e-Marketing Today

(New York, NY - October 14, 2003) — Jupiter Research, a division of Jupitermedia Corporation (Nasdaq: JUPM), today announced that according to a new report from its Jupiter Research division, only 14% of consumers say that personalized offers or recommendations on shopping Web sites lead them to buy more often from online stores, and just 8% say that personalization increases their repeat visits to content, news or entertainment Web sites. This is in contrast to the majority of consumers who stated that basic site improvements would make them buy or visit Web sites more often — 54% cited faster-loading pages and 52% cited better navigation as greater incentives. The report outlines why personalization efforts on Web sites often fail and suggests other alternatives.Based on interviews with dozens of companies and a recent Jupiter Research executive survey, the new report “Beyond the Personalization Myth: Cost Effective Alternatives to Influence Intent” finds that building and operating a personalized Web site can cost four or more times more than operating a comparable dynamic site. Yet most sites that have deployed personalization have realized inadequate returns on their investments. According to Matthew Berk, Research Director at Jupiter Research, “Most Web site personalization projects fail to deliver real business benefits. Our industry has always assumed that a personalized Web site was a better one, both for the visitor and the site operator. Our research has found that this is not the case.”

According to the report, for every intended benefit tied to a personalization-related agenda, site operators can select from many other tactics to achieve the same goals, at far lower cost. “To drive key business metrics, most sites are better off focusing on the basics, like usability, information architecture and making key tasks easy for users to accomplish,” said David Schatsky, Senior Vice President at Jupiter Research.

The complete findings of this report are immediately available to Jupiter Research clients online. For more information about this report or Jupiter Research’s Site Technologies & Operations research service, please contact Kieran Kelly at 1-800-481-1212 or e-mail researchsales@jupitermedia.com.

By: Paul J. Bruemmer

Is Search Engine Marketing cost effective enough to increase profits for B2B marketers? You bet, and here’s why. It’s always been conventional wisdom that the fastest and most efficient way to research products and pricing is on the Web. Now Enquiro has documented survey research on the role of search engines in B2B transactions.

As you know, B2B transactions differ from most consumer transactions because these decisions require coordination between a number of different personnel before the final transaction is made. Therefore, the process requires a period of time between researching the product and placing the order. It’s an ongoing rather than snap decision.

“The Role of Search in Business to Business Buying Decisions” is a well-designed study of approximately 1500 participants responding to a 40-question survey that was validated with pre-testing before implementation. You can download the entire report for free, and here are a few highlights:

• When participants were asked to indicate how they would go about making a B2B purchase, 93.2 percent said they would research the purchase online.
  
• When asked if they would use a search engine at some point in this task, 95.5 percent of participants indicated that they would.
  
• When asked where they would start their search for information, 63.9 percent of participants chose a search engine over consumer review sites, e-commerce sites, manufacturer’s sites, and industry portals.
  
• When taking budget into consideration, manufacturer’s sites and industry portals were the chosen starting place as budgets increased. However, 86.9 percent of participants said they would visit a search engine after visiting those sites.

The study is rich with too many details to cover in this article, but following are some important conclusions:

• Search engines play a dominant role in B2B purchases.
  

• Search engines are used in the early or mid research phase in the buying cycle.
  

• Google is favored over other search engines.
  

• Search engine research takes place at least one to two months before the buying decision.
  

• Good balance between organic and paid search is necessary. Organic SEO gets over 70 percent of the clicks.
  

• Position is a factor, with over 60 percent clicking on the top 3 listings.
  

• Most users decide which listing to click on in seconds upon scanning the page.

With all this qualified traffic originating from search engines, it is more important than ever for B2B marketers, wholesalers, and B2B exchanges to ensure their Web sites are correctly optimized for good positioning in search results. There is also great value in SEO/SEM as a user-friendly marketing tool.

The Uniqueness of Search Engine Marketing

Search engine traffic is highly targeted. That’s because potential buyers who find your B2B offerings through search engines are looking for your products and services on their own, so they are predisposed to hear your marketing message. You can’t find a more qualified prospect than that. Here’s what distinguishes search engine marketing from other types of advertising:

1. Non-Intrusive:  Search marketing is a non-intrusive marketing tool. Most advertising, both online and offline, interrupts consumer behavior. If a user goes to a web site for info, up pops an intrusive ad. Reading a newspaper? Ads dominate and force articles to be continued on another page. With search engine marketing, the user is actively seeking your products, services, and information. They are delighted to be driven to your site.

2.      Voluntary: Search marketing is the result of user-originated behavior. Your visitors from search engines and directories have voluntarily clicked on your listing rather than any competitors, thus they are motivated to explore your offerings.

How good is the ROI? How effective is search engine marketing and optimization for B2B? What are the key-points to consider regarding a B2B search engine optimization and marketing plan? Please join me next month for Part 2 when we examine the answers to these questions.

Paul Bruemmer is founder of trademarkSEO. His distinguished career in Internet marketing began with the inception of the Internet. A renowned author, educator and Internet visionary, Paul pioneered the concept of search engine positioning before “search engine optimization” was part of the lexicon. His company provided search submission services to over 10,000 websites, including many of the most prominent names in American business.

Search engines are hot topic. Google has great financial reports every quarter. Google is the most used search engine and if you want to use the power of search engines and to have success on the Internet you have to do your search engine optimization (SEO) wisely. We will give you several tips that will help you in making better SEO campaigns.

Rule #1 – Quality content

You probably know about that “Content Is King” rule. It is especially true for SEO. Try to have relevant and quality content, at least 400 words per page. Search engines love lengthy articles. You web site should be up-to-date, articles and news have to be added on a regular basis, at least once a week. This will show to search engines that your web site is an ongoing project and not some “let’s make a web site for Adsense” schemes. Make your content relevant to your target audience, use appropriate keywords but don’t make a mistake and do keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is when someone intentionally includes many keywords and repeats them many times in the article hoping to achieve better search engine placement. Search engines are machines but they are not naïve, and they are getting “smarter” every day. Your keywords need to have the most appropriate keyword density. You won’t be able to know the right keyword density because search engines often change their rules. Several great resources and software can help you to choose the right keyword density and to be up-to-date with search engine trends.

http://www.searchenginewatch.com
http://www.searchengineguide.com
http://www.webceo.com
http://www.webposition.com

Rule #2 – Link popularity

Links are the next most important rule in making a successful search engine optimization. Many search engines give very much weight to number of web sites that have links to your web site. It is especially case with Google, the most important search engine, that use their proprietary technology called PageRank that ranks web sites by counting number of links it has on other web sites. However, quantity is not the most important thing. You should have quality links. So, Google will give you better PageRank (PR) if you have links on web sites with higher PR. They assume that if quality sites link to your web site that your site is quality, as well. That’s why you should make ad swaps with quality web sites that focus on similar audience like your web site. Please be aware that linking between sites that are on the same server (IP address) won’t bring you benefit in increasing your PR. To check your link popularity type site:www.yourdomainname.com in Google search bar and you will get list of sites that have links to your web site. Also you can use a free service at:

http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/

Also, you should have a good internal navigation on your web site. It is recommended that you design your web site that every page can be accessed within 3 clicks.

Rule #3 – Meta Tags

Meta tags give different information about your web site. The most used Meta tags are for title, keywords and description. Meta tags are placed between tag in your HTML document. It is very important to give good page titles, description and keywords for every page on your web site. It doesn’t have to be too short, but also it doesn’t have to be too lengthy. Between tag you will write title of your HTML document. Title shouldn’t be longer than 70 characters. Choose it very wisely. After that you can include different Meta tags. We will give you several most used Meta tags:

There are several useful free services that will help you in finding the best keywords for your web site. We can recommend you these services:

Google AdWords Keyword Tool
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox

Keyword Suggestion Tool
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

Also, there are other Meta tags that you can use in your web site.

This Meta tags give info to search engines when they should come back to your web site and re-index it.

The following Meta tag gives info to search engines what to index. In this case they will index all pages. However, you can also make some restrictions and to deny that some pages be indexed by search engines with making a so called robot.txt file.
Also, you can place a Meta tag that will give info about you or the author of your web site.
Those 3 rules are the most important rules in search engine optimization. Also there are other rules that we will only mention like to use a so called ALT tags to give description to your images, don’t use database-driven links (make them search engine friendly) and don’t use frames in designing your web site. Also, it is highly recommended to submit your web site to Open Directory Project web site (http://www.dmoz.org). It takes time to be indexed there but it is useful because it will help you in better search engine placement and many sites use Open Directory Project database on their web sites.

After you have completed your SEO campaign you will have to check your rankings on search engines for different keywords. Beside above mentioned SEO software, we can recommend you these free services for checking keyword/ranking placement:

Free Search Engine Ranking & Keyword Tracker
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/

Search Engine Placement Check
http://www.marketleap.com/verify/default.htm

We wish you to achieve the first results page!