Search Engine Marketing Info and Strategies

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The Pole Position Marketing Team was off to Las Vegas last week for Webmasterworld’s PubCon conference. After last years experience of coming home with my brain on overload, I was prepared for an equally fulfilling week.

This year PubCon went really crazy with sessions, running a keynote and 4 sessions each day. And, to cram in even more information, there were six tracks to chose from! Doing the math, that’s 31 topics to choose from in one day. Truly something for everyone. With so much going on, it wasn’t possible to live blog or even create a wrap up at the end of the day. Thus I am pulling my wrap up together for the entire week in one post.

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When focusing on SEO strategies we often talk about the engines, algorithms, links, page-tweaks and whatnot. We focus on what we can do to improve website architecture, research keywords, or write better copy. All of these are important to successful search engine optimization, but what we often don’t focus on is the internal issues.

Businesses don’t succeed on the basis of a product alone. Those products have to be developed, marketed and sold using sound business principles. Similarly, SEO doesn’t succeed solely by what you do on the technical front, but what you do internally to build a platform that will allow SEO success to happen.

Whether you’re performing SEO for your own site, hiring a consultant or firm to provide SEO services for you, or you are the SEO provider serving various clients, there is the added dynamic of knowledge and communication that factors into building a successful optimization campaign.

Here are 10 questions that you need to ask to make the campaign successful:

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This is part 12 of a 12 part series on keyword research. This series will guide you through four distinct phase of the keyword research process, providing you step by step guidelines to help you gather, sort and organize your keywords into an effective marketing campaign.

Yesterday, as we begun the fourth and final stage of the keyword research process, we looked at several ways to analyze your website and segment keywords into groups based on user intent. Today we’ll wrap up the entire research process, and this series, by outlining the final act of keyword grouping. Often times even your segmented keyword lists can be quite extensive and it’ll be important to group these phrases even further in order to be properly optimized into the website. This ensures that each page optimized maintains a tight focus but still able to be optimized for a significant group of keywords.

Grouping phrases together for on-page targeting

The process of organizing your keywords is similar to the process of splitting a single core term into multiple cores, only its done in a much more fine-tuned scale. With core terms you were dealing with multiple themes, or different ways to search for the same product. In this phase we are working with only a single core term and deciding how to segment literally hundreds of phrases into manageable groups that are similar in nature.

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This is part 11 of a 12 part series on keyword research. This series will guide you through four distinct phase of the keyword research process, providing you step by step guidelines to help you gather, sort and organize your keywords into an effective marketing campaign.

Phase IV: Organizing Keywords for Success

Making SEO Successful

Organizing your keywords into an effective marketing strategy is the most important of the four phases of keyword research outlined in this document. While most often SEOs and keyword researchers focus on the research phases, organizing your keyword properly can truly help you create a vastly more successful optimization and marketing campaign.

Let’s use the analogy of building an engine to help us understand the value in this final step in the process.

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This is part 10 of a 12 part series on keyword research. This series will guide you through four distinct phase of the keyword research process, providing you step by step guidelines to help you gather, sort and organize your keywords into an effective marketing campaign.

Analyzing Phrases for Quality

As we began Phase III of our keyword research process we discussed several different aspects of analyzing phrases. This helped us better understand the value of each phrase and the pros and cons that each bring to the table. Each of these much be considered and weighed carefully when determining if a keyword is valuable or not.

All of the above noted elements are pretty cut-and-dry and fairly easy to analyze. But in addition to those there are also some more vague elements that must be duly considered as well. These additional elements are far more subjective and require a good deal of thought and analysis.

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Next week I’ll be headed out to speak at two different conferences. The first is Learn About Web in Kennewick, Washington, and the second is WebmasterWorld’s PubCon in Las Vegas, NV.

Learn About Web

This is a full-day conference for the price of a two-hour webinar! Speakers include Jennifer Laycock, Mack Collier, and Matt McGee, along with myself. It’s focused is on giving small business leaders the information technology they need to promote their businesses successfully on the web.

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This is part 9 of a 12 part series on keyword research. This series will guide you through four distinct phase of the keyword research process, providing you step by step guidelines to help you gather, sort and organize your keywords into an effective marketing campaign.

Yesterday we began Phase III of the keyword research process discussing several elements of key phrase analyzation. We’ll continue today looking at a few more considerations when determining how valuable any particular search phrase is.

Phrases that convert

As you sort through your lists of keywords, you want to be sure to eliminate phrases that won’t deliver converting traffic. Whatever keywords that you keep for optimization, you want each to be able to drive the most qualified traffic, giving you visitors that are most likely to buy your product or services. Many search terms, if ranked high, can generate tons of traffic, however any term does not directly apply to your site or what you offer, should be scrapped.

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This is part 8 of a 12 part series on keyword research. This series will guide you through four distinct phase of the keyword research process, providing you step by step guidelines to help you gather, sort and organize your keywords into an effective marketing campaign.

I’ve been sick for the past week so my apologies for any of you eagerly waiting for the concluding posts in this series. Let’s go ahead and jump right back into it.

Phase III: Analyzing and Eliminating Keywords

After having researched through your relevant core terms and search phrases, it’s time to start the process of looking more closely at each phrase. What you want to do is separate the good keywords from the not-so good. You need to find the search phrases that will ultimately provide you with the greatest benefit in your marketing campaigns, and eliminating or sidelining the rest.

Selecting high ROI search phrases

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We’ve previously looked at Paid Search Advertising Roadmap, Paid Search Rules and Alphabet Soup and PPC. Now let’s start looking at keyword matching. How well do you understand match types?

Each of the three major PPC platforms follow a similar approach, with Google AdWords and MSN adCenter using essentially identical match types and Yahoo! Search Marketing being a little more confusing. If you can get your head around the different terminology in the three platforms then you’re going to be just fine.

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