Posts Tagged ‘Search Engines’

In my last post, I talked about training your text to “engage”, “inform”, “speak” (call to action), and “convert”. The first step is to make sure the content doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. In this post, I’ll provide some of the tricks you can teach your content; training it how to do all of these things by making it skim-able, scan-able and provide exits to where the visitor needs to go next.

Teaching tricks the audience likes

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Remember the movie Old School with Vince Vaughn and Will Farrell? Yeah, me neither. That’s because, while I’m sure the movie has some funny scenes, it just didn’t have the staying power of, say… Tommy Boy. Of course Tommy Boy had a very distinct advantage out of the gate… it didn’t star Will Farrell. You really can’t come back from that kind of thing.

In the SEO world there is “old school” and then there is “old school SEO nonsense”. In case you haven’t figured it out, in my world, the “old school SEO nonsense” stars Will Farrell. In your world, it might star Colin Farrell, Lindsay Lohan, or the entire cast of Big Bang Theory–all viable alternatives.

Like the actors noted above, “old school SEO nonsense” gets a lot of buzz, but underneath the surface, there just isn’t anything there. People are drawn to it like a mosquito to a bug light because it feels safe. It looks easy. It’s simplicity wrapped in a complexity. But, in the end, it’s hollow, useless, and generally leaves you feeling a little bit ripped off.

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So, you’ve come to realize that there’s a whole Display Network out there through Google AdWords that, if utilized correctly, will take your online business to new heights.  But, you’ve also realized that’s a big “if utilized correctly.”  You may have been burned by the Display Network before (formerly called the Content Network).  Maybe you just jumped right into AdWords because you knew you wanted more traffic for your site.  You heard how easy it was to get it by whipping up a few keywords that were relevant to what you were offering and by writing a few ads to entice the searchers to your site.  Then, since you were never taught that the Search and Display networks operate by completely different rules, you went ahead and turned them both on and started getting more traffic.

Man, getting traffic can be so easy…. and dangerous to your bottom line.  The truth is, there is an art and science to getting traffic just like any other vocation.  It takes skill and knowledge to be successful.  So, when it comes to utilizing the Display Network, you need to gather the knowledge that is going to enable you to use the tool correctly to accomplish your goals.

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Keyword research is a funny thing. You can gain a lot of knowledge about what words people use when searching on the engines, but it tells very little about what a person wants when they search using a particular keyword or phrase. The intent behind the search is the missing component, and I don’t know of any keyword tools that get far enough inside the searcher’s heads to know what exactly the searcher’s intent is.

Many people, when performing keyword research, look primarily at the search volume of a phrase and whether the phrase appears relevant to what they do or sell. On that analysis alone keywords are chosen or rejected.

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People who believe that SEO is the devil’s work have a point. Such proclaimers can stand side by side with those who say lawyers are bad, non-christian music is demonic and TV rots the brain. Sure, outlawing lawyers may make the world a better place, Miley Cyrus is corrupting our adulthood and you clearly must have had an overdose of PBS in order to enjoy Glee.

But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. Lawyers do a lot of good, Bon Jovi is still releasing good albums and shows like Lost and Battlestar Galactica make TV one of the singular enjoyments of life. To lump all SEO into the “evil” category is to completely disregard the benefit SEO brings to the web.

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The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Building Links

There are a lot of different approaches to building links. The different types of links discussed in the previous post in this series can gain you links in various degrees of goodness. But like most things, quick-fix solutions rarely ever provide excellent long-term value. That’s not to say quick fix solutions aren’t sometimes needed or warranted, but they rarely make a good long-term investment.

A link only has a certain amount of value, much like the value of a casual acquaintance. But like a true friendship, a link relationship goes much further and has a lot more potential.

The concept of building links is best when it’s focused on building relationships. You’ve heard it said, “give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.” In the same way, build a link and you get a link. Build a relationship and you get a lifetime of links.

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The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Link Analysis Progression

I said in my last post that each link is essentially a vote for the page that’s being linked to. That, essentially, was the original link analysis factors. Things have come a long way since then. Today’s link analysis factors are far more complex.

Over the years what gets analyzed as part of the link has changed in order to provide better search results to web users.

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The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

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.

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A little over a year ago I wrote an article about how sometimes you have to break a website in order to fix it. This isn’t always the case in SEO but there are those situations where a site is so bad that you pretty much need to burn it to the ground before you can build it right.

The other day I reviewed a site that confirmed this premise. It wasn’t a bad looking site on the surface but once you looked into the architecture a bit you found problems compiling on top of problems. Nothing short of demolishing the entire site and building it from the ground up would allow it to gain any traction in the search engines.

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Since movies can wait 10 or 20 years to produce a sequel, I thought that it wouldn’t be so out of sorts writing a sequel to a post from 2002. Back then, Google was the rising star, there was a lot more competition in search and GoTo dominated the PPC market. Only a few things have changed since then.

Six years ago I wrote a post about what I wanted from Christmas from the search engines. I thought it would be a good time to revisit what I asked for back then, whether it happened or not, whether I really wanted it (20/20 hind site) and perhaps ask for a few new things.

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