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Search Engine Marketing

Yesterday I was updating my friend's site, Tim Woolley, a racehorse trainer. We run a blog, and have been updating recently with the exploits of Barbaro, who is trained at Fair Hill, where Tim trains.

I was looking at the stats on sitemeter (this is a low trafficed site) and noticed there had been a decent spike recently, specifically from May 5 (date of the Kentucky Derby). I looked at the referrer URLs and noticed pretty much all the traffic was coming directly from the Fair Hill Training Center site. This got me to thinking about how to get the traffic to come directly to Tim's site, rather than via the training center, which I assumed is traffic that had come from a search engine for people looking for information on Fair Hill and Barbaro.

SEO
So I decided to 'practice what we preach' and do some SEO work on the site. Make the title tag more search engine friendly, add approriate meta tags and rephrase the H3 tags to include appropriate keywords. These changes will help with the search engine, but will take time to take effect. We have an opportunity now, as Barbaro continues his triple crown effort. So what to do ?

Search Engine Advertising
So I bid on the keywords (from Google) Fair Hill, Fair Hill Training Center, Barbaro. This program began about 3 pm on sunday afternoon. As of monday, 5:30 AM the advertisement has been served 461 times, with 9 click throughs. Barbaro ad was served 412 times, the remainder evenly split between the other two keywords. Lets see if we can build traffic, and then maintain it by having people come back to continue reading about Barbaro and other training issues the blog covers.

Keyword selector tools

The following are the keyword selector tools mentioned by Dave yesterday in his presentation:

• Overture: Keyword Selector Tool
  
• WordTracker Keywords
  

I used Overture's selector to look at appropriate keywords for MBA Admissions Consulting Services, this is what I found:

MBA Admissions Consulting: 0 searches for April
MBA Admissions Consultant: 43 searches for April

Since Clear Admit' site is optimized for the former (see title tags) we obviously need to make some changes to optimize for the latter! This is a good illustration for writing for the search engine versus the browser of the site. We are a consulting service, BUT potential clients are looking for a consultant!

SEO: loocsixela

The notes are relative to each engine listed, and as of Wednesday May 10.

• Google
  note: number of inbound links is important, proof: technorati and toby's site are ranked 1 and 2.
  
  Quick explanation from Chris re: How he won.
  
  
• Yahoo!
  
• MSN
  note: anchor text of inbound links is important, proof: packers site is listed first, and does not include the keyword anywhere on its site (and a mispelled packer site is listed number 3).
  
  

Monday May 8: Guest Speaker Gary Spangler from DuPont

Quick reminder we have a guest speaker today, Gary Spangler, who will discuss DuPont's internet marketing initiatives (specifically search engine marketing and word of mouth).

Office hours today are cancelled. Sorry for the late notice.

Final course content

Given the length and detail of the promotion section I am making this the last set of material we will cover, along with Chapter 5 of Search.

The promotion section is not yet finished, but I am linking to it here as it is good enough to read through at least. I will be editing it over the weekend. Please have this material read before class on monday. Much of the material will be relevant for our guest speaker, Gary Spangler, from DuPont.

MySpace

A quick reminder, today we have Travis Katz, a VP at MySpace conducting a skype presentation. Come with all your questions about MySpace and social networking sites in general.

We will then take a quick look at Google AdWords as we begin the final element of the marketing mix: Promotion.

Adding e-commerce to your blog

As we approach the promotion element of the marketing mix I would like you to add some e-commerce to your blog. You can choose to become an affiliate for Amazon (or other retailer) or sign up to host google AdWords.

Final Wiki Entry: Summary

For each wiki article you are editing, you are required to write a final post, summarizing your work. This summary must include the overall impact you have had on the article, the "communities'" impact on the article during the period of time of your edits, and particularly any direct responses to your edits. You are free to include other insights you think are relevant to this wiki work (how you selected your articles, the research you used to add additional content etc). These posts should:

a. be no more than 200 words
b. include links to each blog entry you created for each edit
c. include a link to the article itself that you were editing

Finally, please add a section to your blog template, titled "Summary Wiki Posts" with a link to each of these final posts, this will make it easy for me to grade the work.

HostMySite; entrepreneurship and Buy.at

HostMySite is coming in today (Monday May 1) to discuss the company, its growth and successes. Essentially looking at the entrepreneurial side of business. If you have considered starting a business after school, or working in an entrepreneurial environment, come with your questions.

On a similar note, the company Dave Brown (our Skype speaker on security issues) works for as CTO (he was a co founder), buy.at, has just received 7.3 million pounds of investment. Its an affiliate marketing company, which we will discuss a little later.