Wednesday 30 January 2008

Google Adwords goes demographic!

Google has announced that it will be carrying out a Beta test on demographic targeting for Adwords. This will allow advertisers to target people by basic demographics such as age and sex. The test is only taking place on the content network to begin with. I am guessing Google will use sites that make people login and provide demographic information to begin with, Facebook would be an obvious starting point.

Could this test lead to demographic targeting in search results?

Although some doubt it, I firmly believe that demographic targeting will soon be available for search network ads. Google could collect demographic data through services such as G-mail and as the user stays logged in when searching. The search results and the Adwords adverts down the left hand side would then be affected by the data gathered on that person’s login. The I Google service is a further indication of Google eventual intention to do this.

Although this kind of targeting is great from a commercial point of view on a personal level it is quite scary. Although in theory the search results will be better suited to you. Does anyone really like the idea of a company being able to gather that kind of information on you?

Tuesday 29 January 2008

6 Tips For Improving Conversion Rates On Your Web Sites Forms

We have all seen Analytics reports where 30 people reach the contact form and no one completes it. It must be fairly safe to assume that the people who clicked through to the form were interested, so why do so few fill out the form? This post will give you some of the ways I have discovered to improve web form conversion rates.

1) Remind people why they were going to fill out the form in the first place.
Ever walked into a room and forgotten why you went in there? People surfing the net do it all the time on web pages, prospects have a very short memory once they reach the contact form: they have often partially forgotten the great sales pitch which took them there in the first place. So you need to remind them on the contact us page. For example, if you offer a money back guarantee or if this price is for today only and they need to complete the form today to get the price, tell them next to the contact form. Don’t let them forget why they went to the page in the first place.
2) Don’t ask for too much information
If you are one of the kind hearted souls that answers market research phone calls and participates in the surveys to enter a prize draw, try and think about how you feel when the survey that was supposed to take two minutes begins to run on. Imagine this feeling and times it by ten. This is how people feel with web forms. Most calls to action refer to forms as being “simple” or “quick” so when the prospect sees twenty fields to complete, it not only affects how much they trust you, but also leaves them feeling angry and frustrated. Even if they start the form like the market research survey, they will probably get frustrated and give up half way through. Try to remember, if the form is for lead generation ask the prospect for the minimal information you need to move to the next stage of the sale. Sales men are more than capable of finding out the other information from a prospect: don’t try and replace them with a web form.
3) Make sure the person has the options they need
If you use a drop down menu on a form to save the prospect time, great, but you need to make sure this form has all the possible answers on it or at least a section for “other” if the list would be huge. For example many companies have a section for status, which in my opinion is a fairly pointless question from a sales point of view in most cases. Anyway, often the status options are married or single, now how many people are neither married nor single? There is a whole chunk of the population with boyfriends and girlfriends. These people will be annoyed by the fact there is no option for them. It makes it look like your company is not set up to cater for them.
4) Don’t distract the prospect
Once you’ve got someone to the contact form don’t distract him or her. Why would you put unrelated special offers and adverts on the contact form? It just encourages your prospect to visit these instead of completing the form.
5) Reassure the prospect
People’s personal information matters to them. Make a commitment not to share it with others or Spam them. Try and take the fear factor out of the prospect giving you their details.
6) The double bump factor: don’t make it difficult
In retail shopping there exists a phenomenon know as “the double bump factor” (this is reported in Why We Buy – The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill.) The basics of this is that if someone is looking for something and they get bumped or forced to move twice they become frustrated and abandon what they were trying to look for. The same thing occurs on web forms if the prospect’s form is rejected twice they will in the majority of instances give up. So check your logs to see how many form errors you are getting. Many people could be giving up just because your form is hard work.

I hope you have found this post useful. This post was inspired by an article at http://www.grokdotcom.com blog these guys really know their conversion science stuff so I recommend you take a look.

Saturday 26 January 2008

How to Choose The Best Paid Links

The first thing I should point out in this post, is that buying links for SEO purposes is against Google’s web master guidelines and so if you do decide to buy links for this purpose there is a risk involved. Google is not against buying links to generate traffic but recommends that paid links should have a “nofollow” tag on them to prevent search engines following the link and Page Rank being transferred. If you would like to look at whether buying links works or not, please read the post entitled “Buying links for SEO does it work?”
Right now to the business of how to chose a good link to buy.

Factors that determine what makes a good paid link:

1) The ranking of the site –not just in Google
When buying a link you need to assess the overall reputation of the site. Previously, Page Rank was a fairly good way of determining this. It is however my belief that Google places less importance on Page Rank now than it did previously, and that the visible Page Rank you see on your screen can often be a long way off the Page Rank Google actually has for the website. I would still take into account Page Rank but consider it as one of several factors. I would also look at the sites back links in Yahoo, check the sites Alexa ranking and see if the site is in the Yahoo and Open Source directories. If you use Firefox and buying links is going to be a regular occurrence, you should consider installing SEO for Firefox, which will help you see these statistics far quicker. Please be warned though, that this tool does slow Firefox down. For thorough instructions on how to assess the SEO welfare of a site visit the post entitled “How to check a web sites offsite SEO health”.

2) The relevance of the site
The relevance of the web site you are linking from makes a big difference as to whether or not you should buy a link from that site. The days when a link from a completely irrelevant site with a high Page Rank would shoot you up the rankings on your key words appear to be long gone. Look for sites that have a similar theme or topic to yours and that share some keywords. Try to remember that page links should bring your site traffic as well as just extra search engine juice. Traffic from paid links is no longer a bonus; it is a must as explained in point number 5.

3) The quality of the web site
Links from good quality web sites will be far more useful to you than poor quality ones. You should check to see that the web site has plenty of text on it that is original to that web site, that the text is of a good standard and that the site is regularly updated. You can check for duplicate content using this tool http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php.

4) The positioning of the link on the page
A links position on the page will affect the usefulness of that link to your web site not only in terms of traffic but also in terms of the search engines. The ideal position for your link is the middle of the page amongst the main content and surrounded by different content on each page that the link appears on. It is rarely practical to be able to buy links like this (which is why they are so valued). Other good positions for links are at the top of the page and on the side above the fold. It has often been suggested that the perceived position of a link, from a search engine’s point of view, can be manipulated using CSS. I personally believe that Google has now developed ways of reading CSS styles to an extent, but I can’t prove this. The fact of the matter is you would be hard pressed to find a Webmaster who will sell you a link on a decent web site and alter his style sheet for you, so the Google reading CSS debate becomes rather a mute point. If however you’re interested in the Google CSS debate check out http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002788.html.

5) Will the link be useful to people
I guess you may be thinking “Does this really matter if I only want the site for SEO?” The answer to this is yes it matters and it matters a lot, link popularity now seems to be having a bigger than ever effect on Google search rankings so having a link that is actually useful to people will not only bring you relevant traffic but will also boost your search engine rankings.

6) Can a search engine follow the link?
Obvious I know, but you would be amazed how many people overlook this when they buy links. You can guard against this by making it clear from the start when you buy the link that it must be crawlable by a search engine spider. Common problems include “nofollow” tags on links and links going to your site via a redirect page.

Hopefully you have found this article useful. If you would like to read more about buying links, check out “Buying links, what if?”
And “Buying links for SEO does it work?” . As always comments and questions are very welcome.

Tuesday 22 January 2008

Testing Your Adwords Copy

I spotted a really good article on testing you Adwords Ads and improving landing pages you can see it at http://successfulsoftware.net/2008/01/21/google-adwords-improving-your-ads/.

Monday 21 January 2008

How to check a web sites offsite SEO health

There are many reasons why you would want to check the offsite SEO health of a web site; you may be sizing up the competition, considering buying a link or you may just want to see how your site is doing. One quick way to check the factors that affect sites offsite SEO health is to download and run SEO for Firefox. This tool, although very useful does slow Firefox down. So if you want to check a sites offsite SEO health manually here is how you do it.

1) Check the two major directories
A place in the two major web site directories will have an effect on a sites SEO health, so, to check for a sites presence in the Yahoo directory visit http://dir.yahoo.com/ and type the web sites address into the search box. To check for the web sites presence in the Open Directory Project do the same thing but instead of going to Yahoo visit http://www.dmoz.org/ and type the websites name in the search box.

2) Check the websites back links
The number and quality of back links will have an effect on the sites SEO health. The best way to check the back links is to go to www.yahoo.com and type into the search box without the link: followed by the name of your site for example link:www.bbc.co.uk . This will bring up a list of all the back links that Yahoo has for this site.

3) Check the Alexa Ranking for the site
Alexa ranking is an estimate of how much traffic the website receives. To check the Alexa rank of a site go to http://www.alexa.com and type the website address into the bar at the top, this will display the sites Alexa ranking.

4) Check the websites Page Rank
You can do this by downloading and installing the Google toolbar and enabling page rank. To do this, simply go to Google, type in Google tool bar, follow the link and install the toolbar making sure you select the option to enable Page Rank. Once you have installed the tool bar, simply visit the site and the Page Rank will be displayed in the bar at the top. If you don’t want to install Google tool bar (perhaps because of the privacy implications) - oh yes they know what you are looking at. Then you can go to http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_checker and type your URL in.

This post has covered the basic ways to check a sites offsite SEO health. There are, of course, other factors but these four should give you the indication of a sites offsite SEO health that you need. Any comments questions or suggestions are always welcome.

Saturday 19 January 2008

Response to an interesting article on how to make your web site more personal

Original article posted on Reality Business Coach

Great post, I think the idea of putting video and sound or you site is a great one when it’s done well. At my work we are considering experimenting with using virtual presenters on web sites. I have to say I am a little bit skeptical about what this will do to the bounce rate but I will give it a go. I would be interested to hear what you think the site with these presenters on is http://www.videotile.co.uk/.

Wednesday 16 January 2008

Buying links for SEO does it work?

The short answer to this question is yes. The long answer is yes if you buy the right links and Google really doesn’t like it.
Firstly I have to say in my opinion, and it is just my opinion you should only ever buy links that will bring traffic to your site, don’t just buy them for SEO.
Why you ask? This is because if you buy a link that will bring you in traffic whatever and it ends up making no odds to the search engines at least you haven’t wasted your money. Also if you buy a link that will bring you traffic you can pretty much be sure the link is more relevant to your web site and more likely to be of use to people on the website selling the link than one that would never bring you traffic.

What do the search engines think about buying links?

Well Google hate it with a passion; cynical people might say that this is because they want every one to have Adsene on their sites rather than selling adverts themselves. This means Google can take a cut of all the money. The less cynical would say Google hates buying and selling links because it leads to inaccurate search results. Personally I think it is probably a little of both, Google’s guidelines on paid links are that web masters selling these links should add a no follow tag to links which prevents a search engine from following the link. This means that any paid links will not affect the search results. My opinion on Google’s stance is that it is good for them, they can recommend no follow tags on paid links to help their search results and if people want to follow the guidelines its up to them. In my opinion Google does not own the Internet and you can do whatever the hell you like with buying and selling links. It’s their job to provide accurate search results and its up to them if you want to help them. I would also argue that if you buy relevant links then it would help them create good search results. I should also point out that Google is always trying to find ways to detect paid links so it can exclude them including providing a facility for people to tell on site providing paid links. Google also recently reduced the visible page rank on a number of high profile sites known to be selling links.

MSN on the other hand does not take anything like such a strong stance on paid links describes paid links as a bit of a grey area.

What does Yahoo say? Well I am not really sure but being as how Yahoo charges a considerable amount for links from its directory I think it would be fairly safe to say that wont clamp down too hard on paid links.

I want to buy links how do I do it?

So in spite of the fact Google hates them you have decided to buy some links. I guess now you want to know the best way to do, well ok but be warned Google really hates paid links. Right now there are several ways you can buy paid links, these are:

1) Pay for directory listings. You can pay for listings in web directories that give you links, you should chose these wisely though check that the links don’t have a no follow tag on them and that the page where the link appears has page rank attached to it. The most obvious and probably best-paid directory is the Yahoo directory.
2) Buy links from text link brokers such as text link ads. These sites are fairly easy to find in the search engines, just type in buy text link ads. Sites like this allow you to search for relevant sites and pay to place links on them. I am always a little wary of buying links from sites like this as you cant see the full site where your link will appear so its hard to tell if the site as relevant or of sufficient quality. Most text links brokers give you the Alexa rank and Page rank of the site where your link will be placed. Just remember that if you found the text link brokers through Google then Google knows about them and Google really hates paid links so this could be a risky way of buying links
3) The third and in my opinion best way to buy links is to buy them from the individual web masters personally. Find web sites that are relevant to yours and approach the web masters to buy links. This way you have far less chance of search engines finding out and can be more selective of what sites you buy links off.

I hope this post has been useful to those of you that are looking to boost your search engine position through buying links. As always all comments and questions are welcomed and appreciated. It is my intention to follow this post up with a post on how to chose the best-paid links so if you’re interested watch this space.

Monday 14 January 2008

Google Adwords – How to waste your money on PPC Advertising

Google Adwords is, in my opinion, one of the best ways to market your business online. Quicker than SEO, it allows you to use a truly commercial message in the search results on Google and it also lets you react quickly to changes such as stock levels and competitor pricing changes and offers. That is not to say Google Adwords shouldn’t be used in conjunction with SEO and other online marketing, just that it is very good. So how do so many companies manage to waste so much money on something that is such an effective way of marketing on the web?

The Three ways most companies waste money on Google Adwords:

1) Using Overly General Keywords. An example of this from the truly exciting photocopier industry is this keyword: Sharp ARM125 set on broad matching. Many marketing executives in my experience would say “We sell Sharp Arm125 photocopiers, so this is exactly the keyword we want to be seen on.” But stop and think about the searches that could bring up this company’s advert. Examples of these would be “toner for a sharp arm125” “how to make copies on an ARM125” and you can see that none of these searches are from people wanting to buy a Sharp ARM125. So you’re probably thinking these people will see the advert and say “Well, I was after toner so I won’t click on the advert.” This will of course cost you nothing right? Wrong. Every time this advert is shown and not clicked on, your CTR (click through rate) goes down and your ads start to cost you more but it doesn’t stop there, which brings me neatly on to point number two.
2) Writing adverts to encourage everyone to click. Getting as many people to click on your advert as possible is not the objective. Getting the right people to click on your advert is. Many companies I have come across have understood that a lower click through rate can increase the cost of your clicks so they have done everything they can to get people to click. No bad thing you might say, well yes and no. By writing an advert that gets everyone to click through you will no doubt have an excellent click through rate but, and it is a big but, you will waste money by having people who will never buy your product clicking on your ad. When writing the advert try and strike a balance between encouraging the right people to click and others not to. It’s not an easy thing to do that’s for sure but you should always try.
3) Bad landing pages. I have saved the worst until last. In my opinion bad landing pages waste more Google Adwords money than anything else. The reasons for this are: firstly bad landing pages reduce your ads quality score making it more expensive to achieve the same position in the Google search results. Secondly bad landing pages stop visitors staying on your site and doing whatever the thing was you wanted them to do.
Basically if you get everything right and the pages your prospect lands on are irrelevant, unpersuasive or poorly designed you have wasted your money, as most prospects will simply go back to the search results.

So in summary use specific key words and make use of the different matching types in Adwords, try and write ads that will attract only realistic prospects and spend time making good landing pages. Thanks for reading this, all comments and questions are appreciated.

Monday 7 January 2008

Choosing a name for your Web Site

For many companies choosing a name for the site will be obvious it will just be the companies name and .com .net .biz or whatever afterwards. I would recommend .com if you can get it as some web browser default to this and it seems to do better in search engines. There are however some other factors you need to take into account when choosing the name firstly search engine optimization or SEO, the name of the your site will have an effect on search engines and you should consider this when you chose your domain name. For example your business might be called Bloggs Sports but the search term you want to be found under might be “buy trainers online” in which case instead of going for the obvious choice of Bloggs-Sports.com you may wish to go for buy-trainers-online.com . The reason for the hyphen is that search engines will read the hyphen as a space and so will see “buy trainers online.com” and not “buytrainersonline.com”.

A further important factor to consider when choosing the name for your Internet site is competition you do not want to spend time and money on offline marketing only to drive people to a competitor web site or a site which just is not relevant. Make sure your name is not similar to others or trademarked by someone else. If you feel you will be investing significant money into marketing your site it may be worth buying similar domain names to prevent other people getting them you could also consider registering a trademark on that name.

When you chose your domain name try to also think about how easy it will be to connect your off line marketing to it. If the web site address is hard to remember it can make your offline marketing less effective.

How to find out if the web site name you want is available

All you need to do it visit http://www.uk2.net/ and enter the name you want this site is one of many which will tell you if the domain is available and how much it will cost you to buy it. Prices can vary on different sites so if you want to save money you can shop around.

What if the domain I want is taken?

Well you have to option you can either pick another one or try and buy it. Generally I would say pick another there are plenty of good names out there but if you really must buy the other one you can perform a who is look up to find the owner of the domain and approach them. You can perform a who is lookup at http://www.who.is/.

Sunday 6 January 2008

Choosing a Domain Name

Response to a very good post on choosing domain names at http://pinoytech.org/2007/12/09/how-to-choose-a-domain-name/

Great post, I think you have pretty much summed up what you need to think about when it comes to buying domains. The only think I would like to add is that if you go for a key word rich domain name you should separate the individual words with hyphens as the search engines will read this as a space. I think your right that more than two hyphens is a bit excessive for people typing it in. I suppose it depends on how you’re going to promote the domain afterwards if all your marketing is online through links, PPC and SEO it probably doesn’t matter that much.

Saturday 5 January 2008

Internet Marketing for Brand Building

Internet Marketing for Brand Building

In response to article posted on http://www.realtybizcoach.com/2008/01/04/internet-marketing-the-big-picture/

I think this is an excellent way of explaining Internet marketing but I do however feel that there is one are which has been missed off and that is Internet marketing for the purposes of brand building. The Internet is an excellent direct marketing medium but it can also work well in terms of building up brand awareness. Everyone slates banner adds for having poor click through rate but at the end of the day that’s not what they are about. By placing a banner add on a web site that is well respected you can increase the awareness and creditability of your brand. Internet marketing in my opinion should be considered a mix between direct response and brand building as with off line marketing. I do however acknowledge that online brand building through banner ads is not cost effective for smaller companies.