Integrate Social Media and Email Marketing With Flowtown

Got questions about Flowtown? Ask us in the comments or jump into the forums!

Comment Spam Hurts SEO

Google says comment spam may hurt your search engine rankings and offers this advice to avoid spam on your WordPress site…

• Disallow anonymous posting.
• Use CAPTCHAs and other methods to prevent automated comment spamming.
• Turn on comment moderation.
• Use the “nofollow” attribute for links in the comment field.
• Disallow hyperlinks in comments.
• Block comment pages using robots.txt or meta tags.

They also offer some other great advice which we often say here… Most times having a great content strategy is the best SEO technique…

FACT: Having original and useful content and making your site search engine friendly is the best strategy for better ranking. With an appealing site, you’ll be recognized by the web community as a reliable source and links to your site will build naturally.

via Google – Hard facts about comment spam

Learn To Run Your Business Online In 2010 – Free Webinar

We are starting our Web Strategy Bootcamp series on Thursday, December 10… What is it? It’s a webinar series to help you learn how to run your business online – simple as that. At 48Web we’ve been running our business online for two years and want to share our tips and tricks with you.

In this first webinar we’ll layout a basic web strategy and concepts for running a business online in the upcoming year. We’ll cover things like creating content outposts, building community the right way, and how to leverage your traditional marketing dollars online.

This is not “how to start an online business and make millions of dollars in 2 months by selling a Twitter ebook”

This webinar will show you how to leverage the web to run your existing business better and more efficiently. I’ll run through a short presentation and will follow up with live Q&A. For more details on what we’ll be covering see my online business mindmap and read 5 Cornerstones of An Effective Web Strategy.

Details

What: Web Strategy Bootcamp – How To Run Your Business Online In 2010
When: Thursday, December 10 2009 at 2:00PM
Where: Online at WebStrategyWorkshop.com

Sign Up Now

If you have any questions, please let us know in the comments or jump in the forums… And feel free to email me at andy[at]48webconsulting.com

The Long Tail Of Search Keywords Visualized

These charts from SEOMoz are based on research from Bill Tancer of Hitwise called “Sizing Up The Long Tail Of Search”. The basic idea is that the long tail of search generates exponentially more traffic than the most popular keyword phrases out there. From Bill’s research…

• Top 100 terms: 5.7% of the all search traffic
• Top 500 terms: 8.9% of the all search traffic
• Top 1,000 terms: 10.6% of the all search traffic
• Top 10,000 terms: 18.5% of the all search traffic

This means if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search terms across all search engines (which is impossible), you’d still be missing out on 89.4% of all search traffic. There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend. To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.

Does that make sense? The basic idea is that more people search for obscure, multi-keyword phrases than they do popular keywords. This has a lot to do with search users becoming smarter over the years to where most people search by phrase rather than by keyword – because they’ve been trained this behavior narrows results.

What does this mean for your business? Well you should start targeting long phrase, long tail keywords in both your content and SEO strategies. Using this method you can target multiple long tail keywords and still have a better chance at generating more traffic than optimizing for a single, popular keyword.

Here’s an example… A couple weeks ago I was talking to my good friend TJ about optimizing his e-commerice site RIPTApparel (cool t-shirts by the way). We were discussing keyword targeting. My advice was to quit targeting the keyword “t-shirt” and start targeting long tail, multiple word keywords such as “cool graphic tees” and “limited edition t-shirts”. Not only do you increase your chances of being found by targeting the long tail – there is much less competition for those terms in both organic and paid search results.

So if you find that you aren’t “being found” online, try some long tail and localized keyword targeting to increase your chances… Look at the keywords coming through in your web analytics to see what long tail keywords people are using to find you and start optimizing for those. And if you have any questions at all on targeting keywords – jump into the forums and ask away!

Charts via SEOmoz | Illustrating the Long Tail.

Run Your Business Online In 2010 – Mindmap

Here’s are my notes for an upcoming presentation on running your business online in the next year. I thought I’d share it with you! You should start planning your 2010 web strategy right away!

This mindmap is based on the 5 Cornerstones of An Effective Web Strategy post…

Click To Enlarge

Is there anything that needs to be added/removed/rearranged? Let us know in the comments or jump into the forums!

I share a lot of my notes and research with the members in our free web strategy community… Are you a member yet?

Products In Ads – Google Integrates Shopping With AdWords

Google integrates product listings for featured advertisers in Google AdWords

Click Images To Enlarge

Google Local Business Dashboard

We’ve talked about using Google Local Business dashboard before but here’s a quick overview in case you have yet to use it. Not only does this give you a huge advantage in local SEO – it helps you manage your business online.

Official Google Blog: The Local Business Center dashboard opens its doors.

Free Google Analytics App for iPhone

We’ve written about the Google Analytics app for iPhone before called “AnalyticsApp” before that lets us manage our web analytics on the run. However while that iPhone app for Google Analytics cost $$$, this one is free. This app doesn’t include all of the features but it gives you a great executive overview…

Details Include…

Analyze This! is a free app that presents an executive overview of Google Analytics data to directors on the go. It does not show you everything that is available in Google Analytics. Instead it focuses on the measurements that matter—the ones that impact your bottom line.

Interested in monitoring goals, e-commerce, and campaigns, and how they develop daily, weekly, or monthly? Then this app is for you!

Analyze This! is intended for businesspeople who set goals, run campaigns, and track sales. It is not for people who just like to analyze visits, visitors, and page views.

The idea is to present only the key measurements that instantly tell you how your business is doing. There are other apps on the market, but ours is free and easy to use.

Analyze This! A Free Google Analytics App for iPhone

Get A Free Website From Google Sites

Google Sites makes it easy for anyone to create and manage simple, secure group websites. Getting started is easy, and there are a number of helpful templates. More than just a visual theme, site templates can include site structure and navigation, custom page templates, embedded gadgets, and more. Google Sites is powerful enough for a company intranet, yet simple enough for a family website.

Visit http://sites.google.com to get started

E-Commerce Checkout Page Design – Learn From Amazon.com

Yesterday I read a tweet from Dan Shipton about a book I’ve heard a lot about – The Paradox Of Choice – so I decided to jump over to Amazon and pick it up. Upon checking out I noticed the beauty that is Amazon’s checkout page design. I thought it was ironic that I was purchasing a book about choice when I came to the realization that Amazon had designed an extremely effective checkout page – that simply reduced the amount of choices.

Here is Amazon’s Checkout Page Design…

Click To Enlarge

Let’s walk through this e-commerce checkout page design. The beauty of this design relates back to the book I was ordering in the first place – Choice. The book explains the psychology of choice – which basically assumes that as more options are provided to a person the less likely they will make a decision. In the case of this Amazon checkout page they have reduced the amount of choices to two: checkout or get out – and they’ve hidden the get out button.

1. Call To Action - Right away Amazon tells you to click the button on the right to place the order

2. Action – Right next to the call to action is the action button – the “Place Your Order” button located in the prime spot in the top right. I guarantee they split tested this numerous times to find the right sweet spot.

3. Get Out – The “get out” button as I like to call it is the only way for a user to get out of this screen and it’s hidden right in the middle – out of sight, out of mind. This is a great tactic to keep people on this screen.

By reducing the amount of choice on their checkout screen Amazon can funnel you into the decision they want you to make, which of course is to finish your transaction.

If you are doing e-commerce or lead generation this is something you need to be aware of on your landing pages, product pages, and checkout pages. By reducing the number of options a user has the odds increase that they will take your preferred path through your goal funnel. If you are having high bounce rates at specific points in your funnel – like the final checkout page – look into the number of options on the page.

Chances are – if you simplify your landing or checkout pages your conversion rates will go up.

Do you have any questions about landing page or e-commerce design? Let us know in the comments or jump into the forums!

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