Thorough keyword research, done with the website’s goals in mind, is critical for a successful search marketing campaign. In part 1 of a short series dedicated to keyword research, today’s infographic explores the first—and arguably most important—step in the process: thinking like the customer.
Collectively, segmented marketing initiatives will help increase your baseline traffic over time. This week’s infographic demonstrates the potential of gaining loyal readers with every marketing initiative:
Once you’ve identified and defined the target markets for your search marketing strategy, you can employ a number of different optimization approaches to reach those customer groups. Whether it’s making use of individual press releases, case studies, or blog postings, today’s Search Illustrated shows how to utilize a page-level localization approach to reach multiple targets:
Last week’s Search Illustrated depicted high-level strategies for geotargeting search campaigns. Today’s Search Illustrated drills down on this subject, showing how to target specific geographic areas with a search marketing campaign that will reach only qualified prospects within a specific area or region:
Are you reaching the right people with your search optimization and marketing campaigns? Even though we’re living in an increasingly globalized world, it often pays to tailor content and optimization efforts to specific regions. Today’s Search Illustrated shows a number of ways that your web sites can be geo targeted for particular areas of the […]
Optimizing content for local search is similar to, but subtly different from, optimizing for general web search. Many key factors, such as optimizing for specific keywords, securing good backlinks to content and so on all apply. But there are several other steps—simple ones, fortunately—that you can take to really give your local content a better […]
RSS feeds offer a unique channel for distributing content that can help expand your audience to people beyond those who visit your web site. But RSS feeds can also be an important part of a search marketing campaign. Well optimized feeds can also gain prominent placement on search engine result pages, attracting even more traffic. […]
With the advent of Google Universal Search, Ask 3D and other “blended” search services, images will increasingly be appearing in search results. If you’re not optimizing images on your web site, you’re missing out on capturing some of this increasingly valuable real-estate. Not sure how to optimize images for search engines? Today’s Search Illustrated shows […]
Most companies are savvy enough today to put press releases on their web sites. Sadly, few bother to optimize press releases for search engines, and that’s too bad, because a well optimized press release can do more than just rank well in search results—it can can also offer additional website visibility benefits, as well. Today’s […]
Have you ever clicked on a promising search result, only to find that the web page you land on has nothing to do with what you expected, or even worse, is a page of porn or other spam? If so, you may have been the unwitting victim of black-hat cloaking. Today’s Search Illustrated shows how […]
In search marketing, stats are important. But which metrics should you pay attention to? Page views? More elaborate measures with fancy acronyms like ROI or ROAS? There’s one metric that’s extremely important, according to a study of searcher behavior by iProspect. As simple (or simplistic) as it sounds, those top ten rankings that all serious […]
Google has two crawlers, each with a different function, to assure that it’s index of the web is both deep and up to date. Today’s Search Illustrated shows the function of each of these content discovery utilities:
What’s the best way to optimize a web site? What best practices should be followed for a search advertising campaign? There are no “absolute” answers to these and other questions that often arise when search marketers are explaining approaches and processes to clients. Multi-pronged tactics often work best, and they vary depending on the type […]
One of the most common questions we get is “how can I safely move a web page?” When moving a page or even doing something as simple as changing its filename (and thus its URL), it’s important to do it the right way. Done properly, you’ll let search engines know where the new page is, […]
Google recently made what Danny called “the most radical change to its search results ever, introducing a “Universal Search” system that will blend listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages.” Danny went on to write a massive, multi-part post explaining Universal Search and […]
Link Baiting is the latest in a procession of strategies search marketers have concocted over the years to ease the often laborious but absolutely necessary process of getting other web sites to link to your pages. Search Engine Land contributing writer Nick Wilson is often credited with coining the phrase linkbaiting, and SEL columnists write […]
Early information retrieval systems were fairly simple—they attempted to understand search terms and then provide matching documents where those terms were found. These “on-page” clues were paramount in the ranking of documents in search results. With the advent of the web, additional “signals” arose, giving rise to additional “off-page” factors that were combined with on-page […]
When a searcher has reached the point of typing an extremely explicit, product-oriented query into the search box, the odds are good that they’re ready to buy. For example, I’m just about ready to purchase a Kodak Easy Share V705 digital camera. A few weeks ago, my searches were far more generic, and the search […]
Tagging is the Web 2.0 version of adding metadata to web content, but with an interesting user-generated twist that the earliest forms of metadata lacked. A W3C recommendation document defined a set of meta tags for web content, including the “keywords” tag. This tag allowed a content owner to add additional descriptive keywords, specifically for […]
While most of the time we want search engine crawlers to grab and index as much content from our web sites as possible, there are situations where we want to prevent crawlers from accessing certain pages or parts of a web site. For example, you don’t want crawlers poking around on non-public parts of your […]
Early information retrieval systems were fairly basic programs designed to essentially to find a match between search terms in a query and those same words appearing in documents. As search has evolved, however, simple keyword-based matching is only one of dozens of factors used to find relevant documents related to a searcher’s query. Because searchers […]
One of the most commonly discussed concepts among search marketers is Google’s PageRank algorithm. Google explains PageRank in the following way: “PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to […]