SEO – Web Landing Page Generation

Somewhere along the line in my sales and marketing career I’ve gotten very friendly with technology. Earlier this year I completed a project for an Asset Recovery company that listed over 2 million products on its site. I’m pleased to say that the top selling products enjoyed organic top search ranking. But getting to that point took patience.

A search engine strategy usually goes something like this.Setup our Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing accounts to give the call center an immediate boost.– at a cost. Next, research keywords and phrases that are popular searches in top search engines and write good content using these words and phrases. Be careful not to “stuff” the pages. Somewhere around 10% of your copy containing the key terms is a good rule. Finally, get well indexed sites to link back to you either by link exhange or listing your products for sale on the site with a link pointing to your checkout page for that product. These are some basics.

Where you will likely have most of your success is building great landing pages which are crawled via your site map. I’ve had astounding success building product detail landing pages on sites with hundreds of thousands of pages that attract search engines to put products at or near the top of the first page on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

e-Bay Hot in a Cool Market ?

Greg Carter, NBC Interview

In a tight economy and looking for ways for “guerilla marketing” tactics, here’s one I used back in 2003 when the economy was in similar straits as it is today. Yes, e-Bay. I’ve launched an entire new product division just through a test on ebay that proved hugely profitable.

I listed 10 products, they sold, so I listed 60,000 more. They’re still selling today on the company’s main site, primarily from traffic that leaves the ebay site “About Me” page. Go to ebay Stores and do a search on PlcCenter. Look for the obvious link to the the About Me page on the main store page. All the links in the About Me paragraph reviewing our products take you directly to the our main site.

Ebay won’t advertise the fact  that you can have as many links to your About Me page on your main store page, and in turn, have as many links to your main site in your About Me page. Still not convinced of the traffic you can get?

Check out the tour I gave NBC cameras when we topped the nation in transactions on ebay during 2007-2008.

About Me

eMarketing Association Membership

Contact me: netmarketing@comcast.net   >> Net Marketing Inc. Services <<

I got my start in net sales and marketing 10 years ago as a Marketing Manager when I had an opportunity to pioneer the search marketing, both SEO and SEM for Radwell International, then a modest $9 million company with a small sales and service staff. At the time I was a traditional sales and marketing guy who relied on relationship marketing, word of mouth, etc to sell products (by the way, word of mouth is still the killer app).

I was a reluctant hero when I showed the CEO how we could get to the top engine rankings in minutes using pay-per-click for a quick infusion of leads. After getting PPC management in place, I got to work learning about organic search. It took about six years to grow to a thriving $40 million global industrial sales organization with an e-commerce call center, service department, and outside sales team.  I was thrilled with this experience to bridge IT and marketing teams with “tech-marketing”. Eventually I trained some of the IT folks in this new marketing side so we could work together building a site that dominated the search engines at that time and the company still enjoys excellent ranking today for a majority of its products. Today the call center simply takes orders as fast as possible and makes very few outbound calls to get business.

Breaking it down…

Is your site serving customers?

I was recently asked by Fortune 500 financial institution to measure “Channel Shift”. They wanted to see the trending of customers using the web to serve themselves versus contacting representatives in the call center — using the “Contact Us” page. The intent was to measure all the different ways (channels) through which the customers are served: Fund Exchanges; Loans; Allocation Changes; Payroll Deferrals and how each channel was scoring when it came to answering customer needs online (afterall, isn’t that what it’s all about?).

Comparison Shopping Engine Strategy

Online retailers who deal with large volumes of SKUs need to optimize their listings, especially when they’re paying for each click on a comparative shopping engine (CSE). To optimize for the CSE, items must be broken into categories that map well to the CSE. I’ve currently been assigned the lead of a database support team responsible for writing queries to deal with large volumes of data and assigning generic descriptions that can be mapped back to top-level categories.

Tangential to this project, any CSRs touching one of over 2 million SKUs must assign the part number/item to one of 30 categories. In the end, the Generic Descriptions and Categories are joined by part number. As you might have guessed, the goal of this project is to prepare the data for shopping engines. The data is immediately being put to use on our own ecommerce site, which is navigated through a short series of drop-down menus that guide the customer through the buying decision to the shopping cart.

If you are planning to use CSE to sell your products, you must undertake this kind of effort. This is the best way to ensure correct placement of your products through your data feed and into the CSE where consumers can easily find what they’re looking for. Most importantly, remember that with large volumes of products it’s easy to focus on quantity and not the quality of your data. If you’re going to pay for performance in the engine, don’t get caught up in counting the products you list. Instead, make the products you list, count.

Building Your Affiliate Network

One of my goals has always been to build affiliate referrals to our site from 6% of web traffic to 15% by the end of 2007. We’re approaching 10%. In the advertiser/publisher model of affiliate marketing, we have always been the advertiser. So when I’m seeking Publishers to place ads on their websites, I usually find affiliate publishers by searching on a keyword that we optimize for (or would like to be optimized for). Usually, our competitors will appear in the natural listings along with us. So I use the link: [domainname].com method to see who is linking to them. Next, I type site [domainname].com where the domain name of the site is the site linking to our competitor. This suggests which of the sites linking to our competitors are most heavily indexed by Google. If Google likes them, they must be good, right? These sites get on my target list of publishers where I might want to place links with a tracking cookie.

Link Building With High Index Referring Sites

We are know that Google Page Rank scores websites heavily based on their “link popularity”. More sites pointing to you means you are popular! And if you get popular sites – those with a lot of pages indexed by Google pointing at you – then you are worthy of being higher in Google search results. I’ve used the “site:www.[partnersite].com” method to find sites in my industry that have a high number of pages indexed by Google. The number of this site’s pages indexed by Google appear at the top right of the page. Type a popular keyword into Google and see what sites are good prospects for you based on their Page Rank “votes”. Then use this method to see which sites have a high number of pages indexed. Invest time and resources into getting your products listed on these sites. Then watch Analytics and see the number of “Referring Site” visits rise.