Archive for the ‘SEM & SEO’ Category

Using the wrong keywords makes your business website invisible to your potential customers. Choosing the right keywords for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the crucial starting point for any online marketing campaign. Starting your campaign with a large set of attractive keywords will bring added effectiveness to every segment of your SEO campaign and deliver more web traffic to your web site.

I recently completed a Search Engine Optimization campaign that increased the apartment search web site traffic from 1.4 million unique monthly visitors to 2.3 million unique visitors per month. A good portion of this increase was based on choosing keywords that were highly sought by web users. Choosing keywords that met the customers’ need to find apartments in their local neighborhoods led to increased presence in search engines and better conversion and sales.

Google uses up to 200 signals to determine the meaning of each web page and where your web page ranks against all other competing web pages for that same keyword phrase. This starts with the major factors like web page title tags and inbound links, all the way down to less relevant factors such as alt tags in the Google or Yahoo algorithms.

If optimized correctly, some of your keyword-focused web pages will rank at the top of the first page of search results. If your optimized web page ranks first in search results, it could be worth 30 to 40 percent of the web traffic for that keyword. The search results for your chosen keywords that rank at second place through tenth place will split up the remaining 60 to 70 percent of web traffic for each keyword. Your strategy should focus on a large set of relevant keywords, with each keyword having its own web page.

Building the right keyword set starts with understanding what your customers really want. You may be tempted to only use keywords that are narrowly focused on the products or services that your company sells. But this will yield disappointing results. I’ve optimized large corporate web sites that fall into the trap of focusing solely on product or service keywords. The web traffic results are poor.

Here are several steps to consider when you’re building your keyword set.

• The first step is to include products or services that your company sells. Go beyond the product names and product numbers. What do customers call the products when they refer to them in emails or phone calls? Search the web for forums or blogs that discuss your products to gain insight.
• What are some popular product keyword variations that actually sell on your web site? Could you expand the number of these keywords and pages to grow more web traffic for those same products?

• Customers only buy your product or service if it meets a need or solves a problem. Think about the problem your customer is trying to solve. What search query or keyword will customers use to look for that solution?
• If you use a web traffic measurement tool like Google Analytics, you may have months or years of valuable web traffic data.  Examine the top most popular keywords and web pages, to learn more of what your customers are really seeking.
• Use paid web traffic keywords and data to sort keywords that have the highest traffic and the highest conversion rate. Use these proven keywords as a starting point to build larger sets of variations on these seed phrases.
• Monitoring social media discussions about your products or company can identify more keywords used by web users. This goes beyond Facebook and Twitter to include blogs, product review sites, bookmarking sites like Digg or StumbleUpon and even forums.
• Don’t ignore the value of location keywords, especially if you’re seeking customers for a regional service business. Apply the local keyword strategy to each market for your nation-wide business.
• One of the best research sources we have at Engauge is our Behavioral Research department. This team often interviews web users in our lab setting. We can also record users’ actions when they search online. Both these techniques help us gain valuable insights into why customers buy and what keywords they use when searching.

Go beyond the obvious keyword types and you will see substantial improvements in your business web traffic.

Ed Hill is Search Engine Optimization Manager at Engauge, Atlanta.

Despite the icy roads and frigid temperatures, hundreds of people from the US southeast region came together at SCAD Atlanta on January 8th – 9th to attend the inagural WordCamp Atlanta, a conference where the WordPress (aka WP) community exchange tips and tricks about this widely popular blogging (and sometimes as a web content management) tool.

I had the pleasure to attend this event along with my colleague Kathlene Hestir. Below are the highlights from the various sessions. I’ve tried to link to the presentations on Slideshare whenever possible.

Friday Night, January 8

WordPress & Journalism
Alejandro Leal and Thomas Wheatley (Creative Loafing Atlanta)

• Managing their blog using WordPress MU (which is the multi-user version of WordPress).
• Have a decent amount of data: 58 blogs, 906 users, 7977 Posts, 17556 Comments.
• Digital or online content is mostly separate from print content; very little sharing between the two.

WordPress & SEO (View on Slideshare)
Topher Kohan (CNN.com)

• Use basic SEO, such as good page title, content headline, 250 words, and ALT tags, on your website.
• You should use breadcrumbs b/c taxonomy is good for both search engines and the user).
• Rankings is going to become dependend on page load times (so hire a developer with strong server and page code optimization experience).
• Sculpt your webite with rel=”nofollow” attributes.
• Canonical URL’s are going to play a larger role in the future.

ADDITIONAL NOTES: Topher takes SEO very seriously — he did an amazing job getting everyone fired up about this topic. There are a ton of good plug-ins in the presentation so just check it out.

The AJC and WordPress
Cliff Barnett and Jason Gilstrap (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

• Rolled out WordPress to make this simple and consistent.
• WordPress is the central content repository for newsroom as content from system gets pushed both online and to the print system.
• Blogs responsible for 8% of traffic; posts on average get 700 comments.

Saturday, January 9

KEYNOTE PRESENTATION: WordPress Resolutions: What to expect in 2010
Jane Wells (Automattic)

• Big Announcement: WP 3.0 is a producet of “The Merge” between WordPress and WordPress MU.
• Expect lots of goodies: a multi-site platform, new base theme, custom posts and canonical plug-ins (or de facto plug-ins for Twitter, Google Analytics, etc.).
• Enhanced media functionality is now pushed to WP 3.1 (maybe).
• WordPress.org is going to be undergoing a major redesign (with help from WP Ninja Mark Jaquith)

ADDITIONAL NOTES: Things like multi-site platform, custom “posts” (aka custom content types) and canonical plug-ins is HUGE news — this is where WP finally takes the baby step to become a true PHP-based web content management tool. Alternative solutions such as Drupal should take note!

Advanced Google Analytics Integration with WordPress (View on Google Docs)
Rusty Tanton (WebMD)

• Current plug-ins for Google Analytics are weak — they only feed you the basic info.
• Using custom variable and advanced segmentation one can REALLY analyze what’s happening on your blog

ADDITIONAL NOTES: Rusty code examples in his presentation so I suggest that you check it out.

Complex Content Management with the Pods CMS Framework Plugin
Scott Kingsley

• Ability to create custom content types in WordPress using Pods (Pods Plug-in).
• Data for pods maintained in separate tables.

ADDITIONAL NOTES: An interesting conversation started up between Scoot and Mike Schinkel over the viability of Pods since Jane announced that custom post types were coming (see tweet).

WordPress Security: Protectin your WP from Inside Out (View on Slideshare)
Syed Balkhi (WP Beginner)

• Do the obvious: keep WP updated, rename “wp-admin” folder and use strong passwords (10 chars or more).
• Use advanced techniques like, moving wp-config.php out of webroot, reassign admin rights to another user and delete admin account, get rid of error message on login screen, and limit access via IP whitelist to wp-admin folder and change DB tables prefix (don’t use wp_)
• Tons of good plug-ins for security so don’t be lazy!

PHP and WordPress – Converging Communities
Aaron Brazell

• Core is still written in PHP4 (some parts are using PHP5) so it is time to update core!

Final Thoughts

The conference was great. Lots of great speakers — I learned a ton! In case you missed it, plan to attend next year’s WordCamp Atlanta Conference, which will be held February 11-12 2011. The event was a great success — kudos to Tessa and Brandon for pulling it off.

I have begun a series of interviews of thought leaders here at Engauge. These interviews are short and to the point, covering topics that are highly relevant to CMOs, VPs of Marketing, Marketing Directors, Marketing Managers, and other marketing professionals.

In this episode, I interview Ed Hill, who is the Search Engine Optimization Manager for Engauge:

Questions that are answered in this video include:

• Why is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so important to the marketing mix?
• What are some of the most effective methods to influence your rankings in the search engines?
• What are some effective ways to measure the efficacy of Search Marketing programs?
• What are some tips to help sell the benefits of Search Engine Optimization up to the management team?
• How can one predict the effects of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by leveraging blogs, link building, social media, or other marketing methods?

If you think that the topic might be relevant to a colleague, then pass this link on or you can tweet this message with the link at the top right:

http://www.Search-Engine-Optimization-for-Business.com/

Please let me know if there are other topics you would like to see us cover, by leaving a reply below.

November’s AiMA event, “Mobile Marketing: How mobile is more than texting, tweeting, and talking,” was the first I’ve been able to attend. The event certainly was more than texting, tweeting, and talking (although there was a lot of texting and tweeting happening in the crowd); panelists encouraged incorporating mobile into marketing plans for 2010 and shared interesting facts regarding the growth of iPhone applications, the mobile web, and more.

The event was moderated by Michael Becker of iLoop Mobile, and there is no better way to describe him than with this tweet from the event:

@JermoH #aima – iLoop’s Michael Becker is like the Britannica of Mobile Marketing.

Becker opened the event by showing a commercial for a Motorola cell phone. From 1983. The advertisement stated that cell phones would completely change the way we communicate. Understatement of the century.

Given that the event was on mobile, it seems appropriate to sum up the key topics via what was tweeted live as each panelist spoke:

Mack McKelvey, VP of Marketing for Millenial Media.

• @briangupton: RT @ATLmobile: Mobile has lowest Cost Per Engaged User per @mellenialmedia #aima
• @JermoH: In Sept, there were 64million mobile users (1/3 size of Internet) #aima

Brian Seti, Division Manager and National Marketing Manager for Yamaha WaterCraft Group:

• @kristengreen: Yamaha no longer spends $ on traditional advertising. They focus on mobile & social and are able to deploy campaigns more efficiently. #AiMA

Derek Von Nostran, Director of Consumer Marketing & Analytics for The Weather Channel Interactive:

• @laurenmullins: Only 20% of iPhone apps downloaded are used the next day. – Derek Von Nostran, TWC #aima
• @JermoH Top phone for Hispanic market = iPhone, top phone for African American market = Razor. #aima

Von Nostran also discussed the popularity of TWC’s iPhone application. It’s the most popular weather application, and one of the top 10 applications (ranked just below Facebook). TWC launched a game as a follow-up, but the application met subpar success because of the target’s inclination to only utilize TWC for weather information.

To read more tweets from this AiMA event, search for #aima on Twitter. The November event was AiMA’s last big event for the year, but there is a web analytics lunch and a holiday party both scheduled for the first week in December.

I had the pleasure of attending (and tweeting) AiMA’s October event, Interactive Creative Engagement. The panel discussion (moderated by Coca-Cola’s Capabilities & Communities Manager, Amanda Thompson) revolved around how engaging and interactive media drive consumer interaction, dialogue, and ultimately brand affinity and sales volume. The panelists at this event included representatives from three big brands: CNN, Chick-fil-A, and Cox Media Group. Below is a recap of what each panelist discussed with the group:

Leon Levitt, VP Digital Media at Cox Media Group reviewed the creative displayed on ajc.com & walked us through the McDonald’s Barista Challenge. Key points that Leon stressed were:

• Good, spectacular creative can make a difference
• Old rules still apply: contact drives eyes, eyes drive revenue, good creative will have an impact, don’t apologize for being intrusive

Michael McCathren, Interactive/Digital Marketing Lead at Chick-fil-A discussed the evolution of the Chick-fil-A cows and the emergence of their (the cows) new website: eatmorechicken.com. Michael spoke about taking risks with creative and the importance of helping your clients feel good about taking such risks.

Adam Naide, Sr. Director of Audience Experience at CNN Worldwide gave the audience a run through of the CNN Challenge which was created to combine the excitement of competitive trivia games with the fun of social online gaming.

Goals of the CNN Challenge:

• Build consumer affinity w/ the brand & talent
• Increase engagement
• Promote sampling of CNN content
• Drive revenue through sponsorship

Below are a few notable tweets from the event:

ewendkos: #aima listening to presentation from Leon Levitt – we can not be too intrusive so long as we have great creative +biz model

JermoH: Summary of Cox’s Leon Levitt: People will respond to great creative. Creative developers, step your game up! #AIMA

DianaBaldwin: Eatmorechicken.com launched last week. Interactive branding. Active branding. #AIMA

GumboShowJoe: #AiMA Michael M from Chick-fil-A empasized that you should push creative and risk with interactive media.

JermoH: cnnchallenge.com looks fun and is going to be a total productivity killer in offices nationwide! #aima

bsteve76: Naide sez CNN tries to be different and provocative w/content. #CNN #aima

To read more of the tweets from this event, checkout the hashtag #aima in Twitter. The next AiMA event will be on Wednesday, Nov. 18 and the topic will be: Mobile Marketing – How mobile is more than texting, tweeting and talking.