Search Engine Optimization & Your Publication; What is Dirxion Doing?

As a publisher looking to move your printed material to the web, you’ll find that the majority of the digital publishing options out there are fully Flash-based. To most people this may actually sound more than acceptable. Flash content is great as there are hardly any limitations to building interfaces, designing, animating and creating user interaction. It has all the elements that give a site the heightened experience that today’s users are looking for. Flash is used to break all those conventional rules associated with flat, lifeless HTML pages.

But with all of its pros comes one very large con – unlike HTML, Flash content can’t be indexed by search engines. And if people can’t find your content on Google, Bing or Yahoo, it’s up to you to put it directly in front of them. But even with Herculean marketing efforts, your content will never reach its full audience potential.

Dirxion understands that if you want to maximize your reach and circulation, it’s critical that the content of your pages can be properly crawled by spiders for search engines. It’s for that reason we have introduced a Search Engine Optimization method designed specifically for digital publishers. We call it Trax. When you send us files for your new digital publication, we not only convert your data into Flash but also run it through Trax making a search engine friendly format called ASP. ASP is a dynamic code that is first sent to an ASP engine, where the file can be read – line by line – and then returned to indexing spiders and browsers as plain HTML. So it works just like HTML. And with Trax laid, this data will run behind the scenes solely for Google, Bing and Yahoo to crawl and navigate through your pages. But on the front end of your publication, your readers will still have the rich media experience of Flash.

Our SEO efforts, in a nutshell:

–Presenting all of the pages in your directory in a format that can easily be indexed by the search engines. Search engine users can now find your directory by searching for business names, categories, addresses, phones numbers, and more. Not to mention, search engine results open up pages inside of your directory with searched keywords already highlighted!

–Creating dynamic, search engine friendly landing pages that are designed for intuitive the optimal user experience.

–Providing additional ways to share pages from your directory with friends and family.

–Implementing URL strategies to optimize traffic to your site.

–Updating or adding more content when possible.

Our ultimate goal for customers is maintaining the familiar experience of print, while using the web to increase readership and engagement. Marketing is always going to be king, but there is no reason not to have SEO on your side. With the help of Dirxion and Trax, more readers will find your content. That’s already been the case with the customers we’ve converted.  Search engine directed traffic has been increasing drastically. Some publications are currently seeing up to 78% of their traffic coming from search engines.

Contact a sales representative to learn more about how Dirxion can have your publishing put in front of a larger audience now. Call 888.391.0202.

Optimizing Your Video Content

Our focus on search engine ranking goes beyond just the text on the page. In our continuing SEO education series, let’s take a look at what our friends at MediaMobz suggest for optimizing your video content. Thanks guys, for providing such valuable insight.

Google Gets Stronger Despite Wall Street Battering

This ought to make all the Google fans out there happy. Even though Google (along with many others) have taken a beating on Wall Street for the past few months, search market share is still a figure that surely ranks up there on the importance scale. A new report released last month shows just how much Google outshines their closest competitors like Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.

U.S. Search Market Share - October 2008

Google - 71.70%

Yahoo - 17.74%

MSN - 5.40%

ASK -3.53%

Everyone Else (remaining 43 search engines) - 1.62%

So for SEO reasons, there have always been a few different schools of thought on which search engines you should place more importance on - the biggest arguement being that even though Google had the majority and is obviously important, there was still more than 30% of the search market share left to target (on other engines like Yahoo and MSN). But now as that gap closes (which it definitely is, considering that last October Google was at 64.49%), I think you’ll see more and more search marketers slowly move a majority of their SEO “eggs” into the metaphorical Google “basket”.

The Differences Between SEO & SEM - Explained

Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are two terms that you’re probably hearing more and more in your daily marketing activities. While they’re still relatively new, they are definitely terms that you need to be at least somewhat familiar with, primarily because online consumer purchasing statistics continue to skyrocket each and every year, and because small businesses are finally realizing that they’re losing potential revenue every day to their competitors that are actively practicing SEO and/or SEM.

For the sake of explaining SEO and SEM in simple terms, let’s talk about the differences, and the pros and cons of each. More advanced readers will already know that SEO is actually a sort of “subset” of SEM, but we’re going to try and keep it as simple as possible.

SEO

Let’s say you have some sort of e-commerce website that you sell green widgets from. Obviously, the more people that hit your site, the better chance you have of converting them to paid customers, right? Well, one of the first and ongoing major concerns of any small business or individual that wants to tap into online revenue channels is traffic. It’s the same thing as having a brick and mortar style store. If you don’t have that steady flow of foot traffic, you don’t make any money, right?

At some point in time, back in the late 90’s, webmasters started to realize the staggering numbers of people that were using search engines to find websites and more importantly, to find websites that they wanted to purchase items/services from. It didn’t take long before someone thought “hey, if my site ranks higher than my competitors site, then I stand a better chance at getting the potential customer’s business”. It was only a matter of time before webmasters and marketers started hunting for ways to increase their rankings in the search engines, and even though SEO is a constantly changing beast (and it has changed drastically from the early years), there are practices today that remain pretty constant.

Practicing good SEO on your site involves many different processes, and it takes time. The time factor can’t be stressed enough. Too many people give up on SEO after a few weeks or months because they’re not seeing immediate results. Let’s say you wanted to rank in the top 10 results on Google for even a semi-competitive keyword (such as “green widgets”), it would take months and months to see any kind of positive result. Now, keep in mind that when you do put in the time and do everything right, the rewards can be huge. Obtaining one of those valuable top 5 or top 10 results (meaning, when someone searches for your most desired keyword, and your site shows up in the listings on the first page) can pay off tremendously, and at that point, you can start to enjoy the spoils of your hard work (or the hard work that you paid an SEO company to do for you, either way).

To conclude, SEO should be a part of your website marketing strategy (actually, it’s an absolute necessity these days) and whether you do it yourself, or hire a qualified SEO company to do it for you, the payoff will likely be well worth it. There are other factors to keep in mind though, the main one being the overall look and feel of your website. Let’s say you are in fact ranking well in the search engines, and people are coming to your site - but then what? Is your site worthy enough to convert those search users into sales? This is where a lot of people fall short, and wonder why they’re not raking in the dough after they finally achieve good rankings. Internet users, in general, have very short attention spans. If your site can’t capture their attention (and you have in the neighborhood of a few seconds to do that), then your numbers will definitely reflect it. Make sure your site is presentable, clean, sharp, good sales copy, and is able to actually convert searchers into customers.

SEM

Now that we’ve talked a little about the basics of SEO, we can jump across the road and explore SEM (search engine marketing). SEM can encompass many aspects of online marketing, but for the sake of simplicity, we’ll talk about it in the same sense that a majority of webmasters know it as - PPC.

PPC (pay-per-click) is a form of advertising that, by now, you’ve seen a lot of. If you’ve ever been to any of the major search engines, you’ll notice that when you search for a term, such as “green widgets”, the search engine returns your classic list of results down the page, but you’ll also notice that there are other results down the right hand side of the page. Those results are actually ads that other webmasters are paying to have placed there for people searching for their desired keyword.

For example - Let’s pretend that you have a new website that sells chocolate candy. Even if you’ve already started practicing good SEO for your site, chances are good that it will be several months out before you start ranking for any of your target keywords (such as, “chocolate candy”), and in the mean time, you need a way to get your brand and product seen by the massive number of search users every day. That’s where SEM comes into play.

As long as you have the budget for it, even a brand new website can be seen in the search engines from day one. The way it works (going back to the chocolate candy example) is that you would sign up with one of the big search engines - we’ll use Google for example. Their PPC program, which is called “Google Adwords” is the interface you use to get your ad seen in the search engines by bidding on your desired keywords. The way it works is if you want to rank on the first page of Google search results for the keyword “chocolate candy” you would sign into your Adwords account, write a small text ad (like the ones you see on the right side of the search results), and you’ll actually set a “bid” amount for that particular keyword. The higher the bid you set, in general, will determine how high you rank for that keyword. Each time someone clicks your paid ad, you are charged for that click. So if it is costing you .25 cents to rank on the first page for a particular keyword, and you’re willing to spend $10 per day, you stand the chance at getting 40 extra visitors per day to your site. The cool thing is, since the ad was served to the end user through a keyword search, the traffic is typically highly targeted. In simple terms, if someone typed in “chocolate candy” in the search engine, and the end user saw your paid ad - they’re probably clicking on it because they want more information and/or a possible place to purchase chocolate candy. If your website delivers a solution to their problem, then you just landed a new customer.

The possibilities are limitless with PPC - it all depends on your budget. Obviously, the more you’re willing to spend, the more exposure and potential new customers you stand to gain. If you’re confident that your site can convert search users into paid customers, then you may be willing to spend more and more, because in general, PPC is much cheaper than traditional marketing channels. Spending $100 on PPC will almost always get you more potential customers than spending $1000 on a traditional paper mail campaign. Justifying the costs associated with PPC will become very easy once you understand what keywords are working well for you, and how much you’re paying for them. Like anything else in the business and marketing world, it all boils down to ROI (return on investment).

Summary

I know you were just hit with a lot of information, but hopefully it was simple enough for even a beginner to understand. As you would expect, there are more advanced and deeper explanations and theories that go along with SEO and SEM, but this should give you a general understanding of each, and how they’re different from each other. Just in case it didn’t, check out the pros and cons below:

SEO

1. Time consuming, yet potential huge payoffs in the future. When you finally start to rank well for your keyword, you are essentially getting free traffic from the search engines.
2. New websites won’t stand a chance at first against competitors that have been practicing SEO for years.
3. Basic SEO can be done by you, although more advanced and “fast track” SEO can be performed on your site by qualified SEO providers. Again, it still takes time (and potentially a lot of money, depending on what keyword(s) you’re optimizing for).
4. Slow, but steady in the long run.

SEM

1. Costs involved up front, but immediate exposure in the search engines.
2. Gives new websites a chance to compete with long term competitors.
3. Highly targeted traffic - meaning your ad is served to those searching for whatever keyword you’ve bid on.
4. Great for branding, and getting a new companies name “out there”.
5. Costs can be justified when you start converting.
6. Nearly instant traffic - a basic SEM campaign can be set up and executed within a matter of hours.

Five Easy Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website and/or Digital Publication

We’ve all been there - checking your stats tracking/analytics account by the hour, waiting for a magical burst of traffic to your site that hopefully turns into dollars and cents. Soon though, you realize that traffic is far from magical, and without a dose of virtual elbow grease and a dash of luck, you’re probably not going to see much of it in the beginning.

Driving and luring traffic to your website is definitely more of an art, rather than a science. There are methods that work well for some, and poorly for others, and without a little trial and error, you’ll never know what pushes the button for you. The most important thing is that at the very least, you take action and try something! Below I’ll list five of my favorite methods to drive more traffic to your site, and while all five might not be suitable for your specific situation, I guarantee that at least one or two will be. Without any action, you won’t see anything, so what have you got to lose? Exactly.

Five Traffic Generation Methods You Can Implement Today

1) Social Bookmarking - First and foremost, if you aren’t familiar with social bookmarking, or maybe you are but you haven’t tried it yet - you need to jump on the wagon (or is it off the wagon?). Regardless, learning about and submitting your site and/or pages to the top 5 social bookmarking sites can be very advantageous for nearly any individual/small business/large company.

In the social bookmarking world, here are the “big 5″ as I like to call them:

1. Digg.com
2. StumbleUpon.com
3. Del.icio.us
4. Reddit.com
5. Propeller.com

Each of the above sites acts differently in the way you bookmark/submit/vote on sites/articles, but they all have the same general idea, and they all have the potential to send your website server melting amounts of traffic. If whatever piece of your website you submit (whether it be an article, your home page, a picture, or whatever) lands on the front page of any of the above sites, you’re in for a wild ride. Getting on the front page of Digg has been known to send hundreds of thousands of hits within a matter of 24-48 hours. If you’re used to getting 30-40 visitors a day, it will be quite a shock, but it will automatically increase your brand exposure, and quite possibly turn a few of those into new leads/customers.

2) Article Submission - Another method that works really well at driving targeted traffic to your site is submitting articles to major article directories. The most popular and most influential article directory on the scene is one called EzineArticles.com. What happens is - you write up an article that talks about something in your industry (perhaps offers a solution or answer to a problem), and at the end of the article, you’re allowed to link back to your website in the author’s resource box. The goal is to give your article an outstanding title that will show up in the search engine’s (for instance, if you have a plumbing business and website, maybe you would write an article called, “How to Unclog a Toilet”.) When people type that phrase into a search engine, EzineArticles has so much search engine influence that there is a good chance your article will rank high enough so that the end user will come across it, read it, and if they’re interested in finding out more about you they’ll click on your link at the end of the article and end up on your website. Some webmasters have submitted hundreds of articles and literally drive millions, yes, millions of hits monthly to their websites just from article directories.

3) More Content - The phrase “Content Is King” is so over-used that I cringe when I have to type it, but the reason that it is used so much is because it couldn’t be truer. Typically, the more content filled pages you have on your site, the more pages you will end up having indexed in the search engines, which means more opportunities for a user to come across your site during a search query. Creating pages for the sake of creating pages isn’t the way to do it. What you need are pages filled with relevant and helpful or interesting content that has a chance of being picked up and ranked well in the search engines. Hire someone to write a few articles for you to stick on your new pages, but whatever you do, just get it done! It takes a while for Google and friends to properly index and rank additional pages on your site, so the sooner you get at it, the better off you’ll be because organic traffic is the best traffic.

4) Blog Commenting - In this day and age, as the “blogosphere” takes over the world, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a blog covering just about every single niche and sub-niche you can think of. Technorati, the internet’s leading source for blog tracking, is tracking over 70 million blogs at any given time, so yes, even if you’re in the underwater golf business, chances are that there is a blog out there that covers your industry. Anyway, point being - a blog is a place where the blogger posts the news, his/her thoughts, or whatever they decide to post and you, the reader, are allowed to comment on that post. Not only can you leave your comment, but 99% of blogs out there let you leave a link to your own website, so that if you leave a good enough comment that sparks someone interest, they can follow your link and end up at your own website. You probably see where I’m going with this, but by leaving intelligent comments on blogs that relate to your industry, you have a chance at like-minded folk’s crossing over to your site after reading your comment, and possibly turning into a customer, lead or whatever. True, commenting on multiple blogs takes time, but you may find that the return on that time investment is well worth it in the long run.

5) Be Remarkable - Last, but certainly not least, one of the most exciting and bountiful ways to drive loads of traffic to your site is to be unique. Break news in your industry that no one else is talking about yet, or maybe a hot new product that your company is developing. Talking about something potentially big within your industry that like-minded companies/individuals will want to talk about can bring you many, many benefits - not to mention boost your credibility at the same time. For example, not all that long ago a relatively unknown blogger wrote an informative and entertaining article on a new type of public restroom port-a-john that comes up from the ground. He submitted it to social bookmarking sites and before long, that single article became so popular that it was picked up by CNN, USAToday, and just about every large blog on the internet. He literally went from zero to hero within 24 hours. It takes as little as one remarkable piece of information to massively boost your popularity overnight. So think outside the box, do something worth talking about and it could pay huge dividends (in the form of traffic, links, credibility, brand recognition, etc…) for a long time to come. Typically, the best way to break stories and unique news/ideas is through a blog. If your company doesn’t have one, then it should be your top priority to get one going.