SEO for Dummies

To optimize a website, you have to look at it from the perspective of a search engine. A search engine considers two basic factors: On-Page and Off-page. Therefore, it’s important for a website to adhere to on-page and off-page optimization guidelines.  Although both types of optimization require very different techniques, they must both exist in the proper balance for either to work – consider them the yin and yang of SEO.

On-Page optimization focuses on the ease of link flow through a site and the clarity of focus on each page. Streamlining a site’s architecture allows both a visitor and a search engine to easily navigate from page to page on within a site – no circling around, trying to find what you’re looking for.

Starting with the home page, internal linking should start from the broadest category and continue subsequent linking to more and more specific pages. For example, Computer Retailer Home Page> Computers>Laptops>Macintosh>MacBook>MacBook 16 GB.

Additionally, a clear market focus on each page is important for on-page optimization. If you’re trying to rank for a specific keyword, it’s important to let a search engine know exactly which page in your site is dedicated to that topic. This is achieved through keyword co-occurrence on the page and through internal linking within the pages of the site.

Off-page optimization is achieved through establishing valuable connections with other sites on the internet. Associating your site with other authoritative sites through linking will pass value and authority to your site. It’s important to know that both quality and quantity of links are important, but one link from a quality site is far more valuable than 100 links from a weak site.

Of course the science of SEO is far more complex than this simple explanation, but this can be a starting place for further exploration. When integrating optimization into your business strategy, always start by improving your on-page and off-page factors.

For your convenience we have provided links to more prominent posts from the past. Each provides additional detail on the topics which we have merely scratched the surface in this post, specifically the topic of on page and off page SEO.

• On Page Optimization – The Roots of Relevance
• On Page SEO for Link Distribution
• How To SEO: Off Page Optimization Tips
• Keywords, SEO and the Tipping Point
• What is SEO, Really?
• What is the Real Value of a Link?
• Organic Search and Thematic Keyword Modifiers

                          

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SEO Tips for Monetizing Your Web Property

This elusive, yet objective necessity creeps into even the most astute web properties, which may have been started on a whim, or even the most expansive enterprise level properties who may have drank their own kool-aid without gauging the need, market or appropriate degree of supply, demand and where their site fits into the e-commerce or monetization food chain.

Stepping back, what are some of the ways to monetize your web property?

• Software, Applications, Widgets or Plugins
• Memberships
• E-books, Courses, Tutorials or How To Information Products
• Physical Products
• Advertisements
• Affiliate Offers via links to other sites
• Click or Call to Action Hooks
• Lead Generation
• Branding

Software, Applications, Widgets, Plugins: Software will always have a place online, while it might not be the easiest way (due to the upfront costs), it can be one of the most profitable ways to monetize a site.

With the web expanding and the the number of niche audiences concurrently growing as a result, creating software applications, widgets, plugins, website themes  or applications is a sure-fire method to cash in on traffic.

In the event that you are not that creative, or want to skip the development process, there are a number of places you can go to purchase a license to resell specific applications then use keyword rich domains to leverage the problem / solution search queries and direct them to your newly developed web property.

Memberships: There is always someone looking for something and for every market, there is a segment, for every segment there is a niche and for every niche there is a micro-niche to explore, position and monetize if you use the appropriate trajectory to position your property and pitch accordingly.

The adult industry is one example of this thriving model, but it does not have to stand out as the only possible variation where this type of business is applicable. This is one way of owning the conversation or creating a privileged type of “information exchange” whether that information is video, a forum, articles or industry insights, those who prefer to pay more for those privileges are rewarded with the benefit of such exclusive “inside” information.

Other examples where this could become a prevalent model is through discount wholesale to consumer (B2C) websites; where consumers could purchase items below retail cost. The volume of the site (purchasing in bulk) would offset the sliding scale incentives most manufacturers require in order to provide wholesale pricing to one centralized source.

Memberships are not always front-loaded, where the community is required to pay to get access or become a member. Oftentimes the benefit or value is transparent to the users and the site owner has affiliate offers baked into the offers they provide. These types of “structured kick-backs” are excellent monetization models for performance-driven industries, where exposure and conversions facilitate a profit for both the web property and the mfg. / product or service provider.

E-books, Courses, Tutorials or How-To Information Products: This by far is one of the most common methods for monetizing traffic. The marketing medium of SEO, email marketing, social media and PPC all succumb to sites who offer information based how to products, tutorials or useful / targeted information.

Everything from link wheel web 2.0 properties, article marketing, SEO, PPC and / or social media all have hints of people selling solutions to the masses for the “right price”…

While much of the content out there arguably is not worth the pixels they occupy, it all depends on what your needs are, where you are at in the discovery phase and what unique problems or situations you need solutions for that warrant the need to acquire such information.

Like anything, value is subjective, and e-books from guru’s selling quick fixes, loopholes and snake-oil can often be the most abused forms of e-commerce; there is still a wealth of good information available using this medium.

You just have to be able to distinguish known trusted sources that have proven tips, techniques and tactics and are passing them along to others vs. the shallow copycats and parrots who often repackage dated information and pass it off as the next big thing.

Physical Products: Selling products via E-commerce embraces everything from Clothing, Shoes, Books, Computers, Electronics and the entire array of ancillary supporting products akin to their category. Although the barrier to entry may be more competitive and the needs to have a firm privacy policy, area for inventory and solid reputation in addition to a merchant account, EIN number and all of the things that go along with commerce, it is one of the most proven monetization methods online.

Particularly for brick and mortar businesses looking for more ways to shift product through channels which already exist to facilitate their own retail operations.

My suggestion is, unless you have (1) the budget and (2) a year to offset the time it will take to gain traction for your market, keywords and products, then you will need to use other methods aside from SEO to supplement traffic and engagement for your web property.

One way to cut the time it takes to hit the top 10 is through using keyword-rich domains, which have the ability to rank for the “exact match” variations for the keywords in the domain; or build a content rich authority site which will allow you to laterally scale later through using flat site architecture (for products) and subfolders for new categories.

Some of the most trafficked sites online are either sites that sell products direct or are portals like amazon.com and overstock.com which sell virtually every type, model and category of products you would find in commercial retail environments and have either have fulfillment arrangements or stock levels themselves to accommodate sales.

Advertisements: With traffic and an audience, comes the ability to monetize impressions. Traffic comes and goes; the web is not static and is always a work in progress. As such, search engines seek out websites with authority to provide guideposts to consumers.

With different advertising networks available from Google, private interests groups and others, finding the ideal place to send traffic can be a lucrative monetization method, much like the affiliate segment of this post.

Affiliate Offers: Just as search engines send traffic, business owners from lucrative websites also know that authority sites within the market their products or services cater to can send even more aggregate traffic through affiliate marketing programs than all the major search engines combined.

Looking at your top 10 referrer sources using an analytics platform can shed light on which websites would make the most sense to consider advertising on, if they have advertising options available. This way you are diversifying your dependency on any one means of delivering new visitors to your website and essentially hedging yourself with alternative channels for monetization.

When you leverage the power of using another site to siphon traffic to your own or pass that traffic along from monetizing your own website, you have to think of the tangential traffic opportunities that exist.

This means that you don’t have to rank for the same keywords, as long as they do, since it is the same audience which now has a buffer to read and consume their content (and based on the quality of that content can set the stage for your ads).

That traffic has to leave sometimes, and with proper positioning, your website is the next likely destination based on the continuity of their sites focus to yours, your ad copy, image, size and call to action.

By understanding that your website about cosmetics may also facilitate advertising or affiliate opportunities for weight loss products or cosmetic surgery affiliate offers due to the mind-set of the consumer that is consuming that content (regardless of what keywords were used to deliver that traffic).

Women interested in how they look who are concerned about cosmetic trends, may also want to lose weight or have some cosmetic procedure to enhance their appearance. Using this cross market or cross advertising appeal makes perfect sense from a demographic or psychographic perspective.

SEO Tip: There is a plethora of affiliate programs out there, just ask Google using a simple search command such as:

Cosmetic Affiliate *

Or

Cosmetic AND affiliates

Just replace the word “Cosmetic” with the market or niche you are seeking to monetize and let the wildcard search or the AND command fill in the blanks. You will find the most popular offers this way to investigate for continuity.

Click or Call to Action Hooks: If you have a content rich website, you can be your own best affiliate. More specifically, you can use the contextual articles on your website (which should be themed based on keyword research and market analysis) to cover the various nodes of relevance within your website.

For competitive keywords, you may need hundreds of topical posts, for less competitive keywords a few mentions/articles is enough or leveraging the power of internal links and co-occurrence of keywords as they appear in other articles to link to your preferred landing pages.

By implementing value-rich calls to action to your landing pages which are designed to cultivate the proper response, you can funnel those visitors into your CRM or have them call you direct where you can close them based on their needs.

Lead Generation: Aside from simply targeting keywords and of offers that make sense to you (from your own businesses perspective), you can also with a little more work and lateral linking create subdomains or sub folders containing semantically related content which in turn could be sponsored by others seeking to generate leads from such traffic.

For example, if you had a large construction website that focused on remodeling, you could also optimize several other real estate related keywords. Those keywords in turn would attract their own audience (based on the optimized pages, their content and their occurrence within the new site segment).

You could then pass those leads on for a price or use an ad rotator script to rotate advertisements for affiliate offers or sponsors who are effectively providing you with the ability to keep scaling your website through adding additional copy.

What is the benefit? The answer is simple, the more themed content your website contains, the more traffic it can attract from search engines, referrers and social media. What you do with that traffic is up to you, but you could pass it along, sell it or use it for internal links to produce a higher SERP position for even more landing pages (which is in your own best interest).

Even using PPC to buy traffic for a fraction of the conversion is not a bad idea. Since the more content you have on your website (based on the subject) the lower your PPC cost per keyword is due to a higher relevance score.

Combine that with the inherent tendency for search engines to reward content-rich sites voicing an expert opinion, you can get paid to produce quality content for consumption while monetizing various tangential facets simultaneously.

Branding: Branding is also along the same lines, it is not the immediate affect it produces, but what you do with the traffic that arises as a result of the brand equity your website has as a result of the proper cultivation.

I hope you found these ideas useful and insightful, although they only scratch the surface, this should still provide food for thought and offer a few guidelines for ways to monetize your website and overcome adversity when it comes to making dollars and cents. 

You may ask, how does SEO fit into monetization? Much like a glass, SEO is a vehicle that can embrace any market, website or niche based on a semantic array of keywords. Just like a glass does not discriminate on what liquids it contains or can dispense, SEO is in much the same way a means to generate more traffic to any of the methods specified above.

How or why you use it depends on which audience you intends to reach, influence or cater to, but the undercurrent remains the same, it is a means to deliver traffic, once that traffic arrives, a different method is required to facilitate conversion. Even though they are independant, both SEO and conversion work through the various tactics outlined in this article.

                          

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Using Video to Close Prospects

In my opinion, the fourth and final element is originality and making sure that your site stands out. You will want people to remember your site long after they leave it. The best compliment you can ever get would be if someone tells their buddy about this great site they found the other day and recommended that they check it out. If you ever hear this- mission accomplished.

In essence, a unique Web site is the final element and this can be accomplished in many different ways. I will talk about biggest marketing trend of the moment first: videos.

Videos are the wave of the future and it’s all because the general public is lazy and they don’t like to read. Unfortunately, the Internet is all about reading – for now. So when consumers see a video, they almost immediately jump into action and hit play. Videos are also beneficial because they can show things that you can’t describe in words. For example, you can show how people are wearing your clothes, how to use your new invention and where your offices are located.

Videos are fantastic for giving your Web site what I call a ‘human element’. Suddenly, the visitor doesn’t feel alone. When it is no longer just a screen, your Web site and the visitor, great things can happen! If you do the video right, your visitors will feel like they are taking a journey with you; the video is the introduction to that journey.

I saw a great video on the homepage of a real estate Web site: the owner of the company simply greeting me and thanking me for using her site. She walked me through the different tools that I can use on her site and how to navigate it. More videos of her popped up on various pages throughout the site so that I felt like she was my personal tour guide. However, this did get annoying after the second video, so be careful not to go overboard.

Now that you are very excited about creating a video for your Web site, take a moment and read my important disclaimers. Here is your No. 1 rule: every video must be under one minute and fifteen seconds. Remember in my first post when I said that you have approximately fifteen seconds to grab the attention of your visitors with sales copy before they click off? Same rule applies in video land.

No matter how much everyone likes you, no visitor wants to watch and listen to what you have to say for more than one minute, if that! Just like comedians always like to leave the stage on a good note, you should end your video long before your visitor has a chance to check how much time is left on the stream. Say what you need to say or show what you need to show. Then get off the air.

You can speak directly to your visitors and welcome them to your site or you can play some music and hire someone to make you some intense graphics. You can run your voice over some animation or you can show your audience a chart of important statistics. So long as you are under a minute and fifteen seconds, you will be fine.

Other things to consider besides a video to make your Web site unique:

-Cover Flow: show off your amazing portfolio, feature your different products or post funny pictures. This is a great feature because it uses the same prime real estate on your home page, but rotates pictures so that your visitor can see so much more!

-Flash: a very simple way to trick your visitors into thinking that your site is interactive. Super enlarge icons when visitors scroll over them, make funny icons dance while the cursor is moving or simply dim the lights in the background when your visitor is requesting an enlarged view of your product.

-Google Maps: this is helpful for visitors to see where you are located. It is a really convenient feature for them and it makes you look like you are a lot more technically savvy than you let on.

-Music: I hesitate on this because music can easily annoy people and making them turn down the volume on their computers and violates the ‘don’t make them think!’ rule. But who am I to judge? Sometimes it works. I have encountered some Web sites that play funny sound effects when I scroll over something or visit another page. This was somewhat less annoying.

Ending on a video note, it is important to realize that videos really are the wave of the future as far as the Internet, advertising and communicating. In fact, not too long ago I met a very interesting salesman who sold video email hosting for businesses and personal use. Many companies that are strictly focused on producing great videos for other companies are quickly springing up and growing fast. Finally, more and more advertisers are relying on video advertisements to get the job done better than their print ads.

However, this could be just another marketing fad when all is said and done. I guess it depends on how attached the average Internet surfer is to words. My guess is not very much.

The key factor to remember from this blog post is to make your video memorable and to end your video before your visitors end their session on your Web site first.

In case you missed the prior 3 posts from this series, please follow the links below.

• I Have Traffic… Now What?
• I Have Call To Action… Now What?
• I Have Design… Now What?

                          

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Building SEO Links with WordPress

A WordPress blog is arguably the most SEO-friendly platform for content creation. Not only is it simple to use, but with the addition of the right SEO plugins, you can basically set it on auto-pilot. It’s important to note, however, that you must still understand basic linking strategy in order to effectively utilize your WordPress blog.

Starting with blog content, you must thoughtfully plan your approach. Write a blog post with your keywords in mind and be sure to mention the exact keyword approximately 1-2 times throughout the post. Aim to write at least 400 words in each post and mention the keyword(s) within the first 100 words – this helps spiders to identify them as important. Additionally, create co-occurrence by including a keyword in the title of your post.

Once the post is written, it’s time to upload it to WordPress and create your links. The following guidelines are essential to remember when building a link.

• Always use a keyword as anchor text for your link.
• Link to the first occurrence of the keyword (which should be within the first 100 words of the post.)
• Make sure that you consistently link to the same url from a given keyword across all blog posts.
• Linking from multiple keywords is okay but only if each link leads to a unique url.
• Try not to link excessively – a minimum content:link ratio is 100 words:1 link.

By following these guidelines, you can skillfully mold your blog into a content-creating, internal link-building machine. If you haven’t already, build a blog on your site and start today!

                          

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SEO and Big Brands

A potential customer isn’t going to use a search engine to look for “tax consulting”, find Deloitte, then use a shopping cart to buy 100 hours of consulting service. Deloitte’s site is not transactional in nature; there’s isn’t a direct response/action taken from a potential customer browsing the site. So, can Deloitte, and other big brands benefit from SEO, when e-commerce isn’t at stake?

To answer this question, let’s ask another question; why do companies pay for advertisements in magazines, television commercials, radio and other forms of traditional advertising? If you say they do this for “brand recognition” or “brand awareness”, then I would agree with you. A Gatorade commercial during halftime of an NBA game isn’t asking the viewer to pick up the phone and buy 5 cases of Gatorade; however, the commercial is reinforcing a message that they’d like you to associate with its BRAND. So, why is search engine exposure any different?

Big brands have to decide how they want to be perceived; and most do an excellent job of this with their advertisements. For search engines, it’s not much different. Selecting keywords and phrases that they feel best represent their brand, such as “best hydrating sports drink” or, “world’s best tax consulting firm” or “most luxurious sedan” are great examples of how companies may want their  brands to be viewed.

If this is the case, then it’s time to get optimizing and FIRST, determine how it is you’d like your company to be viewed, and where you’d like this search engine exposure coming from.

After all, search engines provide a more exact way to shape your brand’s image…by searching for qualities brands would like to portray!

                          

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Harness the Power of the WWW using International SEO

But what does this mean to you? The WWW implies that somehow in some way, shape or form that you can augment your SEO strategy by using exposure to other countries, cultures and websites through leveraging the power of the web.

Taking a few tips from our SEO playbook, you can always visit the search engine URL by country and use a few search operators to find which sites have authority.

For example in this post, we discussed the power of the WWW standalone search to find the sites with the most dominance. In another post (on finding online directories) we showed you how to leverage the power of the AND Boolean search operator in tandem with select keywords; and yet in another post, we show you how to use the wild card search to find hidden online opportunities.

Since we are not the only ones who think like this, another quick tip is to use ALEXA which is well versed in international territories, as least how they pertain to the most visited and frequented sites online.

If I visit ALEXA (by country) I can quickly skim to see if there are any related websites which could yield opportunities for advertising, cross-promotion or links, or I can use Google and use the country extention and use the WWW, Wildcard or Boolean Search operators to find link-rich properties.

For example using Google.co.uk I was quickly able to find bebo and orkut, using Alexa I was able to findproperties like folkd, jumptags,  ning and others. The point is, if you have a product or service and there is an international audience, don’t overlook the power of international promotion, social media or international link building to add a more robust link profile or referrer base to increase the potency of your SEO.

Aside from that application alone, you can always add additional languages to your website using translators (although I would encourage someone from that culture to edit your work) or create software, plugins, themes or modules to promote in those countries which can provide link weight back to your ideal web property.

                          

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Which Types of Keywords are Best for SEO?

We are often confronted with challenges such as this with multiple clients, such as wanting to rank for the most competitive keyword but they (a) have a dated site platform or architecture (b) have no authority within the search query space (c) no relevant internal links or (d) not enough content to push other more optimal sites aside to take their spot.

So what do you do in this instance?

1. Consumer Type: Identify the type of consumers which would best suit your short-term and long-term ranking objectives.
2. Mid Tail to Long Tail Keywords: Find targeted mid-tail and long-tail keyword modifiers (by using the link wheel, related search) and other less traditional keyword research methods.
3. Creating Appropriate Landing Pages: Identify or create critical landing pages for conversion.
4. Mapping out Keywords for Conversion: Create a solid base of new content based on keyword research using a wider array of keyword variations to gain more stickiness in search engines.
5. Second Level Push / Link Insurance: Create a method for producing secondary exposure and / or ranking factor for the new content.
6. The Litmus Test: Measure results and conversions, then rinse and repeat.

Consumer Type: Ideally, you should focus on consumers further along in the sales cycle instead of the broad match keywords “like the root phrase” which represents consumers searching for something the first time or using the query for informative purposes instead of commerce.

For example, what is the likelihood of someone buying a car from searching for the word “car” vs. using a search query that includes the “make, model, color or year” as a modifier instead?

You can see the importance of this tactic in conversions as you target the more appropriate keywords which deliver those interested or motivated consumers to the appropriate destination on your website which in turn deliver a higher degree of user engagement and content consumption.

The longer a person stays on your website, the more likely a conversion will occur if your pages pass the litmus test of trust triggers, appealing design, have a strong call to action or have impeccable grammar.

Mid Tail to Long Tail Keywords: Competition exists and unless you have a large budget and a year to spend dethroning a competitor or the top 30 competitors who occupy the helm of a particular keyword or key phrase, then targeting a less competitive variation should be a natural part of your SEO Strategy.

I have written extensive posts on keyword modifiers, targeting the long-tail or how to target multiple keywords simultaneously in the past (follow the links provided). So, the need to be redundant is not necessary, so, I suggest you read those for further elaboration on each topic.

Creating Appropriate Landing Pages: While this is a given for most, the need to create unique and individual pages for specific keyword variations should not be overlooked. You could easily write a book on the topic of creating landing pages that convert or how to structure which elements should be prominent on those pages. Once again, referred to posts from the past (in the link above) for further elaboration are in order.

Mapping out Keywords for Conversion: This is the first step in any SEO campaign, without having a firm direction, it will be impossible to gauge the effectiveness of the campaign or establish key performance indicators as baseline benchmarks.

Using SERPs along (search engine result page) positioning is only one metric, you can also use things like bounce rate, engagement time, page exit rate, sales conversions, sign ups or subscriptions as a baseline to determine how effective your methods are and what types of results the new keyword variations are producing.

Here are a few posts covering the topic of keyword research and some of the less common ways to conduct keyword research to find treasure troves of low hanging fruit that can deliver more traffic than a mid-tail or top level phrase when aggregated in tandem.

Second Level Push / Link Insurance:  Using other web 2.0 properties, article marketing or RSS feed aggregation, it is possible to build deep links to (a) your new pages and (b) to other web properties to create a holistic ecosystem of referrers to your preferred landing pages.

This second level push should be equally as encompassing and thorough as your initial push and provide a stream of targeted anchor text and or visitors (based on the authority of the sites used) to further your primary web properties position in regard to total market share for the keywords in question.

The Litmus Test: Even some of the most elaborate strategies fail. It is not how elaborate or well thought out the plan is, it is how it is executed and how scalable and repeatable it is that matter.

Instead of getting caught up on the processes alone, implement them, test them, keep the ones that work and dismiss the less effective techniques. SEO is a work in progress and with metrics changing daily, you can never second guess which techniques (that worked in the past) have been filtered out from making their mark in search engines.

The basis of quality, unique content, engaging copy, benefit rich value propositions, great web design, straightforward navigation, a suitable volume of supporting copy from various related keyword clusters (using internal links to pass value to preferred landing pages), refined usability and solution oriented persuasive writing are the perfect complements to SEO.

Just don’t ignore the long tail, realize that even though they may have entered with one keyword, that interest is pliable and the consumer may change in mid stream and explore other areas of your site.

People are complex creatures that transcend typical psychological patterns when shopping, as long as your site has all of the proper trappings, engagement is assured. Just don’t make them think too much or try to force the viewer through goading them or insulting their intelligence.

Let them decide, place the necessary signals in place, but leave the choice to them. As a wise teacher said to me once, don’t force, allow…

So, allow users the same choice when engaging your content, otherwise, all the SEO in the world won’t matter if they bounce.

                          

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3 Primary SEO Metrics

There are various metrics which contribute, such as relevant titles, canonicalization, server settings, site age, exposure, citation and others, but we are referring to the more immediate elements under your control that you can contribute to daily that can make a difference.

Content Relevance:

Content relevance thresholds are the first phase in overcoming the barrier to entry. Sites that occupy top ranking positions have earned the authority based on the sites local and global co-occurrence of keywords and related content.

This content should be based on competitive market analysis and nodes of relevance that are present in the market. Coupled with keyword modifiers, you can take base level phrases and align them with alternative “search savvy” phrases to increase traffic and engagement levels.

These alternative variations are often less competitive than the more searched root phrases, but can yield significant traffic in a fraction of the time and then “stem” into other related mid-tail and long-tail keyword variations.

For a definition of root phrase think of the keyword “lawyer” for mid-tail “personal injury lawyer” for a long-tail variation a phrase like “affordable personal injury lawyer in ______” and adding a city or state would suffice.

Each of the keyword variations has a threshold of how many pages are competing for the top 10 positions in the search engine’s index. More competitive keywords require more time, content, links and coherent site architecture to dial-in a top ranking. Also, the more links and / or content you have the easier it is to sculpt rankings based on keywords that represent the most value for your business.

It is this content that anchors the body of content or preferred landing pages in the SERPs, based on the coherence and continuity that is reflected in trends, synonyms and / or themed keywords from within a market or niche.

Each page functions like a piece in a puzzle and contributes to a websites on page relevance score and authority within a niche, segment or market. If no clear champion exists, then it is easy to occupy multiple nodes of relevance (much like Wikipedia) by using the citation of peer review (others linking to a site) as well as reinforcing topical relevance at every opportunity from using keyword-rich internal links.

Having a higher relevance score allows you to (1) use PPC to augment traffic and (2) rank organically through unifying the content (using internal links) to provide supportive rankings to other themed pages while ranking for specific / designated keywords for each page.

Although we prefer to keep things organic for higher ROI, each has its place (organic positioning or paid advertising) in the grand scheme of online marketing.

Keyword Rich Anchor Text:

On page optimization and content relevance need to be combined with internal linking. These keyword-rich anchors should be based on solid keyword research and also built into the site architecture via the main site navigation, the url / naming conventions and as inbound links from other sites.

Based on how pages are internally linked designates which pages are returned in the SERPs for specific keyword queries.  Links from other sites (deep links if they link to pages other than the homepage) are responsible for adding significant weight to the page through a metric known as peer review.

The more sites that link to a page or a website with a cluster of keywords represented by the on page content equivalents score a higher degree of relevance than websites who ignore these metrics and (a) do not use relevant internal links or (b) gain inbound links from outside sources to the website to increase relevance score.

Despite the various discrepancies in a unified body of SEO logic (based on collective and / or personal experience), we can only speak from our own experience. In this capacity, we have found that once a site acquires a degree of authority via page rank, backlinks or age, the internal links can pass along that ranking factor just as external links from other sites are used to rank web pages.

In this vein, there is very little difference between how internal and or external links are calculated from the standpoint of search engines. Both contribute to a websites inherent ranking factors and should be encouraged to support the pages ideal keyword variations the page is intended to rank for.

Keyword Research and Site Architecture:

While these are not the last, but rather the first metrics a site owner should address and the content and internal links are supplemental to it, it is the last on our list to discuss. This is the starting point – “the alpha” point for market domination and where many ranking battles are fought and won from the perspective of the more subtle aspects of SEO.

The trends in the market, both seasonal and otherwise can be found through competitive research analysis and vertical market analysis. Based on that analysis, upper management can determine which keywords and / or phrases yield the most lucrative traffic for your offering.

The premise of SEO is to take this actionable intelligence and then integrate it into a solid game plan which mirrors the on page and off page needs through a thread of continuity. The more this continuity is reinforced naturally from various metrics from both within the site and from outside the site, the more referential integrity spawns as a result.

This integrity translates as relevance and authority (which is the real purpose of optimization). SEO is not designed to compete with others, but rather streamline the continuity and coherence of your own content to (a) elicit the regard of others within the space and (b) provide structure for search engines to access, interpret and score than content so they it may refer other users to it as a result of the signals amplified through the unification of best practices that are conducive to the search engines design.

Search engines are social barometers designed to serve useful and authoritative content to those in need or searching for that content based on the keyword variations they use in query space, i.e. the search box.

This means that the more relevant the nodes of relevance are (using titles, url naming conventions, meta titles and descriptions, internal links and inbound links from other sites), the higher a page and / or pages within a site can rank for the keywords they were intended to.

By removing inconsistencies through manual revisions or using a CMS to automate best practices (such as tagging, internal linking based on keyword occurrence, etc.), you can let the template and content management system work on your behalf while your content team focuses on creating relevant content extracted from high level keyword intelligence.

This convergence of relevant content, traffic, user engagement and relevance are the crowning achievement of a well orchestrated SEO campaign which uses all of the moving parts to convey a unified purpose.

                          

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I Have Design, Now What?

Now that you have successfully created a call-to-action that transforms casual visitors into active participants, you should turn your focus to the third element of sales conversion: killer sales copy.

3) Informative, enticing and compelling sales copy is, in my opinion, the most important element of marketing. If I had to pick one thing to show up on someone’s screen when they visit my site, it would be sales copy. That is the one element that is either going to convince them to continue clicking through or to click off. The right sales copy has the potential to compensate for a horrible design or lack of call-to-action. Newspapers don’t underestimate the power of the written word and neither should you!

The first thing to concentrate on when you write your sales copy is remember to sell. If you know anyone who works in retail, then you know that there is a definite art in selling. It certainly takes the right kind of salesperson to convince you that the brightly colored comfort clog that resembles a smurf’s shoe (also known as a Croc) actually makes you look cool.

But that salesperson probably wasn’t telling you how the pink Croc brings out your eyes and makes you look taller. Fortunately, consumers are not that gullible.

Instead, the salesperson probably explained to the consumer how the design of the Croc was engineered to help with back pain and to ease the tension created in the spine from walking on concrete. They probably touched on the cushion-like material and how it eases the pain in one’s foot. One thing is for sure: they did not rely on its stylish fashion to turn this oddly named shoe into a must-have trend of the moment.

What is the lesson learned here? The consumer never wants to be sold. Instead, the consumer wants to be related to. The benefit that your Web site has over a store front is that you probably have a good idea of what kind of audience visits your Web site. The employees in a store have to take a guess as to what kind of person you are and, hence, what kind of items to sell you.

Your sales pitch starts there, at determining your target audience. Once you know who you are talking to, start selling your products/services by stating the facts, not fluff! I ask simple questions before I get started:

1. What is your company slogan/motto?
2. What makes your products/services the best?
3. What makes your company the better than others?
4. What are your most frequently asked questions?

The answers to all these questions should be in your sales copy. The bottom line is that consumers want to hear why they should put money down for a purchase. How will it make my life easier or better? Give the facts.

After you sell your product or service, sell your company. What sets you apart from the others? Do you have free shipping? Do you ship on the same day? Do you offer warranties or guarantees? How is your customer service? Have you won awards?

Remember that selling your product is not enough if there are other vendors that sell the same product as you. Your consumers want to know why they should buy from you and not the other guy.

The most important factor to remember is to give the facts! The finesse comes into play by making the facts sound amazingly enticing. Treat every fact as a sales point and a huge deal. Let them build upon each other.

Your facts should make people begin to think about their foot pain or about how terrible concrete is for their feet. By the time they reach the last sentence, they should be wondering what kinds of styles of Crocs are available. That is when you have the link to the Croc inventory page handy. Once they find a style that they love, you have successfully completed a sales conversion! Congratulations.

Final note on writing sales copy is make sure you have impeccable grammar and punctuation, which conveys professionalism and trustworthiness. This is where hiring an editor to give it a proof read can be a great idea if English class wasn’t your forte. No one wants to put down a credit card number on a site that looks and sounds amateur.

Also, don’t make your copy too long. If you are passionate about the product or services that you sell, you undoubtedly have a lot to say. But no one wants to read a novel, which is why I’m trying to wrap this blog post up soon. Just remember that you have unlimited space on your Web site, so use it. If you can’t fit everything on the homepage, create a special page that only talks about the kind of material used for a Croc.

If I had to sum up the secret to killer sales copy, I would say that the more information the better, just make it sound good!

                          

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Catching SEO Blunders

10 Common SEO Blunders That Could Make Your Rankings Dip.

1. Your .htaccess file gets corrupted, changed or hacked.
2. The robots.txt is altered and blocks the bots from crawling or indexing content.
3. A plugin, add-on/module or CMS system is malfunctioning and breaking naming conventions or creates 404 errors (broken links).
4. There is an excessive amount of duplicate content such as meta tags, server side elements, footer links, etc) that toggle an algorithmic suppression from search engines.
5. Server load time could cause a time-out, thus blocking bots from reaching key pages (which support the link flow for other pages).
6. You made too many changes too quickly to pages in your website, which can disrupt the trust and infrastructure your website previously had.
7. You built and or acquired or built too many links too fast and set of an algorithmic filter in search engines for unnatural link velocity.
8. You added too many pages too quickly (such as dumping 500 new pages into a site overnight) when you should have added them gradually to increase spider activity.
9. You excessively linked from common areas of the site from every page with the same anchor and thus cannibalized your SEO efforts of distinguishing each page as a relevant and unique target page.
10. Your website could be suffering from over-optimization or from linking out to a bad neighborhood (untrusted site).

One of the more common things is that your competition turned up the heat for their own SEO efforts and you got too comfortable in complacency (and not defending your position).

Regardless of what happened, each of the ten variables above can be traced back to a systemic root or cause and effect relationship. With the right method, the proper diagnosis and some corrective measures, recovering from a dip in SERP (search engine result page) positioning is all part of the SEO process.

Remaining vigilant and diligent in SEO defense as well as skimming the components that constitute a solid position will keep your search engine optimization tactics polished and ready to deal with inconsistencies (whether deliberate or accidental) as they arise.

                          

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