I thought I would get a few variations of searches, but I had no idea what kind of ideas would pop into my head after asking this simple question today.

I wanted to share a very important lesson taught by students of mine (ironically enough) today, during a webinar presentation on Social Media Marketing that I was giving. Most people that I run into have no clue how to properly research out keywords, and they just want me to do it for them. If that is the case with you, then this post is not for you (email me and we can set something up ..lol). I want to give this advice to the people who want to try to figure out things like … oh … basic Internet marketing, and keyword research for themselves!

There is a reason the title of this post is what it is (no it’s not ALL for link bait). If you ask someone how they would do a search online for a “keyword”, have you ever wondered how many differed results you will get? I wondered, and so I did this little experiment. Out of all who were in attendance of this webinar/presentation I was doing, one of them had products and information for those who suffer from headaches on their website. A simple question to the class got me thinking about this post. “How would you do a Google search for information on headaches?” In other words…if you were looking for information right now on Google for headaches, how would you search it out? Out of the 15 people that were online here is what they came back with: (I left spelling errors)

relieve headache pain
headache relief
migranes
www.headache cures.com (my favorite - don’t ya just LOVE when people “Google” the URL?)
How to end my headaches
Migraine, Headache, Pain relief
get rid headaches
sinus pain
headach remedy
headaches
headache
headache medicine
Natural ways to relief headaches
headaches nomore
I’m done with headaches

To me the results are pretty interesting because often times we get to caught up into finding the perfect “keyword” and we miss out on many gems. I am also amazed that not one person did the Google search the same way. I am further amazed that people are still Googling URLs .. WTF is that about? Again it just further testifies that you need to be diverse in the keywords you chose to go after, and think about all options and all ways that people could find you.

This is a great example of how you would take one of your main keywords, in this case - headaches, and have 15 different versions of the same keyword, or anchor text for it when you are link building. The lesson here? Not everyone searches the same way, yet many people doing online marketing get way to caught up in just going after the big (slam dunk) words. If you were able to get decent rankings for each specific way people were searching for headaches in this example, I am guessing it would bring some pretty decent traffic to your website.

Next time you are thinking about some keywords that you would like to be ranked for, make sure and take the time to do a quick poll of family members, friends, neighbors or people you know on sites like Twitter, or Plurk. These can be great resources for researching out almost anything!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow Chris Bennett on Twitter and make sure you check out our free analytics product BLVD Status and Social Media for FireFox Which is used by more than 500,000 marketers

Recently I was interviewed about keyword research, and why doing proper keyword research is important (or if it still is). I appreciate Nate for wanting me to answer these questions. You can find the full edited keyword research audio interview if you click on that link, or read the text highlights on his marketing blog teaching other people how to start an online business.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow Chris Bennett on Twitter and make sure you check out our free analytics product BLVD Status and Social Media for FireFox Which is used by more than 500,000 marketers

I recoreded a webinar over at Omniture’s head quarters a couple of weeks ago and it is now live. It is geared towards corporate and enterprise sites and how small tweaks leveraging Organic SEO can yield very high returns rather quickly. It is just under an hour I believe and I give away some sweet tips.

If you have a chance click over and check it out, it is titled “Corporate SEO Small Changes, Big Results.”

Omniture is the leading Enterprise Level web analytics product that I highly recommend. If you want to do custom tracking, behavioral targeting, a/b testing and just about anything else Omniture is the place to go.

I am very excited and honored to be doing this webinar with them, go check it out and let me know what you think.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow Chris Bennett on Twitter and make sure you check out our free analytics product BLVD Status and Social Media for FireFox Which is used by more than 500,000 marketers

You may not think the following is a big deal, as I won’t be talking about top 10 rankings, but the number one spot, but when you are a company as large as Toyota and you don’t rank number one for specific car searches, there is a problem in my opinion. If I was over web/marketing at Toyota I would not be pleased. *Im sure this is a timley post and in a month or two this will no longer be the case, but none the less I think it is a big deal.

Do the Following Searches in Google:

2008 Toyota Sequoia

2008 Toyota Land Cruiser

2008 Lexus 570

2008 Lexus lx470

2008 Toyota Tundra (this one is blew my mind with all the attention it is getting)

*there are plenty more

Like I said in about a month or so this shouldn’t be the case, hopefully it isn’t but the Tundra has been around for a long time and it still isn’t number one. (Currently #3) You will see the same 5,6 sites poaching the traffic on alls searches, Edmunds, How Stuff Works, Auto Blog, etc…

I remember hearing the same thing about AT&T and Cingular getting criticism on the iPhone cause of the same thing happening in Google results.

This brand poaching would not be hard to beat. Most of these companies put out press releases on partnerships or on future products or vehicles, all they would need to do is put that press release on what will soon become the dedicated page for that product and throw some links to it from their homepage or another high profile page. Optimize the Title Tag to say something like,
“2008 Toyota Tundra Press Release” then after the product is public and ready for sale, switch the content with the new fresh content, and take “Press Release” out of the title tag.

I don’t understand why Companies haven’t figured this out. Google wants to rank you number one, if you create the product or service, it will not be difficult to rank. I would think that ranking for your brands, products and other proprietary info should be at the top of the list of the marketing team.

I can see an exception if companies don’t want to officially say they are launching a certain product or partnership, you don’t need to rank for 2015 Toyota Tundra right now, but if you have gone as far as to publicly release the information via Press Release, etc.. and there is no doubt as to whether you will be following through on the product, then throw up and page and get it number one, before everyone else does.

* I was logged out of personal, I checked multiple data centers, and like I said in a month or so hopefully this post isn’t relevant anymore. But you may see varied results.
Utah Exotic Car Rentals

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow Chris Bennett on Twitter and make sure you check out our free analytics product BLVD Status and Social Media for FireFox Which is used by more than 500,000 marketers

This was to good to not share, and keep all to myself. I know we all find those funny key phrases that people use to find our sites (and clients) but this one was seriously priceless. Well, as I was going through one of my clients SERPs, and found this key phrase in the analytics -

“loser because not rich or attractive”

This made me wonder what were some of the funniest search queries you have ever seen in your web analytics programs? I would love to find out and maybe compile a list based on the comments I get.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow Chris Bennett on Twitter and make sure you check out our free analytics product BLVD Status and Social Media for FireFox Which is used by more than 500,000 marketers

First off Im not going to start ragging on SES, most of their site is laid out and Optimized just fine. I was going through and looking at sessions and that lead me to Speaker Profiles and Sessions Sponsors for this weeks SES San Jose Conference. I noticed something I thought was a little strange in the terms of lack of SEO 101 with proper On page Optimization.

As I was reading the profiles of some of my friends I noticed that the SES page had no Custom Titles or Meta Tags. Take a look at Cameron’s Page It is specifically just for him but has no mention of him in the Title. I also looked at some of the exhibitors and sponsors especially the pages about huge players in the industry.Omniture has a full company profile on SES and it has no mention of them in their Meta Data either.

Why is this important?

SES is currently the largest Search Engine Marketing Conference on the Planet and they house some of the largest names in both speaking and exhibiting. They could carry out a pretty sweet co-brand Organic seo campaign that would Harbor a lot of traffic and increased credibility.

Company and individual names are always less competitive than your average keyword, yet they bring a tremendous amount of traffic if the name has been branded well. If the SES site had “Cameron Olthuis” in it’s Title tag it would probably rank for Cameron’s name no problem. Omniture might be a little different but with a company that large I would invest a little time in making sure a small campaign was carried out to ensure top ten for their brand search. Omniture pretty much Invented Web Analytics and Search Marketing Analysis and I can guarantee they are getting thousands if not 10’s of thousands of searches a day for their Brand.

I don’t mean to write a post on the importance of Meta Data but with the trust that SES has in Google, they could be getting a lot of co-brand traffic and recognition if they added 5 seconds of work into every profile or exhibitor page on their site. We have seen really good results in traffic, press and conversion by creating co-branding campaigns organically in Google. If people see you rank for a huge brand in Google and they go to your site and it talks about a partnership, or some kind of mutual interaction you will be granted instantly with increased credibility.

Check out the list of sponsors, there is so much traffic in conjunction with those names.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow Chris Bennett on Twitter and make sure you check out our free analytics product BLVD Status and Social Media for FireFox Which is used by more than 500,000 marketers

If you haven’t realized already Social Sites that allow for “Search Engine Friendly” Urls have a relatively easy time ranking in Google. This is due to Google’s over trusting nature on old and large sites. It is true that Google lets old sites get a way with Murder while new sites can’t steal a stick of gum. Don’t believe me? Start to watch how many times Wikipedia, Technorati and Squidoo show up in your every day search results. If you know how to leverage these sites you can get some pretty good rankings in a short amount of time for decent keywords. This method is nothing new in fact it has been overly exploited to the use of Social Media Squatting. Just like buying domains that have your competitors names or products in them you can register those pages at social media sites. I own a squidoo page for one of my old competitors names, I have never done anything with it and never will as we are in different leagues now and I don’t care, but the fact of the matter is I own their name on a large social site. I could rank that page for their brand name and have it filled with all of my companies information. But I digress, social squatting is not the point of this post.

The point is if you notice someone leveraging a social site to rank for a word that you are actively seeking you can poach the work that they have done to rank that page and sneak in right underneath them utilizing Google’s indented rank feature.

If there is a social site ranking in the top 20 for your keyword phrase, go and create a profile on that site with a slightly different URL and similar title tags. Then optimize the text to coincide with the keyword phrase and throw some good links to the page. If you do it right you will see the page show up as an indented rank just below your competitors already existing page.

For example go to Google and Type in Online Reputation Management you will see a squidoo lens on the second page. This used to be on the first page, but it is being re-done and they have lost their title tag and it is now on the second.
I know because our site 97th Floor ranks for Reputation Management words and I have been watching. The lens is labeled with the URL of /onlinereputationmanagement, so when they created their profile they chose their URL to be the main keyword without any spaces. What you would want to do is create your lens and choose your URL to say the same thing but with dashes. If that is taken then say the same with dashes and add a number or something else to make it slightly different like, /online-reputation-management-1 or /reputation-management-online. Then create your profile talking about your services or company linking it to your site and then publish it. Then link to it from your site, your blog or anywhere you can get some good links and you will see it jump through the hoops to an indent rank just below the existing site.

Now if you know what you are doing and don’t mind getting into a little battle you can optimize your social profile better then the first ranked page by passing more authority links to it with varied anchor text and you can replace that pages rank. If you are really good you can actually optimize your profile so well that it will separate you and the indent rank pushing the indent rank to the second page while keeping you on the first. At SMX Seattle one of the best takeaways from the Give it Up Session was explaining,

“Stephan Spencer has 7 tips in 7 minutes:
Secret #1 - Grouped results: Google groups results from the same site together. To find the true position of an indented (grouped) result, you can add a &num=9 to the domain search to see if indented listing drops off.”

This explains that the indented group result is not really the next in line it is most likely number 9 or 8 and Google chooses to move it up next to the other result since it is from the same domain in order to simplify their results.

So you can use that knowledge to steal your competitors rank by creating the profile, grabbing the group indent result, optimizing better and then pushing them to the second page.

This can also be done on Directories or any site that allows for business profiles. If you see a large site with a profile page of one of your competitors ranking you can most likely take advantage of that.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow Chris Bennett on Twitter and make sure you check out our free analytics product BLVD Status and Social Media for FireFox Which is used by more than 500,000 marketers

I am amazed at how many competitors for some clients we have over here at 97th try to duplicate exactly what we are doing to get their websites ranked. The problem is they are missing the point with good search engine optimization and what it takes to rank sites. I see them duplicate things that I do that are only for “aesthetics”, thinking they are going to steal away my clients rankings. It is pretty funny, but I guess copying could be considered the best form of flattery. If these guys spent even half the time trying to develop some decent content then would already be a step closer in the right direction. I just love how they are all missing the point! I would love to hear any other funny stories of flattery related to this!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow Chris Bennett on Twitter and make sure you check out our free analytics product BLVD Status and Social Media for FireFox Which is used by more than 500,000 marketers

I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine the other day, and he was asking me about a few things related to link building, trust and SEO (in regards to his online business). You see, about a year ago he was getting some pretty good love from all of the major search engines (he was doing his own SEO) and especially he was killing it with some pretty high rankings in Google for some pretty impressive words. Then, all of a sudden, he was gone and has spent about a year trying to build his site back up to no avail.

When we were chatting he was telling me that he was about to just give up on the business, and SEO in general (and all the work he had put into it) because he seemed to be getting no where. I think he he started the conversation for insights or encouragement to not give up, but that is another post - another day.

He was telling me everything that he was doing, and what he thought he could have done wrong to get his site “filtered” all of a sudden, and it was not adding up. It really did seem (at first analysis) he was doing everything right on site. He had cleaned up all his 301 problems, and duplicate content issues, he had really good solid content, tried to get rid of any bad links he may have got in the past, his site has been around for several years and he has built up some domain trust, so again - what could it be?

I finally have come to the conclusion that he was not making the most of his links, nor getting enough trusted links pointing to him in the right way. My conclusion, he has not done a good enough job showing the search engines that his site is a trusted authority site with good solid people linking to him. This sounds basic I know, but after a little research I found out all of the places that he had got links from, and most of them were site-wides on non-related sites (in non related categories), or links from directories that were not even indexed in Google. He had very few links that Google would even consider “authoritative”!

What worked a couple years ago, is not going to work today, and you really need to be doing your best staying educated with search engine optimization methods etc. My advice for those looking to gain a little more trust, find related sites with good content, with pages that are indexed, and do your best to strike up a relationship with those sites so that they will be willing to link to you. You have to stop thinking “traditionally” and that submitting to a directory (or sending out one press release) is going to be your save all SEO campaign. Submitting to a directory (especially if done wrong) will do little or nothing for you anyway (on any search engines that really matter that is).

Remember its all about trust. Here is an example to better illustrate - If I am selling memory foam mattresses and I find a site (that is indexed and non-supplemental) that is reviewing the different types of memory foam out there, getting my link on a page like that would be gold! I would take that link over a directory any day!

The best advice for my friend (or anyone else in the same situation) is, if you can do a better job building trust with related links, on related sites and amazing content, you can reclaim rankings! It really is that simple.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow Chris Bennett on Twitter and make sure you check out our free analytics product BLVD Status and Social Media for FireFox Which is used by more than 500,000 marketers

I dont know the exact number of Corvettes (there were a lot), but here are some pretty cool photos taken by my brother Lee Siltala of Bondurant, A High Performance Racing School, down in Phoenix Arizona. They got a police escort through I-10 in route to the racing school.  What a site!  If you wanna drive one of these corvettes (AND I DO) - call 1 800 842 RACE and ask for Lee Siltala.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow Chris Bennett on Twitter and make sure you check out our free analytics product BLVD Status and Social Media for FireFox Which is used by more than 500,000 marketers