Mesa, AZ (Web-Op) February 4, 2010 – Web-Optimize LLC., a leader in internet marketing and software development, announced the release of a new real-time marketing package specially tailored for Twitter and other social mediums.
New internally developed software allows Web-Op to promote site and brand recognition on Twitter and other social mediums. Fused with current online marketing strategies it provides the ultimate in online media presence. This new marketing strategy covers all online sectors including organic search, pay-per-click, social media, and bad press. Providing an optimum balance between automation and human involvement is our goal.
Social mediums such as Twitter are packed full of opportunity. The problem is it would cost far too much attention to hand manage a marketing campaign. The common solution is to say, “Follow us on Twitter!” and periodically post updates to a Twitter account. This isn’t effective. Our solution provides incentive for interested users to opt in though keyword targeting and friendly conversation. The video shows a more detailed view.
Another strategy is through improving organic search and indexing. Organic search rankings can be frustrating for all. The keys to improvement are having a steady and strategic linking campaign while carefully monitoring the changes over long and short periods. Our time proven solution for search provides sustainable long term growth. Malicious or slanderous online press can be buried with higher rankings and the promotion of positive press.
Our strategy also includes pay-per-click campaigns managed in detail with constant tracking and split testing to maximize gains and performance.
Through our re-tooled reporting system businesses can see growth as it happens in an online statistics monitor as well as detailed monthly reporting from the experts. Our engineers have worked hard on streamlining the process to allow for such transparency.
About Web-Optimize
Web-Optimize, LLC is a leader in internet marketing campaign management and software development for both new and established businesses. Our industry expertise and forward looking strategies help businesses grow and gain positive recognition. We deliver hand crafted solutions to businesses to maximise return on investment. Unlike traditional SEO’s, our services are well documented and transparent with solid results. Web-Optimize is based in Mesa, AZ. For additonal information, please visit web-optimize.com or call 1 (866) 937-7082.
Like many of you growing up in the 1990s, I have fond memories of playing the classic role-playing games on the SNES, and later, the PlayStation. Final Fantasy, Breath of Fire, and the like. I bet many of you can still hum the level-up song from Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest in your sleep.
A frequent theme for these titles was, about 80 percent of the way through the game, your character’s love interest ceases to be an adorable 20-pixel-high maiden, and turns into a screen-filling ball of evil spells and tumors which must be dispatched to move forward.
I’ve become a huge fan of the AMC TV show Mad Men. The show centers around a character named Don Draper – a 40 something advertising executive working on Madison Avenue. Don’s character has a knack for simplifying a marketing message down to the essentials – identifying the underlying motives behind the decisions we make – and speaking directly to those perceived needs. I’ve always been more interested in the technical aspects of SEO instead of the nitty-gritty sloganeering involved in branding and marketing but this show has started to change my focus. I can’t help dissecting slogans, the tone of a message, and the various call to actions barraging us from all sides.
Everyone has a shopping cart on their site. Odds are, it’s been 5 or 10 years since the first time you bought something online. You’d think by now, they would have ironed out the kinks. However, year after year, new website owners continue to make the same mistakes. Before you unpack that ASP.NET Storefront or Zen-Cart archive, why not take a moment to plan a strategy for your cart to search and sell well. (more…)
If you’re starting a web presence from scratch, there’s a significant chance you’re about to waste $5,000.
Many businesses are keen on the concept of the “premium” domain name– in particular, short, generic names. Why not be “loan.com” instead of “SmithMortgageCompany.com”, or “roses.com” for your nursery? Even long after the domain market peaked with the multi-million dollar sales of names like business.com, people are still paying four, five, and six figure prices for attractive sounding names.
The problem is, like many Internet-based profit plans, it’s based on dated logic. (more…)
Whether you have a canned blog install or you’re developing a completely custom content management system, many website owners don’t really consider the consequences of their policy decisions. By making smart choices, both users and search engines can do better. (more…)
I’m a big fan of Google Chrome. While working on one of our travel websites located at Hawaii Tours I stumbled onto this gem. Not only does Chrome automatically suggest using a site’s Open Search engine when typing in the same domain you are on in the search bar – now apparently Google can identify standard search features such as search.php and serve them up in the same way. The site in question has no open search xml file and chrome still gives the option to use search.php. Check out the screenshot below:
You can verify for yourself that I never got around to making an open search xml file by trying the following link: http://hawaiitours.com/opensearch_desc.xml – which of course doesn’t exist and never has. If you want to check if Google has found your site’s search feature and included it just visit your domain and start typing the domain name sans www.
I’m personally not sure whether or not I think this is a good idea. I could see several potential problems where a site had several search features and it could be a bug as opposed to a feature. I suspect that simply adding an open search meta tag would resolve it.
For a while now webmasters have wondered why PPC spending generally mirrored a slight bump in rankings. Mounting evidence suggests Google is following closely the visitors to your site (think google toolbar, google analytics, doubleclick etc). As a result, buying traffic via pay per click can have an impact on organic rankings albeit indirectly.
PPC spending generally mirrors a slight bump in rankings
Over the years I’ve read countless webmasterworld/digital point threads questioning whether buying adwords contributed to organic search engine ranking success. I was skeptical that Google would so blatantly provide a pay for play way for website owners to buy their way to the top. Indeed it would be a disservice to their clients if their was a direct correlation between the two as smaller, interesting competitors in the search space would be crowded out by multinational corporations. An indirect, traffic-related metric however makes sense to this SEO as organic traffic is at least as good an indicator of noteworthiness as an editorially given third-party link. So is Google juicing adwords advertisers?
In November of 2008, QuadsZilla of SeoBlackHat stumbled onto an interesting correlation between bounce rate and Google traffic. In January of this year Rae Hoffman (aka sugarrae) wrote an interesting case study that confirms something most of us in the search game have believed for a while: Google is paying attention to traffic as a trust factor. This should come as no surprise to search engine marketers. Google rose to prominence by incorporating third party links into its algorithm. With the recent threat posed by sites like twitter and friendfeed – and their ability to shake up the interwebs with the stream of real time data provided by their userbase – it has become necessary for Google to augment their algorithm.
Relying solely on links is what causes Google to be monolithic and slow in noticing new trends. Indexing the web every second isn’t feasible – despite Larry Page’s recent musings. Traffic on the other hand is extremely easy for Google to gauge. Google can track visitors from a variety of platforms: Google Analytics, the Google Toolbar, DoubleClick, Adwords and more. While Google doesn’t have much in terms of real time offerings at the moment – it does have the tools in place to utilize traffic volume as a component of their search engine algorithm. Don’t believe me? Try buying keywords to pages that have a decent bounce rate, time on site etc. Follow your keyword rankings and find out for your self.
(PS After reading this think how using a 3rd party hosted ppc management company like Reach Local becomes less and less attractive as Google pays more and more attention to traffic)
If you’re looking at the website of a SEO company, it’s probably not the only way you’ve considered building traffic. No doubt, you’ve been bombarded with spam from people eager to show you how to get “50,000 hits on your site every month for $100″ or similar promotions.
While it might, at first, sound appealing to be able to say, “I’m getting 50,000 visitors per month to my site”, it’s the quality of visitors that matter far more than the number.
When people are willing to promise you specific quantities of traffic, your first question should be “how can they do that?” Although we may know, for example, that 500,000 searches per month are made for a given keyword, real customers do not come in neat boxes of 1,000 users that can be blindly pointed to your site. When you see guaranteed traffic packages, it usually comes from one of a few sources:
Malware. A classic symptom of undesirable software installed on your PC is when the browser starts popping up windows you didn’t ask for. Those windows don’t choose their destinations for fun. If you have an army of compromised computers opening whatever pages you order them to, it’s easy to ensure that your site gets 50,000 hits this month.
Automaton Users. A similar story to malware, but with user cooperation. I’ve seen programs where they’ll basically pay users to leave their PCs on a special homepage, which uses browser-scripting to shuffle from one paying customer’s site to another. No matter how compelling your content is, it’s unlikely a user will be willing to turn off the automatic cycling”and his 10 cents per hour credit”to read it, assuming the sponsored browser window doesn’t turn into background noise altogether.
Sham sites. It looks like a search engine, or legitimate directory, but the results have been partially, or completely stacked, to ensure that users end up at the sites that paid for their position. There’s nothing wrong with paid directories in and of themselves”Yahoo! is a shining example of how one can be a legitimate and trustworthy resource, and many of them represent strong B2B presences”but there’s a thin line which seperates “legitimate resource” from hall-of-mirrors scam. And “Hall of Mirrors” here is more than a cute metaphor: I’ve seen sites where “Page 2″ of the results are almost complete duplicates of “Page 1″! They’re serious about moving people to those links.
Domain parking and forwarding. This is, in a sense, a cut over the sham site, in that it doesn’t promise to be anything but a dead site. There’s a little more integrity there. However, the user who typed in the dead site’s address probably wasn’t looking for you.
What do all these traffic sources have in common? Two things:
First, they’re going to be fountains of poor-quality traffic. If the user didn’t even want to go to your page, the odds are extremely high he’ll bounce. Meanwhile, “sham” search engines and directories have a motivation to ensure every user clicks something, even if it’s not a really useful site for his needs. The sham-search may consider your site relevant enough to promote, but the customer probably won’t.
Second, they have terrible reputations. Nobody wants to be associated with spyware or attempts to decieve users. Users may do more than bounce- they’ll remember who was associated with their frustration.
Still, many people will respond to the siren-song of guaranteed traffic, believing “even if a handful of those 50,000 visitors explore my site, I’ve gotten business I didn’t have.” Wrong. You’d be astonished how low click-through rates can be with low-quality traffic. I can quote statistics from a site using one of these programmes: over 80,000 visits to their front page in one month, and less than 50 visits to all the other public pages combined. The click-through rate, overall, was approximately one-twentieth of a percent. Notice I’m not saying “conversion rate”, or “sales rate”, just “rate of visiting a page other than the site’s front page!”
Basically, it’s a rehash of the old “pay-per-impression” advertising model, except instead of paying for uninterested customers to ignore your banner, you’re paying for uninterested customers to ignore your entire home page, plus the additional hosting expenses associated with the extra “junk” traffic.
Moreover, it diverts your web budget from places it will do good. $100 might buy you 50,000 low-quality clicks from a guaranteed-traffic service, or 1,000 hits on a smartly-targeted pay-per-click advertisement campaign which lets you choose, to a much greater extent, who you’re paying to bring to the site. Once you consider the conversion rate of advertising clients, versus the guaranteed-traffic client, the advertisements become an undeniable bargain.
You might be tempted to say “Isn’t SEO very much the same as a sham site or parked domain” fooling customers into clicking on your site?”. The answer is a resounding no. Ethical” and productive” search optimization is about attracting customers for the services you’re actually offering. The visitors SEO produces are customers who already were interested in what you’re selling. Optimization ensures that they know you’re offering it. That’s a far cry from the world of bought traffic, which would merrily hand out the same site to viewers actually seeking information about European vacations, reptile care, and new video cards.
After all this invective, I must admit that there is a potential narrow niche for bought traffic: if your site actually benefits from impressions above all else- such as a site swimming in pay-per-impression advertising- then, by all means, shovel those low-quality clicks on. Just don’t be unsurprised as advertisers grow increasingly sophisticated and wonder why 500,000 views of their banner produce zero clicks.
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