Search Engine Guide

Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing
Search engine marketing news and information you can use to grow your business.

Are you keeping tabs on brand experience?

by Beth Harte

There was a time when companies (or non-profits, universities, etc.) controlled their brand. Today companies control their brand logo, brand colors, and message but what they no longer control is the brand experience or “emotional aftertaste” (coined by Ze Frank).

There’s been a power shift and the first mistake many companies make is believing that they do and can control the brand experience. That’s no longer the case. It’s the people on the other end of that experience that control it. Today, customers sharing brand experiences happen every day, everywhere without being edited or seeking a company’s approval. And sometimes, a brand experience (positive or negative) could be with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. That said there are some new challenges in brand management. So then, what are some basic first steps companies can take?

Listen
The first step? Listen. “Listening” to what’s being said about a company on-line can unveil a lot of critical information. Listening includes, but is not limited to, reading comments, reviews or rankings. Listening is not about collecting “on-line hits.” Listening can start out as simply as setting up a Google Alert for a company, brands (i.e. product names), and people (any employee who is in the public eye). The second step? Hear. Hear what is being said and try to understand the context in which it’s being said (yes, there is a difference between listening and hearing). Make no mistake, it’s a lot of roll-up the sleeves work, but it’s essential to overall brand management. The Internet isn’t going away anytime soon so there will continue to be a lot of places to talk about a company.

Managing Fractured Conversations
Where are customers, prospects, competition, and adversaries talking and where should listening take place? With all the places to leave comments and engage in a conversation there is a potential for fractured conversations. For example, someone could potentially respond to a company news release in a variety of places and other people pick up on that conversation and take it to another place, spreading the comments about a company. What makes it fractured is that is can be disassociated from the original comment, leaving the context in a position to be misunderstood. It’s a company’s responsibility to follow the conversations where and no matter how many places they go, including:
- Social networks (like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Blogs
- Microblogging sites (like Twitter)
- YouTube, Viddler, etc.
- Podcasts
- Photo hosting sites (like Flickr)
Fractured conversations present multiple challenges to companies. So, it’s very important to go where the conversations are being held and respond to them in that specific place. Don’t insist that people talking about a brand experience move their conversation to a place that’s convenience.

The Importance of Listening & Following Conversations
Every time a conversation is being had about a company, brand or person it’s an opportunity to get involved. A lot of companies fear or are not sure how to engage in on-line conversations. But by not following what’s being said companies miss out on a chance to:
- Learn what their true brand perception is in the market
- Collect important feedback
- Engage in meaningful conversations with customers
- Build relationships with customers
- Tell their side of the story (if necessary)
- Harness the power of brand enthusiasts
Tools for Listening & Monitoring
Some of these tools are free and some are not. This is not in any way an endorsement of any of these tools, but just a list to get companies started in the right direction. If there are other tools that are available, please be sure to let everyone know.
- Google / Yahoo Alerts
- Google Blog Search
- Technorati
- Co.mments
- Serph
- Addictomatic
- Disqus
- Radian6
- Twitter Search
- Blogpulse
- Lijit
- Linqia
- NetVibesMotive Quest
- Nielsen BuzzMetrics
- Cymphony
- Trakur
- SEER
- Techrigy
- CyberAlert
- Umbria
- ChatterGuard
- Custom Scoop
- Ice Rocket
Steps to managing brand experience
How can a company get started in a conversation? What steps, in what order should be taken? Take it slow. There is no need to rush into engagement. The old adage rings true in this case: Look before you leap. Here’s just a brief list of steps:
- Start monitoring your brand
- Collect the data
- Process the information (where did comments come from? where are the conversations being held?)
- Analyze the content (what are they saying & why?)
- Determine if you should respond
- Join the conversation
To learn more about the importance of brand management, please be sure to read David Wallace’s post, “Connecting the Dots: Online (Brand) Reputation Management – SBM Unleashed.” This is a great post because it was “live blogged” during Christina (CK) Kerley’s Brand Management workshop at Small Business Marketing Unleashed.

Check out our small business news site.
5 Search Engine Ranking Killers You Want to Avoid at All Costs

by Stoney deGeyter

There are numerous things you can to manipulate your site to help it perform better in the search results. There are literally hundreds of different factors that are analyzed, many of which you, as the site owner, have direct and immediate control over.

But for as many factors there are that you can manipulate to give you better ranking performance, there are other things that when not properly addressed will do a fantastic job of preventing your site from performing as well as it could and should. While this is not a conclusive list of search engine ranking killers, these five issues can, cause serious damage to your site. Fixing these five rank-killing issues will undoubtedly clear the way for better optimization performance.

Little or No Content

Can sites with very little content rank well for certain keywords? Absolutely. It doesn’t take a lot of content to get a keyword to the top of the search results. However, when sites have very little content there are far fewer keyword ranking opportunities to be had.

Having a fair amount of content on your site gives you greater opportunity to integrate important keywords. That’s not to say you should go throw a bunch of text onto your pages just so you can fit in more keywords. Don’t do that. But with proper keyword research you can look for opportunities to work keywords into places where they fit naturally, without forcing and without having to increase the content unnecessarily.

Something else to look out for content-wise is using text in images instead of standard HTML text. Yes, image text looks prettier, but it reduces the value of the content substantially.

Improperly Designed Navigation

There are a lot of ways to screw up your navigation. While Flash navigational elements are not the problem they once were (at least for Google), navigation built with JavaScripts and form fields that must be selected are still search spider stoppers.

A common problem with navigation is too much or too little links, not using proper words in the links and using images with no ALT text. These are all easily remedied, however the number of links in the navigation may take a bit more consideration.

Navigation should not be a site map to all your pages (unless your site is relatively small), but it does need to link sufficiently to all your site’s primary sections. Over-linking in your navigation won’t kill your rankings, but it will prohibit the search engines from fully understanding the site architecture and importance of each page, which can affect how those pages ultimately perform. Under-linking can keep important pages out of the index or getting proper relevance and importance attached to them, which will inhibit ranking potential.

Flash Sites

While the engines are getting good at indexing Flash, websites built entirely in Flash are still a no-go. The biggest issue is that the content can be indexed but Flash sites contain no architectural framework and, worse, no individual pages that can be indexed. While a 10 page site can be optimized for ten distinct keyword groups, allowing each page to achieve top placement for those keywords, the same cannot happen with a Flash site.

Essentially, those ten pages would be crammed into one page. Attempting to target all those keywords into that one page would essentially negate the overall impact and importance of all the keywords and would likely cause the site to fail on all counts.

Duplicate Pages

If your site contains a lot of duplicate content, or duplicate pages on differing URLs, you could be in for a world of trouble. This is common with ecommerce websites that place products into multiple categories and uses dynamically generated URLs based on the path taken to get the product. For many such sites, a single product page can be found via half a dozen or more URLs. In this scenario, a site with 10 products has 60 pages of content, most of it duplicate.

When the engines start indexing pages, they see page after page of duplication, which they really don’t want. So instead of sorting through it, they simply leave. The second downside is that the URLs they do keep in their index may not be the URLs you want appearing in the search results. And finally, with so many duplicates, the link value you are passing to these product pages is split half a dozen ways making each of them only marginally as effective as they could be.

Improper Title and Meta Description Tags

Title tags are probably the single most important piece of real estate on your website. It is important that you take the time to customize all your title tags, making them relevant to the specific pages and integrating proper keyword usage.

One of the primary issues with Title and Meta Description Tags is duplication. Developers and site owners get lazy and just copy/paste the same content into page after page after page. Or, perhaps, dynamically generated sites don’t allow for page by page customization of these tags. Customizing these can be a significant help to the optimization process.

Every day we run across sites that have one or more of these five rank-killing problems. Working on these site’s is often very exciting because we know just a few small changes can make a huge difference in site performance. Unfortunately, we also run across sites that simply cannot make these changes easily without undergoing significant reprogramming of their back end platform.

Those that are willing to invest the time and effort to make their sites more search engine friendly find that they competition becomes less competitive. On the other hand, those that don’t go out of their way to fix these, and other rank killing problems, find themselves constantly struggling to gain traction against their competitors and/or maintain their current dominant positions.

Your competition will be doing all they can to displace you or keep you from moving up in the search results. With that in mind, you then need to do utilize every possible avenue that will help you move past your competitors. Eliminating search engine ranking killers such as these is the first step in a long journey to your goal.

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- buy Wind River
Puppy’s Picks – SES Coverage 12/15/08

by Jennifer Laycock

I scan hundreds of feeds and read dozens of articles each day so you don’t have to. From building a slow and natural link profile to the ethics of sponsored blog posts, find out which articles I dubbed as must-read for the small business crowd today.
- I love John Jantsch’s post from last week about how social media is a tool and not a religion. John hits the nail on the head when he points out the need to use common sense while exploring social media outlets but not letting fear get in the way of exploration. I hear from far too many small businesses who are terrified of getting into social media because they think they’ll “do it wrong” and get themselves in trouble. There’s nothing wrong with finding ways to use these tools to build your business, nothing. Just listen to folks like John and remember to use your common sense.
- While I’m not much of a paid search guru, I’ve always been a huge fan of the idea of using paid search to test keywords, campaigns and offers before rolling them out to an entire web site. Greg Meyers has put together a great little post offering up some input on how you can use paid search to test new campaigns. It’s a quick, but valuable read.
- Peter Kim has compiled a list of social media predictions for 2009 from some of the best and brightest in the industry. You can download the full spectrum of thoughts on 2009 social media changes in PDF form. It’s a good read and has both expected predictions and surprising ones. Overall, I’d wager any company looking to expand or explore social media marketing next year should give it at least a quick read.
- If you’re trying to catch up on some of the great viral videos from this year, you’ll want to check out Time Magazine’s list of the Top 10 Viral Videos of 2008. Now I’m not personally sure these would count as the “top ten” in my book, especially since I had never even heard of some of them, but I must admit I’m fighting the temptation to head to Expedia.com after watching “Where the Hell is Matt” again.
- Heard a great comment from Todd Friesan at SES last week about how he’d rather have one really great link than a ton of average links. A simple truth, but one forgotten by far too many online marketers. If you’re working on your link building plan for next year, you may want to read over a post called “The Secret to Making Every Link Count for Your SEO Rankings” over at Winning the Web.
- Sometimes the commentary on an issue is what leads you back to the issue itself. (One of the joys of social media.) I ran across Amber Naslund’s awesome post on The Sanctity of Social Media” today and then had to go read about the Chris Brogan controversy that started it. The original fuss is over a blog post from Brogan where he talks about a Kmart shopping spree with a $500 gift card they sent him. Brogan also responds to the controversy with an excellent post on his social media blog.
Check out our small business news site.
Why Small Businesses Need Search

by Mike Moran

Image by dave_mcmt via Flickr

I often talk to small business people who lament at how the marketing deck is stacked against them. The big guys have the connections, the money, and the brand name. “How can I compete?” I hear them asking. I always have the same answer–Internet marketing, especially organic search marketing. But when I tell them this, often I get disbelief. These small business owners have painfully learned over the years that marketing is for big companies, not for them. They’re wrong.

A few weeks ago, I ran across a report on SearchEngineLand about a report from Conductor, saying that Fortune 500 companies are “woefully unrepresented in natural search.” Just 8% of those companies got high grades for their search rankings.

So, if the big companies aren’t there, guess who is? That’s right–small-to-medium size companies. Paid search still goes (mainly) to companies with deep pockets, but organic search goes to the relevant. If your business has the relevant answer for the searcher, you can get that high ranking, too.

I’ve seen it over and over again–big companies getting outranked by their own, distributors, partners, and affiliates for their branded keywords. This shouldn’t happen, because clearly the manufacturer should have the best answer for that product’s search. It happens because the smaller companies do a better job on their information.

And because large companies find search far more difficult than small ones. For organic search success, every piece of the equation must be in place. If you fail to do any one piece, you organic search results suffer. Because large companies have so many more people to coordinate, organic search becomes far harder for large companies than for small ones. So, small companies take note: for organic search, more resources makes the job harder, leaving an opportunity for you.

Sure big companies always have some kind of edge in anything. But big companies have far less of an edge in earned media than they do in traditional marketing channels. If you’ve been making excuses about how you’re doing in search marketing, maybe it’s time to realize that any small business that wants to succeed in search has the opportunity.

Check out our small business news site.
Can Twitter Be Useful For Business?

by David Wallace

If you have yet to hear about Twitter,
I might ask you if you have been living in a cave and for how long. The
micro-blogging platform that few knew about a year ago has now gone
mainstream with over 6 million users – a number that is growing daily.
Even major news outlets such as Fox News, CNN and others are using
Twitter on a daily basis to get viewer reaction and create discussion
around breaking stories and issues.

This leads me to question whether Twitter can be useful for business
or is it simply an outlet to waste time and be counter-productive?

As a small business owner, I have found Twitter to be extremely beneficial for
business. Sure there are times I have found it to be an incredible
time-waster (depending on what it is keeping you from accomplishing
such as actual work, spending time with family, etc.). However, in this
post, I’d like to focus on how Twitter can be useful to businesses and
will cover five functions it can serve. I will then invite comments
from others on additional ways they have used Twitter for business.

1. Puts a Human Face On the Company

We already know that blogs are very useful tools to put a face or
name to the company – in other words allow the company to become more
personable. The problem with blogs is that they require one to actually
write.

Twitter on the other hand is like blogging but has a 140 character
limit for each entry you make. You can therefore “say” something
without having to write up a lengthy post.

Furthermore you do not always have to say something that is
important or of any real value. You can tweet (term used for adding
entires to Twitter) things like, “currently at airport awaiting
flight,” or “enjoying a fine bottle of wine right now,” or any other
random aspect from your personal life. While tweets such as these may
seem trivial, they show that you are a real person behind the corporate
entity.

2. Community Outreach

Twitter is a great tool for reaching out to a community of people. I
have seen it used to broadcast Amber alerts, bring attention to
charitable causes (when Twitter users turned their avatars
pink for Breast Cancer Awareness month), connect with people at
specific events (i.e., conferences, parties, local gatherings, etc.),
and discuss breaking news to name a few examples.

How can this be useful for business? Keeping in mind that you should
work to build a community around your products and/or services anyway,
Twitter is a great tool to help in this process. By setting up a
Twitter profile for your company and then making sure you invite your
active customers and prospects to follow you, you now have a direct
connection to them.

And while newsletters, e-newsletters, and even blogs are effective
ways to reach out to your community, Twitter offers a way to reach out
by saying very little. Let’s face facts – not every client is going to
read through a lengthy newsletter or visit every blog post you put out.
Short tweets on the other hand are very easy to read and can even call
for more action such as inviting clients to read a post or bringing
attention to a new product.

3. Product/Service Promotion

Once you have a decent amount of followers, announcing new products
and/or services, upgrades or even promotionals becomes a breeze. Also
consider that many Twitter users will use specific search queries to
locate topics that interest them. Therefore by associating the right
keywords along with your tweets, you can attract those that aren’t even
following you.

While product/service promotion can be an attractive use of Twitter,
I caution you to make sure it is not the only thing you contribute.
Just as in any web forum, blog commenting system or chat environment,
if all you ever do is to “toot” your own horn, you may find yourself
doing more harm than good.

Companies such as Southwest Air, M&Ms, and Comcast

are just a few examples that are well-balanced in their use of Twitter
for a variety of purposes, including product/service promotion.

4. Brand Management

With so many people using Twitter, there are bound to be occurrences
where your company and/or products will be discussed. Twitter’s search function can be an excellent resource for monitoring brand names – when and how they are being discussed.

Simply enter various search terms related to your company brand and
product names and see results in real time. Better yet, save each
search as an RSS feed and add to your reader. That way anytime someone
begins talking about your company on Twitter, you will be notified via
your RSS reader.

5. Polls/Surveys

This is one of the most useful functions of Twitter – the ability to
gather feedback via polls, surveys or even by asking a simple question.
As a small business owner I have utilized this function many times to
locate tools used in my business, find a solution to a web site issue
or even learning business sense from those more seasoned than myself.

Using polls and surveys on Twitter can also help you to gather
useful intelligence on your products and services. Just be ready for
criticism which if you make good use of, can be utilized to improve
your product and/or service offerings.

=============================

These are just a few ways businesses are using Twitter. I’m sure
there are many other uses and would love to hear from other business
owners either on how they are using Twitter for business or
possibilities they have yet to explore. Please use the comments system
below to share your ideas. Oh and finally if you would like to follow
me on Twitter, I’m right here.

Check out our small business news site.
What I Want for Christmas from the Search Engines: The Sequel

by Stoney deGeyter

Since movies can wait 10 or 20 years to produce a sequel, I thought that it wouldn’t be so out of sorts writing a sequel to a post from 2002. Back then, Google was the rising star, there was a lot more competition in search and GoTo dominated the PPC market. Only a few things have changed since then.

Six years ago I wrote a post about what I wanted from Christmas from the search engines
Garfield’s Pet Force trailer

. I thought it would be a good time to revisit what I asked for back then, whether it happened or not, whether I really wanted it (20/20 hind site) and perhaps ask for a few new things.

1. Build your own technology, don’t just backdoor another search engine’s results into your own.

Back in 2002 Yahoo didn’t have it’s own algorithm and they, among others such as AOL and Netscape, were using Google’s results to power their own searches. They were supposedly placing their own spin on the results but they were just about identical across the board.

So what’s different today? Both Yahoo and MSN have developed their own search technologies but they don’t have anywhere near the search audience that Google commands. In 2002 we were looking at a Google monopoly as other search portals continued to regurgitate Google’s results. Today we see a near total dominance by Google despite the competition.

Competition is good, but something needs to happen. These competing engines need to find a way to cut into Google’s lead and steal market share. I won’t tell them how to do this, as I’m sure they have teams of people trying to figure it out, but I can certainly see the upside of a Yahoo/MSN merger.

2. Easy spam reporting.

In 2002 I asked for a way to easily report spam to the search engines. Well, we got it. Now I’m not so sure it was a good idea. Honestly, I’m still mixed. Have I reported sites as spam? Sure, I had to test it, right? Actually, I have reported one particular site several times because they were obviously spamming the results with multiple garbage sites. It’s been a few years and to date those sites still take up space in the SERPs, even while providing little value to any searchers.

Now where I have real a problem is when Google is asking people to report paid links. I can justify reporting on-page spamming. The site owner, if they want to be found in the search results, has the responsibility to make sure their site conforms to the search engine’s guidelines. However, links coming from other sites isn’t something that can be 100% controlled. How hard is it to pay for a link campaign for a competitor then simply report them for spamming? There could be good ROI in that.

Furthermore, this is really little more than Google admitting that their algorithm cannot fix the problem with paid links so they want us to do it for them. By getting people to submit link spam reports Google is trying to fix their results without fixing their algorithm.

Well, I wanted it and now I got it and I guess I have to live with it.

3. Clear Definition of SPAM.

I’m not sure we’ve ever had a clear definition of what spam is, though this may be as close as we’ll get. Though by now I think most people have a pretty good idea of tactics are considered spam. You can find a list of such tactics here and here.

At this point, do we need anything more than that? Probably not. I think anybody can figure out what they should and shouldn’t do.

4. Don’t Sneak Advertisements Into Search Results.

Back when this was requested, PPC was dominated by GoTo which became Overture which became Yahoo! Search Marketing. At the time, GoTo was selling it’s paid placements to other engines who were incorporating them into the search results, often without any indication they they were paid for listings. Google was the only one displaying ads in a way that made it clear they were paid ads.

Since then the engines have just about stopped displaying paid results mixed with the natural results, segregating them in a “sponsored ad” section of the SERPs. This is no longer an issue.

5. More Pay-For-Inclusion.

In 2002 I was a strong proponent for Paid inclusion. The spidering and indexing capabilities of the search engines weren’t what they are today. Paid inclusion made it easy to ensure that your pages were in the search indexes, but didn’t influence the results. You still had to optimize.

Today, paid inclusion is all but dead. If you can’t get your pages in the search engine indexes, the fault is likely yours, not theirs. The engines are able to grab new content quickly and revisit older content on a regular basis. It’s just a matter of making sure all the pieces are in place to allow the engines to find you and revisit often. I’m very glad that paid inclusion is a thing of the past.

My 2008 Christmas Wish List

So what do I want for Christmas from the search engines this year?
1. Better segregation of blended results. ASK.com used to do the best job of segmenting the different results on the page, however it looks like they’ve gone the route of Google, throwing them all into the same pot. I like segmented results because it allows me to skip the type of results I’m not looking for (video or images) or easily move to them if that is what I want.
2. Let me opt out of new options. I don’t like that if I’m logged into Google I automatically get personalized results. I have my gmail open all day but I have to log out if I want my results pure, which means I also log out of my gtalk. PITA! I am also not interested in the SearchWiki. These options are good and all for those who want them, but don’t force them on me.
3. Give me more results per page by default. With the integration of blended results, I’d like to see more natural results per page. This would allow more sites to hit first page and give more options to those who think the second and third pages don’t provide anything relevant. C’mon engines, prove that your results are relevant beyond the top 10.

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