October, 2009

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Don’t Stop at Two

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

There are business owners that understand what SEO is, how it works, and how to use it to their advantage. These SMB owners are on the leading edge (and I still believe that is the case today – most biz owners have no clue about SEO’s potential impact on their business) and they are a little more willing to try new things. They love the idea that they can rank at the top of Google, Yahoo!, or Bing for their industry’s top phrase. They even understand the importance of the long tail, and ranking #1 consistently for hundreds or thousands of different keywords and phrases.

But I don’t think they understand this: You can decimate your competition for any search. Outranking them is one thing, but completely removing them from the first page of results is very possible.  Even better, you can do all of this without going gray/black hat – you’ve just got to be a bit creative.

number twoFace it – getting the top spot on a SERP is great.  And at times you’ll even get a second indented result, further tempting the searcher to click over to your website.  (This of course depends on a lot of things, including unique page titles, simliar content, etc).

But why stop at two of the top ten spots in a SERP?  Why not all ten?  Why not push your competition down to page two, where only an estimated 11% ever visit?  It’s possible, and I’m doing it right now for some clients.  They are totally dominating the entire first page of results in their industry.

Getting Started

There are a few things you’ll need (and hopefully you already have).  You’ll need a nice keyword list that you’ve either done yourself or paid an SEM to do for you.  You’ll also need access to your analytics so you can see what people are currently typing in to find you.

Armed with those two things, you should continue to build great content, but also start to branch out your link building with these phrases.  When asking for a link, anchor it with a keyphrase that you’d like to dominate for.  If possible, give the linker a little paragraph about yourself, that includes the same keyphrase.  Help them rank their page (that’s linking to you) for that keyword/phrase.

The same goes for sites like CraigsList and BackPage.  Build your ads in a way that these pages will rank highly for the term you’re targeting.  Visitors to these pages will still end up at your site.

Ranking Other Sites? Seriously?

Yes.  Think about this.  If every page on a SERP points to you, you are ruling that search. No matter which link the user clicks, they end up at your site. What’s not to love?

There is one thing – be careful of which sites you build links and content on.  If there’s heavy competition for something (particularly in the local market) then it may not help you to be ‘another link’ on an already crowded website.  Find those sites that cater to your niche and that have very little of your competitors listed.

Also – if you’ve got the money to run PPC, you’ve got yet another opportunity to get on that same SERP.  I’m not a PPC expert, but I’d bet having your URL mentioned multiple times on a page would increase the possibility of a click-through.

There’s more than just ranking high.  There’s ranking first.  And there’s ranking multiple times.  And there’s ranking all ten slots.  It’s possible, trust me.  Push your competition to page two, or three.  Why not?

Posted in SEO, small business | 1 Response »
Tags: , ,

Showing Latest Post on Static (non-WordPress) Page

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

I’ve got a client who has a very nice website which was built quite a while back.  Since launching, they wanted to add a blog and a few other things to their site, for which we used WordPress.  Also along the way, they wanted to show their most recent post on their home page, which is outside of “the loop” for Wordpress.

Now I’ve never claimed to be a WP pro, but I have figured out how to make this work.  Below is the code to get it done.  The trick is the first line, the required wp-load file.  That’s what lets you use some of the wp functions outside of the loop.

<?php require( 'path_to_blog_root/wp-load.php' );
$getpostq=mysql_query('SELECT ID,post_title FROM wp_posts WHERE post_status="publish" ORDER BY post_date DESC LIMIT 1');
if (!$getpostq) { die('Error selecting info: '.mysql_error()); }
while ($getpostr=mysql_fetch_array($getpostq)) {
$post_title=$getpostr['post_title'];
$pid= $getpostr['ID'];
$postlink=get_permalink($pid);
echo "Recent Discussion: <a href=\"$postlink\" title=\"Link to $post_title\">$post_title</a>";

If you also want the post date, you can add these lines:

<?php require( 'path_to_blog_root/wp-load.php' );
$getpostq=mysql_query('SELECT ID,post_title FROM wp_posts WHERE post_status="publish" ORDER BY post_date DESC LIMIT 1');
if (!$getpostq) { die('Error selecting info: '.mysql_error()); }
while ($getpostr=mysql_fetch_array($getpostq)) {
$post_date=$getpostr['post_date'];
$post_date=date('F j, Y', strtotime($post_date));
$post_title=$getpostr['post_title'];
$pid= $getpostr['ID'];
$postlink=get_permalink($pid);
echo "Recent Discussion: <a href=\"$postlink\" title=\"Link to $post_title\">$post_title</a>%lt;i>($post_date)</i>"; ?>

By the way, if you have a better way to do this, I’d love to see it.

Posted in helpful scripts | 1 Response »
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SEO is Now a Team Effort

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

I’m the proud father of four children, ages 11-17.  As an Internet Marketer, it goes without saying that there are plenty of computers around the house, and almost always a child parked in front of one at any time.
internet search
Children of this age make terrific guinea pigs.  They are awesome resources that can find things online that even a seasoned SEO expert may have a hard time finding.  Why? Because they don’t use Yahoo!, Google or MSN very much.

Want one of my kids to find something online? Most often, their first stop is YouTube.  That’s right.  Need info on a person? Forget Yahoo!’s people search, there’s Facebook.

And these kids aren’t really any different than most other teens.  Comscore’s May numbers show that YouTube searches are up 4 percent, while Google’s searches dropped 2 percent.  Yahoo is down 4 percent, and Microsoft’s sites are down as well.

What’s up? Well, YouTube as I said, as well as Facebook and Craigslist.

Still Growing, Already Dividing

SEO (that is, Search Engine Optimization) is still a pretty new industry.  There’s not a week that goes by that I have to explain what it is I do and (very generically) how I do it.  People (usually clueless business owners) are fascinated that there exists an entire world based around increasing website traffic and climbing the rankings of Google and such.  They had no idea the system could be gamed. (Yeah, I know, gamed isn’t really the right word to use here, but hopefully it gets the right idea across).

But now that there’s an increasingly younger audience to our SEO efforts, we’re starting to see more and more blog posts on things like Optimizing your Twitter profile, or How to turn your Facebook fans into sales leads.

Wait a minute: I thought my job was to optimize your website for certain terms, build links and make the user experience so that it increases conversions (ie ROI).

Now there are  Social Media consultants (or “experts”).  They help you build up your Facebook profile, tweet for you, and help you create community around your brand.  It’s a terrific idea, and one that ultimately supports a business owner’s SEO efforts, but my gosh it’s time consuming. No wonder these people are creating their own industry.

And this isn’t really the first time SEO has divided.  We’ve seem people go the way of Linkbait expert in the past, along with many other spin-offs.
SEO Team

Get to the Point, Will

Which brings me to the point of this rant:  Choose your battles. Gee, you haven’t heard that one before.  But really, how much money can the average small business owner throw at an SEO project? And then on top of that, social media, PPC, viral campaigns, linkbait and video? Forget it.

I’ll be honest with you.  There is no one person that can do all of that effectively. No way, no how. It takes a team.  Sure, that team may be all quarantined inside a single office, each doing their own little piece of the work, but there’s no way one person can promise a small business owner all of these things his/herself.

If your “marketing guy” tells you that he can do your email blasts, create videos, handle your SEO and run your PPC campaign, you’d better find out if he’s got a team behind him.

Posted in SEO, customer service, small business | 2 Responses »