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This month:
- About the WebMama's Journal
- Listen to Your WebMama: It's
SEMPO time
- Internet Tool of the Month:
Is you IP Address Exposed?
- Internet Tip of the Month:
Optimal use of home page space
- SEO Tool of the Month:
Ever Wonder about a Certain Keyword
- WebMama Guest Spot: Dale
Goetsch on Optimizing Dynamic Pages, Part II
- The Inside Scoop: Overture:
A destination wedding?
- WebMama News and Notes: New
Clients rely on Webmama.com to increase search engine rankings
and manage pay-per-click marketing
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About WebMama's
Journal
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The WebMama's Journal is a monthly e-newsletter, packed with tips
and tricks about Internet marketing -- the low-cost way. You'll
learn all about search engine and directory 'white magic,' new
tools and programs to watch for, new ways to drive traffic to
your site, and search engine
optimization tactics for your website.
If you are an Internet marketeer, marketing programs manager,
Webmaster, or are wearing multiple hats at a new or small company,
this journal should be of value to you. To subscribe, visit the WebMama.com home page and enter your email address into the form provided. To unsubscribe, email associates-unsubscribe@topica.email-publisher.com.
Archives available at: http://www.webmama.com/webmama-journal/archives.htm
If you enjoy the WebMama's Journal, why not pass it around for
others to enjoy? Please circulate it intact or quote with an attribution
to WebMama.com Inc.
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Listen to Your
WebMama: It's SEMPO Time!!!
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What is SEMPO? Is it a fusion noodle restaurant? The name of a
Japanese World War II consul general who helped to save Polish
Jewish refugees? A French marine environment simulator? Well,
yes, but it’s much more. It’s the first professional
organization for search engine marketing professionals - Search
Engine Marketing Professional Organization. SEMPO.
The SEMPO organization is in its earliest stage- the creation
stage. Here is the vision:
SEM is included in marketing campaigns - early, often and with
a big budget -- due to recognition for the maturing SEM profession
as a highly effective, industry recognized, reliable method for
providing high and measurable ROI for online businesses.
Doesn’t that sound right? Isn’t it about time?
We have three working goals:
1. To provide educational materials and learning opportunities
(live and on the web) about SEM to potential clients, other marketing
associations/industries, and the search engine industry.
2. Provide search engine marketers with a lively community to
discuss current issues and provide an entry into the profession
for aspiring search engine marketers.
3. Provide search engine industry with a reliable interface to
the search engine marketing practitioners.
Such an organization has been on my mind for some time and has
been a hallway topic at conferences for the past few years. We
finally decided it was about time we got one started. Right now
the organization is little more than a vision, some ideas and
a founding council (including folks from Search Engine Watch,
Keynote Systems/NetMechanic, MarketLeap,
Did-it, and Alchemist Media). We presented the idea with some
goals to a group at SES Boston last week. There were 200+ in attendance.
100 companies left behind business cards saying they were interested
in joining or knowing more and many offered services or manpower
to help get the organization started. We have a huge ground swell
of support from SEO tool vendors, SEM advertising portals (like
Google), in-house SEM companies and the large SEM companies like
WebMama.com Inc.
Here’s the mission we presented in Boston:
SEMPO exists to:
- Increase the awareness of the definition of and effectiveness
of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to businesses and others involved
in marketing
- Provide a forum for discussions about search engine marketing
tactics, programs and professional practices
- Serve as a professional body of Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
companies and practitioners organized to stimulate development
of SEM
SEMPO will do this by:
- Promoting Search Engine Marketing (SEM) as a viable marketing
method
- Providing a forum to define and develop the emerging field of
SEM
- Presenting a common front for Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
professionals to interface with the search industry
Want to be involved? Email Barbara Coll - thewebmama@aol.com to signup for the
Yahoo SEMPO discussion group. Here we will be making decisions
on how to proceed with the next phase of getting us operational.
SEMPO! It’s about time!
-- Barbara 'WebMama' Coll
CEO of WebMama.com Inc. and
President of SEMPO
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Internet Online
Tool of the Month: Is your IP address exposed?
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Test your shields! To find out if your IP address is exposed to
the outside world. Just go to: https://grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2
. Make sure no one else has access to your traffic stats, sales
information, client information and contact database.
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Internet Online Tip
of the Month: What is the best use of your home page real
estate?
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Don’t miss this neat and concise treatise on what to have
on your home page.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030210.html
Content is key, like I always say!
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SEO Tool of the
Month: Ever Wonder about a Certain Keyword
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Now, most of us know that you have to use a keyphrase in the content
of your website in order to even have a chance of being listed
in the unpaid search results. Now there is a tool that you can
use the check the density (number of times mentioned) a keyword
appears on a web page.
http://www.keywordcount.com/
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WebMama Guest Spot:
Where are my Widgets?, Part II How to use search engines to bring
visitors to your dynamic web page
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by Dale Goetsch (WebMama Associate and Technical Lead at
Search Innovation) http://www.searchinnovation.com
(Part 2 of 2) (Part 1 available at www.webmama.com/webmama-journal/seo-dynamic-sites-part1.htm)
The Widget Queen Revisited
You have the world's finest collection of widgets. You created
the world's best widget website. You have no traffic.
You checked in the search engines and find that your site does
not appear at all, even though all your competitors' sites do.
Perhaps the search engine robots cannot get to your pages to index
them.
Search Engine Robots
Search engine robots are simple creatures. They can "read"
text to add to their databases, and they can follow "normal"
links--those links that are coded to look like
<a href="bluewidgets.html">blue widgets</a>
or the slight variation
<a href="bluewidgets.html><img src="bluewidget.gif"></a>
That's it. Search engine robots cannot select items from lists;
search engine robots cannot type text into boxes; search engine
robots cannot click "submit" buttons. That means that
no matter how important our dynamically-generated page of blue
widgets is, if the only way to access that page is to select it
from a list or click on a button, the robot will never be able
to visit it. That, in turn, means that it will never appear in
the search engine results.
So how do you get your dynamic information to show up in non-dynamic
ways?
The Painful Solution
One of the reasons that dynamic pages exist is because of the
difficulty involved in constantly updating--adding and deleting--pages
from your site, based on which widgets you are offering this season.
If you have a separate page for each make and model of widget,
each of those pages can be spidered. They can all be reached through
links that look like
<a href="bluewidget-1.html">blue widgets style
1</a>
<a href="bluewidget-2.html">blue widgets style
2</a>
<a href="redwidget-1.html">red widgets style
1</a>
<a href="redwidget-2.html">red widgets style
2</a>
<a href="newwidget-1.html">new widgets style
1</a>
<a href="newwidget-2.html">new widgets style
2</a>
The bad news here, of course, is that you now have to create
all of those pages. This loses the benefit of drawing the widget
information from a database.
A Better Solution
A better solution is to create only a "shell" of each
page, and then to dynamically populate the page from our database.
By creating a "real" file, you can assign a fixed URL,
but still use the database to fill-in the page, using any of various
server-side techniques (HTML server-side
includes, Perl, Active Server Pages, Java Server Pages, PHP, etc.).
A simple page like this might suffice:
<html>
<head>
<title>Blue Widgets style 1</title>
</head>
<body>
<!--#exec cgi="myscript.pl?bluewidget-1"-->
</body>
</html>
Save this page as "bluewidget-1.html" and you're good
to go, assuming that "myscript.pl" will actually return
the content you want for the body of the page. True, you will
have a discrete page for each item in your inventory, but at least
you only need to hard-code the bare-bones of that page.
Another Way To Go
There is yet another way to go. This method does not require creating
dozens of static pages, or of having to include exotic scripts
in your web pages. It also may not work for all search engines!
Some search engine robots just will not follow links that include
a "querystring" as part of the URL. You have seen a
querystring if you have ever looked at the URL of a page of search
results in Google. For example, if you look for "blue widgets"
on Google, not only do you get page after page of blue widgets,
you also see that these pages have very complicated-looking addresses
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=blue+widgets
In this address, everything after the question mark ("?")
is a querystring. This is used to pass additional information
to the web server. While some search engines can follow a complicated
address like this, many simply will not follow such a link. That
means that if you use a URL like
http://www.mycompany.com/catalog.html?item=widget&color=blue&model=1
that the robot may not be able to follow it. This is bad.
On the other hand, an increasing number of search engine robots
will follow such links. Usually, links like this are created "on
the fly" by filling-out forms and clicking a "submit"
button, but that doesn't have to be the case. You can grab that
address, querystring and all, and put it into a "normal"
link, like this
<a href="http://www.mycompany.com/catalog.html?item=widget&color=blue&model=1">blue
widgets style 1</a>
Put several of these on a page and the search engine robot can
now visit your dynamic pages from links that require no button-clicking.
Remember that not all robots will follow these links, so your
mileage may vary.
As long as the link to the page exists in a form that does not
require human intervention to get to it (pulldown menus, search
results, form submits, etc) then a bot will follow it.
Widgets Out The Door
Using any of these methods will help search engine robots to find
the dynamic pages on your site. This means that the important
content on those pages is more likely to be included in the search
engine databases, and that people will be better able to find
you. That, of course, means that the Widget Queen will reign supreme,
knowing that widget customers the world over will now be able
to find you and buy your widgets.
**About our Guest Writer**
Dale Goetsch is the Technical Lead for Search Innovation,
http://www.searchinnovation.com
, a Search Engine Promotion company serving small businesses and
non-profits. He has over twelve years experience in software development.
Along with programming in Perl, JavaScript, ASP and VB, he enjoys
technical writing and editing, with an emphasis on making technical
subjects accessible to non-technical readers. WebMama.com uses
Search Innovation regularly for SEO client projects. Dale can
be reached at info@searchinnovation.com
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The Inside Scoop:
Overture: A destination wedding? Printing Money?
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Overture is purchasing a search portal - Altavista -- and a search
database and algorithm vendor -- FAST (the one that powers the
Lycos search engine). Looks to me like Overture wants to be a
destination on the web not just an ad vendor. Look at Google.
Overture raised the minimum bid per keyword/phrase from .05 cents
to .10 cents per clickthrough. Since many, many, word phrases
and misspellings are at the lowest rate this is a great way for
Overture to increase the bottom line without many consequences
for its big clients, with the unfortunate effect of putting the
squeeze on very small businesses.
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Webmama.com Inc.
News and Notes
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- Welcome to new WebMama clients:
- PlanetOut Partners http://www.gay.com
and http://www.planetout.com
-- the largest gay community on the web and
- NetFlix - my favorite DVD rental place
- We are working on an online seminar series. If interested in
hearing more about it please email us at webinars at webmama.com
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Missed a few issues of the Webmama's Journal? Looking
for a low-cost marketing tip that's stuck at the tip of your tongue?
Need a new traffic generation program to give a boost to your
visitor numbers? Read the archived editions of this Journal at
(http://www.webmama.com/webmama-journal/archives.htm)
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webmama is a registered trademark of WebMama.com Inc and Barbara
C. Coll. Comments, feedback and questions always welcome at info
at webmama.com. Reproduction/forwarding of this newsletter
is OK — just forward it in whole or quote with attribution.
Visit my website at WebMama.com
for a client list and history of the WebMama.
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WebMama.com incorporated
info at webmama.com
http://www.webmama.com
650.289.0701
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