A while back I purchased a Kindle from Woot.com, the online store and community which offers a deal on just one item per day (which was recently acquired by Amazon). To inspire me to purchase from them again, they sent me a hilarious email (see below) with a link to a deal on a Kindle cover with a book light. Far from your normal followup marketing email, Woot.com’s email was well written and funny enough that I read it all the way through (plus it got forwarded and blogged). As I’ve said before, a bit of humor can be good for business (also shown by Sharpie) and can inspire, not only repeat business, but customer loyalty and evangelism.

From email titled, “Re-Kindle the passion with Woot”

Hey there,

Woot here. How ya doin’? How’s that Kindle you picked up treatin’ you? Nice, right? Well, not that you asked, but we’re doin’ pretty well too. Big things going on, lots of moving and shaking, y’know. Busy busy busy, that’s us. Yep.

Okay, look; we’re sorry about that “not that you asked” part. That’s not how we wanted to start this. It’s just that, well, things aren’t really the same between us. Don’t look at us like that. We know you feel it too. The distance. The walls we’ve both put up. What happened? We used to spend hours at night just talking. We would look into your eyes and you would look upon our daily deals and things just CLICKED.

This is coming out all wrong. Sorry, sorry. Look, just forget we said anything. No, really. It’s our issue and it’s wrong to pin it on you. In fact, to make up for this, come on by right now and we’ll give you a great deal on a Franklin Kindle Cover with Book Light. It’s the least we can do.

We’re sorry we lashed out like that. You make an effort to just ask us how our day was more often and we’ll make an effort to be more understanding that you work hard all day and you don’t always need us starved for attention when you come home at the end of the day.

Love,

Woot

Will I purchase the Kindle cover from them? Probably not since I’ve already purchased a cover (maybe if it had been closer to the original purchase). But the email did put them Top of Mind again, which can be a challenge in these days of email spamming.

How do you use humor or fun in your business?

Badges. Points. Achievements. As shown by Mafia Wars, Farmville, and Foursquare, just to name a few, gaming can be both fun and addicting. Long before our current social networks, gamers spent hours racking up achievements in virtual worlds. Games on social networks have increased time spent and interactions within networks, but what impact is gaming having on these social networks?

Replacing other forms of Entertainment?

Gaming online used to be the domain of Gamers. These days just about everyone places some sort of online game, even if it’s just Farmville on Facebook. People are increasingly spending more time online and more of that time is in some sort of game:

Social gaming, as a category, has grown incredibly quickly, becoming one of the dominant drivers of usage on Facebook, and an increasingly core component of people’s entertainment. This growth represents a real threat to other forms of entertainment… -Why the Social Gaming Biz is Just Heating Up – Mashable

Gaming Increases Engagement

Do you play Foursquare? Or Farmville? Or some other online game? Why? Probably because you enjoy achieving something — getting more points or a badge or whatever. Just like contests are popular because people like to win. Online games are popular because people enjoy the escape of mindless stockpiling of points.

Even Google is Getting in the Game

Google just added another gaming site to it’s portfolio:

As we know through the acquisitions of Slide and Jambool, and investment in social gaming giant Zynga, Google is getting serious about the launch of Google Games. While we still don’t know the details of the platform, SocialDeck’s mobile technology seems to be a part of the plan. – Google’s Social Buying Spree Continues With Mobile Gaming Developer SocialDeck – TechCrunch

Will Gaming Increase Socializing?

Just because there’s more gaming going on, doesn’t mean people are being more social. Many (like me) find the game spam on Facebook to be annoying (even though I play other online games). Does playing games online increase or decrease socialization?

What do you think?

Special thanks to Andy Kraft for the post idea. You can find Andy on Twitter @roadblock.

(photo by Mykl Roventine)

Ever gone to a business website and wonder exactly what it is they do? It happens far too often. As a business owner you may be spending time, resources and money on advertising and promoting your business and website. If people come to your website (and they often do to get more information), but can’t tell what you do, that’s a huge problem.  It means you’re wasting all the advertising and promotions that you’re doing. People aren’t going to buy from you if they don’t understand what you do (and what’s in it for them).

Describing What You Do

Remember your elevator pitch? How do you describe what you do to someone who has no idea? Take a look at your website and see if it’s clear what you do. Better yet, get someone who doesn’t know what you do to look at the website and tell you what they think you do. That’s usually a big eye-opener.

Be Consistent

Once you’ve worked out what you do (from the customer’s viewpoint), make sure you’re consistent with that description across your entire website, as well as any other marketing and promotions you’re doing. People remember via repetition so having the same message in multiple places is useful for having people remember what you do.

More than the About page

What you do should be clear on every page of your site, even if it’s just a descriptive tagline.  Remember, people don’t always enter your site from your home page — they may enter on any page.  And they may or may not get to the point of bothering with your About page. Make it as easy as possible for people to understand what you do.

What’s Next?

If people do understand what you do, do they know what to do next? Should they call you, email you or fill out a form? That information may be on your site, but make it clear what the next step is. Be very specific and obvious.  For example, “Have questions? Call 555-555-555″ or “Want a quote? Click here.”  A specific call to action with a specific action they should take.

Thoughts?

(photo by Nina Matthews Photography)

I’ve been using WordPress for several years now — I’m a big fan.  It makes it really easy to run a blog (or website) and it keeps getting better.  One of the advantages of WordPress is the ability to add your own plugins to improve the functionality of your site.  Here are some of my favorite WordPress plugins… (for now).

Disqus Comment System

Disqus replaces the WordPress comment system with it’s own, which allows readers to see their comments across all the sites that use Disqus, and it has good spam collection.

FD Feedburner Plugin

FD Feedburner is a WordPress plugin which redirects all the blog’s feeds to Feedburner to utilize Feedburner’s stats and additional feed functionality.

Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps generates a XML site map to help search engines properly index your site.

Lijit Search

Lijit Search lets readers search the content on your site — can also support ads for your site (search and content-related).

LinkWithin

LinkWithin WordPress plugin displays other recommended stories on each article to help increase the amount of time people spend on your site.

PostRank

PostRank provides some social network tracking as well as top posts.  I use it to track the PostRank of each post which is also a metric used by the AdAge 150.

Scribe

Scribe is a paid WordPress plugin (affiliate link) which quickly and easily provides recommendations to increase the search engine optimization for each post.  Requires a theme which supports it (I use the Thesis paid theme — affiliate link).

ShareThis

ShareThis provides links so your readers can share your content on various social networks.  Lets you control which social networks show up (and what order).  Provides stats for how many times that button is used.

TweetMeme Retweet

TweetMeme Retweet adds a button for each post so your readers can tweet a link to the article.  Counts the number of times the article has been tweeted (doesn’t always catch alternative ways to tweet the article).

Wibiya Toolbar

Wibiya Toolbar adds a bar at the bottom of your site which has links for sharing your content on social media, as well as a message (among other features).

WordPress Database Backup

WordPress Database Backup automates the backing up your blog’s database — can have it email a compressed copy or save to your server or computer.  Your theme along with your database are the key parts of your blog.  Having a backup of your database means you can recreate your blog if you have to.

WP Greet Box

WP Greet Box customize a message to your blog visitors depending on where they came from.  For example, ask visitors from Digg to Digg your post.

WP Minify

WP Minify WordPress plugin helps your blog run faster by combining and compressing javascript and CSS files to improve page load time.  I’ve seen a huge improvement since using this plugin.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache adds caching to your blog (which you can control) to make the pages load faster.  Site speed is now a consideration for Google’s PageRank.

What are your favorite WordPress plugins?

(photo by Sarah Worsham)

SEO (search engine optimization) is very important tactic for any website.  After all, most people use a search engine to find what they’re looking for online. However, there is such a thing as taking SEO too far and forgetting that it’s people, not computers who actually read your website and then make a purchase decision. The right amount of SEO will follow best practices and help search engines more effectively index and catalog your site without making the text (or site) unreadable by people.

Follow Best Practices

Best practices for SEO include things like using header tags (h1, h2, etc), having descriptive titles and descriptions and just the right amount of important keywords within the text.  If you follow best practices, your site will be more effectively indexed by search engines, but it should not overly affect the readability of your site.

Choose Only Important Keywords

Pick the top one or two keywords for each page and concentrate on using best practices to highlight them.  Don’t choose too many keywords or search engines will be confused as to which are important.  And people trying to read your content won’t have a clear understanding of what you’re trying to say.

Communicate Your Message

People are selfish.  They want to know what’s in it for them.  Your marketing messages need to communicate the benefits of your products or services to your potential customers.  These messages are vital for converting people into customers.  Make sure your marketing messages don’t get lost in your effort to optimize your site for search engines.

Give it the Human Test

To make sure your website still communicates your benefits and marketing messages after you’ve optimized it for search engines, have a few people who haven’t read it take a look at it.  Ask them what the major points are of the site and key pages.  Ask them if it’s comfortable to read and if it makes sense.  If not, fix it.

Strike the Right Balance

SEO is important for initially getting people to your site, but it’s even more vital that your site is readable by those people.  Find the right balance between SEO and readability so that you’re effectively communicating the information people are looking for as well as why people should by from you.

Thoughts?

(photo by Dannerzz)

Competitive analysis is important to any business strategy.  Knowing what your competitors are doing and how they’re pricing and marketing their products will help you figure out how to market your own products.  Luckily, there are many online tools that can help you get a look (or spy) on what your competitors are doing.

1. Google their company, brand and product names.
2. Google any keywords associated with their company, your company and your industry.
3. Use Twitter’s search for their company, brand and product names (also important keywords).
4. Search on Facebook for their company, brand and product names (and important keywords).
5. Search Alexa for their company websites to see some traffic stats (estimated).
6. Check out their site profile on Compete to see traffic (estimated).
7. Use Compete to compare their site to yours or to other competitor websites.
8. Run Website Grader on their site — can also compare yours to theirs.
9. Run Twitter Grader on their Twitter feed.
10. Run Blog Grader on their blog(s).
11. Check out their site(s) with WooRank.
12. Use Google Trends to check stats on their site and then compare with others.
13. Set up Google Alerts for competitor’s company, product and brand names to monitor for mentions.
14. Add feeds for company names, etc. into TweetDeck, HootSuite or Seesmic to monitor mentions on Twitter.

Do you spy on your competition? What tools and tactics do you use?

(photo by DaveFayram)

I’m often asked what KPIs (key performance indicators) are the most important for understanding how a business is doing online.  My answer is always “It depends.”  There’s not a set of KPIs that works for every business.  Choosing the right KPIs for your business means understanding your business, your goals and what you’re trying to do online. KPIs are the metrics which tell you whether you’re moving closer towards your goal and objectives (see KPIs vs Metrics for more details).

Understand Your Business

This may seem simple, but truly understanding your business means knowing what benefits you offer to your customers.  Who are your customers and why should they care? Saying you’re a carpet cleaner is one thing.  But maybe what you really do is help housewives remove impossible stains so their carpets look like new.  Or help people who are selling their house get more value out of the sale.  Understanding who your customers are and the benefits to them is the first step towards choosing the right KPIs.

Know Your Goal

Unless you know exactly where you’re trying to go — what you’re trying to accomplish — it’s going to be almost impossible to craft a strategy that works with KPIs that tell you whether it’s working.  Choosing an easy-to-understand, specific, attainable and time delimited goal will help you choose KPIs that relate to that goal.

Choose Your KPIs

Now that you know what you do, who your customers are, what benefits you offer and what goal you’re trying to accomplish, you can start to think about how you can accomplish that goal online.  As you choose tools and tactics to help you with your strategy, take a look at what metrics are available for each.  Which metrics tell you whether you’re further along in reaching your goal?  (Those are your KPIs).

Thoughts?

(photo by Pink Sherbet Photography)

Exit Rate measures how many people left your website from a certain page. It would seem like it would show you where people are exiting from your site so you can fix problems with specific pages.  The problem is that everyone who comes to your website has to leave at some point.  What if they came, bought something and then left?  That’s what you want them to do.  Or what if you blog daily and people come to read your latest post and then leave.  While you may prefer they spend time on other pages, if they’re loyal readers, they’ve been keeping up with your posts. So is Exit Rate useful?  Yes and no.  Let’s look at it in more detail…

Defining Exit Rate

Exit Rate shows you what percentage of people who were on a particular page exited the site from that page.  It doesn’t show you how many pages they looked at before they got to that page.  They could have entered the site from anywhere. They may have even accomplished what they set out to do.  You don’t know.  You only know they exited your site from this particular page.

When Exit Rate is Useful

If you have a site where people have to go to more than one page to complete a task — say on an eCommerce site — Exit Rate can be very helpful for understanding where people are getting lost in the process.  Knowing where people get lost in the conversion process can help you fix those pages to increase conversion and decrease the exit rate on those pages.  Exit rate in this context is often called abandonment rate — or how often someone started the purchase process and then left.

When Exit Rate Isn’t Useful

When you’re looking at the exit rates for specific pages (other than those involved in a conversion or sale), exit rate just tells you what percentage of people left the site from that page — meaning that was the last page they looked at.  Those people could have entered the site from anywhere, looked at a bunch of pages and just decided to leave from this particular page.

Outside of the conversion/eCommerce example, what if someone came to your site looking for specific information, found it on that page and then left.  They found what they were looking for, which is what you want.  Again, you may be able to entice them to stay longer by providing links to additional pages on your site, but your goal of satisfying their need was completed.  What can you do with the exit rate?  Not really anything.  It doesn’t give you enough information to know what to improve.

An Alternative Metric — Bounce Rate

An alternative metric that’s more useful for the purpose of improving specific pages is Bounce Rate — or how many people who enter your site on that page never click anywhere else and leave without looking at any other pages.  Unless they happened to find exactly what they’re were looking for on the first page (you have really good SEO), a high bounce rate is an indicator of a problem on a specific page.

Use Bounce Rate to Improve Conversions

Even in the case of good SEO, you probably want people to go to more than one page on your site.  You want them to convert, which usually means more than one page.  Take a look at your top content report and top entry pages in your analytics package and look at the bounce rate for each page. Focus on improving the pages with high bounce rates to increase conversions.

Thoughts? How do you use exit rate and bounce rate?

(photo by Cellular Immunity)

Hi there!  I really appreciate your continued support and readership.

I’ve submitted a panel for the SXSW Interactive conference, which is Austin in March, along with Dave Murray, Betsy Weber and Beverly Cornell.

Our panel is “Have Fun to Increase Customer Engagement“.

I’d really appreciate if you vote for it, even if you’re not planning on attending.  30% of the decision about which panels are chosen is via voting by the community.

Voting just requires signing up for a free account and verifying the account by clicking on a link in an email.  SXSW does not use the data for mailing lists and they don’t give out any information to other parties.

Here’s the link: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/7401

I appreciate your vote.  Thank you.

Engaging customers is all the rage with businesses big or small. Companies are adding communities, comments and reviews to their websites to encourage feedback and conversations. This is all good.  However, if you ask for feedback from your customers, be ready to respond when they give it. Not responding is worse than never asking in the first place.

Requesting Feedback

While customers may already be talking about you online (via Twitter, Facebook, etc.), you can also request feedback just by asking or by implementing systems which allow customers to provide their opinions.  Systems such as comments, reviews and forums are fairly easy to implement for business websites and can be especially useful for eCommerce sites.

Expect the Negative

Unless you specifically ask people with positive experiences to leave their feedback, you may receive mostly negative comments.  People who have a negative experience are more likely to feel compelled to complain or leave their opinions than people who are satisfied (they’re usually hoping for some sort of resolution). If you’re asking for feedback or provide ways for people to leave it, be prepared for the negative and ask for the positive.

Be Ready to Respond

When you ask for feedback or provide ways for people to leave it, you need to be prepared to respond when it happens — for either positive or negative feedback.  Nothing is worse than a company that requests feedback and then doesn’t respond when it’s given.  This means someone needs to be responsible for monitoring feedback and responding to people.

What’s your experience been when you’ve given feedback? Do you have any examples of good response by a company?  How about bad?

(photo by Anna Majkowska)

Thinking about blogging for your business? Wondering about the effectiveness of taking the time to blog daily vs. blogging weekly (or whenever)? Established blogger Justin Kownacki, who was blogging daily, decided to try blogging weekly for a few months to see what effect it would have on his traffic.  That one post per week would be well-thought out instead of scrambling to post 5 times per week.  He found that blogging only once per week does not guarantee a high-impact read of the one post and also dropped his traffic considerably.

According to Google Analytics, I had:

• 7,500 page views in April
• 7,491 page views in May
• 3,583 page views in June
• 4,877 page views in July

Finally, my Alexa ranking hovered around 162,000 when this experiment began; it’s currently at 245,546 as I type this. – What I’ve Learned From Blogging Weekly Instead of Daily – Justin Kownacki

Rapportive is a free-plugin for Firefix, Safari, Mailplane or Chrome which shows you information about a contact — their job, company and LinkedIn profile, their latest tweets, links to their Facebook and Skype accounts and more.  By logging into Rapportive, you can also leave notes for later right on their profile.  Now you can see how else you can connect with a person in order to grow the relationship.

Social Information

When you open an email, Rapportive will try to look up a person’s various social profiles based on their email address.  If you’re logged in, you’ll also see any  notes you’ve left about the person.

Raplets

Rapportive also supports information from several different applications, allowing you to see even more information about a person.  Currently supported applications are MailChimp, Bantam Live, BatchBook, BookingBug, Brightpearl and CrunchBase.

Minor Issues (fixed)

I have a business account with Google for my gmail and I haven’t been able to login to Rapportive from that account.  I still am able to see pretty good information about contacts, such as their social network profiles, but I can’t leave any notes or tie into any Raplets.  It looks like there are some instructions that may help resolve this issue, but I haven’t had a chance to try them yet.

UPDATE: I sent an email to Rapportive’s support and they were able to quickly help me get Rapportive working with my business domain gmail.  It turns out that Google’s directions in this case were just about useless, but Rapportive was able to send me easy-to-follow directions which immediately fixed the problem.

What do you think? Have you tried Rapportive?

Just like Metrics and KPIs, Conversion is another measurement term which is often mis-used (thanks to Jim Suchara for the suggestion). A conversion happens when someone completes an action you want them to take — purchases from you, signs up for a newsletter, registers for a webinar, etc.  So, just like KPIs (key performance indicators) measuring conversions requires first understanding exactly what it is you want people to do — what are your business goals and objectives?

Defining Conversions Starts with Your Business

I feel like a broken record, but again, when defining conversions, you need to start with your business.  What is your business goal and what are your objectives?  What is your digital strategy?  What actions do you want people to complete online which help you achieve your goal?

A Service Company Conversion Example

Let’s say you’re a service company with a website, a Twitter profile and a Facebook page.  Your goal (specific, attainable, time delimited) is to increase sales by 10% over the next 6 months.  After looking at your target audience and the benefits your services offer customers, you’ve decided that you have two actions which will help you accomplish your goal (increasing sales by 10%) — registering for a free webinar and requesting a quote — which will give you sales leads.  These are your calls to actions and they’re also the actions you’ll be measuring for conversions.  When a person registers for your webinar, you have one conversion.  Likewise, when a person requests a quote, you have a conversion.

Measuring Conversions

In our example above we have two different conversions – registering for a webinar and requesting a quote.  To measure these conversions, there probably is a form people fill out on your website and then an email is sent to you with the information from the form.  Every time you get an email is one conversion.

Analytics programs like Google Analytics can also be setup to measure conversions by telling them what page on your website is reached when a specific action is completed — usually a thank you page of some type.  Google then can give you some very valuable information about your conversion rates (how many people came to the landing page/form vs. actually converted), as well as where people may be getting lost in the process (checkout Funnel visualizations in Google Anlaytics Goals).

Improving Conversions

How to increase conversions is the topic for entire books (or at least another post or two) and really depends on your particular business, industry and online strategy.  However, if you have identified your business goal, your calls to action and your landing pages, you’ve made measuring conversions much easier.  Once you have data about your conversions and what’s happening on your landing pages, you can start to experiment with ways to improve your conversions — maybe your target audience isn’t quite right or maybe your messaging doesn’t convey the benefits to the customer.

What do you think? How do you define a conversion?

(photo by jaygooby)

The terms metrics, analytics, data, KPIs, etc. get thrown around a lot — so do hits, pageviews, visits, unique visitors (but those are for a different post).  People want to know how their website is doing so they ask for analytics or reports.  Usually what people really want is an analysis of the data with some recommendations. A similar relationship holds true with metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators).

Metrics

Metrics are measurements of statistics which describe events or trends (in this case, on a website).  Metrics are things like bounce rate or time on site or pageviews.  Metrics are useful for understanding trends on a website and analysis of metrics can help you figure out what’s going on.

KPIs

Key performance indicators (KPIs) is a metric which helps you understand how you’re doing against your objectives (or your business goal).  You won’t have any KPIs until you first understand what you’re trying to accomplish.  KPIs also tend to vary from each company, since each will usually have their own objectives.

The Confusion

People will ask me what KPIs or metrics they should use to figure out how they’re doing online.  My answer is always “it depends.”  It depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.  It depends on what your business goal is and what objectives you’ve set for your online strategy.  It also depends on what your specific online strategy is and what you need to measure.

Understanding Metrics & KPIs

As with any strategy, start with your goal, or your endpoint.  Where do you want to be in 6 months?  What’s a specific and attainable goal for your business?  Now we can start to take a look at what tactics will help us get there (which put together is a strategy).  Once we have our strategy, we can look for metrics and KPIs to understand how we’re doing.

Thoughts?

(photo by Magnus A.)

Remember in The Matrix when information was displayed in code that fell across the screen?  It seemed impossible to understand.  Is the availability of information in real-time becoming equally difficult to understand?  Twitter is working on opening up real-time access to user streams through their API.  A beta version of TweetDeck has incorporated the real-time streams — does it give more information or too much?

Real-time Data

Here’s a video of what TweetDeck looks like with these real-time user streams from Twitter’s API (available in a beta version only):

(Thanks to Steven Hodson at The Inquisitr for mentioning this update and a link to the video.)

The Matrix of Code

To compare, here’s a version of The Matrix code:

Too Much Information?

Even without real-time streaming of information in Twitter, I already hardly ever look at my full feed.  I use filters and searches and lists to be able to see who and what I’m watching for — having real time data may speed up those searches but I don’t want the full set of data.

Does real-time data give us more information or too much? What do you think?

(photo by Gregory Tonon)

Ford has been getting a lot of press about revealing the new Explorer on Facebook.  The initial reveal happened exclusively on Facebook at 7:40am EST, with followup events throughout the day. Reveal events are still happening as part of regular tv & press events in major cities.  I can’t help wonder if the coverage online is helping or hurting their more traditional events.  Pictures of the Explorer, along with video and press coverage are already all over the web.  How do people feel who are attending events where the Explorer is still hidden by a sheet?  Does it lower their excitement? Or does it make people want to see it in person even more?

The use of social media has certainly created quite a buzz and people definitely are talking about the new Explorer, which is what any company wants, right? Like the recent Old Spice campaign, only time will tell if these tactics will help them sell more cars.

What do you think?  Do you like the new Explorer?  What do you think about Ford’s use of social media during the reveal?

If you’re worried about the SEO (search engine optimization) of your website or wondering if your site is invisible to Google, the content on your website plays a major part in how your site looks to search engines and what keywords are attributed. While there are other factors, like the page titles, use of headers, site architecture, etc., it’s really the content on your site that matters the most — both to search engines and to the people visiting.

When to Worry About Content

If your website only has a few pages — Home, About, Contact, Services — you may have enough content for a potential customer to get information about your business, but probably not enough for them to come back more than once (or to spend much time on the site).  Having additional content on your site, even if it’s just some how-to articles or additional information about your products or services, can make a big difference both to people spending more time (and coming back) and to search engines trying to figure out what keywords your site has.

A Reason to Blog

Providing regularly updated content is becoming increasingly more important to search engines, who will no longer rank a site with a lot of content highly if it hasn’t updated for awhile.  Regularly updated content is important for people too and gives them a reason to check out your site on a regular basis — giving you more opportunity to get your message across.

A Great Partner to Social Media

Connecting with customers via social media is so vital to any business these days.  Having a great place to direct those people to when they are ready to purchase from you (or get more information) is key to sealing the deal.  Content is part of that equation.

What do you think?

(photo by chrislugosz)

I was doing a bit of research on a potential client’s website the other day… and it turns out that Google doesn’t attribute any keywords to the site — it’s invisible to Google.  Google has crawled their site and all of their pages, but because of the way the site was coded and the way text appears on the site visually, it’s not readable by Google.  A good portion of the traffic coming to any website is from search engines, especially if you’re just getting started. Being invisible to Google can make it difficult to get any traffic.

What Does It Mean to Be Invisible to Google?

Ok, so Google doesn’t attribute any keywords to your site — what’s that mean exactly?  It means that your site will not show up for any searches done on Google.  It also means that you’ll have a difficult time paying for traffic via Google AdWords, because the algorithm there uses keywords on your site to determine the relevance — and therefore position — of your ads.  In other words, people aren’t going to find your site through a search engine.

What Causes Invisibility to Google?

There can be many reasons your site isn’t visible to Google.  You may have a Flash site which isn’t coded properly to let Google see any content.  You may have text as images instead of text (Google can’t read text in images).  The way your site is coded may make it impossible for Google to see the text.  Lots of different reasons, which usually are specific to your site.

How Do I Know if My Site is Invisible to Google?

There are a number of ways to find out what Google thinks of your website.  Here are some tools to try:

• View Source – If you view the source of your website, what text shows up?  This may be a bit difficult if you’re not used to looking at html, but it can give you a lot of clues.
• Google Analytics – Are you getting any traffic from search engines in your traffic sources report?  Are you getting any traffic via keywords (under traffic sources)?
• Google WebMaster Tools – What keywords does Googlebot associate with your website?  What keywords does your site show up with?  Does it show up for any keywords?
• Google AdWords Keywords Tool – This tool will give you keyword ideas for your website.  If none or few show up, you have a problem.
• SEOQuake plugin – Browse around your site and use the keyword density report tool on various pages to see what keywords show up.  Available for Firefox, Chrome & Safari.
• Website Grader – Put your website into the grader and see what suggestions it makes — good for insights on what to fix.
• WooRank – Another site where you can put your website in to get suggestions — mostly related to SEO, so a very good resource for fixing issues with invisibility with Google.

How Do I Fix My Site?

Good question.  My suggestion is to get help from someone who really knows SEO.  Ask your own web designer about the problem and see what they say.  They may have overlooked something.  Or you may have an older website which was coded in a way that’s not used anymore.  Just make sure you do something.  Being invisible to Google is pretty much the same as not having a website at all.

Thoughts?

Do you have other tools you use to look at SEO for a website?  Other suggestions for checking keywords and visibility?  Please share!

(photo by mattw1ls0n)

Twitter has recently started selling ads in the form of Promoted Tweets & Promoted Trends (both still in beta). While there are only a handful of advertisers (for example, Starbucks and Disney) currently using these ads, marketers are pondering the value of them. Twitter obviously has value as a tool to have conversations with a broad audience. Is it valuable as an advertising channel?

ClickZ, a website providing news and advice for digital marketers, recently put together some thoughts from marketers (including myself), in their story, Marketers Ponder the Worth of Twitter’s Ads:

“I hope Twitter is doing research because I am definitely curious,” said Ian Shafer, CEO of social media agency Deep Focus. “I am sure right now there is a big early adapter discount going on with that program because no one knows [exactly] what it does.”

Results from the beta testing advertisers will be of interest not only to them and Twitter but to digital marketers in general.  Do these ads drive results?  Are they reaching the intended audience?

“My personal opinion is that these ads will work in the short term because some marketers will buy them,” the India-based Evans [Dave Evans from 2020Social] wrote in an e-mail to ClickZ. “The idea of ‘appearing in Twitter…’ will be appealing, just as ‘appearing in the Super Bowl…’ is appealing. At the same time, other brands will recognize that consumers are increasingly ignoring these ads, so the actual utility is questionable.”

Consumers are increasingly ignoring ads across many mediums — at least ads that don’t go the extra mile to make some sort of personal connection.  Recent Old Spice commercials are an example of ads which have managed to gain attention and response.

What’s my take?

Sarah Worsham, CEO of Sazbean Consulting, suggested that Disney’s direct marketing-style approach was probably a smart way to optimize ad spend on Twitter. “Verticals where a consumer can purchase or give you a direct response online would be best for these types of ads – meaning a consumer can buy directly from your website or can download a coupon or [allow marketers] some other way to collect leads and measure conversion.”

I see the Promoted Tweets in search results as being more valuable in terms of actual conversions because a person has shown some sort of intent — in the form of performing a search.  Marketers are excited about Promoted Trends because trends are very popular with users, but that doesn’t mean that ads there will be.  Either way, ads need to not only connect to viewers but also lead to a specific landing page with a specific call to action to get conversions.  Whether that’s possible or not remains to be seen.

What do you think?

Keywords. SEO. Adwords. Content strategy. If you ask a business owner about concerns they have with their website, keywords and SEO are almost always on the list (unfortunately often taking a backseat to usability and proper marketing – but that’s a topic for another post).  Here are some free, good tools, from Google for doing basic keyword research:

Google Analytics – Keyword Report

Located under Traffic Sources in the menu on the left, this report lists the keywords used to get to your site by the number of visits, but also tells you the average amount of pages viewed per visit, the average time on the site, the % of new visits and the bounce rate.  You can also sort the list by any of these variables (for example, taking a look at the keywords that lead to the longest average time on site can be very insightful).

Google Webmaster Tools

Google’s Webmaster Tools give you a look at the keywords the googlebot attributes to your site (with their significance), as well as when your site shows up for search queries (and information about how often it was clicked and for what keywords).

Sorting the queries by clicks and CTR can give you nice insight to which keywords actually lead people to your site.  Seeing all the keywords for which Google shows your site on search results may lead to some unexplored topic areas.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

AdWords has some nice tools for optimizing ad campaigns, but they can also be useful for understanding what keywords Google finds for your site along with their search volume (global and local) and competition.  Using this tool can help you find niches with less competition — both for ads, but also for content creation.

Other Keyword Tools

There are definitely other keyword tools available, some of which we’ve covered here, here and here.

What tools do you use for keyword research?