Masterful Marketing » search engine marketing

“Welcome” is Not a Useful Keyword – 10 On Page SEO Tips

Debra — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 23:44:26 +0000

It’s nice to be friendly and welcome your visitors to your website, but unless you are in the hospitality business, using Welcome! as your home page header and title is wasting valuable real estate when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization). You can have welcoming content for your visitors without sacrificing the best practices of SEO. Remember that a website is your primary tool for marketing your business online and you need to do what it takes to ensure your website is found.

For those business owners that are writing the content for their website, keep these following on page SEO tips handy. Rather than provide the list in order of priority from an SEO perspective, I will present them in the order the human needs to address them.

10 On Page SEO Tips

Write quality body copy using variations on your main keyword phrase. Each page of your website should talk about a specific topic, which naturally optimizes the page. Use the most important keywords pertaining to that page early (within the first 50 – 100 words). Emphasizing phrases of your copy using italics or bold to make it stand out for the reader can have an additional benefit if the emphasis is on a phrase that contains your keywords.
Use heading tags (H1 through H6) strategically on your page. Search engines give headings more weight than regular body copy, therefore you should spend time writing great headings with appropriate keywords. A good example is the heading above “10 On Page SEO Tips” that uses a H2 (heading 2) tag. Although studies have shown that the heading tags have no SEO value, have your Web developer style these tags for your site and use them instead of trying to style the fonts manually. This will make your copy more interesting to your readers, even if the heading tags have little SEO value.
Use keywords as anchor text when linking internally. If you are offering a great ebook on the “Exercises that Can Cause Back Injuries”, use keywords in the text that links to the document rather than generic words such as “click here”. For example, use: Download your copy of “Exercises that Can Cause Back Injuries“, with the title linked to the actual file.
Write a descriptive alt attribute on the image tag for all images using the top keyword phrase for that page. Keyword rich Alt tags help your page get better rankings. Using the keyword phrase as the file name of the image also helps with traffic to your website.
Create unique page titles using relevant keywords. The page title is the most important on-page SEO element. Unlike humans that think of your Website as one entity, search engines ranks each page independently. If you are using the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress, create different page titles for each page of your site using one or two keyword phrases that describe the content that not only is interesting to the human visitor but tells the search engine robots what the page is all about for proper indexing. Preferably, put the most relevant keyword first in the title. Don’t leave the page title with the default “Page Name | Blog Title”.
Get a domain name that contains your main keyword. If you already have a domain name for your business, this may be more difficult but if you are starting fresh, spend some time trying out different domains to get one that helps your ranking. A useful website for researching domain names is Domainsbot. Type in words and it spins out potential domain names.
Use “pretty permalinks”. WordPress handles the page and post naming based on the title you give it so think about what you want to call the page that gets you the most benefits. Having a Services page is nice, but having a Services page that is displayed in the navigation as “Personal Training Services” is better.
Control the content that shows up in the search engine results. Writing quality descriptions for each page increases click-through rates from the search engine results pages to your website. So although search engines don’t use the meta description tag directly, when your site does appear in the results, give the reader a reason to visit your site.
Create an XML Sitemap and upload it to the search engines. An XML Sitemap tells the search engines where to look for all of your content and ensure that pages on the site get indexed in the search engine’s directory. This is especially important on websites where content changes frequently (i.e. your Blog) or have a large number of pages. To easily create one on your WordPress website, use the Google Sitemap Generator plugin that does all the work for you including notifying the search engines that there is new content.
Keep your site structure simple. I usually recommend that your website go no deeper than 3 levels away from the home page in the site navigation. If humans can’t find your content, neither will the search engine robots. Important content should be close to the home page for not only the search engines but also to make it easy for people you are trying to create a relationship with to find.

For those of you who want more education on how to build the perfectly optimized page, read the post on SEOmoz titled Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization.

Search engine marketing starts with a website that has implemented the basics of search engine optimization. Nothing feels better than having your phone ring and a prospect is calling you because they found you on the Internet. It’s even nicer when they found you in the organic search engine results, regardless of which search engine they use. Strive to do the basics.

Have you implemented basic SEO on your Web site?

Search Engine Marketing is not a Commodity Product

Debra — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:24:47 +0000

Another week and another client calls me to ask about yet another company claiming they can optimize his website and guarantee first page placement on Google. After doing my usual research, I find a Ripoff Report by an unhappy customer who felt they were taken for a lot of money. One unhappy customer does not make the company bad. But this exercise got me wondering about why so many of these SEO and PPC companies have so many complaints posted all over the Web?

SEO and PPC are Not Commodity Products

These companies that call small business owners trying to sell them their software to manage their SEO and PPC activities are trying to treat Search Engine Marketing as a commodity – a one size fits all so to speak. This is absolutely not the case and most likely the wrong business model for success.

Each of my client’s search engine marketing strategy is unique. It takes a deep understanding of their business, their customers and what they are trying to accomplish with their online marketing. It takes creating relevant content that appeals to their prospects and attracts them to their Website. And, what works for one company may not necessarily work for another.

Are there common elements to setting up search engine optimization or a pay-per-click advertising campaign? Absolutely. But what is a common exercise is just a piece of the search engine marketing puzzle.

Take Ownership for Your Online Marketing Success

The following will help you get the most out of your online marketing effort.

Do:

Remember that search engine optimization, pay-per-click campaigns and social media activities are all marketing activities. If you are looking for someone to help you, make sure these people understand basic marketing principals. The technology is a tool – the means to an end – not the end itself. Those who spew technical jargon to confuse you should be suspect.
Find someone with whom you can develop a long term relationship. This doesn’t mean hiring a consultant on a retainer, but it does mean having someone you can call and pay to help you when you need it.
Understand that search engine marketing requires a long-term commitment by you to make it work for you. Your site will get better rankings in search engines if you write content regularly, keep your social media outposts updated and active and you monitor your progress and understand what works and what does not.

Don’t:

Hire a company that requires they take over your website, makes a copy of your website, replaces your phone number with theirs (to track phone calls as well as clicks) or transfers your domain to their control! Your domain name, website and content are assets of your company and you need to remain in control of your assets and your brand.
Respond to emails that say they can optimize your site and guarantee that they can get your site on the first page of Google. If you notice, all the emails say the same thing exactly – they just get sent from different fake email accounts. These hopefully go into your SPAM folder and should stay there.
Believe any sales call that claims that their SEO software can get your site top rankings ever will. Although it may work for some small businesses depending on where they are located and how competitive their industry is, most small businesses in and around major cities or in very competitive fields (like plumbing, remodeling or roofing) will never achieve their claimed results. Find someone who can help you with your overall marketing effort to differentiate yourself from your competition.

Matt McGee wrote a very good article on How to Get Started with SEO that can provide a starting point for those interested in learning more. And although most small businesses may not need the $500 – $1000 per hour SEO consultant, you should plan to invest in someone who can help you do it right. At this point there are too many horror stories of small businesses being scammed out of a lot of money, time and visibility on the Web to not take this seriously.

What do you think? Can SEO and PPC be automated with software and become a commodity?

Google Social Circle

Debra — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 01:13:11 +0000

I spent a lot of time this weekend writing a marketing plan for a client. In doing so, I was searching for various resources and spending some quality time with Google. After a while, I noticed some search results at the bottom of the first page that said:

Results from people in your social circle for search term – BETA – My social circle – My social content

What appeared in those results were blog posts from people I follow on Twitter. When I clicked on the link for My social circle I was given a page that described my network of connections that Google used to identify relevant social search results.

What is Google Social Search?

In early January, Google went beta to English searchers with social search. It uses your Google Profile to establish your online social circle and display publicly-available content from these folks to provide a more personalized experience in your search results.

When I did a Google search for Google Social Search, I got two results: a blog post from Jason Falls and a tweet from Paul Chaney. Both were recent and relevant to my search and because I “know” these guys from their blogs and Twitter, the content and their perspectives on this topic will carry more weight than someone who I haven’t met through my social networks.

Matt Cutts from Google explains “How Google Social Search works” in a 4 minute video. It’s worth the watch.

Why You Should Care

With Google is placing relevance on search results based on people you are connected with, embracing and encouraging the use of social media within your business is critical. It is now more important that you:

Create a quality Google Profile and include all your important links.
Stop worrying about personal vs professional connections being mixed together. Connecting with your customers and clients is critical.
Participate in social networks, engaging people and staying visible.
Embrace social media – it’s here to stay. Include your social media links in your email signatures and on your marketing materials.
Consider blogging now! Establish an Internet presence that builds your company’s expert reputation.
Don’t fall for SEO companies claiming they will get you first page results – the game has changed and first page search results will be different based on who you are, where you are and who you are connected with.

Those businesses who ignore social media will soon be at a competitive disadvantage. My advice: Get involved with social media now and take it seriously. Do you still think social media is not for you?

Why You Should Control Your Online Marketing

Debra — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:49:38 +0000

I got a call from a small business owner yesterday that reminds me why I focus on helping small business owners market their businesses. It disheartens me when someone spends a substantial amount of money with a company for pay-per-click or SEO services that do not get them any results. These companies charge $500 – $3000 per month for these services of which only a percentage of it is applied to your actual campaign. The rest goes into their pockets. They also redirect your website to a copy that they maintain, replace your phone number with one of theirs (to measure phone calls from their services along with clicks) and basically eliminate any ranking you may have in the search engines. They basically hold you hostage.

In most cases, what they actually provide can be done yourself with a little knowledge or with someone who can help you get your advertising off the ground for a lot less. Here is how you get started.

Determining Your Keywords

Finding your keywords are easy to do yourself with tools such as Google AdWords External Keyword Tool or the Google Search-based Keyword Tool. Both enable you to plug in your website and they return keywords that they associate with your website. They provide search volume and competition for the keywords. The Google Search-based Keyword Tool also provides a suggested bid price if you want to set up an AdWords campaign. These keywords can be exported so you can organize them into groups for optimizing your pages of your website or to build your pay-per-click campaigns.

Taking Care of Your Online Marketing

Before you rush into implementing a pay-per-click advertising campaign on any of the search engines, you want to make sure your website is optimized first. I just recently wrote a post on Five Easy Tips to Optimize Your WordPress Website so make sure you’ve implemented those tips and let your website get indexed by all three search engines.

Next, you want to set up your local listings in all three search engines local business centers. To make this effort easier, create a profile that contains the following information: name, address, phone numbers (office and mobile if you want folks to know it), web site address, contact email, hours of operation if relevant, payment methods, description of your business, products, services, brands and specialties, certifications, company logo, and a half dozen photos of your work if relevant. Put the content in a document where you can cut and paste it as necessary and have your images available for uploading. Then create your local business listing in Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Best of the Web. Here are the links to all three:

Bing Local Listing Center - Log in with a Windows Live ID to create your listing.
Yahoo! Local Listing – Log in with your Yahoo! ID to create your free listing. Yahoo! also offers enhanced and featured listings, but wait to sign up for those until you get all your free listings established.
Google Local Business Center – Log in with your Google account to create your free listing. Google provides a dashboard that enables you to manage your listing. It gives you simple analytic data about activity and search queries used when people saw your listing. They also enable you to offer coupons with your business listing and post a message to your place page.
Best of the Web – Create an account and submit your free listing.

I usually like to get the above done and let the search engines “do their thing” with indexing your site. Give them time to position your site for your major keywords. Then, if you still are looking for more traffic to your website, now consider creating a pay-per-click campaign. Google, Yahoo and Bing all have pay-per-click advertising that enable you to set up your campaign, manage your daily budget and monitor its progress. Setting up your campaign is simple in all cases. I usually recommend that small businesses start with a low budget and watch how the campaign sets itself up by monitoring your analytics information. You can see where your traffic is coming from, how the search engines are delivering visitors to you, which sites are referral sites and how many people come to your site directly.

In many cases, small business owners don’t really want to do this themselves. But if someone calls you with something that sounds too good to be true, most likely it is. Before you spend your money on these types of services, buyer beware – do your homework. Search the web for these businesses, looking for reviews by other small business owners before you give them your money. Better yet, consult with someone you trust to work with you on your online marketing efforts. You won’t be sorry.

Have you received these types of sales calls? How did you handle them?

Five Easy Tips to Optimize Your WordPress Website

Debra — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 01:19:43 +0000

I highly recommend that all small businesses use WordPress for their Website. Even if you have no plans to blog, a WordPress website gives you control of your content so you can keep it fresh and relevant to your target audience. The following are a few tips that will help you get visibility in the search engines.

Make your permalinks pretty

This is an easy setting but one I’ve seen overlooked on many, many WordPress sites. The default setting is http://yourdomain.com/?p=123. How useful is that? If you leave your permalinks set this way, you lose all the value of those keywords that you used in the title of your post or page. Instead, select the custom option and set the format to /%postname%/ or /%category%/%postname%/. Add the category if you have been strategic with naming your categories using your main keywords. Otherwise, use just the post name and make sure you use keywords in their titles.

Set privacy to allow search engines to index the site

By default, WordPress installs with the privacy setting set to disallow search engine indexing. If you look at the source code of your page, you will see . This is a good thing while you are developing the site, but when you go live, make sure you go to “Settings/Privacy” in your WordPress dashboard and set your blog visibility to “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers“. Otherwise, your site won’t get indexed. Also, make sure your robots.txt file isn’t set to block the search engine bots.

Verify your site in Google, Yahoo and Bing

The search engines give you a way to verify site ownership so you can gather useful information. On Google, you use Webmaster Tools. On Yahoo, you use Yahoo Site Explorer. On Bing, you use the Bing Webmaster Center. All three verify your site using a verification metatag in your header file. Once your site is verified you can point all three towards your XML sitemap to help with the indexing. Install the Google (XML) Sitemap plugin and activate it. This plugin generates a sitemap that supports all the major search engines. Once you have set this up, all three of these search engines will provide a wealth of information on your site, such as keywords used to find your site, incoming links to pages, broken links and other information useful to figuring out how you are doing and making your Website more accessible to the search engine bots. This data in combination with Google Analytics should give you enough information to optimize your site.

Add SEO to your Pages

Using WordPress for your website platform also gives you control of your major SEO components: title and description through the All-in-One SEO Pack. You can also set up your keyword metatag specifically for each page for completeness, but most search engines do not use it in its page ranking algorithm so it’s really up to you if you put a few choice keywords on each page. My recommendation is focus on the title, description, content and the anchor text for your links, using the appropriate keywords for each page on your site. Remember that search engines consider each page independently and will index the page based on the content it finds only on that page.

Not sure where to find your best keyword? Try the Google AdWords External Keywood tool or the Google Search-based Keyword Tool. Once you get your big list, select the top 10 keywords for your business and start using them in all of your marketing materials.

Add Relevant Tags your Posts

WordPress enables you to tag your post with focused keyword phrases so that the search engines can index them more effectively. Don’t confuse Tags with categories. Categories are your file cabinet draw where you file a document under one particular topic. Tags allow you to describe your post in more specific terms that help people find your information. By properly tagging your posts with relevant keywords, you help people find and cross reference your post with others. Stick to just a few tags, however, as too many tags will dilute their effect.

Some final tips:

If you had a website and converted it to WordPress, install the Redirection plugin and map all your old URLs to the new ones in WordPress. Not doing this will mean you lose any page rank that you may have from the old site.
When you insert images, be sure to write good alt tags for images and think about the names of the files before you upload them to help search engines index your images (note that the search engines now have a specific image search feature).

If you use WordPress, review your site now to be sure you are following these tips and helping your website become more popular. And let me know what SEO techniques you use to help you be found on the web.

If I Can’t Find You Online, Do You Exist?

Debra — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 03:24:20 +0000

Eight down and one to go in the year end marketing review series to help small business owners get ready for a wonderful new year.

Before we plan our marketing activities for the new year, we have one more review – do you and your business exist online? As a small business owner, how you are perceived when people search and find your information will determine whether they contact you about your products and services. So as hard as it may be to know the truth, we must understand whether:

We have an online presence or not;
Our online presence consistently projects how we want to be perceived.

Do You Exist?

This may be the easier issue to deal with as you get to start with a clean slate and do it right from the beginning. Make developing your online presence and marketing your business online the major part of your marketing plan this year. If you’re not sure how to go about developing your online presence, it may just be worth it to hire someone to help you make choices. Make sure this person has strong marketing experience in both online and traditional marketing and understands the challenges of small business owners. Make sure this person will guide you through the entire process, from brand and message development through implementation.

Is Your Brand Consistent?

With all the new tools and applications hitting us regularly, it is very common for our brand identity to get out of alignment and become inconsistent from one social network to the next. Maybe you wrote your profiles from scratch each time rather than create one document from which to pull all your information. With profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Business Pages, Google, YouTube, FriendFeed, Technorati and … well you get it, it isn’t uncommon to find old information that never got updated when you updated one. And I bet if you go to your Website, your “about” section may say something different as well. Since you are already online, your marketing effort is to ensure consistency across all online profiles. This effort takes work and regular maintenance, but it is well worth it if you do take control.

What to Review and Tackle

Start with a “vanity search” – that is search for your name and your business name and observe what comes up. Are you or your business easy to find? What is the first impression?
Review your company name, logo and color scheme. Does it project what you do and who you are as a business? Does it work with your differentiators that you determined in part 4 of this review? If your brand no longer aligns with who you are, or you simply never had one developed, it is worth the investment to have one done professionally as it will be what people will see and associate with you. Not too long ago, you could manage with just your company name on a well designed business card. Today, marketing yourself online requires a visual identity that has strength and memorability.
Do you have a Website and blog and are they up do date? If you don’t, get a quality domain name that aligns with your business name or a key differentiator. Have your Website built on WordPress so you can keep your content up to date. Add your blog and provide quality, relevant content that your prospects will appreciate.
Which social networks are you currently using? Are your profiles consistent in what they project to your friends, followers and connections? Is there online content about you that you were unaware of and need to do something about?
Once you determine the state of your online brand, update profiles for consistency and provide new content that will get indexed by the search engines. The more people can hear what you can do and how you can help them, the more likely they will think of you when they are ready to buy. Plus fresh, up-to-date content about you and your business is the best way to counter any old, negative information that may be out there.
Plan to monitor your reputation regularly. Add Google alerts for your name, your business name and your field of expertise. See what people are saying and where your name is showing up.

Online Marketing supports Offline Businesses

Whether your business is a professional service or a local storefront, online marketing, including the use of social media, is a cost effective way to market your products and services. Your online “storefront” is always open for people to find out what you can do for them. And since 69% of people research online before making purchase decisions, your business needs to be online just to be considered. But once you are there, you must be consistent.

What does your online presence say about you and your business?