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.

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.

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.

SEO Dark Lord – 97%

Are you an SEO Expert?

This keeps me from having to open a new tab and then go to the insights page and copy and paste my query, all of which takes about 4 seconds to complete. Mutliply that by, say, 10 x a day x 5 days a week x 50 weeks a year and I have effectively saved myself 167 minutes a year that I can use to find other ways to save time.

As you can see, one site dominates the listings. This occurred sometime Thursday night and as of this Monday the results are still the same. Traditionally Google Base results are fairly spread out amongst competitors provided the proper key term is in the title and description. This is the first instance where I have seen this behavior on a highly competitive term.

Now, why could this be occurring? I can really only think of two reasons:

1) Google Base is temporarily insane and will eventually correct itself.

2) Google Base is undergoing some sort of change and this is simply a side effect.

3) This competitor’s feed has some sort of mojo that no other competitor has.

I think that it may be a combination of all three. Interestingly, this morning I noticed that the initial teaser results on the term do not reflect the same as the first page of product listings:

So what is an ambitious Search Marketer to do?

Do your research. Look at the edu’s that have linked to your competition and find out why. Depending on your industry, there could be a variety of reasons why a school, professor, or student may link to your competition and if they link to your competition then they likely will be open to linking to your site.

Job Postings. Most every school has a place for job postings somewhere on their site. My attitude is that every business that has employees is always hiring, or at least reviewing resume’s. So, get busy on Google and start searching using a query like inurl:.edu “job postings” and you will see thousands of school job posting pages ripe for the picking. And who knows, maybe you can get a hot intern out of it.

Open Your Wallet. If theres anything that both schools and students love and need, its money. If you or your client belong to a relatively large company, then you can probably afford to contribute something to some department or organization affiliated with a school. Start with a local school and find out what they need. Not only will you likely get a link from the .edu, but you will likely get some additional publicity out of it. If not, you can always crank out your own press releases praising your altruism.

Well, that’s 3 ideas that should be good for some .edu’s to any site that is actually worth linking to. Good hunting!

To take advantage of the multitude of coupon sites out there, you will need to participate in some sort of affiliate program such as Commission Junction or Share-A-Sale. I won’t go into too much detail about choosing an affiliate program (that will make a later post) but basically you agree to pay affiliates for leads on a per lead basis or as a percentage of online sales. This is done through the insertion of tracking code on your site and the use of cookies in your visitors browsers. You will also pay a small percentage to the actual affiliate program. Keep in mind that affiliate links are not “clean” links so you will not get any PR juice from spreading them around.

Most coupon sites are just great big affiliate networks.Visitors search for coupons or coupon codes, wind up on a coupon site and end up clicking through to your site via the affiliate link. There are also some coupon forums that are SEO friendly and do not require affiliate code to post a link but they may be a little harder to find since they are generally not for profit as the affiliate sites are. I personally love these little forums since they give me a clean link and some incremental traffic to boot.

Depending on your market, coupon marketing may be a considerable amount of traffic. Try searching for your own primary key terms or brand and add the word coupon. You may be surprised how many of your competitors have already beat you to the punch.