SEO Guidelines - Step to Success

The overarching goal of SEO and SEM is to drive traffic to a company’s website. This can be done is various ways, but they all amount to creating numerous inbound pathways to various pages of the website. Correctly determining and implementing appropriate keywords throughout webpage content is one of the most important things a website owner can do to help promote their site. However, when website owners start to focus on creating a website that is optimized only for the search engine crawlers, neglecting the user-experience, it doesn’t matter how much traffic is pushed to the site, visitors will leave as soon as they arrive. The two components have to work hand-in-hand and receive equal attention for complete SEO success.

Google Analytics can help a website determine what keywords are pulling visitors in and to what page of the site. Keyword research will show a website owner what users are searching for. The goal should be to edit the pages that aren’t drawing traffic and enhance the ones that are by incorporating new keywords with the old ones that work. What website owners need to be conscious of is keyword stuffing. Content should be optimized for search engine spiders but always written for users. It can be incredibly distracting and irritating to a visitor when every other word is a keyword variation. If a website annoys a visitor enough, they will leave and not come back. Driving users away will eventually lower a website’s search result rankings and hinder any other SEO efforts.

To learn how testing can help positively impact your site’s user experience, check out this other SEO Journal post.

A good rule of thumb is to select 2-5 keywords per page based on the content. Website owners should remember that they keywords have to be page specific. The website might sell rain boots, but the “About Us” page isn’t about the products. Therefore the keywords shouldn’t focus on rain boots. Incorporating keywords that have little to do with the page content detracts from the overall user-experience and can be frustrating to a user looking for specific information and not being able to accurately locate it.

User experience also comes into play when working on a website’s link building activities. Blog commenting is a very common and a very useful tool. But just like keywords need to be relevant, so do the blogs being posted on, the comments being written and the links being used. The rain boot company shouldn’t be commenting on an Italian food blog as the two have little in company. Perhaps the comment does focus on Italian food, but the posted link leads to the “women’s rain boot styles“ page of the website. Now a less-targeted user is being drawn—some would consider tricked—to the site and they won’t stay for long. Search engines take into account where a site’s inbound links are coming from. Irrelevant and untrustworthy links reflect poorly on the website.

At the end of the day, SEO means little without good user-experience. Visitors are the ones looking to make a purchase, find relevant information and interact with the company. The two need to work together, not in opposition, in order to produce the best SEO results and overall user-experience to help promote the website, company and online brand.

Keyword modification is a useful concept if you plan to make the maximum use of your keyword management for SEO. The key to modifying your keywords properly is to take your primary keyword and use it in its multiple variations. For instance, if your primary keyword is “ski vacation”, there are a number of ways that you can utilize this phrase other than using that specific phrase as it is. You can pluralize it (ski vacations), turn it into a verb (ski vacationing, or vacation skiing), or split it up with words in between (ski while on vacation).

Keyword modification, however, is not just simply using the modified phrases on the same page with your primary keyword and there is more to it than simply adding new pages to your static website. It is a particularly useful technique for bloggers who write about a topic every day. You likely have a list of keywords related to your topic, and you should. If your keyword list contains 100 key phrases and each of them has 10 different variations that are potentially helpful for you then you’ve just expanded your keyword list to 1,000. Your list, however, is likely larger than 100. If your list has 300 useful keywords on it then you can turn that list into a list of 3,000 just by thinking up useful variations.

That’s not to say you have to use every keyword variation you can think of. But it helps to know that you can use the variations when you need them. Search engine optimization is not all about using the exact phrase every time you include a keyword phrase in your content. It is usually best to write in a natural language sort of way and to include your keyword phrases as necessary to make the language flow well for human readers.

source:http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2009/06/05/modify-your-keywords/

I’m sure you have heard it everywhere you go on how important content is in this industry and how it is the driving force to any successful search engine marketing campaign, but why?

It is important to understand exactly how the search engines work. I know many people like to keep their websites clean and clutter less but the search engines are not artificial intelligence. They are readers; they read massive amounts of information in a split second and find the most relevant information they can in order to supply the search user with what they need. With that said the better the content the easier the search engine spiders can find your business. If you don’t have enough content they don’t have enough to read and your rankings will slip a bit. Text is the search spider’s food. You have to feed them with good quality content and over time you will be rewarded with better and faster indexing.

That doesn’t mean you have to fill each page of your website with thousands of words either. Make an educated business decision with how much content you need to provide for your users to do what they need to do. If you have product pages that need content a hundred to a hundred fifty words will work. You don’t need to drop a thousand words so the search engines can find you. Think about your user experience as well. If you own a website that sells t-shirts do you want to have a thousand words on your product page? Probably not because nobody wants to sit there and feel like they have to read all that but if you are a business to business entity and you offer technical database solutions to your audience than a lengthy description of your services or products might be in order. Think about your audience and step into their shoes.

Take a step back and figure out exactly what your audience is like and what they want to see on your website before you think about what the search engines want to see. Your audience is more important, they are the ones that are going to purchase from you not the search engines. The search engines are just there to display the information in the best possible fashion.
source: http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2010/02/17/content-is-important/

What does SEO mean to you or your business?

To some it means simply putting together a series of inbound links that look like a science project and to others it looks like an online marketing business building plan aimed to actually brand and generate revenue, I think I would take the second approach. The right SEO strategy is not complicated but rather obvious to anyone that is wearing their entrepreneur pants.

Here are some tips for putting together your ongoing SEO strategy:

1. Never go after links from irrelevant sources. This meaning that if you sell car tires a link on a baby product website is absolutely NEVER going to help your link building in any way.

2. Always be consistent. One thing you do not want is to do a big push forward than stop, than do a big push forward and stop again. Keep it consistent and cut that big push forward and spread it out over 2 months rather than doing large “thrusts” of marketing efforts and stopping.

3. Don’t focus on websites that clearly have no link power. If the website just launched that link might not be that great for link building. Age will help link building in a much greater way.

4. Don’t focus on just one area to market yourself. Keep things diverse and your SEO strategy will go much further than just finding a certain location to hammer into the ground.

5. Don’t syndicate an article across a thousand directories thinking you are going to get anything out of that. That type of approach worked years ago and is no longer a real viable SEO marketing approach in today’s online market place.

6. Lack of deep linking. Build links to your important internal service pages and popular blog posts. This will spread your SEO out throughout your website and not just your homepage.

There are good approaches to marketing yourself online and there are bad approaches. It is important to realize that some of the older search engine optimization approaches that were used years ago are simply not the right way any longer. Building a business online now calls for a quality approach backed by a solid plan.

source:http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2010/07/15/seo-strategy-tips/

Keyword research is probably one of the most important steps you will take when you start your on site optimization for your website. Keyword research when done right can have your website operating like a well oiled inbound marketing machine. When done incorrectly it could cause you to miss out on very valuable web traffic leading to a loss in sales and revenues. In this post, I will recommend several helpful tips that could help you research relevant keywords to optimize every page of your website, after you have written your content.

Here are some keyword research tips to help you isolate only the cream of the crop keywords:

1. Thesaurus – A major point in keyword research is the ability to find a variety of keywords that your audience might use in order to find the same exact thing. A thesaurus can help you eliminate the guessing game from sitting there and trying to come up with variations of a certain keyword in your head. Don’t guess just use an online thesaurus and cut through the frustration.

2. Competitors – Take a look at your competition and see what they are doing and what keywords they might be targeting to give you a starting point if you feel stuck in any way. I never recommend anyone copying someone else’s approach but you can look at keywords to get a better understanding of what your audience and competition is using on the internet to attract attention.

3. Keyword Research Tools – Always use a keyword research tool, such as Keyword Discovery. Don’t ever assume you already know all your industry keywords because you have been working in a specific industry for some time. Chances are there are many long tail keywords in your industry that are being used on a daily basis that you are unaware of. Some of these long tailed keywords could be great for conversions because typically the end user knows exactly what they are looking for.

4. Be Strategic with your Keyword Research – When you start putting your lists together be realistic. Take a look at who is sitting around in the search results for the keywords you are picking and truly analyze whether you compete against them or not.

Remember that keyword research is going to be the foundation for almost everything you do online as business in the future. Pick the wrong keywords and you will get the wrong web traffic which could cause you to operate at only half capacity.
source: http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2010/07/21/keyword-tips/

Internet marketing and SEO are supposed to help make a lot of things happen for a site- boost your ranking in the SERP, increase your brand presence online, drive more targeted traffic to your site, build and maintain an online reputation, establish relationships with consumers and so forth. Some website owners decide to focus on one of these goals as the final measurement of success, but in the end it’s all about conversions. Each of those aforementioned points is a path that leads to an increase in a site’s conversion rate; they are a means to an end, not the end in themselves.

I’ve met (and still meet) plenty of website owners who still think that PageRank is the end-all-be-all measure of success, and that just isn’t the case. A site’s PageRank is only one of the thousands of factors Google takes into consideration when determining a site’s position in the SERP. Chances are by the time you are done writing up the report on how well your targeted keywords are ranking, the results are invalid.

Site owners should really be focusing on their conversion rate as a way to tell if their SEO is working. A higher conversion rate means more targeted visitors are being delivered to your site, which in turn means that you targeted the appropriate keywords. A higher conversion rate also means that your site is properly optimized. Visitors are able to find what they are looking for quickly, and the call-to-actions are doing their job.

I’ve had clients call me in panic, anxious because their site analytics showed that visitors were only staying on the site’s landing page for less than 30 seconds. They were certain this spelled doom for their site. But here is the catch- their sites were designed to encourage visitors to CALL the company. Once a visitor has the phone number and has made the effort to place a call, why do they need to hang out on your website?

It’s very easy to get focused on one or two factors (like bounce rate or number of pages visited) and lose the forest for the trees. That is why website owners need to look at their analytics as a whole (and with a grain of salt) to really understand and successfully interpret the data.

While a site’s conversion rate isn’t the only thing that matters, a higher conversion rate usually means more sales and more profits, which is the final goal of any business. A strong conversion rate is usually a good indication that all your SEO pieces are working together.

source:http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2011/05/17/goal-internet-marketing/

The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Internet Marketing covers 8 essential steps including:

1. How to define a keyword strategy
2. How to optimize your website
3. How to create blog & other content
4. How to promote content & participate in social media
5. How to convert site traffic into leads
6. How to nurture leads with email marketing
7. How to be mobile-friendly
8. How to analyze & refine strategies