Posts Tagged ‘Marketing Methods & Providers’

This past week I was first introduced to the new free Google Analytics service. Google purchased Urchin and has come out with their own version of ClickTracks. Though I am not a ClickTracks expert by any means, my first impression of Analytics is a good one. I have found the navigation to be more user-friendly and noticed off-the-bat that there are lots of additional features to that of click tracks. Also, the filters were easy to set up, and the GUI has a feeling similar to that of AdWords, which is good in my opinion. One downfall to Analytics is that it is temporarily not offering the wonderful page overlay feature that ClickTracks is all so good at. Google says the initial demand for Analytics is much more than anticipated, so it will take some time before they regain the capability to bring back the page overlay feature.

Scott Buresh has an excellent article over at search engine guide about SEOs that offer guaranteed top rankings.

lot of questionable SEO companies offer what I like to refer to as a “leprechaun repellent” guarantee. In other words, it’s a guarantee that is easily attainable – if you purchase such services and are not subsequently harassed by a pesky leprechaun, the guarantee has been met. How can you complain?

Interestingly enough, I recently had an old client come to me to ask my opinion on the services his new SEO company provided him. He was certain they did not meet the guarantee and wanted me to confirm it. The SEO company in question is notably the largest (or second largest) SEO firm in the world. What I found interesting is that the contract was relatively vague as to what services they would actually be providing (meta tags and “optimized” text for 15 pages) while their guarantee was pretty darn specific (15 top 10 rankings counted over 15 search engines, from a total number of 25 plus keyword phrases).

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In the interest of providing additional expert thoughts and opinions on the issue of whether link exchanges are all bad or not, here is a link to an ongoing debate on this very topic over at search engine watch. The thread actually starts off on a slightly different topic and successfully gets hijacked into the link exchange debate, but it’s all a very interesting read.

I have not talked much about our new link program here in this blog, however I posted what we are doing over at Search Engine Watch Forums and have gotten some good feedback, which has also raised some good points we have not considered. SEO Book also picked up on the thread which generated some additional comments.

In the course of our efforts we’ve also have been getting feedback from those we are trying to “convert” from the old “link page” format to the new article format. While mostly positive, some of the negative responses range from, “You don’t know what you’re talking about, link pages have always worked just fine,” to “You don’t know what you’re talking about, ALL reciprocal links are useless.” (I’m paraphrasing the responses.)

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I’ve talked about pay-for-performance pricing models for SEO before. I just got an email from a inquisitor looking for a company that will perform SEO on just this sort of model. Here is what they were asking:

…we are looking to Pay-for-performance plans only.
Which means if you optimize our site and we get to #1SERP – we pay you for each keywords archived either #1 SERP or Top 10 or Top3 ( the higher the keyword position, the more we pay )
That is the only way we want to engage SEO company, as we already got quotes with this payment scheme and right now we are comparing vendors who can provide such solution for us,
If this works for you, I would like to get cost breakdown per keyword to something like that – I understand that all keywords have different level of competitiveness – but you can refer to my list of keywords in previous email – it will be either those keywords or keywords with same competitiveness

Google positions Top 3:
$_ when position achieved + $_ to maintain this position / month
Google positions Top 10:
$_ when position achieved + $_ to maintain this position / month
Google positions #1 SERP:
$_ when position achieved + $_ to maintain this position / month

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I just got finished with my rant on Search Marketing Weasels who steal, regurgitate, and republish content, giving no benefit to those they stole from.

No sooner had I sent the weasels an email than I ran across another one of my articles on another site.

This article was published via several article distribution outlets, so technically, it’s not stealing to republish it. In fact, that is encouraged. But the difference here is that they published the ENTIRE article verbatim including the bio and the links back to our sites.

If nothing else, I get the link benefit. The comments are suspicious. Probably all fabricated, but hey, they got the important thing right!

The Internet is full of all kinds of great information, resources, marketing tips, tools and so on. It can also be a great source to help you put together your web site’s content, as you can find many industry related articles that are free to be republished, usually provided that you attribute the author to the content.

We often distribute articles to various industry news and information sources and find that those articles are republished on many additional sites. This is good as it gets our articles out to a much larger audience, and each contains a link back to our site so the readers know who wrote it and can then find out more about us.

There are, however, some lower forms of content republishing that occurs online, everything from outright theft from your website to republishing pieces from various forms of free content as a means to create search engine rich, but otherwise useless, pages.

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Don’t Hyphenate

Avoid getting stuck with a hyphenated domain name as your main website address. While it may be easier to read in print, it is very difficult to speak it. Try telling someone to go to “window dash coverings dot com” or “window hyphen coverings dot com.” See what I mean? Most of the time people will type in windowcoverings.com which would again direct them to a potential competitor.

Find all posts on Securing a Marketing-Rich Domain Name, or follow the links to previous posts.
Laying the Foundation for a Successful Online Business
Securing a Marketing Rich Domain Name Introduction
Build Your Brand

Secure a .com

Jim Boykin provides rather interesting insight as to what type of sites we are likely to find on the first page of Google. I don’t buy it hook, line, and sinker… only because we’ve gotten sites ranked into top 3 positions that don’t fit any of that criteria, but it does give some food for thought.

Is Google deliberately trying to vary their top ten results in such a way. Are they really looking for search result diversity, or simply gunning for relevance regardless of the diversity of sites holding those positions? If the answer is diversity over relevance then the SEO world is in a heap of trouble. Room for moving your site into the first page of the search results would be even more limited than we think. As it is, there are only ten top ten spots.

Let’s consider Jim’s list:

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Seth Godin tells us that all marketers are liars. I certainly won’t argue with that principle. Marketing is often about who can BS the best (kind of like putting together a resumé, he who BS’s the best without lying wins!)

I think it’s also true that all marketers are thieves. A few weeks back Chevy started an “Employee Discount” marketing campaign where us average Joes can get a car for the same price as Chevy employees. Guess what, it worked!

Shortly after Ford started their own campaign called the “Family Discount”. It must have worked for them too because they recently extended the sale a few extra weeks.

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