WDTalk

As a rule of thumb – broad markets invite fierce competiton. Search queries that return in the tens of millions of results are going to be hard to rank on page one of any search engine. Why is that important even if you actually are selling to a broad market?

Online buyers are spending billions of dollars annually – and if not with you, certainly with your competition. The good news is that broad markets can be broken down into niches, with each niche targeted to draw buyers to your site. The key here is to do keyword research to determine the exact niche prospects are (currently) searching for, then optimize your site (using those keyword phrases) to increase your conversions.

Tweaking your site – to take advantage of current trends can be as simple as adding a URL and title description to exactly match the extended keyword phrases that are ranking highest (today).

As an example, I just this morning did keyword research on fitness equipment, which is a fairly broad market. Apparently, fitness equipment is searched for 82,000 times per month on Google. Drilling down, I saw that the extended keyword phrase of home fitness equipment drew 4,400 queries. If my site targeted fitness equipment, I could create a page with the URL of www.(yourdomain).com/home_fitness_equipment/  and include “home fitness equipment” in its title tag. Time and time again, I’ve seen this SEO strategy help sites with low (or ZERO) PageRank and minimal backlinks outrank sites with high PR and thousands of backlinks.

If you’re running a WordPress site – beware. The default for creating URLs looks something like ?p=1237. Sure your site may be indexed, but how many buyers are searching for 1237? By simply changing the default to Month/Name, the URL could look like /2010/08/home-fitness-equipment. If you’re searching for a custom title tag plug-in for WordPress, read the comments first and check it’s compatibility with your version (which should be updated to 3.01).

Increasing traffic is key – but great content and compelling calls-to-action take the reigns once your site is found. To optimize your conversions, you need all three ingredients.

To Your Success

- Steve

As you search the Internet for squeeze page strategies, remember that the rules (Google algorithms) were changed recently, and many once successful one page squeeze pages fell by the wayside. But before I get ahead of myself, what exactly are squeeze pages?

By definition – Once upon a time, squeeze pages were defined as a single web page with the sole purpose of capturing information for follow-up marketing. The ultimate goal of the page was to obtain the visitor’s email address. Why? To build a list of highly targeted prospects (seems fairly simple).

Times have changed – To avoid penalties and drops in SERPS (search engine results pages), squeeze pages are now being designed across multiple pages, each with relevant content. The goal however remains the same – to build a list that affords you the opportunity to present visitors with multiple sales messages over time, develop relationships, and cross-sell other products.

Conversion Strategies – will vary depending on your goal. The best conversion strategies focus on benefits and solutions. These can be either short or long term. Success stories work well, as do freebies – but we need to backtrack again. With the onslaught of spam, convincing anyone to give up their email address means your sales copy has to be compelling and you have to convey trust.

The Trust Factor – is huge, and I contend it’s the most important element of your site. Prospects buy from sales reps, businesses and organizations they know, like and TRUST. So how can you demonstrate trust online?

• Add Your Picture
• Add Your Signature
• Proofread your copy for spelling and grammatical structure
• Have a Privacy Policy
• Use Color Psychology

Successful Squeeze Pages – often use a short video and opt in form at the very top of the home page for visitors who want to sign up immediately, followed by content that essentially explains benefits and solutions in greater detail – with another opt in form at the bottom.

Reverse SEO? Does it mean – trying to get listed lower in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS)? Of course not! Reverse SEO is interpreted in a couple of ways though.

Some say it’s about – researching your competitor’s SEO efforts – analyzing their title tags, meta description, PR, links to their domain and links to a URL found via a search query for specific keywords or keyword phrases. Does their site have quality, relevant and compelling content? Is it updated regularly? Are they using social media? In short, what separates their sites from your site? This method of SEO emcompasses attempting to emulate success. I use this method daily to analyze what others are doing to rank high in the search engines.

Others believe that – reverse SEO means trying to do damage control. What happens when a search query returns results that are not advantageous to your firm or organization (or you)? Believe it or not, there are companies that will perform online damage control – by attempting to push those unfavorable results down to page 2, 3 or 4 where they won’t be so readily noticed. How? By posting a ton of positive reviews to counter anything negative.

Another take on reverse SEO is – to just not do any SEO. The angle here is to design sites for the users and not for the search engines. This sounds great in theory, but viewing patterns very clearly indicate that you need to be on page one, and the closer to number one, the better.

One of the factors that affect site speed is the size of the graphics/images on your website. I can remember using different utilities back in the 90’s that compressed images because the recommended page size at that time was around 27Kbytes.

You were lucky to get transfer speeds of 32K over dial up then, so slow page downloads meant the kiss of death. I sold a ton of ISDN in the day, but by today’s standard, not only is that solution pricey, but slow by comparison to DSL, cable and fiber. 

I’m seeing a lot of websites today that aren’t optimized for speed and that’s a huge mistake. While I have a 10MByte connection at home, much of rural America still connects via dial up. Add latency to that mix and site speed becomes more important than ever. Let’s face it, we’re competing in a world-wide market, so the faster your site loads, the better off you’ll be. 

Achieving the best image quality at a given bit or compression rate is the main goal of image compression, but you should also consider scalability. This could be combined with region of interest coding to further refine your images.

A recent query on Google for “image compression” returned over 40 million results. I only had time to read the first 16 million. LOL.

PS: Google has added site speed to their ranking algorithms (America only), so speeding up site speed could reap immense benefits in SERPS as well.

I read a ton of articles, threads and posts from SEO experts everyday. Why? Because just like everyone else, I want to increase sales online. For years, SEO practitioners preached a mix of link this and content that, or touted banner advertisements or AdSense ads. Since the onset of search engines, techniques to outwit them to rank higher in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) have basically evolved beyond simply obtaining backlinks, providing lots of content or optimizing keywords and meta tags.

FREE versus Paid Traffic
Organic traffic is traffic you receive from free click-throughs in search engines (not sponsored) – the higher your site ranks, the more traffic you receive, thus higher revenues on the backside. Paid traffic would be traffic obtained via banner ads or programs like AdSense. Bottom line to increase profits – reduce overhead – increase productivity. So how do you make your website more productive without forking out a ton of money on paid advertising?

Google Algorithms Put to the Test
For years, I’ve been reading about how complex Google algorithms were. We’ve witnessed a number of cycles or shifts in how Google analyzes and ranks sites, but if you tie in Google’s history of acquisitions and free tools, their core emphasis (today) lies within three (3) PRIMARY variables – all driven by human activity. Much like Bing, they’ve transitioned from being a search engine to being a decision engine.

So What is this ‘FREE Traffic” Big Secret?
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen the phrase, “Content is King” or “Content is King Kong.” I’ve said this myself in a past life. The real KING today is Organic Search Traffic!! Think about this for a second. What does paid advertising get you – a position on a page with the expectation that being seen at the top of that page will result in a click through to your site.

Viewing Patterns Take Center Stage
Numerous studies have been conducted by leading SEO firms to determine viewing patterns and projected click through patterns over the years. Going back to the early 2000’s, banner advertising worked very well, drawing over a 30% click through rate. When banner advertising fell out of favor, the trend evolved to link building, but a ton of black hat SEO strategies forced Google to revise their algorithms.

So what do today’s viewing patterns tell us about paid ads?
Very simply that organic traffic is growing and paid is declining. Here’s a question for you – when you do a search query on Google, do you read the sponsored ads at the top of the page or the ads on the side bar? Studies have shown that those viewers who do read them is on the decline. Consider this – sponsored ads were only drawing 5% of the click throughs in their prime, and even less now. So where are the other 95% of the click throughs occurring? The answer is in Google’s organic listings – the FREE ones!! Banner Ads don’t even register and sponsored ads aren’t much better. Currently, paid listings that appear above the organic listings receive only 2 to 3 percent of the available clicks with those on the side receiving a paltry 1 to 2 percent. To verify this, you simply have to use Google’s own internal Traffic Estimator Tool.

Organic Traffic is KING
Not only is organic traffic FREE, but it also receives the majority of all traffic. The first organic listing receives over 40% of the available traffic, while the second, or number two, receives nearly 20%. Let’s say you’re running an AdWords campaign and you’re getting 1000 clicks per day (multiply those clicks by your cost per click – OUCH). Compare that to number one in Google’s organic listing at 40%. Your paid 1000 clicks translate to 8000 FREE organic clicks. And viewing patterns indicate the first ten organic search positions outperform even the number 1 paid ad on the same page. OK, you’re saying that you know it’s important to rank high in SERPS, so how is this a big secret?

What does Google look at today to rank organic listings?
While Google doesn’t divulge their algorithms publicly, they do post recommendations and guidance. We do know they look at content, which is essentially the domain name itself, certain meta tags and so. They still look at links, both inbound and outbound, assigning authority to those links. And this should be no surprise – they look at the human element – activity. This consists of traffic, RSS subscriptions, comments on blogs, updates to your site and so on.

How do today’s algorithms differ from years past?

I think we all remember PageRank. Up until about 2003, Google counted the number of inbound links to a site, applied a ranking score to each (based on quality), and the sites with the most quality inbound links ranked highest.

When Google introduced Adsense, a shift to content ensued. The focus was to create a ton of pages with content – then place Google’s ads on them. When visitors to those websites clicked thru on the ads, Google split the ad revenue with the site owners. What happened?  For a few years, content worked well, but the SERPS began to be overrun with spam. Another shift was incorporated to regain relevancy, going back to a more robust emphasis on links. This was quickly countered with SEO tactics like link wheels, irrelevant comments on do-follow blogs, robotic article rewrites that were posted everywhere linking back to a main website.  

Enter Google Caffeine
Essentially, Caffeine rewards activity and freshness, meaning more relevance is given to sites that routinely update their content. They still factor in link juice and volume of relevant content, but human activity (social media) is the prevailing trend across all industries.

Over the years, Google has invested heavily in technology that measures HUMAN ACTIVITY. Think about all the programs and businesses they’ve invested in, many that never turned one penny in profit. Why? As long as SEO practitioners could automate strategies to exploit Google’s algorithms, their rankings and AdSense revenue was diluted.

Going Forward
Consider this – with the addition of FeedBurner, Chrome, Google Analytics, Google’s Toolbar and on and on, user statistics are being sent to Google on a massive scale. With Caffeine, their algorithms have shifted once again – only now with primary emphasis on traffic. Note – avoid automated programs. Google has garnered a wealth of information about human trends and SEO tactics over the years, and can see through most attempts to exploit their services.

It’s best to create organic websites that are highly relevant to the service or products you offer, then create activity on that site by embracing social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc), incorporating a do-follow blog (moderating comments and disabling spam links), then tweak your site as needed.

If done properly, your website will not (realistically) leap to number one overnight, but will rise in Google’s rankings over the first 30 to 90 days. Back links and quality content are still important, but my recommendation is to emphasize ACTIVITY.

To Your Success

-      Steve