Google reported that they have recently updated an article entitled: “What’s an SEO? Does Google recommend working with companies that offer to make my site Google-friendly?”
The article is particularly strong in describing some of the things to beware of when talking to an SEO.
Joost de Valk wrote a super article on search engine optimization for Wordpress. It is packed with some really great advice. I particularly like his suggestions regarding permalinks and several great plugins such as:
Altogether it is well worth reading through his suggestions.
Ever since I started using multiple browsers in my daily work life, I have been a big user of FURL. FURL is a social bookmarking tool which enables me to bookmark Web pages and access my bookmarks in whicever browser I happen to be in. I know I could have found some way of synchronizing bookmark lists across browsers, but say I stated using a new browser, ensuring that the bookmarks were synchronized would have been a headache. Not so with FURL. It doesn’t matter where I am (on my computer or someone else’s) or which browser I happen to be using, I simply log in to FURL and I can see all the pages I have bookmarked. One of the things I really like about FURL is the ability to create as many categories as I need and to assign one or more categories to each bookmark. I now have 1.138 bookmarks and so categorization is a necessity.
There are some social media aspects of FURL that I have not yet began to explore, such as subscribing to other people’s FURL lists. This will be fun for another day, but I think it is fair to say that while FURL is very useful it doesn’t have the same social media benefits to your SEM efforts as do Digg or Stumbleupon. In a nutshell, you are allowed to ‘digg’ or ’stumble’ of of your own pages, provided the page is genuinely going to be of interest to other readers. The net result can be a significant increase in traffic.
I use both Digg and Stumbleupon, however I recenlty renewed my interest in Stumbleupon when I started using its Firefox Stumbleupon toolbar plugin.
By clicking the Stumble! button you get a Web site that other stumblers have recommended based on your expressed interests. This is a really easy way to find a lot of high quality sites that you might not have otherwise found. Having looked at a page you can click the thumbs up or thumbs down icons depending on whether you liked the page. This feedback helps Stumbleupon find the really good sites for other users.
Of course you can stumble new sites that you found by yourself, but the Stumble button is a great way of spending the occasional spare five minutes and can be very educational.
Wikia (the search engine created by the founders of the Wikipedia) has started to do some interesting things. Users can suggest pages and add comments to existing ones. Wikia keeps a log of who is doing what, which is also available for viewing.
And because of Wikia’s democratic ideals, users do not need to be registered to comment on links.
While this system is likely to attract SEOs to add and position otherwise worthless sites, I presume the idea is that as Wikia grows in popularity, a sufficient number of people will influence the search results for the benefit of everyone. One SEO (and his social media friends) could only influence Wikia to a finite extent. If the engine really catches on then the input of the wider public would easily swamp any attempted ‘gaming’ by SEOs. For example, some of my pet Google peeves include pages designed exclusively for generating advertising revenue (i.e. low quality collections of links) and the fact that some sites which ought to be authoritative or drowned out by link after link from intermediaries. For example, if I search for RB Inn, San Diego, a local hotel, on Google, as I scan through the results pages I still have not found the actual Web site for the hotel by page 5. Instead I get a collection of travel reviews and newspaper sites, most of which are fastidious in not providing the link to the hotel’s actual Web site. I believe that such shortcomings would eventually be removed by Wikia’s social model.
On Wikia’s downside it seems that the universe of sites included in Wkia’s index is very small in comparison with Google, Yahoo! et al.
Wouldn’t it be great to get an inside look at the workings of a search engine?
You could find out why some things rank higher than others as well as getting an understanding of how and why pages are fetched from the Web, indexed and made available for search. You could also gain an appreciation of the massive amounts of data out there.
There is a way to achieve all this…
I recently spent some time installing and evaluating Nutch which is part of the Apache Lucene project. Nutch describes itself as an: “… open source web-search software. It builds on Lucene Java, adding web-specifics, such as a crawler, a link-graph database, parsers for HTML and other document formats, etc.” One thing that you will notice about the project is that it is very sparing in its use of words. Nutch allows you to create an initial list of pages, fetch the pages from the Web and perform indexing. It also includes a search form.
What is extraordinary about this project is the amazing speed in which it fetched and indexes pages, even using an old e-Machines box on which I installed Ubuntu server.
What is also interesting is to review the results that you get when you do a search.
After you do a search (using Nutch’s default values) the results appear as follows (I added the red oval):
If you click on the explain link, you get something like the following:
I haven’t worked out what it all means yet - and of course, this is obviously not the same algorithm used by Google, Yahoo! or MSN - but is does start to give an inkling in how search works and results are ordered.
Public relations is concerned with managing the relationship between a company and its public. The public includes customers, but can also include anyone else who has an interest in your business, for example: partners, employees, families of employees, potential employees, government, competitors, and people living in the vicinity of your business.
The public relations function includes dealing with press inquiries and writing news releases. These releases are distributed to the press, television and radio (and other interested parties) and can result in free publicity.
The Internet has been a great boon in helping business make the most of public relations. With the Internet a well crafted and newsworthy press release may not only elicit some journalistic interest and hence press coverage, it can also directly help the SEO function by the propagation of your content and link rich press releases throughout the Web.
Potential advantage of Internet distribution can be summarized as follows:
The first question to ask when creating press release is who the press release is aimed at? This should determine how the release is written. For example, if you were writing the release for the editor of a technical publication you would probably spend more time describing your product’s technical details. On the other hand, if you were writing for a general mainstream publication you would probably be better describing features and benefits is a less technical way.
Remember that a press release is not an advertisement and if it becomes one it will not be accepted by the better on-line PR services and it will certainly not be picked up by the media. A good way of determining whether your release is potentially interesting is to put yourself in the shoes of the journalist who ultimately will receiving the release. Ensure that you include any necessary information required to help those receiving the release to understand and get the most out of it.
Once you have considered the sort of information you will include in your release, you will also need to consider which key word phrases you wish to optimize the release for. These phrases should be embedded in the release similar to how you would use them in a new Web page.
Press releases should be written to make the recipient want more information. Don’t tell the whole story, but rather, leave the reader wanting more. The release should be front end loaded so that the guts of the information are included in the first paragraph.
Information must be factual, true and newsworthy and should answer the following questions:
Press releases should not be written in the first person and should contain active language. For example, the phrase: “the software program resulted in Acme Corp saving $10m in 2007,” is written in passive language. The phrase: “Acme Corp saved $10 in 2007 using the software program,” is active language. Avoid embellishment, exaggeration and hyperbole and stick to the facts.
A printed news release should consist of the following main components:
When formatting the release, do not use all capitals (except for the FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE statement) and avoid using exclamation points. In both cases the press releases will be viewed as being over embellished. Check for grammar and spelling. You should print the release out and read it as well as asking someone else to review the release. it is often a good idea to reread the release the next day.
Press release should be more than one paragraph and ideally would be about 300 words. Small articles, that tell a story well will often be used to fill a small area in a publication.
Web based PR services often provide a format to ensure that your release is correctly formated for their service.
One of the advantages of releasing press releases on the Web is the ability to add photos and multimedia files such as video. Some of the on-line PR services (including PRWeb enable you to do this.)
Once a release has been written and submitted, you hope that it will interest a journalist who will seek more information. One of his first ports of call is your Web site. Yet another reason why an up to date and content rich site is so important.
One of the big advantages of releasing news on the Web is that the release may appear in one of the biggest Internet news services:
Google News - http://news.google.com
and
Yahoo! News - http://news.yahoo.com/
Not only do these site include press release, but they also include back links included in your releases.
Neither Google News nor Yahoo! News accept news releases directly, rather they garner information from other news sites. for USA based news releases, Yahoo! mentions
As well as providing press release submission services, many of the sites listed below provide useful information to help you develop your press releases.
PR Web - http://www.prWeb.com/
PR Leap - http://www.prleap.com/
PR.com - http://www.pr.com
I-Newswire - http://www.i-newswire.com/
PRZoom - http://www.przoom.com/
Clickpress - http://www.clickpress.com
http://www.pr-usa.net/index.php?option=com_ja_submit&Itemid=94
The Open Press - Free Press Release News Wire: http://www.theopenpress.com/
Pressbox - http://www.pressbox.co.uk/about.htm
24-7 Press Release - http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/
Business Wire - http://www.businesswire.com
PR Newswire - http://www.prnewswire.com/news/index.shtml
Prime Newswire - http://www.primenewswire.com/
Webwire - http://www.Webwire.com/default.asp
Marketwire - http://www.marketwire.com/
With PR your hope should be that some of your press releases are ‘picked up’ by news sites or are somehow displayed somewhere else on the Web. You might, therefore, be concerned that you could be subject to a duplicate content penalty. In an interview with Lee Odden on Feb 20th, 2008, Google’s Adam Lasnik laid these concerns to rest (http://www.toprankblog.com/2008/02/adam-lasnik-video/). According to Lasnik penalties for duplicate content are very rare. Google recognizes that most duplicate content is either inadvertent or actually quite useful for the end user. He recommended that in order to work with this duplicate content to your advantage, make sure that each piece of work included authorship information and linked back to your site. This is particularly helpful in Google knowing that your site is canonical - in other words, which URL represents the original and most relevant source of the material.
An area where content duplication could have an effect within a site. In this case, while pages wouldn’t necessarily be penalized, the fact that there are duplicates could cause Page Rank diffusion. In other words, the Page Rank of a particular page could be reduced because of duplicate content.
Microsoft adCenter Labs have an interesting tool to evaluate whether there is commercial intent implicit in certain keyword phrases. The idea behind the tool is that certain phrases imply that the person using them has an intention to make a purchase. For example, the phrase ‘Nikon prices’ is evaluated as having a 77% chance of being a commercial query, i.e. the person typing the phrase is interested in prices because he wants to find out how much a camera costs in order to buy it. Of course, the person searching for ‘Nikon prices’ might be interested because he recently bought a camera and wanted to see if prices had gone down, or he might be writing a magazine article, in which case he would not have commercial intent. The phrase ‘buy Nikon camera’ has a 96% chance that the search has commercial intent behind it. By adding the ‘buy’ to the phrase makes the searcher’s intentions pretty clear.
The phrase ‘better portrait photography’ is determined to be non-commercial. The searcher may be looking for equipment to improve their portrait photography, but the chances are, they are just looking for tips, tricks or tutorials.
A powerful use of this tool is to determine the commercial intent behind phrases used in pay-per-click advertising campaigns. Assuming that you are selling something on your site and the objective of your PPC advertising campaign is to generate revenue. If you are bidding on a phrase that is not rated as having a ‘commercial intent,’ if someone clicks on your advertisement, the chances are that they do not have commercial intent to buy anything when they get to your site and hence the amount you paid for the click is wasted. So a good technique is to go through your list of PPC phrases to screen out any that do not have commercial intent implicit in them. By doing so, you should be able to significantly improve the ROI of your PPC advertising campaigns.
The adCenter link included above also includes other useful tools including:
I’m currently reading Web Analytics An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik. It is easy to read and it packed with great insights about analytics - including analystics for social media and SEM.
One thing that struck me the other day was Avinash’s comments about internal search. Even though I often use the internal search box on many of the sites I visit, I hadn’t really thought about its potential as an information source for understanding what people are looking for when they got to my site.
it makes sense that as sites get bigger and bigger, no menu structure, or site map can truly capture the complexity of the information and provide an easy navigation to each and every item. Avinash cites Amazon as an example.
Capturing the data does not need to be complicated, at least not at first. You can start by capturing what the visitor did an internal search for and when he made the search.
If you decide to use Google Analytics, Google recently added a new feature called Site Search. To enable Site Search for your site you need to lo into Google Analytics and find profile settings. Once here you need to edit the Main Website Profile Information and change the Site Search setting to “Do Track Site Search.’ You will also need to enter Query Parameter(s). These enable Google to recognize that a search is taking place. When someone clicks the internal search box on you site, you will probably see something like:
http://billyfire.com/BillyFireSearch.php?search_term=test+entry
or
http://semplanning.com/wordpress/?s=test+search+in+wordpress
In the first case the query parameter is: “search_term”. In the second case, which results from submitting something into the standard Wordpress search box, the query parameter is “s.”
E-mail marketing is a growing practice as companies realize that it is not only less expensive than traditional direct marketing but it is also highly measurable. The growth of the e-mail marketing industry has brought with it a proliferation of e-mail service providers.
Most companies benefit greatly from being able to easily send out targeted and timely messages to its customer and prospect bases. Such direct marketing has the following advantages:
There are also several pitfalls that you must be aware of. The CAN-SPAM act puts several obligations on bulk mailers such as providing the ability for people in your database to unsubscribe from receiving future messages. It also mandates that you include a physical address in your e-mail.
Another potential issue relates to ‘phishing’ schemes where unscrupulous e-mailers create facsimiles of your official e-mails and then send them to large numbers in the hope of obtaining private information such as account numbers, user names, passwords and social security numbers.
In Target Marketing magazine, Regina Brady provided a good analysis of the types of e-mail communications that a company could use, for example:
She then went on to suggest who, internally, should be responsible for creating and sending the email, the target of the email and how often. For example, she suggest that survey e-mails could be sent quarterly to both customers and prospects1.
There are 5 main e-mail marketing options available:
Probably the most familiar way to send e-mails is desktop client software. Obviously this is a great way of sending one-to-one or one-to-a-select group of recipients.
It suffers from several shortfalls:
Its big advantage is that most people have an e-mail account set up and hence it is quick and easy to send this sort of message. In situations where personalization is not important and the speed of sending e-mails to personal acquaintances, is important, then a desktop based e-mail program may be the best option.
Many people use aol.com, gmail.com, hotmail.com or yahoo.com e-mail addresses. It is possible to send bulk e-mail using one of these accounts, however there are some major disadvantages:
A desktop based bulk e-mail program works a little bit like a mail merge within a word processor. In other words, you create an e-mail and in it you add variables from a database (e.g. first name, second name or location). You then merge the e-mail with the database and send personalized e-mails to all the addresses in your list.
It is possible to use OpenOffice’s writer to send e-mail in this way. My preference is a program from Infacta (http://www.infacta.com/) named Groupmail. There are four different editions including a free Edition, With this edition you may create HTML and plain text version of an e-mail, build lists and include list attributes (e.g. Dear <Firstname>) in your e-mails. The free edition requires that you have access to an SMTP server and only allows you to send to a maximum of 100 recipients at one time. The paid for versions allow you to use your personal computer as an SMTP server.
Using a desktop system has some advantages, such as it being free (or a one off cost). Unfortunately there are some major problems:
A major growth area in the marketing services arena is in the e-mail marketing services arena. Service providers include:
Most service providers work in a similar way. When you open an account on service provider’s Web site you can:
One of the main advantages of the Web based solution is that the e-mail service providers jealously guard their ability to deliver e-mails. They tend to be rigorous in ensuring that none of their customers are involved in spamming. This means that it is more likely that your e-mails will be delivered and received by recipients. They also provide a framework so that you are far more likely to conform to the CAN-SPAM regulations (see http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.shtm for a description of the act).
Pricing is generally based on either the number of contacts in your e-mails list or alternatively the number of e-mails that you send in a certain period of time.
A further option is to use phpList (http://www.phplist.com/), an open source PHP program that can be used for sending newsletters. The program is very feature rich with many of the same features found among the email service providers.
Having used this program I believe that its main disadvantages are that if you run it on your server there is a danger that some of your e-maisl are inadvertendly classified as SPAM. If this lead to your IP address being added to an e-mail ‘blacklist’ it could seriously hinder you abilty to send e-mails, not just from phpList but also from anyone who uses your server to send e-mail.
I also found that the software was far less intuitive to use than that of an equivalent service provider.
Recommendations
Overall I recommend Constant Contact. Its easy to use, easy to modify the templates to match your corporate identity and easy to manage databases of contacts. Constant Contact is responsible for making sure their servers stay off blacklists and you pay based on the size of your list rather than how many emails you send (although you need to be careful not to extend the patience of your house list by sending too many emails).
E-mail marketers typically get the e-mail addresses to which they send e-mails in a combination of two ways. It is possible to rent a list for a price per e-mail address (these list are typically priced per thousand emails, e.g. $300 CPM). In this case you will not normally actually receive the list of e-mails addresses, rather your e-mail will be sent for you to the list. The second way of acquiring email addresses is through the house list. This is a permission based list of opt-in email addresses that you gather, perhaps through a sign-up form on your Web site. The house list can be used to foster customer loyalty, cross sell and up-sell products and services.
Of the two ways of acquiring email addresses the house list is significantly more valuable. Not only do you not need to pay a fee when you send e-mails, but you also know that everyone on the list has expressed some interest in your business.
Blacklists are collections of IP addresses that have been reported as having sent SPAM emails. Many Internet service providers (ISPs) check these lists before delivering emails to their customers. There are many blacklist including:
A very useful tool to check whether your IP is included on a blacklist may be found at: http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx. You enter your IP address and the tool reports whether you ar eincluded on any of 147 DNS based email blacklists.
1Brady, Regina. “E-Mail Strategies for Corporate Governance.” Target Marketing Jan. 2008: 27-28.
I define SEM (Search Engine Marketing) as the process of using the Internet to market something. The something can be a product, service, charity solicitation, organization or political candidate, in fact virtually anything. SEM encompasses SEO (Search Engine Optimization), e-mail marketing and Internet advertising.
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SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of modifying the content of pages and the incoming links to a page as well as many other factors, to attempt to have the web site appear as close to the top of search results as possible. These results are known as ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ search results. In Google these results are not paid for. PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising refers to the advertisements that you see above and to the right of the Google search results. With the Google advertising model the position of the advert is determined by the amount you pay when someone clicks on the advertisement and other factors such as the ‘quality’ of the advertisement which Google measures by the ‘click through rate’, i.e. the ratio of people clicking on the advert divided by the number of times the advert appears. With PPC advertising you can set the maximum you are prepared to pay per month and the maximum that you are willing to pay for a click. The other major part of the PPC click system are the keyword phrases. Each keyword phrase has a maximum amount that you are prepared to pay if your ad appears as a result of someone tying in your keyword phrase (or something similar). E-mail marketing is any marketing conducted through the sending of e-mails. This could e as simple as an individual sending an e-mail to someone else. It usually refers to mass e-mailings where many e-mails to people who have ‘opted-in’ to receive e-mail. Social media marketing is defined by Technology in Translation as: “Social media describes a new set of Internet tools that enable shared community experiences, both online and in person.1“ |
SEM Planning is the process of looking at your Internet marketing situation strategically, deciding what you want to achieve and how you plan to achieve it using SEM. SEM Planning is a subset of marketing planning, however for many organizations the value of traditional marketing promotions (such as print advertising, exhibitions, TV advertising etc) are becoming increasingly less ineffective, too expensive or both.
There are many resources that provide information on the subject of SEM tools and techniques that you can use. These resources describe the ‘how.’ The literature available on how to plan the use of these tools and techniques, in other words the what and when, is more scare.
If you want to landscape your yard you would need several tools, a pile of dirt, bags of fertilizer and plants. If these elements all arrived on your driveway and you didn’t have a plan as to how you were going to use them, the results would not be as successful as if you knew exactly where everything was going to be planted and what nurturing the plants required. Furthermore, you would probably find that some of your resources had not been used and you were short of other things that your needed.
It is exactly the same with SEM. The Internet and the opportunities it provides are the resources at your disposal. Incredible, affordable and infinitely measurable resources, but to use them effectively you need a plan.
Throughout this text I will use several terms which you may not be familiar with.
1“Technology in Translation™: a Definition of Social Media.” Technology in Translation. 3 Mar. 2008 <http://technologyintranslation.blockwork.org/2007/04/a_social_media_.html>.
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