Cre8tive Flow

Now that you’ve attended a conference on search engine marketing and picked up techniques and information, how do you turn that into something marketable for yourself, your clients, or your business?

An attendee of the Search Engine Strategies Conference held in February in New York city is asking, How Can Seo Benefit my Company and my Clients?. She wonders what to present. What data does she need and where does it come from? Why? What matters to clients? Her company? What does she need to convince anyone to invest in SEO?

If you haven’t had a chance to meet Bill Slawski in person, travel on over to Webpronews and soak up a chance to meet via an inspiring interview about local search. You’ll see a video where Bill Slawski and Loren Baker are interviewed by Webpronews’ Mike McDonald.

One of my favorite things about these video interviews is seeing how people I’ve read for the last few years move and interact. So far, I continue to like us all quite a bit. We share an intellectual generosity and curiosity that I treasure.

If you were to restart your main website(s) right now, what would you do differently? Hind sight is 20/20, as they say, so what glaring errors can you see? This question has been on my mind for a while, and a recent thread triggered this post.

For me, it’s probably the content management system (CMS). My oldest website started seven years ago, with the current CMS running for most of that time. Needless to say, it’s showing its age. Sure it’s been tweaked here and there, handling many re-designs, but the backend is not really that modern. It works, but it ain’t pretty.

I’m noticing a theme, and we’re still in the first quarter of the new year. Search marketing tactics, old and new, are pushing the ethical envelope, in new ways. Or it seems that way. For example:

An old discussion on Web Directories equal Web Pollution erupted again when someone passionate about their directories wrote:

“Don’t mind me i have half a brain and 36 quality directories with good PR to give back Quality websites and Blogs.

Why do i do it?

Because i make good money and will make a difference …. now can you say the same???

“If I only have time to fix two pages on my site, which two should they be?”

Almost every website owner I know would like the answer to this question. How do you prioritize website changes to best use your available time, money, and skill?

If you have been following this series, you already have some good ideas for changes to your site. In fact, your list may be way too long, and we only looked at a couple of web analytics reports! Data has a tendency to do that – you sometimes get more answers than you can handle.

Last post we looked at identifying visitor goals – what is your visitor’s purpose in coming to your site? The obvious next issue is, how you meet their needs while also meeting yours?

This is a great area to learn from the successes and failures of others. Pay attention as you browse the web. What is your purpose in visiting a particular site? How well has this site done in making it easy for you to meet your needs? What exactly works (or doesn’t work)?

In Web Analytics II we were talking through learning a little about good traffic to your website. I’d lay money that many of you looked at your referrer reports and saw at least one source of traffic you’d like to get better results from. If you didn’t, take one more look :).

When I’m trying to figure out how to get a certain group of visitors more interested, I almost always start with the question, “What are people expecting when they get to this website?”

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association topped yesterday’s newsletter with a plea for readers to go to Wikipedia.

Help save “word of mouth marketing” at Wikipedia. A proposal has been made to close the Wikipedia entry for “word of mouth marketing” and subsume it into the larger entry for “viral marketing”. Viral is a marketing technique of word of mouth equally valid with others such as buzz, grassroots, evangelism, and more.

Read the discussion on Wikipedia. I enjoyed Srini’s observation that WOM is a voluntary result of satisfaction, whereas viral marketing connotes less of a choice.