Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
Domain Cloaking & Redirction
Cloaking is one of many blackhat techniques that can bury your site or even get a website excluded from the index of search engines. As with almost everything, there is both a beneficial and irritating side to cloaking.
What Is Cloaking?
Cloaking involves preparing two or more versions of the same page: the readable version for human visitors and another for search engine robots. The version for search engines is usually optimized to give the appearance that the page is keyword-rich, for instance, so that the site makes headway in search engine listings. But if all the keywords (dozens, even hundreds of vaguely relevant possibilities) were in the readable content, it would quickly irritate human readers.
It’s cheating, right?
Yes. Cloaking is outright cheating and an attempt to manipulate search engines. It is a constant battle of wits with search engines that need to neutralize such attempts for fear of antagonizing their own customers. Otherwise, the integrity of search results is at risk.
How Is Cloaking Done?
Cloaking is a server-side operation. A special script is deployed on the server. When a request arrives, the script delivers the version appropriate to the IP and the user agent of the request. Since search engines identify themselves as spiders, not as browsers, the user agent check results in serving up the especially-prepared page.
Is There a Positive Side to It?
On the other hand, a technique similar to cloaking is also routinely used for serving up, in the lingo of Internet marketing, targeted content. This is geotargeting (short for “geographical targeting”), a server–side technique for discriminating the geographical location of a visitor and displaying appropriate content. A well-known example of this is when a Vancouver resident and a Hong Kong businessman both type in the www.google.com URL. The former receives google.ca (with local merchant advertising, naturally) while the latter is pleased to get the Chinese-language version. Similarly, Canadians who type in www.sears.com never reach the New York headquarters. They receive www.sears.ca instead.
Geotargeting is a legitimate application of cloaking because, privacy issues aside, the web site merely provides what is logically the appropriate or preferable version to each user. As we have seen, search engines already practice cloaking and selective display of query results.
As you can see, there is a line that separates unethical and ethical cloaking. Make sure you do not cross over.
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
Create a Winning Campaign Landing Page
A campaign landing page is the intermediate destination for visitors who click on Internet marketing links anywhere: email, search, referrals, etc. Companies use the landing page to gather information (such as name, email address, source of awareness) from potential customers. For their part, prospects affirm their interest in the information offered without needless exposure to extraneous information such as the rich content on the main company web page..
What are the best ways to get good results from my landing page?
According to recent studies, a website has only eight seconds to make a good impression on a visitor. A focused landing page that reiterates strong selling points while telling the consumer exactly what is required of them to receive the information they seek makes all the difference between a visit and a sale.
Secondly, winning campaign landing pages capture the attention of consumers by re-creating the look and feel of that email, display ad or other marketing channel that provoked their interest.
Keep the form short, limited to the essentials. A good basic landing page form need only ask for the person’s name, email address, and possibly home phone numbers. But if you really have to have extensive background information (like banks, credit card issuers, beta test sites, a university processing applicants, and job sites), do the next best thing by separating the long form into manageable chunks on different pages. Build in transitions like “10 questions to go, 5 items left”. Offer an incentive or premium. Be effusive about how you appreciate their cooperation.
Are there any other things I should do?
Make sure your call to action is prominent.
Reinforce with benefits, more benefits and still more benefits. This is true whether you are in a B2B or B2C situation.
Lay the assurances on thick, especially if calling for a high-involvement, high-risk and premium-priced buy. Consider endorsements, contact information for the company Chairman and assurances by experts. Selling cosmetic surgery is way different from hawking a widget.
In this day and age of cable internet and DSL, provide illustrations, diagrams, charts, and pictures to save your potential customer from having to absorb long blocks of text.
Above all, remember to engage your brand-new prospect. Get down and personal. Talk one-on-one.
Follow these guidelines, get a superb designer on your side and you will be well on the way to an effective landing page!
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
Managing Duplicate Content
There are three ways duplicate content can happen on the Web. All three are deliberate acts and two are within the control of a webmaster.
To get the uncontrollable out of the way first, this is about content that some other unscrupulous party plagiarized and posted as their own without acknowledging the author or copyright owner.
The Duplicate Blog Post: SEO Sin
Posting the exact same blog column, update or opinion piece is the most frequently-occurring case of deliberately-duplicated content. This is content which is exactly the same, word for word, published on different sites. Let’s say you have an article about tulips published on site A. You have an account on site B and you decide to publish the article there, as well.
In fact, there are “black hat” SEO practitioners (so called because they are the underground, somewhat shady kind) who are prone to spam dozens of sites with duplicate content just to get numerous links that are a plus for search engines.
This is duplicate content that, expert opinion holds, the search engines are likely to notice. In the best case, one of the sites will not be indexed. At worst, both could be penalized with lower page rank. The reason is that Google and other search engines are said to have a bias for fresh, original content and accordingly, they penalize wrongdoers.
When to use 301 redirection?
And then there is the legitimate situation of temporarily having the same content on two or more pages or domains. This can happen when the webmaster has made changes to the URL structure of the site or is in the process of migrating it to a new domain. Since it is desirable to maintain the hard-earned ranking of the original pages, a canny webmaster can opt to preserve the inbound links.
The way to do this is with an advanced SEO technique: 301 redirect code is one of the best ways to avoid penalties for temporarily-duplicated content. When a visitor enters the original page URL, 301 redirects seamlessly tell visitors (and search engine spiders, as well) that the page has moved and shift them quickly to the new address.
Needless to say, you must remove the original content eventually and then redirect because if not, you clearly have duplicate content. These 301 redirects are implemented on the Web server (Apache or IIS) or via PHP/ASP, obviously a task system engineers can carry out.
Monday, August 24th, 2009
Blogging for Business: An Engaging Customer Conversation
Do Blogs Mean Business?
“Blogs”, short for “web logs”, are a type of journal that one makes available for all to read on the Web and comment on. In existence since around 1997 and a spiffed-up version of yester-year’s Usenet groups and e-group forums, blogs have exploded in popularity. By May 2007, Technorati estimated there were no less than 71 million around the world.
How to Start a Blog?
This explosion of blogs has, in great part, been facilitated by user-friendly software that permitted non-technical people to write, update and post (also called “publishing”) their opinions on the Web day by day. Owners, also called “bloggers” or op-ed columnists, earn hits and visitors by welcoming feedback or no-holds-barred discussion.
Wordpress.com and Google’s blogger.com are clearly the more popular blogging sites. Their interface is simple and easy to use. Both facilitate ease of use and offer a reasonable variety of customization possibilities for both business and personal bloggers.
Blogging: A fun and lucritive pastime
Making the Most of Blogs
Blogs are even more personal expressions of personal taste and opinion. So targeting niche audiences is not only tolerated, it is actually encouraged.
One key thing to remember is that repeat visitors are attracted by frequent updates or new content. Hence, blog owners update content on a regular basis. Putting up fresh content daily is a great way to achieve this.
Four Reasons Why For Business
Advertising – On the face of it, businesses employ blogs as one more channel of marketing and corporate PR “spin”. The difference is that blogs permit near-instantaneous customer feedback. In that sense, blogs are great tools for customer relationship management, Secondly, professionals can enhance their reputation as consultants or industry “guru’s” by dispensing expert advice.
Employee Relations. Many people-oriented managements have realized that blogs can enhance employee morale freer communication up and down the organization. This makes more sense than for disgruntled employees to post their raves and rants elsewhere on the Web and thereby tarnish corporate image.
Be a Cool Kid: Learn to Love to Blog!
Fourth, blogs can be another channel for conveying customer information – a sale, for instance, or new product introduction – with an urgency that habitués of the blog cannot expect from staid old corporate web sites.
Popular Business Blogs
According to The Times Online some of the more popular business blog categories are those in:
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Banking and Finance
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Construction and Property
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Media and Marketing
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Retail
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Telecoms and,
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Utilities
Monday, August 24th, 2009
What’s in a Name? Domain Names are still VERY Important
Does Domain Name Matter?
Even the best and the brightest SEO experts have blind spots. They know intellectually that search engines assign considerable weight to keyword content on page titles. Yet they sit there day after day, staring at the company web page, with the domain name right on top where no one can possibly miss it. And they fail to acknowledge that the domain name does not help their cause at all.
Nonetheless, there are action items to help fix that SEO gap.
Tips for Creating a Domain Name
Because your choice of domain name significantly affects SEO performance, you owe it to yourself to choose one that best reflects the business of the company. For starters, choose a domain name that is short, descriptive, suits the common domain name extensions (.com, biz, etc.), includes a keyword, and is easy to spell. All these help with brand name recall.
What Domain should I register? So many Choices!
Short Domain Name
This is clear enough. Think of all the global brands seven letters or shorter: IBM, Coke, Xerox, Avon, Exxon.
Descriptive Domain Name
It is sound business and good PR to choose a name that accurately describes what the website is about. If you were selling shoes, allshoes.com makes sense. ”Pizza Hut” is an even better example of a company name that incorporates a product keyword.
Good Web Extension
Try .com before any other extension. Since .com is the most common and still most popular domain extension it is a good idea to try and find an available .com domain name. If all the .com names you want are already taken, try .net, .org, and a few others before moving on to the newer types.
Include a Keyword in your Name
Try and include at least one of your keywords in your domain name. This will play a significant role in increasing your search engine rankings. When someone searches on a keyword phrase that includes your domain name, your website has a good chance of being in page one of the results list. Case in point: Roget’s exists in www.thesaurus.com ; clearly, they own the search right away.
Domain Names: Luck has alot to do with finding a great Domain Name
Easy to Spell
Domain names that need to be written down or require reference to an encyclopedia to look up the correct spelling must be replaced. Double letters or dashes invite misspelling. If your corporate name suffers from these weaknesses, use your top-selling brand. The Marketing Department has covered all these bases before investing marketing dollars.
Generic or Exclusive?
The answer is pretty straightforward: adopt a generic name if you can file a trademark registration or copyright on it. The best idea is to buy generic domain names that are related to your specific business category and redirect visitors to your URL.
So, what’s in a name?
Since domain name does have a bearing on SEO performance, it bears serious thought. The next time you ask, “what’s in a name?” realize that it should be as powerful and effective as the one ultimately chosen for your stable of brands.
Does Domain Name Matter?
Even the best and the brightest SEO experts have blind spots. They know intellectually that search engines assign considerable weight to keyword content on page titles. Yet they sit there day after day, staring at the company web page, with the domain name right on top where no one can possibly miss it. And they fail to acknowledge that the domain name does not help their cause at all.
Nonetheless, there are action items to help fix that SEO gap.
Tips for Creating a Domain Name
Because your choice of domain name significantly affects SEO performance, you owe it to yourself to choose one that best reflects the business of the company. For starters, choose a domain name that is short, descriptive, suits the common domain name extensions (.com, biz, etc.), includes a keyword, and is easy to spell. All these help with brand name recall.
Short Domain Name
This is clear enough. Think of all the global brands seven letters or shorter: IBM, Coke, Xerox, Avon, Exxon.
Descriptive Domain Name
It is sound business and good PR to choose a name that accurately describes what the website is about. If you were selling shoes, allshoes.com makes sense. ”Pizza Hut” is an even better example of a company name that incorporates a product keyword.
Good Web Extension
Try .com before any other extension. Since .com is the most common and still most popular domain extension it is a good idea to try and find an available .com domain name. If all the .com names you want are already taken, try .net, .org, and a few others before moving on to the newer types.
Include a Keyword in your Name
Try and include at least one of your keywords in your domain name. This will play a significant role in increasing your search engine rankings. When someone searches on a keyword phrase that includes your domain name, your website has a good chance of being in page one of the results list. Case in point: Roget’s exists in www.thesaurus.com ; clearly, they own the search right away.
Easy to Spell
Domain names that need to be written down or require reference to an encyclopedia to look up the correct spelling must be replaced. Double letters or dashes invite misspelling. If your corporate name suffers from these weaknesses, use your top-selling brand. The Marketing Department has covered all these bases before investing marketing dollars.
Generic or Exclusive?
The answer is pretty straightforward: adopt a generic name if you can file a trademark registration or copyright on it. The best idea is to buy generic domain names that are related to your specific business category and redirect visitors to your URL.
So, what’s in a name?
Since domain name does have a bearing on SEO performance, it bears serious thought. The next time you ask, “what’s in a name?” realize that it should be as powerful and effective as the one ultimately chosen for your stable of brands.