http://searchenginewatch.com/
On May 26, 2010, In SEO, by Search Engine Watch
As more users surf the web via their phones, making a phone call becomes a more likely solution to their conversion demands. This creates a larger importance for unique campaign phone number call tracking and click-to-call placements. …
As more users surf the web via their phones, making a phone call becomes a more likely solution to their conversion demands. This creates a larger importance for unique campaign phone number call tracking and click-to-call placements. ...
On May 16, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis
Have you ever visited a website and got frustrated because you either couldn’t find the contact information or had a hard time locating the path needed to be taken to make it through the website correctly? It is called user experience and if you get it wrong and forget to really apply it to your [...]
Have you ever visited a website and got frustrated because you either couldn’t find the contact information or had a hard time locating the path needed to be taken to make it through the website correctly? It is called user experience and if you get it wrong and forget to really apply it to your website than your SEO is going to go down the drain. Optimization means all aspects of a website not just search.
Before you think about launching an SEO campaign to drive targeted visitors have you stopped and taken a long hard look at your website? If you are not aware of how your user should be engaging with your website you might want to have someone do a really thorough conversion audit before you start driving traffic to it. The last thing a website owner wants to do is spend a great deal of money trying to drive visitors to a website only for the visitor to arrive and leave due to a poor user experience. Your website visitor needs something to do in order to stay on your website. You don’t want them leaving due to boredom or lack of direction. Lead them down a path to your ultimate business goal. Remember that user experience is just about converting that visitor into a lead or a sale. It is also about creating an emotion for that user so that they engage with your website a bit more than normal.
Your website needs to pull some sort of emotion out of your visitors whether it is from an engaging video, blog or you guessed it, your content!. It is not just about launching a campaign and trying to dump targeted visitors and crossing your fingers hoping they might call or make a purchase. Give them something to do and smile about. Create a community type feeling around your website and give people a reason to bookmark it.
http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com
On February 23, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis
In this video Matt Cutts discusses how important it is to understand the value of interlinking your websites properly if you have multiple websites on your server.
Here is the video that Google’s Matt Cutts talks about the cross linking question:
Often times people think that just because they have a few websites that placing links [...]
In this video Matt Cutts discusses how important it is to understand the value of interlinking your websites properly if you have multiple websites on your server.
Here is the video that Google’s Matt Cutts talks about the cross linking question:
Often times people think that just because they have a few websites that placing links on all of them will help them with their link building efforts when most likely it will negatively impact their search engine results. Cross linking websites works when information is relative and beneficial to the user. If you cross link websites simply to manipulate search engine results to gain rankings the search engines they are going to pick up on that very quickly and penalize your website. Once your website is penalized it could takes months to get it back to where it once was. Matt Cutts states that if the websites are under the same corporate umbrella and they make sense to link to each other than there shouldn’t be a problem. You want to keep in mind that this like any other online marketing effort requires a tasteful approach and abusing it will results in serious ramifications from the search engines.
Always take a tasteful approach to your search engine optimization and internet marketing and keep in mind the user experience. If you over “SEO” you’re online efforts and your user experience starts to diminish you will not get any of the conversion you where hoping to get so it is very important to keep this in mind.
http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com
On January 20, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis
Have you taken the time to analyze every piece of your website before jumping into your link building campaign? Your search engine marketing efforts won’t mean diddly if your website has not been correctly structured for traffic. Remember that your search engine optimization campaign and your website go hand in hand. What this means that [...]
Have you taken the time to analyze every piece of your website before jumping into your link building campaign? Your search engine marketing efforts won’t mean diddly if your website has not been correctly structured for traffic. Remember that your search engine optimization campaign and your website go hand in hand. What this means that all the marketing in the world won’t make you successful if your website doesn’t have the right foundation in place.
Remember that every page of your website should be looked at as an entry point into your website. The search engines do not rank websites, they rank web pages so every page of your website should have good quality content along with all conversion aspects fully optimized so that every visitor has all possible options to create or start an action with your website. Whether that be to pick up the phone and call, submit their info or make a purchase it is really important to have these aspects in place. Your website must always be 100% optimized before you worry about external links or social media. I know the idea of hopping onto Twitter and Facebook and sending people to your website is very appealing but you have to make sure the website is ready for people. Did your website just get out of bed and people are knocking on your door? Or is your website sitting in the den wearing its finest blazer ready to mingle with company? Ask yourself this before you start focusing on the other marketing efforts.
Not only is it important to be ready for website traffic but in order for rankings to occur online you must have a well optimized website. The search engines can see what your website looks like and what features it has on it. If you don’t fit into those parameters you will not be allowed into the party. To many times I see people spending a great deal of time on social media and link building and then their website has been neglected since day one. If you are unsure about your website you should speak with a professional to make sure you are not just spinning your wheels.
http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com
On January 7, 2010, In SEO, by great scott
Posted by great scott!
Welcome, dear readers, to the first Whiteboard Friday of 2010!! As you may notice, there’s a bit of a new look. This comes in large part from our move to a different video hosting solution. We hope these changes will provide a higher-quality WBF experience, and better accessibility for our viewers around the world. On with the show…
There’s always debate: should you focus on your big head terms, or those wide-ranging tail terms? We’ve invited one of our best mozMates, Will Critchlow of Distilled, to join us for a look at how to balance your keyword strategy.
A major factor in designing your strategy needs to be analytics data. As Will discusses, many people find that analytics show most of their conversions coming from branded keyphrases, but this doesn’t adequately reflect the search path people are following before they make a latent conversion. In the video Rand and Will discuss how to take this into account and make sure you’re targeting the best phrases for your business and your audience.
Will is currently stuck at the airport trying to get home to the snowed-in United Kingdom, so the post he references in the video isn’t available yet. In the mean time, you can view his slide deck from the "Analytics Every SEO Should Know" presentation he gave at the SEOmoz London Seminar this winter. Slides 23 and 24 show a little bit about first-touch and multi-touch search analytics. Keep an eye here, or on the Distilled blog for his post about doing first-touch analysis in Google Analytics.
Will’s post is up! Check it out: How To Get Past Last-Touch Attribution With Google Analytics
Posted by great scott!
Welcome, dear readers, to the first Whiteboard Friday of 2010!! As you may notice, there's a bit of a new look. This comes in large part from our move to a different video hosting solution. We hope these changes will provide a higher-quality WBF experience, and better accessibility for our viewers around the world. On with the show...There's always debate: should you focus on your big head terms, or those wide-ranging tail terms? We've invited one of our best mozMates, Will Critchlow of Distilled, to join us for a look at how to balance your keyword strategy.
A major factor in designing your strategy needs to be analytics data. As Will discusses, many people find that analytics show most of their conversions coming from branded keyphrases, but this doesn't adequately reflect the search path people are following before they make a latent conversion. In the video Rand and Will discuss how to take this into account and make sure you're targeting the best phrases for your business and your audience.
Will is currently stuck at the airport trying to get home to the snowed-in United Kingdom, so the post he references in the video isn't available yet. In the mean time, you can view his slide deck from the "Analytics Every SEO Should Know" presentation he gave at the SEOmoz London Seminar this winter. Slides 23 and 24 show a little bit about first-touch and multi-touch search analytics. Keep an eye here, or on the Distilled blog for his post about doing first-touch analysis in Google Analytics.
Will's post is up! Check it out: How To Get Past Last-Touch Attribution With Google Analytics
http://www.seomoz.org/blog
On January 6, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis
You’ve heard the entire search engine optimziation world repeatedly talk about how you need to create compelling or “great” visitor focused content. We all have heard many times that once you have great content then you will magically make you a lot of money or boost your search engine rankings like a magic carpet [...]
You’ve heard the entire search engine optimziation world repeatedly talk about how you need to create compelling or “great” visitor focused content. We all have heard many times that once you have great content then you will magically make you a lot of money or boost your search engine rankings like a magic carpet ride. 
Well, there may not be any magic involved, but you should always produce the best possible content for every page of your website. If you spend the time writing (or hiring a great content copywriter) content for every page of your website, generally speaking it can help your website achieve great results.
These results are not only from the search engines but having great content on your website helps in several key ways, including the following:
- Great content helps deliver your message to the audiences of your website.
- Great content (with excellent call to action) helps generate your conversion (leads, sales, etc).
- Great content keeps people on your website as long as possible.
- Great content keeps them coming back.
- Oh yeah, great content can be naturally optimized to generate the right type of targeted visitors from the search engines to your site.
Keeping clients coming back does not necessarily mean to your website, but it does mean to your business. Once you’ve sold them you’ve just got to keep them and that means good customer service (that’s a different blog post). Keeping people on your site means closing the sale. But you have to keep them long enough to make your case (or sales pitch) by having great call to actions on your website.
Another question that I always get asked is, how much content do I need on each page of my website? The answer to that question as far as I am concerned is quality over quantity is the best policy. If it takes 200 words to accomplish your goals and deliver the message on a particular page then so be it. If it takes 100 words of great content to describe a product, then that works too. Be in tune with your audience and understand what is too much or too little content.
Great content is no magic trick. It’s just good copywriting. If you can’t do it yourself, hire someone who can!
http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com
On January 5, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis
If you are trying to calculate your ROI on performing SEO for your business you are going to be greatly disappointed. Search engine optimization ROI can be measured over time through an increase of visitors, and conversions (sales, leads, phone calls, etc.). But since SEO is such a long term effort that never really [...]
If you are trying to calculate your ROI on performing SEO for your business you are going to be greatly disappointed. Search engine optimization ROI can be measured over time through an increase of visitors, and conversions (sales, leads, phone calls, etc.). But since SEO is such a long term effort that never really has a finish line and preliminary conversion numbers are virtually impossible to accurately predict over time. The only thing you can really do is improve. Improve, positioning, quality of content, call to actions, incoming relevant links, improve your authority and improve your ROI over time.
It is important to know that search engine optimization is not paid advertising so nobody knows when your website will appear in search results and where it will appear. It’s not like some paid advertising models where you know your ad will appear in a certain spot immediately and how many people visit that location on average. In this scenario you can sort of predict how many visitors might make it to your website. With SEO you cannot put this value on it. Your website takes time to climb and you can’t predict how many other bloggers and writers might begin to write about your business from your SEO efforts ultimately creating new streams of visitors that lead to conversions. Search engine optimization is a combination of proactive marketing and some technical aspects.
How can you put an ROI metric on distributing an article or press release surrounding your business? To many business owners I speak with they try to put an ROI value before they pull the trigger to move forward with search engine optimization which can be challenging. Some decide to not even pursue it because of not being able to identify a value or number on proceeding with the effort. This is the worst thing you can do for your online business. If you launch a Twitter account and begin a conversation and 6 months down the road someone from that conversation decides to become a client how can you predict that occurrence?
Depending on what type of industry you might be in your SEO could take quite a while to really kick in depending on how saturated and competitive your space might be. If you decide to not perform any SEO on your website you are already shooting yourself in the foot. Creating many pathways to your website from a variety of sources is one of the most important ways to build your online business. This process takes time so it is important to start it as soon as possible.
http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com
On December 9, 2009, In SEO, by Andrew Shotland
Sivan Metzger, GM of the just announced Kenshoo Local, is up and talking about the local search marketing challenges:
Massive programs/thousands of listings
Cumbersome on-boarding process
Resource intensive ongoing management process
Cross channel geo-targeting/tracking conversions
Manual keyword & bid optimization
Huge surge in demand for SEM services from SMBs, however:
30-40 accounts per account manager
40 accounts x $500/mth @20% margin
= no profit [...]
Sivan Metzger, GM of the just announced Kenshoo Local, is up and talking about the local search marketing challenges:
- Massive programs/thousands of listings
- Cumbersome on-boarding process
- Resource intensive ongoing management process
- Cross channel geo-targeting/tracking conversions
- Manual keyword & bid optimization
Huge surge in demand for SEM services from SMBs, however:
- 30-40 accounts per account manager
- 40 accounts x $500/mth @20% margin
- = no profit when you are doing it manually
They are trying to get onboarding of new advertiser to under 10 minutes v. 1:40 which is where they see things today.
He’s walking through the ad creation UI - looks pretty nice in terms of suggesting keyword & geo targeting. Lot’s of buzzwords re optimization/conversion, etc.
The presentation looked good - he definitely gets points for having a great presentation UI - but on the surface it’s hard to tell how different this is from other local SEM automation platforms (Matchcraft, Webvisible, Yodle, etc.). It may be just the UI which could be significant.
Interesting point - as more SMBs get online competition for inventory will increase making it even harder for any of them to achieve their goals.
http://www.localseoguide.com
On December 8, 2009, In SEO, by Search Engine Watch
Visitors are only as valuable as the Web site that converts them. If the Web site doesn’t convert, the visitors are worthless. …
Visitors are only as valuable as the Web site that converts them. If the Web site doesn't convert, the visitors are worthless. ...
http://searchenginewatch.com/
On November 30, 2009, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis
If you are doing your own search engine optimization or even you have have hired an SEO firm, then you’ll want to make sure that you measure certain data to determine whether or not your SEO efforts are paying off. There are all sorts of data that you can measure, but I’ve narrowed down the [...]
If you are doing your own search engine optimization or even you have have hired an SEO firm, then you’ll want to make sure that you measure certain data to determine whether or not your SEO efforts are paying off. There are all sorts of data that you can measure, but I’ve narrowed down the list to the ones that absolutely are essential data sets for every business owner or marketer to measure.
- Sales, Leads aka Conversions – At the end of the day all of your online and offline marketing efforts come down to increasing and generating sales for your business. Often many times people tend to loose sight of this key aspect and how truly important it is. The only difference is that search engine optimization is a long term and on going. Have patience and measure your sales and conversion increase over time.
- Organic Website Visitors – Tied directly into increasing conversions, over time the key measurable area is how many visitors is your website receiving as a result of your SEO efforts. This means out of all of the keyword phrases that you targeted on your website how many organic (from the 3 major search engines) visitors is your website getting. A simple way to break down the return on investment for this is to add up your monthly SEO service fee or your time (if doing your SEO on your own) and divide the into the money spent. Along with sales this is a good way to gauge how well things are going. I often explain to my SEO clients that if you are spending $5 on average per click for your PPC advertising (although not directly apples to apples with SEO visitors) but if you organic visitors on average cost $.25 then things are looking pretty good!
- Keyword Rankings – By keyword rankings I mean the actual search engine rankings of each page on your site for each keyword that is important to that page. If you have a 10-page website and each page has a primary and a secondary keyword that it has been optimized for, that’s 20 keyword rankings you should concern yourself with. Over the past several years keyword positioning has started to diminish as a key goal (I am so glad!). With universal search, social search and the keyword rankings that fluctuate sometimes daily based on datacenter and visitor location, this is still an important measurement, but 3rd on my list.
- Indexed Web Pages – How many pages you have indexed at each search engine is important. If your website has 100 pages published and you have 90 pages indexed at Google, 94 pages indexed at Yahoo!, 52 at Bing, and 87 at Ask, you’ve got a red flag. That 52 pages at Bing needs to be looked at more critically. Why only 52? Why isn’t Bing indexing more pages? Keep an eye on this metric and make sure that your pages are getting indexed.
- Inbound Links – Finally, the number of relevant inbound links your site has, and each page has, point to it. Obviously, link building is important so make sure your links are getting counted by Google webmaster tools. Also, be sure to build your links the right ways, through highly relevant incoming links from many different sources, over time.
http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com