SEO for the rest of us

Making Money Off Other Sites With Successful Internet Marketing

2012-01-16T16:45:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of online competition in today's market unlike 15 years ago, so it is simply not enough just publish a website online. With literally billions of websites already existing, publishing a new website is literally a needle within a gigantic haystack. If your needle (website) is not easy to find you will have a hard time attracting any new customers to your website. Of course there is traditional marketing, but trying to create a buzz by handing out business cards with your website printed on it is simply not the same as receiving masses of visitors from being listed on the first page of Google, Yahoo or Bing. So, now we introduce Internet marketing. If you have been looking into optimizing your own website so that you can get on the first page of the major search engines, there is literally a multitude of resources available online for free to help you get started. Here are a couple of ways you can get started on marketing your own website:

If you are promoting a free product or service through your website, you want to make sure that your ad copy is accompanied by a dollar amount which accurately reflects the actual value of your offer. By doing this you will influence visitors perception of your brand's value. So for example you might include something like, "sign up for a free furnace service, a $99 value!" You want to make sure that any free offers you are proposing have a value associated with it.

Take a critical look at your website and if you can't hire someone else to review it for you. We all think our creations are beautiful, but sometimes we can't see what everyone else sees. Do not consider your site a stagnant thing, it should always be changing and improving.

For many visitors, offering a private or restricted portion of your website that requires a username and password to get into can be very intriguing. Who doesn't want to be part of a secret society? Honestly, I cannot tell you how many times I have registered for free sites just to see what was on the other side. I'm way too curious to find out what it is that I would be missing if I simply did not give up my e-mail.

Always try to offer something free to users as a thank you for visiting your site. When people get something that is free to them it increases the amount of money they will spend since they feel they are saving a little and they talk to their friends about it most of the time.

Log in the frequency of purchases on your site to determine who buys the most from your company. This will allow you to establish who your best customers are, as you should offer them extra incentive to purchase more products. Always maximize the happiness of your most frequent clients to improve overall profit.

If regular emails to customers and potential customers are part of your internet marketing strategy, make sure to rotate the links you include in your emails. A block of links that remain the same with every email your customers receive is easy to start ignoring. Even a little bit of variety in your email links will keep the recipient's attention from wandering.

Change up your terms to see what works. If you have a product that is guaranteed to give results in two days, measure your traffic for a week. The next week, change the two days to 48 hours, and measure your traffic then. Finding out what terms pull your customers will quickly increase your revenue.

Tell everyone you know and meet about your website anytime you get the chance. Word-of-mouth advertising can be very powerful because people love to talk. So tell every single person with whom you come in contact. This includes your neighbors, the mailman, and the clerks at the grocery store. No one is off limits.

Include a link to your homepage at various locations on your site. If you link up to many pages, this can be a very useful tool, as it will provide easy access for your customers to get to where they want to go. Appealing to your customer's needs is paramount to improve business.

Do a podcast to attract visitors and customers to your site. With a podcast, you can talk about your products, your services, or anything else you'd like. Ask customers to e-mail you with questions or topics they'd like to discuss. Additionally, the podcast will allow you to build relationships with those you want to buy from you.

If you are selling an online service, consider offering potential buyers a time limited free trial. This will entice new customers to visit your website. Additionally, once potential customers try out your service and see how it can work for them, they will be more likely to place an order.

By marketing your website you can take your website from being completely unnoticed to becoming one of the most popular websites within your industry. Here is the secret, it takes a lot of work! Follow the tips that I have laid out above and you will be on your way to getting more visitors and more recognition online.

Internet Marketing: How To Make The Web Work For You

2012-01-12T02:14:00.001-07:00

It is been a long time since I have blogged. Over a couple years to be exact. At any rate when I started this blog, I wanted to create some information for anyone who has been looking into SEO. So this latest post will start off what I hope to be an all-encompassing guide for those who are just beginning to learn about search engine optimization.

Internet marketing encompasses a lot of things. It covers items such as promotion, sales, and traffic. There are so many ways that someone can promote their online business for more traffic, customers, sales, and profits. This article has advice that can help you find what you need to create a better marketing plan.

SEO

If your website has competitors that consistently out rank yours on the search engine results pages, do not be envious. Instead consider the situation as a learning opportunity. Research your competitors to find out what they do to get listed highly. You may discover SEO strategies you can employ effectively for your own website.

Look at your website from the customer's point of view. Is it easy to use? Is it fun to read? Can orders be placed with clarity and in a short amount of time? It is useless to work hard to bring customers to your site through SEO and then lose them (and a sale) because your website is dull or confusing.

You will want to make sure to include keywords that are relevant to the local market where you are trying to optimize. So for example, if I were working on a search engine optimization campaign for a local Seo company here in Colorado, I might focus on search terms like "Colorado SEO" or "Colorado SEO company". After you have started to market and optimized for "geo-targeted" search terms and you can absolutely go for more national type search terms. You just definitely do not want to skip over the local market as it is typically a large population which will more than likely choose your services or products simply because you are located close to where they live or do business.

Try to think up a catchy slogan for your company with great SEO keywords in it. We're not talking about "like a rock", although it is highly effective. "Kills bugs dead" is an excellent choice as it says what you do in a statement while including the keywords kill, bugs, and dead.

In conclusion, internet marketing is a very broad subject that covers a lot of promotion techniques. There are some right ways and wrong ways to apply your plan, but there is so much room for creativity, too. Hopefully, this article has given you the right advice for you to learn just how to make internet marketing work for you.

SEO Is Just Common Sense

2009-05-23T18:42:00.005-06:00

By: Chad Formica

There are many resources online showing individuals how to optimize their websites; all of them have value of some sort. The thing that we see over and over again is that many individuals are simply confused with all the information that is available. If we break down search engine optimization to its most basic form, it's very similar to visiting the library and using the computer to search for books within the library. The library's search engine is simply going to find the book that best matches either the keywords or title that you input into this search engine. Well how does the library's search engine know which book best fits your search? Just logically speaking probably about 90% of the search based on the title of the book. Wouldn't it then stand to reason that Google also places much emphasis on the title of the document?

The basics of your website and WebPages are the very first place to start any good SEO campaign. Start with a title tag and make sure that it has more than just your companies name and phone number, include the relevant keywords that you have researched through Google's adwords tool or through http://www.keywordspy.com/. Never overload the title tag because Google is only ever going to read 100 characters of the title tag to begin with so it does not make much sense to extend way beyond that. The same thing goes for the H1 tag; make use of the headlines of your page. You do want to make certain that your headlines are attractive and does catch the attention of your customer; we also want to include keywords inside the H1 tag to attract the search engines as well. The metadata should also be addressed in your campaign, many search engine optimization experts have claimed that meta-data no longer matters; however, in the search engine optimization campaigns that we manage we definitely see an impact from metadata especially inside the descriptions. Our theory on this is that if the metadata has zero effect on our campaign it's at least gives us a theme for each page that we develop and helps keeps us organized.

I've seen about 1 million different advertisements for submitting your website to 1000's of different search engines, or creating back links overnight and I can honestly tell you that while they might have some positive effect on your search engine optimization campaign nothing will replace useful content and good website optimization. Trying to fool the search engines by using tricks such as mirror sites, or duplicate content is simply a waste of time. Granted you may get a bump in the ratings for a short period of time by going around the "system" but in the long run is that really what you want? If you are attempting to develop a website that will maintain its rankings for the "long run", and it is wise to develop content that will convert your Internet traffic as well as serve the search engines well.

In previous articles we have discussed "black hat SEO" and what to avoid when optimizing your website, as you are developing your website or optimizing make certain that you pay attention to what could hurt you. Search engines are extremely intelligent and you must provide content that is useful and original. As time goes on this is proving to be more and more difficult which requires creativity and thought.

When you're working on your search engine optimization campaign make sure that you set aside enough time to really be creative with it, remember that organically showing up in the rankings does not cost you or your company anything but time so make sure that you do not skimp on the time you invest in this campaign. The more time you spend developing content that is useful with keywords for the search engines, the more likely it is that you will show up at the top of the searches for the demographic and target audience you want to reach.

Chad Formica is a search engine expert in Denver that specializes in Denver SEO Coaching and local Denver SEO

The Next Step, Creating a Plan

2009-03-29T13:48:00.003-06:00

By Chad Formica

Denver SEO Consultant

Okay, so now you know the difference between Organic Listings, Pay per Click Listings and Local Directories at least in the way that it appears in Google. Other search engines like MSN and Yahoo have a similar layout in the fact that they also have local listings pay per click results and organic listings.

My assumption as to why you ever came here to read me dribble on and on about SEO is that you, like most of my clients are sincerely interested in obtaining the highest organic listings that you can for your site. As a matter of fact, I bet that by now you want to just jump right into it and learn how to get that 1^st page result for Google searches. The answer to your question of how to achieve this is not an easy one, and it is not something that I can get to the heart of inside one post or 20 for that matter. It is important for you to understand the entire landscape of search engines, how they work, what they do to index the internet and much more, before we ever approach techniques and strategy.

So with that being said, the next step to your Search Engine Optimization campaign is to draw up a plan of attack. Just like a business, you must have a plan. I think of it just as I would any other marketing campaign. If you were going to run a commercial spot on television, or a direct mail campaign, I don't think you would just send out any old mail piece or run any type of commercial and hope that business would start funneling in the door, would you? Search engine optimization, even though it is free costs you much time and effort and if you are paying a search engine optimization professional to handle this campaign it is costing you money too!

So where do you start, you don't know any HTML (if you do, I am being figurative here), you do not understand anything about the internet, so how could you possibly draw up a SEO plan? That is exactly the reason for this post.

The first step to creating a SEO plan, like any other plan, is to establish your goals. What do you want to achieve with your search engine optimization campaign? Do you want to increase traffic to your site (obviously), do want more "top of mind awareness"? Your SEO/SEM (search engine marketing) plan will help you determine where you should focus your work. Probably one of the biggest reasons that an SEO campaign fails is the lack of a clearly defined goal. The goal for your plan must be built around your business' needs and it is not something that every single business requires. So, let's take an example of an attorney in Denver that specializes in personal injury law in the Denver Metro Area. (We will get into keyword research and defining the best use of keywords in future posts) Why would this attorney want to show up for "personal injury attorney"? Any searcher that types this in will soon find themselves sitting in front of a myriad of directories and sites that will lead them to lawyers in their area. Do those results give them exactly what they were looking for? Probably not. Those searchers will more than likely search again, and this time for something like "personal injury attorney in Denver".

So here is what I am saying, just going for keywords and trying to attain the best ranking for that keyword is not good enough. If I were handling the campaign for the Denver Attorney, I would need to understand his business much better. I would find out what kind of personal injury cases is he/she looking to attain, is there a minimum size for the cases they handle, who are their competitors? Most importantly what do they want to achieve by being more visible online. By answering these questions I can define a goal. Your SEO goal (this goes without saying, but here goes anyway) should align with your business goals.

I recommend setting at least three goals in the beginning of your SEO campaign. Your first goal should be what you are going to achieve in the next 60 days, your second goal should be what you will be achieving over the next 180 days and your final goal will be what will be complete in the next 12 months. I can guarantee that someone is asking themselves right now, "What would I possibly set as a goal; I do not know anything about SEO?" So let's come up with a few goals that might apply to someone who is just getting started with SEO.

If you read my previous post title "Where do I start my SEO?", than you read about the difference of local listings versus PPC versus organic listings. So let's start off this campaign for the Denver Attorney who specializes in class action lawsuits for the medical industry. After examining his business, we find that he is a attorney in Denver and he is mainly interested in obtaining class action law suits in the medical field (obviously I am not an attorney and I am using my imagination here, so if you are an attorney and I am completely crazy make sure to comment and teach me something will you?). Contrary to my previous statement about the injury attorney, I would assume that this attorney's audience is national and that he would want to get in front of every possible searcher that is looking for a talented attorney to start a class action suit. With this being the case, I would develop goals like the following:

Goals for Denver Attorney SEO campaign:

1. Develop a page one presence for local searches in Colorado (60 day goal)

a. Research and find out how many local searches pertain to business

i. Obtain a page one ranking and local listing with Google Maps for those search terms

ii. Establish a PPC or CPC Adwords account and purchase keywords for these campaigns

b. Establish a blog for social networking (unfair that I listed this goal just yet as we have not covered the topic of blogs just yet, don’t fret I will in the future)

2. Develop a page one presence for local searches in adjacent states (i.e. Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, etc) (180 day goals)

a. Again, research and find out the local searches that pertain to personal injury

3. Start to implement strategies and campaigns to obtain rankings for “national search terms”

a. Continue to expand my local search campaigns into other states within the United States

Now, for an attorney that is actually involved in the business of forming class action lawsuits, I would imagine that he/she would be able to go into much more detail than I about these goals. These goals should remain flexible at all times; we don't want to be too rigid with the goals as we do not want our goals to get in the way of our SEO. We just want a bearing, a place to end up. Just like a road trip, it is uncommon to get in the car, pack your things and have no idea where you are headed.

For your SEO Plan, this is really the first step. Now after we have established our goals we can work on developing the rest of our plan. My next post will take us into more details of the SEO plan and we will start by examining the site currently in place. If you do not currently have a website and you are starting here, than good for you! Excellent SEO starts with the inception of the site, having to come back and correct what was done incorrectly in the beginning can be very time consuming.

As always, please comment and e-mail me with any questions you might have.

Where do I start my SEO?

2009-03-25T15:36:00.008-06:00

By: Chad Formica

Denver SEO Consultant

Search engine optimization... if you own a site or a business that has a site, than this is something that you have definitely seen or heard about it. If you haven't than your site is probably all the way out of the loop meaning that the site cannot be seen by the search engines at all. Even if you haven't received an e-mail offer for SEO services, I am certain that you have received a cold call from a SEO agency or local directory like Yellow Pages or DEX that has offered you what they call SEO.

So let's start by getting clear on what search engine optimization really is. There are several opinions and descriptions out there, but my definition of search engine optimization is any attempt to bring a domain (website address) or URL (uniform resource locator otherwise referred to as website address) up to the front page of a major search engine organically. Search engine optimization does not include PPC or CPC(pay per click or cost per click) campaigns or strategies and it does not include the local map listings provided by the search engines like Google. I am not telling you that obtaining a front page map listing with Google is not going to help your website or the overall traffic to your website, what I am saying is that I don't consider this an "organic" result.

Figure 1

Okay if you look in Figure 1, you will see a search completed through Google for "Denver Attorney", in this search you will Pay per click, a local Google Map and Organic results. I have highlighted all the different areas so that I could point out the difference in these. It will make a difference in distinguishing what is organic and what is not. Now, the orange highlighted areas are pay per click advertisements or cost per click advertisements. The webmasters and companies that own these websites have paid or bid rather on keywords with Google Adwords so that they could show up on the first page every time that a searcher typed in "Denver Attorney". As a matter of fact using Google's Traffic Estimator tool through Google Adwords shows that these advertisers bid anywhere from $4.91 - $7.37 to be placed on the first page. Ultimately the Traffic Estimator tool also shows estimated clicks of 8-10 clicks per day.

Looking at the same figure, you will see the highlighted pink area, this is the local business listings with Google Maps. The process of getting to be one of the lucky 10 listed here on the 1st page is not known. We have many customers that we have been able to get listed in this area and in future blog posts I will share with you how we think we have been able to actually get this done. There is not a way that we know of where you can pay to be listed here, it is up to Google and their proprietary process as to whether or not you are actually listed here. So the local Google listings is closer to organic search.

Lastly, the yellow highlighted area is the organic listings. To get listed here in the organic results is what we will be delving into throughout this blog. Anyway, these are the organic listings that are so very much in demand. The reason that these are more desirable than the local listings or the PPC advertisements is because this where the majority of the traffic goes to find the answer for their search. Throughout the thousands of searches a typicaly user has performed during their "internet career" they will usually find the most useful, most popular and best results for their search in the organic ranks. We can see that this is the case using Google's very own Keyword Tool. If we go to the keyword tool and search for results for "denver attorney" we will see that in the month of February there were a total estimated or approximate 60,500 searches for this search term, the approximage average search volume for this term is 33,100. By using the average monthly search terms (33,100) and dividing this by 30 days we come up an average of 1,103 searches every day for this term. We had discussed Google's Traffic Estimator tool that told us we would see an average of 10 clicks every day from the PPC campaign, this would suggest a conservative click through rate of 1%.

According to studies on organic listings versus PPC advertisements, it is estimated that 90% of the overall traffic will find their answer on the 1st page. It is obvious by Google's own estimator that the majority of the traffic is not flowing through to the PPC. Different sources have estimated that as much as 30% of overall traffic will flow through to the PPC advertisements. What does this mean for the rest of the traffic? My guess is that through the process of elimination you have guessed right and you are thinking that the rest of the traffic is going to the organic listings for their final selection.

So now we have covered the differences between the different types of search engine campaigns. In my next post I will discuss things you can start doing right now to prepare your search engine campaign. Please e-mail me or comment on this post with any questions you have.