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Archive for April, 2006

04-28-06

Google Sitemaps and what the mean for your site.

Friday, April 28th, 2006

A quick HOO-RAH for Google Sitemaps.Â I have been using Google Sitemaps on my websites for over a year now, and I would like to talk about some of the benefits that I have seen so far, and why every Search Engine Marketer should be using Google Sitemaps.

YouÂ should add aÂ Google SitemapÂ to giveÂ Google information about the pages in your site to helpÂ them crawl them more effectively. Or, you can simply add a site to your account so you can view information that Google has about it.Â It is a great way to make sure that Google has the correct information and that your site is getting indexed properly.

Information Sitemaps gives you:

Crawl errors

HTTP errors
Unreachable URLs
URLs restricted by robots.txt
URLs not followed
URLs timed out

Tools

robots.txt
analysis

Google Sitemaps also runs a breakdown of statistics for your site and top searched out words from your site and the average ranking position.Â Â In thier words:Â “Top search queries are the queries that most often returned pages from your site and top search query clicks are the top queries that directed traffic to your site (based on the number of clicks to your pages). Average top position is the highest position any page from your site ranked for that query, averaged over the last three weeks. Since our index is dynamic, this may not be the same as the current position of your site for this query. “

In conclusion your site will be updated more regulary on Google, and it will help you better analyize things that need to be changed, and you get an accurate up to date status of your website with the crawlers..

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04-27-06

Targeting the right keywords based on Demographics and Behavior

Thursday, April 27th, 2006

There are three areas I want to cover with this post, because most people do not understand thier customer base. You need to figure out if your customer base is niche specific, or based on the following three criteria:

Age
Gender
Geography

Age: Do you know the age of the people who are your target audience? Are you writting for them? Make sure the content you write, ads you place, and keywords you target are ones they are searching for.

Gender: Male-vs-Female start to understand them. What sex is going to be buying from you the most? When are they going to be shopping online? Write your ads, and find keywords geared for the sex that you are targeting.

Change your bids according to age and time users are online.
Find Alternative or additional words with similar demographic profile to match customer base.
Can help find words that are not working in your campaign.

Geography: Demographic data found out in your CPC can be applied to creating a new campaign better geared towards your potential clients. Find the right keyword to narrow down age, gender, location, and behavior. What time are they visiting your site the most? Only pay for ads that cost more during these times that your clients would be more likely to visit and click.

Strategies and Options:

With many PPC Ad companies you have the options for Bid management for ROI by keyword
Demographic Research and bid boosting by keyword
Behavioral Targeting and Research (personalized search)
Better Variety of search engines
Local Search
Day Parting Flexability
Contextual Advertising
Advanced Analytics and Tracking Software.

When starting your SEM campaigns its important to know who you are targeting. I wanted to give some ideas, because most just have a product they want to sell, and find a few keywords they think people will find them for. There is more to Search Engine Marketing then this! Give it some thought!

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You don’t need the top searched keyword to get traffic!

Thursday, April 27th, 2006

If you had not guessed it I am finally going to dive deeper into my keyword analysis, and keyword research in this post.Â People ask me all the time, “How do you find the best keywords to go after?”, “How do you go about YOUR keyword analysis/research?”Â

Step One:

Plain and simple, you do not need to try to go after the #1 keyword that everyone else is going after.Â Lets explore that. You need to be familiar with the tools, and websites you use to find keywords that people are actually searching for.Â Â

First site: http://inventory.overture.com (called the keyword selector tool)Â This will give us the number of searches for phrases on the search engine Yahoo!.Â So with this tool we can get a good idea as to what people are searching for.Â A reminder that Google gets about 62% of search traffic, so figure in that number on top of Yahoo! for the searches Google gets.Â Another great keyword suggestion tool that comes from Aaron Wall of SEO BOOK (Information taken from SEOBOOK.com)
SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool - tool shows top keyword phrases from Overture. Also
- links to other keyword research tools, including:
  - Overture View Bid
  - CompareYourClicks Bid Viewer
  - Google Suggest (popular Google search phrases)
  - Google AdWords Keyword Sandbox
  - NicheBot (which pulls data from WordTracker)
- the tool also links at various vertical databases, blog searches, and tagging systems to show you the top results from other information sources.

Step Two:

The next site you will need is Google.Â You need to find out how many sites you are going up against.Â So lets say you have a keyword like “mattress” that brings back 250k plus relsults on the keyword selector tool, how many sites will come up on Google when you search for that keyword?Â It happens to be over 32 million results.Â This number is not the number of the people selling mattresses so its not a good number for us base our decision on.Â 32 million is a huge number though, we do not need to try and get ranked for such a general word when there are hundreds of words that are more targeted that people are looking for.Â Â

Examples:Â (these are just a few of the additional results given to us)

258083	Â mattress
Â 51331	Â bed mattress futon
Â 46233	Â tempur pedic mattress
Â 29460	Â bed mattress
Â 18049	Â sealy mattress
Â 13796	Â water bed mattress

So find a keyword that is more targeted to the specific product/service you are offering.Â Or you can narrow it down Geographically.Â Better words to go after (based on the number of sites on Google) would be words like:Â Latex memory foam mattress, memory foam mattress, mattress toppers.Â You can add in the location to any of those such as Phoeonix Memory Foam Mattress (if you are located in the AZ area).Â Instead of getting results like 32 million you will get results in the 10’s of thousands when you are more specific.Â I don’t need to be a brain surgeon to figure out which word would be easier to get ranked for … one that has 32 million site results or one that has 25,000.Â

In conclusion …

So this is why I say “You don’t need the top searched keyword”Â All you need to do is find the really targeted keywords that people are still looking for and make sure you are going up against thousands, not millions when you are first starting out with a new site.Â I only go after smaller words on my Rocky Mountain Mattress website and I get an average of 600 unique visitors a day for very specific phrases that bring me higher conversion. You can always work up to bigger words once you are established, but be realisitic.Â Â

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04-26-06

Search Engine Optimization 102 and steps to Offsite-Optimization

Wednesday, April 26th, 2006

Its all about building links.Â Here are a few (of many) methods to build links.Â I was in charge of another conference call tonight, and I wanted to post/share the notes on the blog.Â This is a follow up to a previous conference call blog I did about SEO 101

Directory Submission:Â

A directory is like an online phone book.Â If you want to find the pizza joint in a new area you pick up the phone book.Â Similarly, directories arrange websites according to categories.Â

Why submit to directories?Â Search Engines love directories (most of them anyway-not all) and the reason is because directories have humans that edit them.Â What the human does is look at your website once itâ€™s submitted and accepts you for approval or denies you.Â For this reason alone if you are accepted into a directory you gain more credibility in the eyes of the search engine and this will help your rankings.

Different kind of directories:

Free Directories
Paid Directories
Multiple Link Directories
Niche Directories
Local Directories

Free Directories:Â They are what they are.Â A great list of free SEO friendly directories can be found here http://www.addurl.nu

Paid Directories:Â Most will guarantee you approval with a small fee.Â I generally donâ€™t have a problem paying for directory submission especially when so many are only 1-5 dollars for a lifetime submission.Â I blogged previously about a great list of paid directories so feel free to check it out!

Multiple Link Directories:Â By far the best directories to list with as you get multiple keywords to multiple sub pages of your website.Â This helps with deep linking and gaining more popularity and rankings with the search engines.Â Here is my favorite multiple link directories:

Article Submissions:

Write about 3-4 articles a month relating to topics or products from your site.Â If you donâ€™t have any topics, then write reviews about your products.Â Generally articles need to be about 300-400 words.Â Use the keywords you are trying to be found for in the headline and content.Â If allowed anchor up keywords inside the content, and take them to sub pages providing more information on that keyword or phrase.

Rules:Â Only submit one article per site, and try to submit 3-4 a week.Â Focus on your major keywords phrase for each article submitted.

Great Places to submit articles:

Press Release:Â

Similar to articles, but more professional and written in 3rd person.Â Writing press helps build up links as well as credibility to your site.Â Any press release you submit make sure to include on your site, as it gives more credibility.Â Also if you have your Press featured inside a major media organization you can spotlight that fact on your website somewhere.Â The main reason we submit Press Releases though is because of the links they will build up for our site.Â When you submit a Press it is normally submitted to over 100,000 media sources.Â There is a good chance someone will pick your story up.

Sites to submit press to (as well as find out all the rules and guidelines to write one):

Blogging:Â

A great way to gain credibility in the search engines and create more back links is through blogs.Â Create your own, and find others to comment on and leave good content.Â You will gain credibility and you will get more traffic to your website from blogging communities.Â Â The search engines will crawl your site more regularly as well if they see you have content that is always changing on a daily basis.

Places to get blogging software OR free blogs:

Communities:

Social book marking and tagging is a fairly new concept to a lot of people.Â Building up credibility through article submission communities can get your more links and traffic then you ever imagined.Â To read a great seo article on tagging and social book marking click any of the links.

Great community sites:

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Posted in SEO | 2 Comments »

Sneaky SEO

Wednesday, April 26th, 2006

I am calling it sneaky SEO, cause I am tired of hearing it refered to as SEO Overkill. In my opinion Search Engine Optimization and Overkill should never be used in the same sentence. Let me explain why. I have been involved in SEO and internet businesses for the last 9 years and I have never stopped implementing good SEO on my websites. It is not OVERKILL its just good marketing practices.

I know why it is refered to as SEO Overkill, but I want to re-define it and call it what it is–SNEAKY SEO.

Lets get more familiar with how users view webpages first. 79% of users scan a web page and 16% read word for word. What are readers looking for?

Headlines
Meaningful sub-headings (not keyword spam)
Bulleted lists
Headers
How the Content is Arranged
Worthless text (for density) or informative text worth reading?

When you have a site that is professionaly designed and full of content worth reading you gain credibility and web browsers will stay longer on your site. Random people I survey tell me the most important things to them on a website are:

Is the layout easy to understand
What kind of font style? (is it the same on all pages)
What kind of font color? (again, needs to be the same-don’t fall into the rainbow text trap)
Font size all the same?
How is the navigation of the site?
Does the site have a site-map?

Write for humans not search engines, and remember that search engines rank pages not websites. Getting back to the SNEAKY SEO, lets list the things we need to avoid on our websites:

Hidden text (any kind, anywhere)
Domain Stuffing (example - www.HowToGetRichUsingTheInternet.com)
Don’t try to get rankings for 400 keywords all at once.
Keyword stuffing folder names
Keyword stuffing page names
Keyword stuffing the title tag (keep it to about 5-7 words long)
Keyword stuffing the meta tag description (keep it to about 25-30 words)
Keyword stuffing the meta tag keywords (keep them to about 10-15 words)
Skip misc. meta tags (they do nothing for you search engine wise)
Don’t over-do visable text with so many keywords its not readable. (write for humans not search engines)
Dont keyword stuff or overuse header tags
Don’t include visible text in places it does not belong.
Don’t keyword stuff your site maps. (site maps are essential, but avoid stuffing keywords and limit the site map to 50 links max.)
To much visible anchor text.
Don’t keyword stuff your link title attribute with keywords.
Don’t keyword stuff your alt tags.
Don’t built up links to fast. (avoid link farms)
Avoid duplicate content by avoiding gateway, or doorway pages.
Don’t stuff your div tables with keywords

Make sure to avoid these tactics of SNEAKY SEO’s, and do your part to keep the term SEO clean. If you play nice, the major search engines long term will reward you. You may find some using these tactics have good rankings, but it will catch up to them so please do everything you can to avoid any kind of SNEAKY SEO practices. You started an internet business for the long term and remember that any time you get tempted to fall to the dark side…

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Posted in SEO | 1 Comment »

Content for humans, not search engines.

Wednesday, April 26th, 2006

I analyze on average about 10 websites a day.Â I look them over for various things, (look, keywords, optimization etc..) but I am amazed at how most of the websites lose me when it comes to content.Â I guess if someone reads post on Search Engine Optimization it makes them an expert or worse they think they are now an SEO.

Somewhere inbetween the keyword analysis and the offsite marketing a grave mistake is being made by internet business owners.Â They are starting to pay for it lately with loss of rankings and credibility on major search engines like Google.Â Â

What are they doing that is so wrong you say?Â When you look at thier content (or try to read it) they have so many keywords stuffed in places where they do not make sense, and they have so many words used on a page that should not be used.Â They think they are “opimizing” thier site when all they are doing is “creating spam” for the search engines and thier potential customers.Â You will lose in both areas if you keep this practice up.Â

See, what they are doing is creating content with only the search engines in mind, and not the humans.Â You need to make sure you when creating content to make it “readable” as if you were writting something that was going to show up in Time magazine.

How to setÂ your SEO tactics right.Â

I am not saying that you should not use keywords, or focus on certain topics on your pages.Â However, you should use some common sense and focus on keywords that really relate to the content, or purpose of theÂ page at hand.Â I usually try to focus on 4-5 keywords per page, and they are the main keywords I really am trying to be found for (for that page).Â (How to find those keywords I will blog about later, if you don’t already know.)Â

Where you should use the keywords:

inside your title tag
in your meta tag description
in meta tag keywords
in your header tags
inÂ site anchor text
in your alt tags
inside your content.Â Â (this one is the most important)

Again, do not use words that really don’t relate to the main point of the page.Â You should always have someone else read your content and make sure they can read it and understand it.Â Believe it or not, using these simple practices (rather then keyword stuffing or spamming) will help you climb the rankings faster then anything else out there.

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04-25-06

Local Search - Google-vs-Yahoo

Tuesday, April 25th, 2006

When setting up local search campaigns start with Google and Yahoo, but lets break down each one and go from there!

Google:

Adwords will allow regional targeting for all accounts.
You must have a website to use Google Adwords.
You do not need a physical address.
You can target by:

State
City
Metro Area
Close to an address

Ad serving-uses searchers IP address as well as other “local factors”

Yahoo Overview:

Local Search PPC
They have a locator page so having a website is optional
You must have a physical business
You have to target from 0-100 miles from business location.
Yahoo serves up ads based on:

Searches done for that location
Registered members users
Location specific on Yahoo Local

When setting up local search campaigns you need to factor in “localized keywords” and really analyze the best words that people are searching, and come up with a list of keywords you will target. You can reach more people with an IP-targeted campaign then you can going after general words.

Example:

A great keyword to go after for a local mattress company (if you live in Salt Lake City) is “Sandy Mattress” or “Salt Lake City Mattress Company” If you are targeting the right areas with your campaigns anyone in these areas when these words are typed in will find you. You can also include area codes in your website and back end meta information as well as the local PPC campaigns.

Yahoo should be your choice for truly local businesses (even if you don’t have a website) wanting to target people near-by, and looking for phone calls and in-store traffic. Google will work better for you locally if you own a website and really want to try to target people by IP-addresses for really targeted local keywords.

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Posted in Local Search | No Comments »

New Internet Explorer 7.0 BETA

Tuesday, April 25th, 2006

Ok,Â I have been using both Internet Explorer 6 and the new Firefox for the last year.Â I have not fully converted to Firefox (mainly because I am a creature of habbit and have been using IE to long) but today I downloaded the new Internet Explorer 7.0 BETA and have been using it all morning and am somewhat impressed so far.Â

One thing I really likeÂ isÂ youÂ have the use ofÂ ”Tabs”.Â (A great feature of Firefox.)Â I have been frustrated with certain toolbars I use not working well.Â Probably because they are not prepared for the new version of IE.Â The main one I am having troubles with is the SEOINC toolbar.Â It seems that IE is just putting it in a certain place and not allowing it to be moved, even with the toolbars unlocked.Â So far this is the only bug that I personally have found (but I am sure there are many)Â You can include the toolbar towards the bottom of the page through some customization, but I have not figured out why its not working up top in the normal area.

The reason I blog about it, is Microsoft has realized they need to make some changes and win some people back from Firefox.Â With that said, according to my stats I still get 80% of my traffic from people using IE.Â So what does this mean to you?Â If you are not looking at your website through ALL browsers you may be missing something.Â See how your website looks, loads, reads and how the colors look.Â You may be surprised when you see the way it looks through different browsers.Â If make your website look good no matter what browser people use then you are doing things right and have nothing to worry about!

One thing that you will never get from Microsoft that you will from Firefox is cool toys … Firefox is open source, and because of that you will always have developers adding to it making it better and better.Â I will probably keep using both cause there are benefits both ways, but its important to understand why you should!

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04-24-06

Converting Visitors into Buyers

Monday, April 24th, 2006

According to Shop.org the average conversion rate for websites is 1.8%. Do you even know the conversion rate of your website? Don’t feel bad if you do not know, because you are not unique. Most internet business owners (sadly) do not know what thier conversion rate is. Why is it important to know? Imagine if you could find a way to increase the people that convert on your website from 1 percent to even 2 percent. You just doubled your money. Do I have your attention now?

4 main ways to better conversion:

Prepare your site.
Target your traffic
Track Conversion
Fix your shopping cart.

Prepare your site: Compare your site to the industry leaders, and don’t be to proud to make changes. You do not need to copy (I am not saying that) but see what they are doing that is good and, see what they are doing that is bad. Make the proper changes to your site to accomodate.

Target your traffic: Where are your people coming from? Do you have a local office? Could you ad any local search to your game plan? When people click on a certain product are they taken to that product? Make sure the navigation is functional on your website.

Track Conversion: If you do not have any kind of analytics software on your website then get some. A great free resource is Google Analytics. Remember you should know what your converstion rate is so you can always work on making it better. You want to know if for every 200 visitors you pay for (or get free) how many are actually buying.

Fix your Shopping Cart: Navigation is key to conversion. Follow the 3 click rule. If it takes a web browser more then 3 clicks to get to the product you will probably lose them (80% of people drop off if they have to click more then 3 times). Don’t confuse people with an unfunctional shopping cart that throws so much stuff at you when you go to check out that you get confused.

Just follow these simple rules and you will see your converstion rate (once you know what it is) go up. Remember, good layout, clear purpose, limited options, self identity and a search function are all ares that any good website needs to have.

Never be satisfied with your converstion rate- TEST - ANALYZE - ADJUST

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Posted in SEO | 1 Comment »

Free Shopping Cart Program

Monday, April 24th, 2006

A quick post today as I am back to the grind getting back from the fun in the sun of Arizona!Â I found this program from a blog I subscribe to. It’s a shopping cart solution that is free to have hosted, and rather than having a monthly fee they get their return from the transaction fee that they set up.Â It’s a unique solution and a good solution for anyone who is in love with the “open source” community.Â You can get more information about the site and the services here:Â http://www.shopify.com

If you have had any experience with this shopping cart (I have not) please let me know (good or bad) Cause if this is a good product it could be a good solution for alot of internet businesses.

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Posted in SEO | No Comments »

Archive for April, 2006

Google Sitemaps and what the mean for your site.

Targeting the right keywords based on Demographics and Behavior

You don’t need the top searched keyword to get traffic!

Search Engine Optimization 102 and steps to Offsite-Optimization

Sneaky SEO

Content for humans, not search engines.

Local Search - Google-vs-Yahoo

New Internet Explorer 7.0 BETA

Converting Visitors into Buyers

Free Shopping Cart Program

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