The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

If you have a Facebook fan page for your brand, it can show up in the search engine results. But you should optimize it to give it an extra boost. Here are 5 Facebook fan page optimization tips, courtesy of SEOmoz.

1. Get a vanity URL – Facebook allows you to get a vanity URL for your fan page after it has received 25 likes. Make sure you use a vanity URL that utilizes your primary keyword or brand name.
2. Use a branded title for your page name – When you name your Facebook fan page, give it a name associated with your brand name. If you can’t do that, give it a keyword-based name. This will go a long way to making your fan page better optimized for search traffic.
3. Include a phone number and address - This is very important for local businesses. This information will make your business more searchable in Google Local Search.
4. Link back to your Facebook fan page – If you own a blog or you have a Google+ account, link to your Facebook fan page. Associating your fan page with your brand in all the places where you are recognized online will help that page to rank better in the search engines.
5. Optimize your status updates – When you create a new status update on your Facebook fan page, use keywords. That will optimize the status update as well as the page overall. The first 18 characters of your post serve as your meta description, so be sure to front-load your keywords.

Optimizing your Facebook fan page is just one more thing you can do to boost your brand’s search chutzpah online. Don’t overlook it.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, often takes questions from people and answers them via video. WebProNews featured one of these questions from Cutts recently regarding synonyms in your content.

Regarding the use of synonyms in your on-page content, Matt Cutts makes the following comments:

• Use both words, “without sounding artificial or stilted or spammy”
• “Make sure that you mention, in a natural way, that you are good at both of those”
• “Maybe once it’s a USB drive, and the next time it’s a USB stick, and at the bottom of the page it’s a flash drive”
• Read the text aloud and ask, “Does it sound stilted? Does it sound artificial?”
• “Try to use the words in a natural way as long as it doesn’t go too far, and people start to notice that it sounds weird”

Notice how many times he used the words “natural,” “artificial,” and “stilted.” He even used “spammy” once, and “weird.” The idea is to use natural language writing techniques to cover the topics you write about online. That is, write as if you were writing about your topic and search engines didn’t exist.

If you use the same keyword phrase over and over again in your content, then it will likely sound artificial or spammy. You don’t want that. So you do want to substitute your keyword phrase a few times with something that is synonymous. You want to do that so that your writing does come across as natural and not stilted. But here’s the catch – if you replace your primary keyword phrase too often and use too many synonyms just for the sake of using synonyms, then it will sound unnatural.

So the key is to find that balance, that in-between place, where you focus on your primary keyword but substitute it for a synonym in certain places so that your content flows smoothly from beginning to end.

I’ve heard more than a few arguments about whether or not long or short content is best for online marketing. To tell the truth, I think it’s a losing argument no matter which side you’re on.

The advocates of short content take that approach because they believe that people won’t read long form content. The truth, however, is that people will read long form content if it is good. They won’t read it if it is not good, but they won’t read short form content if isn’t good either.

Advocates for long form content argue that search engines have more to feed on with long content. The more content you have the more queries you can rank for. That’s true. But if the content isn’t worth reading, ranking well for it won’t matter. You’ll get a lot of bounces if you get traffic at all.

The key to any and all content, whether short or long, is to make it good. Quality content is the best content.

So does that mean that size doesn’t matter? Not really. Size matters if you want to increase your chances at ranking for more search queries, but you have to take the time to do your research and write content that deserves to rank well. That means writing content that people want to read. If you can consistently produce high quality content in long form, then you should do well online.

More and more, I’m seeing top-notch SEO experts – people who have been the top leaders in SEO and Internet marketing for more than ten years – saying that chasing keywords is no longer an SEO best practice. That just doesn’t seem right, but I’ll have to agree with them. If you want to rank well in the search engines going into 2013, I recommend focusing on high quality content without the keyword spam.

What do I mean by that?

Jill Whalen has an article at SiteProNews listing 18 former SEO best practices that could now work against you. I think this is a very important list.

Right in the middle of her article, however, is this paragraph:

Today, and for the foreseeable future, SEO is much less about optimizing for specific keywords, and much more about technical issues, social signals, and the overall trustworthiness of a company and its website.

Pay attention here because this is real important. The emphasized phrases are mine.

Trust: The New SEO

If you aren’t optimizing for specific keywords, then what are you optimizing for? Answer: Trust. That’s it. Your new buzzword going forward is trust. That’s the new SEO.

Does that mean you can’t use keywords? No, not at all. It does mean that your keywords should not be the focal point of your content. The needs of your readers should be the focal point of your content with the end goal of earning and building trust at the forefront of your thinking process.

In reality, this is the way it should have always been. Keywords can get your site ranked, though going forward this is questionable, but they won’t build trust in your brand. Only high quality content that meets the needs of your readers can do that.

Forget about stuffing keywords into your content, building back links with anchor text, and other manipulative SEO tactics. Just write great content. That’s your new SEO strategy.

More and more, I see websites ranking for key terms that don’t appear in their title tags and that don’t have any measurable inbound anchor text using that specific key term for which they are ranking. And in many cases the key term isn’t anywhere on the page. I’m not the only person who has noticed this.

So what’s happening?

Rand Fishkin does a good job of explaining about co-citation, which makes a lot of sense actually. We’ve looked at another type of citation that Google has become adept at using for SEO purposes in the local space as it relates to Google Places. Maybe Google is taking what it has learned from Google Places citations and applied it across the Net as a whole. That wouldn’t surprise me.

SEO is changing, folks. What used to work isn’t working any more for a lot of people. That doesn’t mean that anchor text, title tags, and other classic SEO tactics are dead, or dying. What it does mean is that they may have a diminished effect in the future as Google learns to look for other clues that will help it rank web pages for specific search queries that webmasters may not necessarily be targeting.

Is this good news? I think it is. I think it could mean less spam in the search results, but I also think it will make SEO better for online marketers who want to do it right.

There is a lot of talk among SEOs about White Hat strategies and Black Hat strategies. Obviously, you want to stay away from the Black Hat SEO tactics and go with the White Hat tactics. But there’s just one problem. Every White Hat SEO tactic has the potential to become a Black Hat tactic.

I’m not being facetious. All it takes to become a Black Hat SEO is to take a White Hat technique and overdo it. Many have done it.

Google algorithm updates are full of historic swipes at large numbers of Internet marketers who learned how to SEO their websites from gurus, ninjas, and purveyors of White Hat tactics. What’s good today may be bad tomorrow in the eyes of the search engines. That’s why I advocate any SEO tactic being employed in moderation.

Too many blog comment links can be detrimental. The reason is because so many commentators are only after the links.

Take any SEO tactic that has worked for someone and you can find someone else that it has hurt. That includes simple implementations like using a keyword in your page title. It works because it’s a practice that has been recognized by the industry to get pages to rank well. BUT, there have been some cases where a web page has ranked for a search term that was not included in the page title. It happens all the time. And there are instances, as well, where search terms in page titles couldn’t save a web page from being de-listed or falling in the SERPs.

I’m not saying that search terms added to a page title will get your site de-listed or cause you to fall in the rankings. What I am saying is if you take a good thing to excess, then you could be considered a Black Hat SEO practitioner by the search engines.

Do the good things, but do them in moderation.

Not all content is created equal. You can produce or create content that has temporal value. It can even have intrinsic value. And of course, even content that is temporal can have tremendous value even if for a short time. But there is no value quite like eternal value. That’s what evergreen content can do for your business.

So what is evergreen content? I’ve identified 4 very important qualities of evergreen content that every online marketer should know. If you know these qualities, then you can create evergreen content on a regular basis and keep visitors coming to your website over and over again.

1. Search engine optimized – Evergreen content is content that can be found through a simple search query. It has to have some SEO value and be searchable.
2. Valuable to a large variety of people – The content itself must have some intrinsic value. That value must crossover to people from a variety of backgrounds and achieve some sort of cross-appeal to multiple audiences.
3. Must be shareable – Evergreen content is content that people want to share with their friends.
4. Lasting value – As its name implies, evergreen content is content that has lasting value. It isn’t trendy or fashionable one day and unnoticeable the next. News is rarely evergreen because it by nature is transient. But informational content that has the same value next year or next decade as it has today will always be searchable and shareable. It’s truly evergreen content.

Are you looking for content that appeals to a broad audience and will be valuable for a very long time? You should be. It’s the most valuable content you can produce.

In the midst of a great article on measuring ROI in search engine optimization campaigns, Michael Martinez started talking about depreciating link values. That’s an odd way to talk about link building, isn’t it? But it’s really not – not if you consider inbound links an asset.

A Website’s intrinsic value should include the intrinsic value of the links that point to it. So I feel, anyway. Hence, if you can assign a dollar value to links you can improve your asset valuation of a Website. Furthermore, if you incorporate link decay models into your depreciation methodology you can measure a type of growth in asset value that can be used to infer future conversions over virtually any period of time.

All of that’s well and good when determining the value of a website, but what about in determining the value of a link building campaign?

In order for links to depreciate, they have to appreciate. The value of a link is not necessarily what you pay for it – and I’m not talking about buying links. No matter what kind of link building you do, you have to expend some money to do it. So how do you determine link value?

4 Ways To Determine Link Value

One way to determine inbound link value is the traffic generation method. If you can assign a value to each unique visitor and to each real visitor to your website, then you can value your inbound links by the amount of traffic generation they deliver.

The downside to this method is that it doesn’t take into consideration your search engine rankings.

Another way to determine inbound link value is to measure your search engine rankings, but that doesn’t take into consider your website traffic or conversions. It’s not a very good way to judge value because there are a lot of other factors you can’t control.

You can measure link values solely on how well they convert traffic to sales, but there are weaknesses to that model as well. Not all conversions take place the first time a link is clicked, or the first time a visitor arrives at your site. A visitor could click a link and visit your website, then visit it again through a SERP, and finally convert through a PPC ad. So what is the value of that link then?

The fourth way to measure link values is by using a combination of the above methods. The downside to doing this is that you run the risk of counting certain link qualities more than once. Still, by making an honest effort, you can close the loopholes on each method and you stand a better chance of seeing a realistic picture of your link values.

SEOmoz has an interesting article about SEO insights garnered from a study on pay per click advertising.

I won’t necessarily endorse everything in the article, but I think you can gain some insight into SEO by studying PPC advertising habits, and click-throughs to some extent. For starters, let’s take a look at the top 10 industries by average PPC cost-per-click:

1. Finance
2. Jobs & Education
3. Business/Industrial
4. Computers & Electronics
5. Internet/Telecom
6. Beauty & Fitness
7. Automobiles
8. Home & Garden
9. Travel
10. Shopping

Interestingly, in each of these industries, retargeting is proving to be very effective. Retargeting is the act of using PPC to reach the same market prospects across the Google Display Network as you reach in the Google SERPs. In other words, if you advertise using PPC and run your ads on network websites signed on to Google AdSense, you’ll be more effective with your SEO and your PPC efforts.

Mobile PPC Not As Effective As Mobile SEO

Another thing you should know is that mobile users don’t click on PPC ads as often. That’s because they are on the go and don’t take the time to click on ads. If they’re searching for something, however, they will use the organic search option. Mobile search is primarily about organic SEO. This is a golden opportunity for search marketers, especially where local search and mobile search meet.

Use PPC For Keyword Research

Finally, and we’ve known this for years, you can use pay per click advertising to test your keywords for organic search. If you are getting good click-throughs that convert in your PPC campaigns, that can also translate into excellent search positioning in the organic search space.

Savvy online marketers look at SEO and PPC as complimentary marketing channels, not competing ones.

We’ve been saying for over a year now that SEO has changed dramatically for the long term. In fact, it has changed so drastically from what it used to be that it is hardly recognizable any more. Much of the advice we’ve given over the years no longer is valid. And it’s Google’s fault.

Now I’m no doomsdayer, and I’m not one who typically jumps on the SEO-is-dead bandwagon. We go through this about once a year, at least. And now there is someone else asking the same old question: Is SEO dead?

Nell Terry makes some good points, and I agree for the most part. Google isn’t changing things around just to target the SEO industry, however, they aren’t trying to make it easy for us either. They want us to get discouraged, maybe even give up. But that’s only because so much of SEO has become nothing more than spam, and Google has a valid economic interest in getting rid of the spam.

I particularly like this paragraph:

I think many techniques are outdated – think keyword placement, strict numbers games, community optimization. It’s about creating a presence in your industry and making a name for yourself in order to climb the SERPs.

What this says, and I agree, is that SEO tactics you were using two years ago probably aren’t going to work today, but that’s not a bad thing. SEOs will just have to learn to adjust. But here are three things that I think are still important, and probably always will be:

1. Great content that doesn’t stray off topic – it must be focused
2. Social signals are a big driving force today
3. Your reputation as a content producer is paramount

In light of these three hard truths, if you are an online content producer, it’s time to start thinking about author reputation. Start today.

Should you be a guest blogger? There are a lot of people online right now telling you that guest blogging is the holy grail of Internet marketing. That’s debatable, but what’s not debatable is that guest blogging does have its benefits. What are they?

Here are 5 benefits to guest blogging that you should consider and chase. There’s nothing wrong with coveting your neighbor’s online reputation.

1. Enhanced reputation management – If you guest blog on the right industry blogs within your niche, you will build a solid reputation for yourself. Merely being associated with highly valuable and recognized blogs will enhance your online reputation.
2. Position yourself as an expert – By writing about industry topics and offering solutions to problems you can make yourself an overnight expert on your topic.
3. Expand your audience – When you write posts on other blogs within your industry you’ll reach people who otherwise might never hear of you. You have the opportunity to expand your audience and tap into someone else’s reservoir.
4. More traffic to your website – There’s hardly a benefit more important than more traffic to your website. This is an extension of your reputation, your perceived expertise, and your audience expansion efforts.
5. Search engine optimization – You might as well go for the link while you’re there. You don’t want to appear as if the link is the most important thing to guest blogging, but since you’re there, you might as well take the link.

Focus on the benefits of guest blogging and take advantage of them. It will only help your business.

Friday we talked about AuthorRank, which is the new model of ranking for search phrases in Google. There is actually a lot more to say and today I’m going to say it.

I think it’s inevitable that Google will consider author reputations when ranking web pages for specific key phrases. Gone are the days when search marketers wrote spammy keyword-based content and focused instead on reputation enhancing content that addressed the needs of a specific audience.

That’s not to say that keywords aren’t going to be important. What it does mean is that keywords for the sake of keywords are definitely NOT important.

How To Rank Web Pages Going Forward

Instead of writing keyword-based schlock and spending all your time and money building links to it, here are 5 things you should start doing right now, and keep doing, if you want to rank for content related to your business:

1. Write great content that solves a real need among your community.
2. Develop a social media presence on networks where your target audience hangs out, but don’t just publish keyword-based schlock. Instead, interact with your client base and build relationships.
3. Connect your social profiles with your blog and website.
4. Reach out to industry leaders within your niche, comment on their blogs leaving helpful, valuable blog posts that aren’t necessarily keyword-driven. Link back to your website without spamming.
5. Work judiciously to establish one online identity using Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube.

The key to this online marketing approach is to produce valuable content that people want to read. Become a content king, then share your content widely on your social networks.

A client says to me, “I should be getting more traffic than I’m getting from this SEO business.” My response is, “Of course you should be getting more traffic. You should be doing more things.”

Sometimes, expectations exceed reality because we’re not willing to do the work necessary to make reality reach our expectations. If you aren’t getting enough results from your efforts, maybe you should do more. Or maybe you should see what else you can do to achieve the results you are expecting.

Online marketers should never just rely on one method of marketing. If all you are doing is writing blog posts and hoping SEO will deliver more traffic to your website, then you aren’t doing enough. You should be promoting through social media.

Or you could be using pay per click advertising models, or perhaps doing some video marketing.

If you’re blogging 15 days a month, start blogging 30 days a month and see what happens. Open up a Twitter account and promote your blog through Twitter. Do some Facebook marketing. Or head off to LinkedIn and join a few communities. Join a forum or two. Engage in some conversation in the forums. Write a few articles even.

Marketing is about talking to people. It’s not about sitting around waiting for results. Birds who do that don’t get any worms.

There are numerous ways to make money online. If you are going to attract targeted traffic and convert it to money, then you have to have a content strategy, but there isn’t just one way to develop said strategy. Every content strategy should have a purpose and a plan to push it along.

The following 5 content strategies are available to you in various mix and match options. Pick your options and run:

1. Catalog of themes – Pick your themes. What will you write about? What should you write about? Pick your favorite topics and write about those using the best keywords to attract the kind of traffic you want to attract.
2. Create Value – Your static content pages should be full of value. Whether they are on Squidoo, your website, or wherever, meet your targeted clientele at their greatest point of need.
3. Enter Into Conversation – For this strategy, your blog is the best and most useful tool. Talk about topics that your audience cares about. Solve their problems. Ask them questions. Get them to talking back.
4. Go Social – Drive traffic back to your website and blog using social networks. Your social media content should act to tease and attract an audience that wants something deeper. But don’t just go deep. Also go wide. Different types of social media content is just as important as what that content is all about. Develop a presence at Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Pinterest, YouTube, and other social networks to make your content speak to different interests.
5. Develop Landing Pages – Your final strategy is to build landing pages for your market audiences. Drive all your traffic to those pages and convert it.

When it comes to online marketing, you have to chart a course and stick with it. Then give your plan some time to work.

If you hear an SEO firm promise you permanent search engine rankings, you’d better run. Fast. And not look back. It’s impossible to achieve permanent search engine rankings.

Why is that?

First, because search engines don’t promise anyone a ranking. They certainly don’t promise good rankings. You must earn them.

Secondly, no one else can guarantee you a top spot in the search engines. SEOs can give their best effort to get your site ranked, but they can’t guarantee you a position because they don’t control the search engines.

Thirdly, ALL search engine rankings are temporary. The truth is, search engine rankings change constantly. You could be No. 1 this morning and drop to No. 9 this afternoon for the same search query. You might be No. 1 for a particular search query right now in Minnesota and be on page 2 for the same search query right now in California.

Not only can you rank differently in different places at the same time, or in the same place at different times, but you could also rank differently for different searchers at the same time – even if those searchers are in the same city.

Search engine optimization is no longer about achieving the highest rankings possible for the keywords you are targeting. It’s about maximizing your traffic from the search engines, and that requires more than throwing keywords at algorithms.

If you use WordPress as a content management system or use it for blogging on your business website, you might be wondering whether you need all those plugins that Internet marketers keep recommending, particularly the SEO plugins. Let me just say that SEO is different for every website, so any recommendation for a cookie-cutter SEO plan is a bad recommendation.

That said, there are a few SEO plugins that are good to have, but I’ve seen websites succeed without them. Here’s what I’d suggest to you if you are starting a new website today.

First, build your site and set up your blog. Make sure you employ traditional SEO tactics that are known to still work. These include optimizing your title tags, ensuring your website navigation is pure and easy to use, and managing your keywords effectively. Promote your website using social media, but be careful that you don’t become a social media and/or link spammer. Before you start adding SEO plugins, wait 30 to 60 days. Meanwhile, blog every day using your keyword list as a checklist for topics to write about.

During that 30-60 trial period, monitor your search engine rankings, traffic, and keyword referrer list. Are people finding your website for the keywords you want to be found for? Is your site indexed?

If your site does well without the SEO plugins, you may not need them. But if your site isn’t doing well after 60 days and isn’t gaining in search engine visibility, then add one plugin. Don’t add any more. Test that plugin to see if it improves your search engine visibility. If not, try another. Stop testing plugins when you see improvement. Test each one for 30 days before switching it with another plugin. If you see no improvement at all after 6 months, get rid of all SEO plugins and see how you rank for your keywords now. Chances are, you can get by without the plugins, but it’s nice to have them if you need them.

Local search engine optimization can be a challenge for many online marketers, especially if you provide the same service to multiple cities across a wider geographic area. For instance, if you are an auto mechanic that caters to several smaller cities surrounding a large metropolitan area, then you might conduct SEO campaigns for each of those cities.

This is where you want to beware, however, you can’t simply build a website for each city with the same content replacing the name of the city for each location. That would be ineffective, for sure.

There are ways to provide unique content for each location that you serve. Here are three ideas to get your imagination going:

1. Ask yourself what is different about each location. While the service you provide might be similar (in fact, they could be the same), each location might have specific needs within the overall service offerings of your business. Address those differences in your content.
2. Use different types of content. For one location page on your website, add a video. For another location page, include written testimonials from your customers. On another location page you might use a graphic from a local artist and an article or two from local writers. Use your imagination and come up with your own ways of producing original content.
3. Write a blog. With a blog, every blog post has to be different. You can address general information issues as well as specific local issues unique to each location your serve.

Publishing unique and original content for local areas is a challenge, but it’s not impossible. For better SEO, however, it is essential.

If you want to be helpful to your blog readers, then you’ve got to create useful links. There are a lot of different types of links and not all of them helpful. Here are 4 types of blog post links that are very helpful – to you and to your readers.

1. Past blog posts – By linking to previous blog posts you can increase your blog’s SEO quotient and help your readers learn more information about the topic you are writing about. It’s one of the most useful types of blog post links in your arsenal.
2. Internal website link - This type of link is a link from your blog to a page on your website. The purpose is to send your reader to a more detailed page regarding your topic. Do yourself a favor and create an anchor text link to give your website an added SEO boost.
3. Link to an external resource – Your blog should be helpful to your readers. If you aren’t linking to valuable content on a regular basis, then you’ll lose readers. One way to ensure your readers keep coming back for more is to link elsewhere to a valuable resource on a given topic. If someone else has covered a topic better than you could, link to it.
4. Call to action link – Sometimes you just want to sell something. It could a service, your own product, or an affiliate product you promote. You don’t have to link to get that coveted SEO juice. A simple “click here” or “for more information” type of link after a well done and detailed description of your product or service can get those clicks to going.

A good blog has links in it. These 4 types of blog post links can take your blog from obscurity to popularity in just a couple of months – if you employ them regularly.

A while back, content curation caught on and for a couple of months that all I heard people talking about. The noise seems to have died down now. Fewer people are talking about it, so the newness of the idea must have worn off. The novelty is gone. The sparkle has disappeared.

Does that mean that content curation is worthless?

Don’t bet on it. Content curation actually has its place. Very few people use it as their primary business model, but it can easily be implemented into any business model, and it’s cheaper than creating your own content over and over again. It’s not quite as time consuming either, if you do it right.

Content curation is simply using other people’s content in such a way that you encourage your audience to consume it for its value.

With content curation, you are essentially saying that you’re not the only person or company creating content worth reading about your niche topic. You see value in other people’s content. Therefore, so should they. But how does that benefit you?

By recommending other people’s content, you establish yourself as an expert authority in your field. There can be no greater value than being seen as an authority in your niche. Sharing valuable content created by others can do that for you. That alone is reason enough to become a content curator. And we haven’t even talked about SEO.

Video marketing is becoming more and more powerful, and competitive. It’s also one of the best ways to SEO your website. And I mean beyond building inbound links.

Here are 5 SE0 tactics to ensure you employ when conducting your ongoing video marketing:

1. Submit to more than just YouTube – There are at least 50 video sharing websites online. You should upload every video to YouTube and at least 10 of the more popular video sites in addition to YouTube.
2. Optimize your video titles – Make sure the title on each video you upload to the various sites mentioned above is unique. If you share one video to ten sites, then you should have ten unique titles. Each of them should use your primary keyword. Also, optimize your description and tags for each video on each site.
3. Embed your video on your website and/or blog – Google is now indexing embedded videos on websites and sending traffic directly to those sites.
4. Add a niche-related video section on your website – This will encourage other people in your niche to share their videos on your website. More content equals more SEO.
5. Create a video sitemap – Sitemaps help search engines find pages to index. If you have a lot of videos on your website, then you should create a video sitemap.

Video optimization is one of the most important activities you can perform if you use videos in your marketing – and you should!