Oh my goodness! Can you believe it? Google has decided to finally give numerical data in it’s ever so popular Adwords Keyword Research Tool! I can literally hear SEM’s all over the world in my head cheering like theres no tomorrow. Although I am not an SEM myself, I do have my share of PPC campaigns and I must say that this makes my life just a little bit easier.

Here’s a little screenshot of what I am talking about here. In the past, Google would just show you a bar graph of the search volume, leaving it up to you to guess how much volume it’s really getting. Now, you get a number next to that of the actual “estimated” search volume.

How many of you stand to benefit from this new Google Adwords Feature?

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Janet Meiners recently wrote a very helpful article on Marketing Pilgrim about what customers want. She pulled information from two different survey sources on how online customers want more detailed product descriptions. As obvious as this may sound, it’s very rare to find an e-commerce website these days with very detailed product descriptions. It seems today that many online entrepreneurs have a “short attention span” and are not spending the time and energy to give each product description the attention and care it deserves. Here is a striking stat:

79 percent of those surveyed “rarely or never” purchase a product without complete product information.
- the e-tailing group

This data comes from the WebCollage’s 2007 Survey of Online Consumer Product Research Habits. What does this stat tell you? It says that if you do not give better product descriptions and information, then your potential customer will leave your website and purchase somewhere else. In the survey the people were asked, Which of the following pieces of information are useful to you when researching a product for purchase?

• Detailed product benefits and capabilities: 67%
• System requirements: 61%
• List of items that are included with the product: 61%
• Comparison of different models: 58%
• Product Documentation/Warranty Information: 51%
• A manufacturer’s overview of the product: 48%
• List of new features for this product model: 45%
• List of compatible accessories: 44%
• Larger or alternate product images: 31%
• Product tours or demos: 27%
• Other: 9%

This is some seriously great and valuable information that everybody online who runs an e-commerce store should know. Shoppers said they spent a full 8 minutes reading product descriptions. Images, content, descriptions, reviews etc. All of those included add up to be a full 8 minute presentation of your product to the consumer. Make sure you take advantage of this and give as much helpful information as possible. Be patient in your creation of your product descriptions. Review them regularly. And add to them or change them as you find necessary. Doing so will make you more profitable online.

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Anyone who knows me or who reads this blog regularly knows for a fact that I am not the smartest search engine expert around. In fact I pride myself on the fact that I learn from the best, SEObook.com, Seomoz.org etc. The only thing that helps me is my ability to adapt and learn new principals as they come out, and to have the guts and resources to institute them. I do like to think however that in the state of Utah I can hold my own when it comes to SEO. But as you get outside of little old Utah, you find some amazing experts in the field of search engine optimization.

I wanted to put together for you today my top ten list of SEO tasks to complete for your website. Maybe you are like me and you have a website or two, and don’t have the time, energy, or patience to put together a full scale SEO program. Maybe you are satisfied with doing the basics, and let your branding power do the rest. If this is the case you will find this list helpful. They are as follows:

1. Keyword use in content
2. Inbound Links
3. Anchor Text Of Inbound Link
4. Keyword Use In Page Title
5. Keyword in Meta Descriptions
6. Structured Page Navigation
7. Internal Linking
8. An XML Sitemap
9. Friendly URL’s
10. Keyword in H1 Tag

These basics have worked very well for me. These of course are in no particular order. It’s a top ten basic seo list so if you are going to be basic, you should at least do all 10 and nothing short. You can check out a post I wrote about a few weeks ago about the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization - where you can get a free report from SEOmoz on the basic fundamentals. The fact is if you are a small business owner, just following the basics will get you head and shoulders above the competition. Most “webmasters” are still not following any of these basic principals. Most are outdated and still think that meta keywords justifies “search engine optimization”. What a crime.

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Hitwise has released it’s search engine numbers for the month of March 2007. In these numbers you will find a 10% increase for Google over the other 3 major search engines. You can find out more about the article at Hitwise: Search Engine Stats. Here is a basic rundown of those numbers.

• Google = 64.13%
• Yahoo = 21.26%
• MSN Live = 9.15%
• Ask = 3.48%

This information is helpful for a couple of reasons. For one, it shows Google’s true dominance over the search engine market and why for organic search engine optimization it’s so important to put Google on the top of your list of priorities. It does however also show that you don’t necessarily need to fully depend on Google only for your traffic. Nick Stamoulis wrote about how if traffic can be sustained by 2 out of the 3 other search engines that you can be well off as well. 

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I am a reader of the Alledia Blog and I highly recommend other webmasters to as well. They recently wrote a post concerning Linkbait and about a quote that Aaron Wall gave on his blog SEO Book concerning link-baiting and the potential lack of long term results it will give you in Google. Here is the quote:

“Most people coming to your site from linkbait have a fly-like memory. One visit, one pageview, and they are gone forever … Google is looking at how natural a site’s link growth profile looks like, and discounting many of the rapid growth spikes if they are not followed up by an increased baseline link growth rate … Compare linkbait to developing a real brand. Developing a real brand is slower and more expensive, but search is intrinsically tied to branding. If your brand is the keyword, it is hard for search engineers to take it away from you. They are irrelevant if they do not show you at the top of the results … as you build brand awareness, it causes a smooth natural link growth profile, which helps you rank better for the generic phrases.”

To many “black hat SEO” people out there this quote may be discouraging. But the “white hat SEO” people this is acceptable and there is room to work with it. My feelings are that it’s only about time that Google begins to adopt such principals into their algorithm to help continue to keep away the “spam” and keep the deserving websites on the SERP’s.  My only question to Aaron Wall would be what specifically does he consider to be “brand awareness”? Do you have an example of what you would do specifically to create brand awareness on the web?

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