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Meta Tags go Zombie

02 2008 Tuesday

By Robert Cerff in Featured

I’ve heard time and time again that Meta Tags are Dead� While this may ring true when it comes to gaining a good rank in the SERPs there are always two sides to every story. While it is accepted that this tag certainly isn�t going to aid your rankings, it could make a massive difference when it comes to searchers clicking through to your website.

The description meta tag is possibly the most overlooked marketing tool available to all webmasters and online marketers. Behind the title tag, which is displayed as your listing title in the search engine results page, the description is the first real taste of your website. Does this snippet best describe your flavour?

While many search engines can and do pull snippets from a variety of sources to describe your website/webpage they often fail to present a compelling reason to visit that page. These snippets often come from other directories that your website may be listed on, such as the Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org) or Yahoo!

In order to get the search engines to ignore the snippets from those directories, you will need to add the following line of code to your webpage, between the <head> and </head> tags:

The “noodp” command will stop the engine from returning the snippet from the Open Directory Project and the “noydir” command will stop the engine from returning the Yahoo! snippet.

Now the search engines should ignore these snippets and return the title and description as described on your webpage. Many overlook the true value of this. As many of our websites are real estate based, I’ll show you how this tag has been used to our benefit:

Previously:
<meta name=”description” content=”Exceptional Experienced Realtors with the Best Listings in the County” />

Updated:
<meta name=”description” content=”Townhouse For Sale in Suburb, City | USD 11 000 000 | as listed by Our Realtors” />

As you can see this will make a considerable difference to someone who is searching for “townhouse for sale in suburb” or even “house for sale in city.” This will assure the searcher that this page is indeed what they are looking for. In this case we’ve included the price but other information can be added such as the number of rooms or bathrooms. But I think you get the idea here.

Things to remember when writing a description:

Keep the tag short, the engines will cut it off if it’s too long;
Make sure the description actually matches the page content;
Make sure that each page has a unique description;
Try to include your keywords in the snippet. (This will increase the likeliness of Google returning your description as the snippet.)

A useful tip to remember is that the description doesn’t have to be a perfectly formatted sentence. As you can see from the example given I included the pipe break to break the description into different segments of information. This is where the savvy online marketers can really go to town. Include information relating to a special deal or any other compelling call to action. Often you can instill trust and even conclude a sale purely based on the value of that snippet. This is especially the case when the snippet is on a product page. By simply scanning the snippet, the visitor knows exactly what is listed, the price as well as any shipping conditions which may arise.

There are times when using a description is not advised. Such a case would be on large blogs, or any other page that contains long lists of unrelated topics. In this case it would be better to ignore the description tag. The reasoning behind this is that when returning the search results, the search engine will return a snippet from somewhere on the page that best relates to the search query. The drawback for this kind of search result however is that while the description may meet the query it may be difficult for the visitor to locate this snippet on the actual page. This may lead the visitor to conclude that the page is not relevant to their search.

Looking back on the subject topic, you may be surprised or even confused at my statement “Meta Tags Reach Zombie Mode.” While the description tag (or any other meta tag for that matter) might be dead when it comes to search engine rankings it can still be of great value when converting those rankings into a visit or sale. This may very well prove to be the next stage in the life cycle of meta tags – Zombie.

Author: Robert Cerff is a search engine analyst and marketing consultant for Prop Data Internet Solutions. He has ten years experience in e-commerce, online marketing and web development. http://www.propdata.co.za

SEO Marketing – Why Writing Valuable “Web Page Content” is Worth it!

02 2008 Monday

By Jeffrey Smith in Featured

If you want your business to thrive online, then using search engines for advertising and marketing is mandatory for optimal visibility. The real question is how much can you afford to spend? and how cost-effective is the medium for producing traffic and conversion?

Let Search Engines Work “For You” Not “Against You”

Looking at the function of search engines, they serve to scout the web and retrieve and index relevant pages for visitors based on related semantic or topical queries (a.k.a keywords). Understanding this, we know that words, (your content) plays a major role in this process and is one of the key metrics that determines where your pages rank as a result.

Focus on producing causes and effects follow naturally.

By addressing the root cause (the content) rather than being preoccupied by surface level effects (the rankings), you can groom your pages for success based on the intrinsic topics of your web page content. Relevance is one of the main factors that determines which sites “stand out” and get promoted to the top 10 positions in search engines. Regardless of the industry, one thing is certain among online industry leaders, “great content” is the foundation.

Whether you meet the criteria deliberately (as a result of SEO) or accidentally, at the end of the day the results are algorithmic. Instead of dueling with a competitor one keyword at a time which only encompasses short-term positioning, think about optimizing the entire niche as a whole instead. Then by developing a solid content development strategy, you can systematically research potential keywords or traffic patterns and tailor web page content and links to acquire a dominant position of authority for those phrases.

There is something to be said about patience, planning and strategic execution. Instead of taking the dog chasing their tail approach to SEO and acquisition of keywords and losing focus (and market share) chasing a narrow range of phrases. On the contrary, if you scale all of your efforts to accommodate the rites of passage and focus on quality themed topics, it’s only a matter of time “before search engines cannot help but promote your site” in multiple top 10 results due to the relevancy and stature of your pages (like a mini Wiki, if created properly).

When Keywords Stem Your Content Wins

The premise behind one of the most prominent search engine ranking phenomenon is called (keyword stemming). This occurs when semantic relationships between the keywords spill over and instead of ranking for 10 phrases, now you rank for 20, 30, 40 keywords and so on. This is a boon, since increased traffic an visibility are the result. Not to mention this is naturally occurring phenomenon.

This aspect of the search algorithm dictates that once a website (as a correlation of having themed content) manages to make an impact and garner a degree of traffic & links (which can be hastened by a Stumble, a Digg or a link from an authority site, etc.) it essentially can be fast-tracked into authority status and get the rest of the pages in that site on the map (into the search index with recommendations). What used to take years, can be done in a mere fraction of the time (I have seen instances in as short as 3-4 months) and the site in question virtually ranks for keywords that only appear sparsely on the related content (and higher for a range of keywords that appear more frequently).

Traffic is a metric that equals popularity and this when combined with other known factors for elevating site authority in a niche are ultimately what can escalate your pages from not in the top 1000 search results, to the top 20 or top 10 pages respectively for specific “exact match phrases” as well as their distant “long-tail” cousins.

If cost is a factor and long-term results are important to your search engine positioning strategy, then note that one of the most effective and ethical ways to rank for a competitive or moderately competitive phrases is to incorporate them into your website infrastructure (in a way that search engines understand) through strong internal links and external links from high places for starters.

Once the elements are in place, you must promote that content (so each page can act as it’s own mini-site in essence) and nurture and develop the relationships between those pages into a cohesive knowledge base so that your site is tagged as an authority. For those of you who don’t enjoy composing content, there is a solution, hire a copywriter to do it for you, preferably one who is knowledgeable about keyword density, the appropriate use of tags, relative positioning of grouping keywords and overall delivery (since it has to be encouraging for human visitors to promote conversion).

Why Pay Per Click and Put your Eggs in One basket?

Say for example you were involved in an industry and you opted to use the search engine marketing approach and invest a portion of your sales proceeds every month into PPC (pay per click advertising). Once those clicks are reached, they just dip into your account to refresh the funds and as long as you keep paying, they keep sending traffic your way (at a price per click). So essentially your business model is dependent on that marketing method alone for sustenance. This is definitely not in your best interests for diversifying your link portfolio and only increases your dependence and increases your risk in the advent that something undermines that method such as price.

Yet on the other hand, through performing a function as simple as creating a blog, writing a post or series of posts on topics that relate to your industry (which should roll off the tip of your tongue) this provide an anchor point (for your site) so you can build links back to to elevate those articles and posts organically in search engines.

Renting or Owning? You Decide

You can use the analogy of renting vs. owning from the perspective of real estate. Why invest money in PPC solely, when you could be gaining a return on your short term investments in the long run from utilizing organic optimization coupled with content to systematically increase traffic. The only requirement is patience, quality link development and link building services and promotion if you apply savvy marketing fundamentals known for rousing visitors to act.

Trust is the deciding factor for many to take action (make a phone call, IMS or fill out a contact form), and what better way to gain trust and leads than by housing a formidable range of content that essentially would provide answers to those seeking your expertise in the first place (within your own site).

To say that this is a much stronger selling point than just seeing an advertisement floating around the “hey I am paying for this” Sponsored section, it may as well be a press release. Not to say that using press releases are not part of a larger strategy, but people rarely use a blurb alone to make an informed decision. Once something grabs your attention, the tendency is to dig deeper into the offer by visiting the site, looking at the company profile, other supporting pages, etc. to assure them that they are making an informed decision. This is where your fresh new custom content comes into play.

Which is more Cost-Effective? SEO Copywriting or PPC?

By writing a plethora of topically themed series of articles and posts (then promoting them accordingly, through RSS, social media and building links) you are essentially insuring your future search engine visibility as a result (because search engines love valuable content) in fact they can’t get enough of it. So before you go out and drop a few hundred, a few thousand or few hundred thousand dollars a year on pay per click (you know who you are), consider a tried and true route for building equity in your brand, one page at a time through investing in quality content which can sell on your behalf as a result of the merit and degree of expertise it shares with all who read it.

Once you realize that you can scale and multiply this effect and put your link building, your public relations, your niche authority position and your promotion on the same page, like a symphony if you will. Then you have just graduated from the logic of PPC dependency to using a formulae for developing an authority website which is the forerunner to successful online marketing campaign.

It isn’t about how many top 10 rankings you have, but how many hundreds or thousands you can create as a result of your content development strategy and subsequent relationship with search engines who are insatiably hungry for quality coupled with relevant traffic and promotion to seal the deal (which is your endorsement).

Author: Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Company http://www.seodesignsolutions.com. He has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies to individuals involved in online business.

10 Simple Ways to Generate Buzz & Word-of-Mouth Part 2

02 2008 Monday

By Andy MacDonald in Featured

Yesterday i started off this series of articles with getting the terminology of Buzz & Word-of-Mouth Marketing Correct, and seeing what the power of Buzz marketing can do for your business. Today we are going to look at some word-of-mouth success stories, and how you can put them to use for your own business. You also need to watch out for negative buzz, and how to avoid it. So without further a due. Let’s get started.

Examining word-of-mouth marketing success stories

You can find plenty of real-world examples showing how successful word-of-mouth promotion can be. You probably have even experienced it as a consumer. In order to launch your own word-of-mouth campaign, you can glean some valuable tips by first looking at the success stories of others.

Emanuel Rosen describes a broad spectrum of these successes in his book The Anatomy of Buzz. Rosen describes how buzz was completely and absolutely responsible for consumer awareness of a software product he was involved with (called Endnote, a program to help academics footnote their sources more easily, to meet different guidelines without having to re-type each source). He was able to track consumer awareness to buzz (something he considers synonymous with word of mouth) because the company hadn’t done any marketing or advertising or publicity when people started to call and ask about it. In fact, the product wasn’t even available when the company received its first order! But the company had done a sneak preview locally, and word spread about it nationally. That first order came in from 3,000 miles away.

Word of mouth has been responsible for the success of other high-tech products as well. But it’s not only the geeks in the world of computer technology who buzz about a product; it happens in the larger world, too. When was the first time you considered getting an MP3 player or a PDA? For most people, these gadgets became enticing only after hearing a friend or coworker rave about his new toy.

How many people make travel and vacation plans based on what people they know recommend or buy cars because of buzz about a particular style? How many times have you gone to the movies based on what your friends are talking about or recommend — often, even when you had no interest in a particular movie until people we know start buzzing about it? For example, remember The Crying Game? The Sixth Sense? And The Blair Witch Project? All of those movies benefited from buzz and word-of-mouth marketing.

Books are another typical product that benefit from great word of mouth. In fact, book publicists typically send a copy of a new book to a targeted list of “big mouths” whom they know will talk up a book that they enjoyed. To book publishers, being a big mouth isn’t a bad thing at all. Those people know a lot of people, they talk to many people regularly, they’re free with their opinions, and people listen to what they say and what they recommend. Big mouths spread the word about a new book, and they can help it get noticed and sell — which is increasingly tough to do given the enormous number of new books that are published every year.

You may be surprised at the success stories of many titles you’re familiar with. I remember how buzz contributed to the success of one such book: Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. And Malcolm Gladwell, in his book The Tipping Point, writes about another book that caused a sensation: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells. Interestingly, word of mouth was responsible for the enormous success of each book, but the buzz on the two books happened in very different ways: One was top-down, and the other was bottom-up.

In the case of Cold Mountain, the buzz was driven from the top-down. The book started to sell as soon as it was published, but it became a bestseller because the publisher wrote personal letters to key booksellers and sent copies to people he thought would be key readers (and therefore had big mouths).

In the case of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, the book didn’t sell particularly well at first. It got a few good reviews and sold a modestly successful number of copies in the original hardcover edition. When the book came out in paperback, though, the author noticed that groups of women would come to bookstores to have her sign their copies, and they were buying several copies of the book for their friends. What had happened was that readers had identified with the theme of the book and were reading it in bookclubs and other communities, and those communities started to buzz. That word-of-mouth groundswell caused the book to sell 2.5 million copies.

Beware of negative buzz!

Warning: A product can also be affected adversely by negative buzz. Remember the problem with Intel’s Pentium chip, back in the early 1990s? Someone found a small error in the chip, and news about it spread furiously fast on the Internet — so fast that Intel couldn’t contain it and didn’t remedy it fast enough. That negative buzz cost the company $475 million in write-offs — but it offered a great lesson in what to do and what not to do when someone discovers a weakness in your product or service.

Tip: Keep in mind the old adage that a happy customer may recommend your product or service or store to someone else, but an unhappy customer will definitely complain about you to at least three people. The power and speed of the Internet have increased that nightmare scenario exponentially. Do your best to keep your customers happy — no matter what.

In tomorrows post, i will throwing some ideas around on how to generate buzz for your business or website, hiring the right people to promote your product or service, and taking advantage of celebrity endorsements.

Author: Andy MacDonald, CEO of Swift Media UK, a website design & search marketing company. For daily tips on Blogging, Marketing, SEO & Making Money Online, Checkout our SEO & Marketing Tips for Webmasters blog or Subscribe by RSS.

7 Tips to a High Ranking Site

02 2008 Monday

By Michael Goodchild in Featured

So you would like your site to rank higher in the search engines. Below are some tips to help you achieve your goal.

1. Before building your website decide on which keywords you want the site to rank high for. Keywords are words or phrases that people type into search engines to find websites. Your keywords need to be related to your product or service so that you get targeted traffic ( There is no point in having “buy flowers online” as a keyword if you sell “houses”) Your keywords should also have as many people searching for the keyword and as fewer websites competing for the high rankings. I would not get overly worried about this. There are several tools out there to help (Just google “Keyword Effectiveness”) but I would concentrate more on the relevance of your keywords.

2. Once you have decided on your keywords you can start to build your site. The look of the site needs to be good to convert visitors into customers but will not help with getting a higher ranking. I would concentrate on getting a high-ranking site and then worry about the look and feel of the site later. (There is no point in having a site that looks wonderful if nobody can find it and it therefore has no visitors). Remember when you start to build your site that what the search engines are looking for is content. The content you have also needs to be rich with your keywords.

3. A very common mistake people make is the links between pages on their own site. The links need to be “spider friendly” i.e. a spider needs to be able to follow them easily. A graphic button with a rollover effect using an active X control might make the site look wonderful but a spider will be able to follow a text link far easier. This is important, as unless the spider can follow the links only your Index page is likely to be included in the search engine.

4. There are certain important elements of your site that can be added after the site is built. Title Tag – H1 Header Tag – Keywords – Meta Description. All of these should include your most important keywords and phrases. Your Meta Description should be a short paragraph about your site including your keywords and phrases in the text. It should also encourage people to take a look at your site.

5. Alt Image Tags – These are tags that you attach to an image so that when the mouse hovers over an image the text is displayed. So any images on your site should have Alt Image Tags that are rich with your keywords and phrases.

6. Links – One of the ways that a search engine decides which pages are to be located at the top of the rankings or be a higher ranking page is that it looks at the links that are pointing towards the site. It is not just the number of links but also the relevancy of the links and the type of links that point to the site. Also the type of site that is linking to your site is important. In other words a text link from a high-ranking site that uses your keywords in the link is a far more important link that a picture link without keywords from a low ranking site. – So you want to have as many relevant links from high-ranking sites as you can. There are several ways to achieve this and the more links that you have the more important the search engines will believe your site to be and therefore the higher your site will be ranked in the search engines. The search engines are working on the presumption that if you have lots of high ranking sites that want to have a link to your site then your site must have some valuable content otherwise they would not want to link to it and potentially send their visitors onto another site.

7. You can also help to keep your site high in the rankings by adding new content to your site and updating the pages as the search engines are looking for current content. Not a site that has been built and just left.

Once you have built your site and got some links to it you will need to tell the search engines about it (This is called submitting your site). You can manually submit your site to the search engines but there are several good programmes you can buy to do this for you. Just do your homework before you decide which one to use. ( I use addwebb but its quite expensive)

If this all seems a lot of hard work to get your site ranked – It is! – But if you use the tips above then you will be on the right track. Remember if it were easy everybody would be doing it!

Author: The easy way to make money online with this incredible online business opportunity make $5000 per WEEK with no Meetings or Cold Calling prospects, all you have to do is get some traffic to your site. The system does the rest! – For every sale you make $1000.

SEO Marketing – Why Writing Valuable “Web Page Content” is Worth it!

02 2008 Monday

By Jeffrey Smith in Featured

Let Search Engines Work “For You” Not “Against You”

Focus on producing causes and effects follow naturally.

When Keywords Stem Your Content Wins

Why Pay Per Click and Put your Eggs in One basket?

Renting or Owning? You Decide

Which is more Cost-Effective? SEO Copywriting or PPC?

Author: Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Company http://www.seodesignsolutions.com. He has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies to individuals involved in online business.

Reap Daily Profits from Your AdSense Farm

02 2008 Saturday

By Michael Small in Featured

Hello. My name is Mike Small and I have been an SEO consultant for about ten years. In October of 2007 I published an article about “AdSense Farming.” Since writing that article I have received over 100 emails from readers asking for a bit more on the subject. I just got one last night in fact, so I figured I’d add a little more search engine optimization flavor to the concept of making money with AdSense. But before I begin I would like to stress that this is not a method to get rich quick. I make anywhere from $50 to $150 per month/per site that I have built using this information. Of course it only costs about $1 and a half hour (one time) to build each one, so the profits are quite nice. So, here we go…

Over the past couple years I’ve heard hundreds, if not thousands of stories about people who got rich from Google AdSense. It seems strange that I’ve never actually met one. It feels almost like an urban legend in the making; “I know a guy who knows a guy who made a killing on AdSense.” Kind of strange, don’t you think?

Do you ever feel like the reality of big profit is close but just beyond your grasp? Yeah; so did I. The good news is; it’s not your fault. We are simply trying to attain the dream that some “friends of friends” have already attained. We’ve bought the so called “wealth building” products that promised us an overnight fortune, but for some reason we never made the big bucks. To be honest this really made me question myself. If they can do it, why can’t I? Then I realized that making money from AdSense is a lot like farming. Some crops (or keywords) yield a higher price than others and the more fields you have planted, the better your chances of making good money.

Of course, in this case your “field” is just a website, which can be had at a cost of next to nothing. So, all-in-all, even small profits are pretty much all profit. A few months ago I tried to apply this idea to the real world. And the results were quite nice. Within two weeks I was making an average of $3.50 per day; about $105 a month, per site. It doesn’t sound like a lot but for a one-time fee of $99 I can host up to 100 AdSense farms, forever. The hosting company even supplies free Web content that gets a ton of traffic for me. That’s free traffic clicking my AdSense links month after month, every single month.

So, how do you get started? It’s really easy and very inexpensive. I’ll show you exactly how I did it, step-by-step.

First, if you don’t already have one, sign up for a free Adsense account at http://www.google.com/adsense. But do NOT get your ad code yet. I have some tips that can triple your response rates – and income.

Next, sign up with http://www.WhyParkWeb.com or a similar service. Just be sure to pick one that can create content rich, search engine optimized site for you automatically. That’s how you make your AdSense money. Please Note: When I registered for this service it was $99 and would let you have 100 automatically created websites – forever.

If you go decide to go for it, here are some tips from a 10 year veteran search engine optimization specialist that will put your sites over the top!

Okay, let’s do this by the numbers…

#1 Find the best keywords

Google gets more searches than any other search engine so let’s peek into their database, shall we? Check out https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and type in any keyword or phrase you can think of that you believe your target audience is looking for. Not only will it give you tons of data on that and related keywords, it will also provide “Additional Keywords to Consider”, which is a section at the bottom of the page.

Try to use specific keyword phrases whenever possible. For example, if you are optimizing for a flower store, instead of “flowers” try “send flowers.” Now refine that a bit to reflect how people actually speak (“I am sending flowers.”) and try see what “sending flowers” gets you. WOW! As it turns out, “sending flowers” has very little competition and is extremely popular.

#2 Write a killer title Google loves

Take your most important specific and general keyword phrases and put them together, specific first; general second. Let’s use “sending flowers” and “flowers”. Now separate the keywords or phrases by a pipe (that vertical key over the Enter/Return key). We now have “sending flowers | flowers”. Now go back and grab one or two more relevant keywords like “wedding flowers” and “Mothers Day” and combine them like this “sending flowers | flowers for weddings, Mothers Day and more”.

Now you’ve covered all your bases and build a fantastic keyword rich title that won’t look like keyword spamming. You can also change the Mothers Day to Valentines Day, Easter, as needed.

#3 Write a META description that gets you noticed

This is important. Not only can this tip alone get you ahead of most competitors, but it’s also what readers see of your site before they decide to visit. You need to write something for people, but that search engines will like. Don’t worry. It’s a lot easier than it sounds.

Take all of your keywords and line them up in order of importance. Since “sending flowers” gets more searches than any other, let’s start there and use the same logic for the rest. Now we have, in order, “sending flowers”, “flowers”, “wedding flowers”, and “Mothers Day.” Be sure to improve your keyword prominence (relevance based on position) by using your best keyword within the first few words of the description, like this: “Sending flowers has never been easier. Here you will find inside tips on the least expensive ways to send the freshest wedding flowers, Mothers Day arrangements or whatever else you need.”

As you can see, we used all of our keywords without overloading the text and broke it up a little by adding some detail. It works great! Just try to keep the description at or under 250 characters (including spaces).

#4 Add great content

Why Park does 99% of the work for you. All you have to do is enter your keywords into the article finder provided by the “Research Your Keywords” link (located beside the keywords box.)

Without using any imagination at all, I found 172 articles in a few seconds…

sending flowers – 5 flowers – 151 wedding flowers – 16

Total Articles: 172

Add “roses” and get another 59! That’s 231 articles in 10 seconds. You get the idea – more general related keywords can take you over the top and give you a huge, content-rich search engine friendly site, in seconds!

#5 Use the best-pulling AdSense ad style and color combination

My click-through rate (CTR) tripled when I switched to this format.

Select ad size 336 x 280. If that’s too big, try 300 x 250. And try to make your ad border and ad background colors the same as your Website’s background color. It helps it blend in and take away some of the “advertisement” feel. It’s also usually best to go with the standard blue hyperlink color for the actual links.

#6 Get submitted to major search engines fast and free

I use this place all the time. They submit your site to 40 search engines instantly, for free http://www.submitexpress.com/.

You’re ready! You can do this – Good luck!

Author: Former Information Technology Manager for Harvard University, Michael Small is the author of several well-known search engine optimization books including the SEO Answer Book – http://www.SeoAnswerBook.net

10 Simple Ways to Generate Buzz & Word-of-Mouth Part 1

02 2008 Friday

By Andy MacDonald in Featured

Advertising today not only includes the paid placement of marketing messages but also some free methods of getting your message out. Buzz and word-of-mouth marketing fit into this category — though you can also spend money to create buzz or great word of mouth. . In this 4 part article over the next few days, I explain what you need to know about these tactics and show you examples of how they work in the real world so you can put them to work for your own business. Just ensure that when you plan and implement your marketing strategy, you avoid these common marketing mistakes.

Getting the Terminology Straight

Just in case you’re still thinking that word-of-mouth marketing isn’t a legitimate, controllable, manageable approach to promoting your product or service, think again. An entire professional association is devoted to word-of-mouth marketing, called the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, or WOMMA — a hilariously memorable acronym.

More important, though, is the fact that WOMMA consists of corporate members only (not individuals), which means that big companies are just as interested in word-of-mouth marketing as small businesses and solo entrepreneurs. For example, just look at a few of the companies that are members of WOMMA — the A&E TV network, Coca-Cola, Dell computers, General Motors, Yahoo!, and Zondervan religious publishing.

In the marketing world, Acronym’s and Jargon are thrown around all over the place, yet there are some subtle yet important differences between recent marketing terms, which I share with you here:

Word of mouth: The act of consumers providing information to other consumers.
Word-of-mouth marketing: Giving people a reason to talk about your products and services and making it easier for that conversation to take place.
Buzz marketing: Using high-profile entertainment or news to get people to talk about your brand.
Viral marketing: Creating entertaining or informative messages that are designed to be passed along in an exponential fashion, often electronically or by e-mail.

Seeing the Power of Word of Mouth

Many advertising, publicity, and marketing experts believe that word-of-mouth marketing is the most powerful type of exposure that you can get for your product, service, business, or store. After all, who are you most likely to believe? A paid advertisement, featuring an actor who earns his fee by reciting a script written by a salaried copywriter working for a hired ad agency? Or the unsolicited suggestion by one of your friends that “you should see this movie; you’ll love it!” or “buy that car; it’s really reliable,” or “try this restaurant, or gift shop, or dry cleaner, or face cream, or sneaker, or computer, or cell phone”?

Obviously, you’re more likely to listen to your friend. After all, she hasn’t been paid to recommend that product or business. She gains nothing if you do or don’t try it. She’s simply telling you what she loves or appreciates — and that’s a powerful endorsement for any business. Now all you have to do is get those powerful endorsements!

In tomorrow’s post, I offer up a few examples of how word of mouth has worked effectively, for positive business results — and I show you how to prevent the opposite: negative buzz. For celebrities, it may be true that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” but the same isn’t true of businesses!

In the next post, we look at ‘Examining word-of-mouth marketing success stories’ Do you have a particularly good method of creating buzz marketing, or word-of-mouth publicity which works well? Or even buzz marketing which doesn’t work so well. Then let me know by leaving a comment, and i may well include it in one of the follow-up articles to this series.

Survival in the SERPs – Surveying, Scouting & Defense

02 2008 Friday

By Jeffrey Smith in Featured

There is something to using distinct visual analogies to illustrate parallels between search engines (the jungle), traffic (information foragers), competition (predators) and survival in the algorithmic food chain.

Just like a jungle, survival in the SERPs can be tricky. The uncertainty of search engine algorithms, the survival based impulses that by default comprise 97% of the web pages at large (like playing capture the flag) or a boobie-trap where one step on the wrong twig and you could be consumed, penalized, suppressed, catapulted or removed from the top 10 based on your SEO survival skills, your resourcefulness or your experience in the jungle.

They say getting there is half the battle, in the search engine result pages, the same holds true. The three critical areas of an optimization campaign are; Research & Identification, Scouting and Reconnaissance & Acquisition and Defense.

Research & Identification – surveying the terrain and tailoring the site or pages to represent your best interests in the SERPS. Things like mastering your environment (your industry or niche) and adapting to the requirements allows you to flourish as a result of nurturing the appropriate elements. In this instance, fresh content, relevant information and a compelling writing style that incites action are one of the key ingredients to survival and authority.
Scouting and Reconnaissance – Finding which content has the greatest impact. The primary objective of content is to be fruitful, multiple (it’s exposure that is) and act as a guide back to the base for those foraging information in the jungle (clicking search results or following a link back to your site). While some may think of this as link bait, in reality it is branding and saturation of your niche with carefully crafted intricately woven pieces of information that reinforce a particular theme of thought. The more specialized the content, the higher the elevation on can achieve in social, peer and practical circles.
Acquisition and Defense – You can use a wide variety of methods to acquire a high ranking search engine position, a few that are worth noting such as (a) a massive content management strategy (b) a high utilization of deep links from authority sites developed strategically over time (c) a combination of internal link architecture and aging domain and pivotal use of web 2.0 properties to build traffic and visibility for your content. Regardless of which strategy or combination of strategies you use, maintaining a healthy shelf life in the SERPs is the key. Which means that once you make it to the top, you have to keep feeding your pages a healthy amount of link juice to keep them floating in the top 20 and top 10 respective positions as relevant conclusions for those seeking information on your subject.

The Importance of SEO Defense

During the first phase a site is most vulnerable, and often times without the proper assessment, you may give up right before achieving keyword nirvana and placing the cherry on top of your keyword quest.

With so many potential factors that can influence a favorable outcome in search engines, the more pages, i.e. opportunities you have surrounding a topic, the higher the probability that your target audience will act on it.

As part of a winning content management strategy, administering a diverse range of topical information does more than just blanket a market with link-bait. For example, when you create a post the idea is (1) it should be written to serve a need (2) it should be appealing enough to create an initial buzz as well as survive in the SERPs over time.

As long as you cover your bases, and eventually invoke link insurance (build links to your links to augment positioning) you are creating a dynamic form of equity that can provide sustenance to your business model (and essentially survive the challenges of the SERPs).

Strategies For Quickly Building an Audience with Social Media

02 2008 Friday

By Gary Smith in Featured

The Web 2.0 social media revolution is in full steam. Are people finding your website?

As an entrepreneur, how do you make your business website stand out amongst 435 million other websites and more than 1 million blogs competing for your audience’s attention?

It’s not as hard as you might think.

To begin, let’s look at the demographics of Web 2.0 social networking sites, Myspace.com, Facebook and YouTube.com. This will give you an idea on how to position your message in the Web 2.0 World.

The Web 2.0 Social Networking Revolution

Web 2.0 is a real revolution on the Internet. And these aren’t just college kids…

62% of MySpace visitors are older than 25 (40% are 35+), and 83% are making over $30,000 a year. Nineteen percent (19%) are making $100,000 and up…
On Facebook.com 46% are over 25 and 34% are 35+, but they’ve got deep pockets. Eighty-eight percent (88%) make more than $30,000 and twenty-three percent (23%) make $100,000 or more.

In the years ahead these numbers will get ridiculous…

Social media giant Facebook is currently ADDING a million 25+ (non-student) adults per week to their rosters. That’s 52 million new users a year.
YouTube.com gets over 50 million unique visitors per month. That equals over half a billion a year.
Facebook and MySpace have the equal daily traffic of Google. Experts predict within the next year they will DOUBLE the daily traffic of Google search.

So your prospects are there. The traffic is there. The spending power is there. So NOW is the time you want to establish your presence on the social networking websites.

Web 2.0 Strategy: Why You Should Be a Maven, Not a Marketer

As a website owner, how should you position your message in the Web 2.0 world?

The increasingly savvy buying public will quickly shun marketers. Internet readers want information from the Internet. They don’t want advertising, marketing, or a “pitch”.

According to Schefren in his Attention Age Doctrine, the solution is to become a social media “Maven”.

A Maven is a trusted authority, like a friend, on the social media websites. As you gain their trust, your audience will return to you over and over again wanting to invest in your advice.

Five Steps to Becoming a Social Media Maven

Social Media Maven Step 1: Get in the Game

Begin blogging immediately. Create a video explaining how to solve a problem and put it on YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook with links back to your main website. Just those two things alone will establish more Web 2.0 presence than 90% of your competition.

Social Media Maven Step 2: Share your passion

Build your Web 2.0 website around your passions. Thirty-two year old Gary Vaynerchuk transformed his wine knowledge to his video blog, http://Tv.Winelibrary.com. It now has thousands of subscribers and does $50 million dollars a year in wine sales.

Social Media Maven Step 3: Be Controversial

Your audience will remember you more when you challenge the status quo. Controversy sells. Think like the tabloids and the local news channels here. For example, Web 2.0 Business Coach Rich Schefren challenges traditional marketing wisdom in each release of his Attention Age Doctrine special reports at www.attentionage.net/doctrine

Social Media Maven Step 4: Create World Class Content

You will drive repeat traffic to your website by offering top notch “how to” information. Gary’s wine tastings are highly educational on the benefits of wine, how to cook with wine, and how to choose a wine for your special occasion. Rich’s reports teach Web 2.0 marketing principles.

Remember, as soon as your audience feels that you are “pitching” them, you’ve lost them. So provide content not advertising.

Social Media Maven Step 5: Engage in the Conversation

Web 2.0 is a dialogue not a monologue. Internet businesses profit more when they observe and listen to their communities first before they broadcast their messages. Savvy mavens such as Gary and Rich encourage their audience to ask questions. The answers to these questions then become part of their user-generated content.

How Marketing in a Web 2.0 Social Media Environment Is Exciting.

Visualize it like a big radio or television station or movie screen where you’re the star. You’re building a fan base so you need to entertain, inform, and deliver consistently for your audience.

You have more publishing power at your fingertips right now than at any time in history.

So use it. Share your passions. Reveal your trials and tribulations. Tell your story. And, watch how quickly your audience builds.

Author: Master Copywriter, Gary Smith (www.rightbraincopy.com) has taught thousands of entrepreneurs how to write copy that persuades, motivates and inspires prospects to buy. He strongly suggests using Web 2.0 Internet Marketing Strategies revealed in Richard Schefren’s Attention Age Doctrine. Get it now for FREE at: http://www.attentionage.com/doctrine & discover never-before-revealed Web 2.0 tools and techniques to win in the Attention Age.

SEO’s Unite! our future depends on it!

02 2008 Thursday

By Jennifer Osborne in Featured

The feds seem pretty hesitant to say th “R” word.

But between the sub prime crisis, the credit crunch and plummeting stock markets; you and I both know that it’s not a question of “if” a recession going to hit the US but “when?”

Recession is something that the search industry rarely talk about . . . most of us are currently experiencing a period of tremendous boom.

Our biggest constraint to growth is not finding new clients, it’s finding and training new SEO’s. Where optimizing a site might have cost $350 in the 90’s, now we see SEO’s charge $350 per hour, some even more.

SEO’s won’t be impacted by the recession

Whhaaatttt?

If our clients are affected by the recession then we will be too. Client decisions will be made using different criteria and this will impact us. But it won’t stop there, the industry as we know it is on the verge of a major shift.

Here’s how it’s going to play out…

The Good

A recession is going to drive increased demand for SEO.

It’s counter intuitive but it’s true. When a recession hits companies they respond by reducing costs. The first budgets to be hit are always Marketing and IT (remember the early 00’s?).

When Marketing budgets are decreased, executives will make difficult budgetary decisions based on metrics. All of those Clicks, Conversions and Measurable ROI that companies are currently experiencing with Search, is going to way heavy on their decisions. Much heavier than traditional marketing metrics of Impressions and Branding.

When faced with difficult choices, advertisers will shift their budgets to the mediums that they can measure.

When IT budgets are decreased, executives will trim IT budgets. Often this means an increase in outsourcing. The in-house SEO’s role will change from being the guy to “do” the work; to being the guy to “manage” the work (or the relationship with the outside vendors).

For the SEO shop, it means an HUGE increase in demand.

The Bad

A recession is going to drive increased competition which in turn will create a skilled labor shortage.

Traditional advertising shops are going to have to replace lost profits. Some will get into Search because the want to take control of the adversing dollars back. If they become the “search experts” they can minimize the growth and steer advertising dollars back to their comfort zone.

Others will have true vision. They will see Search for it’s full potential and embrace it. These forward thinking companies will help to grow the search industry.

For some it’s a natural fit. For others (lured into the lucrative search market merely as another way to grow) not so much… ergo, Walmart.

Regardless of motivation or sincerity, the result will be the same. An increased demand for experienced SEO Professionals.

Except,

there are no major barriers to entry into SEO.

Anyone can call themselves an SEO and there is no governing body (association) to dispute this. We have no formal accreditation process or certificates.

And this leaves our industry exposed…

The Ugly

Combine an increase in demand + a shortage in supply = a whole lot of bad SEO

What to do?

There are things that we can do as individual companies and there are things that we should do as an industry.

As an individual company we can…

1) Take a look at our reporting.

If metrics are going to be a Key Success Factor in the near future then improving upon your reporting now is crucial. I’m not just talking about putting together a slick power point presentation. I’m talking about becoming an evangelist for reporting.

Insist that your clients use analytics. Insist on defining what a conversion is and then figuring out how to measure it.

As a Professional SEO Firm you MUST be in a position to differentiate yourself from the UGLY SEO.

2) Review our talent acquisition and retention strategies.

Growing talent in-house will be critical. Do you have a apprenticeship program? Note: hiring a bunch of green SEO’s is not an apprenticeship program.

What about training? Spending time training others takes time away from actually doing the work. Can your work flows absorb the impact of mentoring on your Senior employees?

Growing in-house can be a huge strain on resources. It’s not a tactical decision, it’s a strategic investment.

As a cohesive industry we should……

wait a minute, we’re not a cohesive industry. but we could be…

SEO’s have what it takes to be a cohesive, powerful industry. We support the new guy by mentoring. We help each other out. We brainstorm together when the algorithms appear amiss.

The search industry has the spirit of cohesiveness. We simply lack organization. We are many singular voices.

But this is going to change. Big Business has their toe in the door.

When they come all the way in, they are going to make rampant changes. They’ll organize us. We’ll get our accreditation, but it will it be designed in Big Business’s favor and will probably be designed to keep the little guy out.

The search industry must unite and organize itself because if we don’t, someone is going to come along and do it for us.

Author: Jennifer Osborne writer and marketer for Search Engine People.

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