eMarketing blAWG

Jan

Yahoo Adopts Spamhaus Blacklists…What Does this Mean to You?

By tim 0 Comments

Categories: Email Marketing

This just in: Yahoo has adopted the techniques used by Spamhaus to monitor their email deliverability. But what exactly does this mean to your company and its email campaigns? Depending on the practices used by your email service provider (ESP) along with your current email marketing guidelines, it can mean the difference between showing up in your recipients’ email boxes and being blacklisted.

Yahoo and other ISPs are allowed to filter email using their own individual methods. Usually this means relying on their internal lists and tools. However, with Yahoo’s adoption of Spamhaus blacklists, they have now added an “outsourced” filtering solution in addition to their internal mechanisms.

Spamhaus is one of several companies that tracks Internet spammers, spam gangs and spam services. In addition, it provides dependable, real-time anti-spam protection for Internet networks, and it works with law enforcement to identify and pursue spammers worldwide. Since Spamhaus employs some of the most stringent anti-spam techniques in use today, emailers have to be very careful not to land their IP address on its highly feared blacklists as this can be extremely detrimental to their business.

Yahoo’s decision to adopt Spamhaus’ blacklists shouldn’t be looked at negatively. It simply means that ESPs can no longer buy their way into recipients’ mailboxes. Instead, deliverability will depend more on a company’s email reputation, which is obviously more advantageous to Yahoo’s subscribers.

Since Yahoo is one of the largest email providers on the planet, this is pretty big news in the email marketing industry. Businesses will have to work harder to make sure that they comply with Spamhaus’ strict regulations, some of which encourage double opt-in registration and list cleanliness. Part of the focus now is on how each company’s IP address is perceived, which means reputable companies that adhere to email marketing best practice guidelines have a much better chance to increase their yahoo.com and yahoo.biz deliverability.

Active Web Group rigorously adheres to all CAN-SPAM laws and has been utilizing double opt-in registration for quite some time. In addition to having a no-tolerance anti-spam policy, Active Web Group’s customer support team actively monitors large import lists and emails going to a large number of subscribers. We make certain that information in headers is not misleading, and that all email includes an opt-out link. Plus, we immediately and zealously honor opt-out and unsubscribe requests for our clients.

Oct

Do Any of These Duplicate Content Scenarios Apply to Your Site?

By david 0 Comments

Categories: Search Engine Optimization

Search engines dislike duplicate content for a few reasons. One is that major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask aim to provide searchers with a diverse cross-section of unique content, and duplicate content often results in duplicate listings that impair the searcher’s experience. Another reason is that search engines don’t want to spend the resources (bandwidth) on indexing pages that are very similar.

In some instances, pages containing duplicate content are filtered at the time search engine results are sorted, so there is no guarantee as to which version of a page will appear in results and which won’t. Duplicate content may even hinder some sites and web pages from getting indexed by search engines, and there are some cases in which a search engine crawler will stop indexing all of the pages of a site because it finds too many copies of the same pages under different URLs.

While content duplication is sometimes used in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings to garner more website traffic, in most cases it occurs without ill intent on behalf of the site owner or webmaster. The following is a list of duplicate content scenarios that could be burdening your site.

Scenario #1: Ecommerce sites that include product descriptions from manufacturers, producers, and publishers

Product distribution websites often use text from the manufacturer or producer of the product as a description for the item on their own pages. With the addition of the product name, creator, manufacturer, writer, or recording artist appearing on the page, there is a considerable amount of duplicate content on pages that don’t originate from the same website. Here are some examples:

http://www.amazon.com/Sony-VGN-TXN15P-B-Notebook-Processor/dp/B000J43MR0 http://www.crowdstorm.com/Sony_VAIO_11_1_Widescreen_Notebook_PC_VGN_TXN15P_B+ 2973.html http://www.clearanceclub.com/products/6495-VAIO-VGN-TXN15P-B http://www.provantage.com/sony-vgntxn15p-b~7SONN0UX.htm

Scenario #2: Printer-friendly pages

Many sites offer “printer friendly” versions of their content on different pages. Without the application of robots.txt disallow statements or meta “noindex” tags on these pages to keep search engines from indexing them, they may be indexed as duplicate content. See these samples:

http://www.constructionbook.com/xq/ASP/productid.5395/qx/printable_view_produ ct.htm http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details-print.asp?Ed pNo=1556143&Sku=H24-PX849%20SB

Scenario #3: Websites that create session IDs

A session ID lets you create customized applications for a more personalized user experience, thus increasing the appeal of your website. A visitor to your site would be assigned a unique session ID which is either stored in a cookie on the user side or is propagated in the URL.

Websites with session IDs serve information in their URLs to track visitors as they go through the pages of that site. When search engine crawlers detect this tracking information they may index the same page several times under different URLs. A good example of this is www.staples.com.

Search engine guidelines advise you to allow bots or spiders to crawl your sites without session IDs that track their path through the site. While this technique is great for tracking individual user behavior, the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Since bots cannot always decipher URLs that look different but point to the same page, the use of session IDs may result in incomplete indexing of your site.

Scenario #4: URLs that include multiple data variables

When multiple data variables exist within a URL, this causes bots to crawl and index the same page under different URLs. Here are some examples of sites that show different data variables in their URLs.

http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=100 51&langId=-1&catalogId=10053&productId=100022126&categoryID=502813storeId= 10051

catalogId=10053
productId=100022126
categoryID=5028 http://www1.macys.com/catalog/index.ognc?CategoryID=30977&PageID=30977*1*24*- 1*-1&kw=Hugo%20Boss&LinkType=EverGreenCategoryID=30977

PageID=30977
LinkType=EverGreen

It is difficult for a search engine bot or spider to crawl the URLs listed above. If this scenario applies to your website, you may want to implement the mod-re-write server settings.

Scenario #5: Pages sharing similar elements

Some websites have elements that are very common from one page to another, such as title, meta descriptions, headings, navigation, and text that is shared sitewide. This can be a problem since bots might consider it to be duplicate content. Beware of this scenario if you own an ecommerce site that includes your brand name and information about that brand in every title on every page of your site. In addition, the use of content management systems that do not allow for distinct meta description tags to be placed on each page of a website can cause a similar dilemma.

Here are two well-known websites that use their brand names on every page:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com http://www.officemax.com

These five scenarios represent situations in which search engine crawlers may perceive your website to have duplicate content. Although it is probably inadvertent on your part, you should take steps to resolve these issues to ensure that all of your web pages are properly indexed on the search engines.

Sep

Testing…1-2-3…Testing

By chrisn 0 Comments

Categories: Search Engine Optimization

When it comes to website optimization, you can’t always take the obvious for granted. With the ability to create limitless versions of your web pages, you have an opportunity and a duty to your business to test everything, even that which seems obvious. Follow these guidelines for best results:

1. Make calls to action stand out

What’s the most noticeable thing about a stop sign? Its bright red color? Its octagonal shape? Or the word STOP in all capital letters? Maybe it’s a combination of all three of these characteristics that makes a stop sign so unmistakable to drivers.

The same kind of logic should be applied to your website. Your “submit” or “buy now” buttons should stand out from the rest of your website, eliminating all confusion surrounding your call to action. With its ease of use and abundance of information, the Internet invites laziness and preoccupation. Don’t allow your users to become preoccupied while on your site. Give them clear, easy-to-follow instructions.

Simply brightening the color of a submit or buy now button can increase your conversion rate by several percent. Or perhaps try making it larger, with a unique shape.

2. Give visitors a warm and fuzzy feeling

Everyone likes feeling like they got a good deal, or the inside scoop on something. Web visitors appreciate saving money and getting valuable information not everyone is privy to. Indulge your visitors by making them feel positively about their decision to sign up for your services or purchase something from your site.

You can do so by telling them how much money they saved by shopping with you, or by letting them know that the services or information you are providing them can’t be obtained anywhere else.

If you offer free shipping, make that benefit stand out to customers. Remove any clutter around the positive message you are presenting. Some sites are clogged up with so many “benefits” they hide the true differentiator between them and their competition. Be sure to choose a feature that will set your product or service apart from your competition. Make that offer the most prominent on the page.

3. Don’t make them have to guess

Predictability can be a wonderful thing when it comes to the web. Luckily, it’s also an easy thing to establish on your website. Let your visitors know what to expect when completing your sign-up form, request for information, or other processes. Simply telling them how long it will take to get through the process can increase conversion to your thank-you page by 5 percent or more. For example, add “in one easy step” to your “sign up for our newsletter” above your website’s email sign up box. Quite simply, the more predictability and transparency built in to the process, the easier it is for users to commit their time.

Testing is essential for anyone who maintains a website. It’s the only way to know for sure what works and what doesn’t. It should be a manageable task if you start out by testing the basics and work your way into more advanced testing. You can learn a great deal about what makes your visitors tick by testing seemingly obvious things.

Aug

Search Engine Secrets Revealed

By david 0 Comments

Categories: Search Engine Optimization

While often very complex in their calculations and data processing, the critical operations performed by the major search engines in order to rank websites isn’t as lengthy as one might think. The processes they use to provide relevant results when a web search is undergone can best be described in the following four steps.

Send out the Web Crawlers
Search engines use invisible “bots” or “spiders,” which are really programs or automated scripts, that browse (or “crawl”) the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Search engines use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. This type of technology is necessary because the rate at which people create new Internet documents greatly exceeds any manual indexing capacity. In fact, an estimated 20 billion web pages exist, and search engines have crawled about half of them.
Index the Pages
After a spider crawls a web page, it makes a copy of it and adds it to its database. This process is known as indexing. With so many search queries submitted each minute, it is very important that search engines are steadfast in their index management so that they can search and sort billions of documents in fractions of a second.
Process Queries
Search engines process hundreds of millions of search queries every day. When someone keys in a search term and clicks “Search,” the engine retrieves from its index all of the documents that match the query. It determines a match by finding the same terms or phrase entered into the search bar. Entering a multi-word phrase by itself can return literally millions of results, but entering that same phrase in quotes can greatly narrow the results, giving the user a more accurate listing of websites that relate to their particular search.
Rank Pages
A very closely guarded mathematical equation, called an algorithm, is employed by each search engine to determine how to sort and rank search query results. This algorithm allows the engine to rank the most relevant web pages first, and the rest in descending order of importance to the user.

What You Can Do for Your Website: Avoid Speed Bumps & Walls

You may not know it, but you could be hindering or preventing your website from being crawled by search engine spiders. As spiders crawl the web, they rely on the architecture of hyperlinks to find new web pages and revisit those that may have changed. Complex links and deep site structures with little unique content may act as “speed bumps” in the process by slowing down the spiders. Even worse, data that cannot be accessed by web crawlers are really like “walls” in that they completely prevent your web pages from being ranked.

Beware of the Following “Speed Bumps”:

URLs with 2+ dynamic parameters; i.e. http://www.url.com/page.php?id=4&CK=34rr&User=%Tom% (spiders may be reluctant to crawl complex URLs like this because they often result in errors with non-human visitors)
Pages with more than 100 unique links to other pages on the site (spiders may not follow each one)
Pages buried more than 3 clicks/links from the home page of a website (unless there are many other external links pointing to the site, spiders will often ignore deep pages)
Pages requiring a “Session ID” or Cookie to enable navigation (spiders may not be able to retain these elements as a browser user can)
Pages that are split into “frames” can hinder crawling and cause confusion about which pages to rank in the results.

Beware of the Following “Walls”:

Pages accessible only via a select form and submit button
Pages requiring a drop down menu (HTML attribute) to access them
Documents accessible only via a search box
Documents blocked purposefully (via a robot meta tag or robots.txt file)
Pages requiring a login
Pages that re-direct before showing content (search engines call this cloaking or bait-and-switch and may actually ban sites that use this tactic)

In order to avoid the above pitfalls and ensure that your website’s contents are fully crawlable, be sure to provide direct, HTML links to each page you want the search engine spiders to index. Remember to make every page of your site accessible from the home page, since the home page is usually the place spiders begin their crawl. It’s also a good idea to add a sitemap to your website in order to increase its navigation.

Jul

Latent Semantic Indexing

By lillian 0 Comments

Categories: Search Engine Optimization

Just when you thought you might be starting to understand how search engines compile their organic rankings, you stumble upon a new factor in the algorithm. While latent semantic indexing (LSI) isn’t exactly a new practice, it has been getting more attention as of late so we thought we’d take a moment to shed some light on it.

Latent semantic indexing…sounds pretty complicated doesn’t it? In actuality, there’s really not much to it. LSI is a search engine’s ability to identify synonyms and related terms for a keyword, and to identify pages as being related if they contain those similar terms. So if someone were to enter the search term “marketing,” the results that appear would include web pages that incorporate the words “communications” and “media” as well as those that contain “marketing.” In fact, the pages that contain the former don’t even necessarily have to mention the word marketing at all. The search engines will automatically make the connection between the words.

An important step in the indexing process, LSI not only records which keywords a document contains, but it also examines the document collection as a whole, to see which other documents contain some of those same words. According to LSI methods, documents that have many words in common are considered semantically close, and ones with few words in common are semantically distant. When you think about it, human beings might also classify a document collection using a method very similar to LSI. Unlike humans, the LSI algorithm doesn’t understand anything about what the words mean…it simply notices patterns, which can make it seem astonishingly intelligent.

Any good copywriter would naturally incorporate words into a website’s content that relate to the subject at hand. The trick is not to over do it, adding so many keywords and synonyms that the copy begins to sound robotic and nonsensical. Because that sort of practice is transparent to website visitors and search engine spiders alike, it is certain to drive traffic away from your site and likely to get it penalized by the engines.

Latent semantic indexing (or similar technologies) can also be used to look at the link profile of your website. If all your links are heavy in a few particular phrases and light on other similar phrases then your site may not rank as well.

You can determine which words are related to your keywords by searching Google for search results with related terms. Do so by entering a “~” into the search bar directly in front of your search term. For example, to find words related to race car, you would key in “race car.” You’ll find results that include not only race car, but also racing, track, and NASCAR.

Another option is to look at variations of keywords suggested by keyword suggestion tools. You can also try writing a page and use the Google AdSense sandbox to see what type of ads they would try to deliver to that page. And still another way of determining related keywords is by reading the page copy and analyzing the backlinks of high ranking pages.

The lesson to be learned here is that while you’re concentrating on carefully incorporating your keywords into your website copy, don’t ignore the synonyms that correlate with those keywords. Your website will benefit from the conscientious eye of a skilled SEO copywriter…but keep our LSI tips in mind when writing your own content.

Jul

Email Marketing: Changing the ‘Average’ Opinion

By tim 0 Comments

Categories: Email Marketing

In the days of spam-riddled inboxes, everyone has an opinion on how to raise the average conversion, the average sale, average open rate, or the average click-thru. Years of data from some of the best, and worst, companies who specialize in online marketing have been analyzed and published to help construct “best practices” for email marketers. For that, I say “Congratulations!” You’re on course to bring email marketing, a gateway of infinite marketing possibilities and unlimited ROI potential, to an “average” level.

Email marketing is a channel, a unique marketing avenue unlike any other, for you to showcase your product or service to the world. Whether your company is B2B or B2C, it can help propel you to levels unattainable 10 years ago. But how do you get there? What do you do to get your email to stand out? What type of campaign is going to impact your customer…giving them no other choice but to click on your email and purchase your product?

The answers we’ve seen include “segment your email lists”, or “A/B test your email designs” and even “make sure your offer lies above the fold”. These are all very good answers, and key ways in helping create a successful email campaign. But something is missing. Something that will ultimately make the difference between maximizing your profit or resulting in another “average” email.

That something is creativity. It seems simple really. After all, marketing is creativity. Without creativity, we’d never know about the caveman’s struggle to adapt to human society or about a duck that can provide supplemental insurance. It’s you and your company’s belief that your product is better than any other in your market. Why would you settle for “average” results? It’s so easy to fall back on your averages to gage whether or not a particular campaign is successful, but how creative was it? How was it different than any other email you’ve sent in the past? Were your customers so enthralled that they felt inclined to forward it to their peers so that THEY can see what you had to offer?

I ask you, the email marketing guru, to come up with a different type of strategy. Break free from the standard email you send week in and week out, and come up with something unique. You know your product and market better than anyone, so these are merely just suggestions that might help start the brainstorming process:

Promote Online Shopping Security - If your email is product heavy, create an email promoting your “shopping cart safety” or “customer purchasing experience” and how you take care of your customer throughout the entire process.
Create Buzz - If you only offer 10% or free shipping with every email, offer a special time-restricted sale off large margin or clearance products to create “buzz” throughout your contact list.
Increase Repeat Customers - If your goal is to increase repeat customers, offer an additional 10% off a customers 2nd order.
Obtain New Customers - If you provide a service, maybe an SEO or hosting service, offer 3 months’ free hosting and optimization for referring another company.
Promote Corporate Responsibility – A company like Neiman Marcus sends an inbox cluttering 10 emails or more a week. To show their company is focused on today’s issues, they could offer a special 2-week promotion where 10% of every order is donated to the charity of their choice.

These types of offers may help your email stand out from the many others that are sent every day, and can help increase brand awareness. They’re elementary in their premise, but they give your customer a reason to click.

An offer is only as good as the company that provides it. To consistently offer the same promotion week in and week out is an easy way to ruin your email marketing efforts. Include creativity with every campaign. Be the first in your market to provide something different each time you send an email. Create a campaign that incites a purchasing frenzy, instead of an “average” experience.

Jul

Give ‘Em What They Really Want

By tim 0 Comments

Categories: Email Marketing

Most of us are aware that in order to generate effective email campaigns, they must contain offers that are relevant to our customers. However, innovative teen eretailer Karmaloop recently took that knowledge a step further by giving their finicky consumers even greater control over the merchandise offers they get. By allowing their subscribers to select specific product categories and brands they are interested in, Karmaloop’s email-generated revenue jumped 318%.

The wants of today’s consumers change regularly, especially those of teens and tweens. In the midst of opening your email, a teen might also be talking on their cell phone, downloading songs to their iPod, and watching MTV. Realizing this, Karmaloop, an online retailer of urban, streetwear, rave and boutique clothing, sought to do a better job of offering products of importance in their email marketing initiatives.

With its primary demographic being teen shoppers, Karmaloop’s marketers knew it was imperative to spark the interest of recipients with highly relevant content. With a mailing list of 300,000, the folks at Karmaloop had previously been sending email offers based on their customers’ past purchases, but felt they could do more. So they enhanced their email program by adding an automated system that gives customers control over what merchandise they want to hear about, creating a more targeted email.

To accomplish this, Karmaloop surveyed a large portion of their customer base to determine how many brands to include in the new program. The results confirmed their suspicions – that they had a handful of wildly popular brands — but they were surprised to see that there was also a great deal of interest in dozens of lesser-known brands. They used this information to refine their email offerings and develop an automated program that delivered more customized emails.

Karmaloop achieved the relevancy they were looking for. In fact, they were ecstatic with the bottom-line numbers: email-generated revenue skyrocketed 318%, while conversions-to-sale increased from 3% to 4.6%. The automated system has also helped overall onsite sales, which have been growing incrementally by 3%.

You too can capitalize on the wealth of information that can be obtained from conducting your own customer survey. Then, based on the information you gather from the survey, follow this 5-step system developed by Karmaloop to create your own automated email program.

Step 1 - Pinpoint categories & brands

After sorting through your survey data, compile an alphabetical checklist of your most popular brands. As long as the list is relevant to your audience, an extensive length should not be a problem. If the list starts to underperform, you can easily shorten it.

In addition, you can also incorporate your standard product categories into the checklist. Design your system so that it can recognize IP addresses, so when a customer comes back to modify his or her list, the categories and brands they have selected will be checkmarked to remind them of what they are signed up for.

Step 2 – Include signup buttons on landing pages

Capture more search-engine-generated leads by placing prominent signup buttons on the landing pages for your brand keyword buys. It is also a good idea to add signup buttons on brand and category pages throughout your site.

Step 3 – Target certain behaviors

Next, program your system to take into account behavior information, such as abandoned shopping cart products and recent repeatedly viewed items, and combine them with both the pre-selects and past purchases. In terms of purchases, similar products or cross-sell items can become part of your equation. Hold weekly meetings to discuss the data and decide whether or not to tweak the algorithms.

Step 4 – Carefully plan message timing

Determine how many emails to send customers and prospects based on current sales and new products being driven with the brands they have selected. For instance, you might send two emails one week but none the next week. Be careful not to bombard your subscribers with constant emails. You may even want to set up your program to limit it to no more than two messages a week about sales/new arrivals related to the customer’s selected brands.

Step 5 - Target non-responders four months later with a new offer

If emails do not convert after four months without unsubscribes, design your automated system to rotate merchandise to the next group of items on the team’s set behavioral scale. (Items abandoned in a shopping cart get one of the top weights, while products viewed three times are weighted higher than ones viewed once.)

For example, if a female Karmaloop customer hadn’t made a purchase, the Luxirie by LRG jeans offers she was getting were replaced by Soundgirl jeans or another jeans line she had repeatedly clicked on.

With the right combination of creativity and dedication, Karmaloop’s 5-step program can help you to empower your customers, thereby improving email relevancy and ultimately increasing your open, clickthrough, and conversion rates.

May

Using Local Search to Generate Sales Leads

By david 0 Comments

Categories: Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization

Think of it as an upgrade from the often pricey, frequently overlooked, and increasingly outdated YellowPages ad. Since many small companies do not have the resources to track clicks and would prefer to create sales leads in person or via telemarketing, local search engines offer a more practical option than Google’s AdWords and Yahoo’s AdSense.

Individuals in the 18-35 age range are several times more likely to turn to the Web for information on their surroundings than they are the YellowPages or even 411 information providers. That demographic is widening daily as folks of all ages are going online more than ever before. With the rising popularity of handheld PDAs, it’s probable that local search engines will soon become the most relied upon providers of information on local businesses.

While it is not necessary for a company to have a website in order to take advantage of local search, some businesses invest in basic websites consisting of just one to five pages and list them in the local search engines. For example, let’s say you own a hair salon in White Plains, NY. In an effort to increase business, you decide to have a template website created that provides some background information about your salon, its services, hours of operation, and some pictures of your salon and examples of your work.

Once your website is complete, you list it with a few of the leading local search engines. The benefit is that when someone visits one of these sites looking for a “hair salon in White Plains NY” the person will find your website, have the ability to see what kind of services you offer and other important information about your business, and will hopefully follow up with a visit or phone call your establishment.

Several local search engines have popped up during the past couple years, with the most prominent being Yahoo! Local, Overture Local Match, Ask Jeeves Local, and AOL Local Search. Other sites like CitySearch and AOL’s Digital City have been in on this action for well over a decade now.

Overture’s Local Match allows advertisers to target customers in specific regions or local areas. They can select a geographic area surrounding their business (a radius ranging from 0.5 to 100 miles) and bid on keyword phrases relating to their products and services. The payment structure for Local Match is on a cost-per-click basis. In other words, the advertiser pays the bid amount after a prospect clicks on the advertiser’s listing. In addition to Yahoo Local’s free listings, they also offer Enhanced Listings that allow advertisers to pay a monthly fee in order to provide additional information such as the company’s tagline, a business description, promotional offers, photos, and testimonials.

Local search is especially helpful for those who do research online and plan to buy offline. Searchers have the ability to gather the information they need to visit local businesses for the product or service they are interested in. In addition, for those companies that have intricate e-commerce websites, local search caters to the individual who wishes to shop online, but wants to know that the business they are dealing with is nearby in the event they need to return an item or have a customer service issue.

An estimated 10-20% of searches contain local modifiers that can be interpreted as the user seeking some type of local information. When bidding on local search terms, it is important to understand the user’s intent. The goal is to provide the user with highly relevant results, in this case geographically targeted and pertaining to their specific key word or phrase.

Apr

You Have an Online Reputation to Uphold

By david 0 Comments

Categories: Internet Marketing

Do you know what your customers, ex-employees, and competitors are saying about you? The Internet allows information to travel faster than the speed of sound, so it’s important that you’re paying attention to online conversations about your company. Anything posted on the Internet about you can have a huge impact on how people view your organization.

When it comes to establishing and preserving your company’s online image, a good, quality website is just the beginning. A great beginning no doubt, but there are a wide range of other things to consider.

Today’s smart consumers use the web to make buying decisions. They do this by first researching a brand by reading reviews and getting opinions from other people who have purchased your product or service. With the explosion of blogs, forums, and message boards, consumers have easy access to posting and reading free information on the web. Without spending a dime, they have the ability to sound off about essentially anything they feel like, and people are reading. All you have to do is enter a search term about a brand and you’ll likely come up with pages of results.

Why not try searching your own brand? Look beyond your own website listings and find out what others are saying about you. Are there any negative listings saying bad things about your brand or your company? Listening to what they say gives you an opportunity to perform damage control so that you can ensure a positive web presence for your business.

Here are some steps you can take to uphold your company’s online reputation.

Step 1. Monitor what’s being said about you.

Assign someone at your company to be in charge of performing regular Internet searches for your company. It can be difficult to continuously monitor everything that is being said on the web, so you need to establish an early warning system to alert you of all news relating to your brand. You can set up free Google and Yahoo Alerts to catch the use of your company’s name in the news. In addition, you can use sites such as Feedster and Technorati to see what’s being said about you in blogs. The person in charge of this important task should track for all names associated with your business, including brand names, company names, product names, and key employee names.

In addition to self-tracking, you should look at other information such as competing brands and organizations, industry terms, as well as general industry news. If your company has an individual in charge of public relations, he or she is the ideal person to handle this online reputation management. However if you do not and cannot afford to hire a PR professional, assign the task to another trustworthy individual.

Step 2. Participate in the discussion.

You have the power to influence online conversations by becoming actively involved in them. Your participation will give you the opportunity to improve the perception of your brand. Take an active part in your industry conversation by becoming a regular contributor to blogs and forums within your industry. Besides blogs, you can lead the conversation about your brand on forums, consumer opinion sites, consumer complaint sites, and social network sites. By being honest and responding directly to critics, you’ll build trust in your audience, even if the truth is negative. If a blog or forum includes inaccuracies about your brand you should send them clarifying evidence and ask them to remove the error.

Step 3. Develop your online assets.

First, make sure your corporate website is fully search engine optimized and appears at the top of results lists for your name and your brand. Also consider creating a corporate blog if you do not already have one. There are many benefits to this kind of forward thinking.

It is important that you publish all of your company’s corporate communications on your website. This type of information can include press releases, articles, testimonials, case studies, and white papers. Optimize these pages for the search engines as well. Submit your press releases to online wire service to ensure maximum visibility, and optimize the releases for your company name and brand.

If you do not already have a paid search campaign in place, it is a good idea to start taking advantage of Pay-per-Click advertising. Include a listing for your company name and/or brand. The combination of high organic listings and PPC ad presence will help you to dominate your search engine space and counter the efforts of competitors who try to infringe on your trademark.

A note about PPC ads and trademark infringement: If you take advantage of Pay-per-Click advertising, you should be aware of the dangers of trademark infringement. 20% of all online searches are for actual brands. Companies often bid on the brand names of their competitors. So if a searcher types in your brand name in a search engine, they could get results that include ads for your competitors. They might click on your competitor’s ad thinking it’s related to your website, which is a form of bait and switch. You can control this when advertising on Yahoo and MSN, as they offer you the opportunity to prohibit others from bidding on your trademarked search terms. At this time Google does not offer this option. It is highly recommended that you perform regular searches of your brand name and report violators to the appropriate search engine.

The key to managing your online reputation is persistence. You must constantly monitor and take the appropriate action to uphold your company’s image. Only you have the power to prevent the loss of business and ensure the ongoing success of your organization.

Mar

How to Minimize the Effects of Google’s Sandbox

By chrisn 0 Comments

Categories: Search Engine Optimization

Every new website is subject to the Google sandbox, otherwise known as age delaying. The sandbox is the virtual place Google puts new websites before it deems them eligible for decent search rankings. Although this age delay varies from site to site, on average new websites with new domains must wait six months before they will be allowed into Google’s coveted Top Positions club.

While it can be frustrating, there is a very good reason for the existence of the sandbox. Google has adopted this procedure as a way of sorting out good quality websites from those that employ blackhat practices like link buying, duplicate content, and keyword stuffing. This new site probation period ensures that such practices will not be tolerated.

Since you cannot avoid placement in Google’s sandbox, we’ve put together some tips you can follow to help minimize the damage to your new website with a new domain. While there are several unethical methods in use, we list only ethical advice that complies with the policies of Google and the other search engines.

Create valuable content and good links. Along with the passage of time, nothing can help you reach the tops of the major search engines better than quality website content and good links from reputable sources. Make sure your website copy is original and informative, and that each page of your site contains different content. In addition, a slow and steady buildup of good links will bring you the best results. Links from .edu, .gov, and .mil domains might be beneficial, as those domains are usually exempt from the sandbox filter.

Launch website pages as they are created. Rather than waiting until your entire website is complete before launching, it is better to make a couple of pages live first and add to your site as you go along. These will set the time clock in motion, resulting in your site being further along in the waiting period as it is developed.

Buy old or expired domains. Since the sandbox effect has a greater bearing on new sites on new domains, you may want to consider buying an old or expired domain and launch your site there.

Focus on less popular keywords. You might avoid being sent to the sandbox by peppering your website with keywords that are less popular in your industry or category. Since the popular keywords are the ones most people strive for, the wait for rankings with these words is generally much longer than it would be if you focused on the less popular keywords. You can simultaneously get your site listed for less popular keywords while waiting to get to the top for the most profitable keywords.

Don’t forget about the other search engines! While Google may be the most popular, there are other search engines out there that either do not have a sandbox, or that penalize new sites for a much shorter time. So do your research and plan your SEO efforts to include other search engines as well.

Wait patiently. By following the advice above and waiting patiently for time to pass, you’ll be well on your way to escaping the confines of Google’s sandbox. Be sure to avoid any attempts to fool Google…so-called “sandbox tools” will not only keep you from bypassing the filter, but they can only make your situation worse.