Execnology
Technology for Executives

Read this article if: You are currently using an SEO firm and want to know how to verify the work that they are doing.

I talk with people often about their company’s web site, and often ask SEO-related questions. “Do you rank highly for your target keywords?” “How much traffic does organic search drive to your web site?” Most of the time I am met with blank stares. One popular response is “Well, we use an SEO firm, they optimize our web site pages”. Not exactly the answer I was hoping for, but it’s a start. I do a couple routine checks on their web site and discover what every webmaster fears; their SEO firm has been doing NOTHING and getting paid very handsomely!

A large majority of “SEO” firms out there are fly-by-night operations and swindlers, trying to confuse their clients with techno-babble to make them think that valuable work is being done. The main reason companies get swindled by these types of firms is because these SEO firms use customers lack of SEO knowledge against them. Even you, reading this article right now, you’ve probably employed an SEO firm or consultant. What have they done for you? Can you document and prove the work they’ve done, most importantly the benefits you’ve seen? Most people can’t because they don’t know what to look for. That ends today. Here’s how to verify that your SEO firm is actually earning their keep.

Check for presence of Meta tags

Meta tags are pieces of web page code that are readable by search engines but not by humans; these tags are not visible on the web page itself. Meta tags tell search engines what your web page is about. Meta tags are one of the basic components of good SEO. If your SEO agency did not create Meta tags for your web site, that’s red flag #1, and probably a good indicator that it’s time to send them packing. Your web site’s pages should contain these three basic tags: Title, Description, and Keywords. Here’s how to check for the presence of these tags:

1) Go to your web site’s home page.

2) Check the source code of the web page. To do this, go to your web browser’s menu and select View>Source. Alternatively you can right click anywhere on the page and select “View Source” from the pop-up menu.

3) The page source will display in a new window, essentially a text file full of raw code. It will appear quite messy, so I recommend you go to the Edit menu and click “Find”, then type in title followed by “Find Next”. This should take you straight to the Title tag. If however it says “cannot find ‘title” that means no Title tag was found. Assuming that it did find a Title tag, you should see something like this:

<title>XYZ Company Web Site - Widgets and More</title>

4) Assuming a Title tag was present, now it’s time to check for Meta tags. Still viewing the page source, again go to the Edit menu and click “Find”, then type in meta followed by “Find Next”. This should take you straight to the first Meta tag; keep clicking “Find Next” until you see the Description tag, which will look something like this:

<meta name=”Description” content=”XYZ Corporation, located in Anytown, U.S.A., makers of widgets and more.”>

5) Lastly we want to check for the presence of the Keywords tag, so with the Find window still open click “Find Next” and it should take you to the Keyword tag, which will look something like this:

<meta name=”Keywords” content=”xyz corporation, widgets”>

If you found all these tags present, congratulations! Your SEO firm is doing their job. I suggest you make a note of the tags however, so that in the future when they tell you they optimized your tags, you’ll know if the tags were actually changed or not.

Demand a search engine ranking report

A lot of SEO firms say “Your rankings went up, things are looking great” but never provide any tangible information to back that up. They should be providing you monthly rank reports that show you:

1) What keywords your web site ranks for on all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask.com)

2) The specific ranking(s) for each keyword

3) What pages of your web site are ranked

4) What changed from the prior month, along with some commentary that explains why

Make sure your backlink count is increasing

One of the most important aspects of SEO these days is the number of web sites that link to your web site; these links are known as a “backlinks”. Any good SEO firm should be working to boost the number of backlinks to your web site. If they’re not, you should confront them about it or find a new agency. If they are, ask for routine backlink reports so that you can chart your web site’s progress. Alternatively, you can manually check how many web sites link to yours. There are two ways to do this:

1) Go to Google and type in link:www.yourwebsite.com replacing yourwebsite with your own, of course. Google will display the number of web sites linking to yours. Make a note of this number, checking back periodically to make sure it keeps going up.

2) Go to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ enter your web site’s URL and click “Explore URL”. Note the number of “Inlinks” displayed. This is the total number of web sites linking to yours according to Yahoo. As with Google, make a note of this number, checking back periodically to make sure it keeps going up.

There are many other ways to keep tabs on your SEO firm, but the above three checks will give you a good idea of how hard they are working for you. If performing the three checks turns up results, then you’ve probably picked a decent SEO firm. If not, confront your SEO firm or start shopping for a new one. There are hundreds of good SEO firms out there, don’t settle for less!

Read this article if: Your target audience is the tech-savvy millennial or gen-y age group.

An instant message (IM) is great because it has the immediacy of a phone call without the intrusiveness.  But what happens when everyone you know uses IM and wants to chat with you at the same time?  What if you want to tell everyone the same thing?  This is the problem millennials faced, until Twitter came along.

Twitter is sort of a party line for IM.  You receive a real-time, single feed of short messages (<160 characters), or “tweets”, that are the aggregation of all the people you are “following”.  You, in turn, have “followers” that receive all of your tweets.  The concept of followers allows for one way relationships (e.g. I follow Marc but he doesn’t follow me.)  For this reason, it is often referred to as micro-blogging.  Twitter does allow for “directs” (tweets sent to a single person) and “replies” to allow for private messages.  Users of Twitter can receive updates through the Twitter.com web site but typically receive their messages via SMS to their mobile phones or use a desktop client like Twhirl.

Twitter can be used as a marketing tool very similar to a blog.  Push out the right stream of messages and you’ll build a loyal set of followers who covet your messages and share them with friends.  Push out stale, corporate-sounding notes and you’ll be talking to yourself.

Create an account at Twitter.com and use these ideas to kick-start your millennial marketing program:

• Give people a reason to follow you. Announce news and special event notices BEFORE it hits your web site.  Offer deals only available to followers.
• Promote your Twitter feed on your web site. Show the last few tweets on your corporate web site.  There are plugins to do this automatically, or access via Twitter’s API.
• Follow people in your target audience. A lot of people will follow you back.  Use this info to find out what your target audience is really talking about.
• Promote job opportunities. Don’t let marketing have all the fun.  Twitter is a great place to market job openings to millennials.
• Talk with existing customers. Let these folks help do your marketing.  Provide them with upgrade offers and product use tips.  Maybe this could be a separate Twitter account.

Read this article if: You want to know whether or not your company should be doing Search Engine Marketing, and more importantly, what it will cost you if you don’t do it.

I’m frequently asked by companies why they should utilize search engine marketing. When asked this question I usually run down my case for SEM and list the many benefits. I’m also frequently asked what is the cost of NOT doing SEM, meaning how much it will hurt a company that decides against using SEM. Let’s start with the easy one first.

The Benefits of Search Engine Marketing

• Nearly every Internet user in the world uses search engines, so you can effectively reach your target audience.
• Compared to traditional media channels (newspaper, television, magazine, radio) SEM is far more cost effective.
• When Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is used, your investment will have lasting effects for years. Proper SEO will help you boost your organic search engine rankings - and maintain them - often for several years. Remember, organic search engine traffic is 100% free for life, so you’re wise to maximize it as much as possible.
• When using Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising you can have an instant search engine presence, even for competitive keywords. Your ads can be running in minutes, showing exactly where you want them to show for keyword searches that YOU define, and you pay only when someone clicks your ad. You control how much you want to pay per click and set a daily and monthly budget so that your ad cost does not exceed your available budget.
• SEM is 100% measurable. You can track visitors from the time they click on your organic search listing or PPC ad all the way through their subsequent journey on your web site. Most importantly, you can track conversions from SEO and PPC activity. A conversion occurs when a web site visitor performs a desired action, such as buying a product or subscribing to a newsletter. With such detailed tracking available, you can quickly determine what’s working, what’s not, and adjust accordingly for maximum ROI on your SEO or PPC investment.

Now that we’ve highlighted some of the key benefits of using SEM, let’s take the opposite approach and look at what you’re losing if you’re not doing SEM.

The Cost of Not Doing Search Engine Marketing

• You’re missing out on a huge potential customer base. Over the past several years there has been a tremendous shift towards online media amongst consumers. Depending on your industry, many of your target customers cannot be effectively reached through traditional media channels. There are tens of millions of searches performed every day, but if your company has no visibility in search results, no one will know about you or your web site.
• Your competitors are most likely doing SEM. Because of this, they are intercepting your potential customers on major search engines. In fact, your competitors are probably running PPC ads using your company name, stealing away searchers who were actually looking for information about your company.

The short answer here is that your company needs to be doing Search Engine Marketing in some form. There is a lot to be gained by doing it, and also a lot to be lost by not doing it. It is cost effective, 100% measurable, and in my experience typically produces great results. So ask your web team, IT group or agency about how you can effectively utilize SEM for your organization. If properly done, I think you’ll be very pleased with the results.

Read this article if: You want to know what Search Engine Marketing is and how it can benefit your company.

It’s no surprise to anyone that the Internet has become the cornerstone of many Americans lives, and plays an important role in their daily routine. When looking at the impact of the Internet on society we have two extremes: the Gen Y generation, born and raised on computers and the Internet, all the way to seniors, many of whom still fear technology and prefer to get their information the old fashioned way. But no matter what age group you examine, the fact is that Internet usage within that group is increasing at a feverish pace as the years go by. And most people’s daily Internet journey begins at a search engine.

We hear the names Google, Yahoo and MSN - the heavy-hitters of the search engine world - on a daily basis, and odds are many of you reading this article used one of those three sometime today, maybe even to find this web site. The usage of search engines is growing at a furious pace, and with that comes a host of new opportunities for the savvy company or marketer who knows how to capitalize. Recent studies show that 85% of all web sessions begin at a search engine. Translation: Your target audience, no matter who they are or what they do, uses search engines. If you want to reach and engage them you’ve got to target them where they live: the search engine results pages. How do you obtain a strong presence on search engine results pages? With Search Engine Marketing.

Search Engine Marketing, simply put, is a multi-tiered online marketing approach whose goal is to increase the visibility of a web site within search engine results. The main, and most common, components of SEM are Search Engine Optimization (a.ka. SEO) and Pay-Per-Click advertising (a.k.a. PPC or Paid Search). SEO involves optimizing the actual code of a web site in order to get that site to rank higher for its target keywords in the ‘organic’, also called ‘natural’, search results. PPC advertising involves placing paid textual advertisements on search engine results pages, only paying when an ad is clicked. PPC advertisements are featured in the “Sponsored Links” area of search engine results pages. Below is a screenshot that clearly defines SEO and PPC in the context of a search engine results page:

Naturally it is important to have both a paid and organic search presence. Having both not only strengthens your visibility, as well as your brand, but it increases the likelihood that someone will click on one or the other, instead of one of your competitors listings.

SEO and PPC are very different animals. With SEO, the search engine chooses how your listing appears and decides where your web sites ranks for various keywords. If you’ve done a good job on SEO, your web site should rank highly and with optimal listings. Organic search rankings require a lot of upfront effort and investment, and seeing results can take weeks or months. However, after the initial investment SEO is 100% FREE traffic, and the benefits of proper SEO can last months, even years. With PPC, you’ve got an ongoing investment (you pay for each click), but you are limited only to the size of your wallet. You choose how your listing appears, you decide how highly it ranks, and you decide how many times you want it to be shown each day, and how many clicks you want to get. PPC is immediate; you can have ads running in a little as 15 minutes and get your message out there quickly.

No matter which method you choose - SEO, PPC, or both - Search Engine Marketing empowers you to reach your target audience where they live: the search engines. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling a product, service, or looking to hire the perfect candidate, Search Engine Marketing provides an extremely cost effective way for you to not only reach, but effectively engage, your target audience.

If you liked this article, stay tuned for future Search Engine Marketing articles including: The Cost of SEM, Measuring ROI from Search Engine Marketing Efforts, and much more.