Newsletter June07


 

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5 SEO Tactics to Avoid Magnifying Your Success with Cross-Media Marketing

Using a Blog to Strengthen Your Search Engine Rankings

Google Targeting Paid Links

Is Your Company Too Focused on Traffic?

SEO Tactics to Avoid


Search engine marketing is one of the most successful and cost-efficient methods of spreading the word about products and services online. Search engines are a huge source of targeted, motivated traffic, and the way your website shows up in search results can have an enormous impact on your company’s bottom line. For that reason, savvy e-businesses today are paying attention to website optimisation for better indexing in search engines.

However, not all optimisation methods will help your business; some will even cause you to be de-listed from the results pages of major search engines. If you use spam tactics, either accidentally or to trick the engines into giving you higher rankings, you could get booted out of one of your major sources of free traffic. Here are five SEO techniques that will do your company’s website more harm than good.

Black Hat SEO Techniques that Could Hurt Your Website

1. Stuffing Text with Keywords
If keywords are good, then lots of keywords must be great, right? Wrong. If your content is riddled with keywords, it starts to sound like gibberish. Even worse, search engines know that this is an attempt to put the importance of search engine rankings over the user experience, and actually penalize it in search results.

2. Using Unrelated Keywords
Search engines want to help browsers find what they are looking for. The websites that rank well should, by extension, be the ones that provide this information. However, many webmasters make the mistake of trying to find what searches are popular and then using underhanded tactics to rank well, thinking that more traffic will automatically raise profits. These tactics are easy for search engines to recognize and penalize; but even worse, it’s a bad business decision, as the visitors you trick to your site will leave it frustrated, giving your business a bad reputation and no profit.

3. Doorway pages
Doorway pages are an extreme example of using unrelated keywords. Entire pages are devoted to ranking well for a keyword that may or may not be relevant to the business at all. They are usually visible only to search engine spiders, and not to human visitors, violating two major guidelines of most search engines.

4. Displaying Different Pages for Search Engines and Visitors
Customers of one of the major providers of online shopping carts have seen their pages dropped from Google for just this reason. The shopping cart provided a JavaScript-enhanced page for human visitors to use, while directing spiders to a plain HTML version that people can’t access, thinking that it would help the spiders index the pages.

Google’s quality guidelines specifically prohibit including pages for search engine rankings alone, and they have yanked the offenders. Even though the intent was not to game the search engines, the result was the same – blacklisting from Google, and lots of lost profits.

5. Using Link Farms
Links are good for search engine rankings, right? So if you participate in a scheme where you add a few links to your site and get hundreds in return, that will skyrocket your pages to the top of the rankings, right? Wrong. Search engines do not reward links from low-quality sites and “link farms” and participating in these schemes can get you thrown off the lists.

By using an experienced SEO expert, you can avoid making any of these common, and costly, optimisation mistakes. If you would like a no obligation consultation regarding your SEO activities, call 01491 614121.


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Magnifying Your Success with Cross-Media Marketing


If you are trying to find new ways to make your internet marketing stand out, consider going offline. Although that might not sound like the most logical step for an e-business to take, an integrated marketing plan that incorporates both online and offline methods can amplify your message, making it resonate more strongly with your potential customers. Here are five good reasons why e-businesses should consider incorporating offline marketing into their budget.

How Combining Marketing Methods Can Reinforce Your Message

Establish Your Business as Trustworthy
Even as e-commerce becomes more popular, people still tend to trust companies more when they have also heard of them through offline sources. After all, there are a lot of fly-by-night online businesses, but most of them don’t make the effort to get the word out through offline media as well.

Make Sure You Get Through the Static
People today are deluged with marketing, and many of them have taken steps to cut down on the amount of advertising they see. Some of these methods are pop-up blockers, strict email filters, and using digital recorders to screen commercials out of their television programs. By using more than one marketing channel, you increase the chances that your message will reach your intended audience.

Help People Remember Your Business
The Radio Ads Effectiveness Labs conducted a study to test how people reacted to hearing advertisements on the radio and on the internet. The surprising results were that people were dramatically more likely to remember company names and advertisements when they heard one ad on the radio and saw one on the internet, compared to hearing two ads on the internet. This held true for each gender, every race, every level of education, and every age bracket. In many cases, more than twice as many people were able to recall an advertisement heard on both media as those who could remember it after seeing two internet ads.

Reinforce Your Message
The more people hear something, the more likely they are to be influenced by it. This is especially true if they hear your marketing message in more than one environment. Each additional repetition reminds them that they intended to look into it more, making them more likely to do so.

Online and Offline Shopping are Connected
More and more people today are learning about products offline, then turning to the internet to research and study them, before buying, either off- or online. By giving your advertisements both online and offline appeal, you are mirroring what your customers already do naturally.

Establishing a multi-media marketing campaign is a sure way to reinforce branding, encourage people to shop with you, and increase your e-business’s bottom line. Radio, newspaper, and direct mail ads are affordable ways to create a strong integrated media campaign.


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Using a Blog to Strengthen Your Search Engine Rankings


More and more companies are turning to corporate blogs not only to reach out to their current and potential customers, but also to raise their visibility in the search engines. Learn why blogs are so popular with search engines and how to use them to your best advantage to drive visitors to your website and increase profitability.

Understanding Why Blogs Have Become a Powerful SEO Tool

Blogs tend to get great rankings in search engines because they adhere to the same kind of structure that search engine algorithms reward. For example, each blog post tends to center on a specific topic, which gives it plenty of relevant keywords. Posts are usually organized into categories, which help spiders to understand and properly index the content. Links to and from other blogs work much as the reputation system used by Google and other search engines – great posts get a lot of inbound links, helping spiders to assess their quality.

Furthermore, many directories and listings have been created just to list blogs, which can help search engine spiders and human traffic alike find your writing. Using these listings in addition to normal topical directories can really boost your blog rankings.

However, getting a high ranking on your blog pages will only help your business’ bottom line if you can transform the people who read your blog into paying customers. You can do this with an intelligent linking strategy, where blog posts refer to articles and information on your main website. Those articles can then encourage your site visitors to take the next step in the purchase process.

To have the best effect, keep blatant marketing out of your blog posts. Keep your tone light (or technical) and informative rather than “sales-y.” Use links to your website to reinforce your statements and provide more information.

The great part of this strategy is that not only can your higher blog rankings help improve the rankings of your regular web pages, but also that your blog will be driving highly targeted, motivated traffic directly to your site. The people who follow your links will be actively searching for information on your business topics, meaning that they are primed to be converted into paying customers.

Furthermore, if your blog is doing its job well, they already consider you an expert on the subject, raising your company’s stature in their eyes. Blog traffic can be far easier to convert than regular site visitors. This makes a corporate blog an extremely powerful tool in today’s online marketing environment, both for SEO and for conversion purposes.

If you would like to create your own business blog or require some assistance in marketing your existing blog call 01491 614121 for a no obligation consultation.


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Google Targeting Paid Links


Matt Cutts, Google engineer and prominent spokesman, shook the online marketing world when he asked companies to voluntarily report paid links on their websites to help Google refine their algorithms. Since many websites use some form of paid links to drive traffic to their sites, a lot of marketers are worrying about what kind of impact this news could have on their Google rankings. Here is a summary of some of the most important issues in the paid links topic.

Will Google’s Paid Link Policy Impact Your Business?

Why Is Google Concerned with Paid Links?
Among other factors, Google uses a type of reputation system to help them determine where sites should rank in their search engine results. The idea is that sites with useful, relevant content will be linked from other websites on the topic. That is, if your company publishes an amazing article about how to buy a new car, other sites whose users would be interested in the information will link to it.

The weakness of this reputation system is that not all sites link because the information on the partner website is so good. Sometimes they do it purely to get links back in response (i.e., as part of a “link form”) or because they are receiving money to do so.

Google’s quality guidelines prohibit trying to circumvent the natural rating system. Buying links purely for the purpose of improving your page’s rank in the search engines falls under this prohibition.

Is Google Saying that Paid Links Are Bad?
No, Google has no problem with paid links in general; they are trying to reduce search engine spam results by ignoring links that are made solely for the purpose of raising the page rank of another site. To determine which paid links fall within the Google quality guidelines, you should consider factors like:

Does this link provide genuine value for my site visitors?
Are the other links on the page also relevant and of high quality?
Would I buy this link if search engine ranking wasn’t involved?

To be absolutely sure that you do not cross Google’s quality guidelines in the links that you display on your site, you can add text that makes it clear a link has been paid (by displaying “Sponsored Link” underneath it, for example) or using the nofollow tag.

Can Competitors Hurt Me by Linking To Me?
No. Google knows that you cannot always control which websites link to you. The only effect that low-quality inbound links would have on you is that you would not receive a boost in your page ranking from those links.

In this case as in so many others, the cardinal rule of search engine rankings apply: focus on creating plenty of content that provides the best possible experience for your site visitors, and the search engines will respond favourably.

If you would benefit from a no obligation consultation regarding your online advertising activities, call 01491 614121.


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Is Your Company Too Focused on Traffic?


Many e-businesses invest a lot of money and time on driving more traffic to their websites. The first priority of banner ads, contextual links, SEO, and other such methods is getting eyeballs on the page. The basic idea is that if you throw enough gooey stuff at a wall, some of it will stick. The problem, however, is that if your wall is too slick, you’re going to be paying an awful lot of money to buy goo, even though your real problem is in your walls.

That’s why traffic alone is simply not enough to make your website successful. Companies that develop tunnel vision about driving traffic to the exclusion of their ability to convert that traffic into paying customers will waste their advertising budget and turn visitors off their products and services.

Why Driving More Traffic Could Do More Harm than Good

In order to make optimum use of your traffic, you need to design your website so that it fulfills your visitors’ needs and persuades them to take the next step in the sales process. Here are five tips that will help you do this:

Anticipate your visitors’ expectations. Make sure that your visitors are greeted by the information that they came to your website to find. That means that if they clicked on a banner ad announcing a sale, the page they land on should give more information about that sale.


Give them clear road signs showing them where they are and where they can go. Don’t lead your visitors to dead end pages. Always give them options for finding more information, making a purchase, or exploring your site more deeply.
Persuade them to take the “right” actions. Use prominent calls of action to encourage visitors to take the steps you want them to, from signing up for newsletters to reading more information.


Pay attention to where you’re losing visitors. Use your server logs to determine when people are leaving your site, and try to figure out why those pages are driving people away. If necessary, use surveys and test groups to find the answer. Fixing those holes will drive your conversion rate up.


Provide reassurance when and where visitors need it. Many visitors get discouraged and leave because they have a question or concern that isn’t answered in a timely manner. For example, the promise of a money back guarantee should be prominently displayed on the sign-up page, to reassure visitors that they have recourse if they are not happy with your product or service.
By taking these five easy steps, you can put the traffic that you receive to work for you. Once your site is converting well, you can start thinking about driving up the number of visitors.

If you would like to review the strength of your persuasion architecture, call 01491 614121 for a no obligation consultation.