Roundup: Essential Online Marketing and SEO Blogs
April 25th, 2007
Search engine representatives
- Matt Cutts - Head of Google’s webspam team and lover of cats
- Google Webmaster Central blog - Updates on Webmaster tools provided by Google, and general news about Google and search
- Yahoo Search Blog - News from the other side of the fence
Industry news
- Google Blogoscoped - Every piece of news on Google that’s worth reading!
SEO Bloggers
- SEOmoz - Rand and his crew post about all sorts, but never fail to entertain or to stimulate discussion.
- SEO Book - Aaron Wall shares insights and advice
- Marketing Pilgrim - Andy Beal’s excellent resource with views and search news
- Jim Boykin - CEO of webuildpages, and link ninja
- GreyWolf - Offers the occasional gold nugget of information or opinion. Worth subscribing to.
- Andy Beard - Niche marketing ‘opinion and attitude’
- Dave Naylor - UK seo and supposed occasional grey hat - shares some great tips and insights
Grey and Blackhat blogs
(Because it’s important to keep up to date with what shady tactics are being used, and sometimes these guys share extremely valuable white-hat tricks and tips)
- SEO Blackhat - News and opinion from the dark side of SEO
- Blue Hat SEO - Eli is one of the most candid bloggers out there, often sharing detailed guides on how to make money and achieve results. Shame it’s often not using ethical methods!
Design, accessibility and usability, and other blogs
- Seth Godin - Author of books about permission marketing and general buisness observations, you’ll never read a post on this blog which isn’t thought provoking and makes you question the way many companies run their business. Highly recommended.
- Signal vs. Noise - The way all company blogs should be. Insights into business descisions, interesting opinions and interviews (chats), and some great advice on usability.
- A List Apart - Explore the design and meaning of the web. Standards and accessibility gods
- ProBlogger - Tips on blog writing, promoting your blog and monetisation. Worthy reading whether writing your own blog for profit, or creating a corporate blog for a client.
What does your ‘thank you’ page do for your business?
February 5th, 2007
You spend time and money getting a visitor to your site. You present them with the very best product photography and product description that you can come up with, and then you hopefully convert your visitor into a customer. They go through your payment provider, and thankfully don’t drop out of the order process. You’ve gained another sale and (perhaps) another long term customer. What next?
You probably show them a page that simply says ‘Thanks for your order’ and that’s it.
MarketingSherpa blog this week that the special offers and incentives they place on their ‘thank you’ page receive a click through rate of nearly 40%. This makes sense - after all you’ve done the hard work of convincing your new customer that you’re a trustworthy business worthy of taking their order, so why not present them with an opportunity to spend more with your company and/or build up more of a relationship! At the very least, invite that customer to bookmark your site and remind them to return once they’ve used their new purchase to leave a review. You do allow customer reviews, don’t you? They convert better than sales-speak product descriptions ever can. Otherwise, bright ideas include offering coupons or vouchers, invite your customer to recommend a friend, or get them signed up to your mailing list.
Taking a careful look at your sales process is always worth the effort. Why spend money attracting visitors to your site without ensuring that it will perform at 100% of it’s potential? Of course this doesn’t just apply to e-commerce stores, it works for business leads and enquiries too.
Traffic drop on 1st Feb?
February 2nd, 2007
It’s quite usual for there to be a smooth increase and decrease of visitors during the week, with most sites you can stop some nice trends as to which days of the week your site is most popular (people doing a bit of shopping during lunch hours etc). However, we seem to have recorded around a 10-20% drop in traffic over 30 websites, all of which are on seperate hosting, some have marketing, some don’t, some are even personal sites owned by staff here.
I’ve compiled this quick overview of a few sites from Analytics:
I was wondering if anybody else has experienced this drop, or can shed any light on it? Did I miss a big world event? Was the 1st Feb national “No Internet Day”?.
Bill Gates on the Daily Show
February 1st, 2007
Not really related to search but YouTube have finally left a copy of Bill Gates on the Daily Show live, watch it before they delete it.
How do you think he did?
Thanks Search Anyway
Google Local getting vocal
January 30th, 2007
Something I’ve always wanted present in Google Local has finally made an appearance! When performing a search that gives you a few local results you can now see a star rating and review section.
I’m not sure whether this will affect the positioning of the results (this would lead to teams of company-hired goons writing reviews for themselves and bad reviews for competitors). However, it is however a really nice touch to be able to see some human feedback on the companies that pop up in your search.
