Vanessa Fox, who previously worked for Google and also built the wonderful Webmaster Central tools, was one of our keynote speakers at Symposium 2011 in San Francisco. Vanessa wrote, Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy is Your Business Strategy, which I highly recommend. I’d like to share five things she highlighted that you can do TODAY to improve your site’s performance.
1. Set a Goal: When you’re creating content on your website, whether it is your home page, your blog, or a product page, you should always have a goal in mind of what the purpose is. Who are you trying to target with that blog post or article or status update? If it’s a product page, what elements will be helpful to the buyer? For example, take a dress or top from an e-Commerce website. Put yourself in the shoes of the buyer and decide what elements would make that page more attractive. If it’s a dress, be descriptive about the fabric, the design points, the fit, in addition to available sizes and colors. Perhaps add a video of a person wearing the dress, so the buyer can clearly see how the dress moves and fits. While it seems obvious, outlining these parameters will help you be more successful with your online strategy, whatever they may be.
2. Make Each Page Your Home Page: Can you safely say that if an individual came across your website via the search engines, and landed on an internal page within your site, not only would know exactly why they landed there, but also would they be enticed to stick around? This point is another reason goals are so important when it comes to your site. Every page within your site should be looked at as your home page. The home page is the area where a value proposition, various calls to action exists, and where a visitor should automatically know WIIFM ‘What’s in it for me.’ These various items should be reflected throughout your website. For example, if someone were to land on your blog, would they be able to easily navigate back to the main site? Do you have calls to action on your blog? If not and your blog is being updated one a regular basis, in addition to being indexed frequently, then you’re missing out on HUGE revenue opportunities. Every page on your site should have a theme or subject, assist your visitor to do something and provide direction so the conversion is able to take place. Every page within your site should engage, educate, and attract the user to stay on site.
3. Complete a Task: Another area of focus for a site owner to consider is. If a visitor is able to find what they were looking for according to what they typed in the search engine. Do they land on a page within your site that is unrelated to what they were looking for? This is where off page and on page optimization tactics should unite. For example, if I do a search for ‘pink maxi dress,’ and the first result I go to shows me a page of maxi dresses, but none of which are pink maxi dresses, then I will immediately click the back button back to the search engine results to find a page that shows me exactly what I was looking for. While it sounds pretty simple, you really should make sure that your meta data, heading tags and alt parameters are in sync with the content and anchor text on your page. Once that is done, you may find your ‘task ‘for that page has been ‘completed.’4. Compel Conversion: The main goal of eCommerce sites are making money and constantly find ways to improve conversion. Vanessa’s point about conversion was stated in one of her points, ‘does your site compel conversion?’ Most site owners think ‘obviously it does! It’s my job!’ Think again. Are you one of those sites that upon arrival to the home page bombard visitors with image upon image, mentioning the several hundred deals you have going on? Chances are heavy visuals are going to do the opposite of attracting your visitors, causing them to high tail it out of your site. Conversion should be simple, to the point, but also should be tested often to find the right combination of texts and images.
5. Make Your Site Stand Out: This is the final point out of many that Vanessa shared during her keynote speech. Having your site stand out in a crowd can really aid in overall online marketing success, but unfortunately many sites are unaware their hurting their uniqueness. This common downfall is duplicate content. For example, advertisers have merchants who obviously share the advertiser’s data feed. The major issue is that both parties content is duplicated. Another example is content syndication. If you’re creating content for syndication, develop a different version that can be syndicated, so your site remains one of a kind. This is a hindrance because, when search engine spider crawls your site and comes across content that seems duplicated; the bot could possibly stop crawling your site, thus preventing the pages being indexed. A way to avoid this is offering a data feed different from the one on your site. Other ways you can separate your site from others is providing a distinctive feature where site visitors can leave comments, otherwise known as UGC (user generated content.) Whatever it is, setting your site aside from the rest of the competition, enhancing user engagement on your site will benefit you in the long run.
In conclusion, the above points are among the top insights that website marketers should never ignore. Always looking at your goal list will prevent you from getting side tracked and will make the other tips mentioned, easier to implement. If you feel that your business has lost sight of its goals, or an unsure how to make your site a more unique and profitable place, then an SEO audit can help you prioritize and strengthen your online and business strategy.
Find Out How The Famous Writer Joe Comm things
ADVANCED TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES
1.Recommended Resources: Try These Tools And AdSense Utilities (Some Are FREE!)
Making life easier for AdSense Partners
2. Test Your Mettle With The Adsense Sandbox!
Before you apply to AdSense, put your web pages through a 'mock-test' with a FREE web utility called the AdSense Sandbox at www.digitalpoint.com/tools/adsense-sandbox. It's a great way to determine what type of ads your pages pull up. You can also estimate your earnings potential from the keywords in the ads. The AdSense Sandbox is free to use, requires no subscription and displays results with a single click.
I tested the AdSense SandBox with Chris Pirillo's website LockerGnome.com and was presented with a list of 20 ads. The actual website has 4 ads, all of which were displayed by the Sandbox.
Many AdSense partners are already using it — with excellent results!Click here to try it, Free!
1.Google AdSense Preview Tool
If you have Windows Internet Explorer (version 6 or higher), you can now install this neat tool provided by Google to check out ads that are most likely to show up on your web page. You can check the destination of ads that are likely to appear on your site without being penalized for clicking your own ads, preview your color choices and see what geo-targeted ads are likely to show.
You might find that http://googleadspreview.blogspot.com/ does it better but if you use Explorer and only plan to use AdSense, Google’s own tool certainly has its uses. It takes just a few clicks and works with any web page — even if you still haven't got AdSense.
2.Overture BidTool
While Google won't disclose what each click is worth, you can try indirect methods such as the Overture BidTool to find out the relative cost of different keywords here. Overture BidTool displays the relative amounts that each Overture advertiser is willing to pay 'per click' for a specific keyword. You can compare maximum bids for different keywords to arrive at an educated guess about the most profitable keywords for your website. Remember that what Google actually pays you may vary greatly. But you will get closer with practice! ;)
http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/index.jhtml
3.Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool
Enter a search term and Overture tells you how many times it was looked up on Overture during the previous month. It will also give you a related list of
keywords including how many searches were carried out for each search term in the list.
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
4.Ultimate SEO Tool
Just feed it your website address and hit Enter. This amazing tool will show you a list of the most frequently used words and phrases, including detailed reporting of the number of times it appeared as well as the keyword density. Then, hit the "Create Position Report" button to check how your website ranks for each search term. (Can you ask for more?)
http://www.Googlerankings.com/ultimate_seo_tool.php
5.Google AdWords Traffic Estimator and Bid Tool
If you are an AdWords Advertiser, you can use this tool to get the estimated bid price and traffic for your desired list of search terms.
https://adwords.Google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox1
6.Keyword Rankings Tool
How does your site rank on Google search for a specific search term? Find out with this free tool.
http://www.Googlerankings.com/index.php
7.Mass Keywords Search
Find out how your website ranks on Google for up to ten different keywords — in one go! If you'd also like to study the top 100 sites for your specific search keyword, you'll get the results even faster!
http://www.Googlerankings.com/mkindex.php
8.Guide to Google-friendly Design
You see a beautiful website with great content. But Googlebot spots heaps of nonsense code hidden behind the scenes. Your Google ranking depends on a combination of words, design and programming. Find out how to create a relevant, clean and clutter-free website: the kind that Googlebot loves!
http://www.Googlerankings.com/Googlefriendly.php
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How to To Get More Traffic To My Web Site or Blog
One of the most frequent questions I am asked is “Will your ebook teach me how to get more traffic to my web site?” Lots of people have written books — and series of books — on generating traffic. The focus of this ebook is to show you how to maximize the traffic that you already have. And while tips for building pages through forums and free content are excellent ideas, they are no replacement for a solid course on how to get more people to visit your site. Because this question is so common though, I will address it briefly in this chapter. I’ll give you the basics, describe some unusual ideas that some people are using and tell you where you can get all the information you need.
Fig. 19.8 A contextualized ad unit at the bottom of moneycentral.msn.com.
1. Advertising
Let’s start with the obvious: buying advertising. We’ve already talked about AdWords/AdSense arbitrage but exactly the same principle applies to buying your traffic from other sources too. For example, the minimum price for advertising at Overture is ten cents per click and you must spend at least $20 each month. If you can see that the ads being served on your site are generating less than ten cents per click then you’re never going to make a profit. Exactly the same is true of any other pay-per-click advertising campaign. One of the advantages of following your AdSense stats is that you can estimate how much the clicks on your ads are worth. That can tell you how much you can afford to pay for clicks from other sites when you buy advertising. It might well pay to advertise, but before you buy make sure it pays a profit.
2. Reciprocal Linking
Many people focus on linking in order to improve their search engine rankings. That’s important but don’t forget that the links themselves can be one of your biggest sources of traffic! Probably the easiest way to invite links (apart from searching out related sites and writing to each one) is to add a “link” section to your pages where webmasters can choose a banner, button or text link to place on their site. On the same page, they can also submit their own site for linking. That should help you swap links without being swamped by sites looking for free placement. The most critical factor when requesting a link though is where the site places it. Links on the home page always do better than a link buried on one of the internal pages and a good banner or graphic link on a site with content related to yours will usually get more clicks than a text link. If you find that your links aren’t appearing on the pages you want, there are a couple of simple remedies that you can use.
The first is to ask for a better position! If you have a good relationship with the webmaster or if it’s a small site, there’s a good chance that they’ll agree. It certainly won’t hurt to ask. Not everyone is so generous though, and another option is to offer something in return. A link in a similar position on your own site can make a good deal if your sites are of similar size but you can also offer content or even a special page for that site’s users. If you have a site about furniture for example, and you want a link at a top directory for home furnishings then you could create a special welcome page for users of that site to draw them deeper into yours and deliver targeted ads. You might even want to go as far as creating a sort of co-branded version of your site for their users to click into. As long as you’re getting paid when the users click on the ads, what do you care whose design they’re looking at?
3.Send A Friend
There’s nothing like viral marketing to promote your site! It’s free, it comes with trusted recommendations and it gives you great CTR. Each of your content pages should have a link marked “Send a friend” which opens a form so that the user can send your URL onwards. Until Google allows ads in email, there’s little point in AdSense members sending actual content but there’s no reason why you (or your users) can’t send links to pages with ads.
4. RSS Feeds
One of the challenges of keeping your user base is that readers can be pretty forgetful. Adding an RSS feed to your site is a great way to let people know that a new post has gone up and that they should stop by and take a look You’ll want to make sure that your headlines are attractive and inviting. Many users don’t look past them, so if they don’t do the job, the post won’t be opened or read, and the user won’t click to your site. Images can also help your feeds to stand out. It’s rarely a good idea to send more than RSS post to a subscriber each day. The most common reason that users unsubscribe isn’t poor content or too much advertising, but too many posts.
One good strategy then is to divide your RSS feeds by theme and let subscribers only receive posts on the topics that interest them most. If you’re writing about a range of different themes, that should already help to keep the deliveries down to a manageable level. The only other choice you’ll have to make is whether to include the whole post in your feed or just a teaser to bring people to your site. When the goal of the feed is to get people back to your site to click the ads, you might think that there’s little point in giving them the whole article in their feed reader. But readers will often unsubscribe if they can’t see the whole article. That would reduce your subscriber base. You might be better off giving them the whole article and inviting them back to your site to add and see comments. Test both options and see which works best for you.
5.Offline Marketing
One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they build an Internet business is to forget that there’s a world outside the Internet! Just because you make money out of traffic doesn’t mean you have to source all of that traffic online. You should make sure that your URL is listed on all of your marketing material: your business cards, Yellow Pages ads, flyers, envelopes, freebies and just about anything else you can think of. You should certainly have your site address in your email signatures.
6.Promoting Your Blog
I’ve talked quite a bit about blogging in this book, mostly because I know from experience that it’s possible to make a very nice income from a good blog but also because a lot of people aren’t making the most of the blogs they have. If you’ve got AdSense on your blog, there’s a whole range of different things that you can easily do to increase your traffic and earn extra cash. The first thing you should do is make sure that your blog is set to ping rpc.pingomatic.com as soon as you’ve updated. Pingomatic.com offers a free all-in-one pinging service that covers all the large blog directories and search engines. On Blogger.com, you can find this in your settings; other blog tools, such as Movable Type and Wordpress have a similar option.
You should also set up an RSS feed to let people know when you update. Apart from the fact that you can now place ads on your feeds, it will also keep your regular users coming back to see more ads (and to see your latest posts). Instead of linking to the previous month’s or the previous week’s posts, each page should also have its own link. Sounds obvious, right? And yet how many blogs have you seen with one link to about twenty different entries? One link per entry means more pages for ads, better links from external sites and higher search engine rankings. You should certainly comment on other people’s blogs, especially those that write about the same sort of things as your site, but ultimately the best way to get traffic to your blog is to make it good. If your writing is dull or difficult to read, it doesn’t matter how hard you push it, no one will want to read it — and those who do stay won’t stick around to click the ads.
7.Public Relations And Publicity
Just about all of the methods that you use to bring people to your site will cost you money. You’ll have to pay for ads on other sites, you’ll have to give up valuable real estate on your site to lists of links and you’ll have to decide how much you want to pay for an AdWords campaign or to get yourself promoted through Overture. Publicity can be free. It doesn’t have to be of course. You can pay a PR expert to publicize your site for you and place articles in the press on your behalf... but it’s not necessary and they can be too expensive for most sites, especially at the beginning. Or you can simply create a good quality press release yourself, fax it out to the media and wait for reporters to call. Sound difficult?It really isn’t. A press release is just one page and will take between twenty and forty minutes to write. There are a number of rules you have to follow: you need a gripping headline; you have to include a quote; and you have to be available for the interview to name just three. Most importantly though you have to have a story the press wants to run.
Telling them that you’ve just launched a new site isn’t going to cut it. Telling them that your new site is going to set a new trend or change some people‘s lives just might. Think about the effect that your piece of “news” will have on the public and you’ve got the beginnings of a great story. And what do you get in return for doing that? Well, not only do you get the name of your business in the press, you also get the halo that comes with it. When you’re in the media, people assume that you’re an expert. You become the number one source for whatever your website offers. And to underline that fact, you can even put a button on your home page that says something like: “As Seen On CNN!” Sound good? The real expert on marketing through free publicity is Paul Hartunian. This is the guy who bought a hunk of wood that had been cut from the Brooklyn Bridge during renovations, cut it into one-inch cubes and wrote a press release with the headline “New Jersey Man Sells Brooklyn Bridge For $19.95”. He was on CNN for two days and the story was run as far away as Peru.
He now lives on a 30-acre estate and teaches people how to use publicity for their businesses. You can order his publicity kit at www.hartunian.com. .
