Haven't been here in a while.

Boy oh boy,

I have been so busy lately developing my career that I have not have time to think straight much less do any blogging. I have been learning so much about so many different aspects of Advertising and Marketing that I almost have forgotten HTML (One could only wish right?).

Moving forward I will keep the blog updated with some of the things I have been learning that might be of some use to someone else.

Next topic: Media Buying

Stay tuned...

Is Google the new Eveready?

They keep going and going and going...

Blogging

Blogs still remain unidentified territory for many corporate marketing departments — as well they should. In today’s blog mania, the medium’s strongest assets are getting lost amongst a wave of marketing hype.

A media dream and nightmare all in one, blogs provide some of the most timely communication on the Internet. Those with comment options or obvious "contact me" links are an open forum for feedback and they can help foster in-depth and personal relationships with your real consumers, if they’re used effectively. However, the surge of blogs as personal opinion journals, blogs as lead generation tactics and blogs without relevant information has left marketing gurus struggling to find a niche for these web-based business-to-consumer touchpoints.

So what to do? First of all, do not employ a blog to attract customers to your site or product/service. Nine times out of ten it will be ineffective. Do employ a blog to communicate with your current customers. Give them a place to respond, ask questions, share experiences. In doing this, you will foster the personal relationships that every marketer salivates for.

Next, do not make promises you cannot keep. If you tell your customers that they can expect feedback to their questions within 24 hours, make sure they get feedback within 24 hours. Otherwise that personal relationship you’re after will turn into something ugly indeed, with customer defecting with a negative impression to tell all their friends.

And its not just your own corporate blog that can be utilized. Advertising is expanding into RSS feeds, a move that will be huge once you figure out which blogs your target market is subscribing to. How to find out? Ask your current customers.

In time, bandwagon marketers will learn that corporate blog success cannot be measured in leads and clickthroughs, but in relationship building and brand loyalty. And that kind of success isn’t the type to fade with the hype.

Is It All About the Keyword Density?

In the shadowy, complex world of search engine rankings, keyword density is one of the "key" players for an optimized web presence. But how important is it?

Keyword density is the ratio of your chosen keyword or phrase compared to the total words on a page. If your keyword density is too low, your rankings will suffer. Too high and you’ll be blacklisted as spam content.

Most professionals argue good keyword density ranges from 2% to 7%, some say 3% to 5%, others say 3% to 8%. Personally I find that 2% to 7% keyword density along with all of the other "basics" of SEO marketing will help blaze your path to the promised land. Make sure you are integrating your words/phrases into both your visible web copy and your meta tags. Calculating your site’s density can be tough if you don’t know what you’re doing. Though there are quite a few tools out there that can help you with this, take care. Like any web-based free tool, they are not always entirely accurate. It’s best to trust such an important aspect of your site’s web health to an experienced web marketer/site optimizer that handles these tasks with a calculator and a good cup of coffee.

Contextual Search Engine Marketing

Internet users today are publishing an online guide to their consumer and personal preferences— and they’re doing it voluntarily. Services like Flickr (a photo sharing website) allow guests to give contextual meaning to their pictures by tagging them with user-created keywords. These tags, like "iPod" for example, are then used not only to categorize the specific consumer’s photos, but also to add value to the broader community’s photos that have been tagged by other users in the same way. As more and more sites create tagging "folksonomies," the opportunity grows for marketing experts to more accurately target consumers.

Search engines are starting to take advantage of the tagging trend. Ask Jeeves offers tagging and Amazon has bought into 43 Things, a site that allows people to build tag-based wish lists. Sites that wish to stay competitive will have to roll out tag-like structures that will allow users to easily locate relevant content. For example, a current search on Google for "new car" can yield a results list that includes new car buyers, sellers, insurance, dealerships, anyone that uses/buys the keywords "new car." Whereas, with tagging, you can find out what people searching for a new car are finding and sharing about their search. You can then tailor your new car sales site to attract qualified prospects.

Because tagging is consumer dictated, the opportunity to tap into the mind of your target market is unlimited. Connections can be made between products and services that may have never occurred to you without the insights from those who are buying your product. And although tags are far from perfect (they create some false positives), they allow you to find your consumers and help lead your consumers to you — creating increased traffic to your site and for your products.

© Nicole Keene 2005

Search Engine Optimization in the Here and Now

Search Engine Optimization in the Here and Now

Bloated Code: A Search Engine Marketing Nightmare

Let’s talk about well-written code when it comes to search engine marketing.

It's too easy (when using WYSIWYG editors) to get caught up in bloated code due to library items while developing includes. In most cases, designers are building out the includes in their own pages. With WYSIWYG, this causes the JavaScript that are generated to handle image rollovers and such to be added to the includes page, and on-load event handlers to be added to the body tag of the library item or include as well.

So what's the problem? The problem occurs when you pull the library items into your templates to be used throughout the web design. The library items already have html opening and closing tags and body tags, when you drop them into your pre-built templates, you have two sets of html tags in your code. In some cases, I have seen up to four sets of html tags inside one page.

Code bloat is a Search Engine Optimization nightmare just waiting to happen. Imagine the robots (or search engine crawlers) coming through your site and reading through 100 lines of well-written code that uses external .css and .js pages to include event handlers and styles versus a page that has over a thousand lines of code to do the same thing. And, to top it off when, you use JavaScript and CSS stylesheets (if you do not externally include them) these will be in the head tag of your html, (for non-web pros that’s the behind-the-scenes beginning of the page) forcing the robots to read through tons of gibberish that they do not want or need before getting to your good stuff, the well-written keyword copy that you spent so much time creating.

In a lot of cases, these robots will get sidetracked and move out of your pages before they get a chance to index them. Basically, all of your hard work and research is thrown out by poor web design practices.

How do you know if your site is being held hostage by bloated code? Launch your website in the browser and view your source code. Do you see more than one body tag? More than one set of opening and closing html tags? Do you have a hundred or so lines of code at the beginning of your pages that have nothing to do with your site’s content, only CSS and JavaScript? If so you have been exposed to bloated code.

What steps do I take to get back on the right track?

To fix the problem, you need to get all the jumbled code out of your pages. Use external JavaScript and CSS for everything. There is never a reason that CSS or JavaScript need to be in your page versus in an include page. When building out your includes or library items, there should be no opening and closing html, head or body tags, only table data. What I suggest for new guys starting out is to build all your navigations and whatever else you will be using as includes or library items in one complete working template at first. Then go back and cut out the sections that you want to use as includes and library items.

If you do this correctly, you will see that all of your on-load body event handlers have been added to the main template page and not your library items.

It takes practice to get it perfect, but once you do, you will see the difference in your code and in your search engine listings.