Used properly, social media can help you with market research, learn about the type of people interested in your business, and build your customer base with only the investment of time. Using social media to build your site traffic and improve visitor loyalty is one of the biggest trends for 2010, and small businesses everywhere are doing it to make their businesses better and increase their sales.

Even though there’s no way around the requirement for having good content, a social media campaign built as a framework around your great content can sincerely help your efforts along. And you can track your success due to your social media campaign pretty easily. Here’s a checklist of the things you should do to make your social media campaign work hard for you.

Steps to a successful social media marketing campaign

1. Step 1 is the biggie: get involved. Social networking is a giant conversation between businesses and customers and among the customers. Setting up your presence on the big social media sites (Facebook and Twitter are the hot sites right now.) is easy and quick, and there’s no reason not to try it. You’ll be able to increase brand awareness and build up relationships with customers. The marketplace is heavily competitive, particularly with the world economy still lagging, so don’t miss out on the opportunities social media brings.

2. Block out time or assign a staffer to dedicate to social media marketing. Just Tweeting something whenever you happen to think of it and have a minute or two isn’t good enough. Plan for daily updates. Write it into your schedule. It’s like exercising in that if you don’t schedule it and realize that it’s important, you won’t bother. Regular updating and interacting with followers are important enough that they should be part of your (or your staffer’s) regular work schedule.

3. Remember that social media participation is a give and take relationship. Signing up and spamming everywhere will hurt rather than help your business. Twitterers will stop following you the minute they think you’re only on there to spew links and bombard them with ads. It’s only 140 characters, but you can do a lot with it as far as making it actually say something.

4. Check and double check the quality and make-up of your content. If you put up a new “Top 50″ list on your blog and each of the 50 items on the list come with an image, think about what happens if your dream comes true and thousands of visitors at once want to read it. Will it exceed your host’s processor’s bandwidth limitations? You’re better off using Picasa or Flickr for hosting your images so you don’t use up your hosting resources on extras.

5. Add social media vote buttons and badges. Sure, visitors can go to Digg.com and manually digg your blog post, but they won’t. Have a Digg button and make it easy.

6. Be aware of events that are going to swamp your social media posts. Huge news events like earthquakes and celebrity deaths are going to put the strain on the social media networks. It may be best to wait it out for a day or two. Avoid trying to compete with known big events like elections and holidays. Those are days when you can and should keep it light rather than announcing a new product.

7. The corollary to Step 6 is to pick a good time to launch something big. On what days do you pick up the most attention on Twitter and Facebook? What time of day is best? Do it then.

8. Keep a close eye on analytics during any social media campaign. Instant traffic stats are very helpful in finding out what’s working well and what isn’t. Tracking the number of inbound links both before and after a social media campaign is important, particularly if you’re doing a social media campaign as a consultant for someone else. You want to be able to see how well the campaign is working. SocialMention is a good website for tracking chatter about your brand on social media sites. The interface is very simple, as you can see in the screen shot. SEMrush (see screen shot) is a tool that lets you find out what a page is ranking for and other goodies like the Google keywords for a given site.

Social Mention

SEMRush

9. Keep an eye on Digg, Stumbleupon, and reddit to see what type of articles in your niche regularly make it big on those sites.

10. If you can do it regularly and do it well, start a blog. The web is littered with carcasses of old blogs that people started and then abandoned. Don’t let this happen to your brand. If you start a blog, update it regularly. Once a week is good, and once a day is better. Blog posts don’t have to be long, and they don’t have to be Pulitzer Prize material. Blogs are for keeping interested parties updated and engaged. Allow comments (moderated if necessary) and answer at least a few of the comments.

The bottom line is that as a webmaster, you avoid social media at your own peril. It is something important enough that you should devote regular blocks of time to taking care of social media updates, interactions, and metrics. Two similar websites selling the same thing using a similar design or approach can have very different success rates depending on which one uses social media like Twitter and Facebook to their best advantage. Make sure that’s you and not the other guy.

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If you haven’t checked out our tools page, you should. We’ve got all kinds of things to make it easier to evaluate and improve your own website and find out how your competitors stack up.

The Google PageRank Checker (see screen shot) does exactly what it says. You type in a URL and it tells you the site’s Google Toolbar PageRank. This is a “snapshot” of Google’s mysterious, patented PageRank formula that conveys the authoritativeness of a given page. There’s not actually a publicly accessible tool for finding the patented Google PageRank, but Google Toolbar PageRank will help you determine how authoritative a page is when used with other factors like a page’s back links, anchor text, and number of links. Keep in mind that a high PageRank doesn’t necessarily mean a site will rank high in the search results. PageRank is great, but search engine optimization is the key to ranking high in most cases.

Back links are links that point to a site from other sites. They are a prime source of PageRank juice (though not the only source). Having a lot of high quality back links that are obtained honestly will seriously help your site’s Google rankings as well as PageRank. The Backlinks Comparison Tool lets you compare the number of back links to a list of websites. It couldn’t be easier: enter a URL on each line, then hit “Get Backlinks Count.”

The Google+Bing SERP Preview can show you how a web page will appear in the Google and Bing search results. This will help you improve your title and meta description tags. The screen shot shows a test case for lilengine.com with the fields filled in. You click “Preview” to get your results (seen in the next screen shot). Once you have your results, you can click on the “Compare” button. A new window will come up showing you how the results actually look in either Google or Bing results.

Our Official Google Blog Feeds is a site you should bookmark if you haven’t already. In one place it gives you live feeds from the following Google blogs:

• The Official Google Blog
• Google Webmaster Central Blog
• Base: Google Base Blog
• Checkout: The offical Google Checkout Blog
• Content Central Blog
• Conversion Room
• Custom Search Engine Blog
• Google Ad Manager Blog
• Google Affiliate Network Blog
• Google Analytics Blog
• Google Maps Blog
• Google Mobile Blog
• Google Online Security Blog
• Google Website Optimizer Blog
• Inside AdSense
• Inside AdWords
• Social Web Blog
• Full List Via Google Reader

The Link Report Tool analyzes the links on a given web page and generates a report. You type in a URL and click on “Generate Report.” You have the option of filtering links in a number of ways. For example, you can have it check all the links, broken links, internal, outbound, or redirected links, nofollow links (the kinds that search engines won’t follow), or unknown links, which for whatever reason can’t be analyzed. If you click on the link in the report, you’ll get a brief summary of the link, including the URL, the anchor text, the http response, and problems encountered. You can also view the link HTML from the web page. You can see in the screen shot the initial results of a report on a page from Techdirt.com.

You can use the Google Penalty Checker to test for possible penalties from Google. You enter a domain name in the box and click “Check” to get a quick check of whether a site has been penalized. If you see warnings related to keywords on your site, you might want to investigate these. They may not mean a penalty has been issued, they do indicate that your SEO could be improved. If a site is not penalized, your result will be a happy green check mark indicating Google seems to think it’s A-OK. If a site has been penalized, you’ll see a big red “X” instead.

If you want to know the keywords a domain is ranking for in Google search results, you can use the Keyword Position Checker. You simply type in a domain name and choose which version of Google to check against (Google.com, Google.ru, Google.de, or Google.fr). The results include keywords, position, result count, and URL of the page in the results.

Our Keyword Competitors tool shows you the competitors that rank for the same keywords as your domain. Type in your domain name. You’ll get a report showing you your competitors. In the results, if you click on a competitor you’ll get a side-by-side comparison of keywords both of you rank for, and what position your site ranks for a given keyword.

Hey, wanna get a sitemap for your new website? Use our Sitemap Builder. It’s easy. The tool crawls your website and makes a Google Sitemap. If you don’t have a sitemap, you should. It helps search engine crawlers like Googlebot find the pages on your site, determine their relative importance, and tell which pages have recently changed. You type in your domain, and in a matter of seconds the tool will generate a sitemap, as you can see in the screen shot. You can easily download your sitemap in several different forms.

These aren’t all the tools in our toolbox, and we’re always updating and adding tools, so check out the tools page often and use these tools to help your site make it to the top of the search results.

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The question isn’t so much can you get a decent SEO education for free, online, but will you get a decent SEO education for free, online? There’s a fascinating story in the April 2010 issue of Vanity Fair about a 32-year-old investor who learned how to trade credit default swaps as the real estate bubble inflated and got out right before it burst. How did he do it? Basically, he got his hands on all the information out there, namely the prospectuses that investment companies pump out every quarter, and actually read them. By taking the time to learn the definitions, the risks, and the market cues, he made a fortune. Though you might not make a fortune, there’s just as good a case for availing yourself to all the readily available SEO information out there. You can always sign up for paid classes later. Here’s a sampling of what’s out there.

1. searchengineland.com

Searchengineland.com makes a strong case for in-house SEO education for every sector of website production and maintenance. Effective website design is the rock bottom basic of good SEO. Your website designers should learn how good design influences SEO, your content writers should learn how good content with appropriate keyword use and anchor text influences SEO, and your IT gurus need to know how to do migration and development tasks without compromising the site’s SERP ranking. Programmers and coders should be well-versed in canonicalization and other code-related SEO issues, and marketing staff should learn the importance of good, relevant back links to your website. The philosophy is a “no colleague left behind” approach to SEO. Sharing of SEO wisdom among staff of every stripe is encouraged, as is an internal blog outfitted with SEO references and keyword lists. All staffers need to know what the bottom line results are, such as “Last month we saw an 80% increase in traffic to this page, which translated into $10,000 in revenue.”

2. SEOmoz.org

SEOmoz.org is great for stepping SEO beginners through the process of optimization with handy checklists and other articles. One very helpful article is a sort of master checklist for learning SEO. You get lots of information on the basics: how to design a search engine-friendly site, how to find good html and CSS tutorials, how to choose the best keywords (hint: it involves “Googling” your brand), and how to find good website hosting. SEOmoz highly recommends using the free tools offered by Google since, after all, they’re the top search engine, and they have tools like a rank tracker to help you make the most accurate possible assessment of where your site ranks and why. SEOmoz also points out that with SEO there is a certain amount of hurrying up and waiting, since the big engines index sites on their own timetables rather than yours. There are enough free tools and tutorials to keep an eager SEO student busy for a long time.

3. SEObook.com

A free account on SEObook.com gets you plenty of training tools and access to very valuable forums on SEO in the trenches. There are paid accounts too, that let you access even more training, but you can go along for a good while learning from the free tutorials and articles available. The screen shot shows one such page, on learning to track results so you can figure out what is going right and what is not. Some of the modules are free, and some only come with paid memberships, but you can learn an awful lot by exhausting the free tools and tutorials first. SEObook takes a “snowflake” approach to SEO, based on no two business or websites being alike. The site is limited to 1,000 members so that everyone has a chance to be heard and partake of all the information on offer.

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You have probably noticed that there will be a link on the home page of many websites that is labeled “Sitemap,” as can be seen in the lower right corner of the screen shot. The sitemap is an overview of the structural linkage of a website. While some people used to consider sitemaps as unnecessary to building a website, today having a sitemap is very important for any website. Your sitemap should be placed on your website’s home page. The home page often has the highest PageRank, so by putting the sitemap there, you’ll ensure that your pages get indexed as quickly as possible.

Search engine optimization of your site should be approached from a number of different directions. Sometimes sitemaps are an underestimated tool in your SEO toolbag, but they make things easier on both visitors and search engine robots trying to index your site. When you use your robots.txt file to tell a search engine what pages of your website to exclude when indexing it. The sitemap does the opposite. It tells the search engines where you want them to go.

Sitemaps have been around for awhile. They’ve been part of good web design for years, but now they are even more important due to the adoption of sitemaps by the web-crawling search bots. You should know that while Yahoo! still uses sitemaps in standard html format, Google sitemap uses an XML format that differs from the html sitemap that human visitors use. If you’re worried that having two sitemaps (one in html and one in XML) will be regarded as duplicate content, stop worrying. Google has stated outright that using a sitemap won’t lead to your site being penalized.

SEO is one reason to have a sitemap, and we’ll explore the reasons further in the next section. Other reasons to have a sitemap are for easier navigation within your site, emphasis of the theme of your site, and as “proof” of organization and relevance.

We’ve already talked about sitemaps as a tool in any multifaceted approach to SEO because they can be so helpful to the search engine web crawling robots. Here is how that works. Your sitemap is a page containing links to every page on your site. If a search engine robot hits this page, it will follow every link listed on the sitemap. That means that every page of your site is indexed by search engines. That’s also why a link to your sitemap should show up prominently on the front page of your website. And if your site undergoes changes, sitemaps inform the search engines that they have taken place. The result is that the changes will be indexed faster than if you don’t have a sitemap.

Navigation of your site will be much easier with a sitemap. Have you ever gone to a site and wondered how to find a page without having to poke around endlessly to find it? It’s a great relief to find a sitemap and find a link to exactly the page you were looking for. If you have a very large site, you need to make sure that your visitors can find their way around and back. It’s no fun to find yourself deep within the “shop” section and wanting to get to the “blog” section and not seeing an obvious way to get there. But knowing you can scroll down to the bottom of the page no matter where you are and finding a link to the sitemap makes things infinitely easier.

Sitemaps make it much easier to figure out a website’s theme. Suppose you were searching the web for sites about a certain politician, Mr. X. If you find a site that’s all about Mr. X, you can scroll down to the website and see links to pages within the site on “Great Accomplishments,” “Bio,” and other similar pages. That helps you if you’re a fan of Mr. X, but it also helps you if you can’t stand Mr. X, because you know right away if you want to find another site or stick with the one you are on. Your sitemap gives you the “snapshot” of your site’s theme, so that visitors don’t have to plow through page after page to figure out what your site is all about.

Visitors and search bots aren’t the only ones that sitemaps help. For example, a sitemap lets you, the webmaster have a view of your site’s makeup, and when you add new pages or sections, you can take into account the existing structure just by looking at the sitemap. That way you’ll have a well-organized site, with all the sections sorted out based on relevance.

One advantage of having a sitemap that you submit to the search engines is that you won’t have to rely so much on external links directing the search engines to your website. Sitemaps can also help in the event that you have broken internal links or “orphan” pages that can’t be reached another way. Of course you should fix these problems, but your sitemap can help out temporarily.

For new sites, or sites with lots of new or recently updated pages, using a sitemap can help a lot. Sure, you can go without a sitemap, but they are becoming more standard in terms of submitting websites to search engines. The bots, of course, will continue to index the web, and sitemaps won’t make that procedure go away, but having a sitemap is, if anything, becoming more important to getting your website seen and recognized.

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Before you hire an SEO (search engine optimization) company or consultant, or a PPC (pay-per-click) company, you should be thoroughly familiar with what they do.

Hiring an SEO company can potentially raise your site’s profile dramatically in a short time, but if they go about it in the wrong way, you risk damaging your site’s standing in the search engines and your business’s reputation. The general things that SEO companies do include:

• Technical advice on hosting, error pages, JavaScript, redirects, and other website technology
• Keyword research
• Managing online business development
• SEO training for webmasters
• Some SEO consultants have expertise in specific niches and / or geographical areas.

Perhaps the best time to hire an SEO company is when you’re launching a new site or redesigning an existing site. When you interview SEO companies that you might consider hiring, ask the following questions:

• Do you have experience in my city?
• Do you have experience in my industry?
• What do you think are the most important SEO techniques?
• How long have you been doing SEO consulting?
• Will you document all the ways you change the site and why you chose to do things that way?
• What’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Here are a few things to watch out for when selecting an SEO company.

• SEO Companies that contact you via email out of the blue. It’s spam and they’re probably all talk and no action.
• Companies that promise you a #1 Google ranking
• Companies that don’t explain clearly what they do to optimize your siteSEO companies that talk a lot about linking schemes and submitting your site to a thousand search engines. These rarely help and can hurt.

When choosing a site, make sure you understand exactly where the money is going. There are search engines out there that combine paid results with organic results and some SEOs may promise to get you highly ranked in search engines by placing you in the ad section. These companies are not helpful. Who’s to say they don’t create their own “search engine” that they can easily game or control? You care about the big search engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

Some SEO companies will create shadow domains that shunt users to a site deceptively. Suppose you complain about their service. They could easily point your domain to a different site or a competitor’s site. Another bad practice to watch out for is creation of doorway pages stuffed full of keywords on the client’s site, claiming they will make the site “more relevant.” Number one, that’s bull, and two, these doorway pages may well contain links to the SEO’s other clients, diluting the popularity of your site and possible rerouting it to illegal or “bad neighborhood” (“adult”) sites.

Run away from SEOs that own shadow domains, that don’t differentiate between organic search results and paid ads on the results pages, who operate with multiple aliases, or who get traffic from fake search engines.

A great place to start when thinking about hiring an SEO company is Google’s Webmaster Central page where you can download a free SEO starter guide (see screen shot). If you’re going to hire an SEO consultant, you should know what they’re supposed to be doing so you can protect yourself from shady practices.

Pay Per Click (PPC) companies do the following:

• Analyze your e-business model to gauge how profitable your internet venture could be
• Check on your competitors and their PPC campaigns
• Be familiar with business to business (B2B) directories and consumer product search directories
• Create a marketing strategy and spell out the plans in advance
• Give clients precise budgeting estimates for a PPC campaign
• Be well versed in the latest and greatest analysis software for your site and PPC campaign
• Audit publishers to sniff out click fraud and warn you immediately about it
• Monitor website visitor behavior, analyze and index it

When you choose a PPC company, make sure it doesn’t work for your competitors too. In fact, you should get a guarantee from them that they will not communicate with your competitors when your PPC campaign is in the planning and execution stages. If your PPC company uses unfair means like cloaking to get you a higher rank, fire them at once. They could easily get you penalized or banned by publishers. You should find out what their track record is with top search engines. If their successes come from third-tier engines, look elsewhere for a PPC company. And you should definitely demand references and check up on them.
The reason people hire PPC firms is to give an e-business instant exposure and funnel heavy web traffic to its site. One service provided by PPC advertising firms is landing page optimization. They should also use the marketing techniques that have been proven to increase search engine ranking by honest and acceptable methods. They should increase traffic and conversion rates, and analyze on-site activity as well.

Your PPC company should have a great track record running campaigns on big PPC advertisers like Yahoo and Google. the best PPC companies have a stable of professional PPC experts trained on the most effective SEO techniques so that they can run effective programs for their clients. Their SEO techniques and content should be above reproach. Some PPC companies also offer to redesign sites for SEO, and it is a matter of choice as to whether you want your SEO and PPC coming from the same source. If you do, check and double check references to make sure you’re getting an above-board company.

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Everything you read about SEO at some point comes back to the same thing: offer great content. You can put every SEO tactic to work at the same time, but if your site doesn’t have great content, it’s like putting Robert DeNiro in a Valentino cocktail dress and Christian Louboutin heels: it’s worth a look, but you’re probably not going to go back to it very often. Whether you write the content in-house or outsource it is really a matter of your staff makeup, your budget, and your preferences.

Regardless of whether you in-house or outsource your content writing, here is what you need to know about good web content.

First of all, people usually don’t “read” on the web. It’s like a glossy magazine. People scan pages looking for images or headlines that appeal to them and often skip past entire blocks of text. Good web content has number of attention-snaggers: the occasional boldface font, headings and subheadings, and plenty of white space around the content. Headings need to be simple and clear. Links must stand out by way of color or underlining, and lists, whether bulleted or numbered, should be used where appropriate. Lists shouldn’t have more than about 10 items, and in general, the shorter the list the better.

The first screen shot is part of a page from Ars Technica (arstechica.com). This is how good web content should be displayed. The title indicates that there will be a list. The graphics are clean and include a helpful screen shot. The headings break up the text into digestible chunks, and there isn’t a bunch of annoying flashy stuff trying to give you a migraine.

Keep in mind that people read screens about one-quarter slower than they do a printed page, and that screen reading is harder on the eyes. Keep the fonts at 10 or 12 point size. Internal links will let your readers jump to the parts of the page they’re interested in. If your external links open in a new window, let your reader know. Some users flip out when they click a link and suddenly windows are opening everywhere. The anchor text to your links should be descriptive. Sure, you’re going to use the occasional “click here,” but try to keep that to a minimum and use anchor text that’s descriptive.

If you’ve written a page that you expect will be printed out for reference purposes or whatever, here are a few points to bear in mind. Keep the links to a minimum for stuff to be printed, since they won’t be clicking them from their paper. If you make a “print version” of a page, indicate in your robots.txt file that the print version shouldn’t be crawled. That will ensure that you don’t get dinged for duplicate content.

On paper, serif fonts are easier to read. Who knows why, but it’s true. Your print pages should be black text, white background, and a minimum of graphics. One of the fastest ways to incur the wrath of a visitor is to give him a print page that will drain all the ink from his printer.

But back to the web pages that will be read on-screen.

Make sure each page uses its <title> tag properly. The information in these is seen in search engine listings, history listings, and favorites. They’re what other webmasters use as link text when they link to your site. The first word in the title is most important. Think about it: if your visitor has half a dozen tabs open in her browser, the titles of those tabs will get shorter and shorter until they’re just one word long. Since that one word is the first one in your title tag, make it count.

The addendum to this rule is that if you have a large site, make sure each page has a title all its own. Sure, this is a pain and it’s tedious, but your site will perform better in the search engines if you go ahead and do this.

Your content should start with the conclusion. If you write your pages so that you build up to a whammo conclusion, nobody will read it because they won’t get that far. This isn’t Walden, and you’re not Henry David Thoreau. You want to start out with the big news and then go into the details. The phrase “above the fold” is even more important to web readers than newspaper readers. They’re not likely to scroll down for something unless they’re hooked by the first or second sentence.

Writing good web content is work, and you may not have the time or inclination to do it. That’s when you consider outsourcing. You already know that your website needs to be updated regularly, and if you don’t have someone on your staff who’s gung-ho to do this (and can be the alloted the necessary work time), then you should consider hiring someone to do it.

If you hire a freelancer or go through an agency, it is important to clearly define an initial job for the writer. Try to be as specific as possible as to tone, topic, length, and how densely keywords or key phrases need to be included. Consider their first assignment a test run and see how well it meshes with your needs. You may want to keep this person on hand regularly because updating your site needs to be regular. It almost doesn’t matter how often you update – though the bigger tech blogs are updated more than once a day – but regular updating is a big plus and it builds up your site’s archive of valuable information while you’re building PageRank and ascending in the search engine rankings.

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A landing page is the page that comes up when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or on a search engine result. The landing page displays content that naturally follows that of the advertisement or the link. It is organized around a few keywords or phrases for search engine indexing purposes. In a pay per (PPC) click campaign the landing is customize to measure how effective different advertisements are so that customers can be more accurately targeted in the future.

Landing page optimization, or LPO is a part of the overall marketing process called conversion rate optimization. The goal of conversion rate optimization is to improve the percentage of visitors that become actual customers and sales leads. There are a number of ways of approaching LPO, some based on targeting, and others based on experimentation:

• Open-ended experimentation
• Closed-ended experimentation
• Consumer directed targeting
• Predictive content targeting
• Associative content targeting

Open-ended experimentation shows consumers several variations of a landing page and their behavior is then observed. With open-ended experimentation, the landing page is changed dynamically as the results of the experiment change.

Closed-ended experimentation involves the same process as open-ended experimentation, except the consumers’ behavior is monitored. When the experiment is over, an optimal landing page is chosen based on the consumers’ behavior and preferences.

Consumer directed targeting is sometimes known as social targeting. Page content is created based on publicly available information based upon ratings, referrals, reviews, and tagging.

Predictive content targeting is a type of targeting where the page content is changed based on correlating known information about the potential customer (prior purchases and demographics, as examples) in order to anticipate future actions based on predictive analytics.

Associative content targeting is also known as rule-based optimization, or passive targeting. Page content with associative content targeting is modified base upon information gleaned from the visitors search criteria, geographic location, source traffic, or ther generic factors that can be used for non-research-based segmentation of the consumer market.

LPO testing actually goes far beyond this, but it is clear that webmasters put a lot of time and effort into getting their landing page right. While the specifics of a landing page will change based on the industry and the product being offered, there are a few general tips that everyone should keep in mind when it comes to optimizing their site’s landing page.

1. Get the registration form right. First of all, know what kind of registration form works best with your particular landing page clientele. The conventional wisdom is that you lose up to one-third of your respondents for each registration field. Whether this is true or not, it is certain that seeing a lot of registration fields is a turn-off to most people, so be sure you’re actually using whatever information you plan to squeeze out of your respondents. Some webmasters think that just getting the email address is best to maximize the number of possible leads, while others think that it’s good to gather a few basic fields of data – enough to be able to separate your A leads from B leads, for example.

Put yourself in your landing page user’s shoes. What would he or she think would be sufficient information for you to have from them? Maybe their job title, company, phone number, and potential time frame of purchase would be appropriate, but go much beyond this, and people won’t bother at all. In the first screen shot you can see an example of a very simple registration. While it does appear as a “separate” page covering part of the real landing page, it is simple and it doesn’t float around, following me as I scroll down the page, so it’s pretty reasonable.

2. Don’t overdo the special effects and “wow” graphics of your landing page. Some landing pages make you feel like you’ve landed in the midst of a circus. People don’t have a lot of patience, so it’s better to keep it focused and simple. If your landing page contains a lot of text – and most do – then at least break it up with plenty of subheadings, bullet points and white space. And while you’re at it, offer numerous calls to action. Some people like to click on a call to action button at the top of the page, some will be convinced part of the way through, and others will read through to the last word before responding. Cater to all these people by sprinkling call to action buttons intermittently throughout your landing page. If you’re able, custom tag each link so you can see which ones are used the most. This will help you when it’s time to update your landing page.

3. Make it clear that the customer is in the right place. All it takes is a statement at the top welcoming new subscribers. Users take a little bit of a leap of faith when they click on an ad. It’s nice to know you’ve landed on an actual landing page rather than gone down some virus-laden internet rabbit hole. This leads naturally to the next tip.

4. Don’t do stuff that makes them think their computer has been taken over. Sure, special effects might wow gamers, but a landing page for an e-book on fly-tying doesn’t need the latest special effects. If a landing page is too whiz-bang, visitors may be frustrated close the browser and they’ll never come back.

5. Don’t make it too easy for users to escape, however. You may think it’s nice to offer visitors buttons to click for extra information, or to make your landing page fit in better with your other pages (see second screen shot). While it’s OK for your landing page to have some similarities to the rest of your site, you should keep it focused. Your landing page should stand alone, and it’s sole job should be to funnel your visitors to the call to action. The one exception to this should be to offer a link to your privacy policy, but you should put your call to action button there as well.

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Some people have the idea that the best domain name is the most generic, but that’s not always the case. In most cases, a domain name tied to your brand is better. Think about it. If you’re searching for a certain brand of organic pet food, a domain name matching that brand is going to be more intuitive to you than simply organicpetfood.com (which, as of this writing, is available). The name that you use to advertise your products is almost always the best name for your domain. People who don’t search will try this first in their browser, and if it matches, they’ll almost certainly remember it.

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If you’re looking to work your way up the search engine rankings, and who isn’t? Then one way to get some good insights into what works and what doesn’t is to see what your competitors are up to. What does that top ranking site have that your site doesn’t? It is surprisingly easy to find out these things, or some of them at least. One of the great things about the web is that finding who your competitors are is easy, as is comparing services and products. It’s a given that customers usually return to sites that are easy to browse and that have generous amounts of information, even if the visitors don’t partake of all of it.

Analyze The Top Sites in Your Niche

Once you find out what the top ranking sites in your niche are, what should you do? Well, here are several things you can do.

You can find out some very interesting facts. For example, you might discover that a lot of the inbound links come from websites that the competitor owns. This isn’t always easy to find out, but it’s very informative if you can. The “whois” information may not give you much to go on, but if you do discover that this is the case, you may realize that owning some legitimate websites on the side can help attract more traffic to your site.

You might discover when browsing through your competitor’s site that even though the information on your site is similar, their site has a very different structure – a better optimized structure. It could make a big difference in their search engine ranking. You might discover that your competitor is using a bunch of keywords and key phrases that you never even thought of.

Start off simply enough. Get a pad of paper and a pen and make notes as you thoroughly do your own “crawl” of your competitor’s site. Look over the pages as they appear first, then go back and look at the source html. On most browsers you get this by pressing ctrl+U. If not, this command can often be found in the “Tools” menu of your browser. Don’t worry. You don’t have to be an html genius to learn from it.

Look at their title tag. Is it well written? Does it reflect a common syntax used throughout the site? On the home page, look for the H1, H2, and H3 tags. If you find them, your competitor uses heading tags within the page. Try to identify the actual text used in the headings. You will more than likely find some paydirt key phrases within these tags.

Look for nofollow tags. These are used to spread PageRank throughout the site. Doing this is what’s known as having a themed structure, and it can be very beneficial to your ranking. If you find this pattern, they either know their SEO or they’ve hired someone who does.

How do they do their navigation? Is it in a drop-down menu? Is it search engine friendly? In the footer is there a text menu?

Look at the anchor text: is there a pattern of keywords there? If certain words appear there often, they are almost certainly target phrases.

Check the Google PageRank of the pages you visit. If a page has a notably high PR, pay closer attention to that page. These are often pages that have the information that visitors choose to link to. It could give you some clues for adding similar content to your website.

Backlinks and PR

Here’s another cool thing you can do with your competitor’s website: back link analysis. SEO Book offers a free back link analyzer that you can download here. You enter simple information as you can see in the screen shot. When you run the program, set it up to acquire Google Rank and Alexa Rank for each back link. This is a matter of checking two boxes. The back link analyzer automatically filters out “rel=nofollow” links.

When you’re done, you can sort your results by PageRank and Alexa Rank. The reason for looking at both Alexa and PageRank is that each has its advantages and disadvantages. PageRank may be quirky due to whatever they’re penalizing recently, so you could miss out on a quality site because of its low PR. Alexa Rank is a measure of popularity, but doesn’t say anything about how Google views its quality. So use both as a system of checks and balances.

If you really want to delve into things, put your report data from the Back link analyzer into a spreadsheet. Make a copy where you sort the data by Google PR from highest to lowest. Then get rid of the ones that rank less than 4. Have another copy where you sort by Alexa Ranking from lowest to highest, and then do another sort by Google PR from highest to lowest. Get rid of the ones that have a negative Alexa Ranking. Congratulations: you now have lists of authority pages that link to your competitor.

So now that you have that data, what do you do with it? If you filter the links by domain, you can see how many links per domain the competitor is getting. If one website is repeated a lot, then you can bet that the competitor owns the website (or has bought a link from them). You can try running a “whois” on the domain, but you may not get a satisfactory answer.

Here’s another thing: if you see that a lot of the links are from the competitor’s own website, then chances are they have good content. If so, take note. You may need to focus on increasing your content or the quality of it.

Next you should figure out which of those links you’d like to get yourself. You can probably get several just by asking. It certainly can’t hurt (unless you accidentally ask for back links from sites that happen to be owned by the competitor, and even then, you might get a link).

In the midst of all this competitor sleuthing, don’t forget about your site. You’re doing this to learn, so be ready to apply some of what you find out to your own site, and hopefully you’ll get a boost in the rankings as well.

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OK, let’s be honest right off the bat: most press releases received by most media organizations go right into the recycling bin. But that doesn’t mean yours will. For one thing, the good press releases have a few things in common, and for another, “media” now includes bloggers, ezines, streaming content producers, and freelancers. Whoever you plan to send press releases to, do some research on them first and make sure that your press releases would be a good fit for their organization. It’s the 21st century version of the old “don’t send a dog article to a cat magazine” rule.

The press release is by no means dead, and is in fact very useful in many situations. Your press releases should be sent to news media for the purpose of letting the world know about company developments and newsworthy items. Concentrate on the word “newsworthy.” The number one reason journalists toss press releases is because they so often consist of self promotion dressed up to appear newsworthy.

So really, the first thing you should ask yourself when you’re thinking about sending a press release is “Should I be sending a press release? Or is this just an exercise in vanity or wishful thinking?” Use the “so what” test, because this is what journalists and publishers do. If your press release says, “XYZ Widgetry, Inc. recently hired Dr. Joan Thingity to be head of their engineering development department,” the first thing the journalist is going to think is, you guessed it, “So what?”

Ah, but if your next sentence tells about how she won a MacArthur genius grant for her work on desktop plasma widgetry (or whatever) and that she was at one time part of NASA’s astronaut corps, then you’ve got an answer for the “So what” question. If your press release cannot answer the “So what” question, then don’t send it. Wait until you have something meaty.

While a successful press release ought to be newsworthy, you may have to make the tie-in to the news yourself. Journalists are busy enough that they’re not going to automatically realize that the release of your new phone app coincides with the latest iPhone release. You’ll have to spell it out.

Press Release Tips

Here are some ways to make sure that your press release is newsworthy and therefore less likely to be chucked in the recycle bin.

• Explain its place in a current controversy, whether it’s net neutrality or censorship of search engine results in some foreign country.
• Make a skilled prediction: “By 2015, six million homes will have subscribed to our service, based on current trends.”
• Tie it in with an upcoming holiday: “Our widget is designed to cut the average holiday shopping time by 45%.”
• Adapt a national survey for local use: “Thirty million of those people ditching their landlines are expected to buy a smart phone within the next five years. Widgetry International releases an average of 12 smart phone apps per month across all platforms.”

You get the idea.

Some other possibilities for making your press release more appealing include:

• Including results of a survey or a poll in your press release.
• Hold a competition or a contest and announce it in your press release.
• Announce changes in prices (the downward kind, anyway).
• Write about a prestigious award one of your workers has won.
• Stage a debate or other special event and announce it
• Studies and surveys, which “create” news for you
• Lists that tie to your business: “Top Seven Smart Phone Apps in the Tri-County Area”
• “Hero” stories, such as the maintenance guy who rescued the litter of kittens living under the physical plant
• Relevant trends with pertinent facts and figures

In brief, your press release should include the following:

• A headline that is a very compact version of the key point of the press release
• An opening sentence that can grab the attention of even the most jaded editor
• An opening paragraph that covers the who, what, where, when, why, and how.
• A second paragraph that expands on the topic of the press release
• A third paragraph that includes relevant quotes from a spokesperson or other big wig at your company
• A fourth paragraph that tells a little more about what your company does
• A final paragraph that sums things up tidily, perhaps with a summary quote
• Contact information
• The universal “Here ends the press release” symbol of ### under the last line of the release

You may wonder why you should bother at all with press releases, since they have such a high chance of disappearing into the gaping maw that is the editor’s office, never to be seen again. But it’s all a part of your overall marketing strategy. SEO has a place, plain old advertising has a place, and media relations has a place too. Once you do get a press release or two picked up, consider contacting the editor or reporters you have traction with and offer to send them exclusives. If they know that they’re the only game in town getting your press releases, they may just take you up on it. But none of this can happen without first mastering the press release. You’ll get nowhere unless you have correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation, plus the compelling writing necessary to stand out from the rest of the herd.

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