Marketing Tom

Search Engine Optimization - how to plan

Shari Thurow offers some interesting tips on how to use various techniques to optimize your website, in an article entitled Using Paid Search Engine Advertising for Better SEO Campaigns. It discusses how identifying the right keywords beforehand can help with a site's information architecture, how to refine page titles and how to use paid search advertising to identify the ideal position for your 'call to action' elements.

Search Engine Optimization Problems

Wednesday, 7th July – I read an article on Seth Godin’s blog, entitled The problem with search engine optimization, which paints a pretty dim view of search engine optimization. Seth says that: ‘Lucking into (and it is luck) the top slot of a great word on Google is not a business plan. It's superstition. It's blind faith.’ He goes on to say, ‘If you want to grow your business, you need a reliable and scalable and dependable way to spend time and money… Online, it's about adwords and site design.’

His final paragraph says: ‘SEOs are not a shortcut to success, at least not for 99% of the companies out there. You won't win by fooling Google into listing you first for a common search term. You will win once you figure out the simple mechanics of turning strangers into friends and friends into customers.’

Good search engine optimization is all about figuring out the ‘mechanics of turning strangers into friends and friends into customers.’ It starts with getting into the mindset of your target audience. What are they looking to achieve? What words describe how they see your product? What are their expectations? What problems does their business encounter? In short, your business must look at its products, services or company from the ‘user perspective’. Once you have got into the mentality of the user, you can apply this information to optimizing your Web site for search engines and, in parallel, creating a visitor experience that appeals to your target audience.

Seth believes that the 2 key elements for growing your business on-line are: 1 adwords and 2. site design. I couldn’t agree more with the latter. However, how can Seth say that adwords are the key when at worst the clickthrough rate is under 0.5% and at most around 10-15% - that means a staggering 80-90% of those who don’t know a company’s URL address will click on the search results from Google, Yahoo!, et al.

Thursday, 8th July – The weather in Wales is pretty miserable today: high winds, rain and grey skies. I must get away to the sun! - Tuscanny will be perfect this time of year. So, I go to Google and type in ‘Tuscan Holidays’. First result comes from a company called Tuscan Holidays, with a home page which has been tuned to the search engines, delivers the content I want and just makes me want to get my credit card out and book two weeks at a rural farmhouse right now. This company operates on an even playing field to other larger and richer companies and generates far, far more clicks than Google Adwords can deliver – and it’s all down to a well-optimised home page and good site design.

To conclude, a well optimized site should deliver visitors through search engines, using THEIR language and give them a visitor experience to match.

Incidentally, if you carry out a search on Google for 'search engine optimization problems', Seth's site appears at number 3 - proof that it even works for him!

Beware! - Scam from 'Domain Name Registry of America'

I returned home from work yesterday to find a letter from the 'Domain Name Registry of America' advising me that my domain name, Marketingtom.com, was about to expire and that I should renew it for the price of £18 with the Domain them. With a name like the Domain Name Registry of America I thought that they must be some official body for the registration of domain names but no, they are some scam merchant looking for people to TRANSFER domain names away from their existing supplier to them for an inflated price. I pay GoDaddy something like $7 per year (£4) and my domain doesn't even expire until September of 2005. I did a quick search on the Internet last night and found the following articles relating to this company:

Register.com Wins Stay Against Domain Registry of America
Court bars Canadian domain slammer
Boycot Domain Registry of America
Domain Registry of America, again.
Domain Registry of America (at it again??)

Please inform your business colleagues and friends of this scam and feel free to link back in to this article.

Page Titles and Blogs (Typepad)

As many people who visit this website will know, and even some visiting for the first time, that this site is actually a web log. For more details on what a web log is, take a look at the blogging category of this site:

TheTypepad blog has many great features, including the ability to upload information instantaneously and the ease with which you can redesign its format. However, for me one of the great attractions is its search engine friendly code. Every article that I write is composed of a headline and content which may, or may not, include images. Each article is, in turn assigned its own individual 'permalink', or individual html page and these pages derive their page titles from the headline of the article. This means that you do not have to create individual page titles but you do, or should, think carefully before creating a headline. You have to tread a fine line between creating something that will capture people's interest and coming up with a headline that the search engines can easily index.

Someone searching for 'Retiro Park' (the main park in Madrid) on Google.com would find this listing at number 3:

As you can see the article headline features in the page title of the browser window:

I have read a few articles from people criticise bloggers for clogging up the net with their banal observations on life. It is true that there are a number of poor blogs out there but if people are actually visiting a site and leaving comments, then surely someone is deriving value and if that value is legal, ethical and moral, then that can't be a bad thing.

Page Titles Revisited

A few times on this web log I have mentioned the importance of using page titles to help drive traffic to a website. An article on MarketingProfs.com entitled 'Page Titles That Attract Readers' gives useful tips on how to use page titles effectively.

Keyword Articles

Here are a couple of articles that I came across in Clickz, which contain some useful tools and advice on for identifying keywords:

Keyword Research Revisited, Part 1: Log Files
Keywords Revisited, Part 2: Free Research Tools

They are very useful and though most have been mentioned in this blog, Kevin Lee does come up with a lot of interesting comments:

You need third-party keyword research tools and resources to build and expand keyword lists for search engine marketing (SEM). Each popular external keyword research tool has a place in keyword expansion.

I must say that I especially like his advice to use a thesaurus to identify new keywords!! - modern it may not be, logical it certainly is.

Keyword Links - Try not to 'Click here'!

When writing an article, or adding content to to your website, there is always the temptation to use the words 'click here' to take you to another page. However, it is much better, from both a search engine and visitor perspective, to create keyword (or text) links which tell visitors where they will be going. And we mustn't forget that keyword links are used by search engines to rank sites, albeit to a lesser extent.
Let's look at an example: an online New York food guide will be given greater credibility if another site uses a good keyword link, like New York Food Guide, to link into it. The link New York Food Guide gives the destination page much more relevancy in the eyes of the search engine, hence helping in its ranking. The same can also be said of links from A to B within your own website.

In their 'Quality Tips for Webmasters' the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) offers some good advice on using text links.

How to Score Higher in Google Search Engine

Thanks to Charles of Bizpitch who left a comment on my article How blogs can make money. Bizpitch has an interesting link to a thought-provoking article by Eric Wolfram, Score Higher in Google Search Engine. There are quite a few interesting points he raises, especially the use of hypertext links for navigation buttons and the use of keywords in your hypertext links, instead of words like "click here" (oops! - blatant self-promotion).

Using Macromedia Contribute to modify meta tags and site content

Many of the articles in this blog deal with optimizing websites for the search engines. One difficulty for those who don't have the html skills is that they have to rely on a third party - web developer, colleague, the kid next door - to carry out these changes. Macromedia's Contribute is an ideal tool to help you make these changes. It allows people to download their websites, with a user name and password, modify site content and update in an instant. The result is that you can change page titles, meta tags and body content as and when you require and you don't have to pay anyone for it. For more information, visit the Macromedia site.

Page Titles - How to use them effectively

Clients often ask me about the best way to use page titles effectively. I always say that you should use the page title on your Home Page to give a 'global' view of what the site is about and the Sub-pages to give a 'localised' view of the information that is held on these pages. The sub-pages of the website offer you with an excellent opportunity to focus on particular areas of your business, services, products, or whatever and really shouldn't be used to pedal the same information as the home page. This article, by Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs, offers excellent advice on how to use your page titles to great effect:

Titles and Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Optimization Ethics

Like most people, I'm sure you have come across emails that purport to "give you a top 5 ranking", "number 1 on Google" or "beat the search engines". However, many of the companies who send these emails, which you probably never asked for, will use unethical ways to get you ranked on the main search engines. This article offers advice on what is the correct way to optimize your site.

Ethical and Accepted SEO Practices

Search Engine Marketing & Optimization event

Looking to find out the latest tips and tricks in Search Engine Optimisation, then you should head for Chicago! As the blurb says: "At this intensive three-day event, you'll learn the ins-and-outs of search engine marketing from top experts in the field and from the search engines themselves." The event is hosted by search engine guru Danny Sullivan and runs from December 9th-11th. Click here for more details.

Search words – identifying them

Keywords are THE critical element in achieving search engine success. Keywords are important not only in your meta information but also in your page title and content. These search words filter through to the following key areas: page title, meta information (keywords and description) and content. You may also want to bear in mind the fact that Google does appear to try and match search words with domain names.

I believe the key is to identify the search words that your target audience are using. If you can get into their mindset, and work out what they are likely to type when searching for a ‘product like yours’, then you’ve made some huge steps forward. Tools like Overture’s Suggestion Tool and Word Tracker, may well help to broaden your search word base; however, getting back to basics is as important.

You need to be asking yourself the following questions:
What words do my clients/partners/competitors use to identify my products? For example, mobile phones, religious books, rugby balls, etc
Are there any new buzz words around? For example, ‘Talk-time’, ‘pay-as-you-go’, ‘mobile devices’, ‘broadband’.
What words are my competitors (those ranked highly on search engines!) using? This is how you take a look at the meta keywords and description of your competitors - competitor meta information.
What about regional, cultural or language differences? E.g. elevator (US), lift (UK).
Should I be thinking of the bigger picture? For example, golf is a hobby/recreation but can be a corporate event; marketing is linked to business strategy but also has elements of tactics and promotions; computer chips have huge range of applications not just in a PC.
You may find it helps to list your information in a spreadsheet, placing words for different audiences into different columns.

Which are the main search engines?

The most popular search engines are Google, Teoma, Alta Vista and MSN. You mustn’t forget that companies that create search engine technology like Inktomi and Alltheweb, also provide results for some of the major search engines. Inktomi, for example, powers Hotbot. Another thing to remember is that most search engines provide primary and secondary search results to other search engines. One of the better search engines, and relatively new, is Teoma.

There has been a lot of consolidation over recent years and this has seen the disappearance of many search engines. The simple fact is that you have to target the major ones to get listed. If you’d like an overview of how the search engines work, take a look at Bruce Clay’s Search Engine Relationship Chart