The Cutting Edge of Online Marketing

The other day I overheard a person talking with their paid “web expert” about their ranking in the search engines (SEs). It wasn’t specific to Manufactured Housing, but I’ve noticed similar comments in this industry as well. The “web expert” was explaining how well he had done his job by noting that the client ranked #1 on Google when they typed his company name into a Google search.

Well, glory be!!! Ranking #1 for one’s own name? That must have required a ton of work and some long, hard hours at the keyboard for the “expert…” NOT!

I’ve seen the same kind of claims made for searches conducted using the website’s URL. WOW! A #1 ranking for your own domain name! If you don;t rank #1 for your company name and domain name, there are some serious issues that need immediate attention. Here’s the kind of results you should get using a domain-based search.

This result is for a website I run with news about local businesses.

I have had potential clients come to me who didn’t rank at all for their own company name. That’s a problem. Usually this occurs when a business doesn’t have a website and hasn’t been indexed online by a directory or other service. Fortunately, it is becoming a rare occurrence.

What you really want to know is how well you rank for a keyword that your current or potential customers will type into Google, Bing, Yahoo, About, etc.

For instance, my business specializes in web marketing and is based in Danville, KY. When I typed “web marketing Danville KY” into Google on one day, the following was the result on the Search Engines Results Page (SERP):

As you can see, OrangeCat.com captured the first four results for the keyword AND there is a more results link that gives several more. In addition, my website at KentuckyWebExperts.com ranked number five for an article that’s only been up for a week and after a domain name change to the site two weeks ago.

That’s the kind of result I like to see.

I posted a version of this article to my blog at BobStovall.com on Tuesday and now that article has taken the 5th position in a search of those keywords – in less than two days!

And it’s the kind of result you can get for your keywords if you use WordPress, add the proper plugins and post content that the SEs can easily index and categorize.

Word of caution: If you keep typing the same keyword into a search and then click on the same page over and over, you will notice it rising in the rankings. But only for you.

To get a true picture of how you rank for certain keywords, you need to use a tool like the SE Rank Checker and know how to interpret the results.

As you can see here, when we used the SE Rank Checker, the results for Google were almost identical to our web search except that my second site picked up another listing, giving me 6 of 10 page one results.

Looking up your own rankings by doing a web search will give you a good idea of how you rank, but to achieve the best results, use a SE Rank Checker search as your base results and compare the results of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work in the future to determine how you are improving and how fast.

You hear this a lot lately. It’s a philosophy that Apple has successfully employed since 1984. Get the technology out of the way and empower the user to imagine and create.

The truth is that hiding the nuts and bolts of advanced technology from the user reduces intimidation and allows a wider variety of people to use the gadgets we take for granted.

The same is true of your online marketing. When the technology behind your marketing tools is complicated or too time-consuming, they are not used to their full capacity. You end up getting a lot less value for your investment of time and money.

At MHMSM.com, we have always promoted a 1-2-3 Online Marketing Strategy™:

1. Your website
2. Your email marketing campaign
3. Your social media strategy

Each of these three parts needs to be carefully planned in order to come up with an overall solution that allows the client (you) to manage their online marketing with maximum effectiveness and minimal expenditure of time and money.

A simple interface that is no harder to use than a word processor, use of automation wherever possible and integration of functionality allows even a non-techie to manage the day-to-day necessities of a powerful marketing system is essential to the success of any online marketing program.

Creating an online marketing strategy that accommodates these requirements takes some planning and is at the heart of the MHMSM.com 1-2-3 Online Marketing Program™. This plan didn’t come into existence full-blown, but has evolved over the years from our beginnings in the web marketing business in 1996.

Let’s take them one at a time.

Your website
Using the popular (with good reason) and easy-to-use WordPress platform to deploy your website enables you to have a traditional page-based website with the ability to place fresh content on your site on a regular basis. This is important to achieve and maintain good ranking in he search engines for your keywords.

If you can use Word, you can use WordPress to create or update content, insert or change images and manage an interactive website that truly incorporates social media.

The WordPress platform is Open Source (free to use) and the self-hosted version is extendable by the use of plugins to do much more than the core version does right out of the box.

This is currently the world’s best platform for developing a new website or for refreshing older, static websites.

Automation possibilities include automated backup, search engine updating, discussion management, connection with social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter and much more.

Your email marketing campaign
An effective email campaign is still the best way of maintaining regular contact with your current and prospective customers. With an average Return on Investment (ROI) of over $45 for each $1 invested, email marketing in projected to be a major play in marketing for many years to come.

You need a solid platform to run your email marketing program, one that allows you to create multiple mailing lists, design and send an email as easily as WordPress allows a post to be created and supplies you with the tools to monitor the effectiveness of your Email Marketing Campaign simply and accurately.

I have used and tested all sorts of email marketing programs, applications and providers and I have to say that there is no better than Aweber.

Aweber is the granddaddy of Email Marketing Service Providers. Economical and easy-to-use, Aweber pioneered many of the services that emailers take for granted these days.

Offering over 150 templates to make your emails look their best and videos to guide you through the process, Aweber is as easy as it gets.

You schedule emails to go at any time you like so you can set up emails to go while you on vacation or a business trip and the system handles them automatically.

A completely automated autoresponder system lets to send a series of emails at predetermined times after a subscriber signs up.

You can even set it up so that the application sends an automated email every time to post to your blog.

Your first month’s service is only $1 and you only pay for the number of subscribers you actually have. Only at Aweber.

Your social media strategy
Having a great social media strategy gets more important every day regardless of the demographic your customers fit into. For example, the age segment showing the fastest growth of Facebook users are the “over 55s.”

Once more, using available automation techniques and plugins can make your life easier. They can’t do ALL of the work for you, but they can make many functions fully automatic.

When we set up a 1-2-3 Online Marketing Program™ for our clients, we use WordPress plugins to not only allow visitors to easily “like” your Facebook Fan Page and quickly send your post to their Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr accounts, we also set it up so that every new post is sent to Google, Bing, Yahoo, About.com, Facebook and Twitter – and you don’t have to do a thing to accomplish it.

And we offer ongoing training to make sure you always get the most out of your online marketing investment. Things change fast in this business and keeping you on top of those changes is what we do.

For more information on MHMSM.com services, visit the MHMSM.com.com website.

If you didn’t see it this past Monday, David Segal of the New York Times wrote an article entitled The Dirty Little Secrets of Search. It was a story about how companies use what are known as “Black Hat” Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques* to try and trick Google into giving them a higher search ranking.

“Black Hat” techniques are often very successful at attaining high rankings, but the rankings are often short-lived.

In the article, Mr. Segal notes the case of J.C. Penney and their unusual placement at the very top of the rankings for hundreds of keywords through this past Christmas season.

Penney’s was using a technique where contextual links** were placed from dozens of websites around the world to specific pages on the J.C. Penney website. Many of these were paid links places on sites that had little or nothing to do with the subject matter of the link.

A spokesperson for Penney’s insists that the company had no knowledge of the links and did not contract them. I wonder who had the time and money to donate to making J.C. Penney #1 in so many search results.

At first blush, these techniques simply look like a smart marketing maneuver, and they are certainly not illegal. But Google (and all the other Search Engines) considers them an attempt to “game” the system and takes action against those using them.

The reason Google looks down on any practice that it sees as an attempt to manipulate search engines results is simple. Google’s search engine gets most of its revenue from advertising – AdWords – those paid search results you see in the right column (and sometimes at the top) of a Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

For Google to maximize the return on the placement of AdWords ads, they need to return the best quality results for any given search. And manipulation of the results threatens that system.

In the case of J.C. Penney, retaliation came in the form of vastly demoted ratings, sometimes dropping from #1 to places MUCH lower. So now they are left with the time- and money-consuming effort of rebuilding their Google ranking. It won’t be easy.

‘At 7 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, J. C. Penney was still the No. 1 result for “Samsonite carry on luggage.”

‘Two hours later, it was at No. 71.’

Over the years, we’ve seen many attempts to “game” the Google results, but they all end the same. Google catches wind of the scam, changes their algorithm to compensate and the “Black Hat” marketer is left to start over.

If you aren’t a heavy-weight paid advertiser on Google, like J.C. Penney, the penalty could be complete removal from the Google search results.

I have been involved in marketing on the Internet since 1991. In all that time, I’ve used nothing but “White Hat” techniques for myself and my clients. “Black Hat” techniques sometimes offer quick results, but “White Hat” techniques provide results that last.

###

* “black hat” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.

** A contextual link is one where a keyword-rich phrase is linked to a website, such as in the case of J.C. Penney where hundreds of websites around the world linked the term “grommet top curtains” to the page at J.C. Penney on grommet top curtains.

There’s a new search engine in town. It’s not the first challenger to Google’s supremacy, but it may be one of the more interesting ones.

According to their About Us page, “Blekko is a better way to search the web by using slashtags. slashtags search only the sites you want and cut out the spam sites. use friends, experts, community or your own slashtags to slash in what you want and slash out what you don’t.”

Blekko has some interesting features. Theoretically, using what they call “slashtags” you should be able to narrow your search to results that are only of interest to you. Each result has a “spam” link. If you click that, you will never see that search result again – that’s a real plus if you are getting a lot of garbage results in your searches.

But there are drawbacks…

Overall I found search results on Blekko to be much LESS useful than on Google even when using the slashtags to focus my search. In the example givenin their video, it looks easy and accurate – in my experience, it is neither.

It my tests, I found that it does a HORRIBLE job with local search. Adding a town and state name to a keyword (a typical ‘long-tail’ search in Google) yields results so varied that they are completely useless. Creating my own custom slashtag produced the same poor results.

I conduct a lot of “one-time” searches and creating my own slashtags for these seems to be a lot of work for little return. If I take the time to create a slashtag, will ever use it again?

I hope that this project grows into something that I can use, but right now I’d have to say it is not ready for primetime. Need results in a hurry? Use Google – or Bing, Yahoo or About.com. If you have time to kill on a new shiny object, give Blekko a try.

Last April, in Google changes name, adds features to Local Business Center,we told you about Google changing the name of their Local Business Center to Googled Places, a geo-location service tied to their Local Business Listings.

The Google Places folks made this short video to give you a brief overview of Places and the Service Area feature.

Essentially, you use Places to define your service area – the area in which you service your customers. You can select your service area by city name, county or zip code.

And once you have defined your service area, you ca hide your business address. This comes in handy if you operate your business out of your home or primarily through a post office box or mail drop.

Retailers might find this useful to define the areas they wish to do business in. Installers and transporters can show the areas they serve. And Google can display your business on Google Maps in search engine results pages (SERPs) for your area(s) and your keywords.

Adding Places service area information to your Local Business Listing is really a “no-brainer” if your business services customers in areas other than just your home city.