Internet Marketing Centricity

Internet Marketing Seminar Announced

FYI. I've been invited to speak at an upcoming internet marketing seminar by Lorman Education Services. The internet marketing conference (or seminar) will be held on February 27, 2008 in St. Louis, MO. The agenda is still being finalized, but my part of the online marketing seminar will focus on pay per click advertising optimization and management. I'll share a great pay per click optimization case study one of my current pay per click clients who was able to significantly increase their bottom-line profits through a ppc optimization project.

There will also be other experts discussing search engine optimization, public relations SEO, analytics and more. Should be a great internet marketing seminar. I'll post more information on the internet marketing seminars page of the Terrakon Marketing website and the PPC Marketing Centricity Blog.

Click Profitably,

Rob Reed

Terrakon Marketing
A Pay Per Click Management Company

Smarter Searching from Yahoo?

Yahoo has had a new search feature in beta for nearly one year. Yahoo Mindset is an "intent-driven" search that allows you to influence the order of the top 100 search results by telling Yahoo if you are shopping or researching. Check out the Yahoo Mindset demo here.

A sliding scale -2 (most commercial) to +2 (most informational) is offered to the searcher to determine the order of the results. A 0 represents a balance of informational and commercial.

Two quick thoughts:

1. While content has always been important for search engine rankings, it will be increasingly important to have a mixture of both informational and commercial content on your site. Informational content pages to draw potential/future customers to your site so you'll be in their considered set when they're ready to buy and commercial pages to sell your products or services for those searchers who already have their credit cards out.
2. As Google, Yahoo, and MSN continue to develop new features to help them provide the most relevant results for searchers, it will become even more difficult to have your web pages consistently appear in the top results for all searchers. Google, for instance, has already instituted a "learning" feature that will track your search engine results clicks (if you want it to) so that Google learns your search habits and then "serves" the most relevant results based on your past search habits.

Finding People Who Steal Your Content

To the best of my knowledge, it's nearly impossible to prevent someone from copying/stealing the content from your site. It is possible, though, to find the culprits.

Copyscape offers a service that identifies other sites that are plagiarizing your content. Just enter the web page url from your site that you'd like to check and click "go."

Copyscape will return any pages that match significant parts or all of the content for the requested page.

The free version allows you to conduct 50 "searches" per month.

Search Engine Limits: How Much of Your Page Do They Index?

Is it possible to create a web page too large for the search engines like Yahoo, Google and MSN to index?

The answer is a definitive "yes." However, most small business web pages will most likely never reach those limits.

I came across a really interesting experiment that analyzed each of the major search engines, Yahoo, Google and MSN and the maximum amount they'll index on any given page. The results are actually very surprising. Maximum amount indexed per page:

Yahoo: 210kb
Google: 520kb
MSN: 1020kb

It never ceases to amaze me how these intelligent folks are willing to spend a lot of time and resources conducting experiments and then share the results with the entire world. My hats off to Mr. Serge Bondar and others like him.

Perhaps a more critical and interesting point Mr. Bondar made in an associated forum had to do with the question: "How long does a web page need to be in order to be considered 'informative' by the search engines." Mr. Bondar's response:

The page "informativeness" is better expressed through the number of words, rather than the number of kilobytes. From the analysis of thousands top-10 SERPs, I suppose that the "informative" - from the SE's POV - text is anywhere above 300-400 words. Most commonly, we see 600-1100-word pages among the leaders.

How to Avoid Email Harvesting from Evil Spambots

If you have a website, you are most likely familiar with "spambots." These are evil computer programs that troll websites looking for email addresses to harvest. The harvested email addresses are then used by the spam bot owners or sold to other spammers hawking "free software," "Viagra," and various "patches."

The spam bots identify email addresses by looking for specific characters (e.g. @ sign) or patterns on your website.

To deter the spambots, it seems a lot of companies have decided to eliminate email addresses all together on their websites - including the "contact us" pages. Instead, they've incorporated contact forms that ask us to complete a set of fields and then send the message.

Perhaps my mind could be improved on this, but I don't really care for websites that require you to complete a form to contact them.

It seems very impersonal (even more than support@site or info@site) and why should you give them your email address, if they choose not to provide their own? Trust is already difficult enough to earn on the web. To me, these impersonal contact forms where you're asked to "give up" personal info (e.g. name, email, etc.), without reciprocation, has a negative impact on building trust.

If you agree with this sentiment, here's how you can use email addresses on your website, but still deter the evil spambots. I've included a couple of the least technical strategies below:

...If you want to hide your addresses from spambots, you must understand how they work. Most spambots find addresses by looking for patterns of text that look like an email address. For example, email addresses always contain an @. Spambots therefore scan the text of a webpage to find any @s. If you eliminate the @ from addresses then most spambots won't be able to recognize that your addresses:

carol-at-example.com
carol(at)example.com
carol AT example DOT com

While this hides your address from spambots, visitors to your site will often still incorrectly demung your address, or not even recognize it is an email address, and therefore be unable to contact you.

A more sophisticated version of hiding your address, which still allows human users to see the addresses without any apparent munging, involves using ASCII character codes. ASCII character codes are like machine language for representing characters on a web page. For example, if you want to represent an @ you can either use the character itself, or you can use it's ASCII character code: @ (ampersand number-sign six four semi-colon).

If you use the ASCII code then human visitors to your site will see an @ because their browsers automatically translate the character code. However, most spambots currently do not recognize the codes and therefore ignore addresses created with them. The following addresses will all appear the same if they are included in the HTML of your site:

carol@example.com
carol@example.com
carol@example.com

Notice that the last address above uses an ASCII code not only to replace the @, but also the period (.). On the next page we'll show you even more advanced munging techniques, and provide an automatic address munging tool.

Click this link to learn more advanced techniques to hide email addresses from spammers or to learn about their program to help identify email harvesters.

Keyword Ranking: How to Easily Find Your Keyword or Phrase Ranking for Google, Yahoo and MSN

Would you like to know how your web pages rank for a keyword or phrase? Well, you can certainly type in the keyword or phrase into each of the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) and scroll through the results pages to find if you show up or not. Ouch. Pretty painful and slowwwwww process.

Wouldn't you rather type in your keyword or phrase just once and have the results come back with the specific position for each of the three major search engines? Something like this:

enter keyword or phrase: "marketing consultant"

enter website: "yoursite.com"

your results:

Google:        23

Yahoo:        45

MSN:       Not Found

Here's the keyword or phrase ranking tool that will do this!

In my tests, the actual search engine results have always been within one or two spots of the ranking this tool provides.

One slight drawback of the tool, though, is that it does not provide the specific page that is producing the search engine rankings. If you want to know the web page producing the search engine results, you'll have to conduct a search on a specific engine and go to the page where this keyword or phrase tool shows your results will be shown.

The tool will only show your results if they appear in the top 100 results. Not a big deal, however, since most humans won't see your web page in the results if you're out of the top 30 results anyway.

Local Search: How Google Trends Can Help You Identify Regional Differences

In my previous post, I introduced you to the new Google Trends tool. In this post, I'd like to discuss an example of how you can use this tool to focus your keyword strategy for local search. This example discusses how you can use Google Trends to select the best keywords or phrases for your specific target market geography.

I'll use my own company as an example. Terrakon Marketing, provides sales and internet marketing consulting services.  I'd like to optimize one of the Terrakon web pages for professionals and firms looking to enhance their sales knowledge. For purposes of this example, let's say I'm only concerned about professionals or firms based in St. Louis, MO.

Based on research, it appears the phrases "sales tips" and "selling tips" are good candidates to optimize my web page around. But which phrase would work better for my target market in St. Louis, MO?

In the past, I would have had to rely on one of the keyword tools that provide search results estimates for the entire U.S. For example, if I use the Yahoo Keyword Selector, it tells me that "sales tips" was searched on 1,647 times in the month of April across the U.S. "Selling tips," on the other hand, was only searched on 686 times. So, based solely on information from the Yahoo Keyword Selector, I would most likely optimize my web page using "sales tips."

And as it turns out, using "sales tips" would not be the best decision. Google Trends, which shows  search results made specifically from St. Louis, MO, provides a different answer.

The Google Trends chart for sales tips vs. selling tips shows that I should optimize my web page using "selling tips" rather than "sales tips" because "selling tips" is searched on more frequently by searchers in St. Louis, MO. If I optimize my web page for "selling tips," then, I should see more visitors to the optimized page than if I relied on the Yahoo Keyword Selector tool which suggested "sales tips."

In St. Louis, MO, the difference between "sales tips" and "selling tips" is fairly slight. If I lived in Dallas or Denver, though, the phrase "selling tips" is significantly more popular than "sales tips". In Philadelphia and Salt Lake City, however, "sales tips" outperforms "selling tips," so someone looking to optimize a web page for those target markets would come to a different conclusion.

As I mentioned in my initial post, there are many shortcomings to the current version of the Google Trends tool. For example, your target city will not always show up in the top ten for search volume on the phrases you enter. In that case, you'll have to look to a "similar" city or region for guidance.

Overall, the Google Trends tool provides insight not available through other keyword tools. If you're small business owner with operations focused locally or regionally, I highly recommend that someone in your organization learn to use Google Trends to supplement whatever tools or methods you currently use to identify the best keywords for your web pages.

New Google Trends: Can it Help Your Internet Marketing?

I was just scanning my Google Friends Newsletter and found an interesting new tool in Google Labs. Google Trends allows you to see "what the world is searching for" on Google. Actually, the tool shows you not only what the world is looking for, but also allows you to drill-down further and see what a country or in some cases, even a city is searching for. For business owners, especially those with an on-line presence, the best feature is the ability to compare up to five words or phrases to see which ones are searched for most often on Google.

Let's use a simple Google Trend example from my wife's favorite show - American Idol. The chart in this example shows some interesting information from the contest in 2005. First, you'll note that the search volume in the United States was fairly similar for both Carrie and Bo through the 3rd quarter of 2005 - with Carrie holding a slight lead. You'll note a huge peak in search volume for both contestants in the middle of the 2nd quarter when the 2005 finals of American Idol took place.

After the finals, when they toured with all the American Idol finalists, the search volume was fairly close with Carrie holding a slight edge. At the beginning of 3rd quarter, however, the search volume for Carrie Underwood increased significantly and Bo's search volume stayed relatively flat. I'm no Idol expert, but my guess is 3rd quarter is when Carrie released her CD.

Another interesting element you'll find with the Google Trends chart is the search volume by cities. This chart shows the top ten cities by search volume. The largest search volume for the top three cities came from Leeds, AL, Birmingham, AL, and Huntsville, AL. In these three cities, Bo Bice's name was searched for two to three times as often as Carrie Underwood. Why? Because Bo is from Alabama!

In the next seven cities listed, Carrie had search volume at least twice that of Bo. This was probably a good indicator of why she won the contest.

Google Trends is still in beta and provides limited functionality. However, this new tool provides data that is not available anywhere else - real search data trends from Google. Since Google represents over 42% of total search engine volume, it may be worth your time to experiment with the tool for keywords and search terms potential customers use to learn about your products or services or find your business on-line.

I'll discuss how you can use Google Trends to improve your business in my next post...

Google Search Help

If you are frequent user of Google, here's a resource you should check out. GoogleGuide provides a nice tutorial and in-depth explanations of the features and services of Google. I've used Google Search multiple times a day for over six years. Yet, I still learned quite a few new features and shortcuts that will save me time in future searches.

Email Marketing: How to Improve Your Email Marketing Results

According to Jupiter Research, the average B2B email delivery rate, excluding bounces, is 89%. MarketingSherpa's "Email Marketing Metrics Guide" estimates that 14% of B2B email is bounced. By combining these numbers, then, we can estimate that 25% of B2B marketing emails never reach your intended recipients. So, how can you improve your deliverability and overall email marketing results?

1. Always be testing. Continually conduct simple A/B split testing where you send email to two groups with one variable altered in each (e.g. subject line, from, image, day sent, etc. According to Jupiter, marketers that test mailings are more likely to have conversion rates exceeding the industry average of 1% to 2%.
2. Statistical experts claim you want to achieve 30 to 50 responses to have a statistically significant or valid outcome. So, using the subject line as an example, you need the "winning" subject line to prompt at least 30 responses (in this case, opened emails).
3. Two of the most critical elements to test for open rates are the subject and from lines - day and time the email is sent are also significant.
4. Messages that appear with pictures have stronger conversion rates, so testing images and their placement is a good idea. Other personalization features, like naming the prospect in the message also should be considered.
5. Test the frequency of your emails. You want to find a balance that maximizes your ROI. Send to often and your open rates may drop; email too infrequently and you may miss some opportunities.
6. Some other elements you can test include: recipient segmentation, copy length, copy intro, closing copy, copy style, bullets vs. numbering, view above the fold, response buttons, images, colors, pricing, taglines, unsubscribe wording, credibility symbols (e.g. VeriSign, Truste, TrustBuild), refer a friend, customer testimonials, signatures and charts.
7. Be sure to have an abuse@yourcompany.com mailbox to receive feedback from ISPs and take steps to remove bad addresses from your list.
8. Email to everyone on your list at least once every 90 days.
9. Run outbound email through a content-checker to reduce the chance your message gets caught in a spam filters. You can try this one or Google for more options.
10. To ensure your recipients recognize your messages, use your brand in your email "from" field and use the same address consistently.