Search Engine Optimization News

SEM/SEO Most Important Marketing Tactic

Friday, January 9, 2009

A recent study from SLI Systems asked 319 respondents about the importance of various technologies and tactics in terms of their effect on ecommerce strategy.

While the sample for the study was not necessarily large, it tended to support many preconceived ideas about which web technologies and techniques are the most effective for online retailers. Search engine marketing and optimization, which embodies both SEO and pay-per-click efforts, were clearly the most important marketing tools in the survey respondents’ opinion, garnering a vote of “Very Important” from 70 percent of those asked.

Email marketing was also an important tactic, a finding which parallels results from a recent Practical eCommerce study.

Source - practicalecommerce.com


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posted by SEO Expert @ 3:44 AM permanent link   | |

Choose Your CMS With Care

Monday, January 5, 2009

The best time to start working on SEO is before you start building your site. It goes back to that old saying: "If you don't have time to do it right, will you have the time to do it over?" And, of course you don't have time to do it over. One of the biggest ways to shoot yourself in the foot is at the very, very beginning, when you select your Content Management System (CMS).


With a poor CMS selection you can truly ruin your chances of success. The reason for this is that SEO is a relatively new discipline and most CMS systems were created before SEO was an important consideration. As a consequence, the product managers and software developers who created most CMS systems did not have SEO on their radar. In addition, SEO friendly website code has no real direct relationship to smart coding practices. Here are just three examples (of many) of dire consequences that can occur when you choose a CMS that's not search friendly:


Massive duplicate content issues. A lot of CMS systems create this problem by allowing specific pages on your site to be addressable at multiple different URLS, and then they compound the problem by actually using more than one URL to refer to those pages. As a result, this becomes a guaranteed duplicate content problem, and in some cases, it can occur on a massive scale.


This can really hurt the search engine traffic for a new site by slowing down the crawling of the site. More precisely, every time a search engine crawler spends time crawling a page with duplicate content on it is time that crawler will not spend crawling new unique pages on the site. As a result, indexing of the pages of your new site is slowed. In addition, any links to these duplicate versions of pages are completely wasted. The cumulative link juice (aka PageRank) of your site is a precious resource, and you don't want to squander any of it on pages that will never be included in the search engine index.


No control over meta data. Hard as it may be to believe, there are CMS systems that do not allow you to create unique meta data for your web pages. For example, imagine every page of your site with the exact same title tag. Given that this is the single most important on-page SEO factor that you have complete control over, well, not having control over it seems silly doesn't it?


Or, imagine every page of your site with the same meta description tag. Meta description tags do not affect rankings, but they are often used as the description shown for your web pages in search results. What a wasted opportunity! Well written meta tags tell users why they should come to your page instead of going to the other 9 web pages listed in the results next to yours.


Dynamic URLs that change over time. This is an interesting one. It's kind of like playing "now you see me, now you don't" with the search engines. The content appears on one URL, and a short while later it has moved to another URL. Can this really happen? Yep.


The consequences of this are clear. The search engine will have indexed your content, and will begin to return that content in the results. Users see your stuff in the results, click on it, and land on a 404 page. In addition, the search engine comes back and does not find the page either, and must rediscover it at its new location through crawling. Search engines are not dynamic systems when it comes to understanding your web site, and rediscovering the page could take months. That's another ouch.


Can these CMS problems be fixed later? You can certainly replace a CMS but this is likely to be a huge expense, and it is also likely to set back your SEO by the time it takes to rebuild the site plus a solid 6 months. Ouch. Alternatively, you can use products like Netconcepts GravityStream to retroactively address these problems. This is a great solution for many companies that have been burdened with a bad CMS choice, but it is not free, and also takes time to implement.


Whatever you do, don't come out of the gate with an SEO unfriendly CMS. And, rest assured, there are still a lot of CMS systems that are SEO unfriendly. For the record, I should also state that there are CMS systems that are truly SEO friendly too. The trick is to evaluate this up front, and not simply be satisfied with claims by the software publisher that they are SEO friendly. Make sure they show you some live examples of SEO friendly sites built using their CMS, and have a competent SEO evaluate those sites for you.

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posted by SEO Expert @ 2:32 AM permanent link   | |

SEO and PPC Cannibalization

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Cannibalize: It's a Don't

Cannibalization can occur when your SEO and PPC activities compete against each other and/or one (usually paid search) is unnecessary or even wasteful due to the success of the other.

It can take place in any of the following scenarios:

* You Already Have a High Organic Ranking

If you have a high organic ranking for your key search terms, you may not want to bid on those terms in paid search, as you may end up diverting potentially "free" (organic) traffic to get users to click on your sponsored search ads (that you pay for).

Keep in mind, it's highly unlikely for a site to obtain a strong organic ranking on every keyword phrase relevant to its audience. So paid search would likely still be important to support your organic efforts and gain presence on the more elusive keywords.

* Your Company and Web Site Has Strong Brand Awareness

If your brand is well known, your audience will probably easily find your Web site without the help of paid search. Your Web site is likely already coming up at the top in the organic listings due to high link value, and many people will go directly to your Web site. In these cases, it may not make sense to "pay" for your brand name or variations of it through paid search.

That said, just because your brand awareness is high, doesn't mean everyone will automatically search for your brand. They might think first of the type of product or service they need and search for that instead (e.g. "iPod") versus your brand or company name (e.g. Apple).

* Your Organic Listing and PPC Ads Are Similar

If your organic listings are identical or similar to your paid search listings, there may not be any added value in undertaking paid search. A key advantage to paid search is that you can control the content of your listing and the landing page you are pointing to. In the case that your organic listings are serving up the right message and page to your users, this advantage is no longer required.

When these three situations occur, you may want to think twice about employing paid search, or evaluate exactly how you will use it.

However, before giving up on paid search too quickly, keep in mind that there are significant opportunities to create synergy with your paid search and organic search activities.

Synergize: It's a Do!

A brand could gain positive synergy from having both organic and paid search in the following scenarios:

* Brand defense. If your brand does not have a high organic position, you will want to be sure that you own the sponsored search SOV whenever your brand name is searched for, and potentially when your key competitor names are entered.

* Enhance your presence. Because you don't have much control over the description on your organic listing, having PPC can ensure that the message you want your audience to see is being delivered.

* Ensure landing page control. When your organic listings are driving to obscure or less than desirable pages, paid search enables you to exert control over which page on your site you drive your audience into based on the keyword.

* Combat negative PR. If your company or industry is subject to negative press, you want to make sure your message is seen first. If you don't have a high organic ranking, paid search can be used to make sure your site is listed above the negative ones, ensuring your audience hears about the benefits of your products and services first.

There are many considerations when deciding whether to employ one or both paid search activities. Ultimately, if SEO and paid search activities are planned strategically, it will exponentially benefit your campaign.

Source -clickz.com

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posted by SEO Expert @ 3:45 AM permanent link   | |

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