Does Google notice your site?  Or does it seem like you’re completely ignored?

Well, there’s one way to tell: look at Google’s index of your site.

• Do a site search for your domain. (e.g. www.amazon.com)

• Under the search bar, select “Show options…”

• In the sidebar that appears, select a date range from the second group (“Past 24 hours”, “Past Week”)
• In the filtered results, you can see when the page was most recently indexed in the grey text before the description

Has your site been indexed in the past day? Week? Month? Since you launched?  If the answer is no, then you have a problem.  Here are five ways to get Google to notice you.

Start a Blog

One of the most important things you can do to get search engines to notice you is to actively put new content up on your site.  The easiest way to do this is through a blog.  Ideally, you want to post as often as possible, but, in reality, you may only be able to post as often as necessary.  If Google indexes your site monthly, start posting weekly.  Once the engines notice that you’re regularly adding content, they will be coming back for more.

Distribute Your Content via Social Media

Okay, you’ve got a blog and you’ve got great content on your site, now what?  Get it in front of people!  Don’t wait for them to come to you, go to them.  Using social media as a distribution network is a great idea.  Find a few social media sites that fit what you’re trying to accomplish (Twitter and Facebook being the most popular).  Create an account/profile/fan page on said site and start churning out the content.

Incorporate Social Media Into Your Site

Now that you're using social media sites to push your content out, start pulling their content in.  For example, if you use Twitter, set up a Twitter feed on your home page.  This ensures that engines see slightly different content each time they visit your site.

Add an XML Sitemap (or Two)

Sure, the engines may be indexing your new content, but what about your old stuff?  If you haven’t already, you need to incorporate XML sitemaps.  An XML sitemap is essentially the roadmap to your site that you provide engines.  The rundown:

• Create the XML sitemap.  If you’re not sure how to create one, use a sitemap generator.
• Submit your sitemap to the engines.  Google and MSN both give you the ability to easily upload an XML sitemap through their webmaster tools.  After uploading, you can also check the status to ensure they received the sitemap.
• Identify the sitemap in robots.txt.  If you don’t have a Webmaster Tools or Webmaster Central account, you can add a line in the robots.txt file to specify the path of your sitemap.

If you have a large site and are really feeling ambitious, create multiple XML sitemaps.  If you have a site with tons of blog posts, make one sitemap strictly for the blog and one for the rest of the site.  If you’re an e-commerce site, create a separate XML sitemap for your products.  Have a lot of products? Maybe a sitemap per category would do the trick.

Make Changes

You want to get noticed right?  Well, search engines are not going to notice you unless you actually do something.  Making changes to the site alerts the spiders that your site is different and needs to be reindexed the next time they crawl it.

Remeber, the idea is to get Google to crawl your site as often and deeply as possible.

I do not often enough get an opportunity to collect my thoughts and blog on our company website – but try to make an effort every other full moon or so when I think something is absolutely critical to our industry.  The recent buzz (or lack thereof depending on if you are one that loathes anything Microsoft) has been regarding whether or not Microsoft’s most recent effort at launching a viable search engine is something that the Mountain View Monolith need worry about.  And the short answer to that should be, at least if you are in the Interactive marketing industry, God (or other worshipped deity) I hope so!

Here is a scenario that I am sure is not unique to Fuel Interactive regarding paid search engine marketing: Yahoo provides a pretty good return on ad spend, but not enough volume to make a real difference to your client’s business.  Microsoft/Live.com could not deliver enough traffic to even determine if it might be a viable marketing resource for your client’s business.  The other secondary/tertiary search engines are not even worth you or your client’s time to invest in the allocation of resources to investigate whether or not it might be a viable marketing resource for your client’s business. 

What is left?  The 800 lb Googrilla – which can provide the volume of business necessary to make a difference, but is becoming so hypercompetitive that you cannot afford any inefficiency.  And if you are really trying to deliver market-changing results for your client, elevating the CPC to effectively move the needle absolutely comes into play.  After all, there is only so much optimization you can do before bidding up to garner more impressions across high volume, ultra competitive keywords becomes a reality.

So, will Bing.com be a homerun?  Is it “disruptive” search technology?  Maybe not – but the few searches I have conducted on Bing would indicate the quality of results returned is competitive with what one has come to expect from Google.  I use Google now because I have to – it’s what the majority of the population of Earth uses and it is the only concern our clients have related to their positioning, both paid and organic.  I long for the day where I need to worry about something else.  So count me in to the minority of people who hope Microsoft succeeds with Bing.  Maybe the $100 million ad campaign buys enough market share to make them a viable competitor.  Maybe they will buy Yahoo’s search business before it’s entirely irrelevant.  Having only one player in search is not good for anybody – especially not SEM rockstars like Fuel’s Brian Carter or the agency for which he works.

Stuart Butler and I were recently interviewed by a reporter for a local dining guide about the latest techniques in web design, pay per click, SEO, social media, and email marketing for restaurants.

 

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MYRTLE BEACH, SC – April 1, 2009: Fuel Interactive, South Carolina's #1 interactive agency, has announced a groundbreaking new service to clients to retroactively optimize online marketing campaigns.  The new service offering leverages technology from Archive.org's Wayback Machine, which delivers archived versions of older websites.

The technology, the specifics of which are a closely guarded secret, is based upon updating the cached versions of older sites via a proprietary retro-posting technique on the popular Archive.org toolset.  By effectively posting a new content to a previously released site, Fuel Interactive has been able to break the real-time marketing ceiling, which has typically been seen as a insurmountable barrier in bringing product/content to market and on which Albert Einstein was working at the time of his death.  Now we finally have an offering that gives Fuel the opportunity to promote new products and services back as far as 1997, the date when Archive.org was launched" commented Director of Business Strategy Pete DiMaio.

James "Jim" Woodring, long time client of Fuel Interactive, was interviewed regarding the new service.  "I was initially surprised that development team at Fuel [Interactive] was able to offer such a compelling system.  After approving the process on my site I was amazed that the system had actually been up and running for three weeks by the time I returned to my office [three blocks away] and I had thousands of dollars in bookings, including a couple that had just completed their vacation and had already posted a positive review on Travelocity."

"We created retro-optimization because, at Fuel Interactive, we ask a lot of 'what if' questions and we're technologically innovative," said Fuel Interactive president Will McIntosh..  "We thought, hey, we've learned a lot about web design and development and SEO and analytics- what if we had that business intelligence for our clients 5 years ago?  Well now we do. Retro-optimization is a powerful technology, limited only by your imagination, and we can help you imagine more and newer ways to use it- in fact, we combine retro-optimization and multivariate testing and then we retro-optimize the best retro-optimizations to exponentially power your business forward."

Web 1.5, the previously undiscovered land between 1.0 and 2.0, ushered in with the launch of Retro-Optimization and puts control back into the hands of large corporations.  "The end consumers have had too much power for too long with web 2.0 and it's about time that [control] it's been given back to the faceless corporations that are running the show," said an anonymous CEO who looked a lot like Dick Cheney.  The genius of web 1.5 is that it gives consumers the ability to get their hands on new products and services after they undergone years of trial an error prior to their initial development.

Brian Carter, Director of Search Marketing for Fuel responded, "You may ask why then haven't we seen anything from say 2010 injected back into 2008?  Because retro-optimization will become illegal next year- so hurry up and order your retro-optimization services now, before your competition does, or did."  Brian continued: "While our Retro-Optimization is still in beta, we look forward to our clients having enjoyed the system in the upcoming previous years."

Headquartered in Myrtle Beach, S.C., Fuel Interactive provides all interactive services in-house through expert developers, designers and marketers with more than 583 years of combined marketing and Web development experience who understand the potential of well-done, effective online marketing.

Fuel Interactive provides clients a variety of services to create dynamic, individualized interactive marketing solutions that range from Web site design and Web hosting to such online applications and programs as search engine optimization, online media creative, Pay-Per-Performance and email marketing. The Agency provides clients with an easy, cost-effective way to tap into the online market without having to dedicate important time and internal resources to achieve meaningful results.

There's a very small, simple, yet very important skill needed in PPC.  What is it?

Spelling

Whether it's a keyword, ad copy, URLs, or what, the simple fumble of a few letters can cause major damage to your marketing efforts.

Scenario #1: Misspelled Keywords

By (unintentionally) misspelling a keyword you miss out on traffic.  Yes, you can harness the power of misspelled keywords, but that's not what I'm talking about here.  I'm talking about mistakes in your main set of keywords.  Who's going to search for Myrtle Beach Glof on purpose?

In PPC, not only are you going to loose out on traffic, you're going to pay more.  AdWord's Quality Score is based on the relevance of the keywords, ads and landing pages with a nice mix of CTR, performence history, and a bunch of other stuff thrown in for good measure.  Misspelled keywords are usually going to have a lower relevancy and lower performance then normal keywords, negatively affecting quality score.  If you've got a strong, conscise keyword list, a simple spelling error can cause you to pay more than you should.

Scenario #2: Mispelled Ad Copy

Stupid.  Period.

Scenario #3: Misspelled URLs

This can be broken into too parts.  First, if your Display URL is misspelled, that falls under scenario #2.

Second, if your Destination URL isn't right, you might as well not run the add at all.  This should be a no brainer.  If searchers click on your ad in hopes of having you fufill their innermost desires (or at least their most pressing) and they get an error message, that's like you telling them that they're stupid and you don't care about them.  Maybe that's hyperbole, maybe not.

A simple mistake in your destination URL can screw things up bad.  Not only is that lost revenue, but how does that reflect on your brand?  It gives the cusomers a bad impression.  It's like running a newspaper ad saying that your store is open until 7pm.  When Joe the Shopper strolls down to the store at 5:30 and finds it closed, he's going to feel decieved and it's more than likely going to leave a bad taste in his mouth.

Conclusion

To sum things up: check your spelling!  Not only will you prevent some potentialy costly mistakes, it transfers well into other parts of your life.  Start checking your spelling and your coworkers will stop laughing at you behind their backs after reading your emails.  You know they do...

By the way, did u notise anythin?  I bet it was annoying, huh?

I have a simple point to make to my SEO industry peers...

Should SEO Success Be Measured By Rankings?  Traffic?  Conversions?

There's been a lot of discussion in the SEO community over the last few months about how important rankings are or are not, and whether the main goal of SEO is rankings, traffic, or conversions.  What annoys me is that articles are written as if there's one best answer for all cases.  There isn't just one way to do it.  Every client has different needs.  And every client has different key metrics.

Yeah, yeah, yeah... without rankings, you can't get traffic or conversions.  Some keywords yield more traffic.  Analytics help optimize for keywords that result in the most leads and highest revenues.

The Most Important Thing In SEO Is...

What are your client's goals?  What is their business strategy?  How does SEO fit into that strategy and those goals?

• If their main goal is leads, then optimize their SEO for the keywords that get the most leads.
• If their main goal is revenue, optimize for the keywords that get the most revenue.
• BUT if you have a client (and we have several like this) that need top 5 or even #1 rankings for particular keywords to fulfill other parts of their business strategy, then FOCUS ON RANKINGS.
  

For example:

We have a client that sells advertising on their site, and part of their salespeople's process is to point out the #1 ranking we have for that niche.  That may not be the best sales technique, but that's what works for them, and if we can keep that #1 ranking, we're doing the SEO job they want.

It took me years in SEO to realize that no matter how right you are about the best way to do it, that doesn't mean it's the best way for your client.

Stop trying to fit every client into your style, and see how your skills and talents can help that company achieve their unique goals. 

Optimal SEO Does Not Always Come First

SEO can be strategic, but it needs to fit with your client's overarching business strategy and goals.

It's understandable that optimizers would want to do SEO optimally, every time. 

But take the bigger view: your real goal is to help your client do business optimally.  So, fit SEO into their overall business objectives optimization.

Here's another example- this one from Pay Per Click:

A client came to us with this problem: they are state-funded, and they had not spent their entire advertising budget.  To ensure they retained funding next year, they had to quickly spend the rest. We spent nearly $8,000 for them within five days.  This required focused, short term work to ensure we spent as much as possible.  The KPI was the spend. 

This is not, in my opinion, the optimal way to do PPC.  I'd much rather do conversion-optimized PPC.  But we met our client's goals, and that's our job.

We in the search industry do a lot of things, including

• Staying on top of industry changes and trends
  
• Honing our skills
  
• Educating clients how to do it optimally ;-)
  
• Improving processes and efficiencies

But ultimately, the job is to serve the client's needs and goals.

UPDATE: This opening has been filled as of 8/26/2008.

Join our cool team!  Just saying that because that's what cheezy companies say that want you to think they're a cool, team-oriented, fun environment.  But we actually are cool, team-oriented, and fun.  Really!

Fuel Interactive has an entry-level opportunity in the exploding field of search engine marketing and optimization.

You will work directly with the Director of the department, another Search Marketing Specialist, our Web Analytics Specialist, Account Managers and other team members.

Fuel Interactive is a rapidly growing internet marketing agency partnered with one of the top traditional marketing agencies in the Southeast and another long-standing successful technology company.

We need a sharp individual interested in on-the-job training and working hard in a quick moving environment. You'll learn cutting edge internet marketing techniques and tools.

What's the Job Like?

One Search Specialist says, "it's cool working in an innovative industry not everyone knows about." It's not easy work. He says, "I've read and studied more in the last two months than I did in college." Search is always evolving and requires constant learning.

But Search is a growing field. In these times of economic downturn, getting a job in this field is "true job security in troubled times." While employers in other industries are laying people off, Fuel has been hiring like crazy.

Responsibilities and duties include:

* Following up on SEO research, build relationships with other sites, help build links to client sites
* Mining of multiple data sources to develop keyword lists
* Creating and editing text and URL's for SEO
* Gather and organize data/research from various websites to aid in SEO and PPC efforts
* Pay Per Click and SEO reporting
* Campaign management- on the job training provided
* Similar activities for Online Reputation Management and Social Media Management programs

Skills needed:
* Ability to handle multiple tasks and work independently
* Must be attentive to detail, good spelling a must
* Proficient with Excel- importing, sorting, cleaning data
* Good written and oral communication skills, team player
* Ability to prioritize, multi-task and dependably deliver results
* Ability to quickly learn new software tools
* Analytic and quantitative abilities

Pluses:
* Experience with AdWords, Yahoo PPC management, SEO, blogging, social bookmarking, Twitter, Google Analytics, Omniture, Urchin, HTML, CSS, CFM, PHP, ASP
* Sense of humor, or just the ability to pretend you have one
   
Location: Myrtle Beach, SC

I’m a big fan of the “Now Discover Your Strengths” series of books, including “StrengthsFinder 2.0”, and “First Break All the Rules”.

If you’re not familiar with these books, the big idea is:

It makes more sense to do what you’re really good at, what you’ve always been a natural at, than it does to try to perfect your weaknesses. 

This goes contrary to common business organizational practices.  And that may be one reason why so many businesses are mediocre.

Why Focus on Strengths?

Strengths are

• Things you do naturally do...
• Things you love to do…
• The ways you tend to think, and
• They lead to you perform excellently. 

On the flip side, no matter how good you get at your weaknesses, you’ll never excel by doing them.  You’ll never beat a person who’s natural at those things.

Don’t misunderstand: you can’t be incompetent at certain things, and you should manage around your weaknesses, but you should spend most of your time doing what you do best. 

Enough italics?

Organizationally speaking, there are enough humans with varying talents for you to focus on yours.  Find your spot.

This isn’t just some neat-o-keen idea to sell business books… it’s based upon the Gallup organization’s research on 1.7 million employees at 101 companies in 63 countries.

What Are Your Talents, or “Strengths”?

Gallup discovered 34 strengths or talents… things like: Competition, Relater, Learner, Input, Deliberative, and Ideation.

It takes a while to learn what these strengths all are and identify which ones really are your top strengths.  The first two books I mentioned above each comes with an online test to find them, but as they explain, these tests aren’t perfect, and you really need to understand the definitions and then watch yourself for a while to accurately diagnose.

For example, I would have denied that I was a competitive achiever until I read these books- then the more I watched myself the more those strengths explained stupid things I did like having to pass other cars on the freeway.  It’s stupid, but I think I’m winning and achieving when I do that.  Just so you know: if I pass you on the road, I win!  Deal with it.

Is There Just One Set of Key Strengths for SEO or PPC?

Even more complicated for this particular article: there probably isn’t one set of best strengths for PPC and SEO.  For example, a recent article about SEO’s pointed out the difference between technically-oriented SEO’s and copywriting-oriented SEO’s.  Each requires different talents.  You might have both.

The point of this article is to figure out how to get people who are naturals at the talents required for SEO and PPC.  Some companies hire neophytes and train them from the ground up.  Skills and tasks can be trained but, alas, talents cannot.  Although you could probably train many people to be mediocre SEO’s or PPC’s, my hope is that you’re looking for potentially excellent ones, or wondering if you could be an excellent one.

I’m going to take a stab at which strengths are required.  I assumed that SEO and PPC would require a different set of strengths, but upon review, I found the talents to be quite similar.  Naturally, many talents are required in business, but I’ve tried to include the ones that are most unique to SEO and PPC job functions.

How to Criticize My List of SEO/PPC Strengths

Feel free to discuss and disagree, especially if you’re familiar with the 34 strengths system!  I may have shaped these potentials to fit just our company’s vision- let me know if yours is different and requires something else. 

The other thing to keep in mind is that all strengths look good- it's like looking at some dessert menus- you want everything.  As you read them you may say "of course we should have this, too!"  But everyone can't have every strength- and any job candidate may have a few of these along with others that aren't as critical for SEO and PPC.  So the question to ask of each strength in the list below is "is this talent really essential to excelling at SEO or PPC?"

I tried to put these in order of importance, yet I feel all are indispensable.

The 7 Essential Strengths of An Excellent SEO/PPC Employee

1.    Maximizer – Obsession with making good things excellent.  Optimization.  This one’s a no-brainer for all analytics-based marketing.

2.    Achiever – Relentless need for achievement.  Key for making consistent improvements and getting more and more results.

3.    Focus – Need goals and clear destination.  Filter actions based on effectiveness and efficiency.  Key for getting things done.

4.    Individualization – Tendency to look at how things, people, websites are unique.  Key for dealing with unique niches, varying semantic spaces, and current client’s website situation.  Key for writing ads that are highly relevant to the keywords and landing pages in an AdGroup.

5.    Arranger – Loves complicated challenges.  Productively configures countless variables and factors.  Key for dealing with the number of things that affect search rankings and indexing, and working on all those things at one time.  This is also key for creating tightly focused AdGroups in PPC.

6.    Strategic – Sort through the clutter and find the best route.  Ability to see what would happen if you did this or that.  Key to anticipating possible results of any optimization.  Also important for thinking through the ramifications of interconnected PPC factors like CTR, bid, and quality score.

7.    Analytical – Prove it.  Show me the data.  Key for results-oriented SEO.  Without this you can have lots of fascinating conversations but you need this to get the best results.  However, there’s a lot of mystery in SEO, and if you’re too analytical you might not be able to tolerate that- for this reason, this is probably a better PPC strength than SEO.

Strengths for the SEO Team

Just after publishing this, @DerrickWheeler an SEO at Microsoft told me to check out his comment on this Bruce Clay blog post... it's his summary of the strengths you should have somewhere in your overall SEO team (scroll down to the comments).  I'm reserving my comment for now on the specific strengths he chose until I've had a chance to think about it, but that's another good angle to look at when checking your resources... if you're adding to your team, you can inventory existing members for strengths, find out where your strength gap is, and emphasize your talent search in that direction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

#5. Barack already is mentioned in the #1 google result for "presidential candidate".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The number of new articles on these topics per day is at least 50... 50 good ones.  How do you keep up?  How do you know which ones to read?  How can you filter the god from the bad?

You don't have to.  We do that for you.

Josh Williams, Shannon Sell, and I (Brian Carter) post the best of the best SEO, PPC, social media, and online marketing articles in a special FriendFeed "SEM, SEO, PPC, social media, media placement links, articles" room.  (If you don't use FriendFeed, check that out too- it's a way to aggregate all your most important social networking feeds in one place.)

Get most useful, most relevant-to-the-real-business-world info there.  Check it out!