Making a list, checking it twice

Who’s naughty or nice?

Ok, we’re not talking about a holiday wishlist, although it does seem to be the time of year for compiling lists – best of, worst of, things to do, things not to do, best practices, worst practices. You get the idea. And this week in Search Marketing we’ve been seeing our fair share of lists. Marketing Tech Blog wrote up their Ten Rules of Keyword Usage for Search Engine Optimization which presents a pretty clear-cut and concise SEO strategy for targeting various keywords:

“Each page should target a tight collection of keywords. In my opinion, you should not have a page that targets more than 3 to 5 and those should be related to one another. So “mailing list” and “direct marketing list” are related to one another subject-wise and could be used in coordination with one another on the page.”

The list included a variety of ways to make your site more SEO specific including:

* Keywords in your domain name

* Homepage title tag

* Utilizing internal links

And a whole host of other ideas – most of which are relatively simple to implement into your site and current strategy!

On SEOptimize, they listed Nine Reasons Why Your Viral Campaigns Aren’t Working. It may sound daunting as this list approaches things from the negative side (as in, what you might be doing wrong!), but knowing what you’re doing wrong is a good way to troubleshoot your site usability:

• Don’t restrict sharing – you’d think that this would be obvious when trying to create a viral campaign wouldn’t you? Unfortunately, many companies still require you to enter personal data to access their sharable content such as ebooks, this significantly reduces the success of a viral campaign.

• Encourage sharing – As well as not restricting sharing, you should also encourage it.  If you run a conference or workshop, ask the audience to get their phones out and video you saying or doing something interesting, funny, or controversial, this content will often end up on Youtube or Facebook, infront of your audiences networks.

• Don’t talk about your products – Many companies fall into the trap of filling their advertising and marketing content to the brim with corporate gobblydegook, and jargon that doesn’t interact with the customers needs. If you want customers to share your content they must be able to understand it.

See? These aren’t too painful to fix if you’re doing them – or to stay away from if you haven’t stumbled into one of them already! Staying on top of what NOT to do, can help you do what you do even better!

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