Poor Logic: Letting Your Competitors Hold You Back

By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing

by Miriam Ellis

Being satisfied with as little as possible may be an excellent strategy for enjoying a simple life, but it's a recipe for disaster when it describes your approach to promoting your presence on the web. One of my favorite aspects of my job is conversing with new prospective clients about the nature of their businesses, their plans and hopes. I love hearing their stories! Sometimes, though, these conversations go nowhere because of poor logic on the part of the business owner, and no matter what I say, my own hopes dim for their chances of success on the web. Recently, I had just such a conversation.

A few weeks ago, I was called by a gentleman asking for help in improving the visibility of his local-focused business. He was an extremely pleasant man, but as our chat progressed, it became clear to me that he was very unlikely to become a client because of the following things:

1. Satisfied With A Poor Website

His relatively new website had been built in Front Page by a relative, and, it looked like it. Cross-browser alignment issues, poor structure, poor contrast, poor Usability and no real on-page SEO were the hallmarks of this homemade site, meaning that room for improvement was huge. I am so polite when I speak critically of a company's site, but despite my mild words, he became somewhat defensive, saying he was very happy with the site and that it had been built by a professional.

2. Satisfied With Doing The Least Work Possible

The nature of the business called for the various services the company offered to be broken up into dedicated, unique pages - one for each service, optimized both for the service term + geographic region, in compliance with basic good SEO and Local SEO practices. His objection to this suggestion was that his competitors are ranking well with one page websites. This was true - lazy, one-page websites had a presence in Google's top 10 for his keywords because no one was making any effort in the industry to do more.

When I asked how he would like to blow his competitors away, a motivated response simply wasn't there. If his competitors were doing the bare minimum, why couldn't he, too? The poor logic in this is obvious: what about the competitor who comes along 3 months from now and does hire me, and we oust the lazy folks from their positions with our well-built, properly optimized site? Waiting for a competitor to make the first move before you make any effort is a really strange business strategy.

3. Satisfied With Poor Copy

In trying to help this man see how his website could be improved to meet his stated goals of improving his visibility and conversions, I turned next to the minimal text copy on his few pages. Like the copy on so many business sites, it was speaking to itself instead of speaking to the site's users - this man's potential clients. The passive language of:

We have been in business for 10 years. We are a reliable and trustworthy company. We are proud of our customer service. We, we, we...

was as far as the copy got, never once making an offer to the user to benefit you, help you, serve you, solve your problems and meet your needs.

I explained that the copy needed to be expanded and swung in the direction of the user instead of speaking in this insular, uninviting manner, but again, I met with resistance and an explanation that he had worked very hard on the copy. I didn't doubt this; some business owners genuinely do find it really hard to describe their business in the written word, but this is what I am here for. I explained that, as part of the redesign of his site, I could help him turn his copy into something that would showcase the benefits to the user and call him to the desired actions of making a phone call to set up a consultation. Somewhat dismissively, the gentleman expressed the opinion that this would seem like an advertisement. And, of course, none of his competitors were doing it this way.

"Well, yes," I agreed. "Your website is an advertisement. In fact your website is a sales rep, working for your 24 hours a day. While you are working, eating and sleeping, your sales rep should be working for you, welcoming clients, answering questions, showing what you can do for them and inviting people to contact you. That's the whole point."

Our conversation ended with great amiability and he thanked me for my time, but it was very clear to me that I had failed to help this fellow get past the mindset of doing the least possible. I really liked this man and wanted to help him. He had come to me hoping to find a way to get more contacts and contracts and make more money. I tried to point the way, but because no one else in his town was making the slightest effort to effectively use the web to attain these kinds of goals, he remained completely unmotivated to invest time and money in the very things that would enable him to outrank his weak competitors and start hearing that phone ring more often.

There is nothing strange or new about this scenario. Fellow designers and SEOs will have sat through calls like this many times before, but it really made me think about how, in the business world, we take cues from one another, for good or ill.

If my colleagues and competitors blog twice a week, is this my permission to do no more than equal them, or should I blog twice as much in hopes of seeing twice the benefit? If my colleagues have never hosted a promotional contest, does this mean this just wouldn't work in my industry, or does it mean I've got a secret weapon no one else has tested yet? If no one in my industry is on Twitter, does that mean there's no point, or am I going to be a pioneer in using Social Media in an untapped business sector?

How you respond in your gut to questions like these likely says a lot about your drive to succeed on the web. One thing I can guarantee: every business owner reading this article would like to make more money. In the industry I took a glance at for this gentleman with whom I spoke, it would take just one person motivated to do the most, instead of the least, to wipe the competition off the map. Your industry may not be as neglected and wide open as this, but the same healthy resolve to be bold and do as much as you can is sure to serve you well.

A lax attitude troubles me, because it represents lost opportunities, but on a karmic level, I suppose it represents opportunities won for someone else. Where do you want to stand on the scale of things? Jog along with the pack or set the pace? Money's waiting at the finish line.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

SEO 101 - Part 4: Everything You Need to Know About Headings and Alt Attributes

By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing

by Stoney deGeyter

The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L'Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Heading Tags

Heading tags are certainly no magic solution to building keyword relevance. They are merely one more baby step to creating a well-rounded optimization of a page. Adding heading tags using your keywords may or may not make a difference in your keyword rankings, but nonetheless, balanced against the rest of the page, using a heading tag properly, with keywords, is going to benefit your visitors, if not the search engines.

On the search engine front, at the very least, the Heading tags (H1, H2,... H6) can be used to tell the search engines the hierarchical structure of your page's content.

When developing content, it's pretty easy for visitors to see how the page breaks down, but search engines need a bit of help. The heading tags are that help.

Think of headings as you would an outline of an important paper. At the top is the Title, in this case the H1 tag. Next would be the Main points; In an outline they would be I, II, and III. In HTML you would use the H2 for all of them. Next we have our sub-points A, B and C, or the H3, and following that sub-sub-points of 1., 2., 3., or the H4. You get the point from there.

An alternate strategy would be to use your H1 for the title as noted above and the H2 for a sub-title. Then you'd start with the H3 for your main points I, II and III, and go down form there. You can go all the way down to the H6, but its rare that you have a page with so much content that this is warranted.

One of the problems I often see with heading tags is that they are used by developers for the site's navigation. In a way it makes sense, you want to segment different areas of the navigation with headers of their own. The only problem with this is that you end up using valuable hx tags in an invaluable area and you're diluting the effectiveness of the heading tags in your content where they would otherwise be most effective.

If your developers are intent on using hx tags in the navigation elements then make sure they stick to the lower level H5 and H6 so you can use the higher level tags in the content where they'll make the most impact. Make certain that they don't use the H1 tag for the logo, that's a complete throwaway and prevents you from gaining any effectiveness with an H1 tag in your copy.

All of the tags can be used repeatedly on the page, depending on where they fall in the total hierarchy, except for the H1 tag (or H2 if you are using it as a sub-headline.) Be sure to use it only once on the page.

Alt Attributes

Alt attributes, commonly referred to as "alt tags" allow you to add descriptive text to your images. The visitors generally won't see the alt text unless, in Firefox they mouse over the image or they have images turned off.

The alt text is meant to be a replacement for the image should the image not show. Make sure your alt text reads properly and adds something for the reader who doesn't see the image. The text itself should describe the content or visuals of the image for the visitor. This text also provides much needed information to the search engine, especially if the image contains text. That text should be included in the image.

Using Alt Attributes in your image tags can help you in a number of ways. 1) it provides a greater context for the text on the page which can be factored into your search engine rankings. 2) It can help your images come up in image searches, which can drive additional traffic and conversions to your site.

Text-only browsers, or browsing with images turned off still happens, probably more frequently than we know. People on slow connections will often turn their images off in order to speed up their browsing experience. Without alt text, an important element of your pages won't be available to them.

There are also a good number of visually impaired web surfers that use screen readers to deliver the content of web pages. The screen reader will read the image alt text, which means if the image is important to the visitor's experience on the site, not having an alt attribute can be detrimental.

Finally, many people browse the web on mobile phones. These phones are almost always slower than the typical internet connection and either the phone's browsers won't display images or users will turn the images off so they can browse faster. This is generally not the case with smart phones, but there are still a lot of non-smart phone users out there.

The most important area to use alt tags is in your navigation. Whether it be your header, footer or side-bar navigation, any place images are used be sure to supplement them with alt text. Failure to do so could make your sit unnavigable to any visitor that isn't seeing images.

Missed a part of this series?
Part 1: Everything You Need To Know About SEO
Part 2: Everything You Need To Know About Title Tags
Part 3: Everything You Need To Know About Meta Description and Keyword Tags
Part 4: Everything You Need To Know About Heading Tags and Alt Attributes
Part 5: Everything You Need To Know About Domain Names
Part 6: Everything You Need To Know About Search Engine Friendly URLs & Broken Links
Part 7: Everything You Need To Know About Site Architecture and Internal Linking
Part 8: Everything You Need To Know About Keywords

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Why Marketers Don’t Need to Care About the iPad

By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing

by Mike Moran

It's hard to look up without reading about the iPad. I am sure that it is a wonderful device. And I know nothing about it that you can't read and see in all the usual places. But if you are wondering what you need to know about it for your business, the answer is probably "nothing." And that is a good thing.

For all the hype that you'll hear about the iPad, the best thing about it is that it is a revolutionary new hardware category (because tablets have all failed in the past), but the software is refreshingly evolutionary.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

• Old-fashioned search in a Web browser. We don't have details yet, but it is likely that your plain old boring Web site will work just fine here. If you have already optimized your site to be found, the 1024x768 resolution should display your site just fine, with one exception: Flash is not supported. That will probably be fixed soon, but not today. (If your site doesn't render well without Flash, you probably have other issues that prevented you from optimizing it for search anyway.)
• Local search. If you have a local business that benefits from walk-in traffic from people on the go, you should already be thinking about local search. If so, it is unlikely that you need to do anything special to support the iPad. From what I read, the iPad does not appear to include a GPS chip, so it won't be aware of exactly where people are (unlike most smart phones), so its local search is limited to knowing approximately where you have connected to the Internet. This isn't much different to how computer users are treated in local search, so I don't see any revolutionary changes to what marketers must do.
• Apple apps. I want to call them iPhone apps, but now that they run on iPods and IPads, I think they need a different name and I am not smart enough to know if they already have a different name. Regardless, all of these existing apps are said to run on the iPad, so if your business already has an iPhone app or can be found by an important iPhone app for your industry, it will be found by iPad users with that app, too. You should expect to see some folks update their apps to take advantage of the larger screen size. If you have your own iPhone app, you might want to do that, too, but I don't think there is any fundamental marketing change needed here.

So, there is mostly good news here for digital marketers. If you've been ignoring how folks find you online, or you have no idea what local search is, the iPad is just another in a series of wake-up calls that you need to listen to. But if you've been paying attention to what's been going on the last few years, the iPad doesn't seem to add anything to your to-do list.

If the iPad takes off and creates a new successful category for mobile devices, then more folks will be searching and shopping and that will be great. What's even better is that what you are already doing to be found when they search is just about all you need to do to be found on the iPad. So, if you want to immerse yourself in the details because you are gadget hound, go ahead. But if you'd rather get back to work and mostly ignore all the hype, be my guest. Your business will be just fine.

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Holy Cow, Pick Up The Phone! Or Blow Your Sales Leads

By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing

by Sage Lewis

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Real Time Search - What It Means To You

By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing

by Sage Lewis

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SEO 101 - Part 3: Everything You Need to Know About Meta Description and Keyword Tags

By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing

by Stoney deGeyter

The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L'Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Meta Description Tag

One of the big misconceptions about SEO is that everything we do is designed to increase search engine rankings. This isn't (or shouldn't be) true, and there is no simpler example of that then the Meta Description tag. Even though this description tag doesn't weigh all that heavily into the search engine ranking algorithms, it is still a very powerful part of an effective optimization campaign.

Like the Title Tag, the Meta Description tag will often show up in the search results. Generally what you see in the SERPs is the clickable title link and then the description tag or page snippet just below it. If the description is pulled in to the results, it becomes a very important part of helping entice visitors to click on the link into your site.

If your description tag fails to properly or adequately tell your visitors whats on the page then it's likely they'll click on another result.

The reason why many people don't put much stock into the description tag is because they are stuck on the belief that people click on rankings, not on search results. This isn't true. Sure, more people click on sites that rank higher, but only if those sites also have compelling titles and descriptions, which is often not the case. Few people blindly click links without first vetting them, and those that do often find themselves disappointed if they do.

Those who take the time to look through the search results, reading titles and descriptions to find the site that is most likely to give them what they are looking for, are more likely to be a targeted visitor one they land on your site.

If you're like me then you read descriptions before the title tags in the search results. I figure it's easy to stuff the main keywords in the title, but the description is more likely to have some of the longer tail phrases that I'm looking for. If the title matches my search broadly, the description should match much more specifically. If it doesn't then I'm probably looking at the wrong result.

The general rule is that you want each of your description tags to be unique. The description should b e a 20-40 word summary of what the visitor will expect to find on that page, and that page only. Descriptions for each page should be unique from the next. Make sure you summarize the page in a unique way, using primary and secondary keywords while making it compelling to searchers.

You don't always want or need a description tag on every page. There are some instances when you would be better served not having a description at all. For me, the general rule is if you're targeting broader keywords, use the description tag. If you're targeting long-tail keywords then don't.

The reasoning here is that if you're going after long-tail phrases on an article page or blog post, then there are simply too many variations to attempt to work them into a 40-word description. On the other hand, if those long-tail words are in the content, without the description tag, the search engine will import snippets from the page based on the search. This increases your likelihood of getting actual keywords into the description content below the clickable link in the search results.

Meta Keywords Tag

The only thing there is to say about the Meta Keyword tag is that there isn't much to say about it. The search engines don't put much, if any, stock in it and your visitors don't see it. By all measures its invisible.

But that doesn't keep people from asking, Do I use commas or spaces? Do I use phrases or words? How long should the keyword tag be?

The answer is: It doesn't matter. If you are going to take the time to add the meta keywords tag to your pages then I suggest this: don't waste your valuable time worrying about the "right" way to write it. Throw a few keywords in there and walk away. Don't worry about formatting, spacing, commas, length or anything like that. Keep is short, sweet and move on.

Missed a part of this series?
Part 1: Everything You Need To Know About SEO
Part 2: Everything You Need To Know About Title Tags
Part 3: Everything You Need To Know About Meta Description and Keyword Tags
Part 4: Everything You Need To Know About Heading Tags and Alt Attributes
Part 5: Everything You Need To Know About Domain Names
Part 6: Everything You Need To Know About Search Engine Friendly URLs & Broken Links
Part 7: Everything You Need To Know About Site Architecture and Internal Linking

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Have You Heard Of The Product Launch Formula

By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing

by Sage Lewis

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Beginning with Paid Search

By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing

by Charles Lumpkin

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How to Avoid Bloated Performance Expectations from Google’s Keyword Tool

By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing

by Jeff Howard

Google's keyword research tool is an excellent resource for generating keyword ideas and also trending which keywords deliver a higher volume of searches. But, note the use of trending in the last sentence. The tool can't tell you how many website visitors you'll receive from a #1 ranking. Experience has shown on average it is 10% - 25% of the monthly estimate. Meaning if you go after a keyword with an estimated traffic volume of 4,000 searches per month, on average expect to see ~400 visitors per month from that phrase if it rankings #1.

This is just in general, and of course every case is different. Also clearly it's expected that not all users will click on a number one ranking, and personalized results will have an effect on what listing shows up as #1. Regardless, here are two strategies that can help remedy the ambiguity when determining what keywords should be chosen for organic optimization.

Strategy One - Rankings to Expected Performance

This strategy is not ideal for a website with little to no search engine traffic, it is ideal for a website revaluating its keyword strategy, and does not have a significant budget for a PPC campaign.

1. The Top 50 (or more) Search Engine Referring Keywords for the Past Month
2. A List of All the Keywords Your Website is Currently Optimized For.
3. The Google Keyword Research Tool Estimated Traffic Volume (monthly) for all of the Above Keywords
4. The Search Engine Rankings for all the Above Keywords for Your Website

The result of all this data should create an excel sheet that looks something like this. Notice I've already taken columns B divided by C and placed that percentage into column F. This delivers the performance to expectation level. Notice the trend for all #1 rankings to deliver a range of 10% - 25% of the given estimated volume. The spreadsheet helps identify trends as far as what keyword rankings perform well, for example possibly a few similar types of keyword rankings are sitting at #3 and #4 positions but deliver 40%+ of the expected traffic volume. This may indicate the website's title tags, and description tags are well written for these keywords, or the competitive landscape is less fierce. Either way, this data helps reiterate the gap between the Google Keyword volume estimation and actual traffic from rankings top rankings. You might even find some #1 rankings, that were suppose to bring in a lot of traffic simply don't perform at all. All this leads me to highly recommend using PPC data when in doubt about keyword choices for organic SEO.

Strategy Two - PPC

Run a PPC campaign on Bing (because it will be much cheaper) for one month from a long list of potential keywords rounded up from Google's Keyword Tool. This will help determine an actual search volume for all the keywords that are being considered for an organic optimization campaign.

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Rankings, Competitors and Analytics in One

By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing

by Manoj Jasra

Before we get into the details, there is a full 30 day trial available, which allows you test drive 10 domains and 2500 keywords - Data is collected daily.

The setup is quite standard, like most ranking tools, you add your domains and keywords (with their appropriate groupings) and select your search engines (in this case 30 to choose from). Next you add your competitor's domains, which is not revolutionary, but very useful nonetheless. Finally, you have the option of connecting your Google Analytics account so you can tie together rankings and visits. This will help you decipher whether a rank 5 for one keyword provides more visits vs. a rank 8 for a separate keyword.

The way the dashboard is setup is quite unique. It provides a week by week comparison allowing you to see rankings at a very high level, for example: Total keywords ranked in positions 1-10, 11-20, 21-30 one week vs. another week. See example below:



SEO Rank Monitor also provides other reports (examples below), including Analytics Monitor (visits correlated by rankings) and Domain monitor (domain level data such as pages indexed and backlinks). Click on images to see full size.

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