Comments posted online by the Search Engine Experts on the advice given by Matt in his USA Today interview make you wonder if the experts get the point.Many of the commenters derided Matt for the basic nature of the recommendations, citing strategies that are more sophisticated.They seemed to miss the point that the best message is the one fashioned for the intended audience of USA Today.
The example Matt gave of the San Diego chiropractor is all too common in professionally designed websites. If only his recommendations were followed, most websites would perform well in less competitive businesses.The Amazon affiliate will not be helped, and they were not in the target audience.
Here is a recap of Matt’s recommendations:
Make sure that you have the terms you want to be found for on your page. The terms should be in your page title and in your description tag. The selected terms must be well supported in the body of the content. Leadslander pages build the title and description tags for you.
External Links to your site are what it’s all about with Google. Links to your site from pages that are on your topic improve your position in search.
You cannot buy your way into Google Search Results. Matt stated that one of the biggest misconceptions is that by running paid advertizing on Google your editorial (organic, free) search results will improve.
Google will find you, you do not need to pay for submission. Google provides many useful tools depending on your skill level: from ADD-a-URL to Webmaster tools.
Matt’s recommendations are a great place to start for anyone who has a website. Check your website for the basics; you’ll find the instructions you need on the Visibility blog.
If you have gone to the trouble and expense of publishing a Yellow Page advert in a printed directory, and have not listed in Google Local Search you are missing the boat.
LeadsLander will allow you to publish as much quality content about your business, its products, and your related field to capture search engine traffic. Your website is under construction or you have decided that along with Leadslander pages there is no need for a website. When the principal objective of your business is lead generation and presenting contact information, you have the LeadsLander plus Maps option.
This can be a very cost effective approach for your business. You publish high quality content that is responsive to search term queries. You can ad pages related to topical issues without the need for a webmaster or the associated expense.
You will need to create your Google Maps entry containing all the contact and location information for your business. Start at the Google Local Business Center and create your free account. In your description section of your business you can provide details of you product offering. Google also has a Coupon feature where you add special promotions to entice your visitors to convert.
Once you have created your listing look to the “Link to this Page” a box will drop down with the link highlighted ready to paste in your LeadsLander company home page input box. This will reinforce the weight of your listing.
Once you have established a suitable website that you believe outperform the Google listing you can change the target URL in your LeadsLander campaign. You may also add Landers with the new website URL to reinforce you campaign.
How would like to have someone perform searches in Google for terms related to your company and its business every day then organize them into email folders.They would not charge you a dime and be as reliable as Google.You could collect this information on your competitors and see what level of visibility they are achieving.This may sound too good to be true but its not.You do not need any special status in the search engine marketing world to use a free service Google now offers.
Google Alerts is an email alert for the latest most relevant search result from the Google index, for any term you specify. You may specify any search string in a Google Alert that you would enter in Google Search.
You can get started in no time, just navigate tohttp://www.google.com/alerts then begin by adding the name of your company.Add and delete terms to you list of watch words until you see meaningful results. This service can give you a monitor for your search marketing efforts in Google. Monitoring your competitors websites along with your own keyword set.
Begin by selecting the comprehensive option to get alerts from any source that Google indexes.Set the frequency of the email alerts to the level you desire.At the very least, you can see the progress of any website promotion campaign you are running. You can compare the search terms you are monitoring with a direct search for that term in Google search. The alerts will only be recent additions or updates to the Google index.
This alert will not give you any indication of what is being indexed in the other search engines like Yahoo. Google has almost 70% of the search traffic, so you will have a good idea what the world will see if searching for your terms. There are a number of demonstration videos for Google alerts posted on YouTube so I have not added to the clutter. Here is one representative of the lot.
There are numerous schemes published, promising you high rankings for your website through submission to hundreds of search engines. Let us examine what the purpose of site submission to a search engine may be.
Search engines are in the business of building an index of published web pages so when a user searches for something it can deliver relevant results fast. When a user submits a query to a search engine it’s the stored index that provided the results. The better the results the search engine delivers, the more users it will have. The more users it has, the more ads it can deliver, hence the more money it can make. Having your sites’ pages in the search engine index is necessary for them to appear in the search results.
Search engines are great prospectors; they have several ways to find your pages even if you do not submit them to any search engine. One strategy they employ is collecting hyperlinks they find on any site they have indexed and schedule that linked site for indexing. An example would be a listing in a trade show exhibitor’s online catalog containing your company info and a link to your website.
Once found, your site will continue to be visited by a search engine looking for new content. The rate the content is changed will contribute to the frequency of visits. Remember that the search engines are in it for the money, so if you provide quality information frequently, they want to know about it. You will not have to ask them to return, they will keep an eye on your site for fresh content without an invitation.
The ability of a search engine to index all your pages depends on your site navigation, how each page is linked to other pages. Search Engines have adopted a standard XML format for a sitemap. Adding one to your websites root directory will assure that the pages have a chance to be indexed. You will find many sitemap generators online but you will still need your webmaster to upload it to your hosting site. The path to your sitemap can also be added to a file called ‘robots.txt’ also placed in your root directory. Search engines will still find your site and the pages that are interlinked with or without a sitemap. Adding one makes their job easier.
What about the hundreds of search engines’ you will miss? That’s another story worthy of an example. The index is the place that stores and catalogues your webpage information; the search engine portal is where results are presented. Yahoo and AllTheWeb are often listed in submission schemes in the list of search engines where your site is submitted. The underlying index for both sites is the same one provided by Yahoo as stated on the http://www.alltheweb.com/info/about/index. Google, Yahoo and MSN representing most of the known search world, maintain the three top indexes. If you find that your site is somehow not indexed, by checking with the site: command (instructions here) you can add your site to the Google index free at http://www.google.com/addurl/ .
Adding your site to directories that you know prospects will use to find products in your category can be useful for traffic. Sites like “ThomasRegister.com” will employ search engines to search their listings; however, they only search their paid inclusions. Automated submissions to search portals and directories may just be a waste of money, and certainly do not boost your rankings in Google.
In summary, check to see if your site is in the major indices, if not use the free submission pages. For added traffic make selected submissions to directories you know your prospects will use. Constant resubmission to search engines will not serve any useful purpose.
LeadsLander Marketers launched www.LeadsLander.com designed to help businesses become visible on the web. The first of its products “My Landers” has been substantially revised based on user feedback.
Ed Shea a founding partner stated that, “Our client engine “My Landers” has been redesigned to make it more document centric. The new design is much easier for subscribers without knowledge of the search optimization process to promote their existing websites”.
The LeadsLander Client Engine has an integrated keyword scoring method that easy to understand. The used selects the keyword or phrase that best supports the accompanying text. Page titles and descriptions are generated, and then applied to the generated webpage.
The new release has a more complete Demo mode where many documents can be submitted and scored. Once the user is satisfied with the scoring, they can retain the demo pages for later publishing.
For a limited time Demo, users will have a single LeadsLander published to the web. Unlike “Free” website generator services, all Leadslander pages are automatically submitted to search engines for indexing. The submitted pages have been optimized for search using published search engine guidelines.
Each page contains hyperlinks to the website the user chooses to promote. As pages are added to the account interlinks between are added and updated. This makes for a more search engine friendly publication. Users are searching their local PC networks for candidate documents suitable for a LeadsLander.
The new version is available today with a demonstration video deployed at LL Video Demo.
Offer prospects a chance to have a positive experience with Search Marketing.
Search Marketing Firms turn away potential clients. Small businesses often put their toes in the water at Search Marketing conferences, and at online forums. The buzz in the news media makes them aware that there is something to Search Marketing. They have successful businesses with professionally produced websites.
The small business owner has no experience with search marketing. The prospect of selling a search marketing campaign to the tune of several thousand dollars is poor. So, what is the SEM firm to do with the interest these companies developed.? They can spend a significant effort selling them or a SEM campaign, or refer them to the “Do it yourself” path. Many of there companies are good prospects for a serious SEM campaign but are lost in the sales cycle.
Search Marketing firms offer volumes of quantity information on their websites and forums, but lose most of these prospects. The purpose of offering free advice in SEO, and SEM is intended to build some credibility that hopefully leads to some business downstream. The problem is the conversion rate is too low for the effort. The advice when taken often leads to a poor experience. Technical skills must be developed for the DIY process to be applied, with the risk of a broken website as a result. Even professionals who tackle SEO on an existing website can have problems contending with someone else’s code.
The solution to losing these prospects is to offer them a path where they can have a positive experience in SEM without a large investment in agency fees or technical training. Introducing the prospect to a product like LeadsLander will provide a positive experience with SEM without the risk of breaking their existing website. In the process of using LeadsLander campaigns, prospects collect the valued content needed for any level of search campaign. LeadsLander account users learn the value of quality content is search rankings. The “magic” of seeing their published work in Google encourages them to see the potential of Search Marketing.
Many of the free tools offered online only reinforce the arcane nature of Search Marketing and confirm the owner’s website is ineffective for search. The first recommendation is often a site rebuild, sending the prospect running in the opposite direction.
Leadslander campaigns can provide the positive experience necessary for a potential client to invest in a comprehensive SEM program downstream.
Every SEO (search engine optimization) expert starts with a search for keywords that you need to incorporate in the pages of your website. The objective is to find the terms that searchers use when looking for your products. Producing copy that will support these keywords and hopefully, the pages produced, will rank well in a search engine. This convention is well illustrated by Jill Whalen at High Rankings. http://www.highrankings.com/tz-articles
There is alternative to the “keyword development” process that collects terms and then produces copy to support the term. Quality copy must read naturally for humans and still contain the keywords found to relate to your product. All along, you have communicated with your customers in this natural style.
The alternative approach is to take all of your existing text documents and analyze them for the most relevant terms as seen by a machine. This approximates the process of the search engine when cataloguing a web page. So lets start there and the analysis tool will tell us what the search term are best supported by the our existing content. Once we know the terms your copy will support we can generate the title and other tags to best present those terms contained in your copy.
Trade publications for your industry also provide a rich source of terms that are timely and topical. Your potential customers search for information related to these articles. You can analyze this content for their keywords and match it up with your inventory. Trade journals have done the work of finding topical material in your business, and then introduce it to your customers.
LeadsLander offers a tool where you can copy and paste any text from your documents or web pages to analyze for keyword relevance. This is like taking an inventory of your text document resources.
Here is a screenshot of the analysis page applied to the bulk of this post. The text is scored for its content and the terms contained are ranked for relevance.
The tool is free to use for any text document, just login to a Free LeadsLander account
Content is King, finding content for your website promotion.
Let’s talk about what makes good content and where we find it. Search Engines all publish guidelines for good content and if followed, should lead to the better rankings. The principal guideline is always to write for the intended audience, your prospective customer.
Providing authoritative information related to your business can take many forms, which you are familiar.
• Advertisement or Flyer
• Application Note
• Customer Service Bulletin
• Sales letters to Customer
• Engineering Change Notice
• Trade Journal Article/White Paper
• Testimonials
• Recommend applications
The texts from these documents are a great source for LeadsLander campaigns, Article submissions, and news releases. The original content is written for a human audience, so it just needs formatting for the search engine. When the original documents address a specific customer or project they may be edited for a general audience. You can find candidates to publish by using the tools built into your desktop.
The example given here is a search in the Microsoft Windows XP. Find documents on your desktop that contain phrases related to your products. In the example, all the documents containing the term “music wire” are listed in the results. Select one of the documents and all or part of the text may be copied for publication.
Cut and paste part or all of the text into your promotional piece.
Who is linking to our website and how do we know if the search engine assigns any value to these links?
Links can serve to direct traffic to your site, and boost the position of your pages in the organic results. Submitting your site to industry related web sites and directories could be helpful when those sites are ranking well in the search results. You will get an indication of the pages linking to a web site using the link popularity tools. These tools are not comprehensive and dependant on reporting from the search engines
January 18th, 2008 at 01:07 pm by Fionn in Thoughts
I think this is very true. Many companies view SEO as one off and when they are ranked they congratulate themselves on a job well done. However this complacency leads to problems down the road where rankings are lost and the panic begins. So my resolution for all clients (and indeed everyone with an online business) in 2008 is to pay close attention to your links and be actively involved in developing new ones. This tactic is vital for continued success in these competitive times.
Fionn
Search engines put a lot of effort into filtering spam from their ranking methods. The process of developing links can be very time consuming, so focus on links that will provide the most value. Search engines generally ignore any in-links to your site from pages without content related to your site. Leadslander.com is one tool designed to provide quality links to your site. The tool is most effective when the content provided is highly relevant to the target pages.
Links to your web site can accomplish a number of things, the least of which is making search engines aware of your pages. There is no advantage to submitting your site to search engines directly. Once a search engine becomes aware of your site from a link on any page in its index it will schedule a crawl of your site. Once your pages start showing up in the index there is no need for resubmission. Google Maps local business center is a great place to get started building links for your site. Once you have added your entry not only will Google know about your web site, you may well be included in search results. Here is an example of the results page. So let’s kill two birds with one stone, by adding our business to the local listings of the search engines.
Follow the link and add your site to Google now. Out of pocket $0.00
Follow the link and add your site to Yahoo now. Out of pocket $0.00
Follow the link and add your site to MSN now. Out of pocket $0.00
The ideal website for search marketing would have all the authoritative content on every aspect of a subject related to your products and services. Everyone in the related fields would recognize this site by posting referral links on their websites and blogs. The anchor text of the links would have your best keywords relating to your products. This proposition is unlikely for most of us.
However, we can take advantage of the link building process to improve our web sites performance in search. Links from pages that have content related to our web site and its content have value in improving search results. Search engine rankings are relying more on referrals from related sites. The closer the linking pages relate to your content, the more value they have as a referrer. A link on your local Pizzerias’ website may get you some traffic if someone clicks on the link, but does not contribute to your search ranking.
