There are certain SEO strategies that are certainly goal oriented where you can get to a definitive end-point, but SEO as a whole is a constant ongoing process. Just like brushing your teeth, you do it ever day so you can keep yourself out from under the dentist's drill and not walk around with obvious stank breath.
SES Chicago is a little over a month away and will feature a very well respected online marketing veteran, Rand Fishkin. Rand is the CEO of SEO Moz and is a regular speaker in the international conference circuit. Earlier this week I caught up with Rand to get his insight on his sessions at Search Engine Strategies Chicago...
Matt McGee recently advised business owners not to hire SEOs who contact them and his stance has drawn some critical response. Let me tell you why I think Matt is absolutely right, you tell me whether you agree or not....
We are currently in a lean economy, and many businesses are feeling the crunch. But millions of people continue to flock to search engines every day to find, learn and purchase. The question then becomes, who will they find, what will they learn, and will they purchase from you or your competition?
If you have decided to hire a new SEO firm or consultant, permit me to suggest a simple way to go about it.
Being the perfect client may not be attainable, but you can certainly avoid being the bad client nobody wants. Here are seven things bad SEO clients do:...
How do you know that good SEOs from the bad ones? How can you tell those that know what they are doing from those that don't? It's not always easy, but there are some tell-tale signs. Here are seven things that bad SEOs do:...
Having a successful business and/or marketing campaign doesn't happen passively. It happens with deliberation and intent. The client cannot completely pass off responsibility for her success onto the SEO, but must take actions to ensure the SEO can be successful for her. Here are seven things good SEO clients do:
That relationship feeds into the long-term success of your business. How the SEO engages with you--the client--can make or break your success. Everybody wants a good skilled SEO. But you should also want one that's good at business as well. Here are seven things that good SEOs will do:
One of the things that concerns me most is when clients want to make sure that their competitors don't outpace them. They see competitors making headway but don't look deeply enough as to understand why. What is it that's allowing the competitors to gain so much ground? The first questions to ask is, what is the competitor doing beyond traditional SEO? How much time and money is being invested in their campaign?
Had an email this morning from Oliver Blake over at The Creare Group pointing me to a video on YouTube that stars Creare Group web designer Michael Angrave. Now normally, I wouldn't bother to click a link to a random video, but since Oliver claimed this video featured "The SEO Song," I thought I'd give it a try.
All it takes is a little creativity and out of the box thinking to turn your offline marketing into great online marketing.
Most investments don't give you an immediate return. SEO is no different. Many small business owners fail to understand that in order to succeed online a significant investment must be made. Gone are the days when you could throw up a website and expect to become an overnight success. Most of today's overnight business success are back by investments in time, money, resources or any combination of those.
From an SEO standpoint, the blogosphere is a goldmine. It provides the opportunity for marketers to build targeted natural "in-content" links which are not only great for increasing search engine rankings, but also can drive significant amounts of targeted traffic...
When conducting keyword research, it's important to look for both the deeper, mid- and long-tail variations of keywords - and also other adjacent ways of searching for similar things, such as related terms and synonyms. Last month, WordStream invited me to participate in a private beta of their Free Keyword Tool, which was released as a public beta this week. One of my favorite features is its ability to suggest related terms....
I'm not a proponent of rushing things through, but sometimes you just need to move things forward. When it comes to SEO, perfect may not cost you any more money, but it will cost you time, and time is a very valuable commodity.
Achieving internal buy-in, leveraging your existing assets, and understanding the unique challenges of outsourcing to a search engine optimization company....
"Best practices" is one of those dry as dust phrases that conjures up a consultant orating at you and a dozen co-workers sitting in uncomfortable chairs, each one wishing you could go back to work. If you missed Adam Audette's interesting article entitled, "SEO 'Best Practices' Are Bunk," you should pull up a chair and follow the link to read it. (I'll wait right here.) Adam alluded to my Do It Wrong Quickly concept as a way to do things right (if that isn't an oxymoron in itself), and on the whole I think he is on the right track....
So many times I see businesses investing thousands of dollars building their websites, tinkering with SEO improvements, or increasing/improving their content, only to neglect one of the most basic problems that may be a significant contributing factor in reducing their conversion rates: broken links.
Everybody wants that coveted first page placement, and many are actively fighting for it. But in reality, there is only so much that you can control. If your rankings drop, it may not be you, it may be them.
Search engines are constantly changing. These changes are mostly compromised of small, subtle shifts in how certain on and off page "signals" are interpreted and scored, or by the addition and/or removal of other ranking factors all together. In some instances more extreme algorithm or structural changes are made which can cause more than the usual upheaval of search results.
Understanding what causes typical loss of rankings can give us a better insight into sea of search engine ranking fluctuations. This insight can help you prevent serious long-term effects caused by a sudden drop in search engine rankings.
In SEO there are situations where a site is so bad that you pretty much need to burn it to the ground before you can build it right. Otherwise you're just adding SEO frosting onto a website dung pile.
Breadcrumbs are a nice little addition to a website that largely goes ignored but can be a significant help to those that like to use them. They make both usability and navigation easier. The primary purpose of breadcrumbs is to provide a visual indicator to your visitor where they are in the site and give them an easy link "back" to higher up categories.
We often come to the SEO table thinking that it's going to be relatively easy. While SEO isn't inordinately difficult (neither is changing the car oil, building a fence or painting a house) it is often time consuming and rarely ever "simple." What appears to be a small task on the surface can often become a much larger task once properly researched and considered. Like an iceberg, the bulk of SEO is behind the scenes and requires hours upon hours of labor.
Most companies stop their website development once the site is developed, and then move into marketing mode. The website becomes another product they have to market, rather than building a website that is the marketing vehicle for their products and services. We talk about website promotion quite a bit, which we understand is the process of getting the site visibility on the search engines. But getting people to the website is not the end goal.
In this installment we'll look at FTP accounts, control panel access, tech support and both free and in-house hosting options.
You may not be concerned about your web hosting package today, but I guarantee you that you'll be thinking about it the minute your site goes down or you are unable to send or receive email.
Late last week I caught up with Alex Bennert who is an SEO Strategist at the Wall Street Journal. Alex is scheduled to speak at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies in San Jose on the topic of "How SEO Can Help Save the Publishing Industry" so I decided to get her insight on this topic....
We have no idea where the market will settle and if the market share for Bing will continue to grow. Without this data, there's no way to say if tailoring a website specifically for Bing is worthwhile, especially if it negatively impacts existing Google and Yahoo! rankings....
Everyone is staring hard at Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, and I mostly like what I see, with one exception. I've written before about the search engine conflict of interest between highlighting their own properties and providing the truly best answer. In the quest for ever more cash, search engines are presenting results that point to their own pages. What does that mean to the searcher and to the search marketer?...
Google's Webmaster Central team has started an excellent YouTube channel and in this week's video Matt Cutts Answers: "Will Google consider Yahoo! Directory and BOTW as source of paid links? If no, why is this different from another site that sell links....
PageRank Sculpting is now the hottest topic on the SEO landscape. Learn what it is and how the changes in this area will effect you....
Nobody writes blog posts with a pen as the title suggests, but I think you get the suggestive innuendo. I'll use that theme to further explore what it takes to put together a good blog, not just a good blog post. You'll learn to craft a blog that gets read, repeated, passed on, commented about, processed and put to good use. Oh, and we'll also make sure to cover some of the SEO basics in writing your post. If you've got a great body, no sense keeping it locked in a closet.
I'm sometimes asked this question, usually by someone savvy in search marketing. After all, it's expensive to create and optimize pages for search, so you'd want to amortize that investment over as many keywords as possible right? Actually, no. The number of organic search keywords I recommend you target per page is one....
Why do webmasters and site owners spend so much time obsessing over external links, and so little time even thinking about their internal site navigation?...
I'm a big fan of keyword research but I know that the data provided from any keyword research tool has its limitations. For the most part, these tools can only provide you information on what is being searched. What they can't do is tell you which searches were relevant, which results were quickly discarded in favor of a different or more refined search, or which searches actually provided the visitor with exactly what they were looking for.
There is a reason that the cliche "you get what you pay for" is so often repeated. Because more times than not, it turns out to be true. So the next time you think you're going to save money by getting it for "free", weigh the long-term cost versus benefits. Are you certain that the job will be done right? Do you have the knowledge to ensure success? Are you really going to be saving any money, or will you end up losing more than you're saving?
If you run a business of any size and you still have not made the jump to the Web, why not? If you know your business can make money online, (i.e. you sell an in-demand product or service) then investing money to build your web presence is almost a no-brainer. The question then becomes, how to do it right so you can be profitable.
Every now and then I look at a site and wonder if the owner is even trying to make money. Well, I guess I know they are because they do all the "right" things to make money, but they are doing all the wrong things to serve their customer's needs.
My last three posts covered a variety of questions regarding keyword usage, links and website architecture. In this post I'll address the final question that has to do with the visual display of your pages, duplicate content and CSS.
Website architecture is one of the most important aspects of creating a search engine friendly website. Below are just a few questions I was asked recently on the topic of navigation, site structure, site maps and pages site.
I recently received an email from someone looking for some advice and a variety of topics. I thought our readers here would benefit from my response. This is the first post of a series of questions and answers touching on keywords and how search engines interpret keyword usage.
The first thing we hear in terms of search engine optimization - a company wants to be in that coveted top spot on Google, Yahoo!, Ask, and MSN. No matter the industry or specialty, when companies approach us with their desired goals for an SEO campaign, it's usually all about improving their rankings and positions ... and often nothing else.
This post is a list of all the questions that have been asked in the 8-Part Big Bad List of SEO Questions. Here you will find the full list of questions with links to each of them individually.
In this final installment our questions will be centered on control and expected involvement of the business owner. The site owner, to some degree, will likely have to give up some control of their site if they want the SEO firm to implement anything themselves. At the same time, there is a reasonable expectation that the SEO cannot have 100% control over the site in order to ensure the client approves of the specific changes that the SEO is asking to be made. Somewhere in here is a balancing act from the business owner having to do everything themselves and handing over all decisions to the SEO completely.
In this installment we move into the realm of pricing and asking questions related to costs versus return on investment. When outsourcing your SEO to a firm or consultant it becomes a bit more difficult to control costs than it does when you hire-in house. But that's not to suggest that cost cannot be controlled and you cannot get a return on investment. It's all a matter of knowing how to manage the campaign, expectations and the budget that goes along with it.
Live blogging coverage of SES NY session: "Small Business Case Studies".
Live blogging coverage of the SES NY session: "Search on a Dime".
Today we'll look at the questions pertaining to hiring a multi-person SEO/M firm to manage your campaign. By asking and answering these questions you'll better understand the differences between a consultant and a firm and give you the ammunition you need to decide which, if any, is the better route for you to take.
Before you go and and decide whether to do your SEO in-house or hire an outside firm, lets look at questions related to outsourcing your SEO campaigns. Being able to weigh the pros and cons will ensure you are seeing the bigger picture and understand the potential consequences before moving forward in either one direction or the other.
Last week I had the opportunity to catch up with Michel Leconte, CEO of SEO Samba. During our chat I was able to get Michel's insight into SEO Samba's Organic Search Management platform - click through to read more about our conversation:...
In this installment we'll look deeper at the concept of hiring someone to manage your campaign in-house, specifically answering questions about what it takes to hire someone who already has experience.
This is a continuing series of questions that need to be asked before you engage in any kind of SEO strategies or services. We started in Part I with questions that need to be answered if you in-source your SEO campaigns, specifically addressed questions about doing it yourself. In Part II we continued the in-sourcing line of questioning but addressed issues of splitting the work between you and another party. In this installment we'll expand the in-sourcing line of questioning further, looking at the questions regarding hiring a dedicated SEO to bring into your company.
This is a continuing series of questions that you need to ask yourself before you engage in SEO strategies or services. Part I started off with Questions that need to be answered if you in-source your SEO campaigns. We specifically addressed questions regarding attempting to perform SEO yourself. Here we'll discuss questions related to splitting the work between yourself, as the business owner, and another party, whether in-sourced or out-sourced.
When contemplating an online marketing campaign there are dozens of questions that will start swirling through your head. Each question, in turn, creates more questions, and those questions create others that all will need to be answered before you are able to make a smart, sound business decision.
While I don't think the pay-for-performance pricing model is entirely unworkable, I think the cons far outweigh the pros. The desire for such an arrangement is certainly a valid one, but not always one that can be implemented as easily as it sounds....
I've often been asked why particular pages are not indexed. Honestly, you can never be sure until you fix the problem. If you think that you've isolated the problem, you never know if you've only corrected one of multiple problems. So, it's best to take it step-by-step....
Years ago dynamic websites posed significant problems for search engines. While the engines have come a long way since the early days of dynamic website development, there are still some key problems that arise. When engaging in the battle of online visibility, you don't want to sit around while Google figures out how to plug the holes with their indexing spiders. You need to be proactive and fix the issues so you can be competitive today, not tomorrow.
Every time I come home from a conference, I'm reminded of just how many new people are streaming into the industry every day. While many of us have been optimizing web sites for a decade or longer, the greatest majority of site owners are just now finding their way into the world of organic optimization.
Knowing who your competitors are and what kind of time and monetary investment they are making into their online marketing is nearly as essential as implementing your own marketing strategy. If you have a good idea of what you're up against can make better decisions about where and how to invest your own time and money. You will also have a decent indicator of how quickly you might be able to see results from your efforts.
SEO doesn't all have to be done at once, it can be implemented a little at a time, as you have time.
Last week on the SEO 101 WebmasterRadio.FM show I host with Ross Dunn, we talked about some of the pet peeves we have about working with SEO clients. One of the things that came up in the discussion was companies that hire out their web development and THEN call an SEO once the new site is live. Ross and I talked about the frustration of having to tell a potential client the site they just paid oodles of dollars for doesn't have a shot in the engines, and how nice it would be if companies would call in an SEO consultant up front.
Search Engine Strategies London is less than a month away and is host to a number of great speakers. This includes SEO Veteran Dave Naylor, Owner of Bronco Internet, a highly talented and successful web development and SEO agency. I had a chance to catch up with Dave Naylor to get insight on his sessions related to Blogging & SEO, Reputation Management and Affiliate Marketing...
Yesterday I wrote about the Social Media lessons I've learned from watching my kids grow up. Today, I'm going to put the search engine optimization spin on it. After all, no matter how well we learn the basics of good search engine optimization, there's always something to be said for a reminder of why those basics are so important.
Every now and then I find it useful to look and see what Google has to say to webmasters about their websites. I want to revisit Google's Guidelines for selecting an SEO provider.
There is a big difference between optimizing your site for keywords and making it search engine friendly. While one of the first steps in the optimization process should be focused on ensuring the site is search engine friendly, sometimes we tend to want to jump right into the keyword optimization because that's how we "see results" in the search engines, leaving the site incompatible with the engines while we wonder when we'll get the results we wanted.
Should you care about what kind of marketing is hot? I got a question recently from a small business owner on how important readable URLs are for a Web site. The reason he was asking is that his technical adviser told him that "SEO just isn't that important anymore." Is he right? Well, you probably wouldn't expect me to agree with that point of view, and I don't, but there is some truth in the idea that search engine optimization is not the be-all end-all of Internet success that it was a few years ago. And the question of readable...
Many businesses owners focusing on SEO for the first time, especially those with limited budgets, can often find themselves caught like a deer in the headlights wondering just where and how to begin. SEO, even for smaller sites, can often be a big project, especially if you're trying to run the business at the same time. The question becomes, how many hours a week can you afford to invest (or pay for,) and what should you do first with the limited time on hand?
If you're a small business shopping around for the right SEO to help you out, there are a lot of things you need to consider before jumping in and hiring a SEO subcontractor or firm. Even if you're on a tighter-than-normal budget--and really, who isn't right about now--you can't shop for SEO simply on costs alone. That's like buying an economy car when you really need a mini-van. You just need to find the mini-van that offers the best features at the right price.
It's been more than two and a half years since I first wrote about the "Pinocchio Effect" as a way to explain the ever changing nature of search engine algorithms. Earlier this month, while preparing for the new small business panel at SES Chicago, I read through that old article and realized just how many areas of the Pinocchio story can be applied to online marketing.
I got an e-mail recently from someone very concerned that his product catalog does not have links to every page on his site from his sitemap, although he has a complete link structure emanating from his home page. Should he beat his programmer about the face and body until he creates a proper sitemap?...
SEO is more of a set of guidelines that can be implemented in a way that allows for individual site customization. Most of it is fluid based on each site's needs for their audience. However within that there are also some basic dos and don'ts that need to be adhered to.
Oh, dear! According to an unsolicited email I recently received, the Google XML sitemap for one of my websites is "missing." Should I be concerned?...
For as many factors there are that you can manipulate to give you better ranking performance, there are other things that when not properly addressed will do a fantastic job of preventing your site from performing as well as it could and should. While this is not a conclusive list of search engine ranking killers, these five issues can, cause serious damage to your site. Fixing these five rank-killing issues will undoubtedly clear the way for better optimization performance.
I often talk to small business people who lament at how the marketing deck is stacked against them. The big guys have the connections, the money, and the brand name. "How can I compete," I hear them asking. I always have the same answer--Internet marketing, especially organic search marketing. But when I tell them this, often I get disbelief. These small business owners have painfully learned over the years that marketing is for big companies, not for them. They're wrong....
Rankings are just one way to generate traffic. There are literally countless ways in which you can drive traffic to your website, via both on- and off-line marketing efforts. Unless you sell advertising by the impression, traffic isn't the end-all, be-all of website performance. For many sites there has to be a conversion.
Rankings, without traffic are pointless. In fact, while rankings can be a significant factor in growing your traffic numbers, traffic itself is not reliant on rankings. You can be in the number one spot and still get less traffic than your competitor in the number three spot. And even beyond that, you can often get better traffic (higher conversion percentages) not being in that top spot.
SES Chicago 2008, is happening this week and features a session on the topic of "SEO Through Blogging and Feeds." Lee Odden, CEO of TopRankMarketing.com, is an expert on this topic and is a panelist at this session at SES Chicago. I had a chance to catch up with Lee, to get his insight on SEO through blogging and feeds...
There are times when optimizing for typos is necessary. This is never more true if there are significant searches for your brand name spelled incorrectly. You want and need these people to find you. Using these strategies can help you target the typos that are truly important.
Last week, I had lunch with Mike Rynchek, President of Spyder Trap Online Marketing. We wound up talking quite a bit about social media and managing-per-objectives and impressions rather than the cost-per-conversions avenue many of us are used to. Mike was gracious enough to be interviewed on how to measure results of different objectives.
I'm not for blind cold calling or email spamming. Good marketing via direct mail is highly targeted, not just sent to random addresses. The same holds true for cold calling and email marketing. Good and proper marketing rules must be followed if you want your business to succeed long term.
Recently my team and I (mostly my team) have been doing a lot of cool research with some of the free online tools that are available. We find we often use a tool on whatever site we are working on and then somehow forget about it as we move onto other tools and other sites. Eventually we remember and start working with it again but there is no consistency. So what's the solution? Another list.
Success is a path that must be paved by each person making wise decisions. Search engine optimization isn't an instant path to victory. There are still dozens of daily decisions that have to be carefully considered and thoroughly before action is taken. But once you have a history of making good SEO decisions, success becomes much easier.
I want to take a set of guidelines about making good decisions and apply them to the SEO and business success environment. Every day SEOs and business owners looking for ways to improve their online exposure are faced with dozens of decisions. Any one of these decisions can breath life into a dying SEO campaign, push a successful campaign to greater success, or cause a site to crash and burn in the search results. Here are the first five of ten decision-making guidelines that'll help you rock your SEO and SEM campaigns to success.
This is part two of a two-part series outlining ten questions that must be asked by both SEOs and clients in order to ensure a successful SEO campaign. While these questions can be asked of just about any one in any area of life, sometimes it helps to make them applicable to specific situations. In this case the situation is SEO and running a successful online business.
Businesses don't succeed on the basis of a product alone. Those products have to be developed, marketed and sold using sound business principles. Similarly, SEO doesn't succeed solely by what you do on the technical front, but what you do internally to build a platform that will allow SEO success to happen.
One of the presenters at this year's SES Chicago is Search Marketing Veteran, Bruce Clay. Bruce will be leading a session on the topic of SEO tools: "tools that will help you to accomplish your tasks including indexing, competitive analysis, site ranking, diagnosing and remedying problems, page level information, site level information, on-page optimization and much more." I had a chance to ask Bruce a few questions about his session and how he leverages SEO Tools for his own strategies....
Someone recently asked me how he knows whether to use shopping cart software or a full-blown content management system for a Web site. Does it depend on how large your site is? Does it depend on what kind of content you have? And, most importantly, which one is better for search marketing? These are good questions, so they deserve good answers....
Have you decided to take your blog to the next level by including video? Hooray! Video logs (vlogs) can help communicate in a lot of different ways and they also add a "real" voice to your blog posts....
Whether you're getting ready to overhaul your site in-house to improve your organic search rankings, or you're planning on hiring the process out to a consultant or agency, you need to have a grasp on the fundamental steps of a search engine optimization campaign. Otherwise, you're bound to get most of the way through the process only to find you are missing vital information. Worse, you could end up with a projected that is completed, but severely lacking.
Whether you are an in-house search marketing strategist or you work for an SEM agency, there is a common barrier that you will consistently come across: Establishing priority for search marketing in conjunction with getting buy-in from required stake holders. Below I have outlined 5 ways you can push search marketing strategies along more effectively...
Everyone learns in different ways. Some of us embrace articles, some adore podcasts. Some prefer to learn by doing and some prefer to learn by watching. It's this last group of people that's been targeted by a new site called IMBroadcast.com. Launched by Search & Social's Dave Snyder, Jordan Kasteler and Search Engine Journal's Loren Baker, the site aims to pool internet videos put together by online marketers into an easy to access social community.
I've been reading a lot of posts lately from small business owners and search engine optimization companies talking about the push toward organic search during a bad economy. After all, good organic search campaigns tend to deliver some of the most effective (and least expensive) traffic your site is likely to see. Unfortunately, this isn't always the case. In fact, there are some instances in which you'd do best to focus your limited marketing dollars elsewhere.
If you've been wanting to attend a conference to learn more about online marketing, you've got another great shot coming up next month out west. Matt McGee, Mack Collier, Stoney deGeyter and I will be joining several other speakers at the Tri-Cities Convention Center on November 7th for the one day "Learn About Web" conference. If you've balked at conferences recently because you're tightening your belt, you might be happy to hear the show costs just $129, making it an absolute steal!
We've all heard the phrase "You get what you pay for" and deep down we all know it is true. But as small businesses operating on a low budget, it's easy for us to get into the habit of going for what's free when it comes to our websites. The problem is "free" or "cheap" for hosting and other foundational resources comes with major limitations that are costing you much more than you are saving....
Ever heard of Latent Semantic Indexing? If you're a search marketer, the answer is probably yes. If you're a small business owner, there's a good chance the answer is no. That's ok...it's not a magic term that will turn your optimization efforts upside down, but it is a concept you need to know a little something about.
If SEOs can't guarantee rankings, what can they guarantee? That's a tough question, especially if one is trying to be truly honest with their clients. The prospect of offering guarantees means that everybody must be in cahoots as to what that guarantee actually means, and who it really protects.
We spend a lot of time here on Search Engine Guide talking about how to reach your target audience via the web. We talk about search engine marketing, paid search advertising, social media, link building and everything else that's likely to help customers find their way to your web site. What we don't often do is give you a reminder of how to find information yourselves.
There are a million and one books and ebooks out there claiming to teach you the secrets of search engine marketing these days. Some are excellent, some are passable and some are downright bad. The best of these books are the short and sweet ones. The books that help you get moving instead of trying to teach you each and every bit of information you could ever care to know about SEO. My friend Matt McGee just launched his ebook this week and at $25, it's an absolute steal.
Site maps provide a one-click path to any destination within the site and a way for the search engines to quickly find and index all site pages. Ensuring that your site maps function properly is an important part in ensuring your visitors can find what they want quickly and all site pages get properly indexed.
Matt Bailey discusses the foundational elements of creating a user-friendly site that will encourage users to convert. If you weren't here you missed out! It was jam-packed with info on making an intelligent site that leads users down the right path.
Stoney and the crew at Pole Position Marketing created a fictitious site called "Galaxy Quest Airlines". Instead of just going through a checklist of things to look for, he created an interactive audience participation experience where the audience members peruse the site and find on-page SEO problems.
The foundation of any search marketing campaign is to have a user-friendly and search friendly site. If your site architecture isn't up to snuff, the search engines can't easily index your pages, which means you're basically dead in the water before you start. So what does it take to have a search friendly site? Stoney deGeyter covers the essentials of effective site architecture in this lively session....
Forms are a standard method of allowing visitors to communicate with you, including the placing orders. If forms don't work properly, frustrate your visitors or create additional roadblocks that the visitor must hurdle over, the contact/conversion rate on your site will drop drastically.
If your customers are digging through your help and FAQ pages, chances are they are close to making a decision to purchase, they just need a little extra bump. These pages are essential to these visitors seek by providing answers to questions and other helps that will push them through the conversion process.
Ensuring visitors can easily login and find the information they need is essential to providing a good customer experience. Since this is your engaged audience you want to make sure that you can keep them engaged without additional frustrations.
If visitors only add products to the cart but abandon the cart or get confused in the checkout process conversions will be low as will profit. The more proper cues you can provide that give the shopper confidence and assurances about their purchase, the less likely they will be to dump the cart or lose interest before closing he deal.
Since mini-baskets are ever-present through the shopping experience, the information here can be vital to the visitor, helping them keep track of items, total costs and links back to products already added.
Visitors place items in their online shopping basket for many reasons, one of which is with the intent to buy. But they don't always complete the purchase, often abandoning the cart with products left in it. Being able to close holes in the checkout process can increase conversion rates, getting more sales and higher return on investment.
The product page has a very singular focus: one product. It's job is to provide the visitor with the information about that product they need to be convinced that it is exactly what they are looking for. If you're product pages cannot convince visitors to buy, then you're simply dead in the water.
Being able to convince the shopper to follow through on the purchase is essential to being profitable. The visitor looks for specific cues that help them assess the creditability of the site and the security of their information. Providing these cues will help you provide a better experience that leads to deeper customer satisfaction.
The most ambitious Internet retailers, hoping to emulate the style and online influence of Amazon.com and other recognized brands, tend to aim for sprawling electronic retail websites that may look pretty but accomplish little else. If all the push is towards what appears on the front end instead of a concerted effort in choosing a reliable e-commerce solution from the get go, these decisions can ultimately impact the long-term success of any SEO campaign.
Those who land on this page are showing clear intent in wanting to to get in touch with you. Providing only a few ways to contact you can alienate visitors who have a particular preference. Providing robust contact options and information ensures that you capture as many would-be customers as possible.
Studies have shown that conversion rates for visitors who have visited the About Us page increase measurably. Those who visit here are looking for a few extra elements of trust that will help them decide whether to continue on or move on. What they find can mean the difference in a conversion or the visitor leaving your site for a competitor's.
The home page is often the single largest entry-point. It is the page that gives the visitor the sense of who you are and what they can expect. Go wrong here and it can be all over before it begins.
Links and calls to action are a great way to allow visitors to navigate from page to page, finding the information they feel is important to helping them make the purchase decision. Without these calls to action many visitors will simply not know what they are expected to do next.
A strong, user-friendly and search engine friendly navigation is essential in helping people and bots through your site. You visitors need to find information quickly with minimal hunting and the search engines need to be able to follow the navigation to reach all site pages with the fewest number of jumps (clicks) necessary. If the navigation is broken or doesn't get people (or search engines) where they need to go, the performance of a site will suffer.
Website architecture can make or break the performance of a website in the search engines. Poor architectural implementation can create numerous stumbling blocks, if not outright roadblocks, to the search engines as they attempt to crawl your website. On the other hand, a well-implemented foundation can assist both visitors and search engines as they navigate through your website, therefore increasing your site's overall performance.
The ALT attribute is one of those bits of code that's been abused since day one. People can't remember it's name, they stuff it full of keywords or they ignore it entirely. So with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek, I thought it might be fun to create a graphic that tells you what you need to know about using the ALT attribute....
The logo lends directly to brand identity and site identification. It also creates a certain element of appeal and professionalism in the mind of the visitor. It holds an important role in visitor assurance and navigation.
The browser is (obviously) what we use to view websites. The goal is to give the visitor the best browsing experience possible, but we have to keep in mind that not all browsers are the same. We must make sure to accommodate different users, ensuring that they get the most value out of the site possible.
The domain name is part of the identity of your business. The URL chosen can have a significant impact on brand identity and in a lesser extent, keyword ranking performance. However, how your site domain name and page URLs function can have significant impact on the crawlability of the site as well as overall visitor and traffic performance.
What do Google, SERPs and Cartier all have in common? They are all "In the News" this week. Sage encourages us to check out Google's new tool Google Insights as well as Cartier's My Space page. Google Insights allows you to search for what people are well, searching for and then see both a geographic breakdown and time line of of popularity by percentage. Cartier's appearance on My Space adds credibility to an online community that was previously viewed as the "slums." Sage also highlights several SERP-related studies and articles, discussing the importance of being in the top ten while...
So many people are obsessed with Google. And as far as that goes, there is good reason to be. Google is the largest search engine that gets the most searches and delivers far more traffic than any other engine. But I'm not one to watch Google on a hyper-obsessive level.
Do you do any link building planning? Planning as in mapping out locations you want to get links from and developing strategies around upcoming events? If you're not, you may want to take a look at what one company has done to capitalize on anticipation. The goodwill, media attention and inbound links they generated from one small commercial is priceless and worth it's weight in gold....
Google indexes flash, but so what? There is still not much there that can be optimized with any kind of effectiveness.
Recently Google started blocking several of the big-name rank checking software used by many in the SEO industry. This, of course, sparked the debate on whether SEO firms should be bothering with providing ranking reports to their clients. I have to say, I'm conflicted on that issue.
While my roots rest firmly in the camp of search engine optimization and search engine marketing, I've spent the last year or two leaning more heavily toward the blogging, social media, viral marketing side of things. I'm often struck at the similarities between these methods. For instance, knowing your audience and creating content that makes them happy is generally the key in all four areas. Yesterday, I also realized the similarities in terms of pet peeves.
We often deal with clients that are planning to "revamp" their sites with Flash, with SEO having already generated tremendous gains in their sales. The thing that we most dread to hear is that they've hired an experienced "Flash designer" that will be taking their websites to the "next level." Unfortunately, that "next level" is often the basement - at least in terms of SEO results.
Its important to answer the question "why?" Why go through the hassle of of building a Destination Website? Obviously, there are thousands of successful online businesses that don't operate anything that could be considered a "Destination". If they are successful, should you really go through the extra effort yourself?
Today we're taking a look at a stock photography website selling the rights to gorgeous photos in a niche topic. The website has a great product to sell, and a decent process for doing it. However, the site design and usability could use a little work prior to taking the next step in online marketing. When you are offering a niche product in a common area, IE stock photography, it's helpful to take some cues from other successful industry websites....
While we cannot make a few tweaks here or there to our websites and suddenly expect to be deemed as credible, there are things that we an do to help build the perception of trust in the minds of our visitors.
I'll be willing to bet that when you hear internet marketing related terms like SEO, SEM, PPC, etc, you don't think of conversion optimization. And vice versa, when you hear talk of e-commerce conversion improvements, you may not think of internet marketing. If you do, then bravo!...you're ahead of the pack. If not, that's ok, but you may want to read on for some reasons why you should be integrating them.
Want a sure-fire way to get terrible advice? Ask the right question... to the wrong person....
In non-competitive areas, achieving top rankings often doesn't take much effort. But when you're targeting keywords in more competitive fields you're going up against other websites that have already established themselves in that space. Many of those competitors are are, in fact, the authority for those keywords....
Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose is less than a month away and is always one of the biggest and most popular search marketing conferences all year. One of the speakers that will be featured at SES San Jose includes Michael Gray, President of Atlas Web Service. I had a chance to catch up with Michael to chat with him about a few of the topics he will be speaking on at SES San Jose, link building and SEO Rehab & Intervention...
Your business is not just competing with businesses in your area, but quite possibly you're competing with businesses all over the world. And if you're not unique or remarkable in any way, if nothing that sets you apart, then you're just another one of a million other businesses doing the same thing.
The design of a website is an important aspect of building a destination that people want to return to time and time again. But don't go out and spend all kinds of money for the most current, up-to-date website design with all the whistles and bells. Stop for a second to truly consider what kind of website design you really need.
Running SEO campaigns that don't address usability concerns is like running radio and TV promos to drive people to a store that is unfinished. The traffic being driven may not be a total loss, but you certainly aren't getting the full value out of each customer. Many won't find what they are looking for, others will be frustrated trying to check out, and some may turn around the moment they walk in the door. Usability addresses those issues to ensure each customer has a good experience on your website.
There are a number of different types of expert information that can be developed for your webiste as a means of providing your visitors with additional, quality content. Depending on your site, some types of types of expert information are more applicable than others and not all will be a good fit for you. Each site must be evaluated to determine what kind of expert information will best serve the audience's needs and expectations. By finding ways to add additional expert information to your site you'll begin to build a site that can stand up above the competition.
If you can't be considered as an expert on your subject, what reason is there for someone to make a purchase from you or subscribe to what you offer? For most people, they want to find people who they are confident know their information inside and out. If I'm not confident that you'll be able to answer my questions intelligently, I'll move on to someone who can.
Most site's rely on marketing alone to increase traffic. Marketing drives traffic and traffic is really nothing more than more eyeballs on the site. The site still has to do it's job in selling the product or service you offer. And it has to do it effectively if you want to be profitable. Building a Destination Website rockets you beyond the competition in several key areas.
One of the things many businesses struggle with is how to really make their site stand out. Many of us have dozens, hundreds, even thousands of online competitors. Some are serious competition, some not-so serious, and some not yet even on the radar, but will soon become major players for "our" space. The truth is, everybody wants to be #1 and there is only one #1 position. So, how do you stand out among them?
SEO isn't about "getting" top rankings. Getting rankings leaves open the implication that you're achieving a result that you don't necessarily deserve. Destination SEM focuses on building a website that is truly exceptional in meeting your audience's needs and actually earns top search engine positions.
Search engine optimization should be about how helping businesses succeed online with search engine exposure being a component to achieve success, but not the measure of success itself. But where SEO and other forms of offline advertising differ is that SEO cannot stand alone from the core business. It is intertwined. The "rankings at all cost" mentality needs to be thrown out like last month's leftovers that's made its way to the back of the fridge. It's a stale and moldy strategy that simply stinks up the web.
If you're just getting started with search engine optimization, you may be feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the information and all the details getting thrown around on blogs and discussion forums around the web. While good optimization skills take time to build, it's quite simple to get started.
Before search engine optimization can be successful in driving conversions, not just rankings, you first need to ensure that your site is usable and compelling. Dynamic-Living.com has done a great job of creating a clean, simple, well-organized website and their visitors will have no trouble finding the products they want and getting through the checkout process. With a website in good shape, their next step is to perform optimization so that they start ranking for relevant keywords....
While back I wrote an article about how having a search engine friendly website does not make it search engine optimized. The article discussed how many web developers promise to "search engine optimize" the websites they develop. While I don't mean to discount the value of a good web developer (I rely on them heavily) many developers really know no more about SEO than than they do about pluming. Sure, they can plunge a blocked toilet, or write some decent titles and meta descriptions, but there is so much more to SEO (and plumbing) than that.
I think I stress too much about our clients' performance of their optimization campaigns. Or perhaps I just create too much work for myself. See, all these years I've been working 10-12 hour days to help my clients increase their exposure in the search engines for some pretty important phrases. But just recently I found out that I've been targeting all the wrong keywords!
Have you ever been walking down the street just sort of minding your own business, staring at the cracks in the sidewalk, when you suddenly spot a fiver just laying there on the pavement? My fiver on the sidewalk of search engine marketing was NUMBERS. Yes, Google showed me numbers, glorious numbers. Not just the "1 through 4" types either. Big ones and little ones. Odd ones and even ones. It was neat. It wasn't Bob Barker calling my name or anything. But it was neat....
As I find myself drifting further and further from my search engine optimization roots to focus more time and effort on exploring the worlds of social media, blogging and viral marketing, I'm sometimes astonished at the misunderstandings between these two worlds. Search engine marketers look to social media as a vast expanse of link opportunities, almost completely missing the true potential of social media. On the other hand, social media types tend to look at SEO as some type of dirty game of tricks and scams that would tarnish the pure image they hope to build in their social media utopia.
When making changes to my website I always take the time to view them live on the web before closing up my editing software and patting myself on the back in self-satisfaction of a job well done. Even with minor changes, I like to view them one last time to make sure my changes didn't cause any shifts in on-page display, or I didn't inadvertently create an error somewhere that inadvertently jacked everything up (believe me, it's happened more times than I can count!) But regardless of how careful I am to double check my work, there is one thing I almost always overlook; verifying that my site looks good in the "other" browser.
When I only have about 65 characters to work with in a title tag (that which is visible on the search engine results pages), should I use any of that valuable real estate to display my company name?
Is it just me or are SEOs getting a little big for their britches? Specifically, why do so many of them tell business owners that they must optimize their website for hundreds of keywords?...
When providing SEO advice on the topic of website design, we often warn against placing important content into images. This is because search engines can't read images like a person can. To them, an image with text is just an image. So we rely on ALT attributes to convey proper meaning. ALT text is an important aspect of both usability and SEO. Here's how to do them properly.
There are often cases where a business will choose to develop a custom content management system (CMS) rather than buying something off the shelf. The key to a developing a good CMS is to first understand the purpose of your website (requirements) and secondly to design the framework (database, business logic, GUI) to support it. There are also some fundamental SEO related guidelines you should build into your proprietary CMS if you hope to rank well in the search engines....
So, you are the marketing manager of your firm, and you've finally decided to pull the trigger and hire the search engine optimization company that you've been talking to for months. The budget has been cleared, the SEO firm is ready to start, and it should be just a matter of time before you start seeing a huge uptick in business. Right?
Yesterday I discussed code bloat by looking at how we can move style sheets and JavaScripts off the page in order to clean the coding up quite a bit. I this third post about cleaning up bloated code I wanted to address Tables and other typical causes of bloated HTML.
Sage gives credit to Skitzzo of SEO Refugee, who writes "An Open Letter to SEO Bloggers: Back up Your Statements!" In the letter, Skitzzo expresses his frustration with SEO bloggers for stating theories and opinions as facts without any supporting evidence....
I started a conversation about how code bloat can effect your site's performance with the search engines. This post maps some specific types of code bloat and very briefly--and non-technically--show you how you can eliminate the bloat to improve your pages performance for both visitors and search engines.
Here is another round of questions submitted to me during a Website Architecture webinar I gave a couple months back. I wasn't able to answer most of these questions before or during the presentation so I've been answering them in this Q&A series. This post covers questions regarding session IDs, repetitive vs. duplicate content, robots.txt files, navigation text, and maintaining link juice after a site re-design. Let's get to it....
Google is planning on offering a free webinar on July 8th covering 3 of its most useful products: Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer and Google Webmaster Tools. This trio of tools is key to the success of any business. Analytics, Landing Page & A/B testing and website configuration for organic insight are an absolute must even if you don't use Google products....
There are a lot of little things that can junk up your code, but, for the most part, the search engines don't really care. It doesn't matter to them if your HTML validates or if you keep your code "clean" or not. When it comes to analyzing your pages for search engine rankings, none of that really matters a whole lot. But when it does matter, it matters a whole lot.
Moving your site to a new domain is remarkably similar to moving to a new physical address. In some cases it's much easier, you don't have to pack up, or load or unload a U-Haul truck, but there are other considerations that you have to take into account to make sure your visitors continue to find you after an online move. One of the primary areas of concern is making sure the search engines not only continue to deliver traffic to your new location, but you don't lose all your search engine rankings in the process.
I'm continuing to work my way through questions submitted during a webinar I gave on Website Architecture. This post covers questions on URLs, breadcrumb navigation, CMS, Database driven sites, 301 and 302 redirects, navigation, heading tags, broken links and HTML theft.
Site navigation can come in many different flavors. There isn't just ONE way to do it correctly. If there were then every site would have navigation that looked exactly the same. So while navigation can vary greatly between sites and industries, there are certain navigational elements that should be implemented to ensure solid usability and effective website architecture.
In-site link implementation can make a considerable difference in how effective your optimization campaign is. Or isn't. While your site's primary and secondary navigation is extremely important, you shouldn't make that the only way for visitors to get around your website. Here are some inter-site linking strategies that will help your visitors while also assist with your search engine optimization efforts.
There are advantages and disadvantages to using both absolute and relative links. Here I will explore the differences between the two, outline some pros and cons and also provide some additional information on how you can create hyperlinks in your site that will ensure that all links to your content remain in tact and properly functioning.
This is a continuation of the questions I was asked during a webinar presentation on website architecture. Before and during he presentation I was submitted over 70 question and each week I've been answering a handful of them. This article covers questions about Wordpress, password protected pages, iframes, multiple paths to content, and filenames.
One of the elements of site development and SEO that often gets overlooked is internal linking. When done right, you can kill two birds with one stone, and improve both search rankings and usability.
Yesterday I posted some thoughts on When, Why and How to Construct a Meta Description Tag. While it's relevance in terms of rankings is rather limited, there is still some intrinsic value to implementing a good description that will appear in the search results.
Joost de Valk of Yoast.com makes an indelible mark in the WordPress and SEO worlds with his article "WordPress SEO: The Definitive Guide To High Rankings For Your Blog." This all-encompassing resource talks about everything from basic technical optimization methods like Permalinks, title optimization and image optimization to advanced technical optimization techniques like disabling unnecessary archives, pagination and nofollowing unnecessary links....
Meta description tags get a bad rap. They are often either considered to be more valuable than they really are, or dismissed as near irrelevant. The truth is that the meta description can be useful but it's on the lower rung of importance when it comes to the on-page elements considered by the search engines. So while not a whole lot of time needs to be invested in creating workable description tags, I'll give you a few pointers on what you need to consider.
Building a website gives you a lot of options when it comes to how to set up your internal linking structure. Different areas of your site or web pages may require different linking strategies, but regardless on what kind of internal linking strategy you implement, you want to make sure that it helps you achieve your search engine optimization goals. I'm going to break internal linking into three categories: The search friendly, search un-friendly and search meh-friendly link.
Continuing my Q&A series on Website Architecture, these questions were presented to me before and during my webinar of the same topic. We have some more good questions and answers today that I'm sure you'll find valuable. This session is largely about keywords in domain and file names with an interesting question on nameservers.
My sixteen-year-old son posed a riddle for me the other day: "How does a white beard work?" When I gave up, he revealed the answer: "A hobo." (Should I have mentioned that my son has Down Syndrome?) Anyway, if that riddle made sense to you, then you probably love to analyze the inscrutable world of search metrics....
When a website goes into development most of the attention is usually paid to the design elements. But what often doesn't get enough attention is the site's directory structure, which plays an important part in your SEO campaign.
Kudos to Matt Cutts and the team at Google for finally getting around to adding nofollow documentation (and a few other updates) to the Google Webmaster Help Center.
More Q&A regarding website architecture. Questions answered regarding books for beginners, SEO techniques and how they have changed, pro's and cons of CSS, different types of architecture and favicons.
With all the hot topics in SEO these days, it's easy for newcomers to miss out on the basics, or for those more experienced to forget about them. As long as there is a need for search engine optimization, the core elements will always be Relevance and Authority, and it's important for us to understand what these mean.
More and more each day you probably see Google's custom search engine functionality appear on site's across the Internet. If you are looking for a simple way to enhance your users' engagement level on your site then I recommend you take a closer look at Google custom search engine. Below are few of the top reasons I like it so much...
Let's get one thing straight: much as we like to play God, Internet marketers are not the omnipotent beings some people think we are. The Earthly truth is that we're just some really driven people with a lot of knowledge about working the web to your advantage. And most would agree that this knowledge, when put into action, is worth a few bucks. Of course, it's easier to continue believing in the omnipotent marketer. As in, if you pay someone enough money to market your business for you, then that person is accountable for your business' failure to turn a...
Anyone who has worked for or run a small business knows how hard it can be to get good marketing advice. Everyone from the high priced consultant to the guy you buy your laptop from has advice on how to get ahead online. Most of them are wrong. It can leave a small business owner so desperate for advice, they'll take it from anyone. Even the guy sitting next to them on the plane...
I don't think that the Hx tags are near as important as many people think. But I do believe they play an important role in putting the page hierarchy into expression. Improper usage of HX tags can throw the site hierarchy out of alignment, as well as your search engine optimization efforts.
In this installment I'll provide one of the best permanent fixes to inadvertent duplicate content that is common with business websites. The implications of this can be pretty significant depending on the size of your site.
How you set up your internal linking structure plays a significant role in whether you set yourself up to appear if you have duplicate content on your site or not. Some things we do without thinking, setting ourselves up for problems ahead. With a little foresight and planning, you can prevent duplicate content issues that are a result of poor internal link development.
This week we are taking a look at GolfAsian.com, an agency that plans golf vacations in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. With a well-organized website and great customer service, they are poised to become a leader in the golf vacation industry - with a few website tweaks and online marketing strategies....
Google engineer, Matt Cutts, steals the show with his Web 2.0 expo video "What Google Knows About Spam." Sage extols the virtues of watching the video if you're looking to avoid spam in your own site and also if you want to make sure you aren't accidentally becoming the spammer yourself! Cutts provides tips on how to prevent spam and encourages site owners to register their sites in Google's Webmaster Central area, which allows Google to notify you if something is wrong....
This week, Sage addresses Shoemoney's article "SEO Has No Future," in which Shoemoney talks about Google-influenced search results and the pervasive problem of web spam in the industry. Sage proposes that the article is possibly nothing more than a link baiting ploy and that the industry maintain focus on optimizing for the visitor's experience. Google looks to increase visitor experiences by including landing page loading time as a quality score factor in Google AdWords by mid-June, and they are in preview release stages of a new, comprehensive, sophisticated, integrated social media tool called Google Friends Connect....
I'm gearing up for a 1-hour webinar that I'll be doing for SEMpdx next week. I've got more information on that below, but the SEMpdx crew asked their members to submit some questions that they would like to get answered during the presentation. Instead of waiting, I thought I'd go ahead and answer the questions here:
Duplicate titles is something we often see on newly developed websites or content management systems that don't allow proper control of individual pages. While I get how when developing new websites the title tag can get overlooked, I'm amazed that people develop web software that still doesn't take title tag customization into account.
There are parallels between traditional linking and social media promotion. While I agree the two entities are different animals and call for seperate strategies, the bottom line is the same for both... to increase traffic and inbound links. With some people holding SEO to the fire for exploiting social media, I thought it might be interesting to focus on those parallels and look for common ground....
Registering multiple domain names is, and should be, common practice for businesses wishing to protect their brands. Once purchased, what you do with these domains can have a positive or negative impact on your main URL. Here are some tips on how to set up alternate domains to prevent the search engines from seeing duplicate content.
If you've been wanting to get to a Search Engine Strategies event, but haven't been able to escape from your office, you'll be glad to hear that Search Engine Strategies has teamed up with MarketMotive to offer in-depth online training seminars featuring members of the Market Motive staff and popular SES speakers. The sessions are designed to marketers a chance to receive high level training at a lower price and with a small time commitment than attending an entire show.
Product categorization can play a significant role in how both search engines and users are able to access your products. There are two important things to consider when determining how to categorize your products. 1) Is each product assigned to the most appropriate category or categories? and 2) is multiple categorization creating duplicate content? The first issue frustrates your users and the second the search engines.
Mobile web browsing is gaining popularity and acceptance thanks to the extensive proliferation of iPhones and other mobile appliances with surf-friendly interfaces. As a result it is becoming more and more important to offer a mobile-friendly alternative to your current website....
As of this writing, there are five top Internet search engines: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, and Ask.com, and while Google and Yahoo! get a lot of the press (particularly lately), the Ask.com search engine is a rather interesting engine that deserves a closer look. This article will cover some of the highlights in its 12-year history, from its start as Ask Jeeves to its innovations, as well as the most recent developments behind the scenes.
There are two kinds of duplicate content: content that is duplicated on multiple websites and content that is duplicated on multiple pages of a single site. I believe the search engines treat each differently and, of course, there may be different standards applied to duplicate content within each of these two main differentiations, depending on the cause and instance.
The value of the Hx tag is much the same as the value of your main points in an outline for a book or paper. Your outline shows your main topics and sub-topics. These are often then used as section headings in your final draft.
Have you tried to hire an SEO professional or a link builder and been turned down repeatedly? Is your site not performing to your expectations? Do you like the color beige? If you answered yes to any of these questions read on....
If you're new around here, you've probably never heard of Robert Clough. If you've been around here for years, you've probably decided Robert Clough is my imaginary friend...someone I made up to pin the blame on when things go south. The truth is he's a real person. The folks who attended SBM Unleashed last week know this and thanks to Anita Campbell, the whole world now knows it.
Many website owners have a small technical issue with their site(s) that they don't even realize, and when left uncorrected, can severely hurt search engine rankings....
Last week at the Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference, small business owners (and a handful of marketers) came from around the world (literally) to learn more about marketing themselves online. We decided to open the show with a tag-team panel approach aimed at helping attendees go into the show sessions with the right perspective. Search engine marketing, blogging and social media are wonderful; but if you're a small business doing it all yourself, you need to approach things from a unique angle.
Performing a complete website review is rarely easy. I've found that you can start a site analysis intending to spend just a few minutes looking over it only to find that it quickly spirals into a multi-hour marathon of research. Complete website reviews can be time consuming and often produce many more hours of work beyond that. Many people want to rush into the marketing without realizing that the website itself is part of the marketing process. This is a shame....
This is a live blogging of Stoney deGeyter's Site Architecture session at Search Engine Guide's Unleashed Conference for Small Business Marketing. Stoney covers Website Architecture, Page / Document Architecture and Site Linking Architecture in this great session....
Search Engine Guide's first conference, Unleashed, kicks off with a great opening panel discussing the Common Sense Approach to Online Marketing. Matt McGee, Matt Bailey & Wendy Piersall all present a great overview into why Online Marketing is very important and taking a very common sense approach to things will help your small business.This is a "live blogging" relation to you the audience of what happened in this opening session....
Jiannis Sotiropoulos from the Pandemic Blog divulges his findings about how to maximize your YouTube results in his article, "Going Viral with YouTube." Sotiropoulos studied four different videos, three of which were popular and one that wasn't. Sage highlights five of his major findings, including results like the number of friends you have on YouTube does NOT play a role in promoting it nor does the quantity of videos, but the quality of your video and having lots of friends on other social networking sites does influence the popularity....
Recently I have been involved in creating a search marketing training program which some very clear objectives: help new search marketing strategists get up to speed quicker, allow them to work on billable client work sooner/more efficiently and get them prepared to participate in high-level brainstorming strategies. As much as I can teach the new strategists, I have learned it's as important to learn from them to continually tweak and improve the program. Below I have outlined 3 steps to creating a stronger search marketing training program....
Until recently, there were five major players in the search engine world: Google, MSN, AOL, Ask.com, and the Yahoo! search engine. These top Internet search engines quickly could be narrowed down to four, however; AOL uses the Google algorithm and will yield nearly identical results. Further narrowing is rapidly occurring - Ask.com seems to be stepping out of the spotlight to focus on specific markets, and in early March 2008, Microsoft began attempting to purchase the Yahoo! search engine. If there are just two top search engines with which to be concerned, what does this mean for your business and for SEO as a whole?
Google News bloggers debunk myths about how to get your article submitted to Google News; myths include examples such as having a picture next to your piece increases your rankings. Blogging continues to gain popularity, but according to MediaPost.com, only 23% of people who read blogs are more likely to go out and buy those bloggers suggested products. Also, the debate is heated on the Search Engine Watch forums about whether or not SEO should be standardized....
While search engines are pretty good at finding web sites and getting their content indexed, many site owners have no idea their web sites can be created in a way that looks good to people, but can't be read by search engines. If your site is built entirely in Flash, relies too heavily on Javascript or uses drop down boxes and forms to let people find your content, the search engines may be missing out on your content.
Rarely does SEO bloat happen all at once, but it's usually an accumulation of edits and tweaks made over the course of several months or even years. This is what makes it particularly damaging to your marketing efforts.
If you have an offline store supporting an online presence or even if you exist only online, it makes sense to expose your URL's and special promotions at every opportunity. Doing so helps to build credibility and natural inbound links.
The main purpose of a competitive analysis should be to gain awareness of the competitive factors analyzed and to leverage the client's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) to their advantage. So what kind of factors should be included in an online competitive analysis...
No doubt some of you looked at your calendars last week and realized you'd missed the $850 early bird price for our upcoming Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference in Houston. Don't sweat it, we've got you covered. We've spent the last six months building the perfect conference for you. We know how busy you are. Do you think we'd let you miss out on this great show just because you forget to set an alert on your calendar?
It's a common question that companies who are considering hiring a search engine optimization company often face - is this something that we can do in-house? More importantly, can we do this in-house and get the same results that an expert search engine optimization company would provide?
SEO, Usability, and Analytics are the best investment that you can make for your online business. In fact, dollar for dollar, these recession proof tactics should result in some of the best ROI you'll see from your web site. If you're still on the fence when it comes to investing in any of these three areas, you could be missing out on a wide-open opportunity to get the most out of your website.
The Dallas Business Journal recently ran a story on one of our clients, Wasp Barcode Technologies, describing how they went from spending enormous amounts of money on PPC to focusing more on traditional SEO and link building. The strategy paid off -- Wasp spent less and got better results. These are the kind of results every small to medium sized business would like to enjoy....
Do you simply want more website traffic, or would you rather have better traffic? Did you know you can make more profit with the same (or even less) traffic? You can -- as long as you know how to get the right visitors and make the best use of the traffic you get....
While it has taken many years for SEO to be considered a marketing function within the business community, I sometimes wonder if the pendulum has swung now too far away from SEO being a function of the IT department. SEO is very different from traditional marketing.
Scott Buresh receives top honors this week with his article "Sam's Club Wants to Be Your Search Engine Optimization Company-Should You Let It?". He explains that Sam's Club is partnering with a company called Innuity to provide small businesses with access to a dashboard that submits their sites to local search engines, all for only $25! Scott's concern is that customers will feel they are getting the whole SEO package when really it's just a small piece of it, but he does acknowledge the possibility of the affiliation increasing validity for the SEO world....
As any good search engine optimization company knows, in search, more so than any other medium, you have a very short window of opportunity in which to engage your prospect. The only way to get a solid competitive advantage in this arena is to utilize various techniques in order to make sure that you are giving a prospect exactly what it is that he or she is looking for. Otherwise, your prospect will simply click the back button and visit one of your competitors - a process that only takes seconds.
I remember when there was this nice lull between December and April where I didn't have to book flights, write presentations or find someone to watch my kids. These days, it feels like one conference blends into the next. On the plus side, that means you have tons of options to choose from if you're looking to attend a search marketing or online marketing conference.
If SEO isn't exactly rocket science (and I don't believe it is), then why are people willing to pay so much for site optimization services?...
Sage gives a thumbs up to Search Engine Guide for the site redesign! Search engine optimization continues to gain popularity according to Marketing Sherpa's latest survey; it's low cost and high return keep SEO as one of the best online tactics for budget plans. Danny Sullivan's site Search Engine Land confirms Yahoo's layoffs, and Google emails its customers so they know to link their AdWords account with their Analytics to ensure accurate results....
When putting the framework for a solid optimization campaign you have to spend some time evaluating various aspects of your site. This evaluation gives you an idea of any shortcomings the site has, what will be required to overcome the competition, and will then allow you to map out an effective strategy for success. But there is more to the evaluation than just looking at how the website currently performs in the on- and off-page analysis.
Whether you are putting together a proposal for a client or assessing your own needs, you need to be able to accurately predict how much time, energy and effort will be necessary to build a successful SEO campaign. Of course, in order to predict the time involvement you need to first know the strengths and weaknesses of the website which will then help you determine what will need to be done to accomplish your goals and make the site a viable competitor.
Not every site needs a site map, they can certainly be a good idea. Site maps provide a dual purpose: They provide search engine spiders easy access to all of your site pages and they provide site visitors easy access to all of your site pages. The difference is that search engines and visitors access your site map differently and therefore there are different methods that need to be applied to creating site map(s) that are friendly for both engines and search spiders.
To some, it sounds incredibly simple. To others, it's somewhat mind boggling. Search marketers toss around lingo like "keywords" and "keyword phrases" as if they're part of everyone's vocabulary. While it's true the words are nothing special, the concept can be foreign to someone new to the industry. This article offers up a quick and simple primer on the concept of keywords and keyword phrases in regards to organic search engine optimization.
Analytics are everywhere this week with the release of Google's Urchin 6.0 and the entry of analytics player Crazy Egg. Urchin 6.0 is expensive for the average user at $2,995 after beta and geared more towards large companies that are protective of their analytics data; Crazy Egg offers some standard features but is trying to capitalize on their "visualize your visitors" approach, in which their Heat Map allows you to see where people are clicking on your site. Last but definitely not least, are the SEMMY Awards, where Rand Fishkin walks away with the big win for his SEO article, "Search Engine Rankings Factors 2.0."
Every SEO campaign has to start somewhere. Any good plan; whether you're building a home, preparing for a family vacation or looking to optimize your website for search rankings, starts with research. Before you are ready to optimize your first piece of code you need to understand the landscape around you, which means you need to know the condition of your site as it currently is, and the goals you wish to achieve over the course of your campaign.
Have you ever been surfing the web and come upon Internet advertising that provides a direct solution for something that you've been researching lately? Did you think that it might be related to your computer cookies, or did you chalk it up to serendipity?
Image optimization and video optimization are not secondary organic strategies anymore, they are essential in creating a well-rounded online presence. There are numerous resources you can turn to help perfect your strategy but I wanted to take a look at some techniques you may never thought of as well as some additional questions to ask yourself before applying any tactics....
The other day I received an email from a client noting that some of his Yahoo rankings have slipped as of late. They are still ranking strong on Google as well as MSN and heck, many of their Yahoo rankings are still very strong. But there was, in fact, some slippage and the client was concerned. Well, first we know that there is more to web marketing than top rankings. In fact rankings are just a small piece of the bigger web marketing pie. I know that and you know that, but for whatever reason, we all still have to deal with clients that refuse to accept that. But that's a story for another post. So what do you do in this situation? I know for a fact that the client's business has seen 100-200% growth year over year since we started working with them oh-so long ago. They obviously see the big picture, but they still come back looking at rankings. And Yahoo rankings at that.
Every now and then you have to get back to the basics. You may be learning the ropes and turning in some pretty good results with your search engine marketing efforts. You might be seeing higher rankings, more traffic and tons of links. Of course you might not be seeing an increase in sales. If that's the case, there's a good chance you've made one of three common mistakes with your search marketing campaign.
If the writer's strike has left you feeling like you're missing the best of awards season, Matt McGee is here to rescue you. He's announced the launch of the SEMMYs, a new award that aims to honor the best online marketing posts of the year in more than a dozen categories. The initial list of nominees was compiled by Matt, but more than two dozen industry types (myself included) will be working to narrow the field before Matt opens it up to votes.
Nearly all search engines utilize spiders (which are also known by their original name, robots) to go out and scour the web looking for web pages. These search engine spiders then bring the data back to be indexed by the engine.
Robots.txt files are often mentioned as being an important foundation of a search friendly web site. To site owners and small businesses who are new to search marketing, the robots.txt file can sound daunting. In reality, it's one of the fastest, simplest ways to make your site just a little more search engine friendly.
Everyone knows that if you want to build something big, you have to have a strong foundation. That holds true whether you're putting up a skyscraper or creating an online marketing plan. While you may think it's all about links and keywords, solid search and online marketing encompasses so much more. That's why anyone looking to start marketing their business online should print out and study Matt McGee's new SEO Success Pyramid.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks for many small business sites (well, any site, really) when it comes to search engine optimization is the lack of text on their web sites. After all, it's well known among SEO's that search engines cannot read the text in an image. Or can they? Bill Slawski walks us through a few new Google patent filings today that may point to a change in this long standing rule of SEO.
It's hard to believe it's been two years since Boris Mordkovich and his team launched the print Search Marketing Standard magazine to help educate folks about the search marketing industry. I remember back when I first posted about the magazine's launch. At the time, I was pretty skeptical. After all, the industry moves at a blogger's pace, not a publisher's pace. It just didn't seem like a print magazine had a chance. I'm happy to say I was wrong.
While search engines are important, keep in mind that your visitors are even more important. When making edits to your site always consider the implications on both your human visitors and the search engines as well. Every change you make will have either a positive, negative or neutral effect on your human visitors and the search engine spider. You need to know ahead of time the effect any particular change will have and use that as a basis for determining if its worthwhile or not.
What can you do if your website-kid is getting beat up in the search engines by the online equivalent of a playground bully?...
Are you thinking about outsourcing your link building work or do you prefer to keep everything in-house? There's been a lot of discussion on this issue lately, let's take a look at the pro's and con's of each.
A properly built web site will ensure that the search engine spiders are able to access all pages of your site with more importance placed on the more important pages. It will also insure that the human visitors are able to accomplish their goals, either finding the information they came for and/or purchasing your product or service.
Another reason why people wrongly assume that keyword phrases in URLs are a factor in getting a page to show up in the search results is because the top results do indeed often use keyworded URLs! But (and this is a big but) websites that use keyword-rich URLs are using them because someone, somewhere is attempting to optimize the pages to show up in the search results — which means they are doing a lot more than simply putting keywords in URLs as part of their website optimization.
If you are a small business owner, you may have spent a fair amount of time learning about the generally accepted ways to improve your search rankings. What you probably glossed over or skipped all together was reading about the tactics used to game or "cheat" your way up the search engines. You may be thinking "but I'm not planning to spam the search engines!" That's great, but are you absolutely positive the SEM firm you're thinking about hiring feels the same way? If you know nothing about those tactics, how can you be certain your company or your SEM firm aren't using them.
The year is coming to a close and it's time for "best of 2007" lists to start popping up in your feed reader. While there are some great ones out there, I wanted to make sure to draw your attention to Evan Carmichael's "Top 50 SEO Posts of the Year." Evan has put together one of the most comprehensive lists of great posts you'll see this year. In fact, he's done it without any writer overlap. That means he's offering up fifty articles from fifty different writers.
What many people failed to realize was that when Google purchased DoubleClick, it now was also the owner of a very large search engine optimization company called Performics, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of DoubleClick. This fact is of course raising some eyebrows in the industry.
Last Friday I attended the Search Marketing for Financial Services session at SMX-London. This session was moderated by Danny Sullivan. The session was aimed at addressing the specific challenges facing businesses in the financial services sector, a niche not exactly known for attracting tons of incoming links.
I'm just returning from a well-earned, extra-long holiday weekend away from the computer, so I managed to miss Google's sneaky little update to their webmaster guidelines late last week. Thankfully, Search Rank's David Wallace was on the ball as usual and got a great post up noting the change. While the new guidelines did include mention of the nofollow tag if you went hunting for it, the new ones do a pretty good job of explaining exactly what Google expects from site owners who buy or sell links.
It appears the text Google is now showing [for a particular keyword phrase] is from our DMOZ directory listing. Until very recently (and while our listing position was as good as it is now) Google was showing the first few words of text from the body of our home page. Should we leave everything as is and enjoy the good listing position, but put up with the less than ideal text in the search results?
Can a proper balance between optimizing for spiders and humans be struck? Can you achieve the perfectly optimized web page for search rankings, while also maintain a perfectly optimized page for your audience? No, but since perfection is unattainable, what you can do is find the most effective balance between being both user friendly and search engine friendly.
I'm guessing that most everyone reading this article has received SEO spam and regular readers of Search Engine Guide know enough about the SEO process not to be suckered into believing the sorts of claims made in SEO service spam emails. However, as a public service to all, I am going to deconstruct the latest example to arrive in my inbox.
Last week I attended and presented at SMX-London. It was a great chance to meet with British search Marketers that don't get to make it out to the US conferences, and to hear a different perspective on familiar topics from mostly British presenters. Friday saw the "Search Marketing for Retail" seminar, which was moderated by Rob Kerry of Ayima.com.
I missed a great post last week by Matt McGee, so I'm blogging it now. Titled "Eight Things the Search Industry Can Teach Small Businesses," the post offers up several great examples of how to market yourself online from people in the industry who were simply going about their business. From networking to staying visible to finding your niche, it's a great little set of tips and examples worth reading through.
In the last five years, I've attended dozens of marketing conferences, events and seminars. During each of those shows, I've spent time talking to the small business owners who've come to try and learn a little more about how to market their business online. Time and time again, the message I hear is the same. "The information is incredible, but I have no idea where to start!" It was that line that caused Robert and I to sit down several months ago and brainstorm all the things we'd do if we were planning a marketing conference for small business owners. It was Stoney deGeyter who said "so why don't you do it?"
There's a conversation going on in our Small Business Ideas forum about domain registration and the impact it has on search engine rankings. Generally, when I hear small business owners ask about this, they want to know if the age of a domain has any impact on their rankings. In the case of this thread, the original poster is asking if the length of domain registration has anything to do with rankings. I've heard this question pop up more often in the last few months, so I thought it might be worth throwing down a few thoughts on the issue.
The good people at Google have long maintained that there is a Chinese Wall between paid search results and organic results - that is, the department responsible for advertising is completely separate from the department responsible for organic search engine placement. The company insists that Google Adwords is a completely separate entity than the Google search engine, and never the twain shall meet. This all sounds very good, in theory.
While looking at every last minute detail of SEO is advantageous, it is effective only to a point. One can't get mired into trying to get every last little detail right all of the time. To do so often comes at the expense other important things. Instead of focusing on the big picture, you're mired in the little things that don't provide the return you may have imagined.
The future of search is unclear – what is clear is that change is rapidly happening for all of the top Internet search engines. Google as always is the front runner for many of these search trends, but even little guys like Ask.com are making waves. In this article, I will attempt to cover some of the more interesting search trends that are occurring today with the top Internet search engines – but I am by no means being comprehensive about the subject. Things are changing on a weekly, or sometimes even daily, basis, and future articles will cover additional developments in depth.
I had an alternate title for this post: "Ask not what Google can do for you, but what you can do for Google". We're moving into a new age where we have to pay closer attention what Google does -- despite what Google says.
Something I hear now and then from small business owners and small business in-house marketers is that they aren't afraid of marketing. They're just afraid of internet marketing. After all, most people have a general understanding of how things like the yellow pages and newspaper spots work. Even if they don't run good campaigns, they probably can't end up doing a lot of damage. To them, the internet moves at lightening speed and a bad campaign can turn into a true disaster. While these are valid concerns, they shouldn't be enough to scare you off.
Using directories in your link building efforts is still a viable option from several standpoints. Here's my thoughts on the subject plus a roster of the directories we use and a list of discount promotion codes. Get some links, save some money. Cool.
No matter how hard I try, I couldn't get the first two lines of this song out of my head this past week. Figuring it was easier to give in than to fight it (how ironic) I had to sit down long enough to finish it off. Guess this will date me as a child of the eighties.
One time, when working with an in-house IT manager I was told that his site didn't need 404 error pages because no-one should reach them. I politely explained to him that 404 error pages are needed precisely because people and search engine spiders will reach them, regardless of how well he'd developed the site.
The SEO world is abuzz today with Google's smack in the face to a number of websites that are selling obviously paid-for, keyword-rich text links. The gist of it is that the toolbar PageRank number has been reduced by a couple of points (or more) for many websites.
I spent the morning gingerly picking my way through a minefield of guk. The mess was everywhere. It was unavoidable. It was gross. Then the family and I came home from the pumpkin patch and I logged on to find the exact same type of mess waiting for me online. I'll say one thing for Google...they sure manage to keep folks talking about them.
A reader writes in asking about competing with a number one listing that doesn't appear to be optimized at all. Jill points out that good rankings aren't always about the "obvious" forms of search engine optimization and offers some suggestions on how to compete.
I see it so often, regardless of company size. Web sites that could easily be bringing in loads of traffic and revenue simply wasting away because nobody can be bothered tracking visitor activity, analyzing trends or checking for search engine compatibility and usability.
If you've been looking to attend an online marketing seminar and live within driving distance of Cleveland, Ohio, you might want to check out the 14 Days to a Better Website Seminar being put on by Site Logic Marketing's Matt Bailey next month. I'll be joining Matt for the seminar and we're looking forward to the chance to help some small businesses get their marketing plans off on the right foot.
Last week, as I recounted my story of a troubled client, I got to thinking about this question. In the world of SEO, where do the lines of responsibility fall? When is the SEO responsible for failure and when is it the client's fault? Or can lines be drawn between them so easily?...
So you have decided to hire a search engine optimization company as a part of your overall marketing strategy. The firm that you choose will have a tremendous impact on the success of your campaign, but you knew that already. However, what are your evaluation criteria? For too many companies, the answer is plain, simple, and singular: rankings.
After four pretty lengthy articles covering the history of nofollow and the issues at play in Google's paid link crusade, I'll be wrapping the series up today. In part five, I'll take a look at what's likely to happen if Google continues on their current course and why I believe it could make the Internet a worse place for small business owners.
Ask has some incredible and unique features that I believe will slowly but surely steal search share from its more popular brethren. Consequently, it seems appropriate to provide some tips on how to optimize for Ask without sacrificing rankings on the other search engines.
I recently made a mistake. I took on a client without first having fully vetted them and their prospects for success. Several months later, with a more accurate picture of the situation, things are not looking so bright....
In the first article in this series I outlined the history of the nofollow tag. In the second article, I took a look at some of the complex issues in the "are paid links ok or are they evil?" argument. Today I'll explore the options Google has in dealing with this problem and will explain why I think they're taking the wrong route.
According to new numbers from a global search survey conducted by comScore, Google is the most popular search engine in the world. In fact, Google handles roughly 60% of world wide search. (37 billion) That number is even higher than the 50% of searches it handles here in the United States. The study looked at global numbers for other engines as well and listed Yahoo (8.5 billion), Baidu (3.3 billion), Microsoft (2.2 billion) and NHN (2 billion) as rounding out the top five.
A site's navigation structure is extremely important in providing a rich, friendly user experience. Well designed and implemented navigation assists in the process of helping visitors identify sections and pages of the website that interest them and then in moving them in that direction. If you're able to implement a solidly developed navigation system on your site you'll also be providing strong visual cues to the depth of content you have available. This alone can be an immediate first-impression indicator of trust.
Anyone who has played around in the paid search realm for any length of time quickly learns that paying for traffic is a great way to go broke. It's a far better idea to focus on paying for targeted traffic by getting in front of the folks who not only have an interest in what you have to offer, but have actually gone looking for it. That's the point John Marshall makes today in a post called "Never, Ever Pay for Traffic" at Market Motive.
My daughter has a shirt that read "it seemed like a good idea at the time." I sort of wish they made it in larger sizes. I can't help but think it'd be a nice Christmas gift for the team at Google. After all, I'm hard pressed to believe that phrase hasn't popped into the conversation at least once or twice in the last year as their engineers sit around debating their algorithm and the impact of paid links.
A while back there was quite a bit of scare mongering going around the SEO industry about how reciprocal links were dead. I had a potential client once tell me that so-and-so-big-name-in-the-SEO-industry told them that reciprocal links were dead. I've said this before and I'll say it here again. There is nothing wrong with reciprocal links.
Should a small business in a non-competitive market pay a monthly SEO maintenance fee to their search marketing company? Jill Whalen answers a reader question about the need for a monthly SEO budget.
For the second week in a row author Stoney deGeyter makes the cut for Sage's pick of the week. If your optimization efforts are going to succeed you need focus and a process and Stoney's checklist gives you just that.
I like to create systems for everything that I do and SEO is no exception. While not every aspect of search engine marketing can be programmed, categorized or easily referenced, (I have a mighty team to handle that stuff!) the bulk of the work can at least be outlined into a handy check list.
Whether you're talking about search marketing, blog marketing or any other form of online marketing, small businesses often find themselves competing as a little fish in a big pond. That can be frustrating when your time and your finances are limited. Sometimes those limitations mean you need to start looking for a pond that better fits the size of your marketing budget. I ran across a small business marketing column in the Roseville and Rocklin Today asking "How Big is Your Pond?"
It's an unfortunate fact - no matter how good your search engine optimization company or in-house talent is, brand new websites have a more difficult time achieving search engine success for competitive phrases than their older counterparts, particularly on Google. However, the worst thing that a new site owner can possibly do is presume that they are "too late to the game" and decide not to pursue this marketing channel at all.
Last week I discussed the best tactics for achieving rankings in Yahoo, the web's number 2 most popular search engine. Now it is time to pick on the third most used search property - MSN, which has 6.6% of the search market and is currently found at www.live.com.
The question has been asked: should customers expect web designers to know about SEO as a matter of course, or should designers presume customers know and will ask about SEO if they're interested? Here's what I think......
While vertical search is still in its infancy, the integration of vertical results through Google Universal and Ask 3D are allowing sites to draw more and more visitors from specialty indexes. One of the vertical search indexed that is becoming more and more popular is image search. Unfortunately, many small businesses are overlooking traffic opportunities by not optimizing the images on their sites. Pat B. Doyle has a great post on using images to drive traffic at her blog.
The Yahoo Search Marketing team has a post up this week reminding site owners that online holiday shopping increases pretty much every year. In fact, more than 80% of shoppers bought at least one thing online last holiday season. With the holiday sales cycle already gearing up, it's a good idea to start fine tuning your site and campaigns to drive more business. While most of the five tips Yahoo has to offer are a recap of the fundamentals of good online marketing, they're still worth reading and putting into action.
The search engines do indeed index and rank PDF documents these days. Basically, what they do is convert them into HTML and then index the information just like any other web page.
I've always believed the SEO value proposition to be so clear and obvious that if a person couldn't intuitively "get it" themselves, nothing I could tell them would help them understand. I asked my fellow SEMpdx members to successfully answer the question that I could never answer very well.
There's been a lot of talk lately about what the shift toward blended and universal search means for small business owners. On the one hand, those increased opportunities to snag listings allow one company to snag even more real estate on the first page. On the other hand, those increased opportunities to snag listings allow one company to snag even more real estate on the first page. It's all good if you're the company scoring more listings, it's not so good if your competitor does it and pushes you off the front page.
With small brick and mortar businesses starting to see the value in shifting some of their massive yellow page budgets over to online marketing, local search has become a hot topic. Unfortunately, many small businesses find themselves confused in terms of how to target those local visitors when they move their searches online. Ironically, this often leads them right back to the yellow pages...the online yellow pages. While there's something to be said for maintaining a presence there, it's important that these businesses learn how to better target the growing usage of the local search tools on popular search engines.
The text-based Internet seems to confirm that we will never again attain the vast capacity for memory retention reputed to our ancestors. Taken to an extreme, the Internet can tell you what your own name is if you ever chance to forget it. Yet, there is the very positive side of the Internet acting as an unprecedented repository for the memories and knowledge of generations of mankind.
Most of you read that headline and either thought "I really don't want to hear about Mahalo again" or "No they're not! They're algorithms!!" Well I'm with you on the first one, but you couldn't be more wrong on the second. Algorithms are programmed by the people, for the people and umm...of the people. In other words, every day that passes us by, search engines do a better and better job of replicating human judgement about the quality and authority of web pages. So why do some companies still think you can automate the process?
Algorithmically Yahoo is Google's much younger sibling. I say this because many of the requirements for a successful ranking mirror Google's requirement about 4 years ago and they sum up to one distinct fact; optimize your content boldly on Yahoo and you will be rewarded.
As much as Google *pretends* to like SEOs by inviting us to parties at the Googleplex and posting on SEO forums, the bottom line is that they don't like us -- or rather, they don't like what we do. Google wants to find the best, most relevant sites for the search query at hand all by themselves. Perhaps someday they will actually be able to do that, but for now, they still need our help, whether they like it or not.
A long time ago in an office far away, I spent weeks and weeks optimizing nearly 2000 PDF files for the company where I worked. That was more than five years ago and I'm surprised to hear how many small business owners have no idea that you can optimize a PDF file for search. If you're one of the many, you'd be well served by reading Galen DeYoung's "Eleven Tips for Optimizing PDFs For Search Engines" at Search Engine Land today.
I attended an interesting seminar at Search Engine Strategies San Jose that discussed how search can be used to aid in branding instead of just as a direct response sales vehicle. Each point, stat or anecdote is in itself intriguing but overall add up to a helpful overview of how to use search to brand.
One of the first bits of advice I give to those who are new to search engine optimization is to stop trying to rank for highly competitive phrases and to focus on the long tail of search. Hamlet Batista disagrees. In fact, he wrote a post yesterday explaining exactly why he feels the suggestion to aim for less competitive phrases is a bad one. I understand what he's trying to say, but he's missing the point.
The team at Yahoo! announced yesterday that they've taken steps to make it even easier for small businesses to authenticate their site and setup full access with Yahoo!'s Site Explorer.
How many times have you seen a search engine marketer cringe at a business talking about how our industry is nothing but smoke and mirrors run by slimey practioners? I know I've seen it (and done the cringing) more than a few times in my life. What many in the industry seem to forget is that we often do the same type of generalizations and mud-slinging at other industries. That's exactly the line of thinking Miriam Ellis at SEO Igloo Blog explored yesterday.
by Kim Krause Berg - During the past ten years there's been a drastic improvement in the amount of companies who accept the need to work search engine marketing techniques into their web sites. User centered, persuasive design on the other hand, are still just whispers in the wind. Will it take another ten years for usability and accessibility to be as justified a expense as marketing is for a web site property?
by Scott Buresh - There is quite a difference in what is seen by humans on a website and what is seen by a search engine "spider" (a program that routinely combs the Internet indexing websites). There are an untold numbers of expensive websites out there that are beautiful to behold from a human perspective, yet all but invisible to search engine spiders (and thus searchers).
One of the most interesting presentations at Search Engine Strategies was presented by Bill Macaitis, VP Online Marketing at Fox Interactive. Bill Macaitis provided a list of 20 ways to push SEO projects past existing in house/client related barriers. Below is Bill's list and I have also added descriptions as I saw fit....
Continuing the discussion of the alleged reputation problem for SEOs. It's not just about what SEOs do. As long as clients insist on handing over their money to unscrupulous or incompetent consultants just because those consultants tell them what they want to hear, they have little room to complain when the results they get are less than satisfactory....
There's been talk lately about the supposed "reputation problem" for the SEO industry. So what do you think? Do site optimizers have a bad reputation? If so, where did it come from? And what can be done about it? In Part One, we look at it from the SEOs' perspective....
Are you considering changing your file names, or even registering a whole new domain, in an effort to get "keyword-rich" URLs? Before you migrate to these new web page addresses, let's take a quick look at some of the considerations you should keep in mind before making a move....
The search marketing industry is currently going through a transition phase in which many companies are considering bringing SEO in-house rather than relying on the services of 3rd party search marketing firms. With training from organizations such as the SEMPO Institute as well as the need for companies to have tighter integrations with online marketing efforts, the transition to in-house becomes a much more obvious choice....
Two years ago I put together a post about what I thought was the perfect SEO firm. I revisited that post this morning as I was looking at one of our white boards that had a list of positions that we have filled and positions that we want to fill in the coming months. My list of positions required for good SEO has not changed a whole lot in the last couple of years, although some minor modifications are needed....
Yahoo! has introduced a new class you can use in your page code to mark sections that are not related to the main content, such as navigation, menus, boilerplate text and/or advertising. Good idea? Bad idea? Something you could/should consider using on your pages? Let's take a closer look!...
Simply by adding the following line of code into your robots.txt file, the engines will know where your sitemap is located on the server and pick it up on their routine crawls....
Sometimes people take the concept of keeping an eye on the competition to excess. When sound business decisions take a back seat to the thrill of feeling you're beating the competition, it may be time to step back and think about why you're in business in the first place....
What does valid code have to do with SEO? Honestly, not a whole lot. But it can help you quickly and easily spot potential coding problems that can effect your SEO efforts....
As SEO enters the mainstream of business marketing strategies you would think that less time would have to be spent educating people on why SEO is so very important. But the fact of the matter is, many people still just don't understand SEO or the benefits it can bring. Worse, many companies haven't yet grasped the fact that SEO is crucial to long-term online success, especially for small companies without big brand names or budget....
I think Rand had a bit too much of the secret SEO sauce. His post "What separates Search Marketing Novices from Experts" is, well, just downright ignorant. I think of Rand as a true SEO business man but I think this post shows a lack of understanding of SEO as a business....
Matthew Inman has just posted an excellent CSS resource over at SEOmoz. For those of us who are not designers but are found frequently editing HTML and CSS, Inman's 15 CSS Properties You Probably Never Use (but perhaps should) is a great resource to be printed and filed away for frequent reference....
Have you tried to break into the SEO elite and found it somewhat cliquish? You're not the only one. Aaron Pratt talks about the circular linking patterns of the SEO elites....
It doesn't take much to get the SEO industry from driving straight to Kooksville with their conspiracy theories and predictions of doom and destruction. After Google blogged about their algorithm change to combat Googlebombing, some in the SEO community came up with the theory that this will allow people to Googlebomb other websites out of top positions. That's not going to happen....
It's common to look back upon the past year and reflect upon all that has changed through twelve short months. For an industry as dynamic as that of search engine marketing -- that's certainly true. While I'm a few weeks late on my own schedule, I still wanted to share what I saw as the five most influential changes of 2006 for those in the SEM game....
Last Wednesday Eric Enge put together a great article called "An Introduction to SEO Best Practices" for Search Engine Watch's Search Day subscribers. In the article Eric boils SEO down to four crucial components....
Matt Bailey from SiteLogic has compared the process of making sales to SEO in a post entitled "10 Ways That SEO (Website Marketing) is Like Sales." He explains that his sales experience has shaped his philosophy of SEO and website marketing. It is definitely worth a read. read on for a few excerpts as well as link to entire post....
Matt McGee has a great post over on his Small Business SEM blog titled, The #1 SEO and Marketing Tactic for 2007: Trust. Keep reading to find out more......
While SEO most certainly isn't rocket science in the most literal of senses it is to those that don't know much about it. SEO is a lot of work and requires a lot of time to do it and do it right. Those that don't respect that prove that they really know nothing about it at all....
When people hear about online marketing, they often think of two of the more popular methods that a company can use to enhance its visibility on the Web: organic search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising. In an ideal world, you would use both strategically to maximize your site's profile. However, budgetary constraints often make this impossible, and trying to do both on a limited budget or with minimal resources can result in neither campaign producing ideal results....
There are some of those in the field of SEO that refuse to disclose their methods and processes to clients. Should SEOs keep their procedures and strategies secret from clients? Should their clients sit patiently by, waiting for the end results and not be concerned about the process that gets them there?...
I have seen it happen time and time again. The decision is made to redesign the company web site. However, in the process regard for search engine visibility is not included in the overall plan. The new site is launched and everyone waits for the traffic to pour in but for some reason it doesn't. In fact, traffic declines. Sales drop. The CEO is demanding answers. What happened and who's fault is it?...
Suffice it to say that spam is a major issue with the search engines in terms of time, resources, and ultimately money. New filters are added by the engines to combat spam, and the Web community finds new ways to cheat their way to the top....
One thing that prospects have asked about recently is the effects of combining paid and organic search. Greg Jarboe gave a presentaion in 2003 in which he mentioned the "second opinion effect." He saw a 3 times conversion increase for a site with top rankings in paid and organic...
Originally, search engines focused on mathematical formulas. That often meant that you could meet all the criteria without having a very "good" site. Search engines realized this and they've been working ever since to find better ways to make these judgement calls....
I have been following an interesting thread over at Search Engine Watch Forums entitled "Do Designers Hate SEO?" where forum member "glengara" began with the question of whether all-Flash sites should be used in the commercial web space. It is certainly an interesting topic and one that has been hotly debated time and time again. The SEO argues for an "optimized" site that search engines can comprehend while the web designer argues for artistic liberty and creativity....
Believe it or not, basic SEO is all about common sense and simplicity. The purpose of search engine optimization is to make a website as search engine friendly as possible. It's really not that difficult....
Now that we have come to the conclusion that this sandbox, aging filter or whatever you want to call it, actually seems to exist, what can one do that has been affected by it?...
Many are under the impression that one has to sacrifice the end user if they are to please the search engine. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is the end user that you want to attract and as a result, covert to a customer. Therefore you should always design and market your site with the end user in mind....
So what is the difference between a doorway page and an advertising page? Only the way they are spelled. It is still a spam technique. It doesn't work. If by chance it does, it won't for the long term. The one thing this strategy is successful at is to keep engineers at search engines employed discovering ways they can combat them. It is also successful in that it makes for an easy sale to an unsuspecting victim because it sounds like Black Hat SEO has an advantage that others don't....
To your horror you discover that a client has completely redesigned their web site and in the process, removed all of the optimization you developed. All your work has been flushed right down the drain! Does this really happen? Will a company hire a SEO firm, spend thousands of dollars to optimize their site for better positioning and then sabotage themselves? You bet it does, unfortunately all the time....
It is well worth the money you will spend as well as the peace of mind knowing that someone else is worrying about your rankings for you. A good SEO company will actually not cost you anything in the long run because it will amount to increased exposure and increased traffic which in turn will bring increase revenues.
Optimizing pages with JavaScript and Style Sheets for search engines. Step by step tutorial on how to successfully offload Javascript and CSS (Style Sheets) to external text files for optimum indexing by the search engine spiders....
Right now, I feel like the kid in school, afraid to raise his/her hand and ask a 'dumb question'... but perhaps, like that kid, there are others afraid to ask too! Would it be possible to include a brief explanation and spelled out meaning of the abbreviations or terms?...
As far as AltaVista goes, you are correct: they don't seem to bring much traffic these days, even when you have many top-ten rankings. Of course, they just reinvented themselves a couple of weeks ago. Therefore, it's impossible to say what the future holds for them....
One of the easiest ways to spot a phony search engine optimization company is by their wild claims....
Playing SEO catch-up. How to separate keywords. Redoing a Web site. Using country-specific language TLDs. Keyword stuff. PageRank and its effect on rankings....
I have heard through the grapevine that if you buy many domain names and point them back to your home page, when the search engines find this out they will shut you off. Is that true at all?...
If your company hasnt already made plans to make the most of this years predicted, recording breaking Internet growth, then it may be too late. Most of your competitors have already implemented some kind of search engine strategy and are one step ahead. So what can you do?...
The Search Engine Optimization service industry must now adapt itself to the recent developments in the web industry, namely the emergence of a relatively stable set of web standards and design conventions....
While optimization will help a web site no matter when it is introduced, the most beneficial approach is to keep it in mind throughout all stages of web site development, as well as to be aware of key points in site production....
In order to secure a well-optimized status for any web site, large or small, you must first use your site's strengths as an advantage. Executing your optimization with these strengths in mind will bring great rewards in the form of traffic....
Using doorway pages to enhance the search engine ranking of your website, will not benefit your company in the long-term. While it is tempting to use doorways to gain quick results, inevitably the search engines discover the pages and ban them from their index....
|
|
|
Search marketing information for small business owners.
Fetching the best small business news.
A friendly place to share small business ideas and knowledge.
A different kind of small business marketing conference.
The directory of the best small business sites and tools.
Home of our network.
Copyright © 1998 - 2009 K. Clough, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy
FreeFind Site Search Engine - FreeFind adds a "search this site" feature to your website, making your site easier to use. FreeFind also gives you reports showing what your visitors are searching for, enabling you to improve your site. FreeFind's advanced site search engine and automatic site map technology can be added to your website for free.
(Unpaid placement - FreeFind is a Search Engine Guide partner.)