MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

A few years ago the idea of dedicating a landing page for a certain segment of traffic to a website was a novel idea. Then, with the rise of Google, PPC started becoming more popular.

When that happened, marketers realized that if they made keyword-specific landing pages, they achieved better results from the traffic they were paying for.

Marketers started to realize that they could make custom landing pages for other channels as well, like display ads and email campaigns.

There are other channels that most marketers haven’t capitalized on yet with a targeted landing page. One of those is organic search.

Take a look at the data on SEO landing pages in the following chart from the MarketingSherpa 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – SEO Edition. For advanced marketers, SEO landing pages is an extremely effective tactic, but for the rest, it’s left untouched.  Read more…

Earlier this week, Google formally announced the completion of its new web indexing system cleverly named Caffeine. According to Google, Caffeine provides 50% fresher results for web searches than its last index and is the largest collection of web content the search giant has ever offered.

Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.

– Carrie Grimes, Software Engineer, Google

This is great for those of us who use Google to search and find relevant results to our most common inquiries. Results will become timelier, more social and rely more heavily on keyword strings, ultimately providing more useful results as newer content can be indexed much quicker and from a much larger base of sites. Read more…

If you’re joining us for this afternoon’s SEO live optimization web clinic, you already know the topic is way too broad for one hour.

Learning the fundamentals of search engine optimization is only step one. Keeping up with the frequent changes, learning and testing the latest best practices, and steering clear of the mountains of misinformation? That’s a full-time effort.

If you’ve been around the block with SEO, you’re already a regular reader of the following sites and tools. Still, when it comes to reliable SEO info, these resources consistently rise to the top of my shortlist.

10 SEO resources you’ll want to bookmark

• SEOMOZ
• SEOBook
• Search Engine Roundtable
• SearchEngineWatch
• SearchEngineLand
• SearchEngineGuide
  
• TopRank Blog’s Resources list and Big List of SEO Blogs
• HubSpot and Website Grader tool

That’s it? Why not an exhaustive list of 400+ SEO sites?

A few reasons: First, TopRank already has a megalist; it’s right up there (thanks, Lee!). Second, from the sources above, you can branch out to any number of free and paid tools and augment your own list based on your experience level, needs, and preferences. And third, if you really have time to regularly read more than a dozen sites on SEO, more power to you and your Google Reader and/or RSS feeds.

Feel free to add your own favorite SEO resources in the comments section.

And check back with the blog as we’ll be following up today’s SEO clinic with responses to the live audience Q&A, additional resources and specific articles, plus our clinic contest winners — some lucky marketers will not only have their pages optimized, they’ll also win seats at our Landing Page Optimization Training Tour.