page optimization

Small Business Paid Search Marketing 101

February 7, 2011 By Frank Pipolo 1 Comment

example site for paid search marketing post

I have such a love/hate relationship with paid search marketing. What is so great about it is that your are able to bring traffic to your website very quickly while you work on your search engine optimization to start to work. Yet, what is so frustrating about it is that it can be such a money pit that you do not have the opportunity (budget) to really have it be a successful part of your search marketing plan. Even worse, you hire a fly by night search marketing company to manage your PPC campaigns and you pay the majority of your money to them to give you less traffic than you would have gotten yourself. If you are planning to try to do it on your own here are a few things to do:

Set Up a Trial PPC Account

I can not stress this enough. You are not going to be any good at this at first and you do not want your account (and you) to pay for it in the future. This very easy to accomplish and will help you greatly in the long run. Start off by creating a Gmail account. Then, open a AdWords account under that Gmail account and start! Kind of reminds me of the days in sales at a pharmaceutical manufacturer years ago. When new sales people hit the sales floor we would give them the back of their client book of business (the ones that hated us or have not bought from us for years) so that they can learn how to pronounce the generic chemical names and get a feel of what it is like to perform this job. Of course the sales person was not very good at this and they were able to get their “feet wet” without hurting the front part of their book of business which was the ones who did buy from us.

List Your Conversions By Priority

We all want more money and that could be actual sales through your e-commerce or leads to follow up on. What about branding, newsletter sign ups, downloads of a PDF, webniars, videos, social shares, bookmarks? These are all conversions that will help make sales and you need to take at least the top three and use them as success metrics within your paid search campaign. If not, you run a very big risk (depending product or service your offer) of not seeing the value of your PPC campaign.

Build Your Search Keywords

Start with your website and find the main keywords within it. For this post, I am going to use Billiards Plus website. Billiards Plus is a company out in central Ohio that is a billiards supply store . As you can see from the picture, a pretty cool site that offers lots of different types of billiard and dart supplies. So how do you go about developing your keyword list for your PPC campaign based on this site? This site screams local and I would start off with keywords that will include the city (Dublin) and some surrounding cities such as Colony Estates and Coventry Woods into the more generic terms like pool tables, billiard supplies, pool table service, etc.

Account Category Setup

You have signed up for your AdWords account and you have a good sense of your keywords and conversions so now it is time to set up your categories. Give our example, I would use the following:

Dart Supplies – Local
Dart Supplies – General
Pool Tables – Local
Pool Tables – General
Billiard Supplies – Local
Billiard Supplies – General

At this point you may want to keep the budget more on the local categories than the general ones at first to see how well those general terms like “pool tables” will actually work.

PPC Keyword Exact Match Type

So there are 3 major match types out there across the search networks and I am going to talk about one of them called exact match. I am a big fan of using exact match on the majority of search terms especially when you are first starting your PPC campaign. Your visitors are highly qualified and you really limit your budget while keeping “window shoppers” from clicking your ads and having to implement advanced paid search marketing tactics. You can not go wrong with using exact matching to start off with.

Ad Copy Creation & Ad Testing

I think this is where the fun begins. Ask yourself these few questions first:

What is the motivation of my users?
What is my company’s unique selling proposition?
What makes my company stand out from the rest?
From a visitor’s perspective, what is in it for them?

I think our example site would want to promote that they are family owned, been in business since 1995, and offer all the name brand pool tables at below retail prices. In terms of ad testing I would start with at least 3 different ads and have the search network deliver the ad that is driving the most click through. You want to make the ad copy as relevant as possible to the keywords you are bidding on so make sure you are including the keyword you are bidding on within that ad. A good ad example would be the following:

Ohio Billiard Supplies

Name brand pool tables below retail

Family owned & operated since 1995

I would also implement geo-targeting testing within this campaign as well so that only visitors that are within a certain radius would see these ads. Again, your millage may vary but something you should test.

Landing Pages & Search Ads

One of the biggest mistakes from new paid search DIYs is that they send visitors to the incorrect page from an ad. So many of them send visitors directly to the home page as they feel that this will give them the best opportunity to find what they want. Depending on the ad and the keyword it can be but the best advise I can give to anybody on this is to say think “no click” meaning the best experience you can give a paid search (or SEO) visitor is to have them land on a page that is exactly what they wanted to see from the ad and not to have them click to find what they are looking for. Given the example ad and site I would test sending them to the home page (and the ad and keyword are very generic in nature) or pool table page.

Filed Under: Paid Search Marketing Tagged With: Account Category Setup, Billiards Plus, campaigns, conversions, google keyword tool, inbound links, keyword phrase, keyword phrases, link popularity, link search engines, optimization tactics, page optimization, paid search, PPC, ppc tips, search engine optimization, search engine optimizers, search marketing 101, seo optimization

Top SEO Tricks & Tips Not To Do For 2011 (or anytime)

February 1, 2011 By Frank Pipolo 2 Comments

Being in the industry as long I have it is amazing to see how far the art of search engine optimization has grown and yet how it has stayed the same. There are many SEO service providers and DIY search engine optimizers that still put their careers and websites at risk by performing bad SEO optimization. What we call “Black Hat SEO” in the industry. Times are still tough and small businesses might go with a more cost effective company for their SEO needs or perform their on-page optimization after reading a few blogs. I understand completely and thus here is a list of SEO tips that will get you thrown in the sin bin faster than a jack rabbit on a hot tin stove!

Keyword Phrase Stuffing

Old faithful! This one has been around since the day Al Gore invented the Internet! Basically it is exactly what it says. Take your keyword phrase you really want to rank high for and repeat it in any area you can find such as headings, titles, images, keywords and description tags. What is amazing is this is still happens today! Check out our friends (not) at http://www.viverosdesanjuan.com.mx/

Yes, stuffing SEO keywords still happens

Multiple Title Tags

To this day the title tag is still the most important place to insert your keywords for SEO purposes. Nothing wrong with that it sets the tone to the search engines what the specific web page is all about. But hey if one title tag works how about 2,3,or4?

Small or Nearly Invisible Text

Now search engine spiders “see” it and visitors don’t! Years ago you used to be able to make text exactly the same color as your background (white text on white background). It was easy for the search engines to see. So the cat and mouse game continued and the black hatters when off and started making the text just a few shades different than the background so using the same example the text had a yellow-ish tint to it. Thus the search engines saw it and did not ding you for this and visitors really did not.

Hidden CSS Div Tag

So this one might be a little technical for the DIY person but SEO companies can still perform this. Matter of fact, I ran into a site that posted this technique in 2008 and had comments form visitors from December of last year that said they were going to use it! Basically you use CSS (cascade style sheets) to layer images and text over SEO stuffed text. Only way to know it is happening is by reviewing your code so if you are using a SEO firm you need to check what your HTML code (right click-view source) on the web page to see.

Selling Links

So you get an email that says “would you be interested in you linking off your site to mine for $100 bucks a month? Let me know!” Hell yeah, not a bad way to make a few bucks and what if I get 5-10 of these bad boys it could be a nice little side income! This is where the line to this day turns Gray. Do the search engines frown on selling links? Oh yeah! Will they totally kill (ban) your site? Oh yeah! Do people still use the tactic of buying and selling links today? Yep! Is it still an effective way to raise in the rankings? Yep! Is it worth your business web site to do it? I say no.

But let’s say you did take the chance and sold links. If you get caught you are going to get banned and will have a very had time getting back in the good graces of the search engines. I have helped a bunch of sites get re-enlisted to both Google and Yahoo and I can tell you that Yahoo is nearly impossible. Had one site that took over 18 months to get re-enlisted in Yahoo and then kicked back out a year later for no reason at all. I did manage to get it back in again but by then the business sold the web site due to the economy. Google will give you one more chance but you need to work very hard as well. It will take minimum of three months but that will be best case scenario.

Hidden Links & The Pixel Trick

If hiding text was a no-no so is hiding links. The strategy works the same as hidden text as the search engine will see them yet visitors do not unless they hover over them. As for the pixel trick, it basically runs on the same principle where you create a 1×1 transparent image that equals 1 pixel and use that as a link. Make it very difficult for a visitor to find but the search engines did see it as big as a house. They see it today for what it is.

SEO Doorway Pages

You could say that these pages are still in play today and still work. Any page that talks about a specific topic like a blog post, like this post, is intended to be ranked for a specific set of keyword phrases. A true SEO doorway page is a page with very low quality content that ended in a call to action like “click here to enter”. At one time these pages worked very well until linking became a big factor in search engine rankings.

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: black hat, description tags, Keyword Phrase Stuffing, Multiple Title Tags, page optimization, search engine optimization, search engine optimizers, search engine spiders, Selling Links, SEO, seo optimization, seo service, title tags

SEO Tactics For Small Businesses

January 27, 2011 By Frank Pipolo 2 Comments

I get a lot of questions about search engine optimization for the average “small” business. What is the best SEO tactic? What should I start on first? Is it important to blog? I have come up with the top 10 search engine optimization tactics for small businesses. I am going to pick a site that I have no affiliation with what so ever. Today’s site will be Canyon Pipe & Supply, Inc. at http://www.canyonpipe.com. Here is the home page:

Keyword Research

40% of your time should be focused on here. Targeting the wrong keywords is worthless. You need to find the right mix of keywords that bring quality traffic that will convert against the amount of searches done and the competitive websites that are in a search engine’s database. Our example shows very little (if any) research was done in this area. After doing a very quick search I am going to use a term that has good volume, meets our examples target market, and has very little competitive pages in Google. The keyword term we will use for this example is “Arizona plumbing supplies”.

On Page Optimization

So you have picked around 2-3 keyword phrases per page and now it is time to implement those keywords in the strategic areas within each web page. Your top areas should be:

Headlines
First 25 words of the first paragraph
Bold Text
Hyperlinks
Images
URL/Web Pages

Our example site shows that the home page is not optimized for this term and receives a F for a grade. I would perform a high level of optimization to bring the home page up to speed.

Title Tag Optimization

In laymen terms the title tag is what your browser on the top displays and it is by far the most important tag you can optimize on your site. Think of it as the title of a book. The title sets the tone on what the entire book is about and really the web page title tag is no different. Our example ‘s title tag is ” Canyon Pipe & Supply, Inc. Plumbing Supply and Wholesale Distribution in Arizona”. This title tag does include the keywords of our selected phrase within the title but are not together as a phrase and not at the beginning of the title. This is a very common mistake made by all websites especially by small businesses. A more optimized title for SEO would be ” Arizona Plumbing Supplies – Wholesale Distributor in AZ – Canyon Pipe & Supply.

Link Building

You have got to have quality links pointing into your site/page you want to rank high for. A link is a vote in the SEO world and the more quality votes from authoritative and relevant web sites the better. This is an on going battle and 40% of your time is always devoted around this SEO tactic. The truth of this that it is the grunt work and many companies have no idea on how to do this effectively or have a dedicated effort towards obtaining links. This is where any SEO service provider is worth the dollars you spend on them. If they tell you other wise you should not waste your time and money on them.

Our example site does receive links from a handful of authoritative and relevant sites. Optimization of these existing links would be the first place I would start as the anchor text, the text that points to the example’s website, is very brand heavy and it would greatly improve the web site’s rankings if these links were labeled “Arizona plumbing supplies” instead based our chosen keyword phrase.

SEO Meta Tags

Once used heavily by the search engines as a ranking factor, these tags (keywords & description) are now more important for click through once a site has received a high ranking (description) than anything else. Some will tell you they are still a factor in obtaining a high ranking and need to be optimized. My feeling is that the description tag is the most important of the two and you should optimized for SEO and click through for all pages. While you have the “hood up” you might as well add and optimize the keyword tag.

Both of these tags on our example’s site are pretty good as the do have the keywords within them, while the keyword tag actually has our desired keyword phrase included. I would rate these tags for the home page as a C+ and with some minor tweaks to the description these would be good to go.

Blogging

Fresh unique content is everything in the search engine optimization world. It is also a must to set your website as an authority in your space while giving your visitor/customers reasons to come back to your site. It also is the rocket fuel for your social media marketing . 99% of all small businesses do not perform this task and they suffer a slow painful death that results in little return visits and sales. Our example site has no blogging component and gets a F. The interesting thing about our example site is that it has great possibilities as the site has existing areas like “monthly specials” & “upcoming events”. Not a blog area but these areas can be used to introduce the fresh content.

Social Media Marketing Integration

As you might be able to guess, no blog, no social media. Not much to say here. You need social media marketing and optimization and the example site does not have any social media marketing strategy, or at least I could not find any. The sites does have some good possibilities though. Their “upcoming events” section can be a great place to add fresh and relevant content that would then fuel their SMM. Final grade – F

Online Press Release Distribution

Our example site does not show any use of creating press releases or distribution of them online. I am a big fan of using press releases to help drive your link building efforts. There are plenty of “free” release services out there that can help you come but for $200 dollars per release you can use a premium service such as PR Web. Final Grade – F

XML Sitemap Creation & Webmaster Tools

The major search engines have given us some really good tools to help get some incite on our websites in terms of traffic, rankings, errors, link building, communication, and how they “see” our sites. It really is a no brainer and takes only a few hours to set up webmaster accounts in Yahoo, Bing, and Google. XML sitemap creation is also a snap to create and their are plenty of free tools out there that can create this for you. Our example site does not have these set up or an XML site map created even though they did implement Google Analytics set up. Final grade – F

Conclusion

I bet you can guess right? Total SEO foundation plan? Well, yes and no. Actually our example site has a top 20 ranking for our “money” term. I think there are a few reasons for this:

Even though the site lacks the body copy it should, have it does have the keywords in the copy (but not together as a phrase).
It does have a few authoritative web sites lining to them. I would like to see the anchor text much more optimized but a quality link is a quality link.

So to sum it all up this example site really has some tremendous opportunity to do very well from quality SEO. It also tells you that SEO is an “art” not a “science” as sometimes rankings can be some what positive without the SEO effort behind it.

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: keyword phrases, Keyword Research, Link Building, optimization tactics, page optimization, plumbing supply, search engine optimization, SEO, target market, Title Tag Optimization, web page title

Search Engine Optimization – SEO Content Is Still King

January 23, 2011 By Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

So much has been said lately about SEO and what is the “new” secret. So many people are looking for the quick fix, the get rich quick model and to be successful in search engine optimization, I come back to two simple rules…quality, unique and resourceful content, and gaining quality links, pointing to appropriate pages of your website.

http://www.oracledigital.com.au/consistent-content-is-king-with-seo/

Yes, there is so much more to SEO then that like, proper site architecture, coding, internal linking, and all the other on and off page optimization stuff that we get to consider on a daily basis and optimize for but if you I have to sum it up in 30 seconds, this is what I say.

Others will tell you it is all about links or just get a WordPress blog and go at it! I am a WordPress fan and do believe you need quality links into your site but you need the #1 most important factor of SEO, good judgment!

Look at it from the search engine’s “eyes”. Why would I rank websites? Why would I rank you if you were trying to “game” me? Wouldn’t you do everything within your power to ensure that you weren’t gamed? How would you go about doing that?

Back in the mid 1990′s, search engines were dumb but are pretty smart creatures now a days. Much like human beings, they will learn from past experiences and hopefully become better for having had some bad experiences. Years ago, they may have allowed for the ranking of websites that gained link popularity merely by exchanging links with anyone willing to accept the offer. Years ago, they may have ranked websites that auto-populated themselves with nothing but regurgitated content. Years ago, they paid no mind to those who bought links, created doorway and hallway pages and forced their way to top positions. Today’s search engines are better than that. They, like humans, have adopted methods to protect the integrity of their search results.

So, what is the “secret” to doing well in the search engines, nowadays?

Start with content. If you have no content or horrible content, why on earth would anyone really want to link to your website? What are your link assets? If you do not have any better go get some! Certainly, you can get your mom to link from her website to yours, and you probably have a few other friends that – no matter what you publish – would be happy to extend a link your way, but the most prudent way to generate the necessary links to your website is to create something worth linking to. Seems like a no brainier but you will be surprised what happens to the mind when it comes to search engine optimization!

About three years ago I would have recommended clients to develop a blog outside of their main site. It gave you one more authoritative domain that you would get a link from. But now I recommend clients put a corporate blog on their domain. When I say “on their domain,” I am most often recommending that a client post to a blog that is hosted at www.sitename.com/blog with a permalink structure that looks something like www.sitename.com/blog/name-of-post or, in some cases, the posts themselves will exist at www.sitename.com/name-of-post. If you can create quality content, and promote it, you can generate some high quality links to your website.

Think about it , people naturally want to link (or tweet) to good content. Ultimately, you want that link to go into a targeted page that you want to rank high, but a quality link is a quality link. Link building is about your link assets and quality authoritative content is a key to that.

So, to sum it up in a nice SEO blow (never happens) I suggest that you focus on both content and linking. But, given the priorities that we humans have in our daily lives, I would focus on content, first.

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: link popularity, optimization, page optimization, SEO

What Is Landing Page Optimization – The Basics

December 18, 2010 By Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

Landing page optimization, or LPO for short, is one part of the entire Internet marketing process called conversion optimization, or Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). The overall goal is improving the percentage of visitors to the website that become sales leads and customers. Theoretically, a landing page is a webpage that is displayed when a potential customer clicks an advertisement or a search engine result link. This can be your website or a webpage that is specifically designed for the visitor of that marketing channel. These pages typically display content that is a relevant extension of the advertisement or link. LPO aims to provide page content and appearance that makes the webpage more appealing to target audiences.

From Oli Gardner at Unbounce.com

How Does LPO Benefit You

By default your conversion rates will be higher – According to statistical research by Omniture, the act of using a landing page to target your campaign traffic results in an average increase in conversion rate of 25%. Just this stat alone should tell you that LPO is simply a smart practice to follow.
Targeted messaging – We all want something of value to appeal to us and landing page optimization allows you to provide targeted messaging to wider variety of potential customers.
Campaign measurement - With only one possible action on the page, measurement is easier. A user either completes your desired action or they don’t. If they don’t, you can test the page until they do.
Little dependencies on creative - When you are designing a standalone landing page, you have a higher degree of freedom to design what you want over what creative has done for your website. You also have more freedom to experiment. Something as simple as a purple button vs. a green button may conversions but maybe unlikely on your corporate website.

How to Start Landing Page Testing

Landing page optimization is pretty easy to start. First thing to figure out is where are you getting a good amount of traffic from. Is it from SEO or a paid advertising campaign? Once you have picked a source of traffic to start testing, you need a testing platform to use. I would recommend Google Website Optimizer because it is free and is really a very robust testing tool. I would start with basic element based optimization like different images and button colors. Knowing your demographic of the specific marketing channel is a must.

As internet marketing consultants we have considerable experience in landing page optimization and can help manage and guide you through successful campaigns. If you have a question, just give us a shout and we can help you with no obligation.

Please check out our LPO consulting and landing page optimization services.

Filed Under: Landing Page Optimization Tagged With: conversion, LPO, optimization, page optimization