Internet Marketing and eCommerce Expert – Nigel Burke's Blog

I’m going to describe an important concept about content that appears year after year on your website. If you had a product that came out each year, for example – a car model from Toyota called the Corolla, what address would give it?

• http://toyota.com.au/corolla
• http://toyota.com.au/corolla-series-8
• http://toyota.com.au/corolla2009

Still unsure? read on and I will explain which one to use.

What is Cyclical Content?
Cyclical content can be defined as information about a product, service or event that comes out each year or period.

You may have an awards event that is on every year or a new model of a product every six months.

The mistake most web designers make when working on your website
Many web designers will make the website address for your event, product or service with the date attached to it or the series number or something like that. For example, the awards website address that you have this year is http://yourname.com.au/awards09

What happens next year and people are searching for your awards website address in Google? They type in the name of your awards but what address comes up? This year and all your previous awards website address will be competing against each other.

The answer
The best website address to use is the same one every year or every time the product is released.

These are good addresses because it says the same -

• http://toyota.com.au/corolla
• http://yourname.com.au/awards

It doesn’t matter what year it is, the current information for your awards will be found in the same spot. Previous years’ award information won’t be competing against other years.

If you wanted to look at the 2006 model of the Toyota Corolla, you would use this address – http://toyota.com.au/corolla/2006. If you wanted this year’s model, you would use – http://toyota.com.au/corolla.

Wrap Up
I hope you understand how to use your website address in the most practical way to keep ranking your website high in the search engine results.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) can be defined as optimising your website so search engines can rank your website in the natural search results, as high as possible for those targetted keywords.

But is all the effort in SEO really worth it?
Should you put all that time and effort into optimising your website so that when the search engine bots come through, that your page will rank higher?

Should you even think about paying an SEO professional to do it for you? What return on investment can you expect?

There’s no  guarantees
No one can guarantee number one position for your chosen keywords for the natural search results. You might get emails in everyday with promises but still no real guarantee.

The statistics
The number one ranking website for any keyword has an average click through rate of 56%. So if 1,000 searches are done for that keyword each day, that’s 560 visitors each day on average.

Of these 560 visitors you get daily, 5% purchase a product – that’s 1 in 20 people. That’s a nice conversion rate and works out to be 112 new customers each day from that keyword. If the average purchase was $100, that’s $11,200 a day in revenue. That number 1 ranking is worth a lot of money.

Imagine if it was a popular keyword and it was being searched 100,000 times a day – 56,000 visitors a day and up to 11,200 new customers a day in an ideal scenario. That’s $1,120,000 a day. Now we’re starting to talk big business!!

Would your business benefit from this kind of traffic?
Any online business could benefit from this kind of traffic. On the Internet, targetted traffic is king. It earns money and it’s what some businesses survive on.

Competition is heavy in the search engines and the most profitable the keywords, that more likely there is going to be more competition.

Conclusion
SEO is definitely worth it and can take a company from being good to great! If your website is not search engine optimised, you are not helping the business at all.

If you have any questions about SEO, please contact me – nigel@burke.com.au

Many people may not have noticed this but Google has changed their homepage.

It’s not until you are told of the change that you would realize it.

Go to http://google.com but do not move your mouse. Only the search box and logo are visible. Once you move your mouse, the rest of the details appear.

This is just one of many changes Google has made that is not visible to the general Internet population. By writing and researching for this blog, I read about nearly every change.

Many of these changes are advanced and meaningless to users but as an Internet marketing expert like myself, they are important.

Your Internet marketing consultant should be aware of all the changes Google, Yahoo and Bing do so your website ranks at the top for your targetted keywords and stays at the top!

Twitter is one of the hottest social media tools today. Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon because … because everyone else is so it must be great.

I have been on Twitter for a few months now and yet to see real value from it.

I’m following 2,000 people because that is my limit but I’m not reading many of the tweets that come in. Maybe I am following the wrong people because most of them are about network marketing and making money.

It might be time for a clean out and following some better Twitters.

There is about 500 Twitters following me now. When I post a new blog entry, I normal send a tweet but I’m not seeing any traffic from it.

Is Twitter really worth it?
This makes me wonder if this company is really worth a billion dollars? It has no revenue and any advertisements are going to be ignored.

I see more value in the Facebook platform yet they are still having issues trying to make money from advertising.

Spam Tweets
I am noticing that many of the tweets that I receive are spam. I don’t read many of them because everyone is shouting out to get me to their website.

The statistics from January to November 2009.
The number of new users in July was 9.4 million down to 7.1 million in November. How many of these accounts are really accounts?

The number of Tweets has been increasing more. Are people using this as a real communications tool or are spammers using Twitter to help market their websites?

Conclusion
Will Twitter stand the test of time? Will people remember Twitter as a fad or will it keep growing into a important communications tool?

If Twitter cannot find a better purpose, with real people and less spammers, it may not be be really worth it.

Have you seen Will It Blend? It’s a crazy series of videos by Blendtec, a small blender manufacturer. The series has been seen by millions of people. My favorite is Will It Blend? – iPhone. If you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself a favor and take a minute to watch. This YouTube video has been seen nearly 7.5 million times.

Viral marketing is the phenomenon of other people passing along your ideas to friends via email or blogs or other online means…for free! Best of all, there is very little costs in setting up the costs compared to advertising campaigns. You could compare it to people handing out your business card to all their friends because they think it’s cool.

Here are some tips to make video go viral. Creating a video is easy and it is free to post onto YouTube. All you need is a simple $300 digital video camera, a YouTube account and an idea.

Most importantly: Your video needs to be funny or amazing or remarkable or have some fascinating information or be controversial. Basically the video needs a reason for people to pass it on. If you can find pass along value connected to your organization and its products, great. I’m not a fan of stupid contests or celebrity endorsements unrelated to a company and its products.

Tip # 1 – Homemade is just fine

You don’t need to hire a professional. A homemade quality video can work great. But plan ahead and shoot several takes to get it right.

Tip #2 – Your video should be no longer then 2 minutes (preferably less)

Think very short. You need to get to the punch quickly. Although YouTube will accept a video that is less than 10 minutes, smaller than 100MB try to make the video between 30 seconds and 2 minutes.

Tip #3 – Make your description clear and specific.

To best promote your video, you’ll want its text description on YouTube to be accurate and interesting. Use descriptive keywords and language that people will find when they search for videos like yours. And use the correct categorizations on YouTube so people will find it.

Tip #4 – Don’t attempt “stealth” fake customer insertions to YouTube.

Some companies try to sneak corporate-sponsored video onto YouTube in a way that makes it seem like it is consumer-generated. The YouTube community is remarkably skilled at ratting out inauthentic video, so this approach is fraught with danger.

Tip #5 – Try a series of similar videos to build interest

Sometimes a series of videos works great. The Blendtec Will it Blend? videos are a perfect example. The even sell t-shirts now!

Tip #6 – Tell everyone about your video!

When you upload your first few videos, you are likely to hear a deafening silence. You’ll be waiting for comments, but none will come. You’ll check your video statistics and be disappointed by the tiny number of viewers. Don’t get discouraged. It takes time to build an audience. Make sure people know it is there and can find it. Create links to your video from your home page, product pages, or online media room. Mention your video in your e-mail or offline newsletters, and create links to your video as part of your e-mail signature and those of other people in your organization.

Tip # 7 – make sure bloggers know about the video

Sending a link to the video to bloggers or commenting on other people’s blogs (and including a link to your video) is a good way to build an audience. If you comment on blogs in the same space as yours, you might be surprised at how quickly you will get viewers to your video.

Tip #8 – Experiment a lot to find something that hits

While I think it is difficult to purposely create viral marketing buzz, it is certainly possible. Create a number of campaigns and see what hits, then nurture the winners along. Think like a venture capitalist or movie studio and try a number of things in order to get that elusive hit.

Good luck. And if you do create a cool video, let me know.

Post Author: David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist, keynote speaker, seminar leader, and the author of the hit new book World Wide Rave. His previous book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR is an award-winning BusinessWeek bestseller and is being published in 25 languages.

You can read David Meerman Scott’s blog here.

I am often asked how to get higher rankings in search engines. Perhaps the customer has done everything possible to optimize their website, what next?

Backlinks are key to getting a great search engine ranking.

Next time you send an email to say ‘thank you for doing business with us’, maybe ask that customer to do a blog post if they have a blog. You can return the favour by adding a blog post about them. It’s a win-win situation for everyone – you both will get inbound links to your sites and a higher search engine ranking.

Try and get them to add some links to your site with the keywords you are targeting if possible.

You may not notice a big difference with one or two posts about your business but think if 20+ posts are done about your website. Now that will help you search engine ranking!

Your website can rank higher by simply knowing what elements Google and other search engines look at when indexing your page. When you are aware of these elements, you can make minor modifications to your website to produce a better ranking.

This is information that your SEO expert does not want you to know. SEO experts charge thousands of dollars to apply this to your website.

1. URL – The URL is the web address. You can name the page with the targeted keywords.
   Action – Name your pages accordingly.
   Example – http://yourdomain.com.au/keyword.html
    
2. Links – The links in the page should be related to the targeted keywords. These are just like references and by reading the references, you should be able to work out what the original page is about.
   Action – Name your links so they are related to the targeted keywords.
   Example – <a href=”apr.com.au”>Australian Produce Report</a>
    
3. The title tag – Do not simply place your business name here. Search engines rank the first words as the most important keywords for your site.
   Action – Place the most important keywords first and then your business name.
   Example – <title>keywords | page name | Business name</title>
    
4. The description tag – This does not have as much weight as it used to have but it is still important. Many search engines still look at this for keywords and even Google may use it as the description for your page in it’s search results.
   Action – Imagine that your visitor has not seen the page and write a good description about what the page is about.
   Example – <meta name=”description” content=”a great description of the page”>
    
5. The keywords tag – Search engines may not put much weight on to the specified keywords but it is still good to include it because every bit helps.
   Action – Enter a list of the most important keyworkds into this tag.
   Example – <meta name=”keywords” content=”a list of great keywords”>
    
6. The heading tags – Search engines look at the heading tags throughout your document and define what the page is about. Many websites make the mistake of not using the heading tags at all so the text looks like a long blurb to a search engine.
   Action – Using heading tags to break up your text into headings and subheadings using the search engine recognised way.
   Example – <h1>Big heading</h1> … text … <h2>Sub heading here</h2> … more text.
    
7. Bold text – Does your site use bold text? Using bolding on your most important keywords in your text. This will make it easier for a human reader and search engine bot to understand it – but make sure that it still looks good. Afterall, you need to make pages that humans can read and not pages that are simply only optimized and readable by search engine robots.
   Action – Use bolding for your most important keywords in your content
    
8. Text – Your chosen keywords should be the main discussion points on this page. If you have chosen a keyword but have not mentioned it in the content, should you be really targeting that keyword or maybe you need to add more content so you include the keywords.
   Action – Check that your target keywords are aligned with the content.
    
9. Alt text – Do your images utilize the image description element? If you load a web page without images, you should be able to make out what the images are about using the image description information. Search engines only read text and not images. The alt image value appears when you rest a mouse on an image.
   Action – Describe every image on the page and add your targeted keywords where you can. Remember that Braille readers and speech synthesizers use the alt text value so do not confuse these readers.
    

How could we forget these basic rules?
When making a web page, we often think about the marketing and the selling perspective of the page. We often forget that search engine robots need to read these pages too. On the other hand, we need to create pages that humans can understand as well.

Search engines try and replicate how a human would read a page but sometimes, they need a helping hand. By implementing these elements correctly on all your web pages means that search engines will recognise the content and targeted keywords more easily.

Conclusion
You now know how to optimize your on-page elements for your website. Now go update your website with your new found knowledge!

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising means that you only pay when someone clicks on your advertisement. You do not pay each time your ad is displayed. PPC advertising can be an effective form of advertising because you are paying based on the performance of the ad. If no one clicks on your ad, then you do not pay.

The idea was formed in 1998 by GoTo, a search engine portal. PPC has now become one of the main forms of advertising online. This has created some very competitive marketplaces and can be expensive. Some marketplaces are very inexpensive and can be very profitable.

The Benefits of Pay-Per-Click
There are many reasons and benefits for using PPC advertising. Here are some of the benefits -

• Get instant traffic to your website
• Create test campaigns
• No waiting to be listed in the organic search listing
• Allows (smart) small players to compete against the big guys
• Spending controlled on a daily, weekly or monthly basis
• Anyone can setup a PPC advertising campaign in Google, Yahoo or Bing.
• Continually test landing pages, ads, keywords before putting more resources into the campaign

The Cost of Pay-Per-Click Advertising
The great thing about PPC is you control what you spend. For popular keywords, the budget can be limitless. Industries such as insurance and car rentals can be very expensive and push the smaller players out.

Some keywords can be very profitable resulting in high conversion rates. Having a great ad, the right keywords and sending the visitor to the correct page can make all the difference for a successful campaign.

I have personally seen websites that were previously getting very little traffic and poor sales results – to becoming an overnight success because the world did not know they existed. Once the right traffic was sent to the site, the website started producing great profits and operations expanded.

Always Testing
Pay-Per-Click campaigns allow you to continually do testing. You can run a PPC campaign for one day or even an hour and see how people respond to the ad that you have created, the landing page that you are sending the traffic to and track the keywords that you are targeting.

You can do split testing where you run two ads in rotation and see which one runs best. You cannot do that with normal print media.

Tracking Results = Return on Investment
Through the use of Google Analytics and similar programs, you can track all online transactions. You can see the following information -

• The exact keywords that the visitors enter to find your ad
• The pages they view when they visit your site
• The cost of the ad
• The conversion rates resulting in working out the ROI

Why Pay-Per-Click is Important
If you are not advertising your services to your potential customers, your competition will and they will get your new customers. Can you afford to lose customers?

Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts will be wasted if you target the wrong keywords. PPC allows you to fast track your SEO by testing the keywords before you even attempt to optimize your site for those keywords.

Warning – You Can Lose Money
Google and Yahoo are targeting small businesses to start advertising online by offering free credit. Please be educated before you setup your own campaigns. If you do not know what you are doing, you will lose money. I have seen business with one keyword in their keyword list, poorly written ads and sending visitors to the wrong page. I have even seen ads sending visitors to broken pages!

Professional Pay-Per-Click Consultants
If you do not know what you are doing, I recommend using a professional service. They will charge for their service but in the long run, it can save you thousands of dollars and a lot of time.

A professional Pay-Per-Click consultant will -

• Research for the best keywords
• Enter negative keywords
• Create professional copy for your ad
• Pre-qualify visitors so you are only getting buyers to your website
• Point visitors to the correct pages on your website
• Setup multiple campaigns
• Optimize your ads to have a strong rating
• Continually test keywords, ads and the land pages
• Control the spending of your campaign
• Analysis the existing competition
• Generate reports based on the performance of your campaigns
• Answer any questions you may have

Conclusion
Pay-Per-Click advertising can be used in many ways to help your website get more sales and become more profitable.

I will be writing more articles to explain the different ways you can advertise your site online and setting up your own campaigns. If you have any questions, please email nigel@burke.com.au

Melbourne Cup is the race the stops the nation. It is expected that $230 million dollars will be gambled on this race from punters and an incredible $1.67 billion over the four day race carnival. Many people take a day off work and go to the races, go to Melbourne Cup functions and have office parties. It is even a public holiday in Victoria!

Would your business benefit from advertising for the Melbourne Cup? Could customers interested in the Melbourne Cup use your services? You may not be based in Melbourne but this is watched by half the population in Australia. Is that a big enough market?

Melbourne Cup search on Google
I did a Google web search for “melbourne cup” and there is 17,500,000 results but there are only 4 advertisers which are gambling websites. A search for “melbourne cup catering” has 48,900 results and many more advertisers.

Could your business be advertising for melbourne cup services? What about other events?

Event Specific SEM Campaigns
You can create specific SEM campaigns that target the event. You would need to choose related keywords, create related ads and maybe even create a special land page to send people to. The campaign may only run for a couple of weeks leading up to the event and then you could turn it off. Maybe re-use it for next year.

The benefit of setting up an SEM campaign and paying for the traffic means that you don’t need to optimize your website for the event keywords. You can apply a budget and only pay for the performance.

Conclusion
I hope I have you thinking about setting up event campaigns to targetted events utilisng search engine marketing.

Everyone is talking about internet advertising but how much is really being spent on Internet advertising? Is it increasing or decreasing? Is it all just hype?

No, it is not hype and it is increasing everyday. A report compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) shows Australia’s commitment to this form of advertising with 18.5% growth for 2008-09 financial year compared to the previous financial year. We spent $1.8 billion dollars for the year, ending 30 June 2009 and $453 million in the last quarter.

Where is Internet Advertising Spent?
Internet advertising can be broken down into the following areas including % of total advertising expenditure -

• Search and Directories – 49% (25% growth)
• General Display – 27% (19.6% growth)
• Classifieds – 24% (6% growth)

This is definitely a strong growth area where the big players are putting in large amounts because they see the value in it. I can only see this area increasing compared to other advertising mediums including TV, radio and magazines.