Posted by Chris Knipper on Tue, Sep 07, 2010 @ 07:46 AM
In the number of seconds it takes to watch a YouTube video, the reputation of your brand can plummet from respected to reviled. Remember last year's unsanitary food handling video posted by two (now former) Domino's Pizza employees? How long was it before you'd take a chance on ordering from Domino's?
Businesses must maintain constant vigilance to protect their brands from damage. Brand perception has always been a concern, but today's instant communication makes it that much more important -- and that much harder -- to protect your brand. Large corporations devote teams of lawyers to protecting their brands by ferreting out and addressing every misuse, negative comment or derogatory reference to their brand. Small businesses simply don't have the resources to create that level of protection. For smaller brands, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) offers reasonable brand protection at an affordable price.
In concert with your inbound marketing program, SEO can be carefully managed to protect your brand against negative and malicious online content. Using effective SEO techniques, an inbound marketing professional can increase the search engine page ranking of official brand sites, forcing negative and unauthorized material off the first page of search results.
Fewer than 5% of Internet users navigate beyond the first page of search results, making SEO manipulation a relatively cheap and effective way of protecting your brand from harm. According to Internet marketing experts, customers performing a brand search are generally satisfied and stop investigating after encountering 10 positive to neutral search results. Since the average Internet search page shows about 10 results, pushing negative material off the first page is all that is required to protect your brand from negative online content.
To protect your brand, try these SEO tips:
- Optimize images by adding your brand name to ALT and title attributes. In Flickr, update the title and description in photo descriptions.
- Optimize video by creating tutorials, pod casts, product demos, etc. and adding keywords to video titles and descriptions. Place videos on your website as well as on YouTube.
- Optimize PDF files, particularly document properties that serve as title tag and meta description.
- Create a Facebook page and Twitter account to optimize your social media profile.
- Create optimized press releases monthly to maintain search engine ranking.
- Start a blog and optimize blog posts with branded keywords.
Are you monitoring your brand in social media and search engines? What's your SEO strategy for protecting your brand reputation?
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Posted by John McTigue on Tue, Aug 31, 2010 @ 12:36 PM
Search engine optimization is a vast and dynamic topic, with many experts and even more myths and urban legends. How can business owners or executives make sense of all the debate that goes on and arrive at a sensible search marketing strategy for their companies? Let's start with keywords, since much of the hype centers around this core topic. What's a sensible keyword strategy for SEO these days?
What Are Your Goals?
For most companies, sales are the #1 priority. Without sales there is no revenue. Without revenue, there is no company. So generating more sales leads is their primary marketing goal. This should also be your goal for SEO. You can spend a lot of money on consultants and tools and pay-per-click and content, but if you aren't generating sales leads from these efforts then your strategy isn't succeeding. Marketing takeaway: your keyword strategy is to generate sales leads, not to rank on page #1 of the SERP's.
Who/What is Your Target Market?
You need to understand who will be searching for your products or services and what keywords they will be using to find you. Those are the keywords you should optimize on, not the ones with the most traffic or even the ones your competitors use. The most popular keywords are also the most difficult to rank on, and they may not even be relevant to your business. How do you determine which strategic keywords will drive sales?
- Put yourself in your customers' shoes. Then search for your company's stuff. Don't bias yourself by what you already know - think like a complete stranger. If you can't figure this out, go ask them or try some focus groups. Now check the results. Does your company even show up? If so, how far down the list? Are your competitors doing better?
- Next, do some keyword research. Start with the keywords you tried in your customers shoes or found from research. Find some variations and long-tail versions, for example "inbound marketing agency" as opposed to "inbound marketing", using a keyword suggestion tool like HubSpot's Keyword Grader. You will have an easier time ranking on long-tail keywords than on the high-traffic core keywords, and over time you can build up your authority on those as well.
- Put together a short list of strategic keywords. These are the ones you rate as having the best chance for your target market to find you. Now, we'll focus on accomplishing the mission - getting sales leads via search.
Do This
- Focus on creating web pages, blogs, advanced content and social media updates that include your strategic keywords and are both RELEVANT and INTERESTING to your target market. Again, put yourself in their shoes. What are they most likely to click on?
- Make sure your Page Title and Meta Description are not just keywords but real, valuable information that will "click" in the searcher's mind and cause him/her to click through to your page. This is what they see on the search results page. Rank is important, but so is context.
- Optimize your content, but don't over-optimize. Today's reader knows the difference between a legitimate, well-written Web document and a piece of SEO bait. Focus on one topic and focus your keywords there as well. A really well-done blog post on a popular topic, optimized for the topic itself has a great chance of boosting your keyword ranking.
- Coordinate paid search with organic search. Use the same keyword strategy and content and see how you do.
- Measure results and adjust strategy. Which keywords are driving traffic and leads? Which topics, content types and landing pages are producing those conversions? Which social networks are driving the most qualified leads? Focus on those.
Don't Do This
- Don't focus on keywords with lots of traffic and just try to make your content fit those keywords. No one will buy it. The search engines might rank you highly, but you will not drive sales to your business.
- Don't worry about traffic and keyword rankings alone. Again, you might get highly ranked, but without click-through's and leads, you have accomplished nothing.
- Don't try to "game" the search engines with all the tips and tricks you see out there. Remember, your goal is sales, not ranking. People will find you because you are the best at what you do, and your search strategy reflects it.
Next - Part 2 - Content That Will Click
Need some help with your SEO strategy? We have a knack for that.
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Posted by John McTigue on Mon, Jul 12, 2010 @ 08:08 AM
Every business blog has the potential to become a marketing powerhouse, but achieving that goal takes a solid strategy, a bit of creativity and astute manipulation of search engine optimization techniques. When effectively produced and managed, business blogging can become a key element in your -Internet Marketing Strategy. Blogging has proven to be an effective way to build brand recognition, drive motivated customers to your website, generate sales leads and nurture positive customer relations.
Effective business blogs use a marketing strategy:
Interesting and useful content. Consumers return to blogs that provide information they can use. To attract potential customers, your blog should inform and be relevant to your particular business. Industry news, product updates, interviews with industry experts, developing trends, the impact of current events, and personals insights into topics important to your target audience are all potential blog topics. - Regular content updates. Blogs should be updated regularly to encourage readers to return frequently in search of new content. Publishing new blog posts three times per week, spaced every other day, is optimal. While regular additions of new content to your blog help build reader anticipation, encouraging them to return, posting new content also gives Internet spiders new material to crawl, boosting your search engine rank.
- Create a distinctive voice. Blogging is an informal medium. Approach blogging as a conversation with your readers. When you write a blog post, avoid insider acronyms and corporate gobbledygook. A blog shouldn't sound like a formal journal article or a memo to employees. This is an opportunity to humanize your business, to show potential customers that behind your website are real people waiting to take care of their needs. Most bloggers find it most comfortable to blog in their own voice, and it's okay to be chatty and humorous.
- Optimize your posts. Make sure that every post has strategic keywords in the title, headings, url, link text, body text and alt tags on images. Your blog content should be relevant to those keywords (and vice versa), i.e. make it a coherent keyword-rich post that conveys a message.
- Spread the word. Promote every blog post on social networks, social bookmarking sites and e-mail newsletters. Tell people what your post is about and why they should be interested. Use url shorteners to preserve as much descriptive text as possible in social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Leverage hashtags in Twitter to spread the word beyond your personal network of followers. Target groups, memes or audiences that should be interested in your post. Include social media sharing buttons and subscription forms on every post to encourage people to spread the word and come back for more.
Potential customers will return repeatedly to a blog that is informative and entertaining to read. Include a call to action in every blog post that is relevant to the topic at hand. This creates an opportunity to capture leads from your blog readers.
Content and voice are just the visible face of blogging. Underneath the words is a structure of search engine optimization elements that, when properly incorporated into the structure of your business blog, help to promote your brand in the search engines and bring in qualified leads.
Your blog - is it driving home the sales leads? Need some help with that?
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Posted by Chris Knipper on Fri, Jul 09, 2010 @ 06:41 AM
Effective search engine optimization (SEO) is a complex dance between actions that take place on and off your website. The on-page SEO factors that we discussed in our previous post can be quickly and directly controlled by website designers and so provide the easiest and most efficient paths to achieving search engine optimization. However, off-page SEO factors, while more complex to manipulate, promise the bigger SEO payoff and can have a greater impact on your inbound marketing strategy.
Off-page SEO manipulation requires exacting knowledge of search engine operation, practiced experience with search engines and a high level of Internet expertise. Inbound marketing professionals are highly experienced in implementing effective off-page SEO techniques.
Effective off-page search engine optimization begins with a great website and blog. Well-designed and well-written websites attract site visitors and keep them coming back for more. All that activity keeps your click popularity soaring, one of many factors search engines measure to determine website rankings. Healthy website traffic also increases critically important link popularity. Using the on-page SEO factors we discussed in our last post to create a dynamic website sets you up to capitalize on off-page SEO factors.
Off-page SEO factors
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Link popularity is the SEO gold ring. Before your website can start climbing the rankings ladder, it has to be noticed. The more links from outside sites that point to your website, the greater your Internet visibility. Particularly on Google, link popularity is essential in winning the keyword competition. When many sites use the same keywords, it is link popularity -- the number of other websites that link to your site -- that will make your website stand out from the competition.
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Link building can be augmented by exchanging reciprocal links with website visitors. Invite visitors to link to your site. Blogs, Internet press releases, Facebook pages, white papers and newsletters all provide opportunities for reciprocal linking. The most effective links are created when one of your keywords is included in the link text. To help ensure that others link to your keywords, include your keywords in titles and headings, the items most frequently selected when creating links. Don't engage in mass reciprocal link exchange campaigns or services. They often provide low quality inbound links that aren't relevant to your site and may even damage your site search rankings.
- Social media engagement - the more of this you do, the better. Comments on blogs provide an opportunity for inbound links. They may not always provide SEO "juice", since many will have a "nofollow" attribute that prevents search bots from following them to your site. But in general, your comments should show your expertise and interest in the topic and may entice people to visit your website. In any case, social media engagement exposes your website to more people and often leads to more traffic and better SEO results.
What is your off-page SEO strategy? How well is it working?
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Posted by Chris Knipper on Thu, Jul 08, 2010 @ 07:18 AM
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is more than just a list of keywords. How and where you use those keywords can either help or hurt the way search engines rank your website and impact your inbound marketing program. Different SEO techniques also carry more or less weight in ranking formulas. SEO experts understand the complex interactions between myriad SEO elements, but even a virtual novice can develop an effective SEO strategy by manipulating the following on-page and off-page SEO factors:
On-page SEO factors
Page Title
Search engines consider the page title the most significant element on a page. Strategically chosen keyword(s) should be included in the page title, preferably at the beginning of the title. If optimizing for a 2-to-3-word keyword phrase, keep the phrase intact in the title. Keep titles short. Search engines prefer 3 to 6 word titles. Do not create your title just for search bots. A page title must also grab and keep the site visitor's attention. It can't be a jumble of keywords; it has to make sense to visitors. Your title must also be relevant - i.e. the subject of the blog post or page. Being at the top of the search list won't help you if visitors are not intrigued enough by your title to click onto your site. Search engines will demote you if your page title is not consistent with content. Relevance is vital in capturing qualified sales leads, because people are searching for your strategic keywords. In other words, if they find what they are looking for, they are already inclined to dig deeper and click through on your landing pages.
Headings
Headings and subheadings are heavily weighted by SEO algorithms and are an effective place to use keywords. Place your most heavily weighted keywords in your headings. Just be certain the headings make sense to site visitors. Use headings sparingly to improve the layout of your content and use keywords. Remember the relevance criteria. Your content must make sense or no one will read it or subscribe to it.
Body Text
Keyword rich body text provides necessary follow-through on the keywords used in your title and headings. While page content is not a huge factor in SEO algorithms, it is essential in developing and maintaining site visitor traffic. Utilizing keywords in italics, bold face, underlined or in outgoing links increases their perceived importance to search engines. Keyword phrases should be kept together. Keyword use in body text is important but should not be overdone. One to 3 uses per 100 words is optimal. Again, focus on the relevance and value of your post or page as a whole to keep readers interested and ready for more.
META tags
While they were once crucial to getting found in search, META tags have fallen out of SEO favor. Google now ignores keyword META tags and other search engines give them little weight. However, the description tag is still alive and well, because it serves as a summary of the content of your blog post or web page. Write a description that will grab the visitor's attention and entice them to click through to your content.
Tomorrow: Off-page SEO Factors
How well are your pages and blog posts optimized for search? We can help.
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Posted by Chris Knipper on Wed, Jul 07, 2010 @ 08:46 AM
Keyword optimization is a key factor in effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Choosing specific keywords to describe and identify your website and fine tuning those keywords to drive the greatest amount of traffic to your business is an art. Keyword selection is so critical to SEO success that many businesses hire an inbound marketing agency to ensure that their keyword list will have the impact they desire. Inbound marketing experts have the SEO, web analytics and HubSpot Keyword Grader expertise necessary to create a dynamic keyword list, track and measure the progress of each keyword, and tweak your keyword list regularly to most effectively meet your company's inbound marketing goals.
Keyword Strategy and SEO
Search engines rank sites using complex formulas that weight keyword prominence, frequency, density, proximity and placement. People often fail to give keyword selection the careful attention it requires. Poorly selected keywords that are not robustly related to your website will perform poorly, hurting your SEO ranking. Before investing time in SEO, take time to create an effective keyword list.
To create an effective keyword list follow these steps:
- Select keywords and keyword phrases. Read each page on your website and consider what it is about. Decide which words most accurately describe page contents. Consider the words a consumer is most likely to use to solicit that content. From your list, select one or two keywords per page and several less common words or phrases that might be triggered by multi-word searches.
- Sort by popularity. Using keyword grader and other web analytic programs, sort keywords and phrases by user popularity.
- Tweak keywords and combinations of keywords in phrases to more closely match actual consumer use. Shuffle word combinations to achieve keyword phrases that resonate with consumers. Don't focus solely on the most common keywords in your business. Instead of trying to compete with top industry leaders for high rankings on the most frequently used keywords, improve your opportunity for SEO success by focusing on medium-use key words. Sometimes it's better to be a big fish in a little pond. Re-optimize pages to reflect keywords and keyword phrases.
- Resort by popularity. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you achieve dependable results and periodically thereafter to maintain best SEO rankings.
What's your keyword strategy, and how well is it working?
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Posted by John McTigue on Thu, Jun 17, 2010 @ 06:22 AM
The goal of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to ensure that when a potential customer enters a query for a product or service you sell, your business website appears on the first search page and as close to the top of that search page as possible. Research shows that 95% of Internet users never click beyond the first page of query responses. Making certain that your website link appears within the first 10 search responses is critical to driving maximum traffic to your business website and capturing sales leads.
Many factors affect search engine ranking, from your use of key words to the placement of items on a web page. To keep things interesting, search engines constantly change their search parameters and user rules. Effective SEO management requires expert knowledge, practiced experience and constant tweaking; but there are some tried and true SEO techniques that you can use to improve your search engine rank. Earlier this week, we talked about using deep linking and social media bookmarking to improve your search results. Try these additional tips from our SEO experts:
- Vary anchor text. While anchor (link) text adds important weight to links, search engines perceive over-use of identical anchor text phrases as automation, and they may penalize your ranking for doing it. You need to mix up anchor links and text to provide the fresh links that attract search engines. Vary anchor text phrases by creating new combinations of key words.
- Create SEO-friendly URLs. Include keywords in your URLs (page addresses) and image file names. Try not to overdo it or search engines may define page files as spam. When creating file names, use hyphens which are treated as spaces rather than underscores which are not.
- Use keywords in page titles and headings. Include primary keywords in page titles and headings. The page title is the most important SEO factor on any given page. Including keywords in page titles increases your chances of improving search engine rank. Not just any keywords, though. Search engines also take relevance into account, so make sure the keywords you use are consistent with the article content.
- Benefit from inbound marketing. Start a blog, open a Twitter account, build a Facebook page. Search engines, particularly Google, scan inbound marketing sites. Each new item you post provides the fresh content search engines thrive on. Include keywords in your social media profiles, tweets, blog comments and links and updates on Facebook and elsewhere. Incorporating social media in your marketing efforts also increases your Internet presence and produces new inbound links.
- Diversify marketing strategy. Avoid putting all your eggs in one basket. If you've invested all your SEO effort into Google, a major algorithm change could destroy your visibility. Start a blog and add a newsletter and subscriber-based white papers to your marketing mix. Diversifying will create new avenues for audience growth. Focus on providing sustained, valuable content for your target audience, and you will be rewarded with more traffic and improved search ranking.
What's your strategy for search engine ranking? Try inbound marketing. It works!
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Posted by Chris Knipper on Mon, Jun 14, 2010 @ 07:37 AM
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a handy name for the myriad techniques used to improve the volume and quality of traffic to a website or web page. Attracting qualified leads from search engines is an important component of your inbound marketing strategy. At its core, SEO focuses on two critical processes:
- How search engines work.
- How people search the Internet.
While it may sound simple, search engine optimization is a highly complex, technical and ever-changing challenge. Search engines constantly change their search parameters and algorithms, necessitating constant SEO tweaking. A good example is the latest version of Google Search, codenamed "Caffieine", which changes the way website pages are indexed and ranked in search results.
Internet users search for different products and services in different ways. Pinpointing the precise queries that will effectively target a specific audience and produce reliable results is a challenging undertaking that requires a sound keyword strategy, constant SEO management and fine tuning.
Effective SEO implementation and management requires expert integration of website development experience with knowledge of Internet analytics. Try these approaches to your website SEO strategy to help qualified leads find your website:
- Deep linking. Deep linking creates links into and between as many web pages on your website as possible. When all of the links from outside your website end up on your home page, or if the majority of links to your site are generated automatically, search engines devalue your site. To be found on the first page of the search results for relevant search phrases, you must have a highly ranked, authoritative website. This means that the search engines find that other authoritative, popular sites have links to your pages. To be highly ranked, links from other websites, Facebook, your blog, etc. should be directed to as many different interior pages as possible. Links should also move site visitors from your home page to interior pages and between interior pages. The more complex and varied your linking, the more highly search engines will rank your website.
- Social bookmarking. A slew of popular social bookmarking widgets are available that make it easy for website visitors to bookmark your website for fast returns or sharing with friends. Search engines value these outbound links and the inbound links they may produce if someone bookmarks your website or blog. Make it easy for site visitors to connect by featuring social bookmarking links prominently on your website and other inbound marketing tools.
- Site map. Site maps allow you to link to and from every page on your website. Site maps provide an easy-to-use navigation tool for site visitors and search engines. Search engines crawl site maps just as they do web pages. Linking interior web pages to your site maps ensures that search engines will find and catalog every page on your site.
What's your SEO strategy, and how well is it working? We can help!
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Posted by John McTigue on Tue, May 11, 2010 @ 06:50 AM
One of our web designers brought an interesting blog post to my attention the other day. The article, "The Myth of the Page Fold...", addresses the rule of thumb in web design that if you want visitors to read your content, keep it above the fold. The fold refers to the bottom of your screen. If content is below the fold, you have to scroll down to read it. The authors suggest that their own eye tracking studies reveal that people are willing, even likely, to scroll down as long as there are visual cues above the fold. In particular, if your website design is uncluttered and naturally flows downward (without horizontal interruptions like bars or solid lines), visitors will happily scroll down to read the rest of the page.
From a usability point of view, it seems that you can opt for fewer, longer web pages and still be in good shape. In fact, designing long-page websites is a hot new trend for 2010. Taken to the extreme, one-page websites are perhaps the hottest trend - here's an elegant example. People are comfortable with blogs and blog sites, and these almost always require you to scroll below the fold. Another point is avoiding interruption. If you require someone to click to get to the next page, you may lose them. If you think about accessibility via smart phones, it also makes sense to design pages that can be read via scrolling, as opposed to clicking a (barely visible) button to get to the next page of content. But the debate is far from over. Here are some pros and cons for below-the-fold website designs:
PROS
- More content on each page - easier to find your content
- More keyword-rich content on each page, possible impact on SEO
- Modern, trendy design
- Similar to blogs and blog sites, people are used to scrolling
- Better for smart phones, easier to find and navigate content
- Less interruption, keep visitor's attention
CONS
- Possibly too much content on a page - difficult to focus your visitor into landing pages for lead capture
- Reduced number of indexed pages, possible impact on SEO
- Design may appear to be cluttered or unbalanced
- Too much text can be a turn-off. Need to balance with images, videos and design elements.
- Some people really hate long pages because they remind them of endless sales-pitch landing pages.
What are your criteria for an effective website design?
Do you need a new website design? We have some great ideas for you.
Posted by John McTigue on Sun, Feb 07, 2010 @ 09:12 AM
We focus so much on "getting found online" that we forget the most important aspect of search, aligning the interests of searchers and search results. If you're a searcher you want to find the best results that really match the intent of your search. If you're a website or blog, you want people finding your site who are really interested in what you have to say or sell. Why is it so hard to match the needs of the surfer and the surfed?
Flaw #1
We the publishers worry too much about the general problem of online visibility and too little about "fishing where the fish are". We try to optimize our pages on keywords that we think are the most likely to draw in large amounts of traffic. Never mind that many of these keywords have little or nothing to do with our real business. For example, we worry too much about the keyword phrase "inbound marketing". Sure, we provide inbound marketing services, but we don't create software or host conferences or any of the myriad other subjects associated with this phrase. We want people to find us who are looking for "inbound marketing services", so that's what we ought to focus on, right? So what if we only get 10 visits a month on that search? If one or two of them convert to customers, we're in business, literally.
Flaw #2
We worry so much about on-page optimization that we destroy our content. Yep, we do this too. Guilty as charged. If your blog reads like a bunch of keywords, where's the meaning? Where's the art? More importantly, who's going to enjoy your blog enough to subscribe to it and come back for more? What do you think of blogs that are loaded with obvious keywords and tons of internal links? That's what I thought, you move on as quickly as possible and curse the author for wasting your time. What's the goal of publishing? Who are you trying to reach and how well are you communicating your ideas? These should take precedence over keywords and links, SEO or no SEO.
Flaw #3
We stress over SEO results. Yes, we all do this. It's completely insane. If your website is for business, it's all about leads and customers, not about uniques and Google page rank. You can have the most traffic in the universe, but if you're not getting lots of repeat visitors who convert to leads and customers, why bother? What's the point? A better strategy is to look for relationships, not statistics.
Moral of the Story
The good news is that all of this can be fixed just by thinking about your strategy and making real changes to your approach. Think about your customers. What do they want and how do they find you online? Don't know? Ask them. Study the ways your customers find you via search and focus on those keywords and phrases. Forget about the shotgun approach. Next, focus on providing great content. Lose the mechanical SEO-rich style and get real. Finally, relax and work the relationships, not the data.
I'm expecting scathing comments from all you SEO's, so bring it!