Search Marketing Insomniac…The Blog of Adam Henige

Blogging.  If you talk to the internet marketing snobs they’ll tell you it’s “so 2007″.  If that were the case, there wouldn’t be so many that are still so successful.  Sure there are other newer, shinier mediums, but a good blog still holds a tremendous amount of value and can be a great business and relationship builder.  The real question is, how do you make a good one?

I think I can speak a little bit from experience, as:

1. We’re a small business
2. I’m a blogger
3. I consider my blog a moderate success (though I really wish I had more time to devote to it…but see number 1 for why I can’t)

Most small businesses lack the resources of their larger contemporaries, which adds some significant challenges to creating a successful and beneficial blog.  I’ve created a short checklist that helps me, and will hopefully help you either create or transform your blog as one that people can truly find value in.

Don't put a stinker in someone's inbox.

1. Create quality content.  Too often small businesses will have a couple of ideas that are worthy of a post, but the majority of their blogging is filler.  Don’t make your blog a one hit wonder, think of your blog as an album.  Nobody will buy an album if there’s only one or two good songs.  Assume that every reader will sign up to your RSS feed, and if your post isn’t something someone would take the time to open and read then don’t write it.  Nothing’s more annoying than getting a stinkbomb in your inbox or Google Reader.
2. Be unique.  If you have an idea for a blog, spend some time researching to see if it’s been discussed before.  Do a quick search or two on the topic and if it’s been done, try to add a unique spin to it.  If you want to get some attention, link to the other posts as well, and you can get some exposure by showing up in their trackbacks if the other blogs have them enabled.
3. Involve others.  Once you’ve established your blog and have a bit of an audience, offer others the opportunity to do a guest post or co-write a post on a topic that they’re passionate about.  These people will likely help promote their appearance on their blog or other social media avenues as well.  The more popular your guest, the better off you’ll be.
4. 

   100% of people like graphs. It's a law.

   Make it look good.  Like it or not, credibility often comes with appearance.  So making your blog have a professional look goes a long way to getting people to spend time reading your work.  Furthermore, add relevant images to your blog.  People like visuals - especially graphs.

5. Create a schedule and stick to it.  One of the hardest parts about maintaining a blog is maintaining a blog.  It takes time.  I’m guilty of falling off my schedule from time to time as well, but I try to tackle a blog topic or two each weekend.  It’s always nice to have a spare topic that’s not time sensitive to post when life doesn’t allow.  If you have a team, this gets even easier, as long as each member knows when they’re expected to add a post.  Create a schedule and stick to it.  Reward yourself for sticking to it if you must (I would blog for a Klondike bar.)

If you need motivation or need to sell other members of your team on blogging, keep in mind some of the key benefits:

1. A blog lets you casually articulate a position on a topic or better explain products/services without heavy handed selling.  It’s a great way to tell a story and to personalize your business.
2. Fresh content makes search engines happy - green content shows your site is active and constantly adding relevant content to your blog/site’s theme.
3. Your blog is a great opportunity to build links (which will help your overall site’s ranking as well).  Publish an RSS feed and promote your blog in blog directories and via social media to get yourself noticed.  Once you have an audience and great content, links will follow.

Another great resource for blog beginners is the Clear Writing Checklist - which offers some technical recommendations for selecting colors, images and fonts to make your blog all it can be.  I definitely recommend checking that out.

Any other recommendations are certainly welcome in the comments.  Happy blogging!

If you make your living in the world of SEO like me you’ve looked at the Google PageRank bar so many times that you probably have reached the point that you can identify the score by site. But now it’s time to put your skills to the test. There’s 4 multiple choice options for each answer.  Please share your thoughts (and your scores)  in the comments below!

Many months back we began working with a client who had just launched a new website and wanted to get some quick SEO results.  Their portal site was an excellent tool, well set up for link building, but the site was almost entirely a graphic interface - no content.

Don't mess with the Google!

In our initial meetings I quickly identified this as a problem, and said we needed to aadd some content if we were going to have a chance to begin ranking well for the variety of terms they wanted to go after.  The initial design had the interface all existing above the fold, and they wanted to keep it that way.  So they created a “slider” div that allowed the visitor to move images and see descriptive content about the pages.  I thought this was a good solution, until the client decided that they didn’t want to make an obvious link to enable this functionality.  Rather than adding a “read more” button or something of the like, they developed a nondescript button and shoved it into a corner of the page where no user would ever find it.

The first words out of my mouth were, “You guys are running a serious risk of getting penalized for hidden content.”  The designer wouldn’t budge, and they designed the site their way and rolled it out.  The site quickly attracted links and quickly achieved top rankings for all of their desired target keywords.  A few weeks ago, I got an email reading, “Our rankings have tanked!  Help!”

The odd thing was, some of the secondary keywords continued to rank well.  Only 4 or 5 of the site’s most important keyword had dropped from first page rankings to anywhere from the third page, the tenth page or to completely out of the rankings.  This didn’t make sense as mere jitter, or a huge surge in competitors.  The basic metrics (both on site and off) had not changed significantly in the past week, and entire pages weren’t being penalized, only certain terms.  This was far too unusual to have happened naturally, so it became fairly obvious this was a penalty aimed at this site’s most important keywords.  With the holiday rush on, they had no time to lose to get this organic traffic (which coincidentally was their most profitable traffic) back up to speed.

I worked with them to craft the letter, and followed Google’s reconsideration guidelines.  It went a little something like this:

Our business is based on creating value-added content by categorizing service providers with direct access to their service pages.  A user comes to our site to determine what service provider will offer the bhe best service, and for immediate access to the pages for those providers.  We are providing a service in this market that is similar to the service that Kayak.com provides to the airplane ticket market.  As a result, our rank in Google’s search results is very important to us.

Prior to recent events, we were ranked quite highly for terms related to our service such as X, Y, and Z.  We’ve worked closely with an SEO firm, Netvantage Marketing based locally in Michigan, to obtain these search results.  Following their guidance, we’ve gone from a relative unknown to a first page result for many queries.  However, recently we have fallen off the results altogether for a portion of search terms, while maintaining our ranking for others.  An example search term is “X”.  Our Google webmaster tools report from last week tell sus that our search rank for this term was #2, but now search results don’t show us anywhere within the first 200 results.  Whereas, “A” is a term we have been #1 for and still are #1 today.  We don’t even show up when searching our own brand name despite the fact that all of the results are sites that are directly related to our business.  This recent drop in rankings appears to have occured on or around December 5th, 2009 and does not correspond with any substantial changes in the content of our site.

The drop in results seems to indicate that we are being penalized for some reason.  Netvantage Marketing has recommended that we make some minor modifications to our site and that we request reconsideration from Google.  After a thorough review of our site, our only content that could viewed as worthy of a penalty is our “more info” content on each page that is not immediately visible until the slider is advanced to that page.  We use the slider to present a cool and unique way of viewing our content without overwhelming the user with too much content at once.  We had used a button that lacked a description to point to the slider page containing the additional information, but we have since replace the button with the clickable words “more info.”  We believe that we are being true to the guidelines set forth by Google regarding the quality of content, and all of our SEO content has been planned and reviewed by our SEO firm.  Please consider that our business is a value-added concept, and as a result we expect to be found on searches for the terms mentioned above so that a user is presented with many options for purchasing a related service.  We have no intent to deceive the user and we have never heard of any complaints regarding users coming to our site and feeling mislead.  As such, we would like to request reconsideration.

Sincerely,

Joe Public

I know that a lot of people can accidentally run into this problem, so I thought it would be valuable to show what a successful identification and reconsideration request looks like.  For more resources of value, check out the following:

• from Search Engine Journal
• from Google themselves

This might not seem like the most original post in the world, as a lot of people have covered the topic of keyword selection before, and done so quite well.  One thing I’ve noticed that’s usually missing from these posts, however, is a practical and quick methodology with some examples.  So today, I’m going to walk you through an example of how you can make some smarter decisions on keyword selection.

First, the tools you’ll need to pull this off:

• Google Keyword Tool
• SEO Quake Add-on for Firefox or IE
• Google

Second, the overall concept of what we’re trying to do:

When I talk with clients I ask the three basic questions in keyword selection.

1. What keywords will bring the most traffic to your site?
2. What keywords are likely to bring traffic that will convert into leads or sales?
3. How feasible is it to rank highly for that keyword?

Ideally, you want keywords that meet all three criteria.  My typical rule of thumb for a site is to try to rank in the first three results, because at the fourth listing you’ll only get around 6% of clicks  (so says the numbers from AOL).

So here’s the process, in order of activity for a quick way to select your keywords.

1. Identify the target pages you will be optimizing for
2. Create a list of keywords that pertain to the product/service offered on each page (you can have 5, you can have 50)
3. Toss those keywords into the Google Keyword Tool and export them to a CSV (make sure you use the drop down in the upper right corner to select “exact match” - this will give you more accurate estimates for SEO purposes…and no, these are never exact) .  If you’re looking for additional ideas, let the keyword tool run a scan of the page itself, or a few competitors’ pages.  Export and combine these numbers, using whichever volume, global or local, pertains to your page/site.
   1. If there’s strong seasonality in your business, you may want to look into grabbing Microsoft’s Ad Intelligence Tool, which will help demonstrate possible opportunities and threats for keywords in terms of seasonality.
4. With this initial list, start weeding out the keywords that don’t match or are too general.  Once you have that in place, sort by volume - high to low.  Now go down the list with your second piece of criteria in mind - likelihood to convert.  Here, you can toss things out like “athletic shoes” in favor of “discount running shoes” if your page has a heavy emphasis on low cost running shoes.
5. At this point your list should be cut down pretty substantially, so now it’s time to look at feasibility.  With the SEO Quake Toolbar installed, just turn it on before you do a search on each of your keywords and you’ll have some intelligence available to you in your search results - such as the page’s PageRank, Yahoo SiteExplorer’s stats for links to the page (L) and links to the domain (LD).  The lower these numbers are, the more likely you can quickly achieve this ranking.  Other items to look for include whether or not it’s the site’s home page (typically stronger pages, more likely to capture links) and whether the page title contains the keyword (the page title is always the clickable link in search results.  In the example below, the keyword search was for “keyword 1″ and it is in the title, so that would be something to take note of.

Coming back to my previous comment, I usually aim for the top three positions.  So if you’re in a hurry, I’d grab the metrics I’ve mentioned and build a table for all of your keywords based on these metrics and one more - PageRank of the site’s home page.  Here’s my logic behind each metric.

1. PageRank of ranking page - If Google has determined the page has authority and trust, you’ll need to acquire some, too
2. PageRank of site’s home page - This is usually a quick indicator of whether the entire domain has a high trust score, which can also be a problem if you’re trying to outrank a seemingly menial page on a behemoth of an authority site (this is why Wikipedia is so hard to outrank)
3. Whether or not the page is the home page - as I said before, this is usually a site’s strongest page, so it can be some extra work to outrank it with a subpage, or it may always be a threat if there are a lot of home pages around you who suddenly decide to start getting aggressive with SEO
4. Page links - If a page has a lot of links and a high PageRank, that usually means the page has some good links and/or is attached to a strong domain.  This is a red flag if this number is high, and an even bigger red flag if it’s a sub page with a large number
5. Domain links - another domain strength metric, the home page may not be responsible for all the links, so if the site’s pulling in links from all angles, this is another major hurdle to climb
6. Keyword in title - this is the most important on page element, so if the other sites are fairly serious about your keyword, you should see this bolded all over the titles on the first page of search results, if not, there may be opportunity.

If you take this approach, you’ll build a spreadsheet like the one I have assembled below, where you can go through and quickly select your best opportunities based on the above criteria.

I hope this walk through is helpful for those of you who may not have all the time in the world or the tools available to build a helpful process for keyword selection.  If you want to read more on this wildly fascinating topic from people much smarter than I, I would suggest the following:

• SEOMoz’s 10 Steps to Advanced Keyword Research
• Search Engine People’s Proven System
• Hobo’s Keyword Research For Beginners with Aaron Wall
• 5 Steps to Effective Keyword Research on the Search Engine Guide Blog

There are plenty of web awards out there, and even some locally here in Lansing.  But we at Netvantage wanted to have a bit more fun with it and let the general public vote for their favorite websites.  With that in mind, we cooked up the Lansing Web Awards, our idea for a web 2.0 take on local web awards.  So while this isn’t the most scientific approach to choosing the best website in the greater Lansing area, we think it’s a great way to get local businesses and the general public thinking about the web and the many great websites established by local businesses.

So if you’re a local business or just a fan of a local business’ website, check out the Lansing Web Awards page and tell your friends, and have your friends tell their friends!  The winners will get some fancy hardware, and as much publicity as we can generate for them.

Further, we finally had a chance to use our green screen for something (there is no truth in the rumor that this entire contest was created so I could finally do something with the green screen), so check out this extremely fancy video we put together.

So, if you like this idea, feel free to share it via facebook, retweet it, or write it on a piece of paper and send it via carrier pigeon.  The more people that get involved the greater success this will be.  Thanks!