SEO Ranking Isn’t Everything – What About Customer Conversion

• The Following Article examines the art of Converting website traffic into Customers.

It includes:

1. Tips on how to increase customer conversions for your business
2. Tips on how to optimize individual landing pages accordingly
3. Different methods of landing page construction
4. How to monitor different landing page strategies

There’s a lot to be said for your SEO ranking and how important it is to learn SEO. We all know that it’s important to have a good organic ranking for your website. But what people tend to forget is that it’s not just all about diverting traffic, it’s about customer conversion and retention.

Just because your website is increasing in popularity,  doesn’t mean that you are converting visitors into customers. Your effective use of different  “landing pages” is what’s going to do this for you!

Each landing page you create should be keyword – specific. Meaning that when somebody types a search query into Google, you want them not only to be directed to your site but you want them “to land” on an appropriate page that you have set up in order to convert them into a customer!

A successful landing page functions as a funnel-point for users. It’s a step towards persuading a user to become a client or customer. Often, without the proper attention, a landing page is marginalized: with the feeling that the strength of the overall marketing campaign is all that is needed to attract customers. A poor landing page could derail the best-planned marketing or advertising campaign.

Different examples of “Landing Page” uses:

• Local business queries – a good strategy for local business searches could be to use a page containing customer testimonials and other trust indicators.
• When people are searching for very ambiguous or broad themes, the consumer may often not have enough information to enter the buying cycle yet.
• For specific product queries – users should be sent to a sales or limited option page with very closely related products
• For branded searches users could be sent to a “what’s new” page instead of directly to the home page.

How do you Create Successful Landing Pages? – 6  Simple Steps

1. Page Layout & Navigation:

Simplicity: Flash and expensive designs are very often the culprit to a low converting landing page. Simplify the design utilizing static images and easy to understand language.

Some direct response practitioners like an exciting – if not circus-like – atmosphere in a landing page. Perhaps for some consumer categories it works well, but in most cases you need to keep it simple and direct. Use short paragraphs and bullet points. Offer crisp value propositions to readers that pay off the question in their minds, which is: “Why should I take the action you want me to take?”

There are two differing chains of thought on landing page navigation – give users a choice, or keep them prisoner (don’t give them the option to navigate to the website). Your navigation menu should be limited or nonexistent on a landing page depending on what you want from the person visiting your site.

If you’re trying to sell something or get someone’s details you don’t want to be giving people too many opt out options! This is why it’s a good idea to make your landing pages separate from you main website. They should only be found by searching the web and not via the navigation bar on your homepage.

If you’re a broad informational site and you want them to get a glimpse of what you offer then you should just divert them to your homepage. But still deliver some of the appropriate “call to action” methods that you would otherwise use for a specific landing page.

2. Calls to Action: Don’t underestimate the power of your calls to action. Test with colors, placement, size, and text on the calls to action throughout the page. Offer Multiple Calls to Action.Some people click on the first link they see on a landing page. Others read for long stretchesbefore they take action. Have links at the top, bottom and in between. Make it easy for visitors to take action whenever they’re ready.

Sometimes the use of words like; “Buy now” or “click here” will provide minimal click through rates. I prefer using softer call to action phrases like; “Try It” or “Connect with us”. You want to portray a certain degree of trust in your “call to action” strategy.

3.Use viral & social media to increase interaction. These are a great ways to increase traffic to landing pages. You can access your core target audience by setting up business or fan pages on Facebook or LinkedIn and diverting them to specific landing pages based on their interests. Set up Facebook connect on your individual landing pages so people’s friends on Facebook will be notified of new traffic on your website. You cannot underestimate the power of social media for creating hype about your business.

4.Relevant Content:

There is nothing worse than clicking on a search listing for a product or service you really need, only to be navigated to a page that doesn’t carry a relevant message for what you are looking for. Make certain to maintain the scent through a continuous and consistent message from ad, to landing page, to checkout.

If someone searches for red mountain bikes in Google you don’t want them coming onto your main products bike page or your homepage. You want them arriving on your site on the mountain bike page.However if it s broad search of a key word like bicycles then you would want to optimize your homepage for that.

The same applies for Google AdWords campaigns where  people might put their homepage as the landing page for different
sponsored ad listings.

This will eat into your budget and will give you very little ROI for these “pay per click” campaigns.You need to deliver what your advertisement promises. You don’t want people to “crash land” on pages that do not have a clear message!

5. Split Testing.

Set up a PPC campaign strategy. You need to benchmark different PPC ads against different styles of landing pages and see which ones convert more traffic into customers.You need to make sure each landing page is optimized correctly for each PPC ad. Different key words have different popularity and costs per click, so you will need to chose your keywords carefully to make sure you get a decent ROI.

Experiment with Your Registration Forms: Common wisdom is that you lose 30% of your respondents for each registration field. There are different schools of thought on what to do here:

1. Just get an email address so you can start as many new relationships as possible and get more registration info down the road.
2. Get a few fields of data so you can more easily qualify your A leads from your B leads and C leads, etc.

A good rule of thumb I find is to ask for only the data the user thinks you’ll need to go about your business. So a phone number, title, company, and maybe time frame of purchase seems reasonable. But income level is not.

• Keep forms short- remove any unnecessary fields
• Keep forms above the fold – not many people will have the patience to scroll down the page. They want instant satisfaction!

Experiment with different “call to action” buttons or images, seeing which people seem to be clicking on more. Use bright colours to make certain “call to action” buttons stand out. These should be focused on the key words the user typed into Goolge to find your page in the first place.

Revisit Your Encore Page: Probably the most astonishing thing to me in online marketing is how many sites do nothing with the resolution page, or what is sometimes called the “encore” page. That’s the page you get after someone has submitted their information for that PDF download or made a purchase or subscribed to a newsletter.You want to try divert them to your main site or other area of interest after you have converted them or made a sale on a product. You don’t want to just leave them stranded now that your work is done!You want to show off all the other aspects of your website.That way, the  longer the customer spends on your site, the more Dependant they will become on it!

Test Multiple Landing Pages:

• Try different subject headers, if you’re using solo email messages to drive traffic there.
• Optimize different landing pages for different search terms related to your business.
• Experiment with how many fields you ask for in your request form.

6.Analysis

Online marketing & Advertising is traceable. Conversion rate is the most important metric. Use Google Analytics to benchmark your landing page conversion rate vs. other campaigns.

• Monitor your cost per conversion for PPC campaigns; this will let you know if you are getting your desired ROI for different landing page strategies.
• Monitor Bounce Rate – about 30% bounce rate is really good, up to 50%  is good, over 70% bounce rate means that something is wrong with the page.
• Follow Eye-Tracking: Look at someone who’s looking at your landing page for the first time. Follow their eyes. Do they follow the usual “Z” path down a page? Are your visual cues helping them advance down the funnel?
• Crazy egg provides use of great heat maps to monitor peoples eye tracking based on their mouse activity on your webpage. Try to custom tag each link so you know which ones are the most used.

There’s an insight as to why it’s so important to have different landing pages optimized for different search queries. We can get obsessed with our positioning in Google but can easily forget the importance of implementing different landing page strategies.

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Strategic Internet Marketing Plan – Asking the Right Questions! Part 1

What makes an internet marketing strategy strategic? What are the key elements that will set your business apart from your online competitors?

This post is for anyone with responsibility for their company’s marketing strategy and for evolving their company’s marketing tactics from traditional strategies to implementing a strategic internet marketing plan.

As the person responsible for marketing your company’s business, are you sticking to what has always worked? Are you starting to dabble with online marketing, maybe Google Adwords, maybe some Social Media forays.  Perhaps your hand is being forced or you’ve already run an unsuccessful internet marketing campaign.  

Probably one of the biggest indications that your internet marketing plan is not strategic is if your company is implementing your online and off-line marketing campaigns separately. This may manifest itself by different departments being responsible for key elements of your online strategy, or the online marketing part of the marketing plan being given lip service.

Does the marketing manager/executive feel comfortable with their new responsibilities? Have they developed/owned an internet marketing plan before? Have they successfully implemented a cross department/cross organisational strategic plan? Does something like this even exist in your company, i.e. do different departments traditionally work well on collaboration projects?

You may have the IT department responsible for the hosting and architecture of the website, the marketing department responsible for content, the sales department looking after the leads generated from your website – do they all work together towards a common goal?

Strategic Internet Marketing Mix

This series of articles looks at how you can align all elements of your marketing activities, both off-line and online so that they are all focused on delivering one message and delivering real results for your company.

I have broken down the marketing landscape into four areas. For some businesses online advertising may be more important than for others and others still will find that off-line promotion is still their primary engagement marketing medium.

When you come to evaluate your current marketing position it’s important to at least look at all four segments and cross reference with your target market. If your company’s research indicates that social media is not going to drive engagement then maybe your activities in that space will be limited – at least for the moment.

Thinking About Your Strategic Internet Marketing Plan

When evaluating each of the four quadrants I suggest you use a structured approach to  your thinking. You want to ensure that any bias, personal or cultural within your organisation does not unduly influence the results of your strategic analysis.

I suggest you use something along the lines of Edward de Bono’s Five Stages of Thinking. I use some of his techniques below to summarise one approach to developing your strategic internet marketing plan, but I highly recommend you get his book, Teach Yourself to Think and read it for yourself.

TO: Where do we want to go to? Your answer, in our context, may be to say, ‘We want to develop a strategic internet marketing plan so that 40% of our revenues are being generated from online activities.

This is quite a large definition so let’s break it down in the context of the strategic marketing mix in the image above.

We want to set goals that are driven by metrics and are measurable against the overall purpose. The purpose is very important element of your overall thinking. As k yourself the question, “Why does our company want to move our marketing strategy more online?”

Are your customers more likely to be buying online? Has your product range evolved so that it can now be bought online? Are you doing it because all your competitors are moving online? Are your traditional marketing efforts proving too expensive?

Some metrics you may be considering might include the following..

• We want to reduce our off-line marketing costs by 20% (e.g. marketing spend on newspapers and magazines ads, radio, TV)
• We currently generate 20% of our revenues from online activities, we want to double this to 40%
• We want to reduce our overall marketing budget from 100,000 pa to 60,000 pa.
• We want to reduce our traditional marketing head count by 2
• We want to develop an in house competence in online marketing
• We want to build our online unique visitor traffic from 500 unique visitors per month to 5000 per month
• We want to ensure that all departments are aware of and aligned to the achievement of our online marketing goals. Each departments KPI’s will be measured against their contribution to these goals.

Warning!

Don’t be tempted to just say, er we want more traffic, or we want more authority in our website. Woolly goals lead to failure.

LO: This stage is about gathering information, as much information as you can, from whatever sources you can that will make your task of making a decision at the next stage easier.

The classic way of obtaining information is to ask questions and there are two types of questions that you should be thinking about asking;

1. Fishing Questions are opened ended and explore areas where we’re not sure what answer we’ll get back.In the context of our Strategic Internet Marketing Plan you’ll need to be asking yourself the following type of questions:-How do we start building in house competence-
   What is the best online ‘channel to market’ that we should be using to  to promote our product/services? E.g. Social Media, Organic listings, Pay Per Click…etc
2. Shooting Questions will illicit a quantitative answer…

- How much money is being spent by our target market online?

- How much will it cost us to target our selected keywords using Google Adwords?

- What areas need to be cut to to reach our target of a €20,000 savings pa ?

- What areas of Organic Search do we need a strategy for? This last question may be helped by exploring the diagram below:

The additional types of shooting questions you need to ask of your internet marketing plan are:

1. What is our strategy to get listed in the organic website listings?

Data Feeds Google SERPs

2. Are we listed in Google Local Search?

3. Do we optimise our images and with what keywords? Does each of our images have a unique name that contains a keyword, or is it named something like 1245homepage.jpg?

4. Do we have a Twitter account? Who’s responsible for it? Do we have a set of guidelines for it’s use? What content can we promote?

5. What social media accounts does our company have? What type of content is published on these accounts? Do we manage these account in house or have we outsourced to an agency? Are marketing and sales coming their activities on these channels to market?

6. Do we have a policy for online press releases? Who writes them?

7. What websites do we syndicate our content to? Do we have a content syndication strategy? Do we have a content development strategy?

8. Have we ever developed a video to promote our products/services? Do we have a YouTube channel? Should we have one?

Strategic Internet Marketing Plan – Overview

Your goal after going through the TO and LO stages is to be in a position where you can answer the following questions;

• We know what goals we are working towards i.e. we have defined and developed our company’s Strategic Internet Marketing Plan
• We have looked at many sources of information that will help us to define the possible solutions and approaches to achieve our stated goals.

What we have now is that foundation for your Strategic Internet Marketing Plan;

Strategic Internet Marketing Plan Process

Part II of this post will look at answering the questions:

1. What are the possible solutions and approaches when it comes to implementing your plan?
2. How to choose the right possibilities for your company
3. What’s needed to start implementing your strategy?

What about your company?

Does  your company have a strategic internet plan?

Was there a lot of thought put into developing the strategy, or is it a haphazard approach with no one really taking responsibility of either setting or attaining key online revenue goals for your company?

Posted in Organic Search, Search Engine, internet marketing | 5 Comments »

Free SEO Tips To Enable You Generate More Business From Your Website.

There are so many resources for free seo tips on the internet – if you have done any research at all you will know that the quality of these varies widely.

So how can you go about finding worthwhile information that will work for your business and deliver meaningful results within a realistic timeframe?

Having done loads of research with Google, I have come to the conclusion that what you need is a roadmap containing the most important actions that will yield results matching your business profile.

The profile should categorise your business based on your available budget, and what your goals are.

The Business Profiling Process:

You will need to answer the following profiling questions about your business:

• What are the business goals for your website?
  • To provide basic sales information and directing visitors to your offline store or office
  • To support customers
  • To attract and engage with new prospects
  • To sell products or services
• What best describes your websites?
  • A brochure site with your company contact details
  • A knowledge or learning resource for your target market
  • An e-commerce website
• What geographic market are you targeting?
• Have you defined what you mean by a sales lead?
• What budget do you have for generating sales leads and driving relevant traffic to your site?
• Do you know the keywords that will work best for you?
• How many qualified sales leads come from visitors to your website each month? (Typically these will be online enquiries or phone calls)
• How much competition exists for your chosen keywords?
• What volume of searching is done in your geographic area for your chosen keywords?
• How well is your website optimised for these keywords?

Depending on the answers you give you should be in a position to classify your business into one of the following categories:

1. Low Potential for Online Business Generation:
   1. Typically such a basic website will have little or no marketing budget but may have an aspiration to attract prospective new customers.
   2. It will have lots of competition with low barriers to entry for competitors or in a highly competitive mature online market.
2. Medium Potential for Online Business Generation:
   1. This category describes a business that has a limited marketing budget but has the potential to attract prospective new customers for one of the following reasons:
      1. In a local area, with a retail presence. For example this could be a retail business in a sector that historically has had lots of competitors who advertise in the Yellow Pages or other local classified or trade publications
      2. Lots of searches made in your geographic market for relevant keywords
      3. A unique selling proposition with medium competition and a reasonable volume of search traffic for relevant keywords

1. High Potential for Online Business Generation:
   1. This category describes typically describes a company with a reasonable marketing budget that fits one or more of the following profile characteristics:
      1. Major business volume potential (High traffic with medium competition for selected keywords) with medium competition and a short sales cycle
      2. Medium business volume potential (Medium traffic with medium keyword competition) involving a longer sales cycle
      3. And requiring face-to-face engagement with prospects
      4. Or needing to build your reputation and trust with your prospects before they are likely to buy online.

So What Next?

The next step is to focus sharply on the activities most likely to deliver quick wins and give you a high return on investment.

These activities will form an activity plan or roadmap that will vary depending on the business profile that you best fit.

Roadmap for a Low Potential Business:

In this case for a minimum expenditure you could take the following actions:

• Identify a set of 10 keywords
• Carry out a website audit for these keywords.
• If you wish to invest the time, learn how to do seo – just the basic online seo techniques will do to start.
• Start fixing the top 10 seo issues that stop you being visible online
• Or ask your web designer or webmaster if they are interested in learning how to do this work.
• Download and read this free seo book if you plan a DIY approach to seo.

“A Website Owners Guide to Generating More Business on the Internet”

• Otherwise select a proven seo service provider. Here are some tips on how to avoid having a bad experience and advice on what questions to ask.

Roadmap for a Medium Potential Business:

In this case for a medium investment outlay you could take the following actions:

• Do the keyword research and website audit as above.
• Implement an onsite campaign to make changes to the website to optimise for the chosen keywords.
• You are in a business where people will be searching locally for your product or services you should implement a campaign to ensure your company appears on a local search map with Google’s local business centre to quickly outrank your local competition. Typical businesses that this could deliver quick wins for are:
  • Retail Shops and consumer products and services (Florists, restaurants, fast food outlets, electrical goods, hotels and guest houses)
  • Trades people (plumbers, builders, electricians)
  • Professionals (architects, accountants, solicitors, dentists, doctors)
• Depending on the budget you could also consider investing in some of the following activities:
  • Publish a blog. Read this to find out why you need one and also if you are seriously considering a blog, learn how to avoid failure.
  • Engage in social media marketing:
    • Get active on Linked in if you are a B2B company
    • Consider setting up a Twitter account and a Facebook page if you can regularly publish deals and special offers

Roadmap for a High Potential Business:

First Implement the relevant steps as for a Medium Potential business and then look at implementing the following activities

• A blog is a must if you plan to engage in social media marketing

Why a Blog?

Simple because it is by far the best way to engage people on social networks. Read this post to learn about how online buying behaviour is changing the sales cycle and how to implement an online sales lead generation campaign.

• Next you need to implement a social media marketing program.
• Learn how to build backlinks through social media.

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Learn Internet Marketing-Does Google Steal The Buzz For Business?

Will Google Buzz Help Increase Online Brand Awareness and Can it be used as an SEO Tool for Businesses?

Recently we have seen developments from Microsoft to integrate social networking platforms and email applications to support corporate branding and customer sales campaigns. Is “Buzz” a first competitive response step from Google? And how relevant will Google Buzz be for the enterprise sector?

This article gives a view on:

-    An Insight into Google Buzz and where it’s going

-    Where Microsoft seems to be heading with Social Media

-    Google and Microsoft’s initiatives to integrate social networking sites and applications

-    How Google Buzz may become important for local search.

If you plan to learn more about internet marketing – read more to find if Google Buzz has any relevance for your business?

What is “Google Buzz”?

Buzz is a distributed social networking service integrated with Gmail that lets users post publicly via their Google profiles or privately via their Gmail contacts.

Buzz includes updates on what you and your followers do on related Google sites, such as the photo-sharing site Picasa or on Google Reader. It also can include updates from Yahoo’s Flickr photo service and from Twitter, if a user decides to turn on those services.

Buzz makes sharing photos, videos and links very simple, with no need for URL shorteners.

Users automatically begin by following the people they have e-mailed in the past. And in an attempt to cut through the noise, Buzz only puts Buzz posts into one’s inbox if the algorithms find them interesting.

Will Google Buzz Have Relevance In The Business World?

While Google hopes its new Buzz social networking tool can be applied in the corporate world, I have mixed views over whether it can offer features that enterprise users need. Will Buzz help Business’s develop and learn new Internet Marketing strategies?

Google will attempt to inject Buzz into the heart of the enterprise networking world over the next year or two. Their very well thought out strategy of penetrating the corporate environment started to become apparent with the launch of Google apps going after the MS Office suite, Gmail going after Outlook (and all other still-breathing email apps), Chrome browser going after IE and Chrome OS going after Windows

It has been announced that Google will shortly be launching the business side of Google Buzz in the coming months, I for one, cannot wait to see how it will compete against the likes of Microsoft Outlook Social Connector and other Social Networking sites that have business functionality about them.

What About Microsoft Social Connector for managing Internet Marketing Strategies?

Last November, Microsoft announced the beta of the Outlook Social Connector (OSC), a tool that blends social networking updates into the business functionality of the software.

Recently Microsoft has announced an updated beta of the OSC along with the immediate availability of the public beta of LinkedIn for Outlook. They have also announced partnerships with both Facebook and MySpace. Buzz doesn’t yet integrate with any of these three social networking Giants. It integrates only with Twitter, Flikr, Picasa and Google reader.

If you want to Create Brand Awareness and increase traffic to your website it is vital now to setup a social networking presence for your organization. To ignore this would be catastrophic for any business. However it is vital to be able to harness and control all the interest and traffic that results from your presence on these social networking sites.

Logging in to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other social networks one by one and trying to stay up to date with all of them is both inefficient and time consuming for businesses.

If you can harness all these networks into one organisational hub it will be far easier to manage Brand awareness campaigns across different Social Media Sites. From what I can see, Microsoft’s Outlook Connector seems to provide this service!

With Outlook’s Social Connectors managing your Social Networking Campaigns is made easier. The People Pane at the bottom of the Outlook Reading Pane provides users with an intelligent and effective way to access all relevant social media  information about a given contact, including e-mail, calendar events, file attachments, as well as RSS feeds and social network status updates.

See Outlook Social Connector in Action with LinkedIn!

Why Does Social Connector Look More Promising for Business?

Several analysts noted that Gmail isn’t the primary e-mail service used by most businesses, and that likely means that corporate IT departments won’t be widely installing Google Buzz. I use Outlook as my e-mail platform, so in order to use Buzz I have to open yet another window alongside Facebook and Twitter.

Gmail is used in business, but my feel is that it is typically a second or third e-mail account for most business people in midsize and large corporations. I don’t believe that Gmail’s penetration into the corporate world is large enough to give them a decent sized market to create a Buzz Enterprise.

From what I can see, Buzz turns your e-mail platform into a new social networking tool, while Outlook 2010 social connectors provide a means of efficiently managing your existing social networks. Which would you use for business?

The Google approach with Buzz can be overwhelming-inundating your inbox with a steady stream of comments and status updates. If you are not careful about managing the privacy of your comments and threads, you also risk exposing information to parties that you weren’t even aware of.

Google Buzz is limited, at least for now, to tying Google contacts and a single Twitter account into the Buzz network. Outlook 2010 Social Connectors promises to be a more open platform. Microsoft has created a software development kit enabling programmers to create add-ins for Outlook to tie in any other network. Not just ones on the Goolge Network.

The contact-centric approach taken by Microsoft enables you to quickly and easily view all content associated with a given user–including their recent Twitter tweets, Facebook status updates, or other social networking interactions–without overwhelming the Outlook inbox or dumping an avalanche of irrelevant communications on you.

We’re still a few months away from the official launch of Office 2010, and LinkedIn is the only Social Connector available at this time. However in my opinion, Microsoft’s approach seems much more efficient and more promising for business professionals, especially for business users that already rely on Microsoft Outlook for e-mail, or who are interested in integrating social networks beyond Twitter.

Facebook – A Key Traffic Driver for Online Business.

Facebook is now the top source of traffic for major news-entertainment portals such as Yahoo and MSN, according to traffic analysis firm Compete, and is “among the leaders” for other sites as well.

Compete’s director of online media and search told the San Francisco Chronicle that a snapshot of web traffic from December 2009 showed 13 percent of the traffic to major web portals like Yahoo, MSN and AOL came from Facebook. Traffic from Google generated just 7 percent.

Facebook has a substantial business presence on it. More than 1.5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook . By incorporating the use of  Facebook Ads and useful tools like Facebook Connect business owners have been able to drive more traffic to their sites. More than 60 million Facebook users engage with Facebook Connect on external websites every month.

Business’s can target Niches accurately with Facebook Ad campaigns. If Facebook is now driving more traffic on the web then why should business not be focusing more on Facebook Ad campaigns which are exposed to its target audience in less volume when compared to a flood of sponsored Ad listings in search results pages.

Due to the high Authority of Facebook in search rankings, Business pages and Profiles are indexed for optimal search engine positioning, Allowing for an increased presence in Organic search listings without the use of AdWords.

LinkedIn for Outlook brings together the most popular professional network with the world’s leading professional Inbox. Linked In has over 55 million users now and It will take a lot for the Business version of Buzz to draw away a significant proportion of these users. It would prove very difficult to over shadow the reputable and professional image of this professional social networking site and match its business networking functionality.

From a Local SEO Perspective Buzz is Way Ahead of the Game.

It’s important for business’s to learn the benefits of local SEO and to understand how Google Buzz in the very near future will provide far more Local SEO benefits than Facebook or Twitter will.
When you search for businesses in Google Maps and you go to their mobile place page there is now a button that says “Buzz about this place”. You can Buzz about a business you like, you don’t like, etc.

This is an area where Google is leagues a head of Facebook or Twitter as people who are using Google Maps to search for local businesses will be able to see what other people are saying about this business, much like a review. Far more effective then becoming a “fan” of a business page I would think. The more Buzz’s, the more visibility for your Business!

While Google Buzz’s development is still very young, and its Business platform has still to be released it is evident that it has much to compete with! However it will be exciting to see how it will compete in the corporate world against Outlook’s Social Connector and with other social/ business networking Giants such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

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Posted in Social Media Marketing, internet marketing | 5 Comments »

Sales Lead Generation Can New Online Marketing Systems Deliver a Better ROI?

Cold Calling and Direct Mail are Dead:

If you have been using lists, direct mail or cold calling to for sales lead generation as part of your online sales camapigns, you will understand how difficult it is to get a decent return on investment by using these methods to generate new business.

The Yellow Pages vs Search Engines?

We had a recent Linkedin Discussion on local search titled:

“How Big a Threat is Google’s Local Search to the Yellow Pages?

Here were some of the comments we received:

“It seems that around here,Google, local and not-so-local, has replaced Yellow Pages unless one’s target market is senior citizens.”

“I’m just glad that I don’t won or have any stock in YP.”

“I was recently told by a former SVP of YellowPages.com & SuperPages.com that both company goals this year is to come in at a 45% loss! How would you like to have that as your company goal?”

“For most local businesses it’s relatively easy to get on Page 1 and even Number 1. That usually knocks out one of the directory places.”

“Yellow pages online still has an edge due to multiple listings and wide acceptance but of course yellow page advertising print or online is not cheap !

The thing that will tip in favour of Google local search will be the increasing number of people doing mobile searches for businesses.”

“Google’s Local Search is a large threat to the print yellowpages. The ability to access the web virtually anywhere/anytime makes the print publication obsolete. Not to mention that the books are only published once a year and businesses move, go out of business and so on during that time.”

Clearly Online search is fast becoming the predominant way to find local suppliers.

To gain advantage from this trend we need to understand how people are searching and what factors influence their actions in selecting potential suppliers over the internet.

Recognise How Online Buying Research Is Done Today:

The way people search on the internet usually follows the following pattern:

• Initially they browse to learn broadly about a typical subject or get answers to a question. If they are intending to buy something they wait until they have built up knowledge on:
  • Feature or benefit Comparisons
  • Price comparisons
  • Possible suppliers to buy from (online and offline). If offline 70% will be within 15 mile radius of their home or office location

• Fill out an online quotation request form or call (a telephone call or a visit). The majority of buyers prefer to fill out an online form rather than calling. There are a few reasons for this:
  • Businesses are not open 24 hours – the web is.
  • People often prefer to avoid talking to a sales person until they have the information they need to make an informed decision.
• Select a short list of 1 to 3 possible suppliers based on the trust and confidence built up from impressions gained from the website and experience with any other contact made.

Traditionally SME Websites Have Delivered Little New Business

Traditionally small businesses have set up a website for reasons such as:

• To have an online brochure or business card
• To keep up with industry competitors
• Because customers expect it
• To be credible with new business prospects
• To generate new business sales

In 2010 – more and more website owners  want to generating new business enquiries.

As the internet matures and generating new business online becomes the norm. business owners are beginning to ask questions such as:

• How can I find new business through my website?
• How can prospective customers find my website?
• How serious are they as potential buyers?
• How can I stand out from my competitors?

In response to this trend in online marketing, one question that I keep asking myself is:

“Should business owners continue with  traditional promotional methods or is there a better way to generate sales leads online at a better ROI for the business?”

I am not knocking the use of traditional methods online – many of these make lots of sense and should be employed. Techniques such as:

Online Advertising

This can include pay per click advertising and link purchasing from sites that attract traffic in your specific market niche. This can generate significant traffic and the ROI is easily and instantly measurable. As the internet matures the costs of advertising can become prohibitively expensive for many small businesses.

Online Demos:

The use of interactive demos or videos clearly make a lot of sense and should be employed as appropriate.

PR and Article Promotion

Again these can be used successfully in many cases but you should not expect a lot of traffic. However a benefit of placing articles in highly sites with a high authority can be of substantial benefit to your organic search optimisation efforts.

Organic SEO:

This take time and patience but in the long term can deliver better ROI that paid advertising.

The following benchmark by marketing Sherpa indicates that the quality of sales leads from organic search is over twice as good as from paid search ads.

Clearly any new lead generation system should compliment rather than replace the traditional methods summarised above.

Key Factors For Improving The ROI  of Online Lead Campaigns:

A recent commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Silverpop identifies the following 4 Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that contribute most to improving the ROI of a lead generation investment program.

These were identified as:

1. Profiling and targeting – To learn who your best potential customers are and how to attract them to your website. This involves identifying keywords to drive your lead generation process
2. Lead scoring – To model how lead quality (measured in the form of a score) changes in response to specific events or triggers
3. Content – To determine what buyers needed at different stages of the decision-making cycle
4. Nurture early-stage buyers – To engage potential buyers successfully

I believe that the above 4 principles should form the foundation of any online lead generation system that aims to generate a better ROI than traditional methods alone.

I would add a 5^th and additional KPI for any small business owner that has an existing website.

1. Website Benchmarking – to identify issues with the website content that need addressing to support future lead generation campaigns.

If you accept the logic as I have outlined above, then the next question is:

How can you build such a system to deliver more sales at a better ROI than traditional online marketing methods.

I will deal with that question and describe a specific system to achieve this goal in my next post.

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Learn SEO And Discover How Content Syndication Can Improve Your Website’s Authority

What is Content Syndication?

Content syndication is a method by which web content can be distributed across many other sites.

The most common way of setting this up is by creating web feeds to provide subscribers a summary of a website’s recently added content.

Content or web syndication can also be implemented by licensing website content so that other websites can access it.

Feeds allow visitors to subscribe and obtain regular updates delivered automatically via a web portal, news reader, or by email.

The most common content suitable for syndication includes:

• Blog Posts
• Social News
• Forums
• Videos
• Audio  (such as mp3 files & podcasts)
• Press Releases
• Articles

Remember if you study and learn seo you can use all this content to boost your keyword rankings and drive more relevant traffic to your website throgh search engines and social media.

How can you publish your feeds?

If you have a website, blog, audio/video content, or even photos, you can offer a feed of your content as an option. Choose a feed reader and set up an account (we use Feedburner) and add a subscription button to each blog page.

How do you read feeds?

There are more than 2,000 different feed reading applications, also known as “news aggregators” (for text) or “podcatchers” (for podcasts).

Why Is Content Syndication Important For Internet Marketing?

As part of an integrated Internet marketing program, online content syndication can:

• Generate more website traffic
• Improve search engine rankings
• And increase brand awareness.

This will result in more targeted, qualified traffic that converts to sales and quality inbound links to deep pages on your website or blog.

When people engage in search activities on the Internet, they are often seeking very specific information. Typically the information they seek is relevant to them and should be predominantly Educational, Newsworthy or Entertaining.

Only a very small percentage of searches are ready to buy and open to sales messages.

So the first step in the marketing cycle is to engage visitors with relevant information that meets their search criteria.

If they like this information, they are more likely to subscribe to obtain ongoing information updates and become a ready source for step 2 in your sales funnel.

By syndicating all of your best and high demand content you can greatly increase the potential that it will go viral and drive more traffic and increase your search engine rankings.

What Are The Elements That Make Up Content Syndication?

First, I cannot emphasise enough the importance of creating content that is:

• Educational
• Newsworthy
• Entertaining

Remember that most searchers are not in the buying phase at the start, they are researching to build their knowledge and answer specific questions.

However if you do some sample searches you will find that most content returned by a search is aimed at making a sale. Now this type of content is increasingly ineffective and unlikely to achieve the desired sales results unless the searches are for someone looking to buy.

For example this could be the case if a search is done for “Best Value Nokia mobile phone deals”.

However a search is more likely to be something like “seo software”. This type of search represents someone looking for information on the various types of software that is available. It will probably be followed by an extensive comparison of features, support services and prices. Perhaps it will then be followed by a trial or an evaluation period before the searcher is ready to buy.

If you prepare content that meets the immediate need for information, they are more likely to consider your product or service.

If you can deliver the right content to meet this need you have a better opportunity to create brand awareness for your offering and capture and retain their attention until they are ready to purchase.

Your ultimate business objectives are:

• To nurture them
• To convert them to become customers
• To deliver services that retain their satisfaction
• So that they become life long customers.

So What About a Content Syndication Strategy?

I would suggest that you consider a content syndication strategy involving the following 7 steps:

1. Create high quality non-sales oriented content that is Educational, Newsworthy or Entertaining aimed at your targeted the niche.
2. Build a Content Syndication Network of like minded people who are interested in this niche.
3. Syndicate your content by placing it in front of these people.
4. Make it simple for them to subscribe to your content
5. Use an opt-in process to give them a relevant benefit in return for their email address
6. Keep your subscribers and opt-in prospects informed of future content that you publish.
7. Include a link to your sales page at appropriate intervals in your autoresponder email sequence.

What is the Best Way to Develop and Publish Your Content?

If you are serious about developing and syndicating content you will definitely need a blog.

Here are 6 Reasons why you should consider setting up a Blog. On the other hand read these 5 tips to avoid failure before you plunge in.

I would recommend using Wordpress for the following reasons:

• It is easy to install
• It has lots of style templates to choose from
• It has plenty of useful plug-ins such as a feed tracker to check how many people subscribe to your blog and a basic forum add-in.

I would not recommend using a hosted blog platform as you will not gain the SEO benefits from a blog that is not integrated in your domain.

But the real secret to an effective syndication strategy is to add lots of fresh content. Providing you promote this properly, it can act like a magnet on your site, attracting new visitors every day and giving you the potential to convert those visitors into loyal followers and eventually into paying customers.

Adding new content is the starting point, but you need to know how to just how to place it in front of potential visitors?

Here are some tips:

1. Set up a Feedburner account to allow your feed to be easily accessed.
2. Share your feed on your various social networks. Many social media sites can read and publish your RSS feed to your friends, followers, and fans.
3. Submit it to multiple RSS submission directories.

Many social networking sites will display your RSS feed it as a status update on your social media profiles.

For example Interleado use Twitterfeed to publish our blog on Twitter and Facebook.

Another option is to submit your new content posts to social bookmarking sites such as:

• Delicious
• StumbleUpon
• Reddit.com
• Digg

How To Build A Content Syndication Process?

If you want to be effective in the new Internet age then you must work to build a process that delivers your content to all the right channels.

I would suggest the following three steps

1. Publish new quality content that is not a sales page
2. Syndicate that content to several social media sites with a large market share, e.g. Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon.
3. Increase the visibilty of those syndications by gathering comments, votes, diggs on each blog post, article etc. You can join a syndicate called SYNND that will do that for you on a quid pro quo basis.

You can join various social media sites such as Linkedin or Facebook and identify relevant interest groups. By carefully constructing your profile and engaging in discussions you can identify and contact people with an interest in your market niche.

If you are successful in placing your content in front of them, they can syndicate or re-tweet your content to other websites and portals.

But What About Duplicate Content?

You should be aware that Google doesn’t like duplicate content.  Although Google assure us that you don’t get penalized for having duplicate content.

So why has content syndication been criticised?

Well would you like it if your content was displayed on a Google search from a website with a higher ranking than yours – some people object to this.

In my view as long as the article contains an attribution link to your site you should be happy. In most cases content is syndicated in summary form with a link to the full artricle on your website.

A Few Tips On Avoiding Content Duplication Problems

1. Always wait until your content is indexed by Google before seeking syndication. This is because Google will only index 1 piece of content that is duplicated.
2. If you conclude a syndication agreement with another site be sure to change enough of the content to ensure that it is indexed as original content and not identified as duplicate.

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Seo Ranking Factors – The Top 10 That Really Do Make a Difference

Learn seo to find out how you can easily identify which issues are hurting your website and discover how you can quickly implement changes to your website to get better keyword rankings, more visitors and more sales!

Factor 1: The Global Link Popularity Of Your Website

What is Global Link Popularity?

This refers to the overall link authority of the website. This is calculated based on:

• The total volume of external of links
• The quality of these links
• The diversity of these links

Focus on Link Quality vs. Quantity

Total volume is not as important as quality. Quality is determined by following factors:

• The page rank of the page that the link comes from
• The rank of the home page on that site
• Keywords used in anchor text in the external link

What this means is that a few good quality links from high authority sites will give you a higher global link authority that simple having lots of links from low authority sites.

For example this would include sites from domains including .gov or .edu or those with a high page rank (5 or greater).

Factor 2: Keywords Used In The Anchor Text Of External Links

Anchor text is the visible hyperlinked text on the page. This is the second most important factor in getting a high ranking on Google.

For example, “SEO Software solution” contains the hyperlink http://www.interleado.com/

And “SEO Workbench”contains the hyperlink

http://www.interleado.com/website-marketing-software/internet-marketing-tool-demo.html

In the above example the anchor text = “SEO software” and “Seo Workbench”

Normally anchor text should be a keyword abbreviation of what the visitor will see by clicking on the link.

Search engines give significant weight to the presence of keywords in the anchor text of external and internal links. External link anchor text is more important since by implication a site is saying that a visitor can finds information about the relevant keyword by visiting your site.

You should be aware that it is it is better to include keywords only in the anchor text rather than have embedded common words.

For example “seo software” is better as anchor text with a hyperlink rather than “Read more about seo software here”

Factor 3: Keyword Used in Meta Tags

You can use this meta tag analyser to see what your meta tags look like for any give URL.

For example if I run it on Interleado’s home page I get the following report:

Additional information is also displayed including:

• Page rank
• Web page summary including size and load time
• Display of the SERP organic listing for that page
• Keywords by frequency in anchor tags
• Keywords found in image alt tags
• Keyword density
• URL’s on page plus frequency

Tips For Optimizing Keywords In The Title Tag:

• Do not exceed 50 characters (including spaces)
• Keep your important keywords as far left as possible
• Write your Title tag for your audience first and the search engines second
• Include your company name
• Include keyword phrases
• Avoid title tag duplication
• Use a divider such as the “|” symbol to separate key phrases
• Write a title tag as if it is a header for a Google adword

Tips For Optimizing Keywords In The Description Tag:

You will get the most benefit from this tag if you have a unique description for every page and you keep the description to under 150 words. For each unique description, pick 4-5 keywords and work them into the description.

Remember this is the tag that will be displayed with the search engine results returned after a keyword search is done. Therefore use it mainly to persuade visitors to click on the page.

Lets look at an example:

Take the URL:

http://www.interleado.com/search-engine-marketing-company.php

This returns the following result from a Google search .

Title tag contains the most important keyword “seo software” at the beginning and the next most important “Online Reputation Management” after that.

The length of the title tag is 64 character with spaces (any longer and it will be truncated)

The Description contains “Interleado” at the beginning but is too long since after 165 character it is truncated.

You will get the most benefit from this tag if you have a unique description for every page and you keep the description to less than 165 words. For each unique description, pick 4-5 keywords and work them into the description.

I would recommend ignoring the Keyword tag as it is no longer regarded as an important factor by Google.

Factor 4: Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name

For example if I search for “Interleado”, I get 6,750 results. High on the list is this result:

That is why most company’s corporate website can be easily found by searching for the company name.

Factor 5: Keyword Used in the H1 Headline Tag

If the top of your page has a headline in a H1 style, the search engine very specifically sees that as the headline for the page.

The search engines will read your H1 tags (Preferably in bold) and if you can use keywords in them, you’re providing additional emphasis that should be a factor in enhancing the keyword visibility with search engines.

Factor 6: Keyword Used in on Page Internal Link Anchor Text

The principles are exactly the same as for external link anchor text

Factor 7: Keyword Used In First 65 Words On Page

Again to gain prominence you can use any of the following techniques:

• Bold
• Font size
• Internal Anchor text

Factor 8: Keyword Used in the Subdomain Name

For example:

http://www.keyword.interleado.com

Factor 9: Keyword Used in the Page URL

For example:

http://www.interleado.com/blog/index.php/2010/01/06/how-to-learn-seo/

Factor 10: Keyword Used in the Headline Tags H2,H3,H4 etc.

Putting keywords in a headline tag is where you should start every page.

What’s the first thing you look at on a page? The headline right?

Well so do search engines, putting extra emphasis through a H1, H2, H3 or H4 html tag will tell the search engine that the keywords enclosed in these tags are more important than the others.

Some other writing styles that add emphasis are:

• Keywords in bold
• Keywords in bullets
• Keeping paragraphs short

Previous Posts On This Topic:

How to fix the top 10 seo issues stopping you from being noticed on the internet.

6 Steps For Link Building And Driving Traffic With Social Media

The Top 5 SEO Mistakes and How to Avoid them

SEO Training – What Should Be The Key Areas Covered?

How to Learn SEO?

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Dublin Web Summit – Top Tips from Top Entrepreneurs!

I attended the Dublin Web Summit in Trinity College last night and wanted to give a short summary of what went on and what the speakers were talking about.

First off, hats off to the event organiser, Paddy Cosgrave. I hadn’t met or heard of Paddy until this event, but judging by his CV he certainly gets about. I think you have to admire someone who is clearly passionate about what they do and are willing to bring others along with them in their quest for understanding. It’s also refreshing to see such genuine openness and honesty in someone like Paddy. So, Paddy is great! Nough said!

Mark Little was moderating the event, hats off to his bravery also in moving from the security of RTE to follow his passion and endeavour to sort the news from the noise.  I also bumped into Dermot Casey who’ll be working with Mark to develop their new start-up , aka the Global News Project.

So, Mark kicked off the summit referring to the fact that we were not there to talk about how bad things were, how bad the economy was or about how we could seek out new ways to position ourselves as leaders in the knowledge economy! Big cheer! No political speak was allowed!

Fred Karlsson from Donedeal gave us a quick walk through how he built his business from zero to hero in a few short years. Started with the goal of wanting to be the biggest classified ads website in Ireland – now wants to be the biggest classified ads website in Ireland – by far!

There was a panel discussion then around building a business and the the challenges involved in that, there was  Fred, Colm Lyon from Realex, Ciaran Bollard from Muzu TV and Dylan Collins. I found the discussion very interesting in the sense that these guys are all very comfortable with the concept of risk.

They all embrace the possibility that if you have an idea, work hard, get some lucky breaks and are 100% focused on what you want to achieve, then maybe, just maybe, your business is going to hit the big time! OK, so it doesn’t always work out that way, but with guys like this, failure is part of success not something separate. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that failure is a necessary  component of success, the more you fail, the more your succeed.

This theme of risk and entrepreneurship was picked up by Chris Horn . Amongst many other things, Chris talked about how there may be a perception in Ireland, that being an entrepreneur was somehow a negative thing. The link between failure and the Irish mentality seems to rest uneasy.

True to say that we don’t go out looking to fail, but if we don’t fail at least some of the time, then we aren’t taking risks, and if we aren’t taking risks, then are aren’t making progress – both individually and collectively.

I meant to ask Chris about the Innovation Task force he is part of. Chris said there were 28 people on this task force – 28 people! I know it’s hard to leave all those important people out (there’s politics getting in the way again!), but  I wonder how much innovation you get with 28 people in a room for 6 hours – that’s about 13 minutes speaking time per person! Anyway, I recommend someone on the task force read The Nine Lives of Innovation – it may help the process?

What I really wanted to talk about in this blog is the panel Q&A we had at the end, with Matt Mullenweg (seriously creative and colourful guy), founder of Wordpress, Craig Newmark (dry wit has found it’s home!), founder of Craigslist, Ben Hammersly (cuts through the crap!) , Wired’s Editor-at-Large and Chris Horn, former Iona CEO.

Mark asked the panel about the future of media, no doubt with one eye on his fledgling enterprise and how could we sort out the real news from all the clutter out there. How were we ever going to manage all the information that is thrown at us every day? I’m paraphrasing now, but from memory Ben’s animated response went something like…

Bullshit! We’re fooling ourselves’ that we actually care about this stuff, or that we ever really cared. OK, so in the past lots of papers were bought, but how many were actually read? Your average punter might read the front page, the back page, a couple of articles inside, page 3 (depending on the newspaper of course ), but did we ever really read the news before the digital age? We are selfish when it comes to the news that we digest, we are only really interested in news that interests us.

So what about all that information overload Ben? Get over it! Unsubscribe! Be selective! There you go Mark – sorted!

Chris added that the value in breaking news has essentially disappeared as there are so many opportunities for ametuer reporters on a news scene to spread the news rapidly through their mobile devices. He saw the value for professional journalists in commentary and analysis and in investigative news.

Matt was then asked if he though the era of blogging was coming to an end, backed up partly by the information Chris gave us from a survey carried out at the recent BT Young Scientist competition.  The survey said that only 34% of young people read blogs and only 8% actually have one.

Matt explained that he hoped that as young people matured that they would increase their capacity to write a sentence that is longer than 140 characters! Brilliant! I fully agree with Matt on this one. How are you ever going to promote yourself seriously, when a career kicks off, by sticking to Twitter or My Space or Facebook one liners?

It was very interesting to hear Matt say that Twitter has become one of the top distribution systems for wordpress blogs in recent times, better than RSS or Google Reader. If you look at Twitter these day, apart from the noise of what I’m doing now, most tweets are linking back to blogs or  articles on websites.

Craig talked about the culture in Silicon Valley, where the ethos allowed people to fail, and fail again, and fail again…, as Matt chipped in, ‘Always make new mistakes’. This was bringing it back to the earlier remarks from Chris that Ireland is not a country that embraces failure for the sake of success.

Mark probed a little more on this question – why do the Irish people have a fear of failure?

Chris, being the honorary Irish man on the panel thought that there was an unhealthy race to the bottom by the focus of government on restoring our national competitiveness and Ben added that focusing relentlessly on  attracting companies by offering low tax rates and other incentives is eventually going to lead to a environment where what you’re actually trying to create is lost – a vibrant society where the culture allows people to take risks and are encouraged to try new things.

By developing this type of society Ireland stands a change of actually attracting the people, not the companies, that will in the longer term,  provide the jobs and culture that is so badly needed to survive  in a true knowledge economy. We will never be able to complete with the likes of India and Russia when it comes to knowledge workers, so why try.

What Ireland can compete on is -  creativity, imagination and creating the environment where the right people are attracted to live in the country.

I’m sure I left many things out, but the summit was very thought provoking.

I really hope that some influential people were in the audience and they were inspired, like Pat was, to actually do something about it and not just talk about how bad things are.

Update:

Forgot to add – Mark asked the panel what are the top tips they would give any aspiring entrepreneurs?

Chris – Don’t do it on your own, get a good partners

Craig – Treat customers like you’d want to be treated yourself

Matt – Learn to code!

Ben – Agreed with Matt (though not necessarily on the code language!), plus he said the secret to doing anything worthwhile is to make it beautiful, the really great stuf is gorgeous.

Were you at the summit – what stood out for you?

What about risk and innovation – does your country embrace failure in the pursuit of success?

Posted in Entrepreneurship | 2 Comments »

What Are The Implications Of The Mobile Web For Online Marketers?

There is a lot of discussion going on at the moment about the mobile web and people using smart phones to access the web more and more.

The real question for business owners is How Do You Optimise Your Website For The Mobile Web?

What is different about having a website for people accessing it through a desktop and accessing it through a smart phone?

What about the .mobi domain extension, is it worth getting one?

Do the search engines give it more relevance for people searching using their smart phone?

Do you have to have one website for desktop access (normal access) and one website for mobile access?

Are companies losing out by not addressing the mobile market?

To find answers to these questions you need to:

• Understand the drivers for mobile internet growth
• Be aware of the limitations of the mobile web
• Take a view on the latest mobile web predictions for 2010 and beyond.

What Is The Mobile Internet?

According to wikipedia, “Mobile Web” refers to internet access from a mobile device, such as a smartphone or a laptop.

Why The Mobile Web?

Mobile Web access has many advantages over fixed line access.

With mobile you don’t have to remember to do something on the Web when you get back to your home or office. You can do it immediately wherever you are and when you find a need to do so.

The potential exists to reach places previously impossible for internet access – such as sporting events, mountain  rescue teams or disaster areas.

Clearly with a mobile device such as a mobile handset, a smartphone, an Ipad or a Kindle eReader, the web can reach a much larger audience.

The ability to access a wider audience is likely to be very significant in developing countries.

For example web-enabled mobile devices will probably provide easier access to the internet just as mobile telephones have bypassed the use of fixed line networks in providing telephone services.

What Are The Limitations?

While becoming increasingly popular, mobile Web access today still suffers from interoperability and usability problems.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a Web Initiative that addresses these issues through a concerted effort of key players in the mobile production chain, including authoring tool vendors, content providers, handset manufacturers, browser vendors and mobile operators.

What Do Web Surfers Think?

About.com recently reported that Keynote Competitive Research, measured the performance of 10 retail mobile Web sites during the busy holiday weeks of Nov. 18, 2009 to Jan. 4, 2010.

The 10 sites were Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, Costco, Dell, Foot Locker, Musician’s Friend, Sears, Target and Wal-Mart.

The main problems encountered included slow download speeds, high error rates and unacceptable availability.

From studying a number of other research finding it appears that the most serious problems with mobile include:

• Poor performance and slow download speed.
• This leads to a much higher cost for accessing normal pages from a mobile device.
• Small screen size hinders viewing normal websites
• Mobile devices generally cannot view flash, pdf’s, videos or password controlled access pages
• From a mobile device normal web pages are broken up into multiple segments
• Many pages from a normal website are compressed into a format that makes them difficult to view from a mobile device
• Navigation on mobiles is limited to just up or down scrolling

As you can see, a combination of slow performance and a poor user experience makes it unrealistic to expect any sort of decent results from mobile web for pages not specifically designed for mobile.

Does The Mobile Web Need A Special Top Level Domain .Mobi?

Tim Berners-Lee inventor of the worldwide web and now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) says:

“It is being driven by the big companies pushing for something that will eventually fragment the sector. For instance, this push for a .MOBI domain. Why did these people go out and push for a new domain name? That makes no sense. They say it’s because they want a strong mobile Web, but what does that mean? A strong mobile Web is about device independence. It’s about letting users browse the Web from any phone and from any device without limitations. How does .MOBI offer that?”

Basically Berners Lee believes that this would break the device independence of the web.

Others point out that 9 out of 10 .com sites are not designed to be used on a mobile phone and .mobi was created so that mobile users have sites specifically tailored and formatted for phones and on-the-go needs.

According to mobi.com. There is only one standard that guarantees you a site specifically designed for your mobile phone and that’s .mobi. Just like how sites ending in .gov (such as IRS.gov) guarantee you a legitimate government site, sites ending with the .mobi “trustmark” guarantee you a legitimate mobile site.

Consider it a seal of approval that the site is mobile certified. Why waste time shooting in the dark?

I a nutshell if you are targeting mobile web surfers you do need to consider having a separate mobile site following the .mobi standards.

Where is The Mobile Web Going?

Predictions vary, here are some different views.

According to PC World, Apple’s iPad Will Be the Death of the Mobile Web

Tim Berners-Lee states that the goal of W3C is to Make Web access from a mobile device as simple as Web access from a desktop device.

Mobiletech have a new blog post that summarises their views on The mobile highway in 2010

Highlights include:

• Mobile to be driven by new smart handsets such as iPhone, Android – and Kindle mobile devices. Clearly iPad needs to be added to this list.
• The balance of control over mobile internet applications will shift from mobile operators to handset manufacturers.
• Social networks will drive the advance of the mobile internet.

Fierce Mobile Content predict five trends likely to shape the mobile content landscape in the year ahead.

1. Micropayments will galvanize original mobile content efforts
2. Navigation applications will shift from premium to ad-subsidized
3. Mobile commerce will finally go mainstream
4. Ereaders will emerge as the next hotbed of mobile software innovation
5. Olympics, World Cup fail to ignite the mobile TV revolution

According to a Morgan Stanley Study on the mobile internet:

• “Mobile is Ramping Faster than Desktop Internet Did and Will Be Bigger Than Most Think.”
• “5 Trends Are Converging (3G + Social Networking + Video + VoIP + Impressive Mobile Devices).”
• “Regarding the pace of change, we believe more users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years.”

In summary, the mobile internet is reaching a tipping point with mobile entering an explosive growth phase lasting from 2010 to 2020. See Morgan Stanley Chart below:

Leadership applications are likely to emerge from initiatives by major social networks and hardware vendors. The pace of these will be largely dependent on the success of the W3C mobile initiative.

So How Can You Optimize your Website for Mobile?

Modern Nomads has an interesting post on this topic.

To summarise:

Decide how you would like to allow mobile users to access your page. Options include:

• Automatic generation of mobile pages under the same URL’s
• Having dedicated mobile pages
• Having special (sub)domains for mobile devices.

Decide whether you want to have different content for mobile users. They will often need more specific information and less data due to the small screen size of their mobile device.

Determine how you wish to deliver the mobile content. Options are:

• A specific sub domain (e.g. mobile.interleado.com)
• A .mobi domain

Element Fusion have an optimisation tutorial based on the category of mobile device device. The categories are:

• The iPhone
• Phones that support CSS
• Phones that don’t support CSS

Open Forum has a recent article on this topic that recommends using some tools that

Save you redesigning your website for mobile devices. Basically it recommends:

• For targeting iPhone users
  • Consider using a technology called WebKit to render and display web pages.
• If your website run Wordpress CMS:
  • Check out a plugin called WPTouch that can quickly optimize your website for the iPhone and Android devices.
  • Also look at Carrington Mobile theme.
  • Both of the above options will enable visitors to view the full site, without any mobile optimization, plus they load faster on mobile connections.

Finally Lilengine has a number of useful tips for optimising an existing website including:

• Use external CSS style sheets
• Keep content brief
• Use short titles
• Don’t use flash or frames
• Avoid pop-ups
• Advertise site as mobile compatible
• Put the prefix Tel: before the phone number to enable the mobile device to call with one click
• Put your website into Googles’s local index
• Submit a separate site map for a mobile

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Posted in Online Marketing | 2 Comments »

SEO Software 6 Month free subscription, and the winners are…

You may remember that we ran an SEO competition during the last week of  January  – the prize being a 6 month free subscription to Interleado’s SEO Workbench and 6 one hour, one to one webinars.  Well, the results are in and the regional winners are:

Ireland – Ann Marie Ryan from Osmosis.ie

UK – Josh Ward from Joshwardgardendesign.com

US – Chad Maslak from Chad Maslak Marketing & Consulting

Congratulations to the winners!  Interleado will be touch with them shortly to give them the good news.

Thanks to all those who entered, we have a great response.

Regards

Peter

Posted in General | No Comments »