Search Engine Statistics in SEO

I was doing some research and found that 75 to 80 percent of traffic comes through the search engines. Most people do not look beyond the first two pages of search results. And even less click on Pay per Click (PPC) ads. So if your website does not rank in the first two pages of engines like Google or Yahoo! it is probably only getting about 20 to 30 percent of traffic, and even less for your revenues. The bottom linbe is that you need to rank high on the search engines with those "key" words that your customers will use to find you on the Internet. It is all about relevance.

At MarCom we have noticed that many of our new business clients worry about how much traffic they are getting on their websites, but few really notice or know how many of these convert to sales, or even where they came from. Recently we had one client -- www.peternity.com -- mention that since we have been working on a keyword and social media marketing strategy of pet urns/dog urns/cremaiton urns and her ranking on these words has improved, she for the first month she actually had orders for these urn products It's nice when we can take credit for revenues for our clients.
Another client that we have been working with for reputation management - RoccoBasile.org - has improved in just a week and gone from ten to eight in the first page rankings on Google.

Another thing we recently put together because of all the confusion about social media marketing services, is a standard rate sheet. Our services are actually very cost efficient. We typically charge a one time fee for keyword analysis of $650. Online website optimization depends on each client's current ranking, number of web pages and their situation.

Using Linked In for Social Media Marketing

I was invited to a colleague's BNI networking group this morning, and they had recently implemented a group instruction to network each other via Linked in. I have been on the service for years. And I am guilty of not always using it correctly, as I suspect is an issue with many business people, even though I know the value of social media networking sites like this. We instruct our MarCom Broadband clients about the value of social sites like this.

Because LinkedIn is an online network of millions of professionals from around the world, it will help to improve your Google Page Rank, or Google PR. You can post your personal profile and make the information available for the search engines to index. LinkedIn gets high PR in Google, so it is another way of influencing your ranking so people will find you on the Internet. It is pretty simple: just create your public profile and choose the option called “Full View.” You may also want to have your profile’s URL be your actual name, or the name of your company. Then link this page from your blog, or website or from press articles online.

Also LinkedIn is a great place where you can list your website with a link, and or your blog link. All links back to your blog or website create "activity" on these sites which Google likes, and which will go as credits towards your , or PR, on those sites. Be sure if you link to your blog that you include your name or keyword phrase in the link, which will provide search-engine optimization for your blog site.

The Value of SEO and Social Media Marketing

The transition that is going on in the marketing communicaitons industry is interesting. There are alot of people who know that their websites need Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and many actually believe that their website designers have already done this for them. We see all too often that web masters use duplicate title tags. For example, each page may have the same name - the name of the company. This does not work because Google sees it as you spaming yourself. Here are some basics below.

Each page should have its own unique title tag with keywords (preferably chosen from a keyword Analysis) done by an SEO pro like MarCom's Mike Keesling. If possible, each page should have its own unique description tag as well. Note: in some content management systems this is impossible to achieve as they assign descriptions on a global basis only. In this case, it is better to eliminate the description tag entirely, rather than use one phrase repeatedly for every page.

This brings me to content building and social media marketing. The purpose of building content on your web pages is so that you will have more opportunities for keyword placement. Flash sites cannot be optimized. And sparcely designed web pages with little content offer no SEO advantage either. At least have other content (clickable) on back end pages. Three deep is about as far as the search engines will go.

Content building is part of social media marketing. I write articles for clients that feature their keywords and link back to specific web pages on their sites with those key words. This way Google sees that there's activity going to their website, and begins ranking their site better. The goal of course, is to get the client ranked on page one of Google.

Links: To Buy or Not to Buy

Now that Google has taken the gloves off against websites and firms that they consider in violation of link building protocols, we must pause to reconsider our link building strategies. Initially, Google indicated their policy was to disallow, or even penalize, any paid links as well as websites who purchase paid links. Google may be the purveyors of the one of the world's most advanced linguistic parsing algorithms, but my associate Mike Keesling of MarCom Broadband's SEO expert found their statement to be full of holes.

Would a website be banned or penalized because they had paid for a Yahoo! directory listing? Aren't Pay Per Click (PPC) ads essentially paid links? Would Google really penalize their own adwords users? In the following months, Google has zigged and zagged through this semantic minefield of their own making. Google clarified its Yahoo! Directory position, saying that since inclusion was not guaranteed until approved by a human this did not constitute a paid link. Google clarified its PPC position by saying these are ad buys so they also do not constitute paid links. All well and good, but we are still confused.

If one buys a link on a site that sells them, couldn't this also fall under the safe harbor of being an ad buy? Who determines this and what are the guidelines? The definitive answer is probably many months away. In the meantime, one certainty is that the value of reciprocal links has actually gone up (provided the linking partners are legitimate and within the same or related business categories or markets). How long this bump in reciprocal links lasts is anybody's guess at this point.

So what would Mike recommend? For reciprocal links, choose your linking partners carefully. Make sure their page rank is the same or better than yours. Make sure they aren't blackballed by Google. Look at potential partners websites ... Do they look and feel like a legitimate company website or do they have the barnyard smell of a link farm?

For directory listings (one of the best places to get one-way inbound links) exercise the same smell tests just described. Double up on the inbound links you can control--press releases and article submissions. Mike said he would take a pass for now on the pay per link or pay per blog post outfits. Figure it's at least 50/50 that these will be next to feel the wrath of Google.

"In a weird way, I welcome Google's position, stance and actions against paid link builders--Link building is the most pain-in-the-butt of all SEO practices and this allows people who hate building links (like me) to slack off on it for a damned good reason," said Keesling.

The Art of Article Submissions

I have been doing article submissions for a couple of years now. It all started with writing them for an antivirus company who was looking to push some negative stuff that showed up in Google searches down and off of the first and second pages of searches in MSN, Yahoo or Google. I used our key words, wrote articles, and it worked.

Next I started writing articles for all of our MarCom Broadband clients. I always say that one good topic or article can be written "six ways to Sunday" when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing tactics. Here's an example of that:
1) Press release on PR Newswire - a traditional news release.
2) PR Web optimized press release on PR Web.
3) Articles on articles submission sites like http://www.articlesbase.com/
4) Forum posts in industry forums and chat rooms.
5) Social media site postings on sites like Wikipedia, My Space, etc.
6) Blog content - you really need a blog to regurgitate content.

Plus you have your website content.

You do need to be careful about how commerical articles are in the submission services. Most of them will not take promotional content. But you can add your company's name and website address in the resource box. You just need to be clever about how you talk about a company or client by name. I often mention several comapnies, or provide a quote.

Last, none of these SEO tactics would be of any value without adding your key words. The first thing we do is a key word analysis for clients. Then we all use these key words in every single thing we write up.

Results are fantastic. You usually see results for certain key words within a month or two. And again, it's all about content content content on the web. The more of it you have, the better your rankings in Google.

The Value of Podcasting and Online Radio/TV

I mentioned these numbers in my last blog, but some info is worth repeating. According to Arbitron, 27 million Americans have listened to a podcast, or online radio and TV. Early adopters in any category are going to benefit from this.Internet radio has been around for awhile. One of our clients, Big Media USA, Inc. , provides this service. It's not music, it's information.

Just think of them as the Time Warner of the Internet -- with a number of stations that have a number of channels on topics such as business, health, sports, spiritual, etc. In fact, very soon I am going to be hosting a new channel there on social media marketing.

The value here is that Big Media has been around awhile, so their site has allot of content on it, and Google spiders their site daily. This is great, because if you have a radio or podcast show on BMUSA, and your key words are in the copy of your show promo, or in a press release that BMUSA or you put out, you will be spidered too.Podcasts are easy for others to listen to or watch online 24/7.

Plus the content is great to have transcribed for use elsewhere via social media marketing -- in press releases, online articles, and even in forum posts -- all excellent ways to optimize your website for better rankings by the search engines like Google, Yahoo, or MSN, etc. Then if someone is seeking information open something, they may come to your podcast. That's why it's important to keep them short, and get the key messages about you and your products or services into the first five minutes or less as you can.

Article Submissions for Social MEdia Marketing

Lately it seems pretty clear that the media don't really need PR folks pitching to them. We still do, however, most media are Internet savy enough to research their topics online and find articles about companies out there on the Web. And so that means that we, as marketers, need to make sure that our clients are also out there - accessable even by the media. What does this mean?

You start with a good press room on your website with press releases that include your key words embedded in each release. You add a press kit with documents that describe what your company is all about - that means press releases, company backgrounders or profiles, frequently asked questions (FAQ), product or services profiles, and customer testimonials, etc. Each of these documents too must be key worded.

Next you post your press releases by the wire service companies, and write articles and post them throughout the web in article submission sites. Its important that you not "copy" any documents that are posted. The rule of thumb is to change the content of each artcle on the web about 30 percent because Google will not "count" duplicates.

Just like in the old days, people said retail was all about location, location, location -- well, search engine optimization and social media marketing is all about content, content, content on the Internet.

Optimizing Your Website for the Search Engines

Once you have chosen applicable keyword phrases (see previous blog item) that have a high search volume, but a corresponding low number in the "competition" column, the next important search engine optimization (SEO) tip is that you can now incorporate these key words and phrases to optimize your website. Website optimization is one of the most important things you can do to make your website more visible to the search engines.

When optimizing any website the goal should be to choose one or two of your top keyword phrases for each page in your website. You can make your choices by matching the subject matter of your web pages to the keyword phrases.

Then you can plug your keyword phrases into the appropriate place on each web page. The appropriate places are your title tag (approx 70 characters long), your meta description tag (approx 100 characters long), your headline or page title (preferably as an H2 tag), in the first sentence of your body copy, somewhere in the middle of your body copy, and in the last sentence of your body copy.

You can also use keyword phrases in the alt image tags -- and you get bonus points for using your keyword phrase as link text. Repeat this for each page on your website. Just remember not to duplicate tags, or exact content, because with anything you do on the Internet, the search engines will only count content one time, so you won’t get credit for duplications.

Applicable keyword phrases can also be used to guide your website content. This means you can use your keyword phrases to define what your website content should be about -- one web page per keyword phrase. So, while looking over your keyword phrases, figure out those that you already have content for, which ones you need to write content for, and then add content pages for those keyword phrases where you are lacking content.

Ultimately, good search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing will gain better search engine visibility.

Keyword Analysis - The First Step in SEO

There is a lot of confusion about just what search optimization (SEO) is. There are a number of steps involved, but the first and most important step is to do a keyword analysis to figure out what key words people use when they search for a product or service via one of the search engines like Google or Yahoo.

Here are the basic steps for a keyword analysis:
1) Take a look at your client’s key messages, and jot down the words and phrases that stand out.
2) Go to http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-playground.php
3) Enter your keywords and or phrases and copy the results for searches per month containing the keyword phrase(s) into an excel spreadsheet. One column is for the search term and the other column is for search volume.
4) Go to http://google.com and enter each keyword phrase one at a time. Just above the search results on the right hand side on Google is a line with results 1-10 of about NUMBER for each keyword phrase.
5) Enter the value of this number in the third column (heading of Competition) for each of your keyword phrases. Repeat for all the keyword phrases you can think of. Then sort your spreadsheet under search volume column in descending order.
6) Now look for applicable keyword phrases that have high search volume and low number of competition...these are the keyword phrases you will want to use--the PRIME keyword phrases.

Use your keywords in press releases, online articles, and link to your website with links that use your keywords. All of this will help your website's rankings in the organic listings of the search engines so people can find your site when the use the same keywords.

Content is King in Online Technology and Globalization

A new report by Forrester Research says, "most companies get involved in social media in a haphazard way - a blog here, a podcast there - with no coherent web content strategy based on audience needs."

MarCom has been ahead of the curve in online technology because we have been focusing on technology and software companies over the last twenty years, and those companies are the ones that developed online technology. Now it's going global, and other industries are catching up fast.

One of our more recent clients is in another field - the medical industry. The Wiley Protocol has a fabulous content-rich website - www.thewileyprotocol.com. We started working with the company in December, 2006 and the first thing we did was a keyword analysis. The company specializes in bio-identical hormone replacement therapy - a hot topic these days among 40 plus women, and now, the US Senate thanks to a new law circulating that could limit compounding pharmacies. Their audience is pretty clear cut. Consumers, doctors, and compounding pharmacies. This means we have content being developed to use, as I say, "six ways to Sunday." On the website, in press releases both online and offline, newsletters to consumers, doctors and pharmacies, at trade shows, online in articles, blogs, forum posts, podcasts, radio and TV shows, and more.

The company's website designer used the open source content management product called Joomla. It's free, and actually pretty easy to use. The first problem we encountered was that because Joomla uses Global tagging, it's challenging to optimize the site's Meta tags and pages. But my associate Mike Keesling is going to be able to do it now that we were trained in using Joomla. Next we needed to be trained for an hour on how to write, edit, add images and disseminate one of two newsletters via Joomla. Not to mention how to use the mailing management tools for the lists of those who signed up via RSS feeds. After an hour of training this weekend, I edited my newsletter draft and then didn't hit SAVE, so I lost it all. Today it took another couple of hours to revisit, rewrite, and I still have to figure out how to add my images. Learning these tools to save time is money in our business.

We look at all this as an investment in our future. There are other more customizable content management tools such as www.enthusiastinc.com - and this company's version 2 will be set up for easy optiomization. But the bottom line these days is that as marketing practitioners, we all need to invest the time in learning how technology and globalization is changing our trade, because it's not going to stop growing and changing any time soon.

Launching Early Stage Companies

Last evening one of our clients launched a new product that will help real estate agents get a leg up on the competition. Dogtor Paco™ technology (www.dogtorpaco.com) provides end-to-end electronic mortgages locked in 30 minutes. We held a small cocktail gathering so people could view and interact with the product, a great tactic for early stage companies and products. We had excellent feedback, especially from the mortgage brokers in attendance, and this venue even allowed guests to show us, or demonstrate, what they were already using. Of course when we compared Dogtor Paco afterwards, there was no comparison -- Dogtor Paco always came in first -- as a mortgage calculator and loan organizer that's transforming real estate financing.

As a marketing and PR practitioner, these kind of events provide valuable resources for customer testimonials - because we can go back to them after the event with a customer Q&A and obtain publishable testimonials which can be used on the client website and in press and marketing materials.

We also offered those who attended our event a discount on the product subscription, and an incentive for recruiting others to try Dogtor Paco. The evening's discussions also brought forth new key words and key word categories that we will be using in the client's Search Engine Opitimization (SEO) efforts. Our advertising and branding expert Brad Stone watched the demonstrations and what people said very carefully and in the end has some ideas for what he needs to do to begin a branding and advertising campaign. But perhaps best of all, the venue also provided a unique forum for which we actually discussed some very valuable co-marketing opportunities with other special guests.

In the end, inviting people and employees to an end-of-the week gathering from 4 to 7 PM to learn about your products and services can be an excellent way to garner new marketing and PR ideas, thank employees for their hard work, and ultimately grow a business while having some fun doing it.