Frequently Asked Questions Regarding Internet Marketing

As an Internet Marketing provider, Core3 Solutions gets asked unique and important questions everyday regarding Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing, and Analytics.  I think it is important to answer these questions, not just for our current clients, but for anyone that is wondering about these issues. For that reason, I will start publishing answers to frequently asked questions regularly through our Core3 blog.  Continue reading the Q and A below and maybe you will find the answer you have been searching for! 

1)       Our company needs to understand how 20 SEO keywords will work better than 40 at getting customers to visit our sight.  Can you explain this? 

Targeting a particular set of keyword phrases for each page can help you succeed in internet marketing. As you start to dominate search engines for those first few words and phrases and develop a decent conversion rate, you can then choose to expand beyond them.

Your best approach is to think of highly targeted pages with a single primary goal. For example, let's say you are selling kitchen appliances and you have a page describing each appliance with a shopping cart on each page.  Your goal is to sell appliances.  Each one of the pages should be targeted toward the appliance described on the page. 

Keep in mind, you don't need to avoid talking about other concepts (key terms) on the page as long as they fit into your primary concept. But you shouldn't think of pages as a catch-all where you can optimize for several concepts at once--that usually results in confusing the search engine about the purpose of the page, lowering its ranking. 

20 keywords are generally enough to cover 1-3 targeted keywords for each of your highly targeted pages.  A lot of work goes into optimizing a page for a set of keywords.  The more words you focus on, the less targeted and relevant the campaign becomes and the Search Engines become confused as to what the page is about. 

When it comes to SEO, you want to select your keywords very carefully.  You want to choose money making terms that will drive a lot of traffic to your targeted pages and convert.  But you also want to be careful about choosing words that aren't highly competitive.  It takes a good amount of time to start ranking high for a particular keyword (a lot of work goes into targeting a keyword).  If you focus on too many words, you risk not ranking high for any of them. 

2)      I would like to understand the available detail & depth of the reports in Google Analytics compared to Statcounter?

With regards to system stats, both GA and Statcounter offer a breakdown of your visitors by the hardware they use to access your site, screen resolutions, browser versions, etc. Google Analytics seems to have more accurate data on this than statcounter.

Involving report functions, both services offer reports by email, scheduled and immediate. Both are quite configurable, but the Statcounter report out of the box is pretty weak in quality.  The GA report is very customizable and quite beautiful with graphs and great detail. 

3)      What happens to all of the Meta key phrase & description tag optimization that has earned us our current rankings if we start from scratch?

Currently, using keywords in Meta descriptions and Meta keywords has a minimal affect on search engine rankinsg.  Google does not use Meta keywords at all in its ranking algorithm.  Meta descriptions are important more so for organic listings in that you choose how to describe your site to receive the best traffic. 

Areas that do still matter a lot and should be optimized include:

• Keyword Use in the Title Tag (Anywhere)
• Keyword Use in the beginning of the Title Tag
• Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name (e.g. Core3.com)
• Keyword Use in the H1 Headline Tag (Anywhere)
• Keyword Use in Internal Link Anchor Text on the Page
• Keyword Use in External Link Anchor Text on the Page
• Keyword Use in the beginning of the H1 Tag
• Keyword Use in the First 50-100 Words in HTML on the Page
• Keyword Use in the Subdomain Name (e.g. keyword.core3.org)
• Keyword Use in the Page Name URL (e.g. Core3.org/folder/keyword.html)
• Keyword Use in other Headline Tags (<h2> - <h6>)
• Keyword Use in Image Alt Text

To make things even more clear, the following is what does greatly affect your ranking in search engines.  This information was taken from SEOMoz which is a trusted source of information regarding internet marketing:

• 24% Trust/Authority of the Host Domain
• 22% Link Popularity of the Specific Page
• 20% Anchor Text of External Links
• 15% On-Page Keyword Usage
• 7% Traffic and Click-Through Data
• 6% Social Graph Metrics
• 5% Registration and Hosting Data

4)      Can we access the Google analytics reports and customize them ourselves?

Yes, you will have access to GA and you can create custom reports.  You can create, save, and edit custom reports that present the information you want to see organized in the way you want to see it. A drag and drop interface lets you select the metrics you want and define multiple levels of sub-reports. Once created, each custom report is available for as long as you want it.

Posted March 22, 2010 | Read all posts by Liz Wood