Archive for the ‘SEO Blog’ Category
Yahoo Gets More Clicks Than Google
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010Chitika is a search based advertising network that gets a ton of clicks from Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL, Ask, plus a few others; this makes Chitika a hot-bed for click analysts. They have just released a report which shows where the majority of their clicks are coming from.
Why is this important? Well, as search engine marketers, we want to have a presence in the places on the web where the most clicks are happening. When I checked out the report I was pretty shocked at where Google stood next to the others:
Does this mean that Bing is set to over take Google in their traffic share? I would say no, you could argue that Google searchers may be more jaded about being shown ads so they don’t click on them.
Regardless of how you interpret these results, it’s nice to see Yahoo and Bing out doing Google at something ;o)
The Importance of Running Trackable Marketing Campaigns in Your Business
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010Unless you are an international corporation with a designated marketing department working with a budget of £20m per year, you need to track track track all of your marketing efforts.
You need to be able to answer questions like ‘where do the majority of your leads come from?’; and ‘how many leads did that newspaper advert bring you last month?’. Unless you are testing and tracking all of your marketing campaigns you don’t know how effective they really are. And if you don’t know how well each campaign is performing, how do you know whether to kill it dead or scale it up?
This is the beauty of marketing over the Internet – everything is so easy to track! With the correct tracking in place you can see how many people looked at your website last month, you can see how many people took the action that you wanted them to take (e.g. bought something, signed up to your mailing list etc.), you can see how long they stayed at your site, you can see if they are a unique visitor or a returning one – plus much more. What other marketing channel allows you such transparency in terms of the actions of your prospective customers?
With these kinds of metrics you can see precisely how effective the copy on your website is in bringing you new customers. For example, if you run an ecommerce site and get 1,000 visitors a month but only make 10 sales. This would give you a conversion rate of 1%, not that great, but armed with this knowledge you can work on improving this. You could first look at your keywords that you have optimised your pages for – perhaps the traffic you are getting is not as targeted as it could be. So I would have a look at my analytics stats to see which keywords are driving my traffic. If people searching for red widgets are finding your site but you only sell blue widgets then this would perhaps explain why a lot of your visitors weren’t buying.
After keywords, I would also look at my buying process. Is it confusing? Am I making my visitors jump through too many hoops before they can buy? I would analyse the buying process of say Amazon and see if I could emulate theirs somehow as I bet they have had tons of experts design their shopping cart process. If it only takes 3 clicks to buy something on Amazon, and it takes 12 clicks to buy something from your site – then people are likely to be dropping out of the buying process before you can close them. Holes in your shopping cart = less sales!
And this is just the start of what we can do. I haven’t even discussed split testing yet where you can test one marketing message against another – I’ll save that for another article. But I think you would agree there is a lot that we can test, track, and improve when looking at marketing over the internet. If we compare this to a more ‘traditional’ form of advertising like Yellow Pages we can quickly see how very limited they are in what we can track.
You call up the yellow book people and tell them that you want to run an advert. They ask what size you want to run and may or may not send you a template to fill in. You send it back and they run it in the next print. Ok, now what? You sit their waiting for your phone to ring. There is little else you CAN do. Other than asking every person that calls you how they heard about your business, you have no way of tracking the effectiveness of your Yellow Page placement.
Say you do question every person that calls you (which can actually put off some potential customers) and discover that last month you got 5 leads from the Yellow Pages, and managed to close 1 of them (aside: I have exaggerated these numbers as one business I spoke to got less than 5 leads in one year from the book!) But say you had a decent sized advert and you did get 5 leads, how do you work out the conversion rate of that advert? You don’t know how many people looked at your advert before they called you, so how do you measure the effectiveness of it – answer: you cant.
Perhaps you give the helpful Yellow Page sales guy a call that sold you the placement and tell him that you aren’t getting very good results. His solution? Buy a bigger ad!! So now you’ve increased your spend on an advertising channel without even knowing if your advert was that effective in the first place. All you will have done is turn a small poor performing advert into a large poor performing advert.
In fact the biggest problem with all print advertising (not just Yellow Pages) is that you aren’t able to track ‘impressions’ i.e. how many people SAW your advert. Unfortunately, without knowing how many people saw your advert before they took action – it is impossible to test, track, and thus improve your message.
Just to bring it back to the Internet for a moment, Google offers you a free tool so you can track how many impressions your website got. Therefore you will be able to see, for example, that after 100 impressions 2 people buy. So you tweak your marketing message on your homepage a little bit – for example, you might change the text on your buy button from “Buy Now” to “Add to Shopping Cart”. After another 100 impressions you can see that you now made 4 sales. This is powerful stuff; you literally just doubled your business from only changing a couple words.
How To Rank in Google By Juicing Up Your Pages With Some Page Rank
Monday, July 26th, 2010Page Rank was named after Lawrence Page, one of the founders of Google. It is a numerical value between 0 and 10 that reflects the importance of any given page on the web. Rightly or wrongly when one page links to another page Google sees this as a kind of electronic vote for the other page. The more votes a page accumulates the more important that page must be. Furthermore, the importance of the page casting the vote determines the weight or strength of the vote. So Pagerank (or PR) is Google’s way of deciding how important each of your pages are by counting all the votes.
Why is Pagerank important? Pagerank is one of the deciding factors Google will use when deciding where in to rank your site and pages and is important in SEO.
How Is Page Rank Calculated?
When Google attempts to score your pages out of 10 it will look at ALL your inbound links; this includes links coming from your other pages as well as links coming from external pages. See below for the formula Google uses to calculate your PR.
PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))
It’s not necessary to understand exactly what this formula means. Rather, just understand that the amount of link juice a page has to vote with is slightly less than it’s own Pagerank (it’s own page rank * 0.85). This link juice is shared equally amongst all the pages that it links out to. Contrary to popular belief, you can not lose any pagerank by linking out to other internal or external pages. If one of your pages has a PR5 and you place a hundered outgoing links to another page – your pagerank will still be 5 and won’t be transferred. Just like if you’re at a board meeting; you know that if you have 1000 shares in the company and the guy next to you has 500 shares then your vote carries more weight. But you don’t lose any of your shares once you place you vote.
How Do I Increase My PageRank?
There are a couple of ways that you can increase your PageRank. You can either get more backlinks from external pages or you can add more pages to your site whilst better optimising your internal page structure. Each page immediately has a pagerank of 1 as soon as you create it, so it makes sense that the more pages you create the better PR you will receive.
However, there are some caveats to this rule. To receive the PR benefit of adding a new page to your site, the page does have to be indexed by Google for it to be counted. Also, the page has to be within your network of pages – meaning that it must link to and from another one of your pages. Of course, it makes most sense to link your new page to a page that you want to receive the highest pagerank on your site; perhaps the home page or one of your product pages.
You can not fabricate pagerank from clever internal linking but it can be wasted if not done correctly. For example, if you have a ‘hanging link’ – which occurs when you have an orphan page not linking from or two another one of your internal pages – then the pagerank of this page will be wasted.
It’s also important to note that the Google pagerank calculation is on a logarithmic scale – meaning that it is much much easier to go from a PR2 to a PR3 than it is to go from a PR6 to a PR7.
It’s difficult to look under the hood of Google’s PR system without getting overwhelmed with figures and metrics. Keep the following in mind and your PR will constantly be on the rise:
Keep adding one-way backlinks from sites with a good PR themselves.
Keep creating new pages ensuring they link to and from at least one other internal page on your site.
The importance of Standardising Your Domain Name For SEO Purposes
Monday, July 26th, 2010When you’re out there in the trenches conscientiously building backlinks for your website; which domain variation are you using? Here are the 4 possible choices:
* www.yoursite.com
* yoursite.com
* www.yoursite.com/index.html
* yoursite.com/index.html
When either one of these is typed into an Internet browser they will all take you to the same place – straight to your homepage; therefore does it really matter which one you use in your backlink? Well not really. But whatever one you decide to use, you want to stick with it.
The next time that Google comes along to update the pagerank of your homepage you want to make sure that the majority of your backlinks are pointing to only one variation of your domain name so that you aren’t sharing your pagerank between all 4 variations.
For example, if you use all the above variations in your backlinks you might find that you have this problem:
* www.yoursite.com (PR1)
* yoursite.com (PR2)
* www.yoursite.com/index.html (PR1)
* yoursite.com/index.html (PR1)
When what you really want is this:
* www.yoursite.com (PR0)
* yoursite.com (PR4)
* www.yoursite.com/index.html (PR0)
* yoursite.com/index.html (PR0)
Whatever variation you decide to go with, you want to stick with it so that you can funnel all your pagerank to just one variation of your domain name.
To you and me, all 4 look the same in the browser, but to the search engine spiders they are 4 completely different web pages; so when evaluating the PR they look at each variation individually.
So the answer is that it doesn’t matter which variation you use in your backlinks – but choose one and stick with it so that you can get the PR of your homepage as high as possible.
Local Business Marketing – 5 Free Website Traffic Techniques for Local Business
Friday, July 9th, 2010No matter whether you own a local tool hiring shop or a small Italian restaurant on the corner of the high street, your business will probably rely on a lot of foot traffic. So you may have been a bit reluctant to jump on the website bandwagon initially. But now that you have, how much new business is your website actually bringing you in?
When a new customer or client walks through your door….”ding”….or you get a phone call from someone wanting your products or services….”ring, ring” – do you ask them how they heard about you? How many of these people actually say, “oh, I found out about your from your website”. Probably not as many as that designer bloke who did your website promised you’d get.
So let’s look at 5 free methods to promote your website that you can do yourself to increase the web traffic to your business, thus bring in more customers.
1. Register your business and website with Google Places
If you click on the link below, Google will guide you through the signup process.
http://www.google.com/local/add/analyticsSplashPage
Be sure to add as much detail to your listing as you can e.g. your opening hours, photos etc.
If you can manage to get your listing up to 100% complete then you will stand a better chance of showing up in Google when someone is searching for your product or service.
2. Sign up to as many local business directories as you can
I have listed a few of the good ones below that you can start off with.
http://ukonlinedirectory.co.uk/
www.freeindex.co.uk
www.businesslinedirectory.co.uk
www.business-directory-uk.co.uk
www.uksmallbusinessdirectory.co.uk
They are all free to sign up with and list your business on and should get you a nice increase in web traffic to your business.
You can always find more free business directories by heading to Google and searching for ‘free business directories’.
3. Start participating in Business Forums
One of my favourite business forums is called Web Pro World
http://www.webproworld.com/webmaster-forum/register.php
Once you have created your account you can head over to your profile and fill in details about yourself and your business; make sure you put your website in the appropriate box on your profile page so that people can find you.
Next you will want to create a signature for yourself. This is the text that displays below every post you make in the forum. If you own an Italian restaurant in Milton Keynes then a good signature to have would be:
<a href=http://www.yourwebsite.com>Italian Restaurant in Milton Keynes</a>
If you copy that piece of code exactly and paste it into your signature then it will show up like this:
Italian Restaurant in Milton Keynes
Then the more posts that you make in the forum the more times your signature will display. Post enough and you will find a good increase in web traffic to your business.
4. Find blogs related to your market and post comments
When you’ve got the kids to bed and have a spare hour to yourself, rather than peruse through your Sky+ recordings for anything interesting, spend an hour or helping your business. No matter what market you are in, there are going to be hundreds of blogs out there on-topic that you can comment on.
If you own a tool hire shop then jump on Google and search for ‘DIY blog’ or ‘tools blog’ and you will see hundreds show up. Check a few of them out, pick an article that looks interesting, and post a comment giving your opinion on the article. Of course, make sure you put your website address in the website box, as well as your name and email address.
Even if the blog doesn’t target your area or even your country, it is still very worthwhile adding your 2 cents (and website). Google will notice that your website keeps appearing at all these relevant blogs and will send you more targeted traffic as a result.
5. Give your existing customers a reason to visit and tell others about your website
Other than to find out your contact details and location, are there any other reason why someone might want to look at your site? Probably not! So why not spend £50 or so and have some simple flyers made up. The flyers will tell people that they can get 15% off their next purchase. All they need to do is go to your website: www.yourwebsite.co.uk/15percent and they can print off a coupon to bring in next time. Stick a 6 or 12 month expiration date on the coupon.
So the next time someone walks in to your business….”ding”…and buys from you, staple their receipt to the flyer, or stick it in their bag with the goods.
This will do two things:
Firstly, there will be an incentive there for that customer to come back and buy from you again with their printed out coupon.
Secondly, when that customer gets home she will no doubt jump on Facebook (that’s what people do now). Whilst waiting for her friend to reply, she checks out her new purchase and comes across your flyer. Her friend still hasn’t replies so she opens a new tab in her browser and types in the web address on the flyer. Her friend finally replies asking what she’s up to….she will paste your voucher link into her Facebook feed and tell her friends about her recent purchase and the voucher etc. and BANG….you’ve just gone viral!
You can make it even easier for someone to share your voucher link on Facebook by having a ‘Share this on Facebook’ icon on your voucher page. But we are starting to get into a bit too much detail. Send me a note if you’d like to know more about how to do this.
You may be thinking, yeah right, as if anyone would actually do that! Well believe me, they do…culture is changing, and Facebook is ALWAYS open in the background which means you are just one click away from going viral.
Another popular excuse I hear is that Facebook is great if you want to target teenage girls. But teenage girls aren’t likely to hire any tools from me. You’d be WRONG. The biggest growing Facebook demographic is 30 and 40+ so get on there and ride the wave!
So there are your 5 free traffic strategies aimed at helping local businesses, local business marketing. If you could come up with something more creative than just a voucher then you give people reason to spread your message, and you can instantly leverage their social networking influence.You now can
