Get Rich Schemes

You will almost certainly not get rich by listening to a bunch of motivational speakers lecturing you about the wonders on internet and affiliate marketing. In fact some of them make my skin crawl with their plainly false messages of online redemption.

Not even if you try to apply their nuggets of wisdom can you even reach the proverbial online El Dorado. You might get some cash flow here and there but are they worth your time? Too many people are already online doing Adwords and other forms of online marketing, there is almost no way you will stand out. You might even lose money. (Guess where the money go to)

There is no magic formula for businesses or individual to be profitable online. The same time tested rules of markering, selling and branding still applies. Be creative and innovative, when its time to change a business rule, change it, solid customer relations management, a dynamic salesforce and strong branding still applies. Not forgetting, measure, measure, measure everything from leads to customer satisfaction. Its hard work but there is no short cut to success.

Reason to be optimistic over the upcoming recession

Innovation loves a crisis

…times of crisis, we have a big opportunity to stand apart from our peers, to be better connected to the market, even if it’s in turmoil. Yes, our customers are going to be under stress, but that’s simply another way of saying “open to change.”

Jon Schwartz

I swear to do the following by the end of 2008

1. Master Excel
2. Master the rest of Excel which I am struggling to name like VBA, Services…erm.. I thought doing VLookup qualifies me to be worshiped as an Excel God but someone else outdid me by knowing how to create an entire KPI management system for online marketing on Excel.
3.Write a book on Online Marketing. They say writing stimulates the mind.
4.Make at least a hundred dollars a month through this domain.
5. Know how to sell an idea. It is trickier than it sounds.
6. Speak Japanese

There you have it. 4 hour of sleep a night! And they say money can work for me if I put a few adsense ads on my website. Complete bs.

Quickly invest in Pay Per Click?

We are rushing towards the event horizon of the next great recession, companies are tightening their budget and cutting down on advertising. Maybe they will all rush towards Pay Per Click advertising to cut waste? Surely we can use this to our advantage.

Why spend money on newspapers if they are not effective anyway? Show some pictures of dog poo on the rags.

Pitch, pay per click, measure the effectiveness of your campaigns…throw them a gazillion clicks and collect the money and celebrate like its 1997.

Hold on a second, this isn’t the way to promote the future of online marketing. Should we be a little bit more responsible to our clients? Online Marketing agencies should be like many of those advertising agencies who will do anything to blow money away and produce mind bending results and statistics to please their clients and get them to blow money again.

Surely, we should educate them on online marketing, How EXACTLY does it work.

- gasp!

- What do you mean educate? Like that ar’all idiots? Sure can’t do.

- I say EXACTLY!

- Like how Google give ya all clicks and happy business?

No, like how the analysis of clicks matters, are your clicks effective? Are you spending too much on irreverent clicks? How to stop wild guessing on the effective on your Pay per click campaigns. How Google Adwords is only one part of the overall strategy and not the magical wand.

Its messy and heartbreaking but it must be told.

DO NOT DO PAY PER CLICKS UNLESS YOUR WEBSITE IS FULLY READY AND EQUIPPED. Not with outrageous flash graphics and headache inducing spammy texts but with really solid, SEO and Analytics foundations with some common sense features like quick checkout and easy navigation.

Otherwise those paid click will only go down the drain.

Now that I have said my piece, I expect to lose some business if this piece become the condensed version of the cognitive dissosance of businesses who is finding some ways to avoid the bug eyed monster we call Search Engine Marketing….

The TechCrunch Layoff Tracker

Is the financial tsunami going to hit your IT sector soon? Are you fully prepared. Well I am not and I am still trying to figure out how.

Be informed

Back from our company retreat

Back with lots of work to do and many things to consider. It will be a crazy few weeks ahead with weeping and gnashing of teeth.

I am very sick of something

I am quite sick of people especially people who are selling online services saying that search engine marketing is the future of advertising as if marketing people is going to spend the rest of their natural working life looking at Adword Stats. Firstly, I don’t believe it is. Secondly, they have no experience advertising or marketing something or their company.

1. Not all the clicks are going to convert to your customers. You need to build up your odds of actually converting somebody. You need a lot of things. You need to convince people the product is fantastic. You need analytics to track the clicks.

You need people doing a lot of publicity for your company and product and creating awareness and branding so that when people find your company through search engine marketing, they know its a click worth clicking on. You need to get to the ground and get the word around. Those are the things that Search Engine Marketing cannot cover.

2.  Search Engine Optimization. How long can you last on top? When you are not on top, what do you have to fall back on? Are you screwing your customers again and again knowing that your top positions for popular keywords would get your a constant stream of customers? Where is that investment in customer relationship management?

No one form of marketing works. Someone still need to pick up the phone and talk to the customers and canvess their support.

Basic SEO introduction

Basically, I need a put in little bit of information to allow those nefarious looking spiders from Google, Yahoo etc to crawl while I do some meditation over the weekend on a certain island.

Planning for SEO
Speak the Language of the customer
There’s a taxonomy of search – Informational, Navigational and Transitional – and behind each type of search is user intent, expressed through keywords, and optimizing accordingly will attract users at every stage of the buying cycle.

Decide the following

- What will the user Experience be, how will the SEO strategy fit in the overall corporate strategy.
- What are the Keywords to be used for the SEO Exercise
- KPIs (what is considered as a success in the SEO Efforts apart from Top Rankings. Number of searches, conversion etc). e.g if the aim is to drive more traffic to download a document, then the SEO effort should be focused on that instead of creating many goals.
- In house or outsource it to an agency?

Note: SEO should best be done as part of an overall web revamp and marketing strategy (from conceptualizing to design, testing and launching) instead of using it as tool to “Tinker the website to the top”

Getting Websites to be spidered and brief steps on SEO on different search engines

Optimize for Yahoo
1. More focused on Keyword Density
2. Better if the listing is placed on the Yahoo Directory
3. Higher weight age to keywords in URL and title tags

Optimize for MSN
1. Higher weightage on Meta Tags
2. Fresh Content matters

Optimize for Google
1. DMOZ Submitted webpages tends to rank better
2. Request Google to Crawl the Pages if page is not in DMOZ index
3. Acquire backlinks to boost pagerank
4. Use http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters (Webmaster Central) to check if page has been spidered.
5. Webmaster Central
6. keywords, links, meta tags

Register the URL for a long period or extend the contract of the targeted website

Create legitimacy for the website

Keyword Selection process

Keywords are the search terms that users will type into a search engine to find a website. Keywords are needed as guides to optimize websites for the SEO Exercise

Places to identify keywords
Google’s keyword tool
https://adwords.google.com/select/keywordsandbox

It looks at the best keywords in an Ad Group and recommends additional keywords. It can also look at a web page and recommend keywords for that page.

Wordtracker
Keyword suggestion tool. WordTracker.com

Competitor’s websites
Visit the top five competitors, open their HTML, and look at their tag. Then type link:www.yourcompetitior.com to find out who are linking to them

Log stats and Analytics tools
Log stats (web traffic statistics). This shows the traffic to the website. Reports from analytics software such as Clicktracks and Google Analytics can find which the common keywords which visitors use to find are.

Experience and Creativity
Enquire customers, use Thesaurus, go by gut feeling. Which keywords will customers use to look for the website?

If there are misspellings. What are they? Will customers use other languages or slangs?

Optimizing Website and Landing Page

Search Engine Spiders are not human, the range of information they are able to read are limited. Therefore the following steps are needed to remove roadblocks for the spider and to make the website more accessible.

Short and relevant URLs and use Keywords in URL
Using descriptive keywords in URL is preferable as it allows for better indexing and more informative as well. E.g www.abctoys.com/bears instead of www.abctoys.com/3432433_d33r432432 or if the website sells toys, having www.plasticjoys.com will not cause the website to be optimized well.

Put the main keyword at the beginning of the URL.
Gifts-Heaven.com is better than heaven-of-gifts.com

Creating search friendly Error 404 Page
Error 404 Pages are crawled as well as well and presents a good source of materials to be crawled by search engines.

Alt Texts for Pictures
Pictures cannot be read by search engines, but ALT Texts can.

Coding
- Avoid flash, and ajax if possible. Log in pages and Frames are discouraged
- Creative external stylesheets or CSS can be used in place of Flash and Ajax
- Javascript and DHTML menus should be discouraged

Content

Meta Text

Here is an example of a Website’s Metatext.

Flowers, Roses, Plants, Gift Basket Delivery - 1-800-FLOWERS.COM - Your Florist of Choice

The Title Tag
The title tag is in the HTML’s HEAD section.
This is most likely also what the user sees in the search engine results list.

Write a good TITLE
This will encourage visitors to come to the web page.
Use the keyword first and then the name of the web page.

For example, Flowers, Roses, Plants, Gift Basket Delivery - 1-800-FLOWERS.COM - Your Florist of Choice

Limit to 50 characters (this includes spaces).

The Meta-Description
The meta-description tag also goes in the HEAD section. Here’s an example:

Search engines display the content of the DESCRIPTION tag to the visitor in the search engine results page. However they can ignore it as well (Due to superlative words or spamming) and fetch from the body of the webpage.

Writing the description tag:
• Use the top two or three keywords and write a complete sentence.
• Put the keyword first, then the description, and finally the company name.
• Use up to 250 characters (including spaces).

The Meta-Keyword Tag
The meta-keyword tag tells the search engine what the web page’s main keywords are.
Here’s an example:

Meta-Keywords are not so important nowadays but has some value to search engines like MSN, so it is best keep it relevant and not ignore it altogether.

Body Text
Use an H1 heading on the front page.
Google notices it more than the other text on the body
Again use the main keyword

The Content
•Put the main keywords within the first 25 words.
• Write complete sentences
• Avoid superlative phrases such as Best in the World!
• Don’t stuff keywords into the text. Don’t repeat a keyword more than four times.

Links Building
Buying Links
- Adding the Site to Directories.
- Pay-for-Inclusion Services
- Robots, Spiders, and Crawlers
- SEO Spam

Directories to be Submitted to
- http://dir.yahoo.com
- http://dmoz.org
- http://botw.com

Back Links and Incoming Links
The goal is to be at the top of the search engine results page when the customer searches for the company’s products. Google ranks the pages according to their PageRank value.

Google assigns the PageRank (PR) value by looking at the number of links to the webpage (these are called backlinks). If there are lots of links to that page, other people consider it to be valuable. If there are few links, the web page will has a low value.

Do not link spam and place links in irrelevant directories, as most search engine considered it as link spam.

Get people in related categories to link to the website through writing of articles, press releases and community interaction.

To find the webpage’s PageRank Value, install the Google Toolbar. PR 3 is somewhat low. PR4 is better. PR 5 or 6 is very good.

Creating Link Bait
To link bait is to create interest in the website or article so that people will like to it. The emphasis is on relevancy and creativity as others will not like to a website which although interesting are not relevant to them.

- Create the interest via social networks such as facebook, bulletin board, blogs etc.
- Run contests
- Give something people want (e.g coupons)
- News story
- Humor
- Horoscope, Fortune Cookies
- Emphasis on creativity
- Adding Social Bookmarking Functionality (e.g Digg, Reddit…)

Is the page spidered? - Tracking Spiders under Google
- Website https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard?hl=en
- Log in with Google ID
- Verify Site
- Submit Sitemap
- Statistics can be tracked based on crawling frequency and keywords crawled
- Error messages can be generated

Black Hat SEO
Black Hat SEO are unscrupulous or deceptive optimization practices intended to spam users or compete unfairly for Search Engine rankings
- Invisible text (e.g White text on white back ground)
- Keyword stuffing (repeating keywords very regularly for the meta texts as well as for the website for the only purpose on getting the site ranked highly in search engine)
- Duplicate pages
- Domain cloaking: serving different content to search engine robots than to human visitors
- Link farms

Search Engine usually penalize Black Hat SEO optimized Websites.

SEO is a Tactic

SEO is a tactic not a strategy, there are other parts of website which matters and cannot be covered by the SEO exercise.
1. How easily can the customer make the purchase? (Usability)
2. Is search engine generating most of the sales? (Analytics) Maybe it is the e-mail marketing which creates the sales. (Good reason not to remove the E-mail subscription box.
3. Networks can be a good way of getting links (Social Media)
4. Slow loading pages and other issues which makes surfing the site a nightmare (Performance issues)
5. Crappy content and irrelevant texts (Content)
6. Poor marketing copy.

Most importantly, repeat after me

The aim of websites is to excite and convert.Treat people decently and treat spiders like idiots.