• SEOMOZ’s new LDA research suggests that content may have more weight than links for SERPS
• Use social sites to learn about how customers are talking about / searching on your keywords
• Stop link building, build a game plan first!
• For blog posts, don’t write headlines for SEO, write headlines for trends and attention e.g. tie a headline into current event / topic
• For blogs, make your own URLS. Use the YOURLS plug in for Word Press Blog

As a freelance marketing consultant here in Seattle working with SEO specialists, I truly enjoyed being surrounded by the best of the best in the search industry.

If you need help building your brand online give me a call and we can pull together the right online strategy and team to deliver results for your business: 206-612-2723.

carmen@waanda.com

Here are my top 5 take aways from day one:

• It’s all about domain stacking especially if you have a well known brand then take advantage of this new benefit from Google whereby you can win potentially 7 or 8 of the top 10 spots on page one by optimizing several of your key website pages (e.g. home, about, contact, main categories etc). Remember though, you’ll need as many links to those pages as your home to get these spots.
• Optimize the heck out of images and video - need some quick wins? Competition is not as fierce for Google image and video search so you can get some easy and solid search traffic by optimizing the images you have on your site or adding videos.
• Don’t host all of your video on You Tube - mix it up a bit. If your goal is pure brand awareness / video views then post on You Tube first and foremost. If your goal is SEO and traffic to your site then post on your site first then re-name and post on You Tube, or simply alternate, posting one video on your site (with video hosting service such as Wistia) and then next time post on You Tube.
• Consider using SERP snip its (images / videos / jump to links / forum snip its and other types of rich snip its to enhance your SEO listings. Note: you will need to get approval from Google to use yours.
• Watch for those 4th place PPC ads that potentially perform well as they sit near the traditional SEO first place spot.

Well, I’m here in Seattle at the SEO MOZ conference day two so stay tuned as I expand on the above points in one of my next blog posts and add in additional learnings from day two.

Need a few tidbits on search marketing, online marketing and branding online? Email me at carmen@waanda.com today.

Well - it has been MONTHS since I wrote in my blog due to the fact that I have been 100% completely full to capacity serving my client base as a marketing consultant here in the Seattle, WA area. I have been spending a good chunk of my time developing social media and SEO programs for my ecommerce retail client and came across this request for a link exchange. I am not a believer in these spam, quantity versus quality type of link exchanges so wouldn’t have even bothered if it was properly executed but quite frankly it is the worst case of how NOT to request a link exchange I have ever seen so decided to share it.  (Note: my client is a retail clothing company and his client / company was findasnowblower.com and he is suggesting that we would be a good match - hmmmm)

Want to get real traction? Better to sign up for high traffic directories, distribute press releases, get product reviews on media and blog sites or get your manufacturers / vendors to link to you.

Definatey don’t try something like this:

_____________________________________________________________________________________

To: my email and about 30 other company emails

Subject: FWD Partnership Agreement

Hello,

I have found your website <partner domain> when searching the web on the topics related to my website theme.

I must say your site content is very good and I think we would benefit much from possible partnership - for example link exchange. This would bring more targeted traffic to our sites, plus increase our websites’ weight at the search engines, as they give greater value to the links from the topic-related sites rather than irrelevant backlinks.Alex Brown, 

My website findasnowblower.com is definitely related to yours.

I would be glad to link to your site in return to you linking back to mine.
Feel free to email me direct to usproblogger @ gmail dot com to discuss the details on the possible partnership.

Hope for the fruitful cooperation,

Best regards,

______________________________________________________________________________________

Need some more ideas and better ways to see real SEO results? Give me a call (206) 612 - 2723.

carmen@waanda.com

• 135,000,000+ blogs
• 10’s of thousands of “Mommy Bloggers”
• Top Mommy Bloggers Identified by Nielsen Ratings (email me for the Nielsen report)

Power Pack includes:
- Maria Bailey (http://www.bluesuit.com)
- Lisa Belkin (http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com)
- Alice Bradley (http://www.finslippy.com)
- Daphne Brogdon (http://coolmom.com)
- Amy Clark (http://www.momadvice.com)
- Stacy Debroff (http://www.momcentral.com) 
- Asha Dornfest (http://www.parenthacks.com)
- Jessica Gottlieb (http://www.jessicagottlieb.com)
- Christine Koh (http://www.bostonmamas.com)
- Jenny Lawson (http://www.thebloggess.com) 
- Dana Loesch (http://www.themamalogues.com)
- Audrey McClelland (http://www.momgenerations.com)
- Wendy Piersall (http://www.wendypiersall.com)
- Mindy Roberts (http://themommyblog.net) 
- Jessica Smith (http://www.jessicaknows.com)

• Mommy bloggers are attending a variety of mommmy blogger conferences
  - http://www.blogher.com/blogher_conference/conf
• Moms are heavy readers of blogs and active social media site users
  - looking for advice, coupons, share stories, make a connection
• Almost a million blog posts in typical 24 hour period
• Mommy Bloggers very active on Twitter
• 1,111,991,000 – number of Tweets to date
  - (see an up to the minute count http://popacular.com/gigatweet/)
• 3,000,000 – number of Tweets/day(March 2008) (from TechCrunch)
• 1,212,736 – number of followers for @wholefoods
• 1,180,984 – number of followers of # 1 Mommy Blogger (Heather Armstrong) @Dooce
• 2,000 to 3,000 – typical number of followers of Mommy Bloggers

I was so impressed with all of these powerful moms that I have embarked upon a mega social media blitz of my own, beefing up my own twitter account (@waanda.com), signing up for various blogs, emails and following these fine ladies on twitter.  I’ve also begun participating in some of the great promos that I’ve found like this one from http://simplysweethome.blogspot.com/2009/08/business-card-giveaway.html and true to my word, I’m mentioning Jerri’s promo here in my blog. 

You should give it a go yourself, or if you are too busy and would prefer to have a freelance marketing consultant manage your blog marketing plan or social media marketing activities for you, drop me a line (carmen@waanda.com) or call me at 206-612-2723. Or catch me at the next BlogHer conference…Fun!

We are at a critical point in the business so this is a very important decision which (we anticipate) will greatly increase the company’s growth and so I was tasked with doing extensive research around what options were available to us and the pros and cons of each.

I started by looking at a wide range of companies – apples to oranges to bananas – until we narrowed it down to looking at just apples. Initially we looked at e-commerce technology (shopping cart platform) companies, companies strong in PPC and Internet Advertising, companies strong in SEO and finally companies that were strong across the board with SEM and SEO, web design and development and Internet Advertising.

During the process we came to the realization that we needed to separate our project into two parts; (1) finding a strong web marketing agency and (2) finding a strong web design / development partner and then decide whether or not we should have two separate companies to work with or having one company do it all.

It was fairly easy to find a solid web marketing agency and after speaking with eVisibility, Increase Visibility and WebMetro.com (all listed on the top 25 SEO marketing agencies list http://www.topseos.com/rankings-of-best-search-engine-optimization-companies) we decided to go with WebMetro.com.

Deciding on a web design/web development solution was a much more difficult decision to make.

The first part of our decision was to decide whether or not to lease a platform (like 3D Cart or Volusion) and build our own website (kind of a self-serve model) or whether it is better to work with an agency to build a custom cart using top end shopping cart software (like Shop Site or aspdotnetstorefront.com). The difference in price would be about $20K+ ($20K for a leased, self-serve a.k.a. ‘all in one’ platform and about $45K ++ for a custom site).

As you may know, there are pros and cons of each. As Kirk Waterman of WebMetro.com stated very well: “Websites and the Internet are the new real estate with your site being the home/business/structure and all of the places you occupy on the web being the land. How nice the structure is may be as important as how much real estate you occupy.  Leased platforms – ‘all in one solutions’ – are just like renting a house or leasing a car. You often give up control and ownership of your business. Solutions like Volusion, Yahoo Storefront or Pro Stores are good for small businesses or companies that want to build equity and sell. But even then your value is diminished because you’re forcing the new owner to buy into a leased property. And if and when you or the new owner want to transfer the property to individual ownership, the cost to transfer the site to an individual platform is always higher than anticipated and you never know how much of the online and overall value of the site you may lose when you finally do a DNS redirect. Overall you hold much more equity when you own your property.”

Of course, there are pros of going with a leased, “out of the box”, all in one solution especially if you require very minimal customization. The cost can be low and the platforms are very dependable. One has to check with each platform to see if they force clients to use their own merchant services etc. If you want to take a closer look here are the reviews for the leased, SAS software platforms: http://ecommerce-software-review.toptenreviews.com/

Custom sites built with top-notch e-commerce shopping cart software will provide 100% ownership and control and may deliver higher ROI especially when industry leading web marketing techniques are added to the mix. A review of the top custom site shopping cart software options can be found at: http://shopping-cart-review.toptenreviews.com/

So, in the end, we did decide to build a custom site using the aspdotnetshoppingcart.com software and work with an agency to implement. We believe the new site will provide exponentially better conversion and therefor ROI positive versus keeping our current site or leasing from an SAS Platform.

More to come….such as how we improved our PPC ROI and number of SEO first page ranks etc. Stay tuned.

As a freelance marketing consultant here in Seattle, WA I am often asked by clients to recommend vendors and recently was asked about affiliate marketing networks who would be good for small businesses ensuring that they get good program support, help getting affiliates signed on without the heavy commitment of the more well known and larger affiliate marketing networks.

Here is my review of the three affiliate marketing companies that I took a close look in my recent comparison of the following three affiliate marketing networks:

ShareASale.com

PepperJam.com

AffiliateFuture.com

See complete details for each network in spreadsheet as below:

The main take away for me was the idea of risk and innovation and how it relates to the category leader versus challenger brands.When you are the leader you have to worry about risk. Will you lose sales? Will you harm your relationship with customers? Will you risk being sued? For the leader it is all about ‘protecting’ what you have. But when you are the challenger brand you can take more risks, be more innovative, try new things, throw caution to the wind and this is what you absolutely must use to your advantage.Challenger brands, the #2 or #3 or “new kid on the block” brands need to be quicker and more nimble with respect to listening to customer feedback and coming up with bigger, faster, smarter or better ways of doing something that satisfies customers’ needs.

And that is exactly how new ideas are born, new products are created and new companies are formed. Leading companies are handicapped from the start when it comes to launching new things but with it is possible, if you have the right people leading the effort and you don’t spend too much time trying to get legal approval.

A great book to read on this topic: Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders (Adweek Book S.) by Adam Morgan (Hardcover - Jan 13, 1999) available on Amazon.com

Thanks for listening!
Carmen ]]> http://waanda.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=7 http://waanda.com/blog/?p=12 http://waanda.com/blog/?p=12#comments Fri, 20 Mar 2009 04:49:57 +0000 admin http://waanda.com/blog/?p=12 As a Freelance Marketing Consultant here in Seattle I am often asked about search marketing, specifically SEO. I am asked by my clients, the designers and copywriters I work with and other marketing folks to explain what it means and you would be surprised at how many people talk about SEO with great anxiety in their voice as if it were - dare I say this - brain surgery.

In fact it’s quite simple. SEO is “making your website ‘optimal’ for the search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) to find and index your website and the content on your site for the purposes of serving up website pages, articles, blog posts and other content on the Internet to people who search within thier search engines.”

How you ‘make your site optimal’ is by having the pages on your website coded properly with the right meta tags (html descriptions) so that it priortizes your site based on what you are promoting on your site relative to the ‘keywords’ (words people type into the search engines) when they are looking for something.

The theory is that the more copy, links to relevant (like-minded) websites and product or content relating to those ‘keywords’ the more likely that you will be listed in the search results page (the free results page that is —- because of course you can always ‘buy’ the keyword you want to be listed for if you are willing to pay the price!)

That’s it. Really - it’s that simple. Now, the only thing is that it takes quite a bit of blood, sweat and tears because you need to develop the content and have the right product descriptions and get those meta tag descriptions written up properly but it doesn’t always have to cost that much if you know what to ask for.

Depending on your budget you can optimize your site with a little creativity, a good developer and a good set of keywords. Still need to know more? Give me a call - I’m no brain surgeon and I’ll talk plain English on any online marketing subject!

This led me to believe that it must be very confusing for clients to determine which vendor to go with.

How do you compare solutions when some vendors charge a flat fee, others a one time set up fee, some a % on the media and still others a technology fee.

Here are some of the questions it helps to ask yourself before making a decision:

• Do you want to manage the programs yourself or get someone to do it for you?
• What is your budget and will it change from time to time?
• Do you need the ability to change your programs on the fly or develop custom or seasonal promotions?
• Is the contract length, contract terms or other commitment criteria an issue for you?
• How important is having online reporting or is getting the report emailed to you good enough?
• How critical is it to you to have an integrated approach with your online marketing program?

In the Automotive Industry your search vendor options will be different than if you are in the Finance, Health or Legal Industries so be sure to do your research and see what solutions fit your business needs.

Still confused?

Consider hiring a un-biased outsider to help you review your options and make your decision.

Below you will find the summary grid I prepared that outlines the main differences between each paid search marketing vendor that currently offers search marketing solutions for Automotive clients: