Expert Internet Marketer

A very interesting observation on what makes the search engine optimization seo so damn hard by Rand fishkin.

While working on the seo and sem projects are extremely challenging and engaging, sometimes it can be a pain to do business with clients who demand top 10 rankings guarantee for as less as $100. And that too within in a month of time. The fact is that I have achieved top 10 search engine rankings within such a short span of time and budget. But still its difficult to entertain such offers on a long term basis.
There are some self-proclaimed seos who offer such hi-fi promises for such low fees but they waste both client’s time and money and can not live upto their promises. This post is an eye-opener for clients who can understand the real value out of effective search engine optimization practices and can help them to stick with quality and value.

Read complete observations here…

Multiple media

Whether you favor online media or offline, response devices should be readily available when there’s a higher chances for your prospects to convert. This can differentiate your brand from the rest of the competitors. Investing in solid workflow and automation systems is an important decision in building strong customer base.

Measurement

Measure your visitor and customer behavior and target your campaign accordingly. Every campaign should be measured by landing pages, conversion, application sign ups, etc. If the All campaigns should be tied to the end goal of Return on Investment (ROI). Having an integrated CRM system to track prospects at every stage of their buying cycle is highly critical.

Test aggressively

Test. Test. Test. No matter what findings and recommendations we get from the measurement process, the only we can get real-time data is to test aggressively. Act upon each of the findings and constantly improve and innovate.

1. Failing to build a site that can be indexed by search engines

2. Failing to understand the visitor’s vocabulary and include relevant keywords that match with their thought process

3. Failing to budget sufficient marketing dollars to do a meaningful job of search engine positioning

4. Failing to build a content-rich website that provides valuable information to visitors

5. Failing to interlink the related pages across the entire website

6. Failing to build RSS capability into your website

7. Failing to effectively promote your website using social media and social bookmarking websites

“We actually buy the word ‘eBay,’ which is very, very unintuitive. We’ve done numerous, numerous tests on this, because every time I go and say, ‘We buy the keyword, eBay’, people come back and say, ‘You’re an idiot. Why are you buying the keyword eBay? Everybody knows eBay. You don’t need to buy the keyword eBay.’ says Matt Ackley, eBay’s VP of Net Marketing.

“We have proven this through analytics … over and over again that it is actually incremental to buy the keyword eBay.

“The reason we believe it is such that there are different types of users … [who] use search in different ways. … There’s probably users who essentially, we say, ‘Put their faith in Google. In Google we trust, and I’m just going to click on the organic search results because I trust the Google algorithm.’ Then, there’s the group of users who say, ‘You know what? If somebody’s willing to pay for something, they’ve probably got something of quality to sell.”

“So, we’ve seen that by buying keyword eBay, we actually get incremental traffic. Now, of course, we cannibalize the natural search or the organic search results. We’re paying for traffic that supposedly we would have gotten for free, and that’s always the question internally, ‘Why are you doing this?’ But, we’ve run the data over and over again.”

o Google’s One-Box presents new challenges

“Our site name is the same as our [stock] ticker symbol — so when you do a search on eBay, actually, the ticker symbol and quote comes up at the top of the natural search listings, which effectively drops our first organic result down to what would be like the third position. … I went to the CEO at one point and said, ‘You know we could probably save a ton of money if you changed the ticker symbol.’ That didn’t go over too well.”

Read the full interview of Matt Ackley at MarketingSherpa.com

“Online video ads are quickly becoming the medium of choice to drive both brand awareness and sales,” said Rick Bruner, research director at DoubleClick. “The results show that there are clear ROI advantages to placing video ads. We expect to see strong growth in the number of companies reaping the benefits of online video advertising in the coming months and years.”

DoubleClick announced the results of its recent research of online video ad placements, illustrating that video is a highly effective format for online advertising. The research results shows that audiences have high interaction rates with video ads compared to text and image ads, users click the “Play” button more than they click on image ads.

The analysis was based on more than 300 online video ad campaigns that were placed by more than 130 advertisers over a four-month period in 2006. The main objective is to identify major trends in the performance metrics of online video ad campaigns according to campaign features, such as vertical industry sector, ad format, ad size and ad length. Read full study »

Imagine you are having a large number of campaigns with 1000’s of keywords to optimize, monitor and generate reports. And you have to do it manually. To err with numbers would prove to be an expensive mistake. It certainly doesn’t sound like a smart idea, right?

Google has opened their API Service for the developers. This service is currently in a beta release and is already a huge popular among the adwords community. Adwords API uses the core messaging technology called SOAP which is an XML and HTTP-based protocal.

Adwords API lets effectively create and manage campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and creatives. In addition, you can also generate keyword suggestions, get traffic estimates, and run report performance. You can do all of this and more right from your desktop or through a web page.

To use API service, you need to have a Google Adwords MyClientCenter (MCC) account. Currently, usage of the Adwords API is a fee-based. Charges are based on per 1000 quota units usage at a rate of US$0.25 (or local currency equivalent) .

AdWords API SOAP interface supports a growing number of languages – including Java, .NET, Perl, PHP, Python, OCAML, Ruby and XML.

Learn more about Adwords API here.

“Structure, Structure, Structure and ME CE, ME CE, ME CE…” – The heart of McKinsey.

For a lot of people like me, McKinsey is a dream company and what is really inspiring is the opportunity to encounter the most challenging problems face-to-face every day. It’s interesting to note from the author Ethan M. Rasiel that inspite of the overload of stress and pressure, McKinsey-ites seems to enjoy it. There are quite a lot of insights you can gain out of this book. For example:

“McKinsey will go to the facts first.” - Its clear no matter how much experience you have and how big you think you are, nothing replaces the facts.

“If you keep your eyes peeled for examples of 80/20 in your business, you will come up with ways to improve it.”

“Know your solution so thoroughly that you can explain it clearly and precisely to your client in 30 seconds.”

“Learn from others’ successes and mistakes. Leverage your valuable time and don’t reinvent the wheel.”

“Just give us the resources. We will go and solve any problem on the earth” – One of the key point that every other company should learn from McKinsey, if they do not already realise this truth. When companies provide challenges, they also should make sure that the employees have enough resources to bank on.

Interested to find out how the structure and ME CE helps to solve your problems? Go ahead and buy this book – at Amazon.

Great video to understand the art and science behind the google’s design process. Jen Fitzpatrick, the head of User Experience team will share examples of how design, usability and engineering come together in Google’s unique culture to create great products.

As Jen rightly puts it “Focus on the user and all else will follow. From its inception, Google has focused on providing the best user experience possible.”

One interesting finding is the need of having a delete button in the GMail based on the users feedback. Also, Jen shares the story how the Google.com homepage happens to be what it is today. Watch the video

Great Plugins

• Search Pages – Built in search function in wordpress to search blog posts.
• Search Meter – Find out the performance of user’s search queries.
• Static Homepage – Take advantage of your Wordpress beyond just a blogging tool. Create static pages such as About Us, Contact, etc.

Essential Wordpress Plugins for SEO

• Related Posts
• Recent Posts and Recent Comments
• Top 10 Posts
• Akismet - Spam fighter.
• Bread Crumb Trail Generator – Breadcrumb is a good seo component in any website. Use this tool to implement the same in Wordpress.
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – Create sitemap of your website for better indexing.
• Organizer – Browser-based plugin to upload files.
• Feedburner Replacement Plugin – Keep your feedburner feed on your domain.
• Objection Redirection – Redirect old and broken url’s to clean and fresh url’s without having to touch an .htaccess file.
• Wordpress Database Backup – Backup the core database tables and any other tables you specify. The backups happen on demand or on a nightly schedule.
• Permalink Redirect

Other Plugins

• Adhesive – Stick a posting to the top.
• Adsense Deluxe – Control Adsense on your blog.
• Adsense Injection – Insert AdSense codes wherever you think ROI can be increased.
• Bunny’s Technorati Tags – A simple and easy interface for tagging in each blog post.
• Feed Copyrighter – Let’s you add copyright info to your feed.
• Postie – Do remote posting via email.
• Flickr Photosets
• WP Cron
• WP – Admin Bar
• WP Contact Form – A simple contact form.

CrazyEgg is becoming a hot product for innovative marketers to clearly identify the key spots for maximum usage of their promotional campaign. In addition, this product lets you understand your visitors behavior as well.

I have been using CrazyEgg for past 2 weeks and the insights it has given me is quite useful. It has helped me to make certain key changes to the layout as well. I will share with you in coming days if there’s any profound impact due to these changes. So, keep glued to this space.

Lets take a quick look at CrazyEgg’s features and benefits. CrazyEgg offers three different visual perspective to better understand your visitors. They are Overylay, List and Heatmap.

In Overlay, you get to know the details of each individual element’s performance with respect to clicks. Usually it’s denoted in percentage.

List mode gives you the complete summary of the click data and Heatmap is a neat concept that gives the eye tracking activity on your page.

With CrazyEgg, you can

• Test different versions of a page to see which works better
• Discover which ad placement gives the best results
• Find out which design encourages visitors to click deeper
• Learn which content leads to improved sales

CrazyEgg has both paid as well as free plans. Take a test drive on the free plan which gives you access to track 5 pages and upto 5,000 visits. If you know any other better visualizing tool, do share with us.