As search marketers we’re deluged with daily requests from clients or stakeholders on any number of these areas of focus and more. And it doesn’t stop there…

Red tape, unclear expectations, lack of management support, non-inclusive project management, perceived conflict of interests, and more road-blocks can interfere with many search marketers to the point of utter frustration.

I’m a firm believer that a company’s lack of search exposure and success need not lay at the door of the search marketer.

No  matter how good you are, how innovative, diplomatic, or tenacious you may be, if a company wants to call itself ‘The Blue Widget Company’  when it clearly sells pink widgets, and you are under no circumstances ever to use the word ‘pink’ on the site, you’re going to have to be very inventive. Five thousand, quality, ‘pink-widget’ backlinks – which you’ll have to work darn hard to get considering your company is called ‘Blue Widgets’ – will struggle to help you beat out competitors who call a pink widget a ‘pink widget’ on their site, and who have easy, obvious backlinks of the same anchor text.

So with the pain-points and the rather widespread and grandiose expectations of search marketers these days, what’s a search marketer to do?

Just like everybody else, we need to play the SMART game, starting with an overall strategy –  we start with the goals of search within the organization as a whole, and work down to a project level. Get people educated, informed and finally, excited!

Goals

Determine the goals for the search team/s, for each team’s contribution to the web marketing team, for the web marketing team’s contribution to the business unit… and so forth.

The highest level for which you strategize will depend on the size of your organization and your position within the hierarchy. Regardless of either, all search managers should meet regularly to ensure that their goals are connected, supportive, complementary and can be merged relatively seamlessly in terms of data and learnings to provide overall approach, feedback and results data to the stake and shareholders as part of a larger strategy or as an individual piece of the larger strategy. How?

SMART Search Goals

• Smart – Specific, Significant
• sMart – Measurable, Meaningful
• smArt – Attainable, Agreeable
• smaRt – Relevant, Rewarding
• smarT – Trackable, Timely

1. Specific and Significant Goals

This facet of the goal setting process requires that your search marketing goals be clear, concise and easily understood by the primary stakeholders. The objective being to provide a clear, specific guideline as to what you want to achieve and why citing the significance factor – the use of hypotheses and null-hypotheses can make this process a lot easier.

2. Measurable and Meaningful Goals

The goals must be both measurable and meaningful. By measurable, I mean that your search marketing goals need to have a clear start point whatever it may be;

• Revenue
• Traffic
• Bounce-rates
• Backlinks
• Impact-on-direct
• Increased-traffic-share
• Search-traffic-share-of-whole
• Cross-pollination-impact
• Net-promoter-score-impact
• … this list can get ridiculously long, but the point remains the same.

These goals need to be measurable against subsequent stage-completion points, or an end point. They also need to be meaningful. That’s not as odd as it sounds… the goals need to be ‘meaningful’ in that, regardless of how the strategies assigned to the goal perform, the data will be monitored and presented in such a way as to determine how statistically significant any strategy may have been, or indeed if it was insignificant and merely directional. The objective being to provide measurable goals that are meaningful in terms of the chosen strategy.  

3. Attainable and Agreeable Goals

Attainable goals are exactly that, achievable within your current business framework and taking into consideration resource limitations (people, money, time, hardware, software, space etc).

The term ‘Attainable is sometimes substituted for the term ‘Agreeable’ which I wholeheartedly support. Agreeable or ‘agreed-upon’ goals infer that the stakeholders have all had a say in the formulation of the goal, and that they are in majority agreement as to the veracity of its implementation.

In some companies that can be a headache where search is still considered a ‘new-worrisome-addition’. In time, and with education, the agreement between the stakeholders gives the search marketer far reaching responsibility and support, and consolidates their position as a major leader in the web strategy as a whole. Attainable first, agreeable second if you’re not quite there yet, though clearly while you’re getting there within your teams, being agreeable and diplomatic is vital in the personal use of the word. The objective being to provide attainable goals that are agreeable to the stakeholders.

4. Relevant and Rewarding Goals

I know a lot of people use the word ‘realistic’ here, though I see very little tangible difference between ‘attainable’ and ‘realistic’ unless you want to split hairs. If it’s attainable and achievable, I’m going to use the rational-man mentality and assume that it is therefore also realistic.

That said; the goal needs to be relevant and rewarding. Relevant to the overall objectives of the business, your team and your career in that it is SMART as a whole; Rewarding in the sense that, by hypothesis – and assuming your hypothesis will not be disproved – you are testing goals that are going to be of significant interest to the stakeholders, and which will therefore provide them with rewarding results and information to share and examine. The objective being to provide goals that are both relevant and rewarding to multiple stakeholders.

5. Time-based/Traffic-based and Trackable Goals

Trackable follows from Measurable, and is a somewhat skewed idea for search marketers in that the measurability of our goals depends in great part on the trackability of those goals, requiring web analytics and other secondary search tools. The implementation of effective tracking and analytics is vital to the success of search marketing and to the efficacy and veracity of any search marketing goal or campaign.

The time or time-based/time-sensitive requirement is old-school, and is as important. Deadlines for goal achievement are vital, whether they are based on stage-completion or end point data. The caveat is that you must allow enough time or traffic for the goal data to be verifiable and significant.

There is some dissonance between traffic-based and time-based goal parameters in that (1) too much time can result in the affect of unwanted seasonality or other macro/micro affecting variables; but (2) too little traffic to a page may provide less than directional results.

Finding the happy medium with clear hypotheses is an important part of this element. There is nothing to prevent you from phasing the goal by using traffic, and time, and a combination of the two if needed for low traffic pages, thus enabling the consolidation of the most relevant data for each phase. The objective being to create a goal that ensures time and traffic based trackable goals for review.

I strongly recommend you read Shari Thurow’s thread at Search Engine Land for supportive information and further research if you’re so inclined.

Thanks for reading and come see me at Pubcon Dallas next week! I’m nice… I just look cranky OR… I love my tweeple, so follow me anytime you like on Twitter – I’m on Linkedin too!

.

.

.

[edit... my husband - operations director for a large web company  -  advised me that the differences between 'achievable' and 'realistic' from a personal employee pov, and from a hands-on manager pov is a bit different.]

1. Which Search Terms to Target

This is somewhat subjective & somewhat objective. It really depends on 4 primary interrelated variables:

i.   the level of competition for the phrase

ii.  the relationship between search query language (phrase), search query intent (expectation/anticipated result), and the relevance of the search phrase to your offering (perceived or real match/deviation)

iii. your search marketing objectives

iv. your resources

Example #1. If the query language is very exploratory (generic; e.g. ‘laptop computers’ = 9.1m searches/mo [US]), the competition is relatively high (46m results), and the expectation is more specific (e.g. ‘small dell laptop’ = 2.5K searches/mo [US]) – then you can assume that your primary target audience is not search savvy, and that it’s going to take some work. So you refer back to your other variables:

- Does achieving a good rank for a generic term fit with your objectives?

- Do you have the resources (time, people, money) to commit to targeting this type of phrase set?

Example #2. If your search marketing objective is to generate brand awareness, then targeting more generic, high volume terms makes sense, assuming you have the resources, but; if your search marketing objective is driven by a purely conversion based metric, and you have limited organic pages (by design/default/intent/limitation/whatever), it may make sense to target a more specific set of phrases.

2. Where to Place your Selected Key-Phrases

Most old-hats will know these points, but to continue with the high-level overview, the first thing you need to do is audit your existing URL structure once you have completed the keyword research:

• Get rid of unnecessary folders e.g.:

- yoursite.com/product1group/product1a/overview/product.htm

• Create meaningful keyword rich folders e.g.:

- yoursite.com/dell-laptop-computers/product.htm

- yoursite.com/hp-laptop-computers/product.htm

• Create meaningful keyword rich files e.g.:

- yoursite.com/dell-laptop-computers/small-dell-laptop.htm

- yoursite.com/hp-laptop-computers/hp-business-laptop.htm

• 301 redirect all old files to the most relevant new file. Depending on objectives this could be to the new file for which you anticipate the highest volume of traffic, or for which you anticipate the highest number of conversions (e.g., based on web analytics of the existing site)

Then place the selected keyphrase per page:

• in the title tag (sticking to 70 characters with spaces) – for SEO. Make the title short and match the anticipated search query language & intent as closely as possible e.g.:
  • HP Business Laptop | HP Laptop Computers 
  • Unless you are a very well known brand name, with a high Net Promoter score, don’t include your brand name unless you really have to.
• in the META description (sticking to 155 characters + spaces) – for usability, click-through and some SEO effect e.g.:
  • Easily compare HP business laptops. 1 year factory warranty + 18 months from yoursite.com. Easy payment terms. We get you started – Fast! Find out more…

• in the <h> tags; use the specific term in the <h1> and the more generic term in an <h2> where possible – for SEO and usability e.g.:
  • <h1> Looking for Your Next HP Business Laptop?</h1>
  • <h2> Easily Compare & Choose from our Comprehensive Selection of HP Laptop Computers</h2>
• in the ALT attributes and image names; keep your image naming protocol clean, and remember to title your images as well (see ‘Accessibility and ARIA’) – for SEO and usability
• in the content. Many SEO’s say that keyword density is not important. I disagree – with a caveat; keyword density is vitally important – within reason… If the target keyphrase does not appear in the copy more than a few times in relevant areas, then the page may not actually be relevant to the term regardless of being placed in other key areas. I’m not saying there is a keyword density limit – max or min. What I am saying is:
  • write your content thoughtfully bearing in mind your <h> tags and your actual intent, assuming your intent is to arm people with more information around your core targeted phrases
  • never go back and insert keyphrases into copy once it is written
  • never write copy simply to target keyphrases
  • keep it natural, readable, usable and relevant.
  • it’s simple, yet it’s not. Experienced web copy-writers are worth their weight in gold.
• in the navigation and in your internal linking practice. This may cause some ructions with legal/branding/usability, and if you want to find out how you might get around these challenges, come to my session at Pubcon !

3. Optimized Use of Your Keyphrases

I’ll mention Pubcon again, but in the interim… make sure:

• you know what tag-lines are being used by offline marketing, and create pages
• you connect with PR (press release, not page rank – y’sll have a one track mind)
• you connect with social and help with blog posts, asks and answers and with creating pages around key positives or negatives regarding your offering to speak to detractors and support evangelists. More than 20% of search results are now UGC based. Don’t miss out by ignoring commentary, forums and the social space (a topic I have exhausted in previous posts and nearly bored my lovely readers to death – check them out if you missed them)

Come follow me on Twitter! And please come back soon…

~ Laura

FIRST, I’ll pull from Google Webmaster guidelines – I’m not considering ‘sneaky JavaScript’ or ‘Doorway Pages’ here, just plain old cloaking.

• ‘Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.’

Now, to go a little further; Google on Google Website Optimizer and cloaking says this:

• ‘…Google doesn’t view the ethical use of multi-variate testing tools such as Website Optimizer as cloaking…We encourage constructive testing — optimizing your web pages benefits advertisers as well as users, by increasing conversions and by presenting the most desired information more efficiently.’

So far no problems… I’ll let you in on a secret – LOTS of folks do multivariate testing. Not all of them use Google Website Optmizer.

so…..So far we’ve had no problems with caching & crawling because we try really hard to stick to the guidelines provided by Google for multivariate testing, but one of the guidelines does make ones eyebrow’s scootch up a bit – I’m not saying any of the below examples pertain to anything I’ve ever worked on, I am saying it’s something I’ve thought about in a personal capacity (most SEO folks have one or a few sites they manage out of hours if they have a job, I’m not saying I’m one), and it’s something I’ve pondered on, especially regarding brands who might find themselves in a brand/business changing position.

I’m not talking about this one as far as raised eyebrows goes – it’s a no-brainer if you’re maintaining whitehat techniques::

• ‘…if we find a site running a single non-original combination at 100% for a number of months, or if a site’s original page is loaded with keywords that don’t relate to the combinations being shown to visitors, we may remove that site from our index.’

I am talking about this one:

• ‘Your variations should uphold the ’spirit’ of your original page’s content — they shouldn’t change its meaning or people’s general perception of it.

Okey dokey then. So let’s go with an example here:
Assume I have a 5 year old home page. I’m doing a redesign based on a usability study and other feedback, and I now have 2 completely different home page designs, with entirely different messaging; one isn’t even brand based.

1. The intent is to ensure that there is a difference in perception of all variables due to the desire to test 2 radically different designs. By definition, the ‘spirit’ part of the requirement just died a horrible death.

2. As to the ‘meaning’ of the page – define meaning please…?

a. Online marketing objective (meaning)
b. Subject content and relevance (meaning)
c. Connotative association and relevance (meaning)
d. Etc

3. Now onto a consideration of people’s ‘perceptions’ of my old page & my new test pages. Is a perception based on:

a. Content
b. Brand
c. Usability
d. Aesthetics
e. Etc

Please explain how a spider (an algorithm; a software program) can determine the perceptions of my very human users. I wonder if this is more a case of (like déjà vu isn’t it?) … Is the perception based on:
a. Coding
b. Compliance
c. Perceived similarity (in terms of content, brand etc)
d. Etc…?

Assumption For the Case of Assumption:

Let’s assume the multivariate testing is comparing entirely new ideas, even brand differences in design and naming – ‘Pizza Hut’ to ‘The Hut’ – for example (that’s real), and lets’ take it further and say the ‘new’ ‘The Hut’ was moving more into schwarma territory while retaining a minor focus on pizza (that’s not real, I needed an example and that worked for this illustration).

So, are we cool? Even if we test the original (for the heck of it) against one completely different version for a full 4-5 months? Tradition holds that 8-12 weeks are enough, but if you’re changing your business model and you are in Alaska (or most parts of Canada  ) you may want to see the reactions of folks in both the hot months and the below zero months which means a longer test.

The Apparent Point
Be careful of being too strict with the rules, be careful of not following the rules, be careful of not changing what you need when you need it, and be careful of which test program you use. Don’t piss of Google et al.

The Reality
Multivariate testing is a bit of blind sport and spot for the engines when it comes to cloaking. Do it if it’s in your remit. It’s worth it. Read the guidelines with a pinch of salt, be careful, but be bold. The learnings you’ll get with a well conceived test plan will probably outweigh any potential penalties you may incur… and I stress MAY. I can tell you that so far I have never had a site banned for MV testing, and I don’t use Google Site Optimizer.

I can also say that I play by the rules, always. Yeah, laugh you black hat millionaires, I’m not as gutsy as you, and I’m also a dedicated rule follower, notoriously honest and I stand by my word. Not that you don’t.  I wish you well

.

.

Disclaimer: nothing I say here may or should be attached to any employer, current or previous. This is my personal blog. The views expressed on this page are mine alone and not those of my employer. But still, follow me on Twitter!

It wasn’t a documentary by any manner of means, it was a light-hearted comedy called ‘Confessions of a Shop-a-holic’, and I actually learned something. No, not about my shoe shopping … urm… never mind, about how it can work if you appeal to different every-day people on a very every-day level.

I reckon I’m an every-day person (with a mild shoe, bag and hat thingey going on…), so I wanted to give it a try with a brief touch on accountants, lawyers, PR folks, customers and shareholders. Let me know how you think I did…

Accountants – who want to make a profit online

‘Something for Every-one’ means great web profits, which means a great income statement and a good-looking balance sheet.

… – who want to make a loss online

Objective: to mess with Something-for-everyone

Hire a poor search optimizer and watch your web income fall. Follow up with a really inept sponsored search person and make a bigger loss pretty damn fast. In fact the more money you give them, the more they’ll lose. Tidy it up and it’s a great way to lose money ‘legitimately’ but you still need to show some kind of business case – though that’s not your fault, the VPF should have that nicely in-hand, and he in-turn can blame the COO and CEO and the Prez – and so on… You’ll likely miss a jail term – maybe.

Lawyers

‘Something for Every-One’ means you can ensure you get your legal speak in the right place, and where people can find your terms and conditions, privacy policies and more on the web.

You even get a step up because if you work with the ‘real SEO’ team and the web devs, you can make sure the bits you don’t want the public to see are still there for the right people, but not for the general public. An intranet is best of course, but there is always more. (I did a measly three years of undergrad law, and those three years left me knowing that from a legal stand point, there is ALWAYS more – it’s pretty much 100% guaranteed.)

General Admin

This is a pearl in obeisance to the ocean of general admin ‘stuff’ that makes up the day of the people who actually make the economy run (hat-tip).

SEOs (the ‘something for everyone’ folks) give you a new, different type of person to hire, a new type of training to employ, a different salary range to decipher and apply, and a different personality in entirety to deal with from an HR perspective and a general admin perspective. Define what you need (not what you want) well ahead of time because I have yet (after some years) to find any SEO that fits any stereotype, pigeonhole or preconceived idea of what an SEO should be, do and become.

Public Relations – Interested in positive PR

Utilize the SEOs (the actual search optimizers and something for everyone folks) for the benefit of your online press releases, include them in your PR drive to enable their creation of new pages around new taglines. Even better, assist them in their drive to write what they fondly call ‘link-bait’, and work with them in the social networks to create a PR/SEO optimized (not redundant, and yet somewhat) approach to dealing with detractors and supporting evangelists in real time.

… – Interested in negative PR

Go head-to-head against everything mentioned above. It will work. Even better, strive to pee-off the social networks as fast as you can. Again, 100% Guaranteed.

Customers

SEO (something for everyone) means they can find what they need when they’re already pre-qualified in terms of intent. The level of intent may vary, but that’s where really good SEOs (the optimizing type) have worked with design and dev to ensure a quick, effective targeted conversion funnel.

Customers find what they want and need, and get to buy it online in a usable, friendly, approachable, non-threatening, secure manner. Something for everyone hits the masses right there!

Shareholders

These guys are sometimes likened to the accountants who ‘don’t want a profit’ – but rarely. Most investors are short term, want a fast profit, don’t want undue risk, and have less than a million dollars.

Question:

How can we make their shareholding work for them short-term to encourage them to stay for a longer term?

Answer:

Where possible, offer them a track record of growth, something tangible apart from FS (Financial Statements), invite their feedback on the web-tangible to engage them (unlikely to have any feedback but the perception of involvement is created), show them proof of online sales performance and improvement (hello SEOptimizers* and other online marketing folks) via summary analytics data, and show them the potential for growth in the online arena via research. It’s there, even in these down times. It has a track record of outperforming traditional methods in terms of ROA.

The asterisk (*) above is to testify to the fact that for most well defined and optimized online businesses or web sites, the organic traffic nearly always outperforms any other form of online advertising, including PPC in terms of both pure traffic and conversions, naturally resulting in the lowest cost per conversion apart from email, which is generally far more targeted, and limited in scope…

 ‘Something for EveryOne’ – It’s SEO, it works, it’s undeniable, it’s cheaper than almost any other form of online exposure, and it can be tailored to support every on and offline marketing initiative.

…

Something for EveryOne? …. It’s SEO…

Twitter

SEO is Misunderstood

Background

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a term that was coined in July 1997, where it was used publicly in what was perceived to be a spam message, hardly an auspicious beginning. Over the years, the term ‘search engine optimization’ has become synonymous in the eyes of the general public with spamming techniques, and with the deliberate manipulation of the SERPs (search engine results pages) to reflect less than optimal results via ‘black-hat’  or spamdexing techniques.

Regardless, the SEO industry has grown and continues to grow as many marketers, web developers and planners have realized that SEO can legitimately - effectively and efficiently - assist their online brand exposure, sales and other marketing objectives.

So What is SEO?

It’s a multifaceted discipline and is the practice of the following 4 summary points, and more:

·         Understanding a website’s primary online objective and how that fits in with the businesses overarching marketing objective, which in turn should be supportive of the business model and corporate strategy. How? By understanding the client, and the economic and industry landscape at a bare minimum.

·         Conducting online competitive and market research on behalf of the client. This is not simply limited to keyword research; this is about understanding the search query language and intent of the online target market, their search patterns and behaviors, their demographics and personality types (grouped averages), how they interact with the web, where their sticky and stumbling points are (what your users like, and what they will leave) and much more.

·         Analyzing the client web site’s onpage elements in terms of the research findings and best practice SEO. The objective being to assess how usable and navigable the site is to human uses and spiders, as well as how well the site answers the interest and likely search behavior intent of the client’s target market.

This is analyzed in terms of onpage content relevance and includes a remit of other variables that require some nifty foot-work; there are usually some brand or legal requirements, some usability issues to contend with, friction with creatives and marketing, difficulties with CMS or other backend database limitations, unclear expectations, unreasonable goals, and on-and-on so the wheel turns.

·         Understanding the importance of effective backlinking strategy, integrated social media strategy and the ability to work effectively with public relations and social via innovative and best practice strategy to boost buzz in the blogosphere via the social networks. This in turn is all about creating or enhancing the Trust and PageRank of a site via efficient backlinking from trusted, related, authority resources.

The Challenge?

Personally, I’m really, really tired of the uninformed or the simply ignorantly arrogant stating with utter conviction that SEO is a ‘waste of time’ and that it is conducted only by ‘snake-oil salesmen’.

Actually, effective SEO is pretty hard work, it’s not that easy, and it is a big deal. In my books, SEO remains misunderstood by the masses and I’m fast turning into Ms. Cranky-Pants when it comes to answering these detractors.

SEO is Under-utilized

Background

Search engine optimization has never really had a home. SEOs float between being considered web developers, content writers and online marketers; a jack-of all trades but master-of-none apart from the mystical ability to ‘work’ the search engines.

So Where Should SEO be Aligned?

To be honest, it depends entirely on the seniority of the position and the requirements of the role – much as with most other jobs. But my summary take will consider an SEO lead/management position, and it is this; an SEO lead should be able to:

·         effectively project manage a team of SEM folks (both organics and PPC)

·         work hand in glove with IA, design, copy/content writers and development

·         understand as much as we know we can about search engine optimization without hands-on the actual algorithms themselves

·         have a good understanding of client/in-house brand integrity, design philosophy, content methodology and legal requirements

·         be able to hand code html and have a sound understanding of most web development techniques, and popular CMS and analytics programs

·         train best practice SEO based on discipline functions from a very high level down (that’s not as easy as it sounds)

·         work with other online and offline marketing leads to ensure that SEO is aware of – and if necessary included in –  all marketing initiatives to ensure that there are targeted pages created for tag-lines used in billboards or TV ads (e.g.)

·         ensure full integration with public relations to contribute to all online press releases as well as to have a heads-up on all offline releases to facilitate on-site answer and speak to targeted search query follow up

·         work with social, R&D and XD (experience design) when social and keyword research provides insights to new opportunities or threats, or identifies competitive strengths or weaknesses.

The Challenge?

Being an effective SEO manager or lead requires patience, dedication, tenacity, humility, credibility, diplomacy and so much more that that topic alone deserves a post of its own.

Hopefully I’ve covered some points worthy of highlighting here, but I’d love to hear what you have to say!

Follow me on Twitter!

Some tools have changed, and some are newer than my SEO age (mum’s the word) but as the landscape has changed, I will include them anyway if they are relevant for new entrants to the wonderful world of SEO!

That’s what this post is about. Please add your favourites in the comments!

1. Simulated Crawl

GSiteCrawler gives you full URL list, aborted URL list, some duplicate content, page sizes, page-by-page data, additional external 1-click tools and more.

2. Server Header Check

This tool has helped me figure out quite a few mysteries regarding “WTH happened to my rankings” and other everyday stressies when URLs have been fiddled with. These guys have a host of other tools – well worth checking out.

3. SE Advanced Operators

There are lots of these around, but this is a firm favourite. Maybe not so pretty, but pretty comprehensive is better than aesthetically pleasing in some cases…

4. SEO Gap Analysis

While not fully comprehensive and a bit out of date (and no, I don’t agree with everything here), this is – regardless – a pretty good guide should you be asked to conduct an SEO gap analysis, and not know where to start.

5. Web Page Speed Report

When you’re just starting out, this can be of help to identify what’s up with a client’s pages without trawling through reams of crappy code.

6. URL Strength

Trifecta is a free SEOmoz tool (it replaced the Page Strength Tool). You have to register/log-in to use it, but it is free. I admit that if SEOmoz is at 38% there’s not a ‘huge whole hell of a lot of hope’ for us small SEO bloggers, but the instant backlink and brand check is quite nice to have in one tool, and it’s nice to give to clients as a benchmark.

7. Competitor Discovery & investigation

SEODigger is now SEMRush, and the things you can do for free include:

• Discover competitors’ sites with common Google keywords
• Get list of Google keywords for any site
• Get list of AdWords keywords for any site
• Check your competitors landing-pages for SE and AdWords traffic
• Investigate long-tail keywords for any domain
• …and more

Yes there are lots of other tools paid and free, some general (Google Trends etc), and some more specific (AdGooroo, MarketLeap etc).

8. Code to Text ratio

Yes, for a while I got quagmired in this tool – so for those of you who do, here, I’ll make it easy for you. Yes the ratio is important, but seriously, don’t beat yourself up about it unless it’s really, really dire – which in most cases it’s just not. This site, again, has ample other free tools – enjoy!

9. BackLink anchor text

I’m sure there are more, better tools somewhere, but this has always worked for me, and as I simply copy and paste into excel for data sorting it works. It’s never entirely accurate, but its free and it’s a good sample in most cases.

10. FireFox

Ok, so the FF plugins are fantastic, and there are many more. My favourites are SearchStatus, SEOpen and RoboForm, though there are lots and lots and lots of other awesome plugins available. My recommendation – make that this months task!

11. Twitter

Yeah, there are LOADS of Twitter tools, and assuming you don’t have a paid for RM/SMM tool or the time to use every tool, then my two absolute favourites are Twitter Search and BackTweets. It depends on what you want really.

12. Reputation Management

Google Alerts is still free. Not always complimentary, but free, so it evens out.

.

.

.

MORE—- A small sample of other great free tools site for SMM and RM

- -SEM

WebSiteTips

- -PPC

ClosedLoopMarketing

- -SEO

Google Webmaster Tools

Top 15 by SocialSEO

136 Tools by SEOCompany

- -RM

16 Tools from SitePoint

10 brand monitoring tools from Mashable

- -General Fun Tool test Kit

MSN adCenter Labs

OK, so I hope this has given you a head-start on the game if you’re new. It’s by no means fully comprehensive. It’s also excluding numerous fantastic paid for tools, many of which I now use thanks to bigger budget and the fact that I’m inhouse, but this is, in a nut-shell post, some tools I used when starting out.

- Blogs/Forums/Tutorial Sites

No matter how many free or paid tools you use, if you don’t have a guideline of what is important or when to use what, you may get overwhelmed, so my advice is to use these 7 resources at the very least when you get going:

- Pandia

- WebMasterWorld

- SEOChat

- SEORoundTable

- SearchEngineLand

- SearchEnginePeople

- SearchEngineWatch

- Official Blogs

- Google

- Yahoo!

- Live/MSN

And even though there are many others that are better, I got my start with this little forum a long, long time ago.

CONCLUSION!

There are innumerable fantastic, quality personal blogs about SEO, PPC and RM that can help. Keep looking until you find the one that works best for you and gives you what you need. Word to the wise – don’t overload your RSS feed; you’ll feel overwhelmed and you’ll feel inadequate. This industry moves fast. Stick with some of the blogs above to start as you find your feet with your preferred writers, and follow twitter experts picking and choosing your reads.

Best of luck, and remember this industry is about helping you help yourself and your clients, and waiting for you to get to the point where you can contribute back. We have a bad rep – no longer deserved, and never to the extent it has been sensationalized. Learn. Discover. Explore. Experience. Test. Refine…and continue.

Your learning’s in the end will help the industry as a whole. And one-day, please share your preferred tool set with the rest of us!

Follow Laura on Twitter

Which forms of UGC to leverage, why, where and how can be a challenge to even the most professional marketing team.  Please read more about UGC and SEO here.

VOC (voice of customer) is another part of the same puzzle. Traditionally:

• “…[VOC] is a market research technique that produces a detailed set of customer wants and needs, organized into a hierarchical structure, and then prioritized in terms of relative importance and satisfaction with current alternatives.” Wikipedia

Usability Study

I was recently provided detailed information as part of a team knowledge sharing initiative on a usability study that one of my colleagues spear-headed across Canada and the UK.

It’s interesting that no matter how objective you try to be, once you have been working on a specific account for any period of time, you will be myopic on certain points, complacent on others and oblivious of yet more.

Some feedback from these studies that I can freely share include the following three general points:

1. Don’t ever assume that your online market is nearly as tech savvy or internet experienced as you or your team are. Issues with misunderstood navigation, unseen buttons, confusion on how to even begin to find the site from the engines were not uncommon, even though most issues identified seemed like total no-brainers to the more internet experienced internal team – even those not on the accounts in question – we’re not (in most cases) selling to our technical/internet peers. I’m not saying that our target markets are less intelligent, I’m saying that they don’t spend all day working in html, refining Google advanced searches, using Google and Yahoo operators, visiting numerous completely diverse sites for research, competitive intelligence or pure interest reasons.
2. Don’t assume that features and functionalities you think will be of great interest and benefit to the customer, actually are. Mistrust, uncertainty and the pure search and swap instinct is very prevalent. If you are offering something fancy or informative, make sure you provide them with full information on what they are getting, whether it be in the form of information during a download, or an explanation to the effect that the retailer testimonials they are seeing are not purely self-promotion (link to the original – that simple, but so often overlooked – heck, we know it’s real… right?).
3. Many usability victims… err, test subjects actually think that they are only expected to provide negative feedback. Make sure you ask them to tell you what’s positive. In some cases, it might be the opposite (less common) so ensure that you tell them you want feedback on both their positive and negative experiences and feelings. Try to get them to quantify all feedback via a simple scoring system including positive and negative scoring throughout to keep that top of mind.

What about UGC?

Well, let’s backtrack a little. This usability study was regarding test subjects’ experiences with the web site itself. Admittedly unless a site is particularly awful or particularly blindingly awesome, not too many people comment on the actual site usability of their own free will, and usability is pretty darn important if you’re involved in ecommerce.

BUT… what about conducting a usability test for an online application. I guarantee some of the feedback would be ‘great, fast and easy’ as well as ‘so slow’. Well sometimes, UGC is as effective if not MORE so than usability studies for gaining real time interaction and feedback from real customers as they are using your app/product/service. So what can you do?

1. track the social networks (Google alerts; Radian6; Twitter Search and more)
2. aggregate the feedback and see which comments on which features are the most prevalent (more ‘this is slow’ or more ‘this rocks with speed’)
3. respond to every positive and negative comment and follow up with PR and feedback where possible/required and take it offline if it gets too long, or too confusing – you have other followers
4. feed learnings back to product development and marketing on a regularly scheduled basis (don’t ping them with every tweet, post or comment; they’ll hunt you down and disconnect you)
5. blog about interactions with the socnet including after-the-fact product/app/service fixes based on feedback with a big thank you to all followers/commenter’s etc
6. link out of comments and twitter posts where possible and relevant to followers/readers to specific pages within your site encouraging readers to go to the site with a snippet of highly relevant info followed by an ellipsis ‘…’.
7. Never comment or tweet/forum etc spam. Just don’t do it.
8. get back to initial pure voluntary commentators/tweet peeps when you have a usability study or other research factor on a feature or function as a potential add to your test target market – it’s predefined and you already have an in… awesome J

Why bother with UGC when we have VOC?

• It is likely that when you really impress someone on the socnets (social networks) with customer service, you may well turn them into a fan as opposed to a neutral or a potential/real detractor.
• It is possible that you will generate a ready made contributor base for future usability studies
• It is possible that your socnet folks are UGC addicts themselves with their own blogs, and if you engage them effectively, they may very well blog about your product, your site, or your twitter account/blog/forum etc. All exposure in the socnets that is positive is a good thing, weither indirectly or directly for SEO – both in terms of pure backlinks, but also in terms of SERP real estate and exposure… this is the minefield of the longtail, if you can harness it effectively. Referral traffic is very likely to spike if you make this work, so don’t keep your SEO analytics figures (if you use GA for example) limited to actual organic/non-paid traffic; after a socnet initiative go in and measure before and after referral traffic along with the long tail of referral sites… you may be very pleasantly surprised. I did that today for an SEO post mortem one of our sites – over a 200% increase in referral traffic over a specified period of time. (You can monitor Twitter backlinks currently with BackTweets – one of my faves).
• MOST importantly, if you have free VOC in the socnets, track it, harness it and use it as real time, real people studies of how your real customers feel about your offering (product/service/app etc) in real time. It’s the best kind of VOC out there from a purely qualitative point of view if you record and feed it back accurately and appropriately. It may not be quantitative, but you can assign values to comments (positive and negative) and thus determine a mean value as well as outliers and other statistically significant data to provide some form of non-qualitative data to your stakeholders. Make sure you explain your methodology, but don’t blind them with your process.

Conclusion

UGC and VOC are part of the same puzzle – they’re just on different sides of the board. Don’t lose one, or you may scupper the other.

Follow Laura on Twitter

Speaking Across Disciplines – Get their FULL attention, and their MAXIMUM contribution

Many people involved in IT are first born children or only kids. If you are a third child of 5, but are the first born son or daughter, then you are also likely to have traditional first-born traits (fascinating long-term study by Dr. Kevin Leman). I’ll include a list of some identified common traits just below.

Apparently, people who make the best account managers (sales folks of all levels) are last born children. There are again exceptions – if your parents had 3 children (within 8 to 10 years) and you were the youngest, and then they had another child (or children) 5 or more years later, you would also exhibit youngest child traits – assuming you fit the generalized model, which is amazingly accurate in most cases.

Middle children (second born sons, daughters – all with exceptions, provided preceding and following sibling came along within a maximum of 3-4 years either side) are the hardest to pin-point, but are creative, easy-going folks – again in general.

Some common traits of first borns according to Dr Leman

·  Perfectionist and organized

·  Reliable & conscientious

·  Hard-driving natural leader

·  Critical and mostly serious

·  Reader

·  Logical

·  Does not like suspense or surprises

Some common traits of middle-children

·  Mediator

·  Compromising and loyal

·  Diplomatic

·  Hates conflict

·  Very sociable (real life)

·  Maverick but secretive

·  Unspoiled

Some common traits of last kids

·  Charming

·  Loves attention

·  Tenacious

·  Manipulative and shirks blame

·  People person

·  Engaging & affectionate

·  Loves surprises

And for the Onlies

·  Little adult by age 7

·  Very thorough

·  Cautious

·  Voracious reader

·  Can’t stand to fail with very high expectations of self

·  Low high tolerance for others

·  More comfortable with older or younger people

·  Uses ‘very’, ‘absolutely’, ‘exactly’, ‘totally’, ‘extremely’ a lot in conversation

(if any of this strikes a chord, I really recommend you get his book.)

What on earth does this have to do with SEO?

SEO’s need to make things happen. They need to:

·  Sell their offering

·  Convince stake and shareholder (inhouse)

·  Engage and manage clients and stakeholders

·  Engage and manage a team

·  Co-ordinate, delegate, coerce, wangle and be devoted to the team

·  Do the work on time and to budget

·  Check everything

·  Research and share

·  Encourage and facilitate

·  Strategize and organize

·  Be creative, critical and logical

… and more

Obviously, any one person cannot possibly fulfill each of these tasks as effectively as a small team might. This post is therefore more concerned with big in-house SEO resourcing than small, but the insights can be applied across the board.

Also, this is not a book J and therefore it needs to be short. I could have fun with this, but the ideas are not my own; application to our industry may be a first, but Dr Leman deserves full credit either way.

I am not saying only hire people for open recs according to their birth-order. What I am saying that perhaps hiring a dynamic Lead SEO Account Manager whose responsibility it is to be client facing, diplomatic and prepared to take clients at face value without judgement might not best fit a first born or only child.

A first born or only qualified SEO with experience may, however, be your perfect match to a more driven, pressurized, bottom-line dedicated, highly organized logical position requiring tactics and refined managerial skill.

Let’s see how all this might work to give you the in-house SEO dream team you want that not only sells your SEO initiatives to in-house peeps and stakeholders, gets it organized, and is on the cusp of what’s happening, but gets it done on time and under budget!

A. Oversight team manager who does the charts, deals with the money factor and the reporting,organizing and overall management

- First born or Only (bearing in mind exceptions due to time lapse in birth order and gender).

B. Team manager who deals with cross-disciplines, and handles the social media aspect

- Middle children (again considering exceptions to the rule)

C. Client facing or stakeholder-facing manager and facilitator to sell, get approval and pursue set monetary objectives tenaciously to ensure team gets the best deal they can, while getting the majority of praise themselves

- Last borns (also considering exceptions)

So the next question begs…

HOW TO COMMUNICATE WITH EACH PERSONALITY TO ENGAGE THEM MOST EFFECTIVELY

A. Give your first born managers

Data, facts, figures, expectations, clear real and desired goals, autonomy to proceed without extensive oversight and red-tape, minimize time-tracking requirements with over-arching categories, trust them to deliver the best they can. Give them performance based bonuses. Encouragement will be taken more seriously than less tangible ‘praise’. E.g:

‘You’re wonderful! I love that you headed this!’ (praise)

v.s.

‘I really like how you put this together, the program is performing well due to your leadership. Keep it going!’ (encouragement)

Back this with the performance based bonuses on a quarterly basis, and you have an employee for life. Watch they don’t burn themselves out, so make sure the maximum bonus is both realistic and achievable, and that you let them know weekly how they are performing in relation to achieving it with clear guidelines on where they need to brush-up. And give them a break. These guys will burn their bottoms for you if you treat them right. Lose them, and you have to start again. It’s not easy to get these guys, and bear in mind they are more likely to get head-hunted than most for in-house delivery… Not sales. Try to get them to sell and see them leave within 3 months.

B. Give your second born managers

Clear requirements. Ensure that they have full support of the first born managers to enable them to escalate issues without fear of conflict with team members below or above.  Request regular (weekly) debriefing on work done, their expectations and their understanding of what they have achieved. Give them the ability to lead and run social media campaigns once they have worked out their clear reporting and objectives for that campaign (in conjunction with reporting manager – 1st born or only).

Let them message informally on twitter, facebook etc (or manage a team that does) once you have set a limited number of specific guidelines (e.g. never comment on competitors, don’t get too ‘friendly’ but be approachable for the brand etc) Encouragement is better than praise, but praise is good for these guys. Better in some cases than encouragement – read on….

C. Give your third born managers

Clear requirements on client objectives, business objectives, and what you want to achieve via SEO – or SEM (more holistically). Then let them run. Don’t expect emails and reporting from them, so make sure they have a personal assistant to do their paper work, or you might not get it, and if you do it may be unclear and a bit of a mess. Ensure they know that their PA is not accountable for what they provide, they will be accountable. Remove the ability to shift blame – which last borns can do with exceptional alacrity, goodwill and innocence. They must read and sign everything, with the clear understanding that while they don’t do the paperwork, they must read it before they sign it as their signature ‘makes it so’. Frequent phone or face-to-face meeting (preferably) are required to ingrain protocols and bottom-line expectations, but need to be brief and targeted at humour and appreciation for what has been achieved versus what you want to achieve. Make them realize that you won’t let them off the hook, but you will let them play.

Again, I strongly recommend Dr Leman’s books about birth order, stress management, child management and more. I don’t agree with everything he has to say, but what he does say makes sense to me, and has – in a personal vein – made an enormous difference in my life. This post is based on the reading I have done to date (fascinating books), and I wanted to share what I had learned that might make a difference NOW to SEOs everywhere, and managers everywhere.

Chances are you’re already in the right place, but if you aren’t, and if you’re unhappy, overstressed, under utilized or under appreciated, this might speak to you. Again, these are generalizations, and the economy is tough right now. Regardless, I hope this was of interest.

Happy SEO-ing, and come see me at SMX next week!

1. First, conduct extensive keyword research. From your potential keyword universe, you filter your preferred sample of primary (and some longer tail) phrases for onpage SEO. The full universe of keywords is applied to PPC.

2. If you are unsure of which phrases to target from an SEO perspective, then complete your PPC campaign and make it live. Careful review and analysis of your top performing PPC keyphrases (based on your predetermined KPIs) will give you a great indication of which terms to target from an SEO perspective. Bear in mind, for many major or well known brands, the brand and product names usually account for more than 90% of all traffic. Adding the primary non-brand keyphrases to the mix in the primary on-page SEO elements will not detract from the strength of the brand exposure, but will likely improve your appearance in the SERPs for related non-brand searches. Ensuring that these non-brand keyphrases form part of the anchor text in a backlink strategy is a great strategy.

3. When conducting your keyword research, pay close attention to potential negative keywords for application to the PPC campaign;

3.i. In practice: If you are performing keyword research for a prostate cancer clinic, words you want to include to add your running negative keyword list will include words that crop up in the research on the primary research phrase ‘cancer’, and will probably include:

• sign (people with cancer tend to search for cancer ‘signs’ plural while people interested in the astrological cancer ‘sign’ need to be filtered out)
• tropic
• horoscope
• astrologic (anything to do with ‘astro’ really)
• every other body part (you’re targeting prostate cancer, so you are not interested in ‘brain’ cancer, ‘breast’ cancer, ‘colon’ cancer, ‘kidney’ cancer etc)

3.ii. On a slightly different (and happier) note; if you are a winter vacation resort, and you don’t offer an outdoor hotpool, hot tub, warm spring, steam bath, jacuzzi (and all other combinations) make sure you are not ‘broad’ phrase advertising on the term ‘winter vacation resort’. Run that logic throughout your campaign creation, specifically ensuring you refine your exposure to terms you actually can service, and for which there are dedicated pages on your site.

4. Effective PPC campaign conception, creation and management is not the remit of this post, but in summary, make your campaigns geo-targeted if you serve multiple locations; if not then set campaign by primary topic such as ‘treatment’, ‘signs and symptoms’, ‘statistics’, ‘support’ etc. This step would be the adword level for a geographically diverse campaign. Ensure that adcopy includes the adword level primary search term in the title and at least once in the description, with the primary search term in every URL; i.e. ‘cancer’ at a bare minimum. Create multiple adcopy to allow for a/b testing, make sure you have your goals set, watch your budget, watch your KPI and make sure your landing pages are relevant, highly appropriate and easy to navigate with clear purpose and direction in both copy and call-to-action. Here’s more info on PPC creation why’s and how’s.

5. If your SEO contingent is targeted with assisting IA in the development of a new micro-site to complement a banner ad/TV/radio/magazine etc ad strategy, make sure knowledge of the objectives, along with all the keyword research, is passed to the PPC folks for integration into the PPC initiative.

6. If the company decides on a short term promotion targeting PPC and banner ad placement online, pass the information to SEO where they can include the target tag-line and primary likely converting phrase into a link off the home page to the PPC landing page. The chances are that your home page is crawled at least once every week to two weeks (if you are a small business and don’t update very often). If you are a larger business with more dynamism in terms of visitor volume and interaction, and if you regularly change your content, your home page may be crawled multiple times a day.

7. Most active blogs are also crawled far more frequently than less ‘dynamic’ sites. Therefore, link the corporate blog to the PPC landing page as well, ensuring that the PPC landing page is not excluded via robots.txt, or misuse of noindex etc. I read a great article on crawl and cache rate (due to effective page management and maintenance) and the effect on rankings a few weeks ago by Scott Hendison – totally worth a good few minutes of your time.

8. SEO and PPC may have very different KPI; for example, PPC may be aimed at pure profit or ROAS (return or adspend), while SEO may be aimed primarily at brand exposure.

This does not mean you need to limit either approach to any single goal. In fact I strongly urge you to set up a number of PPC and SEO goals including registration, conversion and contact as well as more tactical goals including bounce rate on select pages, most visited sub-pages, visitor paths and visitor locations. Insight into general web analytics geographic location of visitors can give insights on where to further promote PPC, or withdraw it if it is not effective.

Bounce rate can indicate landing pages that are not working, both from a PPC and an SEO perspective. Apply full web analytics to both and integrate them so that you only have one primary interface. It is very easy to tie your Google Analytics to both AdWords and general data. I strongly urge you to do so.

In Closing: Integrating, managing and reporting on both SEO and PPC initiatives simultaneously with the same team, or with teams that are encouraged to work effectively together to complement and support each other will make an enormous difference to your online presence in the SERPs. It’s not getting easier out there, but while competition is increasing, effective management is not necessarily following suit – yet. Give yourself a competitive advantage in 2009 and start today!

Happy New Year!!!

Before I read the comments on Tom’s blog (which I have summarized and compiled below) I thought about it. These are my thoughts:  

User Generated Content

I am a huge proponent of user generated content (UGC), and its impact on search results, conversions, and online transparency which contributes to the accessibility and exposure of product or service related feedback and reviews. It has also resulted in a significant contribution to site usability, information accessibility and more where it has been effectively and applicable incorporated on official company sites and blogs.

While UGC is by no means a new concept (it entered mainstream use in 2005 according to Wikipedia), it might be considered to have gained enormous traction and exposure, and thus interest over the past 12-18 months due to new studies from big name research corporations including Rubicon, Forrester, Juniper, AdAge and others (see this great list of UGC stats and their compilers). The studies revealed, reiterated and supported each other entirely in their data to the (summary) effect that:

·         Users are actively seeking input from other ‘people’ online via reviews and feedback

·         Usability in the form of ‘satisfaction’ increased with the inclusion of reviews on a site

·         Sites with reviews had higher conversion rates

·         Sites with reviews had higher ‘recall’ rates

·         More than 60% of potential purchasers research online regardless of whether they purchase on or offline and look for both positive and negative reviews

·         Negative reviews are unlikely to detract from positive reviews as long as there are positive reviews, and the negative review is deemed ‘constructive’.

·         Brands appreciate the ability to include reviews as it enhances transparency, and enables the publication of information on the site that they would normally, due to brand legal or marketing constraints, be unable to publish.

The 1to1 Media Survey of the 1to1 Xchange panel in April of this year summarized overall trend based predications on the findings of the studies very concisely in my opinion:

·         By 2020, 84% of marketers agree that building customer trust will become marketing’s primary objective, and 82% agree that collaboration with customers will prevail over marketing.

Reputation Management

The same type of scenario (not new, but ‘newly realized’) is true for the discipline of monitoring one’s, or one’s competitors, reputation online. Despite the fact that Google Alerts has been around for quite some time (2006 I think) reputation management really got a kick in the rear this year with the publication of Andy Beal’s book Radically Transparent, and the advent of TrackUR and numerous other reputation management tools.

I think the boost of interest in UGC and the need to implement it while watching for on-site spam intersected very nicely with the desire to monitor both positive and negative commentary around the web. Finding out what brand evangelists are saying can be a great way to build out a social media campaign, or any other form of online marketing initiative. Knowing who the brand evangelists are enables a company to ‘recruit’ them via empowering them with early news tid-bits, free stuff (like screen savers… no, I don’t mean a new Lamborghini – though that would be nice…), special offers for their readers and other similar free tools or offerings of gratuity and incentive. There is a fine line between empowering brand evangelists and bribing them. My heart-felt advice is;  ‘don’t cross the invisible line’.

Monitoring what is being said about you on the net and in the blogosphere also enables a business to find out what people don’t like about their company, a brand, a product line, a specific product, customer service, an affiliate, a brick and mortar store, and so on. It is a great way to be knowledgeable while at the same time proactive, assuming you develop a strategy to deal quickly, diplomatically, carefully, and positively with brand detractors. Answer them on their own site/blog or wherever they have posted the review or comment, and copy the issue raised along with your responding solution or answer onto your official site.

Not only can you answer your detractors quickly and effectively, you are also likely to gather some great insights for R&D (research and development) and I&P (insight and planning). 

In closing – my thoughts are that…

…the potential impact of effective integration and management of UGC via effective use of a well-thought strategy and a great reputation management tool  is what I think we have really come to see as a ‘significant advance’ in SMM this year.

Other comments from Tom’s readers:

Please do read his post and comment there first as I have unashamedly lifted this whole blog-post-idea-thingey from him via LinkedIn.

Tom’s readers feel that the following are the ‘significant advances in SMM during 2008’ – in no particular order:

·         Microblogging

·         Reconsidering the social dynamic

·         Adoption and consolidation

·         Mobile and iPhone use and effect

·         Leveraging online and offline more holistically

·         Personalized platforms (like Ning)

·         Mobile microblogging facilitation

·         Aggregation of multiple profiles and streamlining enabled

·         Simply the enormous boost in interest as the idea of social networking has grown, matured and solidified as ‘something to stay’ as opposed to a ‘fad’.

Have a wonderful festive season and a blessed New year if I don’t get around to stealing blogging again in the next 2 weeks J !!!