The Title

Each article, blog post, video or other piece of content that you have “external” or “off-page” of your website must have an attention-getting title that must include your keyword or keyword phrase.

The Description or Resource box

Each piece of content will typically have a description or resource box, as well.  Make sure your are leveraging this area with a good sentence or two that includes again… your keyword or keyword phrase.  Very important.  The resource box is usually the area you put in information about the author.  This is also where you would feature your keyword as “anchor text” that has a link back to your website.  So instead of writing something like – “for more information on “keyword”, click here” (where “click here” is the link)… you would write – “if you would like more information on “keyword”, just follow the link (and have the keyword itself linked to your site).

Body Copy

In the case of an article, blog post or special report… your body copy must also feature a few sentences about your keyword or keyword phrase.  Here again you would want to have the anchor text of the link be your keyword.

Linking back to your website with your keywords is an excellent way to help Google associate your keywords with your website. When Google and the other search engines can see the association – it helps your website get a higher ranking when people do searches for that keyword term.

Video Marketing Rocks!!

Ok, so you’ve created this great marketing video about you, your company or the problems you solve for your customers.  Now what?

Well… it’s time to get it out on the wires!!!

Here are 5 steps to effective video marketing

1. First and foremost – use a dependable hosting service
When you are marketing your video, the last thing you want is an unreliable hosting service that ruins your efforts. It’s important to use a provider that will offer you consistent quality and give you the assurance that your video won’t be spontaneously taken down at any point.
 
Websites such asYouTube and Vimeo are traditionally pretty reasonable at providing such a service; if you want 100% peace of mind, then investing some money into a host such as Brightcove or Bitsontherun might be a good idea.  In many instance I use Viddler – it’s solid, you can customize the look of your videos to include your branding and host a ton of them for $50/mo at their premium level.
 
2. Remember to OPTIMIZE your video for the search engines.  SEO, SEO and more SEO!
Video is a great SEO (search engine optimization) booster, and using sites such as YouTube can greatly aid your SEO efforts. Just as in any SEO strategy, your main aim is to allow your video to be found by online users who are searching for content related to your video. 
 
When marketing video, making your video findable by search engines is your top priority. It’s essential, therefore, to fill out all of your video meta-data on all the video sharing sites it is hosted on, and to write as much information as the sites allow you to include.
 

3. Harness the power of social sharing 
Cracking social media isn’t always easy, but the power of a social share is unquestionable. Sharing online video on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and other social sites allows you to reach an almost limitless audience.  Time consuming, YES.  But necessary.
 
One share to your primary audience could generate further social shares within that group, thus reaching audiences you’ve never interacted with before and spreading your video’s message way beyond your current online reach.
 
4. Interact on your platforms 
No matter what platform you are using—your website, social profile, video-sharing site, or blog—as the home of your online video, you will need to embrace and interact with the communities there.  Time consuming?  Yes.  But, necessary.
 
Engage with commenters and other users, Like or comment on their content, video-respond to them, share their work, and generally participate in the discussions taking place in those locations.
 
Doing so will encourage other users to do the same, in turn, with your content and will generally create good marketing karma for you.
 
5. Measure your success / Track your efforts 
Always remember that measuring success creates success. Whether you’re looking to improve your video views, social following, Likes, conversions, website visits, or bounce rates via online video… you need to regularly check the success of your strategy and tactics.
 
Try to check on your success monthly to allow for an appropriate amount of time to have elapsed. Upon checking your results with tools such as Google Analytics, SEOmoz, HootSuite, and the like, sit down with your team to work out how to strengthen your campaign further.

Remember – Video marketing is huge in today’s Internet-focused world.  Don’t take this lightly.  Videos engage, plain and simple.  We offer a pretty good service for video marketing.  If you need help, let us know.

7 Deadly Sins of Keyword Research

Keyword research is an all too often under-appreciated aspect of SEO.

Here are some of the more common mistakes that I see people make with their keyword research.

#1 – You’re being Unrealistic

“It is better to have a bigger slice of a few smaller pies rather than not getting even a slither of a much bigger pie.”

Keyword research appears to be a very straightforward task. You fire up your keyword research tool of choice and find the keywords that relate to your industry with the highest search volumes. Sadly, that’s not the way to do it if you want to see real results.

To many businesses, high-competition keywords are simply out of reach – at least in the short and medium term. Part of good keyword research is about being realistic and selecting appropriate keywords for targeting that take into account the site’s age, current authority and any future optimization that will take place.

Targeting one word keywords is quite often unrealistic but it may also prove unprofitable – someone searching for ‘Toshiba l670 laptop’ is likely to be much further along in the purchasing process that someone who searches for ‘laptops’ – think about which searcher is likely to have their credit card out already.

There’s nothing wrong with targeting generic keywords, I’m simply saying that if your campaign has limited budget and you need results in the short to medium term then targeting less trafficked, less competitive keywords is a much better way to utilize resources.

Lower traffic but lower competition keywords might not seem as exciting to target but if your website can dominate these areas fairly quickly then you are going to see far more traffic from the search engines than failing to effectively target a much more competitive term.

#2 – You’re looking at broad match instead of exact match

A seemingly simple mistake but one which many people continue to make…

Search volume is of course a very important metric when it comes to keyword research but all too often people make the mistake of looking at broad search volumes rather than the exact match figure when using tools like Google’s Keyword Tool.

There can be a huge difference between broad match and exact match search traffic for example:

There are 135,000 broad match searches each month in the UK for ‘dog kennels’ but only 14,800 exact match searches for the same keyword. Still, this wouldn’t prove particularly problematic as this is obviously still a keyword worth targeting – it would knock traffic and ROI projections way off kilter if you do these kinds of things though.

The real problem comes when you choose to target a keyword like ‘ladies leather handbags’ which has a broad match search volume of 2,400 but an exact match search volume of only 260 – failing to base your research on exact match data might mean you think you are targeting a reasonably well-trafficked keyword when in actual fact, once you’ve factored in data inaccuracies, you could be looking at a very low search volume keyword indeed.

It is widely accepted that Google’s Keyword Tool isn’t entirely accurate when it comes to search volumes but using exact match gives you the best data available when assessing how viable a keyword is to target.

#3 – You’re targeting plural instead of singular

It is very common to see a website targeting the plural version of a keyword but in most cases, it is the singular version of a keyword that people are searching for.

I see this most often on eCommerce websites where the site owner optimizes category pages and because they sell more than one product, they naturally focus on the pluralized keywords for example “tablet PCs” which actually gets 91% less searches than “tablet PC”.

I will readily admit that Google is much better at determining that a singular and plural version of a keyword are one and the same, but in many cases there are still differences in the search results. Failing to target the singular keyword can be the difference between your search listing being highlighted in the SERPs (=higher clickthrough) and it can also mean your website appears lower (even slightly) than marginally better targeted pages – that could be the difference between making a sale and not.

#4 – You’re ignoring conversion

This one could easily turn into a rant for me because so often I come up against clients who want to rank for [insert trophy keyword] when in actual fact they’d do better (financially) targeting a different keyword or set of keywords. I try to explain that a keyword that brings in traffic is wasted bandwidth if that traffic doesn’t convert. You don’t hire my company to get traffic for traffic’s sake…you presumably hire us to help you ultimately make more sales.

The online world is competitive and it’s only going to get more competitive, therefore making the most of every penny being invested is vital.

This makes conversion and language analysis a vital part of keyword research. The human mind is the only software capable of performing a good quality ‘conversion audit’ of a keyword list because whilst there are programmes out there that can filter and sort keywords to make your life easier, there’s no real substitute for industry experience and SEO knowledge.

There are some very basic indicators for example prefixes such as ‘buy’ might be a clear indicator that the traffic from this keyword is going to convert.

A keyword conversion audit is more complex than that however since each situation and market is individual. I find existing data to be a very useful way to determine which keywords are likely to convert well. If you have goal tracking setup with Google Analytics, you can easily determine the highest converting keywords your site currently gets traffic from, try to identify patterns in your highest converting keywords and then translate and apply this knowledge to other areas of keyword research.

#5 – You’re selecting keywords that are out of context

This is yet more rationale to further humanize the keyword research process because most keyword tools struggle to compute words and their meaning in the way a human would.

For example, a searcher looking for ‘storage’ could be looking for a self-storage center, boxes and other storage furniture for the home or even professional storage solutions for a warehouse or office.

Opportunities for confused targeting are abundant which is why it is essential the keywords you decide to target are highly-relevant and laser-focused towards what your business offers.

A good way to do this is to search manually for the keywords in Google and see the kinds of results that come up, you will likely be able to get a feel for whether the keyword is applicable to the product or service you intended to target.

#6 – You’re failing to conduct keyword reviews

It is accepted that SEO is an on-going process but rarely are target keywords reviewed and audited. If a marketplace is shifting over time then you would also expect customer search behavior to develop and evolve over time too – this makes regular keyword reviews essential.

In most markets, I find an annual review is perfectly adequate. Any time period shorter than this and there is a risk that targeting becomes a bit chaotic with efforts focused on new keywords before results on old keywords have been achieved or evaluated.

That being said, in some competitive and very fast moving markets a more regular keyword review may be required.

#7 – You go it alone

And… there’s no reason to.  SEO professionals use all the best tools and can guide you based on experience and best practices.

A couple of side notes:  Not only do excessive images impact site speed (which can decrease customer usability and lead to higher bounce rates), but they don’t look as attractive.

But the question remains – if content on your home page is a good thing - how much content is enough?  In our opinion, enough content is that which easily and effectively communicates your product and service offerings to your audience and the search engines.

Is this a quantifiable figure? Probably not. For some of you with shopping sites you may want to take the Zappos.com focus and provide less direct information but more linking text and contextual content around the breadth of features and products they offer.  However, for those of you with blogs or information-focused sites, you may want to emulate the sites of Dave Taylor and Jim Boykin.  Both provide a TON of content in the form of blog posts, industry links and customer testimonials that Google is clearly using to effectively place them at the top of the search engines for dozens of competitive queries.  Just “google” them and you’ll see what I mean.

What Does Google Say?

As for Google’s stance on this question, check out the below Google Webmaster Help video from Matt Cuts:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

In the video Matt addresses this exact question but doesn’t give a clear answer. He does say that you wouldn’t want to have a home page containing 20MB of data since that would clearly be too much. He then continues to relate the following:

“But in general, if you have more content on a home page, there’s more text for Googlebot to find, so rather than just pictures, for example, if you have pictures plus captions – a little bit of textual information can really go a long way”

In the end, only you can decide how much content is enough for your home page. In our opinion though, it’s always better to have too much content as opposed to not enough.

The Experian Hitwise search success rate report revealed that Yahoo sends 81% of their traffic on to Web sites, as compared to 80% for Bing and only 68% for Google. These percentages show how effective Google Places & Google Maps is at keeping local search traffic on Google’s site, as compared to the current similar offerings from Yahoo and Bing.

Just type in your URL to get some ideas.  Tells you what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong.  Check it out.

http://www.seositecheckup.com/

New opportunities in online marketing are literally around every corner. How do you get a comprehensive view of the important ones and prioritize accordingly?

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