Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

Results of a study conducted by ExactTarget, Ball State University and the Email Marketers Club were released recently, so lets take a look at this often overlooked form of advertising and lead generation. The research team looked at ways to grow email lists in an attempt to identify the most effective and fastest growing approaches to list growth.

According to the research the fastest growing list growth tactic is encouraging subscribing through text messages. The report indicates that the overall most effecient way to grow email subscriber lists is to collect customers’ email addresses at optimal times when they are fully engaged -with in-store via text messaging, during online shopping, or at the point of sale. These types of onsite list growing procedures rated up to 60% higher than offline methods (which the report says included list rental and mass advertising.

Tamara Gielen, founder of The Email Marketers Club, commented: “There is no silver bullet, and no one tactic that will provide meaningful list growth. Successful list growth strategies employ multiple tactics to drive new subscriptions and compel subscribers to register because of the value of the communication itself.”

Gielen also Twittered about the highlights of the study, which looked at past performance levels and future plans for list growth from 351 email marketers from around the globe:

- Onsite registration took top spot as the best performing list growth tactic. Capturing information through inbound call centers, requests for email addresses at the point of sale and social sharing techniques played runner up.

- The top spots for worst performing list growth tactics was shared by outbound call center attempts to collect email information, list rental, email append and offline advertising.

- The study revealed that B-to-B marketers are more successful when using incentivized registration to bring in subscriptions, while B-to-C marketers found non-incentivized subscriptions to be garner more results.

- Mobile capture (allowing customers to subscribe to emails via mobile phones) is expected to increase faster than any other list growth tactic in 2009 – more than 500 %.

- Enabling subscribers to share email content with their social networks is also on the rise – expected growth is more than 348 % in 2009.

- Finally, a staggering 33% of all email marketers rarely or never evaluate the performance of their subscriber sources – meaning they miss out on information that could be used to improve their list growth.

Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget’s director of research and strategy, said:

“The best performing list growth tactics are built on gathering subscriber data rather than hunting for it. Whether you are a B-to-B or a B-to-C marketer, the best way to grow your subscriber list is to collect information during customer-initiated interactions.”

Yahoo Local is designed to provide users with quick access to relevant physical business information. They don’t prefer keywords in the name of the business unless the word is associated with the actual proper name of the business, but relevant keywords should be optimized in your local business description.　

Google search results are based primarily on relevance, so Google Maps listings are ranked based on their relevance to the search terms entered, along with geographic distance and other factors. Local listings normally only appear during geo-designated searches (e.g., veterinarian, Seattle). Google does track the IP address on computers, so if you enter in a general search (e.g., veterinarians), Google may bring up results for your location, or wherever your IP address is located (this feature can be disabled by users).

Notice listing abuse? It can be reported here:

http://maps.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528, and if that doesn’t do the trick report it to Google at http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/maps?hl=en

See your listing as active, but can’t find it in Maps? Give it a couple of days to update, check to see if you followed guidelines at

http://maps.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=maps_spam.

A blog can significantly help out your website. Citing lack of time or limited ideas for posts just won’t cut it – every business needs a blog!

An established blog with frequently added content will be spidered by Google often, and could even end up ranking #1 in Google for relevant phrases the same day as posting. Even blogs with a new post just every week or two, so don‘t look at your blog like a major undertaking. Just commit a minimum amount of time per week, and watch the results kick in.

Here are some very good reasons you need a blog:

Blogs can get you rankings on long tailed search phrases.
Blogs can get you increased traffic.

Blogs can add credibility to your website and/or service or product.

Blogs can bring you new customers.

Blogs can increase your visibility.

Blogs can allow you to share a social presence even if your website is technical I nature.

Blogs can bring in free links.

Blogs can gain you the respect of others in your field.

WordPress is a powerful platform and easy to use. The plug-ins available to help you are many, and the options available and support forums are there in case you get stuck or have trouble with customization issues.

Things to blog about include but are not limited to:

Launches of new products or services

Press releases or industry relevant news

About pages, FAQs and How to’s related to your product or service

Detailed answers to or spin offs from reader comments

Posts SEOd for relevant long tailed phrases

Detailed product, service or tool descriptions, reviews and / or tutorials

Company history, customer testimonials, or interesting stories

Once you start to blog, you will see your rankings slowly climb. Just be consistent – even if you can only commit to a biweekly post, make sure it gets done. You can even write content once a month and set it to post at regular intervals.

There is an ongoing debate that whether we should be worried about the coding standards as long as the site is functional and whether the coding standards are likely to affect our website’s SEO performance. Though most of us would like to ignore this factor and conveniently say that search engines do not read through the codes but only the content so let us concentrate on optimizing the content properly, the truth is that you can ruin your website’s online performance very badly by not paying attention to your coding standards.

Just to give you a simple example, if you don’t pay attention to a standardized coding style you are likely to be random. One of the most common places of mistake is the area of domain reference. In some places you will be referring to the homepage as www.xyzdomain.com and in other places you will be referring the homepage as xyzdomain.com. Though in these two instances you will be lead to the homepage, for search engines these two are entirely different pages. You will unnecessarily lose the effectiveness of your linking. At another level, you should have used 301 redirects to ensure that both the URLs namely www and non-www addresses resolve at the same page. If you miss to do this, search engines will consider these two as different domains. This will unnecessarily reduce the effectiveness of your link campaign you will get only half the benefit of what you should actually get.

Secondly, incomplete tags can turnout to be a source of irritation to the search engines. Make sure therefore, your coding is thorough and no half-baked work is done.

Good coding will help your site to perform well because if you follow poor coding standards, it will block your other SEO efforts from bearing good results. Though good coding standards as many opine does not actively get good rankings for your website, it certainly does hinder your success when you are not going to follow good coding standards.

So don’t lose the benefits unnecessarily. Make sure that you are hiring a professional web development company that is aware of the SEO concepts. Even if they are not aware of the SEO concepts, they should at least be good at what they are doing namely, coding. If you can find a web development company that has experience with SEO, then that will be the best option for you. If you cannot find a web development company that is not conversant with SEO principles, at least after the completion of the site, have it reviewed by an SEO professional so that they can recommend the necessary changes. SEO is not just creating keyword rich content; it is a holistic approach that tries to offer the users with the best online experience by helping them find what they want in the shortest time possible.

Have you ever thought of this factor that how the latest trends in internet scams will affect your website’s traffic? Not many website owners are aware of the issues involved in this area. It does not even occur to them that this is problem area for their website’s traffic.

It is not only webmasters and SEO professionals are carefully observing the latest web searching trends to optimize their websites, it is also the scammers and hackers that are keeping a close watch on the latest search trends. These people too try to reach out to the largest audience though for wrong reasons. So if you think that a particular keyword gets the largest number of hits or that a particular keyword is searched for the highest number of times, then spammers and hackers too optimize their websites and web pages for those keywords. They also send spam mails with those keywords so that people will click on those disastrous links and be victimized.

As more and more people become victims they will learn to be careful not to search for certain keywords and click on links associated with those keywords. For example, lately it has been noted that most spammers attack the keyword screensavers and keywords that are associated with “free”. So when you are choosing your keywords do not go overboard on “free” hoping to get loads of traffic. You should be aware of the changing trends and start preparing for those changes. When you look for alternative keywords when your traffic has dropped drastically, you will lose a considerable amount of time in regaining the traffic. So be a wise webmaster. And if you are a SEO professional, it is important that you educate your customers of this changing trend and the problems that they may have to face with certain keywords. Some of the customers may not see the point immediately and it would take a bit of time to convince them to opt for safer keyword choices.

What is even more challenging is to find alternatives for these keywords and to compensate for the traffic that we will be losing temporarily. We must also remember that scammers and hackers will never rest; we should constantly be looking for such problem areas and keep modifying our optimization strategies. Only then, we can be successful. All our approaches and efforts should be futuristic, looking into the future. Just by repeating the same old SEO procedures, we will remain stagnant. We should be able to break through that barrier and look beyond today’s trends. This however, requires experience and good analytical skills.

The next time when you brainstorm for your keywords take this input seriously and come up something that will produce sustainable results.

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