online marketing

A friend of mine, Ernest Barbaric, (Congratulations, Ernest!) has just re-launched a website and asked me about tools he should use and steps he should take to tweak up the new site. We had a conversation with a few messages back and forth. This series of posts is a result of that conversation. Here are a few things to keep in mind when approaching SEO for a new / re-designed website. These are general steps that I've tried, tested, improved. Please note that this is a general process, and I will go into specifics of each step in future posts.

Think about your product

The key in search engine optimization is simple: think about it. Think about your product and how people could refer to it. Brainstorm a few combinations. Ask friends, colleagues, clients, partners, vendors. As a result you'll come up with a list of 5-10 key phrases. SEO Tools: paper & pencil, or white board and a marker. Some of you may want to start a spreadsheet. It may be useful down the road.

Do some keyword research

Once you have a list of those approximate terms it's time to look at what people are actually searching for. Use tools that are usually provided by major search engines themselves for free. First, test the terms that you've brainstormed to see if people are searching for those. Look at other keyword phrases recommended by the tools. The goals here are to 1) select the most relevant terms, 2) select the term with existing search volume, 3) stay away from super competitive keywords. Then shorten you list of terms to 3-5 most relevant to your site. These terms and their variations (for long tail terms) will be used further. Here's a great review of 20 free keyword research tools.

Implement on your website

There's a few things to keep in mind: have one terms for the entire site, and 3-4 other terms for other pages on your site. Focus on optimizing one terms per page. For example, if you sell natural cosmetics in Calgary, then this should be your title for either the homepage or one of your other pages. Some of the tools your can use to analyze on-page components of your website: Website SEO Analyzer, W3Optimizer, Website Grader.

Let search engines know

Yes, search engine spiders crawl the web and will eventually get to your site. I like to inform search engines about major changes on my sites as changes happen. I use webmaster tools that each of major search engines have (Google, Yahoo, Bing). Have an XML sitemap ready just in case (not super crucial but desirable). Here are webmaster pages for major search engines: Google Webmaster Central, Yahoo! Site Explorer, Bing Webmaster Center.

Take a snapshot of your current performance

This is one of the most important step of all. This snapshot is a starting point from which you will track your progress. There are a few free tools that will allow you to take performance snapshots and measure it over time including: WebCEO, Raven Tools, etc.

Engage in link building

Can't stress this enough. Links are super important. But don't fall into a trap of doing a one-time blast and forgetting about it. The process should be continuous. The links should be one way from resources that are relevant to your industry. The idea is that other people consider your site important and link to you. You can check the sites that link back to you using the follow two tools: Open Site Explorer by SEOmoz and Yahoo! Site Explorer.

SEO is an ongoing process, so keep at it

SEO is not a one-time engagement. Search engines change their algorithms, people change their search habits, the world changes. So, make a habit of checking on results regularly (once or twice a month). Either leave as is and continue link building. Or tweak your titles to add / remove / change target keywords. I hope this outlines the process in general. Stay tuned for a a detailed article on each of the steps.

This one will be short and as concise as possible. I just came from a great event put together by the team at FoundPages. It was about 5 easy-to-use tools to improve your online marketing efforts. Great turnaround! 5 presentations followed by a few discussions were quick, to the point and very well moderated by Jimmy Wong. Presenters line-up was a follows:

• Twitter Basics by Terence Fong of Business Instincts
• Google Places for Businesses by Kathryn Blair of FoundPages
• Google Alerts by Shannon Bowen-Kelsick of sbk MARKETING
• Posterous.com by Bryanne Miller of Be Real Communications
• ActiveProspects by Ritu Singh of ActiveConversion

Feel free to contact each of the presenters using the links above to request a copy of the presentation. Lear more about the event and sign up for the next one at Meetup.com. I'll definitely be looking for more events by this group!

I just came from another great Third Tuesday Calgary event. This time we had Jeff Nelson of Anduro Marketing talking about social media and SEO. Specifically, does engaging in social media help your SEO efforts? Below are some notes from the talk.

• One of the main arguments was that social media is NOT good for SEO because most of the social networking sites have a nofollow attribute in links.
• Jeff used seo-browser.com tool to parse a few social media sites including Twitter, Wikipedia, Youtube, etc.
• Results showed that neither Twitter nor Wikipedia pass the Google juice to external pages, therefore these sites were almost useless in contributing to SEO efforts.
• I sincerely believed that Twitter passes the link to your site in the right-hand sidebar (where it talks about the user). The reason for this was that I've seen a link count through SEOmoz's OpenSiteExplorer.org.
• On the other hand, YouTube had one link that actually lead to a site and passed authority (the link to your site in YouTube channel profile). Unfortunately you're not able to customize the anchor text.
• Jeff briefly talked about three characteristics of a link: anchor text, whether it passes the value (not nofollow), and the context (text content surrounding the link).
• Then Jeff went into a bit of history of when social media started to matter for SEO. He showed a list of links to resources talking about it starting in 2006. One of the articles by Rand Fishkin was the most valuable.
• Finally, Jeff got into discussing the three reasons to use social media to help your SEO: brand promotion, link bait, and viral distribution. Meaning that social media is not the best friend of SEO but can be a good buddy to hang out with sometimes.
  • brand promotion: although you're not getting tons of link value from social networks, it's definitely worth participating in social media for the reason of promoting your brand with the relevant audiences.
  • link bait: or developing valuable content on your site (in form of a blog post most often) that others will link back to. The emphasis is on the value of that content. Just writing frequent articles will not help. Make then infrequent, but super valuable. Here's an article Jeff shared that'll help you with creating such content.
  • viral distribution: somewhat related to link bait, yet a separate reason. The goal here is to create valuable content and ensure that it's as simple as possible to pass along. Jeff gave a couple of examples of principles behind successful viral distribution. Then, we all watched "will it blend" as a great example of a viral campaign.
• Here's a couple of great links on the topic Jeff shared:
  • 10 of the smartest big brands in social media, an article by mashable
  • social media marketing guide, an article by SEOmoz

I hope this summary of key points helps those who missed the event and those of you who are not in Calgary. Feel free to comment on other ways you know of where social media can be helpful in reaching your SEO objectives. Here's the link to a copy of Jeff's presentation at SlideShare.net

Link building is hugely important in promoting your website because relevant links increase authority of your site. As authority goes up, so do your search engine rankings. Not all links are created equal. Some have "nofollow" attribute, some "dofollow".

"dofollow" links are generally better because they pass Google Juice to the site they are linking too. The more Google Juice flows your way, the higher authority your site gets when it comes to search ranking. More about what Google Juice is.

"nofollow" links are still great to have but less desirable because they don't let the Google Juice flow through. Nonetheless, "nofollow" links add balance and should definitely be part of your link building strategy.

Most of the links today are "nofollow" because site owners don't want to let go of the Juice from their site. At the same time there's the whole "dofollow" movement happening... But this is a totally different post about Social Media, Sharing and Value transfer...

To conclude this post, here's a list of useful resources to find sites with "dofollow" links:

• Types of dofollow sites on Squidoo.com
• List of dofollow directories
• Categorized list of dofollow blogs at BlogsThatFollow.com
• An extensive list of dofollow resources by Courtney Tuttle
• A list of dofollow blog search engines

You own a site, or you work on optimizing one. You engage in link building, you run a blog, you create pages on your site. Occasionally it happens that you links are broken (both internal and external) and your visitor gets a 404 error page. A 404 error page look like this:

As you can see, getting a page like this does not enhance your relationship with a user. Any time you don't enhance a relationship, you miss out on a great relationship that may result in sales. The goal is to keep developing your relationship at every step of the way even if your links are broken. Here's a great example of good 404 error page:

As you can see, even if something went wrong, you can keep contact with your user. So make sure to review your 404 error pages and here is a couple of links that I found helpful.

• A more useful 404 by Dean Frickey
• Practical guide to 404 error pages by Yoast

I like to use WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS) for modern websites. Any time I deal with a WordPress-based website I use a set of tools that help me in my SEO efforts. One of my main goals is to develop a set of rules for all future blog posts. Below is a base list of WordPress Add-ons I use.

• Google XML Sitemaps: allows you to build a Google-friendly sitemap as well as adds auto sitemap update functionality to your blog.
• Headspace2: A great meta management platform that makes your blog SEO-lovely. "All-in-one SEO pack" is similar platform but I like Headspace and I stick with it.
• Redirection: Understanding and using redirects is very important to your site's SEO. Redirection add-on simplifies redirect management.
• Robots Meta: Robots.txt file tells search bots what to index on your site and what to leave private. Rules specified in this file can also stop spam bots from indexing your site.
• SEO Slugs: This add-on removes stop words from your post URLs making your posts easier for search bots to digest.

The list above is a results of what I learned managing RussianHerald.com since 2007. For an excellent guide to optimizing your wordpress installation see Yoast.com.

I just had a conversation with a client who brought up a few suggestions to tweak his site for better search engine rankings. As a result of our talk I decided to write this quick post... There's generally 3 kinds of SEO tactics: white-hat, grey-hat and black-hat.

Black-hat techniques will definitely get a website unlisted from major search engines as a spam content. An example of this will be page sections invisible to users but targeted at getting higher search engine recognition (i.e. invisible text on pages). Here's a few examples:

• Bad ideas for an on-page optimization
• Learn more about black-hat SEO at About.com
• Talk to people at Black hat SEO forum

Grey-hat techniques will likely get your site unlisted from search engine like Google as these techniques boarder with black-hat. An example of this will be stuffing image alt text with strings of keywords. There is though a certain extent to which this technique is acceptable (i.e. to write a clean and descriptive alt text for visually impaired users).

• Learn more about Grey hat SEO tactics
• Another look at Grey-hat SEO techniques

White-hat techniques are "the rules of the game". These allow sites to play the game clean and stay listed on Google. Our main concern as SEOs should be clients' (sites) reputation with search engines. We've all seen examples of sites being unlisted and it had cost a company time and money to reinstate the website with major search engines. These are a few examples of white-hat SEO techniques:

• A few white-hat SEO examples
• A few more from HowStuffWorks.com
• The best guide there is to on-page optimization by Google (PDF document)

As all three types of tactics evolve over time we follow the trends and make sure we use the right tools and techniques to reach our clients' goals. After all, there are many other things online where we can outperform the competition and even play a bit "grey", but on-page SEO should stay clean.