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Many people who are just getting started in SEO think that there is a “magic trick” to making it all come together. They scour the online forums, blog posts and social networking sites looking for the magic technique that will make it all come together. Even some old-timers in the search engine optimization world are on this question for the SEO secret; what they all find out sooner or later is there is no magic wand of SEO – but there is a lot of reading and keeping up with the Internet industry as a whole.
It really all boils down to the fact that SEO isn’t some mysterious trade that only a few gifted people can ever master; it also isn’t something that you need a degree in rocket science in order to master and comprehend. Search is only one part of the whole marketing puzzle – and as many people have found over the years, you can be great at SEO but still have a site that does lackluster in performance and revenue.
Most often people who are a quest for the secrets of SEO have failed to establish a solid business model for their websites. They jump right in with dollar signs in their eyes and don’t have a firm foundation onto which to build their sites. They will spend all day and night trying to get people to link to them and trying the latest SEO techniques on their sites and fail to realize that why it isn’t working is because their content just absolutely sucks!
Having said all of that, let’s focus in on a few of the essential pieces of SEO that every firm should understand:
- Focus on your market and keywords that fit your market. If you don’t know what your market is, then you need to stop right here and develop your business model.
- Make sure your site is able to be indexed by web crawlers. You’d be surprised how many sites are blocking some of their best content!
- Content, content, content – it’s what it all boils down to in the end.
- Build inbound links and outbound links.
Once you have mastered their four areas, most of the rest of what you will read about SEO is just icing on the cake. In fact, you’d be better off spending that extra time focusing in on your business strategy and your marketing plan. You’ll see much bigger return on investments. Just remember, if your business fundamentals are lacking or poor, no amount of SEO trickery is going to help.
Just think about it for a minute – let’s say that you get to a site because it ranks #1 in a query. If the site provides nothing you want, or the pricing is more than what you would pay elsewhere, then why stay there?
SEO is more than just website techniques; it’s about business as well. The better you understand how business and marketing works, the greater your return on investment will be for your SEO efforts.
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How many times have you heard this one, “All the good names are taken, so don’t even try!” Sure, all the good easy to guess domain names are already taken, but do you think that stopped the liked of Google (who had heard of a GOOGLE before then?) or Endless.com (Amazon’s smash-hit online footwear site)? Of course it didn’t – they recognized that Marketing 101 comes into play with domain names; mainly it’s the brand that matters! If you have a good, memorable brand the rest will fall into place.
The first question you have to ask yourself when thinking of a domain name for your site is what is your site about – what are you trying to sell or provide information on? If you are creating your 50th site about Viagra, then, let’s face it, the domain name really doesn’t matter – we all know what we are after here and the domain is a “throw away”. Choose whatever you fancy!
For the rest of us, we need to ask ourselves some questions so that our domain name not only helps promote our product or service, but also helps us with SEO strategy.
Realize that traffic comes from everywhere. There was a time when traffic came from two places: a search engine or someone typing it in the address bar manually. Today, traffic comes from hundreds of places with more being added every day. Places such as Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia just to name a few. One of the best ways to get traffic to your site is to have someone mention you on a social networking site!
People can’t write about you or recommend you if they can’t remember you. Here is where our first tip comes in: make the domain name memorable, and writeable! Avoid hard to spell words or domain names that run on and on and on and …. Make it easy for people to find and link to you!
It’s all about the brand. As we talked about before, you have to have a branding strategy. However, many website owners only think about the primary brand and give up too easily when they find out that all the good names are already being used. Sometimes you have to go with a soft brand. Think about Microsoft’s Hotmail – the soft brand here is “mail”, with their own branding “hot” added in. You will find that you can often have great success with soft branding your domain, especially if you are in a crowded market already.
Just like real estate, good domain names go up in value. Most companies already know this, but their domain name is an asset just as much as the desk and chairs sitting in the office are. Good domain names appreciate over time as the value and familiarity of them go up. A good, well thought out domain name will only help in this area. You want people to not only visit your website, but eventually to wish they could have your domain name as well!
Exact Match Helps. It’s no secret that people click on the links that are not ads more often than they do when they are ads. So when you have a domain name that is an exact match to a query about a product or service you offer that is pure gold. Google and the other search engines give extra “credit” to domains who match queries directly, helping promote them to the top of the list. It’s essentially free PPC!
What it all boils down to in the end is that picking a domain name is a daunting task, but when you apply marketing and SEO techniques you can help build your business from day one instead of having to rebrand it down the road. Take time to investigate possible domain names and make sure they help you with your marketing strategy both now and in the future.
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There was a time when most communications between a business and its customers was one-way. The business sent out the message and the customer could either accept or reject it. Think of television advertising and adverts in the newspaper as examples of this. Today, however, we are entering what marketing professionals are calling the 3rd generation of marketing – the social media sphere. In this environment communication is bi-directional and may be kicked off as much by the customer as the business itself. Therefore it’s important to keep your ear to the wall to find out what your customers are saying about you and to actively participate in the discussions with them. Luckily, there are a number of tools that can help you do this at low cost and with relative ease.
The first tool you should have under your belt is Google Alerts which tracks search results, Google Groups, Google News, Google Video and the blogosphere. This extremely easy to use tool will send you an e-mail summary every time your search term appears – the e-mail can be sent as it happens (in Google time), once a day or once a week. At the very least I recommend that every company be searching for mentions of the company name to keep track of what’s being said about them and by whom.
Next we’re going to talk about Twitter and tweets – no, this isn’t a new species of birds, but rather it’s the hottest tool out there for micro-blogging. Twitter lets people send short (140 character or less ) messages out from their computer, cell phone or other mobile device. Twitter is by far one of the products marketers far and wise have their eye on now for expanding their media presence. Searching is not as automated as Google but a new interface launched recently at search.twitter.com lets you search for topics and get updates as they happen. There are also a number of third party apps that tie into Twitter to provide this functionality as well – my favorite happens to be TwitterDeck.
What about the video and photos sites such as YouTube and Flickr? You may think you don’t need to monitor these, but remember the world is much more than static text nowadays. Many people are posting videos of their praise (or anger) of companies on Youtube, as well as participating in viral marketing. Some people even make their own commercials for their favorite companies and post them for all to see. Not only can you find people talking about your company through photo or video, but you can also find a wide array of video that might spark ideas within your company as well.
We talked already about searching blogs through Google Alerts, but I’d also like to encourage you to use Google Reader to keep track of bloggers that you enjoy and other topics of interest. Anything with an RSS feed can be put into Google Reader and organized for you. One of the best features of Google Reader is its ability to keep track of statistics of who is reading what and how many subscribers a blog has – valuable marketing insight for free!
Finally, I’d like to talk about the social networking sites – Facebook, Myspace and the like. It’s important to get your business online and setup on these sites to interact with your customers and to find out what people are thinking about your company. Many companies from Sears to Kellogs have Facebook pages that let their customers interact with them and also provides a rich media channel for you to push material out to them and get feedback. Its part of that third generation of marketing we were talking about above!
So now that you know that your customers are talking about you and where, it’s time to get busy monitoring and participating in the conversation – you might be surprised at what you learn just by listening!
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Around a week ago I wrote about Google’s personalized search and search wiki and the impact it might have on SEO techniques. A 2 months ago at the TED conference there was a rather interesting speaker who went into depth talking about Google’s latest offering and put it a new perspective – it’s rather about building the Google brand. And brand is something that goes hand in hand with SEO.
Continue Reading: Build that Brand – Marketing for SEO ProfessionalsRelated Posts:
There is a famous quote that goes, “You don’t know what you don’t know”. This rings true for many firms who don’t realize what value that SEO consulting can offer them. Your site may be doing well, but there could be a lot of uncaptured revenue and rank that you are leaving on the table. Sometimes spending money on SEO consulting can pay back big dividends when used correctly – they can help you realize unrecognized opportunities as well as instill some best practices that will help your organization down the road.
Continue Reading: When Does SEO Consulting Pay Off?Related Posts:
One of the great things about the Internet is that it has opened up for many people the opportunity for them to run their own online business with start-up costs far less than what was required in the years past. Unfortunately for many people who pursue this dream, they fail to fully understand if their business idea is really the next big thing, or if it’s simply another version of an idea that has already been done to death online.
Continue Reading: Is Your Internet Business Worth Pursuing?Related Posts:
Chances are you have a number of both online and offline business assets that are just sitting around. These may be properties that you haven’t done much with online or intangible assets such as customer comments and feedback you’ve received offline. In this article we’ll talk a bit about how to leverage these assets to help you with SEO of your business and show you how some of that intangible data and assets can be turned into a goldmine for your company and your brand.
Continue Reading: Levering Serious SEO Value From Your Business AssetsRelated Posts:
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.
Continue Reading: Choosing The Right SEO Strategy For Your BusinessRelated Posts:
It’s pretty amazing that even in the global economic slowdown that most SEO service firms continue to see robust business. In fact, some say that business has never been so good – obviously companies believe in the power of SEO and the benefits it brings their business and their bottom line. It’s because we are remaining so busy that we tend to never look back at completed projects and do a retrospective to see how we could have improved, or assess what we promised the customer versus what we actually delivered.
Continue Reading: Reflecting Back to Help Your SEO Business GrowRelated Posts:
Is it a recession or a depression? It’s getting hard to tell. Each day brings more stories about companies laying off thousands, budgets getting slashed and even Forrester Research saying that IT spending for 2009 will be anemic. That’s why it may be surprising to hear that amongst all of this bad news that SEO spending is keeping pace and in some cases increasing despite the downtrodden economy. What makes SEO immune from the downturn? Could it be that SEO has a proven track record of getting return on investment, or is it just a safe haven to invest in during troubled times? Let’s look at some of the top reasons SEO continues to be funded in this rough economy
Continue Reading: As the Economy Weakens SEO Strengthens