After years of struggling on the search engine world it seems that finally Microsoft is doing the right things, first at all they decided to go with a “search engine” dedicated site instead the regular “search field” integrated to their MSN page. The approach this time is right for several reasons but two I would like to mention three that I believe are the most important…

1. Great catchy name
The name “Bing” evokes discovery; both in English and Spanish when you suddenly find something you were desperately searching for, most likely you will exclaim “BINGO!” this excellent name is similar to the strategy used by Intel, which name evokes “intelligence”, there is no doubt this strategy will work, the name is catchy short and easy to pronounce in different languages.

2. They are trying to break the paradigm
Early this year Microsoft hired Qi Lu, one of the brightest mind and gifted leaders on the search engine world, prior Microsoft Mr Qi Lu spent 10 years as a Yahoo senior executive, he holds 20 U.S patents. Mr Qi Lu is a firm believer that if Bing doesn’t change the paradigm on search they will be never able to compete there, that’s why Bing is trying to reposition as a decision engine rather than a search engine, and I have to say it is not just an statement, Bing is actually doing things different than Google to help users decide what to do; a quick example is Farecast, a company that Microsoft acquired for 115 M in 2008 and then integrated to Bing search engine under http://www.bing.com/travel/. The system basically predicts future prices on tickets so people can actually “decide” if they buy the tickets now or if they wait for them to get cheaper, the system is 75% accurate and rely of an extensive database of historical data. This is a real example of how a decision engine may work, giving you new parameters to decide other than a list of results, so far Google has not cough up on this one.

Farecast integrated to Bing Decision Engine

3. More Traffic, More Results
Currently Bing has 11% of the market share on search engines but that is going to change in about a month from now. Few days ago Microsoft made public the “Search Alliance With Yahoo” which basically home will merge the indexed pages, traffic and search results for both companies, together the two companies may get 20% of the market share and finally advertisers will start to see more traffic and conversions on their campaigns. The venture news has been well received in the marketing world, Sir Martin Sorrell, Chief Executive, WPP Group said “This is extremely encouraging and introduces more balance into the search and display markets, It is good for our clients and our agencies and for regulators.” (Reuters; July 30, 2009)

In the past I have used Microsoft paid search platform for some of my clients, but unfortunately with disappointing results due to the low and poor qualified traffic, but things seem differently now, with a new name, a dedicated search only site, a different approach to search behavior, new team and new alliances I’m willing to give Bing a second chance… I thing the time is now, don’t you?

This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, founder of Syndikomm; an online marketing firm based in New York city and specialized in multicultural markets. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano

Navigating today on the Internet I found a Google advertising that I haven’t seen before. It seems it is a new campaign that started apparently couple of months ago. The campaign called “Search Stories” is a funny and minimalist sequence of searches in Google that end it up with great outcomes. The ads are being promoted through different size animated banners on the Google Ad network; On the screenshot at the right you can see an horizontal top banner promoting the videos, it is just the name of the campaign and the button “watch”.

Google dedicated a channel for the campaign where they are putting the commercials for public access. The channel is located at http://www.youtube.com/user/searchstories, below is just a sample of one of the stories that I like the most because is actually pretty much my own story. Congrats Google, the campaign is very creative, simple and fun.

This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, founder of Syndikomm; an online marketing firm based in New York city and specialized in multicultural markets. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano

Behind search engines results there is a complex mathematical formula called “algorithm” that determine which pages should rank before others; like the formula of Coca Cola this is the best kept secret by Google and other major search engines such as Bing and Yahoo, actually the quality of the algorithm of Google was the responsible of the rapid adoption of this search engine virtually around the world.

The algorithm is in other words a combination of numbers and probabilities that analyze hundreds of ranking factors to classify the information they display, in other words the science behind search  engines is a mathematical formula. The algorithm is search engines could be perhaps the most complex formula to understand in online marketing, but it is not the only one, I have found other useful formulas that can help people understand the complexity of the online marketing world and help them understand the concept from a scientific perspective. These are some of the formulas that I have found but please if you find any other one related with online marketing share it to everyone on this post, I’ll be added them as I get it.

Conversion Rate Formula

CR = Conversions / Clicks * 100
This is the most simple and significant formula for advertisers, the conversion rate it means just how many people that click in your ad finally made a purchase. This is an example:

Let’s see 1000 people click in your online Ad, and out of those 1,000 just 25 finally made a purchased or any other action that you considered conversion (download a brochure, sign up for a newsletter or more), on this case your conversion rate is 0.01%

CR = (25/1000) * 100 =  2.5%

Website Success Formula

B = V x C x L

Where:

B = amount of business done by the site
V = unique visitors coming to the site
C = conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who become customers); note that the concept of conversion applies not only to ecommerce sites, but to any site where there is something you want users to do)
L = loyalty rate (the degree to which customers return to conduct repeat business)

Jakob Nielsen

This is a formula shared by Peter Morville, Dr. Susan Weinschenk, Dr. Jakob Nielsen, and Kim Krause Berg to  www.searachengineland.com, for Jakob Nielsen the L factor is the most important variable for long-term website strategy: “It is imperative that websites liberate themselves from being overly-dependent on search engines and regain the positioning as the place users turn for the type of problem they address,” he said. “Right now, the best loyalty mechanism is the email newsletter, so it’s important to balance the site design in such a way that it encourages newsletter sign-ups at the same time as it also drives conversions.”

Landing Page Conversion Formula

C= 4m + 3v + 2(i-f) – 2a

Where:

C = Conversion
M = Motivation (what is the motivation of the user when he/she gets to your page? Do they have a level of interest?)
V = Clarity of Value Proposition (what is the valuable offer to your clients)
I = Incentive (sense of urgency, offer valuable exchange for an action)
F = Friction (elements to process, difficult forms can cause friction)
A = Anxiety (entering sensitive or personal information)

• Value Prop and Incentive are Value Contributors
• Friction and Anxiety are Value Inhibitors
• You need the Contributors to outweigh the Inhibitors

This is a heuristic algorithm for landing page conversions developed by www.marketingexperiments.com, there is a webcast available at Inbound Marketing University that speaks about this topic

The value of this formula is that it represents each factor that directly affects the conversion of a visitor on a landing page.

Potential Lost Revenues from Landing Pages

(RPV * NVL) * BR = LRPV

Where:

RPV = Revenue per visitor
LRPV = Lost Revenue Per Visitor
NVL = Number of visitors who land on landing page
BR = Bounce rate

(RPV * NVL) is also known as RETS = Revenue Estimate For The Traffic Source

This formula is presented by Tim Ash on his book “Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning For Conversions” allows website owners to calculate how much they could loose from a bad optimized landing page. Tim Ash though mention that in real life things are a little bit more complicated, sometimes a page can serve as both a landing page and as a link in the conversion path from other pages stream to it, more details about this formula and specific samples can be found on his book.

Viral Marketing Formula

Where:

Custs = Initial set of costumers
K = Invitations send by each new customer * Conversions %
ct = Viral cycle time
t = time

David Skok and Stan Reiss

This is one of the online marketing formulas I liked the most, it was developed by David Skok VC at Matrix Partners and writer of the Blog www.forentrepreneurs.com and Stan Reiss General Partner at Matrix  Partners.

This formula is great to understand how fast a viral message or product can travel over the Internet, when the “viral cycle time” of a campaign/product is short, (1 or 2 days) an initial group of 10 customers can reach almost 30.000.000 users in 20 days. It is worth to see this analysis and understand deeper this concept. The complete explanation of this formula along with spreadsheets where you can make your own calculations can be found at forenterpreneurs.

Finally here you can find some useful calculators from Bplans that you can use to when creating your next eMail marketing or PPC campaign

eMail Marketing Return of Investment Calculator

Pay Per Click Return of Investment Calculator

Conversion Rate Calculator

This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, founder of Syndikomm; an online marketing firm based in New York city and specialized in multicultural markets. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano

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HubSpot is probably the best online marketing company around.  It is actually not an online marketing company itself, what they really do is offer a software for other companies helping to facilitate these companies ability to “get found” and optimize  inbound marketing initiatives. The company was founded by two smart guys – Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shan. I believe Brian is more the business man and Dharmesh is more the technical, analytic thinker, (but that’s just my perception), I wish I had the good luck to already know them both.

I don’t want to spend much time describing the story of HubSpot that you can find in their recently released book called Inbound Marketing: Get found using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (which by the way is a really great book).  Instead, I want to focus on all the strategies they have used to promote their business and literally reach the masses.

These are some of the achievements of HubSpot just to name few

1. Dharmesh Shah ranks 1,231 on Twitter with 15,928 followers, and Brian Halligan ranks 9,236 with 3,552 followers. Total users on Twitter to date are 5,729,908.

2. HubSpot owns the following GRADER websites, that have become very popular within the SEO, SEM community:

• Twitter Grader – a website that helps you find high-impact Twitter users in your industry and identify how influential your tweets are.
• Press Release Grader – a press release evaluation software, all you have to do is upload your press release and receive a feedback in real time on different issues.
• Facebook Grader – a tool to help you evaluate the strength of your corporate or personal Facebook page, measuring Facebook fans over time and giving you a score based on the 49,399 pages that have been graded up to day.
• Website Grader – an evaluation tool to review your website based on different SEO topics and offer recommendations for improvements. I believe this is the most popular of these four grader sites with more than 1,000,000 pages graded so far and more than 50,000 incoming links (combined) from search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
• Gobbledygook grader , which evaluates your written content and checks for use of gobbledygook, jargon, clichés and over-used, hype-filled words.  They developed this tool along with David Meerman Scott when they realized how over used some terms like “unique” are in press releases, making the terms less effective over time.
• Other grader websites include: personality grader and action grader

3. They also own www.inboundmarketing.com an educational community of 10,000 marketing professionals offering classes and inbound marketing certification. I’m currently working towards my certification and will hopefully be certified in January. The site is a great resource for professionals in the online marketing field and has become a true hub for these professionals.  One missing feature is a search capability of users by location or interest, although I am hoping and assuming that HubSpot is working on this now.

4. Currently, HubSpot has more than 2,000 clients using their software to build traffic, leads and sales and has won innumerable awards including W3 Awards and Interactive Media Awards.

5. The corporate website is www.hubspot.com which has one of the most compelling blogs in online marketing with 15,940 feedburner subscribers and many more users connected to their feeds. The site drives organic traffic for more than 1,682 keywords according to www.semrush.com including very competitive terms such as “Internet Marketing,” which alone accounts for more than 25% of all organic traffic.  Additionally, HubSpot has one of the most successful online marketing campaigns ever and they are bidding on more than 500 keywords currently.

6. HubSpot also owns www.hubspot.tv which is part of the Blog.  The website is a weekly video podcast covering all the inbound marketing news of the week including social media, blogging, SEO and more. The program is presented by Karen Rubin @karenrubin and Mike Volpe @mvolpe. Episodes can also be downloaded as podcasts on itunes. http://itunes.hubspot.tv.  There are currently more than 70 episodes available.

7. HubSpot currently has one of the largest groups in marketing on LinkedIn, their group rate #13 for the term “Marketing” with more than 40,000 members.

8. Dharmesh also owns www.onstartups.com a project he started while studying at MIT.  The website is another helpful Blog for entrepreneurs offering lots of advice and good information. The site drives organic traffic from more than 1,200 keywords including the competitive term “startup,” which provides more than 7% of the total organic traffic.

9. Dharmesh also owns the OnStartups group on LinkedIn, which ranks at the top for the keyword “startup” on LinkedIn, and has more than 117,000 members. OnStartups ranks fourth in the entire listing of LinkedIn groups…  An amazing achievement – and a great tool for HubSpot to leverage as it connects with entrepreneurs looking for help with their online marketing efforts.

10. HubSpot has also a strong presence on youtube, with 130 videos viewed more than 250.000 times.  They currently have more than 500 subscribers to their channel http://www.youtube.com/user/HubSpot

How have they achieved such amazing success? Well… HubSpot has done so many things right I’ll try to briefly describe some of their most important achievements here.

Content Generation

The Blog at HubSpot is perhaps one of the most compelling and interesting Blogs focused on online marketing.  HubSpot is one of the few online marketing companies that have several dedicated people generating exceptional content through blogs, social networks and their own content management system.  They have uncommon titles for their marketing professionals like “Blog Managers,” “Customer Success Managers” and “Lead Generation Expert.”

Active social network presence

Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shan are active participants in the “socialsphere” and “blogosphere” but they are not the only ones. Virtually all employees are graded on a regular basis by their “web reach” or the number of members on the community that they can influence online. Employees at HubSpot are driven to be digital citizens of the world running.  I have found Blogs, comments, and articles from HubSpot employees virtually everywhere I look online for “Internet Marketing” or related topics.

HubSpot runs online marketing campaigns in Facebook on a regular basis, (actually that was where where I found them) targeting marketing professionals through this social community.  HubSpot does a great job of identifying prospect bio-personas and creating the text as well as the look and feel that matches their interest.

Effective conversion strategies

Believe me on this one, the people at HubSpot will do everything humanly possible to convert you on your initial visit to the website into a prospective client.  They have developed all kinds of tools, and techniques to grab relevant data from users visiting their domains.  These are just few of the strategies the people at HubSpot use to get your attention – and I have to say they are doing a really good job.

1. Free trial
   Of course HubSpot offers a free trial of their software platform. Here http://www.hubspot.com/free-trial you just leave minimal information and you can access for a limited time (7 days) the same tools and resources they use to promote their “Inbound Marketing” concept.
2. Free white papers and kits
   I don’t how many marketing kits, ebooks and white papers HubSpot has created, but I do know that the quality of these documents is outstanding.  HubSpot distributes and exposes them in strategic places and domains, especially on their own grader sites where people are already interested in getting marketing information and inside knowledge.
3. Live and archive webinars
   HubSpot presents webinars on a regular basis; focusing on a variety of topics in marketing online, which grab the attention of a large number of professionals in the industry. Some of the webinars are really good, but unfortunately not all of them are interesting. Once the webinar is over they place the webinar on their site permanently for future download so the webinar can continue to generate interest and buzz for a while.
4. Email collection on their grader sites
   When you visit their website grader for instance, HubSpot asks for your email in order to send you the final report.  HubSpot communicates on a regular basis (about two times per month) with people who have used their tools allowing HubSpot to nurturing prospective clients over time who may not be ready to buy at the moment, but are interested in what HubSpot has to offer. These grader tools are becoming very popular with a lot of online marketing professional already using them. I have used more sophisticated ones, but for a free tool, the HubSpot grader sites are excellent resources.

Great SEO practices

If any company knows about SEO, it is HubSpot.  They have mastered the techniques of “In Site” and “Off Site” optimization, from information architecture, coding to community building and link popularity building.  If you want to understand better how HubSpot thinks, buy the “inbound marketing book” today and take a look, it speaks for itself.  It took me just two days to finish it because of how interesting the material is and how easy it is to understand (not to technical) so average readers can digest it easily.

From keywords used on the URL, keyword density, information architecture, coding language, titles, metatags descriptions, and more… HubSpot has put all pieces carefully together to make organic findability easy. Between December 2008 and November 2009, HubSpot was able to rank 1,063 new keywords in Google alone.  This is an outstanding result from an SEO perspective.  “If HubSpot were paying for all the traffic they get organically, they would be paying around $80,000 dollars per month.”

Excellent Lead Management and Lead Nurturing

The people at HubSpot understand how visitors to their site are at a different stages in the buying cycle.  HubSpot has a sophisticated lead management system where they track and follow up with prospective clients they are already in contact with. They manage their leads by source, time and so on.  Most importantly, HubSpot measures their conversions per type of lead.  At HubSpot, not all leads are treated equally, a common mistake for companies that have these kind of programs in place. In the inbound marketing book they talk extensively about lead generation and lead management.  If HubSpot applies what they said in the book about creating a well optimized landing page, their “untargeted traffic” should convert at 5% and targeted campaigns should convert at 50% making their growth exponential.

Web 2.0 oriented sites

Internet 2.0 is all about sharing, distribution and collaboration. HubSpot understand that well, they have created strong participating communities such as the Inbound Marketing University.  They have also established strong relationships with prospects and existing clients through different media channels such as e-mail, twitter, and feeds. HubSpot is expert in creating spaces for conversations and incentive community participation.  All of their sites are clean, easy to read and loaded with connection and sharing tools to establish conversations with visitors and prospective clients.

Excellent PR strategy and content distribution

1. Social News
   HubSpot actively participates in social news sites such as www.digg.com just go here and see how many articles they have sent over time. Some of these articles have pretty high number of diggs such as “Now, Any Business Can Tap 53 Million Facebook Users (For Free)” with 552 diggs.
2. Social discovery sites presence
   HubSpot is present in social discovery sites such as www.stumbleupon.com.  Several of the internet properties of HubSpot appear on stumbleupon and are the favorites sites of thousands of users around the globe.
3. RSS feeds everywhere
   HubSpot has RSS feeds everywhere on their site along with direct links to share their information on the most popular social discovery sites, social news sites, social bookmark sites and community sites including twitter, facebook and linkedin.

Successful paid marketing campaign

1. Google
   HubSpot runs more than 500 ads in Google – bidding on more than 500 keywords, including “SEO tool” that generates more than 10% of HubSpot’s paid traffic.  This particular campaign leads the user to http://www.hubspot.com/trial. Other landing pages for their campaigns include http://www.hubspot.com/seo-for-lead-generation-kit/ and http://www.hubspot.com/AdWords-Internet-Marketing-ebook, very clean, straight forward and well optimized campaigns.
2. Facebook
   Aside from their group on Facebook, HubSpot also runs a great advertising campaign for professionals in marketing.  This campaign was the first one I saw about them and it immediately drew my attention, after that I’ve been intrigued with HubSpot and its products.

Absolute control on their domain properties.

The guys at HubSpot add value to the domain properties and treat their sites like real assets (they don’t even link to their social groups or store books by using third party links).  For example, HubSpot promotes the website www.inboundbook.com to promote their book on Amazon, and if you go to this page you will be forwared to https://www.amazon.com/dp/0470499311?tag=hubspot-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0470499311&adid=0KFA9WZWBF6M6Z8RYF41&.  This approach is important for several reasons:

1. If Amazon decided tomorrow to remove the book from its store, or change the URL where the book is currently located, all the link popularity built around it will be lost.  By promoting www.inboundbook.com instead, HubSpot has absolute control on where they are directing users.  If the destination URL changes tomorrow on Amazon, no problem, with one line they can update perhaps hundreds of links that otherwise would have become broken links.
2. The second advantage of doing this is that they can measure the traction and buzz the book is gaining.  By promoting www.inboundbook.com instead the direct link to Amazon allows HubSpot to track the users, information that otherwise would be available just for Amazon. This is extremely important because this kind of analysis can lead to the discovery of new potential markets, for instance if the people at HubSpot noticed a sudden increase in visitors from London to the Amazon store (through their domain), they can recognize that something is going on there and generate new strategies to target this new market.
3. By having control of the link popularity built around the book, HubSpot can extend their web reach.  If tomorrow HubSpot decided to publish the book online or amplify the content in the book on a website, they can use this domain and immediately benefit from all the backlinks created around it.  HubSpot does this with all their groups such as www.facebook.hubspot.com, which points to http://www.facebook.com/hubspot.

In this article I attempted to lay out how a real online advertising campaign and strategy should be done.  It is not just a matter of having a good website and a great idea, you need to know who and where your competitors are, what are they doing online, how much they are spending and what strategies they are using to compete with you. The main difference between the brick and mortar world and the online world is that online it is not as easy to identify your competitors and measure their size, just because you don’t see them it doesn’t mean they don’t exist.  In the offline world you know starbucks is big because you see their coffee shops on every corner.  On the internet it is much more difficult to identify your competitors.  Everything is virtual and some big players don’t even have storefronts, when they realize they have a competitor it would be probably too late… if you’re not convinced yet, checkout the stories of Blockbuster/Netflix or Amazon/Barnes & Noble.

A good online presence today requires more than SEO, it involves active participation on social sites, social news sites, social groups, social discovery sites and much more. Check out what HubSpot has done and learn from them, this is a real, well planned and executed online marketing campaign.

This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, founder of Syndikomm; an online marketing firm based in New York city and specialized in multicultural markets. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano

Recently domain age was added to the algorithm of Google and is one of the many factors they consider now to rank websites at the top of its search engine. But what is domain age?, why is important? How can be check? And how this factor can be improved? Those are common questions that I’ll try to address on the following post regarding domain age of a website.

Domain age is a quantifiable value assigned by search engines based on these three factors:

1. Registration date
2. Expiration date
3. Frequency of changes over time.

Google’s patent “Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data” filed on 03/31/2005 implies that Google does look into domain registration (1), renewal dates (2) and frequency of changes over time (3).

1. Registraton Date
   Well-established sites have old domain names, so by reverse logics, an old domain should mean that the site is well established. Well-establishes companies were among the first one to luck their domain names, while new domain means companies are relatively new or can be used for spam or other purposes. The longer the domain name has been around the better for search engines.
2. Expiraion Date
   Google and other search engines like to see domains that have been registered for extended periods of time as this shows a commitment to the domain name. It also is an indicator that this website is not a temporary spam site. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.
3. Frequency of changes over time.
   Old domains that have been registered for a long time ago not necessarily mean they have better information. Domain names registered long time ago that have been parked for a while could be considered much less important than new domains with high activity and updated information; that’s why Google consider the frequency of changes over time as one of the factors to weight your domain age.

How can my domain age be improved?

As opposite as many believe the domain age factor on your website could be improved and help you rank higher on search engines. As we have seen the domain age is mainly the combination of three factors, one of them fix and two of them variable. The date when you register your domain name cannot be modified of course, is like your date of birth, you cannot just simple get older even if you try very hard, but there are two variables that can be help you get a better domain age, one is extending the expiration date of your website, so the next time you register your domain don’t choose 1 year, but at least 5 or 10 if possible, that shows Google you are really commit to your business and perhaps you can get a better grade, the other variable that can be improved is to apply regular changes to your site, the more updated information you have available the better your domain age will be. So if the registration date of your site is a disadvantage make sure the information of your site is current and is being updated on a regular basis.

How can I check my domain age?

The simplest way is to go to any Whois service and review the date when the domain was registered, I personally like Whois or Network Solutions there are also some simpler pages where just give you this information on a clean and interface, such as domainage.us or SEOmoz and if you want to check domain age but also the domain age of your competition you can use this practical domain age checker tool where you can check several domains at once,  please keep in mind that all these sites just check how long your domain has been registered but it doesn’t give you a real interpretation of your domain age as Google understands it.

This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, founder of Syndikomm; an online marketing firm based in New York city and specialized in multicultural markets. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano

Understanding backlinks… What is link popularity?, Why is Important?

Link popularity is the term used in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to describe the popularity of your site on the Internet, the more links your site has from other sites, the most popular is considered by search engines. This concept, first introduced by Google revolutionized the way websites are ranking on the web, this discovery was a huge success from Google which algorithm became so popular and precise than in a matter of years became the most popular search engine and one of the biggest companies in the world. Link popularity is often associated with PageRank which is a rating scale from Google where they qualify sites from 1 to 10 based on the probabilities of your site being found, off course Link Popularity is a big component of it, but not the only one.

Right now the content in your page and the link popularity are considered the main two factors search engines considered when they decide to place your site on top of the results, that’s why besides of having a great website it is important that you also have a pretty good amount of qualified backlinks to your site; content come first and I assure you backlinks will come after.

I already have a website, how do I check if other pages are linking back to me?

If you want to determine how many backlinks you page has, you can do so directly on the search engines, it is actually a simple process but is different depending the search engine you are using. I’ll concentrate in Google, Yahoo and Bing for being the most popular but virtually every search engine has similar tools.

How do I check backlinks in Google?

If you want to check your backlinks on Google all you have to do is go to www.google.com and on the search field put: link:yourcompany.com it is not necessary to use www or http:// just make sure you don’t live any spaces after the “:” and the URL of your site.

How do I check backlinks in Bing?

If you want to check your backlinks in Bing all you have to do is go to www.bing.com and on the search fields put: inbody:yourcompany.com you can use www or http:// when you make your search, but keep in mind that all of them could give you very different results; yahoo consider links independent if they differ on the prefix “www’ or “http://”, the results are based on an “exact match” criteria, Google doesn’t have that problem and they assume that even if the prefix change the link points to the same website; you can also leave a blank space after “:” and the results won’t be affected, something that for Google is a problem.

How do I check backlinks in Yahoo?

Yahoo Site Explorer

If you want to check your backlins in Yahoo all you have to do is go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com and on the field “explore url” put your url, once you get the results make sure you click on the “inlinks” button and not on the “pages” button, you can use www or http:// when you make your search, but keep in mind that all of them could give you very different results; yahoo consider links independent if they differ on the prefix “www’ or “http://”, the results are based on an “exact match” criteria, Google doesn’t have that problem and they assume that even if the prefix change the link points to the same website.

Now that you did your homework you may find weird results… for instance you may say that on the backlinks results you can see links from your own website… well this problem have several explanations which I’ll try to describe next.

Backlinks misinterpreted.
Why when I check backlinks on Google, Yahoo or Bing I see results from my own domain?

This could be due to several factors, the most common one is that when you or someone in your behalf created your website they used “absolute” and not “relative” links to build it. Absolute links are links that use a complete url on the address, absolute links always include the prefix “http://” so search engines interpreted this is as an external link even tough in reality is an internal link. The other possible explanation is that even though the link is pointing to a page on the same domain could be on a subdomain or could be part of a different database if you are using some king of CMS application. If that’s the case the only way to link from one part of the page to another is to use “absolute” links. The links that Google, Bing or Yahoo don’t considered external are the ones using “relative” links, those links never used prefix such as ‘http://” or “www” they just point to another directory within your own domain and always start with the name of the subdirectory or just the name of the file if it is on the same root.

Ghost Backlinks
Google, Bing and Yahoo list some pages that supposedly have referral links to my page, when I go to those pages to check where the link is coming I can’t find anything.

This problem has also several explanations, first at all the link could be on an image not on a text, so please make sure you revise all the images as well by rollover the with the mouse and review on the status bar at the bottom of your browser where the link of the image is pointing to. The second problem is that the link existed there for sometime but it is not there anymore, this could happened if for instance you are running an online campaign on an Ad Network; whenever your ad shows up this link is registered as a backlink for search engines even if it is not permanent; usually these ads rotate with other advertisers’ ads so if it happened that you went there to check the backlink where another ad was running you would probably missed it.

Beyond the basics of Backlinks

Now that you know how to check the backlinks to your page and how to interpret them, let’s move a little bit beyond that.

What is you want to check the backlinks of Google, Yahoo and Bing all at the same time?

Submit Express - Back Link Checker

Well, if you want to do that, there are some tools that can help you with the task, no need to go search engine by search engine and doing that manually. All you have to do is go to http://www.submitexpress.com/linkpop/ and put the url you want to check. The nice thing of this tool is that compares side to side the backlinks from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Alltheweb and Altavista and also display information about the link popularity of other popular sites so you can get an idea where you are in terms of link popularity on the online world. You can click on the results below each search engine and you will be taken to the search engine itself populated with the results, I have to clarify that this feature doesn’t work so well, in Bing and Yahoo it will show you the results of a regular search, but at lease you will get an idea in terms of quantity.

Backlink Watch

If you want to get more detailed information of from where your backlinks are coming I recommend going directly to the search engines as I explained previously or use tools similar to this one http://www.backlinkwatch.com which gives you a pretty decent list of sites pointing to you including the “anchor’ text being used by the link. The other nice information this tool gives you is the OBL (Outbound Links), which means total external links found on backlink giving webpage; keep in mind that if a site linking to you has so many outbound links to other pages it may look more than a link farm than a reputable website, in those cases those cases the links are less valuable and surely not desirable.

On coming blogs I’ll be discussing

1. What is the anchor text of a backlink and why is important?
2. Why is important the PageRank of websites linking to you?
3. How to properly build my link popularity, avoid websites with High OBL and low PageRank.
4. Advance tools to check backlinks

This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, founder of Syndikomm; an online marketing firm based in New York city and specialized in multicultural markets. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano

Health Care Video Challenge

The team of President Barack Obama created this interesting initiative to get people involve on the Health Insurance Reform, they created some kind of “video challenge contest” where people were able to submit a 30 sec original video about this topic with the option of being selected for a national TV broadcast; the contest were open to citizens residing in the United States and they were asked to submit their entries through the youtube; here are most of the entries (150+) that were sent before the deadline on 10-18/2009; the 20 finalist can be seen here. The campaign were supported also for an email campaign were people registered to the Barak Obama site were asked to vote for the videos in the following categories: Impact, message and creativity. The winner video by popular vote will be broadcast soon on National Television; the public votes were not the only ones responsible of selecting the video that will be air, but also a specialized committee that was put together for this project, part of these committee are the following people:

David Plouffe
David Plouffe was the campaign manager for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. After the election President Obama praised Plouffe for embodying “the entire spirit of the campaign,” and acknowledged his role in contributing to the campaign’s community-building and its willingness to embrace grassroots input.

Tim Kaine
Tim Kaine is the Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Prior to entering politics, Governor Kaine practiced law in Richmond for 17 years, representing people who had been denied housing opportunities because of their race or disability.

Jen O’Malley Dillon
Jen O’Malley Dillon is the Executive Director of the Democratic National Committee. Before joining the DNC, Dillon served as the Battleground States Director for the Obama campaign and has spent the past decade working in Democratic politics throughout the country.

Patrick Murphy
Congressman Patrick Murphy represents Pennsylvania’s 8th District in the U.S. House of Representatives. Congressman Murphy is an Iraq war veteran, former West Point professor and criminal prosecutor, and was the first Iraq war veteran elected to Congress. As a Congressman, Patrick Murphy has worked to ensure access to health care for low-income children across the country.

Michelle M.
Michelle is a medical student and OFA Community Organizer in Arizona. A single mother, she left her job and decided to go back to school to become a doctor because she is passionate about health care.

Courtney S.
Courtney, a native of Savannah, Georgia, is a junior at Shaw University. She is a Political Science major and a Presidential Scholar, as well as an OFA Community Organizer. She plans to attend law school upon graduation with aspirations of becoming a civil rights lawyer.

Erin T.
Erin is currently a senior at the University of New Hampshire, where she is currently working on her senior thesis while also volunteering as an on-campus OFA community organizer. During the 2008 presidential primary, Erin was one of the top student volunteers on campus and worked closely with the field organizers at her university. During the general election she worked as a field organizer in Flint, Michigan.

will.i.am
will.i.am is the frontman and producer of the multi-platinum musical group the Black Eyed Peas. His video Yes We Can, which featured footage of President Obama interspersed with celebrity appearances, inspired millions during last year’s campaign and received an Emmy Award in 2008.

Seth MacFarlane
Seth MacFarlane is an animator, comedian, and director best-known for creating the animated sitcom Family Guy. MacFarlane is also the co-creator/executive producer/voice actor on the FOX animated series American Dad! and The Cleveland Show

Kate Walsh
Kate Walsh is a television and film actress currently starring as Dr. Addison Forbes Montgomery on the ABC drama Private Practice, a spin-off of the hit show Grey’s Anatomy. Walsh recently completed production on the supernatural thriller Legion.

Rosario Dawson
An accomplished actress, singer and producer, Rosario Dawson is best known for her roles in Grindhouse, Rent, and Kids. She is the co-founder of Voto Latino, which promotes voting by leveraging celebrity voices, new technology, and youth working to enact positive change.

Olivia Wilde
Olivia Wilde is an actress best-known for her roles on Fox’s medical drama House and The O.C. She recently appeared in the film Year One with Jack Black and Michael Cera.

Dulé Hill
Dulé Hill is an actor who played Jed Bartlet’s personal aide on the NBC drama television series The West Wing. He also appears on the USA Network comedy-drama Psych, and was nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series in 2002.

John Cho
John Cho is an actor known for his roles in the films American Pie and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. He was last seen playing Lieutenant Hiraku Sulu in Star Trek, and is currently appearing in the ABC series Flash Forward.

Brandon Routh
Brandon Routh is an actor known for playing the title role in Superman Returns. He has appeared in television shows including Gilmore Girls, Cold Case, and Will and Grace.

One of the top 20 finalist on the Health Care Video Challenge Contest

Just to make things even better the “Health Reform Video Challege” invites people who want to contribute and pay for the expenses of broadcasting the winner. The donation page can be access directly on this page; or it is display to you once you rate all videos on this page http://my.barackobama.com/VideoChallenge

All 20-finalist videos have more than 60,000 views in youtube already; this is going to be the first time in History where a TV commercial made from the government will be broadcast on National Television by public decision and support.

If this is Barack Obama’s idea of a “participative government”… welcome anytime.

I got an email today announcing the winner of this campaign, the winner video was “I Deserve Health Care” from Eric Hurt, you can see the winner video here below, more than 1,000 entries were submited acording the Organizing For America organization.

This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, founder of Syndikomm; an online marketing firm based in New York city and specialized in multicultural markets. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano

The Challenge Zoni Language Centers:

Zoni is the biggest ESL School in New York metropolitan area, which includes Queens, Manhattan and New Jersey. Some of the main competitors of Zoni are multinational language schools with thousands more of students and resources around the globe such as EF or Study Group. The increasing competition in the local area forced Zoni to move its marketing to a new arena… the online marketing, locally Zoni was very strong but online competitors were very strong and were taking away business from Zoni more and more, when I started to work with Zoni 75% of their business used to come from agents around the world, so the capacity of Zoni to attract students directly was very limited and its core business was depending exclusively on these agents, by nature the relationship which agents is not stable since they are permanently in demand for better deals with new partners. In 2006 Zoni has almost no presence in search engines, the organic ranking in Google was just a couple of terms and none of them were ranking on the first place; today Zoni ranks for more than 100 keywords in search engines, a lot of them on the first place in all Google, Yahoo and MSN, the daily traffic on the website went from 567 visitors per day average to more than 2,500, four times more. The ranking achieved by 2008 can be verified here

Here below i described step by step what i did to tripled the number of leads, students registered and how i ranked more than 100 terms related to Zoni business in 24 months.

My Approach: I improve the content and the density of the keywords that Zoni were trying to rank for. In order to increase this keyword density and the general content of the page I applied different strategies:

1. Specialized Content: Zoni have campuses in three major cities in North America but they used to have just one site where they were talking about all of them, specialized information of each campuses were found under the menu “locations”, an internal page with no ranking so ever. The first thing I did was divide the site in three different mini sites and dedicate each one of them to the specific local content of that campus and that city. That change not just helped students find the information quicker and easier, but also helped us to increase the content of every section and the page in general at least by three times. Every one of the sections were populated with specific information about each campus and each city, just that change along helped Zoni to increase rankings where people were searching for specific regional information on search engines. Queries made through Google, Yahoo or MSN targeting schools in New York, Miami or Vancouver started to appear for the first time. There are the three mini-sites:

1. www.zoni.com/english/miami
2. www.zoni.com/english/newyork
3. www.zoni.com/english/vancouver

2. Social networking site for students: I created a social network for students where they could write about their experiences at Zoni and on every city in general, this site updated at least 4 times per year have increased the content of the page on at least 100% after two years of being in place. This mini “Social Site” included certain tools for students such as calendar of events, pictures, articles, classifieds and news. The site helped increase the traffic to www.zoni.com as well as the ranking in search engines, the private social network for Zoni can be seen here: www.studentslife.zoni.com

Social Site For Students at Zoni

3. Ecommerce Platform: The ecommerce I implemented for Zoni in 2005 helped them to increase related English keywords on the page by adding all courses and books of every campus. Currently some of the pages ranking high in search engines come from the ecommerce website itself. The ecommerce site also allowed students to pay from overseas without the need of an intermediary agency, which helped Zoni to capitalize last minute opportunities and minimize the cost of student’s enrollment by getting rid of commissions.

Zoni Language Centers Online Store

I created an aggressive online marketing campaign to recruit local and international students

1. PPC Campaigns in Google, Yahoo and Bing: I used Google, the biggest worldwide search engine to advertise Zoni courses and schools, I advertised on search results as well on other websites associated to Google [Ad Network]; the campaign was created in 15 different languages and was permanently monitored to intelligent improve the performance of every AD group, some of the campaigns went from less that 1% in conversion rate to 10% and 15%. Besides Google I also used other major search engines such as Yahoo and Bing. The campaign in Yahoo was particularly interesting since I used the educational section of Yahoo called Studylink to add an editorial profile of Zoni where international students (specially from Asia) were looking for courses and schools in United States, this one was like an special king of campaign combining affiliate marketing and search engine marketing.

Zoni Traffic Statistics - Comparing May 2007 with Sep 2008, Click To Zoom In

2. Affiliate marketing campaigns for Europe and Latin America: I helped Zoni to identify strategic partners on the industry that were able to feature Zoni as one of the favorite English as a second language schools in North America. These associated partners were specialized sites in education that were ranking well in search engines so when students landed on their pages and requested information about English studies in New York, Miami or Vancouver; Zoni was the one receiving and closing those leads. This was a typical affiliate marketing/lead generation campaign, some of the affiliated sites we used were: www.learn4good.com, www.abroadlanguages.com, and FFP Media (www.expo-studyabroad.com)

Zoni Profile Page in Abroad Languages

3. Social Network for Zoni Students: I opened a Zoni’s Facebook group that was heavily promoted in all printed material, website and newsletters, that site along were generating intensive traffic to Zoni’s website and became a point of communication between students of all campus [New York, Miami and Vancouver].

Zoni Language Centers in Facebook

4. Viral marketing campaign in Youtube: I created 13 different videos featuring Zoni campuses in all cities, these videos were uploaded to youtube, each one of them using their own keywords on their own language, these videos were linked to Zoni’s website and Zoni’s Facebook group. Quickly youtube became one of the most important site referrals to www.zoni.com. I used the current video that existed at the school, produced and directed by the marketing coordinator but its quality was very poor; even though this limitation important quality traffic were redirected to Zoni’s website, currently more than 20,000 people have streamed Zoni infomercial videos in youtube. http://www.youtube.com/zonilanguage

Zoni Video Channel in Youtube

5. Email campaigns for employees, agents, current and prospect students: I implemented a mass email system to maintain permanent contact with employees, agents, current and prospect students, these newsletters sent on regular basis helped to drive traffic back to www.zoni.com. Welcome and thank you letters to students after international education fairs gave Zoni a sense of professionalism and quality. These campaigns helped Zoni as well to run specific seasonal promotions to students that at some point contacted the school but never registered.

Zoni Newsletters

I automate some internal sales procedures and facilitate student registrations by Internet

4. Lead Management System: Zoni went from 4.000 leads received per year to almost 20.000 in less than 2 years; this volume increased as a result of the better ranking of the page, navigability and “findability” become overwhelming and Zoni and at some point they were loosing business for its delay to reply to students on a quickly and accurate manner. What I did was to implement a lead management system to help automate some of the communication between Zoni staff and students. This lead management system facilitated the assignment and control of these leads and also helped to centralize all the information on a single database. As a consequence, reporting became very easy; for the first time since Zoni was founded they were able to graphically visualize market patterns in terms of leads received, conversions and number of request by region or per campus. With this system Zoni was able to evacuate five times more leads without increasing the number of employees, the system implemented was Open Leads, a cool, easy to manage software made by a company called Open Companies in USA.

5. New “progressive” registration form: Online registration was extremely poor when I started at Zoni, one of the problems they had was that the registration form was a long boring list of 60 questions on a single page; where visitors visualized these long questionnaire in one shoot they were just very lazy to fill it out and leave. What I did was to create a progressive registration form with few questions on every step; that way the registration form became very user friendly and registrations went from 1 or 2 per day to 20 per day in average. The other advantage was that because I were keeping all registrations on a single database Zoni was able to communicate with students at a later time if for some reason they never showed up at the school, before the registrations were being received by email on text format. The system also allowed Zoni to run reports of student registered by country and other crucial data to understand its market and student demographics.

Zoni New Registration Form

I deployed a sophisticated online tracking system to monitor not just the traffic to the page but also the performance of every campaign

I implemented an analytics application to track traffic, conversions, usability of the site and more. I separately created tracking systems for the most important campaigns to individually analyze its performance over time. The important thing of these measures is not only those have given Zoni a very overview and understanding of its site but also have helped them to make improvements and plan ahead based on the intelligence analytics of this data, for the fist time Zoni were able to get rid of marketing campaigns not performing well and invest heavily on those maximizing the return of the investment. I was able to triple the traffic at www.zoni.com from 567 visitors per day in May 2006 to more than 2,500 visitors per day in October 2008. I also improved the conversion rate on every single online marketing campaign, leads received, conversions and most important the overall number of international students registered; When I started at Zoni they used to register 80 students per month by Internet referral, when I left they were registering 240 students per month in by Internet referral, three times more what they used to.

This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, founder of Syndikomm; an online marketing firm based in New York city and specialized in multicultural markets. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano