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August 12, 2010
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Website SEO: Baseline performance snapshot, step 5

Although this step is not critical to increasing your search rankings, it’s very important to measuring your results down the road. You will have to know what works and what does not. The goal of this step is to create a starting point for measuring your SEO results.

First, let’s make sure you’ve got a website analytics installed. My first recommendation is Google Analytics. It’s free, simple to install (if you have access to edit pages on your site), very flexible and offers tones of insight into your website user behaviors. If you don’t have access to edit your pages, ask your webmaster. There are also companies like Squarespace that offer its own website statistics packages, so feel free to use those.

Second, you will want to create starting measurements of the following things. Of course, a new site will have all values = 0. But hey, 0 is a good starting point.

  • Website visitors (the simplest thing to track through any analytics package of your choice)
  • Number of pages on your website (check you sitemap.xml file)
  • Number of pages indexed by Google, Bing and Yahoo! (search: site:www.domain.com)
  • Number of links pointing to your pages / domain: there’s a few options here:
    • Google: links:www.domain.com
    • Check SEOmoz’s: Open Site Explorer tool
    • Yahoo! Site Explorer. Here are the steps: 1) explore your URL, 2) select inlinks button, 3) choose shot inlinks “except for this domain”.
  • Run your site though something like Website Grader, which is a free tool to check your overall website health. As a result of the check you will get an overall score (based on multiple dimensions). Just rerun the tool again in a month to see how you do.
  • Check to see your current search ranking for selected key phrases using tools like WebCEO and Raven Tool. Both tools have free trials / versions, so make sure you both check current status and recheck in a month. Choose one tool for long term work. Going back and forth between tools takes time and gets on your nerves.

Last but not the least, it’s important to have goals. Having a baseline snapshot and a monthly goal draws pretty much a straight line to success. If you don’t reach the goal by the end of the month, it’s ok. Any information is good information, because it makes you think about improvement. Tweak critical things and keep at it month after month.

August 11, 2010
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Website SEO: Search engine submission, step 4

By this point you should have thought about your product, engaged into keyword research, and implemented SEO changes on your pages. Let’s now look at what you need to do to let search engines know that your site is out there.

Website submission to search engines is no longer as critical as it used to be for one reason: the only engines you need to submit are Google, Bing and Yahoo! (and very soon it’s going to be just Google and Bing). And those engines have spiders that will visit your site if a currently indexed site is linking to one of your pages. However, there’s a few things to keep in mind to simplify life for search crawlers and speed up your indexation.

First, you will need to prepare your website for search engine submission. It’s very simple. You need to ensure that you have a sitemap.xml file in your root directory (i.e. domain.com/sitemap.xml). The sitemap.xml will tell crawlers the structure of your site in a language crawlers understand.

  • Let’s create the sitemap.xml  file using one of a great free XML sitemap services. Please note that this tool is deal for smaller sites. Large sites with 1000s of pages will need to pay for the services.
  • Once you got the sitemap generated, just drop it into your root directory. Once done, just check the result to make sure. Your sitemap (for search engines) should now be here: domain.com/sitemap.xml.

If you can drop the files into root directory you should be able to tweak pages as well. You will need this when verifying your website submission with search engines. You can do it one of two ways: insert a line of code inside <head></head> or drop a file into the root directory of your site (much like you did with sitemap.xml).

Second, once you have the sitemap.xml, it’s the time to let the search engines know who you are. Each of the major search engines has a Webmaster Central. That’s where webmasters talk to search engines. It’s a great idea to create an account with Google, Yahoo! and Bing so that you have access to their Webmaster areas. Submission process is pretty much the same for all 3 engines. Let’s take a look.

  • Google Webmaster Central: Google calls it a one-stop shop for webmaster resources that will help with your crawling and indexing questions, see keyword usage and traffic information relevant to your site. Once you get in, find the button “Add a site”, follow instructions. One separate step I recommend is submitting a sitemap. You can find the submission button inside “Site configuration > Sitemaps”.
  • Yahoo! Site Explorer: Does pretty much the same thing as Google. Click on “Submit your site” and follow the instructions. Again, submitting a sitemap.xml is a separate step that I recommend.
  • Bing Toolbox: Yet another version of a webmaster central. Looks slightly different, especially after a recent update, but the purpose is the same and functionality is similar.

Again, submitting sitemaps, registering with search engines is not necessary. Search engines will come on their own (if somebody that’s indexed links back to you). However, based on my experience, submitting sitemap.xml helps to speed up the process, and helps you get on the same page (speak the same language) with search engines. Additionally, there’s a plenty of intelligence you can pick up from those webmaster tools about your website performance in search engines.

Thanks for sticking around for this one. The next step is about setting up analytics and creating a baseline report. This will help measure your SEO results in the following months.

August 9, 2010
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Website SEO: Keyword research, step 2

Now that you have a list of terms gathered by brainstorming, talking to friends, customers, looking up online, let’s look at a few major components of the keyword research process.

Filter the keywords

The bigger the initial list the better. This will give you more variations of terms that refer to your product. Before you go into grouping the terms first make sure you eliminate all irrelevant terms. You can do it by running your list through tools like Google Keyword-based Search Tool.

It’s very likely that your initial bulk keyword list will be significantly shortened by the tool you use. That’s ok, just make sure that the keywords that are left are relevant to your business. Some tools like Wordtracker will give you suggestions on other relevant terms. Make sure you get through the list of recommended terms and only keep the most relevant to your product. Keep in mind that those terms should also have at least minimal approximate monthly searches number.

Group the keywords

By now you’ve cleaned you your initial keyword list. It’s the time to group the terms. In most cases your product has several variations / types / sub-products, etc. It’s helpful to divide your list into logical groups. For example, here’s one way of breaking the words into groups:

  • SEO Services: seo, search engine optimization, organic search, natural search, etc.
  • Paid search Services: ppc, paid search, adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, SEM, etc.
  • Email marketing Services: email templates, email management, email marketing, etc.

Once you have these logical groups, it helps to run those through a keyword research tool. This will allow you to determine the terms you want to focus for each product. For example, for SEO Services page, the focus will be SEO Services Calgary instead of search engine optimization Calgary.

Implementation document

Finally, once you have the focus terms for the pages, it’s time to prepare the SEO implementation document. First it helps you to keep things organized. Second, it helps to communicate your SEO strategy to a web developer who will be implementing some of the technical things.

Different SEO professional will have different format for the implementation document. Some will have it as a Word Document, some will use a spreadsheet. I use an OpenOffice Calc to prepare a spreadsheet. Here’s an example of a SEO implementation document I use.

I hope this gives a bit of a shape to your keyword research process. Next up is an article about implementing your SEO strategy on your website.

I can conduct keyword research for your website

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August 4, 2010
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Website SEO: Think about it, step 1

This is the first article in the series “Online marketing and SEO, launching a new site“. Today I want to talk about the first and the most crucial step in any SEO endeavor: think about your product and SEO.

Even before getting into keyword research, looking at the tools and trying to understand what people are searching for, it’s crucial to make sure you clearly understand what you’re selling. These are a few questions to ask yourself:

  1. What it is that I’m selling? What are the 3-4 word combinations that can clearly describe my product?
  2. Who’s my target market? What’s my target market’s decision making process?
  3. What are the companies that sell similar product? How are they referring to their product online?

Feel free to talk to a friend or colleague to come up with relevant terms for your product. However, don’t fall into a trap of thinking that people are using the terms that you would use. I will address this in my next post: Keyword Research. For now, the goal is to come up with a list of a few terms that describe your product according to you, your friend, your competition.

September 22, 2009
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Mumiy Troll 2009 Concert in Calgary

In 2008 I was involved in promoting the concert for Mumiy Troll in Calgary. Troika Entertainment, a Vancouver based event management company, got in touch with us at RussianHerald.com to help them promote an event in Calgary. Mumiy Troll was on a North American tour an Calgary could be one of the places the band could visit. As we were fans of the band, we decided that as a team we’ll through 100 hours of our time into promoting the concert in Calgary. The concert ended up being a success getting over 400 people in the room. Such attendance made it the biggest event of the decade for Russian-speaking Calgary.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine, Yuri Konik, mentioned that there’s another concert coming up and Calgary’s Union Events will be organizing it this time. Yuri asked for a bit of help in promoting the event. Now, having the experience of last year, it looks much easier to assess and plan the campaign. So, in cooperation with another good friend of mine, Nadezhda Sannikova, I agreed to help Union Events and my good friend Yuri by volunteering my time to promote the concert. We are into the online promo full speed. Updates will be coming in often, please stay tuned. I’ll try to prepare a marketing review of this campaign once it’s done.

SEO blog by Alex Zagoumenov

Hi, I'm Alex and I blog about online marketing matters including SEO, social media marketing and life in general. Feel free to browse, comment and connect!

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