Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation are relatively new fields representing a new way to market. Some people call the whole approach Marketing 2.0; we call it Inbound Marketing Automation or IMA.

As opposed to the old techniques of Outbound Marketing, Inbound relies on having your website get found on the web. Today, more than 90% of B2B buyers begin their search for a solution to their need online. To make this statistic even more significant, consider that 85% of people don’t progress beyond the 1st page of Google’s results to their search query. Essentially, if you’re not on page one, you’re not there!

If you’re thinking that this kind of thing is a little too much like the next silver bullet, and perhaps as ineffective as the last one, allow me to set your mind at rest: Inbound Marketing Automation really does work:

1. Most people more than double their website traffic using it
2. Conversion rate increases of more than 250% are frequent
3. The average cost to acquire a lead is 60% less compared to Outbound Approaches.

With that as your incentive, then, lets start by clarifying an important point: Inbound Marketing Automation is best thought of as a process. Yes, it consists of a set of tools, and yes, you do use them via specific techniques. But to gain maximum benefit its best to consider the Process as a way to tie them all together and thus ensure that the whole system is greater than the sum of its parts.

Formal Process Descriptions should be based on the Continuous Process Improvements mantra of Think, Plan, Do, Measure and Repeat. This link provides a good example of such a process description, this one dealing with How to run a B2B Twitter Campaign.

Three points to consider while you design the Process:

1. Holistic Websites are the only way to fly…

As a regular reader of Pete’s blog, you will know that he promotes the concept of a Holistic Website – a website which is carefully designed upfront to accommodate the results of your SEO effort, is easily extended to include a Blog and the other forms of Social Media marketing, has its copy and content properly designed around its keyword phrases, and, of course, is ready for your IMA system to plug into when you switch it on.

2. Design your Marketing Strategy

But before you start designing this Holistic Website (or renovating your existing one), the very first thing to think about is your Marketing Strategy. If you have already articulated a comprehensive strategy including its online components, you will obviously omit this step. But if your strategy is out of date (or – gasp – doesn’t exist!), or doesn’t cover the online aspects of the new marketing approach, then proceeding on without it is a bad idea. You are, after all, going to base your whole website (all the copy, graphics, structure and content) on the keywords and core competencies you define in the strategy. If you get the strategy wrong, your entire effort which follows this step is a waste of precious resources.

3. Key performance indicators and metrics
Armed with your strategy, you can now turn your attention to defining some key goals for adding Inbound Marketing to your website. As the famous slogan so succinctly puts it, the goals are usually, More Sales Leads of higher quality at lower cost. Once you have your objectives stated clearly, think of the metrics you will use to both measure the current values now and decide how best to portray these metrics as a trend thereby making it easy to monitor your progress towards your goal.

Okay, now for the overview.

The major thrust behind Inbound Marketing’s success, is that done right, your ideal prospects come knocking on your door and give you permission to sell them something. It’s a lot like the Field of Dreams: If you build a great website, the buyers will come.

And because the buyers may number in their thousands (perhaps even hundreds of thousands), you will need the aforementioned process involving software tools and techniques to manage it all. But please note: This is an all or nothing approach. Automating a part of the whole process is akin to speeding up the flow of water in the middle of a river. It makes that part rush for sure, but the overall throughput doesn’t change.

With that in mind, a good example system is shown below.

Components of Inbound Marketing Automation

1) Your Content. A subject unto itself, but the whole process depends on having content that makes your site the destination of choice for people interested in your field. Tools here help create it, display it, disseminate, promote and catalogue it. Our blog offers some ideas on how to create such content (website details at the end).

2) SEO and PPC Tools. Search Engine Marketing includes tools for Organic Search (SEO) and those for Pay-Per-Click (PPC). There are tools to help you devise the right Keyword strategy; others to assist in developing your advertising campaigns; yet more tools score your website, analyze its traffic share, determine your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking, assess incoming and outgoing links, and on and on.

3) Social Media Marketing tools help you run your SMM Campaigns. Reputation Analytics monitor the social networks to determine the “buzz” around your products/services and company. These tools also help you to find the most authoritative or influential blogs and websites for your area. There are tools to help with Twitter, Blogging, LinkedIn and all of the may social media platforms and because this is a hot topic, there are many articles on how and what and when – again our blog covers the subject well.

4) Demand Generator packages capture, score and grade visitors on their profiles and digital footprints, and then nurture them from cold leads to hot prospects via drip-email campaigns run via Automation Rules.

5) The hot prospects (those who achieve a sufficiently high score) are fed into your CRM system enabling your sales people to place very effective sales calls.

Prospecting Heaven would look like this…

Imagine visitors arrive on your site, attracted by your excellent keyword and SEO strategy, and all that amazing Social Media Marketing you’re doing daily. They find, when they get there, that your site is a perfect match to the keyword phrase they keyed in (because you created your marketing strategy and keyword phrases well, and then used the holistic approach to build the website and write its copy). So they don’t bounce off and they do begin exploring…

They find your thought-provoking content and register to get it. They read it and hustle back for more. Because they are now an official Prospect (i.e. they have given you their name and email address), they are inserted into the first of your drip-email nurturing campaigns and from here on, they are managed automatically. Nurtured and cared for, according to your best sales and marketing practices which are encoded in your Inbound Marketing system’s Business or Automation Rules. Your prospects are cared for flawlessly, repeatably and 24/7. And with each automated drip-email element of every campaign, provided with just the right response to nudge them to the next step in their buying cycle.

Your marketing people are freed from the drudgery of managing leads and responding to routine inquiries allowing them to create brilliant new campaigns, and your sales people no longer spend time on people who are “just looking”, but instead concentrate their efforts on the hot prospects who are ready to buy now. This is how Inbound Marketing Automation increases your revenues while lowering your costs and thus boosts profit significantly.

The use of meta tags in web pages are often required by search engines as a source of information to help them to decide how to list and rank your website. Meta Tags are not always required, but as a rule of thumb, it makes more sense to take advantage of them than to leave them out.

It is a simple process to add Meta Tags to web pages. We have created this free Meta Tag generator, to help you make the most of your submissions.

http://www.addme.com/meta.htm#description_meta_tag

Plenty of bloggers are talking about the inevitable intersection of social media marketing and search engine optimization. Heck, we’ve been blogging about SMO since 2006! Keyword optimized social content and channels of promotion provide abundant signals to search engines for improved visibility on standard, social and real-time search.

The changing nature of social media marketing and optimization create the need for tools whether for research, marketing and promotion or analytics. Here are 11 social media and SEO tools you might find useful:

• howsociable.com – Social visibility score
• knowem.com – Profile building tool
• Social Media for Firefox – Build a powerful social profile on social news & bookmarking sites
• semrush.com – Find competitor organic search rankings
• Google Insights – Keyword demand trends
• Page Inlink Analyzer – Analyze inbound links, their Delicious bookmarks & keyword tags
• majesticseo.com – Historical back-link tracking
• trackur.com – Social media monitoring
• socialmention.com – Real-time social search & scoring, social keyword research
• bit.ly – Search friendly URL shortening with analytics
• analytics.postrank.com – Track social engagement with combined Google & social analytics

Below are screen shots of each tool with a more detailed description of how you might use them.

HowSociable is a useful tool to quickly gauge the social presence of a particular keyword or brand name. Agencies like TopRank Marketing will use this kind of tool (customized) to take snapshots of customer social presence metrics for social media optimization programs. For each social site polled, you can clickthrough to see specific mentions.  This is a characteristic of more advanced social media monitoring tools, but for those that want a quick glimpse, HowSocialble is easy to use and the price is right, just like these free social media monitoring tools. However, if you want more comprehensive brand search and monitoring, then a paid social media measurement tool is worth the investment.

KnowEm is both a free and a paid service that will help you easily and quickly check whether your brand terms or other keywords have been registered as social profiles on a wide variety of social media web sites. Everything from blogging platforms to social news and bookmarking services are included. If you don’t want to complete all those profiles yourself, you can pay knowem to do it for you.  Companies invest a lot in building their brand, so this tool is helpful both for creating off site promotion channels as well as guarding against brand name squatters.

Social Media for Firefox is the only browser addon in our list and can be a handy tool to identify upcoming news items that are gaining popularity on certain social news and bookmarking services. A big part of building a more influential user profile is to be a consistent source of submissions for articles that become popular. This addon helps identify articles that are becoming popular on services like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon giving you a heads up to submit to other services.  The logic is that if a news item becomes popular on one service it has a good chance of becoming popular on others.  Relevance, timing and focus are key as is patience for this kind of tactic.

SEMRush is an interesting tool for identifying the keyword visibility, both organic and PPC, on Google for pretty much any domain name you might be curious about. Your own or competitors for example. A common question for marketers is, “What are my competitors optimizing for?”. This tool helps uncover that insight and in combination with other standard and social keyword research, can be very helpful insight in a social media optimization program.

Google Insights for Search is a handy tool to research trends in popularity of various keywords on their own or in combination.  Filters for search type, geographic location, industry or topical category and timeframe allow you to refine some pretty useful information about what’s in demand.

Eric Miraglia ’s Inlink Analyzer is a back link analysis tool based on Yahoo’s Site Explorer that not only counts and displays source links to a particular URL, but it also shows if the source links were bookmarked on Delicious and what keyword tags were used. This kind of insight can be quite useful for understanding the relationship between social keywords and link popularity. It would be nice if there was a CSV export option.

Majestic SEO is easily one of the most powerful and useful link analysis tools available. There is a free version that gives you link acquisition counts over time and if you are a site owner, you can get full reporting for your site once you validate it.  If you use the paid service, you can get the juicy link details on your competition.  This tools is useful for finding high impact links for standard SEO but it’s also useful for finding out which social media sites your site or competitors’ site are getting  the most links from.  Also, which of your own social destinations (blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc) are getting inbound links and from where.

Andy Beal’s Trackur service is a very easy to use social media monitoring tool that offers a free version that will satisfy many beginners in the social media optimization space.  Social media monitoring services are keyword based, (queries and negative or exclusionary) and that means some very useful information about how popular certain keyword concepts are on the social web. Of course you can use it to monitor what people are saying about your brand, identify a certain measure of influence and where they’re saying it. But seeing social keyword popularity trends can be quite useful for taking advantage of real-time marketing opportunities.

SocialMention is a free real time and social search tool that offers an array of search options (just blogs, just forums, just bookmarks or all) and output in the search results. You can get an indication of basic sentiment and the top social keywords associated with your query. As a free service, you don’t setup an account and save your search results, but you can easily download them into a spreadsheet. This is probably one of the most useful, free social search tools online.

Bit.ly URL shortening is very handy since they’re included as a default service on Twitter and many other Twitter applications. Bit.ly is rock solid reliable with uptime, which is pretty critical when you’re relying on their URL redirect to send traffic to whatever it is you’re promoting. You can also get basic statistics for each URL that your shorten to show how productive the site is where it was shared.  In today’s succinct social web with Twitter, status updates and micro-content, being able to conserve space with a reliable URL shortener is very helpful. Stats on top of that make this a “go to” URL shortening service.

PostRank offers a nice measure of engagement at the individual document level and if you pay attention, you can get that data on any web site in their database, not just your own. You can easily see what content on your competitors blogs are getting popular and where.  If you sign up for the PostRank Analytics service, you can incorporate Google Analytics data with social engagement metrics. These are essential comparisons in a social media optimization program and can help you understand where to plan your time on the social web.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEO and Social Media Marketing tools. What low cost or free tools have you found to be effective for social media optimization tasks?

The Following Article examines the art of Converting website traffic into Customers.

It includes:

Tips on how to optimize individual landing pages accordingly
Different methods of landing page construction
…
SEO Ranking Isn’t Everything – What About Customer Conversion – http://www.interleado.com/blog

Building a Successful Ecommerce Website

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SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has become such a broad term today that whichever activity drives any traffic on your website is considered as an SEO Activity! In earlier days, we – as SEO Consultants -  used to focus specifically on the structure and content of websites only, which we called “On-page SEO”. We tried hard to make sure that our clients’ websites have been set up right with proper page titles, meta text, content placement, image names etc. But today, the definition of SEO has changed expanded drastically. Now-a-days, SEO as a service is divided into 2 categories :-

1. On-Page SEO - optimize content, internal links, meta tags etc
2. Off-page SEO - backlinks, social media, forum posting, press release etc.

Honestly, I don’t agree with the concept of Off-page SEO. You may call it ‘Off-page promotions’ or ‘Off-page optimization’ but ‘Off-page SEO’ definitely does not make sense to me. Wikipedia defines SEO as

the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural or un-paid (organic or algorithmic) search results.

Then why is everyone writing so much about “Off-page SEO” when, ideally, the term even doesn’t exist at all? I leave this up to you all to help me find the answer in your comments below.

Just because it is such a popular term these days, I could not stop myself from using it as the title of my blog article even though I don’t agree with it This is also one of the problems with SEO Consultants & business owners like us – that we have to keep our readers/customers happy with giving them what they want to take!

Image Courtesy – www.topspotoptimisation.co.uk

Coming back to the topic of today’s discussion, which is about the best “Off-page SEO” tactics or “Off-page Promotion” (for my own sake) that can help you drive consistent traffic on to your website for a long run. These techniques are just the ones which I have tried myself and achieved reasonable success for my clients. You may have tried something else which worked for you so don’t hesitate to share that with our readers.

1.  Participate in Forums & discussion boards: 5-6 responses or 2-3 new questions a day (with your website’s URL in the signature) in 5 different popular forums a day is all that it will take to get a decent traffic on to your website. It will hardly take you more than 2 minutes to write a response or come up with a question to ask the community.  Spending 20 minutes a day religiously on forums for 2 weeks will start generating traffic on your website that you won’t even imagine.  Of course, you need to make sure that your responses and questions are intelligent & look like real contribution. Do not post for the sake of posting. It will give wrong impression and other forum members will look down upon you with contempt! Some will even mark you as spam leading to deletion of your account and your hopes as well.

Many SEO companies offer this service really cheap, say 1¢ per post. DO NOT fall for that. They will do more harm than any good. My advice would be that you should hire someone who (1) understands your business’s objectives and can (2) write decent English. He should  really contribute in the forums to lure other readers in clicking on his signature URL.

Some of my favorite SEO Forums are :

• Digitalpoint
• Webmaster World
• V7n Community

2. Publish Blogs / News / Press Releases & submit them in bookmarking websites - Everyone in the web community knows the importance of blog and news updates on your company/ product website. Not only it attracts search engine crawlers to visit your website more often, it also helps you generate more back links by submitting these articles on press release and bookmarking websites. Tons of bookmarking websites have sprouted up recently. And believe it or not, most of them are a good source of traffic generation for your website.  The ones that I use most frequently for my clients are :

• Stumbleupon
• Digg
• Delicious
• Reddit
• Mixx
• Propeller
• Kaboodle (for online stores)
• Yahoo Buzz
• Technorati
• Clipmarks

There are still more than 200 bookmarking websites which you should definitely consider for this task.

3. Create your social profile & share your news update with the community – The first names that lighten up in our minds are Facebook, Twitter & Myspace. Make sure you create a public social profile for the company that you are promoting. You ought to have your Facebook Fan page, Twitter profile, Youtube profile, LinkedIn profile (of yourself and/or your clients). All the websites I just mentioned require you to sign up and they provide you a unique URL of your profile. This is your social profile. Following are must-do activities whenever you have a new blog or new story published on your website or blog -

• Tweet about it on Twitter
• Do a status update on Facebook & LinkedIn
• Update status on Ecademy as well. Ecademy (has a lot of junk but) is still a good source of traffic once you have a strong network.
• Share your blog article on discussion boards & forum of these social networks.
• Flickr – “A picture is worth a thousand words” is not exactly true in the world of SEO which relies heavily on content full of words. But still Flickr stands out and can become a good source of traffic for your website. Just make sure that whenever you write an article, you add an image in your post and submit that image on your Flickr profile with apt tags and description. If you have an online store and sell products, make sure all the images of your products are also submitted on to your Flickr profile. Picasa, Photobucket & Picli are some other photo sharing networks.

Once your profile has been set up, you should start building a community by adding/inviting friends to join your network.

• Youtube
• Vimeo
• Dailymotion
• Slideshare (See a sample below)

5. Yahoo Answers & similar question/answer websites – I love Yahoo Answers and On Startup Answers community where you can post any question you want and community members will respond within hours. SEO companies are using similar sites to drive traffic by maneuvering questions in such a manner that makes other members click on their URLs. It may not be the best way to get the type of traffic you want but still it is one of the widely used method these days. Again, you have to be very cautious with your language so that it does not appear as spam.

6. Article re-writing and distribution – Haven’t we covered this in point (2) above? Not really. This is about article re-writing. Numerous SEO companies are hiring writers to re-write the same articles many times in different versions and keep distributing them on hundreds of press release & bookmarking websites.  It works quite often since your content is not copied and the crawlers will see it as original stuff.

7. Local business listings on search engines & yellow pages- All major search engines like Google, Bing & Yahoo offer business owners to submit their business with full details of name, address, phone number etc. This helps in getting local traffic for your website. Optimizing for local search listings is the discussion of a different topic that I will publish sometime in near future. For now, you should just make sure that your business has been listed on all local listings websites. A few examples of such sites are -

• Hotfrog,
• Business.com
• Superpages.com

These are some of the widely used “Off-page promotion” techniques by SEO Companies across the globe. Please feel free to keep your opinions on this post in the comment box below.

Off-page SEO tactics to drive consistent traffic on to your websiteSEO(Search Engine Optimization) is such a broad term that whatever activity drives traffic on to your website, is considered as an SEO Activity. Earlier, we as the SEO Consultants used to focus specifically on the structure and content of websites only.  We strived hard to make sure our clients’ websites have been set up right with proper title, meta text, content placement, image names etc. But today, the definition of SEO has changed. Now, SEO as a service is divided into 2 types -1. On-Page SEO – optimize content, internal links, meta tags etc2. Off-page SEO – backlinks, social media, forum posting, press release etc.But I don’t agree with the later one. There is nothing called as Off-page SEO. You may call it “Off-page promotions” or “Off-page optimization” but “Off-page SEO” definitely does not make sense to me. Wikipedia defines SEO as – the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.Then why is everyone writing so much about “Off-page SEO” when the term does not exist at all? I leave this up to you to help me find the answer in the comments below.Just because, it is such a popular term these days, I could not stop myself from using it as the title of my blog article even though I don’t agree with it. This is also one of the problem with SEO Consultants & business owners like us – we have to keep our readers/customers happy with giving them what they want to take.So coming back to the topic of today’s discussion, which is about some of the best “Off-page SEO” tactics or “Off-page Promotion” (for my own sake) that can help you drive consistent traffic on to your website for a long run. These1.

Anyone who owns a website would want to get his website among the top results on various search engines. With more and more websites thronging up every moment, it’s getting really tough to manage staying on the top list of the search engines. But by following some simple techniques you can get your website to the top list with in pretty easily – sometimes even in  a matter of days! Seems vague? Read on to know how you could do it!

• Determine the keyword for which you want your site to rank high for. Often there is a tough competition for keywords/phrase that can be termed as “common”. So you have to choose the phrase which is in demand but with less competition. It is always better to select specific words as keywords in place of general words. For example, if you are talking about parenting be specific like “parenting teenagers” or “parental infants”.
• Get effective back links: Write a few articles which are related to your site and submit them to different article directories and leave a link to your site in the block available at the bottom. When your article is accepted by those directories, you get an effective back link to your site. The articles which you write must be related to the keywords which you want your site to rank in the top list.
• Active participation in forums: Actively participate in the forums which are related to your keywords and the site. Along with giving comments and leads in those forums you can leave a link to your site.The more active the forum is ,the more possibility of your site to reach the top list.
• Social bookmarking: Social bookmark sites are all the rage and while with most of them the links do not count because they are a no-follow, there are several sites that a link from does count. Some of the sites which are good enough are Linkedin, facebook, Digg, delicious, reditt and stumbleupon.
  Social Bookmarking websites increase your chances of ranking high on search engines

• Exchange links with a website with a PageRank of 7 or more: Find a website which is related to your site or keyword and try to exchange links with the site. This will help you get to the top list of search engines.
• Avoid using the Google Submission form: Even though the google says you can submit your website or the page you want to be indexed to their site directly, never do this as it will often take more time before your site is indexed. The same is the case with other search engines submission forms. So avoid using this process.

One of the most pivotal aspects of driving large volumes of search traffic in most verticals is effectively targeting long tail keywords. While ranking for competitive phrases and developing link authority are certainly crucial aspects of SEO, much of ranking on long tail keywords is properly targeting and optimizing for them. A while ago Aaron made the following image as a conceptual example of how the relevancy algorithms may differ for different types of keywords:

This article will outline a three step process for targeting long tail keywords.

Step 1: Build a Basket

The first (and possibly most important) consideration is determining which keywords to target. For this I think a three-step process is best:

Traditional Keyword Research

It’s always a good idea to do some idea generation and to get a feel for the possible variations of your specific targeted keyword by utilizing a keyword research tool. For the sake of the article, we’ll assume that we’ve selected our “head” or core keyword target, and that we’re attempting to rank an article for the key phrase and related key phrases. Three tools that I find particularly useful for this purpose are Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool, the SEO Book Keyword Tool, and my company’s Free Keyword Tool.

Using Your Own Analytics

Really the best source of keyword data for determining the long tail keywords you can target is your own data. This is powerful because it shows you a variety of keyword combinations, the data is proprietary (your competitors didn’t pull the list from the same keyword tool you used, so they won’t be targeting the same keywords), and you have actual data both that you can rank for a given keyword, and you have an indication of how that keyword performs on your site. In Google Analytics, there a couple of reports you can pull to get this information (most analytics packages will provide you with similar capabilities). Drill down to traffic sources > keywords > non-paid:

Then you can create a filter for the head term. For the sake of this example we’ll say we’re targeting the phrase “long tail” and variations:

By creating the filter, we can see a variety of modifiers that the page and/or other content on our site are already driving. And, if we are in fact attempting to optimize an existing page for multiple keywords, we can utilize a content report to see what that page is already driving traffic for:

You can then see all of the queries driving traffic to that page. By analyzing the traffic and conversion statistics for that page, you can then start to feature more effective variations more prominently. The beauty of analyzing your own data lies in the fact that you can de-emphasize variations that don’t convert for your site.

Continually Iterate on Both Keyword Research and Keyword Analysis

Periodically, it’s a good idea to return to traditional keyword research, and to dig back into your analytics. This is particularly true if a concept or product is seasonal, but regardless the queries driving traffic to your site are bound to shift, and analyzing both the segment of keywords you’re targeting and the actual traffic to a given page can help to drive a tremendous amount of additional traffic to an individual page.

Step Two: Put It On The Page

Unless you coordinate an army of writers or build a venture-backed model around creating a piece of content for every phrase imaginable, you can’t create a piece of content for every phrase you want to rank for. As such you’ll have to effectively target long tail keywords by including the multiple phrases in your keyword bucket throughout the page:

• Varying the Title Tag and Header – In varying title tags and headers for SEO you are ensuring that your pages aren’t over-optimized and they include relevant long tail keywords you’ll want to target (rather than redundantly featuring the same keyword twice).
• Place Variations and Modifiers in Your Content - By researching the variations of a keyword you might want to include in your content, you can be aware of them as you craft content, and you can strategically place modifiers throughout your page’s content. For instance, it might not be natural for you write out the phrase “affiliate long tail keywords for promoting products” but if you know this is a phrase that drives some traffic, you can be sure to include phrases like “whether you are a retailer or an affiliate promoting products”. You’ll be using phrases like long tail keywords frequently enough that if the longer phrase is lower competition, you might not even need to include the exact phrase to rank for it. Note below that none of the ranking pages use the exact phrase “affiliate long tail keywords for promoting products”:



• Pay Attention to All of Your On-Page Elements – Be sure to work into your page’s headlines, bolded copy, alt attributes, title attributes, etc. the variations you’re targeting. By mixing up the words and phrases you use in these elements, you’re also ensuring your page isn’t over-optimized

Step Three: Building Links For Your Keyword Basket

Finally, even though many of your long tail keyword variations will rank on their own, you’ll want to develop some links with specific anchor text to these pages. You can do this in a few different ways:

• Vary Your Internal Links to a Page– Again, this allows you to avoid being “over-optimized,” and if you stick primarily to variations that contain the head keyword within the variation and append modifiers, rather than synonyms, you’re consistently transferring relevance for your core term.
• Use an Important Modifier in Your Headline – While your title tag is what’s seen by searchers, many people linking to your article will use your headline as anchor text. Using a variation here helps attract links for important modifiers
• External Links You Control- Things like company listings, directory listings, and nepotistic links often offer you the opportunity to control your own anchor text: while many times just leveraging internal links on an authoritative site is enough to rank, sometimes utilizing article submission Websites or other low-quality external linking sources with keyword-rich anchor text can help you to rank for mid to low-competition keywords.

Ultimately the best way to rank for long tail keywords is to build an authoritative Website and seed it with a lot of content, but on a page-by-page basis you can often leverage strategic keyword targeting and your own analytic data to help drive exponentially more traffic than you would focusing solely on the “head” keyword.

Many of you have already developed a PPC from scratch, but for those of you who are new to search, it can sometimes be daunting to know where to start. With that in mind, today’s column will focus on the seven key steps to building a PPC campaign.

Step “zero” – which you should have already done if you’ve decided to develop a PPC campaign – is to do your research. My last column talked about the various intelligence tools you can use to understand the search marketplace and competitive environment. All of this should feed into your overarching search strategy.

However, even more important than understanding the landscape is to have an in-depth knowledge of your company’s or clients’ products and services and their Web site content. And naturally, that’s where the PPC campaign creation process starts!

1. Content/Category ReviewYou will want to review the content of the Web site you’ll be marketing to carefully, to understand the subject matter and offerings. You may want to “scrape” the site for keywords as you go through this process, noting any terms that you deem relevant to the campaign.If you are developing a campaign for a new site launch, you can use the content map or Information Architecture (IA) wireframes and copy decks to help understand how content will be organized and what types of themes will be present.

   In addition, if the category or offering is completely new to you, it may be helpful to do additional research on the topic to broaden your general knowledge based on the topic. These efforts should leave you with my next point.

2. Account Structure DevelopmentOnce you have a good sense of what the category, site, and product/service offerings are all about, you can begin to group your initial content/keyword findings into high level themes or content blocks. These can be used as the basis for your campaign’s structure and will help guide your keyword research.For example, if you are working with a Web site for a home renovation company, you may find the following key content areas/themes:
   

   • Home renovation – general
   • Home improvement contractors
   • Kitchen renovations
   • Bathroom renovations
   • Finishing a basement
   • Home renovation guide/how-to

   Based on the relative importance of the topics in this list, you may decide to assign a budget proportionately to each of these areas.

3. Keyword GenerationNow that you have your high level structure in place, you can begin comprehensive keyword generation. This involves employing various keyword research tools to take your initial list of tens or hundreds and turn it into thousands.Your goal is to discover as many related terms, keyword variations, synonyms, related terms, and misspellings as you can. With paid search, you start with a big list of keywords for testing purposes and then whittle down your list as you find what is working and what’s not.

   It might make sense to tackle each key content theme/topic individually and capture the output of that research on individual tabs in a spreadsheet. This will come in handy when we move to the next step.

4. Keyword GroupingWith your keyword generation exercise complete, you should now be sitting with long lists of keywords under each high level content area. Your job now is to divide these lists into very narrow groupings of similar keywords called “ad groups.” So, for example, under your “bathroom renovations” group, you might create the following ad groups:
   

   • Modern bathroom renovation
   • Redoing your bathroom
   • Bathroom upgrade
   • Retiling shower
   • Replacing bathroom cabinets
   • Bathroom sink installation

   Within each of these ad groups would be highly focused keywords in close relation to each other. There is no set number of recommended ad groups or keywords within each ad group, but the smaller and tighter each ad group is, the better.

5. Match TypingArmed with highly focused keyword groups, you can now go through each group or keyword and assign the match type. (Match types help define the rules around which queries your ads will be shown for.) Many people will simply default to “broad match” – meaning your ad will be shown on any and all queries that contain your keyword – and that’s fine. However, you may want to assign a more narrow match type such as “phrase match” or “exact match” if you want to restrict when your ad is shown, limit your spend, or if you want to test out various match types.In addition to regular match types, you can also assign negative matches to each of your ad groups. “Negative” keywords are essentially terms that you don’t want your ad showing for. So, for example, if you put all your keywords on broad match, anytime the word “home renovation” is part of a keyword phrase, your ad would show up. Which means it could also show for undesirable queries such as “horrible home renovation” or “home reno companies to avoid.” To avoid your brand being associated with these terms, you can added such keywords as “negative” terms to your account, which restricts your ad from showing in those instances.
6. Ad Copy CreationWith your ad groups and keywords well defined, it’s time to create ad copies for each group. Ideally, you will run more than one ad per ad group at any one time for testing various messaging. The rule of thumb is to run at least three ad copies at a time. There are many approaches to developing A/B testing methodologies for search ads, but that’s a whole other discussion.What’s most important is that you make sure your ad copy is as relevant to the keywords as possible. So, for example, in your “modern bathroom reno group,” you might explicitly state in an ad that your company “specializes in creating stylish bathrooms with a modern aesthetic.” In your “retiling shower” group, you might ask, “Thinking about retiling your shower? Learn how a professional contractor can help.”
7. Landing Page SelectionThe final step in the process is landing page designation. As part of your ad copy development, you will need to select “display” and “destination” URLs for each of your ads to drive to. The display URL is what will actually show in your ad copy (usually the domain), whereas the destination URL is where the ad will actually drive (usually a sub-page).For each ad group, your goal is to find the page on the site that is most relevant to the group’s keywords. In some instances you may choose to promote a specific “call-to-action” in your ads and therefore drive directly to an action page. You might also want to create campaign landing pages to up your chances of conversion. You can also test drive the same ad to various landing pages to see which generates a more engaged visitor.

Posted on 02. Mar, 2010 by Pete Hollier in Search Optimization

The age old adage you get what you pay for is in most cases true with the exception of Google Analytic which is free. The Google Analytic application to monitor web site performance is a powerful tool that is often under utilized by many web site owners who just barely scratch the surface of its capabilities.

Google Analytic: Getting Started

There are a number of quick check reports that are invaluable to web site owners, some of the more important reports include:

Visitors

The visitors report provides an indication of how well your web site is engaging your visitors by providing data in the Visitor Summary such as:

• Average page views: The average number of pages viewed by visitors.
• Time on site: How long your visitors spent on your site.
• Bounce rate: What percentage of visitors are leaving your site without viewing additional pages.

Included within the Visitor’s drop down menu are a number of additional reports which are highly recommended depending on your requirements.

Benchmarking report: The Benchmarking Report provides an excellent indication of how well your site performs compares to the average of the competitiors in your niche, and provides a clear indication of whether or not you have to improve your web site promotion strategies. There is one catch to this report, to gain access to this comparative analysis you must agree to share you Analytic data with Google for comparative analysis.

Map Overlay: If your business targets a specific geographic area the Map Overlay is a report you should not ignore. It not only provides a report outlining the country of the visitors origin, but can also drill down to cities to provide you an indication of how well your web site marketing programs are working for such tactics as Local Search or advertising.

Mobile: Viewing the Mobile Report may just offer a few surprises to many web site owners as to how often the web site is being accessed by mobile devices. The Mobile Report may encourage you to consider developing pages specifically for Mobile devices which can potentially offer benefits in Mobile Search.

Visitor Loyalty: The Visitor Loyalty reports include a wealth of information in addition to the Visitor’s Summary Report. Some of the more notable reports providing additional information on how well you are engaging your visitors include:

• Loyalty: Reports on how often visitors are returning to the site.
• Depth of visit: Provides a percentage break down of how many pages are visited.
• Recency: Reports on the time span between first visits and additional visits.

Traffic Sources

To monitor and improve your web site promotion initiatives it is important to understand where your web site traffic is originating. Google Analytic provides this information within the Traffic Sources section. Reports of interest include:

Direct Traffic: The Direct Traffic Report provides an indication of the percentage of visitors which have accessed your web site directly, these could be from a Book Mark or typing the URL into a web browser. This report can assist you to determine the level of public awareness of your web site from either off line marketing initiatives, or to some extent Email marketing or Social Media Marketing programs.

Referring Sites: The web sites referring traffic to your web site are an important part of your traffic generating mix. Understanding which sites deliver traffic to your site can indicate the value of the Blogs you comment on regularly, the effectiveness of your Twitter or Facebook presence, and also provides an indication of how well targeted your link building program has been.

Search Engines: Search Engines are the primary reason you implement an Organic Search Engine Optimization Program. The Search Engine Report when read in conjunction with the Keyword Report also under the Traffic Sources tab provides detailed information about which Search Engines are delivering traffic for specific keywords.

Content

The reports under the Content category provide a wealth of information which can assist you to determine web page popularity, and also identify pages which are not performing to their maximum potential. Of particular interest in this section are:

Top Content: The Top Content Report lists your pages from the most to least visited. Within this report is also important page by page data such as Bounce Rate, Time on Page, Exit Rate and if Ecommerce is used on the site, information about the financial value of the page is also provided.

• Bounce Rate: If the bounce rate of a page is high it is recommended a review of the page is undertaken to determine how to improve the page.
• Time on Page: Consideration must be given to the page content to determine if visitors are utilizing this page as expected. If the time falls short your expectation of how long visitors should spend on a page, it indicates the page may need some revision.
• Exit Rate: Exit rate can be some what subjective and there may well be very good reasons people are exiting via a specific page. However, if the exit page is partially way through the conversion funnel, then close examination of the page is warranted.

Site Overlay: Ever wondered what links are being clicked on your web site? The Site Overlay Report identifies which links are clicked on each page. This information must be analyzed with some consideration of how important or popular you expect a specific link to be. Also it may indicate that an important link within your site is not properly labeled, or in a poor position if it is not achieving the click throughs you would expect.

The Last Word

Although there is some overlap in many of the reports available through Google Analytic, it is a powerful tool to assist you to determine how well your web site and promotional efforts are performing. The reports reviewed here are the basics which must be reviewed as part of your web site monitoring program. In the weeks to come I will provide additional information on how to really leverage the power of Google advanced analytical processes.