One of the main debates in the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) revolves around the type of tactics used to get results - this is the White-hat vs. Black-hat debate.

White-hatters tend to employ a more organic and genuine approach to link building, whereby links are generated through authentic, human relationships. Black-hat SEOers, however, often rely on bots and spammy tactics to derive inbound links and deceive search engine ranking algorithms.

On either side, most of the pros will tell you that one key factor in any good link building campaign is article marketing - the process (or art) of submitting original articles to online directories where they’ll reappear for others to syndicate and ultimately increase traffic back to your site.

With so much dialogue on the topic of article marketing and how it fits into the white-hat vs. black-hat debate, we’ve done our homework and have had the opportunity to put the concepts to work. We’ve learned what works best for us, and more importantly, what SEOers on either side should avoid. In this post, we’d like to share a few of those discoveries with you and let you in on part of our white-hat SEO process - getting your articles listed in directories to achieve maximum exposure.

The WHY of Article Marketing

Article marketing is ultimately a win-win for everyone involved - as the directories grow, they rank higher in search results and see increased traffic; authors gain credibility and see increased traffic, both through the directory and the syndicates who’ve picked up the article; and like authors, syndicates gain a bit of credibility and see increased traffic, too.

The key to all this increased traffic is backlinks. Most directories allow authors to nest links within their articles and since syndicates must copy submission as they are, those links show up on every site that syndicates the article. You get links, the directory gets good, free content, and syndicates get to attract readers to their site, too. Win-win.

The HOW of Article Marketing

Once you’ve got a good article ready for marketing, you must select the most appropriate bundle of sites to submit it to. As all directories cater to a different set of readers and have different review processes, you’ll need to submit your article to at least a few different directories in order to achieve maximum reach.

Additionally, article review time can vary between directories so by submitting to several directories at once, you can extend the exposure cycle of each article.

The WHAT of Article Marketing

Many directories allow authors to submit a few additional details along with their article, usually a summary and resource field. Summaries show up in search results and thus should allow users to make a quick assessment of your piece. Unsurprisingly, a tactfully written, keyword-rich summary will get you noticed more often than not.

Resource fields can really boost link-building exposure by providing authors with a space to enter contact or background information and share links to their website and other resources. This is a great way to gain a few deep-links to your client’s site. For maximum exposure, you should try to tailor these details to fit each directory that you submit to.

The WHERE of Article Marketing

Article directories exist in both all-purpose and niche formats, and can either be free or paid for services - so you’ll need to do a bit homework to figure out which directories are best for your needs. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll just be covering a few of the more popular and free all-purpose forums.

EzineArticles

EzineArticles is a leader in article marketing, some of their strong points are:

High Standards - The Ezine editors take the submission process very seriously. They maintain a high editorial standard in their guidelines section, allowing only the best articles to make it through. I’ve actually had to re-submit some of my articles up to five times due to minor discrepancies that the editors caught. There is no room for black-hat marketing in this system.

Expert Status - To ensure that only the best articles get in, authors are limited to eight submissions until reviewers have approved four of their articles. The review process can take up to eight weeks, but once four articles have been accepted - you reach expert status which allows for vastly more submissions. Expert status also gets your articles displayed on the EzineArticles “High Traffic” page - a great bonus for your client and a boost to link-building.

DoFollow Links - When someone republishes your article through EzineArticles, any links that you’ve included in the article are made into “DoFollow” links to help boost your search engine rankings.

Analytics - EzineArticles helps you track where and when your article gets syndicated with a very easy and helpful monitoring processes.

GoArticles

GoArticles is one of the directories that I couldn’t quite figure out. Here’s what I mean:

Maybe I’m just missing something, but if you’ve had any experience with GoArticles - please feel free to share your thoughts and tips in the comments!

ArticleBase

ArticleBase is my personal favorite. When I’m assigned an article to market, I save ArticleBase for last, like a dessert.

Fast, Quality Review - ArticleBase reviews and publishes articles at an amazing rate, while still maintaining high standards. While many of the free submission sites take up to eight weeks to review your article for editorial standards, ArticleBase’s review cycle is usually less than 24 hours.

HTML - ArticleBase outdoes GoArticles in this regard, allowing for much higher level HTML customization. ArticleBase allows three links in the body of the article and another three in the author section. Not many sites are this flexible.

Reach & Audience - As ArticleBase’s FAQ section is proud to announce, their site is growing rapidly. Although I submit articles to many directories, many of the ones that have been syndicated began at ArticleBase. As an added SEO bonus, content from the ArticleBase directory tends to rank pretty well in Google searches.

Analytics - Not many clients would allow you to work through the tedious and lengthy article marketing process without some sort of return on their investment. ArticleBase has great tracking metrics that help determine exposure and linkbuilding success for your client.

Preferences - Many site preferences can be saved, such as bios for each of the authors you set up. These saved preferences mean you spend less time on the busy work and more time optimizing your article.

A Few More Directory Sites We Like

• ArticleDashboard
• ArticleBiz
• ArticleCity

Additional Tips & Tricks

With all that said, we by no means know everything about article marketing, but we strive to keep up to date on the latest helpful hints - we’ve even set up a Google Alert keep us in the loop!

If you’ve got any experience in article marketing, we invite you to share any tips or tricks might have in the comment!

Many new websites hope to become the next Twitter or Google, but few have actually invested the time and research in coming up with the perfect domain name to guide them towards that level of success. To a person with little internet experience, ‘Twitter’ and ‘Google’ might sound like words a two year old made up, but in reality, they were deliberate and sound choices that have lead both domain names to become cultural phenomenons (and even verbs)!

The best domain names tend to combine a bit of search engine optimization, marketability, branding, linkability, authority, and distinction into one big mash-up. Each factor has its own advantages and disadvantages, so the trick is in finding the right balance for your purpose. Regardless of the purpose of your website though, it will be very difficult for users to find you without the right domain name. And while what exactly falls under “right” is up for debate, we can at least give you some tips to point you in the “right” direction - towards a domain name that doesn’t suck.

Branding Considerations

In many cases, the goal of starting a website is to create a digital space that serves as an extension of an existing brand. In other cases, a brand must be established for the first time through the website. In either situation, the success of the website begins with the choice of strong, representative domain name. Below are a few things to consider when selecting a domain to extend or define your brand.

1. Descriptiveness – Often, companies will try to get the exact name of their business for a domain name. If the .com domain is unavailable, they might consider ditching the .com and moving over to .net or .org, however this often leads to customer confusion (see #2 - Originality). In this case, you might take a creative approach by seeking out domains that reflect the identity of your site through a common industry phrase or illustrative wording. For example, www.ireallylikefood.com, allows for a relatively confusion-free way for a domain name to advertise the site and what they’re about.

2. Originality – Stand out from your competitors! Avoid choosing a name similar to your competitors. Search engines don’t like this and you may lose business when customers mistakenly go to the wrong address. This lack of diversity can be seen in the online flower industry where many businesses have been unable to uniquely brand their domain name, making it extremely hard for any one of them to stand out in the crowd.

3. Creativity – This is especially important for businesses known for their creativity, such as Google. Many aspire to follow in Google’s footsteps by inventing words (see Twitter or Flickr) that result in easily recognized brands. Of course the down side to creative names is that they might not immediately reveal the nature of the site.

SEO Considerations

Sometimes the selection of a domain name may be influenced by an SEO motives, in which case, the goal of the name would be to increase accessibility through search engines. The following factors are just a few things to consider when selecting a domain for SEO. And of course, a carefully crafted, SEO-minded domain name is only step one in the eternal quest for better search engine rankings, so don’t solely rely on a good name to get you to the top.

4. Distinction – Search engines crawl through the internet collecting details to help them provide their users with the most accurate results possible. When these crawlers reach your site, they consult your domain name for an initial overview of your site. A well crafted domain name can definitely help in your SEO strategy. For example, exclusively selling oranges on FruitCity.com is okay, but a name like OrangeCity.com is much better, as it includes the keyword “orange”, thereby reinforcing the target product anywhere it’s displayed.

5. The Hyphen Debate – Despite what you might have heard, domain names and hyphens can play nice. While not exactly user friendly, hyphens can help you rise to the top of search engine ranking pages (SERP), as the hypens help Google to extract the individual keywords in your domain name. For example, search engines will identify, and give you ranking points for, the keywords “baseball” and “gloves” in Baseball-Gloves.com, as opposed to the mash-up of BaseballGlove.com.

   If you are trying to maximize your website’s reach in the human market, hyphens might be a good thing to avoid. They confuse web users and are hard to refer back to. For example, compare the domains: oranges-for-sale.com and orangevendor.com. The same basic usability concerns apply to numbers - do you spell the number out or represent it numerically (Five vs. 5)?

6. Simplicity – When possible, try to keep your domain name under ten characters and the fewer words the better. Stick to easily spelled words and be cautious about using words in other languages, no matter how basic they are.

Acquiring Your Dream Domain

There are a number of online tools available to assist you in choosing and managing your domain name, a few include: DomainFellow, MakeWords, NameBoy, and DomainNameSoup.

Once you come up with the perfect domain name, you should immediately check its availability through a service like: GoDaddy, Network Solutions, DomainTools, or eNom. If your name is already taken, sites like these may be able to provide you with information on the owner of the site, offer similar alternatives, or help get you on a waiting list for later purchase.

These tips should help to get you started, but remember that you’re probably not going to succeed based on a good domain name alone. Content, SEO, customer support, solid functionality - they all play a part, and domain names can certainly be a critical factor.

Editor’s Note: Our guest blogger, Katherine Naszradi, is currently a senior at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, pursuing a career in marketing. She’s had extensive experience building social media campaigns and online brand identities through sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. In her spare time she can be found traversing the Twittersphere as @krnasz, creating abstract works of art, and running with the bulls in Spain. Thanks Katherine, for a great post!

As the internet continues to grow, it gets harder and harder to efficiently find new and relevant information. Luckily for us, Google saw this coming and developed a tool to help keep us informed - Google Alerts, a monitoring system for Google search results that periodically emails you when new content appears.

Lately, I’d been hearing a lot of talk about the Alerts service, but couldn’t quite grasp how they worked or why they’d even be that useful to me. Now that I’ve had the chance to play around with them, I’d like to share a few of their more practical applications with you. This guide will explain how to set up and monitor your Google Alerts, as well as show you how to deliver specific and relevant information right to your inbox.

What are Google Alerts?

Straight from the Google Alerts home page:

In addition to the above uses, there are a number of other interesting applications for Google Alerts in the business world. Next, we’ll be discussing how to set up and manage your alerts. If you are already familiar alert management, I’d suggest skipping ahead to the Practical Implementations section.

What sources are monitored?

Google allows you to keep track of six different sources of information, each with its own criteria for sending alerts:

• News, Blogs and Video – The latest Google results matching your query that appear within the top 10 news, blog, or video results.
• Web - The latest Google results matching your query that appear within the top 20 web search results.
• Groups - The latest Google results matching your query that appear within the top 50 Google Group search results.
• Comprehensive – The latest results from Blog, Web & News for your query - condensed into a single email.

Creating and managing Alerts

Although it is possible to create Google Alerts without a free Google account, it’s advisable that you use one as it will allow you to more easily manage multiple alerts. For the sake of this guide, we’ll assume that you’ve got a Google account and are already logged in.

Creating an Alert

Creating a new Alert begins with navigating to the Google Alerts home page.

From there, you’ll be able to determine the topic you’d like to monitor and type of alerts that you’d like to receive.

A brief description of each of the options follows:

• Search terms - This field indicates what Google will search for. You may enter individual words or entire phrases, and can include any operators already available in advanced Google searches.

  A Few Examples

  • Detroit Lions – Standard Google Search for the term Detroit and the term Lions
  • “Detroit Lions” – Will search Google for the entire phrase “Detroit Lions”
  • site:www.detroitlions.com – Would tell you whenever Google indexes a new page on the Detroit Lions website
• Type – You can choose which Google sources to receive alerts from. These include the six options described above: News, Blog, Web, Video, Groups and Comprehensive.
• How often – Determines how frequently you’ll receive email alerts. Options include: as-it-happens, once a day, and once a week.
• Deliver to – If you are logged into your Google account, this field will be pre-populated with your email address. Otherwise, you can specify the email address of your choice.

Once you click the “Create Alert” button, you’re Alert will be saved and you’ll be taken to your Alerts dashboard where you can manage all of your active alerts.

Managing Your Alerts

Editing and deleting your alerts is dirt simple with the Google Alert dashboard. If you want to remove alerts, simply check the boxes next to the ones you want to remove and click the delete button at the bottom of the page.

If you want to edit an alert’s settings, just hit the edit button to the right of the corresponding alert.

Practical Implementations

So now that you know the basics of creating and managing Google Alerts, let’s look at some of the neat things you can do with them.

SEO Campaign Monitoring

Google Alerts can be used to track the progress of your link building campaigns and even track where competitors have been fishing for links.

Here are a few examples to consider:

• link:www.yourwebsite.com - Will show you new inbound links to your site that Google finds
• link:www.yourcompetitor.com - Will show you where your competitor is getting new inbound links
• site:www.yoursite.com - Will show you which new pages from your website are making it into Google’s index.

Let’s take a deeper look at what our results might look like in the first case - using link:www.metaspring.com, we can see a few of the most recent inbound links to our site that Google has picked up from some of the blogs we left comments on.

Brand / Reputation Monitoring

Alerts can also be useful for keeping an eye on your reputation. In the below example, I am looking for anything that shows up with my name in it. The alert below was sent out when when a press release of ours, in which I was mentioned, gained syndication on another site.

Seeking Out New Stories

Another handy use for Alerts is for finding new information to share in social media. For one of our clients, we maintain a Twitter account focusing on interior design and often use the results found in our Google Alerts to help us gather and share useful content.

Additional Resources

While Google Alerts shouldn’t be the only place you should go looking for new information, they certainly help to automate some of the time spent in research. We’ve outlined just a few of the ways that we use Google Alerts, but we’d love to know how you use them - feel free to share in the comments!

And if you’d like more information on Google Alerts, here are a few more good resources:

• Google Alerts Help
• Google Alerts: Get Email Updates On Specific Topics
• Using Google Alerts To Help Your Business
• 10 Uses of Google Alerts For A Freelancer
• How to Use Google Alerts to Monitor Your Company’s Online Presence

Welcome to Part 2.5 of our Ultimate Ecommerce Reference Guide: Increasing Site Traffic. In Part 1, we discussed maximizing your store’s usability to provide a smooth and intuitive shopping experience; in Part 2, we went through some of the various ways in which you can make your online store more accessible by search engines.

As you may have noticed, we’ve broken our second post up into two MetaParts - Part 2.0 looked at making structural changes to increase traffic; Part 2.5 (this post) will look at the various marketing tactics and additional site features that can be employed to draw more visitors. All of the techniques covered in these two parts can help to generate site traffic - but that doesn’t mean you need to use them all. Doing your research and determining your targets should start you off in the right direction.

Search Engine Optimize

An SEO campaign is a great way to get visitors to your site, residually. While advertising campaigns only last as long as you can afford to pay for them, traffic generated from search engine optimizations can be much longer lasting.

Not to be confused with search engine friendliness - which is a set of methods used to make websites more accessible by search engines and users, search engine optimization is the process of increasing a sites search engine rankings for individually targeted keywords. The higher a site ranks for a given keyword, the more likely someone will find the site using a targeted term.

For a more detailed look at SEO and how it can benefit your site, check out out our SEO Services page or SEOmoz’s Beginner’s Guide - What is SEO?

Set up landing pages for targeted content

Landing pages are web pages created to target a specific keyword, topic or user group. These pages can be a very effective conversion tool in an ecommerce application because they allow you to focus the content of a page on a specific market or product. Once a visitor reaches the landing page, you have the ability to direct them to the section of your store that most closely suites their interests.

Anthropologie highlights their large assortment of jeans and their Denim Decoder.

For a more detailed overview of landing pages and their utility, check out SEOmoz’s article: Landing Pages for SEO

Personalize your brand with a blog

Create a blog and MAINTAIN it! An active blog can increase your site traffic and add countless inbound links to your website. Additionally, blogging can give your brand a personal voice and allow your visitors to more easily identify with you.

Of course, the next question is then - what exactly do you write about? Today, more and more businesses are approaching their blog as a way to offer greater transparency to their customers. People like to know whats going on behind the scene, so as a business with some sort of product, you could write about everything from product development details to events in your industry. You could also post job openings, case studies, or new reports and statistics. Ultimately, you should just try to produce a well thought out and relevant article.

Socialize with your customers

Take blogging one step further - if you’ve got a lot to talk about or would just like to enhance direct customer communication, social media sites are the perfect solution. A few of the more popular networks are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. While these are all very open networks, it’s likely that there are more specialized networks targeted more closely towards your industry.

Creating a dialogue with your customers is a great way to bring traffic to your site. As more and more people begin to follow the conversation, your brand becomes more reputable and people will become more interested in what you’ve got to offer.

For a few ideas on how to utilize sites like Twitter, you may want to check out 6 Twitter Marketing DOs and DON’Ts.

Gain credibility through syndicated articles

There are a ton of online websites that offer free articles available for syndication. Adding some of the more captivating articles to your site could help to establish your company as a thought leader in your industry. This credibility can lead to increased trust and higher conversion rates.

As you add interesting content to your site, you also increase the likelihood that people will naturally link to this information. Attaining these links can help your site appear closer to the top of search engine results. This is because a large portion of Google’s ranking algorithm is based on how many inbound links you have pointing to your site.

Build community with a forum

People love to socialize and it’s likely that they’d appreciate the opportunity to interact with others about your product. Adding a search engine friendly forum to your site adds user driven, unique content and provides a valuable service to your customers. And if you don’t yet have a lot of traffic, it’s generally okay to create a few ghost-conversations to get things moving.

If your product is in too small of a niche to generate a large community, consider starting a forum with a more generalized theme within your industry.

A good open source forum to check out is phpBB. If you decide to setup phpBB, you should also customize it to support search engine friendly URLs. Instructions can be found on phpBB’s website - SEO Modifications

Help customers understand product specifics with a glossary

Adding a dictionary or glossary to your store can be another value added service for your customers. If you have a complex product or service, it can help to define important terms that your visitors might encounter while browsing. It also adds additional content for the search engines. Each term added can then act as a gateway for people to find your store.

Home Depot features a great visual glossary for door and window terms.

Reach out to similar niche markets through Satellite Sites

Lastly, another way to drive traffic to your site is by creating smaller, niche websites that target markets related yours. We employed this strategy with one of our clients, an Amish furniture retailer, by creating an Amish recipes site. Since “Amish recipes” was a niche term, their Amish recipes website only took a few months of search engine optimization to reach the #1 spot in Google. The site now gets over 500 hits a day and sends a few dozen of those over to the main Amish furniture site. You can also monetize these satellite sites directly through Google advertisements.

Do your research! It’s the strategy that really matters

When putting together a good marketing plan, it’s important to remember that you can’t target everyone - it just doesn’t work to spread yourself so thin. That’s why you need to research your market, the competition, your users, and even current internet trends. To make it to the top, you’ve got to be one step ahead of your competition - so find out what they’re doing wrong and do it better! If your competitor spews sales ads to their Twitter followers, step it up by having ACTUAL conversations with yours.

So far we’ve helped you increase the usability of your shop, enhanced its search engine accessibility, and finally how to convert visitors to customers. In Part 3 we’ll look at how to incorporate these tips and techniques into a marketing strategy to increase sales from your new visitors and keep people coming back for more.

Check back soon or subscribe to our RSS Feed for the Part 3 conclusion!

After much delay and anticipation, we’re pleased to present you with the second piece to our three part Ultimate Ecommerce Reference Guide series: Search Engine Friendliness. In Part 1, we detailed the various ways through which you can maximize your store’s usability in order to provide a smooth and intuitive shopping experience.

In this post, we will review a few things that you can do to increase search engine visibility and, in turn, draw more relevant traffic to your site. It’s important to remember though, that as you develop your ecommerce marketing plan, you should conduct as much in depth research on your target markets and the competitors as possible. You want to have a solid idea of how users will want to use your site, the various ways in which they will try to find your product, and how your competitors have succeeded or failed at this.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

Avoid using variables like, product_id=6, in your URLs. An example of this type of dynamic URL would look like the following:

http://www.mystore.com/index.php?product_id=2223&category_id=4

There are several reasons that you’ll want to avoid these variables in your URLs. For one, they indicate to Google that you have a dynamic site and, as a result, the crawler is less likely to index your products. While Google has recently announced that they are improving their ability to understand and index these dynamic URLs, other search engines are not yet as advanced.

Variables in the URL also make links harder to share and are more prone to mistakes while copying and pasting. A friendly URL such as:

http://www.mystore.com/pants/blue-jeans

is makes much more sense to the user and is much easier to share. Additionally, using these sorts of descriptive words in the URL will also add a few targeted keywords to your page. Google doesn’t put heavy emphasis on this factor, but every little bit helps.

Pro Tip: If you use Apache as your web server, mod_rewrite is a very popular module that allows you to create these search engine friendly URLS. Here’s a pretty helpful guide explaining how to use mod_rewrite.

Cross Link Your Products

Cross linking your products or implementing a product recommendation system can be helpful to both visitors and search engines alike.

From a user standpoint, presenting intelligent alternatives can increase product discovery and additional sales. From a search engine’s perspective, cross links intertwine your products, allowing internal links to pass “link juice” to each other.

Unique Product Content

This may seem somewhat obvious and natural, but it’s important to differentiate your products from each other. If Google thinks the content on all of your product pages is the same, it will be less likely to index all of the products in your store. Since each product has the potential to be a targeted landing page, you want to be certain that every page gets indexed.

This can be done by adding unique product descriptions, reviews, product specs, etc., as well as, unique meta descriptions and keywords.

Eliminate Duplicate Content

It is also important to ensure that the architecture of your store does not produce duplicate content. For example, if there are multiple ways that your product can be found, make sure to use the proper tags on the less relevant cases so as to avoid penalization from the search engines (see the next section for more information on proper tagging).

An example of this kind of duplicate architectural content would be if you have a product that can be found through multiple URL paths, say - by brand, category, or price, e.g.:

• http://www.store.com/bose/3-speaker-system (Yes! We want to index this!)
• http://www.store.com/speakers/3-speaker-system (apply NoIndex tag)
• http://www.store.com/low-to-high/3-speaker-system (apply NoIndex tag)

Use Nofollow, NoIndex and Robots.txt file Properly

Using nofollow, noindex and robots.txt tags properly will make a huge difference when dealing with a large scale ecommerce site. These tags will help you tell the search engines which pages to index and which ones to ignore.

Doing this properly ensures that you have control over which pages end up in the search engines and which pages are merely for your visitor’s convenience.

Add a Sitemap

Having a sitemap helps search engines crawl the complex organization of your website. A sitemap can be a simple HTML page that contains links to all of the pages in your website, or an XML document, formatted to meet standard search engine specifications.

Some shopping cart ecommerce packages come with built in sitemap generators. If you don’t have this feature, you could also use Google Sitemap Generator or a similar service.

Once a sitemap is made, you can submit it directly to Google using their Webmaster Tools. Once submitted, Google will schedule a time for their crawler to explore the sitemap and begin indexing pages.

Search engine visibility won’t get you everything…

Ultimately, these structural changes should help visitors find what they’re looking for. Whether that be by making your site and products more discoverable by search engines or by making products more accessible from within your ecommerce application, it should be easily and intuitively accomplished through application of the above tips.

These changes can make a big impact in the amount of relevant traffic coming to your site, but often times that’s not enough to maintain a business. That’s why we’ve broken this post up into two MetaParts - Part 2.0 (this post), looked at making structural changes to increase traffic; Part 2.5 will look at the various marketing tactics and additional site features that can be employed to draw more visitors.

Check back soon or subscribe to our RSS Feed to make sure you don’t miss it!