The Dark Side of Online Marketing

Posted by Persona @ 9:25 AM

Getting inbound links to your web site

It's a common tip given by a search marketing consultant that increasing the number of quality links to your web site can help your search engine optimisation (SEO). We are in a time where web traffic is very valuable to a site owner. After all the time and money spent on SEO and SEM, the last thing most site owners will want to do is loose their visitor to another site they happened to link to. Now, you might argue that opening the links in a new browser window can get around that, but common pop-up blockers can sometimes get triggered by the simple target="_blank" reference. Consider your own browsing habits for a moment - how many browser windows do you keep open at the same time? Most of us are closing more windows than opening them, if only to keep our desktops clutter free, so we can be at least semi-productive. Tabs in the latest versions of Firefox and IE help, but it's the same underlying problem - we're only going to follow a limited number of browsing-paths (aka cross-site user journeys) at any given time - as new pages and content capture our attention, our interest level in the source is reduced and we're more likely to close that window rather than return to it and re-start our browsing-path. Enter the humble blog. Blogs have been great when it comes to giving control to the site owner over their content. Even somebody with limited tech-skills can set one up and manage their own online content - fantastic! There is a dark side to the blog though when it comes to the future of link building for SEO. Track backs and Tags are making it easier for us to share and link content to make the web more interconnected, but much (not all) of these links are linking to other blog posts, rather than standard web pages. With blog content more frequently updated, raw editorial (rather than marketing spin) and often with a personal touch, we're more inclined to read and link to this content, rather than a pre-planned web page of content. When you consider the effort that has to go into getting a reciprocal link on your web site, versus the ease of creating a blog network, it's a no brainier that linking to/from 'normal' web pages will become less compelling for us all; especially when you consider what I said at the beginning of this post about retaining your traffic in the first place.

Keywords are not the answer

Most of the major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo) have significantly downplayed the importance they give to meta information (Keywords, Descriptions etc in the meta area of your HTML code). There is even an argument by some that they can often ignore them completely! Let's just consider that again - Search Engines often ignore keywords completely! All that time spent researching the right keywords and phrases (or money if you paid a professional) could be a complete waste. Not only that, but when you consider that after all the hard word, your competitors can simply cut-and-paste your keywords and clone them in their pages (and potentially steal your ranking), it's a serious problem. It's one that Google, MSN and Yahoo are quite aware of and they have a simple solution - ignore them. If the major search providers continued to give meta information high importance when ranking a page, the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) would be useless because people could just clone popular words and boost their ranking, when the actual content may not be relevant to the searcher. The result would be that people loose confidence in the search engine itself and switch to an alternative. In typical modern fashion, we often don't learn from the past and in the earlier days of online marketing it's something AltaVista suffered heavily from; ultimately resulting in Google taking top crown in the search industry. It's not a mistake Google, MSN and Yahoo are likely to welcome back, so keywords are not likely to drive the traffic to y our web site in any significant numbers.

Email marketing just gets junked

Yes, most email marketing campaigns can simply end up in the junk/spam folder; just like the direct mail you get in the post ends up in the bin without even looking at it. The email marketing trade suggests that the current average open rate is set to drop from 30% to 23%. This is partly because campaign volume is due to increase significantly, but also because the sophistication of junk filters is getting better and the quality of marketing emails are not necessarily getting better at avoid them. Most businesses don't have the time or resources to keep on top of the tricks of the trade and so they have to suffer the consequences. Professional email marketers are specifically set up to learn how the junk filters work and to test campaigns before sending them, so when used wisely can make the difference between 23% and upwards of 50% (Which is what Persona Creative campaigns average!). It might cost more, but what's the point of keeping costs low if it doesn't result in any responses? As with a web page, content is the key. The actual words and phrases that make up your email is what the junk filters will look at most. If they don't like what they read, they will bin it to save it from the eyes on the inbox. Only a supplier with professional online copy writing and editing skills is qualified to advise you on this, so be wary of any 'consultants' and 'agencies' claiming they can help improve your campaign statistics. Finally, the cardinal sins of in-house email marketing are: 1. Using software such as Word & Frontpage to produce the email 2. Sending the campaign directly from Outlook / Notes / etc Often using cost as the excuse, many organisations choose to produce their HTML emails in desktop software such as Microsoft Word and Frontpage. Both of these programs are garbage when it comes to emails, because the HTML code they produce is full of useless extras the the junk filters just hate! They also don't display as well on software that isn't produced by Microsoft (such as Yahoo Mail, IBM Lotus Notes and Mozilla) - and we all know ugly looking emails are more likely to end up in the bin than those with a working layout. Sending a campaign directly from your email software can trigger you as a spammer and may even result in your ISP issuing you with a Ban. It's also easy to place all the email addresses in 'To' rather than 'Bcc' - thus exposing your whole mailing list to everybody on it! If you really want to get technical about it, it also doesn't send it in the professional industry standard - Multipart MIME (Which is quite important really).