Online Marketing Blog

Raise conversions by 55% you say? That’s what Marketing Sherpa says in the promo copy for their new Landing Page Handbook. One of the most popular posts we’ve ever had on Online Marketing Blog was the 10 Landing Page Tips by Jon Miller of Marketo. That’s why I think this new report from Marketing Sherpa may be of interest.

You can spend a lot of time testing and fine tuning landing pages on your own from scratch, but in many cases, it makes a lot of sense to get a bit of a head start. This guide is about both the art and science of landing page creation and optimization.

Google Webmaster Tools is a great resource for any site owner. It’s designed to inform webmasters about how Google bot is interacting with their website. It gives detailed information on broken links, popular keywords and how often Google is stopping by. It’s Googles way of giving site owners the information that they need to be successful.

The Setup

Getting started with Google Webmaster Tools is not to difficult. The first thing you’ll need is a Google account. Since all Google services use the same login, you may already be setup. If you have Gmail, Adwords, Analytics, iGoogle or one of the many other services, then you are ready to go. If not, sign up for a free Google Account.

Earlier this year I participated in an online focus group where questions were asked about various webmaster and SEO tools. The session was run by a third party and I was able to get them to admit it was for Microsoft. Tonight, like many others that showed interest, I received an invite to register from Nathan Buggia, Sr. Product Manager of the Live Search Webmaster Tools Team.

Similar to Google’s Webmaster Tools (Vanessa Fox interview here) and Yahoo’s Site Explorer tools (Tim Mayer interview here), the services included in this Beta of Microsoft’s Windows Live Webmaster Portal appear to be split up into three categories:

Troubleshooting

• Site crawling
• Site Indexing
• Robots.txt
• Sitemaps

Sitemaps

• Creation
• Submission (upload, autodiscovery)
• Ping

Even though she’s moved on from Google to Zillow, Vanessa Fox still carries quite a bit of passion for her creation, Google Webmaster Tools which was renamed from Google sitemaps about a year ago. She was even spotted at the Google Dance giving advice to SES attendees at the Google Webmaster Tools product demo table.

Many webmasters and beginning search marketers could benefit a great deal from the features offered by Google Webmaster Tools so I asked Vanessa if she’d do a short video with me to provide a few tips.

For more info on Google Webmaster Central visit the blog.

Last week I agreed with Barry’s speculation in the comments at Search Engine Land that Microsoft is developing their own set of webmaster tools. After a conversation today, I have an even stronger reason to believe this is so. I cannot disclose the source, but it is credible.

While there are an array of AdCenter tools, Microsoft is also working on additional software to be of assistance to webmasters for use with natural search results ala Google Webmaster Central and/or Yahoo Site Explorer. Unfortunately I do not have a time frame or a specific description of what the tools will be, but I do know Microsoft is putting quite a bit of effort into their development.

Aaron Wall published a number of nifty custom buttons for Google Toolbar in the past and now that Google Toolbar 4 is out, he’s posted a very nice collection:  Google Toolbar SEO Buttons under categories such as:  Link reputation/popularity, domain age, on-page content analysis, competitive analysis, blog link search, official search engine blogs, a nice collection of SEO related blogs and a “how to create your own buttons” tutorial. Nice.

The super popular social bookmarks tool that Thomas created last year has recently been updated. We’ve been keeping him exceptionally busy with “client projects that are fun, interesting, challenging” for quite a while, but he was still able to sneak in a quick update and added several social news and bookmarking services.

New services added:

• Google Reader
• Diigo
• Netscape
• DZone
• Squidoo
• Looklater
• RecommendzIt
• Segnalo
• StumbleUpon
• Mr. Wrong

Several of these should have been added a long time ago, but hey, we’re busy helping clients.

If you’ve used the TopRank social bookmarks tool in the past, you may want to “freshen up” your links with Google, Netscape and StumbleUpon. Hint hint.

As a reminder here are the distinguishing features:

Today I had lunch with Joe Dolson and Mike McDonald as well as several hundred other search marketers in the Google Sponsored – Google Webmaster Central session.

I took several photos below as well

Danny, Amanda and Vanessa

Amanda and Evan from Google

Adam Lasnik from Google

I know what you’re thinking, where’s the blog post about this session?¬† It was lunch so I decided to take photos and a few videos instead. It will take a while to get the videos uploaded to Google Video, but I will update this post with those links later this evening.

I’ve been working with SoloSEO, a web based SEO project management solution, and it’s a good start to what could be quite a nice system. It doesn’t have quite all the features I’d like, but it does work well at keyword research and ties into search engines for inindex and backlink reporting.

Pros

• Shows & Charts Backlinks, Indexed pages, PageRank and Alexa Rank
• Has a link search tool that creates a list of ‘ready to search’ links for Google, Yahoo, MSN or Ask based on your keyword.
• Nice bookmarklet to judge how good a page is for getting a backlink on. Includes that pages backlinks, PageRank, Alexa rank and if it has any .edu or .gov links to it.
• Backlink competitor checker for keeping track of where your competition is getting links.

Zippy is a new meta search engine that queries other major engines and returns results in a format most suited for Webmasters and SEOs. The site was launched in September by the seasoned SEO Dave Naylor, and provides some valuable tools for site optimization.

Zippy’s design is similar to Technorati’s new design, with a minimalist white background and lots of bright colors. The site is pretty easy to use, and has a slick feel with the help of some ajax. It took only a few minutes worth of playing around to really get a grasp on the functionality. However, a tutorial or features page, would be nice to help introduce the functionally to a new user.

The basic search functionality for Zippy queries Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask and mashes the results together. It then ranks the results among the four.

A new keyword research tool called WordZe has launched this week and here is a quick review:

WordZe is a keyword research tool that shows detailed keyword searches, plus ways to track keywords well past their estimated daily search volume. The user data that powers WordZe comes from Internet portals and ISP logs from around the world.

“The tools that WordZe provides do more then just give users a general idea of how often a keyword is being search for, they also allow the user to track daily trends as keywords or industries fall and rise in popularity due to seasons or events in the news.”

WordZe also offers insight into the difficulty of ranking for certain phrases through a tool called WordRank.

Keyword Research Tool

On my flight from Minneapolis to Vegas today I picked up a copy of Fortune Magazine, which had and the founders Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe of MySpace on the cover. The article, “MySpace Cowboys” was pretty good describing the founding of the company as well as the acquisition by News Corp.

With an acquisition price of $580 million, Tom and Chris are still singing the “we’ll keep working as long as we can keep building the vision” song. Well, not exactly, but pretty close. They do seem pretty committed to continuing the journey of making MySpace all about the users and the community.