• The earlier you start the better prepared you will be if other things pop up (which they inevitably do)
• You may find that some of your ideas may take time to come together (Do you have some research to do? Do you need other people to make things happen? How much time will they need to get their part done?)
• If you are optimizing for new products or services, it will take some time for your efforts to show up in the search engines
• If there are changes to your website or marketing message you’ll probably want to test a thing or two to make sure you are getting the most out of your efforts (and test it before the holiday rush of visitors hits your site)

Let’s take a look at each one of these points in a bit more detail.

Things Pop Up
When was the last time your business ran as smooth as you planned for an entire month, let alone an entire year? Probably never. Unexpected things happen that take up your valuable time – the time you may be planning on working on the holiday season. If you are able to map out a plan of attack for your holiday season right now, you will be more likely to stick by it and be able to complete it on time.

Most Online Initiative Take Some Time To Come Together
Some initiatives require other resources like designers and copywriters. The earlier they are involved the more apt they are to meet your deadlines. A PPC campaign is often a powerful revenue driver around the holiday season. And sure, you can pull one together over coffee one afternoon in late November. But to really get the most out of your investment you should start early so you can test different keywords, different ads and different landing pages. That way once the holiday traffic is searching for your product or service you are ready to take advantage of it.

Jumping Up The Search Engines Doesn’t Happen Overnight
As we all know, it takes time for solid SEO efforts to show results in the search engines. So if you start now, you may just be #1 for the terms you want by the time we’re all holiday shopping. But if you start in November there is virtually no shot at that.

It’s Better To Test With A Smaller Sample Size
If you’re testing a new marketing message with an email campaign and / or your website, why wait until the bulk of your customers are coming to buy your product to test it? It make sense to test it out when the stakes are not as high. Test a few landing page designs on a small sample (maybe only part of an email list, maybe a month when traffic to your site isn’t that high). That way you have the kinks out when it’s time for the holiday rush.

Are you still under the impression that it’s too earlier to start thinking about Christmas 2010? Or are you all ready starting to plan for the 2011 season? Let us know your thoughts.

Then we’d like to recommend that you take a look at the PDFs on your site to make sure that they are optimized. One of the items we find when looking at websites is that the PDFs have been completely ignored. Now to be fair, some of this is probably because up until a few years ago many people were told that PDFs couldn’t or shouldn’t be optimized; that any work done to them would not help the page’s or the website’s ranking. Let’s put this argument to bed right now:

PDFs can and should be optimized for search engines.

Search engines can read PDFs, assuming the text is not an image. So if they are optimized properly, the PDFs on your site can offer a new avenue to gain extra traffic from.

So what optimization tactics should you perform on your PDFs? Here are a few of the main ones:

• Whenever possible, optimize the text of the PDF just as you would any page of your site.
• Be sure to fill out the Document Properties: Title, Author, Subject and Keyword. Treat the Title field like the page title, the Subject field like the meta description and the Keyword field like the meta keyword field.
• Optimize the file name.
• Keep total file size down as low as possible. As with any page on your site, the larger the file size the slower it loads. This starts with any images you include with the original file, and continues through to when you convert the file to a PDF.
• When converting a file to a PDF, be sure to use a program that does not make it one image. For this, programs like Adobe Acrobat, Nitro PDF Professional and Bullzip work well. Photoshop and Illustrator do not.
• Link to the PDF. Make sure the search engines can find it. Use quality anchor text as link when possible.
• Link out from the PDF. Give the search engines a path out of the PDFs to continue to the rest of your site.
• Express the PDF file structure in tags.
• Optimize PDF for fast view web.

So the next time you’re looking for something that might give your website a boost in the search engines, take a look at your PDFs. It may be a hidden opportunity for you to increase traffic to your site.

Have you optimized PDFs and seen success? Still have questions about this topic? Comment and let us know. ]]> http://blog.mannixmarketing.com/2009/08/seo-for-pds/feed/ 4 http://blog.mannixmarketing.com/2009/08/internet-self-promotion/ http://blog.mannixmarketing.com/2009/08/internet-self-promotion/#comments Mon, 03 Aug 2009 15:47:28 +0000 sarahl@mannixmarketing.com http://blog.mannixmarketing.com/?p=1221 With the onset of social media mega giants like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, it’s almost impossible to really ‘turn yourself off’. We humans love to connect with others and do so by updating our statuses, profile pictures, photo albums and (obsessively) updating our tweets. There is always something to share with our cyber friends…but are we sharing too much?

With jobs running scarce, the economy shaky and even long standing media closing its doors, we are turning to the internet as our lifeline. With our desire to always stay connected, we post just about anything to our social media profiles – from what we had for breakfast, to whether or not we think it will rain for another 30 days straight. We ask our ‘followers’/’fans’/’voyeurs’ to take polls, quizzes and/or give us advice on what life throws at us. In the world of the internet, we may think it stays on our screens, but it doesn’t. Anything you post online is public and for all to see.

For those who may have just gasped after reading that, rest assured. Each social media networking site has privacy settings that you can alter based upon your preferences. My suggestion? If you don’t want your mom reading about your night out, why would you post it publicly on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter? Don’t post pictures or enable the ‘tag’ feature on photos…your employer does not want to see you pie eyed at some random bar on a Friday night.
Here are some do’s and don’ts when it comes to Social Media.

Social Media Don’ts:

• Don’t Be Pompous: Just because you are sitting in front of a computer screen doesn’t mean you are invincible. No one likes a ‘know it all’, so don’t act like one. If you are looking for a new job, follow those in your niche. Ask questions. Be available for meet ups. Be Proactive. Get your ego in check and act humble. It’s all about networking and building friendships.
• Don’t Slap it on Heavy: Let’s face it. The job market is tough and the hiring process is not easy. Stay true to yourself and don’t lie about your past work experiences because Google always remembers. Tout your winnings, but not too loudly as this might offend your followers or perhaps turn people away from contacting you. Believe it or not, a self promoting tweet may be the demise of your online persona.
• Don’t Blab About Anything and Everything: No one cares if you are drinking a Coke or “so tired you can’t keep your eyes open”. People care about unique, enticing content. Share your thoughts, your goals or talk about the latest project that you worked on. Update your statuses with ‘sticky’ content and it will drive people to look at your profile and even follow you.
• Don’t Just Set it and Forget it: Social media profiles take time to setup and even more time to maintain. If you setup a Facebook Page for your business, it’s wise to have someone on staff to update it regularly. If you setup a Twitter account for your client, it’s best if you maintain weekly status updates; checking for new friends, direct messages, shout outs or reviews. You never know when that ‘hot lead’ will come in…it’s best to be ready.

Social Media Do’s:

• Do Be Friendly, Cordial and Respective: People love feedback. Comment on statuses of those that you follow and respect. Virtually get to know your friends by checking out their social media profile. Where do they work? What is their passion? Comment, share posts, befriend. Karma, folks. It does come back to you.
• Do Participate: Just like with status updates, you can also post messages on links that people share. Or, take it upon yourself to share the content of your peers via a ‘Share This’ button. Blog about a new product. Make news viral. Share the ‘link love’ by giving others a direct link to your website. Link popularity is a huge component to getting found in the search engines. The more high quality links you have pointing to your website, the more credible and valuable your website appears to the end user and the search engines.
• Be Proactive About Leads: You may have a variety of social media accounts. Synch them up using Hootsuite, TweetLater or Ping.fm and update statuses quickly and efficiently with these tools. Make sure to check regularly for direct messages, shout outs or ‘thumbs up’ and give the love right back. Connect, Engage, Communicate and Befriend.
• Do Set Your Privacy Settings: Like I said, no one really wants to see you carrying on in pictures, especially not your employer. We have become too comfortable online and seem to post everything for all eyes to see. Be aware of what you or your friends are posting about you. Set your privacy settings so that you must approve everything first.

Online social networks, whether for personal or business use, are a wonderful thing. Just make sure you know how to use them appropriately to make them work for you!

Social media fatigue can be the result of many different factors.  Successful blogging and social media development requires consistent – nearly constant – submissions to your blog site.  Twittering can become a full-time commitment in itself, not to mention Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn…the list is endless!

How can you tell when you’re suffering from social media fatigue? One symptom is simply being tired of being ‘on’ all the time.  You may feel like people are driving you crazy, filling up your screen with play-by-play rundowns of everything happening in their day, from their conversation with the person at the drive-through window where they get their morning coffee, to complaints about how long they are sitting at a red light or their latest tiff with their spouse. You might be tired of having people you hardly know send you virtual cocktails, hugs, hints, or chocolates!

You really don’t need to lose your internet marketing momentum…there are some ways to minimize the negative and accentuate the positive:

• Whether you are using your social media environments for personal use or to build your professional or business online presence, you may be tempted to simply ‘disinvite’ those people who you so anxiously lobbied as friends or followers. Is there a way to disengage or step away without being insulting? It may help just to review each location individually…each has its own privacy settings that can help to minimize the onslaught.
• If your passwords are all unique and you feel like you can’t remember another string of characters, consider investing in a secure, reliable password password manager.
• Setting limits may be your best option…keeping yourself to a particular time frame and sticking to it can go a long way toward relieving the stress – yes, we said stress – that can accompany the feeling of always needing to be submitting to these locations.

Because successful internet marketing is so incredibly important, you may also be trying to keep up with your website development, content, search engine optimization, etc. Letting the experts handle some of those tasks for you can also go a long way toward helping you manage your time.

Have you checked this new search engine out yet? Do you like it? Let us know what you think of this latest search platform. I was pleasantly surprised, actually, and plan on investigating it further. Bing offers us searchers categorized listings and if you hover over certain links, you will see ‘more info’. Streamlined and quite nice!

The fly-outs next to the actual links give users a quick glimpse into what the page is about prior to clicking on the link.  Like Google, there are advertising links and options for the user to ’sign in’ with an account. Bing’s search results categorize the listings  for you – depending on your industry. See here:

The results are in and they seem pretty good to me! Critics are biting their tongues as they review this new engine. With a mere 8% of the search market, I think it’s safe to say that Microsoft has some catching up to do in order to compete with Google’s dominating, 64%. Oh well, I guess you gotta start somewhere! Kudos to you, Mr. Bing for putting yourself out there.

In this image, you can see where the Ten Pack is located on the Google Search Results Page. If your site is not listed, it is worth the effort to make some adjustments to your Google Local account to try to get it there.

First things first. You need a Google Local account. Click here to set one up. If you already have an account, here are some TOP items to check and adjust:

A. Your Title. By adding keywords in your Title, you are placing yourself at an advantage. You are instructed to use the legal name of your business, so definitely use it, But it is perfectly fine to add some keywords in this field as well.

B. Your Description. By adding keywords within your description, you are building your credibility.

C. Your actual location. Your actual location in relation to what Google considers the centroid of the city will play a part in where you are placed within the Ten Pack. Although this is not something you can modify (unless you want to move your business), you should be aware that this is taken into consideration.

D. Reviews. I highly suggest getting some reviews posted.

E. Google Map. Although you may not find this tip very often in other blogs, I recommend adding a Google Map to your directions page. If you don’t have a directions page, add one! … and then add a Google Map to it.

F. Utilize all Features. There is room for 10 images – add them! There is room for a video – add one! Answer all the questions and make your account as complete as possible.

Try these tips to either get your site included in the Ten Pack or to increase your existing placement within the Ten Pack. Should you need additional assistance, please give Mannix Marketing, Inc. a call! One of our highly trained SEO Specialists will be glad to assist you further.

High Expectations

It’s human nature to want to be the best, the first, the know-it-all. With search, however, everyone may seem to have the answer to the approximate time frame as to when you will see optimal results – but in reality, it’s just a bunch of opinions (for the most part).

Without hard cold facts to back up a SEO campaign; not me, not you, nor the next SEO firm can really tell you exactly what you should expect to see within a given time frame. Sure, we can speculate based upon previous stats, past SEO experiences or what has happened with like-clients in your industry…but ultimately, SEO firms do not control the search engine algorithms, nor should they pretend to.

The Evolution of Search

With the on-set of behavioral-personalized search, the search-wiki, social media optimization and other forms of search – it is the job of your SEO strategist to determine the best online marketing initiatives and execute them accordingly. There are no miracles, no fairies, no stardust here – just dedicated hard work from your Marketing Firm. As we’ve mention before, the verdict is in…true SEO takes time.

(P.S: I’m not the only one in this industry who thinks this way, see this, read that, or find out what they have to say.)

SEO expectations need to be established from the get-go during the initial talks between SEO firm and potential client. This is how you build trust.  A thorough site analysis needs to happen first in order to determine what services are needed to develop a comprehensive SEO plan. How much time it will take for results to show depends upon many website variables: has the site ever had optimization in the past, how old is the domain, how many backlinks (are they from credible sites?), is the site already optimized in the social media arena, does the site already have placements, is the domain name new, how much copy is on the site vs. how much copy needs to be written, competitive analysis (targeting local/niche vs. broad/national),  and the list goes on from there.

An example: Are you targeting the keyword ‘cars’ or the phrase ‘albany used car dealerships’…this is a HUGE difference.  5,000,000 searches vs. a mere 700,000 searches! A 10 page site targeting ‘cars’ vs. a thousand page site targeting ‘cars’ – you get my point, I hope.

SEO is Part Art, Part Science – Don’t believe me? Let me explain.

Crafting search engine friendly, ’sticky’ Title tags and Meta descriptions (the snippets of text that the search engines pull in) are extremely important. And, despite what most people think, is best done  by an experienced copywriter. If you are working with a SEO firm that has copywriters on staff who specialize in internet marketing, you have hit a goldmine. Embrace this. Writing for the web is much different than writing for print. You have 3-5 seconds to captivate your audience, can you do it alone? I think not. You need experienced professionals on your side.

Link marketing and building brand awareness takes time. You think you can just throw some keyword phrases in your text copy and send your website on its way? Think again. The web has advanced light years since it’s inception. Gone are the days of adding a ton of keywords in the <head> tag, gone are the days of link resources and link directories being ‘the way’ to get found, gone are the days of creating one new page of copy per month and seeing high results in the search engines. Currently, there are over 7 billion searches per month. Um, that’s a lot of searches.

It takes time to get a website optimized to beat out those within your industry. Still not convinced SEO takes time? Here are some more reasons why…

Code, code and more code. Does that sound good? Not really. Long  URLS? No good – most of the time. Search engine spiders have an allotted amount of time to scan your web pages looking for keyword phrases and links.  Do you really want to waste their time scanning javascript, flash or frame sets? This stuff isn’t SEO friendly.

Just like anything in life, if there is one bad apple – well, then it clouds everyone. Unfortunately with competition comes greed. Since the explosion of internet marketing and SEO, there are those that feel the need to spam rather than do things the right way.  Some claim that SEO’s are snakes. Kudos to Mark Jackson for setting the record straight. If this guy knew better (the one making the ridiculous claims), he would’ve done his homework first before posting an article in a well known online magazine for millions to see. Read the original article bashing the SEO industry – what’s your take?

You can see why it’s impossible to answer the 64 million dollar question in 5 minutes

There are no cookie cutter approaches, no bargains, no gimmicks, and no trickery in ethical SEO. Don’t let a couple bad apples spoil your online marketing initiative. Read testimonials from our SEO firm and you be the judge! Trust the facts, listen to what’s being said, and trust your gut.

Internet Marketing is still the best way to advertise your business. TV/radio ads are expensive and may show at odd times of the day. If your site isn’t optimized, you could potentially miss out on over 70% of prospective business. Why would you want to do that?

Still confused? Contact us. We’d be happy to help.

Linking the ‘old fashioned’ way involved locating a site you felt was complementary to yours, adding them to your links page, and contacting them directly to request that they reciprocate.  It requires periodic maintenance to make sure the site links are still valid and that they continue to host your link. Indeed, it involved some time and effort for both parties, but the rewards could often be counted in increased traffic from these sources.

Surprisingly, these links or resource pages that contain quality link exchanges continue to perform. For site owners who have created and developed these in the past, are they worth maintaining? Yes! Should you continue to add links to them? Absolutely, in my opinion. Based upon the statistics of some website owners who continue to do so, it’s definitely worth the effort. There is still a huge segment of the population who are, shall we say…more traditional in their approach to research and browsing the web.

Although simpler and a bit more time intensive, link building on your website can continue to add another dimension to your search engine strategy plan and continue to help grow your online business!

Now, being aware of how quickly things change these days (did you know that they actually say coffee is good for you? Wait, now they say it’s bad for you.), I wanted to check out the official difference from Google itself.

To make a short search story long (come on, do you think Google would make it hard to find the answers in their own search engine?), I had it basically right. Besides a few extra paragraph of marketing fluff, my explanation of AdWords vs AdSense was spot on (see for yourself: AdWords here and AdSense here).

Now, I also wanted to see if others had the same question. The answer: a resounding YES. See all the posts that come up when you search for ‘adwords vs adsense.’ Quite a bit.

Let us know if there are other questions that you, your designers, your developers or your friends may have that we can help answer and spread the knowledge.

There’s a split-second buffer before the alarm goes off separating sleep from a warbling mob that stands ready to attack my eardrums with clubs and parade cymbals. In this brief moment, a subtle noise emits like clock radio speakers inhaling. But before the alarm can ever finish filling its lungs to capacity, and quite possibly before I’m ever awake, an arm (connected to my body) penetrates the darkness and depresses the snooze bar with the precision of a laser guided boney missile. After that daily phenomena, my mind wakes up to thoughts of websites dancing with search engine spiders as I roll out and get ready for another day.

A cup of brewed coffee accompanies the 20 second commute back upstairs to the office. Mental engines are now firing on all cylinders fed from the internal combustion of caffeine and core keyword phrases. SEO work commences with checking emails, Twitter updates, and SEO news. It’s in these morning hours that the bulk of SEO monthly work is performed for clients. Tasks like fixing website errors, finding links, analyzing stats and writing copy flows from blurred finger tips to various stacks of open windows on the monitor. ALT Tab is my friend.

Lunch sneaks up quickly with a tap on my shoulder, and has the duration of a bad Haiku:

Tupperware from fridge;
Salivating, Microwave;
Dumptruck hits my lips

Want to know more about the everyday adventures of an optimizer… follow me.