Using SalesForce.com to Improve, Automate and Track Your Marketing

Would your business benefit from:

1.       More sales and higher conversion rates

2.       Optimizing your marketing budget

3.       Eliminating poor performing marketing campaigns

4.       Instant access to your marketing data

5.       The resources to deliver better marketing results

Well, if your organization uses SalesForce.com as its CRM system, consider these 5 SalesForce marketing tips.

Drip Marketing

If you are not using drip marketing campaigns, you should consider doing so. When used effectively, drip marketing campaigns lift conversion rates and boost sales. In addition to bottom line benefits, you will establish a regular communication stream with your prospects.

Whether you choose SalesForce or another CRM marketing system, ongoing drip marketing communication boosts sales.

If your business runs SalesForce’s Enterprise edition or higher, then you have access to workflow automation. Workflow automation is a powerful SalesForce marketing tool and is the foundation for automating your marketing.

If you are interested in reducing costs and freeing up resources while improving sales and conversions – strongly consider using workflow automation to automate your marketing and sales processes.

Schedule follow up calls, send a series of emails based on prospect behavior, schedule tasks and more with this SalesForce marketing tool – you’ll love it and so will your sales team.

SalesForce for Google AdWords

If your business calls for paid search advertising you are likely using Google AdWords. Through an alliance between Google and SalesForce you have access to a powerful marketing tool.

SalesForce for Google AdWords provides the ability to tie in the front end advertising expense and performance to the back end sales and revenue data. This SalesForce marketing tool is the missing link in the chain between marketing performance and sales results. This allows your marketing department to calculate ROI, test more effectively and optimize your business’ marketing budget by eliminating poor performing campaigns and investing more in the winners.

If you are familiar with Google Analytics, SalesForce for Google AdWords operates in a similar manner – using a java script snippet and categorizing how a prospect came to your contact form (i.e. organic search, AdWords, web direct, etc.). If the lead came through Google AdWords, data is synched so you can identify the search term, ad version and more.  A powerful SalesForce marketing tool.

SalesForce Marketing Campaigns

In order to evolve your marketing efforts, you need to test different marketing strategies, tactics and channels. In order to evaluate your marketing efforts, you need to define the costs and the revenue (or marketing benefit) and quantify whether you should invest more or fewer marketing dollars, based on ROI.

SalesForce marketing campaigns allows your marketing department to automatically assign prospects to a marketing campaign and analyze cost, performance and ROI.

Consider this; you are hosting a webinar, your SalesForce marketing resource ensured:

• Prospects sign up on your website and are automatically assigned to the webinar campaign
• An email is automatically sent providing webinar details
• Attendance details are tracked and synched with SalesForce
• Revenue and ROI are calculated
• Resources are diverted from underperforming webinars
• Profitable webinars are expanded

SalesForce Marketing Reports

SalesForce offers a wide array of marketing and other reports. Plus, you can create custom reports – which also need not be limited to marketing.

However, if you are not doing so already, your management team should consider identifying your business’ KPI’s or Key Performance Indicators.  Once your top metrics are established you’ll find SalesForce has outstanding marketing reporting capabilities. These report s can also be summarized and displayed graphically on custom dashboards.

SalesForce Marketing Resources

If the concept of marketing automation, tracking and optimization appeals to you, the next question is how you acquire the resources to implement and manage this.

Basically there are three options:

1.       Do it yourself

2.       Hire a SalesForce Marketing Consultant

3.       Hire an employee skilled in SalesForce marketing

There are a number of SalesForce consultants out there, consider a consultant with marketing and sales background rather than a “techie”.

The SalesForce AppExchange is a good place to look for qualified service providers.

Marketing Practicality also provides CRM marketing solutions

If your business warrants it, you may also want to consider a full time SalesForce marketing resource.

Google AdWords recently introduced a new keyword match option called Modified Broad Match. At a high level, modified broad match fills in the gap between phrase match and broad match. Which is great news, especially for companies using Google AdWords in highly competitive spaces. So let’s begin the Google AdWords Training!

• What exactly is modified broad match?
• How do I use modified broad match?
• What does it mean to my AdWords Campaign?

What is Modified Broad Match?

Modified broad match provides more flexibility with the targeting of your AdWords campaign. You will find Modified Broad Match to be more useful if you are currently using both broad and phrase match types.

This new match type option allows you to better control your broad match targeting and in the case of long tail keywords – you can select which keywords you want to apply the modified broad match rule to.

By placing a + sign in front of a broad match keyword, your AdWords ad will only be served for search terms that contain the exact keyword or contain close variants of the keyword. Google defines close variants as misspellings, singular and plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings. Related search terms like apple and fruit, or synonyms like smart and intelligent are not close variants.

So you can now tighten up your broad match keywords or even portions of your broad search terms that contain multiple words (i.e. cakes, chocolate cakes, red velvet cake).

Google AdWords Training – How Do I Use Modified Broad Match?

The implementation is pretty straightforward. When you add a new keyword, you put a plus symbol in front of your keyword.

For example:

+Google +AdWords +Training

Applies modified broad match to all three individual words for the keyword: Google AdWords Training

You could also elect to put a + sign in front of one or two of the individual words in any combination you choose.

Incorrect examples of applying modified broad would be:

+Google+AdWords+Training or…

+ Google + AdWords + Training

What does Modified Broad Match mean to my AdWords Campaign?

Well, that depends on your campaign(s), your industry, your budget and a whole host of other questions. But modified broad match appears to offer a much needed tool to fill the gap between phrase based and broad match types.

You will need to test this new match type for yourself and determine what is best for your business. I have seen clients that run AdWords campaigns in competitive markets where phrase match was the best option. Broad match produced too many generic, unqualified clicks, phrase match worked well but their budget could support more clicks. Modified broad match presents an opportunity to expand reach to qualified impressions without serving ads to unqualified surfers. Especially if you are targeting multi-word keywords that are fairly generic “tree houses”.

Google AdWords Training for Modified Broad Match

If you are a highly proficient Google AdWords professional, I would recommend setting up structured tests to evaluate the effectiveness of modified broad match on your AdWords campaigns.

If you are learning your way in Google AdWords and are not sure how to most effectively use this new keyword match type, here are some recommended resources:

Google’s Official Page on Modified Broad Match

Inside AdWords Google’s blog and explanation of the new match type

Read, test, monitor and improve. If you need to learn more, you may want to consider some Google AdWords Training. Or hire a Google AdWords Professional to improve your AdWords performance.

Is Local SEO part of your overall internet marketing strategy? SEO for Local Businesses is an area that is increasingly competitive. Let’s cover some basic tips for local SEO and how you can quickly and effectively improve your local presence with the search engines.

Local Business Listings on Search Engines

First local SEO tip – claim your local business listings on the major search engines.

• Google Places (formerly Local Business Center)
• Bing Local Listing Center
• Yahoo! Local Listings

When you create your local listing in each search engine there are a few things to keep in mind. Try to include the name of your product or service in the local business listing title.  Categorize your business accurately in your local listing.  Add your product or service to your business’ local description.

Local SEO Tip #2 – Local Search Listing Reviews

Now that you have created your business’ local listing it’s time to start building your online reputation. Successful SEO for local businesses requires gathering reviews for your local listing. Ideally you want organically generated, genuine , positive reviews.

Local SEO Tip #3 – Local Directories

I recommend you also add your business to several of the top local business directories.

Yelp, Best of the Web Local (BOTW Local), Yellow Book, Localeze and CitySearch are some of the more popular local directories.

On Page SEO for Local Search

Additionally, you should optimize your website pages for local seo.  Let’s look at some simple things you can do to improve your businesses local search engine rankings.

Local Address on Website

Show your complete local address on your Contact page.  This is important. Also, include a local phone number as well, even if you offer a toll free number.

Also consider including your business’ complete local address and local phone number listing on every page.

Use Regional or Local Names in Page Titles

SEO for local businesses is done effectively when you include the region (state, city, etc.) in your web page titles. Consider targeting your money keyword – one that you wouldn’t expect to rank for on a National level, and add your local qualifier.  For example New Jersey Insurance Agency.

Additionally, consider creating individual pages that target your product or service and mention the actual town or city.   A local SEO strategy I like to use is to target at high level on the home page (e.g. Product, State) and then creating pages which target more specific locations (e.g. Product, City, State).

SEO Tips for Local Businesses

If you apply these basic tips for local SEO, you should see an increase in long tail and local search traffic to your website.  Local SEO for small businesses is increasingly competitive. As the web gets bigger, markets get smaller. The sooner your business includes local SEO in its internet marketing strategy the better positioned you will be.

Additional Local SEO Resources:

David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors – 2009 edition of this collection of top local SEO minds

A great Local SEO case study by Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com – I’ve done a similar test of my own agree with Aaron’s results

Most small businesses have dabbled in email marketing – whether it’s a newsletter, e-blast or other email marketing strategy.  Let’s cover some of the most effective email marketing strategies and some practical email marketing tips that will help your small business.

Email Marketing Strategy #1: The Email List

Your list is the single most important factor in your email campaign.  Your house list (you are developing a prospect database, right?) is your best email marketing list.

If you have integrated your email marketing platform and your customer database (typically requiring a CRM system) – that’s the best option.

Email Marketing Strategy #2: The Email Communication

Email communication comes in many forms – informational, newsletters, promotional, etc. For purposes of this article, let’s cover promotional (revenue generating) email marketing communicating.

Email Marketing Strategy #3: The Offer

This goes without saying but developing a compelling offer is critical to the success of your email marketing strategy.

Email Marketing Strategy #4: Segmentation

Once you’ve selected your offer and your email list – it’s time to segment the email marketing file. There are unlimited ways to segment your email marketing file – age of leads, geography, purchase history, recent activity, marketing acquisition channel – be creative and think about what is most relevant to your offer and list.

Email Marketing Strategy #5: Email Delivery

Depending on your business model the day of the week and time of the email delivery can impact open rates. Personally – for most B-to-B or B-to-C email marketing communications, I recommend Tuesdays (Wednesdays are second best) around 11am – eastern time.  That hits your email prospects before lunch on the east coast of the US as well as around the start of the day on the west coast.

Effective Email Marketing Tips

Let’s cover small of the most important design elements of your email marketing campaign. Follow these email marketing tips and you will develop optimal email marketing communications.

Email Marketing Tip #1 – Value Propostion

You have (at most!) 5 seconds to communicate your value proposition through email. Think about how you go through your own email. Your value proposition must be clearly communicated and the first ways the recipient discerns that is through:

1. The From line
2. The Subject line
3. The Email Preview Pane (if applicable) – Images and Content

Email Marketing Tip #2 – The From Line

The is the most important line for establishing trust. If you are using your house email marketing file, the recipient should know you. If you segmented recent or previous buyers, you have a greater chance establishing trust. Send your email from an email address that builds trust and contains your brand.

Email Marketing Tip #3 – The Subject Line

Get to the point – early. And make it compelling to the email recipient. Most email recipients open their inbox, read the From Line first and then the read the Subject Line, and decide to open, delete or save.  Subject Lines and From Lines work together – don’t emphasize brand in the subject line – communicate value to the recipient, in 40 characters or less.

Email Marketing Tip #4 – Images and Content

Your content should clearly reinforce the value proposition and benefit to the prospect. Your images and layout should be attractive. If you choose to send HTML based emails with images – check the layout of the email in multiple email clients.  Odds are your email will arrive with the images turned off, so make sure your value proposition is clearly communicated with and without images.

Email Marketing Tip #5 – Personalization

Personalization, using the email recipients’ information in the email (i.e. name, etc.) is information you should leverage. Consider how you can capture and use prospect data to improve conversion rates. At a minimum, it is generally better to use Dear [first name] instead of a generic salutation.

Email Marketing Tips and Strategies that Work

Effective email marketing requires testing. Once you have the basics in place, it’s important you test and track your results.  Implementing effective email marketing strategies is very important. But out of all these email marketing tips the most important one is to track your results. Email marketing is iterative and specific to your business’ niche.

Contact Marketing Practicality directly to optimize your email marketing efforts.

Here are some 5 email marketing tips to better interpret, test and analyze your email marketing campaigns.

Email Marketing Tip #1: Interpreting the Open Rate

After reviewing your email marketing metrics, you notice one person opened your email 30 times. You think, “Wow! What a hot prospect!”. Not so fast. If you sent HTML email and your recipient uses Outlook with the reading pane, your results can be skewed. If someone uses a reading pane and scrolls over your email using the up or down arrow keys, the email is opened in the reading pane. That counts as an open, even though the intent was nothing more than quickly scrolling past your email to get to a different email. So interpret this metric carefully.

Email Marketing Tip #2: Test, test, test!

If your email marketing list is large enough, you should segment and test your list every time you start an email marketing campaign. Common and useful things to test in your email marketing efforts include:

• Subject line – this is critical
• Email Offer or Call to Action
• List Segmentation – including: geography, age of leads, previous buyers vs. prospects, etc.
• Landing Page
• Creative

Email Marketing Tip #3: Use Website Analytics

If an email generates a click to your website, then what? Use your Web Analytics program to understand what happens next. Depending on your call to action, your Analytics program can tie in the performance of your email marketing campaign to the actual result.

Email Marketing Tip #4: Send HTML and Text Versions

Most email marketing service providers allow you to send an HTML version as well as a text only version of your email. Nowadays, most people use HTML as their default – but many people intentionally or not, only accept text based emails. Make sure you use both.

Email Marketing Tip #5: Follow Up with Qualified Leads

Prospects that opened up your email message multiple times or clicked through to your website, identified themselves as interested. Your next step should be to follow up directly with that prospect.

Email Marketing Service Providers

There are many email marketing service providers out there. Two of the most commonly used are iContact and Constant Contact. My personal preference is iContact but I use both depending on the client. If you have a small business and are looking for a quality email marketing service provider, you be satisfied with either of those two.

Email Marketing Tips Wrap Up

These are some basic email marketing tips. Email marketing can be as sophisticated as you want. But most importantly, your email marketing efforts should continually improve and yield a better marketing ROI. Contact Marketing Practicality for expert email marketing help with your small business.

This is the third article of a three part series on Successful Web Marketing – this article provides web marketing ideas on how to increase website visibility. Because, at the end of the day, no matter how good your content is, what does it matter if no one can find your website (and your content)?

How to Increase Website Visibility

In order to successfully increase your website’s visibility you will need to learn certain tools. Like most things – you will be able to pick up a basic knowledge of these skills with a moderate time investment. If you want to develop expert-level skills, count on 1,000’s of hours for each of these web marketing tactics – or hire a qualified professional. The following 5 tactics can be employed to increase visibility to your website – generating more web traffic – and exposure to that valuable content you have already created.

Increase Website Visibility Idea #1 – Search Engine Optimization – SEO

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the practice of developing and managing your website so it ranks well for targeted search terms in the major search engines. An effective SEO marketing strategy will significantly increase traffic to your website. Search engine optimization consists of both on-page SEO and off-page SEO. I strongly recommend you perform search engine optimization within the search engines guidelines if you intend to build a website for the long haul. When done effectively, search engine optimization is the best tactic in your toolbox to increase website visibility – and a critical component of successful web marketing. Don’t overlook this web marketing idea. And use a proven, qualified SEO marketing consultant if you’re not sure how to do it internally.

Increase Website Visibility Idea #2 – Pay per Click Marketing – PPC

But like most things, you don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket, so if you completely rely on SEO for website visibility, you may be very disappointed if a search engine that sends you a large amount of organic traffic changes an algorithm or otherwise stops sending you the website traffic you were accustomed to. Pay per Click Marketing (also called paid search or PPC) involves targeting certain keywords and paying for search engine listings. This is a great tactic to increase visibility to your website, but of course costs money. So carefully evaluate your marketing metrics and monitor your PPC campaign performance. It only makes sense to carry out a PPC marketing campaign if it produces a positive ROI.

Increase Website Visibility Idea #3 – Social Media

Social media continues to gain momentum as a tool for increasing website visibility as well as developing online relationships with your customers or prospects interested in your products and services. Social media also ties in with search engine optimization as it provides a medium where your website can garner inbound links, thus increasing your website visibility.

Increase Website Visibility Idea #4 – Referring Websites

When I say referring websites, I mean websites that link to your website and direct traffic to your website by means of an inbound link. This also ties in with SEO, but if you build up a network of quality, referring websites that are synergistic with your website, you can increase visibility to your website and quite likely, improve your conversion rates. Generating a network of referring websites takes work; it’s best to reach out to other webmasters and establish a level of trust before simply asking someone for a link.

Increase Website Visibility Idea #5 – Networking

Old fashioned networking and personal relationships can go a long way for small businesses trying to increase website visibility. Think about who could link to your website – starting with your personal network. Vendors, customers, suppliers, business contacts, friends, consultants – there are likely a host of people you already know that have a business website. If you already have an established level of trust, and it makes sense, why not ask that person for a link in to your website?

Successful Web Marketing – A Blend of Old and New Marketing

In today’s competitive landscape, successful web marketing really requires a blend of old and new marketing tactics. Staying on top of rapidly changing technology and how it impacts your business market efforts is critical to successful web marketing.
Ask yourself:

1. Are you getting the most out of your search engine optimization?
2. Have you fully tested pay per click marketing?
3. Are you effectively using social media marketing?
4. Do you know the top ten websites referring traffic to your website?
5. Do you routinely discuss web marketing with your network?

If you take these 5 web marketing ideas and deploy them effectively. you will see positive results. In order to increase website visibility, you need to work at it, or hire someone who will. Successful web marketing depends on knowing what to do, how to do it and then putting in the hard work to ensure success. So get going!

View the first article in the “Successful Web Marketing Ideas” series:

Web Marketing Ideas

View the second article in the “Successful Web Marketing Ideas” series:

Creating Valuable Content

By Marketing Practicality

This is the second article of a three part series on Successful Web Marketing and focuses on creating valuable content for your website visitors. Here are some web marketing ideas for creating valuable content.

Creating Valuable Content – Target Your Audience

Are you in touch with what your website visitors are looking for? There are ways to monitor this within your Analytics program, i.e. your website bounce rate, time spent on website, number of web pages visited, etc. But Google Analytics also provides a way to identify all the organic keywords your visitors used to visit your website. When you review these terms, are the keywords in line with how you view your website content?

If so that’s great – but even still, you can analyze these terms to find hidden gems for creating valuable content – especially the terms that carry a high bounce rate.
To target your audience – simply identify what your website visitors are already looking for when they come to your website, but appear to exit the website quickly. Then develop valuable content around the topics your website visitors are really looking for.

Additionally, creating valuable content that is related to your website and is routinely read by your visitors is great way to reinforce the strong areas of your website content.

Successful Web Marketing – Content that Gets Seen

So now you have some general ideas about why visitors come to your website and the search terms they use to find content on your website. So what specifically should you write about? When creating valuable content, the targets your audience and gets read, I recommend the following web marketing ideas:

1. Target content based on search volume
2. Be honest and open
3. Provide real value

Web Marketing Idea #1 – Target Content for Search Terms

Before you sit down to write an article, use some of the readily available tools out there to refine your targeted search terms. The keyword selection strategy is an important part of creating valuable content. Identify specific keywords by typing your general terms into a tool like Google’s Keyword Tool. While not precise, it will help you narrow down terms that have search volume your website can effectively rank for. If your site is brand new or isn’t an authority in its niche – attempting to rank for a term with 500,000 searches per month is going to lead to disappointment.

Web Marketing Idea #2 – Develop Content Openly and Honestly

Your website visitors are taking valuable time to read your content. And most times, they can tell if your content is genuine or simply fluff.

So I recommend you communicate your message clearly, openly and honestly. My preference is only to develop original content based on my experience, content that I can stand behind and have personally witnessed in practice. I don’t scrape or steal content from other websites but if I see great website content that I can stand behind, I’ll cite it and provide a link to that website.

Simply put, be honest and transparent with your website content.

Web Marketing Idea #3 – Provide Real Value

Creating valuable content needs to add value. Once you draft website content – reread it and ask yourself if your website visitors make take away a few nuggets that will actually help them. For example, my tips to use Google Analytics and Google’s Keyword Tool to target your content will result in web pages that get read. Make sure you add value to your readers if you want to develop a website for the long term.

Successful Web Marketing – Creating Valuable Content

So that’s part 2 in the series of successful web marketing, which focuses on creating valuable content for your website visitors. The next article on web marketing ideas will focus on gaining visibility to your website and how the new online marketing is really a blend of the old and the new.

Read the first article here:

Successful Web Marketing Ideas and Advice – Part 1

Or the next article:

Increase Website Visibility

From Marketing Practicality

Looking for successful web marketing ideas? Here’s some advice on how to effectively promote your business on the web.

First you need a business and a website. You’ve done that but you are not satisfied with the quantity and / or quality of leads your website is generating, so far you web marketing ideas aren’t so successful. Here’s what to do.

Web Marketing Ideas

I’ve broken down these web marketing ideas into three main categories: Web Marketing, Web Design and Web Marketing Process. Consider applying this web marketing advice as you grow your online business presence.

Successful Web Marketing

SEO – or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of increasing the organic (not paid) listings in search engines for targeted terms. Learn how to do this yourself (plan on invest 1,000’s of hours to do it very well) or hire someone to do it for you. Don’t commit the sin of developing a beautiful, content-rich website that no one can find because this step was omitted. SEO applies to both on page optimization and off page optimization. If you only take one piece of web marketing advice, take this: optimize your website for search engines.

Pay per Click Marketing – Google AdWords being the most common, but Bing and Yahoo have their own paid search marketing platforms. Paid search marketing (pay per click marketing or PPC) is a way to quickly generate targeted traffic to your website at a cost you control. The advantage is the immediate traffic; the disadvantage is you pay for every click.

Social Media – This is one of the fastest growing areas of web marketing. There are numerous websites – the heavyweights being Facebook and Twitter but the list is vast and most sites have their own twist on social interaction via the internet. While many find this a difficult area to monetize, the value of the inbound links (in most cases) is certainly a plus, and it creates another channel to communicate your product or service.  (Note the social media links at the bottom of this post).

Create a Blog – By creating a blog you have content that is easily shared throughout the web, allowing you to link to other blogs, and of course have them link in to your website. As your popularity increases you will generate more inbound links and a following of people that are interested in your products, services and content. Plus the content management systems of blogs make it very easy to organize and create new web pages, without knowledge and experience in coding a website.

Networking – Not just networking through the web, but also through your (human) contacts. Networking, especially for small businesses is one of the best ways to build awareness of your website and your products or services. If you educate your network on web marketing (and they own websites) you can also generate traffic through that relationship.  Remember to give more than you receive – it will come back to you.

Quality Content – This will be covered in more detail with the next article in this series, but providing valuable, original content will play a large role in the success of your web marketing efforts. Create valuable content and create it often. Adding a page a day for a year is sound web marketing advice. Sound like a lot of work? It is – but like most things in life that are worth achieving, it takes effort.

Website Design

Website Design – If possible, hire a professional web designer to develop a great looking site.   Successful web marketing, in my opinion, is more by the marketing items I listed above – but good design goes hand in hand with good marketing and quality content.

Website Structure – Your website should be easily navigable – meaning any page on the website can be accessed in two clicks or less. The website navigation should be clean and intuitive. I like to create logical groupings of categories within clients’ websites. The web pages within each grouping interlink to one another so it’s clear to both users and search engines that all related web pages are contained within their logical grouping. Avoid making web pages that run too deep – no more than 4 directory levels in a URL, in fact, the fewer the better. Also, create websites that load quickly.

Contact Form – If you don’t have one, you need one – that simple. Especially if you plan on running paid search marketing. Create a contact form on your website.

Practical Web Marketing Ideas

Granted, this is a partial list of web marketing ideas but diligently applying this web marketing advice will result in successful web marketing. In part two of this Web Marketing Ideas series, we’ll cover how to develop valuable content that targets the type of visitors you want to attract to your website.

Related Resources:

7 Ways Internet Marketing Can Supercharge Your Small Business

Read the next articles in the series here:

Successful Web Marketing Ideas: Creating Valuable Content

Increase Website Visibility

From Marketing Practicality

Keyword selection is a crucial part of developing your internet marketing strategy.  Many factors come in to play, such as:

1. What is the search volume for my targeted keyword?
2. What is the relative competition for the keyword?
3. What is the relevance the targeted keyword to my website’s content?

Presuming you already selected keywords with (ideally) high search volume and relatively low competition, then it’s time to answer how relevant the keyword is to your site’s content.  This can be a deceptively tricky process, so here’s a keyword selection tip as well as a great tool to validate your keyword selection strategy: Google’s Wonder Wheel.

Google’s Wonder Wheel

The Wonder Wheel is a free tool that is easily accessible within Google – no need to log in to a Google account.  Simply perform a search (in the example above I searched on “internet marketing”).

In the light blue bar (below the search box) you’ll see “Show Options”.  When you click on Show Options, a sidebar opens up and about two-thirds of the way down the list of options you’ll see Wonder Wheel, this is where the fun starts.

Once you select Wonder Wheel your search term will be graphically displayed in a hub and spoke pattern – similar to a mind map pattern.  The spokes are based on actual Google searches and represent a visual display of how people searching on Google refine their search terms, switching from short tail terms to long tail terms or even switching search terms entirely.  Again, in the image above, I searched on Internet Marketing and selected the spoke Internet Marketing Company.

For example, if someone searched on the term Apple, the intent of the searcher is difficult to fully understand (i.e. is the person looking for computers, phones or fruit – or something else entirely).  Using the Google Wonder Wheel can help you identify terms that are highly relevant to your product or service, and if your web page is optimized effectively, you will attract more qualified traffic.

Keyword Selection Tips – Keyword Relevance

The concept of keyword relevance should not be casually overlooked or assumed. Just because you believe a specific keyword is relevant to your business does not mean the masses searching on Google will use that term to find your service or product.  So start by casting a wide net and then use Google’s Wonder Wheel to refine your keyword targeting.

And note – although this post is mainly covering the Wonder Wheel and Keyword Relevance in SEO – this tool also works well for identifying long tail keywords for your Google AdWords campaign (pay per click marketing).

More keyword selection tips will follow in future posts (search volume and competition) – in the meantime, try using Google’s Wonder Wheel – let me know what you think of it and if you think it is a useful tool.

The Importance of Meta Keywords and SEO

Meta Keywords Tag is not important in search engine optimization – or not in the way you want it to be.  Many high ranking websites don’t even use them.  I admit, I still use them sometimes, perhaps it’s just an old habit and often clients insist meta keywords are important – but consider the following if you choose to use the meta keywords tag:

1. Keep the keywords short – 5 or so is fine
2. Use relevant meta keywords – don’t add keywords that aren’t in the web page’s content
3. Meta keywords should be unique to each page
4. Understand meta keywords won’t help the ranking of your page but overuse or misuse can negatively impact rankings
5. Your competitors can easily view your meta keywords and know which terms you are “trying” to target or rank for – think about that

If you, your SEO resource, or staff thinks that meta keywords are a way to improve your search engine rankings – well, they are not.

The Importance of the Meta Description and SEO

The meta description however is an important meta element – because, as shown in the picture above, the meta description is what search engines typically display to describe your website.  While the meta description does not have significant SEO value, it does influence whether or not someone may click on your website’s search engine listing.

For that reason alone, care should be taken to craft relevant, meaningful description that are unique for each page.

In some cases, a search engine will choose to display a description other than what you have carefully worded as your meta description.  The most common example is Yahoo! is a Yahoo Directory description (if you have one) or search engines electing to use a DMOZ description (if you have one). Though I have even seen Google use alt tags as a web page description.  Yahoo! directory and DMOZ listings can be easily controlled (by using another meta tag!).  If Google is using other on-page elements for your description you need to understand why and fix it.

Your Website’s Title Tag and Search Engine Optimization – SEO

OK – the title tag (which is not a meta tag) has significant search engine optimization value and they influence whether someone will click on your website’s search engine listing.  So website titles should be crafted carefully and well, to target the intended keywords, provide a meaningful description of your website’s page and influence someone to click through your website’s search engine listing.

The title tag is probably the most important on-page seo element and one of the easiest to modify and improve.

SEO Marketing Services – Pricing and Value

So if you are shopping a search engine optimization partner, and you see a variety of different rates and service levels, and you don’t really understand what kind of value you are getting for your investment, I’ll offer these points for your consideration.

• If the seo service provider is planning on changing your meta tags, title tag, submitting your website to a bunch of search engines and directories – the rate is probably low, for a reason.  There will be little return (albeit some) for that sort of service.
• If your seo marketing resource is charging you a high rate for doing the above, look elsewhere.
• Many seo marketing agencies offer tiered plans – and while it’s good to see a list of what will be done for your marketing investment, understand you are purchasing a pre-packaged seo plan – which may not fit the specific needs of your business.
• If your resource provides seo marketing services which include on-page and off-page optimization; stays current with search engine trends; understands the different algorithms and has a successful track record with other clients – you may be on to something.  If you can effectively determine that seo provider’s professionalism and responsiveness, well then, now you may really be on to something.  Just be sure to use a qualified seo marketing consultant.

Meta Tags and Search Engine Optimization – Recap

So to summarize, here’s the real search engine optimization value of meta tags:

Meta Keywords – They will not help your search engine rankings. If used improperly, they may have a negative impact on your search engine rankings.

Meta Description – Important for your search engine listing and can influence whether or not people click on the listing and visit your website.

Title Tag – Very important for both search engine optimization as well as gaining traffic from search engine listings.