The ROI of Search Engine Marketing

July 31st, 2008 by William Foote

Any small business that could benefit from more traffic to their website should have search engine marketing in some form or another within their budget. Why you may ask? The simple reason is because it works.

I have been singing the praises of search engine marketing (SEM) as a low investment high return activity for years now. Without a doubt the cost of generating traffic from search engine marketing is much lower than traditional media. If you don’t believe me, consider the following numbers for a moment.

According to U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray, search engine marketing has the lowest cost-per-lead and the highest return on investment. That is, U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray estimates that the cost per lead is $0.29 for search, $0.50 for e-mail, $1.18 for the yellow pages, $2.00 for banner ads, and $9.94 for direct mail.

Case closed.

Comments Off | Posted in Search Engine Optimization

Increase Your Search Engine Rankings with Link Directories

July 4th, 2008 by William Foote

Building high quality incoming links to your website is one of the most important steps you can take to increase traffic and improve search engine rankings. With that being the case, it amazes me how many website owners overlook the very simple step of submitting their websites to the Internet’s major link directories.

I wrote about the importance of incoming links for search engine rankings in a previous post entitled Incoming Links: The Missing Ingredient. In a nutshell, you can think of incoming links as votes in a popularity contest and the search engines just so happen to be the judges of that contest. The more incoming, and the better the quality of those incoming links, the better you will come out in this popularity contest, and the higher your site will rank.

So with all of this in mind, submitting your site to web directories is one of the best ways to get quality links to your website. You can think of link directories sort of like an online version of the Yellow Pages. Link directories have vast amounts of listings that are organized by topic. Each listing within the directory will have a brief description along with a link going to the listed site’s home page. There are also special interest link directories that only have listings on a certain kind of topic (business website directories, sports website directories, gambling website directories, etc.) Many individuals that are searching for a particular type of web site will use link directories as an alternative to doing a regular search engine query.

Upon submitting to a link directory, your listing will either be accepted or rejected depending on whether or not your site content is relevant to the directory you are submitting to. When your site is accepted, it means the link directory considers your site to be a credible source of information for a specific topic. In turn, the search engines view this as a strong vote for your website and thus weigh incoming from web directories quite heavily in their overall algorithm. So naturally you will want to have your website placed on as many link directories as possible. /p>

Again, there are three primary reasons to submit your site to link directories.

1. Your site will get targeted traffic when people search the directory for your type of site.

2. Your search engine rankings will improve from an increase in your link popularity.

3. Links from web directories will help the pages of your website get found and indexed by the search engines much more quickly.

Whether you do it yourself or have a web company do it for you, do not overlook this all important step of the SEO process.

No Comments | Posted in Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization: Finding Your Long Tail

June 12th, 2008 by William Foote

I read a book a few years authored by Chris Anderson entitled “The Long Tail”. The term “long tail”, which was coined by its author, is used to describe the economic concept of targeting less-competitive niche markets rather than hugely competitive broad markets. Even though there is a larger total pie (money) available in a broad market, by definition that market is bound to be highly competitive and decidedly generalized resulting in a diminished ability to profit from that market.

So what does this have to do with Search Engine Optimization you may ask? Well, it dawned on me that the Long Tail of Economics is precisely the same concept I preach over and over to clients in regards to ranking high in the search engines.

Keywords that one would optimize for can basically be split into two distinct categories, which would be short tail keywords and long tail keywords, or broad keywords and narrow keywords.

Let’s say you are a retinal eye specialist working in Las Vegas, NV. Conceivably you could optimize for short tail keywords such as “eye doctor” or “eye care”, but the chances of ranking high for these enormously broad and competitive keyword are exactly slim and none.

It would be better to optimize for the term “retinal eye specialist”, as that phrase will be much less competitive in the search engines and the traffic you receive from it would be much better targeted. Even better still would be to optimize for phrases like “Las Vegas Retinal Eye Specialist” or “Nevada Retinal Eye Specialist”. Obtaining a top ranking for these phrases would require very little effort or investment and visitors arriving at your site would be extremely targeted to your particular service.

This same exact concept also applies to Pay Per Click marketing.

Let’s say you are a wedding photographer working in Orange County, CA and are running a pay per click campaign with Google’s Adwords. If you were to bid for the word “photographer”, you would be contending for an extremely competitive term and it would likely cost you around $2.50 or more per click to rank in the top three spots. Even more important to consider is that it could be costing you $2.50 per shot for worthless clicks. That is, an aspiring actress in Omaha, Nebraska looking for modeling pictures is as likely to find your site as one looking for wedding pictures on Orange County. Suffice to say, a model from the Midwest is not the ideal client for an Orange County Wedding Photographer.

The correct long tail strategy in this scenario would be to bid on phrases like “Wedding Photography in Orange County” or “Wedding Photographer Serving Southern California “. Not only would the bid price to be in the top spot run much less than $2.50, but you can be assured that the people clicking on these ads would be seeking your specific service in your specific area.

So to get the best results with your search engine optimization efforts, follow these simple rules.

1. Do not use single word keywords, as they cannot be promoted effectively.

2. Avoid the most popular keyword phrases because you’ll be competing with millions of other pages for a search engine’s attention.

3. Specific multiword phrases are the keyword terms to optimize for. Not only will they be less competitive and much easier to rank in the top spot for, but the traffic you receive will be of much higher quality.

William Foote is co-founder of http://www.vmg-interactive.com.

No Comments | Posted in Search Engine Optimization

Website Stickiness: 7 Immutable Laws To Govern Your Website By

June 2nd, 2008 by William Foote

The initial challenge in making your website successful is getting traffic to it. And since most of you are regular readers of this newsletter, I will naturally assume you have been implementing many of the cutting edge internet marketing techniques (hint, hint) we have discussed and can also then assume there are finally floods of users arriving at your site. But as you probably have found out by now, the bigger challenge is making sure that, now that visitors are there, they don’t click away only seconds after they arrive with the impression your site has nothing valuable to offer.

Website “stickiness” is the term that refers to getting people to stay on your site and getting them to return as regular visitors. Of course the “stickiness” of your site is also a quintessential factor in determining whether your visitors become customers, and whether your website is ultimately offering its full value to your company or organization.

The stickiness equation goes something like this:

Qualified Traffic + Quality Content = Website Stickiness.

Quality traffic is defined as a user arriving at your site seeking out exactly what it is you have to offer. If you have a sports website and someone arrives looking for cookie recipes, that user would hardly be considered qualified. A sports fan that arrives at your sports website would be perfectly qualified, however.

So following the logic above, the next part of the equation is having quality content on your website. If you own a sports website and manage to draw sports fans to it, you must then seal the deal by providing a wide array of quality sports information to keep those people engaged.

I have long said web surfers have the attention spans of fruit flies and this adage becomes truer by the day. Yes, we would all like to believe our site’s visitors are single mindedly focused on what it is we have to offer. But the reality is your browsers are looking at your site while speaking with coworkers, listening to their IPOD’s, half paying attention to their boss on the company conference call, etc., etc.

Internet users are notorious for multi-tasking and the infamous back button is public enemy number one to the savvy website owner. With all this in mind, it is imperative to cut through all the noise by engaging your visitors with relevant content and sufficient interaction.

So here are 7 immutable laws to start governing your site by to increase stickiness:

1. Don’t ever, ever, ever make your users wait.

The initial interaction with your site is critical. Trust me when I say your visitors will be long gone if they are made to wait a few seconds while your page loads. My advice is to do away with any needless flash intro pages and keep the amount of graphics reasonable. When you do use graphics, make sure the file size has been properly compressed. A good rule of thumb is if a particular design element does not contribute to your visitor’s experience, then drop it.

2. You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

I will probably not win any popularity awards by saying this, but appearance can make or break your website. Like it or not, people do in fact judge books by their covers and if your site is not well designed, it will leave a strong negative first impression with your visitors.

When I land on a website for the first time and see that it is poorly designed, I am gone as quick as I got there. Why? Because I make a snap judgment that the website owner is either low budget or has terrible business sense.

The look of your site will set the tone for the rest of the users visit. Right away, visitors will judge your site as professional or amateurish, as funny or serious, as cool or lame, and so on.
Keep your site consistent with a uniform appearance. Use the same backgrounds, colors, navigation menu, and site logo throughout your pages. Consistency helps your visitors remember who you are and gives your site an easily recognizable brand.

3. Be relevant or risk dying a slow painful web death.

Studies show that visitors will leave your website e seconds on average if they do not see what they came looking for within the first five seconds. Yes, I just said five seconds, not five minutes. The implications of this truth are startling.

Let’s say you are a cosmetic surgeon and are offering a special price on tummy tucks. You have spent time, energy and money on drawing visitors to your site to cash in on this special offer. But upon arriving at your site’s home page, the user is overwhelmed with unrelated information and offerings for other procedures. Chances are this user will not take the time to dig through your site to find the tummy tuck offering and end up abandoning the site altogether.

One of the most effective marketing techniques I know of to combat this all too common problem is using landing pages. Instead of sending users to your home page or other general page that does not speak to the particular need, you would direct them to a very specific and relevant landing page.

So if you were that cosmetic surgeon, you would set up a landing page with a bolded headline about the special on tummy tucks. To make even better use of the landing page, you would prompt the user to schedule an appointment and offer them an additional discount if they commit to their procedure within the next 24 hours.

The simple rule of landing pages is to be highly relevant with a specific product or service offering and drive conversions by asking the user to take a specific action. I actually just read a study that says landing pages can increase conversions by up to 1000%!

4. Give them a proper road map.

Make it easy for people to navigate through your site. Your visitors should at all times know where they are and how they got there. Every page on your site should have a navigation panel linking to the other main sections of your website. You should also have a proper Google approved site map, bread crumb trails and site search box. Your webmaster should now what these things are and if he doesn’t, it is time to get a new webmaster.

5. Serve fresh content

Does your audience have a reason to return to your site? I can virtually guarantee you that if you do not regularly update your website with new content; the number of repeat visitors to your site will be anemic at best. The reason for this is simple.

If visitors have taken the time to come back to your site only to see the same thing they saw on the previous visit, they will infer that your site does not ever change and therefore believes there is no reason to come back in the future. The goal is to get your users addicted to what you offer and serve it to them on a consistent basis.

One of the main keys to keeping your site fresh is having an on the ball webmaster who posts information to the site immediately after you have sent it to them. Should you want to take the next step, it is wise to invest in a Content Management System (CMS) which will allow you to post information straight to your website without the need for technical assistance.

6. Get interactive by asking your visitors to participate.

A few years back I renamed our company from Vegas Marketing Group to VMG-interactive. The simple reason is that I saw a huge trend going away from simply serving people information on the internet to one of interacting with people via the web. The recent rise in blogging, webinars, online chat, discussion forums and the like have only confirmed this notion.

The simple fact of the matter is that people love to get their hands dirty. Provide your visitors with ways to interact with your site and it is certain to make their experience more enjoyable and real. Add a poll, host a discussion board, or start a blog … interactivity is now the standard rule for a top quality site.

7. Use innovative tools and technology to keep your users engaged.

The profusion of new technology available has made creating sticky sites easier than ever. Ask your webmaster about audio and video plug-ins, Java-based technologies, CGI and Perl scripting, Web 2.0, Widgets, or any other new technology that can dramatically increase the quality of visit your users experience while on your site .

William Foote is co-founder and a managing partner of www.VMG-interactive.com.

No Comments | Posted in Web Metrics, Web Development

Incoming Links: The Missing Ingredient

April 29th, 2008 by William Foote

I receive at least 2-3 emails per week from potential clients asking me why their search engine rankings are not within the first or second page of Google and/or Yahoo. They will say, we have done A, B, and C by the book for our site, but are still seeing meager results.

The reason in almost every instance is that they have failed to generate any meaningful incoming links to their website. Generating relevant incoming links is by far the single most important aspect of Google’s algorithm.

If you don’t believe me … then perhaps you will believe one of the internet’s premier internet marketing superstars.

“The most critically important aspect of search engine marketing is building quality incoming links to your website. And anyone who says differently doesn’t know what they’re talking about…” - Brad Fallon (Accredited SEO Expert)

Before I go any further, let me quickly reiterate why high search engine rankings are imperative to business survival in today’s e-marketplace.

Simply put, organic search engine traffic is Free Traffic. A high search engine ranking virtually guarantees that floods of visitors will arrive at your website looking for exactly what it is you have to offer.

This will happen because the visitor typed in a keyword or a phrase that is relevant to your website, and because your site had proper optimization, your site shows up in the first few positions of the search results and gets the click-thru from the searcher.

So with this in mind, does it not make sense to focus in on “incoming link building” … the single most important aspect of obtaining a high search engine ranking? Of course it does.

I do not care if you find incoming links for yourself, have someone in your office find incoming links or you outsource to a company that specializes in it. The point is to simply not overlook this golden key of SEO success.

William Foote is co-founder and a managing partner of http://www.VMG-interactive.com.

1 Comment | Posted in Search Engine Optimization

Web Design: Follies in Flash

April 10th, 2008 by William Foote

Nothing gets me as hot, or is as common in the web development industry as companies giving clients erroneous advice. Programmers love to build neat stuff and designer love to design pretty stuff. The problem is that “neat” and “pretty” often times are in direct conflict with “profitable”. To be clear, I do not think this is done out of malice, but rather simple ignorance.

Nowhere is this more common than with the use of Flash technology. Every day I get website owners seeking me out because they are not seeing any sort of return on their website investment. The common story is that they went with a certain web developer because said developer had a fantastic looking portfolio of previous sites. And of course, that developer was heavily reliant upon using Flash technology. To be sure, Flash is indeed incredible looking. But herein lay the problems.

First and foremost, Google and other major search engines cannot properly index a page that is built in Flash. In fact, when the Google robots crawl a Flash website, the end result is the website is viewed from Google’s standpoint as being about nothing. The reason being is that Google’s robots only recognize HTML text and the more HTML text that is related to your specific topic matter, the better.

If you do not think this is a problem per say, then consider the following few facts.

85%-90% of all internet users rely on search engines to find information. (Georgia Tech /GVU Survey)
The top 10 search engines make up more than 90% of all search traffic. (Georgia Institute of Technology).
75% of internet users never click past the first Search Engine Results Page (Georgia Institute of Technology).

This is not to mention that Flash pages are extremely slow to load and that some older browsers do not even support Flash.

So what is the moral of the story you ask? It is that most website developers focus exclusively on aesthetics and completely neglect one all important truth. The purpose of a web strategy is to drive sales for the business and websites that put form in front of function and fail to garner top ten rankings are losing an enormous number of their prospective buyers.

The most design conscious company on the planet, Apple, does not have a Flash website. What Apple does do, and what I advise all my clients to do, is use bits of Flash in conjunction with HTML. What I mean by this is using Flash buttons or a Flash banner as an accent to your text based HTML page. This strategy gives savvy website owners the best of both worlds.

William Foote is co-founder and a managing partner of the Internet Marketing and Web Development firm, VMG-interactive.

No Comments | Posted in Web Development, Website Design

7 Must Ask Questions for Successful Email Marketing

March 26th, 2008 by William Foote

If you have been around me for long, you well know by now my fondness for email marketing. It is far and away the most efficient marketing medium on the planet. Actually, let me re-phrase that … it is far and away the most effective marketing medium on the planet if used correctly.

When I say efficient in this particular context, I am referring to four things:

1. Email is easy to create and send. No costly graphic designers or overpaid printers are necessary.

2. Email is cost effective. It literally costs pennies per recipient to send.

3. Email is instantaneous. Get results in minutes rather than days or weeks.

4. Email is effective. If used correctly, email can generate ROI’s that are astronomically higher than traditional marketing methods.

In fact, I often refer to email as “god’s gift to small business”. So if you are not getting results from your email marketing efforts or worse yet, have not even considered email marketing for your business, here are seven must ask questions for success with this medium.

1. Do you have permission?

The first question is absolutely mandatory in this day and age of SPAM. By permission I mean have your recipients given you permission to send them email, which can come in many forms. They could have subscribed for your communication via your website, at a trade show, etc. Past clients and existing clients of course are also fair game for your communication.

2. Are you in your subscriber’s address book?

The proliferation of junk email or SPAM has led to a proliferation of people using SPAM filters, and thus has made life extremely difficult for legitimate email marketers. The way to combat this fact of “email marketing” life is to ask your subscribers to add you to their address book or “safe list”.

3. Is your email relevant?

Make sure your emails contain highly relevant and useful information. By relevant, I mean on topic. If you are in the business of selling wine, do not send an email about dog grooming. A better choice would perhaps be how to properly pair a Cabernet with a filet mignon.

4. Are your messages consistent?

One of the most overlooked aspects of being a good email marketer is consistency. While consistency can mean many things, I am mostly referring to when/how often messages are sent. If you send out a weekly email newsletter, make sure it in fact goes out every week and preferably at the same time and on the same day. If your emails are good, subscribers will come to look forward to and also anticipate your messages. In turn, their expectations will not be met if the message arrives four days late one week or worse yet not at all.

5. Do you respond promptly to removals?

This one is real simple. If a subscriber asks to be removed from your list, by golly remove them. Most importantly is that they are removed prior to you sending the next email. If not, you will run the risk of them making a SPAM complaint against you.

6. Do you measure results?

Measuring results is another oft overlooked aspect of email marketing. To measure results, you must have an email system that tracks opens, click-throughs, unsubscribes, etc. Call us at 888-218-2002 or email me if you would like for us to set up an email marketing platform that measures these all important metrics.

7. Are you testing?

If you aren’t testing different messages and offerings, then you simply aren’t email marketing. Perhaps the single greatest advantage of email marketing vs. traditional marketing mediums is the ability to cost effectively test with real time feedback. Testing and tracking is not exactly easy to do with a print ad and can take weeks to do with a direct mail piece.

Posted By: William Foote, Co-founder of http://www.vmg-interactive.com

No Comments | Posted in Email Marketing

Beginners Guide to Website Metrics

February 8th, 2008 by William Foote

The most common fallacy I see amongst first time website owners is the notion of “if we build it, they will come”. The truth of the matter is that building a website is merely the first step. I liken it to putting up a billboard in the Sahara Desert. That is, just having a website is not enough. You MUST also draw visitors to that website. And once you draw visitors to your website, you it is equally important to analyze those visitors using web analytics software such as Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/).

Here is a breakdown of the most basic and fundamental website metrics you should work to understand.

Page Views – The number of page views within a given time frame, which represents the number of times a visitor requests a page from your website server. A page view differs from a unique in that a visitor can register unlimited page views per day, but only one daily unique per day (See Below). The relevance of measuring page views is to gauge the interest level of visitors in your site content. A low number of page-views is a sign visitors are leaving the site without browsing any of the pages. Analogous to a shopper venturing into a furniture store, only to walk right back out the door because the furniture lacked appeal. A high number of page views would of course mean that visitors are browsing the pages and actively engaged in your site content. The furniture store shopper that walks every aisle, checks out the prices, asks the salesman questions, etc. If your relative page view to unique visitor ratio is low or lessens, two possible assumptions could be made. a.) Your site content is not interesting, engaging, or properly assembled. b.) Your marketing activities, which drive unique visitors to the site, are not targeting the correct audience. Someone looking for a tennis racket that ends up in a golf store is not likely to browse for very long.

Unique Visitors – A visitor that comes to your site for the first time that day. This number primarily measures site “stickiness”. Stickiness is a term used to describe the amount of visitors maintaining a long term interest in your site—those that return day after day. If Visitor A found your site on a Monday in June, and then came back on Tuesday and Wednesday of June, then Visitor A would be registered as having 3 unique visits during that span. All subsequent visits or page views after the first visit of the day are not considered a unique visit. There is a caveat to be considered with unique visitors and monthly uniques that is explained in the next section.

Monthly Uniques - A visitor that comes to your site for the first time during a calendar month. This number also measures site “stickiness”, but on a much broader level. Again, stickiness is a term used to describe the amount of visitors maintaining a long term interest in your site—those that return month after month. If Visitor A found your site in February and came back again in both March and April, then Visitor A would be registered as a monthly unique for February, March and April. All subsequent visits during those same calendar months by that visitor are not considered a monthly unique visit. There is an awkward part about monthly uniques (and unique visitors to a degree) as they pertain to “stickiness”. Using the example above, if Visitor A was visiting the site for the first time ever, his February visit is registered as a monthly unique visit and also a new visit (see below). So the cumulative total of monthly uniques really signifies (new visitors + repeat monthly visitors). A simple way to use the monthly unique number as a metric for stickiness is to take monthly uniques as ratio of new visitors. This will quickly indicate how much the increase/decrease in monthly-uniques is a result of stickiness vs. new visitors.

New Visitors - The number of visitors to the site that are visiting for the first time ever. All further visits by this visitor will not be registered in this category. This primarily is an indication of how many new leads your site is generating. Naturally, you then would take marketing dollars spent vs. new visitors generated to see how effective your campaign is going. But as mentioned above, both page views and monthly uniques have to also be considered. A new visitor that lands on your home page and immediately leaves is not a good sign, even though it would lift the new visitor number.

Posted By: William Foote, Co-founder of http://www.vmg-interactive.com

1 Comment | Posted in Web Metrics

Search Engine Optimization: SEO 101

January 23rd, 2008 by William Foote

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a very complex topic and a “War and Peace” length document could be written on exactly how one can go about achieving the highest results. That said, the following five steps in this order are the cornerstones of any good SEO strategy.

Research the keywords your prospective clients will be using to search for your web site.
Optimize your web pages for these keywords so that they can get high search engine rankings.
Submit your web pages to the major search engines and internet directories.
Get incoming links from other web sites to your website.
Track the results and refine the first four steps accordingly.

Most websites focus exclusively on aesthetics and completely neglect one all important truth. The purpose of a web strategy is to drive sales for the business and websites that fail to garner top ten rankings are losing an enormous number of their prospective buyers. Consider that 85%-90% of all internet users rely on search engines to find information. (Georgia Tech /GVU Survey)

Search engine users are some of the most qualified and motivated visitors your web site will ever have. However, getting listed in a search engine doesn’t do you much good if you’re number 375 out of 1,447,000 search results. In fact, it doesn’t even help much if you hold the 11th position, as 75% of internet users never click past the first Search Engine Results Page (Georgia Institute of Technology).

Posted By: William Foote, Co-founder of http://www.vmg-interactive.com

No Comments | Posted in Search Engine Optimization

The Future of the Web Depends on Standards

January 10th, 2008 by William Foote

The wondrous web … a common space where users can share information to work, to play, to learn, to socialize, to be entertained, etc, etc … Our job as a web development company is to make this once unimaginable concept a reality. That is, help connect people from all over the world and in all walks of life … help EVERYONE make use of this revolutionary medium.

However, the web will need guidance in order for it to reach its full potential. And “web standards” are this guidance. These standards are crucial and can help ensure everyone has access to information in a quick and easy to interpret format.

For instance, web standards can make certain that individuals with special needs can use the web. Blind people may have installed software that reads web pages to them, while those with poor eyesight have set up their computer to magnify pages for easier reading. And people using hand-held devices can browse the Web just as easily as those using their high-end Sony laptops.

This is not to mention the many other practical reasons web developers should be in favor of web standards. Search engines can do a better job of indexing sites, for example. Developing browser-specific code potentially doubles or triples the work to create web pages and this work is always in peril when new browsers are introduced.

Critics of web standards will cite that they are limiting. In truth, standards remove much of the mind-numbing labor involved in web development, giving developers more room and flexibility to be truly innovative. Standards allow for the future improvement of web pages, while remaining mindful of past technology.

On a macro level … many uses of the Web, including some that are only dreamed of today, will not be possible, or will be more difficult, without widespread standards compliance. As it is, operating systems and software are for the most part similar in function and seemingly close to universal, but who knows what tomorrow’s web will bring?

Universal web standards are the only way for the web to prosper, even survive, in the future.

Posted By: William Foote, Co-founder of http://www.vmg-interactive.com

No Comments | Posted in Web Development, Website Design

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
« Jul
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31