Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010
This might get a little technical, but I think it’s pretty straight forward and easy to understand. Even if you don’t get all of it (or most of it), there are some great facts and graphs in it. Well worth the time, like everything from SEOMoz.org.
For the past few years, I’ve given numerous presentations introducing SEO to new audiences of marketers, engineers and executives. With the end of SEOmoz’s consulting business this past January and the completion of our final contract obligations this Spring, I thought it would be wise to share the 190+ page deck to hopefully help those of you who are tasked with introducing SEO to your companies, agencies and colleagues.
The deck is updated as of August 2010, but I hope to update it again in the future. Along with the Beginner’s Guide to SEO, this resource should help those seeking to learn SEO or catch up on key points from the past few years.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-comprehensive-intro-to-seo-powerpoint-slide-deck-?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+seomoz+%28SEOmoz+Daily+Blog%29
Posted in SEO |
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010
This is a great article if you want to learn how to use Social Media to drive more traffic to your site. It’s in depth, but has some great tips and techniques. Worth the read.
Listening, Content, Socialize and Measure could just as well be represented as a cycle, but I think the forward direction is important because you can’t reach outcomes without action. Any good social media marketing effort needs to begin with some kind of Listening program. That means using social media monitoring tools to collect, sort and manage social content according to topics being monitored. Content is the glue that makes search engines work and content is a critical part of the social sharing experience within social media. Speaking of sharing, socializing with other like-minded individuals as a personal experience can fold well with brand interactions as long as the needs of the buyer persona has been reconciled with business objectives. Successful efforts within the social web can be measured, and should be, in a variety of ways. Measurement justifies objectives and it’s important to identify the right tools for monitoring real time and web analytics.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/07/4-social-seo-success/
Posted in SEO |
Monday, August 2nd, 2010
Remember Tess? She was featured in the interview where we talked about how quickly she was successful when she applied lessons from The Simple Guide To SEO. Here’s the original article if you want to read it again: Ten With Tess – An Interview On SEO Success
Well, it’s 3 months later and I just got the following email from Tess this morning. I had to share.
Hi Conrad,
I just wanted to give you an update on my SEO status.
When we did the interview several months ago, I was super excited at the increase in hits on my Etsy store. Now, I have even more SEO success to shout about! Attached is a screen shot of page one on a Google search for “Hunger Games Bracelet.” The top two results are posts about my bracelet. The third and forth results are direct links to my Etsy shop.
In other words, I now occupy the top four spaces on page one of this particular Google search. Amazing! When I started my SEO work, my shop didn’t show up on Google at all…though I stopped looking after about page 5 of the results.
I’ve also taken your advice and started a joint Facebook page along with several other Etsy sellers of Hunger Games merchandise. We have a Twitter account too. We’ve been doing weekly giveaways and the number of followers increases every day as word spreads.
All of this has led to a measurable increase in sales for me. Wah-hoo!!!
I credit your free SEO booklet for giving me the kick in the pants I needed to just do it. Thanks a million times over!
Tess Richardson
–
www.coldhandswarmart.etsy.com
Posted in SEO |
Saturday, July 24th, 2010
If you like videos and want to learn about SEO, here is Google’s official YouTube channel, answering your questions. There’s a lot of great info there.
Google Webmaster Central
This is the official YouTube channel for Google Webmaster Central, your one-stop shop for webmaster resources that will help you with your crawling and indexing questions, introduce you to offerings that can enhance and increase traffic to your site, and connect you with your visitors. Learn more at http://www.google.com/webmasters/
Read the entire article at:
http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp
Posted in SEO |
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
I get a lot of email, and they usually ask me SEO related questions. I recently got a couple of similar requests. “Why am I not ranking very well?”
Side note: If you send me an email asking for help, I’ll help you. I love to help people. For free. It makes me all warm and fuzzy.
The first case, I looked at their site and I wasn’t quite sure what the site was about. It looked like they did stuff, made stuff, and maybe it was for sale, but I wasn’t sure what it was. There were references to everything that this person was interested in, and they were very interested.
When people ask me why they aren’t ranking very well, I respond with my own question, “What keyword do you want to rank for?”. This person didn’t really know. “Maybe jewelry, or painting, or art, or photography. Oh, I don’t know.” Well, that’s the problem. You don’t have a keyword targeted and you have no words on your web site that would indicate that it was about those keywords. This site had all of those words, and more. What is this site about? I had no idea. Whatever, dude.
You need to have the words on the page to be ranked for the words.
In the second case, they knew exactly the two keywords that they wanted to rank for. I checked the inbound links, which is usually the most basic problem. This site had a few hundred links, while their competitor, who was at the top of the list on Google, had only 10 or so. Woah. That made me wonder.
I looked at the site and immediately saw that the keywords that they wanted to rank for were not on the pages. They were casually mentioned a few times, but if you just read the page, you would not know that was the keyword they were targeting. Other keywords seemed to be mentioned more times.
I suggested that the keywords go in the page titles. If you really want that keyword, then put it in every page title. Use the keyword where ever and whenever you can. Put it in bold. I suggested a stand alone page that was all about that keyword. Explain it. Use it in headings. Use related keywords along with it. Tell us the history, or why you’re passionate about it, and everything related to that keyword. Put a lot of words on the page that use the keyword or are related to that keyword.
A another cool technique you could use is to create stand alone pages for related keywords, or keywords that are sub-topics of the main keyword. In The Simple Guide to Internet Marketing Basics, I say it this way:
If there’s a post on southwest paintings of cactus, and another post on southwest paintings of horses, and one more post on southwest paintings of mountains, you could pretty well conclude that the site is probably about southwest paintings. That’s what the search engines are going to think and rank the entire site for “southwest paintings.”
That’s why there are those paintings in this post. They were painted by an artist in Jerome, AZ, named Mark Hemleben. The dude does awesome paintings.
When you create a web page, you need to look at what’s on that page and ask yourself, “What the heck is this page about?” What’s the point? If my Mom were to read this, would she understand what I was talking about?
I know you don’t want to be writing blog posts. If you did it anyway, you would be adding pages, and those pages would have your keywords on them. More pages, with keywords, means a higher score for those keywords. Stay on topic and use your keywords when it’s reasonable. Google loves that stuff!
When I write, I know what I’m trying to say. It’s all inside my head. The trick is getting out on the screen, so that everyone else knows what I mean. I need to be obvious for the stupid people (Not you! That other guy that was here a while ago.) Don’t mumble. Say it. You don’t know what it is, unless I tell you. You probably don’t even care and will click away before I get a chance to tell you, so I can’t mess around.
So my bottom line advice is the same that they told you in third grade: “Use your words.”
Posted in SEO |
Tuesday, July 6th, 2010
Here’s an article about the idea that search engines like “fresh” content, which is true. Some people react to that by making changes to content on existing pages. Changing an existing page doesn’t help. It confuses the search engine at best. They explain what “fresh” content really means for SEO.
The real opportunity with “fresh” content concerns adding new content (new pages) on a regular basis. Adding new pages provides a number of benefits: Each new web page added to the website creates a new entry point and a new destination for links from other websites. Creating topically specific pages with text, images, video or other media provide a better user experience and gives other websites interesting content to link to. Of course a quantity of quality links from other relevant websites increases direct traffic and can positively influence search engine visibility, sending even more qualified visitors.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/07/seo-telephone-game-fresh-content/
Posted in SEO |
Monday, June 21st, 2010
As recently as a month ago, I was a victim of a state of mind I call Analytics Dismissal Disorder.
This mindset is common after hearing about the importance of analytics, installing the tracking code and then getting overwhelmed by all of the graphs and scary numbers.
When I suffered from analytics dismissal disorder (which my doctors called A.D.D. for short), I knew Google Analytics was important but avoided the extra effort necessary to learn how to get the most out of the software.
This post explains what I needed to learn to get over this.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/overcome-the-google-analytics-learning-curve-in-20-minutes?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+seomoz+%28SEOmoz+Daily+Blog%29
Posted in SEO |
Saturday, June 19th, 2010
I explain how to pick the best keywords for you to focus your efforts on.
The trick is to balance the number of searches for a keyword each month with the number of other pages on the Internet that contain those keywords, your competition. This is straight up SEO training, right out of the Simple Guide to SEO, only explained in a video.
I got carried away with video effects this time. I hope you enjoy the extra touches as much as I enjoyed doing them.
This is a new file format and size. Let me know if it’s any better for you.
Watch the video on YouTube instead. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9hguIH-jMc
What did you think of the video? Did it help or confuse? Did you have more questions when you were done? Tell me anything that you didn’t understand or ask any questions you have in the comments below.
Thanks for taking the time to watch this. I appreciate it.
Here’s the link I reference in the video:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Posted in SEO |
Saturday, June 12th, 2010
I’ve used an SEO tool for a couple years now, that I haven’t told you about. It’s called Market Samurai.
It costs money. I figured you weren’t interested.
The methods that I’ve taught are free and they work fine, but they take a lot of time to do the research. This tool saves the time and gives you more, better information.
They just opened up an affiliate program, so I’ll make a little money if you ever decide to buy it. You can download a free trial and play with it before you buy it. I think they do that because if you see how it works and use it a bit, you’ll want to buy it. It’s that good. If you only want to do research on a couple keywords, download it, use it for free and never touch it again.
I’m pretty cynical about this kind of stuff, and I will not promote anything that I don’t personally believe in, but this tool is really useful and does very cool things in a couple minutes, things that would take you hours to do manually.
The primary things that it does are:
- Keyword Research is amazing. Worth the price alone.
- Track the rank of your site over time.
- SEO competition finds out what you are up against.
- Domain name research.
- Monetization – ways to make money.
- Finding content for your site.
- And more, plus more in the future.
There’s a discount!
The cost is $149, BUT, if you download the free trial first, they will sell it to you for $97, if you buy it within the first week. That’s the sweet deal because you save almost a third off the price. Do not just go buy it without downloading the free trial.
If you’re serious about finding the right keywords and doing research on your market, this tool is really good and it keeps getting better. Every time I open it up, it seems like there’s an upgrade. They keep adding features to it. There’s stuff in there that I haven’t even used yet.
Here’s where you get your FREE copy: http://marketsamurai.com
Here’s the high pressure email they want me to send you:
Hi {!firstname_fix}
After hearing about a bunch of first-time internet marketing “newbies” using this TOP SECRET Market Samurai software to easily capture front-page rankings, traffic and sales in their first few weeks online, I had to check it out.
I was so impressed by the software that I even worked out a deal to give you INSTANT ACCESS to download it at NO COST to see for yourself just how powerful it is.
http://marketsamurai.com
If you want the secret to quick, profitable, high traffic Google rankings – the secret is finding the “right” keywords…
And this tool will help you achieve just that:
http://marketsamurai.com
Thanks,
Conrad Walton
P.S. – There are over 147552 other results-driven internet marketers using it already just in its first few months online.
Don’t get left behind – get free access to this software, and try out its advanced features here:
http://marketsamurai.com
Posted in SEO |
Friday, June 11th, 2010
The second video in one day. (I’m officially addicted to video now.) This is another interesting background and this video has visual aids (and not just me waving my hands.)
I tell a story of how I got beat and what beat me. You can use this tip on your web site to beat your competition.
The trick is using:
<h2>”heading tags”</h2>
You don’t know what a heading tag is? Watch the video and find out!
You can watch it here on YouTube.
Posted in SEO |
Tuesday, May 25th, 2010
Selma asked me on the Walton.com Facebook Fan Page “How do we get the SE’s to crawl the site again? (“SE” is search engines, if you didn’t know.) This is a great question and deserves a great answer.
I told her the best way to get them to find you is to submit a “sitemap.xml” file. WordPress can do this easily.
If that made no sense to you (and it probably didn’t 
, then go to http://www.google.com/addurl/ and submit your site that way. It’s quick and easy.
After you do that, get a “webmasters” account per the book. You can track there how your site is being crawled.
Now, that would have been a great answer except for the part where I brush over the “Worpdress can do this easily” part. I kind of forgot to explain that one.
To make the answer great, I want to direct your attention to the “Google XML Sitemaps” plug in for WordPress (and away from the fact I forgot to put this in earlier.) Download it from the WordPress site and install it as any other plug in. There are a few settings that are pretty self explanatory. It’ll be fine even if you configure it poorly.
Once it’s installed and configured, every time you add a new post or a new page or update an existing item, it will update the sitemap.xml file and ping Google to tell it that there’s a new map.
Don’t forget to get that Webmasters account and follow how often they crawl your site.
If good relationships are built on good communication, this is the best way to communicate with Google.
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
Read the entire article at:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
Posted in SEO |
Thursday, May 13th, 2010
Hidden Under Show Search Tools
Here's the Wonder Wheel.
Google has a tool that I discovered recently that helps you find related keywords. You put in the keyword that you want to start with into Google like you’ve searched a millions times before. On the results page, notice the options on the left side of the page. See where it says “Show search tools”? Click on that and it will expand to display a whole list of options.
Wonder wheel is one of those options. When you click on that, it will bring up the Wonder Wheel using your search term. It will display the top related keywords.
These are keywords that Google thinks are closely related to your keyword. It’s based on what people search for and what pages link to. If pages that are optimized for one keyword tend to be linked to pages optimized for another keyword, they must be related.
If you click on one of the related keywords, you get a new wheel of related keywords to THAT keyword. Keep clicking and you keep seeing new related keywords. You can spend hours doing this.
You can apply this information to your own site by targeting your main page to your main keyword. Then you can have other pages that you can optimize for those related keywords.
If your site has multiple pages optimized for related keywords the way that Google thinks they are related, your whole site will be optimized for all of them. There’s a cumulative effect.
According to the search illustrated here, if I had pages dedicated to “walton family”, “walton music”, “luke walton”, “walton emc”, “walton construction”, “bill walton”, walton high school”, and “wilton”, then my site would rank really high when people searched for “walton.com”.
This is hard to explain without actually using the tool, so go play with it. Enjoy and optimize.
Posted in SEO |
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
This tool will show you what your web page looks like to a search engine. It removes all of the pretty formatting and shows you the text in relative sizes. Links and copy, that’s all that the search engine sees and all that this shows you. You can see which links are more important than others. Maybe you’re not even aware of what links are on your page or how much text you have.
The advanced option shows you some of the technical data that they consider. That info for walton.com is below.
Yeah, it’s a bit confusing, but look at the number of links, external and internal. More internal links is better than less.
The ratio of text to the entire amount of code on the page is interesting also. That’s 46.9% below. That means that only 46% of all of the code on the page is readable text. The other 54% is HTML markup and script and tags and stuff that makes the page work, but users never see. More readable text is better than less.
This might make interesting reading on a boring Spring day, but the really valuable way to use this information is to compare it to your competitor’s pages.
Can you add more links? More copy? Better use of keywords in your internal links? Look at your page with your keywords in mind. Do you use them? Where you can use them more?
Go look at your page with the tool and tell us what find.
Number of of Meta characters : 343
Number of of Meta Words : 50
Text to Page Weight Ratio: 46.9%
Number of of Meta Keywords Words : 25
Canonical Link: http://www.walton.com/
Page loaded: 1.685 seconds
Frame Info: No Frames
Page size: 122.5 KB
Noframe Info:
Number of of Words: 10269
Number of of Frames: 0
Number of of Body Words : 10139
Number of of Cookies: 2
Number of of Images All: 34; with Alt Text: 32; without Alt Text: 2
Number of of Links: All: 270 (External: 50, Internal: 220 );
No Follow: 0
Robots.txt yes
IP address : 76.246.231.1
favicon.ico file: yes, script: yes
Country: United States
Number of of External JavaScript: 31
Number of of Imagemaps: 0
Number of of Objects (Flash): 0
Clickstream Reporting: [Google Analytics]
Read the entire article at:
http://www.seo-browser.com/
Posted in SEO |
Monday, May 10th, 2010
This is a great way to post your articles to ezinearticles.com, which is a great way to get links to your site, which is a great way to build your SEO, which is a great way to get more traffic, which is… OK I’ll quit now.
If you have an account with ezinearticles.com, and you are using WordPress, then you should be using this plug in to create more content. Good stuff here!
With the introduction of our new EzineArticles WordPress Plugin, experienced WordPress users will be able to submit their WordPress posts and blog entries right to EzineArticles.com!
Read the entire article at:
http://blog.ezinearticles.com/2010/03/articles-directly-from-wordpress.html
Posted in SEO |
Saturday, April 17th, 2010
Last week, I wrote an article, Do You Love To Talk? SEO for Comment Virgins, urging people to leave comments on other people’s blogs to increase their own SEO.
Among the 7 people who followed directions and commented on the post was this from Tess Richardson:
After months of procrastinating over the SEO thing, I downloaded your free guide and started getting busy. In the two days I’ve been searching out, and talking on, sites related to one of my Etsy products, Google analytics has shown a jump from 0 to 132 page views. I can send you a screen shot if you would like it.
Thanks for the advice and encouragement, Conrad.
Click to see the whole chart.
This kind of feedback makes me crazy, so I had to follow up and find out more. Please visit her site. Here’s the interview she gave me. The book she refers to is The Simple Guide To SEO.
What prompted you to download the SEO book?
Tess Richardson
When I saw the post in the Etsy forums, I thought I’d give it a look as it sounded like what I needed.
How would you describe the book? Good points? Bad points?
I love the glossary. I love the light, readable style. I love that it’s free! (I kept wondering, “What’s the catch?”)
I LOVE the checklist toward the back, but it doesn’t seem to be in the same order that things are discussed in the book. That bothered me.
I would also like to see the checklist broken up into “Things to do RIGHT NOW,” “Things to do next week,” “Things to do next month,” or something like that. For newbies it’s a lot to digest in one sitting, even if it is all well-explained. I have gotten a start, but I did skip over some of the “sign up for this account and that account” things. I mean to get back to them, but I just picked a couple of tips at random and jumped in. Many people are not comfortable doing that, I suspect.
What did you learn from the book? What stood out?
One thing jumped out at me right from the moment I skimmed it, before I downloaded and printed for later digestion: You must have a blog. Since I’d been hemming and hawing for months on whether I should start a blog, what would be the focus, what free blog site should I use, would it be a waste of time (and all the other second-guessing) that was like a bolt from above. I set up my blog 2 days after reading the book. http://homespunlife.wordpress.com
Another thing was about using bold and italic. I had never read that elsewhere.
Tess Richardson at her Ashford Spinning Wheel (aka My Precious)
How did you find the sites to comment on?
A little background on my Etsy site…I started with rosaries, then added homespun yarn, then got a great idea for a charm bracelet based on a young adult trilogy, The Hunger Games (THG) by Suzanne Collins. A friend turned me onto the books, which are really starting to gain traction and may be the next BIG THING, like Twilight, but there is almost no merchandising yet. Even though I hope to really establish myself in the homespun yarn market (hence my blog focus), the bracelets seemed like a way to bring in some early sales since it was an untapped niche with an eager market.
I thought about where I could find my target (tweens and teens who loved the books) and started Googling for fan sites. That got me a few hits, so I began visiting them, getting a feel for the audience, what was discussed and how open I thought they might be to shameless self-promotion. Some I had to join, like Facebook fan pages and Fanpop.com.
How many comments did you leave? How much time did you spend?
I was afraid I would have to spend weeks becoming a familiar and accepted visitor to these sites, but teens and tweens are pretty open to anyone with something to offer that strikes a chord. I seriously just posted once to the sites I visited this week. Since I’m a fan of the books, I was able to “speak the lingo” about characters, and be authentic, not fake. And I tried to be humble, not pushy; just another fan who wanted to share this great tip about something others might like. And if I had to register to post, I chose a fan-specific username.
It was time consuming, though. I spent an entire morning on it earlier this week and maybe posted on 4-5 sites total.
What was the biggest obstacle in starting from nothing to getting 132 page views?
Having to register for some of the fan sites. I’ve got enough usernames and passwords to keep track of!
What was the easiest part?
Actually, it was all pretty easy. I believe in my product and think there are a lot of girls who would love it. Since I am a fan of the books, it was not hard “hanging out” on the fan sites.
What surprised you the most?
The fact that my Etsy product page doesn’t show up on Google, but my one post on Fanpop.com make it to second place, on the first page overnight!
What advice would you give someone else with an Etsy shop?
Some niches will be much harder than others to see results on. For example, my homespun yarn is going to be an uphill climb because the market is so full of competitors. But it’s something I’m passionate about, so it’s no sweat to read and comment on other people’s spinning and knitting sites. Really, the challenge of developing a unique product and finding that “blue ocean” is harder than the SEO stuff.
Any other comments?
Having spent time chatting up my Hunger Games bracelets on fan sites makes me look at my future product offering with new eyes. I realize, for example, that I don’t really want to spend time chatting on Catholic sites and will probably drop rosaries from my Etsy shop. On the other hand, I’m thinking of maximizing my time spent in finding and joining Hunger Games fan sites by developing other products for HG fans. New products will give me more legitimate reasons to revisit and repost, so I’m not just the nag who keeps hawking her stuff over and over.
Another thing I’m really excited about, having tasted just a bite of success, is that I am in the progress of self-publishing my first novel–a historical fiction. My head is already buzzing with ideas for getting out there and making online connections with history fans.
Thanks, Tess!
If you want more information about Tess, please visit her sites:
http://www.etsy.com/shop/ColdHandsWarmArt
http://homespunlife.wordpress.com/
What did you learn from this story? Did you learn that if you leave interesting comments on other people’s sites that you might end up getting a lot of attention for your site? Would you like to leave a comment now, after reading the interview, and tell us all what you learned? I thought you might. Thanks!
If you haven’t read the book yet, you can download it here:
The Care and Feeding of Search Engines, A Simple Guide To SEO
Posted in SEO, featured |
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
Found this advice on the Etsy forums. All of it is good stuff, even if it’s in lower case. You would read most of the tips in the Simple Guide To SEO, but there are a couple Etsy specific tips in here.
* have titles that are descriptive instead of artsy and original. so instead of naming a necklace just “moon dream” i would include materials and colors if possible, without making it too long, but in a way that when you read the title you know what are the materials, basic colors and style of the item. also to keep up with relevancy its better to have the type of the item more to the beginning of the title, like i would try “necklace” not to be one of the last words but more to the begining
* first 160 characters of descriptions also function as keywords for search engines (this applies for your shop announcement as well). So if you can out more of those keywords in the beginning of your descriptions its great
*about tags- again descriptive, think of colors, styles, materials, textures when using them. Also if i used for example “hoops” in the title i wont use it again in tags, because title is already working as a tag for me. i would try to save slots for words i haven’t used in the title
*sections are your keywords too. now i am still a little lost with this because section names cant be too long and you want them to be relevant to their content, so if you sell jewelery its natural to have “earrings”, “bracelets”, etc, sections but at the same time these are very competitive, just imagine how many shops have sections like that. the key is somewhere in the middle- not that popular name for section but at the same time still descriptive enough to know approx what expect when seeing it.
* links inside the listing can be helpful too, like ones that link back to your shop or other relevant listings. some people might not be accustomed to etsy and not know exactly how to go back to your shop (if they even know they are in one)
Read the entire article at:
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=6493401
Posted in SEO |
Monday, April 12th, 2010
The article below has some great information, but it’s aimed at a more technical audience. The basic “take away” point is a good one to understand and I’ll explain it here.
Before you do any keyword research, you should know who your audience is. I wrote an article named “Before you do anything else” that was about keyword research. I was wrong. I just assume that everyone, including me, knows who they are trying to reach, and most of the time we do, but it’s valuable to formalize that.
Who are you selling to? What do they believe?
What do they want?
Take a few minutes to write down a description of you buys your stuff, or who should be buying your stuff. Describe anything unique about them. What do they like? What do they believe? What do they need?
Marketing is about “the story”, or how you frame and describe your products.
Owning a Prius means that you care about the environment, even though other cars get better gas milage and the Prius batteries are an environmental nightmare to manufacture. Owning a piece of antique jewelry means that you are smart and sophisticated, even if you have no idea of its history. Owning a funky tee shirt could mean you don’t think you are fun and out of the ordinary, but you want people to think that you are.
You need to know the belief system and the needs of the person you’re selling to, in order to be effective in selling them your products.
Who are you selling to? What do they believe? What do they want?
Please leave a comment and tell us the answers to those questions.
STEP 1: DEFINE YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE AND THEIR INTERESTS
The first step in most marketing campaigns, Search Marketing included, is to start by defining your target audience. Your target audience is a defined set of people who you are marketing your product to.
Traditionally, defining a target audience involves determining their age, sex, geographic locations, and especially their needs (aka pain points). Check out usability.gov’s description of personas and how to do task analysis & scenarios for more details, or better yet, read Vanessa Fox’s upcoming book about personas related to search and conversion.
What we want to zero in on for our SEO Strategy are those pain points. What do they want? What are their needs that aren’t being met? Knowing these things will help us better define a content strategy and prioritize content to bring to the forefront.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-8step-seo-strategy-step-1-define-your-target-audience-and-their-needs?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+seomoz+%28SEOmoz+Daily+Blog%29
Posted in SEO |
Saturday, April 10th, 2010
Do you like to talk with people and build relationships?
Have you ever told someone how you feel about their blog post?
Have you ever left a comment on a web site?
If you have never written a comment on a web site, on a blog post, then you are missing the easiest way to get inbound links to your Etsy site and increasing your SEO.
The biggest factor in SEO is “inbound links”. The more, the merrier. You want as many links pointing at your site as you can get.
Almost every time you leave a comment on another web site, it will give you the opportunity to link back to your site. This works for your Etsy site. This works for your own web site.
I know you like to lurk, to read and not get involved. Most people do. It’s easier. It’s safer. No one will disagree with you if you don’t say anything. No one will make fun.
Remember being 13 and going to a school dance? It was scary. I stood against the wall and wished I had the nerve to ask someone to dance. When I finally did risk humiliation, I found out that it was kind of fun. It didn’t hurt at all. I actually liked it.
As you grow up, you find out that having friendships, talking to strangers, just any communication, it’s all pretty good. There are the occasional awkward moments, but you get through them. There’s much more benefit to talking than to staying silent.
In the Internet, the same is true. If you leave comments for people on their sites, they might check out your site and leave you a comment. They might start a conversation on their site.
Every comment you make links back to your site.
Now, if you talk too much, you can get a little overbearing, so don’t get carried away and make your self a pest. Be natural, like you would in real life. You know how to talk to people in real life, so do that same thing on web sites.
Also, not every web site offers the link. If you talk to someone, but they don’t want to talk back, then find someone else to talk to. Comment on the sites that allow you to input a link to your site.
Imagine improving your SEO, just by talking. How easy is that?
Posted in SEO, featured |
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010
I recently received a comment that asked:
I had heard that one way links to your site are better. That mutual linking decreases the Googlishiness of your site. I would like to hear more on your thinking about this.
There are 3 factors involved here. First, there’s a concept of “Google Juice”. This is probably the largest impact on your SEO.
The idea is that each page has some amount of value, called page rank. The rank is actually a value from zero to ten, with the highest being a higher rank. Let’s say that the page rank is the amount of Google Juice that page has.
Be very clear that this is not exact, but I’m describing concepts and relationships, not mathematical algorithms. It’s the relationships and proportions that we’re dealing with.
Google Juice, since 1996
Each link from that page to an external page, a page on someone else’s site, sends off a little Google Juice with it. It’s like a vote of confidence for that other page. The amount of juice it sends (WARNING! Math ahead!) is equal to the total amount of juice divided by the number of links.
Imagine a bucket (your page) and it has a bunch of tubes coming out of the bottom of it (your links). They fill up other buckets (other sites). The more tubes you have, the less juice each one gets. The more tubes from other buckets filling up your bucket, the more juice you have.
If you imagine a bucket that is filling another bucket, but that other bucket is then filling your bucket, your head might explode, so don’t think about that image.
If you have a page rank worth 5 and you have 5 external links, each links is worth 1. If you also have a menu with 5 internal links, then each link is worth a half. Those 5 internal links are to yourself, so you’re passing yourself 2.5 and you’re passing the external sites 2.5, each link getting a half and there’s 5 of them, so 5 times a half is 2.5. Still with me?
Let’s take a quick TV break. I interviewed Coach from Survivor today. He’s a great interview. He likes Jerri, thinks she’s a great girl, but he can’t talk to her by contract, until the actual finale of the show when the winner is revealed. He’s planning on talking to her then and when asked about a relationship, said “we’ll see”.
And we’re back, our minds cleared from all that math.
Considering only Google juice, yes, it’s best to have all the links in the world pointing at your site and no links from your site to anywhere else.
There’s another factor they consider along with Google juice. They consider the pages that you link to. You actually get credit for linking to high page rank, related pages. If you set up a brand new site, with no page rank, and linked to a bunch of sites that all related to your keyword, they figure that your site must be about that keyword. This won’t get you as much credit as Google juice, but it counts.
Considering that factor, it is good to link to related sites. With this factor, I’d say that it’s good to link back and forth between (related keyword) sites.
The last factor to consider is that they are looking for artificial “link farms”. If you just set up sites for the purpose of driving traffic, creating links, trying to push the limits of decency, they’ll ban you and you’ll drop out of the index faster than something that goes really fast.
With all three of these factors considered, it looks like it’s OK to link back and forth between sites, but not too much. As always, if you are natural about it, it works fine. If you go over the top, it’s not good.
Posted in SEO |
Saturday, April 3rd, 2010
Everyone on Etsy wants more traffic. You can get more traffic from search engines if you optimize your site. That’s called SEO, “search engine optimization”, by all the cool kids.
Etsy published the “Etsy Guide to SEO”.
SEO is generally divided into “on site” factors and “off site” factors. In their book, they detail the things that you can do to your Etsy shop and products pages, all of them “on site”.
What they don’t tell you about are the “off site” techniques. “Off site” is everything that is not on your site. It generally refers to building links from other sites to your site, which is the biggest factor in SEO.
They only devote one page to link building ideas and only one paragraph to any task that is not on the Etsy site. They want to keep all of your attention focused on their Etsy site and not necessarily the absolute best ways to get traffic.
Let’s gaze off into the distance and see if we can build some inbound links another way, without anything to do with Etsy.
Before you do anything else, you need to define your keywords. I’ve written a few posts about that and cover it in the SEO book.
When you have your keywords picked, we’re going to create a new website, for FREE, and build a bunch of links ourselves. It’s way easier than you think. Really. Watch closely.
Pick your top 3 keywords.
You’re going to create a new web site for FREE. It will have some limitations, so you can’t do everything that you might want to do, but it will do enough to make this technique work and it’s free.
Go to http://www.wordpress.com and follow their instructions, using the top three keywords as your user ID. If your keywords are “handmade glass jewelry”, then create the site as “handmadeglassjewelry”.
That will give you a site with a domain name of “handmadeglassjewelry.wordpress.com”. You get SEO value for having the keywords in the domain name, even if it’s got the “wordpress.com” in there too.
They have some instructions there about how to create posts and pages, so when you figure out how to write a new post, write a new post about one of your products. Use all of the keywords that you can think of when describing it. Put in a photo. Write naturally, like you were writing so that I could read it. I have some WordPress Tutorial Videos that might be helpful.
Put in a link to your product page on Etsy. In the “edit” page, put in the name of your product and select that text. There’s a “link” button at the top. Click that. Copy and paste in the URL to your product page. Insert that into the copy on the page. You’ve just created a link to your product page.
Write a new post for every one of your products. Write naturally, but use your keywords. Put a link, or maybe two, from each post to each product page.
When you are done, you’ll have a web site, with your main keywords in the domain name, and links to every one of your product pages.
As you publish new products on Etsy, write a new post for each one on your web site. As your products sell, leave the posts and links. The search traffic will build up over time.
If you start to love this stuff, write other posts about the subject of your products, and not your products specifically. Your site will get some SEO just from the related content. Your site gives your Etsy shop a bunch of SEO.
As your SEO rankings start to build and you start see some results, consider creating your very own site that you fully control, instead of the wordpress.com free version. You’ll be able to do more things with it and you will have complete control over it.
**cough** I can build one for you… **cough**.
The more pages you have on a site, the more links you have, and the more links you can point at your Etsy shop, and the more search traffic you’ll get from the search engines.
There are many other SEO things that you can do, but this is free, easy, and effective. Call it the “low hanging fruit”.
Feel the power.
Posted in SEO, featured |
