Archive for May, 2010
May 10th, 2010 by Jessica Runberg
 Geo-targeting is one of the things that makes online advertising so much more precise than offline advertising. Geo-targeting allows you to target ads based on the geographic location of Internet users. While it’s great for many different types of advertising campaigns, one of the best uses for geo-targeting technology is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads.
PPC campaigns are among the most targeted forms of advertising since you can control many different facets of the campaign including the time of day the ad displays, the specific keywords used in the ad copy and to whom, geographically speaking, the ad is displayed.
This paid-search technique works great for websites that only conduct business in a certain region. For example, perhaps your business only serves Phoenix customers or serves the entire Southwest with the exception of Nevada. You can use IP geo-targeting to display ads only to those who match the location-specific criteria you desire.
However, one of the lesser known ways to implement geo-targeting is for national brands that want to compete on a local level. For example, if you own a flower delivery business that delivers nationwide, you can create ads that feature the geo-locations you wish to target. So when a user types in “flower delivery” from a Phoenix IP address, your PPC ad will display “flower delivery in Phoenix.”
The ROI tends to be very high for PPC ads that use this technique since ad spend is not wasted on cities that the company doesn’t serve. Potential customers are also more likely to click on an ad that specifically states that the company serves the city in which they live.
All around, it’s a win-win for everyone!
Tags: Geo-targeting
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May 7th, 2010 by Patrick Hare
If part of your business is based on solid search engine rankings, you’re probably aware that your competitors are plotting against you. Any field of business that makes money, has a competitive landscape, and can be found with a search engine should expect competition. Strangely enough, however, there are many people who buy SEO services and don’t expect their rivals to be employing similar tactics.
In the field of SEO, we can generally tell when our clients are up against companies who are employing advanced search engine optimization techniques. SEO follows a pattern, and even the stealthiest SEO practices leave a footprint. Most people don’t even have to be subtle in their on-page optimization and link building in order to get results. As long as you are sufficiently forewarned about the SEO tactics being used by others, you can build a dynamic strategy that anticipates future SEO initiatives being undertaken by your adversaries, which allows you to plan ahead.
Naturally, the competitive landscape was around long before the advent of computers, the internet, and Google. Savvy businesspeople would spend a lot of time gathering customers (and intelligence) at trade shows, PR events, and through targeted advertising. When that didn’t work, they might recruit a top salesperson from another firm and siphon off as many accounts as possible. Search engines have accelerated the acquisition and sharing of information, and a high ranking on a search engine is going to make you a natural target for imitators. As long as you can stand the heat, and understand that “business is business,” then you should be just as successful as the people who had to deal with similar issues that came along before the advent on the microchip.
How do you compete against people copying your SEO? This is a difficult question, but innovation and improvement are two of the best answers. As a rule, many of your rivals have a mindset that SEO has a “set it and forget it” nature, so even if some competitors get their sites up to a certain spot, their rankings may not last. An in-depth SEO defense involves constant link building and content creation as a hedge against aggressive competitors.
You should also be on the lookout for new and emerging threats to your search engine dominance, considering that a small, nimble adversary can make a decent (or extravagant) impact by going after a few good keywords. Large sites that sell multiple product lines often have a harder time dealing with small, focused sites (or mini-sites) that concentrate on a particular keyword. If you are running one of the smaller operations, you can often sail past billion dollar companies with a linking and keyword approach that is focused on the “what you do” aspect of a business opposed to the “who you are” initiatives of brand-conscious behemoths. Naturally, if you are a large operation trying to stave off a bunch of small-time invaders, you are going to have your work cut out for you.
As a final thought, you should consider that if people aren’t out to get you (and your rankings) then you may not be in a worthwhile field. With thousands of available online business models, from direct sales and lead generation to affiliate and digital delivery verticals, there are endless ways to make money online. The best moneymaking opportunities have the strongest competition. By retaining an SEO firm, you can put a long-term optimization plan into place that works to overcome the initial rankings hurdles while simultaneously planning for counterattacks from your competition. Over the course of your engagement, you can not only learn how to beat bigger rivals at their own game, but also how to outflank adversaries in new fields as you build your online business empire.
Tags: seo competition
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May 7th, 2010 by Jessica Runberg
 Most websites have static content that doesn’t change from day to day and appears the same to each visitor. This works fine for the vast majority of sites on the Internet. There are a few cases, however, where dynamic Web content can greatly enhance your click-through rate and your conversion ROI.
Websites that frequently change their inventory can benefit from dynamic page content, as it is an easy way to update the site to reflect the current product offerings. If your site’s business model is based on providing a custom landing page for your visitors, such as Amazon.com, dynamic Web page content can give you a platform to create targeted pages for each customer.
One of the greatest uses for dynamic content lies in the PPC world. Since PPC is already a highly customized service, dynamic content generation makes perfect sense. Everything from the ad copy to the landing page content can by dynamically created to match the user’s search query and provide them with a highly targeted experience designed to get them to convert!
Often this method of paid search optimization is used for businesses that operate nationwide, and yet want to reach out to specific geo-targeted areas. For example, when someone in Phoenix types in “carpets,” you can show them an ad for “Phoenix carpets.” Once they click on the ad, you can take it a step further by customizing the content to include “Phoenix carpets” keywords in the body content. You can program this type of dynamic keyword insertion to self-populate with a list of all the cities you serve and provide your customers with a customized experience.
Like part of any multi-faceted marketing campaign, dynamic content insertion is just one piece of the puzzle. It may not be right for every website, but can certainly yield positive results when implemented correctly.
Tags: dynamic content
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May 5th, 2010 by Jessica Runberg
 If you want to achieve high rankings, the first step is to get your pages indexed by Google (and the other major search engines). The World Wide Web is so vast that it’s impossible for Google to visit every page on the Internet. But, there are a few key things you can do to get the web crawlers to visit your site – now.
These are Web.com Search Agency’s Top 5 Ways to Get Your Pages Indexed:
1. Submit Your Website to Google. If your website is new or has undergone a name change, you can submit your website’s URL directly to the search engine giant itself at http://www.google.com/addurl/. Google updates its index every time it crawls the Web, and submitting your URL can increase your chances (although not guarantee) that the pages will be indexed.
2. Make Sure Your Code is Clean. Search engine spiders read code and use its associated tags and HTML markup to navigate your site. Therefore, the easier you make your site to read, the easier it’s going to be for these spiders to go deep into your site’s infrastructure and index all of your pages.
3. Build a Winning Link Portfolio. Link building plays a critical role in any SEO campaign, but it’s also useful for getting your pages indexed. Remember, they call it the World Wide Web for a reason; everything is interconnected. If lots of sites point to your URLs, the search engines will take notice.
4. Create New Content. Google loves content. And the more the merrier! It likes to see at least 250 words per page and rewards sites that add to and update their content often. The spiders are always on the prowl for fresh, value-added and interesting content to index.
5. Make Sure Your Website Loads Quickly. The spiders are only going to spend so much time on your site so it’s in your best interest to make sure everything loads quickly. You can also adjust your site’s “crawl speed” on Google Webmaster Tools.
These are just a few of the tricks of the trade. Most sites that follow SEO best practices will receive frequent visits from the spiders, get indexed and, most importantly, increase their rankings in the SERPs!
Tags: indexing pages
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May 4th, 2010 by Patrick Hare
How To Find Out Where Your Non Search Engine Visitors Are Coming From
Understanding website traffic is not just important for people who want to be found on search engines. Your site may be popular because it gets references from dozens, hundreds, or millions of other sites on the internet, and understanding your site visitors can help you build a profitable online strategy. Better yet, you can often reach out to sites that are sending you traffic and work with them to either increase the number of visitors to your site or channel profitable visitors to the best possible pages.
Many Web.com Search Agency customers use Google Analytics, since it is free to install, easy to use, and has plenty of ways to understand site visitors. In this case, the tool we would use is on the left hand side under Traffic Sources>Referring Sites.
The referring site visits (below) generally are more interesting than normal search engine traffic because referring sites can bring better visitors. Many sites will reference your site by way of a link, so the reader, who is already invested in the referring site, may spend more time on your site looking for information or a solution to a problem. Conversely, if you are buying sitewide links on less relevant sites, you will see that referring site customers from these sites actually spend less time on your site or leave quickly when they don’t get the results that they want.
How can you use referring site traffic information to improve your results and your bottom line? First of all, you can identify the “winners” and “losers” in your list of traffic generators. In most cases, you would not stop free traffic coming from low-value sites unless it is consuming a lot of your bandwidth. For the sites that produce better visitors, or visitors that convert into cash, you can examine these sites and see if there are any opportunities for improving your visitor volume. For example, if you see that the link to your site is buried in text further down the page, you can negotiate with the site owner to make it more prominent. You may even come to an advertising agreement to make your link into something more enticing, or get more links of the referring site itself.
An age-old piece of advice from Google is to design your site as if search engines did not exist. Even though search engines have been around for as long as the Internet, the advice rings true because a lot of site traffic comes from other site links, and Google used this networked approach as a basis for its PageRank algorithm. If a customer is coming to your site without using a search engine, it is incumbent upon you, the site owner, to make sure that (a) they can find what they’re looking for and (b) they would be likely to recommend the site to someone else. After a time, your “organic” profile among referring sites can increase in a manner similar to search engine rankings, and these visits and links will contribute to your SEO profile at the same time. Best of all, a better understanding of your inbound traffic sources can help you identify demographics and interest groups that you had not previously pursued, which can lead to increased profitability for your business as a whole.
Tags: referring sites, website traffic
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May 4th, 2010 by Patrick Hare
If you’ve been in SEO long enough, you know that there usually isn’t just one factor driving a top search engine ranking. In fact, according to Google, there are two hundred, and not all of them are public knowledge. This fact can seem a little bit daunting to the newcomer, but the truth is that you don’t have to know all 200 ranking factors to get top spots on search engines.
The most important ranking factors are public knowledge, and have been shared by search engines in public forums and through representatives. Generally speaking, they are the same across Google, Yahoo, and Bing, and will work for most of the little search engines as well. If you want to know the SEO world’s take on all 200 ranking factors, Ann Smarty at Search Engine Journal has a very good list of the parameters that may be in play.
As we said above, you don’t have to understand 200 different factors to get started with SEO. You can start with the website itself. Make sure it is easy for a search engine to read, and easy for a user to navigate. By using a top-down style of navigation, and having a URL structure that describes page content whenever possible, you are creating a good framework for the search engine. By populating those pages with relevant content that is user-friendly or interesting, you are giving the search engine spider something to bring back to its index. By making sure your page titles are concise and relevant to each topic, you are creating a lens through which you page becomes more focused.
Advanced SEO practices generally involve reverse-engineering the search engine algorithms in order to get better rankings for websites. The goal is to get the best keyword traffic possible, and engines like Google can even help you do this with keyword tools, Google Trends, and Google Insights. With good keyword data, you can structure your site to capture the phrases with the best search volume, and work to make sure your site’s links are being descriptive when they reference the site’s content. Understanding some of the penalties that can be imposed for deliberate and accidental search engine abuse can guide the SEO consultant to make a site that avoids black hat seo practices.
It is easy to become paranoid or disheartened when looking at the list of SEO ranking factors. After all, if your domain name isn’t old enough, or does not contain an exact match keyword phrase, there is going to be a larger investment of time and money to get competitive positions. It is possible to go out and buy a site with good domain age, good links, and good search engine positions, but in most cases the cost of such a website may match or exceed the SEO investment that would have gone into optimizing a new website.
Because there are so many factors, and they are all weighted differently, you don’t have to follow the exact formula of your competitor in order to get solid positions on search engines. In fact, following the exact same formula (providing that you knew what it was, and your competitor even knew why it was working) might not give you the same result anyway. It has been a long time since you could just copy the keywords from top rankings sites in order to get a good position yourself. By providing good, user-friendly content, making the site easy for robots to read, and getting links to your site, you probably don’t even have to go into all 200 ranking factors, which are often changed around at Google’s whim. By creating the type of website that search engines want to see, and making it especially useful for humans, you can ride out multiple updates and algorithms while keeping your rankings intact.
Tags: 200 ranking factors, ranking factors
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May 3rd, 2010 by Jessica Runberg
 If you’ve been doing some research on how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can help improve your website’s performance, you’ve no doubt come across the word SERP. You’re probably wondering,
what exactly is it and what role does it play in SEO?
Contrary to popular belief (OK, maybe it’s not that popular), SERP is not something you put on your pancakes. It stands for Search Engine Results Page, which is the link to the Web page that populates when you type a keyword into a search engine and it returns a list of results.
The goal of any SEO campaign is to increase your rankings on a given SERP for a desired keyword phrase. So, in honor of the acronym that is so important to SEO, the following is a list of dos and don’ts that will help you get the rankings you want in the SERPs.
Select keywords you can rank for. If you’re in the travel business, it may seem pretty tempting to go for high-traffic keywords such as “hotels” or “airfare,” but the reality is that it will probably be very difficult to rank for these keywords unless you’re Expedia.com or the Hyatt. Choose keywords that your website can realistically rank for and that will bring qualified traffic to your site.
Earn quality links. One of the best ways to increase your ranking in the SERPs is to build a portfolio of high-quality links that point back to your site. Create great content that others will naturally want to link to and reach out to related websites that may be interested in linking to your site.
Research your competitors’ keywords. Are your competitors ranking in the SERPs for keywords that you want to rank for? Are they targeting keywords that you haven’t considered for your business? Research these keywords and think about how you might be able to apply them to your SEO campaign.
Prepare quality content. As the old adage goes, content is king. Good content leads to natural links and search engines generally like to see at least 250 words on a page. But content isn’t just for the search engines – it’s for your customers, too! Be sure to include content that will add value to your site from a customer perspective.
Not sure where your website ranks in the SERPs for your desired keywords? Use a SERP keyword checker such as our Ranking Report tool to see how your website stacks up!
Tags: SERP
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