Will, we’ve heard what you say about blogging being a great way to increase your overall search presence, but we’re not sure where to start.  Blogger, WordPress.com and others offer free blogging platforms – is that a good way to get started?

- Mike

This is a great question, Mike.  I get this question in nearly every presentation I do.

In short, my answer is no, don’t use a free blogging service.  The entire reason that I preach blogging as such a great tool for SEO is that it generates content for your website – for your domain.  Ultimately you want to build your domain (website) up as the authority for your industry.

By using a free blogging service, you’re basically giving that content over to another company (another domain).  By blogging with them, you are ultimately ranking their domain for your keyphrases.  You are helping another business get traffic, not your own.

Don’t be confused, WordPress(.org) is a great blogging tool that you can download and install on your domain. That’s the way you should go.

Keep the great content, tips and how-to’s on your site. Grow it big and kick butt.

Will, I’m doing alright on clients right now, but by this summer I know it’s going to dry up a bit, so I’m thinking about doing PPC or a link building campaign.  Which do you recommend?

- Jon

I’m not a huge fan of PPC.  While I know it works, and works quite well for some businesses, it’s overall a very short-sighted strategy.  If you have the budget, pay per click is an easy way to the front page for many terms.  Problem is, most small business owners don’t have the budget they need in order to get or stay near the top.  Plus, once that budget runs out, the ads immediately disappear and you are literally back to where you were when you wrote this email.

PPC is fairly easy to set up, it’s quick, and gets you traffic right away.  If you are a short-term thinker, this may be the way to go.  Just realize that there are no long term benefits – it’s money spent and gone.

Link building, on the other hand, is not fast.  Since some sites are not crawled for up to six weeks at a time, a link placed on one of those today may not influence your rankings for two months.  And even then, if you’re on page five for a result, and the search engine finds your link, and it influences the rankings, you may jump to page two or three – still no significant increase in traffic.

But link building has a long-time effect on your overall rankings.  If you were to build 300 links over the course of a month, you’ll see that effort come back to you in increased rankings over time for multiple keywords and keyphrases.

Obviously the rankings you achieve by starting a link building campaign depend on the keywords you choose.  Selecting some that have little competition, such as geotargeted phrases, are more likely to rank on page one quickly.

So it pretty much depends on your end goal.  If you want to put money into PPC every summer, and see no benefit from it during the other three seasons, then by all means do it.  But if you want to get to the top of the organic rankings, a steady push at link building is the way to go.

Before the event, I tweeted that I was wondering if there was a list of things that are suggested to bring, but no one stepped up and sent me any links. So I had to make some assumptions and do the best I could.

What I Remembered

I remembered my laptop, which actually isn’t a necessity. It’s nice because I enjoy the interactivity of the conference, but pen and paper work just as well. I also remembered a jacket, which is good because Vegas in November (at least this November) is cool. About 48 degrees on day one.

Freebies

As with most conferences, I made assumptions that some things would be provided, and in some cases I was wrong. This year, as maybe in years past, they gave a nice bag full of goodies at the registration desk. I learned quickly that carrying my laptop around like a schoolbook sucked, so I thought the bag would be a great tool. The bag, unfortunately is a bit small, and the handles are short. So a backpack is probably the number one item I wish I would have brought along.

While on the topic of freebies, there are a lot of them. The vendor area this year had about 16 or so companies represented (which is apparently nowhere near the amount of vendors at SMX and SES), and most of them were giving things away. They were smart, though – they didn’t put out all their goodies on day one, so bringing your backpack or Pubcon bag is definitely an every day requirement. On day two there were about five different companies giving out T-shirts, plus one giving out beer (yeah, beer) in a mug, another giving out nice pint glasses, and lots of other various sundries.

Things I Shoulda Brought

This list will obviously change for each person, but here’s a list of things I wish I had brought.

• Business Cards
  There are a lot of business owners here, not everyone is an SEO.
• Backpack
  As I mentioned earlier, would have made life a lot easier, and my shoulders would be thanking me by now.
• Pen and Paper
  This one may be obvious, but I really thought I’d get a pad of paper with some company’s branding on it. Surprise – I didn’t. So I swiped a few sheets from the fax machine at the hotel after day one. There were several pens in the bags, though.
  Along these lines, I should also mention a nice tip – A lot of people with laptops seemed to have Word documents set up for each session they were attending. That way they could pull up that doc, type away and then save for later review. Great idea.
• Cell and Laptop Charger
  Another ‘duh’ but I really didn’t think I’d use these as much as I did. Since the cell was on vibrate, the battery was dead by the end of each day.
• Guts
  As with most people in my field, we aren’t the most social. There is a nice crowd of people here that have been coming for years, and they’ll congregate at various breakfast and lunch tables. So most likely you’ll sit next to some other girl or guy who also knows little or no people at the event. Take a minute to introduce yourself, but don’t always expect a lively conversation in return.

By the way, I’ve learned that the official pickup line at Pubcon seems to be ‘Where are you from?’. I’ve been asked that question by many of the people I’ve sat next to at the various sessions and food breaks.

The Sessions

At Pubcon, there were a small amount of tables/chairs with extension cords/outlets, and they weren’t easy to get. If you’ve got a laptop, you’re going to be part of a special crew of people that leave sessions a few minutes early so you can make it to the next one and find a outlet. If you have a second battery, you definitely want to bring it along.

I also learned that picking sessions simply by their title is not always the best strategy. After the first day I realized that most people pick them out by who’s going to be on the panel, and that was probably a good idea. It doesn’t bode well for the newer speakers to the circuit, but from my experience the best panels were done by the most well-known panelists. For instance, the panel on SEO 2010 with Greg Boser was just terrific, even though his presentation wouldn’t work. That one session was worth the price of admission, to me. There’s a reason they are well known – they know what the hell they’re talking about.

Other Notes

Hotel selection can save you money. Paying an extra $20 a day for a closer room may be better than taking a taxi back and forth to the event. We stayed at the Encore, which is next to the host hotel, the Wynn. Pubcon provided a free shuttle from and to the Wynn for the event, but it’s best to find out how to catch that shuttle way ahead of time. I ended up missing it the first day because I couldn’t find the pickup spot.

Probably one of the biggest conference must-have tool is a twitter-friendly phone. If you’re an active user, it’s a great way to see what is going on both at the event and after. My phone (Palm Treo Pro) is not the best and most friendly when it comes to twitter, so either have a twitter-friendly phone or miss out on a lot of the after-conference tweets.

During the meeting, he was telling me how he had control over each page footer, how he could build out each footer to be different, link to different pages, etc.  That’s cool, could help with his internal linking.

But then he started telling me how he could build different pages for slightly different terms, and them link them through the footer, thus creating an entire network of pages.  For instance: Mother’s Day

mothers-day.htm
mothers-day-gifts.htm
mothers-day-ideas.htm
personalized-mothers-day-gifts.htm

and so on.

These micropages, in his mind, could each be optimized for their particular keyphrase, and they’d ultimately dump the visitor to the same products.

I think that’s a bad strategy and can explain with one word – dillution.

By creating a network of similar pages, you’re dilluting the domain and potential authority that site may have for “mothers day” terms by spreading them across 5, 10 or whatever amount of pages.

I think building one page that ranks nicely for Mother’s Day is the way to go.

But – you say – if he creates 10 pages with 10 different targeted keyphrases, isn’t he increasing his landing pages by 10?  Sure, but he’s dilluting the chance that any one of those 10 will ever rank for any of those terms.

One Strong Page

The smart way to go is to build one awesomely authoritative page.  Put links to the various product or product categories that Mom would like, and then add some content that reflects mother’s day.  Naturally use a few different keyphrases (don’t go overboard here) and you’ll be ahead of the curve.  Need an example? Check out what Zappos did.

Step two would be to build links back to the Mother’s Day page with various anchor texts, thus ranking that one page for many related terms.

MicroSites

The inspiration for this post came after I read Vanessa Fox’s article today on microsites.  I agree with her that these sites can cause confusion for visitors and search engines alike.  They also spread out your web designer/SEO guy’s time between several domain names.  That time (and money) would be better focused building one kick-ass domain.

Niche Sites – Not to Be Confused

Lastly, I wanted to mention that there’s a definite difference between a microsite that’s created simply for the reason of pushing traffic to a main site and a niche site.

Niche sites are sites created for the purpose of cornering a particular market (for instance bluedoorknobs.com) and selling to that small & tightly focused audience.  These sites can be highly profitable, depending on the audience.  At no time to niche sites “dump” their visitors off to a bigger and better site in order to expand their sales.  They’re there to sell blue door knobs and that’s it.

The Debate Goes On

I know there are those out there who disagree about both the micropage and  microsite strategy.  I’d love to hear what you have to say!

Here’s a great SEO tip that nearly no business owner is aware of.

Did you know that a simple 4 lines of code can help your website move up the rankings?  Those lines can take any visitor that comes to your site by typing in domain.com and automatically forward them to www.domain.com.  Of course, domain is your website address.

But why would you care if they typed in the w’s or not?  Well, you might not care, but the search engines do.

To most all search engines, anything before the domain.com is considered a subdomain.  There are tons of subdomains out there, and they have their great uses.  For example, most hosting companies use mail.domain.com as their incoming and outgoing mail addresses.  Perfectly good example.

But when it comes to the www. part, search engines see things a bit differently.  To them, the www and non-www versions of your website are copies of each other.  They are two different websites, each with the exact same content.

I’m Seeing Double

The search engine’s “job” is to provide their searchers with the best results possible.  So they love original content that hasn’t been copied from other places.  Since they spider your website, and see the same exact content on “another website” (even though it’s yours), they penalize the domain for having duplicate content.  And duplicate content, to them, means you’re copying from someone else.

Worst of all – it hurts your ranking.

Fixing the www problem

As I mentioned earlier, there are just 4 lines of code that can fix most websites.  You put these lines of code in your .htaccess file, (just step 1) and bang – you’re in business.  Problem is, many business owners have signed into some crappy web design service and they can’t get anywhere near the actual server to fix this.  So we’ve got to find another way.

Luckily, there are other ways.  One is the canonical tag.  This simple fix can help you “teach” the search engines what’s the best way to index your website.  More information on canonicalization can be found at Matt Cutts’ website.

You can also set your preferred domain in the Google Webmaster Tools section.  Click on Site Configuration and then Settings.

This will help Google know what you prefer for the best way for them to access your website.

No Matter How You Do It, Just Get It Fixed

While the latter two things will help your website, the best one is still the modification of your .htaccess file – something many business owners can’t get to.  To do that, you’ll need to call your web person.  And if they don’t know how to do it, you’ve got the wrong web person.

Did you know about this simple fix? If not, that’s ok – there are professionals that do.  When you’re serious about hiring a professional to help you dominate your industry online, hire me.

If you were thinking about registering, use the code SAVE25 and save yourself $25 bucks off the registration.

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