Online Marketing Blog

SEO : "The Man Behind the Curtain"

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:50:00 +0000

This week's SEOmoz whiteboard Friday talks about hiring a consultant for your SEO. One of the frustrations with buyers is the lack of transparency in strategy and tactics. This week's whiteboard Friday does a great job of explaining what to look for when you are shopping around for search engine optimization services.

While it's not wise for SEOs to give everything away before winning a contract, I feel consultants and firms should be more transparent in their approach. How is a buyer able to truly compare firms and services if they do not know the tactics involved or what's being measured. Every company or service is a little different, but a majority of SEO services performed should be similar based on the size of a client's website. Do you agree? How much information is too much?

5 Common Sense SEO Tips

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:29:00 +0000

When most folks start learning about SEO they are sometimes overwhelmed by the amount of information on best practices, tips, tricks and techniques out there on the web. They read everything they can get their hands on, from SEO copy writing to one way link building. Over time the picture becomes more clear and things start to make sense. What most SEO articles and resources fail to mention is that A LOT of SEO is common sense.

Below are 5 common sense tips for SEO:

Why would you name your website "ABCcorp.com" if you sell widgets? Why not buy a domain name "ABCWidgets.com" that includes one of your most important keywords? Unless your company is a household name like Apple or Pepsi, branding is not that important to your domain name.
You use file folders to keep track of important documents at work and home. A website is no different. Organize your website into a hierarchy of main folders (categories) and sub folders (categories) so people and search engines can more easily find your content.
If you sell widgets, why not include the term widgets in your navigation? It will help users and search engines know what deeper categories and pages mean before clicking through to the next page.
Does your customer want to be told how great you are and how cool your company is to work for? Maybe, if they have an hour or two to burn while stuck at the airport. Most customers want to hear what you can do to help solver their problems or make their day easier to manage. Create content that speaks to your customers needs.
When talking to a friend or spouse about cool products you like, do you say "try this new ABCcorp XRB-11 II Widget - Azure"? You would say, "try this new Blue Widget I found online, here's the link". Use the language your customer use to describe your products and services.

Traffic and SEO

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:14:00 +0000

When performing SEO or hiring a consultant, most online business owners are concerned with improving their rankings for specific keywords. If they don't know what keywords to target, they look to an SEO consultant to help them find the right mix of keywords to begin targeting for optimization. The hope is that improving rankings for the right keywords will result in increased traffic to specific areas of their website. Increases in website traffic means more potential sales.

Since much of the success of a website is measured on traffic and conversions, are we too focused on keyword rankings and not enough on overall site traffic? Should we consider overall site traffic as a measuring stick when performing organic search engine optimization? I have listed some thoughts below on the topic with pros and cons for each.

Cons of Measuring Traffic and Organic SEO

There are many factors to consider when measuring SEO performance with site traffic. Does your site have other external marketing that effects your overall traffic? (social media, email marketing, monthly deals, seasonality, radio, billboards) Some of these non-SEO marketing tactics can lead to natural linking, which improves SEO. Non-SEO marketing tactics also lead to brand awareness, which contributes to increased click through rates on organic search results.

Pros of Measuring Traffic and Organic SEO

By using traffic to measure performance, is the shift in focus now to generating traffic through viral tactics? Viral tactics tend to have a greater immediate impact on gains in traffic than do other more long term SEO tactics. If we are too focused on moving keyword rankings, we lose sight of the ultimate goal of bringing in new visitors.

More Thoughts on the Subject

Paid Links and False ROI

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 01:41:00 +0000

Found some interesting slides from SEOmoz that detail the pitfalls of buying links to improve your search engine rankings. The slides below suggest that buying links is a "quick fix" or instant gratification that can come back to haunt your site in time. It also recommends other tactics that will help you build your brand and gain natural links through SEO best practices.

One of the most interesting charts is on slide #34, the cost of paid links over time. The graphic below suggests natural links offer the best ROI of any link building tactic. Paid links will continue to cost the site owner hundreds if not thousands of dollars for a fixed result. Natural links, over time, can grow exponentially to outweigh the benefits of paid links for much lower cost.

If you are a business owner or an SEO looking to get the most exposure for your money, look to natural link building tactics. Building a user friendly website with valuable content is the best way to attract links in a natural way. Search engines will love you and your site for it.

What natural link building tactics have you used to gain traction in search engines?

Where did my PageRank Go?!

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:27:00 +0000

This week I stumbled upon an interesting forum thread on Google Webmaster Central. It appears that Google Webmaster Tools has removed the PageRank metric from their site reports. In the post, a Google employee provides details on why PageRank was removed from the tool:

We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. :-)

More details on why not to obsess over PageRank here:

http://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq--crawling--indexing---ranking#pagerank

Time for some sleuthing. It has been known for some time in the SEO world that PageRank is simply a helpful indication of a website's authority, but not the entire picture. The point above reinforces the idea that you should not focus on metrics like PageRank when looking for linking opportunities or your website's search engine rankings. It's important to keep the "big picture" in mind when building your site. Creating good content that people would link to naturally is the ultimate goal.

Is your company consumed with the PageRank on it's website? What metrics do you use to help measure success?

Twitter and the Hype Cycle

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:15:00 +0000

In early 2009, there was a lot of hype around micro blogging and platforms such as Twitter. The research group, Gartner, has produced a detailed report on where micro blogging falls in the hype cycle.

Technologies tend to follow a cycle of adoption and Twitter is no different. While everyone in the media has jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, many users have signed up only to leave their new accounts tweet-less. With a large number of people turned off by the technology, the hard core tweeters are still in full force. It's this core group that will see Twitter through the "trough".

Now you will probably hear less about tweets and Twitter. This doesn't mean that it is going away. Many other companies are looking into ways to take advantage of micro-blogging and build upon what Twitter started. Who knows, there may be another micro-blogging solution that will remove Twitter from it's throne.

What is Google Wave anyway?

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:11:00 +0000

With all the hype recently, I thought it would be good to get the word out about what Google Wave actually does and how it is helpful. Below is a simple video that helps explain Google Wave in plain English.

(thanks to cmilburndesign)

Brother can you spare a Google Wave invite?

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:31:00 +0000

A while back I posted about Google Wave, the new chat, video, sharing wiz-a-ma-jig from Google. I would like to provide a review but I am still waiting for an invite to this app and would appreciate anyone who has an invite to share. If you do, please email or DM me on Twitter. I would be happy to link to you or do a review on your product or company.

SEO and Google SideWiki

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:20:00 +0000

Recently, Google released a new feature called SideWiki to add to their Internet browser toolbar. The goal of SideWiki is to allow users to input comments and share information about web sites all over the Internet. When visiting a site with the Google SideWiki toolbar enabled, a small blue arrow and comment icon appear to the left of your browser window. When clicked, SideWiki expands to reveal details about the current site and include comments shared by other toolbar users who entered comments.

Why should I care about SideWiki?

SideWiki allows anyone to comment on your site. This means that people can say what ever they want about your products and services. This is important for companies who want to maintain positive PR. It's also important that companies pay attention to what their customers are saying on SideWiki. It's likely that SideWiki users are early adopter types who's opinions can sway early majority customers to buy or ignore your products.

It's unclear as to what impact SideWiki will have on search engine optimization. It's likely SEO impact will be minimal, but could provide Google's algorithm with similar keywords customers are using to describe your products and services. If someone were to comment in SideWiki; "I really like their new Widget and use it every day." it's likely the mention of products will help add relevance to search results. It's unlikely that tons of spam SideWiki entries for "widget" will have any effect.

Have you downloaded SideWiki for your browser? What are your thoughts so far?

Email Marketing and SEO

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:28:00 +0000

The gang over at SEOmoz put a nice video together on using email marketing and SEO together to promote your web site. This video does a great job explaining how each plays a role in attracting visitors to your site and how to keep them coming back.

Reference Extract : SEO Trust Factor

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:55:00 +0000

What do you think of when hearing "Reference Extract"? I'm just as confused as you. Apparently, the reference extract project is an attempt to help people find the best information on the web. Why not use search engines? As you may know, search engines (Google) favor sites with many inbound links and rank sites using an algorithm. This approach takes out some of the human element of selecting the most relevant information. A web site may not be the best possible resource for your search, but since it has many links and content it will rise to the top.

The goal of RE project is to insert the human element, in this case librarians, back into finding information. The video below helps explain the reference extract project and how it can be used to help search engines determine trust. I'm not totally clear on the status of this project, but worth exploring.

Twitter for SEO : Relevance

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:00:00 +0000

Lately I have been paying more attention to my inbound keywords in Google Analytics. I have noticed some strange keywords that I have not optimized for on site appearing in my keyword reports. Some of the keywords appearing are "West Virgina SEO". Since I have not mentioned or optimized for West Virginia SEO terms on my blog or web site, the only source I could draw these terms from is my @seanhecking Tweets on Twitter. The Tweets were about a trip to the WV that I took a couple weeks ago.

This could have just been a test Google was running on social media relevance, but I think it's an example of where things may be headed in search engine algorithms. We know that having links from other web sites with content around those links describing your optimized keywords is essential for top rankings. Are search engines taking it one step further and giving more weight to social profiles and the relevance of their surrounding terms to your web site?

Local Search Listing Optimization Guide

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:40:00 +0000

Many SEO projects start with keyword analysis, web page content writing and later inbound link campaigns. For many companies, an easy win is a local business listing in Google Maps Local search results. Local search listings are free, appear at the top or sometimes in the middle of natural organic listings depending on keywords. They also provide almost instant visibility for small businesses, medium and large companies alike. Whiles it is still important to build a long term strategy for regular organic listings, take steps early to build and optimize your local search listings.

Google now offers some insight into your local search listings with it's Local Business Center. Some great statistics are provided:

Impressions - how many times your listings has been viewed or cued up
Actions - where are people clicking on your listing?
Top search queries - the terms people are using to find your listing
Driving directions - where are people coming from before they visit your store?

A few tips for optimizing your local search listings:

Keep your listing complete and updated
Keep your listings consistent across all local search engines (see engines below)
Gain citations through other sources (press releases, blog posts, etc.)
Build landing pages for each store or branch location and link to those pages
Include common local keywords (ex: Cleveland, Ohio Akron, OH)
Include keywords in categories
If you are not sure how to make updates, contact an SEO consultant to get help
GetListed.org is free service to review your current footprint before making updates

Local Search Engines:

What other resources or tips for improving your local search listings have you found useful? If so, please comment below.

Could Google Wave change email?

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:43:00 +0000

For anyone who hates reading through a long list of email chains, Wave may be the solution. Google Wave combines real time chat features, video and Twitter like conversation streams. If chat, email, and Twitter had a love child, it might look something like Wave. It will be interesting to see how Wave will impact current email marketing, Twitter and other chat technologies.

What About Bing?

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:33:00 +0000

I'll save you from all the cheesy post titles out there like, "Bada Bing", "It don't mean a thing if you ain't got that Bing..." and so on. There is a lot of hype, including commercials, about how Microsoft's new search engine Bing can help cut through the search clutter to help us make better decisions. While I do like the enhanced image search I still feel like the search engine has not done enough to pull me from the grasp of Google. The universal search features are impressive and I do enjoy the image of the day.

What will become of Bing?

Microsoft has come a long way from their early days of search. Yahoo's #2 status in the search engine space may be in trouble with the release of Bing. Yahoo's role as a web portal may be enough for them to hold off Bing for a while, but that value is slowly decreasing over time.

What Google has to offer over Bing are all the value added web based programs, such as Google Docs. These services are the difference maker for many search engine users. I use search engines to do research, but spend more time using Gmail and Google Docs. Until Bing offers some truly unique web based services, I will still be "Googling" and not "Binging".

Twitter For Marketing from Hubspot

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 18:02:00 +0000

Found a great presentation on how to use Twitter for marketing your personal brand or business. The strategies discussed in these slides are very helpful in establishing best practices. What I found most interesting are the average number of tweets per day, key tweet ratios and bio keywords.

Sean Hecking - @seanhecking
Hubspot - @hubspot

Link-ability

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:27:00 +0000

When discussing the subject of inbound links as it relates to search engine optimization, many an SEO will go into a discussion about Google's PageRank, link popularity, anchor text and so on. What many experts fail to touch on is the connection between the content on your site and how likely your pages are to receive natural inbound links.

Natural inbound links are the ultimate goal for any search engine optimization campaign. Natural links offer a relevant and diverse link profile, much of what Google is looking for in how it ranks your site. Google is also looking at from where your links originate. Are they from low quality sites with little visibility or are they from high quality sites with lots of visitors? I've put together a description of what I feel makes a page gain natural links.

Link-ability: The copy, images, look-and-feel and topical subject matter of a web page that increases it's likely hood of being linked to as a valuable resource for an online audience. The ability to easily share a web page with friends and transfer knowledge by way of links.

What do you think makes a web page link-able?

Added Search Marketing Resources

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Wed, 13 May 2009 14:33:00 +0000

To help add insight into search marketing and social media topics, I have started a resources section to help answer common questions that arise during a social media marketing or SEO campaign. The first article entry added is called "What is SEO?" The goal of this article is to clear up some of the myths around search engine optimization. In the coming months, I plan on adding more 101 type resources to this section to help marketers better understand key SEO topics and basic social media strategies.

Deathmatch: Twitter vs. Email Marketing

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:11:00 +0000

In the graphic above, I pulled searches for "twitter tools" and "email tools" in the United States. (email tools=red, twitter tools=blue) I could have just pulled a report of twitter and email marketing, but I think this gives us a more clear picture of how people are searching. When using a technology, people tend to look for tools to help them manage that technology or make things more efficient. Obviously there are more people with an email address than a twitter account, but this gives you some insight into how much real activity is taking place in this space.

Does this mean that Twitter is going to replace Email?

Lets take a look:

Tools and Analytics: Both technologies have tools available to measure impact, emails are more mature. (Let)
Subscribe: This one is pretty easy, just follow someone on Twitter, like me @seanhecking (Advantage Twitter)
Content: 140 characters? please! Email allows you more space for delivering your message with branded content (Deuce)
Forward to a Friend: Twitter allows for a retweet (RT), the equivalent of forward to a friend. Email allows for traditional forward to groups (Let)
Unsubscribe: Twitter also allows you to unsubscribe (unfollow) and means it! (Advantage Twitter)
Tagging: Twitter allows for content tagging to help organize tweets. Email: "what are tags?" (Game, Set, Match?)

What are your thoughts on this match?

Rand on the future of SEO

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 23:03:00 +0000

One topic that doesn't get discussed often enough, in my opinion, is the future of SEO. While doing some research, I found an interesting video interview with Rand of SEOMoz. In the video are a couple topics I would like to highlight:

Trends to Watch: Searches on search engines vs. searches in social network sites.
Links: Still the trump card for gaining search engine rank for traditional SEO.
Google Tags: Helping webmasters with technical issues.

Good Email Design Checklist

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 16:33:00 +0000

I wanted to add some additional tips for email marketers looking to optimize their email designs. Below is a helpful checklist of items for email marketing designers and developers. This list will help you avoid the junk box and spam filters for good email design.

Tables - if your email HTML contains a lot of CSS or in-line CSS, try converting as much of the design to HTML tables. Using tables exclusively will help display your design correctly and improve the total delivered emails to the in box.

Image Size - if your email is full of images and slices totaling more than 150k, try to reduce your total by using more HTML formatting. Reducing images will improve your chances of getting past spam filters. Using Photoshop, generating GIFs at 64 colors or JPEGs at 50-60 quality will help reduce your image size.

Copy Check - does your email contain phrases or misspellings that may flag it as spam? Many email marketing platforms will perform a spam check as part of their delivery service. Use these tools to your advantage.

ALT Text - does your email contain descriptive ALT text for things like headers and buttons? These are the main call-to-action on an email. Don't forget to optimize your email for a good user experience.

Measuring the Value of Link Building

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 17:42:00 +0000

During a link building campaign, a topic that almost always comes up is the value of link building. While folks in the search marketing community have a decent grasp of why to build links, SEO buyers and business associates sometimes struggle with the value links provide.

After some deep thought, I thought it would be helpful to illustrate the role links play in an SEO campaign. As you can see in the graphic below, each function of search engine optimization has it's role in gaining visibility.

Technical - Technical recommendations are the foundation of SEO, allowing your Web site to be crawled and indexed by search engines. Improving your site structure helps search engines and visitors find information they need more quickly.

Page Content - Without quality content on your site, visitors and search engines will fail to see value in what you have to offer. If they don't see quality content, they may visit but not come back very often.

Link Building - Links are the most effective way to gain traction in search engine results. Good content and technical fixes will only get you so far. Going from #8 for a given keyword to #3 can sometimes mean big gains in traffic. To reach those levels for competitive keywords, links are the driving factor when all else is equal.

Social Media Optimization and SEO

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:34:00 +0000

I found a really good article, from a Search Engine Strategies session, that helps explain the relationship of social media to SEO and other forms of online marketing. This article focuses on Social Media Optimization, or SMO for short. SMO is the process of optimizing every aspect of your website and various components to take full advantage of user interaction with your content. Below are some of the highlighted topics I found most interesting.

Using Social Media to compliment your SEO efforts and PPC campaigns
Optimizing your tags, titles and descriptions within social networks
Maximizing searchable content (images, videos, link bait)
Blog optimization
The continued value of forums
Niche social news sites

As social media marketing matures, I think we will find there are few differences between how we optimize content for social media sites and how we optimize content for the Web.

Marketing Myth of Bottled Water

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 16:12:00 +0000

Found a great video that unearths the myths on bottled water. Bottled water companies have spent a ton on marketing to get the general public to believe bottled water is cleaner than tap water. This proves that enough marketing and PR can still sway public option. When two products are virtually indistinguishable, the only difference is packaging and marketing. I used to buy bottled water, but have now switched to Britta filtered tap water.

Google Semantic Search is Here

seanhecking@gmail.com (seanhecking) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:21:00 +0000

For months the SEO community has suspected that Google began using search semantics in it's algorithm. Now we have proof.

" ... we're deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search ..." - Official Google Blog

What does this mean for marketers?

Web Page Content - When creating SEO content for your Web site you must consider using related words, concepts and copy along with your keywords.

User Experience - While creating a good user experience is important, Google seems to be shifting it's focus back to keywords and related keywords.

Longer descriptions - Since Google seems to be focused more on the meaning of each page in it's search results, it has expanded the summary for each link. This will most likely increase the need to be listed "above the fold" in search results, since the longer descriptions will push listings 6-10 further down the results page.