esmoretti.com

If you’re in internet marketing, metrics and data are your part life (or at least they should be.) Permit me to be overly buzzwordy, but using data driven decisions to increase ROI should be a goal. However, understand and interpreting data is what separates the good from bad decisions. In the fast paced world of the internet, people are all to eager to jump on the latest fad in fear that we might miss some incredible opportunity.

Compete, Inc. has released information that shows that Facebook now directs more traffic Google. If you haven’t been paying attention for the past year, every month somebody declares that Facebook is the new Google, and as a person that has chronic ‘this-is-too-good-to-be-true’ syndrome, I don’t buy it.

Here’s why, and this is a shocker, because it’s not a data driven decision. It’s also nothing new, and it’s been said before. People using Facebook or social media aren’t looking to be sold to, they are looking to see what their friends are up to. Aaron Wall said it best, Social Media traffic does not buy.

When people search for something they are actively looking for a solution to a problem. So while Social Media gets more traffic, it doesn’t convert. Traffic by itself is worthless. I’d rather have 1000 unique visits per month with a 10% conversion rate than 10,000 visitors with 0% rate.

B-b-b-ut branding… conversations with the customer… my excuse to use twitter at work!? Sure, those are good points (ok, 2 outta 3 ain’t bad), and any company’s marketing mix should include Social Media efforts, but as lead generation activity, SoMe falls flat compared to search.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go get all these buzzwords off me.

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.

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.

Chances are that if you’ve taken a few courses are been employed to design a website for a decent size organization that you’ve heard about the World Wide Web Consortium. The W3C is ” an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.” The W3C provides a standard for several web coding languages like HTML, XHTML, JavaScript, etc.

The W3C provides a validator that makes sure the code you write adheres to a standard. When designing a web page it isn’t necessary to make sure the code adheres to these standards, but there are some benefits. For one, if you are looking for a job in web design, potential employers will be more impressed with code that clean and proper than sloppy with unclosed tags.

There’s a couple of reasons for that. Consider that your potential boss and coworkers will either have to edit your page(s) when you are working there or after you leave. If you really wanted to, you could write a web site in one line. Wouldn’t that be fun to edit?

Even if you’re thinking that nobody but you will edit your pages validation is important. Why? Consider what the W3C has to say about it:

Do remember: household-name companies expect people to visit because of the name and in spite of dreadful websites. Can you afford that luxury?
Even if you can, do you want to risk being on the wrong side of a lawsuit if your site proves inaccessible to – for instance – a disabled person who cannot use a ‘conventional’ browser? Accessibility is the law in many countries. Whilst validation doesn’t guarantee accessibility (there is no substitute for common sense), it should be an important component of exercising “due diligence”. It is now just over a year since a court first awarded damages to a blind user against the owners of a website he found inaccessible (Maguire vs SOCOG, August 2000).

read more »