A concept that I find some clients have resisted is the use of long tail keywords and long tail copy in their website. The concept seemingly goes against common sense and intuitive interest in being found for some of the most desirable keywords.
But, effective SEO strategies are about creating winning strategies. In some cases (actually in many cases) optimizing for the most desirable keywords for a business can be quite challenging. Everyone wants to be on page one. But, often page one is filled with mature, keyword rich, link rich websites. Penetrating the page one list can be difficult at best and impossible in many cases. So, we must go after winning strategies.
How do we do that? Long tail keywords, that’s how…Consider this example in our industry.
If we want to be search engine optimized for “Internet marketing” there are more than 79 million results in Google! Considering the age of www.findandconvert.com and current content and link count, the reality of ranking even on the first three pages for “Internet marketing” is nill in the near future. Consider that we are an “Internet marketing company” and not everyone searching on “Internet marketing” is necessarily searching for an Internet marketing company like Find and Convert. So, if we optimize for “Internet marketing company” we’re still dealing with a very competitive keyword that has over 13 million results in Google. In fact, we rank on page 6 for “Internet marketing company” (at the time of this writing).
As I browse the results, there are many Internet marketing companies with geographic descriptors in their titles such as “Philadelphia Internet marketing company” and “Dallas Internet marketing company.” So, a winning strategy for us is to optimize for “Internet marketing company Florida.” There are only 635,000 results in Google for this phrase. Obviously, the search volume for “Internet marketing company Florida” is lower than the broader phrases mentioned above. But, the likelihood of someone who finds us for this phrase being a qualified opportunity for Find and Convert is pretty high.
If this “long tail keyword” stuff sounds a little like shooting with a rifle, or being laser focused (or whatever cliché you prefer) that’s exactly what it is. Consider that long tail keywords allow you to write copy to accommodate it with relative ease. It’s easier to write content about specific topics than it is about more general topics. It’s also easier to rank well for various combination of long tail keyword phrases such as “Florida Internet marketing company.”
Go for a winning strategy with long tail keywords supported with long tail keyword copy that will drive the most qualified traffic to your website.
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Sweat the SEO Details
Target Audience: SEO for marketers with websites with less than 100 pages of content.
Content is still king
The more content the better
Search engines crawl your website to learn what your site is about
Commit to writing more content
Google measures who is linking to your content
A foundation of content is needed to get the full value of external links
Add sections to your website dedicated to content for search engines, e.g., Resources
Add “how to,” “faq,” “tips”, “best practices,’ “things to avoid.” Etc.
Links are important but content is the foundation of a good SEO plan
Great content will attract links
Add video with a text summary of the video
Home page is very important!
Has the greatest PageRank (PR)
Share home page content with other pages selectively
Don’t give away all your Google PR
Use Anchor text to link to other pages Think SEF
Search engine friendly architecture
Good URL structure using keywords in the URL string
Use dashes to separate words in the URL
Clean, light and fast loading code
Put javascript files into a separate file and make a call to it
Meta data
3 components: Title, Description and keywords
Description very important: it’s what people read in the search engines
Test to see how your rankings are displayed.
Header tags (H Tags)
Tells the search engines which headings are intended to be noticed by them Sitemap
Give the search engines something to crawl with links to every page in your website
Google sitemap
Give Google an XML based sitemap so they can score your site’s pages, links and other valuable statistics
Also lets you see how Google sees your website
You can fix problems like broken URLs you didn’t know existed
Google penalizes sites with technical problems
Think local
Set up a local listing in Google and Yahoo even if it’s only for your home office
Use a Google map on your contact page
Think multi media
Google and other search engines index images, videos and maps.
This outside the box
Outside links from authority sites, e.g., directories, blogs, syndication sites
Final thought
Remember that organic traffic is the most valuable traffic
More time spent, more pages viewed, lower bounce rates
Content is still king!
Links are important but must be supported by good content
Use SEF URLs
What I love about this industry is that anyone with knowledge can become an authority. For SEO website design guidelines, listen to what Chuck has to say. Below the video is a far less entertaining summary…
Directory structure: Use a shallow directory. Keep the most important webpages on the root.Use of CSS: The site should ideally be styled using CSS as much as possible and designed in div ids. Alternatively, we should be able to edit/create/deploy CSS in the existing site/CMS. If using tables, we should be able to add to the table summary.
Flash Alternative: Provide an alternative text version of the content used in Flash.
Robots.txt: We should be able to upload/modify robots.txt file.
Sitemap guidelines:
1) Site should have an XML Sitemap for Google stats tracking (not for users), e.g.,http://www.khameleonsoftware.com/sitemap.xml
2) Should have an editable site map for user navigation and search crawlers, e.g., http://www.findandconvert.com/site-map.html/Custom 404 Error page: We should be able to customize a 404 error page, e.g., http://www.findandconvert.com/404-error.htmMeaningful URLs Create/edit pagenames:
1.No underscores – use hyphens instead.
2.No special characters
3.Should be able to use keywords in URL structure – should be independent of Webpage title tag, Page Name etc.
E.g., http://www.findandconvert.com/link-building.html/No frames!!!
No session ids – use cookies.
Embedded CSS: CSS should not be embedded on the webpage.
IP based content delivery: Don’t deliver content based on IP detection.
Avoid a deep directory structure so engines can crawl the site easily.
Dynamic URLS: If pages are being generated dynamically, avoid too many parameters (special characters) in the URL
Java Scripts: Call all java scripts externally from a separate .JS file. Don’t embed them in the code.
Images guidelins:
1. The site design should not be made with extensive image usage. Search engines cannot read text embedded in images. There should be no use of any splash page or graphic intensive home page
2. Should be able to upload images
3. Should be able to edit image names
4. Should be able to add alt text
5. Should be able to add title attributes (if hyperlinked) Content guidelines:
1. Should be able to give heading tags to content (H1 – H6), bold, italics, underlines, etc.
2. Title attributes to hyperlinked text
Footer Text navigation is a must.
Meta Tags: Should be able to add/edit Title tags and meta tags (keywords tag, description tag, abstract tag etc).
Validate HTML: Should validate your website using w3c validator.
Redirects: If at all the site needs to use a redirect while programming, make use of 301 redirects. There should be no use of any 302 redirects at all.
I talk every day with clients and write often in this blog about the importance of links in any SEO strategy. Anyone who has spent more than ten minutes reading about SEO knows that back links are critical ingredient for organic search engine rankings.
One point I make often is that a good link strategy will yield limited results or no material results without a strong foundation of content. In fact, we say that (in round numbers) 30% of a website’s SEO success is based on “on page” factors. On-page factors refer to well-optimized content with good use of keywords, meta tags, header tags, search engine friendly URLs and optimized source code.
The math is obvious. We like to say that about 70% of a website’s SEO is based on off-page factors. Primarily, this refers to the extent to which others think your content is good. At first, this sounds very strange. How can others determine how good my content is? And, how can Google (and other engines) determine what others think?
Consider a comment made by a Google engineer at the Online Marketing Summit conference I attended last October. He said this: “Google doesn’t care about your content. Google cares about who cares about your content.” What he means, is when other content (on other websites) link to your content, they are “casting a vote.” for your content.
The Google technology explanation describes how this works. Essentially, other web pages link to your content and Google considers that a “vote” for your content.
To accentuate this point consider how Google’s origin as Backrub, is based on this concept of keeping score of the popularity of your content.
So, if creating links to content is so critical to SEO success then why don’t we just go out and buy a g-zillion links to our content? Well, some do. First, consider that if you pay a site to link to you, that is frowned upon by Google and the other major engines. We don’t condone it.
Let’s go back to the comment by the Google engineer. In fact, Google does care about your content. He went on to say that the more relevant, keyword-rich content you have (along with a search engine friendly architecture), the more links your content will naturally attract.
Then, if you pay someone to build legitimate links to your website (not pay the website to link to you), those links will be well supported by your content and provide good SEO value.
Now, let’s go back to the 30/70 ratio although, this is admittedly hearsay, not a statistic backed up by Google. The point to this ratio is this. If you build a strong foundation in your SEO plan with great, relevant content, then the links you get will carry weight in SEO value.
Of course, the Google PR value of the source of the links counts as well. The point here is that links without content are not effective.
I often talk with marketers about the difference between SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay per click advertising). I remind myself that, unlike me and my team at Find and Convert (and others in our business), most marketers don’t spend their days thinking about Internet marketing strategies as we do.
So, when we look at the difference between SEO and PPC, it goes beyond the costs. After all, most marketers understand that PPC can cost a lot more than SEO. But, for so many marketers PPC (also known as SEM) is the path of least resistance.
Many marketers believe they can measure results from PPC easier than from SEO strategies. But, let’s examine some of the facts.
We spend a lot of our time producing reports for clients. These reports summarize (usually in painstaking detail) many statistics. For the sake of this blog post I’ll hone in on the most telling stats which really point to the advantages of SEO over PPC.
Time and again we see that visitors to our client’s websites which come from organic searches spend more time on the website, visit more pages and have lower bounce rates than paid search traffic. The first two stats mentioned here should be self evident. A bounce rate refers to someone who visits a web page on your site and does not visit another page, essentially “bouncing” off your site.
Moreover, when we provide reports on our PPC plans for clients, we track the cost of conversion (the desired action for the client). Such conversion costs are tracked for the ads and for the keywords. The most telling conversion cost is for the keywords we track. This metric really tells us the cost to produce a lead for the most desirable keywords.
All too often we see marketers show the most interest in the most competitive keywords. They wind up paying dearly for these keywords simply because they are competitive.
In SEO strategies, we are able to (with a lot of hard work) build optimization strategies for select keywords which are less competitive (long tail keywords). For example, we work hard for a client to rank on page one for “project accounting software.” But, the software client we represent has a product that runs only on Oracle. So, when someone searches for “oracle project accounting software,” we hit a home run in ranking and in a qualified website visitor.
So, the message in this post is to think long term with SEO strategies. Do the hard work which will require ongoing care and feeding, but can have long lasting and cost effective sales results through organic search traffic. And, don’t be afraid to target lower searched, less competitive and long-tail keywords.
I’ve always said I’d rather be found by the 10 people who are a perfect fit, than targeting 1000 people who may be a fit but are harder to reach and therefore a higher risk search strategy.
I’ve written before about the importance of merit based link building. I talk about it everyday with our clients. So, here I go again writing about it.
Wait a minute - the title of this post says it’s about press releases. Right….
Too many marketers have a one dimensional view of their press releases. They think a press release is an announcement designed to produce some public relations (that other “PR”) value. Once upon a time, I hawked press releases in a previous life, working the editors and analysts hoping to get ink and win kudos from my boss and my sales counterparts.
Marketers should think of their press releases as content for their website. Even more, they should think of press releases as content that can be syndicated across the web. And, it is a great opportunity for merit based links back to your website, ie., SEO, ie., Google juice!
Those of us in the Internet Marketing business refer to “Google juice” as any content which helps us get indexed by Google. The most powerful Google juice is content which has valuable links anchored from our desirable keyword phrases on a web page of relevant content.
Another term for this simply is an optimized press release. If we optimize our web content for search engine optimization (SEO), then an optimized press release is just another form of optimized content.
The difference is that an optimized press release can get distributed over a search engine friendly wire service such as PRWeb and BusinessWire. And, it can produce valuable and juiced up links, anchored from some of your favorite keywords.
Understanding this should inspire marketers not to limit press releases to the most newsworthy stories in their company. A good marketer should be thinking of press releases as a key component to their SEO strategy. That’s because a good marketer understands that in SEO content is king, and press releases can make for great content. And, great content produces merit based links. This is the SEO circle of life!
Take for example this press release. In this release we announced a client engagement. Regardless of your opinion of the news value, note the anchor text linking in this press release. By optimizing it for keywords such as “SEO strategy” with links back to our website, we are producing valuable one-way links from news services such as PRWeb: http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2008/3/prweb774424.htm.
So, juice up your press releases by optimizing them and creating great content and great links for SEO value. It’s not too hard to do it and definitely worth the effort.
We often see web content in PDF format. In most cases PDF content can be read by search engines. But, if the content is made up of something that was scanned and saved in a PDF format, that content is image based. And, of course you already know that image based content can NOT be read by search engines.
To ensure your PDF content is SEF (search engine friendly) make sure the content can be read by search engines. Start by saving a plain text document (word processing, spreadsheets, etc.) in a PDF format.
To get the maximum SEO value from your PDF content, link important keywords from your PDF document into relevant pages on your website containing those keywords (don’t over do it though).
In your PDF document, select File, Properties. In the Description tab type in meta data including a Title comprised of a few keyword phrases which represent the main theme of your document. Enter the subject (a short sentence) and a description using the main keywords in the document (once again, don’t over do it).
Once you’ve done this, you have optimized your PDF document and when it is placed on your website you will get search engine optimization value from your PDF content!
BTW, you need Adobe Acrobat Professional to do this, but it is well worth the price if you place PDF content on your website.
One of the most overlooked best practices in search engine optimization (SEO) involves naming a web page. Each website page which is optimized for good content has an opportunity (in SEO terms) to be named after the main theme of the page.
When search engines crawl your website they consider all factors to rate the quality of your content and links. One way to tell the search engines you care about your website visitors is by naming URLs using specific keywords.
Even competitive keywords can be optimized for good results, especially when combined with a keyword specific URL and a long tail keyword.
Here are two examples:
Find and Convert provides SEO services. While we market our services nationwide, to compete for the keyword “seo” is very difficult. So, one of the long tail keyword phrases we have optimized for is “seo services tampa” since we’re located in Tampa Bay. At the time of this blog post, our search engine listing is in the middle of page 1 in Google for this phrase with “seo” in the URL ranking on page 1.
Our SEO services start with a survey of your business and your marketing … We operate out of Tampa Bay, Florida and serve businesses from the east coast … www.findandconvert.com/seo.html - 47k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
Another example is “outsourced medical transcription.” The number one position has “outsource” in the URL.
OSI a USA company providing medical transcription company services, HIPAA medicaltranscription medical billing outsourcing service, SEO copy writing … www.outsourcestrategies.com/ - 33k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
Some website’s architecture (or content management system) does not allow specific naming of website URLs. That can be a very limiting factor. Website URLs with the exact name of the keyword phrase for which you want to be found can make a big difference, e.g., www.yourcompany.com/outsourced-medical-transcription-services.htm.
A similar idea is to buy domain names based on your most desirable keyword phrases. You may have to get creative, or buy long domain names. Don’t be afraid to buy domain names using hyphen separators like the example above. The way to make this a white hat (legitimate) tactic is to put original content on your new domain and link it back to your main website. Put this content and URL to work for you using ethical SEO practices through keyword-specific URLs. You just might see your search engine ranking positions (SERPs) increase significantly!
At Find and Convert we’re all about measuring. We provide our SEO clients detailed metrics. You know, the usual stuff including unique visits, page-views, time on site, conversions, bounce rates, keywords, referral sources, yada, yada, yada. I’m not trivializing it by any means. The metrics we track for SEO and PPC are very important.
But, as more of our clients enter the brave new Web 2.0 world the question is how do we measure results? Great question! Not a simple answer….But, there are ways to measure results from your Web 2.0 campaigns.
If you’re blogging, you can measure RSS subscriptions. You can measure how many others link to your blog. Who are they?
You can measure how many social bookmarks you receive from popular sites like DIGG and StumbleUpon and how easily your social media content is found in Technorati and Del.icio.us.
You can certainly monitor and measure the comments on your blog. You can see the tone of comments and the trends in the comments. In fact, you may find comments to be invaluable “research.”
Don’t overlook your web stats reports. You can track referral sources from social media sites. When you see social media referrals increase, that’s a trend to watch. If you run campaigns in social media sites, track your web stats carefully to observe traffic from these sites and time spent on your site. Make sure to have conversion strategies in place for these referral strategies so you can track them easily.
Don’t overlook tools such as Google Alerts and Yahoo Alerts. In Google Webmaster you can track links from social sites.
Internet Marketing strategies require planning, measuring and revising. The methods and tools used to measure Web 2.0 results vary somewhat from measuring SEO and PPC, but not drastically. The web analytics field is evolving. Keep up to date and profit from the results you can measure.
A bounce rate refers to the rate at which people “reject” a page on which they have landed in your website. Website analytics tools consider a visitor a bounce if they only see one page and leave your site. Some tools use time spent on a landing page as a bounce rate criteria, e.g., 10 or 15 seconds.
Analytics tools provide bounce rate information at several levels. I’ll use Google Analytics (G.A.) as the reference. G.A. provides an average bounce rate across your entire website, plus bounce rates for each page. My favorite bounce rate metric is for keywords.
Measuring bounce rates for keywords is a very meaningful metric because you can see how well your website visitors are consuming your content based on keywords delivering traffic to your website.
If you are getting traffic to your website for your top 10 keywords, and one of your top 3 keywords has a high bounce rate, you need to examine the content. It’s possible your content is not adequately feeding your website visitors what they want. Perhaps the content doesn’t do a strong enough job of conveying the main thing about this keyword.
Sometimes, content revisions for keywords with high bounce rates can make a big difference in conversions.
Do the math. If your bounce rate improves by 10% the conversion rate impact can be substantial on leads or sales.
There are other factors which contribute to bounce rates, including where they came from. Generally, we pay closest attention to the bounce rates for keywords coming from search engines. The premise is that someone searched on a keyword phrase and landed on your website. We like to say, “this person is looking for you.” So, when they find you, did you do a good job of connecting with the visitor? Of course, not all visitors will be relevant or qualified. But, we’re talking about statistics. So, we like to maximize the statistical probability of delivering a good match between keyword searches and landing page content.
Any search engine optimization or pay-per-click strategy requires paying very close attention to bounce rates. Studying bounce rates as indicators of the connection between visitor’s searches and your content can play a big role in successful internet marketing practices.
