WSI Online Marketing Blog

Enabling Google Webmaster Tools Information Inside Google Analytics!

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 16:08:00 GMT

On October 4th, Google built-in Google Webmaster Tools data within Google Analytics. For SEO specialists this can be a fantastic new tool to find SEO opportunities.

Where can you discover this report?

You need to have the new version of Google Analytics activated. If you don’t have this version yet, just click on the link at the top right of your window to activate it:

Once you have activated the newest Google Analytics version, you will discover the Google Webmaster Tools queries under: “Traffic Sources”-> “Search Engine Optimization”:

Before one can login into their Google Analytics account and search through the data gold mine, you will need to enable Google Webmaster Tools data with Google Analytics.

How to enable Google Webmaster Tools with Google Analytics?

As it is possible to see from the screenshot above, you need to perform one more step before accessing this valuable date:

The process is relatively straightforward:

Step 1: Login your Google Webmaster Tools account using the same administrator email as your Google Analytics account.
Step 2: Assuming that you have verified your website in Google Webmaster Tools, you will arrive on this home page. Click on “Manage Site”-> “Google Analytics Property”:

Step 3: Select the correct URL and click “save”:

It is possible to now access a gold mine of information in Google Analytics. In my next internet marketing blog post I will show you how you can find SEO opportunities through this report.

15 Ways To Grow Your Facebook Fan Base

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 19:40:00 GMT

Developing a Facebook fan page from scratch is difficult. Not the actual page setup, but the aspect where you actually have to get people to care about and "Like" your page. WSI Online Marketing has created a number of techniques that will help you to increase your Facebook fan base.

1. Embed Widgets On your Site: Facebook has several social plugins which you can place on your website and blog. The Fan Box widgit is now the "Like Box" that works to display your up to date fan page stream and a selection of actual fans.

2. Invite Your Email Subscribers: If you have an opt-in email list you msut definitely send out an invite to your subscribers via email letting them realize that your fan page also exists.

3. Add To Your Email Signature: It's the small details that count. Promote your page via a Facebook link which will appear in every email you send!

4. Generate a Powerful Welcome Tab: The more attractive your landing tab, the more engaged people will be in what you're trying to "sell." Make it appealing! What sets you apart from each other Facebook fan page?

5. Use Facebook Apps: There are a lot of Facebook apps out that make your page interactive whether it be utilizing promotions, polls, surveys, video feeds, etc so. Get your fans involved. Doing so can help create a word of mouth. An example of app integration is National Truck Rental “€100 euro IKEA” campaign. National Truck Rental offered their fans a €100 euro IKEA voucher and free rental of one of our vans or trucks to get the purchases home. By filing out a form, a post goes out onto your Facebook wall and into the News Feeds of all your friends, thus providing National Truck Rental with valuable exposure. (For custom apps, see companies like Promoboxx, FanAppz, Wildfire Apps, Involver, Virtue, Context Optional.)

6. Integrate The Facebook Comment Feature: A fantastic instance of this is a T-shirt brand called Threadless. On their landing tab, you can browse and buy t-shirts as well as "Like" and comment on any of the items and choose to have that comment published to your own, personal profile.

7. Get Fans To Tag Pictures: Take pictures of everything! Load these photos and encourage your fan base to tag themselves. This is excellent exposure!

8. Insert Videos And Embed On Your Site: It is easy to load video content to your fan page and then take the source code and embed it on your website/blog. Once you do this a button to you fan page loads next to the video!

9. Facebook Ads: You should be able to increase your fan base employing Facebook's own social ad feature. This is true even if you're working with a limited weekly budget.

10. Connect To Your Twitter: Connect your Twitter to your Facebook and your Facebook to your Twitter. Doing so will make your life so much easier!

11. Use Print Media: Look at each and every piece of print advertising you use in your business. Is your Facebook fan page clearly displayed? It should be...

12. Display At Your Business: If your business is run from a physical store (not e-commerce) put a placard on the front office letting your potential customers know you're on Facebook. Have a straightforward and memorable URL.

13. Use The Share Button: Share posts, links and photos from your fan page on your personal page. Share it with friends. By doing this you are connecting with a completely different group of users than those just on your fan page.

14. Use the @tag: As long as you’re a fan of your own fan page, it is easy to “@ tag” it on your own personal profile wall. From time to time, it is easy to let your friends know about| something taking place on your fan page by creating a personal status update that includes tagging your fan page with an @ tag. Basically begin typing the “@” symbol and the first few letters of your fan page name this works whether you have your username registered or not, and it will appear from a drop-down list to select. This then helps make it a nice, subtle hyperlink that your friends can choose to click on.

15. Suggest To Friends: On each fan page is a "Suggest To Friends" button where it is easy to send invites to you personal friends to become fans of your page. It's vital to monitor who you invite. Sometimes you may possibly be doing yourself more harm by just inviting people to invite people.

Which ones have you applied with success? Plus,do feel totally free to add any of your own own creative marketing tips in the comments box below!

SEO Guide For Web Designers

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 19:41:00 GMT

The post covers the SEO best practices for Web Designers:

Site organization and structure for SEO

The good, the bad and the ugly of using Flash

Images vs. content

Usability and conversion optimization

Css, site speed, code structure and more.

SEO Guide For Web Designers

View more presentations from donalwsi

Google Places Update!

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 11:21:00 GMT

There have been big modifications in Google's Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) with the recent rollout of an integration of Google Places with Organic search rankings.

Most people will have been familiar with the Google map that appeared for some searches particularly when you added a geograpicial qualifier to the search - e.g. "Van Rental Dublin". Google displayed a map along with 7 selected listings right in the middle of the organic listings. For a little piece of nostalgia this is how is how the 7 Pack used to look - View old 7 pack.

With the new change the 7-pack is gone! In its place Google hasincluded places with Organic results. It’s known as Places Search and Google introduced it on their blog recently. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/place-search-faster-easier-way-to-find.html

At a glance what does this look like?

Effectively, instead of viewing a 7-pack with the top 7 listings in your location you only see the organic listings. Having said that, if the organic listing has a Places account connected to the URL it will combine the pictures, address & reviews from that account into the SERP snippet. Additionally the Map with the place markings has been relocated to the right hand side pushing down the Pay per click sponsored listing. Not only this, but when you scroll down the page the map floats down with you overlaying the sponsored listings as it moves - View new layout

So how will this impact Search Engine Marketing?

Firstly, from a Pay per click perspective, it will increase the importance of your ad displaying in the top 3 sponsored listings.

If your sponsored ad is number 4 now, it will show below the map way lower down the page. Additionally considering the map physicially covers (blocks out) listings as it moves, there may be occasions where listings don’t get viewed at all since they are covered as the person scrolls. This will increase the importance of optimizing your site for local targeted visitors. Secondly, places rankings tended to function in a different way to Organic and users could discover techniques of optimizing their places account to appear in the 7-pack without having to be concerned with their Organic Listings.

Now it’s all about your organic results!

So selecting to target local targeted visitors needs to be a concerted effort that you roll out, site wide.

This change has been comingfor a while. Way back in July, Mike Bluementhal indicated that Google were testing a new results page - View his post . Google will roll out this new SERP in more than 40 languages in the next few weeks and we’ll begin to see the impact on advertising over the following number of weeks.

Certainly Google have done some tests on the impact on Pay Per Click revenue but it remains to be seen whether or not overlaying peoples ads is a great idea. Watch this space.

Google Waves Goodbye To Google Wave

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 08:45:00 GMT

Google has waved goodbye to it's real-time collaboration and communication tool Google wave.

We here at WSI are sad to see it go as we had started using it to enable our Internet Marketing consultants to collaborate in real time during our weekly brainstormng sessions.

Google has blamed a lack of users of the service, which was launched last year. Google were excited about Google Wave internally, although they weren't quite sure how users would take to it. My initial thoughts are that they "bit off more than they could chew" and had too broad a scope of its usage.

Wave has not seen the adaption they would have liked to have seen according to Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations at Google in a recent blog post.

"We don't plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects."

The product was created by the two brothers who created Google Maps Jens and Lars Rasmussen.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt was was speaking in Lake Tahoe California said it was hard to understand why the product didn't take off. "We celebrate our failures. This is a company where it is absolutely OK to try something that is very hard, have it not be successful, take the learning and apply it to something new."

Dan Frommer, a journalist with Business Insider said “By showing it’s smart enough to swallow its pride and get rid of bad ideas, like Wave and the Nexus One store, Google is showing us it's probably smart enough to come up with some really successful ideas, too.”

I think there is a lot of truth in Dan's statemenent. There are lots of great apps and tools out there produced by Google that most people are not aware of. It is interesting that even as an Internet Marketing Agency we often stumble upon these tools by accident - and we spend most of our day in Google land!

Lets hope Google keep these apps coming but they might want to market them a little better going forward!

Why on-site SEO is still very important

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 14:45:00 GMT

When web companies talk about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) they usually focus on Link Building strategies. However on-site SEO is still very important. A poorly optimsed site in terms of metadata tags can lead to a huge drop in your rankings.

Which Meta Tags are the most important for on-site SEO?

Below is a list of the main meta data tags and some tips based on our experience of working with them.

The Title Tag

The html title tag is ranked highly by Google for keyword relevance . From working with our clients we have found that inappropiate use of the title tag has prevented improved SEO results.

The title tag is at the top of your webpage. You can view this on IE,Firefox,Safari or Chrome by clicking on View, Source (or Page Source, or View Source), this will show you the html for the web page you are viewing.

If you look for the <titlle> tag it will be something like <title> Internet Marketing | SEO Dublin | WSI Dublin Ireland</title>

Some Tips for creating a good title tag are:

Do not exceed 65 characters including spaces
Use your keyword phrases in the title, but do not use keyword stuffing
Keep your most important keyword as far left as possible
If you wish to use your company name for site branding keep it as far right as possible. Separate your title from your brand name by using the "|" symbol
Use a unique title tag on each page of your website and make sure it matches the page content
Place the primary keyword in your title tag as a <h1> header on that specific page
Write your title tag as if you were writing the title text for a Google Adwords ad
The more compelling your title is, the more clicks you are going to get in your search results

The Meta Description Tag

The meta description tag is another important element in on-site Seo. The key is to write a unique Phrase for the description tag that describes the content on that particular page. Your meta description should be up to 160 characters. Use 2-3 keywords and work them into the description. The meta description is the text found under the link on a search results page describing the content on that page so it is important that it is written in plain english and is compelling enough to make someone click on your organic listing.

Headings
A Heading exclusively refers to a <h1>, <h2>, <h3> ... HTML tag, and nothing else. Headings are important as they define what sections of a page contain a heading to a computer, so this information can be used both by search engines (aiding SEO) and to aid assistive technologies (for users with disabilities).

Keyword Tag

According to Matt Cutts of Google, he says that we can completely disregard the keyword tag when we are considering our SEO efforts for Google. It simply doesn't affect your ranking. However we have noticed that it is still used by some of the lesser known search engines so it makes sense to include some prominant keywords under this tag. Remember less is more so don't stuff this tag with lots of keywords.

Alt Tag

Use the Alt tag for all images on your website. This text will appear if the image cannot be displayed. The Alt tag gives a description of your image. Use your keywords in the Alt Tag. Like for your logo image, your ALT tag may be like “WSI Online Marketing a source of Internet Marketing tips” etc.

Robots Attribute

The robot tag prevents the search engine from indexing pages that you don't want crawled. A good example of this would be a Contact page. You do not need Google to index this page

New thinking required for traditional marketing campaigns

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 08:21:00 GMT

For many brand oriented companies, there is still a huge dependence on traditional marketing channels such as TV, radio and print to get their message out. This dependence is like a drug habit that is hard to kick!

I think larger companies that spend the majority of their marketing budget on TV campaigns, are worried that if they reduce this spend then they will see a significant reduction in their sales revenue.

I would like to challenge this argument with the following points.

How do you measure the ROI for TV Campaigns? TV advertising does of course have its own set of measurement metrics. Companies running TV campaigns will be familiar with metrics such as audience universes, Campaign Reach, Campaign Impact, TOMA (Top of mind awareness) etc. These metrics are all great BUT... they are all based on a sampling technique. For example in Ireland, RTE (in partnership with Nielson) place a Peopleometer in a number of homes to analyse the viewing habits of a sample audience. They then extrapolate this sample data to provide statistics for your campaign. In effect your data is based on the viewing habits of 1800 people in 670 homes.

"There is no hard data to determine how many people actually saw your ad - and of the people who saw your ad how many took action?"

Consumers no longer trust "Push Marketing". Marketing is no longer a "monologue" message pushed put to consumers. Instead it is a two-way conversation ocurring across channels and around the globe and marketing tactics that respect this transition such as Social Media Marketing will reap better results.

"That's not to say that there is no role for traditional marketing campaigns"

We have found that an integrated campaign incorporating offline and online marketing can yield some great results. We recently ran a campaign for a client over a six week period. Our online marketing initiatives included running a PPC campaign on Google and a Facebook advertising campaign. Although the majority of our visitors came from the search engines you can see from the chart that 12.99% (accounting for approximately 2,000 visitors) came directly to the website. This was primarily due to the TV campaign that ran for a 2 week period.

By integrating traditional marketing initiatives you can start measuring results which will help you determine which campaign elements are working best.

Welcome

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:16:00 GMT

This is my first blog post on our new website which we have just launched this week!

Feel free to grab a cup of tea, put your feet up and take a look around. You'll find heaps of great content and information about Internet Marketing, and there's plenty of goodies for you to take away in the form of internet marketing tips and whitepapers.

We have also put together a knowledge library which has lots of information on digital marketing.

I hope you enjoy and feel free to let us know what you think! Leave us a comment...

The buzz around Social Media

Thu, 20 May 2010 11:26:00 GMT

It seems you can't go to any business conference these days without someone mentioning the importance of Facebook, Linked in, You Tube and of course twitter. I'm sure you've also heard all of the buzz surrounding the benefits of blogging and if you haven't already started, I'd hazzard a guess that you're feeling just a little bit guilty?

There is no doubt about it - Social Media has revolutionised the world of Internet Marketing and as Internet Marketing professionals, it has turned our world upside down. However it is here to stay so we need to understand it and figure out how companies can leverage it as part of their online marketing strategies.

Blog

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 10:15:00 GMT

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