Search Engine Optimization Journal - SEO Journal by Nick Stamoulis

Mike Grehan Video From the SES Conference

Nick Stamoulis — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 05:00:17 +0000

Mike Grehan, VP and Global Content Director of Incisive Media gives his opinion on some of the changes that might be happening in the search industry for 2010. It is pretty clear that the industry is changing and evolving and it is important for all businesses that are eager to get involved with search, that they understand that what they might have been reading from earlier years about search engine optimization might not be the same type of information any more. Social online interaction has changed the way people communicate with almost everyone especially their business audience and community. Things like real time search are slowly creeping into search results and making things even more important than ever to take advantage of.

Here is the video from Mike Grehan taken at SES Last Month:

The search marketing industry moves very quickly and businesses need to harness the power and potential now rather than later. Evidence for this is already here, and as states by Mike Grehan it will become increasingly important for business owners to become visible in all areas of search not just rankings.

Building a Successful Ecommerce Website

Nick Stamoulis — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:12:18 +0000

Building a successful ecommerce website is far beyond the old days of slapping up a pay pal button and performing simple search engine optimization and calling it a day. You need to build trust and have strong branding and trust factors in order to create and build a stream of daily customers. If you want your ecommerce website to function how it is supposed to in the search engines you are going to have to make some real improvements to how they function for the end user.

Ecommerce websites need to create a stimulation in your audience and make them want to act and create an action your website. Let’s take a look at a Website like Wal-Mart. Why do you think they are so successful? Yes, partially their name but their website has a series of components and factor built into it that are vital for online website conversions.

Categories – Make your categories very easy to find. They should all be clearly labeled on the home page. If you can’t fit all your categories you should have at least your most important high level categories on your home page. Don’t make your audience look for anything.
Seasonality: If you visit the Wal-Mart home page today you will see exercise equipment on sale. With spring around the corner many people are trying to shed some weight for the spring and summer. If your industry has this type of seasonality you should be showcasing your most important products during that specific time of year and creating that call to action. Feed off the emotions of your audience during each season.

Newsletter – You have to have a newsletter sign up that gives your audience a reason to give you their email address. You will want create a call to action if you want your audience to submit their email address. “Sign Up for Discounts” or something to this effect will get many more people submitting their information than just a sign up form.

Call to Actions – If you want people to do something on your site you need to entice them. With e-commerce websites you want your audience to be able to make it to almost any page possible in your entire website. They need to know they can trust you, so having things like privacy policies and return pages visible creates confidence in your user. It takes a lot for a person to be able to pull out their credit card and make a purchase.

Other Trust – Build trust in your visitors by highlighting your industry association logos such as Hacker Safe, BBB, your local chamber of commerce, etc. Also, consider live chat and promote your phone number accordingly. All of these types of elements actually help build trust in your audience.

Before you can think about bringing visitors to your website through search engine optimization, social media marketing, pay per click advertising, etc. always make sure your ecommerce website is build to last and built to sell!

SEO and Software Don’t Mix

Nick Stamoulis — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 05:00:04 +0000

I understand in today’s marketplace the need for automation grows and grows as companies seek to cut costs across the board. Streamlining a process down to a science and eliminating as much human interaction seems to be a growing trend but does it work for marketing a website and for SEO? Manufacturing yes, internet marketing to humans? No.

There is not a SEO software program on the planet that can successfully step into the shoes of your audience and try to anticipate what their online behavior or patterns might be at that given moment. There is something that will always require a human touch, search engine optimization and internet marketing equally requires the human marketing touch. When optimizing a website you need to stop and think about each page and really determine what kind of user you want to drive to that specific page. Which keyword you chose to target on that page will deliver a certain type of end user. This thought process is something a computer program is not going to be able to nail down correctly. What if you are torn between two keywords or phrases and both deliver a slightly different end user, do you think a software program would pick that up and pick the right keyword? Most likely not. Software can be used to do many research tasks like keyword research or design but software cannot write a custom crafted meta tag and description like a human could. The human element will always be a factor when communicating with other humans. It would be like asking a program to come up with an award winning design campaign for your brand. What if a software program puts in a keyword that is completely wrong for your business and you don’t catch it. Then you could be wasting the opportunity to build more targeted visitors.

Search engine optimization also requires a certain element of experience. An SEO software product can not by substituted for experience, but experience can play a role to help utilize an SEO software product. The experience of doing certain online efforts and analyzing the results only to tweak and refine to streamline even more. This is only acquired over time. This type of experience is invaluable and SEO software just doesn’t have the capabilities to analyze what works and what doesn’t. If your website generates only a small number of visitors but your conversion margins are very high does the software understand this? Who is to say something works over something that doesn’t? Every business will have their own tools and benchmarks for measuring their own success. If you are thinking about trying to use software to market your business think again, if you have a good amount of SEO and/or internet marketing experience as a business owner, marketer or web master, then there are software products out there that can help automate certain tasks to make you life easier, but it will not do the work for you! For instance, I use several excellent products to do my job, (Keyword Discovery, Compete, Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, etc.) I don’t only rely on these tools alone to make important mission critical SEO and internet marketing decisions for my clients. When you are evaluating SEO software products out there, just think of this: If it was that easy everybody would be doing it. Reaching out to humans and developing and executing a comprehensive strategy requires a human touch and always will.

Please share your stories and thoughts with our readers about what SEO, SEM and internet marketing tools and software products you are currently using, or if you have found better results without using an SEO or internet marketing software product?

How to Break Into the SEO Clique

Nick Stamoulis — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:00:44 +0000

If you are in the search engine optimization industry or you are trying to break into this incredibly saturated industry to make a name for yourself you might have a difficult time getting accepted into the circle of friends at the top of the food chain. The “elite” group that has been in the industry since day one and think they are the all mighty of the industry. The SEO industry leaders have become a tough group of individuals to become friendly with and it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier. All the “gurus” at the top that think they know every about everything seem to feel that they run this industry like they own it. The SEO industry is kind of like an open source program that should be treated like a group effort. There is plenty of business to go around. Lots of businesses out there that need help promoting themselves in the online space. People need to participate, communicate and get involved to make it a better place for everyone. One person tries something that works well they write about and things spread leading to better online marketing efforts.

I have been actively working in the internet marketing industry for over 12 years, have built Brick Marketing for 5 years successfully and have helped hundreds of clients in the field of SEO yet my educational comments that I leave on certain search engine marketing blogs get deleted, why do you think this happens? Leaving all names aside a certain someone contacted me not too long ago and asked me to stop commenting on a certain blog. Yes, I left a comment on each blog very frequently but isn’t that the whole purpose of starting a blog. These where all well written comments that where generated with real thought process adding to the overall message the blog post was trying to convey. Isn’t the whole idea of a blog to get the community interacting in your conversation? Since when is it bad to leave an educated comment on someone’s blog? Even if the frequency was high it shouldn’t really matter. I have seen this occur with other websites as well. I have seen the tone of this clique with others trying to make a name for themselves in the industry and I often see a certain nastiness resonating in the tone of a variety of online discussions. Don’t get me wrong I understand this is a tough industry and if you spend some time in it you get beat up a little but that doesn’t mean you have to be nasty to your colleagues and peers around you especially if they own and operate a successful search engine marketing firm. I apologize if I have not visited you at the trade shows and stroked your ego like many people do. Is it that I don’t kiss the asses of every individual in the “cool group”?

There is plenty of room in the school yard for everyone to get along. Is it because I am a threat to them or the industry? Sometimes I feel like this industry is a lot like high school all over again. You got your cool kids that think they are too good for everyone else and you got everyone else trying to shine in front of their eyes. I by no means want to break into the “cool” click and become one of those has to have their ass kissed by everyone else.

Why is it so hard for people in this industry to come together and work as a team? I understand that everyone is trying to grow their own business but there is no reason why so many internet marketing professionals have to have such a cold shoulder towards each other. We are all in the same game and we do the best we can to provide our clients with great service.

If you are an internet marketer or SEO person do you feel like our industry is heading in this direction as well? Please leave your comments and any related experiences or stories below!

Lead Your Audience Down the Right Road!

Nick Stamoulis — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:00:42 +0000

Whenever you start to put together a marketing plan for your website you really need to take a step back and start by asking yourself if your website is ready for more traffic. What good is all that new SEO traffic if your audience doesn’t have a clue what to do when they make it to your website?

Conversion aspects and search engine optimization should always go hand in hand. If you are not sure about what elements should be where on your website ask a professional to take a look before you spend a great deal of time figuring out how to drive more eye balls to it. This step is vital to the growth of your business. Not only does it help the way your audience interacts on your website but it also helps in strengthening your search engine optimization efforts if the right conversion efforts are implemented correctly. If your goal is to have potential clients and customers call you than your phone number should be visible in more than one area of your website. It is always smart to include the phone number in the header, middle of the page and bottom footer so that if a user visits your website and they scroll through any of your pages they will always be reminded that you are reachable and you that they can call you whenever they are ready. You can never assume that your website traffic will search for anything on your website. People need to be given the choice of what kind of action they want to take on your website. Your business goals should always be laid out on a path for your traffic to follow. The same types of principals apply to whatever the goals of your website are. Whether it is newsletter subscribers or online website sales it is important to have your website optimized for not just search but also for your users. Make sure the path is clear that you are leading them down also. Make the focus of the path the focal point of that page. Too many other distractions could cause that web user to exit your website.

Having the right the conversion aspects in place can drastically increase the amount of activity on your website and also decrease your overall bounce rate. If you haven’t taken the time to analyze your website to make sure it is in its most optimal state you could be missing out on some very valuable opportunities.

How to Write Meta Tags and Descriptions

Nick Stamoulis — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:00:31 +0000

Have you ever visited a website and seen the home page meta tag just jammed with keywords that runs the entire length of the top of your computer monitor? If you have that is a great example of how you don’t want to construct your meta tags and descriptions. There is a lot of argument in the industry on the importance of meta tags and how valuable they are. Meta information alone might not increase rankings but once your website has the power to rank well the keywords in your meta information will steer your website towards the right audience you are looking for.

Your meta tags should always be created tastefully. Each page should target 3-5 keywords for your content and your meta information and it should be custom crafted to what is occurring on that specific page. Remember that your meta information needs to offer an explanation to the end user. Your meta information is what appears in the search engine results when you are searching for something specific in the search engines. At the very least you want to keep it clean and to the point so that a person using a search engine will be enticed to click on your meta tag and visit that specific web page. Each meta tag gives a snippet of information for the user to understand what the information on that page is referring to. If you just cram it with keywords the user experience will be horrible and you will end up losing website visitors very quickly. Search engines really don’t like when meta information sections of a website are stuffed with more keywords than they should be. Some websites have been known to generate penalties in Google for over stuffing meta information with keywords and phrases.

When it comes to crafting well written meta tags and descriptions they need to have a very tasteful approach. Website users and traffic are getting much smarter and when they see these types of approaches where information is being jammed into the meta tag information area it deters them from wanting to do business with you. Always keep it clean and relevant and your website will over time find the audience you are looking for.

Marketing and Technicalities Go Hand in Hand

Nick Stamoulis — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 05:00:58 +0000

If you are making website changes or launching a new website you want to make sure the technical redirects and webmaster related pages are being used correctly, things like when to use a 301 redirect or when to use a 302 redirect. It might sound like not a big deal but the reality is if you get it wrong and the search engines assume you are trying to do something different than what you really are you might find yourself getting slapped on the wrist by Google.

If you own and operate your own website and you rely on its performance for your livelihood than you will have to play the role of your webmaster on more than one occasion. Google recently had a webmaster quiz and it was pretty interesting to see some of the results. Read more the quiz on the official Google webmaster blog.

Here are a couple of questions and answers that appeared on the quiz that might be very helpful to some of you:

Q: You bought multiple domain names and want them to all show the same website. What should you do with them?
A: Use a 301 redirect.

Q: Your website is not in the index 5 days after you’ve put it online; what should you do?
A: Continue working on the site.

Q: You have a country-coded domain name called example.es. To associate your site with Spain, you need to:
A: Google should already associate a domain ending in .es with Spain.

Q: Which of the following is NOT against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines?
A: Running tests on a site that result in some users seeing one version of a page and other users are seeing another version.

Q: Link schemes that can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results EXCEPT:
A: Links to other sites that you think your users will find interesting or useful.

These are just a sample of some of the most important Google questions and answers from a recent quiz. It would be in everyone’s best interest to not fight these and abide by what Google deems appropriate otherwise you could find yourself trying to dig your way out of a search engine penalty.