How 3 Lines of Code Can Improve Your Rankings

"... different versions of the same pages can get indexed in search engines. ...
...
You should be in control of what versions of your site and pages get indexed, and not leave it up to search engines to decide."

Here is a good description of a tip that we have mentioned in class for years.

The issue described here has to do with different configurations of your URL that other sites might link to. For example,

• http://samplesite.com
• http://www.samplesite.com
• http://samplesite.com/default.php
• http://www.samplesite.com/index.html

all refer to different pages, at least as far as the search engines are concerned. If your site can be reached in various ways, like these, you may be losing some "oomph" in your ranking power.

A simple test will show you whether you have a problem or not. Type your URL into the address bar in each of the several configurations that might be relevant, then observe the actual URL that you land on. If different configurations result in your landing on the exact same URL, you are probably all right. If not, then you need to look into the advice provided in this article. The author tells you what you need to do to clear up the problem. Caution: if you are not a web developer, this is a little technical, but your web hosting company or web developer should be able to take care of it for you with no difficulty. If not, you have a bigger problem!

Attention to detail is very important in achieving optimal results with your Internet Marketing strategy, and this is one of those details that is easily overlooked, but can be very beneficial to get right!

How Much is a Top Google Ranking Worth to Your Business?

"In 2004 at the New York Search Engine Strategies conference a JupiterMedia analyst stated that 5 out of 6 commercial purchases which originated from search originated from the organic search results. They also stated 'algorithmic listings in search indexes generate an estimated six in seven commercially natured search referrals.'

2008 Penn State research titled Determining the informational, navigational and transactional intent of Web queries [PDF] found that roughly 80% of search queries were informational, while approximately 10% were each navigational and transactional. With so many searches being informational and navigational, it is unsurprising that people click the organic search results more often than the associated PPC ads."

This is a very extensive article with a lot of information about how to estimate a value for different ranking positions. There is more in this article than I can summarize in a single entry, but the quote above jumped out at me.

To summarize briefly what I found interesting in this selected quote:

1. Most commercial activity originated from search is due to organic results!
2. Ranking determines 6 out of 7 commercially oriented referrals!
3. Some 80% of searches are informational in nature as opposed to transactional or navigational!

These points really emphasize how important performing on organic searches can be to a business. Participants in our free Internet Marketing Clinic receive current information on the best techniques for making your web site perform well in this crucial arena!

This article is well worth some time to study, but be forewarned that it is full of information and will take some concentration.

Using Press Releases Effectively

I just read an excellent article offered on the site above as a free eBook download. this piece is chock full of great advice and links that everyone should know about. I recommend that everyone interested in enhancing his/her site performance read, no, study, the complete document, but I will attempt to summarize below the concepts that particularly caught my attention in it.

"New" means marketing directly to the user, not just through the media that press releases used to be addressed to. Media attention now becomes a "fringe benefit" of your press releases!

Press releases used to be about "big news", but no more. Anything your organization is doing can be fodder for a release now. For example (as the author suggests),

• CEO speaking at a conference? Write a release.
• Win an award? Write a release.
• Have a new take on an old problem? Write a release.
• Add a product feature? Write a release.
• Win a new customer? Write a release.
• Publish a white paper? Write a release.
• Get out of bed this morning? Okay, maybe not… but you are thinking the right way now!

Use distribution services to get your news out to the broad audience available. The article suggests four well known services, which can also be found in my file of useful links (Search the links page in the file for the phrase "press release sites".)

Don't forget to include the news on your web site. You should have a PR section of your site where you collect all your releases. Keep them there for as long as the information is relevant (why not forever?)

Consider "answering questions" and "browsability" in creating content! Keywords emphasize the first, but navigation and suggestions emphasize the second. Suggest things to people that they didn't think to ask!

Include the Press Release as a PDF in case people want to print it for any reason.

Pay attention to links in the PR. That gets people to your site, and increases your ranking. This means that you have to have the appropriate content on your site. That may mean writing something for the site before creating the PR.

Speak in terms that your buyers/users/clients use. That may include jargon, but mostly does not.

"On the best sites, content does more than just sell product – it directly contributes to an organization’s positive reputation by showing thought-leadership in the marketplace of ideas."

Segment your audience and release to every segment specifically!

Create something of interest that you can "mail" to people. Yes, snail mail, so you get their real addresses! Downloading is good, but sometimes people will want printed content that you can add value to.

Blogging’s a Low-Cost, High Return Marketing Tool

"But by far the most successful blog, in terms of traffic, turned out to be Free Money Finance, a blog that has nothing to do with Denali’s business. Mr. Nardini’s plan was to create a blog with so much traffic that it could serve as an independent media outlet owned by Denali Flavors, where the company could be the sole sponsor and advertiser.

He chose personal finance because it is a popular search category on the Web and because he knew he would not tire of posting about it. And post he does, about five times each weekday."

We are always on the lookout for new ways to utilize Internet "features" to improve the marketing of our businesses. this article had a new twist described in it that I thought was really interesting.

In all of our classes about blogging, we have emphasized the idea of informing readers about some aspect of your principle business. This article, by contrast, points out how someone can choose a popular topic to blog about in order to attract traffic that the business can benefit from simply by being the sponsor of the blog. This strikes me as being the same approach as used in traditional advertising, where the shows that businesses sponsor on television and radio are not about the business, but attract demographics that are of interest to the business. Education about the business itself takes place only in the ads that the sponsor has attracted traffic to!

This is one of those ides that seem so simple and obvious that I cannot understand why we have not seen it and talked about it before this time!

One other element of this story also needs to be emphasized, and that is the frequency with which the author of this blog posts to the blog. Note that he posts to the blog "... about five times each weekday." That is a lot of posting, but that is a big part of what makes it work for the author!

Google's “Query Deserves Freshness” or QDF

"QDF is clearly a very interesting model but what really interests me is how I can use it to drive traffic to my websites."

Some time ago in a previous post I wrote about Google tweaking its algorithm to place more emphasis on current information when search volume points to a particular interest in a topic. At that point, I didn't have a name for this feature, but in this blog post I found the name and a more in-depth description of that feature.

What this whole discussion is about, in short, is that if Google notices an increase in search volume for a particular topic, it will boost the rankings for new information that meets the search criteria so that newer information ear at the top of the rankings. Without this artificial boost, the basic algorithm tends to prefer better established pages, that is, older information!

This phenomenon can be quite relevant to sites that have something to do with something that might be mentioned in news stories that draw a lot of attention. For example (I know this seems like a bit of a stretch, but it is for real), if you sell equipment to monitor earthquake activity (how many people do?), you should realize that any reports of earthquakes will trigger a response on the search engines looking for more information. If you have a current posting on your blog about your equipment that would rank on the kinds of searches that people do to find out about current earthquake activity, you will likely see a surge in traffic as a result.

To take another example, the article says, "... what happens when cities suffer power failures. “When there is a blackout in New York, the first articles appear in 15 minutes; we get queries in two seconds,”. The quote is from a Google engineer named Amit Singhal, who was also quoted in the New York Times article about Google. That illustrates how quickly all this happpens and tells you something about how quickly you need to respond to news items in order to get the benefit for your site!

This same article (the main article referenced in the title link), led me to an interesting tool, which, unfortunately, I cannot seem to find my way back to at the moment. This tool was called "Hot Topics" and is something one can use to see what topics are "hot" on various locations.

What happened when I was on the page of this tool was that I typed in a phrase and hit "Search", and it began opening a series of windows for various other sites where it had submitted my phrase as a search. These other sites included Google, digg, Reddit, and many more. On the results pages, I could see an indication of what activity these was going on related to the search phrase I had submitted. This is a quick way to cover a lot of sites to see what is going on around the web in relation to a particular phrase, and to find what you might want to write about yourself to get your own 'buzz" effet going. I found the whole thing very interesting, but, unfortunately, closed the window before I had captured the link, and now I can't find it again. If anyone reading this comes across this tool, I would appreciate a referral!

Web Presence Leverage!

"... the Web's influence on offline purchasing could outpace even the rapid growth of online spending. the Web's influence on offline purchasing could outpace even the rapid growth of online spending."

According to this research, visibility on the Internet impacts sales almost 3.5 times more than retail sales figures indicate! In other words, buyers in "brick & mortar stores" are heavily influenced by information that they have collected over the web!

This characteristic makes it harder to measure the return on our investment in your rankings and visibility on the Internet, but you can feel comfortable that it is greater than your web statistics can document.

This means that performance measurement for your site improvement has to be more sophisticated than simply tracking sales on the site. Site statistics have to be correlated with information about your sales performance. This is not very different from traditional advertising where one has to evaluate the impact that an ad has had by measuring other changes in activity, but it is different in the respect that your web site offers more ability to follow activity on your site such as traffic, keyword activity, and site content, that can give you a more focused set of data on which to base your measurements.

One thing that this observation might relate to is the traditional assignment of the responsibility for the web site to the technology group in the business. For a site to really become effective, it has to be at least a joint responsibility of the marketing and the technology groups. Neither group alone can create a truly effective vehicle for the enterprise!

Internet Retail Growth Continues!

"... retailers should be worrying about a real long-term threat: the Internet. The 1990s-vintage boast that e-tailers would destroy bricks-and-mortar retailers all but disappeared after the NASDAQ went bust in 2001. But e-commerce has quietly been growing at a rate far higher than that of the overall economy. For the past four years, online retail sales have grown at an annual rate of more than 20 percent. In 2007, such sales, excluding travel, rose 21 percent to $175 billion, accounting for 7 percent of total retail sales. "Online retail is growing a heck of a lot faster than the rest of the pie," says Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research. Last year online sales accounted for 45 percent of computer hardware, software and peripheral sales, 19 percent of toys and videogames, and 19 percent of baby products. In the coming years, retailers, who are integrating online sales into their business models, simply won't need the same amount of acreage."

Another report shows how the Internet continues to grow. We have been observing this steady growth for years and talking about what it means to businesses, large and small. This article reflects the impact that this changing aspect of our world will have on real estate in the future.

I attended a real estate presentation years ago where the presenter talked about how the Internet was going to "kill" shopping malls. That warning has proved to be premature, but the speaker was certainly on the right track!

What does this mean to those of us involved in Internet Marketing? It means that the future is bright! The work that we are doing is more and more relevant to the economy, and the potential rewards are greater than ever! Stay current with the industry best practices through our free internet marketing class, offered twice monthly in downtown Houston.

6 Tips for Blogging in 2008

"... blogging is an excellent way to manage PR ..."

This is a nice piece on blogging with tips that we can all use. The key message that came across to me from this article was that you really need to pay attention to the small details of working your blog in order to get it to work most effectively for you.

For example, the author recommends hard coding keyword-rich links on the sidebar of your blog pointing to blog entries that are particularly important to your site. This kind of technique goes well beyond the concept of posting regularly to your blog to keep your content alive and fresh.

He also talks about writing keyword-rich titles for your entries, then, after posting them (and presumably, letting them get indexed?), returning to the entry and changing the titles to something that will be more eye-catching for readers. This reminds me of the difference between how newspaper headlines are written and how article titles or headlines need to be written for the web. Newspapers have had to adjust how their writers create headlines in order to make the stories findable on the Internet. I have even heard that search engines have made special adjustments to their search algorithms to accommodate newspapers' need for both kinds of headlines.

Overall, the message remains, the rewards go to those who pay attention to detail and have the persistence to apply good techniques to their work.