Marketing on Internet Road 

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 :-)

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.

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.

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.

Employing Internet Marketing strategies does not necessarily mean a new way of doing business. It is true that the internet and online marketing opened up a window for new and advance way of doing business, but it is also an online reflection of the way you do business offline.

Ask yourself the following question: “How do I get business today?” This answer should lead you in to the best main strategy you need to be using in your Internet Marketing portfolio.
If you are doing business by more than only one method, use more than one method online. Furthermore, extend your online marketing efforts to be using more than one main strategy. This way you can significantly increase your business while still being very efficient, be able to make constant changes and keep the costs low (surely when compared to your traditional marketing tactics).

Word of Mouth and/or Networking

With Word of Mouth the most important factor is referrals and positive reviews on your products and services. The best fit is with Social Media Marketing.
Depending on your exact type of business, choose your Social Networks: LinkedIn (mainly if you are in B2B), Twitter, Facebook and so on. Social Media is all about connections, referrals and experiences people on those networks experienced. This is literally the new way of Word of Mouth.
The complimentary Internet Marketing strategy to use is permission based Email Marketing: use your website and other online touch-points (like you page on Facebook) to encourage customers and prospects to subscribe to your mailing list. Then, send them timely newsletters to keep them engaged and further encourage them to forward your messages to others.

Cold Calling

If your business depends on Cold Calls or incoming phone calls, your strategies should combine Search Engine Marketing together with bought-list-based Email Marketing.
The Search Engine Marketing strategies of Search Engine Optimization and Pay-per-Click will ensure your phone is ringing. They are designed to get you found by your target market and potential customers exactly when they are looking for what you have to offer, where they are searching for it and in the way they are searching for it.
If you can purchase bought lists of your potential customers (watch out for legal aspects depending on your location and the vendor), this is a very close match to your cold calling tactics, only via the internet – much cheaper, more flexible and more effective.

Advertising

If you focusing offline on advertising, online you should put your focus on
-   SEO
-   PPC
-   Display advertising

As mentioned above, Search Engine Marketing tactics are the best ways in the online realm to reach your target audience. Done correctly, it should be much cheaper and much more effective than your offline advertising efforts. Consider allocating part of the traditional advertising budget to the online realm.
If your advertising budget is more substantial, explore the possibility of using Display Advertising: literally advertise your business (that is – your web pages) on websites that your potential customers visit. Display Advertising constantly improves and allows more capabilities of socio-demographic targeting to make your campaign more accurate and more successful.  

Face to Face

If your business depends on Face-to-Face meetings, make sure your “face” is visible online.
As this type of prospecting suggests you are in the B2B market, invest in your LinkedIn profile along with a professional profile on a Facebook page.
Furthermore, use YouTube to host videos on your business, your offerings and your sales representatives. Similarly, upload photos to Flickr and presentations to Slideshare.
Make sure to have a professional profile on each of those networks as this is one of the first things people will look at and will help them have a positive perception of your business.