Which one is better?

I have been thinking about this issue for a while and have come up [...]]]>

If you want to attract visitors to your site then there are a couple of ways of doing this. Among the most popular and effective ones are SEO and PPC.

Which one is better?

I have been thinking about this issue for a while and have come up with a few points to try and help me reach a final decision.

Let’s take a look.

The Cost

PPC stands for Pay Per Click. As the name suggests, you pay for every time someone clicks on your ad and gets directed to your site. In theory this means that the more visitors you receive the more you pay. Anyone who is completely confident of converting the majority of their visitors into paying customers should get big benefits out of this. SEO is all about search engine optimization and the price you pay is generally not related to the results you get. You will be paying for a package which involves carrying out the tasks necessary to get you up the search engine rankings. However, you are not paying for the results as such but rather for the process.

The Results

In SEO the results you see will really depend upon how competitive a market you are operating in. For instance, if you are up against some big hitting sites then you are going to have to plug away for a while before getting into a good position on the rankings. On the other hand, if the competition is pretty puny then you should sweep them aside more easily. PPC is a different kettle of fish, as you aren’t really battling it out to get more visibility; you are paying for it. You would think that this means that the results are more guaranteed but I have a spanner to throw in the works. With SEO the people who find you are those who are looking for you. With PPC you might get a lot of idle clickers reaching your site. If your page is SEO optimized for your keywords and it has been done professionally then you know exactly what your visitors have typed in as their searches. With PPC you are attracting visitors who were maybe looking at something completely different but saw your advert and decided to have a look at it. Therefore, they probably have less intention of buying something when they enter your site.

The Long Term Sustainability

The final point I want to consider is which of these two methods is better in the long run. This is another close call and again comes down to the website’s own position in the overall market. For example, if I have a site which doesn’t have particularly strong competition then I can run some SEO work for a few months and blitz my way to the top of the rankings. If the rival sites don’t wake up then I can carry on in my lofty position with little or no maintenance work or costs. With the PPC approach you only get what you pay for. If you stop doing it you stop getting visitors from it, as simple as that.

Takeaway

This means that I have to go with SEO here, as it is something which is designed specifically to give your site visibility on an ongoing basis. Getting business from organic searches seems to me like the most natural and long term solution to finding your next generation of customers.

Image: MarketingForSuccess

If you decide to go for SEO then have a look at the benefits of using a great SEO reseller. For professionalism and results which speak for themselves choosing ZenSeo is the smart choice.

We all know that some things go together better than others.

So what about search engine optimization and an attractive website? Common sense tells us that webmasters are divided into two groups; those who only want to sell things and those who just want [...]]]>

Smart bots or sexy design?

We all know that some things go together better than others.

So what about search engine optimization and an attractive website? Common sense tells us that webmasters are divided into two groups; those who only want to sell things and those who just want to entertain the world and share something they are passionate about.

This is fine in theory but we all know that life is not so black and white.

Even if you are writing on a subject you care deeply about you still need to attract visitors as well as pay the bills. Equally, if you are an online business owner then that doesn’t automatically make you the modern day equivalent to an old mill boss who only wants results and doesn’t care how it is done.

The Need of Effective SEO

Let’s look first at the SEO side of things. If we take the example of someone writing about their passion, what good is having a site if no one can find it? Would you be happy spilling all of your hopes and desire onto a site if you knew that your Mum and your Aunt are the only people likely to ever see it? So SEO will give this person the chance of getting a much wider audience, which in turn will give them a chance to earn some money from it.

The Need of Beautiful Design

Turning now to the business owner, they want to make a commercial success of the site but they will probably also want something to be proud of. They will also know that internet users are smart they days and can sniff out a simple money making site no problem. People want something which keeps their interest and gives them a decent experience rather than a site which just tries to get them to click on a sponsored ad or three.

Best of Both Worlds

Now that we have established that, yes, all site owners should be interested in both good SEO and an attractive site we need to turn to the issue of whether this can actually be done. It would be a bit of a disappointment if I were to say that it couldn’t be, wouldn’t it?

Fortunately the two elements are not as mutually exclusive as you might think. An effective SEO campaign can be done on any type of site and doesn’t automatically impose some sort of rigid, unpleasant layout on the site. Luring the big search engines into giving you a higher position can be done in a fairly attractive manner if you place your keywords thoughtfully throughout the site and take care with things such as your backlinks.

Getting the best of both worlds can be done after all, and things which we perhaps had assumed wouldn’t work together can actually match up perfectly.

Talk to your seo reseller about the necessary steps needed to start your SEO campaign off on the right foot.  Visit www.zenoseo.com to find out more.

Did you know anywhere up to 80% of your potential customers will be using the information they get from the web to decide whether or not they do business with you?

To most consumers that doesn’t extend past [...]]]>

Internet marketing statistics are sobering stuff. I mean really sobering.

Did you know anywhere up to 80% of your potential customers will be using the information they get from the web to decide whether or not they do business with you?

To most consumers that doesn’t extend past typing your name into a search engine and glancing over the first five to ten things that pop up – what will they see?

Go ahead and see for yourself.

If Content is King…

If you’re in the position to happily rely on people to type your name or your business’s name into a search engine then you’re actually doing pretty well for yourself all things considered. The difficult charge of competing against established competition is amplified if your business is unknown online and theirs is: whatever your business description, rivals will dominate the search results every time. Any respectable internet marketing agency knows all about this already – but don’t think you don’t need to know the science behind the muscle of search engine optimization and the way your online content dictates your business destiny.

…Online Marketing is Emperor

Content is simply anything and everything your business is attached to that is able to be seen or interacted with by anyone on the Internet. But think about that. There’s millions and potentially billions of pieces of content out there – and not only are people over it, they look over it – mostly all of it. Content competition is fierce. There are only so many hours in the day and only so many minutes people will devote to product and service content. Whether or not your company’s content is ultimately seen is whether or not your online marketing strategy is working. The only way you can get those searches executed is if content is absorbed and curiosity sets in.

Takeaway

What can you do? Respect the awesome power that is search engine optimization – first and foremost. Make it a personal mission to research your industry like a potential consumer would – search what they’d search for, click on the first several hits, and see what you’re up against. Afterward talk with the right people and formulate a solid online marketing strategy. It’s easier than you think and more important than you can imagine. 80% of your business depends on it.

The move ensures the continuance [...]]]>

In a move “to encourage a healthy web ecosystem,” Google recently announced a major change to its search algorithm – a move to devalue so-called “content farms” that primarily copy content from other websites, and sites that offer little or no value-added content for users.

The move ensures the continuance of the Internet adage, “Content is King!” According to Google, its algorithm tweak “noticeably” impacted 11.8% of its search queries, dropping the search engine results page (SERP) rankings of sites that “copy content from other sites or sites that are just not very useful,” while providing better SERP rankings for “sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

This major algorithm change has, of course, generated great interest and some controversy in the search engine optimization (SEO) community, although the change was widely anticipated by most analysts.

“No one can this one came out of left field, writes SearchEngineWatch’s Brent Ragen. “Google,” he notes, “launched an algorithm tweak in January to combat spam and scraper sites.” These so-called “scraper sites” automatically pull content from a wide range of other sites, and compile the unattributed, duplicate information on their own site, a move that many  (including many at Google, it seems) who view “scraping” as a major impediment that discourages original work, have seen as a “black-hat” SEO tactic.

Many questions remain open about how this algorithm will affect various sites. One of the most pressing questions, as Ragen notes, is whether the algorithm changes factor in results from Google Chrome’s newly introduced “Personal Blocklist” extension which allows user’s to report and block no-content or low-content sites as well as content farms.

Google has specifically said that data from its “Personal blocklist” app is not factored into the algorithm changes. However, they do say that when they compared the most-blocked sites, 84% of the top sites users had blocked were affected by the algorithm tweak.

While “grey-hat” and ”black-hat” SEO artists who are scraping content from other sites, and/or operating or utilizing content farms, will be hit hard by the algorithm change, creative web masters who realize that original, relevant and informing site content is what both users and search engine indexing programs are looking for should benefit from the algorithm tweak.

James Barry covers Internet marketing and related topics for Wolf21.com – a full service, Toronto-based search engine optimization firm.

If your content awkwardly uses SEO keywords you can easily turn off your readers.

Also, too many SEO keywords can hurt your ranking on Google and other search engines [...]]]>

It’s a thin line to walk between ensuring search engine optimization and keeping your readers satisfied with your content.

If your content awkwardly uses SEO keywords you can easily turn off your readers.

Also, too many SEO keywords can hurt your ranking on Google and other search engines as well.

Follow these six tips to help your content maintain the balance between marketable and valuable.

1. Use the Right SEO Keywords

Before you sit down to write any content you should first do some research to find out which SEO keywords are the best for the subject matter at hand. You want to select the most popular keyword and use it most often – about once or twice every 100 words. Try to use a few of the other popular search terms once or twice in your content as well. You want to add the main keyword phrase to all titles, headings and meta tags and use it in the first and last sentence of your content.

2. Make Your Content Easy to Read

The easier it is to scan your content for information, the better. Use simple language and avoid jargon. Explain terms in detail whenever possible. You should use plenty of space, so keep paragraphs brief and use sub-headings to break up your articles. When listing items, use a bulleted list instead of excessive commas.

3. Find Your Voice

You don’t want your SEO keywords to take over your content, so work on trying to find ways to naturally fit them into your content. This will improve your search engine results and will be more attractive to your readers. When writing content, try to find your own voice, as plagiarizing content or copying and pasting information will negatively impact your traffic.

4. Make Your Content Valuable

You are writing web content, not a novel, so try to get to the point without adding filler. Whether your information is informative, instructional or just entertaining, you should avoid going off on a tangent and stick to a few simple concepts. If you find there is a large amount of information for one topic, consider splitting the information between multiple articles or web pages.

5. Don’t Forget the Titles

Using SEO terms in your titles will improve your search engine results and increase traffic. When your web page is displayed in a search engine, the first impression a potential reader will have is generated by your title and meta title (or descriptive title). This means your titles need to be informative in order to entice readers to click on your web page over others.

6. Hire a Professional

One way to ensure search engine optimization is to hire a professional content creator to assist you in the process. These professionals that offer article writing services can create valuable content that is creative and engaging. They often have a lot of experience in helping web sites improve their traffic.

Consider search engines to be another visitor to your website. A reader wouldn’t value a website that had clunky content and misused SEO keywords and neither will the most popular search engines. Utilize these tips and you will capture the attention of both your audience and the best search engines.

Philip Rudy helps run and maintain ContentCustoms.com, which is a company that provides many Internet marketing services.

This is not really an easy topic and before you make such a radical move there is a lot [...]]]>

Many website owners as their businesses expand they come to the dilemma of splitting their sites into a few microsites so they can rank better for their targeted terms.

This is not really an easy topic and before you make such a radical move there is a lot to take into consideration.

The first thing you need to ask yourselves is why would you want do something like that?

–

Reasons to split a site into Microsites

1. Your brand name is not doing very well and you would like a part of the business to be re-branded and market it separately.
2. Your businesses are expanding into a few different niches, thus the one site you have can’t really serve all those different businesses.
3. You think that by splitting your site into some smaller ones you will manage to engage the visitors as they all microsites will be dedicated to one particular service or product. Conversion may increase as users will think that they are at a specialist’s website rather than a generic one offering all sorts of services or products.

Risks and Dangers

There are certain risks you will be taking by making such a big change and you need to think carefully before you make any decision.

Log Tail and Link Juice Loss

By splitting your site into microsites you will have to remove a great deal of content. That is going to affect two key elements:

1. Your long tail will be reduced, so will long tail traffic because there will be much less content on the (main) site compared to what used to be there.
2. The power of the whole site will be diminished as certain deep pages with a number of backlinkswill cease to exist. Usually webmasters redirect those removed pages to the new microsite, thus the link juice will be permanently gone.

Subdomain vs Separate Domain

There are two different ways to embrace the Microsite approach:

1. Generate them as subdomains of your main domain so if your main site is www.mainsite.com a subdomain microsite would look like microsite.mainsite.com
2. Generate microsites in a new separate domain, something like www.microsite.com

However, since Google stopped treating subdomains independently and is attaching some association between them, the first approach does not sound like a very good idea. That means that there isn’t much opportunity anymore to rank for both, your main site and the subdomain site so you should choose the separate domain approach.

Links Farms Issue

This is a quite controversial issue but in theory, a great benefit of splitting your site into microsites is to interlink between them so each one passes link juice to another. Because this is a technique that in several cases have been abused by web site owners who deliberately buy tens of websites just to easily get links back to their main sites, your site(s) may end up being banned from Google’s indexes. This practice is called ‘link farms’ and although not all web sites do not end up being penalized, you should probably link between some of your sites and not all of them! And definitely avoid reciprocal links as that is an obvious indication of potential link farms.

Slow growth

Each microsite would be looked at by search engines as a new site, which means you will need to do everything you would normally do for a new site such as creating back-links and all other problems associated with domain development. Unless you have a massive budget you will probably struggle for the first few months as you really need to optimise all those different sites. The more competitive your site’s niche is, the more time and money you would need to spend so your microsite will be in a position to compete with other long established power websites. If your niche is not that competitive that shouldn’t be much of an issue.

The Key Questions

The questions to ask yourselves before making such a big step are:

1. How long could you afford waiting and spending money until you see your new site(s) ranking in Google’s 1^st page?
2. Is the situation with your current site really that bad? What if you spend all those money linkbuilding in order to gain more positions in the SERPs?
3. Is it really because of your brand name that you don’t get the traffic you are expecting? Have you looked carefully at your SEO campaign and how your traffic coverts? Is there anything you can do to increase conversion (i.e. enhance usability, fresh web design) ?

The Big Benefits of Microsites

The post doesn’t suggest that Microsites are a bad idea. There are several benefits if done correctly with the main ones being:

1. You can have various keyword-rich domain names that are highly valued by Google. With a consolidated site you would never manage to fit more than 1-2 keywords in your domain name.
2. Your backlinks will mainly target the homepage as there isn’t any great need to link build for deeper pages. Many directories only allow links to homepages so there is a big advantage here.
3. Your brand name will be very close to your product or service, thus some visitors will think they are at the right place. Specialists’ sites convert better in general.

Modi is an SEO and web designer who works an a consultant for a team building company. You can connect with him on Twitter at @Macmodi.

With the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting an over 9% unemployment rate in June 2009, it appears that job search sites will continue to show an accelerated growth during this economic recession.

On August 6th, 2009 eMarketer [...]]]>

For career sites, there’s no business like the recession business!

With the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting an over 9% unemployment rate in June 2009, it appears that job search sites will continue to show an accelerated growth during this economic recession.

On August 6th, 2009 eMarketer reported that more than 65 million visitors have rushed to job search sites in June 2009.  Most of the top 10 career service and development websites in the U.S. (ranked by unique visitors) have experienced double digit percentage increases in the number of unique visitors from June 2008 to June 2009.

June 2009 data from comScore pegged growth in unique visitors to career resource sites at 10% over the previous year, with seven of the top 10 sites seeing at least double-digit increases. More than 65 million visitors checked out career sites in June.

“The top three sites in the category—CareerBuilder, HotJobs and Monster—have maintained their leadership positions for several years now, but there are also a few upstarts in the industry making some noise,” said Jeff Hackett, comScore senior vice president, in a statement. “Certainly with millions of Americans reevaluating their careers right now there is opportunity for continued growth and innovation in this segment of the online marketplace.”

What are the most common search terms at career sites? Here’s the list:

These job search terms are closely aligned with the job categories of the list of over 3 million jobs that can’t be filled, released by Fortune back in February 2009.

Among all the excitement from career sites, there appears to be no discussion about this fact: the combined number of page views from the top career sites wasn’t even close to that of Craigslist back in 2007.

– craigslist.org – monster.com – careerbuilder.com

According to data from Compete, lately Monster has been able to start getting closer to the number of unique monthly visitors of Craigslist, however it’s important to remember that Craigslist doesn’t operate the large marketing and advertising expenditures that Monster does. Furthermore, the other 3 sites that showed healthy numbers of unique visitors from June 2008 to June 2009 (Careerbuilder, Indeed, and Hotjobs) have a long way to go to reach the monthly unique visitor numbers of Craigslist and Monster.

// ]]>

For the last week, I have been pretty busy creating and tweaking online ads at Google Adwords and Facebook Ads, so I thought it would be useful to provide a bit of advice from my personal experience using Facebook Ads.

Why did I choose Facebook Ads?  [...]]]>

For the last week, I have been pretty busy creating and tweaking online ads at Google Adwords and Facebook Ads, so I thought it would be useful to provide a bit of advice from my personal experience using Facebook Ads.

Why did I choose Facebook Ads?  Consider the following bar graph from Venture Beat’s article titled Facebook’s traffic growth leaving rivals in the dust.

For simplicity, I will assume that you want to drive visitors to a single website.

1. Do your research: You cannot expect Facebook Ads to do miracles for you.  It will do a pretty decent job at providing impressions but the “clickability” of your ad is 100% up to you.  Forget one-size-fits-all approaches, you will require to develop at least 5 ads (I am currently working with 8).  You need to think about the profiles of your website visitors.  For a quick video tutorial of this idea, take the quick tour of the web attitudinal web analytics firm iPerceptions from Canada.  (Avinash Kaushik is on their Advisory Council, so yes, you have to listen).  Is your ad audience: female? male? young? old? English speaking? Time-constrained? Etc, etc, etc.  Preparation of audience profiles should be about 60% of your time dedicated to develop online ads.
2. Select your text and image for your ad: As you can see from the two ads below, you can have a subject line of 25 characters, text of 135 characters, and you can upload an image (there are appear no limits on the image file size because Facebook will resize it to fit the add).  It is important that you have a variety of images available because you will be needing as you A/B test your ads.  Notice that Facebook users can give your ad a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down to your ad!  Don’t try to fully capitalize words (e.g. FREE), or use strange characters (keep to the regular alphabet, both using different languages is ok, actually I encourage it!).  Remember to use proper punctuation, otherwise your ad won’t be approved. 
3. Think of the keyword(s) of your ad: This step is critical because it will allow you to use SEO and SEM tools such as Google Trends.  Let’s assume that you want to promote your great widgets at www.widgets.com.  So an important keyword to consider would be “widgets”.  Let’s check out what is the search volume index of “widgets” at Google Trends.  Wow, this is a lot of useful information!  Notice that we get a couple of relevant news that show what drove queries for this term.  Company names and product names are useful because then you can go into their websites and see what are their current SEO and SEM practices.  Also, you should look if the already have ads around Facebook.  Don’t try to reinvent the wheel and keep an eye on the current practices of your competitors.  It is also important to check out what keywords are related to your keyword, what regions (or countries or cities) provide the most queries for your keyword, and what languages are those queries made on.  Another important source of information is Google Ad Planner.  For a discussion on how to use Google Ad Planner, refer to this web analytics analysis of Flickr, Photobucket, Shutterlfly, Snapfish, and Slide using Google Ad Planner.
4. Reach the (exact) audience you want: Using the information from the previous steps, you can fill in the fields on step 3.  Notice that not all keywords are available at Facebook, so its important that you look for keywords related to your own keyword(s) of choice.
5. Price your ad: I will skip this step for now, because it deserves a whole post of its own.  If this is your first time creating Facebook ads, then I would recommend setting the price towards the  lower limit and setting a total budget for 1 month.  Keep track of your A/B testing and then you will have enough information to develop a more detailed pricing strategy.

That’s it for now and happy experimenting with Facebook Ads!

]]> http://idaconcpts.com/2009/01/15/how-to-target-your-online-ad-at-facebook-ads/feed/ 14 http://idaconcpts.com/2008/09/03/installing-google-analytics-at-srbienesrac/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=installing-google-analytics-at-srbienesrac http://idaconcpts.com/2008/09/03/installing-google-analytics-at-srbienesrac/#comments Thu, 04 Sep 2008 02:49:17 +0000 Damian Davila http://idaconcpts.wordpress.com/?p=216 I know, I know, I promised that the next 5 postings would be about the 5 key factors that determine that your website appears on a search engine query, but I really, really, really have to discuss about the implementation of Google Analytics at www.srbienesraices.com.

The main reason is that [...]]]>

I know, I know, I promised that the next 5 postings would be about the 5 key factors that determine that your website appears on a search engine query, but I really, really, really have to discuss about the implementation of Google Analytics at www.srbienesraices.com.

The main reason is that this will serve as guide for real estate brokers to implement their own Google Analytics code in their websites.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMERS:

1. SYLVIA ROJAS BIENES RAÍCES is a 100% Ecuadorean-owned company specialized in the the negotiation of real estate in the provinces of Guayas, Manabí, Los Ríos, El Oro and with representatives in Azuay.  The home page is www.srbienesraices.com and is in Spanish.
2. Since August 2007 I have served as the webmaster of this website.
3. Sylvia Rojas is my mother.
4. Since August 2007 I have not received any form of payment for maintaining this website and I have incurred in all hosting payments.

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