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.
There was no commercial internet in the 80′s, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t reach into the recesses of our past to see that, everything we know now about SEO, we already knew back then. How? From the greatest, most magical music of all time: 80′s hair band glam rock!
They just don’t make music like this anymore, and it’s a shame. The sweet sound of rock’n'roll has never tasted better. All it takes is a reflective look at some of these song titles to realize that these guys knew their online marketing! (Though I’m sure they were all too wasted to even know it!)
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Most of the PPC accounts I look at do not take advantage of all of the different options that AdWords offers to organize your account for maximum success. Most of them simply organize their campaigns based upon keywords. They’ll separate keywords into separate campaigns just because they’re different keywords. Or, they’ll keep all different kinds of keywords for all different kinds of products with all different kinds of marketing goals in the same campaign. But, AdWords has given us the flexibility to have much more control over how we are spending our money so that every dollar can be maximized.
First, your account should be organized based upon your marketing objectives. Therefore, before you create your campaigns (or if they’ve been running for a while now), lay out specifically what it is you’re are trying to accomplish. Click here to keep learning
We’ve been working our way through Google Webmaster Tools learning how to set up and configure a website and took a detailed look at the site stats Google provides. This post covers the Diagnostics section of Webmaster Tools which lets you assess common issues and problems with your website.
(Don't wait for the movie!)
E-Marketing Performance: Effective Strategies for Building, Optimizing & Marketing Your Website Online
