SEO UPDATES

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.

[...]

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.

Aaron Wall interviews David Naylor (otherwise known as “comments spammer”) in a Q & A series on Search-Marketing.info. Interesting or frightening? You judge. I particularly blinked at answers such as:

We tend to run 2 or 3 different programs at a time and live by the sword, whether it be blog spamming, scraper sites, content driven sites or just plain old clean SEO sites. I’m a great believer that Google only want to kill one idea at a time, so there’s never a massive loss of revenue.

and

As for rules for playing in infested waters – there’s no rules, the gloves come off and you come out fighting. As for tips – don’t hold back… use every weapon in your arsenal. To me infested waters are much more challenging and exciting.

Read the full interview here, and draw your mind. Can we see a bit of some bravado attitude here, or complete seriousness?…

This isn’t about SEO in general, but more focused on blogs and how to build (good) links networks and get some viewage along the road. Aaron Wall from SEOBook hands out a few pieces of advice, as well as links to posts and resources illustrating the point:

With blogs you can just whinge on about whatever, and so long as it is usually on topic some people will read it. Sometimes the smallest things, like mentioning a 20 pound AdWords coupon can get you multiple free links from other regularly updated channels, and the attention of people who read those channels.

If you are looking for resources to cite you can use a tool to look at topical trackbacks (which also point links your way) and help get you noticed by some of the leaders of your community. Of course you can go too far and be labeled a spammer so you want to use some caution / restraint.

A few tips that are likely worth to be taken, here.

While browsing news from the past week, I found an article written by Cari Haus on WebProNews.com, titled “The Biggest SEO Scam of All”. Intrigued, I decided to read, and here’s what I found:

Read the rest of the article here, and in her own words, “beware of any SEO firm that:

• employs a boiler room full of telemarketers
• automates most or all of their services
• insists on gaining and retaining control of the url to be promoted
• focuses on lengthy and obscure search strings
• touts sites that are garnering a mere 100 hits per day as examples of their success.”

Everyone who wishes to employ the services of a SEO firm can indeed benefit from this advice, as it can be easy to fall for such ploys.

Moreover, I especially agree with Cari Haus on the 100 hits bit. I can do that myself without even having worked extensively on promoting my website and not being a specialist at SEO tactics. This is indeed a ridiculous promise!

I spotted this press release on ArriveNet today; while said release is dated from June 28 (I’m a little slow to catch up with all I read at times), the advice it gives probably deserves some attention, as it’s easy to overlook some “details” that can indeed slow be a problem in terms of search engine optimization. Among these so-called details that can quickly add up are listed (and explained, along with advice given):

1. Insufficient link popularity. Not easy at all to boost one’s incoming links (adding to this the high probability of back-firing if it’s done “the spammer’s way”), but it’s definitely a must-do.
2. Lack of keyword research. Frankly, who hasn’t been guilty of that one day?
3. Designing first and bothering about SEO later. As a designer myself, I so know how one can let themselves be carried by design ideas… and not really think at first about how to up the rankings before the website is already finished, with all its trinkets and toys.
4. Relying too heavily on paid advertising.
5. Use of frames. Too bad, I used to like frames, they made things convenient, depending on what the aim was.
6. Wasting time in submitting to a gazillion minor search engines that will anyway rely on the main, bigger ones.

The complete article can be read here. Evidently, as it’s a press release, a bit of self-pimping is included at the end. Experts at search engine optimization may find it a tad bit redundant, or information they don’t need because they know it by heart, but for someone who hasn’t too much knowledge in this domain, this can likely be a useful way to get this all at once to avoid waste of time as well as too much trial & error.

Sorry there haven’t been too many updates around here lately… If you’d like to try your hand at blogging on Search Engine / SEO news, we’d love to have ya join us here on the Niner Niner network and SEO Updates.

You can signup to write for Niner Niner over on the Signup Page, beta password is: niner

Now, onto some AdSense news from a few days ago (in case ya misted it!):

JenSense broke the story of Google’s own AdSense page being hijacked in the SERPS of Google.

This is just silly. Someone thinks they can hijacks a Google page get away with it? LOL. Not.

Jen sez:

When you decide to hijack a site in the Google serps, it makes sense to do one that will benefit you in some way, while not raising yourself too high on the search engine’s radar. So, it obviously makes perfect sense to go and hijack the Google AdSense site

This is the best though. Kevin at All-In-One-Business.com replies back in the comments:

I want to thank JenSense and others for posting this thread.

Thanks for the comment Air Charter. I just got off the phone with two different tech writers explaining why I would have a meta redirect on my site.

It isn’t an attempt to profit from either Google’s page rank or some cloaked affiliate link.

I am no hijacker. In fact, I’m not sure how I could in any way benefit from this link.

The simple fact is this: I write and syndicate articles all over the web. I used to put into those articles direct links to sites I was talking about.

A couple years ago I had a problem when I had written and syndicated several articles about GoTo.com when they changed their name to Overture. There were dozens of websites to notify and ask them to update the links in my articles.

So I decided to begin using meta refresh redirects rather than listing the URL’s directly. I can then keep the links current in all the articles I write.

Hopefully Google will look at this and decide to make some changes so this won’t occur. It’s hard to believe I got a number 1 listing without trying.

Can anyone these days ever just admit when they’ve f’d up and come clean? Feh.