Marketing Fluke #1: Nobody likes a bragger

In the internet marketing world, we use the dating analogy to help new marketers understand that importance of avoiding bragging in their website copy.

Picture this: You are sitting at the dinner table with your date, and all she does is talk about herself. Every conversation you try to bring up turns into it being about her and what she thinks about it. After a while, you will feel un-important and hope one of your boys calls your cell to get you out of this rut. Flat tire anyone?

Bottom line, nobody likes a bragger. Nobody likes someone that goes on and on about how much they rock, what kind of turbo their car has, and how green their grass is.

These same rules apply when it comes to writing website copy. Your website should not be an giant “about me” page. Sure, you should have a company profile with your qualifications, but telling the visitor on a constant basis why they should pick you is a bit over done.

Rule #1: Your content should point out your visitor’s problems
Rule #2: Your content should provide your visitors with a solution to that problem
Rule #3: Your content should highlight how you can help solve this problem.

Your visitor > Your visitor > Your solution for your visitor.

If your visitor feels you care about them, they are more than likely to contact you. So give a little love and help a brotha out. You will benefit from it.

Down the rabbit hole and into my pocket

Website optimization is one thing, but landing page optimization takes on a whole different level of skill. To put it bluntly, getting rankings and traffic to your website is cheesy easy. Getting people to stick around and convert into sales/leads is something else. Rankings/Traffic = Science. Leads/Sales = Psychology. Always has and always will be my favorite thing about my job is understanding the users and what they want.

Attending PubCon this year has taught me that many SEO experts still shy away from this discovery and instead wrap their focus around traffic numbers. I, on the other hand, am amazed at the users who enter the site and what they came for. Conversions are the frosting on the cake. Who wants cake without frosting anyways? This is where the money lyes.

There were a few tips given by Rand Fishkin. The gist of it goes like this:

• There is no formula on how to make a great lead generating page.
• There is no one solution.  Every audience converts in different ways.
• You can try split pages, long long long pages, short pages.
• But all in all, having testimonials on your landing page helps.

Testing your landing page optimization is vital. By taking your best preforming landing page, and teaming it with your best preforming conversion page, you have a chance to not only increase sales, but create a relationship between your company and the web user.

And finally some wise last words, never take on the ‘this is good enough’ mentality: There is always room for improvement.

Dear Google: pagead2.googlesyndication.com

Dear Google,

First of all, I would like to start off with letting you know that I love your search engine. I know it, I use it, and it’s a handy little tool when I need to find things on the internet. However, I don’t feel its okay for your ad sense advertisements to freeze my browser when visiting websites.

I started experiencing my browser freezing on me last night on my home laptop computer. I was visiting a website that was attempting to transfer through pagead2.googlesyndication.com. It happened again today at work causing another frozen browser from a different website trying to display pagead2.googlesyndication.com. Now I understand you make money off these advertisements, but when they lag and freeze browsers, you are both causing havoc for the company displaying the ad’s, as well as losing them valuable visitors.

Now, I know you are probably not trying to cause these problems, but before any updates that you may be doing to pagead2.googlesyndication.com, you may want to make sure that it doesn’t freeze browsers.

Sincerely,

JellyMeli

SEO takes one for the team

How much of a pain in the ass is it when a new online social network comes on board? Yes, as SEO experts we must get on board and take one for the team, sign up, and figure out what it’s all about. Does it have a benefit for me? Does it have a benefit for clients? How much of my time am I going to have to dedicate to this new social network? Is it going to take off? A million questions wonder through you head and the angel on your shoulder shouts “Yes! More opportunity to be known and seen online!” while your devil stammers “No! Not another one. When will the madness stop?”

Aside from social media networks being one of the top ways we can achieve an online presence, we must stay on top and keep up with every network out there. Not only for ourselves, but now for our clients as well. Online marketing is no longer just link buys and a bit of content massaging. Oh no, its much more than the headers, metas, and anchor text. Now we must digg, sphinn, twitter, and even be marketing gooruze if we want to make it in the SEO world. The more the merrier.  We must suck it up, get linkedin, hold on tight to our ankles, and take one for the team.

Companies now offer online branding packages that not only get you top rankings, but also an online presence . SEO package pricing ranges from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands per month with custom built plans that offer solutions for all types of industry sizes.

Online Branding – Your avatar your logo?

As SEO guru’s, our avatar photo becomes both our namesake and logo so to speak. Just skimming down the pages of Digg, Sphinn, and other various social networks, we can reconize users that we’ve seen in the community previously.

It’s not specifically their face we are recognizing, but rather a snap shot of the time the picture was taken. Let me explain a little further:

A logo has a specific design and elements to it that allow us to easily reconize it’s brand. Logo’s are rarely changed.

A avatar (or user picture) does the same thing, but if the image is changed, could cause confusion to the viewer. How one’s avatar looks in one photo from the other, could cause your credibility to drop and your branding to be weakened.

There are a lot of top dogs that can get away with changing their photo often (such as Matt Cutts), but the newer little guy can be diminished.

You guys may think I’m pulling the BS card on you, but there are many social networks that avoid using user names next to friends; such at Twitter. A name to a face does not always apply.

So all I’m saying is, for both clients and yourself, try to use a avatar that will not be soon outdated nor will need constant updating.

This is something I should have learned a long time ago.

I got 25% off my Pubcon Ticket! Now what succa?

I’m so ecstatic right now. I was having a hard time trying to wrap my mind around paying $700 for a ticket to go to Pubcon Vegas this year. So I got smart, did a search, and found a nice gentleman with a 25% off promo code. I was a bit skeptical, but it worked! And I only had to pay $550 for my ticket. It’s already PAID for. Those 5 days are going to be awesome. Aww my first convention!

So much I want to do and see. I still have to look over the list and compromise with James about where we are going and what we are going to see. I seriously want to sit in on a few Social Marketing and content creation speakers. I also think a link baiting one would be a fun one. I am more into the psychology behind search than the science behind it. And I seriously think that sets me aside from a lot of SEOers out there

Hope I get all that I can from this experience. I want to meet as many of you folks as I can and just dive right into the whole thing. Ah exciting!

LoL Worthy Reciprocal Linking Request Emails

This was probably one of the funniest reciprocal link request emails I have seen in my time. Now I’ve seen ones pretty close on the LoL factor, but this one made my Friday evening a pleasant one:

Fellow Plumber and Business Owner

My name is Al Vanden Heuvel, Colorado Master Plumber, and I run the web
site WaterChoices:

I’m not sure if you know about reciprocal linking. That’s an internet term
describing how Google and all other search engines see that like minded
websites are connected to each other through a hidden code. A code that
only the search engines can see.

It is my intention to link to about 2000 plumbing websites to my site and
I recently found your site (website URL) and am very
interested in exchanging links with you.

There is no cost for this and reciprocal linking will benefit both of us
by raising our search rankings and generating more traffic to both of our
sites. I have already added your site to my website and you can view it
here:

http://www.waterchoices.com/linkmachine/resources/resources.html

In return, please have your webmaster add my link to your site as
follows:

Title: WaterChoices
URL: https://www.waterchoices.com/
Description: Water treatment products and plumbing referral system.

If you cannot find your link on my site or you need to change the
information you can do it manually at
http://www.waterchoices.com/linkmachine/resources/exchange_links.html -

Looking forward to a positive reply,

Al Vanden Heuvel, Colorado Master Plumber

PS. This link exchange is beneficial for both of us and you might want to
take a look my website to see the other benefits it has for you!

Does Google want 100% accuracy?

I had this discussion with a peer way back a few years ago at one of my old jobs. Does Google want 100% accuracy in the ad’s that they are displaying?

My answer, as well as his, was No. I wish he had a different answer so I had something to debate, but we both agreed on the fact that Google does not want to have 100% accurate results.
Why? Because Google wants to profit. By leaving a margin of in-accuracy in both organic and sponsored results, we must go back to Google for a second try. A second trip = more possibilities that we will click on an ad.

As users become more wise about Sponsored ad’s, they begin to stop clicking on them. Plus users know that sponsored ad’s are normally in-accurate to their search (especially if the search is specific). Now Google is trying to figure out ways to stick ad’s in there without the user knowing so much. They are also trying to give higher precedence to ad’s that are trustworthy and already rank well for the terms. Double exposure for the client, plus more of a chance the visitor will see a recognizable company and click on it. It also means the visitor will see more than 1 large company, and will possibly click back for a second opinion on the same subject.

Oh Google… you are growing too wise for your own good.

The future of SEO

I look into my little crystal ball, and I can predict all that SEO will have to offer in the future.

1. Search results per demographic area
2. Search results per user preferences
3. Search results per age range

Now more than ever, Google is looking at who their user is to best serve quality results. We have seen major fluctuations in what is appearing on page 1 of Google, but it’s all happening so they can understand who we are. Let’s face it, we feed Google all the juice it needs to better who they are, thus giving us better results.

Who are you as a person plays a roll in what type of results you are looking for, especially when it comes to broad terms. We will scale back to simple searches, opposed to long tail keywords, and will be granted with what we want.

A user will then be able to search for “art” and then be granted with their preferences. Of course it takes time for a search engine to understand you as a person, in the long term its going to be beneficial for both the user and online businesses.

This will then boil down to the website as it is seen by the search engines. SEO professionals will need to focus more on user behavior than getting ‘high traffic’ keywords to rank. By understanding user psychology, we will be able to niche our websites to be strong lead generators.

Time after time, I have asked clients to explain to me their niche. Your niche is your driving force and it’s what sets you out from the rest. Once search engines understand their users, and you understand your users, you will be driven quality traffic from your target audience.

Us SEO folks should already be taking a deep look at who the target audience is, but many of us get caught up in traffic and rankings. If you agree with me and my outlook on the future of SEO, it is time to get into the game with a little more passion and search to discover the ties between your clients and theirs.

Baby Boomers Dead = MSN Search Dead

We all know that MSN is not only a search engine, but an internet provider as well. In fact MSN has over 9 million subscribers. Regardless of this statistic, nearly all of us can agree that MSN stinks when it comes to their search engine.

Since Alexa ranks MSN as being #2 in their traffic rank statistics, it made me wonder a bit why this was.

MSN relates to business men/woman, along with retirees across the US. Since MSN has nearly 9 million subscribers, those with MSN as a pre-set search engine in their browser are more than likely to use the tool not knowing another alternative.

Studies have also shown that users who find search results from MSN for high priced items turn into leads better than from any other search engine. But is that because the users of MSN are the blue hairs or retirees?

When baby boomers start kicking the can, I predict that the MSN search engine user base is going to depreciate. This generations internet users are much more wise than those that started when MSN first hit the shelves. If Bill Gates doesn’t start moving in on this project fast and making it something huge, I have a feeling it will fall flat on it’s face within the next few years.