Bing's not cutting it

When Microsoft rolled out Bing they were intending to beat up Google.  Unfortunately (for Bing) that's just not happening.  When it launched, Bing enjoyed an uptick on the search-o-meter.  It stole share from Yahoo!.  Google marched on. 

Now, Google is marching up.

MarketingProfs.com reported (through Experian Hitwise) that Google's market share actually GREW in April.  At the same time, Microsoft's fell.  Oh, Yahoo!'s fell too.  And, if you're asking (which you probably aren't), Ask.com's share also fell (dramatically).  Have a look at the results on MarketingProfs.com.

Looking for some SEO Software. Here's a shortlist.

Not that this is the "right" shortlist. It is really just my results from a simple Google Search of "SEO Software".

Some of the tools that I'm going to look at as options to help me with my SEO are:

• HubSpot (who also provide the HubSpot Grader for free)
• SEO Suite by Apex Promotion (this site includes a complete hack job on the next product in the list. They lose points on the "classy scale". Still, I'm going to check into their accusations.)
• WebPosition by WebTrends (A pretty thin site. Well promoted through affiliates. Hardcore on the call to action.)
• Web CEO (Probably the best site. Already, I'm leaning towards using them)
• SEO Elite
• SEO Suite
• Internet Business Promoter (IBP)
• lotusjump (This is Software as a Service, i.e. you pay a subscription and use their website to optimize your site)

Watch for a few more posts on this subject over the next few days. I'm getting closer to selecting a SEO software package. In the next couple of days I can tell you what I've chosen and why. After that, I'll let you know how it is working.

Have you used SEO Software? Please post a comment to this blog to tell me what you chose, why, and how it has worked out.

Looking for some SEO Software. But I don't want to wear a Black Hat.

My mission to find the right SEO system continues...

The one thing to be really careful when selecting (or using) SEO software, are Black Hat SEO techniques. These are techniques that were once legitimate, but have been heavily abused by SEO practitioners, and consequently are hated by the search engine companies. Additionally, they are hated by you, me, and everyone else who uses search engines to find what we are looking for quickly.

Once the search engines discover you are using Black Hat techniques (and they will), they will heavily penalize your rankings. Black Hat techniques include: Keyword stuffing, Spamdexing, Spam blogs, Cookie stuffing, Page indexing, Invisible text, Page cloaking, and Doorway pages. You can find out more at About.com or on Wikipedia.

In short, if you ensure that every page you generate has great content on it, and follows basic rules, then you will end up ranking well.

Watch for a few more posts on this subject over the next few days. Ultimately, I'm going to select some SEO software and kick its tires. My intent with the SEO software is to help me ensure that I am following the basic content rules. I'm excited to give it a whirl.

Have you used SEO Software? Please post a comment to this blog to tell me what you chose, why, and how it has worked out.

Looking for some SEO Software. A big extra is SEM capability.

I'm still searching for the right SEO software for me. Yesterday I listed out what SEO software should do, and talked about some of the extras I'd like to have. Today I'm hitting on one big "extra". It would be nice if the SEO software has SEM capabilities.

SEM is Search Engine Marketing. That means that you bid on keywords - sponsored links and the like - on the search engines like Google. Using SEM you pay only when someone clicks on your ad.

SEM capabilites include:

• Submit and manage your user name and profile setting in one place for multiple search engines
• Manage your account settings
• Manage account funding, billing, and so on
• Synchronize PPC accounts - Download campaigns and keywords from your existing PPC accounts
• Manage multiple PPC campaigns with a single interface
• Make recommendations about words that are working and words that aren't
• Campaign budgeting - make recommendations on where budgets should be spent, and change your daily budget setting
  
• Manage campaign status - set campaign online or offline
• Search Network management - change your campaign coverage for Search Network or Content Network
• Create and add AdGroups - create multiple Adgroups or import Adgroups from the program directly
• Create and edit Ad Creatives - from the program directly
• Disable and Enable Adgroups
• Preview Ad creative - improve your Ad Creative quality score
• Maximize your keyword coverage - Keyword Builder to help you to generate more relevant keywords
• Add or Remove keywords - allows you to add new keywords or remove keywords directly from your account
• Keyword forecasting - provides you a quick overview of your Minimum and Maximum position and CPC
• Set keywords online or offline
• URL bidding strategy - allows you to bid above or below a particular URL, enabling you to always be on top of your competitor, or below (if you choose)
• ROI bidding strategy for CPA and ROAS
• URL verification to make sure the url you have entered in you ads is correct.
• Automated email notification when your bids or position have been changed
• Comprehensive bidding & ROI performance reports
  
• Export keywords and ranking results to Excel database
• Competitor Analysis - determine competitors' detailed information and approximate PPC bidding price

Watch for a few more posts on this subject over the next few days. Ultimately, I'm going to select some SEO software and kick its tires. It would be great if it does SEM as well. That's something that I haven't done for Market GoGo yet. I know SEM kicks butt, so I need to get that done.

Have you used SEO Software or SEM Software? Please post a comment to this blog to tell me what you chose, why, and how it has worked out.

Looking for some SEO Software. What about the Extras?

So, there are a few extras that I'd really like to have in an SEO package. This is a short list. As I poke into the software more, I'll probably have some other ideas about other things that would be really nice to have.

• Online training - Free and included.
  
• Web Site Performance Analysis - Help to speed up your site
  
• Link validation tool- Check for broken links

Watch for a few more posts on this subject over the next few days. Ultimately, I'm going to select some SEO software and kick its tires. Hopefully I get it right, and find a good way to legitimately improve my page rankings.

Have you used SEO Software? Please post a comment to this blog to tell me what you chose, why, and how it has worked out.

Looking for some SEO Software. What should SEO Software do?

I'm a Marketing Strategy Consultant. I "get" the importance of SEO. But, I'm not an SEO expert, and as you can probably tell from my website, I'm not a technical expert. So, I've been looking for a Search Engine Optimization tool that will help me to "SEO" my own site. This is a "learning experience" for me.

The purpose of Search Engine Optimization is to improve your organic search ranking. That means when someone searches for phrases that are important to your company, that your site comes up on the first page right near the top. That's the goal, but of course it can be very hard to do depending on your industry, your size, and your competition.

What does Search Engine Optimization software do? Here are some things it should do. Wait a minute ... maybe it should do these things. It is important that you manage the use of the SEO software carefully so that you don't end up in trouble with the Search companies (more about that in another post or two):

• Search engine submission - helps you to submit your website to the search engines. This should hit all of the major search engines, as well as multiple "little ones". It also should allow you to do this manually and / or scheduled.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) - Provide practical advice and tips on how to improve your pages to increase their ranking advice for multiple search engines. Optimization advice touches upon factors such as general page properties, head and body areas and off-the-page parameters.
• Pinpoints possible and existing search engine visibility problems
• Give a complete breakdown of problems by the area of page
• Recommend changes to be made so that your site is found by prospective users
• Density Analysis Report - this search engine optimization report gives a breakdown on the density of phrases used on your page. This report helps you to see what keywords and phrases your page is actually optimized for and whether your optimization efforts influence your on-page parameters.
• Web ranking - Organic keyword rank reporting which tells you how you are ranking for each of your organic search terms. Reports should also show trends.
• Link popularity check - allows you to independently measure the number of incoming links to your website.
• Meta Tag generator and editor - creates or modifies keywords, descriptions, and titles for your web pages.
• Page Creator - Creates a "Doorway Page" or "Landing Page" automatically with the keywords you choose. You should be able to edit and customize this page subsequently. (Hmmm ... be careful with this one. A doorway page is clearly Black Hat. The page that is created should be a Landing Page that will be useful to a human.)
  
• Google Friendly API - Support for the Google API
• Keyword Library and Builder - a keyword research tool that will generate a list of suggestion keywords based on the keywords you provide or that it gleans from your site, in order to create or modify a keyword library database and use them for your web sites. You can target important keywords and phrases generated by Keyword Builder to use them to optimize your meta tags.
• Keyword Competitive analysis - Research each keyword's competition thoroughly.
• Page editor - Automatically tune your web pages for top-ranking in the major search engines
• Competitor Analysis - ability to see how your competitors rank and also what they are doing to rank where they are ranking.
• Maintain reciprocal links
• Generate new links from search engines
• Send "Personalized" link invitation messages
• Track and verify your link partners
• Create link pages automatically and promote them
• Site saturation monitoring - this number represents how many pages of your website are indexed by the search engine. (You can find this easily by querying on Google with the phrase "site:www.yoursite.com query".)
• Live product support
• Multiple URL capability - the ability to do run analysis on multiple URLs.
• Reports - capability to check & track your web site position on all major search engines, based on your list of keywords.
• Custom Reports - the ability to customize the reports with things like your logo, company name, and details.
• Send reports by email.
• Export stuff to Excel.
• Engine data renewal - Most of these SEO tools need you to renew your "license" with them each year.

Watch for a few more posts on this subject over the next few days. Ultimately, I'm going to select some SEO software and kick its tires. Will I get banned by the search engines ... I hope not :^).

Have you used SEO Software? Please post a comment to this blog to tell me what you chose, why, and how it has worked out.

Market GoGo's Blog is ranking well!

I was happily surprised to find out tonight that this little blog is ranking in the top 6.85 % of blogs, according to Technorati. The Market GoGo blog has a Technorati rank of 4,793,965. That doesn't sound great, but apparently it means that this blog is in the top 6.85% of blogs tracked by Technorati. SUPER.

This little tid-bit came to me courtesy of HubSpot's Grader

It's fun when you find you rank high

I've been watching my Google Analytics stats lately, and it is fun to find that my content shows up on the first page of Google search results for various terms that people are searching. For instance, if you hit Google and search terms like:

• business strategy today's economy
• brand audit process
  
• big three what went wrong
  
• marketing audit rfp
• (and a whole bunch of others)

You will find that you the Market GoGo blog entries and web pages manage to show up on the first page frequently. Ahhh... SEO at work.

Trends for 2009: #6. Paid Search advertising (i.e. Google's revenue) will grow substantially again (i.e. Time to invest in Google?)

Web traffic will continue to climb. Web shoppers will increase in numbers. Web surfers will continue to start their purchase process on a search engine. The search engine of choice will continue to be Google, and in fact their share of the search market will grow dramatically.

Simultaneously ... Marketing budgets will drop. Marketing departments will be under more pressure then ever to draw prospective customers in.

So, what is a Marketer to do? In 2009 Marketers will spend more time than ever before focusing on Search Marketing - both paid and organic. Paid search advertising however is the easiest and quickest way to make things work.

It is likely that paid search advertising costs will actually increase substantially in 2009, as more Marketers bid on common phrases. Nonetheless, a good search strategy is still going to be substantially cheaper, much more effective, and infinitely more measurable than any signficant newspaper ad.

Search Marketing strategies to focus on in 2009:

• Do Paid Search Engine Marketing: Oh, and do it well. Track the ROI of keywords and be sure that you are making your money on every word that you are bidding on.
• Work your copy: A paid search ad is just a simple little bit of text. But, it may be the most powerful 12 to 15 words you ever write. Test, revise, test, revise, and don't stop. Make sure that every bit of copy you put out there on those search ads is on brand and works as well as it possibly can. Additionally, customize copy for each search term you have out there. You should have tens, hundreds, or even thousands of ads floating out there in the ether of the search world.
  
• Create Landing Pages: Every paid search bid should have its own purpose-made landing page with your call to action highlighted. No one should ever click on your paid search ad and end up at your home page (or worse, a 404 error).
• Do Organic Search Engine Optimization: SEO is "free" and having a high organic rank will pay off rapidly - even in places where you are also bidding on a relevant keyword. But, to be honest, SEO isn't free and it isn't a one-time project. SEO requires solid resourcing with people who have a good understanding of what they are doing. It is also a journey not a destination. So, you have to be prepared to continually revisit your SEO and tune your website.

Will I be right? The year will tell!

• Follow this blog and watch for the next marketing trends I'm forecasting for 2009.
• Feel free to contact Market GoGo to discuss this further.

Google Analytics is EASY

So - I've been doing web stuff for a while now. But, it has been a long time since I've actually been hands on with anything (in fact, I'm to the point where it is dangerous to give me any passwords, as I might just try to do something on my own).

For some time now I've been a "concept guy", with the ability to craft a credible business case, the capability to pull together a comprehensive workplan, and the experience to put together sound and complete business requirements. However, I've been lucky enough to have a team of people that I could rely on to design user interfaces, write code, test things, and implement changes. So much for that. This is all on my own now.

Every day I plug away and do "a little bit more" of one thing or another to tweak my site or this blog. Every day I up my "technical" challenge to myself. Of course, I know that the technical stuff I'm doing is still all child's play!

But yesterday I took on the challenge of setting up Google Analytics. I headed into it tentatively. I took small steps. I waited to see if it would work. It DID.

I would recommend to you that if you haven't set up Google Analytics or something similar yet ... don't wait any longer. Go get it done today. The implementation is easy, and the results are fascinating.

Enjoy.

Britney Spears and Barak Obama were talking with Angelina Jolie the other day ...

Did you hear that Britney Spears and Barack Obama went to a Miley Cyrus concert? Britney discussed lots of intelligent things with Barak Obama (and his wife Michelle Obama who met them there too). Their conversation included Gas Prices, Oil Prices, Gold Prices, the IRS Stimulus Checks, the Stock Market, and (of course) WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment). Earlier in the day they watched American Idol, and played a little RuneScape. After the Hannah Montana concert, they called up their friend Jessica Alba and she told them that she and Lindsay Lohan were reading a little Naruto. In the end, Angelina Jolie came in and went Lara Croft on everyone. It was like a Hurricane swept a Pregnant Man all the way from Afghanistan, across Iraq, through Pakistan and finally touched him down in China. That would have been just outside the view from Sara Palin's house in Alaska. Then while they were all recovering, Angelina Jolie sat them down and told them all that they had come up in Yahoo!'s top 10 search terms last year. Unfortunately they were all over at Sallie Mae's house at the time, and had to get the heck out fast as George Bush was coming over to perform some foreclosures in the neighborhood.

Was that a ridiculous paragraph? I was trying to jam as many of the Yahoo!'s top 10 search terms into it as I could, and trying to make it sound like it made sense. How'd I do?

Why did Yahoo! publish this result? Well - let's face it, it is kind of fun and it certainly will drive a lot of traffic and links to their site. Check it out ... I linked to them. And what a great article to link to. It has all the major search terms for the last year. Now, those terms will change over the next year. But, this document will end up ranking pretty well in all the other search engines.

Perppering a document with these types of terms - in a relevant manner - is a good choice as part of a Search Engine Optimization strategy (which should be part of your overall Web Marketing and Advertising strategy).

Contact Market GoGo for help with your Web Marketing, including SEO, SEM, banner ads, affiliate programs, and more.