I recently ran across Blogger, Sam Diener, on LinkedIn. If you have not read any of his blogs on networking they are most definitely worth a read. http://www.samdiener.com/

Anyway, I thought that what he had to say mirrored a recent conversation I had with a client, so I thought I’d post his blog for you to read.

A Note For My Readers: Many of you have been used to me writing my articles on Stuff For Success about networking and social media. For this article, I have ventured into the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is a very important topic in the marketing world. As a definition, you can think of SEO as anything you do to make Google, Bing, or Yahoo visit your page. And now, enjoy:

It’s all over the Internet. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the hottest topic out there. Bloggers think that if they write “7 Tips on How to Improve Your SEO” for the 800th time, they will get millions of hits. Companies are – suddenly – feeling the need to create whole SEO departments. Webmasters are compelled to write their content just for the search engines.

And everyone else? They just don’t care. But I have something to say to all of you….Here is the most important thing you should know about most of the stuff you read:

IT’S ALL GARBAGE!

In this economy (and don’t get me started on that) if there is a general misunderstanding about a topic, EVERYONE is going to try and take advantage of it on it. Have you noticed how many career “experts” have suddenly popped up during the recession? Well capitalizing on the same type of confusion, these so-called SEO “experts” have popped up all over the place claiming that they know the answers to make all of your internet traffic dreams come true.

A company with which I did some consulting has 10 million dollars in revenue. The guy spent 1.5 million a YEAR on ADWORDS thinking it would improve his search engine placement. (Adwords are those little advertisements on the side of Google that you never click on…) I almost cried. And then when I tried to find his site, it was nowhere to be found in any search engine. This type of thing is a marketing travesty and it shouldn’t be happening.

My goal here is to make sure you understand the reality of modern search engine optimization. So when you go to “optimize” your site, or hire someone to do it, I want you to make sure you take the right advice and know that there is specific experience you should be looking for that can help you do this job correctly.

So without any of my further blabbering, let me get to it:

1.SEO takes a LONG time: There are no shortcuts to getting your content to the top of Google, Bing, or wherever else…. especially in the popular categories. A major category in determining where your webpage comes up is how long it has been there, also known as Aging. Don’t believe me? Run a search for a popular topic. Try “How to Network.” Even though I humbly think some of my networking articles are MUCH better, Google proudly displays a page from 2005. The first article isn’t even from the past two years and with people losing their jobs left and right since 2007, networking has been a subject of research that has exploded the last few years. Additionally, search engines are reading through billions of pages. If your site is not important, it takes a loooong time to update in search engines.

2.The Actual Algorithms Are Secret: Algorithms in this sense are the complicated methods search engines use to determine what pages should be shown for each search. It has been said that no one outside the actual search engines actually has a copy of the algorithm that determines search engine result pages (SERPS) and it is constantly changing. So how is it that these “experts” know what to talk about? Well, actually, it isn’t really true that nobody has a copy. Most of the basic algorithms are patented or in provisional patent phases and patents are public but you have to know where to look for them.

3.The Days of the Meta Tags are Long Gone: A website owner used to be able to talk directly to the search engines by using “hidden” codes called meta tags. However, the only use for the tags at this point is in order to declare the title of the page. It doesn’t matter what your tags say the subject of the page is. In fact tags, if repeated on your site could hurt you. In fact, Google added a keyword tracker in their webmaster tools. It seems to me that they are trying to suggest that they are reading the actual text content of the site? Additionally, writing content that repeats repeats repeats repeats the keywords doesn’t work either. You will get a site banned from a major search engine that way and that is an awful thing. Amendment: The “description” tag is also still pertinent as it describes your page to the search engine. (I forgot to include this)

4.Not just any backlinks will do: Backlinks are when websites link to yours. Many know that an important factor in SEO is how many links you get coming to your content. What some don’t know is that they must be high quality links. As we previously established, there are plenty SEO companies and individuals who will gladly take your money to submit your page into spammy links directories and link schemes. They may work temporarily, but because this is not the way search engine companies want you promoting your site (it’s considered spam), your site could be quickly removed from search engines. There are quality directories that still exist such as the DMOZ and Yahoo and if you can get your site onto one of these, that’s a bonus. These are human edited and search engines give credibility to this characteristic. This brings us to my next point:

5.Search Engines are Meant To Work For Humans: Back in the beginning days of search engines, it was possible to simply “optimize” your page to attract the search engine to the page. Seeing this as an opportunity, many took advantage of this and found ways to cheat the system. They wrote sub-par (and downright bad) webpages designed to get top results through spam-like tactics. As a result, search engines, which, ironically, happen to be written by some of the smartest people in the world, were redesigned and none of these old techniques work anymore. There is NO way to search optimize your page legitimately aside from producing quality content and getting others to link to it – EXCEPT to utilize:

6.Good Coding Practice: You know all of those SEO changes that people are willing to come in and make for you? Guess what. They shouldn’t need to. They should be employed as a standard when a person writes a web page for you. Content that validates with the w3validator is standard practice. Most websites have hundreds of errors, so call your website programmer and demand they fix it. Think of it this way: you wouldn’t want to read a book littered with grammatical errors. Search engines hate reading webpages with grammatical errors too. One change you can make immediately is to make sure the titles of your pages contain the key words for your page as well as the URL (also known as a permalink). This is VERY important.
Real SEO People are Hustlers and Great Networkers in Real Life. From my rants we have established that quality links to your site, age, and good coding practice are the main ways to influence your search engine rank. Well once you register a domain and have your code written properly, then establishing quality links is the only thing you can do. There are only two ways to get these, and one of those is pay major advertising dollars to get them from high quality sites. The other is to get someone who is VERY good at networking, both online and off, who can get out there and meet the people who run these sites and convince them of a reason to link to you. It’s a very specialized practice that few are good at. But that’s an article for another day. Let’s hear what you all have to say!

Update: As of 12/04/09, evidently Google is making all searches personalized. This means that it could become possible that you will no longer discover sites that you didn’t know you were looking for. This could have a HUGE effect on the SEO world. I would love to hear your thoughts and discuss here as well. This news is from the google webmaster blog.

Conclusions: Sam Diener is from Philadelphia, PA, US. He started Stuff For Success, The Sam Diener Blog. In five months, he has built an audience of nearly 25,000 readers, and has guest blogged for major US sites such as Under30CEO and the Personal Branding Blog. Feel free to read more at the Sam Diener Blog.

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In today’s world, just about everything in business can be connected to the Internet. This applies to all types of business, from multimillion dollar companies to the smaller mom and pop stores.

Small business can be losing out on a large customer base is they do not understand the power of the Internet and how maintaining a well optimized website has many benefits. When people seek information on services or products, most likely the Internet is the place where they will begin their search. Let’s take a look at SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and what this means for your small business.

SEO means search engine optimization. The acronym “SEO” can also refer to “search engine optimizers” professionals who can take your website, optimize it correctly and in the end, bring you a lot of traffic and potential customers.
SEO For Small Business
Let’s take a look at why this is so important and how this applies to a small business. Just about everyone has a website in today’s world, from international companies to personal sites. Phone books are rarely used anymore. When someone wants to find out about services or products, they turn to their computer.

Having a well planned out website is very important for a small business. You want any person to easily see who you are, what you offer and by which methods they may obtain your services or products. However, even if you have a wonderful website, this does not help you if no one can find you.
One business person created a well thought out, easy to read website and was very excited that when entering the search term for their business they came up first in the search results. However, it will do your small business no good if you can only be found by the particular name of your business.
You want to be found when people enter in certain keywords. What are keywords, you may ask. Keywords are words that the average person enters into a search bar to find out information. For example, if you sell a pest control service you would want your small company’s website to come up high in the search results for “pest control”.
The goal of most business websites is to appear on the first page of results. Very rarely does the average person look passed the first page. If they do, it is even more rare if they look passed the third page. You can always pay to appear first, this would be a sponsored listing. However, if you website text is optimized correctly, you can appear highly ranked for the key words of your choice.
The object of optimizing a site is to edit the content and HTML coding to both increase its significance to particular keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
The majority of people search via Google, although other search engines are used as well. In most cases, a website should be created to please Google and other search engines will follow along. Do SEO for your small business and you will be seen by more people than you thought possible. If you are not optimized correctly, you could land so far back in the search results that no one will ever find you. Never underestimate the need for proper SEO for your small business.
If you need help, please contact me: leon.spencer@wvlt-tv.com

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For every business that is working on increased Search Engine rankings, this one’s for you.
Many marketers still fail to strategically optimize their videos. Learn how to avoid this common mistake and get the most out of your video efforts. View

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Over the weekend I was talking with a friend of mine that has her own business and she asked me a question about using Facebook to help market and promote her business.

As we talked and shared ideas I began to think that there are probably a lot of different ideas on how to best use Facebook, or any social media site for that matter, to help promote a local business.

I decided to take a couple of my ideas and put them into a short article here this morning.

How To Optimize Your Facebook Page

“Optimizing” a Facebook fan page can mean different things to different people. Do you want to optimize for search? Are you wanting to create brand awareness? Are you maybe interested in optimizing for lead generation?

The first step in fan page optimization is identifying the objective of your fan page.

Once you’ve made that decision you should integrate design elements using the Static FBML(Facebook Markup Language) app. Create a tabbed landing page that has the same look and feel of your associated website. Consider integrating FBML elements such as suggesting the fan page to friends (WooMe example http://www.facebook.com/WooMe) or marketing elements such as a newsletter (Animation Mentor example http://www.facebook.com/AnimationMentor?v=app_10531514314).

Add conversion points such as a “Get More Information” form or a “Rewards Program” sign up (again, consider your objectives).

Remember your objective is about finding your target audience. Hold contests (Wildfire App good for this http://wildfireapp.com) or offer Facebook-only deals or coupons. Run polls. Ask questions. Share insider info about your company.

If you are an e-commerce company, consider selling products online using the Alvenda app or Payvment apps. Basically, treat your fan page as your homepage for the Facebook community.

What can you offer your target audience? How do you want to engage with them? What action are you looking for them to take?

Then measure and test. Look at Facebook Insights and your web analytics platform. Test a strategy and see what works. Set goals and attribute it to revenue. Measure your ROI. Rinse and repeat.

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Just as promised…more SEM information to help you grow your website traffic!

Five More Common Paid Search Mistakes
Posted by AnnPruitt

We’ve got even more paid search mistakes for you to avoid, in addition to yesterday’s list.
We remember Sherlock Holmes, and his expert ability to find clues. Your prospective customers need clues to be able to find your company, too.

#6 Poor or no landing page at all – Many newcomers to paid search don’t understand the impact of your landing page on your quality score. If your ad links to a page with irrelevant information, this will damage your quality score, causing you to pay more for clicks and appear lower in searches. This correlation is why linking all ads to your home page is such a bad idea. Creating specific and highly relevant landing pages will improve the effectiveness of your campaign.

#7 Poor ad copy – While this mistake should be obvious, there are a few simple rules to follow that will keep your ad copy fresh and click-friendly. First of all, never use the same word twice. You only have so much space and almost no words are important enough to use twice; think of a different way to state your offer. Also, as mentioned previously, you want to include the keyword pointing to the ad in your ad copy. Most engines will highlight the keyword if you include it, which improves the visibility of your ad. Lastly, you must clearly state the offer and use action words in your copy. If you’re going up against competition directly, make sure your offer at least sounds better than theirs. If they are offering a lower price, for example, you use a percentage number or other differentiating statistic to improve how your offer reads.

#8 Focusing only on “big” keywords and not the long tail – These long tail keywords are generally less competitive and less expensive. Additionally, their clicks skew towards searchers that are farther along in the buying process, because they are searching for a specific term, such as a model number like “Blackberry 8330”. According to some recent studies, 28 percent of terms searched in 2008 had never been searched before. This statistic speaks to the opportunities available in long-tail keywords.

#9 Not pairing SEO with paid search – If you’re not leveraging both, you’re missing out. There is so much commonality in the research that if you are doing one, you might as well do the other. Not to mention that doing both ensures that if something goes wrong, such as the algorithm changing or your paid search budget running out, you are still alive in the other part of search.

#10 Bidding on brand terms only – Bidding on non-brand terms is what brings you new customers. If someone is searching for a term with your brand name in it, they are already familiar with your brand and potentially your exact product. While you must cater to these people as well and complete sales, it is important to remember to seek new customers. The beauty of the internet is its broad reach, and if you do not bid on non-brand terms, you are not taking advantage of this reach to its full extent.

Give paid search a shot with a small campaign budget. Remember, even with a small budget, you can compete with big competitors. Provide the right clues for your prospective customers to be able to find you.

Elementary, my dear Watson.

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I’m going to began posting more information about SEO and SEM becaue this seems to be what most business owners are asking me about.

Here’s a great article for the 60 second marketer.
Five Common Paid Search Mistakes
Posted by AnnPruitt

Picture Sherlock Holmes. Armed with his overcoat, magnifying glass, pipe, and unmistakable detective hat, Holmes sets out to look for clues. And he always finds them. After all, he’s got all the right tools for a productive search.

How about your prospective clients? Do they have the right tools to find you?

Whether or not your brand or product already has a presence online, you are missing out if you are not using paid search as a marketing channel. Recent research has shown that 40% of all people on the internet querying a search engine will click on a paid search link first, and that number is increasing.

Paid search allows for unprecedented targeting and tracking, letting you, the Chief Paid Search Detective, control expenditures down to minute details. You can run a paid search campaign with $20 or $200,000, and the $20 campaign is not necessarily at a disadvantage. It can earn the same ROI.

Ready to jump in? Just look before you leap.

Here are ten of the most common paid search mistakes that you want to avoid when starting your campaign.

#1 Ego Bidding – This mistake usually results from emotional attachment to a certain keyword or campaign on the part of the bidder. For example, the bidder decides that his/her phrase must rank number one on a particular engine. In most cases, the bidder simply wants the satisfaction of running a search and seeing his/her keyword in a top position. Sometimes, they want to rank a phrase using internal language, which is irrelevant to most searchers. This mistake can easily result in inefficient spending of the budget, and can often deplete your daily budget before dinner…or even lunch.

#2 Too many keywords per ad – This mistake is common to people fairly new to paid search; it’s easy to fall into but easy to get out of as well. Adding too many keywords to one ad group often leaves you with irrelevant keywords generating impressions for the ad. First, these non-targeted impressions will decrease your quality score because your click-through rate will likely decrease. Second, these irrelevant keywords will cost you extra money.

#3 Focusing on budget instead of ROI – Paid search campaigns are not like other marketing mediums, so viewing them as another line item in your budget is a mistake. The trackability and accountability that paid search offers allow it to run more efficiently than other types of marketing. Focusing on what you are spending instead of what you are getting in return leads to inefficient bidding and a campaign that does not maximize the benefits that paid search offers. Instead, manage paid search on a day-to-day basis, adjusting your bids and keywords in order to capitalize on the return on your investment.

#4 Not learning from your competitors’ strategy – Some paid search programs and software offer the ability to track what your competitors are doing online; what keywords, where they bid, when they bid, etc. Especially if you are going up against larger, more established brands with larger paid search budgets, you must learn from their strategies so that you are not two steps behind. With this approach, you should be able to circumvent a lot of the guesswork and gain on your competitors with efficient bidding, even on a small budget.

#5 Forgetting to think negatively – A common mistake in the campaign planning process is not thoroughly researching negative keywords. Positive keywords will drive traffic to your site, but negative keywords will filter out the traffic that you don’t want. For example, if you are selling Nike sneakers, and you are bidding on the general phrase “sneakers,” you would want to negative keyword “Reebok” or any other brands competing with Nike. This negative keyword will ensure that anyone searching “Reebok sneakers” is not directed to your ad simply because they typed in sneakers.

Elementary, my dear Watson.

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Every once in a while I meet some very outstanding people within their industries. I met Jon Coward a while back and I’ve asked him to be a guest writer for me here on the Blog. He speaks about SEO and SEM and how important PPC actually can be for a business. I’ve got several friends with his company and I think they are doing an incredible job for local businesses.
I hope you enjoy his article!

by Jon C Coward on October 22, 2009

Jon C. Coward, VP of Internet Marketing at AdzZoo

I was reading my daily dose of email newsletters, when I came across a great article from searchengineland.com. It covered seven reasons about how now is a great time for a pay per click (ppc) campaign. These are discussions I have had with many people – this article did it succinctly in one page. If I had this a few months ago, I might have not bored people at last cocktail party with my long drawn out diatribe.

Here’s a little help to make it even easier for you rule the next cocktail party or reception at a ppc conference. Here is a summary of the article that discusses the untapped potential in this channel. Most of your untapped potential online marketing action is on the PPC side even though the the whole world is focusing on SEO.

SEM and SEO may be sexy, but PPC is where the real potential is. If the world of internet marketing was the stock market, this would be the options market. You can make a lot of money if you know what you are doing… you can also lose a lot if you don’t. Your local tech guy probably has told you a lot of stories about the power of organic search and the analytics related to that. I used to argue the same points a while back. The fact is, SEO works, but it is a tortoise compared to the hare called PPC.

Enough fanfare. Here are seven great reasons (edited for size) to start a PPC campaign as listed by searchengineland.com:
Universal search will continue to play havoc with your SEO traffic assumptions. Do you want to play in the world of an index of billions of pages, often winding up no better than below the fold or on page 2 or 3, or would you rather drive additional, predictable traffic to offers you create directly, each and every day without fail?

A huge chunk of Google’s resources go right into developing the paid search marketing platform, features, systems and services. Why not use them? Google knows it works. That’s why their resources are put there.

Custom reports and analytics allow for near instant changes and results. Want to get a breakdown of your New York City geo-targeted campaign, or to see a breakout of the number of clicks? Want to see which of eight ads pulled the best CTR? That’s all in the AdWords back end.

Try getting such actionable analytics from the organic SEO helpers division of Google.

Targeting has gotten gradually better each month for 36 months straight. It’s taken years of Google turning the flywheel and optimizing each part.

Google has taken steps to reduce the participation of some shady business models who compete with you for eyeballs on the same queries, or business owners with shady privacy policies; Google proactively filters click fraud; Display URLs and strong brand recognition help with Quality Score — Google seems to have tuned the system to help brands that consumers are more likely to deem reliable and clickworthy.

New tools to help with bid strategy. They’ve even rolled out a video of Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian commenting on bid strategy. Think you can get an SEO position simulator tool out of the organic SEO helpers division of Google? (There isn’t one, remember, although to be fair, Google Webmaster Tools is a great tool too.)

Rapid feedback and rapid results with less risk. There remains no better mechanism to gain rapid response to different ad copy variations, to gauge consumer keyword search patterns as they apply to your business, to learn about geo-specific buying patterns, etc. There is far less risk to testing offers and marketing strategies rapidly—using paid search—than there is to tinkering with the nuts and bolts of your website’s content and architecture in the hopes of a medium to long term boost in organic traffic.

Keep in mind, again from the article, SEO success is, for many companies, an after-the-fact pat on the back for years of a job well done. It is difficult to ramp up quickly. Paid search, by contrast, scales up quickly, and particular segments and tactics can be tested with relative ease. Most big companies are in the process of figuring out how to migrate some dollars out of their bloated traditional ad spends.

There are many hurdles to doing this right, which just makes the reward sweeter for those who do a lot better than their competition. The easiest way around these hurdles is to have someone with Certified Google Adwords Professionals on staff, like AdzZoo, to navigate the waters for you. It’s tempting to hold out hope that SEO and some word-of-mouth grassroots stuff can do it all for you. For most businesses in conventional industries that do a lot of their selling online, paid search can and should work. It’s about half of all digital ad spend for good reason. Trying to acquire those same customers through other channels, especially offline channels like the yellow pages or coupon mailers, will typically be costlier.

Paid search isn’t sexy. Nor is it tailor-made for penny-pinchers. Its an ROI-driven direct response channel. But its worth the effort if you see it through!

(Portions of this blog were borrowed directly from searchengineland.com because I am a bit lazy today, but they were condensed to make it a quicker read!)

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You hear a lot today about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The best thing you can do for your Web stie is to make sure that you have done everything you can to get the search engines to find your site when someone searches for your business category or service.

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