HerRoom.com, a site that sells ladies underwear, had quite the traffic
problem. Despite loads of visits to its bra site, sales were flat.
Turns out the site’s section featuring videos of women bounce
testing the company’s exercise bras had become quite the hit on YouTube.com.
Scattered all over the video-sharing site were women jogging in place to
test how well support holds up for an assortment of cup sizes, and serving
up all titters and snickers galore, likely to mostly high school boys.
Traffic soared, but too bad none of those high school boys wanted to actually
buy the exercise bras.
What to do? In this case, they called in an search engine
optimization, or SEO
marketing consultancy. They went to work on getting interest in the bounce
test from beyond the YouTube universe.
The site did some research of its own and put together a podcast
featuring a medical expert warning women that not wearing a good exercise
bra while working out or jogging for example can actually damage breast
tissue from all the bouncing.
News organizations soon picked up notice and
stories followed on MSNBC, and other general interest sites and
publications. The site succeeded in turning titters into traffic that turned
into bra sales.
The moral of the story? Well, there’s a few. For one, explained Falkow at
the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in New York, the quality of
your linking and traffic matters. Don’t forget that rule.
OK, you may ask, but what if you don’t have the benefit of bouncing flesh
to help grab eyeballs? How else can you get bouncy rankings and link love?
Stick to some fundamentals, and don’t forget the old standbys, experts
say. Here are a few they listed for building traffic and placement with the
search engines:
where you link as much as the quality of the link and who’s linking to you.
So that means linking to sites that are updated frequently, with lots of
incoming and outgoing links on pages. But word to the wise, adds Chris
Boggs, manager of Brulent.com. Yes, links from authoritative
sources are probably the most important factor on page ranks with search
engines.
the value of a social networking site link from, say Digg.com, Boggs adds.
(Hey, I love Digg, but he’s spot on about the fickle nature of social media
audiences on link-ranking sites: Links can become stale quickly.) Which
leads us back to more of the basics:
advanced strategies, especially as you add reciprocal links as well.
After all, Boggs adds, without understanding the inbound links to your
pages and pages of your competitors, you’ll never get a good sense of the
inbound link footprint your industry may have as well.
little link love goes a long way in this area. Remember that search engines
are always looking for abusers and ferreting links gone wild pages out of
their indexes. So try not to get carried away.
curious businesses listed. One of the best-known directories, for example,
is Best of the Web (BOTW.org). It lists more than 100,000 categories and has long
been considered an authoritative site. (Drill deep and get deep category
links to your pages.)
respected authorities in your industry, for example, be creative and not
“salesy.” You’ll be called out right away by the writers. Plus, the haters
that are out there, as Boggs aptly calls them, will flame away. Try not to
feed their fires.
help draw attention to your site and build page rank.
dealing with press/bloggers, says Lee Odden, the CEO of TopRank Online
Marketing.
By push, he means use outreach to get noticed: wire service releases,
networking, pitching writers and making sure your site provides an RSS feed
on updates, promotions. The pull part refers to how you get them to come to
you: your own site newsroom, links on social media sites that say something,
and, of course, media coverage.
The stories of PR people or other company reps who have no clue about
what the press person/journo/blogger write about are numerous. Don’t be one of
them. Instead, become a reliable source rather than a flack to be avoided.
I’m not sure I agree with all of this, but this is his take on the
differences:
Journalists hang up on you, but bloggers will embarrass you. Journalists
research articles according to beats with editorial oversight. Bloggers tend
to write opinion. So don’t send a press release to a blogger — they don’t
write articles, they link to them!
publicize your publicity. Journalists call it shameless self-promotion and
engage in it all the time with their articles.
experts like to remind the best PR practitioners out there, avoid broadcast
e-mail pitches that say: Dear [blank]. If you do broadcast pitches,
personalize them.
coming back. Develop relationships and continue to send story ideas.
And please, don’t forget to say thank you, even if you don’t like that
person.
Remember the rules, the basics and find a compelling story to help get
your product in front of the audience you want to reach. Remember that your
business has a story. Or, if you’re like me, your business is the story.
Hopefully, it’ll get you the bounce you’re looking for.
Erin Joyce is executive editor of InternetNews.com.
