Habitat UK, Skittles, Nestle, Asus, and more are all tales of woe and warning for anyone going in to social media. Getting it wrong seems easier than getting it right at times. This is often because of lack of planning as opposed to level of difficulty.

As important as it is for SEO, planning your social media strategy is important to ensure minimal brand damage from mistakes. Social media, with its low barriers to entry, may seem easy to do. Many think ‘how hard can it be to tweet and update Facebook’? Well, as Nestle learned when the tit-for-tat between an angry consumer and one of its marketing team on Nestle’s public wall got paraded out by some media and social media experts as a premium example of what not to do, a lot can go wrong.

While some may see Skittles allowing all Twitter search results to be published to its home page as innovative, it became a place where users tried to out-gross each other. My screen-shot from the time has to be blanked due to the nature of the tweets showing. Making a blog of Facebook the homepage of your company may seem cutting edge but a blog can also be seen as unprofessional and Facebook is nota space wholly owned by the brand.

Getting the strategy right to both move in to social media and use it for SEO is not just important – it is essential. There are several things to plan but first and foremost is an inderstanding of the why. Understand why it is your business feels it should be in social media. There are a number of successstories from companies like ABN Amro, IBM, Vodafone and others regarding their forays into social media however they were success stories because a picture of success was planned from the outset.

After understanding your reasons and goals from being in social media, select the best outlet for that strategy. Twitter is not a broadcast medium and no matter what anyone says, Facebook is invisible unless you promote it to existing contacts. Understand the different social media platforms and what type of engagement they are useful for. MySpace may not be mainstream anymore but it is still perfect for music and Orkut is the only way you’ll get a Facebook-like platform in Brazil.

Next plan out what you are going to say and do in this platform. Having a strategy includes not just why and where but also what, how, when and who. Important in here is who will be the voice of the company and if that ‘voice’ leaves will the social media contact go with them or will they be restricted to the brand. Also how do you identify who the person is behind the brand if it is the brand tweeting. Vodafone handles this by having all tweets identified by initials. You have to trust the voice of your company and empower them to tweet according to the schedule and when necessary off schedule.

Connections and outreach should be part of your social media strategy. Understand and research who the influencers are in your vertical and reach out to them. Do not try and make demands of them and do not try and buy space on their blog/facebook page/etc. If done to manipulate rankings, purchased blog posts or links can harm both the place the link/blog is posted and the company purchasing the link/post can be penalised.

When all this is in place and your ‘who’ is in place knowing ‘what’ they are saying ‘where’ and ‘when’ they are interacting, by what method (how), then you will be ready to launch your social media strategy and succeed where others have floundered or failed.

One of the things I think is most difficult to get right and yet is the most important factor for SEO is keyword research. The research that is done for SEO is quite different from the type done for PPC even though both are for search engines. This means while your PPC agency may have done some ‘keyword research’ it needs to be focused and refined for your SEO efforts.

Good keyword research is important because of the number of other critical SEO elements it affects (as well as PPC). The on-page targeting for non-cannibalised keywords is important. That is, don’t target the same keyword on lots of pages. The link building anchor text is important. Internal links and breadcrumb trails also use keywords. The titles, descriptions and URLs are also all affected by keyword research. Keyword research supporting a well optimised page can also reduce paid search costs. This one element of anything I believe has to be done right in order for everything else to flow properly from it.

In order to do good keyword research, the first step is to be open to new ideas. While seemingly fundamental, if a word or phrase sits at the core of branding and yet few use it, it would be more advisable to use the more popular word. If you provide “cookies” and yet insist on calling them “buttery flour chips” there will be issues with non-brand search exposures to your product. Google is good at understanding semantic relationships but even it needs some direction.

Write down groups of words relating to your product or service that you use internally. Next, expand that list to include what the industry you work in calls your product/service (a little spying on the competition). Expand that to how the media talks about your product or service. If you still have a small list, use this list set as a PPC keyword campaign and set the campaign to “broad match”. Keep it tight as a short term, low cost PPC campaign in Google. Crafting a compelling and relevant ad can be tricky but the insight gained from the keywords used to find your ad will expand your understanding of the keywords.

This should give you a core group of terms. Now, use the free online tools available to expand that list, refine it, measure the type of search traffic these terms generate and create a full comprehensive list of keywords that you think are relevant. The tools you can use for free are the Google AdWords Tool, SEOBook tool, and Wordtracker has some free data.

Next thing to do is map the strength of the competition and how much there is. If there are a lot of people competing for a term, or the top 10 are all very strong competitors, it may not be reasonable to target that word. Also be sure to check relevance. If a term has a high search volume but the search results are not relevant and the competition is strong then it may not be the right target.

By mapping the competitiveness of a word against the number of people looking for that term, you will get a very accurate measure of whether you should target that word. This is more complicated than slapping words into Google AdWords and dumping a spreadsheet of search terms and volumes which is what I’ve seen far too many agencies do. This adds real intelligence to your research and keyword selection. This will give you, and your business, a competitive edge.

One of the things I frequently get in trouble for is giving away too much information. I think that giving away too much insider information is what I am about to do below. My argument for sharing is that knowledge is power and by giving companies the skills and ability to understand what I do and how I do it, not only will they will better understand, appreciate and purchase services.

One of the things I get asked most often, next to “how do you choose an agency” is “how do you know if what they are measuring means anything”? Understanding what is being measured, how it is measured and how you can double check the measurements yourself if you choose to is an important part of understanding what your agency, or in-house SEO guru, is doing and how it is positively impacting your bottom line.

The below SEO ROI measurements can be used with different types of businesses. They are not restricted to one industry nor one type of measurement package. Where possible I’ve chosen measures which can be done easily and/or for free in order to keep costs low and understanding high.

In order for any measurement to have meaning, there needs to be a benchmark. Take the measurement you are going to track, record it and date it. If you then take the measure again, you have a point in time to compare it against. Always record your measurements at least monthly. For some sites weekly will be too frequently but less frequently than monthly may mean you miss something going wrong.

Visits from Organic Search Results – Measuring the number of visits in to your site purely from organic search results. To measure this, an on-site analytics package will give the most accurate representation of this number. Google Analytics is free and Omniture is my favourite but there are others available.

Number of Visitors from natural search Per Keyword – A breakdown of the number of visits from organic sources driven to the site via different keywords. The key here is that we’re breakingthis down by keyword and not just overall traffic. No other traffic such as direct or referred (from sites other than search engines or paid search) should be included. To measure, analytics must be installed and tracking incoming referrals. Most, if not all, analytics packages will break down incoming visits from search engines to give a per keyword value for visitors.

Conversions on Organic Traffic – This is a measure of the number of conversions made after a user clicked through from a natural search listing. More complex to measure as this does require the interaction between analytics and cookies. To measure, track user conversions where the last click is from natural search and leads to a sale or whatever you deem a conversion to be. To expand, measure where natural search is responsible for sending 2 or more visits by the same user to the site but where natural search is not necessarily the last click. Conversion rates = (conversions /visits)*100

Rankings for Keywords A ranking is where a particular site ranks for a particular keyword within a neutral set of search results. Neutral search results are where personalization and search history is not a factor in rankings – ie you must log out of Google and delete all cookies, close, reopen. Keywords are single or multiple words which are being targeted on page on the website being measured. To measure this, a neutral tool like Advanced Web Ranking which is able to gather non-personalised results. Failing the use of a tool, in Internet Explorer delete all cookies and history, close and reopen the browser and search for the term. This must be done prior to each search and if possible, a country-specific anonymiser should be used. Record that date this measurement was taken and link to the measured data.

These measurements, once you know what you are doing and have an action plan of execution, will help you see whether the changes are having an effect. Don’t worry if some changes take longer to show a difference – it can take up to 3 months for changes to be picked up by search engines.

For too many people for too long, SEO has seemed like occult sciences. Part research, part technical, part magic, search, and specifically SEO, has seemed something you had to trust someone else to do. Understanding more about how search works means not only being able to ensure it is executed in-house properly, it also means a better working relationship between you and your agency if you utilise one.

Setting up a search strategy may seem impossible if you come from a point of not understanding even the fundamentals of search, but information about the core of SEO – those elements which are most important to ranking – are published and freely available. What regrettably isn’t free is the expertise that comes from years of executing those theories.

To create and execute a search strategy, whether with an agency or in-house you’ll need an internal champion (not the search professional but a senior team member), a set of realistic goals, an understanding of keyword targets, the pages those keywords are associated with, a benchmark for everything – including search results and a gameplan for ownership of as much of the search results for your chosen keywords as possible.

The most important starting point is going to be identifying and establishing an internal search champion. Whether you get your search solution delivered in-house by a team or by an agency externally, there needs to be someone internal to your organisation who will bang the drum of optimisation, visibility and search awareness. Your champion can also manage the agency relationship or keep the internal team up to date with what is happening around the business to ensure everything stays co-ordinated. Lack of an internal champion (or champions) can doom even the best search strategy to failure as without that drive to keep everyone search-aware, it is easy to slip.

Once identified, everyone needs to understand what the goals are. These targets need to be realistic, relevant, achievable, and specific. There are a number of common criteria which can be measured provided the correct tools are in place. Measurements that go beyond followers, likes and fans are useful as they take the focus away from popularity measures and into measures of things which could increase ROI more directly.

The below SEO ROI measurements can be used with different types of businesses: Visits from Organic Search Results – Measuring the number of visits in to site purely from organic search result; Number of Visitors from natural search Per Keyword; Conversions on Organic Traffic; Rankings for Keywords.

Create a list of what you know needs to happen then establish an order in which they can be done as well as what has to happen first. They key elements of ensuring your site is on target are: Keyword research, technical audit & fixes, content audit and optimisation, link building, link bait & non-local content, social engagement.

One of the most difficult and time-consuming things to do, but the one thing which will last longest, is the keyword research. A well executed keyword research piece will last years. This can also be used to map the non-branded keywords chosen to appropriate landing pages. This mapping not only ensures the focus for the page is always clear, it is used in link building. Once benchmarking and the keywords and mapping has been done, other work such as technical audits, gap analysis and optimisation can happen. Keyword research is foundational.

As a search and social media “expert” (boy did I fool them!), I speak at a number of conferences through the year. I talk about the techniques behind ranking well but I rarely speak about the fundamentals and with the changes in Google’s algorithm this is more important than ever. Starting from a solid foundation will mean the difference between ranking well and failing. Starting with a solid foundation and following all the rules means you are also less likely to get hit by negative algorithm updates.

Businesses are experiencing increases in online transactions and more than ever, consumers are using search to drive both online and offline purchasing. Here are some tips about what you could do to help:

Have a strategy and a set of goals to ensure you understand what targets you are aiming for. It may seem overly basic but I have encountered countless businesses who have demanded a social media or search strategy without knowing themselves what success would look like. If your business has a target of being on Twitter, understand how it works and what the point of being there is for you. I can recount dozens of disaster stories for businesses on Twitter and speak about them as well.

Once you have a strategy and have mapped out the goals for a year (yes, 12 months. less is pointless unless we’re talking PPC) and understand what success looks like, map out the steps you are taking to get there and understand the time scales involved. Once you have optimised a website it can take up to three months to get those changes picked up in search. While we do have techniques in the industry to speed that up, misusing those techniques will get a site banned. Get a specialist in where necessary to map things out and deploy a task force of staff who will deliver the work needed to make sure your search or social media strategy can achieve success.

Do not treat social media sites as campaign platforms. Launching strongly in Facebook or on Twitter is fantastic but a long-term strategy is needed for these platforms unlike with a paid search campaign. Once a campaign has ended, if the Facebook page remains live it can become littered with spam and customer complaints. Failing to address these complaints can cause a long-lasting reputation issue that can cause customers to turn away.

Map out everything including keywords to pages, links that exist going to your site and your competitor’s site, your social media profile, the average competitors’ social media profile and your publishing table for the year ahead. Doing this will make search and social media campaigns much more successful. Failing to do this will mean you are not only left behind but a hap-hazard approach to publishing content may leave you with a gap at key holiday times. Failing to understand what most of your competitors are doing in the social media space can lead to unpleasant surprises and a perception of being ‘old fashioned’ or ‘behind the times’. Failing to map keywords to pages will leave both your SEO and PPC strategies lacking and your link building strategy will suffer for it as will rankings.

By starting with the basics now and mapping everything out for the next 12 months, not only will this help your site rank better but also help your link building go more smoothly, your content be seen by more people and your sales increase. Trying to make fast SEO changes risks disaster to make sure your plan covers a full 12 months.

Here’s a bit of advice for those of you looking for someone to help you out with your online marketing:

Don’t be such a complete asshat. For some of you, this is easier said than done (at least judging by some of my recent encounters) but try, please.

Here’s Bill O’Reilly in case you aren’t sure exactly what an asshat is.

Over the past few years I’ve learned that there are quite a few warning signs that tell me that no matter how much money this guy is waving around, I don’t want him as my client. As I co-run the business with my husband, we try our best to agree on which clients to take, but occasionally one of us has accepted a client that the other person didn’t warm to immediately. Due to one of these issues, we’ve lost a lot of money on a client who refused to pay us. As a small business, this kind of thing can be detrimental, as you can imagine. I have 21 employees to protect and after a few bad experiences, I’m simply not going to let my gut instincts be secondary any longer. I disliked this guy immediately as he spoke over me and did lots of name-dropping about all the famous SEOs he knew. He was, and still is, what I like to refer to as a complete douchebag and if I’d only been stronger is voicing my misgivings and standing firm, things might be different right now. Live and learn though right?

So I’m not going to just keep quiet about all the bad signals. I’m not going to risk my business to take on anyone willing to pay my rates. Therefore, here are some things I’d really, really rather you not do if you want to earn my business, and that of any other professional in this industry.

Don’t insult my accent on a professional business call, first of all. Yes, I am Southern and when I hear a recording of myself I do gasp and immediately think of banjos and fried chicken but some of you don’t really sound much better. If you’re also Southern but you live in a “big city” then, um, still don’t freaking insult my accent. You’re sometimes even more Southern than I am. Don’t call me a hick on a business call, and don’t assume that just because I don’t sound like I could cough up a hairball of disgust and indignation like some posh Brit, I’m stupid. I’m just not insecure enough to hide my accent. I also really can’t hide it due to it being pretty damned thick.

Don’t ask to speak to my husband if I’m the one you contacted initially after reading MY articles. Yes, he’s the CEO but when you ask if he’s around because you’re prefer to speak to him and not me, all that says is that you have issues with women. Or Southern women. He’ll just tell you whatever I tell him to say ANYWAY.

Don’t ask me to sell my services to you. First of all, right now (thank God) I don’t need to, Secondly, what that says to me is that you’re going to make my life a living hell if I take you on. I want to spend my time working, not checking in with you and kissing your arse. I don’t feel like being asked to sell my services mainly because if you need what we’re offering, I will sell it, maybe even indirectly. If you start out being cocky and condescending and ask me to tell you why you should hire me, you’ve already pissed me off enough that I wouldn’t work with you anyway. I totally understand that potential clients want to make sure they are making the right decision in hiring an SEO of course, but any SEO worth his or her reputation is going to sell services in various ways when you first make contact. We’ll sell by reputation, or word of mouth, or references. We don’t need you to immediately start trying to totally call the shots and tell us what to do. In this same line of thought, don’t obnoxiously say you’ve never heard of me when you did, in fact, send ME a damned email. Please realize that I haven’t heard of you either, most likely, especially if you’re a schmuck running a network of sites trying to promote overpriced gated real estate in Texas.

So basically what I’m saying is that if you are a jerk, I’m not going to work with you, ever. I doubt I’m the only one who feels this way. However, let’s look at what types of things make me say “wow, I’d love to work with these people!” because there are a LOT of signals for that as well, and I am happy to say that my gut instincts on loving someone upfront have never led me astray. If I like you immediately, I’m going to keep liking you.

I like nice people. Being nice doesn’t mean you are dull, or unintelligent. It means you have a basic sense of politeness and some good social skills. By and large, most of the contacts I receive really are from nice people, and I’m very, very thankful because I do not at all mind taking the time to respond to these queries, and always I am happy to help these people out in any way that I can, regardless of whether they have money, or fit into my schedule, or just need some questions answered and I know I’ll gain something concrete out of the exchange. Our oldest client (well, oldest to us…) is our nicest. No matter what he needs, he respects what we do and it shows. He was immediately nice and he’s never failed to be nice. Did I mention that I like nice people?

Here’s Judi Dench. I think she’s a nice person. Yes, I’ve been thinking for years about how to work her into a post…

Somewhat similar to this is a sense of gratitude. I like to deal with people who actually do seem appreciative of my time and what our business can do, again, regardless of whether we form a client relationship with them. I have never been as busy as I am right now, and most people I know are the same way. I don’t have much time to spare some days but if someone recognizes that, I’ll make time.

Lastly, I like dealing with people who challenge me in some way, whether it’s to answer questions that stump me or to somehow bring about a new way for me to think about something. My link builders are geniuses at this (especially cute little Rachel Alton), and some of my clients are. Many of the people who contact us ask truly fantastic questions that make me think about something besides spreadsheets, management, keeping timesheets updated, and HR issues. They make me remember the days when I was first getting into all this and couldn’t get enough. I’ve never known a single SEO who didn’t drool at the thought of figuring out an SEO problem.

I remember seeing Steve Carrell on some talk show ages ago when the US version of The Office first came out, and he was talking about what an asshole his character is…he said something like (and I’m paraphrasing) “if you don’t think you know this guy it’s because you ARE this guy.” I think the same holds true here. If you read this and think, god she’s a princess, well…you may be an asshat.

So if you do need help, now or later, respect the experience, knowledge, capabilities, and time of the person you contact. SEOs are fantastic about giving out loads of information as we write, participate in and run forums, function as industry journalists, and just respond to emails and IMs. Go on Twitter and ask a question and see everyone rush to help you out. Why would you ever want to insult these people?? Ah…it’s because you may be an asshat. Right.

or the few days around then…

Goals and ambitions, whether personal or work related, keep us moving forward from day to day. And we all love making ourselves feel better by honoring a time-old tradition of setting ourselves some New Years Resolutions…

Before I get to a point of sounding sarcastic, I will get to THE POINT!

As far as New Years Resolutions are concerned we fall into one of 3 groups:

Group 1 – The ones that have all the dreams. They get motivated for “big things” in the coming year. They plan – all in their head – of how great things will be, how much more money they’ll make, and how far up the corp. ladder they’ll climb…

How do you spot Group 1 types:
They are dreamers. They have all the best intentions in the world. Some even have all the right skills to achieve what their dreams hold, but they never take action.

They don’t even go as far as writing down their goals and dreams. By the end of January on the following year, Group 1 types have all but forgotten they even had New Year Resolutions…

What’s wrong with that?
It’s obvious, if you never even write things in black and white, how do you hope to remember them, or take active action towards making them true?

Group 2 – The typical groupie here will do all of the dreaming of Group 1 types, but they will also go as far as writing it all down. Often on a piece of paper. Sometimes in a specially designated area on their hard drive. They would even know that they’re supposed to categorize their resolutions…

How do you spot Group 2 types:
They talk a lot about their New Year Resolutions. They have big ambitions, and they will most likely tell everyone about them (not to boast, but because they really have good intentions). They write it all down, and they swear they’ll work on the goals…

What’s wrong with that?
Most of the time, these people never go far enough to educate themselves about how to set goals that you end up achieving. Had they gone one step further to read up about it, they would have known that just writing down what you want out of life without ever looking back at that list, will not make it happen…

Group 3 – Now these guys have it all sassed out. They do all of the above. They do it not just every year (around New Year’s Day), but in 3 month increments. What sets them apart is that they go a step further. A step that makes all the difference between success and failure…

THEY TAKE ACTION on at least one of their goals!!!

What to do; A.K.A. the right way to set your New Year Resolutions.
I’ll keep this as short as possible.

New Year Resolutions are an excellent way to ‘take stock’ of how productive your past year has been. You can assess all sorts of areas in your life. Personal ambitions, professional goals, physical targets, or mental development achievements…

The problem most people meet is that they don’t know how to set those resolutions and how to effectively follow through. So here are a few points to help you along:

10 Ways to Set Effective Goals & to Actually Achieve Them

1. On a piece of paper, write down the headings: Personal Goals, Work-Related Goals. Write your goals under each of those headings.
2. Dig deep, but be selective. Only list the most important goals.
3. Make the goals as specific as possible. Say “I want to earn $100,000 per month by July 2009.” Even if you don’t know how the heck you’d do it – be specific. Also, by being specific, you are making your goals measurable, i.e. at the end of the year, you can tell if you have achieved something or not.
4. Set achievement deadlines – or you’ll have nothing to work towards.
5. Set achievable/realistic goals. Think of it like this, if you set impossible goals, it would be impossible to achieve them…
6. Make it public. Tell your friends and family that these are your goals. If you make things public, you will feel accountable and are hence more likely to act on and achieve your goals…
7. Take action. Yes, don’t just talk about it, but actually DO!
8. Small steps count. You don’t have to do everything at once, and you don’t have to have the full plan in front of you before you can start. Get from A to B, then from B to C, and so on. You’ll gain clarity with every step…
9. Review your list often. Yes, review your list at least once a month. I print mine and keep it with me all the time. By reviewing your goals often, you help your mind keep on track. And if your mind knows the path, it will start seeing opportunities to take you in the right direction… Thing for a second, if you’ve just decided you want an iPhone, have you noticed how all you seem to see around you is iPhones everywhere?
10. Be flexible, fast and be excited. You need to be flexible, to change course when necessary. In this day and age, nothing stands still anymore, so to succeed you need to move fast, and to be open minded.

Be excited – because if you don’t carry the ‘spark’ for your goal, you’ll never create a ‘fire’. Or for those of you who don’t like my analogy – if you’re not passionate about what you’re doing, you are unlikely to carry through with it to achieve the end goal!!!

The Challenge – or what’s the point of this post?

Most of us reading this post, will fall regularly in Groups 1 or 2.

I’m not saying this to offend anyone – heck, I’ve been in those groups for most of my adult life.

But because I know the value of being in Group 3, I decided to write this post.

New Year’s Eve 2008 is creeping in – and before we know it, we’ll be celebrating the coming of 2009. We have just over 2 months to get better at goal setting, and give ourselves the chance to get a better start on 2009.

I hope the points I made above will make you think. But better yet, I hope you will find the “10 Ways Set Effective Goals & to Actually Achieve Them” list inspirational enough to take my challenge.

The Challenge:

Set up your New Year (2009) Resolutions, by following the list above. Now I know you can’t share all that’s on your list, but to be in the challenge, you need to share at least one of your goals for 2009.

You decide which one to share with us, and post it as a comment below. By making it known to all of us, you’re making a public commitment to do something about it! Don’t forget to include a timeframe for your goal.

Go on, start thinking…
At the end of December 2008 (Dec 31st), we will close this post for further comments, and will review it periodically from then on to see who is meeting their deadlines…

The Prize!!!
The only prize you get is the satisfaction of actually achieving at least one of your New Year Resolutions.

I’m in…

P.S. If you have a tip to add to the 10 tips above, please feel free to comment – it will help us all…

A few weeks back, I spoke at a small conference in Las Vegas for the Forex market called the Forex Affiliate Conference, which is run by the guys from the Casino Affiliate Conference. It was the smallest conference I ever spoke at (about 20 people) but it ended up being one of the most productive. I made some really great connections and was able to target my presentation to what information would be most useful for the attendees. From speaking there, I came up with some conference tips that are appropriate for any upcoming event you may be attending.

Lucky 7 Conference Tips

1. Reserve judgment for the end. Just because a conference has 5,000 attendees doesn’t mean that you will get anything out of it.  A conference is about who you meet and what you learn and if it is too crowded and overwhelming for you to meet anyone or learn anything, than it was probably a waste of money. On the other hand, just because there are only 20 people there, doesn’t that these aren’t the right 20 people and best leads you can find.

2. Network regardless of your mood. Just because the conference isn’t exactly what you expected is not an excuse to sit in your hotel room or bail on your presentation. Talk to other attendees or presenters, don’t be shy just strike up a conversation over a beer.

3. If nothing is planned, plan it yourself. If there are not parties, dinners or events planned for that night, get everyone together and plan and time and meeting location yourself. DK planned the Pubcon Poker Tournament, the least you can do is plan dinner.

4. If you are presenting, gear your presentation to your audience. A smaller conference gives you the benefit of meeting everyone and asking them what they want to learn. It also leads to more audience participation. If you are in the audience, ask questions and participate.

5. There is always something you can learn, so sit in on a couple of sessions. No one knows everything, so sitting in on a couple of sessions can be really beneficial.  I don’t do a lot of affiliate marketing, so the nuggets of information that I gathered will definitely be helpful for my own sites.

6. Don’t tell people overly specific information. Just because someone asks you a direct question face to face about one of your clients site doesn’t mean you have to tell them your clients best keyword/conversion tactic/seo tactic etc.

7. Don’t stick to just hanging out with people you know. I am sure your coworkers are great people, but this is your chance to broaden your horizons and meet new people.  Go up to someone you don’t know and just start a conversation. The vast majority of the time, people at your conference will be very friendly and responsive.

I read an interesting article the other day which discussed the importance of targeting and bounce rates and it got me to thinking about the clients that I have had, past and present and the buckets of money I have seen thrown away. So, I decided to put a list together of 10 ways you or your client may be wasting money they could be paying you:

1. Stop sending paid traffic to your home!
   1. Your homepage is rarely the page your potential customers are looking for. If I am searching for �buy sony flatscreen 1080p� PLEASE send me to a page with sony flat screen tv�s on it!
   2. Check your homepage�s bounce rate. It is 60% than you should only be sending people searching for �sitename.com� to that page otherwise, you are throwing at least 60% of your money away. Why do I say at least? Because if you are sending all your paid traffic to your homepage than you probably haven�t optimized your paid search ads and are just looking for a high click through rate.
2. Stop duplicating terms in your paid search accounts
   1. It never ceases to amaze me when clients are using the same keyword in multiple ad groups with the same geo-targeting and timing. Don�t do this
3. Have goals for your website
   1. Set goals for your website. �I want to make money.� Isn�t a sufficient goal. Come up with trackable metrics to get you there so you can optimize your website to eventually make you some more money.
   2. Publishing sites – # of page views, repeat visitors, high CPM.
   3. Ecommerce � lifetime value
   4. Lead-gen sites are a monster in and of themselves. If you generate leads so that they become sales then focusing on the lead only is going to inhibit you from making money. Remember, unless you are selling leads, they don� t make you any money until they become a sale.
4. Don�t cut the long-tail
   1. If you aren�t tracking performance over-time, you are probably missing all of your long-tail terms. Don�t cut terms that are attracting people in the educational phase of the sales-cycle. If you market to them differently you can increase your conversion rate over time. Don�t cut them just because these phrases take a little longer to convert - MARKET TO THEM DIFFERENTLY. These are long sales cycle leads
5. Use negative keywords in your paid search campaigns
   1. This may sound basic, but if you aren�t using negative keywords than you are paying for traffic that will NEVER make you a dollar, pound or euro. If you have paid-search clients or use paid search and using mostly broad match than you really need to spend some time investigating exactly what terms are being clicked on.
6. Learn what terms lead to conversion and optimize your site accordingly
   1. Welcome to the beauty of the internet and web analytics. You can actually tell how people get to your site, what they do there and if they are making you money. It�s brilliant. So why are you optimizing your site based on what you think will work well?
7. Stop making creative decisions based on what your boss thinks is a good idea.
   1. See point 6. We have the ability to test and optimize, which means we can run multiple ad creatives (banner and search) and see what drives the greatest revenue rather than based on the CxO�s affinity to the color blue. Back your decisions with data
8. Test, test, test and SPLIT TEST!
   1. See point 7. Products like Google website optimizer and Omniture�s Test and Target (formerly Offermatica) can optimize your landing pages based on conversions. There is no excuse for not testing your landing pages and assuming that your designers first try is always correct. In all likelihood it is not optimal and assuming it is will make an ass out you but not me because I�m split testing
9. Track how changes to your website affect your bottom line
   1. If designers, programmers, your kids or whomever are making website changes that affect your business� especially your homepage � you should be recording that this is being done and how this is affecting organic placement and conversions. If there is no tracking there is no accountability.
10. Know what your users are clicking on
    1. Heatmaps and click analysis tools, like Crazy Egg are great at letting you know what your users are clicking on and responding to. Using this information to optimize page layout should help you to make the most of the traffic that you have.

I am a bit of a geek girl. I’m good with computers, the Internet and various other pieces of technology. However, since getting into the tech world and especially since developing a nasty Twitter habit, I’ve noticed a new breed of annoying female that I’d never come across before. If you live out in the real world, you may have seen them on occasion, but they’re everywhere on the web. Outside, where flesh replaces pixels, they’re harder to spot. Enhanced with Ruby on Rails, these women have become the sorority girls of the Internet. Get mad at me for being hypocritical if you like; I’ve probably done some of these things. However, if you must become famous on the Internet, here’s what you have to do:

1. Relate oneself to frosting, icing, cupcakes, muffins or any other variety of sweet confection which one does not actually consume on a regular basis but which is often pink.
2. Pick a blog handle, Twitter name or general online pen-name with care. Is your name Nicole Kent? (I made that name up, in case you’re wondering.) “NicoleKent” won’t do. “jnikkicakecat” would be a far better choice, but for God’s sake, avoid using numbers. No one’s done that since 2001′s Yahoo! chat rooms and you don’t even have Yahoo! saved in your browser’s history.
3. Pretend to be retarded.
4. Talk a lot about Apple products, even if you secretly use a Dell Inspiron 6000 that’s running XP, weighs more than a year’s pile of college text books and is missing its down arrow and F5 keys.
5. Attend a lot of tech-related events to give off the impression that every day of your life is SXSW. Twitter at Michael Arrington and make it seem like he replies.
6. Blog about your diet, which consists solely of tea, sushi and oddities only found at strange markets in Austin and Providence, RI.
7. Reclaim MySpace; Abandon Facebook. If in United Kingdom, flirt with Bebo.
8. Actually change your name. If people find out you’re really called Nicole Kent, things could get ugly. Hint that your name is actually Fairess Sweetakins.
9. Own a regular pet but make sure to point out that it’s not a German Shepherd, it’s a Belgian Malinois. What? I said I was a hypocrite.
10. Practice yoga and meditation in order to forget that 9,280 of your 9,302 Twitter followers are pony-tailed software developers from Omaha.
11. An oldie but a goodie: take pictures and video of yourself from strange angles. It worked on Friendster, it ruled MySpace, it’ll work in the odd life you lead that can only be dubbed Blogtter.
12. Stay the fuck out of politics, unless you’re expressing sexual fantasies about Barak Obama. You risk alienating at least half of your audience no matter what you say, and it’s way more interesting to talk about Wii Sports. The Barak stuff is fine: pony-tailed software developers don’t care if you’re fantasising about Margaret bloody Thatcher, so long as they get to think about you and sex.
13. OMG Digg.
14. Stay the fuck out of coffee politics. Claim that the people at Starbucks have your idiotic drink ready for you before you get there.
15. Choose a yummy sample of generic pop culture phenomena, such as cartoons or musicians, and obsess over them. There’s nothing better than claiming a pop culture mainstay as your own and subtly indicating that it’s far more deep and meaningful than everyone else understands it to be.
16. Learn at least some real computer skills so that you can Twitter about your server from time to time.
17. Write blog posts that consist of less than one-hundred words. In the Twitter culture, no one has time to read 900 – 1,000 word entries.
18. Have an offline friend who is very cool. Talk about the friend a lot online. “Stacey” did this. “Stacey” did that. Elevate “Stacey” to a god-like level for no particular reason at all. Don’t let “Stacey” know.
19. Refrain from talking about “Web 2.0.” It makes you look like a dick. Instead, talk about digital media.
20. Write for a blog called “(Technology-related Subject) Chicks” and wear little shirts with name of said blog emblazened across them, atop the boobs. And be a fuck ton better than the “(Technology-related Subject) Blokes” blog while you’re at it.