hovercrafttotheinternet.com is a little website I’ve put together for creatives to post any cool links they find around the webs…feel free to join the party and post some of your faves!

Last night I went along to an SEO and SEM seminar held by the dudes from the Gold Coast digital marketing agency, e-CBD. I took a bunch of notes and am once again, posting them on DelightfulGoodness so I don’t lose them.

Below is what I learned/found helpful from their presentation…

• Google determines a piece of text’s importance and search engine relevance by the tag it is wrapped in. Your main headings should be wrapped in <h1,2,3,whatever> tags and paragraph in <p>. Within the <p> tag, anything bold or italic will be ranked as more important as it is more likely to be a keyword for the page.
• Google Adwords doesn’t have to be used soley for advertising. The keyword suggestion tool can help with writing the content for a page, by showing you what words are most frequently searched for your product/service.
• Use keywords in your pages title. ‘DelightfulGoodness – Art Design & Culture’ is good ‘DelightfulGoodness’ is bad.
• Around 1-5% of your content should be keywords. No biggie if it’s not, however if you pack your content with keywords, search engines may recoginse it and punish your organic ranking for it.
• Try removing CSS from your page as this is what search engines see. The most important parts of your page should be towards the top as this is what gets read first by both search engines and visitors to the page.
• Specify a meta name for each page. Use the 140 characters to attractively describe your product/service as this is what search engines will display beneath your link in organic searches.
• Try and use keywords in your page headings.
• Use keywords in <alt> tags to describe images.
• Have in-text links to other pages of your site and a sitemap for search engine spiders to crawl through.
• Write useful and interesting articles that people will want to link to.
• The more inbound links to your website, the better. The reputation of the website the link is coming from determines how much the link is worth/how good your website is, so try and get reallllllly good websites linking to you. Governments, schools, charities etc are great websites be linked from as they are seen as trusted sources.
• Try and get keywords in your inbound links. Once again, ‘DelightfulGoodness art design & culture blog’ is good ‘DelightfulGoodness’ is not quite as good (but it’s better than no link).
• Submit your site to general directories and directories within your field. Plumbers should be putting their listings in plumbing and trade directories.
• Contact bloggers who write about the product/service you provide and ask them to write a review or article including links on what you offer.
• Swap links with business partners.
• If your product/service has an office or a physical location, register with Google Places. Once you have registered, get your employees, customers and parents to write positive reviews on what you offer.
• Use value propositions and benefit orientated language on your sites’ landing pages eg. save %15 by booking online!. This also gives people a reason top visit your site.
• Use videos and interactive content where appropriate. This can greatly increase time on site.
• Sign up for Google Webmaster to see information about your website such as number of inbound links.
• Use the Yahoo Site Explorer tool to see how many inbound links your competitor websites have…try and get more!

If you have any more tips I’d love to hear them. Drop them in the comments section

I know this isn’t a typical post for DG but I wanted to post some notes from an Email Marketing Webinar I checked out this morning before I forget about them…

Dan Zarrella (@DanZarrella) and his team at Hubspot did a study of over 9 billion emails sent by email marketing company, Webchimp, to come up with the insights below. Hopefully these hints will help boost an e-blasts open rate, click through rate and subscriber base.

• The optimal time to send and email blast appears to be early Saturday morning, before people are awake. The theory behind this is that people have a different email reading ritual for every day of the week. Emails sent on Mondays and Tuesdays have the lowest open rates, possibly due to these two days being the busiest of the week for most people. On Saturday mornings, people are more likely to sit down at the computer and take a bit more time to check out what has come in.
• Ensure the email is easily read on mobile devices. As more and more people are getting smart and super-smart phones, the number of emails being read on these devices is increasing. Having the most important text and links in plain text as well as ensuring all images have alt tags will help with this one.
• Give the readers a reason to archive and revisit your emails. Include reference data such as prices, dates, statistics, anything handy that readers may want to come back to at a later date.
• Once your email gets through the email junk filter, it will need to get past your recipients personal junk filter – sometimes known as their brain. The first thing everyone looks at to decide whether an email is worth reading or not is the subject line. Words such as newsletter, bulletin, survey and digest all have high open rates with words like rewards, prize and magic usually sucking pretty hardcore. The next thing they look at is who it has come from. Make sure the sender is a person or a business they know.
• Make the recipients feel like VIP’s. People like to feel like they are being offered something exclusive, even if it’s being offered to 100,000 other people…but they don’t know that. Give your subscribers special deals, discounts, competitions etc and remind them of it in every email. Change these deals up with every email to give them a reason to open.
• Sending email blasts once a month produces the highest open and click through rate, but also the highest number of unsubscribes. This could be be because when given the opportunity to unsubscribe once a month versus four times a month, not everyone who unsubscribes will do so from the same email. Send frequency is a bit of a tricky one and is different for each email. In the end, as long as you have interesting, relevant content in every email, your open rate shouldn’t drop and you shouldn’t lose many subscribers, no matter how often you send.
• If a reader is ever going to unsubscribe, they usually do so within the first 3 emails that are sent to them. After this period, the likelihood of them unsubscribing drops considerably.
• The longer a person is subscribed to your mailing list, the less likely they are to open your email and click through a link. Your newest subscribers are your most valuable readers and are far more likely to act on calls to action in your emails.
• Send to friend links don’t really work…most people never use it or may use it once a month, depending on the frequency of the email.
• When pushing your social media, they likelihood of someone clicking a ‘follow’ link compared to a ‘retweet’ or ‘share’ is much higher.
• Integrate a method to get determine ROI of your emails. Include trackable vouchers, offers, keywords or link to a specific pages that only subscribers get links to.
• The more links included in an email, the more likely a reader is to click through. This also appears to make unsubscribe links a bit harder to find…weird.
• Link to pages that will make you $$$.
• Sign up to other newsletters and see what’s out there!

A pretty neat-o email analysis website was also mentioned, messagegrader.com. From what I understood, you can send an email to the site and it will grade the email before you send it to your posse.

I have probably missed some other points, so please add your hints and tips in the comments section below

If you are keen, you can check out some of the juicier, data filled slides from the webinare here or keep scrolling down to more awesomeness.

www.thewildernessdowntown.com – check it out if you think you’re cool.