Posts Tagged ‘Search & Marketing’

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When performing a site architectural review, one of the first things I look at is the site’s main navigation elements. This includes top, side and footer navigation. Together, they all play an important role in both the ability of the search engines to properly spider your website, as well as allowing your visitors to find important areas and information quickly and efficiently.

Site navigation can come in many different flavors. There isn’t just ONE way to do it correctly. If there were then every site would have navigation that looked exactly the same. So while navigation can vary greatly between sites and industries, there are certain navigational elements that should be implemented to ensure solid usability and effective website architecture.

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Many years ago I put my site through a re-design. I worked hard to make sure everything was done just right, including the images and navigation. But one thing I failed to consider was internal linking, separate from the navigational elements. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how much traffic I was losing because my internal linking was (or lack thereof) wasn’t benefiting my visitors.

In-site link implementation can make a considerable difference in how effective your optimization campaign is. Or isn’t. While your site’s primary and secondary navigation is extremely important, you shouldn’t make that the only way for visitors to get around your website.

Building a website gives you a lot of options when it comes to how to set up your internal linking structure. Different areas of your site or web pages may require different linking strategies, but regardless on what kind of internal linking strategy you implement, you want to make sure that it helps you achieve your search engine optimization goals. I’m going to break internal linking into three categories: The search friendly, search un-friendly and search meh-friendly link.

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If you’re new to working with PPC, you may be like every other newbie in the world and be confused by the jargon often used. PPC, CPC, CTR, DKI … It doesn’t take long to figure it all out, but in the early beginning it would have been nice to have someone lay out the soup for me, so I thought I’d lay it out for you. The obvious ones are: PPC = Pay Per Click; CPC = Cost Per Click; CTR = Click Through Rate; and lastly and maybe not so obvious, DKI = Dynamic Keyword Insertion.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion
When I was first learning PPC, I had no idea what DKI referred to, so as part of Boot Camp, I hope to help others understand. Essentially what DKI does, is insert the searcher’s keyword into the ad text. With search terms bolded in the ad text, your ad stand out among the other advertisers. Because the search phrase is actually displayed in the ad, exactly as the searcher entered it (well, almost exactly), it also makes text more relevant to the searcher. They see your ad written and advertising exactly what they’re looking for! In finding this, the searcher is more likely to click your ad.

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• Strategic Collaborations: A Powerful Way to Promote Yourself
• What You Need to Know About Google Automatic Matching
• 17 Principles of Building Good Relationships With Bloggers
• 5 Great Marketing Blog Lists And What You Can Learn From Each One
• Linkbuilding Using Fiction

In case you’ve missed the news, let me announce the September Small Business Marketing Unleashed. Jennifer Laycock has written a detailed summary of what you can expect.

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Last week I was privileged to conduct a webinar on the topic of Website Architecture. Unfortunately I was only able to get to two of the three main topics due to time and my inability to not talk so much! Overall I think we covered the two areas we got to, URL & Domain Structure and Link Structure, pretty sufficiently.

Over the course of the hour I was told that over 16 pages of questions were submitted, yet we only had time to answer a few during the hour. I’m hoping to be able to go through those and answer as many as I can, but I’m still making my way through the pile of questions sent before the webinar. So without any more yapping, let’s jump right in and answer some more…

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