TKG SEO Blog

Guest Blogger: Chad Henderson

With your initial keyword research complete, as discussed in the Initial Keyword Research blog entry, you can now start turning your attention to how your phrases will be optimized within individual pages. Remember, you have targeted about 20-30 core phrases, depending on the size of the site, that represent popular but not too competitive key phrases that will maximize qualified traffic.

I don’t want to oversimplify things here, but the optimization of a page generally centers on the selecting optimized keywords and phrases that will be used as the page titles on the page. Page titles, which are displayed in the blue title bar of a browser window, are a crucial component to the optimization of the page and establish the theme to the page you are optimizing. But in addition to developing a page theme, here are a couple of general guidelines when thinking about the page titles to create:

1. Keywords selected for top tier pages, like the homepage, will generally be broader than pages that are more inside. For example, an inside page may contain specific product information. While there are always exceptions, inside pages will be traditionally more specific than top level pages and therefore the selected keywords should reflect it.

2. On any site, never optimize for a single phrase more than two times. Keep track of your optimization efforts so this can be avoided.

3. Don’t use misspellings in your page titles, unless the misspelling of a company phrase is the point of the page.

4. Use the company name only on pages where branding the name is appropriate. These include pages like about us, home, and contact us.

One final thought, while I try to utilize as many core keywords within the page titles as I can, pages can include key phrases that are not on your core phrase list. But don’t forget to research and document these “non-core” phrases to ensure you are making the best choices and not duplicating your efforts anywhere within the site.

Guest Blogger: Corey Hammond

Social Media Marketing: What is it and What is it Good For?

Moderator:

• Pauline Ores, SES Advisory Board & Senior Marketing Manager, Social Media Engagement, IBM Corporation

Speakers:

• Erik Qualman, Search Engine Watch Expert & Global VP, EF Education
• Brent Csutoras, Online Marketing Consultant, Brent Csutoras
• Vanina Delobelle, PhD., Global Product Director, Monster Worldwide

Vanina from Monster will be speaking first. She starts by giving a very basic overview of social media and how it works. One big point that she makes is that companies need to be consistent with social media. People get use to a company posting, updating, and interacting with them and they won’t like it if they just leave and lose that interaction.

Erik kicks it off after Vanina. He starts by feeling out the audience for what they use like Del.icio.us and Twitter. It was funny because he tried to trick people in the audience to raise their hand to an adult content site. Brent raised his hand to it. Companies should figure out what they offer and how it is different. Once they establish that, they can decided on the approach they need to talk with social media.

Brent goes after Erik. He wants to tie in social media with people’s search engine marketing campaigns. With paid links being a negative thing these days, people have looked for an alternative for building links and have turned to social media. People are looking for great content. Site’s should be pushing their content onto social networks so people can find it and they will reference your content by linking back to you. Brent says he doesn’t worry about traffic from social media because it will come and go so quickly but the links can be huge. A campaign he references got over 8000 links. Brent has some awesome enthusiasm in his presentation! Some tips he gives at the end is to check what people have done before and what worked, pick the appropriate communities, and to create high quality content.

Guest Blogger: Corey Hammond

Advanced B2B Marketing

Moderator:

• Jeffrey Rohrs, Vice President, Marketing, ExactTarget

Speakers:

• Barbara C. Coll, CEO, WebMama.com Inc.
• Patricia Hursh, President & Founder, SmartSearch Marketing
• Adam S. Goldberg, Chief Innovation Officer, Clearsaleing

Patricia up first. She starts by giving 10 tips for B2B sites. Some highlights were offering multiple action options and simplifying forms. There is a Forrester graph that she shows that illustrates that people do more searches very early on in the buying cycle. It is easier to reach people at that time and then either keep them on the site to convert or to get them to come back. In my opinion, I think it is best for sites to offer everything to buyer going through the buying cycle. Sites should educate and inform to the point where people either buy or request to be contacted. Another graph she shows displays that people will still convert on branded terms later in the buying cycle when they are looking to purchase because they found that resource earlier in their research. She says that PPC ads can qualify searchers by being specific in their ad copy. The example is if a B2B business only can work with 15-300 users for an IT solution. I don’t completely agree with pre-qualifying through PPC ads. You could always sell your leads to another company that can handle bigger accounts if you get them to convert on the site or by contacting after visiting the site. If you pre-qualify them in the ad, you may get good qualified clicks for your business but no other opportunities. She emphasises that everyone should test landing pages. There is a test that her company did that took a landing page and made 2 of them. The only difference between the pages was on had a conversion form on the bottom right. The test showed that the landing page with the form converted worse than the one without. The conversions depend on the market you are targeting.

Barb is up next and to talk about the enterprise world. Traditional enterprise salesforces think their best leads come from their network or previous connections. A good way to get these sales people to trust online leads is to give the site visitors a free trial or a demo. These 2 qualifiers show that the user is interested in the product or service that the company offers. Barb suggests that if you are looking for keywords, talk to the sales people and find out how they explain your products or services to new perspective clients.

Next up…Adam. He is relating the marketing industry to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and that there is a flow that businesses need to take. He says that people need analyze the right metrics. Sometimes companies apply the same average numbers to their cost per lead metric and they could potentially not make the money they could have if they analyzed each traffic source. Adam gives a lot of details on analysing your sales based on where they came from, how did they convert, etc.

Guest Blogger: Corey Hammond

5 Things No One Will Tell You About SEM

Moderator:

• Chris Zaharias, VP Search Sales, Omniture

Speaker:

• David Rodnitzky, VP, Strategy, PPCAdBuying.com
• Terry Whalen, SEM & Internet Marketing Expert, Founder, TDW Consulting
• Chris Knoch, Principal Consultant, Best Practices Group, Omniture
• Vinny Lingham, CEO, Synthasite

Goal is to talk about different things that isn’t talk about that much. People are allowed to ask question whenever.

Chris is speaking first and his topic is about the long tail. Most people originally said the long tail is where marketers should target because of the growth vs. shorter keyword phrases. The stats are really showing that 1 keyword and 2 keyword search terms are going up as well. Search is becoming a “final destination” meaning that people are searching with the expectation to end up at a particular goal.

Vinny is speaking now about the return on effort. His main theme is that people should focus their efforts on where they are getting a return and where things work. A lot of people try to cast the net too wide and target too many keywords across too many search engine (referring to PPC) and what happens is their efforts get diluted.

Dave starts speaking on SEM Works for Everything and how it is a myth. He think other mediums can be better suited by other marketing means like offline media and banner ads.

Chris is going to now talk about Search vs. Search Engine Upsell. This was all about PPC and leveraging content networks with your PPC campaign. Search engines are trying to “upsell” people by trying to get them to spend more money by offering different type of advertising. These different types of advertising can be found within one’s Adwords account. Some people will just click the content network option without creating a new campaign that will target the different audience of the content network vs. the usual search network.

Search is opaque is now covered by Terry. There are factors like quality score and the algorythm that people don’t know. People can always see what their competitors are doing through competitive intelligence. If companies are new to the game or behind, they can always use that as a resource and learn from the strategies, keywords, etc. that their competitors are doing or using. He referrences Spyfu.com for PPC competitive research as a tool to use.

This session was labeled as a more general search engine marketing but it heavily leaned to PPC vs. organic search. It was interesting to see their points about keywords and keyword selection even though it had that PPC keyword buying spin.

Guest Blogger: Corey Hammond

Shopping Search Tactics

Moderator:

• Brian A. Smith, Analyst, ComparisonEngines

Speakers:

• Aaron Shear, Partner, Boost Search Marketing
• Brian Mark, CTO, Toolbarn.com
• Greg Hintz, General Manager, Yahoo! Shopping

Brian Smith leads off with an overview of the shopping search landscape. One third of the US internet audience passes through a shopping search engine during a peak buying season. A data feed is a list of your products that can be submitted to the individual shopping engines.

Aaron is now talking. He starts out by talking about e-commerce sites and their traditionally poor layout. People normally navigate through e-commerce sites by using their site search because there is too much information to navigate through. The best shopping sites have multiple ways of navigating to a particular product. Aaron then starts talking about sites like ShopWiki.com that have benefits like the user generate content and suggests that e-commerce sites either leverage their network or do it themselves if they can. He ends by clean urls

Brian Mark is now up from ToolBarn.com. Conversions from shopping search engines can be high. He says he sees 3-5 times the conversions from these types of sites. Using these shopping search engines can be a backup for regular organic search results. ToolBarn.com had been removed from Google’s index at one point and they could have been out of business but they had the shopping search engines to back them up. One recommendation he had is to find where your competitors are to give you an idea of where you need to be. It is also good to test these sites to see what works and what doesn’t. An important thing to do is to make sure you are tracking the results of what you are doing. There may be an increase in the generic searches for your brand name as well due to placing your products on the shopping search engines.

Next up is Greg from Yahoo. Yahoo Shopping is getting 30 million visitors a month with around 250 million monthly pageviews. The main site is shopping.yahoo.com. He says that products can also show up across the Yahoo network. He gives and example of their gaming section. If someone is looking for Halo 3 reviews, Halo 3 product results will show up on the page as well. Yahoo Stores will automatically get their products uploaded and all others can do it through the data feeds. The interesting point he states last is that you are charged based on CPC (cost per click).

It is interesting that Yahoo charges for their product submit and Google doesn’t. Google doesn’t have the content network that Yahoo does though to be able to leverage these products across it. Google is just using the products to get them placed in their universal search results. A couple of the speakers said that people could realistically get at least 50% of their traffic from shopping search engines.

The Karcher Group is hosting Search Engine Marketing Made Simple at The University of Akron this September! TKG experts & guests will be presenting on SEO topics related to natural optimization both on and off-page, social media marketing, PPC, usability and more.

** Save $100 by registering with the promo code: jennifer **

When?
September 18, 2008 (Basic Track):
9:00 AM-2:00 PM (Seminar)
2:00 PM-4:00 PM (Workshop)

September 19, 2008 (Advanced Track):
9:00 AM-2:00 PM (Seminar)
2:00 PM-4:00 PM (Workshop)

How Much?
$249 per day
$399 for both days
$399 one day + workshop
$499 both days + workshop

Register online for the SEO seminar today!!

Guest Blogger: Corey Hammond

Storyteller Marketing: How the Art of Storytelling Matches Up With the Business of Marketing

Moderator:

• Rebecca Lieb, Contributing Editor, ClickZ

Speakers:

• Gary Stein, Director of Strategy, Ammo Marketing
• Sally Falkow, President, Expansion Plus Inc.
• Larry Lawfer, Founder/President, YourStorys.com

First up is Gary. He starts by telling a story about Nordstroms and customer service. People will pass on stories more than anything else and they are very powerful. Stories can influence whether or not an item is purchased. People will write reviews, their stories, and those are what influence other’s buying decisions. There are 5 types of stories that can be told he says, but he lists 6. Origin is the one he is leaving off for some reason:

1. Origin - Where did it come from
2. Purpose - Why you are doing something
3. Vision - Where are things going
4. Education - Teach people about your product, service, or industry
5. Ethics - What they stand for

Sally is up next. They had to switch some stuff with the computers. Sally has a background in PR. Companies need to find their brand story and know what is being said about you. She points out the story of the PC vs. Mac ads and how just the picture of the 2 guys in the ad speak the story. The next example she is using of Kleenex and their “Let It Out” campaign. Kleenex is putting user’s stories on the site and these stories are heart-felt and deep. After those examples she starts giving more of them like Dove and HerRoom.com. HerRoom.com turned their site into a resource that cared about women’s health. Sally the sites different ways of telling your story like through videos, blogs and articles. She just referred RSS to multi-level marketing for content.

Larry is the last up. He says Seth Godin wrote a great book called “All Marketers Are Liars” and that is why he is a story teller. Some rules of stories: Have to be real, have to be authentic, and an invitation for others to join. He is a big fan of telling stories through video. Stories should make the person want more.

I think this session took a unique view of marketing and how to leverage it online. People will pass on stories, good or bad. If businesses took the time to plan out their goals and what story they want to tell, it can be very powerful. This session seems like it would tie in well with the SEO for Video session. I’m hearing it was a good session on Twitter and hopefully I’ll read some more on it since I didn’t attend that one.

It’s been about 6 weeks since the last Google rankings update and things are still trending fairly well. The majority of the Google rankings we’re tracking have either increased or remained steady, with a few slightly dropping or not returning at all. Keep in mind that we haven’t actively been optimizing the site for these phrases over the last 3 months - so some of the dips may be due to not implementing SEO efforts into the site.

Two weeks ago, I mentioned that the number of pages Google was indexing had declined from 186 to 94… This decrease continued over the next week down to the mid-50’s! TKG.com’s Google saturation has been hovering around the mid-60’s for 2 weeks and is now at 62.

We’re checked robots.txt file, google webmaster tools, drop in rankings…

Wouldn’t it be great if Google reported what pages it was no longer indexing to make it easier to investigate the cause?
Rankings still seem to be up & so is traffic… So until those both plummet, we’re not going to stress too much; but we’ll still keep researching!

Guest Blogger: Megan Jeffery
While everyone agrees that link building is still an essential part of a successful SEO campaign, it has become increasingly more difficult. Link building is easily one of the most time consuming tasks of an SEO campaign. There are plenty of articles out there to guide you, a couple of good ones I have read lately focus a little more on what not to do, such as The Link Building Kiss of Death by Eric Ward. Very simple, yet vitally important - he illustrates the idea that when requesting links, you should actually find out who has the authority to grant the request - a novel idea!

There are many theories that float around the SEO world, certain tactics that are now supposedly defunct, or are misunderstood. One of the most debated is Reciprocal Linking - you may as well have said a dirty word when you dare utter the phrase! Some now refer to it as a link exchange. I feel that there is still a very important place for this practice. I think if it makes sense, do it! There are many times when this is a perfectly acceptable practice.

Say for example, you are selling gourmet cookbooks on your Web site. It naturally makes sense to link out to a provider of gourmet cooking untensils, or pots and pans, especially if they are items recommended in your cookbooks. Asking for a link in return is also acceptable, especially if you have already placed a link to them on your site. This is beneficial for both parties, in that the sites are related, it makes sense to link to one another, it is only natural to do so. Your users will appreciate the ease with which they are able to find the cookware mentioned in your books. Their users will appreciate thier ability to buy great cookbooks to go with thier new cooking tools. A relationship is formed. This aspect is important, as you would not want to form this relationship with just anyone.

Linking to the wrong site is to be avoided. Because a link is viewed as a “vote” for that site, you want to avoid linking to the wrong kind of site. An example of this would be that your nephew Marvin has a site. His site is all about his pet cat, and he really wants you to exchange links. Don’t do it! Marvin’s cat has nothing to do with your gourmet cookbook business, it won’t benefit your users, and it will look questionable to the search engines, causing you to loose some of your standing. Now, if Marvin has a section of his site devoted to gourmet cooking, with some articles and other interesting tidbits, then it would be appropriate to link to that page, and to have him link to you from that page.

As for forming the wrong kind of relationship, be careful about whom you ask for a link. If they have a links page devoted to obscure, unrelated sites, you probably don’t want to be on that links page. The site is just trading links with anyone who is willing, and you are in the wrong neighborhood, get out!

As always, if you provide good information, some points of interest, and are willing to do some work, building links will come, slowly, but they will come.

So, how do you feel about granting link requests? Do you do it? Do you ask for a link in return?