According to a new report from Hitwise about search trends, the average number keywords used in search queries is increasing. Queries with four words and more are showing an increase in number of searches. It’s the final proof to the long tail theory . People is realizing how crowded the web is and how hard is to find exactly what they’re looking for. Hence a more specific search query which supposedly will turn up better results.
It’s good news for advertising as well: long tail queries mean a higher rate of conversion when it comes to turn a lead into a customer.
The weirdest thing though is the steep increase in search queries with eight or more words. Is people actually treating search engines like some weird kind of slave robots, submitting articulated and verbalizaed queries? Are those words only keywords or proper sentencies? Anyway, it’s just good news for SEO. Being more specific on content can only help and this is the final demonstration.
This is a good example on how versatile Analytics is. If someone though putting out Analytics would have been only to get on a massive amount of date (even if users are allowed to keep their statistics out of Google’s sight), I guess it just a great added value to Google’s brand as it’s getting closer to other big analytics names like Webtrends or Nedstat.
Anyway, this article explains in depth how to start tracking article campaigns on Analytics. Since sending press releases around has become a standard practice in web promotion strategy, this one will help you out in case you need to get exact figures about that traffic.
Months ago I bumped into a website claiming to have discovered the real secret to get top rankings through video posting. It is definetely proved that videos my help rankings but in the end the same principle we apply into standard optimization must be applied to videos.
I’ve been working on a client website for a while which is a video portal It fetures video from youtube and other big video portal (dailymotion, veeme). This shortlist applies to this case, when running a website which features content from a bigger portal. Anyway, even if you’re not featuring content for you tube, posting a video related to your original page and applying to it any standard seo practice, with an obvious link ti yiur homepage, will result in a positive effect for your rankings.
It’s basically being focused on providing page with descriptive title focusing on the long tails (e.g long titles extremely specific but still featuring the two main keywords we want to optimize the website for).
Pretty much all the classic onpage optimization factors apply for youtube but it can be better resumed like:
- Use your primary keyword on the video title
- Write one or 2 line description with your keywords in them
- Place a link to your website
Rest will be depending on your video quality.
Youtube video ranks higher based on views and onpage factors listed above.
So more views you get, better you rank.
It’s not that much different from promoting a standard page. In the end, external optimization of content will help higher rankings for your original page.
The main goal of any online marketing campaign is to maximize conversion while reducing costs, therefore improving your ROI (return on investments).
I pointed out a very short list of some advices to be always kept in mind when dealing with online advertising.
1. Continuity
The message we published on the ad must be relevant and truthful. If we advertise something we have to make sure users will actually get what we told them in the first place through the ad. So there has to be some continuity between the ads and the following landing page. We have to make sure that leads will get what we promised in the first place, this will guarantee an higher conversion rate.
2. Targeting
Internet advertising is extremely dynamic but also its results can be 100% tracked. Therefore targeting has become really easy, considering the huge amount of parameters we’re able to trigger while configuring an ad. Targeting helps us delivering the ads to those leads more willing to be converted into customers, therefore increasing conversions while reducing costs.
3. Testing
The best experience comes from mistakes. Planning a campaign on the internet can be a daunting experience, expecially during the very first months, when you just go for it without any past knowledge of a certain market or target. The best thing to do is.. just keep on trying different text, ads, images, and see which is the more effective. Hours spent on testing are definetely more valuable than time spent on marketing books and how-to’s.
4. Focus on client advantage
When writing down a ad we need to focus on the client perspective rather than showing off how good we are at our job. People is way more interested the personal advantage they can get with our product or service rather than the partners you’ve been working with or since how many years you’ve been the leader on the market. Try to imagine an ad which says that you’ll benefit of 50% less costs for your company purchasing a particular service or one in which the same company says it’s the leader of his own market: which one would you click on?
This was a very short list. There should be a lot more material to go through and of course and endless list of advices to boost your PPC and advertising performances. I’ll try to go through all this in the next posts, stay tuned for more.
So here’s a short list of the most useful WordPress plugins for those who need some promotion and craving for some good quality traffic.
Nb: this is not the same old list of SEO and Social plugins. These add-ons will actually drive traffic to your blog e ven if you’ve just started from scratch.
One of the great qualities of WordPress, besides its ease to use it’s the fact that is fully customizable. We can just tweak it the way we want, and with the rght tools we’re able to turn it into one of the most versatile blogging platform on the internet.
Plus there’s a huge community ready to put out tons of apps to satisfy any needs. The thumb rule is: thi
nk about anyway you can spread your content, than try to imagine a plugin able to do it and look for it on the wordpress plugin website.
Pingcrawl – This comes straight out from Bluehat SEO. If you don’t know this blog you’d better check it out it’s proably one of the best resources around for SEO with a really interesting approach to coding and the internet. Anyway, the plugin woks with Google API: everytime you publish a new posts, Pingcrawl looks for blogs related to your posts keywords and posts a linkback to them at the end of your post. It’s a really smart way to get some backlinks.
Linkcurl – It works in a very similar way to Pingcrawl. It differs for requirements and code but it’s another great piece of code you got to have. Works with WordPress 2.3+ but needs PHP5.
Twitter Tools – I still find hard to rationalize all the hype around Twitter in term of its online marketing use but after being using this plugin for a while I can definetely say it’s a powerful tool if wisely used.
This plugin twits a link to your post every time you publish something. Basically you ping all your followers every time you publish your blog.
Auto Social Poster – Ever wondered what would it be to be able to post a link to your latest post on the social bookmarks with the most traffic? If you want to kickstart your blog promotion probably it’s one of the best way to do it. With this plugin you’ll be able to post to a bunch of social bookmarks at the same time and get you some relevant backlinks to get your website quickly indexed by Google.
If you´re not able to get a copy of your plugin, you might also try to take a look to this website.
