1. Title should contain the subject of the web page
2. URL of the web page should also contain the subject
3. The same goes for the content of the ALT attribute of the main images on the page
4. The web page needs to be linked to a Home page and linked back to its category and subcategory pages
5. Subject needs to be specified a couple of times in the text content

And, of course, the web page itself should be highly relevant to a specific topic. By building each and every page, according to these patterns, you have a chance to build a very search engine friendly web site. This is very time-consuming but in the end it will pay off.

1. Not spending 15% of your Marketing budget, every month, on experimenting with new techniques / channels / ideas.
2. Not having a fast, functional, incredible mobile-friendly website.
3. Gratuitous use of Flash.
4. Writing campaigns your website can’t cash.
5. Not having a vibrant, engaging, non-pimpy blog.
6. “Shouting” on Twitter / Facebook.
7. Your SEO strategy is buying links, expired domains, et. al.
8. Not following the “10/90 rule for magnificent web success.
9. Doing anything on the web without a Web Analytics Measurement Model.
10. Making lame metrics the measures of success: Impressions, Click-throughs, Page Views.
11. Not centering your entire digital existence on Economic Value.

One of the main reasons  – the lame sales process that occurs internally. We were recently auditing a great client with an outstanding website.  All processes undergone a very strict website analysis. Some of his organic keywords are extremely lucrative and beat a lot of competitors who have to pay high AdWords fees for paid search.  That website was getting web traffic and leads. Every week a a couple of dozen people would sign for a mailing list. So, everything was in place, however our client was complaining that the level of sales was very low.

We found that nobody was properly processing leads,  customers questions were not answered in a timely and orderly fashion.  Promised newsletters were never received and the blog has not been updated for several months, etc.

So, even when the web business optimization and best website analytics work guarantee great results, small web business still would fail if  it does not dynamically and constantly work at least on the following issues

• Customer Service
• Customer Retention Process
• Conversion of Leads into Prospects
• Constant communications with past and present clients
• Timely updates and a consistent Lifeline with clients
• Competitive Prices
• User Satisfaction

Let’s be honest: customers like website not because the site in question knows how to manipulate keywords on Google – they simply do not know or do not care about it. Customers fancy certain websites because they can add the word “great” to any component mentioned above. And if every component is in place then the positive result is obvious. Website visitors get satisfied and want to learn more about services and products offered by the site. They  learn  something with each visit and wholeheartedly  refer  the site to people that they  know. This is the best referral possible.

When sales and other internal business processes are down, website owner gets completely opposite results.  As for me, that kind of business would  remind of a neat and nice store in real life where everything is in place but nothing is happening. If somebody visits such a store for a month and nothing is happening there – what will be the outcome? A potential customer  will start losing interest. And why would he bother if in this cool place there are no sales, no promotions and no communications?  Visitors  will still like that store, even drop in there occasionally. But after a while knowing that no other pleasant surprises will expect them, the stream will get dry, for sure.

1. IMPORTANT: No more than 25 links per week to be added !
2. 100% of websites should be in English
3.Bids to submit to Web/Links Directories or article sites will be ignored.
4. No link farms, link-exchange programs, forums, web directories, Blogs or articles submission, strictly no FFA’s, gambling, pharmacy, illegal, porn, violent, or hate-based, guestbook’s, classifieds, dynamic links, spam sites, or generally black hat links.
5. All links must be indexed by robots, not blacklisted by Google.
6. Links must be from different Class-C IP addresses.
7. The linking page has to have no more than 30 outbound links.
8. All links must be static, plain, standard a href type links (no cgi etc…) and direct using provided anchor text
9. All links must be indexable by googlebot. no rel=”nofollow”, robots.txt blocking and the like
10. Link page must have a recent Google cache; no less then 30 days old.
11. No hidden links. All links must be visible and readable.
12. No sites using dynamically generated links, MouseOvers or other PageRank-hoarding tricks.
13. Non-reciprocal links only.
14. Staggered deployment of the links to avoid any penalties (over 3 months)
15. Links should not be from framed pages or cloaked links.
16. Links should not be through a javascript.
17. Links should be through a redirect script.
18. Links should not be on Flash sites or pages.
19. All links should be free and not paid links.
20. All links shouldn’t appear in a paid links slot such as: “sponsored” links, advertisers, links, ads or any other slot links that will show the search engines that it is a paid link.
21. All Links have to be on sites which are NOT penalized or banned by Google.
22. All links have to be new, links from websites that already link to my site will not be counted.
23. Page containing link must be listed in Google’s Cache.
24. No use of Automated software (Zeus, Arelis or others)
25. Links must be permanent and remain active.
26. All links will point to one domain.
27. The anchor text (or title, description) will be different, and will have several options.

Relevance of Inbound Links

A search engine is likely to view a link from semantically related web page or site as more valuable than a link from a random unrelated one. Usually, a series of links with very similar anchor text from unrelated sources is an indicator of an artificial link scheme, and they may be devalued. Too many links from irrelevant sources may result in a penalty. For additional information, click here

Link Churn

Links that appear and disappear on pages are likely to be a part of a linking scheme. The rate at which these links appear and disappear is termed “link churn”. If this happens frequently, it may be regarded as spam. Those links will either be devalued, or at worst your website will be regarded as spam and penalized.

Number of Links on a Page

A link on a page with a few outbound links is generally worth more than a link on a page with many outbound links. this concept is also implied by the formula for Google’s Page Rank.

So you hired an SEO contractor and got top rankings for the keywords that you wanted. You say to yourself: “Now my site does not just have the great design, it is also visible on all leading search engines. Where are all the Internet crowds that I expected and why am I not getting any return on investments?” Of course, there is another scenario when you see a lot of visitors but they are mostly coming for information without any regard to your products and/or services. Well, I can give an answer that not everybody will like: you, man skipped web analytics and relied too much on basic SEO.

I can predict a lot of objections of the type “How come? I installed Google Analytics and get reports weekly/daily/monthly!” Yeah, you are getting reports, but do you think you can really process and analyze them? For the last several years I saw so many SEO guys who  claim they understand web analytics. But after a couple of questions and 5-10 minutes of conversations, I realize that these people can generate reports but don’t have ability to drill down and get to the bottom of the problem that worries their clients.

At the opposite side we meet many SMB  clients who started their online business, thinking that money spent on a website development will be the major key to success and profitability.  Some even think that they are Internet pros because they surfed there a lot, some don’t even have a clear business concept of actionable web strategy.   After the months of idle waiting, they find some dubious SEO “boys and girls” who can talk but not deliver serious  business results.  These “SEO specialists” assure them that as soon as some certain keywords reach the first page on Google/Yahoo/MSN all business problems will be solved.  Sometimes it takes up to one year for an SMB client to realize that his website is mostly at the same place where it was before.

Before or after his unsuccessful marketing campaign, some business clients turn to Pay Per Click solutions and pay dearly for each click, especially if their business  offers products or services in a highly competitive field.  Without the help of a savvy PPC administrator who needs to constantly adjust the campaigns ,  cost per click for some single keyword in AdWords may easily reach $10 or higher.  If the Quality Score is low, the campaign may turn into a money-draining, painful experience.

The majority of proactive companies begin to wake up from this nightmare and start asking themselves the right questions. What went wrong?  What are the right online solutions?  If they do pose these questions, they may find that the best answer will be: “I should not have neglected web analytics”.

by Allen Gabriel

I am amazed at the audacity of this step.  First of all, Automatic Matching will only use broad match. This means that the keywords Google adds may not be as relevant as it claims them to be.  As a result, multiple imprecisely matched keywords can cause your campaign a lot of harm. Including low click thru rates and more expensive cost per click.Second, it means that your daily budget will be reached more often than you even want to, thus increasing your ad spendings.

Currently, Automatic Matching feature is already active for certain accounts with billing addresses in the US, Canada, Australia, UK, Italy, Germany and Spain.  There is a possibility to opt out from this feature by going to the Campaign Settings and manually unchecking the box.

Overall, I think any business that has a PPC administrator or in-house SEO consultants on board and/or other personnel which is actively involved in PPC campaign management should opt out immediately. However, I am open to possibility that this feature may be advantegous to small businesses  with limited number of keywords, ads and campaigns.

As you may well know, social media represent a wide variety of not marketing but personal communication tools.  All these online networks appeared for the needs of social communications not for advancing the agenda of the marketing companies.  However, some of our clients try to get from us some kind of traditional “measurements” that will allow them to calculate retun on investments in this case.

Naturally, it is completely natural to understand the result from campaigns conducted through natural marketing channels. It is relatively easy to put numeric quantities, report the results, count conversions e.t.c.  Unfortunately, it is not possible to create viable metrics on conversations and other human interactions, which is what the social media is about.  

Social media was not invented for marketers, millions of Internet visitors use it to communicate and interact, exchange opinions.  Internet marketing companies hope to stream some of those visitors to the clients websites, in other words to take advantage of the existing online SMN subscribers.

I would say that the better criteria for measurements from viral marketing will be the number of positive interactions of clients websites with the masses, web traffic increase, and, possibly, the number of positive exchanges between the websites in question and Internet visitors coming from SMN.

Quality Score policy did tremendously improve the relevance of the sponsored ads.  If any company wanted to build a successful PPC campaign it had to hire an experienced SEO contractor who would be capable of  tuning up landing pages and working on keyword performance.  He would also have to provide solid PPC campaign management, according to the new Internet trends.

Surprisingly, even now, when the year 2009 is swiftly approaching,  many businesses still don’t follow Google guidelines and Quality Score policy.  They think that by not hiring an SEO professional they save money. But quite the opposite happens. They keep bidding on keywords that are nowhere to be found on landing pages. In turn, Google, in absence of other words, fines them by raising sky high the minimum of CPC.  The minimum can keep on on going up to the extent, that makes any profitability impossible.

Personally, I like Google approach with Quality Score. It moved organic results and ppc sponsored results closer to each other.  If you are a web analyst or an SEO consultant, you know that there will be no organic results if you try to sell shoes on the web page that has content about oranges.