When it comes to e-commerce you need to select your SEO firm very carefully. There is perhaps no service more important to the success of your company online than SEO. Brick Marketing makes SEO simple and effective through a methodical process that is proven and continues to bring results for our clients. Some of the SEO services we offer include:

• SEO Strategy
• Keyword Research
• Meta Tag Copywriting
• Content SEO Recommendations
• Link Building Strategy

We will communicate with you every step of the way to ensure that you get the best possible SEO for your business. Whether you have an Internet-only business or you have a brick-and-mortar business that you are moving online, we will do everything we can do to ensure that your SEO is the most effective that it can be at an affordable price.

Our SEO packages are designed for any level or size of business. Whether you need a long term SEO strategy or you need a one-time SEO copywriting service, we give you 100% of our attention all the way through your project. Give Brick Marketing a call, or contact us through our website for more information

In your website copywriting, are you using emotional trigger words? This is the one thing that I see more often on website copy - copywriters not using the trigger words.

Trigger words are words that trigger an emotional response. You want that response to be an appropriate response for your product or service - one that inspires action. It doesn’t necessarily have to mean a positive response. Trigger words could be words that provoke fear, love, greed, self-confidence, lust … and it must be appropriate to your product or service. In other words, if your website is about food then you want people to get hungry, not greedy for money.

Website copywriting is all about getting people to respond. End your website copy with a call to action with a strong trigger word. Then watch the dollars roll in.

One great tool you can use to improve your SEO and the user experience on your website is called Site Search. Google Analytics allows you to track what your users are searching for. You can see what pages they are on when they search and where they end up. Then you use the information you gather from the analytics tool to improve the SEO of your website and the experience of your users based on what they’ve searched for on your site.

Site Search is easy to set up, but there is a free and a paid version. Which you use is up to you, but I’d definitely put it on your website, especially if you have a website that has a lot of pages on it. Some of the great information about your site visitors that you can gain from the tool are:

• Search terms they use
• Start pages
• Destination pages
• Categories they search for
• Trending allows you to see individual user statistics over time
• Segments lets you group your users and see how they act as groups

It’s the perfect tool for large websites with lots of information.

I found this on TechCrunch today.

If you saw this one coming, give yourself a very large prize. Google is experimenting with Digg style voting features on search results that allow users to vote up or bury search results they see.

This is actually a good idea, but I could find no record, either at TechCrunch, on Google’s own website, or at Marketing Pilgrim, which also ran a story on the topic, of how to sign up for this experiment.

Another benefit to Google, and this could be the real reason behind the experiment, is this: If users vote up or down certain results on their searches and this experiment works the way it is supposed to work then Google will know more about each person's preferences. That means more personalized results and better results for each user's personalized preferences. Once Google nails down precisely what you are looking for when you type in "Rabbit" - the furry little creature or the German-made automobile - then they'll be able to target their customers' pay per click advertising to you better, which will increase the value of the clicks. It's all food for thought.


(Source) Yahoo has managed to score a significant win by beating ad competitors like Google and Microsoft to the opportunity to mine the PDF space for advertising revenue. Adobe and Yahoo announced the new program for delivering dynamic contextual ads in PDFs this morning.

This is good news for advertisers and e-book publishers. It has been recognized for awhile now that the PDF format is more conducive to publishing e-books because it is a format that has the widest compatibility since mobile phone users can read books in PDF, but generally do not have web browsers. If this takes off then we’ll likely see more PDF e-books getting published and advertisers flocking to get their ads published in them. The only drawback to this is perhaps that it’s Yahoo! and not Google. Although if Google were to roll out a similar program for AdWords it might take off sooner. Maybe they’ll wait to how it fares with Yahoo!

One question that is an obvious one to ask is how will this affect the SEO of e-books. Search engines can already crawl PDF documents, but if the search engines can make any money on advertising, you can bet they’ll figure out a way for advertisers and publishers to make those books more available. Will free downloads be more crawlable in the future? Will we start seeing mass advice on how to SEO your PDF e-books? Will the search engines off up new verticals for PDF documents? We can count the possibilities. At this point, all of them are valid.

Several companies have been promising us better search for a long time now. Some of them have succeeded. Others just keep trying.

One company that is racing to improve its search is Yahoo!. So how does the search engine hope to improve search for its users? Here’s what Mashable says:

In an effort to stand out (and then beat) Google, Yahoo may soon be rolling out a structured search for particular keywords, which would give a more informative set of results than just links to websites containing relevant information.

But what does this mean? According to Mashable’s blog post on the topic, Yahoo! is attempting some version of semantic search. Other search engines have tried this before and some of them have succeeded in one way or another, including

• Grayboxx
• Powerset
• Twine
• Krillion

Each of these unique brands in search offer some kind of natural or semantic search, but none of them have the power or reputation as Yahoo! Grayboxx, for instance, tries to incorporate search engine technology at the local level. The problem is that its database is incomplete and it hasn’t rolled out the technology into every geographical area just yet. Powerset promises true natural language search, but it’s still in development. Twine is still relatively new and boasts of giving users true semantic search and it’s still in beta. Krillion sets up a nice interface for letting users find national brand products in their local area.

While each of these smaller search engines can cater to a niche market, I doubt that any of them can achieve the kind of greatness that Yahoo! if it tapped into real semantic search with the ability to help users find local businesses better. One simple technology improvement could potentially wipe out any of these smaller competitors. Why couldn’t Yahoo! replace the need for Krillion, for instance, with its own brand search technology? It seems like such a simple thing to be able to do. By incorporating a Grayboxx-type local search box with a Krillion-type product search box, Yahoo! could truly be a force to be reckoned with and might actually achieve some sort of search technology that might live up to the term “revolutionary.” But will it happen?

If anyone is in a position to make it happen, it’s Yahoo! But based on what we all saw this past Monday, are we holding our breath?

Yahoo Merchants Solutions had an off day two days ago on Cyber Monday. They lost revenue, many of their customers lost revenue, and they likely will lose many of their customers. The comments and feedback on Yahoo!s blog were not friendly pats on the back. One customer had this to say:

“Just telling us the time line of what happened isn’t very useful. We already know that as we watched it happen and suffered the lost business because of it.

If you want to gain back the confidence of your customer base you ought to be more specific about what happened, why it happened, and what you are doing to assure us that it won’t happen again. ”

That’s just plain old-fashioned bad business. If Yahoo! expects to keep its small business customers and not lose them to Google’s Checkout services then they’ll have to work hard not to let this happen again. One more such instances on a heavy shopping day like that and you’ll see small business merchants flying to anywhere else. The sad thing is this: The customers who likely lost the most business were the customers who did the best job in their SEO and SEM promotions. Their reward? Nada.

Just when you thought Aaron Wall couldn’t get any more remarkable, he goes and does the unexpectedly ridicumarkable. His free SEO book for bloggers is so short you can read it all in one setting and he’s giving it away because, as he says, “SEO for a blog is different than SEO for most other websites, largely because of the social elements baked into blogging technology.”

The free book covers everything from blog hosting and keyword research to advertising and promotion, which makes it a great book to download. Here’s a free tip from Aaron’s new book: Don’t set your blog up as a subdomain on a free host. I totally agree with that.

The book is chock full of great advice for bloggers and Aaron is right about his basic premise: It is so easy for the search engines to gauge trust for blogs based on a number of factors, including how many RSS subscribers you have, how many inbound links you have, the relevance and reputations of those inbound linking blogs, and a host of other factors too. Probably the most useful tip in the book is this: Don’t overlap your categories and your tags. If you want to know the difference between the two, you’ll just have to read the book.

And while you’re there, don’t forget to buy his SEO book.

For more great information on blogging and SEO for bloggers, read Blog Marketing Journal.

This video of Matt Cutts appeared on the Google Webmaster Central Blog this morning. Matt shares his insights into how Google displays the description, which he calls a “snippet,” of your website in the Google SERPs. This is very interesting the way he explains it. I think what you can glean from this video is how you can write your own snippet (description) or determine what your snippet will say by the way you write your website content.

If you are selling products that might appeal to more than one target market you can build a landing page for each target market and optimize each landing page around a specific keyword. For instance, let’s suppose you are a work-at-home mom who knits bobby socks by hand and sells them on her website - bobbysocks dot com. Perhaps you want to bring back the bobby sock as a fashion trend and you make bobby socks for different markets.

Here are your identified target markets for your hand-knitted bobby socks:

• Young girls who like to look cute (we’re talking kiddie age here)
• Teen age girls who like to feel “classic”
• Grandmothers who wore bobby socks “back in the day”
• And the mothers to the teens and daughters to the GMs who didn’t like them before but now think they’re cute

You want to sell the “bobby socks are cute” mentality to each target market, but you know that each market has special needs and will be spoken to differently. So you decide to set up a sales page that identifies with each specific target market and their needs. Here are the keywords you might use:

• Kiddies - Cute socks. Knowing that little girls aren’t going to know what bobby socks are in the first place, you decide to just sell the concept of “cute socks.” But it isn’t the little girls who will buy them. It’s their mothers. It is likely that Mom has never worn bobby socks because she wasn’t born in the 50s when bobby socks were popular and when she was a little girl there were different trends. Now that she’s older she can see the cuteness in the socks and wants her little girl to look like a 50s cutie-pie. You can say they’re bobby socks on the sales copy, but it isn’t necessary to make “bobby socks” so important a word that the page is optimized around it.
• Teenagers - “Classic bobby-style socks.” Your teen age beauty queen is different. She has some autonomy, but not complete autonomy. She likely makes her own decisions regarding the clothing she wears. She may or may not have purchasing power. Either way, you still have to “sell” her on the idea. Remember, you’re selling benefits, not socks. The benefit to the teenager is that she will look “classically cute.” She will be as cute as the teen girls were in the 50s. The same ones who wore “the original” bobby socks.” It’s OK to call them bobby socks to this market because the class style might be known to her. Her grandmother likely wore them and maybe even her Mom, so she’ll know what they are by the stories told her by the older ladies in the family. But simply calling them “bobby socks” might be a turn off because she isn’t her Mom or grandmother. She’s different and she knows it. You need to sell her on being “classically cute” and not just classic or cute.
• Grandmothers - “Bobby socks.” Grandmother wore bobby socks in the 50s. She liked them then. She likes them now. The problem is grandmother is getting old and she can’t dance any more. But she remembers what it was like to cut the rug in her cute little pink bobby socks. She wants to feel that way again. What she wants is the feeling of being young even though she knows she isn’t. What better way to feel young again than to have your own personally hand-knitted pair of bobby socks? Nostalgia is a benefit too.
• Moms - “The socks your mother loved.” Now you’re talking to the toughest market of all. Mom rebelled against her mother’s fashion statements. Bobby socks were “so old-fashioned” when this girl was a teen. Now that she’s all grown and has teens of her own, she realizes how bad she was rejecting her mother’s trends. They may not have been “the best,” but they weren’t so bad after all. She cares a lot more for her mother’s approval now than she ever did. And now that her mother is getting old, nothing would make her happier than to see her now grown daughter accepting the trends that she made a big deal about rejecting 20 years ago. Why not try it out now that you’re pushing 40? These are “the socks your mother loved.” Now you can love them too.

I hope this little illustration will show you the power of using specific keyword phrases to target a specific market. Same product. Different markets. Different keywords. Separate landing pages. Close the sale.

This is perhaps the most comprehensive list of questions to ask before getting started optimizing a website that I’ve seen. Kalena Jordan asks all the right questions and seems to get right to the meat and heart of a job before she ever starts on it. I highly recommend this list as a checklist. I would just add one more question:

What search engine marketing is the site owner currently engaged in?

You want to make sure that your search engine optimization efforts are compatible with other marketing and advertising initiatives of the company. Otherwise, you might screw something up. It would be a shame to re-optimize a landing page, for instance, only to find that the pay per click ads pointing to it are optimized for a keyword that you took off the page. That would certainly jack with the effectiveness of those ads and likely reduce their quality scores. So add one more question to that list.

Yesterday I posted a list of ways you can encourage inbound links to your website. It seems that lists are popular. Everyone is doing it and if they’re not, they want to. But how do you go about creating a long list of 100 or 1,000 top _____________? Fill in the blank.

Well, for starters, you need to identify what it is you want to create a list on. Don’t do something that other people have done. Be different. It is OK to take a list that has already been done and modify it into something else. Obviously, then, the first step is to do some research in your niche to see what kinds of lists other people have put together.

After you’ve created a good list of lists that have already been done in your niche. Try to see if you can tell which of those are the most popular. That should give you some kind of clue as to what kind of lists work within your industry. If there is a way you can capitalize on a similar list without duplicating the list that has already gained notoriety then you can do that.

Essentially, there are three ways to go about creating your own list:

• Find a list that’s already been done and modify it with your own criteria and values
• Start from scratch and build your own list using what you value as the criteria for judging
• Take a poll or ask people to nominate candidates for your list

There are pros and cons to doing it any of these ways. Obviously, the drawback to the first one is that you are playing off of someone else’s idea. If they flopped on their list then you should know why. Otherwise, you run the risk of flopping as well. If they were successful then you need to know what sets your list apart from theirs.

If you create your own list from scratch, be prepared to put in a lot of hours. You’ll have to research all the sites, books, movies, etc. that might fall into your list. It could take a lot of time to do the research just to find the candidates for the list. Then you have to narrow the field by judging the candidates against your criteria. Of course, the upside is you’ll have a unique list that potentially has some value to your visitors.

Asking people to nominate candidates for your list will save you a lot of time, but you are subject the prejudices of the marketplace. What if someone is left out? It could be someone that you would have nominated. Should you allow yourself to make a nomination? What will your visitors think if you do? These are all very good questions and you’ll need to answer them yourself.

Lists can help you build good solid inbound links. But be sure to think it through before you do it because you’d hate to spend hours putting together a good list without any payback. You’ll have to consider the promotion of your list as well. How will you let people know about it?

After 410 posts on Search Engine Optimization Journal, I thought I’d go back and take a look at some of my most commented on blog posts. I wanted to put together a top 10 list of blog posts that have attracted the most comments. I started off counting blog posts that had at least 4 comments. After surpassing 15 popular blog posts I dropped those with only 4 comments and started focusing on posts with at least 5 comments. Again, I went over 20 posts and ended up dropping all the 5. Below are the top 11 blog posts - those SEOJ blog posts with 6 or more comments.

• Blog Comments Make For Some Good SEO 11 comments
• If Content Is King, Who’s Wearing The Crown 9 comments
• Yahoo Vs. Google On Search Fulfillment 9 comments
• PR Update? The SEO Community Is Expecting 9 comments
• Why Do Bloggers Make Commentators Sign In? 8 comments
• Article Marketing Beats Out Link Exchanges For High Quality Links 7 comments
• How To Ensure You Never Get Link Love 7 comments
• Word Documents Insert Bad Code Into Blog Posts 6 comments
• How To Improve Organic CTR Through Two Important Meta Tags 6 comments
• Is It Fair To Use Other Brands To Promote Oneself? 6 comments
• “Click Here” vs. SEO: Clark 1, Miller 0 6 comments

When I survey this list I notice three things. First, all of these blog posts are after June 2007 despite the fact that I started this blog in March 2007. That just goes to show that there is a time value to SEO. Older posts are not necessarily as popular as the newer posts. They likely received less traffic when they were new than the newer posts received when they were new. That accounts for the increase in popularity among those posts in June and after.

The second thing I notice about this list is that the blog posts that attract the most comments are the controversial ones. Humor doesn’t get me many comments. But make a stand on something that someone is likely to disagree with and you are almost assured a good number of comments.

Thirdly, 6 of the 11 blog posts were written in August or later. 10 of 11 were written in July or later. This could be an indication that my skills are improving. What do you think?

Inspired by Mashable’s new troll contest, I came up with 10 ways to encourage link baiting. If you really want people to link to you, try one of these time-tested methods of encouraging people to link to your blog or website:

1. Run a stupid contest like Mashable’s troll contest
2. Make a top 10 list
3. Create a list of top 100 websites in some category and encourage people to nominate candidates
4. Start an argument with someone else like Aaron Wall did
5. Take a poll
6. Bash Bush
7. Bash Google
8. Make a funny video and post it to your website or blog
9. Ask a serious question on your blog and ask people to respond
10. Make an outlandish claim that you can’t back up with supporting data and trackback it to 100 blogs within your niche

You know what? There are really more than 10 ways you can encourage people to link to you. Here’s one to grow on:

1. Offer a valuable service on your website that requires people to use it on your website

Can you come up with your own ways to encourage links to your website? Leave your ideas in the comments below. If you can’t think of anything, troll Mashable. They seem to like it.

Giovanna Wall, wife of the famed Aaron, started posting to Aaron’s blog on November 20. That was the day of her first post. Aaron asked everyone to give her a warm welcome, so here’s mine.

I’d first like to say what a great topic she chose for her post. Wikipedia. And then the proverbially rhetorical question as a post title, “When Will Wikipedia Rank For Everything?” Funny. I thought they already had.

The part that I liked the most was the chart she borrowed from RankPulse that showed Wikipedia ranking in the top 10 for 989 out of 1,000 keywords. Then she said that she added high traffic classifiers to those phrases and found that Wikipedia’s results dropped considerably. No doubt. They probably did simply because Wikipedia is not concerned with the long tail.

But I found Giovanna’s conclusion to be enlightening as well:

My explanations for the results are:

1. Although Wikipedia ranks well for competitive phrases, they don’t belong to the associated topical communities. They rank primarily on site authority.
2. While they have enough content to rank for said terms, they don’t have pages targeting those terms. In many cases the relevant content for the phrase is compressed as part of a broader related page.
3. Their title tags target core keywords and lacks modifiers needed to rank well for popular terms that Wikipedia did not dedicate unique pages to.

By fixing the above issues, they may very well rank for the remaining 11 keywords.

My response: Yes, Wikipedia is all about site authority. No long tail. Just a good and trust source of information. Regarding Bullet Point No. 2 - that’s an important SEO principle. You don’t necessarily have to build pages that target specific keywords to rank for those keywords. If you get enough inbound links using a particular phrase as anchor text then you can rank for that key phrase. Match it up with a web page that is relevant in a broad sense and you can steal the thunder of top notch websites in your industry. Finally, if Wikipedia did fix those three issues above then they might actually rank for more than the remaining 11 keywords. But will they?