How to help a friend get started in the world of online marketing
Apr 30, 2007 Blogging, Search Engine Optimization
We have all had friends who ask us for help getting into the world of online marketing and search engine optimization, wanting us to teach them everything we know so they can make just as much money as us while working in their pajamas from home all day… but without really wanting to put in the effort to do it. Not to mention the fact that you often feel you “have” to help them out if they ask because of that guilty complex you have of always being there for your friends. Now combine that with the fact you can almost guarantee that certain friends who ask you this will never actually be serious enough about it to make it work after you do help them out. So you don’t necessarily want to invest a huge amount of time or effort into it in case he decides he hates it!
Lucky for you, there are some ways you can be that good friend and give them the tools and help they need to get started with as little pain and suffering (yours!) involved. Here are some tips on what you can do to be helpful and supportive… yet not do everything for him, which unfortunately, as experience has proven, some of your so-called friends will want you to do!
The most important pay per click metric is not click through rate
Apr 23, 2007 Pay Per Click
It is still amazing to me the number of people who care most about what their AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing CTR is on their ads, while seemingly ignoring what is arguably the far more important - not to mention valuable - pay per click metric. Yes, CTR is valuable to know, but in reality, a higher CTR doesn’t necessarily equate to higher profits or sales.
Adding seasonal content to your site for increased traffic
Apr 19, 2007 Writing Content
Seasonal content is one area that too few websites take advantage of. This is for a few reasons, but primarily because when a website writer comes up with an idea for a great holiday-related article, it tends to be only a few weeks or days before the holiday and there just isn’t enough time for that article to get traction in the search engines before the season is over.
If you are one of those people who comes up with brilliant article ideas a few days before the actual holiday, you can start preparing to earn money off that content next holiday season. Because let’s face it, the majority of us won’t remember that great article idea next year, nor will be remember we were going to write it at all until it is too late to get it ranking or even written before the holiday has passed yet again.
The other reason is that webmasters tend to dismiss seasonal content because it is only searched for over such a short period of time each year, then lies dormant, without earning any revenue, for the other eleven months of the year. And the thinking is that it is better to have content that is searched for throughout the entire year, not just the 2-4 weeks that seasonal content tends to be searched for.
However, many webmasters find that seasonal content can drive a huge number of sales or clicks, even though that seasonal content tends to only be heavily used for a short period of time each year. There are sites that can make the majority of its yearly income simply through well ranked seasonal content driving visitors to the site in droves over the period of a few weeks. So there is the potentiall that you could more than double your income simply by adding some seasonal content.
So here is a plan of action you can use in order to timeline yourself better. Once you do this, you can easily add the new content to your site in the best way to get the related holiday traffic next time around before it comes upon you again and you realize that you missed the boat again.
On-page keyword mistakes: the good, the bad and the ugly
Apr 17, 2007 Keywords, Search Engine Optimization
Are you feeling a little overzealous about your use of keywords? If you have the nagging worry that you just might have used your chosen keywords a few too many times on your webpage, chances are good that your probably you did.
But how too many is really too many when it comes to search engine optimization? Well, you’d probably be surprised. There are plenty of “thou shall nots†that webmasters seem to break constantly, simply because they don’t realize that keyword spamming is an actual penalty that will cause their site to get booted right out of the Google index. Here are some of the things you can check and do to ensure your on-page keywords don’t trip the spam filter and are working most effectively for your site’s optimization.
Five dangerous SEO tools in the hands of the uneducated optimizer or client
Apr 16, 2007 Search Engine Optimization, Tools
You know the tools, the ones that the uninformed… or barely informed… take as gospel when it comes to search engine optimization. These tools in the hands of your client… or worse, a really bad SEO who is trying to steal a client… can be a deadly thing. And worse, because they used to be useful once upon a time, most of these tools are the ones that people have heard of.
Is your client measuring your success on how much the site’s Alexa ranking goes up or down? Or using an automated rank checker program, ala Web Position Gold, to check the Google positioning for his top fifty chosen keywords every hour on the hour? Here are the tools and programs that can be oh-so-dangerous in the hands of the SEO uneducated.
Anatomy of a highly converting landing page
Apr 9, 2007 Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimization, Usability
When you create the content on your landing page, it is important to consider not only the elements that go into your landing page design, but also consider the things that should be avoided. Yet time after time I come across landing pages – some which advertisers are paying premium prices per click to send traffic to – that seem to break many of the landing page rules and very likely result in a high loss of potential conversions.
So what are the things that should and shouldn’t be included on a landing page? Here are some tips on creating and maintaining a high converting landing page for both organic and paid search results. And as an added bonus, some of these also help with your AdWords quality score if you are having issues with it.
Should a favicon be part of your online branding & marketing presence?
Apr 7, 2007 Branding, Search Engine Optimization, Usability
You know those little favicons, where people try and make something resembling their logo appear in a teeny, tiny 16×16 pixel image. They show up in the navigation bar of many browsers and also appear in browser bookmarks or favorites (hence the name favicons which was shortened from favorites icon). But while they definitely have the coolness factor, especially if you manage to capture your site’s look successfully in the favicon, does your site really need to incorporate one? The answer, surprisingly, is yes.
A few years ago, favicons were only seen on a handful of sites, either super geeky ones or big brand ones. But since then, favicons have been becoming more mainstream and much more common to see. So while they have been gaining popularity, some savvy marketers are using them for branding as well as to encourage repeat visitors. But how, you might ask?
Targeting keyword variations for increased search & pay per click traffic
Apr 6, 2007 Google, Keywords, Microsoft, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimization, Tools, Yahoo
When planning and researching your keywords to target for either pay per click advertising campaigns or on-page keyword focus within your content, most marketers don’t realize they are leaving a lot of potential keyword options on the table. And what’s more, these alternative keywords are often less expensive to purchase or less competitive to target in the search results for. Why is this? Because too many people take what keywords the various keyword tools give them to heart. There is a huge wealth of traffic to be gleaned by targeting variations of your top chosen keywords.
So what exactly do these “variations” refer to? It definitely goes far beyond the typical misspellings, which is what most people think of when considering alternative keywords. And while misspellings are a crucial part of your keyword variations, there are more areas to look at. Here is what they are and how you can use them to your advantage when creating keyword lists.
What exactly qualifies as a quality link?
Apr 5, 2007 Linking, Search Engine Optimization
We have all heard everyone say that quality inbound links are crucial to any search engine optimization campaign. But that said, what exactly qualifies as a quality link? Is it just a link from a PR6 site or higher? Is it a link from a site that ranks for your chosen keywords? Is it a site that sells links through a text link broker? You would probably be surprised that the answer can be yes or no, but it is up to you to identify what makes a quality link and one makes a link you’d be better off passing on.
There are many factors that can go into identifying what makes a quality link from a site. Let’s look at some of the things that makes a link a quality link and how to know if there are potential buyer-beware issues for each.
Do you really need meta tags? You bet
Apr 4, 2007 Search Engine Optimization
A couple of years ago, using meta tags definitely fell out of style. They went from being near the top of every search engine optimiser’s to do list to being dropped right off the bottom and added to a site more as an afterthought than a SEO technique. True, they stopped being the sure-fire SEO technique they were several years ago, but should they really have been relegated to non-existence? Definitely not.
Even today, however, marketers are confused about what meta tags are actually good for, especially with so many people saying meta tags are useless and not to add them. But then add to that the fact that Google, Yahoo & Microsoft have stepped up to add new meta tags into the mix in the past year to allow webmasters to customize how their sites are displayed in the search results. So here is what meta tags are still useful for in 2007, and why you should be using them.
