WHAT SEO EXPERTS SAYS :

Paul's Quality Backlinks - Paul & Angela's Backlink Service

2010-06-28T12:33:00.000-07:00

Save Yourself Time And Money To Focus On Your Business!

Angela V. Edwards and Paul Johnson have teamed up to offer you this amazing link building service. We have been offering this service to only subscribers of our monthly backlink packets, and many of them have already seen their sites move up in the search engine rankings. We have now decided to open the doors to everyone, and offer four different pricing packages as well.
Don’t waste your hard earned time & energy on tedious tasks that consume most of your day, let us build your backlinks for you, so you can spend more time to focus on your business.
Not only will you get your site and keyword manually linked on High Page Rank authority sites, but you will receive a detailed report upon completion, which will have links that you can click on that will take you to the exact location of your site & anchor text links on each High Page Rank authority site.
We are proud to announce that we have 6 different link building packages ranging from 6 to 120 backlinks per month, and you now have the option to pay by invoice of monthly subscription.
Please Note: This is a first come first serve basis, so you should reserve your spot now due to the limited amount of clients we can take.

Backlink Packages
6 backlinks $12
14 backlinks $27
30 Backlinks $57
50 Backlinks $94
80 Backlinks $150
120 Backlinks $215

Note: Pricing above is for only one site and up to two keywords, contact us for custom packages.

How Social Media Helps Businesses Deal with Economic Downturns

2010-06-24T22:43:00.000-07:00

The economy, while showing signs of not deteriorating further, is also not as robust as we would like it to be. But smart businesses all over the world have managed to stay afloat by cutting down on their expenses considerably through some pretty innovative strategies. It is no surprise that such cost cutting innovations came to fore only during one of the worst patches of the economy. Nonetheless, even after the economy slowly started picking up, the strategies remain because they are not just a cost cutting measure; they result in substantial benefits for the business.

Marketers turned to social media in droves when the businesses had less money to spend. We went through, and haven’t yet completely come out of, a phase where even spending money for paper, printing and other routine expenses were brought under scrutiny. This has helped companies in a big way. Most of them were able to cut down unnecessary fluff in their expenses and metamorphosed into lean and tough warriors who had a real chance in surviving this battle.

Social media usage started in a big way during the economic downturn. It shows no signs of letting up, if any; the rate of usage is only increasing. When businesses learn how effective social media is, the more aggressively they use it.

The success of social media is based on its ability to converse with customers. When you use social media sites to promote your business, you are creating and magnifying the buzz about your brand. The customers speak directly to you, and that too within a matter of minutes after you initiate an attempt at engaging with them. This is an advantage that helps social media tower head and shoulders above all the rest of the advertising and marketing channels. Consider the amount of money that you have to spend on running a traditional print or a television ad. Even with the ad campaign running, it takes weeks or even months to get an inkling of what the customers think about your new product or service, updates or anything else that you are up to.

The caveat here is that you need to dedicate as much time to the social media conversations as your customers do. Prompt responses, staying away from hard sell, acknowledging blunders gracefully etc. are requisites for success.

Though social media first started to be used as a tool to cut costs, business people have since realized it’s potential and still continue to use it effectively to engage with customers. During the recession, many businesses that were forced into a corner to cut costs resorted to less than popular and sometimes downright unethical business practices. Social media gave a platform for those transgressing thus and for others to make the most of the situation.

Even those customers who had lost trust in the business could be wooed back by responding to their concerns genuinely and addressing them. Those businesses that did not bother to do so lost the customers because they went to some other company who did seem to care. Social media was, and still is, a great way to engage in a two way communication. Because of its subtlety and lack of hoopla that is usually associated with traditional marketing, social media is seen as more genuine, real and believable.

Whether the economic scenario is bleak or not, social media is and will remain one of the most powerful tools to build credibility for your brand and to attract a loyal following. It is not really a quick-fix for all the troubles of your business, so do not use it like a band-aid. Rather, use this powerful tool intelligently to build steady and deep relationships that are based on trust, respect and loyalty.

Posted by Empowered on June 23rd, 2010

Must-Have SEO Recommendations: Step 7 of the 8-Step SEO Strategy

2010-06-24T22:41:00.000-07:00

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

You know the client. The one that really needs your help. The one that gets pumped when you explain how keywords work. The one that has an image file for a site. Or maybe the one that insists that if they copy their competitor’s title tags word-for-word, they’ll do better in search results (I had a product manager make his team do that once. Needless to say (I was thrilled when) it didn’t work).

In Step 6 of the SEO Strategy document I noted that this strategy document we’ve been building isn’t a best practices document, and it’s more than a typical SEO audit. It is a custom set of specific, often product-focused recommendations and strategies for gaining search traffic. For that reason I recommended linking out to SEO basics and best practices elsewhere (in an intranet or a separate set of documents).

But most of the time you’ll still need to call out some horizontal things that this client must have put in front of their faces, or else it will be missed completely. SEO/M is your area of expertise, not theirs, so help them make sure they’ve got their bases covered. You can create an additional section for these call-outs, wherever you feel it is appropriate in your document.

WHAT CAN I INCLUDE HERE?

Here are some examples of things you could include if you felt your client needed this brought to their attention:

Press Release optimization and strategy
SEO resources for specific groups in the company:
1. SEO for business development (linking strategies in partner deals)
2. SEO for writers/editorial
3. SEO for designers
SEO for long term results rather than short term fixes
International rollout recommendations
Content management system – how it is impairing their SEO
Risks and avoidances
Anything that you feel should be covered in more detail for this particular client, that wasn’t covered in your strategy in the last step. This is a catchall – a place to make sure you cover all bases.
Nothing - if you dont feel it's needed.

If the client really needs a lot of help, you’d want to provide training and best practices, either as separate deliverables along with the strategy document, or better yet – work on training and best practices with them first, then dive into more specific strategy. You don’t want to end up with a 15 page (or even 4 page for that matter) best practices document in your strategy doc. Remember, we’re beyond best practices here, unless, in this case there’s something specific that needs to be called out.

If the client needs more than one thing called out, do it. If it’s several things, consider either adding an appendix, or as I mentioned, creating a separate best practices document.

The reason I recommend best practices as a separate document is because it is really a different project, often for an earlier phase.

EXAMPLE 1:

Let’s say for example, my client has the type of content the press loves to pick up. They don’t do press releases, mostly because they don’t know how exactly to write them and where to publish them, but they want to. I‘ll add a Press Releases section after the strategy and I might give them these simple tidbits:

High level benefit of doing press releases
What person or group in the company might be best utilized to manage press releases
Examples of what to write press releases about
Channels they can publish press releases to
Optimization tips
References they can go to for more detailed information

EXAMPLE 2:

My client gets it. They’re pretty good at taking on most SEO on their own. This strategy document I’m doing for them is to really dig in and make sure all gaps are closed, and that they’re taking advantage of every opportunity they should. Additionally, in a few months they are going to roll out the site to several international regions.

My dig into the site and its competitors (and search engines) for this strategy have all been for the current site in this country. Because the Intl rollout hasn’t started yet, I will add a section to my document with specific things they need to keep in mind when doing this rollout.

Localized keyword research (rather than using translate tools)
ccTLD (country code top level domain) considerations
Tagging considerations (like “lang”)
Proper use of Google Webmaster Tools for specifying region
Potential duplication issues
Maybe even a lit of popular search engines in those countries
Point to more resources or list as a potential future contract project

Make sense? Use your judgment here. Like we’ve seen in the rest of the steps, this strategy document is your work of art, so paint it how your own creative noggin sees it, Picasso.

Other suggestions for what you might include here? Love it? Hate it? Think this step stinks or mad I didn’t include music to listen to for this one? Let’s hear about it in the comments!

Posted by laura on June 22nd, 2010

Bing It? “Bring It,” Says Google

2010-06-23T21:30:00.000-07:00

I got a chuckle out of this on Google. Do a search for bing it, and Google comes back with a suggestion of “bring it.” Is Google telling Bing to bring it on?

It’s all automated, of course. This is just Google’s spelling correction kicking in. Many more people are likely typing in “bring it” than “bing it,” so Google’s trying to do the right thing and help them. But it’s still funny to me.

Over at Ask, the same thing happens there:

So see, it’s not just Google being mean to Bing.

Yahoo also does something similar. It brings back results for for both “bring it” and “bing it” mixed together, along with an option for the searcher to get only “bing it” results:

What about Bing itself? No suggestion there that the searcher might want “bring it” rather than “bing it,” as you can see:

I suppose that makes sense. More people at Bing who enter “bing it” might really mean that rather than “bring it.”

Does anyone actually say Bing It? Yes, a few actually do. Our Yes, People Do Say “Bing It” — Barely story from last month covers this in more depth. Not many, but it is a term that some people are saying — and perhaps searching on.

Of course, many more people say “Google It.” How’s that play out at Bing? Just fine — its lists Google tops, with no special suggestions.

That’s not the case with Yahoo, which shoves a box encouraging you to “get straight to your answers here with Yahoo! Search” above Google’s listing (the same thing happens if you just search for “google,” as well):

Why’s Yahoo listing Google Italy rather than the main Google site? The “It” part of “Google It” is probably being interpreted as a search for www.google.it, the Italian version of Google.

Ask plays straight with a search for “google it,” but if you search for Google, it tries to keep you there like Yahoo does:

Yahoo’s done this type of thing in the past (see “You Could Go To Google,” Says Yahoo — But Why Not Stay Here?). To its credit, Bing — in a search for Google there — doesn’t try to convince you to Bing It instead.

Bing SEO Services Jun 23, 2010 at 9:31pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Bing Has A New Look, Now Hosts Deep Content In Search Results

2010-06-23T21:27:00.000-07:00

While Bing is throwing a star-studded party to announce changes to its entertainment-based search results, there are several other changes that deserve a close look, not the least of which is the amount of deep content — including full articles with thousands of words — that Bing is now hosting in its search results. More on that in a bit.

Look & Feel

Let’s start with the overall new look and feel that Bing has announced. The biggest change is that search options — or, Quick Tabs in Bing-speak — have been moved from the left-side column to immediately under the search box at the top of the page. Bing calls this the Answer Bar.

Just like before, the tabs will change depending on the query; the U2 search above has tabs for Songs, Albums, and Videos that are obviously query-specific. In order to make the Quick Tabs more visible below the search box, Bing’s background “image of the day” has been cut down in size pretty substantially, and you can barely tell what it is now. (If you care, that is.)

The left-side column, meanwhile, still has Related Searches and links to your recent searches; these are now easier to access because the Quick Tabs don’t take up several hundred vertical pixels above them.

What’s unchanged is the inclusion of categorized results further down the search results page.

But beyond the new Answer Bar at the top of the search results page, Bing has made some pretty substantial additions and changes to the search results for certain verticals, like Autos, Finance, and Health.

Bing: Autos

Consider a search for honda accord specs. On the old Bing interface, you’d get a pretty standard page of search results with a little bit of information about the car in Bing’s standard Instant Answer.

In the new interface, auto-related searches that include the word “specs” (and perhaps other terms; I haven’t been able to trigger it, though) send you directly to a new Quick Tab with what appears to be a pretty complete look at the Honda Accord’s specs.

The data comes from MSN Autos, and each of the orange headings you see above (Pricing & Warranty, Fuel Economy, etc.) links to further information at MSN Autos.

Bing: Finance

Bing has been strong in finance-related searches, and already shows a wealth of company information on searches that involve company stock ticker symbols. Do a search for MSFT and then click the “Finance” Quick Tab on the left, and you would see a page like this:

But, as part of the new interface, Bing has added several new content pages underneath the Finance Quick Tab that give investors faster access to deeper company information. You can see links (below) for Balance sheet, Income statement, and Cash flow — each one is a page of data like this:

Bing: Health

Coming later this week will be a variety of upgrades to Bing’s search results and interface for health-related searches. One is the addition of authoritative Twitter updates to the existing Instant Answer for medical conditions. Here’s a look at what the Instant Answer for prostate cancer will look like:

The tweet above comes from the Prostate Cancer Foundation. Bing says the tweets will only come from authoritative sources and will appear when relevancy and recency standards are met; the tweet above mentions a new discovery related to prostate cancer, which is a piece of information that the Instant Answer might not otherwise have shared with searchers.

More important than that, though, is Bing’s integration of content directly in the search results via partnerships with a variety of well-known health industry sources.

Do a search for diabetes, for example, and the initial search results include Bing’s standard Instant Answer. But there’s a new Health Quick Tab at the top of the page, and under that tab is a detailed article from the Mayo Clinic.

There’s also a box for “related articles,” all of which link to additional articles hosted by Bing.

Bing has had health information from the Mayo Clinic (and others) in its Instant Answers since day one, but this is much more than Instant Answers. This is full content articles acting like a search results page (or tab, in this case). How detailed and lengthy is that Mayo Clinic article on Bing? It’s a collection of the 10 articles that appear on the Mayo Clinic’s diabetes page — mirroring the ten links on the left side of that page (Definition, Symptoms, Causes, etc.). I cut-and-pasted Bing’s version into Microsoft Word: It took up eight pages and shows a word count of 5,264.

Final Thoughts

With this latest round of changes, Bing continues to drive home the idea of being a “decision engine” — getting searchers the information they need to take action right from the search results, or with as few clicks as possible from the search results.

Bing says that the new Answer Bar increased user engagement during its internal testing, and also helped to decrease the number of manual re-queries. Bing says that’s a sign that searchers are getting the information they need.

What’s very important in all of this, I think, is the increase in real information sitting on/in Bing’s search engine — the type of stuff search engines typically just provide links to. Whether it’s full specs for a new car, a company’s complete and current balance sheet, or an 8,000+ word article about diabetes, this is new. Search results are now content.

Note: Some Bing users may not see all of the changes at this time while the updates are rolling out; the Health updates, in particular, aren’t due to go live for a couple days.

Bing Optimization Jun 23, 2010 at 2:14am ET by Matt McGee

8 Reasons In-House SEOs Hire SEO Consultants

2010-06-22T02:04:00.001-07:00

When I was an in-house SEO I hired outside SEO consultants. Now as the outside SEO consultant I often work with in-house SEOs. In the comments of my most recent post, an interesting question came up, "...why would a company who has an in-house SEO expert hire an external company?"

Here are 8 excellent reasons why talented in-house SEOs often bring in outside help.

1. Specialized Expertise

Not too long ago, SEO was a niche marketing specialization. I remember when even Internet Marketing was considered a highly niche specialization. In fact, my college marketing instructor tried to talk me out of Internet Marketing because it was too niche and I ran the risk of limiting my prospects down the line.

Times have sure changed. As the search engines have matured and the SEO industry has evolved along with them, it is becoming increasingly difficult to be on top of every SEO related factor. Even something as specific as SEO is segmenting into specializations. Experts have emerged in social media promotion, local SEO, mobile SEO, copy-writing for SEO, link-building, and so on.

"I hired the external consultants simply because they had more experience in the area I needed support in. Everyone needs to learn new things, so you're rarely an expert in everything at once. Hiring the external consultant gets around a lot of hurdles and ramps up your program much quicker. Their deeper domain expertise allowed me to focus in areas I was strong in, while our entire SEO effort moved forward at the desired pace. Why reinvent the wheel when someone else already has an established, productive program that can benefit you?"

Duane Forrester is an in-house SEO with Microsoft, running their program for MSN. He is also the author of How To make Money With Your Blog and Turn Clicks into Customers. In his spare time, he writes for Search Engine Land.

I like what Duane said about the hiring of external consultants ramping up your program quicker. By knowing and doing what you do best and outsourcing other tasks, you can super-charge your site's SEO and get closer to your potential traffic level.

If I worked for a national business comprised on thousands of brick-and-mortar locations (think Burger King), I'd definitely look at retaining the services of someone like David Mihm to ensure I had all the right pieces in place. I doubt that many people reading this post are as well versed on the intricacies of Local SEO as David.

How about mobile? You have the choice to either delve into the details yourself or do as other talented in-house SEOs have done and hire someone like Cindy Krum who wrote the book on Mobile Marketing. Literally.

"Mobile SEO is a niche within a niche, and it is pretty specialized. Top in-house SEO's have brought me in to help with mobile SEO, simply because they don't have time to learn the niche. There is a lot to know, and it is easy to make mistakes. Mobile is still a small part of most in-house SEO's traffic, so they want to know that things are set up correctly, but they don't have enough bandwidth to devote to learning the niche or even shepherding the project."

Cindy Krum is the CEO and Founder of Rank-Mobile, LLC, and author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are. She also hosts a weekly radio show called Mobile Presence, acts as an SEOmoz Associate, responding to Q&A about mobile SEO.

Why bumble around yourself on such specialized niches when you can focus on the pieces you know best and outsource those pieces to a more qualified expert? You don't need to be everything SEO all the time. Give yourself a break!

2. Too Much to Do. Too Little Time.

Effective SEO is a lot of work. Managing the internal politics can be a full-time job unto itself! Perhaps you are confident that you have the strategy nailed down but you just can't get your projects through the pipeline fast enough. In order to keep things moving while you consider the next big project it can help to hire an outside consultant.

"I outsource as necessary for specific tasks, not for general consulting or strategy. Specific examples include content creation for new pages on a site, link building, and social promotion of blog content. This has generally worked out well as I'm able to shape efforts and budget across all aspects of Internet marketing while having a specific challenge or need addressed by the consulting company."

John Santangelo is an Internet marketing professional based in Jacksonville, FL and currently works in-house as the Search Marketing Manager for a staffing firm.

Once you've established what needs to be done, hiring an SEO consultant can help you push through a task list and get closer to your goals.

3. Fresh Perspective

Working on the same website for years on end can get mighty boring. You can only come up with so many interesting articles related to nylons, and if you have to rewrite the homepage title tag one more time you're going to scream. With boredom comes creative stagnation. Bringing in the right SEO consultant can help get the creative juices flowing again. Fresh eyes bring fresh ideas to help your business grow.

At SEOmoz we used to provide whirlwind audits in our boardroom. The client would bring along their best and brightest SEOs, marketing folks, and development staff. We'd go through their site and point out areas for improvement. One particular client comes to mind; well known brand, important website, talented SEO expertise... They'd blocked an important directory in the robots.txt. Sometimes when you are too close to a problem you can miss little details like a line in your robots.txt or an important redirect.

4. Educational Purposes

At SEOmoz we often sold an educational component along with our site audits. We'd go in with slide decks and teach anywhere from one to dozens of in-house resources some of our knowledge. This empowers the in-house team to move forward on their own, knowing a little more. Training can be formal or otherwise. Topher describes his outsourced project as a learning experience.

"As the in-house at CNN.com I have used a agency (Bruce Clay) and have brought in an outside consultant. I think a good SEO has to know what they don’t know and I do not know mobile SEO well at all. I went and asked about for a mobile SEO expert and Cindy Krum's name came up all over the place so I brought her in and she was great. I am still not an expert on Mobile SEO but I for sure know a heck of a lot more now then I did before because of her."

Topher Kohan is the SEO Coordinator for CNN. He joined CNN, a division of Turner broadcasting and a Time Warner company, in early 2008 after two years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

5. Validation

SEO enhancements can be expensive to implement and sometimes take months or even years to complete. Based on high level experience across more web properties, an outsourced consultant can help you prioritize your enhancements and validate your project plan to ensure you make the most of the development investment.

"Outside SEO consultants typically have very broad experiences with a variety of websites and industries. Our role is to come along side the in-house team and help them manage the process of inserting SEO into the overall marketing and web production schedules and tackle the different hurdles associated with that. The in-house SEOs are our biggest allies to help us navigate the internal roadblocks and in return we are their biggest allies for getting their projects implemented."

Todd Friesen in the Vice President of Search for Position Technologies Inc. and has been working in SEO and online marketing since 1999 with many high profile clients such as Nike and the NCAA.

At SEOmoz we enjoyed working with strong in-house SEO individuals or teams for our consulting gigs. I suspect that this is true for most SEO consultants that specialize more on strategy and less on implementation.

6. Collaboration

As in-house SEOs, a lot of folks work independently. It can be refreshing and rewarding to expand on the one-man show. Marty describes how he and his employer benefit from expanding his team from time to time to meet a need.

"It really benefits me to be able to divvy up the responsibilities for things like site architecture, internal linking, etc. to an outside firm/person I trust while I focus on other important tasks like content migrations and cleanup with our internal web team. I find it very useful to spread the workload in order to be able to launch a redeveloped site sooner rather than later and in most instances it is also more cost effective in the time savings."

Marty Martin is an SEM/SEO with a broad range of experience working for colleges and universities, regional and state tourism, government and business. He is employed currently as an in-house SEO for Leisure Publishing Co., Inc. in Virginia.

7. Overcome Internal Politics

Of course you know your stuff when it comes to SEO. That is how you got your in-house SEO job, right? Then why do you spend so much of your time selling the value of your projects and negotiating for resources? One challenge that a lot of in-house SEOs face is finding the time to do actual SEO work. External consultants can help pave the way to get home grown ideas implemented.

	"Sometimes in-house SEO departments need help convincing another department that their ideas are solid. We do a lot of consulting that helps the different departments learn how to play together throughout the development life cycle."
Jessica Bowman is an SEO Expert, international speaker, member of the SEMPO Board of Directors and works with companies to figure out what they need to build a successful in-house SEO program.

8. Breadth of Knowledge

As an in-house SEO for a growing business, the challenges you face for the first time have more often than not been considered and successfully addressed by another SEO somewhere out there in cyberspace.

	"A number of our clients have in-house SEO teams and we love working alongside them. There's quite a range of reasons why we'd be brought in. One of the most common reasons is because we have specific experience across a range of sites or in solving a specific tough problem."
Will Critchlow is the Director of Distilled, an SEO and internet marketing firm in London and Seattle.

Lets say you've inadvertently landed yourself a Google penalty. How do you diagnose the problem, get it fixed, and request forgiveness with a successful outcome? A consultant who has helped other websites work their way out of a penalty situation can be invaluable.

There are plenty of less dramatic examples. How do you implement a WordPress powered blog as a sub-folder of a .Net site? How do you handle millions of constantly expiring pages (as is common with job boards and classified ad sites)? How will you write a compelling link bait piece?

Action Items

The next time you get push back when proposing to hire an SEO consultant, choose from the reasons outlined in this post to support your case.

We need specialized expertise.
We have too much to do. We'll get this project moving faster if I can get some help.
We can learn a lot from an outside expert.
We want to double check our strategies before we get going.
We would benefit from collaboration with other SEOs.
A consultant can help us work through the concerns of marketing/IT/executives.
We need the help of someone who has done (insert complicated initiative) before.

In-house SEOs hire outside assistance for all kinds of things from strategy, implementation, retainer, special projects and more. Are you an in-house SEO that has worked with external SEO experts? I'd love to hear your experience.

Happy optimizing!

Posted by Lindsay

Choosing the Right Keyphrases - Especially for the Smaller Sites!

2010-06-22T02:02:00.000-07:00

Hey there folks! Today's post is a hands-on walkthrough of some of the decision making used when choosing the keyphrases to target. Producing a list of the most important terms in an industry is nice, but actually choosing the right keyphrases is essential. The post was largely created in response to a question submitted by Kien in the comments of my last post.

What to Expect

This post should provide you with real-life examples of the keyword decision making process and help you make sense of the output from the revamped Keyword Difficulty Tool. If you're already a hardcore keyword research (and keyword difficulty) guru, this is more of a refresher, but should provide valuable insights to journeymen and perhaps a bit more transparency into how to choose the right keyphrases for your site (plus a bit of a tour for those of you who haven't used the Keyword Difficulty Tool for a while).

While you may get more value from this on smaller sites, and those that are newly launched, large sites with specific keyword targets may benefit, too.

Two Different Camps

There are really two separate and distinct camps on keyphrase research implementation: those who always go for the highest volume search terms that are moderately relevant to a page and those that also give consideration to the competitive landscape for a certain term. Regardless of which camp you fall into, this tool can be immensely useful. If you find yourself in the "competitive" camp and always go after the highest volume term no matter what, the Keyword Difficulty Tool could and should still be used to track your linkbuilding efforts vs. the competition and to have some understanding of if/when you might be able to rank for the term in question. There's no point in setting goals (even if they are lofty) without having some idea of how to reach them.

Image: Ebaums World

However, if you are in the camp that likes quick results and has a bit more time to give to the keyphrase research process I strongly recommend going the extra mile to indentify realistic targets for the short-term and keep those lofty ambitions in the back of your mind to be addressed as a site grows, gains new links and hopefully acheives higher authority and trust metrics.

But what if my site is brand new?

As a general rule any newer sites should probably be aiming for the "less-moderately competitive" types of keyphrases for the most part. The one exception to this rule would be for exact match domain names.

If you can afford to look at these metrics in this light you can scale up the competitiveness for your terms as you improve the quality and competitiveness of your website.

Image from: Rand's Post on Multiple vs. Singular Keywords

Thinking about it logically (with the above graphic in mind): if you could rank first for a term with 30,000 global monthly searches or somewhere on the fourth or fifth page for a similar term with 300,000 global monthly searches which would you choose? The optimist might choose the second option, but the truly intelligent will pick the first for now and aim for the second option down the road. It doesn't take superior math skills to figure out that a small fraction of 1.2% of clicks from the 300,000 searches will not amount to anywhere near 42.1% of 30,000 searches.

I'm not saying it's always better to play it safe, I'm just saying that realistic goals will help you achieve more in the short term, and the opportunity to re-evaluate these goals will help you in the long term.

Does this keyword require a new page? How many terms can I target on a page?

This depends on a couple of factors. It depends, again, on the competitiveness of the terms but also largely depends on the strength of the overall site or page on which the keyword is being targeted.

As covered in Rand's post in March on this issue, a highly competitive term deserves "single page targeting". This is true in most instances and particularly good advice for smaller, newer sites. The way this works is somewhat backwards, but experience suggests stronger sites can target multiple terms on a page yet also can afford to rank for a larger number of long-tail keyphrases. This may seem a bit unfair, but it is what anecdotal evidence has shown me.

The long and short of it? If your site is big, unless the keyphrase is highly competitive it can probably be targeted on a page targeting other similar terms as well. However, if the phrase is extremely competitive it deserves it's own page.

In the case of smaller, newer sites there are forces working against the best approach. On the one hand, smaller sites will have fewer pages indexed and will not have a great deal of authority to rely on and spread throught the site. On the other hand, this also means they cannot drop the term "breast augmentation" on the same inner page as "breast enhancement" and expect to rank for both terms.

How do I know if my Site is Strong Enough to Rank for that Term?

The Difficulty Tool pulls in some nice metrics from the rankings that allow you to see a fair bit of information about the other sites ranking for a particular search term or phrase. It won't always be a simple case of "my page/domain is stronger than theirs, thus I will rank". There will always be other factors: is the keyphrase an exact match for the Top Level Domain [TLD]? Are the other sites targeting multiple terms on the page or just the one? How many inbound links does the other page have? How relevant is this specific keyphrase to your term?

I think you get the point here, it won't always be a simple fix but let's look at an example to try to get a clearer idea of how to work through this.

Let's look at an example from a recent client project I did for a plastic surgeon (honest). In doing research for terms around plastic surgery for a brand new website I tried to get my head around some of the inner nuances of some of the terminology and procedures to try to better understand search behaviour. As you can see from the above research the broad match search volume for breast augmentation is considerably larger than the others [insert corny joke here], however the local search volume is quite comparable for the top two terms and they are about equally competitive.

This particular area of research can be quite complicated because you also have to look at the intent of the searcher and weigh that with the product offered. The term "boob job" whilst funny, is probably not likely to lead to serious searchers who are considering having a selective surgery so that coupled with the lower search volume means we can probably get rid of that one for now (though it might be worth bearing in mind for future link bait).

As an aside: by doing a bit further research into the types of pages that rank for the two terms and looking into search behaviours a bit it actually seems that people searching for "breast implants" are also not likely to be the highest converting traffic and there are certain social stigmas associated with the various terminology. So, in this case we can actually probably rule out breast implants (in terms of the main target of the top level page) because it is not likely to lead to highly converting traffic. This does not, however mean that we won't want to target the term at all, just that it may move down the priority list a touch.

So, the very first step has helped us eliminate two of the terms for the time being- so we're making some progress! The next step is to compare the terms that seem as though they might both be realistic targets for the page but are also relatively similar in terms of competitiveness. Although the scores assigned by the Keyword Difficulty Tool can be very helpful when comparing a term that is ranked as a "10" versus one that is ranked as a "95" these "difficulty scores" do not provide enough information alone when comparing two simialrly competitive terms. Thankfully, the tool gives us a lot more data to work with.

As you can see above, although "breast augmentation" seems to be a slightly "less competitive" term based on the diffculty metric there is a clear outlier within this chart (which we can go ahead and guess is going to be Wikipedia without even having the rest of the data) that looks like it will be extremely difficult to outrank even if the top spot seems slightly weaker than for "breast enhancement."

Similarly, the overall landscape for "breast enhancement" actually seems a bit more realistic as a target for a new site. Thus, in this case (based solely on the likelihood of ranking) we would actually choose to target "enhancement" rather than "augmentation." And try to work our way up to the more difficut term by building links to the site as a whole and specifically trying to target this page before shifting our approach on the term targeting. But before we make this a final decision, let's have a slightly closer look at what the competition really looks like.

As you can we were right in assuming the 5th spot for the "augmentation" comparison has been taken by Wikipedia, though not on a page directly targeted towards "breast augmentation" (hence why it's probably riding as low as it is in the rankings).

Meanwhile, setting aside the Wikipedia page it looks like the top spot for "augmentation" is actually being held by a rather weak site that happens to have great anchor text in the domain. This is a perfect indicator of just how much benefit having a strong TLD with exact match anchor text can be, but unfortunately this sort of tactic won't help much when you're trying to land the client who wants a "tummy tuck" instead.

So, what do we do?

In an ideal world, the client would be a great big site with loads of authority and without much sense. They will have been targeting "boob job" and have 302'ed all of their old links so we can make some quick changes and win. In this case, we go after all of the terms, do a bit of linkbuilding and we'll probably turn out just fine.

Meanwhle, in the real world situation we would recommend going for "augmentation" as our targeted term for a couple of reasons.

Labeling/Usability Fail

First, it is probably the "best" of the keyphrases in question. It targets the right kind of customer/searcher (we know this based on existing data and background insights on behaviour) and it has the highest search volume at the broader level.

Second, this keyphrase actually makes the most sense for the page we set out to build. As a top-level page it gives us the opportunity to (over time) target some of these other terms on the page (with the exception, maybe, of "boob job") . Augmentation is the most generic term and will allow us to discuss "implants, reduction, enhancement, etc."

Third, after having looked more closely at the sites/pages currently ranking for these terms it actually seems like it will be easier to rank for this particular keyphrase (please note that Wikipedia is not even directly targeting this keyphrase in this case).

"But what about all the other keyphrases? I don't want to waste them!"

This is where the post comes full circle. If you're building the small/new site the most sensible option (in the short term) is to create a page that is optimised for as many of these pages can be justified and for which you have research. As we mentioned ealier on, you can't just go after every single keyphrase in the industry on individual pages from the get-go because they won't all be indexed.

Try just to use some common sense: create the augmentation page high-up within the information architecture, construct a page for "reduction", "implants" and "enhancements" and forget about "boob job" for now. This term may get some traffic but if it doesn't fit with the theme/tone of the site then save it for the linkbait and build strong links to these inner pages now.

This technique creates much more work. But with a brand new site this is to be expected. Try to structure things in a manner that you can get rid of some of the smaller pages targeting extremely similar terms without impacting usability. This is essential and will make your life much easier in the future.

"What if my client is a massive site with great links?"
We should all be so lucky. This is obviously a different ball game we're talking about here. But, if you are fortunate enough to have a Domain Authority that is considerably higher than your competitors for the keyphrase(s) in question you aren't going to struggle too much and you only need one page to rank for a number of terms.

Image via: 3 Meeses

If this is your starting point, I would advise creating one hub/landing page for all "augmentation" related terms. If your site is strong enough the Wikipedia example quite clearly illustrates that some of these other pages may be superfluous.

There's no need to jam all these keyphrases in the title-tag either. If there are enough inbound links and the site is trusted enough you can probably just go for the highest search volume terms so long as the term is related to the service offered (never forget usability!), if you are in this position kick back, relax and just wait for the little guys to catch-up!

Sam is based in London as a lead SEO at Distilled. He hopes you've enjoyed this post and is looking forward to your comments, questions and concerns!

Can Google Real Time Search Have Its Own Home Page Now?

2010-06-21T23:01:00.000-07:00

Google’s Real Time Search is awesome. I’d love to point more people at it, but I can’t. That’s because unlike many other specialized Google search services, Google Real Time Search doesn’t have its own home page. That sucks, and it’s time to change.

Want to search for images on Google? Head over here to Google Image Search. Videos? Here’s Google Video Search. Books? Google Book Search. Heck, even Google Patent Search has its own home page. I can point readers at any of these with a simple URL. But to point them at Google Real Time Search, I have to explain things. Painfully. Like:

Go to Google
Search for something
Look on the left side of the screen, in the new Search Options section
Click on the “Updates” link or the “More” option to get to Updates, if you don’t see it
Now you’re getting results from Google Real Time Search

Or:

Go to Google Trends
Look for the “Hot Topics” section at the bottom left part of the page
Find the “More Hot Topics” search box
Search for something to get Google Real Time Search results

This is stupid. It’s time for Google to put Google Real Time Search out on something like realtime.google.com or social.google.com or whatever. But get it done. If Bing can manage to put its real time / social search service on a dedicated page, Google can do the same.

Jun 16, 2010 at 6:37pm ET by Danny Sullivan

A few thoughts on SSL Search

2010-06-21T22:57:00.000-07:00

I’m incredibly happy that Google has added the option to search over SSL by going to https://www.google.com/ — note the “s” in “https.” I’m writing this blog post in a hotel right now because I’m in Europe for a week doing a series of tech talks, but I could just as easily be working down at local Dublin cafe with an open WiFi hotspot. In both cases, I might want to do a private search that the hotel or local cafe can’t see. A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connection provides an encrypted tunnel between my browser and Google, so other people can’t sniff what I’m searching for.

I believe encrypted search is an important option for Google searchers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked for secure search in the past (see this post from 2009), and I credit them for helping to put this on Google’s radar. Another inspiration that helped to spark this project was Cory Doctorow’s book “Little Brother.” It was one of my favorite books of 2008 and while I won’t go into the book’s plot here, it’s a quick, fun read. “Little Brother” also makes a compelling case for encrypting HTTP traffic on the web.

Some people don’t yet fully understand how SSL search works. I saw one commenter say “If they still pass in the search parameters in the URL (Get), what’s the point? People can still see what you queried, if they made them “post” messages it might actually do something.” It’s important to realize that even though you as a surfer can see the query in the url, the sites between your browser and Google can’t. Google OS demonstrated that by sniffing a regular HTTP query and an HTTPS query in Wireshark to show that the query can’t be seen going over the wire.

Thanks to all the people at Google who did the all the hard work and heavy lifting to deliver this. One of the main engineers behind the effort was Evan Roseman, a member of the webspam team who you might have met at previous search conferences. In fact, Evan was originally scheduled to be on our site review session at Google I/O this past Thursday, but we decided that launching SSL search took priority. I also wanted to say thanks and congratulations to the other Googlers (for example Andrew Widdowson, Nathan Dabney, and Murali Viswanathan, but also many, many others) who generously gave their time and effort to make the launch happen and happen smoothly. You might think that switching on SSL for websearch is easy, but for a website with the complexity and scale of Google, it’s really not. The launch wouldn’t have happened without a ton of assistance from Googlers from many parts of the company, and I sincerely appreciate it.

I hope you enjoy https://www.google.com and find it useful.

Our Idol: Matt Cutts

Google Caffeine, Has Your SEO Been Affected?

2010-06-21T22:53:00.000-07:00

It’s been a few weeks since Google announced the rollout of its new indexing service “caffeine”. It’s been on the back of every SEO companies minds for months or even years when certain sites aren’t ranking or there are obscure websites ranking ahead of content rich SEO friendly sites. It was all about “caffeine”. Now the veil has been lifted on what caffeine is and does.

Courtesy of http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

Caffeine aims to crawl and analyze web pages much faster than their old system. Allowing for more real time content showing up on google. They aim to provide “50% fresher results for web searches”. This surely benefits the theory of good fresh content on sites helps SEO.

Since this update we have seen no drastic changes in the google results we receive. Is this because we generally deal with sites with regular fresh content or is it across the board and all this buzz about caffeine is unfounded or is the coming months going to be the real test. Our question to our readers is have you seen changes? How has it affected you and you’re rankings?

Determining Whether a Page/Site Passes Link Juice (and How Much)

2010-05-17T02:45:00.000-07:00

We've been hearing some requests lately for some really advanced, expert-level content, and this post is here to deliver. I've built up a short list of topics that deal with more cutting edge SEO, and if there's interest in this series, I'll try to make it a regular part of the blog. These tactics aren't black or gray hat (we're not advocates of that kind of thing), but they're very specific in use and tend to be at the opposite end of the "low-hanging fruit" basket.

The first in the series touches on a common SEO problem - determing if a link has value and how much. This tactic isn't low effort, so it should only be employed when the link or link source is particularly critical.

Testing Whether a Page/Site Passes Link Juice (and How Much)

Scenario: You've found some potentially valuable, but possibly suspect link sources. These could include things like a seemingly high quality directory that requires payment or a site you're worried may have aroused Google's ire for one reason or another. The need for a credible answer applies anytime you're unsure whether a link is counting in Google's rankings and need to know.

Tactic: Find a page that's already in Google's index and a somewhat random combination of words/phrases from that page's title and body for which it ranks in position #3-10. For example, with the query - http://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+presentation+morning+entitled+link, my blog post from last week on Link Magnets ranks #3. The query itself is not particularly competitive and the pages outranking it don't have the exact text in the title or domain name (a critical part of the process).

If I now place a link with the exact anchor text from another page (like the blog post you're reading now), e.g. new york presentation morning entitled link, I should be able to see, once this post is indexed by Google's spider, whether it passes link juice. The result will be positive if the page moves up 2-4 positions in ranking and I can be fairly assured that the link is indeed "Google-friendly." With that knowledge secure, I can change the anchor text and/or repoint the link to the desired location. I don't simply use the anchor text I want initially because with competitive queries, a single link may not make enough difference for the ranking impact to be visible and I don't want to waste my time/money/energy.

(Metrics displayed in the SERPs via mozbar)

Special Requirements: To make the testing work, you'll need to be able to repoint the link, change the anchor text or 301 redirect the linked-to page (though the last of these is the least desirable, since 301s lose some link juice in the process and good anchor text is so valuable for ranking in Google). Also, here at SEOmoz, we don't recommend buying links, so while this tactic could be applied to that process, remember that manipulative links may later be devalued, wasting all that time and effort you spent acquiring them.

Results: With this technique, you can not only get a yes/no answer to questions about whether the link passes ranking value, but a rough sense for how much (depending on the position change - this can be a good reason to use pages that rank in the #7-10 range). Do take care to record the ranking positions of all the pages in the results and leave the test running for 1-2 weeks (longer if there's very fresh results ranking for the query). If you don't, other factors may conflate to hide the true results.

I'm looking foward to your feedback about this technique - and let us know if you're interested in seeing more of this advanced/edge-case content on the blog, too. Below, I've listed the topics I could tackle in future "Advanced" level posts.

Hosting Pages on Third-Party Sites
oDesk/Mechanical Turk for Content Development (and Link Research)
Email Marketing for Search Personalization
Modifying Product/Business Naming Conventions
Spiking Search Volume and Capitalizing on QDF
Protecting Inter-Network Links & Domain Acquisitions from Devaluation

p.s. If you do like this kind of thing, I'd also suggest:

Register for SMX Advanced: Seattle or SMX Advanced: London - both are quite good and SEOmoz will be sending speakers to both. You can use the code SEOmoz@SMX for a 10% discount to either event.
Check out the SEOmoz Expert Training Series DVD, which just launched last week. The video alone will get you pretty excited :-)
PRO members should check out our libraries of tips, video content and webinars.

I'm in Tampa, then Miami this week, but will finally return to Seattle for some much needed time in the office next Monday. Until then, blogging, commenting & email may be a bit slow from me.

Posted by randfish on March 30th, 2010 at 7:42 am Link Building

The Definitive How-To Guide For Conversion Rate Optimization

2010-05-13T07:56:00.001-07:00

Let's start by asking one of the most important questions in conversion rate optimization (CRO):

A good question.

In this article, you’ll get:

A clear and defined process for CRO
Checklists to print and check off as you go

I’ll share the same processes that I use to consistently boost my clients’ conversion rates – sometimes even doubling or tripling them. (I specialize in industries like finance, gaming, travel and weightloss, where even a 5% increase in conversion rate can generate millions of dollars.)

This is the article I wish I could have read when starting out.

Conversion Rate Optimization - setting the record straight

If you only remember one thing from this article, make sure this is it.

Conversion rate optimization is…

Finding out why visitors aren’t converting
Fixing it
That's it.

It sounds obvious, but a lot of people forget it – and they leave a ton of money on the table as a result.

Conversion rate optimization isn't…

Split-testing the colour of your buttons (unless you really want to)
Following best-practice and guesswork
Based on misleading metrics

Let's look at the first point:

Don't split-test the colour of your buttons (unless you really want to)
The more people talk about CRO, the more you hear bizarre recommendations on the colour of your buttons and headlines, the alignment of form labels, and so on.

This is one real-life example:

"Making your headline red will increase your conversion rate 30%."

Let's rephrase the statement, using the definition of CRO above:

"I think that visitors aren't converting because our headline is black rather than red."

Putting it like this, it starts to sound less plausible.

Just because Youreapoorloser.com has a red headline, doesn't mean you should.

We need to start by finding out why visitors aren’t converting – then fix it.

The trouble is that statements like “green buttons convert better than red ones” and “short forms are better than long forms” are appealing, and quickly become considered “best practice”…

Don't follow best-practice and guesswork
It sounds counterintuitive to say "don't follow best practice" (especially in an article actually giving advice). To put it another way, don’t assume that just because it worked for someone else means it’ll work for you.

It's natural that we'll look for silver bullets – in fact, it's good to look for ways to get bigger wins quicker – but this kind of testing doesn't fit with a successful conversion rate optimization strategy.

Conversion rates are hugely personal to your website – what works on someone else's website will only work on yours if you have similar objections. You've got to find out what’s wrong with your site – not what worked on someone else’s.

Don't worry about misleading metrics
Focus on the money. So don't worry too much about microconversions or other metrics. (The only reason people boast about increasing their "add to basket" conversion rate is often because they didn’t increase their overall conversion rate.)

Focus on the money and the conversion rate that’s directly linked to revenue.

Why CRO matters

Ok, let's start with the easy one:

1. Make more money

But wait... there's more! When you increase your conversion rate, it also means you can…

2. Increase advertising spend

After all, when your conversion rate increases, then PPC, affiliate marketing and other advertising will suddenly become much more profitable. And when you do that, you can…

3. Increase market share

The more you increase your conversion rate, the more traffic you can buy, the more customers you get, the more repeat business you get... You'll rapidly increase your market share. And it all starts with your conversion rate.

Conversion Rate Optimization – step-by-step

Make sure you download a copy of the checklists here:

That’s a real button. Click it!

Stage one: research and analysis

Become the customer
This is a massively important step – and one that most people skip. Don’t be that person.

Buy the product or service. And when you’re buying it, take screenshots and/or use Camtasia or similar to record yourself buying it. (It's incredible how many people haven't bought a product or service from their own site.)

Increasing sales starts with understanding what you’re selling, so when you’ve bought the product or service, use it as a customer would. Test it, take it apart and put it back together – even demonstrate it to others as a salesperson would.

Set up funnels in Google Analytics
Most companies haven’t even set up goals and funnels in Google Analytics (and if they have, they stopped working properly months ago). When they’re set up right, they’ll quickly show you where you’re losing traffic and where the biggest opportunities are.

If you need help setting this up, take a look at this excellent article on Google Analytics goals and funnels.

Use other analytics packages
Other analytics packages are great at showing you what’s happening on your website.

Crazy Egg will generate heatmaps of your website, showing you which areas are getting the most clicks. Yes, Google Analytics does heatmaps too – but not like Crazy Egg. They’ll even show you clicks on inactive elements – the things people are clicking on that aren’t actually links. Often this will reveal areas the visitors want more information on. It can be a great source of quick wins.

Crazy Egg – Look for clicks on inactive elements, as they can be a great source of quick wins.

ClickTale is several tools wrapped into one. It’ll give you heatmaps showing how far down your pages visitors are scrolling (perfect for your long spammy weightloss page). It can even record videos of your visitors’ sessions (which will help you get in the habit of looking at your site through someone else’s eyes). And finally, it has brilliant form analytics – you’ll see exactly which questions in your form are causing visitors to abandon the page.

ClickTale gives you access to a huge amount of data – including how far down the page visitors will scroll.

Do five usability tests
With several cheap usability testing companies available, there’s no excuse not to be doing it anymore. It’s one of the most profitable activities you can do. With sites like UserTesting.com (US and UK) and whatusersdo.com (UK), you’ll pay around $40 for a 15-minute usability test. At the end, you’ll get the video of their session, plus the voiceover as they navigate your site.

With sites like UserTesting.com and whatusersdo.com offering quick and cheap usability tests…

…there are no excuses not to do any.

Remember, don’t make your brief too prescriptive. You want the tester to use the site as they would if they weren’t doing a test – don’t make them follow orders. (You can even set them the same task on a competitor’s site to see what the competition is doing right/wrong.)

Survey your customers
By this stage, we should be building a good list of reasons why visitors aren’t converting – whether they’re usability issues (can’t buy) or objections (won’t buy).

We’ll gather more data on this with surveys. It doesn’t really matter how you survey your customers – so long as you do it.

You can create a survey with SurveyMonkey and email it to your customers and non-customers (but make sure to use free-text answers rather than multiple choice – we want the customers to tell us in their own words, not to pick the closest reason from a list). Or use a tool like Kampyle to gather feedback directly on your site. Or just pick up the phone and speak to them.

Talk to sales staff
Your website is the online equivalent of your best salesperson. So… find that salesperson and ask them to sell the product or service to you. (If you’ve got a Flip camcorder, use that to film it.) Find out what questions and objections the customers ask and – more importantly – find out what the answers are.

Flip camcorders – Keep one of these handy when speaking with sales and support staff.

Stage two: solutions

Create a list of all the objections + issues
Ticked everything off in stage one? Good. If not, make sure you complete it soon (seriously – if you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table.)

When you’ve got all the data, start a spreadsheet with a list of all the usability issues (can’t buy) on one tab, and the objections (won’t buy) on another. Highlight the ones that come up most often, or that you think can have a big impact.

Brainstorm ways to overcome them
Next, brainstorm ways to solve the usability issues and objections. Put the possible solutions into the second columns of your spreadsheet.

Look for hidden opportunities
Remember, it’s important to be creative with the solutions. Here are a couple of examples:

If you’ve got a low conversion rate on a form, do you even need the form in the first place? Take a look at posterous.com – a great example of removing the sign-up process altogether.

Posterous.com – “Look Ma – no sign-up!”

If you have to keep your sign-up process, but people are abandoning it, how do you fix it? Lovefilm.com are great at conversion. If you abandon their sign-up form, on your next visit, they’ll redirect you back to where you left off – even if you type in their homepage URL. (Abandon their sign-up form and you’ll see how.)

Lovefilm.com – “Haven’t I been here before…?”

It’s creativity like this which will boost your conversion rate. If you do the same as everyone else, your conversion rate will be the same too.

Prioritise the actions (aim for quick results and maximum improvement)
So now we’ve got the objections, the issues and the possible solutions. Next we need to tackle them in the right order. There’s an opportunity cost, so we want to start – not with the quick wins – but the quick and big wins.

Go through the list with your developers. Mark the ones that can be developed and tested quickly and easily. If they match up with the ones you highlighted above (that can have a big impact), you’ll know where to start.

Stage three: development and testing

Develop the variations and take screenshots
Now the fun part. Start developing the variations. Don’t be tempted to test too many things in each variation – you won’t know what’s increasing the conversion rate and what’s lowering it. Be scientific in your testing and you’ll get bigger wins quicker.

When the variations have been developed, make sure you take screenshots of them. We need to keep records of everything we’re testing. It’s easy to get 20 tests into a campaign and forget what you tested at the start. Be like Travis Bickle: “One of these days I'm gonna get organezized”.

Today is that day.

Set up Crazy Egg on variations
Don’t forget your analytics when you’re testing. Crazy Egg is a staple in my testing diet. If the Crazy Egg code is in your footer, it’ll be on the new variations automatically (as long as it’s an A/B test, not a multivariate test). Just set up a test at CrazyEgg.com and you’ll get a heatmap for the new page. Compare the two and you’ll have a clearer insight why one page is converting higher than another.

Test using Google Website Optimizer or other testing software
Google Website Optimizer is fairly powerful, fairly easy-to-use and – best of all – completely free. No excuses.

Google Website Optimizer – the price is right.

Now let me qualify those statements. It’s fairly powerful out-of-the-box, but you may want to hack it to do things like testing multiple goals. It’s fairly easy to use – especially if you’ve got a good developer – but there are alternatives that are easier.

For a detailed guide to testing software, take a look at whichmvt.com.

Stage four: review and expand

Log the results and screenshots
When the test has finished, log the results and store them with your screenshots of the variations. As we repeat this process, we’ll build up a folder of what works and what doesn’t. This is crucial.

Analyse the results (big losses are just as important as big wins)
Big wins are awesome. Big losses can be interesting too – just flip it around. So rather than saying, “Page B lowered the conversion rate by x%”, you should say, “Something about Page A effectively increased the conversion rate by y% over Page B.”

Then all we need to do is find what that something is. Take a look at your Crazy Egg screenshots and review your list of objections and usability issues.

If you got a win, can it be developed further?
The first question after getting a win is, “How can we develop this?” So if you added a testimonial to your landing page, what would happen if you added five more? Take the winning element to extremes and see how big a win you can get.

If you got a win, can it be applied to other parts of the funnel?
The second question is, “How can we apply this elsewhere?” Take the principle that increased the conversion rate – adding trust, emphasising a particular benefit, introducing a guarantee – and work out how you can apply it to other parts of the funnel.

These two questions together can magnify increases to the conversion rate several times over.

Stage five: repeat

As you can see, the process works in a cycle. The insight you get after completing a test will feed into the top – giving you ideas for other tests to try.

This is Conversion Factory's approach to conversion rate optimization.

After a few rounds of testing, repeat all or part of stage one (research and analysis). Do the usability testers still struggle with the same things? Are potential customers still uncertain about the benefits of your product? Either way, you’ll get fresh ideas for CRO.

Follow this process and you’ll quickly – and reliably – increase your conversion rate.

What now?

Thanks for making it through to the end. If you haven't already downloaded the worksheets, you can get them now.

If you want to get more articles on conversion rate optimization, sign up to the mailing list on conversionfactory.com and we’ll keep you updated.

Define Competitors: Step 4 of the 8-Step SEO Strategy

2010-05-13T07:52:00.000-07:00

Congratulations on making it halfway through building this SEO Strategy document with me! Do you feel your value as an SEO rising?

If you’re jumping into the 8 Step SEO Strategy here in Step 4, or just need a recap, you can find the previous three steps here:

Step 1: Define Your Target Audience and Their Needs
Step 2: Categorized Keyword Research: Step 2 of the 8-Step SEO Research Strategy
Step 3: Finding Gaps and Opportunities: Step 3 of the 8-Step SEO Strategy

DEFINING CATEGORY COMPETITORS

Step 4 is a simple one where we’ll be defining our competitors in SERPs for use in dissection in the Step 5.

We’ll only be looking at search engine competitors here, and not comScore, Hitwise or other types of industry-defined competition by Uniques or Page Views, or any other metric. For the SEO Strategy we’re building here, we’re concerned with Search, therefore we’ll stick to competitors in search results only.

I can already hear you saying – this is easy – just do a search for your keywords and see who shows up. True. That’s part of it. But because we’re going to do some serious dissection in Step 5, we’ll want to make sure we get the right competitors to dissect and compare ourselves against.

We broke our keyword research out into categories in Step 2, so we’ll want to define competitors for each category (or pick just a few important categories – especially if you're working on large enterprise-sized sites).

What I mean when I mention defining competitors by categories is this: If I am working on a site all about celebrities, my competitors might be OMG, TMZ, Perez Hilton, etc. But that’s only at the high level. My keyword categories from step 2 might cover subtopics like celebrity photos, celebrity news and more. Each of those subtopics has someone who is dominating those rankings. It may be the same one or two sites across the board, but it’s likely that each subtopic will have different high-ranking competitors. We want to know specifically who’s doing well for each topic.

HOW TO FIND YOUR COMPETITORS

There are several ways you can do this. If you’ve already got a method you like and want to stick with – by all means do (and if you’re compelled to share your method with us in the comments – you know we love to hear it). I’m going to give you an example of how I pull this data together.

Here’s how I set it up:

Grab a new Excel worksheet and name it something like ‘Competitors’. Create one tab to keep track of your overall site competitors, and if you’re tracking any subtopics on your site (likely the keyword categories we defined in step 2), create a tab for each one of those that you’re going to do competitive research for. We’re not going to do any calculations or fancy stuff with this worksheet – it’s just for keeping track of your competitors in one place. You can use a Word doc or good ol’ pen and paper if you want too.

The easy way to figure out who your competitors are is to type a couple of terms into the search box and see who shows up. So let’s look at that method. Here’s what I see in the top 5 results for [celebrity gossip].

Take note in your Excel sheet of who’s appearing in the top rankings for a couple of terms for each tab/topic. You don’t have to look up the competitors for every term in your keyword group, just pick a few and make note of what comes up.

You can also choose to check the top rankings in all three search engines, or just pick one. It’s up to you. In the end you’ll be looking for which site(s) show up the most often for this keyword group.

Another method of doing this is to use SEOmoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool. The cool thing about the Difficulty Tool is that you get extra insights along with your top competitors. But for this example I just want to get my top-ranked competitors in a downloadable csv file that I’ll just copy and paste into my Excel sheet.

To get this info, type in one of your terms:

Below the difficulty score and authority comparison graph are the top-ranked results...

...and at the bottom of the page you can export the results. I’ll do the same thing for a few more terms that represent the topic I’m researching, and add the results all to the tab for the topic.

In the end I have something that looks like this – here’s my general terms (there’s only two for this example, but the more terms you can use the better idea you’ll get of who shows up in the rankings the most):

I’ve highlighted the sites that show up in the top 5 rankings for both terms and made a note of it on the top. This is a competitor I know I want to target.

Here’s another example of one of my subcategories:

Here I see two sites appearing for multiple keywords. I’ve highlighted them and made note of them at the top. These are competitors I’ll be targeting for my competitive dissection of sites for the Celebrity News subtopic in Step 5. Again, there’s only 3 terms in the screenshot example above – I recommend pulling the data for at least 5-10 per topic.

Note that you can also choose to target 2 competitors or 5 competitors for each category – whatever you prefer (I usually like to do at least 3). The more sites you choose the more work you have to do in Step 5, but the more insight you’ll get back.

That’s the jist of it folks. Now you have targeted competitors defined for each topic you’re interested in. In the next post we’ll look at how to dig into the competitive landscape to uncover site features, content, and SEO strategy that should be built into your site in order to outrank your competitors. This is where we really start to take SEO to another level.

In the meantime, if you use any of the vast selection of SEO tools out there to define your competitors, or just do it in a different way, please share with the readers in the comments!\

Search Engine Reputation Management

2010-05-07T10:29:00.000-07:00

I constantly implore my boys to take their online profiles very seriously. A month doesn't pass without my asking them to expunge from their Facebook pages any obscene wall posts and photos in which their "friends" tagged them in some state of unseemly debauchery, e.g., beer pong games or dubious attire.

Fortunately, compared to others in their age demo, they appear downright conservative -- something for which I am thankful and, one day, presumably they will thank me.

Managing one's Facebook profile is a piece of cake compared to gaming one's Google profile. The Wall Street Journal's tech-savvy Julia Angwin today shared her experience (and success) using search-engine optimization (SEO) to modify her search engine results page (SERP).

In her piece "It's a New Me (As Seen on Google)," she writes:

"One of the paradoxes of the digital age is that the boundless freedoms of the Internet also constrain our identity. Before the ubiquity of search engines you could go on a date or a job interview and construct a narrative about your life that fit the situation. No one in your book group had to know that you were a punk-rocker in high school. But it's much harder to package yourself in the Google era. Online, your digital identity often comes down to the top 10 links on your SERP, or search-engine results page."

Julia proceeded to cull advice from experts, including one of the venerable and still active chroniclers of all things search, Danny Sullivan. Angwin was trying to de-elevate an article she had written years before and even considered asking Google directly to remove it. Sullivan explained that it is "extremely difficult" to remove things from Google's search results: "They don't really intervene unless there is some good legal reason to do that," he said.

On a related note, I recently asked Edelman's Steve Rubel about the strategy of using keyword densities as a means for elevating one's news release's rank in Google's organic search results. He said, in effect, that the keepers of the algorithm driving the world's de facto search engine have gotten hip to that, i.e., it no longer works.

Anyway, Julia then collared Google's Adam Lasnik who offered up what seemed like the company line:

"...create original compelling content about yourself that is easily accessed by Google and earns links from authoritative and relevant Web sites."

Hmm. Easier said than done.

She finally found one of the myriad SEO experts: Rhea Drysdale of OutspokenMedia.com who astutely advised Julia to:

"...focus on linking my online presences to each other -- that is, my Twitter page would link to my LinkedIn page, which would link to my biography on my book-publisher's site. These interlinkages are key to understanding Google's page-ranking system. Google rates Web sites, in part, by how many links they have from other credible Web sites."

Now she was getting somewhere: "By interlinking my sites, my efforts soon began to pay off," Julia wrote. But her efforts to take control of her Google profile soon were disrupted via an article she wrote on Steve Jobs that drew considerable online conjecture. The SERP-altering noise eventually subsided, and she was able to turn her attention to optimizing the meta tags embedded in the WSJ website.

By optimizing her meta data and offering up a steady stream of Twitter links, she exerted even greater control over her organic results rankings, and ultimately her personal brand.

I would recommend reading Julia's journey into the art of search engine reputation management from which she learned: "the final lesson of SEO: Patience is required."

Google Paid Links – Google Sliding Down The Slippery Slope of Evildom

2010-05-07T10:25:00.000-07:00

Matt Cutts has again been writing about paid links and has also jumped into the sponsored themes discussion, invoking the power of the Google Webspam team from behind the protection of a carefully worded disclaimer.
As Matt says:-

This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.

Disclaimers are strange things…

Matt can basically discuss anything he likes, whether true, false or possibly true in the future, without his parent company being held liable for anti-competitive practices. It would be very interesting to see if that disclaimer would hold up in court, with Matt being head of the Webspam department.
On his unofficial blog he is in the position to cause an awful lot of financial damage to a lot of very well funded startups, and a fair number of massive internet corporations.

Google is in a Monopoly Position

Whilst everyone has a choice about which search engine they use, they have a significant market share of search traffic, and also a significant market share of the website monetization market, recently increased by the acquisition of DoubleClick (there is an agreement in place, but paperwork isn’t finalised)

What is a Paid Link?

We shouldn’t really think about whether a specific link is paid for, but whether there is a monetary benefit in making the link to another site.

Matt Cutts is an employee and probably has a lot of stock options in Google, yet constantly links through to his employer, from which Google benefit.
Microsoft bloggers frequently blog about Microsoft launches, and even have a mailing list set up.
Yahoo employees blog about Yahoo sites.

If you are a large corporation there are a number of ways to get millions of inbound links.

Have an affiliate program – use clever redirects on the affiliate links – Google and specifically Matt Cutts has never suggested people report sites that contain affiliate links that are not blocked from being crawled by search engines.
Buy websites with massive link equity – how much is The Internet Movie Database worth to Amazon from an SEO perspective? Shopping.com and Epinions.com were Ebay purchases. When you go to these sites there isn’t a nofollow link in sight.
Create Widgets – there are tons of widgets that pass on link equity

Once a large corporation has a lot of existing link equity, it is easy for them to pass this on to money generating sites and services.

Companies are allowed to buy links from the Yahoo directory, which is well known to confer a large amount of trust to a domain, and has been propping up Google’s algorithms for years.
Will we soon see Google state that the Yahoo directory should be made nofollow for all paid inclusions? Matt Cutts has previously stated that the Yahoo directory is OK because there is editorial review.

Matt Cutts has been speaking out saying he agrees with Matt Mullenweg on Sponsored Themes.
A company is paying a theme author as a subcontractor to create and maintain a Wordpress theme, and there is attribution to the designer, and the company paying for the work.
Maybe it is a charitable contribution and the designer chose to include a link as a thank you.

How many consultants provide links through to the companies they work for?

How many software firms provide links through to their major corporate clients?

If you make a donation to someone, and they decide to give you a link back, is that a paid link?

If you are a consultant, and are paid to analyse a company, but to make the findings known publicly, are you supposed to stick nofollow on all the links?

If you are a VC or Angel investor, should you have to use NoFollow linking through to companies in your investment portfolio?

Are developers working on an open-source project allowed a link back to their sites (cough Wordpress), and then use that link equity to dominate search engines on whatever topic they please?

If you are a blog network, or large internet content producer, is it gaming Google to have links to your sister sites, whether there is a direct financial connection or not?
An interesting twist on this is the WPNI Blogroll. They are providing link equity to the members who are then showing adverts – even if the adverts weren’t converting, would you carry them for the links and traffic?

Should a not for profit organisation link through to their paid members with a live link? One of the benefits is always being included in the members directory, and not just for traffic. These are often high quality credible relevant links, and easy to buy.

A large number of Wordpress developers have paid links on their personal sites, as do theme and plugin developers.

If you write a blog post, thanking your sponsors, should you use nofollow?

Some people give away prizes for links, or offer some kind of reciprocation. Links have value, and Google invented the value of a followable link, not webmasters.

If you are a expert in a particular field, and someone asks you to write a review of their site, and the type of review you write means that writing that content might take 10 hours of your time to do due diligence, is it wrong to accept some kind of monetary contribution?
In such a situation, why would you be forced to use nofollow on all links to the site being reviewed?
I guarantee I spend a lot more time on a paid review than someone working for Yahoo for their paid directory.

Imagine someone created a commercial Wikipedia, and paid $5 for every link made to it.
You might think that is crazy, but 100,000,000 links with good anchortext would create a website that would rank for almost any term imaginable, and the company would be worth far more than $1bn, and would certainly bring in more than $100,000,000 revenue each year.
There is another evil twist you could add to the mix as well…

Sickened

I have read through the comments on Matts blog from where this is being orchestrated.

Why is it coming from Matt’s blog and not the Google Webmaster blog?

Why the focus on the effect of paid links and reviews for small webmasters rather than on the major corporations?

This is like a witch hunt with a disclaimer attached

Where is the precise definition of a paid link?

Biting The Bullet

I am actually proud of the paid reviews I have written, and I am so confident that they are not webspam, I am going to “bite the bullet”.

I have already submitted The Matt Cutts blog as webspam, because he is frequently linking through to his employer with undisclosed links.

Now I am doing what many would think of as being unthinkable, I am submitting my own content to Google’s Webspam form

Here is what I have just submitted to Google

paidlink
I am submitting my own content, because it is my own strong belief that there is nothing “webspam” related to the paid reviews I write, and am willing to submit them for scrutiny.
http://andybeard.eu/2007/03/sponsored-reviews-now-live-in-depth-review.html
http://andybeard.eu/2006/12/search-engine-glossary.html
http://andybeard.eu/2007/03/volusion-review-and-suggestions.html
I should also note I also give away half my earning from those reviews to Wordpress plugin developers.
I would love an official response that I can publish stating whether Google has any problems with the quality of work I have done for my clients, or the fact that I include live followable links in the reviews I write.

Do you think I am going to get an official response?

Do Google employees have the balls to decide whether something is spam, or will they just blame it on their algorithms?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) vs. Pay per Click (PPC)

2010-02-03T03:53:00.000-08:00

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines using "natural" or un-paid search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, higher a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.

Pay per click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system.

While pay per click is a guaranteed way to bring your listing to a good spot in the search engines, sometimes this is not necessarily the best way to market your content. Obviously if money is not a problem you will benefit greatly by using PPC but you should not exclude SEO from your marketing strategy.

When a prospect does a search it is natural that we look to the left first, then look to the right and scroll down forming a triangular pattern. Generally SEO results which are highest in the ranking will get the most looks.

This is how prospects search for sites that have been organically placed using SEO techniques to get them there. If you use fresh content that is keyword rich and placed all over the internet instead of just one place you will bring your site here. Marketers that use pay-per-click, however, are placed in the front pages of Google because they purchased the space for advertising. People are exposed to advertising everywhere they look, all day so they are less likely to look at another paid ad on Google. People want genuine, fresh, quality content and advice from experienced marketers who are interested in benefiting others by placing their experienced advice on the internet rather than simply paying for an ad to drive traffic to their site.
In summary, regardless of whether you choose to use PPC or not, to be a successful marketer you also need to be adding fresh content targeting keywords to bring your search engine ranking up naturally. Online marketing should be primarily about helping people to find what they are searching for and your input of content is a sure way to do that. Secondly, all marketers endeavour to make a profit and by regularly adding content you have a good chance of being on the first page of the search engine listings for your targeted keywords at no cost to your business. For new marketers this is a great way to generate revenue to put toward some paid advertising or PPC whilst keeping up with your SEO efforts as well.

Wishing you Success

Landing pages Make A First Impression

2010-02-02T00:53:00.000-08:00

Whether a website is about cars or guitars, common errors with landing pages can cause users to bounce away quickly, according to Steve Baldwin, writing a column at Media Post.

Custom landing pages, Baldwin writes, are among the most important pieces of content that search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search professionals will create. While the most serious error - a landing page that fails to load - is among the least common, according to Baldwin, he nevertheless emphasizes that a broken link can cost marketers dearly.

What Baldwin refers to as "the dreaded Demon of Disambiguity" is a more common pitfall experienced by landing pages. "The mere fact that I'm searching for Taylor Guitars doesn't make me a prospect for the James Taylor Guitar Songbook, and there's a world of difference between a Fender Jaguar guitar and a 4-wheeled Jaguar that happens to have fenders," Baldwin writes.

Experts say that search engine optimization (SEO) efforts can easily focus too heavily on search engine results pages

25 Things I’d like to See Google Fix

2010-02-02T00:49:00.000-08:00

25 Things I’d like to See Google Fix

While I’m well known for being critical of many of the things Google does, I’m also a power user of site and many of their tools. Being a power user gives me a unique insight to see some areas these tools could be improved. This post is written in the spirit of constructive criticism, since I know my posts sometimes “get around” inside of the plex …

Google Apps for Domains

A lot of the cool and interesting things that happen in Gmail and Google Docs don’t get released for Google Apps for domains. They have definitely gotten better about this in the past few months but it’s still happening. For example, want the Google Chrome Gmail Checker extension to work on your domain? Be prepared to do some hacking to make it happen.

GMail

Filters lets expand the number of filters you can have. Right now it maxes out somewhere between 20 to 30 (I’ve hit the limit and had to delete and start from scratch creating multiple ones). Also let me forward a copy to more than one person. For example I want to forward my travel receipts/itinerary to evernote and tripit.
If I’ve selected/highlighted the subject or body copy and click “filter,” don’t start with the from field filled in; instead, start with the field I have selected filled in.
Let me send scheduled emails. Right now I use lettermelater. If I forget to BCC a copy to myself, I forget it got sent.

Google Docs

A lot of people became worried about the announcement of Google Docs becoming publicly indexable because of the possibility of a link from an external website pointing to them. Allow users to see which documents are linked to or, even better, give them a universal “off” switch to block indexing of all of their documents. Allow Google Apps for domains customers the ability to block all documents on the domain.
Let me create and edit spreadsheets offline. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve wanted to work on a spreadsheet flying from NY to Vegas or California and been unable to.
How about the ability to export clean HTML? Right now any exports are as bad as a Microsoft word HTML document with tons of unnecessary tags adding to the “weight” of a document.
Let me specify a default font/size for my account. Maybe I’m just a snob but anything other than arial or verdana irritates me. The fact that you force me to start with new times roman or some other serif font every time is like an annoying roommate who leaves the toilet seat up.

Google Reader

Allow Google reader to work with the Google apps for domains address book not just the Google contacts address book
Allow me to temporarily suspend updating of all the feeds in a folder for a specified time. Maybe I’m working on a big project or going away on vacation. Some feeds I need to keep up with; others not so much.
Allow me to connect more than one twitter account for sharing. I run multiple accounts and want to forward it to different places depending on subject matter.

Google Contacts

Allow Google contacts to work with Google Apps for domains. Right now they are separate which means sometimes you have access to them in Google offerings and sometimes you don’t.
If I have pictures tied to a contact and I’m using Google Sync, pull in the picture and match it to the account.
Allow people to opt into a profile/contact sharing program. If someone changes emails, phone numbers, or whatever and changes it in the centralized shared profile, everyone who is a contact has the information automatically updated

Google Chrome

Multi browser password sync – we need it. I know I’m not the only one who has a laptop and netbook, and I need my passwords to travel with me. Lastpass kinda works and Roboform wants to make it work–let’s help move that forward.
Multi browser extension sync. Allow me to move extensions, settings, and customizations between browsers.
Copy and paste as plain text. So many things like wordpress and google docs will let the font, color, size, and style persist. I’d like to be able paste with no formatting. CTRL+SHIFT+V thanks @mattcutts
Give me the ability to set the cache size to zero. I know you don’t like to speed things up, but my ISP gets a little wonky and I’ve found that clearing the cache solves the problem 99% of the time.

Google Voice

OK I know you want this too, but lets figure out a way to get this thing on the iPhone. This buerocracy quagmire helps no one.

Feedburner

Let me specify an order for posts in the email if I’m using it. Last out First in (lifo) isn’t always optimal. Give me the option for first in first out (fifo) in the email.

YouTube & Universal Search

I understand that you only show videos from sites that have a high reliability in universal search. However, having the YouTube page rank doesn’t do much for conversions. Why not have something like rel=canonical to allow us to point to the page we really want to rank with the YouTube video?

Google Search

Allow me to turn off any and all new things you introduce into search. The &PWS=0 flag works to turn off personalized search but everything else is hit or miss. I know that you think all of these things are your POD, but sometimes I’d like to not have to see them. In fact, like Matt, I’d really just like clean URL’s all the time.

Google Tasks

Let me have recurring tasks. I have some things that need to get done every week or month, and this saves me the trouble of having to reschedule them.

Google Alerts

For any notification that’s not “as it happens,” let me specify the time of day I’d like to to come. Right now if I choose once a day it comes 24 hours from the time I created or last modified/updated the filter.

Picasa Web

You offer the right settings to share and protect pictures as needed, but the language/terminology used to explain it doesn’t make it at all easy to understand. The only reason I figured it out was by trial and error. Pretend you are explaining it to your grandma who isn’t at all computer savvy. You’ll do everyone a favor.

Comments are open. Feel free to drop your suggestions in as well. Meander off topic and I will purge your comments without mercy.

Keyword Targeting: How to Employ Multiple Keywords for SEO & Conversions

2010-02-02T00:45:00.000-08:00

At some point during your University's SEO 201: Advanced Keyword Research & Targeting class, they probably gave a few lectures and case studies on how to effectively split up your keyword research list across multiple pages and use those terms/phrases to maximum benefit. But, for those who might have missed that lesson (which would be, umm, all of us, since no formal education in SEO exists), a handy refresher might be in order.

Many SEOs struggle to answer questions like:

How many keywords can I target on a page?
Should I try to target all of my most important terms on my homepage (since it gets the most link juice)?
When I should try to target similar phrases together vs. splitting them up?

This post is meant to help with precisely those issues.

At the end of the keyword research phase you've established which terms and phrases are worthwhile. Now you'll need to determine which keywords to target where, and how. This four-step process should make that easy (and apparently, checklists are awesome).

I'm using comic books both because they're fun, and because a recently retired-from-Google friend opened his own comic shop in West Seattle, so I've got superheroes in tights on the brain. In the example above, I've sorted several high demand keywords into groupings that relate to their core subject - in this case, by superhero. You can do this with products, articles, blog post categories or any type of content.

Next, I need to segment the keywords in each group by the intent of a potential visitor. This is absolutely critical, because even if two keyword terms/phrases are very similar, putting them together can be disatrous if the goals of the searcher are different. It's technically worse to rank 1st and convert visits at 0.1% than to rank 10th and get a conversion rate of 2%. By segmenting on intent, you can make sure to uniquely target searchers seeking a specific goal without cannibalizing or misdirecting traffic to the detriment of your site's usability/conversion rate.

If possible, you'll want to use the insight you gain from the keyword research and targeting process to help determine the site's hierarchy and information architecture. Even if you're deep down in the weeds on an already existing site, you can employ intelligent cross-linking to make sure visitors can find what they're seeking from potential landing pages. The concept should be to make the primary content of the page the most likely target of the searcher's intent, then provide navigation to secondary, tertiary or more specific needs.

You now have the keyword groups segmented to individual pages and a hierarchy for your site, so the final step is assigning the keyword targets to individual pages and providing recommendations on Titles, URLs, Meta Descriptions and page functionality. In the example above, I've employed multiple keywords in the page elements (plural and singular versions of "comic" as well as "dc comics" and "batman comics") to help attract that traffic. I'm also listing "detective comics" here, though technically, I might even have a separate subcategory for that individual series that's linked-to on this page.

This planning process is key to getting the best results possible. Over time, your analytics data can help show you where assumptions have been incorrect and you can course correct. What's important is understanding the basic rules for keyword targeting:

No page should target keywords just because it "can rank for them;" you need to also consider the visitor experience and whether the page's content can serve as many "keyword masters" as you're targeting.
Pages can target multiple keywords and phrases at once so long as the intent is the same. Don't arbitrarily split up pages or make a new page for every permutation of a keyphrase simply so you can have "optimum" optimization. Remember it's much easier to earn links to one page than to many (and much easier to build one good funnel than two).
Keyword targeted pages need to provide the content a visitor is seeking and the links to the detailed pages they might want. Search engines are pretty smart - if visitors aren't getting value from your pages, they're not going to link to them, not going to click them in the SERPs and not going to recommend them to others. Even if you manipulate your way to the top today, in the long run, the engines will identify methods to get relevant, quality content ranking.

I'd also suggest checking out previous posts on:

Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization
Optimizing for Multiple Word Order Search Phrases

Hopefully this has been valuable and I'd certainly appreciate examples and suggestions from the community on how you employ keyword targeting for maximum benefit.

p.s. I may have overstated when I said there's "no" formal education. Market Motive offers some great online classes and certification as does Search Engine College. And yes, SEOmoz has a video training series, too - the metaphor was meant tongue in cheek :-)

Posted by randfish on January 19th, 2010 at 12:16 am Keyword Research

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2010-01-08T08:47:00.001-08:00

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2010-01-08T08:44:00.000-08:00

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2010-01-08T08:02:00.000-08:00

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2010-01-08T07:58:00.000-08:00

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2010-01-08T05:33:00.000-08:00

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2010-01-08T05:23:00.000-08:00

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Are Your SEO Resolutions Actionable?

2010-01-08T05:11:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again; the one where we look back on everything we ate during the last two weeks and promise not to do it again in the new year. It's also the time that many of us set new and ambitious goals for our businesses. Unfortunately, while goals are important and ambition can be admirable, we make the same mistake with our professional resolutions that we do with our personal resolutions. Take the classic weight-loss resolution. The problem with saying that you're going to lose 20 lbs. in 2010 is simple – it's just not actionable. At the end of the year, you'll either have lost 20 lbs. or not, but that outcome is affected by dozens of things beyond your control. What exactly are you going to do to make it happen? If the answer is wait around and wish for the pounds to melt away, best of luck.

Uncontrollable SEO Resolutions

Similarly, our SEO goals are too often beyond our control. If you set a goal like "Rank #1 for Keyword X" (a very common SEO resolution, I'm sure), what does that actually mean in terms of action? Are you going to pray to the Google Gods every morning and say 50 Hail Matts to purge your SEO sins (my apologies to our Catholic readers)? If you're worth your salt as an SEO, you have actions in mind that you plan to take, so why not resolve to take those actions in a measurable way? It's fine to have ranking (or weekly searches, CTR, CPC, conversion rate, etc.) as an ultimate objective, but wishing won't make it happen.

Actionable SEO Resolutions

Before this starts to read like a self-improvement seminar, let’s look at some SEO resolutions that are actionable. These are goals that you can directly control – you're in charge of whether or not you accomplish them. I'll break them up into two groups: (1) On-page SEO, and (2) Link-building (with some social networking thrown in). Of course, not every idea is appropriate to every situation – these are just ideas for actionable goals (substitute an appropriate number for "X").

(1) On-page SEO Goals

Rewrite X page TITLEs
Write X unique META descriptions
Create an XML site map
Create a custom 404 page
Canonicalize problem URLs
301-redirect X broken URLs
Remove X low-quality internal links
Create a new [cleaner] master CSS

(2) Link-building Goals

Find X promising link prospects
Send X personalized link requests
Dig into analytics and find X hot topics
Create X pieces of new content/month
Write an e-book or comprehensive guide
Spend X minutes/day building up a social profile
Comment [thoughtfully] on X industry blogs/day
Re-tweet X pieces of great content/day

What Are Your Resolutions?

Of course, these are just a few ideas. Let me open it up to the community – what kind of actionable SEO resolutions have you made for 2010? What can you do that will really kick-start your efforts and make you look like a miracle worker to your clients?

Posted by Dr.Pete on January 4th, 2010 at 7:09 pm Business Tactics

A way to do Real Estate SEO and Real Estate Search Engine Optimization

2010-01-08T05:02:00.000-08:00

Are you searching for a way to leverage traffic from buyers and sellers?

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Our Real Estate Search Engine Optimization (Real Estate SEO) program is customized to deliver results, so we give your company more leads from buyers and sellers.

There are many technical factors that contribute to the success of your website. SEOSPEED monitors these factors daily so you can spend more time selling real estate!

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10 Effective SEO Tips You Can Do Right Now

2009-12-18T22:19:00.000-08:00

Boost traffic without rebuilding your site from scratch

The problem with most search engine optimisation advice is that it effectively tells you to tear down your site and start again.

Does it really have to be that drastic? While any site benefits from having SEO in mind at the time of its design, there are some tweaks and tune-ups you can do to any site, quickly and easily.

They won't get you to the top of Google's results page overnight - but in the pitiless world of PageRank, the only way is up.

1. Use meaningful document names

Give pages descriptive file names that search engines can follow - like, "galleryofillustrations.html", for example. Your CMS, if you're using one, will probably allow you to configure this automatically in your main settings.

In Wordpress go to Settings > Permalinks and clicking "custom structure". Define a structure that includes the page title, using the %postname% tag.

Wordpress

GOOD URLS: When creating Permalinks in Wordpress, combine the descriptive post name with a unique tag, like the post's ID number

2. Speed up your site

Google software engineer Matt Cutts recently told WebProNews that site speed will be added to the criteria that affects your site's PageRank in 2010.

Easiest way to quicken up your site? Make sure you're using the right image types: JPEG for photos, PNG for graphics - and that their file size is as small as you can get away with without compromising quality.

3. Grow inbound links

Google, Bing, Ask and Yahoo - none of them publish a list of the rules they use to rank your sites. We do know that good quality, incoming links are a factor, though. So mention your site on Twitter, put it in your email signature, add it to social networks you use and get your friends to blog about your site.

4. Sign up for Google Analytics

Google Analytics is more than a log reading tool. It enables you to set goals, track conversions, see entry and exit pages and catalogue keywords. Add it, give it a week or two to work its mojo and you'll soon be bursting with site optimisation ideas.

5. Add popular pages to your sidebar

Using Google Analytics, or whatever traffic measurement comes bundled with your account, you can see which pages attract the most attention. Give people more of what they want. Add links to your most popular content to your sidebar. On Wordpress there's a popular posts plug-in that'll do it for you.

6. Put up signposts

Another analytics inspired tweak. Think about where you need users to go and give them a clear way to get there. You want people to find a picture gallery or a contact form? Add it to your main navigation as near to the top of your content as possible. If users can find it easily, so can a search engine.

7. Build a better landing page

Does your site have a lovely splash page filled with a nice big logo? Get rid of it. The landing page for your site should assure search engines it's the one of the best hits for the topic users have searched for. That means relevant, textual content filling up your front page.

8. Add "alt" text to images

Search engines can't see pictures, so you have to describe them. Required for your site to pass as valid HTML, make sure that all images have short but accurate "alt" text. While you're at it, add the "title" attribute to links, with a brief description.

Lynx

TEXT ONLY: Got a static HTML site? See it like search engines see it - with a text based web browser like Lynx

9. Ditch Flash navigation

Though some content in Shockwave Flash can be indexed now, it's best to make it as easy as possible for search engine spiders to find the links in your site. So, plain text links wherever possible please.

10. Make your site hypertextual

Internal references to similar content within your site will help search engine spiders determine relevance. Add links to existing entries in the body of your pages - or as a "now read this" recommendation at the end of a post. You'll improve both user experience and ranking.

Source:http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/web/10-effective-seo-tips-you-can-do-right-now-658200

How To Increase Google Position?

2009-12-18T00:17:00.000-08:00

Increase Google Position

The more incoming links you have is one way to increase Google position and therefore increase search engine ranking entirely. For instance, if you go to Market Leap you will be able to see how many incoming links you have through Google, MSN, Hotbot, and Google. Most well optimized websites have several thousand incoming links pointing to their homepage. One more important piece of information to remember: It is important to make sure all your outgoing links are being reciprocated back. If you have an outgoing link, you must have one pointing back to you. It is a good practice to use a program such as SEO Elite or Link Sleuth and run a backlink analysis once per month. Using our effective one-way link building program is another great solution to increase Google position. We have developed a customized program that will increase you real estate content, build one-way links, and increase your sales!

Guerilla SEO Marketing

Press releases and RSS Feeds are other techniques SEO professionals use. The trick to online marketing success is to be creative and not artificially inflate your website using blacklisted techniques. The search engines have become increasingly sophisticated and are more difficult to manipulate than ever before. By using a natural and ethical approach, your website will stay within the top rankings for the longest period of time. The best strategy I have used is to keep current with technology and informative resources, including blogs, press releases, and by reading articles printed by top SEO professionals. Contact us now and become the leader in your industry!

Source:optitrex.com

How To Promote My Website? How to get listed by search engines?

2009-12-17T22:54:00.000-08:00

Everybody knows that web site promotion is vital for website success. The good news is that promoting your site boils down to two simple strategies:

1. Creating compelling content that site visitors and search engines 'enjoy', and
2. Building inbound links to your site (and repeating).

And SEO SPEED is your free guide to website promotion that shows you how to do just that. (More advanced site promotion activities like using pay-per-click search advertising and email marketing also covered).

My free SEO SPEED, covers basics like search engine optimization, building incoming links, and publishing a newsletter to more advanced subjects like using pay-per-click search engines and how to write a press release.

And if you already know the basics of website promotion, you can:

* Find advanced website promotion strategies here!, or
* Read how and why Harvey Segal is saying "It's Goodbye To Google"

Over the years, I've found that there are just a few 'how to promote website' strategies that you need to employ to successfully promote your website (now and in the future).

SEO SPEED has helped thousands and thousands to "promote my website", so PLEASE do explore the site and learn more.

Build incoming links, get people to link to your web site
Answers the question: why would someone want to link to your site in the first place. Covers link building strategies like link building services, link building campaigns, paying for links and even the dubious practice of swapping links. Before you start link building you should read this article...

Search engine optimization; use keywords and meta tags

Search engine optimization; use keywords and meta tags to get the click. Works for google search engine placement, search engine positioning, search engine ranking etc.
Pay per click advertising, google adwords, yahoo! search marketing
PPC search engine internet marketing is about using the power of pay per click advertising - Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture) etc. - to generate cheap, targeted traffic to your website. This free article shows you how to get going with pay per click search engines and also includes pay per click management tools as well as what to look for in professional search engine marketing firms should you want someone else to do your pay per click bidding...

How to write a news release
Press release writing, or news releases, are a great way to promote your website or business. This free article on press releases includes a sample press release, a press release example and press release format. Yes, simply how to write a press release that gets your news published. - read the press release checklist

How to write a newsletter or publish an ezine
Writing newsletters and ezines are a great way of getting your site visitors to return (or to purchase your product). This 'how to write a newsletter' article covers basics of newsletter publishing...

Search engine submission, free services, web site tools
Are you interested in free web site submission to search engines? Then read this free guide to search engine submission to learn how to promote your website. Don't bother with search engine submission services...

Viral marketing, word of mouth, tell a friend schemes etc.
Viral marketing includes things as simple as word of mouth (word of mouse), tell a friend schemes and is also known as guerilla marketing. Dr Wilson explains all in his principles of viral marketing

How to write articles to promote your website
"Traffic Magnet"... The Genuine Article! is an article by Jim Daniels that explains why you should and how to write articles to promote your website.

More website promotion methods
There are always more website promotion methods to try. Some of these are free - using cookies, checking website stats etc.

Promote! Promote! Promote! newsletter
Free web site promotion guide offers tips, tutorials and articles on promoting your website. Tactics like using pay per click search engines, writing a newsletter, using word of mouth, and more!

SEO for images—is it that important?

2009-12-17T03:36:00.000-08:00

Experts say that search engine optimization (SEO) is not just limited to site content. It also includes images in weighing which sites will rank top in search engine results.

According to PR and SEO expert, Michaela Lica, optimizing images will attract more traffic and keep visitors more interested in the site.

To optimize images, keywords should be used in image file names. These keywords should be separated using dashes and not underscores. Keywords should also be added in image ALT attributes and title tags.

Lica also advised that images should be posted on the immediate vicinity of keyword-related content.

“The cool factor of a good image has an important psychological impact on the reader: images make the visitor stay and remember the page via associations,” explained Lica.

Source: http://www.lastclicknews.com/seo-for-images%E2%80%94is-it-that-important-10770.html

SEO Best Practices When Moving a Web Site

2009-12-15T21:41:00.000-08:00

When moving a Web site to a new domain, the primary objective is to make the transition seamless to users and search engines alike. It's important that the search engines receive the same quality score signals as the pages shift from old to new domains.

Test the relocation process by moving the contents of one directory or subdomain first. Then use a 301 permanent redirect map to transfer authority from your old Web pages to your new destination online. This tells the search engines that your site has permanently relocated and that old URLs indexed by the engines should be replaced by the new URLs that will eventually encompass the new site.

There are several options for producing the 301 map. You can crawl the site with Xenu or GSiteCrawler and then pattern match each old URL to its new URL, assuming you have already set the URI patterns in stone. Another way to get started is to download the pages indexed by the three engines, deduplicate the indexed URLs listed, and then pattern match the URLs of the indexed listings to their equivalents on a one-by-one basis.

Once the 301 mapping is in place, you should audit indexation levels to ensure that the pages on the new site are appearing in Google, Yahoo, and Bing search results. Web CEO or Rank Checker can help verify that rankings have been passed along to the new URLs. When you're satisfied that the test went well and all freshly moved pages are working correctly, you can schedule a series of staged releases for moving the rest of your site's content.

It's not in your best interest to just do a blanket redirect of all old URLs to the home page of the new site. You really want to avoid producing any volume of 404 errors that could produce a poor user experience and signal the engines that your site isn't healthy or cared for. Page-by-page redirects, where each page on the old site gets redirected to the corresponding page on the new site, is a lot more work, but doing so provides search engine spiders and users with a consistent and transparent path to the new site location. If there aren't one-to-one page matches between the old and new site, try to make sure that every page on the old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content.

Also, it's a good idea to check internal links within the old site and update them to point to the new domain. Once the content is in place on the new server, use a link checker like Xenu to ensure there aren't any broken legacy links on the site. This is especially important if the original content included absolute links instead of relative links. Depending on the content management system (CMS), it's relatively easy to use the "find and replace" feature to change internal linking structures. If not, you can use freeware like Text Replace to make the changes.

Add the new site to each of your Webmaster Tools accounts and verify your ownership of the new domain. That way, when you are ready for relaunch, you can readily create, validate, and submit XML sitemaps listing the URLs for the new site. At the same time, you can take down existing XML sitemaps that include URLs that have been redirected. Doing so will help send another strong signal to the search engines that the old content is now available at a new location. The same holds true for any product feeds to shopping engines.

You'll want to keep both the new and old sites verified in Webmaster Tools for a certain amount of time. Doing so allows you to review crawl errors regularly to ensure that the 301s from the old site are working properly and that the new site isn't showing unwanted 404 errors. To prevent confusion in the engines, retain control of the old site domain for at least four to six months. It takes approximately one to three months before the content's previous rankings stabilize in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Limit duality as soon as you see that the old domain's authority has been transferred to the new domain.

Check external links to pages on the old site. The most accurate listings can be downloaded from Webmaster Tools accounts with Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Ideally, the Webmaster of each site that links to yours should be contacted with a request to update the links pointing to the new pages on your new domain.

If this isn't practical, which it often isn't, target the top referring links. Review the analytics for the top 200 to 300 domains sending traffic to the old pages and contact as many Webmasters as possible about changing their links. Or review Yahoo Site Explorer links to the old site. Because Yahoo tends to show more important links first, Webmaster contact can be prioritized in a nearly optimal order.

Remember to write a post in the Google Groups Webmaster Central forum, indicating the sites are moving and why it's being done, in the hopes that doing so will help Google recognize the new domains are legitimate.

Also, monitor rankings for the content, comparing old to new over time. If site rankings appear to drop and not rebound in two weeks or so for the new sites, post an update in your original thread at Google Groups with details about the specific shifts that are problematic. Ideally, ranking reports for targeted keywords and phrases should be benchmarked for at least three months prior to the site moves so rankings can be closely monitored as search referral traffic and conversions.

Launch the new site in tandem with a media and online marketing blitz. The goal is to get as many new inbound links pointing quickly to the new content and attract a high number of branded search referrals for the new sites at the same time. Doing so will help rebuild the link authority of the new site. Other support strategies include, but are not limited to:

* Buy ads for any brand related queries or keywords that you feel your site must rank for during the site transitions.

* Produce press releases about the new site launch.

* Unleash a series of e-mail marketing promotional campaigns and/or contests and promotions.

* Unleash a social media blitz in Twitter, Facebook, etc.

* Update all business card contact information, Web addresses, e-mail signature lines, etc.

Summary

Moving a Web site is never easy, but if you take a phased approach and complete at least one trial run you will be better prepared to overcome any search engine obstacles. That way, design and development resources can be efficiently allocated and it will be much easier to diagnose any potential issues, should they arise. Unfortunately, no one can just flick a switch with the search engines to let them know the sites have moved to new destinations. At the very least, the SEO (define) best practices recommended here can be implemented to help make the transitions as trouble free as possible.

Source:http://www.clickz.com/3635887

Find Affordable SEO Services

2009-12-15T04:28:00.000-08:00

While you are shopping around for affordable SEO services, you have to keep your eyes wide open. You will find a number of companies that claim to offer affordable services, but what you will be paying for is link building that is of low quality. So when you are searching for services, you want to ensure that you will be provided with the same professionalism as you would get from the larger companies. The question is then, how do you find a quality service that is within your budget? Well, down below are some guidelines that will aid you in searching for quality service that you can afford.

Follow these guidelines:

1. Choose a company that keeps a full-time staff and completes the work on time: Many websites that offer SEO are not genuine companies. They only resell SEO for other companies and not able to provide on time support service.

2. Get references: SEO companies which are professional will provide references, if you cannot find any you can ask and they should supply them. If they refuse, then you have reasons to believe that they are not a legate service.

3. Pick a service that has large corporations as clients: It is difficult for a service to get business from a Fortune 100 company, so if you find a SEO expert that has affordable SEO services and has large corporations; it means that they are trustworthy.

Anyone that has their own internet business and website knows that it takes time and money. Anywhere you can save a little money is a plus, but when it comes to optimizing your site, it is important that you be careful while searching for Affordable SEO Services.

It is possible, however, that you can acquire the help of SEO experts who offer prices that are reasonable, but offer and provide the best work possible. Remember that you can ask questions and request for references before you make the final decision on hiring them. After all, this is your business and you want nothing but the best. So if you take the time and do a bit of homework; you will not be disappointed with the results.

Finding affordable SEO services is a time consuming task, but by following the above guidelines you should be able to find a service that fits within your budget. A company that will provide you with quality work. Be sure before hire any affordable SEO service provider Company that they are professional enough to know each strategy and provide you the best service too, because only affordable price does not matter if you are getting nothing after getting touch with them, so try to see the end result before making any decision.

How To Promote Your Business through a Directory Submission Service

2009-12-15T04:27:00.000-08:00

t is said that the best and most affordable way wherein a website owner can increase the back links of their sites, is through directory submission. This process is one of the important aspects in the link building approach and is widely used to improve search engine ranking. The directory listing helps generate more traffic, and therefore increases the number of clients visiting your site. Using an expert directory submission service will enable you to find the right directories, which perfectly meet the theme of your website.

These directory services are a great way of promoting a website, which has just been created. It is important not to submit the same web URL more than once and not to hide your listings either. It is a good idea for a website owner to stick with manual submission, since it’s possible that automatic submissions may be banned if there is a use of repetitive content or instances of errors. It is also important that the same title, description, and keywords are not used over again. If this takes place, all of the sites which have the specific link going to your site; will show the exact information. It may seem that the information is unnatural and search engines will definitely find the repetitive text. On this note, only submit to directories that are cached, indexed and search engine- friendly.

However, before submitting your site to a directory, it is important to do keyword research. Create title ad descriptions for your listing so that they are keyword rich and choose the keywords that fit your business/niche. Making use of multiple title and keywords will help maximize the benefits of SEO, but with the help of a directory submission service; all of this can be out of your hands and in the experts’ instead. Also keep in mind that there is a niche directory submission service that can be very beneficial. They offer you with quality, as well as specialized links and you will get heavy traffic from these directories, in addition to quality one way links. The latter will also increase your ranking in the popular search engines.

Once your website has been listed correctly in the various directories, search engines will begin to automatically crawl and index your site. Before submitting though, do a run through, to be sure that your site is not already listed. Every directory acts in different ways and views contents, as well as format differently. Knowing their set of rules or guidelines will surely be beneficial.

It is best to submit to directories which have a high page rank and have high quality traffic. Niche directories; normally have sub categories which have the sites within the main subject area. This is a benefit for the everyday internet user. Remember that the older directories have a more popular and trusted reputation of the major search engines. They also have a bigger human base; however if you do not want to do deal with any of this on your own, then it is best to acquire a directory submission service from the professional.

Great Content Equals Great Rankings, Right? Wrong.

2009-12-14T23:13:00.000-08:00

I've been a big fan of Chris Dixon's excellent blog for a while now, so you can imagine that I was really excited to see him writing about SEO in a post last week. Chris kindly called out SEOmoz, which humbled me, but he also espoused some thinking in the comments that made me a bit concerned and was the catalyst for this post. Here's how it went:

RAND: Chris - I think the biggest thing you've forgotten to mention is that 70%+ of the weighting/ranking used by all of the engines depends on links. If you're not thinking about how your content and pages will incent users/bloggers/writers/media/other sites to link to your work, you'll lose out to someone who does.

A while back I got riled up about the lack of SEO in startup marketing and wrote about it - http://j.mp/4q9zkh - might be relevant/useful, though I did write with a bit more anger than was likely deserved.

CHRIS: Rand - totally agree re links. But isn't getting links primarily about creating great content?

Read the article you link to btw and am in complete agreement.

RAND: Tragically, at least in my experience, the answer is a resounding no. Great content is easily missed by the web's link-heavy audience, while some pretty crummy content that's been marketed well (or made the right connections or comes from the right sources) will tend to overperform.

The web's link graph isn't a meritocracy - like everything else in life, it's a popularity contest. Those who find the best ways to distribute, promote and market their works to the audience most likely to link to it are going to succeed much more so than just the "great content" producers.

Just think of it like politics. The best, most rational, reasoned, intelligent arguments are the exception, not the rule. Instead, the conversation and media attention (and thus, public awareness) is focused on concepts that are easy to grasp, virally distributable (which often puts rumor and innuendo above fact) and fit a compelling narrative (rather than add complexity).

A post on this topic - http://j.mp/4tYThK

I would love to tell Chris that he's right, that the better the content, the better, higher quality and greater quantity of links that content earns. But, perhaps sadly, that's not the case. What those in the content world would call "better" does not always (nor even mostly) garner the links and rankings. Instead, those who have "better optimized" for attracting links tend to far outshine their peers with rankings and traffic.

This may seem like a tragedy, or even a travesty of the democratic structure the web is supposed to represent, but in fact, it's the way all marketing has worked for generations. The "best" restaurants are often family-owned, hole-in-the-wall, never-marketed-themselves joints whose fabulous epicurean creations are a secret to all but the most diligent culinary Clouseaus. Meanwhile, the affront to humanity and cooking that is Olive Garden advertises relentlessly, conducts impeccable market research and appeals to the lowest common denominator in town after town to achieve geographic and market-penetration ubiquity (BTW - my wife is Italian and thus recoils at the very mention of this establishment and the tarnish it's brought to her beloved countrymen's kitchens).

Like many parts of life - it's not about the quality, diligence or aptitude you bring to your field, but your ability to market it successfully. As SEOs, our responsibility is to help the best of the best become the most noticed, most beloved and most linked-to in their field. It's a strange, almost paradoxical leap of logic, but one you internalize this principle, it gets easier to accept and to spread to your clients and managers.

p.s. I'm also a fan of Chris Dixon's startup, Hunch - I'd urge you to check it out and try answering a few dozen questions. The results are quite fascinating.

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/great-content-equals-great-rankings-right-wrong

Google Caffeine SEO Notes

2009-12-14T05:28:00.000-08:00

Google Caffeine SEO

Since the SEO News industry has become so noisy (with lots of well-titled posts hyping mostly empty articles), and the major news sites are apparently jumping to publish first with such headlines, using similarly low-value content, it’s not easy to find real content about Google’s new “caffeine” indexing system. Google says it’s a big deal:

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits ‘under the hood’ of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

Matt Cutts says this is a complete rewrite of many parts of the Google indexing system, and that it’s fundamentally a big change. He suggests caution and asks for feedback via an alpha review, and says Google plans to deploy it on one data center first for evaluations, before depoying it completely. According to Matt, “whenever you change SO MUCH stuff under the hood…” you need to move forward carefully.

There is some speculation that this will form a basis for the Google’s annual “screw the affiliates right around Thanksgiving, to have maximum impact on the holiday sales season” effort this year. If that’s true, I suppose it’s a good sign that Google finally recognizes the importance of such huge changes, and the need for more than a week or two of lead time. It also makes sense that Matt’s out front handling PR on this, since he has to face the webmasters at Pubcon in November.

I have yet to see any meaningful discussion of this new Google on the web, beyond basic observations on a few specific searches. But I’ll keep watching.

In the mean time I’m aggregating references on Google’s “Caffeine” update and what it might mean for search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. If you know of a meaningful article about Google’s Caffeine update, that would be interesting to SEOs, please note it in a comment.

For starters:

* http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/08/help-test-some-next-generation.html
* http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ (they’re working on it)
* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NU5cKDryjy0&feature=player_embedded
* http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/explaining-algorithm-updates-and-data-refreshes/
* http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/whats-an-update/
* http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/more-info-on-updates/
* http://www.comparegoogle.com/ (cute, but obviously not always working because it probably violates TOS)
http://www.webmetricsguru.com/caffeine (not published yet… not sure what it is)
* New Feature: opting out of Google by tattooing your forehead with a big “G”
* The Google Roommate Video
* Bald Matt Cutts with WebProNews
* Bill Hartzer’s review of Caffeine so far http://www.vizioninteractive.com/google-caffeine-a-comprehensive-analysis/

Types of Navigation - Organization is Key

2009-12-14T04:45:00.000-08:00

There are three basic types of navigation: hierarchical, site wide, and locally determined.

Each of these types of navigation can be represented in a tree structure (see figures). The navigation trees can be traversed vertically or horizontally by following the links (lines) between the elements.

In an earlier post, I offered Tips for Simple Navigation. Here I’ll describe the three types of navigation.

Note on the figures: If no connection exists between two elements, a direct link is not available between those elements in that navigation structure.

Hierarchical Navigation

Hierarchical Navigation Tree

Hierarchical navigation is based on a strong organizational structure that forces a choice between elements at each level of the tree. In a hierarchical system, it is only possible to traverse the tree vertically as there are no direct links between elements that reside on the same level.

For example, in our figure, it is not possible to move from one product element directly to another product element. In order to move between product elements, you would need to return to the category (or even the home, in some cases) element and then move to the desired product element.

Hierarchical systems are excellent for large sites that contain vast quantities of detailed information that need to be sifted through to find specific information. They make traversing the tree easy and intuitive by successively narrowing down the relevant choices as the user moves down the tree.

Think about storing papers in increasingly specific sub folders within file folders – this is hierarchical organization.

However, pure hierarchical systems break down in real-life situations where a person would like to traverse horizontally as well – from one category element to another or one product element to another without retracing steps.

Site Wide Navigation

Site wide navigation is based on an organizational structure that places primary emphasis on interconnecting most, if not all, elements in a site. The goal with site wide navigation is to remove any unnecessary traversing of the tree when looking for a specific element – to reduce the number of clicks to find a particular element.

Think about the papers sitting in a stack on your desk, unfiled and all within easy reach, regardless of their categorization – this is similar to the site wide organizational structure.

The most extreme example of a piece of site wide navigation is the sitemap page that many sites have. Imagine the sitemap page as the homepage of a website; you have easy access to every single page on a website – in just one click! So, why don’t all sites employ this tactic on their homepage?

Site wide navigational systems are very good at reducing the number of clicks that it takes to reach the desired element, but run into problems when people are unable (or unwilling to spend the necessary time) to find the particular link they are looking for.

Confusion can easily be the result of a pure site wide navigational system. Offering too many choices in one place makes the decision much harder to make. [Take a look at Barry Schwartz’s “Paradox of Choice” talk for a more in-depth look at the fascinating subject of complex decision making.]

Local Navigation / Locally Determined Navigation (recommended)

Local Navigation

Local navigation is a combination of hierarchical and site wide structures applied on a case by case basis at the local level. This navigational system uses the strong points of both previous navigation types, while eliminating many of the problems that can be associated with using a ‘pure’ hierarchical or site wide system.

Going back to our desk analogy - think about your desk with those unfiled commonly used papers on the desk and the filing cabinet next to it filled with categorized files - combining your different organizational schemes acts just like localy determined navigation.

For a web example, a site that has a store, a forum, and a blog probably doesn’t want or need direct links between particular forum posts and individual products in most cases, but might want to connect specific elements that contain relevant information. Separate and unique navigational structures would exist within the store, forum, and blog sections of the site based upon what navigational system would work best in each specific situation.

A well designed local navigation system builds flexibility into the navigational system that allows people to intuitively traverse the tree while avoiding any extraneous or confusing links.

As with most things, with navigation, moderation is key.

Read more: http://blog.vortx.com

10 Tactics for Video Optimization

2009-12-14T00:54:00.000-08:00

This is an area of SEO that got hot once Google started showing “Universal Results”. Universal results is just a term that means Google includes in the Search results everything now. Along with the organic text listings are News, Images, Shopping, and Video. Google pulls these search results from all types of different websites.

The big question is “How can I get my video there?” Now it behooves advertisers & publishers to conduct a Video Optimization for specific keywords related to the video. In many cases it’s worth the time & money invested to get your video to the top of the search results page.

Without showing any of my client work, I’ll show a personal video that is ranking. Search for the term, AFX race cars.

10 Tactics for Video Optimization:
1. Use the Keyword in the Title. Make the Title sound interesting.
2. Write approx 2 paragraphs of text for the Description.
3. Tag each video with keywords.
4. Choose proper category for each video.
5. It’s best to put a hyperlink to the target page within the Description, but before the user needs to click (more info) to see the hyperlink.
6. Upload all videos to multiple video sites (Youtube, Viddler, etc)
7. Comments help by showing interest, and by additional user-generated content (more words on the page).
8. Video responses show interest/activity.
9. Rating. Try to get as many 5 star ratings as you can ;-)
10. Views, views, and more views.

Treat the video as you would any other webpage, and begin a Link building optimization to increase the amount of Inbound links. Ideally, your objective is to increase Link popularity and Link relevancy. While building links for your off-site optimization, try to mix up textlinks and the number of Embeds. All these are Video Ranking Factors.

A great productivity tool to upload videos to multiple video sharing sites is TubeMogul .

Source: shimonsandler.com