Archive for February, 2010

Some people love Twitter and others still find no purpose for it. I get lots of questions from people about what they should do regarding Twitter, and this is what I say. Do not let the “hype” of Twitter distract you from your business or intentional marketing practices such as search engine optimization of paid search. Most businesses will do far better focusing on connecting with those people currently searching for their products or services because these are people who are looking to make buying decisions.

That said, Twitter does have tremendous value in terms of building your brand, connecting with others in your industry, and providing customer service (for those who are on Twitter already).

Here are my recommendations for anyone considering adding Twitter to their online marketing program:

1. Decide how you are going to use Twitter and let people know by putting this on your Twitter page. If you are simply providing customer service, then let people know. If you have limited staffing for Twitter, let people know the quickest way to reach you. If you are building community or having a contest, make that known as well so people know what to expect.

2. Make sure you have someone who can spend at least 30 minutes per day on Twitter. You can even break it down into two 15 minute tiem slots and make the focus on checking for direct messages or mentions of your company and responding. As you grow, you will eventually need to dedicate whatever time is needed to handle the inquiries so be prepared for that. Ideally, you should make time to see who is following you and decide if you want to follow them back.

3. Don’t feel compelled to spend time growing your followers if you are not using Twitter as a branding platform. The customers that want to find you on Twitter will find you because they will search for you. Ideally, you would want to use it for all of it’s value which includes branding and promoting your company, but people need to realize that the more you want to use Twitter for, the more internal resources you will need.

4. Find a tool that helps you manage your Twitter account as simply as possible. There are many, but a few popular Twitter tools to check out are TweetDeck and HootSuite.

I hope that is helpful.

Happy Tweeting and have a great weekend!

P.S. – You can also find me on Twitter (Anthony Kirlew).

This is the last of this 3 part series on “what you need to know about SEO.” Originally, I only wanted to cover the main two aspects (web content and links) but I realized that many people are still unaware of what a search engine friendly website architecture is.

In short, you want to build a website with URL’s that have your keywords in them as opposed to those that have query strings and contain characters such as “&” or “=”. You normally see query strings associated with ecommerce websites and it is basically showing you where the web server is looking to produce the webpage – but it make for an ugly, non search engine friendly URL. It is also common to see non search engine friendly URL’s with websites that are constructed with a Content Management System (CMS).

Here is an example of a search engine friendly URL: http://www.azrebsi.com/blog/2010/01/owe-more-than-your-home-is-worth-help-is-here/. This is a URL produced by a WordPress blog. There are actually settings in WordPress that determine whether or not you will have search engine friendly URL’s or not (under the section called Permalinks). If you are using WordPress as a CMS or blog, you will want to make sure that these setting are correct. And if they are not and you change them you may have some issues with your old URL’s changing.

Amazon gets a lot of bad PR from SEO folks as their URL’s are very commonly used to show examples of non search engine friendly URL’s. I don’t think it matters because they are such a strong web property, and because over time the search engines will often index dynamic URL’s from strong sites such as Amazon. Here is an example of a typical Amazon.com URL: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0015T963C?ie=UTF8&tag=finamark-20&link_code=as3&camp=211189&creative=373489&creativeASIN=B0015T963C

Take a look at your website and determine whether or not you have search engine friendly URL’s or not. If you do, then you are on the right track. If you do not, then you have a potential hindrance to obtaining search engine success. If you need help, let’s chat!

Have a great weekend. I am off to the races for three day!

According to a press release issued today by Yahoo, they have received approval from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission to move forward to merge, forming the 2nd largest Search Engine.

ZDNet reporter Mary Jo Foley provided a great overview of the partnership which you can find at ZDnet.

Stay tuned for what is to come from “BingHoo”.

In last week’s Fueled Friday, I discussed the first of three critical factors in SEO; content, which is “king”. Today, I want to discuss the queen that turns the kings neck; off page SEO – otherwise knows as link building.

The content on your website lets the search engines know what your website is about. Left to itself, there is no way for the search engines to know what content is better than the next, so the search engines decided that a great way to determine which site is more valuable, is to measure the number of inbound links to a site.

The process of link building can be time consuming, especially for more competitive markets where your goal is to outrank well known brands. I will share some simple strategies for building links to your website. I will tell you in advance that in the cases of very competitive markets, you may require the services of a professional to get more powerful links to your site, but whatever you do on your own will be a step in the right directions.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the purpose of acquiring links is twofold. You do want to have solid inbound links for the purposes of improving your rankings, but you also want to have links for the purpose of sending qualified traffic to your website.

Before I share with you the several ways of acquiring links, I want to address a few related topics; PageRank, no-follow, and outbound links. If PageRank and no-follow don’t mean anything to you at this point, don’t worry – literally don’t worry about even finding out what they mean.

PageRank
PageRank is the measurement of a websites inbound link strength as determined by Google. I won’t get into the technical details, but I will say this. Don’t be overly impressed with or consumed by PageRank, but rather focus on solid metrics such as the number of website visitors you have and the keywords they use to find you.

No-Follow
This is a technical designation given to links as to whether or not they contribute to a websites PageRank. Again, do not worry about this, just worry about acquiring links. Why? Because good links bring visitors, whether or not they contribute to your websites PageRank and you never know which visitor will end up being a customer.

Outbound Links
Some people get confused in the link building process and start placing links on their sites to other more powerful websites thinking that these sites will then link to them automatically. The truth is that most sites won’t even know that your site links to them unless you send them lots of traffic. Having links to other sites helps those sites, but does nothing to help you build links. In fact, it dilutes your link value.

So where are some good places to acquire links? Here are some thoughts to help you get started:

1. Search Engine Directories. In general if you have to pay to be listed in a directory, the value of that link will be decent. Stay clear of free directories that also list sites in the “pills, porn, and poker” categories and you can actually lose credibility with the search engines by being associated with them.

2. Blog Comments. One of the simplest ways to get a link to your website, is to comment on other blogs. I wrote a blog post on getting links from blogs some time ago.

3. Guest Blogging. Another great way to get inbound links is by blogging on other blogs. This not only provides you with inbound links, but it also gets you in front of a new audience.

4. Plain Old Blogging. If you are a blogger, you can often leverage lots of links to your blog/website through Social Media channels such as Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Twitter.

5. Press Links. If you can get coverage in an online story with a link, that is a good thing. If you have trouble getting coverage, you can always issue an online press release which will have a similar effect.

6. Social Media Profiles. If you create Social Media profiles, most of them have a place for you to add your URL. The top 3 I recommend are LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

7. Article Writing & Syndication. Aside from creating blog and web content, you can write articles and submit them to Article Sites such as EzineArticles.com where they will link to you and others can syndicate them as well which produced more inbound links.

8. Association Memberships. Many associations and trade groups have directories where they list their members along with contact information including their website.

I did not get to discuss how to find out how many links you have and track your progress, so stay tuned and I will cover that next week (before Friday).

If you have any questions or need professional help with link building, feel free to contact me.

Have a great weekend and a Happy Valentine’s Day.

Search Engine Optimization (a.k.a. SEO) is a very confusing subject to many. Like anything else, once you learn the theory and the specific components of SEO, it starts to make more sense. Some might even say it’s not that hard, and I would agree. Not to beat a dead horse, I will define SEO as “architecting a website such that the search engines are able to understand what is is about and why it should rank well for its related terms.”

There are two general components to SEO; “on page” elements and “off page” elements. On Page SEO refers to how the keywords related to your business appear in the written content of your site as well as the behind the scenes code that only the search engines read. Off Page SEO refers to how other (relevant) websites link to your website. When speaking, I put it like this “on page SEO tells the search engines what your website is about and off page SEO tells the search engines that your website is important enough to rank for what its about.” There is a third component to consider for effective SEO and that is the website platform iteself. There are essentially search engine friendly and non search engine friendly web platforms. I am sure you can guess which one is best for SEO. In this post, I will discuss on page SEO in detail and in the next two posts, I will discuss off page SEO and web platforms.

The two components of on page SEO are the actual page content (what people read) and the page coding (which the search engines read). In days of SEO past, content was referred to as “king”. You would hear people in the SEO business using that phrase very often – in fact too often – “content is king“, “content is king“. So let’s chat about what kind of content and coding you need to have on your website to get great results in the search engines.

Themed Content
Your website content should be “themed” meaning that each page on your website should target a unique set of keywords. For example, if you own a financial services company, you would want to have a separate page on your website for each service that you offer. This gives each of those pages an opportunity to rank for its related keywords. Many people fall short here in trying to get a single page site (often their home page) to rank for multiple keywords, and that generally can’t happen. What the search engines are looking for is how relevant a single page is to a keyword or set of related keywords. If you have a single page website that talks about everything you do, chances are that it will not rank for anything that you do because the keywords are diluted in value.

Fresh Content
The search engines want to serve relevant and current content to the searching public. While it is often not practical to change your web content frequently, there are certainly things you can do to keep current content on your website. Here are a few suggestions:

- Whenever there are changes to product or service offerings, you want to make sure to use those opportunities to update your website.

- If you have events or news, always make sure to add those to your site as well (news websites tend to do well in the search engines due to continually having new content).

- Adding articles to your website on a consistent basis can allow it to grow into a resource website that will attract those search at search engines and others linking to and sharing your content; which should ultimately lead to increased sales.

- Having a blog as a part of your website is a great way to add content on a continual basis and can help to position your company as the thought leader in your industry.

Website Coding
If you are not technical, some of this may not resonate with you. This just means you need to get someone to sit down and explain it or do it for you. Website coding (for the pupose of SEO) refers to having your keywords in the specific tags that the search engines look for such as TITLE tags, ALT tags, and META tags. Some may disagree with me, but I will say this. If you focus on creating solid content and use relevant keywords in your TITLE tags, you will do well. You should add META tags as a matter of good practice, but NEVER expect the META tags to make a big difference in your website. In he past, they used to have value but they have been abused so the search engines simply devalued them. I have had website obtain #1 rankings with no META tags whatsoever. Using ALT tags to add keywords to your images is a nice way to reinforce their keyword relevance, but a bigger way to do this is to name your images with keyword terms rather than the default names (i.e. loan-modification.jpg vs. DSC0112.jpg).

I hope this gives you some great ideas for adding relevant content and coding to your website. Once you start to put it into place, I am confident you will see results. If you need more specifics on the coding aspects, my book on Internet Marketing spells a lot of this out.

So, while content may be king, links are the “queen” that turns the kings head. Stay tuned for next weeks Fueled Friday where I disucss links and off page SEO.

Have a great weekend!