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Just a quick a post to share a new site that I am helping out with, beergutblog.com.  This site is the vision of my good friend Dave Gomez, beer connoisseur and all around mans man. Soon to be full of interesting stuff that every guy needs to know.  Be sure to stop by and tell him what you would like to see posted on his blog, even if you don’t have a beer gut.

You may have seen the recent buzz about the the 2 bottled ghosts sold through New Zealand ebay clone Tradme to an electronic cigarette company. Besides wondering wtf an “electronic cigarette” is (do you plug it in or is it virtual, like that zippo iPhone app?) I immediately thought, “Holy Shit, whatever an e-cigarette is, those guys are viral link building geniuses”.

The most expensive colored water on the planet

Well after the story had went viral, I started looking around on Google to see what kind of link juice this company was getting from all of this press, which includes virtually every major news organization on the planet. Imagine my horror when I discovered that 1) the company was referred to over and over again as “electronic cigarette company” and 2) this company has no web site or web presence what-so-ever.

So, after reading like a gillion articles on this thing, I finally found the name of the company – Safer Smoking New Zealand. Checked Google NZ, nothing.

I understand you may be a new company starting out, haven’t got the web site up yet, just trying to make a splash with a big gimmicky auction buy, but dude, at least make sure the reporters know your freaking name! It’s called a press release! Instead of taking advantage of an almost priceless viral marketing opportunity, they just paid about $1,400 USD for what appears to be 2 small bottles of blue food coloring and will probably not sell one more electronic cigarette than they did the month before.

The moral of the story, always make sure you are in a position to take advantage of marketing opportunities at a moments notice. Maybe in a future post I will expand on that topic.

Many e-commerce companies have felt the effects of the recession and the pressure is on for search marketers to keep the traffic coming in while staying on budget. Traffic is flat, conversions are tanking, what is an SEO guy (or gal) to do? Assuming you have already squeezed every bit you can out of your PPC campaigns, I would like to discuss a few low cost ways to keep the SEO momentum going and hopefully improve those conversions in the process.

Review your keyword list

Time to hit the analytics and find those low bounce, high converting long tail terms that you have been ignoring. You will not get the same traffic as you do with your big money terms, but you can certainly move up the SERPs a lot quicker and easier and they tend to convert better.

Get back to the page

Even if you don’t have money to pay for links or to hire content writers, you can certainly freshen up those boiler plate product pages that you have been meaning to re-write for months. Take the long-tail variants from your keyword review and start working them naturally into those deep pages. Just having a unique sentence or two for each of your products will give you an SEO advantage over your competitors using boiler plate descriptions provided by the manufacturer.

Look closely at your calls-to-action

Go ahead and use this opportunity to reinforce your calls to action in the text of your product descriptions. This can be as simple as linking back to your contact page or to your sale or overstock page.

Add some new content

This can be product guides, how-to’s, testimonials, anything really. Just get some fresh pages added. Every time you add content to your site Google tends to notice and we all know Google loves that fresh content. Again, if this is something your competitors are not doing then it is one more SEO advantage that you can have without spending a ton of dough.

Reach out to your affiliates

If you have an affiliate program in place, time to reach out to your partners and let them know you appreciate their referrals. Nothing says thank you like a bump in commissions. I like to offer an additional percentage for 30 days and then give my affiliates some promo codes that they can sprinkle around on twitter and facebook. Still haven’t got that affiliate program off the ground? No point in waiting any longer. It can take months or even years to build up a stable of reliably producing affiliates. I firmly believe that any e-commerce site can benefit from affiliate marketing and that the return far outweighs the investment.

Well, hope these little pointers help. In a future post I will try to go into more depth on things you can do off-page for little or no money that can have a measurable impact on your rankings.

The more time I spend in the SEO game, the more fascinated I become with semantics. Semantics is the study of how people and machines use and interpret words. A significant portion of my job (or any SEO’s) is looking at products on websites and then researching key words that customers are likely to use when searching for those products. That may seem pretty easy but it is truly amazing how many different words people use to convey the same meaning. It is even more amazing that search engines are getting so damn good at knowing what we really mean when we search for something. Knowing how both people and search engines refer to your products is the most important part of any SEM or SEO strategy.

If you sell blue widgets and want to show up on the term “blue widget” then you would include “blue widget” in the content of your site and maybe get links from other sites using that term as the anchor text. This is all well and good and your boss or client will be thrilled when you are #1 on Google for blue widget but where do you go from there? You can start by using stemming variants or variants that are based on the same root word. This can be as simple as using the plural form (blue widgets) or maybe even different prefixes or suffixes.

The next step is to determine as many synonyms as you can for your target term. Search engines provide suggestion tools to help with this (and there is always the thesaurus) but you also want to talk with key personnel in your organization who deal with customers. This is especially important if you are in a niche market where the search data maybe lacking. This is when you find out that customers in the Northeast call blue widgets blue bobbits.

Once you have a healthy list of variants and synonyms, you will need to prioritize according to popularity. There are many tools to help with this. Google Insights is one of my favorite free ones. If you participate in any paid search advertising then you likely have some good data of your own as well.

Google has been making some great strides in semantic search and specifically in parsing synonyms. Recently Google engineer Steven Baker wrote a great post about synonyms in search and for the first time actually gave some stats on how good Google is at extracting synonyms from their vast amounts of search data.

… our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports. We took a set of these queries and analyzed how precise the synonyms were, and were happy with the results: For every 50 queries where synonyms significantly improved the search results, we had only one truly bad synonym.

Steven is not one of the more public Googlers (see Matt Cutts) but I definitely look forward to reading future posts from this guy.

This weekend I was perusing some of the more popular SEO sites looking for material to prepare some sort of lesson plan for my new SEO/SEM guy. I thought that since the new guy is a college student, then the best way to train him would be to stick with what he is used to, ie: having him read a lot of boring material and testing him on it. Since I myself am way to busy and important to make both a lesson plan and a quiz, I let Google do the work for me. Looks like the folks at seomoz.org have made an almost perfect seo quiz, and I don’t just say that because I scored a 97%. The questions are a nice mix of basic best practices and more advance stuff thrown in. Anyway, here is my SEO Dark Lord graphic/link bait:

SEO Dark Lord – 97%

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