The KeyWord is our monthly publication focused purely on search engine marketing strategies. Below are past editions of the KeyWord for your reading pleasure. Our staff of certified search marketing professionals use methods like the ones explained below to help our clients around the world realize their full internet potential. If you would like to use an article, please credit Horizon Marketing Group and provide a link back to our site. Click here to subscribe.
The subject of linkbait or Linkbaiting has come up in conversation so much in the past month I thought it would be a great topic for The KeyWord this month.
Linkbaiting is the practice of creating online content that attracts other internet users to backlink to your website by passing the link around. Linkbait can be passed around via blogs, forums, posting on sites
Like Digg and del.icio.us, as well as social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter.
The key is creating something that is interesting enough that active participants in the blogosphere will pay enough attention to it and pass it on to their network of friends and contacts. These backlinks not only drive interested visitors to your website, but also show the search engines your site is a relevant contributor to the internet, which helps your search rankings.
So what makes good linkbait? The answer to this question could be very broad, but the short answer is, good linkbait is news, information gossip, humor, insight and bulletins that are of interest to those who you are trying to reach. For example, if your business sells ongoing education for DBAs and computer programmers, posting information useful to that group on your site in the form of top ten lists and whitepapers would provide good linkbait to distribute throughout the online communities, groups, blogs and forums relevant to DBAs and computer programmers.
The process of identifying the right channels for distributing your linkbait also takes time and careful attention to develop. To behave as an active contributor in an online social network it is important to continuously contribute, not just attempt to sell your brand at every turn. Time and care must be given to build your network of friends, in finding and/or building groups to help spread the word and spread the word, of others in your networks as well. The distribution piece of a linkbait strategy forms an overlap between SEO and social media, and not only creates an opportunity, but also potential for a lot of wasted time if handled haphazardly.
Pay-per-Click ads on networks like Google Adwords can be extremely effective channel for driving conversions on your website.
When it comes to pay-per-click, the competition can be fierce and the cost-per-click can be expensive. One way to keep costs down and your conversion rate up is to incorporate "long tail" keyword phrases into your PPC campaigns. A long tail phrase is a specific phrase that may not receive a lot of clicks, but the cost per conversion is generally much lower. Using lots of long tail keyword phrases will in aggregate add up to a lot of traffic. In PPC advertising, broad generic terms always cost more per click. Advertisers with the biggest budgets get their ads placed in the top search results and they end up with mediocre results at best. The best way around this issue is to set up ads with long tail keyword phrases. Long tail search phrases allow for more control over whom PPC ads are presented to.
A few examples of broad generic phrases could be "restaurants", "air conditioning repair" or "mortgage refinance." These phrases would most definitely have tough PPC competition. Plus, once these phrases are entered, the person doing the search would have to click through pages of search results to find exactly what they were looking for. This is not how most people use search engines. For the most part, when we are looking for something specific online, we enter a phrase into the a search engine like Google and if we do not see what we are looking for on the first page, we simply type in a new search. Each search tends to get more specific.
Taking into consideration the search phrases from the example above, the next round of keywords would be more "long tail" search phrases such as "lunch restaurants East Raliegh", "air conditioning repair South Tampa" or "refinance mortgage broker Hartford Connecticut." As you can see, each of the long tail phrases include more descriptive wording. True, these phrases might not get a lot of traffic but the people that are searching on the long tail phrases are more likely to convert and cost a fraction of what the broad (less descriptive) phrases cost.
Incorporate your long tail search phrases with targeted ad copy and landing pages and you will have a winning combination.
Horizon Marketing Group is a Google AdWords Certified Company. If you are interested in creating a new stream of conversions for your site, I would be happy to develop a comprehensive SEM plan that meets your objectives. For more information contact me using the direct number below.
There are certain steps that must be taken in order for any analytic plan to be effective. If the data being reported by Google Analytics or any other website tracking system is hard to understand it will be difficult to make educated decisions.
For those currently using Google Analytics we recommend implementing tagged URLs which allow you to easily identify traffic sources and campaigns that are drawing visitors to your site.
This process can become cumbersome when tracking email campaigns. One challenge internet marketer’s face is tracking specific email campaigns from inception through conversion. Sure, most email marketing applications provide useful data like open rates and click analysis, but how are they tracking the traffic from the email to verify they are truly adding revenue to the bottom line?
At Peer360° we recognized this obstacle and developed a solution.
When an email publication is created with our Peer360° WEBLetter application, any external link is automatically transformed into a tagged URL, including source, campaign and medium, making it automatically tagged for Google Analytics tracking. It is only by tracking traffic and conversions by specific source that we are able to make changes to our marketing budgets putting the dollars where they provide the best ROI.
By designing effective search marketing and email campaigns and optimizing websites to convert traffic, Horizon Marketing Group and Peer360° work together to help our clients set and achieve goals productive to their online marketing plans. If you would like to improve your internet presence and turn your website into your most active sales and marketing tool, just contact me using the information below.
As online video content becomes more appealing to search engines in terms of ranking and indexing, I thought it would be helpful to send you a few pointers on how to use online video to your advantage.
In recent years, the search engines (especially Google) have begun to incorporate video into their search results pages. Google obviously thinks that video will play a very important part in the future of the internet as they paid $1.65 billion to purchase video giant YouTube back in October of 2006. Many search marketers including myself believe that Google is adding additional weight to video content, therefore ranking videos more highly in their results.
In a recent report Forrester Research's Nate Elliot found that “…On the keywords for which Google offers video results, any given video in the index stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index.”
Knowing this before your competitors do is a big advantage. Being the first to post a how to video on your subject or a video to introduce a new service may bring high rankings swiftly and secure your company a top spot in search results for the keyword phrases that you were not able to rank highly for with text.
Here are five tips that you can use to help boost your videos to the top of search engine results.
- Be sure your META Tags accurately describe your video and consider using the word video in the title.
- Fill the page with content that is related to the video or that describes the video.
- Use h1, h2 & h3 tags on the page to further describe the contents of the video.
- Name the file using keywords to explain the file’s contents. You can also name the html page in a similar fashion.
- If you are posting the video on YouTube you should tag the video with relevant keywords.
These five tips should get you started in utilizing video to improve your website's search rankings. For a more comprehensive list check out the most recent On the Horizon newsletter here.
Horizion Marketing Group is a full-service interactive marketing agency. We can produce your online video content then help you use it to build your internet presence and drive traffic to your website.
Due to the current economic situation effecting businesses around the world, executives are being forced to cut back even more on spending in order to help their companies survive. Unfortunately some of these cut backs tend to include critical marketing budgets. Ensuring the right cuts are being made is more crucial then ever. This week I wanted to discuss ways your web analytics data can help you make better informed decisions.
The best approach is to find campaigns or parts of campaigns that are not efficient and to cut them while supporting the more efficient campaigns with the leftover marketing dollars. Here are a few places that I would check first to find these inefficiencies:
Cost per Conversion Comparison
Compare the cost per conversion for each of your campaigns. In Google Analytics you will find this information under All Traffic Sources. From there click Traffic by Medium and finally select the Conversion tab. The cost per conversion for each traffic driving mechanism (I.E. medium) should be displayed if you have set up your goals properly.
Compare by Geography
Compare the cost per conversion by geography. You will find this under Map Overlay in the Visitors section of the reports. You may find that some regions have a high cost per conversion for whatever reason. Eliminate them from the geo-targeting of your paid marketing campaigns.
Time of Day
Review the cost per conversion by time of day. You can do this by going to the goals section and clicking the Graph by Hour button. You can also run a custom report to get more detailed information about the cost per conversion for each hour of the day.
Sources
We also recommend you dive more deeply into your reports to see if there are specific referring sites in paid campaigns with an abnormally high cost per conversion. Then check the cost per conversion against the creative or message used for each campaign.
If you monitor your reports closely and track the trends over time you will be able to eliminate inefficiencies and improve your ongoing campaigns. If you don't have an analytics program set up, or are interested in understanding more about the system you have in place, my team at Horizon Marketing Group is here to help.
Microsoft’s new search engine “Bing” has been attracting a lot of attention from the media over the past few months. All of this attention is definitely driving searchers to try out Bing.com, leaving some marketers concerned about their website’s ability to be indexed and found by the new search engine.
The way Bing search results are sorted and presented in groups is to help speed the search and decision making process, which is why Microsoft has dubbed Bing a “decision engine.” The question that has been coming up since the inception of Bing is, "what does this mean for SEO"?
Here we will explore four tips you can employ immediately to ensure your websites are considered relevant in the Bing "Decision Engine."
First, Bing's search algorithm doesn't change anything in regards to SEO basics. Developing content relevant to search terms that lead visitors to your website(s) is still the most important area to focus on in terms of your search engine optimization. Solid website content will always help across all search engines. However, there are a few tricks you can incorporate to make your site play better with Bing and won’t hurt your results with other search engines.
1. Page Title: It seems that Bing is putting even more emphasis on page title than other search engines. Here is a short list of page title considerations to improve your site’s performance with Bing:
- Use unique page titles for each page.
- Be sure to place your most important keywords for each page in the page title.
- Keep your page title between 15 to 70 characters. The shorter your page title the more emphasis is placed on each word.
- Place your most important keywords closer to the start of the page title.
- Avoid the following characters in your page titles ‘ ” < > { } [ ] ( ) , |.
2. Text: The more relevant text on a page the better. Keyword rich content is a fundamental of search engine optimization, but even more important for performance with Bing. It’s been found that Bing responds best to pages with at least 350 characters of text. So pay close attention not only to your keyword density, but character count as well.
3. HTML: Make sure your HTML code is solid and free of errors. Confirm all of your tags are closed, no links are broken and each link leads to the correct page. . If your site includes broken links MSNBot will be able to index your site effectively, let alone allows visitors to navigate your site easily. You can validate your site’s code using the HTTP Conditional Get test tool or HTTP compression tool available for free from Microsoft. You can check your site for broken links using the W3C Markup Validation Service.
4. MSNbot: Make sure that MSNBot is admitted to crawl your site and not on the list of crawlers banned from indexing your site. MSNbot is a web-crawling robot deployed by Microsoft to supply Bing. The robot collects documents from the web in order to build a searchable index for the MCS search engine.
The information above is just a start. Each search engine involves their own unique algorithms and characteristics of how they present search results to their users. Continuously refining your site’s code, content and links will ensure effective optimization across all engines. The SEO team at Horizon Marketing Group manages the search optimization strategies of all types of companies to ensure they are found online by their target market. If you are concerned as to whether your site is operating up to par or have questions about your company’s online visibility, contact Horizon Marketing Group today.
When it comes to measuring your website’s traffic sources, one of the fastest growing segments you should be watching is visits from iPhone users. Considering Apple has sold over 37 million iPhones and recently reached their billionth iPhone App download its safe to say iPhone users represent a substantial market.
Businesses that identify a trend of visits from this popular traffic source early will be able to beat their competition to the table with new campaigns designed for this rapidly expanding segment.
Google has recognized this by enabling Google Analytics to track visits from iPhone users. Using Advanced Segmentation within Google Analytics, users are now able to isolate and analyze subsets of traffic, including iPhone traffic.
Here is how to view iPhone and iPod Touch traffic in Google Analytics:
- In Google Analytics click on the drop down menu, next to "Advanced Segments" in the upper right corner of the screen.
- Select "Visits from iPhone." (You may want to uncheck "All Visits" when viewing your iPhone segment to isolate the traffic. If the percentage of total visits to your site from the iPhone is low, it might be difficult to visualize both sets of numbers on the same graph.
Advanced Segmentation is one of Google Analytics' most powerful features. You can use it to slice and dice your Google Analytics data using many variables. Another application of Advanced Segments would be to compare the segments of iPhone and Android
From the “Advanced Segments” dropdown menu, click on "Create a new custom segment", and create a segment with two criteria.
- Drag "Operating System" under the "Systems" dimension into the target area with the dotted-line border, and type "iPhone" into the "Value" field.
- Click "Add 'or' statement" to get a second target area, and do the same for “Android.”
- Name your segment and click “Create Segment.”
You can now watch both traffic sources.
Click here for a short video and further explanation of Google Analytics Advanced Segments.
Through strategic search optimization methods and traffic analysis, Horizon Interactive can help you take your company’s online marketing campaigns to the next level. Contact us today to schedule a search engine optimization and website analytics consultation.