A few weeks ago I decided it was finally time I took the Google Advertising Professional Qualification exam. Although I have spent hundreds of hours in the Adwords tool I was nervous about the test. I spent several hours going through the Help Center, taking quizzes and reviewing areas that I do not use all that often, like the API. Google requires that you have at least 90 days of account management under your belt before you can take the exam, but I can tell you it took all of my experience and the additional “cramming” to get through the test. I’m also fairly certain there was at least 3 trick questions in it.

However all the nerves and the extra preparation paid off because I passed the exam! I now get to use the spiffy graphic below on our website, business card and other marketing materials.

What the Exam is Missing

While the exam is a great test of your knowledge of the Google Adwords tool. It is not a test of your ability to create a great campaign that delivers targeted traffic and generates sales. In my mind, only experience can give you that kind of qualification.

Rand’s article raises some valid points about the SEO industry. Now that other forms of advertising and sales channels have slipped up a bit due to their high costs or lower ROI, online marketing – including SEO, is taking more of the marketing budget pie in a lot of corporate environments. Internal marketing departments and external marketing agencies are having to prove their worth more, now that budgets are getting stretched and squeezed to their fullest. If a channel isn’t accountable for spending vs. sales then the likelihood that it will survive this downturn is unlikely.

Also, SEO is coming out of the shadows. As myths get debunked and education is expanded to business owners and marketers, true SEO is gaining ground as a viable marketing initiative. Of course there are still gamers, hacks and snake oil salesmen out there and until our industry grows up a lot more and sets some standards the fight will rage on between white hat and black hat SEO.

On the other side of the fence Ms. Callow discusses the benefits of search marketing or PPC advertising. Which is one arena where we have seen tremendous growth in the last several months. Of course a majority of this growth can be attributed to the holiday season, as we handle pay per click advertising for several online retailers. However it is not just retailers looking to leverage this channel over traditional advertising – many of our b2b customers have been asking about it as well. I believe Ms. Callow nails the reasoning for this perfectly in her article.

Often marketers are attracted to PPC advertising due to its inherent benefits such as advanced targeting, accountability and cost effectiveness. With PPC advertising you can start or stop ads at any time, run them only when you know people will be looking for your product or service, target by geographic region (down to the city level) and attract customers using their nomenclature at the exact instance of their interest and query. With advanced web analytics you can track click to conversion metrics to further account for each dollar spent vs. each dollar generated.

There is also a “safe” factor to PPC advertising. Marketers know that they can invest a minimal amount upfront and give it a test run. If they feel it is not working for them they can stop all ads and outgoing costs instantly or they can retool ads and spend more time doing keyword research to find better converting terms. Right now these are especially attractive features.

Don’t Stop at SEO and PPC Advertising

The only thing both of these articles are missing is any mention of other online marketing initiatives, like permission based email marketing. Email marketing is still a tremendous way to market on a very cost effective platform. It literally costs pennies, and in most cases fractions of pennies, to leverage an internal customer or lead list that may be gathering dust and turn it into a powerful customer relationship management channel and sales tool.

So if you are not already involved in online marketing, you better get your move on! You are already losing ground, market share and revenue to your competitors if you are not actively working the online channel. In all market conditions it is a powerful marketing tool, but especially during an economic downturn.

Titles

Hello my name is Fred and there’s nothing unique about me.  Would you be interested in hiring me?  Seems like the job interview from hell.  The funny thing is many websites have this same mentality in regards to title tags.  Titles are the first glimpse of a page users have with your site.  When a user bookmarks a page, the title is what is saved in the bookmarks folder.  Could you be missing conversions simply because your titles are not unique with your site’s main keywords?

Google recommends using accurate, unique and brief titles for each and every page on your site.  This is simple SEO at its finest, but quite often gets overlooked or forgotten about.  The title is valuable real estate for your site and as such should be effectively communicating the topic of the page.   All search engine queries that have keywords in your title will be bolded, instantly encouraging eyes of searchers towards your listing.

Descriptions

The meta description tag gives search engines a glimpse or summary of what the page is about.  Google recommends accurate and unique phrases that inform and interest users.  In essence, your site’s description is a brief piece of marketing copy that can make or break someone clicking on to your site.  There are many worst practice scenarios that seem to come up over and over again and should be avoided:

• duplicate descriptions across a website
• copying the title tag into the description tag
• stuffing the description tag with a list of keywords
• using a description that is not compelling marketing copy and lacks uniqueness

URL Structure

Hello, my name is Fredrif-06390p=12.  What’s your name?

Who’s going to remember Fredrif-06390p=12 and what makes him unique?  No one.  In the same sense your  website’s URL structure plays an important role in best practices SEO.  Google recommends using a URL structure that uses keywords from that specific page.  In addition, from a usability standpoint, a nice looking URL structure will make it easier for others to remember pages from your site.  Google also recommends having one URL for one unique page.  Many sites have duplicate pages with different URLs causing a duplicate content issue.  Set up a 301 redirect to solve this problem and clear any duplicate content issues.

Navigation

Your site’s navigation should be both intuitive and user-friendly.  Visitors on your site should find it easy to navigate to the page they are looking for.  Google recommends:

• text-based navigation
• properly formatted site-maps
• useful 404 pages

Content

The brunt of your site lies within its content.  It’s the reason that someone visits your site.  Google’s guide has quite a bit of good information on this subject.  Here are some of the key take-aways:

• make effective use of heading tags
• make text easy to read, staying organized on the topic
• use relevant language with keywords that users are searching for
• keep anchor text intuitive and relevant
• name images in a more intuitive way

• Why Reputable SEO Firms Don’t Promise Guaranteed Search Engine Rankings
• Time to be creative — and cost-efficient — in marketing
• Top 7 Reasons Why It’s Better to Hire a Freelance Designer or Small Design Firm Than a Large Design Company
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• Traffic trends for Digg vs. nine other social news sites
• I Don’t Have Time for Marketing

Is the WWW Necessary in Today’s Internet?

The answer – it depends.

It depends on a lot of things including the psychology, demographics and the users’ comfort level with computers among many other things. In the SitePoint article they note the launch of their own site, 99designs.com, as well as the social networking service Twitter.com as two examples without the WWW prefix. However, these two sites are targeted at a younger, more technically savvy, demographic that most likely will not even bother typing the WWW prefix in the first place.

With an older demographic on the other hand I would argue it is a requirement to include the WWW. When I used to do computer training courses for a public entity with a large percentage of older employees, instinctively I would speak domain names without the WWW and inevitably someone would ask if they needed to type WWW before that. Their limited knowledge in this area dictated how they interacted with websites. No amount of explaining the how’s and why’s of the internet would make them more comfortable in their interaction.

Any Ol’ Domain Will Do

While browsing through the comments on the SitePoint blog I noticed an overwhelming majority of people stating they didn’t care either way, but they set up domains to work with both the prefix and without it. They do this by changing the setup of their domain records. Few of the respondents indicate whether they use 301 redirects. While I am a proponent of having WWW and no-WWW take the user to a working website I also understand that if you fail to set up a redirect to one or the other it is possible to create a real search marketing snafu. More and more we are finding this to be one of the most overlooked aspects of web design and development. As an example we just took on a client who has had a website for over 7 years and yet their was no domain preference set via a 301 redirect.

The problem with this is referred to as canonicalization errors or canonical problems. It is a huge ugly name for something very simple. Basically search engines will count www.domain.com and domain.com as two separate pages. It doesn’t end there either. They will also see all of the variations below as separate pages.

• www.domain.com
• www.domain.com/
• www.domain.com/index.html (or index.php, index.asp, index.cfm, etc.)
• domain.com
• domain.com/
• domain.com/index.html (or index.php, index.asp, index.cfm, etc.)

Having multiple instances recorded by the search engines is a bad thing. Your website will suffer in the SERPs. One quick way to find out if your site is suffering from this problem is to use the site: and link: commands in Google and look at the total number of results returned.

So for example, type in site:www.domain.com and then try site:domain.com

If the numbers vary then you may have a canonicalization problem.

Which One Should You Use?

From an SEO standpoint I analyze all of the potential versions floating around that may or may not have links to them or may or may not be indexed by the search engines before I just hop on board with one or the other. If the non-WWW version has more backlinks and is generally performing better, I might redirect the WWW version there. However, coming back around to my first point in this article, current SEO performance should only be one piece of the puzzle. Usability and understanding your demographic should also play a role, because your domain name will be on everything (remember Integrated Marketing) from business cards to outdoor billboards to email marketing and PPC campaigns and should always look the same. Right down to how it appears in your address bar.

We knew we could go in there with all the facts, figures, and evidence to support what we do, but we also knew it wouldn’t benefit us and it wouldn’t benefit our contact. We would be seen as an outside source with just another pitch and the contact would be seen as inept by their supervisors. Prior to meeting the executives we worked closely with the marketing manager to help them sell SEO as a critical marketing initiative to the executives. What we provided them with is more or less included in the following boiled down list.

Do Your Research (or have someone do it for you)
You’ve got to be able to talk the game if you have any hope of selling it. Even though it is time consuming, find as many authoritative SEO sites as possible and do your reading. Visit forums and blogs to find other people in situations similar to yours. Put yourself out there and ask questions.

Show and Tell
Within your organization get out there and talk to people about SEO. Some times people’s eyes glaze over when they hear that term so soften it up by talking about internet or search marketing. Talk to the people that matter outside of a formal meeting – water coolers, coffee makers, all the usual places they might hang out.

List the Advantages
Create a list of all the advantages a search marketing campaign can give your organization over your competitors. Initially you will use this list for your own information, however later you will use this in formal meetings with your execs. There are numerous benefits of SEO, but keep your list under five items.

Understand Management’s Pain Points
Do every thing you can to understand management’s objectives and find the pain points that relate to the advantages list you created previously. They probably will not talk about those points in the same way you might so listen carefully. Where applicable interject with the benefits of SEO as they relate to those pain points.

Don’t Give Up
People are resistant to change and fear the things they don’t know. Through education and repeated discussion you can break through their fears and show them the benefits of a strong SEO strategy so by the time you bring in an outside company to manage your search engine optimization campaign the execs are comfortable making an informed decision.

SMWC (Slapping Myself With Celery) indicates an extreme reaction similar to a “spit take” but more vegan-trendy. Often combined with other exclamatory acronyms. – WTF/SMWC, or perhaps ROTFL/SMWC.

While their list format is not the easiest to get through, this is the most complete list I have seen. I also recommend the SEO Dictionary for quick reference.

Sphinn.com is, according to the website, “a social site for search and interactive marketers. It’s designed to allow you to share and discover news stories, read and take part in discussions, discover events of interest and network with others”.

A Sphinn it button, if placed here, would allow you to click on it and cast your vote for this post as a newsworthy search marketing topic.

Think Digg.com for search marketing. It’s a fantastic idea and a great website that is garnishing a lot of attention and praise in the search marketing arena. I believe in the concept as well as the site, heck I’ve even subscribed to the RSS feed.

Which again, is the reason we’re not adding a sphinn button to the blog. You, our loyal and dear reader, are not like me (one me is enough thank you) and you probably could give a rat’s hind end about the ins and outs of search marketing. After all you have a business to run! You don’t have time to become a search marketer, which is probably the reason why you’re here. You are the type of person we want here, the business owner or person in charge of marketing for your company, that wants to take a peak around, see what we’re up to, and maybe get some advice.

We’re not running a blog for search marketers. The search marketing industry at large, much like the design community at large, needs to stop speaking to ourselves and start communicating and educating the business community at large.

Which is exactly the reason why we’re not adding a Sphinn button to our blog.