Posts Tagged ‘Search Engines’

When people come to your site, it can be really hard to know why they are there.  The truth is the average conversion rate on e-commerce sites is only around 2-3%…and that’s on sites that are specifically built to sell stuff.  So, what happens to the other 97%?  Why were they there?  Did they find what they were looking for?  If not, why not?  Is the content they are looking for even on your site?  If so, are they able to find it easily?

Keywords that bring users to the site via search engines can help, but visitors are prone to being vague when they use search engines.  But, there’s one place to go for insights into why visitors are on your site that gets overlooked.  It’s a place where your site visitors become much more precise about their browsing intent.  It’s your site search data.  No, not the keywords they used in search engines to find your site.  It’s the phrases they used to search ON your site after they arrived.

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As much as the title is vastly overstated, these questions will at the very least help you ponder SEO in a way you hadn’t pondered before. At least that’s my theory.

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Below is the second set of questions from an interview I had given late last year. If you started this series with the introduction, you already know that the answers here differ from the answers given in the interview. One of the reasons I like written interviews is that it gives you a better opportunity to provide a more thorough and thought-filled answer. While these may not be life-changing questions, I hope they are at least thought provoking for the small business owner who doesn’t know a lot about SEO.

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All right, I’ll admit, the title is somewhat over dramatic. But, when you don’t have much to offer, hype it up anyway! Kinda like the movies!

This post started from talking about How NOT To Do An Interview: The Basics. What was originally going to be an intro paragraph turned into a full post. When this happens, I just do what I often do… take one idea and make multiple posts out of it. Love it!

What follows are 15 questions I felt were important for a business audience to know about SEO. And, now that I know what I meant when I wrote them (see introduction), I can provide the answers I intended. Here are questions 1-5:

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This series is pulled from a presentation given at SMX East. Part I of this series covered the problems duplicate content creates. Part II covered some of the causes of duplicate content. This post covers some of the solutions that will help you fix your duplicate content problems.

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In my last post, I shared using a fishing metaphor to talk about stepping your PPC game up to the point where you know how to use it to build your online business for the long haul.  So, let’s start looking at some of the “tricks of the trade” to do just that.

Trick #1 – Use Keywords Correctly

A great misnomer among PPC advertisers is the belief that the foundation to success for an account is found in picking the right keywords.  While picking good keywords is important, it’s not the foundation.  The foundation is knowing how to use keywords to find search queries that you can use to attract customers to your website.  That’s right, keywords are different than search queries.  Search queries are the phrases that real users actually type into the search engines.  Remember, keywords are like nets that you throw into Search Engine Sea to find the fish (search queries) that you will then use to prepare dinner.

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This series is pulled from a presentation given at SMX East. Part I of this serious covered the problems duplicate content creates. This post covers the causes of duplicate content, and Part III will look at the solutions you need to implement to fix your duplicate content problems.

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Duplicate content is like a virus. When a virus enters your system, it begins to replicate itself until it is ready to be released and cause all kinds of nasty havoc within your body. On the web, a little duplicate content isn’t a huge problem, but the more it replicates itself, the bigger the problem you’re going to have. Too much duplicate content and your website will come down with some serious health issues.

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I’ve been doing a lot of Information Architecture (IA) work for clients over the past few months, and each time, I can’t help but think, “Why didn’t we do this sooner?” Though I know the answer to that question before it’s even a twinkle in my brain’s fiber-optic nerve cell ending’s eye. It’s the same old song and dance, really.

The clients come to us and they just want to get optimized. They want rankings. They want action, not reports. So we give them what they want, optimize their pages and get results.

Some of these clients have been with us for years. So… why now? Why, after all this time, do we need to work on the site’s IA? If they are successful and happy, why change what ain’t broke?

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Yeah, yeah, the search engines are getting smarter about duplicate content… blah, blah, blah. It’s no longer the problem it once was… yada, yada, yada. Google will get it all sorted out for you.

Whatevs.

I don’t care how smart the search engines are, it’s no excuse for laziness. Sure, a maid may clean up your living room for you, but that’s no excuse to ask them to wipe your…, er, mouth, too.

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