The Top 10 Dumbest Web Site Decisions

By Kalena Jordan

Having worked with web sites for the past eleven years, I've seen a LOT of errors, poor judgment and embarrassing gaffs on the web. Sometimes they are the fault of the client, the web designer, the IT Manager, or the SEO, but human error is always to blame. The saddest thing is that the problems are usually preventable.

Here is a list of what I consider to be the Top 10 dumbest web site decisions ever, in reverse order, David Letterman style :

10) Misspelling a Domain

Back in the glory days of the late 1990's when I was working for a large Internet agency, the web designers had responsibility for the registration of domain names on behalf of clients. One particular designer had a face to face meeting with a major client, during which the client asked him to register CarTuneCentral.com (or so he thought!). The staffer did a check and was delighted to see the domain available. He made the purchase and proudly emailed the client.
An hour later his boss called him in to his office to say that he'd had a call from a very frustrated client who *actually* wanted him to register CartoonCentral.com. Needless to say the desired domain wasn't available and the whole office dined on his mistake for months.

9) Letting the Domain Name Expire

Now what type of company would allow their domain to expire a month after site launch? A very large one, that's who. I'll save the company some embarrassment and won't reveal their name but the site was offline for a total of 2 days while they scrambled to pay their registrar, sort out DNS propagation and cover their tails.

8) Flashing your Cyber Underpants

One of the most common web site management platforms provided by hosting companies used to store the site statistics in a common folder called /statistics/. You could password protect this folder, but the default was to leave it open to the public and so many unwary webmasters unwittingly published full traffic data for their site on the Internet, open to any person who knew where to look.

I learned this the hard way in a public forum from a member who said he had just reviewed my traffic for the previous month and was very impressed. Publishing site statistics for all the world to see is what I call flashing your cyber underpants and I’ve never let it happen again!

7) Publishing Sensitive Company Information

Quite a few companies have been guilty of doing this, including AOL, who published a search data report in 2006 that contained the private details of thousands of AOL customers. Although the report was taken offline within a few days, it had already been mirrored and distributed across the Internet. The fallout eventually led to the resignation of AOL’s Chief Technical Officer.

Although not quite as serious, an ex-client of mine once published a page that had notes on it from the Sales Manager about the best way to strong-arm a customer into purchasing a higher-ticket item. Apparently the web designer didn’t realize the hand-written post-it notes were not part of the web page copy. Duh!

6) Using an Insulting 404 Error Page

I clash with the web design team of one of my clients on a regular basis. Earlier this year, my client completely re-designed their web site and so I recommended they ask their web design team to design a custom 404 error page in case visitors navigated to a page on the old site that no longer existed. Their web design team put up a message that read:

"404 Error. You've obviously typed in the wrong URL. Either that or the page you are looking for no longer exists."

That was it! No apology for the missing page, no recommendation to use the navigation to find what they were looking for, just an insulting message that accuses the visitor of being an idiot. Persons viewing that page would be clicking the "back" button as fast as they could.

5) Taking a Site Offline for Maintenance

I find it fascinating that very large sites run by intelligent people still get taken offline for maintenance on a regular basis. Search engines don't understand the "Back in 15 minutes" sign and the longer the site is down, the bigger the risk.

If search bots try and index a site while it is down, they will most likely assume the previously indexed pages have expired and remove them from the search index. This means that all your hard-earned rankings could be flushed down the toilet until search engines can successfully re-index your site. Surely a mirror site for maintenance periods isn't that difficult to set up?

4) Buying a Dot Biz When the Dot Com Was Available

Ok, I'm putting up my hand on this one. I'm not going to reveal the domain but yes, I registered a dot biz domain back in 2000 when the dot com was actually available. The dot com version of my domain was bought by Yahoo a short time later and turned into a product site. Ack! My excuse is that, at the time, dot biz sites were rumored to be the next big thing and all companies were being urged to choose them over dot coms. Ok, I was wrong!

3) Allowing a Customer Complaint to Remain on a Site for 12 Months

When I was working as a public relations consultant, I was given the responsibility of re-writing the web copy of a large real estate client. One of the areas I was asked to re-write was the welcome paragraph on the Customer Feedback page where existing customers of the estate agent chain could login and leave comments about their experience.

While writing the copy, I scanned some of the customer feedback and came across an aggressive message left 12 months earlier by an obviously unhappy customer. She had used some of the most colorful language I've ever seen (and some that I hadn't) and very detailed descriptions of how she was going to take her revenge on the company for allegedly allowing a tenant to destroy her house. Nobody in charge of the web site had even noticed the comment and I still wonder how many potential customers would have been put off from using the estate agent after reading it.

2) Switching a Web Site Off for a 3 Week Christmas Vacation.

Yes, many moons ago, an ex-client of mine decided to take her entire web site offline (without telling me!) while she was on a 3 week vacation over Christmas. Only a month earlier, she had paid me $5,000 to optimize it for search engines.

It had just achieved some impressive top 10 results and all the carefully optimized pages were attracting good traffic when she shut it down and replaced the entire site with a 1 page sign that said “closed until after Christmas”. I noticed the traffic and search ranking declines in her stats and was completely flabbergasted when I found the site gone. Her response when I confronted her? "Why didn't you TELL ME this could happen?"

And the dumbest web site decision I've ever witnessed?

1) Promoting a Domain Name You Don’t Own:

My Alma Mater, the University of Newcastle, have spent thousands of dollars on television advertising here in Australia, marketing their new site for online post-graduate coursework: GradSchool Dot Com. There's only one problem. The domain for this site is actually Gradschool.com.au. They don't even own Gradschool.com!

Sadly, this glaring marketing error seems to have totally escaped them and they are happily referring to their brand as Gradschool.com on all their marketing material and throughout their .com.au domain. It's tragic to think of all the potential students typing in Gradschool.com expecting to find the University program. I see that whoever purchased Gradschool.com has slapped up some AdSense code on it so at least somebody will reap the benefits of those thousands of advertising dollars wasted by the University.

Don't let any of these web site tragedies happen to you. Make sure that your site decisions aren't in the hands of dummies!


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Why Online Businesses Should Be Blogging

By Kalena Jordan

Last weekend my husband and I were having a conversation with some friends over a bottle of wine. The wine was a delectable New Zealand chardonnay and the friends were a husband and wife team who run a small but highly successful web/graphic design firm.

The conversation veered towards blogging and whether or not it was a viable marketing activity for online businesses. My friend Wendy was lamenting that most of her clients couldn’t see the value in blogging. An avid blog reader herself, she could see it had value but she wasn’t sure whether it would work for her clients or how to implement it in a way that would be worthwhile for her own online business.

I suggested that she start a blog about environmentally-sustainable business, as this is her company’s unique selling proposition and something she is particularly passionate about. I think a lot of small businesses would like to take steps to be more environmentally responsible but aren’t sure where to start. A blog about the subject could gain readership quickly and also gain attention for her own company.

This led to a discussion about what types of businesses would benefit from a blog and what THEY could blog about. The potential number of blog niches and opportunities we thought of was incredible. Here are just some of the ideas we came up with:

1) Web Design Firms could blog about:
Unique business practices
Customer success stories
Web site tips
Staff success stories
Web site usability issues

2) Travel Related Businesses could blog about:
Last minute travel deals
Customer travel stories
Staff travel stories
Travel tips
Flight details
Breaking news in the travel industry


3) Government agencies could blog about:
Changes to Government regulations
Communication between Government agencies and the public
Government issues and news
Legislation affecting various industries

4) Marketing agencies could blog about:
Marketing trends
Successful client case studies
How to reach different target audiences
Tips for marketing offline and online
How to create effective marketing campaigns

5) Retail businesses could blog about:
Products and services
Customer service issues
Special offers and discounts
Industry news
Product recalls

6) Sport-related sites could blog about:
Latest game results and scores
Team news and updates
Individual team member diaries
Nutrition and weight loss/gain

7) Public relations and advertising firms could blog about:
Advertising trends
Successful client case studies
Press release writing
Successful advertising campaigns
How to deal with the media
How to create effective advertisements

8) Telecommunications firms could blog about:
Industry trends
Products and services
Communication legislation
Tips for getting the most out of phones and related equipment


9) Law firms could blog about:
Understanding contracts
Case histories
Tips for court appearances
Understanding legal jargon
Court and case schedules

10) Insurance firms could blog about:
Changes/updates to premiums
News of insurable events (e.g. flood, fire)
Tips for protecting your house from burglary
Tips for getting the most from your premiums
Fire prevention tips

The entire discussion made me realize that blogging is not the answer for every business and in fact, some companies should steer clear of it. But for the majority of online businesses, particularly small businesses, there ARE terrific incentives to blog.

Blogging can provide unprecedented opportunities for new business, media exposure, networking, traffic, customer feedback and interaction. Plus business blogs don’t have to be boring. Just glance at the topic range of some of the most successful business blogs, based on Technorati rankings:

Kotaku – a blog for gamers and persons working in the video gaming industry.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog – news and views relating to Apple Macintosh business and products.
The Pharma Marketing Blog – a blog for persons in the pharmaceutical marketing industry.
TechCrunch – a blog that profiles and reviews new Internet products and companies.
Advertising for Peanuts – a consumer’s guide to advertising and media.
The Consumerist – consumer rights blog where people can lodge complaints about products and businesses.
TreeHugger – a blog trying to bring environmental sustainability to mainstream business and media.
Construction Marketing Ideas – Information and ideas for marketing and promoting construction-related businesses.

Business blogging does take time and commitment, but the rewards are well worth the investment.


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Web 2.Overwhelming: 22 Ways to Frustrate Your Site Visitors

By Kalena Jordan

Damian Conway is known as the "Mad Scientist of Perl" and he was my favorite speaker at Webstock 2008. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and until recently was an honorary Associate Professor with the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash University Australia.

A popular speaker and trainer, he is a former columnist for The Perl Journal and author of two books about Perl. He also runs an international IT training company which provides programmer training throughout Europe, North America, and Australasia.

Damian kicked off his presentation by revealing that his wife is responsible for him being at Webstock. A few months ago, she was trying to buy a DVD on the Internet and was yelling expletives. He went to help her and after several minutes of frustration he finally gave up. Her response was "Are they deliberately trying to make it impossible for non-geeks?" His reply was "Yes". Damian's impression is that mankind has evolved into two distinct species - typical web users / typical web designers.

Damian then showed the Irony Ahead symbol. The sad truth, he says, is that the web designers are losing the battle to the masses. There are now normal humans who can almost use web sites on a daily basis! His sacred promise is to protect your web sites from infiltration by the terrible general public.

In reverse order, here are Damien's top 22 web design ideas to fend off the non-geeks and prevent Web 2.0 from taking hold:

22) Use Zen: Confuse them with anime and odd artistic blobs that are a complete mystery. Is it a web site? Is it art? Is it impossible to enter?

21) Use yellow or black and yellow: This signals danger as in wasps and Star Trek uniforms.

20) Use xenophobia: Try geo-location as an instrument of torture. Show only products not available in their country or illegal in their country e.g. "show me products I can't buy with a credit card issued in my country".

19) Get a site that requires the "www" to work: This is known as a canonical URL to us normal people. Make the www necessary and confuse the heck out of them when they type in the domain name without the w's and get shown an error page.

18) Use variable navigational layout (VNL): Use the previous and next links as people hate them. Let's replicate it for the entire web!

17) Throw usability out the window: Navigability is the pre-requisite for usability. So let's create navigation buttons that don't go anywhere. The non-geeks will be occupied for at least half an hour. Use Javascript to turn the navigation into confusing shadowy arrows. Javascript your scrollbars so they don't look anything like regular browser scrollbars. Use back buttons that embed links that take you up a level rather than actually taking you back. Your visitors will get lost in the hierarchy. Inconsistency is important.

16) Terrorize them with typography: Most non-geeks don't care about typography. They don't even have a favorite typeface! If they do, it's comic sans. Or Impact! All they care about is whether they can read it. Therefore, typography DOES matter. Go with something unreadable! Go with Abduction 2 font or something just as annoying. Fonts are not toys people, fonts are weapons!

15) Make shipping a last minute surprise: Shipping is a powerful tool to dissuade purchasers. It delays their instant gratification. Don't let them calculate the shipping cost in the cart otherwise they can go and comparison check on other sites. Instead, use the W3-recommended 34 step method and make all these fields compulsory:

product selection
shopping cart
checkout
purchaser address
phone number
fax number
email address
social security number
payment method
billing address
shipping address
shipping method
shipping costs
income bracket
referral source
etc.

With any luck, they'll abandon the cart in total frustration.

14) Make them register and login before they purchase: They'll be naturally terrified and run off. Even better, make them register before they can even view the web site!

13) Reduce the quality of site search results: How can you minimize the quality? Don't provide site search facilities at all! Or make the options highly improbable. Don't let them search for the product. Make them search by date of manufacture, or the name of the manufacturer. Or, make them search for the type of person that they are. Or what type of person YOU think they are. Pure genius.

12) Add pages ad infinitum: Don't return more than 10 results for a search at one time, even if you have to list 250 pages of search results. God put the fold there for a reason. If you don't follow this rule, it can result in scrolling! Protect the kids from scrolling!

11) Delay their gratification or their dis-gratification: Show items that aren't in stock, services you used to provide, options that won't work for them. Only tell them a product is not available AFTER they click through to the shopping cart total. This builds up a sense of hope so you can dash it immediately.

10) Don't allow them to sort search results: This non-sortability of results preserves the natural social order. Sort things in random order. For example, don't let them sort by product type, or price. Provide an alphabetical sorting option only. Or sort according to the web designer's favorite items.

9) Use background music and lots of it: It's a sure way to irritate your users. Your music choice probably sucks if you choose it carefully enough. Don't provide a stop button. Make it restart again on every new page. They'll soon leave.

8) The little things count: Like tiny little font. It's the most effective deterrent for anyone over the age of 20. Damian finds size 4 or 3 point is pretty good. Government and news sites use it all the time to great effect. Some browsers have the ability to change text size. Thankfully, most web users Damian surveyed didn't know this until it was pointed out to them. But it's ok! Because 2 weeks later, they'd forgotten again. Tiny text is the web designer's ally.

7) Use Cute Kitten Aversion Therapy: There are some web sites that you don't want your kids to see, Damian says. One of these is the W3 HTML Validator. AAARGGGGHH! It means that solutions for non-valid HTML code could be discovered by anyone and you don't want that. So spread the message, every time you validate, someone kills a kitten!

6) Use J-version therapy: The non-geeks have a strong aversion to the letter J and things like Jscript, Javascript etc. These J languages create fear in the non-geek. Online security companies have scared them into avoiding sites with Javascript or other items starting with J because hackers use them to distribute viruses. If you're lucky, they're so convinced by these fears that they've turned off Javascript in their browsers. This means that if your site uses Javascript menus, they can't be navigated! Brilliant.

5) You can never use too many images: Encode your important data and text in an image so it can't be cut and pasted and make the images huge and dark so that they can't be printed out. Or they can be printed but they use up masses amounts of printer toner. It's a great way to scare off even the most persistent of non-geeks.

4) Play hide and seek with your site visitors: They don't like to wait, so make them. Information that is impossible to find is safe. Don't use a sitemap and make sure there is no rational hierarchy to your site. Hide your most important data on a page that has no links pointing to it!

3) Use gray: It's the new black and it goes so well with black or darker gray. When using gray, make it impossible to read. Use nano-text in gray or even gray text on white. The site visitors run away! Even better, use gray on darker gray - it's the low contrast approach. This is even more effective for site visitors with a color impairment. If all else fails, use intestinal beige. It's apparently the new gray.

2) Flash is very important in our defense against web-mortals: Clocksucking Flash they call it. Some non-geeks even have their Flash facilities turned off so make your site entirely in Flash. Once visitors arrive at your Flash page, they see - "loading 1%". This is delayed gratification at it's best! Also, don't provide a "skip intro" button. Or if you do use it, make the link move away from the mouse. Over and over again. If the visitor persists, then make it disappear entirely. If the visitor without Flash is determined to view your Flash site, provide the "You Need Flash" link. Then make them download an enormous file that maxes out their bandwidth limits. Even better, use a Flash-based installer that requires them to have Flash installed first.

1) Combine all of the above for optimum effect: This is Damian's number #1 best way to scare away non-geek visitors. His favorite example of this in action is the World Glaucoma Association. Scroll down and place your mouse over the eye for the full effect. [My own personal favorite is Fred Frap and Friends where the pink text on the purple background asks you to click on the non-existent image to enter. Nice!]

But seriously folks, Damian says, the non-geek level is the SAME LEVEL as the MAJORITY OF YOUR WEB SITE USERS. Remember this. The typical experience for web-mortals is bad. He's here to plead with us all to build software for how people really ARE. The non-geek users.

The single biggest mistake that web designers make is not doing accessibility testing on their grandparents. Your grandparents are the typical Internet users. Use the Grandma usability metric. It's not about what your client wants. It's about what your client's customers want. It's not about clever, it's about comprehension. It's not about style, it's about usability. It's not about searching. It's about finding. It's not about ambience it's about the outcomes for people visiting your site.

Web 2.0 is Web 2.0verwhelming for most people. So make their experience measurably superior.


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

SEO Basics in 45 Minutes

By Kalena Jordan

As most people who read this newsletter will know, Jill Whalen is a pioneer in search engine optimization. Nicknamed the First Lady of Search, Jill founded the site HighRankings.com in 1995. Today High Rankings has grown to be one of the pre-eminent SEO companies in the US. Jill's company is dedicated to educating its clients and sharing its knowledge with the industry at large through the High Rankings Advisor newsletter, the High Rankings Forum and her in-house seminars.

In her presentation for Webstock 2008, Jill gave the audience a 45 minute tutorial in SEO Basics. First up, Jill discussed what SEO isn't. Some of the most common SEO myths she exposed included:

PPC Myths:

• PPC ads will help organic rankings


• PPC ads will hurt organic rankings

Tag Myths:

• you must have a keyword-rich domain


• you must have keyword-rich page URLs


• heading tags are necessary (H1, H2 etc.)


• you need to use keywords in meta keyword tags, in particular you need to use keywords that are included in your page content. Jill says that it's actually better to use the keyword tag to include misspellings and other keyword varieties that you don't have in your pages.


• using keywords in comment tags will hurt your rankings.

Content Myths:

• page copy must be a certain percentage of words. Jill actually made up the 250 word limit a few years ago and it's stuck, but there is really no set limit to please search engines.


• that you need to bold/italicize your target keywords.


• that you must use a specific keyword density. Jill says that keyword density tools are ridiculous.


• that you must optimize a page for a single keyword or phrase per page. Instead, try to optimize each page for 3-5 phrases that are related, so that your copy reads better than repeating one phrase over and over.


• that you need to optimize for the long-tail searches. You don't generally need to optimize for these - engines will find them on their own.


• duplicate content will get your site penalized. There is not a penalty as such, but engines will filter out duplicates in lieu of the original copy (or what they think is the original).

Design Myths:

• your HTML code must validate to W3C. Not even Google.com validates!


• your navigation must be text links not images. Surprisingly, graphical navigation is fine as long as you use ALT tags.


• you can't use Flash. It's fine to use Flash, as long as it is one element of your page, not a complete Flash site. Use a text-based site too if using a Flash site.


• certain design techniques are black hat. Javascript code is legitimate, not just used by black hats.

Link Building Myths:

• that Google's link: command is accurate. It's not a useful tool. Use Google Webmaster Tools or the Yahoo link command instead.


• that reciprocal links won't count. From the right site, reciprocal links are fine, even very helpful.


• that pages are ranked in PageRank order in the search results. They're not. Google Toolbar PageRank is not accurate anyway so ignore it.


• you must be in DMOZ or Yahoo Directory to get good Google rankings. In Jill’s opinion, the Yahoo Directory is not worth the money these days.

Submitting, Crawling and Indexing Myths:

• that you need to submit URLs to engines. Provided you have a link to your site, you will be found and indexed.


• that you need a Google Sitemap. Not needed for the average site. It won't change your site rank.


• that you need to update your site frequently.


• frequent spidering helps rankings. Not true


• that you need multiple sites. This won't help in the engines and creates more maintenance work.


• that you need doorway pages. Jill says this is so 1995!

SEO Company Myths:

• that a #1 ranking will always lead to more traffic or sales. The good rankings need to be for keywords and phrases that people are actually searching for.


• that the company can place pages in certain positions. Not possible, unless they're using Pay Per Click or sponsored spots.


• that your rankings will tank if you stop paying the company. Rubbish!


• that they have a "proprietary method" of SEO. They're lying!


• that they have a "special relationship" with Google. Again, they're lying. Google has no relationships with organic SEO companies that Jill is aware of.


• that they can increase your rankings without doing any on-page work. Run away!

Next, Jill defined what SEO is. Her definition of SEO is "making your site the best it can be for your site visitors AND the search engines". She made the point that search engines need to:

• Find


• Crawl


• Index


• Determine relevancy


• show results

So you should keep these top of mind when designing and SEOing your site.

Jill also made the point that search engines don't know you. So you should disclose what you sell and who you are in plain language that naturally incorporates the keyword phrases. Dumb down your pages for users. What search engines want is good content. If you're not getting good traffic from your pages, they're broken, she says. In a nutshell, make sure your pages speak to your target audience and solve their problems.

Jill then discussed how to choose keywords to target on your site. She recommended brainstorming with friends, family and business colleagues and creating a seed list of keywords. Then take that list and run it through keyword research tools such as WordTracker or Keyword Discovery and even Google AdWords to determine the best keywords and phrases to target.

Jill says there are three types of keyword phrases:

1. General and highly competitive terms - not good choices.


2. Long tail - uncompetitive terms - generally no need to SEO for.


3. Relevant and specific terms, which are the best to choose because they highly searched, yet are targeted enough to bring qualified traffic.

Next, Jill explained where to put your keywords. She recommended putting them in:

• anchor text


• clickable image alt attributes (alt tags)


• headlines


• body text copy


• title tags (Don't make your titles less than 10 words, she says.)


• meta description tags

Jill finished up by teaching the group how to measure SEO success. She said that high rankings are not the best measure of success because you might be ranking for phrases nobody is searching on. Instead you should be looking for increased targeted traffic to your site and more conversions. Use your web stats to give you the clues as to whether your site and your SEO is working.

As for the future of SEO, well despite the rumors that SEO is dead, Jill doesn't think that the big engines will switch to exclusively paid listings any time soon. In her opinion, there will always be some free ways to get listed so there will always be a need for SEO. In the same vein, a crawler-friendly site will always get good results and off page criteria (e.g. links) will always be important.


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

SEM Industry Standards: Nonsense or Necessary?

By Kalena Jordan

A storm in a tea cup has been brewing in the search industry over the past few days. It was prompted by Jill Whalen's recent blog post titled We Don't Need SEO Standards where she came to the conclusion that she didn't think the search industry needed standards or regulation, at least in relation to Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Here are Jill's top 4 reasons why she believes we don't need SEO standards:

1. There are too many ways of skinning the SEO cat.


2. We can't even agree on the definition of search engine optimization.


3. There are already laws to protect people from SEO scams.


4. There's no such thing as "cheating" in SEO.

The post got a few people fired up and they blogged fiery rebuttals pushing their case for standards. Their reasoning included:

• That the industry has a black eye and needs a regulating body.


• That industry-wide standards need to be put in place to protect the public from unethical SEM operators.


• That SEM practioners need to take responsibility for their own profession.


• That it's about time the industry adopted a set of agreed best practices.

Yadda yadda.

Passionate commentary ensued on Sphinn, proving that the industry is divided on the issue. But the truth is, we have been arguing about this very subject for years.

Personally, I agree with Jill's post.

As an educator, I can understand the frustration at the lack of industry standards. But do we "need" them? Are standards going to solve the problems people perceive as dogging the industry? I think not. Creating standards is not going to get rid of shoddy SEOs or make them switch hats. Creating standards is not going to prevent the general public from being ripped off by SEM cowboys. Industry veterans will understand this. Education and publicity has always been the solution but it just took some of us years to work that out.

This industry has unspoken standards and they've worked well for 10 or more years. We white-hat educators promote the unofficial standards and search engine guidelines already. The creation of official standards would, in my opinion, just spawn more problems.

It's interesting to see how personally some people are taking this issue. I too recall the days when I took SEO scamming quite personally and made it my own little agenda to hunt, expose and ridicule dodgy SEO firms in an effort to save the great unwashed masses from themselves and rid the industry of it's shoddy reputation in the media. Now I simply educate as many people as I can about what tactics to avoid rather than who to avoid. I think this is more of an issue of buyer beware than anything else. Standards are a nice idea, but they can't be discussed in isolation when we don't have a governing body to determine or implement them.

I used to get so annoyed at the black eye given to the industry thanks to dodgy operators and ignorant journalists, but the tide has turned so we must be addressing the problem. These days, the general public and the media (with the exception of American Express perhaps) *get* that most SEOs aren't out to rip them off.

As for best practices, these can't be created from the outside in, they have to be generated from inside out - and that means with involvement from the very top - from the search engines themselves and possibly an independent regulatory body. No search engine or government body has imposed formal regulations on the industry so right now we just have guidelines and ethics and semantics. We white hat advocates can all pat each other on the back for following Google's Webmaster Guidelines and not spamming, but we can't be too hard on the black and gray hats for breaking the rules when there are no clear rules to begin with!

So who should be entrusted with the creation and regulation of SEM industry standards or best practices? Some are suggesting an existing organization or SEM firm should be given the job.

Within the Sphinn commentary, Jill said: "...those that would create the standards all have their own agendas."

She's got a point. I for one would balk strongly at one of the existing search marketing organizations or firms being given the power to determine best practices for the entire industry. The conflict of interest rumpus that would create would be unbearable and accusations would taint the reputation of those involved, even if their intentions were honorable - remember the drama relating to ethics in SEMPOs first year? Until we have a completely independent board/panel consisting of government officials and nominated representatives, the argument for standards is circular.

Meanwhile, we have to rely on our interpretation of the search engine's guidelines, our own experience and our voices to educate webmasters about SEM best practices, as we see fit. As an industry, we're doing this already via the many channels we have access to: forums, blogs, articles, webinars, media, training, conferences and the like. Do we need standards in order to educate? Nah. I think we're doing a pretty good job without them.


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Planning for Web Site Disaster

By Kalena Jordan

When you have a business web site that multiple people work on, one of the most difficult tasks is to manage and allocate responsibilities. For example, you might have a corporate site where the content is written by various in-house staff members, the pages are managed by your freelance web designer and your outsourced SEO is responsible for ensuring the content and code is search engine friendly.

But what happens when communication breaks down between all the stakeholders or a miscommunication occurs? It's more common than you might think and it can result in disaster for your web site. Here's a true story of how it happened to one of my clients:

The site in question was being re-designed by the client's 3rd party web designers and the client asked me (as their SEO) to send them a list of instructions to follow during the re-design and launch that would ensure they didn't lose search engine visibility. Naturally I sent the client a list of the usual things to watch out for, including:

• Ensuring that any URLs being replaced or moved had 301 redirects placed on them to their new locations.


• Transferring the optimized title and meta tags to new page versions.


• Implementing a custom 404 page; and


• Building a replacement XML sitemap for Google and Yahoo.

So a week later the client tells me that the new site is now live and would I have a quick check to see if everything is ok? I opened the site and typed in each of the URLs for the pages I had carefully optimized months before. The first one came up with a big ugly 404 Not Found error. Not a custom 404 error page, but an ugly white server-generated one with no design, no branding, no apology and (more importantly) no links back to the main site. So I tried the next one. Same story - 404 error.

As I went down the list, I became more and more concerned. Less than half of the pages I optimized had been transferred to the new site. When I checked their site logs in ClickTracks, I noticed that around half of the page views generated since the site re-launch were 404 errors. Not only that, but a quick check of Google Webmaster Tools showed a small fraction of the original number of site pages as being indexed. Obviously Googlebot had been shown the 404 errors too and had promptly removed the old pages from the Google index. Disaster!

I contacted the client and told her to get a custom 404 page implemented as soon as possible and to double check that 301 redirects from their old page URLs to the corresponding pages on the new site had been put in place by the design team, as per my instructions. Turns out the designers never received explicit instructions about this from the client and didn't know that:

a) a custom 404 page was important

b) 301 redirects were necessary to ensure the continuation of search engine indexing.

I found this news quite shocking - what web designer/programmer doesn't understand the need to redirect old URLs to new ones?

Plus, we found out later that the few pages that the designers HAD successfully transferred to the new template did not have the carefully optimized Title and META Tags transferred, meaning that all the hard-won rankings we had earned for the client had now vanished. The designer's excuse? They weren't SEO experts so didn't know tag transfer was necessary. I found this excuse pretty flimsy considering they managed to transfer the rest of the page HTML code intact.

This started a chain of urgent emails back and forth between the client, the designers and myself, with the designers blaming the client and me for not providing clear enough instructions, me blaming the designers for not taking the initiative to protect the client's site traffic during the move and the client caught in the middle trying to appease everyone. The emails escalated until finally the designers admitted defeat and acknowledged that they should have paid more attention to the client's instructions.

It took a couple of weeks for the designers to upload a custom 404 error page and I still had to manually login to the client's CMS to replace the optimized Title and META tags. As this goes to press, the client site has started to recover in the rankings, the 301 redirects are back in place, the number of pages indexed by Google is increasing, but the site stats are still showing a large number of 404 pages delivered to searchers. I expect it to take upwards of 3 months for the site to fully recover from the disaster.

The whole saga just goes to prove that you can't assume your site is in capable hands. If you are about to make extensive changes to your site design or move it to a new domain, you absolutely have to have a rollout plan in place with crystal clear instructions and tasks allocated to a team so everyone knows who is responsible for what. Otherwise you will be paying the penalties for months to come.


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

How Google Applies Science to Search

By Kalena Jordan

Dr. Craig Nevill-Manning is a New Zealander who joined Google in 2000 as a Senior Research Scientist to develop more precise search techniques. Previously, Craig was an assistant professor at the Computer Science Department of Rutgers University, where he conducted research in data compression, information retrieval and computational biology. Before that, he was a post-doctoral fellow in the Biochemistry Department of Stanford University, where he developed a software suite used by pharmaceutical research laboratories to identify the role of particular proteins within cells.

A scientist at heart, Craig is probably best known as the developer of Froogle (recently re-named Google Product Search) and the founder of Google's software engineering center in New York City. Google New York is responsible for developing products including Google Maps, Google Finance, Google Spreadsheets, and many important features in web search and advertising. This article is a summary of his presentation at Webstock 2008.

Google's Spelling Bee

Craig started his presentation by talking about one of his first challenges: Google's spelling correction tool. As the popularity of the search engine grew, Google needed to be able to spell-correct lots of obscure words. So his solution was to take a sampling of content from the entire web. Craig's team came up with a algorithmic model and ran it over the web. He discovered that there were several correct answers to the same question. For example, words like “kofee” could mean either the searcher is seeking a cup of java or information about Kofee/Kofi Anan.

To combat this, Craig came up with an interesting solution: the "Did you mean?" alternative spelling option, based on predictive examples of searcher spelling patterns. You can see this in action if you type in "kofee anan" in Google. Above the search results is a line that reads: "Did you mean: kofi annan" and links to the search results for this spelling variation too.

But the research went even further. Craig's team worked out how to take into account the context of the search query by studying the 2 or 3 other keywords surrounding the query, for example "kofee cup" or "kofee anan". The research used the science of bigrams and trigrams to better understand how people search. Bigrams are groups of two written letters, two syllables, or two words, very commonly used as the basis for simple statistical analysis of text. So Craig and his team applied this knowledge to Google's spelling correction system and now, Google's algorithm can determine the searcher's intent with much more accuracy, based on the context of the search query.

As an example of the spelling challenges that Google face, Craig showed the audience the huge number of ways "Britney Spears" is misspelled on the web. He said it's encouraging to see that the most popular spelling is also the most correct one. Scale is important!


Google Maps Lead to Apps

The Google team wrote the code for Google Maps many years ago but the code was actually built into your browser. When Google maps first launched, people took the dense data-script and worked out how to reverse engineer it for their own use. Google engineers decided to release an API key to make these mash-ups easier after seeing so many people reverse engineer Google Maps without Google's help. Now people can mash-up Google maps within minutes to create their own applications.

To show how easy this is, Craig took the audience through the steps to create an interactive application with Google Maps. In the space of about 2 minutes, he signed up for an API key, grabbed the HTML code and pasted it into his page. He then hacked the map to show Wellington Town Hall (our location) and made the point how easy it is to create really useful tools out of technology that is already available.

As an example, Craig showed the audience Seattle Bus Monster. This site used an API key for Google Maps to make Seattle bus data and tracking available 24/7. Anyone who needs to catch a bus can look online and instantly find their nearest bus location and run to the bus stop in time to catch it. It's these type of interactive applications that add value to both corporate and government sites. Craig referenced Rodney Brooks from MIT whose provocative paper "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" offered new logic and a completely different view of machines. The idea is that there is no center of control among robots so you should make lots of them; don't treat them so precious. Craig said developers should use this logic to create lots of small apps that you can replicate and tweak, rather than one big expensive app that can go horribly wrong. Scale trumps smarts every time!


Experiments in Scale That Have Impacted Google's Operations

Precision vs. Recall

Back in the early 90's, information retrieval on the web was limited to things like Lexus/Nexus. So at that stage, Google would take queries and apply it to the broadest possible search. This was great recall at the cost of precision. But Larry and Sergey wanted something better so they decided to use Boolean search. At the time it was heresy because everything was focused on recall. But the Google founders knew that things had to be super relevant so they developed an algorithm - the core algorithm. It was very simple and relied on Boolean search to determine relevancy.


Genomic Sequencing

In the mid 90's a large project - the Human Genome Project - was underway. The race was on to sequence the genome. Scientists decided to feed this out to a bunch of different people. They chopped up the genome for researchers everywhere and allowed it to replicate. The researchers mapped each chunk with genetic markers and computed a tiling path of tiny fragments.

Sequencing was very expensive, so the data was computed based on a minute number of chunks - very labor intensive. The sequencing took forever and reassembling was a long way off. But then a company came along that said they could do it faster. Sequencing becomes cheaper by automating the job using machines rather than individual people so this company used a clever computer algorithm to conduct the sequencing. This reduced the cost and the researchers were therefore able to reassemble more fragments and achieve a rough draft of the genome in 2000. This sequencing approach was the shotgun approach, where accuracy is lower, but the larger scale allowed the impossible to become possible.


Web Definitions

Google used to do a terrible job of defining terms. Craig noticed people were searching for "definition of...", or "what is a...." etc so he wanted the search engine to provide better results for these searches. He found lots of web pages that contained glossaries and definitions, so he hacked up a Perl script to get the glossary formats.

The first recall results were only 50 percent accurate. He wanted to improve this rate, so he did some experiments with the data. But he could never reach an accuracy level he was happy with. It was later he realized that most of the questions people actually needed answers to could be answered with his crappy little Perl script. He concluded that 100 percent accuracy is not important, that scale is much more important.

Now Google allows you to use the "definition:" query and the question format to get definitions from around the web. Type in "what is a blog?" and you'll get lots of results from Craig's original script.


Protein Sequencing

In biology, Craig says, you're constantly producing proteins. The proteins fold up with particular sequencing. Within computing, you can use this knowledge to do amazing things. You can conduct computations with this type of data but it's time consuming. Somebody at Stanford University noticed that proteins spend a lot of time moving about before folding into an alpha helix. So it was suggested they start the computations with lots of configurations. In this way you can parallelize the data by scale and one will be magically close to a folded protein. So they worked out a way to reduce the problem to a simple process based on mass scale. This is why Google uses maximum scale to conduct algorithmic computations.


Chess vs. Go

You can now compute the value of any potential move in chess. Based on that information, you can compute your projected probability of wining the game from any move. Chess grand masters put a lot of time into this knowledge. But the opposite is true for the game Go, because there is more randomness to the game play.

The smart way (Chess)

- study lots of past games
- compute the probability for each position
- compute far into the future

The stupid way (Go)

- pick moves at random
- re-create the Monte Carlo simulation (a computational algorithm that relies on repeated random sampling for results)
- play like a human

Curiously, the stupid way works better for Go players because it's more logical to compute the data based on the game's inherent randomness.


How Google Applies the Lessons of Scale

So how does Google apply these lessons of scale? For starters, Google does not buy expensive hardware. PCs are unreliable, especially if you have thousands. However, they are cheap and fast. So what's Google's strategy? Craig says they exploit the processing power of off-the-shelf PC hardware and simply make the software more reliable.

Craig revealed that Google buys cheap hardware on a mass scale. The problem is that these cheap processors are notoriously unreliable because they are packed into datacenters by the thousands and they are running 24 hours a day so they get very hot. Commodity hardware therefore fails at an accelerated rate. Once you cope with that realization, you need to design recovery situations to deal with the problem. So Google's software understands that their data can fail at any moment and works harder to cope with that.

For every server at Google, there is another with exactly the same data on it, the same configuration, the same everything: a clone. Replication is needed for scalability so that if requested data isn't fetched instantly, the backup or clone computer is searched instead. The result is that failures don't hurt Google, they only reduce capacity. When hardware crashes or software hangs, there is a time out and a re-issue request. Google has a central control system in place to manage all this.

Cooling failures at Google can be exciting!. Craig recalls the time when the air conditioning failed entirely at one of the datacenters and the monitoring system recognized that the centre was heating up, so they were able to shut down remaining PCs at the datacenter within minutes. The fire brigade turned up and it was quite a big event internally. But the best thing was that nobody using Google even noticed! Because of Google's scalable solution, searchers were unaffected by the major hardware outage.

Craig says that once a week, a person at each data center has a list of all the failed hard disks and walks around the datacenter with a pile of hard drives, replacing them one at a time. Velcro is Google's secret weapon! All Google's hard disks are velcroed in. This allows super quick service and replacement time. So curiously, there is no downside to hardware failures at Google, because they are expected and managed via scale.


Google: The Startup

Craig showed the audience a photo of Google's original PC configuration put together by Larry and Sergey at google.stanford.edu. It consisted of three hard drives and a couple of monitors. Larry and Sergey used Lego to enclose the hard disks and when Lego became too expensive, they used cheap Lego knock-offs! He then showed a picture of Google's first office inside a residential garage and the hard drive racks that they built in a rented datacenter to save money. Larry and Sergey packed the racks together and used layers of cork between the motherboards so they wouldn't explode. Eventually they hired people who knew about safe wiring, but they still used floor fans in the datacenter to try to keep the PCs cool.


Google and the Brady Bunch

Google's Zeitgeist pulls together interesting search trends and patterns generated from the billions of searches conducted on Google. Craig is consistently fascinated by search trends and recalls a particular event that sticks in his mind. On the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, the competitor got down to the final question for $1 million and it was: "On the TV show The Brady Bunch, what is Carol Brady's maiden name?" The competitor used his phone-a-friend lifeline and his friend was able to look it up live on Google and provide the competitor with the correct answer, earning him a million dollars.

The next day, out of interest, Google staff looked at the logs for "carol brady maiden name" and saw a huge spike in traffic when the show aired on the West Coast, then another spike when it aired on the East Coast and then a tiny spike when it aired a few hours later in Hawaii.

So Google Trends is a useful tool to study data patterns, but Google keep a bunch of statisticians on staff who check that random effects aren't making the data significant. Craig says that in the same vein, you should look at your site logs and react, but be careful about jumping to conclusions about what the trends say.

At the end of his presentation, I asked Craig whether he is concerned that Google's PageRank algorithm will gradually become less accurate due to the demands of scale. Craig acknowledged that as Google's indexed data grows, user input and search patterns will become increasingly important. He says PageRank will need to learn to become better at providing search results and scale up accordingly. But scale makes things interesting!


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Ambient Findability and the Future of Search

By Kalena Jordan

Peter Morville is widely recognized as a founding father of information architecture. He co-authored the best-selling book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and has consulted with such organizations as Harvard, IBM, the International Monetary Fund, Microsoft, the National Cancer Institute and Yahoo! Peter is president of Semantic Studios, co-founder and past president of the Information Architecture Institute and a faculty member at the University of Michigan. Peter's latest book, Ambient Findability, was published in 2005.

In his presentation for Webstock 2008, Peter called himself a crazy librarian who fell in love with the web. Peter designs sites so that people can find what they're looking for. It's not just about findability, Peter says. The structural design of shared information environments is important. The vast majority of Internet architects don't even know the term Internet architects. Content authors, bloggers etc. have a responsibility for shared information. One lesson Peter says he constantly needs to give clients is that it's not enough to provide a single taxonomy. You can bring multiple ideas and formats to a single document to a wide audience with different needs. The Stanford University site is a good example of a usable site. When you design for the web, you should provide usable navigation and a site search facility at the very minimum.

The Consumer Reports site is another good example. It doesn't stop with global navigation but gives a couple of information sub-sets to tell the user what the site database consists of. One size does not fit all in taxonomy. The Mayo Clinic use a more user-friendly design by listing all diseases by their most common name rather than the formal medical terminology. The site was re-designed with users in mind and has positively flourished as a result. It demonstrates that you need to design site taxonomies for specific audiences and users.

The elements of the user experience are multilayered. Peter is sick of the word "usability" as it means different things to different people. Depending on who you talk to, usability could mean:

useful
usable
valuable
findable
credible
accessible
desirable

All these elements are important. Peter recommends asking these three questions when designing a site layout:

1) can users find your web site?
2) can users navigate your web site?
3) can users find your products and services despite your web site?

He also claims that not enough attention is paid to accessibility these days. Your web site needs to advance your business goals and inspire trust. Peter mentioned Google search as an example. People tend to trust results that are listed high in Google. Findability and credibility are therefore increasingly connected.

Peter has provided site usability services for the National Cancer Institute. When he began working with the site, 90 percent of traffic was from the general public who had been diagnosed with cancer and were seeking specific information. Peter helped re-design the site to make sure these people found the information they were seeking about specific cancer types. At the time Peter worked on the site, an amazing 70 percent of searches on the major search engines were for specific types of cancer so the Cancer Institute used this information to improve the findability of their specific cancer pages.

We can talk about findability at the level of the object and the system, says Peter. What are the ways the object/data can be found? How do we make it easier to be found? How does the environment support the navigation and retrieval of the object/data? What he calls ambient findability is the ability to find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime. The destination is never quite reached because perfect findability is impossible.

We're now drowning in information and suffering from information anxiety in the information age. "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." says Herbert Simon (Nobel Laureate Economist) or the Dilbert version of this is: "Information is gushing toward your brain like a firehouse aimed at a teacup". We are creating alternate ways to receive information via our digital networks, Google Earth being a good example. Another example is the "kid tracker" which is a GPS wristwatch your kids wear so you can know the location of your kids 24/7. Soon, people will be able to track other people every second of every day. This raises privacy concerns.

Peter showed a couple of examples of findability technology available now. Within a wireless network area, you can now use the Cisco Wireless Location Appliance to add electronic tags to items so you can locate them at any time. Hospitals use the technology to tag wheelchairs so they can be found instantly and save staff time and money searching for them. It's claimed this saves one hospital $28K per month. Another example was the keen couple who had tagging devices embedded in their hands so they could open each other's apartment doors and access each other's computers. How romantic!

So in a world where the information haystacks are getting larger, how do we create information needles? How do we solve the findability question? We need to think about business intelligence, visualizing patterns etc. Back in the 1980's Peter wrote an article claiming that the Internet will turn everyone into a librarian and now it's happened. We can't stop talking about meta data, social media labels, bookmarks and Flickr tags! In 5-10 years, Peter thinks that many sites will become like Amazon in terms of findability.

Search is one of the most important ways we learn. "Search has become the new interface of commerce" says John Battelle. Search startups such as Endeca and Trexy are pioneering new ways to search. Everyzing is a search engine that allows you to search audio files by individual words within the transcript. Buzzillions is an example of a site using both structured meta data and tag search. Hybrid search solutions are launching all the time. Google is struggling with how to provide data the way people categorize it. Google Book Search is an example of a site with usability issues. Flickr solved this issue by using clusters to sort photo tags, with huge success.

Peter says that we need to focus on usability in the future. Everyone working on your site needs to have the same goals in mind. He completes his presentation with the story of the three stone cutters. There is a guy wandering in the wilderness and he comes upon a quarry and asks the workers there what they're doing. The first stone cutter is working at a slow pace and says "I'm making a living". The second guy is working really hard and fast. He says "I'm doing my very best". The third guy is working at a pace somewhere in the middle but with a smile on his face. He says "I'm building a cathedral".


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

A Beginner's Guide to Pay Per Click Marketing

By Kalena Jordan

Pay Per Click (PPC) search engine marketing refers to a specific type of advertising where you pay a search engine every time a potential customer clicks on your ad. These ads appear on search engine results pages and sometimes on sites within a search engine's network of partners.

How do Pay Per Click Ads Work?

If you look at a search engine results page (SERP) carefully, you can generally distinguish between search results that are regular algorithmic or "organic" search listings and PPC search results which are actually paid advertisements. The latter are generally listed under the headings "sponsored results" or "featured listings" and consist of specially designed text, image or video ads that are triggered to display when your target keywords are used in a search query. The PPC ads generally appear on the right hand side and/or at the top of the search results pages.

To appear in the PPC results, advertisers sign up for the PPC program of their choice and create short text ads, image ads or videos describing the product or service available on their site in a way that will best entice searchers to visit it. During the program setup, an advertiser will decide which trigger keywords/phrases they wish to bid on and how much they are willing to pay when a visitor clicks on their ad. Generally, the higher the bid, the more likely their ad will show above their competitor's.

The Origins of Pay Per Click Marketing

The PPC industry was pioneered by GoTo.com (later re-branded as Overture before it was purchased by Yahoo! in July 2003). Despite their enormous success, GoTo's PPC model was met with a lot of skepticism in the industry following their IPO in 1999. Their eventual purchase by Yahoo put to rest any doubts that pay per click advertising was here to stay.

In October 2000, Google which was eventually to become the world's most popular search engine, launched their own keywords advertising model (Google AdWords), blending algorithmic search results with pay per impression ads.

In 2002, in an attempt to compete more successfully with Overture, Google expanded AdWords to include the pay per click pricing model we are familiar with today. This model provide both more popular and more successful and eventually replaced the pay-per-impression model as the default system.

By 2002, GoTo (by then rebranded as Overture), had distribution deals with an impressive range of search engines including Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista, InfoSpace and a number of meta search engines including MetaCrawler and Ixquick. Overture's powerful distribution network guaranteed advertisers placement of their ads in front of a LOT of eyeballs and it became clear that many were willing to pay big bucks for the privilege. Other major search engines also formed successful distribution partnerships with PPC providers during this time, noticeably AOL, AskJeeves and MSN with Google AdWords. The pay per click industry had officially arrived.

Scores of PPC search engines began to spring up following Overture's lead, however the PPC industry continued to be dominated by the two big PPC players, Overture and Google AdWords, while Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and Google fought it out for dominance in the general search market.

In July 2003, in a move that shocked the industry, Yahoo! purchased Overture to enable them to better compete with market leader Google. In April 2005 they rebranded the PPC engine as Yahoo! Search Marketing and in 2006 they launched a revamped version of the service, code-named Panama.

Meanwhile, in October 2005, Microsoft quietly launched their own PPC service called MSN adCenter. An official launch in the US, together with a name change to Microsoft AdCenter occurred in May 2006. In May 2007, Microsoft revamped AdCenter with new features and rolled it out to advertisers worldwide.

Currently, Yahoo and Google continue to dominate the PPC landscape, although Microsoft AdCenter is beginning to make an impact. Second tier PPC engines such as MIVA (formerly Espotting and FindWhat) and Kanoodle are fast catching up to the majors.

There are now hundreds of PPC search engines worldwide, servicing global, regional and niche markets, but only a few that have achieved a significant market share of advertising revenue. A summary of the majors are listed below.

Yahoo! Sponsored Search

Yahoo! Sponsored Search is the current name for what was originally called Overture Precision Match. Yahoo! Sponsored Search prominently displays your site in search results on some of the top U.S. search properties that Yahoo! partners with. With Sponsored Search, you set the price you're willing to pay for each customer who clicks on your listing. Your ads appear at the top, bottom or right hand side of Yahoo search results pages under the heading "Sponsor Results". Your ads are triggered on search result pages when searchers enter the keyword combinations that you've bid on. Your ads can be targeted by language and country.

If you create a keyword campaign and you use the ContentMatch option, your bid also buys you top listings on Yahoo's partner sites AltaVista, InfoSpace, eBay, CitySearch, AllTheWeb and a range of news and content portals, such as USAToday, National Geographic, iVillage and NBC.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords gives web site owners the ability to promote their site when particular keyword or phrase searches are conducted at Google and partner sites. Your ads appear at the top or on the right side of search results pages in a "call out" box under the heading "Sponsored Links". Your AdWords text, image or video ads appear on search result pages for the keywords you buy, and can be targeted by language and country. With Google AdWords cost-per-click (CPC) pricing, you pay only when a customer clicks on your ad, regardless of how many times it's shown. Google adjusts your bids automatically to keep you ahead of your competition at the lowest possible price. Google AdWords results appear on Google search results pages, Google's distribution partner sites, Google Gmail, and numerous content sites which are syndicated through the Google AdSense program.

Microsoft AdCenter

Microsoft adCenter is the newest kid on the Pay Per Click block. It includes the ability to target your ads to MSN Live Search users who match your target regional and demographic criteria. Microsoft adCenter allows you to submit base bids for keywords or phrases you associate with your ads. This base bid is the maximum amount you are willing to pay if any Live Search user searches for one of your keywords and clicks your ad. You can also increase your bid in order to reach specific audience targets, which help increase the chance your ad will appear for a user who fits your buyer profile. Targeted bidding in the Campaigns tab allows you to add amounts to your base bid to increase the possibility that your ad will show to searchers who fit your optimum buyer profile. You can use your bid amounts to influence your ad's position in the Live Search results. In general, the more you bid, the higher the position your ad will have. You can use Microsoft's Intelligent Targeting feature to adjust your ads to match these variables:

• Geographical location


• Age and gender


• Day of the week


• Time of day (morning, afternoon, or night)

Interestingly, Microsoft pitch the ability to "build brand awareness" with their PPC program, due to the continued exposure of your ad and brand to a large market, regardless of whether that ad attracts clicks. This is an important feature of all major PPC programs but one that is rarely promoted by Google or Yahoo! Perhaps brand-building is adCenter's Unique Selling Proposition (USP) because Microsoft claim to reach more potential eyeballs than their competitors: over 99 million people per month have access to their Live Search tool across MSN and Windows Live.

The Advantages of Pay Per Click Advertising

The growth of the search industry worldwide has created a huge market for paid search advertising and most search engines and directories now have some type of Pay For Performance or Pay Per Click (PPC) element to them.

Pay Per Click advertising:

• Enables webmasters to target geographical and niche markets more precisely via specific search queries.


• Enables webmasters to have their page URL displayed at the top of the search engine results pages without having to figure out complex search engine algorithms or pay an SEO expert to tweak their site for higher rankings.


• Enables webmasters to receive new traffic instantly.


• Enables a website or offline store to be found by search engine users even if no site exists or the site is not search engine compatible.


• Enables small businesses to operate globally and compete on an equal footing with much larger competitors.


• Enables instant sales and more measurable ROI via conversion tracking.


• Enables more precise visitor pathways to be plotted (e.g. by leading visitors to specific landing pages).


• Enables campaigns to be switched on and off on-demand to meet specific needs, search trends or specific events (e.g. Christmas sale).

About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Should You Change Your Copy When Rankings Fall?

Article By Karon Thackston

I've been on a seesaw for the last year. I have a client who, for almost 12 months, has been asking me to rewrite their home-page copy because they dropped from the top 10 to position #11 (the dreaded second page!). My question to her was always, "Is your copy still converting the way you want it to?" She answered yes every time, to which I advised, "Leave the copy alone."

"But what about my rankings?"

"Is business suffering?"

"No, we're swamped."

"Leave the copy alone."

"But it's over a year old. Don't you think it needs to be refreshed?"

"Is your copy still converting the way you want it to?"

"Yes."

"Leave the copy alone."

We'd have this same discussion every 3 or 4 months. Some people just get hung up on being in the top 10, and their tunnel vision can cause them to make decisions they otherwise would not make. Others think that, because they are tired of seeing their website copy, others are too. This is usually not true.

My suggestion was to enhance her linking campaign with some quality articles through an article distribution campaign, but to leave the copy alone since it was still doing its job. Search engine positioning isn't the whole ball of wax. Getting top 10 rankings shouldn't be your primary goal. Attracting and keeping more business is what it's all about. If that means using search engine optimization as one tool, so be it. But too many times, website owners bow to the SEO gods and sacrifice conversions and their best business sense all for the sake of saying they are #1. Not advisable, if you ask me.

I am happy to report that, after holding at #11 for many months, this company's site is now back in spot #5. While we can't say with any certainty that it has driven any more business to their site than being at #11, the managers are quite pleased.

Never Change Your Copy?

Is this my advice in every case where rankings drop? No. There are instances where you do need to change your copy if your rankings decrease. Ask yourself (or your client) these questions:

1) Are conversions suffering?

If you're experiencing a decline in conversions, by all means take a look at your copy. It might need some help. But keep in mind that decreasing conversions may also be due to a new and more complicated shopping cart, recent design changes that impaired usability for your visitors or a dozen other reasons.

2) Have products or services changed?

If you have products or services to add or remove, certainly you'll want to change your copy to reflect that.

3) Has business fallen off?

If, due to the decrease in search engine positioning, you've tracked a definite lag in business, then yes, you'll want to make an effort to gain the lost rankings back. But, changing the copy isn't the only way to do this. If you answer no to the other questions, I'd leave the copy as-is and opt for an article distribution campaign first.

4) Other than hoping to appease the SEO gods, is there any other reason that the copy mandates changing?

If the answer is no, don't change the copy.

With all of the above, if the answer to each question is no, leave the copy alone.

There are as many reasons for your positioning to change as there are days in the month. Guessing at and trying to adjust for mysterious shifts usually does little good. Plus, while you're chasing the golden ring, you may be losing sales.

About the Author:

Learn to write emotionally driven SEO copywriting with Karon's Step-by-Step Copywriting Course at http://www.copywritingcourse.com. Read Karon's copywriting blog at http://www.marketingwords.com/blog.

Environmentally Friendly Web Site Marketing: Recycle Your Content!

By Kalena Jordan

Do you ever hit a slump when you're trying to come up with new content for your web site? Do you get blogger’s block on a regular basis? It happens to the best of us.

Yet it seems like everyone around you is a marketing genius. Search engine marketers are churning out articles and blog posts day after day and what about those multi-level marketing gurus promoting seemingly endless products and e-books? Do you ever think “How do they find the time to come up with all these new ideas?".

The answer is simple: content recycling. Yes, the secret behind many of the Internet’s most successful marketers is the recycling of content in different ways to appeal to different audiences. Let me give you an example:

The original Search Engine Optimization 101 course that I created for Search Engine College was based on a brief training manual I wrote for web design staff of an ex-employer many years ago. When it came to writing a full course for the first time back in 2004, I took the original training manual content, checked it for accuracy, expanded on it to bring the content up to date and then divided it into logical lesson plans. Then I added case studies, examples, 3rd party references, diagrams and coding samples. Then I devised suitable assignments and quizzes for the lessons that would test a student's knowledge of the material. Voila! I had my finished course.

But my use of the material didn't stop there. I noticed that some of my lessons had sections that would make excellent stand-alone articles, so I pulled out the relevant sections and re-worked the content into suitable article context and added broader appeal for my target markets. These articles were then circulated using various article distribution channels and social media communities. The more popular ones became feature articles in our monthly newsletter and offline marketing magazines. Some became marketing tools for our Search Engine College affiliate network to help drive more sales.

When I receive comments and feedback on the articles, these in turn generate discussion and ideas for blog posts for my search engine advice column. But that's not all! Occasionally I am asked to give in-house training or presentations on search engine marketing. Depending on the subject matter, I often take my original SEO lesson notes and my articles and rework the content into MS PowerPoint slides and handouts.

The marketing and affiliate gurus are expert content recyclers and they make a LOT of money using this system. But guess what? You can apply the same principle to your own web site content. Here are some ideas:

Documentation such as training manuals and client case studies make great web page content.
Web page content such as product reviews and descriptions make great fodder for "how to" articles.

That silly staff Christmas video might make a terrific viral marketing tool.
A set of FAQs would make for an interesting webinar or video blog.
A group of case studies could be made into a free white paper or auto-responder email series.
A collection of articles or bookmarked tools could easily be converted to a downloadable e-book or give-away CD.

Get the picture?

The more ways you can re-package your information, the wider audience you will reach because not everyone responds to the same medium in the same way. Some people like to read articles, while others prefer a structured training program. Some people absorb material better if it's presented in-person and others like e-books and YouTube videos.

The more ways you make your content accessible, the better. The Internet's current love affair with social media offers even more opportunities to get your content and brand circulated. But there’s an even bigger incentive to recycling your material: Google’s Universal Search.

The Universal Search Model that Google rolled out in May this year incorporates web search results with related results from Google Images, Google News, Google Video, Google News and Blogger in the one search interface. The new search model boosts the importance of non-text content within web sites so that image and video content have become major marketing channels in their own right, rather than tools to attract visitors to text content.

It makes sense then that if you offer your site information in a range of formats such as video, audio, news releases, PDF and images as well as general text or HTML content, you provide more potential channels for it to appear in Google search results.

So re-package your knowledge into articles, e-books, webinars, training courses, podcasts, white papers, CDs, videos, blog posts and web pages and recycle that content!


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

How to Convert Customers While You Sleep

By Kalena Jordan

You might be surprised to hear this, but many of today’s Internet marketing millionaires actually make their money by doing nothing. That’s right, they make money by doing nothing at all. How? They have their Internet businesses set on automatic pilot. They’ve put systems in place to gather leads, generate content, follow up leads and convert them into customers automatically, while they sleep, travel abroad or laze around on a beach somewhere. Sound too good to be true? Well it isn’t.

A major component of the dot com guru’s toolkit that helps them achieve this is something called an autoresponder. An autoresponder is simply a computer program that automatically sends out email when triggered. The trigger could be the entry of an email address into a form, the download of a product or document, a certain date or a period of time. The beauty of autoresponders is their ability to create instant interaction with new leads while requiring only limited time to set-up. This establishes a “set and forget” system.

For example, we use an autoresponder at Search Engine College whenever somebody decides to download our free sample SEO101 lesson. As soon as anyone enters their email address into our online form, they are sent an email by the autoresponder asking them to verify their email address and confirm their interest in opting-in to receive our information. The recipient does this by clicking on a link embedded within the email.

Once that occurs, it triggers a series of emails to be sent to the recipient at different time intervals following the original request e.g. a day later, a week later or a month later. These emails can contain further information on the original item downloaded, links to other products, a special offer, a mini-tutorial or any other information you like. The primary aim of the autoresponder is to convert the lead into a customer over time. It’s a well-documented fact that it can take up to seven interactions with a lead before they convert to become a customer and your autoresponder can set this process in motion and manage it for you automatically.

Many people think that creating a series of autoresponder emails is difficult, but it is actually very easy! Your emails don’t have to be clever or witty or long. They just need to contain an immediate benefit to the customer or information that the reader will find useful. Ideally, you should create at least 10 initial emails and decide on a time-frame and order in which you want to send them. Then you can simply add 1 or 2 new emails to the list each week as you find time to write them. Any new leads added to your autoresponder will receive the entire series of emails, in the order you intended. Existing leads will be sent any new emails you add to the series, in the order and time-frame you specify.

Sound complex? Let me give you a concrete example. Imagine you are a jeweler that specializes in selling gold chains via an online store. Here is a sample autoresponder series (and trigger) that you could create:

Trigger: Visitor signs up to receive your monthly jewelry catalog via email.

Email 1: Welcome and thank you for signing up. Includes link to current catalog download page.
Time-frame: Immediately

Email 2: Follow up on catalog and request for feedback on jewelry selection.
Time-frame: 7 days after trigger

Email 3: Special offer to members – 20 percent discount on all gold chains for 7 days only. [Includes unique discount coupon that expires in 7 days.]
Time-frame: 21 days after trigger

Email 4: Reminder that discount coupon expires in 3 days. [Includes unique discount coupon that expires in 3 days.]
Time-frame: 25 days after trigger

Email 5: Latest jewelry catalog. Includes link to current catalog download page.
Time-frame: 33 days after trigger

Email 6: Helpful article about how to clean jewelry.
Time-frame: 47 days after trigger

Email 7: Information about unique or value added service e.g. free monogramming or free shipping.
Time-frame: 54 days after trigger

Email 8: Latest jewelry catalog. Includes link to current catalog download page.
Time-frame: 64 days after trigger

Email 9: Special offer to members – free pair of earrings with every gold chain purchased for 7 days only. [Includes unique earrings coupon that expires in 7 days.]
Time-frame: 78 days after trigger

Email 10: Interesting article about the difference between various qualities of gold e.g. 9 kt, 14 kt, 24 kt and why they are used for different pieces of jewelry.
Time-frame: 88 days after trigger

Email 11: Latest jewelry catalog. Includes link to current catalog download page.
Time-frame: 94 days after trigger


Get the idea? The more leads you acquire and the more often you contact those leads, the more likely you are to convert them into paying customers. If you can add to your autoresponder series on a regular basis, you’ll have established automatic communication with your leads for months or even years to come.

I should stress here that you should ALWAYS use a double opt-in email sign up process to ensure your readers really do want to receive your communications. The extra verification layer prevents unintended subscriptions by persons who’ve had their email address entered into your sign-up form by others. You should also make it clear to subscribers what they are opting into – if you plan to contact them beyond the trigger event, make it clear on the sign up form or in the verification email exactly what type of communications they will receive and how often.

You will also need to use autoresponder software, a host that supports autoresponders and/or an email marketing service such as A Weber that creates multiple autoresponders for you.

So what are you waiting for? Go switch your email marketing to auto pilot and convert customers while you sleep!


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

10 Search Engine Marketing Myths Debunked

By Kalena Jordan

In this article, I'm going to try and debunk a few myths floating around the Internet about what's required to get your site visible in search engines. Here goes:

Myth 1 - You need to buy a domain with keywords in it

I'm sure you've seen them, domains like: www.paris-hilton-pink-diamond-dog-collars.com. For some weird reason, webmasters seem to think that they need to have a keyword-stuffed domain to do well in the search engines, the more hyphens the better. Well it just isn't true.

In fact, Google spam evangelist Matt Cutts is known for warning against using over-stuffed keyword domains. If you have a look at one of the last sentences of this post of his he talks about possibly attracting Google's attention with keyword-filled domains and gives an (excessive) example. Could he be hinting that using ultra-keyworded domains may trip a filter of some kind? I think so.

Myth 2 - You need to submit your site to 1000 search engines and directories

Ok, I don't know who started this silly rumor but it's NEVER been true. Latest figures from Nielsen/NetRatings show that over 95% of the search market share is dominated by the top 5 search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN/Live Search, AOL and Ask. As long as your site is found in these engines, you can rest assured you've covered the main bases. Despite this, I still get emails offering to submit my sites to the "most popular" 1000 search engines.

Myth 3 - You need to stuff keywords into as many areas of your site as possible

I like to think this rumor was started by the same idiot who started 1). It's correct that search engines actively seek to match your site content with search queries, but stuffing the same keywords over and over into your site code via visible or invisible text DOES NOT automatically make your site relevant for searches containing those keywords. It's more likely to trip spam filters and earn your site a ranking suppression. In fact, you might as well hold up a big red flag to Googlebot that says "COME AND GET ME"

Myth 4 - Your site has to be flat HTML

Wrong again. A few years ago, search engines had difficulty indexing sites that were built using dynamically-generated pages or pages with multiple parameters in their URLs. So the recommendation by SEO experts at the time was to use flat HTML pages or convert existing pages into HTML and/or use mod_rewrite to convert dynamic URLs into flat ones. However the search engines have all become better at indexing dynamic site content now and also provide a universal sitemap protocol to enable webmasters to ensure all their pages are submitted and indexed.

Myth 5 - You have to swap links with as many sites as possible

I'd like to strap whoever started this story to a couch and make them watch re-runs of The Golden Girls for a whole year. Because this is probably the most persistent and frustrating myth there is about search engine marketing and it's one of my pet peeves. I am bombarded daily with emails from webmasters who tell me it's "...extremely valuable to swap links to boost your Google PageRank" or who tell me I should form 3 way reciprocal link partnerships because it "...will help boost the link popularity of our sites in a way that is undetectable to Google". Excuse my French, but that's Bollocks!

Reciprocal links are pretty much worthless for search engine value these days. In-bound one way links from high quality sites are much more valuable from a search engine relevancy perspective. If you are going to seek out reciprocal links, for heaven's sake, swap links with sites that offer related or complementary content to yours! What's the point offering your site visitors a link if it doesn't relate to what they are seeking on your own site? Don't seek out links based on perceived search engine value. Swap links because they offer traffic to your site or valuable resources to visitors of your own site. If you base your linking strategy on search engines alone, you'll end up with a Free For All link farm that search engine staff will mock as they slap a ranking penalty on it.

Myth 6 - You have to buy an existing domain to be successful

This myth started shortly after Google began "sandboxing" new sites for a period of time before releasing them into the main index. The phenomenon became known as the aging delay. Webmasters were stumped when they couldn't find their pages listed for any keywords in Google for months at a time and when learning of the sandbox effect, some decided that purchasing an existing domain could help them avoid the sandbox altogether.

A similar rumor suggested that purchasing a domain with a high Google PageRank would automatically transfer the PageRank and traffic to any new site built on the existing domain. Neither of these assumptions is true. Hindsight has shown us that the sandbox does not actually exist, merely that Google has become a little more picky about which sites to feature in their main index versus the supplemental index and older, better linked sites have a better chance than brand new ones with no link reputation.

As for purchasing existing domains, this can actually backfire on webmasters because Google's latest algorithm looks closely at domain registration details and if a domain has changed hands too many times or has had dodgy content in the past, it could attract suppression filters until the newest version of the site has built up some trust-rank.

Myth 7 - You only need to optimize your META Tags

Back in 1996 when I first began optimizing web sites, nobody knew anything about SEO and so even slight changes to a web site meant you could outrank your competitors. Simply optimizing the title tag of a page could bring on a Top 5 position in the SERPS. Adding keyword-rich META Description and META Keywords tags too pretty much guaranteed you a top spot. Now it's a completely different story. Most search engines don't even support the META Keywords Tag anymore and Danny Sullivan recently determined that Google's never supported it.

You have to offer search engines more than optimized title and META tags if you want your pages ranked highly for related search queries. You need to optimize the copy on your pages, reduce code bloat, provide a logical navigation structure, have good link popularity, update your site regularly, have sticky content and make sure your site code validates, amongst other things. Despite this, many webmasters assume that if they add an optimized title and META tag to every page, their job is done. Not so! You've got to think bigger than that.

Myth 8 - Any traffic is good traffic

I received an email recently from an online ad agency that had developed what they thought was a knockout SEO tool that they wanted me to review. It was basically a membership site designed to generate traffic via a voting and points system where you earn points for visiting sites and receiving visitors from the same network. As I explained to them, the concept merely builds false traffic and fake link popularity, which goes against practically everything in Google's webmaster guidelines. It is also very open to manipulation and is, in my opinion, operating on flawed logic.

This mutual optimization idea has been tried before. It doesn't work because it only attracts the most aggressive clickers and the whole thing turns into a competition between 2 or 3 lazy webmasters who think traffic at any cost/quality is the way to run an online business. It's not. Unqualified traffic that's unlikely to convert to sales or sign-ups is only wasting valuable bandwidth and hosting resources. Visitors that disappear from your site a few seconds after they arrive skew your site metrics and send a message to search engines that your site is not worth visiting. You want traffic from qualified leads, loyal repeat visitors and new visitors via highly targeted search queries.

Myth 9 - If you're not found in Google, you're screwed

I said it recently and I'll say it again: Google is NOT the Internet. There are plenty of ways to market your web site online, so you shouldn't become discouraged if you can't seem to crack good results in Google. I know of plenty of sites that receive more referrals from Yahoo and MSN than Google and that's the way they like it. Bento Yum is proof that an e-commerce site doesn't need Google (or any of the 4 main search engines) to survive. Owner Jennifer Laycock has deliberately blocked search engine robots from the site to prove that an online business can thrive via word of mouth and social media buzz alone.

But even if you can't live without Google referrals, you need to have back-up traffic channels in place. Never rely too heavily on a single source for your traffic. What if something happened tomorrow that stopped all your Google traffic? Would your site survive? It should, if you're doing your job well. Keep adding good content to your site, update and submit your sitemaps regularly, seek out high quality back links and the traffic will come.

Myth 10 - Search Engine Marketing is expensive

Not so. You can market a web site on a shoe-string budget or no budget at all! You don't need to spend thousands on SEO services or PPC advertising. Simply invest at least an hour per day learning how to optimize your web site for better search engine rankings, submitting it to relevant search engines and directories, adding fresh content, building up backward links and marketing it via social media networks such as Digg, Facebook, Del.icio.us etc.

Not sure where to start? Visit webmaster forums, read search marketing related blogs and sign up for related newsletters and you will soon learn everything you need to know about marketing your web site successfully.


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Top 10 PPC Ad Tricks to Boost Your Click-Through Rate

By Kalena Jordan

When it comes to Pay Per Click campaigns, there tends to be a lot of focus on the quality and content of landing pages in order to increase conversions. That's all well and good, but to get people to visit your landing page, you first have to convince them to click on your ad. This is often much more challenging because while your landing page generally has your visitor's full attention, your ad is just one of several ads all vying for the same attention.

That tiny ad has just 2 or 3 seconds, a tiny headline and a very short amount of copy to convince the viewer your site is worth visiting. So how do you make your ad jump off the page and become a click magnet? The secret is *triggers*. Your ad headline and copy need to trigger a response within the viewer instantly.

Pretend for a moment that you own a florist business in Miami that specializes in bridal bouquets. Imagine you have set up a Google AdWords PPC campaign to attract customers to your web site where they can order their bouquets online.

Here are some of the triggers you could use in your ads:

1) Ask a Question

People are naturally curious and seeing a question addressed to them automatically triggers a reply in their minds, whether they intend it or not. By asking a question in your ad headline, you are taking advantage of this curiosity and making your ad appeal to them on a personal level. Here’s an ad example our fictional Miami florist could use:

Need Wedding Flowers?
Gorgeous wedding flowers
delivered free to your door
www.funkyfloristsmiami.com

2) Use Humor

People like to laugh. If your ad headline or copy makes them chuckle they are already associating your ad with positive emotions and are more likely to be receptive to your message. Here’s a humorous ad example our Miami florist could use:

In the Dog House Again?
Sweeten her up with a dozen roses.
Free delivery to your door!
www.funkyfloristsmiami.com


3) Use: Colons

Using a colon after a word indicates you are about to sum up or define an idea. This creates an automatic trigger in readers to pay attention to the content following the colon. Our Miami florist could take advantage of this with:

Bridal Bouquets: Stunning
Browse our unique and stunning
bridal bouquets. Free delivery.
www.funkyfloristsmiami.com

4) Get Regional

Depending on how you’ve set your ad campaign’s regional/demographic settings, it often pays to use regional triggers in your ads such as city or state names. Persons from the mentioned areas will automatically recognize that your ad is relevant to them and be more inspired to click on it. Our florist in Miami could use:

Need Flowers in Miami?
Floral bouquets for every occasion.
Free delivery throughout Miami.
www.funkyfloristsmiami.com

5) Use Power Words

There are a number of keywords known as “power words” that are proven to attract attention and sales. They include words like “secret”, “free”, “super”, “now”, “limited”, “exclusive”, “must”, “save”, “expert” and so on. Our florist in Miami could tailor his ads to use some of these. For example:

Free: Roses
Order a dozen roses and receive
half a dozen free! Limited time.
www.funkyfloristsmiami.com

6) Use Catch Phrases

People recognize popular catch phrases used by major brands. Provided you are careful not to directly infringe on their trademarks or copyright status, you can use them in your ads. For example, our Miami florist could use:

Got Flowers?
Floral bouquets for every occasion.
Free delivery throughout Miami.
www.funkyfloristsmiami.com

7) Use Personalization

Just like ads asking a question, ads that specifically address the audience are much more likely to gain attention. Our fictional florist could use this to his advantage with ads like:

Your Bouquet is Ready
Your wedding bouquet can be ready
within 24 hrs if you order online.
www.funkyfloristsmiami.com

8) Tell a Story

Internet searchers are good at recognizing advertising and blocking it out. So your ads can sometimes be more effective if they have a storyline and appear less like advertisements. Stories create empathy and parallels with the reader’s own life. For example our florist could try an ad like this one:

Your Perfect Wedding Day
Dress dirty. Veil torn. Rings lost.
At least your bouquet was gorgeous!
www.funkyfloristsmiami.com

9) Use Emotion & Senses

As well as personalization, your ads can appeal to the five senses of readers: sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. Our Miami florist could achieve this with:

Stop to Smell the Roses
Nothing beats the heady fragrance
of a bouquet of lush red roses.
www.funkyfloristsmiami.com

and finally…

10) Use Calls to Action

In my experience, ads that achieve the highest click through rate (CTR) are ones that use a call to action within them, for example “download now”, “read our e-book”, “sign up now” and “call us toll free”. Our fictional florist could achieve this with:

Gorgeous Wedding Bouquets
Order your wedding bouquet online and receive free wedding-toss posy!
www.funkyfloristsmiami.com

Apply a few of these triggers to your current PPC ads and I guarantee your click-through rate will improve dramatically.


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

How to Start Your Own SEO Business

This article is for those of you who are learning search engine optimization (SEO) or working in the field with a view to starting your own SEO business or on-selling your services as an SEO contractor or freelancer.
Planning and Preparation

First up, you need to think about what type of SEO services you are going to provide and what type of goals you would like your business to achieve. You’ll need to prepare a business plan and answer questions such as the following:

· Will I require finance?
· What are my long and short term goals?
· How will I market my business?
· Who are my potential customers?
· Who are my competitors?
· What services will I offer?
· What should my business / trading name be?

Getting Started

Next, you need to decide how to set up your business structure. You’ll need to answer questions like:

· How will I structure my business? Will I be a sole trader? A partnership? A company?
· Will I need to hire staff?
· What taxes will I be liable for?
· Do I need to create a business bank account?
· What type of business stationery/marketing materials do I need?

Your Workplace

A key component of your new business is its location. Ask yourself questions such as:

· Do I need to rent commercial office space or serviced offices?
· Can I work from home?
· Can I claim home office expenses?
· Do I have a dedicated workspace?
· Can clients access my workplace easily?
· Do I need to purchase equipment or furniture?
· Should I buy a desktop or laptop computer?
· Do I have adequate room for extra staff?
· Can I set and stick to reasonable working hours?

Tools of the Trade

In the SEO business, there are quite a few “must have” tools of the trade that you will find indispensable. Some of these are huge time-savers and others are vital if you run an online business. These include:

Hardware

· At least one desktop computer with plenty of memory and hard drive capacity
· Broadband, ISDN or Wireless Internet connection
· Separate phone/fax lines
· A cell phone and/or palmtop
· A reliable fax machine or PC fax software*
· An answering machine*
· A printer / scanner / copier*
· A file cabinet / desktop filing system
· A large desk with drawers
· A comfortable, ergonomic office chair

* There are a large number of product manufacturers that offer a combination of all these elements in the one machine.

Software / Tools

There’s plenty of tools and software available to help the busy SEO / SEM operator. Here are some of my favorites:

· Freshbooks Invoicing and Timesheets
· Keyword Discovery
· Proposal Kit Proposal Creation Software
· ClickTracks Log File Analysis Software

You’ll find other tools and software in my articles 20 Must-Have Search Engine Marketing Tools and 20 MORE Must-Have Search Engine Marketing Tools.

Subscriptions

· Search Engine Watch
· The Search Light
· Search Engine Marketing News
· High Ranking's Advisor
· Search Engine Report
· Search Day
· Marketing Pilgrim
· Pandia


Books / E-books

· Search Engine Visibility
· The Nitty Gritty of Writing for the Search Engines
· Ring Bell For Service Usability Report


Memberships

· SEO Consultants
· SEO Pros
· SEMPO


Open for Business!

When you’re ready to start business, you need to spread the word about your business and start dealing with clients. You’ll need to address things like:

· What domain name should I buy?
· Can I design my own web site?
· How will I market my business online?
· How will I promote my business offline?
· What are my short and long term marketing goals?
· What clients do I want to attract?
· How will I invoice clients?
· How do I want clients to contact me?
· What type of client contract do I need?

Getting Clients

Finding clients can be difficult for new business start-ups. You haven’t yet developed a reputation and you have no clients to vouch for the quality of your services. Here are a couple of suggestions for attracting new clients:

· Ask friends and family if they need or know of anyone seeking SEO services.
· Approach your favorite charities and offer to do some pro-bono work in return for publicity and use of their case studies.
· Join SEO industry organizations like the SEO Consultants Directory.
· Spread the word you are open for business.
· Hang out at SEO forums and chat rooms offering free advice.
· Commence a PPC campaign targeting persons seeking SEO services.
· Optimize your own site so you rank high for SEO related searches!

Other Considerations

· Having a watertight contract
· Having a professional services proposal (e.g. Proposal Kit)
· Business and indemnity insurance

Keeping Clients

Once you have your clients, keep them happy. Try to address these issues:

· How can I provide the best customer service?
· How can I solicit client feedback on my services?
· Should I offer a satisfaction guarantee?
· Is my contract client-friendly?
· How can I reward my best clients?
· What can I on-sell to my clients? (Would you like fries with that?)
· Do I want to give my clients corporate gifts?
· How should I regularly keep in touch with clients?

Working in the SEO Industry

The SEO industry is a strange beast. It’s growing enormously fast, due to the boom in search and so the demand for search engine optimization services is huge. However it is also plagued with a bad reputation, thanks to a handful of fast-talking, money-grabbing companies claiming to be SEO experts and taking advantage of web site owners with little knowledge of how search engines work.

For this reason, if you choose to work in the SEO industry, you may come across some skepticism and doubt from clients who have been burned by shoddy operators in the past. You’ll need to work extra hard at overcoming client fears and proving the value of your services.

But as long as you truly know what you are doing, can prove the ROI on your services, educate your clients about the SEO process, use ethical business practices and follow the guidelines set down by the search engines, you should build up a good reputation quickly.

Here are some resources that will help you in this direction:

· Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008
· Writing Useful Articles That Readers Will Love (Finding Your SEO Niche)
· Google Information for Webmasters: SEOs
· Questions to Ask Before Hiring a SEO Company
· Selecting a Search Engine Optimization Company
· What SEOs Expect From Their Clients
· Working Well With Your Search Engine Optimization Firm
· Let Your Trusted SEO Do Their Job
· Search Engine Optimization

Getting Help

Even if you’re a seasoned pro at search engine optimization, there’s always something more to learn. Occasionally, there will be times when something has you completely baffled or you don’t quite know how to handle a particular client situation. That’s when you need a little advice or guidance from your peers.

The following forums are popular hang-outs for persons in the SEO industry. Whether you’re a novice or veteran, you’ll always learn something new, make new friends and possibly even get new clients by visiting regularly and contributing your time to the webmaster community:

· Cre8asite Forums
· SEO-News Forum
· High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum
· SearchEngineWatch Forums
· Webmaster World
· Search Engine Forums
· SitePoint Forums

Growing Your Business

After you’ve been in business for a while, there comes a time when you’ll need to decide whether to expand and take on more and more clients or to cap your growth capacity and turn down new projects. Here are some things to consider when that time comes:

· Do I want to expand my business?
· Do I really need more clients?
· Can I hire more staff?
· Should I take on an admin person or virtual assistant?
· Should I take on temporary or contract staff?
· Can I outsource some aspects to specialists?

Pitfalls to Avoid

Here are a few common pitfalls to avoid when running your own business:

· Don’t fail to create a business plan and update it regularly. Small businesses don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan.
· Don’t let bad creditors get away with it – always chase overdue invoices before they cause a cash-flow problem and make sure your Terms of Trade are clearly available on your site, on your invoice and in your proposals.
· Don’t get caught up on administrative tasks. Delegate them where possible so you can concentrate on your clients and your business.
· Don’t forget to communicate with your staff regularly. Make use of collaboration software to manage your client projects effectively.
· Don’t take on more clients than you can handle.
· Don’t discount your services if you can help it – recognize the value of your knowledge, time and services.
· Don’t lose sight of your goals – spend at least one day per week on marketing and business development.
· Don’t spread yourself too thin. It’s better to let someone else handle a client than do a poor job of it yourself.
· Don’t become a workaholic, make sure you work reasonable hours and take regular vacations with your family.
· Don’t burn-out. Keep asking: Am I enjoying myself? Remember to have fun!!


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

20 MORE Must-Have Search Engine Marketing Tools

By Kalena Jordan

My recent article 20 Must-Have Search Engine Marketing Tools listed 20 of the most popular time-saving tools you can use to help you with your search engine marketing efforts.

The article proved quite popular with both search engine marketers and webmasters, some of whom decided to send me their favorites that weren't included in the list. I also discovered a few more of my own since I wrote the original article, so I decided to add to the list by reviewing another 20 tools.

So here is a list of 20 MORE must-have search engine marketing tools:

1) SEO Toolbox

The SEO Toolbox is a collection of 11 free SEO tools developed by the team at SEOmoz, including a backlink checker, URL inclusion checker, an outbound link checker, domain age detection and a PageRank checker.

Price: Free

2) EditPlus

EditPlus is a 32-bit text editor, HTML editor and programmers editor for Windows. While it can serve as a good replacement for Notepad, it also offers many powerful features for Web page authors and programmers.

Price: Shareware (Registration fee encouraged)

3) WordPress

Like Blogger, WordPress offers hosted blogging and blog templates. Unlike Blogger WordPress also offers a stand-alone publishing platform to enable you to host and fully manage your own blogs.

Price: Free

4) Marketing Experiments

MarketingExperiments is an online laboratory engaged in research publishing and education. Their mission is to test and document every conceivable marketing method on the Internet.

Price: Free

5) Web Page Analyzer

Web Page Analyzer is a free web page analysis tool and web page speed tester to help your improve web site's performance. Enter a URL and the tool will calculate page size, composition, and download time.

Price: Free

6) Web Accessibility Toolbar

The Web Accessibility Toolbar has been developed by the Web Accessibility Tools Consortium to aid manual examination of web pages for a variety of aspects of accessibility. It's particularly helpful for site usability testing and there are versions for both Opera and Internet Explorer users.

Price: Free

7) Search Engine Friendly Layouts

SearchEngineFriendlyLayouts offers CSS-based layouts that are known to be search engine friendly (easier for search engine robots to index). All of the XHTML, CSS and Javascript code used in the layouts are provided for use free of charge.

Price: Free

8) The Interactive HTML Tutorial

Dave's Interactive HTML Tutorial is a tutorial is for anyone who is serious about learning HTML code or who just wants to brush up on some of the basics. It includes code descriptions and integration examples.

Price: Free

9) Indextools

Indextools is another popular web site analytics program that also offers built-in PPC bid management tools.

Price: From USD 49.95 per month

10) WordTracker

WordTracker was one of the very first keyword research tools available on the Internet. It helps you pinpoint the most popular keywords for your product and services, generate thousands of relevant keywords to improve your organic and PPC search campaigns, research your online markets and find niche opportunities to exploit.

Price: From USD 30.00 per week

11) CSS Layout Techniques

CSS Layout Techniques catalogs search engine friendly web site templates based on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). All code is made freely available for download. The site also includes links to various online CSS resources and tutorials, appropriate for both the novice and the seasoned CSS veteran.

Price: Free

12) RSS Feeds Submit

RSS Feeds Submit is automatic RSS and blog submission software that submits your feed to over 80 search engines and directories automatically. The creators claim it's the quickest way to submit your feeds to the most popular RSS directories and blog search engines. You can also choose to submit your site manually to directories that require more detailed information about your feed.

Price: USD 29.95

13) iBusinessPromoter (IBP)

iBusiness Promoter (IBP) is a suite of professional web promotion tools created by Axandra.com that helps you with all aspects of website promotion and search engine optimization. It includes tools for optimizing your pages and links, researching keywords, submitting your site to search engines and directories and search position querying to determine how your site pages are ranking for particular keywords.
Disclaimer: Some of the functions performed by this tool (e.g. automatic submissions and search rank querying) are discouraged by Google in their Webmaster Guidelines.

Price: From USD 249.95

14) Bid Rank

BidRank is a desktop application that you run on your PC to help you manage your PPC campaigns and automate the keyword bidding process. There are two versions of the product available: BidRank for Yahoo! which is a Yahoo! approved third party bid management tool to help you manage Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns. Then there's BidRank Plus which works with multiple pay-per-click search engines, including Google AdWords, to help you manage multiple PPC keyword accounts.

Price: From USD 14.90 per month

15) Hot Banana Web CMS

Hot Banana is an easy-to-use Web Content Management System (Web CMS) that helps marketers build and manage SEO-friendly Web sites that can be automated and optimized for maximum lead generation and conversion performance. Content Management Systems are notorious for being SEO unfriendly but this one is purpose built to avoid such problems.
Price: From USD 329.00 per month

16) WebPosition

WebPosition is a powerful suite of tools aimed at improving your web site's search engine positioning and monitoring performance. WebPosition allows you to check your search engine rankings, target your keywords, optimize pages using built-in expertise, submit URLs to search engines and analyze conversions using WebTrends site metrics.

Disclaimer: Some of the functions performed by this tool (e.g. automatic submissions and search rank querying) are discouraged by Google in their Webmaster Guidelines.

Price: From USD 149.00

17) Competitive Intelligence

Trellian's Competitive Intelligence provides the means to monitor your competitor's web sites to identify their major traffic sources. You can find out which sites are responsible for sending traffic to their pages, including search engines and the search keywords used.

Price: From USD 99.95 per month

18) HTML Toolbox

The HTML Toolbox from NetMechanic is an online tool that helps you discover HTML errors and syntax that prevents browsers from processing your HTML and prevents visitors (both humans and spiders) from reading your site. HTML Toolbox automatically fixes html problems upon request with one quick click. The Toolbox includes several tools in one, including a HTML Check and Repair, a Spell Checker, HTML Validator, Browser Compatibility Check and a Load Time Checker.

Price: Free for up to 5 pages

19) Web CEO

Web CEO claims to be the most complete SEO software package on the planet. The latest version of this SEO/SEM software provides the ability to research keywords and keyphrases that will bring most targeted visitors to your site; optimize your Web pages for better search engine visibility; submit your site to search engines; research, analyze and build links; manage pay-per-click campaigns; track your positions in search engines; review site traffic statistics; get rid of errors on your sites; find bad links before your visitors do; edit your Web pages; upload any file or folder to your site and monitor the availability of your web site.

Disclaimer: Some of the functions performed by this tool (e.g. automatic submissions and search rank querying) are discouraged by Google in their Webmaster Guidelines.

Price: From USD 199

20) AdWatcher

AdWatcher is a suite of tools designed to help you receive the maximum ROI for every advertising dollar you spend from online marketing campaigns, be it Google AdWords, banners, text links, or email marketing. It detects and combats click fraud and allows you to manage all of your ad campaigns from one easy-to-use interface. Essentially, it provides click fraud monitoring and ad tracking.

Price: From USD 29.95 per month

So there you have ANOTHER 20 time-saving tools to help you with your search engine marketing efforts. Now there's no excuse for avoiding SEM. Happy site marketing!


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running her own SEO business, Kalena is Director of Studies at Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

20 Must-Have Search Engine Marketing Tools

By Kalena Jordan

Anyone working in Search Engine Marketing knows that this industry travels at warp speed. If you're trying to market your web site or the web sites of your clients via search engines, chances are your time is limited - severely limited.

To squeeze as much into my schedule as possible without resorting to self-cloning, my daily routine involves the use of a range of time-saving tools and software. I use such tools on a daily basis and I truly don't know how I'd function without them. I'm not the only one. I've talked to other SEM experts and they also rely on various tools to help them through their hectic schedules.

Here is a list of 20 must-have tools used by busy SEM professionals:

1) Freshbooks Invoicing and Timesheets

Freshbooks is an online estimating, invoicing, project management and time tracking service that gives your business a professional image, no matter how small. I use it to invoice all my clients online and it can even be set up to automatically bill and debit the credit cards of recurring clients every month. It also has built in staff timesheets and project management tools for online collaboration.

Price: Free for 3 clients or less

2) XML Sitemaps Generator

The XML Sitemap Generator trawls through all levels of your site to generate an XML sitemap. It also gives you a running count of pages, provides a text-based URL list and a HTML sitemap you can import straight into your site. The online version of the generator is free for sites of less than 500 pages, but there's also a low-cost script-based version for larger sites that can be set up to automatically index your site, upload an updated XML file to your server and ping Google and Yahoo when done.

Price: Free for sites of 500 pages or less

3) Proposal Kit

ProposalKit takes the chore out of creating and tailoring client estimates and proposal contracts. With over 200 pre-designed self-guiding templates ready to fill in the blanks with your company, project/product/service and client information, ProposalKit has already half completed your proposal for you.

Price: From USD 47.00

4) ClickTracks

As far as site analytics goes, the depth and accuracy of data provided by ClickTracks just can't be beaten, in my opinion. The visual analysis ClickTracks provides is probably its best known feature, with statistical data overlaying actual screenshots of your web site pages. The ability to flag individual visitors or groups of visitors based on unique identifiers (such as all persons who visited page x or all persons who bought product d) provides a level of analysis that other analytical packages can't compete with.

Price: From USD 79.00 per month

5) AWeber

AWeber is a multiple auto responder and mailing list management service rolled into one. Members can send an unlimited number of campaigns, follow up messages, and newsletters to an unlimited number of approved opt-in lists. For newsletter purposes, a wide range of templates are provided, as are free training guides and videos to help you create campaigns.

Price: From USD 19.95 per month

6) JROX

JROX Affiliate Manager software (JAM) is a super powerful affiliate program that includes follow up email tools, mass email broadcasting, custom URLs and the ability to create up to 10 affiliate downlink levels. It offers affiliates groovy 3d Flash-based graphs and charts displaying their referrals and commissions and an organized marketing tools area for storage of banners, links and promotional materials.

Price: Free for 50 affiliates or less

7) Keyword Discovery

Keyword Discovery is an advanced keyword research and search term suggestion tool produced by Trellian.

Price: From USD 69.95 per month

8) Google Analytics

Google Analytics is free web-based site metrics/analytics software hosted by Google. After you insert tracking code on all desired pages of your site, Google collects data regarding visitor activity and then you are able to log into an Analytics interface and view site activity and produce reports.

Price: Free

9) Backlinkwatch.com

Type your URL into Backlink Watch and get complete detailed information about the quality and quantity of backward links pointing to your website. It will show you anchor text, Google Toolbar PageRank, total outbound links on that page and nofollow flag for each of your inbound links available.

Price: Free

10) Jim Boykin's tools

A collection of 17 free SEO tools developed by Jim Boykin and his staff, including a cache analyzer, Backlink checker, keyword density tool and multiple inbound and outbound link checking tools.

Price: Free

11) Google Webmaster Central

Google Webmaster Central is Google's one-stop shop for webmaster resources. It contains answers to common questions about Google crawling and indexing and guidelines for webmasters to follow when publishing their content. It also provides statistics, diagnostics and management of Google's indexing of your website, including Sitemap submission and reporting.

Price: Free

12) Yahoo! Site Explorer

Yahoo! Site Explorer is Yahoo's version of Google Webmaster Tools. It allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search, view the most popular pages from any site, view a comprehensive site map and find pages that link to that site or any page.

Price: Free

13) Ranks.nl

Ranks.nl is a keyword density and page prominence indicator. Type in a URL and target keywords to determine the page density and prominence for certain keywords within the page text and/or HTML tags.

Price: Free

14) Rex Swain's Tools

Rex Swain is an independent software developer who has uploaded a range of his custom server tools and demos to his web site. Tools include an RGB color sampler, HTTP Cookie Demo, a HTML sampler and an email form demo.

Price: Free

15) SearchStatus for Firefox

SearchStatus is a toolbar extension for Firefox and Mozilla that allows you to see how any and every website in the world is performing in the search engines.

Price: Free

16) Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is probably the world's most popular spreadsheet application. Apart from it's powerful formulas for financial reporting, Excel charts and spreadsheets are great for site analytics analysis and sharing, sitemap creation, SEO/PPC campaign reporting and tracking link building campaigns.

Price: Bundled with MS Office from USD 180.00

17) Google Reader

Google Reader is a RSS and XML feed reader that constantly checks your favorite news sites and blogs for new content and presents them to you in one interface. It also allows you to share sites/pages of interest with others.

Price: Free

18) Blogger

Blogger is a popular online blog hosting and templating service owned by Google, where you can quickly set up a blog of your own to post thoughts, interact with people, and more.

Price: Free

19) The Lynx Viewer

The Lynx Viewer developed by YellowPipe allows webmasters to see what their pages will look like when viewed with Lynx, a text-mode web browser. This view is very similar to how search engine robots see your site.

Price: Free

20) Basecamp

Basecamp is an online collaboration and project management service designed for staff and clients to manage internal and client projects from multiple locations.

Price: Free for 1 project

So there you have it. 20 of the most popular time-saving tools to help you with your search engine marketing efforts.


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running her own SEO business, Kalena is Director of Studies at Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

How to Find Free Content for your Web Site

By Kalena Jordan

I see a lot of webmasters complain in forums and chat rooms that they don't have enough content on their web sites but they don't have the means or the knowledge to find more.

There are actually many ways to obtain more web site content. You could hire someone to write it for you. You could purchase some ready made content about your site topic or you could spend some time and write content yourself. But did you know that there is a way you can get hundreds of pages worth of high quality, fresh content every day without paying a cent? There is. It's called article syndication.

Article Syndication

Articles relating to thousands of topics are freely available for syndication on web sites. Authors provide them for this purpose to gain a wider audience and achieve more back links. Generally, the only requirement for webmasters is that the author's by-line, resource box and link is included with the published article. In terms of copyright, you simply need to follow the author's publishing guidelines when republishing their article. This usually involves an "About the Author" paragraph at the bottom of each article with a sentence and link to the author's site. These syndication requirements are generally specified in the article itself.

How to do it:

1) Browse the Internet to find articles you can syndicate. I use the article announcement groups at Yahoo Groups but you can also find them at sources such as Submit Your Articles.

2) View the articles being distributed by the group and check their freshness and quality.

3) Join the email list or subscribe to the RSS feed of any article groups that seem to be distributing content relevant to your web site.

4) Check your email or feed reader regularly to browse and select new articles.

5) Cut, paste and publish the articles into your web pages, giving credit to the author as requested in their syndication guidelines.

6) Voila! Fresh, daily content.

Articles for Blogs

If the article content is to be used on a blog, there is an even quicker way to publish it. Depending on what blog software you use, you can simply forward the email containing the article directly to your blog control panel using the publish via email option and then edit the post to correct any formatting issues. The other advantage of this method is that search engines LOVE blogs and tend to index them more often than regular web pages.

I use blog article syndication quite successfully for a couple of my clients. One is in the travel industry and the other has a large wedding portal. I simply subscribe to articles on travel and wedding related topics and publish them to the blogs belonging to each client. My clients supplement these with articles and blog posts written by their own staff or hired writers.

Advantages

There are a number of advantages to using article syndication:

Relevant, Timely Content - You can choose content that is closely geared to your existing content and of interest to your audience. For example, if you sell airline tickets, publish travel articles about exotic destinations. The idea there is that persons reading travel articles might be thinking about traveling themselves and need to be reminded to book their plane tickets.

Cross Promotion - You can choose content that gives you the opportunity to up sell to your own products or affiliate products. For example, if you sell scented candles online, you could choose to publish articles about increasing the romance in your marriage and then include a link at the end of the article to your candle sales catalog (would you like fries with that?).

SEO Value - Apart from the obvious value of having fresh content regularly available for indexing, there are other SEO advantages to article syndication. Most articles are keyword-rich, meaning that they contain a lot of keywords and phrases that people might use in search queries. Publishing these articles means that your site has a better chance of being found for related search queries. One of my clients noticed their syndicated article pages ranking in the top 10 Google SERPs for target keywords within two days of publishing! You can also embed links within the articles or at the end of articles to related areas of your site using keyword-rich anchor text.

Increased Traffic & Sticky Content - It's not only search engines that love fresh content. You'll find that you'll attract more visitors when you publish relevant articles. Provided you find ways to interact with your new visitors such as allowing them to comment or sign up for your article feed, your site will become stickier and retain those visitors more easily.

Disadvantages

There are really only two disadvantages that I can think of about using article syndication. One is that the same article published on various web sites can sometimes be treated by search engines as duplicate content. So generally, a search engine will try to determine the original source of the article and index/rank that page while ignoring all other versions. If you publish a fresh article quickly enough, you can sometimes be lucky and have your version of the article picked up and treated as the *original*. The other disadvantage is that it can be time-consuming to trawl through the hundreds of new articles announced daily and choose the ones you want. You also have to scan them carefully to ensure accuracy of facts and to check if the author has used correct spelling and grammar usage. But compared to the costs of paying somebody to write articles from scratch, I think this is a very minor inconvenience.

Want to get the jump on your competition and increase your traffic? Use article syndication to publish fresh, relevant content on your site every day.


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

How To Turn Around an Unprofitable PPC Campaign

By Kalena Jordan

Did you know that 80% of new advertisers fail to achieve a Return on Investment from their Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns? I didn't either because I just made that up. But seriously, I bet the percentage is very high. I seem to be spending more and more time helping clients and Search Engine College students to tweak their AdWords campaigns these days. Unless they live and breathe search marketing, I think it is difficult for most people to allocate the time and resources necessary to maintain a successful PPC campaign. Plus there are just so many little tricks and secrets that most people don't know about. I've heard so many horror stories about PPC campaigns hemorrhaging money in the hands of new advertisers and I've seen a few shockers first hand.

As one of their first assignments, our PPC Marketing students at Search Engine College are required to set up a new Google AdWords campaign, complete with carefully considered strategies for keyword selection, ad copy and matching types. More often than not, what they come up with is a campaign that is destined to fail. I then spend the rest of the course teaching them what's wrong with their campaign, how to correct the errors and how to make sure their campaign has a good chance of succeeding.

But it's not just first-timers that make mistakes with Pay Per click advertising. I'm often asked to review PPC campaigns for my clients, some of whom have been advertising for years. I often cringe at what I find when I login to their account. Campaigns that have been unprofitable for years are left to flounder and waste thousands of dollars because the staff are too busy to manage them or are simply ignorant of what it takes to fix them. Unfortunately, the "Set and Forget" mentality is alive and well in PPC.

The Unprofitable Campaign

Take last week for example. A client asked me to take a look at their Google AdWords campaign because although it brought traffic to their site, it didn't seem to be resulting in any direct business. They had decided that PPC was simply unprofitable and they were ready to abandon it as a marketing channel. I logged into their account and had a good look around. It wasn't the worst campaign I've seen but it was pretty close.

Here are the problem areas I discovered and rectified:

1) Not Enough Ads

This was the single biggest problem with the campaign. There weren't anywhere near enough ads to cover the number of keywords the client was targeting. Some ad groups had 18 keywords and only 1 ad! Ideally, each keyword should have it's own ad, sometimes two, because it is important that each ad is laser-focused on the keyword and includes repetitions of that particular keyword. You should always create multiple text ads for each keyword so that you can measure which ads work best. Not everyone will click on the same ad so you need to create and test multiple ads with different wording to see which convert best. AdWords will gradually show only the best performing ads over time.

2) Using Ads That Don’t Reflect Target Keywords

One or more of the ads didn't use the keyword in the ad headline. For example, one Ad Group targeted the keyword phrase 'bridesmaid dresses' but that specific phrase was not in the headline or ad text. The single ad they had in place actually related to wedding dresses so it wasn't relevant to be triggered for 'bridesmaid dresses' and related keywords. The client had tried to cover all bases with a single ad, but this was never going to be effective. To entice people to click, they need to see the keywords they've just searched for appear in your ad. You should always use your target keyword in your ad headline and first or second line of ad text.

3) Not Using Enough Ad Groups

This was the second biggest problem with the campaign. There weren't nearly enough ad groups to cover the keyword themes the client was targeting. Many of the keywords in each Ad Group required dividing into several other Ad Groups based on unique keyword themes. For example all "bridesmaid" related keywords and ads needed to go in their own Ad Group, while all keywords and ads relating to 'used wedding dresses' needed to go into their own Ad Group and so on. Then several new ads needed to be drafted for each new Ad Group to laser-focus on those keywords as described above.

4) Not Using the Quality Score Column

The client didn't have Google's Quality Score column showing, so it would have been difficult for them to know the quality score of their keywords so they could tweak bids and ads. I switched it on immediately. To find the Quality Score, look at the Keywords tab and click on "display columns". This column will show "Poor", "OK" or "Great" for each of your keywords. The better your score, the lower the minimum bid Google requires you to pay for each keyword.

5) Opting into the Content Network

The client had opted into Google's Content Network as well as the Search Network. Using the Content Network will almost always produce a lower ROI and higher click charges because the network includes many personal and irrelevant web sites that show AdSense ads. These often have content only loosely related to your subject matter but it is often enough to trigger your ads to appear as a contextual match. In my experience, Click Fraud also seems to be more common in accounts that utilize the Content Network. I advise my clients to avoid the content network like the plague unless they have an e-commerce style site where they can expect some drive by sales. Needless to say, I flicked the Content Network off on this campaign pretty quickly.

6) Not Using Content Bids

The client had opted NOT to use Content bids, even though they had opted into the Content Network. If you must use the Content Network, you should always use separate, lower bids for your keywords on that Network because the ROI is so much poorer. The number of clicks you are likely to receive on the Content Network is much larger, but of a much lower quality and less likely to convert so you shouldn't pay as much for them. You can set your maximum bids to a lower amount than the search network by opting in to use Content bids.

7) Not Using Position Preferences

Still under Campaign Settings, the client had NOT enabled Position Preferences. This is a powerful feature of AdWords that gives you the ability to tell Google what positions you want your ad placed in for particular keywords. For example, you can set it to positions 1-3 for some keywords, meaning that you want your ad shown in ranking position 1 to 3 for those keywords or not shown at all. For keywords where you don't need to maintain top positions, you can set it to 1-10 to indicate to Google that you want your ad shown in whatever position is available for the bid amount you've set. This is a particularly useful feature for more competitive keywords, where you can specify lower positions for your ads where keywords have too high a price tag for positions 1-3. Obviously if your bid amounts aren't high enough to secure you the positions you want, your ads won't be shown, but this still gives you more control over when your ads appear and how much you spend.

8) Unnecessary Use of Multiple Campaigns

The client had actually created two campaigns, but they both had the same regional target markets and other settings. There is generally no need to set up multiple campaigns unless you have totally unrelated products or services, you are targeting different regions/countries and/or you have multiple advertising campaigns with different start and end dates.

9) Not Using Targeted Landing Pages

Some of the ads created by the client had destination URLs that led to pages on their site specifically relating to those products/services, which is ideal. But most ads led to the generic home page of the client's site, which was never going to be effective, especially now that Google takes landing page relevancy into account when determining a keyword's quality score. The destination URLs for all ads and keywords should be reviewed to ensure they are laser-focused to the search query. If there aren't suitable landing pages for a keyword or phrase, the development of tailored landing pages for each keyword set or Ad Group should be considered.

10) Incorrect Use of Keyword Matching Options

Most of the client's keywords were set to broad match. Broad match means that you want your ad shown for variations of your keyword/phrase. So if you target 'wedding dress' using broad match as my client had done, it means you want your ad triggered for ANY searches using those two words in any order. So your ad will automatically be shown for 'hideous wedding dress', 'I need a dress to wear to my friend's wedding' etc. To avoid your ad being shown for inappropriate search queries, I highly recommend using "phrase match" and/or [exact match]. You can read more about the different keyword matching options here.

11) Not Using Negative Keywords

The client was not using negative keywords. The use of negative keywords is a very powerful but often overlooked feature of a PPC campaign. A negative keyword is a keyword that prevents your ads from being shown for irrelevant search queries. Adding a negative keyword to your campaign means that your ads won't show for search queries containing that term. For instance, the negative keyword "–free" tells the PPC system not to show your ad for any search query containing the term "free". This feature is extremely useful because it helps you rule out any searchers who are less qualified and less likely to be interested in your offering. For example, if you run an e-commerce site selling DVDs, you probably want to add "-free" as a negative keyword so that persons searching for "free DVDs" don’t see your ad. You should always include some negative keywords in your PPC campaign to ensure your ads are not triggered for inappropriate search queries.

12) Not Using Tracking URLs

Tracking URLs were NOT being used. As with any advertising campaign, results need to be tracked to determine overall ROI. Pay per click campaigns lend themselves to this because you can add a simple piece of code to the end of your landing page URL and most site statistical packages will allow you to track click-throughs. This code is called the tracking URL and looks something like this: http://www.mysite.com/mypage.htm?source=adwords-mykeyword. Everything from the question mark onwards is the tracking code. Many of the larger PPC providers provide automatic tracking of your ads, but the statistics you get are not always detailed enough or, in my experience, accurate. I recommend implementing your own tracking code to the end of the destination URLs of all your ads, based on keyword, ad group name or unique ad creative. You'll then need to set up your web analytics program to be able to track these individual parameters to determine which keywords, ad groups and ad creatives are the most effective.

13) Setting the Daily Budget Too Low

The daily budget was set too low. Because the client had been targeting very generic keywords using broad match and had also opted in to the Content Network, their ads were attracting thousands of irrelevant clicks (including some fraudulent ones!) and the costs of the campaign were skyrocketing. To try and curb this, the client had lowered the maximum daily budget for the campaign, meaning their ads were only being shown for around 2 or 3 hours per day until the budget was used up. What they should have done was to use more targeted 2 or 3 word keyword phrases, used phrase or exact matching options and opted out of the Content Network. That way, their ads would be shown 24 hours a day to a more targeted audience, they wouldn't miss out on any traffic, they would reduce the amount of click fraud they were experiencing, yet they wouldn't exceed their maximum daily budget.

14) Not Using Conversion Tracking

Finally, I noticed that Conversion Tracking had NOT been switched on for the campaign and no conversions were being measured. This is because what constitutes a conversion for the client hadn't been determined and conversion tracking code had not been integrated into the site. Not using conversion tracking makes it very difficult to measure the effectiveness of the PPC campaign. PPC advertisers should always define a successful conversion and establish conversion goals and targets prior to campaign launch. A successful conversion might be a sale, submission of an enquiry form or a newsletter subscription. Tracking such conversions is a simple matter of embedding some javascript tracking code into the conversion page. Tracking this data lets you identify how effective your PPC campaign is in isolation from your other marketing efforts.

The Turnaround

So what were the results of my investigation? Well, after I pointed out the problems to the client and made the changes, the campaign made a complete turnaround. One week after my changes, the campaign was experiencing Click Through Rates of up to 40 percent and the client began receiving higher quality traffic, more enquiries and a huge increase in conversions as a result. The turnaround has renewed their faith in Pay Per Click and they are now excited about increasing their PPC marketing efforts.

If you ensure your campaign avoids the 14 common blunders listed above, you too will be well on the way to a profitable PPC experience.


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Back to the Future SEO

By Kalena Jordan

Recently I took on a new SEO client who had a major problem. They had a very popular portal site in a competitive industry but for 3 months running, their Top 10 search engine rankings for major keywords had taken a consistent dive. The position drops ranged from 1 or 2 places up to 20 places. They hired me to try and address the issue quickly because their advertising revenue relied on the top 10 visibility of their brand in the SERPs.

I looked for the usual suspects, a Google penalty, dodgy code, hidden text, new competitors, 404 errors, keyword stuffing, fast acquisition of links, domain issues, major hosting outages, over-optimization and code bloat. Nothing - the site checked out clean. There had been a major Google algorithm update in the past 6 months, but that had occurred weeks earlier to the downward trend. So then I asked about the design history and if any major changes had been made a week or so prior to the sudden ranking drop. The client couldn't recall any major changes so I went about the business of improving the site as best I could and integrating a link building campaign to obtain links from high quality sites in the same industry.

But I couldn't shake the idea that there must have been some major change to the site that impacted its previously ideal search engine compatibility. So I asked for the site's log files for the past 6 months and imported them into ClickTracks for a closer look. I discovered that the site showed a solid growth in traffic starting in February and continuing until April. It was attracting the most traffic on April 5 and then it suddenly plummeted. The logs didn't reveal much else, except record keyword referrals for the period, followed by record lows.

It was then that the little light bulb above my head switched on. I could use the Internet Archive to see what the site looked like on those dates! If you aren't already familiar with the Internet Archive (affectionately known as the Wayback Machine), it's an online repository of web sites in historical timeline format so you can see what web sites looked like on different dates in their history. Check out Wikipedia's front page design from 2001. It's fun, and a little embarrassing, to see what certain web sites looked like many years ago.

So I pulled copies of the client's home page from the archive for the date range that coincided with the major spike and fall and studied the HTML code of each carefully. When I compared them, I saw one glaring difference. The older version contained keyword-rich link titles for the main navigation area while the later version didn't. The links were still there, but the link title attributes were not and a quick check of the client's current home page HTML showed they were still missing. It turns out that the web designer had inadvertently removed them during an update without realizing and never replaced them.

Because the navigation area consisted of a large number of untitled links, the result was a drop in the home page keyword density for the client's major target keywords, allowing their competitors with higher density to push them down the SERPs. I presented my discovery to the client and they were somewhat relieved to have an explanation at last. The link titles were reinstated and the client's rankings have been climbing back ever since.

The whole experience got me thinking: the Wayback Machine is really the SEOs secret weapon. It's Back to the Future SEO! Here are just some ways SEOs could use it:

1. To spot major HTML coding changes on your own sites or client sites that may have impacted rankings (as per my case study).


2. To study the design and HTML history of your client's sites and their competitors.


3. To spot if a web site has been optimized in the past.


4. To study the design and HTML history of the web sites belonging to your major SEO competitors.


5. To spot if a web site has used dodgy optimization tactics in the past.


6. To see what keywords your competitors targeted in the past versus the ones they now target.


7. To compare design and usability changes made over the years by big brand sites (and imitate them).


8. To rescue HTML code and images for sites that have been hacked or wiped without back-ups in place.


9. To track content duplication or copyright violations where the site owner has already removed the offending material.


10. To check the true age of a web site and see if it has been used for a different purpose or company in the past.

These are just uses I came up with from the top of my head, but I'm sure there are plenty more. Some of these uses are not SEO specific, but useful to webmasters in general and particularly to persons looking to buy an existing domain.

Then there are the fun uses – embarrassing your mates by emailing them a copy of their old site complete with frames and blinking graphics. Having a laugh at the first designs rolled out by some of the major search engines. This is what Yahoo looked like in 1996. Here's Google in 1998. The possibilities are endless.

So what are you waiting for? Use the Wayback Machine and Get Back to the Future!


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

What Do Busy SEM Professionals Keep in Their Toolkit?

By Kalena Jordan

As a busy professional in the hectic Search Engine Marketing industry, my time is limited. Severely limited. Sometimes I feel like I need to travel at warp speed just to keep up with the demands of this industry!

To squeeze as much into my schedule as possible without resorting to self-cloning, my daily routine involves the use of a range of time-saving tools and software. Here are a few of my favorites:

Freshbooks Invoicing and Timesheets

This little gem is an online estimating, invoicing, project management and time tracking service that gives your business a professional image, no matter how small. I use it to invoice all my clients online and it can even be set up to automatically bill and debit the credit cards of recurring clients every month. It also has built in staff timesheets and project management tools for online collaboration.

Staff can use the stop-watch to time the various tasks they do for certain clients and then press a button to bill those clients automatically, based on the hours logged in the timesheet. Freshbooks offers plug-ins for a wide range of third-party tools such as BaseCamp, PayPal and 2Checkout and provides the option of email or ground-mail invoicing. I've raved about this product so much that they put my testimonial on their home page!
Price: Free for 3 clients or less

Link: http://www.freshbooks.com/

XML Sitemaps Generator

For fast and easy XML sitemap creation, the free generator from XML-Sitemaps.com can't be beaten. It not only trawls through all levels of your site, but it gives you a running count of pages, provides a text-based URL list and a HTML sitemap you can import straight into your site, plus it generates the XML file for you in both compressed and un-compressed versions.

The online generator is free for sites of less than 500 pages, but there's also a low-cost script-based version for larger sites. It can be set up to automatically index your site, upload an updated XML file to your server and ping Google and Yahoo when done. The XML Sitemaps Generator also gets endorsement from Google by being included in their List of 3rd Party Plugins for Google Sitemaps.
Price: Free for sites of 500 pages or less

Link: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Proposal Kit

I discovered ProposalKit when I was searching for a sample contract for my SEO business. Basically, ProposalKit takes the chore out of creating and tailoring client estimates and proposal contracts. With over 200 pre-designed self-guiding templates ready to fill in the blanks with your company, project/product/service and client information, ProposalKit has already half completed your proposal for you.

You simply flesh out the templates with your own data and contact details. Templates are particularly suited to online businesses and include documents for the initial sales pitch, the planning stage, estimating, contracting, project timelines, analysis and even invoicing. For SEO consultants, ProposalKit's Contract Kit even includes a Search Engine Optimization Services contract.

Creating a proposal from scratch can be a real pain. ProposalKit provide the structure, layout, design, instructions and examples to get you well on your way before you even get started. What I like best about this tool is the range of ProposalPack templates and ready-made contracts you can buy as add-ons to suit certain industries, such as Web Design, SEO, Hosting and the like. The smartly designed, colorful templates also give your proposals a slick and professional edge, regardless of your business size.

Price: From USD 47.00

Link: http://www.proposalkit.com/kits/pkhelp.htm

ClickTracks

I use ClickTracks Optimizer exclusively to track the visitor metrics of my sites and those of my clients. Many in this industry claim that Google Analytics is just as good as ClickTracks, but I disagree. While it's good that Google Analytics is free and the depth of data is impressive, I personally find the interface clunky to use and not very intuitive. The reports and graphs also seem to take a long time to load, even on broadband.

While ClickTracks Optimizer is a bit on the expensive side, the depth and accuracy of data just can't be beaten, in my opinion. The ability to flag individual visitors or groups of visitors based on unique identifiers (such as all persons who visited page x or all persons who bought product d) provides a level of analysis that other analytical packages can't compete with.

The visual analysis ClickTracks provides is probably its best known feature, with statistical data overlaying actual screenshots of your web site pages. While many of my clients find web site statistics a bore, this visual display can impress even the most skeptical. The depth of referrer data is superb, with the ability to drill down to IP address and the precise keyword search that triggered the referral. The WYSIWYG interface is simple to use and gives you true "at a glance" stats. The ability to export reports into Word, PDF or Excel is another plus.

Every time I use ClickTracks, I shake my head in wonder at how I ever managed with the far inferior analytics packages I used before.

Price: From USD 76.00 per month

Link: http://www.clicktracks.com/

AWeber

This is a recent discover of mine. I was tired of using two different tools to manage my autoresponders and newsletter subscriptions lists when a friend pointed out the fact that I could use AWeber to manage both.

The beauty of AWeber is that they manage ALL your mailing lists on your behalf and make it simple to send campaigns and emails to each list individually, or broadcast to all your lists at once. Members can send an unlimited number of campaigns, follow up messages, and newsletters to an unlimited number of approved opt-in lists. For newsletter purposes, a wide range of templates are provided, as are free training guides and videos to help you create campaigns. Various types of subscription web forms are created at the press of a button and you have a central control panel to access statistics so you know at a glance which sign-up forms are more effective. They even offer split testing for this specific purpose.

AWeber also have a very diligent verification and opt-in process, which weeds out drive-bys from genuine subscribers and ensures your subscribers know exactly why they are receiving correspondence from you. AWeber claim to have 99.34% email deliverability rates and I can understand why. All messages have personalization features and can be run through CAN-SPAM compliance testing prior to sending to ensure higher deliverability.

Probably the biggest advantage of AWeber is that their service is very affordable with free unlimited customer support.

Price: From USD 19.95 per month

Link: http://www.aweber.com/

JROX

After months of searching for the perfect affiliate software that did everything we wanted it to for our Search Engine College affiliate program, we finally chose JROX Affiliate Manager software (JAM) for the job. We first heard good things about it via webmaster forums and then read user reviews on Tucows. After a couple of days integrating it into our site, testing, tweaking and testing some more, it pretty much runs itself.

JAM is a super powerful affiliate program that includes follow up email tools, mass email broadcasting, custom URLs and the ability to create up to 10 affiliate downline levels. It offers affiliates groovy 3d Flash-based graphs and charts displaying their referrals and commissions and an organized marketing tools area for storage of banners, links and promotional materials. What's particularly useful is that it integrates with both PayPal and our 3rd party payment gateway 2Checkout, meaning that whenever a course sale is made via one of our affiliate links, the commission is automatically calculated and communicated from the payment gateway to JAM. Overall, the features of JAM are very impressive compared to similar products on the market.

Price: Free for 50 affiliates or less

Link: http://jam.jrox.com/


I use all of these tools on a daily basis and I truly don't know how I'd function without them. Which got me to thinking, what 'must have' tools do other busy SEM professionals keep in their toolkit?

To find out, I surveyed a few of the busiest industry rock stars that I know and asked them to share their favorite tools. I sent my request to:

1) Andy Beal, Owner of Marketing Pilgrim
2) Jennifer Laycock, Editor of Search Engine Guide
3) Jill Whalen, Owner of HighRankings.com
4) Karon Thackston, Owner of Marketing Words
5) Kim Krause-Berg, Founder of Cre8asite Forums
6) Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder of SEOMoz

Here's what they came back with:

Andy Beal

Owner, Marketing Pilgrim - http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/


Andy likes:

1) KeywordDiscovery - http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/

2) Google Analytics - http://www.google-analytics.com/

3) Backlinkwatch.com - http://www.backlinkwatch.com/

4) All of Jim Boykin's tools - http://www.webuildpages.com/tools

5) QuickBooks for accounting - http://quickbooks.intuit.com/

6) Ranks.nl for density checking - http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html

7) Rex Swain for checking server stuff - http://www.rexswain.com/

8) FireFox plugin - http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

"This is not all, but just some quick picks…"


Jennifer Laycock

Editor, Search Engine Guide - http://www.searchengineguide.com/


Jennifer likes:

1) ClickTracks - http://www.clicktracks.com/

2) KeywordDiscovery - http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/

3) EditPlus - http://www.editplus.com/

4) Microsoft Excel - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx

5) GoogleReader - http://www.google.com/reader/view/


"Then of course Blogger, WordPress and Movable Type since those are the three blog platforms I use…"

Jill Whalen

Owner, HighRankings.com - http://www.highrankings.com/


Jill likes:

1) KeywordDiscovery - http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/

2) Basecamp for project management - http://www.basecamphq.com/

"Plus a bunch of Firefox extensions that come in really handy…"


Karon Thackston

Owner, Marketing Words, Inc. - http://www.marketingwords.com/


Karon likes:

1) Marketing Experiments – http://www.marketingexperiments.com/

"All the rest of my favorites are books..."


Kim Krause-Berg

Owner and Founder, Cre8asite Forums - http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/


Kim likes:

1) BaseCamp for project management - http://www.basecamphq.com/

For accessibility testing:

2) Web Page Analyzer - http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

3) Colorblind Web Page Filter - http://colorfilter.wickline.org/

4) Web Accessibility Toolbar - http://www.wat-c.org/tools/

5) Opera Mini for mobile web browsing - http://www.operamini.com/

6) Sizer for resolution testing - http://www.brianapps.net/sizer.html

"My tools are a bit different because I no longer do SEO and for my own sites…"


Rand Fishkin

CEO & Co-Founder, SEOmoz http://www.seomoz.org/


Rand likes:

1) Indextools for analytics - http://www.indextools.com/

2) Wordtracker for keyword research - http://www.wordtracker.com/

3) Keyword Discovery for keyword research - http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/

4) Google Webmaster Central for all sorts of yummy data - http://www.google.com/webmasters/

5) Yahoo! Site Explorer - possibly my number one tool; I love the link & URL information they provide - http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

"In terms of tools, at SEOmoz we almost exclusively use our own stuff…"


So there you have it; a few old favorites and a few new time-saving tools to try. Warp speed, here we come!


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running her own SEO business, Kalena is Director of Studies at Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

SEM Industry Training - What Are The Options?

By Kalena Jordan


The State of SEM Training

Search Engine Marketing is the hottest new career to sweep the employment sector. There are literally more jobs available than there are marketers to fill them, hence the high salaries. Traditionally, SEO/SEM has had a long, steep learning curve, so there is currently a large supply/demand gap.

The growth of the industry has underscored the need for faster, more flexible training options. The demand for trained SEO/SEM staff has accelerated the launch of online training programs in the past three years. The spread of misinformation and the growth of dodgy SEO practices have also highlighted a need for best-practice industry certification.


Advantages of a Career in SEM

Here are the major advantages of having a career in search engine marketing:

The search industry is hot, hot, HOT!
SEO considered one of four jobs on the cutting edge
The pay is (usually) fantastic
You can learn it all online
You can be your own boss
Search marketing has the WOW factor
The demand is strong and growing
The industry is hip and groovy
The skills are portable and global
Job satisfaction is high


SEM Training Options

If you decide to start that career in search engine marketing, you have numerous training options open to you:

Do It Yourself (DIY)
E-books and online manuals
Books and offline manuals
Conferences and seminars
In-person training
Online courses

Let's go through these training options one by one.


Do It Yourself (DIY)

You could try to learn search engine marketing on your own, by conducting your own research, reading widely in webmaster forums and honing your skills on your own sites via trial and error.
The advantages of learning SEM on your own are:

You can set your own timeframe
It's generally inexpensive
You have the satisfaction of acquiring skills on your own

The disadvantages of learning SEM on your own are:

There is a very long lead time
You will be faced with conflicting and unreliable information sources
There is only a limited ability to network with peers
Research is time-consuming
You won't know what works and what doesn't until you trial it
You'll have no record or proof of skills acquired


E-books and Online Manuals

There are plenty of e-books and manuals about search engine marketing available online.

The advantages of learning SEM via e-books and manuals are:

They are generally inexpensive
They are readily available

The disadvantages of learning SEM via e-books and manuals are:

They are generally considered lower quality than training
There is no interaction with your peers
You'll have no record or proof of skills acquired

Examples of SEM e-books and manuals include:

The SEO Book by Aaron Wall
The Nitty Gritty of Writing for the Search Engines by Jill Whalen
SEM: The Essential Best Practice Guide by Mike Grehan


Books and Offline Manuals

As with online versions, there are just as many physical books, CDs and offline training manuals available to persons wanting to learn search engine marketing.

The advantages of learning SEM via books and offline manuals are:

They are usually inexpensive
They are readily available

The advantages of learning SEM via books and offline manuals are:

The information dates quickly
There is no interaction with your peers
You’ll have no proof of skills acquired

Examples of SEM books and offline manuals include:

Search Engine Visibility by Shari Thurow
SitePoint’s SEM Kit by Dan Thies
Building Your Business with Google For Dummies by Brad Hill


Conferences and Seminars

As search engine marketing has grown as an industry, so too have the number of conferences and events dedicated to it.

The advantages of learning SEM via conferences and seminars are:

They offer cutting edge information
They often provide access to search engine staff
They give you the ability to network with peers

The disadvantages of learning SEM via conferences and seminars are:

You must travel to the venue
They generally provide no training material
They can be more expensive than other options
You’ll have no record or proof of skills acquired

Examples of SEM conferences and seminars include:

Search Engine Watch's Search Engine Strategies
Webmaster World's PubCon
Search Engine Land's Search Marketing Expo
Australia's Search Summit


In-person Training

Just as the number of conferences relating to search engine marketing has grown, so too has the demand for in-house training in SEO and SEM subjects.

The advantages of learning SEM via in-person training are:

It generally includes step-by-step instructions
Training material is usually provided
Verification of subjects studied is provided
You have the ability to network with your peers
Some form of certification is generally given
University credits are sometimes available
Certification may be recognized by potential employers

The disadvantages of learning SEM via in-person training are:

You must travel to the venue
The information can date quickly
It can be more expensive than other options

Examples of SEM in-person training include:

Bruce Clay's SEOToolSet
Jill Whalen's SEM Seminars
Robin Noble's Search Engine Workshops
Search Engine Bootcamp
Elite Retreat


Online Training Courses

It’s not always viable or affordable for webmasters to attend conferences or training sessions at a venue other than their home or workplace. For these reasons, the demand for online training in search engine marketing subjects has skyrocketed.

The advantages of learning SEM via online training courses are:

Courses are available 24/7 from any location worldwide
Training materials are provided
They are usually cheaper than venue-based options
They generally include step-by-step instructions
Courses are self-paced and interactive
Certification is provided
A knowledge benchmark is required to qualify for certification
Verification of subjects studied is provided
The lesson materials are updated regularly
University credits are sometimes available
Certification is usually recognized by potential employers
Training institutions can assist graduates with employment

The disadvantages of learning SEM via online training courses are:

They can be more expensive than other options
There is only a limited ability to network with peers

Providers of online training courses in search engine marketing include:

SEMPO Institute
Search Engine College


Benefits of Industry Certification

When it comes to industry certification, there are various schools of thought in the SEM industry. Some suggest certification is simply not necessary, others state that SEO/SEM has no official industry standards, so any certification is meaningless, still others insist that certification is becoming increasingly important to potential employers and persons seeking careers in SEO and SEM.

If you’re skeptical about the value of industry certification, ask yourself these questions: Will you be looking to hire search marketing staff over the next 12 months? Would you prefer to hire search marketing staff that hold industry certification? Will you be seeking a job in the search industry over the next 12 months? Do you think holding industry certification would give you an edge over applicants applying for the same jobs?

Here are some advantages to having industry certification in search engine marketing:

For Staff:

Proof of subjects studied and skills acquired
Ability to promote certification on web site / CV
An edge over other applicants when applying for SEO/SEM jobs.

For Employers:

Ability to hire based on a proven skill set (e.g. ability to set up a Yahoo! SEM campaign quickly). Ability to impress clients with certified status of staff.
Reassurance that search engine-approved methods are used.
Less on-the-job training is required.


To Sum Up

Everyone has a different learning style, so don’t assume one method will work for you. Don’t rely on a single source of training for your search engine marketing needs. Attend conferences, purchase books, take a course, network in forums and DIY when you can to acquire a broader knowledge base.

Finally, remember that training should always be supported by hands-on SEO/SEM experience so get those hands dirty!


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About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running her own SEO business, Kalena is Director of Studies at Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.


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How to Create Search Engine Friendly Title and META Tags (Part 2)

By Kalena Jordan

In Part 1 of this article, I defined Title Elements and META Tags and took you step-by-step through how to create an optimized Title Element. Now it's time to create your optimized META Description and META Keywords Tags.


Create Your META Description Tag

Now it's time to create your optimized META Description Tag.

Take your list of target keywords and phrases and open another text file. Again, you can use an existing sample META Description Tag as your template. Let's say our existing description is:

[META name="description" content="Miami Florists create beautiful floral bouquets, arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions, including weddings, Valentines Day, parties and corporate events. Deliveries throughout Florida."]

You can make your META Description Tag as long as you like, but only a certain portion of it will get indexed and displayed by search engines. According to Danny Sullivan in his article How to Use HTML Meta Tags, 200 to 250 characters of the META Description gets indexed but less than that gets displayed, depending on the search engine. So you want to make sure all your important keywords are listed towards the start of the tag.

Now take your list of keywords for the home page in order of importance. For our fictional florist these were:

- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- wedding bouquets


Now you need to create a readable sentence or two describing your web site and incorporating these keywords so they make the best use of the keyword real estate available.

Because search engines often display the contents of the META Description Tag in the search results, it is very important that your sentences make grammatical sense and are enticing enough to encourage readers to click on your link. Let's start with:

If you're seeking a florist in Miami Florida, Funky Florists create unforgettable wedding bouquets, floral arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions.

Ok, so that's around 150 characters long and gets our three important keyword phrases included. But it’s a bit bland. We need to add something to entice the searcher to click on it. How about:

Order online for a 10 percent discount!

So now we have the following completed META Description Tag:

[META name="description" content="If you're seeking a florist in Miami Florida, Funky Florists create unforgettable wedding bouquets, floral arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions. Order online for a 10 percent discount!"]

Our new tag is optimized for our keyword phrases, it's around 200 characters in length, it describes our site accurately, it speaks to the reader and it (hopefully) entices them to click on the link and view the site.


Create Your META Keywords Tag

We're almost there. Now it's time to create your optimized META Keywords Tag. Let me stress here that this Tag is quite unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Not many of the search crawlers even support it any more. You can see which ones do on this page. If you have the time and you really want to create META Keywords tags for your pages, then go ahead, but if not, then leave them out of your code altogether. This tag will have very little impact on your overall SEO campaign.

Assuming you do want to create a Keywords tag, take your list of target keywords and phrases and open another text file. Again, you can use an existing sample META Keywords Tag as your template. Let's say our existing Keywords Tag is:

[META name="keywords" content="flowers, roses, weddings bouquets, florists, floral arrangements, flower deliveries, Valentines Day gifts, Christmas decorations, Mother's Day, tributes, wreaths, clutches, sprays, in sympathy, funerals, corporate functions, parties, floral displays, Miami, Florida"]

You are just including a list of related keywords to include in this tag. Now take your list of keywords for the home page in order of importance. For our fictional florist these were:

- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- wedding bouquets

Because you have a lot more room in this tag, a good rule of thumb for creating a META Keywords Tag is to include the keywords and phrases your are targeting with your site content, as well as some terms that you don't necessarily want to use in your site copy but are still relevant to the site content. For example, the site copy, TITLE and META description tags would include the most important search keywords, but the META Keywords Tag could be used for keyword variations and combinations that don't appear in the visible site text, but that people may also search for. Examples include plurals, contractions, slang, variations, misspellings, cultural nuances and industry jargon.

For our fictional florist, these may include things like:

- wedding flowers
- roses
- wedding roses
- Valentine's Day roses
- sympathy gifts
- Mother's Day gifts
- funeral wreaths
- flower deliveries
- floral arrangements
- birthday gifts
- flowers
- flowers for wedding
- wedding decorations

So now we have the following draft META Keywords Tag:

[META name="keywords" content="florists Miami, florists Florida, wedding bouquets, wedding flowers, roses, wedding roses, Valentine's Day roses, sympathy gifts, Mother's Day gifts, funeral wreaths, flower deliveries, floral arrangements, birthday gifts, flowers, flowers for wedding, wedding decorations"]

However, when creating your Keywords Tag, you should not repeat any particular keywords within your META Keywords Tag more than five times and exclude commas so that all your keywords can be indexed in combination with each other.

So we need to fix the draft tag to remove the excess repetition of the words "flowers" and "weddings". This is easy to do because some of the keyword phrases already incorporate these single generic keywords.

For starters, we can lose the single "flowers" as it is already covered by some of the other phrases like "wedding flowers". Next, we can drop "roses" for the same reason. Then we can combine some keyword phrases together to save space, e.g. "flowers for wedding" and "wedding decorations" can be integrated to become "flowers for wedding decorations" so we can lose the extra instance of "wedding".

So now we have the following completed META Keywords Tag:

[META name="keywords" content="florists Miami florists Florida wedding bouquets wedding flowers wedding roses Valentine's Day roses sympathy gifts Mother's Day gifts funeral wreaths flower deliveries floral arrangements birthday gifts flowers for wedding decorations"]

Tailored TITLE and META Tags

While some webmasters remember to include a META Description and a META Keywords Tag in their home page HTML code, many forget to include them on every page of the site that they want indexed. Or worse, they duplicate the homepage TITLE and META Tags on all other pages. To give a web site the best ranking ability possible, it is highly recommended that each page of the site include a unique TITLE tag and unique META tags, individually tailored to the content of that specific page.

For example, our fictional Miami florist may have a page devoted to wedding bouquets and another devoted to funeral wreaths. The TITLE and META tags for the first page should include keywords relating to weddings and the page about wreaths should utilize keywords relating to funerals and sympathy.

The use of tailored TITLE and META Tags on each page creates multiple entry points to a web site and enables relevant content to be found in search engines no matter where it resides on a site. For example, instead of relying on visitors to arrive via the Home Page, the optimization of individual site pages makes each page more visible in the search engines, providing additional gateways to the site's content. The more pages optimized, the wider the range of keywords and phrases that can be targeted and the more entry points are created to a site.

(This is a two part article. Click here to read Part One.)

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About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

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How to Create Search Engine Friendly Title and META Tags (Part 1)

By Kalena Jordan

In this article, I'm going to show you step-by-step how to create search engine optimized Titles and META Tags. This is a two part article. This part discusses the Title Element, also known as the Title Element. (Click here to read Part Two).

The TITLE Element

TITLE elements, (commonly called TITLE Tags), are one of the most important factors that search engines "look" at when it comes to determining the relevancy of a web page against a search query. In their ranking algorithms, nearly all the major search engines attribute a high relevancy weight to the content of the TITLE tag.

In the HTML code of a web site, TITLE tags look like this one for a fictional florist:

[TITLE]Miami Florists - beautiful floral creations made to order.[/TITLE]

(Please note that square brackets [ ] have been used in place of open and closing tags < > to prevent this page code from breaking. You'll need to replace all square brackets with open and closing tags.)

To view the HTML code of any site, choose "View, Source" from your browser toolbar or right click anywhere on the page and choose "view source code".

The META Description Tag

META Description Tags are designed to describe the content of web pages. Search engine robots will gather up this information when indexing web sites and often use it when referencing web pages in the search listings.

While not all search engines continue to utilize the META Description Tag, a majority of search engines rely on the content of this tag (together with a site's visible content) to provide information about a site that they can match with search queries. It is therefore important for webmasters to include keywords and phrases in the META description that they would expect searchers to use to find their site content.

In the HTML code of a web site, a sample META Description Tag looks like this:

[META name="description" content="Miami Florists create beautiful floral bouquets, arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions, including weddings, Valentines Day, parties and corporate events. Deliveries throughout Florida."]

You can view the META Description Tag of a site by viewing the source code.

The META Keywords Tag

While only indexed by a small handful of search engines these days, the META Keywords Tag is still worth including within a site's HTML code, if only to provide those search engines with as much information as possible about site content.

In the HTML code of a web site, a sample META Keywords Tag looks like this:

[META name="keywords" content="flowers, roses, weddings bouquets, florists, floral arrangements, flower deliveries, Valentines Day gifts, Christmas decorations, Mother's Day, tributes, wreaths, clutches, sprays, in sympathy, funerals, corporate functions, parties, floral displays, Miami, Florida"]

The current lack of support for the META Keywords Tag by so many search engines can be attributed to increasing spam abuse by ignorant webmasters. These webmasters thought the keyword tag was a good place to stuff hundreds of keywords in the hope of achieving a higher search ranking, thereby "spamming" the search engines with useless, non-relevant data. This prompted many search engines to filter out the META Keywords Tag or lower its importance within the ranking algorithm.

You can view the META Keywords Tag of a site by viewing the source code.


Create Your Own Optimized Tags

Now, it's time to create optimized TITLE and META Tags for your own site. Let's start with the TITLE Tag for your Home Page.

Create Your TITLE Tag

Take the list of target keywords and phrases that you want your web site to be found for in search engines. You should have already allocated them to the appropriate pages of your site to be optimized. I use a spreadsheet for this purpose but you should use whatever works for you.

Now, open a text file in Notepad or something similar. If you like, you can use an existing sample TITLE Tag as your template. Let's say our existing Title is:

[TITLE]Miami Florists - beautiful floral creations made to order.[/TITLE]

Now take your list of keywords for the home page and put them in order of importance, with the ones you want to rank highest for at the top. For our fictional florist these are:

- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- wedding bouquets

Now you are simply going to combine these keywords into a sentence or short blurb so they make the best use of the keyword real estate available. Always try to use as few words as possible in your Title Tags, because each additional keyword dilutes the ranking relevancy of all the others.

In this case, I would initially combine the keywords as follows:

Florists in Miami Florida specializing in wedding bouquets.

Notice how I've got the keywords in the correct order for the search queries? I've tried to include the most important keywords towards the start of the tag. There was no need for me to repeat the keyword "Florists" more than once because the sentence I've used covers both "Florists Miami" and "Florists Florida". Most search engines will ignore "in" as a stop word, so it shouldn't matter that we've included it.

Although it's tempting to put a comma between Miami and Florida, on some search engines commas act as a keyword separator, so we don’t want to use one here because we don't want "Florists" and "Florida" to be separated.

Now, there is just one problem with this draft Title. Our 3rd keyword phrase "wedding bouquets" is right at the end of the sentence, meaning it may lose some relevancy weight (search engines consider keywords closer to the start of the tag as the most important). How do we fix this? Let's try this:

Florists in Miami Florida - wedding bouquets a specialty.

We don't want to use a period after "Florida" for the same reason that we don't use a comma. But a hyphen should not make a difference to search engines yet still allow the sentence to read logically to a searcher. So now we have our three target keyword phrases covered in a very short space.

In fact, the above sentence now covers the following keyword combinations:

- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- florists in Miami
- florists in Florida
- florists in Miami Florida
- wedding bouquets
- Miami wedding bouquets
- Florida wedding bouquets

When integrating your keywords, remember that their order is important. If you want your site to have the best possible chance of being found for the search query "Miami florists", you need to put the keywords in that exact order and not "florists Miami", because the spider searches the keywords in exact order. Unless they are stop words, also try to avoid using extra words between your keywords.

If you wanted to, you could integrate your company name into the Title tag, but (unless your company name is super short or includes a keyword), don’t sacrifice a keyword to do so. Instead, try placing the company name at the end of the tag so you can be sure that all your important keywords will be indexed first.

In the case of our florist, let’s imagine their name was Funky Florists. We could easily accommodate the name into the beginning of our optimized Title as follows:

[TITLE]Funky Florists in Miami Florida - wedding bouquets a specialty.[/TITLE]

It may reduce the keyword relevancy impact very slightly, but including your company name enables you to brand your page, which may be more important to you.

The content of the Title Tag is also what gets saved in a person's Favorite’s list when they bookmark your site, so having your company name included is worth considering from a branding perspective.

In Part 2 of this article, I will show you how to create your optimized META Description and META Keywords Tags.

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About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

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Does Your Web Site Need a Workout?

By Kalena Jordan

Here's an analogy for you. Yesterday, I was working my butt off in the gym on the cardio machines, panting wildly with sweat dripping off me and my face as red as a beet. Not the most attractive sight, but I figure, you're at the gym to work out right? I might as well "go hard" or "go home", as they say.

As I looked around me, I could see all these people simply going through the motions. There they were, minus perspiration in their shiny new lycra and expensive gym shoes, casually walking on the treadmill or lazily turning the wheels on a bike while reading a book or glued to the TV screens in front of them. Only a few seemed to be there for the actual purpose of working out. The rest seemed to be there to check out the talent or to simply keep up the appearance of fitness, while doing the bare minimum.

Huh? I don't get it. Why have these gym bimbos paid so much money for a gym membership and all the related gear if they aren't going to take full advantage of their investment?

Then it struck me - these gymbos were just like those companies who spend thousands of dollars on a shiny new website with all the bells and whistles like graphic design, blogs, shopping carts, web analytics, the lot and then fail to take advantage of it. I see it so often, regardless of company size. Web sites that could easily be bringing in loads of traffic and revenue simply wasting away because nobody can be bothered tracking visitor activity, analyzing trends or checking for search engine compatibility and usability.

These companies are simply keeping up appearances, investing heavily in Internet technology because their competitors are doing the same. But no thought has gone into the search engine compatibility of the site, how usable it is for visitors or whether it meets accessibility guidelines. They don't look at their site statistics, they don't check for broken links and they sure as heck don't investigate why their sites aren't converting traffic into customers. What a waste!

Is your web site working hard enough for you? Run it through the following 20 point fitness assessment to find out:

• Is your site fully search engine compatible? Are all your pages being indexed by the major search engines?
  
  
• Do you track your visitor statistics on a regular basis? Do you use the information provided by your visitor statistics to improve your site?
  
  
• Is your web site accessible to visually-impaired visitors? Does it meet the international standards set down by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)?
  
  
• Do you know which sites and search engines provide you with the most traffic? Do you use this information to increase your traffic further?
  
  
• Do you track the source of all reported errors in your site statistics and fix them promptly?
  
  
• Do you know which keywords your site was found for in the search engines? Have you conducted keyword research to determine what search terms your target markets are looking for so you can optimize for them?
  
  
• Does your web site HTML code validate to W3 standards? Do you check for validation regularly?
  
  
• Does your site contain zero broken links? Do you check for and fix broken links regularly?
  
  
• Has your site been fully search engine optimized to integrate your target search terms into your Page Titles, META Tags and visible page text?
  
  
• Have you created and submitted an XML sitemap to Google Sitemaps?
  
  
• Have you created and submitted a sitemap to Yahoo Site Explorer?
  
  
• Have you checked to see if your site meets Google's Webmaster Guidelines?
  
  
• Do you measure your visitor sign-ups and conversions on a regular basis? Do you tweak your landing page copy to increase the conversion rates?
  
  
• Is your site navigation intuitive and are your visitors following the navigation paths you intended?
  
  
• Do you encourage feedback from your site visitors and provide an obvious way for them to provide such feedback?
  
  
• Are there at least 250 words of text on your home page to satisfy search engines?
  
  
• Does your site contain a visible, text-based site map to aid user navigation?
  
  
• Do you have an ongoing link building campaign running to secure more incoming links to your site and improve your site's link popularity score?
  
  
• Does your site have a high percentage of repeat visitors? Are the majority of your visitors staying on your site for more than a minute?
  
  
• Do your search engine referrals and site traffic figures grow each month?

Unless you can answer yes to all the questions in the above checklist, your web site is not working hard enough for you and needs a workout. Get to it!

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About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

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20 Things You Need to Know Before Optimizing Your Site

By Kalena Jordan

One of the most important aspects of a search engine optimization project is also one of the most overlooked – preparation! There are some important steps to take in advance of optimizing your site that will make sure your SEO is successful.

Before You Start

Before you start any search engine optimization campaign, whether it’s for your own site or that belonging to a client, you need to answer the following questions:

1) What is the overall motivation for optimizing this site? What do I/they hope to achieve? e.g. more sales, more subscribers, more traffic, more publicity etc.

2) What is the time-frame for this project?

3) What is the budget for this project?

4) Who will be responsible for this project? Will it be a joint or solo effort? Will it be run entirely in-house or outsourced?

Answering these questions will help you to build a framework for your SEO project and establish limitations for the size and scope of the campaign.


Get Ready: How Search Engine-Compatible is the Site Currently?

Something I find very useful before quoting on any SEO project is to produce what I call a Search Engine Compatibility Review. This is where I carry out a detailed overview and analysis of a site's search engine compatibility in terms of HTML design, page extensions, link popularity, title and META tags, body text, target keywords, ALT IMG tags, page load time and other design elements that can impact search engine indexing.

I then provide a detailed report to potential clients with recommendations based on my findings. It just helps sort out in my mind what design elements need tweaking to make the site as search engine-friendly as possible. It also helps marketing staff prove to an often stubborn programming department (or vice versa!) that SEO is necessary. You might consider preparing something similar for your own site or clients.


Get Set: Requirements Gathering

Next, you need to establish the project requirements, so you can tailor the SEO campaign to you or your client’s exact needs. For those of you servicing clients, this information is often required before you are able to quote accurately.

To determine your project requirements, you need to have the following questions answered:

1) What technology was used to build the site? (i.e. Flash, PHP, frames, Cold Fusion, JavaScript, Flat HTML etc)

2) What are the file extensions of the pages? (i.e. .htm, .php, .cfm etc)

3) Does the site contain database driven content? If so, will the URLs contain query strings? e.g. www.site.com/longpagename?source=123444fgge3212, (containing “?” symbols), or does the site use parameter workarounds to remove the query strings? (the latter is more search engine friendly).

4) Are there at least 250 words of text on the home page and other pages to be optimized?

5) How does the navigation work? Does it use text links or graphical links or JavaScript drop-down menus?

6) Approximately how many pages does the site contain? How many of these will be optimized?

7) Does the site have a site map or will it require one? Does the site have an XML sitemap submitted to Google Sitemaps?

8) What is the current link popularity of the site?

9) What is the approximate Google PageRank of the site? Would it benefit from link building?

10) Do I have the ability to edit the source code directly? Or will I need to hand-over the optimized code to programmers for integration?

11) Do I have permission to alter the visible content of the site?

12) What are the products/services that the site promotes? (e.g. widgets, mobile phones, hire cars etc.)

13) What are the site’s geographical target markets? Are they global? Country specific? State specific? Town specific?

14) What are the site’s demographic target markets? (e.g. young urban females, working mothers, single parents etc.)

15) What are 20 search keywords or phrases that I think my/my client’s target markets will use to find the site in the search engines?

16) Who are my/my client’s major competitors online? What are their URLs? What keywords are they targeting?

17) Who are the stake-holders of this site? How will I report to them?

18) Do I have access to site traffic logs or statistics to enable me to track visitor activity during the campaign? Specifically, what visitor activity will I be tracking?

19) How do I plan on tracking my or my client’s conversion trends and increased rankings in the search engines?

20) What are my/my client’s expectations for the optimization project? Are they realistic?


Answers to the first 10 questions above will determine the complexity of optimization required. For example, if the site pages currently have little text on them, you know you’ll need to integrate more text to make the site compatible with search engines and include adequate target keywords. If the site currently uses frames, you will need to rebuild the pages without frames or create special No-Frames tags to make sure the site can be indexed, and so on.

This initial analysis will help you to scope the time and costs involved in advance. For those of you optimizing client sites, obtaining accurate answers to these questions BEFORE quoting is absolutely crucial. Otherwise you can find yourself in the middle of a project that you have severely under-quoted for.

The remainder of questions are to establish in advance the who, what, where, when, why and how of the optimization project. This will help you determine the most logical keywords and phrases to target, as well as which search engines to submit the site to.

For those of you optimizing web sites for a living, you might consider developing a questionnaire that you can give clients to complete to ensure you tailor the web site optimization to their exact needs.


Go!

So now you are clear about your motivations for optimizing the site, you know more about the target markets, you know how compatible the existing site is with search engines and how much work is involved in the search engine optimization process. You’re ready to tackle the job!

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About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

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3 Steps to a Search Engine Compatible Site

By Kalena Jordan

Is your web site search engine compatible? Despite all the misinformation out there, it's very easy to design a web site that search engines will love. All you need to do is follow 3 simple steps:

1) Obey the Search Engine Guidelines

Nearly all search engines publish their own guidelines regarding the submission of sites, the type of sites they will accept and recommendations for optimized content. Google recently updated their Webmaster Guidelines which cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative search engine behavior that they consider to be 'spam'. They also published SEO Guidelines – advice for webmasters to heed when choosing an SEO. Google was the first search engine to publicly acknowledge search engine optimizers in this fashion.

It's not just Google publishing anti-spam guidelines. You'll find them at the following search engine sites as well:

• Yahoo terms of service
• Yahoo guidelines on search engine spam (covering AltaVista and AllTheWeb as well)
• Yahoo definitions of search engine spam (covering AltaVista and AllTheWeb as well)
• Yahoo content guidelines
• MSN Search webmaster guidelines
• AltaVista terms of use (AltaVista is a Yahoo-owned company)
• Ask.com terms of service and spam policy
• Ask.com editorial guidelines

2) Don’t Use Spammy Search Engine Tactics

Often, webmasters will use search engine spam techniques without even being aware that they are doing so. Or worse, web designers can - advertently or inadvertently - integrate techniques that could cause a site to be penalized in the site's rankings in one or more engines, without the site owner's knowledge of such penalties. The key to avoiding spamming the engines is research.
Keep track of the various search engine guidelines via the links above. Watch for any changes they make to these guidelines and tweak your site accordingly. Trawl the various webmaster and search engine forums regularly to ensure your site doesn't use any of the latest optimization methods that appear to be penalized. If you suspect your site has been penalized, remove the offending content, contact the engine concerned and ask to be reinstated.

Google actually encourage you to file a re-inclusion request via their Help Center and this post by Google staffer Matt Cutts outlines what should be included.

Alternatively, here is a sample email template you can use instead:

--------------------------------------------
Sample Re-inclusion Request Email

Dear [search engine name],

I am the owner of [your site URL].

I did not realize that participation in [spammy method] and
[spammy SEO name] programs could cause problems for my website. I was
assured that these techniques were search-engine-friendly by [your source for using spammy method].

I now understand that the practices used are not acceptable. I apologize for having allowed them to be placed on my website. I've removed the questionable pages and links from the site. I promise not to repeat such mistakes.

I am asking you to please consider reinstating my website,
[your site URL] into the [search engine name] Index.

Sincerely,

[Your Name]
------------------------------------------

To assist them to provide a high quality service, search engines encourage people to report search results they are dissatisfied with. If you spot some content spam or techniques that are clearly in breach of the search engine's public guidelines, you can report it using these links:

• Google spam report or via search-quality@google.com
  
• AllTheWeb relevancy problem report (AllTheWeb is a Yahoo-owned company)
• AltaVista search results manipulation report (or via Yahoo's spam report)
• Yahoo spam report
• Ask.com spam report or via information@ask.com

3) Build Sites for Visitors Rather than Search Engines

The methodologies may have changed over the years, but the same principles have always applied to "good" or "white hat" SEO. Build sites for humans, not search engines. Make the site as user friendly as possible, avoid the bells and whistles and include high quality, relevant content.

Wherever possible, include text-based content and navigation menus with simple, descriptive, well-written copy designed to convert your visitors into customers. Include keywords and phrases your audience would logically type in to search engines to find sites like yours. Only link to sites that are relevant to your target audience and spend some time on usability, making sure all your forms and shopping carts work.

Remember that what pleases a visitor is almost always what pleases a search engine too.

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About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

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Think Global Act Global: Writing for Your Online Market

By Kalena Jordan

When you write web site content and design your pages, do you truly act with your target audience in mind? Or do you think global and act local?

I am amazed at the number of web sites I see that claim to target a global market, yet design and write their content for a regionally-specific audience. Not sure what I mean? Take the site I saw yesterday, for example. I won't embarrass the site owners by pointing to the specific domain, but let's just say the site is based in the U.S. and sells high quality gold chains throughout North America, Europe and Australia.

Now the owner of this site was complaining loudly in a webmaster forum that his pay-per-click campaign was having no luck converting sales from overseas visitors, particularly in the UK and Australia. He had spent a long time developing and tweaking a landing page for the campaign and he couldn't work out why hardly anyone outside the U.S. was buying. I took a look at his landing page and could see the problems straight away:

1) He used the American English spelling "jewelry" throughout the page without considering that persons who use British English spell it "jewellery".

2) He provided a toll-free phone number for persons in the U.S. to call, but did not provide any contact phone number for persons located outside the U.S.

3) He used the word "national" throughout the page, immediately isolating anyone outside the U.S.

4) He promoted "free shipping throughout the U.S." but did not specify shipping costs for persons outside the U.S.


The owner of this site had not even considered that persons outside the U.S. might search for keywords in anything other than American English. It didn't even occur to him that there may be an alternative spelling of his main keyword and he didn't think about the logistics for purchasers outside his country. No wonder the page wasn't converting outside the U.S.! He had made the classic mistake of isolating a large chunk of his audience by sending everyone to a one-size-fits-some page.

What he should have done was to create a separate landing page using British English spelling and shipping/contact information applicable to persons overseas. He could then have set up a unique PPC campaign targeting only UK/Australian searchers with regional keywords and ads leading to the British English landing page.

I see similar problems occur quite often in the online travel industry where you not only have to deal with regional spelling options, but also regional jargon. Think about the word "accommodation". Apart from the fact the word is commonly misspelled, it is used most often in the UK, Australia and New Zealand to describe places to stay while traveling. In the U.S., the words "accommodations" and "lodging" are more commonly used. Same goes for "holiday" and "vacation", with the latter being more common in the U.S. The word "traveling" itself is spelled "travelling" in British English! So you can imagine the minefield of problems webmasters must face promoting their travel sites online to a worldwide audience.

I don't mean to single out a particular country, but Americans seem to find it especially difficult to step outside their regional mindset. I am always receiving emails from the U.S. with helpful suggestions for fixing my "spelling mistakes".

The funniest email exchange I ever had in relation to this was from an American web designer. She had seen our Australian-based web site (with a .com.au domain) and emailed me to tell me it was "full of errors" and that if I wanted to present a professional business to site visitors, I should correct them. So condescending! I asked her to elaborate and she pointed me to these words she felt were spelled incorrectly:

optimisation
counselling
organised
enrolment
colour
catalogue
favourite
centre

Resisting the urge to use a few offensive words I'm sure she would recognize, I tactfully explained that our site was only targeting the Australian market and that we use British English spelling in Australia. Her response? Perhaps if we wanted to be taken seriously by an international audience, we should consider using the "more proper" American English. Flabbergasted, I pointed out the fact that American English was a derivative of British English and was not widely used outside her own country. Wikipedia has more about the differences between the two here. And let’s not forget that although it is the most common language used on the web, English is used by less than 30 percent of the world’s total Internet users.

The point of this story is that you absolutely have to think outside your market if you are going to advertise on the web. As ignorant as she was, my email friend did make me realize that many of her compatriots might also think our site was full of errors. American English is more common on the web and I've since learned to cater to that trend. I try to remember that in all writing I do for the web now, whether it's in my daily blog, the syndicated articles I write regularly or web page content.

Whenever you design or write for a web site that has an international audience, make sure you address each market. It pays to undertake detailed keyword research into your markets you are targeting so you can capture the correct regional jargon and spelling that people are searching for. Remember it's not enough to think global, you've got to act global too.

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About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

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How to Create Search Engine Friendly Web Site Copy

By Kalena Jordan

Search engines read text and not much else. Because they can’t generally index graphics, search engines rely on the text in web sites to provide information about the site content, which they can compare with search queries.

Webmasters therefore need to use body text on any pages on the site that they want indexed by the search engines and ranked highly for matching search queries. Not graphical text that was created in design software, but actual, visible body text. Not sure if your site uses graphical or body text? A good rule of thumb that I learnt from search engine guru Danny Sullivan is to try and highlight the text with your mouse. If you can drag your mouse over individual words in the text when viewing it in a browser, chances are this is body text and the search engines can read it.

Figure 1



Figure 2

The most important page on which to use body text is the home page. Above is an example of a home page that uses graphical text instead of body text. Figure 1 shows what content the site visitors see, while Figure 2 shows the content a search engine sees and indexes.

How much information about a site’s content does a page like the one above provide a search engine? That’s right, very little. With next to no text to be found, the search engine would have to rely on the page’s Title and META Tags to tell it what the page is about. With such little information to go on, it is unlikely that a search engine would consider this page a relevant match for search queries relating to its content. To remedy this, it is widely recommended that each web page you want listed in search engines should contain at least 250 words of visible body text.


Keyword-Rich Text

While it’s a good idea to use plenty of body text on web pages, if that text doesn’t contain relevant keywords and phrases that people type in to the search engines, there’s not much point, because a site isn’t going to be found for logical search queries anyway. Many web sites make the mistake of including text on their site that is either unrelated to their products and services, or full of marketing-speak like “Internet solutions” or “superior services”. The Internet is plagued with web sites selling particular items without once making reference to those items in their site text. Weird huh?

For a search engine to find a site relevant for a particular search query, it MUST find that search query somewhere in that site. The easiest way to ensure this is to include logical keywords and phrases within the visible text on web pages, as well as in the Title and META tags. The best way for webmasters to find keywords that searchers are actually using is by conducting keyword research of their target market on a site such as Keyword Discovery or WordTracker.

Once it is determined what search terms perspective visitors are commonly typing in to search engines, they can then be compared to the goods and services offered on the site and the body text can be adjusted accordingly. Sites lacking any keyword research tend to use very generic, unfocused body copy, or sales-oriented “hype”. Neither style contributes to high search engine rankings.

Target keywords and search phrases placed strategically throughout your body copy give your pages a much higher ranking potential on search engines for related searches. But it’s not as easy as throwing the keywords into your site text willy-nilly. You must ensure that the keywords are integrated seamlessly so their repetition is unobvious and so that the text flows smoothly for the reader.

Don't compromise the readability of your copy to achieve this - hire an expert copywriter to strike the right balance if need be.


SEO Copywriting

Before writing your web site copy, you should research potential keywords and phrases that your target audience may use in search engines and then narrow the list down to your priority terms for each page, sorted in order of importance. You should then use those target search terms as a basis for the creation of optimized Title and META tags for each page on your site. Once you’ve done that, it’s time to integrate those same target search terms into your visible web page copy. We call this SEO copywriting. But exactly how do we do it?


Speak to Your Audience

Don’t lose site of the reader when writing your body copy. Integrating your keywords is important, but not if you are sacrificing the readability of your site and losing the attention of your audience. Put yourself in their shoes like you did when researching your keywords. What are they looking for? What do they need? How will your product/service help them? Does it represent value for money?

Be emotive when describing your products and services. Describe how your product/service will make them feel or look, how it will improve their lives, give them more time etc. Use trigger words that people respond to such as “free”, “success”, “you”, “cash” etc. Not sure what these are? Check out Words That Sell reports. These reports are perfect if you are targeting a specific industry or profession because they define what keywords people in over 38 industries respond to and what they expect when making a buying decision.

Not sure who your audience is or what they’re looking for? Why not ask them? Use a free survey service such as Survey Monkey to learn more about them so you can write “to” them and not “at” them. You could even draft various styles of body copy and obtain feedback from your site visitors to determine what copywriting style works better for them.


Use Easy to Understand Language

The Internet is no place for verbosity. People are in a hurry - they want to find what they seek quickly and easily with the least hassle possible. You can help them in this quest by ensuring your site pages use simple language and easy to grasp concepts throughout. For example instead of "brand-building web information architects", use "website designers specializing in brand promotion". Keep the large chunks of text on each page to a minimum, using bullet points, white space, graphics, lists and sub-headings to break it up and make it easier to read. This rule of thumb is especially important when creating landing pages for pay per click and other advertising campaigns.

Use examples to get your main points across or to demonstrate your product benefits. Use the old WIIFM (What's In It For Me?) adage when composing your body copy to keep the user's interests at top of mind. Remember your international visitors by incorporating regional word usage (such as organize versus organize or jewelry versus jewellery) and avoid technical jargon that could alienate. Want your visitor to take a particular action? Spell it out for them in plain English, for example Click here to Buy Now, Subscribe to our free newsletter, Bookmark this page now etc. These references are called “Calls to Action”.


Build Your Copy Around Your Keywords

You should always build your page copy around your keywords and not the other way around. If your existing page copy doesn’t contain any of your target search keywords, you’re going to have to rewrite it! Start from scratch if you have to. The secret is to focus. Search engines aren’t going to rank your web site about socks highly if your body copy talks about foot sizes. You need to get specific. It sounds really obvious, but if you sell socks, make sure your site copy has plenty of references to the word socks! If you sell green wool socks, target the phrase "green wool socks" and not "foot apparel in lovely shades of emerald"! Who's going to search for socks using that phrase?

At the risk of sounding like Dr Seuss, if you want to be found for, big socks, small socks, cotton socks and wool socks, then mention them all. Better still, sort your copy into categories based on your various products and services. If you sell wool socks AND cotton socks, then have a page dedicated to each kind. This allows you to target niche keywords within your copy and meet the search engine's relevancy guidelines for related search queries.


Keyword Integration

So imagine you've added plenty of text to your pages and the copy flows well for the reader. You've researched your keywords and phrases and now you're faced with the dilemma of integrating the keywords into your copy. So how do you satisfy the search engine's craving for keywords without interrupting the copy flow for the reader? The answer is: very carefully.

Let's take a look at a practical example. We have a client that specializes in luxury adventure travel. Before I optimized their site, part of the home page copy read like this:

"We specialize in providing vacations for people who want a personal service. We bring to our efforts a fanatical obsession with quality and exclusivity. We also bring a freshness, an outward-going passion for discovery which justifies our growing reputation as one of the world's top travel providers. We can put together packages that include all adventure activities, accommodation, transport and food".

Extensive Keyword Discovery keyword research for the client had determined that the site should target the following key phrases:

• adventure travel
• best adventure vacations
• tailored travel
• overseas adventure travel
• luxury travel packages

So taking our original home page text, the challenge was to integrate these keywords carefully and naturally so as not to disturb the logical flow of the copy and lose the interest of the visitor. Here's how I did it:

"We specialize in providing the best adventure vacations for people who want a personal and tailored travel service. We bring to our efforts a fanatical obsession with quality and exclusivity. We also bring a freshness, an outward-going passion for discovery which justifies our growing reputation as one of the world's top overseas adventure travel providers. We can put together luxury travel packages that include all adventure activities, accommodation, transport and food".

Note that the key phrase "overseas adventure travel" accommodates the phrase "adventure travel" too. Voila! The search engines are happy because the site contains text content relevant to related search queries, the client is happy because we were able to integrate the keywords without distracting the visitor and I'm happy because I know the site is going to rank highly for the client's target search terms.

Now it’s your turn – go tackle your web site copy!

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About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

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Social Media: The Instant Brand Killer

By Kalena Jordan

With the increasing uptake of social media sites such as Digg, Technorati, Slashdot, YouTube and MySpace, together with community bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, Reddit and Ma.gnolia, companies the world over can reach their target markets via a whole new channel.

Social networking is like viral marketing on steroids. Companies can release a new product in the morning and have it talked about by millions of users on thousands of sites by the afternoon.

The good news is that social media is user driven. The bad news is that social media is user driven. Yes, there's the rub. Users are fickle creatures - they can love a product one minute and then drop it like a lead balloon the next, depending on their experience with the product, a rumor, or whether they have had their morning coffee yet. And if their experience is bad, the noise is generally louder. To protect their reputations it's not just journalists that companies have to impress these days. It's anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. Love it or hate it, the user community now has enormous power over the online reputation of a company or brand.

Not surprisingly, businesses and individuals alike clamor for the attention and mostly enjoy the limelight that social media can bring. Others hate the intense scrutiny that often accompanies the popularity. An example is usability blogger Kim Krause Berg's unpleasant first experience of Digg - I Don't Digg Being Dugg.

Online communities can even bring a site to its knees. Marketers are calling it the "Digg Effect" or the "Slashdot Effect". Buzz for a site can cause more than good or bad publicity. As Kim found out, the effect can cause traffic overload sometimes resulting in site downtime and lost business.

Social media can also kill the reputation of a brand instantly. Take the Microsoft Windows Vista Laptop Scandal for instance. No stranger to the benefits of social media, Microsoft had allegedly tried to exploit the power of the blogosphere at the end of last year, by sending a number of A-list bloggers a free Acer Ferrari laptop loaded with the yet-to-be-released Windows Vista and Office 2007.

The pitch was a request for the bloggers to "review" the new Windows software in their influential blogs. Many bloggers did write a review, but some did not disclose their free gift. When this fact was discovered later, the bloggers were hammered by large portions of the blogosphere for what they saw as a clear conflict of interest. Microsoft were tagged both literally and figuratively as bribers and Windows Vista was widely panned with parody tag lines such as "Vista: So Bad We Had to Give it Away". Not a great start to an online product release.

Another example of the damage that social networking can do to a company's online reputation is the National Pork Board of America's recent battle with breastfeeding advocate and well-known blogger Jennifer Laycock. Jennifer was sent a harshly worded letter from the Pork Board's representing counsel, threatening her with legal action for allegedly stealing their pro-pork slogan "Pork: The Other White Meat" in a pro-breastfeeding t-shirt she had designed that read "The Other White Milk".

The letter suggested that their case for trademark infringement was probably solid. Unfortunately for the Pork Board, the poorly-worded letter also suggested that they were insensitive to breastfeeding mothers and the plight of starving infants. The Pork Board didn't count on Jennifer's influence in the blogosphere and the power of social networking to carry her defiant response to the world. The Pork Board ended up receiving bags of hate mail and thousands of flame emails via their online contact form, forcing them to issue a public apology to Jennifer from the Board's CEO and a generous donation to the Mother's Milk Bank of Ohio in order to save face.

To their credit, the Pork Board did the right thing. They also made sure that all persons who complained about their approach to Jennifer received a polite, measured email response from the CEO. As a former PR consultant myself, I tip my hat at them. Having the apology come from the very top is smart. It demonstrates how seriously they took the complaints. The wording of the complainant response is polite and restrained. Addressing each and every complainer personally is impressive. It would've been tempting to ignore all the flames and issue some stock standard release.

Their choice of legal team may have been questionable, but the Pork Board's public relations team mobilized quickly, upgraded to full damage control mode and did a great job of mopping up the PR mess before it spread too far. Social media might have damaged them, but the Pork Board's reputation was ultimately salvaged by quick thinking and a swift online response.

Such situations underscore the growing importance of online reputation management (ORM) in our Web 2.0, social media-driven world. Companies should be tracking their online reputation on a daily basis to check for negative commentary via social media in order to avert potential PR disasters. Major search marketing players such as Andy Beal recognized the potential growth in ORM a long time ago. But I wonder how many PR/Search Marketing agencies currently offer this service?

With brand reputation increasingly at risk, you can be sure the smart agencies will be adding ORM to their service offerings faster than you can say "Can you Digg it?"

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About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

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11 Reasons To Consider a Job in Search Engine Marketing

By Kalena Jordan

Are you currently seeking employment? Looking for a new profession? Considering a career change? Then a job in the field of Search Engine Marketing should be at the top of your list. Here are 10 reasons why:


1) The Search Industry is HOT

The first dot-com bubble may have burst 6 years ago, but the current bubble is getting bigger and stronger every day. One of the main reasons for the current dot-com boom is the skyrocketing growth of the search engine industry. No longer the territory of geekdom, search has exploded into the mainstream over the past few years and businesses are falling over themselves to get seen by online searchers. And they'll pay big bucks to search engines for the privilege.

Have you noticed that Google shares recently hit USD 500 EACH? It's not a coincidence. Search giants like Google, Yahoo and AOL can't fail to make money because everybody wants a bit of the search action. There's no denying it, search is HOT, HOT, HOT.

2) It's Considered one of Four Jobs on the Cutting Edge

According to a recent article on MSN Careers, the position of Search Engine Optimizer is considered one of four jobs on the cutting edge right now. Who gave it this title? A representative from the world's largest specialized recruitment firm - Robert Half International Inc.

Search Engine Optimization is considered a sub-set of Search Engine Marketing. If you're unsure what a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) does, below is a definition provided by MSN Careers:

"Search engine optimizers (SEOs) increase a firm's Web site traffic by improving its search-engine page rankings. This is an especially important task in today's Internet-driven world, where many customers first learn of an organization and its products or services through the Web. Because of a shortage of experts in this relatively new area, many top SEOs receive multiple job offers. SEOs typically supplement their knowledge of how various search engines operate and determine
page rankings with strong marketing skills, as well as the ability to communicate effectively and program using HTML."

Wikipedia also defines Search Engine Optimizers here.

3) The Pay is Fantastic

A job in the search industry can be unbelievably lucrative. As noted recently by Jennifer Laycock of Search Engine Guide, "There are quite literally more jobs than there are skilled marketers and salaries can skyrocket to almost embarrassing levels."

Have you seen the type of salaries that search engine marketing and search engine optimization consultants are currently commanding in the US? Clearly, the search industry is making some people rich. Here are some typical salaries in USD:

Entry level SEO/SEM position = $30-45K
Three to five years experience / online account managers =
$50-75K
Five + years / organic SEO specialists = $75-90K
Senior management level = $70-120K
SEM Director = $95-150K
VP Level = $100-315K

Additional Salary links:

From ClickZ
From Search Engine Watch Forums

4) You Don't Need a College Degree

Because the search industry is relatively young, there are only a handful of online courses and certifications offered in the field of Search Engine Marketing (Search Engine College being one such training provider).

Most search engine marketing practitioners are self-taught, learning the trade by experimenting with their own sites, researching trends, attending conferences and participating in discussion forums and so employers don't generally require SEO / SEM certification or a tertiary qualification as a pre-requisite for a position in the industry.

However, candidates who hold a marketing degree or specific industry certification in Search Engine Marketing may well have an edge over their fellow applicants when it comes to interview selection.

5) You Can Learn it all Online

Everything you need to know to become a Search Engine Marketer, you can learn online. All the information is out there, you just have to find it. To become an expert in SEO / SEM, you need to do research, research and more research. Read everything you can get your hands on relating to search on a daily basis, including articles, forums, ebooks, blogs and newsfeeds. Then you need to put this knowledge into practice by experimenting with your own sites, or finding guinea pig sites to practice on such as those of friends, family or charity sites until you find the methods that give you the best results. Programming knowledge is not a pre-requisite for SEO / SEM jobs, but it does help to learn basic HTML. There are plenty of free HTML tutorials online.

If you don't fancy years of research or are in a hurry to jump-start your career in search, consider taking an online Certification course in one of the many Search Engine Marketing disciplines such as the Certification Pathways provided by Search Engine College. These type of courses are usually tutor-led and designed to fast-track your training and ensure you gain the right type of skills to make you immediately employable within the search industry.

6) You Can Be Your Own Boss

Because most of the work you'll be doing is online, Search Engine Optimizers and Search Engine Marketers often have the freedom of choice to work for an employer, work from home and/or freelance. Many SEO / SEM freelancers end up hiring workers and starting their own company due to the massive demand. This gives search engine marketing experts the work from home lifestyle that others can only dream of.

7) Search Marketing Has the WOW Factor

Once they know what they're doing, it's very easy for a Search Engine Marketer to wow their clients. The difference that a successful SEO or PPC campaign can make to a client's bottom line is substantial. I've seen online conversion rates for a client zoom from 1% to a massive 5% after just two small tweaks to their web site. And although rankings are not as important as actual conversions, clients still get very excited to see their site listed in the top 10 search results for certain keywords. It's the WOW factor in action.

8) The Demand is Strong and Growing

As mentioned in relation to search engine salaries, there are literally many more jobs than there are skilled marketers to fill them. This extreme demand means Search Engine Marketers can pick and choose their jobs and/or clients. The more skilled marketers are head-hunted regularly. For Search Engine Optimization firms, there are more than enough clients to go around and rarely a need to advertise for new business. That's why you often find SEOs turning away clients or recommending their competitors during extremely busy periods.

Experts in select specialties such as Pay Per Click Advertising (a sub-set of Search Engine Marketing) are currently enjoying even higher demand than usual, as advertisers out-bid each other to have their site shown for popular keyword searches on Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Another indicator of high demand is the sheer number of search-related job postings seen on employment sites such as those listed here.

9) The Industry is Hip and Groovy

There's something very trendy about people in search that I can't quite put my finger on. There's a constant buzz around them. If you've ever been to a search engine conference or to Google's headquarters you'll know what I mean. Maybe it's the fact that they've come from so many different professions. Or that the age range of search marketers varies from teens to Baby Boomers. Or their whacky dress sense.

Maybe it's the smell of money and happiness that they give off. Maybe it's the fact that they are constantly in the media. I don't know. All I know is that it's no longer uncool to be a geek. In fact it's downright hip to be square.

10) The Skills Are Portable and Global

Skills in search engine marketing are portable and global. You don't need to be at a desk, in an office or on the phone all day. You don't even need to meet your clients. Of all my clients, I've probably only met 20 percent of them and spoken to half of them on the phone or via chat. You can be on vacation for six months out of the year in various locations and still conduct business. You literally only need a computer and an Internet connection. The Internet is the universal equalizer. You can service clients in any country in the world, in many different languages. You can compete with one man operations and Fortune 500 companies on the same level playing field. The flexibility of the search industry is a huge advantage over other career options.
Have laptop, will travel!

11) Job Satisfaction is High

Search is a fascinating industry. With all the hype, daily gossip, corporate take-overs, start-ups and geek toys, I can guarantee that you won't get bored. This combined with the flexible work hours, low start-up costs, ability to be your own boss and the excellent income keeps job satisfaction high for Search Engine Marketers.

So what are you waiting for? Go get a job in search!

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The above article may be re-published as long as the following paragraph is included at the end of the article and as long as you link to the URL mentioned below:

About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running her own SEO business, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing subjects.

How to Make Search Engines Happy in 3 Easy Steps

By Kalena Jordan

Does your web site make search engines happy? Despite all the negative hype lately, it's pretty easy to design a web site that search engines will accept with open arms. All it takes is 3 easy steps:

1) Follow the Search Engine Guidelines

Nearly all search engines publish their own guidelines regarding the submission of sites, the type of sites they will accept and recommendations for optimized content. Google recently updated their Webmaster Guidelines which cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative search engine behavior that they consider to be "spam". They also published SEO Guidelines - advice for webmasters to heed when choosing an SEO. Google was the first search engine to publicly acknowledge search engine optimizers in this fashion.

It's not just Google publishing anti-spam guidelines. You'll find them at the following search engine sites as well:

- MSN Search webmaster guidelines

- AltaVista terms of use (AltaVista is a Yahoo-owned company)

- Yahoo terms of service

- Yahoo guidelines on search engine spam (covering AltaVista and AllTheWeb as well)

- Yahoo definitions of search engine spam (covering AltaVista and AllTheWeb as well)

- Yahoo content guidelines

- AskJeeves / Teoma terms of service and spam policy

- AskJeeves / Teoma editorial guidelines


2) Avoid Spamming the Search Engines

Often, webmasters will use search engine spam techniques without even being aware that they are doing so. Or worse, web designers can - advertently or inadvertently - integrate techniques that could cause a site to be penalized in the site's rankings in one or more engines, without the site owner's knowledge of such penalties. The key to avoiding spamming the engines is research.
Keep track of the various search engine guidelines via the links above. Watch for any changes they make to these guidelines and tweak your site accordingly. Trawl the various webmaster and search engine forums regularly to ensure your site doesn't use any of the latest methods that appear to be penalized. If you suspect your site has been penalized, remove the offending content, contact the engine concerned and ask to be reinstated.

Google actually encourage you to file a re-inclusion request via their Help Center and this post by Google staffer Matt Cutts outlines what should be included.

Alternatively, here is a sample email template you can use instead:

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Sample Re-inclusion Request Email:

Dear [search engine name],

I am the owner of [your site URL].

I did not realize that participation in [spammy method] and
[spammy SEO name] programs could cause problems for my website. I was
assured that these techniques were search-engine-friendly by [your source for using spammy method].

I now understand that the practices used are not acceptable. I apologize for having allowed them to be placed on my website. I've removed the questionable pages and links from the site. I promise not to repeat such mistakes.

I am asking you to please consider reinstating my website,
[your site URL] into the [search engine name] Index.

Sincerely,

[Your Name]
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To assist them to provide a high quality service, search engines encourage people to report search results they are dissatisfied with. If you spot some content spam or techniques that are clearly in breach of the search engine's public guidelines, you can report it using these links:

- Google spam report or via search-quality@google.com

- AllTheWeb relevancy problem report (AllTheWeb is a Yahoo-owned company)

- AltaVista search results manipulation report (or via Yahoo's spam report below)

- Yahoo spam report

- AskJeeves spam report or via information@ask.com


3) Build Sites for Visitors Rather than Search Engines

The methodologies may have changed over the years, but the same principles have always applied to "good" or "white hat" SEO. Build sites for humans, not search engines. Make the site as user friendly as possible, avoid the bells and whistles and include high quality, relevant content.

Wherever possible, include text-based content and navigation menus with simple, descriptive, well-written copy designed to convert your visitors into customers. Include keywords and phrases your audience would logically type in to search engines to find sites like yours. Only link to sites that are relevant to your target audience and spend some time on usability, making sure all your forms and shopping carts work.

Remember that what pleases a visitor is almost always what pleases a search engine too.


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running her own SEO business, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Top 10 AdSense Tricks To Boost Your Commission

By Kalena Jordan

Google AdSense is fast becoming the preferred way for people to earn an income online. Forget eBay and multiple affiliate programs - Whether you are a work-at-home mom trying to make a little extra cash or an Internet entrepreneur with hundreds of monetized websites, AdSense is truly the easiest way to earn money.

Simply sign up for a free account, grab your ad code and paste it in your site. But here's the amazing thing - no matter how much money AdSense is making for you right now, a few simple tweaks can increase that amount considerably. And I should know, after learning about these tricks, I more than doubled my AdSense commissions!

The self-proclaimed AdSense gurus and experts are sharing this insider knowledge, for a fee. You can learn all these secrets from them, as long as you buy their e-book, sign up for their seminar or purchase their newsletter. But I'm going to share all their AdSense tricks for free. Here they are:

1) Color code your ads to match your web site palette *exactly*. Don't use frames around your ads. Instead, in the AdSense code generation interface, make sure you choose the same color as your page background for the ad frame and the ad background.

When choosing the ad heading colors, match them to the *exact* color of your page headings. Use the exact same ad background shade as your page background. Use the exact same ad text font and color as the text on your pages. You can see an example of this color-matching on my search engine advice blog - notice the 4 link ad unit and skyscraper text ad unit on the left hand side under the headings Ads by Google as you scroll down the page? The link and text colors are identical to the color palette used throughout the rest of the page.

Near enough is NOT good enough. If you can't quite get the color matching right, use Google's built in color palette together with the RGB to HEX or vice versa color converter on this page. That handy little tool was a life saver for me.

This is probably the one single tweak that made the most difference to my commission levels.

2) Try not to use the traditional horizontal banner style or leaderboard image ads because people are blind to them.

3) Use Google's own AdSense optimization tips and visual heat map to assist you in deciding where on your page to place your AdSense ad code.

4) Research competitive keywords using a keyword research tool such as Keyword Discovery or grab a list of the most popular keywords from various sources and use them in your web site pages where relevant. This article is a good source of frequently searched keywords. Targeting popular keywords should trigger AdSense ads on your pages that utilize those keywords. The more popular the keyword or phrase, the higher AdWords advertisers are generally willing to pay per click for it so the higher your commission on those clicks.

5) Incorporate the AdSense code into your page so that the ads look like a regular part of your site. You can see an example of this on the Internet Dating Stories site where link ads are incorporated within the regular left hand navigation of the site under the heading "Sponsor Links".

6) Use Google's new 4 and 5 link ad units wherever possible. They seem to have a much higher Click Through Rate (CTR) than regular ad styles. You can view all the AdSense ad formats here.

7) Place images next to your ads to attract the eyes. You can see this in place on the search engine article library page at the bottom where 3 images draw your attention to the bottom of the page. But be careful here - the use of arrows or symbols enticing viewers to click are NOT allowed by Google and publishers may NOT label the Google ads with text other than "sponsored links" or "advertisements".

8) Use the full allowance of multiple AdSense ads on each of your pages - 3 regular AdSense ads, plus 1 link unit. Use careful placement of these ads so they blend into your site and don't distract from your content. Clever use of this allowance can be seen on this page about bad Internet dating stories where you see:

- 1 horizontal 4 link ad unit towards the top of the page under the first paragraph
- 1 vertical skyscraper text ad unit about halfway down the left hand side under "Sponsor Links"
- 1 vertical skyscraper image ad unit down the left hand side under "Sponsor Links"
- 1 horizontal text banner unit at the bottom of the page with images above each ad.

You can also include 1 AdSense referral button in addition to the 3 other units.

9) Tailor your page content to a particular niche or focus. Page content that is tailored towards a specific theme is more likely to trigger AdWords ads that closely match the content and are therefore more likely to interest your visitors and inspire them to click. Don’t create pages merely for the sake of placing AdSense ads. Visitors (and search engines) can see through this ruse in an instant.

10) Use custom Ad Channels for each of your ad placements, for example, "Top 5 Link Unit Blue Palette" or "Left Side Navigation Image Skyscraper" etc. Tweak, track and measure the success of each of these custom channels so you know what gives you the highest CTR. Some ad formats and colors will work better than others, but you won't know which until you test, test and test some more!

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The above article may be re-published as long as the following paragraph is included at the end of the article and as long as you link to the URL mentioned below:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running her own SEO business, Kalena manages Search Engine College, an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing subjects.
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How to Improve your Click Through Rate in Google AdWords

By Kalena Jordan

Like many people who earn their income via the Internet, I use affiliate programs to supplement my income. One of the affiliate products I promote (Proposal Kit) had been performing particularly well for me recently and I decided to help things along by creating a Google AdWords campaign based around my reviews of the product.

After one month, the campaign was going ok, I was getting a few sales here and there and certainly making a good ROI on the promotion. However, although my Click Through Rate (CTR) was pretty good (1.2%), it was starting to slide backwards and I thought I could do better. As you probably know, your ad position in Google relies heavily on your CTR compared to your competitors, so I was keen to turn things around and keep my high ad positions.

Around this time, I bought Nick Usborne's book Net Words and started to read it, taking notes as I went. I realized that according to Nick's philosophy, my AdWords ads were flat and boring. They were just not appealing enough to entice people to click on them. As Nick explains in his book, "Being blah guarantees you'll never be heard".

So I set about re-writing some of my ad text to speak more directly to my audience and ask them a question that required a response. Below is an example of an ad targeting the search query "business proposal before I changed the text:

Business Proposal Kit
Close the sale with a professional
business proposal template kit.

And here is the text I replaced it with:

Need a business proposal?
Create your own professional
proposal with our template kit.

The aim was to get my average CTR for the entire campaign up to around 2% from the existing 1.2% it was sitting at.

I logged off for the evening and went to bed, not expecting too much. The next morning, I had messages in my email in-box advising me that I had made 3 sales overnight! I was quite excited and logged into AdWords to see how things were going. Sure enough, my clicks were way up and two of the three AdGroups I had edited were showing an average 33% CTR! My overall campaign CTR had risen from 1.2% to 2.4%. I had never experienced CTR that high before. The ad I had changed used to show a 2.5% CTR and after a few days the changed ad displayed a 4.3% CTR.

Taking note of the ads that had attracted the most clicks, I created more around related keywords and phrases, using similar headlines to the ads that were performing the best. This time, I incorporated Nick's advice to use short and punchy copy.

Below is an example of an ad I was using to target the search query "seo contract" before I changed the text:

Sample SEO contract
Proposal Kit provides a perfect SEO
contract template. Read our review.

And here is the text I replaced it with:

Need an SEO contract?
Create yours.
Today.

After another week, my average CTR for the whole campaign jumped from 2.4% to 4% and I had a couple of ads showing 100% CTR! You can imagine how excited I was. Of course the high CTR builds on itself because the higher your CTR, the higher your ad position and the higher your ad position, the more clicks it is likely to attract. So my campaign had jumped from 1.3% in the first month, to 2.4% in the second month and after my fine-tuning, it's now showing a 4% CTR consistently. And the sales? Well I now average at least seven sales per week, up from two per week over the past 6 months and my affiliate commission is at an all time record.

The exercise just goes to show that a few thoughtful tweaks to your ad copy can make a HUGE difference to your bottom line. So what are you waiting for? Go tweak that copy in your own campaigns...

Copyright © 2005 by Kalena Jordan. All rights reserved under U.S. and international law.

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The above article may be re-published as long as the content remains unchanged and the following paragraph is included at the end of the article, including the URL links:

Article by Kalena Jordan. As well as running her own SEO business Web Rank, Kalena Jordan manages Search Engine College, an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing subjects.
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How to Profit From Your Free Reprint Articles

By Kalena Jordan

I came across a very clever tactic by an article author the other day. I was reading one of his free reprint articles and when I finished it, I realized just how smart he really was. Not simply for the content of the article, which contained very timely and useful information, but for the way he managed to hook the reader in and possibly profit from them. Let me explain:

Like me and other article writers, this author circulates his articles to hundreds of article distribution lists on a regular basis. His articles contain a link back to his web site, which is an ideal way to boost his site's link popularity on the search engines. Like other authors, he writes about hot topics and current events in his particular industry. Like most article authors, he writes in a casual, relaxed style that engages the reader quickly and earns their trust. BUT, (here comes the clever part), unlike most article marketers, this author always divides his articles into two or more parts.

The first part of the article is circulated as a stand-alone free reprint article via traditional distribution methods. But at the end of the article and in his Author Resource Box, he adds a link to invite the reader to view "a continuation of the article" on his web site. The link is described as either part two of the first article, or a related article with more detailed information or a specific tutorial on how to implement what was discussed in part one.

Why does he do this? Because most people reading the first article will naturally click on the link leading to the next. Once they are at his web site, he has much more control over how the rest of the article/tutorial is presented. If the article is a tutorial about an aspect of web design or search engine marketing, it generally includes software recommendations that integrate his affiliate links. He also manages to weave in Google AdSense ads at convenient points between the article paragraphs. And of course, by the time readers arrive at his site, he has engaged the reader and gained enough of their trust for them to take his recommendations and click on his affiliate and AdSense links so he earns commission from them. Very clever, don't you think?


You too can use this tactic to profit from your own free reprint articles, by doing the following:

1) Write articles that solve a problem for the reader, like a "how to" article or a basic tutorial.

2) Write about hot or new topics in your industry that people are likely to be searching for.

3) Write the article in two or more segments and save the key instructions for part two.

4) Design a landing page for the later part/s of your article that naturally weaves in your affiliate links and/or AdSense ads.

5) Create a text link "hook" to the continuation of your article, (your landing page), from the bottom of part one.

6) Make sure the first part of your article is well-written and contains useful information as a stand-alone article. The key is to provide a relevant, interesting article with a link to another relevant, interesting article. No-one wants to read a poorly-disguised ad for your affiliate products.

7) Submit part one of your article to free distribution lists.

8) Observe the increased link popularity your site attains and the resulting increase in search engine traffic.

9) Enjoy the benefits and potential profits from your article marketing efforts!


Copyright © 2005 by Kalena Jordan. All rights reserved under U.S. and international law.

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The above article may be re-published as long as the content remains unchanged and the following paragraph is included at the end of the article, including the URL links:

Article by Kalena Jordan. As well as running her own SEO business Web Rank, Kalena Jordan manages Search Engine College, an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing subjects.

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Are You Targeting The Wrong Keywords?

By Kalena Jordan

Someone asked me recently to name the most critical element of any search engine optimization campaign. I didn't hesitate to respond 'keyword selection'.

Like it or not, the keywords and phrases you select to describe your site within your META tags and body text can make or break your listings in the search engines. It's a sad fact that most companies are targeting the wrong keywords and losing traffic as a result.

Even sites that have excellent rankings will not benefit if those rankings are for unsuitable keywords. Let me give you an example:

A few months ago, we had an Australian client who wanted us to implement an optimization campaign to improve their search engine rankings, but without jeopardizing existing rankings they had achieved for two particular search phrases: 'Internet solutions Australia' and 'online banking solutions'.

Can you guess what products and services this company sells? The search phrases don't really give much away do they? In fact, this company is a distributor of web site design software that is specifically tailored for banks. Now ask yourself this: if you were a bank looking for this company's products, would you have typed in either of the phrases above to find their site? I doubt it. You would type in something more logical like 'web site design software' or 'web sites for banks' right?

This company was clearly targeting the wrong keywords and phrases. Their top ten rankings for these phrases were irrelevant, because nobody was searching for these phrases in relation to the products this company was offering. The phrases they had chosen are what I call 'jargonized', that is, they are filled with industry jargon and buzz words.

Take 'Internet solutions' as an example. Such jargon has found its way into our language with the onset of the digital age and is bandied around boardrooms and marketing departments everywhere. However the definition of this phrase is very broad and could be used to describe anything from a dial-up connection to a web site itself. It's not a logical choice for searchers and is therefore useless as a key phrase to target.

To prove my point, I researched the client's chosen phrases using Wordtracker keyword software and then did comparison research using the more logical phrases above. The results were crystal clear: the logical, simplified phrases were many times more popular than the jargonized ones. Once I demonstrated this to the client, they were more than happy for us to conduct more thorough keyword research and start their search engine optimization campaign with a clean slate.

When selecting the keywords and phrases for your site, remember to select search terms that describe your products and services in the most logical, simple and specific way. By doing so you'll not only increase the search engine traffic to your site, but you'll ensure your visitors are highly qualified to buy your products and services when they arrive.

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About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running her own SEO business Web Rank, Kalena manages Search Engine College, an online training institution offering instructor- led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing subjects.

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Beginner's Guide to Pay Per Click Search Engines (Part 2)

By Kalena Jordan

In Part 1 of this article, we looked at the various pay for performance advertising models offered by Yahoo! Search Marketing. In this article, we will look at the remaining pay for performance search engine models on our list, starting with Google AdWords.


Google AdWords

Similar to Yahoo! Sponsored Search, Google AdWords gives web site owners the ability to promote their site when particular keyword or key phrase searches are conducted at Google and their partner sites.

Your ads usually appear on the right side of results pages in a call out box under the heading Sponsored Links. Your AdWords text or image ads appear on search result pages for the keywords you buy, and can be targeted by language and country.

With Google AdWords cost-per-click (CPC) pricing, you pay only when a customer clicks on your ad, regardless of how many times it's shown. Google adjusts your bids automatically to keep you ahead of your competition at the lowest possible price. Google Adwords results appear on Google search results pages, Google’s distribution partner sites, Google Gmail, and numerous content sites which are syndicated through the Google Adsense program.

For more information on Google AdWords, Click Here.


Google AdSense

Google AdSense is a way for webmasters to generate income from their sites by displaying text or image advertisements from companies participating in the Google AdWords program.

You can display targeted advertising for your content pages or you can add a Google search box to your site and show targeted ads on search results pages. When visitors click on these ads, Google pays you a fee. The ads are targeted to the content already on your page so they are not as intrusive to your visitors.

For more information on Google AdSense, Click Here.


LookSmart LookListings

The LookSmart Directory originally offered a Paid Submission model and then transformed it into a Pay For Performance model, removing their Express Submit directory submission service and receiving a lot of criticism in the process.

To have your site included in LookSmart.com, you must pay a per click fee when visitors click on your listing, similar to the Yahoo! Search Submit Express model. The relevancy keywords, title and description chosen during the set up of your listing determine when your site appears for searches.

There is no free submission option to Looksmart and the only way to get your site into their directory is to either pay for their LookListings or submit your site via the Zeal Directory, which is only an option available to non-profit sites.

LookSmart LookListings work like this:

1) Create Your Listing which includes:

- site description & title
- relevancy keywords (for keyword targeted listings)
- directory category

2) Set Your Monthly Budget:

- set your maximum monthly budget
- set your maximum click rates for each URL (for keyword targeted listings)
- your account is debited USD 0.15 per click (for inclusion-targeted listings)
- minimum account deposit totaling your maximum monthly budget
- each campaign has a minimum monthly budget of USD 15

3) Account Management

- traffic reporting
- automatic monthly account refills (from your nominated credit card)
- adjust your budget
- update description, title and relevancy keywords
- bids monitored automatically (for keyword targeted listings)

LookListings appear on sites across the LookSmart Network including LookSmart, Lycos, Mamma.com and CNET Search.

For more information on LookSmart LookListings, Click Here.


Other Pay-Per-Click Providers

Apart from the big players, there are a large number of other medium-sized search providers selling pay-per-click search advertising. These include:


- FindWhat

- Enhance (formerly ah-ha)

- Kanoodle

- Espotting

- 7Search

- GoClick

- ePilot.com

- Lycos Insite AdBuyer

- Search123


Of course there are hundreds more PPC engines, many of which can be found via the sites listed in our Further Reading section below.

Don’t be afraid to set-up some test pay per click campaigns to dip your toes into the paid advertising waters. You don’t have to have a large budget to reap rewards, just a willingness to experiment and apply what you learn to improve your campaigns. What you do with all your extra traffic is up to you!


Further Reading

Pay Per Click Search Engines (CPC / PPC)

Pay Per Click Search Engines on Pandia

Pay Per Click Search Engines on Search Engine Guide

Buying Your Way In: Search Engine Advertising Chart

Pay Per Click Analyst

Pay Per Click Guide

Pay Per Click Universe

Copyright © 2005 by Kalena Jordan. All rights reserved under U.S. and international law.


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The above article may be re-published as long as the content remains unchanged and the following paragraph is included at the end of the article, including the URL links:

Article by Kalena Jordan. As well as running her own SEO business Web Rank, Kalena Jordan manages Search Engine College, an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing subjects.


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Beginner's Guide to Pay Per Click Search Engines (Part 1)

By Kalena Jordan

Pay per click (PPC) advertising via search engines has become extremely popular with businesses of all sizes, due to the booming search market and the massive growth in online sales over the past few years.

According to ComScore Networks, online consumer spending for the 2004/5 financial year is expected to top USD 66 billion dollars, up 25% on the previous year. That’s right, 66 BILLION dollars! A large chunk of that expenditure will come from leads generated via pay per click search engines.

If you've been thinking about trying out PPC engines but are confused about the different models available and the costs involved, this article will shed some light. I will also explain the newly launched PPC products offered by Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly operating under the Overture brand).

Below is a current list of the most popular pay for performance search engine advertising models:

> Yahoo! Sponsored Search (Pay Per Click)
> Yahoo! Content Match (Pay Per Click)
> Yahoo! Local Sponsored Search (Pay Per Click)
> Yahoo! Search Submit Express (Paid Inclusion)
> Yahoo! Search Submit Pro (Hybrid Paid Inclusion / Pay Per Click)
> Google AdWords (Pay Per Click)
> Google AdSense (Pay Per Click affiliate program)
> Looksmart LookListings (Pay Per Click)

You will find that some of these will provide better results than others. I'm not going to recommend one over another here because results vary widely and really depend on your site content, your market and your budget. But below is a brief description of each product offering and the minimum cost involved.


Yahoo! Sponsored Search

Yahoo! Sponsored Search is the new name for what was recently called Overture Precision Match. Sponsored Search prominently displays your business in search results on some of the top U.S. search properties.

With Sponsored Search, you set the price you're willing to pay for each customer who clicks on your listing.

If you create a keyword campaign and your bid buys their "premium listings" (top 3 positions) for particular keywords or search phrases, your bid buys you top listings on Yahoo's partner sites (Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, InfoSpace, Excite, AllTheWeb and a range of news and content portals, such as CNN).

For example, go to AllTheWeb and type in a search for used cars. Take note of the top 3 spots. Now go to MSN Search and type in a search for used cars. You'll see that the "Sponsored Sites" listings in the green box at the top (and/or the text ads to the right) contain the same top 3 listings from AllTheWeb. The regular MSN directory listings follow underneath the green box. So basically, purchasing PPC listings on Yahoo! can give you top billing on other major search engines too.

For a monthly fee, listings can be automatically monitored using the Yahoo! Search Optimizer to ensure bid amounts are consistent to attain target positions without going over budget. Volume levels are determined by your budget, as you only pay for the traffic delivered.

How much you pay depends on the keyword or phrase you are bidding on and what position you want to purchase. Each account has a USD20 minimum monthly spend and a USD30 non-refundable initial deposit is required to open the account (which is applied to click-throughs). There is a minimum bid requirement of USD 0.10 per click through and you pay the bid price EACH TIME somebody clicks your ad from Yahoo! and their partner listings.

With the large traffic numbers driven to your site via Yahoo! Sponsored Search, the costs of keyword bid campaigns can quickly add up, so I highly recommend deciding on a total budget so that you can develop a cost effective keyword bid allocation and maintenance plan combining both premium (top 3) and other listings.

Yahoo! provides detailed reporting tools to help you track the performance of the PPC campaign and traffic generated. Yahoo! also offers a special Keyword Selector Tool to assist in the selection of your keywords, a View Bids Tool, where you can see the current maximum bids and listings for the top 3 advertisers on any search term, a PPC ROI Calculator and a CPM ROI Calculator.

Yahoo! offers two sign-up plans, Fast Track or Self Serve, giving you the choice of expert assistance or starting out on your own. With Fast Track, Yahoo! experts research your website and recommend effective search terms based on the content of your site and Yahoo!'s editorial guidelines. They also create customized ad titles and descriptions based on those search terms. Fast Track has a one time service fee of USD199, while Self Serve is free.

For more information on Yahoo! Sponsored Search, Click Here.


Yahoo! Content Match

Content Match works on the same principle Yahoo! Sponsored Search, but offers advertisers access to more targeted customers on a pay-per-click basis by displaying their site listings alongside related articles, product reviews and other information on the Content Match partner network.

This network includes sites like Yahoo!, MSN.com, CNN.com and ESPN.com. Yahoo! Content Match complements Sponsored Search while offering separate pricing.

Yahoo! Content Match works like this:

1) When you sign up for Sponsored Search, your Yahoo! account will be set up to automatically receive Content Match traffic, and your listings are automatically re-purposed for Content Match.

2) When a web user goes to a Yahoo! and views content pages (such as articles), Yahoo! provides one or more relevant ad listings on the same page.

3) Users may also be targeted based on their interests and actions. For example, a user who demonstrates an interest in photography-related topics on one site may be provided with photography-related Content Match listings on that site or on other Content Match publisher sites such as CNN and ESPN.

4) Minimum bids start at USD 0.10, and you pay only when a user clicks on your listing.

5) You can manage and track the performance of your Content Match listings from the Manage Content Match pages in your Sponsored Search Account once you have completed the Sponsored Search advertiser sign-up process.

6) Separate campaign management, including bidding, ad listing and tracking, lets you adjust your bids and measure performance independent of Sponsored Search to achieve maximum ROI.

7) You can control your advertising spend across your Content Match campaigns with Yahoo's Budgeting feature.

For more information on Yahoo! Content Match, Click Here.


Yahoo! Local Sponsored Search

Yahoo! also offers a regionally-focused pay-per-click advertising option. Yahoo! Local Sponsored Search enables both online and offline businesses to potentially increase sales by precisely targeting customers in a specific geographic region.

Local Sponsored Search works best for businesses that are targeting customers in their neighborhood seeking to purchase local products and services via a web site or physical store location.

Local Sponsored Search features a Locator page, which provides prospects with information about your business, including address, phone number, store hours and a map of your location. In addition, if your business has a Web site, your main Web page will be displayed along with the Locator page.

Yahoo! Local Sponsored Search works like this:

1) You select keywords you wish to bid on that best describe your business, products or services. Write listings and choose a geographic range (0.5 to 100 mile radius around your location) from which you want to draw customers.

2) When a customer interested in your area goes to a search site such as Yahoo! and searches for a product or service you sell, your listing appears.

3) When the customer clicks on your listing, they see your Locator page and a link to your Web site, if you have a site.

4) Just like your Yahoo! Local Sponsored Search listing, you only pay your bidded amount when a customer clicks on your listing and there is no monthly minimum.

For more information on Yahoo! Local Sponsored Search, Click Here.


Yahoo Search Submit Express

Through Search Submit Express you can submit one or more web pages for consideration to appear in the algorithmic search results powered by the Yahoo! search engine. This is what is known in the search industry as a paid inclusion model.

Search Submit Express offers a single point of submission for your web pages into Yahoo!, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, and other search portals.

If you have content that has just changed or is updated frequently (such as pricing information or product items), Search Submit Express ensures the most up-to-date content is available to search users by refreshing your URLs every 48 hours.

The program provides detailed reporting and data designed to help you improve your pages, optimize program performance and generate more leads.

Search Submit Express works like this:

1) Submit your URLs for review and pay an annual fee for quality review of your submitted pages. Make sure your pages follow Yahoo's Quality Guidelines.

2) Once reviewed and accepted into the program, your pages are added to a database of sites that powers search results for major web portals such as Yahoo!, Alta Vista, AlltheWeb and others.

3) Submitted URLs are presented in search results based on relevance to search terms.

4) When a user clicks your Search Submit Express listing in search results, you pay a cost-per-click fee for that lead. You must maintain a positive balance in your account for your pages to remain active in the program.

5) Your URLs are refreshed (re-crawled) every 48 hours to ensure that the most up-to-date content is available to search users.

6) At the end of one year, you can renew your annual subscription or let it lapse.

Submissions to Search Submit Express consist of a review fee and a CPC (Cost per click) component. Billing, reporting and account management for Search Submit Express listings is provided by Yahoo! or one of their reseller partners.

Search Submit Express annual review fees consist of:

Price Structure (effective 30 April 05)

Price per domain (USD):
1st URL $49.00 each
URLs 2-10 $29.00 each
URLs 11-1,000 $10.00 each

In addition to the review fee, there is also a per click fee of either $0.15 or $0.30, depending on the category of the content. The complete list of categories is listed here.

For more information on Search Submit Express, Click Here.


Yahoo Search Submit Pro

Yahoo! Search Submit Pro is the same paid inclusion program as Search Submit Express, but with more features for larger advertisers. Search Submit Pro is designed for companies wanting to submit Web pages that might otherwise be excluded from algorithmic search results (as long as they still meet Yahoo's Content Quality Guidelines). Examples include sites that require cookies or session IDs, sites with Flash content and information stored in content management systems, or sites that aren't well crawled because of Web site design.

Search Submit Pro is typically for customers with search marketing budgets of USD 5,000 per month or more, or advertisers who submit more than 1,000 Web pages to the program. A dedicated account manager is available to answer any questions, provide technical support, and help you manage your Search Submit Pro program.

Search Submit Pro lets you create titles and descriptions that are displayed as algorithmic search result listings. The program can automatically generate result listings that best match user queries. You can update the information frequently, independent of changes to your Web site.

Search Submit Pro works like this:

1) You provide an XML feed of your URLs.

2) Once reviewed and accepted into the program, your pages are added to a database of sites that powers search results for major web portals such as Yahoo!, Alta Vista, AlltheWeb and others.

3) When Internet users visit the Search Submit Pro partner sites and enter keyword searches, your listings may appear within the search results based on their relevance to the user's search request.

4) Your URLs are refreshed (re-crawled) every 48 hours to ensure that the most up-to-date content is available to search users.


Pricing for Search Submit Pro is based on cost per click - customers are charged each time a user clicks on one of the customer's search listings. The specific cost is based on the type and category of content provided for inclusion in the algorithmic search results and is obtainable from a Yahoo! Account Manager.

For more information on Search Submit Pro, Click Here.

In Part 2 of this article, we look at the remaining pay for performance search engine models on our list, starting with Google AdWords.

Copyright 2005 by Kalena Jordan. All rights reserved under U.S. and international law.
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The above article may be re-published as long as the content remains unchanged and the following paragraph is included at the end of the article, including the URL links:

Article by Kalena Jordan. As well as running her own SEO business Web Rank (www.webrank.biz), Kalena Jordan manages Search Engine College (www.searchenginecollege.com), an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Log File Analysis and SEO

By Kalena and Jerry Jordan

If you own or manage a website, you are probably already aware of the importance of your log files or site statistics. Such data can give you insights about your site's usability, errors in your HTML code, the popularity of your site pages and the type of visitors your site attracts. But did you know it can also highlight the success or failure of your search engine optimization campaign?

There is specific data about your web site that you should be looking at in your log files on a regular basis. Several variables should be examined monthly or even weekly to ensure your site design and page optimization is on the right track:


1. Entry Paths

Most sites can be developed and analysed around the concept of visitor pathways. If, for example, your site is a Business to Business (B2B) site and you service small, medium and large businesses, there should be pathways through your site designed for each class of visitor. An extremely simplified example would be:

Clients coming to the site through an optimized home page:

home page ---> small business page ---> order page ---> order confirmation page
home page ---> medium business page ---> order page ---> order confirmation page
home page ---> large business page ---> order page ---> order confirmation page


The site entry pages for these pathways are often optimized home pages or optimized content pages. The final page of this route is often the action that you want clients to take on your site (e.g., sign up for your newsletter, buy your products online or contact you for further information). You can easily determine how effective your pathways are by tracking the entry paths on a regular basis via your site stats.

You should have some idea of the main pathways that clients take through your site, both for monitoring the effectiveness of your page optimization and conversions, and for the purpose of subsequent site redesign(s). A good starting point to track the pathways through your site is via the graph or chart called "Entry Paths" in your log files / site statistics.


2. Top Exit Pages

These are pages from which most visitors click away from your site. Why is it useful to track these? Because exit pages can tell you:

a. If there is a technical problem with the page that is causing visitors to leave your site. For example, if there are broken links, or the form on the page is not working properly etc.

b. If your site design is breaking the strategic pathway, for example, you may have links to external sites that are inducing clients to click away before buying your product or signing up for your newsletter.

c. If there is something on these pages that is encouraging visitors to leave your site. For example, an unprofessional design or confusing layout.

In your log files / site statistics, the graph or chart called "Top Exit Pages" is the place to learn why visitors are leaving your site.


3. Single Access Pages

These are entry pages that are viewed once before the visitor clicks away from your site. Similar to Top Exit Pages, Single Access Pages can tell you a lot about why people are not staying on your site for long.

Have a close look at the search terms used to find your site. Single Access Pages can often indicate that your target search terms are too broad. For example, you may be getting a lot of traffic by targeting "printer cartridges" but if you only stock a particular brand of cartridge, then people seeking other brands are not going to find what they truly seek when they arrive at your site so they will leave immediately. This can be resolved by narrowing down your search terms to be more targeted and focused on your niche products and services, for example, by changing "printer cartridges" to "HP printer cartridges" and so on.

To see what pages of your site are viewed once, look for the graph or chart called "Single Access Pages" in your log files / site statistics.


4. Most Requested Page(s) and Top Entry Pages

Tracking these pages is key to measuring the success of your SEO campaign. If your optimization is effective, the Top Entry Pages and Most Requested Pages should be those that you have optimized for target keywords. The Top Entry Pages are particularly relevant as you consider the pathways through your site. Do the most popular entry pages have any relationship to the start pages for your plotted visitor pathways? Or are visitors entering and navigating your site via ways you didn't intend? You can use this information to continually tweak your page optimization to guide visitors to the right pathways.

To see your most requested pages, look for the graph or chart titled "Most Requested Pages" in your log files / site statistics. Also look for "Top Entry Pages".


5. Page refreshes

Why are visitors refreshing pages on your site? Are the pages not loading properly? The "Page Refreshes" variable is another one to monitor on a monthly basis via your site stats to ensure that there are not site usability issues for visitors.


6. Referring Domains and Referring URLs

Where are your visitors coming from? Are they coming from sites that are linked to yours? Are blog authors or forum members talking about your site? Referring Domains will tell you what sites are linking to yours, while Referring URLs will list the actual pages where the links are located. These can be little gold mines because you can often find valuable sources of traffic via links to your site that you didn't even know existed.

In terms of an SEO campaign, these links can all add to your site's overall link popularity, an important factor in the ranking algorithms of many search engines, particularly Google. Monitoring these metrics can tell you if your site requires a link-building campaign or help you measure the effectiveness of various online and offline advertising campaigns.

In your log files / site statistics, Look for the graph or chart titled "Referring Domains" and "Referring URLs".


7. Search Engine Referrals

How many of your visitors are coming directly from search engines? What percentage of overall traffic does this represent? This is a good variable to track to help you keep up with how many search engines are listing your site (both free submission and paid submissions), how much traffic they bring and whether to renew your paid submissions. It can also tell you whether you need to increase the number of search engines your site is submitted to in order to build on your link popularity. As a a very rough guide, you should be receiving at least 30 percent of your site traffic via search engine referrals.

To see search engine referrals, look for a chart or graph called "Search Engines" within your site statistics.


8. Search Phrases

This topic is related to search engine referrals generally, but gives added insight into what terms you were actually found for in the search engines. Do these terms match what your site was optimized for? Are there any surprising terms that you might want to develop site content for? Some log file analysis programs will even break down what specific phrases your site was found for in which particular search engines. The more detailed the data you have, the more closely you can tweak your optimization campaign to your precise market.

To see the search phrases your site was found for, look for "Search Phrases" or "Search Phrases by "Search Engine".


9. Landing pages for PCC Campaigns, etc.


If you run a pay-per-click campaign or dedicate specific pages to advertising product specials, you may use special landing pages or tracking ids to monitor your traffic and conversions. Your site logs can help you track these by showing you how many visitors they each had and what they did after they visited those pages.


10. Metric values that show a radical change from developing trends

Any site metrics that show a dramatic change from one month to the next could pin-point a problem with your site or with your optimization campaign. For example, if your search engine referrals have dropped dramatically, it could indicate that you have been penalized in a search engine (or more than one). Noticing changing trends early gives you the chance to investigate problem areas and make adjustments if necessary.


Please note that all log file analysis and site statistics programs are different and use slightly different terms to describe the metrics listed above. If you're confused, ask your site admin or hosting provider to highlight these for you.

Remember, your log files are gold mines filled with nuggets of information about your optimized web site. If you keep digging on a regular basis, you'll eventually strike it rich with success.

Copyright © 2005 by Kalena and Jerry Jordan. All rights reserved under U.S. and international law.

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The above article may be re-published as long as the content remains unchanged and the following paragraph is included at the end of the article, including the URL links:

Article by Kalena and Jerry Jordan. As well as running their own SEO business Web Rank, Kalena and Jerry Jordan manage Search Engine College, an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing subjects.

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How to Submit Your Site To Directories

By Kalena Jordan

Unlike submitting to search engines, submitting your site to directories and niche portals usually involves a lot more than simply typing in your URL. You often have to start by researching the various topic categories to find the most appropriate area to submit to. Then you generally have to provide some detailed information about your site, its’ content, your company and your contact details.

When selecting the most appropriate Directory category to submit your site to, conduct a search for your main keyword phrase and view the various related categories. Study the sites listed within these categories and choose the category that is the most relevant to or closely related to your site content. Some directories like ODP have specific Category Descriptions you should read before submitting, to ensure you have chosen the most relevant topic for your site.

Another way to choose your category is to search for sites belonging to your direct competitors. It is likely that the category they are listed in will be the most relevant to your site.

If your site targets or discusses a specific regional market, you will need to submit to a regional category. For example, if my site was about rental cars for hire in Sydney, Australia, I would need to submit it to this regional Yahoo category and not this general Yahoo rental car category.

I find it useful to submit a slightly different description of my client’s sites for each directory submission. That way, I can gauge which descriptions are more effective in terms of encouraging people to click and also which directories are providing my clients with the most traffic. Many directories feed their database results to other engines and directories, so if I have a description unique to each directory and I see that description pop up on other search sites, I know it is the result of that original directory submission and immediately recognize the value of that original submission.

Remember that directory editors don’t care about your site’s ranking in their search results. If they are reviewing a site submission that contains an obviously keyword stuffed title and description, they are unlikely to find it appealing or beneficial for inclusion in their database! Always make sure your submission details are relevant, interesting and accurate. Try to highlight your site’s benefits for the visitor and unique content that makes it stand out from others in the same category. If your site sounds just like a cookie-cutter version of others of the same topic, there is no incentive for the editor to include it.


Submitting to the Yahoo! Directory

There are a couple of sites where you want to take extreme care and do advance research when submitting your site. One of these is the Yahoo! Directory. The way you submit your site to Yahoo! can make or break your site’s ultimate ranking in the Directory and if you’re not careful, could also cost you USD 299 for nothing.

With Yahoo!’s huge market share and popularity worldwide, I believe it’s vital that your site is listed in Yahoo!’s Directory. The best way to get listed quickly is by paying the fee for Express Submission. Yahoo! Express is an expedited fee-based site suggestion service for web sites submitted to the Yahoo! directory. A member of Yahoo!'s editorial staff will look at your site, consider your suggestion and respond to you within 7 business days. Important: Payment does not guarantee inclusion in the directory, site placement, or site commentary. It only guarantees that Yahoo! will respond to your suggestion within seven business days, by either adding or denying the site.

The secret to obtaining excellent results via your Yahoo! submission is to choose the most appropriate category and include a carefully-crafted description that contains your main keyword phrase/s without being too verbose. For those of you offering a Yahoo! submission service to clients, be sure to charge a generous admin fee for your expertise in researching the category and writing the description for your client – a successful Yahoo submission can pay dividends for your client for years.

Example of a successful site description for Yahoo!:

ABC VIP Adventures - offers tailored adventure travel and vacation packages to New Zealand including day tours, exotic corporate trips, luxury travel packages, kite surfing, and extreme sports.

Example of an unsuccessful site description for Yahoo!:

ABC Travel – we are the best! We are the only company to contact for your vacation. Call now!

The latter does not use the actual company name, plus it contains lots of hype but no keywords and few clues as to what the site is about. In this case, the Yahoo! editor would have to visit the site submitted and come up with their own description and it’s doubtful the edited description will be something the submitter would be happy with.


Submitting to Open Directory

Another Directory where submission is critical is the Open Directory. DMOZ is run entirely by volunteers and your site submission must be hand-reviewed by one of these volunteers before it can be considered for inclusion. DMOZ is extremely under-staffed (I know this because I’m a DMOZ editor!) and it can take 6 or more months before your submission is reviewed – you must be patient. When submitting to DMOZ, make sure you follow the directory submission guidelines above and prepare to wait, wait and wait some more.

Procedure to follow for a successful DMOZ Submission:

1) Submit site
2) wait for 3 months
3) follow up email to category editor
4) wait for 3 months
5) escalation email to category editor above your category
6) wait for 3 months
7) ask for assistance in the Open Directory Public Forum
8) wait for 1 month
9) escalation email to DMOZ senior staff & post to various forums seeking help (last resort only)
10) Assume your submission is not relevant for DMOZ inclusion and move on!


Rules of Submission

1) Do it once: Despite the hype, there is NEVER a need to resubmit to a search engine or directory unless your site is dropped entirely (which is a very rare occurrence).
2) Do it properly: Be very thorough when submitting, especially to directories. Take the time to research and locate the most appropriate category for your site.
3) Be brief: Don’t waffle on about your site in the description field. Get to the point and describe your site in a short sentence or two.
4) Be accurate: Don’t try to trick potential visitors by using vague or misleading descriptions about your products or services.
5) Be relevant: There is a fine line to tread between relevance and keyword optimization when creating your site descriptions for submissions. Try not to cross it by using descriptions over-stuffed with keywords.
6) Be humble: “Best Web Site in the World!!!!” is not going to convince anyone and may earn you the wrath of search engine editors.
7) Be patient: Search engines and directories can take up to 6 months to index and list your site. Re-submitting won’t help things and could result in your site being shoved to the bottom of the review pile.


So that wraps up the directory submission process. It can be time consuming, but taking a little bit of time and care with your submissions can pay dividends for your site for years to come.


(1,206 words)

Copyright © 2005 by Kalena Jordan. All rights reserved under U.S. and international law.

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The above article may be re-published as long as the content remains unchanged and the following paragraph is included at the end of the article, including the URL links:

Article by Kalena Jordan. As well as running her own SEO business Web Rank, Kalena Jordan manages Search Engine College, an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing subjects.

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How to Submit Your Site To Search Engines

By Kalena Jordan

Many years ago, when I was first learning about optimization and search engine submission, I looked everywhere on the Web for an easy tutorial that explained step-by-step how to submit a website to search engines and directories. I couldn’t find one and so I had to piece together the most successful process to use via trial and error.

Now there is such a huge amount of misinformation on the Web about search engine submission, I thought it was high time I wrote a basic tutorial to help webmasters sort fact from fiction.


Before You Begin

Before you can start to submit your site to search engines, you need to make sure it is ready for indexing. Use the following checklist to be absolutely sure your site is submission-ready:

• Are all pages complete? (No “under construction” pages)
• Are all links valid? (No broken or dead links)
• Are all pages optimized?
• Are all pages search engine compatible?
• Have you used Robots.txt or Robots META Tag to prevent pages you want hidden (e.g. shopping cart) from being indexed?
• If your site is an e-commerce site, is your ordering process or shopping cart functional and tested for bugs?
• Are you prepared to handle a sudden influx of traffic and/or sales?
• Have you tested your site for usability? (Google “web site usability” for more information)
  

Submission Spreadsheet

To make your job of submitting easier, you also need to prepare a text file or spreadsheet listing the following:

1. Your site’s main URL
2. The URLs for other pages on your site that you will be submitting
3. Your site’s Title (the name of your site you want listed in engines. This is usually your
4. company name e.g. Atlanta City Tours or Acme Widgets)
5. A short description of your page/site content (10-20 words)
6. A long description of your page/site content (30-50 words)
7. A list of target keywords for your page/site
8. Name of submitter
9. Email address of submitter (we suggest using a real account you check regularly, but one where you have strict controls over incoming spam email – you will receive some spam as a result of your submissions!)
10. Address and contact details of your company (some directories ask for this)
    

It is particularly important to keep track of the email address you use when submitting your site, because some directories, like Yahoo for example, require you to cite this address if you want to make changes to your listing later on.

I like to use a text file created in Notepad for the above, but some people prefer to use a Word doc or a spreadsheet. It’s up to you. Remember to utilize your target search keywords as much as possible when creating your site descriptions. Or you can use parts of your optimized Title and META tags, as long as you don’t go overboard stuffing keywords and making your site description spam-like.

The site submission information I might prepare for a fictional Miami florist would look something like this:

1. http://www.funkyflorists.com/ (fictional URL for demonstration purposes only)
2. www.funkyflorists.com/page1.htm, www.funkyflorists.com/page2.htm etc
3. Funky Florists of Miami
4. Florists in Miami, Florida creating wedding bouquets, floral arrangements, tributes and displays for gifts and special occasions. Online ordering available.
5. Funky Florists Miami create beautiful wedding bouquets, floral arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions, including weddings, Valentines Day, parties and corporate events. We arrange florist deliveries throughout Miami and right across Florida. We are one of very few florists in Florida to offer a personal floral service, delivered anywhere, anytime.
6. Florists Miami, florists Florida, wedding bouquets, wedding flowers, wedding roses, Valentine’s Day roses, sympathy gifts, Mother’s Day gifts, funeral wreaths, flower deliveries, floral arrangements, birthday gifts, wedding decorations.
7. Kalena Jordan
8. webmaster@funkyflorists.com
9. 12 Fictional StreetFictional Town, Miami FL USAPhone: (00) 555 55555
   

You should also create a spreadsheet or Word doc listing all the search engines you plan to submit your site to, their URLs, a comments field (for chosen categories etc) and a date column. Then as you submit to each site, you can check it off on your list, writing down the date submitted.

You could even create another date column for when your site appears in the search engine so you can gauge how long the submission took to become active. It’s important that you keep track of this information so that you don’t accidentally resubmit to a search engine or directory that you’ve already covered. If you are submitting to a search engine using a paid submission option, always make note of your receipt number in case you need to follow it up.

Happy submitting!

(780 words)

Copyright © 2005 by Kalena Jordan. All rights reserved under U.S. and international law.

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The above article may be re-published as long as the content remains unchanged and the following paragraph is included at the end of the article, including the URL links:

Article by Kalena Jordan. As well as running her own SEO business Web Rank, Kalena Jordan manages Search Engine College, an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing subjects.

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How to Create a Favicon for Your Web Site

By Kalena Jordan

Ever see those little custom icons next to a web site listing in your favorites folder or on your browser address bar? Have you ever wondered how to create one for your own site? Well I'm going to teach you in this article.

The icons are called "favicons", a contraction of the phrase "favorite icons". To see an example, go to Search Engine College and bookmark the site (or add to your "favorites" list). Now close your browser window and open a new one. Click on your bookmarked sites or favorites list and find the site you just bookmarked. See the tiny mortarboard graphic next to the listing? That's a favicon. It makes the site stand out from all the others in your favorites list. If you click on that site, the favicon will even load next to the URL in your browser address bar from now on.

Cool huh? Like to create a favicon for your own site? It's easier than you think. Here's what you do:

1) Choose an image or symbol that you would like to use to represent your web site. This could be a tiny version of your logo, a graphic or perhaps a stylized version of your company initials. A famous example of this is the "Y!" favicon used by Yahoo! A favicon is meant to reflect the look and feel of a web site or a company logo. Remember it needs to be simple and clear enough to have visual impact when converted to 16 x 16 pixels.

2) Take a high quality version of your chosen image in .JPG or .GIF format and if it isn't already, convert your image to the 256 color Web Safe Palette or the Windows 16 color format (the fewer colors the better).

3) Using your favorite graphics package or image manipulation software, reduce the image down to 16 pixels wide by 16 pixels high, being careful to preserve the image resolution. This is the tricky bit, because you might find your chosen image looks fantastic at the original size and downright silly at 16 x 16 pixels! Keep experimenting until you are happy with the finished icon.

If you can't seem to make it work or you're short on time, you can use a free icon converter like Image Icon Converter to convert your graphic to an icon or use an icon editor such as ImageAuthor to build your icon from scratch.

4) You're nearly done! Now, take your completed icon and save it as "favicon.ico". This is the default icon name that web browsers like Internet Explorer and Netscape look for. If you want to be really clever, you can even create a customized icon for each page on your site - instructions for this can be found at Favicon.com.

5) Take your .ico file and copy it into the the root directory of your web site (the main directory that contains all your HTML pages). Now every time a visitor bookmarks your site, your icon is copied into their cache file and displays whenever that visitor returns.

6) To test your finished favicon, get a friend or colleague to bookmark your site and then open a new browser window. You can bookmark your own site but you generally only get one attempt at this so it's best to save it for when you are sure you're happy with your finished favicon.

Alternatively, dump your temporary Internet cache and open a new browser window between tries. If you did it correctly, you should see your shiny new favicon appear in your favorites list next to your site listing and also next to your URL in the address field of your browser.

That's it, you're done! You now have an eye-catching icon representing your web site in the favorites list of all your visitors. A professional impact for very little effort.

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The above article may be re-published as long as the content remains unchanged and the following paragraph is included at the end of the article, including the URL links:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running her own SEO business Web Rank, Kalena manages Search Engine College, an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing subjects.

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Before Launching Your SEO Campaign

By Kalena Jordan

One of the most important aspects of a search engine optimization campaign is also one of the most overlooked – preparation! There are some important steps to take in advance of launching your campaign that will make sure it has a better chance at succeeding.


Before You Start

Before you start any search engine optimization campaign, whether it’s for your own site or that belonging to a client, you need to answer the following important questions:

1) What is the overall motivation for optimizing this site? What do I/they hope to achieve? (e.g. more sales, more subscribers, more traffic, more publicity etc.)

2) What is my/their time-frame for this project?

3) What is my/their budget for this project?

4) Who will be responsible for this project? Will it be a joint or solo effort? Will it be run entirely in-house or outsourced?

Answering these questions will help you to build a framework for your campaign and establish limitations for the size and scope of the campaign.


How Search Engine-Compatible is the Site Currently?

Something I find very useful before quoting on any SEO project is to produce what I call a Search Engine Compatibility Review. This is where I carry out a detailed overview and analysis of a site's search engine compatibility in terms of HTML design, page extensions, link popularity, title and META tags, body text, target keywords, ALT IMG tags, page load time, and other design elements that can impact search engine indexing. It just helps sort out in my mind what design elements need tweaking to make the site as search engine-friendly as possible.

You might consider preparing something similar for your own site or clients.


Requirements Gathering

Next, you need to establish the project requirements, so you can tailor the SEO campaign to you or your client’s exact needs. For those of you servicing clients, this information is often required before you are able to quote accurately.

To determine your project requirements, you need to have the following questions answered:

1) What technology was used to build the site? (i.e. Flash, PHP, frames, Cold Fusion, JavaScript, Flat HTML etc)

2) What are the file extensions of the pages? (i.e. .htm, .php, .cfm etc)

3) Does the site contain database driven content? If so, will the URLs contain query strings? e.g. www.site.com/longpagename?source=123444fgge3212, (containing “?” symbols), or does the site use parameter workarounds to remove the query strings? (the latter is search engine friendly).

4) Are there at least 250 words of text on the home page and other pages to be optimized?

5) How does the navigation work? Does it use text links or graphical links or JavaScript drop-down menus?

6) Approximately how many pages does the site contain? How many of these will be optimized?

7) What is the current link popularity of the site?

8) What is the approximate Google PageRank of the site? Would it benefit from link building?

9) Do I have the ability to edit the source code directly? Or will I need to hand-over the optimized code to a site admin for integration?

10) Do I have permission to alter the visible content of the site?

11) What are the products/services that the site promotes? (e.g. widgets, mobile phones, hire cars etc.)

12) What are the site’s geographical target markets? Are they global? Country specific? State specific? Town specific?

13) What are the site’s demographic target markets? (e.g. young urban females, working mothers, single parents etc.)

14) What are 20 search keywords or phrases that I think my/my client’s target markets will use to find the site in the search engines? (More about this next lesson).

15) Who are my/my client’s major competitors online? What are their URLs? What keywords are they targeting?

16) Who are the stake-holders of this site? How will I report to them?

17) Do I have access to site traffic logs or statistics to enable me to track visitor activity during the campaign? Specifically, what visitor activity will I be tracking?

18) How do I plan on tracking my or my client’s rankings in the search engines?

19) Do I or my client have the ability and resources in place to respond to increased traffic/business as a result of the campaign?

20) What are my/my client’s expectations for the optimization campaign? Are they realistic?


Answers to the first 10 questions above will determine the complexity of optimization required. For example, if the site pages currently have little text on them, you know you’ll need to integrate more text to make the site compatible with search engines and to be able to include your target keywords. If the site currently uses frames, you will need to rebuild the pages without frames or create special No-Frames tags to make sure the site can be indexed, and so on.

This initial analysis will help you to scope the time and costs involved in advance. For those of you optimizing client sites, obtaining accurate answers to these questions BEFORE quoting is absolutely crucial. Otherwise you can find yourself in the middle of a project that you have severely under-quoted for.

The remainder of questions are to establish in advance the who, what, where, when, why and how of the optimization campaign. This will help you determine the most logical keywords and phrases to target, as well as which search engines to submit the site to.

For those of you optimizing web sites for a living, you might consider developing a questionnaire that you can give clients to complete to ensure you tailor the web site optimization to their exact needs.


You’re Now Prepared

So now you are clear about your motivations for optimizing the site, you know more about the target markets, you know how compatible the existing site is with search engines and how much work is involved in the search engine optimization process. You’re ready to tackle the job!


Copyright © 2005 by Kalena Jordan. All rights reserved under U.S. and international law.

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The above article may be re-published as long as the content remains unchanged and the following paragraph is included at the end of the article, including the URL links:

Article by Kalena Jordan. As well as running her own SEO business Web Rank, Kalena Jordan manages Search Engine College, an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing subjects.

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Latest Proposal Kit Ideal for SEOs

[This article was updated in January 2008]

By Kalena Jordan

Last year I discovered a terrific new business tool and I was so thrilled with its potential that I wrote a review article about it to share my discovery with others.

The product was Proposal Kit. My review was called Close the Sale With Proposal Kit and I've had a lot of feedback from readers of that article, thanking me for introducing them to the product.

In case you're not already familiar with the software, Proposal Kit takes the guesswork out of drafting a proposal or contract. It automates the chore of putting together a complex business proposal. Basically, Proposal Kit provides a comprehensive range of templates to suit any business requirement and helps you build a framework for your proposal to match virtually any product or service offering. You then flesh out the templates with your own data and contact details. Templates are particularly suited to online businesses and include documents for the initial sales pitch, the planning stage, estimating, contracting, project timelines, analysis and even invoicing.

I've been using Proposal Kit for over 8 months now and I am still as enthusiastic about it as ever. So when developers of the product (Cyber Sea) told me of their latest upgrade this month, I was very excited.

You see, amongst the 40 new contract templates available in the new versions of Proposal Kit Pro and Contract Kit Pro is a Search Engine Optimization Services Contract, designed for SEOs just like me.

More about that later, but first let’s take a look at what’s been upgraded in the latest versions of the product:

Proposal Packs 9.0

• Over 300 pages of new material have been added to Proposal Pack (new templates, checklists, samples, instructional material) adding over 60% more material to this version.

• Added 61 new proposal templates increasing the total number of templates to over 270. Templates added: Profile, Client Summary, Abstract, Estimate, Significance, Activities, Design, Planning, Approach, Innovativeness, Project Plan, System Plan, Promotion, Site Planning, Environmental, Public Relations, Community, Coordination, Responsibilities, Documentation, Authority, Measures of Success, Dissemination, Budget Information, Wholesale Price List, Retail Price List, Cost Effectiveness, Resources, Hourly Services Contract, Invoice, Memorandum of Understanding, Credentials, Capabilities, Accreditations, Certifications, Geographic Information, Key Positions, Contractors, Legal Eligibility, Authorization, Board of Directors, Policies, Flow Chart, Board Resolution, Contact Letter, Letter of Transmittal, Support Letter, Commitment Letter, Collaboration Letters, Report, Tab, Worksheet, Supplied Form, Appendix F, Appendix G, Appendix H, Appendix I, Appendix J, Fax Cover Sheet, Bid / No-Bid Checklist, Grant Proposal Development Checklist.

• Added a proposal bid/no-bid decision checklist.

• Added a government grant proposal development checklist.

• Added a complete service level agreement to the Contract and Terms template.

• Added an additional manual for writing Federal government grant proposals using Proposal Pack.

• 15 general business sample proposals have been added.

• 10 Federal government grant sample proposals have been added (USDA, Department of Justice, Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services, Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Housing and Urban Development).

• New Title Page graphics have been added for “Resume”, “Contract”, “Plan”, “Submission”, “Presentation”, “Report”, “Study”, “Estimate”, “Response”.

• The Table of Contents has been updated to add all of the new templates.

Proposal Kit Pro 12.0

• Over 500 pages of new material have been added to Proposal Kit Pro (new templates, checklists, samples, instructional material) adding over 50% more material to this version.
  
  Contract Pack:

• Minor grammar changes made to some documents.

• Four new categories of contracts have been added: Advertising and Marketing, Graphics and Printing, Computer Systems and Internal Company Plans.

• 41 new contracts, agreements and related documents have been added (over 144 pages of new material): Authorization to Start Work, Replication Quote Order Form, Email Marketing Creative by Agency Agreement, Email Marketing Creative by Designer Agreement, Pay Per Click (PPC) SEO Campaign Services Contract, Signage and Printing Order Form, Print Quote Form, Colocation Hosting Short Form Contract, Managed Hosting Service Level Agreement, Web Hosting Change Addendum, Pocket Photo Release Agreement, Photo Reprint Rights Agreement, Photo Credit Waiver, General Services Agreement, Repair Estimate Quote, General Contractor Work Order, Right of First Refusal Partnership Agreement, Right of First Refusal with Non-Disclosure Agreement, Works for Hire Agreement, Project Acceptance Partial Signoff, Project Acceptance Simple Signoff, Software Development Plan, Reprint Rights Agreement, SEO Services Reseller Contract, Disaster Recovery Plan, Software Disaster Recovery Plan, Human Resources Guide Update Addendum, PDA Usage Policy, Wireless Networking Usage Policy, Application for Employment, Employment Non-Compete and Non-Disclosure, Drug and Alcohol Testing Consent Form, Employee Promotion Authorization Form, Employee Notice of Salary Increase Form, Employee Injury Report Form, Expense Report, Hourly Services Agreement, Company Equipment Checkout Form, Agency Photo Shoot Model Release Form, Employee Grievance Form, Employee Demotion Form

• Many existing contracts have been updated with new replaceable tags and consistent usage of terms.

• Added 20 new standard mail merge tags to many documents: <>, <>, <>, <>, <>,<>, <>, <>, <>, <>, <>, <>, <>, <>, <>, <>, <>, <>, <>, <>
  
  Estimate Pack:

• Updated HTML organizer to help find and open documents easier.

• Added Customer and Proposal Number tags to all spreadsheets for helping organize estimates by customer and proposal.

• Updated line items in existing spreadsheets with additional material.

• Added Help Desk Services Estimate Spreadsheet.

• Added Print Project Estimate Spreadsheet.

• Added Flash Animation Project Estimate Spreadsheet.

• Added Network Server Setup Estimate Spreadsheet.

• Added Software Services Project Estimate Spreadsheet.

• Added Computer Repair and Maintenance Estimate Spreadsheet.
  
  Project Management Pack:

• Renamed product from "Web Plan Kit" to "Project Management Pack".

• Minor updates to existing documents to update outdated material.

• Added Web Development Worksheet Overview.

• Added Describe Your Web Site Worksheet (R01).

• Added Describe User Controlled Content Worksheet (R02).

• Added Describe Your Web Site Functions Worksheet (R03).

• Added Describe Your Web Site Users Worksheet (R04).

• Added Describe Your Web Site Administration Worksheet (R05).

• Added Describe Your Web Site Home Page Worksheet (R06).

• Added Project Plan Worksheet.

• Added Project Analysis Overview Worksheet.

• Added SEO Organic Keyword Report.

• Added SEO Pay Per Click Keyword Report.

• Added Customer Service Call Log Spreadsheet.

• Added Disaster Recovery Plan.

• Added Software Disaster Recovery Plan.

• Added Expense Report Spreadsheet.

Click Here for details on Proposal Kit pricing, a product comparison chart and information on how to upgrade.

Now about that SEO Services Contract that I’m so excited about. Having run an SEO business for over five years now, I KNOW how difficult it is to produce a reliable, standard contract to give to SEO clients. Search engine optimization can be such a complex process that it is vitally important your client contract spells out your services, delivery schedule, responsibilities and campaign expectations while addressing all areas of potential client confusion.

Such contracts take time to develop and can be very expensive if drawn up from scratch by a law firm. Many SEOs, especially those just starting out, simply don’t have the time, resources, knowledge or budget to have a high quality, water-tight contract developed for their business. That’s why I see the inclusion of an SEO Services Contract in the latest Proposal Kit upgrade as a boon for SEOs everywhere.

Even if your business already has a contract in place, the purchase price of Proposal Kit Pro or Contract Pack Pro, (both which come with the SEO contract included), is well worth the investment to be able to compare your contract with the detailed sample provided. Something important to keep in mind is that legal contracts in the Contract Pack should not be viewed as binding legal documents until they are reviewed by your lawyer. Because every business has different products, services, clients and operates in different geographical environments, legal requirements vary widely. By all means use the contract templates to draft your contract, but make sure you have the document carefully reviewed by your company law firm to ensure it meets your specific legal requirements. This is emphasized within the templates.

Not all sections of the SEO Contract will apply to every SEO business, particularly those listed under “Services Provided”, but the document is so comprehensive that you can mix and match sections and clauses that are specifically relevant to your business, such as “Delivery Dates and Milestones”, “Web Page Creation, Edits and Custom Programming” and “Keyword Selection”.

I’ve already spotted three or four important clauses that our existing client contract overlooks. Not to mention the benefits of having access to hundreds of professional proposal templates from which to pick and choose to match your own business requirements.

For smaller SEOs or those just starting out in the industry, the latest version of Proposal Kit could save you a fortune and give your business a much-needed injection of professionalism. Of course, that goes for non-SEO businessess too!

Copyright by Kalena Jordan. All rights reserved under U.S. and international law.

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The above article may be re-published as long as the content remains unchanged and the following paragraph is included at the end of the article, including the URL links:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running her own SEO business, Kalena manages Search Engine College, an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing subjects.

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10 Easy Steps to a User Friendly Website

By Kalena Jordan

As a busy search engine optimization consultant, I don't have a lot of time to manage my website. But recently I learnt the hard way about the fickle nature of website visitors and the damage that having a user-unfriendly site can do to a business.

Now I give my website usability much more priority than ever before.

Here's what happened. I had written a research report late last year and was selling it as a downloadable e-book via the site. However, I was relying on an offline press release and links from other sites to lead visitors to the specific page from which the report could be purchased.

Although this report resulted in considerable press attention, much of the media coverage did not include a link direct to my report page, or in some casese, even my website, meaning that interested parties were forced to conduct a search for my site.

It wasn't until I received an email from a potential customer advising me that he had searched my home page and couldn't find a link to the report that I had my "Duh!" moment. I had forgotten to include a link to the report page from my home page! My old website had no site map or site search tool either, so potential customers finally arrived at my site, only to click away in frustration after not being able to easily find information on my research report.

Goodness knows how many sales I missed out on due to this oversight. Embarrassed, I quickly added a link to my home page and made a mental note to study up on website usability, pronto.

Since then, I've learnt that improving your website usability isn't time-consuming, it isn't expensive and it's certainly not difficult. It simply involves common sense and dedication to the task. Here are 10 easy steps that anyone can implement to make their website more user friendly:

1) Create a Site Map

No matter what the size of your website, you should include a detailed, text-based site map, with a link to every page and preferably, a short description of what each page offers. An excellent example of a site map can be found here. The advantage of using a site map is that you don't have to link to every page from your home page, but you should link to your site map from every page. Not only are site maps useful for visitors looking for specific information on your site, but they are great "spider-food", meaning they are a way for search engines to easily find and index every page on your site.


2) Use a Logical Navigation Structure

When designing your site navigation menu, use logical headings and link descriptions. For example, "web site design services" is much more intuitive to a visitor than "Internet services". Use Cookie Crumbs to show visitors where they are on your site at any point. These are headings you often see at the top of websites and search portals showing what category and page you are currently browsing (e.g. Home > Travel > UK > Bristol > Bed & Breakfasts). Guide Visitors to specific pathways throughout your site. You can do this using Call-to-Action links instructing visitors what page they should view or what action they should take next e.g. "Click Here to Order", "Bookmark This Page", or "View Our Catalogue Now".


3) Check for Errors Regularly

There's nothing worse than browsing a site or following a link only to find it leads nowhere. Make sure you check your site at least once a month for any broken links. There are low cost link checking tools such as Link Defender available to help you keep on top of this. Make sure your HTML code is designed to display correctly in different browser versions.

Also ensure that your site hosting provider is stable and reliable to avoid any unnecessary downtime of your website. Services such as Internet Seer can help you monitor your site uptime free of charge. Make sure your site does not contain spelling or grammatical mistakes. If you're not the world's best speller, have trusted friends and colleagues check your site copy for errors. When proofing your site, remember to take into account regional spelling usage for different audiences worldwide, e.g. British versus American English. A webmaster service such as Net Mechanic can be used to check for many of these errors via the one location.


4) Use a Consistent Design and Layout

Common sense rules here - make sure you use a consistent design and layout for each page on your site. This means using the same general colour scheme, logo, consistent navigation menu, header and footer in the same location and consistent link attributes (e.g. always underlined). This way you never alienate your visitor or cause them to become confused and lose their momentum to keep looking.


5) Include a Site Search Tool

A user friendly website provides the visitor with the ability to search the site for specific keywords. Thought this one was too hard? Me too. Until I discovered Atomz Site Search. This is a software program that provides site-wide search for websites of 500 pages or less, for free. It's a quick and painless way to setup and customize your own site-wide search tool. They also offer a paid version for larger sites.


6) Ensure All Forms Work

It sounds obvious and it should be. If you're going to make your site interactive with feedback forms, newsletter sign-ups, guestbooks and the like, then make sure they work! Double check each form field is large enough to accomodate even the longest of names. Think about your international visitors when creating fields such as Zip Code. Make it clear which fields are required by marking them with an asterix. Test the form to make sure it submits correctly and displays the right confirmation message upon completion.


7) Ensure Shopping Carts are Functional

This is vital for any type of e-commerce site. Ensure you have adequate product descriptions, pictures, specifications and crystal clear pricing. Include information on shipping and freight costs and integrate any taxes within your price list. If selling internationally, include a foreign exchange calculator such as the free one provided by XE for visitors to compare costs in their local currency. Make sure your shopping cart pages are protected by SSL or a secure certificate to give visitors the confidence to reveal their personal and credit card information without threat or risk.

Provide simple instructions for completing the online transaction, give them the ability to back out easily and provide a help email address or phone number on every page of the process in case they get stuck. For instant transactions, provide a receipt immediately and confirm their transaction was successful. As with your online forms, test, test and test again. It only takes one bad experience for you to lose a potential lifetime customer.


8) Include Obvious Contact Details

With all the scams proliferating the web these days, people are understandably sceptical when it comes to online business. To build trust, you absolutely, positively need to display contact details prominently on your site. If you're not willing to provide a way for people to contact you, why should anyone be willing to buy from you? You should include your business address (preferably your street address and a postal address), a telephone number and at least one email address. If you are concerned about spam email harvesters, you can either hide your email address within a HTML encoder such as Natata or only use a contact form for people to submit to contact you with (although many people, including me, find the latter annoying).


9) Use Easy to Understand Language

The Internet is no place for verbosity. People are in a hurry - they want to find what they seek quickly and easily with the least hassle possible. You can help them in this quest by ensuring your site pages use simple language and easy to grasp concepts throughout. For example instead of "brand-building web information architects", use "website designers specialising in brand promotion".

Keep the text on each page to a minimum, using bullet points and sub-headings to get your main points across or to demonstrate your product benefits. Use the old WIIFM (What's In It For Me?) adage when composing your body copy to keep the user's interests at top of mind. Remember your international visitors by avoiding regional word usage or technical jargon that could alienate. Want your visitor to take a particular action? Spell it out for them in plain English.


10) Make it search engine friendly

Last, but by no means least, make sure your site is search engine compatible. A user friendly site is generally a search engine friendly site too. Use body text and headings in place of graphical text. Use a text-based navigation menu instead of a graphical or drop-down javascript menu. Avoid frames, Flash or any code that could trip up a search engine spider trying to index your site. Use logical Title and META tags for each page, tailoring these to match the content found within. Scatter target keywords and search phrases throughout your body copy to give your pages better ranking potential on engines and directories for related searches. Don't compromise the readability of your copy to achieve this - hire an expert copywriter to strike the right balance if need be.


So there you have it. 10 easy steps to making your websites more user friendly. Now you have no more excuses for avoiding usability. Implement one of these per week and your visitors will repay you with loyalty.

Copyright © 2005 by Kalena Jordan. All rights reserved under U.S. and international law.

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The above article may be re-published as long as the content remains unchanged and the following paragraph is included at the end of the article, including the URL links:

Article by Kalena Jordan. As well as running her own SEO business Web Rank, Kalena Jordan manages Search Engine College, an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing subjects.

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Close The Sale With Proposal Kit

[This article was updated in January 2008]

By Kalena Jordan

I never read banner ads. That's why I was surprised to find myself clicking on a banner the other day. The ad intrigued me because it offered to fulfill a pressing need I had.

Over the years, I had developed what I thought was a fairly slick proposal template for my search engine optimization business. But still the document lacked an edge. I knew I had lost a couple of recent pitches to my competitors and I wondered if there was something about their proposals that I was missing in mine.

You know that a good proposal can make or break a sale. This is particularly the case when your only communication with potential clients is via the Internet. But how do you know you've covered all the important aspects of your services? How can you be sure you've covered all project estimates? What if you need to include some legal contract information in your document but you can't afford to hire a lawyer? How do you make your proposal stand out from your competitors if you don't have any graphic design skills? Are you forgetting an important section in your proposal that your potential client was expecting? I found myself asking all these questions when preparing quotations for potential clients.

The banner ad from Proposal Kit offered a solution to my problem. It advertised "Turn-key contract, estimating and proposal kits for today's Internet professional". That's exactly what I was looking for, so I clicked on the banner ad, fully expecting to find some ultra-hyped, over-rated, disappointing backyard software. Boy was I wrong!

What I found was probably the most cost-effective and useful tool for online business that I have EVER come across. Seriously!

Proposal Kit takes the guesswork out of drafting a proposal or contract. It automates the chore of putting together a complex business proposal. Basically, Proposal Kit provides a comprehensive range of templates to suit any business requirement and helps you build a framework for your proposal to match virtually any product or service offering. You then flesh out the templates with your own data and contact details. Templates are particularly suited to online businesses and include documents for t