7. You cannot make money with social media

This is simply a lie. Social media can be a great source of revenue. The biggest complaint about social media I often hear is, “I cannot measure the success of social media.” With the use of iFrames and reporting tools, success can now be more easily measured. An iFrame allows us the ability to create a welcome tab on your page that acts like a website, so we can install analytics, implement a form and utilize call tracking to get a detailed and effective overview of what’s going on.

Social media is the only outlet that allows you to target your proper demographic. Through the use of highly targeted Facebook display ads, we have the ability to put your brand in front of your target audience.  Social media is also one of the easiest and most effective ways to create interaction with your existing and potential customers.  There is no reason you cannot see profits through social media.

6. SEO is a set-it-and-forget business

I wish obtaining the best rankings was as easy as that.  I often hear potential clients ask me “Why am I paying for a monthly service?” to which I respond, “Your competition isn’t asleep.”  Much of the work for optimizing a site is done off-site. This comes a shock to many people who believe you can just make a few edits on your site and magically you are now in position 1.

Yes, having your site speak properly to the keywords that potential customers are searching is very important, but it is not everything. This will not get you to the top position in a competitive industry. Ongoing link building is a key element to the success of any SEO campaign. Google looks at links as a form of “popularity contest” that proves to Google you really do what your site says.

5. I need a new site before I do any SEO

We can help almost any site rank, including ones that are not as attractive as others. There are a few exceptions to this rule, such as Flash and templates that do not give you access to the backend management. Many time people believe that their site needs to be “pretty” to rank well, when in reality, it is more about the conversion optimization of your site. This includes prominent display of your phone number and a small form located on every page of your site. Your design has no effect on the organic rankings.

4. Guaranteed rankings

Since my email also attached to sales@searchinfluence.com, I have the privilege of receiving all of the spammy SEO emails we get on a daily basis. My favorites are the ones that use scare tactics and money back guarantees. These guys are full of it! I recently read one that was trying to make you believe the paid results were part of SEO. Ultimately, the money back gaurantee is just a ploy to get you in the door, give them some money, and sure enough a few months down the road you’ll be calling me cursing everything SEO.  These scammy SEO companies can offer these guarantees by choosing keywords that are so irrelevant there is no search-around and by paying to be on page one.

Why we not guarantee results? Hint: it isn’t lack of confidence! We would have never been able to earn placement in the INC. 500 (with no sales team!) if we did not produce results. Unfortunately we do not have control of Google; if we did, I would be on a beach enjoying a Mojito right about now. Earlier this month Google made a change to the display of search results.

3. Article marketing does not work

I have recently read a number of blog post questioning the effects of using articles as an effective form of obtaining backlinks. For those of you who question the effectiveness, ask any of our clients who are in the top positions for their most popular searches. We have been and continue to use articles as an effective way to obtain backlinks. What doesn’t work is spammy, zero-effort articles with poor-quality or even plagiarized content. We put a great deal of effort into this part of our services and it shows. Article marketing works!

2. Paid search affects organic rankings

Paid search results have zero effect on organic rankings. They can not help nor hurt your organic rankings. You can do things to optimize for both organic rankings and paid search rankings, but you cannot affect one without the other.  Its that simple!

1. TopSEOs.com is a legitimate SEO rankings site

I won’t mince words: TopSEOs.com is the biggest bunch of bullshit out there. According to their website:

“The independent authority on search vendors, topseos.com, evaluates and ranks the best in the internet marketing industry. Through in-depth vendor analysis, review of work completed, and client evaluation, we put together a list of the top search engine optimization companies in the industry. Our in-depth analysis delves into a vendor’s business practices and compares them against industry standards to ensure that the work is quality. Often times we connect directly to the clients of a vendor and ask about their overall experience as well as details about the processes, reporting, and success of the campaign.”

Sound legit, right? Wrong! Companies like Webimax.com pay for their placement in TopSEOs.com so they can tout the fact that they have been ranked “#1” SEO company. Garbage! It’s complete garbage.  For just a few thousand dollars a month Webimax gets to claim to be the “#1 SEO Company in the U.S.” There are many blogs and forums that expose the scam for what it is. Oh yeah, and if you attempt to leave a negative comment about Top SEOs or one of their “valued clients,” they will filter your post to ensure only positive messages can be seen.

Below are just a handful of resources that expose Top SEOs and Webimax for the scams they are:
How Top SEO Companies like WebiMax Scam Clients – P.T. Barnum
TopSEOs.com – A Review of the Top SEOs Paid Rating Service – Aaron Wall
Sphinn.com – Multiple posts about TopSEOs Scam

We’ve all seen these people at conferences, pimping out their extra shiny business cards and talking like late-night infomercials – the online business strategists and social media experts. They claim to have the secrets to creating a successful online brand and promise “more profitable business now” if only you are willing to hear the pitch. They use buzz words like “online reputation score” and “viral marketing” to excite business owners into trusting their expertise and ultimately signing up for expensive year long contracts but never promise actual results.

I hate these type of people.

They prey on ignorance, offering fly-by-night schemes which promise efficient ways to generate more revenue at a low-cost for small businesses. Of course that low-cost is for the online expert’s one-size fits all advice.

Advice that seems to always involve action plans centered around mediums that have no measurable results *cough* Twitter *cough*. These experts rarely provide their clients’ with monthly performance reports – just monthly invoices. And clients would be hard pressed to get details on how that “low-cost” investment has translated into online business.

Who should you trust with your web presence? I’ve got a few questions you should ask before you sign on the dotted line.

Congratulations Dat Dog, you almost rank in the Top 3 for your own name!

Anyone who is aware of the most basic and fundamental tenets of SEO knows as long as you’re not screwing up your site too bad (using only flash, no content on home page, etc.), backlinks will be the most important factor determining how well your site performs organically. If you don’t believe me check out how much better Dat Dog performs after I gave them a link in my last Search Influence blog (it actually shot up 10 spots in a few days in spite of being new and having hardly any words on their home page). The problem is, Google may or may not be using all of your backlinks, so not all of them will have value to you.

Before any search engine can see your backlinks, it needs to index the page containing them. Consider that search engines are constantly scanning the web for new pages to include in their index, which will be available for searching. To be considered for any search you need to be in that engine’s index. So how do you know if you’re indexed? The easiest way is to search for the actual URL in any search engine, like you see below. In this case, this Scottsdale plastic surgeon‘s Thank You page is not in Google’s index (which is fine because it has no value being there).

When your page is not indexed, you get no results.

So back to your backlinks. You know they are out there, you know where they are, and you know whether they have been indexed or not, but do you really ever know whether Google, or any other search engine, is reading or ignoring the links pointed towards your site? Some people think as long as the page that your link came from is indexed, Google is reading all of the backlinks and boosting your page rank, but it’s not always the case. Let’s say your backlink was added to a page that a search engine has previously indexed: it’s possible that the Google Spider has not come back to visit the page, and doesn’t see your link yet. Beyond this, we just don’t always know what search engines are really doing, it’s highly possible that some may deem a given page worthy of indexing and only feel like visiting some of its links.

Here is the sure-fire way of knowing whether Google has even read a given link to your site: Webmaster Tools. If you haven’t registered for one of these accounts do it ASAP. Here you can submit your sitemap, get warnings about problems you’re having, and much more, including getting a list of your backlinks.

After you sign up and submit your site, your links won’t appear instantly, but will slowly accumulate. In the Dashboard, under Links to your site, click More. Then, under Who links most go to More and you can download a spreadsheet of all the links that Google is willing to admit to knowing about!

OMG look this site has a link from facebook.

This is far from fool-proof. As I read on Search Engine Roundtable, there have been some reporting issues with these links. The least you can do is pull your links from the dashboard and visit the sites that you’ve never heard of before and make sure you really have a link on that site. Many times content gets scraped by spam sites, which is not necessarily bad for you, depending on the reputation of the site and the content that it scraped. Another problem is this: just because the link is not mentioned in this report, doesn’t mean Google doesn’t care about it and has not viewed it, it’s just impossible to know, because the SEO dominatrix won’t tell us. The internet is gigantic and growing every day. Search engines do amazing things, but they can’t be perfect, especially with their free software. Just because you can’t find a link in this report doesn’t mean it is not there; you should be worried, however, if you know you have several different pages that link to you from a given domain, and none of them show up here after months. You might want to stop building links there.

Alligator dogs from Dat Dog's Yelp page.

As a stereotypical New Orleanian, I’m obsessed with great food. I have always noticed and been upset when a business doesn’t rank #1 for its own name, or even in the top 3. Recently I saw the phenomenon three times on the same weekend, so I had to blog about it.

I was hungry for something inexpensive, but really good and meaty, which means I had approximately 1,298,450 locations to choose from in this city. Many of these will never have websites. Somehow it came down to Courtyard Grill, Cowbell and Dat Dog (I have been to only one of these restaurants but can tell from the reviews that I’m going to love the other two). Since I only trust hours of operation posted on official websites, I searched for the restaurant names with city names behind them. These were the results (from 3/28/11):

Aesthetically, most would agree that these sites are beautiful, but since Google is a robot, it does not share this opinion. Of course I don’t expect a year-old restaurant to rank #1 for the term Courtyard Grill, but including the city name should be enough to make that happen. Same goes for the other two. Why are these restaurants not ranking first for their name?

Who dat? Ain't Dat Dog.

Yes, they all are getting outranked by Yelp and Urban Spoon pages with a bunch of reviews, but the big problem here is a lack of on-site optimization. Breaking the most fundamental rule of on-site SEO, Dat Dog and Courtyard Grill both fail to include any content on the home page. Furthermore, they all lack meta-descriptions and only one has a decent title tag. Cowbell performs the best in the results because “cowbell” and “new orleans” are mentioned next to each other twice in the text of the home page; not to mention the address is in text at the top of the page.

Unless you have a unique name, or a URL that perfectly matches your business name — (Bouligny Tavern has both, as you can see here) — you will need on-site optimization to save you from these problems. On-site optimization is so important that even Google, which is secretive about their search formula, has written a guide to this which can be found here. I highly recommend it to web designers and webmasters because it expresses the minimum that you should do to be favored in search results.

Who cares if my site isn’t first? I have 4 stars on Yelp!

You should be concerned about making sure that when people are looking for YOU that they can find YOU, and not another site that is talking about you. Otherwise, why would you have a website in the first place? You want to be in control of your own destiny, and it helps to lead the conversation. Let’s say you have 4/5 stars overall on Yelp, but the most recent rating was a 1; do you want a potential customer to have this information branded in their head so early in the relationship? Even if a customer has a good experience, reading bad reviews can lead to Yelp-fulfilling prophecies. Yelp is a great site, and if you want people to see your Yelp page, link to it with a banner, just like Lock Busters did.

I know I’m not first for my name and city, but x means the same thing as my city.

Even though I am talking specifically about NOLA, it’s a lesson we can all learn: think about the words people are saying when they search for your business, and optimize based on those words. Locals often call New Orleans Louisiana “NOLA” (and it happens to be a component of the URLs for the 3 sites we are comparing), but chances are that when someone is looking for you they are not using this word. The screenshot below is from Google Insights. Not only are people searching for New Orleans a lot more than NOLA, but as you can see at the bottom of the image, people are searching for “nola jobs” and “nola news,” which undoubtedly refers to our friends at www.nola.com, and the term “nola restaurant” probably refers to the Emeril’s establishment called NOLA Restaurant.

Nola What? Nola Who?

On-page optimization does not guarantee you will rank for your name, but you don’t have much of a shot at ranking for anything without content and metadata on your home page. There are other ways, like being linked to via anchor text from an awesome blog, which we are glad to do for 3 great local businesses, but small business owners should go for the low-hanging fruit first.

Content Farms are like the McDonald's of Content.

There has been a lot of praise and criticism for its internet marketing and SEO tactics including content-farming, a practice of creating, many times tremendously low quality, pieces solely for the purpose of attracting visitors via trending searches.

The Huffington Post’s content model has been under much scrutiny, especially in the wake of a debate about low quality content in Google search results. As Jason Calacanis of Mahalo.com said, “If you make Google look stupid, they’ll fuck you up.” A content farm is basically a website or company that produces a massive amount of content a day at low prices, and therefore low quality. Content Farms are like the McDonald’s of food, or the Soulja Boy of Rap, and you normally don’t want to find their efforts in your search results. A great laughable example of this results when you Google: what time does the Super Bowl start?

Yeah, the Huffington Post, the serious political blog getting purchased for $315 million is responsible for that crap. Beyond this, it is a site for unpaid bloggers to submit their possibly low quality, redundant content. To get back to what Calacanis said, and what Matt Cutts of Google has been saying, sooner or later low quality (but not quite spam) and redundant content will be penalized to a greater extent by Google. Whether through Facebook likes, bounce rates, account personalization, or several other means, Google is looking at ways to do this.

I would argue, however, that what should be even more important to the Huffington Post than SEO is its brand. A brand is not a logo, it’s a promise to customers, inherent in a company’s products. As of 2/15/11 – 10:15 am CSD, if you Google News “obama’s budget,” you get results from the Huffington Post among others, but what you don’t get in the first 30 results is the Economist, a weekly magazine, which in spite of current economic conditions and a $130 yearly subscription rate, is experiencing growth in the United States. This is because the company knows what matters to its readers. Economist readers know that the content will always be well above average, including the free stuff on the website. This is a real danger for the Huffington Post: if, as they claim, the bulk of its readership is interested in the serious, paid-for political pieces and the equally as serious unpaid contributions from people like John Kerry, then it risks alienating its most important customers by posting 153 word “articles” about Lady Gaga smoking pot.

There are some pros. If you beleive that the perception of Huffington Post’s most loyal readers is not altered by the inclusion of subpar content, then there really is not much of a branding problem at all. Without this problem, the SEO strategy works wonders. As recently discussed in the New York Times, the Huffington Post sometimes creates search engine optimized content based on what they predict will be a popular search, or what is trending on Google and Twitter during any given time frame, like the Super Bowl page. If you can maintain a core audience and acquire additional readers who are interested in pop stars and what time the Super Bowl starts, you are cultivating more eyes to make more clicks to make more ad revenue. There is also the added bonus of the possibility that these newly acquired customers will stick around, actually read some real news, and maybe an Op-Ed here and there.

Furthermore, whatever happens to be news at any given time will inevitably be trending online. It makes perfectly good sense to make sure you are using the right keywords and html optimizations to grab hold of the traffic that you are competing for. This is where the Huffington Post wins–where the New York Times spelled out the acronym SEO in its title tag, the Huffington Post would have stuck with the acronym, after a review of the evidence below.

Ultimately, AOL is now responsible for answering these questions. What do you think about the Huffington Post’s business strategy?

Image Source: Thanks to selective_hearing on Flickr for the McDonald’s image.

A recent study conducted by software and website training company Intellimon has revealed some fairly eye-opening findings about the use of social media in traffic generation for online businesses. They surveyed over 4,000 online business owners earlier this year and the results surprised everyone, including those conducting the study.

67% of those surveyed utilize Facebook to promote their business. Of those, only 29% said the platform is an effective means of driving traffic to their site. Similarly, of those businesses using Twitter, only 27.2% found it effective.

While these statistics alone seem jarring, when looking deeper into the study it begins to make a bit of sense. 70.1% of businesses operate on a part-time basis only. Not just that, but the vast majority of work is only done by one person, most likely the business owner. This includes a whopping 88.2% of them taking on traffic generation, with only 1.7% outsourcing the work.

These numbers highlight the importance of hiring a professional online marketing company to handle traffic generation, especially by way of social media. I’d like to see which of these businesses even have a spend budget for Facebook advertising. These numbers are in direct conflict with the great success we’ve had in using paid ads and contests to drive fans and traffic. Here’s some proof from one of our clients:

And that’s just from the past 30 days. So next time you think about running social media campaigns on your own, think again. It can save you a lot of time and, more importantly, a lot of money.

You can download the study here.

Australia's the key to the whole game.

“The art of war is of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry, which can on no account be neglected.”

OK sure, SEO isn’t of vital importance to the state, nor is it a matter of life and death. It’s called a metaphor, alright? In this technology-based society, to ignore Internet marketing is to ensure failure. The most popular method of finding businesses- or any information, for that matter- is through Google. As stated by Sun Tzu, this cannot be neglected. If you’re buried underneath your competition, it’ll likely lead to your business’s ruin.

“He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious.”

What Sun Tzu is essentially saying is that it is pointless to fight a losing battle. It wastes your resources, which you’ll need in the long run. Now, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t try to take on your competition. I’m saying to pick your battles wisely. This is where thorough keyword research comes in. Find out how many people are searching for targeted search phrases, and then find where your competition ranks for them.  If they rank number 1 for a really high-ranking keyword, it may be more beneficial to attack them using slightly lower ranking keywords; ones that you can take more easily. From there, you can start slowly overtaking them on the larger ones as your site gains more trust in the eyes of Google. It may be a slow process, but it’s better than losing before you begin.

“The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand.”

Strategy is everything in SEO. Don’t just go into it blindly with your guns blazing. For every new client we receive, we have a detailed strategy that we employ to ensure a quick and fast climb in rankings. Keywords, optimization, metadata, internal/external linking, and directories are all necessary for a successful campaign. However, all of this means nothing if you are missing a well-organized plan of attack.

“Management of many is the same as management of few. It is a matter of organization.”

It doesn’t matter how many strategies you have if you aren’t organized in your application. Same goes with your number of clients. If your strategy is well organized and followed, number isn’t an issue. It becomes a simple matter of execution. Don’t become too comfortable in this process, though. New strategies always arise and adaptation is just as necessary as organization.

“Opportunities multiply as they are seized.”

The more you adapt to new opportunities, the longer you’ll last. SEO is an ever-evolving practice and Google is constantly changing their algorithms. The more you stay on top of these changes, the more new strategies you’ll end up learning.  When new opportunities arise, it is imperative not to neglect them.

“One cannot afford to neglect opportunity.”

We’re living in some tough times and businesses are struggling left and right. If you know your competition is one of these businesses, exploit this knowledge. If you can afford to, run some specials that will draw more customers away from them, and use SEO- specifically pay-per-click- to bring them to you. It sounds cruel, but your success hinges on the failures of others.

“Secret operations are essential in war; upon them the army relies to make its every move.”

This tip is more for us more than it is for you. We enjoy educating our clients and readers to some of the ins and outs of SEO, but we don’t want to give away all of our secrets. That could be the difference between a thriving SEO company and a dead one.

Special thanks to blogger extraordinaire, Anthony Coleman, for the great concept of this blog.

The Web Analytics Association defines conversion as a “percentage of a visitor type who complete a multistep conversion process with a defined beginning and end within 30 minutes, whether it be signing up for a newsletter, buying a product online or some other desired outcome.”

Turn this into cash!

How can you turn your website into more conversions? Below are a few pointers:

Call to Action

Think about it. How are you supposed to create conversions without a call to action? Each page of your site should include one or more of the following: a form to request more information, your phone number prominently displayed, somewhere to sign up for a newsletter, or a purchasing option.

Create Goals

Define what type of conversion you want from your website and what a conversion means to your business. Many business owners have not identified what conversion means for their site. Each business is unique and every website has different objectives. It is imperative that you properly define a conversion. In order to be considered a conversion, the site visitor must take some form of action. This can include completing an online form, signing up for a newsletter, or picking up the phone and calling.

Track your Goals

Once you have defined what you classify as a conversion, track it. Use tools like Google Analytics to discover where your conversions are coming from and focus your marketing efforts on these areas.

Provide Information that Helps Consumers Make Purchasing Decisions

Most consumers are on your site looking for a reason to purchase your product. They are not looking for a flashy picture or video that lacks quality information. Provide the consumer with a reason to purchase your product or service.

Having people visit your site is great, but having people visit your site and purchase your product or service is better. Your site can be more than a flashy information tool; it can make you money!

You like money, don't you?

]]> http://www.searchinfluence.com/2010/08/website-goals-convert-traffic-to-sales/feed/ 2 http://www.searchinfluence.com/2010/07/link-building-strategies/ http://www.searchinfluence.com/2010/07/link-building-strategies/#comments Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:28:07 +0000 Rodney Hess http://www.searchinfluence.com/?p=4147 One of the most important and oft-overlooked aspect of SEO is link building. Link building strategies are one of the simplest concepts, but most make it more difficult than it needs to be. For instance, Sage Lewis defines link building as, “The integration of useful elements into a whole Web site to allow for the accretion of links through natural means.” Sage obviously doesn’t follow one of the mottos I live my life by: Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Basically, what he’s saying is link building is the process of creating inbound links to your site from other sources. There are a variety of  link building strategies one can use to accomplish this, some of which include article submissions, directories, newsletters, and back links. In fact, just look above for an example! By linking to Mr. Lewis’ article, we’ve just strengthened his site and maybe even drove a little traffic there as well.

For those of you reading who may not be familiar with the SEO process, I may have just confused you more than I helped. So let me put it this way: Link building is incredibly similar to body building. Don’t believe me? Through following these exercises, you add strength to your website and bulk up your legitimacy and visibility.  Didn’t think I could do it, did you? Yay puns!

Just as focusing your workout to target specific muscles will increase body mass, focusing link building from relative sources will increase your site’s exposure and visits. The submission of articles to outside sources is one of the easiest ways of doing this. Make it relative to your site, throw in a few keywords that link to specific pages, and you’re on the fast track to becoming one of the strongest sites on Google!

Another way link building is beneficial is that it makes your site seem like a valuable resource. With enough links, your site could be the first to appear in search engines, just like a body builder is the first person people ask to help them move furniture.

...or be their state's governor.

The more your pages appear in places other than your own site, the more exposure it’ll receive, which makes it appear more legitimate. It turns your site from just another pale, puny face in the endless crowd to a bronzed, powerful, incredibly hard to miss shaven gorilla.

Don’t think you can do it all on your lonesome, though. Body builders need spotters to make sure they don’t drop dumbbells on their dumb bell, and reciprocal links serve the same purpose for you. These are basically agreements between two sites to link back to each other, like a partnership of sorts. This will not only add legitimacy, but you’ll surely get a few views directly from the other site.

So that’s link building in a nutshell!

**Note to body builders** Please don’t take my insults seriously. No harm intended. Please don’t beat me up! Seriously, it wouldn’t be any fun. I look like this guy:

Thanks to d_vdm and Marcus Q for the great pics!

Well, I knew I needed to revisit linking strategies … it’s one of those things that I never sat down to research and really dig into because I have procrastinated incredibly well, but the past week has propelled me in that direction, not necessarily with my consent. But once I started digging into the data and ignoring the world around me, it was good.

It was good to see what I have been doing right and to discover those little opportunities that I have missed but can now take advantage of.

I have always used locally relevant linking in link building exercises to a certain extent. The links that are obvious have been submitted and published, but I’m really appreciating the value of these opportunities that I have not fully exploited:

• Links from sites that are not top of mind but have a great trust value
• Links from sites that may be local in 1 market but may not exist in another (i.e. local newspaper sites, local television news channel sites, etc. are truly local to a given market)

From seomoz.org:

“What is local authority? It’s the popularity (read: link popularity) of a particular site among sites in their topic community. So, a link from Wikipedia or Yahoo!’s directory, despite being on an on-topic page, will not count towards local authority, while a link (even a reciprocal link) from a website in your own industry that’s geared towards a related topic or the same topic as your own website, is a boost in local authority.”

In my client linking profiles, I have always included local link building in the past but treated more as a side item rather than an entrée. This past week as I have been looking at many local sites trying to assess some level of value, and I am lovin’ the really specific, really local linking sites that I am finding. I knew I would find good stuff but didn’t expect to find as much as I have.

If Google were looking only at quantity of external links, we could all submit our websites to low authority global directories all day long. But Google doesn’t work that way, so pretty quickly, we hit a point of diminishing returns. Consistently, over time, quantity of links has a consistency value, sure, but for the real trust building and local relevance, a website needs to be connected to the local online community.

This post is certainly not to argue the value of locally specific search links. That subject is well covered by many more expert than I. The point is, don’t get lazy with your backlink strategy.

It’s not a checkmark on the to-do list. It is not where you can say, “Local links … DONE!”

It should be looked at frequently. Look at what the local competitors are doing, where they are linking and see if those same are attainable, and search for the area’s local online directories and assess what level of value they offer.

Really giving local linking a thorough and hopefully exhaustive review has been my procrastination project for some time, and I am happy to be tackling it and finding great opportunity.

Image Credit: Thanks to koalazymonkey and XowOffroad for the pictures!