01. Mobile internet usage is projected to overtake desktop internet usage by 2014

The facts and numbers around mobile usage is pretty staggering. Over 1 billion mobile devices are currently in use, and the number keeps on growing. We use and rely on our phones on a daily basis and if you don’t have a mobile friendly website you will get lost in the shuffle. By 2014 mobile internet usage should outpace desktops. This stat varies by source but 2014/15 is right around the corner. 2013 is the year to think about how your website caters to the mobile market.

Why Consider Search?

1. 82% of Internet Users Use Search
With the majority of internet users “looking” for content via search it’s important that your site is showing up on page one of Google. Source

2. Over 100 Billion Global Searches are Conducted Each Month
Even if you think that you’re in an industry that doesn’t have a huge search appeal I can pretty much guarantee that someone out of those 100 billion searches is looking for content on your website. Source

3. 80% of B2B and B2C Marketers Rely on Search
Out of the 500 marketers surveyed in Web Marketing 123’s 2012 Digital Survey, 84% of B2B marketers rely on search and 82% of B2C marketers are relying on search. Clearly there’s a reason why, even then they plan on spending more marketing dollars on search in 2013. Source

Why Content Needs to be Optimized?

4. 75% of Users Do Not Click Past Page One of Google
If you don’t have optimized content you will most likely not be on page one of Google. Not being on page means your website is only visible to 25% of searchers. Page one results should be a goal for any SEO campaign. Source

5. Top Google Result Gets Almost 40% of Clicks
Optify did a study on organic search clicks and the top three spots in Google command close to 60% of all clicks. Spot one takes in close to 40% of clicks by itself. Due to the high click through of these spots, once we get our client’s on page one we then fine tune the campaign to push the site to the top of the page. Source

6. 70%-80% of Users Ignore Paid Search Ads
Paid search is a proven tactic but simply relying on paid search for search engine traffic can be costly and ineffective. With a good portion of users ignoring ads organic search should be the focus. Source

• News releases
• Media/blogger outreach
• Banner ads
• Email campaigns
• Facebook custom tabs
• etc., etc., etc.

And all of these techniques link back to your client’s website, because one of the goal’s you’ve established with them is “to drive traffic to the homepage.” At the end of the campaign, you may want to provide a report for your client showing how well each channel performed.

Google Analytics is the tool for this, but reporting could turn into a nightmare as simply cracking open Google Analytics and trying to figure out how much traffic is coming from each medium could be troublesome. Without any sort of tracking urls getting used in your outreach, you’ll have to accurately keep track of placements and sift through myriad referral data to figure out what traffic came from which tactic. Even then, some tactics will show up as direct visits to the site, which are relatively untraceable and hard to report. At this point, the reporting is tough, and you have no way to see how well each tactic is doing side by side. To solve this reporting dilemma, each digital avenue (email, banner ads, releases, etc.) should be using a customized link relative to the tactic. In doing so, each tactic can target the same page on the website, and you can easily filter traffic from news releases vs. banner ads vs. email campaigns, all in Google Analytics.

Pretty neat? It’s really easy to implement as well. Here’s how you can accurately measure a multichannel digital PR campaign.

1. Plan

Each campaign will have different goals, but knowing what page(s) you are trying to drive traffic to is a must. Setting these goals up front is really important to make sure everything runs smoothly and is accurately reported. Now that you know what pages are targeted, you can begin to figure out what digital tactics are truly needed to drive traffic to the website. Once those tactics have been assessed and approved, you can then create custom urls for each avenue.

2. Create Custom URLs

The core point of this blog post is pretty much this step here. You may be targeting the same page across multiple channels, but creating a custom url for each avenue will make your life a lot easier. These custom URLs are actually called UTM tags, and they allow you to integrate your source (i.e.: email), medium (i.e.: banner ad) and campaign (i.e.: spring outreach) name into one unique url. Using a UTM tag allows Google Analytics to easily filter out visits that use this specific and show you exactly what you’re looking for. By utilizing a unique url for news releases vs. banner ads vs. email, you can easily see how much traffic each medium is providing without the hassle of manually going through analytics data. You can even take this a step further and make more customized tags based on the type of release, etc., to really see what drives the most traffic.

Creating UTM tags is super easy and takes less than a minute to create. Google even has a site that builds them for you. Simply enter in your credentials, and you’ll get provided your custom URL. With a set of tactics in place, make all of the custom urls you need for your campaign. I’d recommend keeping all of your custom urls organized in a spreadsheet for easy access.

4. Execute

With all of your custom urls built, it’s time to work them into the planned out tactics. Just as you would insert a hyperlink into a release, make sure you use the right news release specific url. Nothing about your approach will change just the type of link you are using.

Helpful hint: UTM urls are really long, feel free to use a url shortner to make them more manageable.

5. Measure

The joy of UTM tags is that they are designed to easily work with Google Analytics. To see the traffic for the custom urls you created, you’ll need to set up some advanced segments in Google Analytics. It’s really easy to do and John Haydon from Inbound Zombie has an excellent video below and can walk you thorough this step.

I’d recommend watching the whole video start to finish as well.

I’m constantly trying new beers and I’m always interested in what new style breweries are throwing out there. In recent years I’ve noticed more easy drinking craft beers hitting the store shelves and tap handles. Beers like Founders All Day IPA and 21st Amendment’s Bitter American have quickly become a few of my favorite summertime session ales.

Creating a session friendly craft ale is interesting as you typically don’t associate “easy drinking” and “quantity” with craft beer. Typically, this mindset has been reserved for American Macro’s as they are marketed as light, smooth refreshing beers that you can consume in abundance. With the majority of Americans still in that mindset and with the craft beer market continuing to grow, a session ale seems like a logical place where the two markets could meet.

I don’t see a lot of breweries pushing their lighter beers as session beers. A few do but I think more can and will begin pursuing this term as more consumers become educated about beer. I feel that no matter what the style of beer, if it’s under 5%, the beer’s packaging should adorn the session ale term as it gives an instant snapshot of what the beer’s purpose and alcohol content is all about. Beyond the stated marketing and packaging opportunities, here are a few reasons why brewers and distributors should consider pursuing the session ale.

Lower Alcohol & Lower Calories

Most craft ales are in the 6+ ABV realm and with more alcohol comes more calories as more malt (sugar) is needed to obtain a higher ABV. I love a great IPA but maybe I don’t want to get wasted off a handful of them or wind up consuming 2,000 calories worth of beer during a cookout. Not that session ales should be marketed as “light” beer, but quality beer under 5% ABV should be explored as we may not need the extra alcohol or calories typically found with craft beer.

Approachable & Flavorful

I used to always carry Victory All Malt Lager and North Coast Scrimshaw when I worked in the industry. These were great gateway beers as I would always recommend them to Macro drinkers or people not too familiar with quality beer. These beers are great lagers but it’s nice to see Founder’s and 21st creating some nice flavorful ales instead of lagers. Even Flying Dog’s Pearl Necklace is very session friendly stout (even though its 5.5% ABV). I see opportunity with beers like these as they are great introductory ales for beginners and interesting enough for seasoned craft beer drinkers.

Highlight the Brewmaster’s Skill

Lastly, if you want to highlight the skill and craft of brewing, try making a light beer. It’s tough. The lighter more delicate ales and lagers can easily showcase any off flavors, poor ingredients or brewing mistakes. A solid brewmaster should be able to create a flawless beer no matter the style. A clean American IPA, a stout from Flying Dog or a Berliner Weiss from Bell’s – these are all perfect examples of quality driven beers that took skill to create and a product that the brewery and brewmaster should take pride in.

I love my high ABV stouts, double IPAs and barleywines but those aren’t necessarily cookout- or boat-friendly beers. For the reasons I mentioned above, I think that every brewery should be brewing and marketing a session-friendly beer.

Cheers!

From both a PR and SEO standpoint pitching and reaching out to bloggers has been a trend over the last several years. With over 77 percent of internet users reading blogs it’s a natural place to pitch our client’s story. “Blogger relations” is a skill set that every PR pro needs and getting bloggers to write about our clients is important. However, bloggers can easily get overwhelmed with the amount of content and maintenance it takes to run a successful blog. To combat this fatigue, one strategy that has seen good results is a guest post approach to blogger relations. Rather than pitching a blogger to write about your client/product/initiative, you pitch a pre-crafted “guest post” for their site. If all goes well, the blogger gets free excellent content and you get exposure for your client. It’s a win-win right?

This strategy helps boost search rankings because the post you pitch can be chock full of links that point back to your client’s website. Links are still a huge factor in determining where your website ranks in Google. Links signal popularity to a search engine and we know that popularity (links) combined with relevancy (keywords) create a well ranking website. The link game has shifted over the years but links are still the backbone of SEO and should be sought after. If your client’s website is optimized for search and you’re trying to promote it, you need to do some research before you start pitching bloggers. Here are a few things to research before you pitch a guest blog post:

1. Blog Relevancy

It’s a no brainer but whatever blog you are pitching needs to be extremely relevant to your client’s niche. Pitching a tech article to a blog about backyard gardening will not go over well. If the blog “needs” your content and they publish your article it will not look right in Google’s eyes. Google wants links to look as natural as possible and the site’s that you pitch need to be relevant to your subject matter. Using non-relevant sites to build back links could look like a link scheme to Google and they could in turn un-rank your site which would kill all traffic from search.

How to: The best place to start gathering a list of relevant sites will be through modifying searches or using customized searches in Google. A lot of SEO research programs offer site finder tools as well but the easiest and most cost effective place to start with is Google.

2. Blog Activity

How often are posts going up on the blog you are pitching? Is it a nice looking site? Decent traffic and participation? Getting an article up on a dead site that has only monthly posts will do little. What you want to look for is a site that someone cares about and actively publishes on. A lot of subjective questions fall into the activity research but site traffic is something that can get measured.

How to: Get a free account with Compete to quickly get traffic estimates. Lots of other traffic estimator tools exist so just poke around the web and see which one you like the best.

3. Blog Domain Authority

This is the one technical side to guest posting that needs to get considered. In short, domain authority is a score of 0-100 that represents how a website performs in search engine rankings. Domain Authority is essentially the “strength” of a website. Over 150 signals are used to calculate this metric into one single score and getting a link from a higher scoring site will “pass more juice” than a link from a lower scoring site. However, getting an article on higher scoring site will be more difficult as there is more traffic and competition on sites with high domain authorities.

How to: Targeting sties with a domain authority in 30s or 40s is a good place to start as these sites could grow and their domain authority can jump prospectively. You can easily check the domain authority of the blogs you are pitching at Moonsy. Drop in the blog’s url and it will give you a domain authority number, super easy.

A spreadsheet will be your best friend to keep track of your urls, traffic and domain authority for the site’s you are researching for guest pitching. Once you have completed your research, filter through your collected data and rank the blogs you want to go after. For a more in-depth look at guest posting for SEO purposes I highly recommend checking out the ultimate guide to guest blogging.

With over 300,000 mobile applications in existence and downloads in 2013 expected to get close to the 16 million mark it’s impossible to ignore the app market. It seems like having a mobile app for your client’s brand/product/cause/campaign is a necessity but creating a mobile application doesn’t necessarily mean mobile success. Like moths to a flame, PR Pro’s, marketers and clients are still drawn to these shiny new downloadable objects. As you think through solutions for your client an app idea will most likely cross your path. Before you pitch this fantastic idea, ask yourself these three questions to ensure a successful app.

1. Is your app educational, entertaining or resourceful?

Just like a Youtube video, your app needs to fit within one of these rather broad categories. If it doesn’t, rethink your idea as it’s going to be hard to have an app that gets downloaded and used if it isn’t educational, entertaining or resourceful. All three of these categories can share similar elements but an app that’s meant to be entertaining really needs to be a game.

2. How will users know about your app?

An app can easily get loaded up on iTunes or Android Market but how will people find it? Yes, an app can get “optimized” for app store visibility but a clear and concise app promotion plan will need to get thought out and executed. Keep in mind that a educational, entertaining or resourceful app is easier to promote too. Incentivizing an app download is one method to build awareness but not entirely recommended. Incentivized downloads can get costly and users will most likely only use the app once to claim the incentive and never use it again.

3. Does your “app” even need to be an app?

You don’t need to be an app developer to know if your app idea needs to be a full on iOS or Android developed application. With technology ever growing, immersive app-like environments can now get created within your phone’s web browser. If your idea revolves around the motion of the phone, camera or geo-location you will most likely need to go down the app road. For general information, interactivity or if you are trying to leverage web based content a web based app can get created.

The great thing about a web based application is that this one app will work on both iOS and Android devices. No need for two sepereate apps to get created for two separate operating systems. Just as with a native app, a web based app can be downloaded through iTunes or Android Market. The benefits of a web based application are numerous and if applicable should get pursued as it will be easier to update and more cost effective.

In late 2011 I wrote a blog post that highlighted 5 web trends that discussed where the digital landscape might end up in 2012. Now that 2012 is said and done, I wanted to take a look back and see if my trend predictions for 2012 were accurately fulfilled. I may not be the next digital Nostradamus full of prophetic speculation but I think I did pretty good with only one blatant unfulfilled prophecy…

Prediction 1: Mobile Continues to Grow

Prophecy Fulfilled

• 2011 Statement: 5 billion mobile devices expected to be in use by 2012 and mobile spending is predicted to grow 39 percent and should come close to the $1.2 billion mark.
• 2012 Reality: This was a pretty easy one as I think it would be relatively impossible to have seen a decline in the mobile market for 2012. None the less, the rapid growth of the mobile market is still pretty extraordinary to see this sector grow with leaps and bounds seemingly overnight. I couldn’t find exact mobile device usage stats but Trinity reported in July of 2012 that there are over 6 billion mobile subscribers worldwide. As for mobile spending? Try a 180% increase over 2011, with mobile ad spend coming in at a little over 4 billion in 2012.

Prediction 2: Quality Matters

Prophecy Fulfilled

• 2011 Statement: With the Panda algorithm update from Google, design, branding, user engagement and social signals all seem to have more weight to a site’s rank.
• 2012 Reality: It’s no joke that to rank in Google you need a “quality” website as Google rolled out another major algorithm update (Penguin) in April of 2012. The Panda update in 2011 attacked low quality, poor content and this most recent “Penguin update” took a deep dive into a website’s backlink profile and penalized websites with unethical low-quality linking tactics. Quality driven, diverse content and legit linking tactics are a must for any website that is looking to garner rankings from Google.

Prediction 3: Pin It! (The Rise of Pinterest)

Prophecy Fulfilled

• 2011 Statement: I think 2012 will be a big year for the pin boarding site.
• 2012 Reality: Pinterest has continued to have explosive growth throughout 2012 and topped in at over 27 million visits. This 1,000% increase (compared to 2011 traffic) has now catapulted Pinterest past Tumblr.com in unique views. With this growth and participation, Pinterest is now viewed as legit social network and marketing channel packed full of Pinterest contests and Pinterest business accounts.

Prediction 4: Google Dethroned

Prophecy Partially Fulfilled

• 2011 Statement: Search results maintained by humans present a socialized search experience that might gain popularity in 2012.
• 2012 Reality: Google still remains king of search with about a 66% – 70% market share. Social search engines like Blekko grew by 400% in 2012 but not to the point to even remotely affect the search giant’s market share. Even though social search did “gain popularity” it wasn’t to the point to over throw Google. So, that’s why I give this prediction a partial fulfillment.

Prediction 5: Filter Bubbles Burst (Defeating Personalized Search)

Prophecy Failure

• 2011 Statement: No matter where the filter exists, whether it’s Facebook, Netflix or Google, the need for the human touch is the future.
• 2012 Reality: Integrating the human element into “search” is still years down the road as their seems to be no solution to breaking filter bubbles and defeating personalized search results. Google, Netflix and Facebook still continue to serve you content that they think you want based on search activity, likes, ratings and recently viewed materials. As annoying as this can be the only way to get away from these types of results is the introduction of the human element. Small strides have been made but not enough to change how content is delivered and filtered to us. Prophecy failure…

With the convergence of digital marketing tactics, it’s pretty clear that the core to a successful digital strategy is content. Just about every SEO expert, content/digital marketer should agree with the age old “content is king” statement. It’s no secret that if you want to rank in a search engine, generate leads or get the most “likes” or “tweets” you need unique, valuable, and quality driven content on your website.

I continue to push our clients and my co-workers to generate content but the true question is “what type of content should get created?” Whether its a article, infographic or press release, content should fall into one of these three main buckets outlined below. Creating a content plan that varies itself across these silos will help establish your client from a relevancy, expertise and authority standpoint.

 1. Evergreen Content

• Definition: Just as the name implies, evergreen content is “always fresh” (forever green) and not relative to one specific moment in time. Evergreen content is pretty general and will bring visitors to a website for a long period of time. This type of content helps establish the basics that define your business or objectives.
• Content Example: Creating a keyword rich article on a website that isn’t time sensitive. I.E. creating a “benefits of maple syrup” section on purecanadamaple.com
• Establishes: Relevance as the content created is relative to business objectives and searches.
• Ideal for: SEO/SEM

2.Brand Content

• Definition: Content that highlights your companies accolades, work and expertise.
• Content Example: Press releases, white papers and case studies.
• Establishes: Expertise
• Ideal for: PR

3. Industry Content

• Definition: Content that provides insight into your businesses overarching industry.
• Example: Blog posts, infogrpahics and other insightful content.
• Establishes: Authority
• Ideal for: SEO, PR, Social Media

Photo from Scott Meis

My post from last week talked about some digital trends and tactics for 2013 but I didn’t really focus too much on SEO. I talked about a few paid search trends but I wanted to dedicate a full post to really cover where things are headed and the perception of search engine optimization.

Crappy SEO is Dead

With the rise of the social web and articles like this one pronouncing “The Death of SEO” one has to ask, is SEO dead? SEO is not dead. Legit, quality content driven SEO is a thriving marketing tactic that continues to grow and deliver a high ROI. What is dead is the crappy, spammy, deceptive “SEO” of the past. The days of buying links, spinning articles and “manipulating” the search results have been killed by Google’s Penguin and Panda algorithm updates. Even the term “search engine optimization” feels a little out dated as SEO is really about content marketing and less about trickery these days. At its core, the goal of a search engine will remain to deliver quality results in a user friendly manner.

Search is Still Young

Search engines are still really basic machines that rely on keyword relevancy and link popularity signals. This is there backbone and hasn’t really changed since the inception of indexing the web. As technology evolves we should see strides in a search engines ability to index other content. The future will bring better technology that allows a search engine to crawl images and video more efficiently. What about voice recognition? A lot can and will happen with voice recognition in the future and search will be impacted by these advancing technologies.

Social Influence & Personalized Search

The rise of the social web has made an impact on search. Social hasn’t taken a piece of the search pie but the pie has now been expanded to include social media. Social is here to stay and it will continue to integrate and evolve with search. The data associated with your social activity may influence future rankings creating a more personalized search experience. Google’s jaunt into G+ pretty much verifies this theory as user are asked to “plus one” websites that they like. Social is a validation technique outside of the web but even on the web more social based search activities may start to sway algorithm based searches. Site’s like Blekko rely on human editors and not algorithms in order to personalize and socialize the search experience. With users maintaining topic tags, search results can be more relative and accurate to the query.

I barely scratched the surface on where the industry is headed but these were some of the concepts that resonated with me that got discussed at SMX East. Search is still an abundant and growing industry and it will be interesting to see where it goes in the future.

With the ever changing and evolving digital landscape it’s hard to predict what will happen in the future of web development, search, marketing and PR. Based on observations and tactics witnessed in 2012, here are some concepts and strategies that should be more apparent throughout the digital world in 2013.

Responsive Design Kills the Mobile Domain

Responsive design blossomed in 2012 and will continue to emerge as the main technology used for mobile friendly websites in 2013. A sited developed with responsive techniques will react to it’s digital environment so the same site viewed on a desktop computer will deliver a user friendly experience on a phone or tablet. With this “one website for all devices” concept, the need for specific “mobile only” .mobi or m. domains will subside. Not only is responsive design favorable when device accessibility is a concern but a responsive website is also ideal from a SEO and content management standpoint. With only one website to manage, you no longer need to update a desktop and mobile version of your site. A responsive site will also eliminate the worry of how Google ranks and indexes and ranks your mobile domain. One website that works on all devices will eliminate these woe’s and is truly the only type of website needed for multi-device success.

Focus on Conversions Lighten Up

The most common goals for paid search revolve around lead generation and the sale of a product or service. However, according to a recent SEMPO report, those objectives are on the decline. When marketers were surveyed about paid search objectives, brand awareness and web traffic are on the rise and sales and conversion are on the decline. With bids and competition in AdWords continuing to rise, it’s interesting that marketers are using such a high ROI and precise tactic for very loose, hard to calculate, brand awareness objectives.

The main goal of paid search campaigns in 2013 will still be lead gen and sales but why are marketers going spend money on these more ambiguous overarching objectives? My speculation is that when economic times are bountiful, money is spent more freely with less concentration on return. As the recession begins to lift, the focus on conversions and sales will lighten up. With these core business objectives moving to the back burner, more budget can be allocated to brand awareness, reputation and web traffic.

Rise of the Semantic Web

This subject can get pretty technical rather quickly but as you begin to think through digital strategies in 2013 I strongly encourage integrating rich snippets and microformats into your website’s content. At it’s very basic level, a microformat is a standardized way to represent data to users and search engines. As of now microformats exist for calendar events, news, media, recipes, reviews and handful of other pieces of content that can follow a set archetype across all websites. As Google tightens the reins on how they rank pages, the use of microformats (when appropriate) could help provide stronger signals to Google and it’s users. This type of semantic mark up is only found on about 1.5% of websites across the entire web so their is a clear opportunity here. With relevancy being a huge part of your ranking factor, participating in the semantic web is a must for 2013.

Forget Contests and Sweepstakes. It’s Time to Gamify.

As user engagement grows as an important tactic, marketers will look for new ways to connect with their audience. The integration of game-like characteristics into websites and apps relies on rewarding users with points, incentives and rewards to have them engage with your site and content. Gamification caters to the competiive nature in humans and provides a totally different approach to engagement and return visits. A simple contest or sweepstakes might provide a lot of inital interest but it’s rare that participants will come back and engage with your site beyond that first form entry. By gamifying a website you could reward users with points based on social shares, comments, etc. At the end of the month, the top 5 users with the most points could be placed into a drawing for a prize. This type of incentive based marketing has worked for some very large brands and should be found throughtout more campaigns in 2013. Be on the lookout, we just might gamify the buzz bin… If you have an hour to kill and you’re really interested in gamification I highly recommend the Google Talk video.

Ads Will Continue to Follow You Around the Internet in 2013

One of the biggest updates to paid search in 2012 was a feature called retargeting. For example, if you are the owner of an online shoe store and a potential customer browses your site and clicks on a blue tennis show, but doesn’t decide to purchase it that day. You can now target that potential customer with ad’s relevant to blue tennis shoes as they browse other parts of the Internet not related to your site. Utilizing this tactic has been shown to have a really high conversion rate. With the success that display ad retargeting has shown, rumors have it that search based retargeting might be in the future. This would enable advertisers to target display advertisements at users based on the queries they entered on search engines. This tactic would utilize the targeting of search with the reach of display taking online advertising to a new level in 2013.

By Jason Poulos (@TheSaganaki)

For one of our clients the answer is yes, a $500 spend in Google AdWords did yield a 20% (19.5% to be exact) spike in traffic to their website. Here’s how it all worked out.

Background

Our client, a local staffing agency knew that a large nationwide online retailer was looking to build a warehouse in the Richmond Virginia area. As this employer searched for staffing solutions via a search engine, our client wanted to make sure that their site and brand were visible in Google.

Problem

Our client’s website was not optimized for organic search and was not easily found through Google and ranked poorly. Knowing that this online retailer had an aggressive timeline we didn’t have enough time to do a full site audit and proper organic site optimization.

Solution

Time was not on our side, the instant nature and exposure that Google AdWords offers seemed to be a perfect solution. Google AdWords has many benefits but with a minimal amount of time and budget we knew that we could start generating impressions and visits to our client’s website.

Implementation

Our first step was to do some brief keyword research and discover popular keywords relative to our content and to what the employer would be searching for. Not knowing where our client’s potential partner would be searching from, we created two main ad groups that used different location targeting parameters.

Our first ad group focused on a 50 mile radius of the Richmond area. Our goal with this group was to make sure that anyone in the area searching for “temporary staffing” etc. within that 50 mile radius would see our ad.

The second ad group we created targeted searches outside of the state of Virginia. Not knowing the geographic location of where our employer would be searching from we wanted to make sure that our ad would get displayed for a “temporary staffing va” search that originated from New York.

With our keywords researched, ad groups set up, landing page created and bids in place it was time to launch our ads.

Google AdWords Results

Our ads ran for 3 months and generated over 9,000 impressions and over 500 visits to our landing page. Click through rates were around 5% and our ads averaged a 2.9 position in Google. All good metrics in my book, when looking at the website’s analytics, traffic to our landing page from the ad’s counted for almost 20% of the site’s visits during this 3 month time period. So, yes, in the case of our client, a $500 spend in Google AdWords did generate almost a 20% spike in traffic.

AdWords Metrics Screenshot

Landing Page Analytics Screenshot

By Jason Poulos (@TheSaganaki)

As digital marketing strategies evolve it’s not a bad idea to see if your PR content or PR campaign goals can integrate with other marketing channels. Traditionally you wouldn’t associate search engine marketing with PR but SEO has grown into a legit marketing channel over the years. With so many searches happening on Google we wanted to make sure that our PR message for our Maple Syrup client was getting exposure through search engines.

We did a full on-site SEO audit and execution for the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers back in early 2011. With the optimized site fully up and running we started to see some rather favorable results for the site. Seeing these increases in traffic from Google we thought we had a good case study on our hands for some award submissions. We submitted and won:

1. Virginia Public Relations Awards
2. PR News Digital PR Awards
3. Bulldog Digital/Social PR Awards
4. PR Daily’s Digital and Social Media Awards

Here’s how we did it:

PR Campaign Goal

Our goal was to raise awareness of pure Canadian maple syrup, showcase the product as versatile and innovative in cooking, and finally demonstrate that maple syrup is a healthy, natural sweetener and a good substitute for simple sugar.

Website Overview

The Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers’ website was beautiful, consumer-focused and communicated its message about the health and culinary benefits of pure Canadian maple syrup. Though rich in content with an extensive recipe database and mouth-watering photographs for the maple lover, the website was nowhere to be found when searching for relevant terms on Google. While Canada accounts for 80% of the maple syrup production worldwide, the client’s website and our message was all but invisible. As the Federation entered a year with significant news to announce, We knew the website needed to be restructured, infused with a cross link strategy, married to the client’s Facebook and Twitter pages and optimized for strategic search terms.

Research

In auditing the website’s content, we learned the site’s content, while informative, was not keyword rich making the site hard to find in Google. Not only was content not optimized for searches but some technical aspects of the site were not catering to the search engine either. Knowing that Google ranks web pages based on keyword relevance and popularity, we set out to align and restructure the content around keywords to enhance the website’s Google presence.

Planning

The first phase of planning was to determine which specific keywords should be used on the site. Google’s AdWords tool as well as Wordtracker was used to understand search volume and the strength and opportunity of particular keywords. Our goal was to raise awareness of pure Canadian maple syrup, showcase the product as versatile and innovative in cooking, and finally demonstrate that maple syrup is a healthy, natural sweetener and a good substitute for simple sugar. We targeted keywords that were relative to our content goals but had a high search volume and low competition.

Execution

With our keyword research in place it was time to think of how these keywords would influence our content and site structure.

• Restructured the site’s architecture and navigation to cater to specific keywords
• Rewrote the site’s content, page titles, urls, heading tags and page descriptions to be keyword rich
• Redesigned the homepage to feature more content and act more like a “dashboard”
• Restructured the interior page sidebars to highlight and cross link deep content
• Integrated social share functionality for Facebook and Twitter in order to grow our social backlink profile

SEO Results

With our plan fully executed and the site redesigned, www.purecanadamaple.com was re-launched on March 1, 2011. The results below compare the optimized site (March 1, 2011 to Feb 28, 2012) to the non-optimized site of 2010 (March 1, 2010 – Feb 28, 2011):

• Unique Visits increased by 355%
• Page views increased by 415%
• Pages per Visit increased by 18%
• Bounce rate decreased by 20%
• Visits to our site directly from Google searches increased by 485%
• Because of our keyword research and website restructuring, there are now 50 search terms that place the website on page one of Google

YouTube is the second largest search engine outside of Google and it receives over 3 billion views a day. Not only are these numbers impressive but users are engaged on YouTube with over 100 million people taking social action on the site every week. It’s pretty clear that video content is a necessity for any brand and from a sheer numbers standpoint it’d be ridiculous not to participate and market content on a network with these staggering statistics.

However, in a recent Econsultancy report, 40% of companies surveyed stated that “video search was in significant” and in a recent discussion at SMX East, I discovered that only about 40% of marketers are actually pursuing video marketing. It seems like YouTube might be the wild west for marketers and it’s pretty clear that opportunity exists. If you feel that you want to maximize your marketing opportunity with YouTube, here are a few things to keep in mind.

Make a Good Video

It all starts with the video and the concept behind the video. First, you probably want to do a little competitive research as well as some keyword research just to see where your concept aligns. If your concept can be transformed into an informative, instructional or entertaining video you just might strike YouTube gold. Keep in mind that first 10 seconds of the video need to capture your audience’s attention so avoid any lengthy intros or credits.

Get PR Involved

With a solid video created it’s time to get the PR team involved to start generating some buzz around the video. The PR team will be able to cover:

• Social Media Promotion – Leveraging the video on Facebook, Twitter etc. and targeting key influencers.
• Media Outreach – Depending on the video and where/if it fits within an overarching campaign, the PR team can pitch this content to the media.
• Community management – keeping up with the comments and users on YouTube and other social networks.
• Monitoring – Knowing who, what and where the video gets mentioned, linked or embedded off of YouTube is critical to the success of the video.

Get Search Marketing Involved

With the Social Media team pitching the video and generating buzz around it, the search team can now do the following:

• Video Optimization – Just as with Google, keywords can get researched and implemented for YouTube videos. Keywords should be found in the video title and description. Having a keyword rich and video that’s relative to the keywords will make the video easily found through YouTube search.
• Promote & Advertise – YouTube has a lot of different locations and options for promoting and advertising a video. Promoted videos can be targeted to users interest, topics, or get re-marketed to what previous viewers watched. If using TrueView advertising you pay only when viewers watch your video ad.
• Annotations – don’t go overboard with annotations but this is a good way to feature a specific deal or call to action and link people back to your site.
• Aesthetics – Keep in mind the branding of your YouTube channel as well as what thumbnail that gets selected for the video. These aspects will all influence a user’s decision to watch your video.

Just as with a website, on-site and off-site factors will influence it’s ranking in Google. The same goes for a YouTube video as it will need to be promoted off site as well as optimized for on-site performance. The combination of a SEM and PR will roll together nicely for ultimate video marketing success.

I just got back from the search marketing expo conference up in New York City and I wanted to share some of what I learned. The conference was great and I learned a lot, a ton of info got covered and my brain still hurts from the education overload. Here are some key points and highlights from the courses I attended.

The State of Digital Marketing

• As we come out of the recession ad spend seems to be growing exponentially. Google ad spend for 2013 is looking to have a significant jump compare to the last few years. Ad words campaigns have been expanded out to include branded terms. When times are good, brand awareness spend goes up and the focus on conversions lighten up.
• Ad retargeting is an effective marketing tactic and should be deployed
• Opportunity exists with video marketing, only 40% of businesses surveyed use video marketing tactics
• Allocate 5-10 % of budget for experimentation and testing
• Always have a measurable action on a website even if you aren’t selling product. Have a download form sign up etc
• Average cost per acquisition- $10 – Google lead, $4 Facebook lead, $2 Ad retargeting
• Television advertising only has a 4-6 week influence on paid search

SEO and the future of SEO

• SEO is an investment and needs to incubate
• A #1 ranking site in Google is like having a billboard in Times Square
• More marketers are getting involved in SEO. The 2012 search marketing expo was the largest to date
• SEO is a legit marketing tactic and not a gimmick or form of spam. A good SEO/agency will understand PR, marketing and social as well as have an understanding of content and technical SEO skills
• SEO isn’t dead, crappy, spammy manipulative SEO is dead
• SEO is a great channel for brand awareness
• Search is still really basic right now, the future of search will get better at indexing image, video and voice recognition
• Responsive design is the future, m. domains will no longer be supported in Bing
• Social and search will continue to grow and evolve together. Social is a great validation technique but links are still the #1 signal to a search engine

Google Penguin/Panda Issues

• If your rankings and site traffic has been hit by penguin or panda don’t contact Google and request the site back in for inclusion. Fix everything first, go through the site thoroughly and give Google full disclosure on what happened. Create a document that covers history and tactics used on the site. This document should contain a list of links, methods of content, dates of outreach for link removal and any links that have been removed

Links

• Links are still the back bone of Google. Even with modern advances Google’s core is still relevancy and popularity
• Anchor text on back links needs to be evenly distributed between brand terms, keywords and general phrases. Needs to look natural
• Building quality links back to a website is tough and don’t be discouraged if you aggressively go after sites and don’t get a lot of back links
• Call the author instead of e-mailing when requesting a back link
• Plan for link building: List website assets, Research, Strategize, Schedule, Adapt
• Linkable content ideas: testimonials, product history museum, complete guide, glossary, badge/widgets, reviews
• Don’t: buy links, use article submission sites, link directories, reciprocal links, spin articles or link exchanges

Development and Markup

• Only about 1.5% of all sites on the internet are utilizing micro data/rich snippets. Using micro data will help provide a stronger semantic mark up for a search engine and give detailed info about your page that can get processed by a computer
• Micro data examples: Reviews, things to do, events, recipes, specials
• Site speed will influence conversion and UX on your website. Conversion rate goes up with a quicker site and bounce rate will go down. Slow site lose business
• Fast loading site formula: Good hosting, use a content delivery network, use some form of cache, have a low number of requests
• 1.0 – 1.5 seconds load time is ideal for a website

Keywords

• Keyword discovery is an ongoing aspect of site optimization and not a one-time deal
• Look at your AdWords search query data to discover keywords
• 3 buckets of keywords that a site should have: informational, navigational and transactional
• 4 levels to a well-rounded keyword strategy: must haves, business relative, industry relevant, broad

A lot more got covered and I can definitely write a bunch more but I just wanted to provide some basic snippets of what I thought might be valuable to other marketers out there.

When trying to create content that’s friendly to both organic search and paid search it’s important that your digital strategy utilizes keywords from these three main buckets below. Each type of keyword has their own pros and cons but wrapping these all together in one solid keyword strategy will yield the strongest results.

Generic Keywords

Just as the title suggests these are very generic, unspecific terms that get searched for. Something like “Tennis Shoes” or “Digital Cameras” would be considered a generic term. When developing an organic search strategy we typically stray away from these terms as they are highly competitive and not specific enough to the sites actual content. However, if you are able to rank for a generic keyword your site should receive a decent amount of traffic from that term. Conversions for that term might be a little low as a user is hitting your site for a very generic overarching topic and nothing too specific.

When running an AdWords campaign its nice to integrate some of these generic keywords to make sure that every opportunity is covered. Due to the competitive nature of a generic keyword they will cost more per click. If the ad ranks well and receives a good Ad Score from Google, decent traffic might follow. Just as with organic search, once a user gets on the website from the search engine, conversions will most likely be low for this term.

All in all, generic terms are a tough decision to pursue and I tend to avoid them unless I have the right site with the right content and the right promotion behind it.

Broad Match Keywords

For me, broad match terms are the core of SEO. Terms like “Red Tennis Shoes” or “Canon T2I Digital Camera” will present a stronger opportunity and engagement than a generic term. Optimizing for broad match terms will provide good traffic with not as much competition because not as many sites are trying to rank for these type of terms. A broad match searcher has a specific item/content that they are searching for and optimizing for these type of terms will provide the strongest conversions.

All in all, broad match terms are right in the middle of things and are highly recommended due to moderate competition/cost and click through rate. A site that bases the majority of its content around these type of terms should perform pretty well.

Long Tail Keywords

The last of these three types of keywords to consider is the long tail keyword. Think of these as the sentences that get typed into Google. Something like ”how do I set the aperture on my Canon T2I digital camera” would be considered a long tail keyword. Long tail keywords might not be the biggest traffic drivers to your site but if you rank for a long tail term you will get traffic from it due to its specific nature and low competition. From an AdWords standpoint, these terms will be the most affordable out of the three keyword options discussed.

The meat of a strong keyword strategy will reside within the broad match keyword but long tail and generic terms should be integrated from both a paid search and organic search perspective to maintain a balanced approach to your search engine marketing campaign.

Last week I helped pull together a digital plan for one of our clients that covered SEO/SEM, Social Media and PR. It was great to see these tactics molded together and rolled into one digital strategy. As with any solid digital plan, the core of the strategy was creative, engaging content but the strongest part of the plan was showing how our converged tactics would work together as one cohesive unit. We delivered an integrated digital strategy and as you think ahead to 2013 here are a few reasons why your digital marketing tactics should get integrated.

Deliver a Unified Message

It’s not uncommon for one agency to have the SEO work, another for PR and another for Social Media and so on. This bucket of agencies will go about their specific tasks and specialties and will most likely never communicate with each other (or care to communicate with each other). As each tactical agency focuses on their own specialties, your core message or goals could get lost with this fragmented approach and lack of communication. It will be a challenge to deliver a unified message when multiple tactics are spread across multiple agencies.

The beauty of having one agency to do deliver all of your digital marketing tactics is that it’s essentially the “one stop shop.” Having all of your tactics under one roof will allow messaging to filter down and integrate across all assets because one solid team is involved. Your message will not get lost when you have one core strategy that leverages multiple tactics working together to achieve your goal(s).

Budget Flexibility

The metric driven nature of digital marketing allows for flexibility. With real time and up to date analytics its easy to see what works and what doesn’t. If you have one agency managing all of your assets, they can easily move budget around to where it’s needed. For instance, if AdWords is doing a great job with lead generation and PR struggles to generate leads it would be easy to reallocate marketing spend to the favorable tactic. Just imagine if you split 50k between 5 different agencies, it would be a challenge to move money around in order to leverage the strongest tactic.

Adaptability

What worked for one tactic might work for another. Having all of your tactics in one spot could allow for some cross pollination creating some unique strategies. For instance, if keyword research worked well for SEO, you can easily integrate some SEO tactics into your PR. Maybe some keyword research to help leverage a press release?

Convergence of Technology

As the digital world converges, search, social and PR rely on each other more and more. Google rankings are now influenced by social signals, new releases need to be search engine friendly and your AdWords quality score relies on your website’s content. With everything in the online world connecting and relating to each other its imperative that your agency understands how all of these aspects work together. Digital tactics need to converge not only from a messaging standpoint but also from a technology standpoint in order to deliver the strongest results.

By Jason Poulos (@TheSaganaki)

Whether its a new site for a PR campaign or an entirely new business initiative, the domain name you associate yourself with on the web says a lot about who you are. It may not seem like a big deal but what comes after the http://www. in the address bar of your web browser is important.

Web domains usually get purchased before a website or business is even developed. When thinking about that “big idea” here are 4 things to consider in order to achieve ultimate success on the web.

1. Does your domain name incorporate keywords?

Yes, another suggestion around keywords… if you are looking to rank in Google you need to play into the search engine’s hand. One of the many areas that Google looks for keywords is the domain name and url of a website. An easy way to show relevancy to a search term is to have that term in your domain name. For instance, if you are trying to rank for “Blue Widgets” something like “http://www.bluewidgets.com” would be perfect. Doing a little bit of research and making sure a keyword resides in your domain name will be the first step in having a site that’s friendly to search engines.

2. Did you choose a fitting suffix?

The “.com” in crttbuzzbin.com is this site’s domain suffix (or domain extension). That .com could’ve been one of many others, hundreds of domain suffixes exist but the most popular domain extensions are .com, .net, .org, .biz and .info. Each suffix is intended to serve a particular purpose and has a different connotations behind it. It might be the only domain name available but you may not want to go with that .org extension as that usually refers to a non-profit organization. The.com address is still highly sought after as this suffix still carries the most weight and authority to users. For most initiatives on the web, this would be the first extension I would look at purchasing and basing a web property around.

If you plan on getting creative with your domain extension for your campaign, make sure you think it through and its easy to say, spell and read. A while back we thought of creating a site called “pr.ovoke.us.” Yes, it seems pretty clever but looks kind of weird when its typed out due to the subdomain and nontraditional extension. Plus, when you tell someone the site, it doesn’t sound right. P r dot ovoke dot u s? That doesn’t sound like it’s intended “provoke us.” All in all, be careful on what extension you select before you base an entire website, campaign or business around a particular domain name.

3. Did you buy variations of the domain name?

This aspect is really done to protect your brand, investment and website. Simply buying the .com version of your great idea won’t cut it. If the name is available, grab the .net, .org and any other popular extensions that are available. This should be done just to make sure that you have full control over every domain name associated with your brand. In doing so this prevents any competitors from spinning up a similar website that could tarnish your identity. You may want to consider any misspellings or variations of the domain name too. For instance, if I sell widgets and I own “widgets.com” I may want to buy “bluewidgets.com” as well as “redwidgets.com.” As the business or PR campaign grows, having these domains on hand will allow for greater flexibility and scalability.

4. Did you read your domain name?

Not only will the suffix of the site have it’s influence but the length of the domain name will influence readability too. Typically, the shorter the domain name the better as it’s easier to print, say and remember. Don’t try to fit an entire sentence in your domain name.

Without capital letters or spaces, some businesses might be surprised to see what their business name actually spells out when it’s in the domain format. To avoid any confusion like the examples below, please look at the domain name and make sure it reads the way it’s intended to. Keep in mind this is your business, reputation or campaign at hand so be strategic and think things through.

Domain name blunders

1. ‘Who Represents’ is where you can find the name of the agent that represents any celebrity. www.whorepresents.com
2. ‘Experts Exchange’ is a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views. www.expertsexchange.com
3. Looking for a great pen? Look no further than ‘Pen Island ‘. www.penisland.net
4. Need a therapist? Try ‘Therapist Finder’ www.therapistfinder.com
5. Then there’s the ‘Italian Power Generator’ company. www.powergenitalia.com
6. ‘IP computer’ software. www.ip_anywhere.com
7. ‘Speed of Art’ await you at their wacky web site www.speedofart.com

Client’s ask me “When I Googled _______ our site is was way back on page 4” or “How come our site isn’t #1 in Google?” As the awareness and importance of #1 rankings grows, these types of questions have been becoming more frequent. Here’s two core SEO principles and a little bit of insight into why a website might be ranking poorly:

1. Your site isn’t relevant to what’s getting searched

If you want to rank for “Blue Widgets,” the term “Blue Widgets” needs to be found on the website. This “relevancy” factor is the first element that Google looks for when determining where a website ranks on the results page. Google is essentially looking for a match between the term that gets typed into the search engine (keyword) and what’s on the website. If that keyword doesn’t exist on the site, you will not rank for that term. Google will favor a site that contains the queried keyword.

When I conduct an SEO audit, this is one of the first things I look for. Based on what our client wants to rank for, I compare the search terms to what’s currently on their website. If I can’t find any matches between the search terms and content of the website, this phase of the audit can pretty much stop.

But what if those search terms exist on the website? In order to be as relevant to the search term as possible, it’s important that the keyword resides in the right places on the website. There are several places on a website where Google looks for embedded search terms when determining the relevancy of a website. The content of the site is one of many locations but keywords also need to be found in heading tags, navigation, url and meta data. Having the search terms in these locations will send out the strongest signals to Google on what your site is trying to rank for.

2. Your site isn’t popular

Site popularity is the second “big” factor that influences search results. Just like in high school, the kid with the most friends is generally viewed as the most popular. The same exists in the web world. Instead of “friends” a search engine judges popularity by links. A site with a lot of links back to it from other websites (friends) is viewed as a popular site. This popularity signal means that Google will favor a website that has multiple sites referencing its content over a site that has no links back to it.

The quality and quantity of the sites linking to your content does make a difference but the main point here is that participating in the online world is a must to get good rankings. This factor of SEO can get tricky but be sure to look beyond social media to grow a website’s popularity.

How do you know a site isn’t popular? The first signal is poor rankings but a lot can get determined in the referral section of Google Analytics. This is the first place to start looking when a sites popularity is in question. Based on what’s discovered here a web analyst can provide some insight into the site’s performance.

Relevancy and popularity are the core concepts of search engine optimization. To rank, a website needs to be successful in both of these areas. A page that’s relevant to a search term and popular will produce positive results.

*I’m assuming that the site in question is in good standing and is being hosted by a legit hosting company. If any malicious activity has happened on the website or the server it’s an easy way to get flagged in Google. Most sites won’t have any issues like this but I just wanted to throw it out there because your rankings can be drastically influenced by any malicious activity. If any malicious activity has happened on a website I would begin resolving those issues first.

This past week, I came across a couple of articles that talked about how some Facebook advertisers think that ad clicks are coming from bots and not “real” people. The first article that was brought to my attention showcases Limited Run’s struggle with Facebook. They claim that 80 percent of their ad clicks came from bots. In a Forbes article, Erik Larson claims that 90 percent of his ad clicks came from bots.

What sparked Limited Run’s suspicion was that they noticed that incoming traffic to there website from the ads had javascript disabled. When a user has javascript disabled in their web browser, it becomes very difficult for a website to track and monitor clicks. By default, javascript is automatically enabled in all web browsers and would have to be manually turned off. In Limited Run’s case, I would be suspicious too if I saw a lot of users to my site that didn’t have javascript enabled.

When Erik thought something wasn’t right with his web traffic, he contacted Facebook to see if they could provide any insight to what was going on with his ads. Even with the amazing analytics that Facebook has, they were not willing to divulge any details on his campaign. The same happened to Limited Run. They received little support from Facebook, so little that they are no longer going to participate in the social network.

My Opinion

Both the Forbes and the CNET article chronicle the experience that these users had with Facebook, and both articles are worth a read. To me, the issue at hand isn’t really about bots or Facebook’s unwillingness to cooperate with these people. I’m more curious about the decision to market a website through Facebook. One thing that both articles failed to talk about was the decision to market a website through Facebook advertising. Both Limited Run and Erik used Facebook ads to target an external website and not their Facebook page.

That decision right there is an anomaly on its own. Why would you do that? Yes, I understand that Facebook has billions of users, and you can get really specific with your ad targeting, but why send a user off of Facebook to your website? Why wouldn’t you use your ads to get “likes” to your Facebook page? I think it’s pretty clear that having a Facebook fanbase is imperative for many businesses and brands. Build up your Facebook presence/engagement, and you can easily promote your website through Facebook.

If web traffic is truly what these folks wanted, SEO or an AdWords campaign would’ve been a much better marketing decision.

Are bots drumming up “likes” on your ad campaign?

Seeing if your “likes” are from real people or bots might be a challenge. What you can do is create an engagement ratio to monitor your users engagement with the page. Using Facebook insights, you should be able to come up with a little formula for your page. In looking at the history, lets say that for every 100 likes you get, you average 10 wall posts and 25 shares. If you run a campaign and you get 500 likes, you should see wall posts and shares go up proportionately. If your likes compared to shares/wall posts grows at a disproportionate rate, something might be up.

What do you think about all of this?
Photo from BirgerKing

I have touted the powers of organic search and how SEO can leverage your clients initiatives but what about paid search? Can paid search help further your client’s message? Below are a few reasons why Google AdWords should make it into your Digital PR campaign.

(Unfamiliar with AdWords? Check out the video to the left)

Search is a Pull Medium

A user engages a search engine because they are actively looking for content. This simple yet core concept makes a huge difference compared to other advertising and digital mediums. Traditional ads and banner ads are a push medium that try to push a message to an audience. With potential visitors looking for content in a search engine, it’s necessary to be found where they are looking. It’s a pretty simple idea and it makes sense but this idea doesn’t seem to penetrate PR campaigns as often as it should.

Accurate Ad Targeting

Unlike traditional advertising, the targeting in Google AdWords can get really specific which is a huge asset. Having a wide variety of targeting credentials allows for accurate ad placement. This precise targeting ensures that you are delivering your client’s content to the intended audience. In AdWords you can target searches for specific geographic locations, languages, age groups, gender, time of day and mobile devices.

Set Your Own Budget

AdWords are Pay Per Click (PPC) so you only get charged when someone clicks on your ad. On top of this, you also have control over how much that click costs. Low competition terms can start around fifty cents per click and higher competition terms could be as high as fifteen or twenty dollars a click. You can control budget by how many different keywords you bid on, the more keywords you bid on, more budget will most likely be required. Targeting fewer more specific keywords is an easy way to lower expenses.

This concept of setting your own bids based around keywords combined with accurate targeting is a great way to get traction for clients who may not have extensive digital budgets.

Instant Results

Fully implementing an organic search campaign is a timely investment. Even once the site is “fully optimized” it can take weeks for Google to re-index and re-rank your website. When trying to act fast or run a quick promotion, paid search is nimble and can start delivering results as soon as it’s launched. Not only can paid search campaigns get launched really quickly but they can also get turned off in an instant. Paid search only works when you tell it to work, as soon as you turn of the campaign, clicks stop which will inevitably save some budget.

Support Organic Results

If your site is already optimized and it ranks well in organic search, paid search can be used to help “dominate the results page.” Having your brand in multiple areas of the results page will give searchers a greater opportunity to interact with your message. Some might think that this is overkill  but this study found out that paid ads have a higher click through rate when an organic listing for the same site showed up. Ads had a lower click through rate when organic listings for the same site weren’t displayed. Not only is there a physical presence on page when organic and paid search are combined but this combination also effect in a user’s decision making process.

At face value Google Alerts comes across as a simple single purpose tool that’s only good at monitoring the web for new content. With a little bit of tweaking you can do a lot more with Google Alerts to help monitor your client’s web property, reputation and content.

Monitor Your Client’s Name

This basic approach allows you to monitor your clients name, product or branded term. To do this, simply put your client’s name into the “search query” field, leave the result type set to “everything” and then fill out the rest of the form to create an alert. Depending on what you selected from the “how often” dropdown, this simple alert could send you an email every time Google indexes a page that contains your client’s name. All in all, a pretty quick and easy way to see who’s mentioning your client out there on the web.

This is by far the most basic form of a Google Alert that most people might be familiar with. As useful and simple as this alert is, you can do much more with Google Alerts to get different and more specific results for your client. Here are a few more ideas:

Monitor Links

Want to see what website’s are linking back to your client’s website or blog post? In the search query box type this: link:http://www.my-website-name.com. This is a great way to see what other sites have referenced your client’s website or content. Not only can you see who’s referencing your client but identifying who these sites are might offer further networking and outreach. If you only wanted to monitor blogs, select “blogs” from the “result type” dropdown menu.

Monitor Plagiarism

Want to see if another site has plagiarized your client’s content? In the search query box simply add a unique sentence from your client’s materials. You’ll get an alert if another website has used the same phrasing. Keep in mind that the site in question might have quoted the text so be sure to fully read the article that spawned the alert.

Monitor a Specific Website

Rather than setting up an alert that monitors the entire web, an alert can get set up to monitor a specific website. This is a great option if you know what websites might be mentioning your client or content. To do this, type this in the search query box: “what you want to monitor” site:http//site-you-want-to-monitor.com. This technique is also a great way to monitor Craigslist for stuff you are looking for. As you can see I have several alerts set up for some car parts. When a part gets posted that matches my term, I get an email.

Monitor Local News

This is great if you’re interested in monitoring local publications from a specific state for your client. Google alerts will recognize state codes in your query so you can keep a close eye on a specific state’s news. First, make sure that you have “news” selected from the “result type” dropdown menu as this functionality doesn’t really work with other result types. Then add a location to the query. So, if you wanted to monitor local news in New York for your client, this is what you would put in the query field: “term you are monitoring” location:ny

Monitor the Competition

Most of the above techniques can be used to monitor your competition too. Simply replace “clients” with “competition” and you can have alerts set up that monitor what your competition is doing on the web.

Google Alerts can be extremely helpful and useful. Pretty much any advanced Google search technique can get integrated into an alert. You just need to experiment and get creative with it. Check out this infographic on “how to use Google search” it might provide some more inpiration for a Google Alert. Also, if you want explicit results be sure to wrap your search term in double quotes. This will limit the results to exactly what you are looking for.

Whether it’s a massive power outage, contaminated food issue or an ethics disagreement, a crisis can strike your client at any time. To properly manage communications around the issue, a page on their website, subdomain or microsite might be created to help inform people about what’s happening.

But which avenue is best? Where should your position on the crisis get posted?

Page Addition on a Website

This method will most likely be the easiest and quickest of the three. Assuming that your website has a content management system, adding a new page to the site should be really easy. This approach also will closely associate the crisis with the brand as this page is directly off of the main site. Also, if SEO is a consideration, this option will work best as this new page will be able to inherit the website’s domain authority and “link juice” that has already been established.

Subdomain

If you are looking to take more of a passive role to the crisis, a subdomain off your website might be the answer. A subdomain is essentially a brand new site and will have to be built from the ground up. Not only will a site need to get built, but this new subdomain won’t inherit any authority that your main site might have established. In doing so, this method creates a challenge from an SEO standpoint.

Microsite

There might be a time when minimal branding or association with the crisis is needed. To help communicate the issue, a microsite/new website might be the answer, as the new domain name could contain no branded terms. Just like a subdomain, a ground up site build will need to occur. This new build can give you the opportunity to design a website that looks totally different from an established look and feel. However, this approach takes time.

Although a new domain name can be bought in a matter of minutes, it can take up to 72 hours for the new domain to get fully associated with its web server. When trying to act fast on an issue, a microsite may not be the way to go. Just like a subdomain, you’re starting fresh and having a site that performs well in a search engine will be a challenge. Typically, crisis domains are purchased really quickly and set to expire within a year. Not only will the lack of authority that a new site has work against you, but Google rankings also are influenced by domain expiration and purchase metrics.

All in all, it’s tough to recommend the perfect crisis plan on the web. It all depends on the severity of the crisis and the communication strategy. However, the three options I outlined offer three slightly different approaches to managing a crisis.

At CRT/tanaka, we have made a promise to “whatcanbe,” a simple idea of endless creative possibilities. This mindset of looking at the world through a slightly different lens is emulated through our work, process and agency culture. Rather than sharing some digital marketing tactics today I wanted to share some videos that I felt emulated the whatcanbe mindset. Whether it’s a different way of looking at negative space, electromagnetism or a year of your life, all of these videos present a different/whatcanbe approach to a solution.

Reverse of Volume

Magnet Happy

One Second Documented Everday for a Year

By Jason Poulos (@TheSaganaki)

A website’s copy has a huge influence on where a site ranks in Google. The most strategically planned out and well built website could fall flat on it’s face if copy isn’t properly crafted and executed. With Google wanting valuable content, the role of web copy and SEO copywriting is becoming more apparent now than ever. If budget isn’t allocate to SEO copywritng or you don’t have a SEO copywriter on staff, you might feel compelled to take this task on yourself. However, this can be quite challenging as I’ve had some excellent writers deliver some really crappy “optimized” copy to myself.

If you are going to write web copy for SEO purposes, here are some copywriting tips:

Incorporate Keywords

It seems like a given but I’ve received SEO copy that didn’t contain any of the targeted keywords that we were trying to rank for. Granted the person writing this copy had little experience but a clear explanation and list of targeted keywords were provided for each page of the site. In general, I recommend that one keyword phrase represents one page on the website. This makes it clear to Google on what you are trying to rank for and will avoid confusion. The targeted keyword will need to get integrated into the content at least 2 to 3 times as long as it naturally fits the copy.

But Don’t Over Incorporate Keywords

As this is called “keyword stuffing.” As content gets crafted with keywords in mind a tendency may arise to over use a particular keyword. SEO copy should not sound repetitive or like a broken record. The content should read naturally to a human and if you have any doubts about your content, try reading it out loud to a coworker. In doing so, both of you will be able to hear any annoyances or repetition in the copy. Trying to force keywords into the copy can penalize the site and hurt rankings. This over optimization penalty can be seen in Google’s most recent Penguin Update.

Add Some Links

In the copy try to contain links to other pages on your website. Google likes this as it signals relevancy between a site’s content. On top of Google, users like links as well as they act as a signal for more information around the linked term(s). Links to external sites aren’t entirely necessary but offer a good way to reference information that you’ve discovered. Linking out to another website’s content might also spawn a reciprocal link back from them. With Google using links back to your site as a popularity measure, any effort towards gaining a quality backlink is a good move.

Don’t Forget About Page Descriptions and Page Titles

Yes, these elements fall within the copywriting spectrum and are very important to rankings. Most of the time these items are forgotten about as they aren’t found in the main content area of a website but they are found on a Google search results page. Page titles should be keyword rich and contain the site name as well as the page name and should be no longer than 70 characters. Page descriptions should be no longer than 160 characters and should be keyword rich and offer a brief description of the page’s content. Think of the page description and page title like writing copy for an ad as you have a very short time period to grab a user’s attention.

Don’t Ramble and Pontificate

Avoid long lengthy rambling dissertations and try to wrap up your content in about 500 – 750 words. A lot can get said in 500 words and it’s a good number to shoot for when you’re generating copy as this doesn’t look too daunting to a user. If you find that a page’s copy is running long you might need to break the content down into further sub-sections. Remember to stay focused and relative to your specified keywords. Running off on tangents that having nothing to do with the subject matter will just pollute your copy and confuse Google on what you are trying to rank for.

Well, there you have it, 5 sure fire tips that will help the SEO copywriting process.

By Jason Poulos (@TheSaganaki)

I started working with a new client this past week and in typical web nerd fashion I was curious to see what was going on behind the scenes in the analytics world. I took a look at the website’s history for the last 2 years and glancing at their data I noticed a pretty huge spike in traffic from November 2010 to February of 2011. This spike in traffic came from a paid content targeting campaign (Google display ad network) that ran during those months. With all of this increased traffic, how did those marketing dollars pay off? Was this campaign a success?

At first glance, we can say “yes this campaign was a success.” More visits to the website = greater brand awareness = success. To truly measure success, the real question is what did visitors  do once they reached the website. In looking at the graph we can easily see that a person visited this site (page views), looked at one page (pages/visit) in a pretty short time frame (time on site) and then left the site (bounce rate).

Digging deeper into the website’s analytics I discovered the landing page that users would be presented with when an ad was clicked. The targeted landing page contained some brief copy, a product demo video and a form to request more information about the product. All solid landing page techniques. This campaign was also set up with a conversion goal in the analytics. This goal tracked how many people filled out the form on the landing page. Clearly the goal of this campaign was lead generation and they were measuring the success of the campaign by how many people filled out the form. How well did this campaign do? How many users filled out the form?

124. 124 people completed the form out of the 11,117 visits to the website that the campaign generated. That gives this campaign a 1.1% conversion rate. Not so hot in my mind but I have no idea how much money they put into this campaign or how much their product sells for. In theory, out of those 124 leads, one sale could pay for the entire campaign depending on the price of the software being sold. Unfortunately it’s a mystery as I’m missing some data to fully analyze the ROI of this campaign. Purely by the numbers this doesn’t look like a successful campaign to me.

Improving that Conversion Rate

Out of all of this I do find the marketing decision interesting, going with display ads over search. This aspect alone is a challenge as content targeting is a push medium. Realistically, this type of campaign would’ve done better as an AdWords campaign because it’s a pull medium. AdWords are served up based around a user’s search in Google. This type of user initiated marketing tends to do better than a medium that pushes a message to an audience.

It’s hard to say what went wrong in this campaign, most likely the content of the ad reflected something different than what was on the website. What makes me think that these elements were not aligned is that the average time on site for this campaign was a mere 19 seconds. On top of having the ad and content misaligned we need to think about where these ads were placed and what determined the ad placement. More research and tweaking of these elements as the campaign progressed could’ve helped out. The other side to the argument is that this campaign was perfectly executed and this data truly highlights the disadvantages of display advertising.

What do you think? Success or failure?

During our web projects, I’ve run into the same situations/questions with clients over the years. Whether you are an account executive, marketer or small business owner and plan on working with a digital team to create a website, the conversation can get extremely technical very quickly. However, there are some very basic technical considerations/skills that you should be aware of when working with a digital team.

1. Let us buy the domain name

Unless you want to manage your own DNS and MX records, your digital team will need to access where the domain got registered in order to launch the website and set up e-mail. Sometimes clients will buy domain names with a personal account and not want divulge the login credentials to the web team. In doing so, we need to walk through the DNS process over the phone. All in all, it’s not an ideal situation… Yes, you can transfer domains to different accounts but that has another set of issues and can get rather technical too.

To resolve this, have your web team buy the domain for you. This way it’s in the hands of the people who know exactly what to do with it. You might also want to consult domain names with your web team too as having keywords in your domain name will influence your SEO. So, that domain name you thought was so great may not be so hot once the team does some quick research. Also, your web team will know if other similar domain names should get purchased as well as what domain extensions should get purchased.

Don’t feel like that once someone else purchases a domain that  you can’t get it back. Once the domain is fully set up, it can get transferred back into your possession.

2. Know where to post content

At CRT/tanaka we have a tiered approach to launching our website. The website will first reside on our internal test environment that only the web team can see. Once the site is ready to share it’s then pushed to a staging environment. The staging environment is viewable to our client but not to Google or the outside world. Once the site has been approved it’s then moved to a live environment that’s viewable to the public and Google.

If you are managing content across these environments versioning issues can quickly come about. To avoid any issues make sure you check in with the web team to see what tier the website is at and where content should be placed.

3. Launching a website takes time

I’m not going to get into all of the specifics around DNS (domain name service) but if you are getting a website built here’s what you need to know. DNS is usually managed where you bought your domain name and DNS controls which server your website is pointed to. Whether you are launching a new site, switching hosts or trying to get up that website for a crisis changing DNS credentials can take up to 72 hrs to fully propagate worldwide.

4. Be sure to do a hard refresh

Client requests change to a website. Web team makes the change. Client doesn’t see the change on the website. It happens all the time, so what’s the deal? Before going back to the web team and inquiring about the change, make sure that web page isn’t getting cached in your browser. To do this, simply go to your web browser and while holding down the shift key click the refresh button. In doing so, this tells your web browser to go back to the server and grab the newest version.

It’s so simple to do a hard refresh and will save everybody time, effort and headaches.

5. Bookmarks

In a given web project a client might receive multiple links for comps, sitemaps and schematics. Couple those links with links to a staging server and you can easily have a handful of urls that are getting referenced. Using a project management tool like Sharepoint or Basecamp will help ease the burden but in case those services aren’t available be sure to bookmark all the links you receive from your digital team. This way you have everything that’s been provided and its easily referenced and you don’t have to go back to the team asking for urls.

Answer: Sites Ranked 1-4 in Google have the highest probability of getting clicked

The top 4 organic rankings in Google garner almost 2/3’s of all clicks.

#1 Result in Google = 36.4% Click through Rate
#2 Result in Google = 12.5% Click through Rate
#3 Result in Google = 9.5% Click through Rate
#4 Result in Google = 7.9% Click through Rate

Why do the top 4 spots get all the clicks?

Users look towards the top of the page.

This eye tracking study performed on a Google search results page shows that most eye movement is concentrated towards the top of the page. The most relevant search results are ranked highest on the search results page therefore these results contain the most bolded terms. When a user see’s these bolded terms they act as a signal of relevancy and their eye moves towards the top of the page.

Top rankings are “above the fold.”

Essentially you don’t have to scroll to see the top 4 rankings. With these rankings right in your face on just about every laptop, desktop or tablet it’s no surprise that they have the highest click through rate. However, as we think about search results on a mobile phone it’s even more important to have strong rankings as only 2 results are shown due to the smaller screen.

Auto complete keeps you up top.

With the ability to modify a search query in real time some Google users are relying on Google’s auto complete functionality to find what they are looking for. Using the auto complete functionality to find content keeps users at the top of the page which in turn limits their visible results to the top 5 or so.

If you were to look under the hood of Google you’d be presented with an extremely complex and intricate math formula. Since it’s virtually impossible for humans to keep track of every website on the internet, Google has turned to it’s algorithm to help determine how a website ranks on their search results page.

Knowing that their formula isn’t perfect Google periodically changes these algorithms in an effort to provide searchers with the most relevant and accurate content. When this happens, it’s known as an “update,” which in turn has an impact on the search results we get. Sometimes the updates have a big impact; sometimes they’re hardly noticed but within the last year two major updates have occurred that now determine some characteristics of a “quality” website.

The first of these two updates occurred in February of 2011. The Panda update was designed to filter out thin, un-fit content that lacked substance. When the update first ran, some websites that had number one rankings were now shuffled to the back of Google’s index due to the website’s lack of content. The Panda update isn’t a one time update either. Google will occasionally run the update in an effort to re-sift through all of it’s content to ensure the best search results.

On April 24^th of this year Google released it’s most recent change to their ranking formula. The newest update named “Penguin” targeted content that over used keywords (keyword stuffing) and sites that have “unusual linking patterns,” such as links from content with text that is completely unrelated to the actual on-page content.

How to Survive in Google’s Panda-Penguin World?

As Google keeps on throwing out more and more bumps in the road it might seem impossible to attract and maintain those #1 rankings. We have no idea what lurks in Google’s update future but one thing that will never go away is Google’s thirst for compelling content. Not only is Google thirsty for content but we can see through recent updates that the search engine seeks quality content. Focusing  on the creation of engaging content will not only attract strong rankings but good content will also avoid getting caught in an update that could potentially hurt your website’s rankings. As we look to the future, here are some timeless tips:

1.Create valuable content.

If you aren’t producing content that is entertaining, informative or educational it will be a struggle to get ranked. Excellent content will be relative to your keywords and provide enough detail to fully satisfy your readers inquiry. A good way to see if your website contains valuable content is by taking a look at your website’s social profile. When users are excited, surprised or humored by the content they interact with they react by buying, sharing, connecting or returning to the site. A site with valuable content will have lots of return visits, shares or purchases.

If you feel that your website’s content might be lacking take a look at Google’s guide for quality content.

2. Don’t try to game the system with your content.

Their are tons of ways  out there to try and trick a search engine into better rankings. The recent Penguin update tried to eliminate some common “black hat” techniques but as time goes on it’s inevitable that a new technique will show up that will “guarantee #1 rankings.” As tempting as it might be to follow the latest and greatest cheat, your site will most likely suffer down the road. From a content stand point, make sure that you aren’t over using a keyword as this will come across as keyword stuffing and you could get penalized. The copy of your website should sound natural and not like a broken record repeating the same phrase in every sentence. If you can work your keyword into your copy at least 2 or 3 times you should be in good shape. Image from Warrior Forums

3. Diversify how people reach your content.

You’re taking a risk by solely relying on organic search for traffic as a simple algorithm update can annihilate your rankings. To help avoid a situation like this, look towards other methods to market your content  as putting all of your eggs in the organic search basket could be disastrous. Beyond a well optimized site for organic search, paid search, e-mail marketing and social media marketing should fit into a your content and distribution strategy.

Links back to a website are one of the most important ranking factors to a search engine. The materials, content and outreach created in the public relations world could be chock full of extremely helpful back links that could help get your clients content on page one of Google.

Are you reaching out to bloggers, websites and the media on your client’s behalf? How about creating articles, press releases and  blog posts that will get posted on websites outside of your client’s?  If you have any of these responsibilities you could be passing up valuable opportunities for your client. As a PR professional, your influence on these media outlets could be greater than what you thought.

Grasping the concepts of SEO and trying to manage your client work and stay on top of the latest PR trends can seem a little overwhelming. However, integrating some of these best practices into your workflow can create strong results for your client.

Tip 1: You need to know how a search engine works

Just the basics are necessary, if you want to help with your clients rankings some basic SEO knowledge will be very helpful. When relying on a search engine to generate traffic to a website there are two main factors to be concerned about.

1. Relevancy: How relevant your site is to the search queries. Meaning, when I search for “Bypass Burger” where is the phrase “Bypass Burger” located on your site. For best results the term (keyword) should be in the url, page title, page description, heading tags and content.
2. Popularity (Backlinks): How popular your website is. Search engines determine popularity by links back to your website. The quantity and quality of these backlinks influence a websites ranking.

A website that ranks well in search will be keyword rich and will have a strong backlink profile. Need more SEO tips? Check out my 15 basic SEO tips.

Tip 2: You need to care

More often than not, SEO and PR will not be found in the same agency. Typically, the client will hire two separate agencies, one for PR, the other for SEO/SEM. First off, this lack of integration has it’s own set of issues but most likely the responsibilities of generating traffic and improved search rankings will not fall into the PR bucket. So, if you’re on the PR side why should you care about how your client’s website is ranking in search? You have a myriad of responsibilities of your own, besides that’s another agencies task and not yours.

Well, you should care. What you do in the digital PR world could be full of extremely helpful backlinks that could help boost your client’s search rankings.

All in all, this boils down to caring about your clients. If you want to see them succeed and get better rankings ask them about SEO.  Even though this might be another agencies task but your client should be able to provide you with a list of specific keywords and landing pages they are trying to rank for.

Tip 3: Integrate keyword rich links

Even if you don’t care about how a search engine works or your clients this is by far the most important tip in this post. Whatever you are creating needs to have links back to your client’s website. Not just a http://www.clientsite.com at the end of the release but links throughout the article/post/release/pitch…

For instance, let’s say we are trying to rank for “bypass burgers” in Google. When that term, “bypass burger” is used in your article, link it to that specific page on your site that references that content.  So, “bypass burgers” would link to http://www.clientsite.com/bypass-burgers/ and it would look like this in your article: bypass burgers. Now, keep on doing this throughout the rest of the article, integrate the supplied keywords into your content and hyperlink them out to the proper pages on your client’s website. Easy, right?

Having these keywords integrated into the article and then linking out to that content is a must. Search engines love links like this as it signals to them the specificity of the content at hand.

Tip 4: Ask for back links

This tip is also found in my 5 SEO tips for PR Pros article but it fits here too. If you catch wind of coverage that you didn’t pitch, go back and ask the author to include a link back to your site if their isn’t already one. Super simple yet effective way to grow a back link profile.

Oh, and why do I keep on mentioning bypass burgers? Because I just read this article on Heart Attack Grill, and it’s pretty crazy! I kind of want to try one too….

I’ve recently received a handful of e-mails that have been breaking some of the basic fundamental rules of an HTML email.  Whether it’s the lack of knowledge from a marketer, a stubborn designer or lazy developer, this post highlights some of these discrepancies that I have been noticing.  To have a successful HTML e-mail, please follow these 3 basic rules:

1. Don’t have your entire e-mail as a giant image.

Why? You’re essentially sending out a blank e-mail. If your recipients don’t have you marked as a “known sender” most e-mail programs will not display images. To view images in an e-mail, a user initiated download of the image will be required. Rather than sending out that huge graphic with your copy embedded in it, cut it up and make your copy HTML text. In doing so, this will allow your recipients to see your message without having to download any images. In the narrow window that you have to grab a recipients attention it’s important that your message reaches them with as little effort as possible.  With this hybrid image/HTML text version expect open rates and click through to increase.

2. Don’t have your e-mail wider than 650 pixels.

Why? Not everybody will see your content. Even though some of us have small tv’s for monitors keep in mind how preview windows act in desktop clients like Outlook. Even with a hi-resolution monitor your preview window for e-mails might not be that big. I have a 1920×1080 22″ flat screen monitor and my preview window in Outlook is only about 800 pixels wide. I’m in the upper echelon for screen resolution and even then 800 pixels isn’t that much. What about, laptops, iPads and mobile devices? Expect their preview/e-mail windows to be even narrower. To be as compliant as possible across all devices and to deliver the best user experience for your recipients have your email  in the 550px – 650px range. 74% of designers surveyed agree with this width.

3. Don’t use the same subject line for each e-mail.

Why? You’re killing your open rate. Think of your subject  line as an ad’s headline. Your subject line needs to be brief, reflect your e-mails content and be catchy and  engaging. Poise a question, highlight an offer, statistic, recent news or event. If this month’s subject line was “Company’s Name April Update” and last month’s e-mail was “Company’s Name March Update” get away from that trend and highlight what’s in the e-mail and what’s important to your recipients. Once again, you have a narrow window to grab a recipients attention and having a well-crafted subject line is just one more element that will help market your message.

Take a look at this gem, sub par subject line, too wide and it’s all image. Breaking all my rules in one e-mail!

If you have/own/manage/support a website or blog I’m sure you’ve cracked open Google analytics at least once to see how many visitors your site has received. Some of us might spend more time in the analytics world but at a base level Google Analytics provides some basic solid metrics (visits, page views, time on site, bounce rate) that any website owner or blogger should be interested in.

As you dig deeper into the data world of Google Analytics curiousity might approach you. For instance, you might want to know how those 15,000 visitors last month reached your site via search engines. Visiting the “traffic sources” section in Google Analytics provides you data on what search engines are used, traffic from Adwords and what keywords are queried to reach your site.

All sound great, right? Google Analytics has all the data and tracking you ever needed?  However, a couple of months ago Google started blocking some of the most valuable data that could have been provided to you in analytics. If a user is signed into Google and uses Google to search, the terms they used to reach your site will not be reported in Google Analytics. From Google:

“When a signed in user visits your site from an organic Google search, Google Analytics will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site.” Full Google Post

Knowing the terms  that  are used to reach your site is extremely valuable data. If you are curious or doing any sort of organic optimization, this data is gold. Keywords are the core of SEO and dictate your whole optimization and monitoring strategy. This is huge, with search terms blocked, you are now blind to the queries that are getting used to reach your website. How can we optimize and monitor a website blindly?

Google claims that this was implemented to help protect their users privacy. However, paid search is treated differently, traffic and reporting via Adwords will not be affected by this change. So, privacy is only important for organic searches and not paid searches? Interesting… you do have to pay to play right?

Google also anticipated that this change would impact 10% or less of searches. Wrong! Just take a look at a couple of the sites we manage, those numbers are in the 15% -27% range! In looking at site one, for 27% of our search traffic, we don’t know what terms are getting used to reach our site. Take a look at the others too, in 3 out of 4 examples our highest ranking keyword is “not provided.” Awesome!

This is a game changer, as more people sign up with Google and stay logged in while searching, keywords will continue to get blocked in your analytics. It seems really odd that a search engine who relies so heavily on keyword usage and relevance for rankings would want to block this data from us. Google provides keyword research tools and resources to help out website owners. It appears that Google wants to help us make our sites more efficient by the use of keywords. Blocking keywords in analytics inhibits this initiative and will prevent your site from being truly “Google friendly.”

Not only do consumers rely on search but journalists rely heavily on search engines to do their job. In TopRank’s Journalists Use of Search Survey they found that 91% of journalists, editors and reporters use Google. In a more recent survey, George Washington University found that 100% of the journalists surveyed use Google to research stories (PDF, page 12).

It’s no surprise that search is used that heavily, as a PR professional are you maximizing your clients news in Google? Here are a few tips that will help:

1. Ask Your Client for Keywords

As a PR professional you may have nothing to do with your clients SEO initiatives. However, to maximize news exposure and results for your client, PR and SEO should be aligned. When crafting your next press release ask your client about keywords. If they are running a SEO or PPC campaign they should have access to a list of keywords that they are trying to rank for. Integrating select keywords into your release can help your clients SEO initiatives and online exposure.

If your client doesn’t have any keywords to share, you at least looked smart and focused on their business. You might want to explain to them the benefits of SEO and have your SEO team follow up with your client.

2. Create an Optimized Press Release

Assuming that your client has provided you with some valuable keywords, you can now craft an optimized release. Based on the list of keywords provided some should align with what you are writing about. Here are some press release tips:

• Keywords should be present in the press release title and copy.
• Ideally, keywords should be mentioned in the first paragraph of the release.
• Don’t over use a term or try to cram too many terms into the release.
• Avoid “click here’s” and try to use the selected keywords as the link text.
• Link deep into your clients site, don’t have all of your links dropping users on the homepage. If text refers to a specific piece of content, link your readers to that content.
• More press release optimization tips.

2.5 Distribute

The optimized release needs to get distributed, this article covers some of the pro’s and cons of BusinessWire, PRNewswire, PRWeb and PRLeap. What about free press release distribution services? Visitpr did a pretty in-depth test of free press release sites.

3. Publish Press Releases on Your Client’s Website

Treat press releases like blog posts and publish them to your client’s newsroom once they get distributed. Google favors a website with frequent updates and these keyword rich press releases are perfect content additions.

4. Media Mentions: Request Backlinks

When other blogs and news sites mention your client online, make sure that they link back to your client’s website. If no links are present in the article, contact the post author and ask if they could include some links back to your site. Be concise, polite and explain your SEO efforts. Links back to your client’s website from other websites are very valuable and will help boost Google rankings.

If the author isn’t willing to help out with a little bit of link love you can always post links in the comments section. These links in the comments won’t have the same impact as a link in the body copy but will help generate traffic to your client’s website.

5. Monitor & Report

Take a look at your clients Google analytics and what traffic your site received via the release or referring sites. It’s a pretty simple idea but knowing how many people got to the website is useful information. Any metrics that shows the success of the release or media mentions should be brought to your client’s attention.

Over the past couple of months there has been a lot of buzz around the growing social bookmarking site Pinterest. For those who aren’t familiar with it, Pinterest is a visual based social bookmarking site that allows users to share things they like. Users can “pin” images from  a website to specific boards they create on Pinterest. Once an image is pinned, it contains a link back to your website. An intriguing or appetizing image will entice users learn more about the image’s origins and generate traffic back to your site.

Why Consider Pinterest

If you have a website, you want visitors. Participating on a site that receives over 10 million monthly unique visits is a must. Just as a successful brand optimizes for search engines and participates in other social networks, leveraging content to a larger audience is imperative.

No Participation Required

The great thing about Pinterest is that your website can reap the benefits of the network without even touching the site. No need to register and maintain a user base or brand profile (although I’d recommend participation), you can get away with doing nothing! Assuming your site already has some traffic behind it,  you can fully rely on your current web traffic to curate your content on Pinterest. To do this, you just need 3 things on your website.

1. Great Content: This kind of goes without saying and as you may know content is king on the web. Ask yourself, do you have content that will work on Pinterest? Keep in mind it’s a visual based site…
2. Excellent Photos: This is absolutely necessary, if you don’t have photos to support your content you can’t participate on Pinterest. Not only do you need photos but they have to be good photos.  Over staged or over produced photos won’t resonate with the community.
3. Pin It Button: Pinterest offers a few ways to add the “pin it” button to your website but they aren’t ideal. If you have a wordpress site, this is a easy tutorial on adding the button. Even though Pinterest provides a bookmark driven button, adding the “pin it” button will make it easy for users to pin your content.

Some Traffic Examples

CRT/Tanaka has added the “pin it” button to a couple of our clients websites that feature recipes (Blueberries, Maple Syrup). Recipes are a hot item on Pinterest and we wanted to leverage the recipe content as easily as possible. In both cases, by simply adding the “pin it” button and having pin worthy content and photos, Pinterest has become one of our top referrers for both sites.

I’d also like to mention a co-workers blog. Rather than adding the “pin it” button to her site she created a board on Pinterest and pinned her blog’s photos. With minimal effort, her site received a 535% spike in traffic due to her pins and participation on Pinterest. Be sure to check out topoftheapple.com, lots of delicious photos and recipes!

On Wednesday January 18, the Internet spoke out against these ridiculous bills that our government is trying to pass. It’s very nice to see big and small sites take a stand and fight for our Internet freedom. Did this protesting make a difference? Did we influence our representatives? Check out the graphic from ProPublica.org that compares supporters vs. opponents for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

The Internet won! Right? Obama says he won’t support SOPA, but what about the Protect IP Act (PIPA)? Keep in mind SOPA and PIPA are two separate bills, but I think a lot of people might think it’s one bill. According to ProPublica.org 37 senators support PIPA, and only 22 oppose the bill.  What is PIPA?

Our government isn’t giving up on passing something completely idiotic, a co-worker forwarded me this info sent out by the New York Tech Meet Up:

“The proponents of PIPA/SOPA are now regrouping and redoubling their efforts to force these egregious pieces of legislation into law by forcing a vote next week in the Senate called “Cloture”, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloture) which in effect forces Senators to vote for a bill as written without debate or amendments. They are doing this as fast as possible because they know opposition is building, and they still think they have the votes necessary to pass PIPA.”

If you haven’t done so, please contact your senator and oppose this bill!

Take action now.

In last week’s post, Making the Most of Email Marketing, I talked about some of the basics of email marketing and why it should be consideration for a brand. From that post, there are two main things to remember on why email marketing works.

• Email is Data driven: Knowing who opened your email, when they opened it and what they clicked on is all recorded. Data like this can allow for accurate targeting/retargeting and can further interactions between recipients and the brand.
• Email marketing has a strong ROI: The Direct Marketing Association puts email marketing’s ROI for 2011 at $40.56 for every $1 invested. Only organic SEO scored better.

If the need for an email marketing campaign has been identified,  it’s time to get people to subscribe to your email list. The core to any new or existing email campaign are your recipients. Continually getting people to subscribe, or “opt-in” to your email list is key. Here are a handful of ideas that can help increase opt-in/subscription rates for your email campaign.

1. Simplify the sign up form: Depending on what email distribution service is getting used, the opt-in process should be really simple. Most likely a name and email address, or just an email address is required. A form that asks for phone numbers, place of business, addresses and pet’s names will appear very daunting. Even if those fields aren’t required, the physical appearance of them will deter email sign ups.
2. Get the details later: If you do really want to know what your recipient’s pet’s names are, follow up with them later. Once they are signed up a survey can be sent out that gathers more demographics around your recipients. But don’t do this immediately after they sign up, give it some time.
3. Location: A email opt-in form should be on every page of your website, like this: http://searchenginewatch.com/ Not only on your website but email signatures and Facebook pages can contain the form or links to the sign up form.
4. Why sign up/ Incentivize the sign up: Be clear on what the recipient will be getting. Is it email only offers? Industry insights and information? Sign up for our email and receive?
5. Make sure the email has value to it: If the email doesn’t really offer anything or has poor content people will unsubscribe.
6. Frequency of emails: Daily, weekly, monthly? Recipients want to know how often they will be getting your email. Not knowing your delivery schedule a daily email can be viewed as spam if they weren’t aware of this when they signed up.
7. Stick to the schedule: Try to be as consistent as possible with your email delivery. A weekly email that goes to monthly then back to weekly will not be well received.
8. In the email: Make sure that the email sent out has an easy way to forward it. If the recipient of the forwarded message likes what they see, provide an easy way for them to opt-in to the list.
9. Tradeshows: Have a way for users sign up at a tradeshow, a personal interaction can lend itself to a sign up. I know when I was at SES New York last year, vendors could just scan your conference pass and you’d automatically be enrolled in their email list.
10. Opt-in by default: On any order form or contest entry form have the email opt-in box checked by default.

Why it really works? Email is Data Driven

Outside of the fact that everybody uses email,  the true beauty of email marketing is that every email sent is monitored. From who opened it, to who clicked on the links, it’s all recorded. Having all this data at your fingertips allows for retargeting and follow up with specific recipients who opened and clicked through. In doing so, recipient lists can be created around demographics and based around what content they like and how they interact with the email. Not only can you retarget and get specific but having all this data allows you to see what email content and subject lines work better than others.

The ROI of Email Marketing

The data driven nature of email marketing can produce a very positive return on investment. The Direct Marketing Association puts email marketing’s ROI for 2011 at $40.56 for every $1 invested and 72% of respondents to an Econsultancy survey in early 2011 described email’s ROI as excellent or good. Only organic SEO scored better.

What type of email should be sent?

Email marketing isn’t for every business category but if your business is in sales, lead generation or consumer areas, the use of email can produce strong results.

By Jason Poulos (@TheSaganaki)

1. Mobile Continues to Grow

   In previous posts I’ve mentioned where the mobile market is headed and the importance of the emerging mobile market. With over 5 billion mobile devices expected to be in use by 2012, I don’t see this area losing any steam next year. Marketing in the mobile world will continue to grow and according to the Direct Marketing Association, mobile spending is predicted to grow 39 percent and should come close to the $1.2 billion mark. With only 33% of US businesses having mobile friendly websites, the time is now to “go mobile” while the opportunity still exists.

2. Quality Matters

   Google’s Panda/Farmer update earlier this year affected a lot of websites and brought to light that a “quality” website is favored by the search giant. Post Panda, design, branding, user engagement and social signals all seem to have more weight to a site’s rank. No one really knows how much weight these factors have but a poorly designed, ad heavy site with thin content that was ranking well will not rank as strongly after this update. You’d think that quality would be a given but this relatively major update has really tried to weed out the content farms and low quality websites.

   The design, brand, user engagement and social footprint all need to be thought out, planned and integrated to really create a well rounded digital footprint that plays well with Google. As Google figures out how to work these factors further into their algorithm, the need to adhere to these factors will become more and more important in order to obtain those first page search results.

3. Pin It!

   Check out that graph! With vists up 10,000 percent from last year and up 50 percent from last month, I’d say that the scrap booking inspired social network Pinterest, is gaining popularity.  Is it just a fad or will this social network really take hold? Compared to other  networks, Pinterest is the biggest mover. It might be too early to tell but I think 2012 will be a big year for the pin boarding site.

   Think of the site as a blend between Google Images and Twitter. Users can create “boards” based around specific interests and “pin” images to them. Users can follow others with similar interests and can share, comment, interact with others boards.

   The visual nature of the site is pretty cool and really sets the site apart from other networks. Having all of your interests and your friends interests at your fingertips can offer up tons of inspirational ideas and recommendations that are accurate and credible to your tastes.

4. Google Dethroned

   Google dominates the search world with a 65% market share but the need for the most accurate and relative search results might push users away from algorithm based search engines. Search results maintained by humans present a socialized search experience that might gain popularity in 2012. At the moment, I don’t think any of these have the potential to dethrone Google but at one point no one knew about Google either.

   • Blekko’s goal is to use human editors and not algorithms in order to personalize and socialize the search experience. With users maintaining topic tags, search results can be more relative and accurate to the query. Blekko averages 1 million searches a day.
   • DuckDuckGo has partnered with Blekko and shares some of the same information and technology to improve search results. DuckDuckGo’s main feature provides zero-click info, similar to Google Instant Search, DuckDuckGo tries to provide the most relevant information without clicking. DuckDuckGo averages about 5 million searches/month.
   • Greplin, Wajam and Quora are three other alternatives that are socially and human driven search engines.

5. Filter Bubbles Burst

   Eli Pariser offers up some very insightful thoughts based around how we find information and how that information is filtered to us. We experience these filter bubbles on a daily basis and may not even know that certain content is hidden from us. Google forms user profiles and engineers the info sent to your results page based on past searches and web activity. If I like Obama, Google determines that and sends me pro Obama links when searched, if I do not like Obama, I mainly get negative links when I search for Obama. As Google tries to serve up what it thinks I want, my view of the world is misshapen by the search engine.

   So how do we break these filter bubbles? The social web seems to be a partial solution but even then the social web won’t fully solve filter bubble issues. 2012 might see the rise of human based search engines and the human element of Pinterest might help you find that perfect recipe.

   It’s pretty apparent that fully relying on algorithms to serve us the “right” content isn’t the answer. Even algorithm based Google is starting to take human interaction and social signals into consideration when ranking pages. No matter where the filter exists, whether it’s Facebook, Netflix or Google, the need for the human touch is the future.

Bonus Trend: Catvertising

• Video is social: Ever hear of a viral video? I’m not saying that every video created needs have this aspect to it but overall video content is easily shared (especially emotional content, funny, insightful, etc).
• Video is engaging: Compared to text sites, websites with video have a lower bounce rate (59% compared to 87%) and a higher average time on site (5 minutes compared to 42 seconds).
• Videos are getting viewed: 83% of executives say they are watching more online video today than they were a year ago.
• Video content is growing: 48 hrs of video content uploaded every minute to YouTube in 2011 compared to 35hrs/minute in 2010 or 8hrs/minute in 2007.
• Video is accessible: With HTML 5 video can easily be viewed across all devices including iPad’s and iPhone’s.
• Video will generate better rankings: Forrester research has identified that web pages with video stand a 50 percent better chance than text pages alone of showing up on the first page of Google search results.

What type of videos to create?

It really depends on what type of business you are in and what type of content you are generating but here are a couple of basic ideas.

• Slideshows
• Demonstrations & Screencasts
• Services & Offerings
• Tutorials & How to’s
• Case Studies

Where to place video content?

YouTube: YouTube is the biggest search engine outside of Google, with over 3 billion daily views and approximately 48 hours of video content uploaded every minute YouTube is truly a heavy hitter with staggering traffic. The numbers don’t lie, video content is growing and getting consumed. Getting your videos on YouTube is key.

Your Website: Outside of having videos on YouTube, videos should be posted on your website. Not only will this help rankings but video can also aide in conversion. A simple how-to or demonstration of a product can greatly enhance a user’s experience and entice them to purchase.

Make your video findable on YouTube

So, simply posting a video on YouTube and having it “findable” might seem a little overwhelming with the amount of content getting posted. However, optimizing a few key areas of your video will help in making it more search friendly.

YouTube looks heavily into these areas when ranking videos:

1. Text in your titles, tags and descriptions. These should be keyword rich and content specific. YouTube offers a keyword discovery tool to help with keyword development.
2. Number of views and recent trending. YouTube considers a video “viewed” after 8 seconds of runtime, so make sure your video has enough pull to get past that mark. To look at how videos are trending, click the graph to the right of the views. Also keep in mind that a YouTube video viewed on a website will add to the view count.

• Identity-Schizophrenia: Everywhere I look, I look and feel different
• Budgetitus: I have champagne dreams on a beer budget.
• Post-traumatic-design-syndrome: I hate what my former designer created for me
• Creative-constipation: I’m having trouble “releasing” old ideas
• Content-arexia: My website is thin because I’m not feeding it enough content
• Arachna-keyword-phobia: My website’s afraid of search engine spiders
• Antisocial Tendencies: My brand doesn’t participate in social networks
• FatFingerusOsima: I’m having trouble navigating a mobile website

If your brand has suffered from the above, the doctors in the interactive practice at CRT/tanaka can help mend these ailments among many other common problems and challenges faced during a PR Campaign.
		Dr. Feelgood: Chief of Medicine, Identity Systems & Typography Specialist
Dr. Whats-she-do: Paper & Printing Specialist, Production & Traffic Manager	Dr. Whitespace-wow-factor: Desgin & Illustration Specialist, Business Development	Dr. What-the-font: Print & Web Design Specialist
Dr. Googleopoulos: Motion graphics, Front End Development, SEO/SEM Specialist	Dr. Webalicious: Backend Development, Mobile & Emerging Technology Specialist	Dr. Frederick von Codeburger: Backend Development, Content Mangement & Application Specialist

Our Capabilities

Prescriptions

Solutions for your Ailments

By Jason Poulos (@TheSaganaki)

I have touted the power of SEO over several posts now. It truly is a necessary element to your web strategy and should be considered if you are looking to increase visibility through search engines. In my first post, I talked about why SEO should be a part of your digital strategy. One of my reasons in that post was that SEO works. If SEO is truly a powerful tool how about some results?

For those of you that need to “see it to believe it” today is your day. Skeptics and naysayers step aside because I have results to share with you. Let’s hope that results like this can sway any SEO doubters (if they exist).

Problem

Our client, The Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup created a microsite dedicated to pure Canadian maple syrup. However this site was experiencing poor Google rankings. The age old “I can’t find my site in Google” was presented to our team. What they had was a nice looking site that was aimed towards consumers but this nice looking site’s content and architecture weren’t aligned with their brand or communication strategy.

Goal

Our SEO goal for this project was to simply generate more traffic to the website. Our content goal was to raise awareness that pure maple syrup is a versatile innovative ingredient and a healthy, natural sugar substitute.

Solution

To increase traffic to the website, and achieve our goals it was determined that an optimized website that caters towards a search engines needs would be the solution. In order to achieve our search and content goals we looked at several elements on the maple website.

Our solution entailed:

• Keyword research based on current content and would be content
• Restructured the sites architecture to cater towards specific keywords and content
• Rewrote the content to be keyword rich
• Implemented keyword rich page titles and page descriptions
• Redesigned the homepage to promote/cross link deep content
• Restructured the interior page sidebars to cross link content

Results

Our keyword rich, optimized site was launched March 1st of this year. The results below compare the optimized site (March 1, 2011 – Oct 16, 2011) to the non-optimized site of 2010 (March 1, 2010 – Oct 16, 2010).

• Visits increased by: 431%
• Page views increased by: 704%
• Pages per visit increased by: 51%
• Avg. time on site increased by: 17%
• Visits from Google increased by: 765%

The keywords that we selected are ranking well and we also have about 40 terms that when “Googled” land you a page one result.

What’s Next

Our client was thrilled with these results but as nice as these metrics are more work needs to get done to the website. What we’ve accomplished are on-site, organic rankings. To keep the momentum going we need to look off-site. We plan on integrating an off-site strategy for next year’s SEO campaign.

In last Friday’s post, Dave Hess talked about how responsive design can tackle a website’s mobile challenges. Having one site that reacts to mobile, tablet and desktop displays conquers all content, aesthetic and technical woe’s around the mobile web. A responsive design is where it’s at and is a solid solution to the mobile web dilemma. If gaining exposure and communicating information through the web is a goal. A responsive/mobile friendly website can help achieve those goals. Here are a few reasons why a mobile friendly website should fit into your digital strategy.

1. Future:

   The ever growing and emerging mobile market is the driving force behind having a mobile friendly website. With over 2 billion cell phones world wide and 35% of American adults owning a smart phone the need to be present where your potential audience browses is a must. Not only now but mobile is the future as well. It’s expected that over 5 billion mobile devices will be in use by 2012.

2. Opportunity:

   In June of 2011 Google and the Mobile Marketing Association found out that only 33% of US based businesses reported having mobile friendly websites. Finding your foot hole early in this expanding landscape is a necessity and easy way to beat out your competition.

3. Search:

   Search engine websites are the most visited websites on mobile devices. 77 percent of smartphone users cited this, followed by social networking, retail, and video sharing websites. Google has separate indexes for web content versus mobile content. A mobile friendly site that gets submitted to Google’s mobile site index has far more mobile ranking potential than a traditional desktop friendly website.

4. QR Codes:

   Have you ever snapped a QR code and it takes you to a non-mobile friendly web site? We love QR codes and in June of 2011 14 million users in the US scanned a barcode or QR code with their mobile device. As QR codes maintain popularity they will continually be used to drive traffic to a website. Before slapping that QR code on your print ad, or packaging make sure that your website is mobile friendly.

   Charles Schwab’s Schwab MoneyWise campaign was an early adopter of digital in the financial education space. To extend the reach of Schwab MoneyWise and its Money Mondays Tips, a fun weekly tidbit of financial advice, CRT/tanaka suggested building a responsive mobile friendly Money Mondays Tips page. To help get the word out, we also created a business card featuring a QR code to distribute at events.

   Whether you view the mobile Money Mondays Tips site on your desktop < www.schwabmoneywise.com/money-mondays > or on your mobile device (scan the business card’s QR code), the page works seamlessly.

5. Email Marketing:

   With a mobile device in hand, checking email anywhere is extremely easy. When running an email campaign that contains links back to a website keep in mind that you have no real idea of where your audience might be checking their email. An email sent out might get looked at on a desktop, tablet or mobile device. To ensure the strongest experience as possible when an email recipient clicks a link, it’s best to be prepared for all three of these different environments.

   Another responsive design in action is a one pager that CRT/Tanaka put together for Barnes and Noble. With a tradeshow coming up Barnes and Noble ran some ads in a html email to help drive traffic to their booth. The ad in the email links out to this responsive design that’s friendly for desktop, tablet and mobile users. The video to the left illustrates how the desktop design can collapse down to tablet and mobile versions. You can view the responsive site here

In my how a search engine works post I identified that relevance and popularity are the two major over-arching factors that search engines take into consideration when ranking pages. Keywords and all those other fun on-site factors all pertain to relevance but what about popularity?

How does a search engine measure website popularity?

The biggest factor in the popularity contest are back links. Having influential and  credible websites linking back to your site’s content will help ensure strong rankings.

This is really important, with back links counting for about 20% of a sites overall ranking, links can’t go ignored. Not only are links important but where these links come from is even more important. As noted, credible and influential sites carry the most weight in a websites back link profile. Links from Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and other social networks back to your site are golden!

Aren’t they? Facebook and Twitter are credible, influential sites, right?  So, how do links from these sites influence your rankings?

They don’t. Simply put, using social networks for link building will have little to no effect on your sites ranking. Even though search engines are taking social influence into their considerations, these types of links will have little persuasion in the website popularity area. Social influence counts for about 7% of  a sites ranking and where social media is important it’s not the avenue to go down when trying to obtain high quality links back to a website to grow popularity.

Why? Links back to your site from these social networks are considered “no-follow links.” Pretty much any site that allows a user to insert a url will have a “no-follow” attributed to it. No follow links were first created as an effort to stop comment spam on blogs. The no-follow attribute has now evolved way beyond blog comments and can be found everywhere on the web. Search engines are able to detect no-follow links and don’t pay attention to them when considering a websites popularity.

Think of how easy it would be to have #1 rankings if all you had to do is blow up Twitter and Facebook with your site’s url. Unfortunately search engine makes you work a little harder for those #1 results. Back links do need to be incorporated into your SEO strategy as well as your social media strategy. If having strong search engine rankings is a consideration look beyond social media for link building tactics.

In just about every one of my posts so far I’ve stressed the importance of keywords. As I’ve said before, keywords are the cornerstone of SEO. Without well-crafted and thoroughly researched keywords it’s going to be hard to maximize a website’s exposure through search engines. Think of keywords as search terms; what gets typed into Google needs to be found on your site if you want to rank for that search term. Keywords aren’t just one word but can range from one word all the way up to full sentences. Typically, some of the strongest keywords are two to three words in length. These keywords just don’t need to be on your site, they need to be fully integrated into your website. For maximum success your website/blog needs to live breathe and be one with the keywords.

When to start the keyword process?

Keywords need to be thought of and developed way before a website is even designed or built out. Whether a new site is getting created or an old site is getting redone, both scenarios offer up great opportunities to get a site aligned with searchable terms. In both situations, the greatest success will occur when a keyword friendly site structure, design, content and development techniques are implemented. In some cases for existing sites starting with a clean slate and a complete “redo” from the ground up is necessary to fully get every aspect of a website in line with keywords.

Selecting and determining keywords

During the keyword phase of a website, one of the first questions we like to ask a client is “what do you want to rank for?” The answers to this question give us a starting point for what keywords we should begin to research. For existing sites, with existing content, we like to go through the site as well and pull out overarching themes and what terms we think the content represents. With these two “buckets” of terms, we can now turn to some powerful keyword research tools to help us determine what keywords are the right fit for a website.

Tons of keyword research tools exist, but the basic premise behind them is that they report how many searches occur for a particular term, how many other pages are using your term and the overall competition for a term. A good keyword will be highly searched but have low competition to it. Terms that have high search volume and high competition to it will be harder to rank for.

Sitemap creation: keywords = site structure

Keywords should dictate your site structure; we like to view keywords as specific pages or posts on a website. One keyword term should equal one page/post and each page should be specific to its subject matter. Having multiple keywords and subjects on one page will confuse the search engine bots and render poor rankings. After determining and analyzing what keywords a site should rank for, a keyword sound site structure needs to be developed and planned out.

Now what? Integrating keywords into a website

By this point in the process, strong keywords that have good ranking opportunities have been determined and a keyword friendly site structure has been created around them. The next phase of a keyword is physically getting them into the website. This phase encompasses areas in the development world as well as the copywriting side of the site. A good copywriter is a must for this phase and beyond the content of a website, these carefully selected keywords need to be in the key areas listed below. All these little elements work together in order to provide the search engine bot with a clear idea on what your site/page is all about.

• Domain Name: Keywords in a sites domain name will rank better for those terms. Before a new domain is purchased, consider a keyword rich domain.
• URL: A sites url structure needs to be page specific and keyword rich, these urls need to be readable to humans and search engines. Unfriendly url: http:///www.domain.com/00145.php?id=39
  Friendly url: http:///www.domain.com/keyword-rich-term/
• Page Titles: Page titles are the links you click on from a Google results page
• Page Descriptions: The 160 character description below the page title on a search results page
• Navigation: Navigation reflects the keyword rich site structure created earlier
• Content: Content needs to be specific to the page and reflect the page titles and descriptions
• Heading tags: These occur in the content as well, but on the HTML side of things. For headings, sub-heads and beyond use H1 through H6 tags to provide a hierarchical approach to a site’s content.

An easy first step to maximize your exposure as a local business is to turn toward the search engines. With more than 3 billion searches a day, and a rapidly expanding mobile search market, every local business should be catering toward location-based searches and services.

A local search is when a geographic location is added to the search query. For example, “hamburgers richmond va.” would be a location-based search. When a search is submitted that contains a geographic location, different, “local results” get displayed on a user’s search results page before most organic search results.

How to show up in local searches?

Participation in the local world is easy. The first step toward better local “findability” through search engines is to create local profiles with Google, Yahoo! and Bing. All three search engines display “local results” whenever a geographic search is submitted. As with everything else related to search, Google commands the local search market so if any profile were to be a priority, Google would be it.

Now, create the proper accounts for Google Places, Yahoo! Local and Bing. Once the accounts have been created, you need to claim your business. Once your business has been “claimed,” try to max out your local profile as much as possible. Photos, store hours, your website will all have a positive influence on your local profile. Reviews have a big influence, and be sure to carefully select your business categories. Just like with normal searches in Google, there are ranking factors that go into Google Places. I’ll go into this later, but from a beginner standpoint, the more information you can provide in these local profiles, the better.

Pretty easy right? Well, that’s the absolute least you can do. The above method might increase visits to your location and website, but to really do it right and own your local business space you need to be more aggressive.

Get Aggressive! Take Your Local Business a Step Further.

Beyond having a local profile, I would recommend the following tactics to maximize exposure as a local business:

• Run geographically targeted search ads. With a high amount of competition in the local space, running geo-targeted ads will help with exposure.
• Have an optimized website. One of the ranking factors in Google Places is your website criteria. Having a Google-friendly site will only help.
• Submit to other directories. Outside of the big three search engines, set up profiles with CitySearch.com, Local.com and SuperPages.com.

Engage with your Customers

• Participate in social media. This is huge! Engaging with your customer base is a “must do” as well as participating on industry specific review sites such as Yelp.com. With coupon applications on Facebook, the social landscape is only going to become more important to local merchants.
• Go Mobile: The mobile web movement shouldn’t be scoffed at. Look toward networks like Foursquare to engage and reward loyal customers.

The term “going local” isn’t reserved for your local meats, cheeses and produce anymore. Any local business, big or small should have a local digital strategy to maximize exposure and brick-and-mortar visits.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Having a slick design and some dynamic functionality on your website can only be considered the beginning of a successful website. If the conversation with your client is only based around aesthetics and functionality, I urge you to keep on reading in order to grow your digital footprint and to increase your findability through search.

Take a look at this graphic that Response Mine Interactive created. It visually depicts what goes into a successful website outside of the design phase. Here’s a little bit of insight on why each of these areas are important to a successful website.

Click for larger image

1. Keywords (Search terms)

What are keywords? Think of keywords as the search terms you would type into Google. The research, strategy and selection of keywords is an integral part of a sites ability to be found through search. Not having well researched keywords or a site that lacks keywords will cripple your sites potential at being found through search.

2. On-Site Factors (How your site is built and how keywords are implemented)

What this area really means is that anything on your website can and will influence your success. From how your site has been built, where it’s hosted and how the content has been written all will have an influence on your ability to be found. These all get lumped into “on-site” because all of these elements happen on site… Here’s a little more insight:

• Content: Assuming that proper research and selection of keywords has been completed, they now need to find their way into the site. Not just a sprinkling here and there but everywhere a search engine looks a keyword needs to be present. From urls, to content to page descriptions, they all need to be keyword rich. Just updating your H1 tags with keywords and doing nothing else might help with results but pales in comparison to what a full-on keyword rich site could do.
• Technical: Make sure that whomever is building your site knows what they are doing. You might pay a little more for a professional to build your site but at least you know that it’s getting done the right way. Your buddy’s cousin who “knows some web stuff” may not be the best option. A slow site will hinder rankings. Make sure old pages get redirected to new pages when a new site is launched. You don’t want to kill all of your link juice.
• Structure: The structure of your website should be based around your keywords. Content should be cross linked and easily accessible from every page. A poor structure and hard-to-use site will not sit well with users and search engines.

3. Off-Site Factors (Site promotion and links back to your site)

Consider this the promotion phase of your website. You should be participating in every small bubble shown here. Wherever a conversation occurs about your site’s subject matter you should be participating. Links back to your site are important and count for about 20 percent of your ranking in search. If you are already doing media outreach or getting coverage from other blogs make sure that these sites contain links back to your website.

4. Analytics (Know what’s going on)

Without having any sort of analytics, your site is wandering blindly on the web. Analytics are a key component because they provide insight into the who, what, where, when and how of a website. From what terms people are using to reach your site to how long they stay on the site all get monitored. The analytic world can get very in-depth very quickly and a ton of information can be provided.

Analytics aren’t just for reporting. The information provided from analytics should be deciphered and used to tweak the website experience for your visitors.

This was just a brief look at some of these components, implementing and abiding by what’s in the RMI graphic will make your website successful.

Being knowledgeable and keeping up with any sort of technology or trend can be a daunting task. Sounding smart, strategic and staying on top of your game is key to any sort of client interaction. So, what happens when a spontaneous SEO conversation sparks? Silence? Blank stares? I hope not…

Knowing some basic concepts around SEO might save your butt when confronted with questions like: “Why isn’t my site ranking well?” or “I Googled our company, and it didn’t show up on page one?” and “Why is my site not getting a lot of visits?”

Keyword Basics
1. Always ask: “Is your website using keywords?” Keywords are the cornerstone of any SEO campaign and will heavily influence rankings. No keyword integration = poor rankings.
2. Keywords are the terms typed into a search engine. Keywords are developed around a website’s content, subject matter and search terms for which you want to be ranked.
3. A website needs to be dense with keywords. Keywords need to be located in the:
   • page title
   • page description
   • heading tags
   • url
   • content
   • navigation
4. To maximize keyword usage, the site structure and navigation should cater toward these keywords.

Content Generation

5. Content is king. A successful website will have unique, original and relative content to the subject matter.
6. Content should be written for humans not search engines.
7. This content should be link friendly (people, blogs etc. want to link to it) to help leverage resourcefulness and back links.
8. News releases can and should be optimized for SEO.
9. News, events, blogs, recipes and bios can be using microformats to increase visibility.

Back Links

10. Outside of keyword usage, links back to a site are another important aspect of SEO. The more credible and reputable the site is that links back to your site, the better.
11. These links back to your site count for about 20 percent of your pages ranking factor.
12. Don’t put all your back links in the social basket. Back links from Facebook and Twitter are considered “no-follow links.” They can draw traffic but won’t really help a sites back link profile.

Website Development

13. Don’t try to trick a search engine into better rankings, they are smart and will figure it out and ban your site.
14. How a website is built has an influence on how easy or hard it is for a search engine to index the site.
15. Search engines favor faster loading sites.

In my previous post, I highlighted a few reasons why SEO should be a part of your digital strategy. In case you missed it, Philadelphia SEO summed it up perfectly. Their response to my post was “Because it works!” Correct! SEO does work, and it should be a part of your digital strategy when building an online reputation.

Now that you’re on board the “SEO is awesome because it works” train, I wanted to explain some basic elements of SEO. Before we get too far down the road on how to optimize your site, let’s first understand how a search engine works.

Search Engine Basics

User browses to a search engine. User types in what they are looking for. User gets results. Simple right? But how does the search engine know what to place first and how to rank all those results? Here’s how they do it:

1. Search engine crawls and indexes your site: Every search engine has a crawler. Google, Bing and Yahoo! all have some version of a web crawler (aka robot, bot or spider). This “crawler” is a piece of software that goes through your site (in a peaceful, non-disruptive manner), reads everything and then stores selected pieces of your site’s information in a data center. This stored information is then cataloged in a manner that the search engine can quickly return results when a user searches.
2. Search engine delivers results: A user searches and upon hitting the submit button, the search engine goes through all that stored data and tries to serve up the most relevant info to the search query. A myriad of items go into ranking all those pages, but two of the biggest factors are relevancy and importance. Relevancy can be looked at this way; “is what was entered in the search box anywhere on your site?” If yes, (for this example) the search engine “stars” that page.

Ranking Factors

The engine then looks at all those “starred” pages and assess that pages importance, which can be interpreted as popularity. A popular page is one with high amounts of traffic and credible links to it. The engine evaluates the relevancy and popularity and then displays those pages for you in a list on your results page.

Both importance and relevancy have a ton of aspects associated with them and both get wrapped up in this giant algorithm that search engines use to evaluate and truly rank these pages.

No one truly knows the exact formula for getting those number one rankings, but over time search professionals have figured out the general elements that go into the ranking structure. Knowing what the search engine’s look for allows us to align a website’s structure and content with those ranking factors. As stated above, two of the most important factors to a strong ranking are keyword usage (what a search user types into the search engine) and links back to your site. Credible sites linking back to your content combined with a keyword rich site will yield strong results. For a full, in-depth and technical look at ranking, check out SEOmoz’s 2011 ranking factors.

By Jason Poulos

For me, it’s a simple question, but others might struggle when the above question is posed about search engine optimization (SEO).

If you want your website to be found through a search engine, your site needs to be optimized in a manner that search engines find friendly. From the content itself down to how the site is built, all factor into how well your site ranks in search engines. This process of tweaking a website to be more search friendly is called search engine optimization.

Years ago, simply having a web presence could yield high rankings in search, but those days are long gone. Today, being found through search is a much more extensive process. If you want to be found, having a web presence is important, but having an optimized website for search is even more critical.

If building an online reputation and driving traffic to your website is a priority, here are the most important reasons why to optimize when planning your digital strategy:

• People use Search Engines
  If you use the Internet, you’ve probably used a search engine. More than 77 percent of mobile consumers use search engines to find information, and Google has about 3 billion daily searches. Optimizing your website will increase your chances of standing out from the crowd in the eyes of the search engines.
• 1^st Page Results
  Only about 10 percent of web users venture past the third page of their search results. An optimized site can help you raise your site to the first page of results.
• SEO Works
  Assuming you follow the industries best practices and are not trying to trick the search engines, you will rank better. If managed correctly, and without any tomfoolery, your site will inevitably rank better than prior to optimization.
• SEO is Measurable
  Using tools like Google Analytics, you can measure the success of an SEO campaign and measure pre-site optimization search traffic to that of post-site optimization. Reports of this nature can be a valuable tool for you to track the origin of search engine traffic, measure “conversion” (how these searches have converted into sales), and in turn, demonstrate the return on investment of an SEO campaign for your client. Compared to traditional methods such as direct mail or banner ads, if done properly, SEO will have a significantly higher ROI.