AWG - News

Do Any of These Duplicate Content Scenarios Apply to Your Site?

David Montalvo — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 04:00:00 GMT

Search engines dislike duplicate content for a few reasons. One is that major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask aim to provide searchers with a diverse cross-section of unique content, and duplicate content often results in duplicate

Testing…1-2-3…Testing

Christian Neuberger — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 04:00:00 GMT

When it comes to website optimization, you can’t always take the obvious for granted. With the ability to create limitless versions of your web pages, you have an opportunity and a duty to your business to test everything, even that

Search Engine Secrets Revealed

David Montalvo — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 04:00:00 GMT

While often very complex in their calculations and data processing, the critical operations performed by the major search engines in order to rank websites isn't as lengthy as one might think. The processes they use to provide relevant results when a web search is undergone can best be described in the following four steps.

Send out the Web Crawlers
Search engines use invisible "bots" or "spiders," which are really programs or automated scripts, that browse (or "crawl") the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Search engines use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. This type of technology is necessary because the rate at which people create new Internet documents greatly exceeds any manual indexing capacity. In fact, an estimated 20 billion web pages exist, and search engines have crawled about half of them.
Index the Pages
After a spider crawls a web page, it makes a copy of it and adds it to its database. This process is known as indexing. With so many search queries submitted each minute, it is very important that search engines are steadfast in their index management so that they can search and sort billions of documents in fractions of a second.
Process Queries
Search engines process hundreds of millions of search queries every day. When someone keys in a search term and clicks "Search," the engine retrieves from its index all of the documents that match the query. It determines a match by finding the same terms or phrase entered into the search bar. Entering a multi-word phrase by itself can return literally millions of results, but entering that same phrase in quotes can greatly narrow the results, giving the user a more accurate listing of websites that relate to their particular search.
Rank Pages
A very closely guarded mathematical equation, called an algorithm, is employed by each search engine to determine how to sort and rank search query results. This algorithm allows the engine to rank the most relevant web pages first, and the rest in descending order of importance to the user.

What You Can Do for Your Website: Avoid Speed Bumps & Walls

You may not know it, but you could be hindering or preventing your website from being crawled by search engine spiders. As spiders crawl the web, they rely on the architecture of hyperlinks to find new web pages and revisit those that may have changed. Complex links and deep site structures with little unique content may act as "speed bumps" in the process by slowing down the spiders. Even worse, data that cannot be accessed by web crawlers are really like "walls" in that they completely prevent your web pages from being ranked.

Beware of the Following "Speed Bumps":

URLs with 2+ dynamic parameters; i.e. http://www.url.com/page.php?id=4&CK=34rr&User=%Tom% (spiders may be reluctant to crawl complex URLs like this because they often result in errors with non-human visitors)
Pages with more than 100 unique links to other pages on the site (spiders may not follow each one)
Pages buried more than 3 clicks/links from the home page of a website (unless there are many other external links pointing to the site, spiders will often ignore deep pages)
Pages requiring a "Session ID" or Cookie to enable navigation (spiders may not be able to retain these elements as a browser user can)
Pages that are split into "frames" can hinder crawling and cause confusion about which pages to rank in the results.

Beware of the Following "Walls":

Pages accessible only via a select form and submit button
Pages requiring a drop down menu (HTML attribute) to access them
Documents accessible only via a search box
Documents blocked purposefully (via a robot meta tag or robots.txt file)
Pages requiring a login
Pages that re-direct before showing content (search engines call this cloaking or bait-and-switch and may actually ban sites that use this tactic)

In order to avoid the above pitfalls and ensure that your website's contents are fully crawlable, be sure to provide direct, HTML links to each page you want the search engine spiders to index. Remember to make every page of your site accessible from the home page, since the home page is usually the place spiders begin their crawl. It's also a good idea to add a sitemap to your website in order to increase its navigation.

August 15, 2007 This article was written by David Montalvo, Senior SEO and Director of Business Development at Active Web Group.

Search Engine Secrets Revealed.

David Montalvo — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 04:00:00 GMT

Search Engine Secrets Revealed

David Montalvo — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 04:00:00 GMT

Search Engine Secrets Revealed

David Montalvo — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 04:00:00 GMT

Latent Semantic Indexing

Lillian Taylor — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 04:00:00 GMT

Just when you thought you might be starting to understand how search engines compile their organic rankings, you stumble upon a new factor in the algorithm. While latent semantic indexing (LSI) isn’t exactly a new practice, it has been getting

Latent Semantic Indexing

Lillian Taylor — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 04:00:00 GMT

Latent semantic indexing…sounds pretty complicated doesn’t it? In actuality, there’s really not much to it. LSI is a search engine’s ability to identify synonyms and related terms for a keyword, and to identify pages as being related if they contain those similar terms. So if someone were to enter the search term “marketing,” the results that appear would include web pages that incorporate the words “communications” and “media” as well as those that contain “marketing.” In fact, the pages that contain the former don’t even necessarily have to mention the word marketing at all. The search engines will automatically make the connection between the words.

An important step in the indexing process, LSI not only records which keywords a document contains, but it also examines the document collection as a whole, to see which other documents contain some of those same words. According to LSI methods, documents that have many words in common are considered semantically close, and ones with few words in common are semantically distant. When you think about it, human beings might also classify a document collection using a method very similar to LSI. Unlike humans, the LSI algorithm doesn't understand anything about what the words mean…it simply notices patterns, which can make it seem astonishingly intelligent.

Any good copywriter would naturally incorporate words into a website’s content that relate to the subject at hand. The trick is not to over do it, adding so many keywords and synonyms that the copy begins to sound robotic and nonsensical. Because that sort of practice is transparent to website visitors and search engine spiders alike, it is certain to drive traffic away from your site and likely to get it penalized by the engines.

Latent semantic indexing (or similar technologies) can also be used to look at the link profile of your website. If all your links are heavy in a few particular phrases and light on other similar phrases then your site may not rank as well.

You can determine which words are related to your keywords by searching Google for search results with related terms. Do so by entering a “~” into the search bar directly in front of your search term. For example, to find words related to race car, you would key in “race car.” You’ll find results that include not only race car, but also racing, track, and NASCAR.

Another option is to look at variations of keywords suggested by keyword suggestion tools. You can also try writing a page and use the Google AdSense sandbox to see what type of ads they would try to deliver to that page. And still another way of determining related keywords is by reading the page copy and analyzing the backlinks of high ranking pages.

The lesson to be learned here is that while you’re concentrating on carefully incorporating your keywords into your website copy, don’t ignore the synonyms that correlate with those keywords. Your website will benefit from the conscientious eye of a skilled SEO copywriter…but keep our LSI tips in mind when writing your own content.

July 17, 2007 This article was written by Lillian Taylor, Senior Copywriter at Active Web Group

Give ‘Em What They Really Want

Tim Brown — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 04:00:00 GMT

Email Marketing: Changing the ‘Average’ Opinion

Tim Brown — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 04:00:00 GMT

In the days of spam-riddled inboxes, everyone has an opinion on how to raise the average conversion, the average sale, average open rate, or the average click-thru. Years of data from some of the best, and worst, companies who specialize

Give ‘Em What They Really Want

Tim Brown — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 04:00:00 GMT

Most of us are aware that in order to generate effective email campaigns, they must contain offers that are relevant to our customers. However, innovative teen eretailer Karmaloop recently took that knowledge a step further by giving their finicky consumers even greater control over the merchandise offers they get. By allowing their subscribers to select specific product categories and brands they are interested in, Karmaloop’s email-generated revenue jumped 318%.

The wants of today’s consumers change regularly, especially those of teens and tweens. In the midst of opening your email, a teen might also be talking on their cell phone, downloading songs to their iPod, and watching MTV. Realizing this, Karmaloop, an online retailer of urban, streetwear, rave and boutique clothing, sought to do a better job of offering products of importance in their email marketing initiatives.

With its primary demographic being teen shoppers, Karmaloop’s marketers knew it was imperative to spark the interest of recipients with highly relevant content. With a mailing list of 300,000, the folks at Karmaloop had previously been sending email offers based on their customers’ past purchases, but felt they could do more. So they enhanced their email program by adding an automated system that gives customers control over what merchandise they want to hear about, creating a more targeted email.

To accomplish this, Karmaloop surveyed a large portion of their customer base to determine how many brands to include in the new program. The results confirmed their suspicions – that they had a handful of wildly popular brands -- but they were surprised to see that there was also a great deal of interest in dozens of lesser-known brands. They used this information to refine their email offerings and develop an automated program that delivered more customized emails.

Karmaloop achieved the relevancy they were looking for. In fact, they were ecstatic with the bottom-line numbers: email-generated revenue skyrocketed 318%, while conversions-to-sale increased from 3% to 4.6%. The automated system has also helped overall onsite sales, which have been growing incrementally by 3%.

You too can capitalize on the wealth of information that can be obtained from conducting your own customer survey. Then, based on the information you gather from the survey, follow this 5-step system developed by Karmaloop to create your own automated email program.

Step 1 - Pinpoint categories & brands

After sorting through your survey data, compile an alphabetical checklist of your most popular brands. As long as the list is relevant to your audience, an extensive length should not be a problem. If the list starts to underperform, you can easily shorten it.

In addition, you can also incorporate your standard product categories into the checklist. Design your system so that it can recognize IP addresses, so when a customer comes back to modify his or her list, the categories and brands they have selected will be checkmarked to remind them of what they are signed up for.

Step 2 – Include signup buttons on landing pages

Capture more search-engine-generated leads by placing prominent signup buttons on the landing pages for your brand keyword buys. It is also a good idea to add signup buttons on brand and category pages throughout your site.

Step 3 – Target certain behaviors

Next, program your system to take into account behavior information, such as abandoned shopping cart products and recent repeatedly viewed items, and combine them with both the pre-selects and past purchases. In terms of purchases, similar products or cross-sell items can become part of your equation. Hold weekly meetings to discuss the data and decide whether or not to tweak the algorithms.

Step 4 – Carefully plan message timing

Determine how many emails to send customers and prospects based on current sales and new products being driven with the brands they have selected. For instance, you might send two emails one week but none the next week. Be careful not to bombard your subscribers with constant emails. You may even want to set up your program to limit it to no more than two messages a week about sales/new arrivals related to the customer’s selected brands.

Step 5 - Target non-responders four months later with a new offer

If emails do not convert after four months without unsubscribes, design your automated system to rotate merchandise to the next group of items on the team’s set behavioral scale. (Items abandoned in a shopping cart get one of the top weights, while products viewed three times are weighted higher than ones viewed once.)

For example, if a female Karmaloop customer hadn’t made a purchase, the Luxirie by LRG jeans offers she was getting were replaced by Soundgirl jeans or another jeans line she had repeatedly clicked on.

With the right combination of creativity and dedication, Karmaloop’s 5-step program can help you to empower your customers, thereby improving email relevancy and ultimately increasing your open, clickthrough, and conversion rates.

July 06, 2007 This article was written by Tim Brown, Email Marketing Manager at Active Web Group.

Using Local Search to Generate Sales Leads

David Montalvo — Tue, 08 May 2007 04:00:00 GMT

Think of it as an upgrade from the often pricey, frequently overlooked, and increasingly outdated YellowPages ad. Since many small companies do not have the resources to track clicks and would prefer to create sales leads in person or via

You Have an Online Reputation to Uphold

David Montalvo — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 04:00:00 GMT

Do you know what your customers, ex-employees, and competitors are saying about you? The Internet allows information to travel faster than the speed of sound, so it's important that you're paying attention to online conversations about your company. Anything posted

How to Minimize the Effects of Google’s Sandbox

Christian Neuberger — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 04:00:00 GMT

Every new website is subject to the Google sandbox, otherwise known as age delaying. The sandbox is the virtual place Google puts new websites before it deems them eligible for decent search rankings. Although this age delay varies from site

The Latest Trends in Web Design

Sung Choi — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 04:00:00 GMT

Let's face it, we've all come across websites on the Internet that are less than appealing. With large, intrusive text, multitudes of bright colors competing with one another, and crammed information, it's a wonder these sites accomplish anything at all.

Web 2.0 for Businesses

Lillian Taylor — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 04:00:00 GMT

With the explosion of online social networks during the past couple of years, it was only a matter of time before businesses got in on the action. More and more small businesses today are bypassing conventional methods of advertising and

Establishing an Effective E-Commerce Website

Lillian Taylor — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 05:00:00 GMT

E-commerce debuted in 1994 when the first banner ad was placed on the Web. Since then e-commerce has grown in leaps and bounds and today generates yearly sales in excess of $108 billion in the United States alone. Introducing a

9 Steps to Improving Your PPC Results

Lillian Taylor — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 05:00:00 GMT

When paid search is done correctly, it can deliver the best results for your advertising dollar. However, it can be quite challenging and requires careful selection of keywords and phrases, expert copywriting for ads and landing pages, and in-depth analysis

The Highest ROI for Your Marketing Dollar

Tim Brown — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 05:00:00 GMT

Business owners are constantly looking for the most successful and cost-effective ways to grow their businesses and boost their bottom lines. So why are some businesses still not taking advantage of email marketing? Studies show that the majority of adults

The Panamazation of Paid Search

David Montalvo — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 05:00:00 GMT

First announced in April 2006, Yahoo's "Project Panama" promised a revamped paid search engine marketing platform that would eliminate its "open auction" structure in favor of the invisible bidding format already in use by Google, MSN, and Ask. Yahoo began

What's all the noise about SEO?

Lillian Taylor — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 05:00:00 GMT

If you're a marketer, odds are you've been hearing a lot about SEO lately. But what exactly is it? And how does it work? SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of arranging a website's content in a way