26 Miles

Automating SEO, PPC, and Landing Page Optimization

// June 7th, 2007 // No Comments » // Online Marketing

Yield Software is a (fairly new) company whose software promises to simplify and automate “the process of search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click bidding (PPC) and landing page optimization.”

If it works, I can see this having real value in the market – especially for small businesses who have no in-house expertise and can’t (or won’t) hire a full-service web marketing firm to manage their online marketing and optimization. I’m curious about the technical details and will wait for the reviews to start coming in to see if it proves itself in the market.

Many will argue that you can’t automate SEO in any significant way. Time will tell but I’ll keep an open mind to the possibility that parts of it probably can be automated. Having worked with some of the major SEO firms, I can tell you that at least a few of the “experts” I’ve met could indeed be replaced by a very small shell script.

SEO Title Tag WordPress Plugin

// June 5th, 2007 // No Comments » // Online Marketing

NetConcepts has a WordPress SEO plugin to help make make your WordPress page title’s SEO-friendly.

Some of the features include:

• Allows you to override a page’s or a post’s title tag with a custom one.
• New for v2.0 A Title Tag input box in the Edit Post and Write Post forms. (Previously in version 1.0 you had to use the Custom Field box.)
• New for v2.0 Mass editing of title tags for all posts, static pages, category pages, tag pages, tag conjunction pages, archive by month pages, — indeed, any URL — all in one go.
• Define a custom title tag for your home page (or, more accurately, your Posts page, if you have chosen a static Front Page set under Options -> Reading), through the Options -> SEO Title Tag page in the WordPress admin.

It’s always nice to have an SEO babysitter when you can get one.

AdGooRoo

// April 17th, 2007 // No Comments » // Online Marketing

AdGooRoo is a company providing search marketing intelligence and reporting through their three product offerings: SEM Insight, Natural Rankings, and Trademark Marketing.

SEM Insight is a suite of reports giving you visibility into some key areas critical to search marketing. Notably, it gives you intelligence about the keywords your competitiors are targeting, industry-targeted ad copy that is converting well, comparing two advertisers campaigns in a side-by-side fashion, as well as a handful of other reports.

A sampling of the Natural Rankings features is monitoring that allows you to track search engine rankings for any company. Since this is something you can monitor over time, this empowers you to understand the organic marketing strategy of your competitors, helping you spot weaknesses in your own strategy, or identifying competitors you may not have been aware of. They also have an inbound link report that describes not only the incoming links to your site but to your competitors as well, helping you understand what sites are lending the most authority to improving search rankings.

Finally, their Trademark Monitoring service automates the monitoring and reporting on advertisers who are bidding on or using your trademarks in their ad copy.

Their pricing model starts at $99/month and goes up as you expand your keyword inventory and take advantage of the more advanced features they offer.

AdGooRoo is providing a cohesive set of reports and tools that help automate and manage your SEO and keyword bidding strategy and can scale as your online advertising budget grows.

Keyword Research With WordTracker.com

// April 16th, 2007 // No Comments » // Online Marketing

WordTracker.com is a keyword research tool.

It let’s you research how often people are searching for keywords and how competitive those keywords are. It also helps you find alternative combinations of keywords phrases related to your business or products.

I’ve seen other tools that do some of this, but it’s a competitive price point for what you’re getting.

It’s not a total solution though, as Dan Thies mentions. Doing some targeted research using the advanced Google search features can build on the information a tool like WordTracker gives you to give you a more complete picture of the competitiveness of a given keyword phrase.

Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization

// April 13th, 2007 // No Comments » // Online Marketing

I’ve been asked many times by individuals and companies what they have to do to improve their site’s rankings in search engine results pages.

Recently I’ve been directing people to the Beginner’s Guide To Search Engine Optimization available from SEOMoz.org.

Despite not having been updated in over a year, it still represents a cohesive set of basic guidance for site designers and administrators on the key elements they should consider when architecting a new site or redesigning one with SEO in mind.

It’s an excellent resource for people seeking a basic understanding of SEO and the how to get their sites going in the right direction for better ranking.