Determining your website’s ROI is not as easy as it seems. Your website ROI can change over time—sometimes, very quickly.

There are different methods of determining a website’s ROI, depending if it’s a content website or a sales website. You need to know how to calculate your website ROI correctly and how to improve it.

At first glance, you may decide to use a calculation like this:

Total Internet Sales – Total Website Investment & Costs = Total Website ROI

But, you would be wrong!  Even for an e-commerce website with clearly defined sales income, this calculation could seriously overvalue or undervalue your website ROI. A miscalculation of either sort adversely affects your decision making.

• Jump to Calculating Website ROI for an E-Commerce Website
• Jump to Calculating Website ROI for a Content Website

Calculating Website ROI for an E-Commerce Website

E-Commerce Website ROI %= { [ ( NIS-COGS )-( AORC-RCS ) ] / ADC } * 100

It looks complicated but we’ll define those acronyms below. Keep in mind, all figures are to be calculated for the time period you are trying to analyze, whether it’s your yearly ROI, monthly ROI, or your ROI for the past 30 days.

NIS (Net Internet Sales)

Gross online sales dollars – returns of online purchases

NOTE: You may also want to add any advertising revenue generated by your website as well as the Value of Online Conversions such as new leads, memberships or newsletter subscriptions. The significance of these values vary greatly from company to company.

COG (Cost of Goods Sold)

• Original cost of goods
• Handling & inventory costs
• Packaging & postage (include return postage as needed)
• Insurance
• Value of damaged returns
• Online marketing costs
• Offline marketing costs
• Online customer service costs
• Website updates & maintenance costs
• Website hosting fees
• Software & e-commerce license fees
• Consulting fees

AORC (All Other Related Costs)

• Online marketing costs
• Offline marketing costs
• Online customer service costs
• Website updates & maintenance costs
• Website hosting fees
• Software & e-commerce license fees
• Consulting fees

RCS (Related Cost Savings)

This number will be different for every business. Some examples of potential cost saving are:

• Reduced catalog printing and mailing costs
• Reduced lead time
• Reduced long distance phone calls
• Reduced marketing materials – printing, updating, waste and mailing
• Reduced handling
• Reduced inventory
• Fewer sales returns
• Increased market reach (estimated value)
• Fewer bricks and mortar stores

ADC (Associated Development Costs)

Your website development costs, including website design.

Calculating Website ROI for Content Website

Content Website ROI % = { [ ( WIS +  AR + VOC + VOI ) - ( ARC - RCS ) ] / ADC } * 100

It looks complicated but we’ll define those acronyms below. Keep in mind, all figures are to be calculated for the time period you are trying to analyze, whether it’s your yearly ROI, monthly ROI, or your ROI for the past 30 days.

WIS (Web Initiated Sales)

The dollar value of sales your company can attribute to being initiated on your website.  Your company may track this information very carefully and have a precise value you should use.  If not, you may want to establish such a practice.  Otherwise, you will have to extrapolate this value based on discussions with your sales and customer service managers.  You can look at the number of completed contact forms and follow those inquires through to sales to get a feel for how many web based leads convert to offline sales during the period you are analyzing.

AR (Advertising Revenue)

You may have a content rich website to attract “eyeballs” from a particular demographic or the public in general.  Once you have established the number of repeat and unique visitors over time, you may be selling advertising space on your website much the same way as TV, magazines and newspapers do.

VOC = (Value of Online Conversions)

the value your company places on: new leads, newsletter sign ups, new memberships, new contact info.

VOI (Value of Intangibles)

The value of increased brand awareness or products & services awareness.  This should be expressed as a dollar figure.

ARC (All Related Costs)

• Content development costs
• Online marketing $$
• Online customer service costs
• Website updates and maintenance fees
• Website hosting fees
• Software and e-commerce license fees
• Consulting fees

RCS (Related Cost Savings)

This number will be different for every business. Some examples of potential cost saving are:

• Reduced catalog printing and mailing costs
• Reduced lead time
• Reduced long distance phone calls
• Reduced marketing materials – printing, updating, waste and mailing
• Reduced handling reduced inventory fewer sales returns
• Increased market reach (estimated value)
• Fewer bricks and mortar stores

ADC (Associated Development Costs)

Your website development costs, including website design.

Get Help Calculating your Website’s ROI

If you want to learn more about your Website ROI, request a free website review from Pittsburgh Internet Consulting. One of our knowledgeable Internet Marketing Consultants will provide you with more information about our valuable website consulting services including the help you need to define and optimize your website ROI.

Twitter

The introduction of advertising on Twitter has been one of the more transparent transitions amongst the social media networks. While networks such as Facebook have inundated their users with updates and advertisements, advertisements on Twitter have been much less invasive. Users now have 3 options for advertising on Twitter which include:

1. Promoted Tweets – ordinary Tweets that advertisers pay to highlight to a wider group of users. Promoted Tweets from advertising partners are called out at the top of some Twitter search results pages. Promoted Tweets are clearly labeled as “Promoted” when an advertiser is paying, but in every other respect they exist initially as regular Tweets and are organically sent to the timelines of their followers. They also retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, Retweeting, and favoriting. Promoted Tweets are displayed in search in Twitter. If users click on a Tweet that includes a hashtag that is being promoted by an advertiser, they may see a Promoted Tweet among the related Tweets in the details pane. Promoted tweets will also display in related searches in Search Engines. These can be extremely effective for targeting explicit audiences and topics.

1. Promoted Trends are a new advertising concept that began testing in June as an extension of the Promoted Tweets platform. With Promoted Trends, users see time-, context-, and event-sensitive trends promoted by our advertising partners. These paid Promoted Trends appear at the top of the Trending Topics list on Twitter and are clearly marked as “Promoted.” The only real difference from a regular trending topic is that a Promoted Trend is marked as being promoted. Like all other Trending Topics, Promoted Trends are already popular subjects on Twitter, but may not have made their way into the Trending Topics list yet. If a topic doesn’t already meet a minimum level of popularity on Twitter, it can’t be a Promoted Trend.
2. Promoted Accounts are part of “Suggestions for You,” which suggests accounts that people don’t currently follow and may find interesting. Promoted Accounts helps introduce an wider variety of accounts people may enjoy. As with Promoted Trends and Promoted Tweets, this suggestion is labeled as ‘Promoted’ to distinguish it from other recommended accounts. Promoted Accounts are suggested based on a user’s public list of whom they follow. When an advertiser promotes an account, Twitter’s algorithm looks at that account’s followers and determines other accounts that those users tend to follow. If a user follows some of those accounts, but not the advertiser’s account, then Twitter may recommend the advertiser’s Promoted Account to that user. One of the drawbacks of promoted accounts is that they are generally not very targeted and can overlap into other popular topics and end up giving you followers who are not genuinely interested in your products or discussions.

Although Twitter advertising has been well accepted in the social network’s community, advertising should in no way be considered a silver bullet. Advertising alone will not be an effective marketing tool in Twitter. Companies still need to pay considerable attention to activity and monitor @ replies and retweets to ensure Twitter users know that they are “alive”.

Advertisers should also be sure to tailor their ads. Users rely on Twitter for quick information and finding a variety of input on any given topic. Companies need to analyze the important facets of their business to users to create effective promotions.

The challenge for businesses in Twitter advertising is to avoid throwing money at it rather than carving out a stakehold in the community. Thinking that ROI is going to good by simply buying your way to the top will not be effective. Twitter is very communication driven and users tend to appreciate companies that put in the time and effort to provide good information and interaction with followers will be much more respected and thus much more profitable.

Lastly, Tweets count as links and authoritative users are given more credit for links. So become a Twitter authority if you want link building power.

Facebook

Facebook has become one of the largest markets for businesses worldwide and there seems to be a general consensus that you either love it or you hate it. Those who hate it are the companies that have had little or no success doing business on the social network. The main reason that many FB campaigns fail is because they are created hastily and poorly and are not created with a plan to monetize. Some steps to take that will help prevent this problem:

• Make use of newsletters, webinars, and contests on your FB page. Any type of activity or event you can create that provokes user involvement will keep users on your page and make them more apt to purchasing.
• E-commerce stores like SortPrice provide users a direct store on the company FB page. This allows users to shop the products rather than having to follow links to the website in order to view more products.
• Send gift cards to users through FB. The more benefits users see on a FB page the more they will spread through word of mouth and return to the site.
• FB now has applications that essentially use the technology of Groupon. Certain coupons or sales can be offered with a threshold for the sale to take place.

Today, 30% of traffic on sites is socially referred. It is important to the success of business to initiate effective FB campaigns to keep up with competition and convert sales.

Many companies outsource their Social Media, which can be very effective but should be done with caution. There is more to it than simply handing over your account username and password to a SM guru and sitting back with your feet up as the money rolls in. The owner should have involvement in the social networks. They will need to minimally log in and respond to questions and inquiries that a social media expert is not qualified or able to answer. Your SM expert should also be integrated into your company, brief them on the essentials of the business so they understand it and can interact appropriately with your social circle. Databases of pre-approved content for your SM expert to post is also a good idea as they can be provided with weeks’ worth of material to send out without having to constantly ask your permission or ask for new material. Also, promotions, coupons, updates etc. should be sent out in bulk. Very rarely does one message get read by the majority of your fans or followers. It is likely that to reach most of your followers you will need to send out information 3-4 times through a variety of avenues like direct messaging, status updates and @ mentions.

It is worth noting that 92% of fans of any given page never return to the actual page. So, unless you are sending updates and material out to your followers and fans, most of them will never see anything on your page. Advertising to friends of fans is a great way to get new followers and keep the fan page a “social community” as users will see that their friends are fans of the page and be motivated to join as well.

Fan interaction is also vital to FB pages. Don’t be afraid to ask people to participate and throw out some general questions. A good example just to get some interaction would be on a Friday posting a question asking what people are doing with their weekend. Remember that nearly everyone goes to FB for their own entertainment, so selling your business under the guise of entertainment is key to growth and success. Pushing product on FB simply put does not work. You must be subtle and persuade people to want your products rather than tell them to.

Photos are also a great tool for getting people to interact with your site. Scrolling through photos is one of the most popular activities on FB so it should come as no surprise that they will get you traffic. What kind of photos? Well, if you can finagle a way to relate it to your business, pictures of girls are the most viewed photos on FB. Guys like to look at girls, girls like to look at girls – it may sound a bit odd but for traffic’s sake it works.

Copywriting

Content is a great way to drive traffic to your site. There are tons of sites where you can submit articles and content and provide backlinks to your site. Not only do you get visits from people visiting reading your article but you also get the added organic benefit of link building. Unfortunately, after the infamous Panda Update by Google many of these content and link farms have lost much of their swagger. The solution is creating blogs of your own and updating content frequently on your own site.

Fatal mistakes of businesses make with their content

1. Targeting wrong audience. Things you’ll want to ask yourself BEFORE you start.

• What are the demographics of your audience?
• What problem/need do they have?
• Where are they in their buying cycle?
• What kind of hooks/prompts do they respond to?

Again, if you don’t know the answer to these questions, do some research and figure it out. Targeting the right keyword to the right person                will have the biggest impact on conversions. And that takes knowing who they are.

1. If you’re targeting the wrong keywords, it doesn’t matter how well you’re targeting them, you’re still bringing people to your site who won’t convert. Check your conversions rate and find out if the people coming to your page are actually finding what they want. If not, it’s time to make some changes.
2. Ignoring Meta Description. The meta description the second most important tag next to the title tag. It appears right beneath the title in the SERP’s and needs to be as descriptive and accurate as possible for the user to click it.
3. Often business owners switch CMS without giving it much thought and they do that to their detriment. The result of switching to the wrong CMS can be huge duplicate content issues thanks to new page extensions, SEO suicide when you find you can’t customize elements (like the URL structure, for example), and a need for medication when you have to 301 all of your URLs by hand.

Distribution through FB can also be a great avenue for getting content out. Post it on your wall and let your fans know about it. When doing               this follow the 4 A’s approach.

• Authenticity – make sure your content is unique and genuine. Don’t take content from another site and post it to your own FB page trying to pawn it off as your own.
• Attention – make the content interesting. As discussed before, FB is primarily used as entertainment, a distraction from the work day for most people. So make the content interesting. When you’re on lunch break do you feel like reading about a products for cleaning your chimney? Probably not, but maybe you can find an interesting story about something related and subtly place your product promotions within it.
• Authority – plain and simple, make it sound like you know what you’re talking about. If people don’t believe what you say, they’re not going to read it.
• Action – drive your visitors to an action without telling them to do it. You want to funnel them toward the goal rather than throw it in their face.

Advanced SEO

Large scale websites no longer can have the luxury of being optimized page by page. The process is much too time consuming for the benefit it provides. Large scale optimization techniques are the way of the future.

Currently, the number 1 SEO factor is considered to be the site load time. A site that has a site load threshold greater than 4 seconds has little chance of being the top rankings. Some ways to ensure your load time is faster:

• Leverage browser caching to once a month
• Minify CSS and .js files. This is essentially defragging the files so they are all in one place rather than the server having to find all of them all over the place and load them.
• Image SPRITE to defrag images and use CDN for image content. An image SPRITE is a collection of images put into a single image. A web page with many images can take a long time to load and generates multiple server requests. Using image sprites will reduce the number of server requests and save bandwidth.
• If you have a wordpress site install W3 Total Cache.
• Use Google Page Speed Tool to find where your load time is getting held up
• Use The Cloud – a group of servers to scale your platform

Log Files

These are the glue of your website. Analyze your site performance through a few steps:

• Get a bot list of search engines and use the Fantomaster Spider Spy
• Download Log Files
• Onsite SEO match bots to visits to unveil the activity of your visitors
• Find broken links to your site by running test to find 404 errors

Link Building

Exercise this next sentence with extreme caution. Buying links works. Yes this works but you better trust the people you are buying them from because it is technically illegal in Google, but if it is done correctly you can make it work. I don’t recommend doing it, but it is feasible. If Google suspects a site of buying links they will look at who the webmaster is and make a subjective decision. If you have been caught before buying links they probably are not going to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Here are a few better ways to do link building:

• Writing and dispersing content
• Social medias
• Exploratory link building
• Deep linking – embed links within content and request top sites to place it on their pages
• Directories
• Guest posting

PPC Advertising

These are few ways that you improve your PPC campaigns to increase traffic and get more targeted visitors. Use your broad match to find more specific keywords and phrases.

Common mistakes:

• When setting up ppc campaigns manually setup each step rather than using default settings. This will customize your ad to make it function better
• Separate your search/network displays
• Separate mobile/desktop changes
• Make sure your landing pages are accurate and directed a page the ad says
• Use keyword mining
• Analyze your search query reports
• Increase your quality score. No seems to fully understand what all goes into the Quality Score of a ppc ad but more targeted ads and higher CTR seem to be 2 of the major factors.

1. What is an SEO website? An SEO website is a website that does not have technical or structural barriers preventing search engines from reading and indexing its pages. Barriers that may prevent search engines from indexing pages may include: frames, image-based navigation, missing tags and perhaps even poor URL structures. If your site has any structural issues, don’t panic! There is almost always a solution short of a complete re-design. Get a free website review and proposal from our SEO experts.
2. What do you mean by keyword theme? There are keywords and then there are relevant keywords. Keywords used by industry insiders (like yourself) may not be the same terms your customers use to describe your products or services. Your website content needs to be optimized for the terms potential customers are searching for—your relevant keywords. But even relevant keywords may have a broad association with a product or service that is totally unrelated to yours. Due to click patterns associated with those overly broad keywords, search engines may determine that people using the keywords a different product or service. Our keyword research defines your relevant keywords and uncovers unrelated use issues.
3. What are the most important parts of my website to optimize? The short and sweet answer is: all of it . Your website should be full of references to your relevant keywords as well as industry insider terms that your visitor can use in their decision making. In addition to on-page content, a page’s URL, title, meta tags, headings, and image alt tags need to be optimized for the best results. Don’t try to optimize every page for every relevant keyword on your list, though. Select a focused group of a few relevant keywords for a page’s specific content and proceed from there.
4. How is SEO Copy Writing different from just writing content for my website? SEO Copy Writing starts with a review of your site’s current content and cross references that with your list of relevant keywords and your site’s search engine rankings for each term. New content is determined by identifying relevant keywords and phrases that are not meeting their organic ranking goals and writing content that incorporates these terms in readable and informative text.
5. How does a “Link Building Campaign” help my organic rankings? Acquiring links to your website from a network of relevant websites  tells search engines that your site is an “authority” on your particular product or service. The more of an “authority” you become—with more in-bound links—the better your organic rankings for relevant keywords will be. To get the best results from your link building efforts, links to your website should contain your relevant keywords. You do not want to be among the thousands of experts on, “click here” or, “learn more”. Creating properly formatted in-bound links from relevant websites is a time consuming, labor intensive project that has the biggest effect on your website’s rankings. Building link popularity requires more than a little salesmanship to sell website owners on the value added by a link to your website. Do your homework, make contacts, be persistent, be polite, sell your website’s value proposition and you will move up in the rankings. Or save yourself the time and energy by calling the link building experts at Pittsburgh Internet Consulting at 412-942-0222.

Learn SEO Techniques from the Experts

The SEO experts at Pittsburgh Internet Consulting use the 7 Keys of SEO Copy Writing to craft just the right content for clients. Now, you can learn how to use them too.

7 Keys to SEO Copy Writing

• Master Keyword List
• Web Page Purpose
• Visitor Response Goals
• Focus Keywords
• Optimized Titles and Tags
• Optimized, Readable, Engaging Content
• Call to Action

Here’s How Each Key Element Works:

Master Keyword List

Create a Master Keyword List where you list all of the keywords you expect to use with a corresponding page assignment. The competitive environment of each keyword also needs to be evaluated in terms of the number of web pages you will be competing for organic ranks with as well as competing connotations of that term.

Web Page Purpose

Define each page of your website in terms of what you need it to contribute to your website goals. Here is a list of some options you may use to define a web page purpose:

• landing page
• product information
• purchase process
• contact information
• product comparisons
• external resource page
• internal resource page
• member log in page
• about us
• custom 404 Error page
• site map
• thank you page.

This list is not complete nor is it cast in stone. Create your own list then apply it consistently.

Visitor Response Goals

Define what you want your visitor to do when they get to this page. This step will help you start to focus on what your customer will need to accomplish the goal you define for them.

Focus Keywords

Each page on your website should have a well defined and focused sub-set of keywords that you have optimized it for. Do not use the same keywords as the focus of every page of your website. While the value of the keyword meta tag has reportedly decreased in recent years, it is still a good idea to define it as it will help you focus your content.

Optimized Titles and Tags

Use the keywords defined in your keyword focus step to create Page Title, Meta Description, Meta Keyword, H1 tag and, image alt tags for each web page. Don’t overlook these important opportunities to optimize your website. If your web developer failed to include the Meta Description and Meta Keyword tags, have them added to your pages or page templates so you can optimize them.

Optimized, Readable, Engaging Content

While you want to make use of your focus keywords in your on-page text, you also want to keep in mind that your visitor has to read your content. No one is going to read sentences stuffed with keywords and phrases. Organize your content and think about your keywords as you write. Be sure to use keyword variations to make your text more interesting and readable. On-page content should contain more than sales promotion and fluff. Provide truly useful information such as: product specification and applications, service tips and tools, buyers’ comparison pages, etc.

Call to Action

Don’t get so caught up in your content that you forget why you have the website in the first place! Many websites have great information and readable text, but they never get around to asking you to do anything. Include a call to action (web page goal) in your text on every page.

This Article covers you Personal Profile.  Company Profiles are another great area to maximize, but for now… let’s keep it simple.

Are you Visible in Search?

The first thing we need to do is make sure your profile is visible for search engine spiders.  You want search engine spiders crawling all over your linkedin profile, but if your privacy settings are wrong… game over.

Planning & Strategy

Ok, first part is done.  Your profile is now able to be crawled by search engine spiders.  SCORE!  Now we need to build a theme to your profile.  I am not talking color and stye, I am talking topic.  Start by selecting a term that is relevant to your industry.  I will pick Internet Marketing for mine.  I live in Pittsburgh, so specifically my term will be Pittsburgh Internet Marketing. Let’s see where I rank on Linkedin for that term.

Now that we see I need  some serious work on my profile, we need to know what exactly it is that needs done. So, to start, let’s examine the key word density of my profile and the #1 spot profile.  I can do this with an awesome free tool at webconfs.com.

We can learn a LOT from this information.  Look:  Pittsburgh, Internet, and Marketing are all in the top five keywords in April’s profile.  Not mine.  I am missing Pittsburgh.  My density is also much weaker than April’s.  This give me an IDEAL starting spot.  We need to boost my keyword density.

Edit My Summary

To bump up my density, let’s start with the profile summary.  I am going to rewrite it.  I can use this keyword analysis tool to help me get a feel for my keyword density in REAL time.

Current Ratios

• Pittsburgh           .8%
• Internet               1.7%
• Marketing           2.5%

I am strongly lacking in my Pittsburgh term.  So I rewrite my summary and revamp my specialty area and get these results:

New Ratios

• Pittsburgh           2.5%
• Internet               2.5%
• Marketing           3.3%

Ok.  I am on the right track.  Now, if I check my overall profile density again, this is what I get:

Ok have improved my keyword density and optimized my titles.  I don’t want to get too carried away with worrying about the density because there are factors that will totally change the density – If you link your blog… if you link your twitter account.

Edit Professional Headline

We can edit our professional headline to get a bump in our target terms also.

Now the (Link) Juicy Part

Great, so we have done a lot to develop a theme in my profile so far but the best is yet to come!  The real reason I am making this tutorial-  LINKS! LinkedIn.com is kind enough to allow us three links in our profile.

We have several options to label these links:

• Personal Website
• Company Website
• Blog
• RSS Feed
• Portfolio
• Other

Really, all I am interested in is OTHER.  This will allow me to add my own anchor text (The text you click on to get to where you are going) The other options are vague and generic and not very user friendly.  Now, there is a good chance that Google is going to start putting a lot of value into Brands.  So we definitely want to use  one of the links to help build our Brand awareness.  The remaining links I can use to target key terms and deep link into my website.  I am doing it like this:

• Pittsburgh Internet Consulting (Our Company Name) to http://www.pittsburghinternetconsutling.com
• Website Development Pittsburgh to http://www.pittsburghinternetconsulting.com/consulting/website-design.asp
• Pittsburgh Internet Marketing (My targeted term) to http://www.pittsburghinternetconsulting.com/marketing/

There is also an Interests section.  In here, I can tag my key term again buy adding a few Interests:

• Internet Marketing
• Joomla Website Design
• Pittsburgh Steelers

Optimized but not forgotten

Almost for sure, I will not get to number one on my first try. So mark your Calendar for three week. Go back and check your profile ranking. The important part is we now have some great links pointing back to your website. The better your site ranks for your desired key term, the more authority it will pass along with it.

So why bother reading my 2,500 plus words on PubCon? First, I didn’t waste your time with lots of my own opinions. Below you will find the great takeaways from some of the best speakers at the conference in short sweet bullet points for easy scanning. Second, rather than breaking it up by session or by speaker, I tried my best to categorize it so you only have to read the important information about the online marketing topic that you are responsible for. Please send me additions or corrections and I will get them made ASAP. Cheers to PubCon, PubCon Speakers, and PubCon attendees that were all so great throughout the week.

Now some jump links by topic: Social Media, Organic, Pay Per Click,Online Reputation Management

Social Media

General

• Marketing is not a task, it is engagement. Talk to your customers and potential customers. Be human. – Scott Stratten
• Things are not viral because you call them “viral marketing”. They are viral because they spread. People spread emotion. They spread AWESOME. They DONT spread “ehh?” – Scott Stratten
• Social media doesn’t make anything better or worse. It just amplifies. – Scott Stratten
• Do not think of it as a sales tool. Remember its relationship building. Think of it as networking. – Jeff Schroeffel
• Claim lots of company usernames and brand profiles for the future and to stop squatters and people from harming your brand. Just like buying and protecting domain names – Chris Winfield
• Do not try to build on all social platforms at one time. Pick 1-2 platforms and build up your social currency there before spreading your efforts too thin – Scott Stratten – Chris Winfield
• Do not just wait for followers to come. Target the influencers in your space. Follow them and engage in conversation with them. List them on a twitter list for example. Get them to notice you – Chris Winfield
• Do not ignore forums since they are not sexy, still some great conversation going on there. Use Big-Boards.com to find the best message boards. – Chris Winfield
• Use a social media monitoring tool to listen proactively to your audience and your competitors audience – Chris Winfield
• 30% of all traffic to websites is now social. Second only to search – Lisa Buyer

Twitter

• Don’t be afraid to tweet too often, think about tweet quality and conversation, not just about sheer volume. Stats indicate that accounts with 22 tweets per day have the most followers – Dan Zarrella
• Tweets that contain links are much more likely to get RTs compared to tweets without links. – Dan Zarrella
• The more you talk about yourself, the less followers you get – Dan Zarrella
• Negative remarks harm your follower count – Dan Zarrella
• Reach and influence matter. You have to work on growing your followers and in particular followers who are influential – Brian Clark
• Don’t just tweet once about legitimate press releases. Split them up into multiple tweets and spread throughout the day/week. Such as headlines, quotes, stats, etc. – Lisa Buyer
• Resuscitate dead and buried content in your blog or news center. Some content is “Evergreen Content” – Lisa Buyer
• Metrics to Measure & Monitor Twitter
  • Total Followers
  • Retweets Per Follower
  • Total Followers / Total Tweets
  • Percentage of Following / Followers
  • Content Engagement Percentage
  • Klout Score – From klout.com a measurement tool to identify influencers on topics across the social web
• A Few Twitter Tools:
  • Tweetpsych.com – An interesting tool from Dan Zarrella to psychoanalyze any public twitter account
  • Exacttarget.com – tool to upload your e-mail list and find them in social media.
  • Backtweets.com – locate yours and your competitors brand evangelists and connect with them
  • Mentionmap – Online app to visually see the influencers in your space
• Some interesting & applicable Twitter Stats:
  • Stats indicate that accounts with 22 tweets per day have the most followers – Dan Zarrella
  • Over 50% of journalists are on twitter already – Lisa Buyer

Facebook

• Recommended audience size to shoot for is: – Brian Carter
  • 10-20% of the local population
  • 10x the number of customers you want
  • 10x the size of your e-mail list
• Facebook uses the EdgeRank Algorithm to decide how many people see your posts. If you have a 1% engagement rate, then 70% of your followers see your postings – Brian Carter
• A click through rate on Facebook from .02% to .15% is good. Cost per click of .02-.30 can be good depending upon your industry – Brian Carter
• The Facebook “Like” button is now installed and in use on more than 12 million sites – Lisa Buyer
• Fatal FB Pay Per Click Mistakes: – Dennis Yu
  • Not keeping users inside facebook. Don’t send them away from the platform they have chosen. Let them interact with your business there
  • Not rotating and changing ads regularly. Click through rates can go down by 50% within 24 hours
  • If you are selling and not engaging, you are doing it wrong
  • Not using a reveal tab. “Click Like above in order to see XXXXX”
  • Targeting keywords with pay-per-click rather than identity. Use friend of fan targeting
  • Not using the full real estate of the large size that FB pay-per-click offers you
  • Not using the traffic on your existing website to grow your Facebook fan base
  • Not integrating your site with the Facebook login system to allow interaction on your site

Organic

General

• Many speakers at Pubcon 2010 theorize that “user data signals” will become an important factor in organic search rankings. This includes items such as: Tweet links, URL shortener data, Click through rate, bounce rate, google toolbar data*, even Facebook Likes in the future. It is assumed that many of these items are already in place and their influence on rankings will increase over time. – Jeff Schroeffel

*Mike Grehan believes this is very important – Mike Grehan 

• I believe it was Marty Weintraub who explained that google actually has two indexes: a fast index and a deep index. I have not found confirmation of this YET, but I will. From observations, I agree with Marty – Marty Weintraub
• When choosing keyword phrases to target, focus on phrase that ARE NOT generating blended results where your article or blog post will have to compete with video, image, and local results. Target phrases where the result set is primarily the traditional organic listings. SEOs have to start looking at “distraction factor” of queries – Greg Boser
• Do not use spaces within URLs inside your canonical tags. Be sure to HTML encode them – Mike Grehan
• Google Labs is now reading the text in images, so this may be indexed & utilized in ranking algorithm soon – Bruce Clay

Local Search

• Your data should match across the platforms where Google would spider your location. From your contact page to whois data to Google Places and other 3rd party local web directories. The more places your local phone number, business name, address, and web address appear together and identical improve the trust in your local listing – Jeff Schroeffel
• Here is a (partial) list of platforms recommended from the Pubcon speakers:
  • Local.com
  • Yellowpages.com
  • Whitepages.com
  • Dexknows.com
  • Local.com
  • Localeze.com
  • Yelp.com
  • CitySearch.com
• When your company has the ability to service local areas legitimately, the dependence on a physical location to get rankings is clear in today’s results of local organic search. To combat this, use virtual offices. Not PO Boxes. There is some indication that UPS mailing locations are currently working, but that is not recommended. A true virtual office should appear to be an actual location of the business
• Do not mess with your business name in Google Places to get rankings – Doyal Bryant
• Listings across sites are matched together using your local phone number. So do not use tracking numbers and be sure these all match – Doyal Bryant
• Huge boost to Google places positioning when video is added – Doyal Bryant
• Review velocity is definitely a factor in the algorithms to monitor SPAM, so do not batch reviews in anyway or overdo the strategy of encouraging reviews. – Brian Combs
• Ways to encourage reviews of your business – Brian Combs
  • It’s a mindset, make it part of your processes
  • Promote multiple review options to spread them out and to let user choose the review site they like
  • Be ethical and transparent. Be clear you are not asking for a positive review
• Tips about responding to reviews – Brian Combs
  • Listen first and decide if you should respond
  • Calm down before you respond, don’t make it worse. If you had a problem, then own it
  • If there were positive items within the review, own those as well

On Page & Content Development

• Stop moderating comments on your blogs and articles. Let the conversation occur. Then people will share it and talk about it. Edit out trolls, spam, and vulgarity after it is live. Setup notifications so you can delete this stuff quickly.- Scott Stratten
• Take an editorial stand on your blog or buyers guide and don’t worry about upsetting manufactures. Milk toast reviews do not get shared or linked too and do not have much value. – Rob Snell
• Interview the “expert” at your company and transcribe the interview as text to generate content – Rob Snell.
• For eCommerce SEO, identify your top twenty products and play “twenty questions” Then use this exercise to build out your product pages or create separate content pages within your blog, article section or buyers guide – Rob Snell
• Never use manufacturer’s product descriptions if you have the time to write custom ones. Otherwise your products will have the same copy as hundreds of other sites. If the size of your inventory prohibits this, then rewrite the important products and only use manufacturer products – Rob Snell
• Use actual customer questions to build out your FAQ section – Rob Snell
• Liberate manufacturer’s content by using product materials such as .pdf owner’s manuals to generate content. “It is easier to get forgiveness than permission” to do this according to Rob – Rob Snell*

* (This may be dangerous depending upon your size and industry) – Jeff Schroeffel 

• One good technique to reduce requests and load time is to use CSS Sprites to break multiple image calls into one request and use CSS to display what you want. http://csssprites.com/ helps you in this process – Daniel Schulman

Link Strategies

• Guest blogging on a quality source is a valuable and approved form of link building when blogging on a legitmate media or blog source. You can use a service such as http://myblogguest.com/ to find opportunities. Ideally recurring blogging or articles would be ideal – Michael Gray
• Write a quality article for Google knol (http://knol.google.com/). When the content has been viewed and reviewed enough, rel=“nofollow” tags are removed and inbound links then benefit your site – Michael Gray
• Locate the “Linkerati” within your space who regularly site and source content in your industry. Find out where they get their information and then get your content into that source. What PR sites do they read? – Michael Gray
• Take and place high quality images on your site and allow webmasters to embed your images on their site. These embeds count as inbound links – Michael Gray
• Link buying is extremely high risk and against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. If you choose to purchase advertisements that DO NOT follow the rel=“nofollow” recommendation then: No footers, no run-of-site, No sidebars. Look for permanent, not month-to-month relationships. Do not buy links on content that has been online and not linked for a long period of time
• Be careful with having a high percentage of deep links with anchor text compared to branded links pointing at the home page. This appears to be SPAM and that you are trying too hard. It also impacts Google’s new focus on branding / trust – Mike Grehan
• Use ereleases.com to get your press releases into prnewswire. Send them a word document with embedded links rather than using their online form. Links stay put – Brian Clark
• Use search terms to find links that point to your competitor sites but generate 404 errors, then contact them with a better option from your site – Dixon Jones
• Offer testimonials to your vendors, once the testimonial is posted, ask them to link to your site. – Dixon Jones

Example: http://www.americanbuilders.com/aboutabn.html

• Use tracking tools such as majesticseo.com to find mentions of your brands that are not linked. Then request links from those existing mentions – Dixon Jones
• Speak at conferences. Most conferences will link to you from your speaker bio – Dixon Jones

Black Hat Techniques Being Used Against You

• Contact your backlinks using an e-mail that looks like it came from Google reporting malicious content and asking them to remove the link to your page – Brett Tabke
• Report your site to the e-mail blacklists – Brett Tabke
• Send Google a Re-inclusion request for your site apologizing for all the nefarious tactics you have used – Brett Tabke
• Create a link farm and make your site the hub – Brett Tabke
• If your site is on a shared server, they can keep buying new hosting accounts until they get on the same or similar IP Block. Then they create a duplicate – Brett Tabke

PayPerClick & Landing Pages

Pay Per Click

• Focus on queries more than keywords or keyword phrases. Each phrase should be geared to match about 50 unique phrases. If it gets more, refine it by getting more specific or using negatives – Craig Danuloff
• Quality score is only impacted by CTR when the keyword = query, not for broad match results – Craig Danuloff
• If your quality score in in the 4-6 range, do not work on bid adjustments. Instead work on your quality score – Brad Geddes
• Use Google Sets http://labs.google.com/sets to find “STOP” words that harm keyword relevance. Set non-relevant results from sets as negatives – Brad Geddes
• Some similar phrases make HUGE difference in quality score. So test & measure. For example:
  • Changing “Read” to “Learn” increased quality score from 2 to a 7
  • Changing “Testimonial” to “Review” also increased quality score from 2 to 7

Landing Pages

• Four steps in Landing Page Optimization
  • Data mine your statistics for pages to focus on
  • Research the current performance of the page
  • Test New Options for the landing page
  • Roll Out / Rinse / Repeat
• You should be tracking & monitoring the conversion rate of every page with significant inbound traffic – Tim Ash
• Images are processed by users 400 to 500 times faster than text – Tim Ash
• 80% of user time is spent above the scroll – Brad Geddes
• Load time still matters in a “broadband” world. 49% of US rural users and 35% of urban users still on narrowband access speeds. For example mobile devices – Brad Geddes
• Use wire framing to get landing page concepts approved without getting “Brand Nazi’s” upset about which image or exact button style you recommended. Get conceptual approval first – Tim Ash
• Tools for testing landing pages:
  • ClickHeat from Labs Media – Free
  • CrazyEgg.com – $9/month to $99/month
  • Clickdensity® from Box UK
• Tools for getting user feedback
  • Usertesting.com – $39/user – Single user test of your site for $39 including video with audio commentary
  • KISS Insights – $0 – $29/month – $300/year – Simple online survey technology
  • Keynote – Corporate Solution – Pricing not posted online

Online Reputation Management

• Audit the top 20 or 30 results for the brand name and/or personal name. Start with a simple spreadsheet with a tab for each variation. Setup your columns such as

Rank | URL | TITLE | STATUS | SENTIMENT – Andy Beal

STATUS = Good, Updated 10/21/, Independent, Competitor, CopyrightTarget- Jeff SchroeffelSENTIMENT = Positive, Negative, Neutral – Jeff SchroeffelTARGET = A negative result you want to actively push down in the result set – Jeff Schroeffel

• What strategies can be used to push down Negative reviews & other undesirables?
  • Buy an additional domain or use a subdomain to create brandcares.com or cares.brand.com for a customer service section service blog or where you locate your charity work and donations. If you are going to use this strategy, it has to be a legitimate site or site section and not filler fluff. Has to be something you want your customers to see. To work effectively, you are going to want to link to this new content from your existing site. (you could also use companyname.wordpress.com or companyname.org if either matches the plan of your content) – Andy Beal
  • Use Facebook pages where appropriate to occupy positions in the SERPs when appropriate and useful.
    

    Examples: Company’s main page, Employee pages where appropriate. – Andy Beal 

  • Employee’s Linked In Profiles can be public and setup to rank for their current company / position. – Andy Beal
  • Setup and optimize company profiles at the web services you use. Twitter,Flicker, Youtube, etc. – Andy Beal
  • DONT “optimize” wikipedia except to request removals of SPAM and malicious content. Monitor changes and be a responsible editor. If a page does not exist but a competitor of equal size is listed, go ahead and create an honest brief wiki – Jeff Schroeffel
• Other options: wetpaintcentral.com, associatedcontent.com, business partners who have existing content about your company on their site, convention sponsorships or speaking engagement bios – Andy Beal
• At some stage large brands need to go beyond the spreadsheet. Monitoring services starting with Google Alerts and advancing to something like Andy Beal‘s Trakur Service move you towards real time monitoring of your company reputation. Combining this with some of the tools geared to monitor twitter and facebook merge reputation management with social media and customer service. – Jeff Schroeffel

Check out the nice animation our designer did on the easy fence setup page. The XtremBol case study is pretty cool too, I think it would be fun to play soccer in a cage or fence.

The first line of the explanation reads “Automatic matching shows your ads on relevant search queries not already captured by your keywords. ” In other words, we at Google will now decide when to spend your money instead of you. The spin that Google puts on the e-mail notification they sent out is that the goal of the program is to keep your cost per click and click through rate on these queries in line with the keywords you have signed up for. BUT THE REAL GOAL is to help Google’s bottom line.

Many Ad Words advertisers are not that savvy when it comes to running their accounts. This policy will effectively increase Google’s revenue immediately beginning June 3rd as a result of being able to show ads for keywords nobody has signed up for. Expect their 3rd quarter advertising revenues to go up significantly. By automatically opting all client into this campaign, many advertisers will be unaware that they are now spending on keywords THEY DID NOT SIGN UP FOR.

If this policy was to improve accounts and not to improve revenue, then it would be something you could opt IN to, not opt OUT of. If the major benefits were for the customer, then the e-mail notification would have announced the great new feature and tried to get people to sign up for the beta. By doing it the other way, Google shows themselves to be no better than the competition they hate so much. So much for point number six in their company philosophy page, “You can make money without doing evil.”

Today we are opting out of this program for 100% of our client base. If they had allowed us to choose to opt-in, we would have tried it on a couple clients.