WHITE HAT SEO BLOG » Search Engine Marketing

Choosing Right Social Media Sites

Internet Geek — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:24:35 +0000

As you are used to choosing the right meat for that BBQ, or the correct bread making machine, so should you chose the right social media site for your company.
The simplest way to choose a site is to do so with one that works for you. Pretty simple really.

You can be in various social sites and then narrow it down to the ones you feel most compelled to use.

Do you need a very friendly, young, hip hop site? Or do you need a serious business-like site? That depends on whether you are selling high priced sneakers to a young crowd or a warehouse full of these sneakers via B2B.

Alternatively, if you do not find a social media site that fits your needs, then go to Ning.com and create your very own.

The pros and cons to using a smaller site like Ning.com is that they do not have the visits, media exposure and is not as well known as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or Twitter.

Therefore, just as you need the right meat for that great BBQ, you will need to find the right show size for those sneakers; otherwise it will be one sore foot at the end of the BBQ.

Live Customer Service Increases Conversions

Internet Geek — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:28:28 +0000

Let’s face it; we all need customer service or some kind of help. We have that need of an immediate fix and preference is given to live help, as opposed to waiting days for an email answer. I mean, if you are willing to wait days for an answer, you might as well send it via the Pony Express!

There are various products on the market today that can meet your need. Here are some of the market leaders. For example:

Live Person – The uniqueness of this service is that you can do it in-house or have an entire network of people waiting to help your customers. The range of expertise is simply awesome. From coaching to personal development, astrology and psychology.

Live Help – Features departments and operators. You also get free lifetime software upgrades. A plus during these tough financial times. And it is PHP based.

Omnistar – This product offers also a PHP based live person, ticket support and knowledgebase. It also comes with a staff calendar. Now that is useful.

CraftySyntax – This product allows multiple languages to operate at one time, along with multiple departments and multiple operators. It is a free PHP based product.

As you can see, there are a plethora of products that suit your particular need.

Reputation Management

Internet Geek — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 18:18:35 +0000

When we talk about reputation management, we usually think of EBay. Where a user leaves, usually, a positive feedback in exchange for another positive feedback. Many see this as a major flaw with this company’s reputation system.

Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) methodologies are often used to protect a brand name and reputation. Increasingly, due to user provided content such as blogs, everything is said about a brand and there is no real policing.

SERM and SEOs are used, along with content management practices to further protect a brand or reputation. With online content management, reputation management is time critical.

One of the tools that can be used for RM is Google Alerts. You will get an email whenever a keyword that you have entered is newly placed on the net. This includes videos, news, groups and images.

With this tool, you are notified within a set time, chosen by you, about you and that gives you the advantage of knowing when you or your product is mentioned.
Also, along with Google Custom Search, you create your “own” search engine. This provides you with specific site searches where your product is mentioned.
There are other sites that help you with Reputation Management, but the two noted above, if using them combined, that could be a great start to your RM control.

Google Analytics – Good but with Limitations

Internet Geek — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:31:31 +0000

Google Analytics is a powerful tool to see what your visitors do on your site. It is an effective analysis weapon that can give you real statistics as to what it is your site is doing on the web.

Knowing the behaviour of your visitor is important, as you need to be able to identify the weak and strong parts of your site and tweak it. Along with AdWords, its integration with it is paramount for this tool to work.

It is free and all you need to do is register your account and add some java snippet to each page on your site.

Google Analytics is not without its limitations. For example, a custom report. It cannot do it. This is a major limitation. Another limitation is ownership transfer. You cannot do it.

The lack of support. Google has its help files, but forget about emailing them to ask a question. Choose some of the forums instead.

AdSense is not integrated with Analytics. You are not allowed to track users. There are hacks available that allow that. Included in the negatives here are two more: heat maps are not part of it. A site report simply does not provide this and, real time tracking is nonexistent. They are updated once every 24 hours.

Website Funnels to Increase Conversions

Internet Geek — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 13:27:06 +0000

A website funnel is a series of pages by which a customer will go through from the first page through to the final page (or thank you page). Typically, this is used in a shopping cart web environment, but is important for all industries.

Clearly, you want the user to buy your pair of shoes, or whatever your product and/or services are. In the case of shoes, you have a page with many shoes, then he chooses brown shoes. Your page then shows brown shoes, sizes, pricing, etc. Then you want the user to input the marketing information (email address, cc information, demographics, etc).

From this part of the funnel, you do not want to lose the customer by him or her going to another shop. You need the customer to click the checkout button and finish the procedure and complete the sale.

The strategy here is to keep the guests and make them register on the site. Many people prefer to shop anonymously and then create an account and then checkout.
The funnel works in reverse if the registration is needed before shopping is allowed. The people who would have bought these shoes, leave, as the pages are too difficult to navigate and too difficult to complete a given transaction.

A rule of thumb is to see if 20 or 30% of them leave before completing the purchase. Then analyse the funnel and see where the fault is with this form abandonment.

The Google Sandbox

Internet Geek — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:21:52 +0000

A new site is sandboxed by Google once indexed. Google tries to find out what this site is all about, before releasing it for higher indexing by the Google SERPS.

You get what is called the sandbox effect: It has not yet been ranked by keywords and is a new site. These sites wait longer to be at the top of a Google page and are basically punished; irrespective of how competitive they are, until such time as Google’s algorithm takes the site out of the sandbox.

There are many ways to try to avoid the sandbox. One of them is to check your site with the many sandbox checkers on the web. You input your URL and check. If you are sandboxed then the following may help.

A new site is given enough rope to hang itself. Google SERPS give you a fair ranking and essentially wait for you to screw that up. Get natural links on your page (other sites linking to yours).

Possibly purchase an older site and ride on its coat tails for a higher ranking. This helps with the age bonus factor, where the site has been up for a long time and the SERPS therefore reward you.

Add no more than 10 new links to your site. Also, add quality content to the site. Don’t just link to your homepage but also deeper pages.
And finally, try to get a higher ranking with Yahoo or MSN. That can only help you with staying out of the sandbox.