Exposed seo and internet marketing

Most of the SEO gurus and guides out there tell you to focus on getting your site to the top spot in Google for your keywords. It’s an admirable goal and it’s certainly something to strive for but being on top of the SERPs isn’t everything. There’s more to getting clicks to your site than just being ranked highly in Google. Take a look at this chart I swiped from one my sites using Google Webmaster Tools:

I cut out the search terms on left but this is for a varied bunch of terms that all rank number one in Google. You’ll notice that despite all the terms being ranked first, the click through ratio varies greatly from 100% down to 33%. That is because of other factors in the SERPs beyond just being the first result.

Some of these things you can change. Your onsite SEO is very important, like the meta info and page titles that appear in the results (if you’re using WordPress there are good plugins like All in One SEO that will do this for you automatically). Your site name is a factor- site names relevant to the keywords will be more likely to get clicks. The number and type of ads appearing above the results is a HUGE factor that unfortunately you can’t control without buying ads yourself. Relevancy of the other results is also a big factor; if your site looks like it matches what the searcher is looking for better than the rest of the results on the page (or with a more intriguing page title), you’re going to get the click whether you’re number one or number nine.

Here’s another chart I pulled sorted by clickthrough percentage; I chose a middle of the road percentile for demonstration purposes: Read the rest of this entry »

One of the more popular groups of bloggers today in terms of sheer number of blogs and readers is the “Mom Bloggers” or “Mommy Bloggers” category. I’m sure many of you have at least heard of Dooce which is probably the most well known in the genre (she gets over 3 million pageviews a month!). But there are literally tens of thousands of other smaller sites with hundreds of thousands of readers and you can use this to your advantage.

While it’s hard to generalize about such a large group, I’ve found that some of the more popular topics that Mom Bloggers write about is kids and parenting, family life, coupons and deals and contests. Again generalizing here but I’ve found Mommy Bloggers to be VERY receptive to relevant comments on their site and direct emails. Of course like any other site you can leave comments for links. But let’s delve a little deeper.
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I’ve noticed an interesting change in the way that Google gives results when searching with quotes. In the past it was not necessary to close your quotes to get an exact match search. You could use an opening quote only and then type in your search query and the SERP page would appear exactly the same as if you had used both opening and ending quotes like the search pictured above. But now, an open quoted search looks like this:

It’s gone from 1 match to 400,000 matches. While the exact match for this particular search still ranks at the top of the SERPs, note that Google lists many other results as if the query was entered without quotes at all. What’s interesting is that on a particular search I just did (not pictured), the exact match DID NOT appear first in the SERPs.

What does this mean? Well I’m not sure how many people use the no ending quotes shortcut to search in Google (or if there’s even a way to find out) but it’s no longer a viable way to research anything. Any users who do search in that way, will no longer be getting the exact match results they are expecting. I don’t think it’s worthwhile to pursue any strategies to take advantage of it in any way other than to increase your rankings in general (since I’m assuming the percentage of users who are affected is small) but it’s something you should definitely be aware of for your own research if you had been using this shortcut.

If you’re like me you belong to a LOT of different affiliate programs on various networks. Each network and merchant on those networks have their own set of rules about email notifications. Some only send out important notices, others like to email you daily with deals and new items, others don’t seem to email you ever. The quantity of mail can get to be overwhelming. But no matter how OVERLOADED your inbox might be, you NEVER want to miss an email like this one I received yesterday from a merchant on Shareasale:

This merchant has made a change to their default commission rate.

Previous Per Lead Commission: $25.00
New Per Lead Commission: $0.00

OUCH! Luckily I was not actually promoting this merchant at the time (although I had planned to soon- not anymore obviously). But that’s the exact reason why you should subscribe to email notifications, especially if you are spending any sort of money to bring in clicks. On the flip side, if the merchant increases a payout, you definitely want to know about it right away too so you can promote it more.
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