Tag Archive for: SEO

Highest Traffic Keywords Do Not Always Bring Profit

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It seems like the focus for a lot of internet marketers is finding that top trafficked keyword.  However, this can be a mistake by not focusing on the true marketing involved.  In some cases, the top traffic keyword is not one that will bring conversions.

Putting focus purely on the traffic numbers for keyword research is the reason many internet marketers are not able to pull the profit numbers many others do.  Making sure you focus on the consumer and their intent more than the pure traffic size is key.

This can be done more quickly using PPC, but at a price.  And in SEO, solid keyword research must be done to target proper keywords – a mistake here will cost a lot of time and money.

Evan LaPointe goes into a bit more detail about all of these factors at Search Engine Land.  At any rate, it’s good to remember that the focus should be on the human experience, not just the analytics numbers.

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Personalized Google Results for Searches

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Most people nowadays use Google as their primary search engine.  Well, something not everyone realizes is that when you’re logged into your Google account, Google keeps track of all searches you do with their search engine.

What this is intended to do is to enhance your experience with Google (although many people have conspiracy theories as to what their purpose really is).  The results are varied, but Google will keep track of every site you visit and display that on their search results, in addition to adjusting the order of the search results for you based on which sites you showed a preference for.

So that means if you visit one site several times while logged in and found them through Google, the next time you do the same search that site will be quite a bit higher on the results pages.

For any SEOs, this means it will not show accurate search results for keywords you do searches on.  Which is not something SEOs want to happen, if they’re looking for accurate results.

To get around this, you want to use Google when you are not logged in to your Google account.  Only then will it show unadjusted search results, which may still vary based on which server serves up your own results.  But it will not be affected by Google’s personalization of your own search results.

Whether or not they still track you based on IP address is something I’ll leave up to the conspiracy theorists, but for those of you who want a more objective search result, I recommend staying logged out of Google unless you need one of their services at that time.  Or else use a different computer/browser to do your Google searches that you want raw unaltered search results with.

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Search Engine Optimization is a Changing Animal

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Nowadays the web is getting more and more attention.  People are realizing that businesses are made by being found online.  The methods of doing that are through creating good web pages, having an online presence through blogs, social media, online advertising.  And tied into almost all of this is search engine optimization.

If a business uses any of the other means (social media, blogging, site design), then it all comes down to wanting to be found online, to gain a presence.  And this ties into SEO.  Whether or not you realize it, if you have a Facebook account, you’re helping one site or another with search engine optimization.  Every link you post makes a difference.  On Twitter, any link posted can have an impact on visitors and the search engine listings.

Anything online will make a difference in SEO.  The key to doing good search engine optimization on purpose (as opposed to on accident, as a surprising number of sites have done) is to continue learning what changes impact the search engines.  As it is now, social media is starting to have an effect.  But that doesn’t mean you just need to put one post and you’ll shoot up three pages.  The trick is learning how it all ties together.

A good SEO stays educated on many aspects of the internet.  Just because you learn the basics doesn’t mean you’ll still be an expert SEO four years later (or even one year later).  The internet is a changing beast, and knowing these changes can make a big difference in your placement online.

And if you choose to hire someone else to do the search engine optimization for you, make sure that you’re happy with how educated they are on these changes.  Learning the basics of SEO is easy – but mastering it is more than just a few steps above that.

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How To Determine Quality of SEO Services

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Do you get phone calls for your business from people who say that’ll put you on page one for your keywords with their SEO services?  It can be difficult to determine which SEO companies can actually do the work they claim (and some of them make full-time SEOs like me just look bad).

Find out what their skills are before agreeing to anything.  If you can determine that a company really knows what they’re doing, it can be worth the price.  Good SEO is not cheap, but the revenue you get from solid listings on your primary keywords will more than make up for it.

I’ll say now from my own experience – anyone that guarantees position 1 (or even page one) listings in a set time period (or at all, really) is in all likelihood full of it.  SEO is part of an industry that is constantly changing.  To do it right, you have to keep track of how the search engines operate and adjust where necessary.  Bad SEO may work temporarily, but in all likelihood will eventually make your listings drop lower than ever (or even get you blacklisted).

Shannon Rogers with Web Advantage put together a good list of questions to ask SEOs who cold-call you.  If you can find SEOs who can answer these well, they may very well be worth the marketing investment.

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Using PPC to Help With SEO and Link Building

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Pay for link building?  What?  Yes, the different ways people do their link building vary from totally free to exorbitantly expensive, but one method a lot of people have not really considered is actually sending traffic that will build links to pages that deserve them.

There are different ways to use PPC to target your landing pages, but if you have good enough content you can use the traffic you attract to help create more links.  The cost will vary based on the keyword you choose, but in some cases this can be very beneficial for your SEO.

Julie Joyce at Search Engine Land has 8 tips to help you fine-tune this approach.

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Great Example of Why SEO is Needed

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I just had to pass this one on. This is a real-life example of someone who was trying to find a hospital where a friend of his had been relocated, but couldn’t. All of his searching through Google wouldn’t let him find the right phone number.

In some cases, I can understand, but for a hospital?  This is one case where I do agree with him for sure – something should have been done.  It’s a great example of how not doing proper SEO will make it so that people trying to find you or your services will never be able to online.  In cases like that, the only way to pass on your site (and get traffic) is through offline marketing, be it on business cards or television commercials.  I think if you have a web site, it’s silly to have it sitting on the web without getting any natural traffic.  But that’s where SEO comes into play.

At any rate, if you want the full details on this crazy hospital example, check out Alan Bleiweiss’s SEO story.  It’s a doozy.

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Captions on YouTube SEO Eligible?

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It appears Google and YouTube are starting to put in something new – automated captioning.  This will help a lot for people who are unable to receive the audio for either physical or mechanical reasons.  It’s going to start with English only, but they will be using voice recognition software to turn the audio into legible captions.

There is word that this update may affect SEO, but I have my curiosities about this.  It can only truly affect SEO if the captions are somehow written into the page code.  We can only see if this is the case once this new development in YouTube goes live.  We’ll see how it turns out.

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AdWords and SEO, Together

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When doing SEO, one of the most underutilized tools I know of is actually Google AdWords.  The benefits of how running an AdWords campaign can help SEO in various ways are numerous, and a lot of straight SEOs aren’t even aware of it.

Dave Davis of Redfly is a PPC pro, and he covers the crossover nicely in this post.

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SEO for BBC? It’s the Latest News

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Yes, even the BBC is starting to adjust to the new wave of internet marketing.  It appears that they’re starting to consider SEO when writing their news posts online.  And keep in mind for the BBC, SEO stands for search engine optimisation, not the silly search engine optimization we talk about.

Enough of their traffic comes from the web and search engines, so they are making changes.  It’s true!  I read it on the Guardian.

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Worthwhile Online SEO Tools

So what SEO tools are out there, available online, to save you time and money?  Are there any that are worthwhile?  I actually think so.  Some of the big ones that I use include Yahoo Site Explorer and the Google AdWords Tool.  There are several other tools that people use, some of them cost to use, some of them are free.  (The above tools are free.)  So what’s worth using?

Well, Chris Boggs from Search Engine Watch has put together a really nice list of different quality SEO tools.  For the most part, I think his list is solid.  Not sure why he’s an IE man (I won’t question that too much, it can only lead to something bad), but his choice of tools for search engine optimization is solid.

One tip he mentioned that I think is worth saying again – make sure any of the methods in which the tools help you are things you already know how to do!  It’s worth extra time to learn how to do it manually first.  Then you can go on to find a tool to save your time and effort, and still have the skills that tool applies towards.

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