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miercuri, 26 ianuarie 2011

SEOptimise

Not Using AdWords Remarketing? Don’t Delay! (Actually Do)

Posted: 25 Jan 2011 08:13 AM PST

I recently read an AdWords Remarketing tips post which made me think of a few ways to improve your AdWords Remarketing campaigns by introducing a delay between when a person visits your site and when you start showing adverts to them.

Image from Stuck in Customs on Flickr

Buying Cycles
One problem with Remarketing is that it is hard to measure incremental value from it. A remarketing conversion tells you that someone who visited your site came back to your site and then bought something; the causal link between the advert and the purchase is not as clear as it is with search advertising.

Giving users time to complete their purchase naturally before you start showing them adverts avoids this problem whilst still taking advantage of the main feature of Remarketing; that people who have already been on your website are more valuable than people who haven’t.

For an ecommerce client we set up a 7 day delay on their remarketing to match the length of their buying cycle.

To setup a delay you need to create a remarketing tag as normal and then create another list using that tag but with a shorter duration. In this case they have 1 tag across their whole site with two remarketing audiences associated with it, one of them has a duration of 21 days and the other has a duration of 7 days. Then create a custom list containing everyone in the 21 day audience and no one from the 7 day audience. Bingo! Now you have to wait to see if it works.

Consumables
Another client sells a product which uses a consumable that they also sell. They reckon that people will need a refill after about 6 months. Using AdWords Remarketing, we are able to target people 6 months after they purchase with adverts for refills. Awesome!

Setting this up can be a bit more complicated.

If you want to target everyone who purchased but with a 6 month delay then you can use an existing Adwords conversion tracking code as a Remarketing tag. Then you can define your audiences as above.

If you need to target only people who purchased a particular product then you will need to insert a new remarketing tag into the conversion page only if the customer has bought the product. This might be easy or hard depending on your platform and web development team.

Seasonals
I manage several clients in the travel industry. I have setup a Remarketing audience for them that targets people who have converted 11 months down the line; just when they will be thinking about their next holiday!

Image from joiseyshowaa on Flickr

The maximum duration for a Remarketing audience membership is 540 days (nearly 18 months) so there is plenty of time to take into account all sorts of seasonal variation.

I hope this post has given you some Remarketing ideas. Leave a comment or find me on twitter if you have any other Remarketing tips.

Seth's Blog : The shell game of delight

[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]

The shell game of delight

Let's try a challenging thought experiment.

I'm going to pick a number between one and five, inclusive. I'm not going to tell you what it is. Now, try to guess. Focus hard, sharpen your senses, and see if you can guess what I'm thinking of...

Click on your guess (just one, please): one, two, three, four, five.

Cynics have already become annoyed at me. But most people, particularly if I added a little spin, would be delighted at their sensitivity and psi-power.

The point: you can easily create similar interactions in the way you do business with people. Setting up prospects, customers and bosses to be right is almost always worth the effort. It's so much more useful than setting people up to fail.

Why then, do we organize interfaces, manuals, contracts and relationships to have people fail merely because they didn't guess what we had in mind? When in doubt, make it so people succeed.

• Email to a friend •

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marți, 25 ianuarie 2011

You've Never Seen a State of the Union Address Like This

Good morning,

Tonight at 9 p.m. EST, President Obama will deliver the State of the Union Address and outline his vision for putting aside the politics that divide us and moving forward to create jobs, up our game to out-compete in the global economy, and win the future for our children and our country.

This year we're trying something new. As President Obama addresses the Nation, we'll offer a companion stream of visual aids, including charts and quick stats about what’s happening in the country. You can view this feature at WhiteHouse.gov/SOTU.

Immediately following the speech, stay tuned for our live Open for Questions event with policy experts from the White House answering your questions about key issues in the speech.

Watch the speech and submit your questions:

Throughout the week, we'll have plenty of ways for you to get involved and ask questions of President Obama and other senior Administration officials about the State of the Union Address. See a full line-up of events and find out how to submit your questions:

http://www.WhiteHouse.gov/SOTU

Don't forget to tune in tonight at 9 p.m. EST!

Sincerely,

David Plouffe
Senior Advisor to the President

P.S. The State of the Union Address is a major undertaking here at the White House. You can learn more about the history and the making of this annual speech in our brand new "Inside the White House" video:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/Inside-SOTU

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Please do not reply to this email. Contact the White House

The White House • 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW • Washington, DC 20500 • 202-456-1111

How to Build an Effective Footer Graywolf's SEO Blog

How to Build an Effective Footer

Posted: 25 Jan 2011 07:13 AM PST

Footers are one of the most often underused, misused and abused areas of a website. In this post, I’ll be taking a look at footers and passing on some tips to help you get more out of them.

Link Brothel

Have you ever visited a website where they have 50, 100 or even 150 links down in the footer area? Then, friends, you have seen a link brothel. Search engines look at your website and try to isolate the template from the content, and weight different areas differently. They also try to break down the template and isolate masthead, sidebars, and footers and weight them differently (see How to Silo Your Website: The Footer). So by plunking down all of those static links, you aren’t helping yourself. My recommendation: keep the number of links in your footer to a minimum–under 25 if possible. You better have a really good reason if you have more than 50.

Dynamic Footers

One tip to make make footers more interesting to search engines is to make them dynamic. By dynamic, I mean mix up the content. You could include links to your 5 most recent blogs posts, add links to the 5 pages you updated last, or add links to your 5 most popular posts of the week, your 5 most emailed posts, or 5 of your featured posts. The key is to introduce and expose content that is changing on a regular basis to search engines. The New York Times does an excellent job of this in their footer. They may have added images, but the concept is the same.

New York Times Footer

Date Tagging and Crawl Debugging

If you have a large site, it can sometimes be helpful to tell what parts of the site Google doesn’t “like” and doesn’t crawl frequently. If you add the current month and year into the footer with a bit of unique text like “page generated on Jan 2011,” and then come back two months later and do a search for [site:example.com "page generated Jan 2011"]. It will give you a listing of pages that haven’t been crawled in over 60 days. It’s a low tech but easy way to figure out where you have crawl issues. WARNING: don’t go with a full date or Google might use it date tag your pages.

No-Follow and Pagerank Sculpting

Full disclosure: I used to be a strong advocate of no-follow and pagerank sculpting. I have since changed my position and no longer feel that it’s an effective tactic. So if you are using no-follow to keep search engines out of things like your contact page, privacy policy, terms of service page or similar pages, please stop. It’s likely doing you more harm than good. However there are some instances when you want to use no-follow. Do you have any login links, such as gift registries, customer accounts, or admin pages? If you do, those are pages you want to keep the search engines out of and where you should use no-follow. Additionally you should use robots.txt to block those pages as well.

Usability and Font Sizing

While this has nothing to do with SEO, usability is something everyone should be concerned about. When constructing your footer it’s ok to use a font size that’s slightly smaller than your normal font size. That said, micro fonts are bad, no matter what that beret-wearing designer tells you. You can use a lighter or different color font, but don’t make it invisible: that just makes it look like you are trying to hide something. If you have a lot of items in your footer, group them into logical categories or hierarchies, don’t be scatterbrained about it. Use sub-headers to make it easy to figure out. Use standard naming conventions: if you have a contact form, name it “contact” or “contact us”; don’t be cute and use “talk to us.” You don’t want to violate the “Don’t Make Me Think” Principle.

So let’s recap. What are some ways to make your footer more effective:

Limit the number of links, keeping only essential elements.
Introduce a limited number of dynamic elements.
Include a limited date on your pages to track crawling issues.
Use no-follow to keep spiders out of protected content, not for pagerank sculpting.
Organize your footer into categories, using sub-headers to keep things clear.
Use smaller and lighter fonts with care. Don’s sacrifice usability for looks.

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How to Build an Effective Footer

The State of the Union Address: Watch and Engage

Your Daily Snapshot for
Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2011

The State of the Union: Watch and Engage

Tonight at 9 p.m. EST President Obama will deliver the State of the Union Address at the U.S. Capitol.

Watch: As President Obama addresses the Nation, WhiteHouse.gov will offer a companion stream of visual aids, like charts and quick stats to provide context and emphasize key points. Anyone will be able to use this feature by heading to WhiteHouse.gov/SOTU.
Engage: Immediately following the speech, stay tuned for our live Open for Questions event with policy experts from the White House answering your questions about key issues in the speech: WhiteHouse.gov/SOTU

Inside the White House: The State of the Union Address

Ever wanted to know how President Obama tackles a speech like his State of the Union address? Our latest Inside the White House feature takes you into the West Wing offices of Jon Favreau, a longtime speechwriting aide to the President, and Senior Advisor David Axelrod to get a rare glimpse at how the process works -- and what the President is thinking.

Watch the video.