I can no longer even count how many times a new client has asked me why they should pay to be in the sponsored listings on a keyword that they show up for organically. They are even harder to budget when it comes to bidding on their own brand names!

The truth is in the numbers. A recent study by Enquiro supports what I have been telling companies since the start; it pays to be present in both Organic and Paid search results. The study shows that this deadly combination results in lifts in brand affinity, brand recall, and most importantly, intent to purchase! Clients and prospects have come to the point where they almost expect you to show up in both sections of search results. Another thing that is important to keep in mind is that, whether you like it or not, your competition is out their bidding on your name as well.

One of my clients has a branding campaign that managed to pull in a 500% Gross Return last month alone. We use keywords, including their company name, trademarked products, common misspellings, and their full domain. So when you are building or optimizing your next search engine marketing campaign, don’t steer clear of these obvious choices. The reinforcement that you are providing to your potential customer can result in quite a pay day for you!

Although we are more than halfway through the month of December and well past a much hyped Cyber Monday, there is still much online holiday spending to take advantage of! Online retailers are really stepping it up this season and they should be, as the competition is mighty fierce! Just a few questions for any online retailer to ponder…..Are you utilizing the most effective keywords? Are your paid ads eye-catchy enough? Why should/would a searcher click on your ad versus another?

In an effort to capitalize on this heightened online spending season, here are a few selling features retailers should try to get across in their advertising message. We have also found it to be helpful and quite effective to mirror the same message/theme on the website itself. For example, if you promote free shipping in your ad copy, the same promotion should be displayed on the page you are directing the searcher to. This will simply reinforce your message and possibly convert better, as well.

Here are just a few incentives to offer your potential shoppers:

• Free shipping and free returns. This will allow your shoppers to purchase with confidence.
• Repeat buyer/loyalty discounts - This goes a long way with shoppers who have bought on your site before.
• Free gifts or gift cards with online purchases. The more money spent on your site - the better the gift!
• Online only sales. Shoppers who buy online like to know they are getting a great deal!
• Last minute specials/deals/discounts. There are a lot of people who wait until the very last minute to do their holiday shopping. You can take advantage by giving them a deal too good to pass up!

Happy holidays and happy selling!

This is part two of a two-part topic. http://www.morevisibility.com/semblog/content-management-systems-and-seo-part-1-of-2.html

In my last post, I introduced content management systems and listed a few of their benefits to a web site creator, including search engine optimization benefits. To review, a CMS organizes and stores the content portion of a website, separating the content from common visual page elements and from the inner-workings of the system used to organize and display your content. It can standardize a content creation workflow and allow multiple authors and multiple site administrators. Standardizing your processes, as well as having organized content saves you time. Whether it is starting a website from scratch, or updating many pages at once, using a pre-built CMS can help you move toward your goal faster.

SEO benefits of quality content management systems include being able to easily and quickly create keyword-rich, SEO-friendly URLs and remembering to create accessible and valid HTML code when you forget. It can also help maintain and properly display your articles’ meta information and titles. The ease and speed in which a CMS will allow you to update meta information, titles, URLs and content can be a huge time saver, but can get you into trouble quickly if you’re not careful: the automatic and global nature of a CMS will multiply effects of any un-optimized aspects of your website.

For example, if you don’t realize that your CMS is not using search engine friendly URLs, (out of the box, many of them do not) every page in your website can suffer. An inflexible CMS may reduce the effectiveness of your site if it does not support SEO-friendly html code such as alt (alternate text) attributes or allow you to control what text goes into the H tags. In addition, possible ‘code bloat’ may occur from including useless features which causes the user to wait for unneeded features to download. By its very presence, this extra code will reduce the effectiveness of your valuable content on your web pages, especially since it’s likely that your content will be pushed further down the page. A CMS can readily propagate all these problems to every page of your site instead of potentially only a few if you did not use a CMS.

You should be aware that without a solid transition plan, changing URL patterns (or structure) after your web site has been indexed can be extremely detrimental to your search engine positions.

Before using a CMS, I recommend that you spend plenty of time evaluating different systems, while considering your requirements. Also weigh heavily the skill level of the people who will be using the content management system day in and day out.

There are three final suggestions I’d like to leave with you:

1. Be prepared to spend time tuning your CMS for the best SEO results possible
2. Remember that the more flexibility you require, the steeper the learning curve
3. It’s likely that someone has already developed a solution for the problem you’re facing