Aaron Wall provided some of his "secrets" to keyword research on the WordTracker blog. It's about ensuring you have developed the best possible seed list - because the final list is only as good as the seed list you start with. This goes pretty deep, so it is a good read for ideas on your next keyword research project.
http://learn.wordtracker.com/articles/keyword-inspiration-aaron-wall-of-seobookcom-shares-his-secrets-1/
Here's how online media releases (press releases) help your search engine optimization program:
We just completed a project for Wild Apricot redeveloping and relaunching their Membership Management Software web site. As part of a larger search marketing program we planned and wrote a media release announcing the re-launch of their site. We planned and optimized the content and links in the release for their ideal key phrases and distributed it through PR Web.
The goal of a search optimized online media release is a little different from a traditional media release. Traditional releases are intended solely to get the attention of journalists who might be able to write or air a story related to the release. Internet distributed releases can do that, too, but are also intended to be indexed and rank in the popular online news search engines (Google News, Yahoo News) so that consumers searching for news on the topic will find and read the releases directly. The other benefit of online distributed releases - the benefit that helps your search engine optimization program - are the links generated from the release.
Online media releases are generally made available through RSS feeds. There are thousands of web sites that filter and re-publish these feeds on their web site, frequently with the original links intact.
At the highest level of payment through PR Web, it is possible to insert many links into the content and control the link anchor text of each link. If you have well defined key phrases for your search marketing program, this is an ideal opportunity to get links out there on the net that point back to your site with the words you choose.
The final release targeted several high value phrases. The most important phrases to our search optimization campaign, such as membership database management, event management, and association management were linked to appropriate sections of the site using the link anchor text we wanted.
The results? A quick search in Google for a unique phrase in the release shows 350+ pages displaying the press release. A few examples can be found here, here, and here.
Google, Yahoo and Ask have come together to embrace a site map standard effective immediately. Microsoft promises to start using the standard later this year. Enhancements to the protocol were announced at Search Engine Strategies New York last week.
Information on the new XML protocol is available at sitemaps.org
Search Engine Watch has a good article covering the announcement.
Since the major engines are going to use this to assist in crawling the web, it makes sense to add this XML site map on your domain to help them index your content. We'll be adding it to all of our clients that contract us for search engine optimization.
If you are thinking of attending Search Engine Strategies New York, there is now a 20% discount coupon offered by Incisive Media. I will be using this next week to book my ticket. Check it out on the Google analytics blog here:
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2007/03/ses-new-york-2007-discount-coupon.html
Microsoft Outlook 2007 has a new feature called business contact manager, that among other things, allows you to send and track email marketing campaigns.
The obvious question for me, as the founder of an email marketing service, is will this enable users to do their own email marketing without using an outside EMSP (Email Marketing Service Provider)?
At closer inspection it appears to be a good solutions for salespeople sending small group messages to their clients, but is not something that a marketing department would want to be using, or even a small business managing their entire customer list.
Tracking
In the demo section about email tracking it shows only unsubscribed, bounce or delivered. There is no display of open, click, or forward. On the specifications page, it says that tracking requires a separate subscription to the listbuilder service. I am currently not aware of whether the list builder service is required to handle the unsubscribes and delivery tracking, whether it adds the open and click tracking, or whether tracking opens and clicks are even possible.
Costs
To get the basic email marketing features, you require Office Small Business 2007 or Office Professional 2007, not Office Standard 2007. Small business will run you $395 and 425 USD respectively at Amazom.com.
There is no mention of cost of the list builder subscription, and list builder stopped taking signups as of November 15th, 2006.
You may also need exchange server 2007. Here's what they do together.
Bandwidth and Processing Power
As soon as you start sending tens of thousands emails you are still going to run into the bandwidth and server processing issues that email marketing service providers take away for you. Many of our customers started with an in-house solution for marketing and moved away from it to use an outsourced EMSP because their in-house servers could not take the load. Once an email campaign went out, their server slowed to the point where office staff could no longer send and receive emails at an acceptable speed.
Graphics
Graphical emails will be created using the new Microsoft Word 2007 rendering engine, which I have previously posted about. Presumably this will render fine in other Outlook 2007 clients, but how the emails will look in webmail clients like Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo, and in other popular mail clients like Mozilla Thunderbird is your guess against mine.
Images have to be added as attachments, since there is apparently no way to edit the source code to add an image that is hosted on an outside server. This is going to be a certain flag for spam filters reducing the deliverability of messages. Another problem with sending images as attachments is that the file size of each message will increase enormously. Multiply this by thousands of messages and the bandwidth and processing problems I mentioned previously are that much worse. Both the sending of the messages, and the receiving on the other end will take far longer.
Not a solution for Marketing
Forbes magazine recently published a article on the Outlook bulk email solution, and said:
From an e-mail marketing perspective, Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager effectively solves yesterday's challenge: How to create and send bulk e-mails.
But today's e-mail marketing challenge encompasses much more: Cutting through the clutter, crafting a legal and effective message, managing subscribe and unsubscribe requests and tracking statistics.
Sending mass emails also requires ensuring that messages look like they should across a wide variety of platforms, which should still be left to professionals that know HTML and the idiosyncrasies of each platform.
As a wrap up on 2006 marketing, MarketingSherpa and ad:tech created a survey to ask online marketers what worked in 2006 and where they expected to spend their time, efforts and dollars in 2007:
What I find really interesting is that Email is both on the top of the list - and the bottom. House lists rank #2 in effectiveness, while rented lists are on the bottom. Our email marketing business is reflecting that trend, with more and interest being shown every day - in an industry that I was thinking was starting to mature.
Another business I thought was starting to mature was search engine optimization - yet SEO showed the biggest jump this year.
SEM (PPC) slipped slightly, surely due to increased click costs and the increasing fear of click-fraud. I believe staying away from the content network in Google is your biggest hedge against this. All of the recent interest in PPC is most likely what's driving the growing interest in SEO. Now that marketers see that search marketing really works, they want to find new ways of getting that golden targeted traffic from search engines without paying the crazy costs per click.
Overall, It's nice to be validated in that the three main focuses of our company line up perfectly with what works in online marketing. And, yes, that's by design.
I can't believe my ears. I am hopping mad!
Can it really be true? Microsoft - in the release of the new Outlook 2007 - has apparently decided to mess with Internet standards as only they can...
Ask yourself: What is the WORST possible thing Microsoft could do to make a mess of HTML email and ruin how it is going to look and work inside of email?
Answer: They could change the rendering engine to the most notoriously bad HTML tool on the planet - Microsoft Word.
As an email marketing service provider, all I can think about is the problems that this is going to cause our customers. We are going to have to figure out what this means to the hundreds - if not thousands - of email newsletter templates that have been tweaked to work well in different email clients, and then help people make changes to them to work in the new email environment. Just think of the millions of people in corporations that will naturally upgrade to the newest version, and then the follow up movement of all computer users to the new environment as they purchase new computers with the latest software built in.
If this is an important issue to you, CampaignMonitor has an excellent post on what these changes will mean to you.
If you want to see what this means to your email campaigns, Microsoft has an HTML validator for their new email client.
What are they thinking? The only thing that makes sense is that instead of supporting standards, they want to MAKE the standards. From a business perspective - with their monopolistic market share - it's a logical move to gain more control of the Internet.
Does that make them ... evil? I think that is an ethical/moral question that is up to each individual to decide for themselves.
Dmitry Buterin, President of Bonasource and Chief Apricot of WildApricot, the web site and membership database tool for non-profits and associations, wrote an excellent post on OneDegree yesterday on how to choose an SEO Company:
"In my experience, the best SEO companies are the ones which look at the whole picture - how SEO fits into overall online marketing strategy. (vs. narrowly looking at some technicalities of URL rewrites, meta-tags, keyword density etc.) Best SEO is also about balancing how content works for the user - vs. how it works for search engine (so conversion issues are given top priority)"
Dmitry is correct. SEO needs to be part of an overall marketing strategy. It can't just be one tactic that is applied without consideration for it's needs from and effects on the rest of the picture.
The rest of Dmitry's post goes on about the various other things you and an SEO company, should be considering. It's worthwhile to read the rest of his response to "Best in class SEO companies"
In addition to a list of points to consider, he goes on to write a glowing testimonial for me and my company. Thanks Dmitry!
Ralph Wilson's newsletter today brought a new term to the in the long tail discussion. I thought Tall neck was a cool addition - but now we have the "torso" (which I from now on choose to call the "Fat Torso").
The principles are perfectly sound - it describes where the real value keywords are for PPC campaigns:
It's not the tall neck, where all of the generic, one word, high traffic, sometimes very high priced keywords are. Those keywords are typically reserved for those with more money than brains.
It's also not necessarily the long tail, where you'll find thousands of three and four word highly targeted but infrequently searched words. These are great - don't get me wrong! It's just that on many of the phrases the trickle of traffic may not be worth the trouble.
It's the Fat Torso! The part in the middle with typically two word phrases that have a decent amount of traffic, a reasonable cost, and good targeting. Andrews suggestion is that most people don't spend enough time making the torso as fat as possible. He pushes us to think of all of the variations of your possible words. Have you really got them all???
All good (or at least great) PPC managers will know this, and revisit the list frequently to make sure, but Andrew Goodman just named it. Congratulations on coining a new term, Andrew.
The full article is here:
http://www.wilsonweb.com/paid-search/goodman-torso.htm
And wasn't I pleased to see that Andrew is from my very own city of Toronto, Canada!
Hey Andrew - if you are looking at your link reports or referring sites and come across this post, please drop me a line.
Ken Shafer interviews Josh and Dallas, founders of DreamHost, about their affiliate program. Some good candid insights here for those thinking of starting affiliate programs.
Key concepts are:
Emails deployed in July and August actually out-perform those deployed in September - even in the B2B industry! That's perhaps the most surprising item noted in this Email Trends Report Q3 2006 just referenced in ClickWeekly.
What I don't like about this report is that 'clicks' are measured as a percentage of open rate, vs. a percentage of delivery. I think this is a misleading number because it makes your click through rate appear far better than it is.
It is being reported as such because the author of the report uses ConstantContact, a service aimed at small businesses, and they choose to report it that way.
Read the full report here:
http://www.dmn.ca/Click/articles/vol101/vol101_b.htm
With the new slew of mobile devices out there, and the increasing availability of wireless Internet, mobile web access is growing by leaps and bounds.
As a web designer, it is great to see some standards being introduced by the good ol' W3 org.
Written for designers of Web sites and content management systems, these guidelines describe how to author Web content that works well on mobile devices:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/PR-mobile-bp-20061102/
Finally, PR companies are seeing the value in optimizing for the online news search engines:
We just optimized a release for a PR company that is working for a skin care company. This company found us through Google, looking for "Toronto news release optimization". (We are number three if you select 'pages from Canada'... hmmm, I'll have to take another look at that because we can definitely do better there.)
Anyways, this is how it worked:
The first thing we did was research on the 20 or 30 appropriate terms to do wit their press release. Most of the terms are searched less than 10 times per day. One is searched more that 3000 times per day. So we chose the top 3 most searched terms and optimized for those. The release went out yesterday and here are the ranking results so far:
Google.ca News:
"skin care" - position #7
"lip liner" - position #1
"anti-aging" - position #1
Yahoo.com news:
"Skincare" - position #1 and #2
"Lip liner" - position #1 and #2
"Lipstick" - position #4
"Anti-aging" - position #1, #2
I cannot seem to find it in Yahoo Canada yet, which is strange. We'll check again later today. The results overall look very good so far! With the strong search traffic on the terms we chose it should be a huge success. Let's see what the traffic numbers look like in a few days.
If you are sending press releases, I highly recommend news release optimization and submission to Google and Yahoo news. The last release we did for ourselves quadrupled our daily traffic for several days, and we got a few very good leads in the first few days.
Cool! I just checked the search rankings for Agito Internet Marketing for the first time in a few weeks and found these NEW #1 positions in Google:
Google.com:
toronto e-mail marketing company
toronto web analytics company
Google.ca:
toronto internet marketing company
toronto e-mail marketing company
toronto web analytics company
webtrends 8.0
I was just e-mailed a link to this video by Andy and Brad. I've so far only watched the first few minutes but it is real Gold. I'll review the whole thing soon, but for now - check it out yourself:
http://www.convertlinks.com/whitehatseo
I checked out Stundubl today and saw he posted a great article on the 12 different types of links and how to get them.
This is actually a more useful article than the 101 ways to get links (from SEO Book) that I blogged about the other day. Here's what I liked in Todd's article:
#1: Authority Links: Going through the Google directory in your niche - duh, what a great idea! I am shocked at myself for not trying this one. It sure beats searching for "keyword phrase + add url, add a site, submit link, submit site, etc". Not that the searching isn't a great method, but the directory method here offers some fast quick hit ideas.
#11: Comment and Profile links: Matt Cutts shows us a cool method of obtaining x-ray vision for no-follow links (It's a hack for Firefox). So it makes sense to use this if you are big on commenting on blogs (a great way to build profile and get backlinks to your blog.)
The other ideas were pretty straightforward, but kudos to Todd for creating a no-nonsense list of the 12 different types of links.
I've been finding more and SEO / Internet marketing tools on sites these days, so just for fun I've decided to start a list. I've named this post "Part One" because I am sure there are PLENTY more out there, and I don't want to make this first post an exhaustive list. Here goes:
http://www.urltrends.com
Interesting trending idea upgrade for them to make some money.
http://www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester/
Linkhounds seems to be trying to create an all over linking resource site. Cool that their software is open-source. This requires some more looking in to.
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/
Keyword ranking trending. Requires free login, but nice charts.
http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm
Nice link popularity, search engine saturation and keyword ranking tools with many industry benchmarks.
http://www.submitexpress.com/tools.html
Really cool meta tag checker that shows keyword density and tag relevance to page content.
http://www.bruceclay.com/seo/tools.htm
One of the more in-depth keyword density and prominence tool I've seen. The free access link is near the bottom of the page.
If any of my thousands of readers knows of any more, please feel free to add them to the comments. :-)
Update: September 4th: The Big List of SEO Tools:
Ok, these guys at seocompany.ca seem to have the biggest list of all:
http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/18-toolbars.html
Want a laugh? It's about time all of the search engines got together and released some standards on linking that we can all use.
Aaron Wall posted a great set of tips for link building in 2006 here.
Here's a one I like:
20. Create your own topical directory about your field of interest. Obviously link to your own site, deeplinking to important content where possible. Of course, if you make it into a truly useful resource, it will attract links on its own.
This is still an opportunuty in many industries, but don't underestimate the investment required to make a great quality portal. Our own new business networking events portal, BizNetworkNews.com, increased it's own search engine traffic by 250% last month.
But of course that's nothing to the guy that is making a killing selling Viagra (through affiliate links) because his hilarious Viagra prank ranks number 8 in Google for Viagra, a very, VERY, competitive term due to all of the back links from the Viral nature of his site.
A classic example of link bait that I don't see on Aaron's list.
Ken Mccarthy brought up an interesting point about the AOL data that was mistakenly published a few weeks ago. In his blog, attributing this point to Lee Gomes from the Wall Street Journal (published free here), these are the top 10 most searched words in the list:
1. free
2. new
3. lyrics
4. county
5. school
6. city
7. home
8. state
9. pictures
10. music
The fact that county, city and state are some of the top 10 most popular phrases seem to point to an increased number of local searches. This is huge to local search advertisers. Seems like my prediction of the death of the yellow pages (a fairly obvious prediction to me) is coming true (of course).
Another interesting point was the fact that so many searches start with the 5 W's: Who, What, When, Where, Why. It seems that searchers still like to put searches in the form of questions. You would think that AskJeeves would have done better than it did then, but there is still an opportunity here.
Perhaps we should be using more questions on our site linking to answers. FAQ's are an obvious place to do this. Also, working up personas and the questions each would have, and then posting the questions and answers on the appropriate pages would help bring search traffic.
