Posts in "Marketing"

What are UTM tracking codes

Let’s start with a definition.

A UTM tracking code is a snippet of text added to the end of a URL that helps track the performance of campaigns using Google Analytics. They can be used to differentiate how different channels, content and creatives in the same campaign are performing.

Anyone can create and use a UTM tracking code and you can use them in virtually any place where you can control the link back to your website.

When a person clicks on a link which includes a UTM code, the browser address bar will look something like this:

In order to get any value from using UTM codes, you need to use Google Analytics as this is the tool that captures and processes the data from your UTM codes.#

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What are lead magnets?

Let’s start with a lead magnet definition:

A lead magnet is used by a company as an incentive for the visitor to hand over their email address. In B2B marketing a lead magnet is often in the form of a downloadable PDF. Other types of lead magnets could be discount codes when a visitor signs up for a newsletter, a webinar or a free tool.

For B2B marketers, getting a visitor’s email address is the first significant step towards building a relationship with a potential customer. 

The goal of a lead magnet is to offer something that the visitor values enough that they are willing to share their personal information with you.

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RIP Pagerank – No More Pagerank Updates?

Pagerank. It’s a little green bar that can mean the difference between your site earning thousands of pounds a month and nothing. Well, that has been the story up until now. An entire link buying industry has sprung up around the little green graphic.

Google was “supposed” to update the pagerank of all the sites in mid July. Now, 3 months later and there is still no sign of this happening. Pagerank is not being updated.

Further research has led me to conclude that Pagerank as we know it is dead. Google has constantly stated that it doesn’t rank websites according to pagerank (it’s a very common misconception that higher pagerank automatically means higher rankings), and Matt Cutts, an engineer at Google, has said that pagerank is not a big deal in Google and exporting the data to the toolbar is seen as a none event.

There’s no official word from Google as of yet on the status of Pagerank and it’s future, so it might not be officially dead, but they’ve never taken this long to update the toolbar before.

Still, pagerank had it’s uses. You could gauge the level of popularity of a website if it had a high PR and determine whether it was worth getting those valuable backlinks. Now that PR is dead (but certainly not forgotten) it leaves webmasters and internet marketers to rely on other sources, namely Alexa and Compete.

Both of these sites try and estimate the level of traffic to a site and quite frankly, both of them do a rubbish job. They take their sample data from users that have installed their toolbar. This means that if a site gets 100,000 visitors a month but none of them have the toolbar, and another site gets 1,000 visitors a month and 10% of them have the toolbar installed, the latter website would be ranked higher.

So what are we left with now to determine the value of a link or advertising on a website? It’s very difficult. Say what you want about Pagerank, but it was an exceptionally useful tool for determining the cost of a link or advertising.

Top 5 On-Page Optimization Tips

When most people think of search engine optimization (well ok, only those that are actually nerdy enough to know what it is of course!) they immediately think about meta tags, keyword density and doorway pages.

Like many things when it comes to SEO, what once worked no longer does.

Take meta-tags for example. Way back when the internet was still a baby, meta tags were introduced to help search engines (at the time the big search engine was AltaVista…Google hadn’t even been invented) work out what the site was about. It wasn’t long before people started abusing the Meta Tags and when the next generation of search engines came about the importance of the meta tags diminished forever.

There are some self styled gurus that will tell you that you need the optimum keyword density to rank well in the search engines. The truth is, if there were an optimium density then it would be very easy to rank in the search engines. The best thing to do is to keep your writing natural and focus on the reader first, search engine second.

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Are You Making These Top 5 SEO Mistakes?

To the average internet user the acronym SEO is just yet another bit of gobbledegook internet jargon tossed around by web geeks and nerds. To some of us web geeks and nerds SEO is the be all and end all of internet promotion. The holy grail of appearing at number one spot on Google is a dream many of us aspire to bring in to reality…but often fall dismally short in Supplemental Hell.

So often the different between getting a good ranking and a bad ranking is down to how you approach the optimization of your site. As with most things in life there’s a right way and a wrong way. Do it the wrong way and you’re looking at a life in Supplementalville, do it right and you get to live on the converted home page bringing in so many visitors you won’t know what to do.

Sidenote: Google’s Supplemental Index are results that it gives when it can’t find anything definite that you are searching for. Web pages in the supplemental index are pages that don’t have enough inbound links for Google to ‘trust’ the page enough to serve it up as a main result.

If you want to get good rankings, then make sure you avoid these top 5 SEO mistakes:

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