It can be highly tempting to rely SOLELY on keyword research tools. Both to indicate what keywords your target market is using to find your kinds of products and services, and what keywords to target for search engine optimization.

After all, the good tools reflect what people are actually searching on… not anyone’s opinion or theory of what they’re searching on.

But are they the be-all and end-all?

Then answer is NO.

There are two main problems with the data generated by even the best keyword tools:

1. It’s retrospective - it tells us what people have searched on in the past, not necessarily what they will search on in the future. Now, depending on your market, people may not use significantly different keywords going forward. On the other hand, you could miss out on huge opportunities to capitalize on the most topical issues and developments by focusing entirely on past search queries. For example, it took one announcement for searches on words related to Governor Sarah Palin to skyrocket in the search engines.
2. A lot of your competitors are not only looking at the same data but may also be typing in those keywords, thereby distorting how often your target market really is using various search phrases. Again, this may not be significant… but if you’re in a hyper-competitive market it may be significant enough for you to make erroneous decisions about which keywords to target.

By all means use a quality keyword research tool (some good ones are listed below). But I also recommend keeping abreast of what’s happening in your industry and the media for news that may impact on what people search on… and what keywords YOU target for search engine marketing purposes.

Tools I like:

• Wordtracker: http://www.wordtracker.com
• Keyword Discovery: http://www.keyworddiscovery.com
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Do you run pay-per-click ads in the search engines… or run ads in different ezines, email newsletters or on other marketers’ websites or autoresponder series? Do you have – or want to have - just ONE landing page for the traffic from ALL those ads… but still be able to track the click-throughs from each of those ads?

Well, instead of creating mirror pages of the same landing page (which can be painful) just do this: add a ‘tracking code’ to the end of the destination URL in your ad.

Your tracking code should begin with a question mark i.e. ‘?’ and end in whatever word or code is meaningful for you.

For example, if I was running an ad directing people to the Kikabink News advertising page I might add the following tracking code at the end of the URL:

?knsept08

‘knsept08′ is simply a made-up code to help me identify traffic that derived from the ad in question. I would add this to the destination URL in my ad as follows:

http://www.kikabink.com/news/advertise-with-us/?knsept08

So my ad might read:

Have a product or service aimed at Internet marketers? Advertise it in the Kikabink News email newsletter and reach a growing audience of passionate, entrepreneurial Internet marketers eager for ways to improve their marketing results. Click here to find out how: http://www.kikabink.com/news/advertise-with-us/?knsept08

Now, if people click on that link:

1. They will end up on the right landing page and
2. I will be able to check my web analytics to see how many people clicked on this particular URL, giving me an indication of the effectiveness of the ad.

Nifty, huh?

There are at least two myths circulating in the Internet marketing and search engine optimization communities that frustrate me no end. They frustrate me for two chief reasons:

1. These myths cause real DAMAGE to people’s businesses by inciting them to devote time, resources and money to the WRONG things; and
2. They allow wannabe experts to continue selling their B.S. at others’ expense.

The first myth is the ‘duplicate content penalty’ myth - the idea that the search engines will ‘penalize’ you e.g. remove your site from the index or lower your ranking - if you publish the same content more than once on the Internet.

This is JUST NOT TRUE.

There are sooo many examples of duplicate content being routinely indexed by the search engines. Just do a search on the title of an article syndicated by Reuters or the Associated Press. Up will come results for the same article on lots of different news sites.

Let’s face it. If the search engines de-indexed sites for publishing the same articles… there would be NO news sites listed in the search engines at all!

And that’s just one example.

But if you don’t believe me when I say the duplicate content penalty is a myth, hear it from the horse’s mouth. This is what Susan Moskwa said in a recent post to the Official Google Blog:

“There’s no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.”

Couldn’t be clearer than that.

Okay, so why do concerns about publishing duplicate content - either on your own site or on others’ sites – persist? Two reasons.

Source: Susan Moskwa, “Demystifying the ‘duplicate content penalty’”, The Official Google Blog, September 12, 2008

A couple of years ago Simon (my business partner and husband) and I had an argument. We didn’t end up screaming or throwing things at each other, but it did get a little heated. But it wasn’t about one of us coming home late… or whose turn it was to do the dishes… or who was or wasn’t pulling their weight around the house…

It was about marketing!

Specifically, Internet marketing and how to design our websites.

In this case, Simon had his search engine optimization (SEO) hat on, while I had my ‘conversion’ hat on. As such we had different ideas about how to construct our websites.

We both agreed that designing a commercial website to ‘look good’ was not the most important objective (rather, it was to sell products or services), but when it came to designing a website to sell, we looked at things differently.

Simon wanted to maximize search engine traffic, so he wanted our sites to be ’search engine friendly.’ I wanted to maximize conversions, so I thought that every aspect of our websites should be engineered to sell. If this meant something wasn’t ’search engine friendly’ then so be it!

Simon argued that the site would miss out on lots of traffic unless it appealed to the search engines. He said, “What’s the point of having a highly converting site if there’s no one to visit it?”

I said, “What’s the point of generating a lot of traffic if you can’t convert it into customers? In any case, search engine optimization is only one method of generating traffic, so why should a website be designed with only that in mind?”

Yes, acknowledged Simon, but the search engines often generate the most traffic… and, what’s more, it’s free.

Who was right? We both were!

The truth is, many Internet businesses need both organic search engine traffic AND the ability to convert it into customers.

Why do I say they NEED organic search engine traffic? Can’t they just use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and non-search engine sources of traffic?

Well, you may be able to rely on PPC advertising alone, but you’d be missing out on attracting the vast majority of people who search on search engines. Eye-tracking research by Enquiro and MarketingSherpa has found that a fraction of searchers look at the right side of the page of search results. That’s right, where all the PPC ads are.

Now, plenty of people DO look at the right side – and these may well be enough to support your business.

But if ‘almost no-one’ looks at the PPC ads on the right, then ‘almost everyone’ is only looking at the natural / organic listings on the left. Do you want to attract ‘almost everyone’ or ‘almost no-one’ to your website? In other words, if ‘almost no-one’ amounts to 100 people a day… imagine how many the ‘almost everyone’ is!

And in case you don’t really care about generating traffic from the search engines, let me quote Dearl Miller of Trafficology who has said that 85 percent of all online sales originate from searches on search engines.

That’s a lot of sales to say goodbye to!

But if all this supports Simon’s view that website design should be based around search engine optimization, let me re-iterate my argument: loads of traffic is worthless if it can’t be converted into customers. I firmly believe that your website should be designed to sell.

Which leads me to how Simon and I resolved our differences.

Eventually, after we both calmed down, we agreed that there must be a ’sweet spot’ – likely to be different for every website – where the design achieves a balance between generating the most organic search engine traffic and converting the most visitors into customers, and where the result is the maximum possible profits.

So the challenge is to find that balance.

How do you do that? Simple. You test. Yep, you try something and see what happens. Or as we say, you innovate, test and track. Innovate, test and track. Innovate, test and track. On and on, with the aim to continually improve your profits.

And it’s profits that really matter. Not the amount of traffic. Not even the amount of customers or sales. Profits.

That’s what your website should really be designed with in mind. And, because no one – not even you – can really know what will yield the most profits, or even what the ‘most profits’ is, you must constantly innovate, test and track!

Great article in MarketingSherpa about how to identify and avoid click-fraud i.e. where you end up paying for someone to either erroneously or maliciously click on your pay-per-click ad.

Competitors, employees, customers and blatant fraudsters can all bring about click-fraud. It may be accidental or malicious, and it tends to be more common in highly competitive industries.

Jon Myers, Head of Search at MediaVest offers some great advice in the MarketingSherpa article for how to identify and avoid click fraud. Among other things, Mr Myers offers these three tips for avoiding, or at least reducing the instance of, click-fraud:

1. Avoid ad networks, since click-fraud is more prevalent on ad networks rather than in the search engines.
2. Identify the IP addresses of your key competitors. This will allow you to see if you’re getting a lot of clicks from them. You can then ask them to ‘cease and desist’.
3. Identify your company’s IP address. Although it’s known as ‘fraud’ a lot of click-through fraud is really just ‘click-through ignorance’ - where employees click on your ads out of interest rather than spite. Deterring employees from clicking on your PPC ads may be a simple matter of explaining that you pay each time they click (and that you’ll dock their pay the next time they do it… only kidding!)

Check out the article (free account required) for more helpful advice about the causes of click-fraud and how to detect and avoid it.

Source: MarketingSherpa, “Crack Down On Click Fraud: How To Identify, Monitor, Prevent It: Red Flags and Links”, MarketingSherpa

For all the hoopla about Chrome… Mozilla Firefox (ideally version 3 and over) is the browser of choice for many Internet marketers.

Why? Simply because there are tons of powerful free extensions and plugins for Firefox that can give you invaluable information on the fly.

Aaron Wall’s plugin, ‘SEO For Firefox‘ is one such tool. In fact, it’s one of my favorite search engine optimization (SEO) extensions. (I’ll cover some of the others in future articles.)

What does SEO For Firefox do? Well, when you perform a search using Google or Yahoo, it yields a host of other data about each of the search results.

Specifically, the tool pulls market research data into each of the search results, including the following:

• PR: Google PageRank - an estimate of global link authority.
• Age: age pulled from Archive.org - the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider (and theoretically the search engines).
• Links: Yahoo linkdomain - a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain.
• .edu Link: Yahoo .edu linkdomain - a rough estimate of the number of .edu links pointing at a domain.
• .edu Page Link: Yahoo .edu link - a rough estimate of the number of .edu links pointing at a specific page.
• .gov Link: Yahoo .gov linkdomain - a rough estimate of the number of .gov links pointing at a domain.
• Page Links: Yahoo link - a rough estimate of the number of links pointing at a page.
• del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us.
• Technorati: an estimate of the number of links to a site from blogs.
• Alexa: rank based on website traffic (heavily biased toward Internet marketing and webmaster sites).
• Cached: Google site - how many pages from a site are indexed in Google.
• dmoz: based on the number of pages from a site listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
• Bloglines: an estimate of how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
• dir.yahoo.com: indicates whether a site is listed in the Yahoo Directory or not.
• WhoIs: a link to the whois data for a site.

SEO For Firefox also provides links to the given data sources to enable you to verify and further analyze the data. You can also choose which data points and links you want activated at a given time.

SEO For Firefox is a handy, free extension that can save you a LOT of time when conducting keyword, SEO and competitive research.

Just one tip - and this applies to similar such extensions - turn SEO For Firefox OFF when you are casually browsing.

If you always have it switched on, then each time you perform a search, you will effectively be running hundreds of search engine queries… to the point where the search engines may view you as a robot and ban you for a certain period of time. (This has happened to me, so I speak from experience!)

==> Click here to get SEO For Firefox

Fun article by Jill Whalen in High Rankings Adviser. Ms Whalen admits to being a Google Analytics “junkie” and explains how she uses the website analytics tool for multiple purposes beyond simply tracking her search engine statistics.

For example, when she’s needed reassurance that writing articles for other publications has been worthwhile she’s simply checked her stats to see how much traffic she’s received from those sites, and what percentage have ended up subscribing to her newsletter.

I like the way she thinks. Nothing like the motivational boost you get from some cold, hard facts (or as close to “facts” as Google Analytics can provide).

On the other hand, I guess it could be depressing to discover that all those article directories you’ve spent months hand-submitting unique articles to… have delivered NO traffic, much less any converting traffic!

And then there are those traffic sources that have delivered a ton of traffic… which doesn’t convert at all. Ms Whalen mentions StumbleUpon as being a major culprit here.

Similarly, she notes that while 60 percent of her website traffic comes from search engines, a lot of it doesn’t convert. That’s to be expected. The more content-rich your site, the more people will come to it via all kinds of wacky and weird search phrases. If, however, you have optimized your website for the search engines, you’ll attract a significant number of search engine visitors who ARE your target market and who will convert very well.

Google Analytics is also great for revealing information ABOUT your target market (not just where they come from). For example, you can get a good sense of not only how advanced and elaborate your website should be, but also how technical your visitors are, by considering the percentage of visitors who use the various web browsers used by your website visitors. It was interesting to find, for example, that over 70 percent of visitors to a corporate site I’m working with use Internet Explorer, whereas only about 43 percent of visitors to the Kikabink site use IE. Different horses for different courses!

All in all, Jill Whalen’s article is a welcome reminder to set aside some time to analyze your website statistics. Regardless of whether you use Google Analytics or some other web statistics program, you may just uncover some “pearls” that could impact on your marketing, product development or other aspects of your business.

This is powerful information - real data about YOUR website - that may be far more pertinent and instructive than any general research study findings.

Source: Jill Whalen, “Measuring Success Beyond the Search Engines”, High Rankings Adviser, September 10, 2008

A new chart from MarketingSherpa indicates that people and companies blog for many reasons. All blogs, however, would do well to apply MarketingSherpa’s three tips for crafting a blog for maximum impact:

1. Provide genuine, heartfelt content
2. Update regularly
3. Be focused

Here’s my take. When it comes to providing genuine, heartfelt content… leave the “corporate speak” for company brochures and annual reports. (Actually leave it out altogether). The best blogs seem to have a somewhat personal, informal tone.

Updating regularly means… regularly blogging. Now, this can certainly be a challenge for large corporates and individual marketers alike. I’m currently working with a large company to establish a weekly blog. The challenge we face is being able to select a topic, get it written, have it reviewed and approved by a gaggle of ’stakeholders’ - marketing, legal, public relations, etc - each and every week. Trust me, it’s like herding cats and I honestly don’t think it’s going to happen without everyone being absolutely dedicated and committed to the task.

For the typical Internet marketer, the challenge is finding the time to blog when there’s so much else to do. Should you spend an hour on your blog… or write some articles… or contact potential JV partners… or develop that new product?

My feeling is that unless you can update your blog at least once per week, it’s not worth doing. You’re better off focusing on other activities that you can commit yourself to doing well.

Having said that, blogging once per week is really not ideal in terms of getting frequently visited by the search engines, attracting backward links and traffic, and inspiring reader interactivity, among other things. It’s probably fine if you are already a “name”, but if you view blogging as a means to becoming a “name” you really want to be blogging several times per week. We started Kikabink News - which is both a blog and a newsletter - a few months ago and, while I’m delighted with its performance so far, we have a long, long way to go in terms of achieving our goals.

Bottom line: if you don’t have the time or interest to devote to blogging, don’t bother with it. Don’t waste time setting up a blog you never update. (Trust me, I have one of those, and it’s not doing much for our business). And, by the way, you CAN be successful without a blog. The key is to choose one or two core strategies for achieving your business aims and doing them extremely well.

Finally, when it comes to “focus”, the idea here is to stay on topic, and ideally choose a topic that others are not covering as well or in the same way as you. There are tons of blogs covering various topics… how are you going to stand out and keep - indeed, increase – your readership? Usually by having something different and interesting to say.

Source: MarketingSherpa, “New Chart: Craft Your Blog for Maximum Impact: 3 Absolutes to Make it a Must-Read”, MarketingSherpa, September 2, 2008

eMarketer reports that U.S. kids aged 10 to 14 years old spent more time on the Internet than any other kind of media in May 2008, with 83 percent going online for an hour or more each day.

Of interest to marketers of products aimed at “tweens”, a significant number of these kids are using the Internet to research items they want to buy. 40 percent of the children surveyed said they used search engines to learn about products or services after seeing
ads, and many used search engines to find places to buy, check prices, or research new purchases.

Source: eMarketer, “Young Consumers Research Purchases Online”, eMarketer, August 15, 2008

Good article by P.J. Fusco on getting backlinks from web directories. Ms Fusco explains that obtaining backlinks from the RIGHT directories is still a legitimate link building practice for the purposes of search engine optimization (SEO).

For one thing, directory submissions typically give you control over the anchor text used to link to your site. For another thing, directories are not only fairly easy to find, but also allow and WANT you to submit your site to them.

Just be sure to focus only on directories that are RELEVANT to your business - whether they are general, topical, niche or local/regional directories. Indeed, Ms Fusco suggests you take your time when evaluating a directory and to look for these signs:

• .edu and .gov backlinks;
• An aged domain;
• Lots of pages indexed by the search engines;
• Good PageRank flow-through to the listing pages; and
• Fewer than 100 links per listing page.

Similarly, she gives some solid tips for what to AVOID in a directory. You want to steer away from directories that:

• Are NOT relevant to your website;
• Are really just thinly veiled link farms;
• Contain links to “bad neighborhoods”;
• Have excessive broken links; and
• Feature numerous pop-up or pop-under ads.

Check out Ms Fusco’s article for more tips, including a list of other things to avoid when evaluating a directory.

Source: P.J. Fusco, “Tactical Link Building: Reliable Directories”, The ClickZ Network, August 27, 2008