Can Reputation Management Services Erase Negative Reviews?
An article on BusinessWeek’s website asks if online reputation management services work. It’s a legitimate question and one worth considering. Just what does a reputation management company do and does it work?
First, you need to understand that if someone goes online and makes a negative comment about your business that you can’t make it disappear. Once it is online then it is a permanent record. Period.
Having said that, there are some things you can do to help diminish the impact of negative information about you online. One of the things you can do is try to use search engine optimization to push negative results down further and to increase the exposure of positive information about your company. Honestly, though, that’s not a perfect solution and it’s getting harder and harder to accomplish.
Another thing you can do is respond to information about you that you feel may be unfair to you. This is typically the response of companies that have grown in stature and want to be viewed as reputable.
It’s almost inevitable, once you grow to a certain size then you’ll encounter negative reviews of your company. It used to be that information spread by word of mouth and you had no way to control or monitor it. Now, it quickly makes its way online, which is a benefit to a business owner because you can actually read what people are saying about you and not just hear the rumors. That make it easier to respond to.
Online reputation management is not a cure-all panacea for every negative information you find about yourself. It is part SEO and part PR. But its purpose is to aid you in telling your story in a positive manner.
Why Are Google And Yelp Fighting Over Local Search?
It seems that Google Places has moved in on Yelp’s turf. And Yelp isn’t happy about it.
Specifically, Google’s strong moves into local with their new Places push seem to be going right at Yelp’s core. Sure’s it’s potentially about more than just local venue reviews, but that’s a huge part of it. And that’s what Yelp is all about.
So, Google and Yelp had a deal. Then Yelp pulled out of it. It seems that Google thinks it doesn’t need a deal after all. Perhaps that is why they introduced Google Places. Perhaps Google feels it can do local reviews better than Yelp. But it’s using Yelp content to draw in searchers. Is it sending traffic back to Yelp?
I can’t imagine that Yelp isn’t getting any new traffic from Google Places. It may not be as much new traffic as they’d like to get, but Google has far more users than Yelp has and not everyone who searches for local businesses knows about Yelp. That equates to a good thing. So I’m not sure what this is about really.
Is it just me or is Yelp over reacting? Perhaps they just need to focus on quality search engine optimization.
How Important Is Content Creation?
Without content no website can succeed. It’s like a car without an engine. It just won’t go. So you can bet it’s the most important part of your website development. But should you outsource it or hire an in-house writing team?
There are pros and cons to both. An in-house writing team will be easier and more convenient to communicate with and train. However, it could also be more expensive.
With outsourcing, it’s easier to let someone go if they aren’t producing the quality that you expect. It’s also a good way to test writers that you may be considering for an in-house team. Many times you can get very good quality writers at just a fraction of the cost of hiring someone to work inside your company.
So where do you find writers to produce your content? Here are a few resources you might consider:
- Craigslist
- Freelance websites like Guru and Elance
- Reading blogs within your niche or industry
- Job boards
- Local colleges and universities
- Professional writing associations
It’s important that any writer you hire, whether they be an in-house writer or a freelance writer, have some necessary knowledge. At a minimum they should:
- Be familiar with search engine optimization strategies
- Understand social media marketing
- Know your goals and objectives
- Be familiar with your company style and voice
On that last point, it’s not just important to know your style and voice. A good writer must be able to imitate it. After all, they are producing content for your website and your readers will know if they get it wrong.
Whether you hire an in-house writing team or a group of freelancers, keep in mind that your content is your business. Don’t let them compromise it.
5 Internet Marketing Terms You Should Know
If you want to become an Internet marketer, whether your interest is in affiliate marketing, e-mail marketing or you intend to promote your small business through Internet marketing strategies, then you need to become familiar with Internet marketing terms. Here are 5 terms every Internet marketer should know before starting their IM career.
- Keyword – What’s a keyword? If you don’t know what that means then you’ll have a difficult time figuring out how to market yourself online. It’s a very basic concept and an important one. A keyword is any word that you would like your website to rank for in the search engines.
- Search Engine Optimization – Also called SEO, for short. Search engine optimization is the utilization of keywords and links to help your web pages rank better in the search engines.
- Social Media Optimization – You’ve no doubt heard of social media. Maybe you’ve heard of social media marketing. But have you heard of social media optimization? This is the practice of producing your content in such a way that it has an increased chance of spreading itself around in social media circles.
- Link Building – You cannot maximize your SEO efforts without inbound links. These are links that point to your website without a reciprocal link back to the linking site. Also called one-way links. Link building is the process webmasters utilize to build their one-way link portfolio.
- Pay Per Click Advertising – Pay per click advertising, or PPC, is a form of online paid advertising where you bid on keywords and you pay for the advertising after your target audience clicks on the ad and visits your website. Other forms of PPC-like advertising include pay per action (PPA) and pay per view (PPV), or CPM (cost per thousand views).
These are not, by any means, the only terms you should be familiar with. There are others – viral marketing, video marketing, HTML, PHP, CSS (cascading style sheets), and many more – but these 5 Internet marketing terms are so basic that no one should start their Internet marketing plans without being familiar with them.
Take the time to learn if you want to earn.
Why URL Shorteners Are Bad For SEO
It seems that Twitter has made URL shorteners popular again. But are they good?
Naturally, many URL shortening services do offer value-added benefits that you won’t get with your traditional long URLs. The primary benefit to any URL shortening service, of course, is that you don’t have to pass along those godawful long URLs that could take up three lines or more in print. And if that’s the reason you are using the service then more power to you. It’s a useful benefit.
But what you should know about URL shorteners is that they are not good for SEO. Use them sparingly.
Think about this. When a visitor to your website clicks a link you created with an URL shortening service, they are being redirected to the URL shortening service’s website then on to the end page where you want them to land. The visitor actually leaves your website (or the website of origin) for a few seconds while the URL shortening service redirects them to the destination page. Because of this redirect, the link juice that flows from the web page of origin flows to the URL shortening service’s website, not to yours.
You know that some of the important and necessary SEO elements are inbound links with relevant anchor text. You won’t get those benefits with URL shortening so you should weigh the importance of the service against any search engine optimization benefits you desire before committing to URL shortening.
Is PPC Like Renting Traffic?
I read somewhere on another blog (don’t remember where now) that running a PPC campaign is like renting traffic. The analogy makes sense, but if you think that renting is a bad thing then think again. Renting traffic can actually pay off.
There is a difference between renting and owning, however. While PPC is like renting traffic, SEO is more like owning it. Here’s how they differ.
When you spend $100 on a PPC campaign and receive 100 visitors to your website then you’ve paid $1 per visitor to read your offer. But let’s say that you close 1 in 10 of your visitors or, to say it another way, you have a 10% conversion ratio. Each sale costs you $10. But you only pay for that sale whenever you have your PPC ads turned on. Stop the advertising and you stop the sales and the traffic.
Measuring ROI is a different thing altogether. Let’s say you sell pink widgets for $20 each. For each sale you pay $10 to obtain you also earn $20 to close. But that’s not your profit. You also have material costs. Let’s say it costs you $3 to make your widgets. Your profit is $7 for each widget you sell. There’s your ROI.
SEO works a little differently. Let’s say you pay an SEO professional $500 to optimize your website. Your conversion ratio is still 10% and let’s say that you get 1,000 visitors from the search engines each month. That means you make 100 sales every month and at $20 each you earn $2,000 on your search engine traffic the first month. That’s an ROI of $1,200 the first month and $1,700 every month after that.
Obviously, the money you can earn from SEO has a lot greater potential than the money you can earn from PPC. But, realistically, you have to wait 2-6 months for that SEO traffic to become profitable. If that $500 investment doesn’t start paying off for 6 months then you do not realize an ROI for 6 months on your investment whereas you can realize an ROI on your PPC the very same month. It’s a lot more immediate.
Question: Would you rather earn $70 additional income today or $1,700 additional income 6 months from now?
Consider that your $70 ROI will add up to $420 over a 6-month period. If you re-invest that money into other vehicles then $420 could turn into more. So don’t knock the lower numbers today that you can earn from PPC. I’d recommend that you utilize both channels – PPC and SEO – for your online marketing efforts.
BTW, the numbers in these examples are not reflective of actual sales and ROI numbers. They could be higher or lower for both PPC and SEO. Some companies actually earn higher ROIs from PPC.
Is PPC An SEO Killer?
Many webmasters, when they first start thinking about running PPC campaigns, want to know how it will affect their SEO. Will it kill your SEO campaigns or enhance them? Or neither?
Let’s just address the idea of killing your SEO right now. That won’t happen. Your PPC ads and your organic SEO are judged by separate algorithms so they really don’t directly affect each other. Note that I said “directly”. So I guess that answers the second question, will PPC enhance your SEO.
The answer: Not in a direct way. But it will enhance your SEO efforts if you target the same keywords or approach both campaigns in a complementary way. You want your PPC ads and your organic SEO to work together, not against each other. And if you do the proper keyword research, build a well optimized landing page that achieves high rankings and a high quality score then you can ensure that your campaigns do complement each other. Everything else is simply figuring out the score.
Do SMO and SEO Go Hand In Hand?
Social media optimization also carries search engine optimization benefits. Or, to shorten it, SMO is SEO.
But the vice-versa isn’t necessarily true. SEO does not equate to SMO. Search engine optimization and social media optimization are two different things. They achieve different purposes and as such require different strategies and approaches. Nevertheless, there is a search engine optimization component to SMO.
But what does that mean exactly?
In truth, it means different things depending on the social media platform. For instance, with Facebook, your profile can end up in the search engine results pages for your name. And many of them do. For Twitter, however, your tweets will likely end up in the search engine results pages for real-time keyword queries. Other social media services have their own ranking positives.
But what you need to understand about social media optimization is that it does come with search engine optimization benefits. If you perform your SMO tasks correctly then you’ll get a double-pronged benefit.
How’s Your Long Tail Hanging?
Google has confirmed rumors that a recent algorithm change has taken place, and that’s a rare event. Not the algorithm change; that happens all the time. But Google confirming reports of an algorithm change rarely happens. Nevertheless, Google is pretty specific about who is affected by this change.
Here’s what I find interesting about the news:
Based on Matt’s comment, this change impacts “long tail” traffic, which generally is from longer queries that few people search for individually, but in aggregate can provide a large percentage of traffic.
In other words, there are some sites out there that are going to do better with their long tail keywords and other sites that won’t do as well. So here’s the question: Which are you?
You should know by now if you’ve seen a rise or a drop in your long tail search rankings. If you see no effect then your site probably hasn’t been affected at all. But if you’ve seen a rise in long tail keyword rankings then Google has helped you; if you’ve seen a fall in similar long tail keyword rankings then Google socked it to you. But don’t take it personally.
These types of algorithm changes are about one thing: Providing searchers with the best web pages for their search queries. If Google made this change then it’s because they believed that the search results were dominated by a certain class of webmaster to the detriment of others. I think this change means that top-notch SEO is not always necessary, but knowing how to do it will improve your changes at getting good rankings.
Would You Buy SEO Services From Your Local Newspaper?
Ever since Google started selling convincing AdWords campaigns to small business owners, newspapers have been in decline. Their advertising customers have been giving up the newspaper ads and doing PPC instead. The revenues have been falling.
I guess they’ve tired of that so now newspapers are selling SEO services. Is that a good thing?
I suppose for the newspaper, it is. But what about the customer?
There is one edge that newspapers have over professional SEO firms. They know their customers. And they can offer personalized local optimization services based on the needs of their customers. So I guess that’s two edges. But can newspapers perform SEO?
I think the only way that will work is if the newspapers employ SEO professionals on staff, or outsource the SEO work. Reporters are not SEO professionals. Advertising representatives are not SEOs either. So it seems to me that if newspapers are going to survive as SEO companies then they need to hire SEO experts. What do you think?
Is Web Design Different From Web Development?
Is there a difference between web design and web development? Actually, there is. But sadly, most small business owners don’t really know what it is.
Web Design is about one thing – making your website appealing and attractive to your target market.
Web Development, on the other hand, is about making your website functional and helping your visitors find more easily the information they are looking for. There are a variety of strategies for accomplishing that task.
While web design is concerned about elements such as logo design, sidebar widths, header and footer appearance and photo/video presentations, web development is more concerned with elements such as navigation menu protocols, conversion funnels and usability studies. Of course, copywriting and SEO are also very important.
I won’t say that one is more important than the other, but it does help to know the difference. Your web development team should include a good web designer. But it shouldn’t consist only of a web designer. At any rate, if you are setting up a website that you hope will make you money then you should think about web design within the framework of your web development strategy – not the other way around.
Why Keyword Density Is Not Important
Veteran SEO Stephan Spencer wrote a blog post for Search Engine Land that has sparked a bit of controversy. In this blog post he wrote:
Ok, no one says “da bomb” anymore, but you get the drift. Monitoring keyword density values is pure folly.
A commenter took issue and wrote:
Folly? Hardly. If you’re trying to rank for a keyword, you want to make sure you use it a few times on a page. That’s just common sense. Of course, you don’t want to overuse a keyword, or it might come across as spammy. Any smart SEO pays attention to KW density.
The logic here is a bit spurious. There are two true statements followed by a non-sequitur. Yes, you must use your keyword enough times on a web page for it to matter. And, yes, if you overuse it then you might be tagged as a spammer and your web page de-listed, or diminished in rankings. But that doesn’t mean that keyword density is something you should be counting.
Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz says:
The formula for keyword density – a percentage of the total number of words on the page that are the target phrase – is indeed folly. IR scientists discredited this methodology for relevance decades ago. Early search engines and information retrieval systems already leveraged TF*IDF as a far more accurate and valuable methodology.
The Wikipedia link was added by me.
Back to keyword density. It’s not important. I’d say there are three keyword factors that are much more important than density:
- Keyword Placement
- Semantic Language Relevance
- Anchor Text
This is not necessarily in order of importance.
What I mean by placement is the location within your web page of your keywords. The Title tag is very important. It’s the most important place for your keyword. First paragraph and last paragraph are also important. H tags are disputed, but I’d say they are somewhat important. I’ll stop there.
Semantic language relevance is a reference to the use of synonyms within a web page document. If you are writing about fighter planes and you mention Tomcats, Messerschmitts and Skytrains then those words will do more to rank your web page for the term “fighter planes” than using the phrase “fighter planes” with a density of 5% throughout your web page document. Don’t buy the keyword density hype.
Finally, anchor text is undisputed as a major search ranking factor. Use your keyword in your internal anchor text. It’s much more important than keyword density.
I’ll have to agree with Stephan Spencer on this one. Search engine optimization is denigrated with talk of keyword densities.
Pay Per Click Is The Bedrock Of Web Marketing
A lot can be said of organic SEO and I’ll have to admit, you can’t really run a Web business without it. The lion’s share of Web traffic, even today, comes from organic SEO. It’s a necessary component to Web success.
However, PPC is the bedrock of Web marketing. Not SEO.
Why do I say that? Because pay per click marketing is a pay now-buy now model. When you operate a successful pay per click marketing campaign you know you are getting good traffic. You know it from the results. You paid for the traffic, but you paid for traffic that responds and it happens quickly. With SEO, you could wait for months to see your results. With PPC, it’s instantaneous.
Well, almost.
Rarely will you find great PPC keywords by running an organic SEO campaign. If you did, it would take months to figure it out. But webmasters do use PPC to find new keywords for their organic SEO campaigns all the time.
Another reason I can say that PPC is the bedrock of Web marketing is because it can also be used as a basis for determining website valuation. Cost per click is an important metric that domainers use to value Web properties they are interested in. They know that if a website can command a high cost per click on a pay per click campaign then it is in a competitive niche. Niches garner that kind of competition in only one way – there’s money to be made. It’s a profitable niche.
So when you think about how you want to conduct your next marketing campaign online. Think about combining your SEO and PPC efforts. That’s how you should be doing it anyway.
13 Timeless Internet Marketing Strategies That Still Work (And Likely Always Will)
Internet marketing is a science, and an art, that has come of age. There are timeless strategies and tactics that will likely always work. There are those, of course, that are just plain silly or that haven’t been proven. The following 13 Internet marketing strategies are strategies that have been used over and over again by countless thousands of marketers online and that still work and will probably always work:
- Search engine optimization – SEO is the most basic of Internet marketing tactics. There is a reason is still works.
- Pay per click marketing – PPC can usually deliver more immediate results than SEO, but I’d rank it as a very close second to SEO in terms of must-use strategies.
- Blogging – It took a while for blogging to catch on en masse, but now that it has you can add this to your Internet marketing arsenal.
- E-mail marketing – Before there was PPC or blogging, there was e-mail marketing. This timeless strategy has proven itself so many times that it’s not even questionable any more.
- Link building - Link building is usually considered an SEO tactic, but there’s more to link building than simply increasing your search engine optimization benefits. That’s only part of the equation. The other part is finding where the traffic is.
- Guest authoring – Be a guest author on someone else’s website or blog.
- Video marketing – This one is late to the party, but it sure has made a big splash. I think video marketing is the new article marketing.
- Article marketing – Article marketing isn’t as effective as it used to be, but it’s still good.
- Build niche-specific microsites – After you’ve tested your keywords on you main website by building single web pages around them, take your best ones and create a new site around those keywords.
- Directory submissions – Believe it or not, people still do go through online directories. There are some good directories and some bad ones. Stick to the prominent ones that are general in nature and those within your niche. Don’t pay for an upgraded listing unless the directory is well trafficked by people in your niche.
- Forums – Forums are well trafficked and a good forum can send you loads of traffic to your website. This is still one of the best ways to market a Web business.
- Social Networking – Social networking has taken off like a rocket. Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are great ways to meet people, make connections and promote your website.
- Social bookmarking – Submit your best links to the most popular social bookmarking sites and watch your traffic soar.
Try these 13 Internet marketing strategies. If I’ve left any out, share them here with our readers. What ways do you use to market your products and services online?
SEM Is About Benefits, Not Profits
Search engine marketing has as many definitions as there are marketers, and most of them are right. But what hardly gets talked about among search engine marketers is that SEM is more than just selling your stuff for a profit. You’ve got to do more than attract audiences with keywords. You are selling benefits.
No one cares about your product. No one cares about your company. No one cares about you. They want to know what you can do for them.
The question is, how can you do that with search engine marketing?
First, the two arms of SEM:
- Pay per click advertising
- Search engine optimization (organic search)
So how do you sell benefits through these two primary channels?
With PPC you’ve got to sell your benefits to get a click. Your goal is to get people to your landing page and then sell the benefits of your product there.
With organic search marketing, you use your landing page optimization to get rank your web page, build links to it, drive traffic to it and sell your benefits to your visitors to close the sale.
Search engine marketing really follows the principles of traditional marketing – sell the benefits. You just do it with modern technology.
Do You Have A Video Sitemap?
One of the most important developments the search engines ever came out with was the sitemap. It allowed all of the search engines to better crawl websites and find content for indexing. Now, Google is offering video sitemaps and I’m betting it’s going to be every bit as revolutionary as the original HTML and XML sitemaps.
A sitemap is very important for crawlability and getting indexed and ultimately for achieving high SERP rankings. It tells the search engines how many pages you have on your site and which pages are important for crawling and, more importantly, what changes you’ve made to your website since it was last crawled. A video sitemap will do the same for your video content.
You might as well face the music. Video marketing is here. And it’s only going to grow bigger. The only question you need to answer is, Are you getting on the bandwagon now or later?
How Many Links Does It Take To Rank A Web Page?
At one time SEOs talked about something called keyword density. The idea was that if you put just the right number of keywords in your content then you could rank it pretty well in the search engines. Then Google came along.
For awhile after Google became the dominant search engine, keyword density was still talked about widely. But links became so much more important and after about three years it became apparent to many SEOs that inbound links were just as important or more important than the number of keywords on your page. Some SEOs even start saying that the number and type of inbound links to your web pages were more important for ranking purposes.
In fact, links did become important. In many cases, you could rank a web page for its key terms by finding the right kind and right number of links with just the right anchor text. Today, however, that’s a bit more difficult to do.
Links are still important, but all the search engines are a bit less forthcoming about how links fit into the overall picture. The search engines used to report your links. Now they don’t. Not much any way. And it’s a lot more difficult to find out information about how your links are affecting your search rankings.
The way it looks now, links are still important. They’re as important as they ever were, but there are so many ranking factors now that it’s difficult to say that there is any one ranking factor that is any more important than any other. We could probably identify a dozen or so ranking factors that are at the top of the ranking factor food chain and inbound link anchor text is one of them. Still, when it comes to the number of links you need to rank for a keyword, your guess is as good as mine.
Should You Use A Content Mill?
Content mills are not new. They are, however, new at dominating the SERPs. I’ll restate that another way.
There was a time long ago (like in the late 1990s) when there were two types of content. There was the high quality content that you’d find on any A-list website and there was less-than-stellar content. Some of that less-than-stellar content was produced by freelance writers or people who wrote SEO content for others to profit from.
In those days the ratio of quality content to the other kind was pretty even. But today, the less-than-stellar content seems to have taken over some corners of the web while quality content struggles to stay afloat.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
There really are just two (legal) ways to acquire quality content for your website.
- You can write it yourself
- You can hire someone to write it for you.
If you hire someone to write your content for you then you’ll still be responsible for its quality. What guidelines do you have for that? If you have none then you’ll have to accept the guidelines of you content provider. Will it be quality content?
This is where webmasters who cannot write themselves can end up in a quandary. If you hire a budget writer then you’ll likely get budget content. For the high quality content you need to spend some money. And there’s the rub. Can you afford the quality content?
This is ultimately your decision to make, but don’t make it blindly. If you want your content to shine then you need to hire a quality content provider.
Using YouTube For Search Engine Marketing
It’s called Universal Search. Google has been doing it for a couple of years now. Including videos in the organic search results for certain key phrases. Where do you think those videos are hosted? Most of them are on YouTube.
Most of them, not all of them. But YouTube is the most trafficked video site online and the second most popular search engine. That means that video content found at YouTube is highly valuable to the search engines. You can get your YouTube videos to appear online for search queries and have those videos rank reasonably well for the key search terms you are targeting.
The first step, of course, is to produce a really good video that people want to watch and share with their friends. Secondly, upload it to YouTube.
Beyond that, how do you optimize for the search results page?
Here are a few tips to keep in mind as you optimize your video content on YouTube for the search engines:
- Use your video title as an opportunity to target the right key phrase.
- In the text portion of your video upload, describe your video accurately using the proper keywords.
- Establish a YouTube channel with your keyword in it.
- If you include links in your YouTube video, make sure they point to a relevant page on your website.
Video optimization is just now getting its start, but you can be sure that YouTube videos will have as high a chance to appear in the SERPs as any content can.
Why Web Design Is Important
Web design is an important part of doing business online. In the old days, if you had a website it was enough. People were not expecting attractiveness. But today, an ugly website won’t do. Your website needs to have a pretty face.
Your first impression as a business will often be your website. If it looks cluttered and unorganized then people will have that impression of your business and you will lose sales. It is vitally important to focus your web design efforts on three key areas of first impression:
- Attractiveness of design
- Search engine optimization
- User functionality
If you ask which of these is more important, the answer is none of them. They are all equally important. Your web design should be attractiveness enough to keep people interested long enough to read the content. The content needs to search engine optimized so that it attracts the right people through search engine marketing channels. And it needs to be functional and easy to use for your visitors. Miss the mark on any of these and you’ll lose sales. But it all starts with a pretty web design.
Why Strict Keyword Densities Are No Longer Necessary
To truly understand how SEO works today you need to have an understanding of the history of SEO as a marketing strategy. Search engine optimization did not develop in a vacuum and it won’t evolve into what it will be tomorrow without the developments that are occurring today. There is a continuum and it can be traced.
To begin with, SEO did not really get its name until after Google came on the scene. Before Google, Internet marketers were optimizing their websites but they didn’t really call it that. However, that “optimization” was very primitive compared to how it’s done today.
Meta Tags, Backlinks And The Rise Of Google
At one time, pre-Google, all you had to do was add a bunch of keywords to your meta tag list and you’d rank well for those keywords. It didn’t even matter if those keywords appeared in your page content or not. You’d still rank. Hardly seems fair, does it? That’s why Google rose to such prominence as quickly as it did. The company introduced a whole new paradigm.
When Google came along, no one was interested in analyzing back links. Today, that seems intuitive, but at one time no thought it was important except for two guys with the software to make it happen.
Those two guys started Google, whose search ranking algorithm was based largely on the number of inbound links pointing to a particular web page. Soon, Internet marketers started dropping their meta tag strategy in lieu of a backlink strategy. Back links became the new currency.
From Backlinks To Semantic Natural Language
Over the years, Google has tweaked its ranking factors to include more than just an analysis of the number of inbound links to your site’s pages. Quality of links, relevancy of links and link diversity are important too. And there are more than 100 other factors Google considers as well. And then there are Bing, Yahoo!, AOL, Ask and many other search engines. Each one has their own ranking criteria.
One consideration that the major search engines look for today is natural language, or semantic language, syntax. While keywords are still important, successful web page do not need X number of one keyword phrase per Y number of words on the page, what marketers call “keyword density”. Instead, it’s important to put your keyword phrase in the right places on your page and in proximity to other important elements on the page. And to write naturally for your site visitors just as you would if keywords were not important.
In essence, the search engines are looking for the best content for every keyword phrase they rank pages for. If you stuff your pages with keywords just for a ranking then you are doing yourself and your site visitors a disservice. It’s basically shooting yourself in the foot. Trust me, that hurts.
On Page Vs. Off Page SEO: Which Is More Important?
There are SEOs today, and some of them are quite well known, who teach that link building is the most important aspect of SEO. But is it? Well, just try building links to a blank page and see what happens. I’m betting not much.
On the other hand, I’ve seen web pages rise to the No. 1 position for their targeted keywords just for their on page factors alone.
A few years ago Google fixed a problem called Google Bombing that caused certain pages to rank No. 1 on the basis of thousands of inbound links using the same anchor text. The thing was, the anchor text was seldom relevant to the page in question. We can chalk that one up to the value of link building.
Of course, it goes without saying that both on page and off page SEO are important. But, what if you had to do without one or the other? Which would you choose? You’d better say off page SEO because even if you could rank a page on the basis of inbound link anchor text alone, what value would that be for a page with no content?
There’s more to SEO than being No. 1 in the SERPs. You’ve also got to convert traffic and you can’t do that without on page content.
The Best Reputation Management Tool On The Planet
There are reputation management tools and then there are reputation management tools. The best tools for managing your reputation online are more than just reputation management tools. They are tools that can also – and should also – be used for other things.
For instance, a good reputation management tool will also optimize your website for search engines for the key terms that are important to your website as well as the key reputation term that you are managing. It is a branding tool, and SEO tool and a reputation tool all rolled into one.
So what tool is that?
Your blog. And this is what your blog does in each of those areas using normal, every day tactics that the search engines approve:
- Adds fresh daily content to your website – This alone takes care of all three of your goals: Branding, Reputation Management and SEO. Your blog is a unique branding tool, but it also can be used to SEO your website around your key terms. Every key term that is important to your marketing efforts can be taken care of through your blog. Then there’s reputation management. If you write your blog yourself and sign your name to every post, that’s a big reputation plus. Even if you hire a ghostwriter, you can have blog posts signed as they are a reflection of you and your values.
- Link building and internal navigation – Yes, this is also a three-time bread winner. Your anchor text not only acts as an SEO element for your website, but it also is great for branding. And links that include your key reputation terms perform an added boost as well.
- Increases your chances of being found – Every blog post is counted as a unique web page so the more often you blog the more often you brand and SEO your website and manage your reputation.
- Gets your website crawled more often – If your website is crawled more often then the search engines will update their indexes more often to rank your important pages for your key terms, key reputation terms and, of course, that makes you more brandable.
So, as you can see, your blog makes your website more brandable, increases your SEO and adds a reputation management element that other SEO and branding tools do not. It’s the perfect reputation management tool.
Is SEO Getting Harder?
Search engine optimization seems to be getting harder and harder. Is it, or is it just my imagination?
In the early days of the Web, all you really had to do to rank a website is choose a good domain name and add the right keywords to your meta tags. You could have hundreds of keywords in your list of meta tags, even some that weren’t on your web page, and you’d rank for the key terms you wanted to rank for. Not today.
The search engines have become so much more sophisticated. And so have search engine optimizers. And there is more competition going after every keyword. It’s not easier. It’s harder.
So how can a new webmaster seeking to get his website recognized earn the rank that he desires? The first thing to do is to study a little bit about SEO. Learn what you can. If you have a business to run then you likely won’t learn everything, but you can learn enough to be able to discuss valid tactics with a real professional. Learn enough that you won’t be taken advantage of. The life of your website depends on it.
Should You SEO Your Site For Facebook?
According to WebProNews, Facebook and Microsoft are extending their relationship, which will be a big boost to Bing’s search share. Or Facebook’s search share. However you want to slice it.
This is obviously good news for Bing since Facebook is one of the Web’s most trafficked websites – more so even than Bing itself. To get the exclusive on the search feature of Facebook should do wonders for the search engine’s search share. But what will it do for website owners?
I think it could mean that search engine optimization for Bing will become even more important. It’s already important though not quite as important as SEO for Google. But I can see that this relationship with Facebook could make it just as important to optimize for Bing as for Google. That is especially true if Facebook manages to overtake Google as the No. 1 most trafficked website online.
But here’s the catch: Optimizing your web pages for Bing won’t be any different than optimizing them for Bing right now. It will just be more important.
Why PPC Is A Good Place To Start
If you have a new website that you are trying to promote and believe that a targeted SEO or social media campaign is going to help you reach your desired ROI sooner then you are in for a disappointment. It’s not search engine optimization and social media campaigns don’t have value. They do. But they usually take a while before the value starts to show.
With an SEO campaign, it really depends on the competitive playing field. But if the competition is average then you are likely to wait a year before a hard-hitting SEO campaign really starts to pay off. You might get some results within that first year, but it takes a while before you achieve respectable rankings for competitive keywords. In some industries that one year becomes two or three.
With social media, it might not take that long or it might take longer. There are a lot of variable factors that can influence the success of your marketing campaigns. One of those is your choice of social media platforms. If you show up at the wrong place then you’ll find the wrong party. Plain and simple.
With PPC you have a lot more control over the outcome than you do with social media and you can achieve much quicker results than you can with SEO. The biggest problem for many advertisers is budget. But if you can get a handle on that, running a PPC campaign right out of the starting gate should get you a quicker ROI. Are you in a hurry?
How Phrase-Based Indexing Influences SEO
If you’ve never heard the term “phrase-based indexing” then let me give you a quick primer. The concept is based on clustering. Google’s search bot will go out and analyze pages that use certain phrases together. For instance, “baseball” and “home run”. Add to that the key phrases “base hit” and “strike out” and you’ll start to get a picture.
If a large percentage of pages on the Web that discuss baseball also use the other key phrases in the cluster then you have a high value set of phrases. Google can use this information for several purposes.
One purpose is to identify phrases that are popular among spammers. If the search engine can identify those then the spam can be filtered from the search results. But another purpose is to use the phrase clusters themselves for ranking purposes. A web page that successfully incorporates the cluster of phrases into its content could rank higher for the initial key phrase – “baseball” for instance – than a web page that simply re-uses the initial key phrases over and over again attempting to achieve the right density.
This is particularly telling because what it is really saying is that natural language writing is preferable to stilted keyword-based writing. The search engines have been treating content this way for several years. Understanding this will improve your SEO.
Do Article Spinners Work?
There is a new practice in article marketing using SEO tactics on the cheap. It’s called article spinning. The practice is simply taking an old article and putting it through a computer software program that mixes it up and changes the sentences around so search engines don’t recognize it as duplicate content. The problem is, it is duplicate content and usually the articles don’t make a whole lot of sense.
For instance, the article spinner will take a sentence from the third paragraph and make it the opening paragraph. It might even exchange a keyword for another pre-selected keyword. Then it will take a sentence from the bottom of the article and make it the second sentence while moving the first sentence of the original article to the third sentence spot and thus forming a new paragraph.
The article spinner rearranges the entire article this way. And marketers actually use them.
I’m not going to say that the articles are poorly SEOd. By bot standards, the SEO isn’t bad. But the writing is usually horrendous. I don’t know how people make money with these articles, but some do.
It’s almost always better to use original articles. Original content in any format is always best. The search engine optimization will almost always be better, but the writing, which is always for humans any way, will nearly always be a big step up. And your reputation will go along with it.
Will SEO Ever Die?
Veteran folk rocker Neil Young sang a popular song in the 1970s and 1980s that went something like this:
Hey hey, my my
Rock and roll will never die
Later, King Missile made a hit with a song titled “Rock and Roll Will Never Die.” The message has become a clarion call for rock musicians who want the romantic dream to live forever.
SEO is no romantic dream (and some would argue neither is rock and roll), but you could apply this message to it just as well. SEO is a marketing tactic for online businesses that involves writing your web content in such a way that search engines rank that content against other web pages for specific keywords. If you do it well then you rank high. Bottom line.
The reason SEO will live forever is because search engines rely on content. Searchers thrive on it. Robots feed on it. Webmasters provide it. If you provide what human searchers need and what search engine robots feed on then you’ll always be in business. SEO is a necessary tool for doing business online.
2010 Search Engine Optimization Goals
Happy New Year! Welcome to 2010. Have you established any search engine optimization goals for this year?
It might seem like an academic exercise to establish goals for SEO, but it’s really not. If you want your search engine optimization efforts to be successful then you’ve got to have a plan and you’ve got to work your plan. That requires setting some goals.
The first step to successful goal setting is to analyze where you are now. What got you here? Have you been tracking your progress?
Some of the important SEO metrics to keep an eye on include:
- Search engine saturation
- Number of inbound links
- Keyword rankings
- Page rankings per keyword
- PageRank
- Traffic count (visitors, unique visitors, etc.)
- Bounce rate
These are not the only metrics that are important, of course, but it’s a good start. Figure out where you stand right now then chart a course for where you want to be by year’s end. Goalsetting is not a difficult task, but it is an essential one – even for search engine optimization.