Ideate Media SEO Web Marketing Blog (2)

Archive for August, 2010

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

SEO Strategy: A Few Examples of SEO & SEM Tools

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

As we’d mentioned about A/B testing, search engine optimizers can’t get by with guesswork or intuition. For the best web analysis and website performance enhancements, optimizers need guidance and feedback to find best-practice processes to improve the functionality of our websites (and businesses).

We’ve put together a short list of useful tools for SEO & SEM processes. This isn’t the end-all-be-all list, mind you, but to keep your website performance healthy, you should have tools similar to this.

Google AdPreview- First off, as a budget-conscious search engine optimization expert, you should have Google EVERYTHING. Why? Because unless the other search engines step up their game, Google runs the show. That being said, AdPreview is a great tool to preview what a PPC advertisement looks like before it “goes live.” It also has a nifty feature that allows you to change your geographic location to preview what the ad would look like locally or otherwise.

Another bit of Google you should have in your arsenal is Google Sets. It generates related keyword ideas based on a handful of keywords and key phrases you enter. Why WOULDN’T you get this optimizing tool? It’s FREE.

SEO Digger- This is a nice little tool that builds reverse indexes. What does that mean? It shows which search queries your business is ranking in the top 20 Google results. This has a bonus of showing you key phrases you might not have thought of or optimized for originally.

SEO Book/SEOMoz Plug-ins- Among other things, these plug-ins are boss for showing you metrics on how you are ranking for SERPs on Google. SEOMoz has a great blogging community ready and willing to help you in your search engine marketing, web design, and performance improvement projects!

You should also keep an eye out for a tool that checks for keyword misspellings, so your internal search is optimized. We don’t have a favorite just yet, but it’s worth an honorable mention.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

SEO Optimizing Strategy: Would You Like To Take a Survey?

Monday, August 16th, 2010

No matter how much face-time you enjoy with your customers, it’s hard to get their honest opinion unless you take some kind of informal and anonymous poll. Enter the survey.

Online surveys work great for any company with an e-commerce aspect to it; even the big box stores like Target and Walmart have web-only sales and specials. It’s an ideal way to get honest feedback on how your company and website performance. It also keeps your customers engaged, and takes a little bit of the guesswork out of website analysis for you.

For a successful and optimized survey to generate the best kind of feedback on website content, performance and improvement, there are a few basic rules to follow.

1)      Keep it Short- Even the most dedicated customer will not take a million questions without some really, really good incentive.

2)      Keep it Simple- Ideally there should be a yes/no/all of the above/none of the above and that’s it. You should also leave a section for comments.

3)      Reward Good Behavior- If you want your customers to keep giving you feedback, offer some kind of a discount upon successful completion of the survey.

Make the process painless on yourself and use an online quiz/survey generator like SurveyMonkey. Use surveys to get feedback on anything from web design changes you want to implement to having something interesting to promote on your social media newsfeeds. It’s a quick and easy way to get some interesting results, so, have at it!

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

SEO & E-mail Marketing, Part 2-What is it, and Why Do You Need A/B Testing?

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

If you were in a cave, what’s the first thing you would want? Hopefully, the answer is a flashlight. As a search engine optimizer, web marketer, or web solutions expert in general, you need to use the proper tools to ensure your website strategy is achieving the results you want: increased traffic, brand recognition and sales.

For e-mail campaigns, a/b testing is the flashlight to help you figure out, as a web marketing expert, what is working better for your company. It can also help you optimize your campaigns, subject lines and ultimately, gain new subscribers and loyal customers for your product and company.

A/b testing, as the title suggests, allows you to test variables in the types of emails you send; e.g. text e-mails vs. image emails. Does an all text e-mail work for your company, or a heavier image-only version? What about subject lines? Do long ones work, short ones? All CAPS?  Which gets you the most feedback in terms of click throughs? Also do “call to action” e-mails work for your sales and products, and what time of day (the time where your emails are most likely to be opened and read) works best for your target audience?

Having a finely-tuned set of variables and running a/b testing can help create the best optimizing conditions, not just for your email marketing campaigns, but how you run your affiliate marketing and search engine optimization processes.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

SEO Strategy: E-mail Marketing Campaigns Part 1- Sneaky Subject Lines Strategy

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

When starting an e-mail campaign, the one thing that can make or break the success of the e-mail is its subject line. Although there’s no guarantee your e-mail won’t be immediately trashed, a catchy, captivating title can prevent that fate.

A few ways to keep your subject lines sexy and appealing in that optimized way you have to think like the people who write subject lines for products on eBay and Amazon. For you grammarians and spelling snobs out there, e-mail subject lines are not prime examples of either. E-mail marketing web strategy is all about titles that are catchy and clever, compound sentences that use symbols like “+” instead of “and” and the shorter they are, the better.

From an SEO perspective, or even a web analytics perspective, writing a great e-mail title breaks the rule of good content for an eye-catching display. Your competition is an e-mail from grandma, and at least 7 or 8 “spam” e-mails promising enhanced body parts and free 30 day trials of snake oil. If your e-mails have the attention-grabbing words like “free,” “sale” or promises something like a “huge discount” without going into detail, it would encourage the e-mail recipient to click through the e-mail to see what it’s all about.

Finally, do not forget to do some good old-fashioned a/b testing to figure out what your e-mail subscribers are responding to positively and negatively. For the uninitiated, we’ll go into the process of a/b testing in our next post, so stay tuned!

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

SEO for E-Commerce, Part 4: Anything Else We’ve Forgotten

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

To round out our search engine optimized checklist for e-commerce websites, we’re just going to give honorable (and important) mention to the odds and ends of optimizing strategy you need to pay attention to while building and maintaining your web marketing platform. This post is, by and large, about making sure some on-page elements are being taken care of properly.

What Else You Should Optimize: The success of your website depends on it having clear, optimized content that can load quickly and display flawlessly. While developing your web strategy, keep the marketing concept of being unique and fresh in mind, always.

Along with having solid keyword research and optimized key phrases, you should also optimize your images and internal site search. This helps your visually-impaired customers navigate your website easily, and, on the off chance your images load incorrectly in a browser, you will at least have SOMETHING there instead of a sad-looking broken link.

If you’re selling any brand name items, then you should capitalize on that brand name and set up optimized landing pages for those products and categories. That way, when someone searches for “Nike shoes” (or whatever) your website has a shot of showing up in the higher search rankings.

Finally, before we sign off on e-commerce web marketing for a while, remember to use title attributes in your links and track your page’s results, (<a href=”yourpage.html” title=”optimized keywords here”>) so you can see what is working for you, make the necessary tweaks, and finally, pat yourself on the back for a job well done!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Have a Question? Contact Us Now

Connecting Buyers With Sellers On The Internet