Technology Marketing by Tatum MarketingJust another WordPress weblog

One of the most interesting things about marketing is that it constantly offers a multitude of choices and options. There’s never a lack of things to try or things to improve.

Sometimes that leads to paralysis. Marketers and business owners just don’t know what to do next.

But some decisions are really no-brainers. Here are three. I’ve mentioned these all many times before. But judging by the questions I get from clients, they’re worth repeating.

1. Fix your website

I’m not going to bore you with stats that I’ve already posted on this subject. Suffice it to say that you’re never going to achieve a high level of quality lead or traffic generation if your website is lame.

That fact is pretty obvious if you sell online. A bad site repels buyers. It may be less obvious to those of you who don’t sell online, but it’s equally true.

If you don’t believe your prospects are looking at your website think about your own buying habits. When was the last time you bought a complex or expensive product or service without taking a look at the company’s website?

That just doesn’t happen much these days. Your website is often the first – and last -  impression.

2. Get visible online.

Unless you’re one of very few companies that have a truly unique solution to a problem no one has thought of yet, your prospects are looking for you online. They’ll find your competitors with or without you. Which would you rather it be?

Personal referrals still top the list of the best lead generation sources for business-to-business products and services, but buyers also search. If nothing else, they’ll look for solutions to compare the referred product or service to. More likely they’ll be compiling a list of vendors to consider.

This means you need to be visible on search engines and websites where your prospects hang out. Otherwise you’re missing your best prospects – the ones who are actively seeking a solution.

3. Start with Google.

Achieving visibility on Google may be harder and more expensive than becoming visible on other search engines, but let’s face it – Google delivers the bulk of the traffic. Last April, Hitwise found that Google’s marketshare in US searches was 67%. Yahoo (at 20%), MSN Search (at 5.25%) and Ask.com (at 4%) – although not insignificant – trail far behind. Google’s dominance is even greater among business searchers.

Even if you can’t afford the click costs on Google, it’s the best testing ground because the heavier traffic allows you to figure out what works best faster.

So there you have it. Three marketing decisions you can make and act on without a lot of agonizing over whether or not it’s the right thing to do.

Technorati Tags: websites, seo, search engine, visibility, google, lead generation, traffic

You may have heard the term ‘Landing Page’ and wondered what that means.

A Landing Page is a sub-page – not the Home Page – which is designed to target or focus on a specific topic. Think of them as additional doors to the website.  Most people come in the front door, but some people come in a side door or enter through a patio door.  They all lead to the same building, but each door is different.  Of course that’s not an exact analogy, so let me use a better example:

If you look within the website of a car manufacturer, you will find that in addition to their home page they make use of several different landing pages.  The home page is a general directory with information about the company, but then there are sub-pages for each car, that they make.  While you can get to these pages using the home page you could also find them in a search for the car name.  And following that link you would wind up at the landing page, rather than the home page, with no need to click-through to find what you are looking for.

Landing pages can even be more specific than just for a particular car model.  They can be temporary pages designed for a special edition of the car or for a coupon for an oil change or a special sale campaign.

To increase visibility in online searches these landing pages are focused on a particular subject with its own content, keyword headings, keyword text, and keyword links.  Unlike a home page which normally contains general keywords, landing pages are designed to be used for niche topics or specific products.

Generally, it’s much easier to develop content with great keywords for specific products or services than it is for general topics, and there tends to be much less competition for those specific keywords. So landing pages are a valuable tactic for search engine optimization.

Landing pages can also be used for great effect with direct links from a pay-per-click or email campaign. In these cases, an online ad or mass e-mail directs the viewer to the landing page though links. Viewers skip over the home page and go directly to the landing page.

You may be getting this type of sales pitch in your inbox on a regular basis.  Borders Books uses temporary landing pages for its email campaign sent to everyone who has signed up for one of their customer loyalty cards.

Another benefit of using these targeted landing pages is that visitors who come to them tend to be more satisfied because they find the exact information that they are looking for.  These visitors tend to stay longer, and have a lower bounce rate with more click-though to other pages.

How is it possible to know these things?  Because landing pages can be tracked thanks to Google Analytics and other tools. With tracking software it is possible to create several landing pages and track and compare the results of each set.   With pay-per-click or e-mail campaigns where people are directed to come straight to the landing page instead of the home page, the statistics will show the true results of the marketing campaign and SEO stratagem.

Many companies shy away from landing pages because they do represent a fair amount of work to target niche customers or run a limited time email campaign.  One can not deny there is more time and energy involved in creating these extra pages but the reward in reaching these prospects is more than worth it. Think about it this way, if you have already captured a person’s attention and enticed them to act and go to a landing page, then you have a real potential customer not just a lookie-loo.

Whether you hire a professional or do the work yourself, make sure that your landing pages are focused with specific content and SEO key wording.  Don’t forget to setup proper tracking to insure that you can see if all the effort on the landing pages is paying off, or if you need to adjust your site for better results.

Technorati Tags: seo, landing page, keywords, search engines

When it comes to researching and selecting keywords you will often hear the term “Long Tail” and it can be confusing.  The name for “Long Tail” searches is credited to Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired Magazine.

The concept is fairly simple. When people search online they tend to type in not a single word but a series of words. In this grouping of words there is a main simple word, which is the head, and behind that are a few more words which are the tail of the search.

An example of this is:  Software (head) Management Inventory (the tail)

When trying to optimize a website, companies tend to focus all their energy on the head words.  But under the Long Tail theory, the tail words are actually the more useful and powerful words to focus on.

Tail words do not generate the large search volume that head words do, however the people searching with tail words tend to much more focused and easier to convert from a website visitor into a true customer. Long Tail keywords also allow for more unique products and services to be found because the searcher is not focusing on a single word but a series of words which can better describe niche items.

For example, Google says people search for the single word “software” an average of 550,000 times a month while “inventory management software” gets less than one-tenth of that. But which is the better search term?

Let’s look more closely at the above example. When I typed in the word “software” into Google, it found 1,340,000,000 pages (heavy competition) and the word is not specific enough to get a good quality of visitor.  Even if you could get ranked high for “software” it would likely generate a very high bounce rate. Since there is a virtually unlimited combination of things the searcher could actually be looking for (different kinds of software, buying software, developing software, comparing software, etc) the majority of searchers are not going to be looking for any one specific thing.

However, when I added “management inventory” Google comes back with only 9,510,000.  While this is still a lot of websites it is only a fraction of those for the single word “software” and we’ve narrowed the potential search target significantly. We can continue adding words (creating a longer tail) and improving the likelihood that the searcher is looking for us.

With the smaller search volumes for the Long Tails, the Pay-Per-Click advertising costs can be much lower because the competition is smaller. For the price of advertising on a major search word it is possible to have several different Long Tail PPC ads running at the same time.

Like all other Keywords decisions, Long Tail choices should not be picked out of thin air.  Research should always be done to make sure that there is good traffic on these Long Tails.

Are Long Tails the right decision for your website?  Perhaps. Every website is different based on what service or production they are providing. But Long Tails are definitely something that all websites owners should investigate when looking for the best way to reach potential customers on the internet.

Technorati Tags: keywords, long tail, search, volume, ppc, seo, search engine optimization

In my last article I talked about how to compile a list of possible keywords. Eventually you will have to narrow down your list and select the best keywords to focus on.

One of the most important – and often overlooked – aspects of a keyword is its search volume. That is: how many people search for that keyword in an average month?

Software programs such as WordTracker as well as Google’s Keyword Tool (available to all with Adwords accounts) will give you a good idea of the search history of the words you are considering.

Using these tools you’re likely to discover that some of your keywords only average one or two searches per month.   This clearly means that it is not worth the effort, the space or the text to optimize for these keywords because they are not being used by enough people.

But do not jump to the conclusion that you should automatically go after the keywords with the highest search volumes.  Keep in mind that a high search volume generally means high competition.  It might also mean that that the keywords have more than one meaning or they are used in multiple industries, and much of the search volume may not be from your prospects.

If your company is considering a pay-per-click campaign, going for keywords with higher search volumes could cost a lot of extra money, again because there is so much competition on these word searches. Additionally, since many of those searches will be made by people who are not looking for your product or service, your click-through rate will be lower. This can have a negative effect on your quality score (which is too much to address in this article).

I am not saying that you should turn your back on all keywords with a high search volume, but often a company’s time and energy is better spent looking at the keywords that generate a more targeted search result. These are searches that may only have a few hundred to a few thousand searches per month, but because of the competition it can mean a better chance of being found – and you have a better chance of being more relevant.  This means that these keywords will have a lower bounce rate and will convert web traffic into real customers.

On something of a side note, if you have someone else handling your search engine optimization, pay special attention to search volumes. Sometimes less-than-ethical SEO firms or people will use low-volume keywords just to generate a number one ranking. This impresses prospects and unsuspecting clients. It’s easy to get a high ranking on little used keywords. If the words “limburger cheese socks” appears on a webpage, I can guarantee that they will be number one for this phrase, but it’s meaningless because it won’t result in any traffic.

It’s easy to become obsessed with trying to be number one in searches on Google. It makes us all feel good. But if there is no traffic for the word that you are number one for, what is the point?

Do not let an obsession to be Number One cloud your judgment in picking the best keywords possible for your site.  It is far better to be ranked number ten on a high-traffic word than to be number one with “limburger cheese socks”.

Technorati Tags: search engine optimization, Google, ranking, quality score, search volume

On the subject of keywords, one of the first thoughts that many people have is that they should take their list of keywords and stuff the page with those words as many times as possible.

This is known as keyword ‘cramming’.

While it’s good to place as many keywords as useful on a page, it is very easy to go over board and do too much. In the past this was a viable strategy; however today there are several reasons that this is a bad idea.

First there is the artistic problem of converting those keywords into text that makes sense to the humans who come to the website.  Always remember your first priority is your human visitors, and it’s important to ensure they can read and enjoy what is on the website.  If there is gibberish on the page then those humans you are working so hard to attract are going to click the back button as fast as they can.

Still want to cram as many keywords as possible on to your page? A simplistic answer for this problem, for some people, is to repeat keywords at the bottom of the page.  People who do this often try to be clever and hide the words by making them the same color as the background.  Search engine companies learned about this trick several years ago, and have designed their searches to ignore this information and even to penalize sites that use this trick.

This is the second reason it doesn’t make sense to stuff keywords on a page. Search engine companies such as Google and Yahoo are constantly reworking their search programs in order to give better results to their users and thus preventing websites from cheating their way to the top of the results pages.  If the search engine sees too many of the same words and phrases over and over again it will rank a page lower in results than one without multiple repeats.  The old tricks that used to work just a few years ago are no longer effective; and worse, they make your website look unprofessional.

Many people assume that the search engines only look at words that are right next to each other.  I think that this is because in unseen code of the webpage Meta Tag Keywords you can use commas to group words and search engines do pay attention to those groupings.

However, in the visible text each time a word appears is counted towards the total count for that word.  For example, if your website uses the phrases Accounting Software, Management Software and Network Management software search engines count software three times, management twice and Network and Accounting.

It’s possible to accidentally use a keyword too often. If the same word keeps appearing over and over again search engines will start downgrading the position of the website in the search results.

The real solution is that one must carefully craft the text that goes on the website so that the keywords are there for the search engine but are easy to read for the humans who come to the site.  When editing the text always double check that each keyword does not repeat too many times.

Finding the best keywords and making the best use of them will give you better results than trying to trick or cheat your way to the top of the search results.  If your website shows old tricks the search engines may  not be your only problem. Your potential customers will wonder what tricks you might try on them.

Next week we will discuss how to settle on the best keywords.

Technorati Tags: keywords, stuffing, cramming, search engines, penalize

In last week’s article I went over the basic concepts behind keywords. Now, how does one go about picking good keywords?

No website should rely on a single keyword; there is normally a group of keywords which attract people to any website. Think about it being like the different ways to find a book in a library or on Amazon. There’s the title, the author’s name, the publisher, date of publication, the subject, etc…  If you rely on only one of these, only the people who use that keyword will find your site. However, if you give them the other options, more people will find your site.

Unlike listing a book, companies have to discover what keywords work for their website, since very few people look for websites based on what company hosts the HTML code (the publisher) or the date the site went ‘live’ (publication date).

The most obvious keywords are your company name and the names of your products and services. If the person sitting at the computer is going to try to find you and not just someone with your specialty, they will either type in the business name or the name of one of the products.

But what about the people who do not know about your company or your products yet?  Trying to figure out what words these people are typing in gets trickier, and this is where a little bit more knowledge and research comes in.

Approaching this challenge from several different angles can help.

You can start with website statistics. Google Analytics and other software track what words people have used to find your website in the past. The longer you’ve been capturing your website statistics, the more keywords you will find listed.

Beyond analytics you’ll also want to take the human approach: talk to people – customers, prospects, your sales and customer support teams. Ask them what words they think of when they think of your company or products. This method often captures words that insiders don’t normally associate with their company or products.

The third place to check is your competitors’ websites. It always a good to see what other people have on their websites and after checking out a few one can often see some of the same words repeated again and again. You can also check what keywords your competitors are using by looking at the web page source. You’ll find keywords in page titles, descriptions and the keyword list.

By using these three methods as starting points it is possible to build up a good list of words to start thinking about. Why think about these words?  Why not use them all? That has to do with the fact that not all of them might be useful to building up website success.

You’ll need to research your list more to determine which words are gold and which are fool’s gold. What I mean by “fool’s gold” is that some words are totally useless. They may be too popular and common. Or they may be words that few people actually search for.

Even if all your words are really gold, it’s possible to simply have too many words. A website of limited size can only be optimizer for a limited number of keywords.

You can discover your best keywords by using software like Word Tracker or even Google’s free Keyword Tool to see the history of the words on your list. These are just two of the easiest tools to help you weed out the less than optimum keywords

Next week: Why not just throw every keyword possible on your page?

Technorati Tags: keywords, seo, website, traffic

One night a week I teach video editing at a local community college. Recently a student found out about my day job in the SEO business and the first question they asked was:

What are the magic words I need to put on my website to make it ‘Number One on Google’?

I have been asked this question one way or another so many times I figured it couldn’t hurt to review the concept of Keywords again.

In the next few articles I will talk about keywords – finding them, using them, and the myths about them. I will also cover the myths about the idea of being ‘Number One on Google’ and how this concept gets abused.

I’m going to go over the very basics, so don’t be surprised if you already know some or all of these ideas.  I’ve taught a variety of classes over the years and I’ve learned that it’s never a bad idea to start from the very beginning – someone needs the information, even if most people already know it.

So let’s look at the most basic aspect of keywords.

“Keywords” are what a person types into a search engine in an attempt to find something. But here is where the website comes in. In order for the search engine to find you, those keywords must be on your website. It is the intersection of what is typed into the search engine and what is on the website – the intersection between the groups of words – that is important.  If you do not have the right group of words on your website then the search engine will not find you.

Very basic, I know. But, in my reviews of websites I see a lot of sites whose owners do not seem to understand how keywords work.  One great example is sites which have nothing but flash or other flashy graphics on the home page. This may look impressive but with no text on the page the search engines have no idea what’s there.

No idea what’s on the page = no listing in the search engine results pages (SERPs) = no possible traffic to your website. The only way such a site would be included in search results is if that search is for the website name.

Another way companies fail to connect with the search engines is by putting useless text onto their website. By “useless” I mean text which does not help them with search engines or with humans visitors.

The most memorable time I saw this problem was a website whose home page had only their mission statement on it.  To make it worse, it was one of those ‘Dilbert’ mission statements:  “We empower our employees to……”

Absent from this homepage was the name of the company, what they did or who was in charge — any of the information that most humans want from a company’s website.  And this company could not figure out why they were not getting any business from the website!

When looking at or reviewing a website the first question I ask is: do they have the right words on the webpage?  This is even before I start to question how to raise a website to ‘Number One on Google’.  I’ll talk about the question of rising in ranking a little later; right now we are talking about building a good foundation to the website.

It’s so basic yet so often ignored, let me say it again. Without the proper words on the site there is no hope to even show up on the radar of the search engines.

Now that we have reviewed the basic concept we can move on in the next article to talk about picking out the right keywords for your site.

Technorati Tags: website, seo, keywords, flash, search engines, humans

Websites generate a large number of statistics and it can often be confusing.  Today I want to focus on one important statistic called bounce rate.

The concept of this is fairly simple. It measures how many people come to a single page of a site and then hit the back button.  No matter how someone found your website, the bounce rate tells you how many people left your site after one quick look.

Clearly every website owner wants to have the lowest bounce rate possible, but just how low can cause many arguments among people. I personally like to see fewer than 40% on the bounce and anything lower than this is very good.  Because this means that people have found want they were looking for and are willing to look at other pages of the website.

But what if your website has a 50% or higher bounce rate?  In this case you should review carefully what people expect to find when they come to your site. For example, take a look at your listings on a search engine.  Does the description text that shows up on the search engine accurately describe your website or does it give false impressions of what the visitor is going to find? If it’s the latter, you’ll probably want to change your description. In most cases, it does no good to drive traffic to your site if it’s just going to bounce.

This is also the time to look at the contents of your homepage. Analytics applications such as Google Analytics allow you to see what is being clicked on — buttons, links and so on.  If only a few buttons are being clicked on and the other links have no clicks this clearly indicates that some changes need to be made.  The changes don’t have to be drastic.

Let’s say you have a button on the home page to download a document, but no one has clicked on the link.  A change of the document description could help attract people to take a look at it.  If you change the description and people still ignore the document, you’ll want to consider removing that button and using the space for something else.  This is especially true if the document is also available on another page of the website and it is being downloaded from that link.

In the next few months bounce rate might become even more important than it has been in the past.  Rumors have been going around the past few months that Google is going to do a major modification of their filters and make the bounce rate more important.  This will have an impact on a website’s organic ranking, with a high bounce rate dropping it from the top of searches.

From Google’s point of view this makes sense. They are trying to give people relevant results. If people keep bouncing off a website this means that people are not finding what they want when they type in their keyword search.  So these failed searches might pound a website down to the bottom of the ranking.

Even if Google does not make the rumored changes, it’s still worth it to drive down your bounce rate.

Next week I will talk about pageviews.

Technorati Tags: search engine optimization, analytics, seo

One of the great things about web marketing is the ability to measure and track what people are doing. This means you don’t have to guess at what’s working and not working.

I thought I would start the new year with a back-to-basics look at website statistics. These statistics are available from analytics applications – such as Google Analytics – as well as from your website itself.

Back in the early days of the World Wide Web, people were obsessed with how many ‘hits’ their website was getting.  I’m not going to go into the technical side of what a ‘hit’ was measuring and why it was not an accurate count of how many visitors the site had.  Suffice it to say that “hits” doesn’t tell you anything valuable from a marketing perspective.

It is much more accurate and useful to look at website “visitors” for both search engine optimization and website performance.

Most statistical software can now do some form of filtering to separate the number of computer spiders which ‘ping’ websites from the number of humans coming to the site, and the software usually calls humans “Visitors”.   The first thing to look at within the data is how the visitor numbers are broken down into “Total Visitors”, “New Visitors” and “Returning Visitors”.

“Total Visitors” is a much more accurate measurement than hits.  A word of caution though. For website owners who are used to looking at “hits”, the number of “visitors” can be frightening or depressing because it is a much smaller number. It also suffers from greater fluctuation in the daily numbers.  Weekends and holidays can cause massive drops in the number of visitors to many websites but they will return Monday through Friday.  I often have to calm business clients when they look at site statistics on weekends.

Beyond “Total Visitors” the numbers breakdown into two groups usually called “New Visitors” and “Returning Visitors”. People often jump on how many new visitors a site gets, but the returning visitor statistic is important too.

“New Visitors” are not necessarily people visiting your site for the first time.  Depending on the setup of the data collection from the website some people could be counted as ‘new’ if they only return once every few weeks.  They can also be counted as new if they delete the cookies your website or Google has placed on their computer.   Still, the number of “new visitors” can provide you with valuable information, especially if the company has started a new marketing campaign or made any changes to the website designed to increase the search engine placement.

While it is important to attract new visitors to your website, the returning visitors should also be appreciated. A high number of “Returning Visitors” means that people like your site and are coming back on a regular basis.  “Returning visitors” show customer loyalties and indicate there is something on the website worth coming back for again and again.

I also like returning visitors because I think that if people keep coming back to the website the odds are good that they are telling their co-workers and friends about the website.  For some companies and websites a “refer to a friend” button can be a very powerful feature, allowing people an easy way to tell others about your site.

Next week I will continue looking at statistics by looking at “bounce rate”.

Another in a series of articles on Search Engine Optimization and Web Marketing in Plain English from Eric Gerds.

As we come to the end of 2008 it is important to look back not just on friends and family but to also review your website.

The first question to ask yourself is when was the last time that you totally reviewed your website?  If the answer is “never” or longer than six months ago, I suggest your first New Year’s Resolution should to setup a schedule to review your site at least four times a year.

Under this review, make sure all information on the site is up-to-date, especially contact information! Nothing can give a bad impression to someone looking at a site faster than outdated information.  Worse still is to have outdated prices, product details, or buying information.

Old newsletters, articles and blog-like comments can be moved off the main pages.  If they are over a year old, dated 2007 or earlier, these are the things that should be archived.  If information in them is important and popular then consider repackaging them in a “best of” article to give it a fresh new look, or just rewriting the information to make sure you don’t have dated language or outdated technical jargon.  If there is enough information then consider bundling it all together and offering it on your site as a free download. This could be very attractive addition to your 2009 website and an easy way to get more use out of the same content.

Also under this review, check all links and buttons to insure that they work.  This includes all internal links and any external links.  Nothing is more frustrating to people than to try to click on something and then nothing happens.

Be sure to click on ALL buttons from each page. This includes the master buttons that are part of the headers at the top of each page.  Do not assume that because it worked on the home page that it would work on every page.  Technically speaking while it looks like the same button on each page, it’s not actually the same button, which is why they all need to be checked.

Going beyond the basic function of the website, you also need to find out whether or not your website is backed up.  If it is backed up do you have a copy?  Is the copy updated regularly? Do you have the passwords to reinstall the backup?   All computer system should be backed up on a regular basis and this includes your website.  This backup should be safely stored, in your control and away from your other computers systems.

You don’t think that backups are important?

I was just at a party where a webmaster friend of mine describe the problem of his new customer.  This company had been using the same web firm for years.  They went to contact the web firm to make some changes and discovered that the people had gone out of business without bothering to inform their clients and left my friend’s customer, and others, high and dry.

Because the web firm controlled everything, the customer had no passwords to the website, no information on the coding or databases of the site and could not even move it to a new web server.  The customer trusted the web firm and now need to pay a new company to rebuild their site from the ground up.  A full backup, even without the passwords, would have quickly solved many of these issues.

So as a final task for yourself this year take a good look at your website and give it a review.  The three starting points listed above should get you started.