Archive for the ‘search engine optimization’ category
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.
Free Web Sites that Make Video Distribution Easier
Wow, we are really doing a lousy job with this blog this month. For about the last week, a large chunk of any available time at my (Jerry) disposal has been consumed with this law firm linking system we’ve been developing. The code for such a thing is extremely complex, and it seems like I just keep tripping over myself. It would probably help if I were a professional programmer, and not an Internet marketer trying to hack code together on his lunch break or late at night when my eyeballs feel like they’re going to melt from staring at a computer screen.
Hmmm…we’re already pretty deep into this blog post and I haven’t said a thing that is of any use to someone looking to learn about Internet marketing. Here’s something:
I have found a couple of sites that you can use for free to do video distribution. Well, one is for distribution and the other is for something else. One problem I have had is cleanly downloading videos from YouTube. YouTube does not have any kind of its own functionality to let you download videos you like. But I found a site, www.savevid.com, that makes it extremely easy…and it works! The videos you download actually seem to be just as high in quality as the original video hosted on YouTube. So…if you have a video or know of a video on YouTube that you would like to do something with, just visit www.savevid.com, type in the URL to the video, tell it what kind of file you would like, and you’re all done!
For distributing videos, I have been trying out www.tubemogul.com, and it seems to work very well. I have used a couple of other solutions (Traffic Geyser and Hey!Spread), but this one seems to be the most intensive in terms of providing in-depth analytics, and it is free! Definitely worth a try.
Okay. I feel better now. It has been two weeks since my last blog post, but at least I did give you a couple of sites to check out. Now go promote your web site!
Better Linking by Going Deep
April 8th and my first blog of the month. Shameful. My excuse is that I have spent a lot more time lately updating my newer blogs, those of the legal marketing variety on a couple of other sites. But really, there should be no excuses. I should just get it done. You need to have the same attitude yourself. You must blog!
Okay, now onto the actual subject of this blog.
When link building, the temptation is to always focus on your home page. Obviously, you would prefer that that be the page most people see and arrive at. It’s sort-of like the cover of a book. It creates interest and gives the reader a little idea of what it is about.
So people love to link to their home page. However, the problem with this approach is that it does not account for two things:
1. You need to strive for a connection between the keyword in the link (if there is one) and keywords on the page that it links to; and
2. A single web page can only be optimized for a VERY small set of keywords (technically, it can only TRULY be optimized for one keyword).
So you want keyword-specific links pointing to keyword-specific pages. If you always link to your home page, you are not doing this. Instead, you need to practice something called “deep linking.” Deep linking is the act of linking not to the home page but to a more specific sub-page. For example, if you have a web site that sells shoes, and there is a sub-page on the site devoted to Nike shoes, then a keyword link like “Nike shoes” would be more effective if it linked to the Nike page rather than your home page.
For help with your company’s Internet marketing, contact Work Media at www.workmedia.net, info@workmedia.net, or 888-299-4837.
Getting Down and Dirty with Link Swapping
Don’t tell me about search engine marketing. I have been doing this for years. I have hundreds of articles and blog posts all over the Web. I have two books in print. I have many satisfied clients. I know SEO.
So I feel qualified to tell you that, without a doubt, link swapping still works. My firm will continue engaging in link swapping on behalf of our clients until we see that it no longer works.
Yet this continues to be a practice that we are questioned about over and over. Look, the purpose of link swapping is not to provide your visitors with other web sites they might want to visit. Not at all. It is only for the purpose of improving search engine rankings.
I’m not at all implying that you should rely on link swapping is your only strategy for getting links. You need lots of links from lots of different places. One way links are preferable to swapped links, and you should take steps to get those kinds of links as well. But link swapping is one important component of your overall online marketing campaign.
If you’re going to use this strategy, do it right. To begin with, have mo more than 50 links on a link swap page. So you will probably need to have multiple pages. You also need to supply your link partners with very specific verbiage and HTML to use for their links to you. And remember, this does not have to be a page that is featured prominently on your site. You just need a small text link somewhere on your home page for search engine spiders to follow. That will be good enough for search engines to find.
This is a great way to begin the process of building a catalog of links to your site if you are just getting started.
So don’t be a snob. Set up a link swaps page or directory on your site and begin the process of swapping links with other relevant web sites. Over time, it will improve your search engine rankings.
By the way, if you promote a law firm, you have to check out the Law Firm Internet Marketing site.
An Example of a Cleanly Coded Site
We just finished work on a small web site for a local client, Property Solutions of Tennessee, which provides janitorial cleaning services for businesses in Nashville. Here is the URL:
http://www.propertysolutionstn.com
I advise you to check out the HTML on this site for an example of what a cleanly (and thus, more search engine friendly) site looks like. The main thing to take note of is how little code there is that formats the page. The sections of the page are separated by div tags that describe their appearance. There is some in-line styling used in a couple of places that would be better moved to an external file. But all in all, the code is minimal, which makes it much easier for search engine spiders to find what they are looking for.
Also take note of the keyword-rich title which is not overly bloated. The title is exactly ten words (although the word “of” in the title really doesn’t count), and almost every words in the title is a keyword related to the company’s business. The page also has meta tags that contain roughly the same keywords used in the title and in the page copy.
The other pages of the site all have a keyword link at the bottom that points to the home page. This establishes a theme for the site and boosts the home page relevance for those keywords.
This site has an excellent chance at ranking well. It is cleanly coded and optimized for specific keywords we uncovered in our research that we think our client has an excellent chance at ranking for. The only thing lacking now is some external keyword links (or any links in the case of a new site like this one) linking to the site.
If you operate on a local level and are careful with your keyword research, you can build a site that has a high change at ranking well, if you code the site well and use your target keywords throughout.
Get Those Social Networking Profiles Set Up!
Take the time to set up your profiles on social networking sites. I know, I know, it takes forever…but it must be done. And it is my suggestion that you have lots of such accounts. It is not sufficient just to have a LinkedIn profile. You should create accounts at Squidoo and LinkedIn and set up good profiles there. You also need accounts at the major article directories like EzineArticles.
To create all these accounts and set up profiles, you will need to devote at least a half day to it, if not the whold day.
This is the kind of work that would be good to hire someone else to do. I suggest you create a document that has your bio, contact information, links, and any other information you may want shown on your profiles, and then find an intelligent young person to do the work for you. Paying a kid $10 per hour to do it is a bargain compared to using your own time, which you probably value a lot more than that.
Do people really look at other people’s profiles on social networking sites? Absolutely. So don’t blow an opportunity to brand and market yourself to people who are potential sources of business or leads.