Jan
6

Use Meta Description Tags to Improve Search Engine Marketing Results

Cuong Huynh on January 6th, 2009

A page’s meta description tag is one of the most important elements of your search engine optimization activities from Google’s standpoint.

When you’re marketing your site online and hope that people will find their way to your content or offering, most of the traffic coming to your site will be through organic searches. In a typical Google search engine result, as shown below for the search phrase “hybrid cars compendium”, what you normally see are the page title snippet (from the meta title tag), description snippet (from the meta description tag), url and page size, then the cached version of the page followed by the “Similar pages” link.
google organic search result Use Meta Description Tags to Improve Search Engine Marketing Results
It’s clear that Google tends to choose the title and description metas as snippets to show in search results, although there’s a caveat to keep in mind. Obviously Google is not going to tell us what it does or does not do exactly. However Google does indicate that it might use other relevant sections of your page’s visible text if those do a better job matching up with a searcher’s query (in Google’s eye of course). So if you want control then write your own description that is relevant.

According to Google, the description is important because it gives search engines a summary of what your page is about. The description can be a couple of sentences in length and should be relevant to your content as explained above. From my experience it’s probably a good idea to load all your important keywords within the first 170 or so characters of the description. Anything beyond that may get cut off and not shown in the search result snippets.

And here’s a bonus, courtesy of Google itself. You can use the Google Webmaster Tools to analyze your title and meta description against Google’s expectations. This handy tool tells you if your meta tags are too short, too long or even duplicated. Just log in to your Google account, select Webmaster Tools, find your site and go to Diagnotics/Content Analysis area. Then you can fix any problem listed in the analysis.

Writing proper meta description should always be part of your best practices in search engine optimization and search engine marketing efforts. It’s time well spent to ensure visitors find what they’re looking for. In summary here are some simple rules:

  • Write relevant, focussed description that accurately summarizes the page’s content to inform and attract searchers.
  • Write unique description for each web page on your site.
  • Avoid descriptions that are too generic.
  • Avoid filling description with only keywords. 

By the way, because good descriptions attract visitors, you’ll get improved click-through rates (CTR) from the search engine results pages (SERPs), but no effect for your search result ranking.

It’s always a good idea to begin working your SEO before a new site goes live. But what if you already have a functioning site with lots of pages? Should you go back to your pages to redo/improve description metas? It’s probably worth it, at least for those pages with the best/most relevant/unique content.

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Tags: meta description tag, meta tags, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search engine result, SEM, SEO, SERP

Customer Facing, Google SEO Techniques, SEO Marketing 1 Comment »

Dec
30

One Secret to Successful SEO, If You Don’t Do Anything Else

Cuong Huynh on December 30th, 2008

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important element of getting a website found by the Internet content reader. After all, without a reader to consume your content, there’s no reason for anyone or any organization to have a website, thus no reason for online marketing and SEO.

The reader, or consumer of content, normally uses some kind of search engine such as Google, Yahoo, MSN (or a whole host of others) to find the information s/he needs. But we as marketers must always keep one thing straight: SEO and search engine are only a mean to an end. SEO is not the end goal itself. It is the content that is the end that serves the readers. This is the reason why providing relevant, useful information for visitors to consume is a crucial step in the SEO process.

Think of it this way. Decisions you make and things you do to attract visitors to your site must be based first and foremost on what’s best for the visitors. If this is not the case, even if a visitor somehow finds your site, s/he can and will immediately leave if the content searched for does not exist. Good content attracts high traffic. Conversely, useless content repels visitors.

In summary, if you do nothing else but just concentrate on creating great and captivating content, you already have a winning SEO strategy in place.

So are you spending a good amount of time on developing great content as part of your SEO strategy?

Tags: great content, Inbound Marketing, Marketing, optimization, optimization seo, search engine optimization, SEO

Google SEO Techniques, SEO Marketing No comments yet, but your thoughts are welcome »
Dec
26

Blogging for SEO Benefits, Plus a Great Side Effect

Cuong Huynh on December 26th, 2008

Blogging can bring excellent and relatively quick search engine optimization (SEO) benefits to a company’s website. Catfish over at BusinessOnline has some great tips for marketers in the blogging department to help with search engine optimization (SEO). Called “3 Top Ways Blogging Enhances Your SEO Campaign“, the article touches on the 3 easy-for-executive-to-understand reasons why blogging is important for any corporation.

In a nutshell, the 3 benefits blogging can bring your business are:

  • Blogging creates new content opportunities. With blogging, a marketer can write marketing content relevant to any desired marketing message or campaign with very little effort, and without messing up the main corporate website. For blogging to be effective, all blog content should be keyword focused.
  • Blogging creates new internal link opportunities. Because of new keyword focused content being generated regularly, there are ample of opportunities for internal linking between keywords and other relevant blog posts and articles. And when you automate this process with tools such as the Cross Linker WordPress Plugin for WordPress (as suggested by Catfish), the benefits can be multiplied ten-fold, as older content are given new life with every new keyword linking back to them.
  • Blogging creates new external link opportunities. Blogging by its nature encourages communication between readers and content creators. If your content is captivating, interesting and useful to others, they will want to link back to your source article, vote for or recommend your content to others on social sites, and subscribe to your content through RSS feeds.

These are all excellent reasons for companies to get into blogging. But there is an additional good side effect from a marketer’s point of view. Blogging provides a critical, yet almost forgotten basic skill a good marketer must possess: the writing skill.

Anyone and everyone can claim to have excellent verbal and written communication skills. But let’s be honest to ourselves and our customers, how much formal marketing communications do you as a marketer actually write? And how often? The fact is we get bogged down in everyday to-do lists and deadlines that we no longer write proper marketing communications. Blogging brings good writing back to marketing communications.

And you know the saying is still true. With practice comes perfection.

So are you and your organization blogging? If not, what are some of the hindering factors? Share your experience with us.

Tags: Marketing Communications, optimization seo, search engine optimization, SEO, SEO Marketing

Blogging, Corporate Marketing, Customer Facing, Google SEO Techniques, Marketing, Marketing Communications, SEO Marketing, Social Media, Social Network Marketing, Viral Marketing No comments yet, but your thoughts are welcome »
Dec
23

How to Ensure Google and SEO Friendly Page Title

Cuong Huynh on December 23rd, 2008

Web page titles are an important element of getting traffic to your site for the following reasons:

  • Page title is one of the few elements search engines show in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Therefore the words in the page title do carry significant authority in the subject matter of your web page content.
  • Because page titles are representative of the content on a page, it’s an effective technique to link to pages using their page title as the link anchor text. This is another SEO technique discussed in another post on link anchor text, and it directly influences click-through rate (CTR).
  • On a SERP, more informative page titles are likely to attract clicks from a searcher because it meets his search needs. Good, descriptive titles stimulate an emotional response and promise to the searcher that what he is looking for can be had by clicking on your search result. This is a key differentiator between your site and other sites listed on the same SERP.

It is recommended that your page titles be different from page to page on your site. And when pages have similar content, thus causing similar sounding page titles, try to creatively vary the keywords within the title so it is clear that the 2 titles are different and represent 2 different pages.

In addition, the format, order, and word selection of the words in your page title should be somewhat different than the words in your page meta description and on page headers.

Finally, if you look at a typical Google search result page, you’ll notice that Google does not display the page title beyond 65-70 characters. Therefore your title should fit within 65-70 characters and anything beyond that will be cut off by the search engine. You may still write longer than this character budget to provide great user experience for your web visitors, but be sure to put all important keywords up front before the 70th character.

Tags: descriptive titles, Google, google search, page title, post, results, search engine result, search engines, search result page, SEO, SERP, traffic, web page content, web page titles

Google SEO Techniques, SEO Marketing No comments yet, but your thoughts are welcome »
Dec
18

Social Media Done Right: U.S. Air Force

Cuong Huynh on December 18th, 2008

Need a little help to kick-start your social media marketing? Here are some tips from the Air Force.

From a post by David Meerman Scott on WebInkNow, the U.S. Air Force is now Armed with Social Media. The Air Force apparently now has a team called the Air Force Emerging Technology team, led by Capt. David Faggard of the Air Force Public Affairs Agency in the Pentagon. The group is responsible for “developing strategy, policy and plans for an ever-changing communication landscape for communicators worldwide”. This includes their main mission of using “current and developing Web 2.0 applications as a way to actively engage conversations between Airmen and the general public”. By any name, this is social media marketing at its core.

It is refreshing to see such a large organization committing and embracing social media as an important communication and public relations tool. This serves as a good example for private corporations who are still on the fence or even “not sure” on how to proceed with social media. When you are committed and do it right, social media can be one of your best marketing and PR friends. In the case of a global organization like the U.S. Air Force, what did it take to pull this off? I’m sure it was not easy flying. In Capt. Faggard’s words, “There has been resistance; but the leadership of the Air Force is very supportive of what the expert communicators say are the best ways to reach people”, especially young people.

Here are a few tips we can learn from the USAF on getting involved in social media:

  • Encourage, empower and employ all your human resources as communicators for the organization. The problem is not that people can’t represent their companies properly. It’s the lack of training and guidance from upper management on corporate policies governing such communication channel. Employees are always good resources to advocate for the company. For the Air Force, the program’s goal “is that every single Airman is an on-line communicator.” So what’s your corporate goal?
  • Again for the Air Force, the focus is on “Direct Action within Social Media (blogging, counter-blogging, posting products to YouTube, etc.); Monitoring and Analysis of the Social Media landscape (relating to Air Force and Airmen); and policy and education (educating all Public Affairs practitioners and the bigger Air Force on Social Media).” So if you’re not sure where to start your social media program, as a starting point, just replace “Air Force” and “Airmen” in the statement above with whatever appropriate for your organization. It’s totally applicable.
  • Capt. Faggard explains “counter-blogging” as when “Airmen counter the people out there in the blogosphere who have negative opinions about the US government and the air force.” Well this sounds 100% applicable to corporate marketing and PR to me.
  • According to Capt. Faggard, “We educate people in the Air Force about security of social media to make sure that people don’t expose secrets via Twitter or Facebook…” Again this is totally applicable to private corporations when running a social media campaign. Inaction is not a good option. The key is proper education and guideline must be provided to your team to carry out the mission.
  • “Besides Twitter, Capt. Faggard writes The Official Blog of the U.S. Air Force; has pages on YouTube, MySpace and Facebook; helps publicize a Second Life area called Huffman Prairie; contributes to iReport (user name USAFPA); and is on Friendfeed, Digg, Delicious, Slashdot, Newsvine, Reddit. There’s Air Force widgets. And there’s even a video mashup contest for high schools to show school spirit sponsored by the Air Force.” It’s a pretty impressive list of social media channels. However, it would be not be fair to expect a new corporate team to try doing all these things at the start. Just pick a few in combination that you’re most comfortable with and add new channels as you go. The important thing here is to get started.

Finally, courtesy of David Meerman Scott’s site, below is the detailed Air Force blog assessment flowchart shared by Capt. Faggard. It provides a visual representation of what social media work is all about. It’s obvious that you don’t have to be in the Air Force to understand and use it. We actually paid for this and I hope you’ll find good uses for it. I know I will.

In the end you don’t have to be a large organization to employ social media in your marketing mix. The Air Force is really using the resources it already has, and so can we.

Click on image to view larger version (172KB).

air force blog assessment 133x200 Social Media Done Right: U.S. Air Force

Tags: Social Media, social media marketing, social network, Social Network Marketing, US Air Force, USAF

Corporate Marketing, Customer Facing, Marketing Communications, Social Media, Social Network Marketing 1 Comment »
Dec
13

Beware the Marketing Creeps

Cuong Huynh on December 13th, 2008

Most of us recognize a marketing creep when we see one. But not many are willing or equipped to deal with it.

What’s a marketing creep? Marketing creep is comparable to feature creep in web development, or design creep in engineering. In whatever name or industry, marketing, feature or design creep refers to unforeseen requests for additions and changes that are outside the project scope. Generically it can be called scope or requirement creep, but again they all mean the same thing: You’ll run into trouble if you’re not careful.

Why is this important? We all have our own way of dealing with marketing creep in a traditional marketing, but with online marketing, the problem can be much more easily compounded. New features can creep into the project at any time, therefore strict project management and control is crucial.

The fact is, features are normally agreed upon with the client and formalized in a contractual agreement at the beginning of the project. Considering today’s communication options are available in many forms including voicemail, email, text, instant messaging, even through social media channels like Twitter and others, ideas being kicked around in these remote communication methods can easily become a new, undocumented feature or requirement without a formal agreement. Over time the list grows uncontrollably and can spell trouble for your marketing project or campaign. SEO itself is especially vulnerable to feature creep.

Kevin Lee writing for Online Marketing for Marketers touches on this issue in his article “Learn How to Say No to Dumb Ideas“. He suggests to deal with the issue by paying attention to these 4 things:

Beware “Pet Projects”
There are always plenty of tasks and projects on any road map or agenda, many of them with a high likelihood of success. Otherwise those tasks and strategies wouldn’t have made it onto the roadmap (assuming the team putting the roadmap together was competent). Yet it isn’t unusual to see a strong personality on a team or outside supervisor suddenly derail a highly profitable project plan with some pet project…

Remember: You’re Being Paid For Your Expertise

Sure, saying no feels dangerous. And there’s still a decent chance that a superior or client will override your objections. In reality, once you become a search marketing professional, your opinions (backed up by experience and expertise) are what you get paid for…

Fully Analyze the Cost of Changing Directions

The question becomes how do you present your case when you think a campaign is about to go off track due to a “pet project” inserted by a well-meaning senior manager or a client. The first method that can be effective is the pros and cons discussion…

Search Engine Reps Will Never Have Your Unique Expertise

Interestingly, as a search marketing expert, your responsibilities include protecting the marketing budget and campaign from outside influences who promote projects that have a low expected return…

Jacob Gube also offers some excellent ideas in “Eight Tips on How to Manage Feature Creep” in his post over at SixRevisions.com. Based mostly from his own experience, you may find them useful below:

1. Accept that feature creep will happen.

Feature creep is a natural part of any project-based work. Acknowledging this eventuality will allow you to be prepared when it finally rears it’s ugly code-retrofitting, design-wrecking head. Anticipating unforeseen changes in your plans forces you to be more adaptable, and promotes the development of a solution that’s flexible and malleable to your client’s ever-changing needs.

2. Commit enough time to requirements-gathering.

Easy and fairly common sense. Just don’t rush the planning phase of projects.

3. Giving a hand might cost you your arm.

If you constantly give in to changes, you might be get more of them in the future. Try to set boundaries of what is and isn’t appropriate to revise, this not only prevents unneeded requests for changes, but gives the project strict quality-control guidelines.

4. Be the devil’s advocate when changes are requested.

You were hired and assigned to the project because of your knowledge and expertise. Don’t be afraid to contradict unwise feature requests by providing well-formed reasons that the project should proceed as originally planned.

5. Be task-oriented, not vision-oriented.

Be clear on what it is, exactly, you’re developing for the client. Don’t promise a grand, exciting, but ambiguous/ambitious end result.

6. Shed the “Customer is Always Right” mentality.

You, more often than not, are a more qualified judge of how things should be developed. You’re not working to get a big tip at the end. Don’t feel pressured to do something that isn’t in the job description or something you feel will lead to a less desirable end product.

7. Research before committing.

If you think the budget and timeline can handle a modification in plans, research thoroughly on what the change actually entails before committing.

8. Realize that feature creep is a two-way street.

Clients and employers aren’t (purely) evil. They don’t intend to make our jobs more difficult. Oftentimes it’s our desire to please, to prove our worth, and our perfectionist mentality that can be, in part if not equally, to blame. If feature creep happens, it’s only because we allow it to.

So how are you dealing with your own marketing creeps?
What would you do if you realize, way deep into a project, you now have a long list of features that were regretfully accepted verbally?
And what do you suggest the best ways to bring feature creep back to the negotiating table?

Share your experience with us.

Tags: feature creep, marketing campaign, project management, requirements, SEO Marketing

Corporate Marketing, Customer Facing, Internal Relationship, Marketing, Marketing Communications, Online Marketing, SEO Marketing No comments yet, but your thoughts are welcome »