There’s a dark cloud looming on the horizon. It’s gathering in energy and getting bigger as we speak. It’s as destructive as a tornado and just as indiscriminate. What I’m talking about is the next G-Slap; be ready for big changes from the monster of search engines around the first of the year. They’ve already been tinkering with the algorithms and are definitely trending away from current PR and content rich based results. Early next year, though you may have noticed it already if you’re sharp enough, the big G will display rankings based on the intent of the searcher. This means that your content will be less relevant if you’re not:

1. Geo-targeting (G is doing this already based on users IP whether the user is signed in or not)
2. Relevance - generically speaking, if a room full of searchers were to type java into the query box, some would be looking for software, some would be looking for drinks and yet others would be looking for travel sites.
3. Using video on your site
4. Preparing for the changes NOW.

Getting prepared for the next ominous  G-slap is an adventure in speculation. One line of thought says that if you concentrate your marketing on single keywords you may want to offer content for the other possible synonymous uses of your keywords. It means a shift in methodology, but for the studious and adaptive marketers out there that can make the necessary changes and move ahead of the trend it can be the difference between having top ranking for you kw’s today and being off the chart completely overnight or keeping your top listings by adapting and overcoming. The proliferation of “scraper sites” and “spam sites” that steal the top rankings by virtually scraping the content from its competitors and republishing it, most times without proper credit to the original authors, has prompted the change. They have managed to skew the results based on current trends at G and the other major search engines. When you think about it, this change will mean even more success for the marketer that is savvy enough to ride the wave. It’s kind of like the analogy for marketing to baby-boomers; the bowling ball in the garden hose. Baby-boomers make up the vast majority of the demographic of buyers that Internet Marketers target. When those boomers pick up on a new trend it’s like a bowling ball in a garden hose, thus the .com millionaire boom of the 90’s. Get in at the upswing of the trend and you’ll ride a very profitable and somewhat predictable course. Transfer that thought over to this looming change and you can see how the change SHOULD actually bring even MORE targeted traffic, intent on BUYING your products. Wouldn’t you rather have the searcher that was looking for your new java software product be the first at your site? This change will ultimately alter the way that Internet Marketers promote products. The question is whether or not we should do anything at all. This new way of presenting search results only make a difference by weeding out those less targeted results for a particular searcher based on their search and usage histories. I think it will be a win/win/win situation.

Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internet marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your website goals. If you don’t know what you want your site to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything. Without goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your website, all your site will be is an online announcement that you are in business.

If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them, or purchasing a product, there are steps you can take to insure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven’t been doing any unusual offline promotional activities.

However, just because hoards of people have passed through your gates does not mean your site is successful. Usually, you want those visitors to actually do something there. It is equally important to monitor the number of visitors to your site who made a purchase. This figure is called the site conversion rate, and it is an essential element of the efficacy of your website.

To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action your site is set up for. For example, if you had 2,000 hits to your site, but only 25 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this figure, take your number of visitors and divide that figure by the number of visitors who made a purchase. Then divide that result by 100 (25 ?00 X 100).

If your website is set-up to get visitors to fill out a form, make sure to then figure out what the difference is between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is because not everyone who fills out your form will actually become your customer. However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site.

You may find that you need to implement some additional marketing strategies if you find that traffic to your site is extremely low. There are several effective methods to improve the flow of traffic to your website, particularly launching a search engine optimization campaign. This campaign is targeted at increasing your position in search engine results so that consumers can find your pages faster and easier. You can either research the steps you need to take to improve your search engine rankings, or employ a search engine optimization company to do the work for you. In either case, after your have improved your search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of them by regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to maintain high positions.

Another factor to examine is how easy it is for a visitor to your website to accomplish the action the site is set-up for. For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible, or does the visitor have to go through four levels to get to it? If it’s too difficult to get to, the customer may just throw in the towel and move on to another site. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.

Finally, have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.

STATISTICS AND DEVELOPMENTS INDICATING THE NECESSITY OF SOCIAL NETWORKS FOR BUSINESS AND MARKETING Provided by SE-Optimize During the summer of 2006, we saw several key indicators that business executives and investors were taking keen notice of social networks and their potential impact on the online advertising and marketing arena. Many popular bookmarking and social networking sites have been acquired by larger corporations – the most famous of which was of course Google’s acquisition of social video network, YouTube. However, what is more interesting to business owners and C-level executives are the large investments now being made into advertising models and programs within social networks. In June, Interpublic Group announced it would be developing marketing programs on FaceBook for its agency clients to the tune of $10 million worth of ad space. In early July, WPP Group invested $2 million into corporate social network, LiveWorld. This unique joint venture will help WPP’s agency clients, such as the skincare company Dove, deploy their own social networks. We find it fascinating, as a company that participates in both the social networking and search optimization spaces, that Fortune 1000 companies and large advertising agencies are recognizing the importance and profitability of social networks far faster then they recognized the benefits of search marketing. However, to the benefit of the small business or medium-sized company, these large corporations will take time to implement their large-scale campaigns, while their smaller counterparts are moving quickly to acquire their piece of the social networking pie. For instance, Forrester’s December 2005 survey of marketing executives showed that 13% were marketing via blogs or social networks at the time, but 51% forecasted “total adoption” of such marketing strategies within the next 12 months. BUT JUST HOW LARGE IS THE SOCIAL NETWORKING SPACE? According to comScore Media Metrix, the total US internet audience has grown by roughly 4% in 2006. Yet several social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and Bolt have seen growth percentages in the triple-digits. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the top 10 social networks (MySpace, ClassMates.com, Flickr, FaceBook, YouTube, etc.) received roughly 68.8 million unique visitors by 2005 – reaching 45% of all active web users. That means that nearly 50% of all Internet traffic ran through one or more social networks last year. But think of the explosive growth and public acquisitions in 2006… In June of this year, US web stats company, Compete, released some fascinating data that blows 2005’s growth out of the water: Their Key Findings: 1.In June, 2006, 2 out of every 3 people online visited a social network 2. Social Networking sites are now close to eclipsing traffic to search giants like Yahoo! and Google 3. MySpace received 55 million visitors in June 2006 For those of us who participate in the global markets, it’s interesting to note that Bebo overtook MySpace as the top social network in the UK during most of 2006. WILL THE SOCIAL NETWORKING FAD LAST? Jon Gibs, senior director of Nielsen/NetRatings, said social networking sites are the “reality television of the Internet.” “The content is relatively inexpensive for publishers to produce, and social networking is not a fad that will disappear,” Gibs points out. “If anything, it will become more ingrained in mainstream sites, just as reality TV programming has become ubiquitous in network programming.” This means immense opportunity for any business owner or executive. First of all, online advertising is far more affordable than television or traditional media advertising. But more importantly, there are ways to market yourself in the various social networks without spending money on advertising. These strategies include maintaining your own blog, creating profiles for your company on MySpace and other networks to interact directly with your audience (without spamming, as we’ve seen recently occurring on MySpace), producing engaging and buzz-worthy content that gets circulated among bookmarking websites (as well as Technorati), and producing media content for networks like YouTube and BlogTalkRadio. The key to success in marketing with social networks is to understand that there’s no middle man here. No marketing hoopla. And no wall of corporate messaging to hide behind. Social networks are transparent and to effectively engage their audiences you have to be willing to be transparent as well. Then all you need are some creative strategies for communicating with your audience – which we are happy to provide you. Contact us for a free consultation to discuss.

 

TRAFFIC CONVERSION PRIMER

HOW TO INCREASE YOUR CONVERSION RATIOS BY UP TO 300% OR MORE IN LESS THAN 90 DAYS

Provided by SE-Optimize.Com

If you’re interested in increasing the traffic to your website, you’re on the right track. But don’t stop there! Yes, traffic is great, but if your visitors aren’t converting into customers, it won’t do your bottom line much good.

More importantly, even if you are converting a fair amount of visitors into buyers, unless you’re regularly testing the multiple variables of your various marketing messages and landing pages, we guarantee you that you’re missing out on easy money.

Q. But how can we test every variable on our website that could affect sales?

A. This is where Multi-Variate Testing comes in.

But first, let’s talk about the traditional method of testing, also known as “Scientific Advertising.” This will help us answer the more immediate question, “Just how important and profitable is testing?”

SCIENTIFIC ADVERTISING

Claude Hopkins revolutionized advertising with his marketing handbook, Scientific Advertising. In it, he explained that advertising need not be a gamble. That we can scientifically track, analyze, and guarantee profitability for any advertising campaign—provided we test each element of the marketing message to continually determine the best version of a headline, an offer, pricing, and so on.

To properly compare one element’s effectiveness against another, advertisers would conduct A/B Split Tests. These would provide two identical versions of an ad or marketing message with only one element altered.

So, if we were to test the headline first, we would create two versions of the headline. 50% of the recipients would receive the marketing message with Headline A and the other 50% would receive the one with Headline B.

We would then take the better performing headline and test it against yet another headline until we were satisfied with conversions.

Next, we’d test another element, such as the introductory paragraph, in the same way, and so on, across all elements.

THE CHALLENGE WITH SPLIT TESTING ON THE WEB

Split Testing is considered a requisite for any advertising campaign. However, few business owners bother to test the marketing messages that appear on their websites, their landing pages, in their email campaigns, and product descriptions/purchase pages.

One reason for this is that sometimes we forget that our website is a sales channel—that every word of text, every link, every image and even the layout, color, and design, are all sales agents responsible for selling our product or service.

Therefore, we concentrate on driving traffic to our website, accepting whatever conversions come our way. We forget that we can systematically improve our website’s sales conversions.

Now, the second reason few business owners test their website’s ability to convert is that the web simply moves too fast. Many sites are now dynamic with constantly updated copy, new offers, and shifting markets or demographics.

Scientifically testing marketing messages online is nearly impossible when you are forced to test one element at a time across a large enough audience. By the time you know which elements work best, that particular product or service is no longer being sold, or your company’s messaging has shifted.

THE COMPROMISE

Businesses have found a compromise between the low-risk/high-profit scientific advertising methodology and just plain giving up. This is where traditional website analytics come in.

Though a company would be hard pressed to scientifically test and improve its marketing messages, it could track and analyze its visitor behavior to try and ascertain what its audience wanted and how they would behave.

Such analytics are powerful, but they cannot give us definitive answers that directly translate into increased sales conversions.

This issue leads us back to Multi-Variate testing, which we promised to cover…

WHAT IS MULTIVARIATE TESTING?

Multivariate Testing is a unique and rapid methodology for testing multiple variations across dozens of elements to not only reveal the winning version of each element, but the winning combination of various elements.

Until now, such testing was impossible. For instance, if you had 15 elements on your website that you wanted to test, and 2 variations for each element, that would require 32,768 different versions of your website that would each need to be tested among a large enough sampling of your visitors. This would take nearly a century to test and is of course not nearly plausible.

However, just as search engines have developed sophisticated algorithms to measure and analyze numerous elements on your website to determine relevance, we now have algorithms to accurately rotate, measure, and analyze thousands or even tens of thousands of variations of your website. The process does not alter your website’s code, nor interfere with your visitor’s experience.

Now, you can determine in as little as 90 days the absolute best combination of elements to create a marketing message or web page guaranteed to far out pull all your previous website efforts.

WHERE TO BEGIN

As powerful as multivariate testing is, you’d expect it to be an excruciating process to get moving and implement. But thankfully, it’s not!

Unfortunately, very few professionals or companies offer multivariate conversion analysis. You can probably count us on one hand.

However, this this actually works to your advantage! Our analysis experts will work with you to determine which elements you’d like to test and how many variations of each you would like (you can have two variations for one element, four for another, and so on). We will analyze your current traffic, support inquiries, and competition, to ensure we’ve covered all your bases.

Next, you’ll create the different variations of copy necessary for testing (or one of our professional copywriters can do this for you), and provide any graphics for design variables.

We then customize our software with your data and let it run through a series of mathematical queries to determine the 10-20 combinations of element variations that will deliver the highest impact to your sales.

As each new visitor lands on your site, our software rotates these versions , collecting data to determine which version pulls the best results. You receive daily results and weekly reports during this time.

Once enough data has been collected, our software calculates precisely which combination of variables will maximize your sales gain (in addition to just the 10-20 combinations actually tested).

This results in 3 or 4 “greatest gain” versions of your website that are then tested in a traditional A/B Split test. We compare these to your control (original) version of your website so you can see the precise increase in conversions and sales.

The entire process takes roughly 90 days or less.

Contact us to learn more and to request a free conversion consultation.

This is of course at no obligation to you to work with us. We’re simply happy to help.

So get in touch with us. You can contact us several ways:

Email: info@SE-Optimize.Com

or

Complete the following Contact Us form and one of our staff will phone you in the next 24-48 hours.

We look forward to hearing from you.

 

The Importance of Tag Titles and Descriptions

When optimizing your site for search engine statistics, one of the most important things you used to be able to do is offer a good title tag. Recently, search engines have begun to look beyond this simple headline to determine what your site is about and index it accordingly, but it can still go a long way toward putting yourself in a good position if you create good title tags with these simple tips:

Length

Google will take only the first 65 characters of any title tag to display. Any more than that and you’re wasting time and space. Be efficient and succinct right off the bat. Of course you want to optimize your title tag as well for the best results, so you’re walking a very fine line here. The difference between optimization and intelligibility is not quite as thin. The best way to get the results you’re looking for might be to simply stuff keywords.

Making Sense

But, stuffing keywords doesn’t always make sense either. If you write everything out without a sense of what your site is actually about save the word “dog collar” repeated four times, you’ll get fewer visitors. You’re writing this for multiple audiences – the search engine algorithm as well as your visitors. Find the right balance.

Capitalization

Make this a headline of sorts. You should have every word that is of any importance, or just simply every word capitalized to grab attention. More or less all copywriting is better and more effective if you use this technique and hey if newspapers have been doing it for centuries, why not you as well? This is an important step you can take in separating your text from others; however make sure not to capitalize every letter in your title. It looks juvenile and angry.

Unique Key Words for Every Page

It might be easier to just use a set list of keywords and title tags for each page of your site, but by separating them out and utilizing numerous styles and phrases throughout your website, you can further enhance your search results. Otherwise, you’ll likely never see any of the subpages of your website ranking in the search engines. By optimizing every page individually, you can receive a better chance of each individual page being successful.

Company Names in Tag Titles

Don’t do this. It’s just a bad idea. All you do by adding your company name to a tag title or headline is waste space in a search engine. The only way this helps you is if someone searches for your company name directly, in which case they’ll likely find your site anyways. You want to use keywords that attract audiences looking for products like yours. If they are already looking for your product, you probably don’t need to optimize.

Optimizing your tag titles is a key step in providing the best and most efficient description of your website to both the search engines and potential visitors. Doing it correctly is important or you’ll likely find that no one visits your site or those that do, do it for the wrong reason.