Archives for June 2007

The BigSERP.Com Theme Song

June 29, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

After countless hours in the studio, slaving away with high-dollar producers to perfect our website’s new jingle, I proudly present the final product to you in Google video format. You can read the lyrics below if you care to and sing along, I mean of course you will because who wouldn’t want to in an MTV Unplugged semi-restrained office environment kind of way? Without further ado…

this is how we kick it 354 miles south of the googleplex…when you rev up the big google machine
do you know how they figure out what you mean
when you type in “buy widgets” on screen?

do you wanna know how to climb right up
and see your ads at or close to the top
of the search engine results page?

well that’s what you’re here for
fo find what you need
some free advice
on seo for your website
or if you’d rather have us
do it for you professionally

oh yeah, serp’s up..
serp’s up… the wave is comin’ in…
www.bigserp.com

Robots.txt Can Kill Archive.org’s Effectiveness As A Domain Name SEO Tool

June 29, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

If you aren’t using Archive.org while performing your domain name SEO research, then you certainly should be… or maybe not for long? It looks like some clever chap has found a way through robots.txt to undermine the Internet Archive Wayback Machine so that the site history cannot be viewed. I won’t go into too much detail because it is a site that we are considering purchasing, however there are some interesting entries in the site’s robots.txt file:

Disallow:/cgi-bin
Disallow:/cgi-bin/link.cgi
Disallow:/cgi-bin/links.cgi
Disallow:/cgi-bin/Links.cgi
Disallow:/cgi-bin/Count.cgi
Disallow:/cgi-bin/ls1.pl
Disallow:/servlet/UserPrice
Disallow:/servlet/PrivateSale
Disallow:/servlet/buyDomDLS
Disallow:/ticker.jsp
Disallow:/searchAdvanced.jsp
Disallow:/searchPrice.jsp
Disallow:/searchPremiums.jsp
Disallow:/searchRegister.jsp
Disallow:/jsp/search_advanced.jsp
Disallow:/jsp/search_advanced_text.jsp
Disallow:/jsp/search_category.jsp
Disallow:/jsp/search_expired.jsp
Disallow:/jsp/search_keyword.jsp
Disallow:/jsp/search_letter.jsp
Disallow:/jsp/search_namefind.jsp
Disallow:/jsp/search_pricerange.jsp
Disallow:/jsp/search_similar_domains.jsp

It looks like a lot of these entries are referring to apps that crawl the web looking for expired domains, or domains for sale. At any rate, for the price this particular site owner is asking for the site in question, this use of robots.txt to prevent prospective buyers from seeing the history of a site seems a little shady. We’re still thinking about buying the domain because it’s a great name, but it’s more difficult to gauge the value of a site we don’t know the history of. And just the fact that this owner would go to such lengths to prevent people from seeing the history of the site does not reassure BigSERP’s confidence in a possible transaction.

What this means is that people parking domains, buying sites for resale, or vulturing for deleted sites now have a powerful tool in their arsenal to potentially deceive honest people looking for a good name. Who knew, it turns out robots.txt is more valuable than just a piece of code that most sites ignore!

That Rack-Mounted Yellow Box: Google’s Search Appliance

June 21, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

It’s hilarious to me that the Google Search Appliance looks like a rack mounted The Cheat. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Google’s partnership with Dell to distribute enterprise level search solutions using Google’s algorithms, they have been making a splash in server rooms all over the place. On the Google Blog, they discuss how these new search appliances are plug and play goliaths, capable of indexing corporate content like no other and compatible with a wide variety of applications, security setups, and data repositories.

What’s the internet marketing application? Well, the first thing I can see happening with this is using these internal search engines to index all the marketing information the company processes. If that’s easy as Google and Dell make it sound, then you’d be able to quickly pull (using Analytics) the popularity of new marketing materials with your production staff. Are they using it? Which documents are getting the most traffic and clicks? It’d be a great, lazy way to verify that your vision is getting properly implemented. You could also use it to query your PPC and SEO work logs, to see if there are any other cathode lighting clients who you’ve had a hard time getting PPC traffic before noon, or if decreasing the size of your title tags from 70 to 63 characters really makes a difference.

Preaching Persistence With Big-Ticket Leads

June 19, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

When Your Widget Leads Don’t Pan Out

So you’re in the big business of fine widgets. Fine, pricey widgets! And you’ve spent a great deal of time and resources towards your comprehensive online marketing campaigns to make sure that your brand of widgets receives a steady source of traffic from the search engines. And because you did such a killer job, those leads are starting to come in at a steady pace. Congratulations! …but wait. A lot of them have fake phone numbers. Most of them don’t tell you close to exactly what kind of widget they want to buy. And most of them that you write to or call are unreceptive to your pitches. This is going downhill really fast, isn’t it?

Understanding The Widget Buyer

If this has happened to you, before you start panicking, stop, take a deep breath, and consider for a moment the art of persistence. Before I start explaining the benefits of constantly staying in touch with your high-dollar clientele, let’s quickly venture into their mindset for a little reality dose. So you’re looking for this really expensive widget that has all these awesome widget features like turbo charge, and extra strength, and so forth. You’re probably not 100% sure as to what model of widget you want to buy, and certainly not sure as to who you want to buy it from. I mean, that’s why you pulled up Google in the first place. To do some diligent research on your future purchase so that you don’t make a mistake.

Notice that in that paragraph I make no reference to wanting to make a hasty purchase? Probably the most important thing to consider when pitching your potential customers with your pricey wares is that when they contact you they are probably just looking around right now. Casing the joint. Not to rob you, but to find out if your site is for real. See how it compares to others. Taking their time. I realize that’s at odds with your priority, which is getting them to commit as quickly as possible. Well, unfortunately the large majority of sales that you’re probably missing out on are ones that you’re scaring away by being too aggressive and unhelpful. Aggressive in that you’re pushing for a sale right off the bat. Unhelpful in that you’re only sending aggressive marketing materials to your prospects. What you need, my friend, is a sermon on persistence.

How To Gain The Trust Of Your Widget Market

Staying in constant contact with your leads is the best strategy for large-ticket items, yet so many make the mistake of abandoning the leads that don’t yield immediate returns. Labeling them as “not serious.” Well, that’s true, they aren’t serious. Yet. And especially not about doing business with someone who’s only interested in selling them something right now. Here’s where your best marketing friend steps in; email drip marketing. With email drip marketing, you can stay in touch with your leads in a way that is friendly, helpful, and ultimately drives more potential clients your way instead of away from you as fast as possible.

Email Drip Marketing 101

Setting up the drip email marketing system doesn’t have to be difficult. There are three basic steps to it: establishing categories to fit your leads into, drafting relevant and helpful content for each category, and then implementing it using drip email software.

Step One: Settling On Demographic Categories For Your Leads

When setting up your categories, think of the different demographics that could be attracted to your products. Then think of the different widget lines you offer. Set up a group for each demographic and product line. For example, if you have three different main demographics that would be interested in your 2 highly profitable widget lines, then you’d need to set up 6 categories overall. You will use these categories for the next two stages.

Step Two: Drafting Great Original Content To Blast Out To Your Leads

The next step is to draft content that you can send out to these different categories of leads over the next several weeks, months, possibly even years. The strategy you employ will obviously vary depending on your widget industry, but the most important thing is to send your potential clients information that is valuable to them in a way other than just to help them make a purchasing decision. You want to come at them sideways, and then work in a subtle pitch at the end of each message. For example, if you’re in the market of high speed widgets, you could send an article about all the fun nearby places you can go cruising around in a high speed widget. Make the information very personal, use humor, include pictures, even links to audio and video files. At the very end, include a brief paragraph with a link to your site, or better yet, seamlessly include a link to your site in the copy itself without making any sales pitch. That’s just one way you can contact your category of leads though; use newsletters, a series of articles about the widget buying process, send out a page of helpful links about widgets (that include plenty of non-commercial sites, and of course yours). The possibilities are endless, but take the time to plot out a series of emails for each category of leads you have. Have at least a dozen of them to start, and also an introductory email. Once you’ve done that, then you’ll be ready to actually set up the campaign!

Step Three: Setting Up The Drip Marketing Campaign Itself

To set up the campaign, first you’ll need to choose a drip email solution provider from this list:

IContact
Constant Contact
Vertical Response
Bronto

Each one will have its own unique learning curve, features, perks, and potential drawbacks. I will give you the lowdown on these in a future post. Once you’ve settled on one, they all have the same concept: creating groups of contacts to blast out messages to over a period of time. You determine when and what gets sent out to each category of lead by setting up a group for each, and then scheduling those leads to receive the messages you drafted specifically for them. As for exactly how often to contact your leads, that will vary from industry to industry, but don’t let them go for a week without a new message from you. And don’t stop sending them email until they request to be removed from your list.

Getting The Right Leads For Your Drip System

Oh, and one final thing: definitely don’t just buy an email list from some guy in an alley and expect it to work. All drip email providers are vary aware of spammers, and the potential cost it could to do them if they get cracked down upon by the major ISPs for blasting out spam on your behalf. So if you start sending out spam, and send it to a bunch of people who aren’t looking for it, then you’ll surely be blacklisted from that drip provider. The way you get around that is by generating the leads yourself, and fortunately that’s not difficult to do with a little seo content, inbound linking, and a good ppc campaign with landing pages.

Conclusion

So that’s the way you turn your impatient energy into something productive that will yield you more conversions on those big ticket item leads you feel ‘stuck’ with. For a thorough consultation on your business and what the best drip marketing strategy would be for its specific need, please feel free to contact BigSERP.Com.

Content is King.. Is it Really? All Hail Inbound Linking!

June 17, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

It is no secret that one of the best things that a website owner can do is add good, relevant seo content to their site as often as possible. By consistently updating a site with keyword rich, quality content the chances of ranking high naturally become much more likely.

However, before you start devoting all of your free time and/or money to adding content to your site you better do some research because you need to set some resources aside for an additional strategy. According to many SEO professionals, content is extremely important, but is is NOT king!

Depending on your level of SEO knowledge you probably have a fairly good idea of where this is going. If not, then pay attention because you need to be focusing a majority of your SEO efforts on something besides content. That something is Inbound Linking. Some SEO experts are saying that Inbound Links are more important than content.

Whether you agree or disagree that inbound links are more important than content, you need to be concentrating at least half your time and money on a solid linking strategy. For more information on inbound links click here or feel free to drop a comment or email.

Write Incredibly Effective Page Title Tags!

June 14, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

How do I write effective HTML title tags?

In less competitive industries/markets, sometimes all that’s needed for first-page placement on key terms is a simple website with plenty of SEO content and… correctly labeled title tags! When done right, your page title tags (along with the META keywords and description tags) assist the search engines in properly indexing your content. On the other hand, if handled poorly or without thought, title tags can be one of your worst SEO enemies, causing your pages to either be misinterpreted or worse yet be thrown into duplicate content filters. Both of these things result in the search engines disregarding your pages when they consider the most relevant sites for the key phrases that are most important to your business. With so much riding on this 63 character HTML element, let’s make sure and get you off on the right foot with configuring your title tags. Here are some helpful SEO tips that will optimize those tags for you:

1. Be wary of the length of your title tags. On the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) of most of the major search engines, the title tag is used as the first line to identify your website. This line is typically in bold face, and hyperlinks to your site. Now all the search engines have different line character limits before they begin to truncate your title. That’s why it’s important to get the most vital keywords into the first 63 characters. There’s a good chance that everything after that will be replaced by ellipses.

2. Don’t put your corporate branding first. There are exceptions to many rules, and there is one in this case, but unless your company name is already extremely popular and competitive as a key phrase, there’s no reason to put your company branding first and foremost in your title tag. Best practice is to put the company name at the end of the title, after a dash. This way, your site has the best chances of being indexed for the actual key phrases that people are most likely to type into the search engines. And your pages will still get indexed for your company name, especially if it’s a unique one.

3. Prioritize your key phrases. For each page of content, which should be written to emphasize a main key phrase, and several secondary phrases, you should configure the tags to reinforce the importance of those phrases. Always place the most important key phrase, in the exact order that it is typed into the search engine, in the very front of your title tags. Then use commas to separate out the remaining key phrases that are relevant to this page of content, ordering them from most important to least.
(Note: Something that’s at least fun to consider with this is checking out your competition for specific key phrases. If you type in a phrase, and notice that your competition is showing up for that phrase, and all of their titles begin exactly the same, you may want to try and at least switch up the first key word so that when your page displays differently from the crowd. What usually works best is to add original content pages of all kinds of different variations of the phrases you want to show up for, so that increases your chances of having your page appear differently than the others in the SERP.)

4. Use synonyms and stems. The search engines are pretty smart these days. Most of them can equate “websites” with “site,” “sites,” “website,” “web pages,” and so on. So don’t be afraid to use stems of words or synonyms in the second half of your title tags. For example, you could use “car website” early on in your title tag, and then use “car site” later on. Definitely do a little research on your competition and see what synonyms and stems they are having success using, and then do some of your own experimentation. If you need help determining what search engines consider synonyms, Google actually has a cool feature built into it. If you place a tilde (~) in front of a search term, the SERP will return a page full of relevant sites with the synonyms highlighted.

5. Eliminate unnecessary words. Connectors like “the,” “for,” and “a” are disregarded by many search engines, so there’s no need to waste precious real estate in your title tags for them. Eliminate them wherever it makes sense to.

6. Don’t completely ignore formatting. In the end, the title tag is what searchers are going to see as the representation of your page. So when you’re finished considering all the previous tips, give your title a final look and see if there aren’t a couple of small formatting touches you can make to polish the look of the title up. Adding a colon or a connector here and there can make a comma-separated list of keywords look more like an ad, and will increase the chances that once you actually get on the first page, that someone will clickthrough to you.

If you utilize these tips to the fullest, and get plenty of practice, your content will be indexed properly, and will receive the best consideration by the search engines for placement in the SERP. Don’t forget to check out the other free SEO tips provided on BigSERP.Com, and don’t hesitate to contact us if you need professional assistance with optimizing your entire site’s title and META page tags.

Asking For The Right Amount of Information On Your Forms

June 14, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

Boring as they might be at times, still one of the biggest tools in your lead generation arsenal these days are forms. Forms not only give you a way of contacting your visitors, they can also be powerful pre-qualifying tools. For newbies, the key is making sure you don’t make a colossal mistake like asking for too much from your visitors. In fact, figuring out just the right amount of information to ask for is crucial to your online business.

As a general rule, concerning the information required on your lead generation forms, the more data you ask for up front, the less likely someone is to fill out the form. So logic dictates that you should figure out what you really need from your visitors. If you need more than a few fields of information from the visitors you’ve driven to your form from a landing page or other marketing (some forms, such as those that add a visitor to an email list, should only require 1 field!), then you should break apart your form into several, more easily digestible forms.

If you offer many different services, and want to offer them on the same page, there are some really cool things you can do with interactive forms. For example, you can ask for basic contact information on the first form. Then, on the second form, you can ask a question that qualifies your visitor. Based on the answer to that form, the next form can be customized to ask just the right follow up question.

So to sum it up, definitely don’t ask for too much information from your visitors. Whenever possible, stagger larger forms into multiple smaller ones. And finally, use the power of scripting to make interactive forms that make your visitors feel like they are only entering in information that pertains to what they are looking to buy from you!

Should you need professional assistance optimizing your website’s forms, the SEO analysts of BigSERP.Com offer their expert services at a competitive rate, and always with a free initial consultation.

Don’t Mess With The PageRank Success Your Site Has!

June 13, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

This tip is for those of you running an online business that has managed to achieve the holy grail of internet marketing: first page natural placement for terms that are highly relevant to your products and services. Some frustrated site owners, out of concern for a lackluster website design, or a re-branding of some sort, will make the worst mistake possible… they will mess with success! Anyone who has learned this harsh lesson first-hand will tell you that it doesn’t take much for the search engines to re-index your site. And once your site goes into that re-indexing purgatory, who knows how long it’ll take to get back. If it gets anywhere near where it was before. Trust us, it’s not worth risking first page placement to rebrand your site, or tweak with your tags.

Here are just a few things that can cause your site to be re-indexed:

1. Changing page tags, including the page title and META tags.

2. Completely changing the content on your home page, especially if that content contains links.

3. Changing your homepage layout, especially if it reorders your links and content on the page.

So be ultra careful whenever you change any of these things, because once you lose that prime positioning, it is very hard to get back. This is especially true for sites that do not have a ton of inbound links established.

Our recommendations are for you to consult with a professional. Often times, the best solution involves developing another site and using your old one to boost the new one, or taking position reinforcing measures before making major changes to your site. But the best course of action is always found after carefully considering your business and its marketing goals. Please let the SEO experts here at BigSERP.Com assist you with a free consultation. We can turnaround your current campaign, or custom design a successful solution from scratch for you.

Combined PPC/SEO/Link Marketing Strategies

June 12, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

In our line of work we must get asked about it hundreds of times a year, so it makes sense to dedicate a post to the topic: getting your site 24/7 coverage on the search engines. Most want to know what it takes to get to that point. We’ll run you through a common mistake, and then the best strategy.

Many of our PPC clients initially don’t opt into any natural strategies (despite our warnings) because most of them have a large up-front cost associated with them. These same clients find themselves wondering why their ads aren’t serving all the time at top positions in the SERP. It’s hard for many to accept, but quite often ad budgets simply will not allow for day and night coverage for those highly-relevant, coveted terms. What’s even worse about this is that the reaction of some of these clients is to then throw more money at PPC, forcing their way to the top against our recommendations. In the end, they end up with a relatively small amount of high-quality traffic that isn’t cost-effective, and has no long-term value to the site. Don’t make the same mistake they quite often do: let us implement for you a blended online marketing strategy that gets your site ranked on the first page twice!

Of course, we’ll still set up a PPC account for you. But instead of going for position #1, we’ll do some “position surfing” to get you quality traffic at a price that won’t break your bank each month. Then we’ll take an initial budget and dedicate it to two things that your marketing strategy should not be without: highly relevant SEO content that targets specific key phrases that you want to show up for in the SERP, and link building campaigns that will generate valuable inbound links to your site from high ranking, relevant sources. And then we’ll re-allocate part of your PPC budget to both content and link maintenance, meaning we’ll continue to build on the robust content and rich inbound links coming into your site on a monthly basis.

The end result, as we have seen for so many of our clients, is first page placement not only on the PPC results, but also in the natural SERP. And when you have both of those, it more than doubles the chances you’ll get a click, and also keeps a competitor out of one of those slots!

So definitely utilize this combined marketing strategy to the fullest. And don’t hesitate to contact us if you’d like a quote on having BigSERP professionally set it all up for you… we’re here to help you achieve your online marketing goals.

Turning Those Leads Into Conversions

June 11, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

When it comes to turning those leads that come in through your PPC campaigns and SEO efforts, the thing that’s most important is to maximize the chances you have with each lead. Every bit of effort helps, as over time you’ll end up with thousands more in sales.

Follow up on the leads you receive is probably the most important thing when it comes to getting the most conversions out of them. If a lead isn’t followed up on promptly, constantly, and with relevant information, you will lose them to someone who provides all three. Remember that most of the leads you receive don’t use your website exclusively; they are active shoppers who are trying to get a feel for what you do, along with dozens of other sites. So that’s why it’s crucial to follow up with them right away (within the hour if at all possible), put them on a drip-marketing system so they will continue to see your branding over time, and also make sure that information you send to them is really helpful. Many buyers are just getting their toes wet as far as buying large-ticket items is concerned, so that’s another thing to consider; many of them won’t be ready to ‘get serious’ for months. That’s all the more reason to keep in touch with them over time! The person who’s there for them the entire time, even if they aren’t interested in responding right away, is usually the one they contact when the time comes to finally make a decision on who to work with.

If you need someone to step in and maximize the impact of your online marketing campaigns, look no further! The professionals at BigSERP.Com are here to assist you with expert SEO & PPC consultation, all the way from concept to your successfully launched campaign. We always offer a free initial consultation to get you on the right track.