Denver Search Engine Optimization Meetup – Don’t Miss!
The Denver Search Engine Optimization Meetup is launching 2010 with a bang. The meetup has grown substantially over the last two years, and is collaborating with two other meetups for the January 21, 1010 event.
The Denver SEMPO Meetup is hosting a presentation from Todd Barrs of Spyglass, LLC (a local Conversion Optimization Consultant). This event will also be the start of a new Denver/Boulder Conversion Optimization January Meetup , to cover website conversion topics every month. From the meetup page:
Join us at the January Denver SEMPO meetup for a fantastic introduction to conversion optimization!
Google’s introduction of Website Optimizer in 2006 has since increased the awareness and availability of conversion testing in the marketplace. Yet, so many organizations still fail to harness the power that a properly executed conversion strategy can bring to a website. Successful conversion strategies begin with a thorough customer analysis, and the alignment of website goals with visitors’ needs.
Hope to see you there!
Jim Kreinbrink
Denver SEMPO: InHouse vs. Agency – Search Engine Marketing Insights Panel
Denver SEMPO is hosting an excellent panel discussion The Denver SEMPO Meetup is hosting a panel discussion of In-House Search Marketing vs. Search Marketing Agencies this month. For all you interested in SEO / SEM, this program will have some valuable information and experiences shared. The panelists are among some of the best SEOs from both sides of the isle. As a top Denver SEO Agency, Hyper Dog Media is also a sponsor of the program.
It’s going to be at the Tivoli Center on the Auraria campus. You can see details below and on our Denver SEMPO Meet Up page. There is also a charge of $25 for the program. It will be a good very informative meeting. We’d love to see you there.
Date: October 23 — 5:30-7:30
Go to Denver SEMPO Meet Up page: Denver SEMPO Meetup Group
InHouse vs. Agency – Search Engine Marketing Insights Panel
> Is there a difference between an internet marketing campaign created by an In-House Marketer vs. an Agency Marketer?
> Are the challenges different?
> Which is more likely to be successful?
Learn the perspectives from both sides of the fence!
Instead of the normal Denver SEMPO Meet Up we are going to have a panel discussion concerning the difference between in-house search marketers and those from agencies. Your paid RSVP gives you access to an evening of great networking opportunities with likeminded SEM’ers, light refreshments and the chance to “pick the brains” of some of the top people in our profession.
The following search marketing professionals will be taking questions from attendees and sharing their professional knowledge and experience in establishing, growing and maintaining their search marketing campaigns:
In-House Search Engine Marketers:
* Everett Sizemore – Gaiam
* Jim Brown – Quark (SEMPO)
* Joe Gira – Regis University
Agency Search Engine Marketers:
* Steve Riegel – Faction Media (SEMPO)
* Jason Lehman – Hyper Dog Media (SEMPO)
* Nicholas Yorchak – Lee Ready (SEMPO)
The evening is certain to be worth your while.
Save the date and spread the word.
To Register: Denver SEMPO Panel Discussion Registration
4 essential questions when planning a web design
Successful web development projects require a tremendous amount of planning, and planning starts with asking the right questions. Any web design benefits from extra planning, but 4 questions should define the entire project from the start:
1. Who is my target audience?
Too many websites try to be all things to all people. Instead, think of your most important visitors and design according to their tastes. They may or may not appreciate animation. They may be on dialup connections or they may be visiting the site via a cell phone. Knowing your website’s target audience is vital to the project, even before a web site design has been created.
2. What do I want them to do?
If the purpose of your website is to get prospective customers to call, be sure your phone number is prominently displayed. A link to the “Contact Us” page should also be prominently displayed. Other websites may want to capture email addresses or newsletter signups. Ecommerce websites want to make a sale. Whatever the objective, make it as easy as possible for your customers.
3. How will they get to my site?
With competition among websites growing daily, it’s important to plan how you will increase the visibility of your website. Will you blog? Or participate in forums? You might even use pay-per-click advertising on Google AdWords. There are many ways to bring targeted visitors to your website, but they won’t come just because you’ve launched a new website design. Plan ahead, and watch your website bring you new business!
4. How can I measure the project’s success?
Many smaller website owners do not measure their web site metrics or statistics. Without an idea of traffic patterns and popular keywords, it is difficult to tell if a new web site design is effective. Are web site visitors converting to leads? Is the web site generating sales? Only by measuring can you know for sure.
Search Marketing Standard: Read it twice
I’m still getting two copies of Search Marketing Standard magazine, but I’m not reporting it. First off, it’s so good that I don’t want to possibly miss an issue by having anyone mess with my subscription. With other magazines, I’ve found that fulfillment centers sometimes get confused, and it’s usually months before I realize a certain issue isn’t coming. I just can’t risk it. Every article is good.
Secondly, I’ll probably read through it twice. Might as well have a fresh crisp copy the second time. I wonder if I’ll even dog-ear the same pages?
Here are four excellent resources for anyone interested in SEO, internet marketing, ecommerce, and the affiliate scene:
1. Search Marketing Standard
2. Practical Ecommerce
3. Revenue
4. Internet Retailer
It is essential that web designers and web site developers start paying attention to the many facets that can make or break an online business. These publications can help get you serve your clients!
5 web design & SEO tips from the world of PPC
Many view the worlds of Pay Per Click Advertising and Search Engine Optimization as opposites. While they are certainly very different, the goals are similar: bring eyeballs(with wallets) to your site and make it easy for them to buy. Here are 5 tips to improve your SEO based on lessons from PPC.
1. Converting keywords
Some keywords convert into sales better than others. Use your analytics to discover which keywords are bringing you sales, then target them with your SEO campaign. PPC(Pay-Per-Click) ads are a wonderful testbed to discover those converting keywords if you are pressed for time.
2. Your title and metadescription are your ad
When composing your titles and metadescriptions, remember they will be shown in the search engine result pages. It’s like having an advertisement to click, but without Google’s AdWords rules. Always remember you are competing against the other pages in the SERPS(Search Engine Result Pages) – who will get the click?
3. Landing pages
It’s great to optimize for your homepage, but setup some (even more relevant) landing pages and be sure they get some of the inbound links you are building.
4. Optimize landing pages for different steps in the buying process
As visitors reach your site, think about what step they might be at in their buying process? Are they conducting preliminary research? Give them links to bookmark your content, send it to a friend, or signup for your newsletter. Is their search so specific that they are probably ready to buy? Now is the time to wave the free shipping!
5. Split Test
Internet marketing is measurable. Why not setup split tests when you design your web pages? Create a couple of similar pages(avoid duplicate content) and use your analytics to measure performance. When your sample size tells you which one is better, adjust the worst of the two and measure again. Or create a third page. Hey, why not? HMTL is still free.
7 untimely ways for a SEO to die
In ancient Rome, the ghosts of the ancestors were appeased during Lemuria on May 9. Not many people know that, and even fewer care. But in the spirit of Lemuria, we offer seven untimely ways a SEO can die(It’s a dangerous world out there, and also I’m low on blog posting ideas):
- Bitten by search engine crawlers.
- Trampled by googlebots(This is actually the best way to go, if you have to).
- Trip over a HTML tag someone forgot to close. (This was funnier last night when I thought of it – go figure)
- You get (google)whacked while visiting a bad link neighborhood.
- You’re doing the googledance, slip on a banana peel and hit your head. Certainly I’m not the only one who knows the googledance? Please submit your videos if you know it: googledance@hyperdogmedia.com.
- You receive a suspicious package in the mail, and it turns out to be a googlebomb.
- Setting linkbait traps and you get an arm caught.
Please submit any other ideas you might have via email: lemuria@hyperdogmedia.com. So strike up that pun machine, it’s Friday!
Update: Debra just suggested you could “overdose on link juice” – if only!
9 Common Web Design Mistakes Prevent Google From Indexing Your Site
Web Designers frequently destroy their clients’ chances of ranking well in Google, without even knowing it! Here are three common mistakes that can ruin a client’s chances of ranking well in Google, Yahoo or MSN – simply by preventing the site from being indexed!
Search engines follow regular text links, but web designers like to use these unfriendly search engine navigation methods:
1. JavaScript Menus
Search Engines do not follow links reliably in JavaScript, if at all.
2. Imagemaps
Search Engines cannot see the image, and so cannot classify the relevance or topic of the link. Lesser search engine robots do not even attempt to follow imagemap links.
3. Image Links / Rollover links
These links frequently contain JavaScript, but also are difficuly for search engines to classify.
4. JavaScript popups
Search Engines do not follow JavaScript reliably, and do not seem to like popups at all!
5. “Jump menus”
These pulldown menus are usually submitting a form. If the form target is sent GET requests, there is a chance that the links will be followed in some manner, but again – this isn’t reliable navigation for Search Engines.
6. NOSCRIPT embedded links
We were told that content in NOSCRIPT tags is for those visitors that have JavaScript off. But if you were told this means search engines, you were told wrong! This HTML tags has been abused by spammers early on, and search engines do not reliably follow navigation within these tags.
7. Frames – they’re rarely done in a search friendly manner
More on the “right way” in a later post. Frames are challenging for search engines, and we have recently seen Google penalizing framee-based sites, perhaps due to the usability challenges they can present.
8. Java
Java cannot be executed by search engines. Many early rollover effects relied on Java, but the navigation cannot be read by search engine robots.
9. Flash
Flash navigation cannot be followed by search engines. Splash pages can become a deadend for search engines, and alternatives to Flash navigation should always be given.
So what can you do to be sure that search engines will crawl your site? We’ll have answers in a future post, but a frequent supplement to websites that use the above techniques – meant almost entirely for search engines – is a set of footer links for seach engines to follow.
Google Hell: How the supplemental index can kill a company
Google Hell is a term being used to describe a sudden, far drop in a website’s ranking on Google. The ranking is usually for an important – or many different important – keyword terms.
I’m pleased an article on Google Hell being covered in the mainstream press. It’s a phenomenon known to main online businesses, tied heavily to changes in the Google algorthym. Some of the excellent points in the article:
- The criteria for Google’s Supplemental Index can be vague.
- “Grey-area” techniques are sometime necessary to compete on the internet with larger stores.
- Duplicate content penalties exist!
- Newly created sites are especially vulnerable to falling into the supplemental index.
- Buying links may now be a deciding factor in whether your site ends up in the supplemental results.
The article quotes Jim Boykin and Micheal Gray. Besides the great sources, it is refreshing that businesses are starting to see the importance of search engine marketing to the bottom line.
3 things NOT to do: The importance of titles in SEO
Sometimes webdesigners get low blood sugar, or suffer minor head injuries. The effect? Bad HTML title tags.
Title tags are an important piece of real estate on your page. In properly structured HTML, it’s the first chance for you to tell human prospects and search engine visitors what your page is about. Depending on the search engine, page titles are someytimes shown prominently is results – your page is likely to be passed up if it doesn’t look relevant to the potential visitor’s search. Think about your page title as an advertisement for your website!
Since I’m feeling snarky today, here are three things NOT to do when creating your title tags:
1. “Welcome to our website”
It sounds like a friendly greeting for your human visitors, but it completely ignores the wonderful gift that a title tag can be. A title tag is a chance to tell both human and search engine visitors just how helpful your content is. Use this chance to target keywords that BRING and CONVERT traffic.
2. “Unititled Page”
If your web designer is using Dreamweaver, hope that they are properly caffeinated when they are working on your page. Otherwise, they may forget to change your HTML title tag from the default. Don’t expect quality traffic when you are one of the almost ONE MILLION pages that have “Untitled Page” as their title.
3. “Welcome to Adobe GoLive”
You can probably guess where this default page title came from. Check out the ONE MILLION crappy page titles. Oh, that’s neat: version 6 is out. I think we can see what they DIDN’T improve.
What SHOULD you do in your title tags? Keywords, focused sets of keywords. More on that in a later – and less snarky – posting.
MSN adCenter Update: Will it compare to Google AdWords?
For those of you not currently signed up with MSN adCenter, you may want to give it a look(starting tomorrow).
On April 26, 2007, we’re upgrading Microsoft adCenter with the improved navigation, reporting, and campaign management features from our beta site…
While I currently like some of the MSN adCenter demographic targeting and PPC keyword bargains, I think they have room for improvement. Will this be MSN’s “Panama” upgrade that catches it up to Google? We’ll know soon enough!
Also from the email:
Additional feature upgrades will also occur on April 28, 2007. During this upgrade, adCenter will be unavailable for up to 24 hours starting at 12:00 P.M. Pacific Time. Your ads will continue to run as scheduled during both adCenter upgrades.
With these upgrades, you’ll experience new features that will allow you to:
- Search within your campaigns. Use full text search to easily find ads, keywords, ad groups, campaigns, and accounts. Please note that orders are now called ad groups.
- Save important items in Favorites. Tag your campaign items for follow-up using Favorites.
- Quickly navigate your accounts. Use the improved navigation to quickly navigate to any campaign or ad group in your account.
- Easily access help content. Hover over the green question mark icons for pop-up help tips.1
- Manage keywords faster. Bulk edit keyword settings and delete low-performing keywords.
- Save time importing campaigns. Directly import your campaigns from other search advertising programs.
- One click downloads. Download your datasets into Excel with one click.
- And more! View our blog and watch the webinar for tips and training on these new features.
If you have any questions, please contact our adCenter support team.
Sincerely,
The Microsoft adCenter Team
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are you upgrading Microsoft adCenter?
Over the past few months, we’ve been running improvements on the adCenter beta site, which has been available to customers in our U.S. Content Ads pilot. Now, it is time to share these new and improved features with all advertisers.Will my campaigns be affected?
Your campaigns will continue to run as scheduled. With this upgrade, using adCenter is now easier and more efficient. The updates provide you with improved campaign management, navigation, and reporting.Where can I learn more about the most recent updates to adCenter?
Our webinar, walks you through the features that will be included in this upgrade, and additional information can be found on our adCenter blog.
Google Advertising Professionals
Hyper Dog Media is proud to employ Google Advertising Professionals. We are one of the few Google AdWords Qualified Companies in Colorado.
Yahoo Search Marketing Ambassador
Hyper Dog Media is proud to be a Yahoo Search Marketing Ambassador
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