: Search engines and free tools such as Google Alerts can help you find brand mentions quite easily, but may not afford you the ability to filter results based on influence, authority, sentiment, or reach. This is where paid social media monitoring tools such as Sysomos or Radian6 come in handy. When dealing with larger brands and thousands of mentions, it helps to begin your outreach with negative sentiment from the highest authorities in social media, and then slowly whittle down the list.
  • Example: if I worked for Southwest Airlines, and I wanted to monitor negative (or positive) comments on new routes opened up to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I knew I was going after the lucrative young professional crowd competing with youth-oriented carriers like Virgin, my weekly alert filters might look something like this:

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How to Measure Success in an SEO Campaign

Thursday, September 30th, 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.

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Getting Started in Affiliate Marketing — What You Need To Know

Monday, September 20th, 2010

Ask 10 Internet users what they know about affiliate marketing, and you’ll likely get 10 wildly different answers. Getting a handle on the nuts and bolts of affiliate marketing can be a challenge, to say the least.

This article will help you understand the basics of affiliate marketing, and point you in the right direction. Before long you’ll be on your way to building a successful revenue stream as an affiliate marketer.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

So what does it mean to be an affiliate marketer? At its core, an affiliate helps to promote a business, product or service online. The affiliate makes referrals to the business, and receives payment for any sales resulting from those referrals. Sales are driven from the affiliate’s site to the business through the use of “creatives” (banners, copy and/or product feeds provided by the company).

This type of revenue sharing has become extremely popular with online vendors; so much so that it’s spawned an entirely new industry. One of the reasons for this huge popularity is the low risk to the affiliate; typically it doesn’t cost anything to become an affiliate, and the partnering company will supply the materials and support to get you going. All you need is a website.

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How to Identify and Reach Underserved Markets

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

Go beyond demographics by targeting specific types of people.

So, you think you have all your online marketing bases covered? Sure, you may be reaching moms over 40 with your super smoothie maker ad and men between 30 and 60 with your online golf resale marketplace offer, but reaching potential customers online should be more than simply broadcasting ads to large demographic sets. The online market is packed with various ethnicities, interests, lifestyles, religious affiliations and more. Many of these niche audiences are expanding rapidly and are made up of millions of potential customers that you might not have considered before because they were one step removed from your obvious targets.

Before we go further, let’s make it clear that this article will discuss specifically how entrepreneurs can reach niche audiences primarily through specialized ad networks. For those unfamiliar, ad networks are an aggregation of websites on which you can advertise to reach your target audience, wherever they are, with one advertising purchase. They alleviate the burden of coordinating advertising across multiple websites, and they measure your success. Ad networks can be an extremely useful tool to raise awareness online and increase brand recognition and influence among niche audiences.

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