If you are like me, you are regularly receiving unsolicited email from various quarters, telling you about the latest and greatest SEO solutions on the planet. Just buy the book, or guide, or download the promotional whitepaper and this expert will offer you the latest "Secrets" to search engine success.
Google it. At last count I saw
millions of results! Well, it's not a very well-kept secret anyway.
One reason for the mysterious "secret" is simple: Google and other search engines do not publish their algorithms, and they are known to change without notification. Another reason, of course, that everyone is clamoring for the top spot, is because that's where the eyeballs track. Plus, if you monitor your placement closely, you'll find that it will change at least somewhat, even from one day to the next.
That said, practicing good SEO is not mysterious. A secret you only share with a BFF? Hardly. Good SEO is a combination of good standards-based web design and using your keywords intelligently, plus (and here's the tough one) getting good quality inbound links, as has been mentioned in "Business Blogging: the Value of Adding a Blog to Your B2B Mix."
Of course, aside from your own blog, your ability to add in-bound links can be limited, but here are some principles you should stick to that will make a difference right off the bat:
Make sure your web site or blog uses CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) rather than "inline styles." In short, inline styles (boo, hiss!) clutter your content pages with information that should be tucked away in a style.css file. Google only cares about your content, not what fonts and colors you are using.
Use key words in your page titles, headings and links to other content in your site. We know that Google "weighs these" as part of the keyword density of your site. Of course this assumes that you have a handle on your keywords, and this certainly takes some thought and analysis. Likewise, you want to avoid so-called keyword stuffing, as Googlebot has been around the block a time or two and can sniff it out and penalize you. It's really a common sense thing, don't try and trick the Google!
Whenever possible, use keywords in your URLs. Sounds easy, right? It may not be if you are using an outdated CMS or blog system that builds links that are full of squiggles and look like www.blahblah.com?p=1234&abdc. If your web site is built and linked manually, then it is easy, just www.blahblah.com/my-important-keywords. The standard preference is to use a "-" hyphen between words rather than an underscore or a space.
You almost never want to only put keyword text as an image. It not only makes it a pain to update them in the future, but it is completely opaque to search engines. Seems like common sense? Maybe, but there are cases when particular graphics fall into the "I absolutely must have them or I will just die" category. In these cases, you should label it with an "alt" tag. The general idea is that alt tags function to describe the image and they can contain your keywords. Keep in mind, though, that alt tags aren't "weighed" in the same way as paragraph headings and other parts of your site.
Again, you don't need an SEO secrets BFF to help you with basic principles. Just use some common sense website optimization considerations, and some analysis and footwork to get a good understanding of your marketing keywords. There are some great self-help tools available at www.seochat.com.
Image credits: PEANUTS© United Feature Syndicate, Inc. and the Charles Schulz Museum
If you have been paying attention to SEO principles, and your 
site's keywords, and your Google ranking - give yourself a pat on the back! A lot of the battle of marketing on the web is simply getting found. If you are at this point, you may well be asking, "okay, so what's next?" In order to realize a return on investment for your efforts, you need to actually convert those web clicks to sales leads. It's not magic, it's a combination of building the right landing page, and then measuring, testing again, and measuring.
The Obvious Offer is Key
Don't kid yourself, there is precious little time to catch the attention of a prospect. In a matter of a very few seconds, your visitor must determine whether they are going to take action or whether they will contribute to your bounce rate. Is your offer clearly visible? The entire approach of building your page must take this into account. As a result, the featured offer should be the most obvious item on the page, above the fold. Don't overuse graphics, or you can run into the over-stimulated "Las Vegas effect." Simply remember that you have a fleeting chance to get the focus of a short attention span, so use these images judiciously.
Highlight Value Points
We've already answered the question: "What do I get?" Next we need to make the short and sweet "value points." It is much shorter than even the proverbial elevator pitch, much shorter. Bullet points that clearly relate some clear message that your targeted audience will understand and value. Keeping things concise and understandable is, in fact, quite challenging. But if we were asking someone to download some new "Widget for Cleaning Windows," we might point out:
See clearly through your windows like never before
Allows window cleaning without usual streaks
Easy application
Keeps windows clearer longer, less work
This is really about enough! This is truly one of those times when less is more.
Effective Elements of Call to Action
Don't Distract: If you are linking from a landing page to a form, be sure and link both text and images, and of course they all need to point to the same offer. And while you may have a standard menu or navigation for your site, bear in mind that your offer page serves a very specialized purpose. Consider removing that standard navigation, sidebars and such, as you want to avoid extraneous links as much a possible. We want to feed the funnel, and if we present the visitor with a network of pathways, we are defeating our own business purposes.
Minimal Field Requirements: We've all seen it happen: An offer form designed by consensus with dozens of fields and drop-down lists from which to choose. This is definitely what we don't want. Figure out what you minimally need. The user experience is just as important as the business need and if that user feels hassled by multiple questions, your own results will suffer. The rule is simple: ask for the minimum information you need to fulfill the business objective. Pay special attention to see whether your required fields make sense. Hopefully you can get away with something like: name, email, and perhaps phone number --whatever you need to be able to contact them. Consider linking to a clear privacy policy, particularly if you must ask for phone number details.
Measure and Test
Well, hopefully you've been using some kind of web analytics tool to measure traffic. Google Analytics is a free and powerful tool, so there's really no excuse. Plus, having web analytics in place is critical in getting to the next step: measuring and testing what works with Google Optimizer. Think of Google Optimizer as kind of a subset of Google Analytics, more specialized, but dependent upon it. The combination of these two products gives you the ability to see abandonment rates, what versions of a landing page work best, and even what other pages on your site are of interested to those key constituents who convert. Consider the A/B test: Say you have your standard version of your "Widget for Cleaning Windows" description (A), and another that includes a couple of customer testimonial quotes (B). Do the quotes truly add value to your offer? Run the A/B test, and Google optimizer will randomly present one or the other version of the form to your prospects. In addition, Google Optimizer will present you with a running tally of which version is the most successful at converting visitors.
Building landing pages is a combination of trying different approaches, testing the results and simply doing more of what is the most effective in feeding the funnel. The approaches that work require some common sense approaches and some real discipline around focused messaging and value propositions. With the kind of tools now available for measuring and reporting, you can substantially improve your marketing efforts.
photo credit John Smith's, UK
A quick background on Inbound MarketingThe truth is, that while more traditional marketing tactics and outbound-type campaigns still do have a place in the B2B
marketing mix, it's to a much lesser degree. Email marketing done right, for example, is still an effective way to nurture existing leads and contacts that have already opted in to receive your content. But, as far as getting new prospects, there's been a massive shift toward inbound marketing (getting found by potential customers).
David Meerman Scott describes inbound marketng best and recommends that marketers "publish their way in" (via blogs, social media, etc.) in contrast to outbound marketing where marketers used to have to "buy their way in" (via paid advertisements, direct mail, list rentals, etc.).
So, the first place to start is to
turn your website into a lead magnet. To help get you started, we put together a
website optimization eBook that'll walk you through the basics of search engine optimization (SEO). The main goal is to show you how, with a little bit of effort, you can start to adjust or revamp your website to drive more traffic to it and begin making your Internet efforts more profitable -- without investing a fortune.
For those who are looking to enhance the marketing of your company website or feeling the pressure to increase website and online marketing performance, this eBook was put together to help get you started.
Learn how to:
- Quickly turn your website into an optimized, lead generating tool that gets your company found by qualified prospects.
- Implement effective natural (organic) search engine optimization (SEO) tactics in a few easy steps. If your site isn't receiving enough traffic, it might not be properly optimized.
- Apply keywords to your website and some best practices.
- Use linking to your advantage. Explains link popularity, PageRank and the importance of getting more links to your site.
Once you've had a chance to go through the eBook, let me know what you think by commenting on this article. There will be several more eBooks in this
Internet Marketing Essentials series so we want to provide only information you'll find useful.