The Google Penguin Update

by John Eberhard

Periodically Google comes out with a major change in its algorithm, that then changes the way Google responds to people’s searches, and changes the way many web sites will rank. In other words, after a major algorithm update, your site may suddenly not rank as well for your major targeted keywords.

So fewer people will see your listing on Google, and fewer people will click on it and come to your site. Which would mean less traffic to your web site all of a sudden, potentially a lot less. For people who have spent years working on building up the traffic to their site, this can be quite upsetting.

Last year people were concerned about the Google Panda update that happened in May 2011. But the Google Penguin update (what’s next, Google Aardvark? Google Albatross? Google Komodo Dragon?) which came out in April 2012 has dwarfed concerns about the Panda update.

Quite simply Penguin is the most dramatic algorithm change in years. And some sites have been hit hard. If your site experienced a dramatic loss of traffic around the end of April of this year, you have likely been smacked by the Penguin.

Have You Been Gaming the System Again, You Naughty Boy/Girl?

The crux of the Penguin update has to do with search engine optimization, and specifically it has to do with links to your site.

The one thing that Google hates more than anything else in the whole wide world, is to feel that people are “gaming” their system. I have described elsewhere the silly logic that they have adopted, where they have based most of their ranking system on the number of links pointing to your site from other sites, but they don’t want you to do anything proactive to increase the number of links coming to your site.

You are supposed to just keep putting great content on your site, and people will see that and think it is so great that they will put a link to that content on some other site.

In my business I have opted for the road of (gasp!) proactively creating links to my site and clients’ sites.

So the Penguin update is essentially geared to detecting an “unnatural” link pattern, and penalizing sites where that pattern seems to indicate that we have been naughty boys and girls.

Types of Links

According to the makers of Market Samurai software, the Google Penguin update looks at all the links to your site, and puts them into three categories. Then if you have too many links of one type, your site is penalized. It’s all very arbitrary, but the general hope on their part is that they can stop people from doing all that pesky link building.

The three types of links are:

• Brand links
• Target links
• Generic links

These links are based on the words on the page of someone else’s site that links to yours. When you have words on a site that are made into a link (usually underlined and in blue) that is called “anchor text.”

Brand Links: These are links where the word that is linked, i.e. underlined and in blue, is either simply a web address, or the name of your company or your product. In my case these would be http://www.realwebmarketing.net, or “Real Web Marketing Inc.”

Target Links: These are links where the words that are linked are a keyword phrase that you are targeting. In my case this would be things like “web design,” “search engine optimization,” or “pay per click advertising.” If these words were underlined in blue and linked to my site, on someone else’s site, those would be considered target links.

Generic Links: These are links where the words that are linked are some random or meaningless words, not your name and not some keyword. For example, “click here,” or “learn more.”

It used to be that we were told that keyword anchor text, or “Target Links” according to this new system, were the most valuable type of links that you could have. But now Google has decided that these are the bad boys of the link universe, and if 50% or more of your links fall into the category of Target Links, you are in trouble. Your site has possibly already been penalized, or soon will be.

The safe percentages that Market Samurai recommends are:

• Brand links – 40%
• Target links – 20%
• Generic links – 40%

Luckily the link building program we have been doing for clients for years tends to produce the highest percentage of brand links, and a lot lower percentage of target links, so we are not particularly worried about this update.

We can do a check on anyone who is worried about their site and their links, especially if your site experienced a big dip in April.

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Generating Leads with a Web Site

by John Eberhard

Everyone who has a web site wants to generate leads with it. Sometimes the site isn’t doing anything. Sometimes it is generating some leads, but not enough. Sometimes it is generating a steady flow of leads, but the owner of the site wants to get more leads and at less cost.

How Much Traffic?

The first thing to put your attention on is the flow of traffic. How much traffic is the site getting? If you don’t know, the very first thing to do is to find out. Google offers a free service called Google Analytics, which will tell you how many people are visiting the site, where they are coming from, what pages they visited and so on. So if you don’t have a quality web statistics program on your site, the very first thing you should do is to install Google Analytics.

Generating Traffic

Here are all the various ways you can generate traffic to a web site:

1. Pay per click advertising
2. Getting organic traffic through search engine optimization (SEO) and link building
3. Having a Google Maps / Google Places listing that is near the top
4. Having listings on other business listing sites
5. Social media marketing
6. Blogging
7. Video marketing on YouTube
8. Having your web address on printed items such as brochures, business cards, fliers, direct mail, or ads

Pay Per Click: This is one of the best and fastest ways to generate traffic and leads from a web site, with Google AdWords, MSN Ad Center and Facebook ads. This works best for high ticket items because the cost is relatively high. I don’t usually recommend it unless you are able to spend $1,000 or more per month on your Google AdWords budget. Plus to compete well I recommend having an experienced person manage it for you. But for developing a steady stream of leads, pay per click is one of the best methods.

SEO and Link Building: This is where you get your web site to rank highly in search engines and so develop a steady stream of traffic. This is a great way to develop traffic, but it takes time (6-12 months) and doing it right is not cheap.

Google Maps: This is for local businesses where Google displays a map and 3-8 listings on the first page that correspond to the orange balloons on the map. This is much faster and less expensive than developing organic traffic. But with really competitive industries, it can still take several months.

Business Listing Sites: We put up listings on these types of sites as part of our Google Maps program. It’s a good way to get your business in front of people searching.

Social Media: This is probably the best way for a small business to generate traffic, especially if you don’t have any money to spend. But it is very effective for businesses at all levels. Larger businesses often pay others to generate friends, followers and connections for them, and sometimes to manage communications with the networks.

Blogging: Most people don’t understand that simply writing and posting content on your blog regularly will generate traffic. See my article on this.

Videos: Having one or more videos about your business, that explain what your business does and what benefits you offer, is a tremendous advantage in marketing. Prices have come down and are generally pretty affordable.

Printed Items: You should make sure that your web site address is printed on all of your printed items. People will often get some promo piece and then go to the web site for more information.

Conversions

OK, now you’re increasing the traffic to your site and you’re tracking how many people are coming. Now, how do you get them to contact you, by either calling or filling out some kind of form on the site? In web marketing we call that a “conversion.” We also call that a lead.

Well I have seen figures saying that the national average for web conversions is about 3%, meaning 3% of web visitors contact the web site owner and become a conversion. I have seen it be a lot more, and sometimes a lot less (like none). But the first thing that tells you is that if your site is only getting 50 visitors a month, you will be lucky to get one or two conversions.

One development in the last year or two in the direction of increasing conversions is that many marketers are putting a form in the sidebar on every page. Also put your phone number in a prominent position, either in the sidebar or the header at the top.

Another important consideration is what you are offering. You could offering a free consultation or free estimate, or some kind of discount. See my article on offers.

Another important consideration in increasing conversions is to make sure your web site is organized in a simple way and your navigational structure is easy.

If you get traffic to your site and make sure your site is well organized in such a way as to maximize conversions, you will increase your lead flow.

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Real Web Marketing Blog Categories

By John Eberhard

I have been writing a newsletter and blog article nearly every week for the last four years, and I was recently going through my blog and putting all the articles in categories. Blogs are organized in such a way that you can create categories for your articles, then assign each article to one or more categories.

Once you assign your articles to categories, the blog will display all the categories, you can click on one, then see all the articles that are in that category. It’s sort of a table of contents structure.

While I was doing this I was struck by how much material I had on all the various topics. And it occurred to me that probably most people, even those who follow my articles closely (and I occasionally meet people who say they keep all the newsletters and put them in a folder), have not been exposed to all of these articles.

So I decided to provide links to all of my blog categories. These can now also be seen on the sidebar of my website. The numbers next to each category show how many articles are in that category.

• Article Marketing (9)
• Blogging (23)
• CMS (4)
• Email Marketing (15)
• Internet Marketing (41)
• Link Building (13)
• Local Marketing (9)
• Marketing for the Arts (2)
• Marketing Offers (1)
• Marketing Strategy (10)
• Online PR (8)
• Pay-per-click (34)
• Reputation Management (1)
• Reviews (2)
• Search Engines (18)
• SEO (22)
• Social Media (37)
• Software (1)
• Surveys (2)
• Traffic Building (6)
• Uncategorized (24)
• Video (5)
• Web Content (12)
• Web Design (18)
• Website Tracking (8)

If you click on a category name the link will take you to that category and you will see all the titles plus a short excerpt from each article.

Enjoy!

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Marketing Analysis and Planning

by John Eberhard

 

Marketing analysis and planning is a vital action to do regularly with any marketing campaign. This means to review your statistics and then make decisions on how to proceed. You can do this weekly or monthly.

The first step is to collect your statistics.

Let’s assume that your marketing campaigns are oriented towards generating leads for sales people. Then the most important statistic you have to get is the number of leads.

I will define a campaign as either a) a promotion going out that has a specific message and/or offer, or b) a promotion going out utilizing a specific media, such as magazines, newspapers, Google AdWords, email, etc.

But in order to track things properly and do any kind of analysis, you have to also track where each lead came from, i.e. what prompted them to respond to you? This usually involves either asking the person what promotional campaign they responded to, or having some sort of coding system, where each form on your web site is coded to tell you where that person came from. Unfortunately most businesses are really poor at this.

Some other statistics you would probably want to track:

• Amount of promotion out
• Number of visitors to your web site
• Total number of leads
• Break down the leads by campaign or according to different media, i.e. from email, from advertising in magazines, from fliers, from pay per click advertising, etc.
• Cost per lead. This is the total amount spent on a campaign divided by the number of leads gotten. In some cases you have to let a campaign run its course before you can compute this. From this you will often find that a specific campaign in a certain media will have much lower cost per lead. That is your more successful campaign.
• Proposals out and/or dollar value of proposals out. If your company does proposals to prospects, then you want to track the number of proposals out and the dollar value.
• Dollar value of sales. You can track this by which campaign the lead came from, but you have to have a good sales lead database to do it.

The statistics you track could be some variation of the above, depending on how your business runs.

So what are we trying to determine from all these statistics?

1. We want to find out whether statistics are going up or down, and then take appropriate actions to get them up. Often we find that promotion has dropped out or gone down, which is the first step in the whole chain and one of the things that is easiest to be at cause over.
2. We want to find out which promotional campaigns are working and which ones are not. You determine that by which campaigns are producing leads in the door, and which ones have the lower cost per lead. If you have a good database set up you can also check which campaigns are producing actual sales.
3. If a campaign is working well, you want to either leave it running as is, or decide to increase it in some way.
4. If a campaign is not working well, either by having low leads (or no leads) or by having a higher cost per lead, then you want to either stop that campaign altogether, or change your campaign in some way. Changes could include changing the message or offer, changing the graphics or colors, or changing the media where the campaign is running.

Media: One of the first and most important jobs in marketing for a business is to discover which media work best for you, i.e. email, referrals, pay per click advertising, magazines, radio, TV. This is different in every industry. One tip here is to observe what your competitors are doing. If they are consistently using certain media you can be relatively sure that those media are producing results for them. Because they wouldn’t keep spending money on them if they didn’t work. Then when you try different media, you have to analyze the statistics as above to have a clear idea of what works best for you.

Message and Offer: You have to work out what your message should be and how to best communicate it. Surveying your target public is the best way to determine this. Another important thing is your offer, i.e. what you are offering to entice people to respond. An entire article could be written on this topic. You could be offering:

• Something free like a free report or white paper or newsletter subscription
• A free inspection or consultation
• Some free item along with the sale
• A discount of some type, often for a limited time
• Just offering the item for sale with no discount

You can survey different offers or just try different offers and track which ones work the best.

Summary

It’s vital to track your marketing statistics on a regular basis and make decisions based on what you find. You want to reinforce successful actions and drop out the unsuccessful ones. You may have to change the media where you are running your campaigns, or change your message or offer.

Good luck with your analysis and planning.

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A Premium Web Site

by John Eberhard

Everybody wants a good looking web site, but what are the factors that create a really top notch web site as opposed to a boring or mundane design?

I have been doing a lot of web design lately, and I want to present my opinions on what factors go together to make up a really stellar web site design.

Color
First of all and possibly the most important, a good web design has to have a good color scheme. There is a fair amount of technology on how to combine colors correctly, and you have to know the color wheel and what it means and how to use it. One technique is to combine color opposites on the color wheel, i.e. blue-orange, red-green, or yellow-purple. Usually you have one color that is the dominant one and the other is there to a lesser degree. I also think it is important to include contrast in terms of light and dark. You want to avoid a boring, monotone look.

Size
Size does matter on a web site Virginia. 3-4 years ago everybody had screen resolutions of 800 x 600, so all the web designers were making web sites 700 to 800 pixels wide so you wouldn’t have to scroll back and forth to see it all. Today those web sites look hopelessly tiny in the middle of the screen since everyone today has screen resolutions of 1100 pixels wide or more. So I think web sites today should be 1000 pixels wide or more.

Backgrounds
Most web sites today are designed with a centered text area and sidebar of fixed width, with a background around that. Some people prefer a white background and lots of white space, but often today you see the text area and sidebar in the middle with a colored background of some type around it. I tend to favor making the background some kind of pattern or color gradation, i.e. light at the top going to dark at the bottom or vice versa. You can also make the background a large picture.

Slide Shows
Many sites today have some kind of slide show on the home page. I like to make these big, usually going across the whole screen, which then gives them really good impact. I used to do these in Flash, but recently started using a program called the Nivo Slider, which gives some cool transition effects between the slides.

3D
Not everyone likes this and I don’t use it all the time, but one useful technique is to use Photoshop effects to make things in your header, navigational bar and sidebar look like they are in 3D. This includes beveling, drop shadows and other 3D effects. I think 3D effects can really add a lot to a web site.

Forms
This is not an aesthetic consideration but an effectiveness consideration. With a web site you want as many of your visitors as possible to either call you or fill out a form of some kind on the site. In online marketing we call this a conversion. So it is smart to offer something on the site and get people to fill out a form with minimally their name and email to get it. Lately the trend is to put a response form right in the sidebar so it is visible on every single page. It’s also smart to put your phone number right in the header so it’s very visible on every page.

Sidebars
It’s common for web sites today to have a sidebar, i.e. a bar that starts below the header and goes the rest of the way down the page. Sometimes you can leave this out on the home page. Then this content is visible on all or nearly all of the pages. Common sidebar contents can include:

• Your address and phone
• A response form
• Small pictures linking to various pages inside the site
• Links to social media accounts
• Business hours
• Testimonials
• Links to various free offers or things you are selling
• Links to your other web sites
• Sometimes navigation buttons are placed in the sidebar, though some content management systems like Wordpress make this difficult
• Share or like buttons

Movement
It can be interesting to add Flash animations or scrolling text or other things moving on your page. But be careful as this can easily be badly overdone.

Transparency
I have just started experimenting with having a large picture go all the way across in the background, and having the main text box and sidebar be partially transparent, so you can read the contents, but you can also still see the picture in the background. Stay tuned to see the results on this.

Text Box
The main text box in the middle of the page can be white, but it can also be a color, or it can even have a background pattern or gradation like the overall background of the page. This can work really well but you have to make sure it works in combination with your overall page background, and that it doesn’t detract from the contents of your page.

Summary
All these factors work together to make up your web page, and you have to work with them and try things and combine them until you come up with something that works and looks great. So don’t settle for mundane or mediocre. Go for greatness.

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Writing Relevant Content

by John Eberhard

If you have a web site, a blog, a newsletter, or any printed promotional materials for your business, you need to be able to write good, relevant content. This is also called “copy,” or the text in your promotional materials.

Not everybody is a good writer, and if you have tried and tried and haven’t been able to write good material, then hire a professional copywriter. But if you are involved in writing for any of your promotional efforts, here are some tips to help you.

First of all I want to divide copywriting into two categories. First there is the openly promotional material you write to get someone interested in buying your products or services. This includes most or all of your web site, promotional emails, and any printed promotional materials such as brochures and direct mail. Second there is writing informational material such as articles for use on blogs, newsletters, article syndication, or writing free reports or white papers.

This article will cover more writing for informational material. This is where you are not overtly promoting for people to buy your products or services. Instead you are offering information that the reader will find helpful. I wrote an article about this last October; “Becoming a Trusted Information Source.” The idea is that you put out material that is helpful to people, and by becoming a trusted source of information, you become more trusted in general and people are then more willing to and interested in doing business with you.

Although I think this strategy is not necessarily for everyone, it can be a powerful way of generating trust with the consumer today. And especially on the Internet, where someone has not heard of you or your company before, it is vital to develop that trust before the prospect will be willing to buy from you.

Solving Problems

One of the things I do with my writing is consider what problems the prospect may be experiencing, and write about how to solve those problems. In my case I write an article once a week. Sometimes it is hard to come up with a new topic every week, but I find that interacting with clients and prospects during the week, usually gives me ideas for article topics.

If a client or prospect problem gives me an idea for an article, I will write that down, so that on Tuesday I have a topic ready to write about.

Bleeding Edge?

In my field of Internet marketing there is a new technological development about every 30 seconds. Although you may not be in a highly technological field like mine, there are always new developments in your field. So the question is, should you write about the new, bleeding edge stuff?

I approach the brand new stuff somewhat warily. I see some writers in my field that are always writing about the brand new technology, even if it is untested and speculative. I tend to find such articles somewhere between mildly interesting and extremely boring. So I stay away from that.

Instead, I try to write about things that I know actually work and that people can use, not just the latest gadgets. One of my friends routinely criticizes me for not picking up on the new stuff fast enough, but my readers seem to really appreciate that the information in my articles is actually useful. The key to me is, do I know from personal experience that this new technology or solution actually works? If so I will write about it.

Tone

You have to select a general tone for your articles and pretty much stick with that. I use a down to earth, informal style, with a little humor thrown in now and then. You have to select a style or tone that is right for your business and your industry, and that reflects your personality. For some businesses, like say legal or insurance, a more formal style might be better, but don’t make it so stuffy that no one wants to read it. For some really serious subjects (like handling debt for instance), a more humorous approach can diffuse some of the tension of the topic.

If you’re in doubt about the correct tone to take with your writing, check out the articles or newsletters of competitors in your industry, and select the approach that is right for you.

Summary

A strategy of writing and disseminating informational material can be very effective today in making you or your company a trusted entity, i.e. safe to buy from. And the more you write, the easier it will get.

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Handling Negative Search Engine Listings

by John Eberhard

One of the perils of life today is that people can criticize you on the Internet.

So you hand out a business card to someone, or they hear an ad on the radio about your company, or they receive a direct mail piece or email about you. And they want to learn more about you. So they bring up their favorite search engine and enter your name or company name into the search bar.

What are they going to see on page one, two or three about you? Or about your company? Well unfortunately those listings aren’t always going to be what you would most like them to see.

So let’s say that you have a problem. Let’s say that when someone does a search using your name, or the name of your company or organization, page one has a number of listings that are negative about you or your company. Maybe most of them are negative. What can you do?

Well if there are listings that go to web pages that have actually false information about you, i.e. libel or slander, that’s a legal matter. You can legally force those people to take down false or slanderous information. I am not an expert in this area, but a letter from your lawyer to that person will probably go a long way. If this is your scenario, consult a lawyer.

But let’s say that the listings that appear when your name is searched aren’t libelous or slanderous per se, but they’re negative. So what can you do?

The basic handling for this type of situation is to put up lots of content on the web, that will rank highly when someone searches your name or company name. The idea being that these new listings will rise to the top and push all of that garbage down in the listings and off of page one.

The Handling

So here is the “Overwhelm the Garbage” program. Some call this "reputation management."

a. Write press releases and submit them to multiple online PR sites. See my blog or my book for advice on how to write press releases for online PR sites. These sites tend to rank highly on the search engines, so your press releases will tend to appear on pages 1, 2, or 3 when you search your name or company name.

b. Create social media accounts for the entity on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites. On Facebook start a personal profile and if for a business, put up a Facebook fan page. Your listings on these sites tend also to rank highly in the search engines. It also helps if you are putting up status updates on the sites regularly.

c. If it is a local business you can put up listings on Google Places and other local directory type sites like Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Hotfrog, Yelp, Insider Pages, Merchant Circle and others. There are dozens of sites like this and they all tend to rank pretty well.

d. Get videos produced about your company and post them on YourTube.

e. I have gotten good results by putting up multiple web sites, each with specific purposes related to my company. For instance, I have an articles blog on a separate domain, another blog that is just for press releases about my company, and another blog that is for press releases about my clients. I have put up several web sites and blogs for my political commentary.

c. Start multiple blogs and post items to them regularly. Include free blogs like www.blogger.com, www.blog.com, www.posterous.com, and others. When you post things there, include links in the articles linking back to your main site.

d. Write articles and post these to article directory sites. These tend to not rank as highly as some of the items above, but they’re great for volume.

This is a bit of work but it is an extremely effective program. I have done this program for myself and for one client. The client had quite a few negatives and now has none on the first five pages of Google.

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