When it comes to your B2B online marketing, make no mistake. Headlines make a big difference. Here’s what CEOs and CMOs need to know.

On every website page or blog entry you have an opportunity to include headlines. Search engines like headlines, and the more keyword rich the better. Headlines are designated in HTML code as H1, H2, H3, up through H6.

Bad Online Headline Examples

All too often, headlines on webpages are omitted altogether or written poorly. For example, a home page may have no headlines at all. The About Us page may have a headline “About Our Services,” when it could say “About Our Printing Services” or “About Our Printing Services for Realtors.” Instead of “Why Hire Us?” a headline could say “Why Choose ABC Printing?”

Blog Post Headlines that Work

When it comes to blog posts that you share with your connections on social media, the post headline is even more important. It should contain some keywords and at the same time be interesting enough for people to click on the link and read the post. The post can include some interesting subheaders to break up the post text that include keywords as well. These subheaders make a post easier to read and more keyword rich for the search engines.

Headlines that include numbered lists seem to get the most click throughs and popularity. Looking at a list of  popular blog posts by Hubspot (a well-known marketing software company), 15 of 24 of Hubspot’s most popular recent blog posts have headlines that include numbered lists, such as:

• 5 Awesome Landing Page Lessons From Real Life Examples
• 5 Tools to Battle Social Media Content Overload
• 25 Eye-Popping Internet Marketing Statistics for 2012

Headlines that include in-the-news celebrity or politician’s names also get attention and are definitely examples of “gaming the system.” Again, Popshared.com’s list of popular Hubspot headlines shared this week on social media include:

• How a 9-Year Old Successfully Newsjacked the GOP Primary
• How You (and Rick Santorum) Can Fix a Damaged Search Reputation

For an additional resource on writing effective headlines, check out Copyblogger’s page How to Write Magnetic Headlines.

Your website and blog post headlines matter!

They make a difference in whether or not you are found online. For more information about great headlines or for help with your online marketing, please contact us at New Incite today.

Santorum photo from Flickr, Some rights reserved by Gage Skidmore.

Lady Gag photo from Flickr, Some rights reserved by TJ Sengel

Have you spent money on your web site, search engine optimization (SEO), maybe even online pay per click (PPC) advertising to drive more traffic to your site? Are you getting more traffic, but no return on your investment in the form of sales revenue? How do you get web site visitors to convert to customers and generate sales?

Today we need to track more than the number of visitors to a web site and where they come from. How do visitors behave? What do they click on from your home page? Where do they go? What do they do?

If visitors to your site are leaving, you need to ask more questions. Is your site easy to navigate for your target audience? Is it targeted to your key customer segments? Does it have valuable content for your target audience? Does each page have a strategy and an expected outcome that you can measure?

Is there a way for a visitor to your site to take some action short of buying now? If they’re not ready to buy now, how can they stay in touch with you? Does each page on your web site have a few actions a visitor can take such as subscribing to your blog or newsletter or following you on Facebook or Twitter, so they are not forced into an “all or nothing” call to action? (By “all or nothing” I mean the one where the web site says “Contact Us!” The visitor reads, “Contact Us So We Can Annoy You With Our Sales Pitch!” and doesn’t call.)

Now that you’ve invested your hard-earned marketing dollars in driving more traffic to your site, make sure you’re getting results when visitors are there. Connect with them, engage them, and you’ll have a better chance at converting them to customers.

Flickr photo, Some rights reserved by Cirofono

Ouch! Your search engine optimization (SEO) company, maybe despite claiming that their  tactics are above board (white hat tactics), tricked the system with black hat tactics that go against search engine guidelines. Maybe you didn’t know that you should ask the question, “What kind of tactics are you using to optimize my web site for  search engines?”

We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know About SEO

As executives (whether we’re CEOs or Chief Marketing Officers/CMOs), when it comes to technology, we often don’t know what we don’t know. We may not be marketing technologists experienced in search engine marketing or optimization (SEO/SEM). Even if we are experienced, we’d like to believe that when our SEO vendor says they use best practices, they really do. Even if we’re asking the right questions, what if they don’t do what they say?

Black Hat Tactics Have Been Around for Years

I heard firsthand about black hat SEO tactics in 2002, at Confab, the conference for consultants by consultants. I attended a  presentation in which a consultant told his SEO horror story. He hired a company to optimize his site. The company used tricks to improve performance. His site was summarily de-listed by Google. His site had been coming up high in the results and generating potential client leads. De-listing was a disaster after all he had invested in SEO. He had to create a new site with a new URL and start all over again.

More than ten years later public company JC Penney is having their search results “manually adjusted” (not de-listed!)  by Google for use of black hat practices by their SEO vendor. The story broke with a New York Times article, “Dirty Little Secrets of Search.” Doug Pierce (Doug Unplugged blog author) wrote an excellent analysis of the SEO vendor’s use of black hat tactics (“spammy”  links, doorway pages, and keyword stuffing) in The Data and Details Behind “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search.”

How Could They? Their Site Said They Wouldn’t

Two days after the NY Times article appeared, I visited the web site of the search engine optimization company hired by JC Penney. From their Recently Asked Question page titled, “SearchDex Best Practices,” I clicked on a link to read, “SearchDex Response to Google Guidelines.” On this page on their web site they wrote the following:

“Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a web site that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, ‘Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?’
Only site original content is made accessible; tricks are not possible nor approved.”

“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or ‘bad neighborhoods’ on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
SearchDex does not support link scheme architectures”

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
Sites which employ these techniques are not eligible for the SearchDex license. Indexed pages do not contain hidden text or hidden links.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? But apparently what they said on their web site was not what they did. Actions speak louder than words.

My Solution? Do a SEO Audit

We have no control over the honesty or integrity of our vendors, so let’s focus on what we can do. If you’ve engaged an SEO company to work on your web site, you need to either learn how to audit their work at a detail level or hire a third-party expert to do a SEO audit for you. Find out exactly what tactics your vendor is using to get your site performing high on search engine results. Then, compare those tactics against search engine guidelines like Google’s or Yahoo’s. If there are any questionable tactics being used, remove them. Focus instead on creating tons of strategic, relevant content to attract and engage your prospects and customers.

Your next action as a CEO or CMO? May I suggest one? Do an SEO audit. Now.

Photos on Flickr – Black hat: Some rights reserved by dariuszka; White hat: Some rights reserved by A. Germain

What’s the point of spending money to drive traffic to your web site… …if you’re not getting a return on your investment? Several of our new B2B clients came to us with this very frustration. After years of hearing about the benefits of search engine optimization and/or pay per click advertising, business owners finally bit the bullet and invested in these tactics. So why are their online marketing dollars not turning into sales revenue?

There are two main reasons your spend on online marketing can be like flushing money down a toilet.

1. SEO Has Changed

First, search engine optimization techniques have drastically changed in the last three to four years. Some SEO companies keep doing the same old tactics – and you’re expecting but not getting great results. The old tactics (metatags, alt tags, keywords, links) have some value, but what’s more important is strategic and relevant content on your web site and on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. You need to crank out content that your prospects will find of value and that puts your company, product and services at the top of the list for the searches your prospects are doing. In all of this you also need to get your prospects, colleagues and customers buzzing about and “liking” you and your content.

2. Your Web Site Isn’t Sticky

What happens when a visitor comes to your site? Do they leave? Scratch their heads (or something else) and then leave? Do they read the one article they landed on because they searched for “chartreuse widgets” and then leave?

Your web site must be designed with your target visitor – not you – in mind! Then, your web site needs to be measured against objectives and tweaked or modified if you are not getting the results you expect.

Put together a great marketing plan to add relevant and strategic content to your online presence in 2011. Make sure that your web site is attractive and compelling to your target audience. Only then can you stop flushing precious marketing dollars down the toilet!

Photo from Flickr, Some rights reserved by Mai Le

Here’s a video that show you how to optimize your LinkedIn Profile website links with keywords. Making this easy change will help make your links more compelling so that visitors to your profile will be more apt to click on them and help optimize your profile so that you will come up higher on LinkedIn search results when users search for what you do.

If you prefer to read the instructions, I’ve provided them below. Please comment below if this information is helpful or if you have other questions about optimizing your LinkedIn profile!

Instructions on Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile Website Links

LinkedIn has generic defaults for the three links it allows each user to set up in their profile. This is OK, but who wants to click on a link that says “My Website?” Remember that visitors to your profile or web site listen to radio station WIIFM – What’s In It For Me? They are more likely to click on links that say something about the content, especially if there might be something on the website or page that adds value for them.

You can change the generic to custom descriptions of your choosing in a few easy steps. Make sure you use keywords that will help LinkedIn visitors find you when they search for certain skills.

1. First, go to Your Profile and click on the Edit Profile tab.
2. Scroll to the Website links below the Connections sections on your profile and click “Edit” on one of them.
3. You will see a screen that first allows you to select a title for the link. Use the dropdown list and select “Other.”
4. Now additional fields are available so you can enter a custom description and the URL for the link. Note that you can link to three different sites or three different pages on the same site or any combination of the two. Also, note that you are limited as to the number of characters, so you may have to get a little creative with your link naming.
5. Enter your custom descriptions and make sure you scroll to the bottom and click on “Save Changes.”
6. Return to your profile and make sure the changes show up.

Congratulations! You are one step closer to optimizing your LinkedIn profile!

This week I talked to two different organizations whose top managers have a serious difference of opinion. On one side, some of the managers cannot believe their colleagues would allow an outdated, un-optimized-for-search-engines website represent the organization to prospects and customers! The other side doesn’t believe they will ever get qualified leads online and just don’t see any need whatsoever to update the website, let alone optimize it for the search engines.

Here are the top five reasons management should consider keeping their site updated with a fresh look and feel, accurate content, and current technology. (Note: some of these stats are from the Earnest blog.)

1. 9 of 10 buyers say that when they’re ready to buy, they’ll find you. (Source: DemandGen Report) Let’s face it – in today’s marketing world, buyers are in control. They don’t want to be sold to until they have a genuine need. And, when they have the need, most are gonna start by searching online (see next reason).
ANY CHARACTER HERE
2. 62% of executives over 50 and 81% under 50  use online search daily for business intelligence. (Source: Forbes Insight -  The Rise of the Digital C-Suite) As younger generations move up in the workforce, the executives who make the decisions are the ones who grew up in the information world. They like to get information themselves and use Internet searches to do so.
ANY CHARACTER HERE
3. 96% of journalists use corporate websites when conducting online research. (Cision & The George Washington University) If your prospects aren’t searching online, the media certainly is. One of the big benefits of getting found online is getting called by journalists who need your expertise and can quote you in the press.
ANY CHARACTER HERE
4. Outdated content and “look and feel” of your website IS noticed by customers and prospects. Do you still use your brochure from 1985 with outdated colors, content, font, photos and style? (Please say, “No!”) When a prospect is deciding between different providers, your materials create a perception. Do you want your website to be old and outdated or new and fresh?
ANY CHARACTER HERE
5. The cost of developing websites has come down dramatically  in the last five years. If you spent thousands (or even tens of thousands) years ago for your website, you will spend only a fraction of the original cost to update it now. Also, if you leased your website through a proprietary service that developed it and hosted it, you can probably save thousands a year by paying an independent developer to create a new site that you own and host with a cost-effective third party service. Use of open source programming code, templated web pages, and cascading style sheets (CSS) instead of table-driven coding make website development much more efficient.

If your website was created five or more years ago, it’s time to update it. Out with the old and in with the new. Make sure your online presence is appealing to all generations and that it shines over your competitors! With the falling cost of web development, you almost can’t afford not to update your website.

Flickr photo – Some rights reserved by micah.d

The major search engines are placing more emphasis on content, not so much on tricks and behind-the-scene tactics, to rank web sites higher for keyword searches.

Let’s say you are a metal-stamping company, and your prospective customers are searching for “flat springs.” It’s all well and good to have text, meta tags and even photos with alt tags about flat springs on your web site, but it’s even better if you have written a blog entry, produced a video, sent out a press release, even recorded a podcast about these parts.

It takes time to create all this content. Part of the solution is to have a plan in place that maps out goals and a schedule for online content. How many videos will you produce? When will you produce them? How many podcasts, blog entries, press releases, articles, etc.?

Another part of the solution to make content generation easier is to re-purpose. Once you write the article, re-purpose it for the press release. Use the same content to write the script for your podcast and video. Re-purpose the article content again and again by creating several blog entries from it.

Make sure your SEO supplier has content creation built into the services they provide to get your website ranking high and qualified visitors coming to your site.

Photo from Flickr, Some rights reserved by James Cridland

I got an inkling that all was not right in the web development and SEO world in 2008. I went out to bid for a client of mine – a manufacturer of green industrial lubricants – and got bids for a new, optimized web site that ranged from $2,000 to $20,000. Hmmm – that’s too big a range! That’s a red flag of a fragmented industry – or innocent business owners being ripped off on their Internet marketing!

Then again in January 2010, I requested bids for a client that needed a web site update and ongoing SEO. I got bids for $4,000, then $7,000 for the update alone. Hmmm. I called my web dev/SEO guru  and asked, “Mark, if I’m not mistaken, to update this site we need to do steps 1, 2, 3 and 4, test everything and then flip the switch, correct?” He said, “Yes!” I said, “How much would that cost?” He said, “$400.” Eeeesh! A 10 x markup from the other guy? Are you kidding me?

I started directed successful web site and SEO in 1998 (among other marketing), when I first worked on a client’s web site. At that time, there were very few SEO experts out there. I rolled up my sleeves, learned SEO,  instructed the web developers involved with my clients, and we got fantastic results. From this experience and in part because I spent 14 years in the software industry prior to founding New Incite, I understand SEO and web development technology!

In 2005 I placed more emphasis on positioning and marketing my B2B CMO for Hire services. I said, “Now there are more good SEO companies out there, I can partner with them and focus on  strategic marketing, marketing planning, execution/project management and results tracking!”

But now in 2010 I am seeing SEO and web development practices that aren’t right, and I’m going to continue to blog about them and consult with my clients to protect them and save them money. There are too many new web development and SEO companies who got into the business because they saw the need, but:

• They see web dev and SEO as a money-making business only – not a win-win for both their company and their clients.
• They learned SEO when they got in but they haven’t kept up with best practices and they’re still proposing old tactics – I kid you not!
• They’re specialists in something else (graphic design, IT services, publishing) and have added or moved to web development and SEO as a cash cow that they pay lip service to but are not experts in!

So, share your war stories – have you or your clients ever been ripped off on web development or SEO?

Photo on Flickr – Some rights reserved by superk8nyc

The Chinese New Year started on Sunday and is being celebrated around the world. It’s the Year of the Tiger in the Chinese Zodiac, which relates each year to one of twelve animals. The attributes of the tiger are tenacity and verocity, perfect qualities for marketing in today’s economic environment.

Merriam Webster defines tenacious as: 1 a : not easily pulled apart : cohesive; and 2 a : persistent in maintaining, adhering to, or seeking something valued or desire.

What does it take to be a tenacious marketer?

1. Identify business goals that you need to achieve. You’re at Point A now. Without goals (Point B) you not only can’t determine how to get where you’re going, but you don’t even know where you’re headed.
2. Have a marketing plan. You won’t be “easily pulled apart” if you have a written, strategic marketing plan. Stick to a plan instead of operating by a seat-of-the-pants approach.
3. Dare to innovate and take measured risk. Marketing has changed phenomenally in the last ten years. Are you still stuck in 1999? 1989? Learn new tactics and new technologies that will get you where you want to go faster and more cost-effectively, including social networking, search engine optimization, and inbound marketing.
4. Eliminate marketing tactics that don’t produce results. When tigers are hunting, if they don’t succeed, they starve. They don’t waste their energy chasing anything but dinner. Track your marketing results, and if certain marketing activities don’t produce what you need, eliminate or change them.

Photo by Keven Law on Flickr,   CC BY-SA 2.0

…And the Answers You Should Expect to Hear.
The search engine optimization field is extremely fragmented, with companies ranging from solo independent consultants working from their garages to large established organizations. The barriers to entry are low. There is a ton of information online, allowing anyone who is interested to pick up information and profess themselves an SEO expert.

I wrote about this in my blog entry SEO Industry Has Some Snake Oil, But Also Much Success. I do think there are good SEO vendors out there now. But, in the fragmented SEO industry, the wide range of capabilities and prices  make it more difficult to know which vendor provides the best value. Furthermore, SEO is a technical specialty that not many of us understand. The fact that we are dealing with a fragmented industry and uninformed buyers begs the question, “How does a lay person who doesn’t understand SEO choose a vendor?”

Below are the 12 questions you should ask any SEO vendor before hiring them. Before you talk to vendors, try to  educate yourself about search engine optimization best practices so that you can make an informed decision. One source of SEO information is Search Engine News by Planet Ocean Communications. For the past ten years, I have found this to be a great source of SEO best practices. Planet Ocean rewrites the book on SEO and publishes the results to subscribers each month. Planet Ocean provides timely information on search engine algorithm changes and how to deal with them. With their service, you can get accurate, high-level information and the ability to drill down into the how-to when you want. Even if you don’t do the SEO work, it might be a good idea to subscribe to stay current so that you can better select and then manage your SEO vendor.

12 Questions to Ask When Choosing an SEO Vendor

1. Can you provide me with references I can contact about your performance, results, responsiveness, etc.?

The SEO vendor should easily give you at least 3 references. Ask the references if their expecations were met and how (timeliness, results, professionalism, ability to explain technology, etc.).

2. What methodologies or best practices do you use in search engine optimization?

You should hear that the vendor uses white hat SEO techniques, focuses on keyword analysis and content updates, manually generates quality inbound links, and uses cascading style sheets or other techniques to separate a web page’s content from its design. The vendor should NOT do black hat SEO practices such as link farming, keyword stuffing, or doorway or gateway pages.

3. What steps does the SEO vendor take to understand your business before search engine optimization?

The SEO vendor should take some time to learn about your business so they know which audiences you need to target and the best way to reach those audiences through SEO. You should get a sense of how strategic the vendor is and how much they can think outside of the box to make your SEO project a success.

4. How do you conduct an analysis to determine what needs to be done for our SEO project?

The SEO vendor should have a proven methodology including a checklist of steps they go through to anayze your SEO needs. Find out if they reverse engineer competitor sites to uncover techniques and opportunities. Ask them what tools they use for keyword analysis, and find out if they use any other automated tools to assess your web site.

5. What methodology do you use to you submit our web site URL to online directories?

Submission to key online directories should be done manually, not through automatic submission programs. The automatic programs have been recognized by certain search engines who dismiss the submissions as spam.

6. What features do you recommend we add to our web site to enhance SEO?

Current practices call for inclusion of a variety of media to improve search engine performance. This is mainly because Google places more emphasis on video, audio and blogs on web sites in search engine results.

7. How do you recommend we go about building links to our site from other sites?

There are programs that automate creating links to your web site. But the major search engines recognize when you get large numbers of links into your web site in a short period of time and will rank your site lower as a result. You are better off getting a few links from related, quality web sites each week to build your incoming links.

8. Is SEO your only service or do you have others?

Find out if search engine optimization is the focus of the vendors you talk to or if it is a sideline to other services they offer like web development and marketing. The most important factors in your decision are the quality of the service the SEO vendor provides and the results their work gets for you. But it’s important to know if SEO is the core service a vendor offers or a sideline that they provide using someone else’s automated tools.
9. How many years of SEO experience do you have?

The longer an SEO vendor has been practicing the art, the better. More years experience means that the vendor has dealt with more optimization issues and challenges and (presumably) has found solutions. SEO vendors with more experience will have a better perspective on the history of search engine optimization and understand how work-arounds to search engine algorithms are negatives once the search engines figure them out and rank web sites that use them lower or delist them altogether.

10. How do you stay up-to-date with the ever-changing search engine algorithms and techniques for optimization?

SEO vendors should have some process for staying up to date on algorithm changes and proven techniques for SEO success. The Search Engine News service that I mentioned above is one of several reputable service that you can follow. In addition, SEO vendors should be part of industry associations and professional groups (see next question).

11. From Lee Odden’s blog entry: Have you been vetted and listed in industry directories? Selection guides?

If SEO vendors are serious about SEO, they probably will have a presence in the industry and may speak at industry conferences and programs. Some directories and listings of SEO vendors include SEMPO, SEOConsultants,  TopSEO.com, Marketing Sherpa’s SEO Guide, and Marketing Profs Vendor Selector.

12. How do you charge for your services? Hourly or project? Are there ongoing costs to maintain the SEO?

Any vagueness in the SEO vendor responses about pricing or ongoing, monthly maintenance fees and length of the process should raise a red flag. It is not unusual for a good SEO project to begin with initial programming and changes and then continue for at least six months with monthly analysis, tweaks to keywords and programming changes. The analysis and tweaks on an ongoing basis should not be expensive, especially if the SEO vendor uses automated tools to do the analysis. Small keyword and program tweaks take do not take much time to do.

I hope these 12 questions help those of you who are choosing an SEO vendor. SEO vendors – did I leave anything out? Please comment using the link at the end of the page.