So would you like a website domain name that ends in dot.bank? dot.hotel, or what about dot. restaurant? Well in the future of the world wide Web, you may get your wish. This may be the situation, and major brands are really worried about having to spend millions in order to protect their brands.
The entity that oversees the Web, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, plans to start selling the rights to an unlimited number of top-level domain names in the year 2009. The names would be those of popular subjects geographic locations, types of businesses.
Think about it this way. If you were a national restaurant with a cool branded name, for instance, like McWeener, and you already owned all the sites you thought you needed to own surrounding that name, like McWeener.com, McWeener.biz, and dot.org, dot.net, etc. Now you have to worry about owning McWeener (dot)restaurant, or McWeener (dot) Los Angeles and every other city where the franchises exist too!
Big companies are really worried that this situation could open the doors to Internet scams and fraud, and drastically increase their costs of doing business online. Brand names could get hijacked, causing millions in legal fees, and loss of business.
Showing posts with label online optimizaiton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label online optimizaiton. Show all posts
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Versus Pay per Click (PPC)
We had a new business opportunity this week with a medical professional client who is completely confused about search engine optimization (SEO), versus Pay per Click (PPC) advertising. And she is not the only potential new client who doesn't get it. Some of my most sophisticated professional friends are having a hard time grasping the new media tactics that we do required for getting their websites onto the first pages of Google and the search engines.
This gal asked about her PPC campaign, and why it isn't getting any results after three weeks... so my associate Mike spelled it out. First he did her competitive landscape, and determined that she only had three other real competitors in her geographical area. One of the three was getting 15,000 visitors per month. But they also had more than 300 pages of content on their website. Her site had very few in comparison. He researched and noted that the competitor was spending about $700 in PPC advertising. The lesser known competitor got about 570 visitors per month, and did not have a PPC campaign. Both of her competitors have press rooms which means she will need one too and they are a great place for linkable content. The more content on your site with relevant keywords the better.
If your goal is to book five clients per week initially, and then eventually in a year, you want to have ten clients per week, think about these numbers. Typically conversion rates for Internet customers are a three to five percent lead generation per visitor to your website. Out of 100 visits per site, you should get three to five leads, and out of those, one percent will buy. Basically it takes 20 leads for one customer. You need a minimum of 100 visitors per day to get business, or about 500 visitors to get a sale. It's compounded as well, so the more visitors, the better the chances for sales.
But here is the deal insofar as PPC. It's important to remember that PPC may be beneficial when launching a company and its products and services online, but ultimately PPC and offline advertising benefits will disappear as soon as you stop spending money, while SEO keeps on working long after the money is spent. We actually helped wean another client off of spending thousands on PPC ads, while increasing their SEO results. The Entertainment Connection, who offer film schools for audio engineers and radio professionals - people who want to learn how to be a DJ for instance. One of the tactics I worked on was to get their press room up and running with press releases and a press kit. Next I will be writing articles and blog content for them to provide links back to their website, while Mike will continue adding website content and track their optimization, tweaking their site for increasing their customer leads via SEO.
That said, our goal for clients is to evaluate their needs, by asking these six questions:
1) What is your URL or website address?
2) When people search for your product or service on Google, where does your website appear?
3) Do you have a tracking or measurement program for your website?
4) Who are your top five competitors (National/Regional/Local)
5) How much traffic do you think your website can get by this time next year?
6) How many customers from your website would you like per month?
For a free analysis feel free to email us - check out http://marcombroadband.com/
This gal asked about her PPC campaign, and why it isn't getting any results after three weeks... so my associate Mike spelled it out. First he did her competitive landscape, and determined that she only had three other real competitors in her geographical area. One of the three was getting 15,000 visitors per month. But they also had more than 300 pages of content on their website. Her site had very few in comparison. He researched and noted that the competitor was spending about $700 in PPC advertising. The lesser known competitor got about 570 visitors per month, and did not have a PPC campaign. Both of her competitors have press rooms which means she will need one too and they are a great place for linkable content. The more content on your site with relevant keywords the better.
If your goal is to book five clients per week initially, and then eventually in a year, you want to have ten clients per week, think about these numbers. Typically conversion rates for Internet customers are a three to five percent lead generation per visitor to your website. Out of 100 visits per site, you should get three to five leads, and out of those, one percent will buy. Basically it takes 20 leads for one customer. You need a minimum of 100 visitors per day to get business, or about 500 visitors to get a sale. It's compounded as well, so the more visitors, the better the chances for sales.
But here is the deal insofar as PPC. It's important to remember that PPC may be beneficial when launching a company and its products and services online, but ultimately PPC and offline advertising benefits will disappear as soon as you stop spending money, while SEO keeps on working long after the money is spent. We actually helped wean another client off of spending thousands on PPC ads, while increasing their SEO results. The Entertainment Connection, who offer film schools for audio engineers and radio professionals - people who want to learn how to be a DJ for instance. One of the tactics I worked on was to get their press room up and running with press releases and a press kit. Next I will be writing articles and blog content for them to provide links back to their website, while Mike will continue adding website content and track their optimization, tweaking their site for increasing their customer leads via SEO.
That said, our goal for clients is to evaluate their needs, by asking these six questions:
1) What is your URL or website address?
2) When people search for your product or service on Google, where does your website appear?
3) Do you have a tracking or measurement program for your website?
4) Who are your top five competitors (National/Regional/Local)
5) How much traffic do you think your website can get by this time next year?
6) How many customers from your website would you like per month?
For a free analysis feel free to email us - check out http://marcombroadband.com/
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Using Linked In for Social Media Marketing
I was invited to a colleague's BNI networking group this morning, and they had recently implemented a group instruction to network each other via Linked in. I have been on the service for years. And I am guilty of not always using it correctly, as I suspect is an issue with many business people, even though I know the value of social media networking sites like this. We instruct our MarCom Broadband clients about the value of social sites like this.
Because LinkedIn is an online network of millions of professionals from around the world, it will help to improve your Google Page Rank, or Google PR. You can post your personal profile and make the information available for the search engines to index. LinkedIn gets high PR in Google, so it is another way of influencing your ranking so people will find you on the Internet. It is pretty simple: just create your public profile and choose the option called “Full View.” You may also want to have your profile’s URL be your actual name, or the name of your company. Then link this page from your blog, or website or from press articles online.
Also LinkedIn is a great place where you can list your website with a link, and or your blog link. All links back to your blog or website create "activity" on these sites which Google likes, and which will go as credits towards your , or PR, on those sites. Be sure if you link to your blog that you include your name or keyword phrase in the link, which will provide search-engine optimization for your blog site.
Because LinkedIn is an online network of millions of professionals from around the world, it will help to improve your Google Page Rank, or Google PR. You can post your personal profile and make the information available for the search engines to index. LinkedIn gets high PR in Google, so it is another way of influencing your ranking so people will find you on the Internet. It is pretty simple: just create your public profile and choose the option called “Full View.” You may also want to have your profile’s URL be your actual name, or the name of your company. Then link this page from your blog, or website or from press articles online.
Also LinkedIn is a great place where you can list your website with a link, and or your blog link. All links back to your blog or website create "activity" on these sites which Google likes, and which will go as credits towards your , or PR, on those sites. Be sure if you link to your blog that you include your name or keyword phrase in the link, which will provide search-engine optimization for your blog site.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Reputation Management Online
Have you ever wondered what to do when something shows up online that you wish would just go away? You know - like when you blasted that person's blog comment. Or the time you were being interviewed by the press and said something they took out of context and published online.
In case you hadn't noticed, things have a way of lingering around on the Internet -- and in fact -- they never go away. They just get pushed back to the earlier pages of the search engines like Google -- and if you are lucky -- when it's something you want to just forget about, it will eventually be replaced. The bad news that it's always searchable, and findable. There is even one website where you can find stuff on the very first initial Internet. Internet acrchives - if you will. (I forgot the website address for that.)
The first and MOST important thing is to remember that ANYTHING you post online, anywhere, will remain there, visable for all to see. So be careful what you say in forums, and on other people's blogs in the comment sections.
I do many press releases, if you search for my name on Google, you will find a number of old press releases that I have written and posted. They go back for years. And there is a novelist (romance novels) named Kristin Gabriel, but it's not me. I spoke to her once and asked her if that was her real name. Nope she just invented it for her writing. Now I can't use my name for the book I am writing. It will have to have my niddle name associated with it.
A couple of years ago MarCom had the pleasure of helping one former client with this problem, and it seems that he's not the only one, because we are getting more new business calls regarding this topic. It took about 6-9 months to clean up the mess that was online. We actually used one cool trick. we created a special website only in his name. And we posted a ton of content there that was bout all the good things he has been doing - like charity events, etc. That site was optimized properly, and then we started adding content articles in other spots on the Internet, and built links to his website. It really helped push his negative posts down off page one.
In some cases, when there's a live link on a website with negative content that you want to disassociate from - it may be necessary to approach the person who posted the info, and ask them to remove it.
Another place to be careful - and my associate Mike Keesling would be happy to talk in depth about it - is Wikipedia.com. Another client of ours, T.S. Wiley and The Wiley Protocol, has had an ongoing challenge with an adversary group. All contributions are subject to Wikipedia policies and guidelines, and only adminstrators have special privileges, however, updates can become more than definitions, but online arguments. It's not very productive, and at some point can become fodor for legal disputes, especially when companies are concerned. The point here is that some people can use tools like this to try to succeed with smear campaigns. Wikipedia does allow the posting -- "This is a controversial topic and may be under dispute. Please read this talk page and discuss substantial changes here before making them." But in the end, using Wikipedia this way requires a huge amount of monitoring.
When doing reputation management strategies for hte web, we use many of the same tools we use for online marekting campaigns -- such as blogs, article submissions, and PR Web releases. It's all about pushing the negative listings down and replacing them with positive links.
In case you hadn't noticed, things have a way of lingering around on the Internet -- and in fact -- they never go away. They just get pushed back to the earlier pages of the search engines like Google -- and if you are lucky -- when it's something you want to just forget about, it will eventually be replaced. The bad news that it's always searchable, and findable. There is even one website where you can find stuff on the very first initial Internet. Internet acrchives - if you will. (I forgot the website address for that.)
The first and MOST important thing is to remember that ANYTHING you post online, anywhere, will remain there, visable for all to see. So be careful what you say in forums, and on other people's blogs in the comment sections.
I do many press releases, if you search for my name on Google, you will find a number of old press releases that I have written and posted. They go back for years. And there is a novelist (romance novels) named Kristin Gabriel, but it's not me. I spoke to her once and asked her if that was her real name. Nope she just invented it for her writing. Now I can't use my name for the book I am writing. It will have to have my niddle name associated with it.
A couple of years ago MarCom had the pleasure of helping one former client with this problem, and it seems that he's not the only one, because we are getting more new business calls regarding this topic. It took about 6-9 months to clean up the mess that was online. We actually used one cool trick. we created a special website only in his name. And we posted a ton of content there that was bout all the good things he has been doing - like charity events, etc. That site was optimized properly, and then we started adding content articles in other spots on the Internet, and built links to his website. It really helped push his negative posts down off page one.
In some cases, when there's a live link on a website with negative content that you want to disassociate from - it may be necessary to approach the person who posted the info, and ask them to remove it.
Another place to be careful - and my associate Mike Keesling would be happy to talk in depth about it - is Wikipedia.com. Another client of ours, T.S. Wiley and The Wiley Protocol, has had an ongoing challenge with an adversary group. All contributions are subject to Wikipedia policies and guidelines, and only adminstrators have special privileges, however, updates can become more than definitions, but online arguments. It's not very productive, and at some point can become fodor for legal disputes, especially when companies are concerned. The point here is that some people can use tools like this to try to succeed with smear campaigns. Wikipedia does allow the posting -- "This is a controversial topic and may be under dispute. Please read this talk page and discuss substantial changes here before making them." But in the end, using Wikipedia this way requires a huge amount of monitoring.
When doing reputation management strategies for hte web, we use many of the same tools we use for online marekting campaigns -- such as blogs, article submissions, and PR Web releases. It's all about pushing the negative listings down and replacing them with positive links.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Links: To Buy or Not to Buy
Now that Google has taken the gloves off against websites and firms that they consider in violation of link building protocols, we must pause to reconsider our link building strategies. Initially, Google indicated their policy was to disallow, or even penalize, any paid links as well as websites who purchase paid links. Google may be the purveyors of the one of the world's most advanced linguistic parsing algorithms, but my associate Mike Keesling of MarCom Broadband's SEO expert found their statement to be full of holes.
Would a website be banned or penalized because they had paid for a Yahoo! directory listing? Aren't Pay Per Click (PPC) ads essentially paid links? Would Google really penalize their own adwords users? In the following months, Google has zigged and zagged through this semantic minefield of their own making. Google clarified its Yahoo! Directory position, saying that since inclusion was not guaranteed until approved by a human this did not constitute a paid link. Google clarified its PPC position by saying these are ad buys so they also do not constitute paid links. All well and good, but we are still confused.
If one buys a link on a site that sells them, couldn't this also fall under the safe harbor of being an ad buy? Who determines this and what are the guidelines? The definitive answer is probably many months away. In the meantime, one certainty is that the value of reciprocal links has actually gone up (provided the linking partners are legitimate and within the same or related business categories or markets). How long this bump in reciprocal links lasts is anybody's guess at this point.
So what would Mike recommend? For reciprocal links, choose your linking partners carefully. Make sure their page rank is the same or better than yours. Make sure they aren't blackballed by Google. Look at potential partners websites ... Do they look and feel like a legitimate company website or do they have the barnyard smell of a link farm?
For directory listings (one of the best places to get one-way inbound links) exercise the same smell tests just described. Double up on the inbound links you can control--press releases and article submissions. Mike said he would take a pass for now on the pay per link or pay per blog post outfits. Figure it's at least 50/50 that these will be next to feel the wrath of Google.
"In a weird way, I welcome Google's position, stance and actions against paid link builders--Link building is the most pain-in-the-butt of all SEO practices and this allows people who hate building links (like me) to slack off on it for a damned good reason," said Keesling.
Would a website be banned or penalized because they had paid for a Yahoo! directory listing? Aren't Pay Per Click (PPC) ads essentially paid links? Would Google really penalize their own adwords users? In the following months, Google has zigged and zagged through this semantic minefield of their own making. Google clarified its Yahoo! Directory position, saying that since inclusion was not guaranteed until approved by a human this did not constitute a paid link. Google clarified its PPC position by saying these are ad buys so they also do not constitute paid links. All well and good, but we are still confused.
If one buys a link on a site that sells them, couldn't this also fall under the safe harbor of being an ad buy? Who determines this and what are the guidelines? The definitive answer is probably many months away. In the meantime, one certainty is that the value of reciprocal links has actually gone up (provided the linking partners are legitimate and within the same or related business categories or markets). How long this bump in reciprocal links lasts is anybody's guess at this point.
So what would Mike recommend? For reciprocal links, choose your linking partners carefully. Make sure their page rank is the same or better than yours. Make sure they aren't blackballed by Google. Look at potential partners websites ... Do they look and feel like a legitimate company website or do they have the barnyard smell of a link farm?
For directory listings (one of the best places to get one-way inbound links) exercise the same smell tests just described. Double up on the inbound links you can control--press releases and article submissions. Mike said he would take a pass for now on the pay per link or pay per blog post outfits. Figure it's at least 50/50 that these will be next to feel the wrath of Google.
"In a weird way, I welcome Google's position, stance and actions against paid link builders--Link building is the most pain-in-the-butt of all SEO practices and this allows people who hate building links (like me) to slack off on it for a damned good reason," said Keesling.
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