Author Archive for ‘Jeff Dailey’

Jeff Dailey - Principal and CEO
Jeff has been at the forefront of eMarketing for nearly eighteen years, including the planning, development and implementation of more than 350 websites in the B-to-C and B-to-B sectors. Several of these sites have won national awards from PCWeek and eWeek magazines, Information Week magazine and Harris Interactive.

The Advantages of Using Sitemaps

Google Sitemaps are files (XML) that list the pages available on a site. The aim is to help site owners notify search engines about the pages on a website that are available for indexing.  You  can also include information about each page, such as when it was last updated and its importance in the context of the site.

A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.

Now some developers argue that site index is a more appropriately used term to relay page function, web visitors are used to seeing each term and generally associate both as one and the same. However, a site index is often used to mean an A-Z index that provides access to particular content, while a site map provides a general top-down view of the overall site contents.

The document structure and encoding are standards for Search Engine Spiders to find and parse sitemaps. There is an example of an XML sitemap below (missing link to site). The instructions to the sitemap are given to the crawler bot by a Robots Text file, an example of this is also given below. Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found. This is especially important if a site uses a dynamic access to content such as Adobe Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links.

Google Sitemaps Benefits:

  • Alert Google to Changes and Additions to your Website Anytime You Want
  • Your Website is crawled more efficiently and effectively
  • Web Pages are categorized and prioritized exactly How You Want
  • Speed up the process of New Website and New Web Page Discovery
  • No Waiting and guessing to see when Spiders crawl your web pages
  • Google Sitemaps is likely to set the standard for Webpage Submission and Update
  • Notification which will extend the benefits to other Search Engines
  • The Google Sitemaps service is Free.

 

Deadly SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid

Are you getting mediocre results from SEO? If yes, this article is for you. To achieve success with SEO, you must target the right key phrases and build links consistently. It is a continuous process – not a one-time effort.

With this in mind, let us take a look at the 4 deadly SEO mistakes that you must avoid at all cost. These are the mistakes that many optimizers made that prevent them from getting successful results:

  1. You optimize the wrong keywords. If you are trying to optimize keywords that are too generic, it is very hard for you to achieve success from your SEO effort. This is because you will get yourself into a more competitive battlefield with other optimizers. So, spend some time to do your research and look for key phrases with lesser competition but relevant to your business. Remember that if you optimize keywords that are not relevant or too generic, even if you achieve high rankings for them, there will be no conversion.
  2. You do not tag your pages with relevant key phrases. This is the most common mistake that many webmasters made. I believe you have seen websites that place only their company names in their Title tags. Title tags are words that appear on the top left hand side of your Internet browser. You must place keywords in your Title tag because search engines give a lot of weight to it. The title tag is like the Title of a book. It tells readers what the book is about. Likewise, the title tag tells search engines what your website is about. If you are trying to get higher rankings for a keyword but it is not present in your title tag, it is very hard for search engines to award you with high rankings. Therefore, make sure that your title tag describes the content of your page and place important keywords right at the front of it.
  3. You do not have enough content or your content is outdated. SEO is more than just tagging your pages. You need to have enough content for search engines to read. To rank high on search engine listings, you must place keywords in your content. Moreover, if your website content is outdated, search engines will visit your site less often, and thus view it as less important. This also prevents your site from getting higher rankings in search engine listings.
  4. You do not build link consistently. Link building is a process of getting more incoming links to your website. Quality inbound links will help your website to achieve higher rankings for competitive keywords. But link building is a continuous process. If you never do it consistently, you will not achieve good result from SEO. So, always build links consistently by using article marketing, blog commenting, directory submissions, and other common strategies that optimizers are using.

For more information on SEO or if you would like to start a SEO program for your site, please call eTargeting today. Click here to contact us today to learn more about what eTargeting can do for your company.

Hosting Tips #5

Finding a good host is not a foolproof business. Even the smartest and most experienced webmasters can still fall prey to a host which suddenly goes bust. Hosting itself is a risky, expensive and complex business, so the companies involved in hosting – just like any other business – can experience ups and downs. If you find a good host, stick with them through the bad times, although this doesn’t negate the earlier rules I mentioned. For example, if a good host goes down for 24 hours or more, you should still research other hosts in preparation to move. Then when your host provides you with a reason for the downtime, judge its plausibility based on some research. All hosts have outages from time to time, but if a ‘good’ host experiences frequent outages, and things are steadily getting worse, then it’s time to move on.

Website Design & Development Tips #3

Make sure that your load time is low. In our fast-paced world, we don’t like to wait. I want to see your web page and I want to see it NOW. Try minimizing graphics, flash and scripts as they increase your file size. Also, make sure to optimize your code and delete any unwanted tags or unused scripts.

New Methods To Improve Website ROI Using SEO

Return on Investment (ROI) is the relationship between the total amount you spend and the total amount you earn from a certain internet marketing campaign.

If you are doing any online marketing campaign, then Return On Investment (ROI) is the most important measurement to estimate your success and the one metric that you must work hard on to improve over time.

Generally speaking, Return on Investment (ROI) is a performance measurement used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment and to compare the efficiency of one investment to the other or over a certain period of time.

Return on investment is a very popular metric due to its versatility and simplicity. That is, if an investment does not have a reasonable positive ROI, or if there are other opportunities with a higher ROI, then this investment should not be done. Return On Investment (ROI) is the final measurement of success for any advertising campaign.

How To Calculate your Return On Investment (ROI) ?

Return on Investment (ROI) for any advertising campaign is very simple to calculate. There are only two variations in the calculation formula:

  1.  Total cost of advertising campaign including all expenses related to this specific campaign
  2. Net Profit of this specific advertising campaign.

The Net Profit (return) of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment; the result is expressed as a percentage or a ratio.

Why should you constantly monitor your Return On Investment (ROI) ?

Constant monitoring of your Return on Investment (ROI) either daily, weekly or both will guarantee 5 vital goals:

  1. To ensure that you are not losing money on any advertising campaign on a daily or weekly basis.
  2. To detect any sudden decrease in the performance of any campaign and to take necessary actions to put it back on track.
  3. To detect any sudden improvement in the performance of any campaign and to take necessary steps to exploit the situation for your advantage.
  4. To assess the effect of changing different elements of the campaign to keep the best elements as in split test and other testing methods.
  5. To detect if the campaign is achieving its goals or falling short.

How to Increase Your Return On Investment?

The two most important factors to improve your Return on Investment (ROI) are:

  1. Professional Search Engine Optimization.
  2.  Website Conversion Rate Optimization.

First: Website Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is one of the best internet marketing strategies to improve your Return on Investment. SEO if done properly will bring your pages to the 1st pages of Google, Yahoo, Bing and other major search engines. This will simply give you much more exposure for a long period of time.

Once the initial cost of Search Engine Optimization is paid, you do not need to pay much money to keep your publicity or exposure on the internet.

Other traditional online and off line advertisements require continuous payment to keep your ads running. These payments accumulate to a huge amount of money over time that will far exceed the total cost of Search Engine Optimization.

Proper Search Engine Optimization can be in the form of a combination of any number of the following factors:

  1. Meticulous keyword research, analysis and selection to find and use the most profitable keywords for your business.
  2. SEO copywriting your main website pages and your landing pages to make them more Search Engine Friendly and more easily found by search engines.
  3. Link building to improve your link popularity and to achieve a top search engine placement.
  4. Social Media Marketing to create more brand loyalty and to reach more targeted visitors.
  5. (YOU DON’T PUT POINT #5 LIKE IN THE OTHER FILE??)

Second: Website Conversion Rate Optimization

When you increase your Conversion Rate, you will get more leads and more sales from your targeted traffic.

A variety of improvements can be applied to increase Conversion Rate:

  1. Find what are your Unique Selling Points (USP) and make them clear and obvious in your website and your landing pages.
  2. Improve your website design to be more search engine friendly and to better communicate your message to your visitors.
  3. Improve your website usability and accessibility to make navigation and finding information, products or services easier for your visitors.
  4. Improve your sales copy to clearly present the benefits of your products or services to be more convincing and compelling to your visitors. Such a Sales copy will encourage and entice your visitors to convert.
  5. Improve landing pages to accurately match your advertising campaigns and the keywords used in them.
  6. Ensure that your landing pages are closely relevant to the content of your website.
  7. Track your campaigns and analyze results to improve performance.
  8. Experiment with different ads, and split test every element and every step of your campaign to fine tune your marketing campaign and improve your return on investment (ROI) results.

Social Marketing Tips #2

Depressing tweets, vague tweets, tweets about your weight loss – and of course, our favorite, the bragging tweet – these are all messages that are better kept to yourself. A little personality is fun. But for the most part, stay professional and positive. And always, always stay classy, of course.

eMail Tips #1

Make sure your e-mail includes a courteous greeting and closing. It helps to make your e-mail not seem demanding or abrupt.

Website Design & Development Tips #1

Many people are used to seeing the www at the beginning of a website address (e.g. www.etargeting.com). Ensure your website functions both with and without this famous sub domain.

Hosting Tips #1

Never rely on one or two pieces of advice when purchasing hosting services, no matter how glowing the recommendation. Aside from the fact that people may not really know what they’re talking about, some people often don’t have any direct experience with the host they’re recommending, and of course some people may even be paid by or affiliated with the host and thus their recommendation is not genuine. Nothing replaces decent independent research when choosing a web host. Hit Google and start searching for any and all accounts of a host by actual users. Virtually all hosts will show both good and bad experiences, but the good hosts usually have far higher incidences of the good rather than the bad.

How to Make Your Website “Sticky”

Getting people to visit the first time is less than half the battle. You’ll need them to remain on the site long enough to take an action that benefits your business for the site to be effective. A site that gets people to stay there once they’ve arrived is called “sticky.”

There are myriad ways a website can fail at stickiness. If the site fails to establish trust, people will probably leave. If the site seems shoddy, messy or unorganized, people will also leave. If the site asks too much of the user, like asking them to fill out a long form without offering any free teaser content before they can view valuable content, people are going to leave. If a site is confusing, people will leave. If a site has many broken links or “Page Not Found” errors, people are going to leave. This list goes on and on.

On the other hand, if a website offers quality content that is original, you greatly increase your chances that a visitor will stay. If your copywriting is compelling, succinct and easy to consume, people will want to continue reading. You want people to stay so you can capitalize on their presence. For example, if your call to action is to get visitors to sign up for your newsletter, they’ll need to be there long enough to accomplish the following:

  1. Learn that there is a newsletter to sign up for in the first place
  2. Begin to trust you as an authority in your industry
  3. Get their interest piqued enough to want to learn more from you
  4. Be compelled enough to actually sign up for your newsletter
  5. Learn to trust you enough to feel comfortable with giving you their e-mail address

This works for selling online as well. As a matter of fact, it is even more important to establish interest, trust and authority to make a sale online because you are lacking the power of one-on- one in-person communication.

Another factor that makes a site sticky is its ease of use. People like to get maximum benefit for minimum effort. Have you ever considered the design of Google’s website? It is one of the simplest and cleanest home pages in existence. We can all learn from this. You and your Web vendor ought to be chanting this mantra through the entire planning and building phase of a new website: Clean Simple Easy, Clean Simple Easy, Clean Simple Easy. Say it over and over again.

People dislike complicated websites that make them think too much. They hate feeling confused. They hate feeling stupid. They hate wasting their time. Many competing websites are a literal click away. And people have itchy back button fingers.

So to make your website as sticky as possible, create original and compelling content on a regular basis, establish trust and above all else, be sure to design it in a way that appears clean, and is simple and easy to use and to find information.

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