Archive for October, 2006

Determining the best allocation of your search marketing budget is an important part of how successful your search campaign will be. The options within Search vary depending whether your campaign goals are for Branding or Direct Response.

A Branding campaign is more about “findability“, and measuring things like Brand Awareness, Reach, Share of Category, Share of Voice, and Brand engagement. If you are using Google, a reasonable mix between Content and Search could initially be: 33% Search, 33% Content Network, and 33% Site Targeting. This is a way to quickly build buzz. Of course you’ll want to optimize these channels and shift budgets if necessary according to your performance metrics.

If your Search campaign is mostly Branding, then the mix could be: 20% Search, 30% Content, and 50% Site Targeting.

If your Search campaign is more focused on conversions (direct response), then the mix could start out as: 60% Search, 30% Content, and 10% Site Targeting. This mix is particularly useful if you’re interested in driving online and offline conversions.

You might want to take Site Targeting out of the mix for Search, if you are running a separate banner campaign.

As an SEO Consultant in the New York metro area, it seems like I’m always asked the same question…Where are you based? New York, or New Jersey. Not that it matters, because an SEO Consultant in New York can do the required tasks anywhere in the world…even in India ( although, I wouldn’t recommend that).

Anyways, I just had a few drinks with my dinner ( or supper as some people say). 7 shots of full-bodied, burnt flovored, delicious Michters 10 yr old bourbon. Freakin delicious. A real American treat. So, excuse me if this post doesn’t make much sense.

I remember that someone ( i think it was Avi, but i’m not sure) posted about how it matters if you are linked in a neighborhood, as opposed to trying to get links from all over the place. Who cares if you have links all over the place? You are considered more important in the eyes of the engines if you have links within your niche neighborhood ( i hope i’m making sense). That’s how an engine like Google will decipher that you are important within your niche. If everyone links to you in your niche, then you must be important. Rather than the site that tries to get links from every Tom, Dick, and Harry.

Impression Fraud is a sneaky & unethical way of harming your competitor. In order to explain Impression Fraud, let me ask a question. What would happen if your keywords got a ton of Impressions, but no clicks? Answer: You’d end up with a very low CTR. And, Google penalizes keywords with low quality scores by lowering position, and increasing minimum bids.

So, any advertiser that wants to harm their competitor just needs to turn off their own campaign. Then, conduct an unusally high amount of searches for specific keyword phrases. But, DON’T click on them. Some employ bots similar to click fraud bots. The high search volume and zero clicks will cause a low CTR for the competitors.

Then, turn your campaign back on. Voila! You will most likely have a higher position and lower Avg CPC.

Impression Fraud is much harder to prove than Click Fraud. Microsoft is thinking of using Pay Per Percentage model as a solution.

If you are running a phpbb forum, and you’re wondering why your webpages aren’t indexed by Google, it’s most likely because they have Session ID’s on the URL. Session ID’s are the “sid” part of the URL string. A typical URL looks like this: www.mysite.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=7&sid=c76b2a

The phpbb URL’s that have session ID’s won’t get indexed by Google. Google will crawl & index dynamic URL’s with several parameters. However, Google won’t index those dynamic URL’s that contain Session ID’s. The Search Engines have a problem with things like ?SID=abcdefghijklmnop where the string is randomized each visit, but if the content is always the same (i.e., viewtopic.php?t=100 is always viewtopic.php?t=100), then bots (at least Google’s) shouldn’t have any problem whatsoever, which is why there are thousands of phpBB boards all over Google without having to change to so-called static URLs.

To get phpbb pages indexed by Google, the only change that needs to be done is modifying the URL to remove the Session ID. That’s it. That’s because Google will crawl and index dynamic urls. But, ideally, it’s best to write a MOD Rewrite that changes all the dynamic pages to a static URL, and write a MOD to remove the Session ID from the URL for each user-agent ( Eg: Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc ).

Additional resources:
See Feb 15th. Disabling Session IDs in PHPBB Forums.
MOD to remove Session ID’s
Session ID removal, and static URLs
User-agents & Robots.txt
Webmaster Tool

I’ve been hearing more and more about Pay-for-Performance for SEO Consultants.

Although, many an SEO Consultant I’ve spoken with, have a problem with the performance based compensation model. The reason is because the client is asking the SEO to take the all risks. Especially for a new website to rank well in a competitive vertical. That can take a lot of time & investment. So, the idea is…why not challenge an SEO Consultant, and not assume any risk/investmest yourself?

Many SEO Consultants will not entertain the thought of this payment model for a millisecond. However, if they do, here are a few pay-for-performance SEO business models.

1) No upfront or monthly payments. Pay per lead, per sale or % from profit.

2) Small monthly fee. And, Pay per lead, per sale or % from profit.

3) SEO Consultant charges a one-time minimal fee for the initial SEO Optimization then only gets paid when the Top 5 positions are achieved. In this model, the SEO Consultant gets paid when the Keyword(s) rank in the SERP’s in a specific position.

For example: Pay an initial ( one-time) fee of $1000. Then, pay the SEO Consultant on Search Engine Rankings for specific keywords.
$125.00 per month for position #5.
$250 per month for position #4.
$500 per month for position #3.
$1000 per month for position #2.
$2000 per month for position #1.

There can be a list of many keywords, and the cumulative pay, might be more than expected. A real win-win situation for both parties.

To allieviate the unbalanced risk that the SEO Consultant takes, he can charge a low monthly fee in addition to the performance incentive. Of course these are just examples, and the actual amounts will vary per SEO Consultant.

Postscript:
Another idea is for Pricing to be a specific amount (eg: $0.15) for each “unique visitor” to the website. A Web Analytics summary report should be provided at the end of each month.

What happens if a company, brand, or individual gets slammed in the news? Especially, if the bad news gets a high position in the search engine rankings. It would seem like a good time to urgently ramp up a reputation management and repair campaign. So, here’s a few thoughts on how to use Search for that purpose.

SEO:
1) Optimize the site(s). If necessary, hire an SEO Consultant.
2) Create a Viral campaign that will generate a lot of incoming links.
3) Conduct a Linking campaign.
4) Googlebowl them over.

Pay-Per-Click:
1) Conduct a PPC campaign in multiple search engines. Create keyword lists that contain mispellings, brand terms, people names, product names, bad news, good news, etc.
2) Use Yahoo’s Paid Inclusion.
3) Opt into the Content Networks.

Using digital channels such as Blogs & Press Releases are also very effective for Online Reputation management and repair.

Postscript:
It looks like 1 & 1 Web Hosting is gonna be needing some reputation repair real soon.

The power of off-site optimization is very powerful. Eg: do a search on Google for “failure“. Then, look at who is in position #1. I’m sure George Bush is not optimizing for that keyword. If you’re wondering how that is possible, it’s because there are thousands of webpages that contain the hyperlink “failure”, and point to the White House.

Therefore, you can see the power of off-site optimization, and understand that in some cases, there is no need to touch the source code of a website in order for it to appear in the top positions in the Search Engines. A critical component of Off-site optimization is a strong linking strategy. However, in most cases of SEO, there needs to be a balance between off-site optimization, and on-site optimization.

When building links, you can either go thru a Link Broker, or do it yourself.