Marketing on Internet Road

Using Social Media for Business Growth

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 14:46:00 GMT

There is no better strategy to achieve better reach, expanded coverage and enhanced brand awareness than social media marketing. Social media is by far the number one tool for engagement and interaction with your target audience. Now is the time to adapt to the already-changed online landscape and market your offerings through social networks, if you haven’t already started.

Social media allows any business to connect with people, reach potential customers faster than ever and strengthen relationships with existing customers and prospects.

Interested in learning how to leverage social networking for your own business?

The first action to take is to register on a social network and to create an account or a profile (depends on the network). Online networks are specifically designed to connect with others, so make the most out of this possibility.

Get on Facebook and set up a page for your company (important: not a personal profile!). Consider also setting up a group for your company. In case you have a specific niche you want to reach, set up a LinkedIn and/or Facebook group and invite current clients and other contacts to join. Make sure to publish regular (but valuable) content to that group.

Communities which are formed on the basis of shared ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ are great “entry points” into potential customers’ mind. This also helps in adding a human element to your product offering. Social networking sites enable you to get in touch with people who may be interested in your product or service, so make sure to take advantage of that.

To build your online brand reputation, which is becoming one of the most important factors online, focus your efforts on getting people to follow and endorse you through the various social networks..

To support all of your efforts, make sure to have a blog for your business. Blogging gives greater exposure to your business expertise and knowledge and could be information that people will value hence will engage with and share. You benefit as social media users gain awareness about your business and offerings and “syndicate” your words to other people they are connected with.

To help you engage with the online business community, here are some key social media best practices:

Welcome Participation and Feedback - Let people talk to you. Developing relationships and communities within the social networks online can facilitate buy in, provide amazing feedback and business opportunities.
Advise, Don’t Sell - Listen in to what is being said and offer expert advice. The simple rule here is the more you have to give, the more you get back. People who use social networking sites are sensitive by nature to sales pitches. So be the expert first, build trust, and then leverage your position to subtly 'recommend' your products or services.
Be Visible and Credible - Establish yourself as an expert through regular blogging, tweeting and interacting on forums within your area of expertise.
Listen and Respond - Don't participate in random conversations. Listen in on social networks, try to find out what is the online buzz, what your prospects need or are interested in. Then offer your opinion and custom solutions.

Use social networking to work your way into the hearts of potential as well as existing customers. Respect the tone and culture of the sites that you join and avoid being pushy. Share your knowledge and expertise, and very fast social networking will give you a good boost as you market your products or services online.

4 Tips for Content Sharing

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 14:39:00 GMT

All over the globe, businesses have recognized Social Media Marketing as an exploding marketing strategy and are utilizing it to cultivate more returns from their marketing and strengthen their branding. Make sure you are active in this realm and with by that increase you lead generation efforts, drive results from your marketing and gain ROI.

Here are 4 tips to remember when it comes to content sharing:

Tip #1: Engage with Them – Engagement is a new and genuine form of “un-marketing”. Prospects, Influencers and Customers are already engaging with others to discover, learn and contribute. Aim at using engagement as a free, fast and powerful way to reach and serve.

Tip #2: Quality is more important than Quantity - Quality followers will engage with you, give you honest feedback and could even become your brand evangelists. Don’t fall into a trap like only counting the number of followers you have on Twitter.

Tip #3: Ensure it is Shareable, Searchable and Portable- Good quality content should be written in a way people can use. Stop assuming that content must be published only on your website and should be controlled completely by you. Help your audience download, embed or share it as they like.

Tip #4: You should Give to Get - Successful social media marketing strategies involve listening and participation. This implies providing value before expecting to get anything in return.

Distribute your Content via Social Media

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 14:34:00 GMT

You should maximize the benefits you can get from social media. Those powerful networks are built to strengthen your online presence and bring you a lot of value.

The heart of any effective online presence is Content. What you need to look for is engagement, and if your content isn’t what it should be, your target audience won’t engage with it and therefore won’t engage with you they way you need them to. You should look for sharing of your content as much as possible via social networks. When this is done, people are being linked to your business.

To get things started, you first step you should take is to identify what type of content is interesting to your target audience. Only then, analyze which platforms (i.e. – which social networks) as well as which tools are going to give your content the best chance of being share and syndicated.

Track your social profiles to see what people like more and what is being ignored (or even disliked). You can even initiate discussions with your audience about various topics to understand why they prefer certain topics and not others.

To support your efforts, you should identify people and companies in iyour market and industry and follow them. Look at the content they publish and provide them with feedback. This could be a great way to provide them with a link to your content that is about similar topics and getting their feedback in return.

A relatively easy way to get started is with using your company’s videos and presentations on channels like YouTube and SlideShare. Video is considered a great tool for demonstrations and presentations to your target audience, and now you can make good use of the tons of presentations you have anyhow in the business and spread them for prospects to find online.

Google signal #2 for 2011: The “Plus 1” Means Social

Mon, 09 May 2011 15:35:00 GMT

The first signal Google had sent to the online community in 2011 with its “Panda Update” was “Content”. The second signal from Google is “Social”, being delivered with Google’s new initiative of the “+1”.

Understanding the way the internet is consumed, Google has been adding social elements to its algorithm constantly and introduced the “social search” aspects as well as multiple ways to be able to enables searches to be connected with the social realm.

One of the best online resources, seomoz, published their findings on the way social factors affect ranking. It seems evident that the social authority of web pages and their domain are influencing their ranking. It is another clear indication of the importance Google is setting to what is happening on social networks.

At the end of March Google announced the new concept called “+!”. This is not really a revolutionary concept from Google and actually it’s an imitation of what is being available online for a while now (it is very much like FaceBook’s “Like” button, so nothing new here). However, the integration with search is new and should be looked at from a broad angle.

What is Google’s “+1”?

Google is adding to its search results an icon of “+1”. The idea is that anyone who wishes to share his/her positive attitude towards a web page on the search results could click on the icon, and with that, adding a “point” to this page.

Where is Google now with “+1”?

Google is currently focused only on integrating the “+1” into the search results. Similar to other updates they are introducing, it is rolled first in the US, then English sites globally and later globally. I suspect it will take couple of month (at least) before we see that all over.

But, Google intention is not to stop as only having the “+1” in the search results. Similar to the “Like” of Facebook, they wish to see their social icon integrated on websites and web pages. Another outcome Google is hoping to achieve is to create a social network around Google, using the Google Profile (which is where you need to opt-in for the “+!”).

What does the Google “+1” mean?

At this point, this initiative looks “half baked” and incomplete, or we just don’t know enough.

However, ignoring the arguments on whether Google will be able to compete with Facebook or not, we need to make sure we are reading behind the lines. In this case, the letters are big and bold: go social!

We suspect that by the end of 2011 the impact of your social graph on your ranking and overall traffic would be huge and actually the line between search and social when applying SEO work will disappear almost completely.

So, if you are not yet engaged in Social Media, start now. Invest in creating professional profiles for your business on some of the major social networks, get yourself engaged in some social networks to follow trends related to your business and thought leaders in your industry, and set cross references from your social profiles to your website and vice versa. Lastly, enable visitors to share your webpage on their social networks.

Don’t hold back on any comments. Feedback is more than welcome!

Google signal #1 for 2011: The Panda Update Means Content

Fri, 06 May 2011 14:56:00 GMT

In the beginning of 2011 Google had introduced a major and substantial update to it search algorithm, known as the “Panda Update”. The update that started in North America in February was rolled out to all international English websites in April and is gradually rolled out to all languages globally.

This is a major signal of how Google sees the web in 2011. We all kept repeating the “Content is King” slogan that came from Google but we still got used to see bad sites with bad or poor content ranking high when we are searching on Google.

This is what Google reported regarding the intention of this update:
“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”

What Does Google Really Want

Google became what it is today by being able to show searches with the most relevant results (and faster than any other search engine). So, Google is constantly looking to find ways to automate their algorithm with criteria for the best results for a certain query.

As such, Google is looking for content that is useful and valuable. They want the content to be unique, interesting, worthwhile and recent. Furthermore, they have no problem with website owners that are making money from the internet, but there should be a reasonable proportion of advertisements and content on the pages, because the content is still the most important factor.

Lastly, Google is looking for quick response time (this is also why only recently they introduced the ability to monitor the load time of pages on Google Analytics), with the underlying assumption being that as consumers of search results we don’t want to wait for a web page to load.

The Effects of the Panda Update

Google reported shortly after rolling out the update in North America that it affected close to 12% of the search queries. Data that is being collected from various sources report that about 20% (!) of the ranking sites and pages were affected by this update, amongst them big “content farms” (websites that host content generated by the global community, without ensuring that there is no duplicate content and with the main purpose of using the content to make money) like eHow, Squidoo and Hubpages. The update caused huge effects on keywords visibility, ranking and of course on traffic.

Data in the UK is not different and in some markets even worse. Econsultancy published a report on several vertical industries, showing dramatic ranking changes, averaging 43% of the sites moved up, 33% fell and 24% remained in the same position.

There is no doubt the same will start taking place everywhere this update is being implemented.

What Google Signals with the Panda Update

This one is clear: Google is shouting loudly: pay attention to your content (and take care of your site’s load time). The days where you could have left your web site untouched for years or copy text from other places (something we see often, mainly with distributers’ sites that copy the text from the manufacturers) are gone, unless you wish to drop way back in the search results.

What to do to succeed in the post-panda era?

Let’s make this part short:
1.   Ensure there is no duplicate content on your website. None that is copied from other places online or from other pages on your own website.
2.   Make sure your website is being updated. It does not mean you need to have things that will make the 9 o’clock news, but maintain a fairly updated website.
3.   Avoid using too much advertisements and/or AdSense ads on your pages (if you are into that).
4.   Aim at adding content to your website on a regular basis. Even once a month – if you can’t do more – is good. Anyone said “Blog”….?
5.   Make sure your site is not slow which means visitors will have to wait too long for the page to be presented. If it does, see if you are not using heavy images that cause this problem. Otherwise, think of improving your code or even replace the platform your site is using to a better one.

Share with us your thoughts and experience on the Panda Update

6 Internet Marketing things to “do or die”

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 15:54:00 GMT

Internet marketing strategies face a constant need to keep up with the recent changes that take place. Unless you are keeping a finger on the pulse regularly, you are facing the risk of carrying out redundant tasks and setting your focus on irrelevant tactics.

Although there are so many ingredients in this stew, we have collected several hot topics that we consider as Internet Marketing “do or die” as of today and listed them below (not in any order of importance).

Each topic below can be (and actually is) a topic for an article or an e-book. However, in order not to turn this post into one, we didn’t include anything related to each of the topics. Rather, the intention is to shed some light per topic to explain the main parameter and why this topic is important.

Segment your data

In the spirit of giving context to any analysis you are doing on your data (e.g.: your Google Analytics data), slicing and dicing your data across (your) various dimensions is a must.

Make sure to be aware of the risk of analyzing the average and referring to total figures and “typical” visits or visitors. Everything must have a context and the key for achieving context and ability to drive conclusions (and as a result of that improve the various marketing efforts) is with segmentation.

Some examples:

Your online presence spans today over multiple places (and if not it should; see also down the list) and your traffic arrives from different sources.
New visitors behave differently compared to returning ones. Getting back to the context issue – this depends a lot on your business.
Visitors from different geographic places might or may behave differently.

If you wish to draw the right conclusions and improve your efforts, you must first know what should be corrected and/or what should get even higher investment. The only way to do that is with proper segmentation.

So, take a close look at all your traffic sources, your target market’s demographics and any other important aspect of your digital touch-points (yes, it’s not only your website) and segment your data accordingly. Never expect the same behavior from different segments, and even if you do – the only way to measure it is by segmenting.

Conclusion: prepare a list of critical segmented reports on your data and then add some whenever you see the need to dive in furthermore.

SEO your site(s)

Although Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a highly dynamic terrain and no one holds the secret to what it means, it is still the basics to anything else.

No matter what is “known” as the key factors for ranking well on search engines, there are fundamental things that should be dealt with in any case:

Make sure your website is “spiderable” by search engines
Make sure your website contains unique content (that is, no duplicate content on different pages of the site and no copied from elsewhere on the internet)
Make sure that each page is optimized for one key-phrase where all the copy of this page is about this one key-phrase
Make sure each and every page has its own unique title and description, and that they support the key-phrase each page is optimized for.

Add to that the bonuses you will get from Google and the other search engines for having a lot of content (arguably – 100 indexed pages and more) and fresh content, and you have the foundations set properly for anything else.

It’s worthwhile to indicate that in the last year or so, SEO can and should be done not only to your website but also to other places online where you have presence in (e.g.: YouTube, Facebook). It’s not the same as SEO for your website and there are different details for each. There are enough details for a separate post on each of them (will take on the challenge:-)).

Tip: register your site on the webmaster tools of any of the major search engines (Google’s one is https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools) to make sure your site is being crawled quickly and on a regular basis as well as to get indication on problems on your site that will hurt your SEO efforts.

Conclusion: take a close look at your website and make sure all the fundamentals are in place and aligned with the best practices of SEO.

Build Good and Long list of Links

We have already established the importance of SEO and the need to ensure that all the basic on-site elements are in order. The second most important aspect of SEO nowadays is related to link building.

What you need to be concern of from SEO perspective is your authority. That is, the authority of your website and your web pages. What used to be measured by Google’s Page Rank in the past is now being measured mostly by the links that are pointing to your pages.

From the perspective of links size does matter, so you need to make sure more and more websites are pointing at your content. But it’s not only the count, the type of sites that are linking to you is also important: The more authoritative sites sending links at your direction, the better.

The fact that we are referring to “pages” and not (only) “website” has a reason: the search engines index your web pages and not your website. Your website is a collection of your pages and although your website’s authoritative score is important, if you wish to rank with specific pages (and you do), you must ensure there are links pointing to each of those pages directly and not only to the home page of your site.

Another important point is the “anchor text”. There is a huge difference if a link to your page reads “read more” compared to a text that explains what the page is about. The best is to use variations of the main key-phrase the page is optimized for and not just general wordings or your company’s name.

Tip: although not the most important, internal links on your website also play a factor. Make sure to point at your more important pages from multiple pages on your own site and always use absolute URL (http://www.yoursite.com/pagename.html and not /pagename.html).

The top three ways to have links are:

Submitting your pages to directories
Ask other websites that are related to your industry and market to hold a link to your web pages
Submit your web pages to various social bookmarks networks (e.g.: reddit.com, stumbleupon.com and alike). You can do this yourself, use a “pinging service” to help you with that, or outsource this service to one of the so many service providers that exist online.

Small word of warning: link building needs to be done on a constant basis and with no too big of peaks. That is, don’t aim at getting in one month 1000 links to your website. This will always look artificial and suspicious to the search engines and will be ignored.

Conclusion: place the amount and type of links pointing at your pages in the top list of important factors to measure, optimize your internal links on your websites to point properly to your most important pages and create a steady stream of links with proper variations of those key-phrases you are optimizing your pages for.

Have an active Blog

As a result of the abovementioned SEO and link building topics, having an active blog is really a must:
For one, having a blog will help you build your authority in your market. You are producing interesting information of topics related to your industry. The more often you do that with unique and interesting content, the more your target audience will know you as an authority in your field. Not bad for brand awareness as well.

This authority will project on your website overall authority since you will get more links for your interesting posts and more visits to your domain.

Regular posting to a blog will gradually make your website bigger and with fresh content. We already established that the search engines love those 2 factors, so you are holding a great opportunity to have so many great outcomes, simply by writing on what you do and what your know.

Your blog is also a great tool to create more internal links to your important pages. Simply make sure to think about key phrase optimization when writing posts and set a couple of links from any post you are writing to your website’s pages.

Tip: there is a general wonder how the blog should be set up from SEO perspective. Should it be yoursite.com/blog, blog.yoursite.com or a different domain all together? The online community is getting lately to the conclusion that the first option is actually the best. Nevertheless, if it’s not possible, the goal is still to have a blog, so don’t just give it up because of one or another reason.

Conclusion: create a blogging agenda and start writing one post per week. After about 2 months, Increase it to 2 per week at least.

Get (seriously) involved with Social technology

Coming from the (great) book of Scot Klososky called “Enterprise Social Technology”, Social Technology includes the following 3 elements:

Social relevance (reputation management mainly)
Social Media
Social networking

All three are important and we are using them or being affected by in our day to day as users, but they are also very important for our business and online marketing.

Setting the focus on Social Media and Social networking, they contain great opportunities to promote your business today. We won’t be getting into too much details as for this topic you can really find a ton of resources (and Klososky’s book is a great example), but we will indicate that active participation in the social realm will enable you to connect with your potential customers and existing customers in levels that were the dreams of business owners since as long as businesses exist.

Coming back to the points made on SEO, link building and authority, Social Technology is the one place to be to get great values for those factors!

Conclusion: Set up your Facebook page, LinkedIn company page and personal profile, YouTube channel, Twitter account and more and start generating content on those platforms. Content could be syndicated from your website and blog whenever there is anything new there, as well as created specifically for those social networks.

Set goals to track your website conversion

For a very long time, the Internet Marketing community is debating if Google is using “click data” as one of the factors in its algorithm. Click data means data on how many clicks (and related aspects) a web page is getting.

Google is in a great position to look at this data with their access to their own Google Analytics platform that is dominating the analytics market online. For the sake of this post, we are putting aside the discussion on whether this is right or wrong, ethical or not.

A few months ago, one of Google’s top people hinted that Google is actually using this data, and if Google does, we should think of what it means to all of us.

The idea behind looking at the “click data” is to be able to determine not only which content is better on which pages, but also which pages are actually getting clicks from searchers and even more importantly – which of them end up with conversions! From Google point-of-view, if a web page is being clicked more and is achieving more conversions when people are searching for a certain phrase, it means that this web page is more relevant to this search query and should be promoted to make itself useful for more searchers. Make sense!

Assuming that you are running Google Analytics on your website already (and if not, leave this post now and do it), you must make sure goals are set up on your account and that your site is getting conversion for your top key-phrases. We actually noticed several examples in the last 6 months of web pages of our customers that went up in ranking simply when we set up proper goals and improved the conversion architecture of the web site to get more conversions.

Having said all of that regarding setting and measuring your website’s goals, don’t stop there: SEO, ranking and measurements are all nice things, but what you should really be concerned about are the conversions on your site. After all, this is what really matters. So, when you are tracking your goals, make sure to draw actions and improve your online results.

Conclusion: Set your website’s goals on Google Analytics

On last thing to point out:

Each of the 6 tactics listed above have their own value. But, if you take a closer look at the whole, you can clearly see that values gained from one tactics will promote your efforts on more than one topic.
This is for me one of the beauties of online marketing: the idea of one plus one equals more than the obvious two. How is that for an incentive to roll up those sleeves and get busy with internet marketing?

Questions, comments, remarks, praises and shared thoughts are more than welcomed :-)

4 Key PPC Web Analytics Metrics You Should Consider - Guest Post.

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 14:01:00 GMT

PPC is an important strand of your web analysis. One of the cool things about PPC data is that you don’t need a lot of history to draw conclusions from it – a few weeks is enough time to give you an idea of how well a campaign is performing.

Google Adwords data is included in your Google Analytics data and includes metrics like click through rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC). Google recently released AdWords API v201101, which allows you to more efficiently run reports, as well as implement campaign experiments and other recently released advertising features at scale.

But how do you track success after PPC visitors are on your site? What metrics should you investigate to ensure that you are getting high quality traffic and capitalizing on opportunities to convert?

For these types of performance metrics, you need web analytics! Here are 4 important metrics you should review on a daily basis to evaluate PPC campaign performance.

1. Conversions

It pretty much goes without saying that conversions are the best metric to determine how a PPC campaign is performing. You should have your web analytics set up to record both online conversions (newsletter subscriptions, content downloads) and offline conversions (phone calls, offline campaigns).

To track online conversions, configure your web analytics to record a conversion every time someone arrives on a specific URL. In the case of web forms, this URL would be something like a thank you or confirmation page. For downloads, you might need to add a piece of tracking code that will register the download as a pageview.

To track offline conversions, see one way of doing this in our previous post on Measuring Success of Offline Campaigns in Google Analytics. There are plenty of other solutions out there for tracking other offline conversions (e.g. by telephone) which will integrate directly into your web analytics program so you only have to access one dashboard.

2. Bounce Rate

A bounce is when someone lands on a site and leaves without viewing any other pages. Your bounce rate will vary for each campaign. A high bounce rate may be an indication that your content is not relevant or engaging to visitors.

3. Pages Per Visit

The interesting data comes from a very low or a very high number of page views. Very low could mean that visitors are not finding content useful or interesting, and have resigned to go back to search results to find a more relevant page. A high number of page views could mean either you are producing interesting and engaging content (look at time spent on page for engagement), or that the visitor cannot find the content they are looking for.

In both cases, review the relevance of the page content to traffic-producing keywords, and make sure the information people appear to be seeking is on the landing page, or a click away.

4. Average Time on Site

It goes without saying that a higher time on site is better than a low one. Extremely low (0-1 second) — There is no way to read a page’s content in this amount of time. If there are a lot of visitors spending less than a second on the site, it may be the result of one of two things:

Invalid clicks – Check with your PPC platform to ensure you are not being charged for these.
Slow site load time – May cause people to get frustrated and hit the back button before ever arriving on the landing page.

Low (less than 15 seconds) — Generally, those visitors who spent 10 seconds or less on a site quickly decided that they were in the wrong place. This may be because at a first glance they didn’t find any relevant information, see their keywords anywhere on the page, or were confused by the landing page’s layout.

Look at these 4 web analytics metrics and you will have a better idea of your PPC performance. Once you have gathered enough data to draw conclusions about which parts of your campaign work well and which don’t work so well, you can start implementing small changes and tracking the different outcomes. By taking this methodical approach you should be able to optimize your campaigns to get the best ROI.

Top Five Ways to Use Twitter to Promote a Website - Guest Post

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 16:36:00 GMT

Twitter is the quintessential next-generation tool for social media. Each Twitter user follows hundreds of accounts and keeps tabs on hundreds more topics of interest. If you want your business to thrive in this massively interconnected world, you need to get on Twitter and use it effectively to attract other Twitter users' interest.

Branding

You can say a lot about your website in 140 characters or less. The tone you take, the sorts of keywords you mention and what other Twitter feeds you resemble play a huge role in determining who follows you. Look at the details of successful Twitter feeds and brand yourself accordingly by emulating the look and feel of Twitter feeds with similar markets as yours.

Keeping Customers Updated

One of the main reasons people use Twitter is that it provides a real-time live feed of information at all hours of the day. If you update your website or offer a new product, you can tweet out a link for people to check it out. This works even better if your website is just getting started, as you can build hype by tweeting about every new addition to your site as it grows.

Real-time Interaction with Visitors

Twitter allows you to engage with visitors so you can learn what they want you to build next. By responding to fellow Twitterers' tweets, you build the sense of camaraderie that defines social media People are much more likely to visit your website and check it out regularly if they feel that you're they're friend and that you care about what they have to say, to the point that you let their opinions guide where you take your business.

Cooperate With Competition

On the Internet, nobody wants to hear you badmouthing other people. The quality of your products and your branding simply has to meet customers' needs and market position better than those of your competitors. On Twitter, you should try to be kind to your competitors so their followers follow you also. The Internet lets users compare products directly from their seats, so spreading misinformation will only decrease your standing. Kindness always begets kindness - it's called karma. ReTweet your competitors' announcements while maintaining consistently better quality products, and you'll be surprised at how many people flock to you.

Tweet about Things Your Visitors Want to Hear

Every business has a certain demographic, and chances are that your followers will all also follow different things. With Twitter, you can figure out what it is that your followers also enjoy hearing about. You can then find a way to tie your website, product or business in with those other things, then compose tweets complete with hashtags that you know will appeal to your followers. Twitter users love it when fellow Twitterers share interests with them, and your business is no exception.

This is a guest post.

When he's not reading about the latest auto news, Miles Walker looks at comparing car insurance over at CarinsuranceComparison.Org.

Google Instant Preview – The Implications

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 13:49:00 GMT

Following Google roll-out of its new search feature named Google Instant (where search results appear as you are typing your search query), and Google new Google Places revolution (where local results appear as the organic results on its first page), Google also introduced – rather silently – another interesting feature – Google Instant Preview.

In case you haven’t noticed it, Google had placed a small magnifying glass to the right of the web page title on the search results. If you click on this magnifying glass, a preview of the destination page is presented nicely on the right side of the page, so you can take a look at how the page looks like before actually visiting the page from Google search results page.

What is the Idea with Google Instant Preview?

Google main idea has always been “Relevance”. This is what brought Google to where it is today.
This concept means something like “we wish to deliver the most relevant (and accurate) search results and in the fastest possible way”. Therefore, Google is attempting to enable us as searches to see that the destination page we are about to visit is really relevant to our search query and with that to eliminate pages that rank with no real reason on the first page.

Google Instant Preview Status

Google didn’t disclose too much information on this feature. What we can witness is that we see the magnifying glass of the Preview feature in some browsers but not in all of them. There are also still search queries where this feature is not available. This could be an indication that this feature is still being rolled out and tested by Google (which is the same as with the other new changes Google had introduced).

Google Instant Preview Implications

It is very soon to have any conclusions on the implications of this new feature. The Online Marketing community’s buzz has a lot of idea and possibilities but obviously nothing is conclusive. More conclusive implications will surely come after this feature had been rolled out properly and had run for a while.

Just as well, here is out attempt at forecasting the implications:

1.   Pay per Click (Google AdWords): Surprisingly enough, Google is placing the preview of the page on the right side of the page in a way that the Google Adwords listings disappear. This is surprising as AdWords is Google’s milking cow and if this will cause less clicks (leading to less advertisers as well), Google stand to lose.

Therefore, our estimations at this point are that AdWords campaigns will face a drop in clicks once (if) users are becoming used to use the Google Instant Preview feature (and it is an “if”).

Note: This is even more surprising since the other new changes to Google, like the Google Places Search, are placing elements on the right-hand of the search results page, overriding the AdWords listings. Google knows something we don’t?

2.   Site Re-Design: if the online community will start using the preview feature, the way your website (you web page actually) looks like will have a lot of impact on whether your potential visitors will visit the page or not.

It is rather safe to assume that if your web page does not look well and/or does not look relevant to the search query of the visitor, she will not click to visit.

Note that at this point in time, the preview does not present all page equally and even nicely designed pages but such that contain chunks of flash as example comes out badly on the preview image. Again, it is too soon to know if this is an issue that is being solved as part of the implementation or a feature that is here to stay.

3.   Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The visits from organic results have a potential to change, depending on this new feature. As we saw exampled where pages’ position on Google listing where changes according to click-stream for a certain keywords, it could be that we will see the same phenomenon here: if a page is ranked but people don’t click to visit, it might drop in position.

We also can’t overlook the possibility that the ranking algorithms (the plurals here is not a mistake – there are multiple algorithms being tested constantly) will take also the Preview feature into account, one way or another.

I will be more than glad to hear your thoughts and experiences with Google Instant Preview.

Google AdWords is a Great Tool, But Maybe not Always?

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 22:45:00 GMT

Google AdWords is a great lead generation strategy and an amazing tool for generating immediate traffic to your website. It is a very intuitive system, quick to set up and easy to track on results.

And here comes the “but”: just like any other marketing initiative, we need to take a look at the big picture. Since we are mostly interested in Return on Investment, using Google AdWords needs to make business sense.

Here is an example:

Assumption one: Imagine a competitive market where the average Cost per Click (CPC) for the keywords we wish to bid for is €7.5 (or Dollar, or any other currency as it does not matter for the exercise).

Assumption two: we use the global benchmark for Click through Rate (CTR) on Google AdWords, and that is 2% (you should always opt for a higher ratio, but for this exercise it will actually make things worse as you will see later on).

Assumption three: we use the global benchmark for Conversion Rate, and that is 2% as well. Now, this is a ratio that you really wish to improve since the results will be much better and since plainly put – it is your revenue.

Assumption four: are Lifetime Customer Worth is €225. This includes the initial sale as well as repeating sales later on and so forth.

Now, for the calculation:

In order to have one customer we need to drive 50 visitors (1 divided by 2% conversion rate).
50 visitors from AdWords will cost us €375 (50 times €7.5 CPC).
Our profit (sorry, loss) per customer is €150 (€225 minus €375). Oops!

So, what went wrong?

Nothing really. This is a classic case where the Acquisition Cost is higher than the Revenue per Customer which actually mean that you should either make your goods more expensive, or increase the Customer Lifetime Worth (by creating more up sells opportunities or recurring sales), or find an alternative acquisition channel that will make business sense.

As for the CTR comment that appeared before: actually, CTR is not really a factor here since we measure things by a single acquisition. But (and it’s a big but), if your acquisition costs are higher than your revenue per customer, higher CTR means you are spending more money on Google AdWords. You will get more customers of course (do the math: conversion rate stays the same but you get more traffic), but eventually you will have X amount of customers with a loss per customer of €150, so more customers – bigger loss. You should have a really good reason to want to be in this situation.

No matter what is your lead generation strategy, always check the acquisition cost compared to your revenue per customer. We used Google AdWords in this example since a many are rushing to this generally very good Search Engine Marketing strategy without doing the proper calculations first.

What makes a suspicious back link profile?

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 14:41:00 GMT

Analysing your back links can help to give you a real insight into your websites strengths and weaknesses, and can also flag up any activity that could potentially be viewed as suspicious by the search engines.

By understanding what search engines look for you can spot any suspicious trends and gain insight into the best direction for the SEO campaign. So what constitutes suspicious activity?
Well there are a few things to look out for:

No anchor text variation

This is an obvious one, but depending on the tool you are using you may not have really had a chance to look at the anchor text variation for your inbound links. There are some tools out there that can give you insights into this, such as SEOmoz's Opensite Explorer.

Too many links all pointing with the same anchor text can often look unnatural, as links that are naturally given tend to contain a whole load of different terms. Consider varying it up while still keeping the emphasis on your core terms.

All low quality links

Have you got loads of low quality links pointing to your site? It's very easy for search engines to tell the difference between low and high quality links, and without any high quality links your website you will really suffer. I have often found that you are more likely to benefit from lower quality links if you already have the high quality ones in place.

No link diversity

Too many links from the same sorts of places can flag up potential spammy behavior. If all of your links come from directories or blog comments you may want to consider getting some variation in place. Try building links from other relevant sources or create some link bait to attract more natural kinds of links.

Reciprocals and link wheels

While you may not have been doing reciprocal linking for a while, there may be cases where you have to deal with sites that have reciprocals in place. It may seem like these are helping the site to rank, but the chances are they have been devalued and they are not what's contributing to your rankings. It's always worth in cases like this to remove the links gradually over time so you can review the effect they have on the account.

All links point to one page

All links pointing to one page does not seem natural, and also doesn't help you ranking on the long tail searches. You want to be sharing the links out around your site. Create useful content, promote it and encourage others to link to it. Any links to any page will have beneficial results for your domain overall.

Avoiding these factors can prevent your link building activities from looking suspicious and help your website to avoid any penalties from the search engines.

This is a guest post by Ben Hook, director of Navaro, a search marketing company that helps clients to increase their online presence.

Guest Post: Without a Web Presence Your Small Business May Die

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 12:56:00 GMT

There is a huge change headed to the landscape of not only the United States, but all countries around the world. This change in the landscape won't be in terms of buildings or even in the methods of travel that we are already used to, but it will certainly change the way that people travel in a certain respect. It will also change one of the most important areas of human life: how we spend our money. Though it might sound ominous at first, this change is coming from the web directly to the physical world and once it hits in a big way, things are going to change rapidly.

If you run a business, it is very crucial that you know about this change right now and begin taking steps to figure out a way to adjust to what is about to happen over the course of the next few years.

If you thought the Dot Com years of the late 1990's were something that truly changed the shape of society, then what is headed our way now will make that look very small scale. In those days, businesses discovered that they could sell their products and services on the web. In that era, many businesses had a go at taking their operations, either in part or whole, online to see what the response might be. Many companies also began that focused their operations exclusively on the web. These dot com oriented companies have done very well, in fact so well that they have proven that there is a massive market on the web that is ready, willing and able to spend quite a bit of cash to order in services or have products shipped directly to their door.

Right now, millions of people order such products and services on a regular basis. If you are a big company, then you already know all about this and most likely have a web presence of some form. If you are a small company, then you might feel that these web visitors do not count for your local business, but this is not true at all. The hand is now writing on the wall and you would be wise to decipher what it says.

The fact is, those on the web are no longer sitting in their houses and using a novel device such as a desktop PC or Mac. Instead, they are in airports, hotel rooms, coffee shops and campuses with their laptops. They are also browsing the web with cell phones and the next generation smart phones that feature broadband internet connectivity. These are the customers of the future, on the go and using a variety of devices to search for whatever they want to buy or any services they need right now. That means they are not at home just relaxing and browsing, they are looking to make immediate purchases of food, clothing, entertainment and a variety of other products. They may also need a plumber, mechanic, roofer, seamstress or dog trainer and they are obviously not going to be getting those services from a national provider. Nor do they want to hunt down so-called national directories. The Yellow Pages have become all but obsolete as customers begin to seek out more immediate and specialized results that search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo can provide.

Let's repeat this one more time, for good measure, until it becomes your small business mantra: without a web presence your local business could die. In fact, it most likely will, as consumers turn from thumbing through phone books or wandering around town as an incredibly inefficient way to find what they need, to a much more robust, faster and more economical means - searching the web.

You do not necessarily need a fancy web site with bells and whistles. Good hosting, a decent design and a good strategy to show up in the search engines will work. You simply need a way for your local customers to find you quickly and efficiently over the web. If they cannot do this, you risk losing not just foot traffic, but any form of calls that could come in as a result of someone finding you right over the web. Now that Google and Yahoo both have mapping services, along with Bing, getting your business listed is easy, but protecting your name and your position in the local community as a premiere provider of quality goods and services? That is going to get a bit tougher. You have got to seek out the talent who can get you where you need to be in the search engines. You can do this by focusing on keywords that describe your business which people search for.

You also need to have more than this, however, you will need to make sure you are listed in local directories such as Yelp, for instance. An ad on craigslist would not hurt and a few other places will offer you similar services for rock bottom prices. A profile on Facebook will help some small businesses, while others can benefit from a YouTube video campaign or even a well stocked Twitter loaded with helpful tweets or sales. You can benefit from an email mailing list, too. The options are plenty, but the time for getting your act together grows increasingly scarce.

The core fact here is, you have got to listen to the internet marketing geniuses who know how this industry works, not because they know more about your business than you do, but because they do know more about the web than you will ever need to. What you need to know is that consumers are shifting their habits to favor, what else, but the easy way. You've got to plan for this or other businesses that exercise a savvy plan will rip your market share away and you will be left with nothing but your most loyal customers. You cannot afford to do this because the times are changing and not getting in sync? It will be a bit like telling the Beatles that guitar music is going out of style back in the early 1960's.

Don't get caught making a mistake you can easily avoid. Get started building a meaningful web presence by any means necessary today.

This is a guest post by Laurence Flynn:

Tired of unreliable and expensive web hosting? As CEO of top Web Hosting Provider, HostNexus, Laurence Flynn is helping thousands of webmasters achieve online success. Check out HostNexus today!

Real-Estate Agency YouTube Channel

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 10:12:00 GMT

The first real-estate YouTube channel for a real estate agency in Belgium is launched.

We are very pleased to be able to launch the first YouTube channel for a real-estate agency in Belgium.

We created this channel for our existing customer - Luxestate, aiming to achieve the following goals:
1. Extend their online reach
2. Strengthen Luxestate's brand as a leading, top-of-class real estate agency.
3. Utilize existing assets (what is known as Social Media Optimization, or SMO): Luxestate is creating an amazing-looking video for each property they are handling. Those high-quality videos appear now not only on their website, but also on YouTube.

We are sure that the professional manner in which Luxestate is operating and serving their clients will be reflected in this YouTube channel.

Google Analytics: Remove your Blindfold (Video)

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:06:00 GMT

We have uploaded a new video to YouTube on titles “Google Analytics: Remove your Blindfold”(available also on our channel at youtube.com/wsieservices). As states in its name, the video is a running presentation we gave on Google Analytics.

The list of topics covered in the video:
- What is Web Analytics & Google Analytics
- Key definitions
- The importance of Analytics
- Website goal, KPI’s and Analytics goals
- Best practices in account setup
- Google Analytics Interface & Dashboard
- Profiles, segments & filters: “Segment or Die”

The heart of the presentation is an analogy of Google Analytics analysis with the roles of the Bookkeeper and the Accountant (following the statement of “Not analyzing your web analytics data is like not looking at your financial books”):
In this analogy, the main reports in Google Analytics are presented in a view of the Bookkeeper and the Accountant, where the Bookkeeper view presents the data being collected in the repots (and presented) and the Accountant view shows the real analysis questions a website owner should ask himself when looking at those reports.

Take for example the “site usage” data. The Bookkeeper collects metrics such as VISITS, PAGES VIEWED, PAGES PER VISIT, BOUNCE RATE and TIME ON SITE.

The Accountant will ask “What are the trends?” “What do peaks and slumps mean?” “Pages/Visit & Avg. Time correlation: are they visiting more pages and staying longer on my site because my content is interesting, or is it that they are looking for something I don’t have or nor visible enough?” “Is the Bounce Rate a concern? Do I want and expect my visitor to navigate to other pages once landed on my site or not? ” “New Visits or Returning Visitors – what is more important and how is my site doing?”

The Accountant will dive into detailed trends and analyze how the metrics look over the last few months and compare metrics between this month and last one as well as with the same period last year, mainly to examine seasonal trends.

Hope you will enjoy this video/presentation on Google Analytics and that you will find it valuable.

The 4 key methods to have YouTube videos rank high on search engines

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 00:08:00 GMT

Although Search Engine Optimization is still mainly for web pages, as Google is presenting different media types in the search results first page, there is a lot of value in optimizing other media files such as videos on YouTube.

Once you have your videos on YouTube (and hopefully you have created your own channel where they are hosted), the same core principals of optimization should apply. The following list describes the 3 main elements for SEO’ing your YouTube videos to get them to appear on Google’s first page for your keywords of choice:

Use the name of the video like the title of the web page: Just as the optimization of a web page starts with a well optimized title, you should use your main keyword in the title of the video. Unlike with web pages’ titles, you may want to consider adding your website name after the key phrase as you would like to generate traffic from the video to your web site (so the structure should be something like: “Main Keyphrase – www.yourwebsite.com videos”).

Include your keyword in the description of the video: The description is where your second optimization step should take place. Unlike with web pages – where the description tag appears only on search results – the description of your video will appear both on the search results as well as on YouTube as well. So use your keywords and related keywords in the description of the video. Don’t forget to put the full URL of your website as well (starting with http://) as this will create a live link from the description text to your website.

Include your keyword in the video tags: although the keywords Meta tag has no effect anymore in web pages optimization, they very much do on YouTube. Those are used as the main search method for visitors on YouTube and will help a lot with showing up on relevant searches on Google itself.

Build links to your video: again, just like with web page, the key is to have links pointing in to your videos. The more links there are to a video on YouTube, the more authority ranking it gets and more visibility. Since visibility is what we all wish to gain, invest in link building to your videos as if you were doing link building to your website.

To sum it up, optimizing YouTube videos is very much like SEO for web pages, only it is much more focused around the keywords.