Archive for the ‘search engine optimization’ category
Google’s New Instant Search
You may have noticed something odd about Google all of a sudden – rather than waiting until you click the button, Google now starts returning search results while you are still typing out your query. This feature can be turned off, and it is too early to know if this will affect people’s search behavior. IF the feature remains and people use it, I think there are a couple of things you are going to need to keep in mind that relate directly to your site’s search engine optimization.
First, it is going to be more important than every to focus on higher volume keywords. Example: let’s say you have a store in Madison, Wisconsin that sells cheese and you are trying to decide between focusing on the keyword “Madison cheese shop” or “Madison cheese store.” Well, if Google is now displaying dynamic, predictive results, it is going to fill in the search based on which of “shop” or “store” is most widely used. So you will want to optimize for the higher traffic variation.
Another issue may be that the new predictive search will lesson the use of long-tail keywords. Since Google is supplying results while the person types, the searcher may see what he is looking for before he even finishes his query. So rather than finishing the keyword “Atlanta used car dealership,” he may stop at “Atlanta used car.” IF this is what actually ends up happening, then you may have to change the focus of your optimization to more broad keywords. It will be more competitive, but if search engine traffic is important to your business, then it will have to be done.
These are just a couple of examples. And none of this may even happen. It may very well be that people don’t like the feature, or that Google removes the feature, as it has a tendency to do. The main thing for the time being is to watch your stats so you are aware if your traffic changes for the worse because of the change to Google.
Focus
I wanted to take a few minutes today and discuss something that is CRITICAL to success in the world of search engine optimization: FOCUS.
Focus is a requirement for success in anything in life, and search marketing is certainly no different. If you want your website to rank highly in Google or any other search engine, you have to decide what keywords you want the site to rank for. You must avoid the temptation to take some wishy washy, half-ass approach where your sort-of optimized for this keyword, sort-of optimized for that keyword, etc. You must decide on specific keywords (with those decisions being based on proper keyword research) and then map those keywords to different pages of your site. Forget about trying to get your homepage to rank for all your keywords. Pick two keywords for the major pages of your site and optimize each one of those pages individually and specifically for those keywords.
This is kind-of like the concept of picking a niche to target in your business (a very good idea). If you present yourself as a generalist in your field, there are likely way too many potential prospects to do a decent job of marketing to, and you are going to face price difficulties. Generalists cannot charge the same premium as specialists. You should pick a specific market and go after it hard. The same is true with your search engine optimization. Pick a set of keywords that matches the criteria explained below and there will be much more congruity between your keywords and your website.
Keyword Criteria
1. It is highly relevant to your business.
2. It generates some traffic.
3. It is in a reasonable competitive situation.
In addition, any keyword for which you are currently in the top 50 is a good candidate, unless the competition is so competitive that it will take a very long time to reach the front page.
Another thing to remember is that the links you create in your link building campaign should contain your target keywords or close variations and that they should link to the specific pages of your site that are optimized for those keywords. Again…focus.
If you need help focusing your search engine optimization campaign, please call Work Media today at 888-299-4837 or email info@workmedia.net.
Getting Started with Spanish SEO
The market for your products or services among those who speak Spanish is potentially massive. And chances are very good that you are completely missing out on that market. This is somewhat of a complex subject, but I am going to give you a bare-bones strategy for promoting your business to the Hispanic market.
1. It goes without saying, but if you are going to promote your business in Spanish, you need to be prepared to speak to someone in that language. So you are going to need someone on your staff who can do that.
2. Use Google’s external keyword research tool to perform keyword research, but set the language preference to Spanish. The seed keywords should also be in Spanish:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
3. Create content for your web site, or create a new web site altogether, written in Spanish and optimized for the keywords from step 2. However, you should avoid any kind of automated translation software or web site. You need to hire a real human being to do the translation work. If you’re going to do it, do it right.
4. Generate keyword links to your Spanish language pages just like you would your English pages.
That’s it! Easy, right?…
Well, not really. English language SEO is time consuming and has many moving parts. But doing it in a language that you are not familiar with adds a whole ‘nother level of difficulty. If you are already fluent in Spanish, then you’ve got a big advantage over the rest of us.
Another consideration is whether you are promoting to a broad, global Spanish-speaking market or to markets in particular countries or to specific groups of people. There are many variations of the Spanish language, and what works and is acceptable language to one group may not be understood or considered rude by another group. In general, the best strategy is probably to take a high level, global perspective and try to avoid using language that is specific to any particular group.
So preparing yourself to do business with Spanish-speaking people will require some effort and resources, but it will open you up to a whole new market.
Google Search Options You Should Try Out
There are many things about Google that I dislike. I dislike many of the things about the Google AdWords program, such as the change recently preventing advertisers from split-testing different domain names in their ads within an ad group. I dislike the way Google constantly throws out new technology, and then provides little in the way of support for it (for example, sometimes Blogger will publish to an external web server, and sometimes it won’t, yet Google has shown very little interest in dealing with the problem or providing any guidance).
But the fact is, despite the many things I dislike about Google, I pound on the Google search ,engine non-stop. It is a fantastic research tool. There are a couple of Google search options that I recently started using that aid in the research process. If you write articles or use Google as a marketing tool (and you probably wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t), then you should try these out.
To start, do any search in Google. The search I am using as an example while I type this out is “law firm internet marketing.” Hey, there’s my law firm internet marketing site at number six, and the Amazon.com page for our book on the subject at number nine. Neat. Anyway, now click the Show options link next to the plus sign at the top left above where the search results start.
Now you should see lots of links along the left-hand side of the screen. Some of them let you focus in on specific types of search results, such as images or blogs or whatever. But the two that I want to discuss here are Related searches and Wonder wheel.
Clicking the Related searches link shows a number of other searches that are, obviously, related to your first search. I think it is safe to assume that these are search queries that people have actually used because some of them are way too specific to just be synonyms or whatever. Clicking on one of those related search query links brings up a new page of search results, just as if you had types that keyword into the search box. Doing this process repeatedly will expose you to all kinds of search terms that you may not have thought of that might be applicable to your business. If you are purely engaging in the process for research purposes, it may lead you to some web sites or resources you would not have found by using your own search terms.
The Wonder wheel option is similar to related terms but more dynamic. Clicking that option displays a circle (or “wheel”) with your keyword in the middle and spokes coming out that point at related search terms. Clicking on one of the outside search terms draws another wheel with the second search term with a long spoke that connects to the first wheel, as well as its own set of spokes pointing to a new set of keywords. Really, this tool does the same thing that the Related searches link does, but it presents the information in a “mind mapping” kind of way and lets you see the path you followed to arrive at a search term.
Gain an edge on your competition by putting these tools to use today in your research and online marketing activities.
Blog Comment Linking: Good or Bad?
Recently, in its Google Webmaster blog (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com), Google posted about spam links in blog comments, and how using these links will damage your positioning. This is a strategy that Work Media sometimes employs, so we wanted to address this subject.
First off, you have to take these things with a grain of salt. Google likes to keep things secretive, and we believe it often does and says things just to create confusion about how its algorithm works. And the Web is built on links. Google uses links to find web sites and as a measure of a site’s worth in assigning it a ranking. So, in general, you still have to get links to your site if you want high search engine rankings.
For another thing, we don’t think it really makes sense to PUNISH sites for having links to it. That’s not to say Google doesn’t do it, and it seems to have done it in the past, but think about this: if Google is going to punish a web site for having links to it contained in blog comments, why wouldn’t I use this against my competitors? What is to stop me from going around to blogs and submitting spammy comments with links to my competitors’ web sites?
Google says this: “…it’s useless to think of harming your competitor’s ranking by spamming comments with their name, since it usually won’t affect their ranking if their sites are complying with Google Webmaster Guidelines.”
Ah, there’s the rub. If you do things the right way, you will be fine. Here is our approach to blog commenting:
1. Use a keyword for the name field.
2. Type a URL in the appropriate field.
3. Type out a well-written, well-thought-out comment that relates directly to the content of the blog post.
The difference between this approach and what Google is talking about is that we are making legitimate comments, while also taking advantage of the opportunity to get the link.
Here’s another thing: don’t rely solely on this or any other SEO strategy to get links. Mix it up. And be credible.
Here’s another thing that we find odd: one of Google’s suggestions is that a way to prevent this is to set comment links in your blog to no follow. However, it was recently revealed that doing that reduces the value of your own internal-pointing or other do follow links. The reason is that PageRank leaks out of your page from the no follow links, even though the pages the links point to do not get credited with the PageRank. So setting your links to no follow is now damaging to your own SEO efforts.
So what should you do? Don’t worry about it. Do your blog commenting like we suggest above and you will be fine.
Google Shakeup: Just Stick to the Basics
Google has been doing some things lately with its index that have caused quite a bit of shuffling of rankings. However, what we are finding is that, in general, in a few days things get restored to something like what they were before. So if you have high rankings that have suddenly disappeared, chances are pretty good you will get them back in a few days. The main thing is: stay calm!
We have been checking a lot of our clients’ rankings in the beta version of the new Google algorithm which is to be released in the near future. We are actually seeing improvements for many of our rankings with the new release. This validates our theory that, if you stick to the basics and work it, you will be fine.
So…what does that mean exactly?
First off, make sure the copy of your web site (including page titles and headers) is optimized for specific keywords, and not all on the same page. Spread your keywords out!
Make sure you have a keyword-rich internal linking structure. For example, if you are a law firm and your number one keyword is “Huntsville injury lawyer,” then you should have lots of links throughout your site pointing back to your home page that incorporate that keyword.
Next, make sure you systematically build up a heavy catalog of external links to your site. And spread it out. If you do reciprocal linking, that is fine, but that should not be your only linking strategy. Submit articles to article directories. Add your site to general directories. Look for lots of places for your links, and add new links regularly.
Also, we have seen some evidence that Google may now be giving preference to sites that have been updated recently. So if you don’t do a blog, set one up! Stream or publish it to your blog and update it regularly. Pepper your blog with keywords, links to your own content, as well as useful content from other web sites.
In other words…if you want to maintain or improve your search engine rankings, stick to the basics! It would also be an excellent idea to mix in some social media marketing, but that is another discussion.
Don’t Be Fooled by this Old SEO Trick
Here is a trick of the SEO trade:
To demonstrate your skill in SEO by achieving a very high search engine ranking for a very low competition keyword.
Look, if your site ranks well for a keyword that noone ever uses, have you really accomplished anything? No! My partner relays an interesting story about an SEO “expert” coming in and demonstrating how she could take a particular keyword and very quickly get it ranked number one on Google. Fantastic! Only…the web page she optimized was the ONLY result brought back by Google for that keyword. In other words, there was not a single other web page competing against her page for that keyword.
It is easy to be number one when you have ZERO competition!
So don’t be fooled by this trick. SEO is not easy. It’s not quick. And it’s not cheap. If you want your web site to rank for keywords with no competition and no traffic, you don’t need an SEO firm. You can easily make that happen yourself. But if you want to rank highly for competitive keywords that may actually drive targeted traffic to your web site, then you need to be prepared for war.
New Direction for Work Media
Work media is enjoying our new office located in downtown Dickson. Our productivity is up and our travel time is way down. We can all get to the office in 15 minutes or less, which uses more time to spend researching Internet Marketing strategies and applying them to our clients accounts. If any of you ever find yourself in Dickson (about 1/2 hour drive west of Nashville), we invite you to stop by for a visit. We are in the old Ragan arcade on main street.
We’ve been getting really heavy into social media and video. We have begun recording a lot of video footage, including short 12 second video four 12 seconds/twitter. Of loading videos to 12 seconds has a definite SEO advantage, in that it can result in the creation of a lot of web pages with a keyword links pointing to your main site. This is somewhat of an advanced strategy that could have a powerful long-term impact on a search engine optimization campaign.
Combining video, social media, and content distribution is definitely the state of the art in search engine marketing. We invite you to contact us today to talk about creating and implementing this type of marketing campaign for your business.
By the way, if you’re into Twitter, you should check out our Twitter blog, http://twitterforbusiness.blogspot.com.
By the way one more time, I invite you to check out our 12seconds page, http://12seconds.tv/channel/lawfirmseo. As the name implies, this particular channel is intended to discuss law firm marketing, but it pretty much all applies to any type of business.
The Three Critical Criteria for Judging SEO Keywords
The first step in any Internet marketing campaign is picking the right keywords. Many businesses and law firms make the mistake of choosing keywords to target based on their opinion of what keywords potential customers would use to search for them, rather than basing that decision on research. Don’t do that.
The other big mistake I see some companies make is picking a huge basket of keywords for which to promote their web site. Don’t do that, either. Think small in number and highly specific.
So just what do you do? Let research guide your decisions, and pick keywords that meet three specific criteria.
Here are the three major criteria to consider for any potential keyword:
1. Degree of relevance. You want a strong sense of congruity between a keyword and a particular web page. It doesn’t have to be relevant to your home page, but it needs to be relevant to SOME page on your web site.
For example, a good keyword for the home page of a Ford auto dealership in Memphis might be “Memphis Ford dealer.” A good keyword for a page about Ford Mustangs on this same dealer’s site might be “Memphis Ford Mustang dealer.” These are completely hypothetical examples.
2. Search engine traffic. The more search traffic there is for a particular keyword, the more potential traffic the keyword could drive to your web site.
3. Competition. The fewer competing web sites there are for a keyword, the more attractive that keyword is for the subject web site.
So the three major criteria for any keyword you are considering targeting is relevance, traffic and competition. The relevance criterion is judgment-based. It is common sense. For the traffic criterion, the best tool to use to generate that data is the external Adwords research tool, located at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. For the competition criterion, I suggest basing it on Google “allintitle:” searches, because this will return the number of web pages that are closest to being specifically optimized for that keyword.
Compile a list of potential keywords using Google’s external keyword, eliminate the less relevant ones, then rank them by the number of searches Google claims for each one. Then look for ones that are in a favorable competitive situation. Your highlighted keywords at this point are your best bet for generating targeted organic search engine traffic in a reasonable amount of time. Your chance of ranking for those keywords, and thus generating visits to your web site, is excellent.
Call Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net if you need some assistance orchestrating an organized SEO campaign for your business web site.
Getting Organized with Your Social Networking
I have spent a good bit of time the last week using Excel to sketch out a social networking management system. The resulting spreadsheet will be a tool that we will give away for free for use of our readers. And the concept will then be carried forward into an online database-driven application that will be used for our own purposes and our clients’. But the exercise has been very helpful at helping me think through the process of how a social networking campaign should be organized.
First off, I consider content distribution to be a major part of online social networking. If you leave this part out, and just concentrate on meeting people online, then you are not taking advantage of the Web’s ability to spread your name and marketing message. So writing blogs and articles and distributing that content should be an integrated part of what you do. The system I am setting up makes the assumption that you will be doing this.
Social networking is one of those things that tends to happen haphazardly, as time permits, whenever you think about it. It can be done much more effectively if you create a monthly social networking/content distribution schedule that tells you exactly when you should be doing things and what you should be doing.
To begin with, I suggest you create a simple calendar of when blog posts should be posted and articles written. Aim for eight blog posts per month and three articles. If you can do more than eight blogs, that’s fantastic, but a minimum of eight is sufficient. In a year’s time that is nearly a hundred blog posts, which is a lot of content. Three articles in a month may be aggressive, but try.
When you lay out your blogging and article writing schedule, go ahead and write out an idea for each blog post in advance, and create groupings of two or three blog posts in a row that elaborate on the same general topic. Then for each of those topic groupings of blog posts, specify a date to write an article that combines the information from those blog posts. This way, rather than trying to always think of a topic for an article from scratch, you can just use the content you create in the process of blogging as the basis for those articles.
Just doing the above things will go a long way toward giving your content distribution efforts more focus, but we’re not done. In my next blog post we will continue talking about scheduling and hit on some other functions that should be included in your calendar.
Work Media is here to help with your social networking, content distribution and search engine marketing. If it involves driving traffic to a web site, we’re into it. Give us call at 888-299-4837 or email info@workmedia.net.