Internet Marketing Revealed

One of the things I often say that most bloggers get wrong is they sacrifice keyword focus for being clever, cute, or entertaining. Yes, it is important that you make your blog posts as interesting as possible; but you should never ignore the opportunity to tie into commercial concepts. Since I often get criticized for telling you what you do wrong but not how to do it right, here are some examples about how to write interesting blog posts that are more keyword focused.

First out of the gate is an article from the New York Times about how to get an artificial tan without looking like Snooki from the Jersey Shore. As we come into summer, lots of people are looking for ways to look like they have a tan without spending time in the sun or in a tanning booth. Artificial tanning products have been around for years, but the results can be hit or miss. This article addresses that issue with a tie in to the Jersey Shore, which makes a nice pop culture hook.  If it were my site and not a news site, there would have been some affiliate products links, but I think you get the picture.

Next up is another seasonal post–but this one has a viral keyword hook. I know that flip flops aren’t the most supportive shoes, but I didn’t know they made your shin muscles work harder … did you? When I passed by the magazine rack at the gym, I noticed that toning shoes have started to  appear on the covers a lot, but I didn’t know much about them. Here’s an article about toning shoes from USA Today that plays the viral hook “revolutionary sneaker, or overhyped gimmick.” When you come across the article, it’s very likely that you’ll share it. I know I did. Again, if I ran a site and we did an article like that, it would certainly have some affiliate links in it.

Hopefully by now you are familiar with the concept of an editorial calendar and are using it to your advantage. It’s also an excellent opportunity to try and capture some KWD focused searches with things like posts for Father’s Day. These kind of posts are easy because you know they are coming, have a lot of lead time, and can time your publishing for maximum exposure. Something else to note: see how they interlinked the Mother’s Day post at the bottom … don’t miss out on opportunities like that.

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Google has one of the most extensive web site indexes in the World Wide Web. Being the most popular search engine there is today, Google has established itself and set standards for other search engines to try and follow. The company has done this by using one of the most advanced indexing tools in its arsenal, the GoogleBot.

The GoogleBot is the company’s web crawler that scours the Internet and inspects the web sites in order to have them ranked according to Google’s standards.

Earlier versions of the GoogleBot had limited functions. It did nothing more than to search and read links and analyze codes in the Web. Google though revealed that the GoogleBot has been upgraded and can now interact with JavaScript. It went so far to declare that the Bot can understand some Java. If what they said was true, indexing and differentiating web sites with rich and quality content would be a whole lot easier.

JavaScript is not a relatively easy thing to understand. And for a bot to be able to do this is very impressive. According to Forbes, it is very hard to apply algorithms to a program and ensure that the program will continue to work ad infinitum. These difficult issues though can be eased if GoogleBot can execute JavaScript by itself.

Many analysts credit the Google Caffeine, the newest version of the company’s search index, for this vast improvement on the GoogleBot. With Google Caffeine, searching the Internet is now faster and more comprehensive. In order to do these, upgraded web crawlers would definitely be needed.

The world is now feeling the results that this new and improved GoogleBot provide. Now, many are looking forward at what the world’s largest search engine company will be doing next.

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SEO, as you know, stands for Search Engine Optimization, and you might rightly expect that SEO is about optimizing pages to appeal to search engines. And you’d be right. Increasingly, however, I am finding that clients believe so fervently in SEO that they aren’t actually optimizing their pages for sales. If you are falling into the trap, you’ll likely regret looking so narrowly at SEO.

This was all brought to mind by interactions with two different people the last few days who each are concerned about the same thing—search traffic dropping to their sites. When I dug into the situation further, I found that neither had any idea what kind of sales they were generating from their sites. One, in fact, knew that the page that had recently dropped in search rankings had an extremely high bounce rate, so they couldn’t have been selling very much.

Now, for both of these people, the lack of sales was not a crisis, but the drop in search traffic and the drop in search rankings was a crisis. It was hard not to chuckle at how times have changed.

I guess you’ve been in the search business a long time when you can remember when you had to prove every nickel that would come in because we did this new SEO thing. No one believed it would work and no one wanted to do it.

And look at us now. Now there are people walking around that have such a rabid belief in SEO that they think it is an end in iteself—that high rankings or even high traffic is some kind of magical elixir. It’s not.

Getting people to the front door of your Web site isn’t the end of the game. Unless you are optimizing your pages to actually sell things, online or offline, you’re not ready for SEO. In fact, if your Web site stinks, you should probably try to have as few people find it as possible. If you don’t know why you want people coming to your site, then figure that out first. Once you know your site can sell stuff, then it makes sense to use SEO and any other means at your disposal to drive as many people there as possible.

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