Unknown Search Results Make SEO Harder

Google has been encrypting keyword searches for several years now. That makes web searching more private for users, but a lot more complicated for web marketers. In a blog post from 2011, Google claimed,

Over the next few weeks, many of you will find yourselves redirected to https://www.google.com (note the extra “s”) when you’re signed in to your Google Account. This change encrypts your search queries and Google’s results page. This is especially important when you’re using an unsecured Internet connection, such as a WiFi hotspot in an Internet cafe.

Some controversy developed at the time, but as secured browsing has grown, I hardly see search keywords in my reports any more. Part of the controversy has to do with the fact Google continues to display specific keyword searches for its ad program; AdWords. It makes sense to use secured browsing when surfing on a public connection. I’m just not sure I can buy into allowing paid advertisers access when website operators typically keep their organic search reports private.

Unfortunately for small businesses, it’s changes like this where having a professional working for you can be of benefit. There are some pretty complicated solutions detailed here that I won’t go into in this article.

What I will go into are two straightforward workarounds that can still provide the information you’re looking for.

The first is to examine user behavior on your site’s pages. Pages that get traffic are typically ranked. Digging a little will tell you which keywords are on that page and you can have a general idea of which keywords are bringing visitors to your site.

But what if you have a campaign or publicized link out there? Could that skew your results? Yes it could! Which leads me to step two…

ALWAYS use a tracking code for links you promote. What’s a tracking code? It’s a simple bit of php you put on the end of a URL. For example this is the link to the Guide I’m promoting:

Click to access ZTGuide.pdf

This is the same link with tracking code:

http://www.swabymedia.com/downloads/ZTGuide.pdf?src=test

It’s the “?” that initiates the code. You can put whatever you want after that. I use src to indicate a source and test can be anything you want. If I posted this to Facebook I could use –

http://www.swabymedia.com/downloads/ZTGuide.pdf?src=fb

For Twitter –

http://www.swabymedia.com/downloads/ZTGuide.pdf?src=tw

If you use multiple posts to the same source you can track them in more detail by adding a numeric code or date like this –

http://www.swabymedia.com/downloads/ZTGuide.pdf?src=fb1

http://www.swabymedia.com/downloads/ZTGuide.pdf?src=fb100614

BEFORE you publish the tracking code be sure to test it! You don’t want to spend time or money publicizing a link for it to go to your 404 not found page.

I have been an advocate of tracking codes for a very long time. Google’s encryption of keywords is going to force smart marketers to have to use them 100% of the time. Or you can just buy ads…

2012 in Review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 24,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 6 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

Search and Social are Colliding!

On my podcast in the summer, we discussed an interesting phenomenon in Europe…more visitors were using Facebook than Google.  Back then, it was an interesting sidenote, but today that phenomenon isn’t exclusive to Europe.  It’s becoming more and more apparent the future, indeed the present, of marketing is through social contacts.

90% of consumers online base their decision on the recommendation of a friend.

The online marketing industry is taking note.  I was recently made aware of a multi-day conference where the entire subject is search/social convergence.  Several recent articles I’ve read discuss social site results showing up on search engines.  Businesses are rushing to create social profiles for the purpose of selling products and services.

Unfortunately, many of these businesses are going to step on some toes and incorrectly sell on social sites.  When we engage on social sites, we don’t want to be pitched or sold.  If we’re in the market for a product, we’ll ask!  So why should businesses have a social presence for sales if people don’t want to buy?  Several reasons.

1.  Facebook is a far more effective sales platform than a website because of the potential to extend influence to friends of your customers.  Activity on your Facebook page can be spread throughout the platform with very little effort.  Social activity can also be added to non-Facebook sites.

2.  Buyers want to stay on the platform they’re using.  Why go to a third-party site when you can make your purchase on a site you already trust?

3.  Searches for buying signals for your brand can be set up on Twitter and Google alerts.  For instance if you’re XYZ widgets you can set up searches for “XYZ widgets” and “buy XYZ widgets” and “XYZ widgets sale.”  Not only can you monitor your brand, but you can monitor people who want to buy your product or service.

I recently “asked Twitter” for a recommendation on telephone tracking numbers.  Within five minutes a vendor responded.  Of all the companies in that space, only one responded.  Are their competitors missing out on business?

The worlds of search and social media are definitely colliding.  As this new medium evolves I think we’ll see social media become more and more effective as a sales tool.  Search sites must adapt or they will be left behind.

SEO Results?

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

Three Ways to Out Rank Your Competitors on Google

Taking on the big dogs is always hard to do.  That’s what I did when I started optimizing for “Salt Lake City SEO.”

One of the fundamentals of SEO is established sites tend to out rank new sites because they have more links and more content.

While researching for that post, I found I could easily out rank my competition on the blog side, but out ranking on the website side would be much more difficult.  That’s OK.  I have a plan.

Use established sites to gain search engine ranking –

There are probably a million sites to leverage to get a good ranking, but I like to submit to sites that will duplicate my work through RSS.

Article Directories

The easiest way to do this is submit content to article sites.  Article sites have been around a lot longer than any new websites, so they’ll show up in search engine results higher and sooner than anything else.  They also act as a filter for the visitor because if someone reads my article, then comes to my site for more information, it seems they are becoming a pretty well qualified prospect.  I only submit to article sites that allow anchor text so I am maximizing my time.  Other websites that use syndicated content take those feeds as is, so my anchor text gets duplicated all over the web.  I can even submit older articles from this site verbatim without worrying about a duplicate content penalty.

I am currently submitting articles to three of my favorite directories.  I will let you know how that turns out.

Press Releases

Press releases are one of my favorite ways to generate buzz, branding and inbound links.  They are great for new sites because the fact you’re launching a site is newsworthy in itself.  Press release sites not only distribute to major news sites, they also utilize RSS so blogs and other news aggregators scrape and publish your content.  To get the best distribution and the ability to use anchor text, it will cost you money, but the exposure is well worth it.

The key to writing a successful press release is making it newsworthy.  While it’s worth the money spent just for the links and the distribution, ideally you want to generate a release that will create press.  Too many web marketers submit press releases that are poorly written or just plain spam.  By taking the time to write something newsworthy, you will create something worth your effort.

I have not submitted any press releases yet, but I came up with two newsworthy ideas I think will generate some press.  I’m still working on some details, but plan to have idea one fully implemented this week.

Directory Sites

While doing some research on my targeted key words, I found some localized directory sites I thought would be worth submitting to.  Besides Blogtopsites and Blogtoplist which I always submit to, I found Blogcatalog and MerchantCircle.  Much to my surprise, I found the following for my key phrase a couple days ago:

Hi front page of Google!

Over time and after implementing some of my other strategies, I believe this site will rank in the top ten, but for now I’m pretty pleased.  Look out big dogs, I’m nipping at your heels!

If you want a hint about the future of SEO, this is it.  Other sites are the place you want to be; Facebook, Twitter, Directories, Google Maps, etc.  Don’t believe me?  Ask Seth Godin.  He’s launching Brands in Public, a content aggregator for companies.  For $400 a month you can get some pretty cheap SEO, but the idea has its detractors.  No matter how much people hate it, it’s going to happen.

Embrace change.

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.

Google Keywords for this Blog – SERPs

Please ignore this post.  There is nothing to see or learn here.

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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.

How to Get Traffic to Your Site by Using Outbound Links

The hardest thing about starting a new website or blog is getting traffic to come visit, interact and buy your product or service.  It’s the thing I most dread and I know others do too.  Having been doing SEO for over a decade now, I’ve certainly got the jump on most of my competitors.  I don’t have to spend money on SEO services because I can do that myself.

When I started this blog, I wanted to try a few things differently than I’ve done in the past.  I really wanted to experiment with the new social media tools especially Twitter and Facebook.  So I made sure to set up a Twitter account and Facebook business page for this site and see how things worked.  Both of these tools point traffic to me and I have to actively promote to keep that traffic coming.  They also allow me to leverage their platforms to work for me.  If you’re on Facebook, you know how easy it is to build your friend list.  I received subscriptions to my Twitter feed after signing up just to follow a few other people.

After I started doing this, I ran across this article that talks about twelve steps to kickstart your blog traffic.  It looks like I’m on the right track using Facebook and Twitter.

However, I’m going to share with you my secret to getting traffic, inbound links and high search engine results – use outbound links.  Huh?  I know what you’re thinking, “that doesn’t make sense.”  How can you get traffic to your blog by sending what you don’t have somewhere else?  Hear me out and I’ll show you.

It has been said that on the web, content is king.  This is true.  Why do you think RSS feeds get misused by splogs?  As a web user, do you go back to sites you find that have poor content?  Do you bookmark them?  Do you subscribe to their feeds?  You will never do that unless those sites have content that is interesting or useful to you.

You will not have a successful website if your content is substandard.  So, if you want a well trafficked site, that is the foundation.

Links are queen and blogs are about links.  Blog software is set up to easily link to other sites.  Their structure is inherently search engine friendly and services exist to set those spider bots in motion as soon as you hit publish.  Besides setting up a Twitter feed and Facebook page, the other things I did to make sure this blog started getting traffic immediately was to register with Technorati and make sure I had an RSS feed.

Then I started writing.  Since I’m starting up a new business I was thinking a lot about branding.  This business has been in my head for over a year, the circumstances just became viable for me to start expending a lot of effort on it.  Looking back at that article, I should probably redo it, but I won’t.  I haven’t been writing on a regular basis for a while, so it’s nice to see how I improve through practice.  You will notice that I used some links.  I used more in part two of that article.

Links add credibility by showing examples to back up points made in your article.  They serve as evidence.

Quoting other sources is perfectly acceptable.  Copying entire articles and posting them to your blog is not.  Think back to your old term papers from college.  Links are the digital equivalent of a citation.  You’ll see an example here.

When you quote an article, provide a link back to the original.  When you link to a blog, don’t link to the main page, link to the specific article.  That will provide a trackback which will give you an inbound link.  By linking to an original article, it greatly reduces accusations of plagiarism.

Blogs are timely and I often use current events as examples.  This is a good thing because Technorati and other aggregators will include you in their search results for that term.  If you link to a Technorati registered blog, you’ll also show up.

I’ve also found if I mention a publicly traded company, it’s a good idea to use their ticker.  A lot of news stories will link to sites that use stock tickers.

It can be a good idea to write something inspired by an article you’ve recently read.  Consider this one recently written by Mark Cuban.  His entire post was a response to someone’s article.  I did the same thing with my posts on how to use Facebook.  The original article was rather a fluff piece, but the attributes she described were right on.  So I took those attributes, properly credited with a link of course, and wrote my own article.  Here’s the cool thing.  By linking to it, I now have a link back from a very high authority site with lots of traffic.

When starting up a new website or blog it’s difficult to get traffic and links.  However, you can get people and search engines to find you by providing outbound links.

Here’s a summary of my best outbound link tips.

1. Do link to other blogs with related content to yours.
2. Do link to specific pages in a blog so you get the trackback.
3. Do name drop.  You’d be surprised at what gets searched for.
4. Do use stock tickers when you mention a publicly traded company.
5. Do make sure your links open in a new window (_blank).
6. Do back up your points with links.
7. Do define industry jargon with a link to the definition.
8. Do test your links to make sure they work.
9. Do take screenshots of links you’re not sure will be there in the future.
10. Do link to your own site within each post.
11. Do provide great content so others will want to link to you!