Linking Q&A

Here is a Q&A session from Search Marketing Expo. A couple of good nuggets here

Linking Q&A

Should you worry about the keywords Meta tag?

Worried about which keywords to put in your Meta tags? Google apparently doesn't pay attention to this tag at all. Read more

Notes From Search Marketing Expo 2008

Below is a link to notes taken from one of the keynote speeches at the Search Marketing Expo 2008 going on right now. There is some interesting stuff about the evolution of search and where it is heading. The part about blended search and personalized search is especially relevant to search marketers. It really is changing the whole ballgame.

Notes from Keynote

A Nice Illustration of How to Best Use Social Media Sites

Does Your Site/Blog Suck? Use StumbleUpon to Test and Find Out

If you haven't heard of StumbleUpon, you should really check it out. Here is a blurb that brifly explains what it is:

StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 4,493,158 other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.

While StumbleUpon is a great supplement to using search engines, the real benefit comes in the ability to cheaply test sites or blogs to see whether or not they are any good. You can drive visitors with specific interests to your site for just $0.05per person. (Check out StumbleAds) When people stumble across your site they have the ability to give the site a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down". Within about a day or so you can look at the percentage of likes to dislikes to get an idea of what people think of your site. This is also a great way to just get some initial traffic to a new site or blog. I have used this method to bolster readership of our corporate blog. It's cheap and it works.

**One caveat is that the content of the blog or site should be useful or educational -- not just a site selling products. I have found that StumbleUpon works best with blogs or free viral content.

Google Users Older, Bigger Spenders Than Yahoo's

Hitwise performed an interesting demographic analysis last week, comparing the breakdown of Google and Yahoo search users. What it found was that Google users skew older than Yahoo search users, bucking some of the conventional wisdom in the market about the relative composition of their audiences. Google users are also more likely to be affluent and have spent more online.

Read the full article: http://searchengineland.com/080218-093339.php

SEO Strategy Tip: Start with SEM (Google Adwords)

Most website owners eventually come to the conclusion that to have any success getting traffic to their site, they need to do one of three things: optimize the pages of their website (SEO), start a pay-per-click campaign (SEM), or do both. In an effort to save money, most people will tell you to go the free route first – that is, work to optimize your website and hope that your pages get indexed high in the search engines. I’m here to tell you a couple of reasons you may want to consider shelling out some money on a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign first.

For those of you with limited budgets, you may be asking yourself – why spend money on a PPC engine like Google Adwords before taking advantage of every possible opportunity to get free listings? My best answer to this question is that doing so will save you weeks or possibly months of frustration. How? When you begin optimizing your website, you have no idea what will drive potential customers to your site, let alone what will prompt them to buy. Sure, you hopefully will do some keyword research ahead of time, but you still won’t know which keywords will ultimately bring you the targeted, motivated traffic you are looking for. Aside from that, you have no idea if Google or other search engines will even list your pages anywhere near the top (check out the chart below to see why being above the fold on page 1 is essential in a competitive b2b environment). In the end you may end up spending a lot of time and effort waiting to gain that first page result only to be disappointed because you show up on page 10. Alternately you may show up on page 1, but end up getting the wrong type of traffic resulting in few or no leads/sales.

Eye tracking study: Areas of the page searchers focus on


Now let’s consider that you do the same keyword research, but set up a Google Adwords account first and wait to optimize your site. With Adwords you can be up and running ads in minutes instead of waiting days or weeks to get indexed by Google in the organic (free) listings. You can also guarantee visibility within the eye tracking sweet spot from the chart above. Now you can begin testing. You can test which keywords are getting the most conversions, which ad copy resonates best with your target market, and which landing page copy convinces people to fill out their information. Once you begin gathering this data, you can begin transitioning the things that work to your website; you can now be confident that your optimization efforts will not be a waste of time. It’s like having the ultimate focus group; people from all over are telling you which keywords they are interested in when looking for products or services you sell. You will now know exactly which web copy to add to your pages to get the most conversions - it is no longer a guessing game. Authors and publishing companies test book titles with Adwords before going to print. Entrepreneurs use adwords to test product ideas before manufacturing the product. Adwords is the ultimate market research tool; if you look at it this way, it is well worth the money spent. Of course this all depends on whether you use Adwords to its full potential and testing capabilities.