Start the new year off right by getting up to (search) speed

Are you on top of today’s hottest ideas in free and paid search? Here are 14 easy-to-implement ways to get your site to the top of everyone’s results. Each could support a full article in its own right, so I’ve also provided additional links to help you dig in further.

Free Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

1. Social media sites drive links; links drive rankings. Get familiar with Digg (digg.com), StumbleUpon (www.stumbleupon.com), Netscape (netscape.com) and Reddit (reddit.com), because these social-media sites can drive huge traffic. More importantly, that traffic leads to numerous inbound links, which are the rocket fuel powering your organic rankings.

Not all of your content is Digg-worthy, but see if a few times a year you can develop content so compelling that it warrants attention from the social-media tribes.

2. Markup matters. Inbound links are critical, but markup still matters. Use clean, well-formed, validating HTML. Pay special attention to your title tags, and give each page a unique title. Use the robots-nocontent tag to tell the spiders to ignore your navigation.

3. Embrace cascading style sheets (CSS). These separate presentation from content. Well-designed CSS achieves the following:

● your pages load and render more quickly;

● searchbots better understand your page; and

● your site will be friendlier to disabled users and mobile devices. When using JavaScript enhancement, make sure your site degrades gracefully for older browsers. For a thorough explanation of CSS, I suggest you check out www.csszengarden.com.

4. Blogs and RSS. Search engines love fresh content presented at regular intervals in machine-friendly format. Blogs and really simple syndication (RSS) provide just that. With proper publishing pings and tagging, the engines will discover and index your RSS content rapidly. Blogging is another great way to communicate with customers and prospects. There are many good blogging platforms; WordPress (see wordpress.org) is particularly popular given its rich set of plug-ins.

5. Google’s Universal Search offers new opportunities. Launched last May, Google’s Universal Search strives to merge relevant results from across Google’s specialized engines (news, images, video, blogs, etc.) into the core Google search results pages.

Universal Search offers savvy multichannel marketers back-door, first-page results on competitive terms. Provide the engines fresh and relevant images, video, blog posts and press releases that are suitably tagged and marked up.

6. Great free apps. Among the many free tools Google provides for AdWords advertisers, Google Analytics (google.com/analytics) is a powerful application for understanding how visitors reach and use your site. Google Website Optimizer (services.google.com/websiteoptimizer) is handy for multivariate testing.

Paid Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

1. Brand vs. nonbrand. Many multichannel marketers enjoy large sales with little cost on searches for their brand name. These searches aren’t incremental, however. Analyze your campaigns both with and without your branded terms. Challenge your paid search agency or in-house team to drive profitable sales growth out of your nonbrand portfolio.

2. Beware of broad match and content networks. Broad match allows the search engines some leeway in matching your ads against similar search queries. While broad match is a convenient tool and appropriate in some circumstances, often that additional traffic is of lower quality.

Test what happens to your pay-per-click (PPC) sales and your PPC costs when you remove broad match from your top terms. You may find considerable benefit.

As with broad match, syndicating your ads to the content networks can offer you greater click inventory. But again, this additional traffic can be of lower quality, increasing your PPC costs with minimal sales benefit.

For one thing, know if you’re running ads on the content networks. If so, test to determine if the additional costs are warranted by additional sales. There are good clicks to be found hidden in the content haystack, but finding them takes effort and care.

3. Bid for profit, not position. If you’re concerned with impressions and branding, bid your pay-per-click campaigns to hold your ads in the top positions. If, on the other hand, you’re concerned about profitable sales, bid your ads based on your economics.

Long-Tail Term Bidding

Track cost and sales at the ad (not ad group) level, and use statistical clustering approaches to help you bid your long-tail terms efficiently. All bid management systems are not created equal. Top-notch bid management algorithms pay for themselves many times over in incremental profit.

4. Comprehensive term lists. There’s great value in the long tail of search terms, and comprehensive term lists are your ticket to capturing that value. As a rule of thumb, test a number of terms equal to four to six times the number of pages on your site, expecting about a quarter or a third of those terms to have sufficient traffic and performance to merit ongoing funding in your campaigns.

For example, an online marketer with 4,500 SKUs and a 5,000-page Web site should test 20,000 to 30,000 terms, expecting 5,000 to 10,000 of these terms to work long-term.

Keyword counts (adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) can be inflated artificially with no benefit — for example, by pre-pending “buy” or post-pending “online” — your object is real unique phrases with actual traffic and marketing opportunities.

5. Build rational ad groups. Your Google campaigns will perform better when you group ads semantically. Sensible ad groups help your performance on the content networks and also can improve your quality score. (See adwords.google.com/select/guidelines.html.)

6. Quality score matters. Google ranks ads by a combination of maximum bid and quality score. Quality score is a function of clickthrough rate, landing page relevance and additional secret factors. To avoid quality score concerns, write targeted and compelling copy, ensure that your destination URLs tightly match the ad phrase and ad copy, and don’t launch new campaigns with artificially low costs per click.

7. Conversion is the ultimate PPC battleground. In the long run, multichannel marketers who get the most from each paid click to their site can afford to pay the most for those clicks. Do everything you can to increase site conversion.

Offer great merchandise, fair pricing, free or reduced shipping, strong guarantees, shopper-friendly return policies, user testing, multivariate site testing, Web-effectiveness projects and so on, and you’ll do fine.

Increasing your sales-per-visit metric allows you to invest more in advertising. Higher bids place your ad higher on the page, scaling your sales and profits considerably.

Both SEO & SEM

1. My SERPs aren’t your SERPs. Increasingly, search engines serve customized search engine results pages (SERPs) based on profiles and prior searches. To view search results without this user-specific “contamination,” use Firefox and install the CookieSwap add-on. Also, try Google’s Ad Preview tool to see your paid results as a normal searcher does.

Hopefully some of these tidbits spark new ideas for you — best of luck with all your search marketing efforts!

Alan Rimm-Kaufman is CEO of the Rimm-Kaufman Group, an online paid search and Web-effectiveness consulting firm. You can reach him online at www.rkgblog.com.

11 steps to get you up to speed

Is your company blogging yet? With the soaring cost of postage and pay-per-click advertising, blogging offers catalogers a powerful channel to get their message to prospects and customers worldwide. The cost is low. The impact is high. Here are 11 steps to get you started.

1. READ LOTS OF BLOGS. Before you start your own blog, spend at least two weeks voraciously reading. Choose an RSS reader; I recommend Google Reader. Get familiar with blog search engines, such as Technorati. Find bloggers writing about niches related to your company, products, industry, customers, etc.

Add bloggers you like to your RSS reader. Follow their link-outs to find more bloggers. Intentionally oversubscribe to feeds. Aim for 50 feeds in your RSS reader by the end of the second week. Oversubscribing helps you understand which blogs keep your attention. It also lets you experience how readers decide to subscribe and unsubscribe. After you hit overload, pare down your reading list to a comfortable level.

2. READ BOOKS. To understand why blogs are revolutionary, read these books: “Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers” (Wiley, 2006) by Scoble and Israel, and “The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual” (Perseus Books, 2001) by Locke, Levine, Searls and Weinberger. For stories and tactics, check basic blogging books, such as “Clear Blogging: How People Blogging Are Changing the World and How You Can Join Them” (Apress, 2007) by Bob Walsh.

3. MAKE COMMENTS. Before you start, get comfortable commenting on blogs in your niche. Commenting offers a gentle way to ease into the conversation.

4. PICK YOUR PLATFORM. Decide if you’ll download software or use a hosted application. I’m partial to WordPress because of its rich ecosystem of plug-ins and themes. I suggest running this free software in-house, if your IT team can accommodate.

5. PICK YOUR WRITERS. Decide who in your organization will blog — and how frequently. Some organizations have top management blogging: Check out Bob Lutz at GM (http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/archives/bob_lutz) or Richard Edelman at Edelman (www.edelman.com/speak_up/blog). Other organizations hire bloggers for their content, such as Ice.com’s blog Sparkle Like The Stars (www.sparklelikethestars.com/) and BzzAgent’s “90 Days” experiment last year (http://90days.bzzagent.com). Blogging is a serious time commitment. Make sure your designated writers can produce solid content, consistently.

6. PICK YOUR TOPIC. A blog needs a focus and an objective. Decide what your blog is about — and why.

Firms blog for many reasons:

• to attract prospective customers;
• to communicate with vendors;
• to establish expertise;
• to attract potential employees; and
• to communicate with Wall Street.

Different objectives dictate different writing styles and topics. For example, Google maintains one official blog in multiple languages (English version at www.googleblog.blogspot.com) for announcements and news. It has another 50 or so blogs for specific products. An example: Inside AdSense at www.adsense.blogspot.com. Google officially recognizes another 50 or so employee blogs. Check out Matt Cutts at www.mattcutts.com/blog or Christopher Sacca at www.whatisleft.org. While Matt Cutts can blog about the Spicy Chicken Sandwich at Jack in the Box, such a post would be out of place on Google’s main blog.

7. START WITH A PRIVATE BLOG. No need to practice in front of the world. If you’re hosting your blog internally, don’t allow outsiders from beyond the firewall to reach it. If you’re using a hosted blog, try marking posts as private, restricting readership to folks within your company.

Treat the posts as public. Use this internal test period to work out technical, branding, visual or legal hurdles for a month or so. See what frequency of blogging your organization can support. I recommend two posts a week. Choosing a posting frequency and posting consistently builds readership.

8. GO PUBLIC. After a test period of private blogging, commit to a public blog. Launch your public blog with the posts you made during your test period, so your shiny new blog enters the visible blogosphere with a hefty amount of established content.

9. LEARN MONETIZATION. Never run other people’s ads on your blog. Your team should read bloggers who cover blog monetization, however, because they often provide great tips for increasing readership, engagement and inbound links. I regularly read John Chow (www.johnchow.com). He offers great advice on gaining blog traffic, and is far less evil than he purports.

10. MOD YOUR BLOG. Most blogging platforms allow you to customize your design, change functionality, embed video and add widgets. Enliven your basic blog with brand-consistent gadgets and bling. A little bit goes a long away. (For a great, intentionally over-widgeted blog, check out Fred Wilson’s A VC blog at www.avc.blogs.com).

11. TRACK YOUR SUCCESS. You’re doing something right if your blog gains readers, subscribers, comments and inbound links. Track these metrics with FeedBurner, Google Analytics and Technorati. True success is when your blog gets into the mainstream press, is mentioned positively by vendors and customers, and starts generating sales.

Read Hugh MacLeod on increasing revenue at Stormhoek winery five-fold through blogging (www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/003577.html).

Best of luck, and see you around the blogosphere!

Alan Rimm-Kaufman is CEO of the Rimm-Kaufman Group, an online agency helping catalogers manage paid search and improve site conversion. You can reach him at (434) 970-1010 or at www.rkgblog.com.

Yes, your marketing project list is longer than your arm, and your IT department is backlogged through 2010.

Don’t despair!

In this fast-paced session, Alan Rimm-Kaufman will present 17 actionable projects you can start (and sometimes complete) this coming Monday – all with little or no cost or IT involvement. Amazing but true!

These cutting-edge tricks and tips to turbo-charge your paid and natural search, make your site run more quickly, increase sales per visit, generate more PR and blogosphere buzz; simplify your web analytics; and boost your email results.

Buckle your seatbelts and grab your notepad for this session!

Link: NEMOA 2008 Spring conference