Questions with CT Moore

CT Moore is  a senior strategist at NVI, where he handles client SEO, PPC, and social media. He is also a blogger, journalist, podcaster, and speaker and has more than five years of experience in SEO. He consulted on web strategy for brands, such asAmerican Apparel, Yellow Pages, and Microsoft, as well as a number of media start-ups.  He also sits as a staff editor at Revenews.com. Moore will be talking about technical SEO for enterprise level & dynamic websites at Make Web Not War, with Mohamed Hamad.

What do you love about WordPress?

Well, there are probably two things about WordPress that I love. The first is that it’s free. I first encountered WordPress back in 2006. I wanted a blog, but was too cheap and broke to higher someone to build it for me. So after some Googling around, I found Wordpress. At the time, I didn’t even know what an FTP client was, and it took me two weeks to figure out how to properly install and configure it. But I would’ve never started my web dev education it wasn’t for WordPress being free. Just goes to show that freedom is power

The other thing I love about WordPress is how versatile it is. I mean, you can use it to build a blog or static website, or you can use it build a small ecommerce store.

The open  source community behind WordPress has resulted in so many different plugins, add-ons and themes that you do just about anything with it. Come to think of it, WordPress’s versatility is owed to the WordPress community so I guess it’s the community I love.

What impact is do you think WordPress is going to have on open source platforms moving forward?

I think, if anything, WordPress has demonstrated the power of communities. Like I said, WordPress’s versatility is owed to the community behind it, so I think that open source developers will really be forced to invest in their community when developing platforms. It’s that kind of crowdsourcing that streamlines new releases and bug fixes, and it’s that kind of crowdsourcing that can take a platform to a level where it’s a viable and dependable business options.

What do you think are some of the most relevant web technologies coming up for 2011/2012?

I guess pretty much anything mobile. Obviously, Android is huge, and is going to continue to influence what developers choose to develop.

I also think it’ll be interesting to watch the development of Window Phone 7 (disclosure: through NVI, I currently work with Microsoft Canada and worked on the Great Canadian Apportunity mobile dev contest with them). The deal between Nokia and Microsoft has a lot of potential. Nokia makes great hardware but needed a really strong OS, and Windows Phone 7 needs quick marketing penetration. If consumers buy into the Windows Phone 7 platform via Nokia, it’ll definitely have a significant impact on mobile developers.

Why are you passionate about open source platforms?

The freedom, versatility, and possibility they afford us. Open source technologies afford people the tools and experience that they couldn’t get if they had to pay for licenses. As I mentioned already, I learned about web dev because of WordPress.

But being free from licensing constraints and having access to the source code also allows people to take something that is only partially what they’re looking for, and customize it to their needs. That can save you countless hours in product development and make the impossible otherwise possible.

But “the possibilities” go so far beyond that. The idea of having a strong community of sharp minds collectively working on a platform means that the technology can evolve very quickly and in so many ways.

Just imagine where WordPress would be today if Matt Mullenweg had been trying to make money off of it as a licensed solutions. He’d only have a small team of developers working inside the box, and WordPress would’ve never evolved the way it had. Instead, you have thousands of developers finding bug fixes, developing plugins, and making themes so that WordPress can be used in so many different ways. And the result is that a lot of business get started or save a lot of money on what they otherwise might not have been able to do.

I honestly believed that open source is one of those paradoxes where everyone gets richer because something is free. It opens the door to so many possibilities and minds to so much inspiration.

Questions with Morten Rand-Hendriksen.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen is creative director for Pink & Yellow Media. He is a web designer, developer and educator and specializes in remarkably customized and unusual WordPress themes. He is also an author for Pearson publishing and Lynda.com and has published three books and two video series on web design and WordPress. He enjoys writing about anything and everything web related on the his blog Design is Philosophy. He loves web standards, information design and making the web make sense for everyone. He recently launched  PhotoPivot.com with Chris Arnold. PhotoPivotcreate a digital lightboard for professional photographers by using the Microsoft Pivot application. His topic for the Make Web Not War conference is: open source in the cloud – PHP on Azure.

What do you think is the most misunderstood thing about SEO?

SEO as a service is a bit of a scam (cue flame war). In the past you could game the search engines to get a better ranking. That just doesn’t work any more. Today search engines are simply too smart. If you want good search engine ranking (SER?) what matters is well written and well formatted content. In my opinion you’re better off buying the services of a great copywriter than getting an “SEO expert” to look over your content.

If you could suggest one thing to improve someone’s SEO, what would it be?

Focus on proper markup (page title, description, headers etc.) and put some effort in attaching accurate and descriptive alt tags to your images. Images are largely overlooked and search engines – being text driven – don’t understand them. Simply tagging your images with a proper description will make a huge difference in your findability.

What do you think are some of the most relevant web technologies coming up for 2011/2012?

Cloud, pure and simple. As solutions become more advanced and people need more space, faster transfers and larger pipes the old world of static servers and shared hosting will quickly be supplanted for the new and more agile cloud system. Yes, it’s more complicated, but the payoff is immense both in lower cost-to-performance, better stability and the benefits of a properly distributed network.

Why are you passionate about open source platforms?

In Norwegian we have a word “dugnad”. Translated to English it would mean something like “work done voluntarily by the community for the common good.” Open source is that – dugnad on a massive scale. To me open source is what the internet is and should be about: people working together for a common good. Open source is crowd sourced innovation on a scale not possible when run by an organization or a corporation. The ability for everyone to pitch in and add the little details they think matter produces an organic evolutionary process that often ends up with things no one ever thought of before. Sure, open source also produces a lot of garbage, but it’s easily balanced out.

What impact do you think open source is going to have on the web in the long term?

If we jump back in time we see open source as this fringe element written off as a joke by the people in power. Now we see open source leading the way and taking over for proprietary solutions. This organic collaborative environment can easily be the way forward for both the web and society as a whole as long as we, the people who work in it, keep our bearings and focus on innovation and betterment.

Furthermore, social media sites currently have some of the highest Internet traffic, surpassing even email usage and email users (see graph below).  CNNMoney.com reported this March that Facebook had surpassed Google as the No. 1 most highly-trafficked site during the week of March 13th.

via Morgan Stanley Internet Trends Report shows social networking online has surpassed email users and usage.

Social Media may level the playing field because anyone can enter the space, but not everyone understands how to do it well – taking into account both a sound and flexible strategy as well as steady execution. It is important for companies to understand where an agency’s role lies in social media marketing.

There is an obvious benefit to having a specialized team within an agency that handles the brand’s entire online social media presence. However, it is also clear that as more companies fully embrace social media, they can be very successful by using an agency for guidance and strategy, while managing the execution of day-to-day activity in-house. Instead of taking on the daily execution, an agency’s time can be more effective by teaching a client’s internal team the social media best practices and providing marketing strategy to grow its social media footprint.

Additionally, brands benefit from keeping their social media “voice” inside the company, with employees that can best convey the human aspects of the brand. When an agency plays this role, it acts as a consultant, essentially helping a company establish social web presence, cultivating or connecting an online community, and then creating social campaigns to leverage that community. We’ve seen many recent examples of the transition of social media accounts, from agencies to internal staff, resulting in more personal and natural messaging.

Does your company have anyone who’s job description includes social media tasks? If not, is your agency handling 100% of social media management? Or perhaps your company is using social media but without direction? Whatever the case, companies can no longer ignore or sideline the medium that has the majority of their customers’ attention. If your company is investing more in SEO rather than leveraging social networks, it’s time to capture the market and start planning or seeking advice on social media. Just follow the traffic.

This will be the first in a series of three articles examining which online marketing initiative, organic SEO or PPC, will offer the best results for your online business requirements. (These are only two of the myriad of online marketing tools available, but they will be the focus of this series.) The likely answer to this question will be a combination of both, but this series aims to answer why and what benefits are associated with each to enable you to make an informed decision when moving forward with your overall marketing budget allocations.

You have an online business and you need to drive qualified traffic to your website in order to increase your ROI or KPI (key performance indicators), whatever forms these business indicators may take. The next step is deciding which Internet Marketing tool or combination of tools to utilize in order to achieve these specified goals. One major online marketing tool in your arsenal is PPC or pay per click advertising; this will be the focus of the article.

There are many benefits associated with using PPC advertising; the major benefits are outlined below.

Increased Traffic

Usually, the primary goal of any online marketing initiative is to increase traffic to your website. There are two main types of website traffic, targeted and untargeted. Untargeted traffic, are people who happen upon your website whilst not specifically searching for your product or service. Targeted traffic, on the other hand, are people who are specifically searching for either your business or people who are searching for the product or information that your website provides. This is the type of traffic that you want to draw to your website, as they are far more likely to convert (this can be many things, a download, a purchase, a lead – and is defined in your KPI).

A properly managed PPC campaign will provide your website with the later traffic type. Since you choose specifically which keywords to target in your campaign, you can ensure that the people who click on your ad are specifically searching for you, your product or the information that your website provides. Also, you only pay for people who actually navigate to your website, rather than pay for the number of people who view your advertisement.

Campaign Management

As with any marketing campaign, tracking of campaign ROI and other KPI is critical. PPC advertising offers quantitative measurements of these indicators that are unavailable in many other advertising mediums. In the initial setup of your PPC campaign, you can enable your campaign to measure each conversion the campaign makes, you are also able to specifically define what the conversions is, this is not limited to sales. This automatic tracking of campaign conversions, allows you to measure the exact ROI of the marketing initiative. This is simply not an option that is readily available in most marketing campaigns.

Advertising Timeline

This is can be one of the best benefits associated with PPC if it is utilized properly. Unlike SEO and most other forms of advertising both online and offline, which can take a long period of time to launch and begin to see the results, a PPC campaign can be conceived, planned, written, launched, and receiving results in less than a day. This highly compressed time frame allows companies the ability to seize opportunities that are not readily available with other marketing campaigns, due to the long planning and launch timelines. This is a particularly useful attribute with limited time sales or promotions, targeting developing events or news, major events (ie/ sporting events or elections), amongst many others.

This is also particularly beneficial to companies that not only have a sporadic need for instantaneous first page access to the SERP’s (search engine results page), but can be uniquely beneficial for companies that have seasonal or uneven demand trends within their business cycle. The ability to change your ad spend budget at will allows you to increase and decrease your advertising market penetration, with immediate results, in correspondence with the given level of demand.

Campaign Costs

The costs of running a PPC campaign can be precisely pegged at the onset of the campaign. Due to the billing format, you are able to choose exactly how much you wish to spend on ad clicks each day in a given search engine. This amount can be varied as you wish throughout the duration of the campaign, but this feature does allow you to accurately determine a budget at the inception of the campaign. The only costs that are associated with a PPC campaign are the amount you would like to spend on click traffic and, if you outsource the management of your campaign, a management fee that is determined prior to launching the campaign.

Unlike many other online pay for traffic or pay for impression advertising campaigns available, such as banner and email campaigns, there is no minimum spend required with PPC campaigns. You can pay as much or as little as you determine is optimal for your business goals.

In the short run, a PPC campaign is extremely cost efficient because there are no set up fees and you only pay for traffic as it comes in. This is particularly beneficial for companies that have a small advertising budget and need to get the maximum return on their small investment. Couple this with the fact that PPC has a lower CPA than most other marketing initiatives, makes PPC advertising an extremely option for smaller or extremely niched businesses.

Testing

Testing is perhaps the best and least utilized benefit associated with running a PPC campaign. The amount of data that you are able to collect and analyze is phenomenal. The easiest aspect to use and analyze is the ad testing functionality that is built into the search engines. You are able to use your ad variations to test which combination of headline and ad copy lead to the highest click through rates. Once you have narrowed the selection down to the best ad or two, you can continually tweak the ad copy to see which version has the best result. This data can be very useful for your on-page copy as well as your meta description tag, as this is basically the ad copy that is presented in the search engines and can greatly effect your organic listings click through rates.

You are also able to test your various landing page conversion rates by utilizing the a/b and multivariate testing functionality that is provided by the search engines. This allows you to tweak your on-page attributes to find the best combination to maximize your conversions and thus your ROI. This information is very useful for not only your PPC campaigns, but also your SEO campaigns and overall website conversion rates.

Finally, PPC campaigns give you a veritable gold mine of keyword and traffic data. This information can be leveraged in the planning stages of an SEO campaign. With this data, you are able to have an approximation of how often a term is searched, the click through rate, and most importantly, the conversion rate of a given keyword. This information can save you costly mistakes that can occur with an SEO campaign, as this information takes much longer to gather and analyze through and SEO campaign.

Branding

One of the added benefits of a PPC campaign is branding. A properly implemented PPC campaign will increase your brands visibility in the major search engines. By running PPC advertisements on keywords that relate specifically to your business, you can ensure that potential customers searching for information or products related to your field will find your company at the top of the search results.

If you are a large company, people expect to find your business in the search results. In this case, not dominating the SERP’s can tarnish your reputation in the eyes of your consumer, as not being there signals that other companies have greater relevance than yours for the given product searched, giving them the opportunity to take part of your market share. This is of increasing importance as greater percentages of people are using the internet as a primary method of sourcing product information and making product purchases. This gives other companies an opportunity to move in on your dominant market position and establish themselves as a leader in the field.

Conversely, if you are a small company, you can greatly increase your business’ exposure, and subsequently increase the value of your brand, by appearing in the results. By ensuring that your company is constantly visible, you substantially increase the chance that consumers will associate your business with the product or information they are looking for now and in the future.

There are many other benefits associated with a PPC campaign that have not been listed here, but this is a good start and should provide you with critical information when making your marketing budget allocation decisions. If you need more information regarding PPC campaigns or need a qualified company to manage your PPC campaigns for your, please contact Invoke today.

One of the most prevalent errors in SEO is to optimize solely for Google and overlook the other major search engines. Google does currently have the largest market share in the search industry, but Yahoo and MSN combined have an approximate market share of 39% – a demographic that you do not want to overlook. Although the algorithms for each of these search engines are unique, there is overlap, albeit with different weighting, as to what factors the search engines consider important when determining ranking. When designing/optimizing your website, it is critical to keep these factors in mind. Below is a list of some of the factors that the search engines use when determining the rank of a website for a given keyword.

First you need to ensure that your website is search engine friendly. Search engines cannot read flash or images. If you have these elements on your website, you need to ensure that you have written alt tags for all of them that are descriptive and contain the keyword(s) you wish to optimize for. This will start you on your way to ensuring that the search engines can successfully index the content on your website.

Your website also needs to have unique Meta tags for every page. These Meta tags need to be unique to avoid duplicate content penalties that will hurt your website in the SERP’s. You should also keep in mind that these tags are what are displayed in the SERP’s. Therefore, you need to ensure that the copy is also human friendly, as it is counter productive to rank well in the search engines if no one clicks on your result – in the end which is more important, rankings or traffic? You can get both if you properly optimize for both people and search engines.

The copy on your website is a critical factor in determining your search engine ranking. You need to have your targeted keywords sprinkled through out the copy on your website, making sure that you do not try to optimize each page for too many keywords. Be careful here though, you do not want to stuff your website with keywords, you will want to ensure that it is comprehendible to the people who visit your website. You can also get your website banned from the search engines if they determine that you are trying to game them by keyword stuffing.

A site map is also really important element to have on your website. It lets the search engines know that you have deemed those pages in the site map as important and helps the search engines to crawl those pages more efficiently. Google and Yahoo now have a feature that allows you to submit a site map to them directly.

You will also want to ensure that you implement proper 301 redirects to avoid any canonical issues with the search engines.

The most time consuming part of SEO is inbound linking, this is also one of the most important things that you can do to help your website rank in the search engines and if done incorrectly, one of the ways you can hurt your SERP’s the quickest. You want to get quality inbound links from websites that are related to yours. You will also want to keep track of the anchor text that you use when doing the inbound linking – as this is one of the factors that the search engines use in their ranking algorithms. You need to ensure that you adhere to SEO linking best practices so that you do not get your website banned from the search engines – you must not engage in linking to areas that the search engines deem to be ‘bad neighborhoods’ and your inbound linking must appear to be natural and should not consist solely of reciprocal linking.

If you have covered all of the above steps, you will have started your journey towards improved search engine rankings. For more information on Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization, contact Invoke Media.

1. Research � We talk with you about your business and the goals for your SEO campaign. After we have a thorough understanding of your campaign objectives, we gather keyword targets. We look at your site, your server logs, your competitor�s site, top ranking sites in your industry and use our SEO toolkit to gather a comprehensive list of keywords that will give you the best return on your investment. Then with your consultation, we pair down the list to the most relevant keywords/phrases and initiate the Search Engine Optimization campaign. This is one of the most critical steps in any Search Engine Optimization campaign.

2. Website Analysis � We use analytic software and our past experience to determine how search engines perceive your website and any pitfalls that currently exist. Our goal here is to ensure that search engines are able to fully index all of your sites content and specifically our recently identified keyword targets. In this step we look at your sites structure on a macro and micro scale including meta tags, alt tags, html, keyword density, and URL structure. If you need, we will make website changes based on these recommendations.

3. Link Building � Once search engines have indexed your content we then need to drive your site to the top of the results for these keywords. Link building is a powerful way to let the search engines know you mean business. We do not participate in any linking free for all schemes that could hurt your results and ultimately get you banned from the search engines.

4. Reporting � We monitor your site and track the results of your campaign. We track your site and keywords versus your competition. This is important business intelligence that many of our clients find as valuable as their increased rankings.

5. Maintenance � Based on reporting we make in-flight adjustments to your Search Engine Optimization campaign to ensure that you receive maximum results from your campaign.

6. Campaign Re-Evaluation – At predetermined intervals in your SEO campaign, our internet marketing strategist will discuss with you your current marketing objectives and the SEO campaign results up until this point. We will then reevaluate and alter the campaign as needed to ensure that the campaign results are still aligned with your business objectives.

If you would like to see your website increase its visibility in the Search Engines and increase the traffic to your site, contact Invoke Media today for your free consultation.