Internet Marketing - a Quick Review

First there is SEO - Google crawls your site. If you have good SEO, Google rewards you with visitors.

Then there is VIRAL marketing. Viral marketing is like a chain reaction [where people share your cute media file].

Mobile Marketing - New, Hot and Sexy! Gets your message out to cellphones, and other mobile devices.

Pay Per Click

Last but Not Least — Email Marketing

If you are thinking of getting a 642-372 or a 646-362, you will have to give 70-551 as well since that is a prerequisite to get into the Kaplan University. Later you can get enrolled in advanced courses like 646-588 and 1z0-147.

With the release of statistics of the incredible growth of Web2 and Social Bookmarking, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that many people still don’t know what Social Bookmarking is, much less how to use it to increase traffic to their websites. See my previous post where I may have gotten a little ahead of myself.

I was very surprised today to discover that 3 people I spoke with hadn’t heard of Social Bookmarking or Web2 ( or del.icio.us, technorati, digg etc.). Never mind an explanation of delicious’ URL. When I started talking about Optimizing for Social Media, I got blank stares and had to backtrack.
(more…)

Anyone that hasn’t heard of outsourcing by now must be either hiding in a cave or not working in the service industry. Call Centers are front and center but it seems outsourcing is spreading to every nook and crannie of the economy. On a recent trip to Manila in the Philippines, a job fair for Call Center employees was held for 65,000 vacancies in Call Centers. Other statistics are just as shocking. India is set to emerge as a $17 billion knowledge outsourcing destination by 2010, states a new industry study. (Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) May 2005 ) Three-quarters of U.S. companies outsourced some or all of their information technology activities in 2004, and that percentage is likely to increase this year according to Global Outsourcing Report March 2005.
(more…)

Here is a great plug-in that I have found for increasing traffic from Social Bookmarking sites. This Wordpress plug-in automatically bookmarks your site to Social Bookmark sites each time you post, including:

blinklist.com
furl.net
del.icio.us
myweb2
shadows.com
simpy.com
spurl.net
ma.gnolia.com
blogmarks.net
rawsugar.com
smarking.com
linkrolling.com
blogmemes.net
markaboo.com
linkagogo.com
feedmelinks.com

This plug-in avoids spam with a clever option which randomly selects ‘X’ sites for submission, so you aren’t spamming.

Check it out Auto Social Bookmarking

I have been meaning to put an FAQ page on my site for a awhile but never seem to get to it so here is a quick FAQ for Search Engine Optimization.

What are SEO and SEM?

SEO is Search Engine Optimization and SEM is Search Engine Marketing. SEO comes from the early days of the net where it was possible to rank webpages by simply stuffing more keywords into the different parts of the page (ie Title tage, META tags, Headings etc.).

Things have changed though! Now there are many factors both “on the page” and “off the page” that influence a pages rank. See below for more discussion of this.
(more…)

Lots has been written about promoting blogs which covers the basics, of pings, submitting, creating content people want to read and all that. In this article I thought I would take it one step further and talk about some of the techie SEO aspects of promoting an blog, and specifically, avoiding penalties.

For the basics of promoting a blog, the best article I found was Margin of Eric - Making Yourself Known.

This is the place to start and covers all of the basics.
(more…)

Linking is the staple of SEO. Reciprocal links, one-way links, directory links, links from article syndication are all part of a well rounded linking campaign.

With the search engines, especially Google, looking for quality and ‘trust-rank’ for sites, choosing high quality link partners is critical.

So how do you choose link partners?
(more…)

Here is an interesting video from www.intralinkinc.com, which explains their Website marketing plan. What caught my eye about this is they are basically describing a content site, and taking a much broader view of marketing than just SEO.

The key point is they start with the content and force the SEO into the content rather than forcing the content into the SEO. The emphasis is on marketing the content, not marketing and then finding filler content to market.

Here is a recap of their 5 point marketing plan.

1. Product Mix. What is the thesis statement for your website? What is the something special about your site that distinguishes it from everything else?

2. Keyword Research — How customers can/are finding your website. Keywords focus on the Root, and the Long Tail. The root keyword might be,
real estate Denver, and the Long Tail would be keywords targeting communities surrounding Denver

3. Competition Level — 1. determine level of SEO required & 2) Normalization — Look at the top 10 results and their content and match it according to the number of words etc.

4. Search Engine Optimization. Force the Search Engine Optimization into the content rather than forcing the SEO into the content. The emphasis is on the marketing and the content.

Here are a few of the essential newsletter for SEO and Marketing that I enjoy every issue and learn something every time. These are the cream of the crop.

Grokdotcom by Future Now. Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg are the Gurus of Conversion. Their bi-monthly newsletter is like sitting down and picking their brains for an hour or so. This latest issue they have a blow-by-blow analysis of a non-profit website, with a running commentary on what is working, what isn’t, and what should be done at every step of the purchasing process.

Larry Chase’s Web Digest for Marketers. This weeks issue is edited by Mike Grehan, on 11 Insider tips to improve Search Results. I find this newsletter has a little too much advertising for my taste, but still, always a good read.

IR Watch - the Newsletter. . This give newsletter by Information Retrieval expert Dr. E Garcia (Orion at searchenginewatch.com) gives all the gory technical details of SEO. From his site, “Tired of SEO speculations? Our email newsletter can change that. Not fancy, but to the point. Get it one month in advanced. Stay ahead of the curve and at the pace of computer scientists, IR students and advanced search engine marketers.

Read about search research that normally does not reach mainstream. Includes optimization tips, programming advice, software/books we recommend you to buy, and monthly highlights from our blog.”

Marketing Experiments Journal. These guys are great! Practical, down to earth, advice from the experts. Free web clinics that are jam packed with information, podcasts, blogs and more. Marketing experiments recently purchased Marketing Sherpa.

Working with affiliate sites, I am continually confronted with the problem of “What should I do next?” As a small business person, the answer is you do whatever will make the most money the fastest. Pick the low hanging fruit first.

Assuming that you have a content site already, and you are adding more content regularly, submitting content for syndication, adding quality links regularly and consistently over time. So you have say, 250 products, ranging from very competitive to almost no competition. How do you decide where to focus your SEO and prioritize your efforts?

The low hanging fruit here are the product related keywords that have a relatively high search volume, and a low level of competition.

One measure of the competitiveness is the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) which measures the search volume and the number of sites competing for that phrase.

The formula for KEI is p^2/C

Where p= Popularity - Wordtracker searches
C = Competitiveness, measured by the search volume (number of results returned in a search on Google with the search phrase in quotes)

Open an Excel spreadsheet and put your keyword phrases down column A, column B will be the Wordtracker searches, and insert this formula in column C

=((A2*2)/A2) *1000

and use FILL DOWN to populate column C.

Start filling in your data down the list. Quickly you will see some keywords have loads of competition, while others are open season.

Sort your data by column C, the KEI, and you have a prioritized list of keywords to target and can develop your plan of attack. Higher KEI is better.

The high KEI phrases can be targeted immediately for fast results, the medium level KEI keywords, can be started now for a longer campaign, and the low KEI phrases, either not targeted, or a long range plan developed for them.

Problems and issues

Determining the competitiveness of keywords is a complex issue and in this post I am looking at just one method — a more technical discussion with links to other methods is at Search Engine Watch Forum.

A few problems are that KEI is a mathematical ranking system that says nothing about the quality of competition.

A modification to the formula, proposed by Dan Theis has taken the original KEI formula and tweaked it:

s = matches for “allintitle”
p = popularity (search count)
KEI = p^2/s = p / s * p