In uncertain times, you’ve got to tighten up the marketing budget, right? Actually, no. The smart marketers understand that this is the time to crank up your marketing efforts. Why? If there is a smaller pie, you’ve got to fight harder for your share. Secondly, if you do it right, you can swoop in and grab up market share while your competitors are huddled in the corner in the fetal position.

I’m not telling you to spend like it’s 1999. You’ve got to be smart about where you spend your marketing dollars. Your specific marketing/media plan will depend on your target market and your specific objectives, but generally, you should focus on measurable, direct impact marketing media. Start with the stuff that will bring in actual sales now, not feel-good branding campaigns that might yield sales at some future date.

Here are a few tried and true marketing tactics that you can use to succeed in good times or bad:

Search Engine Optimization
If your website shows up on the first page of results for your keywords, you will get a constant flow of customers who are looking for exactly what you have to offer. Aside from the increased traffic and sales, owning the organic search listings builds your reputation as a leader in your industry.

PPC Search Marketing
Pay per click search advertising offers a lot more targeting control than organic search. Sure, you have to pay for every click, but you’re only paying for the clicks you want. Plus you can limit your campaign to specific geographic regions or time of day. Have a professional set up and manage your campaign and you’ll see a huge difference in results. Make sure you’re using the right match types, including applicable negative matches to weed out the junk.

PPC Contextual Advertising
Many people assume that content network ads don’t perform as well as search. This is true some of the time, but not always. Average cost per click is often lower with contextual ads, so you can achieve comparable results to your search ads even if the conversion rate is lower. However, just because you can display your search ads in the content network doesn’t mean you should. Since people seeing these ads didn’t necessarily search on your keywords, you need to use an ad that matches their frame of mind.

Affiliate Marketing
Get 1000’s of websites to promote your wares and only pay for completed sales. That’s the allure of affiliate marketing. It’s a lot harder than it sounds to get it right, but if you are generous with your payouts and treat your affiliates right, this channel can make a huge impact to your company’s sales numbers.

Email Marketing
Build a list of customers and prospects and send them valuable information, and good offers. Customize your offers to their specific needs and let them know how you can help them. This is a good time to maximize your house list and nurture your relationships with existing customers. They say it costs 10 times more to acquire a new customer than to sell to an existing customer, so it’s a no brainer.

Joint Ventures
It’s smart to use your own customer list to its fullest, and it’s also smart to leverage the loyal customer base of partner companies. Pay your partner a commission for sales they generate, or cross-promote their products to your customer list.

Direct Mail
Response rates for direct mail campaigns are way down, and non-targeted campaigns are usually a waste, but if you target the right list with the right message and the right offer, DM can be golden. If all your competitors are sending email, a personalized letter in the mail will stand out.

Customize your marketing plan to meet your objectives. Test EVERYTHING. Ditch the stuff that doesn’t work and increase spending on the stuff that works. Don’t let the stupid recession get in the way or reaching your success!

Here are the highlights of what he discussed:

The primary litmus test for whether something is acceptable, ask yourself, “What is the regular user looking for?”
-Does it add value for the customer?
-Will they be happy to find this site?
-Is it relevant?
-Is the content unique?

He talked about how there are lots of great reasons to buy domains, but not as many domainers want to actually design and build out sites around the domains. He gave some examples of parked pages that don’t really add value, gmhs.com, earthday.org.

He mentioned ajaxian as a site that has great content even though their domain isn’t generic/premium. It’s a multi-author blog about all things AJAX.

Someone asked about duplicate content/stolen content. Matt said Google keeps track of when/where they first find content, and they do a pretty good job of rewarding the original source of the content and not the thieves’ version of the content. There was an attorney in the audience who was asking about DMCA requests and Matt referred us to the DMCA process with Google, and admitted that this stuff is outside his area of expertise.

When somebody asked about moving a site to a new domain, he recommended reading the recent post about moving a site on the Google Webmaster blog. He said people often overlook the suggestion to test the redirect with a small part of your site first (subdomain or directory), and it works smoothly and quickly, you will be fine to do the 301 redir on the whole site.

The question came up about whether it matters which TLD (top level domain) you’re using. For example, do .com domains carry more weight than a .net, .us, .info, etc. He said that TLD doesn’t matter–that’s the way Larry and Sergey originally designed the Google algorithm. The algorithm doesn’t care where the page is located, it’s all about pagerank (LINKS) of the particular page. At the end of answering this question he did admit that they might have started to look at particularly cheap (and spammy) TLDs differently than other TLDs–or they might start considering TLD in their algorithm if they’re not already doing so.

Regarding interlinking between sites, he said it’s fine to interlink if the sites are related, but he said not to overdo it. When pressed, he said over 10 sites interlinking might be asking for trouble. He said it would also be ok to break out your network of sites and interlink sites within a certain category. The specific example was a network of local sites, and Matt said you could either have a single portal with links to all the geo-portals, or maybe interlink between all the various plumbing sites.

Matt mentioned that sites don’t automatically get pagerank just for existing. They need backlinks to get pagerank. Also, he said if you have a network of sites and add a bunch more sites, it’s like spreading the same amount of peanut butter across a bigger piece of bread. In that case, each site in the network gets a smaller share of the pagerank distribution.

On expired domains, Matt said Google tries to reset pagerank/links for all expired domains to zero when they are registered by someone new. They don’t try to penalize the expired domain, but they also don’t want to give credit for the previous owner’s links.

He said keywords in the domain carry weight with users, and for this reason, Google also gives some weight to a keyword in the URL and/or domain name.

I don’t have the question in my notes, but something prompted Matt to mention Google Ad Manager, which I wasn’t familiar with (who can keep up with Google’s products?). It’s an ad serving solution that’s free and lets you serve ads on your site. You can serve up adsense ads, but you don’t have to, or you can use Adsense as your backfill for any unsold inventory.

Matt suggested doing a site: search to check if a domain is indexed before buying the domain. He also talked briefly about webmaster tools and how to submit a reinclusion request if needed.

Matt was asked what is the best way to park your domains without ticking off Google. He replied that Google can detect any change in content as it recrawls the site, so it’s fine to park a domain with a simple PPC parked page or whatever, and then when you start building out the site, Googlebot will notice and start indexing the site as quickly as possible. He also made the obligatory recommendation for using nofollow for links on parked pages, “just to be safe,” and then he explained what nofollow does and how it is used.

He suggested reading and abiding by the webmaster quality guidelines.

He was asked about IP delivery and he said that IP delivery is not bad, but it is bad to cloak–serve up different content to Google than what everyone else sees. If you use IP delivery (for geotargeting content for example), you should simply geotarget the content to Googlebot, too.

more from John Andrews

There have been plenty of posts by industry experts on the process of online reputation management. I’m not trying to re invent the wheel. I want to give you an idea of what it’s like to actually carry out a reputation management campaign so you can decide whether it’s worth it to do it yourself or pay someone to do it for you, or a mix of both.

For starters, you need to decide if you just want to bump down negative results or just monitor the conversation.

Scenario A: Bumping Negative Results

What keyword(s) do you want to focus on that are showing the negative results?

Try and focus on just one or two main keywords to begin with. Now, go through all of the results in the top 5 pages, and see which are positive, neutral, or negative. Decide on the top 10 neutral and positive results that you want to show up for your search term. Now start linking to those articles or sites with your main keyword as the anchor text or title. Creating social media profiles and other things will come in down the road, but using sites that are already showing up will give you much quicker results. Then create your wordpress, squidoo, blogger, typepad, facebook and myspace profiles, but don’t count on them showing up too quickly for your keyword(s), especially if there are already a lot of other pages showing up. Be sure to create unique, useful content on each of these blogs/profile pages. You’re not just trying to spam the index, you’re trying to add valuable new content to increase your exposure in the SERPS.

Another of the easy way to get links is by using social bookmarking sites. Here’s a list of social bookmarking sites that are perfect for this.

Scenario B: Monitoring the Conversation

How much monitoring do you want to do?

There are at least 20 different blog/article search sites out there from which you can see what others are saying about your keyword(s). I would say Technorati and Google Blog Search are your best bets to find most of the prominent results. Just enter in your search term in the respective search boxes on those two sites, and then subscribe to the feed of the results. Another option is to sign up for a Google Alert on your name and Google will email you updates whenever your name is mentioned.

Now, once you find some good reviews or posts about your keyword, leave those alone. Or you might write an email or post a comment thanking the author for the positive review.

On the other hand, when you find a negative review or post, don’t get emotional or angry. Get smart. These posts or reviews won’t always show up near the top search results in a regular Google search, so you don’t necessarily need to worry about bumping these results. So your strategy should just be to make sure that an overall positive (or at least neutral) message is presented (which is pretty hard to do if you’re reacting instead of interacting).

I’ve been researching Google’s initiative to crack-down on websites selling and buying paid links. I’ve let myself get a bit riled-up as I’ve re-discovered the following:

1. Too many people still think Capitalism is somehow inherently evil
2. Some usually bright people have an amazingly hard time distinguishing between spam and good content

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on why Capitalism is not inherently bad. Go read Mike Mann’s book on making change—it’s a free book (making it appealing even to anti-capitalists).

On point number two I’ll voice a few more thoughts. Aaron Wall wrote an insightful post on new link strategies that people have employed to avoid having to purchase links outright. Some of the comments to that post just about killed me.

One comment reads, “It can’t be long until Google starts detecting these types of strategies.” An astute retort followed shortly, “Never going to happen. What is there to detect? Good content written by an author who writes about the field? Sorry, writing guest posts/content is as legitimate as it gets.”

After reading so many on similar blog posts, I got the feeling that there are many people out there who must have been bitten so many times by the spam bug that they can no longer see the difference between junk and good content.

What do people expect? Should Google be penalizing online newspapers because their journalists get paid to produce the content? Should Google ban their own site for offering up paid listings?

I think some people have this idea that any website actively trying to get links, traffic, or any other type of attention is spam, or at least in the same category. They think that any site attempting to draw traffic must be doing so surreptitiously, or behind some clandestine operation. No so! These are surely the same people who think Wikipedia would turn to the dark side by posting ads on the site. I’ve got news for you people; most of the sites you read that have content worth reading exist because someone is getting paid (refer to the link to Mike Mann’s book above).

The difference between spam and good content lies in context and relevance—two things that these spam crying scuttlebutts should be able to determine. Google doesn’t claim any artificial intelligence and they seem to be able to do a good job most of the time.

Don’t get me wrong, I hate spam too. But you need to know the difference. Here is a very succinct and simple way to distinguish spam from quality content for those of you who have a hard time telling he difference: spam will always appear unsolicited and out of context. Both attributes must accompany any content for it to be categorized as spam. If you have a site that has relevant content about a particular subject and it is accompanied by pertinent ads, you are not looking at spam. Read this entry by Matt Cutts for other good insights.

Hi, everyone! I’ve just come back from the future. Well, not really. I’ve actually just been reading through a bunch of articles about the Semantic Web as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee and other brilliant thinkers. My appetite to research this topic was spurred by this article I read about two weeks ago. It’s been a fun escape into the world-of-tomorrow. Some have already assigned the moniker “Web 3.0″ to the Semantic Web. Here we go again…

So did I find anything of value on my futuristic escapade? Well, I started my trip (as always) by going to see The Oracle to find out what she thinks of the Semantic Web. It’s still unclear to me how people will interact with such a system—from what I can tell there are no consumer apps yet that handle these types of semantic web interactions. But according to the Wikipedia article, computers will do most of the menial pairing of search results that we currently do manually.

Funny enough, there are many who believe that this particular vision of the future cannot come to fruition. Others say it has already begun to happen. I don’t know enough about it yet to base an opinion either way, but I do see elements of a semantic web in now widely used web techniques like tagging.

According to Tim Berners-Lee, Google will not survive on the semantic web—at least not in its current state. Yahoo even recently announced that they will begin supporting certain semantic web standards and technologies to let people produce much richer search results.

So if search engines as we know them need to change at the advent of this new Semantic Web, do SEOers need to follow suit? Will SEO become the task of simply building properly formatted semantic markup for digestion by future search engines? That could be part of it. In fact, part of good SEO practices now include creation of semantic based data feeds (think RSS). And now with the birth of Yahoo’s open search, website owners will be rewarded for producing more semantic data and suppling it to Yahoo. I expect Google has something similar in the works.

But how far out is our paradigm shift? How quickly will the bandwagon pass? Is there a bandwagon at all? The more you think about it, the more you think, “wow, this Web 3.0 is going to be pretty cool! It’ll make SEO and search in general a lot cleaner”. As I began to ponder all of these new ideas, The Oracle sent me to this other article. Stopped in my tracks.

Mr. Doctorow is right on. One of the huge problems Google et al currently face is the overabundance of garbage on the web. This must be what Berners-Lee meant in part when he said, “…make sure people aren’t using their authority to do things that they shouldn’t be doing”. Unfortunately, that’s much easier said than done. There will always be people who are trying to game the system. Website owners of the future will be creating oodles of inaccurate meta-data about their spam sites to trick your computer into pulling bogus information into your data mash-up. Can you imagine searching for a good Italian restaurant near the place you have a meeting tomorrow at noon and you’re given a map full of bogus locations all advertising male enhancement pills. No thanks.

Let’s get back to the original question quickly: does SEO die on the semantic web? I think the answer is a resounding no. In fact, an understanding of keywords, search engines, markup, and semantics will play an even bigger role as time goes on. But who knows what the real future will bring.

Alright, I’m outta here. Where I’m going I don’t need—roads. But I do need to add some quick semantic metadata to this post before signing off (*throws in another old can and a banana peel*). OK, I’m off!

Some of the key findings from the report:

It’s not really clear how they came up with the spending figures for this report. If this data is simply coming from the SEMPO survey, I’m not sure how it could be accurate. They must be pulling from other sources, right? Also, this only includes search, not contextual ads, because if it did include other non-search ads run through the search engines, the figure should be much higher than $12 billion. Google did $16B total revenue themselves last year, mostly from PPC advertising (search/contextual). Even if it is just search, the $12B figure still seems low to me. Also, I’m not sure how Google and Yahoo spending could have decreased with the overall total going up so much from the previous year, especially when Google’s own financials tell a different story. Perhaps those surveyed just said they were spending less?

Regardless of the details, the search marketing pie is growing and is projected to double by 2011. In our country’s current economic situation, I expect we’ll continue to see a shift of marketing dollars from less cost-effective media like print and broadcast into search marketing. People are going to put the money into the marketing channels that yield results.

Keep it coming.

A few of us here at SEO.com are big Apple fans. The much anticipated announcement today that the iPhone SDK would be released propels the iPhone into competition with a variety of other handheld devices for business and gaming, and publicizes a few interesting facts about mobile web browsing.

Apparently the iPhone is the most widely used mobile device for browsing web pages, consuming 71% of all web pages accessed by mobile devices. Yes, the iPhone does present the web as you would see it from your desktop or laptop computers, but a few considerations will be forefront in the minds of developers as the iPhone continues to gobble up market share. To name a few:

Use of Flash
Steve Jobs makes it sound like he has no immediate intention of making the iPhone and Flash Player compatible. You may want to look at your site and make sure you don’t have essential pieces done in flash–or that you have iPhone detection and replacement of flash content. For example, Google Analytics uses flash to display graphs and other data. It’d be nice to have some sort of replacement instead of a question mark in the spot of the embedded swf.

Accessibility
You should always make your sites as accessible as possible (for SEO purposes and otherwise). I know, the iPhone shows pages like your computer does, so you don’t think paying special attention to the iPhone is important. But remember, the screen they’re looking through is much smaller. I personally like to see the sites I visit on my iPhone without “special” formatting. However, it may be the case that some charts, graphics or features may need an iPhone friendly interface, either for faster user interaction, or better visibility.

I’m sure a myriad of things will begin to surface as site owners continue to see iPhone agent strings in their stats. Feel free to comment on what other influences you think the iPhone will or will not have on the way web pages are built and delivered.

P.S. The iPhone user agent string is:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543 Safari/419.3

1. Peek inside the minds of searchers
Often we as marketers think we know a lot about how people search. The truth is, there are a lot of different ways to search and it varies by industry and from one individual to another. By analyzing the keywords and phrases that are driving traffic and sales to your website, you can find out how your customers search to find your site. What adjectives or other modifiers do potential customers search on? What order do they search

2. See which keywords are working for organic search
If your site is showing up on the first page for some of those keywords, how much traffic are you getting from those organic listings? More importantly, how many leads or sales are you getting from those keywords? You will sometimes be surprised at which keywords drive the most traffic. Often it’s not the keywords you think will be best, and that’s why you have to watch your keyword referral reports to see which keywords are working.

3. Determine which keywords are not driving traffic
If you’re on the first page of Google and you get zero clicks, it’s time to find some new keywords. Stick with the keywords that drive sales and ditch the keywords that don’t work. There is a huge difference in click through rates depending on the position your site is listed in, but if your site is anywhere on the first page of Google, you should expect some level of traffic, or you’re not targeting the right keyword.

4. Find keywords that work in PPC that can be used for SEO
The nice thing about PPC search advertising is that you can choose exactly which keywords your ad shows up for. The thing that sucks about PPC is that you have to pay for every click. So why not take what you’ve learned from your PPC campaign and make sure you’re focusing your SEO efforts on the right keywords? You’ll usually find that a first page organic listing for the same keyword will send a lot more traffic than a paid listing for the same phrase, and the price per click is way better

5. Find keywords that work for SEO that can be used for PPC campaigns
The same idea for taking PPC keywords into your SEO campaign works the other way, too. Organic search listings will bring people to your site for all kinds of different keywords–including tons of keyword combinations that you never would have thought to include in your PPC campaign. If you notice a particular phrase that drives a lot of sales from a unique organic search keyword, you should try it out in your PPC ads. You’ll usually see a similar conversion rate, or maybe even better conversion from PPC on the same keyword!

6. Identify keywords to add as negative matches
Negative matching with PPC campaigns is when you tell the search engines to not show your ad when certain words are included in the search query. This can come in handy when you’re doing broad matching on keywords that have multiple meanings or connotations. They can also help you eliminate keywords that are driving a lot of traffic without resulting in sales. By watching your conversion metrics on a keyword level, you can identify keywords that drive traffic without sales and add those keywords to your campaigns as negative matches. You can even save yourself some money by looking at irrelevant, under-performing keywords from your organic search that should be excluded from your PPC campaigns before you even spend a penny on PPC ads.

7. Get ideas for new content and products
You’ll start to notice that people find your site for all kinds of different, sometimes strange, keywords. Watch the keyword list for new ideas for topics you can write about on your blog or even a new product you can add to meet the needs of your customers. If you’re getting significant traffic on keywords that you don’t have content about, it’s a good indicator that traffic would flow to your site if you create content to match what people are looking for.

I find it very interesting to review the keyword referral data in website analytics reports. As you dig in you’ll find all kinds of hidden gems that you can apply to make your website better and more profitable!

Any other ideas of ways you’re using keyword analytics to grow your business?

Based on our previous analysis of Google Trends leading up to Super Tuesday, we predicted Obama and McCain would come out on top after Super Tuesday. As it ended up, Google Trends was only about 70% correct in a state-by-state comparison and Hillary Clinton was actually on top with a slight lead after Super Tuesday. However, Obama has since pulled ahead in the delegate count in the close Democratic race and he is gaining momentum. It appears that Google Trends may be an accurate indicator of how people will vote after all.

The graph below from Google Trends shows the amount of search traffic on the top four presidential candidates’ last names, Google Trends data shows “Obama” is searched on more than any other candidate, with “Clinton” a distant second.

For the Republican nomination, McCain has been searched on most often, thus predicting his nomination as the Republican candidate. However, the disparity between searches for Republican and Democratic nominees predicts there will be a Democrat in the White House after the 2008 Election, and it looks like that person will be Barack Obama.

Based on Obama’s huge lead in Google Trends, the possibility of McCain beating out Obama in the 2008 General Election seems next to impossible.

From the Iowa Caucus on January 3rd to Maine’s Caucus on February 1st, the search trends for the candidates last names have directly correlated with their wins. So far, with our methodology we have been 100% accurate in determining the winner. We think we have a good chance of accurately predicting Today’s Results.

Here are the predictions:

Note: “Not Enough Data” indicates that there was not enough search data in Google Trends to create a graph. “NA” means the primary will take place at another date.