Category Archives: Website Search Engine Optimization

Dedicated Landing Pages Vs. Default Website

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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

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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

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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.

Domain Names and SEO

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A topic that comes up frequently when discussing URLs is the importance of the domain name. The domain name is that part of the URL that is shared by all other pages on the website.

Since the domain name is part of all URLs on a given web site, it is often useful to have a keyword contained within your domain name. The reason is simple, since all of your URLs contain your domain name, any keywords that are in your domain name automatically become part of all of your URLs. This is why keyword-rich domain names have become so popular recently.

The question is, should you change your domain name so that it contains one or more of your most important keywords? It depends. For a business web site, the domain name should likely match the name of the business. If the business happens to contain a descriptive keyword, then you’re fine.

If not, it’s unlikely that you want to change the name of the web site and the business, simply to get a keyword-rich domain. Further, if you do decide to change your domain name, it will take some time and effort to reclaim any SEO authority you have built on the old domain name. Tread lightly here. We’ve gone through this process several times and it always has its challenges.

If you do want to use a domain name that has one or more keywords in it (which may be the case if you’re a startup and have not decided on a business name yet), keep these points in mind: The best domain names are those that are relatively short and memorable.

If you’re running a business, you want to focus only on .com domain names. Though there are other top-level domains, such as .net, .biz, .info, and others, the .com extension is the de-facto standard for businesses.

Black Hat SEO: How to Get Your Site Banned by Google

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Please please avoid these techniques and be careful with the experts you hire especially if they are using these techniques.

Black hat SEO involves exploiting current limitations in Google’s software to try and trick it into ranking a particular web page that would normally not have ranked.

Here are the techniques you should stay away from when optimizing your site for Google.

LINK FARMS

There’s general consensus that one of the strongest influences on search rankings is the number and quality of inbound links to a web page.

A link farm is a group of web sites created for the primary purpose of creating a high number of links to a given web page. These web sites are not real, and the links on them are not genuine signals of quality.

They are often generated automatically by computers and their content is of minimal, if any, value.

KEYWORD STUFFING

This practice involves over-populating certain portions of a web page with a set of keywords in the hope that it will increase the chances that Google will rank the page for that keyword. Search engines caught on to this trick years ago, and it’s no longer effective. Of course, this doesn’t keep people from trying it.

CLOAKING

This practice involves delivering different web site content to Google’s spider than what is delivered to human users.

The usual motivation for this is to send the search engine crawlers content for ranking on a certain term—but send different content to real users. It’s pretty easy for the search engines to detect this. If you’re suspected of using cloaking, it’s easy for someone (like a Google employee) to simply visit your web site as a human and check if you’re cloaking.

This technique, when discovered, is one of the most reliable ways to get a site banned.

HIDDEN TEXT

This technique hides text on the web page. The idea is to include text so only Google can see it, but humans cannot.

The simplest example is some variation of white text on a white background. This combination is not easily visible to human users, but from a computer’s perspective, the content still exists. This technique is a bit harder for Google to detect, but not by any means impossible.

DOORWAY/GATEWAY PAGES

This practice is similar to the cloaking technique. Instead of dynamically delivering different content to Google, a doorway page involves getting a given page to rank well in Google, but then redirecting human users to a different page. Clearly, this is not in the interests of end-users, as they don’t get the content they would have expected.

For most marketers, the time and energy spent on trying to take these short-cuts is much better invested in improving the company web site so that it deserves to be ranked highly and helping the search engines discover this content for the benefit of users. Working with search engines instead of trying to exploit them is the only approach to SEO that works in the long-term.

Five Social Media Models

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It’s a good idea to know how others are using social media so you can incorporate those models into your own campaigns.

Here are five common social media models that are being used by most people (some of whom are our own clients):

Branding. Some companies use social media strictly as a branding tool. Typically, this means running a YouTube campaign that (hopefully) gets a lot of buzz around the water cooler. In our opinion, using social media simply as a branding tool is a twentieth century mindset. If you really want to supercharge your social media campaigns, you’ll incorporate one or all of the next four highly measurable approaches.

eCommerce. If you can sell your product or service online, then you’ll want to drive people to a landing page on your website where they can buy your goods. How can you accomplish this? Just do what Dell does—they Tweet about special promotions available only to the people who follow them on Twitter. The promotional links are easily tracked so they can see how many people went to the landing page and how many converted from a prospect to a customer. They generate millions of dollars in revenue each quarter by using this method.

Research. Many companies are using social media as a tool to do research. Sometimes, this involves building a website to track the results. Starbucks has done this famously with their MyStarbucksIdea.com website. Other times, using social media as a research tool can be as simple as doing a poll on LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey, or via email.

Customer Retention. A good rule of thumb is that it costs three to five times as much to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. Given that, wouldn’t it be smart to use social media as a tool to keep customers loyal and engaged? That’s what Comcast and Southwest Airlines do—they communicate via Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms to help solve customer service issues.

Lead Generation. What do you do if you can’t sell your product or service online? Then you’ll want to do what many B2B companies do—that is, to use social media to drive prospects to a website where they can download a whitepaper, listen to a Podcast, or watch a video. Once you’ve captured the prospect’s contact information, you can re-market to them via email, direct mail, or any number of other methods.

Getting People To ‘Like’ Your Facebook Page

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With Facebook attracting more than 400 million users, the question is no longer if you need to create a Facebook brand presence, it’s how you’re going to use one. If people are talking about your brand, you want them to be doing it on your official page so that you can leverage Facebook’s open social graph and drive users back to your site. But you can only do that after you jump one very important (and large) hurdle.

You have to make people want to join your Facebook page.

It’s simple: You can’t market to or build brand awareness with someone who’s not opted in. What’s not simple is getting a user to hit that ‘like’ button. Users are a lot more discerning on Facebook than on other social sites. For them to opt into your page, they need a compelling reason. It’s a big step from passively liking a brand to publicly ‘liking’ them in full view of friends and colleagues. You have to make it worth their while.

How do you get something to like you enough to make it Facebook official?

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Effective Business Blog Designs

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The design of your business blog has a huge impact on how it is perceived by your visitors. A great design instills trust, makes you more credible and invites your readers to participate. A poor design can make your blog and your company look unprofessional.

Just as with regular website design, there are certain best practices you should keep in mind when working on the design of your blog. The best practices of regular website design still apply, of course, but there are also important blog specific considerations:

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One of the Best PAID SEO Tutorials

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I met Maximus Kang, founder of RankingChannel.com a while ago. I feel that it is important for Small Business Owners to understand and learn the topic of SEO and Social Media Marketing themselves before they pay a lot of money to other professionals. I highly recommend his tutorials that he provided in his website.

Anyway, please check out his new website, his Blog and his comment below:

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a pretty hot ticket these days. With the economy the way it is right now, it sure is tough justifying an agency to optimize your website for thousands and thousands of your hard-earned dollars isn’t it? Results are never guaranteed and when all is said and done, you have absolutely no idea what the agency really did for you and unfortunately, you’re back at square one but this time with a deep void in your wallet. As someone who managed the SEO for the world’s largest online travel agency Expedia, I can tell you that SEO is an on-going process and once you decide to stop paying somebody to do it, you can expect your results to start dwindling away slowly.

Got 5 minutes to spare? I’d like to introduce you to a new service that not only saves you a huge chunk of your initial investment with an agency, but also empowers you to learn the fundamentals yourself and consistently stay ahead of your competitors for a tiny fraction of what an agency might charge per hour…

SEO Membership Preview + Client Results from Maximus Kang on Vimeo.

How a Membership works
• First, you will be enrolled in a 4 month training series where you will learn the fundamentals of SEO through 19 video tutorials.

• Getting other websites to link to yours accounts roughly 70 – 80% of Google’s ranking algorithm. Once you finish the first 18 tutorials, you will receive some of the best link building techniques that I’ve come across in video format. If you have been kicking around the idea of getting a blog, the first 8 videos are on the topic of setting up a blog and using it effectively.

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Learn more about the benefits of a membership by visiting www.RankingChannel.com/membership. Be sure to claim your FREE copy of my new e-book. If you have any questions, let’s talk! max@rankingchannel.com