Anchor text, is the text that becomes the clickable link usually created to avoid placing long URL’s in the body of text or in menus. For example, “Eric Moretti” is the anchor text in this link, Eric Moretti. Anchor text is important for search engines because it usually attributes relevance to the page. Of course, one or two links could have faulty anchor text, but when many pages link using similar anchor text search engines get a better idea of how important a page is to a particular phrase or keyword. As I have mentioned in the past, overzealous link-building can be bad. So simply cramming a bunch of links with anchor text targeting your key phrase will have the same effect as link farming.

So why avoid using ‘click here’ as anchor text? Simply put, it’s wasting potential influence. What does ‘click here’ say about a page? Nothing, because ‘click here’ is probably used as anchor text for billions of links on the web. Make relevant anchor text so that search engines can get a better idea of what your page is about.

Chances are, if your company is small or the internal search marketing department just needs more bandwidth then search agencies or consultants have been brought up. Great! If it’s a small company search marketing can provide great results and if you already have an established search team then an outside expert can always offer a different perspective and help your team develop professionally.

However, as with anything, caveat emptor or buyer beware. Bad agencies will often try to target high traffic terms without taking into account relevancy. This can happen with both Pay-Per-Click and Search Engine Optimization.

With SEO, consultants can walk in and give you great news. “We can get you guys on the first page!” What they don’t tell you is they will get you on the first page for a term that is low traffic and not relevant. It would be pretty easy to rank for “Pink Concrete and Tire Barriers” but how many people actually search for that? Is it even relevant to your business? It’s also number 2 of the “Three SEO Strategies That Stink.”

They might even be able to find a high traffic term and drive a ton of traffic to your site. Chances are though, it won’t be terribly relevant. There is an easy way for you to check this, watch your conversion rate and bounce rate. If conversion rate drops and traffic climbs then they aren’t sending you customers. If bounce rate is approaching 80% then the traffic is quickly leaving your site.

The same is true for PPC campaigns. If your impressions and clicks go sky high and your conversions drop then you are now spending more money on less customers. That’s not good business!

How do you know what search marketing experts are good or bad? Well, if you have unlimited budget you can talk to SEOmoz, Aaron Wall, Danny Sullivan and Search Engine Land to find great agencies. If you are dealing with a smaller local agency a good litmus test is to search for seo + your city and variations of that. If they can’t rank for the terms you want either. This isn’t fool proof either, if they are using black hat techniques to game the system then it can be hard for those not in the know to figure it out.

There’s no reason why you need to go gung-ho and revamp an entire site. Starting your consultants off with a single page or small campaign can be a good way to vet their approach if you have concerns.

1.) Overzealous link-building. Links are great to improve rankings, but just like anything too many of them could have a negative impact on rankings if they aren’t good links. One black hat strategy is to generate links through link farms. Black Hat SEO’s will use worthless sites to make search engines believe that pages are important. In the short term this works and rankings for those pages improve but Google is pretty good at filtering out. What happens when Google figures out what links are spammy? Google either devalues those links or blacklists that site.

2.) High Traffic-Low Relevancy Keywords. If Acme Co. sells custom pipe fittings, but the traffic around custom pipe fittings is low, then bad SEO’s might try to optimize pages for Brittany Spears to draw in traffic. Granted, the IQ of custom pipe fittings and Brittany Spears are pretty much identical, but the two things are very different. If Acme Co. manages to rank and draw traffic from Brittany Spears keywords, how many custom pipe fittings do you think they will sell? Chances are that people looking for Brittany Spears don’t care a whole lot about plumbing. While traffic volume is important it isn’t the be-all to end-all metric that people make it out to be. Just optimize for the relevant term that best fits the page!

3.) Cramming Only Keywords In The Title. We’ve all seen those search results! Custom Widgets, Blue Widgets, Red Widgets, Green Widgets. Uh, what? Remind your SEO that it’s still forward facing marketing – people see this. It looks like crap and doesn’t make people click on it. Write meaningful title tags for people, not robots.

Mmmmm, Donuts. While they happen to be Homer Simpson’s favorite “food” they also happen to be unhealthy. Naturally, that hasn’t run Dunkin’s out of business. Thankfully, we can still get our overly sugary breakfast treats. However, like most food places, Dunkin Donuts is diversified and its big push item is coffee?

How do I know this? Well, I happen to own a TV and whenever I see a Dunkin commercial it’s not for the donuts, it’s for the coffee. While I like donuts, there are mornings I can’t make it through without coffee. Dunkin knows this, and when they go marketing they want you to think of them as a coffee place that offers donuts and not the other way around.

Just look at their home page:

Coffee cup in the logo, coffee beans, coffee drink and a coffee bean cartoon. How many donuts are on that page? Uh… that twist thingy?

That should clue you into what your competitor is concentrating on – what is actually on the page. The name says Donuts, the content says coffee. Let’s look at what SEO experts change when they talk keyword strategy. There are 3 big things, the URL, Page Title and Meta Description. The URL is a hard one, they really can’t escape going with dunkindonuts.com. The page title and meta description offer some pretty concrete evidence that the double D want’s a sip from the coffee cup.

The page title is:

“Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee | Buy Coffee Beans Online.”

Buy coffee beans? What about donuts?

The meta description makes the coffee theme get really obvious:

“Buy Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee Beans Online – ground coffee or whole coffee beans shipped by the pound in Original Blend, Decaf or flavored coffee beans; sign up for regular coffee delivery service. Shop online for coffee gift baskets, coffee makers, Dunkin’ Donuts store gift certificates and coffee lovers gifts.”

They used the word “coffee” a total of 8 times! There are 49 words in that description, and over 15% of them are coffee. If you read that out loud to yourself it sounds like they wrote it on their 3rd pot of coffee.

Why did they try to target coffee? Well, the business reason is that coffee is the 3rd most consumed beverage on the face of the earth and therefor has a pretty big audience. The profit on coffee sales are also pretty good. The SEO reason for it though? According to Google, there are over 2.7 million searchs a month for just the word “coffee” – compared to about 135,000 for “donut.”

What audience do you want to go after? The one that is 2.7 milllion in size, or a paltry 135,000. That’s what I thought.

Is it effective though? Well, from a business perspective I can’t say. Who knows how much coffee Dunkin Donuts sells through its website. It does however, rank 10th for “coffee” in a Google search – your results may vary, and theres reasons for it, not the least of them personalized search.

Although 10th isn’t in the golden top 3 results its not too bad considering it gets beat out by Starbucks, Wikipedia, Folgers and the like. That’s tough competition.

There are some really easy steps to improving search engine rankings that are often over looked. One of the big ones is actually putting keywords in your title. How often do you see a title that simply offers the brand name? Quite often! In fact, lets take the Pepsi challenge! Both Coke and Pepsi have their brand names as their homepage titles. However, Coke gets bonus points for using Cola because it can help them rank for more than their brand name. The simple truth is that Pepsi and Coke’s page titles could be anything they wanted to and they would still rank for their brand names. Why? Because the URL takes care of ranking for their brand name. As an added bonus, sites that link to Coke or Pepsi probably use the brand name as the anchor text. You will notice though, when you search for pop or soda neither Coke or Pepsi show up.

Search results for the keyword 'toilet paper'

What does this have to do with toilet paper? Nothing and everything. Searching for ‘toilet paper’ brings up another one of those missed oppurtunites. There is one brand that ranks for the keyword toilet paper, Charmin. What’s in Charmin’s page title? You guessed it, toilet paper! Guess what, Charmin still ranks for ‘Charmin’ too. It’s good to protect your brand name, but if you’re looking to gain more traffic from search engines, consider placing the actual product or service in the title.

If you run a pay-per-click campaign you are probably very concerned with how much money you spend per click. It should be a goal to target to your audience instead of just putting in a few keywords and setting a budget. To help PPC managers achieve targeting most PPC programs allow for ‘negative keywords.’ That is, words that will not bring up your ad when searched for. Here is an example of why this should be done.

If you use Google reader you have seen the following style ads:

Served up by Google these ads are displayed based on the content of the blog post. It’s clear what is happening here. The PPC manager for Del Opticians is advertising on Google’s Content Network and probably trying to target the keyword ‘glasses.’ There is a slight problem here. The article talks about 3D glasses, not glasses to correct vision. From the consumer perspective, someone who is interested or search for 3D glasses probably isn’t interested in vision correcting glasses or contacts. Adding ’3D’ as a negative keyword to their PPC campaign could help reduce costs without affecting conversion.

It’s about the conversation – not the number of friends or followers.

Social Media has become the buzz word of the day on the internet. Carrying websites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace and turning them to the glorious way for marketers to make money without spending money. It couldn�t be farther from the truth. For one, if you get everyone in your company to Twitter, you�re taking them away from their real jobs. To successfully work in Social Media you need to have a person who understands it and to continually monitoring and developing the plan.

Having a person dedicated to social media does not mean hiring a full time Twitter intern. Social Media is not simply creating Facebook profiles. Social Media is away for companies to open up dialog for consumers and to achieve granular details about the client like never before.

What really attracts people to Social Media is the fact that they can reach people they wouldn�t normally have access to. If you aren�t responding and actively engaging your customers through your social media initiatives then you�re paying someone a lot of money to screw around on the internet.

It�s laughable to see corporate Twitter accounts being followed by 50,000 people � but that corporate account is only following one person. What is that? There is no interaction, there is no socializing, and it�s not social media. It�s almost more laughable when a corporate account follows 50,000 people and still acts the same way the corporate account following one person does. If you don�t occasionally respond to the people that follow you and ask questions it isn�t social media.

Social Media also isn�t another place to jam your brand down consumer�s throats. I follow about 180 people and I probably actively pay attention to are the people who post funny things or post interesting topics. The people who just post a bunch of links to new products � well I don�t follow very many of those. I’ve also started to trim down the people who I don’t find interesting or hold conversations with.

I recently saw a ‘social media expert’ tweet about how they thought it was funny that people with less followers than them would make posts about how to gain twitter followers, and then followed the tweet with a profane hash tag. That person followed some 3,000+ people, what do you think the percentage of people she actually communicated with out of those 3,000 people was. I’m guessing less than .01%. It’s pretty easy to get 3,000 people following you if you follow 3,000 people. The real expert will be the person following 3 people but its followed by 3,000.

Another way people misuse Social Media is they don�t have a plan. �We�ll do it because the kids are into it� isn�t a plan � well it is a plan, but not a plan for success. If that�s your attitude, it�s time to wake up because the internet isn�t going anywhere. You as marketers have the ability connect and get more data about your consumer than you have ever had. Find out what consumers like and dislike about the product. Somebody somewhere hates your product � get over it.

Social Media isn�t Facebook, isn�t Twitter, isn�t MySpace. Don�t get the idea that being on the most platforms means you�re social media forward. You can get more results just using Twitter than all the others combined if you know how to leverage it. Social Media is conversation and dialog with the consumer. If you allow the consumer to leave feedback on your site and actively us the information it supplies that�s more social media forward, and useful than creating a thousand Twitter accounts to have some phantom Twit post to. Social Media is trendy – today it’s Facebook and Twitter, tomorrow who knows?

Do you think the only place people are going to talk negative about your product is on your Facebook page? Why not take the opportunity to defend your product head on, or realize you have serious problems and actually fix the damn thing. It isn�t the 1930�s anymore � word gets around fast when something�s wrong. Because you don�t let people see bad comments on you blog doesn�t mean nobody will see them.

As Dave Culbertson of Lightbulb Interactive points out even most large corporations don�t get Social Media. A big example of this is Ford, which shouts �We use social media, we�re hip and cool� but it fails to be nothing more than the same old tactics of marketing days of old. He calls companies that do this �social media chickenhawks.� See Ford has social media initiatives � but they don�t use them. Dave explains that Ford started off with a neat idea but dropped the ball by only offering up one vehicle model, one that isn�t even sold in the US yet to and then didn�t even bother to interact with the consumers they lent the car to. This point is clearly lost on Ford as their �Social Media Guru� � Scott Monty, who responded to Dave and just didn�t get the point Dave was trying to hit home. Ford should be letting people review their cars on their site � much like most electronics site allow users review products.

It�s about the conversation. Engage the consumer or take the �Guru� off the resume. Because if you�re just doing the same thing you�ve always done, you don�t need a new title, unless that title is Social Media Chickenhawk.

There have been a lot of social media efforts I’ve seen latley that just don’t cut it. It’s a really obvious problem that gets neglected when social media outlets become buzz words on the evening news. Usually it starts out something like this:

Boss: Hey! I heard about this Tweety or Twitter or something like that on the news last night, are we on that?
Marketing Head: Ummm no.
Boss: Well we should be, get us an account ASAP!

First of all, before I get negative, it’s great that companies are trying to stay current with marketing trends. Ugh, I hate that word, trends. That’s really the wrong word for this. Marketing Fashion is a more appropriate term, or maybe marketing fads. If there is one thing to remember about the internet, it’s that it is constantly changing. While Twitter is vogue right now, the shelf life in indeterminate. We can sit and debate how long Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, etc. have to last or we can approach everything with the same question: How can we use this to leverage our company?

Are you ready for some internet marketing blasphemy? Some companies don’t and/or shouldn’t have Twitter. The reality of Twitter, and social media outlets is that it’s addictive. We might go out there as internet marketers to post a new ad, or to tweet about a cool new company product… but then you get sucked into the vortex of poking that attractive person you met at the networking event last week or retweeting that hilarious YouTube video. Which is a really quick way to get fired because internet marketers have a lot of legitimate work. So you think, I know… hire some college kid to do some tweeting for the company. Ok, great, but now you have someone else doing the exact same thing and wasting a whole lot of time and money.

If you can’t answer the question, how can we use this to leverage our company? Don’t do it! Better yet, look at ways you can actually use things to leverage for the company! Traditional marketing, or what I like to call “dumb marketing” like a dumb bomb is a lot of “drop from a plane and hope it hits its target.” Dumb Marketing is the same approach, the flashy ads, the billboards, the TV commercials, etc. Create a big enough presence and eventually that translates to sales. And look, it’s proven, it has worked for eons and that’s great. There’s a big problem with that, it’s costly and it the actual sales generated isn’t all that great considering how many people see an ad.

So, again, how can we use social media to leverage our company. If you’re a traditional marketer your probably think of this word as “incentive” but internet marketers call it engagement. You need to create incentive, or engagement with your social media efforts. If you don’t give your followers something to tweet about then fire the college intern you hired to tweet because you’re wasting time and money. Besides, interns are supposed to learn something and teaching someone how to twitter takes 30 seconds. As marketing differs between industries I will leave you with the same question: How can we use social media to leverage our company? Stop thinking about following the fashion and try to think about why social media is such a buzzword. I’ll give you two big hints, it’s the data and the interaction.

Get your twitter mosaic here.

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Twitter Mosiac does the obvious, turns your flock into a mosiac. still the effect is pretty neat.

To the non-corporate user (IE, most of us) the most noticeable changes will come in the form of the visuals. Both the Facebook “homepage” and corporate pages are changing to become more personable. Now those pages that you are a fan of will look less corporate and more like your buddy. Also good news for you super friendly types, no more cap on 5000 friends.

The new Facebook Home page

The new “Pages to Profiles” shift allows is supposed to make it easier to interact with with those things you become a “fan” of. It seems to be what Facebook is attempting to do is to go after the music crowd hanging around MySpace. It’s really the way it should have been done in the beginning. I’m always a big fan of K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple, stupid) and it really did not make sense for Facebook to differentiate between company pages and friend profiles. Now that’s been fixed.

What’s Facebook going for here?

Facebook wants to incorporate all the good parts of other social networking sites and leave out the bad. Now it’s worried about Twitter. The microblogging site that is capturing congress and media attention has also caught the eye of Facebook. It wants to be your real time friend connection and has looked long and hard at the Twitter model. They hope to take some of that Twitter audience with the updates to the home page. One way that they have attempted to attack the Twitter paradigm is to make the home page update in real time. It’s also added new sorting features to help users sort through the clutter, something Twitter doesn’t do.

If Twitter is watching this, they should really be concerned. I like the simpleness of Twitter but there are some things that it could better do. It seems the real thing that hinders them is servers. We’ve all seen the twitter fail whale. Twitter should be updating pages to be live using an AJAX page or something similar. Although a lot of twitter apps already do this, can Twitter’s servers handle it if the web page does?

The new home page should be going live according to Facebook. Although the changes are impressive, it still leaves me questioning their profit model… are rather, do they have one? It’s hard to be too critical, what I see Zuckerberg & Co. doing is laying the foundation for possibly one of the greatest connection platforms since email. With that amount of connectivity Facebook is bound to capitalize on the interaction but for right now they seem to be playing it cool and getting people in without cost prohibitive fees. Smart move.

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