Blog: Fresh Tilled Ideas

Online marketing for beginners article gets it right

Posted On: August 10th 2008
By: Richard Banfield

I came across this article after writing my previous post. It's an excellent summary of the things that are important in SEO and web design. The article is written from the often frustrating point of a client-agency conversation and outlines how important a long-term view is for search marketing success.

Here's a snippet...

The problem is that the way most people look at SEO (and they are thinking SEO, not marketing - it's up to you to show them the difference) is that they're going to pay a certain amount of money for the top spots for certain keywords. You can guarantee they've been told another company will guarantee 10 number 1 positions for $50.

This is where ROI comes into play. ROI stands for "Return on Investment". Paying $50 for a $0 return is a bad idea - but people do it all the time, because it's cheap. Paying $5,000 for a $50,000 return is a great idea - but people gasp at the very idea they could spend that much in the beginning, despite the potential.

Comments (0) Post a Comment Permalink

Which metrics to track for SEM?

Posted On: August 10th 2008
By: Richard Banfield

Tracking keyword ranking is mostly a waste of time yet almost every site owners obsesses over them. So if keyword ranking has little or no value, what does?

There has been much debate in the search marketing world about Google's decision to prevent automated tools like Web Position Gold and WebCEO from using ranking data in their reports. It's not surprising but it is disappointing if you are trying to track your target keyword's performance on Google's SERPs. In truth there are several more important stats to be watching. There are performance indicators that offer much more value to the website owner than keyword ranking. Here are the indicators we watch on our own sites and recommend to our clients:

Incoming links: The quantity and quality of the incoming links to any given website or page will be as close as you are going to get to knowing your PageRank success potential. Bearing in mind that PageRank is itself not an indicator of success, incoming links will increase the opportunity of being highly ranked by all search engines. Another way links can help is to suggest future content themes and topics that correlate to audience interests. By looking at the links source and content we can see what type of sites and audiences are linking to our sites.

Indexed Pages: The amount of pages on my site as compared to the amount of pages indexed by a search engine tells me where there might be problems. If Google has 100 pages indexed but my site has 1000 then there could be several things wrong with my site. The easiest way to solve this problem is to submit a XML site map to Google and set up a Google Webmaster account to ensure they are indexing my site frequently. The more pages that are indexed the more likely one of them will be found in a search.

Conversions: At the end of the day we're all looking for conversions. Even sites making money from advertising are still shooting for email newsletter signups, form submissions, subscriptions and registrations for alerts. For ecommerce sites the conversion rate is the lifeblood of the site. If you need to be obsessed with a statistic then this is the one to get crazy about. Constantly doing A-B testing on offers, page layouts, user interface improvements and keyword choices should be the guiding direction of all your analytics.

Title Tags: One other measurement we trust is how long does it take for a new page with new title tags to be indexed. Understanding the gestation period of a new page or a recently reworked page in terms of first page is critical to knowing when and how you can launch new offers or optimize an existing page.

Organic traffic vs. paid traffic: Any site worth it's mettle should be trying to replace aid traffic with organic traffic. My goal with any new site is to quickly move the traffic from the instant-gratification paid advertising to the long-term optimized organic traffic. Some sites can benefit from having both paid and organic but only one is sustainable. There is also a direct relationship between organic traffic and conversions. A site's ROI is much higher for organic traffic so will always be my first choice for any future investment.

Comments (0) Post a Comment Permalink

Online Reputation Management for Beginners #1: Business Networking Sites

Posted On: June 17th 2008
By: Dave Pye

Chances are that if you're a self-respecting businessperson in 2008 you have an account on Plaxo, LinkedIn, Xing - or maybe even all three. What you may not know is that these behemoths of the social business networking space have a considerable amount of red-headed stepchildren nipping at their heels. Although these lesser, 2nd tier sites may seem like overkill at first glance, don't be so hasty to discount them. Now I'll tell you why.

Tip the Social Scales in Your Favor.
Forget about networking, finding old school chums and job searching for a moment. Creating multiple profiles for yourself on a variety of professional business networking sites may be time consuming but is well worth the effort in terms of the ORM (Online Reputation Management) benefits. Simply put, ORM is the practice of positively influencing the search results that rank highly for your name or that of your company/products. Filling Google's top 10 with positive references (like profiles on a variety of social business networks,) while pushing down existing or potential blog posts, forum messages or other content which may be negative in nature.

A Practical, Real World Example Would be Helpful.
On many of the sites I use for both clients and myself it's possible to get your company or personal name into the URL, header tag, title tag or a combination. As these three elements are held in very high regard by search engine algorithms, business networking sites can be tremendously helpful for online brand reputation management. Simple. If someone "Googles" the name of your company, for example, and finds your dedicated page on Spoke - that could mean a negative blog post from a critical customer being pushed down to the second page of the search results for a potential one. Web 2.0 gives anyone the opportunity to become an evangelist or a skeptic - be they an objective reviewer out to help their fellow mankind or a drooling wingnut. It will be tough for potential customers to tell the difference.

You Have my Attention, Dave. Where do I Start?

• My Cubicle Space: Their stated mission is to provide a search engine platform where any business can promote their product or service in a creative way to the fore front for millions of people. Free to use and includes press release submission, blog and keyword targeting capabilities. HQ: Watertown, MA.
• Ryze: Members get a free networking-oriented home page and can send messages to other members. They can also join special networks related to their industry, interests or location. The local features are particularly impressive and should be perfect for businesses with physical store locations or service areas. Both free and paid options exist. HQ: San Francisco, CA.
• Ziggs: A definite fore-runner of the emerging LinkedIn competition, Ziggs allows you to build a profile, network, post jobs and other classifieds and is strongly marketed as an online brand management resource. HQ: Boston, MA.

Act. Don't React.
ORM is a dish best served... in advance. Why wait until the #1 spot in Google and Yahoo for "Your Name" is the profile off a semi-retired Austrian adult film star? If I had a nickel. Listen to me very carefully: Start tailoring your own set of search results today. Here is a full list I recently compiled of lesser-known business networking sites and check back as my ORM for beginners series will continue next week with part 2: Domains and Blogs.

Comments (0) Post a Comment Permalink

The 5 year overnight PageRank success

Posted On: March 24th 2008
By: Richard Banfield

This month our website achieved a 7/10 Google PageRank. That's a ranking generally reserved for major media companies, Fortune 500 companies and A-list blogger, none of which describe Fresh Tilled Soil. So how does a small web design studio achieve a high PageRank? The answer is patience.

We have been very patient with our site's performance. Although the domain has been registered for 5 years we've avoided the tempation to actively build links to the site. So what did we do? We methodically wrote articles and blog postings that filled the site with relevent information. That's it, no secret sauce. Sure we made a bunch of on-site updates through the years like improving title tags, adding a permanent redirect and adding no-follows to the outgoing links, but nothing mind bendingly difficult.

The tough thing it to try and convince your clients to be patient for these kinds of results. Unfortuantely for SEO clients there is not magic light switch to make it all happen instantly. The best strategy is patience, and that's very rare.

*******************

Update: Since posting this blog a very interesting thing has happened. If you Goggle the term "pagerank success" you will see this blog posting at either number one or two (depending on your geographic location) on the search results page. This is evidence that a relevant blog posting with a good title and considered URL can achieve something close to overnight success in terms of rankings.

Comments (0) Post a Comment Permalink

Tracking SEO success

Posted On: February 12th 2008
By: Richard Banfield

Unless you're tracking your search marketing you won't know what's working and what's not working. One of the tools we use to track client progress is Compete.com. Its not the only tool we use but it provides easy to read graphical results that are useful in dashboard type reports.

Comments (0) Post a Comment Permalink

Advanced Search Marketing Workshop

Posted On: January 28th 2008
By: Richard Banfield

Comments (0) Post a Comment Permalink

What's your cookbook?

Posted On: January 28th 2008
By: Richard Banfield

This is the question Jason Fried of 37Signals asked at the recent SEED Conference held in a very cold Chicago. The point is to ask yourself what manifesto or principles guide you. More importantly, how will your customers, partners and vendors know your story unless you publish it in some way. Publishing your ideas isn't giving away your secrets. Chefs publish the recipes and people still pay top dollar to eat in their restaurants.

On Friday we are hosting an Advanced SEO Workshop. We wondered if giving away all our hard-won secrets would reduce the value of the search marketing services we offer. I think we'll follow the way of the chef and share openly the recipes and ingredients that have made our clients successful.

Comments (0) Post a Comment Permalink