Search Engine Optimization

Google Ad Planner Review

Last week Google Launched new service Google Ad Planner.

Google Ad Planner is a free media planning tool that can help you identify websites your audience is likely to visit so you can make better-informed advertising decisions. – Google

Ad Planner is designed for online advertisers engaged in impression ads, banners and contextual ads. Ad Planner includes both Google partners and non-partners.

Google Ad Planner Options:

You can select websites in over 50 countries and filter results by:

• Gender
• Age – categories: 0-17, 18 -24, 25 – 34, 35 – 44, 45 – 54, 55- 64.
• Education – categories: No high school, high school, some college, bachelors, graduate.
• Household Income – categories: $0 - $24,999, $25,000 - $49,999, $50,000 - $74,999, $75,000 - $99,999, $100,000 - $149,999, $150,000 or more.
• Countries - there are over 50 countries to choose from.
• Language

You can also filter results by media type:

• Text - 728×90 Leader board,120 x 600 Skyscraper
• Image - 336 x 280 Large Rectangle, 468×60 Banner
• Video - 300×250 Inline Rectangle, 250×250 Square
• Rich Media 160×600 Wide Skyscraper, 200×200 Small Square

Media type and ad formats only apply to Google Content Network.

Google Ad Planner provides site metrics such as:

• Site Name
• Category – social networks, merchants, ISPs, movie rentals, cable/satellite providers, banking and many more.
• Comp Index - A numeric score assigned to every site displayed in Google Ad Planner. The composition index shows how concentrated your audience is on a specific site relative to internet users within the country you have specified. For example, if you’ve defined your audience as ‘males,’ a site with a composition index of 212 means that you’re approximately twice as likely to find a male user on this site relative to finding males across the internet within the country you’ve specified. The composition index is calculated by dividing the site’s reach into the audience by the percent reach into the audience on the internet within the country you’ve specified.
• Unique Visitors – Estimated number of visitors from the country you specified
• Country Reach - The estimated percent of total internet users, from the country you’ve defined, that a specific site reaches.
• Page Views - The estimated number of times pages across a specific site have been accessed by visitors within the country you’ve defined.
• Impressions Per Day - The number of daily ad impressions available on a specific site in the Google content network(if available)

Website are presented in list fashion. You can click on website URL and visit it in a new window. If you are satisfied with website metrics(page views, unique visitors, etc.) and like its content, you can put a check mark next to it. Select as many sites as you wish and press ..

Once through, go to “Media Plan” tab and review what you have. Google will produce cool graphs:

Ad Planner will also supply you with Summary Data of the media plan.

You can export Media Plan as a .csv file for Microsoft Excel.

Quality and Review

Ad Planner is a breeze if you got a campaign on your hands. Google doesn’t limit websites to its content network and lets you see all websites that meet Ad Planner guidelines. Guidelines are:

——

Sites might not appear in Google Ad Planner for a variety of reasons. For example, a site might not appear if it:

• Has a traffic volume below a minimum threshold.
• Used a robots.txt exclusion file to prevent indexing by Google.
• Doesn’t adhere to our quality guidelines.

——

Google does all demographic research for you, all you have to do is select websites you want your ads to appear on.

Right now Ad Planner is very limited in counties other than US. If you select Canada and apply demographic filters, website lists shrink to 10-30 websites!

Sometimes you will see websites that have no advertisements at all so you will have to persuade webmasters and negotiate ad placement.

Ad Planner is perfect if you have banner or branding campaigns. Number of websites is immense and Google does a good job with demographic judgment.

Google is not first to come up with this tool. Current leaders are:

• Quantcast
• Nielsen Online
• comScore
• Microsoft

All services are fee based, unlike the Ad Planner.

It’s not likely to pose a threat to these services, since marketers prefer to get data from various sources, but it’s an addition to the toolset.

Right now Ad Planner is by request only. You can apply here.

Conversion Optimization – Online Copywriting.

This is the forth part of the series focused on Online Copywriting.

The topic is broad and full of valuable advice. There are great many sources where you can learn online copywriting.

Why the need for online copywriting?

Text is the substance of a website. What’s a site without text? It’s like a car with no wheels. Text is the food of search engine spiders and it’s the food of your visitors.  What do visitors read when they come from search engines? Headline. Then the paragraph, and if you’re lucky - the entire page.

Text, or copywriting has the power to engage readers, inform them and move them closer to the purchase. Bad copy, or one that merely fills pages for search engine spiders – hurts sales more then you like to think it can.  Check landing page makeovers from Copyblogger

Like with search engine optimization, there are wealth of sources on online copywriting. Instead of reinventing it or being repetious, we will give you the best sources. You make of it what you can. The point is to arm you with all ingridients for a successful website.

Copywriting Resources:

Online Copywriting 101: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet - The Groks

Online Copywriting 101: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet — Part 2 - The Groks

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell

Writing for the Web - Useit.com

Books:

Make Your Words Sell

Persuasive Online Copywriting

Elements of Style

Don’t worry about keyword density. Write naturally, go back and plug keywords where they fit. If phrases don’t fit, change sentances, play with it. The point is to create natural reading.  Google is after links anyway, so 15 and 25 keywords per page wont make any difference.

Sources:

• International Center For Journalists
• CopyBlogger
• John’s Calrton Big Damn Blog
• Robust Writing

Forums:

Copywriters Board

Digital Point

Blogs:

• Copyblogger
• Write to Done
• The Copywriter Underground

Web Position helps to monitor search rankings on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com and other search engines. It provides a list of useful features and we’re going to review it in this article.

Reporter

First feature is called reporter. With reporter you specify search engines of your preference which include Google.com and all its regional versions, Yahoo.com and its regional versions, Ask.com, AOL, Lycos, Mamma and other search engines.

Then you specify keywords. The list can be as big as you like it. You can also import keywords from an .csv file.

Next step is “options”. There you set reporting settings, archive setting, email and exporting.

WebPositions takes some time and generates resutls.

• Summary - Provides overview of the metrics that affect site’s visibility.
• Visibility - Shows how many web pages from a web site are published by the leading search engines along with how many links from other sites are pointing at the home page of your site.
• Engine - Current rank, previous rank and change in a keyword’s position categorized by search engine.
• Keyword - Current rank, previous rank and change in a keyword’s position categorized by keyword for each selected search engine.
• Listings - Position of each keyword found, along with the actual listing text displayed in the search engine results page.
• Detail - Search engine listings for a keyword by search engine providing visibility into your position relative to the competition.
• Alert - Listings that have dropped in ranking since the last run of a mission.
• Trend - Changes in keyword position over time.
• Competitive - Keyword positions in relation to competing web sites.
• URL/Keyword Description - Position of each keyword for each keyword by URL for each search engine.
• Log and URL - Shows program statistics.

The feature may not be as useful to search engine optimization expert as it is for the clients. All this information can be checked manually. The advantages of Web Position are pretty graphs and an interface, which can be used in communication with clients. It looks organized, pretty and very professional, something CEOs and business owners appreciate.

Wordtracker Keywords

Refused to work in the trial version.

Page Critic

Page critic is uniform in set up to the Reporter, only this time, WebPosition checks your website for SEO quality. it produced this document with suggestions:

Our website ranks top on Google.ca, yet Page Critic offered advice to change keywords in more than 5 positions. WebPosition answers:

“Why does the Page Critic sometimes recommend changes to a page already ranking well?”

This is a common question particularly from users new to WebPosition Gold. The recommendations and suggestions given by WebPosition Gold’s Page Critic are based upon statistical AVERAGES of top ranking pages. Used effectively, these suggestions and tips can do wonders for a page’s position. But, the suggestions made by the software are far from being the only solution to a top ranking page.

Page critic will help beginner SEOs to rank better. Pros wouldn’t and I guess don’t trust the machine with SEO suggestions.

Page Builder

Page builder is a weird creature. It builds CSS less pages based on the keywords and text you enter during set up . The end result is a naked page, with nothing but a heading and text.

This can be achieved in any other WYSIWYG editor in seconds, yet web trends take some time. A worthless feature.

Submitter

Submitter gets your site submitted to search engines. Nothing fancy here, a free version is found here.

Scheduler

Set schedule for any of the tools mentioned above.

Meta Manager

Edit your meta data.

Link Defender

Link defender scans for broken link within a website. Nothing fancy. Scan link for free with Lunk Sleuth.

Summary

Web Position costs:

$389 for a Pro version and $149 for Standard.

Pro version offers:

• Insight into the highest-value keywords, your web site’s link popularity and search engine saturation
• Monitor your PPC (pay per click) keywords across more than 200 global and regional paid search engines
• Private label the reports so that you can use your company logo on the reports
• Track ranking information for an unlimited number of web sites and keywords - including your competitors!

We reviewed the basic version, which does not have those features. The only useful feature in the basic version is the “Reporter” which generates very detailed and visual reports - perfect for clients. Other features are unuseful.

Pro version looks a lot a better, so we encourage you to try it.

Google launched ad media buying software called Google Adplanner.

To make your life easier, we’re introducing Google Ad Planner, a research and media planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers. When using Google Ad Planner, simply enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit. You can drill down further to get more detail like demographics and related searches for a particular site, or you can get aggregate statistics for the sites you’ve added to your media plan.  - Google

Adplanner is rival to:

• Quantcast
• Nielsen Online
• comScore

Considering Google’s immense online database it will offer some of the best ad planning services in the industry. For now Google Adplanner is limited to invitations only. You can apply over here.

News Updates:

Google adds Google 411 Service to Canada:

Canadians can dial 1-800-GOOG-411 to connect to a computer that’s armed with voice recognition software software. The automated voice will ask for city and province. A voice menu will assist users by finding the information they’re looking for. Users can ask for directions to a business or location, phone numbers, or receive a voice spoken text message about the business or restaurant that they’re researching. - Search Engine Watch

Yandex to Open Labs Office in Bay Area

Russia’s most popular search engine has officially announced plans to open a labs office in Silicon Valley. This news began to leak last week with the departure of Yahoo SVP and General Manager of Search, Vishal Makhijani. Makhijani will be President of Yandex Labs in the Bay Area, and will report directly to the CEO of Yandex. - Search Engine Watch

Russians are biting Google now? Lets see how it goes. Russian based anti-virus company Kaspersky won a big chunk of corporate accounts from Norton. Though Norton plain sucks, Google does not, so it will be tough.

In this blog post we would like to keep the topic of internet on the background. This is one of the posts, which all blogs have, where we ignore its purpose and dive into a different realm.

The Reality?

The question that I ask and probably many others do:  “Is there a point to life? Do I have a purpose?”

There are many answers.

Religion says we are created by God and have to follow a set of rules and customs to rejoin with the infinite.

We had over 30,000 religions to date.

Science says we are bodies and nothing more than sacs of meet.  We die and that’s the end of it.

“You can be whoever you want to be.” Believe it.

Yet sometimes, we see a different story. How many people are what they want to be? Doing what they want? Living the way they want? How many of them do you know?

The vast majority wake up to depressing jobs, talk to their spouses, who they hate, and get to work, passing till the night, watching numb shows on night TV. Next day is another dull day. Nothing changes.

Whats going on?

The Thoughts.

Through research you will find that great many leaders will and have signed up for this statement.

— Our Present Thoughts Shape our Future Reality —

• “We are shaped by our thoughts, we become what we think” – Buddha
• “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of Life’s coming attractions” – Albert Einstein
• “We become what we think about, all day long” – Rhalph Waldo Emerson
• “The Empires of the future are the empires of the mind” – Winston Chirchil
• “Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.” Henry Ford

Can those profound people, be telling us their secret… out in the open?

• “We are shaped by our thoughts, we become what we think” – Buddha
• “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of Life’s coming attractions” – Albert Einstein
• “We become what we think about, all day long” – Rhalph Waldo Emerson
• “The Empires of the future are the empires of the mind” – Winston Chirchil
• “Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.” Henry Ford

Could… thoughts be manifested into reality, by a law? Could the shifting of thought pattern change ones life?

This is what movie “The Secret” talks about.

Watch a clip here.

So could it be that easy…? Your dominant thoughts, shape you… and your present?

This seemed absurd, but very attractive … Our thoughts, shape our current experiences and our future?

What we think now and today, eventually manifests itself in the future?

This brings us to another question? Could the difference between people living in the wealth of dollars today be simply –…..

….thoughts?

That is the claim, of the author of the book “Think and Grow Rich” Napoleon Hill.

Before writing the book, he spent 20 years analyzing and researching the most successful people in the world, including:

• John D. Rockefeller
• Henry Ford
• Theodore Roosevelt
• Thomas Edison
• Wilbur Wright
• Alexander Graham Bell
• King Camp Gillette
• Woodrow Wilson
• William Wrigley Jr.
• Franklin Winfield Woolworth
• John Wanamaker
• James J. Hill
• George Eastman
• John W. Davis
• Elbert Hubbard
• William Jennings Bryan
• J. Ogden Armour
• Charles M. Schwab
• Frank W. Gunsaulus
• Daniel Willard
• Frank A. Vanderlip
• Edward Filene
• Edwin C. Barnes
• Arthur Brisbane
• William Howard Taft
• Luther Burbank
• Edward W. Bok
• Frank Munsey
• Elbert Henry Gary
• John Henry Patterson
• Julius Rosenwald

Men who made fortunes.

Franklin Winfield Woolworth, the American billionaire, stated:

“By applying many of the 17  fundamentals of the Law of Success philosophy we have built a great chain of successful stores. I presume it would be no exaggeration of fact if I said that the Woolworth Building might properly be called a monument to the soundness of these principles.”

And the whole book comes down to … thoughts. It highlights a practical way of changing ones thoughts and putting thoughts into action.

So could, over 500 wealthiest men in the world be wrong about accumulation of riches?  Unlikely. The thought that comes to many: “thoughts could be unlikely responsible for the riches… “ yet it’s right there, from the horse’s mouth.

We often look at people’s achievements, overlooking the stuggles they had to go through.

• Napoleon Hill, author of “Think and Grow Rich” was born in poverty and had a son with no ears. He is now regarded as a man responsible for success of many people.
• Li Ka-Shing tenth richest man in the world  - When he was just 12 years old, Li and his family fled to Hong Kong when Japan invaded China. When he was 15, Li’s father died and he was forced to drop out of high school to support his family. (source)
•   Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times before he invented the light bulb.

Those are perfect excuses not to go on and give up.

The thought of knowing better kept those men going, until they achieved their goal. There was nothing but a thought and desire for a goal.

Goal, is nothing but a thought, until it is achieved in the psychical form. Before it is achieved, it is merely the imagination in ones mind that only exists in ones mind.

Think of your goals. They are nothing but thoughts that exist in your imagination. Mental images, not yet manifested.

So could the answer be … thoughts make you?

George Calrin, a stand up comedian died in Santa Monica, Calif., on Sunday.

• New York Times
• Google Video

New Google Trends Feature

Matt introduced new Google Trends feature called Google Trends for websites.

You can see visitor traffic volume, and compare up to 5 websites against each other. Google doesn’t show any data for smaller websites(certain number of visitors).

You can also see traffic by

• Regions
• Visited
• Searched for

There are other, similar services to Google Trends for Websites - Compete.com and Alexa.com All 3 disagree on the traffic levels.

Compete.com says that traffic for: seoroundtable.com, searchengineland.com, and search enginewatch.com is around 100 - 500 k, from May 2007 to May 2008. All 3 have a spikes from almost 0 to 500K!

Alexa.com ranks sites from ~5000 to 100,000 visitors in spring - summer 2008.

So who do you trust? Alexa gets its data from Alexa toolbar. Compete.com relies on ISPs and Google…

• Click through rate from searches
• Google Analytics
• Google Reader
• more Google services.

It has access to goldmine of information on any website, especially if it has Analytics installed. For now, Google only shows data for sites that exceed certain traffic volume and Analytics or not, Google knows a lot about you :D.

Search Engine Marketing Firm

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• View our Clients
• Explore our search engine marketing services.

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At your disposal is the experience in: B2B, Financial, B2C, Industrial, Travel, Entertainment, Real Estate, Retail and Health industries. View Clients

We employ a unique approach to search engine marketing, garnering campaigns to capture local market exposure, provincial market exposure national and international market reach. Find out more about our SEO Strategies. SEO Expert is able to efficiently reduce cost per acquisition of new customers by aggressively placing your website on top search engines spots for keywords that indicate high probability of sale. Learn about our Keyword Research Strategies.

Search Engine Marketing Approach

Strategic market expansion, reduced costs and more sales are not achieved with “links & keywords”. It is achieved with understanding of your business goals, products and more importantly your customer audience. As a professional search engine marketing firm, we get to know you, your team and your marketing initiatives in order to understand and deliver results.

Once we align ourselves with appropriate stakeholders within your company and have clear sights of your goals, we move to the phase of studying your marketplace, competition and customers.

Keyword Research Strategy

Keyword research strategy begins with identification and analysis of words used by search engine users to find products and services offered by your organization. A set of keyword research tools is used to identify keywords. First phrase of keyword research allows you to source keywords that indicate high probability of sale, giving you returns shortly after implementation of basic SEO enhancements. Other stages encompass analysis of search behaviour and identification of optimization for various markets(local, provincial national).

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine optimization process starts with analysis of your website, it’s strengths and weaknesses, initial positioning and initial traffic flows. With this information we come up with a check list of best practices and techniques that will improve your search engine rankings.

As professional search engine marketing firm we will fully maintain the design of your website, while dramatically improving search engine visibility. Our creative team can optimize: website content, press releases, PDFs, flash, video and any other assets.

Contact SEO Expert Now at 514 - 397 - 95 12. Prefer Email? Write an Email

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Competition Analysis - Research

This article is a continuation of conversion optimization series.

Once you know your industry and customers you have to know competition. Competition research encompasses:

• Paid Search (PPC)
• Organic Search (SEO)
• Brand Equity
• Information Structure
• Site Message(copywriting)

PPC and SEO Competition Research

The goal is to measure search visibility of your competitors on major search engines. This one is pretty straight forward. Plug your keywords and see who appears and for what queries in both natural and paid search.

SEO Competitive Analysis Resources:

• SEO & PPC Competitive Analysis & Keyword Research Tools
• SEO & Competition Analysis - Part One
• SEO & Competition Analysis - Part Two

Brand Equity

Brand equity refers to the marketing effects or outcomes that accrue to a product with its brand name compared with those that would accrue if the same product did not have the brand name. And, at the root of these marketing effects is consumers’ knowledge. In other words, consumers’ knowledge about a brand makes consumers respond differently to the marketing of the brand. The study of brand equity is increasingly popular as some marketing researchers have concluded that brands are one of the most valuable assets that a company has. - Wikipedia

Sometimes strong brand does not need search, nor does it need strong copywriting. Strong brand is a half way sale. Competing with one is tough. To find out who has a strong brand, go out to forums, chats and blogs. If a site gets mentioned, linked and discussed – it’s likely has a strong brand within your niche. In most cases it will rely on direct traffic and outside links, while holding top search engine spots(due to natural links). To compete on search you will have to buy your way through SEO or work hard to develop the brand.

Online brand development.

SEO company that can get you search visibility.

Competitive Information Structure

Information structure has the capacity to double your profits. Many designers overlook it and shoot for eye candies. Good info structure will:

Make navigation a breeze

Best sites have seamless navigation that users take for granted and never notice. Look at your competitors, try to get from page F to page Z. How hard is it? Do you have to look around, click or go to the homepage to get there? If it’s good, you can get anywhere within 3 clicks(assuming there are 50+pages).

If your competitor has an effective site structure, copy some elements and wrap your own design with it.

Persuasion element

Effective site structure will also persuade. This is achieved with link text, amount of links and page links.

Link text is usually limited to SEO, so there not much room here and it can be sacrificed.

Links that cross connect related pages within page copy create persuasive momentum.

For example: Page talks about security. Reader will be interested to know how exactly it works. Within page copy you can create a benefit packed sentence with a link to a deeper overview. On that same page you can populate other related links. The goal is to ensure that visitors keep moving within your site and keep finding relevant information.

If your competitors achieve both persuasive momentum and make their navigation seamless you’re in trouble. Prepare for some work, since information structure and site optimization are industries on their own.

Competitive Site Messaging

Read through competitive writings. Are they we-we-we? Or do they focus on the benefits that products brings to the customer?

A good technique is to copy all the benefits from most competitive sites onto to a file. Add your own benefits on top of it, improve existing ones, and populate them on your own site. This way you don’t miss any benefits that competition has and ensure you have plenty of your own.

Also look at the copy structure and its persuasiveness. If a copy is good it will usually create desire to explore more and order the product.

You can take apart competitive sales copy with several structures:

• What is the problem?
• Why hasn’t It been solved?
• What’s Possible?
• What’s Different?
• Ask for Order?

My favorite:

• Open strongly and create desire
• Develop drama and differentiates the product
• Explain how to use product or service
• Elaborate Unique benefits
• Justify the Purchase or lasting value
• Address Service Concerns
• Ask for the order

A thorough analysis will let you know if competitors strategically developed their copy and help you develop a better one.

Research Tools

This article is a part of conversion optimization series. Here you will find best keyword research tools on the web. Use them to do marketing research, PPC research and SEO research.

Google Keyword Tool - Use it for both SEO and marketing research.

• Wordtracker Keyword Research

Free - free service works for general SEO research, Wordtracker will produce 100 keywords per request. If you want to do marketing research, you need more data.

Subsciption Based - perfect if you want to examine search intent through long tail keyword analysis. There you can spot questions, concerns and more.

• Compete.com - Compete gets keyword data from Internet Service Providers and toolbars. You can run analysis on your competitors and see what keywords send referrals. You can also purchase keyword lists for B2B, Retail, Industrial, Financial, Travel, Real Estate, Law, Communications and other industries.
• AOL Keywords - Over 20 million leaked keywords from AOL search, powered by Google. AOL has around 5% search market share in US. You can find search history of AOL users and how they approached topic research.
• Hitwise - Competitive intelligence tool. Find out what organic and PPC keywords send most refferals to your competitors. Bid for and optimize for exact keywords. Starts at $500 per report.
• Google Trends - use this tool to spot seasonal and geographic search trends. See how press releases affect search volume.

This is the Research part of our conversion optimization series. In this article we talk about research.

Research is key to conversion optimization. It arms you with knowledge which helps creative juices. Look at this part as a preparation for an exam. If you don’t prepare – you fail the exam. If you don’t research for your site – it fails. You can get lucky, but hoping for the best is foolish.

Proper research arms you with: Insight into the product/service. Ability to create strong arguments in your copy, supported by facts. Knowledge of the questions/concerns your customers have. Ability to answer questions in a way your customers prefer, and discharge their concerns. Knowledge of your rivals and their best/worst techniques.

There are 3 parts to research.

• Industry Research
• Customer Research
• Competition Research

If you’re a pro in your industry, you can ignore the “Industry Research” part and focus on competition and customers. If you think you know enough, still give it a shot. You may find tricks that you didn’t know before.

Industry Research

Industry research encompasses knowledge of the industry jargon, main players, products, services, features, benefits and the process.

There are two information sources available. Internet and books. Use both of them.

If you’re new to the field, go out and Google basic info about the stuff you’re engaged in. Pretty straight forward and you’ll find plenty of info. Once you get the basics, get some books on the topic. You can buy them on eBay, Amazon or get them in your library. Get books that offer two perspectives. For example, if you offer real estate services, get one for “consumers” and one for “businesses”. This will enhance your knowledge of the subject from both perspectives and enable you to be more creative in your copywriting, design and development.

Stay up to date. Subscribe to the latest news updates in your industry. You can find sites that specialize in your industry news or use Google News.

Head out to university portals and dig through white papers related to your field. Find all the resources here. You might get an idea or a different perspective on things.

The goal is to arm yourself with strong knowledge of the subject. This will help you in copywriting, since you’ll be creative in your features / benefit list and will be able to present stronger arguments than “we’re a leading, best of breed, customer focused, peoples company”.

Customer Research

Customer research is the trickiest part of all. You will have to identify what your customers want and how they want it. A lot of sites fail to do this. Just look around and you’ll see. The we-we illness is rampant, mixed with blunt features that don’t make sense to a person who barely knows anything about whatever you’re offering. Customer research will help you speak on the same tongue with your prospective clients.

Where to go for customer research? Start with what you already have.

Quote:

“Who should be involved in these discussions? Marketing, of course. But often the best uncover insights come from sales people and customer service people, individuals who have daily encounters with customers and understand their questions and concerns.”

So start with your internal knowledge. Get a team from customer service, reception, marketing, etc. Sit and make everyone jot down all possible questions customers ask and concerns they indicate. Then organize and combine everything together. Questions that appear from several participants may be ones that need to be answered first.

The problem comes if you’re small, and research by yourself. In this case, you have to rely on your own customer knowledge and outside sources.

Good place are keywords. Keywords uncover intentions your customers have. Each keyword typed into a search engine is question your customer has.

Example

By digging through keywords you can spot questions and concerns your potential customer have.

We’ve covered this before. You can read articles to find out in detail how keywords uncover customer intentions.

• Using keyword commands to get into the Brains of your Customers
• Keyword Marketing Research
• Answering Anticipated Questions

• Website Architecture Part 4

• Information and Copy Structure for Different Personality Types

Here(link coming soon), you can find a list of best keyword research tools both for SEO and marketing research.

Blogs / Social Networks / Forums

Customers get together and talk about you and your industry. They love, they hate and they gossip.

Forums. Find forums where your customers sit and participate in the conversation with them. Don’t lurk around, but talk to them. You can mask yourself as another customer.

Blogs. Find A-class bloggers, follow what they say about the industry and products in general. They are usually leading online customer voices, with plenty of comments to dig through.

Social Networks / Social Bookmarks. Search for groups related to whatever you do. Talk and listen.

By talking with your customers you’ll get into the right mind set and feel more intuitively on what to talk about in your copy / copies.

In the next issue we talk about competition research.

SINGLE BLACK FEMALE…
Seeks male companionship, ethnicity unimportant. I’m a svelte good looking girl who LOVES to play. I love long walks in the woods, riding in your pickup truck, hunting, camping, and fishing trips, cozy winter nights lying by the fire. Candlelight dinners will have me eating out of your hand. Rub me the right way and watch me respond. I’ll be at the front door when you get home from work, wearing only what nature gave me. Kiss me and I’m yours. Call xxx-xxxx and ask for Daisy.

(Callers - and there were many - got the local animal shelter. Seems Daisy was a playful black Labrador puppy! Apocryphal though this story may be - it’s made the rounds on the Web - it is nevertheless a brilliant example of Franking.)

 From the Groks. 

“Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, is planning a trip to outer space in 2011, according to a report in the New York Times. Space Adventures flies wealthy explorers on Russian Soyuz rockets to the International Space Station. The Virginia-based company plans to buy a Soyuz flight all its own in 2011, with the option of buying more.” - Search Engine Watch

Read Full Article About Google Browser  

“…Consider this: Since its inception, Firefox has pushed billions of search queries to Google, from which billions of dollars have been made. Not millions, billions…

….As companies go, Google’s not a particularly evil one. Supporting open source in so many aspects of its business is a wonderful, non-evil thing. However, continuing to support Firefox fully would mean further reliance on Mozilla’s not screwing up a good thing. That is, Google needs Mozilla to keep making the right decisions as the browser maker grows its business. On the other hand, this same growth gives Mozilla a reason to start requesting a larger piece of the pie – and with reason.

As Firefox continues to grow – its market share is around 20% worldwide – Google keeps getting a better deal. For merely a few million a month, Google’s market share in the search and advertising industries has the ability to grow leaps and bounds and generate a five- to ten-fold return on investment. A win for Firefox is a win for Google … until Mozilla gets greedy.

Google, always known for iterating slowly on most of its projects, has taken its time on GBrowser for a very good reason: it only has one chance to get it right. Failing to succeed in its browser move means rocky negotiations with a core partner, Mozilla, and could negatively impact its financials in a significant manner. A move into the browser market requires perfection, and GBrowser has undergone at least one substantial rewrite and many major user-interface iterations….

Conversion Optimization - Search Engine Marketing

This is a continuation of our series on conversion optimization. In this article we talk about search engine marketing.

Term Search Engine Marketing or SEM, covers two disciplines SEO and PPC. Both are ways to market your site on search engines.

Some definitions if you’re not already familiar.

• SEO
• PPC

The reason why we talk SEM first is because there has to be a healthy flow of traffic to your website. What good is a site no one visits? Search engines are ideal. They deliver visitors interested in your products / services, because visitors:

1. Got to a search engine. 2. Typed in keywords. 3. Clicked on your site.

So your company and your offer are very relevant to them, as opposed to banners, pop-up, pop-unders and other “push” online marketing methods.

Selecting between PPC and SEO is not hard. If you’re willing to pay for the traffic all the time and have resources for it, PPC is for you. If you want traffic, but for a onetime fee, SEO is the solution.

Search Engine Marketing is a vast industry. We won’t spend much time discussing it, because other have done it 1000 times before, and done it better. We’ll rather point to best resources.

You have 2 choices:

- Learn the stuff yourself.

- Hire a search marketing company.

You can also go for branding with social media and direct traffic building.

Learning Search Engine Marketing – PPC

It’s very easy to learn Pay Per Click basics. You select the keywords, put up a bid and search engines do the rest. Of course there are more advanced strategies, such as selection of longer keywords, headline testing, ad copy testing and 100.000+ keyword list strategies. Those are advances you will learn once you get into it. Search engines offer very intuitive platforms. All you need is to grasp the basics. As you go along, you’ll read more material, test more strategies and eventually become a pro at it.

3 Major PPC platforms:

• Google Adwords
• Yahoo Search Marketing
• Microsoft Adcenter

PPC tutorials from search engines:

• Google Adwords Learning Center
• Google Adwords Tips and Tricks

Google offers both training and PPC strategies in its learning center. Best of all resources.

• Yahoo Search Marketing Help
• Microsoft doesn’t offer much help, but its similar to other 2 networks.

This all you need to know about PPC to launch a campaign and drive traffic to your website

Here’s 2 more advanced techniques:

The Secret Of Large Term Lists (It’s All In The Bidding)

Computing Optimal Pay-Per-Click Bids In 19 Easy Steps

Learning Search Engine Marketing – SEO

SEO is too big to cover in one, two or 20 sittings. In fact, some pros made businesses by teaching search engine optimization. We’ll give you the resources, you do the rest.

SEO Articles to Read.

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine - Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Google founders released a paper back in Stanford University, before Google wasn’t known beyond its walls.

• Beginner’s Guide to SEO - great article to get you started in search engine optimization
• Search Engine Ranking Factors - SEO professionals get down and share their opinions on what matters to search engines.
• Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone - Webmaster World member shares his experience on how to build a successful website.
• Rewriting the Beginner’s Guide - update to beginners guide on SEO.
• Sculpting Your PageRank For Maximum SEO Impact - use of the “nofollow” tag to sculp Google PageRank
• SEO Articles by Aaron Wall - number of articles by a search engine marketing expert Aaron Wall.

How Google crawls my site - How? Google answers.

How do you choose your URL file names? - want to change URL names but afraid of loosing rankings? Here’s a solution.

Link Building

• Link Value Factors - experts get together and share their insight on link building.
• Link Building Secrets Revealed by Top Linking Experts - link build tricks revealed by SEO experts in PDF file
• Advanced Link Building Strategies - …have attempted to list here many of the link building tactics used by the SEO community
• Experts - Link Love - blog on link building
• How Google, Yahoo & Ask.com Treat the No Follow Link Attribute - a “nofollow” is an attribute in a link which tells search engines not to follow the link. Some search engines adhere, some don’t. Article explains which ones exactly.

Paid SEO Resources

SEO Book – a site from a search engine marketing professional who wrote the best book on SEO - Aaron Wall. The book is no longer on sale and you need to become a member at $50 per month to get book content and much more.

SEO Moz – another website that offers vast SEO resources and training on all search engine marketing. Membership is $40 per month.

SEM Blogs

List of best blogs on search engine optimization.

SEOmoz

SEO Book

Weip.net

SEO by the SEA

Wolf-Howl

StuntDubl

Matt Cutts Blog

SearchRank Blog

Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Forums

Whenever you got a question about search engine optimization, best place to ask is on forums. Here’s a list of the best SEO forums.

• WebmasterWorld Forums
• Digital Point Forums
• Search Engine Watch Forums
• Cre8asite Forums

Search Marketing News

Search engine marketing is a dynamic business. A major shift in algorithms can cost you rankings, visitors and money. Keep an eye on the news. If anything big happens, everybody will talk.

Search Engine Watch - the oldest one, was founded by a search expert Danny Sullivan.

Search Engine Land - latest news in the industry. Run by Danny Sullivan

Search Engine RoundTable - coverage of SEO forums.

Hiring a Search Engine Marketing Company

There are many great companies that can take care of both PPC and SEO. You can try us, or use a search engine to find one.

This is a series that will consist of 6 parts and about 10-15 posts on how to build a website that sells.

A successful site is a site that brings a nice return to the bank. There are several components that make it bank worthy. Components can work separately and get site owners results, but when combined, they produce search visible, persuasive magic.

Best guys at this are FutureNow, authors of Persuasive Online Copywriting, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark and the inventors of the Persuasion Architecture. We’re the fans, so a lot of stuff will come from them in our next posts. Highly encourage you to subscribe to GrokDomCom blog, and to get their books.

Persuasion Architecture is what it is - an architecture. It’s complex, blueprint-like approach to websites, where every click possibility is measured before a line of code written and a single letter typed into a word processor. It requires time, research, resources and collaboration of people from different disciplines. Guys at FutureNow charge from $3000 for landing page optimization and from $70.000 for full architecture design and rigorous testing.

The GrokDotCom guys, in their book, talk about persuasion architecture applied to all marketing channels, including internet. Here, we want to describe the process in simpler terms, applied to websites exclusively.

You will need, above all - time and SEO. Time to learn and then implement(or manage) conversion optimization and SEO to get the traffic. If you don’t have SEO, you’ll need more time to learn it or a good SEO company. If you don’t have time, nor resources, well… good stuff isn’t free..

To make persuasion architecture easier, we decided to break it into more digestible chunks and call it conversion optimization. Not very unique, but no trademark infringement either. We’ll also list resources where you can get more, in-depth information and eventually learn all the pieces.

As a disclaimer: we’re not pros at this stuff, nor have ever executed the whole thing. This is rather a theoretic post to share(which is good anyway) information and organize everything in our heads. Writing can organize your own thoughts.

The Essential Pieces

Pieces may work separately, but a combination is destined to deliver results.

• Search Engine Marketing. Who you going to convert? SEM gets you the traffic(unless you manage to build a strong brand, but majority don’t, so we won’t touch it here)
• Research. Research into your field(if you’re fairly new), your customers, competition, social and more. Designed to arm you with knowledge and info.
• Planning. Planning of all the pieces that will be featured on a website, such as copy, content and tools.
• Copywriting. A good copy can sell more than an army of outbound telemarketers.
• Design/Usability. Design without usability in mind - is a bad design.
• Measurement/Testing. Is it working the way you want? If not what’s the problem? If yes, what can be better? Find out with testing.

Structured in the way we’re comfortable with. Depending on your approach, you can swap some of the phrases. For example, if you’re making a new site, it’s wise to apply research, planning and copywriting before SEM, but if you already have a site, why not SEO it first? Once the trust factor is there, its easier to implement changes, since Google trusts the site.

The whole process takes a lot of time. Depending on the number of people working on the project it may take from 1 month to 4 months.

Before we get started, we recommend reading these books:

• Waiting for Your Cat To Bark. Costs $10 bucks.
• Make Your Site Sell. A bit old, but a lot of essentials still hold their ground. Free.

It is also helpful to understand search, know a bit about copywriting, have some research skills and know a bit HTML and CSS(or know how to use Dreamweaver). All can be picked up on the way, as we’ll give appropriate resources in each section.

In the next post we discuss Search Engine Marketing…

We’ll be going back and linking new posts, to this original post / making some changes.

Search Engine RoundTable reports that webmasters suspect Google is rolling out a big SERP update.

This month, WebmasterWorld are reporting that there are fewer results being returned for specific queries. The suspicion lies in quality control practices that are now being implemented, but others believe that the “human editorial army” may be the reason behind this.

WebmasterWorld

Search Engine RoundTable  

SEO Expert™ Vancouver SEO Search Engine Optimization Company

Search engine optimization is what delivers the results to your company and ensures that you are getting motivated customers and expanding your revenue flow. The level of Vancouver search engine optimization you need depends on the competitiveness of your industry, complexity of your website and complexity of your products and services.

Does this sound familiar… you get a consultant – they walk in and claim to have all the solutions to your problems. There’s one problem. They don’t you, your team, your problems, business model and most importantly your customers. Should you listen? The answer is no.

Vancouver Search Engine Optimization – The Critical Steps

You cannot have successful Vancouver search engine marketing campaign(or any marketing) without strategic planning. You cannot have successful planning without successful keyword research. There’s a reason it’s called keyword research. Some companies believe that marketing is about being creative and making stuff up – that’s what ad agencies are for. Successful companies know that marketing is about something that is our there that represents the truth. The purpose of keyword research is to find out important facts about your targeted customers and their search behaviours.

The first and the most important step of Vancouver search engine optimization, keyword research, builds solid foundation on which rest of the campaign gets executed. Before we touch anything, we must have a deep understanding of your customer search behaviour, language and their perceptions in your industry. Keyword research results in keyword lists that take into account key phrases with different search volumes, different intentions and indicators of interest in your company. This approach provides better customer acquisition approach and a better ability to convert visitors into customers.

With our proven search engine optimization methodology, we can easily implement a strategy that brings results. We will work with you or with your team to establish and hold best search engine spots for keywords that indicate interest in your products and services. Our approach can help you:

• Discover new opportunities for your company
• Develop better online brand awareness through link enhancement services
• Optimize your website for Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines
• Promote you an industry leader on search engine listings
• Develop an online customer flow to your website through search engines

Please review this page for a more detailed look at benefits delivered with our search engine optimization services.

What You Will Receive With SEO Marketing Services

Upon completion of our search engine marketing services you will receive at least 3 first page search engine spots(depending on your package). If you prefer a more tactical implementation explore our local search engine optimization service.

Vancouver SEO process. You and your team will be involved in the process. It may required by one of our representatives to visit our offices and discuss in detail your objectives.

Our Vancouver search engine optimization services are available to any business. Fees begin at $3000.

You can engage in a short term search engine optimization campaign or shoot for long term where we will capture a spot for each competitive keyword in your industry. Throughout our relationship, our team communicate with you and evaluate your suggested courses of action.

Contact us now to discuss your Vancouver search engine marketing goals.

“SEO Expert optimized Better Business Bureau web site in Quebec and since then 80% of all the business listings are on the first page of the search engines. Thank you.”

- Serge M. www.bbb-bec.com

Explore Our Site | View Clients | SEO Services

Yahoo announced and webmaster world reported:

“OPTIMIZATION. In the U.S. only, for those advertisers not bound by an Insertion Order, we may help you optimize your account(s). Accordingly, you expressly agree that we may also: (i) create ads, (ii) add and/or remove keywords, and/or (iii) optimize your account(s). We will notify you via email of such changes made to your account(s), and can also include a spreadsheet of such changes upon your written request. If you would like any of such changes reversed, please reply to such email within 14 days of the change(s), and we will make commercially reasonable efforts to reverse the change(s) you specifically identify. Notwithstanding the foregoing, you remain responsible for all changes made to your account(s), including all click charges incurred prior to any reversions being made. It is your responsibility to monitor your account(s) and to ensure that your account settings are consistent with your business objectives.”

Forum participant put a nice perspective on it:

“Unless you send us an email to opt out, We will come into to your kitchen, eat your food, make a bunch of long-distance phone calls, and rearrange your spice cupboard. If you don’t like that situation, send us an email we’ll make a commercially reasonable effort to put your spices back the way they were, but won’t reimburse you for the food we ate.”

This shows Yahoo desperation to raise profits and increase shareholder value. If they proceed, it will only hurt them in the long run.