The Secret Lives of Promo Codes

Oct 19, 2009

Over at SEOMoz, a typically brilliant post is getting some good attention: Ranking for your promo codes. Tom posts some great exapmles that companys are not ranking for there own company name in relation to promo or coupon codes.  “My Company promo code,” for example – is your company even in the top ten?  Don’t wait, check it out now.

SEOMoz suggests adding a static page to your site with listings of promo codes.  While this page might push down some of the affiliate sites and coupon mega-stores out there…it adds another task to your perhaps already full plate.  Do you add those coupon codes manually?  Write some sort of custom script to pull new codes out of your shopping cart back end to populate the page?  And this doesn’t answer the most pressing question: does listing codes on your own site cheapen your brand?  A writer at GetElastic Ecommerce Blog talks about this very issue.

To quote:

“You erode trust with the customer and potentially damage your brand. Coupons can cheapen your image, and you condition the customer to expect a discount next time too. They may never pay full price from you again.”

Her basic point is that your customers will be trained to look for these discounts, and perhaps might wait to buy a product that they might otherwise have bought on the spot.  She then goes on to reccomend showing the promo box to only those customers coming from an affiliate link or banner.

User MOGmartin at SEOMoz caps the conversation with a great tip:

“About six months back I realised that several affiliates were driving hundreds of transactions per month for ranking for “[our brand] discount code” as a search term.

the domain, “[our brand] discount code.com” was available – registered it, set it up as a thin affiliate, and guess what, we have reduced our affiliate commisions on that term by about 85%.

Total cost to us? $8 for a domain.

Monthly savings? substantial!”

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SEO Snakeoil

Oct 14, 2009

The blogosphere is abuzz with the publication of an inflammatory blog post entitled “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists,” written by a web designer by the name of Derek Powazek.  The short version of his thoughts is that SEO is pure snakeoil, that good SEO is just good design, and no one should ever pay for SEO.

“Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.”

Like all good rants, his comments have garnered tremendous attention and citations from industry voices and bloggers (and here’s me adding to the pile).  Danny Sullivan has written on it not once but twice.  Over at SEOBook Peter wrote up a nice commentary on the issue.

The Issue

Part of Derek’s whole problem is a confusion and distortion of terms.  “SEO” is a term beloved by many and despised by still more.  It doesn’t fully describe the methods and/or tactics involved in promoting a website online.  “Online Marketing” or “Internet Marketing” is a better catch-all term.  What Derek means by SEO is in truth “shady spammers who try to game the system in various dishonest ways.” Guess what – most online marketers don’t do that.  Of course everyone is against that – but he’s putting forth his narrow view and experience of this topic as Truth.

All in all his post has been a great opportunity for discussion and commentary – a true example of great link bait at work, whether it was conscious or not.  He ends with a statement that I couldn’t agree with more:

“Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.”

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Our next Internet Marketing training class is on July 23rd

Jul 15, 2009

We started our Internet marketing training classes at the beginning of the year, and they have become so popular that we’re now aiming to have them more regularly. The next one is schedule for Thursday, July 23rd, from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. in our Chicago Loop training center in the Burnham Center at 111 W. Washington, on the corner of Washington and Clark Streets.

The Intro course/workshop is a comprehensive session that covers a broad range of topics pertaining to SEO, SEM, and PPC, taught by a staff with decades of experience in the competitive field of Internet marketing.

Just a few of the topics we will cover:

•Internet Marketing Terminology
•How search engines work
•Who shows up on the search result list and why
•How and why a search engine will rank your site
•How to maximize your whole site for more traffic & how to get your ranking as high a possible
•How to select the right keywords
•How to build or modify a page to rank for a specific word
•Other ways people will find your site (Social networking sites like Facebook, Blogs, and other directory listings)
•How to see who is the top listing and why they rank so high
•Understanding Pay Per Click (PPC) and how to get the most out of Google Adwords

Each day, there are more than 213 million searches on more than 25 billion web pages in Google alone. Will your site be found? Register for our class today, and find out how to get more from your site.

For more information, and to register for this class, or the next (August 13th), check out our Search Engine Marketing 101 page.

Let’s talk usability

Jul 01, 2009

Usability is one of the most overlooked aspects of good web design.

I love going to the site TED.com and watching the lectures of some of the most brilliant minds living today. For a site that delivers Informative, Inspiring, and fascinating lectures they need to make sure their web sites’ usability is held to the same standards as their speakers.

When I see a talk by a speaker that I would listen to no matter what the topic is, such as Al Gore, Tim Berners-Lee, Julia Sweeney, or J.J. Abrams, I click through to the video and enjoy, but I am not familiar with everyone that lectures at TED, so there is need to see what the topic of the talk is before I click through. Now when I do click through the entire title of the talk is revealed, but if I am not interested I have to click the back button and I shouldn’t have to. That is why there are ALT tags.

usability - alt tag description graphic - TED.com

TED.com - Truncated Titles AND ALT tags?

You will notice in this screen shot of the TED.com site they truncate some of the titles of the talks with ellipsis (the worst culprits shown with red arrows), which is fine if you provide the entire title in the ALT tag, but they don’t, they give you the same truncated description. On this particular day half the talks to me are a mystery with such titles as: “Katherine Fulton: You are the…”, or “Philip Zimbardo prescribes a…”, and “Paul Collier’s new rules for…”.

New rules for WHAT?

You are the WHAT?

WHAT are you prescribing Phil?

This is a cousin to mystery meat navigation where the user has to guess at what they are clicking through to. Again, wouldn’t be that bad if I could hover over the link to see the full title, and why they don’t include the full title in the ALT tag is beyond me.

Remember when you truncate links or titles to articles, make sure your ALT tag gives the full description, that is what they are there for. They are also for the handicapped, but I guess in this case all of us are handicapped when it comes to figuring out what these talks are about.

Another quick example off the top of my head is at ABC.com where they allow you to watch their shows online. When I open up their player and chose the show “What Would You Do?” I found each episodes summery a description of the concept for the show as a whole, but not actual details on what each episode contains. Even though this ABC player is in Flash I am considering these roll over descriptions alt tags and it just repeats the same  text for each episode. Now I believe some of their shows like LOST do give summaries for each episode, but it shouldn’t be hard to do it right for all the content.

Trust me your users will thank you for it.

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Our next Chicago Internet marketing training class is May 28

May 15, 2009

We began our Internet marketing training classes at the beginning of the year, and are now aiming to have them more regularly. The next one is schedule for Thursday, May 28, from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. in our Chicago Loop training center (at 111 W. Washington).

The Intro course is a comprehensive session that covers everything from how search engines work, how and why a site ranks (or doesn’t), how to maximize your site for more traffic and higher organic ranking, pay per click and much, much more.

Fore more information, and to register for this class, or the next (June 11), check out our Search Engine Marketing 101 page.

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