Devour The Web

Reality Check: A Straightforward Guide to Keywords and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
 by: Michael Murray, VP of Fathom SEO

Web site owners need to have realistic expectations when it comes to the world of keyword selection.

It’s essential to understand your audience, as well as to aim appropriately at powerful, concise keywords that are not vague or generic—those broad, expansive keywords that rarely attract the audience you are seeking–and lead to disappointing rankings and wasteful expenditures of cash resources.

If you want a healthy return on investment (ROI) with search engine optimization (SEO), your success - or failure - hinges on the keywords you select when combined with other factors like link popularity and web site design.

If your web site has content and design barriers, lacks saturation (a term used to describe how well a site is indexed by search engines) and isn’t found on many other relevant web sites, you’re odds of ranking well are pretty low.

Be careful with keyword research so that you don’t miss excellent opportunities or aim so broadly that you target phrases that will never rank well. Get your act together. Here are 5 tips to guide you along the way in your research. They may help you make good choices, achieve high rankings and bring more traffic (and leads) to your web site.

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Google now checks the year your domain name was first registered.

This just makes sense. Those that care about their domain and their brand will register their domain for a long time. This demonstrates commitment. Of course it’s not very hard for a spammer to do the same but the upfront costs are just that little bit higher and might help act as a deterrent. If anything a short domain registration period will be yet another flag in the Google system that will keep certain sites away from top rankings. Hopefully it will be the spammers that trigger the penalty when combined with all the other spam flags they trigger.

If you are anything like me and you like to register domains for an “idea” you have for the future there is no way you will be investing in a 10 year registration for something you may never pursue. An idea is an idea and I know half of the domains I buy amount to nothing. However buying the domain also signifies *some* commitment to the project and on many occasions is the motivational spark I need to get the website built and a new project off the ground. A one or two year registration is not a significant cost. Securing a domain for 10 years is. The easy workaround is to initially register a domain for the minimum period, if things take off then renew the domain for a longer period. Simple.

On today’s show with Jack Humphrey and Jim Stroud, learn about making money with Twitter (you haven’t heard this one yet!), a scary site to visit, how to track link activity on Twitter and all your other social accounts, and much more!

You know, a lot of writers and other creative folks don’t spend a lot of time chasing down the latest productivity tools and tips, and with good reason. Most of us are too busy actually writing and making stuff.

Go figure.

But there is an amazing selection of free or low cost applications out there that can help us create things better and faster. It’s just a matter of finding them.

Well, you’re in luck. The Ultimate Productivity Toolbox for Creative People assembles the best stuff all on one page. It’s the hard work of former Lifehacker contributor Tamar Weinberg, who joins Lateral Action today as Associate Editor.

Check it out now or bookmark it for future reference.

The news this Halloween morning continues the harrowing themes that have dominated the digital marketing space for a couple weeks now. In addition to mounting layoffs at agencies and vendors, several other ghoulish reports should give you pause.

• Google/Yahoo deal on the rocks. There’s very little substance in WSJ’s anonymously sourced report about the distressed deal, other than a comment from “people familiar” with the companies’ ongoing talks with the U.S. Justice Department. The gist is that very little progress has been made so far in the negotiations, and that the parties could back out — or announce a break-through deal — “as early as next week.” ClickZ’s clever readers will observe almost anything “could happen” by then — including a zombie holocaust. It’s a safe prediction.
• Rising expectation of a 2009 contraction in digital ad spending. Will the digital ad market actually go into a recession along with the rest of the nation this year? Shrunken heads want to know.
• Layoffs mount. This one bears repeating: IMC2, Curiosity Group, Inform Technologies, LowerMyBills, Digital Influence Group have all seen heads fall. ClickZ expects to report on two more agencies with significant layoffs by Monday. Scary indeed.

Congratulations! You’ve built a great blog with high-quality content. You’re getting decent traffic, and your readers might even be using social media tools to recommend your stuff. Life should be good.

But no one’s buying. Or barely anyone, which is no fun.

So why isn’t that great content translating into more sales? Let’s look at three common copy mistakes that keep your readers from becoming customers, and how you can turn that around.

Mistake #1: You haven’t asked them

Recently I was looking at a blogger’s promotion of a big project. He’s mobilized a great community to help spread the word, the project is getting decent buzz, and he’s demonstrated an ability to get folks to take action when he asks them to. From a social Web standpoint, he’s doing a terrific job.

But the sales of the product still aren’t stellar.

When I visit his blog, I notice that I have to hunt around to figure out how to buy the product. There’s no attention-dominating ad that clearly says BUY THE PRODUCT HERE. There are no hyperlinks in his posts that say Click here to buy the product. His email signature doesn’t include a link to buy the product. He hasn’t asked his community to Twitter the TinyURL (which he, of course, could conveniently provide them) for the product.

I read over a lot of blogs each week, casually surfing one or two of the blog exchanges I belong.

I realized yesterday that I seldom read the whole entry unless it’s very short. Many are quite uncomfortable to read, some downright excruciating, in terms of their grammatical skills, spelling, and style. Because it is such an immediate and off-the-cuff personal expression, do the standard language rules apply?

The conversational nature of a blog leads naturally to an informal, casual approach that can be refreshing and innovative, indirectly echoing some of the great writers of the past who used dialect and local expressions to vitalize their work.

It is unfortunate that so many who write don’t understand basic language rules so cannot effectively break them. When it takes major time and effort to understand what on earth the writer is trying to say, rather than being able to appreciate the content and point of view being expressed, it becomes merely an exercise in frustration.

The beauty, and ultimate value of blogging, is that communication is direct, individual, and uncensored. No editor with an eye on public opinion or potential legal consequences is cutting out whole paragraphs in fear they will offend. There is no filter applied by conservative management or the need for committee consensus prior to publication.

Simple Steps To Plan Your Business For Success
 by: Tina Valiedi

Planning your business is the critical starting point. You need to map out your business. Where do you plan on going with your business? What steps are you going to take to get there? How are you going to market your business. All of these questions should be answered in your business plan.

Some people are excellent at planning. Others are not. The problem is, we were never taught how to plan in school. So how do you begin planning? It’s an acquired skill, it won’t appear over night.

The first step to becoming a successful planner in learning your personality type. Once you learn who you are, you can learn to plan according to you personality type.”Personality Plus: How to Understand your Personaltiy” by Florence Littauer, is an excellent book on learning about your personality type. It is easy to read and comes with a personality profile test.

Don’t worry if you feel like you’re not making any progress. Learning a new skill, especially planning, takes time to learn. Be patience and persistent. Start your in planning in baby steps.

Despite any failures or slow starts you may be experiencing or rebounding from right now, don’t focus too much on the people you listened to who may have contributed to your current state.

We all rely on “experts” to get ahead. Problem is you never know for SURE if the expert you just listened to is right until what she told you pans out in hard results.

Case studies are nice, but results in your bank account would be better. So there is always a leap of faith when deciding on a plan of action for your online business based upon the input from an “expert.”

Many times you fall flat on your face. Whether it is a marketing test, new sales copy, or a new product or service, you can do everything that was recommended to the best of your ability, and sometimes it still doesn’t work out.

I will tell you a secret that most experts won’t admit: everyone, even the “experts,” go through the same exact thing from time to time! We are all in the same boat when it comes to trying and failing. Or trying and succeeding.

ValueClick already warned investors back in July that it’s performance for the rest of the year would suffer owing to a number of factors. One of those factors was the defection of sites and advertisers from its lead-gen programs in the wake of an FTC investigation of the company. Another is the well-documented trend of falling prices for display ads.

So it should come as no surprise the company continued to struggle in the third quarter. In its just-announced Q3 earnings report, ValueClick reported net income of just $2 million, down 88 percent from $16.8 million for the year-ago period.

Afterward, UBS Analyst Ben Schachter added some discouraging commentary to the bummerfest. According to his research note, ValueClick will have a harder time drawing search traffic to its comparison shopping sites, and may lose ground in display as Yahoo, AOL and others build more sophisticated platforms.

“While it has not been impacted significantly yet, we are concerned that the platform display ad approach from YHOO/GOOG/others may affect VCLK’s Display biz (though the impact is admittedly unclear),” wrote Schachter.