Small Successful Business Ideas

In our day and age, nothing is becoming more important than monitoring your brand name. With websites like RipoffReport.com and Scam.com, you can find yourself looking for an SEO company to handle your Reputation Management in a hurry. Some companies often take it a step further, monitoring their executive management member’s names and their products and services names. The beautiful thing about monitoring your brand name is that you can use the time spent monitoring toward your link building efforts as well.

Using different methods and different tools, it is very easy to follow what people are saying about your brand. When someone references your brand, you can immediately reach out to that individual and thank them (if it is a good mention) and ask them for a link to your website. You might even ask for specific anchor text to be used and leverage that opportunity for maximum SEO effectiveness. These are some of the easiest, most beneficial, and natural looking links you can acquire to diversify your link portfolio.

What if you took this a step further? What if you used these methods and tools to monitor chatter in your industry and around your keywords and keyphrases? You could not only promote your brand by answering people’s questions, but you could find additional link partners with those people who are already talking about your industry and the specific keywords you are targeting.

There are many different tools that can be leveraged in finding these link building opportunities. I will discuss my favorites and how I use each of them below.

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Yahoo recently sent out an email to their advertisers that discusses some of the organic Yahoo to Bing transition topics. The email goes over some of the basic questions about the transition and gives some pointers, but it adds some appreciated insight into the launch of the Bing search results in the Yahoo engine and dates of when they will begin testing.

In the email, Yahoo confirmed that they are currently testing the Bing powered results “offline”, but today, for the first time, Yahoo confirmed that they will be testing the Bing powered results in the live search results this month.

The email said:

“Though much of our testing is already happening offline, this month (July 2010) we’ll also test the deliver of organic and paid search results provided by Microsoft on live Yahoo! traffic.” Yahoo also said: “testing volumes will fluctuate during this period” and they will ensure to keep the “paid search volume in particular kept low” so that it will not impact their advertisers adversely.

It is assumed that the complete switch over will happen sometime in August or September, depending on how the testing goes, but you should keep your eyes open for the Bing search results on Yahoo as early as the next few days.

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A fool and his money are soon parted. This old time Idiom has never been truer especially when it comes to poor PPC management.

1) Website not clearly defined

All the traffic in the world can’t overcome a poorly defined website. Sites that are confusing with poor navigation will lead to poor website conversion rates. Remember, that finding the winning PPC recipe takes time and effort. If possible, test different versions of your site. Sometimes a landing page will work better than a 50-page website. Regardless, be sure to synchronize your keywords, ads, and site. PPC is a science of relevancy. Matching keywords, ads, and pages improves user experience. On the other hand, failure to do this will have a negative impact on conversion rates and quality scores.

2) Failure to implement AdWords tracking and Google Analytics.

With PPC virtually every metric is measurable. Without tracking, how do you know which page, keyword, or ad is working and what’s not working? Don’t do anything with PPC unless you can track it.

3) Sending traffic to broken pages

Sending traffic to broken pages only results in wasted money. Be sure when pages are deleted the corresponding PPC elements are also taken offline. PPC accounts should always mirror the website.

4) Not evaluating the competition

Frequent competitive reviews will help keep your pulse on the competition. Using your core keywords, you can easily study your competitors messaging and website in just a few clicks. From this info you can counter and find a hook that will differentiate your company from the competition.

Keep in mind you won’t really know what is working until you test it yourself. Be sure to also study your competitor’s ad text. At any time you might be competing with 9 other advertisers on the search network. Make sure you are always testing more than 1 ad at a time with a strong call to action. You should also rotate your ads evenly. You can then determine the best messaging based upon CTR and conversion rate.

5) Allowing campaigns to run on auto pilot

You might remember that old infomercial with the catchy tag line

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We’re teaming up with Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) in a free webinar that will discuss how to tear apart a site and find common issues that are keeping it from ranking well.

This webinar is about the nitty-gritty details, and will explore the key components of a Web page that search engines analyze to determine how a page should rank. Join Dan Patterson, our Director of On-Page Optimization, as he discusses various search tools and analyzes elements like:

Keyword targetingURL structureUnique and duplicate contentPage titles and meta dataInternal linksImage & flash optimization

When: Thursday, July 22

Time: Noon Eastern (9 a.m. Pacific)

Where: Online Web conference

How: Register Here

Cost: Free

Who Should Attend: Executives, in-house marketers, IT professionals

To register for this session, go here.

Information about how to attend this Webinar session will be emailed directly to you before the Webinar. Please note that the audio portion of the Webinar will come through your computer speakers or headset

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