Written By: Sujan Patel On June 7th, 2007 | 3 Comments
To run a comprehensive search marketing program, you will need to use both organic search and pay per click advertising. Before investing heavily in either area, I’d like to show you how you can save time, money and effort by allowing these services to compliment one another.
Tip #1 — Record & Review Web Analytics Regularly
Run, don’t walk to get some analytical reports that record data on your site visitors. You will need to use your web analytics tool to locate the following data:
ï What pages convert the best?
ï What is the most common path through your web site?
ï How are visitors searching for you now?
ï What are your average conversion rates?
(There is other data that will prove to be helpful, but the above represent the standards that apply to all sites and all markets.)
Once you have access to this data, you need to make it a point to record it and review it on a regular basis. Doing so will open your eyes to critical trends in your visitor behavior.
Armed with this information, you can then monitor the effectiveness of future tests in PPC spending (like different keyword targets, ad groups and landing pages) while also providing insight to how successful your search engine optimization is performing.
Tip #2 — Smart Execution Requires Patience
Many of our clients come to us wanting to see an overnight success, but the truth is that results take time to develop. While we may stumble upon a needle in a haystack overnight from time to time — there is a wealth of work and effort that goes into each successful marketing plan.
In order to evaluate success with your SEO and PPC efforts, you must test a large enough sample of users and time ranges.
Never consider a PPC campaign a success by reviewing less than 1,000 visitors. Doing so will skew your data, and leave you susceptible to many potential oversights — including the following which tend to be the most common:
Time of Day
Users act differently during business hours than they will at night. Likewise, search based traffic on the weekend is much different in origin than during the week for some markets.
Origin of Traffic
Google AdWords by default can send you traffic from search based pages as well as from content-matched third party sites. The patterns that develop between each source of the referral are incredibly different.
Changes in Ad Copy
Subtle changes in your ad copy or the placement of the ad on a page will many times dictate how your users act and react once they arrive at your site.
…in all of these cases, sampling a small audience will result in data that provides a false sense of security for you. If your test only lasted through business hours on one day — we would strongly advise you to activate that ad full time on a much more conservative level. You can’t expect to set the ad spend through the roof and just let the ad run… because you could be wasting your money quickly and end up with nothing to show.
Tip #3 — Use PPC Success to Dictate SEO Goals
Once you have identified some strong areas of performance and conversion for your pay per click efforts, we recommend revising your organic search efforts accordingly. For example, you may find a dozen keywords that are converting into sales on your site like crazy — but you also know that PPC is the only vehicle you have to reach those potential customers.
Well, change things up! The beauty of SEO is that you are able to make changes, adapt your keyword targeting and test a number of items without ever spending more than your own time.
The end goal of this exercise is to rank well for the terms that you were once paying for. Once you can earn your way to the top, you can then refocus your ad spend and approach other markets.
Tip #4 – Scalability is Key!
The final tip we would like to offer up is the importance to keep things scalable. For many of our clients, successful search marketing campaigns result in a big time commitment on their end. Be sure that you have the manpower to accommodate more calls, emails and leads through your site.
Having a systematic approach in place will allow you to quickly get things done and continue to grow your business out using the engines to your advantage.
Conclusion
When you pay for traffic, you always feel more committed to the end goal of improving your ability to generate business online. Do not allow yourself to become complacent with your progress. The most successful efforts exist when you revise data regularly, adapt to your visitors needs, and minimize the amount of work that your visitors need to take before closing the process.
Written By: Sujan Patel On May 14th, 2007 | 4 Comments
For all you do-it-yourselfers out there, there is a SEO friendly way to develop a community-related site created with AJAX (otherwise known as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). This alternative uses AJAX extensively but manages to solve many of the problems that cause search engines and user’s issues. While still a work in progress it offers solutions that benefit search engine optimization and marketing.
Search engine bots have been known to ignore JavaScript. Often, JavaScript redirects have been abused which hasn’t helped matters. In addition, to being crawler “unfriendlyâ€, in the case of AJAX, often times other functionality that affects the user is also inhibited. (for example, the use the back button). These are a couple of issues faced when employing JavaScript on a site.
Now a social networking platform solution based on AJAX that remains both user and search-engine friendly is available. The open-source solution that intends to resolve many of the user issues and problems that affect search engine optimization and the user experience is known as Orca.
The Orca Interactive Forum Script developed by BoonEx is an AJAX solution that has solved the issues of having an operational “Back†button, the use of permalinks, search-engine friendly structure, and bookmarkable pages. The script is also being developed to include unique page title tags and human-friendly URLs. In addition to the Orca Interactive Forum Script there will also be scripts available for Directories, Wikis, and Blogs.
For the more technically advanced this is how some of the issues are resolved
The need for multiple variations of a code is eliminated. A solution many developers have used in the past has been to create one site for the user and one for the search engines. In this case, XSL Transformation (XSLT) is used to create site contents and resolve the issue. Because XSLT can be done on either the client side (in browser) or server side (i.e. PHP) there is no need to create two sites. One code can be used for the user and the search engine.
For example, if you look at the Orca forum url:
< a onclick="return f.selectForum(5, 0);" xhref="index.php?action=goto&forum_id=5&start=0" mce_href="index.php?action=goto&forum_id=5&start=0" >Orca Installation< /a>
When a user clicks this URL the browser executes onclick event and if return f.selectForum(5, 0) statement returns false the browser will execute onclick code and doesn’t follow the link in href attribute. In this case, a XSL Transformation on the client side is executed (good for server performance because xsl transformation is performed on the client machine).
When a search engine “clicks” this URL it sees only the href part of the url and opens a page with a regular URL with the same page content. In this case XSL Transformation performs on the server side and this URL outputs a regular html page.
And to solve the problem of a dysfunctional back button this is the solution they provide. The back button in Orca is based on # symbol after the URL. JavaScript can read and change the value in the URL after the # symbol without a page reload, but a browser stores this URL (with another text after # symbol) in browser history.
The sequence (as in Orca):
1. User opens a forum via AJAX
2. JavaScript reloads the target area on the page and stores information about this action in the URL (example: #action=goto&forum_id=5)
3. Browser stores this URL in history
4. The user clicks the Back Button
JavaScript sees that the # part of the URL has changed, takes the new text after the # symbol, parses it and calls JavaScript to reload the target area on the page (example: #action=goto&forum_id=3 would open topics in forum with id=3)
Mozilla and IE handle these URLs (with changed text after the # symbol) differently. So JavaScript code for them is different, but the algorithm is the same.
Note that xsl transformation is very strict - you have to write xsl templates very carefully, but at the end of the day you will have perfectly valid HTML code.
Source
Has anyone have any experience with using any of these solutions? How has it affected your SEO? Feel free to share your experience or thoughts.
Written By: Sujan Patel On April 6th, 2007 | No Comments
Telling your perspective clients or anyone that their websites sucks is very hard to do. You don’t want to say the wrong thing and anger them but you also want them to know that it needs some changes (It sucks!).
1. Your website needs to be optimized so that it’s picked up by the search engines while still appealing to your visitors.
2. Your website has great information, though it could use a touch up to make the information more accessible.
3. Your website looks great but it is worthwhile to check out your competitors and see what they are doing different (point them to some outstanding site).
4. Your website would get a lot higher conversion if you change a few things…(tell them few suggestions). These changes would also make the website more search engine friendly.
5. I’m sorry but your website is search engine friendly or does it appeal to the end-user. It would be best if you did a complete redesign. Some changes I would make are.(give example of some majors changes you would make)
There never is a good way tell someone their website sucks, but there are less harsh ways.
Written By: Sujan Patel On April 6th, 2007 | No Comments
So you want to increase your returning visitors? It is actually quite simple…have a good Website. In the real world it’s a bit more complicated than just having a good website. Here are a few tips can help you increase your returning visitors.
1. New/Updated Content
Update your content frequently, add more content. If you are selling a product, offer some information about the product. i.e. An ecommerce site would have testimonials and detailed information about their products.
2. Offer a Bribe
What does everyone want? Something for free! So you offer something for free, weather its free information on a certain topic, or free shipping (if you’re an ecommerce site) or a free tool (if you sell a service).
3. Branding/ Bookmark
Branding your website is very important; make sure your website design unique and uniform, so that visitors know they are at your site. Make it very simple to go back to your website by having an easy to remember domain name and/or having a “bookmark this site†link on your site. The easier it for a visitor to remember your site and bookmark it the more chances there are that they will come back.
Remember: Don’t just follow these tips blindly make sure they apply to your niche. What works for some niches may not work for your’s.
Written By: Sujan Patel On April 6th, 2007 | 1 Comment
Yesterday, Lee Odden wrote 5 myths about SEO, I thought I’d follow up with 5 more myths about SEO…
1. Instant Results
“Our company assures that you will get instant results with our SEO programâ€
If an SEO says that they can get you instant results, they are either purposely feeding you incorrect information, thinking you don’t know any better, or they themselves don’t know any better about results. Either way, stay away from this false promise. Optimizing your site takes time. You will see results after you start your SEO program, but you’re not going to miraculously be on the top of the SERPs (search engine results page) from the start.
2. Guaranteed Placement
“We guarantee top placementâ€
This has to be the worst lie ever told, yet so many people fall for it every day. If an SEO or company says the word “guaranteeâ€, then you should NOT hire them (or even waste time talking to them). Since an SEO is a third party and are not affiliated with the search engines, they can not make any guarantees.
3. 1000 Search Engine Submission
“We will submit your site to over a 1000 search enginesâ€
Since there are only four major search engines which feed 99% of the world’s searches, submitting to 1000 of them wouldn’t really do you any good. Also, these four search engines feed most of the smaller search engines. For example, Netscape and AOL use Google’s search results to feed their search engines. Another thing you should think about is the fact that submitting to a search engine doesn’t mean your site will get indexed by them, you are merely suggesting your site. And what’s the use of submitting a site that is not optimized?
4. Meta Tags
“Each page of our website is optimizedâ€
If each and every page of your website is already optimized, why aren’t you ranking in the first position for all your keywords? Changing your Meta tags isn’t just what it was a few years ago. Search engines now look at many more factors than just meta tags, such as keyword density, link popularity, relevance of your site to the actual keyword.
5. We Don’t Need SEO
“Our website 100% search compatibleâ€
Unless you get an email from Google congratulating you on your 100% search engine compatible site, it’s just isn’t true. Let’s face it…no site can be 100% search engine friendly. Search engine optimization is based on one’s perception of guidelines released by the search engines, most of which are theories, not facts. What works on one niche may not work for another.
There is no easy way out when it comes to SEO. It is all about testing theories, hard work and sometimes a bit of luck.
Written By: admin On November 3rd, 2006 | 1 Comment
