This year I was invited by Graeme & Jo of Site Visibility, our SEO agency, to attend the SEO seminar that they were sponsoring. I thought it would be a great chance to immerse myself in an industry which I have followed for some time, but never really ‘participated’ in.

It started with what promised to be an ..read more »

Another new keyword in 1st place on Google UK last month.. I love it when a plan comes together!

There is a growing number of people who believe that SEO is a con – this isn’t helped by the fact that there are a lot of cowboys out there, all promising you the world and usually it comes either via cold call tele-campaigns or, increasingly ..read more »

I’ve been a/b testing a lot lately – I usually do this with most of my campaigns, using a sample group to test and then sending the best subject line to the rest of the list. Our email providers latest update claims to do this automatically (if you want) – but I’m not sure I trust it entirely…

Anyway – I keep reading that the best way to write good subject lines is to pick up a newspaper. Many believe if you use journalistic style headings then people will want to read your emails. I don’t believe this is accurate.

Journalistic style headings work in Newspapers because someone has already shelled out money to buy a product from a brand they trust – they already want to read the paper. If they are buying it as a one off, for the news title, they are likely to buy the paper they trust and are loyal to.

Your email in their inbox doesn’t work like this. People are filtering out the emails – what get’s past the filtering technology is then up against the filtering done by the recipient themselves – anything too pushy is likely to be skipped over or trashed.

The key to a good subject line is just to tell them facts regarding the email content – if you sell too hard in the subject line, it will be sniffed out as SPAM by your recipients and the resultant open rate will be poor.

Just include the main theme, matter of fact. If your audience is well targeted, try and include some facts in the 50 character limit. Whatever you do don’t make it look like a question – I hate these emails and my mouse goes straight for the delete button.

If you have a company name that is well regarded and your recipients will recognise it, use it. Your company name conveys a certain amount of trust in your relationship with your customer, so this can only add value.

If you really need to use ‘buy, buy, buy’ and money off techniques then maybe your email isn’t that relevant – if the content is not good, then you don’t really have a leg to stand on and no matter how good your effort to promote it, it won’t do much good.

Just found this brilliant postthat tells you how to extract your search ranking from the URL that visits your site from Google. If all goes well, I should then be able to know exactly where my search terms are showing up in Google – I will be keeping an eye on this new profile to see what happens.
Failing this, SEO book has a great free tool for the Firefox browser that allows you to input the keywords you would like to keep an eye on and then it fetches their position information in all the main search engines including google.co.uk! It will be good to see if their is nay disparity between these data sets.

Following on from my last post, here is the analytics tracking code in the onclick handler that will pull the text entered into the contact form and submit it to google analytics event tracking. This will label each action with the users email address (although you could use any part of the form as a unique identifier). The benefit of this is if you select the paid search segment, and can link these email addresses (or other information entered on the contact form) to converted sales from your sales information then you will know what kind of return you are getting on your pay per click spend, such as adwords.

Use this code on the form button:

onClick="pageTracker._trackEvent('Form', 'Submit Contact', document.Form1.txtEmail.value);

You need to replace ‘Form1′ with the name you have given your form, and then change ‘txtEmail’ for the name of the particular part of the form you want to pull the value from.

*Apparently linking GA data to individual visitor info is in breach of GA’s terms and conditions – something about it being an invasion of privacy – so use at your own risk! I don’t see how this applies in this case, as it only affects visitors that contact you with their information, which they are sending to you anyway… so hardly an invasion of privacy? Still, you’ve been warned!