Why honesty is the best policy

This month, I want to dispel a few basic untruths for those new to optimization, and emphasis the importance of arming oneself with the basic building blocks of what passes for good, bad and downright ugly SEO.

I’ve spoken with a few companies of late who feel they’ve been led down the garden path by black-hat SEO ‘specialists’. Years of monthly payments, time and effort, and what to show for it? Mediocre ranking (at best), sloppy design, clumsy copy, and unfulfilled promises.

Firstly, I urge to all readers to take a good look at Google Webmaster Guidelines. Other resources are at hand , too: High Rankings and Search Engine Land to name but two . There’s really no excuse in not knowing what is and isn’t permissible and thus avoiding turning off your visitors.

Spurious tactics include keyword spamming excessive links on any one page, tiny invisible text, multiple cloaked pages , paid link schemes that bring a whole new meaning to ‘bad neighborhoods’ and reams of duplicated content. And do the redirects correctly, too. If you must move a document to a new location, the old one requires a 301 redirects code, not a 302 temporary redirect to fool users.

Ultimately, avoid deception. Furnishing pages with content aimed squarely at engines, and not your users, will not only reduce your coverage but dilute your conversions, too. Ask yourself, is this what you’d want as a visitor? In the long run, shortcuts rarely work and the adage, ‘what works for the user, works for the engines’, almost always rings true. Tricks blatantly designed to improve ranking rarely works, so don’t let any firm you outsource SEO to pull the wool over your eyes.

How to integrate paid and organic effectively

This week i got a meeting request from one company in Mumbai who wants to do SEO / Pay per Click Campaign to promote and market their product and services. After carefully listening to their internal marketing team about their current SEO / PPC activities and their past experience with another vendor who promised to be on the first page of Google in 10 Days for a premium …and guess what the ROI / Result for the company with the kind of commercial they spent was a disaster.

Folks, after the meeting i came back to my office and decided to write on how companies and individuals can integrate paid and organic search marketing effectively .

Pay per click (PPC) is a highly effective marketing tool, but many organisations get it wrong. Wasted spend on PPC is huge, largely because companies bid on the wrong terms and fail to synchronize their paid and natural search campaigns. So what can you do to ensure that these search engine marketing techniques work alongside each other to maximize  return on internet spend? First and foremost, careful preparation of paid search account is at heart of every successful combined, natural and PPC search campaign.

1) Planning

Its tempting to rush and get your PPC account live, but a researched approach, releasing the campaign only when complete, will ensure greater success.

2) Keyword research

Paid search campaigns should be build around popular industry keywords along with those terms that can successfully find your site through natural search. Building content around the keywords data in your analytics package will also help you increase traffic to your site.

3) SEO landing pages

Ensure that all landing pages are just as SEO-frendly as your homepage. A well optimized landing page will help you better search positions in natural and paid listings. if you need to use isolated landing pages away from the rest of the site, make sure they’re well-crafted in order to increase your Google quality score.

4) Usability

Users arriving from paid search listings should be sent straight to the relevant pages. Information should be very clear and user should always know what the next step is . This is the key to a successful sales conversion. If users are unable to find what they’re looking for they’ll give up fast!

5)  Analytics

To stay ahead of the game in natural and paid search. it’s vital that you study traffic and user data. Creating a new page, adding keywords and advertisements to your paid campaigns, and shortening user journey will move you in the right direction.

Focus on Microformats

A number of sites have recently implemented a new breed of pre-filled registrations. This idea is called portable social networks. It enables one social networking site to access the public profile data of another via the use of microformats.

As the concepts of social media extend into the design of many modern sites, the addition of user profiles and friend lists are becoming common. It’s a relatively simple process to mark up your site so that they can become part of this exchange of data.

If you’re not yet familiar with microformats, they ‘re documented at http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page Most social media sites follow a common architecture, which contains a profile page for each user . The foundation is to mark up all your user information on this page with hCard microformat. if the information is fragmented there’s and include pattern that enables you to glue it all into one hCard.

Where you have additional pages containing other useful user information, such as a friend list, you should add the XFN rel=”me” attribute to any link. This will tell a parser that the linked pages are also about the user.

<a rel=”me” href=”../nareshsadasivan/friends/”>Friends</a> Often, friend list can be so long that you need to use pagination and break them into several pages. You should mark up any pagination links with rel=”me next” or rel=”me prev” . Although XFN can describe relationships well, it lacks the richness of hCard. The microformats community has now started promote the use of the joint hcards XFN design pattern for marking up friend lists.

When using icons without text , the alt attribute can be used to define the formatted name of the friend. You may have to create mapping between your site’s own relationship values and XFN. If your system doesn’t differentiate the strength of a relationship, use the default value rel=”acquaintance”. There are now sites the pull together information from multiple online identities across the net, so it’s also good  practice to add the rel=”me” to any link to an external profile.

How to Optimise your online campaign

Any marketing activity needs careful planning and monitored outcomes. one of the most popular tactics, online advertising ,is viewed as low cost and effective in addition to delivering transparent and measurable results. Given below are few key tips on how businesses can use this tool to support strategic marketing and business plans, and how to make it work on a tactical level.

1) Know your audience

Research which business websites they regularly use: which do they trust and look to for the latest industry updates and opinion? where is the competition advertising and why? Speak to media providers to find the best match . Register with sites that are most appropriate and try them . If they’re useful and helpful, the changes are the target audience will fell the same way too.

2) You only get out what you put in

Most lead generation campaigns are based on an offer made to the target audience. It could include:

• A white paper or article
• A free “How to ” Guide
• A free Trial
• A discount voucher
• A Free entry to an event

Better quality offers generally result in a superior quality of leads.

3) Less is More

When writing copy, keep it short, simple and to the point. Try to be different : if several software suppliers are all advertising at the same time it can be difficult to see the difference in their approach.

4) Did you get my message?

Rather that sending out blanket emails to undefined audience, contextual and behavioral targeting means that messages can be placed to the correct audience in the right place, at the right time.

5) Keep trying

For some advertisers it doesn’t “click” straight away. If so, get some advice. Listen to media providers or an Digital Marketing Agency. They ‘re experts and will want your campaign to work as much as you do.

Surf and turf

Does honesty pay on the internet, or are astroturfers deliberately ruining online advertising?

Honest comments have saved me a fortune over the years. They’ve prevented me from buying a vacuum cleaner that had a tendency to explode, steered me away from a nice-looking holiday resort where, it turns out, the streets are paved with lager louts’ vomit, and they’ve stopped me from buying games / softwares that won’t work on my particular hardware. However I ‘ve stopped trusting the net. Part of the problem is fanboys- the utter tools who post detailed reviews of things they haven’t seen. heard ,used or played six months before they even go on sale – but more often than not the problem is astroturfers, the people with a vested interest in trying to mislead the rest of us.

Thanks to the unfair cyber laws and practices in India, which criminalises deliberate attempts to mislead people both online and off.

Astroturfing and other irritants exist because internet users are bunch skinflints . Every single attempt to persuade punters to pay for web words has failed because people simply won’t pay, and they don’t expect advertising to fill the gap when AdBlock Plus does such a good job. That’s why the ads get more aggressive in their attempts to evade the ad0blockers, and it’s why content get perverted with product placement and links to purchasing pages instead of actual information. It’s also why frims pay the astroturfers to ruin things for rest of us.

Analytics and the art of engagement

Much has been written about engagement and how to measure it – but it’s a difficult idea to pin down.

Engagement is helpful because as activities online and site continue to develop and diversify, so does the need to qualify behavior.

Generally, web analysts and site stakeholders use clearly identified goals and a few corresponding “hard” conversion metrics to assess performance, but using a set of trended , softer metrics can help build a more rounded picture of visitor engagement.

Engagement metrics as their most basic are often considered in the context of average volume of pages viewed during a visit and the average amount of time taken to view them. This on its own has its problem. For instance, it doesn’t answer the question whether a visitor was engaged in the site in a positive or negative way.

As with so much in web analytics, some context is useful in assessing engagement . when looking at a set of engagement metrics over time. What happens to them when conversion to a desired goal increases ? Do visitors that convert spend more or less time on your site? Do they view more or fewer  pages that the average visitor ? is the site’s bounce rate higher or lower? How often do they return to the site and at what intervals? In most cases a high bounce rate is bad but in some instances it may act as a filter, sorting the wheat from the chalf , leaving only the more interested or “engaged” visitors.

Using segmentation to isolate and compare referring  source of traffic will also help in  understanding which users are happily engaged with your site content and which are less so engagement metrics for new and repeat visitors may well differ. Alternatively, creating a segment using the combined benchmark data that’s already been established for positive engagement can help in unearthing top referring sources and keywords to zero in on when developing an acquisition strategy.

Having a conversion benchmark provides a target to aim for ; establishing an engagement protocol offers insight into what good and poor visitor behavior looks like .But to truly understand engagement we must go beyond just web analytics and look at other sources of data.

Don’t panic when your rankings drop

What’s the first thing you do when ranking drops off the search engine radar? Do you wait a few days and calmly hope things will return to normal? Or do you reach for the keyword tools and claw in reams of new keyword-rich text in quiet desperation?

Of course, there could be any number of reasons why your ranking might drop – and the reality is , you may never find out exactly why. But here are a few top tips if your ranking plummet.

Waiting a while might be the best thing you can do . While the major engines are getting better that ever at ranking sites, fluctuations and algorithms shifts do occur. It could be simply be that the search result are temporarily being delivered by another data server. If your exposure is still low for terms you previously ranked well for ,double check your site’s structure ,usability, navigation and copy, and talk to your designers.

Look at your competition to see what they are doing differently, market trends, and evaluate who’s linking to you. A mix of questionable links might be harming your credibility. You could also ask a SEO Specialist for site audit.

Ensure your site is free of anything resembling spammy text –  consult Google’s webmaster Tools console. Upload and XML sitemap and look for any indexing errors that Google flags up.

Most importantly, monitor the changes you make and the impact they have, and use it to your advantage when there’s an upturn in your site’s search engine success. Once you’ve found a search engine “friendly” fix, stick with a template that works and iterate incrementally.

Do you know what’s best for your audience?

We all know what we think makes an effective website design. The trouble is ,you and I aren’t the customer and we can’t possibly know for sure what works the best across the online audience. We can also waste a lot of time arguing within the design team, or with what analytic guys calls the HiPPO (Highest Paid  Person’s Opinion) about what works. But it’s the customer who counts as they vote with  their mice…

Step forward AB and multivariate testing , which are increasing in popularity to squeeze higher conversion rate out of a site. Established, paid tools from suppliers such as Optimost, Omniture (Abobe Product Now) ,Test & Target , Maxymiser have mainly been the preserve of large organization. The profile of these tools has been increased by the free Google Website Optimizer .

A/B testing is where most people start. It’s great for testing major changes such as different versions of a landing page, or a key element of a page such as headline or call to action. It can offer huge improvements.

Many large site owners have now graduated to multivariate testing, where you statistically define the best converting version of a webpage or pages in real-time. Recently at on Unicus website we did a test with 192 elements and found two major changes that increased conversion by 10 per cent.

So structured testing is well worth a look if you’re not using it already, but remember it’s a specialist technique requiring understanding of experience and statistical validity.

Stop building communities and start joining in

The internet is changing the way smart companies sell to their customers.

Traditional corporate ad-speak sounds lofty and unapproachable online, especially when the rest of people are talking with human voices. There’s also been a huge shift in the balance of the power . Think how quick and easy it is to fire off an email to customer services when a product doesn’t deliver. Now think how many more people you could reach in the same amount of time by changing your Facebook status, posting in your blog or adding a review on Amazon. Your potential audience as a consumer is huge and you can strengthen or damage the reputation of brand once considered untouchable.

Smart online marketers have realized it’s time to start talking with, not at their potential customers. After all, the customers are communicating with each other-why not join the conversation? Community marketing isn’t new of course; it’s been a buzzword of the last few years –right up there with “user generated content”. It’s only recently been knocked off its perch by the term “Web 2.0”, but all of these ideas are backing up a fundamental shift in the distribution of power.

Owing an online community has become a holy grail for many companies. What could be better than having a community at your finger tips? A group of users, passionate about your product, talking to you and each other? Communities can connect customers old and new, provide support and advise and give essential feedback to the mothership. It’s thereto applauding you when things go right and, if managed well, support you when things go wrong. It opens up the conversation and say that you, as a company, are listening.

For long time now, it’s been assumed that if we build it, they will come. The general feeling has been that customers aren’t doing much online when left to their own devices, so they’ll be thrilled to hang out in a new community all about a specific Ice Cream, phone or washing power.

Several years ago, perhaps this was safer to assume, but things have changed. Before you think about building a new branded community, just look around at the huge number of passion based group that exist already. There are groups for everything from professions to illness to hobbies. There are cluster of people talking with knowledge and genuine passion about so many things, and this potentially includes your product.

Your branded community now has all this to compete with. Are you sure you can drag enough users away? Perhaps the challenge now is not how to coax people into your online world, but how you can fit into theirs. How you can join in their conversation and bring with you an interesting voice from the inside.

Before you crash into these brave new worlds, put in some legwork. It is not simple as turning up shouting “Hi! I’m from X company! Our Product are awesome!” You’ll be appreciated more for fitting in than standing out, so sit quietly for a while and observe. What value can you add to the conversation? Can you genuinely help? The power of large company listening to a single consumer is immense-never underestimate that.

Think too about the huge number of social platforms on offer. If Facebook is where your target audience hangs out, go hang out there too. Start a Twitter feed to put human voices to your team, or setup a group on Flickr and let people show the product they’ve bought. Show them what it’s like in your warehouse or share hints of the new things you’re working on.

If you must own a community, don’t be afraid to start small with a blog. They’re accessible, easy to join in with and simple to setup. When it looks like a little community is starting to develop, expand the offering, adapt and change.

Most of all, don’t forget to comment, encourage and give feedback. Genuine connections are what make communities tick, but you can’t connect until you and your company start acting like a real human beings and joining in.