Content and relevant information are king. We all heard marketing experts say if you want to attract visitors, you should provide relevant content. Even Google itself says so in its Webmaster guidelines. Let’s face it. Web users, both the consumer and the business kinds, are all after a single thing when using their search engines: information. So it makes good sense to give them exactly what they want. You’ll achieve your SEO goals fasters, while retaining visitor loyalty at the same time.

Knowing what web users do is the key to attracting them to your site. You have essentially two challenges:

1. To be found by information seekers, and once found,
2. To attract and retain them.

While we can follow a number of steps to address each of these challenges separately, there are things we can do that benefit both, killing 2 birds with one stone, so to speak. Let’s look at some key behaviors of typical web visitors:

• Web users are information hounds. Because of the speed and convenient of the Internet, information is always at the users’ fingertips – both good and bad information. So give lots of information, and differentiate yourself from the amateurs with great quality content.
• Web users are analytical. While the fingers are clicking, the minds are on high level of awareness and working overtime. There are only two kinds of visitors that matter to you. One is the browsers who want something but not sure exactly what. The other is those on a mission to find exactly what they want at the best deal they can get. Either way, the web users are actively analyzing the content they find.
• Web users are impatient and critical. Because of the available choices and the speed available to get to those choices, web users have been trained to be impatient. If they can’t find what they want, they’ll just move on to the next provider. 
• Web users scan content. They don’t read content. Web users know there may be better choices out there waiting for them to discover, and their impatience kicks in. Web users are fast scanners. So if your content is thousands of words long and contains just fluff in the first paragraph, or requires 3-4 paragraphs to lay out your case, then you’re losing readers fast.
• Web users don’t like to be sold. Sales pitches are so old school. You and I don’t like to be sold, we like to decide for ourselves. So consider dropping the aggressive spiel. 

If you stop and think about it, these are exactly our own behaviors, aren’t they? It’s pretty easy to understand and all you have to do is focus your efforts on what many call “inbound marketing” instead.

So what do we do with these behaviors? The best thing to do is addressing them head-on. Marketers have a single goal which is to sell something. But amateur marketers don’t realize that it’s very easy to fall into the selling mode trap. It takes more effort, but with much more effective results, to attract attention through a good combination of relevant information and great value proposition. The sales process will follow naturally.

Here are a few tips on writing relevant content.

1. Define your topic clearly and early in your content. This gets you found in relevant searches above your competitors, and lets visitors know immediately that they are in the right place with the right information, effectively answering their key question: “Am I in the right place?”
2. Keep your content short and to the point. If you have a lot to say on the subject, break them into sections, bulleted lists, or even series of articles. This does 2 things: a) it answers quickly the visitor’s question “is there something for me here?” and b) facilitates their tendency to scan your content.
3. Drop the use of teasers and fluff. I’m never a fan of teasers. They waste my time and indicate to me that the website has nothing to offer me. If you have to read through paragraphs after paragraphs of copy, and at the end still have to take additional actions with the promise of receiving the information sought, wouldn’t you feel cheated? So take the direct approach, don’t play around and make the content easy to get to.

The bottom line: consider how your visitors like to consume content and present your information to benefit their search. In the end, if your content is relevant with clear value proposition, you’ll reduce your bounce rate without resorting to sneaky tactics.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

How to Write Relevant Content by Understanding Search Behaviors

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Search engine optimization (SEO) is a powerful tool for managing many aspects of your organization’s online marketing. One of the least use of SEO, but also one of the most important, is online reputation management.

A simple search for your name and keywords associated with your name and products will reveal things about your company that you may not be aware of. There will be things that you can easily fix, while others are harder to resolve, but more often than not, all can be managed. If you’re already doing SEO for your website, then the technique is directly applicable for reputation management. The only major difference is normal SEO is a marketing and sales function. When applied to reputation management, you add public relations (PR) to the team.

Here are few ideas to get started. 

• Know what’s out there. Do a thorough search of terms related to your business name, products and services, like you’re doing a keyword analysis. Be sure to pay attention to the blogosphere and social networking sites. These are the places where you’ll find people discussing and sharing their own experiences about your products and services, both positive and negative.
• Know your battlegrounds. You may find sites and blogs where your reputation is being discussed in positive or negative lights, and you’ll also find sites and blogs where there’s no discussion about your name and products at all. These are both valuable sites to get involved in, as your team will need to not only create marketing and PR campaigns to deal with (or take advantage of) the conversations, but also to create presence where there is lacking.
• Know your online social etiquette. Whatever your campaign goals are, you must adhere to proper social networking etiquette and mind your online social manners. Be yourself, be truthful, be honest, be helpful, and above all, be respectful and understanding of the public’s viewpoints. There are many ways to tell your story, and it’s much better to take the join-and-conquer approach instead of going in with your guns blazing.
• Know where the action is. If you can join a discussion to tell your side of the story or to do damage control, by all means do it. This will allow you to head off a problem straight on, or prevent an issue from blowing out of hand. By doing this, you’ll be seen as part of the solution, as you are actively managing your reputation at the same time. Additionally, you’ll leave a trail of written communication representing your company’s viewpoints around the web. This means when these discussions are found in search results, then your company is also found. This is effective SEO at work. 
• Know your first rule of SEO: content. Applying other SEO techniques such as writing keyword-rich content in comments, responses, blogs, forums and chat rooms will further help get your story found in relevant search results. Make it a habit, no, a policy, to always be helpful to the group with good and useful information about your company, products, services and industry. Doing this without being and sounding pushy will get your content found by your potential customers.

Actively managing your reputation through SEO and social networking will bring back immediate and measurable benefits. Reputation management should be an ongoing process. Don’t wait until you really have to manage your reputation, but manage it before you need to. Your name, and the reputation tagged to your name, is so important, you need to start managing it with the utmost urgency. After all, if you don’t care about your reputation, why should your customers?

So what are you doing to manage your reputation, online and offline? Whether you have a campaign or plan in place, try adding SEO and social networking to the mix. And don’t forget to share your experience with us in the comment below. We need all the help we can get. Thanks.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

SEO and Social Networking as Reputation Management Tools

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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.

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.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Use Meta Description Tags to Improve Search Engine Marketing Results

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• About Cuong Huynh
• About Marketing Autopsy

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?

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

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

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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.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Blogging for SEO Benefits, Plus a Great Side Effect

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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.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

How to Ensure Google and SEO Friendly Page Title

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Thank you for visiting Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Marketing Autopsy Blog is a place to collect, share and discuss the good and bad marketing ideas, with special attention on enterprise social networking, new media, inbound marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. It’s also a place to collect new thoughts, tools and trends about the ever changing marketing world.

It is undeniable that in marketing it is critical to keep up with techniques, ideas and tools that are continually developed and made available. Learning must be unrelenting so that we can effectively serve our clients/employers in any business climate. There’s nothing like a great marketing campaign executed efficiently, with innovation and creativity, on time and budget, with measurable results and buzz, all while achieving established goals and our client reaps the benefits.

Today online marketing strategy is even more critical as inbound, social network and viral marketing give a whole new set of challenges and opportunities. In this environment, it is important to understand what to do as much as what not to do in inbound marketing and SEO marketing.

Critiques, suggestions and ideas are always welcome. Please subscribe to Marketing Autopsy Blog if you haven’t done so already. Also follow me on Twitter @cuonghuynh.

Cuong Huynh

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

About Marketing Autopsy

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