Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Mon, Jul 26, 2010
When negotiating with a search engine optimization professional, is a search engine positioning guarantee reasonable?
This topic of discussion was much more common in recent years but as many businesses are more involved with the inbound marketing or search engine positioning process and are deeper into this process, they seem to understand the relative validity of a search ranking guarantee. Especially an Organic search engine positioning guarantee.
This blog post is more general in nature for those who still need to understand the process, expectations and the differences between a sponsored ad strategy and an organic search strategy.
I was asked by a potential new alliance partner today about guaranteed search engine positioning from an SEO (organic) or pay per click perspective. This is a topic of discussion that I have had more often 12 to 24 months ago. As SEO was the primary method of entry into the world of inbound marketing, many businesses getting involved with inbound marketing presented this question but has now become less frequent. I think that many businesses and many organizations that are getting involved with inbound marketing understand a little bit more about the nature of search engine optimization both from an organic stand point and a sponsored ad stand point, here is how I answered this question about a guarantee in the world of SEO.
A guarantee in the world sponsored ad marketing is reasonable. I believe that there can be a guarantee simply because you're purchasing position (not in all cases) but in most cases a certain paid sponsored listing in a specific targeted search engine location. So I believe this can be guaranteed in one form or another.
Offering a guarantee for an organic search engine position as a rule, is much more dangerous from an inbound marketing professional's standpoint. The reasons are as follows:
- Each computer/IP address will get varying search engine positioning. For example if we're discussing an air conditioning company in a specific geographic region I can type in a given keyword and get x-results on the search engine results page while another individual, even in the same location and certainly other geographic locations will get a different ranking position. This is because the search engine technologies and algorithms are changing. They are becoming more personal and geo focused based on past personal searches.
- Another determining factor that would make a professional avoid making a guarantee is the actual real estate available. The search engine results page is becoming more limited as search engines like Google are including blog results and soon-to-be social media results on the SEPR or search engine results page. This decreases the space available for straight SEO or search engine optimization programs.
With these reasons in mind a wise and experienced Internet marketing professional would not make any guaranteed search engine positioning statements. It's more a matter of establishing expectations on a case-by-case basis. Each business is different and each business has a different target market. In some cases the target market is local with limited competition whereas others are national or even global in nature. These factors must be taken into consideration when discussing expectations.
To add to this thought process, I would advise that any search engine optimization strategy that maybe recommended by and inbound marketing professional doesn't guarantee a certain search engine position through organic search. This, in my mind should raise a red flag. The actual process of search engine optimization on any given website is as follows and is not as secretive in nature as it used to be.
- Each page can be optimized for 1 to 3 keywords.
- The relative components on a given web page need to reflect these one to three keywords.
- The content on the actual page needs to also reflect the other elements like page titles, page description, and all other related HTML code tags.
Here is a new checklist that you can use to be sure each of your web pages is at least "search engine friendly".
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Thu, Apr 22, 2010
Your Search Engine Placement Can Be Handcuffed Without Strong Visitor Optimization
Another term to explain what I mean would be Usability Modeling and Testing.
The main point being made in this blog article is this: If you are going to spend significant amounts of time, effort and money developing your inbound marketing plan and search engine placement, you would be doing yourself a dis-service by not paying as much attention to what your visitor gets once they arrive at your site. Great search engine placement will do little if you can't take advantage of it. If your current bounce rates are showing that you have a retention challenge, you might want to refocus some analytic effort to the usability of your main pages. This is an important but sometimes overlooked component of an overall inbound marketing strategy.
You landing pages should already be configured to focus on very specific topics and they will probably do a better job at retaining and then converting your targeted traffic. But, what about your home page and the follow, main, site pages.
If you have good search engine placement for your main pages. but wondering why that traffic isn't staying on your site or converting to leads, you have to ask yourself if these pages are delivering exactly what your visitor is hunting for. This is the essence of good inbound marketing. You are attracting those customers that are actively searching for your information. Don't send them in the other direction because your site is unclear, confusing or drowning in images.
Search engine placement is great but know that once you've lost a customer on your Web site, you've lost that customer for good. This happens for many reasons: faulty or ambiguous navigation, bad interface design, long download time, incompatible technology, and so on.
What can you do about it? The answer is simple: Find out what your site visitors want your site to do. The earlier you discover their needs, the better. If you have a site running and still don't know why the logs aren't meeting your expectations, try testing your site for usability. One way to do this is to create dummy sites to test various scenarios of users transporting themselves through your site.
Usability is an integral part of the design process and should accelerate your search engine placement naturally. It should not constrain good design. Rather, it should enhance the ability of a good design to create a highly functional and usable site.
To make it easy for you, I have created a Usability Checklist that can be used to test your site before launch or even after you have secured some good search engine placement:
- Purpose of the Site - Is your site fulfilling its purpose?
Is it designed to give your audience what they want?
- Abilities of the Site - Is it efficient?
• Is it intuitive?
• Does it behave and appear consistently throughout?
• Is it engaging enough for the user to feel in control and relaxed? - Branding -Does the first screen from your Web site portray your business in a distinctive light?
• Does the branding appear on all the pages of the site?
• Does the branding appear in a prominent area on the top of the page, like on the left side?
• Branding can serve as part of the navigation system, as a link back to the home page. - Navigation - Does the main navigation of the site appear in a prominent place before the scroll?
• Is your site navigation in the form of images? If so, consider also having text-based navigation on the page.
• Do the image links have tags filled in?
• If JavaScript is used for the navigation tools, have you also provided text links on the page?
• Are there any dead links on the site?
• Does your site have a site map or search engine for those who prefer to reach the information without having to navigate the entire site?
• Are the navigation tools and system consistent across the site?
• Does your site give the user his or her exact location within the site, with clear options to move back or forward?
• Do the links tell users where they lead to? - Images - Are images used in context with the content?
• Are images optimized for their file size?
• If there is a need to describe an image, is the description clear?
• Have you added text to the tag for the image? This also helps with the search engine placement efforts.
- Animations - Avoid continuous cycling animations unless they serve a purpose, as these can be distracting.
• Use Flash animations only if they are indispensable. They take long to download and often require a plug-in. - Sponsors and Advertising - If your site has ad banners, have you considered optimizing the file size?
• Where have you placed the banners? - Content - Is the content in sync with not only your search engine placement but the context of the page or the site?
• Is your content brief and precise?
• Have you cross-linked the content to documents or sites with related information? - Technology - Are the interactive widgets on your site compatible with your target audience's browsers, or does your audience need to download a plug-in or software to use them?
• If it's important to use such a technology, have you informed the user about its need and importance? - Overall Interface - Does your site have a pleasing interface, with colors matching the need and flavor of the site?
• Does the layout have enough white space to be pleasing to the eye?
• Is the interface consistent, layout and colors, throughout the site?
• Does the site look the same on different platforms and browsers? - Feedback - Do you provide an appropriate feedback mechanism for any action on the part of the user?
• Do you give users an opportunity to provide you with praise and/or suggestions or to make an inquiry on any issue related to the site or its content?
• Does your site give users access to your email and postal address, phone numbers, and fax?
When testing your site for usability, you can, undoubtedly, add more things to this checklist. However, this checklist will give you a good start when evaluating on where your company's web site may need some initial improvements and can take better advantage of your great search engine placement.
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Thu, Apr 08, 2010
Search Engine Submissions? Does that still exist?
Yes, search engine submissions are, to one extent or another, part of the SEO process. However, the actual task or process of search engine submissions are no longer a high priority component of achieving the desired search engine positions. Mostly, the major search engines no longer (prominently) include direct links to a search engine submission page within the search engine site. 5 to 10 years ago, search engine submissions were one of the main methods used by web site owners and one of the main ways of getting listed on a major search engine, but we have come a long way since those times.
Search engine submissions are now more of an automatic part of the process than anything else. Typically, search engine submissions no longer need to be a part of any search engine marketing or inbound marketing campaign. If you are creating relevant and remarkable content within your current search engine marketing endeavors, all major search engines should include your pages in there databases and page inventory. The actual search engine submissions aren't necessary any longer.
Search engine submissions have been replaced by a larger list of other needed components included (but certainly not limited to) in the following list:
- Keyword - On Page Optimization: Including your keyword in the following:
- Page Title Tags
- Page Description Tag
- Page Keyword Tag
- Page Image or "Alt" tags
- Page Headers
- Page Content
- Blog Development: This process creates new pages and keywords that are evaluated by the major search engines and don't require any direct search engine submissions.
- Inbound Links: This may be the most valuable search engine marketing campaign component. Inbound links create:
- Traffic from linking web sites
- Search Engine Credibility
- Search Engine Authority
Search engine submissions have been replaced by comprehensive inbound marketing activities and may include hundreds of different components and elements. Overall search engine (Internet) competition has increased dramatically over the years in a direct response to business & consumers being better equipped to block out older forms of outbound or interruption marketing and connected more with inbound or search marketing. We are still at the very beginning stages of this evolution and most (if not all) business needs to pay attention and develop an appropriate search engine marketing campaign.
But: Don't let the increase in competition and mountains of inbound marketing work scare you off and cause overwhelm. The more you understand that even though this may be the most significant shift in marketing in the last 40 years, it is something that could and should be used to your advantage. Align your company with an experience Inbound Marketing consulting and services organization and they will teach you all you need to know to stay involved and growing. They will show you how the right inbound marketing applications coupled with the appropriate service provide can give you the resources to launch a powerful yet budget conscience marketing campaign.
Inbound marketing solutions now can include all in one software solutions that allow your marketing efforts to integrate:
- Lead Generation
- Lead Tracking
- Lead Nurturing
- Lead Conversions
If done correctly, any size business can benefit from the inbound marketing revolution.
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Tue, Feb 16, 2010
As SEO or search engine optimization become more important and a critical cornerstone of many Inbound marketing (Internet marketing) projects, I offer the SEO check list below. These are items that need to be a part of your "on page" SEO execution.
1. On-page Optimization:
Keyword Research/No. of Key phrases Optimized - Keyword Research is very important and can literally make or break your SEO campaign. Most popular mistake people make is to select one word or two word keywords to rank on. The whole idea of keyword research is to select realistic keywords which can bring in significant amount of traffic. We use paid version of Word Tracker and Google Keyword Research tool and involve our clients in keyword selection.
Optimization of Titles and Meta Tags – Title tag appears at the top bar of your web browser. Based on the keywords in this tag, search engines list the site relevant to a search made in their engines. It is one of the important aspects of getting rankings in search engines. Since this title also appears in search engines’ result pages, appropriate use of keywords in promotional language may result in more clickthroughs. We optimize the Titles and Meta Tags since these provide information about your Web page to search engine robots so that the search engine can better understand what your site is about. Meta tags provide this information in a format that the web crawlers/spiders that visit your site can understand.
Robot.txt Optimization - This file allows you to hide files or directories that you don’t wish the search engine spiders to find. You can let us know which files or folders you do not want spiders to crawl they will be disallowed. Here we create Robots.txt file. This file is created so that your site can be crawled and added to the search engine database. Using this file, you can also allow or block a search engine from crawling specific parts of your site such as the cgi-bin folder, images folder or any folder containing critical information.
W3c Validations - The Markup Validation Service by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) allows Internet users to check HTML documents for conformance to HTML or XHTML and is also a quick method to check for errors in code. We validate your sites as per W3C guidelines. This is done to make the source code of your web pages clean and concise which allows the search engine spiders to move more efficiently through your site. When it comes time for a search engine to add your page to its results, it’s going to have a much easier time understanding the page if it’s been validated. This will often get you a higher ranking in the results.
Working on the HTML source code - Apart from Title Tag, there are other sections on your web page which can be optimized. These include, Meta Description tag, Image Alt tag, Adding Header tag for important information on your web page. Sometimes we take out Javascripts and making them external to increase Text to HTML ratio. Open any site, right click and check view source option. It will show you the html code. Working on it means we will update the tags, externalize java scripting, add alt tags and hyperlink attributes, etc.
Editing Content for SEO - Copywriters will work on modifying existing content based on the keywords being optimized. Keywords will be strategically used within the content based on various keyword densities.
Image & Hyperlink Optimization - We incorporate keywords in Alt text of image tags and title attribute of hyperlinks. This helps to a certain extent in search engine rankings.
One way to evaluate the condition of a given web site is to have an search engine optimization consulting firm run an analysis and provide the related reports. For example:
Web Site Analysis Report
Search Engine Ranking Report
Ask us for a no cost report that might help you measure the SEO condition of your web site
Virtual Support Systems
www.virtualsupportsystems.com
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