Headings

The first place to begin in writing your content is to create a great heading for each page. In the last post I discussed grabbing the visitor’s attention. This is one of the primary jobs of page headings.

The heading is different from the page title tag. Where the title tag is displayed in the search results the heading is viewed on the page itself. Sometimes you want the heading and the title to be the same, other times you don’t. The title MUST use keywords in it. The heading SHOULD use keywords in it. It all depends on the hook you want to use to grab attention and entice your visitor to keep reading.

Core Term Qualifiers

Optimizing your website for core terms is only part of the optimization process. The vast majority of searches are performed using longer, more specific phrases. When it comes to keyword research, these phrases are really nothing more than your core terms with key qualifiers added to them.

Using your keyword research tools you can find dozens or even hundreds of qualifiers for just about every core term. Each of these new phrases must be carefully analyzed for appropriateness for your site, whether it targets what you offer and fits with the page’s content for which that core term has been applied. Those that don’t can either be discarded or set aside for optimization to other pages.

Research Takes Time

The process of researching your keywords isn’t something that should be rushed. Each phase of the research process needs to be performed deliberately, ensuring that you take the time to find all relevant terms and discard the irrelevant. Any attempts to rush through the keyword research process will likely lead you down the wrong paths at best and at worst cause you to have to rethink your entire keyword targeting strategy.

Unfortunately the research process isn’t always linear. You can often be working on several phases of the research process at a time depending on what your focus is on at a given moment. There is a lot of overlap and moving backward and forward through the processes but care needs to be taken that you don’t skip over or leave any of the phases out.

Keywords are the blue-prints from which all your marketing efforts are built upon. Keyword research tools provide valuable insight into what words people are searching on the major search engines. But research tools are just the first step in a thorough and well-planned keyword research process. Great tools like Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker or even Google’s tools don’t tell you the intent of each search, however that information can be deduced with a bit of analysis and keyword organization.

But before we get into that, let’s look at how people search so we can better understand how to segment and organize your keywords into an effective optimization campaign.

Common Architectural Problems

In order to move your site up in the search engine rankings you have to get your optimized content to the search engines in the most streamlined way possible. There are some common problems that often stand in the way of that. These problems may not keep the search engines from finding and indexing and even ranking your content, however they can greatly effect the performance of that content in terms of how well it ranks in the search results.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

When developing a website, you can save yourself a lot of problems down the road by planning ahead before moving full speed into the site development process. One of the first site architectural issues to consider is how your URLs will read. This is especially important for e-commerce websites that quite often have long complicated URLs. But having good URL structure is still no less important for static websites.

Here are a few things you can do to give yourself search engine friendly URLs:

Domain Names

Its easy to think that all the good domain names are taken. Sure, the easy and obvious ones have been snatched up years ago, but that doesn’t mean there still aren’t any good .com domain names left that are perfect for your business or blog.

The starting point, however, is to realize that you do need own your own domain name. Most businesses have figured this out already but a lot of bloggers haven’t. That’s because it takes a bit of work and some small fees. First you have to purchase the domain, then host it, pay the monthly hosting fees, install the blog, etc., etc. Not quite as easy as signing up for a blog service and pounding out your first blog post all in ten minutes.

If your blog is nothing more than a personal diary then the free blogging services may be all you need. But if you’re looking to build an audience, sell a few products, or make a name for yourself, getting your own domain name is the way to go.

Whether you’re a business, a blogger, or something in between, selecting your domain name can be a trying process. Those of you who have searched for the “perfect” domain name know what I mean. You go through dozens, if not hundreds of different options looking for just the right one. When looking for domain names for your business or blog, here are a few guidelines:

Heading tags are certainly no magic solution to building keyword relevance. They are merely one more baby step to creating a well-rounded optimization of a page. Adding heading tags using your keywords may or may not make a difference in your keyword rankings, but nonetheless, balanced against the rest of the page, using a heading tag properly, with keywords, is going to benefit your visitors, if not the search engines.

On the search engine front, at the very least, the Heading tags (H1, H2,… H6) can be used to tell the search engines the hierarchical structure of your page’s content.

When developing content, it’s pretty easy for visitors to see how the page breaks down, but search engines need a bit of help. The heading tags are that help.

One of the big misconceptions about SEO is that everything we do is designed to increase search engine rankings. This isn’t (or shouldn’t be) true, and there is no simpler example of that then the Meta Description tag. Even though this description tag doesn’t weigh all that heavily into the search engine ranking algorithms, it is still a very powerful part of an effective optimization campaign.

Like the Title Tag, the Meta Description tag will often show up in the search results. Generally what you see in the SERPs is the clickable title link and then the description tag or page snippet just below it. If the description is pulled in to the results, it becomes a very important part of helping entice visitors to click on the link into your site.

On-Page Optimization

A website can do just fine online without SEO. PPC, social media and other properly implemented off-line marketing efforts can really help a site succeed online with little or no SEO. But unless and until you begin to SEO your site it will always under perform, never quite reaching its fullest potential. Without SEO, you’ll always be missing out on a great deal of targeted traffic that the other avenues cannot make up for.

To be more accurate, SEO should be called WO, or WSO: Website Optimization. That’s what I do, I optimize the website in order to help it gain more exposure, increase traffic and get more sales.

But what are we optimizing the website for?

I’d love nothing more to see a backlash over the vast amounts of free crap available online and the sites that provide it. Searchers and internet users would begin to demand quality and search engines wouldn’t reward those sites with the greatest amounts of crap over those with smaller amounts of quality content.

I love that the Internet is free and there is tons of free content available at my finger tips. Sites such Search Engine Guide provide a lot of free content to their readers and make their money by selling ad space. The idea is this: the higher quality of content, the more traffic the site will receive, the more visitors will click on ads, the more ad space can be sold for, the more money can be made.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work that way. Enter MFA sites.

Sometimes SEO is just like that, but the opposite. A lot of time and energy is spent on the “exterior” (search engine rankings) while ignoring the interior (building a great website.)

After spending dozens of my free-time hours just getting this new site set-up, I can totally see why people would just rather pay someone else to do it for them.

I’m just a small business owner that happens to blog on a few times a week. But since my source of income is my business blogging takes a back seat to business needs. Most small businesses can’t afford to hire a full-time blogger or ghost writer so they have to work blogging into their many business-owner duties. And because those duties are so heavy on the business owner, blogging generally falls by the wayside as more pressing matters are attended to.

Many small business owners are out there thinking “Blogging? That’s just one more thing to add to my already over-booked work schedule. No thanks.” I feel you.

But “that” doesn’t always go away no matter how much “it” gains in popularity.

Remember radio? Of course you do. We still listen to radio. Sometimes even listen to it on old fashioned radio tuners instead of over the internet or via satellite. But didn’t you hear? Radio is dead. Radio “died” with the invention of the TV.

An argument can be made that as soon as I take on these clients I need to learn everything I can about their industry so I can market it properly. This is also true. But no matter what, I’ll never be an expert at cost segregation. Nor do I believe my clients want me to be. They want me to be an expert in SEO and that takes enough of my time as it is.

And this is why clients need to be involved. I can do the keyword research, weed out the junk, and help them organize them into strongly optimization groups. But I still need the client’s help telling me what’s good and what’s not. How am I to know that “net present value equation” is a good keyword while “net present value annuity” isn’t. The client, that’s how.

Unfortunately you can’t know how well your SEO’d title tags will perform until you make the edits, wait for the search engine to index the page, and check the results. Depending on how deep your site is and the frequency of the search spiders coming back, even the most basic changes can take several days to a week to show in the search results.

When dealing with ecommerce sites you don’t often get the luxury of making changes on a page by page level because everything is pulled from a database into templates. Generally it is counter productive to implement site-wide changes until you know how those changes will work. The last thing you want is for all your pages to drop in rankings at one time because you tweeked the global template for a new title or description.

This gives them a lot to worry about, making sure they are doing it right and that the results will be all they had hoped for. And hoping it doesn’t break their budget in the process.

Every small business owner wants to get the most value for the money they spend on their marketing efforts. Simply put, the ROI must be there. But even with a good SEO and a good campaign outline, you can still break your budget–or render your SEO campaign ineffective–when you let your worries get the best of you. Worrying about smart things is smart. Worrying about the other stuff, well, that just sets you up for failure.

Here are five things you should stop worrying about if you don’t want to blow your SEO budget over the top:

Slogging through SEO forums, blogs and article sites can provide a great deal of good information, but it can also leave the small business owner confused on what—or what not—to do.

Those that choose to hire an SEO provider can push some of their SEO decision-making burdens off onto someone else, but some then open the door to a whole new set of worries that can circumvent their online success, even with a successful SEO working for them.

Spending nights worrying about your SEO campaign can eat up a lot of energy that is better applied to other, more important matters. While every business owner needs to be fully aware of the progress being made by their SEO’s efforts, they also need to trust that the SEO knows what is needed for them to succeed. For that to happen, here are a few things the business owner need to stop worry about. Failure to do so can kill an SEO campaign in its tracks.

There are certain SEO strategies that are certainly goal oriented where you can get to a definitive end-point, but SEO as a whole is a constant ongoing process. Just like brushing your teeth, you do it ever day so you can keep yourself out from under the dentist’s drill and not walk around with obvious stank breath.

But SEO also isn’t about changing things for the sake of change. We don’t brush our teeth just for the heck of it. Those who think that you always have to be changing your content, titles, and pages in order to keep it “fresh” for the search engines are pursuing a pot of gold on the other side of a rainbow. The truth about SEO is somewhere in between these two elementary schools of thought.

If you don’t want to be a mom and pop operation, or you want to be more than the small business you are, then it’s time to start thinking not like the small business you are but like the bigger business you want to be.

From my examples in my post Why Branding Matters to Small Businesses, you might conclude that a full-scale SEO or PPC campaign is the only way to brand yourself online. SEO can play a role in branding, but you can engage it strategically so you’re spending less time and less money while still building brand recognition.

In the past, we often felt that some clients just didn’t need to be branded in the search results. Maybe because they were smaller clients or didn’t have a nationally recognized name. But then how do companies become nationally recognized names? You got it. Branding.

Branding isn’t just for big companies any more. With the internet and search, it has become easier and cheaper to for companies to brand their names in front of their target audience. Good branding efforts will always cost you some time, energy and even money, but it’s not out of reach of the small businesses.

“There will be fat years and there will be lean years. But it is going to rain.”
–Don Draper, Creative Director, Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency

The fictional character on the TV show Mad Men, when speaking to the executives of London Fog, makers of rain coats, made this very astute assessment of their business. In the age of the web, this could easily be reworded, “There will be fat years and there will be lean years. But people are going to search.”

We are currently in a lean economy, and many businesses are feeling the crunch. But millions of people continue to flock to search engines every day to find, learn and purchase. The question then becomes, who will they find, what will they learn, and will they purchase from you or your competition?

Boil that down and you get one glaring question that every small business needs to answer: Can you afford SEO? Or to put it in even starker terms: