Internet Marketing Blog by NoonanNight

Eric Enge of Stone Temple consulting has published another SEO interview. This time, it is with SEO Book creator Aaron Wall.

Here are the five main tips I got out of reading this interview:

Social Relationships are Stronger than Ads

Because of the amount of advertising that is filling the web (many of which tries to look personalized), Internet users are getting more efficient at filtering at the noise. Therefore, while purchasing advertising on a blog or website may only bring you a small stream of visitors, getting discussed in a blog post can not only bring you more visitors, but more interested/targeted visitors. Therefore, before you throw all your money down the drain buying up banner ads, work on establishing social relationships with the leaders in your field.

Immerse Yourself in the Marketplace

The more time you spend in your target marketplace, the better you will understand your target audience. Aaron mentions an example from when he was running Threadwatch. He understood the marketplace so well that he knew how to change a title in order to attract links from certain users. Having this level of understanding for your marketplace can enable you to create content that attracts links for years to come.

Don’t Be Afraid to Recycle Research

Aaron states that in terms of ROI, recycled research can be the most effective. If you are able to take research from different sources and combine them into something new that offers value and adds your own unique touch (while giving credit to the original research publishers), you can create a great piece of content without the need to conduct all of the research on your own.

Don’t Beg or Tell Someone to Do Something

As Internet marketers, we all know how annoying it can be to constantly get hit up for favors. From IM to email, it seems like people are always asking for something. Therefore, since you don’t like this kind of behavior, it’s important to avoid doing it to others. Instead of saying “Digg This,” when you link to someone from within a post, send them an email and ask them for their honest feedback on what you wrote. You can also say that you would appreciate feedback from their audience of readers.

Loyal Customers are Worth More than Money

It’s important to understand that loyal customers are worth more than a monetary sum. When you are able to attract loyal customers, they will do everything from promoting your brand to others to defending your brand to answering questions from potential customers to alerting you about people who are stealing your content, ideas or products. The more loyal customers you have, the easier your job as a marketer becomes.

B2B marketing is much different than B2C marketing. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that B2B SEO should be handled differently than B2C SEO. To ensure you are going about things correctly and not wasting your time on techniques that don’t work, here are a handful of tips to keep your B2B SEO efforts moving in the right direction:

You Have to Understand Your Target Audience

When it comes to B2C copywriting, you can normally take a fairly straightforward approach. When a consumer starts looking to make an online purchase, they have a pretty clear idea of what they want. However, when it comes to B2B visitors, there are many times when they aren’t completely sure of what they need. They have a problem that needs fixed, but there is a strong chance that even if there is a clear cut solution, they may not know about it. Therefore, the best B2B SEOs are those who can get inside the head of their target audience and fully understand what their problems are, what they need and the approach they will take to finding their solution.

B2B Customers Don’t Purchase Instantly

Although most B2C customers do some form of research before making an online purchase, it doesn’t come close to comparing to the decision making process most B2B prospects will go through. Whereas a B2C customer may make a decision in a matter of minutes or hours, a B2B customer can take days, weeks or even months. Therefore, it’s important to ensure your website has all the information a B2B customer needs. If your website is thin on content, you can almost guarantee that you will have a hard time converting B2B leads into customers. Additionally, having a large amount of quality content can attract lots of long-tail inquiries, since (as described in the first tip) many B2B customers take an indirect route to solving their problem.

All Keywords are Not Created Equal

Although this is the last on the list of tips, this point is arguably the most important for B2B SEOs. If you are doing B2B SEO, it’s important to understand that one keyword can have multiple meanings. Therefore, you may think a keyword you want to target has a lot of traffic, but in reality most of the traffic is from B2C customers looking for a product or service other than what you are offering. The most important thing you can do to find keywords that are truly related to what you are selling is by talking to customers. By asking them about how they would describe their problem and solution and getting concrete keywords from them, you can begin developing your keyword strategy. B2B SEO is a long-term effort, so it’s your responsibility to stay on top of the efforts and ensure you are making the most of your keyword targeting and link building efforts.

The problem with many business websites is that they only include marketing and sales copy. While this kind of information is obviously necessary to ensure you land new customers or make sales, you need additional information to make a website that is viewed positively by search engines and visitors. Here are five types of information that should be present on your website:

FAQ/Resources

Having a hard time coming up with content for your website? One of the easiest ways to increase the amount of quality content you have is through a FAQ or Resources section. There are two great ways to generate content for this section of your website:

1) Publish the answers to questions that your customer support deals with on a regular basis.

2) Include a form so visitors can submit new questions for you to answer.

Tutorials and Tips

People don’t always want to buy something. Many times, people are simply looking for information on a specific topic. If you have great content that is related to the topic of your website, you will attract more visitors from search engines. Even if these visitors aren’t necessarily in purchasing mode, if you provide them with truly useful information, they may revisit your website at a later time when they are ready to make a purchase. By creating worthwhile tutorials and tips, you can help to establish a loyal base of customers.

Product Reviews

The biggest way to increase trust is by including reviews of your products or services. If you review the products or services yourself, be sure to be honest when it comes to minor flaws or shortcomings. If you have your existing customers leave reviews, be sure that you allow them to be honest and don’t try to force words into their mouths. Although it may be somewhat scary to include this kind of information, if you are providing quality products or services, you shouldn’t be afraid of people telling the truth.

When a visitor comes to your website for the first time, you have a wonderful opportunity to convert them from a casual surfer into a regular. If you handle things correctly, that visitor will add you to their RSS feed or bookmark your homepage. However, if you don’t know how to grab their attention, they will hit the back button or type in a different URL and never visit your website again.

In order to maximize the number of people that convert from visitors into regulars, here are a few tips for optimizing your blog or website:

Show Your Subscriptions: Whether its an email newsletter or RSS feed, if you have something that you want people to subscribe to, make sure it’s easy for them to find. If your feed icon or newsletter sign-up box is hidden underneath a big block of ads, chances are most of your visitors aren’t going to see your subscription options. Also, keep in mind who your target audience is. If they’re tech savvy, chances are the majority will understand RSS. However, if you have a general audience, you may be more successful by promoting a subscription through email.

Keep It Simple: Don’t scare people away with your design. If you have a ton of ads or too many elements crammed onto your page, people will be unable to find the content they want and end up leaving in frustration. When in doubt, remember that less is more.

Respond to comments and email: When someone takes the time to write a message to you, whether its a comment or email, you should take the time to respond. By showing that you care about your visitors, they will feel more attached to your blog or website and be much more likely to return.

Update Old Material: If you have old material that needs to be updated, edit it to reflect current times, add the current date to it and republish. If you have content that provides information that is timeless (but the date on it is old), remove the date from that content. This way people won’t necessarily assume that they are reading something out of date when they land on that page.

If you answered yes, WordPress can help.

Over the past few months, I have really begun to understand the power of the WordPress platform. While it has always been my top choice for blogging, I never quite grasped just how powerful it can be at creating other online properties, such as an e-commerce website.

Instead of trying to struggle with a clunky, hard to install and configure e-commerce solution, there are multiple WordPress based solutions which are simple and elegant. Instead of reading through a mountain of documentation, all you have to do is download a plugin, upload it to your plugins directory, activate it and choose the options that best fit your specific needs.

I’ve looked at quite a few different e-commerce plugins for WordPress, and while there are others available, the one I recommend is:

WP e-Commerce

According to its home page, WP e-Commerce powers over sixty thousand websites, and it’s easy to understand why that is probably true. Whether you are selling twenty t-shirts or ten thousand DVDs, this plugin can handle your needs.

WP e-Commerce is an attractive solution that offers everything from an AJAX powered shopping cart to product feeds to social networking tools.

Installing WP e-Commerce couldn’t be easier, and once you have installed it, there are an endless amount of easy to use options you can tweak to get things exactly as you want them.

Here’s a site that uses WP e-Commerce to sell nature stock photography: Image Cubes.

Although the plugin is free, you can upgrade to Gold Status, which gives you even more functionality, as described here.

You may know that Content is King, but when you’re writing it, do you actually spend as much time as you should be writing? Since the answer is most likely no, here are some tips to help take your content to the next level:

Title Tags Can Increase Clicks: Many misinformed SEO newbies try and stuff as many keywords into their title tags as possible, assuming that this will increase their SERP rankings. Although they can help, just like most factors relating to Google’s ranking of websites, when you start to abuse something, it doesn’t work as well anymore. Therefore, instead of thinking about trying to increase rankings through stuffing keywords into title tags, think about what kind of title tag would make someone want to click a SERP listing. By writing title tags that grab people’s attention, you can make yourself stand out from the competitors listed with you in the SERPs.

Make It Personal: People like reading stories. Therefore, if you can give your writing a personalized touch that helps people connect to it, you will be able to hold people’s attention. On the other hand, if you just write with general examples, why would someone stick around to read your post when they could go read almost exactly the same thing on dozens and dozens of other blogs?

Format Your Text: Regardless of how great the content is that you write, if it’s formatted so badly that people can’t read it, no one is ever going to see what amazing thoughts you are capable of getting down on paper. Properly formatting your content includes your choice of font and color, along with line spacing, length, etc.

Be Detailed: While it’s tempting to write in general terms, the more specific you can be, the better. If you come up with an idea, only to realize it’s going to take several thousand words to thoroughly explain it, why don’t you break it down into smaller pieces? By tackling a more niche topic, you can demonstrate your expertise and set yourself apart from the regurgitating blogosphere.

Yesterday, Eric Enge published his interview with Carter Maslan. Carter is currently the Director of Product Management for Google Local. In case you don’t have time to read the entire interview, here are some are a few of the best pieces of information Carter gives out:

Sign up for Google Local Business Center: If you haven’t signed up for Google Local Business Center, you need to do so. Even though Google may already have your business listed as a result of pulling data from directories or other sources, by signing up with the Local Business Center and claiming your business, you can ensure everything from your phone number to hours of operation are correct and up-to-date.

How Does Google Handle Multiple Locations: In many cases, a company has more than one location. Although this has presented some issues for Google, there are working hard to find a better solution. While their bulk upload feature has been a significant source of map, they are still confident that they will find a reliable solution for business owners with a large number of locations. Once again, signing up for the Local Business Center can help you get all of the locations of your business properly listed.

Other Souces are Important Too: Carter emphasizes that in addition to the Local Business Center, it’s worth business owners time to ensure their information is correct in the large directories, including Yellow Pages, Super Pages, Localeze and InfoUSA.

The More Content, the Better: Carter mentioned several times that it’s important for businesses to have an ample amount of content describing what they do and offer. By having plenty of content on their website, businesses can pick up long-tail searchers that may have otherwise never found their website.

PPC testing can significantly decrease the costs of your PPC campaigns, while simultaneously increasing your conversion rate. Although there is always a lot of chatter in the blogosphere referencing topics such as multivariate, most of these posts fail to actually address the How aspect of PPC testing. To help you get your feet wet, here are a handful of things you should know about PPC testing:

What are you tracking: Although this may sound like a no brainer, far too many people jump into PPC testing without clearly outlining their goals (just like people jump into internet marketing without defining their goals). You can test anything from page copy to the layout of your pages, just be sure that you know what it is you want to test. By ensuring that you have clearly defined goals for your PPC testing, you will be able to make the most of the data you collect.

Testing product pitches: If you have a product (such as a piece of software) for which you can offer a free trial, you should consider tracking direct sales of the product versus sales that result from a customer purchasing your product after their trial period. By keeping track of this data, you can decide whether or not you should continue to offer a free trial version of your product.

Use your data: Before and after you begin PPC testing, use the data you have to analyze what’s going on with your landing pages. Don’t just look at the basic stats; dig into the data that you have at your disposal. From conversion rates to seeing where your visitors are going to how long they’re spending on specific landing pages, you can use this data to continue refining, testing and improving your PPC campaign.

Don’t rush your tests: If you run your tests for a few days and think you have all the data you need, you couldn’t be more wrong. Far too many marketers don’t let their tests run long enough, and end up without enough useful data. Because of fluctuations in data, if you don’t run your tests for long enough, you may end up deciding to get rid of a landing page that actually has a better conversion rate than you realize. In most cases, if you run your tests for a month, you will be able to get enough data to make sound decisions.

If you’re not yet comfortable enough to shell out the money required for paid analytics and testing software, you can collect plenty of great data using Google Analytics and Website Optimizer.

Earlier this week, I talked about how you can use competitive SEO to increase your backlinks. However, when it’s not a directory or a website that has a submission form, how do you go about obtaining the links that your competitors already have?

In most cases, you will need to initiate this process by sending an email. Before I say anything else, let me emphasize what I just said: send an email, not spam! We’ve all got the poorly worded generic link requests in our inbox before, and if you’re like me, you automatically hit delete (or even spam in some cases). While outsourcing can be beneficial for some tasks, this is not one of them. The key to creating a email instead of a piece of spam is personalization. By sending an email that the recipient will be able to tell was actually written by you, you will greatly increase your odds of getting them to act on your request.

Since everyone is busy, you should make sure your email is concise and to the point. There’s no need to make someone read through paragraph after paragraph of useless rambling. While it may be tempting to try and suck up to the recipient of the email, most people will see through this quite quickly. Therefore, it’s important to be honest about why you are sending the email. Instead of giving line after line of flattery, just tell the person that you noticed they link to sites similar to your own (provide a link or two; these will normally be your competitors) and you thought your website would be a useful addition to their list.

If you have been linked to by a major website (such as a well-known blog or a mainstream media website), mention this to show that you are indeed a credible resource.

Finally, provide a link and suggested anchor text to page of your website that is most relevant to their list of resources. Not only can this help you get some great anchor text, but it will actually make their job of linking to you easier.

Just remember: you’re asking a favor of someone, so handle the composition of your email just as you would handle asking someone face to face for a favor.

Trying to crawl back into Google?

As I’ve discussed before, getting de-indexed by Google can happen to anyone. Therefore, if it does happen to you, it’s important to know what steps you can take to get back into the index as quickly as possible. Here are some concrete steps you can take for minimizing the amount of time your website spends outside of Google’s index:

How bad is your problem: The easiest way to find out how bad of a situation you are in is by using the site command to perform a search of your URL. If this search returns a lot of results, you are simply experiencing a penalty for trying to push the envelope too much. Although this is not an ideal situation, it can be remedied in a fairly short amount of time.

However, if you see nothing when you perform this search (or only your homepage), you are in a world of trouble. Google has officially kicked you out of their index, and trying to get back in is never a fun task.

Is Google Telling You Anything: If you haven’t registered your website with Google Webmaster Tools, you need to go ahead and do that. By registering your website, you will be able to find out if Google has anything to tell you about the current state of your website. Whether it’s difficulty crawling your website or your site being flagged as spam, Google Webmaster Tools is the closest thing you can have to a direct line with Google.

Could It Be Duplicate Content: A lot of webmasters think the whole duplicate content issue gets over-hyped. In reality, a big enough duplicate content problem can get you kicked out of the index. While it won’t come to that serious of an issue in relation to duplicate content on your own domain, if there enough other sites copying your content, you can run into some problems. Although Google does it’s best to figure out the original publisher of content, it’s not perfect, and it does make mistakes. If you determine that this is indeed your problem, you are probably going to need to file at least a few DMCA claims.

Did Your Risky Activities Finally Catch Up With You: In many cases, a webmaster knows exactly why they’ve been de-listed. Like a fugitive on the run, a webmsater engaging in risky activities such as link building campaigns that go against Google’s guidelines is living on borrowed time. Sooner or later, acquiring all of those questionable links is going to catch up to you. When Google finally punishes you for not complying with what they want, the only thing you can do is clean up and beg for forgiveness. Once you have cleaned up all of your dark hatted activities, you can explain to Google that you know you were wrong and ask them to give you a second chance by filing a reinclusion request.