SEO UPDATES

When you did the keyword research for your website, you probably found a lot of simple words you’re now incorporating into your website. These general terms are things that many people search for, and are not necessarily going to help your business or website to be number one in the search engine for, other than bragging rights.

What you need to find are the long tail keywords. Keywords that are searched for far less, but searched for by people interested in something specific enough you can be pretty sure they’ll buy if you are offering something that remedies the problem.

Are you wondering how to search for long tail keywords? There are a couple ways. The first way is to use a site like NicheBot to find the terms that people are searching for. Good long tail keywords can be three or even four words long. These keyword phrases are things people actually type into the search engine. Think about how you search on Google. Do you just type in one word or do you type in a full phrase? Some people even type in questions, complete with question marks on the end!

The second great way to find long tail keywords is ask people. Start with your friends and family – tell them your niche and then ask them what they would type into Google to search for your product, service, or site. The more people you ask, the closer you will get to understanding how other people (that aren’t as close to your subject as you are) look for what you have. No jargon, no buzzwords, just the real searches. You can use this information to add important keywords to your website.

Many people enjoy using flash on webpages. They feel that moving images and movie-like quality make a website seem more flashy, more professional, and cooler. The problem is that when you use flash Google has no idea what that super-cool movie says.

What does this mean for your SEO? Any keywords you use in your flash graphic or header are worthless – it’s like giving part of your website away for nothing in return. If you’re trying to target keywords for organic search, every keyword counts. Google doesn’t know if that section of your website is relevant or high quality. It just sees it as space, because search engine spiders cannot crawl that area.

Even if you think that flash is amazing and high quality, do a survey of your demographic. The odds are they would feel less overwhelmed finding information if there wasn’t a bunch of moving pictures distracting them from your menu or content.

Making sure your website is simple to navigate and easy to read is a far better alternative for both your website visitor as well as the search engine ranking of your website.

Everything you do for your website should be geared toward your visitor and the search engine. When in doubt, definitely default to the needs of your visitor, because even if Google sends oodles of traffic to your website, it won’t matter if your website usability is nil due to a bunch of flash graphics all over your site.

Keeping it simple can not only save your pocketbook, because flash is not inexpensive to contract, it can also help your conversion rates once you do get visitors to your website.

Pay Per Click consultants and agencies are holding their collective breath…

Yahoo! Is going to use Google for paid search…to see how it’s going to go. According to Marketwatch.com - Microsoft and it’s increasingly aggressive acquisition deal is freaking out at Yahoo! using Google paid search. The head of legal is saying that will bring 90% of all paid search to Google, a possible antitrust problem.

But the ads Yahoo is planning on using will only total 3% of all paid search, and they’re only doing it temporarily.

This is fantastic for those of us doing PPC, because Yahoo needs to find a better way to run the backend of their PPC campaigns.

The Yahoo backend is clunky and confusing, while Google’s MyClientCenter is sleek and easy to use. Yahoo could take many lessons from Google and I hope they do during this possible try-before-you-buy time. If Yahoo could incorporate some of the Google strategies of backend usage as well as not making it darn near impossible to work with Yahoo if you haven’t already spent $1,000 with them would make my life as a PPC consultant so much easier.

Yahoo has the right idea. If your system is broken, look at someone else’s (preferably someone that has paid search in the bag, like Google does) and use the knowledge to improve your own systems.

Or just merge with Google PPC so those of us running campaigns don’t have to spend three times as much time to run the same campaign we do over at Google. It’s just silly.

So you’ve got your page titles, image title tags, and keywords all picked out.

Your copy is amazing and you have everything in order.

What does your navigation structure look like? Do you have pages labeled “About” “Home” and “Services”? Have you researched the keywords you want to use for your page links? If not, you should be doing your Search Engine Optimization due diligence and research the best keywords for your page links.

For regular websites:

• Make sure your page titles are keywords - Instead of “Home” call that link “Name of Company” so the linkback points to the right page with the company name instead of that page just being labeled as “home” by the search engine spiders.
• For the “About” or “About Us” page - Make it a little more interesting and help the search engines love you. If you were an accountant or financial advisor, call the link “About the Accountant” or “About (your first name)” something a little more specific than “About” will help the search engine know what’s behind the link.
• The “Services” page is more neglected than most pages - You could either split your services into categories and label them accordingly (so the page behind the link matches, thus giving it more weight in the search engine.) Or, you could do something as simple as saying “Financial Services” instead of just “Services.” Again, a little can go a long way, as long as you do something beyond doing the bare minimum.

Images are becoming more and more important when it comes to Google.

When you insert an image into a blog post or a website, you need to be making sure you’re adding the title tag attribute to the picture. The title tag tells Google what the picture is, and pictures hold more weight when Google spiders crawl your site.

If your website says flowers for sale, it could easily be a scraping site just pulling feeds to make some quick cash. But if you take the time to put pictures of flowers on your site, Google thinks that means you are probably more legitimate because you put pictures of flowers for sale on your site.

Make sure you use keywords in your title tags whenever possible. If you have a picture of a flower on a gardening site, don’t just put “flower” or “rose” as your title tag. Put something like “we have the best roses at the best prices.” You could specify red roses or yellow roses if you have different pictures on your site.

Using the title tags can really help boost your SEO presence online, and will also help Google bring you targeted traffic by making sure that when people search for what you have, they find your site, your pictures…and your flowers.

Alt tags, while not quite as important as title tags, should not be forgotten. The alt tag on a photo is what the little box will say that pops up when you hover over the photo. This can be as simple as “You can buy these!” or you could just duplicate what your title tag says. Having those little boxes pop up with words in them entertains your potential customers while letting them know what they are looking at.

Larry Weaver, Director of Internet Marketing Services says that keeping your eye on the revenue not your seo ranking is the best way to see your money grow.

“You can measure your ROI by tracking a conversion rate that’s important to you, whether it’s an online sale, a newsletter sign-up, or a phone call. Even informational sites that don’t sell products online or collect leads can still learn to measure their conversions.”

That may be true but seo is a pain no matter how you look at it. Even the big guys have companies that resorted to the “cheaters” tactics of hidden keywords to try and get their clients moved up in the rankings. No matter what a high ranking is where peoples eyes are because they feel that the higher they are the more money will come rolling in.

Your site might rank high on search engines, but it could probably go higher — there’s always room for improvement.

How can you achieve this? Try these tips:

Change the focus of your copy
Make the content as visitor-focused as possible. Visitors don’t want to know about you and your business as much as they want to know how your product or service will make their lives easier.

Change the structure of your copy
Put the most important and impressive things first. Don’t ‘lead up’ to the best details, because your readers might not stick around long enough for the climax.

Don’t simply pack in keywords and keyphrases
It’s not a numbers game. “Basing your copywriting strategy simply on the sheer volume of times you can include keyphrases makes the copy sound forced and ridiculous.”

And some final words of advice…

Take the time to explore, experiment and test. Replace a headline. Rephrase a paragraph. Subtle changes can often make noticeable improvements in conversions and other areas of business.

Source: ISEdb)

Stoney deGeyter of ISEdb.com says that the relatively new online market place is really “still coming into its own,” and that “the old brick and mortars might have some wisdom to dispense [regarding] how to run a successful business”:

Achieving top search engine placement is the B&M (brick and mortar) equivalent of choosing your store’s location. We’ve all heard it, when setting up your store, location is everything: location, location, location. Unlike B&Ms, however, websites can’t just buy or rent their location on the organic search results. When you set up a B&M, you can choose your location based on the demographics of the area and your customer. You obviously want to go where your target audience is most likely to shop.

This is similar to the process of keyword research and selection. You want to choose the keywords that your target audience is using in the search results, in hopes that you can achieve the top search engine rankings for those phrases. Unlike B&Ms however, knowing where your target demographic shops (or searches), you can’t just sign a lease agreement and start getting foot traffic. Search engine optimization is a long-term process that requires you to finesse and “earn” your way into the prime locations, i.e. top rankings for your targeted keyword phrases.

But is placement enough? Not quite.

The next logical step when it comes to growing a business is… Advertising.

Even businesses with a prime location are seen advertising on the TV, radio, billboards and newspapers. You might even notice some that advertise in other stores with coupons and discount fliers. All this is aimed for the goal of bringing in even more traffic than the location itself allows. And it’s good business sense that many online business owners forget about.

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Web based businesses can … employ pay per click (PPC) marketing campaigns to achieve visibility in those high-traffic keyword targeted areas. Also, similarly to off-line businesses, you can establish strategic partnerships with other online businesses. This can be done via customer referral deals, affiliate partnerships or giving each other a plug in the form of a quality link.

In short, “don’t rely completely on your location. Especially newer businesses because 1) you won’t get those top positions for many months, and 2) top positions can be lost overnight with a dramatic algorithm change (even if just temporarily).”

David Pasternack has an interesting article on SEO Today about Yahoo Subscription Search and its implications for the way we all search, and do search engine optimization.

Currently in beta, Subscription Search will give people the ability to search subscription sites such as the Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports, the New England Journal of Medicine and TheStreet.com directly through Yahoo. It’s like a website search page is built into your browser. People who subscribe to those sites can search for articles they are interested in and automatically be directed to the information they want. People without subscriptions will still be barred from viewing those sites.

Pasternack argues that this development will spark a trend where people will be searching fewer and fewer websites (instead of the billions tracked by Google) to find the specific information they want.

Instead of marking the end of SEO, though, he says this will make optimization even more important. When your site is up against two or three competing sites as the only results a searcher sees, you’ll want your SEO to be perfect so they choose your site.

But while organic search might have lost some of its charm, SEO has gained a tremendous amount of importance for the top-brand companies. Because, if subscription search catches on as well as it does, then two things will happen: 1) people will increasingly use the search engines for what is, in effect, site-search; and 2) you’ll be competing with your closest competitors in Search more fiercely than ever.

Which really means that 3) you should start looking at the search engines as your pre-site sitemap. And, in a SERP that only shows results from three websites - yours and those of your two top competitors - you’ll want to do everything you can to make sure that you win in that SERP.

So your SEO needs to be absolutely, positively stellar. Not only in terms of getting positioning for your site, but in terms of being able to describe and present exactly the right landing page to the searcher who’s looking for what happens to be on your site. Because if you don’t do a stellar job of that, that doesn’t mean that your competition won’t.

It will be intersting to see if things really go this way.

One thing I’ve learnt since I’ve started dabbling into SEO is that when it comes to domain names, cryptic and smart names aren’t a good choice, contrary to what a “newcomer” in this field may think. Instead, one should aim at transparency and efficiency. Here’s a little list of all the tips and tricks I’ve gathered so far about this:

• Choose a name that reflects your product or the goal of your site. Don’t pick BobJones.com if you sell lava lamps: in such a case, lavalamps.com would be a much better choice.
• Pick the domain name first, then build your site around it, not the contrary (see next point for one of the reasons to this).
• Don’t take too much time to choose: things move fast on the internet, and you may find yourself without anything if the domain name you so carefully thought has been taken in the meantime.
• Keep your domain name short! This also involves keeping it readable and easy to remember.
• Use keywords in your domain name. If a person wants to buy a lava lamp, it’s only logical that the first URL she’ll type in will be lavalamp.com, or something close to that.
• In the same vein, try to get your domain name in multiple extensions (.com, .net, .biz…), in singular and plural versions if applicable, as well as in several spellings. Yes, this is to take typos into accounts.
• Always prefer .com as top domain level, as it’s the most searched for TLD.
• Limit your domain name to two words, three at the most.
• Avoid hyphens, numbers, “the”, “and”, etc… in your domain name. These make things terribly awkward when you need to spell it; moreover, people usually won’t think about typing “the” in a URL.

There probably are other useful tips to take into account here, but these ones should already carry you far when it comes to marketing your website.