Google Caffeine Officially Annouced

admin    google     alpharetta seo, facebook, google caffeine, Social Media, twitter

Google has officially announced the launch of caffeine their new search index. There has been a buzz around for a while that caffeine was being launched and Google told us a while back that they were testing out caffeine in various markets. It looks like it now official as you can see on their blog with the official launch of Google caffeine.

So what does the launch of the new index mean to you and me. As you can tell Google is pushing hard to pull as much content as they can and they are going to index it faster. If you have a static web site than you may be in trouble but if you have a blog on your site or are continually adding new web pages to your website you will be just fine. This also means you will see  a lot of the social media sites such as facebook, twitter, and youtube showing up in your search results more now than ever.

Remember the saying that content is king? Well this has been true in the past and will continue to be very important. If you do not have a content strategy now is the time to create one. My first recommendation would be to add a blog to your website and decide to populate it with new content. Make a blog part of you site so that it sits in a sub-directory so it would like this www.mysite.com/blog. Do not put it in a sub-domain or put your blog on an external site such as wordpress or blogger. I recommend wordpress because it has tons of free plug-ins and it is really seo friendly.

Consistently add new articles to your blog or website and if you have a company with several employees make them part of the content team and let them contribute articles to your site. If you are adding new content to your site every month or so you are missing the point and you need to schedule time in your week to add as much content to the site as you can.

Go ahead and add a facebook business page and a twitter account if have not already done it and when you post new content to your website
link back to the content. Since Google and the other search engines are constantly crawling facebook and twitter this will insure that the new content has been picked up by Google. If Google knows that your new content exist than the better your chances are that it will rank.

The caffeine update can be a good thing and help you with traffic to your website if understand what Google wants and serve it to them. Websites that are consistently add new and relevant content to their site will get all the Google love that they can stand.

Need help with your search engine marketing strategy drop us a line and schedule a consultation.

Twitter 101

admin    Uncategorized     alpharetta seo, Social Media, twitter

It has been a while since I have posted and I apologize but it has been a busy few weeks and business has been booming. So as opposed to not updating my blog I thought I pass along a link to a great read that I came across recently. If you have ever thought about using twitter to drive traffic than now is a great time dip your foot in the pool.

Twitter has gotten a lot of buzz and it seems like every place that you turn somebody is pushing their twitter account. To learn the basics of twitter here is a link to an article by Ron Jones that you should check out…Twitter 101.

After reading the article feel free to comment let me know your thoughts.

Social Media Marketing For Your Business

admin    Social Media     facebook, maketing for business, Social Media, twitter, youtube

If you go back 3 to 4 years ago using social media for business purposes was almost unheard of as a marketing avenue. Fast forward to today and most progressive  businesses realize that social media is here to stay and can be a great way to drive traffic to their website and can be great for branding. As part of their marketing they are using sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the list goes on and on. In fact social media is so popular that Facebook has passed Google as the most visited site on the internet.

If you are still skeptical about about the value of social media here are some stats for you to consider.

• The percentage of Facebook users who login on a daily basis is 50% and they spend a minimum of 55 minutes per day on the site.

• Twitter has 18 million users with an average of 600 tweets per second.

• YouTube had over 91 million unique visitors in the month of March 2010.

To give you some more stats that back up the fact the social media is now a major player in marketing your company. In January 2010 Facebook passed Yahoo and was only second to Google in regards to visitors. Based on visitors to Facebook in a week compared to last year the number increased by a whooping 185%. As I mentioned earlier Facebook now has passed Google for total visitors.

When you take a look at the numbers and utilize the selling power of social media when it comes to business marketing it has become a must in todays market. Using social media effectively is more than setting up accounts and hoping that people find your company, you need to jump and engage in the conversations. As with any type of selling and business in general people tend to buy from people they like and trust. Using social media can set your company apart from other businesses by building your brand becoming an expert in your field.

If you decide to add social media to your marketing efforts try not to only promote your business in every post or tweet. Get your followers or friends to communicate with you by adding interactive polls, games, or quizzes to your pages to get people to spend more time on your site. Repost interesting information from other users that are interesting  and relevant.

Social media is here to stay and using it to market yourself or your business is a cost effective way to find new prospects and customers. If you have not dipped your toes in the social media world now is a perfect time to give it a shot.

Excluding Domains from Google Content Network

admin    Pay Per Click, Uncategorized     adwords, alpharetta ppc, content network, pay per click alpharetta, ppc marketing strategies

There used to be a time when you were advised against using the Google content network in your pay per click campaigns, well not anymore. If you are not using the content network you are missing out on an opportunity to drive traffic to your website that you would not normally get if you only ran the campaign on the sponsored search.

The Google content network can be a great way of capturing additional traffic but if it is not managed correctly you could end up spending a lot of money without getting the results that you are looking for. If you are running on the content network and you have not reviewed your account and added exclusions now may be a good time to do that.

In the content network you can exclude not only domains but also sub domains from your network. When you look at your performance on the content network make sure that you choose a date range that will give you relevant stats with a minimum of 30 days performance. Also, keep in mind of your overall goals, just because a particular site or domain does not work well for one ad group it does not mean that it will not work for other ad groups.

When you go to your campaign within Google go to the networks tab and show details next to the automatic placements. This will allow you to see all of the websites that Google is placing your ads based on the keywords in your ad groups. As with all of the other Google reports, you can sort by cost per conversion, spend, clicks, and etc. and this let  you see which sites are converting the best and you are getting the most bang for your buck.

To exclude a website click on the box to the left of the actual website and select the exclude placements radio button. Google will ask you if you would like to exclude the website at the campaign level or the ad group level. If you are absolutely sure that the website is not working for your campaign than you can exclude it from the campaign level but my recommendation would be to only exclude at the ad group level. After you have excluded the website you will see a red excluded box net to the site. The next time you review your campaign you will know that it has already been  excluded.

To take a look at all of the exclusions within the account go to the bottom of the page and expand the exclusions section. It looks and feels the same way that using negative keywords displays on the page.

content network exclusions

If you have not taken a swing at the content network now may be a good time to try it and if you are currently running on the content network you should review to make sure it is producing solid numbers.

Is Seo A Winner Take All Game?

admin    Website Traffic     alpharetta seo, Keyword Research, number 1 listing, organic rankings

What a number 1 listing for your keyword can mean for traffic.

I am sure you have seen the advertisements for seo companies that claim to get on the first page for you keyword. Getting on the first page for your keyword term is a great outcome but there can be a huge difference between being in the number 1 postion and being in the number 10 postion. In terms of traffic to your site and sales or leads increasing your ranking several postions can have a huge impact on the overall visitors to your site.

How much difference does it make to have the number 1 postion versus the number 10 postion? Lets take a look at what you can expect from click through rates from being on the first page.

- Listing #1 : 42% CTR

- Listing #2 : 12% CTR

- Listing #3 : 8.5% CTR

- Listing #4 : 6% CTR

- Listing #5 : 5% CTR

- Listing #6 : 4% CTR

- Listing #7 : 3.5% CTR

- Listing #8 : 3% CTR

- Listing #9 : 3% CTR

- Listing #10 : 3% CTR

The numbers above only take a look at the organic clicks and do not factor in Pay Per Click. So as you can see having a number 1 listing can have a massive effect on the traffic to your site. You also have to keep in mind that there are other factors when it comes to click through rates such as the title and description that is shown in the listings. If you have a compelling title and meta description than your click through rate can go up but as you can see most of the eyeballs go straight to the top listing.

When you are deciding on an seo program and your keywords than you can see that sometimes keywords that receive less traffic but are less competitive might be the way to go initially. If we use the numbers above we see that if you have a keyword that receives 1,000 searches per month and you have a top ranking than you should see about 420 visits per month for that keyword. If a keyword gets 5,000 visits per month and you are in the number 8 postion you should see about 150 visits per month for the keyword. Typically, keywords that have more traffic are tougher to rank for because other websites are gunning for them.

Sometimes less is more and in the instance of gaining a top ranking this really is the case. So when you are doing your keyword research do not discount the keywords that do not get a massive amount of traffic because you could be losing out on easily attainable keywords.