Keyword Optimization is the key to Search Engine Marketing. It is crucial that a business develops a search engine marketing strategy that includes web friendly copy, keywords, keyword phrases, title tags, meta description tags, headings and keyword density.

Here are some suggested questions to ask yourself if you want to win with online search.

• WHEN YOU START TYPING YOUR PRODUCT/BRAND NAME INTO A SEARCH ENGINE, WHAT SEARCH TERMS AUTO-FILL?
• DOES YOUR WEBSITE OR MESSAGE APPEAR ON TOP THIRD OF FIRST PAGE RESULTS?
• HOW DOES YOUR PRODUCT/BRAND APPEAR ON KEY RATINGS/REVIEW SITES FOR YOUR CATEGORY?
• IF SOMEONE SEARCHES FOR KEY PHRASES FROM YOUR MARKETING WHAT DO THEY FIND?

Source: Ion interactive

Google recently released a thought provoking white paper on the future of digital marketing…The Zero Moment of Truth.

A busy mom in a minivan, looking up decongestants on her mobile phone as she waits to pick up her son at school.

An office manager at her desk, comparing laser printer prices and ink cartridge costs before heading to the office supply store.

A student in a cafe, scanning user ratings and reviews while looking for a cheap hotel in Barcelona.

A winter sports fan in a ski store, pulling out a mobile phone to look at video reviews of the latest snowboards.

A young woman in her condo, searching the web for juicy details about a new guy before a blind date.

ZMOT is that moment when you grab your laptop, mobile phone or some other wired device and start learning about a product or service you’re thinking about trying or buying.

Are you winning the Zero Moment of Truth? Download the full article at zeromomentoftruth.com

Source: Ion interactive

Every effective landing page is a marriage of strategy, creative & execution. Even when your strategy is sound, if you fail to execute landing page best practices, it can hurt your ability to convert. Run your landing page through this 10-point checklist to make sure you have the basics covered.

Message matched. Your landing page copy should mirror the words and phras­es used in your ad. Make sure what the visitor clicked on is reflected very clearly when they land on your page. This is called ‘pathway to purchase’ and it helps reduce bounce rate by reinforcing the visitor is in the right place.

Relevant. Just because your ad & page copy match doesn’t necessarily mean your page is relevant. Make sure your page is rel­evant to what you offered in your ad, and rele­vant to your call to action. Everything needs to be cohesive—the copy, the offer, the images.

Valuable. Is there a clear value proposi­tion in your offer? The role of the landing page isn’t to inform, it’s to sell. So don’t be afraid to make your pitch. Tell people why it’s in their best interest to convert.

Above the fold. Make sure your most important content is above the fold. That means copy, images and calls to action. You can have good stuff below the fold, but the best stuff needs to be high on the page.

Scannable. Long sentences, tons of bul­lets, lots of paragraphs—it’s hard for a visitor to read all that! On the landing page you have only a few seconds to make your case. Make sure that it’s easy to scan the page and absorb the overall message. Vary the length of your sentences, use bullets (and keep them short), and make sure paragraphs aren’t too long.

Visually actionable. At a quick glance it should be very clear what the key ac­tion is on the page. What does the page want the visitor to do? Pick up the phone? Fill out a form? Click a button? Whatever it is, make sure your page is very obvious and very ac­tionable. It should visually compel the visitor forward into the desired action.

Distraction minimized. Edit, edit, edit. Get rid of unnecessary copy, graphics and especially links. Every element of your page should be increasing your odds of con­version. No exceptions. Get rid of extra links, unrelated calls to action, superfluous graphics and anything else questionable.

Easy to convert. Make sure your con­version is clear and easy to act upon. If your conversion is someone picking up the phone, make it really easy to see your phone number. If it’s making a purchase, then adding to the cart needs to be super simple. If it’s complet­ing a form, only ask for information you really and truly need. Just like minimizing distrac­tions, you want to eliminate hurdles between the click and the conversion.

Feels good. The most subjective point, but important. Take a gander at your page. Ask others to look at it too. Does it make the visitor feel good? How good is your page as compared to your competitors? Don’t neglect the ‘feel good’ factor—even landing page visi­tors want great experiences!

Tested & optimized. Landing pages are the perfect place to test—copy, images, offers, layouts, forms. You name it, you can test it. Without testing you are leaving conver­sions on the table.

Source: Ion interactive

Down the road is a red corrugated iron shed. Swaying outside in the wind is a guitar woven from barbed wire. If you go by the shed late at night you’ll see that the windows are lit up and that a man is moving about inside. Sometimes you’ll hear a snatch of music.

The man is Peter Stephen and he is a luthier, crafting guitars and double bass. Last year friends of ours made a short video portrait of this man and his exquisite work. I’d like to share it with you.

Lizzie

Guitar Man from Simon Clark & Alison Farmer on Vimeo.

Tatts wrote back in July about the power of positive affirmations.

We’ve all had our priorities shifted here in Christchurch by recent events. Once the fact really sank in that we live in a place where any second, with absolutely no warning, the earth can rise up roaring under our feet and the walls come tumbling down, we had to accept certain realities, like ultimate lack of control, quite differently.

I mean, sure we can control our day to day realities up to a point, but the big things, the life and death stuff, that’s pretty much out of our hands. That’s the same for everyone, no matter where we live or what we do.

But there’s something we can control no matter what our personal situation. Our own response to life. This isn’t easy. In fact it’s probably the hardest thing of all. Often it feels easier to move mountains than control our own minds.

But here in Christchurch, when we feel so helpless in many ways, shifting our priorities to focus on the things we actually can have some small hope of controlling has been a very healthy thing for a lot of people I know.

I’ve been reading some interesting writing recently about how to grow wellbeing and happiness in our lives, and more specifically, the power of gratitude to increase happiness. I have a small daughter, so I’m particularly keen to teach her how she can nurture happiness in her own life. One thing many of these writers emphasise is how making a daily habit of stating things we are grateful for can create a sense of well being, and encourage the habit of savouring life.

Some people keep gratitude journals. And I am a stone cold sucker for nice stationery, so when I saw this puppy, well, the idea of keeping a book of things I am thankful for seemed all the more enticing.

But we as a family have chosen instead to go round the table at supper and ask each other what we are grateful for. Initially it felt contrived. Some days I struggled to think of anything I was thankful for. I was tired, I felt grumpy, work had been hard and I still had three hours of writing to do once I put the small person to bed. What had I got to be grateful for?

Well of course the answer in these situations is always, “so much, you self pitying twerp!”

As soon as I realised that, I begin to remember the good things, the little moments that illuminated a difficult day. I’m not talking about the bigger picture stuff, like the fact that here and now I am incredibly lucky just to have a job, a house and my family around me (although some days, believe me, when I say I feel grateful for these things, I really mean it). I’m thinking about the gilded instants that lift the whole. The moment when, walking home, the sun came out and the bellbirds started singing. The postcard that arrived from a friend. The hug that my daughter gave me when I picked her up from preschool. The little beautiful things. I’m grateful for them.

Lizzie

I wrote a post about Gap Filler back in December last year.

Of course we didn’t know then that the September earthquake was just the beginning of the invigorating jitterbugging our local friendly fault lines were to indulge in over the next year. One of the many outcomes of these seismic shenanigans has been that Gap Filler now have a heap more empty sites to pay with. Hundreds and hundreds of rubble filed gaps in fact.

One of their latest life enhancing projects is the Think Differently Book Exchange.

Gap Filler found a big double drinks fridge. You know the kind? The sort of fridge you see packed with soft drinks in garages and corner stores. They put it in the middle of the vacant lot on the corner of Kilmore and Barbadoes Street and built a path to the fridge through the rubble, with yellow painted paving stones.

And then they put the word out. They invited people to come and bring a book that had changed their lives and leave it in the fridge for someone else to find and read.

And people came. Quite a lot of people. And they bought books. Quite a lot of seriously awesome books. And they swapped books, read extracts from the books to each other and talked about the books. Some people also bought cake. So they all ate cake. And then they went away, full of cake and fizzing with ideas, clutching new books under their arms. And even though everyone that came that day took a book home with them, the fridge was still full of more great books. And it is still there, right now, full of books, waiting for you.

Lizzie

Photo borrowed from Gap Filler.

As TimeZoneOne’s digital marketing portfolio continues to expand, we find ourselves employing more and more landing pages as part of any optimized digital presence.

A landing page is a web page specifically designed to elicit a particular response from a visitor to a site. These pages will match messages with specific PPC ads or keywords. The best landing pages keep visitors engaged and lead them toward the desired action.

The following elements are important to keep in mind when looking to create a great landing page:

Make sure there is an obvious connection between the headline of your landing page and the ad that got the visitor there. This is called message matching and is extremely important.

Be sure to keep the most important/relevant information, along with the call to action, above the fold so visitors do not need to scroll.

Do not be too text heavy. Presenting less demanding looking copy can ensure the page actually gets read – and remember – content is king.

Be sure to include a “Call Now” or similar call to action button visible from anywhere on the landing page.

Creating a great landing page requires marketing planning and thought, but done correctly can be powerful lead generation tools.

The earthquakes in Christchurch obviously hit the TZO team hard – losing our offices and many of the TZO family dealing with stress and damaged homes.

Do you believe in the 2012 prophecy that the world will end on December 21, 2012?

My wife made joking reference to this today – but some people take this seriously! (Maybe Harold Camping’s followers need another doomsday prophesy to grasp on to…)

Earthquakes – there seem to have been more of these recently, making their way around the ring of fire – Chile, New Zealand, Japan – there was a 6.9 earthquake in Peru today, along with a 5.6 magnitude quake in DC yesterday. These quakes can be combined with the floods and wildfires in Australia, the tsunamis in Japan and Thailand, the crazy weather we have been having, to paint an alarming picture of global natural disaster. Even people are going nuts with uprisings in the Middle East and pirates off Somalia.

Both the Mayan and Egyptian calendars seem to stop around or on December 21, 2012 – suggesting the end of days. This is the day after my birthday so I am going to have one hell of a bash!

Could this be the end of the world?…Or perhaps the Mayan and Egyptians just ran out of “calendar oomph” or writing implements – or maybe they were just conquered before they got around to writing the next version.

Perhaps the date simply represents the end of an age as the Mayans saw it – and a new one begins. In this age of instant information, maybe people are simply more aware of events as they happen around the world so it seems like more stuff is happening.

I’m still gonna have a big birthday bash on December 20, 2012 – just in case.

TZO recently completed a successful photo shoot for SJSM on Anguilla and Bonaire. We captured some great footage that you will be able to peruse on the SJSM website and supporting collateral soon. I was supposed to go on this shoot but unfortunately had a clash that stopped me from going. I had, however, promised to take my wife back to the Caribbean – so we took a week off and went to Aruba.

Aruba is a member of the Lesser Antilles along with Bonaire and Curacao. So I figure I was close enough to SJSM to get a feel for the island lifestyle.

Now I am not one for beach lounging. I can lounge for about 30 minutes before I start getting fidgety and looking for a something else to do – much to my wife’s annoyance. I dragged her all over the island to go diving, snorkeling, kite surfing and exploring when all she really wanted to do was relax. We did manage to get in a couple of days of doing absolutely nothing so she can count herself fortunate and I can count myself burnt (stupid).

Let me just say that I could really get used to an island lifestyle – if I were going to dedicate a couple of years of my life to pounding the books to become a doctor – I can think of worse places than a Caribbean island!

Hamish

Cruising the interwebulator today for inspiration I came across these damn fine works from Korean artist Yong Ho Ji, made from car tyres.

Matt