Subscribe in a ReaderArchive for January, 2009
People often think of SEO as just one strategy – to get web page content ranked higher than others. However, SEO has many different strategies and knowing which ones to apply can help your business deliver the results your clients are looking for. In this article we’ll examine some of the most common SEO strategies out there today.
SEO for E-Commerce
One of the most common objectives are clients want is for our SEO strategy to help them boost sales at their online shop. This is by far the most common use for SEO and is one of the most profitable as well. When users find your content through search and you end up making a sale you have proven to your client just how valuable your services are.
When to Use: When your client has a direct product or service for sale.
Keyword Targeting: PPC campaign is one of the best ways to test potential keyword combinations. Remember, the most focused and granular you can make the keywords, often better the conversion rates.
Content Optimization: Links, links and more links! Focus on how to link build through your customers and a community – but don’t forget about internal link building strategies as well. You may find some value in manual link building strategies here as well.
SEO for Influence
Sometimes your goal is to sways people opinion about a product, company or topic. You want to get your content rated high in search so that you can influence people who may be searching for general information about the subject. Policy makers and political action groups are the most likely users of a strategy such as this.
When to use: When you want to change how people think or influence them on a particular topic.
Keyword Targeting: Varies greatly – you’ll probably have to stick with the keywords you know that are related to the topic.
Content Optimization: Standard SEO, but you will want to gather your supporters up and make sure that you are sharing the links. Communities like these often sprout up out of nowhere sometimes overnight.
SEO for Traffic
There are times when you just want people to come to your site! Most often, once people get to your content you are then going to monetize that traffic through affiliate programs, ads, banners, etc. This is one of the most common SEO practices you will find outside of E-commerce.
When to use: When you want to monetize search engine traffic without handling the financial transactions on your own site.
Keyword Targeting: Focus here on content, not keywords and let the search engines do the work. If you have quality content on a topic then the search engines will naturally find you and so will the people doing the search!
Content Optimization: Categorize and make sure you use a shallow link structure. Make sure that all content has been through standard page optimization techniques (alt text, headers, titles, etc.). The easier you make your content to share, the more traffic you will get.
SEO for Branding
It’s all about the name – and some websites want their names at the top all the time. This is called brand building and many news and blog sites fight to make sure their brand is always near the top. Sites that fall into this category often want to be perceived as the “authority” on the subject matter they are presenting.
When to use: When it’s not about the money, but rather about the name building and brand recognition.
Keyword Targeting: Focus on the brand if you use keywords. Like SEO for traffic, much of your traffic is going to come through the search engines. If you are consistently having to “buy your way to the top” then you need to re-examine your content and your topic/brand.
Content Optimization: Make the site accessible, easy to link to, and make sure that content is optimized from the moment it is published.
SEO for Direct Marketing & Leads
Similar to SEO for e-commerce, but you rather want to help customers find you and not sell them a tangible item online. Think of services like lawyers, plumbers, electricians, insurance sales, etc. This type of SEO fits the service industry well.
When to use: When you are selling a service and using the web as a means of helping people find out about the service rather than purchase it directly.
Keyword Targeting: What service are you trying to sell? This will determine your keywords.
Content Optimization: Believe it or not, this is a very challenging area with a lot of competition. You need solid link building strategies with a lot of external links pointing back at you. Think of it as a combination of E-commerce and branding.
Related Posts:
Think about the last time you visited your mechanic. Why is that many of us would gladly lay out $800 to fix a major problem if our mechanic told us it needed immediate attention, but at the same time very few people are willing to spend the $50 to make sure a little problem doesn’t become a $800 problem. The same thing can be said about SEO – clients see the “big” things, but often don’t see the value in the little items that add up to sizeable shifts in rankings. How do you as an SEO company show that the little things matter as much as the big optimization items?
First, you have to make sure that you have a solid understanding of what constitutes the small things in SEO. Consider it a best practices document. This list is by no means complete, but includes:
- Making-sure-your-links-look-like-this instead of your_links_looking_like_this.
- Make sure that keywords are towards the front of title tags, rather than buried at the end.
- All images and imbedded media should have alt text tags describing them.
- Less code, more content!
- Login pages, legal text and general “fluff” should have nofollow tags.
- Page headlines should always be within a H1 tag.
- Similarly, subheadings should use H2 and H3 tags.
- Bold face keywords that are the main topic of the page at least once on the page.
- Internal links should always contain anchor text that you are targeting on the page.
Sounds easy doesn’t it? Little items that by themselves don’t add up to much, but put together can have measurable SEO impact. So now the question is how do you sell the client on this?
One way to accomplish this is to build-in this best practices work into your quote. Don’t ask the client if they want it, instead just deliver it as part of your standard SEO services. It’s one of those things that will set you apart from the competition because of the quality you deliver in the end.
Another way is to have a boilerplate site that you use to measure impact before and after. Why not find a non-profit organization or charity with a website in your area and offer to do the little tweaks for free? It not only helps you build your portfolio but also gives you an excellent way to show off how it impacted the results before and after the “little things” was taken care of.
Sometimes we focus so much on the big picture we forget that if it weren’t for the little pixels, there wouldn’t be a picture. Make sure in your SEO practice you are providing value from start to finish by establishing best practices guidelines that put emphasis on both the big and the little things to give your clients the very best you can for both them and yourself.
Related Posts:
Think of a popular site that you maintain or run. Now think of all the inbound links that the site receives. Perhaps some of those you helped nurture, but how many of those are using poor SEO practices that aren’t living up to their full potential to boost the site higher in the rankings? By taking a few minutes to reach out to those who are linking to your sites you can have a measurable impact on your search rankings by making sure people focus on quality links and not just random links.
Many links are an SEO nightmare. They either are linking to the wrong content (or pages that no longer exist) or the anchor text, if it exists, has absolutely nothing to do with the content they are linking to. By taking a proactive approach to managing inbound links you can help a number of sites that link to you use proper SEO techniques. Keeping an eye on new inbound links and reaching out to new linkers in a timely fashion can help you more than you might imagine.
Of course you have no control over what people do outside of your site, but a little politeness through a carefully crafted e-mail can do wonders. Sure, you will never convert 100% of the people to forming SEO friendly links, but even converting 25% of them can really help you.
First, how are you going to know when new inbound links point to your site? Your best resource is your logs – one of the most underutilized data sources on the web. Your web logs contain a treasure trove of rich data that can be used for SEO purposes. By monitoring them for new referrers you can find out who the new kids on the block are and reach out to them to help build your brand.
There are others way, as well. Various reputation monitoring services exist out there and of course Google and Yahoo have strong web master tools that help you monitor inbound links. If you haven’t already, be sure to setup Google to alert you whenever new links and mentions of your websites appear!
Next, focus in on three main things in your email:
- Proper anchor text
- Link to pages that actually exist (and remove any query strings)
- Adding multiple links to other pages of interest on your site
Some of this can be automated, and a craft coder could write a script to parse logs looking for new links and response codes quite easily. However, even if you have to do this manually for a while you may find taking a few minutes to craft an email is a wonderful way to build a relationship with other sites that not only help you but can help them as well.
By keeping your “ears” to the ground you can find out about who is talking about you, your service or your site and help build your SEO rank at the same time.
Related Posts:
I’m sure you know of someone, or seen pictures of people, who live in absolutely beautiful houses on the inside. We’re talking about marble floors, well-decorated rooms and spacious appointments throughout the house. Then you walk outside and it looks like a train wreck. Overgrown grass, lack of landscaping and paint on the house that is 20 years old. The type of house you’d drive right past without giving a second thought if you didn’t know much better. How many of you are aware that content layout follows this same type of behavior? You can have the best content in the world, but it doesn’t matter if you make it impossible to find and hard to read. People will just “drive right by”.
Continue Reading: SEO Content Optimization – Designing Your LayoutRelated Posts:
How many times have you worked on a client’s site and thought to yourself, “I hope these changes work!” For many people in the SEO field testing is not a part of their toolkit. They make changes based on what has worked in the past and hoped it would work now. Only time would tell if the changes actually helped or hurt the site – and by the time you knew the results, so did the client!
Continue Reading: SEO Testing – What Works and What Does notRelated Posts:
Seasons change, the kids are grown up and off to college, and websites that once offered a product or service disappear into web history or stop offering the feature. All these things are just facts of life – but luckily for those of us engaged in SEO the third one is something we can use to our advantage. By finding sites that are still ranked, but no longer offering relevant content, we can turn what were basically dead sites and ghost links into creative link strategies to help our clients.
Continue Reading: Using the Ghosts of Links Past To Build Your SEO Link StrategyRelated Posts:
Have you ever heard people use the phrase “new school” and “old school”? They are talking about ways of doing things, or certain styles and fashions. Something is considered “new school” if it’s a radical departure from how we dressed, thought, acted or behaved in the past. “Old school” refers to ideas, beliefs, designs and such that have been around for what seems like forever. When you think about link building for your SEO business, are you old or new school?
Continue Reading: Link Building – The New SchoolRelated Posts:
As an SEO business owner you face the challenge of keeping multiple clients happy while working within their budgetary and technological guidelines. You want to provide the best SEO services you can to get results for the client without breaking your own budget. One of the best ways to bring SEO to clients is through effective and profitable use of keywords. In this posting I’m going to walk you through a few of the strategies and tips I use for finding the best keywords for clients and hope that I can show you a few tricks to help your SEO business as well.
Continue Reading: Keyword Development Strategy – SEO Company TipsRelated Posts:
What’s the “secret” to getting your site listed in the coveted top 10 spots in the search engines? Create outstanding content and get people to link to it. Pretty simple huh? Oh but if SEO was that simple. We all know that SEO can be one of those things you can spend weeks, even months on, and still not break into the top 10 on search. This is because that you can optimize your site for SEO until you are blue in the face, but until you get quality sites to link to you then you are almost invisible to the search engine folks.
Continue Reading: Keep Them Linking With Content That Screams Out – Link to Me!Related Posts:
Think about this for a moment – how many ways can you ask someone for directions to a restaurant? I’m sure there are three or four ways we can all think of off the top of our heads, and in reality there are probably hundreds of different ways we could all ask the same question. Now think about the same scenario, except this time instead of asking someone they are typing in the query into a search engine. How in the world you can you apply SEO techniques to help you get the maximum value for queries and ad campaigns without having to design the site around every possible combination?
Continue Reading: SEO Optimization for Multiple Word Search Terms