There's a lot out there to read on internet marketing.  What will help you the most?

This week's #msmktg chat discussed our top resources for learning SEO, social media, and anything that can be called by the name "internet marketing."

Happy browsing!

Do you have a partners page on your website?

CHECK.

Do you link to your partners’ websites?

CHECK.

Do all your partners link back to you?

CHE -

Hmmm… I don’t know.

If that was your answer, go right now, click on all those links and find the partners page on each website. Are you there? Are you there with a link?

While doing link building for a client recently, I found it astounding how many of his partners did not have him featured on their partners page.

If you are not there – and you should be – write them an email. Better yet, pick up the phone. You have a relationship with them, after all.  They’re your partner.

What do you say?  Some pleasantries, and then a cordial mention that you happened to look at their partners page and saw that you weren’t mentioned. It was obviously an oversight, but you’d appreciate if they could correct it.

Bonus: if they use logos on their partners page, ask if it would help them if you would send them a logo with the link.  This helps them.  It also helps you.

How?

Search engines give weight to the anchor text of the links pointing to your site when they decide what terms to rank you for.  Here’s a simple example (although this isn’t the whole story): If you link to Amazon.com like this: Amazon - it will give them a push towards ranking for the term Amazon.  If you link like this: Online Shopping - it will give them a push for ranking for “online shopping.”  Which do you think they’d rather have?

Same with you.  You do want to rank for your brand name, but that will usually happen fairly automatically if you’re doing a semi-decent job optimizing your site and link building. But you really have to put in the effort to rank for your keywords. Getting some links with your keywords here pointing to your site is helpful.

If someone links to you through your logo, that usually gives you no anchor text. If you provide them with a logo image that is hosted on your site, you can add anchor text in the alt text of the image. (See here for more on alt text and using images for SEO).

(Not all webmasters may want to do this; some may prefer to host the image themselves, but it’s certainly worth asking.)

So host a decent logo somewhere on your site, and then fill in the blanks of this HTML Mad Libs:

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com“><img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/images/yourlogo.jpg“ alt=”your keywords“/></a>

Here’s what it might look like for us (although we are not trying to rank for this keyword):

<a href=”http://www.debi-z.com”><img src=”http://www.debi-z.com/seosite/wp-content/themes/Debi/img/DebizLogo1.jpg” alt=”Internet Marketing”/></a>

If your partner copies and pastes that HTML into his page, he’ll have a good-looking logo with a link to your site – and you’ll have some good-sounding anchor text pointing to your site.

Go straight from this post to your partners page. On your mark, get set… go!

You've found it.

You toiled day and night, digging holes, scraping through bramble bushes, buying maps with an X marks the spot, trekking into the depths of the desert… and now you've found it.

The perfect site to get a link from.

You reach out your hand to take your link – and BAM!

Hit a forcefield.

Hmm… apparently these sites don't give up their links so easily.  Try a different direction – BAM!

Your hand is starting to hurt.

I might have to ask for this link.  But how? How am I going to convince the Master of the Site to give me a precious link?

You pull out a piece of parchment and dip your quill in your handy portable inkwell.

Dear Master of the Site,

You are the perfect site for me to get a link from. I looked long and hard until I found a site like you.  My link would fit on this page of your site. Please put it there.  Thank you.

You read it over. While you admire your penmanship, something about that letter just doesn't seem right to you.  Maybe you need to offer something in return. You pull out another piece of parchment.

Dear Master of the Site,

You are the perfect site for me to get a link from. And I probably have the perfect site for you to get a link from to. If you give me a link, I'd be happy to give you one too. Thank you.

Also – something just isn't right. And parchment is expensive.  This next one had better be good.

Your mind stays blank.  Your parchment does too.

And then a piece of parchment falls out of the sky and hits you on the head.

Your first thought is: Great! A spare piece of parchment! Then you open it up and see writing on it. Oh, drat. A used piece of parchment.  I'll have to spend two hours scraping off all the ink if I want to use it.  But then you begin to read the writing, and you realize that in no way do you want to scrape this writing off:

You lay the scroll down thoughtfully on the sand, pick up your quill, and begin to write…

I’m not a big fan of free directories for SEO.  One of the major issues is that it’s hard to find “free” directories that will actually accept your free link without demanding a reciprocal link or subtly hinting that it will take your link 5 years (minimum) to be accepted unless you opt in for their premium $20 service in which case it will take 24 hours.

The other issue is the value these dime a dozen, link-farmy directories actually provide. You could probably spend your time better writing a good guest blog post and getting one quality link from a blog in your industry.

That said, if you’ve run into writer’s block and want to submit to a few directories, to spread your eggs around the SEO baskets, try this list.  These are the directories that I’ve submitted to and actually did accept and list our site for free, with no reciprocal link (even if they did have reciprocal or paid options).  If you have issues with any of them, please let me know.  I don’t want to keep them on the list if they’ve changed their approach.

Infignos

Txtlinks

The SEO King (a little pushy with advertising to buy text links after you submit the link, but just close the window and they won’t bother you any more)

Link Centre

Viesearch (they bombard you with email ads after you submit, so use a spare email for this one)

Jayde

WikiDWeb

ABC Directory

Add to the Net

After you’ve finished this list, you can say that you fulfilled your directory obligation. Now go and write some guest blog post, or use other more valuable link building techniques.

#msmktg Twitter Chat – Nov. 28

Key takeaways from this chat (if you need the background information about the topic, skip to after the image below):

• Target markets must be reachable with one message. Can you get your message to them as a *group*? If you can’t have one unified message that will impact all of them, they cannot be defined as a target market.  @DebbieBenstein
• If your market can be broken down into different groups, each attracted by a different aspect of what you offer, make sure you treat each group as a different audience from a marketing standpoint. Have different messages tailored to them.  @laurabendavd
• Do your research on the audience before you get caught up in site design, like colors and logos. @eliesheva
• To figure out the exact message you should be sending, get inside their heads. Talk to people who are in your target market. Ask questions. @DebbieBenstein

I’ll add on that last point a tip heard in seminars from @DovGordon, who as seen below was the inspiration for this chat topic:

• Figure out the *exact way* your target market would voice the problem that you are solving for them. If you can use the same words that they would use or in fact do use, they will identify with your message enough to be interested in what you have to offer. They will feel that you understand them and their issues because, in fact, you do.
•  The message (what you can solve for them) comes from your target market and defines your target market: they are the people who will identify with and respond to that message.

(If you want to see the full transcript of all the tweets from this chat, here’s the PDF.)

Background to chat topic:

I’ve been thinking recently about defining your target audience, after having listened to Dov Gordon’s teleseminar The Five Steps to a Consistent Flow of Customers. Dov mentioned the need to define your target customer very narrowly – to have maximum impact with your message.  But narrowing our options sounds scary.  What if I miss out? I could help other people also – why should I restrict myself?

This #msmktg chat, we discussed defining our target audience, with the following questions:

1. Is it better to have a narrow or broad target audience? How narrow?
2. Who is your target audience?

We recently decided to try out Caphyon’s Advanced Web Ranking SEO Software.  The following are our observations, the pros and cons of Advanced Web Ranking, or “AWR.”

Lots of Information

Pro: you can tell the AWR developers have put lots of effort into this program. Rankings from many possibilities of search engines and geo-locations, links from SEOMoz’s Linkscape API, your Google Analytics account information… It puts everything at your fingertips in one application, and it lets you create charts that bring all the information together, like: your traffic for keyword ABC graphed against your ranking for keyword ABC graphed against the incoming links you have at that time.

Con: information overload. Whichever section you click on (e.g. Ranking), there are so many possible combinations of keyword/competitor/metric for any report, and so many reports that I found it hard to tell what I was looking at or what I wanted to look at.

Computer-based Software

Con: This is software based on your computer, not the web. I found this to mainly be a con, as that meant that only I could access it on one computer (I put it on my home computer, as that’s where I do most of my work) - no one else in the office, on no other computer. (There is a server option, but that starts to get very expensive.)  Also, in order to automate updates of rankings and other things, you need to give it your Windows user access information, which I didn’t really want to do (paranoid?).  There is a manual update feature, but it was a little buggy.

Pro: The one pro in this was that you can access all information already gathered and do analysis even if your internet is down, or if AWR is on your laptop and you’re out without a netstick or free wireless.

Bugs

Con: As mentioned above, I encountered some bugs with manual updates – as well as sizing of the application screen (discovered while trying to solve the update problem). Running into bugs on basic things lowered my interest level in continuing to use the program.

Pro: AWR’s customer support team is WONDERFUL!  The support representative I kept, err, “bugging,” responded promptly, patiently, and kept it up over a really long email dialogue. They really are committed to helping you and to improving their product.

In short, my recommendation on Advanced Web Ranking is that if you have time and patience, you may get a lot out of it.  If you’re short on either one, you’ll probably give up.

But with a free 30-day trial, it’s definitely worth a try.  So why not?  If you have anything to add after your experience, feel free to do so in the comments below.

After a long hiatus, the women’s internet marketing Twitter chat (#msmktg) returned this week, and with the topic:

What’s your MVSN (most valuable social network)?

With a lot of active participation, the general conclusion was: depends what you want to get out of it.  Here’s a summary of each social network’s valuable points:

Twitter

Biggest, easiest, fastest reach, can build relationships and a community the most easily, especially for B2B. @skjask, @myparnasa, @jewnet

Nicest people, willingness to help others, quick answers to all sort of questions. @skjask, @myparnasa, @ilenerosenblum, @hadassah_levy

Driving traffic to a content website. @hadassah_levy

Facebook

Photo sharing – they can be discovered and “liked” months after you posted them and go around again. @RealJStreets

Conversion for B2C businesses, especially those that provide a “fun” product or service people will want to tell their friends about. It’s an extension of word of mouth.  @JewishSpeeches

LinkedIn

Business leads for B2B. Make yourself useful on LinkedIn groups, then post your relevant content there, keep posting it in different groups, and you can get sustained traffic. @myparnasa, @ilenerosenblum

Google+

Tech news. @ilenerosenblum

Quora

Help getting answers. @ilenerosenblum

We look forward to seeing you in two weeks for the next #msmktg chat, on Monday Nov 28th.  We’re considering changing the time to accommodate more people, so if you have a time preference (sometime in between 9AM to 1PM GMT+2, tweet to @DebiZSEO and let me know.  Follow us also to get the time and topic updates!

Hmm – two keyword research posts in a row.  Must be something in the air.

When you pick the keywords for your site, how do you come up with the ideas? Think what you would look for? Use the “official name” of the products or services?

If you’re selling children’s toys, that probably works.  What you would call your product is likely to be what your customer would call it.  A doll is a doll is a doll.  If you’re in a technical industry and you’re selling to very technically-oriented customers, that might also work.

Here are some cases where it might not work:

If you’re in a technical industry and you’re selling to not technically-oriented customers – DO NOT TRUST YOUR INTUITION!

• using a keyword that involves “near field communication (NFC),” when all your customers know is that they want a credit card or wallet that will pay at a distance.

If you’re solving a common problem with a unique solution – do not specify the type of solution as your keyword.

• using “flying cars” as your keyword when all your potential customers are thinking about is how they can get to work faster in rush hour traffic. No one realizes you can use a flying car (you didn’t, right?), so they’re not going to look for it. Use keywords relating to decreasing commuting time.

How can you figure this out? Doesn’t your inside knowledge bias you?

Yes.  And that’s why a very important part of picking your keywords is asking real customers. They can be actual current customers, or people who fit into your customer demographic.  Give them the problem your product or service solves, and say: You have this problem. What do you look for on Google? Use that as the basis for your keyword research.

Much success to all on finding the right keywords – for your customers!

Is your site optimized? Of course, you say – I did an extensive keyword research (or had one done for me) three years ago when I started my site.  I took the conclusions and made sure my content, my titles, my alt text was all super-optimized (and of course not overdone).

Three years is a long time in the world of the internet.  Search trends change.  Let’s take an example:

You started a company that markets businesses on the social networks, especially Facebook. When you did your keyword research a few years ago, you checked the keywords “social media marketing” and “facebook marketing” and saw that the search volume was similar.  So you decided to go with “social media marketing”, because it was a broader term, and maybe it would get you more traffic as the space grows.

Let’s see what happened over the past few years in search (this is from Google Insights for Search):

Although they were about the same then, “facebook marketing” has overtaken “social media marketing” by a long stretch, Google says.

Now, true – you don’t know about the competitors.  Maybe competition is a lot stiffer for “facebook marketing” and so if you’re doing decently where you are for “social media marketing” you should stay put and not change a thing.

But it’s worth a look.

Google Insights is only good for search terms that get lots of search, so if you want to look at smaller volume terms, the Adwords Tool is the best way to go.  For more details on keyword research you can check out our step by step guide to keyword research.

I’ll make the point here, as we do in the guide, that we don’t use any kind of mathematical KEI (keyword efficiency index), as many paid tools will give you.  They’re based – usually – on some calculation of the number of people searching a month and the number of results Google will return for that phrase.  Number of people searching – important. Number of results? If there were billions of results but not well optimized compared to what you could do, or 100 results but each of them from a well-optimized, well-linked to page: which would you rather compete for?

If your goal is to be on page one, once you have your keywords organized by relevancy and number of searches, do searches and analyze the top 10 results.  If you *need* to get into the top 5, just look at them.  They’re your competition. Can you compete with them and do one better?  If you can, go for it.  If there’s no way, save your time and effort.  That’s your KEI – number of searches and some human analysis.

Happy keyword re-research!

Before even starting this post, I should give a BIG thank you to all the people who have developed these and other addons.  It’s their time, their energy – and they’re donating to make our lives better.

Now for the list – the 6 SEO addons for Firefox and Chrome without which my job would be *so* much harder.

SEOMoz Toolbar – this has to top the list.  SEOMoz does an amazing job of providing helpful information for making SEO decisions. If you use the toolbar on the search engine results pages, it shows you their page strength metrics for the page and the domain, as well as the number of links and linking root domains to the page and the domain and a click takes you to their opensiteexplorer.org where you can find out lots of backlink data. These are some of the primary metrics that I use when making decisions about which keywords to target, or what link to go after. (Note: some metrics are only available if you’re a PRO member. If we did not have a PRO subscription, its value would go down for me.)  On individual pages, it gives you all those numbers and more information about the tags and characteristics of the page.

Fireshot – this used to only work on Firefox. Today, as I was writing this, I double checked that that was still the case – and it wasn’t!  Yay! Fireshot works on Chrome now also!  Why am I so excited?  Fireshot is a free screenshot program that is really powerful – take a screenshot of the entire webpage you’re on (not just the visible screen), and then crop, mark it up with arrows and circles and text, use special effects like blurring – and save it to use as an image in a blog post.  I work on Chrome usually, but whenever I would want to take a screenshot of something, I would go into Firefox and open the page up there.  It’s really, really good.

Google Global – Did you know that no two people get the same Google results, even if they search for the same thing?  Well, maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement, but Google results are so influenced by where you are searching and what you’ve searched for before with that Google account or with that computer that it’s not far from being true.  So let’s say I wanted to know what a search would look like done in a different country, by someone who hadn’t visited sites in that niche before?  Enter Google Global.  Do a Google search. Then with a click you can pick which Google you want to look at (e.g. google.co.uk), in which language and in which country. (You may have to add some yourself if you want beyond the defaults.)  Make sure when you first set it up to go into the settings “Show options” and  check the box that says “de-personalize Google search results.”

(Note: my Google Global sometimes does this strange thing where when I try to see results from a new country, it shows me the results for the search term “f” – which is not what I was searching for.  So then you’ll just have to put your search term, separated by plus signs,into the URL where the “f” is.  Meaning, instead of http://www.google.com/search?q=f&pws=0&gl=US, turn it into http://www.google.com/search?q=seo+addons&pws=0&gl=US and press enter.)

Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Addon – do you ever get really excited about all the new traffic to your site, only to realize that it was… you? Enter this addon (also available for Internet Explorer) which will block any Google Analytics code, whether on your site or anyone else’s, from registering your presence.  It works per browser, remember – so make sure to put it on every browser on every computer you’ll be looking at your site from. (See here for a more detailed overview of ways to exclude yourself from your Google analytics.)

SEOQuake – a pretty standard SEO addon, I don’t use it anymore for link information (I prefer SEOMoz’s – it’s consistently available, as opposed to SEOQuake’s which is based on Yahoo’s and depending how many times you tried to access it, Yahoo will start giving you error messages instead of data).  I do like it for the “Density” tab – which is quick access to all information about the meta-tags and text on the page, as well as the link to the Whois information for that site. If you’re looking to request a link from a site, but you can’t find any contact information on the site, sometimes you can find the right email address in the Whois info.

(Don’t worry – the real thing is bigger.  :)

Web Developer – also thrilled while writing this post to find out that it comes in Chrome! Web Developer, while meant for designers, is good for SEO analyses of sites. You can quickly see all the image alt text on a page, and hide the CSS to make sure there’s no funny business going on like writing keywords in a font color that matches the background.

What are your favorite add-ons?  Share in the comments below!