Small Business SEO – Episode 3

On-page SEO

If you’ve read and applied the info from the previous article, you are now the proud owner of an exact match domain (EMD) for your main keyword; this will give you a good boost in front of your competitors. I have websites that rank on the first Google page just because they’re EMDs, without needing more than a few pages of content and a dozen of quality backlinks, so if you choose the other route you’ve been warned in advance!

But what should you do if you plan to target (let’s say) 10 different keywords? Should you buy 10 different domains? And what should you do if you simply love your trusty ole website and you don’t want to get rid of it? I’ve been there, so I can totally understand what you feel; in fact, I still have a few ancient websites that aren’t EMDs, like this one, and yet they rank on the first page for their keywords, like this one.

Want to keep your old website? Then the closest you can get to an EMD is to put the keyword name in the html file name. If you plan to get some results out of your SEO efforts, make sure to use plain html files for your website pages (or WordPress blogs – Google loves them!) and name them this way:

my-first-keyword.html
my-second-keyword.html

for example:

buy-cheap-solar-panels.html

if you are targeting the “buy cheap solar panels” keyword. This will allow you to go after many keywords without having to buy lots of EMDs and will save you a lot of time because you won’t have to maintain dozens of websites. Nevertheless, if you have found an EMD for your dream keyword, one that has a great commercial value, a big monthly search volume and a decent competition, then go and buy it right now!

OK, so what are the rules when it comes to on-page SEO? I’ll start with the well-known ones, and then move on to secrets that the masters prefer to keep for themselves; this proves that I am not a master, but I guess that I can live with that

1. Your keyword must be included in the URL / file name; we’ve discussed this a few paragraphs above.

2. The keyword must be included in the “title” tag; the title should start with your keyword, and not with the name of your company. Here are a few examples:

Buy cheap solar panels – ideal version
Buy cheap solar panels | Solar Solutions LLC – this version works OK
Solar Solutions LLC | Buy cheap solar panels – not a great one
Solar Solutions LLC – the title doesn’t include the keyword in the title (a terrible mistake!)

The total length of the characters inside the title tag shouldn’t exceed 64 characters (fewer are always better). Use pipes or dashes to separate the keywords; here’s what I use for my title tag on this website:

<title>Full Internet Marketing Service – Randombyte</title>

3. Your keyword must be included in the “description” tag. Since the content of the “description” tag will be visible in the search engine results, you want this tag to include some info that will make the people click your link. The good news is that the description tag can have up to 150 characters; here’s what I use for this website:

<meta name=”description” content=”Full Internet Marketing Service for companies of any size. Guaranteed page1 Google results.” />

4. Your keyword / related keywords must be included in the “keywords” tag. This tag used to work wonders in the past, but now Google ignores it; nevertheless, some of the less-known search engines still take it into account to a certain degree, so placing your keyword(s) in the “keywords” tag can’t hurt.

<meta name=”keywords” content=”full internet marketing service” />

5. Your keyword must be included in the H1, H2 and H3 tags; if you can’t / don’t want to use H2 and H3, make sure to put the keyword at least in the H1 tag. People are sometimes scared by the huge size of the default H1 tag font, but this can be easily changed through a small, simple css file – ask your webmaster to help you with that if you can’t do it by yourself. Here’s what I use:

<h1>Full Internet Marketing Service</h1>

6. Each website page must include at least an image; make sure to name it your-keyword.jpg and set its “alt” tag to your keyword.

7. The website pages should have at least 500… 600 words of great content. If you can, try to come up with quality content that has a length of 800… 1200 words.

8. Keyword density. Your keyword must appear in the text body several times; the ideal keyword density is somewhere in the 1…4% range. This means that if your website page has 800 words, the keyword should repeat at least 8 times in the body. Make sure to place the keyword at the beginning of the page and close to its end.

9. Incorporate LSI (latent semantic index) keywords in your page; fire up Google’s Keyword / AdWords tool, search for your keyword and you’ll see the related (LSI) keywords below it in the “keyword ideas” section. Use some of these keywords along with your main keyword; Google sees them as being related to your keyword, so it will be able to understand what your website page is about much easier.

10. Bold and italicize your keyword at least once. Some SEO experts recommend underlining the keyword as well, but I have a feeling that Google doesn’t like that, because it makes the visitors think that you’ve got useless hyperlinks on your page and Google values the user experience a lot lately.

11. Make sure to add fresh content to your site on a regular basis; blogging is a great way to add more and more pages to your website without doing a lot of work. Another option is to set up and maintain a forum; each new thread will become a new website page, thus boosting your authority.

12. Interlink your website pages whenever it is appropriate. As an example, if you mention that you have written an article about losing followers on Twitter, make sure to include the link to it. Learn from Wikipedia; they do it perfectly and it shows in the search engines.

13. Some of the SEO gurus also recommend linking out to an authority site, but I didn’t see any measurable results with this. If you post a link like that, make sure the page you’re linking to is related to your page / keyword and is hosted on a neutral website like Wikipedia (don’t link to one of your competitors!)

This is pretty much it! We’ve covered all the important on-page SEO factors, so you should now be able to tweak your website until you squeeze the maximum benefits out of each and every page.

 

Small Business SEO – Episode 2

Competition research

As you might remember from our first episode, a winning keyword has, in this order:

a) A good commercial value;

b) Low competition;

c) A good amount of traffic.

We’ve already discussed two different strategies that will allow us to pick keywords with a good commercial value. We also want our keywords to have a low competition; it’s quite clear that since you run your own business, you don’t have too much free time at your disposal, so you can’t overpower knowledgeable SEO teams that are working at this 8… 10 hours per day. Not to worry, we are going to learn how to pick a keyword that has a low competition, and at the same time a decent traffic volume.

Picking a set of keywords with low competition is also good because you’re going to see good results much faster; you might need many months of work in order to get a first page result for very competitive keywords, not to mention that you might spend years chasing a certain keyword without being able to get a good rank for it. Once again, having your website on the 5th Google page for a very competitive keyword isn’t a good result at all; I’d rather have the first Google spot for a keyword that has a much lower competition.

Let’s take a practical example: business A targets a low competition keyword that only has 1,000 searches / month and a few months later it gets the #1 spot for keyword abc, while business B targets a much more difficult keyword that has 100,000 searches per month and several months later is stuck at #42 for keyword xyz. Now which one of these businesses will sell more? The #1 spot gets about 40% of all the clicks, so business A will be getting about 400 prospects per month, while business B will only get about 5 visits per month (maybe less!) for that high traffic keyword.

Crucial rule: always pick a fight that you can win; otherwise, you are going to lose a lot of time and money and you won’t be able to get good results. Target a keyword with a low competition, or prepare to invest a lot of effort (or money) into SEO; getting a position on the 3rd results page is pretty much useless these days, unless we’re talking about keywords with HUGE search volumes. If you run a small business and want to take care of SEO by yourself, don’t go after difficult keywords that have much more than 3,000 searches / month; if you follow my advice and manage to get your website into one of the top 3 slots you’re going to get more than enough targeted traffic.

Now that we got that out of the way, how do we assess the competition? Google’s keyword tool also includes a “competition” column, but I wouldn’t trust those results – sometimes they are way off! We’re going to use Google itself for our research. We want to discover a long tail keyword, a phrase that consists of 3 or more words, because it will be easier to get a good rank for it and at the same time we will get highly targeted traffic that is most likely to convert.

We don’t want a keyword with a huge monthly search volume, because we can’t beat those SEO specialists at their own game, right? Let’s imagine that an innocent small business owner sells bags and wants to get a top Google rank for “bags”. Here’s the search volume for several related keywords:

a) bags = 11,100,000 searches / month

b) leather bags = 201,000 searches / month

c) cheap leather bags = 2,400 searches / month

d) cheap ladies leather bags = 46 searches / month

I can tell you for sure that our innocent fellow won’t be able to get a good rank for “bags”; in addition to this, even if he’d be able to do that by hiring a strong SEO team, he would get lots of visitors that aren’t actually interested in his products – we want to make sure that we’ve got a buying keyword here, something that will make our visitors use their credit cards right away.

Now what keyword should we pick from the list above? We could probably dominate “cheap ladies leather bags”, but even a #1 Google results spot would only bring us about 20 visitors / month (40% of the monthly clicks, remember?). In this case, the ideal keyword to target is “cheap leather bags” and we’re going to see if we’ve got a winner (or not) right away, using a simple method that works very well.

If you’ve read the 1st episode, you know that “cheap leather bags ” is a keyword with a great commercial value – there are AdWords everywhere! The number of results returned by Google isn’t too encouraging, though; we’ve got over 8 million competing pages! Let’s move on to the following step; search Google using the same keyword, but this time put some quotes around it, like this: “cheap leather bags”.

These quotation marks will help us see which one of the competing pages contain all the enclosed words in exactly that order. We’re still getting close to 2 million competing pages, so the things don’t look that good. Let’s move on to the final step of our research using the “allintitle” operator:

The “allintitle” operator will tell Google to display only the web pages that have the “cheap leather bags” text (without the quotes) in their title, which means that those particular web pages were optimized especially for this keyword. We want to have a maximum of 10,000 competing pages here, so getting 170,000 competing pages is a sign that we should definitely step off.

OK, so now we’re in a position where we have discovered that even though our small business produces cheap leather bags, we don’t have too many chances to get a good rank for this keyword. What can be done about it? The easiest solution to the problem is to run as many keywords that are related to what we’re selling through Google’s keyword tool, and then pick another related keyword that has a decent search volume and run the tests above using the new keyword until we get a winner. I’ll use another technique this time, though; simply paste one of the keyword in Microsoft Word or another text editor that has a built-in synonym dictionary, and then let’s try and replace one or more of those words and run them through the same steps as above.

Word has returned “inexpensive”, “economical” and “discounted” as plausible synonyms for “cheap”, so I have fired up Google’s keyword tool again and got the corresponding search volumes:

a) inexpensive leather bags = 4,400 searches / month;

b) economical leather bags = 0 searches / months (not necessarily zero, but definitely lower than 100 searches / month);

c) discounted leather bags = 880 searches / month;

The “inexpensive leather bags” keyword has a good search volume and returns 4.5 million competing pages without using the quotes, but only 27,100 competing pages in quotes. And the good news doesn’t stop here: the “allintitle” operator gives us only 625 results, so this keyword might have a lot of potential.

I didn’t see any domain name containing our keyword (like http://www.inexpensiveleatherbags.com) in Google’s results page – this is definitely a good sign! Let’s point our browser to http://instantdomainsearch.com/ and paste the keyword in the textbox that’s close to the top of the page.

I knew it! All these domains are available and if we’re buying one of them (.com if possible, but .net and even .org will do) we are definitely maximizing our chances to get a top 3 place for our keyword. Before buying one (or all) of these domains, though, we will want to look at our main competitors’ websites; we want to stay away from huge, authority websites like Wikipedia, About.com, and so on. Go and visit each website on the first Google results page, install the Google toolbar and then check its PageRank value – I’d stay away from websites with a home page PR value of 5 or more.

The competing page might have a much lower PR (even zero), but if the home page has a big PR value it’s a sign of potential danger. I’m not saying that you can’t beat PR5+ pages; I have seen PR0 beating PR7 pages several times. Nevertheless, you are going to have to put a lot of effort into it or to hire a great SEO company in order to overpower the authority websites.

Install the toolbar, and then make sure to check the “PageRank” checkbox in Google toolbar’s options; you will then be able to see the PageRank value of any web page by simply visiting it and moving the mouse over the small, green, horizontal bar that appears at the top of the screen.

Check your main competitors’ websites looking for weakness signs: websites that look like they’ve been thrown together quickly, pages without too much text on them, ancient content, and so on. I have to admit that your intuition will play an important part too. If all sounds well, snatch the domain and pat yourself on the back – you definitely deserve it!

Small Business SEO – Episode 1

Allow me to start by introducing myself: I’m George Pirvu, CEO and owner of Randombyte, a small Internet Marketing company that has had the privilege of working for big companies such as General Motors, as well as the privilege of working for small business owners and seeing their Google ranks improve greatly and thus their profit increase exponentially. This is the first episode in my 100% free “Small Business SEO” article series; I plan to teach the small business owners that have some free time at their disposal how to get their websites to the first Google results page – something I’ve been doing for all my clients until now.

Google Instant (Google’s predictive search) was launched last year and it has changed the SEO game dramatically; very few people go beyond the first search results page now, so if your website can’t be found there it’s pretty much useless. Before Google Instant, most SEO specialists would have told you that even a result on the 3rd Google page is good enough; sadly, this isn’t the case anymore, because most people prefer to refine their search if they can’t find what they’re looking for on the first Google page, instead of checking out the following results pages.

So how do you manage to get your website on the first Google search results page? It all comes down to picking the winning keywords and following the exact strategy I’m going to outline in this article series. And while you might not be able to beat the top SEO teams that have budgets of tens of thousands of dollars per month, you can definitely get many more customers by targeting the keywords that have a lower competition.

In fact, a winning keyword needs to have, in this order:

a) A good commercial value;

b) Low competition;

c) A good amount of traffic.

a) Good commercial value. The winning keywords should always be buying keywords, search words or phrases that are used by people who are interested in buying your products. Here’s a quick example of a non-buying keyword: I was approached by a photographer from New York a while ago; she was interested in having her name come up first in Google and she was pretty upset because the #1 spot was taken by a guy who had a similar, but (obviously) not an identical name with her. I asked if she was a famous photographer, which would have explained why a lot of people would be searching for her name, and she’s told me that she was only starting out this photography-related business, so none of her potential clients would have known her name. As you can probably guess, “New York photographer” would have been a much better, buying keyword.

The story above might sound a bit funny to some of you, but trust me – this happens most of the time! An entrepreneur will found a company named (let’s say) “Pure Power Lighting Appliances”, and then he will be happy to discover that his website ranks #1 in Google whenever he searches for “pure power lighting appliances”. Sadly, nobody is using that search phrase to buy lighting appliances, so despite its #1 Google rank, the website is pretty much useless.

So how do you find keywords that have a good commercial value? The easiest method is to simply type the keywords that feel right to you into Google’s search box, and then see if there are any AdWords ads (sponsored Google results) for those particular keywords – the more ads you see, the better. Just take a look at the example below:

It’s clear that this particular keyword has got a lot of attention from the business owners that sell solutions to stop dog barking; they wouldn’t invest their precious money without making sure that they’re going to get a greater return on their investment.

An even better method is to Google “google adwords keyword tool” (without using the quotes) and then click the relevant link, which should be near the top of the page – this should open up Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool, a website that looks just like the one in the picture below. The exact address might change at some point (it did in the past), but this link should work fine at least for now: Google AdWords Keyword Tool

This website will allow us to find out the average cost-per-click value, the average amount of money paid by the business owners for each visitor that clicks their website links. The CPC value isn’t displayed by default, so make sure to click the “Columns” button at the right side of the screen, and then check the “Estimated Avg. CPC” checkbox and hit the “Save” button, just like I did in the picture below.

A new column named “Estimated Avg. CPC”  will be added to the Keyword Tool. Now you can type in the keywords that interest you (one per line), fill in the captcha code (the weird looking letters that prevent the automated programs from taking advantage of Google’s tool) and then press the “Search” button to display the results; you should see something that looks like this.

Crucial Tip: make sure to select the [Exact] checkbox from the Match types section of the left side column; otherwise, the search volumes will be irrelevant.

You can sort the information by clicking any of the column headers at any time, but in my example you can see right away (without doing any sorting) that we’ve got some poor performers, keywords with CPC values that start at only 0.05$. I have to admit that I have added that particular, non-buying keyword – “dog barking concert” on purpose; who would want to pay money for something like that? Well, now that I think about it, this might be an interesting idea, so if you decide to pursue it and organize a dog barking concert please make sure to send me an invitation.

Back to our keyword research: the most important thing on our research list is to make sure that all our keywords have a good commercial value. A good CPC rate will tell us that other business owners are willing to pay their hard earned money in order to get their websites displayed on Google’s first page when people are searching for those particular keywords. You might want to stay away from the keywords that have the highest CPC value, though, because these ones will have a big competition most of the time.

That’s all for now! Stand by for the 2nd episode, when we will discuss about competition research. Meanwhile, if you have any questions or comments don’t hesitate to post them here and I’ll do my best to answer them all.

Twitter Marketing Strategies For Businesses

Twitter is a great tool when it comes to promoting your business online. If you don’t have a marketing strategy yet or want to improve the existing one, here’s what you can do if you want to be successful with Twitter:

1. Promote your company online:
- Increase your company’s visibility, allowing it to reach a much bigger audience.
- Find targeted customers and engage with them using personalized direct messages (no spamming). Make sure to check out their profiles before sending them a DM. Target the potential customers by location, age, sex, education, interests, etc.
- Post information about your company’s products.
- Broadcast your company’s latest news.
- Create conversations about your company using contests, surveys, discounts, etc.
- Get a better position in the search engine results pages (SERPs) using your Twitter account.
- Brand your company as the place to go to for the type of products or services that you are selling.

2. Care about your customers:
- Respond to your customers at an individual level, thus encouraging them to get involved.
- Build trust.
- Educate your customers using videos, images, etc.
- Offer public relations.
- Build loyalty; reward the loyal customers and the enthusiasts.
- Find out what your customers’ needs are and take care of them.
- Monitor and respond to customer service issues.

3. Help your company grow faster:
- Find influential people that can help your company grow.
- Find suppliers, connect with potential partners.
- Identify new market opportunities, develop new products.

4. Let the others know that your company is driven by human beings:
- Help other people.
- Cultivate relationships.
- Provide accurate information about your company.
- Post interesting pictures on Flickr and tweet links to them.
- Promote stories about your company’s employees, decisions, etc.

5. Offer value:
- Provide exclusive information about special events.
- Answer other people’s questions.
- Share 3rd party cool stuff (links, pictures, blog posts, etc).
- Give away precious information.
- Comment on other people’s tweets and retweet them if they are useful.
- Promote hot deals.
- Create online / offline meeting experiences.

6. Get value:
- Stay up-to-date with the industry news.
- Do market research.
- Collaborate with other companies.
- Follow keywords to improve your products and services.
- Learn about your competitors and the feedback they’re getting.
- Seek out interesting followers and get involved in their conversations.
- Learn about other people / companies you work with or might work with in the future.
- Get feedback.

7. Protect your company:
- Monitor, manage and protect your reputation.
- Solve the problems with unhappy customers quickly.
- Listen to your customers by monitoring keywords, brands and products.

Top 25 Ways to Beat the Blog Writer’s Block

I’ve always wanted to be a writer and one day, when I was about 10 years old, I took a brand new pen and a brand new notebook, feeling that just by picking these tools I had won half of the battle already. As time was passing by and the pages were still blank, the smile on my face was turning more and more into a frown. If you’ve also experienced the writer’s block, here are some ideas that will get your creative juices flowing.

1. Write down all your blog posts ideas as soon as you have them – they tend to disappear in only a few seconds.

2. Run a contest.

3. Write “How To” articles.

4. Get ideas from the top marketing experts, not necessarily from your industry, by subscribing to their newsletter; even well written spam messages can be useful sometimes

5. Find a theme, and then write a series of articles on that theme. As an example, you could “borrow” a top 10 list from the net (“Top 10 ways to be more productive”?) and then write 10 small blog posts (an item per post) instead of including them all in a large, boring, single blog post.

6. Write blog articles that respond to the news (not necessarily industry-related news).

7. Get inspired using an online idea generator. Just type “online idea generator” in Google’s search box and see what comes up.

8. Solicit guest articles.

9. Publish informational graphs or images.

10. Write down people’s questions on other blogs, and then write an article that answers them. Don’t forget to post a link to your article on those blogs.

11. Discuss new and innovative things in the industry.

12. Scan the best articles on the industry-related blogs, and then republish a paragraph or two from the original source, linking to the original article.

13. Compile a collection of resources and links on a subject.

14. Save all the comments from your visitors / customers to a text file, and then use them as ideas for new blog posts.

15. Visit a place you’ve never visited before (a park, a museum, etc) and then go back home and get blogging.

16. Post an interesting, intriguing photo and tell your readers all there is to know about it.

17. Interview an expert over email.

18. Mix things in the industry with fun stuff, like “What search engine would Snow White use and why?”

19. Read your competitors’ blogs.

20. Create lists such as this one – most people love them!

21. Run a random image search on Flickr.

22. Write down a few questions that a potential client would ask when considering your product, and then write a blog post that answers them. Have a friend or relative help you on this.

23. Ask questions on Twitter, etc and then use the answers to write your article.

24. Share one of your experiences (be it recent or not).

25. If all of the above fail, recycle previously written content.

Just make sure that the result of your work is great / funny / engaging / worthwhile / controversial – don’t make it too salesy.