Reaching the Hispanic Market with Search

Whether you are a U.S. Hispanic advertising agency, a busines owner, an entrepreneur, a web master or a consultant, the opportunities to educate this new multilingual and multicultural search engine marketing opportunity are here in a big way.

Considering the following:

2002 Hispanics officially became the largest minority in the U.S

The $700 billion spending in 2006 is to reach $1 trillion by 2010

70% of the market has a home computer connected to hi-speed

Start Your Hispanic Search Engine Marketing Plan:

Research will be the key to marketing to this rising market.

New market = new strategies, don’t just layer your mainstream campaign model on top.

Keywords need to be well thought about in both english and spanish

Please, take the time to write your site in spanish, hire someone who can translate your current site.

Spanish keywords are very cheap for now! and have high traffic and great CTR.

Invest in the right people, time, money and technology to take your plan of action to the next level

You will need atleast 12 months to review true metrics, in order to apply real measurements

To be continued…

Choosing Domain Extensions – .com? .net? .biz? ..

Is a .com better then a .net or an .info or is owning a .info smart?

One of the largest advantages of securing a .com over the many other extensions is that users have adopted the .com out of habit when using type in traffic. Users assume that you have a.com extension, so… you could be losing out on a lot of type in traffic and if you do not control the .com version of your domain, then I would return to the drawing board and brainstorm a new domain.

You may say right….. I’m sticking to my guns, well… Go ahead and watch your other .com domain steal all your hard earned traffic.

Search engines will give equal weight to your .net, .info .biz so on… just as a .com, just that the information given previously is the disadvantage of not having capturing the .com of your domain.

For our global clients, we address having your extensWhat are the benefits of having a .com?What are the benefits of having a .com?ion in the same country i.e. if your located in the UK you would want to try to capture a .co.uk extension or if you’re in China using a .cn is beneficial while also hosting your site in the specific country will aid in securing additional country specific visitors.

When users search online the engines will ping data bases within the specific country. This is the advantage of hosting your site in the country specific, since engines aren’t going to ping initially, information across the pond but rather internally.

Now for .org, and .edu you have to be a non-profit outfit or an educational institution to use these domain extensions. What benefits can they bring if you can’t purchase them, well… they are terrific links from 

Constratus Search

Subdomain Part 2 The Fuzzy Area

I left off explaining how to use subdomains the positive way, now let me explain how you can negatively impact your subdomain strategy.

For example, shoe-talk.domain.com might be a subdomain containing a forum about shoes for a shoe site, shoe-blog.domain.com might be the location for that site’s blog and so on. Whenever there’s a part of your site that justifies having it’s own category, then it makes good sense to the search engines and your site visitors when it’s placed within its own subdomain.

Where sites get in the fuzzy area is when they add multiple keyword-rich subdomains with just a page or two of copy and link them back to their main domain. I.E., creating the subdomains newyork-realestate.domain.com, la-realestate.domain.com, and vegas-realestate.domain.com all with just a single page and a link back to www.domain.com would be frowned upon by search engines and quite possibly subject to penalties.

Some other cautions are in order. Taking into account that subdomains can be separated by a period—making possible certain combinations like keyword.keyword.domain.com—I recommend sticking to the more customary single level format: keyword.domain.com. Rarely do you see multilevel subdomains ranking for the more difficult generic searches.

Another possibility is to delimit your subdomain using dashes. For example keyword-keyword.domain.com is technically an available possibility as well. However, I don’t recommend using more than one dash in a subdomain, since it look like you’re keyword-stuffing to boost your rankings.

The moral of the story, is be smart when applying subdomains to your search strategy. Yes, subdomains will help in the long run, just work with someone who knows what their doing.

- B

Understanding Subdomains

Can subdomains actually help boost my rankings?

Yes, couple reasons, one it could lead to a higher CTR with
users by having the targeted keyword within the sub domain and having a rich keyword anchor text pointing towards you site are just some benefits of using smart sub domains.

Understanding what the heck subdomains are?

Basically subdomains are a way to organize your sites structure. Compare subdomains with subdirectory.

http://subdomain.yourdomain.com
http://www.yourdomain.com/subdirectory

For example, if your site is about realestate, you might typically have a section devoted to New York shoes in a subdirectory:
http://www.domain.com/newyork-realestate/

But, as an alternative, you could place it in a subdomain:
http://newyork-realestate.domain.com/

Remember, many users look at the URL when deciding on click through and also those little spider bots read left to right and using smart keyword phrasing in the subdomain will only help you, unless you go to far… to be continued…

- B

Constratus

The Big Three

So.. I’m going to rant about my passion for the big three, FYI the big three for me is Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing (PPC) and Web Analytics. I work for a well known web and mobile interactive firm called Constratus (www.constratus.com) and I’m responsible for what was mentioned before for our clients.

The industry has been making headlines for the last two years in leaps and bounds, I’m here to rant about what is going on in our industry and what I’m up to… so enjoy, if not email me and complain.
- B

Constratus