Pleasanton Web Design

UPDATE: I am out of gift cards for now. Will be getting some $75 credits soon, so check back. Please note that I need your mailing address, not your email address. Businesses in the U.S. get priority. Sorry – SEO and Web design companies are not eligible.

As a Google Engage partner, Google gives me $100 Google Adwords Gift cards to hand out to my clients. I have a limited number of left. To get yours:

1. Go to http://www.tpdesigns.net
2. Click on the “Contact” link at the top of the page
3. Fill in your contact information – put your mailing address in the “Message” field,

That’s it! I’ll mail you the gift card. Supplies are limited, so do it now. The $100 is only valid until January 31.

Taking advantage of the current trends in social networking doesn’t have to be difficult or time consuming. You don’t need a social networking “guru” to get you set up. Here are the basic elements I recommend to get started.

1. Start a blog. This is the core of your social networking strategy. The overall goal should be to drive traffic and increase search engine authority of your website. The bottom line is that if you have value to add to the Internet, your website blog is your forum to do so.

After everything is set up, your blog will be the only thing you need to spend time on regularly. Everything else will be automatic.

2. Get Social. Create a Facebook profile, and create a Facebook Page for your business. Open a Twitter account. Create a LinkedIn personal profile and a Company profile.

3. Add your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile. You’ll need to uncheck the box that says “Share only tweets that contain #in”. This is a way to specify that only certain Twitter posts are displayed in your LinkedIn profile. Since your posts will be automatically fed to Twitter from your blog, you won’t have this control.

4. Twitterfeed. Go to http://www.twitterfeed.com and open an account. You will need to enter the URL for your blog’s RSS feed. This will differ depending on your blogging software.

The next step is to set up Twitter feed to publish your blog posts automatically to Twitter, as well as your Facebook profile, or business Page. Once this is done, your blog posts will automatically show up on Twitter and Facebook, and through Twitter, on your LinkedIn profile. All  you have to do is write the post!

Let’s face it. Maybe Google started off as a egalitarian, nice, fair, “do no evil” type of company, but they have officially hit the big time. Big companies aren’t nice or fair. There is too much money involved. If you still buy into the nicey-nice Google culture, read the New York Times article on Google’s Marissa Mayer and the reaction/comments from Silicon Valley Web Guild and ValleyWag. That, along with comments from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, paints a pretty good picture of corporate executives drunk on their own elitist Koolaid (ok, crappy metaphor, but it’s early).  He calls the internet a cesspool. And the solution? Good ole Big Brands. Trusted by millions.

So what does that mean to you, trying to make information about your products and services available to the general public ? It’s going to be harder, at least in the short term. What does it mean to you, the searcher trying to find specific information that’s a little bit off the beaten path. It may be more difficult.

Here’s a possible side-effect of the brand bump in the Google SERPS, that I haven’t see much discussion about. In a couple of different verticals I work with, I’ve noticed page one being filled with directory results from large paid directories, rather than websites of individual businesses, when doing a local search for a specific product or service. Are these big directories considered a brand?  How does adding an extra step of displaying a directory results page in the search engine results page help anyone?

So Big Brand=Higher Quality, More Accurate Content=Better Search Results? No. Google has the ability, resonsibilty, or authority to determine what information is “TRUE” and what is not? NO. My personal opinion is that such an idea, forced into the algorithm by the almighty dollar rather than a concern for helping the searcher find what they are looking for, will result in people switching to another search engine to find what they are looking for. Then, when the traffic decrease results in a loss in revenue, Google will move the other way. I hope.

Here is part two in the series recapping a recent Web Guild panel discussion:

Advanced Search Marketing
Silicon Valley Web Guild
12/13/06

Speakers

1. Barbara Coll, Founder & Search Specialist, WebMama
2. Jessie Stricchiola, Founder, Alchemist Media
3. Moderator: Massimo Burgio, Search Specialist, Global Search Interactive

I’ve just outlined comments or information that stood out as being useful for someone involved in or trying to understand search engine marketing.

Pay Per Click (PPC) and Web Analytics

Massimo: Analytic tools are important in obtaining necessary metrics to determine ROI for a marketing campaign.

Barbara: Business to business marketers selling products priced between $5000 and $25,000 aren’t worried about PPC costs. What is the most important question to answer? What are you willing to pay to get a customer? What is a customer’s lifetime value to you?

Jessie: Send PPC traffic to the proper landing page. Properly track clicks with a query string in the link, i.e. url?page=2.

Redesign your page layout for the best conversion. You can better track the effect of changes by testing with a PPC campaign. Use split AB testing for this purpose. Feed the data obtained by this testing back into your SEO program.

Keyword Analysis

Massimo: Talk to your sales force. They are most likely using different terminology than you PR department and customers.

Tools:

Trellian.com – Keyword discovery.
Wordtracker.com – Wordtracker keywords. Has a steeper learning curve. You can buy a daily license.
Bruceclay.com/web_rank.htm

Firefox tools for SEO
Extensions:
seobook.com – search “SEO for Firefox”
http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/

Jessie: The average number of words in search queries is increasing all the time. The following are measurements and predictions by John Smart -
2002 – 1.3 words
2006- 2.6 words
Projected:
2010 – 5.2 words
2013 – 10.4 words

The average number of words in a human to human questions is 11.

Question and Answers

Q: What is the most critical piece of information in designing your internet marketing campaign?
A: Barbara: Which action converts.

Points to Take Away from the Q&A:

1. There is better conversion on the long tail.
2. Local.google.com gets most of it’s traffic from Google.com because Google includes links to local results in it’s SERPs when appropriate.
3. Buy a feed on local.google.com. You can also include local results in your adword campaign.