Robots, Ranking, Relevance & Results

1. Robots

As the lotto commercial says: "You can't win if you don't play". You'll never win the SEO game unless your site gets discovered by bots and indexed. How do you get discovered? You can move to L.A. and wait tables, or you can build relevant inbound links, create a crawlable, spider-friendly architecture, and work to get mentions and citations (through social media, for example).

2. Ranking

Of course, ranking is the Holy Grail of SEO – we all want to be #1 on Google. I've been tough on rankings over the past year, but it's not because they aren't important. Clearly, you have to rank if you want to generate search exposure and traffic. My concern, and the message of this post, is that rankings are just one element of the big picture.

3. Relevance

Of course, ranking is only effective if it drives relevant traffic, and I mean "relevant" in the very practical, business-minded sense of attracting visitors who are looking for your products and services. Too many clients want to rank for what they think are the most popular keywords, but that often creates two problems: (1) What they think is popular isn't always popular, and (2) What's popular may not be relevant or ultimately drive click-throughs.

4.Results

Ok, I know "results" is a bit vague, but hey, I needed another R-word. Seriously, I'm talking bottom-line results here - leads, purchases, and anything else that drives your success as a business ("conversions", in the industry vernacular). Traffic is only valuable if it drives measurable results - otherwise, it’s just costing you money.

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Link Building Notes

The very first tip in the notes is Link Building Opportunities

 

Where to look for links:

• Social news sites
• Online media sites such as The New York Times, Boston.com, and About.com
• University sites
• Government sites
• The blogosphere
• Professional contacts (satisfied customers, suppliers, business groups, regulatory bodies, similar sites operating in different geographic areas)
• Personal contacts
• Directories

How to get links:

• Link bait content
• High quality exclusive content
• Missing content on other authority websites
• Article submissions/article exchanges
• Your own blogs
• Widgets
• Through PR firms and offline marketing
• Contests
• Ask for a link (directly/indirectly)
• Micro sites/buying sites for links
• Restructuring your website to make it more link-sexy

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5 Internet Marketing Tips To Promote Your Online Brand

5 Tips For Building Your Brand Online

1. Create a Listening Post

Consider using Google reader or Google alerts to monitor key websites and blogs to keep in touch with where you are being mentioned online.

2. Don’t Just Rely Solely On Your Website

Relying solely on your text only website is becoming less effective when it comes to spreading your companies message. Building your website should only be the start of your online marketing efforts and building your brand is definitely not going to happen if you just stick to your traditional website.

When trying to build your brand you should give your company every opportunity to get noticed. Using text is naturally one way, but how you deliver that text has become much more important. Having a website is only the starting point. You should be delivering your brand through:

Blogs

Video

Images

Online PR releases

Link building strategies

3. Use RSS

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is an extremely effective method for people to get notified of changes to your website and blog. If one of your customers has a large number of websites that they want to keep up to date on, instead of checking the actual websites every few days, simply let them subscribe to your website using your RSS feed. This way, they get all your important new content delivered straight to them. This is possible using a piece of software called an ‘Aggregator’ or ‘Feed Reader’ Popular aggregator’s are:

Google Reader

FeedBurner

NewsGator

4. Consider Social Media Marketing Strategies.

The social media websites below should play a key part in your online brand building strategy. As these websites are used by the larger search engines for content, you will get more visibility when you start to build a presence in these web 2.0 sites.

5. Keep Viral Marketing in Mind.

Viral marketing is an excellent strategy for spreading your message and building your brand through ‘word of mouse’. Perfecting a viral message is not an easy thing to do. A recent example of viral marketing was the Susan Boyle video of her performance on the “Britain’s Got Talent TV show”

The power of Viral Marketing lies with your audience. When they start spreading your message for you, without you having to advertise or push the message, bingo! The more effective the viral message, the more online visibility you get.

In Summary………

Building your brand online should be an ongoing exercise that continually looks for new ways to get your message out there. Increasingly online users are getting information sent to them rather than going searching for it.

Your ability to create a buzz has become increasingly more important, it only takes months now to reach 50 millions potential customers – the trick is knowing how to find them!

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The DoubleClick Ad Exchange: growing the display advertising pie for everyone

Hundreds of thousands of advertisers use search advertising — short, highly relevant text ads alongside search results on Google and other search engines — to grow their businesses. Thanks to a decade of innovation, search advertising is an open platform that allows businesses to easily connect with customers.

As you browse the web today, you'll also see "display advertising," such as videos, images and interactive ads. Like search ads, these connect users with products, services and ideas that interest them. For advertisers, display ads are vital in boosting awareness and sales. For websites and online publishers, they help fund investments in online content and the web services that we all use.

But with a multitude of display ad formats, and thousands of websites, it often takes thousands of hours for advertisers to plan and manage their display ad campaigns. With this complexity, lots of advertisers today just don't bother, or don't invest as much as they would like.

On the other side of the equation, some publishers are left with up to 80% of their ad space unsold. It’s like airlines flying with their planes mostly empty. And for the ad space that they do sell, publishers also have to deal with the complexity of managing thousands of advertisers and campaigns.

We believe that a better system built on better technology can help grow the display advertising pie and benefit everyone.

Three principles underpin our approach to the display advertising field:

1. Simplify the system for buying and selling display ads: For example, our DoubleClick ad serving products help advertisers and publishers manage campaigns and ad formats across thousands of websites and from thousands of advertisers.

2. Deliver better performance that advertisers and agencies can measure: We're building a host of new features to help advertisers to run display ad campaigns across the Google Content Network (comprising hundreds of thousands of AdSense partner sites) and on YouTube. We're also developing better measurement and reporting technology so they can figure out what's working and what's not.

3. Open up the ecosystem: We want to democratize access to display advertising and make it accessible and open, like search advertising. We recently launched the Display Ad Builder to help businesses easily set up and run display ad campaigns. 80% of advertisers who use that product have never run a display ad campaign before.

We've been working hard to put these principles into practice, and today we're excited to announce the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange, a step towards creating a more open display advertising ecosystem for everyone. The Ad Exchange is a real-time marketplace that helps large online publishers on one side; and ad networks and agency networks on the other, buy and sell display advertising space.

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The 6/90 Rule: 6 Reports Contain 90% Of Actionable AdWords Insights

Google offers numerous AdWords reports that allow you to view more data than most people have time to analyze. One of the tricks to working with PPC is to determine what data you need to look at every day or week, and then determine what data is useful to analyze when improving your AdWords account.

There are six reports that, when used effectively, can give you the majority of insight you need to analyze your accounts on a day-to-day basis. In part 1 of this two-part series, I’ll take you through these reports to find insight into your accounts. In part two, I’ll take an in-depth look at the keyword report to create actionable items from the data.

While these reports are easy to run they are most effective when combined with the AdWords conversion tracking script. This is a different feature than what you find in Google Analytics. The conversion tracking script sends data from your website back to AdWords so that you can see conversion information in your AdWords reports. In walking through these reports, I’ll make the assumption that you are using this script. If you are not, then you can still use these reports; however, you should marry up the data with the analytics package you are using to track conversions to get a complete picture of what’s going on.

The keyword report

The AdWords keyword report should be your starting place for analyzing keyword data. This report shows metrics by individual keywords within your account. For instance, the main data points to examine when reviewing information by keyword are:

Impressions
Clicks
CTR
Conversions
Cost per conversion
Conversion rate
Value per click

There are three main uses of this report:

Set bids based upon cost per conversion or other metrics with your established bid methodology
Find low quality score keywords with high spends so you can optimize for quality score (note: it can be useful to use a pivot table to find AdGroups with high spend and low quality scores. See Josh Dreller’s In The Trenches column about mastering pivot tables for more info).
Find keywords that are not on page one (where the first page bid is higher than your max CPC). Remember, though, that just because your keyword is not on page one does not mean you should raise your bid to be on page one. If you cannot be profitable on page one, then you need to decide if this is a word that can be on page two; if not, you need to optimize the landing page, ad text, or other factors for this keyword before you raise your bid to be on page one.
In part two of this article, I’ll take a deep dive into the keyword report to show various ways of working with the data it produces.

The search query report

The search query report will show you the query that was actually typed into a search engine that caused your ad to be displayed. For instance, if you bid on the broad match “coffee mugs,” your ad could show for “yellow coffee cups,” “blue coffee mug” or possibly even “tea cup.”

Use the search query report to find words that are not converting yet are consuming your ad-spend dollars. When you find such words add them as negative keywords.

Then use the report to find words that are converting and are not keywords in your account—consider these to be Google’s gift to you to help you improve the overall importance of your campaign. Add these words as keywords so that you can bid on these words based upon their actual returns. Remember, your broad match keywords will never convert higher than your exact match keywords.

When you conduct keyword research, you should always consult the search query report as part of your keyword expansion methodology.

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Let's talk about Article Marketing and why RSS is so important?

Real Simple Syndication is the BIG... Buzz around the Internet these days because of its Powerful ability to syndicate content effortlessly and instantly across the Internet to any website and/or subscriber who subscribed to that particular RSS Feed with a 100% GUARANTEED delivery.

What other technology online can guarantee you that?
Email- I don't think so.
RSS is it... Period!
And the crazy thing is, everybody who publishes content on their website on a regular basis is quickly adapting because of the many benefits RSS offers because lets face it, updating content manually on any given website is a very time consuming task, especially when you have to do it on a Day In and Day Out basis
But, by having an RSS enabled website, not only do you get high quality content INSTANTLY delivered, you can now give your audience more content with less work on your part leaving you more time to focus on other important tasks you might have sitting on the back burner when you have time.
This is the main benefit RSS Syndication gives the website owner and/or valued subscriber.
Now that you have some idea of how RSS can simplify updating content on any given website, what does this have to do with Article Marketing and how does it benefit the content publisher who writes the articles?
Well... let's talk about it.
We all know that content is the life blood of the Internet and is why most people come online... right?
We also know that RSS syndicates content to whatever website that is RSS enabled and/or subscriber who uses an RSS aggregator.
The BIG question that's probably floating around in your head is... how do Article Publishers who write the articles benefit from RSS Syndication?
The answer is simple really.
Ever heard the phrase... "The Internet Is Nothing More Then A Numbers Game"?
If not, now you have and that is exactly what RSS Syndication will do for anybody who does or is just starting out can expect to benefit from by joining the Article Marketing game.
Let's talk about this a little more so it's clear in your mind.
Let's say you write your first article and your manage to locate, lets say... 20 Article Directories that offer FREE Article Submissions and offer RSS Feeds to website owners and to the general public to use.
And let's say that those 20 Article Directories collected all their RSS Feeds and submitted them to all the TOP RSS Directories on the web so that website owners and/or people with RSS Aggregators can locate those RSS Feeds so they can subscribe to them.
You with me so far now, you go and submit your article to all 20 Article Directories and wait for their reply to see if your article got accepted.
You check your Inbox and find that all 20 article directories accepted your article into their database and would be syndicating it within the next 24 hours.
Notice I said the word "syndicating". That's because once your article is approved by that article directory and because these article directories use RSS technology to syndicate NEW content to whoever is subscribed, guess what happens to your article?

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7 Rules for Writing URLs

1. Keep URLs as short as possible.

Usability impact: According to several studies, people prefer short URLs. Searchers more likely to click a short URL. Google’s Maile Ohye wrote that a long URL “decreases [the] chances of [a] user selecting the listing” in the search engine result pages (SERPs). A Marketing Sherpa study confirms that users click more often on shorter URLs.

SEO impact: Weaker sites with few inbound links are unlikely to see spiders crawling deep content. Spiders may visit and revisit content closer to the root directory more often; these are pages with shorter URLs. Also, it stands to reason that other webmasters and bloggers will be more likely to link to pages with shorter URLs; as a publisher, I trust short URLs more than longer ones and tend to avoid linking to long URLs that I’m not sure will remain active forever.

2. Remove session IDs from URLs.

Crawlability impact: Spiders are less likely to crawl a URL with a session ID because there’s a strong likelihood the content is a copy of another URL. Long parameters can look like session IDS and should also be avoided.

3. Limit variables and parameters in URLs.

Crawlability impact: At conferences, Google’s Matt Cutts has said it’s best to limit the number of parameters in a URL to “2 or 3.” As described in the Google Webmaster Central article referenced above, URLs with too many parameters are likely candidates to be duplicates of other URLs, so spiders try to avoid crawling them.

Usability impact: As mentioned above, users prefer short URLs.

4. Use keywords in URLs.

SEO impact: Keywords in the URL help tell the spider what the page is about. A URL such as www.domain.com/green-widgets.html is obviously about green widgets, whereas a URL such as www.domain.com/product.php?ID=23476234 is not obviously about anything. Keywords in the URL are an additional signal to the spider.

Usability impact: As the Marketing Sherpa study (and many others, too) indicates, users prefer short, clear URLs that help them pre-determine what the page will be about before they click.

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Awesome Online Tools And Resources For Writers

Writing, whether it be copywriting, web content, blogging, or anything inbetween, is one of the most popular, most demanded, and most sought after skill sets in the world of online work. Don't believe me? Just look at a few of the past Elance Online Work Indexes and you'll turn into a believer.

And as a writer, don’t think for one second that all online tools and resources are just for coders, graphic designers, and web developers – there's a grip of writing-related tools out there on the web for you word-smiths to take full advantage of. Here are some of my personal favorites:

OneLook: Founded in April, 1996, OneLook describes itself as “a search engine for words and phrases.” The site offers definitions and translations from over 5 million words in over 900 online dictionaries and has a robust set of search query tools so you can properly narrow down your search results. If you can’t find your word on here, it’s likely because that word doesn’t exist… yet.

GoogleDocs: As an integral part of Google Apps, Google Docs is an cloud-based text editor that boasts a healthy feature set. One of Google Docs’ strongest features is its collaboration tools – meaning while on Google Docs, you can have up to 10 people edit a document at the same time, and you can also share a document with up to 200 people. If you’re looking for other options, SynchroEdit is another browser-based editor that allows for online simultaneous collaboration.

Write Rhymes: This one goes out to all my poets, and they all know it. Okay, obviously not the best rhyming skills out there, but if you’re just as bad as I am, then go ahead and bookmark Write Rhymes. All you simply need to do is begin typing, highlight your words, press the ALT key, and a window of 2-or-3 syllable words with rhyming elements pops up. There’s even an option to save, copy, and print your new limerick, song, poem, rap, or whatever else your zany mind conjures up.

BibMe: If I had to guess, I’d guess that most writers on earth would agree with me on this: Writing bibliographies or works cited documents are the absolute worst, un-fun procedures known to humankind. I’m being a little extreme here, but if you share in my sentiment, then check out BibMe. It’s an easy-to-use, automated bibliography generator that can create entries for books, magazines, newspapers, websites, film, and more in MLA or APA format. EasyBib is another alternative, although only MLA generation is free. (APA requires a subscription.)

Advanced Text Analyzer: Who would have thought of combining analytics and writing? Advanced Text Analyzer lives up to its name by calculating a wide variety of different variables present in a document. Analyze word difficulty, lexical density, reading grade level, and more. Registration is required for the site but only takes a few moments. And after calculating this blog post, it appears that you have to be reading at the 11th grade level, according to the Coleman-Liau Grade. Neat.

Awesome Highlighter: Here’s an interesting one – highlight any text on any web page, and Awesome Highlighter creates a URL that will take anyone that clicks your link to the same page with the same highlights you entered earlier. This is a great resource for those spending a lot of time doing hitting the web for hardcore research sessions.

Any of you writing elancers have any particular tools you love to use while doing what you do best? Let me know in the comments below, and I’ll be sure to add it to the list. Enjoy!

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Why Social Bookmarking?

There are three reasons.

1. More links
2. More traffic
3. More credibility

More links are always a good thing.

Think of links as the road traffic moves through on the web. If there are no roads to where your business “lives” online, namely its website, it’s far less likely that the visitors you want will end up getting to you.

That’s true whether you’re talking about search engines or links from other sites. Search engines use a mysterious cross between the number and quality of links to your site in their determination of whether you should be number one or number 701 for your desired keyword.

In addition, the “nicer” the road, the more traffic will flow through it - think of an authority site linking to your site as a highway that leads directly to your site, and one from a reciprocal link or link exchange scheme as a back street in a sketchy neighborhood full of potholes.

More traffic, also good.

From social bookmarking, this traffic is often targeted. Through tagging, the description someone writes, or the title they assigned to your link, the person who discovers the submitted link on a social bookmarking site knows exactly where they’re going, and why they’re interested in getting there.

It’s like seeing the cover of a magazine on a rack. That’s what pulls them in, they see a headline - to get to the story they are compelled to take another action.

The more credibility thing is a bit harder to explain, so we’ll go with another analogy.

Let’s say I made a movie and I thought it was fantastic. If I’ve never met you before, and I tell you, “hey, I made a kick-ass movie, come see it!” - you may come see it, you may not.

It depends more on how much time you have and if you’re interested in that kind of movie, even how nice of a person you are, than my opinion.

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The 10 things you need to build a Brand

Here are 10 things that you should have.

1. Symbolism. The most successful brands represent something greater than themselves. A lifestyle, a philosophy, an emotion.
2. A story. Most major brands have a story. Examples: if you like Ford vehicles, you might be familiar with the story of Henry Ford or if you love your Nikes, you probably know how the Nike swoosh logo was created.
3. A track record. When your business is first starting out, don't fool yourself into believing that your marketing efforts are 'brand building' efforts. They're not because to build a real brand, you have to have an extensive track record with consumers.
4. Trust. When you've consistently delivered for your customers long enough, you'll gain the type of trust that many brands have. Case in point: a friend of mine always reminds people that he won't buy an automobile that isn't a BMW. He's had a good experience with his and trusts so much in the company that he doesn't believe there's a better-made car.
5. Expectation. When a consumer chooses a product or service because of brand association, he or she is buying an expectation. Perhaps it's the expectation that the branded product is of higher quality or that the service will be provided in a more efficient manner.
6. Differentiation. Expectation is often borne of differentiation. Many brands offer products and services that are commodities but they're successful in developing some differentiation for their products and services that consumers are sold on.
7. Imitators. Imitation is the sincerest of flattery and you're probably not a 'brand' until you have competitors trying to copy you.
8. Market leadership. Top brands are usually looked at as leaders in the markets they compete in.
9. Adaptability. The best brands are flexible and capable of reshaping and reinventing themselves and their messages over time. Coca-Cola is a good example of a brand that has never abandoned its core product but has evolved its message over time to keep up with changes in the marketplace and society at large.
10. A strong marketing presence. Although it's nice to believe that you can market yourself for free on Facebook and Twitter, the reality is that brands aren't advertising on television and radio because they're dumb. Building and maintaining brand equity requires awareness and awareness requires broad marketing efforts.

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