The Truth About SEO

Posted on February 4, 2012 by admin

Search engine optimizers (SEOs) have been compared to snake oil salesman. With the huge amounts of money to be made online there are thousands of people claiming to be SEO experts. I was listening to the radio and heard ad by Yellowpages where they were looking for people to join their business and to become SEO experts with no experience required. They hire these people not to be SEO experts but to be phone reps that sell the services regardless if they can provide it or not. Even though I am a SEO and my business clearly states that is all I do, I still get calls from companies guaranteeing top positions on the search engines. As a joke, I ask them a few basic SEO questions which takes them off script and the answers they provide are usually very humorous. These are the snake oil salesman that give the industry a bad name. The truth is there are many really good and honest SEOs out there that live and breath search engine optimization just as I do. Sad thing is we are the exception and not the rule.

Here is something all people should know about SEO. People at Google please listen to this as well. SEO is not evil. SEO is not trickery. SEO, when done right, is about helping the search engines to improve their quality by getting sites that should rank for a term to rank for a term. Often a good SEO must trouble shoot to find out why a site isn’t ranking for a keyword. A good SEO knows and understands the search engines’ guidelines so they can make sure their clients’ sites follow them. Sites don’t rank often because they break the rules. A good SEO fixes these mistakes. So you may think SEO is all about breaking the rules, but the opposite is actually true.

This is the truth about SEO. I hope this helps to set the record straight.

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3 SEO Words That Should Make You Weary

Posted on February 1, 2012 by admin

There are three words that you really don’t want to hear: fast, easy, and guaranteed. Some days I devote my time to building my knowledge and skills. I search the web for all the latest trends and information on search engine optimization. Often I find many articles where people claim to be SEO experts or like me, a SEO guru, but really have a very limited knowledge of the field. Often to encourage people to use their services they’ll use the three words I mentioned above: fast, easy, and guaranteed.
However, SEO is anything but fast, easy, or guaranteed.

SEO is not fast
Sometimes getting rankings does happen fast, but as a rule SEO involves a bit of patience. Content in the site must be built and links from external sites must be built. This just takes time. There are tricks the help speed up both of these processes but often they have short lived gains. The best way is the time tested true way, which is build good content and encourage people to link to it. It is a slow way but it is the right way. As the tortoise says “slow and steady wins the race.”

SEO is not easy
Often my clients will ask me what I do. They’ll believe they can just change the meta tags or repeat the keywords 1000x and get rankings. Funny thing is many SEOs do exactly these types of things and the result is no result. Creating content with keywords is only part of the battle. Understanding how the search engines and how your competition are changing is other the major part. SEO is not rocket science but it does require ever changing knowledge of the field. So companies hire SEOs because as a SEO you must constantly expand your knowledge base. Things change and a good SEO changes all the time.

SEO is not guaranteed
Often clients ask for a guarantee. My favorite response is: If I could guarantee rankings on Google, I would have to be an owner of Google and if i was an owner of Google I wouldn’t need to do SEO work any more. The point is there are no guarantees. SEOs have no control over Google and can only follow best practices and should help with rankings.

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Reducing Twitter Noise

Posted on January 25, 2012 by admin

Unless you are a rock star, celebrity, or someone truly interesting building a Twitter following does not happen over night. However, hiring someone like me can help. Recently, I helped a client building 1,400 followers targeted to their industry. The problem was also I had several non-targeted people added in the mix. To build a following means following others. If they like what you are Tweeting about they will follow you back. I had to set their account to follow back people automatically in order to help the growth. This is where the problem can happen and the client received many followers who were not relevant. As a result, their timeline was filled with both good and bad posts. This really annoyed my client. The benefits of increasing their social media presence was lost on them and they could only focus on the negative. The funny thing is if you have more than a few hundred followers your timeline gets filled up pretty quick with people Tweeting about random crap. “Random crap” is an industry technical term for junk. ;) So there is a problem for all of us. The more we follow the more noise we get.

So here is the dilemma we all face we want more followers and yet we want to make sense of it all. How can we cut down the general non-useful rants and tweets on Twitter and focus on what we are truly want to hear.

Here are a few solutions for reducing the Twitter Noise:

1) unfollow everyone: hmm…I not really recommending this and if you do this too fast your account will get banned on Twitter. But if you really want, you can do this over time. 200-300 unfollows per day will not get you in trouble. However, unfollowing everyone has its consequences you’ll probably loose many of you followers. Hopefully, the ones remaining will be true followers and active.

2) create lists: Creating a list allows you to put all the people you really want to listen in one spot where you can check. add them to a list..
– click on the follower’s name
– click on the icon that looks like a person..then choose “add to list”
– click “create a list” or add them to an existing list

3) read your @ (reply) messages: Your reply messages are usually messages of engagement so fortunately they are all gathered together for you to easily check all at once. Now you would normally assume these would appear under the “messages” tab; this is not the case. The messages tab shows all your direct messages and these are usually spam. For the most part direct messages (DMs) can be ignored. To see the replies click “home” next to the timeline tab is the “@username” tab where you can see all your replies.

4) use external tools: I have mentioned this tool many times but it deserves another mention. Monitter.com allows you search for conversations that might interest you. It allows you to type in a search term and it finds all the conversations where that term is used. You can even geographically target it so you can find local people. I use it often as a means to find clients or cool things happening in the world.

5) use hashtags: Hashtags allow you to quickly check all of the conversations on a specific topic. I’ll often watch trending topics for cool and timely news. When the earthquake happened at the beginning of this year in Japan I looked about it first on Twitter. I was able to use the hashtag to then engage with people to quickly learn everything I could about the situation. Within seconds I knew more on the topic then most news stations were providing on TV.

Finally if all of these things don’t help you reduce the Twitter noise…try turning off your computer and going out into the real world. I know scary thought..just stick to trying my above recommendations.

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5 Things You Need to Know About Google Plus

Posted on January 23, 2012 by admin

Google Plus is growing as a social media contender. Google might have pulled the plug on previous social media attempts but Google plus seems to be here for the long haul. Understanding Google plus as a business owner is important because when social networks are new it is the best time to take advantage of them. Twitter only a few years back would allow you to follow an unlimited number of people per day and there were software like Hummingbird where you could follow thousands of people at once and build massive followings fast. Now such activity would result in a quick account suspension. Google plus is still young and pretty unrestricted. How long it remain this way is anyone’s guess, but it is a good time to learn the system and take advantage of what it can offer.

So here is what you need to know in order to get the most out of Google plus for your business.

5 Things You Need to Know About Google Plus:

1) When someone pluses a site its ranking goes up for any term related to it for that user. More pluses means people will see your site highly ranked. It is kind of like bookmarking but it affects the Google search results.

2) If you unfollow a Google plus page, it immediately unfollows you. So be careful about unfollowing it could result in less activity for your page.

3) You can easily add a Google+ icon to any web page. Here is the link http://www.google.com/+1/button/ There are many plugins for WordPress that help as well like social profilr.

4) Contacts in Google+ are arranged in circles. With circles you can categorize your connections by relationship: family, work, friends, business, frienemies or whatever you like. You can also import your contacts from your gmail and other social sites.

5) You circles do not impact how people categorize you. So just because you put a person into a friend circle doesn’t mean they will do the same. However, when you add people to circles they receive a notice that a connection has been made. Sometimes this can be a good way of encouraging activity from people who you don’t know but would like to know.

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SEO Secrets Revealed

Posted on January 16, 2012 by admin

Search engine optimization (SEO) is about getting your site to the top of the search engines. However, the rules for what makes a site rank are for the most part kept secret by Google. Here is what we know. Content and links to a site are the two major factors that determine rankings. Content means having the keywords within your site’s pages’ text. Having these keywords in the title and throughout the page helps theme a page toward a keyword. So best practice is to have the keyword appear in the top, middle and bottom of the page. Headings on pages add emphasis to a keyword and boost rankings. The goal for the search engines is to look relevant so when someone goes from the search engine to a web site and the keyword is large at the top of the page the searcher feels that they found the right page. Therefore the role of a good SEO is to make the search engine look good.

Here are a few secrets that you should know that will help you make your content shine on the search engines:

1) Be precise about the phrase used. If people search for “Alaska best hot dogs”, then don’t say “top hot dogs in Alaska”. You need to use the exact match for best results.

2) Theme your site. Don’t expect that just because you have one page that is SEO gold that your site will suddenly rank #1. The whole site needs to theme the keyword. A one or two page site won’t rank well. More pages are needed to back up the good page and help it to rank.

3) Rephrasing helps. I see so many sites which try and fail to target a keyword because they spam the term in the content. Saying SEO, SEO, SEO will not help me rank better for it. In fact it will actually hinder my rankings because the search engines can recognize spam. Reinforcing a keyword is important and can be done subtly by using semantically similar words. I try using similar meaning phrase that are also popular keyword phrases. So instead of saying SEO, SEO, SEO, I could say search engine optimization, SEO, and web marketing are important.

4) Remember content is only half the battle. It used to be the case that if I optimized a brand new site it would jump to the top of the rankings. It still can happen but it has become a much more challenging game. The level of competition has improved and links are extremely important in achieving the top rankings. So building a good content site isn’t enough, you must get links to it. Social media helps in this because you can use it as means of posting your link on high powered sites. So go out and get links.

Please feel free to post your tips or questions and I’ll be glad to help.

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5 Signs of Being Addicted to Social Media

Posted on January 8, 2012 by admin

Here is a little humor…I hope you enjoy. The keyword is “little” so if you think you can be funnier please feel free to post your humorous suggestions in the comments below.

1) Most of your “friends” you’ve never actually met in person

2) You speak in 140 chars or less

3) Hanging out with friends means going to FaceBook or Twitter

4) People, whether they want or not, know where you are at all times…you even check in to your home.

5) Asking your friends on a social media site if you are addicted to social media

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Top 5 Social Media Myths For Business

Posted on January 2, 2012 by admin

Businesses are rushing to social media with the misguided believe that it is the new cure all. Social media is great, but many businesses will find it live up to these high expectations. Many companies will set up a FaceBook fan page, Twitter account, etc. then let the dust collect on these social profiles and wonder why it hasn’t resulted in any new clients or customers. Or businesses might do the opposite and avoid social media altogether because it is seen as a waste of time. Here are my top 5 myths associated to what is social media:

1) Too time consuming
Many businesses avoid social media because they feel it is time consuming. Actually, if you let it can be very time consuming. But it doesn’t have to be. Many of the daily tasks on social sites can be automated or social activity can be connected across multiple sites so communication doesn’t just happen in one place but across many social media sites. Usually, I spend less than 20 minutes a day on social sites and even with such a small investment of time I reach out directly to over half a million people and indirectly to almost a billion. There are no other means online or off that can provide such an impact that short amount of time. Social media is possibly the biggest time saver of for businesses seeking to market themselves.

2) Can’t make money with social media
I have heard said this from people, who are so-called experts, many times. It just isn’t true. Social media is a goldmine. It helps when finding clients, converting clients, and creating a network of potential clients. Social media is about making connections and the ability connect with pretty much anyone you want makes it very powerful. Doing a few searches on social sites you can very accurately pin point people interested in your product or service. I use sites like monittor.com or even the advanced Twitter search to find local people that need my help. With social media you can easily listen to these conversations then engage with them. Daily I get 2-5 clients from my social sites, so it is major source of income for me, but it could easily do the same for your business.

3) Not right fit their business
Every business relies on customers and clients. Social media can help any business to build both. If you feel that your business doesn’t need any more customers then you shouldn’t be in business. Successful businesses rely on growth and those that rely too much on their existing client base are destined to fail. Even the most loyal clients can leave. Social media isn’t only about building customers, can it also be about providing better service to them. I often use it to educate my clients so they have a better understanding of what I do. Often this leads to even more business from them.

4) Having a profile is all that is required
I’ve been doing social media for several years now and built companies’ followings on Twitter, LinkedIn, FaceBook, etc. and though I can help them all create thousands of connections some still don’t get it. One client, I built 2000 targeted followers on Twitter, never Tweeted from their account and asked why with such a large base of followers they weren’t getting more daily traffic. The reason I explained was they didn’t give those followers a reason to visit their site. Sounds simple, but if you want to get something out of social media you have to put something in. A little bit of communication can go a long way. So don’t expect that once you built a social profile that you are done, this just the starting point.

5) Social media is expensive
Social media’s only cost is time. Though time is money, it takes very little time to get a lot of return on the time spent. Keep things simple do a few updates, connect with some new people, respond to a few posts…after a while you’ll find yourself building a following and a base of connections that will build your business. I offer many marketing services and social media marketing is always the lowest priced. It is much easier then other online marketing methods. SEO, which is my bread and butter, is expensive to do. It requires constant work on the site and building links. Google ads are even more expensive with SEO approximate cost is 5 cent per visitor with Google ads on average it is $1/visitor. In contrast, social media costs about 1 cent/visitor and as it grows the price continuously drops.

Please feel free to comment…ask me about your problems with social media and I’ll try to help.

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Why Businesses Need to Use Twitter

Posted on December 20, 2011 by admin

Many many years ago people probably thought having a phone wasn’t necessary for business. However, the same thought today would sound silly. The same happened with the advent of the Internet. However, companies gradually embraced the idea of having a web site as an essential part of being in business. Now it is happening again with social media. Businesses are quickly learning that social media is becoming the new way to reach customers. One of the social sites leading the pack is Twitter. Twitter is now essential to business. If governments in Africa and middle east can be brought down by it, then realize how powerful it can be if harnessed for your business.

So why do businesses need Twitter?
Twitter is for the most part just another means to communicate. The difference is that unlike the telephone where it is a conversation between usually two people, Twitter allows you to converse with thousands (if not millions of people) at once.

How can your business use Twitter?
This can be done in several ways on Twitter. First is through building a following, where people are tuning in to your message by following the Tweets you make. This following you can think of as a client list or prospect list. They are people who might represent business today or in the future. If you give out the right information, then they will become clients/customers sooner rather than later. The second method of reaching these people and the more than 200 million people on Twitter is done via hashtags. For businesses hashtags represent conversations on a topic. A hashtag could be your product name or service. For example #microsoft or #seo. The hashtag could have been started by a competitor or customer, but how you engage using these tags can impact your success with Twitter. Unlike traditional means of marketing, Twitter only costs time and the reward for the time spent is the ability to reach out to more people than was ever possible before these social networks existed.

So is your business on Twitter? My next post will explain the pitfalls of Twitter and show how to get the most out of it. Please feel free to comment or ask questions. Or better yet Tweet your question to me.

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Google Freshness Update

Posted on November 10, 2011 by admin

On Nov. 3rd, 2011 Google announced its freshness update. Google is usually fairly secretive about its updates, but this one they boldly stated that it would impact 35% of the searches. This means about 1.2 billion searches a day will be impacted. That is 3x more impact than the Panda update which had SEOs scrambling to work out new ways to get on top. Google said the following about the Freshness update:
“Building upon the momentum from Caffeine, today we’re making a significant improvement to our ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.”

This means that it is an algorithm change and must be considered when trying to best optimize your site for Google rankings. It should be noted that 35% of the search queries were effected not 35% of sites list in Google. The difference is that popular time sensitive searches will show the majority of the impact of this update.

So what does the Google Freshness Update impact

Regular recurring events: One problem that plagued Google was old established event pages were generally ranked higher than newer more timely event pages. Show so doing a search for a popular trade show might result in shows from 5 years ago appearing at the top. Google is trying to fix this by having the most recent show rank best.

Latest News or trending topics: The goal for Google with this update is to look more fresh. So searches for recent events or trending topics are greatly affected. Searches for such topics will show a time stamp in the results where you can actually see how the more fresh the story the higher it ranks.

Frequently updated information: The algorithm tries to determine topics where freshness should be important to rankings. For example a review for best digital camera should show recent camera reviews of newer model cameras. Doing a search for “ipod review” and you’ll see how “freshness” impacts the results.

How to Optimize (SEO) for Google Freshness Update

When targeting fresh terms, now it is important to appear fresh. Google determines whether a site is fresh or not based on when your page was last modified. Using sitemaps you can timestamp your latest changes and Google will know how fresh your content is. The goal would be to make the content look constantly fresh. Rankings with Google “freshness” update can be as fresh days to minutes old. Now top ten means having updates be hourly. The great thing is its all new, which means there is a huge opportunity to take advantage of this untapped method of SEO. An observation made by SEOmoz was the dates associated to content seems to be also closely corresponding to rss feeds of the articles. WordPress automatically creates rss feeds for the blog posts, which means people using it will have a slight advantage. So to sum up reminder the these three things to SEO for the Google freshness update: 1) use sitemaps 2) use rss feeds 3) update often

If you need help with optimizing for the Google freshness update, please feel free to contact me or comment below.

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10 Ranking Factors for Google: Myths and Misconceptions Part 2

Posted on November 3, 2011 by admin

This is part 2 of the top 10 list for Myths and Misconceptions of Google ranking factors.

Time spent on the site
There was a belief the Google would track the time people spent on a page after they had clicked a link from its search results. The belief was if a link resulted in a a high bounce rate or more searches then it would mean the result wasn’t good. To improve its result Google would reduce the rankings of sites with high bounce rates. However, though this theory sounds great, there has been no evidence that Google actually does this. It is my belief that though Google does try to improve the quality of its results there are easier ways to do it than to monitor time spent on the site.

Keywords in the URL
Yes, keywords in the URL help in rankings. However, Google only gives a small boost to the rankings from the keywords being present in the URL or page name. Probably when I say this every other SEO will think that I’m out to lunch because they’ll cite thousands of sites that have good rankings by just having the keyword in the URL. Here is where the misconception comes into play. Google likes links as a ranking factor. In fact, Google really loves links when the keyword is in the anchor text of the link. When people link to sites, that just happen to have the keywords in the URL, they generally will use those same keywords in the anchor text. This is what causes the rank boost people are noticing. The point is if you can get people to link to your site just using the correct anchor text your site can get the same benefit even without having the keywords in the URL. So if you can get a keyword in a URL that’s great, but don’t worry if you don’t.

Description meta tag
The description meta tag is what Google will use as a default description in its search results. This is hidden code within a site’s HTML that has been historical spammed by overly aggressive optimizers. Google gives little or no weight to it. I spoke to a representative in the past from Google who said they give some value albeit very little value. This was many years ago and I doubt the tag is given any value now. However, this doesn’t mean the tag should be ignored it is used because it is often what the user will read and use to decide whether to click your link or a competitors. So having a good description meta tag can improve your clickthrus.

Google editor adjusted ranking
Google has the power to adjust the rankings. It can in theory put itself at the top of every search result, but it doesn’t. Google for the most part tries to make the ranking process as automated and reliant on its algorithms as possible. I have actually made some of my client sites rank better than Google for keywords it targets. However, in the past in should be noted that Google editors have put Wikipedia pages at the top for certain searches. However, there are millions of searches happening everyday on Google and editor influence is a minute.

Large amounts of repetition of a keyword
Keyword stuffing is never the correct way of trying to achieve rankings. It is better to write content that people will want to read. The fact is keyword stuffing can actually negatively impact your rankings. I recently experienced this first hand when I was doing some design work for a client. I put up a template where I just copied the keyword phrase several dozen times for showing the layout of the site when temporary text was in place. Google indexed the site while I was doing this and if you searched using the keyword phrase the site’s homepage where this temporary text was placed would not show up. However, internal pages would show up where it appeared naturally. This goes to show that Google hates keyword stuffing.

Oh this is a bonus or 11th myth. There are companies that tell their clients they will submit their site to Google and that regular submissions will increase a site’s rankings. This is not true. First a site doesn’t need to be submitted to the search engines, Google will naturally find it. However, pinging of deep pages or creating a site map is sometimes necessary to encourage fast indexing of this deep content. For most part never pay for submitting your site to the search engines it is a waste of money and does not improve your site’s ranking.

If you have any questions about what are or are not ranking factors, please feel ask me in the comments section below.

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