FTC announces guidelines for disclosures
What has got every internet marketer up in arms this week? If you have not heard, the FTC ( Federal Trade Commission, USA ) has released its final guidelines for advertisements using endorsements and testimonials.
In its press release on the FTC blog, the commission released two PDFS titled;
Guides Concerning the Use of : Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising – PDF
Revised Endorsement and Testimonial Guides – PDF
A combined behemoth of 94 pages, most of which is filled with legal jargon ( Hint – skip to the end of the first PDF and the second PDF, it has some easier to read scenarios and examples of what the FTC classifies as an endorsement etc ) .
While this author has not attempted to completely analysis the guidelines, which is a task too daunting at 3:31am, I have managed to find some great resources for our readers, that should help explain and clarify the report and its impacts.
Update: There is a great interview by Jim Edwards of igottatellyou.com with Mr. Rich Cleland, Assistant Deputy at The Federal Trade Commission that really clearifies a great deal of misconceptions of the new FTC guidelines. Thank you to @smbusinesscoach for the twitter update.
yahoo site explorer
Looking for an alternative to Google Webmaster tools? Yahoo’s site explorer might just be the answer. Yahoo recently announced 2 new features to site explorer which should add even more appeal.
Keyterms are available for individual pages and site-wide , this will help you nail down how your pages and entire site in search engines eyes related to your target terms. To read more about the technology behind how the keyterms are generated check out this post on the yahoo blog.
Delicious bookmarks is also a handy way to find out how your content is spreading. Clicking on each tag will give you some additional data from the delicious website.
These new features are certainly not ground-breaking, but add to the value of Yahoo site explorer which makes it an attractive alternative to Google webmaster tools.
competition research using bit.ly service
URL shorteners are sweet, they help turn those really long URLs into nice neat URLs, but besides from this basic service, some URL shorteners also provide great data services.
Have you ever wanted to find out how your viral content is spreading? or how many times your blog post was retweeted, emailed or IM’ed?
Even better, what if you could see this data for your competitors shortened URLs and not just your own? Would this give you an extra advantage above your competitors? Yes I would think so.
So now that I have your attention, lets introduce Bit.ly into the picture.
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Guest Post by DejanSEO
When the topic is SEO secrets or PageRank algorithms, mum’s the word from Google — most of the time. Yet it seems even the king of search engines will unzip its lips with the right amount of coaxing. In an interview with Google’s Senior Support Engineer Maile Ohye, Jen Lopez from SEO Moz gained the juicy scoop on two critical topics: do low-quality backlinks influence rankings, and do they incur a risk for penalties?
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2 new Google webmaster labs tools
Breaking news, Google announced 2 great new additions to the Google webmaster tools.
The tools are located under the new ‘Labs’ menu heading in your webmaster tools console.
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Like you and most SEO’s around the world, we are constantly scouring the web for information and news regarding Google’s activities and updates. Some of your favorite sources may include websites such as SE Roundtable and SEO Journal. But do you ever wonder where these great sites source their information?
You may not realize this, but Google has over 30 official blogs that it regularly updates by Google employees, these blogs cover news and information on most of Google’s products, such as Google Search, Google Adwords, Google Adsense, Google Analytics and so forth.
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Google Conversion Room released a free online guide titled “Make your website work – Ten ways to convert visitors into buyers“, this booklet is a great supplement to our e-Commerce SEO guide posted not long ago.
While the 28 page booklet was launched towards the UK market, the tips offered are universal to successfully convert visitors to sales. The language used in the booklet is easy to understand and written for business owners and non technical users.
The 10 tips offers before and after examples and really simple steps to test, analyze and implement.
Head over to the Google Conversion Room blog and check out this e-book, even if you are a seasoned marketer, spending the 10 minutes to read through the tips will be refreshing.
via flickr
Many internet entrepreneurs have an idea, they have a product, they have a website, but they typically still fail because they do not have the internet marketing savvy. They need a plan on how to get people to visit their website, how to ensure these people are looking for exactly what it is they are currently trying to sell, and to make sure once the visitor arrives at their website they are presented with a website which will provide them with the information, tools, overall navigation structure and calls to action to make sure they buy the product while they are visiting.
I know this sounds like a lot of work, but these are all so important to the success of your product or service online. Great products, great prices, great service do not sell online alone; great internet marketing offers you the opportunity to present your potential customers or clients with the great products, services and prices that you have to offer.
It is interesting how a traditional business person’s thought process varies from a search engine optimization or internet marketing professional. The entrepreneur thinks in a traditional sense of its order of events: unique or original idea, obtain products or services at good price, great presentation, good price points, and finally marketing.
SEO’s like me tend to approach business completely backwards from what is traditional. Give me any product, as long as the demand is good, and some decent profit margins, and our mind is racing ahead with marketing and getting traffic! (very targeted traffic).
So how does one get targeted traffic, well once you know what you product or service is and whom your potential customers are, you need to find out what search queries these people are currently performing that is going to present you with the highest opportunity to sell them your product or service. This is accomplished with what we call keyword research. Keyword research as defined by Wikipedia is “a practice used by search engine optimization professionals to find and research actual search terms people enter into the search engines when conducting a search.”
Targeting the right keywords is probably the single most important factor in the future success of your business. There are a multitude of keyword research tools available these days, with one of them being tied to Google Adwords which is called the Google Keyword Tools or SK Tool. I will focus on this tool for the time being and will list a bunch of others.
My experience with this tool has been all over the map. At times it has proven to be balls on accurate and other times it seems to have seriously flawed data both in the competitive nature of search terms and the traffic currently being seen within Google.
Once you log in to the tool you can fire when ready, everyone knows for the most part what their select few targeted keywords might be, so this is where you should start. Enter you top 5-10 keywords that you think would be good (do not forget to use both singular and plural). Google will suggest related terms. Google helps you gather your keyword list, which is not surprising as it is in Google’s best interest for websites to be prepared to optimize their websites for the appropriate keywords as this will make their job much easier.
Once Google has displayed a nice fat list of potential target keywords, be sure to select the drop box that says ‘broad by default’ and select ‘exact match’. Otherwise you are seeing merged results, which skew the search volumes heavily towards your potential trophy keyword; exact match supposedly will display exactly how many search queries for each keyword combination Google has actually received over the past month. Another thing I like about this tool is the ability to change the language to show results in particular countries searches.
So now that you’re looking at the list of words with exact match, you will see some columns that display how competitive each keyword is. For the most part this is completely useless as in most of the verticals we have worked in, all of the words anyone would want to rank for are displayed as very competitive, therefore having the little green bar nailed all the way to the right. The only way to use this info is when you see words which are not currently shown as competitive and have a reasonable amount of search traffic, you’ve found a fantastic potential target. (and if for some reason you do not like that keyword send me an email and tell me about it, as I will build a website and quickly figure out how to make money from that keyword J).
Once you feel comfortable with the results, you can continue down the road of building a list by adding the words like cheap, discount, sale, new, used, in conjunction with your selected keywords . And bust out your thesaurus; if you do not know what this is, Microsoft Word has one 🙂
You may also be well served depending on the products or services you offer to add state names and city names both as a prefix and postfix to your primary keywords. The sky’s the limit, you can add colors, sizes, calls to action like fast, limited, crazy etc. You really need to take your time to develop a large and long list of keywords. If your just getting onto the game, the likelihood of getting to page one any time soon for your trophy terms is quite low, so realize that this lower hanging fruit using these popular two and three word search query phrases are going to be your life blood for the next 12-18 months.
Rinse and Repeat… There is really no secret to this, simply repeat this process for your other main phrases and by targeting these low hanging fruit or longtail keywords if you want to get technical. You will see a steady increase in organic traffic, from there move onto web analytics to see how you can better convert this traffic into sales. As a general rule, longtail leads tend to convert a lot better than leads from competitive phrases.
After your keyword research we can get into laying the on site groundwork for a successful website, like getting a keyword rich domain name, aged preferably, possibly online for its entire life, and having a few very aged links, then cooking up a really tight website, with all the required on site meta info, fully optimized content, solid internal link structure and multiple forms of updating content. We will circle back to many of these additional onsite SEO tips at a later date.
Additional Resources for good keyword research tools are as follows (I have used all of the below to some level):
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/
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li'l engine techCrunch50 Wrap-up
TechCrunch 50 is a yearly conference for IT startups to showcase their products & services for judging by the public and expert panels. Every year new startups come and go, occasionally some startup’s make it big ( Mint anyone? ) but most do not.
Day 1 of the techcrunch50 delivered some impressive and unique products & services, some of which relate directly to Search Engine and Internet marketing, here is a round up of the highlights and how it will effect SEMs and internet marketers, remember most of these companies are in Beta Testing right now and offering free registration and sign-ups.
Just a quick note as I live in Australia, I’m having to stay up at ridicules hours to catch the live stream and bring you this news 🙂 Hope you guys appreciate it!
Two startup’s this year are tapping into children’s edu-tainment market, Clasemovil from Finland and Toon Tunes from the USA.
Clasemovil is a virtual world where children can sign-up and learn math, history, language and science through a colorful multi-media interface and mini flash games delivered via a virtual world. In this virtual world children can interact with each other by playing educational games and buy / sell virtual items ( movils ). Teachers and parents can sign-up and become moderators of this virtual world. Movil also incorporates a backend for teachers where each class or student can be profiled to understand which areas they may be under-performing.
Toon Tunes is online subscription based leisure product, where kids can create music and interact with other children by virtual clubs, gigs and share their music via facebook and download their track as a ringtone. I have to say, the interface looks fantastic and some of the music creation tools are very cool. By putting a social media element to the product, kids are able to upload their recorded tracks ( complete with loops, synths and their own voice recording ) to a virtual club, and the playlist will stream their track to the other kids that are in the club as well.
This is a huge untapped market, 3 startups this year are set to coin in this niche to deliver entertainment content via the internet to hand-held devices, with the increase in bandwidth and broadband connectivity I think they have timed their entry in perfectly.
StorySomething delivers customised children stories via email or to the parents iphone, each story is customised to your child’s name. Authors can sign up and submit their stories to be published, which they will earn a commission.
ToyBots have created an innovative platform where toy manufactures can make toys that can interact with the internet social crowd. An example demo’ed was the Woozee Doll, the doll is able to interact with an online service where friends and families can send voice recorded messages, kids can download new personalities and interact with other dolls. The platform includes a hardware component which has a GPS, accelerometer, wifi and onboard memory. This is a new step towards robotics in my opinion, and ignoring the fact that its a childrens toy, the idea behind this is very powerful. I predict we will see many other similar products for adults in the near future.
Spawn Labs will appeal to teens and adults that are into video gaming and console gaming, which is one of the biggest money making industries. By attaching a special hardware box to your gaming console (xbox, playstation etc) and connecting it to the internet, you are able to play the game through any computer or laptop connected to the internet, anywhere around the world. The platform also supports social gaming, where you can join in other gamers console around the world.
No surprise this year had 3 startup entries related to the booming social media market. I think this arena is a way over crowded at the moment, and with each new startup, innovative ideas become far less interesting. Here are the three entries;
Sealtale lets bloggers create custom seals or badges related to their favorite product, blog or website, than place these seals into their social media network sites such as facebook, blogger. The interface was nicely designed, and the hope to generate revenue from companies that sponsor a seal, once sponsored the advertisers can place their advertising messages, special offers etc onto the the badge and when clicked the badge will display these details. This one is set to fail in my honest opinion.
Udorse has more of a potential by giving users a cash / donation incentive when they tag their social network photos with ‘endorsements’, these can be directly linked to a advertiser, which they will get a commission everytime someone clicks on the tag on a watch, dress, gadget that appears in the photo. I see this working well for viral marketing, if you managed to get a photo of a celebrity holding, wearing one of your products, you can tag it for everyone to see.
Rackup Interesting business model, where consumers can bid on how much additional money they can add to your giftcard. Its not a gambling based system, because the consumers always get the amount of gift card + bonus, they will never loose that giftcard amount. The catch is to get in as early as you can, providing you are in the top 10 bids list, you will get the giftcard + the bonus.
Good model I think for all parties, business get more “prepaid” sales, Rackup get about % comission per card and consumers get some nice bonuses, however the issue will be increased debt, as consumers may buy these cards on a rush of blood to the head, but cant actually afford them.
FluidHTML is a new markup language which aims to solve the major problems related to Adobe Flash. Flash is not crawlable by search engine robots, flash websites often avoid deep linking and flash sites are hard to maintain and update. FluidHTML uses standard HTML / CSS in addition to special “Objects” or tags which gives designers flash objects.
Such as a flash movie player, which you can directly style using CSS and because it is coded in HTML, search engines are able to crawl and index the content with ease.
I wasn’t overly impressed with the presentation, having worked as a web designer I was hoping to be wow’ed more with the demo. If you are a developer looking to integrate flash into your custom CMS site that is SEO friendly, it might be worth learning more about fluidHTML. But I suspect many of the cool objects can already be achieved with Ajax.
Google Fast Flip is a new Google experiment tool, which aggregates content from major news & publishing sites and displays them in a magazine format. Don’t worry this new tool is not going to effect anything you do for SEO or SEM, unless you’re blog is ranking in the top 100 of Alexa 🙂 The mobile version of Google Fast Flip is very cool, if you are ever bored and want to catch up on some light reading, use your mobile device to browse through the latest content from the top blogs. Worth a look during your lunch break.
Bing Wave 2 & Bing Visual Search – While not a startup, Bing have announced a major update to their search platform at this years TechCrunch50. This presentation deserves a post of its own, and I have the pleasure of guest posting about Bing Wave 2 and Bing Visual search at SEOMoz ( Thanks Jen! ) Click here to read this post on SEOMoz.
I’ve deliberately left the 3 most important presentation till last because I wanted you to read the entire post 🙂 These three startups deserve your attention if you are in anyway involved in Pay Per Click advertising and affiliate marketing,
Refmob the refer-a-friend marketplace, is a service that helps business owners create and manage their referral programs. Many smaller business owners are missing out on an extra 10% – 20% additional business by not using a referral system and taking advantage of their customer database. Refmob aims to help these users create, manage and measure the success of these referral campaigns.
Refmob also offers consumers the ability to market their referral programs as well, the concept is a little hard to explain here, I encourage you to take a look at this demo.
This is a very interesting service with great potential, which I recommend every business owner especially small Yellowpages business that are thinking of getting into social media marketing, Refmob would be a good launchpad. The interface seems very easy to use having the ability to actually perform your mass mailing and track the progress of your campaign via an impressive dashboard.
5to1 A new advertising publishing network. Great concept behind this new ad network where publishers are able to pick which ads they want displayed on their blogs / sites. Which means no more degrading ads such as ‘hit the monkey with the banana’ or ‘congratulation you are the 1 millionth visitor’ showing up on your website. If you have worked hard to gain loyal visitors to your blog, there is nothing worst to find you have lost that following because your ad network decided to post on of these ads on your site. To me this seems like a great idea, been an obsessive designer I can spend hours tweaking the layout of my blog and making sure it looks and feels right to my audience, the thought of having remnant ads as described above has put me off joining smaller ad networks until now.
5to1’s interface looks very clean and easy to use, the ability to see the banners before they get published is an awesome feature and having the ability to turn off an ad instantly is a nice touch. 5to1 reminds me of buysellads, but since buysellads only target a small niche, 5to1 would appeal to a wider scope of blog and site owners. Great new concept! Would be worth checking out on some of your lower traffic websites, to see if the ads you selected is actually getting better CPMs than algorithm ads ( Adsense ).
DataXu An advertisers platform to optimize their campaigns. This is some serious data crunching and statistics service! On the flip side of the coin from 5to1, DataXu is focusing on machine calculated algorithms and advertisers that want to aggregate their advertising stats from larger ad networks such as Google, Yahoom, rightmedia, PubMatic and combine these stats to give a clearer view of which type of campaigns are working the best.
The data segmentation is pretty impressive, in the example DataXu shows quickly in what time of day on what category of websites the campaign is best performing on and in another example DataXu shows what time of the day in which region of America the campaign best performed, DataXu also claims to have a very powerful user profiling engine, which it shares the results with the advertisers.
I would recommend researching further into DataXu if you are a advertising company looking for better ad optimization and reporting for your clients, or in-house ad managers for mid-cap companies. I think for smaller advertisers ( <$10,000 per month ) there is just way too much data to sift through, looking at your own time vs the cost savings, I would stick with easier tools such as Google Analytics.
It’s also worth noting that during the the demo, Marissa Mayer from Google was very busy taking notes, no doubt she will have an interesting discussion with the AdSense team when she gets back to the Googleplex. 🙂
Phew! So that is my wrap-up of day 1 of the TechCrunch50 conference, thanks for reading and hanging out with me, Why not stay a little longer by discussion or commenting on any of the start-ups here!
Search engine optimization for ecommerce websites is often a difficult area to tackle and most smaller SEO firms will avoid taking on this task or fail at succeeding good results.
It is true most SEO companies can offer strategies that will boost the rankings for standard websites with less than 20 pages of content and for a small range of niche keywords. Ecommerce SEO requires a lot more planning and resources to become successful, this first guide in a series will aim to provide a checklist to those that are about to start-up their own ecommerce empire.
If you are just beginning your journey to start an E-commerce website, plan ahead for your success by following these steps and head over to out guides page to download the accompanying checklist ,
This includes SEO both onsite and ongoing costs. For example ( from a $10,000 investment, $3000 should be proportioned for SEO. This includes $1000 for keyword research and onsite optimization, $2000 for ongoing SEO, which should get you 3 – 5 months of ongoing SEO.
For ecommerce websites, I would certainly recommend a larger firm with proven experience in producing e-commerce websites. Also be on the look-out for companies that can offer all-in-one services, this will save you time and money in the long-run, where both aspects of your online business can be managed together.
Going Open Source. Will you be using an open-source platform such as OSCommerce, Zen cart? The advantages are generally
Going Custom. A custom-built platform will offer the best flexibility and customization options, which may set you apart from your competitors. The down-side of this is higher development costs and SEO firms may have difficulties working with your system.
Refer to the e-commerce SEO checklist for what to ask your developer.
Part of your pre-planning should also include selecting an SEO firm that has proven experience in e-commerce SEO. They should also be comfortable working with your chosen e-commerce platform, longtail SEO campaigns and preferably content generation. Refer to the ecommerce checklist for questions to ask your SEO.
To be successful you must indentify who your competitors are. I would recommend splitting this into a Global competitor list and a local competitor list and further separate them by short term and long term competitor. Your SEO should be able to help you create this list. Start small by first eliminating your local competitors in the search results, once you have the momentum look at tackling the big players. Be honest with yourself, SEO’s are not magicians – your SEO budget will directly affect your SEO performance.
The best ecommerce SEO strategy for those that are on a small budget is using a long-tail SEO strategy. If your products are not niche, and your competitors are dominating the generic search results. Focus on developing a long-tail SEO strategy to capture traffic from less competitive keywords or phrases, by combining a good content creation plan and good Keyword research.For example – rather than focusing on “Digital Cameras” which would be highly competitive, a longtail strategy may include keywords such as “Cheap Sony digital camera” + “buy Sony digital camera” which may be less competitive, but still bring favorable results. A longtail strategy will involve more content creation ( see below ) and onsite SEO rather than link building.
Yep, content is king in most cases of ecommerce SEO, and especially where you are using a longtail strategy. Ask yourself if you are willing to participate in writing good unique descriptions for each product category and product description. If you are not be prepared to hire a content writer. Copy and pasting the vendors product description is not going to win you favors with search engines. Remember Google can not see the awesome photography which you have paid a fortune for. They can only see the text on your website.
Most ecommerce websites now-adays will sport a blog as well. But a blog will only be useful if you have fresh relevant content. If I had to choose between creating content for product descriptions and a blog for SEO, I would choose product description creation. A blog can work in a social marketing concept. SEO wise, stick with the product descriptions.
