Archive for the ‘Search Engine Marketing’ Category
Is this what you paid for?
The new 2009 edition of Yellow Pages has been arriving on doorsteps of businesses and homes around the country, or in this case conveniently placed in the stair-well of SearchKing’s premises.
Are your customers fingers walking or typing?
Phone directories were once a reliable customer acquisition and search tool, and getting your listing in on time for print was crucial for businesses to be discovered by their customers.
Here at the SearchKing premises however, the new edition of Yellow Pages is nothing more than a door stop, and much like the 2008 edition of the White Pages (still sitting under the stairs after several months) will likely go unused, in favour of more modern search tools.
Listings in the Yellow pages are often in excess of $500.00 AUD, for a return that is difficult to measure, and given the non-searchable nature of the format, being significantly overlooked for Search Engines and web directories.
Would you pay $500 for your ad to be featured in an almost redundant format which poses a potential tripping hazard, or would you allocate your budget toward an online marketing or other campaign?
Growing too big for your web host
Technology and adaptability is problem akin with many new startup business that experience great success and rapid growth.
Generally most startup businesses are one or two man (or women) businesses that are for obvious reasons, run on a very tight budget.
Over time, some of these startup businesses are fortunate enough to experience rapid growth and see their businesses go to great heights, but whilst this is occurring, there often remains a problem with the original technology solution they started with that may be hindering performance in the long term.
In terms of e-commerce and web hosting, these problems may be poorly designed web pages, or database structure which can sometimes be costly to fix if left unattended, and often should be addressed as soon as possible, when time and budget allow.
Other problems, and fortunately easily curable issues, but those that have an obvious and immediate impact on the business is the choice of web hosting company, or in some case web hosting solution that has been selected to host a fast growing website.
It is all too easy to order a very cheap web hosting account, which is sufficient in the short term whilst you develop your business, but when your business grows legs and takes off, can your web host handle it?
The most obvious problem you will encounter with increased growth in your e-business is traffic. This is usually the bad issue that you really want to have. Traffic is the page requests to your site or browsing, so in simple terms, traffic = customers, but there are bandwidth considerations.
Bandwidth is basically the amount of data, and the speed at which the data travels from the server to your computer.
Bandwidth issues are obvious in a few ways:
- Speed is affected. Your hosting server might not be able to keep up with the requirements of the vast number of visitors your site attracts.
- If you exceed the amount of bandwidth allocated to you, you may incur high excess usage charges.
- If your web hosting company only allows you to send or receive a small amount of data, then they may lock your account, which is embarrassing and unprofessional if your site says “suspended, contact accounts” as most companies will display with default hosting control panel software.
Last month we published an article on dead clicks, which explains how having your website down costs you money if you are running a pay per click campaign. This is a similar problem encountered when you exceed your bandwidth.
Other issues might related to the actual server that you’re hosting with. Shared hosting is great for small businesses as it is cost effective, but if your site is running intensive applications, then you might be too big for your own boots, and it’s times like these when you need to consider finding a hosting supplier that can handle your demands, or look at hosting your own dedicated server.
The cost considerations associated with these upgrade paths can sometimes be hard to swallow, but in most cases, these perceived problems are good problems that you want.
A busy website is a successful website, one which gives you opportunity to promote and sell your product.
When choosing a web provider, whether you are running a start up or blue chip supplier, you should look for a few factors:
- Cost, location, specification of hardware, software and network
- Account limitations - does it come with a lock-out limit, or will you incur high fees for excess usage?
- Upgrade path - can your host meet your current and future demands? Can they easily add more resources at the press of a button, or will you outgrow them and need to go through the trouble of relocating your website to a new host?
Search King is an expert in Web Hosting and Search Engine marketing, and we can’t stress enough that “traffic is king”, so whilst hosting your site with a quality hosting company may be an expensive exercise, if you have the volumes of traffic and potential customers, then you really don’t have a problem, and it’s now a matter of you turning that traffic into converted sales.
Splash Pages, Why they’re bad for Search
Remember the early days of internet usage? I’m not talking back in the 70s or 80s when internet used to be very basic HTML websites and text-based bulletin boards, I’m thinking more along the lines of the late 90s and early 21st century when the internet was becoming mass-market, and people first started experiencing the web and it’s potential.
The early days of web publishing saw an abundance of terrible looking websites churned out by Frontpage and worse, MS Publisher. The thought of a yellow-text website on blue background makes me want to cringe.
Fortunately for many of us, new content management systems and web design packages are standards compliant and pre-loaded with many visually appealing sites that can be built and published by even the most inexperienced internet user.
But despite all of the great lengths we’ve gone since the days of ugly websites, I’m still seeing a lot of websites that present “spash” pages, or intro pages to visitors upon first visit to their website.
I too have been guilty of using splash pages, and despite being a little outdated and unprofessional (if not done properly), splash pages can be bad for search marketing.
For starters, splash pages are generally presented in GIF, JPEG or Flash multimedia images, and search engines for the most part index text, which is where most of your search marketing efforts lie.
Due to the lack of text, a search engine is generally unable to determine the page relevance to search terms and categorised data on your website, so therefore the spash page is likely to have a much poorer page rank (or none at all) when compared to other pages on your site that are loaded with relevant information and key words.
You ideally want your homepage/start page to be the first thing that a visitor sees when they land on your page, and you want this information to rank well.
Internet users are very savvy, they use tabbed browsing and skim through information on many pages to quickly find the data they need.
If you’re presenting a splash page to a person who has clicked through a search engine, they need to wait or make an additional click to get through to the information, and you can’t afford to be adding these hurdles to your visitors, especially when you’ve paid for them to click on your advertised link in the search engines.
Additionally, pagerank is usually much lower due to the lack of information on the splash page when compared to other pages on your site that actually do contain relevant information and keywords, this is where you want to attain higher page rank and have your visitors land when they click on your link or paid advertisement.
Tip: remove your landing page and present your visitors with relevant information as soon as possible and you’re likely to attract their attention long enough that they stay on the page and find what they’re looking for, or in many cases, find the product or service they’ve been searching for, which will hopefully convert to a sale.
Be on the lookout later this week for more news from search king related to landing pages, part of a good search advertising campaign.
Google Trends
A new tool recently launched by Google, which is very useful for Search Engine Optimisation and Advertising is a tool called Search Trends:
This tool allows you to view historical search data related to key word searches performed by internet users dating back to 2004
Search Analysis - Google Trends
Google previously had a site similar to this which displayed only select popular search terms on an annual basis, and this report is referred to as the Google zeitgeist
This new Google Trends tool was released by Google last month and contains much more information, that has presumably been gathering data since 2004, launched now to to provide historical data.
This is a fantastic tool for SEO, as it allows you to perform search engine analysis to see what your target audience is searching for, and gage the popularity of certain key words, phrases or search terms which is indicated by the number of times the phrase has been searched for.
It’s great for narrowing down region-specific search results, by Country and can even State and Territory based results in some cases.
This is the tool that search engines optimisaton specialists have been waiting for. Book mark the site today.