Archive for November, 2008

Jumping into Social Media can be confusing & overwhelming. Do you need to sign-up and be active on every one? Which Social Networks should I spend my time on? These questions could cause Social Media paralysis. And, that’s been my situation for quite some time. Non-action, even though I have profiles on several social networking sites.

I get IM’s and emails regularly asking me to Digg this, and Sphinn that, and Stumble this, and Reddit that. Not to mention the Linkedin invites, and Facebook friend requests. So up until recently, I’ve been more of a helper & spectator than a participant.

I don’t remember the exact reason why, but Twitter is the Social platform I’ve embraced. I guess I like the micro-blogging aspect which is similar to what I already do here on my blog….just in a much abbreviated format. Not to mention, it’s fun to watch my follower count increase.

That forced me to put on my thinking cap and try to figure out how to get more followers. I wondered about Quality vs Quantity. In my opinion, I think both are important. Quality for the consumption and dissemination of information relevant to my interests. And, quantity for the reason to get a message out. The pure viral aspect is an exciting potential for every post.

My Twitter objective is to Tweet (and Retweet) about SEO/PPC, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing & related news strategies and tactics.

Twitter:
I’ll come right out and say it….I want more followers. Let’s be honest; I’m sure most people do. Follow me. One of my tactics to gain followers is to conduct a Twitter Search, for keywords related to my core subject/interest. Eg: SEO, PPC, Social Media, etc. Then I click on the @ in the results to find out if that person and I have the same interests. If yes, then I follow them 1st. There’s been a high percentage of people that follow back. If related interests, then it makes sense to follow each other.

Social Etiquette: If someone follows me, then I follow them back. I think it’s social etiquette and just the right thing to do.

I also retweet stories that are related to my core subject matter. And, interacting with fellow Tweeters by @’ing at and with them.

Linkedin:
I’ve become more active on Linkedin through joining Groups and starting a discussion within those groups. In the discussion, I use my Twitter profile URL as my signature. Linkedin also has “Answers”. This is another valuable Social platform to get noticed and build your personal brand.

Facebook:
Recently, I’ve been updating my Facebook status when I’m Tweeting. And, I’ve been friending people who I should’ve connected with a long time ago. This is another way of building my personal brand awareness and Twitter followers.

Flickr:
I started using my Flickr account more. I’ve signed up for a Pro account. After I upload a photo, I search to see if there is a relevant group. Then, I join it and add my photo to the group. Besides increasing views to the photos, I’ve gotten a few comments and some Twitter followers who are photographers. Leaving comments on other photos is another good method to get noticed and perhaps a clickthrough to your profile page where a link to Twitter is.

Even though my focus is on the Social Networks above, I’m still happy to help out my fellow Social Media peeps with a Digg, Stumble, Reddit, or Sphinn

Additional Reading:
1) If I Started in Social Media Today.
2) 10 ways to find readers for your blog.
3) Getting More Twitter Followers and Twittering for Business.
4) How do I get more followers on Twitter?.
5) Great Internet Marketing Tips.
6) A reaction to Howard Stern’s thought on Social networks.
7) 26 Reasons Why I Love Twitter

It can be a confusing process to find a good Search firm. If anyone has ever been to an SES or SMX show, you probably find every PPC (Pay-Per-Click) vendor says the same thing. They all say they do the same thing, and they are the best.

Many advertising agencies & corporations outsource their Paid Search (PPC) Marketing. They usually will use a PPC Consultant or a large search firm. Very often there is a RFP process that involves questions and answers.

Below, I’ve put together an organized list of questions that anyone can use when gathering information regarding a potential Paid Search partner.

Conversion Tracking:
Do you have integrated tracking across all media types and all the leading search engines worldwide?
Does your platform have the capability for Transaction tracking based on:
- Using server redirects or direct traffic?
- Unlimited types of tranactions?
- Multiple variables (Order ID, zip code, etc.)
- Organic search results

Bid Management:
Can you set up rules based bidding such as:
- Optimum Keyword Ranking
- Bid Gap Management
- Cost per Acquisition (CPA) targeting
- Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) targeting
- Day Parting Rules
- Manual bidding

Reporting:
Does your platform show both reporting and tracking data for the following criteria:
- Campaigns
- Keyword Groups
- Keywords and phrases
- PPC Search Engines
- Destination URLs
- Date Range (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly)
- Latency Reports

Please attach a sample performance report.
Can we export reports as Excel or csv?

Account Management:
Can your platform handle multiple accounts?
Are there single or separate Logins, or dropdowns for each campaign?
Is there a limit on the number of keywords per account?
How many bid reviews per day? Is there a limit?
How many people will be dedicated to our account?
How is your client services team structured?

Keyword Generation Tools:
Do you have a Keyword Research/Generation tool to suggest relevant keywords and phrases for our campaign based on our input, AND through “crawling” our website?
Do you have a Keyword tool that enables us to build large keyword lists specific to our campaigns by utilizing all potential combinations of keyword phrases?

Ad Creative:
Does your client services team write ad copy?

Testing:
Is your platform capable of handling A/B split tests?
Is your platform capable of Multivariate testing?

Portfolio Mgmt vs Keyword level:
Does your platform offer the ability to choose between a portfolio based management, and keyword level bid management?

Pricing:
How is your service priced? Is it full-service client services, or just advice for do-it-yourself?
Are there multiple pricing models?
How is your technology priced? Can your platform be licensed?
What is the pricing structure for 100 campaigns that need full-service?

International Search Feature:
Does your technology support keywords and ad creative in all languages — including Asian double-byte characters?

Competitive Differentiation:
How do you differentiate your company from the rest of the industry?

Properly optimizing a website is a combination effort of both on-site and off-site optimization. The ole’ 1, 2 punch. This post is about the off-site component of SEO to achieve link popularity and link relevancy.

In the past, I’ve written about how to use a Link Optimization and the Criteria & Time Period for Link Effectiveness. Below, I reveal the “secret sauce” on how to properly structure a Link Campaign to achieve high keyword rankings for your target keyword and target url.

I’ve crafted this as powerful, and permanent Link Campaign “package”:

Custom Blog Reviews
We hand pick higher quality blogs from within our network to write reviews about your website/product/service. The blogger posts their review on their blog. As part of the review the blogger links back to your site 2-4 times (randomizing the number of links will avoid creating a pattern). All of these links are considered permanent.

Custom Article Marketing
We provide an SEO friendly, professionally written, fully optimized Article(s) with 500+ words of content. The Article is submitted for syndication to the top Article sites. Package includes a guarantee of 15 placements. The article includes 2 footer links, embedded within content. [eg: ezine, with links in footer].

Article Plus (A couple targeted blogs):
Longer articles & more textlinks.
We write a full article and embed 4 links within the 500+ words of content. This article is then hosted on the homepage of the website for a minimum of 10 days. The article then archives within the site permanently. We will also backlink boost the archived page monthly, to ensure it continues to receive full search engine visibility and continues to gain trust over time.

2nd Tier Links:
This package includes Comment Links and Social Bookmarking Links on sites that have PageRank and dofollow. 100% of these links will point to your newly created link pages to ensure quick spidering and visibility, as well as support the relevancy using the same anchor text .

- Comment Links:
Make a relevant comment on a blog or other Social Media style site and link back to your site within the comment. Get the links on pages with guaranteed Pagerank from 1-5. You’ll have full anchor text and URL control. Sites are 100% SEO friendly (without nofollow).

- Social Bookmarking Links
Hand build keyword links on Social Bookmarking Sites (web-based sites designed to let users share internet bookmarks). This is a great way to build natural looking links in high volumes at low costs.

Premium Directory Links
Relevant, SEO friendly links on Directory Sites. Get the highest PR web directories available. They provide guaranteed SEO friendly links, regardless of the number of submissions.

Pricing:
Prices varies depending on the budget, and how competitive your industry is.

I get frequent enquiries about my SEO Consultant services. Today, some guy contacted me, showed me his site, which looked like a 6th grader built. I tried to help him by briefly discussing my SEO Methodology, and he told me, “You probably say that speech to everyone”. I actually don’t! I wasn’t pitching him. But, I must admit it sounded very good. One of those times I wish I was recorded. I was spot on. It’s like in sports. You know when you’re playing good. So, here’s a recap of my SEO methodology:

1. Keyword Analysis and Competitive Analysis: Involves researching the actual amount of searches for thousands of relevant keywords. The goal is to identify the keywords we want to champion. When I say “champion”, I’m talking about getting a #1 ranking position.

We also analyze the keyword competitiveness of each of those terms. Because, it might not be realistic to try to rank for a term that is too competitive…especially with heavyweight websites already ranking in the top 10 Google results. Also, we don’t want to waste money on keywords that are not competitive enough. So, we find keywords to champion that can provide a good ROI for both the short-term and long-term.

2. Technical Site-Analysis: This is the stage where we make sure the website is Search Engine friendly. We look at information architecture, tags, html coding, javascript, etc. We want to make sure there aren’t any spider traps on the site either.

3. Content Analysis: We analyze the crawlable content. Content can mean many things. Eg: video, images, etc. But we look at the crawlable content and how well the structure is internally linked together. We create Content Silos of themed content, and make sure there is enough of it in each silo. If there is not, then we create additional webpages that are full of keyword-rich content optimized for Search.

4. Continuous Link Building: This component of the SEO Methodology is to increase Link Popularity and Link Relevancy. Link Building should be a continuous process for any serious web business. Specifically, we go through a discovery process of related websites, and contact the site owners, and negotiate a price for a link or banner ad. There are many factors we analyze for each linking website such as:
- Age of Site.
- Inbound link profile.
- Link placement on page.
- Relevant text around link.
- Relevant content on overall website.
- Co-citation (related topical neighborhood).
- Authority of the outbound links on page.
- PageRank.
- Alexa rating.
- Homepage vs Subpage (which is more relevant/powerful?).
- Avoidance of Link traps like nofollows, redirects, etc.

Let me ask you a question….Why does Google rank one website at position #1 on the first page of the SERP’s, and another on page 5? I’ll tell you. It’s because Google considers them an authority. Or, better yet…Google considers them the subject matter expert…not just the subject matter expert, but the subject matter expert in their own topical neighborhood.

And, that’s the goal of our optimization initiative. To make a website the subject matter expert in their topical neighborhood.

Was making a list of ways to conduct Link Development, and decided to revisit the subject of Sponsored Themes.

Sponsored Themes are when you pay to be the “sponsor” of a Wordpress Theme. Your textlink goes into the footer next to the designer. Then, the designer/owner uploads the Theme for free downloading to the Wordpress Theme Directory. Then, if a lot of people download the theme, it’s very likely that many will NOT take the sponsors link off.

About a year ago, Wordpress posted a survey whether or not they should remove sponsored themes.

Wordpress’s official position on this is:

…all themes with sponsorship links will be labelled as such when they are published, non-sponsored themes will be published first and we require sponsorship disclosure to be made to us when authors make us aware of their new themes. If this disclosure is not provided and the theme has sponsored links, the author will be barred from being able to post their new themes on weblogtoolscollection.com until further notice.

There are several ways how to outsmart the system, for example - just hire someone to create totally original themes on your behalf, and have the only credit link to your own site where you distribute it.

Google (Matt Cutts) is trying to scare you into thinking that Sponsored themes can cause you to lose your TrustRank in the Google Algorithm. That’s ridiculous! Sponsored Themes that contain an inconspicuous link in the footer. It’s perfectly normal for websites to contain outbound links in the footer.

There’s a great discussion at WebMasterWorld.

Bottomline, I think a link in a Sponsored Theme can help your SEO efforts. But, don’t think just because you built it, they will come. Just like everything else, the Sponsored Theme will need a wide distribution, and a marketing effort to create the beneficial SEO value you initially intended.

Those marketing methods to promote your Sponsored Theme can include Social Media, Email, PPC, Word-of-Mouth, etc.