Dedicated Landing Pages Vs. Default Website

Posted on June 14, 2011 by Rionald Soerjanto

Dedicated landing pages (DLPs) provide the most straightforward way to serve select traffic segments with targeted, relevant messaging and experiences. Typically, DLPs are utilized to receive traffic from separate advertising campaigns.

Dedicated pages provide instant segmentation, since the marketer can more easily deduce visitor preferences from the messaging that would trigger the visit. When the marketer controls the messaging, as in the case of email, ads, etc., the marketer then indirectly influences traffic quality.

The term “landing page” comes from SEM, and not surprisingly, paid search traffic is most likely to be directed to a DLP. Email is the next most likely campaign type to use DLPs, and the balance between what content goes into the body of an email message versus which content appears on a corresponding landing page is a typical subject for optimization testing.

The Effect of Google’s Farmer Update

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Rionald Soerjanto

Google’s Farmer update at the end of February forced many Web Businesses to take a closer look at their content and how it would rank under new algorithm aimed at improving quality.

A lot of content-website Web Businesses were penalized severely (see the picture below).

The final takeaway for anyone looking to rank remotely high in search results is to avoid shallow, unoriginal, poorly written or virtually useless content whenever possible.

Understanding the Role of Facebook Places

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Rionald Soerjanto

What should people who have a physical location be considering? Would they want to combine their Facebook Page or their Facebook Place? What does that look like?

Facebook has recently rolled out a specific type of Page called a Place page. It’s still fairly early in the adoption of Place Pages. If you are a single-location business, it might be better for you to use a Place Page instead of a fan Page just because there’s some additional things that you can do with a Place Page, such as the ability to do offer ―deals.

Deals are when somebody checks in at your location and you give them an offer. You pay for that in a similar way you pay for advertising. It’s the only form of mobile advertising available on the Facebook platform right now.

If you are the type of business with multiple locations, then it would be a good time for you to continue to keep your brand Page but then roll out a Facebook Place Page for each of your locations. And again, that allows you to roll out deals specific to each of those locations, and it allows people to start to then interact with the other fans. This interaction is one of the key things that people are looking for from the whole fan Page experience, and they can do so with people who are from their same geo-location.

If you are a massive franchise or a very large business, something like a CVS Pharmacy or a McDonalds or Starbucks, then you would have thousands of Place Pages to roll out. Right now, the problem that we have seen with brands is most brands are just trying to figure out how to manage a single brand page.

The idea of adding the complexity of thousands of these individual locations when the tools really aren’t mature enough to allow you to be able to manage a volume of Place Pages like that, it’s probably a little too early for a brand like that to get in unless they have some large investment that they plan on making for a Herculean effort to manage it.

What Is the Best/Easiest Way to Grow Fans & Followers in Facebook?

Posted on April 23, 2011 by Rionald Soerjanto

The biggest thing is to have something that makes someone want to become a fan of your page or want to like a page. It’s really important to have good content that people want to engage with, but you also want to encourage them to do that. So to every blog post you have, to every piece of content that you create, add a call to action inviting people to share it on Facebook or ―like‖ it on Facebook.

This type of social media optimization will dramatically increase the number of people who are going to do those things. And definitely make sure you’re continuing to post the content. Try to engage people once they are fans on Facebook, because they have the power to increase your visibility within the Facebook community. So the more engagement you have, the more you will show up in news feed and gain a lot more exposure.

If you’re creating compelling content, actually spending time engaging on the Facebook page with your community and creating content that’s specifically for them, will bring you more visibility.

Starbucks, the Community and Other Tools of Social Media Marketing

Posted on April 13, 2011 by Vanesha Manuturi

In attempts to further establish the brand of community that Starbucks created, the company didn’t stop at Twitter. The community image that they wish to portray is pushed further a new tool they called “My Starbucks Idea”. With the “My Starbucks Idea” tool, Starbucks manages to offer the target market the sense of community by not only being transparent in their strategies, as seen by the Twitter updates of the Annual Shareholders’ Meeting, but also by taking in the market’s opinion for the company.

My Starbucks Idea acts as a forum where visitors may be able to submit their ideas to Starbucks. The visitors are also able to vote for ideas from other people, thus allowing the people to have a more sense of say in Starbucks. Besides that, the website also directs visitors to the blog where people write about the ideas that were submitted that have been implemented in the community.

Needless to say, with these successful marketing tools, from Twitter to the MyStarbucksIdea.com, Starbucks have achieved a marketing level that other companies should take note of. Instead of focusing on keeping up with the next big thing in social media marketing, companies should hold one moment to establish a strategy where the social media marketing can support, if not strengthen both the brand of the company and its image. More often nowadays also is that companies tend to pushes more on the marketing side of the tools that they oversell the brand. One of the reasons that the social media marketing tools seem to be working for Starbucks favor is because the tools didn’t oversell, thus giving the target market some impression that they are attracted to the brand by choice and not by the fact that they are being marketed to.

Utilizing Facebook Connect for Your Marketing

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Rionald Soerjanto

Facebook Connect is a new feature that extends Facebook Platform to other Web sites and offers members the ability to connect their Facebook identity, friends, and privacy settings to a Facebook Connect-enabled Web site. There is no charge for Web site owners to integrate Facebook Connect, although there is rumor of a Facebook ad network in the works serving ads across these sites.

One good example on our client’s website is www.negpri.com (will be launched sometimes in April of 2011).

Facebook Connect allows Facebook to extend its influence on the Web at large. By turning its social network outside in, it’s empowering tens-of-thousands of Web sites and blogs, both big and small, to make use of many of the same features that have made Facebook the fastest growing social network on the planet. And it’s proving to be a successful strategy.

The main point to adding Facebook Connect is to encourage members to interact with your Web site in ways that generate stories in Facebook. It’s this seamless integration between Facebook Connect partner sites and Facebook News Feed stories that can help make your site viral that is, spread very quickly within a specific group of friends or to a larger demographic.

Here are four more reasons your organization should add Facebook Connect to its website:

Allows your visitors to effortlessly connect their Facebook account and profile information with your Web site.
Offers site owners access to fans Facebook profiling data, such as name, location, age, and so on, to provide deeper insights into your site visitors.
Provides your visitors with an easy way to find and interact with other Facebook friends who also visit your Web site.
Leverages Facebook News Feeds as a way to share and promote your other members’ actions on your site with their Facebook friends, increasing word-of-mouth buzz and the likelihood of more Facebook visitors.

Like all platform extensions, Facebook Connect does require some sophistication on the part of the Web site owner. Although a number of tutorials are available, via Facebook and third-party Web sites, we recommend that an experienced Web developer integrate the code that’s necessary to connect Facebook Connect to your website.

Google’s New Search Algorithm (it’s no joke)

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Rionald Soerjanto

2 months ago, Google, announced the release of their new spam algorithm on 24th of Feb 2011. Allegedly, the algorithm, was armed and aimed to deal with content farms as their prime objective.

According to Google, their goal was quite simple. The algorithm was re-tuned to provide their users the fastest and most accurate relevant answers to their search queries.

It appears that this algorithm, was tweaked to devalue rankings for low-quality sites and sites containing copy content of little value to their users.

It’s purpose is to give quality sites better rankings that provide original content of value, for their search engine users. However, with a major improvement like this, it is going to effect a lot of websites and their ranking will fluctuate. Furthermore, this new algorithm, will reward sites that focus on high quality page copy. Therefore, this is what the algorithm, does! Here is the link for the original post, “Finding more high-quality sites in search“.

Who Uses Facebook Pages?

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Rionald Soerjanto

Facebook Pages are for public figures, businesses, and brands who want to establish a presence on Facebook and start interacting with fans. Pages can be enhanced with apps and provide an open forum for discussions and shared content. Only the official representative of the artist or business controls their Facebook Page.

Facebook Pages provide a great opportunity for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) marketers to get the word out about their product or organization. Here are some examples of companies who use Facebook now.

Continue reading →

A (Brief) Introduction to How Google Works

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Rionald Soerjanto

To succeed with search engine optimization (SEO), and rank for keywords you care about, it’s necessary to understand a little about how Google works.

Google does two basic things. First, it crawls the Internet looking for web pages, storing these pages in its index. Think of the Google index as a massive catalog (much like a library would have a catalog of every book).

Second, it has software that processes user searches and finds the best matching web pages from its catalog. In order for your web page to rank well in Google for a given keyword, two things need to happen.

First, Google needs to crawl and index your web page. If your web page isn’t being crawled, you’re not even in the race! Then, of all the possible web pages that Google thinks is a match for the keyword being searched, your page or pages have to be considered better than the other possible candidates.

Getting Google to visit a Web page and index it is not as hard to do as it once was. In the early days of SEO, it was often necessary to manually submit new web pages to the search engines so they would know these pages existed.

Many SEO consultants and software tools offered this as a service called search engine submission. Today, manual submission of pages is rarely necessary. Instead, simply getting a link to a new web page from a page that is already being crawled by Google is sufficient to get the new page crawled as well. That’s how most new pages get into the Google index today.

If you do decide you want to manually submit your pages to Google, it’s free and easy (and should not involve hiring a consultant). Just use the Google Add URL tool (http://www.Google.com/addurl).

Getting web pages indexed by Google is not the problem. Getting them to rank well is where the challenge is. To understand how to rank well, it’s helpful to understand the basics of how the Google ranking algorithm works.

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