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Beyond Page Rank ; Graduating to Actionable Metrics

July 23, 2011 in Blog by SearchEnvision | No Comments

I had to re-post this one.. Straight from the Lion’s Mouth. Check out what Google has to say about their new algorithm, and what really matters when it comes to increasing your Google rankings. Keep these 3 things in mind; 1) Conversion Rate 2) Bounce Rate 3) Click-Through Rate (CTR)

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Beyond PageRank: Graduating to actionable metrics

Thursday, June 30, 2011 at 10:18 PM

Webmaster level: Beginner

Like any curious netizen, I have a Google Alert set up to email me whenever my name is mentioned online. Usually I get a slow trickle of my forum posts, blog posts, and tweets. But by far the most popular topic of these alerts over the past couple years has been my off-handed mention that we removed PageRank distribution data from Webmaster Tools in one of our 2009 releases.

The fact that people are still writing about this almost two years later—usually in the context of “Startling news from Susan Moskwa: …”—really drives home how much PageRank has become a go-to statistic for some webmasters. Even the most inexperienced site owners I talk with have often heard about, and want to know more about, PageRank (“PR”) and what it means for their site. However, as I said in my fateful forum post, the Webmaster Central team has been telling webmasters for years that they shouldn’t focus so much on PageRank as a metric for representing the success of one’s website. Today I’d like to explain this position in more detail and give you some relevant, actionable options to fill your time once you stop tracking your PR!

Why PageRank?
In 2008 Udi Manber, VP of engineering at Google, wrote on the Official Google Blog:

“The most famous part of our ranking algorithm is PageRank, an algorithm developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded Google. PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a much larger system.”

PageRank may have distinguished Google as a search engine when it was founded in 1998; but given the rate of change Manber describes—launching “about 9 [improvements] per week on the average”—we’ve had a lot of opportunity to augment and refine our ranking systems over the last decade. PageRank is no longer—if it ever was—the be-all and end-all of ranking.

If you look at Google’s Technology Overview, you’ll notice that it calls out relevance as one of the top ingredients in our search results. So why hasn’t as much ink been spilled over relevance as has been over PageRank? I believe it’s because PageRank comes in a number, and relevance doesn’t. Both relevance and PageRank include a lot of complex factors—context, searcher intent, popularity, reliability—but it’s easy to graph your PageRank over time and present it to your CEO in five minutes; not so with relevance. I believe the succinctness of PageRank is why it’s become such a go-to metric for webmasters over the years; but just because something is easy to track doesn’t mean it accurately represents what’s going on on your website.

What do we really want?
I posit that none of us truly care about PageRank as an end goal. PageRank is just a stand-in for what we really want: for our websites to make more money, attract more readers, generate more leads, more newsletter sign-ups, etc. The focus on PageRank as a success metric only works if you assume that a higher PageRank results in better ranking, then assume that that will drive more traffic to your site, then assume that that will lead to more people doing-whatever-you-want-them-to-do on your site. On top of these assumptions, remember that we only update the PageRank displayed on the Google Toolbar a few times a year, and we may lower the PageRank displayed for some sites if we believe they’re engaging in spammy practices. So the PR you see publicly is different from the number our algorithm actually uses for ranking. Why bother with a number that’s at best three steps removed from your actual goal, when you could instead directly measure what you want to achieve? Finding metrics that are directly related to your business goals allows you to spend your time furthering those goals.

If I don’t track my PageRank, what should I be tracking?
Take a look at metrics that correspond directly to meaningful gains for your website or business, rather than just focusing on ranking signals. Also consider metrics that are updated daily or weekly, rather than numbers (like PageRank) that only change a few times a year; the latter is far too slow for you to reliably understand which of your changes resulted in the number going up or down (assuming you update your site more than a few times a year). Here are three suggestions to get you started, all of which you can track using services like Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools:

Conversion rate
Bounce rate
Clickthrough rate (CTR)

Conversion rate
A “conversion” is when a visitor does what you want them to do on your website. A conversion might be completing a purchase, signing up for a mailing list, or downloading a white paper. Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your site who convert (perform a conversion). This is a perfect example of a metric that, unlike PageRank, is directly tied to your business goals. When users convert they’re doing something that directly benefits your organization in a measurable way! Whereas your PageRank is both difficult to measure accurately (see above), and can go up or down without having any direct effect on your business.

Bounce rate
A “bounce” is when someone comes to your website and then leaves without visiting any other pages on your site. Your bounce rate is the percentage of visits to your site where the visitor bounces. A high bounce rate may indicate that users don’t find your site compelling, because they come, take a look, and leave directly. Looking at the bounce rates of different pages across your site can help you identify content that’s underperforming and point you to areas of your site that may need work. After all, it doesn’t matter how well your site ranks if most searchers are bouncing off of it as soon as they visit.

Clickthrough rate (CTR)
In the context of organic search results, your clickthrough rate is how often people click on your site out of all the times your site gets shown in search results. A low CTR means that, no matter how well your site is ranking, users aren’t clicking through to it. This may indicate that they don’t think your site will meet their needs, or that some other site looks better. One way to improve your CTR is to look at your site’s titles and snippets in our search results: are they compelling? Do they accurately represent the content of each URL? Do they give searchers a reason to click on them? Here’s some advice for improving your snippets; the HTML suggestions section of Webmaster Tools can also point you to pages that may need help. Again, remember that it doesn’t matter how well your site ranks if searchers don’t want to click on it.

Entire blogs and books have been dedicated to explaining and exploring web metrics, so you’ll excuse me if my explanations just scrape the surface; analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik’s site is a great place to start if you want to dig deeper into these topics. But hopefully I’ve at least convinced you that there are more direct, effective and controllable ways to measure your site’s success than PageRank.

One final note: Some site owners are interested in their site’s PR because people won’t buy links from their site unless they have a high PageRank. Buying or selling links for the purpose of passing PageRank violates our Webmaster Guidelines and is very likely to have negative consequences for your website, so a) I strongly recommend against it, and b) don’t be surprised if we aren’t interested in helping you raise your PageRank or improve your website when this is your stated goal.

We’d love to hear what metrics you’ve found useful and actionable for your website! Feel free to share your success stories with us in the comments here or in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Avoiding Google Penalties by Using White- Hat SEO Techniques

June 1, 2011 in Blog by SearchEnvision | 2 Comments

Studies show that around 90% of traffic on the Internet originates through search engines. Search Engines also handle more than half of all the E-commerce transactions. This clearly shows how important the impact of search engines is for your online business. At the same time, this also means that you can change the way your business performs on the web, or in other words worldwide (as your business is now visible to all who accesses the Internet).

In order for business owners to rank their websites on the top of Search Engines like Google, Yahoo! or Bing, they must invest both time and money into Search Engine Optimization or (SEO). SEO can quite simply be explained as the practice of improving your business or site’s ranking on search engines by utilizing various tools and techniques. Getting your business listed on the top rank of search engines means your business will be the first recommended option for whoever runs a search, inquiring about a product or service related to the one your site provides.

However, not all types of tweaking and methods (that you perform on your site) are permitted by search engines like Google (which is also touted as the ‘Search Engine King’) who provides guidelines for site owners and webmasters. These guidelines, also known as the search engine guidelines, if implemented on your website, assures what is called the natural ranking of your site on the search engines. This type of optimization with the application of ethical approaches is also known as white-hat techniques. Some white-hat SEO techniques are:

* Quality content on your site.
* Structural or semantic mark up and separate content from presentation.
* Providing proper & unique titles and meta data for your pages.
* Keyword research.
* Quality inbound links and so on.

To ensure that your website stays on the right side of the track and violates none of the search engine guidelines, you need a webmaster or a team of professional SEOs that has an extensive knowledge of all the guidelines and are able to follow them while optimizing your website. A poor or erratic SEO campaign may result in the violation of the search engine guidelines and get your website a web spam label, or simly just poor rankings which, to me, is much worse than being labeled one thing or another. Web spam,spamdexing,search spam or search engine spam, is the manipulation of the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine. This practice is considered un-ethical and unfair, and is commonly known as the black-hat SEO technique.

Since black-hat SEO technique violates the guidelines for ethical techniques in getting natural ranking on search engines, your website could be penalized or even removed from the search listings of the search engines. This can be explained in a better way by citing an example. In a recent video posted by Matt Cutts,the head of the Web spam team at Google, he reveals two main types of ranking penalties a site can receive (from Google) and also how to deal with them. The two penalties are:

* Algorithmic Penalties – They include content spam, keyword stuffing, cloaking, sneaky Javascript redirects etc. If one of these or other related discoveries are made by Google on your website, your site will be penalized. To remove the penalty, you must fix the issues on your website, then Google will detect them and would return your website in its search results again.
* Manual Penalties – In case of a manual penalty, the length of the penalty depends on how severe the penalty is and how badly your site has violated Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Matt also added that in case your site is penalized (Manual penalty only) and you have, in response, made the required changes, it is helpful to request the reconsideration of your site. This action notifies Google that you have made the corrections on your site and that it now adheres to the guidelines. You can also do the same for a recently purchased domain (which you suspect may have violated Google’s guidelines before you bought it) or in case your site isn’t appearing in Google search results.

In short, to avoid such penalties and complications that could harm your business and your bottom line, you need to tweak and tune your site very carefully and skillfully or get the best SEO service provider who’ll handle it for you. This way, you can also focus on other core areas of your business. However, keep in mind that not just any SEO service provider will do. Only an expert SEO service provider will always stick to the search engine guidelines and never beat around the bush. Make sure when you are looking into hiring an SEO company, you check the rankings of their site itself. SEO is quite the competitive niche, and you are essentially competing against the best of the best.. if the SEO company you are looking into has at least a few first page rankings for common SEO related keywords, chances are they know what they are doing, and their skills are a result of White-Hat SEO techniques. From this point, it all comes down to a matter of preference in regards to location, price, etc.. Make an educated decision, but make a decision. Your bottom line is counting on it!

The top result on Google gets over 36% of all clicks

May 5, 2011 in Blog by SearchEnvision | 1 Comments

A new study of Optify shows how important it is to get a high position in Google’s search results. The top results get an average click-through rate of 36.4%. The number of searches and the cost per click for a keyword also influence the clicks. What does this mean to your search engine optimization activities?

What are the exact numbers?

According to Optify, the web pages on position one get a click-through rate (CTR) of 36.4%. Position 2 gets a CTR of 12.5%. The CTR’s for position 3-10 are 9.5%, 7.9%, 6.1%, 4.1%, 3.8%, 3.0%, 2.2%. The top results get as many clicks as results 2-5 combined:

Surprisingly, position 11 gets slightly more clicks than position 10. That’s probably because position 11 is the top result on page 2.

The cost per click for AdWords ads and the CTR are related

According to the study, keywords that have a high cost per click (CPC) on Google AdWords have a lower CTR for the organic results.

The first organic result for a keyword with a high CPC gets less than 20% of the clicks. The first result for keywords with a low CPC gets more than 30% of the clicks.

The search volume also influence the click-through rates

According to the study, keywords with many searches get a higher CTR for position one (32% for popular keywords versus 25% for long tail keywords).

Long tail terms keywords have a better overall CTR on page one (9% average CTR for long tail keywords versus 4.6% average CTR for popular keywords).

What does this mean for your search engine optimization campaigns?

These numbers have several implications for your SEO campaigns:

1. Popular keywords are even more competitive than they seem

If you’re optimizing your web pages for very competitive keywords then you won’t see huge benefits until you get in the top 5 results.

2. It makes sense to optimize for long tail keywords

Long tail keywords have several advantages:

* they are much more targeted than popular keywords and you will get a much higher conversion rate
* it is much easier to get high rankings for a long tail keyword because there is less competition
* you will get more visitors through long tail keywords (unless you are in the top 5 results for a popular keyword)

For most businesses, getting page 1 rankings for a lot of long tail keywords is much easier and more valuable than getting high rankings for a few popular keywords.

3. High rankings are important

Ranking on the first result page for a keyword that is related to your business is still more valuable than anywhere else. The higher the position, the better.

How To To Exclude Your Own IP Address From Google Analytics

April 28, 2011 in Blog by SearchEnvision | 3 Comments

Google Analytics will help you with more accurate reporting. To get a more accurate account of your page views, click throughs, and conversion percentages you need to exclude your own IP address from the counts. When you visit your own website you will be logged as a visitor just like everyone else unless you filter your IP address from the equation. Not filtering your IP address will lead to watered down results.

For example, if you have 100 pay per click visits to your website and 20 of those result in sales conversions you will have a conversion rate of 20%. But if you visited your website 20 of those times then your conversion rate should in reality be 80/20, not 100/20, which is a 25% conversion rate. That’s why it is important to use the Google Analytics filter.

Log into your Google Analytics account. Below your website profiles you’ll see three links:

Add Website Profile (on the left)
Asset Manager (in the middle)
Filter Manager (on the right)

Click on Filter Manager. Now click on “Add Filter” in the top right corner of the gray bar. Put a name in the Filter Name box then click on the drop down box below that field and select Exclude All Traffic From An IP Address. In the IP Address field you’ll see a sample IP address. That is a hypothetical address example, not a real IP address. You’ll have to replace the numbers in the field with the numbers of your own IP address, but be careful not to edit out the back slashes or the dots, copy the IP exactly how it is. If you are unsure what your IP Address is, just go to this site and your IP Address will be right on top once you enter the site. Next, select the websites that your filter will apply to. You can filter a range of IP addresses by including the range in the form of ([1-9]|1[0-9]|2[0-5])$ where your last set of numbers in the IP address appears. Here’s an example:

^65\.24\.132\.([1-9]|1[0-9]|2[0-5])$This will block IP addresses between 65.24.132.1 and 65.24.132.25.Click “Finish” and you are done. Now you should be able to get more accurate results from your Google Analytics, especially concerning your conversion rates. Be careful when testing the results, however. You don’t want Google to close your AdSense account because you decided to test your click-throughs on your ads. If you visit your website and Google Analytics doesn’t log you as a visitor then you know it’s working. You can further test it by purchasing your product to see if Google Analytics registers the sale as a conversion.

Optimizing Site Navigation and Menus

April 23, 2011 in Blog by SearchEnvision | 1 Comments

Menus Contain Meaning

Site navigation information within menus can be a good clue to what a site is about. The rule of thumb is that you should avoid buzzwords and special terms in your navigation menu, unless you know for sure what you are doing and your target audience.

When menus are keyword compatible they’re fairly clear and concise. Commonly, they utilize 2 to 10 graphic buttons leading to all the key pages on the site. When a search engine spider reads such a menu, it’s able to quickly and easily figure out what your site is about and which pages are most important. As a rule, you put links to other pages of your site in the navigation menu. The search engine can analyze what the links to those pages say. They do that by reading what’s within the text hyperlink or the alt text tag or they read the words around the hyperlink itself. They’ll even include title tags and associate them with the link.

For instance, if you have a text menu on every page with your first menu link reading “About us“, it’s probably not something you want to rank high. Actually, you won’t rank well at all, because there are millions of websites competing for that keyword phrase. It’s the same for the old standard “home” button. In terms of search engine optimization, it is a waste of search engine ranking power. You are not only positioning your website for the phrase “about us“, you’re also taking away the linking power from the really important pages on your website. A link that reads “About MyCompanyNameHere” will be a much smarter substitution. The ideal case is when you have your primary keyword in the company name, e.g. “Widgets International”.

Consider how many links you have outgoing from the home page via your menus. Along with the external link structure of the World Wide Web, the internal link system of your site is also crucial for your rankings.

It is not enough to write a Web page using the correct keywords. There needs to be keywords in other Web pages pointing to your page(s) for it to rank well. No Web page is an isolated entity. It draws its meaning and relevance based on links. Use your links with precision and purpose.

Link Menu Keyword Themes

Since site menu links are so prominent and weighty on a page, consider creating an internal keyword theme (also called keyword profile) for your site. Keywords themes are discussed in more detail later on in this course; for now, it’s enough to know that search engine spiders collect all the visible words (anchor text) from all the links to a certain page and these words will make up your keyword theme. If the spider is able to detect that certain keywords are used with certain regularity across your keyword theme, your rank will get a boost for these.

Following is a sample menu for WeatherScreen (weather forecasting software):

Weather forecast software
Desktop weather forecast
Desktop weather maps
Daily horoscopes
Biorhythm calculator
Long-range weather forecast

If we use this menu across all pages of our website, chances are the site will be considered strong for “weather“, “forecast“, “desktop” and “software” – provided, of course, that the keyword distribution across these pages is properly adjusted.

The beauty of this simple approach to menus is that both users and search engines can see that this particular page has something to do with weather forecasting.

There may be occasions, of course, when using a keyword theme for menus may not be the desired idea. Such decisions are dictated by site-specific needs. If this is the case, you can use technology that spiders ignore to build your main menu – e.g. JavaScript or Flash. Make sure to provide an additional tiny menu at the end of the page to give the search engine the right message and allow it to visit and index all your pages. It is wise to use your keywords within this menu for best results.

You should also have text links in your body copy of the page.

Text menu links placed at the top or bottom of the page usually look like this:

Weather forecast software | Desktop weather forecast | Daily horoscopes | Biorhythms

Graphical navigation buttons

Navigation buttons are graphic images (such as .gif or .jpg) that link to a URL. These buttons are often used by designers to create a site’s navigation menu or site map because they can be more visually pleasing than text links. Search engines can generally follow a link surrounding a navigation button, provided it does not contain JavaScript. Navigation buttons using a mouse rollover effect are often not search engine friendly because they contain JavaScript.

If you have an all graphics page, you’ll need to attach simple hyperlinks to the graphic buttons and use the html tag called the alt tag. This technique is not as good as a text link but if it’s all you’re allowed, use it. It’s usually better than nothing at all.

Image map menus

Image maps are a single graphic that contains separate hyperlinked areas leading to different pages of a website or to different sections on the same page. Shari Thurow, the author of “Search Engine Visibility” and an SEO expert, explains why image maps affect a site’s search engine compatibility:

“Many search engines do not follow the links inside an image map because of the possibility of image spam. Thus, if you choose to use an image map as part of your site’s navigation scheme, always use text links elsewhere on your Web pages”

(Find out more about the book “Search engine visibility”: http://www.searchenginesbook.com)

Drop-Down Menus

If you use drop-down menus on your pages, be sure to include actual HTML links to your pages as well. If you rely on your drop-down menus to direct the spiders to other pages on your site, those pages will probably not be indexed.

Since drop-down menus usually use some kind of JavaScript to operate – particularly when you are redirected to a certain page immediately upon selecting the menu item – they are not indexable. However, if you choose a menu item and then click some button to go to the selected page, chances are that your dropdown menu is clean from JavaScript code and can be of use for optimization. Try to put keywords as inner HTML content of your <OPTION> tags:

<select name=”navigation”>
<option value=”about.htm”> About Weather Screen </option>
<option value=”horoscopes.htm”> Daily horoscopes </option>
</select>

In any case, as a safety net, be sure to use a simple text link menu somewhere at the top or bottom part of a page. An alternative is to create a good site map which is clearly linked to from the main page.

Menu placement

If you use a vertical navigation menu, the best position for it in terms of SEO will be on the right side of the page. Doing so moves your textual content closer to the beginning of the body tag, making it more accessible to search engine spiders.

If you need to place your menu on the left side of the page, let the spider first pass through your content and then read the menu. You can easily accomplish this by help of CSS. All you need is to place the DIV Content element firstly in the code to feed the search engine crawler by attractive texts. Next will be DIV Navigation and other DIV elements such as Header, Footer, etc. (see the previous lesson on HTML tables).

It’s a common and useful practice to place a text link menu in a row on the top of the page or in the bottom section. If you use your keywords and don’t forget about the keyword theme, these links will have their say when the spider comes to index.

Promoting Your Brand with the Help of Social Media

April 23, 2011 in Blog by SearchEnvision | 1 Comments

Integrating Social Media into your marketing mix will help build your business in several ways. SMM can be quite effective for increasing online awareness and establishing the right brand reputation. It may also improve SE rankings and increase web traffic. Next, we will show you a step-by-step plan of how to promote your brand with Social Media.

First, there is some preparation involved. In order to succeed with Social Media, you need to answer several questions, ideally, before getting started:

Are you ready to invest adequate time in Social Media Marketing?
Will you do it yourself or need to involve a team/others?
Will you and/or your employees need additional training to maximize effectiveness?
Do you know how to form a proper brand reputation online?
Where should you direct your main efforts, how much and when?
What tools will you use to measure social media marketing success?

We advise you to think it through and develop a plan based on strategies from proven experts. There are a large number of people who present themselves as knowledgeable in SMM – but actually have little social media marketing experience. (A person who uses social media a lot is not necessarily knowledgeable in the marketing aspect of social media.) To employ real expertise, one approach is to hire someone; another is to up-skill yourself by learning from established pros and then applying what you learn. No doubt outsourced services provided by agencies and consultants are more expensive, but sometimes well worth it in the end.

No matter, if you are an online ‘do-it-yourself-er’, try this proven scheme.

Social Media Marketing Plan to Promote Your Brand

Step 1: Listen to the Audience

Social Media is not like marketing of the past which was mostly a one way communication. It is a conversation. Marketing used to be a description of the benefits of your product or service and telling everyone how great it is, cleverly enough so they would buy from you. It was like one person shouting a message trying to be the loudest to get your attention.

While benefits selling is still part of the equation, Social Media Marketing involves two way communication. In fact, people and companies who do nothing but slam ‘one way’ messages all day long without listening to their audience almost always end up hurting, instead of helping, their brand reputation. You need to tune in to what others in the target niche are saying and prepare your input accordingly. Don’t jump into conversations too soon. Get a feel for the discussion by listening to what is important to that audience.

There are a number of handy tools to help you target and monitor relevant online conversations. Here are several:

You may set up Pipes to create one RSS feed that aggregates results from Flickr, Digg, YouTube, Technorati and other social media sites. Yahoo Pipes is a widely used resource to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.

Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. The results are aggregated from the top social media sources, such as Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Delicious, Twitter and more. Like the other services, you can subscribe to your results by RSS or email.

BlogPulse is a specialized search engine that helps you patrol the blogosphere with four tools – (1) Trend Search, (2) Featured Trends, (3) Conversation Tracker and (4) BlogPulse Profiles. Use them to track the conversation about you or your competitors.

Trendpedia is a buzz-monitoring service that allows you to search the world of blogs by keyword, brand or topic to see whose blogging about the target topic and what they’re saying. Moreover, you may compare one keyword vs. two more related keywords or brands.

Keotag offers a simple search tool for single-word tags or combinations of them. It allows searching for tags across several search engines and social media sites, including Google, Technorati, Del.icio.us, Twitter, BlogPulse, Newsvine, Digg, YouTube and others.

Summarize is a search tool designed for Twitter that allows you to search by keyword to find out who’s tweeting on any topic and what they are saying.

Now that you are armed with some knowledge and tools, choose a few keywords that will return the most helpful results and start building a list of relevant blogs to read. The difficult part is to discover and sort search results which are most relevant to your brand. Do your best to use specific keywords.

Keyword discovery takes time; however, done properly, it will produce a host of blogs, twitter profiles and videos relevant to your industry that is useful information for building your business.
Step 2: Develop Your Strategy

In this step the task is to devise a workable plan. In order to create one, you will first need to evaluate what resources/people you have available for the effort and their level of skill. Will you retain an outside consulting team for certain functions, chose members of your existing team, add members to your team or possibly need to provide training to those involved? Again, be advised that there are many unproven tactics circulating the internet, wasting lots of time and money. The trick is to locate and stick to, expert advice. Learn from professionals – be professional.

Use a format that helps your plan of action come alive. Otherwise, the plan will more likely fail. Too often plans are reduced to a bland document that is uninspiring. Plans that take time, such as a SMM plan, are much more likely to be followed consistently if someone has taken time to make the plan not only accurate, but appealing.

After you choose who will be involved, next you must set a plan of actions and define your strategy. Remember that throwing all your efforts into one channel, such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter could prove costly. Generally, one method does not get the job done. Better to identify multiple channels and spread the time among them than to risk putting all your eggs in the wrong basket.

Social Media is evolving. There is no one right strategy. First you create relationships with readers that provide them something of value. Then as your ‘community’ grows, strategies evolve naturally from the needs of people in your social media audience. That’s one reason business models are quite diverse.

To summarize: You need valuable products, services or information; a selection of tools you are going to use; and people to create real connections. Determine how much time you are willing to have employees invest in social media communications & marketing.

Step 3: Contribute to Social Media

Let’s get down to business! You have a strategy and have started building online relationships. Now it is time to add value: leaving comments on blogs, building community on Twitter or uploading images to Flickr, etc. Let’s look more closely at how to do this.

Create the accounts and get involved with the people in your target audience. Follow those who provide valuable and interesting information. Interact with them. Join the existing conversation before trying to create your own. Such actions greatly encourage others to share. Participate in conversations that are close to your topic and as you do, be ready to respond to comments and questions.

Retain your followers by consistently providing what is valuable to them. Remember by being ‘real’ and ‘genuine’ with your audience, you make them feel special. (You’ll be able to read more on this topic in our lesson “The Most Effective Social Media Tactics”.)

It might also be useful for employees to create a social media calendar. A company social media plan will help keep your SMM campaign on track, especially if you or your company are newer to Social Media. As you become more well-known, more conversations will emerge around your brand name. You’ll need more time to listen and respond to worthwhile blog posts, tweets, etc.

When possible, automate certain SMM jobs using special software (such as auto-follow or auto-DM on Twitter, autoresponders to let people know their comments and ideas matter to you and someone will respond to their input shortly or rss publishing to share content immediately over many channels). These are the types of things that will give you an edge ever most competitors, especially those that haven’t yet developed optimal SMM tactics.

A valuable suite of tools, HootSuite, can help with rising scope of tasks on Twitter. It manages the Twitter conversation stream with multiple accounts from a single dashboard. The Scheduler tool helps write tweets in advance, useful for posting product announcements or coupons at specific times.
Step 4: Measure Your Success

You have already structured time to participate in SMM and begun to work your plan. To judge results and make necessary improvements, next you will need to track and graph blog topics, benchmark your company against the competitors and check results before and after your SMM campaign begins. Your efforts will require effective tools to monitor external feedback and for reputation management. With these in place, you’ll be working smarter, not harder, and leveraging your time more effectively.

It’s advisable to use blog search engines that streamline topic monitoring or setup alerts that notify you when certain subjects are active in the blogosphere. Use the tracking tools we’ve mentioned in Step 1 as well as other programs. Please refer to the “Tracking Your Performance in Social Media” lesson of this course to learn more about the techniques applied to measure your success. You’ll be able to read all about these and other tracking tools and get valuable tips and tactics.

In addition, you should be aware that perfectly measuring the return on investment (ROI) in social media is difficult. Marketers can track such metrics as unique visitors to your site, increase in brand ”buzz” or sales increase. However, directly linking all SMM activities to sales, for example, is next to impossible. On the flipside, avoiding social media is dangerous as well. Evidence shows that ignoring customer feedback can damage your brand and credibility. Most companies are quickly learning that they ignore social media to their own peril.
More Steps

As stated in Step 1, social media is a group of tools that help facilitate conversations, yet there’s really no replacement for face-to-face interaction. If appropriate to your business model, offer additional ways for people in your online community to build stronger relationships, such as workshops, conferences or webinars.

Use trade shows and other events to offer exclusive sessions, an informal breakfast or even a group picture from the event. In general, the payoff for corporate social media participation is enormous. Engaged companies tend to have a better sense of how they are perceived by their audiences and increased website traffic.

Most of all, remember that social media marketing does not happen by itself. Without a strategic approach, it’s difficult to succeed.

Why You Shouldn’t Alway Listen To Google

March 18, 2011 in Blog by SearchEnvision | Comments Off

This is a post that I would like to share from an SEO Consultant over at SEER INTERACTIVE. These guys are really good at keeping up with the latest industry news and have a great reputation in the Search community. Although SearchEnvision does not offer PPC management directly, we do work with many clients who run these types of campaigns, so in order to provide value to all business owners, we think it is important to share knowledge across the community as a whole. Take a look at what Crystal Anderson has to say about the numbers Google puts out;

Why You Shouldn’t Always Listen To Google…

Conversions +320%
Clicks +677%

Do I have your attention?

With all the power Google has in the Search space, it can be easy to take what Google says at face value. However, it is important to remember that PPC is about testing and taking risks (calculated, smart risks that is), not just relying on Best Practices (what Google says).

The above graph is the perfect example of when you should do some digging and testing on your own, regardless of what Google tells you.

So, let’s talk about what made clicks and conversions increase sustainably above.

It was nothing crazy or difficult, one very simple change was made – Language Settings.

As you can see, early in the graph there was minimal traffic and conversions.

Why? Because the campaign was developed based on best practices, according to Google Language Settings, copied verbatim below:

Target the right language for your business
• Single language – Target the language in which your ad is written. For example, if your ad is written in English, target English-speaking users. Remember that Google won’t translate your ad for you.
• Multiple languages – If you want to target more than one language, create a separate campaign for each language.
• Combine with location targeting – As people speak many different languages in many different locations, language targeting also gives you an excellent way to reach your users even if they are physically located in non-native areas. For example, if you are a company based in the UK and want to target the English-speaking population of Spain, you can set your country targeting to Spain and your language targeting to English. When we detect that a certain user in Spain speaks English, your ad can be shown. We recommend creating separate campaigns for each country and language pair. This will ensure that wherever your potential customers are located, they will see your ads in their language.

The campaign featured above is an International Campaign; however, the business is English speaking only. Given Google’s claim “if you are a company based in the UK and want to target the English-speaking population of Spain, you can set your country targeting to Spain and your language targeting to English. When we detect that a certain user in Spain speaks English, your ad can be shown,” we set out with our Language Settings to English only. Results were dismal.

After a few weeks live, we decided we HAD to be missing out on volume given results in other countries. Within the Adwords Interface Google has this note:
When determining where to show your ads, the AdWords system looks at a user’s Google interface language setting to see if it matches one of the languages that your campaign targets. For example, only users whose Google interface language is Spanish will see ads in a campaign targeted to Spanish.

We realized that what may be occurring is that users in other countries likely use their native language as their Language Default and perhaps Googles’ claim of “we detect that a certain user in Spain speaks English, your ad can be shown,” didn’t work as well as we’d assumed it would.

Simple change – add in the native language(s).

Voila – Conversions increased 320% with clicks increasing 677% from month to month.

While a very simple change, it’s a classic example of when to do digging and testing on your own and not just use “best practices.”

Moral of the story: If you are running campaigns outside of the US, make sure you have an understanding of the native languages and conduct a monitored, strategic test to determine if adding additional languages gets you the desired results. If you do add native languages, be prepared to monitor your Search Query reports like a hawk, as you will likely be matched to terms in the native language. Given the results shown above, monitoring Search Query reports is a small price to pay for the conversions you may now be driving!

Note: Though CPA was not included in the above test example, it is an extremely important factor that should be evaluated in all tests. In this case CPA was well beneath our goal CPA in both instances (English only & English + Native Language), as such this was simply a test on maximizing traffic and conversions.

Case Study – Primetyme Sports Bar & Lounge

February 28, 2011 in Case Studies by SearchEnvision | Comments Off

The Advertiser

The Challenge

The Solution

The Results

Why It Worked

100% Organic – Search Engine Optimization Tips – Top Ten Organic SEO Myths

February 22, 2011 in Blog by SearchEnvision | 1 Comments

SEO myths get crazier every year. Some are based partially in reality, and others have spread because it’s often difficult to prove what particular SEO action caused a resulting search engine reaction.

For example, you might make a change to something on a page of your site, and a few days later notice that your ranking in Google for a particular keyword phrase has changed. You might naturally assume that your page change is what caused the ranking change. But that’s not necessarily so. There are numerous reasons why your ranking may have changed, and in many cases they actually have nothing to do with anything that you did.

Mixing up cause and effect is one of the most common things new SEOs do. If it were affecting only their own work, it wouldn’t be so bad, but unfortunately, the clueless often spread their misinformation to other unsuspecting newbies on forums and blogs, which in turn creates new myths. It’s always interesting to see how people are so willing to believe anything they have read or heard without ever checking it out for themselves.

Here are 10 of the most common organic-SEO myths:

Myth 1: You should submit your URLs to search engines. This may have helped once upon a time, but it’s been at least 5 or 6 years since that’s been necessary.

Myth 2: You need a Google Sitemap. If your site was built correctly, i.e., it’s crawler-friendly, you certainly don’t need a Google Sitemap. It won’t hurt you to have one, and you may be interested in Google’s other Webmaster Central Tools, but having a Google Sitemap isn’t going to get you ranked better.

Myth 3: You need to update your site frequently. Frequent updates to your pages may increase the search engine crawl rate, but it won’t increase your rankings. If your site doesn’t need to change, don’t change it just because you think the search engines will like it better. They won’t. In fact, some of the highest ranking sites in Google haven’t been touched in years.

Myth 4: PPC ads will help/hurt rankings. This one is funny to me because about half the people who think that running Google AdWords will affect their organic rankings believe that they will bring them down; the other half believe they will bring them up. That alone should tell you that neither is true!

Myth 5: Your site will be banned if you ignore Google’s guidelines. There’s nothing in Google’s webmaster guidelines that isn’t common sense. You can read them if you’d like, but it’s not mandatory in order to be an SEO. Just don’t do anything strictly for search engines that you wouldn’t do anyway, and you’ll be fine. That said, the Google guidelines are much better than they used to be, and may even provide you with a few good tidbits of advice.

Myth 6: Your site will be banned if you buy links. This one does have some roots in reality, as Google (specifically Matt Cutts) likes to scare people about this. They rightly don’t want to count paid links as votes for a page if they can figure out that they are paid, but they often can’t. Even if they do figure it out, they simply won’t count them. It would be foolish of them to ban entire sites because they buy advertising on other sites.

Myth 7: H1 (or any header tags) must be used for high rankings. There’s very little (if any) evidence to suggest that keywords in H tags actually affect rankings, yet this myth continues to proliferate. My own tests don’t seem to show them making a difference, although it’s difficult to know for sure. Use H tags if it works with your design or content management system, and don’t if it doesn’t. It’s doubtful you’ll find it makes a difference one way or the other.

Myth 8: Words in your meta keyword tag have to be used on the page. I used to spread this silly myth myself many years ago. The truth is that the Meta keyword tag was actually designed to be used for keywords that were NOT already on the page, not the opposite! Since this tag is ignored by Google and used only for uncommon words in Yahoo, it makes little difference at this point anyway.

Myth 9: SEO copy must be 250 words in length. This one is interesting to me because I am actually the one who made up the 250 number back in the late ’90s. However, I never said that 250 was the exact number of words you should use, nor did I say it was an optimal number. It’s simply a good amount to be able to write a nice page of marketing copy that can be optimized for 3-5 keyword phrases. Shorter copy ranks just as well, as does longer copy. Use as many or as few words as you need to use to say what you need to say.

Myth 10: You need to optimize for the long tail. No, you don’t. By their very nature, long-tail keyword phrases are uncompetitive; meaning that not many pages are using those words, and not that many people are searching for them in the engines. Because of this, ranking for long-tail keywords is easy…simply include them somewhere in a blog post or an article, and you’ll rank for them. But that’s not optimization.

Before you go spreading these myths or any other SEO info that you believe is true, test it many times on many sites. Even if it appears to work, keep in mind that it may not always work, or that there could be other factors involved.

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