Review: the MindValley Way to Ecommerce Success - SEO and SEM Tactics
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MindValley starts discussing SEO heavily in its tenth tactic, “Designing for Search Engine Optimization.” Again, it emphasizes information I have seen before, but that would likely be new to someone who has no experience in the field. This tactic does stress the importance of using keywords that will deliver lots of prospects rather than lots of traffic (useful to keep in mind also when planning a PPC campaign). I was a little surprised to see them talking about the importance of meta tags as if it were a given, since I understand there is some debate as to whether search engines pay attention to meta tags anymore.
They mention some other practices in this tactic that I haven’t heard much about recently, so can’t judge whether they’re good ideas. One is submitting your site to the Yahoo Directory, even though it costs $299 a year (does anybody still use this resource?); another was submitting your site to dmoz.org and then resubmitting it after six weeks (I thought you needed to wait longer than that to resubmit); and the third was putting yourself in Wikipedia if your site has a good resource about something it covers. This may not be as easy to do any longer, given recent stories about the site’s owners trying to make it less easy to indiscriminately edit the online open encyclopedia.
The e-book covers email marketing in the third section. If you handle any of this for your web site, you’ll find some good information about how to legitimately get past spam filters, and how to use newsletters effectively to keep in touch with your customers.
MindValley devotes an entire section (five tactics) to pay-per-click advertising. This makes perfect sense, because getting this wrong will drain the budget of a new business in a real hurry. The first tactic in this section links to a free “crash course” in Google AdWords rather than starting with the absolute basics. Again, I was surprised to see the e-book recommending the use of misspelled words as keywords, since Google has a “Did you mean…?” function that takes care of that little problem, and using misspelled words can look unprofessional.
On the other hand, this section does do a very good job explaining how to target your keyword list for Google – and it doesn’t neglect Yahoo, either. It also stresses the importance of making continuous improvements in your SEM campaign, and the kinds of little changes that can make big differences in your click through rates. I was impressed with the description of how to do split testing of your PPC ads in tactic 17, for instance.
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