Month: September 2012

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Using Marketing Automation Tools for SEO

Excerpts from my latest article at Practical eCommerce: “SEO: Using Automated Landing Pages.”

Marketing automation tools make creating landing pages a snap. They focus on making it more efficient to deliver relevant content to relevant individuals at relevant times via email and paid search campaigns. Why not use them to create landing pages for SEO campaigns as well, right? Unless they’re set up to create searchable landing pages, your marketing automation platform may be completely unable to drive organic search traffic and sales.

Email marketing platforms were the genesis of today’s more sophisticated marketing automation platforms. Today, these platforms can track the behavior of customers interested in your products to understand intent and deliver more targeted messaging. The goal is to move potential customers farther through that marketing funnel to eventually convert them to paying customers.

Email campaigns and paid search ads are common drivers to the customized messages contained on these targeted landing pages. Because they’re so targeted, marketers feel confident in placing specific promotions on them such as a discount or a special download. Naturally, marketers don’t want these types of targeted promotions to get indexed for anyone to find in Google and the other engines. The result would be skewed metrics and campaigns with potentially high-value promotions being distributed far too widely as more customers find the content via organic search.

That natural desire to keep targeted email and paid search landing pages out of organic search results can be the foundation of the problem with using marketing automation platforms for SEO. Unless they’re set up to make specific landing pages searchable and others hidden from search engine spiders depending on campaign needs, creating optimized landing pages for organic search with your marketing automation platform could get you a bit of nowhere.

The article goes on to explain:

  • How to Tell if Landing Pages Are Indexable
  • How to Fix Indexation Problems
  • More Links and Sound SEO

Read the article in full at Practical eCommerce >>

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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Meta Keywords: Spam & Spy Wrapped into One

Excerpts from my latest article at NBC Chicago’s Inc. Well: “Why Meta Keyword Tags Are a Waste of Time.”

 

When discussing keywords and content optimization best practices, clients will invariably ask about meta keywords. Sorry, guys, but meta keywords have been dead to the major US search engines as ranking signals for nearly three years now. Google was the first to denounce meta keywords, then Yahoo! and Bing.

Once upon a time when the Internet was young and search algorithms hadn’t evolved independent methods to determine relevance and context, meta keywords allowed site owners to specify the keywords their content was relevant for.

Unfortunately, meta keywords were visible only as a signal to search engines. Humans never see meta keywords unless they enjoy staring at source code, which is not typical consumer behavior. Spammers everywhere rejoiced at the ability to stuff popular keywords into a page to improve its rankings without the human visitors ever seeing that nasty cruft behind the scenes.

Consequently, meta keywords were short-lived as a search engine ranking signal and quickly became nothing more than a spam signal. Or a traitorous avenue for competitors to spy on your optimization efforts….

Read the full article with all the details at NBC Chicago’s Inc. Well >>

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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Avoiding Algorithmic Pandas and Penguins

Excerpts from my latest article at Practical eCommerce: “SEO: Avoiding Penguins and Pandas.”

 

Google’s recent penchant for naming major algorithmic updates after animals has the world of search engine optimization sounding more like a zookeeper’s dilemma. But with rumors of an impending Penguin update right around the corner, ecommerce marketers need to know their Penguins from their Pandas, and how to avoid the ire of both.

In both cases, Penguin and Panda are algorithmic updates. Each represents updates to the hundreds of signals that Google uses to analyze and rank web pages for its search results pages. Penguin and Panda are primarily associated with negative impact on organic search traffic. Algorithmic updates are different than a manual penalty, in which human members of Google’s Web Spam team manually identify violations to Google’s webmaster guidelines and assess penalties on those pages. Because Penguin and Panda act algorithmically, if a site that has been demoted can identify and remove the issue, the site should be able to rebound algorithmically as well.

Most algorithms are being constantly tweaked and updated within Google’s main index. As a result, the impact of these continual updates isn’t felt strongly or suddenly as the algorithms evolve. Interestingly, Penguin and Panda are processed outside of the main index. Consequently, the updates to the rankings that these two algorithms produce are experienced in sudden bursts of change to rankings and traffic, lending Penguin and Panda their fearsome reputation.

Read the article in full at Practical eCommerce for more detail on Google’s Penguin and Panda algorithm updates. »

PS: For lots of interesting details on how Google instructs its human quality raters, see Search Engine Land’s article from 9/7/12: “Google Search Quality Raters Instructions Gain New “Page Quality” Guidelines.” I guess this topic is on a lot of minds lately.

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.