Search Engine Marketing Info and Strategies

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We regularly get email something similar to this:

I’m just one guy running my business. I want a great PPC program and I heard you can cater to someone like me. Can you help me?

I typically respond to questions like this very carefully because there isn’t a simple yes/no answer. I don’t want to provide false hope because yes, I do create great PPC programs, but much of the success is going to depend heavily on the website. Let’s look at a few things relevant to the campaigns first.

Choosing a SEO to manage your website marketing has never been easy, but during these tough economic times it’s more important than ever to choose wisely. No one wants to be the guy at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, who chose the wrong chalice. You’re site will be nothing but a shell of it’s old self with the Knights of SEO standing over you saying, “He chose… poorly.” Uh, yeah… “Information that would have been helpful yesterday!” (to mix my movie quotes.)

If you’re a small business shopping around for the right SEO to help you out, there are a lot of things you need to consider before jumping in and hiring a SEO subcontractor or firm. Even if you’re on a tighter-than-normal budget–and really, who isn’t right about now–you can’t shop for SEO simply on costs alone. That’s like buying an economy car when you really need a mini-van. You just need to find the mini-van that offers the best features at the right price.

Not all SEO providers are the same and not all sites require the same type of SEO service. All thing must be taken into proper consideration. Here are five things that are relevant to the overall pricing and success of your optimization campaign.

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• The Five Love Languages of Teenagers, Gary Chapman
• Search Engine Marketing Journal Supplemental Issue, Vol 1.
• How to Win Friends & Influence People, Dale Carnegie
• Lightning in the bottle (The legends of Eorthe), Charles Beamer
• What’s So Great about America, Dinesh D’Souza
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip Heath & Dan Heath
• The Ezekiel Option (Political Thrillers Series #3), Joel C. Rosenberg
• A More Perfect Constitution: Why the Constitution Must Be Revised: Ideas to Inspire a New Generation, Larry J. Sabato
• Still Growing: An Autobiography, Kirk Cameron
• The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life, Philip Zimbardo & John Boyde
• For Men Only: A Straightforward Guide to the Inner Lives of Women, Shaunti and Jeff Feldhahn
• For Women Only: What You Need to Know about the Inner Lives of Men, Shaunti Feldhahn
• Sinner: A Paradise Novel (The Books of History Chronicles), Ted Dekker
• If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans, Ann Coulter

Over the last few months I’ve become a convert to Google. I’ve always used Google as my primary search engine but only recently have I started using a few other Google products such as Gmail, calendar and documents. I’m a fan.

But when it comes to search, I’m fed up with Google’s dominance. We could use a little competition in search.

Of course, it’s really not Google’s fault that they run between 50-70% market share, depending on who you ask. It’s really the fault of all of us searchers. We use Google because we like the results. We don’t use Yahoo or MSN because for whatever reason we feel the results are inferior.

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Many SEO newbies, or new businesses starting out online, come to SEO blogs such as this looking for some quick and easy solution that will vault them to the top in the results. Unfortunately, there are very few hard and fast rules in SEO, and no step by step solutions that, if implemented, guarantees you top search engine rankings. If there were, then it would quickly become obsolete because everybody would be doing it.

Instead, SEO is more of a set of guidelines that can be implemented in a way that allows for individual site customization. Most of it is fluid based on each site’s needs for their audience. However within that there are also some basic dos and don’ts that need to be adhered to.

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Web searchers looking to research or purchase items to buy on the web are inherently skeptical. This is especially true when they end up on a site which is new to them. Regardless of how they got there–web search, referral, advertisement, etc.–this skepticism interferes with the buying and selling process.

There are numerous issues that make their way into the visitor’s conscious and sub-conscious, most of which must be overcome before they are willing to seal the deal and complete the sale. Here are just a few:

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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.

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I attended ion Interactive’s “Extreme Makeover: Landing Page” series this week. On Wednesday landing pages for lead generation were addressed, then today landing pages for transactions were covered. I found both of these webinars provided good information, however I felt they weren’t much different from each other. The advantage for attending both was that I was able to see/view more examples.

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