On Page SEO: Online Marketing’s Building Blocks
2009 Update: Changes You Need To Know

Search engine optimization comes in many flavors, but marketers must think about more than on-page elements and old best practices. Good on-page SEO is only part of the solution you need to attract quality visitors to any type of site. Good SEO is the heart of online marketing. Poor on-page SEO will cause any site’s efforts to crumble in other areas.

Marketers should already know about page titles (aka title tags), alt image text and font decoration. An online marketer must be able to speak with absolute conviction about the characteristics of these and other influencers.

A wise soul described search engine optimization as a predator and prey game where the search engines show just enough about ranking factors to aid their mission, but not enough so that the results can be gamed. As search technology changes, marketers must also quickly change.

Consider these 2009 changes to on-page SEO so far:

Changes To Previous Best Practices: After an off-the-cuff (that’s how it seemed from the audience at SES San Jose 2007) remark about “no follow” links, Google announced in June that this type of “page rank sculpting” was unnecessary. And in October, Google pulled “PageRank” from its Webmaster Tools console. Why? Google says it’s a good indicator to use as a success metric any more.

Google also confirmed in September that meta keywords convey no search ranking attributes. A month later, Yahoo said the same, but then admitted a week later that it assigned a weak ranking signal for meta keywords.

To reduce duplicate content, all four major search engines agreed in February to support the “canonical” tag. Multiple ways to address the same page, including those resolved by rewrite rules or redirects can be winnowed to one “canonical” page, deemed to be the source and authoritative page.

And the fastest way for any site to be indexed, Yahoo’s Paid Inclusion program, will end in 2009.

New Partnerships: After chasing Yahoo! for a web eternity, Microsoft announced a search deal in July that would combine the #2 and #3 company’s search results. The deal is nowhere near final, but happened fast on the heels of Microsoft’s June launch of its rebranded Bing search engine in June. The new entity, quickly dubbed Microhoo, is expected to use Bing algorithms on Yahoo! properties.

New media darling Twitter cut its own deal with Microsoft and quickly announced a nearly identical deal with Google as both companies try to move into “real-time search”.

New Search Results: Google debuted six variants of search engine results pages (SERPs) in 2009, starting in January with a Timeline view that had previously only been seen in Google Labs. The largest search company followed with announcements in March of its “Vince” update that gives more weight to brands and branded terms. Google also previewed “Caffeine” in August – a jumble of traditional search results, news, video and even blog comments on the same page, but mixed together.

Google had already taken steps to assume searcher intent by starting to automatically display local results for service and product searches even if a geographical term wasn’t included in the search. Combined with the Vince/brand update, ranking nationally for generic words that brands traditionally use became extremely difficult using traditional methods.

Bing quickly countered with visual search in September, and as Google shortened its hotlist of trends to 40 terms, other companies including Twitter, Wikipedia and Bing quickly filled the void and reported on what terms were seeing the most search activity.

Title tags are important. But as an online marketer, you must stay abreast of monthly, sometimes weekly, changes in on-page SEO to enjoy continued success.

Guest Blog by Silver Beacon Marketing

Next time you log into your Google Adwords account you may notice a difference and a big one at that! They have completely revamped the interface and seem to be using ajax for the account loading aspects. It look a little getting used to, but I think I really like it! Seems to be a lot more organized and clean. Things are a little smaller so you have really focus on finding functions at first, but when you get used to it it’s great! As I was tinkering with one of my accounts, I started brainstorming new keywords phrases and site placements to test. I still think their keyword tools need more improvement. I was really upset when Yahoo finally took offline their keyword suggestion tool which was based on actual monthly searches for a particular phrase. Anyways, just letting everyone know about the changes in Google Adwords. Have a great day!

There are so many possible ways of driving traffic to your website, it’s hard to know where to focus first. This article will attempt to explain some of the best ways to drive traffic to your company’s website, including: organic search (SEO), pay-per-click search advertising, affiliate marketing, and database re-marketing. All of these methods are effective and must be done properly and with gusto. These concepts are in no particular order, but equally important to your overall Internet marketing mix.

Organic traffic or SEO is as old as the the Internet itself. I remember formatting the meta-tags on my web pages 10 years ago! Guess what…good, complete meta-tags still matter to your organic rankings, so make sure they are completely filled out on EVERY page of your site. There are basically 2 main aspects of organic optimization you need to focus on initially: meta-tags and on-page content. Like I said, every page of your site should have complete, unique meta-titles, meta-descriptions, and meta-keywords filled in. On-page content also has a huge amount of importance for gaining search rankings. I have sites that ranking organically just off the content on each page alone. If you are able to expand you content on certain pages like your category pages and product descriptions, you can potentially gain more search traffic off those pages, maximizing what you are currently doing with your site.

Pay-per-click search marketing is probably one of the most necessary, yet misunderstood types of campaigns you can run. All companies, in my opinion, should be running a good amount of PPC search in order to drive targetted traffic to their sites. Whether you handle this internally or outsource it, you should keep a very close eye on the performance and management of your PPC accounts with Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Your PPC accounts should be ever growing, as you test different groups of keywords to see what converts and what doesn’t. What converts you run with and what doesn’t you eliminate. The goal should be to attain the best ROI possible. Of course, your landng page should be as good as it can be to best convert the traffic into sales or leads.

Affiliate marketing is my favorite topic and where you should be focusing a great amount of resources and money. A well-managed affiliate program should always be growing in the number of participants and active producers. Many companies launch affiliate programs and just expect them to grow on their own. This will occur to a certain degree, but plataeu quickly without good affiliate management and a good affiliate growth strategy. Companies should be trying their best to make it as lucrative as possible for affiliates in order to get the most production possible. Again, having a good converting website is key to ensuring your affiliate traffic will convert and produce commissions for your affiliates. Affiliates should be treated with the utmost respect and given as many tools to become success as possible. At all times, affiliates should be worked with and motivated to produce more revenue, as well as new affiliates should be recruited into the program to grow the number of participants. If either of these 2 things aren’t going on, you are not maximizing the growth of your affiliate channel.

Re-marketing to your database is one of the most powerful ways to generate revenue for your company. You can send promotions, deals, and coupons to motivate your database to purchase for the first time or re-purchase more products. Re-marketing to your database at the right interval and with the right message is essential to getting a good response. Subject line is everything! Getting people to open your email promotions is key to getting them to act, so make sure to make your subject lines compelling. Email content is also improtant to getting your database members to move into action.

Once you have a good strategy in place for all of these traffic driving methods you are ready to make it happen! Make sure to have the right people or companies handling these tasks for you, as they are extremely important. Don’t assign a new employee to manage your PPC or affiliates, you will suffer the consequences or just not grow like you should. I hope this mini-article was an enjoyable read. I couldn’t mention everything, but you get the jist. If you would like to have a conversation about these concepts make sure to email us or leave your comment below! Now get out there and drive some traffic!

The reports are out and Google has increased it’s domination over Yahoo, MSN and the rest of the search engines…again. Not really too suprising, as it doesn’t seem that Yahoo or MSN can get their act together to promote their search engines effectively to web-surfers. According to the Hitwise report, Google posted an 8% year or year gain over the competitors.

What does this mean for companies trying to gain as much traffic from the search engines as possible? Focus on Google first and foremost with your organic SEO and PPC campaigns. Make sure your Google PPC Adwords campaigns are as built out as possible and your ad copy is effective and working. Doing things to maximize your website’s organic and paid search is always time well spent. You should re-evaluate your SEO and PPC strategy at least every quarter to make sure you are doing search as well as possible.

In order to improve the amount of free, organic traffic your site is receiving, you can put a strategy in place to add freshly written articles to your site to increase your overall page count. Google loves frequently updates sites and posting new, unique articles to your site is a great strategy for increasing your organic traffic to those pages. Make sure you have an effective layout to capitalize on the traffic those pages are receiving, otherwise what’s the point? You can monitor how well your articles are converting into actions to maximize and expound on the topics that are working well. I’d love to hear your coments.

Most companies, when running their PPC search campaigns, only reserve phrases in their ad groups with 1,2, and sometimes 3 words, such as “Fort Lauderdale Florist.” However, according to Hitwise, longer search queries averaging 5 or more words long increased 10% in Janauary over a year ago. This represents a tremendous opportunity for both advertisers and affiliate marketers. Usually, keyword tools only provide shorter phrases as suggestions, so it’s up to you to come up with good, longer combinations. You should also look to anticipate what people might be search for, such as: “Where do a find a florist in Fort Lauderdale.” You might still come up for some of these phrases with the broad-match features, but it never hurts to have a bunch of longer, more obscure phrases reserved in your account. If you are using an SEM firm to manage your PPC you need to speak to ask them what strategy they are using to build out and test new search phrases. If they don’t really have a strategy tell them to get one or go elsewhere for your PPC management. If you are handling your PPC management internally you should evaluate your keyword lists every month and look to build them out. Your keyword lists should never be “finished”, they are always a work in progress. If you hear back otherwise re-evaluate who is managing your PPC.

For affiliate marketers this represents a great opportunity to get cheap clicks on obscure, longer search phrases. Since more advertisers running affiliate programs don’t use a lot of longer phrases, it’s a golden opportunity to get that positioning for cheap. If you are an affiliate and would like to discuss how I go about building keyword lists, you can contact Evan through this website. Now get out there and build out your keyword files darn it!

When you run an online business, or any business for that matter, you are inevitably spending money to acquire new customers. What you are willing to pay for each new customer is entirely up to your business model. Some companies can afford to pay up to $100 or more in marketing cost to acquire a new customer, depending on the value of the customer to the company over the life-time of the relationship. Every online campaign you run, whether it be search engine, shopping engine, email marketing, affiliate marketing, or even organic SEO will have a cost-per-acquisition attached to it. It’s advisable that you have a good internal tracking and reporting system in place so you can see the clicks and sales from each source of traffic to measure your “effective” cost-per-acquisition. I will attempt to touch on some of the more important aspects of a good cost-per-acquisition strategy.

Every company needs to be focusing on driving traffic to their website from a variety of online sources. Most companies find that pay-per-click traffic from Google, Yahoo, and MSN converts the best, however the acquisition cost from PPC search can be very high depending on your particular industry. Over the years, as more advertisers have jumped into the PPC fray, online merchant’s acquisition costs have continued to rise. In order to combat the rising costs of acquiring new customers, companies should focus on things like improving their ad copy and improving the conversion rate of their websites.

Improving website conversion rates is definitely the best way to lower your average cost-per-acquisition and make your marketing campaigns more effective, allowing you to spend more money and acquire more customers. Having on-site conversion optimization in place, that rotates in different variations of graphics, tag lines, bullet points, etc and measures the overall best combination, can yeild improved conversion rates and lower your overall cost-per-acquisition. “Tweaking” your website to make it more “sticky” can help you retain more of your visitors so you can re-market to them later, which will help lower your acquisition costs.

There are many ways to make your website stickier, so that you retain more visitors. Some of these ways include:
- Newsletter Sign-up Box – helps capture visitor data
- Email this page to myself – captures email data
- Email this page to a friend – viral exposure
- Bookmark this site – increases repeat visitors
- Print this page – allows visitors to print and save your site
- Referral programs – rewarding customers for referring others
There are definitely other ways to make your site a stickier site that I will discuss in another post in the future. Making your site stickier with added functionality is a great strategy for lowering your overall cost-per-acquisition and capturing more of your visitor’s data for future follow-ups.

As you grow your online business you are going to want to test and re-test different traffic sources, keyword groups, creative variations, ad copy, and landing pages. I highly recommend building an internal tracking system to handle and measure all of your campagins. When you are measuring the effectiveness of your online campaigns, you can test tons of new things every month, see which are working and which are not, keep the good campaigns and kill the rest. Always make sure you are getting the ROI you are looking for with your online campaigns by measuring the cost-per-acquisition. If the campaign is exceeding your acceptable CPA goals you can either kill the campaign or work a little harder to make your site convert better! I hope you liked this post, feel free to contribute your comments on cost-per-acquisition best practices. I look forward to hearing from you!

Presented by Guest Blogger Aaron Korff

Everyone wants to learn those “special” tricks, those little known gems, that will give them that little push over the competition. This article focuses on leveraging your content to increase your SEO. I’m going to discuss methods for two types of sites: e-commerce and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service).

My first assumption is going to be that your e-commerce site has a database. My second assumption is that your site has a brand/category drill-down feature, as well as product detail pages. The problem is that search engines don’t do a good job of gobbling up these pages, and unfortunately, the majority of your site is comprised of them. Usually they are coded with a query string, or there is a session variable controlling which product page is currently displayed. Instead of leveraging valuable keywords from your URL, you are instead showing the search engine spiders the same page over and over again.

A skilled web developer can turn those “ugly” URLs into “friendly” URLs. There are different methods and unless you are a developer, the jargon can get very technical. Suffice to say that there are widgets available that work with your Internet server to spit out friendly URLs based on a set of logic that you determine. My custom software development company, Vazkor Technologies, uses URLRewritingNet. Another popular method is Apache Mod Rewrite. As an example of how nicely this works, compare www.shoebuy.com and www.allfootwear.com. ShoeBuy.com rewrites their URLs. As you click through products and categories, you will see friendly URL names. On AllFootWear.com, you only see database codes in the URL. Obviously, database codes do not make for good keywords.

The next method for content-based SEO is a little more difficult to implement but if you have access to a decent software developer, it will be a snap. Basically the trick is to take all of those responses that you or your support staff are sending to customers who email your company with questions, and push them to your website, either to an FAQ page, a blog, or some other informational page. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, but the easiest way to get started would be to create a special folder in your email software client (e.g. Outlook) and instruct your support staff to move every Sent Item that was a response to a customer into this folder. Then your software developer needs to write a script that will “crawl” this email folder and parse out the original question and the response your staff made. Voilà, you have a lot of juicy FAQ content for your website.

With this sort of automation you can make the mistake of pushing too hard for perfection, which will end up costing you in the end. Yes, you could develop the script to crawl the email folder, parse the content out and upload it automatically to a location on your website or to a blog. However, the smarter solution would be to inject a checkpoint into the process. I would recommend having the content dumped to a text file that can be scanned and edited before uploading. If there are any emails that weren’t of a Q&A nature, you can manually cut them out.

For SaaS product owners, there are other methods for content enrichment. With these types of products, the users need training and support, and that usually means creating documentation. Put your documentation online! I’ve spoken with SaaS owners who worry about revealing their product information to the public. They fear that their competition will reverse engineer their functionality. While anything is possible, keep in mind that your competition can always subscribe to your service and get the information anyway. In the vast majority of cases, the SEO gain from having your documentation online far outweighs the risk. As an example, at my SaaS product’s website www.enteryourhours.com, I have my documentation with all the screenshots fully exposed.

Another simple content method for SaaS owners is to create a user forum and have it open to the public. Forums work especially well if you have a decent amount of market traction. It’s a great avenue for potential new customers to ask questions, and will allow your user community to build your content for you. If you don’t have a large customer base, you might want to forego the forums, and instead offer freebies to some of your best customers in exchange for contributing to a product-review blog.

Hopefully this article has gotten your wheels turning on content enrichment. Whether you have an e-commerce site, SaaS site, or some other web presence, you should consider this one fact: Your content is all around you, but not always on your website. Be clever, and you’ll come up with your own tricks. Get a scanner with OCR (optical character read) and scan your printed content. Rummage through all of your word documents and see what you find. If a customer gives you a testimonial over the phone, ask them to send it in an email so you can post it online. Be vigilant, and get into good habits, and you’ll have a content-rich site in no time!

Author: Aaron Korff

Just in case you were wondering, Google’s Matt Cutts makes it official (on Twitter nonetheless):

Twitter / Matt Cutts

Curious to see what your new PageRank is now? Here’s a nifty tool (of course, you can always go the toolbar route, but that takes away all the mystery and surprise).

Personally and professionally, PageRank is meaning less and less these days. Why?

1. Social networking sites (like Matt’s Twitter page) have taken on just as much authority as blogs yet these social profiles and pages fall outside the playing field of PageRank.

2. Sure, PageRank is important for SEO and PPC to some extent, but if you’re doing marketing work in the niches, PageRank becomes increasingly non-relevant the more niche you go. Someone, like myself, who loves and deals in antique books doesn’t really care if a blog on 19th Century German translations of Hebrew texts has a PR of 6.

The point is, PageRank is great if you’re dealing with keyword buys on large scale sites or blogs, but it’s not the ultimate determiner of a site’s authority.

3. PageRank has always been a standard for determining a site’s legitimacy for consumers, affiliate managers, bloggers and even Google itself. However, in the ongoing process of “web fracturing” (nice network science term), a metric built solely on the number of inbound links doesn’t scale.

4. Affiliate managers and advertisers have better tools to determine if a site is legit these days. PageRank is a part of that mix, but not the dominant part anymore.

5. Google itself doesn’t seem to always abide by PageRank only in its own SERP’s. Why should we rely on it solely as the metric of authority?

All in all, PageRank is sill a necessary part of any marketer’s daily life. However, the almost clinical obsession some people have over their PR number seems silly in a world where the determination of authority is increasingly based on intelligence and discernment rather than an algorithm.

One of my favorite pieces I’ve ever written was a March ’07 post on the rise of search motors to replace search engines:

My college students don’t use Google near as much as I do, or I would expect them to do. In fact, they don’t seem to use (or know how to use) many search engines at all.

They do know how to use Wikipedia, though. The idea of going to a specific “search engine” or “search site” in a few years will seem as stupid as dialing in to an AOL server to get on the internets. We’re going to be talking about “the good old Google days” soon enough.

Google is our generation’s AOL, I fear.

What young people seem to be realizing (and helping the rest of us realize) is that reliance and dogmatic faith in the preeminence of one search engine is not efficient or natural. Instead of relying on inefficient search engines, individuals doing search on the web are moving to search vehicles that rely on countless tiny motors.

What I realize now is that social networks are those motors. Facebook, Twitter, etc are the new search motors that run on fuels much more efficient (and better for the environment) than the fossil fuel of PageRank.

Courtesy of the always erudite Merlin Mann:

Twitter / hotdogsladies

Yes, some of this is uber-geeky.

However, if you’re an online marketer, it’s in your best interest to keep an eye on the horizon.

What is quickly coming towards us is the “real-time” web that includes our laptops, mobiles, netbooks, iPhones, TV’s and just about anything with a chip in it.

Why is this so valuable?

One word: Track. If you don’t know what Track is or why it’s important, you missed a good part of 2008. Welcome to the web.

Track will be the grease that keeps online marketers on the tracks in the coming years. Twitter might not be the service to provide it, but somehow and someway, a real-time firehose of specified keywords and info will be available to you.

Track will make our current marketing paradigm of Google keyword buying based on passive searches look like print advertising from the 60′s.

FriendFeed takes us a big step towards the real-time web with the beginning of SUP implementation…

FriendFeed Blog: Simple Update Protocol: Update: “Several months back, we announced SUP (Simple Update Protocol), a proposal for making RSS and Atom feed updates faster and more efficient. Since then, a number of services have added SUP support, we’ve SUP-enabled our feed fetcher, and there are now thousands of SUP enabled feeds being imported into FriendFeed. Among the services that now support SUP are Disqus, Brightkite, Identi.ca (and other Laconica-powered micro-blogs), BackType, and 12seconds.tv. Whenever one of these feeds is updated, the new entry appears on FriendFeed within seconds (non-SUP feeds typically take 15-30 minutes to update). Check out the public feed of Brightkite updates to see this in action. “

I’m not kidding when I tell you to watch this space if you want to be doing online marketing five to ten years from now.

Last year Jason Calacanis gave the keynote at Affiliate Summit and made the point (if I may summarize) that affiliate marketers are bright and have lots of potential but think too small…instead they need to make quality platforms that people and VC’s will get behind.

Clearly, that mindset should have changed as the economy continues to dive bomb and the Silicon Valley companies (such as Calacanis’ VC backed Mahalo) that Jason lauded continue to make double digit percentage staff cuts in the name of runway to survive the long recession/depression that we’re in for.

However, I’m listening to the new This Week in Tech from Leo Laporte, which features Jason Calacanis, John C. Dvorak (drink!) and Sarah Lane. Listen to the first 15 or so minutes if you’re interested in how much Jason’s views haven’t changed over the last year regarding affiliate sites being equatable to parked pages and spam.

Look, I hate spam as much, if not more, than the next guy. Just follow me on Twitter if you’d like to see an affiliate marketer filled with self-angst over the spam problem. I recognize that some “affiliates” use tactics that suck and should be looked down upon. But that is not the majority of affiliates considering that “affiliate marketing” itself is mushrooming to encompass a whole range of publishers because of the evolution of the social web.

However, an outsider calling all affiliate sites spam for his own business gain is just lame considering Mahalo itself is an affiliate site. I guess the Valley way to eliminate competition is to call it spam.

Good luck with those runways, Jason. We’ll keep the traffic flowing in the control tower.

Brian Littleton, head of ShareASale, was in NYC for Ad:Tech and sat down with Shawn Collins, Missy Ward and Connie Berg to discuss a few topics including the network’s interesting “3 Strikes” PPC policy on AffiliateThing…

ShareASale Blog » Blog Archive » Ad-Tech NYC, the Affiliate Thing Podcast, and the PPC “3 Strikes” policy: “I was also lucky to have the opportunity to speak with Shawn Collins on his ‘Affiliate Thing’ podcast at the Affiliate Summit booth. Also on board were co-Affiliate Summitter Missy Ward, and Connie Berg. We had a good time talking about some industry news, issues, and it gave me an opportunity to talk about our PPC ‘3 Strikes’ policy as well. Since September 1st when the policy became active, we’ve received a great amount of feedback and reports. I would also like to thank all of the affiliates who have really stepped up their efforts to make sure that they are in compliance with the rules at hand. I know how difficult it is to keep up with so many policies, and your effort is very much appreciated. We know there will always be mistakes, hiccups, etc… and will continue to do our best to determine the difference between an honest mistake and a continued violation. So thank you…. “

The show really is a good listen.

Here’s the mp3 or head over to GeekCast.fm for the streaming version.