They started off telling me that my website doesn’t meet Google and Yahoo’s guidelines. When I asked what those were I was transferred to the “research” department.

I spoke with a nice woman that proceeded to talk to me about meta tags and what information should be in them. She told me my title only showed my company name (apparently they missed the “Professional Search Engine Optimization & Marketing Solutions” that the title actually reads) so I asked her to show me. She walked me through how to view source and find the title.

I honestly don’t know what she was looking at but it wasn’t my title. Or my description or keywords. I asked for a screenshot of what she was looking at but lost my opportunity when I finally disclosed that I was an SEO company.

That’s when I was told I didn’t know the first thing about SEO.

But I learned something today. It seems that, according to her the book SEO for Dummies says title tag isn’t supposed to be a sentence. Never heard that one before, but perhaps its telling that she is referencing a book meant for SEO idiots.

After she hung up because I was being unreasonable in trying to explain how title tags were supposed to work, I visited their website. Maybe there’s something to this whole title tag business. Afterall, according to their home page they can get me ranked on AllTheWeb, HotBot, WebCrawler and Excite! Cutting edge stuff here folks!

Now, I can remember to shower and brush my teeth most mornings (I sometimes forget on rainy weekends when I plan to stay indoors.) But when it comes to things that I don’t do on an absolute daily basis, well, a checklist helps me to stay organized.

Google
November: 53.18%
October: 52.63%
Change: +0.55

January 2008: 52.14%
Change: +1.04

Yahoo
November: 8.98%
October: 8.97%
Change: +0.01

January 2008: 10.94%
Change: -1.96

MSN
November: 4.41%
October: 4.49%
Change: -0.08

January 2008: 5.78%
Change: -1.37

AOL
November: 1.74%
October: 1.75%
Change: -0.01

January 2008: 1.86%
Change: -0.12

ASK
November: .78%
October: .78%
Change: +0.00

January 2008: 1.09%
Change: -0.31

Data scoring techniques tend to change over time making past data inaccurate. As always, information here is for entertainment purposes only.

Source: Net Applications

Google
October: 63.1%
September: 62.9%
Change: +0.2

January 2008: 58.5%
Change: +4.6

Yahoo
October: 20.5%
September: 20.2%
Change: +0.3

January 2008: 22.2%
Change: -1.7

MSN
October: 8.5%
September: 8.5%
Change: 0.0

January 2008: 9.8%
Change: -1.3

ASK
October: 4.2%
September: 4.3%
Change: -0.1

January 2008: 4.5%
Change: -0.3

AOL
October: 3.7%
September: 4.1%
Change: -0.4

January 2008: 4.9%
Change: -1.2

Data scoring techniques tend to change over time making past data inaccurate. As always, information here is for entertainment purposes only.

Source: comScore

Take time to get all the facts; conjecture leads to crisis.

There are two sets of facts that you need to have before moving forward with any type of SEO strategy or fix. The first is understanding what the problems with the site are, and the second is knowing what can or cannot be done to fix them.

Google
October: 61.2%
September: 59.7%
Change: +1.5

January 2008: 56.9%
Change: +4.3

Yahoo
October: 16.9%
September: 18.1%
Change: -1.2

January 2008: 19.0%
Change: -2.1

MSN
October: 11.4%
September: 11.8%
Change: -0.4

January 2008: 12.1%
Change: -0.7

ASK
October: 2.3%
September: 2.2%
Change: +0.1

January 2008: 2.4%
Change: -0.1

AOL
October: 4.3%
September: 4.1%
Change: +0.2

January 2008: 4.7%
Change: -0.4

Data scoring techniques tend to change over time making past data inaccurate. As always, information here is for entertainment purposes only.

Source: Nielsen Online

Last week I presented a two part series of questions that SEOs and clients must ask themselves in order to work together to create a successful optimization campaign. Each of those questions could have been posed of anybody for any situation. But by looking at each specifically in the context of SEO we were able to create a thought process that allows for specific application of those questions in the SEO / client relationship.

Today I want to take a set of guidelines about making good decisions and apply them to the SEO and business success environment. Every day SEOs and business owners looking for ways to improve their online exposure are faced with dozens of decisions. Any one of these decisions can breath life into a dying SEO campaign, push a successful campaign to greater success, or cause a site to crash and burn in the search results.

Here are the first five of ten decision-making guidelines that’ll help you rock your SEO and SEM campaigns to success.

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.

And then since 15 summaries is too much for anyone to deal with, I’m just going to give you the takeaways from my favorite sessions.

PPC Engine Vendor Panel

If you’ve ever been to any conference, you’ve at one time or another sat in on a vendor panel. And typically, I think the feeling is that if you’ve been to one, you’ve been to them all and there’s no point in attending another one. Well, with PPC it’s always nice to get an update on what might be new in each. For example last year I was excited to hear first hand (before any blogs posted about it) how MSN adCenter were releasing their keyword tool to integrate with Excel (07). Cool stuff.

This year I got excited to learn some stats from the Ask.com rep Dustin Kwan. He emphasized the importance of spreading your presence across a variety of vendors. He mentioned how Ask has a larger percent of the search traffic over MSN, saying that 2/3 of searchers don’t use MSN, and of those, 1/2 of them don’t use Google. Interesting point, and something to consider for my clients who are looking for more presence in the search world.

Yahoo Search Marketing rep Patrizio Spagnoletto told us how Yahoo have fine tuned their geo-targeting down to the zip code, which having that ability is pretty cool.

AdWords rep Frederick Vallayes mentioned something new in the Geo Reports, that you can find where clicks are coming from. Important information to have, helps you fine tune your geo targeting. Why pay for advertising and clicks in regions that don’t convert as well? Or with this information, create a geo-targeted campaign and spend more money in the regions that convert well.

Not much of a takeaway from MSN adCenter rep Doug (last name??) beyond his focus on improving ROI using 3 metrics of Market Change/Technology/Knowledge. He did recommend the following @adCenterBlog on twitter and staying current with adCenterCommunity.com

Navigating the Complex World of PPC Engines

The big take away here is Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance, she’s just totally awesome every time I hear her speak. She gave us a big list of copy “secrets that sell” … excellent take aways, easy to follow, easy to implement.

The big bullets that I grabbed (although I did get her entire list) are:

• Know what differentiates your ad
• Provide incentive to click
• Talk about benefits
• Use psychology - add humor and get their attention
• Use DKI - when it works
• A/B test your ads
• Pre-qualify clicks with ad text to eliminate those unwanted clicks

Top-Secret Tools of the Trade

This session was great - I have a list of tools to check out. Some of which I have seen and used, but there are others that I’ve not so I’m interested in looking into them further. I’ve recently found analytics to be FUN to play with. I want to check out Caphyon and DupeCop

Fun Stuff

Had some time to do fun stuff in Vegas too, including walking blisters into the soles of my feet … Spent a bunch of money, did the roller coaster at NY NY, the rides on the Stratosphere, and saw the Cirque du Soleil, KÀ. Even taught a friend how to lose money gambling. Ye ha!

That wraps up the wrap up … until next year…

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ll be giving my presentation on Website Architecture, that I’ve presented twice now for SBMU. Or rather I’ll be presenting two of it’s three parts. Gotta leave time for Q&A! Other topics include Local Search, Blogging for Business, Web Security and User Interface Design. We’ll also have the pleasure of hearing a Keynote address by Jennifer Laycock.

Cost for the one-day event is $129, however if you’re looking for discounts both Matt McGee and Jennifer Laycock have what you need.

WebmasterWorld PubCon

After Learn About Web, I’ll be flying out of Kennewick to Seattle and catching a flight directly to Las Vegas. This will be my third year attending PubCon, second speaking. PubCon is filled with speakers from every area of our industry covering six unique tracks and 84 sessions, not including daily keynotes, all packed into a remarkable 3-day conference.

I’ll be speaking on Tuesday, on the Keyword Research panel. I’ll be providing the powerpoint version of my Keyword Research and Selection series of blog posts. There will be other great speakers on the same panel including Ken Jurina, Larry Mersman and Wil Reynolds. Wednesday I’ll be on on a Site Review panel with Andy Langton, Robert Charlton and Brant Bukowsky.

If you’re interested attending you can get 20% off the $1299 full event pass by using the following code: de-54820

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.

Google
September: 59.7%
August: 60.0%
Change: -0.3

January 2008: 56.9%
Change: +2.8

Yahoo
September: 18.1%
August: 18.1%
Change: +0.7

January 2008: 19.0%
Change: -0.9

MSN
September: 11.8%
August: 10.7%
Change: +1.1

January 2008: 12.1%
Change: +0.5

ASK
September: 2.2%
August: 2.0%
Change: +0.2

January 2008: 2.4%
Change: -0.2

AOL
September: 4.1%
August: 5.2%
Change: -1.1

January 2008: 4.7%
Change: -0.6

Data scoring techniques tend to change over time making past data inaccurate. As always, information here is for entertainment purposes only.

Source: Nielsen Online

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

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.

How to find search phrases

I’ll continue where I left off last week, looking at the different factors involved in finding relevant search phrases. You’ll remember that we discussed the first three; Time, research and deletion. The fourth factor is a bit more involved and it has to do with analyzing the phrases in a bit more detail.

The split / combo factor

Depending on your keywords, a search for any particular core term may produce results ranging from 0 to 1000 different keyword search phrases. Obviously if it produces zero then that core term can likely be scrubbed, or maybe set aside for a day if/when it gains in search popularity. If you’ve broken down your core terms correctly you will usually get a list between 10-300 keyword phrases returned, but again, this varies by industry and term. In the real world, things don’t always work out like we hope.

If you’ve ever doubted that buying additional domain names solely to protect your brand then this post is for you.

Years ago we went buy the name Pole Position Web. Then we re-branded as Pole Position Marketing. I wanted to go with “marketing” instead of “SEO” because I needed a name that better represented our focus on website architecture, usability SEO and PPC.

All things considered, I should have bought the SEO domain name anyway.

Recently a new company sprang up working out of the UK that was using the name–you guessed it–Pole Position SEO.

That’s not the worst of it.

We recently found out they were sending spam emails as part of their link building efforts.

That’s STILL not the worst of it.

A few days ago we found ourselves on a span list that was suddenly preventing some of our emails from getting to the recipients.

So now we have to go into damage control to ensure that our name is not being associated with this companies’ spam efforts.

So if you haven’t quite caught on that buying up additional domains to protect your company brand is smart business, maybe this post will get you to rethink that. Domains only cost $10/year at the most. Small price to pay for brand protection.

Phase II

What is a search phrase?

Before we go any further, let’s discuss the difference between a core term and a search phrase. For the purpose of this document a core term and search phrase are similar in that both will be searched and both can provide potential traffic to your site. Core terms, represent a broader topic while the search phrases are simply core terms with added qualifiers, therefore representing a narrower focus. Both core terms and search phrases will be optimized into your website to drive traffic and hopefully, be instrumental in generating strong conversion rates.

In the research process each core term will be used to uncover dozens, if not hundreds of search phrases which collectively will bring in the bulk of your targeted traffic.

Four factors of core term prioritization

By now you should have several dozen or more core terms documented on your spreadsheet. The question is, what to do with all of these keywords. Before moving on to Phase II you’ll first need to prioritize your core terms a bit. In the next phase you’ll start digging deeper into each core term to find the relevant search phrases it produces. Instead of taking the shotgun approach, you can go at deliberately, starting the the core terms that provide you with the best opportunities and will have a more immediate impact on your optimization campaign.

There are four different factors that you need to analyze in determining the relative importance of each core term:

Yesterday I discussed three steps in finding core terms: looking through your website, brainstorming, and then scouring your competitors’ websites. These three steps can give you a wealth of information and you’ll uncover some very important core terms. If you missed yesterday’s post, that quickie recap above doesn’t do it justice so be sure to go back and read. Today I’ll finish up with the steps in core term research before concluding phase one of our keyword research process tomorrow.

Step 4: Use keyword research tools

Site owners often begin the research process by first going to the available tools. There are numerous keyword research tools available and it really doesn’t matter which tool or tools you use, so long as you’re getting the results you need. Since every tool is slightly different it’s a good idea to use multiple tools to ensure you’re getting a wide range of data.

But you can’t really use these tools effectively–or to their fullest potential–until you have some information in which to actually research out, which we’ve covered int he first three steps of core term research. In this step we want to take core terms that we’ve already discovered and plug them into the tools to help us find core terms that have still remained elusive.

How to Find Core Terms

In Part II of this series we defined what a core term is. Today I’ll show you the research steps involved in finding good, strong core terms that will be the basis for the rest of our research, and provide us some actionable intelligence that will be used throughout the keyword research process.

It’s very important that during this core term discovery phase that you don’t give up too early. There is never a point where you have too many core terms or “enough” to work with. To stop researching before you have uncovered just about every possible core term can leave you handicapped in not only the rest of your research, but also in the success of your optimization efforts.

I should also point out that keyword research isn’t a one-time process. No matter how hard you try to be as thorough as possible, you simply won’t uncover everything right now. That’s OK. As time goes on and new core terms come to mind, or search patterns change, continue to add these new core term ideas to your lists to be researched and optimized in the proper time.

Phase I: Finding Core Terms

When most people start with the task of researching keywords they often start by looking for keywords they are familiar with. They’ll use their familiarity with their products or services to find new word variations, maybe a few new relevant words, or even learn some new ways of phrasing what it is people are looking for. While this approach provides valuable information to the researcher, it’s somewhat disorganized.

Because keyword research is so crucial, a more organized approach to it is essential. Instead of starting the research process looking for words you essentially already know but are just in an unknown order, you must start the process looking for what is unknown. In order to find those unknown phrases, you have to start with a foundation that will guide you from where you are to what it is that you’re trying to find, a list of keywords that can be optimized into your site.

The keyword research process starts not looking for search phrases, but core terms that are the foundation of what your site, or specific pages of your site, is all about. Let’s start by defining what a core term is.