I often have conversations with clients about the importance of good internal linking and anchor text, and recently I saw a great example of the power of both these things.
Author Archives: charles
Power of anchor text and internal linking
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Google [not so] Local
Checkout this search query on Google.co.nz….
Searching on google.co.nz, selecting pages from New Zealand, and using a query which makes it pretty clear what I am looking for, you’d think Google would know which set of local results to show. Notice anything wrong?
Search and Brand Marketing
[an abbreviated version of this article first appeared in the Febuary issue of Admedia magazine]
Let me state at the outset that I am a card-carrying member of the direct response school of search marketing, an unapologetic advocate for spending more on search and less on everything else. I got this way because I was responsible for making a return on online marketing budgets and over time I found that search consistently delivered the results. Simple. Continue reading
Free WordPress Theme
There’s loads of places to find free WordPress themes, the best is probably the official WordPress Theme Gallery. You name a topic and there is undoubtedly a royalty free theme available to suit.
Our own talented studio head, Karen Rubado, designed this theme for the Online Marketer blog, and we figured we might as well make it available for others to use too…
Download Online Marketer WordPress Theme
Here’s a screenshot:
We have a few customizations live on this site which we’ve had to remove from this distribution so that it will play nicely with an out of the box install of WordPress, but we hope you’ll agree it is a nice, simple, and clean theme…and of course it is pretty well optimized for SEO :)
Installation Instructions:
- Download the zip file and extract the contents
- Upload the extracted folder to the /wp-content/themes/ folder
- Log into your WordPress admin, navigate to the Design administration section and select the Online Marketer theme
- Go and make a cup of tea to celebrate because you are all done
Leave a comment here if you have any questions. We’ll try to answer them as best we can, but please understand that we can’t promise to provide installation or customization support beyond informal Q&A :)
When the going gets tough…
Just last might I was reflecting to a friend that we had been unexpectedly busy recently with lots of enquiries, proposals and statements of work going out the door, many of them related to search marketing and SEO in particular. Then this morning I read Rand Fishkin’s post over at SEOmoz:
In the last 6 weeks, SEOmoz has received a higher than normal volume of requests for consulting. Alongside that, we’ve been getting calls from venture capital firms out of the blue - seven to date – asking either about investments they’re considering in the SEO sphere (and requesting insight) or literally asking whether SEOmoz would like to take more capital to grow (post about that coming soon). And it’s not just us. The jobs and contracts section of the Marketplace has been humming in November, and anecdotal conversations with other SEO firms tell me there’s quite a bit of business to be had for both in-house and external SEOs.
Read the full post: Why Companies are Investing in SEO During the Economic Downturn
One thing that really rings true for me is his point about interest in SEO being driven by paid search marketing. With the ROI on PPC being so immediate and accountable it is only natural for Marketing Managers to start asking about the other 70% of search queries which don’t result in a click on a paid listing. How good would it be for your business if you could rank top 10 for those?
Marine Electronics Case Study
“Netconcepts took away the headache of getting the site built so I didn’t have to manage it too closely.”
In March 2008 Blair Peach, Director of Marine Electronics launched their new ecommerce website, designed and built by Netconcepts, with the aim of shaking up the recreational marine industry online.
With many marine related websites in New Zealand being a “jack of all trades” by selling everything from ropes to wrenches, Marine Electronics differs by targeting the recreational fisherman and boat owner by being a price competitive specialist in marine electronics.
Marketing is an Art and a Science
This post over at Idealog caught my attention this morning…
Google chief executive Eric Schmidt told a recent Advertising Age conference that the future of advertising lies in measurement. But, to quote the genius campaign for Toyota’s Signature range of imported used cars: they would say that.
It would be easy to assume that Google is utterly unbiased—the numbers don’t lie, after all. But data (gathered after the event) doesn’t necessarily amount to intelligence.
If Google is right we will have gone from one extreme to the other. Rampant idealism meets bloodless statistics.
The point I think David MacGregor is making is that marketing and advertising are not just about statistics, and that we should not let Google’s algorithmic approach to what they do vanillify marketing practice. And I have to say that I agree in large part…marketing is about people and when it comes to people there’s always more art than science imho.
But marketing and advertising is an art in the conception and the execution (just like business generally). Google are pioneering ways to execute better but I don’t think that necessarily means there isn’t still plenty of scope for well conceived advertising creative.
Even in Google’s Adwords product there’s a need for creativity and persuasion. For sure it is very a limited medium, but good ‘creative’ copy in search marketing can move ROI + or – an enormous amount. And Google’s Adwords product isn’t just about what you do to get the click, that’s only half the job (or less), what happens after the click is probably more important…enter stage left talented marketers.
So, I would argue that Google’s algorithmic approach doesn’t reduce the need or importance of good creative marketing and advertising (the big idea!), but does bring some long overdue science to the execution. Measurement is really important. Particularly as the economy tightens good marketers want to know where the ROI is.
But then again, I’m a dyed in the wool search marketer so I would say that :)
Blended Search
This article also appears in the September edition of NZ Marketing magazine
What is search engine optimisation? The usual reply is “oh, that’s placing keywords on the homepage of your website”. Truth is there is much more involved in optimising a website, and it is goes well beyond just the words on your pages. Indeed, where the end goal is to generate qualified traffic to a website to reach marketing objectives it does not necessarily mean that only your website needs to be optimised.
The term “Blended Search” represents the various online media and search products that can be found in search results today. Traditional web search is only one product offered by search engines. Other search media include images, video, news, people, maps, documents, directories, books and blogs.
Online Retail Seminar Series
I just got back from a really great seminar series organized by e-retail consultant Cate Bryant under the auspices of the New Zealand Retailers Association. It was a great event with fantastic presentations from Grant Jennings of Ezibuy and Vikki Branagan, former CEO of Stevens. Sailesh Manga (of Optimal Usability), Cate, and myself also did some site reviews of well known Kiwi eCommerce sites as well as some on the fly assessments of sites volunteered by attendees. The event was held over three days in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch and I think was genuinely useful for all the attendees. If you are in the business of online retail I would recommend looking for the next in this series which will feature a talk by Will Hunsinger, ex VP of Gap online in the US.
A couple of takeways for me related to the use of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) in the online retail space, which was something the Ezibuy team talked to, and also the idea of Gift Giving as an online retail strategy which is what Vikki Branagan talked about. I’ll be following up with some posts reflecting on both these soon.
If you are interested in search…
Just a quick one to point out this post on the official Google blog by one of their ‘Google Fellows’, Amit Singhal. Of course it doesn’t dive too deep, but it is a good read if you are interested in the way Google works. I also find it interesting because it seems to signal an intent to be a bit more communicative with the marketplace…
As part of our effort to discuss search quality, I want to tell you more about the technologies behind our ranking. The core technology in our ranking system comes from the academic field of Information Retrieval (IR)…read more.
The post goes on to talk about one of my favorite topics, searcher intent, but one of the take aways for me was the reminder that Google not only has to solve the problem of indexing and understanding the content of pages on the web, but they also have to solve the problem of understanding search queries, which might be mispelled, have double meanings or be otherwise non-specific. Amit gives some great examples to illustrate these.