Webmaster tools is far the most underutilised tool on your web marketing arsenal.

Webmaster tools is not just essential for your SEO strategy but it can also be very very handy for your Web analysis and pre-strategy plan.  A smart strategist can use this data to improve how search engines crawl and index your site’s content but it also can understand and explore opportunities looking through SEO eyes.

Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google released an excellent video about usage of Webmaster tools, enjoy.

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The company has just announced they’re opening a full App Gallery for Google Analytics.

Google Application Gallery

This gallery contains applications that extend Google Analytics in new and exciting ways.

They are solutions that help analysts, marketers, IT teams, and executives get more out of Google Analytics
(if you are part of the ones that believes that Analytics=Visits stop reading here).

Apps are available in 12 categories, including business intelligence, campaign management, content, data collection, e-commerce, email marketing, mobile marketing, phone tracking, reporting tools, SEO, site auditing, and widgets and gadgets.

According to Mashable website – Coming Soon Google Analytics will release a new set of Analytics reports for Adwords.

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However one of most important steps is most of the time forgotten – Landing pages.

This “little” detail may be the main reason you are losing money on your campaigns.

One of the most underutilised tactics in Internet Marketing is landing pages.

Landing pages have been discussed since Internet marketing started with emails and display ads. Unfortunately, it’s one of those things that people talk about and write about more than they actually do.

For the sake of this article, a landing page is defined as the web page that a prospect “lands” on after clicking on a link – any link – from an email, a CPC campaign, search engine result, inbound link from another website, newsletter; you get the idea.

In essence, every landing page you develop (in fact, every website page) should have a specific goal (inspired by Seth Godin):

-          Get a visitor to click (to go to another page, on your site or someone else’s).

-          Get a visitor to buy.

-          Get a visitor to give permission for you to follow up (by email, phone, etc.). This includes registration of course.

-          Get a visitor to tell a friend.

-          Improve your Market Position in the visitor’s mind.

-          (and the more subtle) Get a visitor to learn something, which could even include posting a comment or giving you some sort of feedback

As Gavin Heaton once wrote – “Every page is sacred, EVERY page. You always need to consider the upstream and the downstream”

A great competitive advantage.

I cannot understand why marketers don’t spend enough time and energy in building the last, and probably most important, step in the Internet marketing process.

Most websites create their landing pages as their campaigns launch, and they leave them alone until they collapse under their own weight.

As more companies find out about the advantages of Internet marketing, and fighting for places on SERP’s or a better position on PPC campaigns increase in competitiveness, testing and improving your landing pages help you to optimise your ROI converting more visitors for less cost.

Loveday and Niehaus, the authors of Web Design for ROI, discuss some unique issues for landing pages, which I’ve summarised below:

* They have to essentially perform the entire sales process.

The landing page (remember what Gavin says) must offer a product, service, or information, capture your visitor’s attention long enough to pique his or her interest and ultimately want to convert, and entice the user to take action (fill out a form, provide payment, etc). Basically, your landing page has to act as your best salesperson. That’s a lot to ask of one little page.

* They have to capture attention very quickly.

People skim, scan, and scoot. Your landing page has only a few precious seconds to keep your visitor from hitting the back button.

* They’re viewed by a lot of new eyeballs.

A lot of new visitors see your landing page compared to your built-in audience. These new people probably aren’t going to know what your site’s about or whether it’s representing a reputable company.

Below you can find a list for guidelines:

1.Establish credibility.
2.Make sure your design looks professional to your audience and is industry-appropriate.
3.Include positive resources and testimonials when necessary or useful
4.Make sure nothing’s broken eg. links to a YouTube video.
5.Simplify and separate.
6.Reduce or eliminate navigation.
7.Minimise your branding.
8.Think of your landing page as a continuation of your ad.
9.Don’t make promises you can’t (or won’t) keep.
10.Re-iterate your ad’s call to action.
11.Use consistent graphics and images.
12.Keep the language consistent.
13.Segment for different audiences/customers.
14.Personalise for your visitor.
15.User fewer but better graphics.
16.Make sure the medium is what’s best for your offer.
17.Speak the customer’s language, not yours.
18.Emphasis benefits, not features.
19.Weed out all but the most essential points.
20.Cover all your bases.
21.Be intelligent about how you display your information.
22.Provide a clear call to action.
23.Consider providing a secondary call to action (don’t overdue it – it can cause a paradox of choice)
24.Provide offline alternatives.
25.Don’t request more than the minimum information necessary.
26.Make your buttons look like buttons.

There are different tools available (Google optimizer is a great free one) that help you to test.

Before releasing Internet Marketing Academy, my team ran more than seven variations of landing pages. There were variations with and without clients testimonials, videos and other combinations. We learnt a lot!

One of the combinations gave us around 200% more conversions, just by changing few key elements.

Only testing will tell what is better for your website. The more you test, the more profitable (useful) your website will become.

Once you have evolved a combination producing profitable results, you then have your new “control” level and you can start testing new ways to beat it.

It will cost you more time, but it will also increase your ROI.

In this case more is more.

(Obs I originaly publish this article on Digital Ministry website)

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Each section also features a marketer profile with brands such as Deloitte, Dell, Commonwealth Bank, Jaguar, and Subway.

On the Search and Online Marketing section it couldn’t be better, real guns Julian Persuad, Phil Duffield and more.

I couldn’t be happier to be part of the “around the Table” on Search and Online Marketing section. Good work and thanks to Sean and Kate.

Read the edition and be prepared to 2011.

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Lucio’s Ribeiro note:

It is a privilege to have Danny Sullivan guest posting to Marketing Easy. For those who don’t know Danny Sulivan is probably the number one SEO professional in the world. He writes and edits Search Engine Land. When we swapped emails, I suggested he wrote about Basics of SEO and what it means to a business. Voila, he brings now this post. I hope you guys like. Dan, thanks very much for you collaboration

Understanding Why You Need SEO

Before you can understand the reasons for using SEO, it might be good to have a definition of what SEO — search engine optimization — is. It’s probably a safe assumption that if you are here reading MarketingEasy.net, you have some understanding of SEO, so I’ll keep it simple. SEO is the science of customizing elements of your web site to achieve the best possible search engine ranking. That’s really all there is to search engine optimization, but as simple as it sounds, don’t let it fool you. Both internal and external elements of the site affect the way it’s  ranked in any given search engine, so all of these elements should be taken into consideration.

Good SEO can be very difficult to achieve, and great SEO seems pretty well impossible at times.

Why is search engine optimization so important? Think of it this way: If you’re standing in a crowd of a few thousand people and someone is looking for you, how will they find you? In a crowd that size, everyone blends together.

Now suppose there is a system that separates groups of people. Maybe if you’re a woman you’re wearing red and if you’re a man you’re wearing blue.

Now anyone looking for you will have to look through only half the people in the crowd. You can further narrow the group of people to be searched by adding additional differentiators until you have a small enough group that a search query can be executed and the desired person can be easily found. Your web site is much like that one person in the huge crowd. In the larger picture your site is nearly invisible, even to the search engines that send crawlers out to catalog the Web. To get your site noticed, both by crawlers and visitors, certain elements must stand out. That’s why you need search engine optimization — to help you focus on the right elements.

By accident, your site will surely land in a search engine; and it’s likely to rank within the first few thousand results without any effort from you.

A crawler will eventually find the site and bury it somewhere in the results with every other web site on the same topic.

Clearly, that’s not good enough. Being ranked on the ninth or tenth page of search results is tantamount to being  invisible.

To be noticed, your site should be ranked much higher and for the right keywords, the ones that translate to a business opportunity for you.

Ideally, you want your site to be displayed somewhere on the first two to three pages of results. Most people won’t look beyond the third page, if they get even that far.

Indeed, it’s the sites that  land on the first page of results that get the most traffic, and traffic is translated into revenue, which is the ultimate goal of search engine optimization.

To achieve a high position in search results, your site must be more than simply recognizable by a search engine crawler. It must satisfy a set of criteria that not only gets the site cataloged, but can also get it cataloged above most (if not all) of the other sites that fall into that category or topic.

This is no easy task. Some of the criteria by which a search engine crawler determines your site’s rank in a set of results include the following:

• Anchor text
• Site popularity
• Link context
• Topical links
• Title tags
• Keywords
• Site language
• Content

Site maturity It is estimated that there are at least several hundred other criteria that could also be examined before your site is ranked by a search engine.

Some of the preceding criteria also have multiple points of view. For example, when looking at link context, a crawler might take into consideration  where the link is located on the page, what text surrounds it, and where it leads to or from. These criteria are also weighed differently.

For some search engines, links are more important than site maturity; and for others, links have little importance.

These weights and measures are  constantly changing, so even trying to guess what is most important at any given time is a pointless exercise. Just as you figure it out, the criteria will shift or change completely.

Many of the elements used in search engine rankings are likely to have some impact on your site ranking, even when you do nothing to improve them. However, without your attention, you’re leaving the search ranking of your site to chance.

That’s like opening a business without putting out a sign. You’re sure to get some traffic, but because You’re sure to get some traffic, but because people don’t know you’re there, it won’t be anything more than the curiosity of passersby.

Danny Sullivan

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