Over the past three years I have engaged several folks to work on our SEO and Google AdWords programs. Everyone has a little different approach and each vender has strengths that the others did not. For the most part I felt yuck adwords statistics and number crunching all so boring... I just wanted to pass the buck and run as far away as possible. Yet the results have the most dramatic effect on our sales. To not hone my skills up front was a very expensive lesion learned. Like any technology if you are going to direct teams to manage this for you, you have to know and understand the rules of the road and how to navigate the ship in changing waters.  I feel like quite a goof for not digging deeper into this earlier in this process. I guess having worked with some talented SEO folks it was always a bit intimidating. I have recently found it is not really that difficult but requires some skill, patients and consistency over time. If you are someone like myself whom enjoys more instant gratification this can be rather frustrating. I will not get in to the great techniques we are learning for Google adwords since there are several great books on Amazon that can steer you in the right direction and this is part of our secret sauce. What I can tell you are a few things we tried and some of our lessons learned.

SEO for Joomla.

On the SEO side we went through our content after researching keywords to make sure we had the right density but we made some mistakes early on our Joomla CMS configuration so this did not work as well as we had hoped for natural search. Over time we found ways of optimizing the Joomla CMS environment to get better results. The key things that are important in a Joomla CMS optimization for

Search Engine Optimization:

1.       (SEF) Search engine friendly URLs. There are a number of components that do this and depending on whether you are using Joomla 1.0 or Joomla 1.5 there is a little different process for implementing this.

2.       Meta tags and Keywords management. There is a great component from iJoomla.com called meta tag generator that allows you to manage the keywords and meta tags for your articles from a central location.

3.       Careful use of Style attributes such as H1, H2 and H3 tags and bold etc. In Joomla 1.0 there are a couple things you need to do under the hood to optimize the templates use of these tags and then you have to make sure you implement the content management consistent with this. There are a couple great Joomla SEO books available that help guide you. Check Compass Designs web site for more information.

Directory Submissions:

This worked out pretty well and we had a great team implement a couple rounds of over 1200 directory submissions. This created a nice boom of traffic to our site but these have to be updated often and it is helpful to submit alternate pages. Most of the directories require manual submission since they have captua codes to avoid spiders from flooding them. I had a nice piece of software that would do small batches to a couple hundred directories that showed some quick results in traffic but the real key to success was working with a vendor that had an extensive list of over 6000 to rotate to over time.

Landing Pages - Lead Capture:

This was an effort to set up but can be a real powerful tool with significant impact on the conversion results. The landing pages must have targeted content based on the source that is driving traffic to them. If you have an adword campaign for Customer Relationship Management you need to have a page with targeted content and Keyword optimization for this campaign. In our case we integrated lead capture forms with a few select fields. Our goal was to direct the user to three options. Fill out the form, call us or go visit the web site at a page of our choosing. There is a real art to synchronizing the messages in your landing pages with the ads and associated keywords. Effective use of related video or graphics on the page is also something that can really give the campaign a boost. If you get your message wrong here you will not get good conversion. They will come and say "Yikes! ...another ad... bub bye." We ad some light (4-5 links back to main site) at the bottom so that it feels more like a mini site vs. an ad.

Here are some examples:

• http://socialnetwork.cnpintegrations.com
• http://joomla.cnpintegrations.com/
• http://projectmanagement.cnpintegrations.com/
  

Google Adwords:

The adwords for us has been on and off success and failure. Everyone that we has worked with on this had a different take on how to structure the ads and manage campaigns. While it is important to track and manage your campaign in a way you can optimize your results to improve over time, often if you need to drive traffic quickly to offset a slump in sales or current event it is more important to make sure your message and content is in sync than how deep you are tracking the results. This is one of those gut things you have to balance with statistics and strategy. Creating ads is really a science but having them connect with the pulse of the folks you want to attract takes a little more intuition. There are a ton of great tools in Google and elsewhere that can help you do more than just get a good ad campaign initiated. If you are intuitive with these tools you can really gather a significant amount of business intelligence regarding your competition. For small businesses this is best gathered and most efficiently managed if you can get a little hands on with developing these campaigns. Since your ability to compete effectively moving forward will most likely involve the internet. So you had better start getting savvy about these tools and how to use them. Adwoords can help you connect quickly with a large audience of folks with an itch to scratch related to your products and services. Great book: Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords

Social Technologies and the blogosphere;

Well it is a no brainer that social communicates are taking over the web waves and having the connections to the popular social networks and rss feeds built into your web framework helps you syndicate your articles and take advantage of a bit of the Social technology groundswell. Each of the many social networks has unique demographics and features that you want to review for the best audience you wish to attract. You will need to get involved and contribute to the conversations to get traction and link backs to your site. You also may want to segment which you will use for more of your professional verses personal profiles. The real power that kind of blew my mind was how blogging and twitter seemed be like gasoline on a fire. With the blog being the fire and twitter being the gasoline. The buzz right now to build a following is to have something to say that is honest and somewhat personal. In this new digital world we still want to communicate with humans vs the technology itself. So I started this blog a couple years ago and posted very little but I wanted to be cool and say "Hey yea I have a blog" so I posted some pictures and shared a few stories. Once I discovered twitter and looked at what many folks were doing "ding" the light bulb finally went off. When building a business the first rule in sales is to meet greet and relax before you try to sell anyone anything you have to sell yourself and build confidence that they can come to you for solutions to their pains. This is where blogging can help you communicate your message, corporate philosophy, approaches to doing business and other information that will build trust and confidence.

Being a Thought Leader:

The most successful bloggers are "Thought Leaders" where they are helping to inform folks by being ahead of the trends and often they help set them. So when you can find a voice for presenting interesting information that folks can identify with and where the information you present is useful, naturally you will grow an audience. When you throw the power of twitter at this it actually gives you a real time platform to drive folks to your blog. At the time of this article I am rapidly approaching 6000 followers on twitter and when you post links to your blog with this many followers, most likely someone in this group will go there. If you catch them with something interesting, they may RT or retweet you or send reply's (wink wink nuge nuge fellow twits... please RT this!). This pushes the information into the "twitosphere" that may get pushed to every other social network depending on the buzz that is created. Stop and think about this for a minute. You can now as an individual working from your spare bedroom or basement office reach out to and connect with the market place like never before. It really can be a powerful set of tools if you use it effectively. Look at how Ashton Kutcher competed with Media Giant CNN for the most followers on Twitter through his grass roots campaign and won. (http://twitter.com/aplusk) as of today he is up to 2,057,829 followers. Man... I would love to get a RT from him for "our company voice"!

Press Releases on the web:

This is by far one of the most effective tools for getting your message out quickly.  An earlier blog post on my blog lists 23 links for web sites that can push your press releases out to the world on the web . What this does is puts your "News Worthy" message out in circulation on the web for quite some time. Other bloggers may take this and expand upon it and perhaps add their two cents worth. This actually cascades across the web and cell phones reaching a huge audience very quickly. I sent out a release last year for the info@hand training support we offer and some new training modules we built. I was blown away when I did some Google searches at how many articles and other sites had picked this up and added to their syndication feeds. Regular press releases can really help get good track backs to your site and get your message syndicated quickly and over time for great results.

Conclusion:

There is no real silver bullet since all of this stuff takes time, patience and has to happen in concert with each other. There should also be a thread linking everything together with a pulse and rhythm just like conducting an orchestra. I remember a funny trick they used to do at the state fair where they would have a kid conduct the orchestra... they would give him/her the baton and whatever they did with it the orchestra would play. This often led to some very funny and unpredictable results. I kind of equate this to running an effective eMarketing campaign. If you write a good score and then study all parts, cast the right players, practice a lot, understand how to conduct the orchestra, keep a solid beat of consistency, then and only then can you create powerful music that will compel, inspire and motivate your audience. If not you are paying a lot of talented musicians to follow you on a goose chase and you could waste a lot of cash and miss potential opportunities.

CN