September 2009 Archives

How to Trim the Online Ad Budget

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Website Marketing
on September 30, 2009 9:15 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
hear one big question over and over again when I speak: where do I trim the fat from my online budget?

If you aren't being asked to do more with less, then just wait. You will.

Online marketers that have well-monitored stews of traffic on their site are hesitant to do anything other than add to the traffic pot. The thought of shifting or slashing online budgets and risking traffic is surely keeping many marketers up way past their bedtimes. They feel like their marketing/traffic mix is some house of cards and the most delicate of movements will send traffic and conversions into the ether

See the ful story at: http://www.clickz.com/3635090

Differentiate Yourself for SEO Success

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Website Marketing
on September 29, 2009 8:15 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
One of the biggest keys to success in the world of SEO is differentiation. The reason for this is two-fold:

1. Potential linkers are much more likely to give you a link. It will make a stronger impression on people who visit your site, and is therefore more likely to result in a conversion (i.e., they buy something, fill out a lead form, ask you to contact them, etc.).

The reason these things are true has to do with the intense competitiveness of the environment on the Internet today. Those who understand the basics of how search works are making a lot of money, and more people are investing serious dollars in their Web site marketing strategies. The result: Web sites are getting plentiful in virtually every category and subcategory you can imagine.

See the full story at: http://searchenginewatch.com/3634895

10 Common SEO Mistakes

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Website Marketing
on September 28, 2009 8:19 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
One of the biggest challenges in SEO is the ongoing lack of recognition it plays in getting traffic to your Web site. This can be especially true in larger organizations where key members of management aren't familiar with it, and how it works. Uninformed senior managers can easily make decisions that are catastrophic from an SEO perspective.

Here are some of the most common mistakes made as a result:

1. Not Starting Early Enough

Even organizations that are aware of SEO's importance have a tendency to start the process too late.

See the full story at: http://searchenginewatch.com/3634797

What Social Media Can and Can't Do for You

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Website Marketing
on September 25, 2009 8:22 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Unless you've been living under a rock, you don't need me to tell you that social media has legs. And it's getting leggier by the minute.

Many companies don't fully understand what to do with social media. They don't see the path to benefit from it. Others have tried using it and walked away not seeing the value of social media. Others still don't get it at all, and have left themselves completely to the mercy of the online mobs.

See the full story at: http://www.clickz.com/3634426

Do Accents Really Matter in International SEO?

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Website Marketing
on September 24, 2009 8:19 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
International SEO specialists like to talk about the importance of "accents," those marks that reside either above, below, or between existing characters in a piece of text in the relevant language, for search engine algorithms.

But don't search engines these days actually compensate for accents automatically? Some argue that all you need to do is directly place the character in HTML and Google will do the work for you. So what's the story?

See the full story at: http://searchenginewatch.com/3635055

Five E-mail Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

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Website Marketing
on September 23, 2009 8:52 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Not paying enough attention to your email marketing effort can lose you customers and compromise selling opportunities. While e-mail marketing is a great way to stay in contact with your customers, if handled badly it also has the power to ruin the relationship. You'll respect your customers and get the most out of your e-mail marketing efforts by avoiding these five critical mistakes:

1. No Opt-out Clause

The U.S. CAN-SPAM Act 2003 requires that your commercial e-mails contain an unsubscribe link making it easy for a list member to unsubscribe from your e-mails. It also makes good business sense.

To avoid your e-mail being perceived as spam, make sure that every outgoing e-mail contains an opt-out link that the recipient can click to unsubscribe from the list. Make sure that the link works and make sure that the system is in place for managing the process effectively. Respecting your list members by doing this is a way of saying that you care about your business and your relationship with your customers.

See the full story at: http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/advertising/article.php/3840356s

Online Video Advertising FAQ

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Website Marketing
on September 22, 2009 9:46 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
What's the state of online video advertising as we enter Q4 2009? Last year around this time, some bemoaned that, as a consequence of the economic crisis, experimental budgets for online video advertising were gone. Ad rates all over, including those for online video, fell as much as 25 percent and many of us held our breath to see how our clients' budgets would be affected.

Suddenly, though, a slew of good news about online video advertising came out last month:

See the full story at: http://www.clickz.com/3635030

Seven Factors to Consider When Pricing Online TV Video

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Website Marketing
on September 21, 2009 8:21 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Hulu, which distributes TV and movie video content, has experienced a 265 percent increase in streams over the past year, making it the second largest online video site, according to Nielsen data. Although the number of video viewers is increasing, comScore's Tania Yuki believes the more important trend is the growth in viewing engagement and intensity, where the same viewers become more engaged and spend more time watching quality long-form video content. This has fueled speculation that traditional television content business models will experience serious damage, similar to that experienced over recent years by the newspaper and music industries. Increasingly consumers are looking to watch long-form television shows on their favorite electronic device wherever they are and whenever they want.

See the full story at: http://www.clickz.com/3635007#comment

Video Optimization: Google Supports FB Share and RDFa

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Website Marketing
on September 17, 2009 9:21 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
If you're creating videos, hosting them on your website, and aim to optimize those videos for competitive search engine placement you'll want to pay attention to this one.

Google today announced support for Facebook Share and Yahoo! SearchMonkey RDFa for videos.

These markup formats (micro-formats) allow you to specify information (like titles, descriptions and even preview images) about videos and potentially influence how they are indexed - although it's doubtful that videos utilizing this technique will be given preferential treatment. While Google does pretty well at discovering this information by itself as it stands today, using these format structures enables you to give them some help and guidance.

See the full story at: http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2009/09/15/video-optimziation-google-supports-fb-share-and-rdfa.aspx

Redesigning Your Web Site? Don't Neglect SEO

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Website Marketing
on September 16, 2009 8:49 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
About 9,999 times out of 10,000, companies that begin a redesign of their Web site do so with the following reasons in mind:

1. "We want to freshen the look/feel."

2. "We need to update our content, to be more relevant for where we are today."

3. "We have too much information on our Web site...we need to clean house and provide a slimmed down version."

It's rare, even in 2009, that companies will speak to things that also matter a great deal: usability and SEO.

Usability and SEO go hand-in-hand. Search engines want to rank Web sites that provide a quality user experience for the searcher. How that's defined can be somewhat subjective (every Web site is unique and its target audience will also be unique).

See the full story at: http://searchenginewatch.com/3634964

E-Commerce Web Page Response Times

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Website Marketing
on September 15, 2009 8:57 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Akamai Technologies and Forrester announced the results of a survey on website performance and its correlation with an online shopper's behavior. What they found is that consumers are seemingly growing more impatient with slow loading web pages.

Results revealed that two seconds is the new threshold in terms of an average online shopper's expectation for a web page to load and 40 percent of shoppers will wait no more than three seconds before abandoning a retail or travel site.

See the full story at: http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2009/09/14/e-commerce-web-page-response-times.aspx

PPC Integration: Integrating PPC with SEO, Part 2

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Website Marketing
on September 11, 2009 7:58 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
The number of companies performing SEM in silos is still surprising. They'll hire one agency to do PPC and another to do SEO. Or they'll have an in-house marketer doing PPC, while SEO is delegated to their IT department.

These scenarios aren't inherently bad. They can work very well -- if there's communication between the two. In Part 1, we outlined ways to integrate PPC with e-mail marketing. Today we'll talk about the key information that should be shared when integrating PPC with SEO.

Step 1: Develop a Master Keyword List

In school, we knew we had to do our homework if we wanted to get good grades. It's no different in search marketing.

See the full story at: http://searchenginewatch.com/3634874

How To Write Product Descriptions That Sell

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Website Marketing
on September 10, 2009 8:10 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Product descriptions are critical to the success of selling on the Web. Great product descriptions entice your visitors to buy while at the same time properly describe the products thus avoiding returns because visitors didn't fully understand what was offered. We'll look at what you need to know in order to write great product descriptions for your Web site.

Write Your Own Product Descriptions

It's important that you write your own product descriptions for each product on your Web site. Do not copy them from other Web sites. This is crucial because Google and other search engines may penalize your site if product descriptions are simply copies of those that are available elsewhere on the Web. You're more likely to rank higher on the keywords that you use if you write original product descriptions for your site.

See the full story at: http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/advertising/article.php/3836521

Going the Distance -- Integration of Your Marketing Efforts

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Website Marketing
on September 9, 2009 8:22 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
With integration comes the ability to target and tweak the message to fit many different geographic, demographic, and psychographic niches. The beauty of search marketing is that every type of traffic generation gives you some control over who you send that message to.

Organic traffic is targeted by the nature of the content and the keywords you're ranking for. Paid advertising can be so narrowly targeted you can define the age, gender, and city or borough your ad is shown in.

E-mail marketing allows you to send that message out to people who have opted in to receiving your message. Any good salesperson will tell you that a person willing to listen to what they have to say is someone who can be sold.

See the full story at: http://searchenginewatch.com/3634854

Ecom Primer: What You Need to Set Up Shop Online

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Website Marketing
on September 8, 2009 8:27 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
If you were to look at ten different retails sites online you'd probably notice small to drastic differences between each of the sites. While they all offer products for sale, the features, functions and options available to customers will differ.

Regardless of how big or how small a retail Web site is, all ecommerce sites have the same basic fundamental building blocks that enable them to work. From choosing a domain name to accepting and processing credit card payments online, Web retailers have a lot of work to do before they can hang their open-for-business sign.

Choose a Domain Name, Web Host and Design a Site

If you were planning to open a physical store, one thing you would plan early on would be your business name and location. Online, you need to register a domain name, find a service provider to host your site, and you also need to design the Web site itself.

See the full story at: http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/advertising/article.php/3836866

Common Mistakes When Hiring an Online Promotions Person

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Website Marketing
on September 7, 2009 9:22 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
When a company hires a person for online promotional strategies, too often they want to put the position in a tight box. This is especially true when it comes to social media and link marketing. I prefer to think of this person as public relations as opposed to promotions.

We've all seen it. A person is hired for online promotions. Often their boss knows little about what is truly involved. The position quickly turns into low-quality link trading and trying to get to the first page of Digg.

Then, a couple months later, the company wonders why they're getting little or no results. At that time, they realize they can outsource it to a developing nation for a fraction of the cost. This story is repeated time and time again.

See the full story at: http://searchenginewatch.com/3634873

Social, Search, and Brandings

By
Website Marketing
on September 4, 2009 9:16 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Social media is frequently looked at by search marketers as an exercise in SEO. And, in some cases, it might be. But looking at social media from an SEO perspective will get you into trouble.

What's Your Definition of Social Media?

See the full story at: http://searchenginewatch.com/3634798

Social Media Is Not the Message

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Website Marketing
on September 3, 2009 9:03 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Social marketing is a shiny new toy and almost everyone is wising up and getting involved, as they should. In fact, a rumor is spreading that the new Mac OS, Snow Leopard, is integrating Facebook addresses directly into its own address book app. There's no question that social applications are becoming central to our online lives, and soon social apps will be a central part of the very operating systems we use. People are tweeting, flickring, and facebooking like mad, with no signs of slowing.

See the full story at: http://www.clickz.com/3634815

SEO vs. PPC: The Engine Ready Study

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Website Marketing
on September 2, 2009 7:57 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
It's the one discussion that every Website promoter wants to know - which traffic source is more valuable when it comes to conversion.

Search marketing service and software provider Engine Ready released an update to its ongoing study which compares conversion data of visitors arriving on sites from PPC ads, organic listings, other websites and direction navigation (typing the URL).

See the full story at: http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2009/08/24/seo-vs-ppc-the-engine-ready-study.aspx

Eight Great API's For Your Next Website or Application

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Website Marketing
on September 1, 2009 8:50 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
What a Web you work on! Technology from a wide variety of companies and industries is freely available for you, a web designer/ web developer, to capture and leverage for your own or your clients benefit.

If you're a company considering publishing an API, taking a look at the successes of others might encourage you to complete that project. iContact for example just announced the winners of its API Challenge, a content for partners and customers that asked them to build an integration between third party apps and iContact. The result, in addition to greater exposure for their service, was a lot of new mashup technology that can be used by the greater Web community (not just iContact clients).

Let's review a few other great API's for your next website or application now:

See the full story at: http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2009/08/27/eight-great-api-s-for-your-next-website-or-application.aspx
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About this Archive

This page is an archive of entries from September 2009 listed from newest to oldest.

August 2009 is the previous archive.

October 2009 is the next archive.

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