http://marketingsource.com/articles/ Articles at marketingsource.com Articles Library en-us http://marketingsource.com/articles/marketing/marketing-on-line/how-to-fix-your-on-site-money-leak-with-smart-internet-marketing.html http://marketingsource.com/articles/marketing/marketing-on-line/how-to-fix-your-on-site-money-leak-with-smart-internet-marketing.html Tue, 02 Nov 2010 04:51:15 -0500
The bottoms of our webpages are given too little attention when designing the on-site sales path. Why does that happen? It’s like you’re giving your sales pitch to a hot prospect, but then you suddenly stop and go silent. You leave the prospect there, needing their questions answered or just requiring a little more information before they buy. But you’ve left the room and they’re getting ready to leave, too – on their way to your competitor’s site.

By leaving the page bottom incomplete, it’s almost like you have a subconscious wish to lose sales. This is happening on websites all over the Internet – including yours, probably. What should you do? Here are 3 things you can do now to fix that money leak.

3 Keys To Fixing The Holes In Your On-Site Internet Marketing

#1 At the very least, give your visitor a Call To Action.
Tell them what you want them to do so they move from being a Visitor to becoming a Customer. Tell them in plain, clear language what that action is. For many it’s something like ‘Order Now’ or ‘Contact Us’. It’s amazing how many sites don’t even have this minimal Call To Action on their pages. Of if they do, it's done very timidly or practically hidden away when it should stand out boldly.

#2 Give your prospects some links or some way to see more information or related products.
Internet Marketing is just like offline marketing in that you don’t stop selling after the 1st attempt. Most buyers or clients need more to go on than the contents of just one page before they’re ready to take the final step into the conversion column.

You must give them another avenue to find out more or see other, similar products that might get them should the current one not fulfill their needs. Leaving your visitor with no place to go is a great way to lose them permanently.

#3 Give your site visitors a ‘Return to Top’ option.
All that requires is a link that takes them to the top of the page they’re on right now. This will put them back where your main menu and information lies. If your internet marketing is optimized correctly, the top of your webpages will have an easy to understand road map to your most important website areas. Do you have that?

You can’t count on the reader to make the decision to scroll all the way back up once they reach the page bottom, especially on longer pages. Give them the easy way to do it and make sure that option is easy to see.

Remember, your visitor doesn’t know your site like you do. Even a repeat visitor won’t know your layout or navigation very well. Give them the easy-to-understand signposts they need to get on the path to becoming your customer. Internet Marketing isn’t an easy job, but you can make the buying process easier for your visitors.
]]> http://marketingsource.com/articles/search-engine-optimization/the-truth-about-your-bounce-rate-and-how-to-fix-it.html http://marketingsource.com/articles/search-engine-optimization/the-truth-about-your-bounce-rate-and-how-to-fix-it.html Thu, 07 Oct 2010 18:51:27 -0500
A client called me and asked me about the current bounce rate. When I told him what it was, he replied that he was concerned because it should be another number. He was told so by somebody. I had to explain some things quickly to calm him down:

There’s no Right Bounce Rate that fits all industries and types of sites. It’s a fact that customers ‘bounce’ at different percentages in different markets. Now if you have an 80% or above Bounce Rate, you should be worried. But there’s no standard rate.

HOW BOUNCE RATES CAN BE VERY DECEIVING

Bounce Rate should be looked at more according to individual pages, not necessarily across an entire site. For example, the above client’s site had a lot of articles I’d written that ranked very well nationally on his subject.

So, a lot of those visitors who came in through the articles were from all over the country. They stayed to read the articles because they were helpful and informative. However, this client’s office only served a certain geographical area, and most readers weren’t from there and couldn’t use his services. Because of that they didn’t stick around after reading the articles. Thus, the Bounce Rate was inflated by those articles that ranked so well nationally.

THE TRUE MEASURING STICK OF BOUNCE RATE SUCCESS

The real measurement of your success with Bounce Rate is improving it. As we noted above, it's often difficult to say definitively that your rate is a good one or bad one. Unless it is abnormally high, of course. So you need to work on things like these –

- Is your headline strong and to the point?
- Are you giving the visitor real content or do they arrive and find nothing on the page that truly grabs them and their interest?
- Are you giving your visitors a reason to go deeper into the site?
- Are you showing them clearly how to get to the information they want?
- Is your Navigation easy to understand and easy to locate?

These are just a few things to look at critically on those pages that have high bounce rates. Go over them through the eyes of a visitor who has never been to the site before. You might even want to have a friend or family member look over the site to give you their impressions and a critique.

Remember, your point of view is not the one that’s most important here. It’s the POV of your customer, your visitor, the searcher. You have to give them what they want or else you end up with a very lonely site and a very quiet business.
]]> http://marketingsource.com/articles/search-engine-optimization/how-to-use-subdomains-to-rocket-your-pay-per-click-ppc-profits-upward.html http://marketingsource.com/articles/search-engine-optimization/how-to-use-subdomains-to-rocket-your-pay-per-click-ppc-profits-upward.html Thu, 30 Sep 2010 17:34:11 -0500
www.Books.com

The Subdomains could be:

Cook.Books.com
Fiction.Books.com
Used.Books.com

From these examples it’s clear that they’re often used to focus on a subcategory of the primary domain. This application for the purposes of SEO will have to wait for a different article. Right now we want to examine how they can be used to raise your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or Paid Search profits. But you should know the ‘Why’ first.

Why would you use subdomains for your Google AdWords campaigns? There’s a couple of reasons. Number 1, they allow you to get another occurrence of an important keyword into your ad. Let’s say you’re a real estate agent. You want to match your ad copy and content to your most important keywords, and their markets, as closely as possible. Here’s what you'd do.

For your business prospects you’d create a subdomain like this one:

Commercial.RealEstateAgent.com

This insertion of ‘Commercial’ clearly communicates that you serve business real estate clients. The space you have to work with in a Google AdWords ad is very limited. Therefore any extra keyword mention can be very valuable to you. After all, most searchers who are looking for space for their shop or business are going to use that word, ‘Commercial’, when they’re searching in Google. It just makes sense because that’s how most define and label that type of real estate, right? But that subdomain gives you more than just that bump up in searcher’s minds

The AdWords Built-In Advantage

You might have noticed that Google bolds the words in your AdWords ads when they match a search term a searcher has used. So when someone has searched for ‘Commercial real estate agent’, all occurrences of any of those 4 words in your ad will now be in bold type. And that benefit extends to terms in your URL. If you haven’t noticed, Bold Type makes things stand out.

Anything that causes your ad & your message to stand out on that search page is an advantage over your competition. You need to grab any and every edge you can get in business because that can be the difference between success and failure. That’s why this is something you need to think about.

What You Give Your Pay-Per-Click Visitors Matters. A lot.

That’s not the only reason to use a subdomain in your Pay-Per-Click campaigns, though. Subdomains also give you the ability to focus on serving that customer you’ve gained from Google with exactly what they want.

Every day businesses online lose customers and clients because their visitors can’t find what they’re looking for fast enough. How soon do you leave a site if you can’t locate that one thing you want? Pretty quick, I’m sure. You and I both know there’s another person selling the same thing a click or 2 away so it’s no big deal to hit the Back button.

A subdomain that’s concentrated purely on a specific area gives you the opportunity to focus very clearly on a specific need. You can, and should, restrict the content on the subdomain to the subject of that subdomain, like commercial real estate, for example. When you serve your visitors precisely what they want, you increase the chances of a sale. Why wouldn’t you do that?

Now to make all of this work you still need to target your AdWords campaign precisely so that the right customers get the right ad and see the right subdomain. You don’t want Residential real estate clients getting the Commercial real estate ad. Especially since that ad will take them to the Commercial content, which a Residential customer has no interest in.

That means you have to create keyword targeting and focus within your campaign. That’s a subject and a process that’ll have to wait for another article, or series of articles. For now, keep in mind the use and powerful benefits of subdomains in Pay-Per-Click. They could make a huge difference for your business.
]]> http://marketingsource.com/articles/search-engine-optimization/how-your-reciprocal-links-might-be-cheating-your-seo.html http://marketingsource.com/articles/search-engine-optimization/how-your-reciprocal-links-might-be-cheating-your-seo.html Thu, 23 Sep 2010 18:14:35 -0500
The real issue with reciprocal links is the fact that it’s very easy for you to get the short end of the deal. In fact, you could get absolutely nothing out of the trade. There’s a few ways that this can be done without you knowing it. Some examples:

1. The No Follow Link. ‘No Follow’, if you aren’t familiar with the term, is an attribute that can be added to a link that tells Google not to give any SEO credit or benefit to the site being linked to. In other words, all the other guy has to do is add ‘Rel=NoFollow’ to the link to your site and that link is now worthless. You link to them in good faith and, in return, you’re given an empty shell.

2. The Link That Disappears. Other times you’ll actually get a good link in return. For a while. Then, after some time has passed, they take down the link to your site. What’s left? A one-way link from you to them, giving them the full SEO benefits at your expense.

3. The Link On The Page That’s Invisible To Search Engines. One of the tools webmasters use is the Robots.txt file t hat allows them to tell Google which pages to index and which ones not to index. Your reciprocal link partner puts a link to you on a page they’ve told Google not to catalog. Google can’t give you any SEO credit if they can’t actually see and index your link, can they? Now you’re catching on.

What You Can Do To Protect Your SEO Linking

What can you do about this? There is reciprocal link software out there, but they can’t catch every technique used by less honest websites. Still, it can give you the advantage of protecting you from the most common ways. But do you really want to have to monitor these less valuable links constantly?

There’s nothing wrong with exchanging links with sites you truly believe are helpful to your visitors or that have good content. Blogs exchange links often because of the traffic they bring even more than for the SEO benefits. That’s a great reason to exchange links.

However, if you have to keep a constant watch over reciprocal links, it’s probably time to look at other link strategies, especially at acquiring one-way links. Write articles, create solid content, start blogging.

There’s a lot of ways that can get you the SEO advantages you’re seeking than just link trading. And they’ll probably last longer, too. It isn’t necessarily wrong to do reciprocal linking, but your time and energy can probably be better spent on other efforts.
]]> http://marketingsource.com/articles/search-engine-optimization/google-instant-the-future-of-search-and-how-it-affects-you.html http://marketingsource.com/articles/search-engine-optimization/google-instant-the-future-of-search-and-how-it-affects-you.html Mon, 20 Sep 2010 22:11:45 -0500 This development has the search engine world talking and there’s a good reason for that reaction. It’s an especially public change is one searchers will be interacting with directly starting with the search box on the Google homepage. It doesn't get much more public than that. This is one of those Google developments that could have a lot of repercussions for searchers, SEOs and search engine marketers the world over. What is Google Instant?

Basically it’s a quicker, instantaneous response to your search query as you type it. You’ll see that as you begin entering anything in the search box, from the very first character or number, Google will start trying to match what they think you’re after in an expanded box just below the where you’re typing.

The idea is to give you even faster access to whatever it is you want. This is a response to what they believe searchers are looking for – instant gratification, you might say. Does it provide it? Sometimes it’s on the mark, other times not so much. This is early in the implementation, though, so it might see improvements as time goes on.

Another issue is that you just might be slowed down in entering your query because you’re watching, and reacting to, what Google is throwing up. You can’t help but look at the stack of keyphrases that are appearing, which stops you from typing. So it’s not clear that this will speed up getting to your destination quicker every single time.

WILL THE SEARCHERS LIKE GOOGLE INSTANT?

I think some will love this and appreciate the speed advantage it promises, even if it isn’t a huge gain. Google actually only promises 2 to 5 seconds of saved time. Others will find it distracting so they will turn Google Instant off by clicking on the link that’s next to the search box. You can also turn it off by going to your Preferences in Google.

It’s not ‘psychic’, truly anticipating without fail where you’re going, but it is quick to respond as your search query takes shape. There’s something amazing about how it can change direction without slowing one bit.

This will be making waves for some time, though it's not entirely clear how or where that will happen. Even Google doesn’t seem to have a clear idea of what this will ultimately bring into the world of search engines. That will be up to you and the other millions (billions?) of everyday searchers who are the true testing ground and the final judges on these developments.
]]> http://marketingsource.com/articles/search-engine-optimization/why-google-knows-your-page-load-time-and-how-it-could-be-keeping-your-rankings-down.html http://marketingsource.com/articles/search-engine-optimization/why-google-knows-your-page-load-time-and-how-it-could-be-keeping-your-rankings-down.html Mon, 20 Sep 2010 22:09:16 -0500
While it can seem to be bad news, it does have a silver lining. It means that Google is giving you direct control over an important element in moving up in their listings. If your load time is better than your competitors, you’re giving yourself an advantage you didn’t have before. So why wouldn’t you take advantage? It’s as easy as SEO gets. So how do you figure out your page load time?

It’s easy to find out. Google is making it very easy by actually telling you how they view your loading times. All you need to do is go to your Google Webmaster account. There’s a tab in there now that, when clicked on, will show you a page speed report. Now you just have to take that feedback from Google and benefit from it.

While you’re in the page speed report note down what pages Google labels as ‘Slow’. Those are the ones you need to fix. It’s that simple to figure out where the problems are on yours site. The next step in this SEO process is to take action to fix those pages.

How To Lower Your Load Time & Raise Your Google Ranking

Here are a few tips to quickly improve load time on those pages:

Optimize Your Graphics. See if you can reduce their size (in bytes) without sacrificing quality. You might even want to consider making the graphic dimensions smaller if that’s an option. Often photos and other graphic files are the largest parts of a webpage so starting there is only logical.

Cut The Code. Look for redundant code that can be taken out without altering the page’s appearance. Often, especially in template and WYSIWYG site builders produce all kinds of extra coding that serves no purpose at all. You’ll need to know some things about HTML and webpage coding, but it will be worth it if you can get rid of what’s weighing you down here.

Divide Long Pages Into Smaller Ones. If you have to scroll down a lot to see the entire content of a page, it might be a candidate for dividing it into 2 webpages. You’ll have to make a judgement on whether you lose any sales ability by chasing SEO before doing this, though. However, if there’s a logical place to divide or focus on the different points you’re pursuing, that should make this task easier.

Faster load time is something that not only Google will appreciate, but also your visitors. No one likes to wait and wait for a slow page to arrive in the browser. So, in a sense Google might be doing you a favor by getting you to provide a better experience to your visitor. Take them up on it.
]]> http://marketingsource.com/articles/search-engine-optimization/3-things-you-should-do-immediately-if-your-search-engine-rankings-suddenly-drop.html http://marketingsource.com/articles/search-engine-optimization/3-things-you-should-do-immediately-if-your-search-engine-rankings-suddenly-drop.html Mon, 20 Sep 2010 22:04:16 -0500
It’s safe to say that all of us have woken up to see our rankings drop from page 1 to a status that can only be compared to being enrolled in the Federal Witness Relocation Program. You can’t be found. And that’s bad news.

Here’s what you should do when this happens. You may not be able to fix the problem quickly, but you’ll at least be in a much better position to address it and deal with it.

1. DON’T PANIC.

This is very important to remember. Take it seriously, but don’t lose it. There are many reasons why rankings can drop. Sometimes it’s due to one of Google’s famous algorithm shake-ups. This might be a temporary shift that will see your rankings restored in short order. The key here is to avoid the urge to do something that will only hurt your site, its long-term rankings & your business itself.

Many people will jump to work and make large-scale changes in their site. They try to bring it in line with what they think the search engines want now. This can actually hurt their standing in the search engines as they alter the structure and layout of their pages. It confuses the search engine bots and creates an impression of confusion, a lack of cohesion in the site. That’s bad for rankings. So, remember – Don’t Panic. The drop may be temporary. If it isn’t, an impulsive Bulldoze & Rebuild job is not the way out.

2. Think Back: What Have You Changed Recently?

Sometimes your rankings plummet because of something you did. For example, I’ve had rankings drop because I screwed up the code on some redirects I did in my .htaccess file. Did you add some new pages lately? Check that the links in them, and to them, are pointed correctly. If you write the destination URLs wrong you’re feeding the search engines a bunch of 404 Error pages. They don’t like that.

There are many things that could cause the rankings to slip. Keep in mind that you should look at changes you’ve made as long as 2 weeks ago, just to be safe. Search engine bots vary in how often they come by your site, so they may be reacting to an alteration that is old news to you, but new to them.

3. Keep Going

It’s tempting to turn to the dark side of SEO, become a Black Hat when you see your rankings drop. Especially when you see a weak site, or a totally irrelevant one, outrank yours. We’ve all been there.

But you know what the right choice is, even if it’s hard to resist doing a little cloaking. What you must do is continue building a solid site: adding relevant, targeted content, working on your site structure so that all content can be found & indexed by the search engines, working on links to your site. A little boring? Yes, sometimes. But it’s the best choice, especially for those of us looking to be in business for the long-term.

Keep in mind these 3 steps next time you see rankings fall. It’s okay to be frustrated. It’s okay to be confused. It’s even okay to be a little angry. Let it out, constructively, and then get back to work. It’s the surest path.
]]> http://marketingsource.com/articles/search-engine-optimization/how-to-get-your-site-indexed-in-google-and-start-getting-traffic.html http://marketingsource.com/articles/search-engine-optimization/how-to-get-your-site-indexed-in-google-and-start-getting-traffic.html Mon, 20 Sep 2010 22:00:35 -0500
So, how do you get indexed quickly in Google? First of all, I would suggest not submitting your site through Google’s submission page. That would seem the most logical thing to do, but you’re actually slowing things down, believe it or not. Some have reported it taking a week or longer before they start seeing their listing come up. That’s too long. What else shouldn’t you do?

One thing to avoid - Don’t go after indexing if your site is still ‘Under Construction’. Google may still index your site, but you’re spinning the wheel if all you have is one page with a couple sentences, or even less. Especially don’t have the words ‘Under Construction’ on there. That’s a dead giveaway that there’s nothing actually there. Even a search engine bot knows what those 2 words mean.

If your site isn’t ready for prime time, at least put some descriptive text on your 1 page so the bot has something to latch onto there. Give them something to consume and go through that tells what the site will be, even if it isn’t there just yet.

Found By Google Instead of Submitted?

There is a belief in some SEO circles that being ‘found’ by Google bots is better than submitting your site directly. By that I mean allowing their bots to discover the site. The theory is that sites that are found have a small advantage to sites that were submitted, all things being equal. So how do you get found?

It isn't very hard to do. Your best avenue is to be linked to from a blog post. Specifically from a blog that pings Google when a new blog post has been put up. That signals Google to come check it out and can get your site indexed sometimes within 24 hours.

You can also have a friend link to your site from their site, though you want to go with one that is ranked well. Ranking usually comes with a more active visit rate from Google bots. Therefore the chances are better that your link will be followed sooner, rather than later.

Use these tactics to get indexed and you should have no problem getting into Google and the other search engines relatively quickly. Nothing in the search engine world is guaranteed, but following these suggestions should give you a leg up.

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