As a current owner of a website, I have discovered its not as easy as people make it seem. Its a common misconception to think that creating a site is easy. You need to make sure that your layout is easy to understand and friendly to the user. The interface colors and placement of items [...]
Category Archive for ‘SEO’ 
Does self-linking really degrade the Web?
Last week, Tim O’Reilly posted about self-linking as a journalistic practice, where one article on the Web refers to another story at the same site instead of an external link. For example, at BusinessWeek.com, a new feature article may link phrases and terms to other articles at Business Week for more explanation.
Sir, Would You Like Fries With Those Links?
Recently in several SEO forums I noticed a number of threads discussing ways to find and build “economical” links. The forum participants wanted to know how they could initiate “safe” reciprocal linking as well as “fast” submissions to free article directories. They reasoned these tactics were worth doing because both linking methods were “economical” and “easy” to use.
I understand some linking techniques can be expensive, tedious to implement and extremely time consuming, but tying your online business success to linking tactics deemed “easy”, “fast” and “cheap” seems counter-productive. If you limit your linking to low-cost tactics or look at the practice as “link building” instead of “marketing for links” you’re almost guaranteed to fail.
Social Media Marketing ROI- Metrics and Analysis
When I attended South by Southwest 2008, I had the pleasure of attending a panel where four somewhat lost panelists were (with difficulty) trying to come up with metrics to measure success from a social media marketing campaign. I was a little annoyed when they concluded that there were no metrics available right now, and that someone would have to come up with a new way of measuring social media success.
While many people argue that the current metrics are no longer applicable, here’s a look at how we can adapt the currently available methodologies and apply them to social media marketing campaigns.
Headsmacking Tip #6 – Test with Paid Search Before You Target with SEO
Posted by randfish
This may seem like old hat to many SEOs, but it’s a tip that never fails to get an "oh yeah!" during client meetings. The concept is simple – in any given search engine optmization campaign, you are naturally going to form a list of high-traffic, (perceived) high value keywords that are an idealistic goal for your site to dominate. For a site like SEOmoz, those might be the highly competitive terms like "SEO" or "Search Engine Optimization," while in a field like BuddyTV‘s it might be "tv shows" or "tv news."
The problem is that while these keyword searches seem like no-brainers, ranking for them can take a remarkable amount of effort on both the content and link building side. To warrant that investment, you need to know, from a business perspective, that financial returns will accompany the rankings. One great way to do this is to use paid search to investigate the likely ROI of visits from those keywords. Buy the keyword traffic for a few weeks or a month and measure visitors via a segmented tracking campaign (check out this post on action tracking to learn more). If the visits that arrive via those searches convert well and produce value, you know that a serious investment is warranted. If, however, they turn out to be tire-kickers and have a low propensity to produce returns, you can re-focus on higher ROI targets.
There’s just a few valuable tips to bear in mind when you’re pursuing this process:
- Paid search traffic can behave differently than organic traffic, so don’t take the figures at 100% accuracy. Build in some room for error, and you’ll create far better expectations.
- When crafting your PPC campaign for test purposes, make sure to narrow to exact match so you don’t accidentally measure traffic that’s coming in for longer tail or modified versions of the search query. It’s great to do this and measure response in a PPC campaign, but with SEO, you won’t be able to naturally rank for those same variants unless you identify and target them individually.
- Make sure to narrow to a geographic area, especially if your keywords contain any potential local intent or local modifiers. Otherwise, you can seriously over/under-estimate.
- Keep seasonal variation/flux in mind. Use Microsoft’s Keyword Forecast or Google Insights for Search to help out. Volume fluctuations usually indicate shifting intent as well, so purchasing keywords in a down period can hamper the accuracy of your forecasts.
That’s it for this week’s headsmacker. I’ve got a very personal post I worked on during my plane flight back from LA this weekend coming soon (hopefully tomorrow), and we’re also launching our new blog etiquette guidelines and some explanations this week, so stay tuned!
BTW – If you somehow missed it, go back and check out Danny’s brilliant post from last week on analyzing the Top 100 Blogs. It flew under the radar a bit, but is worth a thorough examination.
Forming Good Title Tags for Local Businesses
If you’re looking for a quick improvement in your local business site’s rankings and don’t have a lot of time, you can’t go wrong with making some simple improvements to your homepage title tag. The text within the title tags is one of the top signals used by Google, Yahoo! and other search engines to decide what keywords are relevant to a page, and it’s also one of the most frequently neglected parts of a site design. If you have a good title tag, you can rank at the top of the search results for users seeking your business — and a bad title can leave you in the dark.
Below are a few details on how to make better titles and get your pages to rank higher.
The Trendy Concept of Behavioral Marketing
The term ‘behavioral marketing’ is being increasingly heard across the world these days. The entire concept of behavioral marketing involves noticing consumer’s online behavior and then target them using advertising which is tailor made for their online conduct. It goes needless to say that the whole process is done unobserved by the consumer.
It won’t be [...]