Google has changed its algorithms – over 200 times recently, in an effort to return the most relevant results to search queries. Link farms are in their cross-hairs now. In the headlines, J.C. Penny and Forbes.com were both penalized, the former for using paid links to advertise their website and the latter for selling links.

What worked well in the past – will not necessarily work well going forward, especially if you used the following methods to increase the ranking of your website:

• Keyword stuffing
• Fully automated, unrelated and centralized link farms
• Cloaking
• Pages loaded with irrelevant content
• Hidden text
• Made for AdSense sites that consist entirely of scraped content
• Hidden links
• False redirects
• Link wheels

Who wins with this most recently tweak – of Google’s algorithms?

• First, Google wins because HUGE advertising revenues are at stake, and this makes them more relevant and marketable.
• Searchers win because they’ll receive more relevant results to their search queries.
• Ethical website owners win because they’ll receive a more targeted audience open to the products and services they offer.

What should you focus on going forward? On page and off page SEO optimization remain as primary ingredients in any marketing strategy. Optimize your existing web pages, title tags, H1 tags, meta descriptions, keywords and content. Follow that with steady growth of organic (high quality) inbound links from relevant sites.

Google’s take on link farms

Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?

It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the buzzing blogger community can be an excellent place to generate interest.

Revised January 18 2012

By default, WordPress blogs use a rel=”nofollow” attribute - so when you read of Do Follow Blogs, these are blogs that have used a plugin that removes the nofollow attribute. Comments then that contain links back to the poster count as backlinks for their sites.

To the Search Engines – these links then are simply links. It’s up to the search engines rather to follow that link and pass value to the poster’s site. There is no “do follow” attribute to instruct a search engine that these links must be followed or assigned value. Why DoFollow versus NoFollow? The NoFollow attribute was introduced in 2005 to discourage comment spam.

Quality Backlinks - To a large segment of SEO experts, a quality backlink is a one way incoming link from a relevant (respected) site with higher PR. It’s a link you earn via hosting a great site that delivers useful information (the stuff that people want to link to).  These are also known as natural (real) links. The theory is that more natural links help boost your site’s popularity and Page Rank.

A Word of Caution - Blog spam is rampant, especially for Do Follow blogs. There are some “do follow” plugins that allow you to set how many comments a visitor needs to leave (with the same domain URL and/or email address) before their comment link will follow. The DoFollow Plugin for WordPress options:

Timeout

Comments

Pingbacks, trackbacks and other special comment types

My Recommendation

• Use a Do Follow plugin for your WordPress blog if you enable comments
• Do not add the “NoFollow” attribute to inbound links.
• Only add the ‘NoFollow” attribute to outbound links in widgets like Subscribe or Bookmark Me.

When you publish your website - there are things you can do to get found and accelerate inbound traffic. I’ve seen a lot of SEO practitioners recommend submitting your site to Google and so on, but they’ll find you (quicker than you imagine). If you’re online, there isn’t much that gets by Google.

The following services are largely analytical in nature - with each of them providing some valuation of your site. Beyond that, researching your site at these locations actually helps get your site recognized and indexed.

Robtex - Swiss Army Knife Internet Tool

Alexa – is the leading provider of free, global web metrics. Search Alexa to discover the most successful sites on the web by keyword, category, or country. Use their analytics for competitive analysis, benchmarking, market research or business development.

Quantcast - Quantcast Measurement provides free, directly measured traffic and audience composition reports. These reports are Media Ratings Council-accredited, ensuring that your traffic data is both accurate and reliable.

Web Worth - is a free and innovative tool to help find out a website value or worth calculation, estimations about a web site and SEO information about any web site the user submits – you could call it a Website Value Calculator

Cubestat - is a free tool for website value calculation, estimations and information.

Website Informer - is a special service for web masters that gathers detailed information on websites – general information, statistics, main competitors, similar sites, IPs etc.

PeekStats - estimates website value based on a wide range of publicly available statistics. They provide you with insight in all these numbers and the estimated results.

Markosweb.com - is a web service that collects and analyzes any data about domains and keywords they are optimized for.

With shopping cart abandonment hovering - between 50-70%, understanding WHY could help you refine your checkout process and improve conversions.

Whereas getting from Point Query to - Point Buy (complicated checkout process) used to dominate shopping cart abandonment, today’s shoppers cite high shipping costs high on their list, followed by a desire to shop around. About 1/4 of prospects leave simply because the price is too high.

So, what makes your site unique - and sellable? How does it differ from sites your prospects just came from or are going to? If your strategy relies on lowering prices alone, you’re not necessarily missing the boat, but it’ s never venturing far from the dock.  If your product or service doesn’t require shipping and handling charges, offering a special coupon code helps.

Again, trust remains high - on everyone’s list. Do you have a return policy? Do you provide contact information on your site, like a brick and mortar mailing address and phone number? Do you reassure your shoppers by providing privacy and and trust language? Do you offer PayPal or Google Checkout – and why is that important? Some prospects aren’t comfortable entering their financial information on a site they just found that day, even if you’ve got the best deal.

I read an interesting approach to tackling shopping cart abandonment this morning – and that was to offer a discount in return for a customer review, outlining why they decided to purchase from you. Would that work? Maybe. I’d be thinking, “Did they write up a nice review just to get the discount, or was this really the best deal?” On the other hand, reviews do help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO)  and Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS), especially on Google Places.

Just this morning, I read an article on a web hosting forum about Keyword Research Guidelines - and was so impressed I considered asking the OP (original poster) for permission to use it on this blog. However, after performing a few Google searches, these guidelines have been circulating around the Web (verbatim) since 2003, and in fact, returned over 18 thousand results. I have no clue who the original author is, but the guidelines remain valid, nonetheless.

Many businesses recognize that search engines can - bring volumes of highly targeted prospects to their website, typically at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing.

Unfortunately, these same companies often overlook - the most important part of their search engine marketing campaigns, which is keyphrase selection and evaluation.

Keyphrases (those phrases that potential customers are using to find products or services on search engines) are -  the building block of any search engine marketing strategy.

It is essential that they are chosen carefully, or else - the remainder of the campaign, no matter how effective the implementation, will likely be in vain. What follows is a three-step process that goes over the process of compiling, selecting, and evaluating the ongoing performance of keyphrases for search engines.

1. Compiling a keyphrase list:

Usually, companies are sure that they already know their ideal keyphrases. Often, they are wrong.

This is typically because it is very hard to separate oneself from a business and look at it from the perspective of a potential customer (rather than an insider). Compiling a keyphrase list should not be, despite common practice, a strictly internal process.

Rather, it is best to ask everyone outside of your company for their input, especially your customers. People are often very surprised at the keyphrase suggestions they get- and sometimes dismayed to realize that an average customer doesn’t speak the same language that they do.

Only after you have put together a list of likely phrases from external sources do you add your own. As a last step, try to add variations, plurals, and derivatives of the phrases on your list.

2. Evaluating keyphrases:

Once you have compiled a master keyphrase list, it is time to evaluate each phrase to hone your list down to those most likely to bring you the highest amount of quality traffic.

Although many individuals will base their assessment of key phrase value based only on popularity figures, there are really three vitally important aspects of each phrase to consider.

a) Popularity

By far the easiest of the three to judge is popularity, since it is not subjective. Software like WordTracker gives popularity figures of search phrases based upon actual search engine activity (it also gives additional keyphrase suggestions and variations).

Such tools allow you to assign a concrete popularity number to each phrase to use when comparing them. Obviously, the higher the number, the more traffic that can be expected (assuming you are able to obtain good search engine positions).

However, this number alone is not good enough reason to pursue any particular keyphrase, although key phrase analysis too often stops here.

b) Specificity

This is more abstract than the sheer popularity number, but equally important. For example, let’s assume that you were able to obtain great rankings for the keyphrase “insurance companies” (a daunting prospect). Let’s also assume that you only deal with auto insurance.

Although “insurance companies” might have a much higher popularity figure than “auto insurance companies”, the first keyphrase would also be comprised of people looking for life insurance, health insurance, and home insurance.

It is very likely that someone searching for a particular type of insurance will refine their search after seeing the disparate results returned from the phrase “insurance companies”.

In the second, longer keyphrase, you can be reasonably sure that a much higher percentage of visitors will be looking for what you offer- and the addition of the word “auto” will make it much easier to attain higher rankings, since the longer term will be less competitive.

c) Motivation of User

This factor, even more abstract than specificity, calls for an attempt to understand the motivation of a search engine user by simply analyzing his or her search phrase.

Assume, for example, that you were a real estate agent in Atlanta. Two of the keyphrases you are evaluating are “Atlanta real estate listings” and “Atlanta real estate agents”.

Both phrases have very similar popularity numbers. They are also each fairly specific, and your services are very relevant to each. So which phrase is better? If you look into the likely motivation of the user, you will probably conclude that the second is superior.

While both phrases target people looking for real estate in Atlanta, you can infer from the second phrase that the searcher has moved beyond the point where they are browsing local homes or checking out prices in their neighborhood- they are looking for an agent, which implies that they are ready to act. Often, subtle distinctions between terms can make a large difference on the quality of the traffic they attract.

3. Evaluating Keyphrase Performance:

Until recently, judging the performance of individual keyphrases was a dicey proposition. Although it is possible to tell from your log traffic analysis how many visitors are getting to your site from each keyphrase (valuable information, but unfortunately not enough to do much with), it was very hard to decipher which phrases were bringing you the most quality traffic.

Recently, however, some sophisticated but affordable tools have been developed that allow you to judge the performance of each individual keyphrase based upon visitor behavior.

This new software makes it possible to periodically analyze which keyphrases are bringing your site the most valuable visitors- those who buy your products, fill out your contact form, download your demo, etc.

This type of data, rather than the sheer number of visitors from each search phrase alone, is invaluable when you are refining your search engine marketing campaigns, since you can discard and replace non-performing keyphrases and put increased effort toward the phrases that are delivering visitors that become customers. This kind of ongoing analysis is the final piece of the keyphrase puzzle, and allows you to continually target the most important phrases for your industry, even if they change over time.

Conclusion:

Keyphrase compilation, evaluation, and performance are all vitally important to any search engine marketing campaign. While high rankings in search engines are an admirable goal, high rankings for poor keyphrases will consistently deliver poor results.

Integration of this keyphrase process into your overall search engine marketing strategy can dramatically improve your website performance (and thus your bottom line).

I just typed in “Let It Snow” on Google – as recommended by a story in the Los Angeles Times.  Instantly, my screen started filling with snowflakes and in just a matter of moments, it fogged over. Fortunately, I could wipe the fog from my screen with my mouse.  I wonder – Is that causing condensation inside my monitor?

Anyway, once your screen becomes unreadable – there is a defrost button in the upper right hand corner that clears your screen.  They do this by turning up your internal monitor temperate remotely. NOT!

Tilt and Askew – Google didn’t stop there. Type either tilt or askew in Google and see what happens. Try scrolling thru the results.

There was also a time when if you typed the word “Gravity” into the search engine you’d watch all the copy on the page plunk to the bottom. It doesn’t do that anymore, but you can see what you missed here.

When you speak about the tradition of Internet technologies - you need only go back a couple of decades, but there is value to understanding the culture of your niche as a tool to connect with visitors on your website.

Staying connected entails identifying  - technologies, traditions or events that exist in your specific niche – that you and your audience find culturally significant. In other words, what has made your niche important to you and your visitors?

Websites with longtail (tradition relevant) keyword-rich titles – help draw a very targeted audience. When we speak of Internet technologies, we’re not necessarily spanning generations of cultures with regard to time, rather information.

Do you connect the vendor-client dots – via timetables, explaining how you, your clients or your industry have grown through the years? Taking this one step further, explain “why you now” concluding with a benefits statement and compelling call-to-action.

Performance Marketing Insider ran an article earlier this month - about the launch of WordAds by WordPress, wondering whether it could compete with Google’s AdSense.

While I don’t think that’s going to happen overnight - the article did make a couple of great points about the explosive growth of WordPress.

WordPress estimates almost 50,000 new WordPress sites start online every 24 hours. Alexa.com estimates that almost 15 percent of the top 1 million websites are WordPress configurations. The platform has morphed into the most popular full-fledged content management system on the web.

That’s over 18 million NEW WordPress sites each year! Even more significant is the Alexa estimate, based on traffic. Increasing numbers of businesses are upgrading their hosting platforms to WordPress because it has morphed from its early days as a blogging platform to a full fledged dynamic CMS.

Will WordAds succeed? Only time will tell, but my money is on YES.

As Google continues to refine its algorithms to return relevant results - I sometimes don’t want to see results based on where Google thinks I am, my past search history or what Google Plus circle I’m in.

In the graphic below, my default location - is Maryland Heights, MO (West St. Louis County). If my default location was Honolulu, or if I selected my location to be Honolulu, I’d see different results for the search query of “dedicated servers St. Louis,” even though my search was very specific to St. Louis. From Honolulu, WHT dropped from number 2 to number 5, Hostirian remained at number one on both, and a couple of local St. Louis firms moved ahead of WHT (using Maryland Heights).

In the following graphic, I’ve compared search queries, again using Honolulu versus Maryland Heights, but dropping St. Louis from the search query.

In this comparison, the query using Honolulu as the location showed NO results for Hostirian, a St. Louis dedicated server provider. However, the same query using Maryland Heights did show Hostirian on the first page at numbers 11 and 12. Worth noting is that by adding St. Louis to the search query, Hostirian ranked at number one on both, because it is a local St. Louis company.

Of course, if you’re using Chrome – and are logged into your Gmail account, throw all this out of the window. Personalized search takes over, making social book marking all the more important.

Update: September 23, 2011

CALIFORNIA REPEALS THE AFFILIATE NEXUS TAX LAW

See this Press Release by the Performance Marketing Association.

PMA executive director, Rebecca Madigan stated, “The signing of this legislation means these 25,000 web-based entrepreneurs will be able to get back in business. For the PMA, this issue has always been about keeping the vibrant Affiliate Marketing sector of the economy strong and growing.”

Original article written July 19, 2011

Thousands of entrepreneurs market other vendors wares as affiliates - but it seems an increasing number of states are defining virtual stores as an in-state entity for the purpose of collecting sales tax, even though the affiliate may not have a physical presence in their state.

I can’t confirm the list below - but they have all reportedly terminated their affiliate memberships in California.

6pm.com   1-800-PetMeds   Amazon.com   Amerimark   Backcountry   Bag.com   BagsBuy.com   Barware.com   BedBathStore B&H Photo   Boden   BrickHouse Electronics   BuildDirect.com   Cabela’s   Calvin Klein Jeans   Candelabras.com   CD Universe CKU   Collections Etc.   Compact Appliance   Costume Craze   CreateForLess.com   CSN Stores   Cymax   Dermadoctor   Dr. Leonard’s   Endless.com   Eurosport   Fabric.com   Fingerhut   FootSmart   GAIAM   Garden.com   Gardeners Supply Gettington   GiftBaskets.com   Hayneedle Stores   Herroom   K. Jordan   Luggage Online   Maryland Square   MetroKitchen Overstock.com   Overstock International   PC Connection   Potpourri Group   Shindigz   Shoe.com   ShoeBuy.com ShopBop.com   ShoppersChoice.com   Silkpalms.com   SmartBargains.com   Spiritline   StumpParty   TABcom theWineEnthusiast   ThinkGeek   TimeForMeCatalog   Total Gym   Woot.com   Zappos.com

Understandably, these states desperately need to increase revenues - but I wonder with so many vendors terminating their affiliate memberships there, will California’s anticipated increase in sales revenue ever come to fruition?

Your thoughts?

Have you ever heard the term - “Sell the Sizzle, not the Steak”? Buying means making a decision, and that decision making process begins with a need to ease some pain, then logically progresses (in person) through stages of talking, thinking and actions toward closing the sale.

Online though, there are no body clues – no sales representative to nod their head up and down, looking for a yes response, cueing the prospect to follow suit. Online, compelling landing & checkout pages are vital to your success.

Buying anything is an emotional process – for some much more so than others, like me. Using the five senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell to evoke an emotion (tied to your offer) helps reinforce your solution in the eyes of your prospect.

Closing the sale – isn’t simply a yes or a no. It’s a logical progression from a search query to the point “Add to Cart. “ The term, “Always Be Closing,” applies to each and every page the prospect touches until the order is completed, and really should continue beyond that, with either a survey or recommendations for other products and services based on what they just purchased.

Giving your prospect too many choices – or making the navigation from Point “Search” to Point “Buy’ difficult, is just as bad.

Last month, Matt Cutts from Google posted - on his blog, “What cool new websearch ideas should Google launch in 2012?” That article received 254 comments like the ones listed below:

• “I’d love a “search by date” and “search by newest” options to be expanded to the main search functions (and as a webmaster, the option added to Site Search). Too often I am looking for something very specific that happened recently, but get older articles that Google deems to be more relevant, even though from my perspective, they are useless.”
• “The other thing I would like to see (and rumors say it is coming) is the scroll down result effect you see for image searches being applied to web searches so there is no longer page 1, page 2, page 3, etc. results. It might level the playing field a bit and would certainly make scanning results easier.”
• “I would like to have the option of turning personal search on and off for when I need to see different results.”
• “And a “-1″ button in the search result, so I can penalize pages I don’t want to see.”

I read an interesting article that contends - that keywords beyond the top ten (in sum) refer more traffic than the top ten combined. This was attributed to a long tail effect. It went on to say that the terms that are most popular (most managed by site owners) are rarely those that provide the most business.

I couldn’t disagree more – as I’m seeing a growing trend toward more descriptive content, offering solutions to problems or issues – than I am to SEO structured content (for example, keyword saturation). Google has been stressing relevancy for some time, and webmasters are realizing the importance of combining keyword research with content – in other words, writing for their audience (visitors) rather than sculpturing their site for SERPS.

Content that reads naturally - (entices all five senses) and that has a strong call-to-action converts at higher ratios. Which do you prefer from the two examples below?

Susie’s Flowers has the right boutique for you! We carry an assortment of flowers from roses to lilies. Visit our online shop and photo gallery to view our current boutiques.

Susie’s exotic flower shop specializes in custom arrangements for every occasion; from weddings to back yard BBQ’s. From prom queens to blushing brides, imagine yourself adorned with a deep purple orchid corsage, being presented with a boutique of red and white long stemmed roses from your special partner. That’s the dream we deliver at Susie’s exotic flowers. Search our extensive online gallery of corsages and boutiques, or come by in person. We’d love to meet you.

The second example uses emotions to - drive traffic and conversions, and if you’re like me, buying anything (taking money out of my wallet) is an emotional experience.

How do you measure the success of your website? Is it an increase in link popularity, search engine results pages (SERPS), hits per day, unique visitors, pages viewed, length of time on your site, conversions – or what? What keywords are visitors entering into search engines to find your site? 

Are you actively managing your websites? In order to manage anything, you need some benchmarks to measure against. Web analytics provide those benchmarks. Analytics are indicators that reflect the potential of your website. As Internet professionals, we all know that we can’t manage what we can’t measure, and that goes to say, you can’t monetize it either.

How would you know if your site is underperforming? Is it as simple as tracking unique visitors or page views? Not really. There can be an endless number of other performance indicators that define and reflect the success, or lack thereof, of a particular campaign. Are you sending out direct mail? Doing email broadcasts? Advertising in print media? Running pay per click (PPC) ads? Are these tied to your website? If you’re a solutions provider, analytics analysis helps both you and your customers by defining opportunities.

Knowing how a visitor arrived at your website, when they arrived and what they did on your site is invaluable. Aligning that data should define the scope of future marketing campaigns.

What’s important to your organization? This all starts with what’s important to you. Tie that in to your analytics metrics. Decide what key indicators best align with the objectives of your campaigns. Come up with a list of a few basic indicators that will reflect the most insight. One key indicator could be – how many visitors does it take to achieve your goal? If that goal is for visitors to purchase product directly from your website, conversion factors are important measurements. If your goal is to generate leads or brand awareness, would poor page design or navigation hurt? Landing pages are immensely important, especially those that draw the most traffic to your site via relevant keywords or extended keyword phrases.

Tweaking your website What typically happens when a visitor first lands on your website – first impressions?  If you draw 100 unique visitors to your main landing page daily, but only 2 click through to your shopping cart, could tweaking your landing page improve your response rates, and ultimately the number of conversions?

Are some pages on your website not attracting visitors at all? If not, it’s probably time to update those pages. Likewise, if viewers are highly engaged in a specific content area of your website, would linking other parts of your site to that content help?

My recommendation Start with keyword analysis. Enter the keyword or extended keyword phrases that attract the most visitors to your site. Take notice of the results pages, specifically your competitors’ sites. If their sites rank higher in SERPS than yours, what is different between the sites? Is it their content? Their navigation? Their meta tags? Displaying higher in search engine results pages dramatically improves website performance. Take that information and your analytics analysis – to shape and redefine your site for success.

The Internet is information intensive - with major search engines like Google and Bing assigning priority to content on websites that lend value to the end user.  Gone are the days where SEO experts could simply employ search engine tactics to trick sites onto page one to increase their advertising revenues.  As the Internet attracts more computer savvy enthusiasts, the value of  search engines results pages (SERPS) increases in turn. The greatest content is of little value if no one sees it.

Content is KING - More and more, you’ll see websites on page one and two of search queries with relevant content. I personally hate clicking on a site that tells me nothing – instead just leading me to countless pages of links going nowhere.  While the major search engines do not reveal their search algorithms, they do make recommendations, for instance with Google’s Webmasters Tools.  Relevant content creates value, and value sells products and services – and advertising.

Content should have appeal and uniqueness. If a prospect were searching for a web hosting provider, and clicking between results, why would they be intrigued by your site?

• Do you have products or services that drastically vary from hundreds of competitive providers?
• Do you offer a knowledge base that’ll help with their research?
• Do you offer live chat or 800 phone services for those with questions?
• Does your site appeal to their senses (a tour)?
• Is it graphically pleasing?
• Is the type well written and easy to read?
• Does the information on your site flow, and is it easily navigable?
• Do you have a site map?
• Is your pricing competitive?
• Do you offer the culture of your business – it’s management, history and valued clients?

Content is about supplying answers (and solutions) - If you offer Live Chat on your website, when asked a question you cannot answer off of the top of your head, admit you don’t know the answer, but promise you will find it … or at least give the perception that you have the ability to get the answer. It’s extremely important to get back to the prospect in timely fashion, whether you have the answer they’re looking for or not.  You can’t be everything to everybody, but you can be professional in every contact with every prospect and client.

Under promise and over deliver - is a phrase I’ve heard a lot. Don’t promise what you can’t deliver. This applies to your websites as well. Putting relevant content on your website is so much more than an SEO strategy. It’s a business strategy – one of providing value, and that’s what drives business long term.

Revised Oct 31, 2011 to reflect Bing update.

Bing clarifies stance on keyword meta tags - if you’re tagging keywords in WordPress, you need to read this!

Volumes have been written about – keyword meta tags and keyword density. While Bing still looks at keyword meta tags, Google does not. If you’re like us, the majority of our referrals are from Google, followed in the far distance by Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. Don’t forget about Bing, though – if you’re looking to maximize your SEO efforts because indiscriminately throwing in tons of keywords on your keyword meta tags could result in spamming penalties.

I have a keyword statistics plug in on this site - and found that it was generating keyword meta tags for some absurd keywords, so I blocked the ability of robots to read those tags.

Staying in the game means – keeping in touch with industry trends. Thus, I recommend Google Webmaster Tools as a viable resource for Search Engine Optimization of your site.

In the following video clip – Matt Cutts from Google officially addresses a lingering SEO controversy on the viability of keyword meta tags.

The full article can be seen on the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Revised Oct 13, 2011

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 the current WordPress version.

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.

In the last week, I’ve read a number of threads discussing Page Rank – most noticeably how it affects SERPS or back links.  To optimize your back links, measure the relevance of the content of the source page of that link to the content on your landing page. The more relevant, the more weight given that back link.

To determine Page Rank - which of the following are easier to grasp?

PR(A) = (1 – d) + d * SUM ((PR(I->A)/C(I))

Where:

* PR(A) is the PageRank of your page A.
* d is the damping factor, usually set to 0,85.
* PR(I->A) is the PageRank of page I containing a link to page A.
* C(I) is the number of links off page I.
* PR(I->A)/C(I) is a PR-value page A receives from page I.
* SUM (PR(I->A)/C(I)) is the sum of all PR-values page A receives from pages with links to page A..

Versus

PR is a purely mechanistic calculation of the probability of a resource being randomly requested, defined by the following expression.

 

 

where:

• p1,p2,…,pN are the pages under consideration;
• M(pi) is the set of pages that link to pi;
• L(pj) is the number of outbound links on page pj;
• d is the damping factor; and,
• N is the total number of pages.

Keywords are words in the content of your website that are relevant to what prospects would be searching for in Google and Bing queries – leading them to your site. Long tailed keywords are three and four word keyword phrases which are very specific to whatever product or service you’re selling. I prefer to call them keywords, then keyword phrases, and finally – extended keyword phrases.

Why are long tailed keywords or extended keyword phrases important?
When prospects use extended keyword phrases in search queries, they tend to know exactly what they’re looking for, which makes it so much more likely that they’ll buy whatever you’re selling once they find your site.

An example – if your business sells exclusive hair products not found in the major chain stores, search queries for shampoo would lead prospects to millions of results – but probably none of them yours. The search query is simply too general.  And the catch here is that if that prospect is searching for shampoo, they’re probably not a good prospect for your product anyway. Using shampoo as a keyword in Google AdWords will probably cost you a ton in advertising dollars, with little return on your investment.

But if you sell Brocato hair products, a search query for Brocato Volumizing Tonic will rank much higher in the search engines, improving your visibility to the world – and in turn, increase your sales.

Taking extended keyword phrases one step further
To capture discriminating shoppers, you should be creating pages based on extended keyword phrases. If you’re a Salon, Car Repair Shop or Web Hosting Provider, there are hundreds of variations of extended keyword phrases that you could use to create unique pages. Each of these pages should have its own title, description meta tag, H1 header tag and content that emphasizes your product or service.

A word of caution
Don’t go overboard on extended keyword phrases or you may SPECIFIC yourself out of business. Of course, if you have 500 visitors to your site looking for shampoo versus 100 visitors searching for Brocato products, which would you prefer? Site analytics have to be matched to conversion ratios.

How do you know what extended keyword phrases to focus on?
The key here, really, is how to determine which extended keyword phrases have sufficient traffic for you to target. Research is paramount. Fortunately, there are tons of programs available. A recent search on Bing for Keyword Analysis Tools returned over 34 million results!

From Wikipedia:

 The anchor text, link label or link text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The words contained in the anchor text can determine the ranking that the page will receive by search engines.

Websites can actually rank for keywords - that aren’t on their site, ANYWHERE. To test this, simply do a Google query for “Click Here.”  I just did and the first result was: http://get.adobe.com/reader/. The term “Click Here” is no where on that page or the page source code, but how many times have you seen the hyperlink “Click Here”  on websites, or used it yourself?

The visible, clickable text in - the following hyperlink, <a href=”http://www.wdtalk.com”>WDTalk</a> is WDTalk (the anchor text).  OK, so why is that important? It all ties into relevancy. Anchor text should contain keywords relevant to the page you’re linking to, and it’s part of Google’s algorithm for ranking pages.

Some examples:

• Free SEO Report – as a link that takes you to an SEO consultant’s website
• Chocolate Cake Recipe – as a link that takes you a Cookbook website.

What is your Google Analytics IQ score? Google offers a Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ) test to determine your score, but you might want to take their Analytics IQ lessons first. You’ll learn everything from interface navigation to event tracking and virtual pageviews.

Google offers twenty five analytics presentations – each on average lasting from five to ten minutes. While most of what is presented will be second hat to seasoned webmasters, much of Google’s analytics has been updated, for example – Campaign Tracking and AdWords Integration. Are you running AdWords? Google recently updated their Analysis Focus – AdWords.

For an in depth analysis of your sites -you may wish to view their presentations on custom reporting, advanced segmentation, motion charts, internal site search, event tracking and virtual pageviews.

Google Presentations

First Steps

• Updated: Introduction to Google Analytics:
• Interface Navigation:
• Updated: Installing the Google Analytics Tracking Code:

Interpreting Reports

• Guidelines:
• Pageviews, Visits, and Visitors:
• Time Metrics:
• Traffic Sources:
• Content Reports:

Fundamentals

• Profiles in Google Analytics:
• Updated: Campaign Tracking and AdWords Integration:
• Updated: Analysis Focus – AdWords:
• Goals in Google Analytics:
• Analysis Focus – Funnel Visualization:
• Filters in Google Analytics:
• Regex and Google Analytics:
• Cookies and Google Analytics:
• Updated: E-commerce Tracking:
• Analysis Focus – Revenue Metrics:
• Updated: Domains and Subdomains:

In-Depth Analysis

• Custom Reporting:
• Advanced Segmentation:
• Motion Charts:
• Internal Site Search:
• Updated: Event Tracking and Virtual Pageviews:
• Updated: Additional Customizations:

Why are stats important? Imagine spending thousands of dollars developing an eCommerce website, then not measuring traffic to that site. Would it be useful to know what keywords find your site, or what the majority of entrance and exit pages are? Would it be wise to tweak your site to maximize your conversion ratio? Would that relate to more money in your pocket at the end of the day?

Statistical Analysis is a no brainer. Search Engine Marketing & Optimization is crucial to the ongoing success and growth of your online business. Statistical analysis is one piece of that pie – as a reference for formulating action plans and test markets.

For comparision, Search Engine Marketing relates to - paid advertisements on search engines – Pay Per Click (PPC), Pay Per Thousand Impressions (PPM), Pay per Acquisition or Cost per sales (PPA) and Pay Per Visitor (PPV), whereas Search Engine Optimization relates to methods for increasing the ranking of your website on search engines.

Monetizing your site starts with understanding - what your prospects want and what your competition offers, then integrating that knowledge on your site, constantly measuring trends and tweaking as necessary.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become very philosophical in terms of - defining how it works, what works best, what strategies are old hat, who are the real experts, what are the major search engines looking for, how to improve Page Rank (PR) and Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and how relevant each are.

Everyone seems to agree that content is KING - matched with relevant keywords. Long versus short tail, follow versus no-follow, community building versus commercial backlinks are terms debated everyday in SEO forums by practictioners – some with years in the industry and some just cutting their teeth in the industry.

If you’re looking to increase traffic to your website - SEO tips abound on the Internet. My recommendation is to subscribe by the guidelines offered by the major search engines themselves. Google presents some in-depth insight into their strategic guidelines. Published (hard bound) books on the other hand are frequently outdated before they ever hit the stands, as it can take 1 to 2 years to go to press. Forums are an excellent venue for debating strategies with others actually practicing in the industry.

Multiple inbound links from the same IP - can occur any number of ways, the most common from a webmaster who controls multiple sites under one shared hosting plan. Are inbound links from his domains bad? Not necessarily.

Most inbound links will - carry some link juice, the more relevant – the more juice. Google has some very talented folks manning their algorithms and abuse departments, so unless you’re attempting something ‘black hat,’ I wouldn’t worry too much about Google penalties. When you start accumulating thousands of these links, of course the search engines are going to take notice, especially if they don’t occur naturally, meaning they occur in spikes. I recall one specific provider who took on sponsorship of a popular web hosting forum. Backlinks to his site jumped by the thousands overnight (all entirely white hat), which quickly caught Google’s attention.

Inbound links to second or third level - internal pages on your site lend authority. A balanced approach to inbound links works best, and that includes having the appearance (again) of accumulating naturally.

Every so often, I’m introduced to extraordinary entrepreneurs - like Ana Hoffman, who specialize in industries I find fascinating – in this case, SEO.  This morning, I received an alert that Ana was following my tweets , so naturally I had to check her out. What I found was a wealth of information on Search Engine Optimization, light years beyond anything I expected. And it’s presented in a manner that everyone can understand and implement themselves.

Ana has published - “7 Steps To Complete Search Engine Domination.”  I highly recommend this as a MUST read. She covers how to dominate search engines by researching keywords, studying your competition, making a plan, on-page optimization, getting indexed, RSS feeds and link building.

I’ve always asserted that VALUE is the key ingredient – to every facet of business, including SEO.  I guarantee this piece by Ana contains incredible SEO value.

There is a great giveaway going on at the Traffic Generation Cafe Blog where you can win your own copy of Thesis Theme, as well as a 30-minute consultation with Ana Hoffman.
Participating is very easy! Visit Thesis Theme giveaway page for more information.

I’ve re-posted this because Traffic and VALUE drives business.

I see this one question asked over and over - in the forums, so I took some notes about what their members recommended. It’s no surprise that writing unique, high quality content and building relevant back links took center stage.

In the order of their recommendations:

1. Build High Quality (relevant) Back Links
2. Create Unique and Fresh Content
3. Create High Quality Keyword Rich Content Pages
4. Do Social Bookmarking
5. Build Back Links from Do Follow Sites
6. Do Social Bookmarking
7. Submit Articles
8. On Page Optimization
   1. Titles
   2. Headings
   3. Anchor Text
   4. Meta Tags
   5. Alt Tags
9. Submit to Directories
10. Forum Posting
11. Submit to Blog Directories
12. Do Press Releases
13. Blog Writing
14. Target Long Tail Niche Relative Keywords
15. Review SEO tutorials
16. Keyword Density 2-4%
17. Follow Google Recommendations
18. Blog Commenting

My recommendation – varies slightly from theirs, although everything listed is important to maximize your marketing efforts. Certainly, building quality back links ranks high, as well as creating unique and fresh content (that adds value).

Value is the one word that was absent from - every thread and comment, even though it was implied. Value drives business (period). Keeping your keyword density between 2 and 4 percent won’t help one click if there’s no perception of value on your site.

Another key point is your Title tag – it’s the heavyweight contender with On Page Optimization. Too often I see the same title tag repeated on every page of a website. And many of them lack keywords that are relevant to their specific page. The title tag on your home page should highlight your entire site, but title tags on interior pages should target that specific audience.

Following Google’s recommendations is - (very) smart advice. I’d also search for SEO tutorials; being careful to concentrate on current articles (what worked yesterday doesn’t work today).

And last, but not least, ABSOLUTELY – add VIDEO to your site and place it at the top left of your pages – why? Google indexes video and displays that on SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). It’s very possible to get a first page listing for a video, even when competing with the giants in your industry (you know – the ones with 1000′s of back links to their site).

I pay a lot of attention to affiliate marketers - because their livelihood depends on accurately analyzing and predicting market trends, then tweaking their marketing and SEO strategies to match. The problem with an awful lot of affiliate marketers is that they’re stuck in 2000-2004 strategies – that worked like clockwork then, but “Mom and Pop” e-commerce has transitioned over the last few years … becoming exceedingly difficult. Market share for small to medium sized companies on the Internet is shrinking, while the top 10% of web sites on the Internet continue to grab more audience, leaving scraps for the rest of us.

To complicate matters - the trend to mobile apps has caused an overall decrease in Internet use – with mobile content predicted to double within a year. This results in a smaller piece of a smaller pie for entrepreneurs just entering the Internet with e-commerce strategies – and dreams of working from home instead of fighting rush hour traffic to and from work.

I suspect an alarming number of Mom and Pop shops will – go under or at least by the wayside on the Internet – in as little as one to two years down the road – if they don’t transition with the industry. Let’s be honest here – how many of you understand how to market on Facebook or Twitter, or use any number of hundreds of social media platforms to advance your business – while the future of your business rides on the fence. Your competition isn’t sitting back waiting for you to fail – they’re accelerating the process by incorporating Internet strategies that work TODAY – pushing you further back in organic SERPS (search engine results pages).

My recommendation – follow the guidelines that the major search engines put out there – so you can succeed. Do split testing to determine what works from what doesn’t work, then repeat what works over and over and over. Be open to change.

One of my favorite quotes - “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” — by Aristotle, applies to business across the board. Typically, one or two individuals in an organization will be assigned to develop and follow up on Internet strategies, but I contend that each and every employee in businesses of every size, can add intrinsic value to their business (online). In a world that is trending toward peer-to-peer evaluation, each employee brings with them intellectual assets and their own sphere of influence. Encourage each of them to share what makes them special and your business special – on your corporate blog, industry forums, social media platforms – and the list goes on forever.

Exposing Pain
What are some of the fundamentals that drive higher conversion ratios? The first, I think, is to reinforce your prospect’s existing pain. Here’s the catch. When you’re designing an online campaign, how would you know your prospect’s specific pain?

In one-on-one meetings, it’s relatively easy – you ask questions, lots of them. Here, I recommend the POCCAD approach, asking questions related to personnel, their organization, their current system, their current vendors, what applications they’re using, and who their decision makers are. Find their hot buttons and drill deeper.

Online, these tactics don’t convert well. Here, pain is relative to industry trends, and measuring that pain requires some research. I start with the search engines, typically Bing, Google and Yahoo, followed by industry specific forums. Pain can cover everything from slow Internet connections to issues related to their current provider.

Showing Value
Value is perceived. You may not have the best product or service, but the perception of those can be vastly improved with effective copywriting. Here, professional presentation is key. You need to capture your prospect’s attention, then emotionally motivate them to action.

Minimize their Risk
Trust is key to minimizing their risk. There are a number of ways to convey trust. One of those is via testimonials, while another is a guarantee. Testimonials lend considerable credence, especially if that business or organization is well known. Guarantees won’t completely ease the pain of making a bad decision, but it does give the prospect a way out, should the relationship sour.

Cap the Offer
By that, I mean make your offer limited in some fashion, either by time, event or availability. We see these tactics everyday in retail – when they’re gone, they’re gone. Don’t miss this chance to own this once in a lifetime deal.

Have an Exit Strategy
Either offer other related products (I see this all the time on sites like Amazon), offer a discounted price or offer some consolation for visiting your site – either a discount on future purchases or possibly a free report.

I read a tuturiol on canonical redirects on a web hosting forum this morning – and it seems not everyone understands either the reason for using redirects or knows how.

A canonical redirect is the redirect of – one URL to another URL (the authoritative address), for example redirecting non WWW websites to WWW websites – but why should we redirect to the other? The most common use of redirects is for Search Engine Optimization, using 301 redirects – which is the preferred redirect for Google page rank and SERPS. If you don’t use a redirect for your website between the non WWW and WWW versions, you’ll notice it’s possible to have different backlink and SERPS for each, independent of each other. You essentially lose SEO power by dividing the links.

If you’ve registered domains with – common typo’s (misspellings) of your domain and want them to resolve to your authoratative (main) website, you’ll want to use a canonical redirect – the same for pages that may have been moved or if you’ve changed domains. An example for changing domains may be switching from a long name to a short, more rememberable one – or for instances where companies are bought out or merged, for branding reasons.

An example of 301 redirect code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(.*)\.yourdomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I believe that consistently posting quality original content on  your website, on forums, on article submission sites, and so on is absolutely critical to your marketing and SEO strategies. As search engines revamp their algorithms to emphasize relevancy, and as prospects become more computer and Internet savvy, content lays the foundation for every other strategy – from SEO to PPC to social media marketing.

Branding is about consistency in your message, your logo, your mission statement and your site. I search everyday for clues on how other firms have successfully marketed their firms, to emulate what works, or what I perceive to work.

My perception
Publishing great content builds credibility. This is simply common sense. The Internet has grown to become a global resource for information. Why? Because it’s users are there searching for what? Information!! If not yours, then your competitor’s!

I love walking into shops that don’t have computers or Internet connections. They do still exist. Most of them come to agree that having an online presence is like mining for gold online with an offline shovel. See Mining Online Gold with an Offline Shovel by Joel Christopher (Author) and George McKenzie (Author). Add to that, prospects do business with firms or reps they know, like and trust, so building credibility enhances business relationships over the long haul.

Internet Marketing Guru, John Reese, once wrote that content is not king – it’s Kong. Content levels the playing field on the Internet. The web has made it easy for small businesses to reach more people than ever before, opening up a variety of avenues to provide great content, and thus, solidify their business’s success.

Ok, I admit that – I didn’t jump on the Twitter bandwagon right away. I didn’t perceive a great deal of value with a lot of tweets I read. Twitter has evolved though, and I now realize there are plenty of super ways to leverage Twitter to grow your business.

Brand awareness – is huge on Twitter. The key to branding is keeping your business in the public eye, using promotions to increase conversions for your products and services.

Engagement with your target audience – lends to a heightened perception of know, like and trust, a crucial element in the sale of ANYTHING. And you don’t have to be the originator – simply show an interest in their tweets by reposting them or commenting on them.

Listening to tweets can identify market trends – What are people interested in today – RIGHT NOW?

Gain a competitive advantage – by monitoring your competition’s tweets. Are they coming out with a new product or service? Or are they using Twitter in a way you haven’t thought of yet?

Reputation management – is another critical app for Twitter as it allows you to know what’s being said about your brand in real-time. Quite often, simply by responding that you’re working on an issue helps quell any negativity.

Directing tweets to landing pages – can help with conversions, especially if the offer is so compelling that your tweet gets reposted. A significant side effect would be higher ranking in SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) leading to increased organic conversions.

Participating in industry discussions – may help others perceive your business as EXPERTS in the field.

Set up your corporate blog – to feed Twitter your URLs automatically. WordPress plug-ins are great for this.

Don’t forget mobile apps – for people on the move. Twitter is ideal as a mobile communications tool.

Just issued a Press Release – and want to get your announcement out quickly? Spread the word by Tweeting it.

Updated Dec 28 2011

Smaller businesses are driving content marketing initiatives – by double that of large businesses. Over two-thirds attribute social media as their primary marketing venue. Why? Because it works and it’s far less expensive than direct mail or print/TV advertising.

Corporate Blogs
Small business blogs can increase website viewership by over 50%.  In today’s business climate of shrinking budgets, blogs have become a low cost viable online marketing strategy. A recent search on Bing for ‘corporate blogs’ returned over 504,000,000 results (up 470 million from last March!). As higher and higher percentages of shoppers search the Internet to research products and services, well designed and maintained corporate blogs frequently add real value to the mix.

The Challenge of Providing Valuable Content
While content has to be relevant to the company, it needs to provide value to the visitor as well. Simply creating posts that promote your products or services will have diminished results. Typically, blog posts should add value to the visitor – offering creative solutions.

The Real Goal?
What are we are looking for on our websites? I’ll venture “recurring traffic.”  Why? Because return visitors are considerably more likely to respond to a call to action. Successful blogs build regular readership that, over time, foster a business relationship of know, like and trust. Prospects don’t buy products or services – they buy from people or businesses they know, like and trust.

Content marketing requires a commitment of time
Posts need to be frequent, and contain a consistent source of useful information. Building a readership takes time – sometimes months before users recognize your blog as worth following, and recommending to others.

Corporate blogs should engage your entire organization
If you’re responsible for your company’s blog, look for ways to engage others within your organization to contribute. The collective knowledge of everyone in your company shapes who you are. Connecting with your visitors on multiple levels leverages and sustains your marketing efforts, and ultimately, your return-on-investment (ROI).

Designing your site for e-commerce – begins with keyword research, matching keywords and phrases that most closely match today’s search queries. Why? Because designing a site with keywords or phrases that no one searches for makes conversions very very difficult (lack of traffic). Of course you can still advertise via article, blog and forum posting, or micro-sites, which should provide some very targeted leads, but you lose the viral power of organic search results.

I’ve seen sites that dominate –  SERPS (search engine results pages) for their particular niche, but can’t convert a prospect. Frequently, keyword research reveals that NO ONE is searching for that niche. In simple terms, if you’re getting 6 pageviews/month, it doesn’t matter if you have the best design, intuitive navigation and a kick a** shopping cart, your ROI (return on investment) will suffer.

Taking keywords one step further - selling anything is about the perception of providing value & solutions, and this applies to everything from selling toothpaste to cloud hosting – which leads us to Landing Pages and relevancy, and on to compelling calls-to-action. The words you use cross-site and intra-site need to be relevant to the search query. Getting traffic from a search query that leads to a product or service that’s either in conflict with the search, unreadable (poor theme or contrast), not compelling or out of alignment with the rest of the industry won’t convert well.

My recommendation - absolutely use keyword research tools to match the products and services you want to sell – with the keywords and keyword phrases currently entered into search queries – that will produce sufficient traffic to sustain and grow your business.

Last May 2010, Google updated their search results – to include an expanded left-hand navigation panel:

What’s new and what’s changed?
We’ve added contextually relevant, left-hand navigation to the page. This new side panel highlights the most relevant search tools and refinements for your query. Over the past three years, we’ve launched Universal Search, the Search Options panel and Google Squared, and it’s those three technologies that power the left-hand panel.

Universal Search helps you find the most relevant types of results for your search. The top section of the new left-hand panel builds on Universal Search by suggesting the most relevant genres of results for your query and letting you seamlessly switch to these different types of results. The “Everything” option remains our essential search experience with different types of results integrated into the main results, but now you can also easily switch to just the particular type of results you are looking for.

Our expandable Search Options panel launched last spring brought many rich slice-and-dice tools to search. The new left-hand navigation showcases these tools and enables you to get a different view of your results. Perhaps you’d like to see images from each of the results or just the newest information? These options are all on the left, and our technology will suggest the tools that are most relevant and helpful to your query.

Their slice-and-dice tools offer – a truly unique way to research your website and the products and services you offer. For example, typing in your domain and clicking on ‘Blogs’ returns every blog that mentions your domain name within their content. Want to know if you’re being tweeted about? Click on ’Realtime’ and hope the tweets fly off the page (in a good way). Selecting ‘Discussions’ returns threads about your company on forums and social media sites.

As Google continues to tweak – its algorithms to improve relevancy, business reviews got added to the mix. This morning, I moderated a spam comment on WDTalk that promoted an unethical method to work around that, promising to raise your search rankings by writing thousands of fake positive reviews.

The commenter did make – a few excellent points about positive reviews which I’ve quoted below:

Google is now using reviews to determine ranking.

How do positive reviews help in your businesses Google ranking?

1. Positive reviews increase your business rank by linking important and relevant websites to your website.
2. A constant stream of positive reviews improves your online reputation.
3. Positive reviews drive traffic to your business.
4. Positive reviews restore a tarnished reputation by pushing down negative reviews and links.
5. Helps protect against competitors or anyone else from attempting to run your ranking.

 All good points, but my recommendation is – to simply provide superior products, services and support – with the aim to make each of your clients ‘Raving Fans.’ When you go that extra 1% on every call and interaction with your prospects and clients, your business grows internally and externally.

When the major search engines decided that relevance – should take priority in their ranking algorithms, backlinks took on a whole new meaning. With billions of dollars in future advertising revenue at stake, the quality of search engine results became very important.

Just this morning I received an email – from an affiliate marketer bemoaning that Google had banned 15,000 marketing sites with no explanation. Reading through his email, he was promoting advertising via Facebook. Was his email believable? I think it probably was because so many affiliate marketers use SEO techniques that Google frowns upon, and he was advocating alternative solutions.

A relevant backlink is – a live link which takes the visitor to your website from a relevant third party’s website. That backlink can be displayed either as anchor text or as your URL, or it can be linked from a graphic. Your website’s popularity and page rank are largely determined by the number and quality of incoming links to your site. Traffic from relevant backlinks is highly targeted, but do all backlinks carry the same weight, in terms of SEO power? The answer is NO.

A link is a link is a link – but links from sites with high page rank give your site more “SEO Juice.” To maximize the value of your backlink, I recommend using keyword anchor text that matches the keywords in your URL, title tag, H tags and content. And don’t send all backlinks to your homepage – spread them around your site. Make your backlink relevant to the page on your site it most closely matches.

Press releases should be – an integral part of your marketing strategy. They increase brand name recognition, as well as get the word out about what you do and what you have to offer. 

Are press releases expensive – not if you use the services I’ve listed below. In addition to the links, I’ve added their current Alexa rank and verbage from their site.

The key to maximizing traffic streams lies with promotion methods that work TODAY, such as:

• Social Bookmarking – is a favorite way to build links, with 400+ social bookmarking sites available (at my last count).
• Article Marketing – is one of the best ways to market your site (just make sure your articles pass CopyScape.com).  Some of the better article submission sites are:
  • EzineArticles
  • Buzzle
  • ArticlesBase
• Video Marketing – want your site to go viral, then upload video to any number of sites like:
  • YouTube
  • DailyMotion
  • Vimeo
  • Metacafe
• Directory Submission – is also an effective way to build links, which in turn helps with SERPS. There are 3000+ directory submission sites (mostly free), but many still charge nominal fees.
• Answer Sites – like Yahoo and Wiki Answers are great ways to generate leads.
• Press Release Sites – always generate a ton of hits, and some draw traffic years after their release.
• Blog Directory Submission – helps boost your SERPS for targeted keywords.
• RSS Feed Submission – with 100+ RSS Feed Sites to submit your blog to, your traffic will grow exponentially.

I recently stumbled upon an SEO site with this verbage:

Being an honest business person is a good thing. Hinging your marketing on ethics is a blatant display of desperation.

The ethical tag is a marketing idea used by:

• people who are new to SEO and rather ignorant; or
• unoriginal marketers who are severely lacking in creativity.

Since a search engine is a tool its not something you can spam.

I wonder how many people actually buy into this? Probably the same lot that frequent The Pirate Bay, thinking free is an entitlement. Without ethics, where are we as a community?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is – attempted by webmasters worldwide, some with real success and others none at all. Getting your website on page one of the major search engines pays big dividends, and while some gray and blackhat techniques may work short term, whitehat SEO works long term. Ethics are a value add -  and value drives business.

SEO strategies need to encompass not only – your site, but your competition’s sites as well. If they rank higher than you in SERPS, why? Is it the quantity or quality of their backlinks? Possibly their social networking efforts? How old is their domain name, and does this really matter?

I repeat – the key is VALUE. Value drives business long term, from sales to support and everything inbetween. There is value in being ethical.

My recommendation – stay clear of sites and services that advocate sleaze tactics. Visit SEO forums to get a feel for member companies that portray trust and competence. One such company is Omaha SEO Experts - tell them WDTalk sent you (and no, they have no clue who we are, LOL).

I don’t think it would surprise anyone to say that the majority of today’s prospects search Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines prior to making a purchasing decision, for everything  from pets to cars & homes. You need to be on the Internet in some fashion so that relevant prospects can find you, because your competitors will most certainly be there in force.  So how are inbound links a part of that online marketing strategy?

Geo-Marketing
Are search queries results exactly the same regardless of location? For example, if I entered “web hosting providers” as a search query in Google from my home in Spanish Lake, MO, would I get the same results as someone from Sacramento, CA entering the same search query? The answer is NO.  In St. Louis, I see local results even when I’m NOT using location as part of my search query, since search engines automatically determine my location. If Google displays local results above your listing, is this a problem? Absolutely YES. 

Link Neighborhoods
Links matter, especially geo-specific links – so much more than the sheer volume of links. The search engines are particularly sensitive to the online neighborhood you live in – meaning they analyze the quality of inbound links and either reward or penalize your site accordingly.  If inbound links to your site are largely unmanaged and originate from known spammers, your visibility on the Internet will be punished.

My recommendation
From the beginning, the search engines have essentially judged sites based on the quality and quantity of their inbound links. Those links influence ALL of your rankings. If you have a blog, moderate your comments and blacklist spammers. I don’t think it’s any secret that spammers are out there in force, trying to line their pockets at your expense. Be proactive – work on the quality and quantity of inbound links to your site – with good anchor text. By that I mean, instead of hyperlinking from CLICK HERE, hyperlink from a keyword, keyword phrase or extended keyword phrase related to a relevant search query, such as BUSINESS CLASS WEB HOSTING.

What is click fraud? I just did a quick Bing search for click fraud which returned over 40 million results. It’s actually a cybercrime dating back years that occurs with PPC advertising when a spammer or some program or script imitates a real user clicking on an ad for the purpose of generating an actual charge per click, even though they have no interest in the target of that ad’s link.

Have you ever noticed in your PPC advertising campaigns, the same IP address clicking on your ad, spending one or two seconds on your website and then leaving? And coming back again within seconds? If you’re spending $3.00 per click, that adds up quickly.

From SearchEngineWatch.com 19 Dec 2010 - “A recent Click Forensics report showed that fraud for online advertisements rose to 22.3 percent, up from 14.1 percent during the same period last year.” And “With increased marketing spend during the holiday season, it’s more important than ever that online advertisers pay attention to their traffic and ensure that they are protected from fraudulent clicks.”

What’s the Motivation?

One motivator is competitor click fraud.  The motivation of the perpetrator here is to simply obtain higher-placed ad positions for lower bid amounts by depleting the advertising budget of their competitors. Other motivators of click fraud include financial gain, revenge and blackmail.

What can you do to detect and prevent click fraud?

This starts with being proactive – measuring your advertising results, analyzing trends in click volumes with or without accompanying increases in your website’s traffic or sales.

There are also anti-fraud softwares to protect your advertising dollars. A quick check on Google just now for FREE click fraud software returned over 361,000 results.

I just read a great article about microsites written by Andrew Wheeler in Search Marketing Standard. The article basically addresses SEO strategies related to microsites – the pro’s and con’s. Like the name implies, micosites are mini sites or weblets consisting of a single page or a small cluster of pages that act as auxillary supplements to a primary website.

Which attributes to a better SEM or SEO strategy?

This would depend on the reasoning for the microsite. It takes time and significant resources to promote even the smallest of microsites. While I think the original intent of microsites was to promote SERPs, that strategy spells trouble today. The prevailing trend in the major search engines is to look for value to the end user. A better use of microsites envolves branding a niche market. The question should be whether it’s best to take advantage of your primary domain’s history and attributes by creating subdomains rather than microsites – to promote that niche. Certainly, it takes time for the major search engines to crawl and index new microsites, whereas your primary site may already draw significant traffic.

If the niche is significantly diverse from your primary site, then microsites may be a good approach, but if your niche flows well within your primary domain, then subdomains are a better strategy. As always, neither are “create and forget” strategies – each has to be measured and tweaked to achieve maximum results.

The most well thought out (content) and beautifully designed websites – may NOT be optimized for search traffic. Do your sites rank well? Have you pondered why your site doesn’t fare as well as you’ve expected? 

Capturing organic search traffic (not paid) to your website that produces results
Ideally, you’ll need a compelling search result that causes a click through, but how does that happen? Two very important components you’ll need to analyze:

• Your Title
• Your Description

Title
Your ‘Title’ logs in as the heavyweight contender. While it appears first on the search result, its power punch is in how it’s massaged – if your domain is included in the Title it’s displayed in bold typeface and the entire Title is hyperlinked. Keywords in the Title are important as well, since they are one of the components in Google’s ranking algorithm. Ensure your title is keyword rich. In other words, use keywords that are currently being searched for in your niche. It’s best to perform keyword analysis from the onset.

Description
I always recommend managing your prospects expectations. Your description may not have an effect on Google’s ranking, but it could project a powerful perception of your business’ relevancy to a prospects search. Again, Google may boldface the searchers keyword in your description. I know when I type in a phrase, I look to see if the entire phrase is boldfaced, or simply pieces here and there. I perceive immediately, as I suspect others do, the level of relevance this site has to my interest. Managing your description to maximize relevant traffic (and ultimately conversions) is paramount to optimizing your website.

How is the description displayed on Google searches?
Google uses a combination of META tags or abstracts from your page to display the description of your site to the prospect – not always under your control. If you have a description META Tag, Google will likely use it or relevant phrases from it.

They often extract phrases – from the body of your website, as well, usually from the first few paragraphs. To maximize the click through rate, use compelling and accurate descriptions on each page of your site that best match that individual page. On your home page, describe your website as a whole.

Google attempts to rank based on – value to the end user so try to avoid market hype. Match your description to what the prospect will expect to see should they click through. Misleading your prospects is frowned upon. Place emphasis on providing benefits and solutions.

I’m often asked if phrasing is permitted. The answer is ABSOLUTELY. Google limits the description META tag to approximately 20-25 words (115 characters – including spaces), so select your phrasing carefully – to match and flow with content on that specific page.

I just read an interesting article related to website navigation – that started me thinking (Is it smoking in here? LOL).  The core focus of this article addressed exit strategy. What happens when your prospect, just turned client, finishes the checkout process on your ecommerce site? Are they ushered to politely exit your site, or could you fulfill other needs they may have overlooked?

Traditionally, brick and mortar stores – lead shoppers toward the exits as they check out, but I’m seeing more stores move their registers to the interiors of their stores. Why? I think because the more a client lingers, the odds increase they’ll purchase something else. After all, they’re already there! They just said yes to one of your products or services and are in a buying frame of mind. They’ll eventually leave, so there’s no real rush to push them out the door.

Can you relate this exit strategy to your own business?
Websites are no different. Exit strategies affect customer loyalty, cart abandonment, up-sell opportunities and your site’s overall return on investment (ROI).  Step through your purchase steps. Do you funnel your prospects buying experience, or do you offer options similar to Amazon (people who purchased xxx were also interested in yyy products)? Do you offer a customer satisfaction survey? How will you know how well received your site is if you don’t ask?

Minimize abandoned shopping carts
How many times have you been in line at a store and realized you forgot an item? You don’t care, but your wife will beat you if you don’t bring home everything on her list. LOL.  Certainly, there are a percentage of abandoned carts related to prospects wanting to edit or add to their list. Can your prospects break out of your buying funnel to do that?

Is your ‘thank you’ page monetized?
Does your ‘thank you’ page pull your clients back into your site, or does it kick them to the curb? Could it  cross-sell your merchandise or services while their credit card is still out? Or could it offer them opt-in services, like a quarterly newsletter, or related industry tools?

Be creative with your approach to exit strategy
Just like the cash register doesn’t absolutely need to be by the exit door in a brick and mortar company, websites don’t need to be one dimensional. Order receipts needn’t be the end of the line. Best business practices keep clients lingering. If one approach doesn’t work, try another. Every NO brings you closer to a YES. And if you’re like me, I love the word, YES.

I first saw Let Me Google That For You  on a web hosting forum this morning. One of the members asked a question he clearly should have Googled first. OMG, he was flamed by the moderator with a response from www.lmgtfy.com that started a trend by others on the board.

I tried to think of some good keywords for examples, but you can use any search term you want. Click on any of the links below to see why this made me smile.

What is a Virtual Private Server?

Is the correct term bandwidth or data transfer?

What does BGP mean?

What is a favicon?

Why can’t dogs fly?

Super Bowl Champions – Saint Louis RAMS

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.

WordPress has a default setting for Permalinks, which doesn’t do much for you in terms of SEO.

The problem?

The default setting doesn’t really tell your readers or the search engines anything about your posts.

For example, compare how these two settings look:

Default

?p=1237

versus

Month/Name

/2010/06/SEO-TIP

When you’re using Google Analytics to analyze which pages on your site are more popular (most viewed), would SEO-TIP give you immediate feedback? Yes.

Of course, you could link through to ?p=1237, but that’s an extra step.

A current trend in SEO is to use EMD’s or exact match domains. Why? They seem to rank higher in Google search engine results pages (SERPS), which in turn drives conversions and profits. This technique is very popular with affiliate marketers.