Search Engine Marketing Seminar
October 20th, 2006 by Anthony Curreri
I attended a Search Engine Marketing Seminar sponsored by Adhost yesterday. When they get the audio and slides of the presentation up I’ll link to that here. It was pretty interesting, here’s what I took away:
Pay Per Click talk by representatives from Point It
- More specific (and relevant) search phrases are more likely to convert than broad terms
- Yahoo offer’s ‘paid inclusion’, which is paid ads in natural listings.
- 62% of users cannot distinguish between paid and organic listings.
- The search pie: Google comprises 49%-55% of the market, while Yahoo is 23.8% and MSN is 9.6%
- Google, Yahoo (which was Overture), and MSN are all separate PPC systems
- Instead of short keyword lists matching on broad, it’s better to have long keyword lists of all permutations with exact matching. They claimed you get a little boost for an exact keyword match.
- Use Webtrends to find what keywords people actually use to get to your site
- This Tool helps you pick keywords.
- You want to turn off optimize the ad for click through rates in google analytics, and do it manually. GA doesn’t wait for statistically relevant responses before it starts favoring ads. Also, turning it off allows you to test two (or more) ads against each other. There may be an ad which leads to more clicks, but actually costs more because it doesn’t lead to conversions.
Organic SEO by Larry Slivitz of SearchWrite
Organic SEO
- Don’t Target your Company Name. His rationale: If people know your company they have found you. You want people who don’t know you to find your company.
- Google and Yahoo have separate Sitemaps. You should use this to ensure your entire site gets crawled, especially if you have dynamic pages. He also liked my idea of including your (local) blog in your sitemap. I’ll see if there is a script to generate this for Word Press, and if not I’ll write one and link to it here.
- You want to increase your PageRank. You do that by Link Building:
Link Building
- You need “Four 4’s to get in Google”. Meaning you need four pages with a PR (Page Rank) of four or above to be ranked well in google.
- Create a “Link to Us” Page. Give code for people to use to link to you, this is important because the text people use in the links to you will be considered by search engines.
- Don’t link to pages with Low PageRanks. These are bad neighborhoods, and Google doesn’t like it when you associate with them. Bad neighborhoods linking to you doesn’t hurt you though.
- Reciprocal Links are a zero sum game. Try to encourage people to link to you without you linking back to them, if possible.
- You can pay for some high-quality links. Being listed in these business directorys will also increase your PR because search engines know you paid for the following links, and so you are a more established site.
- Yahoo Business Directory ($299 annual fee)
- Microsoft bCentral Small Business Directory ($49 annual fee)
- Business.com ($199 annual fee)
- The ODP directory is free but will take a few months for the human editors to approve you
- Find out who is linking to your competitors and see if you can get them to link to you as well (or instead?) on google using the ‘link:www.competitor.com’ operator
- Get listed on Local Listing sites.
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One Response to “Search Engine Marketing Seminar”
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The PPC comments seemed largely on target.
Regarding Organic SEO: in general all links are useful, although some of them from lower PageRanked web pages with lots of links coming from those web pages will do little for you. Google has much refined how PageRank gets into the algorithm and the old rules give only partial explanation of the way links work. However the value of a link to your website is probably still proportional to the PageRank of the web page divided by the number of links on that web page. So the ’sponsored ads’ that I run for Comtech Phones on the right of the web page for many of the Newsletters will be relatively strong. Most of them are PR 5 and have relatively few links out from them.
There are such things as bad neighborhoods but these are websites set up usually with thousands of links, which have employed black-hat SEO methods. They will usually have a PR of 0. However there are many perfectly good web pages that have a PR of 0 and links from them may be a tiny bit useful if you have lots of them.
Reciprocal links if with clearly unrelated websites will have almost zero value. So that is why a Links page put up just to encourage links from others is a waste of time.
On your question of a site map for blog entries, I would think the tool I’ve mentioned in the past would automatically pick them up.
Thanks for sharing this with the world, Tony. I think it’s good to get dialogues like this going. .. and of course the new links you create all help visibility.