Marketing Tips & Tricks

Database Heaven

admin — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 13:46:52 +0000

Recently we needed a database for a new website we were using for affiliate marketing. We wanted to add enough content that the search spiders would have enough to feed on to pick up a ton of long tail keywords without much effort. What we came across was a fantastic database download site called Database 2 Go. The site has over 100 databases with almost 3 million records and proved to be the best money we have spent for this sort of need.

Hot new tool for marketing websites

admin — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 05:27:24 +0000

I found a new tool to help sort thru which directories to submit websites I manage to and which not to today. The tool is at http://www.directoryrecap.com and I found it when browsing the SEO blog at http://www.seofox.com. It is well worth a peek and test-drive.

PPC – Adwords Ad Groups

ogletree — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 02:23:53 +0000

When creating a campaign it is important to create many ad groups and many campaigns. Your ads should match your landing page as much as possible. Once I have a very specific category picked out and creative written for the ad I set up my negative keywords at the campaign level. I then create an ad group that contains the basic root keyword phrases. This will be mostly 2 to 3 word phrases. I set them.all to broad match. I then create an exact negative keyword for each phase. This is my catchall group. My next group is set up the same accept I set them to phrase match. The third group is exact match. I set the same phrases from the first 2 groups in here and set them to exact matches. Try to repeat this process as many times as you can to make sure your ads reflect your landing pages and keywords. Don’t assume that you can catch all searches with your root keywords in broad match. It is very important to come up with good add-on keywords for your broad and phrase matches. Try to come up with as many as you can. Google does not show your ad every time your broad match terms are typed in.

PPC Adwords – Quality Score

ogletree — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 02:12:58 +0000

Google Adwords has something called a quality score. They implemented this to add another level of complexity to running a pay per click campaign. You can read the official word from Google here.

When you set up your Adwords account Google will send AdsBot-Google to your site. Make sure not to block this. If you have pages set up just for PPC make sure you block googlebot. Here is what I put in my robots.txt file

User-agent: AdsBot-Google
Allow: /PPC-Pages/

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /PPC-Pages/

It is important to make sure you have a quality landing page. This means creating lots of landing pages that match your keywords. Create lots of ad groups. Use negative keywords as well. One thing that I do is to add server side code so that you can change text on the page using URL parameters. Set up landing URL’s like www.domain.com/ppcpage.php?my%20keyword%20phrase. Google will allow 1024 character so you can put quite a bit in there. It is important that your ad and your landing page contain the kw people are typing in.

PPC Adwords – Getting the most for you money

ogletree — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 01:17:07 +0000

When you set up your Adwords account it is important to not waste money. There are many ways to avoid wasting it. The first is to turn off content network. Most of the time this is a complete waste. Next you can set what days and what times of day you want your ads to run. If your conversion rate is real bad during non business hours when you can’t answer the phone then you might want to just run during business hours. It is always important to keep track of your visitors so you can know if you are wasting money on certain times of the day. You might find that certain times of the day you get a lot of clicks but no sales. That would be a good time to avoid. Another way to save money is to have a high quality score and have lots of different ad groups and use negative keywords. Paying attention to your log files is very important to help you do all these things.

Paid reviews

ogletree — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 02:16:13 +0000

There are places out there that will pay you to review your site. The biggest such site is www.reveiwme.com. All you have to do is submit your site. If you are approved they will let you set the amount that you charge for reviews. Reviewme will take half of whatever that number is. You can only do this if your site has good traffic. You can always set it up but nobody will hire you to do a review unless your site has good on topic traffic for what they are selling. They are a legit company and I have friends that have used them and got paid.

Contextual Advertising

ogletree — Thu, 31 May 2007 02:54:31 +0000

Contextual advertising is one of the easiest ways to monetize a site. It is a shotgun approach but is often times not the best way to go. It is best for backfill or for areas of your site that you can’t find affiliate network advertising. There are several major companies you can use.

or you can sign up for Yahoo contextual advertising. There is a new program out called AuctionAds . I have never used it but I have heard good things about it. Google is the best one out there. It pays the most overall. It has been a while since I used Yahoo but I hear it still does not give relevant ads. Their ads pay high but they are so off topic that it is not worth it. All you have to do is sign up for the services and they help you generate some code to stick on your site. You just keep trying to get traffic to your sites and the checks will come in. It is not easy to make money this way. You have to work at it.

Incoming Traffic – Type in & Electronic Communication

ogletree — Tue, 29 May 2007 01:59:35 +0000

There are different types of type in traffic. The first kind is having a good domain name. If you own a domain that is the keyword of your subject a lot of people will just type it in. If you own a one or two word domain people will try that domain to see if it has what they need. The other type is brand recognition. If you have spent time advertising your site through online and offline means people will type in your domain name. This can be business cards, mails outs, tv & radio commercials, newspaper ads, brochures, or through word of mouth.

There are many types of electronic communication. The most popular is email. People love to send links to websites to their friends. I spend a lot of time in chat rooms about SEO and post links and see links posted all the time. IM is very big these days as well. I have so many friends on different IM programs I have to use a program called Trillian to keep track of them. I send and received links to websites from friends all the time.

Incoming Traffic – Google Image Search

Caydel — Fri, 25 May 2007 01:52:47 +0000

Contributed by Caydel

In the search to find the best ways to promote or drive traffic to your site, Google Image Search is often overlooked. While ranking for terms in Google Image Search is unlikely to ever bring you massive amounts of traffic a la Digg or StumbleUpon, the steps to optimize your images for Google Image Search are extremely simple, and the traffic gains you do make more than make up for the effort.

As an example, we will use the image of Barry Schwartz, Chris Boggs and Daron Babin at SES Chicago 2006 doing the Search Pulse one evening.

Photo Credits SmallBusinessSEM.com

Note:I borrowed (stole) this image from Barry’s blog. Check it out - it’s always a great read.

The first two steps are more SEO ‘common sense’ than anything else–they should always be performed in order to include extra keywords in your content so that you’ll provide more context for your pages. In addition to being common sense for general SEO, they are an absolute necessity for good results in the Google Image Search.

Steps to Optimize Your Images for Google Image Search

Use Descriptive Filenames - A filename can present you with your first chance to include keywords in your images. Title the image with a word or short phrase which describes what is in the image. For example, rather than using a camera-assigned filename such as DSC05443.jpg, use a filename like barry-schwartz-chris-boggs-daron-babin-SES-chicago.jpg. Notice the way that I have used a dash (-) between the words in the title - this is commonly interpreted by Google as a space in the filename. This is the most search engine friendly way of labeling images.
Use the alt tag! - the alt tag in your image link code will allow you to include some more keywords describing your image. Additionally, the alt tag text will be displayed by Google Image Search in place of the filename in each search result. Therefore, use that as well when linking your code. Here is an example for the example image we are using:
Get Included in Google Image Labeler - The Google Image Labeler is a game in which you and a partner collaborate to write tags for images presented. You receive points when you both submit matching tags. The matching tags are then assigned to the images, and taken into consideration for the Google Image Search search results. In order to ensure that your images are included, access your Google Webmaster Central account, and go to the management page for your site. In the left hand bar, you will see an link which says ‘Enhanced Image Search’. Clicking this link will present you with the option to opt-in to the Enhanced Image Search features. This option signifies to Google that you are allowing them to use tools such as the Image Labeler to assist in the indexing of the images on your site.

These steps will help ensure that you can get your images ranking in the Google Image Search. As I said above, GIS is not likely to drive nearly as much traffic as many other means; at the same time, the steps to optimize for GIS are quite simple.

Incoming Traffic – Word of Mouth

ogletree — Thu, 24 May 2007 02:29:57 +0000

I have already talked about incoming traffic from free search engine results and pay per click. Today I want to talk about word of mouth. When you think of word of mouth you normally think of people just telling their friends at work or at school or calling them on the phone. These days it covers a lot more than that. There are many ways to tell your friends about new sites today.

The first type of online word of mouth is through online communities. This includes Blogs, Forums, and Social Book marking. As I have mentioned before I got my start at forums. This is a great place to learn about things and to network with other people. Get involved in forums and create a profile page. On my other blog www.ogletreeseo.com I still get traffic from forum posts from years ago. Get involved in discussions. Make a name for yourself. Send messages through the forums system to people. Blogs are very similar except that every subject is brought up by the site owner. You can still have discussions in the comment section. Social book marking sites like www.digg.com, www.youtube.com and del.icio.us have comment sections you can comment on as well. You can get traffic by making good comments and submitting stuff yourself. The important thing is to contribute by being part of each community.

The other type of online word of mouth is electronic messaging. This often times is a result of doing the online community thing. People will see something you said or did or something about your site and email their friends. They can also send instant messages to their friends.

Right now word of mouth traffic is probably one of the best ways to get traffic to a site. It is not uncommon for a site to go down because it got so much traffic from people spreading the word on some of the more popular communities.