May/090
SEO 10 Step Run-Down - Step 8 - Stats
After the initial grind work of researching keywords, tested them with PPC for conversions, analyzing your competitors, optimizing your site, building your links and using social media to promote your cool tools, it’s time to reflect.
Hopefully at this point, you’ve watched your website crawl up the rankings and finally hit the sweet spot - you’re on the first page of Google or better yet - you’re above the fold on Google! Time to kick back and watch the money pour in from whatever goods or services you’re providing.
Unfortunately, that’s not true… Now’s when the work REALLY begins. Now don’t get me wrong, you’ve gone through a lot to get here and you’ve definitely put in your hours - you do deserve to take a bit of time off from dealing with your site before you head into the final three stages . This couple weeks will give you time to collect some baseline data for what we’re going to discuss here …
Improving Site Efficiency and Overall Health
At this point, your website is probably performing for you, generating sales leads, perhaps even help increase revenue. This is where so many businesses drop the ball… They get comfortable.
Now is the perfect time to analyze visitor data, and see exactly what’s happening with your visitors. Where are they coming from? How long are they staying, and which pages are they visiting. These answers will help you further improve your website, thus making it even more profitable.
We suggest Google Analytics. It provides in-depth information and statistics regarding your website’s visitor activity.
The stats are collected and seen by Google and provided to you in a fairly simple-to-read format complete with the ability to customize a lot of the data and set targets so you can track specifically who is landing on specific pages (such as you’re “thank you” page). The data in which Google Analytics is extremely favorable.
For example: If the average visitor to your site only stays for 30 seconds and visits 1.5 pages… what do you think that means?
I would take that to mean that your website isn’t providing the visitor with the most relevant information at their fingertips. Adjusting content to make it more favorable to the visitor will not only help you keep them on your website longer, they will browse more pages… Ultimately this leads to more sales.
I could go on all day about website stats and what they should mean to you, but who’s got that kind of time.
If you’re one of those types who’s never looked at their stats, or perhaps doesn’t have access to them… It’s time to start. Seriously.
Apr/090
SEO 10 Step Run-Down - Step 7 - PPC
Before we get into the practices that should be applied to a PPC campaign, it is tremendously important to understand why you’re interested in getting started. When people read about a PPC campaign, they often think of a Google AdWords campaign geared around making a sale. While this is generally the main use, there are certainly other aspects of PPC. The environment you are in will have a massive impact on how you manage your campaign. This will likely make more sense after they are outlined. So let’s do this dance:
Environment One: For the Sale
A lot of PPC campaigns are ran purely for the benefits they themselves provide. The goal of the campaign is to produce a lead or sale. The main issues you are going to face with this type of PPC environment involve budget, tracking, conversion and targeting. We will discuss this at another time.
Environment Two: For Research
When you’re considering launching a major organic search engine optimization campaign it is often smart to launch a Pay-per-click campaign first. When you’re conducting your keyword research for your organic campaign, you’ll get a good idea of the volume of traffic you can expect from each keyword but that doesn’t really tell you what you can expect as far as conversions.
Environment Three: The Whole Lot
There are also those aggressive types, that run Pay-per-click campaigns in conjunction with successful organic SEO campaigns. These are companies that want to be found in both sets of results and/or who want to use PPC to target those phrases that they aren’t ranking for in the organic results. Again, for people engaged in this type of promotions the metrics and the focus are very different than those running campaigns in a different environment.
Doing your Homework is Key
Just like organic SEO campaigns - PPC campaigns begin with keyword research. It is wise to use the keyword tools provided by the engine you are engaging in a campaign with. While all tools have their pros and cons - if you are launching an AdWords campaign with Google - the data provided by Google will be that which they’ve gathered from their own searchers and thus is far more likely to be more accurate than data gather from any other source. The same can be said for other PPC engines.
Here at Primary Target, we’re not the hugest supporters of Pay-per-click as a whole, however if you can get market some solid keywords at a low enough cost, and are willing to really stay on top of your PPC campaigns, they may perform well for you.
If you have any questions regarding Pay-per-click, don’t hesitate to drop us a line, or give us a call at 519-253-8885.
Feb/090
SEO 10 Step Run Down - Step 5 - Link Building
In step five of the series, we’re going to talk about link building and it’s importance in the search engine optimization process. Link building is the important practice of getting other websites to link to yours. Having quality websites backlink to yours is amongst many important aspects considered by search engines, while determining the rankings of a site.
When it comes to using this Search Engine Optimization technique for a website, links pointing to a particular website is one of the most dominant off-page factors. Building quality links is vital, however also a very lengthy and extensive task to perform. This is where most webmasters and marketers fall short. They look for an easy, shortcut solution, instead of carrying out a genuine link building campaign.
There are many ways in which link building can be performed. Some are genuine while some are incorrect methods. The quantity of the backlinks can also be increased by using dishonest techniques like cloaking, redirecting and adding hidden content in to the web pages. This is the reason why the search engines do not give much weightage to the quantity or the number of links pointing to a website, but, to the quality of the links, while measuring the Link Popularity of a site.
Search engines mainly give credits to quality links and it is with the help of these links that they determine whether or not, a website is relevant for a particular search. Quality backlinks also help Search Engine in determining the rankings for your site. Google especially gives a lot of preference to good and relevant backlinks, while ranking a site.
The quality of the backlinks depend on genuineness and richness of the content of a particular website which is linking to your website, or which we are linking to. The most significant factor in determining the quality of the links is the relevancy . When we say that a particular link is relevant to our site, we mean that that particular link belongs to a site which is content rich and genuine, and, belongs to the same theme of websites as ours. In simple words, we can say that it is related to our website, so the link coming from their site would be relevant to us. And it is this relevancy of links, which is given weightage to, by the search engines.
Relevant links carry more significance even than high PR (Google Page Rank) irrelevant links. That is why high PR does not guarantee high Search engine rankings. There are chances of a low PR relevant link carrying more weightage than a high PR irrelevant link. There are numerous ways to obtain high PR, like using dishonest black hat techniques, but if you are looking for quality and relevant links, there is no way out except to work hard and build them up slowly.
Feb/090
SEO 10 Step Run Down - Step 4 - Optimization
Nearly half way through the run down, we get to arguably the most important part of the search engine optimization process. The optimization of your website’s content.
Content is the most effective element in which SEO’s have to work with. Content is often times described as ‘All Things On-Page’, and includes titles, tags, text, in-site links and out-bound links.
In the search engine optimization process, content optimization describes most of the hands-on work completed to create unique pages in a website place well in search engines.
Occasionaly, optimization of an existing website simply requires the SEO to perform minor tweaks. Sometimes, optimal content doesn’t exist and has to be written by the SEO. Frequently, SEOs come across pre-existing page content that needs to be totally rewritten or redeveloped.
The biggest downfall of most site owners and SEO’s, is trouble finding the balance. Often times, too much emphasis is put into the optimization process, to try and make the content most relevant for search engines. Unfortunately, this content doesn’t always seem to be the most relevant or best written content for the end user… your customer/prospect.
The first step you want to take, is to ensure you’re writing ’simple’ rules and outlines for the search engine’s robots. These robots are what control how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. You’re best to keep it simple.
Limiting to one topic per page allows you to truly focus on optimization the content around that specific topic, while providing relevant content for the end user.
As for ‘titles’. Each of your website’s pages should have clear and descriptive titles. This element is what search engines, and most human visitors see first.
Look at the very top of your screen. Notice the words beside the Firefox or Internet Explorer symbol? That’s the title of this page. Your title should be carefully written and no longer than 50 characters.
After the title, comes ‘meta-tags’… Although these don’t have the impact they used to have in search engines, they are still very much important to the overal optimization process of your website.
The most important is by far the ‘meta-description’ tag. Search engines use the meta description to help confirm the topical intent of the specific page. They also use them for a much more practical purpose. The description is often used to phrase the short paragraphs found under the Title in search engine results. When a search engine users is making a decision which link to click, a well written meta description might make the difference. Don’t ignore this tag, each page should have a unique one.
Now, it comes to visibile elements such as images, text, links etc. When starting a new search engine optimization project, SEOs usually analyze what they have to work with. The best SEOs often think like doctors when reviewing a website with the understanding that they could do a lot more harm if they are not extremely careful. More often than not, changes made to titles and meta descriptions are beneficial to clients. Frequently overlooked or under-utilized, augmenting the titles and descriptions of pages usually helps a site achieve better rankings. Changes to the text that appears on a page, on the other hand, might unleash a host of unintended consequences. Aside from the chance a SEO might mistakenly change the message the client is trying to convey, messing around with body-text might also damage current search engine rankings.
The first task in content optimization is analysis. Having a full understanding of where a clients’ web pages rank, under which keyword phrases and the degree of success current placements enjoy is critically important for making decisions about what to work on. Analysis requires data and data requires information.
Almost any page in a URL has a good chance to achieve strong search engine placement under a limited number of keyword phrase. In deciding which phrases to apply to which pages, dividing items on the keyword selection list into categories ranging from general to specific proves to be a solid system.
At first mention, content optimization might be thought to be about writing primarily for search engine spiders. It’s not. Well optimized website content should be created for live-human visitors and deployed in a way that that draws the reader towards a decision. Anyone can talk to a bot. Compelling website visitors to commit to an action and achieve a conversion is a bit more difficult.
As noted earlier, a good working rule is to stick to one topic per page and to consider the overall website as a document tree. The top of the tree is the INDEX page. Below the INDEX are the second or upper-level pages that tend to describe the company, its mission, goals, general services, and contact information. Pages found on subsequent levels of the website tend to feature more specific information the deeper a document is found on the tree.
Writing for a web-based readers and search engine spiders is much like writing for newspaper readers. Because the web is a dynamic environment, readers have notoriously short attention spans. Important points and keyword phrases need to be mentioned early in the copy and, by the end of the third short paragraph; the reader should know what they are supposed to do next. Subsequent paragraphs are used to support the story told by the first three. The goal is to hold their interest long enough to confidently direct them to the next step.
The final thing is linking. Internal linking is huge. Providing both search engines, as well as your visitors with an easy to use navigation and sub-linking system will keep everyone happy. Having links simply bounce around to various pages on your website, with no specific purpose will not only confuse your visitors, but also hurt your rankings. Use links on pages to point to other relevant pages within your website. This will help increase your ‘page-view’ rate among website visitors.