By: Dezmon Landers

I often get asked if I would be willing to run SEO activities for startup companies or if I know any SEO experts. I unfortunately don’t have the time to help as much as I would like. But I have have come across an SEO professional that I feel is worth suggesting and recommending to young companies.

SEO Expert Inc. is run by Sean O’Brien. I have had a chance to work with Sean one-on-one for months now and am impressed with his knowlege and attention to detail. If you are looking to outsource your SEO jump over to their site and see if it would be a good fit.

2 Comments • August 4th, 2008

By: Dezmon Landers

In my never-ending quest for more web data, I have added Quantcast to my arsenal. Quantcast is a mix of traffic rankings and analytics that gives you an additional data point when researching competitor movements and shifts in traffic segments.

I prefer to use multiple data points when calculating both traffic for my sites and competitor sites. There are not many options that provide realistic data when comparing site traffic. Alexa.com and Compete.com are the two “best” options for traffic rankings currently. Compete also gives you an estimated number of visitors, as does Quantcast. You will notice large deviations in the data for some sites, but that is expected as traffic estimation is difficult.

One advantage Quantcast provides over other traffic sites is the addition of demographic data. Gender, age, education, income and race are shown to provide a rough make-up of your visitors. You can compare these numbers to your Google Analytics data to gauge the accuracy.

Quantcast also provides other sites your audience has visited and keywords that are likely to find that site (you can never have too many competitor keyword tools).

One last piece of information that is interesting is the Traffic Frequency graphs. This displays three levels of visitor activity (addicts, regulars and passers-by) and the amount of your traffic they generate. Again, this data could be checked against Google Analytics.

All of these online tools have their issues and will provide different results, sometimes dramatically different. The best way to get a level playing field is to average data from all available sources. I have added Quantcast to the list of sources I use when researching site traffic.

Thank you Dezmon (founder of Simplifyed.com), for turning me on to Quantcast.

No Comments • July 31st, 2008

By: Dezmon Landers

A common adjustment businesses make in a recession, (I’m not saying we are in a recession, although many indications point in that direction), is to cut their advertising budget.

That is often found to be the wrong reaction, as cutting your advertising budget wont lead to more sales. Since cutting the ad budget is still practiced by many, your competitors might join that crowd. Or, you can go crazy and expand your marketing spend during a down turn.

I have noticed a reduction in the number of AdWords advertisers. This decreases spend per click and reduces the options searchers have, which could lead to more sales for you. Even if the general populace is buying less, they still research products which could lead to sales down the road.

Any web startup that sells a product should give pay per click a try for two reasons:

1. It could be a great sales channel
2. The keyword exercise is essential to SEO

What better time to do keyword and marketing (ppc) testing than when prices and competition are low.

Here are a few articles I wrote over the past year regarding pay per click advertising:

Adwords Quality Score

Keyword Cost for PPC

Adwords GeoTargeting

No Comments • July 29th, 2008

By: Dezmon Landers

Google has begun the PageRank update. I have seen updates on multiple site that I work on.

Some of the potential changes per the Search Engine Roundtable blog:

1. Internal links and external links on the same page may not be splitting the PageRank vote equally.
2. Depending on the location of the link, PR may be weighted differently.
3. Multiple links to the same url from the same page may not each get the same piece of the PR vote.
4. “Run-of-site” external links, like Blogrolls, may now have diminished PR.
5. Links between domains that Google sees as “related” may have their PR significantly damped down. Possibly the same goes for sites that link to subdomains.

Although many deem PageRank unimportant I still contend that it is one way to tell how relevant Google deems your site.

No Comments • July 27th, 2008

By: Dezmon Landers

With the launch of the new iPhone App Store, a new platform has been created to reach millions of tech savvy users. With new platforms, comes new marketing channels. While the cost of entry is higher to build an app for the iPhone, that also limits the number of competitors.

You have three options when building an iPhone app:

1. Build an app that promotes your service (MLB has a paid app for scores and stats)
2. Build an app that replicates your service (ebay, facebook, paypal and myspace all do this)
3. Build an independent app (an app that is not tied to a current product or service)

Building an app that promotes your service without actually mimicking it is probably the most difficult. The only purpose is to make users aware of your service, but there has to be a hook to download and use the app. Major League Baseball’s “MLB.com At Bat” ($4.99 in the app store) is a great extension of the brand. While you could look up scores through the web on your iPhone, apps are usually faster and give you the essential information that you are looking for.

The next option is an app that is an extension of your service. Most apps that replicate a service are scaled down versions that lack features but do the essentials. It is easier to navigate Facebook on a normal computer screen, but you can get the main objectives competed through the Facbook app. Twitterrific on the other hand (which is a third party twitter app) almost makes going to the main twitter site pointless (when it is up….eww low blow). Most of these apps are free, like the main sites, and allow you to spend more time using the service since you don’t need a computer to access them.

The third option is create a new app as its own entity, not tied to a current business. This is a new way to launch without doing an extensive site and service. An app is a great way to test a potential startup idea. If the iPhone crowd loves to use it and there is a need on the web, your app may have a bigger market than you realize.

Another aspect of the iPhone app store is the paid vs. free models. With apps being as easy to buy as music in the iTunes store and on your iPhone, not needing to pull out your credit card to buy will increase purchasing. Games have been a huge hit as they are eight of the top ten paid apps as of July 15th (less than a week after the app store was launched).

With any new platform, there will be many lessons learned as to how far someone will use their phone to replace normal computer tasks. While email, IMing, and social network apps are widely adopted, many are not comfortable banking on their phone.

I’m diving head first into iPhone apps. I have started to spec and build my first iPhone app which is a whole new venture, and does not correlate with any of the startups I am working on now. I am also helping with the marketing for another iPhone app, FastTrackr. I will keep you updated on the launch, marketing efforts and what works in the iPhone app world.

2 Comments • July 16th, 2008

By: Dezmon Landers

Adobe Flash is a pain to the SEO community. Flash has never been indexed well by the search engines which reduces the amount of copy/images to work with. The best work around was to produce an HTML version of the Flash page so search engines could index all the awesome unique content that you produced. I work with a sketchbook site that uses Flash (against my wishes ). As you can see there is very little on-page material for the search engines to work with.

The fight against the use of Flash is going to get a little harder. Adobe has announced that they are working with Google and Yahoo to make Flash and rich Internet application (RIA’s) files searchable. Google also announced that they have built a better “Flash indexing algorithm”. How well they index and exactly how much information can be pulled from Flash files is still to be seen.

On a side note, the Flash site I referenced above has released new, one-of-a-kind sketchbooks signed by the artist. If you know anyone that is into original art please forward the link.

Source: Adobe makes Flash Searchable - ReadWriteWeb

No Comments • July 8th, 2008

By: Dezmon Landers

Recently I have received many questions about the Adwords Quality Score. I have wanted to write an article that explains the most important aspects of the quality score and which segments you have the most control over so I can use it as a resource with startups I work with.

First, lets discuss the segments that you control when building an Adwords campaign.

1. Keywords - Like keyword research in SEO, paid search keywords are vital to reaching the correct audience. Competition can also be tough for highly searched words, so a long-tail strategy can also be useful to keep cost down. Regardless if they are high volume keywords or long-tail, they need to be relevant to your offering.
2. Ads - One of the most important tasks in paid search is ad copy. These ads are displayed in the search engine results pages (SERPS) and are the only source of information that searchers have when deciding where to click. As you will read below, Google uses click through rate has a major gauge in the quality of your ads.
3. Landing Page - This is the page that searchers will land on when they click your ad. You (should) build and control this page. Google will look at this page to determine if it is relevant to your keyword and ad.

The keyword, advertisements and landing page need to be closely tied together. Your keyword should appear in both your ad and on your landing page (both in the meta data and on the page if possible). Adwords will look at all three when allocating the initial quality score. Over time the click through rate will gain more weight in the overall quality score.

While there are hundreds of factors that make up the adwords quality score, there are a few very important segments that you should be aware of.

1. Ad Group Structure - Create ad groups with keywords that are closely related. This will also simplify the ads and the landing page keywords. I prefer to isolate all major keywords into their own ad group. This will allow to write ads that can use the exact keyword. While your landing page most likely can’t contain every keyword you bid on, those that are closely related will be fine.
2. Click Through Rate (CTR) - This is the percentage of your ads that are clicked compared to the number of times it was shown (impressions). Remember, you are competing not only against the other ads on the page, but the organic results as well. The higher your CTR is, the better your quality score will be.
3. Account CTR - Google will look at the CTR on your entire account. One way to determine the overall quality of your Adwords work.
4. CTR History - Google also compares you to the overall CTR for keywords you bid to industry averages.

The one major aspect that people concentrate on is the bid price. While important, the bid price will fluctuate widely for the same position based on the quality score.

Google also provide tools to help you gauge your quality score per keyword in each ad group. This will help you narrow down which keywords might not be fully optimized all the way through the ad and landing page. To activate this setting click the “Customize Columns” link and pick “Show Quality Score” from the drop down.

5 Comments • June 24th, 2008