For any small business website there are a number of critically important factors that need to be spot on to convey the right message for your business and company.

Here are 9 such factors:

1. Curb appeal
2. Your content
3. Your navigation
4. Consistent topic
5. Keep it simple
6. Search engine friendliness
7. Build trust with visitors
8. Have compelling calls to action
9. Keep your visitors on your site

1. Curb appeal

When you are in a strange place, perhaps traveling abroad or somewhere unfamiliar, and are looking for somewhere nice to eat or have a coffee your decision will be greatly influenced by the appearance of the different coffee shops and restaurants.

Your new visitor to your website is in a similar situation when surfing online so make sure that when they land on your site that they are reassured by the appearance and “curb appeal” of your site. People DO judge the book by the cover and you need to make sure that the look and feel of your site conveys the right message and reassures the visitor that they are in the right place.

2. Your content

The content on your site should be comprehensive and answer the visitors’ question as to how you can help them, who you help and why they should trust your business and do business with you.

Most people are searching the internet for a purpose and more often than not they are seeking to solve a problem they have. Your website needs to give them relevant and accurate information to help them solve their problem and your content can demonstrate your expertise, build trust and reassure the visitor that doing business with your company will satisfy their needs.

3. Navigation

Your site navigation should be clear and make it easy to get around your site and find what they are looking for. Most sites have good navigation on their home page but once the visitor goes deep into your site the navigation can fall down so make sure that your navigation on secondary pages makes life easy for your visitor.

You can also enhance this with relevant internal linking in your content which will kill 2 birds with one stone-make it easy for visitors and help to spread link juice for targeted keywords around your site.

4. Consistency

Keep the topic of your site consistent. If you have personal views on politics, sport or any other interests your business website is really not the place to vent.

So stay on message.

5. Keep your site simple (but deceptively comprehensive)

Avoid the latest design fads and gadgets-keep your site simple and easy for your visitor and search engine robots to find their way around and find what they are looking for.

You could spend a lot of wasted time redesigning your site every 6/12 months with the latest technological design breakthrough. This time would be better spent adding great content and answering the visitors’ question “what’s in it for me?”

6. Search engine friendly

As well as your visitors you need to think about the search engines in order to rank well in the SERPS (search engine results pages) and ensuring that search engine robots can easily crawl your site is essential. This reiterates the need for good simple, functional design.

7. Built trust with visitors

If a visitor is to buy from your business they will firstly have to trust it-your website offers you a great opportunity to build trust with your visitor.

You can do this by providing them with answers to their questions in great content which is regularly updated and demonstrating your expertise in your area of activity.

8. Compelling calls to action

You need to make your calls to action easy to execute and compelling. Examples would include “call now for a quotation” or “sign up here for your free report”.

9. Keep your visitors on site

Keeping your visitors on site is critical. If you are running a restaurant or any retail outlet for example you are not going to send your visitors down the street to buy their dessert or coffee so don’t do it with your website.

A prime example of an easy way to send visitors away from your site is YouTube videos-when someone watches a YouTube video they are invited by YouTube to watch related videos which takes your hard earned visitor away from your site.

By all means have video on your site-but on your terms. You can host your videos on your own Amazon S3 account for cents per month and you will not be leaking visitors and traffic.

In summary, getting traffic is getting more difficult. When you do attract visitors to your site follow the 9 steps above and increase exponentially your chances of return visits and increased engagement and sales.

Related posts:

1. 6 Reasons Why a Website is Essential for your Business
2. 5 Reasons Why You Need A Website For Your Small Business in 2011
3. Marketing Your Business Online-Internet Marketing for Small Business
4. 7 Essential WordPress Plugins for your WordPress Website

Article source: http://webdesigndublin.org/9-essential-elements-for-your-small-business-website

As we saw in its IPO filing, Facebook does very little consumer marketing in a traditional sense. But that may change: It’s bringing on former Levi’s and Apple exec Rebecca Van Dyck to head global marketing, according to people familiar with the matter.

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Ms. Van Dyck spent the last 10 months as Levi’s Global CMO, where she oversaw the company’s global “Go Forth” campaign. Levi’s confirmed her departure.

Prior to joining Levi’s, Ms. Van Dyck served as senior director-worldwide marketing and communications at Apple, where she worked on the launches of the iPhone, iPad, iPod and iTunes.

She explained her approach and what it was like working with Steve Jobs at Ad Age’s Digital Conference in San Francisco in September: “The iPhone] was something created from the outside in, by how it felt to the consumer and the user experience going through it,” she said. “It was first and foremost about the user experience. And that’s how I approach marketing, that theme of focusing on what’s important to the customer.”

Ms. Van Dyck could not be reached, and Facebook did not return calls for comment. Facebook reported spending $28 million on advertising in 2011, up from $8 million in 2010 and $5 million in 2009, in its IPO filing.

Ad Age named Ms. Van Dyck a Woman to Watch in 2011. Incidentally, so was Carolyn Everson, VP-global ad sales at Facebook. Both women attended Ad Age’s Women to Watch luncheon in August.

Update: A Facebook spokeswoman has confirmed that Ms. Van Dyck is joining the company’s marketing team.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AdvertisingAge/LatestNews/~3/3pYdcd_fHp8/

This post will walk you through a solution to these keyword analysis issues and provide some tips on how you can slice and dice your data in wonderful ways.

With Microsoft Excel, we can create a report with all the keyword data you will need, all in one place, and fairly easy to update on a weekly or monthly basis. Then with all this data we can easily categorize segments of it to more quickly determine the better performing sets of keywords.

What we will need to do is push Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Adwords, Ranking data, and Revenue data all into one excel spreadsheet. Then we will put it all together into one master report and one categorized pivot table report.

To start, you should be especially familiar with pivot tables, the Google Adwords API, the Google Analytics API, and keyword research of course. Utilizing these APIs and being consistent in the formatting of the data you put into your spreadsheet will make it easy to update. If you aren’t familiar with these tools, I have provided resources below and some steps to organizing this data.

Here are some resources for learning to use pivot tables in Excel:

Excel for SEO
Microsoft Pivot Table Overview

Now let’s go fetch that data.

I Got 99 Problems, But A Keyword Visit Ain’t One

First off we need to get our keyword traffic metrics through the Google Analytics API. I suggest using Mikael Thuneberg’s GA Data Fetch spreadsheet. You can follow the instructions, read the how to guide, and download the file here.

Make sure to build off the GA data fetch file or a copy of it, as it has the proper VBA functions (the Visual Basic code that allows for the API to work) installed for API calls. Once you have your API token and the spreadsheet setup you can perform your first API call.

We will be using the more complex query to extract organic keyword visits for a specific date field and filter by the number of visits. The query I use for example, will output visits, average time on site, page views, and bounces for any keyword with 5 or more visits in the last 30 days. However, you can modify the parameters to your liking. To see what other metrics can be used, check out the Analytics API documentation.

Your Analytics data should look something like this:

Google Analytics data called through the API in Excel.

Now select the whole keyword column and create a pivot table of the keyword list in another sheet. In the adjacent column create a table where the cells equal the values in the pivot table column. Label this table “KeywordList” or whatever you like. We now have the keyword table to reference for extracting Adwords data.

Pivot tables don’t have the same referencing abilities as regular tables, so the table in column B is what you will reference in future steps.

To Be, Or Not To Be Searched, That Is The Question

Next up is pulling in search volumes for our keyword table. Thanks to the wonderful Richard Baxter, there are a couple articles on using and installing the Adwords API Plugin. One on SEOmoz and one on Seogadget.

I know the Adwords API access is a bit of an issue for some, so if you cannot use the API, utilize the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (gathering data from this tool will unfortunately require a lot more work).

In a new sheet, use the Adwords API array formula called “arrayGetAdWordsStats” to pull in the average and seasonal monthly search volumes for your keyword table. Your formula should look something like this:

=arrayGetAdWordsStats(KeywordList,”EXACT”,”US”,”WEB”)

You should now have 12 months of historical search volumes and averages for all your keywords.

Results from an Adwords API call usually look like this.

Note: If your keyword list is greater than 800 keywords, you will have to break out the list into a few separate tables just to perform API calls for those keywords. If this is the case, make sure to keep each array of search volumes aligned in the same columns.

The Impression That I Get

No API required here, Google’s Webmaster Tools provides a pretty easy way to download its search query data. If you open up the Search Queries report in Webmaster Tools there is an option to “download the table” at the bottom. Download the table for the same date range you used earlier and drop it into a new sheet.

The report downloaded from Webmaster Tools. Note the “-“ is used for zero values, in the yellow columns I simply cleaned that up with an IF statement.

Impressions, CTR, and Average Rank can now been added to our metrics.

If You Ain’t First Page, You’re Last

Since we all know how accurate average rank is from Webmaster Tools, let’s get some current rankings into this report .Grab your main keyword list from the spreadsheet and run rankings for them with your application of choice. I usually use Rank Tracker, but I am sure everyone has their own preference. Once you have your rankings drop it into a new sheet.

The More You Know

The number of metrics we can add to the report are limitless, but there comes a point where adding too many can create more work for updating the report or create analysis paralysis. The only other metric I suggest adding in is the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty if you have a PRO account. Again this may be very time consuming to add for large numbers of keywords, hopefully you have an intern for that.

Mo Money Mo Metrics

Revenue data may come from different places dependent on how your business works, so I unfortunately don’t have a one stop solution to importing that data. However, most applications usually allow you to download that data to CSV or Excel. If you have Ecommerce enabled in Google Analytics, you can use the API to pull in this data. As long as you have some metrics to relate to your keyword such as Average Order Value or Conversion Rate, drop it in a new sheet and you will be good to go.

Some of you may be asking yourself what to do if your revenue data does not tie back to the keyword visit. This is where the categorization of keywords plays an extremely important part in this report. In this case, we want to create a bridge between the revenue data and keyword data. This can be done through categorizing your keywords into a category that relates back to a field in your revenue data. For example, you might be able to associate keywords with product names or landing pages. These products or landing pages would then become categories. Once you have determined what your categories will be, you can assign them to keywords in a new sheet that simply contains keywords in one column and the category tag in the other. You can learn more about keyword categorization here.

Categorizing the keywords above not only lets me group them to aggregate metrics for analysis, but it allows me to bridge the gap somewhat between the keywords and conversions in this example.

One Report To Rule Them All

Finally we have all the data; we just have to put it all together. Create a new sheet and pull in your master keyword list by using =NameOfTheTable, drag this down until you reach the last keyword on the list (paste values after if you want sorting capabilities). Now select your keywords and create a new table. In the columns next to the keywords all you have to do is a VLOOKUP of each metric you would like to add to your report. Once you fill in the first cell of each column, the column should automatically be added to the table and populate the other cells with the equation. Repeat this process until all your metrics are in this table.

There will also be a need to calculate some metrics such as the Bounce Rate or Conversion Rate if you pulled in revenue data. Those should be added in adjacent columns as well. Additionally, if you didn’t need to categorize your keywords earlier, I suggest categorizing them now in an adjacent column. When completed your master report should look something like this:

The master report.

Amazing. We have all the data in one place in a simple to sort and use table! Just wait…it gets better.

Pivotal Success

Now you may be wondering how this report can get any better. Two words my friends: Pivot Tables.

Creating a pivot table of your master report will allow you to segment your data in a number of ways that weren’t possible before. In the Pivot Table Field List, the Row Labels, Column Labels, and Values will define the layout of your report. What we first need to do is drag and drop the Category and Keyword fields into the Row Labels respectively. This will set your top level metrics to summarize at the Category level and allow you to drill down into each Category to see the associated keywords and their individual metrics.

Next you will want to start dragging your metrics into the Values section, which will automatically populate the Column Labels section with the Values field. As you add your metrics in, you can edit their names and the way they are aggregated. You will want to think carefully about how you will aggregate certain metrics so that viewing those summarized numbers at a Category level makes sense.

This shows you how best to setup your pivot table fields and their value settings.

For instance, I might summarize Impressions and Visits, but average CTR and Bounce Rate. Seeing the average CTR and Bounce Rate for a Category will allow me to narrow down which sets of keywords are performing better than others. Then looking at the total Impressions and Visits for those well performing categories will allow me to see where there might be a higher potential to increase traffic to my site. While this may not be an absolute rule to determine keyword focus, it is a good rule of thumb and can be a way to prioritize which ones to focus on.

Pivot table reports also allow you to add report filters, letting you filter out data by any metric or even multiple metrics. With this you could analyze keywords that only rank on the first page of SERPs using the current ranking as a filter. Hell, you could add a field to the master report calculating the number of words in each keyword phrase, then filter by that and bounce rate, giving you your well performing long tail keywords. Get creative, let loose, play with the metrics, you will be surprised at what kind of conclusions you can make about your site’s keyword traffic.

The final product.

Conclusion

Updating the report is simple. Rerun the API calls with the new date range, rerun your rankings for the new keyword list, and export the other reports you need with new date range. As long as you kept your formatting and equations the same, the rankings and other reports should be dropped into their respective sheets without having to change anything. The master report should automatically be updated once you update the keyword column and the pivot report should update once you hit refresh under the pivot table menu. That’s it!

Well I should probably stop talking now and let you get to your hours upon hours of keyword analysis fun. Hopefully this was informative enough to make building a report such as this fairly easy. I would love to hear your feedback and will gladly answer any questions or comments about the post below. If you have issues later on, you can always contact me via Twitter.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/xdY75HrxZJo/how-to-build-an-advanced-keyword-analysis-report-in-excel

The latest issue of ‘The New Early to Rise’ newsletter has been released. The featured article is titled “The Future-Based Self ”.

Dan Sullivan says, “People naturally think of themselves as one person. But your one person is composed of three different selves: your Past-Based Self, your Present-Based Self, and your Future-Based Self.

Your Past-Based Self is who you believe you were in the past. It’s who you are when you dwell on your memories.

Your Future-Based Self is who you believe you’re going to be in the future. It’s who you are when you focus on your goals”.

Read rest of the article on ’The New Early To Rise’ newsletter site.

‘The News Early To Rise’ Newsletter

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/imnewswatch/sNTr/~3/gc9fhhzghOI/

When required by local laws and regulations, Google has said they will remove content in a manner that impacts the smallest number of potential readers. The Google Blogger site says the following of the new change:

“Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law. By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers.”

The changes, which are already live in India, Australia, and New Zealand, enable Google to easily remove content on a per-country basis by redirecting users to an address that utilizes a country-code top level domain. For example, if a U.S. blog’s address is http://name.blogspot.com and a user with an India-based IP attempts to visit the blog, Google will send the user to http://name.blogspot.in. However, if the blog’s readers would prefer to reach the U.S. (non-censored) version of the site, they can add “ncr/,” which stands for “No Country Redirect” to the end of the URL (i.e. http://name.blogspot.com/ncr/) and the user will no longer be served the country-specific (potentially censored) version of the blog.

The new Blogger policy does not currently affect blogs that use the custom domain feature.

Do you feel that the new Blogger policy is necessary to maintain the continued free flow of information while simultaneously complying with local regulations?

[Sources Include: Mashable, Economic Times, Google Blogger]

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SearchEngineJournal/~3/eMkztlnKuj0/

Wolfram|Alpha teamed up with sports information provider STATS to offer the Guide to Pro Football Statistics, which could very well become a great resource for fantasy football players next season.

You can type simple or complex questions about individual NFL players and teams, or get a little more creative by comparing teams, players, or games for seasons dating back to 1985.

Among the queries you can try to get you ready for the Super Bowl:

• New England Patriots vs. New York Giants: This query will show the most basic information for football newbies (such as city, conference, division), team logos, 2011 season standings, 2011 season game totals (which you can further break down by defense, offense, passing, rushing, receiving, returns, kicking, and punting stats) and totals by position (passing, rushing, receiving, defense, kicking).
• Patriots vs. Giants postseason: This will show you their head-to-head matchups (from Super Bowl 42 four years ago), game information, totals, and stats.
• Eli Manning vs. Tom Brady: This will give you an overall comparison, but if you just want to know their QB rating, passing touchdowns, or passing yards during the 2011 season, Wolfram|Alpha will tell you the stats and also visualize the data in a chart for these and other statistics you want to know.
• Giants versus Patriots regular season game in 2011: See the box score, game information, game totals and player stats from their week 9 clash in Foxborough, Mass.
• Patriots and Giants at Lucas Oil Stadium: Neither team has won a game there, although the Giants have only played there once (the so-called “Manning Bowl” in 2010) and the Patriots were winless in two visit to the Indianapolis Colts home stadium.
• Weather at Lucas Oil Stadium 6:30PM this Sunday: Though weather shouldn’t be a factor at kickoff time since the roof will likely be closed.

Curious about the results of previous Super Bowls? You can also explore some Super Bowl history. Or you can type in Super Bowl plus the number (or a year) to see the location, results, attendance, teams, scores, and more.

Register now for SES London 2012, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place 20-24 February, 2012. SES Conference Expo features presentations and panel discussions that cover all aspects of search engine-related promotion. Hurry, early bird rate expires February 3!

Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2143999/Super-Bowl-Stat-Time-WolframAlpha-Offers-Stats-Guide-for-Football-Junkies

Last week I talked about how marketers should leverage culture to promote brands. Today I would like to talk about why we also can (and should) change culture.

As I watched the video above I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Is marketing changing culture? Or is culture changing marketing?” Or in other words, are these ads changing our perception of beauty or is our perception of beauty changing the ads? I still don’t have the answer, but maybe it;s a little bit of both.

In the end it doesn’t really matter, the bottom line is that the concept of “ideal beauty” has been around for a very long time. However, that doesn’t mean that it has to continue, and as marketers we have a unique ability to make a difference. Because as marketers we, in part, define culture.

How To Change Culture With Marketing

Develop Icons – Cultures love a good icon. For example take a look at Donald Duck in Germany, they love him. A strong icon can be a powerful force with in a culture. And who creates icons? Marketers do, that’s who! If we want to change our culture’s obsession with ideal body types we need to work to develop more icons that embody realistic and diverse forms of beauty.

Change The Narrative – Maybe with the help of some of our new icons we can start telling some new stories. How about a story about a fully figured woman that men fight over. Or perhaps a movie about a funny young guy in a wheelchair that hordes of women lust after (wink). Stories shape our collective conscience and define the way we view the world. They also help define our own personal narrative, which gives us courage to be different and try new things.

Make A Profit – Remember that marketing is still all about generating wealth. With out wealth we can’t elevate icons or tell new stories. So we need to use the power of marketing to create consumer demands that redefine cultural norms. We need to start building brands that target individuals that deviate from the prevailing cultural narrative. We need fashion brands that market directly to consumers with wrinkles and body weight. We need to grow these brand’s revenue streams and make wrinkles profitable.

Quit Being Lazy – As I watched the video above I couldn’t help but think how unimaginative and uncreative the ads pictured were. Smart marketing is never easy. To redefine culture we have to be creative and try many different things and be willing to fail. Sometimes, it’s hard selling failure to our clients, which is why we need to demand and expect more courage from the companies and brands we work with. Most of you that work with large brands know that they are run by good people that want to do the right thing, they just often times lack the needed courage to do what needs to be done.

In the 21st century marketers are one of the most influential elements on our culture. We have the power to redefine ideas and conscientiousness and it’s our job to wield that power responsibly. This does not mean simply abstaining from the types of ads in the video, it also means taking an active role in the development of new trends that shape our collective identity. If we can effectively do that, we can use marketing to make the world a better place while generating wealth. And, to me that sounds beautiful.

Article source: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2012/02/cup-of-joe-changing-culture.html

Edmund Purcell, a VP on the Honda account for Santa Monica, CA-based RPA, provided a glimpse into how the length of the 2:23 video was determined, among other details. His agency has been running digital for the car brand since 1994, he said, with a healthy focus on testing online product videos and other digital spots over the last five years.

“We have a whole baseline of metrics,” Purcell said. “Going in, we knew how people consume long-form videos.”

The initiative’s short-form tease, dubbed “Coming Soon”, was seeded on the morning of Jan. 26 and served as the launch pad for the 2:23 video, which went live on YouTube four days later. True to modern marketing form, the RPA-Honda team leveraged the brand’s accounts on Facebook (1.5 million likes/fans) and Twitter (35,000 followers) by repeatedly pushing the long-form video to its earned media audience. At the same time, Matt Fiorentino, marketing director for Boston-based Visible Measures, said the :10 video was the element most responsible for the large number of views “Matthew’s Day Off” has accrued this week.

The brand wasn’t mentioned at any point during “Coming Soon”. The mystery surrounding the :10 spot created a groundswell of interest that exploded after the activation of the long-form video, Fiorentino said.

If the short video hadn’t been seeded first, he said, “I think the trajectory of views for the long-form video would have been much lower.”

Purcell added, “There wasn’t anything instantaneous behind [the seeding] besides PR. Because of the strong content, we were confident it would take off with a small push.”

When asked what data or sentiment analysis his team would use to determine the ad’s success, he didn’t offer specific metrics. Instead, Purcell pointed out that “Matthew’s Day Off” has produced some 26,000 YouTube likes vs. only 2,000 dislikes.

“It’s safe to say that sentiment has been extremely positive,” he said.

Here are some interesting facts about the Honda effort, taken from ClickZ’s Thursday interview with the agency director:

• Since there are hours of unused outtakes from the commercial’s shooting, Honda and RPA plan on releasing some of the funniest moments on YouTube after the Super Bowl, extending the life of the campaign.
• The footage was shot in Los Angeles during a week in December.
• The decision to reprise “Ferris Bueller” was made late last summer.
• Contractual negotiations for the acting and directing talent went “smoothly” but “took longer than average,” Purcell said, as did the pre-production groundwork. In terms of the latter, he said that getting the concept pitch perfect was key. 
• The final version of the Super Bowl commercial is :60 and was submitted a few weeks ago to NBC, the network broadcasting the Feb. 5th game.
• The carmaker is targeting 24- to 49-year-olds, particularly taking aim at young adults and young families.

Check out ClickZ’s live blog of #SB46 ad campaigns Sunday night, featuring analysis and stats.

Article source: http://feeds.clickz.com/~r/clickz/~3/eRODu2eYn-c/hondas-super-bowl-ads-12m-views

You have a good point there zerillos although I wonder how may folks on this forum are doing particularly well with adsense. Just like real life, you only hear from somebody when something goes wrong – not when it is going well.

Having said that, there is a sticky post on this forum (want to earn more with adsense) but it points to threads that are either locked out to non paying members or are somewhat on the old side.

Since you broached the subject, why not start a new thread along those lines and see what happens.

Article source: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4413144.htm

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Search Topics of Discussion:

• February 2012 Google Webmaster Report
• Google Rich Snippets Showing 3rd Party Results
• Google Title Tag Bug Causing Untitled Snippets?
• Google Engineer Explains Why Your AdSense Earnings May Drop
• Google Says Most Invalid Clicks Come From Publishers
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• Bruce Clay Lets The SEM Industry Down

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Article source: http://feeds.seroundtable.com/~r/SearchEngineRoundtable1/~3/B-WWVsdZS-s/video-02-03-2012-14680.html