Will Hanke

Here’s a couple quick ways to keep up with the latest trends in your industry.

Set up a custom news feed with Google

Go over to http://news.google.com and type in your phrase. This will bring up all the latest news that mentions that subject. If you need a specific phrase, make sure you put it in quotes.

Then click on the RSS button in the lower left corner and sign up for this custom news feed. Now every day you’ll have the latest news about your industry right there in your RSS reader.

Over time, you’ll see mentions of related items that you don’t want to read about. I suggest you go back to the Google News page and rewrite your query, using delimiters such as the plus and minus.

Get Google Alerts

While the Google news thing is cool, it’ll only give you updates on actual news items that have been submitted. Since many people are publishing items in formats besides press releases, we want to be able to capture these additions to the web, too.

To do so, we’ll set up a Google alert with our same phrase(s).

Go to http://www.google.com/alerts and you’ll see this page:

In the “Search Items” box, put in your same search criteria that you used on the news site. You can use quotes and other delimiters just as you did above.

Depending upon how often you want these alerts, choose the correct option in the “How Often” area. If you’re running a news site, you’ll want to put the “How Often” to “As it happens”. That way you can get that info onto your website as soon as possible. If you are just trying to keep up with trends, leave it at “once a day”.

Now plop in your email address. Now every time Google indexes a new page on the Internet that includes your specific phrase, you’ll get an email.

You can use these same methods to keep an eye on your competition as well, your own business name, or even mentions of specific products that you carry. Watch for bloggers that are mentioning your business and drop a comment on their site. They’ll be blown away that you visited their blog and you’ll have an even stronger chance of getting future referrals from them.

By the way, this should not be confused with Google Trends, an online way of watching search trends over time. That’s a nice tool too, but not what I was going for here.

Will Google Alerts, Google updates, beginner sem, competition, trending

Just how much is an SEO campaign for a small business? And if you do it, will you get free traffic?

Andrew Shotland discusses the true cost of SEO

Search Engine Land talks about free traffic

Will free stuff, small business, traffic

SEO is like fitness training. From start to finish, it’s like the training for a major event. It doesn’t happen over night, and it won’t improve if you don’t ‘feed’ it constantly.

The Decision
Fitness Goal: To move a train 50 feet in less than n minutes.
Fitness: The entire fitness process starts with a simple decision. That decision is to start treating your body the way it should be treated. No more neglect. Feed it well, give it specific nutrients, cut off the bad stuff and start working out.

SEO Goal: To rank number one for your industry related terms.
SEO: The entire SEO process starts with a simple decision. That decision is to start treating your website the way it should be treated. No more neglect. Feed it well (content), give it specific nutrients (keyword targeting), cut off the paid and reciprocal links, duplicate content and Flash, and start fixing those title tags and meta descriptions.

The Workout / Training
Fitness: Working out daily is essential to getting fit. Each day you need to do a little bit of cardio, then follow up by working on your upper body one day, and your lower body the next. This switchoff will keep your muscles growing and allow your body to grow and repair consistently.

SEO: Changing your site (often) is essential to getting the rankings you want. Each day you need to read and be aware of the latest trends in your industry, then follow up by working on building your content one day, and your link building the next. This switchoff will keep your website growing and allow your rankings to grow consistently.

The Event / Goal
Fitness: Finally, you’ve been working out for months and you’re ready for your challenge. You wrap the rope around your waist and begin to pull. The train doesn’t budge, and you pull with all your strength. Suddenly the mammoth machine begins to nudge forward, just millimeters at a time. You continue to pull, and soon the train is moving inches instead of millimeters. Pull some more and its moving feet. Soon you attain your 50ft goal - and something happens. The train continues to roll. It rolls another 150 feet before coming to a rest. You’ve attained your record - but you could have done more.

SEO: Finally, you’ve been building content and targeting keyphrases for months, and you’re ready for your challenge. You grab the keyboard and start to adjust code. Your sites don’t rank, and you continue to modify pages and tweak settings. Suddenly you rank on page 10 for a few of your terms. You continue to put up fresh content, and soon your site is moving up the SERPs. Build some more quality links and soon your website is moving towards the top. A little more work and you hit page one. Soon you attain your top rank goal - and something happens.

What Can Happen
Once the site is ‘rolling’, there are a few choices to make:

Option One: Stop Pulling
Quite often this is where a small business cuts off the SEO funding, and the ‘train’ rolls to a stop. Ouch. For a while there, the site was doing great. Traffic was high, orders were coming in. But slowly they slowed, and now there’s only a trickle of orders. You no longer rank on page one. Sure, you’re still only on page four, but who looks that far down?

The worst thing a small business owner could do is to tell their SEO to stop pulling. You may live fat off the rankings for a while, but eventually it’ll stop. And then you’ll have to start pulling again. Start from zero again? Sounds expensive.

Option Two: Keep Pulling
There’s plenty more for the SEO to do, and the best part is, once the train is rolling, keeping it going isn’t as hard as getting the process started. The SEO can still continue to create content, creating more and more fodder for long tail results. The SEO can continue to build links, building up the trust and authority of the site. Pulling at this point produces more inertia with less effort, thus extending the SEO aftershock further and further into the future. Overall, it’s less expensive because your SEO can fine-tune the machine to run efficiently and smoothly. He can add new components (bolt ons like a blog, customer reviews or an interactive forum) with ease. These things just help the train move even faster.

Summary
SEO is a lot like fitness training for a major event. It’s tough and costly to start, but once its rolling, its a hard mama jama to stop.

Will Marketing, SEO, small business

“Would you like the formula for success?” Thomas Watson (IBM) asked. “Double your rate of failure.”

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