Posts Tagged ‘Pole Position Marketing’

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When making changes to my website I always take the time to view them live on the web before closing up my editing software and patting myself on the back in self-satisfaction of a job well done. Even with minor changes, I like to view them one last time to make sure my changes didn’t cause any shifts in on-page display, or I didn’t inadvertently create an error somewhere that inadvertently jacked everything up (believe me, it’s happened more times than I can count!) But regardless of how careful I am to double check my work, there is one thing I almost always overlook; verifying that my site looks good in the “other” browser.

At any given time I have three FireFox browser widows open, each with their own number of open tabs. So it’s natural for me to check and verify my changes using my browser of choice. Sometimes, I even think to check my changes in Internet Explorer. Admittedly, I don’t regularly check IE when the changes are relatively minor, but always when the changes effect formatting. But that’s not the other browser I’m referring to.

We get so accustomed to our own way of surfing the web that we forget that there many other browsers and browsing experiences that may be foreign to us. Now most web designers will do their due diligence and check a site in multiple versions of FireFox, Internet Explorer, Netscape and Safari. Heck you might look at a half of dozen other browsers that most people, including myself, have never even heard of. But those are not the browsers I’m referring to either.

There are four primary “other” browsers and browsing experiences that are typically overlooked by site owners, casual webmaster and, yes, even by the average web designer. But with more and more users moving to these alternate browsing experiences, it is even more important to check your websites to make sure that they function properly for these users.

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When providing SEO advice on the topic of website design, we often warn against placing important content into images. This is because search engines can’t read images like a person can. To them, an image with text is just an image. They really have no idea what the image is or if, in fact, it says anything at all. So when optimizing sites, anytime we are dealing with keyword optimized content, we want to make sure it’s standard HTML text. This includes headers, benefit lits, and even normal body copy.

While the search engines can’t read actual images, they can read what we say about the image. This information can be gleaned a few different ways:

• Image file name (image1234.jpg vs. mustang-gt.jpg)
• Text immediately surrounding the image
• The overall content of the page the image is on
• Image ALT attribute in the image tag

When trying to optimize images for image search, all of these can provide important indicators the search engines use to produce the best set of image results. In terms of traditional optimization and website usability, the ALT attribute plays an important role.

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I work in website marketing … it is our job here at Pole Position Marketing to market our client websites. Having become something of a workaholic, putting in 6+ days a week of work, I can never completely put the work behind me. This truth has been evident for over a year, but the event I’m about to tell you brings a new level of realization.

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Google has been spidering the new URL for the (EMP) blog so I thought I’d do a few vanity searches to see if it’s showing up in the search results. Not yet, but I did see something cool. It looks like Pole Position Marketing has gained some site links:

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Over the next few weeks we’ll be in the process of rolling out some pretty significant changes. First, I’ve been named Pimp McFly Associate Editor at Search Engine Guide. What this means exactly, I still haven’t been told. But I think it has something to do with blogging.

So seeing that I’ll be doing 90% of my blogging over there, we are going to change our focus over here at EMP. A new design has been in the works for the past couple of weeks and we hope to have that rolled out shortly. With the new design we’ll be moving the blog back to the Pole Position Marketing domain and turn it into a local company blog.

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One Conference:

I went to SEMpdx SearchFest 2008 in Portland earlier this month and loved it. Come April 21 & 22, we’ll be in Houston for Small Business Marketing: Unleashed. At SearchFest I found it refreshing that one track had sessions led by a sole speaker. These sessions gave the speaker thirty minutes to provide more in depth information. I loved them! The other track was more typical with 3-4 speakers, all given 15 - 20 minutes to fill you with as much information as they possibly could.

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SEMpdx Searchfest

Ok, this one has come and gone but I wanted to provide a short debrief. I have to say that I had a fantastic time. Searchfest marked my one-year anniversary speaking at conferences. They opened the door for me at Searchfest 2007 and were kind enough to invite me back this year. Boy, am I glad they did.

I have to say that I was really surprised by the marketing power they were able secure for each session was amazing. I felt severely out gunned on both panels I was on. I was amazed at the quality of the information provided and the overall environment established by the SEMpdx team.

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I’m big on reputation management tracking. I have well over 50 Google alerts set up at any one time. I track my own name, company name, blog name, names of my employees, names of my competitors, company names of my competitors and even my articles. All via Google Alerts.

So you know I had to be interested when I got an email about trackur, a new reputation monitoring tool from Andy Beal.

Here is what I like about trackur:

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In the never ending effort to improve the success of the current campaigns, I recently spent some time going back through our AdWords history to see which ad creatives had been successful, as well as to see what keywords had converted strongly. I went back a year, prior to my employment with Pole Position Marketing. Sometimes I feel like my creativity has been tapped out, so I was hoping for some inspiration.

Looking at the campaign level, I found some paused and deleted campaigns with healthy Conversion Rates, leading me to wonder why that campaign had ever been paused, much less deleted. A quick glancing at the CTR and my questions were answered. Sometimes it is best to just dump what isn’t working and begin again. Ad group quality score certainly reflect that.

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Audio feed

As more and more users gain access to the web, it becomes increasingly important to ensure that your website is accessible to all, not just a few. Just as businesses must comply with the American Disabilities Act to ensure proper access to customers with disabilities, businesses should do all they can to make their websites accessible to all users regardless of the means in which they access the site.

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