Steven Nash

eCommerce and Digital Marketing

Category: SEO

Online Marketing Show 09 – London Olympia

Just finished up at the Online Marketing Show at the Olympia and there wasn’t really a lot to report, there was certainly an abundance of SEO and PPC firms but a worrying dearth of analytics firms there.  The only name I spotted was Webtrends which is a shame considering the number of interesting analytics toolsets out there, perhaps they’ve appeared there in past years and haven’t generated much business from it. If that’s the case then it’s a worrying scenario when we work on the most accountable sales channel – with powerful metrics showing where your sales come from and where you are simply throwing money down the toilet. Interesting…

The most interesting stuff in a very mixed bag was a demonstration of ‘augmented reality’, a term I’d heard of but didn’t understand.  Basically a webcam was focused on a piece of white paper which had something that looked like a large QR code on it, instantly a 3d rendered model of a car appeared on an adjacent monitor which was relaying the footage from the webcam. As I moved the paper around in my hand the car rotated as well.  While I couldn’t think of any use of this technology on any websites I currently work with, I can certainly see some creative implementations from very large brands over the next couple of years.

Pure 360 gave an interesting presentation about some do’s and dont’s of email marketing (unsurprising considering they’re an email marketing agency) and pleasingly encouraged the audience to test as much as possible. Man after my own heart.

Not all link building campaigns are created equal

Link-building, the result of an irrational obsession with the ‘green bar’ can damage your health.

Why? Two reasons:

  • Your main focus should be on delivering a regular stream of good content, peppered liberally with good keywords, marked up in an accessible way. Link building obsessions can take your eye off the ball.
  • The approach towards link building campaigns vary wildly with some tactics used that are downright dangerous!

Just as unnatural sounding product descriptions stuffed with keywords will undermine a user’s trust, poor link-building campaigns can produce similar effects.

Dangerous link-building campaigns

Last year, I had to evaluate a link-building campaign and it generated a few horrific gasps as I looked at each backlink in detail.

The site had been associated with low quality blogs containg bad or hardly any content.  In one instance the backlink was sandwiched between links to other sites which were either poor  pornographic.

Any development on your site including SEO strategy must be focused through the prism of your ultimate goals, in the case of an e-commerce site you should be gaining targeted traffic and persuading visitors to buy.  If a user stumbles upon less than reputable link partners, this could undermine your attempts at persuasion and lose sales.

Beware of link farms

The number of SEO companies that create link building campaigns based on ‘link farms’ is still worrying.  Following some research, I found that the majority of backlinks in the campaign I mentioned earlier had been purchased from a few users on a blackhat SEO forum.  The domains had lapsed, individuals would buy the registration and post them on the forum for sale with thread titles like ‘PR 5 domain for $10’.

The majority of these links came from the same IP range, the danger here is that Google will see these as ‘link farms’ and see it as a cynical attempt at cheating your way to a good ranking, rather than appearing to be a genuine set of links from webmasters who have seen your content and like it.

Review your link-building campaign

If you’ve outsourced your link-building campaign insist on as much transparency as possible – ask for a regular spreadsheet of links that have been acquired, research those links yourself or ask your IT team to do it (I recommend SEO Spyglass for obtaining a good list of backlinks, the competitor analysis is worthwhile using too), and ask the following questions:

  • Is it a good quality site?
  • Is it related to the topic of your site?
  • Was the domain name sold within the last few months (if so, it’s a fair bet it’s been bought by vultures and part of a linkfarm – avoid!)?
  • Are there a suspicious number of links from the same IP range?

There’s nothing inherently bad about link-building, but make sure your campaign doesn’t actually harm your SEO and persuasion efforts – you have been warned!

Bing & Web Analytics Reporting

I’ve just been looking at last weeks web analytics data and I’ve spotted something that I expect will cause other people problems as well.  I’ll use the example of Clicktracks because that’s the web analytics solution that I use regularly,  I expect similar issues could arise with other analytics software.

Here is a snapshot of the paid search referrals from MSN adcenter for the week ending 30th May 2009

Week ending 30th May - PPC MSN

Week ending 30th May - PPC MSN

Ok…. so here’s the paid search data for the week ending 6th June.

Week ending 6th June- PPC MSN

Week ending 6th June- PPC MSN

Wow – where did all my visitors go?  Relax – they’re still there, but since Live.co.uk now redirects to Bing and Clicktracks isn’t yet recognising Bing as an engine so I’m not getting accurate stats on the search engine report.  Hopefully there’ll be an update soon.

UPDATE – Just been chatting to a confused webmaster who was unable to find out why Google Analytics was reporting that her MSN referrals had dried up, now she knows why! Google Analytics needs to update too as Bing shows up as one of my top referrers, but not in the search report.  Phew… Lets hope Microsoft stick with this brand for a bit longer this time round eh?

6 WordPress plugins I can’t live without…

WordPress is much more powerful than you might think and I love searching through the plethora of plugins available that can add in functionality that will turbo-charge your blog.

All-in-one SEO Pack

One of my main gripes with WordPress is that you can’t apply tailored meta tags and title tags to a blog post.  By default, all tags inherit from whatever tags you’ve specified for your homepage – unsurprisingly enough if you want to get ahead on the search engines, you’ll need to make sure you can specify apropriate titles and meta tags per blog post.  This excellent plugin fixes that.

Akismet

When you first set up your blog – be prepared for comment spam, it’s very annoying and even if you set up moderation on comments you’ll still get an alert everytime someone wants to post vague and poorly worded comments like ‘Good post. I like.’, accompanied by a link to some site selling viagara.  Akismet is a spam filter that makes my life much easier, I’ve heard there are other good alternatives but I’ve not had a problem with Akismet.

TweetMeme

Twittering is obviously a good way of getting some immediate traffic to your latest news articles and blog posts and giving a clear call to action to encourage people to post your link via twitter is great!

Twitter Status

A good way of adding a constant stream of fresh content to your site by displaying your current Twitter status – a great way to get new followers too.  My only issue with it, is it’s reliance on JavaScript – but I’ve looked at some alternatives and they’re not as good.

WP-Gravatar

Ever been on a blog and found that the users posting comments have avatars – that’s because they’ve registered on the site right?  No!  Gravatars is a global avatar system and wordpress blogs can hook into and extract the correct avatar based on the email address that’s posted a comment on your blog – very cool!

Google XML Sitemaps

Like the All-In-One SEO pack – this makes your life easier if you want to get some traffic from natural search.  Your XML sitemap comtaining URL’s of all of your pages are automatically generated after updates to your blog.

Any recommendations and suggestions for other plugins I should look at,  post them below.

BING it on! Microsoft’s ‘decision engine’

“Hang on one second and I’ll just Bing it!”… no, it doesn’t sound very likely does it? Having criticized MSN/Live Search for lacking a brand name that rolls off the tongue, it would appear that Microsoft reached for the scrabble set, threw it in the air and picked whatever tile combination landed at their feet.

From a marketing point of view – how do you get people to use Microsoft Live Search, or MSN? Those names just cannot enter the publics imagination in the way that Google has.  MSN is probably too strongly identified with Instant Messaging and ‘Live Search’ isn’t something likely to get used in conversation. Google has become a verb, Google defines what a web search is, and while ‘Bing’ is probably an attempt at addressing this issue, it just sounds terrible.

The most puzzling thing about Microsoft and the web, is that there doesn’t seem to be a strategy, with search sites seemingly abandoned quickly after hoping that setting it as the default engine in IE is enough to steal the market share from Google. It won’t. Google is the dominant search player because it delivers relevant results. It appeared at a time when alternative search engines were increasingly being overloaded by spammy results and creeping functionality led to unbearable homepages. Anyone remember Yahoo from a few years ago? An incredibly busy homepage with links to features and content that the vast majority of users didn’t need. Then came this new site which just had a search box, delivered relevant results in a clean uncluttered way.

So uncluttered in fact that if you dressed up identical search results and branded them up as Google, Yahoo and Live Search respectively, users believed that Google delivered the more relevant results.

The Register’s analysis is an interesting read, particularly when it talks about Microsoft’s decision to label Bing as a ‘decision engine’.

The Marketing Dinosaurs Are Extinct

Online Marketing Manager – a job title that appears in increasing numbers on job search sites, but it’s probably to be expected that an adequate description has not been settled on, and given the constantly changing, ever evolving nature of the web a satisfactory description will probably remain rather flaky.

The problem with online marketing in general is the number of Dinosaurs who are trying to transfer their skills from old-school media into this new age.

The proliferation of Internet access has been rapid, first with painfully slow dial-up connections and then almost as rapidly broadband connections – which are still becoming ever faster.

We’re not tied to the old fashioned breeze block style desktop PC anymore, with mobile phones allowing us to twitter on trains, & check your email at a football match. Right now I’m blogging from a tiny Acer netbook on a wireless connection. The online marketers who truly understand technology and the general direction it’s heading are the marketers who will prosper now, and continue to prosper. While general marketing principles can be transferred they need to be revised and updated to tackle this new media.

As Jeffrey & Bryan Eisenberg explain brilliantly in ‘Waiting for your cat to bark’, the increasing choice of media, be it more traditional such as magazines and television – or web-based have had a dramatic impact on how target customers behave. The increasing specialization of TV channels and the syndication of web content and the ability to display only the content relevant to the individual via services such as iGoogle means ‘1-size-fits-all’ style advertising campaigns have less of an impact than they once did.

Unless you understand this shift, it is difficult to succeed in online marketing, that’s why an increasing number of online marketers will have an academic background in technology. In many ways it is easier to transfer the skills of a web technology graduate to the online marketing role.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing…

SEO – I’ve yet to meet a traditional marketer who understands exactly what it is and how it should be practiced.

I’ve heard flippant dismissals and unjustified faith in snake-oil salesmen-like unethical agencies who deliver nothing but poor quality keyword-stuffed pages.

Better yet I’ve recently heard from one marketer who believed that Google would actually phone you up and tell you off if you had duplicated someone else’s content.

Make sure you write unique content and brush your teeth kiddies – or the GoogleMan will get you!

In itself, it seems fairly innocuous stuff – after all, does it matter if you believe in nonsense like that as long as the end-result is the same?

Well yes it does, because it leads to a very disjointed, jarring approach to online marketing, when what you should be striving for is a holistic approach. An approach focused on communicating your product benefits effectively, serving a user’s needs and answering their questions.

Online marketing should primarily be about fixing holes in a leaking bucket (your persuasion process):

  • Attracting your target users (Pouring more water into the bucket)
    • SEO, PPC, email marketing
  • Maximising your site performance (fixing those holes, so it doesn’t leak as much!)
    • Site usability, persuasive copy.

Search Engine Optimization is as much about the implementation of web technology as it is about writing, the myriad of issues that can affect the performance of a site in the SERPS make it difficult for a traditional marketer to perform such a task, or hold an agency accountable for potentially shoddy work.

Pay-per-click in isolation is something that can be run by a traditional marketer (writing good ad copy), the problem is – it’s performance is linked to the performance of your website, and this performance is measured by tracking user activity with analytics and usability testing – something traditional marketers rarely embrace.

If you’re constantly testing and incrementally improving how your site deals with it’s current traffic levels, retain existing customers and attract new ones – you’ll constantly be improving turnover and lowering your cost per acquisition.

Despite this, the number of online marketers who arrive into a new role and ditch the current site without performing any type of analysis on it, is staggering. What successful business ditches a site without analysing what went well, and what went wrong?

After a site design, too many sites are basically abandoned with a sigh of relief – ‘phew! The new site is live, we can forget about that until next year when we try to justify our salaries by asking for the annual redesign.’

What about testing individual page elements with a split test (Google’s free ‘website optimiser’)? Does the change work? If yes, make the change permanent and devise your next experiment.

Online businesses are much more accountable than their offline equivalents. Log files, Javascript tracking, usability tests all offer insight into what works on sites and where problem areas lie, and yet too often massive business decisions are made on the whim of an arrogant online marketer who doesn’t exploit the resources now so freely available – these are dangers that are much more likely to be avoided by the new breed of tech-savvy individuals who understand the medium now and where it is going, rather than old dinosaurs transferring what worked 10 years ago to a new and much more accountable medium.

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