Posts Tagged ‘blog’

There are a lot of different ways to say the same thing. Anyone who has performed keyword research knows that people search for a lot of the same things using very different phrases and terminology. For example, if you’re looking to build your online business, you could search for: internet marketing, website marketing, online marketing, website promotion, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, SEO, and a dozen other variations.

Or if you’re a physician looking to manage health records online, you could search for: EHR, EMR, electronic health records, electronic medical records, medical software, personal health records, practice management software, and so on. One of the problems many business owners and SEOs come up against is how to optimize their site for each of these variations that all potentially mean the same thing.

Click here to keep learning

Over the last dozen plus years, unscrupulous SEO’s have given the entire search engine optimization industry a bad rep. It seems like every few months some high profile person in the Internet world says something about how SEO is snake oil, sending ripples throughout the SEO community.

To be fair, some of the complaints about SEOs are deserved. Not for the entire SEO community, but for a small segment of “SEO providers.” Unfortunately, like sleezy lawyers, it only takes one to ruin the whole batch, perceptively.

I’m sure many readers have either heard about, or know someone who has had (or have themselves had) an extremely negative SEO experience. I talk to many business owners who are skeptical about SEO because their last SEO didn’t perform as expected, either over-promised and under-delivered, dropped out of contact, or just wasn’t doing the job as promised.

Click here to keep learning

Over the past few days, I’ve been playing around with Google Instant and reading a lot about it. There is a pretty broad range of opinion, and I’ve been drawing some of my own conclusions. Will Google Instant change the face of SEO or PPC? Will it save us time searching? Will people adopt or reject it? Anybody offering opinions on these questions is merely speculating. I’ve got my own speculations, and I’ll share them here.

The questions posed above are yet to be answered, and really, only time will tell. But, since I’ve had a few clients ask my opinion, I thought I’d provide some of my thoughts here where they can be “programmed, categorized, or easily referenced.”

Click here to keep learning

Much like life, websites have to adapt over time. When they don’t, they risk becoming stagnant, outdated, stale, and boring. As times change, so should your content. Content that was once relevant becomes irrelevant or in need of an update, old products get dumped in favor of new products, and data becomes outdated and needs to be replaced.

There are any number of reasons why content needs to be changed, freshened up, or removed altogether. But rarely, if ever, do you want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Something can usually be salvaged. Previously valuable content can be made valuable again. Here are four ways you can keep good content alive, even when it’s old.

Click here to keep learning

In my last post, I talked about training your text to “engage”, “inform”, “speak” (call to action), and “convert”. The first step is to make sure the content doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. In this post, I’ll provide some of the tricks you can teach your content; training it how to do all of these things by making it skim-able, scan-able and provide exits to where the visitor needs to go next.

Teaching tricks the audience likes

Click here to keep learning

Remember the movie Old School with Vince Vaughn and Will Farrell? Yeah, me neither. That’s because, while I’m sure the movie has some funny scenes, it just didn’t have the staying power of, say… Tommy Boy. Of course Tommy Boy had a very distinct advantage out of the gate… it didn’t star Will Farrell. You really can’t come back from that kind of thing.

In the SEO world there is “old school” and then there is “old school SEO nonsense”. In case you haven’t figured it out, in my world, the “old school SEO nonsense” stars Will Farrell. In your world, it might star Colin Farrell, Lindsay Lohan, or the entire cast of Big Bang Theory–all viable alternatives.

Like the actors noted above, “old school SEO nonsense” gets a lot of buzz, but underneath the surface, there just isn’t anything there. People are drawn to it like a mosquito to a bug light because it feels safe. It looks easy. It’s simplicity wrapped in a complexity. But, in the end, it’s hollow, useless, and generally leaves you feeling a little bit ripped off.

Click here to keep learning

Keyword research is a funny thing. You can gain a lot of knowledge about what words people use when searching on the engines, but it tells very little about what a person wants when they search using a particular keyword or phrase. The intent behind the search is the missing component, and I don’t know of any keyword tools that get far enough inside the searcher’s heads to know what exactly the searcher’s intent is.

Many people, when performing keyword research, look primarily at the search volume of a phrase and whether the phrase appears relevant to what they do or sell. On that analysis alone keywords are chosen or rejected.

Click here to keep learning

People who believe that SEO is the devil’s work have a point. Such proclaimers can stand side by side with those who say lawyers are bad, non-christian music is demonic and TV rots the brain. Sure, outlawing lawyers may make the world a better place, Miley Cyrus is corrupting our adulthood and you clearly must have had an overdose of PBS in order to enjoy Glee.

But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. Lawyers do a lot of good, Bon Jovi is still releasing good albums and shows like Lost and Battlestar Galactica make TV one of the singular enjoyments of life. To lump all SEO into the “evil” category is to completely disregard the benefit SEO brings to the web.

Click here to keep learning

Once a PPC account is set up and running, a good account manager is always looking for ways to improve results to better reach the account’s marketing goals.  One such way is to test different types of ad messages to gain insights into what attracts your industry’s customers to your products/services so that you can better understand and communicate with them.

Some of these message types include: Click here to keep learning

In my last post, we took a look at a good reason for an account manager to make separate campaigns in an AdWords account.  If you have a similar product with different profit margins and total profit, then you want to control how much you’re spending on each.  In this post, we’ll explore more of the reasons to separate campaigns.

The marketing goals for your company should guide you into the correct account organization for your PPC campaigns. Click here to keep learning