Wednesday, February 10, 2010

My Friends at Search Engine College just sent a great article out on Keyword Selection

Worth repeating:

"The Importance of Selecting Effective SEO Keywords for your Website"

By Micky Stuivenburg

Keyword research is often vital to the success of your website.

The only time keyword research might not be needed is if you're lucky enough to operate in a market with no or very few competitors. In that case, if you use common sense and accurately describe in your website content, page titles and META tags what you offer, your website should be found by your potential customers.

However, in most cases the market will be more competitive. Particularly if your website is still new, or you have only just begun to optimize it, it can be incredibly difficult to rank well for the keywords you think describe your products or services best.

You could be competing against hundreds, if not thousands, of other websites that are targeting the exact same keyword phrases as you. And it will be hard to outrank your competitors, because they may have many advantages over yours, such as:

· Their websites may have been up for years and have 'proven' their worth.

· They may have many more pages of content than you do.

· They probably have a lot more incoming links to their site than you do.

Google and other search engines are bound to rank those websites higher than yours in searches for those popular keywords - especially if your site is new, doesn't have a lot of content yet and no or few incoming links. This is regardless of how good your content is or how well you have optimized your site for those keywords.

If you start a new website, you have to be realistic with your expectations of SEO.

Here are two observations that may seem obvious but are still worth pointing out:

· The more general and popular a search term, the harder it will be to be able to rank for that phrase.

· Single keywords are way harder to rank for than keyword phrases consisting of 2, 3 or 4 words.

What can you do to still get your website found?

1. Find out what people type into search engines. Do keyword research (or have someone do the research for you) using a keyword research tool, so it's not a guessing game but you actually KNOW what people are searching for. In addition, you can ask a number of different people what they would type into a search engine if they were looking for your kinds of products or services.

2. Check out the competition. Type some of the relevant search phrases you have found in your research into Google (or other search engine you want to optimize your site for) and see how many results you get. Decide whether it's worth it or even possible to compete on those phrases.

3. Think of alternative keyword phrases. Many keyword research tools give suggestions for related words. You may hit upon a slightly different description that people use in their searches as well, but not many other websites are targeting. That gives you a great opportunity to optimize your site for that phrase and rank well for it.

4. Target so-called 'long tail keywords'. These are longer and quite specific keyword phrases that maybe only a handful of people search for each month but have very little competition because nobody else has thought of optimizing their pages for them. Blogs are great for targeting long tail keywords because you can keep adding new pages, each optimized for a different long tail keyword phrase. An added benefit is that because the keyword phrases are really specific, they often attract very qualified traffic so your conversation rate from those pages is often higher.

5. Start small: Go local. Rather than immediately trying (probably unsuccessfully) to capture the market in the entire country or world, consider starting smaller. Focus on your town, city, region or state. You'd be surprised how many people type in their location after a search phrase because they are looking for a business in their area. Targeting "web designer Newcastle", for example, is likely to be much more successful than only optimizing your site for "web designer", a generic and popular keyword phrase that just has way too much competition. Also make sure you claim your Google Maps/Local Business Center listing and submit your site to various local and regional directories. Once you are successful locally, it's a natural progression to target a wider audience. Of course, this option may depend on the type of products or services you offer, but for many businesses it's a good way to start.

Finally, a few more tips for your website to be found and be successful:

Unique pages: Target different keyword phrases and combinations with each of your web pages and ensure you have different page titles and META descriptions in place for each page.

Professional content: Have clear, concise and compelling content on your pages to engage and retain your visitors, plus obvious calls to action to convert those visitors into customers or at least get a sales lead. Consider outsourcing the content writing if that is not your or your web designer's strongest point.Link building: Try to obtain valuable links back to your website from 'authority websites' with some of your targeted keywords in the link text. It's best to get links from a variety of different types of websites, including social media sites, to different pages on your site and with slightly different link texts. The idea is to mix it up for more natural results and gradually build up your links over time.

And last but not least: don't expect miracles overnight.

Article by:

Micky Stuivanburg of Content Writer and tutor for Search Engine College. Micky specializes in professional copy for both web & print and helps clients improve their online presence through quality websites and SEO. Micky offers a variety of affordable website copywriting and optimising services at http://www.contentwriter.com.au

Friday, February 5, 2010

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Great post on SEO and Social Media from Mashable!

http://mashable.com/2009/04/15/social-media-seo/

Great stuff to follow. SEO should be a key part of the Social Media strategy.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

How to ask a customer for a review or testimonial

Customer reviews are one of the mainstays of customer confirmation and is paramount to getting found online. But how do you ask a customer for a review or testimonial for your product or services? Here are a few tips to get you started in requesting customer reviews and testimonials to hasten your business status online:

1. Simply Ask.
Amazingly this step is often overlooked. Sales people, at the end of the transaction often don’t want to bother the customer or just want to finish the sales and move on. However, asking for customer quotes or testimonials can be a way to build stronger relationships with the customer. A customer, especially a happy one, will be flattered. They will want to talk about their experience and often do by telling others about your business. Why not lead them to ask for a referral or testimonial online?

2. The key is to lead them to where to leave a referral.

Make sure it is easy, simple and quick for customers to provide the review. Provide links to sites you prefer they leave testimonials on. A good place to find sites that you want to promote reviews on is to find where your customer leads are coming from. Website Analytics (Google Analytics, Urchin…) are a great resource for this information under “Referring Sites” or better yet, ask your customers where they found you.

Don’t be afraid to give your customer guidance on what you are looking for. Tell them what you are looking for. “John, I am so thankful you are happy with our service. Would you mind giving us a review online?” Then hand a card to them outlining where and how to post a review. Clearly you would like them to indicate their name and company to the review, but it is OK if they’d like to remain nameless. An unidentified review is better than no review at all.

If the customer has practical feedback, give them an alternating path to provide that information rather than letting it go into a public review. You want to be sure to capture and address specific comments or concerns, so as to direct them to the appropriate person, email or site. Management of bad “press or reviews” can help your business grow.

3. Get easy one’s first.

Ask your happy customers for testimonials and reviews. They will be happy to assist and you can then get the ball rolling to integrate a process of asking into your sales process. Requesting past customers for reviews will let you see the value as well by demonstrating the return through more leads. A recent case is one of our clients at LuCorp Marketing said a majority of their leads come from Kudzu.com because of the testimonials posted. Through 8 reviews his company is number one on the Kudzu website for services his company provides. He gets leads all the time off the positive reviews on the Kudzu site.

4. Combine requests with an existing marketing program.
If there is a newsletter going out to all your current customers, you may want to include a message about reviewing your product or service. On your billing invoices you may want to add a thank you and “if you liked our services please consider reviewing us on….” But make this personal to the customer if at all possible.

5. TRY NOT TO BE IMPERSONAL.

Really try to take a personal and targeted approach. Determine who your most satisfied customer is, who you feel will give a review for your service or product. Be careful here though! Do not pay for reviews. The Federal Trade Commission is coming down hard on companies that pay for reviews in the future. The reviews will need to be transparent and follow a business trail. Be above board on all of this and you won’t have issues in the future!

The point is to ask and you shall receive. Many customers are happy to give their input. That’s why Yelp and Kudzu are such strong websites! People want to hear other’s experiences in this high-tech world!

The Online Review Sites

There are many online review sites out there. In fact, it is hard to keep track of all of them. Here are a few of the top ones that you could use cultivate reviews on for your business:

§ AzCentral

§ Dr. Review sites: Healthcarereviews, doctortree.org, arizonadoctorsearch.com, bookofdoctors.com, drscore.com

§ Angieslist

§ BBB

§ Epinions

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Google Posted These Statistics

Google Just Posted this http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ : Interesting stuff!

In honor of the first full week of the new year, it seems the perfect opportunity to take a look back at 2009. Just as with our year-end Zeitgeist in early December, it's always fascinating to glimpse the collective consciousness of Google users. Beyond search queries rising for Michael Jackson, swine flu, Twitter and Lady Gaga, what else did Google searches reveal last year?

Proportion of Google users in the United States making more than one query per day:
7 out of 10

Proportion of Google users in the United States making more than 10 queries per day:
1 out of 7

Fraction of Google queries, duplicates excluded, never seen before: More than 1/3

Fraction of Google queries, duplicates included, never seen before: More than 1/5

Country with the greatest increase in Google web search traffic in 2009 vs. 2008: Indonesia*

Approximate percentage of Internet users in Indonesia: 11.1%*

Average amount of time it takes a user to finish entering a query: 9 seconds

Average amount of time it takes Google to answer a query: Less than 1/4 second

Number of search quality improvements made by Google in 2009: 540, ~1.5 each day

Proportion of Google result pages that show a map in search results: 1 in 13

Average increase in driving distance on weekends vs. weekdays on Google Maps: 11km

Median distance from a user's location to ice skating rinks found on Google Maps: 30km

Median distance from a user's location to ski resorts found on Google Maps: 300km


Unless otherwise noted, most of these statistics are based on our U.S. weekday traffic. We hope you enjoyed this week — and year — in search, and we're looking forward to an exciting 2010!