You Are Here: The Truth Behind Keywords and Google Rankings:
2011 Edition » web marketing

Posts Tagged ‘web marketing’

23
Mar 2011
Posted by Michelle LaPointe
1 comment

The Truth Behind Keywords and Google Rankings:
2011 Edition

Meta keyword tags are out, good content is in. Imagine!

Try this sometime. Go to your website and right-click (Ctrl-click on a Mac) anywhere on the page that doesn’t have a picture. Select “View Source” from the context menu.

You’ll see the code that makes your page viewable in web browsers. If you scroll to the very top, you may see something like this:

Excerpt of screen capture - meta tags

Example of meta tags in a web page

 

The text highlighted in yellow includes the keyword meta tags. They’re invisible to viewers, but search engines can see them. Once upon a time, this was one of the ways that search engines found your website; that made them useful for SEO (search engine optimization).

But here’s something very, very important to know: Google doesn’t search meta keyword tags anymore.

You don’t have to take my word for it. You can check out this Google video blog and get the facts right from the horse’s mouth.

At  C3 Advertising, we still include meta tag keywords in websites we develop for our clients. They don’t hurt, and they may be helpful for some other search engines.  But the real trick to optimizing your website for search engines is to fill it with well-written, relevant content.

Good content gets Google’s attention, and gets the attention of others in your market, which causes some of them to link back to your site, which gets Google’s attention, which raises your ranking in searches by qualified prospects, which increases your sales.

Some people think that your content should include popular search terms that have nothing to do with your product or target market. That’s nonsense. The truth is that you still need relevant keywords in your text, but they can’t be stuffed into your copy like candy in a piñata.

Here’s the right way to include keywords in your copy:

“We offer the largest selection of fine patio furniture in Southern California. The next time you’re in Redondo Beach, visit us for designer patio sets, wood, aluminum, and wicker patio tables and chairs, wrought-iron bistro sets, market umbrellas, and beautiful outdoor lighting. Try our handy Outdoor Living Room Resource Guide to help you plan.”

You get good Google results and are talking to people ready to buy in terms they understand; in addition, the resource guide is a reason for people in your target audience to link back to you and to share your site with others.

Here’s the wrong way to include keywords in your copy:

“We offer the largest selection of patio furniture Justin Bieber, Charlie Sheen, Prince William and Kate Middleton would love. Our patio furniture, outdoor furniture, market umbrella, outdoor lighting, patio tables, patio chair store is in Redondo Beach, which is near Manhattan Beach, Torrance, El Segundo, Hermosa Beach, and Palos Verdes Estates in California, Southern California to be exact, zip codes 90277, 90278, 90266, 90501, 90502, 90503, 90505, 90245, and 90274, where Britney Spears and other Sexy Stars In Bikinis hang out, sometimes Tiger Woods, rarely Barak Obama, but not usually Snooki, The Situation, the Real Housewives of Atlanta, the Japanese tsunami or radioactive fallout. Also Libya, March Madness, and the iPad2.”

You think I’m kidding, but I have seen pages written this way. You might get a momentary Google bump before being banished to page 148 of search-engine results — justifiably — for stuffing your page with nonsense, but you’ll get lots of searches from 14-year-olds in no position to buy a $2,000 redwood patio set. Worse, your qualified buyers will think you’re an idiot, or insane, and click away before they catch something.

Trash pile with keywords

Trashing your website with irrelevant keywords is useless, and damaging to your site's success as a marketing tool.

Remember, search engine rankings do not equal qualified prospects, click-throughs, or sales. Instead of tweaking meta tags or buying expensive services to turn your website into a keyword piñata, hire yourself a good copywriter and get good search engine rankings while using your site to sell stuff. What a concept!

Posted in: Google, search engine optimization, search marketing, SEO, Website design & content

05
Aug 2010
Posted by Michelle LaPointe
0 comments

You Lost Me At “Hello” #1

Traps to avoid if you want your prospects to stick around past the handshake

#1 in a series.

Trap #1: The mysterious home page.

It’s cool. It’s pretty.  It’s got a talking head, animation, a soundtrack, an interest form, and half a dozen widgets. It’s crammed full of keywords that the SEO specialist gave you. It matches your brand personality, your product packaging, or the colors in the CEO’s office.  Yet none of that matters if the prospect needs more than three seconds to figure out what it is that you do.

That means:

  • The right words: A short, clear statement of what you offer. (Hint: it’s not your mission statement.)
  • Pictures that communicate. If you sell products, show them and/or their benefits. If you’re a charity, show the people you help. If you offer a service that’s harder to depict in a snapshot, work with creative professionals who can help you find images that quickly communicate what you do.
  • A look and feel that’s on brand. No matter what you do, you have competitors. Yet you differ from them in one or more ways that means something to your customers. That’s your USP (unique selling proposition). Are you the upscale custom brand? The low-price leader? The boutique brand?  The friendly one? The one with the huge array of offerings? The one that specializes in a niche? The one with overnight shipping?  Your USP should be reflected in every brand choice you make, from the colors in your design to the tone of your copy.

    And it goes without saying (I hope) that your website should have branding elements in common with marketing and advertising you do through print, direct mail, broadcast, trade shows, social media, and every other channel.

  • Cues to help your audience self-identify. Your visitors have to know, instantly, that the site is for them. It would be an easy thing to say, “This site is for…” and simply list the members of your target audience. Easy — but not very effective. It’s much better to include stories, situations, images, benefit headlines, and other cues that let your audience identify themselves as part of your target market, and recognize you as someone who understands and can meet their needs.

In short, does your home page pass the “Wheelbarrow Test”?

I admit it. I made up the Wheelbarrow Test years ago on the spur of the moment, out of frustration. I did it during a meeting with six insanely smart people.

Three of them were business geniuses and three were technical geniuses. They talked about complete solutions, world-changing innovation, unique business models and flexible innovation.  It was fabulous, and they were clearly excited. But after an hour of this, I still had no idea what they were planning to sell.

In desperation, I said, ”STOP. Take a deep breath.  Close your eyes.

“Imagine that your customer is standing in front of you with a wheelbarrow full of money. If he gives it to you, what does he get in exchange?  Is it a box with a product inside?  Is it hardware? Software?  Something to wear? Something to eat? A consultant showing up on his doorstep?  A subscription or a service?”

“If you can’t answer that question clearly on the home page, then your website will not succeed. And if your website is crucial to sales, neither will your company.”

The conference room got very quiet. The six geniuses looked at each other. Four of them said “Oh…” The two Europeans said, “Eaux…”  And at last they understood the critically important task at hand.

When we start working with a new client at C3 Advertising, invariably the first item on the client’s wish list is a website redesign.  Clients are often dismayed if their existing home page doesn’t pass the Wheelbarrow Test (although it often explains a lot about why their current site isn’t working).  But all is not lost.

“Cheer up,” I say. “Chances are, your competitors’ sites don’t pass the Wheelbarrow Test, either.”

Posted in: branding, marketing, Website design & content

15
Jul 2010
Posted by Michelle LaPointe
1 comment

Do You Need To Be On Twitter?

If you’re like 80% of businesses, you can safely  ignore the cute little bird. Here’s why.

Twitter Bluebird of Happiness

I got a chance to catch up with my friend Marti Barletta last week. It was delightful, as always, and fun to catch up on news of our lives, work, and families. But when the talk came around to marketing, Marti shared two astonishing bits of information.

  1. She is now among the top .05% of Tweeters in terms of followers.
  2. She has just over 700 followers.

You read that right, and because you can do math, you know what means: 99.5% of Tweeters have fewer than 700 followers.

How can this be, you ask?  Twitter is EVERYWHERE!  Dell, Walmart, and Four Seasons Hotels invite you to follow them on Twitter.  Cable news anchorpersons read tweets on the air. You know that Lindsay Lohan is upset, and that Aston and Demi are doing The Cleanse, because they posted it on Twitter. Maybe you even opened a Twitter account, just because you thought you should, and you haven’t used it since a month after you opened it.  The Old Spice Guy is responding to tweets via a whole series of towel-clad videos on YouTube.

And that’s why you should be on Twitter, if you want to bring your marketing program into the 21st century, right? Wrong.

In fact, everything I just said is why, if you’re like 80% of businesses, you probably won’t gain a thing by being on Twitter. You won’t have much to lose, either, unless you post things that are incredibly stupid — but you will be wasting your time.  Here’s why:

Dell, Walmart, and Four Seasons invite you to follow them on Twitter. Have you accepted? No? Why not? Because you don’t care? Because you have enough stuff to follow already?  Because you’d rather get information some other way?  Because you don’t have a Twitter account?  Because your Twitter account is somewhere…you think…maybe under the bed with the dust bunnies?

Twitter can be a good tool for communicating breaking tech news and frequent sales and other offers, but it’s not the only tool — and maybe not even the best one. Unless you post your Twitter feed elsewhere, you’ll only reach your Twitter followers.  They won’t stumble across your message on a casual visit to your website, blog, Facebook page, user forum or message board, or even mobile app.  So you might get traction that’s just as good, or even better, via one of those other channels.

Cable news anchorpersons read tweets on the air. News organizations use Twitter a lot, mostly as a tool to get up-to-the-minute information that they can follow up with traditional reporting. Why do cable news networks read tweets on the air? Partly, I’m sure, because it’s a faster — and shorter — way to get viewer feedback than traditional letters to the editor.  Partly, I suspect, because they have 24 hours of air time to fill. Every single dang stupid day.  If you’re not in the news business, you may not need Twitter.

You know that Lindsay Lohan is upset, and that Aston and Demi are doing The Cleanse, because they posted it on Twitter. But I’ll bet you read it on The Huffington Post, or People.com, or heard it on Entertainment Tonight.  Even for celebrities and other heavy Twitter users, the news is disseminated to the wider world via bigger channels.

Maybe you even opened a Twitter account, just because you thought you should, and you haven’t used it since a month after you opened it. You’re not alone. A study last year by Nielsen reported that Twitter has an alarming 60% churn rate — that is, 60% of Twitter users abandon their accounts within the first 30 days.

Tamagotchi, C. 1998Twitter is like owning a Tamagotchi. Some people love it. Others find it amusing at first, and then kind of a pain.  And that’s the other side of Twitter — if you intend to use it for marketing, you have to keep feeding it, preferably every single dang stupid day.  You’re going out to an audience that is not quite as engaged as you might think, so you have to constantly give them something really interesting and fresh.

If you’re a celebrity trend-setter (or a celebrity train wreck),  your very life is the drama that your followers want to know about.  If you’re speaking for your company, not so much. That’s probably why even some very famous brands don’t have Twitter feeds. Take Clorox, for example. What are they going to say?  ”Day 2,327: still getting socks 30% whiter.”

The Old Spice Man is responding to tweets via videos on YouTube. Think about this sentence for a moment. Instead of responding to Tweets via Twitter, they’re responding via YouTube. Limitations of the medium aside, why might that be?  How about because there are a lot more people visiting YouTube than using Twitter?

As with all things on the Web, that’s the state of the art at this moment.  Things may change, and there may come a day when a Twitter feed is an indispensable marketing tool. But for most of us, that day is not yet.

Posted in: marketing, social media

28
Jun 2010
Posted by Michelle LaPointe
0 comments

3 Lessons From the $500 Solution

Last week I wrote about how a one-time investment of $500 could help computer companies — and Adobe — sell thousands more units this year.  What follows is a summary of the lessons all organizations can learn form that industry’s mistakes.

Lesson #1:  There’s no substitute for putting your customers first

It’s especially dangerous when you spend more time obsessing over your competition than you do thinking about your customers.

The bad blood between Adobe and Apple is a perfect example how this mistake can hurt sales. “Us vs. them” thinking can quickly permeate an entire organization, especially when your fearless leader is as vocal about it as Steve Jobs has been. In this atmosphere, can you imagine that a Apple marketer would even suggest a website graphic that says “Adobe CS5-Friendly”, no matter how much it would help sales? Can you imagine that Adobe would do anything that might accidentally help a software customer purchase a computer from Apple? Yet that’s exactly what they should both be doing — if they care about sales and customers more than they loathe each other.

Next: Lesson #2: There’s no substitute for talking to each other.

Posted in: Uncategorized

17
Jun 2010
Posted by Michelle LaPointe
0 comments

The $500 Solution

Or, Everybody Loses Except Mr. Singh and Me

Imagine that you are a manufacturer or retailer of computers, software, or computer chips. What if I told you that you could move tens of thousands of units this year — perhaps hundreds of thousands –  for a one-time investment of $500, most of which you’re already paying out in salaries?

Would you do it? Of course you would. So why hasn’t HP, Sony, or Toshiba? Why hasn’t Intel,  Adobe, or Apple? I’ll tell you how they should spend that $500. But first, the back story.

I’m almost certainly going to buy a new computer this year.  I don’t want to. There’s nothing wrong with our old ones.  But I want to upgrade to Adobe Creative Suite 5.  In order to do that, I have to replace at least one of our 32-bit computers with one that  will support the latest edition of the behemoth suite of apps for design, web development, and video and audio editing that is the Adobe Master Collection.

Theoretically, all I have to do is match the list of specs on Adobe’s website to a computer brand’s specs, and I’m done shopping. Right?

Wrong.

The Search Is On

Here’s where I looked:

  • Online: Websites of half a dozen different PC manufacturers, and PC Connection, an online retailer. I found exhaustive specs, but either their language doesn’t match Adobe’s, or there are big gaps in descriptions of key components, like graphics and sound cards.  Everyone has “finders”, but they’re useless unless you fit into one of four broad buckets: road warrior, home user, gamer, or business user (by which they mean “people who use spreadsheets and PowerPoint™”).

    I tried Intel’s website, too, figuring that if I could nail down the processor, I would at least have a starting point.  But I ran into trouble from the home page.  Adobe’s site says that CS5 requires an Intel® Core™2 Duo processor. Intel’s website offers a host of brand names on its first few pages, none of them an exact match. I picked Core vPro, the closest match. A few pages in, I did find a Core 2 Duo, only to lose it again when I clicked on a link for laptop processors. A link that said “Where to buy” lead to an error message on a server in the U.K.

  • Email. OK, I thought; I’ll tackle this from another angle. I copied the Adobe list into emails and sent them to sales departments of Sony, Toshiba, and Apple, among others, and asked which of their models met these requirements. Some didn’t write back. Some pointed me back to their website. One wrote that they couldn’t answer the question in an email, but that I should call the sales department. (When I did, they asked me if I was a road warrior, home user, gamer, or business user. Sigh.)
  • The mall: Best Buy and the Apple Store. It was no surprise that the Best Buy clerk didn’t know the products well enough to guide me. (Although, when you’re in the right mood, it can be amusing to watch a Best Buy employee “answer your question”  by standing next to you and reading aloud from the card on the computer.)  The Apple clerks barely glanced at my list of specs.One recommended a laptop that didn’t meet the Adobe specs for processor, graphics card, or memory, but he said he was confident it would be fine for running the Master Collection, because he, himself  “does a lot of Photoshop” on that very same machine.
  • Google.I’m not alone in this. Sadly, if you Google “best computer for Adobe CS5″, you get a lot of people like me. You can hear them weeping through their message board posts. “Won’t someone please tell me which computer to buy? Please? Pleeeese?”

It’s not surprising that there are so many of us out there. Love it or hate, it, Adobe Creative Suite is the preeminent software package for the world’s millions of print designers, web designers, illustrators, and many people who work in animation, audio, video, and film production. If even 10% of them are in my boat, that’s a lot of people who need new computers. Right now. This year. During a recession. We just don’t know what to buy.

Sarwan Singh To The Rescue

Just when I was about to give up, I remembered U2W, the place that fixed my laptop last summer.  I dug up the owner’s business card and gave him a call.

It took Mr. Singh all of fifteen minutes to solve my problem. He looked at the Adobe specs online while I was on the phone. He compared it to the specs he had for laptops, and said an Apple would be ok if I upgraded the graphics card. He suggested an HP model that would also work.

The Magical $500

Fake badge that says Ready for CS5

If any one of those manufacturers or vendors had thought about customers like me, I wouldn’t have had to go through this exercise, and they’d be selling a lot more computers.  This is all they would need to make me and mine happy: a silly little badge like this one, placed on websites next to all the  computers that support Adobe  CS5.

That’s it. No one would have to dig, email, call, worry, or pray that they wouldn’t be making an expensive mistake. We customers would know what to buy in less than 5 seconds.  The only decisions left would be the size of the hard drive and the color of the case.

How I got to $500

  • You need someone with a lot of product knowledge to come up with a list of products that meet the Adobe specs. Let’s say that in your organization, that person earns $150 an hour. It took Mr. Singh 15 minutes to think about which computers would support CS5, so we’re at $37.50.
  • I spent another 15 minutes making this awful badge in Illustrator. A production artist would want a little more time to make a non-ugly version. Let’s say that this cost is $50.  Add $12 in case your designer wants to start with a stock illustration.
  • Someone in your marketing or web department has to look at your site, decide where these badges should go, and communicate that information to the web developer. $80.
  • The person who maintains your website places the image in all the right spots. $60.
  • You run it through QC. $40.

You’re now at $219.50. To make this work, you need two more people: someone who will suggest the idea and insist that it happens, and someone who will follow through and make sure that it did happen. Take the remaining $280.50 and give each of them half of it as a bonus. You’re done. Hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars in sales, for $500.

But since, in the real world, nobody did that,

Let’s List The Losers

  • Apple, Toshiba, Sony, HP, et al. They’re busily NOT selling computers to lots of people who really want to buy them.
  • Adobe. They’re not selling software to people like me, because we don’t have the computers to run it. At the very least, they should have used the same processor brand names that customers will find when they shop.
  • Me, and potential customers like me. We’re really annoyed that this is so hard to do.

And The Winners

  • Mr. Singh. He understands the specs, he knows his own products, and he invested 15 minutes in me. When I do buy a computer, I’ll buy it from him.
  • Me again. Uncertainty banished. Anxiety gone. I’ll never get my lost time back, but I can now buy a computer with confidence.

Next…

Larger lessons to be learned from this, no matter what your industry.

Posted in: Uncategorized