The Maine SEO Blog

I just got back from a radio interview where they asked for my Top 5 Blogging Tips. Since I’m a strong supporter of business blogs, and our own web marketing blog generates so much search engine traffic, I figured I’d share those tips here on the Maine SEO Blog.

Own Your Own Domain Name

Make sure that you own your own domain name for your blog. That means you want to blog at mycompany.com/blog or mycompanyblog.com, but not mycompany.typepad.com or mycompany.wordpress.com. Two reasons for this:

1. When you blog on a domain owned by someone else (i.e., wordpress.com or blogspot.com) you’re building up trust for that domain, not for your own. Why would you want to blog for the man when you can blog for yourself?
2. If you ever need to change platforms (we did a couple of years back, moving from TypePad to WordPress) you will lose all of your inbound links if you didn’t first establish your own domain name. All those links to mycompany.typepad.com/whatever? They don’t get to come with you.

Blog so That the Search Engines Can Find You

That means starting with a keyword analysis to determine what keyword phrases your audience is using at the search engines. Then using those keywords in your blog post title, headers, in the first sentence or two, and sprinkled throughout your post. Also drop them in your meta-description, meta-keywords, tags, categories and alt-tags.

Create Keyword-Rich Links Back to Your Website

For many of us, a blog is the place where we establish our credibility and engage with our audience, while our website is where we do our sales. If this is the case for you, you should link your keywords in your blog post to appropriate pages on your website. For example, if you wanted to promote your web design skills you might blog about the top 10 web design mistakes and then link the words website design to the page on your website where you talk about your mad design skills.

Engage Your Audience On and Off Your Blog

If someone takes the time to comment on one of your posts (unless their “name” is SEO India, Whiter Teeth, or Natural Cialis) then you should respond to their comments. Likewise, you should be active in social networking on sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as applicable for your business, and engage your network; ask questions, answer queries, and promote their stuff as well. They will be more receptive and interested when you post a link to your most recent post.

Be Patient and Persistant

Blogging is not like PPC ads on Google; you don’t get page one results from day one. Instead, it takes time to succeed. I’d recommend 2 – 3 posts a week for six months before you start to get the results you’re looking for. Although that may seem daunting, those posts continue to drive new qualified leads to your site for as long as you have your blog. I have posts from 2006 that still bring in hundreds of new visitors every month. Now that’s return on investment.

Rich Brooks
Top 5 Lists Are Easier Than Top 10 Lists

Photo credit: WoodleyWonderWorks

Dear Maine SEO,

We’re trying to decide whether we should set up a business blog or do pay-per-click advertising. Which will provide a better return on investment?

–Marketing in Maine

Dear Marketing,

We’ve never recommended putting all your eggs in one basket, be they proverbial or free range. Both blogs–which help with your organic search rankings–and pay-per-click (PPC) ads–which appear on page one–can help deliver qualified traffic to your website.

One way to look at this is the difference between cooking in an aluminum pan vs. a cast-iron pan. The aluminum pan heats up quicker, but it also cools off quicker.

PPC advertising is a lot like that aluminum pan. If you need to get page one results on Google or Bing, you just need to pay them and your ads will start running immediately. Same day results. That’s fantastic for sites that may not otherwise do well in the organic results, such as new sites or sites that rely heavily on Flash.

However, the moment you stop paying them–whether because you hit your daily budget or you’ve decided that PPC is no longer for you–that traffic stops just as quickly. You’ll get no more benefit out of the money and time you’ve invested.

Compare this to blogging: you may not enjoy much search engine visibility for the first few months of your blogging and you’ll be putting in a lot of work…we’d recommend 2 – 3 keyword-rich posts a week of 300 words or more. However, once you’ve established your blog and built up trust and inbound links, your blog stays hot like a cast-iron pan.

In reviewing the top ten traffic generating posts this month at our web marketing blog, five of the posts are at least a year or two old, the oldest one was written in 2006! Five years later and it’s still pulling in hundreds of new visitors each month…that’s a much better payoff than most PPC campaigns in our opinion.

So, if your budget allows it, we might recommend setting up a small budget for PPC, but develop develop a business blog for your long term success.

Rich Brooks
Now You’re Cooking with Gas

Photo credit: Jeremy Noble

Maybe you bought a directory listing at the Yahoo Directory. Or maybe you’re trying to leverage AdWords. Perhaps you (gasp) bought a link from a link farm. Or even advertising on a local news website.

Regardless of where you’re spending your money; at the end of the day, all of these incoming links are intended for one purpose and one purpose only: conversions.

If a free link you got after spending a few minutes courting a blogger aren’t getting you any conversions, well, what can you do really? But if you’re actively spending money for those links, the traffic had better be converting, right?

There’s an easy ways to check. Head over to your Google Analytics account.

First things first, do you have Google Analytics Goals set up? Do it immediately if you don’t.

Incoming Links

With goals in place, go to the Traffic Sources section, then Referring sites.

Now click your Goal(s) tab. You should have a pretty good idea now about which referring websites convert and which ones don’t.

Why does it matter?

Perhaps your links you’re not paying for are converting at a far higher rate than expensive directory listings or advertisements. Make sure you look at many months’ worth of data before you make any big decisions. But these conversions might help show you your expensive paid efforts aren’t worth the money.

AdWords Campaigns

If your goals are already in place, go to the Traffic Sources section, AdWords, then into AdWords campaigns.

Just like for referring sites, click on your Goal(s) tab.

Why does it matter?

Again, do you want to be bidding for keywords that aren’t converting? Same thing as referring keywords: gather enough data to make deleting keywords/ads/campaigns plausible.

Note: This is the Google Analytics version of AdWords conversions. In order to get the robust version of conversion tracking, make sure you use AdWords’ Conversion Tracking.

Nicki Hicks
Are you throwing away money?

Ever come home from a conference, start sorting through your notes and think I know I learned something, but what the heck was it? Closely following will often be: Now I remember what I learned, what can I use to help my business?

There’s a lot of information in the SMX live blog recaps, a lot of which involves quick note taking and scattered thoughts. So in an effort to consolidate (in an admittedly very long post) and walk away with something helpful, here are my takeaways:

(more…)

I don’t expect clients to entirely understand search engine optimization when they come to us – or really even know what it is at all. And in all honesty, that’s fine, because that’s why I have a job. (Thanks for that.) 

But, after reading this perhaps you’ll know a lot more and be that much the wiser when you talk to your Search Marketer.

1. How bad is it to use white on white and write in a bunch of keywords?

Umm really bad. Probably as bad as you can get actually. In the olden days (probably all of 10 – 12 years ago), you could possibly get away with stuffing keywords. Today? Not so much.

2. I know SEO is important, so I’m going to do it this once and get it done with It’s a one-step process, right?

Sorry, no such luck. We’ll talk about it a little more later, but with search moving toward other venues like social media, local reviews, RSS, blogging, and other modern forms of web marketing, there’s no way you can do it once and be done. SEO requires constant massaging and experimentation.

3. What are these meta-keywords I keep hearing about? Can you make me a huge list of them?

Well I could. But it probably wouldn’t do a whole lot.

The thing with meta-keywords is 1) only Yahoo uses them and 2) if you use too many, they’ll hurt you. So, what do I suggest? Using a small group of focused keywords for each page if you’re intent on using them. And remember – even though Yahoo uses them, they don’t have much weight at all.

4. I just don’t have time for social media. Plus, I can get away without doing it.

Again, it’s really not an option any more. Soon, folks who haven’t hopped on the social media bandwagon are going to be struggling to catch up with the rest of the crowd.

So…create a LinkedIn account, get yourself on Facebook, and – if you’re feeling really socially frisky - join Twitter!

5. I’ve heard about this nofollow thing. Do I need to do that to all of my outgoing links?

Nofollowing links is sometimes a good strategy. But that doesn’t mean you should do it to every single outgoing link. 

Nor is it PageRank sculpting. To demonstrate that point, I like this short, sweet description by @Halfdeck.

(more…)

I just watched the MarketingProfs’ webinar with George Seybold, head of Seybold Scientific, put on a great presentation on PPC basics. Here are some of my notes from the presentation:

Advertising Basics

• Traditional Advertising – TV, radio, print; impression based
• Banner Advertising – online equivalent of traditional advertising; impression based
• Pay-per-click – performance based

…and they all work together…

• Traditional – awareness, informative, branding, sales lead
• Banner Ads – awareness, informative, branding, sales lead
• Pay-per-click (PPC) – awareness, informative, branding, sales lead, closest point of sale
• The way they flow:
  Awareness & Branding –> Research –> Promotion & Point of Sale

Example: Car Buying

1. Awareness: TV, radio, search
2. Consideration: website, brochures
3. Point of Sale: PPC, website

Great quote from George: You have to be present to be selected.

Rules of Thumb

• PPC is not necessarily good for…
  - building awareness
  - branding
• PPC is good for…
  - incentive
• Banners are great for…
  - branding

Why do we search?

• Answer questions
• Find information
• Validation
• Entertainment
• Find products/services

How PPC providers differ

• Cost – Google is approximately 50% more expensive than other search engines
• Relevance – Google gets 63% of total traffic
• Demographics – Ask heavily targets women
• Shopping – New market entrant Bing is focused on Ecommerce
• Psychographic – Yahoo targets the financial/news-focused

Yahoo

• Lower cost per click (CPC)
• Financial/news target
• Attempt to drive searchers to the search engine
• Yahoo Mail solution is very popular
• 2nd largest search provider

Google

• Greatest search
• De-facto search standard
• Most advanced/relevant results
• More advertiser competition, more searchers to balance
• Largest content network (Adsense)

Ask

• Female demographic
• NO right hand column advertising
• Sponsored links are (almost) indistinguishable from organic results
• Lower CPC
• Less overall search result

Bing

• New! (as of about a week ago)
• Targeted for Ecommerce
• Freshly positioned as the “new type” of search engine
• Hybrid of Google, Yahoo, and Ask
• Decision-based search results

Ad Creation Basics

• Keyword selection
  - Use descriptive words (cd player vs. cd)
  - Think like your customer (cd album vs. compact disk)
  - Balance of search volume to competition (mp3 cds vs. best cd)
  - Longer tail search term is closer to the sale (red nike tennis shoes vs. tennis shoes) 
  - Recognize terms used across other industries (CD – compact disk vs. CD – Certificate of Deposit) 
• Can I pay for the first position in Google? No…quality score. 
• Quality Score – Google’s algorithm for PPC, based on: 
   1. relevance of keyword
  2. performance of ad click through rate (CTR) 
• Ad Copy
  - Needs an incentive, call-to-action
  -  Use geo-targeting (region, zip code, country, language, etc.)
• Measurement/Goals: Google Analytics
  Focus on:
  - New visitors (should be upwards of 75%)
  - # Pages/visit
  - Bounce rate (should be less than 50%) 

Some PPC Jargon

• Keywords – what your consumers are searching for
• Impressions – number of times ad is presented
• Cost-per-click (CPC) – money you pay for a click
• Click-thru-rate (CTR) – ration of impressions/clicks
• Conversion – reaching a desired goal

Nicki Hicks
Maine SEM 

Moderator: Detlev Johnson, CEO, SearchReturn

Speaker: Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster

• PPC and SEO are complementary
• Focus on 2-3 word terms; use one word keyword only very rarely if ever
• Watch conversion rates/web logs
• Hone in on important high-traffic terms
• Negative match – excluding keywords
• Reduce ad impressions on non-productive searches

Speaker: Karon Thackston, President, Marketing Words

• How to create a PPC ad: use keywords in headlines whenever possible, know what your customers are looking for, write a long paragraph and narrow it down, include negative/filtering language when applicable, test, tweak, track…

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.