Facebook engagement = Word of mouth referrals = Better marketing

Lucas Adamski    Twitter Marketing     content-generation, firm-marketing, Internal, internal-client, Media, oversees-the-internal, patrick, patrick-morrell, team-as-well, three-ships

Editors note: Patrick Morrell oversees the internal client content generation team as well as the Three Ships Media firm marketing and brand development efforts.

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Facebook engagement = Word of mouth referrals = Better marketing

Marketers grow internal use of direct and digital

admin    Web Marketing     Digital, Direct, Grow, Internal, Marketers

CMOs are stepping up their use of traditional direct marketing tactics, including customer data integration and analytics, lead qualification and harvesting and performance measurement, according to the Chief Marketing Officer Council’s latest State of Marketing report, released April 19.

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Surprise! Internal B2B Email Lists Are Far More Effective Than Third-Party Lists

admin    Twitter Marketing     Effective, Email, Internal, Lists, More, Surprise, Than, ThirdParty

Imagine this: Your company is making a big push to generate leads in Q2. Your CEO is making this a top priority, doubling your lead-gen budget. This is important, so you focus on the tried-and-true: email.

You begin with a campaign to your modest internal list, then you plunk down $15k for a big send from a vendor with a highly targeted, high-quality list.

Then … well, then, nothing.

Your small in-house email campaign chugs along, reaching its goals, but the big rented list ends up getting about 75% of what you expected. Bummer. Serious bummer.

Sound familiar?

For many marketers, it should. According to Marketing Sherpa’s 2010 B2B handbook, marketers find solo email sends to proprietary lists far more effective than emails sent to third-party lists (you can download a free chapter of the report here).

Effectiveness of Email Marketing Techniques 

As the chart above shows, more than 7x as many people surveyed by MarketingSherpa find in-house lists more effective than third-party lists.

Why are in-house lists more effective?

It’s simple: Subscribers to your in-house list have a relationship with your company; people subscribed to third-party lists do not.

Although marketers typically talk about relationships in the frothy context of social media, they are just as important in the context of email.

When you’re sending to an in-house list, you’re communicating with a group of people that was attracted to your site and your content. You’re using the email to nurture that initial attraction.

When you’re sending to a third-party list, the story is different. You’re emailing a group of people that have some demographic quality that interests you, but that don’t have any context for your content, or your business. That makes it much harder to create a relationship of value.

So what’s the takeaway for smart marketers?

Focus your email effort on nurturing and building your own lists. Create content that attracts new people to your site, use calls to action and landing pages to add them to your list, then nurture those relationships via email.

If your organic list growth falls short of your goals, experiment with paid media, but avoid renting lists as much as possible. Instead, invest in paid campaigns that will drive people back to your site and build your own list.

What do you think? Do you get a better return from paid or in-house lists? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments.

Free Download: Marketing Sherpa’s 2010 B2B Handbook

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View full post on HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

Top Five Internal Linking Tactics To Get Top Google Rankings

admin    Google Optimization     Five, google, Internal, Linking, Rankings, Tactics

If you’re a website owner and are not following these five tactics for correctly linking your website together then you’re losing Google traffic as you read this. Internal linking is the links on your website that point to other pages within your same website. External linking is when you link to another website.
There are things you can do when developing or re-working your internal linking structure. If you carry out the following tactics, you’re going to achieve two things. First, you’ll make your website better from a user’s perspective. Second, you’ll rank better in Google. And it’s no coincidence that Google rewards you for doing things that make the website user’s experience easier and better. In fact, the most important thing I can recommend is that you create, design and link your website together is a way that benefits the visitor first. Your visitors are most important, not Google rankings.
And remember, links to your site (whether from other sites or from pages within your own site) help your rankings.
1) Add links in your navigation or footer as text links to all your important pages and main sections.
This is a very easy and an extremely effective tactic that not all sites do, and even less do for maximum results. This is the first thing I look for when reviewing a website for a client. Unfortunately, sometimes artsy Web designers add cool buttons, which are images, to all the main sections of the site, but neglect to include text links as well. Or a programmer decides to make the website’s navigation a dynamic drop down menu in DHTML or JavaScript but forget to include text links to the same pages represented in the menus. Search engines cannot follow image links or links created in JavaScript, they can only follow simple text links, so be sure you add them to your site as well.
So if you want search engines to visit and index (or record) ALL your website’s pages, be sure there are text links pointing to all the main sections of your site and to all your important pages.
2) Use of the rel=”nofollow” HTML tag.
This is fairly simple. Google created this tag which tells them NOT to count the link in their search engine ranking algorithm when used on a link. There’s debate that maybe Google does count them a little, or will some day in the future. But for now, this tag does greatly decrease a link’s value in Google’s eyes. Therefore, consider using this tag on some of your links within your site. For example, let’s say you have a homepage and then create two inner pages, and that’s the extent of the site. Let’s further say that you add a link to both pages on your homepage.
If your homepage has some external links pointing to it, then it has some value in regards to Google’s ranking system. When you link to each of your two new pages within your site from your homepage, each page gets only 50% of the value the homepage has. (This is all measured in Page Rank). Let’s then say that your first inner page is the one you want to rank well in the Google, but you don’t care if your second inner page even gets found by Google or ranked. You could add the nofollow tag to the second link on your homepage, thereby giving the first inner page 100% of the homepage’s value.
Think of the implications. Imagine if you had a website with hundreds or thousands of pages and used the nofollow tag throughout. To understand how to implement this tag is, do a search in Google such as “how to add a nofollow tag to link”.
Finally, if you have pages such as a privacy page, terms page, checkout pages or contact pages that you don’t care if they rank well in Google, be sure to use the nofollow tag when creating internal links to these pages.
3) Use descriptive & different phrases to point to the same inner page
The words that are in the text of a link (also known as the anchor text) affect your search engine rankings. For example, the anchor text in the two links above is “Your Website”. If enough of these links that were on quality and valuable sites, including your own website’s inner pages, pointed to the same page, it would eventually rank well in Google when someone searches for the phrase “your website”.
Therefore, be sure to make the anchor text in all your internal links the phrases you want the pages to be found for in Google.
Going back to the number 1 tactic above, you would be far better off making the anchor text in all your footer links as descriptive as possible. If you want to rank well in Google for “affordable Red widgets” then make the anchor text “affordable Red widgets”.
Finally, vary your anchor text when pointing to the same page within your website. For instance, on some of your pages you could link to your Red Widgets page with the anchor text of “Red widgets”, then on other pages link to it using “affordable Red widgets” and then maybe use “widgets that are Red”. This allows you to get the page ranked for multiple terms and helps the user since you’re being descriptive and making your anchor text better match the content of the page it’s on.
4) Make links in your content
If you have text on your site, make some of the words within the text links that point to other pages within your website. For instance, if you have an article about Red widgets, or a page that describes how great your Red widgets are, make the first or second occurrence of the phrase “Red widgets” in the text a link that points to your Red Widgets page.
5) Create breadcrumbs at the top of every page
This looks something like this: Home – Products – Red Widgets
Each of words between the hyphens (which are also often greater-than signs) above should be links to their corresponding pages within the site. This helps your website visitors know where they are in relation to the rest of the site. It helps orientate site visitors. Anything you can do that helps your visitors’ experience is something you ought to consider doing. This also helps search engines spider your website more easily as well. Finally, making breadcrumbs creates more internal links to your pages, thus helping your rankings as well.
By following these top five internal linking tactics, you’ll be far ahead of the competition, you’ll rank better in Google and other search engines and you’ll be making your website visitors’ lives easier.

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Utah Search Engine Optimization: Avoid the Internal Search Results Catastrophe

admin    Google Optimization     Avoid, Catastrophe, Engine, Internal, optimization, Results, Search, Utah

SearchEngineLand.com recently published an article1 that offers good information for Utah search engine optimization professionals as well as other SEOs across the nation and beyond. The article discusses an SEO topic that isn’t commonly targeted as an area of SEO interest since it lies in the shadow of much-discussed issues that may include keyword research, Flash/optimization issues, optimized content, search engine site maps, etc.
However, the issue the article presents is a valuable one for Utah search engine optimization professionals and others.Utah Search Engine Optimization Professionals and the Desire for Google-Kosher ContentM
Early on, the searchengineland.com article quotes some of the Google guidelines for webmasters2:“Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.”
This quote may galvanize a debate among Utah search engine optimization professionals among others. Why? Well, some online commerce professionals might claim that the Google “regulation” doesn’t make sense, at least not when extremely interpreted (i.e. getting rid of all the internal results).An Issue for Utah Search Engine Optimization Professionals
The issue or the debate over internal search results is moderation vs. an extreme contumacy against all internal “search results page or other auto-generated pages.” For Utah search engine optimization professionals with an online store and various lists of products generated via internal searches this issue might specifically be of interest.The Debate a Utah Search Engine Optimization Professional Can Participate In
Both sides of the moderation vs. extremism debate support the idea that internally generated results shown by search engines are simply not as useful as product pages that provide more graphics and more information. After all, the search engines clearly want to provide value for their search engine users and it’s hard to provide value when an online searcher is typing the phrase buy bike in Utah and finds a list of internal results that may include results for additional sporting equipment, results about recreation, results that include company information, etc. Perhaps the “bike website” also sells health food and fishing licenses and those results would be presented as well. The process simply isn’t organized or dependable. However, However, should Google really penalize a website that has quality products but not enough money to fund a massive product content campaign?A Vote for Moderation regarding Internal Results Listings
Some Utah search engine professionals might prefer a more moderated approach. For instance, what about categorized search results? Wouldn’t those present clear (at least fairly clear) options for an online visitor. Let’s say for instance that you typed in the phrase Groundhog’s Day Movie into the Google search box and found a categorized list of movies one of which would be Groudhog’s Day. Some Utah search engine professionals might be able to get away with these types of listings (consider Amazon’s internal product results listing for example) for a while but better content and an easier streamlined process will inevitably win the Google game. After all, if you could choose between an attractive page devoted to Groundhog’s Day instead of a drab list of movie options, you’d probably be more likely to buy the movie and in addition you’d probably save time doing it as well. So, does that mean you should go all the way and start creating more exciting product pages as quickly as possible?
The answer is that yes you probably should.What should a Utah search engine optimization professional do?
Remember, your robots.txt file is not going to keep search engines away from your internal results pages. In fact, search engines can’t enter queries into your website’s search box but they can follow links, which means that only a lack of links to your website’s internal results pages will keep the search engines from indexing those ill favored pages.What should a Utah search engine optimization professional do next?
The next step towards higher quality search results that Google does want to index, requires better content for (at the very least) your most popular and sought after products. The product content should include photos (or graphics) and well written text that includes the product’s name and other key terms.
Just think better usability and you’ll start thinking like a Google-ite.
1 http://searchengineland.com/070312-104201.php
2 http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

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How Do I Add An Internal Google Search On A Website?

admin    Website Marketing Resources     google, Internal, Search, website

I’m doing a website and I would like to add a search feature that will allow users to search for things on the website using Google. How can I do this?
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