Google is to go head-to-head with Wikipedia, the web’s largest reference work, in a clash of two of the internet’s most powerful brands.
A new Google service, dubbed knol, will invite “people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it”, Udi Manber, a Google engineer, said.
Like Wikipedia, articles in knol (the name derives from “knowledge”) will be free to read online. In a departure from the nonprofit Wikipedia model, however, knol’s authors will be able to attach advertising to their work and take a share of revenues.
Another opportunity for Web Marketing and SEO folks!
Dec 16, 2007
Goolge to Tackle Wikipedia with New Knowledge Service
Oct 5, 2007
SEO Guidelines for the Production of White Papers and Case Studies
If you are responsible for marketing lead generation campaigns at a B2B company, white papers and case studies would always be in the center of your attention.
White papers and case studies is something your site's visitors (aka potential customers) will always read if they are serious about buying your type of product or services. Every purchasing decision is accompanied by research of prospective suppliers and basic price/feature comparison. It does not mean that lower prices always win, companies buy "value", but they do shop around before they pick up the phone or click on the "contact sales" link.
Most companies ask users to provide basic registration information before allowing them to download white papers. Case studies are usually available onclick, without registration, but users take case studies less seriously than white papers. Case studies are often written like infomercials and are therefore perceived as being purely of sales value, whereas white papers are more product oriented and perceived as more neutral.
As a rule, white papers and case studies are produced collaboratively by Engineering or R&D departments and Marketing & Sales. Engineering describes the product whereas Marketing explains why customers love it. Every document undergoes a few revisions and the final version usually gets approved by the company CEO (for companies under 100 people).
Marketing managers participate in the white paper production process by making stylistic edits, providing additional illustrations and examples, obtaining customer and partner quotes, and above all by coordinating activities between all parties involved, including external graphic design firms. Once the final version has been approved, marketing managers seldom have freedom to make even minor changes to the document.
So what does a marketing manager need to do in order to maximize the effectiveness of white papers and case studies for the purposes of high SEO ranking and lead generation?
The good news is that if your company has a narrow specialization, SEO optimization of your marketing collateral should not be difficult or very time consuming. First of all, you need to ensure that all your site's content is SEO optimized. Below is a how-to list. Then, you need to create quite a bit of content, i.e. create many web pages, including your PDFs. Then, you need to earn as many back links pointing at your site form external sites as possible. Then, you need to interlink your internal site's pages as often as possible. And you also need to include outgoing links to relevant large websites in your industry. While doing all this, you need to be sure to repeat your selected keywords in the exact same way everywhere.
Start by typing your company's most important keywords on Google and check to see how many search results your query has generated. Avoid using generic one-word or two-word combinations. Adjust your keywords to reflect your company profile as closely as possible.
If your keywords generated under 1 million (M) results, your company's website has a very good chance of getting on the first page quickly. A few million results - you are looking at a few months of work and need to prepare a project plan. Over 10 million results, you need to dive into a serious SEO project, so if your management is not ready to commission it, focus on paid PPC and keyword ad campaigns.
Let's assume your keywords are "worth" less than 1M, i.e. the number of search results returned by search engines in response to your query is under one million. Here is what you need to do ensure that your company's site appears on the first pages on major search engines and is found by your prospective customers:
Summary by priorities:
1) Keywords inside file names (i.e. static URLs), inside links, headers and copy (text), keywords must be repeated everywhere identically
2) Number of back links to your site (get as many as you can)
3) Number of pages and number of words per page, with keywords repeated 10-12 times per page
What Not To Do:
1) Do not start working on this project without getting approval from your boss(es)
2) Do not promise specific results to your management at the start of the project, wait until you actually get them (remember, you don't have a budget, so this project is not on your department's road map)
3) Do not try to do everything at once, split your tasks by priorities
4) Do not overdo keyword stuffing, never sacrifice quality of your content for the sake of SEO
5) Do not outsource link building to questionable SEO firms, or else you may find your site listed in adult directories
Good luck and call me if you need help, remember your first 30 minutes is free of charge: http://www.annatulchinsky.com/SEO_Ottawa_Registration.htm
Or contact me via my website design Ottawa site.
Sep 27, 2007
Free Google Presentation Software Now Available
Finally, free presentation software from Google as part of the Google Docs suite.
The Google Docs service is free but you will have to create a user name and password. Once logged in, click on 'New' and then click on 'Presentation'.
The software is compatible with all popular browsers and can be shared by multiple users, eliminating version control headache. You can upload images, change backgrounds and do other fancy things. Zip it up and save it off line, if you wish. Sweet and simple, but why did it take so long?
Sep 25, 2007
SEO Consulting Rates
In the last couple of weeks I received 12 customer leads via my main website at http://www.annatulchinsky.com . Most of those leads were from small business owners who were trying to find an affordable SEO consultant or service provider.
I know that my rates do not exceed industry average, in some cases they are lower than average SEO consulting rates. I am able to offer lower SEO consulting rates because I have low overhead and don't need to pay account managers. When I have concurrent projects, my SEO consulting rates usually go up, as I need to compensate my freelance account managers and SEO copywriters.
Most small business owners complain that SEO consulting rates are high and SEO services are expensive. I routinely nod, waiting for them to vent out their frustration.
Everything is expensive these days, but everyone's gotta eat. Search engine optimization is business like any other. SEO consultants help you make money via your website, and they do it fast. Just like any other prices, SEO consulting rates are based on the current demands of the market, and the market went up 64% last year: http://www.annatulchinsky.com/Newsletter_Ottawa_SEO_SEM_News.htm .
To stay competitive I periodically do research to see what the current SEO consulting rates are. Here are my recent findings:
1) SEO consulting rates range from $60 to $250 per hour, but most companies charge $100-$125 (up from $75 last year)
2) SEO copywriting services range from $35 to $55 per hour, minimum order charges almost always apply
3) SEO copywriting services per page range from $30 to $200 per page (a page contains roughly 400 words), with most companies charging around $50-$75 per page, minimum order requirements almost always apply
4) SEO training services typically range between $300 - $1000 per hour, some seminars cost $2500 for a couple of hours
5) The lowest SEO consulting rate I saw was $28 per hour, but I did not call to find out the minimum order requirement.
In other words, even you price your project at the lowest SEO rates of $28 per hour, given the minimum order requirements, you will still be looking at $3000 per 100 hours or 2.5 weeks of service, roughly.
In my view, SEO consulting rates are not expensive at all, considering the benefits. An SEO project, once implemented successfully, requires little maintenance over time, so if you are willing to learn how to do your own PPC campaign management, your SEO costs can be finite whereas the benefits long lasting.
If you need a quote on your SEO project, please contact me via my main website: http://www.annatulchinsky.com/SEO_Ottawa_Registration.htm
Sep 20, 2007
Be Found: Adding RSS Feeds to Your Blog
If you have a specialized website or a blog where you publish new content regularly, don't forget to add a feed to it. News feeds come in different standards, with RSS being the most popular one.
Adding a feed to your blog is very easy, especially if you are hosting your blog on large platforms like Blogger or Word Press. In this case, you simply need to check the right box in your management settings.
If, however, you are hosting your blog independently, adding a feed will require a bit of code copying and pasting.
Tools for creating syndication feeds:
http://www.devx.com/xml/Article/10790http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt8/rss_feeds.htm
http://www.webhero.org/Homepages/newsfeeds.htm
http://www.rss-specifications.com/display-rss.htm
RSS directories (submit your RSS feed):
http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm
Tools for creating blogs:
Blogger (by Google)
Fantastic service, loaded with features, ability to streamline AdSense ads and many other perks. Anbsolutely free.Wordpress
Create a nice-looking blog with fancy features in less than 2 minutes, absolutely no technical skills required, everything is free, including hosting. Charges apply for advanced features and additional users.BlogRolling
Add links to your blog as you surf, on the fly, without opening up your HTML template.Drupal
An advanced portal with collaborative book, search engines friendly URLs, online help, roles, full content search, site watching, threaded comments, version control, blogging, news aggregator.BlogPatrol
Track your blog stats free of charge.Sep 19, 2007
SEO Tips for B2B Businesses without SEO Budget
One of the best ways to SEO optimize a B2B website is to focus on the company's marketing collateral.
As rule, B2B companies do not have a flexible infrastructure that would allow for a full-scale SEO optimization project on the fly, because this type of projects requires close collaboration between multiple teams, demanding a fair amount of project management effort. Given that websites are rarely a priority for B2B companies (with the exception of SAAS and web-based businesses), SEO optimization of a website is often pushed to the end of to-do lists by executive management.
To make matters more complicated, marketing managers often do not have access to the website code and cannot make changes easily. Working with third-party website design firms involves budget decisions. It is difficult to conduct proper SEO optimization of a website in this situation.
At the same time, it is expected that marketing departments generate customer leads on a weekly basis, marketing managers are often assigned quotas, and the company website is perceived as a major lead generation resource.
If your role requires you to generate customer leads while not having adequate management support and/or a budget for it, the most cost-effective SEO strategy in this situation would be to focus on existing marketing collateral.
B2B companies spend a fair amount of resources on the production of web-based customer-facing collateral, such as white papers, case studies, success stories, etc. Optimizing these documents can be done by one person, it can be done quickly and in most cases would not require budgetary spending.
Here is what you can do to boost your search engine ranking without diving into a whole SEO project:
- determine your most desired keywords based on your company's sales scripts
- rename all pdfs by adding these keywords to the end of all titles, separate individual words using underscores (your file names will be long)
- assuming that your pdfs are already posted on the company website, check to see that each document title contains your keywords and is presented as a link
- provide a short abstract underneath each pdf link using important keywords (many companies simply have lists of titles)
- if your design guidelines permit, include document links in bold and italics
Example: Top 10 CRM Software Management Benefits for Small Businesses (pdf)
In addition, review your existing web pages and where possible:
- rename files using most desired keywords
- make sure each page has an H1 tag that contains your keywords
- split your texts in chunks add H2 and H3 subheaders with keywords
- add bulleted lists and sprinkle keywords as often as your style permits, do not overdo it
- add links to other pages on your website that contain similar information
- if possible, include keywords inside the link descriptions and make all links bold and italics
- add more paragraphs using keywords (aim at having at least 500 words per page)
- focus on 2-3 keywords and repeat them 10 times per page, 2-3 times in the first and last paragraphs and at least once in headers and subheaders (H1, H2, H3)
- use the same keywords in your file names, page titles, headers and subheaders, links, and copy (text). This should be done without offending users' sense of style, so be careful.
Going forward, make sure that all web documents are produced with the above SEO guidelines in mind. The more documents (pages) you have, the better it is for your SEO.
Having wealth of resources on your website will also create positive affect on your users' perception of your company. This in turn helps generate qualified customer leads - something your sales people would be sure to appreciate greatly.
Google to Sell Web-Page Ads Visible on Mobile Phones
In another step to extend its dominance of online advertising, Google said Monday that it would begin selling ads on Web pages that are viewed on cellphones.
The company said that its new product, AdSense for Mobile, would establish a cellphone advertising network in which Google would match ads with the content of mobile Web pages, much as it does online.
Other Internet giants, including Yahoo and AOLTime Warner, as well as some start-ups, have also created advertising networks tailored for mobile phones.
Dilip Venkatachari, product management director for AdSense, said the ads would provide a new source of revenue for publishers and could encourage more online sites to create mobile-focused Web sites. Like most other Google advertising systems, ad prices will be set through an auction and and advertisers will pay when a user clicks on its ad.
Mr. Venkatachari said Google had encouraged publishers to have no more than two ads per mobile page, a smaller number than typically appear on a PC’s Web browser.
Google has been testing the system with a limited number of advertisers and publishers this year. On Tuesday, it will open it to all mobile publishers in 13 countries, including the United States, Britain, France, China and India.
Last summer, Google began selling ads that appear next to search results on mobile phones through a program known as AdWords. Last week, it said that all of its online AdWords advertisers, which are said to number in the hundreds of thousands, would be eligible to have their ads appear next to search results on cellphones.
Google’s further inroads into mobile advertising have long been expected. But the market remains relatively small, and analysts do not expect the new service to contribute much soon to Google’s bottom line.
Still, advertisers and publishers appear to be growing increasingly comfortable with mobile advertising. AdMob, a start-up that runs a mobile advertising network, showed 230 million ads in January and expects to show about 1.5 billion this month, said Omar Hamoui, its founder and chief executive.
“The reason that Google and others are getting in is that the market is growing so rapidly, so people are getting very excited,” Mr. Hamoui said. Earlier in the year, AOL acquired Third Screen Media, an AdMob competitor, while Microsoft acquired ScreenTonic, a mobile ad company based in Paris. On Monday, Nokia said it would buy Enpocket, a company in Boston that displays ads on cellphones.
Microsoft said it was expanding a mobile search partnership with Sprint first announced last November. Since then, Microsoft’s search technology allowed Sprint customers to look for ring tones and local Web content, like restaurants and stores. Starting Tuesday, Sprint customers will be able to use Microsoft’s service to search the entire Web on their cellphones.
In addition, customers will be able to choose to have Sprint track their whereabouts, so that when they search for local content, they will not have to type in their location.
Users will also have access to these services through voice-activated technology, allowing them to speak into the device rather than triple-tap or type in a keyword.
Read the full article on NY Times
Sep 18, 2007
Google Program Enlists Mini-Sites as Selling Tool for Advertisers
Google is seizing on the popularity of widgets — small online tools that function like mini-Web sites — for its latest push into advertising.
The online giant will announce today a Gadget Ads program that will provide tools for advertisers to run widget ads in Google’s AdSense network.
Marketers can use space within these display ads on Google’s network to show videos, offer chats with celebrities, play host to games or other activities. If consumers like the widget ad, they can save it onto their desktops or on their profile pages online on sites like Facebook and MySpace.
The new widget ads represent a more aggressive push by Google to attract big brand advertisers who like flashy ad units rather than the simple text ads commonly run in
thin.
Advertisers bid for keywords to place their widget ads in Google’s network in the same way they do other Google ads. Since many users will interact with the ads within the ad units and not click through, Google has developed a new interaction measure to document the interest in the ads.
Google tested its Gadget Ads program this summer with a group of 50 marketers. To encourage more advertisers to make such ads, Google is offering to be host of videos for the ads in YouTube’s servers — a cost-saving for advertising agencies. And Google provides tools for updating the ads, even if marketers do not bid for ads in Google’s network. Marketers pay Google only for the ads that run in its networks and not for any downloading or saving of those ads that consumers may choose to do.
Read the full article on NY Times and on Mashable
SEO Perspective: Why Have a Blog?
This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.
Sep 14, 2007
Blogs: Time to Get Serious
As reported by TechCrunch, blogs are officially media. In two determinations handed down on September 4, 2007, the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) found that political blogs and bloggers are media for the purposes of US Electoral Law.
The blogosphere is shaking its head and giggling, since blogs have been one of the most reliable sources of information for a few years already. Everyone knows that if you want to find good information, use blogs and social networking sites. People rely on other people's opinions and referrals much more eagerly than search engines. It is now commonly known that search engines favor large sites with thousands of pages whereas sites of this size often belong to official "mainstream" organizations and commercial entities - and who can afford to trust these organizations nowadays when oil costs $80 per barrel and most of it has to be imported? I know I can't. Needless to say, there is no such thing as independent media, and I am not interested in infomercials.
If I want to know what's really going on in the US and the world for that matter, I read French, British and Russian news sources. I then browse blogs and specialized forums and contrast and compare information from these news sources with what people are saying.
So thank God for blogs and their innocence, however transitory it may be. It will not be too long before this medium is completely compromised with SEO-optimized content that has been sponsored from A to Z. There is a lot of it happening already, but for the moment, one can still find plenty of interesting, truly independent, blogs offering fantastic content.
Logically then, I feel saddened by the now official status of blogs as media. To me it indicates that from now own mainstream commercial entities will begin taking blogs seriously, hence "spinning" the blogosphere and eventually destroying blogging the way we know it now.
Sep 12, 2007
SEO Experience: Starting a New Business
If you are starting a new business and haven't yet registered a domain name for your future website, here are a few things that you can do to ensure your site is found by visitors:
Purchase a 1-day subscription for WordTracker and do a reality check on the keywords you want to to focus on.
When I source new contracts for my firm, I often visit job boards to see what kind of skills are in demand, and it always surprises me to see that even large companies list among "required skills" things like knowing how to use WordTracker.
WordTracker is a software that literally "tracks" or records the keywords people type when they search via search engines. The tool stores those queries and then displays them to you in various combinations.
- Example: if you are a travel website, you would find that people rarely query 'popular activities' or 'popular attractions' when they use search engines to prepare for travel. Instead, they query 'things to do'. If you type 'popular activities' in WordTracker, the tool will display for you all related keywords that people have actually used in reality and you will see that 'things to do' are used by far more often. So if you are a travel site, you would not want to miss 'things to do'. But you might not necessarily think of this keyword on your own. This is where WordTracker comes very useful.
In my view, checking your prospective keywords via WordTracker is probably the most important thing you should do before you do anything else, before you register your domain name. But! Anyone over 7 can learn how to use WordTracker in less than half an hour. Go to their website, fill out their registration form, provide payment and then type your keywords in question, make selection by clicking a few boxes and then wait to see the results. Be patient, it make take a while for a page to load. After you check the keyword combinations you had in mind, also check (click) all suggested keyword combinations that this tool will have degenerated for you. Be patient and wait for pages to load. Have you been taking notes?
Register a domain name that would contain your most desired keywords.
A message therapist located in Ottawa would want to consider the following name combinations:
- ottawamassagetherapy.com
- massagetherapyottawa.com
- massagetherapydowntownottawa.com
- ottawadowntownmassagetherapy.com
Having your most important keywords as part of your domain name is the best thing you can do for your future SEO. The major drawback is that it is very difficult to find short domain names, so your URL ends up being very long and cumbersome. My advice: never mind this and include your most desired keywords in your URL. A long domain name is a small price to pay for high search engine ranking. If nothing else is available, use hyphen or dots to separate individual words, but remember that search engines are able to distinguish individual words even if they are joined together in a long string.
Create your own network by starting a few websites at once, each having a distinct specialization or focus.
Make sure all "sister" URLs contain the best keywords for their specialized subject matter. You don't necessarily need to have only top domains: www.domain.com. You can work with sub-domains instead: www.sister.domain.com. Many hosting companies provide sub-domain hosting free of charge.
- Example: TripSpot, a company that has implemented a very successful multiple-domain SEO strategy. Take a look at the right-most drop-down box at the top of their home page, it is called 'StartSpot Network'. Each listing is a separate site, all joined together in a network.
If multiple domains or sub-domains are absolutely out of question, focus on creating a clever folder structure, i.e. arrange all your HTML files in folders and sub-folders by categories, naming all of them - your folders, sub-folders, and files -with your most desired keywords. If you prefer,use underscore to separate words. It is also advisable for the names containing more than 3 words - makes it easier for your visitors. The result will look in a browser like this:
http://www.yourwebsite.com/folder1withkeywords/file1withkeywords.html
http://www.ottawamassagetherapy/downtownmassage/massagetherapyschedule.html
http://www.ottawamassagetherapy/downtown/massage_therapy_schedule.html
For questions, contact me via my website design Ottawa site
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