Many B2B marketers are frustrated by their inability to reach executive-level decision makers. Recent research indicates they needn’t look further than the internet. Let’s explore how marketers can utilize search engines to easily and cost-effectively reach executives online.
Category Archive for ‘Search Engines’ 
Using Search Engines To Reach Business Executives
2008 Web Development Trends
So we’re in the middle of Web 2.0, the first real movement in web development since it’s interception. New technologies, most notably AJAX and the enhanced knowledge and usage of CSS, has allowed for amazing, innovative websites that would have never been created in the not so distant past.
But even Web 2.0, or at least [...]
Nailing the Coffin Shut on the “Don’t Link to External Sites” Philosophy
Posted by randfish
Rare is the month that goes by when the spectre of the none-too-solid argument for hoarding link PageRank and link juice doesn’t rear its ugly head. And since I’ve just spent the last 5 hours on Q+A duty (as our beloved Q+A manager, Jane, is on vacation), and in need of a short punchy post, I’ll make this brief.
Arguments against linking out to other sites:
- If the original PageRank formula holds true, and no other algorithmic elements are in place to benefit sites and pages that link out, you could be costing yourself a small fraction of potential link juice.
- Visitors might click those links and never come back to your site.
Arguments for linking out to other sites:
- You tend to get more links coming back in (evidence)
- Your domain and pages appear in the referral analytics of other sites, inviting site owners (who are often very likely "linkerati") to check out your site
- The search engines have at least looked into algorithms that reward external linking behavior (like HITS)
- Karma – and not just the invisible, metaphysical kind – bloggers really do look at who links out and who doesn’t and they tend to reward the more generous
- In any type of "neighborhood" link analysis model, a site’s outlinks can be used as a good predictor of a domain’s relative trustworthiness
- Readers and web visitors can derive value from the links you point to, and they can help to prop up the crediblity & association of your own site. Note this research about memory association & repetition (and apply it to the marketing world rather than the political)
- Sites that don’t link out are extreme outliers on the web’s link graph and thus, may fall more easily into negative classification schemes (particularly if they’re run by overzealous, over-optimizing SEOs)
- Never linking out doesn’t keep visitors on your site any longer, it simply means they’ll jump away via the back button, bookmarks, a browser close or a typed-in address.
What do you think? Is there anyone who still practices the never (or rarely) link out philosophy?
Headsmacking Tip #4: Use Keyword Variations with Matching Intent Together
Posted by randfish
For this week’s tip (see #1, #2 and #3 in the series) , I thought we’d quickly run through an issue that, early in my SEO career, frequently confused me (and seems to trip up lots of sites today, too). The concept is simple – given a page that’s ranking well for keyword "A" some folks make the mistake of targeting close variations of "A" on separate pages without good justification.
Here’s a quick example:
Sometimes, it can be wise to target variations on different pages, but you need to think carefully about why. In our example above, the intent for a searcher seeking "electric scooters" vs. "buy electric scooters," "electric scooters for sale," and "cheap electric scooters" isn’t substantively different. Therefore, it might be unwise to create a multitude of pages to target each of these variations when a single page could target each effectively. In my experience there’s no need to even venture into spammy territory here. Let’s look at some title tags:
Spammy Version
TITLE: Cheap Electric Scooters for Sale, Buy Electric Scooters
Good Version
TITLE: Buy Electric Scooters at Scootermoz – 1000s of (In Stock) Electric Scooters for Sale
In the good version, I didn’t use cheap in the title, and I probably wouldn’t in a real example either. From experience in retail SEO, I’ve seen that "cheap" (as a keyword modifier) is often a low conversion rate visitor, and it may even lower the conversion rate of other visitors. Instead, I’d probably opt to put it in the text of the page (and even then, relatively sparsely). The other phrases are valuable, and I’ve included them in the title and would pepper the page appropriately with mentions. Typically, with a variant that’s best to keep on a single page, the broader phrase is included (as in "electric scooters" being included in the phrase "electric scooters for sale"), and thus, mentions of the longer phrase will help with keyword prominence of the original as well.
There’s no trick here – just a simple guiding philosophy:
- It’s far easier to get links to one page rather than four
- Wasting internal link juice on extraneous pages is never a good idea
- Spending time and energy on content for additional pages that could be focused in higher ROI activities is tragic
- A single page with a concentrated keyword phrase and several variations is likely to perform better in the engines that multiple offshoot pages targeting very similar phrase variants
There are times when breaking out the pages would make more sense. I’d use a relatively simple process to determine which path to choose:
There may not be any rocket science at work here, but given how commonly I see mistakes like this, I’d say it’s a valuable tip to keep in mind and apply to the sites you build and audit. As always, input is welcomed!
XML Sitemaps, guidelines on their use
Posted by Duncan Morris
Over the past couple of days I have been putting together some internal guidelines on various aspects of our jobs. This should ensure that we are giving consistent information to our various clients. Most of these guidelines have been fairly straightforward with nothing in them to write home about. However, one of the hardest guidelines to write has been the one talking about xml sitemaps. So, rather than horde my thoughts, I’m going to open them up to all of you.
What are xml sitemaps?
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL… http://www.sitemaps.org
On the surface this seems to be a great addition to any website’s armoury. However, before you rush away and create your sitemap, there are a number of pros and cons you should be aware of.
Benefits to using a xml sitemap
The first set of benefits revolve around being able to pass extra information to the search engines
- Your sitemap can list all URLs from your site. This could include pages that aren’t otherwise discoverable by the search engines.
- Giving the search engines priority information. There is an optional tag in the sitemap for the priority of the page. This is an indication of how important a given page is relevant to all the others on your site. This allows the search engines to order the crawling of their website based on priority information.
- Passing temporal information. Two other optional tags (lastmod, and changefreq) pass more information to the search engines that should help them crawl your site in a more optimal way. "lastmod" tells them when a page last changed and changefreq indicates how often the page is likely to change.
Being able to pass extra information to the search engines, *should* result in them crawling your site in a more optimal way. Google itself points out the information you pass is considered as hints, though it would appear to benefit both webmasters and the search engines if they were to use this data to crawl the pages of your site according to the pages you think have a high priority. There is a further benefit which is that you get information back.
- Google Webmaster Central gives some useful information when you have a sitemap. For example the following graph show googlebot activity over the last 90 days. This is actually taken from a friend of ours in our building who offers market research reports.
Negative aspects of xml sitemaps
- Rand has already covered one of the major issues with sitemaps which is that it can hide site architecture issues, by indexing pages that a normal web crawl can’t find.
- Competitive intelligence. If you are telling the search engines the relative priority of all of your pages, you can bet this information will be of interest to your competitors. I know of no way of protecting your sitemap so only the search engines can access it.
- Generation. This is not actually a problem with sitemaps, but rather a problem with the way a lot of site maps are generated. Any time you generate a sitemap by sending a program to crawl your site, you are asking for trouble. I’d put money on the search engines having a better crawling algorithm than any of the tools out there to generate the sitemaps. The other issue with sitemaps that aren’t dynamically generated from a database, is that they will become out of date almost immediately.
XML sitemap guidelines
With all of the above in mind, I would avoid putting a sitemap on a site, especially a new site, or one that has recently changed structure. By not submitting a sitemap, you can use the information gathered from seeing which pages google indexes, and how quickly they are indexed to validate that your site architecture is correct.
There is a set of circumstances that would lead to me recommending that you use a sitemap. If you have a very large site and have spent the time looking at the crawl stats, and are completely happy with why pages are in and out of the index then adding a sitemap can lead to an increase in the number of pages in the index. Its worth saying that these pages are going to the poorest of the poor in terms of link juice. These pages are the fleas on the runt of a litter. They aren’t going to rank for anything other than the longtail. However, I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that even the longest of the long tail can drive significant traffic when thousands of extra pages are suddenly added to the index.
One question still in my mind is the impact of removing an xml sitemap from a site that previous had one. Should we recommend all new clients remove their sitemap in order to see issues in the site architecture. I’m a big fan of using the search engines to diagnose site architecture issues. I’m not convinced that removing a sitemap would remove pages that are only indexed due to the xml sitemap. If that is the case thats a very nice bit of information. *Wishes he’d kept that tidbit under his oh so very white hat*.
So I guess let the discussions start, do you follow amazon.co.uk (who does have a sitemap), or are you more of an ebay.co.uk which doesn’t?
Whiteboard Friday – Why Linkbuilding and Landing Pages Don’t Mix
Posted by great scott!
Anybody who has ever put together a killer piece of linkbait has thought about it: how could I get this kind of attention to my landing pages? It’s an obvious dilemma. You get a ton of traffic, a ton of links, all of the ranking boost that follows, how could you not want that juice directed toward your conversion-centric pages? Well, there are reasons why the two tend to be mutually exclusive, and that’s what Rand explores in this week’s Whiteboard Friday.
Fear not! There are ways a good piece of linkbait can and will benefit your conversions and we’ll explore several of them in this video.
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-Why Landing Pages and Linkbait Don’t Mix from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
Let it be known that not all methods discussed are of the fairest shades of habberdashery, but that DOES NOT mean we advocate the dark side. Some of this stuff can get you in serious trouble. We discuss it only to educate and warn our readers of tactics they may see and be tempted to try despite the very negative ramifications that may result.
New Recommendation System = 40 Percent More Diggs
One month after launching its new recommendation system, Digg is already reporting positive results. Digg recommends stories based on other members with similar voting patterns and interests. Chief scientist Anton Kast writes on the Digg Blog:
- Digging activity is up significantly: the total number of Diggs increased 40% after launch.
- The Recommendation Engine [...]