I had the opportunity to attend a Google Business webinar last week hosted by Avinash Kaushik. The topic was outcome driven digital marketing. Avinash divided web marketing skill sets into three stages.

Cute Toddler: When web marketers are in this stage they are focused on cost; tracking things like clicks and impressions to figure out the cost per conversion/acquisition. At this level, tracking is implemented like Google Analytics but is only used to see the basics like traffic volume, most visited pages, bounce rates, and conversions.

Rockin’ Teenager: As your web marketing skills grow and develop, you start to focus on revenue instead of just cost. If your site has e-Commerce, this is especially important. At this stage you’re also probably using Pay-Per-Click advertising. Creating advanced segments in Google Analytics will start painting a clearer picture of how your visitors interact with the conversion path. Also, linking your analytics with you Adwords (or other PPC) account allows you to start looking at not only cost-per-click, but revenue-per-click. You can now factor in cost of goods sold to find net profit.

Ninja: After mastering the skills above, you are now in the ninja stage. You understand analytics and know how to calculate revenue but now you’re onto something much bigger…value. Ninjas hunt for what’s beyond the basics and try to unite web marketing with total marketing efforts. In addition to major conversion points like purchases, ninjas track customer value by tracking minor conversions like email submissions, catalog requests, loyalty programs, and social media. Using data gathered from the web and from traditional marketing, ninjas can estimate not only cost and revenue per acquisition/conversion but total value to the company.

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My Thoughts: I was extremely pleased to learn that our Web Marketing team here at Beacon is packed with skilled ninjas. We become partners with each and every client in order to reach the most sophisticated level of understanding and achieve powerful results. If you want the best in Web Marketing, hire the ninjas! 

Microsites are not recommended because…

1.      Your company will lose brand identity and audience engagement.  Think about how much you have spent and will continue to spend through corporate energy and funds on positive brand perception and awareness. Building a microsite is starting over completely from scratch with an entirely new brand. If you are trying to reach an entirely different audience and your current brand would be confusing to this new audience, then building a subdomain would be a better option than building a new site or microsite.  In most cases, microsites are subsets of or promotions for the main site, with exactly the same audience. There are two questions you should ask when considering a microsite.

Do you really want to work at building up multiple brand identities?

Do you really not want to benefit from the brand building in one category for another related category?

2.      A microsite will confuse people and search engines.  You do not want to exclude your regular visitors from your microsite content.

3.      You can’t leverage all areas of your business.  For example; If your company launches a new product andomeone writes up a positive article about this new product (with a separate microsite) in say, the NY Times, readers will start clicking over to the microsite.  But, what if these visitors are also in the market for another one of your company’s products?  If you have a separate microsite, you’ve just missed a great opportunity to reach a targeted and motivated audience currently looking for your other products.

4.      A big part of rank is the number of inbound links from other sites.  You don’t want to split partner links between two sites. You want to keep it all coming back to the main site.

5.      If this is a new site and concept the buzz will not be as strong.  Why not build up the buzz on your main site using the current PR and traffic as a spring board?

6.      What about time and costs?  You are going to have to spend extra time and money to maintain two separate places with different styles, and hopefully different content, etc.  And…if you are building a microsite for a specific campaign, what happens when the campaign ends?

One of my duties here at Beacon is to manage this blog. I’m lucky enough to work with a talented group of people that contribute insightful and informative posts on a regular basis so handling this blog has been a fun experience. It’s nice that all our authors are tech savvy and have a firm understanding on how to post. However, there are many company blogs out there authored by individuals in all kinds of industries with varying blog writing experience. I put together a very simple checklist that takes blog contributors through the three stages of writing a post; Before Writing, Before Posting, and After Posting.

I’d like to share this checklist with you and open up a discussion. Have I thought of everything or are there more steps that could make this checklist better? Please share your ideas and comments!

No one likes spam. I for one dislike spammy blog comments the most. Unfortunately, in the blogging world, spam constitutes a large chunk of total comments and can be a major pain. As a Web Marketing Analyst/Consultant and blogger, I try to use comments for good and not evil. When used correctly, blog comments are a way to build relationships, exchange ideas, share links, and aid SEO. Sadly, all those spam comments make it difficult to be seen and heard out there. Many bloggers use spam filters and/or delete any comment containing a link. So for those of you wanting to reap the benefits of blog comments as a link-building tool or a relationship builder here are some simple Do’s and Don’ts.

DO

Keep it short. Paragraphs of text scream spam. (…and paragraphs of gibberish scream even louder.) Keep your comments brief and easy to understand. You want others to be able to quickly understand your message and respond to it.  A few sentences should do the job.

Get personal. Show the author you actually read the post. Explain why you agreed with them or like what they have to say. A lot of times comments saying things like “I love this post.” or “Great topic.” can be considered spam and bloggers feel like the comment is purely trying to leave a link since your comment often allows your name to link to your site.

Play nice. Offensive comments are never appropriate. It seems like an obvious suggestion but keeping your words civil and constructive instead of rude and aggressive contribute to the conversation instead of destroying it. It’s also a major reason for comment deletion.

DON’T

Don’t be useless. One-word comments or unrelated comments do not add anything to a blog discussion. It leads blog owners to believe your comment is spam and many times it will be deleted. Show that you have actually read the post you are commenting on and try to add some value. Your comment will have a greater chance of sticking and generating interest.

Don’t go link crazy. First, many blog sites allow your name to be a link so try not to duplicate that ink within your comment if this is true. Use your comment text to post useful information instead. If you must include a link within your comment, make sure it is specific and relevant to the post or discussion. An explanation of why your link is relevant is also helpful. Too many irrelevant links are a huge red flag and do your link building efforts no good.

Don’t wear out your welcome. Try not to comment multiple times on the same blog post or on every post. This strategy may get your name out there but it will quickly be received as bothersome and obvious. Spread your presence across multiple blogs and don’t force yourself into the spotlight.

Sure every email marketing solution needs to do some basic things like import email addresses, build emails (on some scale) and send those emails. However, there are a whole lot of bells and whistles out there. After years of working with email marketing I have compiled a master list of what I want from my email marketing solution.

• Ability to compare email message data
• Personal representative available to help maximize effectiveness, segment your audience, give consultative advice, and provide trouble shooting expertise.
• Free customer support
• Email design and creation tools.
• Open & click tracking
• Spam checker to ensure your emails do not get sent to junk email folders.
• Inbox preview (including mobile), which is invaluable to creating universally accepted emails
• Works with you personally to clean up your email database to achieve the highest deliverability.
• Automatic data clense
• Unsubscribe processing
• Stays current on changes in the practices as major ISPs in order to resolve deliverability issues.
• Real time stats
• Ability to send targeted emails to opt-ins based on their actions
• Extra reporting on things like friend forwards, survey responses, updates and bounce inactivation.
• Easily integrates with Google Analytics
• Ability to run A/B tests.
• Allows you to set up automatic emails to remind or encourage recipients
• Data integration application to sync data with your applications
• Ability to upload email data

I came across this extremely “bookmarkable” (Yes. I’m making up that word.) article on the SEOptimise blog. It covers all things title tag including their importance, an explanation of their parts, how to use them effectively and much more.

Check it out!

40 Title Tag SEO for Google Ranking Factors & Optimization Techniques + Resources

What are video search results?

When conducting a keyword search, video results sometimes appear in the search engine result pages. Many keywords will not be news worthy, have videos or even major brands attached to them so video results do not always appear. In addition to keywords, Google is also using the number of social bookmarks, Diggs, Twitter followers, YouTube subscribers and many other factors in determining whether or not to show video results, much in the same way all those factors contribute to an overall site ranking. Google also chooses where to display the video results on the search engine result pages.

How do we optimize video hosted on YouTube?

• Metadata: Make sure to add keyword-rich metadata to video files before uploading them to YouTube.
• Title and Description: Titles and descriptions are the text most commonly applied to videos. YouTube allows you to insert this information in the provided specified title and description fields.
• Filename: Ensure the filename is a sensible and descriptive one, ideally with hyphens or some other form of separating character in between words. For example, “2010-MBA-tour-interview.wmv” rather than “videofile.wmv” or “2010MBAtourinterview.wmv”.
• Tags: YouTube will generally give the opportunity to provide tags. Unfortunately, many video sharing sites, YouTube in particular, are plagued with irrelevant tags from SEO scammers.
• Social Media: Social bookmarking sites and tools to assist in the visibility of your videos, add backlinks to your videos, and create traffic. Also, getting your “fans/followers/subscribers” to submit/vote/like/re-tweet your videos on social media sites helps optimize videos as well.

How do we optimize video hosted on your website?

• HTML: When you publish a video to your website, surrounding it with HTML content will help search engines obtain additional information about the video from the surrounding page.
• Filename, title and description: Although these elements will not provide excellent rankings by themselves, they are almost necessary to rank at all so remember to include them.
• Metadata: Include keywords into your video’s metadata. You can even go as far as tagging each scene with relevant keywords.
• Keyword “video”: This may seem silly or obvious, but using the word “video” as a keyword can help your video rank better if people add “video” to the end of their search query.
• Links and Backlinks: Backlinks are just as important for video optimization as they are for regular website SEO. You want as many backlinks as possible to your video. These links could be on your own site, blogs, etc.
• Video sitemaps / MRSS / RSS: In order for search engines to easily find your videos, you will want to make a sitemap, RSS, or media RSS (MRSS) file to help identify where to locate and index your video content.
• One Video Directory: Compiling all video files in one directory that is not buried within your website also helps search engines find and index those videos.
• No Flash Video Players: Search engines have difficulty crawling videos contained within flash players.
• URLs: Optimize your URL structure so they include video information. Having one video per URL is a good idea as well.

What are other methods for optimizing video?

• Tell The World: Sending press releases, emailing bloggers that might be interested in the video, and posting on social media sites will likely get someone to link back to a video. Online forums are another place to spread the word.
• Do Some Legwork: Submit your video link to online directories or social bookmarking websites. The directories can be free or paid and since most have some page rank and a good amount of traffic the links will be worth something.
• Network: In addition to forums and blogs, sites that are relevant to your video content are even better. You can email the webmasters of these sites, explain your company and video, and ask if they would create a post about the video.
• Discuss: Allowing comments on your videos can potentially spark interesting conversation that may be picked up by other sites. Allowing discussion is a good way to generate interest and interest can spread causing others to link back to your video.

Why track video results?

Producing video content takes time, money and energy. The results should be tracked in order to know if those resources were correctly allocated. Knowing how much traffic you are receiving from these video results and whether or not this traffic is valuable can help make a number of decisions. Perhaps a major chunk of your organic search traffic is actually from video results.  You could segment those visitors to find out when they watch. Also, are you posting new videos when our audience is actively seeking them out?

…and by the way…have you seen Beacon’s amazing video?

Finally! This great new feature is still in beta but it is exactly what Facebook marketers have been waiting for. Soon all of us will be able to track activity that happens on our websites as a result of someone on Facebook seeing or clicking on our Ads. Conversion tracking helps us see the whole picture and I am very excited to start using this on a future campaign.

Tracking is available in the Ads Manager Menu.

Fill out the form to receive script for your conversion page.

When using Google Analytics, it’s a no-brainer to track goals like e-commerce purchase points, contact confirmations and newsletter sign-ups. These conversion points are common and provide valuable data about your site. When visitors successfully navigate through a desired path and take an action you want them to, it’s important to understand everything you can. That’s why Google Analytics also provides goal funnels. However, I’m not here to discuss the obvious. I’m here to talk about event tracking.

Although Event Tracking isn’t a new feature in Google Analytics, it is often overlooked. In order to gain a clearer understanding of how visitors interact with your site, try to find the less obvious places to track. These can include playing a video, clicking on an application, downloading content and many others. Actions that do not take users to a new page are prime candidates for event tracking. Google Analytics can track these events with the use of the _trackEvent() method. Adding the following to the source code of a page, object, video etc. will track the desired event.

_trackEvent(category, action, opt_label, opt_value)

The four components of _trackEvent() method are:

Category -chosen name for the tracked items
Action -a string individually paired with each category that defines the type of interaction such as views, clicks, or downloads
Label – an optional string used for additional attributes
Value – an optional integer used to provide numerical data about the event

The data is sent to Google Analytics and reports can be accessed almost immediately. This useful feature is something we implement and report to our clients. We aim to track everything. Are you tracking everything?

If your business uses WordPress for blogging or as a content management system, there are some great plugins out there to make life easier. Here are the top 10 WordPress plugins that I love.

1. Headspace 2 – HeadSpace manages meta data and other SEO functions. It allows you to tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions that help your page ranking.

2. Simple Facebook Connect – This plugin comes with many different options. You can give your visitors the ability to comment using Facebook Identity (with FB avatar support), login with Facebook credentials and register using Facebook. It also allows you to automatically publish new posts to a Facebook Profile or manually publish posts to a Facebook Profile or Application/Fan Page. And if that weren’t enough, check out the other available buttons and widgets available through this plugin!

• Share button and Shortcode
• Connect Button Widget and Shortcode
• User Status Widget and Shortcode
• Live Stream Widget and Shortcode
• Bookmark Widget and Shortcode
• Find us on Facebook button Widget and Shortcode
• Fan Box Widget
• Fan Count Chicklet and Widget

3. TweetMeme – The TweetMeme button plugin simply adds the TweetMeme button to your posts and feed. It keeps a running total of how many times your content is tweeted. (See example on this post!)

4. Akismet – This does a great job of keeping your WordPress site free of spam. When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your site it is Akismet runs hundreds of tests on the comment to determine whether or not it is spam.

5. WP Click-Track – This plugin automatically posts and rewrites links in your content (pages, sidebar, posts, etc.) in order to include a tracking element. It also allows users to create stand alone trackable links that can be included in posts. It also provides extensive reports right within the WordPress dashboard.

6. Category Order – This seems like a simple plugin but there have been countless times where I’ve needed categories to be in a specific order that wasn’t alphabetical or by ID. This little plugin allows you to easily reorder your categories the way you want via drag and drop.

7. Google Analytics for WordPress – Even though you can use Google Analytics on a WordPress site without this plugin, it’s missing a whole lot of features that this plugin offers. This plugin includes:

• Google Analytics Custom Variables
• Google Analytics API integration
• E-Commerce integration
• Event tracking

8. cformsII – CformsII is the best form plugin I’ve used. Its creators are actually the authors of one of my favorite cooking blogs. This amazing plugin has an incredible amount of features and flexibility. You can create detailed custom forms, style them individually and place them in sidebars, posts or pages.

9. AddThis – AddThis is my favorite share plugin because  it automatically optimizes itself for each person who visits your site. AddThis custom fits each menu with the services they’ll normally use. This plugin also has an automatic interface for iPhone users. The plugin allows a customized share button to be placed in a sidebar or on each post. AddThis.com also provides detailed analytics so you can see how your content is shared across the Web.

10. YD Recent Posts Widget – This WordPress plugin installs a new sidebar widget displays your most recent blog posts along with images. It is very customizable allowing different settings on the home page and other blog pages.