Nick Garner

Long time no post! I wrote this email to someone who is in this classic situaiton were they are more or less in a straight jacket when it comes to their web site and how it can help their business…

” I think the 1st thing is to define what you want to achieve with your web site. Once you are clear on this, then everything will roll in with this.?? Usually its about being see on the search engines and having the right conversion pathway i.e. getting your visitors to turn into paying customers.

On a high level, the most important thing about a good site is that its easy to change and easy for you to add new information (this is why wordpress is cool). Because this is your business, the information you put on the site is critical – its like when you meet a potential customer, they will want to know, you know what you are talking about. You will do this I guess by helping them with some useful information.

Web sites are the same. The difference between a bad site and a great one is simply the information you give to the potential customer and the clear pathway you bring the user along when they decide to buy – i.e. make it simple and clear and answer all their questions.

So the question is whether you can do this with your current site ?

Ideally you would combine both a brochure site and a blog – this is such a good way of getting across your expertise.

If you can become a really useful place for ideas on (>>>>placeholder here<<<<<<<) then you will be well on your way with this. There is a general rule with Internet – give away as?? much valuable information as you can. Its counter intuitive, but it works because you have to do something exceptional to break through the noise.

10% of the overall work will be building the site, the other 90% is the content. Its a big misconception to think the site will do it for you – I’m trying to say keep the site simple and let the words and pictures make the impact.

From that good stuff will come. “

Imagine a tool that gives you all the ‘hot pages’ on a site where there are a ton of inbound links, like a page that scored on Digg? If you could find these pages, then its not beyond the realms of possibility to somehow get a nice relevant link from that page on that site? http://www.majesticseo.com/

Predictably Irrational which is about human psychology and how we interact with things like price points on goods, packaging and general behavioural stuff that marketeers need to understand. ????http://www.predictablyirrational.com/)??????

Incidentally, ??thought I’d share this book outline site…i.e. you can get the summarised version on a single page of the book Ive been raving about. ??Really useful ! http://bookoutlines.pbwiki.com/Predictably-Irrational

There is an excelent SEO Moz blog post about how these ideas can be tranlated into internet marketing.??

1. Up the ante on linkbuilding
2. Read more blogs (I already follow about 100)??
3. Work out how to get more traffic and make more money for my happy employers??
4. Work out how to improve efficiency on SEO marketing ??spend by 25% whilst being able to double or treble it…
5. Become more attuned to the flow of ideas and thinking on the web so I can make better use of then from an SEO and online PR perspective.

On linkbuilding know how, I will be doing well if I can get as good as this 19 year old: Colin Lahay. See his killer post on link building

This is a bookmark post as much as anything…

I read Andy Beal’s ??RSS and often he comes up with really useful tools and insights for reputation management. With the necessary toolkit you can see where people mention you.

From this you can work out the context from which they are talking. The reputation bit is where you can manage those conversaitons by responding to them and hopfully enhancing your brand online, or saving it…dependent on what’s being said of course.

So for SEO these tools are great for seeing where youre getting links naturally. Knowing the context of those links, it can help you understand how to get more links through sources like this who are naturally disposed to giving you a citation

26 tools for monitoring buzz

reputation management beginners ‘how to’

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I was asked about keyword finding and here is my response:

I find the easiest way to start is to pick a few big phrases you care about i.e. football and so on and theme the site around these main words. This doesn???t mean writing stories where you try to have 5% of the keyword density saying ???football??? ??? it means building an editorial plan around certain subjects.

So the big idea is to work out where you want to go editorially, and the rest will follow. For instance on a blog site I look after, I often roll out this stat: the site has had 285,000 unique key phrases.

If that were printed out on A4 paper , 50 phrases a page, you are looking at 5700 pages or 11 reams of photocopy paper???.

But we have not tried to come up with 285,000 phrases, our users have. So the point is to not worry about keywords too much ??? focus on subject matter.

Of course there is a lot of optimisation work to do. One example is how you write headlines???

Normal; Razza hat trick for reds in prem kick off

SEO: Manchester???s Renzo??scores 3 goals in Premiership semi final

It???s as simple as thinking like a librarian and making sure your ???lablel??? content properly. Once you’re on your way and understand how to write for your user and SEO, then you can target more important ‘money’ phrases.

This is a case of one step at a time.

This is a ‘bookmark’ post…
Google media planner.
It gives a lot of detail on various sites and whilst they may not be great for begging links, they may be good PR targets or places to do content for links. Its amazing who much the big G knows…
https://www.google.com/adplanner/authorization/login

And here are a number if really useful reputation tracking tools:
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/12/social-media-monitoring-tools.html

The ones I have used most are:
http://boardtracker.com/ for tracking forum conversations. On the whole these are just noise. but occasionally they are critical touch points that you need to either contribute to or get links from.

http://usernamecheck.com/ for seeing wether company social media profiles have been taken. its a brand territory thing.

http://www.backtype.com/ for searching comments on blogs. Whilst comments are mostly ‘noise’, its good to see where you are being talked about. You can also get some nice low level links out of these.

http://www.google.com/alerts and http://blogsearch.google.com/ both really comprehensive ways of finding where the conversation is.