SEO and Exaggerated Claims
I started my SEO and online marketing career in 1998, working for a crown corporation in BC. Since then, I've had a few other full time stints, interspersed with time in sales… admittedly, a bit of a bizarre combination. I can only say that I'm easily bored…
However, one of the ongoing and less savory aspects of SEO work has been the ongoing population of hucksters and outright scammers that also work in the field. It was the same in 1998.
Why is that the case? I think that it's because the barrier to entry is low, the standards are ill defined, and many customers do not know what is involved in the "black art" of SEO.
That is one of the reasons that I am and will continue to outline the basics of true SEO here. Forewarned is forearmed!
Recent conversations with some of our customers, are revealing that there is another wave of SEO promotion going on. In my opinion, there are a few telltale signs that the company you are talking to, might be less than ideal.
#1 – They claim a special relationship or "deal" with Google.
This does not exist and never will. Google's entire business model is derived from providing impartial, accurate access to the data you are looking for. They are far too smart to ever risk searcher's trust by doing special deals with anyone. Ditto for sharing "insider" knowledge.
#2 – Guarantees.
Business areas online are becoming more and more competitive every day. The SEO company that offers a guaranteed "#1" position is either not being accurate or offering that position while optimizing a poor, uncompetitive keyword term.
"Wait a minute, wait a minute!!! Top Local Rankings offers a guarantee of position for the highest traffic, most effective keywords – what the heck are you saying?"
Here's why we do that: We specifically only do "Local SEO" and that means we optimize websites for city specific terms that apply to their business area. So far, that means the terms are nowhere near as competitive as globally searched keywords, so we can offer a guarantee in good conscience.
We also specifically guarantee a first page search result in the Google Map (at the top of the page) portion of a local search.
By the way, less competitive only means that local website owners here haven't optimized their websites for local search terms (if at all). It does not necessarily mean little traffic!
We know that this will change fast over the next 2-5 years. These halcyon days of relatively simple #1 rankings for local search will be a fond memory, soon… sigh.
#3 – Ridiculously low prices.
It takes time and expertise to accomplish proper SEO. That time and expertise must be paid for and if it's too cheap, how can it be good?
#4 – State that they will improve "keyword density" by rewriting your content and "meta tags" to improve your rank.
These techniques have not worked for 7 years. It's a clear sign they do not know how to do what they claim.
#5 – State they will use "secret proprietary or black hat techniques."
Run away, run away! These techniques (like cloaking, doorway pages, link farms and schemes) will get you banned from Google and sink your business.
Filed under Blog, Local Search by . 
Google Training In Optimization?
The core of website optimization is testing. There's an axiom in internet marketing, "Always be testing."
(It comes from direct mail marketing, and the people who developed that industry pretty much invented everything we know about conversion!)
Looking at the tasks associated with a website, it seems there are numerous other areas to concentrate on. Site design, copywriting, video, offers, article writing, blogging, traffic, even SEO… many, many paths to follow and expertise to acquire.
After 15 years of doing this, I would strongly suggest that the online skill that underpins success more than any other, is testing. The best tester in the world will "always" win out over the best copywriter or the traffic genius, or best conversion expert (except the best conversion expert is an expert tester.)
Hopefully, if you are not "into" being a tester, you have someone on staff who can take up the tasks or can hire someone to manage it for you. This is so important that if you are not into handling it, I would seriously recommend that you rethink having a website.
Thankfully, this is an area where there is plenty of good, free information for you to get up to speed. Google provides!
An easy way to get started is available at this Google provided YouTube Channel.
Here's a quick (1min 20sec) introduction to using Website Optimizer:
If you think of anything I left out of this post, please feel free to put that on the comment.Filed under Blog, Website Conversion by .
Top Ten Natural Search Engine Placement
The start of getting a top ten natural search engine placement is keyword research. The logic of this is easy. If you find and use the terms that people are searching for (in your particular niche) balanced by the terms that have less competition, you will be able to rank fairly quickly.
Over the years I've used many many keyword tools; from Wordtracker, NicheBot, etc. to Google's keyword tool. I've even spent $200 per month for fancy, supercharged Latent Semantic Indexing keyword research tools that were "state of the art" (and now defunct.)
The tool I have recently become a huge fan of is Market Samurai (… that's not an affiliate link).
It's developed by a bunch of "cut snakes" from down under (OZ). I've found that it is the easiest and for me, best thing I've ever used for keyword research. It also adds in a Rank Checker; a SEO Competition checker; a Monetization module (to find CPA, Clickbank, and other offers); a Find Content module; a Publish Content module and a Promotion module (for link opps) and more to come! It is freaking awesome!
Here's a video on how to do keyword research with Market Samurai…
After you've done your keyword research, there are three specific places to put your keywords. The first is in the Title Meta Tag and the closer to the start the better. The second place is in your Heading tags (h1, h2) and again the closer to the front better. The third place is one or two times in your body content.
For extra bonus (and long debates about effectiveness…) you can also use the Description Meta Tag and the Alt text of any images on the site. Please don't put more than one instance in these places; you are asking for trouble if you put more. These are one case where more is definitely not better!
If you have a blog you also want to make sure that you put the keyword phrase you are optimizing for, in the Post tags.
For WordPress blogs and SEO optimization, I also strongly recommend using Semiologic. It simply is "the" SEO wordpress blogging platform.
Now for a completely different view on this, check out my friend Colin McDougall's blog post on doing this. He has some contrary advice that is worthwhile checking out!
Colin's VEO Report blog is an in depth, extensive and kick butt resource about internet marketing! Again highly recommended.
In fact, this post is a test to see if… and how fast I can get ranked for the keyword phrase "top ten natural search engine placement". I'll report back with results in a week or so!
What about you? What are your thoughts on this subject?Filed under Blog, Local Search by .
Wherein Colin McDougall lays the smackdown on Me!
I've been licking my wounds since the last post; the last article isn't in the top 5 pages for "Top ten natural search engine placement" let alone on page one!
One of the important life lessons I've learned is when to eat humble pie and when to admit I still gots things to learn. I humbly bow to Colin. There is always more to learn about SEO!
In fact Colin, being the good guy he is, has offered to show me what to do, to get that last article ranking better. So I'll be over at his place tomorrow and he'll show me the magic!
Oh, and video tape my shame! I think I'll take a paper bag to wear over my head… the unknown local SEO guy. Whaddya think?
This will be fun!
And to end with a scrap of my SEO dignity in place; we're #1 for "vancouver local seo".
Please take a moment to comment below.Filed under Blog, Local Search by .
Head Tags
SEO ranking is about using steps to help your site in the search engines. These are the "On Page Factors" that matter: Head tags, body tags, and Url's.
First up; Head tags are the tags that show up in the code of the Head element on an html page code.
Not familiar with what I'm talking about? Go to a webpage and then under the View section of your internet browser, select "View Source". Head tags are at the top of that page of code… like below.
Head Tag Example Code
There is a seemingly infinite amount of possible data, scripts and tags that can and do go in the Head element. For a reference you can check out Head Element.
Today we'll reference the four important ones (…as of August 2009) for SEO ranking purposes: Title, Meta Description, Link rel="Canonical" and Meta Robots.
Title – this is the Macdaddy of on-page keyword elements, which testing by various groups has shown is the primary factor affecting on page SEO results.
The best practice is to use the keyword term or phrase as the first words in the pages 'Title tag'. So for instance, your keyword research is showing you that your page about "Lettuce growing" would benefit from being optimized for the keyword phrase "quick growing lettuce", you would use place those terms at the very start of your title tags.
Meta Description is, in most cases the only meta tag that you should spend any time on. (There are many other meta tags but they have little to no effect on your search ranking, especially now with Yahoo and Bing merging search. Don't use 'em.)
The Meta Description tag will often be shown as the description that follows the page title on a search engine result page. (Especially if it is an accurate description and is not filled with numerous spammy repetitions of the search phrase or overly hyped up phrasing. Do that and you will be penalized!) Remember that only 160 characters will be shown, so anything more than that is not recommended.
The idea here is to help searchers to see if your page is relevant to their search request. However, the meta description tag copy may not always be displayed in search results. Often search engines will show a section of your page's content that has the exact words used in the search query – so that means your pages better have text that matches the keyword phrase. More about that when we get to the body tag…
Rel="Canonical" This tag was introduced to help solve the problem of sites having multiple pages with the same content and the Search Engines then not knowing which page to include or exclude. Multiple pages of the same content can happen on many sites due to the way categories, print pages or session ID's are setup.
If your blog or site is larger and complex, it's best to use the canonical URL tag to prevent duplicates and unplanned, appended URL strings from confusing search engines and causing your ranking to drop. Below is what it looks like on this site:
link rel="canonical" href="http://www.toplocalrankings.com"
Meta Robots – There is some debate as to whether this is a "needed" tag. If you have a robots.txt file, you certainly do not. However, it's included here because you must make sure that if it has been used on your site, this tag does not contain any code that could direct the search engines to not crawl your site.
Like if the code shows the below; Your search traffic will drop off a cliff!!
meta content="index, nofollow" name="robots"
or
User agent: *
Disallow: /
Apply good keyword research, and then use that research to fill in appropriate Title and Meta Descriptions in your Head element; You'll have a great start to getting better rankings.
Do you want more blog posts like this? Comment below telling me you want it...Filed under Blog, SEO Ranking by .
Keyword Ranking Update
I received an email from Colin "Google" MacDougall today, telling me that my recent article "test" for the search phrase Top Ten Natural Search Engine Placement was now #5 on the 1st page of Google SERPs.
Cool beans! You will see that Colin has places 1, 2, and 3 of the Top Ten ranks… yeesh!
Page 1 - Top Ten Natural Search Engine Placement
Looks like it took a week to work through the Google algo dance; probably took that long because this is a brand new blog without any Page Rank, no significant history, and very few links coming in to the site.
Now if I can just get time to post on here every day …mumble, mumble… sleep is over-rated anyway.
I'm preparing a huge update and continuation of my series on the basics of local SEO. So, forget sleep!
I'm eager to hear your comments...Filed under Local Search, SEO Ranking by .
Vancouver SEO Secrets
Vancouver SEO secrets – are there any? Search engine optimization – abbreviated as SEO – is the actions taken so that a web site, or a web page is: researched, coded and written to optimize its performance in the search engines.
These actions result in an improvement in the placement of the page in the search engine results pages or SERPs. SEO is a key part of internet marketing and is done to improve the ability of a website to generate inquiries or sales.
Expert marketers know that one of the secrets to a successful product marketing campaign is to, in the words of the late, great Gary Halbert, “Offer burgers to a starving crowd!” SEO’s task is to accurately create or modify a webpage’s content so that it is easily found for the terms people use when they are searching for a product or service.
The side effect of this is improved rankings.
The plain and simple reality is that there are no “tricks” or “insider information” needed. Great search engine optimization (seo) takes a solid plan, great research, and consistent implementation to first find the starving crowd and then stand in front of them with your burger offer in hand.
The most wanted end result of SEO is to generate more valuable web site traffic. Getting a higher ranking from relevant search terms is worth it for a web site because it will attract more qualified traffic than a lower ranking. In an increasingly competitive and growing web world, SEO is a crucial online marketing tactic.
How much traffic? A lot. ComScore estimated that Google was processing 304 Million searches per day in June 2009. Per Day! Google recently reported that as many as 50% of those searches are unique. As in never seen before…
A first place ranking in Google, will net you around 40% of all the clicks for a search phrase. Second place bestows around 12%. Third place equals 8%. The remaining 40% goes to everyone else on page 1 and maybe a few on page 2. There are usually hundreds, if not millions, of pages below there that get no clicks to speak of.
Google, Yahoo, Bing and YouTube are all primarily concerned with providing searchers with useful accurate information. (They want you, the searcher to use “them” and not the other guys. The best way to do that is, help you find what you are looking for – fast!)
In order to do that, their search programs find and quantify massive amounts of data. For instance, as of 2008, Google had 36 data centers in all—19 in the U.S. (…somehow Toronto is included in this), 12 in Europe, 3 in Asia, and one each in Russia and South America. With more in the planning stage. All this, just to store and process online data.
The details of how the search engines gather all this information and then decide who ends up ranked where, are complex; however it boils down to that the bigger the market that you want to be in front of, the more content and links your website needs.
That’s it. More content specific to what people search for; more links back to your site.
There. I’ve revealed the “hiding completely out in plain view” secret of high rankings and market domination.
Now while some might claim that there are few genuine guarantees of a top placement, particularly for highly competitive search terms, again the simple reality is that great ranks are a function of finding markets that are starving and not being served. This takes work! The more competitive the niche, the more work it takes. The search landscape is always changing as are the keyword terms.
Now from the view of someone doing the work, accomplishing that “secret” in a programmed and repeatable manner that consistently produces results, means you look at 5 actions:
• Research and develop a keyword strategy to target the highest value searchers
• Build a well-structured web site
• Write good content with “on page” optimization
• Promote the site to get links from the rest of the web
• Check that the site is sound technically and meets web standards of coding
Good search marketing SEO will improve a web site’s ranking across a range of appropriate phrases. Ongoing research and maintenance of what's been done and adding ever more new content makes sure your site stays at the top!
Anyone else have feelings about this?Filed under Blog, SEO Ranking by .