As much as the title is vastly overstated, these questions will at the very least help you ponder SEO in a way you hadn’t pondered before. At least that’s my theory.
Back in 2002, Stanford published their Top 10 Guidelines To Establishing Web Credibility. Amazingly, these conditions for creating a credible website are just as relevant today as they were back then. Isn’t it funny how, with all of the advancements in site development and marketing, it all still comes back to the basics?
Below are the first five guidelines. I’ve provided some of my own additional thoughts and commentary and would be interested in hearing yours as well.
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.
If you manage a PPC account, you know that for several years now AdWords has had three match types: exact, phrase, and broad. You also know what they mean and how your keywords are matched to search queries. Up until a couple of years ago, broad match meant that the keywords in your phrase were matched to queries that had all of your words in any order.
Then, broad match became “expanded broad match” where Google’s algorithm was given free reign to decide if search queries were a close enough match in search intent to show your ad. Many of the results were not even close. Your keyword could be business cards and your ad would show on state ids and business plans.
The overwhelming advantage of broad match of course is that you get more impressions, clicks and conversions; although you most likely would have a lower conversion rate that will make you pay more for each conversion. So for some it works and for some not so much. The major disadvantage is that you have to spend time going through your search queries very often to weed out those that are not applicable to your business because you paid for clicks state ids and business plans.
So, you’ve come to realize that there’s a whole Display Network out there through Google AdWords that, if utilized correctly, will take your online business to new heights. But, you’ve also realized that’s a big “if utilized correctly.” You may have been burned by the Display Network before (formerly called the Content Network). Maybe you just jumped right into AdWords because you knew you wanted more traffic for your site. You heard how easy it was to get it by whipping up a few keywords that were relevant to what you were offering and by writing a few ads to entice the searchers to your site. Then, since you were never taught that the Search and Display networks operate by completely different rules, you went ahead and turned them both on and started getting more traffic.
Man, getting traffic can be so easy…. and dangerous to your bottom line. The truth is, there is an art and science to getting traffic just like any other vocation. It takes skill and knowledge to be successful. So, when it comes to utilizing the Display Network, you need to gather the knowledge that is going to enable you to use the tool correctly to accomplish your goals.
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
OK, we got rid of some wasted clicks from our PPC campaigns there. Now, let’s do some more.
Let’s say we have an ad group that is dedicated to selling something specific like “Gibson Guitars.” We’ve got keywords and targeted ads directed to a targeted landing page dealing directly with guitars that are made by Gibson. And let’s say we’ve got a decent amount of money to work with so we decide to use the broad match term “gibson guitars” in our ad group. Well, with broad match, we will get our keyword matched to all kind of queries, even as simple as “guitars.”
A little over a year ago I wrote an article about how sometimes you have to break a website in order to fix it. This isn’t always the case in SEO but there are those situations where a site is so bad that you pretty much need to burn it to the ground before you can build it right.
The other day I reviewed a site that confirmed this premise. It wasn’t a bad looking site on the surface but once you looked into the architecture a bit you found problems compiling on top of problems. Nothing short of demolishing the entire site and building it from the ground up would allow it to gain any traction in the search engines.
Over the past ten years or so the Internet has busted the doors of “free stuff” wide open. More and more we are able to get cool things for absolutely no charge. Blogging platforms such as wordpress are free. WordPress addons are free. Many iPhone apps are free. Blogs and newspapers provide free content online. You can download TV shows and songs for free (legally or not.) And you can connect with your friends for free via IM, MySpace, facebook, twitter, and a host of other free social networking platforms. I could go on.
The era of “there’s no such thing as a free ride” is coming to an end. So many things are free now days I often wonder how anybody makes money anymore, especially competitors trying to sell what someone else gives away.
But free works. This has been true long before the web was invented.
(Don't wait for the movie!)
E-Marketing Performance: Effective Strategies for Building, Optimizing & Marketing Your Website Online
