Category Archives: Internet Marketing

Everything you need to know about SEO but were afraid to ask

One of my favourite sites, Search Engine Journal has put together a brilliant list of the blogs and sites you should pay attention to if you want to really understand SEO.

One of the weirder ones is Bill Slawski’s SEO By The Sea, where he covers what the search engines try to protect by way of patents. If you are in any way techy, grab yourself a large latte and get stuck in.

There is also Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, something that every respectful SEOer should be reading and taking notice of, as well as the die-hards like SEO Moz and Search Engine Land.

There’s also mention of a few forums worth checking out such as Webmaster World.

And just to show there’s no bias, SEO Black Hat is also included.

Anyway, sign up to the newsletters and keep abreast of the changes going on every day in SEO Land.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/free-seo-resources/15336/

Marketing Online Today

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Whatever business you are in, you cannot ignore marketing online, especially today.

But here’s the crazy thing, local businesses are ignoring it. In fact, 76% of local businesses in the UK are ignoring it.

Yes many have a website, and a tiny few have a Facebook page, but few take it seriously. I know this because most of my time is spent talking with small business owners.

On the other side of the fence we have an almost unlimited supply of SEO and online marketing experts. They sell an ever growing number of online marketing methods including On Page SEO, PPC, Backlinking, List Building, Auto-responders, Mobile Sites, SMS, Article Marketing, Reputation Management, Newsletters, Press releases, Joint Ventures, Affiliate scheme, RSS, Social, Blogs, Video etc.

So we have local businesses who either don’t care, don’t understand or are completely bewildered by all the technology, and hence very reticent to do anything about it.

Not least because for every legitimate webmaster there are a bunch of cowboys plus many others who are well meaning but not good enough to cope in today’s changing landscape.

Now, add on to this a fast changing search engine environment and you really have a recipe for disaster.

But it’s all a lot simpler than that. It starts as always with a great product or service.

Then you identify your market (in theory it should be the other way round [look for the problem, create the solution], but in practice it rarely is).

Finally you find out where your market hangs out and market to them.

Google have just released a new patent (August 2012) that will hurt SEO specialists a lot. In short it says if you try to manipulate the search engine ranking positions, they will find out and your site will be punished.

They are looking for signals.

If a page on your site drops a few places and you take action to try to recover (eg. editing the page or adding backlinks) a yellow flag is raised (especially if the activity is different from what has happened previously to that page – the search engines know everything!).

If that page drops even further despite your interventions, and so you start removing the backlinks, then the yellow flag turns to red and your page may get a manual check or it just may drop off the charts completely.

And all the above could happen over a delayed and unknown time period.

The bottom line is that from now onwards, the more you attempt to game the system the more likely you are to be caught out.

So the only choice is to create great content, let others know about it and pray you get some backlinks and mentions along the way.

No one knows where all this is going, but one thing is for sure, if you have been relying on search engines in the past for traffic and leads, you had better be very very careful in future about your SEO.

I am going to have another dabble in PPC and media buys. I will report back when I have some solid results for you. One thing is for sure. Bigger businesses spend a considerable amount of their advertising money online. It is now time for small businesses to do the same.

What is Trust and How To Get It for Business Success

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What is trust is a massive question for marketers or anyone researching some product or service they need or want, so what is the first point of trust you look for?

These are a few trust indicators I can think of:

Social Media (Facebook likes/shares, Google+, Digg etc.)
User Comments/Feedback (on blogs and shopping sites)
Online/offline reviews (online product reviews, magazine reviews etc.)
Brand Recognition (well known brand)
Abundance (i.e. the product seems to be everywhere)
Celebrity Recommendation (‘endorsed by’ etc.)
Personal Recommendation (from friends or family)

So which is your top one? And equally importantly, do you see one omission?

Personalisation

I Trust Meercats

The one thing missing from the list above is the trust gained by knowing the owner of what you are after.

It could come under brand recognition, and if it were, say, Sir Richard Branson, then that would make sense, but the question is, how many small businesses push personality as one of their top trust signatures?

Take a look at all the top brands. How many actually do this? I would love to know if any research has been done, but my gut feeling is that only those companies that are still driven by the founder use personality to sell trust.

Now that Steve Jobs is gone, will Apple’s PR machine use his name? I don’t think so. In fact in just a very short space of time since his death, the media has lost all interest.

And this despite the fact that Apple are now the largest ever company in history to make up more than 4% of the US stockosphere! (movement in Apple shares are now skewing US stock exchange figures).

This is one of the big problems with corporates. We all know them as faceless, non-caring, profit-grabbing entities.

So what does all this mean for small business owners?

For a start, you need to pay attention to ALL the trust indicators. You need every weapon you can possibly get your hands on. You want to succeed, right, so that means you must be a ‘better’ version of whatever it is you do than all your competitors.

And that may as well start by personal branding. The reason for that is simple. From the list above, the biggest trust signals are recommendations starting with your friends and family. They care for you, therefore they have your interests at heart.

If you concentrate some of your effort on YOU, the brand, then others will notice, and once they start to notice, recognition gets easier and easier.

Get yourself out there. The more you interact with your audience, the more they will return your interest.

And the best way to get started is to make sure your message is as clear as possible. Here’s the question you need to answer right now:

What do you do?

If you start meandering all over the place with your answer (or you have none at all), then you have some work to do.

Now ask your competition what they do?

Finally, compare answers. Who would YOU go with?

So, what is trust? Get that, and you increase your chances of success.

How Many Backlinks Do I have?

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Want to know how many backlinks you have, and how that compares with your competition? I show you exactly what you need to know…

Backlinking is probably one of the great myths of Internet Marketing. There are tens of thousands (literally) of products, books and articles on the subject.

The advice ranges from ‘no backlinks necessary’ to ‘get as many as you can as quickly as possible’. So what is the best advice?

Before we go down that route, here’s a new online tool where you can check your own site(s) and your competitors (it is in beta at the time of writing so may disappear or cost money sometime in the future):

http://www.backlinkfinder.com/backlink-checker.html

Most people used Yahoo site explorer to research backlinks in the past, but it was rumoured it would be turned off in 2011, so there was a need to find alternative tools.

However, Microsoft came to the rescue with their Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. As I write this, the original Site Explorer site is still up as they are busy incorporating it into Microsoft Webmaster Tools (the MS version of Google Webmaster Tools).

One site I like is this: http://website.informer.com

Enter any URL and depending on how popular it is, you will get a ton of information. It uses a mashup to bring together information from Yahoo, Compete, Alexa, Site Advisor, Mywot and others depending on the site. It will also tell you about the owner of the site, and even shows other popular sites from the same owner. Very revealing.

SEO Moz is another well known and respected tool and has been used by many as a good alternative, but it is quite costly (it is aimed at webmasters rather than business owners).

So, back to backlinking. First up. The truth! No one knows how the search engine algorithms are tweaked. You can look up Google’s patents or see what Google spokespeople like Matt Cutts has to say on the subject, but we are talking here about many hundreds of different metrics that make up a search engine’s idea of page relevancy.

And those metrics are constantly changing. In other words it’s pretty much anyone’s guess as to what works today and what will work tomorrow.

Google are fairly transparent about this, which is a good thing in my view. The massive changes made in 2011 (Panda etc) and the new social metrics introduced in 2012 (Google’s ‘Search Plus Your World’) have changed things even further.

What the search engines are after of course is completely natural backlinks. They absolutely do depend on them in order to test relevancy. The basics of this relevancy is called PageRank (PR). Each page is given PR and if that page links to another page, some of that PR is passed along to it (the original page doesn’t lose any PR, it is just accumulated along the path).

So if you have a page with a PR of 2 that has lots of outgoing links, each link will have a very diluted portion of 2. Or to put it another way, the more outgoing links there are on a page, the less important the PR from that page is (note that the page itself is obviously still relevant as it has a PR of 2).

So, imagine you have a page you want to rank for the keyword ‘best sausages’. It makes sense that if other pages have a link to it, and those other pages have something to do with sausages, then your pages PR will increase. Right?

Well, not necessarily. Those other pages may have links pointing to them that are not about sausages (i.e. not relevant). They may also have pages that a search engine may consider spammy (negative PR anyone?).

Links to your page may also not be relevant, or they may be spammy. So would you lose PR because of this? Well, again, no necessarily. If that were the case, then as has been stated before, you could kill off a competitor site.

So, the SE’s algorithms have to be extremely robust. And they do this in many ways, including tracking activity over time. This is one reason why it is possible to get a brand new site on to page 1 of an SE within 24 hours (it is very easy to do BTW).

But unless you have a very strategic plan, there is a good chance your new site will just as suddenly disappear.

Here’s a simple blueprint to follow to give you a rough idea of what to do:

Pick the keyword you want to target
Type it into an SE
Research the top 10 sites that show up (for backlinks and other metrics such as keyword in title etc,)
Research the PR of the pages linking to those top sites
Make a decision on whether it is now worth chasing
Build your plan to ‘naturally’ out do the competition

I will go into far more detail with this in the future with examples. Make sure you join my Inner Circle by filling in the form on the right so you get the latest information on internet marketing tactics that work.

Meanwhile you may like to check out some interesting things about the Google Penguin update and how you should think about linking and ranking: read it here…

Also, Matt Cutts of Google announced in a tweet in October 2012 that another tweak of the search engine algorithm had been implemented (actually, this is along with well over 60 updates in September) to stop thin sites that use exact match domains (EMD) ranking so highly.

See my post on the Google Freshness Project.

How To Promote Your Local Business

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by włodi under CC BY-SA with wpseopix.com

Years ago the only way to advertise local businesses was through ads in local newspapers and Yellow Pages…

Then the internet came along. The problem is that even now, few businesses I talk to have much of an understanding of just how effective internet marketing can be for them.

Many still pay a fortune to Yellow Pages and other print directories in the hope they still work as well as they used to.

So let’s compare costs. A typical spend for a local business in one of the print directories is around 400 a year (and that is for a very small ad). Now look at what the public is doing when searching for you…

They ‘Google’ your type of business. And as humans we learn very fast, so 10 years ago we may type in ‘dentist’ and see what comes up, then read the local directory instead. Now we type in ‘dentist in Bedford’ or something similar and up pops loads of ‘Google Places’ results plus a few other bits and pieces.

You are spoilt for choice, and once you have tasted the nectar of instant search (and smart phones are making this even simpler) your habits will change fast.

And that is exactly what is going on today. So the question is, why isn’t your site on page 1 of Google? And the answer is, because you have no idea how to get it there.

Well here’s a quick snapshot of what to do:

1. Register an exact match domain. Eg. ‘BestDentistInBedford.com’

2. Use a CMS system like WordPress to create an instant site

3. Use the front page of your site like a business card – include your telephone number, address, and a simple story of why you care for your customers

4. Optimise the site further by adding photos of popular buildings etc. of your town so local people recognise it and start to understand and trust your service (makes even more sense for a local photography business – add in a church or two)

5. Add more pages, each with a title that reflects relevant keywords, eg. ‘tooth implants in Bedford’

6. Add backlinks to your pages on a regular basis

7. Set up Google Places so your site is shown automatically

I can pretty much guarantee within a few weeks you will hit page 1 of Google. From there you just need to do a little more work to move up the ranks to the top position.

Please sign up to my list (fill in the form on the top right) and I will ensure you get further hints and tips to radically improve your success using the latest trends in internet marketing techniques.

How Do I Get More People To Open My Email Blasts?

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How much spam do you get? Do you recognise it immediately? Which emails do you open on sight? Which do you delete instantly? And the most important question of all… why?

And here’s a few more. Why do some emails get through the spam bots? Why are some marked as spam instantly? What is blacklisting? Am I on a blacklist? How do I get off that list? And the $64m question, what should I use to send email so I never gat blacklisted again?

OK, so let’s take a look. The first thing you need to do (so you ‘get’ it and it sticks) is to analyse what you do when you view your email.

What’s the first thing you look at? Is it the subject line or the sender name? Maybe it’s the snippet from the email if your email client shows that (eg. Gmail).

I can tell you that for the majority of people it is the sender name. Now of course this may not be your personal habit here, but research shows the vast majority of people always check who it’s from before they look anywhere else, and it’s those people that matter when it comes to internet marketing (ie. the ‘vast majority’). Everything starts with targeting, and this one little point is often overlooked.

So make sure you put your name as the sender. Anything else will look either spammy or just as bad, commercial. If you see an email from Virgin, for example, you know immediately it will be something to do with some product. Suppose, however, it came from ‘Richard Branson’. Would you open it?

Next up is the Subject line. These have been tested to death by internet marketers and the following points are the important ones to take on board:

Must be original. ‘Get 10% off today’ will only work if you trust AND BUY from the seller (otherwise it’s straight in the trash – or worse marked as Spam).

Must be enticing or plain simple. And that does not mean ‘Did you hear this amazing news!!!’ (it’s not just the overuse of exclamation marks that give this obviously spammy title away – the only way you are going to open this is if you REALLY trust the sender). Plain simple is exactly that. Tell it like it is. ‘Just to say thank you for ordering xxx’. They can see who it is from, the title is non-threatening, so there is a chance they will open it. So, what is ‘enticing’ then? I’m glad you asked that. ’Thanks for signing up to my newsletter. I have something special for you’.

Don’t use the word FREE. Don’t even use it in the body text of your email either. It is a red flag to spam bots. Many internet marketers will break the word up (eg. f ree or fr ee etc.) but these will be spotted sooner or later and once they are, they look even spammier. So what do I use then? Use ‘Gratis’ or ‘no cost’ or ‘zero cost’ or even ’100% off’.

Make sure the first line of the body text of the email also grabs attention or interest. This is because it is shown in many email clients. The people receiving your email will most likely look at who it’s from first, then the subject, and if that isn’t enough for them to make the decision to open, they look at a snippet of the content.

And what happens if none of the above is interesting enough? They file it ‘for later’ (which means never) or mark it as spam.

Worse though, their email client may mark it as spam automatically. This can be for far too many reasons to list here, but one of those reasons is that it has come from a sender who has been blacklisted. You can use this online tool if you are worried email from your domain is being blacklisted. Just enter your domain name into the tool: http://www.mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx

The only real way to avoid your email blasts being blacklisted is to use a bona-fide email service like Aweber. There are lots of services like this, but I have found them to be about the best all things considered. They also have incredible help. For example, we have used them over at Accountz.com in order to split people into two separate lists from a single optin form.

To conclude, getting your domain or email address banned by spam bots is the last thing you need to do. So if you want to communicate via email to more than one customer at a time, you must use a dedicated email service.

Leaked Google Doc

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Few people (except everyone into IM) realise that you can read the Google search patent publicly. Yes, Google it! Of course the patent (and there is more than one BTW) merely describes the mechanism, NOT how the elements of the algorithm are subtly changed multiple times during an unknown period.

So, apart from that being pretty interesting to those that have not heard of it before, why should it be interesting to you?

Well, most people understand that Google took over Yahoo’s dominance for one reason. Automation. Yahoo = people power. Google = server power. But surprise surprise, the only way to check the ‘algorithm’ is to use people to see if the search results make sense.

So, these people need some training then, right? Oh yes. And every now and again someone leaks the training manual, which has just happened again in October [2011 in case you are reading this from an Apple TimePod tm].

So how does it work. Simple. Human readers get fed a bunch of sites to see if they match up to the search criteria that led to them being served up to the user. The BIG problem of course is one of subjectivity (how can a mere mortal ever replace a computer). Porn is the easy one (for fetishes of this decade at least), but what about relevancy?

Let’s take a hypothetical case of a relevant site over another equally relevant site. And let’s look at the search term ‘cloud’. The guidelines start with the term ‘Vital’ for grading results. So what is vital about ‘cloud’. Well of course it is the cloud of the internet (what did you expect!) in first place. Followed by a real cloud. Then a couple more virtual clouds, then some cumulo-nimbus, etc.

This is great and it shows Google as its best. But if you dig deeper you will find some well known search terms are a little cloudy. It is of course all about relevance and I an happy with that, but the point here is two fold.

If you add a human into the algorithm, you bring a bunch of trouble. If you then try and cure the trouble with a set of rules, you will only make the trouble worse. Humans are not machines QED.

So, what’s the point of this? If you want to know how Google *might* review your site, you need to know the criteria of the human aspect. So take a look at this excellent article from SearchEngineLand. It is worth your time. This is not so much a leaked Google doc as a completely public one!