SEO Results?

SEO results or something else?  Does it matter?  Comments?

The SEO Snowball Effect

For new websites, or sites that have never undertaken an SEO campaign, a common question is, “How do I know this SEO campaign is working?”

The answer is when you see an exponential increase in traffic or inbound links without expending very much current effort.

Of course your initial SEO campaign should involve a flurry of activity in research, creating content, link campaigns and so forth.  To truly measure the effect of that activity, one must wait.

That’s actually the part I like the most about SEO…when you get to the point you can create terrific content without worrying about how to promote it.  I’m still not “there” yet with this site, but I know I’m on the right track.  Why?  The SEO snowball effect.

A month ago I made the comment the site had reached the milestone of attracting 1000 unique visitors.  30 days later, meaning today, the visitor total is slightly over 4,000.  That’s not just doubling, that’s exponential!  For the most part all I’ve done is create content.  It’s also organic.  There were no paid links, except for the fee to distribute the Utah’s Top Blogger press release.

That monthly graph looks great right?  All uphill.  The daily and even weekly graphs aren’t as fluid.  Sometimes there are drops in traffic.  That’s OK because traffic is just one aspect of a successful SEO campaign.

What else is an SEO campaign supposed to do besides increase traffic?  If you think SEO is only about traffic, you’re approaching the concept the wrong way.  SEO is about business, increasing business.  That takes a lot of forms.  Increasing traffic is useless if your site doesn’t have a way to let those visitors engage you in a discussion about their needs for your business.  Those ways may include an email contact form, a Twitter follow, a Facebook fan, a phone call or even a face to face meeting.

The way to measure your online influence is by the amount of inbound links you’re receiving.  In that regard, I’m very pleased with how this site is growing.  Two and a half months ago, I had no inbound links.  Now I’ve got 550.  That’s also exponential.

Where are these inbound links coming from?

A lot of them are generated automatically through Twitter and splogs, so they don’t carry much weight.  They’re also very easy to get.  Some of them are coming from the blog carnivals and others come from comments I make on other sites.  Most of them come through pingbacks and trackbacks.  I registered with Blog Buzzer to automate that process.  Otherwise, WordPress only automatically pings other WordPress blogs.

The best inbound links are the ones you create just from having good, searchable content.  They’re the links you earn from doing a great job writing your blog or website.  I found this link to my blog on Google.  I have no idea how they found me.  That’s good.  That’s SEO.

From an SEO perspective it’s a good link because it comes from a site with similar content to mine – social media and Internet marketing – plus they’ve got a higher page rank than mine.  It’s a bad link because it’s buried along with a bunch of others in a blog roll style.  Even though it won’t get me any traffic, it will help with my page rank.

A better inbound link is this one.  It’s a blog post about my Facebook friends policy.  The link to this site is in the body of the post, which Google loves.  Plus it’s sending traffic as well as sweet Google link juice!  How did I get this link?  By linking over to them first.  I didn’t ask for a return link, I simply linked to their story as an example from mine.  A pingback shows up in their comments and they saw my site and,

I love it, and would highly encourage anyone wanting to use Facebook for professional purposes to follow this practice.

That is good SEO.  It’s the kind that snowballs into traffic, inbound links and authority.  Once you obtain authority (trust) you will only get more.  The final step of a good SEO campaign is one I haven’t reached here yet, but I have in the past.  That step is media recognition.

Some people are willing to do anything to get media attention.  I know the best way to get media attention is the same way you get your customer’s attention: good content/products and the ability to be found.

When I was writing real estate blog, I got a call from a reporter at USA Today.  He had found my number from my blog and was actually writing a story I didn’t know very much about regarding stocks.  I even told him I wasn’t a good source, but he asked a few questions anyway.  I referred him to other people to speak to about his story.  At the end of the day, I was the one that got written about.

The USA Today story wasn’t a good piece for me.  There was no link to my site and the reporter actually misrepresented me a little in the story.  However, a story in a local trade magazine was a lot better.  It put my opinion in the cover story and the magazine was distributed to people who could send me referrals.  Neither story would have happened if I didn’t have excellent SEO for my site.

Determining whether your SEO campaign is working is actually pretty simple.

1.  Are you getting more traffic?

2.  Are you getting more inbound links?

3.  Are people (not necessarily mainstream media) talking/writing about you?

If your SEO campaign has been going for 90 days and you haven’t seen any results, you need a new SEO company.

Salt Lake City SEO – Guerilla Marketing

I wanted to provide an update of the strategy I tried last Friday to try and get some search engine rankings for this blog for the term “salt lake city seo.”

I based my strategy from tip number three in this article.  Please understand I wasn’t “testing” this strategy, I was implementing it.  I have carried this out before with great success in gaining new readers and obtaining links from more authoritative sources.  Yes, some of the companies mentioned in my article took notice.  Yes, they are considering using my services.

However, that wasn’t my main goal.  My main goal was to get ranked on page one of Google for my key phrase, “salt lake city seo.”  First of all I knew to be realistic.  There is no way this blog will get ranked on the first page of Google for my key term because it doesn’t have enough inbound links and it hasn’t been around as long as the others.  Looking at the search results this morning confirms my thinking.

Eventually it will get up there, but I’m pretty sure I’ll never claim the top spot, unless MWI does a site redesign and makes a mistake in the migration.  I don’t think they will.

I know I can’t compete on that playing field, but I can compete on another…the blog search results.  Yeah, yeah, people don’t search there very often.  But if they do, I think they’re probably a pretty qualified customer.  Perhaps they’re a competitor doing research?  Anyway, I know this blog can dominate the Google blog results for my key term…and it does.

Between the several posts I made about this topic and my RSS copiers, these articles take up many of the search results.  Even better?  I’ve earned a top position on the page that won’t disappear.  You see someone else could write an article about Salt Lake City SEO and push my position down because the blog posts typically rank based on freshness.  By owning that top position, it doesn’t matter if my articles move, because this site has gained enough authority to keep that top spot as a relevant site.

From my perspective, these have been great results.  I hope I’ve been able to turn a boring topic into something interesting and hopefully you’ve learned something.

Use Photos for SEO!

Photos can help SEO

A few weeks ago, I suggested/informed/declared that Flickr was a great place to get a little extra traffic to your site.  A photo site?

Yesterday Bing announced a visual search where photos would show up instead of text.  I believe this is something every SEO company should be aware of…and exploit.

Google already has an image search.  It’s something I use for almost every image used here and elsewhere.  Sometimes the search term I use to find a photo reflects the topic at hand.  For this post I knew I would be talking about photos.  In my mind it was a lot of photos, not a specific one.  So I searched for collage, found the one displayed here and saved it to my hard drive as a file called “photo seo.jpg.”  Then I added the “alt” tag  “photos can help SEO.”  This is a little SEO trick to help this page and to help the photo show up on Google images.  I could have kept the original file name or left off the alt tag, but why let such opportunities go to waste?  Plus I want my photo to be more relevant so someone doing a search for seo photo might actually read this article.

Sometimes I pick a photo that’s ironic or funny.  Yesterday, I did a search for apples and oranges to represent visually how different Facebook and SEO are.  I didn’t change the file name which was applesoranges.jpg or some such thing.  I also didn’t use an alt tag.  The file name was perfect.  I assume that’s a pretty common search term and I’m hoping that article will show up.

For the Facebook article, I didn’t use the best photo I found.  I really liked the one where someone had hand stiched half an apple and half an orange together and then taken a beautiful photo of it.  When you use images, there are copyright issues to consider.  Here’s how I handle it.  If I see a copyright, like I did with that image, I steer clear of it.  If I see the same image over and over on different websites, I assume it’s fair game.

The image I used yesterday was also an original image, but had no copyright info on it.  I supplied a link back to the original and feel pretty confident I won’t have any problems.  If for some reason the site owner asked me to remove the image, I would comply in a heartbeat and find another suitable image.

Why don’t I link right to the image instead of saving it first?  This practice, known as hotlinking, has become quite dangerous for several reasons.

1.  By linking to the image, you’re using the other site’s bandwidth.  I know I don’t have enough traffic yet to impact anyone, but it’s bad form.

2.  The site hosting the image may go down, and your site will have an ugly gap.  Sites come and go.  It’s a fact of the Internet.  Never rely on someone else’s site.

3.  The image may be changed.  Any one can name any file, anything.  It’s happened in the past where a completely benign file name that was hotlinked, suddenly became a pornographic image because the disgruntled host realized someone was effectively stealing their bandwidth.

If you’re not using images in your blog posts or website, now is the time to start.  Here are some quick tips.

Use Flickr to host your original images.  Do fill in the description tags and use an SEO friendly file name.  Do provide your website in the description area as well.

Always save and reupload images you find on the web.  Do rename the image if necessary.  Do use alt tags to enhance the image’s description.  Remember that humans can read the alt tags, so don’t simply keyword stuff.

Don’t steal images!

Remember that photos provide additional SEO exposure especially on Bing and Google.  Plan accordingly.

Facebook for SEO?

Is Facebook a good tool for SEO?  I’m not really sure to be quite honest.  The reason I say this is Facebook has a lot of anti-spam features and is just now evolving into a business marketplace.

Think about what Facebook was originally created for – a place for college age friends to meet up online.  Now look at what it has become.  Then think about where it could go!

Facebook is not an SEO tool, it’s a tool by itself.  Facebook does rank well on search engines.  My business page is pulling a respectable SERP of six on Google, but how many business pages do I want to create for SEO?  How many will Facebook even let me create?  I want to build my “fan” base on Facebook, not fragment it, so I’m not going to become a “spambooker.”  I’m just going to be satisfied that two key terms for my business get duplicated in the search engine results because of Facebook.

Facebook and SEO?

Utilizing Facebook has been a key to establishing this site.  A web marketer has much more to think about in developing an Internet marketing plan, but they have that many more tools at their disposal.  I actually think Facebook will replace websites for a lot of small businesses.  A business owner can easily create a page that is clean and well designed with a lot of backlinks naturally going to the main page for a small amount of time and no money.  Promoting this page will grow the customer base with people who are willing to listen to the marketing message.  How long will Facebook business pages be free?  I don’t think anybody knows, but I do believe it would be wise to get one as soon as possible.

In July, the California startup company announced it had hit the 250 million-user mark, which indicates it has grown by 50 million users in two months. That’s more than 800,000 new users per day.

Can Facebook be used for SEO?  Yes, but in a very limited way.  Facebook is its own tool and should be used along with other web marketing tools like SEO, PPC and social media.

Salt Lake SEO Blogs – Lessons From my Competitors

On Friday I wrote an article reviewing the top ten SEO blogs that appeared on Google for the key phrase “salt lake city SEO.”

It was interesting because I was writing in real time.  I did the search, clicked on the sites and wrote my article.

As you may recall none of them stood out.  They suffered from boring content, lack of updates and no sense of community.  Clearly there are some lessons to be learned.

Today I want to talk about those lessons.  The analogy that came to mind for me is a blog is like a seed.  Millions of blogs have been started, but far fewer grow and develop an audience.  What’s the difference between a successful blog and one that never grows?  It could be money or talent or inspiration.  I believe it’s much simpler than that.

A blog seed gets planted in fertile ground with plenty of good ideas and intentions.  A lot of work goes into setting up a blog…choosing the layout, the name and even the blogging format.  So I know the intention is there.  That blog seed needs water to grow and that water is content.  It’s your writing, your podcast, your video or your photos.  Feed that seed with the water of good content.  Write down your ideas so you can come back and expand on them later.  I like Google Docs because I can type in ideas anywhere and come back to them when I’m ready to write.  As an expert in the field you’re writing about you have a unique perspective on your subject matter.  That’s where to start.  That’s where your blog will “find its voice.”  Then you can expand later on.

Now that your seedling blog has started growing, it needs to put down roots.  Those roots come from links which will drive traffic and search engine results.  You don’t have to be a spam artist or link whore to get those roots to start growing.  Just by properly inserting links into your articles you can get links back!  You’ll want to use these ten sites to get links.  Tell your friends on Facebook that you’re blogging just to get sympathy traffic.  Follow blogs in your topic area to see what they’re doing, get ideas and leave a comment.  Those roots will grow, but it will take time.  Just like a plant doesn’t grow overnight, neither does a blog.  There is little instant gratification in blogging.

When your little blog is firmly rooted with links and after you water it with content and the plant fills out with branches and leaves full of content then you’ll start to see fruit – the audience.  You want to encourage the audience to leave comments, join your email list, buy your product, fan your Facebook page or whatever your goal is…but you don’t want to do it in a slimy or salesy way.  Make sure your comments are turned on.  Write posts that encourage feedback or questions.  Answer those questions in the comment section.  If you have comment moderation turned on, make sure to approve them quickly.  The easiest way to engage your audience is to thank them for commenting.  Andy Sernovitz loves that strategy and it’s so simple.

So you know I follow my own advice, let me share with you a recent encounter I had.  I did a search on Facebook for Internet marketing and subscribed to a group I thought looked interesting.  A blog post popped up that looked interesting, so I read it.  I commented on the Facebook page and later linked to it in an article I wrote.  Do you know what that blogger did?  He thanked me.  He sent me a personal email to thank me for my comment.  Then he made an excellent suggestion on how to grow my business.  What a brilliant strategy!  I’m so impressed, I’ve adopted the strategy myself.  Thank you Mark!

If you think of your blog like a seed that needs content, traffic and community to grow and flourish, it becomes easier to stay motivated and focused.  At the center of it all is content.  I’m betting the question you’re thinking is, “How often should I post, Nigel?”  That answer really depends on you, but the more you post good content is the faster your blog will grow.  My goal for this site is to post at least once a day.  Some blogs post more than that, but they have full-time bloggers to do it.  I know there will come a time when I can’t post an original 1000 word article every day.

I have a strategy for that.  I’ve created two “features” for this site that will allow me to make short posts.  One is “Blogger Quick Tips.”  When I find something interesting, cool or useful in relation to blogging, I write about it.  I even designed a custom image so I save time searching for one.  The other is the “Notable News.”  I learned with my real estate blog that I’m not CNN.  Your job as a blogger is not to be a newshound, but to offer your experience and perspective on your subject matter which sometimes will be in the news.  With the Notable News feature I can link to something newsworthy and quickly add my two cents  There may be some days where I post a few original articles or maybe none.  Either way I have a system in place to produce seven interesting, subject relevant, keyword optimized articles per week.

Any questions?

Salt Lake City SEO – Blog Review

My friend Pat tweeted an interesting article the other day about new media.  The article suggests that instead of waiting for media to write about you, you can become the media and attract visitors that way.

So it got me to thinking, if I’m a small business and I’m looking for SEO help, where am I going to find it?  On the search engines of course.  So the very best SEO company, must be the one that turns up first on the listings, right?  Not necessarily.

Since social media – blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. – is the new hot thing, perhaps a better way to evaluate an SEO company would be to look at their blog.  That’s what I’m going to do here.  I’m going to pull the top ten search engine results for the keyphrase “salt lake city SEO” and evaluate the blogs of those companies based on three important criteria -

• How interesting is the material?
• How often and recently the blog was updated?
• Is there a discussion going on or a sense of community?

The blogs will be evaluated in the order they appear in the search results.

1.  MWI – This is pretty typical of a blog that doesn’t really understand its purpose.  The writing is boring, it’s fairly new (April, 2009) and it hasn’t been updated for nearly a month.  There’s no sense of consistency with infrequent updates.  It looks like somebody over there said we need a blog and Joshua Steimle thought he could do it.  Sorry Joshua, you need some help.  When a blog has no purpose or direction, it can’t build community.  This site has none.

2.  SEO Expert Pro – Sounds interesting.  They’re experts.  They’re pros.  They do SEO.  Let’s check out their blog!  Oooh, they haven’t updated since April.  It looks like somebody put a little thought into the article, but it’s nothing to really write about.  Ironically, the last article is about social media.  Clearly a case of understanding it’s important, but not understanding how to do it.  There are some comments, but a community can’t be built when a blog is so sporadically updated.

3.  All About Training – This is not an SEO company, it’s an SEO training company hosting an event in Salt Lake City next month.  Do they have a blog?  No.  Does the parent company have a blog?  Not that I could find.  But there are all these interesting social media buttons on the top of their page.  Cool, they’ve got a Facebook business page?  No.  They Twitter?  No on this front too.  Do they understand social media?  I don’t think so.

4.  All About Training LinkedIn – This is the LinkedIn page for the previous event.  Maybe they do understand social media?  No.  Only one attendee and that’s the guy that’s putting on the event.  This is a good example of how social media can help with SEO.

5.  Seminar Insiders All About Training – Wow, three straight search engine results for the same SEO seminar.  Pretty good.  Too bad they’re really not capitalizing on these rankings.  What’s this?  It’s been cancelled?  Thanks for letting us know.

6.  DataFlurry – This one could be good.  The search description says they’re “the best.”  Let’s check out the blog!  Last updated August 31.  That’s almost two weeks ago.  The content is clearly for SEO only and not designed to start a conversation with the audience.  These sorts of SEO articles are better served being published on article sites instead of your blog.  Look, more social media buttons.  Joel Mclaughlin is LinkedIn and Twittering!  LinkedIn looks good, but his last Twitter was a month ago.  And it looks like he’s a Glenn Beck fan.  Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but in the business world I don’t think it’s a good idea to wear your politics on your sleeve.  Who knows who your next client could be?

7.  All About Training Again – It’s already been established there is no blog associated with this seminar and the event has been cancelled.  Let’s move on.

8.  Search and Social – I’m excited to see this one.  They’ve got “social” in their name.  Their blog should be awesome, right?  Well, it looks like it was good…last year.  No updates since February.  Some of the old articles are interesting and they did get comments, so there was some community going on.  It looks to be over now.  The question is why?  Are these guys so busy they can’t blog anymore?  Or did they go out of business and forget to take down their website?  I’m amazed by people like Mark Cuban, Matt Cutts and Ashton Kutcher who regularly update their blogs and Twitter even though we know they have to be incredibly busy.  I think it’s because they recognize the power they hold in keeping their audiences engaged.  You can’t do that once a week or once a month.  You’ve got to be consistent and frequent.

9.  Epic Marketing – This looks like a real live ad agency.  They should have a good blog, right?  Wrong again.  Two posts – a case study and a blurb from Nick White the President do not a blog make.  There is no community.  I would think it could be real fun to blog from an ad agency.  There’s so many components to talk about.  Oh well.

10.  All About Training Techvibes – Another ad for the cancelled seminar.  Techvibes looks to have a good blog, but they’re not a Salt Lake City SEO company, so I won’t be reviewing it.

To wrap up, it looks like none of the companies that rank well for Salt Lake City SEO have decent blogs and those SERPs are dominated by a cancelled SEO seminar.

I think there are a lot of lessons in this review and I’ll go over them in my next article.

Salt Lake City SEO – Local Search Engine Optimization

Downtown SLC

A couple weeks ago a long time reader Zack asked,

Any advice on doing SEO for local businesses? I am fairly familiar with SEO but would like to concentrate on helping my local market.

Zack, you have come to the right place!  For two years I ran a hyperlocal real estate blog for Salt Lake City.  Within a few months I had top Google rankings for search terms like “Salt Lake Real Estate” and “SLC real estate.”  It was easy to do because that was my subject matter.

It gets harder is when your subject matter is broad, but you want a specific audience.  This site right here is a good example.  I have a super broad subject.  I can do the work anywhere.  My clients don’t need to be in Salt Lake or even Utah.  But how would it look if I tell people I’m an SEO expert and my site doesn’t even show up for local listings?  Not very good.

Two things you can do right off the bat is include your address on your site.  When Zach made his comment I realized that nowhere on this blog did I have my Utah location.  I had a phone number, name and email, but no address.  Since I currently have a home office, I don’t think it’s necessary to plaster my residence all over the web, so I just included the city and state.  If I get a little bigger, I’ll rent a P.O. box and use that.  People will often search using a zip code, so I think that could be of benefit.  When the Swaby Online Media empire grows to its climactic peak, maybe I’ll have a commercial office, but until then a P.O. box will suffice.

The second thing you can quickly do to get local search engine rankings is have a page or a domain with the local area you want to get ranked for.  In this instance, the URL for this post will be http://seobyswaby.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/salt-lake-city-seo-local-search-engine-optimization which will be just fine for the spiders.  The spiders don’t read hyphens so I’m going to have a killer optimized URL for Salt Lake City SEO.

Zach, who wrote the original question, has a great site optimized for his location…Tampa SEO Company.  His URL has his keywords, his site is loaded with relevant copy and it’s also got his address at the bottom.  Zach is even doing well on the search engines for his key terms.

I think what Zach’s question pertains to is when he lands a client like “Bill’s Widgets” that has an exclusive Tampa customer base.  Zach can’t very well sit down with Bill and say, “I need you to change the name of your company to Tampa Widgets.  Oh, and you’ll need to change your domain name too.”  The key will lie in making some adjustments to the copywriting on Bill’s “about us” or “FAQ” pages and including a company address on the site.

Recently I was doing some research for a client and found they ranked very well for certain Utah county terms simply because of their address showing up in the page description in the search engine results.  The page is annoying because it has a video that automatically starts on load, but you can’t argue with the search result.  Sometimes the simplest fixes are the best solutions.

There are many other ways to take advantage of local search including Google maps and pay per click.  However, these two basic steps will get you going in the right direction.