SEO
SEO Selection Via Google Webmaster Guidelines
Every now and then I find it useful to look and see what Google has to say to webmasters about their websites. I want to revisit Google’s Guidelines for selecting an SEO provider.
Are You Guilty of Crimes Against Usability? Let the Jury Decide
Your website is being judged. If presented before a jury of your peers, would you be found guilty of gross marketing misconduct or absolved of all charges of crimes against usability? Let the jury decide.
Your Site is Keyword Optimized, But is it Search Engine Friendly? You Might Be Suprised!
There is a big difference between optimizing your site for keywords and making it search engine friendly. While one of the first steps in the optimization process should be focused on ensuring the site is search engine friendly, sometimes we tend to want to jump right into the keyword optimization because that’s how we “see results” in the search engines, leaving the site incompatible with the engines while we wonder when we’ll get the results we wanted.
Big Project/Small Budget: Where to Begin Your SEO Campaign
Many businesses owners focusing on SEO for the first time, especially those with limited budgets, can often find themselves caught like a deer in the headlights wondering just where and how to begin. SEO, even for smaller sites, can often be a big project, especially if you’re trying to run the business at the same time. The question becomes, how many hours a week can you afford to invest (or pay for,) and what should you do first with the limited time on hand?
SEO Pricing: 5 Things to Consider When Shopping for a SEO
If you’re a small business shopping around for the right SEO to help you out, there are a lot of things you need to consider before jumping in and hiring a SEO subcontractor or firm. Even if you’re on a tighter-than-normal budget–and really, who isn’t right about now–you can’t shop for SEO simply on costs alone. That’s like buying an economy car when you really need a mini-van. You just need to find the mini-van that offers the best features at the right price.
I’m a Google Convert But I Still Want to See Competition in Search
Google got to where it is because it earned it. None of the other engines seem to be able to dent that and are losing market share to Google each month. However, I’d be surprised if anybody would notice if Google’s results were swapped with MSN’s for a week.
Beginner’s Guide to SEO: Quickie Dos and Don’ts
SEO is more of a set of guidelines that can be implemented in a way that allows for individual site customization. Most of it is fluid based on each site’s needs for their audience. However within that there are also some basic dos and don’ts that need to be adhered to.
4 Tips to Improving Your Site’s Ability to Sell, Sell, Sell
There are numerous issues that make their way into the visitor’s conscious and sub-conscious, most of which must be overcome before they are willing to seal the deal and complete the sale. Here are just a few:
5 Search Engine Ranking Killers You Want to Avoid at All Costs
For as many factors there are that you can manipulate to give you better ranking performance, there are other things that when not properly addressed will do a fantastic job of preventing your site from performing as well as it could and should. While this is not a conclusive list of search engine ranking killers, these five issues can, cause serious damage to your site. Fixing these five rank-killing issues will undoubtedly clear the way for better optimization performance.
What I Want for Christmas from the Search Engines: The Sequel
Six years ago I wrote a post about what I wanted from Christmas from the search engines. I thought it would be a good time to revisit what I asked for back then, whether it happened or not, whether I really wanted it (20/20 hind site) and perhaps ask for a few new things.
Traffic Is Cool and All, But How Do You Turn That Into Conversions?
Rankings are just one way to generate traffic. There are literally countless ways in which you can drive traffic to your website, via both on- and off-line marketing efforts. Unless you sell advertising by the impression, traffic isn’t the end-all, be-all of website performance. For many sites there has to be a conversion.
Rankings Are Cool and All, But How Do You Turn Them Into Traffic?
Rankings, without traffic are pointless. In fact, while rankings can be a significant factor in growing your traffic numbers, traffic itself is not reliant on rankings. You can be in the number one spot and still get less traffic than your competitor in the number three spot. And even beyond that, you can often get better traffic (higher conversion percentages) not being in that top spot.
Typo SEO is a No Go Unless You Know the Flow
There are times when optimizing for typos is necessary. This is never more true if there are significant searches for your brand name spelled incorrectly. You want and need these people to find you. Using these strategies can help you target the typos that are truly important.
SEO Sales Spammers Make the Rest of Us Look Bad But We Should Keep Marketing Anyway
I’m not for blind cold calling or email spamming. Good marketing via direct mail is highly targeted, not just sent to random addresses. The same holds true for cold calling and email marketing. Good and proper marketing rules must be followed if you want your business to succeed long term.
Not Another SEO Checklist Post!
Recently my team and I (mostly my team) have been doing a lot of cool research with some of the free online tools that are available. We find we often use a tool on whatever site we are working on and then somehow forget about it as we move onto other tools and other sites. Eventually we remember and start working with it again but there is no consistency. So what’s the solution? Another list.
How to Make Decisions That’ll Rock Your SEO Campaign, Part II
Success is a path that must be paved by each person making wise decisions. Search engine optimization isn’t an instant path to victory. There are still dozens of daily decisions that have to be carefully considered and thoroughly before action is taken. But once you have a history of making good SEO decisions, success becomes much easier.
How to Make Decisions That’ll Rock Your SEO Campaign, Part I
I want to take a set of guidelines about making good decisions and apply them to the SEO and business success environment. Every day SEOs and business owners looking for ways to improve their online exposure are faced with dozens of decisions. Any one of these decisions can breath life into a dying SEO campaign, push a successful campaign to greater success, or cause a site to crash and burn in the search results. Here are the first five of ten decision-making guidelines that’ll help you rock your SEO and SEM campaigns to success.
10 Questions that Guarantee SEO Success, Part II
This is part two of a two-part series outlining ten questions that must be asked by both SEOs and clients in order to ensure a successful SEO campaign. While these questions can be asked of just about any one in any area of life, sometimes it helps to make them applicable to specific situations. In this case the situation is SEO and running a successful online business.
10 Questions that Guarantee SEO Success, Part I
Businesses don’t succeed on the basis of a product alone. Those products have to be developed, marketed and sold using sound business principles. Similarly, SEO doesn’t succeed solely by what you do on the technical front, but what you do internally to build a platform that will allow SEO success to happen.
Comprehensive Guide to Keyword Research, Selection & Organization, Part XII
The process of organizing your keywords is similar to the process of splitting a single core term into multiple cores, only its done in a much more fine-tuned scale. With core terms you were dealing with multiple themes, or different ways to search for the same product. In this phase we are working with only a single core term and deciding how to segment literally hundreds of phrases into manageable groups that are similar in nature.
Comprehensive Guide to Keyword Research, Selection & Organization, Part XI
Organizing your keywords into an effective marketing strategy is the most important of the four phases of keyword research outlined in this document. While most often SEOs and keyword researchers focus on the research phases, organizing your keyword properly can truly help you create a vastly more successful optimization and marketing campaign.
Comprehensive Guide to Keyword Research, Selection & Organization, Part X
The most important aspect of analyzing and eliminating keywords is to fully understand what the customer is looking for. We often see keywords through our own lens of understanding. You think about things a certain way because you are educated and trained that way. But the customer may not be educated in the same way, or at all, in terms of industry related jargon. So you have to step outside of your own thought processes and learn to look through the lens of searchers who think differently from the way you do.
Comprehensive Guide to Keyword Research, Selection & Organization, Part IX
As you sort through your lists of keywords, you want to be sure to eliminate phrases that won’t deliver converting traffic. Whatever keywords that you keep for optimization, you want each to be able to drive the most qualified traffic, giving you visitors that are most likely to buy your product or services.
Comprehensive Guide to Keyword Research, Selection & Organization, Part VIII
After having researched through your relevant core terms and search phrases, it’s time to start the process of looking more closely at each phrase. What you want to do is separate the good keywords from the not-so good. You need to find the search phrases that will ultimately provide you with the greatest benefit in your marketing campaigns, and eliminating or sidelining the rest.
Comprehensive Guide to Keyword Research, Selection & Organization, Part VII
As you research out your core terms you’ll notice that there are three types of results produced. The first will be a core term that returns a very small list of search phrases. Almost too small to do anything with. The second is one that produces a healthy list of phrases that you can easily organize for optimization. The third produces an extremely long list of phrases that can be broken up into several other sub-core terms and groups. We’ll discuss this latter in detail.
Comprehensive Guide to Keyword Research, Selection & Organization, Part VI
A core term and search phrase are similar in that both will be searched and both can provide potential traffic to your site. Core terms, represent a broader topic while the search phrases are simply core terms with added qualifiers, therefore representing a narrower focus. Both core terms and search phrases will be optimized into your website to drive traffic and hopefully, be instrumental in generating strong conversion rates.
Comprehensive Guide to Keyword Research, Selection & Organization, Part V
There are four different factors that you need to analyze in determining the relative importance of each core term:
Comprehensive Guide to Keyword Research, Selection & Organization, Part IV
Site owners often begin the research process by first going to the available tools. But you can’t really use these tools effectively–or to their fullest potential–until you have some information in which to actually research out. In this step we want to take core terms that we’ve already discovered and plug them into the tools to help us find core terms that have still remained elusive.
Comprehensive Guide to Keyword Research, Selection & Organization, Part III
Today I’ll show you the research steps involved in finding good, strong core terms that will be the basis for the rest of our research, and provide us some actionable intelligence that will be used throughout the keyword research process.
Comprehensive Guide to Keyword Research, Selection & Organization, Part II
Because keyword research is so crucial, a more organized approach to it is essential. Instead of starting the research process looking for words you essentially already know but are just in an unknown order, you must start the process looking for what is unknown. In order to find those unknown phrases, you have to start with a foundation that will guide you from where you are to what it is that you’re trying to find, a list of keywords that can be optimized into your site.
Comprehensive Guide to Keyword Research, Selection & Organization, Part I
A start to finish guide on how to find, analyze, prioritize and organize your keywords. How to create a solid keyword foundation for your SEM campaigns, whether SEO or PPC, that puts you in a stronger position for success and gives you a significant advantage over your toughest competition.
What Should You Expect From Your SEO?
Keeping the client’s expectations is no longer the job of the salesman but instead becomes the job of the project manager and/or SEO. And it has to be done throughout the life of the optimization campaign. No matter how many times an SEO tries to keep the client’s expectation in order there are always clients want and expect more than they are currently getting.
A Case Study of SEM Campaign Failure and Client Refunds
I ran into a couple of unique situations a few months that really challenged me. Both had to do with unsatisfied customers demanding that we give them money back. Each situation was different and therefore handled differently with a different result. In one case, money was returned, in another it wasn’t.
Do SEO Guarantees Protect the SEO or the Client?
If SEOs can’t guarantee rankings, what can they guarantee? That’s a tough question, especially if one is trying to be truly honest with their clients. The prospect of offering guarantees means that everybody must be in cahoots as to what that guarantee actually means, and who it really protects.
Making Site Search Work for You (and Your Visitors)
The problem with site search on a lot of sites is that they often don’t really work all that well. They’ll produce good results for some searches but not for others. I’ve been on a number of sites testing their search only to find that there are “no matches” for exact searches on products they clearly sell. This is a problem.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for Site Maps
Site maps provide a one-click path to any destination within the site and a way for the search engines to quickly find and index all site pages. Ensuring that your site maps function properly is an important part in ensuring your visitors can find what they want quickly and all site pages get properly indexed.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for Privacy and Security Issues
While most visitors won’t read Privacy and Security pages, they do provide necessary assurances that visitors look for in terms of being able to trust you. However, when visitors do click into these pages need certain information needs to be presented to them to ensure their needs are met.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for Site Search
Site search is an important element of on-site usability. Both in its ability to help visitors find the information they are looking for, or by being absent if it doesn’t produce accurate results. Site search must be able to improve the visitor’s experience in your site, otherwise it does more harm than good.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for Forms and Processing Errors
Forms are a standard method of allowing visitors to communicate with you, including the placing orders. If forms don’t work properly, frustrate your visitors or create additional roadblocks that the visitor must hurdle over, the contact/conversion rate on your site will drop drastically.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for Help and FAQ Pages
If your customers are digging through your help and FAQ pages, chances are they are close to making a decision to purchase, they just need a little extra bump. These pages are essential to these visitors seek by providing answers to questions and other helps that will push them through the conversion process.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for Login and My Account Pages
Ensuring visitors can easily login and find the information they need is essential to providing a good customer experience. Since this is your engaged audience you want to make sure that you can keep them engaged without additional frustrations.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for Shopping Checkout Processes
If visitors only add products to the cart but abandon the cart or get confused in the checkout process conversions will be low as will profit. The more proper cues you can provide that give the shopper confidence and assurances about their purchase, the less likely they will be to dump the cart or lose interest before closing he deal.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklists for Mini Baskets
Since mini-baskets are ever-present through the shopping experience, the information here can be vital to the visitor, helping them keep track of items, total costs and links back to products already added.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for Shopping Basket Pages
Visitors place items in their online shopping basket for many reasons, one of which is with the intent to buy. But they don’t always complete the purchase, often abandoning the cart with products left in it. Being able to close holes in the checkout process can increase conversion rates, getting more sales and higher return on investment.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for Product Pages
The product page has a very singular focus: one product. It’s job is to provide the visitor with the information about that product they need to be convinced that it is exactly what they are looking for. If you’re product pages cannot convince visitors to buy, then you’re simply dead in the water.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for E-Commerce Considerations
Being able to convince the shopper to follow through on the purchase is essential to being profitable. The visitor looks for specific cues that help them assess the creditability of the site and the security of their information. Providing these cues will help you provide a better experience that leads to deeper customer satisfaction.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for the Contact Us Page
Those who land on this page are showing clear intent in wanting to to get in touch with you. Providing only a few ways to contact you can alienate visitors who have a particular preference. Providing robust contact options and information ensures that you capture as many would-be customers as possible.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for the About Us Page
Studies have shown that conversion rates for visitors who have visited the About Us page increase measurably. Those who visit here are looking for a few extra elements of trust that will help them decide whether to continue on or move on. What they find can mean the difference in a conversion or the visitor leaving your site for a competitor’s.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for the Home Page
The home page is often the single largest entry-point. It is the page that gives the visitor the sense of who you are and what they can expect. Go wrong here and it can be all over before it begins.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for Links and Buttons
Links and calls to action are a great way to allow visitors to navigate from page to page, finding the information they feel is important to helping them make the purchase decision. Without these calls to action many visitors will simply not know what they are expected to do next.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for Content Appearance
Great content can get lost if it’s not easy to read thrown into an otherwise cluttered page. Ensuring that your content fits visually into the site is just as important as having good content to begin with. If you want the sales message to get across, your visitors will need to read it.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for Website Content
Content is an essential part of the persuasion process. Pretty, image-based sites may be appealing to the eye, but it’s the content that appeals to the emotional and logical centers of the brain. The inclusion of content as well as the effectiveness of the writing are all crucially important to the sales process.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for Website Navigation
A strong, user-friendly and search engine friendly navigation is essential in helping people and bots through your site. You visitors need to find information quickly with minimal hunting and the search engines need to be able to follow the navigation to reach all site pages with the fewest number of jumps (clicks) necessary. If the navigation is broken or doesn’t get people (or search engines) where they need to go, the performance of a site will suffer.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for Website Architectural Issues
Website architecture can make or break the performance of a website in the search engines. Poor architectural implementation can create numerous stumbling blocks, if not outright roadblocks, to the search engines as they attempt to crawl your website. On the other hand, a well-implemented foundation can assist both visitors and search engines as they navigate through your website, therefore increasing your site’s overall performance.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for Website Design Considerations
The site design is essentially the first impression that someone gets when they land on your site. You may have all your usability and SEO elements in place, but if the design is lacking then your visitor’s impression of you will be lacking as well. A visually appealing site can not only bolster trust and credibility, but it can make you stand out among other less-appealing sites in your industry.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for Your Site Logo
The logo lends directly to brand identity and site identification. It also creates a certain element of appeal and professionalism in the mind of the visitor. It holds an important role in visitor assurance and navigation.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for Browser Issues
The browser is (obviously) what we use to view websites. The goal is to give the visitor the best browsing experience possible, but we have to keep in mind that not all browsers are the same. We must make sure to accommodate different users, ensuring that they get the most value out of the site possible.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for Domain Names and URLs
The domain name is part of the identity of your business. The URL chosen can have a significant impact on brand identity and in a lesser extent, keyword ranking performance. However, how your site domain name and page URLs function can have significant impact on the crawlability of the site as well as overall visitor and traffic performance.
The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period!
My master website marketing checklist covering over 400 specific items through 23 topics. These topics include things such as website development, SEO, usability, accessibility, etc. This list doesn’t cover any “how tos,” which are an essential ingredient to successful online marketing, but sometimes you need to first know what to do so you can then discover how to do it.
How Well Do Search Marketers Brand Themselves?, Part II
This week I’ve been looking at the speakers from Search Engine Strategies in San Jose. I first covered a handful of featured speakers and then moved on to the search marketers themselves. Here are four more search marketers and an quick review of how well they brand themselves in the search results.
How Well Do Search Marketers Brand Themselves?
Monday I discussed several of the featured speakers from Search Engine Strategies and looked at their search results branding for their names and businesses. It turned out not to be as enjoyable as I had hoped as all of them have very high visibility. Not that I wanted to point out anybody’s faults, but hey, that’s kinda the fun. Today I want to look at several of the search marketers themselves.
How Well Do Search Marketing Speakers Brand Themselves?
Since it seems everybody does their own recaps of the sessions they attended at Search Engine Strategies, I like to take a different approach. Last year I ran a two-part series covering just a handful of the session speakers. I looked at how well each branded themselves in the search results of Google. This yearI wanted to start with the list of SES’s Featured Speakers.
Why I Won’t Grab Any Schwag from SES
My list of reasons why I won’t be bringing home any schwag from Search Engine Strategies.
Why I Think SERPs Should Go Beyond 10 Results
It seems to me that if the search engines are confident that they are providing strong, relevant results to a query, that they would want to provide more results than just 10 to each searcher.
Why I Don’t Obsess About Google
So many people are obsessed with Google. And as far as that goes, there is good reason to be. Google is the largest search engine that gets the most searches and delivers far more traffic than any other engine. But I’m not one to watch Google on a hyper-obsessive level.
Why I Still Won’t SEO Flash Websites
Google indexes flash, but so what? There is still not much there that can be optimized with any kind of effectiveness.
An End To Ranking Reports Is An End to Analysis
Recently Google started blocking several of the big-name rank checking software used by many in the SEO industry. This, of course, sparked the debate on whether SEO firms should be bothering with providing ranking reports to their clients. I have to say, I’m conflicted on that issue.
Why Destination Search Engine Marketing Is So Essential
Its important to answer the question “why?” Why go through the hassle of of building a Destination Website? Obviously, there are thousands of successful online businesses that don’t operate anything that could be considered a “Destination”. If they are successful, should you really go through the extra effort yourself?
Seven Building Blocks of a Destination Website: #7 Trust and Credibility
While we cannot make a few tweaks here or there to our websites and suddenly expect to be deemed as credible, there are things that we an do to help build the perception of trust in the minds of our visitors.
Seven Building Blocks of a Destination Website: #6 Voice
Creating a very distinct voice for your website is really about giving your website a personality. You can have great copy that lacks a clear voice that can be heard. But by creating a voice that can be heard clearly and distinctly through each written word on the page you are increasing the level of engagement with your visitor.
Seven Building Blocks of a Destination Website: #5 Time and Presence
In non-competitive areas, achieving top rankings often doesn’t take much effort. But when you’re targeting keywords in more competitive fields you’re going up against other websites that have already established themselves in that space. Many of those competitors are are, in fact, the authority for those keywords….
Seven Building Blocks of a Destination Website: #4 Unique Value Proposition
Your business is not just competing with businesses in your area, but quite possibly you’re competing with businesses all over the world. And if you’re not unique or remarkable in any way, if nothing that sets you apart, then you’re just another one of a million other businesses doing the same thing.
Seven Building Blocks of a Destination Website: #3 Website Design
The design of a website is an important aspect of building a destination that people want to return to time and time again. But don’t go out and spend all kinds of money for the most current, up-to-date website design with all the whistles and bells. Stop for a second to truly consider what kind of website design you really need.
Seven Building Blocks of a Destination Website: #2 Usability
Running SEO campaigns that don’t address usability concerns is like running radio and TV promos to drive people to a store that is unfinished. The traffic being driven may not be a total loss, but you certainly aren’t getting the full value out of each customer. Many won’t find what they are looking for, others will be frustrated trying to check out, and some may turn around the moment they walk in the door. Usability addresses those issues to ensure each customer has a good experience on your website.
Seven Building Blocks of a Destination Website: #1b Seven Types of Expert Information
There are a number of different types of expert information that can be developed for your website as a means of providing your visitors with additional, quality content. Depending on your site, some types of types of expert information are more applicable than others and not all will be a good fit for you. Each site must be evaluated to determine what kind of expert information will best serve the audience’s needs and expectations. By finding ways to add additional expert information to your site you’ll begin to build a site that can stand up above the competition.
Seven Building Blocks of a Destination Website: #1 Expert Information
If you can’t be considered as an expert on your subject, what reason is there for someone to make a purchase from you or subscribe to what you offer? For most people, they want to find people who they are confident know their information inside and out. If I’m not confident that you’ll be able to answer my questions intelligently, I’ll move on to someone who can.
Destination Search Engine Marketing, Part IV: It’s Not Just Marketing as Usual
Most site’s rely on marketing alone to increase traffic. Marketing drives traffic and traffic is really nothing more than more eyeballs on the site. The site still has to do it’s job in selling the product or service you offer. And it has to do it effectively if you want to be profitable. Building a Destination Website rockets you beyond the competition in several key areas.
Destination Search Engine Marketing, Part III: Standing Out in a Sea of Thousands
One of the things many businesses struggle with is how to really make their site stand out. Many of us have dozens, hundreds, even thousands of online competitors. Some are serious competition, some not-so serious, and some not yet even on the radar, but will soon become major players for “our” space. The truth is, everybody wants to be #1 and there is only one #1 position. So, how do you stand out among them?
Destination Search Engine Marketing, Part II: What Would Sudden Exposure Get You
SEO isn’t about “getting” top rankings. Getting rankings leaves open the implication that you’re achieving a result that you don’t necessarily deserve. Destination SEM focuses on building a website that is truly exceptional in meeting your audience’s needs and actually earns top search engine positions.
Destination Search Engine Marketing, Part I: Do you Deserve Top Search Rankings?
Search engine optimization should be about how helping businesses succeed online with search engine exposure being a component to achieve success, but not the measure of success itself. But where SEO and other forms of offline advertising differ is that SEO cannot stand alone from the core business. It is intertwined. The “rankings at all cost” mentality needs to be thrown out like last month’s leftovers that’s made its way to the back of the fridge. It’s a stale and moldy strategy that simply stinks up the web.
SEO is an Orchestra, Not an Instrument
While back I wrote an article about how having a search engine friendly website does not make it search engine optimized. The article discussed how many web developers promise to “search engine optimize” the websites they develop. While I don’t mean to discount the value of a good web developer (I rely on them heavily) many developers really know no more about SEO than than they do about pluming. Sure, they can plunge a blocked toilet, or write some decent titles and meta descriptions, but there is so much more to SEO (and plumbing) than that.
If a Ranking Falls on the First Page, But There is Nobody Around to See it, Does it Still Make Any Difference?
I think I stress too much about our clients’ performance of their optimization campaigns. Or perhaps I just create too much work for myself. See, all these years I’ve been working 10-12 hour days to help my clients increase their exposure in the search engines for some pretty important phrases. But just recently I found out that I’ve been targeting all the wrong keywords!
Is Your Website FUBAR in the “Other” Browser?
When making changes to my website I always take the time to view them live on the web before closing up my editing software and patting myself on the back in self-satisfaction of a job well done. Even with minor changes, I like to view them one last time to make sure my changes didn’t cause any shifts in on-page display, or I didn’t inadvertently create an error somewhere that inadvertently jacked everything up (believe me, it’s happened more times than I can count!) But regardless of how careful I am to double check my work, there is one thing I almost always overlook; verifying that my site looks good in the “other” browser.
Does Your Company Name Really Belong In Your Title Tag?
When I only have about 65 characters to work with in a title tag (that which is visible on the search engine results pages), should I use any of that valuable real estate to display my company name?
Stop Wasting Your ALT Attributes and Make them Work for You
When providing SEO advice on the topic of website design, we often warn against placing important content into images. This is because search engines can’t read images like a person can. To them, an image with text is just an image. So we rely on ALT attributes to convey proper meaning. ALT text is an important aspect of both usability and SEO. Here’s how to do them properly.
How to Fix the Bloated (Tables and HTML) Code that is Jacking Up Your SEO
Yesterday I discussed code bloat by looking at how we can move style sheets and JavaScripts off the page in order to clean the coding up quite a bit. I this third post about cleaning up bloated code I wanted to address Tables and other typical causes of bloated HTML.
How to Fix the Bloated (CSS and JavaScript) Code that is Jacking Up Your SEO
I started a conversation about how code bloat can effect your site’s performance with the search engines. This post maps some specific types of code bloat and very briefly–and non-technically–show you how you can eliminate the bloat to improve your pages performance for both visitors and search engines.
Website Architecture Questions Answered, Part VIII
Here is another round of questions submitted to me during a Website Architecture webinar I gave a couple months back. I wasn’t able to answer most of these questions before or during the presentation so I’ve been answering them in this Q&A series. This post covers questions regarding session IDs, repetitive vs. duplicate content, robots.txt files, navigation text, and maintaining link juice after a site re-design. Let’s get to it….
How to Fix the Bloated Code that is Jacking Up Your SEO
There are a lot of little things that can junk up your code, but, for the most part, the search engines don’t really care. It doesn’t matter to them if your HTML validates or if you keep your code “clean” or not. When it comes to analyzing your pages for search engine rankings, none of that really matters a whole lot. But when it does matter, it matters a whole lot.
How to Move to a New Domain With Minimal Ranking Loss and Downtime
Moving your site to a new domain is remarkably similar to moving to a new physical address. In some cases it’s much easier, you don’t have to pack up, or load or unload a U-Haul truck, but there are other considerations that you have to take into account to make sure your visitors continue to find you after an online move. One of the primary areas of concern is making sure the search engines not only continue to deliver traffic to your new location, but you don’t lose all your search engine rankings in the process.
Directory Links = Paid Links. Or do they?
One of the areas of confusion that many have regarding paid links is knowing when a paid link is really a paid link, and when is a paid link penalized. in their attempt to eliminate all forms of paid links from affecting their natural algorithmic search results Google has left one giant loophole in the paid link witch hunt: paid directory links.
Website Architecture Questions Answered, Part VII
I’m continuing to work my way through questions submitted during a webinar I gave on Website Architecture. This post covers questions on URLs, breadcrumb navigation, CMS, Database driven sites, 301 and 302 redirects, navigation, heading tags, broken links and HTML theft.
How to Create Effective Site Navigation that Leads Visitors to Your Most Important Content
Site navigation can come in many different flavors. There isn’t just ONE way to do it correctly. If there were then every site would have navigation that looked exactly the same. So while navigation can vary greatly between sites and industries, there are certain navigational elements that should be implemented to ensure solid usability and effective website architecture.
Internal Linking, Nofollow and Link Blocking Strategies That Provide Maximum Impact On Your SEO Campaign
In-site link implementation can make a considerable difference in how effective your optimization campaign is. Or isn’t. While your site’s primary and secondary navigation is extremely important, you shouldn’t make that the only way for visitors to get around your website. Here are some inter-site linking strategies that will help your visitors while also assist with your search engine optimization efforts.
The Glory of Absolute Linking (As Opposed to that Relative Linking Crap!)
There are advantages and disadvantages to using both absolute and relative links. Here I will explore the differences between the two, outline some pros and cons and also provide some additional information on how you can create hyperlinks in your site that will ensure that all links to your content remain in tact and properly functioning.
Website Architecture Questions Answered, Part VI
This is a continuation of the questions I was asked during a webinar presentation on website architecture. Before and during he presentation I was submitted over 70 question and each week I’ve been answering a handful of them. This article covers questions about Wordpress, password protected pages, iframes, multiple paths to content, and filenames.
Everything You Need to Know About The Meta Keyword Tag
Yesterday I posted some thoughts on When, Why and How to Construct a Meta Description Tag. While it’s relevance in terms of rankings is rather limited, there is still some intrinsic value to implementing a good description that will appear in the search results.
When, Why and How to Construct a Meta Description Tag
Meta description tags get a bad rap. They are often either considered to be more valuable than they really are, or dismissed as near irrelevant. The truth is that the meta description can be useful but it’s on the lower rung of importance when it comes to the on-page elements considered by the search engines. So while not a whole lot of time needs to be invested in creating workable description tags, I’ll give you a few pointers on what you need to consider.
Search Friendly, Unfriendly and Meh-Friendly Links
Building a website gives you a lot of options when it comes to how to set up your internal linking structure. Different areas of your site or web pages may require different linking strategies, but regardless on what kind of internal linking strategy you implement, you want to make sure that it helps you achieve your search engine optimization goals. I’m going to break internal linking into three categories: The search friendly, search un-friendly and search meh-friendly link.
Website Architecture Questions Answered, Part V
Continuing my Q&A series on Website Architecture, these questions were presented to me before and during my webinar of the same topic. We have some more good questions and answers today that I’m sure you’ll find valuable. This session is largely about keywords in domain and file names with an interesting question on nameservers.
How to Create a Directory Structure Search Engines Rock To
When a website goes into development most of the attention is usually paid to the design elements. But what often doesn’t get enough attention is the site’s directory structure, which plays an important part in your SEO campaign.
Three Easy Ways to Fix Broken Links and Stop Unneccessary Visitor Loss
One of the easiest ways to lose visitors from your site is through broken or invalid links. In business, it is pretty much well known that it requires less of a financial investment to keep a customer than it does to acquire a new one. The internet is really no different. Once you get a visitor on your site, or get them wanting to be on your site, it takes less investment to keep them there than it does to go bring in another new visitor. Therefore it is important to do whatever you can to keep acquired visitors on your site helping them move through the conversion process.
Website Architecture Questions Answered, Part IV
More Q&A regarding website architecture. Questions answered regarding books for beginners, SEO techniques and how they have changed, pro’s and cons of CSS, different types of architecture and favicons.
Securing your Brand and Minimizing the Competition Through Alternative Domain Names
Buying up alternative domains can help people find you when they type in the wrong domain in inadvertently, or when they are just randomly typing in keywords in the address bar.
A Little Favicon Goes a Long, Long Way
I remember when favicons first started to appear, it was like, hey, how cool is that. But now they are so common that I hardly notice them anymore. Well, no, that’s not exactly true. I do notice them, and like them, it’s just that I’m not surprised to see them anymore. But I AM surprised when I don’t see them.
Website Architecture Questions Answered, Part III
More website architecture questions answered including questions on website submission, viral marketing, content and moving a website.
Website Architecture Questions Answered, Part II
Last week I answered some questions related to my Website Architecture webinar that I’ll be conducting today. More questions were submitted in the last week and I’ve provided my answers to a few here.
Please Stop Abusing Your Hx Tags, It Doesn’t Help Your SEO Efforts
I don’t think that the Hx tags are near as important as many people think. But I do believe they play an important role in putting the page hierarchy into expression. Improper usage of HX tags can throw the site hierarchy out of alignment, as well as your search engine optimization efforts.
How to Use Your WWW. to Prevent Duplicate Content
In this installment I’ll provide one of the best permanent fixes to inadvertent duplicate content that is common with business websites. The implications of this can be pretty significant depending on the size of your site.
Effective Internal Linking Strategies That Prevent Duplicate Content Nonsense
How you set up your internal linking structure plays a significant role in whether you set yourself up to appear if you have duplicate content on your site or not. Some things we do without thinking, setting ourselves up for problems ahead. With a little foresight and planning, you can prevent duplicate content issues that are a result of poor internal link development.
How to Create Printer Friendly Pages Without Creating Duplicate Content
When it comes to issues of duplicate content, one of the most frequent offenders is the “printer friendly” page. Just about any kind of site can benefit from creating printer friendly versions of their pages, but improper implementation of these pages can wreak duplicate content havoc on your site.
Securing A Domain Name Isn’t Enough… Did You Secure Your Twitter Name Too?
The last thing you want is someone out there twittering in your name. Maybe they have good intentions for you, but maybe they don’t. In either case, they are out there engaging in the community saying things that may appear to be official company communications.
Website Architecture Questions Answered
I’m gearing up for a 1-hour webinar that I’ll be doing for SEMpdx next week. I’ve got more information on that below, but the SEMpdx crew asked their members to submit some questions that they would like to get answered during the presentation. Instead of waiting, I thought I’d go ahead and answer the questions here:
What Does a Title Tag, Title Tag and Title Tag Have In Common?
Duplicate titles is something we often see on newly developed websites or content management systems that don’t allow proper control of individual pages. While I get how when developing new websites the title tag can get overlooked, I’m amazed that people develop web software that still doesn’t take title tag customization into account.
Why Session ID’s And Search Engines Don’t Get Along (Hint: It’s a Duplicate Content Thing)
There is no better way to create an infinite amount of duplicate content on your site than to force session IDs onto each visitor (and search engine). Typically, session IDs are used for tracking a single visitor’s navigation path through the site, including the adding or removing products from the shopping cart. They are great for tracking purposes, but really, really bad for search engines and inbound linking.
Preventing Secure & Non-Secure Site Duplication
When shoppers can access secure and non secure versions of the same page, then likely the search engines can as well. This creates almost a complete duplicate of your site, one secure and one non-secure version. It’s essential to tell the search engines what to think, especially when it comes to which pages of your site should or should not be included in the index.
Redirecting Alternate Domains to Prevent Duplicate Content
Registering multiple domain names is, and should be, common practice for businesses wishing to protect their brands. Once purchased, what you do with these domains can have a positive or negative impact on your main URL. Here are some tips on how to set up alternate domains to prevent the search engines from seeing duplicate content.
How Poor Product Categorization Creates Duplicate Content and Frustrates Your Shoppers
Product categorization can play a significant role in how both search engines and users are able to access your products. There are two important things to consider when determining how to categorize your products. 1) Is each product assigned to the most appropriate category or categories? and 2) is multiple categorization creating duplicate content? The first issue frustrates your users and the second the search engines.
Theories in Duplicate Content Penalties
There are two kinds of duplicate content: content that is duplicated on multiple websites and content that is duplicated on multiple pages of a single site. I believe the search engines treat each differently and, of course, there may be different standards applied to duplicate content within each of these two main differentiations, depending on the cause and instance.
How to Use Hx Tags To Boost Page Performance
The value of the Hx tag is much the same as the value of your main points in an outline for a book or paper. Your outline shows your main topics and sub-topics. These are often then used as section headings in your final draft.
Selling a Product or Are you Selling Yourself?
There are two important questions that every business needs to be able to answer: What’s in it for me? and Why should I buy from you? The first questions, when answered correctly, helps sell your product or service, but it doesn’t necessarily close the deal. In order to get the deal sealed and money in hand you have to be able to answer the second question sufficiently….
The 19-Hour Website Analysis, in 20 Minutes or Less
Performing a complete website review is rarely easy. I’ve found that you can start a site analysis intending to spend just a few minutes looking over it only to find that it quickly spirals into a multi-hour marathon of research. Complete website reviews can be time consuming and often produce many more hours of work beyond that. Many people want to rush into the marketing without realizing that the website itself is part of the marketing process. This is a shame….
6 Quick and Easy Accessibility Issues That Make Your Visitors Happy
As more and more users gain access to the web it becomes increasingly important to ensure that your website is accessible to all, not just a few. Just as businesses must comply with the American Disabilities Act to ensure proper access to customers with disabilities, businesses should do all they can to make their websites accessible to all users regardless of the means in which they access the site. And of course not all accessibility issues involve meeting the needs of the disabled. What must be considered is the growing number of users that now access websites through non-traditional means, whether it be mobile phones or with images turned off. These users can still be your target audience and ensuring your site can be used through alternate avenues is essential to capturing that audience.
How to Prevent SEO Bloat from Overcrowding Your Marketing Campaign
Rarely does SEO bloat happen all at once, but it’s usually an accumulation of edits and tweaks made over the course of several months or even years. This is what makes it particularly damaging to your marketing efforts.
14 Website Usability Guidelines That Keep them Coming Back for More
Sites that are designed to sell products and/or services must go the extra mile to enhance the visitor’s engagement with the website. Shopping cart abandonment (shoppers abandoning their carts before deciding to pay for the “items” they’ve added to their cart) can result in a significant loss in potential sales. But much of that can be reduced when the shopping process is streamlined and geared for shopper satisfaction. The selling process–from initial interest to the very last checkout page–must be able to grab shopper’s attention and proceed to drive them through to the finalization of the sale. But even…
10 Ways to Help Your Visitors Trust You
Trust is a key usability issue when it comes to running a successful online business. Most people automatically view web businesses with a bias against them compared to their brick and mortar counterparts. Your ability to convince your visitors that yours is a trustworthy business is one of the key components to getting visitors to convert into customers. Creating a website that conveys trust can be tricky. There are rarely any answers that are always “right” for every visitor. There are, however, several factors that have universal appeal to the weary shopper.
Think Beyond The Link: How Exposure Building Trumps Link Building
Getting links is great, but as search marketers we should be looking far beyond that. We should not be so much as trying to get other websites to link to us (that’s certainly a welcome result) but we should instead be working on getting exposure, in whatever format that comes in.
The Anatomy of a 12-Month Link Baiting Campaign
Last February (2007), I had a diabolical plan to become a household name in the SEO community. Here I was, a guy who has been in SEO for almost ten years and remained a relative unknown. Sure, I made a few friends here and there and have been slowly building my reputation, but who would of thought 12 months ago that I would be able to snag an interview with one of the biggest names in the SEO. And that’s not me interviewing the big name, mind you… that’s the big name interviewing me!
11 Ways to Fill Your Shopper’s Cart
Since the “purchase” is the ultimate conversion, it is imperative that you remove as many obstacles from the customer’s research-to-buy cycle as possible. Providing your visitors the key ingredients in their shopping experience creates a smooth and worry-free transaction process. The easier it is to shop and buy the more customers will overcome the natural hesitations that many feel before they commit by hitting the final “complete order” button.
Sometimes Fixing a Site Means Breaking It First
While it has taken many years for SEO to be considered a marketing function within the business community, I sometimes wonder if the pendulum has swung now too far away from SEO being a function of the IT department. SEO is very different from traditional marketing.
Social Media Marketing is Branding
Think of all the ways that companies use branding to build awareness of themselves or to promote their social awareness and customer service values. A few things come to mind such as greeters at the entrance of your my favorite store, go-green awareness issues, charity drives that “give back” to the community for every purchase made, TV screens playing music videos or news as you wait in line, and the list goes on. None of these things lead directly to conversions but they do lead to higher company awareness and the good old fashioned fuzzy-feelings we get when we…
Searching for Better On-Site Search Usability
Not every site needs, nor should have, an on-site search feature. But those that do must be sure that the search isn’t just an after-thought. It needs to be more than something to add because you think visitors want it. Adding a search function is not necessarily good for on-site usability. Implementing a search function improperly is often a greater source of frustration than not having one altogether….
How to Uncover the Fundamental Information Necessary To Plan A Strategically Successful SEO Campaign, Part III
When putting the framework for a solid optimization campaign you have to spend some time evaluating various aspects of your site. This evaluation gives you an idea of any shortcomings the site has, what will be required to overcome the competition, and will then allow you to map out an effective strategy for success. But there is more to the evaluation than just looking at how the website currently performs in the on- and off-page analysis.
5 Engaging Ways to Engage Your Audience
How engaged a customer is with your website will determine whether they can be persuaded to buy, comment, download or submit their information for you to follow up on. Customer engagement goes beyond just getting the customer’s attention, you must keep their attention. This can be done by providing your visitors near immediate gratification.
To do that you have to first know who your audience is, know what they seek and then also know their purpose for being on your site. Knowing all this then lets you work toward meeting the needs of your target audience. But it also means taking things a step further and building a relationship with them. The ability to build a relationship with your visitors can be crucial to driving them through the persuasion process. Relationship building starts the moment the visitor hits the website.
How to Uncover the Fundamental Information Necessary To Plan A Strategically Successful SEO Campaign, Part II
Whether you are putting together a proposal for a client or assessing your own needs, you need to be able to accurately predict how much time, energy and effort will be necessary to build a successful SEO campaign. Of course, in order to predict the time involvement you need to first know the strengths and weaknesses of the website which will then help you determine what will need to be done to accomplish your goals and make the site a viable competitor.
9 Tips for Creating a Site Map for Visitors and Spiders
Not every site needs a site map, they can certainly be a good idea. Site maps provide a dual purpose: They provide search engine spiders easy access to all of your site pages and they provide site visitors easy access to all of your site pages. The difference is that search engines and visitors access your site map differently and therefore there are different methods that need to be applied to creating site map(s) that are friendly for both engines and search spiders.
12 Privacy and Security Issues Your Customers Care About
Your website’s privacy information and security settings can be significant hurdles when it comes to gaining trust with your visitors. Establishing trust is paramount to enticing visitors to make that final commitment, whether that be making a purchase, choosing to provide their info, or simply making initial contact with you. Your job is to make sure your visitors feel confident that their information is kept safe and will not be used for nefarious means, or anything other than what they fully expect. While providing assurances are nice, those assurances only go so far as what actually happens. Be sure that your small print reinforces what your visitors already expect to find in regards to how their information is used.
How to Uncover the Fundamental Information Necessary To Plan A Strategically Successful SEO Campaign, Part I
Every SEO campaign has to start somewhere. Any good plan; whether you’re building a home, preparing for a family vacation or looking to optimize your website for search rankings, starts with research. Before you are ready to optimize your first piece of code you need to understand the landscape around you, which means you need to know the condition of your site as it currently is, and the goals you wish to achieve over the course of your campaign.
14 Usability Tips for Login and My Account Pages
Sites that require users to log in to access certain information and/or purchase products add an additional layer of potential complication to the usability process. To avoid potential visitor confusion and the possibility for errors, it is important that any login process requires little or no thought on the part of the site visitor. Once logged in, you must be sure that visitors are able to find the information they want and expect to find. My Account pages need to provide visitors with access and ability to view and change personal information, as necessary.
When is Usability More Important than SEO?
Every day we get businesses coming to us looking to improve their search engine rankings. They want to talk about an SEO campaign but one quick look at their site and we see that SEO may not be the right approach for them. Usually in these cases the site needs a complete usability makeover.
The SEO Fool’s Errand for the SEO Fool
The other day I received an email from a client noting that some of his Yahoo rankings have slipped as of late. They are still ranking strong on Google as well as MSN and heck, many of their Yahoo rankings are still very strong. But there was, in fact, some slippage and the client was concerned. Well, first we know that there is more to web marketing than top rankings. In fact rankings are just a small piece of the bigger web marketing pie. I know that and you know that, but for whatever reason, we all still have to deal with clients that refuse to accept that. But that’s a story for another post. So what do you do in this situation? I know for a fact that the client’s business has seen 100-200% growth year over year since we started working with them oh-so long ago. They obviously see the big picture, but they still come back looking at rankings. And Yahoo rankings at that.
4 Copywriting Steps that Will Sell Ice to Eskimos
For many business owners, writing can be a daunting task. Sure we know our products and services inside and out and putting what we know into words is easy enough, but that’s about as far as it gets. Is that enough to sell? Sure. Could more be done to sell better? You bet!
Four Quick Ways to Improve Your HELP and FAQ Pages
Depending on the nature of your site, Help and FAQ’s (Frequently Asked Questions) can span a few or many pages. Building up these sections of your site can greatly enhance your visitor’s experience with your website. These pages are often sought out by shoppers who are looking for just a bit more information to help them feel confident about their purchase. Building comprehensive Help and FAQ pages gives your visitors confidence that you’re there to provide them the information and help they need to be comfortable purchasing from you. Solidly built pages can often reduce visitor confusion, lessen support call frequency, and create higher conversion rates as more shoppers are satisfied and confident that you can meet their needs.
Searching for Better On-Site Search Usability
Not every site needs, nor should have, an on-site search feature. But those that do must be sure that the search isn’t just an after-thought. It needs to be more than something to add because you think visitors want it. Adding a search function is not necessarily good for on-site usability. Implementing a search function improperly is often a greater source of frustration than not having one altogether.
Developing Exciting Copy that Speaks Your Visitor’s Language
There is a distinct difference between editing a site for search engines and making edits for visitors. Traditionally in SEO, adding keywords to a web page falls under the category of editing for search engines. But many don’t realize that adding keywords to your copy can and should be a function of making the site function better for visitors. The copy of your website falls very distinctly into the marketing realm of website management. Yes, search engines look at copy too, and adding certain keywords can help you achieve search engine rankings rankings, but each page needs to appeal to your readers first.
9 Paths of SEO Enlightenment, Part III
While search engines are important, keep in mind that your visitors are even more important. When making edits to your site always consider the implications on both your human visitors and the search engines as well. Every change you make will have either a positive, negative or neutral effect on your human visitors and the search engine spider. You need to know ahead of time the effect any particular change will have and use that as a basis for determining if its worthwhile or not.
Converting Visitors Through Errors and Form Fields
Forms are one of your primary points of contacts with your visitors. While many visitors still use email or even the telephone to contact you or to place an order, the vast majority will contact you first via your web forms. Forms that are broken or improperly implemented cause frustration and can greatly reduce your conversion rate for leads and sales.
8 Items Every Shopper Needs In Their Shopping Cart
Customers who, by all means, appear to be ready to make a purchase are often found abandoning their shopping carts before they complete their online transaction. In many cases this is part of the normal online shopping experience as the shopping cart is just used as a place to collect items of interest but which the user has no real intent to purchase. But all too often it is a failure of the shopping cart page itself that leads visitors to abandon their items which they do, in fact, wish to have.
9 Paths of SEO Enlightenment, Part II
A properly built web site will ensure that the search engine spiders are able to access all pages of your site with more importance placed on the more important pages. It will also insure that the human visitors are able to accomplish their goals, either finding the information they came for and/or purchasing your product or service.
12 Product Page Conversion Strategies That Shant Be Ignored
To be effective, your website must implement product pages that are able to satisfy each of your visitor’s needs. But information isn’t enough either. While providing necessary information, these pages must be convincing enough to entice your visitors to move through the purchase process — on your site rather than on a competitor’s website.
9 Paths of SEO Enlightenment, Part I
Can a proper balance between optimizing for spiders and humans be struck? Can you achieve the perfectly optimized web page for search rankings, while also maintain a perfectly optimized page for your audience? No, but since perfection is unattainable, what you can do is find the most effective balance between being both user friendly and search engine friendly.
6 Ways to Get Your Visitors To Contact You From Your Contact Us Page
Along with the About Us page, your Contact Us page is one of the most important and crucial pages on your site to get right. In fact, the Contact Us page could be considered the absolutely most important page. Even if the rest of your site succeeds in the goals, if visitors fail to find the information they need to contact you then you will bring their shopping experience to a screeching halt.
Big Picture SEO vs Small Detail Obsessions
While looking at every last minute detail of SEO is advantageous, it is effective only to a point. One can’t get mired into trying to get every last little detail right all of the time. To do so often comes at the expense other important things. Instead of focusing on the big picture, you’re mired in the little things that don’t provide the return you may have imagined.
Full RSS or Summary Feed?
I’m not the first one to chime in on this topic, mostly because I’ve gone both ways and I can make pretty valid arguments from either side. But I’ve finally settled it in my mind which is “best”. Full RSS feeds are better than summary feeds. Let me tell you why…
The Great SEO Lie Exposed
I had an alternate title for this post: “Ask not what Google can do for you, but what you can do for Google”. We’re moving into a new age where we have to pay closer attention what Google does — despite what Google says.
5 Easy Ways to Make Your About Us Page More About Your Customers
For many sites, visitors that find their way to your About Us page tend to have a somewhat higher conversion rate than those that don’t. Potential customers that do visit this page are showing a bit more than a casual interest in what your site has to offer and are looking for additional signals of trust.
Nobody Wants Your Stinking Content… So Give Them a Community!
On the web it is impossible to have a conversation without content. That is why content will never truly be dead. Every word written, every blog post, article, instant message, forum post, etc/ (the list goes on and on) is done via content. But content, outside of community, is not a conversation, it’s merely a one-way communication. To paraphrase an old philosophical riddle, if someone communicates and no one is around to hear (or read) it, is he really saying anything at all?
7 Ways to Make Your Home Page a Home Run for Usability
Your home page is the single most crucial page of your site. This is the page that will be the primary entry point for a majority of your visitors. It is also the page that sets the stage for the rest of the site giving visitors a birds-eye view of who you are, what you’re about, what you can do for them, what you offer, and how they get the information needed.
25 Ways to DESIGN Your Way to Higher Conversions
During the design phase of building a website all too often we find that the end result is really nothing more than what somebody decided “looked good”. In some cases it’s a combination (or compromise) of what a handful of individuals have determined to be “good enough”. What many fail to realize is that web design and visitor usability go hand in hand.
An Amazingly Detailed Post on Why PageRank Should Be Ignored
These figures can’t (or can, depending on how you look at it) be ignored.
Where Does the Responsibility of the SEO End and the Client’s Begin?
Last week, as I recounted my story of a troubled client, I got to thinking about this question. In the world of SEO, where do the lines of responsibility fall? When is the SEO responsible for failure and when is it the client’s fault? Or can lines be drawn between them so easily?…
9 (+1) Tips For Writing User-Friendly Content
The content of your website is your #1 sales tool. Pictures, tools, and other fun stuff can be important in making your site visibly and functionally appealing, but it is the content that sells. Well written and user focused content allows your visitors to “find out” more about your products and services, as well as how your company will be able to meet their needs.
4 Strategic Lessons to Avoid an Ill-Advised SEO Campaign
I recently made a mistake. I took on a client without first having fully vetted them and their prospects for success. Several months later, with a more accurate picture of the situation, things are not looking so bright….
How Easy Could This Be? UnSubscribe Me!
Last month I posted about Barnes & Nobles tedious process for unsubscribing from their email newsletters. It was so complex that I honestly couldn’t even figure out why I was receiving emails to begin with. By all appearances I was not subscribed to anything. This was confirmed after a couple of submissions to tech support, they also told me that I had already unsubscribed. Phew! But that’s not the end of the story….
20 Ways to NAVIGATE to Higher Conversions
A site’s navigation structure is extremely important in providing a rich, friendly user experience. Well designed and implemented navigation assists in the process of helping visitors identify sections and pages of the website that interest them and then in moving them in that direction. If you’re able to implement a solidly developed navigation system on your site you’ll also be providing strong visual cues to the depth of content you have available. This alone can be an immediate first-impression indicator of trust.
Reciprocal Links Are (Still) Not Dead
A while back there was quite a bit of scare mongering going around the SEO industry about how reciprocal links were dead. I had a potential client once tell me that so-and-so-big-name-in-the-SEO-industry told them that reciprocal links were dead. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it here again. There is nothing wrong with reciprocal links.
The Best Damn On-Page Optimization Process Checklist, Period
I like to create systems for everything that I do and SEO is no exception. While not every aspect of search engine marketing can be programmed, categorized or easily referenced, (I have a mighty team to handle that stuff!) the bulk of the work can at least be outlined into a handy check list.
Content or Community, The Red Pill or the Blue?
In my last article I declared that content was dead and community was the new king online. The title of that post was a bit of an overstatement which wasn’t backed up by the rest of the article. (It was a link bait-y title, but yet another example of community ruling content. But I digress.) In the article I found some stats that some have used to re-declare (yet again) that “content is king” but I went on to show how those stats really didn’t say that at all. I wanted to go a bit further in today’s post while…
Sometimes Motivation Has to be Felt
Motivation is a funny thing. You can try to encourage people by telling them the benefits of this, that or the other, but sometimes it’s just not enough. You’ve got to make them “feel” it. If you craft your message right, you can do just that using words only.
Lessons From Blockbuster: Don’t Hide All Your Good Sales Material
In the last of my four part series about lessons learned from Blockbuster’s Total Access program, I’ll explore the need to make sure you’re giving site visitors enough information to make the sale.
Content is Dead. Community is King Now.
I can hardly bring myself to say the old cliche about content being… well, you know. I think it’s one of the original cliche’s in the SEO industry. And as redundant as it has become, for whatever reason we keep hearing it over and over again. And every now and then a new studies pops up seemingly proving proving, once again, that content is… uh, good….
Lessons From Blockbuster: Total Access Takes Another Minor Misstep
Blockbuster provides a perfect real-world example of a company struggling to get it right. Sometimes they get the DVD in the tray and sometimes they don’t. (That analogy sounded better in my head!)
How Hard Does This Have to Be? UnSubscribe Me!
Every week I receive weekly emails from Barnes and Noble telling me about books that are being released and other such stuff that I’m not interested in. The other day I decided to go ahead and click the “unsubscribe” button and be done with it all. If only it were that easy….
Losing Wait: 5 Simple Steps to Reducing Web Page Download Times
While high-speed access is far more common today than it was just a couple of years ago, web technology has also gotten more advanced. With each new whistle and bell added to your website, with every new feature, wait time is added in your page downloads. So high-speed access or no, you still have to make sure you keep your download times in check and therefore reducing wait time for your site visitors….
A Look at Search Engine Strategies Speakers and How Well They Brand Themselves, Part II
Last week I started looking at the branding savvyness of a handful of speakers at Search Engine Strategies, San Jose. There was no way I could go through each and every speaker so I narrowed the list down to those who spoke in sessions I attended. Here I continue through the list (alphabetically) and will provide an additional bonus: me. Yeah, I got my own set of branding issues which I uncovered once I started looking into some of the others here. But before I rip me a new one, let’s continue…
A Look at Search Engine Strategies Speakers and How Well They Brand Themselves, Part I
While I was live blogging the search engine strategy sessions last week I was often in a hurry to find links to each presenter’s website. Come to find out it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. In some cases I was able to find a speaker’s company name fairly easily with a quick Google search. But other times I was left actually guessing to make sure I got the right company….
Lessons From Blockbuster: Money For Nothin’, and the Survey’s For Free
What happens when a company asks users to spend a great deal of time filling out a “customer experience” survey, but fails to offer anything up in return?…
Lessons From Blockbuster: A UVP Worth Writing Home About
Blockbuster figured out how to leverage their offline properties for their online rental service, namely the local Blockbuster Video store. Instead of putting your movie back in the mail to be shipped back, you can now take your movie, which you received in the mail, directly to the local Blockbuster store….
Writing for Readers, Skimmers and (Yes) Non-Readers Too!
There is a lot that goes into developing good content for websites, and there are a lot of schools of thought into how to develop text that is “just right” for search engines and customers alike. We’ve heard all the arguments about content before. “People don’t read, they just look at the pretty pictures.” “Lots of text is needed for SEO.” “Not everybody skims text, some like to read word for word.” “Not everybody reads word for word, some like to skim and scan.” On the surface these appear to be quite contradictory points, but they are not. In fact,…
SEO through PPC Eyes
There is a lot more to SEO than often meets the eye, but sometimes the SEO eye isn’t enough to make a good optimized page great. While the actual SEO work can be pretty straight forward, it’s the additional effort in making the page user-friendly and has the ability to drive visitors to conversions….
So Many Blogs (comments) and So Little Time (for tracking)
A few weeks ago one of my employees ran across co.mments.com, a free, web based comment tracking tool. It’s turned out to be a very nice one-size fits all solution to keeping up with any comments on any blog post, whether I’ve commented there or not….
What Would You Do with 1,200 Email Addresses?
MIVA is updating their records… and in the process giving all of their contacts access to over 1200 email addresses. Early this morning I received an email from MIVA and there it was, right in front of me, over 1,217 email addresses staring at me in the TO box….
Giving Personality to Your Personas
One of the things we’ve been trying to wrap our head around is the concept of writing content for both personas and the personality of site visitors. We battled with this for several days, trying to distinguish properly between a persona and a personality. I was finally able to boil each down into a few words that made it easy for us to see the difference….
The 50 Best Websites of 2007
Do you ever get the feeling that there are super cool websites out there that you have not discovered? Sites that everybody is talking about, except to you? Well, fret no longer, young Internet Junkie. Time Magazine, in partnership with CNN.com has issued their report on the 50 Best Websites for 2007….
Ezine Articles Says “NO” to Business Article Content
I’ve been submitting my articles to Ezine @rticles for a few years now and I have great respect for them, but lately, well, they’ve been riding the short bus to school drinking crazy Uncle Joe’s home made Koolaid….
All Roads Lead to Congestion: Weighing in on Universal Search, Part II
With Google’s new universal search being rolled out the concept of “top search engine rankings” changes dramatically. On one hand a first page ranking is much more difficult to achieve, and on the other, there are now more ways in which to achieve a first page ranking….
The Construction of a High-Performance SEO Campaign
Two years ago I put together a post about what I thought was the perfect SEO firm. I revisited that post this morning as I was looking at one of our white boards that had a list of positions that we have filled and positions that we want to fill in the coming months. My list of positions required for good SEO has not changed a whole lot in the last couple of years, although some minor modifications are needed….
A Day in the Life of a Search Engine Friendly Web Page
In a previous article I wrote that a search engine friendly website is not the same as a search engine optimized website. I’m using that as a jump off point for this article on the topic of building a search engine friendly website. The purpose is to simply highlight a few of the aspects that comprise a SE friendly (not necessarily optimized) website….
Shut Up and Listen to Your Audience for a Change
Having the right message is critical to the success of any business. The number one key to business growth is crafting a message that speaks to your target audience….
Don’t be Afraid to Try and Err
Though already successful, Pepsi understands that long-term success and company growth means always being willing to attempt new ideas and strategies. Marketing online has proven that rule time and time again….
What’s the Best Way to Communicate With Your Clients?
We once had a client complain that they didn’t know if we were doing anything for them. I guess the ranking improvements they were seeing wasn’t enough of a clue. That complaint only happened once. We realized then that there was a breakdown in communications between us and our clients and instituted measures to insure that it would never happen again….
Mmmm! Tasty Search Goulash: Weighing in on Universal Search
Google realized that very few people were using their individual search areas such as images, video, news, etc, and universal search is their one-size-fits-all fix to that. The result is a bunch of, what I would consider to be, irrelevant search results. I understand what Google is trying to accomplish, I’m just not convinced this is the best approach….
Where Have all the Online Sales Gone?
A recent New York Times article has pointed out a trend showing the slow down in the growth of online shopping. The article points out a few previously hot industries are starting to show a slowing in growth….
How Safe is Your Search?
McAfee recently reclease their State of Search Engine Safety report, an updated from their May and December 2006 reports….
Winning is for Wimps and Losers
People often find themselves looking for the winning scenario for themselves or their businesses. Finding the winning scenario is important for any long-term success. But even better than the winning scenario is the win-win scenario….
Google Experimental Search
Google recently added Experiemental Search to their list of Google labs options. I spent some time playing around with it and found it quite interesting, to say the least….
Link Bait is the New Reciprocal Link
Link bait and reciprocal linking programs have quite a bit in common. Without disparaging anyone who engages in link baiting strategies I do believe that many forms of link baiting are just a dressed up version of reciprocal links without the reciprocation….
Managing your “Inbox Tasks”
Our company has built our own custom task management system that integrates with our SEO and Marketing client reporting system. It’s great. In fact, I’m a big fan of task management. But having a task management system in place, and even when used properly, still does not take care of all of my task management issues….
Search Engine Friendly is NOT Search Engine Optimized
When we are quoting development work for prospective clients we are often asked to develop a website that is search engine optimized. This usually brings me into a long-winded explanation on how developing a website to be search engine friendly is not the same thing as optimizing that website for search performance. Kind of like how building a car is not the same as making it ready to compete in the Indy 500. Those are two different tasks altogether….
Are You Saying What You Think You’re Saying?
When you think that your employees just don’t listen or follow directions very well perhaps its time to sit down and start listening to yourself for a change. Get out of your own head for a second and hear your directions from the standpoint of someone who doesn’t already know what you want….
Spider-man 3 Bible-Study Guide (no joke!)
Finding biblical wisdom in a pop-culture geek film! I love it! (Oh, I love the marketing angle, too!)…
Follow the Path, Not the Piece to Success
When we find something that works, it may not be for the reasons we initially thought. Only after thoroughly analyzing one success, and seeing the big picture we can realize that the strategy that we thought was the reason for success is really just one of many pieces. It was really all of the pieces together that formed the path which led to success….
How Much Would You Pay to Get Visitors to Leave Your Site?
If you’re paying for marketing that will drive traffic to your website but have not spent any time or money providing a better customer experience on your website, then you might as well be paying your visitors to leave….
Small Businesses Should Know Their Place Online
The Internet allowed many mom and pops to move out of mom and pop status and develop a new kind of corporate identity. But as the e-marketplace began to grow, driving traffic to a new online business became increasingly difficult. While starting a business on the internet today is still relatively easy compared to doing so off-line, it has become more expensive and time consuming than ever….
Everything is Marketing
As a small business, everything you do has an impact on your marketing message and ability to get that message out clearly. This includes how (or whether) you answer your phones, how you reply to email messages, what you say in online forums, the comments you make in blogs the speed of your computers, the presentation of your website, and potentially even the car that you drive….
The Best Keywords Ever
No, I’m not going to give you a list of most searched or most clicked keywords or whatever. Instead I’m going to talk about how to determine which keywords will be the best for you….
Finding Success Outside Your Target Audience
It’s not often that a company finds success outside of its intended target market. But that seems to be what is happening with the makers of Slingbox….
Cookie Crumblers Corrupt Conclusive Counts
Have you ever been suspicious that your traffic stats are overinflated? Well, you should be, especially if you use cookies to track user analytical data. According to a new press release by comScore cookie-based counting overstates the size of a web site’s audience….
How to Make Fridays Productive Again
Fridays are typically the most unproductive day of the week, with the exception of the occasional Monday doldrums. By Friday everybody is ready for the weekend and its often just difficult to get into the work rhythm of the first four days of the week….
Small Businesses Should Know Their Place Online
The Internet allowed many mom and pops to move out of mom and pop status and develop a new kind of corporate identity. But as the e-marketplace began to grow, driving traffic to a new online business became increasingly difficult. While starting a business on the internet today is still relatively easy compared to doing so off-line, it has become more expensive and time consuming than ever….
Google, Yahoo, MSN add SiteMap Auto-Discovery
Simply by adding the following line of code into your robots.txt file, the engines will know where your sitemap is located on the server and pick it up on their routine crawls….
How To Sell That Thing You Sell
The other day I went to a local seminar on “internet marketing”. I honestly didn’t expect a whole lot; it was one of those “how to make money on the internet” things, which promised to tell you tips on how to use the search engines to your advantage, yada, yada, yada. But I have to say I was surprised, at least from the first 30 minutes of the 90 minute seminar….
bBy bCentral
Years after having any sort of relevance in the search engine landscape, Microsoft has finally chosen to close down their bCentral Submit It service. Yesterday I received an email from Microsoft explaining, in that Microsoft sort of way, what’s happening….
How Little Information Can Provide Accurate Expectations
Providing a little (or a lot) of information can go a long, long way to building a good relationship with your visitors. That, in turn, can lead to more sales and significant business growth. Unfortunately, many online businesses go with the less is more philosophy. As such, this leads to less user satisfaction and in turn, fewer sales….
MSN Says Don’t Use Our Search for Research
Yesterday MSN posted on their blog that they have turned of certain advanced search queries because, (gasp!) people are using it for research!…
An Argument for Website Validation
What does valid code have to do with SEO? Honestly, not a whole lot. But it can help you quickly and easily spot potential coding problems that can effect your SEO efforts….
Hey Google: What Did You Do With My Alerts?
Within the last week or so Google updated their Google Alerts service to incorporate it with some of Google’s other services. Somewhere in the process of the change they screwed up as over half of my Alerts are missing!…
8 Ways I Wish Being Offline Was Like Being Online
Ever wonder what it would be like if we had all the conveniences of the Internet in the “real” world? I do. A lot, actually. Whether I’m sitting at a stop light, looking where I left my keys or just waiting in line at the grocery store, if we had the power of the Internet available to us I think our lives would be so much simpler….
Do Music Downloads Spell the End of the Music Biz?
In reading an article about the plummeting of music CD sales believed to be caused by the increase in music downloads (purchased and pirated), I got to thinking about the music business in general. While most news stories and editorials talk about the effects of the music distribution industry, I can’t help but wonder if this will effect the music industry as a whole–artists and fans included….
A Marketing Campaign Gone Wrong… Or Right?
Lionsgate films may have an unintentional hit on their hands. It appears that someone put up the wrong billboard campaign which many are finding objectionable….
Does your SEO Only Know SEO?
The SEO industry has changed significantly in the last few years. Gone are they days when SEO focused exclusively on top search engine rankings. Today’s SEOs, or at least any worth paying more than one dollar to, are focusing on many other aspects that were once traditionally left to more marketing minded people….
Don’t Hide All Your Easter Eggs All In One Place
Right now Google is the 900 pound basket delivering a sizeable chunk of traffic (eggs?) to businesses on the web. That’s fine and all but what happens when you lose your Google rankings for a day, month, year?…
If It Ain’t Broke… Fix It!
Should you change your page content frequently? The answer is yes and no….
Why Should You SEO?
As SEO enters the mainstream of business marketing strategies you would think that less time would have to be spent educating people on why SEO is so very important. But the fact of the matter is, many people still just don’t understand SEO or the benefits it can bring. Worse, many companies haven’t yet grasped the fact that SEO is crucial to long-term online success, especially for small companies without big brand names or budget….
10 Not-So-Quick-But-Still-Important Ways to Increase Conversions
There are literally thousands of signals that can be changed to improve one’s conversion, last week I pointed out ten. Today I give 10 more, but they are not quite as easy to implement as those on the first list….
10 Quick Ways to Increase Conversions
My SEO firm has been spending a good deal of time analyzing conversion and usability aspects for our clients over the past year. While there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of things that can be changed to help improve conversion rates, we’ve created a short list of things that are both quick and easy to change or add to your site….
Tired of Opting Out When You Never Opted In?
The big news of the past couple of days is that Yahoo now allows you to opt out of having Yahoo use the directory title and description in their general search results. As I was installing the new robots meta tag onto my home page I started thinking, “why am I opting out when I never opted in?”…
Multiple Path Link Building
In just about any form of marketing, when something works it gets repeated to death until the strategy is no longer effective. Online marketing, especially link building, is similar. While there is no replacing the concept of building a good site worthy of links and letting people know about it, there are actually numerous strategies available for attracting good links through solid marketing efforts….
The Paperless Office is (Not) Here
According to comScore, 65% of Bank of America account holders use their online bill pay service. In fact, B of A is dominating the online bill pay market. According to the study, Wells Fargo has the next highest usage at 18% and then Chase and Wachovia at 13% each….
Serving the Client’s Best Interest is Not Always in the Client’s Best Interest!
We are in business to serve our clients, not ourselves. But the more I thought about this the more I realized that this sentiment is not entirely true. While we want our purpose to be client-centric we realized that in order for us to properly server our clients we have to serve ourselves as well….
When Good SEO’s Go Elite
I think Rand had a bit too much of the secret SEO sauce. His post “What separates Search Marketing Novices from Experts” is, well, just downright ignorant. I think of Rand as a true SEO business man but I think this post shows a lack of understanding of SEO as a business….
(Some)Things You Wanted to Know About CSS (But Were Afraid To Ask)
Matthew Inman has just posted an excellent CSS resource over at SEOmoz. For those of us who are not designers but are found frequently editing HTML and CSS, Inman’s 15 CSS Properties You Probably Never Use (but perhaps should) is a great resource to be printed and filed away for frequent reference….
Changing the Face of Advertising, 8 Seconds at a Time
A new company is about to change the face of off-line advertising as we know it. They are starting in the movie industry (and only for eight seconds at a time) but the implications of this will reach into every aspect of paper advertising and even into the digital photo market….
Achieving “Outsider” Status
Have you tried to break into the SEO elite and found it somewhat cliquish? You’re not the only one. Aaron Pratt talks about the circular linking patterns of the SEO elites….
Time Tracking for Greater Productivity
The time spent on billable activities is important information to know, and not just to have a better picture of the bottom line. How our time is spent affects both us and our clients. The more time we spend on unbillable activities the more we have to compensate by adjusting package pricing, but the less time we spend on billable activities, the less we are actually doing for our clients….
Google Provides (Almost) Accurate Backlink Information
Google Webmaster Central has just releases a tool that allows you to check your site’s backlinks. Hows that different from the link: operator? Well, this one actually works!…
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
True success doesn’t come easily but requires patience, determination, hard work and sometimes even personal sacrifice. If you do want to succeed and are willing to put forth the effort, here are seven steps to success in business and in life….
Mapquest Offers Gas Pump Pricing and Locations
Mapquest now lets you find and compare gas prices in your city, state or zip code….
Link Request Flattery
The problem with most link emails is that there is never any real effort involved in getting the links. Just some generic crap about how they “really liked your site!” Wow. That’s awesome! When I was contacted about getting the manuscript I was flattered that somebody wanted me to read their book and blog about it. Flattery is effective….
2006 Internet Growth Trends
According to recent press release by ComScore, overall internet usage increased 10% from Dec. ‘05 to ‘06. Also includes information on top web destinations and category growth trends….
Billable Rights of SEOs and Their Clients
Ever wonder just what you as a client and your SEO firm as a service provider have the right to expect from each other? You’re not the only one. As such, Stoney deGeyter has put together a comprehensive list of “billable rights” for both SEM providers and SEM clients….
The Googlebomb Conspiracy: The Truth is Out There (Somewhere)
It doesn’t take much to get the SEO industry from driving straight to Kooksville with their conspiracy theories and predictions of doom and destruction. After Google blogged about their algorithm change to combat Googlebombing, some in the SEO community came up with the theory that this will allow people to Googlebomb other websites out of top positions. That’s not going to happen….
Being Successful by Committing to Constant Growth
Someone asked me my definition of success recently and I responded: Life, Health and Happiness. Life and health are easily determined, but happiness is pretty darn vague, and I deliberately answered that way. What makes me happy?…
What’s It Take to SEO Your Site?
Last Wednesday Eric Enge put together a great article called “An Introduction to SEO Best Practices” for Search Engine Watch’s Search Day subscribers. In the article Eric boils SEO down to four crucial components….
Managing Your Pay-Per-Click Portfolio
Investment into the stock market and PPC marketing has a lot of similarities. By drawing these comparisons this article sheds some light on the expectations of a well-managed PPC campaign and provides solutions to effectively managing your PPC “portfolio”….
Don’t Cheat Your Business by Going Cheap On SEO
If you’re like me, that frugality carries over into just about all areas of your life, including searching for an SEO company. But one thing that bargain shoppers tend to find out the hard way is that sometimes the best deal isn’t always the best deal. In fact, the bargain often turns out to cost you more in the long run….
What Were You Doing the Day After?
What were you doing the day after Christmas? If you were like many folks, you were online. According to Nielsen//NetRatings online shopping for the day after Christmas rose 35% over 2005….
Guide for Writing Optimized Text
Optimized text (OT) is first and foremost marketing copy for the website. Each optimized page must be written with the client’s products or services in mind. They are not general information pages, but pages designed to provide the visitor with the information they seek which compels them to take the desired action….
Ignorance: The Downside of Social Marketing
The ignorance of the Wikipedia community in regards to SEO is, well, interesting. There is an internal debate as to whether or not Matt Cutts is noteworthy for his own Wikipedia page. Huh? Really?…
Are We Finally Seeing the Decline of PPC?
PPC (pay-per-click) advertising has been a great way to almost instantly start an online marketing campaign and get immediate returns. Recently, however larger companies seem to be cutting back on their PPC spending. Last week MarketWatch posted a story about PPC costs and why businesses are looking for greener pastures….
Long- vs. Short-Term SEO
I’ve always thought of SEO as a long-term process. More of a perpetual process, really. SEO firms (not to be confused with SEO consultants) tend to provide one of two different types of service. For the most part, they can be defined as “long-term” SEO and “short-term” SEO….
Building Trust in 2007
Matt McGee has a great post over on his Small Business SEM blog titled, The #1 SEO and Marketing Tactic for 2007: Trust. Keep reading to find out more……
Google Myths Debunked
The blogosphere is a great place to get information, learn new things and even to spread your own knowledge. It’s also a way for myths and rumors to spread, many times unchecked. These myths get passed on from blog to blog and soon they are simply believed because they’ve been repeated so many times….