Internet Marketing in 10 Minutes

Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, Susan Moskwa informed us in the Q & A section of last weeks phone conference that even if a page is blocked by Robots.txt that it still can have PageRank passed to it from pages that are linking to it unless you use nofollow within the link.

Let’s say that you don’t care rather or not your Policy & Procedures page is indexed by Google or not so you decide to add the page to your Robots.txt file. This will effectively tell search engines that abide by the rules set fourth within Robots.txt to not index that particular page.

Let’s say that you have a footer link to your Policy & Procedures page as well as a link to this page immediately below your order form or other forms found through out your website. If these links are not property created with the nofollow tag then you are going to be passing PageRank to your Policy & Procedures page that doesn’t even have the privilege of being indexed by Google.

This goes to show us that taking the time to make sure something is done right is going to be far better then having to go back and fix things later. If your website is leaking PageRank then that can affect how well certain pages of your site performs within Google SERPs.

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

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Blogs have an uncanny advantage over most static websites on the web today. Here are just a few of those advantages:

1. They automatically alert search engines of new posts whereas a static website gets to simply wait to be crawled for the update to be picked up.
2. They are also crawled in the same way a static website is crawled in addition to advantage number 1.
3. They tend to rank far quicker for many different terms than static websites.
4. People can subscribe via RSS Feeds which also announces new additions by the Blogger.
5. There is a whole subset of search engines are available to blogs that aren’t as readily available to regular old static websites.

However while all that might be impressive and certainly many reasons why you should have a blog; it may not be worth all it is made out to be. Consider the following scenario:

You write a post targeted to reach a particular audience. Let’s say that post is all about foreclosures in your area. You then spend your time promoting that post through different social media sites, forums, maybe a press release and other types of marketing venues.

Sure you’ll get targeted traffic for this and you might even pick up a customer or two and a few really good rankings in Google in a matter of days. While this all sounds good here is what happens next in this scenario:

The housing market is no longer in trouble and our economy is stabilizing out. The banks and lending companies are just about back to normal with foreclosures in your area and new homes are priced so well that this is the latest buzz.

You write a post targeted to reach people interested in new homes and since foreclosures typically indicate a formally inhabited home, you decide to stay clear away from mentioning foreclosures except maybe in a brief passing. You then spend your time promoting like you did before.

Now you’ll get a whole new group of targeted traffic. However you are still getting traffic from your foreclosure post and that particular targeted audience is now seeing a post on new homes. This creates for a potential increase in bounce rate and lost business.

Not only does a Blogger have to find a creative balance when making sure not to alienate one target audience or another but they also have to worry about maintaining rankings for older posts as well.

Every time a Blogger posts a new post on a different topic, closely related or not, they are giving search engines the idea that their topic of interest has changes which then begins a slow and steady rank decline for past targeted keywords you’ve spent time and money targeting.

How about tried and true static websites? Do they have advantages? Absolutely and I have a few advantages to point out about them as well. They are:

1. They don’t typically change all that much and when they do it is partially due to syndicated content which isn’t always seen by search engines depending on how the website owner is choosing to display it.
2. Because they don’t change all that much their rankings tend to be long lasting even though it almost always takes some time to rank for targeted keyword terms.
3. Visitors come to recognize your site and learn how to navigate it. This would help increase your return visitor ratio.
4. The more times someone visits your site the more likely they are to do business with you because their return visit usually means they are keeping an eye on something you have.
5. With a little creativity you can syndicate pages of your website to other websites and even get to those special search engines like Technorati.

Clearly there are advantages and drawbacks to both methods. One shouldn’t replace the other though at this stage of the game.

Final Thought: While you are constantly posting new posts to your blog you should be spending equal amounts of time building onto your plain old static websites.

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

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Writing content for a blog, website or promotional print media isn’t all that easy when you think about it. You cannot expect to attract readers simply because you wrote something and put it out there on the Internet. If you build it they will come does NOT hold true with traditional or online marketing efforts in today’s marketplace.

I’ve written some pretty horrific blogs on here before even by my own standards. Some I’ve simply removed right away and others still exist though I won’t be pointing them out. Then again maybe a “Top 10 Worse Posts” section on my blog is a good idea…

I once gave a friend of mine some advice when he first launched his blog and he wrote a decent follow up blog titled, “Swallow Your Pride: How To Take Advantage of Constructive Criticism“.

So in the spirit of good humor and in hopes of everyone actually liking what I write on this blog I think for kicks I’ll find a way to set up a thumbs up / down system much like Rand Fishkin is doing over at SEOMoz with the blogs they post. Everyone could use a little constructive critism every now and then and even Rand would agree with that; right Rand?

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

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Throughout my day on the job I find myself constantly explaining to my client’s things like writing content and even link building is one of a kind. They both are vital parts of on site optimization efforts. Giving advice on these two topics is probably one of the things I spend most of my time doing each and every day.

The conversation usually focus’s on what parts of content the website owner is using for linking purposes to internal or external pages. It is simple enough to say, “Click Here”, “Here”, “E-Mail Me” and so on.

When writing content it is a fairly decent idea to include the desired target keyword within your content. When that doesn”t seem possible with how you wrote it out then you should consider rewriting the content. If THAT doesn’t work for you then at least try to use parts of your keywords within the content.

What looks better from these two sentences?

• Click here for an example of keyword parts
• I’ve written a blog post on keyword parts if you are interested

From a visitor point of view, “Click Here” is a straight forward invitation to do something. From a search engine spider point of view you’ll get them to follow the link but when they record what the anchor text link was all they will see is, “Click Here”

From a visitor point of view, “Keyword Parts” explains what they are getting when they click on the link. Since most people surfing the web can identify a link and what you are supposed to do (Click It), you really don’t need to instruct them on what to do. From a search engine spider point of view you’ll get them to follow the link and they will record a potential keyword for the anchor text link.

Through this example I hope that my advice has given you some idea’s to look at when you are writing content. I also hope that you’ll pay attention to what you are using as the anchor text link.

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

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I ran across an interesting article today that my co-worker shared with me. It had asked us to find something on a particular website. I’m about to ask everyone reading this to try to find this exact same statistic. However what I’ll ask is that you pay attention to where your eyes look first and how long it took you to find it.

So if you will, please try this out and comment on this blog your findings. If you don’t want to try it out yourself you can simply visit the full eye candy report.

All I want you to do is visit http://www.census.gov and tell me what the population of the United States is. Where did you find it, what parts of the page(s) did you look at first and most importantly; was it or was it not obvious?

Also, due to this new eye candy report I have to ask… would you consider this blogs rss icon to be in a noticeable place?

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