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%

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I think the packaging says it all:

emmm, chocolate faith

And, of course you need edible praying hands to go with your chocolate cross:

I Pray for More Chocolate

I looked all all over for a chocolate Jesus but apparently eating your actual savior would be too tacky.

A few weekends ago I came across this disturbing stock photo in a picture frame at Kirklands:

The resemblance to the real McVeigh is frightening. Hard to believe that this would be the photo that was chosen to be displayed in who knows how many picture frames across the country. Although I have to admit they make a cute couple.

Here is the real deal for comparison:

You can check out some behind the scenes video and pics from the full cast at http://www.streetwithaview.com.

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.

No, not really. It actually was so engaging that the Digg community voted it up in a matter of hours and basically brought down the server on which his blog resides. Unfortunately that server has a lesser function that involves hosting ecommerce sites or some silly nonsense.

Luckily, we all gathered in a prayer circle and laid hands on the ailing server and revived it through sheer power of faith.

No, not really. Alan saved the day by redirecting the digg traffic to Google’s cache of the page. Thanks Alan!

I have to say, it is a great post demonstrating how agnostics are bunch of pussies that just need to step up and admit that there is no fucking god.

No, not really. He is just trying to explain the difference between believing that god does not exist and not believing that god exists. Yeah, I know it makes my head hurt too.

I think that I am going to start calling myself a pragmatic agnostic or pragnostic. Think on that one and get back to me.