Entries from October 2007 ↓

Before you build a website, you have to decide what it is going to be about, right? Everybody has an idea of that, obviously. If you sell cars, the site will be about cars. If you are a non-profit art school, it will be about your organization’s classes,  and mission etc.

This is great. A good start, but now we get into actually writing the copy for the site, including titles of pages, and headlines, anchor text, etc. We want to know what keywords and keyword phrases people will use to find us, and our product or service, or better yet the generic equivalent of our product or service.

Once you know what phrases users are typing into Google, Yahoo and MSN’s search field, you can target these phrases and have the best chance of someone finding your site.

Paid services such as Word Tracker, and Keyword Discovery are some of the most comprehensive tools that tell you what phrases users are searching for on the web. I use both. Some free options are also a good place to start like, Google’s keyword suggest tool, and Digital Points Keyword tool, along with Yahoo’s (Overture) Search tool.

There are many more tools for keyword research, and I will have to revisit this topic soon to include them all. However, the thing to understand here, is that you want to find phrases that people type into the search engine’s ’search box’ but that don’t have a ton of competition. The less web pages that are seen as being relevant for your chosen phrase, the easier it will be to get that traffic.

You will begin to see patterns of what’s called the long tail of search. That’s the idea that you can target more phrases that consist of 3 or more words (longtail) and get more traffic from them, than spending your time targeting what may be more-searched-for terms, but also have more competition, and the competition can be tough – producing less results.

In summary, it is very important to know what users of Google, Yahoo, and MSN are typing into the search boxes. Only when you know this, will you be able to most effectively target the proper phrases for your site headlines, titles and text. Ultimately making your site relevant for what people are searching for.

If you have any more questions whether your site is targeting the proper phrases for your product or services, contact me through the contact form on this site.

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In the world of Web 2.0 and dynamic websites, every person who has a website is able to add and edit text and images.

It was only a few years ago when web agencies were building web pages with spacer gifs and tables. The web design community has come a long way site then. Today, web sites are built, designed, and developed with w3c standards in mind. Websites are now made to work the same in different browsers, for the blind, and together with other web technologies.

What is a Content Management System?
Simply put, a CMS is a platform for a website. It has a frontend and backend. The frontend is what the visitors see, and the backend allows you to create pages, add copy, pictures, and more.

There are many CMS systems out there to use. A lot of them are open source and free to use. I have been using Joomla for more than a year now and have created dozens of sites with it. I like it because the online community is huge, the site www.joomla.org has over 1 million posts in its forum and hundreds of developers writing third party components.

There are many other great CMS out there. Drupal, Wordpress, and Joomla are just a few.

Review more CMS systems to find out which one is right for you at:
http://www.cmsreview.com/
http://www.opensourcecms.com/

And a detailed article about what to look for in a CMS.

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Google launches conversion optimizer Now through you Google Adwords account you can use this bid management tool. It allows you to manage your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) another way to bid on CPA with Google is Pay-Per-Action (PPA) beta.

If you want a positeve 101 course on Google’s conversion optimizer this is a great article that speak to the dos and don’ts while doing your conversion experiments.

Andrew Goodman, author of “Winning Results with Google Awords”, recounts his 2-day Google Conversion Optimizer experiment gone bad … “ we had lower conversion volume as well as higher costs per acquisition”

Optimization is a key in any online campaign, here Andrew Goodman looks at the need for a detailed picture of click quality.

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Online Ad Revenues Reach $10 Billion In First Half Of 2007, Search Remains Largest Single Category

Greg Sterling over at Search Engine Land has a good review of the numbers.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) released online advertising figures for the second quarter and the first six months of 2007.

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Two Googlers Decipher Trends on Google Mobile Search by Analyzing Search Logs

Gary Price takes a look at what Google is doing with mobile search.

Gary Price at ResourceShelf points us to an intriguing article appearing in the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer Magazine about mobile search at Google. In the piece, two researchers at Google dissect and mine mobile query logs from WAP-based searches coming through a single (unnamed) U.S. carrier. One million “page view requests” from one month earlier in 2007 were analyzed. In the study, Google looked at queries from traditional cell phones, as well as smartphones.

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