SEM best practices

View the webcast here.

Aspects of integrating aspects of a Total Web Presence campaign: PPC, Social Media, & Search. Covers SEO/PPC budgeting, tactics for increasing PPC quality score, & Social Media Advertising strategies. Closes with case study from Timex.

Posted via email from crockettdunn's posterous

SEO Tip: Incoming Links

Incoming links are a heavily weighted factor in establishing your search engine ranking (your Google Page Rank).  However, it is not the QUANTITY of links that is important (in fact, too many links from bad sources can actually hurt you), so much as the QUALITY of incoming links to your site.

OK, so what is this "quality" I am referring to?  To define that, let's step back for a moment.  To define what are quality in-links for your specific search engine campaign, you have to first have established your objective.  This involves a thorough analysis including:

1. Defining your competition
2. Determining how your competition is being found on the internet (Read, in this context: extracting the key phrases your competition is successfully targeting)
3. Thoroughly analyzing the competition's targeted key phrases to derive similar key phrases and discover targeted words your competition may be missing
4. Performing a similar analysis of the competition's in-links and deriving a strategy including opportunities the competition may be missing

There is obviously a lot more to the above list, but I can stop there and limit the scope of discussion to factors related to in-links.

*Shameless plug: CDLLC can help you through the process of competition analysis and key phase targeting (steps 1-4), as part of an initial, discounted consultation.  Our special tools automate the initial process of checking your key phrases against the reality of how Google sees you and your competition.

Once you have your competition defined and analyzed, it is possible to evaluate the QUALITY of incoming links of your competitors.  Quality factors include:

• The search engine rank of the linking page/site (#1, #5, #50 in Google results page)
• The number of key phrases in the linked text of the page/site
• The Google Page Rank (different from the search engine rank #) of the linking page/site
• The number of quality links (quality defined by the criteria herein) to the linking page
• The key phrases in the TITLE of the linking pages
• The number of relevant incoming links.

At this point, you have a good idea of your competitions in-link situation, and it's time for the fun part (ok, maybe it's not everybody's idea of fun, but I love it): embarking on your link campaign!

-Crockett Dunn
CDLLC

Posted via email from crockettdunn's posterous

Google Blended Search, Revisited

Sometimes clients look at me sideways when they find out they need to be discussing their products on YouTube or Facebook and Twitter. Why bother? The short answer is: Google recognizes and rewards "buzz" about your website.  For the long answer, and an explanation of Google Blended Search Results, a.k.a. Google Universal Search, read on...

Since May 2007, we have been hearing about Universal Search and Blended Search.  Google was the first of the major Search Engines to unveil blended results as part of their main search results in May 2007 with Universal Search.  ASK was second in June of 2007, followed by MSN in July 2007 and Yahoo in October 2007.  Yet here we are two years later and the discussions have died down a little.  When’s the last time you heard someone in your office discuss blended search?  Of course there are exceptions and early adopters, but in discussions that I have with many, they are not yet leveraging blended search optimization.  How is blended search affecting B2B websites?  Should B2B sites be optimizing for blended search? What is Blended Search Optimization? Blended Search optimization is simply the process of developing relevant content in a format other than a typical web page so that it appears as part of the different types of search results within the major search engines.  There are numerous types of blended search results that are now being featured as part of a search engines main results.  Types of blended search results include videos, shopping results, images, news results etc. Why is Blended Search Important? The short answer is that searchers (i.e.. users of Search Engines) are expecting richer experiences.  They are looking to find relevant information that answers their questions and their need for timely, relevant information.  In the past, this need was satisfied by newspapers, print, radio and television.  With the digital age and with the emergence of digital natives (More on Digital Natives here) and millennials, people are looking for dynamic types of content.  Not just a blue link with a somewhat relevant description.  Hence the need for blended results.  Some users relate better to articles and press releases, others to podcasts, images or videos.  The fact of the matter is, depending on the nature of the searcher’s query, the type of results that they are looking for will vary.  This is why blended search is important.  Someone looking for a new CMS solution may be more tuned in with a video demo as opposed to a webpage that describes what a CMS is.  Blended Search results provide a richer experience and search landscape for the user.  Searchers are looking for this.  They are no longer satisfied with ten blue links on a results page. Does Blended Search Work for B2B? The short answer is that yes blended search optimization can work for business to business websites.  It depends on your blended search strategy.  For example, we know that unlike a B2C site that may feature a large variety of products, for B2B sites things such as optimizing shopping feeds to improve visibility with shopping results may not be the best avenue to pursue (for the simple facts that a typical B2B site may not have a series of  "products" to submit).  However, things such as video optimization, news release optimization, image and blog optimization can all help increase the visibility of a B2B site on a search results page.  From an SEO perspective, blended search optimization can work well for B2B sites. The SERP landscape has become hyper-competitive over the past three or four years.  Being found in Google, Yahoo, Live Search or even other vertical search engines is becoming increasingly difficult.  While it is not necessarily about the rankings, it is about the visibility and about the click.  A 2008 study on blended search from iProspect outlines, the continued importance for marketers to ensure that their digital assets are found within the first three pages, if not the first page, of search results. Blended Search provides an opportunity to accomplish this and in some cases effective blended search optimization can allow an organization to dominate the real estate of the Search.  We have clients who actually represent 30-60% of a Google SERP for a given key phrase as a result of strong blended search optimization. The secret with blended search optimization for B2B sites is that there is no secret.  You simply need to understand your audience and the type of content that they prefer to engage with.  For B2B sites, this means testing the type of content that you feature on your site.  Do users engage with videos better than PDFs?  Or is your audience looking for news updates and articles describing your service/product offering?  Perhaps they are looking for content that is updated frequently such as blog posts or maybe they are simply looking for user reviews and testimonials about your brand.  This is where a social network result such as Facebook or Twitter may prove beneficial.  While technically not a blended search result, social network results for your brand are a different type of result that elicit a specific response (participating in a community setting) from the searcher which is why we classify social network results as a "type of blended result".  The fact is, the searcher may be looking for a different type of result when searching for your brand or related key phrase. Past search research dating back to 2004 shows that typically users will not look past the third page of search results, in fact many might not even click through to the second page of results.  As a B2B site, having the ability to "own" multiple results (and multiple types of results) on page one of Google or Yahoo for a non-branded key phrase can provide a great return in terms of intercepting your audience.  This is what blended search optimization can do for a site.  You can have a traditional website result as well as a video result or perhaps a news result to intercept these clicks and gain this traffic. Three Types of Blended Results That B2B Sites Should Focus On While the following is not specific to B2B sites, here are three types of blended search optimization that B2B sites should focus on: News/PR Optimization – optimizing articles and press releases is a great way to find your site within the blended results of Google, Yahoo or MSN.  The Engines (and searchers) tend to treat news results as more relevant due to the timely information that is within them.  Launching a new version of your software or a new strategic partnership can provide useful information to your target demographic.  As a result a well optimized press release can show up in Google News and in the blended search results displayed by Google.  Not to mention that in Google, News results tend to appear above the top organic results of the SERP or after the first one or two organic results meaning that they often occupy prime real estate within the results page.  Furthermore, deeper analysis from the above mentioned iProspect study indicates that search engine users click "news" results more than twice as much (36%) within blended search results as they do when they use the vertical "news search" (17%). Video Optimization – for whatever reason video results seem to appear more often than other types of blended results such as image results, book results etc.  All B2B sites should feature some video content on their site and/or on a video aggregator site such as YouTube that demos a product, explains their service, communicates their unique competitive advantage etc.  Video may resonate better with certain demographics and as a result create more engagement with your brand from the SERP.  The messaging in the video can be more targeted than say the information that a user receives once they click through the "blue link" result from the results page.  Perform a search in Google for "supply chain management".  Depending on the data center that you hit you should be returned with a couple of video results (as well as a couple of image results) in addition to the typical blue link text results that would normally appear. Blog Optimization -blogs, love them or hate them are garnering more trust as a resource than typical web results.  Optimizing your blog posts and posting regularly can be a great way to tap into the blended results for a topic specific keyword query.  Blogs that feature relevant and informative posts about a specific topic have been known to show up in the main search results of Google.  The thing with blog results are that they can appear "blended" in within the normal results, meaning that they look like a typical result, or they can be labeled as a "Blog Result" indicating that they are in fact a blended result.  A search for "online marketing" or "Susan Boyle’ in Google returns both. Blended Search is all about content and the type of content that you optimize for your audience.  Does it apply to B2B?  Yes of course it does, for blended search optimization is simply another way to gain visibility in the organic/natural search results of a search engine.  So while rankings may be dead, visibility is not.  Blended Search allows you to optimize content and different types of content in order to intercept your audience to begin or build a relationship between the searcher and your brand.  So while they may not convert on this initial visit, they will at least engage with your brand and become more aware of what your organization has to offer.   Originally published at marketing.jive.com: Does Blended Search Optimization Work for B2B?

-Crockett Dunn Owner CDLLC

SEM: Does an industrial material handling equipment supplier and forklift parts distributor need a social media campaign?

http://store.hgmforkliftparts.com/

When the on-page optimization is maxed out, and the tie-breakers are all off-site variables, the answer is a resounding "heck yes!"

If you click the link above, I will not give you a free iPad, but Bill Gates will send you to Disneyworld if you forward this to a friend ;).


-Crockett Dunn
Owner
CDLLC

Windows 7 Tip: Easy Tutorial Creator

While Windows 7 was in development, the engineers over at Microsoft had the smart idea to build a troubleshooting tool called, "Problem Step Recorder."

What this tool does is follow your mouse and record screenshots in order to document what you're doing.  You can also enter notes as you go about recording your business.  It even creates an HTML file slideshow for reviewing the actions, screenshots, and comments.

Turns out, this is a great way to document actions for tutorial purposes!



Check it out: Start: psr.exe.

Enjoy!

[source: maximumpc.com ]
 
-Crockett Dunn Owner CDLLC

The Current State of Popular-Inquiry According to Google

A recent study of Google's suggestions for questions of the "WH" variety (who, what, when, where, why, how, which) revealed the following top themes (after normalization for celebrity a television media):

1. Pregnancy, Marriage, Love, and Kissing Skills
2. Weight Loss
3. Poop

The original study can be found here.

























































This is the study.
How:

 Why:

What:

When:

Where:

Who:

Which:

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

Feeding Froogle: Search Engine Marketing for E-Commerce

Remember when the Internet was simple?

The all-important e-commerce beast Google Products was originally known as Froogle. Froogle was a pioneer in compiling products from many online stores and websites into one big "store front."

This idea we call "The Dog Pile" approach (by the way, dogpile.com was a pioneer in multi-engine key phrase searching, way back before Google was . . . Google) to product searching, has resulted in new opportunities for marketing discreet products.

Products are listed in Google Product Search by name, category, description, price, original website, and other attributes—sometimes, even a picture is used and indexed by Google.  The result?  A giant storefront you can be a part of.

Presumably, you want ALL of the information about your products to show up in search engines. And this is in addition to the traditional marketing of key phrases!

Why does this matter? Because, there are OPPORTUNITIES out there you don’t want to miss. Opportunities for not just a second or a third, but many additional store fronts.

Now add this: there's a synergy to be created between your product search results and your key phrase results. Done right, this causes dramatically higher search engine listings for both!

In e-commerce, there are other places to rank high. We don't usually recommend putting a great deal of effort into the "other" search engines, but in e-commerce you create traction for your brands by paying attention to several commerce tracking and promotional engines. These include Amazon, Google Products, Yahoo Shopping, eBay, Bing Shopping, Nextag, Shopzilla, and more!

Getting listed on some of these are free. Others have payment structures similar to Google AdWords and Pay-Per-Click, where you pay for views and clicks, or bid and pay a market-established rate for views and clicks.

To take advantage of these opportunities, you need to know how to feed them. Grossly over-simplified, that means you setup an account, then either manually enter your product data or feed a specially structured data file to each service.

Not a big deal, until you realize that to maintain ranking you need to monitor each service for changes in product listing requirements, or resubmit data after specified expiration periods, which may vary from one service to the next.

Of course, this is one of our areas of expertise. We've been feeding Froogle hundreds of thousands of products since it was a fledgling Google Labs pre-beta product. We've created top ranking for large sites and small, trained clients to manage their own data entry, and done it for them (when they realized that programmatically extracting thousands of products and attributes into specially structured files according to the requirements of each product listing service was something we could do better and more cost-effectively).

We often say that much of what we do isn't rocket science; if feeding the e-commerce search stream is something you're interested in doing yourself, good news: there are volumes of information available online on the topic.

But just because you can do it doesn't always mean you should. If you want someone to get you up to speed, or skip the learning curve and outsource it altogether, give us a call.


Happy Search Engine Marketing.

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services