Marketing Tom - Internet Marketing

How Madrid 2012 uses viral marketing to help its Olympic Candidacy bid

Whilst looking at Madrid's 2012 Olympic Candidacy website I came across a neat way of spreading the city's candidacy bid using viral marketing. The site invites people to download some software which, when clicked on, automatically places an email signature on your outgoing messages (I have tried on Outlook and Yahoo! and both seem to work fine).

Those who receive the messages can click on a link and leave their messages of support in a visitor's book.

How to Optimise Website Content for Search Engines

In an article entitled 5 Content Ideas for Optimizing Your Site to Get More Organic Search Engine Traffic, Anne Holland offers some good, practical advice on driving traffic to your site by simply tuning its content. They include:

1. Topical glossary
2. Topical Q&A
3. Press releases
4. Email newsletter articles
5. Blogs

A British company, its .com website hosted in Germany and Google

I spoke to a company this week which was having problems getting its site listed on Google for the search 'pages from the UK', even though the site was listed on Google.com. Frustrated at this the owner decided to contact Google and was told by them that only sites hosted in the UK could display the search results 'pages from UK'. He then decided to contact his hosting company, a large well-known, and he thought British, company who informed him that, yes, his site was hosted in Germany. It turns out that though he paid in pounds, the company is actually German.

And Google's advice to him on how to get listed on the UK country-restricted search - get your site hosted in the UK. You may be interested to look at some similar experiences of users on this search engine forum:

Get listed under google uk

Google Adwords and Jakob Nielsen

Most people know that about Google Adwords - they are the adverts that often appear on the right-hand side of Google search results. Companies usually create their own Google Adwords, unless they have big enough budgets and Google will help them create this, and they only pay when an advert is clicked on. In most cases the more you pay the higher you get, though companies who have written good adverts that are clicked on are rewarded by Google and can appear above those who have paid more.

It is worth considering what Jakob Nielsen (www.useit.com), the web usability expert, has to say on Google Adwords in an article he wrote way back in September 2001: ".. I have always maintained that search engines are the exception to the Web advertising rule. There are two reasons for this:
"Search engines are the only type of site that users visit with the explicit intention of finding somewhere else to go as quickly as possible.
● Because they know what users are looking for, search engines can target ads to a user's current navigation goals.
● Displaying an ad for something that the user immediately wants is much more powerful than targeting ads based on general user profiling and demographics. "

Most of the observations from the article - Designing Web Ads Using Click-Through Data - are still relevant today.

Search Engine Optimization - Update

A week ago I put up an article entitled Search Engine Optimization in Action. In it I mentioned that I had had problems getting some pages of Marketing Tom listed on Google with their correct page titles. To give you an example, this page: Search Engine Optimisation - Don't Forget Design! had following page title - htttp://www.marketingtom.com/2004/04/search_engine_o.html, that is the URL was listed as the page title. As page titles are such key elements in search engine indexing, this page stood little, if no, chance of being found.

In order to remedy this I did three things:

1. I wrote an article about the subject.
2. I created keyword links to the article, the page title of the destination page also used the same keywords.
3. I added a new section to this site called 'Recently Posts' which obviously included the article I published. This was important in that Google added the article/page to its index much quicker.

The result was that the article, Search Engine Optimization in Action, was created on the 27th July and it was added to the Google index on August 3rd. The problem articles were all re-spidered at the same time. It is worth noting that Google did spider the home page and article within 2 days of publishing but the individual URL for the article took a couple more days to index. It now means that I have 6 more optimized pages through which people can enter my site.

Even Big Companies Make Usability Mistakes

Here is an interesting article that I came across on Sitepoint from Trenton Moss, an usability expert:

Top 10 Usability Blunders of the Big Players

Like most usability articles it does make some interesting points and it's always nice to read stories about big guys making basic mistakes. When optimizing a website it is easy to take your eye of the ball and forget that visitors need to be able to use the site effectively in order to make the right call to action. That's why it is always a good idea to understand how a site should look and function from a user's perspective and why email newsletters from Jakob Nielsen are always welcome in my inbox. Here is a list of Trenton's Top 10.

1. No Search Function
2. Massive Download Time
3. Non-scannable Text
4. Unclear Link Text
5. Poor 404 Error Page
6. Visited Links Not Shown
7. Frames Used
8. Links Point to the Current Page
9. Important information contained in images
10. Unique Scrolling System