Marketing Tom - Internet Marketing

Paid Search Advertising Fraud and How To Overcome It

John Carreras is President of Impact Displays, Inc, a company which provides Trade Show Displays, Exhibits, and Booths. His company uses paid search advertising, like Overture, to drive traffic to their site. Whilst at a trade show he noticed that all his competitors were there, he also found that his clickthrough traffic dropped by one-half to two-thirds of pre-show activity. Sure that this was not a coincidence he started to do some investigating. Read this interesting article, with accompanying spreadsheet!, to find out how he managed to identify and overcome this problem:How to Stop Click Fraud (Or at Least Get a Refund)

Search Engine Optimization in Action

The other day I noticed that the pages that Google had spidered on Marketing Tom fell into 2 categories:

1. Those which where the page title was displayed:
Marketing Tom: Search Engine Basics and
2. those which only displayed the URL:
www.marketingtom.com/2003/10/tom_peters_on_t.html

Needless to say that your ranking on Google is much better when the page title is displayed. When I found out that an important page on my other blog, Mad About Madrid, was not listed I took one simple step - I put a keyword link on the left-hand navigation bar to that page. The result: within a couple of days Google had re-spidered the page and it was appearing in position number 2 for my keywords (if you want to try it out, type in "Plaza de Cibeles" on Google).

Search Engine Optimization Experiment
I would like to use this article to demonstrate how the above can be achieved. I will simply put links to all the articles below and wait for Google to re-spider the pages and add in the page titles. You will obviously notice that the keyword link is the same as the page title on the destination page. In order to further help this process, I have also included a new section on the left-hand side of this page called 'Recent Posts' which links to the permalink of this article. Please check this article periodically to see how I get off and why not even read the articles. I hope to God it works now!

Search words – identifying them
Yahoo! launches a new paid inclusion programme
Search Engine Optimisation - Don't Forget Design!
Measuring Web site Success
Page Titles - How to use them effectively
Overture's Suggestion Tool for search keywords

Google vs Yahoo! Ranking

Thumbshot is a great tool which visually shows you how any 2 search engines rank sites differently for different keywords. Thumbshots is an improvement on the initial tool which was brought out by Langreiter. If you type in your own URL, it will indicate using a red dot how your site ranks on these search engines, too.

Here's an example of how my other site, Mad About Madrid, ranks for the search words "madrid bars" - the top row corresponds to Google, whilst the bottom line is Yahoo!

Google Rankings Tool

I just came across a nice tool for identifying your rankings on Google, called Google Rankings. Simply type in your selected keywords, input the domain name and Google Rankings will let you know where you are listed on Google. Here are some search results for 'Madrid Bars':

The same people have also created Yahoo Search Rankings which works in much the same way.

Article Source: SEO Book

Search Engine Optimization - how to plan

Shari Thurow offers some interesting tips on how to use various techniques to optimize your website, in an article entitled Using Paid Search Engine Advertising for Better SEO Campaigns. It discusses how identifying the right keywords beforehand can help with a site's information architecture, how to refine page titles and how to use paid search advertising to identify the ideal position for your 'call to action' elements.

Domain Name Mapping, Go Daddy and Typepad

I had a recent post to my other site, Mad About Madrid asking for more details on how to go about domain name mapping - I think Marketing Tom is a better forum than the other site to discuss this issue. Here is a definition of domain name mapping from TypePad (the people who power this blog):

Domain Mapping is the process of pointing a registered domain name to a TypePad, weblog or photo album. Domain mapping is more than domain forwarding, because your permalinks and URL contain the address of your domain (www.example.com), and not your TypePad sub-domain (example.typepad.com).

In my case the domain name www.marketingtom.com maps to madrid.blogs.com/marketing_tom and all sub-pages are displayed under www.marketingtom.com. Since I last spoke about domain name mapping, the control panel on Godaddy has changed. This is the new procedure you now need to follow:

Step 1
Once you are in your control panel yu select 'manage domains'

Step 2
Click on the domain name that you need to set domain name mapping up on

Step 3
In the bottom right-hand side of the page click 'Total DNS Control'. Then click Manage DNS Zone File' and add in the details.

From here, you can following the instructions on TypePad Domain Mapping

Online Spanish Newspapers and their readership

If you are looking to make your website a subscription-only site, then you should take a look at how some of the Spanish newspapers have fared in this interesting article from Vin Crosbie: Free or Fee in Spain, Revisited. It would appear that the newspapers for which data is available, El Pais, El Mundo and La Vanguardia have each adopted a different model for generating advertising and holding on to customers, including:

● Registration through paid subscription, coupled with advertising revenue
● No registration but heavy advertising
● Free registration, advertising and compulsory subscription to weekly email newsletters.

In their own ways they have all benefitted through one or all of the following: increased revenue, market share and increased marketing intelligence about their visitors. For me, though, the remarkable stat is that El Pais went from being a free online newspaper to a paid subscription one and still kept 60% of its readership, many of them contributing to the estimated subscription revenue of $2.5 million a year.

Paid Search Engine Listings and the Importance of Ranking

According to digital marketers Atlas DMT there can be huge differences in positions 1 and 2 on Google's paid search listings. The report points out that someone in position 1 could be receiving as much as ten times more traffic than the person in position 10. There could be a 40% drop in traffic between number 1 position and number 2.

However, on Overture "Taking the number two spot is a better strategy on Overture than it is on Google." See what Janis Mara has to say in the Clickz article Study: Size May Not Matter, But Ranking Does

Tom Peters live - Free event!

If you like Tom Peters, then you may be interested to know that he will be holding a FREE web seminar on August 19th entitled Outsource-proof Your Career. He will be joined by Dan Pink author of Free Agent Nation.

Search Engine Optimization Problems

Wednesday, 7th July – I read an article on Seth Godin’s blog, entitled The problem with search engine optimization, which paints a pretty dim view of search engine optimization. Seth says that: ‘Lucking into (and it is luck) the top slot of a great word on Google is not a business plan. It's superstition. It's blind faith.’ He goes on to say, ‘If you want to grow your business, you need a reliable and scalable and dependable way to spend time and money… Online, it's about adwords and site design.’

His final paragraph says: ‘SEOs are not a shortcut to success, at least not for 99% of the companies out there. You won't win by fooling Google into listing you first for a common search term. You will win once you figure out the simple mechanics of turning strangers into friends and friends into customers.’

Good search engine optimization is all about figuring out the ‘mechanics of turning strangers into friends and friends into customers.’ It starts with getting into the mindset of your target audience. What are they looking to achieve? What words describe how they see your product? What are their expectations? What problems does their business encounter? In short, your business must look at its products, services or company from the ‘user perspective’. Once you have got into the mentality of the user, you can apply this information to optimizing your Web site for search engines and, in parallel, creating a visitor experience that appeals to your target audience.

Seth believes that the 2 key elements for growing your business on-line are: 1 adwords and 2. site design. I couldn’t agree more with the latter. However, how can Seth say that adwords are the key when at worst the clickthrough rate is under 0.5% and at most around 10-15% - that means a staggering 80-90% of those who don’t know a company’s URL address will click on the search results from Google, Yahoo!, et al.

Thursday, 8th July – The weather in Wales is pretty miserable today: high winds, rain and grey skies. I must get away to the sun! - Tuscanny will be perfect this time of year. So, I go to Google and type in ‘Tuscan Holidays’. First result comes from a company called Tuscan Holidays, with a home page which has been tuned to the search engines, delivers the content I want and just makes me want to get my credit card out and book two weeks at a rural farmhouse right now. This company operates on an even playing field to other larger and richer companies and generates far, far more clicks than Google Adwords can deliver – and it’s all down to a well-optimised home page and good site design.

To conclude, a well optimized site should deliver visitors through search engines, using THEIR language and give them a visitor experience to match.

Incidentally, if you carry out a search on Google for 'search engine optimization problems', Seth's site appears at number 3 - proof that it even works for him!

Web site Advertising for FREE!

The other day I decided my travel guide blog, Mad About Madrid, would have to generate more revenue to justify the time and effort I spend finding and then writing information to it. Google AdWords is one revenue channel I have but this generates very little income, the same applies to Amazon. Therefore, I started thinking about paid adverts.

Having identified a list of organisations that would benefit from advertising on Mad About Madrid, I tested the water by sending a couple of eMails to their marketing departments enquiring if they would be interested in placing ads on the site. One company responded very quickly and said that it wasn’t their policy to pay for ‘banner adverts’ but they would pay me a percentage commission for every lead that resulted in a ‘sale.’

This got me thinking: The advertiser gets their brand flagged up on a number of Web sites, which can potentially generate thousands upon thousands of page impressions and they only pay a commission when someone purchases a product. In effect, the Web site is offering advertisers FREE advertising. Can you imagine these same companies asking newspapers and magazines to do the same?

That said, I will probably keep my Amazon adverts on this page as I believe that they do add value to the visitor experience and, you never know, some day someone may buy 50 Tom Peters books through this page!!