Digital Marketing and Web Strategy by Bob Hazlett | One Half Amazing!

I apologize for being away for a while, lots of new and exciting things going on in my personal life including an upcoming wedding as well as a new job.  I’ll do my best to get new and fresh content on the site in the coming weeks, but it could be pretty sparse.  In the meantime, why not check out my shared article feed or find me on twitter?

Here are a few article that have caught my eye recently.

• Do Mobile Coupons Matter? – Forrester breaks down which consumers are using mobile coupons, what technologies are on the forefront and if your company should begin to support mobile coupons.
• Rapportive – a simple CRM tool built right into GMail (Firefox add-on)
• How to Create a Text Marketing Campaign – Straight-forward advice for small businesses along with some great tools to help you get started with your first SMS campaign.
• Landing Page Makeover Clinic from CopyBlogger
• Best Keyword Ranking Tools for SEO (video) – paid and free versions
• Keep your website up to date with these SEO Health Checks
• AlertRank is like Google Alerts on Steroids -  each site in your alert will be rated based on an algorithm that takes into account the overall value and influence of the source

NOTE: I originally posted this story last year right before the Super Bowl.  I thought it was timely and in addition, I’ve updated it with a little more information. I will agree that this technique is sometimes frowned upon in the search world.  This is by no means a supplement for creating an amazing product.

Don’t have $3MM to spend on a 30-second Super Bowl commercial? Take advantage of your competitors deep pockets by bidding on long-tail memorable ad keywords that your competition may have missed. For example, Career Builder put out a series of spots during last year’s game that focused on “Follow Your Heart.” Users who searched on the “follow your heart” terms most likely didn’t remember the brand behind the commercial.  Monster.com took advantage of Career Builder’s publicity by bidding on their tagline and directing a large amount of focused traffic right to their site.

NEW: Here’s how to get started.  AdAge has a list of 2010 Super Bowl commercials and the creative behind them.  First, take a look at your competitors and see if you can find any holes or key terms from their spots that may stand out in a user’s mind.

Results from Google keyword tool

Next, drop on over to SpyFu and input your findings from above.  So for example, I’m a competitor to Dockers and I see that they’re running an ad with the song “I Wear No Pants.”  From what I’ve found via SpyFu and cross-referenced through Google Adwords tool, I see there isn’t much bidding going on for the term.  There isn’t a lot of search volume on this term either, but that could change.  Again, we’re really just trying to find a small niche of long-tail terms.  The likelihood that you get rich on these is slim to none.  Heck, you may even want to go as far as registering a keyword happy domain and using it for a landing page.  I hear that www.I-wear-no-pants.com is available.

Lesson: If you’re the guy paying $3MM for a single TV commercial, make sure you have a little extra left over for other channels as well. If you’re the guy who can’t afford the budget, riding your competitors coat tails, doing a little recon and spending a few hours setting up a landing page could turn you into the MVP.

Having an overall search engine optimization strategy is important, but sometimes you’re so far over your head that you just want a few quick wins to build a base and get you rolling.  Here are 6 quick SEO tweaks you can make today to improve your site and rankings.

1. Focus on a small set of related keywords – Find the best words that you want your site to be known for and add in the terms your customers (or potential customers) use to describe your service. Write content relating to and focusing on that small set of keywords.  5-10 words is probably the best recipe and Google’s keyword tool is a great place to get started.
2. Clean up your URL’s – Search engines like URL’s that are clear and concise.  If your page URL’s look like www.mywebsite.com/?p=123, tweak your content management system so that they display more like www.mywebsite.com/category/my-amazing-post-with-keywords-in-the-title. If you’re using WordPress, here’s a guide for permalink structure.
3. Use the H1 tag – H1 tags are used to define headlines.  In the eyes of a search engine, text with an H1 tag looks more important than regular plain text.
4. Link to other pages within your site – Use keywords in your links.  A link that looks like “Creative Online Marketing Campaigns” looks much better to a search engine than “click here for my favorite post.”
5. Make sure all pages have descriptive page titles – If you’re selling laptop memory, a page title that says “Laptop Memory | Computer Memory, DDR RAM, Memory Sticks and Computer Upgrades,”  is much better than “Memory.”  I would keep titles to about 60-80 characters
6. Build a site map and make sure it gets submitted to search engines.  Ensure that engines can index and find all your content. A good place to start is Google WebMaster Tools.

Bonus Tip: Write great content so other sites will link to you – inbound links are one of the most important aspects of optimizing for the web. Link bait is one thing, but truly unique and valuable content goes much further.  Shoot for the latter, it has more staying power.

Share your successes in the comments below.  What are those quick SEO wins that you would suggest?

Originally posted January 15, 2009

As budgets get tighter, take 20 minutes today to update your paid search negative keywords.  Negative keywords are those irrelevant or low converting keywords that you add to a pay-per-click campaign which tell the ad system not to show your ad when that particular keyword appears in a search.

To start, do some research for new negative and low-performing keywords through Google’s keyword tool or your web analytics data. Add your findings to your already established campaigns and adgroups.

Adding additional negative keywords optimizes and streamlines your campaigns’ effectiveness. They increases your quality score, improves your click-thru and conversion rates.