Search Engine Marketing Spot

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When you hear someone say website advertising or website marketing, do you think it means the same thing? In today’s fast paced society many people believe they mean the same thing, or they get the two mixed up. There is a big difference between the two, and I am here to try and break it down for you.

Website advertising is building your brand recognition and showing the general public what services or products you are offing. There are many forms of advertising your website, such include PPC, banner placement, text links (yes I did just say it), article writing, pod casting, targeted email campaigns. All of these are nothing more the different methods used to advertise a website. Website advertising is just a small piece to the big puzzle, many just seem to overlook it.

Website marketing is the strategic planning you do in an effort to help your website grow. Website marketing is the big puzzle, if you can put it together properly then you have a chance at succeeding with your website. However theirs no guarantee that a marketing plan will be successful even though you have taken all of the right steps in putting the puzzle together. So what is website marketing then?

Concepts – Here you will come up with and think about all possible concepts that you would like to use when advertising your website.

Research – Research is a very important step to take in your marketing strategy, you need to research your competition and see what they are doing. What keywords are they targeting, what websites have linked back to them, what anchor text are they using, what is the dominant catch phrases they are using in there online advertisements, etc. You do this not to copy them, but to see what is working for them and just better your efforts. You will then want to research and try to find other keywords that you can use as well, there could be highly searched keywords in your niche that your competition has not found yet. That will be a good ticket to punch in, finding those other highly searched keywords that have little to no competition. You will also want to take a look at Google or Yahoo and see what those keywords are going to cost you per click so you can factor that into your budget. The same thing goes for buying banner space, you will want to look for the sites you want to advertise on and see how much they charge and what size banner you get. Even a small 125×125 banner can cost a good amount of money on some high traffic websites. Do not try and rush through your research, you do not want to overlook something that could have propelled your website to the top.

Planning – Planning your website marketing is almost as crucial as the research you do beforehand. Here you will need to determine what roads you want to take your website down. Are you going to be heavily involved in PPC campaigns? Plan on buying up a lot of banner space on high traffic websites? Maybe you will want to write some good articles for your website in hopes that the social media craze will come and blow up your website. In some cases making the front page of Digg has taken some website offline due to poor hosting. A big factor in determine what you will be doing is your budget. Can you afford a highly target PPC campaign or buying banner space on high traffic sites? This goes back to the research you did before, you should know how much your keywords and banner ads will cost you. Now just take those figures and divvy them up among the direction you want to take your marketing campaign.

Design – Designing the right material (banner ads, PPC ads, email ads mainly) is very important for your marketing campaign to succeed. If your ads look and sound like crap, well then there is a good chance your marketing campaign will end up that way. You always want to design multiple ads no matter what. With multiple banner ads, you can then go over each design with your team, family or friends to see what everyone else’s opinion is and which would be the best to use. The same thing goes for your PPC ads because you have very little room to make a big impact on the person reading them. With PPC though, you have more room to test them and see which ones are converting better for you. They can be changed almost instantly with little effort, unlike banner ads or an email campaign.

Testing – Testing is pretty straight forward, here you test out your designs to see which ones you want to invest fully with.

Advertise – There is that other word, advertise. When you have finalized your designs and they have passed your quality tests you then begin advertising your website. If you chose PPC, banner ads and a dozen text links, then you are using three forms of advertising in your marketing campaign. This is the second to last step and the one where you go for it and see if your marketing strategies will pay off.

Research – Research again? Yes you do some more research again, this time though you need to find out what forms of advertising you used that paid off the best for you. This is where you will take a look at your website analytics or your PPC campaign to see where the traffic and conversions were coming from. After you have taken this data, you can go back and design any new ads that you see fit.

In the end, I want you to understand that website marketing is the strategic planning that you do for long term results. Website advertising is nothing more then a small piece of your planning and is really the “action phase”. When you advertise your website, you are putting forth the actions you designed and to implement in your marketing strategy.

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.

You are looking at a screenshot taken of Matt’s start menu. As you will notice there are not very many options really, just some of the important things that he would use on a daily basis. There are icons on his desktop that allow him to do his other daily tasks at Google as well as what it listed here.

Open Email - Pretty self explanatory, this opens his MSN email.
Messenger -This opens his MSN Messenger program.
Spell Checker - This auto spell checks www.semspot.com and checks for every time I screw up “there” and “their”.
Google Updates - This folder contains all of the upcoming Google updates that will be rolled out in the coming months.
Complaints - This folder is 301 redirect to the computers recycle bin.
PR Update Tools - Tools used by Matt to start the process of updating page rank for every website on the internet.
PR Killer! v1.05 - Program used to target individual websites and lower there PR with a click of a button and a captcha code. Version 1.06 should be out soon and will no longer use captcha to validate the user, it will now use a retina scanner to ensure it is in fact Matt Cutts. Some rumors are floating around in regards to someone using this program without permission and lowering the PR of some websites that did not deserve it earlier in the week. Those websites can be found on numerous forum and blog posts, you can check out these blogs for a short list, Andy Beard, Search Engine Land.
Paid Link Detector 2007 - This program searches through a website and with 20% accuracy can determine if a link is paid or not. It then saves the found data to the PR Update Tools folder. This program is still in beta testing so most links it finds on a page are all considered paid. Donna is running a paid link poll, so if you do in fact buy links right now, run over and take her quick poll at SEO-Scoop.
SERP’s Eraser 6.5 - Program used by Matt to penalize your website and at times even erase it completely from there system. Last I saw johnchow.com was bookmarked in this program.
Backlink Deleter 2.0.8 - Program is very touchy and almost has a mind of it’s own from what I have been told. It has the ability to find backlinks to your site, however it not only finds them but also deletes them from the Google database. This of course is still in beta and needs to be tweaked.
Shut Down Yahoo - This folder contained an all in one script that would lower all Yahoo pages PR to a 1, label the Yahoo Directory as a paid link farm, and send out 1 email to every yahoo.com email address advising them to switch to GMail.

I wish I could tell you what is behind the blurred links, but that is top secret Google applications and links to there future plans to take over the internet. Acrobat reader is self explanatory and I checked his Internet Explorer and his homepage was in fact set to SEMSPot.com!

Matt has the option to simply log off, or melt down…I did not test the melt down feature as I did not have the time to leave the building.

One a final note, all of the links shown on Matt’s start menu ALL used the NOFOLLOW tag. This post was meant has a joke, and Matt if you are indeed reading this then I hope you are at least laughing a little bit.

 

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.

 

 

Today we were witness to a major shift made by Google and there PR. As you have now probably read, several high profile websites have had there PR reduced drastically overnight without any warning. I first read about it this morning on Andy Beard’s site where he has a small list of compiled sites and there effected PR numbers. It has been all over Sphinn today as well, with everyone trying to decipher why the sudden change by Google. Jill Whalen wrote a nice article over at High Rankings that makes for a good read. However I do not feel that this sudden change is just over paid links, I also feel it deals with inter linking with other sites. I believe these changes were also made manually. There is no new algorithm out that has made these changes. If that was the case, then why didn’t everyone else’s websites see a drop in there PR? It isn’t the case, so we can put a nail in the coffin on the idea that it is a network wide change by Google and all sites are now on a new PR system.

So I am sure we can all agree that this deals with sites selling links that do not use the nofollow tag. There are the obvious sites that have there sponsored links section somewhere on the front page. What about sites that say they have never sold a link, but were still penalized? I believe they fall into the realm of inter linking with other sites, or what I will just call the Google Fog List. GFL for short, which we could also interpret as “Good F’ing Luck” getting your PR back. You can get on there fog list by simply linking to other sites that have been hit with a penalty for selling links. If your site links enough times to them then that would cause Google to start looking at you.

Right now Google is on the top of the world looking down through the fog clouds at everyone else like a puppet master. Well when they start looking at how many times you have linked to these other sites that sell links, they bend down into the fog and start penalizing you as well. Almost like a link farm system where sites are all connected somehow with a lot of links. Popular blogs like SERoundtable, Problogger, Search Engine Guide, Search Engine Journal, Any Beard, and Copyblogger have all seen there PR drop. Some of these sites obviously sell links, and others do not. However the sites that do not sell links might have enough links pointing back to another site that was penalized, thus they to are now being flagged by Google. It goes back to watching who you link to, if you link to bad sites then you are running the risk of being penalized yourself. Also a lot of these sites penalized sell quit a few ad spaces, some even for text-link-ads so does that play a role in the mix? It could be part of it, in order to demand higher dollar for your advertising space the higher the PR the more people will pay for that ad space. I do not work for Google so I can say these are the definite reasons, just my opinions.

I personally feel that right now this change is just in PR alone. So far none of the sites have mentioned a drop in there SERP’s or there traffic. It is a warning shot from Google, either clean up your act up, or the next time we will drop you in the SERP’s. I could be wrong, maybe this is just phase 1 and in the coming days phase 2 kicks in and we start to see these sites drop all of a sudden. So I would love to have some type of answer from Matt Cutts in regards to this pretty big shuffle today, question is, we he make one? As Jill said, let’s get the popcorn and get ready to watch the show. I personally can care less about the green bar and what it has labeled for PR. I will continue to optimize my clients sites for the results they are looking for, last I checked increasing there PR was not on the to do list.

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.

Today’s Spot On tip of the week is about getting the most out of your marketing efforts by better utilizing your time. I will begin this article with two quotes, one I am sure everyone is familiar with and the other you might have never seen.

The early bird catches the worm.

Early to rise and late to bed.

So my quote of the early marketer catches the dollar is a little off from the original. However, as a search marketer, when someone tells you the early bird catches the worm then you need to think of it as the bird catching the dollar. Do you wake up at 10am. or even 11am. and begin your day? For some reading this then you are shaking your head yes to that question. You should notice I said wake up and not begin working at those times. Most that wake up in the morning do not start working right away. They may take a shower, eat some breakfast, take care of the kids (if you wake up at 10 Am. then I will assume either you have no kids or the wife/girlfriend has taken care of them) or you may catch the morning news. You might start working at 11am. or even noon if you are waking up at those times. When you start to actually work you may check your email, hit a few of your social media sites, send a few good afternoon instant messages or just read the MSN home page news. What I would like for you to do is keep track of your normal routine, keep track of the times you are most productive and what it is you were doing during that time. Then I would like for you to keep track of the non productive things you were doing and what times of the day and or night.

Why should you keep a log of what it is you do during your time of work? Well one of the words to the answer is in the original question and the other is about managing it. Time Management, it can make or break you, some people have it and other’s do not. The people that have it are mostly already successful in there line of work. They got to be successful because they knew how to properly manage there time, they are one of the early birds that catches dollar bills while you are still catching your Z’s and sleeping. In the same aspect they are also the ones who are going to bed late. Either to get some more work done or setup for the next morning or to just socialize on there favorite forums or social media sites. I personally get more work done early in the morning and later at night after the family has gone to bed. Lunch time hours for me seem to be my slack time, unless I am in a meeting with a client of course. I make a list of things I need to get done and also on things I would like to do, like start a new website project. Each morning I respond to some of my emails, and then I begin working on that list. I do not respond to all of my emails, I do this for two reasons. One being I do not want to get side tracked for the next few hours on nothing but emails, by doing this I would take my motivation for the morning and put it on slow motion since I would have been doing emails for the past few hours. Reason two being I wouldn’t have much else to do during my slack lunch hour time, or I should say hours.

This may sound crazy to some of you reading this, but I want you to take the log of yourself and make a list of things you will need to do the next day. I then want you to force yourself to wake up at 6am. and start working by no later then 7am. This gives you an hour to actually get out of bed and get your motivation for the day. There are two groups that start this early in the morning, your competition and the successful people in the same industry as you. Now some will argue with me that they get up at noon and do not start working until 2pm. What time do you go to bed, 3am, 4am. 5am? Those people still get more work done. They are the ones that are later to bed. I start my day around 7am and normally end it by 12am-1am. I do have down time from 6pm-10pm for the family, but the last few hours are spent writing a blog post, setting up new campaign ads for clients, sketching to landing page ideas and sometimes just unwinding with some forum reply’s. That is me, early to rise and late to bed.

What it boils down to is time management, either you start it now or you can continue to drag the extra weight on your shoulders that will continue holding you back. I understand people want to succeed online; they read the make money online blogs like shoemoney, doshdosh, darren rowse and think that it should be them. Well you do not make money online by working a partial schedule, you need to bust your butt and take the initiative to succeed. In the world of search marketing there are always new things to learn, new ideas to test and try out. You need to be on top of your game, not afraid to fail and by all means understand that time is valuable. Take full advantage of every hour you are in front of your computer and working. I understand we all need an hour or so a day to just relax or slow down so we chat in forums, chat rooms, instant messenger or whatever. You are still working though because you are networking with other people in the industry, or at least I hope you are lol.

I want you to make a schedule for the next day and force yourself to get up early. Now I understand the first day or two might be hard and you might feel like this is a waste. However, by the fourth or fifth day I bet you will sit back and see that you are getting more work done. So by all means be the early marketer that catches the dollar.

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.

For those of you who do not know, every Monday I try and put someone new “On The Spot” by giving them a chance to tell the rest of the SEM community about themselves, there website, services they offer, a link (FREE LINK), etc.  However, it has been slow going as of late, so if you are interested in getting some free publicity, then contact me.  You may also invite your friends to this offer as well, as long as it pertains to SEM in some form then you can be put On The Spot! This is not a paid review, there is no cost for this.  This is my way of trying to give back to the SEM community at no cost to you.  Contact me today and get yourself On The Spot!

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.

Not everyone has the ability to design a great site, they just know how to effectively market it.  So a designer is hired to make there site for them and of course hopefully take the burden away as well.  How your site is designed is a very important factor when launching your SEM campaign.  I understand that some designers have no idea about optimizing a website with proper marketing strategies in mind.  To some, they simply made a site and expect the owner to advertise with PPC or simple word of mouth.  They do not grasp the concept of proper optimization techniques that go into marketing a website online.  There is more then just simply optimizing your website for the search engines.  You need to optimize your layout for the viewer, optimize your content for both the viewer (more important) and the search engines, optimize your pictures, how they are used.  I will have a guest post on Monday over at PoorSEM in regards to optimizing your images for your marketing campaign.

Yesterday my daughter came home sick from school, so she was in my office most of the day with me and wanted to help me work.  She wanted to make her own website, have her favorite Hannah Montana song playing, she wanted the buttons to bounce around and wanted to make her own video to put on her site.  I love it when she tries to help me, it not only makes her think creatively, it also makes me think as well.  This time though it got me thinking of some of the worst things you can do that will crush your marketing efforts and my 7 year old just listed 3 of them for me.

Using Frames – If you use frames to design your website around then you have just killed any real chances at having a successful SEM campaign.  This technique was popular 10 years ago, so please leave this technique in the past and move on to a more up to date design method.

Resizing the Browser – It is very annoying when visit a site then all of a sudden your browser gets resized.  You are running a campaign for your new landing page to generate leads for whatever.  When the viewer clicks on a link to your site, there browser is resized on the fly.  Yea I just closed my browser to…People do not like drastic changes like that, they did not ask to have there browser resized to fit your poorly designed layout.

Flash Intro’s - Using a flash 20%….. introduction that 40%…..makes the user wait 60%……to view your……80%……website and 90% then they have 95% to wait again to watch it.  100% Why have a flash intro that makes the user have to wait that long to load?  Remember you only have about 15 seconds before most people will move on to another site.  Also keep in mind that the search engines really have no content so spider on that flash intro.  You might want to think about adding links that point to internal pages on your website so the bots have something to start with besides just the flash.

100% Flash Sites – Some company’s think that the interactive site that uses flash is best for the visitor because the site talks, moves, and has all the bells and whistles.  Well try and rank that flash site a top the organic search listings without having to make some major changes.  I won’t drag this out, everyone knows that trying to optimize a site made entirely of flash is a train wreck.

Music or Speech – You arrive at a site and all of a sudden music starts to play and you cannot find your volume button fast enough.  How about the site that has a speech going about how great there product is or why there services are top of the line.  Majority of the visitors will get annoyed having to listen to something while they are trying to read what you wrote.  Also, who is to say the viewer even wanted to listen to your speech in the first place?  Instead you should have given them the option to listen to it.  Have a small heading at the top that has a link to it or make a graphic that stands out so they can see the option to listen to it.

Interactive Flash Navigation (That Does Not Work) – Most navigation menus are on the top, left or right side.  The navigation flows together and is in unison with the design and layout.  Then comes along a 3D spinning box made in flash.  When you put your mouse over the side, the box spins around, the top opens and you see the page name to click on.  Try click on that page name and the box top closes and spins back around.  How about site navigation that is done in flash and when you go to click on the button nothing happens.  Instead you have to put your mouse exactly on the word in the box because whoever made the button made it for the text only and not the entire box itself.  This is a great way to frustrate your visitor who has probably just left the site and moved on. If you insist on using a flash navigation that actually works property, please make sure to have a footer on your site that has the same links so the engines are able to spider the rest of your site.

Cross Browser Compatibility – Try paying a bill online just to find out there site doesn’t recognize firefox and forces me to use IE.  How about going to check out and then get hit with “your browser is incompatible with our checkout system”.  Well what the heck, I had no problems finding the items and adding them to your cart.  Now your payment process wants an IE only user to be able to checkout and pay.  Yea you just shot yourself in the foot if your website does not work with all major browsers.

Quick Loading Time – Having a site that loads fast is crucial. We know the average time you have to capture a visitor’s attention and keep them is about 15 seconds.  Well if they have to wait 15 seconds for your page to load then chances are you have lost there attention already.  I will be writing an article on techniques you can use to have a faster loading page tomorrow.

Showing Video - Use an embedded player in flash to show your videos.  Do not ask the user which speed they would like to view and which player (real player, QuickTime, windows media player).  There are people out there that would get confused with all the choices that they have.  Then when they click on QuickTime and realize nothing happens and they are then taken to download and install the software you just lost a visitor.  Chances are they will be there for an hour trying to figure out how to install QuickTime and realize they forgot why they were installing it in the first place.  Once it gets installed, they then have to reboot there computer.  Ok the user just got up to go watch some TV now because there computer takes 10 minutes to boot up.

Right Click – When I am browsing sites, I have made a habit to right click on a link and open it in a tab to browse that page.  Well when I go to a site and it tells me “sorry, right click is disabled” I want to scream.

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.

Today’s Spot On Tip revolves around writing better content for your websites. A common phrase you have probably read or heard about is “content is king”. Here I will list a few steps that should help you get towards your end goal of having quality content that is laid out properly on your sites. One thing to remember is it’s not just what you say, it is how you say it and how you present it to your readers that will make it “king”.

Unique Information – This is tricky for a lot of people, not everyone is a professional writer or has the ability to come up with there own content on the fly. To give yourself more ideas, you need to read more. Stumble, Digg, Sphinn, your favorite forums or even just flip through the SERP’s to give yourself ideas for your next great article or website topic. You could even ask a question in your subject or page heading and then post your own informative answer. By reading more, you should be able to get more ideas to write about.

Research – Unless you are an expert on the topic, you should always research what it is you are writing about or referring to in your content. One of the worst things you can do is make yourself try and stand out with a great story, just to find out you had mis-informed the readers. You now are standing out, as a sore thumb because the readers will more then likely let you know where you were wrong. This is where research comes into play, make sure you have your facts right before making your site content go live. People would rather read well informed content, this is what will make them come back and read more.

Readability – Not everyone actually reads your entire content, some people simply scan the content until something stands out to them or they find what interests them the most. This is why your content layout is very important and you make it easier to for the readers. Separate different areas what you write with paragraphs and ensure if the next paragraph is a different topic that you highlight that for the readers. Here I have broken down each paragraph, made the paragraph topic bold so anyone scanning can easily see the steps I am referring to from my subject line.

Grammar/Spelling – I am not a professional writer and I will be the first to admit I have a hard time with this one here. However try your hardest to make sure you use proper grammar and always spell check your content. You can lose loyalty to your website if the content does not read properly or has obvious misspelled words all over the place.

Passion – Always try and instill passion in what you write, make your points stand out and state your information. Readers will pick up on that passion for what it is you are writing about and they will be hungry to read more of your content. I like to refer back to your science teacher, he/she used the same mono tone voice in there lecture and going over notes put you to sleep. Imagine if you had a science teacher that had passion each and every day while lecturing you, I bet more people would pay attention. The same concept goes when you write your content. A good example would be Andy Beard’s Blog. He shows his passion in almost every post he makes, which is why people go back each day to see what new things he has written about.

I cannot promise you that by following these 5 steps that you will make the front pages of every major social media site out there. I hope though that by using these 5 steps as a foundation to your content writing, that it will give you a better understanding of where to start.

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.

Will Hanke
Company Name: Lighthouse Technologies

I’m Will Hanke, better known in the WMR chat as TechLH. My business is Lighthouse Technologies (www.TechLH.com). I started out doing web design and hosting back in 1997, and now offer SEO and other SEM related services.

As for other things, I specialize in military-related websites, and do a little payday loan action as well. I got into SEM in October of 2004 when I
downloaded an ebook and got inspired to start putting up some MFA sites. When I discovered WMR and have been hanging out in there since, gaining tons of knowledge and tips (and friends) along the way.

I’ve done web hosting for years and love it. My other website I manage is PoorSEM.com. PoorSEM is a blog for people
with not a lot of money who want to get into SEM and learn how to advertise effectively on the internet.

My affiliate program gives $150 payouts for reseller hosting accounts, something that all internet marketers need. You may read more about my affiliate program here http://www.techlh.com/affiliates

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.

In the past flash was used to redirect visitors from Myspace pages to whatever website you wanted to send them to.  Now you can use this code below on your Myspace profile to redirect traffic to any site you like with one line of code.  This is a nice way of getting links on a high authority website in very little time.  I would not try and abuse this, I am sure if you tried spamming them with the same redirect link through multiple accounts they would see that and just filter it out.  I bet they will be fixing this soon though, anyhow here is the code to use:

http://dect.myspace.com/event.ng/Type=click&FlightID=32281&AdID=53575
&TargetID=5380&Values=710&Redirect=http://www.YOURSITE.com

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.

So you have your eyes set on what you consider a prize domain name for your new website, and to your luck it seems to already have a pretty high PR. Before you rush out and buy that domain name, do some homework first to make sure everything checks out. Falsifying a sites PR is not as hard as people may think. Lets say the domain name you are looking at has a PR of 5 which is not to bad really, but how do you know it is legit. The quickest way is just do a search for www.yourdomain.com into google and check the cache site. If the URL’s do not match up then there is a strong chance that site has a fake PR. This is not 100% accurate, as no PR checking tool out there can ever claim to be 100% because we do not know what steps google takes to fully determine a sites PR. An instance of a site cache not matching up and still be legitimate is if the user has used a 301 redirect for that domain name in recent weeks.

So how do people actually fake there PR? With cloaking of course! You take your favorite cloaking script and you can use this code below. I do not take credit for this code as a co-worker of mine gave it to me. All in all still nice to know how it all works.

<?php
/* insert a cloaking script here to detect whether the visitor is
Googlebot */
if (Googlebot) {
echo ‘<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://www.google.com/”>’;
exit();
}
else {
echo “<p>My page!</p>”;
}
?>

This trick has been around for quite sometime now, but I bet most people were unaware of how this all works and really how quick and easy it is to check a site for potentially have a fake PR. People will use this technique quite often when trying to sell a domain name to people in hopes for a much higher price. The higher the PR, the better the domain is suppose to be. Most experienced domainers know of this already, however people new to the industry might be unaware of this.

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.