This month we’ve invited some guest bloggers to contribute. The first is by friend and colleague Guacira Naves (Owner, The Online Strategy House):

The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

Over a decade ago, an online marketing strategy was comprised by separate tactics that had only one concern in mind: to drive traffic to a site. The game was relatively simple: a site would be built, it’d be supported by email newsletters, advertising, maybe some traditional media, and that was all that there was to it.

Then, marketers became aware of the importance of search engine optimization, and added that component to their plan. Today, social media marketing is the new kid on the block. Not only that – it’s changing how the other online marketing elements interact with each other.

Below is a sample of how this interdependence plays out – and how you can combine each individual channel for the greater good:

Twitter and Google:

• Google’s new real time search results mean that tweets with your brand may now appear in search results. So, a strong visibility on Twitter can very well influence your site’s exposure on Google. That’s another reason to maintain an active Twitter profile, and populate it with quality content.

Twitter and Customer Opinion:

• Not only is Twitter the most important micro-blogging network, it is increasingly used as a search tool. It is a channel where people go to find the online equivalent to “word of mouth” about a product, service, etc. On Twitter, frustrated customers often share their gripes, and loyal clients rave about their favourite brands.  Here’s an example:

Imagine if you were looking for reviews on Virgin Mobile and came across the two tweets above.  They may very well sway your decision-making.

However, Virgin Mobile could have stepped in to have their say. It’d potentially have an impact not only on the three individuals involved in that dialogue, but Virgin’s update would’ve been found in searches made for that brand.

Here’s a positive example of how proactive companies observe Twitter conversations, and interact with users: on December 10th, I decided to try Pearltrees. I then tweeted this update:

Minutes later, I received a reply from Pearltrees CEO, Patrice Lamothe, with this message:

That update was not only relevant to me, but to any other individual making a search query for “Pearltrees” around that time.

So, the lesson is: people are going to use Twitter’s search tool to find information on your products or services. You might as well help them find information that is as positive as possible.

YouTube and Search Engine Optimization:

• YouTube videos are prominently represented in Google’s search engine results.You do have a YouTube channel, don’t you? Then, make sure that, among other things, your videos titles and tags are optimized. And guess what – this will help your presence in search engines, too.

YouTube and other Social Networks:

• YouTube also gives viewers the option to share a video via Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, orkut and StumbleUpon, directly from the video’s YouTube page. You can also embed a video into your blog, and invite readers to share it – either by embedding into their own blogs, by adding it to Facebook, or inviting them to share it through social bookmarking sites like Reddit. Earlier today, I embedded this third-party YouTube video about Hewlett-Packard into my own Facebook profile:

I wasn’t the only one. According to the video statistics, it was watched an additional 279 times as a result of links from Facebook. Reddit, a popular content-sharing site, had also generated 1,317 views.

Blogs and Search Engine Optimization:

• By frequently adding fresh, relevant content to your company’s blog, not only will you improve your brand’s presence and clout in the blogosphere, but you will help your site become more appealing in Google’s eyes. That is because Google naturally gives more importance to sites that are updated on a regular basis.

Blogs and Twitter:

• Blogs can easily be set up to automatically promote a new post, as soon as it is published. You will be not only be driving traffic to the blog itself, but will also help to keep your Twitter profile active with new, original material.

I could go on and on. This just scratches the surface, but gives you an idea of how, nowadays, online marketing elements are so interdependent. When planned accordingly and executed in an orchestrated manner, these tactics will make the whole stronger than the sum of its parts.

About the author: Guacira Naves is an online marketing strategist who has 18 years of Internet experience. Her company, The Online Strategy House, develops and executes holistic online marketing strategies to help clients achieve their short, medium and long-term goals.

Thanks to Guacira for this.  If you are interested in contributing  a post – give us a shout!

Its almost the festive season, the sun finally came out in Vancouver today after three weeks of rain and there is lots going on online.  Check out our new media reasons to be cheerful for this month:

Grooveshark – groove to your favorite music while you work.

About Men – a new men’s health site in BC.

Twubs - making sense of Twitter hashtags #.

Twittersheep – see what your followers are Twittering about.

Sprouter – collaborative networking tool.

Slickplan – Create flowcharts and site maps for free.

SiteScan – verify your Google Analytics tracking codes.

Enjoy!

Landing pages are the pages on your site where you want users to go after clicking an ad or a search result link. If you’re running any sort of online effort, you should at least have identified a landing page and its purpose.

Landing pages are a critical part of your site because it’s the place where you’re supposed to close the deal – have a user make a download, provide you with an email, make a purchase, or service the reason your business exists online.

While every landing page depends on an overall strategy and past performance, there are a few things that, with time, have become best practices. Not all of our landing page optimization tips may apply to your case so look at these objectively and take what works for you.

Here are our top 10 landing page optimization tips.

1. Make a Clear Offer or Proposition – What do you want your visitors to do: sign up for the news letter? Join a community? Try the new demo? Constantly ask yourself what it is you want your visitors to do and optimize for it. This is important to help you understand your strategy and avoid including too many choices or unnecessary information.

2. Careful With Distractions – Some even to the extent of removing page navigation to help focus attention. Though this might or might not work for you, have in mind that it’s easy to distract your visitor with less relevant options like company information, certifications and other products for example.

3. Size Matters  (Call To Action Buttons) – Have you noticed these buttons keep getting bigger? That’s because they perform better. Seth Godin calls them “bananas” and your visitors are the monkeys. The objective is to make it easy for the monkeys to find the bananas before they give up (less than 3 seconds).

4. Contrast (Call To Action Buttons) – Contrast for call to action buttons is good.  Use colours like red, yellow and green or a colour not widely use on the rest of the page to attract attention. Careful: contrast does not mean annoying. For the love of all that is good, avoid the flashing “YOU”RE THE 1,000,000th VISITOR!” style banners.

5. Above and Bellow (Call To Action Buttons) – Make the offer visible above the page fold and at the bottom. Perhaps your visitor has already done enough research to make the decision and want to buy right away. If the button is only at the bottom of the page you risk losing the lead to unnecessary actions.

6. Add Peer Validation – If you have previous client reviews or testimonials, this is the place to showcase them. This is important to add credibility and trust. Customers believe peers much more than they believe you, the seller.

7. Deliver The Offer – Don’t just hand them offer, email it to them! Yes, it’s an extra few minutes of waiting time for your customers, but it’s a great way to ensure you’ve got a valid email address.

8. Say Thank You – Take your customers to a “Thank You” page. This important to track conversions, an opportunity to ask for more information, and it’s just plain good manners.

9. Track It – Use tools like Google Analytics to track how your visitors come and interact with the page. A great way to do this is by creating funnels.  Funnels will help you understand where to make changes to improve conversions.

10. Test It – Use tools like Google Website Optimizer to try out new variations and see which one performs better. Making minor changes – e.g. colour, text and position - can sometimes boost your conversions beyond your expectations.

Thinking about your business bottom line? Contact Out-Smarts Marketing about creating a solid Internet Marketing Strategy.

Other resources:

Lee Munroe, a web designer from Ireland, has put together a great list of good call to action buttons here: http://www.leemunroe.com/web-design-trends-call-to-action-signup-download-buttons/

Wider Funnel, a Marketing Optimization company in Vancouver, works with a very effective principle for page optimization called the LIFT model. Learn about it here:  http://www.widerfunnel.com/conversion-rate-optimization/the-six-landing-page-conversion-rate-factors

Elastic Path, an enterprise ecommerce software company in Vancouver, published this short experiment on their blog about call to action button size.  http://www.getelastic.com/cta-size/

Whichtestwon.com – Anne Holland’s weekly optimization test. It’s not only insightful but also very cool! www.whichtestwon.com

Omniture, a popular web analytics platform, also has a landing page performance guessing game here: http://www.omniture.com/en/pickthewinner?cms_site_lang=1&s_rtid=25460&etlink=gra_sub2&sfid=0033000000WN28AAAT&elq=0d8c9eeab87e4680b981e1ff4831ddc4&s_iid=25443&ct=email&cp=lead%2520acquisition

by Jose Uzcategui

Our SEO copy writing  partner Louise Desmarais of Mud Creative recently wrote a great article in their newsletter that discusses the key elements that make your website attractive to visitors.  Louise kindly agreed to allow me to share it with you:

As your site’s welcome mat, the elements of the home page are critically important in terms of communication and usability.

What’s your story? Just say it.

Visitors expect to find out in three seconds or less if a site has what they’re looking for. Jakob Nielsen, a web usability consultant, says that not explicitly stating what you have to offer is #1 of The ten most violated home page design guidelines.

If the headline on your home page says “Welcome to company X,” that’s only telling your visitors who owns the site – not what you can do for them. If your company story is buried in generic corporate speak, it is a one-sided pitch that visitors quickly see through.

In plain language with purposeful words, explain what your product or service is and how it can help your visitors. Use first person so that it feels like a comfortable conversation. Then casually direct them to other pages for more information.

Keep the important stuff above the fold – that is, above the point where visitors have to scroll down to continue reading. They may not get that far, so you want to make sure to make an impression early on.

Make the reading easy with subheads and bullets

Web readers tend to scan on-page content to decide if they want to stay or move on. (Did you know that the back button is the third most-used button on the keyboard?) To make it easier to scan and to hold visitors’ attention longer:

• Break up your story with intriguing subheads
• Use bullet points to separate thoughts
• Incorporate links into bullets to direct visitors to other pages

Where do they go from here? Don’t leave them hanging.

There are many ways for visitors to navigate your site. But it’s up to your site to show them where to go and how to get there.

Does your site have a global navigation – defined as a set of top-level navigation links (for example, Home, About Us, News, Contact Us) – that appear on every page? This helps to orient your visitors. The global navigation should be in about the same place on every page, with the page or section that visitors are currently on highlighted.

Don’t rely on your global navigation alone to be your site’s road map. Include links to important pages in the content of your story. At the bottom of the page, give readers an option to go elsewhere, such as “Contact us for more information.”

Let visitors know they’ve landed on a happening site
Today’s websites are dynamic, engaging and interactive. When people arrive, convince them that there is real value in sticking around. Some ideas for doing this are:

• What’s new? – showcase your latest projects
• Newsletter sign-up – offer free information
• Recent blog postings – prompt visitors to read and comment
• Social media widgets – invite them to follow you on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook
• Post your latest podcast
• Link to your latest press release

Say no to digital barriers – open the doors wide
You want to eliminate any and all frustration around your site, so avoid the following:

• Splash landing page – you know you hate these. So do your visitors. What’s more, splash pages make your site virtually invisible to search engines
• Pop-ups – unless there’s a good reason for a pop-up, don’t go there
• Embedded scroll-down boxes – these can be confusing to visitors, and they’re not pretty
• Long sign-up forms, surveys and password requests – too much work and your visitors are reaching for that back button

When visitors arrive at your site, they already know what they’re looking for. Will they find it on your home page?

Louise Desmarais is an SEO copywriter with a loyal following of web clients from across North America. Louise operates Mud Creative, a writing company based in Calgary, Alberta.

As your site gets established and gains attention, the inevitable link request emails will begin to appear.   Here’s Jose Uzcategui’s blog post following one such email he received  recently:

Today I received a letter requesting a link from my blog. Because I’m a relatively small player, I though some of you might be interested in seeing what one of these looks like.

Link building is ultra-very important when trying to build our site’s authority, page rank, and overall SEO awesomeness. What is “link building” you say? It’s any strategy used to get links from other websites pointed to your website.

How do you it? There are many ways, and one of them is sending a letter to the site’s owner requesting a link just like the letter I received today. Here’s the letter:

Good morning,

My name is Xxxx Xxxx and I work at a company called Xxx Xxxxx Xxxxx. We are a publisher of a variety of leading business and industrial sites across North America and Europe.

I have noticed that your organization’s website, http://www.joseuonline.com/, is linked to http://www.boardoftrade.com/ which is a Board of Trade in Canada. I am writing to you to request that you please also link to our Canadian industrial business site called Canadian Trade Index at http://www.ctidirectory.com/.

Why link to http://www.ctidirectory.com/?

* Canadian Trade Index is Canada’s leading industrial website (comScore, March 2009) with nearly 9 million annual visitors.
* The site plays a key role in connecting buyers and sellers of industrial products.
* The site features a rich, relevant and searchable database of industrial products and the suppliers, distributors and manufacturers of these products.

More information about us can be viewed at www.ctidirectory.com/pages/about_us.cfm.

For these reasons, it’s likely that your constituents that visit your site may find Canadian Trade Index to be a valuable resource to source, buy and sell industrial good and services.

Would you please place a link to http://www.ctidirectory.com/ on your site?

Thank you for the consideration and if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at my email below.

Regards,

Xxxx Xxxxx
Xxxx Xxxxx Xxxxxxxx
XX@XXXX
905.xxx.xxxx xxxx

I am sending this email to you using an address I found on your web site. If you no longer wish to receive emails from me, please click here: unsubscribe. Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause. Xxxx XXxxx xxx-xxx-xxxx ext. xxx.

The lack of perosnal detail tells me that this is probably the work of some automated system, so I’m probably not goingt to act on it. Having said that, I did check Canadian Trade Index site advertised here.

I believe in these letters, as long as they are personal and have sound reasons behind them. Have you ever sent one of these? I’m curious on the results. Feel free to coment here.

Lots of new media reasons to be cheerful this month.

Microsoft has a new offering the promises to change the way we search the Internet. Its called Bing and is still under wraps so we’ll have to wait and see if it will better the mighty Google.

Not to be outdone, Google also has a new offering in beta. Google Wave promises to change the way we communicate and collaborate on the web.

Make your own book with Blurb and BookSmart.

Have fun with your desktop at Bump Top.

Twitter tools: Untweeps (get rid of anactive users), Twilert (Twitter keyword listening tool) and Just Tweet It (another Twitter directory).

Here are 10 great ways you can easily improve your search engine positioning without putting your hands in your pocket and without having to be a SEO technodweeb.

1. Update your site regularly – this may seem obvious but many corporate sites rarely change.

2. Post a video – it can be short and sweet but has the added benefit of enhancing your image.

3. Add a podcast – our traffic peaks every time we podcast and by submitting the podcast to top pod sites, the effect ripples. Coincidence? I think not.

4. Label your images – most sites don’t bother but this is viable real estate on your site, use it. Image titles should relate back to your keywords and offering for maximum impact.

5. Use Google’s webmaster tools – make sure your site is crawled regularly, submit your sitemap (okay I concede you might need a technodweeb for that) and identify any problems so that you (or your technodweeb) can fix them.  If you can’t work out how submit your sitemap do it page by page in Google.

6. Get bookmarks – book marks are like links the more you have the better. Hit on employees, partners and colleagues to bookmark your site.  Good sites include Digg,  or Stumble Upon.

7. Comment regularly on relevant blogs and always remember to insert your url correctly.

8. Spend some time developing a keyword map for your products and services so as to identify the most effective words to use and those to avoid.

9. Use bold and headings to identify key terms in your text.

10. This one should be first on the list but it seems so obvious I almost left it out. In case you haven’t done so, remember to submit your site to Google and other search engines otherwise there’s no hope whatsoever.

1. Understand your prospective customer: who they are, why they buy, when and so on – do they buy on-line or use the Internet to research product information – are the using social media and if so which tools?

2. Your company – what resources are in place or will be made available. Also consider existing web presence, company culture, mission, goals and policies.

3. Competition – check out what your competition is doing on line, track blog and RSS feeds that mention them as well as comments on their products or service from users. Also consider the actions of similar companies operating in different jurisdictions.

4. The market – is your market place experiencing and up turn / down turn or is it in a state of flux? These will all impact the approach you take.

5. Integration with your overall marketing and advertising strategy is imperative. Each must complement and support the other by conveying the same brand image and messages.

6. If you don’t have web savvy resources in house then don’t worry – get guidance from people who do this (like us ).

7. Positioning – find out where you stand in the web rankings in comparison to others in your field.

8. Traffic – who visits your site right now, how often and how long do they stay.

9. Pricing – if your offering is considered “prestige” then your web strategy will be different than if your its aimed at the masses.

10. Consider all tools at your disposal to promote your web presence and don’t forget to consider newer technologies such as wikis, social networks and microblogs for effective online marketing.

1. Write an article that relates to your area of expertise and submit it to ezine and article sites (the ones with the highest Google ranking).
2. Update your site often – a blog is a great way to do this.
3. Add forms to your site – check out Jotform.
4. Get more backlinks – find out which sites link back to your top competitors and submit your site to those with the highest traffic – don’t use a mass submit tool.
5. Podcast – add audio or video content to your site and make sure its listed in the podcast hubs.
6. Have the right content: effectively use keywords and appropriate SEO copy writing (listen to our upcoming podcast to find out more).
7. Get active in social networks – LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter and make sure that those link back to your site.
8. Encourage community – use your blog or podcast to build community and invite others to get involved.
9. Remember that Google may be the most common search engine but there are many others – take these into account when considering SEO.
10. Utilize the hot spots on your site to the best advantage. The top left hand corner is valuable real estate – use it to tell the audience (and the engines) what you do.

Links are like gold on the Internet, the more your have the better your ranking. Link building however can be arduous and frustrating and if you don’t know what you are doing you can spend a lot of time chasing your tail.

Here are some tips to make your efforts more effective:

1. Always ensure your site is listed in all of the major search engines prior to starting your link building campaign.
2. Only submit links to quality sites.
3. Target your linking to sites that are pertinent to your business.
4. Remember to add your links in appropriate directories.
5. Quality is better than volume. Link to sites that have good traffic stats.
6. Track your progress – set up a spreadsheet to track submissions.
7. Many sites require a reciprocal link. Decide in advance if you will take this approach and add this to your web site.
8. Only pay for listings if you can determine your ROI.
9. Go for the low hanging fruit. Request a link from customer and partner sites.
10. And this is perhaps the most important. Don’t get disheartened. Effective link building takes time and commitment. Results are not instantaneous and it often takes several months to see the full effect.