Martin’s Ecommerce Copy Writing Secrets
There is an important trick to writing great ecommerce copy – remember your TWO “readers”. Copy on an ecommerce web site is read by search engine spiders and people and the first one (spiders) catches the second (people) in its web. Here is the rub – you ecommerce copy is constrained by mutually exclusive ideas such as:

SEO in Under A Minute A Day from Raleigh Web Developers Atlantic BT is short, frequent tips you can easily do that take about a minute. Our goal is to share sixty SEO In Under A Minute Tips before the end of February. One caveat needs stating. You may spend more time READING about Atlantic BT’s SEO In Under A Minute Tips than actually doing them. Explaining takes more time than doing sometimes especially when distilling more than 20 years of search engine optimization experience (on the Atlantic BT marketing team).

SEO In Under A Minute Tip 1: Don’t Start With SEO
Name five of your company’s core values and ideas. Why does your company, brand or product exist in the world? How, who and why is better because your company is here.

Take these questions as an elevator quiz, a Rorschach test.

If you have trouble firing five company and brand ideas, five core values then we suggest homework. Read these books:

• How: Why how you do everything means everything by Dov Siedman
• Delivering Happiness: Path To Profits, Passion and Purpose by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh
• Grow: How ideas and growth power the world’s largest companies

Your web site is a huge reflecting and amplifying pool. If you have any dissonance, confusion or unresolved, “Who are we,” issues resolve them BEFORE you create a web site or at least before your next email marketing campaign. If your site is a reflecting pool of your company then SEO is a reflecting pool of your site. You can see the trickle down problem. If your brand communication is unclear at the top it gets way to murky by the bottom, by the time you reach SEO land.

Start with brand clarity or as close to clarity as we can get these days or the marketing problem, like a snowball rolling down a steep hill, gets bigger with each roll.

Free SEO Evaluation White Paper (coming soon)

Look for the Atlantic BT SEO White Paper soon. Today’s post shares SEO Tips prompted by a customer who successfully made SEO low hanging fruit changes and is looking to move his web site to the next level.

SEO – Martin’s Tips Note

SEO is a many layered challenge with touch points in site design, site reputation, viral campaigns, PPC (as a traffic generator and source of content research), hosting (site speed is becoming an increasing issue), meta data (particularly page titles), keyword aligned body copy and about fifty other things. We’ve seen tremendous SEO change in the last two years due to the growing influence of social networks. Diving into the middle of such a many layered challenge takes skill, time and a solid understanding of your site and business goals. Here are “best practices” you can implement in your site today to improve organic traffic:

• Facebook Likes (macro and micro) – Be sure to have the Facebook LIKE button on your home page and on important individual pages such as product pages or key articles AND make sure your counters are accurate to the page the LIKE button is on. I want a macro “reach” counter capable of summarizing LIKES across multiple touch points, but no such tool exists yet (that I am aware of) so make sure your Facebook counters are aligned to pages they are on.

• Platforms Beat Websites – read my Internet Marketing – Platforms vs. Websites post on ScentTrail Marketing to understand how significantly Internet marketing is being transformed by Web 2.0 and the promise of Web 3.0. As Amazon nears a billion pages in Google’s index understanding the interconnected “platform-yness” of Internet marketing has never been more important.

• UGC Rules – One of the implications of living in the land of platforms is you can’t create enough content to win keyword wars on your own. You team and content creation budget isn’t big enough even if you have millions. User generated content (UGC) is KEY. Create campaigns that develop community and encourage people to share your site across their social nets (and remember to use the Facebook LIKE button whenever possible). You may want to read my 1:10:89 Rule post too as it explains how magical and rare contributors are. My favorite UGC tools are polls, contests and games. Each UGC tactic has a “best practice” application I will write about in another post.

• Content, Community and Campaigns THEN Conversions – Living in a platform time means learning SEO stepping stones to success. Each step builds on and contributes to the next. Create a content strategy. We create content strategies with extensive keyword research, something we’ve named ”branding keywords”. Branding Keywords maps keywords to business values, buying personas, buyer pain points and potential blue oceans (those keywords not frothy red with competition). This kind of research is a HUGE time commitment (days usually), but it makes your content and campaigns jump off the page. We are working on sharing these steps so anyone who wants to can “brand keywords” (look for our tutorial in about a month). Community can be as little as adding reviews or as much as building out a Facebook environment. Content without community support is a tree falling in the desert with no one to hear it. Campaigns are the “buy one get one free” or the “free white paper” or the “Holiday Sale” language of email and social marketing. You need deadlines, a great offer and compelling presentation across all touch points (site, blog, social, email) to motivate and cut through clutter and buyer apathy. Conversions come because you fire on every step. Any friction such as TRUST and REPUTATION must be fully eliminated (another post for another time). Conversions Key Performance Indicators can be anything including more time on site or increased page views. We like to make conversions some ACTION such as sign up, download or buy.

• SPEED – Go to Alexa or use a speed evaluation tool. If your site is anything other than FAST redesign it or serve it better or both. Google’s margins erode when pages take too long to load so they will punish your listings for slow response.

• SPAM – Work in SEO long enough and you can feel hidden SPAM traps. You know exactly how to SEO write to push keyword density without spamming. There are tools that you can use to confirm and help eliminate things like “stop words”, but do this long enough, test enough content and you develop an intuitive feel for what works. If you don’t have such a sense yet read my SEO Writing Tips 1 – 5 on ScentTrail Marketing for a quick crash course.

• DATA – We are constantly reminded that however much we think we know about SEO we don’t know anything. SEO and the Internet live organically in Real Time. The only things that matter or define SEO success is what is happening now. The good news is there is a sea of data to help cut the cost of the gamble. SEO and Internet marketing are always gambles, but informed ones perform better and better over the long run. Every now and again we re-read Black Swan by Taleb just in case we think we can finally predict Internet marketing’s future (no one can and arrogance goes before a huge fall in our Internet marketing experiences).

• Snake Oil – In another much younger life I sold soap for P&G, an honorable straight forward job. SEO is full of people who project confidence when they should have NONE. They use words they don’t understand but do so in a way that makes listeners confused or anxious. Here is a quick Snake Oil test. Ask a prospective SEO how they would change your home page title, the most important meta copy on any page. If they answer anything other than, “I have no idea,” RUN FOR THE HILLS. Existing sites are modeled and indexed in Google. Change is expected and accepted WITHIN parameters, within modeled limits. First rule of SEO is DO NO HARM. Anyone who, at a moment’s notice, creates a SEO plan for your site is dangerous and should be avoided. Avoid snake oil salesmen since the first rule they violate is DO NO HARM and harm within Google’s Elephant Memory Brain is forever (or a very long time anyway). Another good Snake Oil test is anyone who says, “I can get you #1 on X keyword in Y time.” The only way to achieve such a mission is to wear a black hat, to game or trick Google. Never game or trick Google. The math always wins and the over/under doesn’t favor such a tactic (what you stand to gain vs. lose). A former CFO told me, “I want you to make something happen on Google by the end of the week.” Something is happening on Google all the time, I had to explain, but only BAD things can happen for sure by the end of the week. Hard concept for a CFO to grasp.

Keep the faith, keep creating content and find a way to move your “site” to a platform generating UGC and the magic Google Juice it provides is the most important SEO lesson once you are past the low hanging fruit of solid meta, body copy, tags and purple cow link bait.

Hope these ideas have helped. Look for our Free SEO White paper and more on Branding Keywords soon. If you would like to be kept up-to-date with the latest at Atlantic BT (never share our list and don’t spam) use the link below to stay in touch.

Yes, Please Add Me To Your Think Like An Internet Marketer Email List.

Martin
Director Marketing

Suggested Reading:

Phil Simon’s new book

The Age of the Platform

Although landscaping tends to be a seasonal industry, Jimmy Tompkins has found a way to not only maintain his business during the typical off-season but to grow his company and keep his employees working through the winter. Every fall, we help JT’s Landscaping transition his focus from lawn maintenance to holiday decorating by updating his website, re-optimizing  for search engines and targeted pay-per click campaigns for the holiday season. Innovative clients such as Jimmy make our job easy!

JT’s Landscaping provides holiday lighting and holiday decorating services for the Triangle, including Raleigh, Durham, Cary, Chapel Hill and Wake Forrest. This year his team is decorating more than 160 homes in the Raleigh area.

As marketers, we admire Jimmy’s ability to recognize a void in a market and capitalize on it. This helps grow his business, develop his brand, and maintain jobs for his employees when traditional landscaping work is slow.

Check out some of Jimmy’s beautiful work below!

I created Content Marketing Networks, a short slideshare PowerPoint that has been riding on top of the term in Google since 2009 thanks to Slideshare’s SEO strength and possibly being first on an idea about to explode. Those 2009 content marketing network slides tried to explain how Internet marketing is an interdependent world of links, connections and virtual cycles (positive or negative).

My content marketing network thoughts became richer and deeper thanks to a friend and a book. The book my friend recommended was Linked: Why Everything Is Connected To Everything Else by Notre Dame network researcher Albert-laszlo Barabasi. Linked explains the organic life of networks, what happens naturally behind the the wizard’s curtain.

As a Director of Ecommerce I’d observed how hubs formed bending the fabric of networked space and time sometimes in my site’s favor sometimes against. Hubs bend the fabric of network/time in their favor because they become self sustainably bigger displacing more Google winning more traffic faster and faster.

My Internet marketing team and I could watch a hub form on the horizon (in our web analytics) almost like a thunderstorm. Dark clouds formed in the distance. Traffic moved there in ever increasing numbers. If the “traffic storm” was on keywords we cared about suddenly our site was less competitive, received less traffic and, for no fault of our own OTHER than not being as well linked or ready, the storm built moving traffic, conversions and money away.

Sometimes traffic storms built and quickly blew out. Storms from ephemera didn’t last long. Ephemera such as a single great email offer or a mention on a hot site creates quick traffic showers. Other storms, such as the use of free shipping on all orders for a full year, gathered into permanent traffic and share loss for the ecommerce site I managed because we weren’t willing to match the offer. The key content marketing network idea is not about a particular offer, but the capacity for a competitor to become more of a “hub” based on a bold and uncovered Internet marketing actions (the unmatched free shipping offer). When the smoke cleared a competitor way back in the rankings ranked higher than the good guys (my site ).

“Scale Free” networks (such as the Internet) have certain natural innate characteristics. Hub formation is a “natural” content network marketing characteristic. I think about content network hubs like Einstein thought of planets and gravity. Hubs bend the Internet’s “fabric” creating a gravitational force where links, traffic and commerce flow downhill (toward the hub) in at ever-increasing rate.

“An ever increasing rate,” is another way of saying a positive virtual cycle. Positive “virtual cycles” are when good things happen faster and faster with less and less effort (push). Barabasi defines this self-reinforcing positive cycle as, “The Rich Get Richer.”

Traffic is Internet marketing’s compound interest. When, through great Internet marketing or sheer luck, you bend the web’s fabric in your favor and so create a self-reinforcing hub life is good. Faster and faster with less and less effort means profit margins go up and costs go down. Profit going up as costs go down mean your site (or business or company) is in the middle of a network effect – perhaps the most magical Internet marketing storm.

Google’s role is crucial. Google is a leading and trailing indicator. Google doesn’t create the web’s weather, but it can amplify or significantly change Internet marketing storms. If a traffic storm seems “spammy” or illegitimate Google’s magic math cuts credit and reduces storm force, power and longevity. If magic math is in favor of the storm, meaning traffic is sticking, high value links are increasing (link love in from high PageRank sites) and bounce rates are low Google shifts more traffic to the storm blowing it up. Google plays leading indicator with spam and trailing indicator when blowing a medium storm into a larger one.

Time’s role in Internet marketing is easy to forget. Time is the great equalizer and why sudden unexplained storms appear spammy. Trends do brew up suddenly usually in response to some unanticipated news event such as Michael Jackson’s unanticipated demise, a great sports victory or a new cool thing, but most traffic storms appear, build into a bell curve and then fade.

As News Jacking author David Meerman Scott points out, traffic storms are increasing even as their longevity is decreasing in our ADD “always on” culture. Scott’s sense of immediacy changes artist Andy Warhol’s infamous “15 minutes of fame” quote.  Meerman Scott’s Internet marketing as arbitrage changes Warhol’s quote to, “Everyone will be famous fifteen times for one minute at a time”. Can the need for your business, brand or product to recognize, feed and “jack” such precious moments be overstated?

Experiencing a positive traffic storm makes you want it to happen again, and again, and again. When Oprah’s O magazine included hand made place settings (dishes for the men reading this) created by an upstate New York potter represented by FoundObjects.com, the specialty gift site I co-founded in 1999, we were off to the races selling $10,000 in a matter of hours (and melting down a server). At that time, almost twelve years ago now, we didn’t think or know how to feed Oprah’s traffic storm with blog posts, widgets and social network support. Social networks twelve years ago weren’t what they are now.

Linked defines our jobs as Internet marketers differently. We are in the business of bending the web’s space/time fabric to create self-reinforcing hubs. Creating self-reinforcing hubs can start in a few ways, but almost all include:

• Related Archived Evergreen Content
• Related Relevant NOW Content
• Related Link Love
• An Ever Increasingly Fast Content Creation Cycle
• An Ever Increasingly Fast And Growing Amount of Link Love

Related Archived Evergreen Content
One day Oprah discussed a topic out of the blue. The site I manged at the time had content on Oprah’s doctor, the one who appeared as the expert. We had content on the products discussed. We didn’t have content on doctor and products together. We scrambled to create content to match Oprah’s lead.

There is a problem. No matter how fast NEW content is created it is too late for maximum impact. Evergreen content has to cook inside Google for weeks, months or years. Evergreen content must live in the archive for some time before being deployed in response to an event for maximum return. It was a good idea to create new content pages combining doctor and products, but we wouldn’t reach Amazon-like penetration on related keywords.  Amazon is powerful because, as it moves toward being the first site with a billion pages indexed in Google, it is already cooking pages on just about any topic.

Some of Amazon’s evergreen content lives out in Anderson’s long tail for years. Suddenly a traffic storm gathers and Amazon has everything it needs to deploy new content and content fully baked in Google for years. Evergreen content’s value, when so deployed, is immense. Your site’s “trusted authority” status deepens when current storm matches NOW content (the mix of doctor and product pages we rushed to create) AND evergreen’s fully cooked content. Google’s coveted “authority” status is awarded to sites capable of creating content on the fly in response to an event combined with fully baked related evergreen content because relevance increases while traffic bounces decrease (what Google cares about).

Amazon creates content “at an ever increasing rate”. “Ever increasing rate” is another way of saying Amazon is constantly creating a network effect. Amazon is the most powerful hub outside of Google. Facebook is discussed as a Google competitor. Few understand how Amazon is Google’s Siamese twin – connected at the hip and impossible to remove.

Facebook arbitrages content and traffic trying to figure out the money. Amazon has Internet marketing money figured out. Despite Jeff Bezos’ seeming “B” status, the massive Internet marketing arbitrage implied by Google and fully executed by Amazon may be the most revolutionary change to commerce and our lives. I love my Macbooks, iPhone and iPad, but the world’s traffic arbitrage market is more Google and Bezos than Jobs. Amazon is Google’s cash register a role both are happy the other plays.

Related NOW Content
Our combination of content in response to Oprah’s show is a form of “News Jacking”. News Jacking defined by author David Meerman Scott sees and surfs traffic storms (or PR “waves”). Like Bezos, Meerman Scott’s Wall Street career prepared him for the traffic arbitrage Internet marketing is becoming. Creating unique content, content capable of several updates over the course of a storm, is a good idea. See the wave, surf the wave makes sense even if such a reaction is only half as good as NOW + evergreen.

Related Link Love (Or Facebook Shares, Likes and Links)
Back in the day (two years ago) your web site needed link love from high PageRank sites with proper anchor text. It isn’t surprising Facebook shares; likes and links are replacing such hard to achieve and rare “link love”. Getting links wasn’t “rare”. Getting links with proper anchor text with related keywords was almost impossible. Those with the knowledge to build proper links did so for MONEY not LOVE. Amazon may have ecommerce down, but Facebook has reputation economics down to an evolving new science. Facebook’s sharable LIKE widget is pure Internet marketing genius.

When there are a billion people inside your network you create weather. Figuring out how to PROJECT your vast community’s influence across the flexible fabric of the web’s space/time makes Facebook the wizard behind the curtain. Inside the Facebook firewall you are half as powerful as what can be projected beyond the wall. The Like, Share and Comment widgets project search engine optimization (SEO) power across the Internet. If you work at PowerReviews or Bazaar Voice you must be smacking your head thinking, “why didn’t we think of that”.

An Ever Increasingly Fast Content Creation Cycle
No matter how much content you are creating it isn’t enough by half AND creation is too slow. Being competitive NOW means understanding how the Internet marketing game is changing. Change is the only true constant. Noticed how noisy the web is becoming?

The web is noisy because its value is clear and beyond ROI question. Debate continues about social network marketing ROI, mobile marketing and other things we will look back on in five years and wonder what we were debating, but there is no question all companies must swim in an increasingly crowded red ocean (an ocean made red with the blood from fierce competition).

Some like Etsy.com and Amazon understand the importance of an ever increasingly fast content creation cycle. Some understand platforms beat websites. You can’t go it alone is the most important realization. You and your team, no matter how large, can’t create content fast enough to be competitive. User generated content (UGC) is a must. You must tap mob power to become a hub, to thrive and become the rich getting richer.

An Ever Increasing And Growing Amount Of Link Love
The international fashion site Zara has 10,000,000 Facebook likes. Using Marketing Profs Facebook fan value of $136.38 (seeing the full article requires sharing your email, but it is worth it) means Zara’s Facebook community is worth over a billion dollars. I can hear the scoffs now. “That’s total nonsense,” some will say. “How do they know what a Facebook Fan is worth?”

I could defend Marketing Profs numbers. They may be low actually.  The costs of trying to recreate such a community jacks the value sky high. How fast do your Facebook likes grow? Let’s not get lost in a stupid debate because it doesn’t matter what a Facebook fan is worth.

What matters is how much Google juice 10 million supporters displace. Answer: A Ton. If, like REI, you don’t have Facebook LIKES, shares and comments throughout your site it will be harder to become a hub. If your competitors understand the importance of Facebook first you may NEVER become a hub. When your competitor becomes a hub an ever-increasing amount of traffic, link love and money will move away from your site pulled by your competitor’s hub-like gravitational force.  The real frustration is you will work three times as hard for less result (than your hubbed competitor). Hubs rule the web, so rule or be ruled.

Importance Of Togetherness
Atlantic Business Technologies grew from 30 to 54 employees last year. We could grow to more than 70 this year (2012). 54 people as connected as the technical crowd at Atlantic BT is the start of a powerful content marketing network. In six steps 54 people can reach 2.5 million:

In today’s Internet marketing we are as strong as the network links we create. We can’t JUST link to each other since doing so is spam. We can link to each other and the products we create as a natural part of our Internet marketing conversations. Every now and again we may all point to the same thing by chance OR we can be more purposeful and aware using network power to create a hub, a self-sustaining hub where we do less and less to achieve more and more.

I have no idea how planets formed out of the cosmic dust of the Big Bang, but hubs form when you create great content and share it with 2.5 million people. Atlantic BT’s employees is our first content network step. We will include our customers and former customers next (Phase II), then vendors (Phase III) and finally open up the network to public participation and use.

What about competition? I can hear some readers thinking. Competition provides important and welcomed participation. What if competition wins business via Atlantic BT’s content network? Then we will learn from the experience and do better next time. No business is lost or gained because we occupy the high ground created from a content network hub. Competition wins business because we didn’t communicate our value proposition or, and this can be hard to realize, there was a better fit with someone else.

Eckart Tolle taught a valuable Internet marketing lesson when he wrote, “whatever is happening is exactly what is supposed to be happening” in The Power of Now (I think). This helpful truth eliminates wasted energy. When SEO/SEM helps wins business Tolle’s statement helps. When SEO/SEM loses business it is what was supposed to happen so find out why and test something new. We Internet marketers build sand castles and Google’s tide is inevitable.

There will always be more business than we can comfortably handle in Internet marketing in our lifetime. Online commerce is less than 10% of total retail gaining rapidly but still less than 10%. There is much work to be done and plenty of work as long as insanely great is our mission, innovation our guide and togetherness our rule. We, and this is the royal we, are more powerful together than apart by an order of magnitude (100x).

PS. Hardware
Waking up this morning to finish this article I realized a missing point. If you ever wonder why it is important to hire real network support creating a content marketing network is why. If pieces of your empire are too easily self referential you will end up in Facebook, Twitter and Google jail. Getting out of jail isn’t easy, it takes time and costs money.

You need right brainers (marketing types) to figure out your blended curation plan, blended between promotion and curation. You need left brainers (network pros) to plumb your systems to appeal to Google (fast, non-spammy). Your left brain can eliminate all your right brain work and vice versa. You CAN buy a $500 web site hosted for $50 a month. I have one of those, built in half a day with a template (visit MartinMartySmith.com), but my MartinMarty site will NEVER win a keyword battle in Google. Winning Google battles isn’t always important (though I’m hard pressed to find an example in my life when I wouldn’t want to win traffic and conversions).

If winning keyword battles in Google IS important then you need pros on the right and left side of the brain. Even if you think you know how Google works trust me you don’t (only they do really). Google may be the most beautiful living art ever created so complex complete understanding is impossible. Do you “understand” or feel great art? A: Feel. Anyone tells you they will get you a page one listing on X keyword is lying and a snake oil salesman. Stick with Internet marketers who freely admit not knowing what they don’t know, are willing to share what they do know and can easily tell five stories of SEO loss and learnings (they may call it “testing” depending on how geeky they are).

No matter who you decide to receive Internet marketing help from YOU and your company, your company’s friends, vendors and even competitors are stronger together than apart.

Martin

—
Martin Smith
Director Marketing
Atlantic Business Technology
Martin(dot)Smith(at)AtlanticBT(dot)com

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@lindzie Lindsay Wassell Partner and Consultant, KeyPhraseSEOlogy

Commentary:

Notes:

Create great news content and you can compete with main stream news media if you have expertise in that space.  It is easier to rank a video as opposed to entering a simple web page.

Images get great rankings, make sure you have a file name, alt tag and text around the image.  Use images in News articles, places pages, and use Panoramio.  Look for any opportunity to add rich media types as they will increase your rankings.

Google Local – if you have brick and mortar locations you absolutely must in local listings and encourage and manage reviews.  Local Places page you can add photos, videos, description, categories and address.

David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors is a great resource for using Google Local.

Microdata = Rich Snippets – all the search engines got together and set standards for classifying information.  Microdata (the date about data) is really important for rankings.  Check out Schema.org for examples of this.  Music microdata can be used to have links in search results directly to songs.

Products can be tagged using microdata to make them show up in a different way so it shows the reviews.

Info on Rich Snippet resources can be viewed on http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=21997.

Key Takeaways:

1. Expand your view of Search Marketing
2. Explore new content types and find ways to expand
3. Identify your content with microdata to help it shine in the SERPs.
4. Think beyond the web page

Next Generation SEO: Beyond Best Practices

@michaelmarshall Michael Marshall SEO Guru

Commentary:  The brunt of this one and its discussion of the Power Law did go over my head, but it was interesting from how this is used to generate traffic.  Personally I think he had too much content in his slides and moved too quickly so it was difficult to digest and get any true takeaways from the session.

Notes:

This is important because traffic leads to sales.

On-page Optimization has to do with Title Tags, Meta tags, ALT tags, Header tags, URL structure, anchor text, Keyword proximity is more important than Keyword density.

The Key to navigating through all of the methodology is MATH.

The Key benefit is to get the data so that you connect it to a mathematical model to create understanding.

More often than not your competitors have changed something that improved their rankings.  Don’t change too much at once on your site when it comes to SEO so you can track what you have changed.

StatistiXL is a great product for evaluating your SEO performance to do the work using Math as opposed to trial and error you will save money over time.

Make Your CMS Work for Your SEO, Not Against You

@markusrenstrom Markus Renstrom, Head of SEO Yahoo!

Commentary: The big take away here for me that the SEO team of your company needs to own how new pages are created to make sure they conform to a template that can be re-used to save money.

Notes:

It makes sense to have quality over quantity and you need to focus on your platform that you are going to use to get good SEO rankings.

Concept #1 – Expectations – If you work in search you need to educate your company on what they can expect from the results.  Markus spent time talking about what SEO is not.  SEO takes time, strategy and investment and not more links.

SEO is a long term Content Strategy.  50% of people are using 3 or more keywords to search now.  You also need to make that content accessible to everyone.  Search engines disable all of the javascript so that it can search through the content.

Think about who is the top user to your site?  Is the search engine your top user because they will actually look at everyone one of your pages.  SEO is about User Focused content.

Concept #2 Ownership – ownership created agility, enables standardization and automation, and it saves time and resources. If you create standards to tags and Urls it gets faster to create content.

Duplication is your enemy.  Your one article should not exist in more than one category. Dynamic URLs are scary from a search perspective.

The importance of tagging cannot be underestimated especially around the coverage of titles and well formed anchor tags.

Yahoo’s traffic is up even though they have reduced the number of pages by 40%.

Yahoo has its own content management system.

Next Level SEO: Social Media Integration

@bill_slawski Bill Slawski, President CEO, SEO by the Sea

Commentary: You should be teaching your clients about relevance of social in search results because they are the subject matter experts.

Notes:

Google has reacted to the advent of social media to show fresher more relevant content.

Bill brought up several sites that failed fast and hard like Dodgeball.com, Google Answers, Google opensocial, Googlevark, Google hotpot was integrated into Google places, Google SearchWiki, Google Wave, Google Buzz.  All of these have been shed and some parts are now being incorporated into Google Plus.

Real Time Search is what is changing.  The recent earthquake is great example of this.  Address recency-sensitive queries are starting to drive results from social media.  The results cannot be ranked the same way that normal web pages are ranked.  When you interact with Google Plus you are building a type of ranking system that will help results with your +1 activity.

Google Plus of course is now showing up in search results.  Authorship markup standards are now published by Google that will show your Google+ posts and your author picture to have richer content.  Authorship markup is difficult but uses the aforementioned mircodata from schema.org.  All Blogspot and YouTube contributions automatically incorporate authorship markup.  Google is using a contribution score to control how the markup is displayed in results.

Why Google+?  Well we should be using it because of the access to all the collateral data that they have access to.  Teach our clients on how to social network instead of networking for them.

Google caused a stir in the Internet a couple weeks ago. Google announced that they would encrypt the search sessions of users signed into Google accounts (also called SSL or secure socket layer encryption.) Why would Google do this? That’s a great question. This question is creating heated Is Google Good Or Evil debates all around the web (read my colleague Brian Chiou’s Google Good Or Evil article for his take).

What does SSL Encryption really mean?

SSL encryption means search queries and search results are private. Search results are only visible and accessible to the individual user on the other end of the computer (or phone)…well, AND to Google of course.

Did search engine optimization get harder?

Yes, since search engine optimizers lost the ability to identify keywords searched for a large portion of web traffic. SSL encryption means Internet marketing analysts can’t tie a keyword searched to a goal (or conversion) on a website for users signed into their Google Account.

Were we spoiled with free access to such valuable information in the past?

Google’s decision to limit analysis comes as a blow. SSL encryption isn’t Google’s first paradigm shift and won’t be their last. But why would Google cloak something we are used to knowing? Something we used to help clients optimize content for search marketing?

Google says in their official blog that they want to “make search more secure”:

As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, we recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver. As a result, we’re enhancing our default search experience for signed-in users.

Is Google really concerned about our privacy? I just looked up my house in Google Earth. There is my car sitting in the driveway. I could zoom and see me sitting on the couch watching TV. Security? Really?

Google says they will continue to pass across secure socket layer data for those using Google’s advertising platforms. SSL encryption only affects organic (non-paid) search results. The lesson here: Pay the price and Google will giftwrap keywords, tie a bow around them and drop them in your lap.

Not convinced money is at the bottom of Google’s SSL encryption?

SSL kills retargeting, the practice of showing ads related to recently visited sites. Retargeting works for old advertising reasons. Retargeting works because repetition works. Retargeting works because customers think serendipity when a massive, intelligent, invisible hand sends subliminal messages and influences free will. Leaving aside the used car salesman feel to retargeting for another post, Google killed retargeting because of how this marketing tactic impacts search. Retargeting reduces search volume. Reduce search volume and Google’s PPC money takes a hit. Money–not security–is at the bottom of Google’s SSL encryption change.

Does Google have something else up their sleeve?

The answer to that question is always YES. Are they prepping us for a paid tool that will allow access to this valuable data? Is Google pushing us to pay for data to improve their $10 billion revenue (from last quarter alone)? Answer: YES.

Or is Google responding to a security backlash? An “adbusters-like” attack on retargeting? Is Google taking steps to improve their privacy policy to benefit the end user? Like most things Google, the answers to all of these questions and many more is always YES. Personally I will believe in the divine Goodness of the “do no evil” company when my house isn’t so easily accessible from any cell phone, iPad or computer on earth.

So, where do we go from here?

As Internet Marketing Specialists, SSL encryption means we have our work cut out for us. We need to be creative in how we collect, analyze and report with our new search engine marketing (SEM) reality. Our Internet marketing world is challenged once again. But who isn’t up for a good challenge?

We say bring it on, Google. We’ll adapt. We’ll figure out ways to help clients understand your new SSL world as we’ve figured out all the other new worlds you’ve created. You’ll make us better Internet Marketers because of it. So thank you Google. I knew I loved you for a reason.

A step in the right direction towards making the internet “less big brother”? As internet marketing analysts and specialists write angry blog posts, I’m relieved. The internet just became more private. It may surprise you that an Internet Marketing Analyst feels this way about Google trying to hide search referral data.

What is SSL?

The acronym stands for “Secure Sockets Layer” which is a way of privately transmitting data through the Internet. Basically, when you are logged into your Google account and execute a search, it will prevent your search query from being grabbed by the website result you eventually click on.

Internet Marketing Just Got Harder

The Internet marketing is rife with Snake Oil salesmen. Businesses who promise the world based on little more than a grouping of keywords and magical thinking.  I’ve been optimizing web sites for search engines a long time and have yet to see magical thinking attain a Google page 1 listing. Have you heard this sentence before, “I will get you #1 position for  keyword x”?  This is the wrong question asked in the wrong way about the wrong thing. why Why focus on a keyword??  Keywords don’t kill business, people do. You hire us to increase your business.  Focus on a keyword’s rank and not the bottom line is how businesses die.

Once your company’s, brand’s or product’s unique selling proposition (USP) is defined, your creation story written and macro strategy outlined keywords can be placed in context. Keyword research is not fun. Researching keywords requires patience, determination and experience. It may be difficult for you to target specific keywords to optimize because they are “red oceans” (competition is intense) The good news is EVERYONE ELSE is having the same problem.

Google makes changes all the time. Everything we know can change any minute. “This,” as Mr. Pacino so aptly stated in GodFather III, “is the business we’ve chosen.”During my Atlantic BT tenure in Raleigh we’ve pivoted many times. SSL becomes just another turn, another rule in an ever changing game.

SSL and Search Retargeting

What is search retargeting?  Retargeting is when a company sells your personal and private data gathered when you visit a site via a “cookie”.  Ever had that eerie feeling of a company following you as you traverse the world wide web?  Google’s SSL implementation reduces the footsteps by hiding data from the companies who were  following you.

How search retargeting works:

1.  I type “best basketball shoes” into Google and visit www.about.com

2.  www.about.com assigns a cookie telling a cookie repository I searched for “best basketball shoes”.

3. Simpli.Fi, Rocket Fuel, or another search retargeting company buys my cookie data from a vendor such as Blue Kai.

4.  Nike works with the search retargeting company showing you their basketball shoe ads on advertisement exchange networks encompassing almost  85% of the internet.

5.  My search  information was just sold to the highest bidder!

Putting all of eggs in ONE basket?

Google’s SSL changes opens online marketers eyes forcing more creative solutions to grow client business.  Google wants to make the search experience better.  Is Google’s SSL change good or evil.  The good or evil question is moot, like most things GOOGLE this latest change, this SSL change, simply IS. If Internet marketing was the same all the time it would be less interesting and not as fun. Internet marketing is building castles on the beach as fast as humanly possible and with the inevitable mean regression already in mind. The next time some snake oil salesman promises a #1 listing on an intensely competitive keyword ask them about their sand castle building philosophy.

Nancy Jin, a co-worker of mine, and I attended the Start Up Weekend.  Over the weekend, participants met the challenge created by the Start Up Weekend committee and outputted prototype Facebook applications, Mobile applications and websites that encapsulated an idea that was created and pitched by a participant.

Here is a quick summarization of Nancy Jin’s experience at Start Up Weekend:

Friday night, out of over 100 participants (evangelists and hackers – basically marketing specialists and developers), 54 people each had 60 seconds to pitch an idea. We then voted and picked which ones we wanted to work on. I landed a team of 2 other designers, two ruby developers, and three marketing specialists, with an idea of urban farming. We were then up till midnight figuring out what our plan was the next day.

8:30am – 12pm Saturday was spent surveying real people, defining problems, coming up with a solution and a base model for the business. Wireframing started at 2:00pm. By 4:00pm we had a logo and by 6:00pm we had a homepage. By 8:00pm we had a working site where people could log in and sign up, and by 11:00pm the rest of the pages were designed, functioning, and the homepage sliced out. Then I went and got some sleep.

The website was completed at 1:00pm the next day, and we had 5 minutes to pitch the idea against 17 other teams in front of everyone including a panel of judges.

We won.

Here’s the site: yardsprout.heroku.com

We addressed that local food is important for economic, environmental, and health reasons. Urban farming is important because we are utilizing fertile spaces that are otherwisewasted. People can grow their own gardens but for most people the toughest part is getting started. We wanted to first establish a business model where novices can seek master farmers to help them plant something,  to eventually have the company provide people with gardening kits, which is where yardsprout could team up with brands like Lowes and Home Depot.

Some other cool stuff I got to do was working with github, some ruby on rails (it was like what? I think where I’m sticking my HTML makes sense), and a lot of SASS (my first time).

Here is a quick summarization of my experience at Start Up Weekend:

Friday – I did not plan on making a pitch but one of the hosts came by everyone’s tables and urged us to make a pitch, so I motivated myself to bounce ideas off of random people around me.  I decided to pow wow with two random students from NCSU about business concepts.  First one that we came up with was struck down by our very own Nancy Jin who saved me the embarassment of pitching a product that pretty much existed in the wild.

I considered the 5-10 minute pow wow over a great idea and being shown the thriving product by my coworker next to me my first “failure” of the night.

I considered the pitch my second “failure” of the night.

“Pivoting” is when you change a fundamental part of the business model. It can be as simple as recognizing that your product was priced incorrectly. It can be more complex if you find the your target customer or users need to change or the feature set is wrong or you need to “repackage” a monolithic product into a family of products or you chose the wrong sales channel or your customer acquisition programs were ineffective.

(source: http://venturebeat.com/2010/04/14/business-plan-not-working-time-to-pivot/)

Therefore, I considered not winning my third “failure” of the night.

What I learned and did over the weekend:

• Deals along the way (think Groupon deals for long point to point trips)
• Concert and Sporting Events (which led to more focused growth strategies by my teammates)

• Work with TicketMaster, StubHub & Political Campaign managers to push individuals to Carpool to events.

This most recent study comes on the back of an earlier survey E&Y carried out between between August and October 2010 found that 76 per cent of UK businesses questioned believe urgent and decisive action is needed or the UK will fall behind other countries that are prioritising cleantech as a sector of national strategic importance.

(source: http://www.newenergyworldnetwork.com/alternative-energy-analysis/by-technology-kb/energy-efficiency-kb/confidence-in-uk-cleantech-policy-ebbs.html)

The survey I created was this:

It was definitely a memorable weekend and I plan on attending this event again next year.

What is Google Boost?

Google Boost is a new advertising platform that Google has begun to roll out to all industries across all cities in the world.  In short, the platform allows you to pay for placement at the top of the page when an individual searches for a keyword that matches your industry. In the example shown below, you will notice the individual has typed “Asian restaurants San Francisco.”

The Business Case

Another way Google Boost can help (or hurt)

If you take a better look at the Google Boost ad, you will notice five yellow stars. By now, most Internet users are familiar with the yellow stars and can quickly associate that with reviews. The following report performed by Kudzu.com tries to show how important consumer-generated media (CGM or in layman terms reviews) really is.

When 600 users were surveyed in December 2008:

86% of shoppers said product evaluations and reviews influenced their purchasing decisions.

Of those 3,000 conversion focused users, 2,820 – 2,910 are searching online for your product / service before setting foot into your store. Of the 2,820 – 2,910 visitors 2,425 – 2,502 are allowing reviews to influence their purchasing decision.

So, if you start getting reviews that are negative it may be wise to hire someone who takes care of your online reputation management. It is also a good move to give some perk to customers who choose to give your business feedback / review online.

Why Google Boost then for this audience segment?

I would like to expand on point #6 because it is 100% necessary to have one when targeting online shoppers. In the previously shown screenshot,  the UVP is that they use, farm-fresh ingredients.

Let’s assume the example business we own is a car repair shop. There are five competitors who will most likely rank within the top half of the Google page when the user searches for “car repair in Raleigh.”  Having your Google Boost ad say, “Car Repair Shop located in Raleigh.” is less effective than delivering a clear UVP such as, “Car Repair Shop with Competitor Price Matching.”

Oh…nobody trusts pay-per-click…right?

Takeaways

• If you are a local business who relies on customers, I’d recommend getting started today.
• The pay per click market is growing. Google Boost is similar to a pay per click system and I maintain that it will have a high chance of growing alongside that market or turning into pay per click altogether.
• The majority of people making purchases are doing research online for local shops prior to the trip to the location.
• Have a Unique Value Proposition ready if you want to create a Google Boost advertisement.

Please feel free to comment with any questions or counter points.