10 Keyword Research Tools to Help with Your SEO and Tips

Just last week, I attended Blogworld Expo in Las Vegas. I think the conference could have been called “Social Media World” instead because it was a great event to understand social media overall (i.e., micro blogging, external blog commenting, social media interaction, social media tagging, video and much more).


One of the many seminars I attended was “Search Engine Optimization, SEM & New Media” with Brian Clark (from http://www.copyblogger.com/), Michael Gray (from http://atlaswebservice.com/) and Leed Odden (from http://www.toprankblog.com/) and Stephan Spencer (from http://www.netconcepts.com/).

They all had some great tips on how to optimize your blog or website.

I particularly liked their list of keyword tools. Keyword tools help you decide what to focus on to label your website meta data and use within your content. Using relevant keywords will help your website show up in the search engine results pages letting your customers find you. When you start your keyword research, try to anticipate what people are going to type in the search box, answer a question or solve a problem. The keyword tools will come up with many more iterations for you based upon your first hunch.

Here’s the list of the keyword tools (can vary in depth of features, price and uses) that the panel shared with us:

1. Google Insights for Search - This is in Beta and it is a free tool. You can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames. I Particularly like this for it's geographical filtering for Canada, but wish that it had a North America filter to see both the US and Canada. Pretty neat graphs and insights (I guess that's why they called it insights!)


2. Wordtracker - This is a subscription based tool ($59/month or $329/year). Allows you to keep your reports and keyword findings. It seems like it can suggest more keywords with it's Keyword Universe. I have used this tool in the past, but it doesn't seem like it has evolved over the last 2 years -I might be wrong though.


3. Keyword discovery - This is one of Trellium's paid services ($69/month or $599/year). By looking at their offerings - it's features seem to match Wordtracker and then some.
   
4. Wordze - has a subscription model ($7.95/day or $38/month)
   
5. Wordpot - has a free plan as well as standard ($23/month) and enterprise with API connections ($249/month).


6. Spyfu - has a free and a subscription plan. This one seems interesting because it breaks down adwords average click prices for keywords. The free service is very limited.


7. Seodigger.com (organic search results)- has a free and a subscription plan. It is an interesting tool where you can enter your domain (or competitor’s) and find out which of your keywords rank high enough to be listed within Google’s top 20.


8. Compete.com - a free service. Their site was down when I was writing this post - so I have no comment on it!


9. Comscore marketer - is an expensive keyword discovery tool, but would be well worth it for an enterprise company. I actually attended one of their webinars (few months back) and it seems like a great service. From what I remember, it can cost you a minimum $20,000 investment though.


10. Hitwise - this is another expensive yet robust research tool. It can cost you about $695 per report. This is ideal for a larger corporation that may need most up to date reports.
    

Using the keyword tools above, you can implement your final choices into your website pages or blog post to optimize and raise your chances to be found on the web more. Here are some tips on best practices the panel shared with us:

• Make sure the keywords are in your page title. This is your tag in the head of your page code. Some platforms automatically take your page name or post title and embed it in the page title for you. Others may give you a choice to override it manually.


• Use keywords in the tagging and tag pages .


• Make sure you use keywords in h1 (It's usually the first header in the content body).


• Avoid a lot of repetition of keywords in the title tag .


• Stephan recommends using http://www.seobrowser.com/ - It's a free tool to see your website like a Search Engine sees it.

Want to read more about keywords? Read my post " How to Discover Key Words for Search Engine Optimization".

Did I miss a keyword research tool that you favor over the ones mentioned above? Or want to share your take on this topic - feel free to comment on this post!

What to look for in a search engine friendly platform

When your website is SEO friendly, search engines can visit, read, find, and remember all of the pages within your site. This enables them to know what you are about and to list your pages in relevant search results pages – preferably the first!

I find, however, that website owners will often ask me about search engine optimization (SEO) after their website has been built. This is because they are not seeing the desired results when their new site goes live (such as site visitors or site visitors that convert), and only realize after the fact that their site was not optimized correctly when built. To be effective, SEO is something that you must consider before designing and building your website. Otherwise, you’ll be left with nothing but a great looking site without significant visitor numbers.

I believe a truly SEO-friendly site is dependent on the following two things:

• First, your site should be properly designed with optimization in mind. It’s a shame that some web design providers (mostly smaller shops) still build sites that are not SEO friendly, either through poor design, lack of content, lack of tagging and defining keywords, and lack of linking within your site, site structure, or the platform it is built on. I call designers who ignore these important best practices “build-and-run designers,” as they only care about their portfolio and their pay check .
  
• Second, your site should be built on a search engine friendly platform or content management system (CMS). If your site is built on any content management platform, it will be dependent on its code output and there may be some limitations to what you can tweak to further optimize your site (so that, in the end, it will be found on the search results pages).

These two elements go hand in hand and should be taken seriously. I like how Stephan Spencer explains it in “Search Friendly CMS does not Equal Search Optimized One”. Some people sell the platform as the be-all and end-all solution, but you need a human element involved that understands optimization, plans the site, and implements the best practices to compliment the platform and fully optimize your site for the search engine results pages.

Disclaimer: Not to be biased, but I presently work at Sitemasher as the online marketing manager, so I give feedback and recommendations to our product development department on what is required for an SEO-friendly platform. These recommendations are from my experiences with regards to the code output and site infrastructure. (Sitemasher is a software as a service (SaaS) website builder with a build-in content management solution.)

Believe me, I’ve been through the pain of building websites where I’ve chosen the wrong platform (there weren’t many choices in 2000!) and I had to deal with work-arounds or hire a programmer to do custom 301 redirects (one of many painful tactics to make your site seo-friendly). So I thought I’d share some tips on what features to look for in a website platform. Understanding the website platform should be your first consideration for your SEO-friendly website requirements.

10 features to look for in a search engine friendly platform

1. SEO-friendly URLs and site structure
   This helps by allowing the search engine robots to visit your site, read your pages in the right manner, and properly index your pages (to remember and bookmark them) for the search results pages. If you don’t follow the basic guidelines, your site may not be ranked properly or show up on the search engine results pages. Look for a website builder or platform that can follow these requirements:
   
   o Avoid dynamic URLs with characters: Your chosen platform should not generate URLs that contain ampersands, equal signs, or question marks. It should also eliminate session IDs from the URLs for the spiders. This is specifically true if you are using an AJAX Web 2.0 platform type, so ask if the pages have been rewritten and simplified for the search engines.
   
   o Control of your URL naming: You should be able to define and rename your pages to names that the bots can understand. SEO experts say that short URLs work best in the search engine rankings. Most platforms automatically name your pages by the product, title, or page name within the editor. Look for this feature so that you have control of the URL names, as this will allow you to help your SEO even more.
   
   o Control of site structure and categories: You should be able to define a site structure (categories) that the bots can understand. This is the same as URL naming, apart from the sub folders or categorization. You should also have control of your categorization naming. Most platforms name your categories automatically, but if you have control of them, you will again benefit in the long run.



2. Easy access to control your meta and title tags
   Not all platforms will give you access to override these tags. These platforms may brag that it is automatically done for you, especially in online store platforms. In most cases, you want control to override these meta tags. And in other cases, you may have to dig into the code or get help from a developer to insert the meta and titles tags in the head of the pages (which is hidden code). Look for platforms that allow you to override these tags at a global or page level, and ask whether they can be edited in a simpler manner that doesn’t require HTML knowledge. Most will have an SEO dashboard (like http://www.sitemasher.com/) and it will be a matter of inserting the tags in a form that automatically inserts the code in the head for you.



3. Auto robots page insertion and easy edit access
   This is a text document with certain snippets of code (always named “robots.txt”) that usually sits on your web server at the root folder, and it is, in simple terms, “the welcome mat for the search engines.” A search engine will look for it when it first crawls your site – it wants to see whether you have any instructions on what pages to visit. In this way, you can direct the search engines to important pages and herd them away from unimportant pages that shouldn’t be indexed to show up on the search engine results pages (SERPS), such as password-protected areas, landing pages for special time-sensitive promotions, or internal pages (some SEO experts call it bot-herding). Google will actually report an error if it doesn’t see your robots page, but it won’t necessarily harm you. I have also found this handy to use with very large sites, where some robots take up tons of bandwidth and can slow the site down (especially in online store platforms). In the past, I have actually defined a rule for a certain robot not to look at the site, because it wasn’t serving that area or relevant to the search engine (for example, in Asia). Your CMS platform should automatically generate this page for you so that you don’t need to know the exact code or have access to the server. It should also give you access to simply define areas of your site in the robot.txt file that you don’t want to show up on search engines. An alternative yet helpful feature is that some platforms will allow you to define the robot permissions at the page level.



4. Automatic Google sitemap.xml generation
   Google Sitemap is an XML sitemap that lets you give Google information about your site. In its simplest terms, a site map is a list of the pages on your website in one or more XML pages. Submitting a site map ensures that Google knows about all of the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process. To save time, look for a platform that does this automatically for you. Good ones will update this XML code when you add new pages, update the date stamp, or define the page rank (importance), and will also allow you to update the file in a WYSIWYG editor. Read more in the “Why Use Google Sitemaps” post on my blog.



5. Automatic URL list generation
   Much like the sitemap.xml file above, this is used by Yahoo and possibly some other smaller search engines, but the code is simpler and in a text document. Look for a CMS or website building platform that automatically generates this code in the urllist.txt document, and then Yahoo will look for it and index your pages.



6. Auto generation info.txt and easy edit access
   This is an information text document for your website and business that is particularly used for the Alexa bot. Alexa is one of the largest database repositories on the Internet, containing historical snapshots of the Internet. These snapshots not only show what the websites looked like, but also how they are interconnected, and the general surfing activity over time. It is the only major public database that’s larger than Google. This file helps you get listed on Alexa, and help gives you legitimacy if you show up in their directory. Look for a CMS platform that generates this automatically for you and that gives you the ability to edit it in a WYSIWYG editor. I have also heard that other website bots like Compete may use this file as a reference to list websites in their directories.



7. Easy access to insert analytics and tracking codes
   Analytics and tracking codes let you understand how people come to your site, and where your online advertising and other efforts are turning into leads and conversions. There are a lot of platforms that have analytics built in, but these can be somewhat limited, so it doesn’t hurt to connect your site to third party analytics like Google Analytics. Also, some of these analytics (such as Google Analytics) allow you to set up advance tracking code snippets, and it’s a good idea to look for a CMS that allows you to easily add these tracking codes without the help of a programmer.



8. Defining image alt tags with a WYSIWYG editor
   Do question whether the platform lets you define the alt tag through a WYSIWYG editor. (An alt tag is hidden code that contains a textual description of an image that the bots can read, as well as users who have images turned off or are visually impaired). Matt Cutts in Google (he’s the head honcho of the search results rules) suggests that you should use the alt tag for every image on your site. Learn more about the image alt tag with Matt’s video here.



9. Fast page serving
   There’s talk among SEO experts that pages should be served to the user within 500 milliseconds, or else it can affect your search engine results rankings. It makes sense that Google would penalize you if your pages take forever to download and leave the user waiting. So serving pages faster with the same content may show up higher in the ranks. You can avoid this issue by making sure that your images and code are optimized. If you are looking at a CMS or other kinds of platforms, ask to see a sample site that runs on the same platform, and run a test of a page through a website speed test at http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test.



10. Home page naming and avoiding duplicates
    Many CMS solutions have a default home page other than www.domainnamehere.com/ (for example, www.doaminnamehere.com/index.htm) and the search engines get confused and may read the pages as duplicates, which is not too good for your SEO efforts. This is usually a by-product of the URL that is generated through the platform and you may not have control over it. Eric Enge’s blog post “SEO Hell, A CMS Production” explains it well. Just make sure your website is able to default to the home page www.domainnamehere.com/ regardless of how your site is built or the platform that generates it, as it is standard SEO practice. (A work around can be redirects and some platforms will have a WYSIWYG editor for that.)
    

Final tip to take home: If you found a CMS or web platform that is SEO-friendly, but is not familiar with all of the SEO best practices, don’t start designing and building your site just yet. Contact an SEO firm beforehand, as they will help and consult with you on planning the site structure, and naming pages for SEO with strong and relevant keywords, so you can integrate it within your site build. Every little detail in the initial planning stages can have great results in your SEO efforts!

If you want to share similar experiences on this topic, I encourage you to leave a comment!

How to Increase Your Online Exposure with Blended Search

You may or may not have noticed, but when you do a search on the top search engines, different kinds of results are creeping in all the time. Search results pages now display content that is beyond text links. These results contain a mix of web pages, video thumbnails, images, maps and local directory listings. This is an emerging trend and called “Blended” or “Universal” or some experts are coining it as “Search 3.0.” You can use this to your advantage by understanding how these results are considered and how you can present your company to have multiple results on these search results pages. You can also offer a richer and more interactive experience to your potential customers and possibly increase click-throughs to your site.

I attended a great webinar "Blended Search One Year Later" with Chris Sherman from Search Marketing Now. During the webinar he posted an interesting poll to the attendees and it was: “Over the past six months have you noticed your company’s images, videos, or press releases appearing on the main search results pages of the major search engines?” Half of the attendees said yes, 34% said no and 15% said not sure.

Sherman explained the stages/versions of search that we have seen to date:

• Search 1.0 – was first-generation search engines. Primary ranking method was Boolean logic, which was early ‘60s information retrieval based more so on database queries. It did a good job within a closed universe. It was pretty basic and easy for search marketers to optimize their websites and not really algorithmic (dependent on multiple variables and checks and balances). It also was a green light for black hat (aka spammers, the bad marketers) and opened the door to Search 2.0. Remember the good old days when you’d search “Britney Spears” and you clicked onto results and somehow landed on a porn site? That was trickery and not effective results for the searcher! You did not have a huge amount of confidence that Google would deliver the right results and you probably had to spend a lot of time searching for the right information or website. You had to really hunt or take chances on faith and luck of the draw. Back in 1993, Alta vista said 99% of submitted URLs were spam. Search engine marketers were mostly viewed as black hats (if that term was even coined then?)
  
• Search 2.0 – With the issues and limitations of search 1.0 – it lead to search 2.0. This was more of an algorithmic search, which factored in hundreds of different variables to figure out the key words and main categorization of our website. For search marketers, it was imperative to understand how the search engines work and keep up with the best practices. If you fell back on old tactics to trick users to visit your site with irrelevant key words, you were labeled as a black hat and your site could possibly be delisted from the algorithmic search engine. Larry Page from Google reasoned that the entire web was loosely based on the premise of citation and introduced the page rank. If he could divine a method to count and qualify each back link (site that linked to your site and validated who and what you are) on the web, as Page puts it "the web would become a more valuable place." This was a way to understand the authority – simplistic toward page rank. This was harder to spam (better for white hats – people who followed the rules), and sophisticated SEO became imperative. Then search engines started to have vertical searches such as catalogues of videos, news and images through links, and tabs and radio buttons. People were just using the regular search results and ignoring the other “vertical searches” for the most part though. Search marketers never really focused on them either.
  
• Search 3.0 – Where we are today. These separate catalogues or vertical searches are becoming irrelevant as digital assets are being considered in the algorithms for regular search results. We start to see that more people are clicking on news in regular search results more and not via the news tabs. People are starting to click on YouTube videos and maps or news links served from third-party sites.

How to take advantage of universal search and show up multiple times on a results page:
You have a chance to have multiple results show up on Google, but not necessarily web page text links as Google doesn’t like to serve multiple pages from your site on a results page. But what you can work around is try to increase the possibilities of mixed pieces to show up on that same results page. Here are some tips to help you optimize other pieces and increase your impressions (showing and displaying) on the results page under your company and or key words strings that customer search for you.


Images – How to optimize for blended search:

• Name the image with an appropiate name.
• You have an option to tag images within your WebPages with the “alt” tag. Try to label it with your company name, product or service or whatever is appropriate for that image. Something that is straightforward and not “image_201.”
• Also try to optimize or tag (categorizing) any images you have hosted on any photo-sharing site like Flickr - it’s not all about optimizing images just on your site.
• If you have images within your pages, also make sure they are surrounded by text in html that has some complementary or same key words in the paragraph above and below.

News – How to optimize for blended search:

• Optimize text the same way as web pages (juicy, meaty content).
• Choose a news distribution service that has optimization features or services – free services don’t really have all the features to optimize your release properly.
• Add important key words in the headline that you want to show up in the search results pages.
• Leverage linking power within your press release. Use links, one for each 100 words.
• Use alt tags on your images.
• Add key word anchor text with your hyperlinks.
• Take the time to tag the release itself.
• Run a key word density check and tweak – make sure your target two to three key words are defined through all areas mentioned above.

For more details read my blog post on “How to Optimize News Releases for SEO and Tips”.

Local Business Listings – How to optimize for blended search:

• Opportunities are huge now here.
• Crucial – take control of your own listings with Google, Yahoo and MSN. Take control of your listings (free or enhanced) use them for the exposure – local listings are given prominence. You usually have to go in and open a local account, verify that it is you via phone or snail mail and then add all the information. This is a manual process and you are not automatically added.
• Add location-specific info within your site – put it everywhere on every page – not as an image. This helps the search engine to understand where you are. You can put it in the footer of every page in html text.
• Localize content if you have multiple locations – you can really do well if you take the time to create localized content for each location and have local listings with the search results for each location.

Video - How to optimize for blended search:

• Most people are not optimizing their videos – they are just uploading them.
• Add your video to your pages - use descriptive text around the video with keywords that are relevant, just like images (paragraph before and after).
• Define your video tags according to key word and strings that people may use to search for you, not just your company name.
• Make sure you add a description.
• Host it on a social media site that is optimized, like YouTube.
• Include URLs in videos to encourage viral distribution with “letterboxing” as a title in lower left.
  

Do you have a specific question about online marketing? Send an e-mail to shannon@sitemasher.com , and we'll try to post a blog on the topic in the future (and possibly do the research for you, if we don't know.) If you want to share similar experiences on this topic, I encourage you to leave a comment!

Optimizing Images for Search Engines

I really like how simple and yet descriptive Matt Cutts from Google explains optimizing images in the video below. I wish everything about SEO was as simple to explain as the alt tag! For those of you who don't know - Matt is the head guy who understands how Google reads your site and ranks it for the results - he knows the inside variables that make your website search engine friendly. Matt will never hand over the full recipe to success in Google though (as it can open up black hats to cheat the system), but his tips will help you!

Optimizing Images - why?
When you optimize images within your pages with relevant keywords, your website pages are more likely to show higher in the ranks on search engine results pages. The higher your links show up on the results page, the more site traffic you will receive. The kicker is, that you must use relevant keyword terms to what your site and images are all about and terms that potential site visitors or customers would use to search for you.

To complement your overall search engine marketing efforts, you should already be naming the alt tag for every single image on your site. Also to take it further - Matt recommends that you name the image names with keywords that make sense (not "img1234.jpg"). Which I highly recommend as well- it wouldn't hurt!

How to Optimize News Releases for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Traditional public relations (PR) is being completely redefined as a result of the Internet.

One subset of PR is news release distribution. A news release, media release, press release, or press statement is a written or recorded communication directed at members of the news media to announce something deemed to have news value. Typically, it is mailed, faxed, or sent by e-mail to assignment editors at newspapers, magazines, radio stations, television stations, and television networks (source: Wikipedia: News Release). It used to be a traditional tactic within the marketing department (in-house or outsourced), but it was expensive, and for the most part ignored by smaller companies. Some companies simply couldn’t afford to hire PR firms to help them with releases, and they couldn’t afford the expensive distribution.

Isn't it funny how the world evolves over time? Now the distribution model has changed and is far less costly. Press releases are not only being pushed to journalists and media - they are also being served out on the Internet via blogs, news feeders, directories, and aggregators, thereby - tapping into an enormous audience and, in some cases, talking directly to the consumer or customer. Additionally journalists, media, and end users may have subscribed to particular key word feeds, which are more of a pull versus push.

So what’s the big deal to a website owner?
Press releases can help your search engine rankings for popular and competitive search terms. If you're a website owner, you should seriously consider adding press releases, optimization, and online distribution into your online marketing mix. Ultimately, this will benefit you by producing higher search ranking results on key word strings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), which in turn creates more site traffic and more site conversions (such as newsletter sign-ups, product or services purchases, downloads, phone calls, or trials)

My favorite news distribution tool:
After doing some online research for news distribution providers, business wire, and service shops, my favorite choice is http://www.prweb.com. It is good for those who understand SEO and how to write a release…and for those who don’t! If you fall into the latter category, you can add on editorial revision, drafting, and optimization. Depending on your news release length and the additional services you choose, it can range from $80 to $1,000 for each release. For Sitemasher, I personally choose the “Media Visibility” package at $360 for distributing our news releases, as it has more options for optimizing and distributing news. Sometimes I will upgrade with the business wire add-on, as it can reach an even larger media network, but only for very important releases. Recently we distributed a news release about Sitemasher’s Blue Sky Award from Microsoft and we valued that as very big news.

Ten top tips for optimizing your press releases to increase search engine rankings and site traffic
Some changes to a press release are relatively minor, but can make major differences in the most critical spots. If you take the extra time to implement the following tips, not only will you see the benefits, but your release could potentially be picked up by more sites, search engine results pages, aggregators, and directories, and also attract more media attention and bloggers (who may write about your product or service).

1. Choose news distribution services that have the right features. Research self-serve online distribution services that offer features to optimize your releases (see points below on those requirements, and question whether you can do it on their platform). Some don’t offer all of the features to properly optimize your news. If you’re unsure from their website whether they do, then sign up for an introduction webinar, if available, to understand the tool more. Alternatively, ask them for a test account that will let you log in and kick it around to actually see the features. Also, look for a service that gives you reports on readerships, downloads, and archiving (for longevity on exposure). Consider the geographic distribution networks and whether you can upgrade to larger networks or language translation (if you are a global company or plan to go global in the future).
   
   


2. Optimize: add all important key words in the headline. Understand and define the most important key word strings that you want to be known by, and try to incorporate them in your headline. Why? Because it increases the possibility of people finding your release or your release being picked up by key word queries in readers and directories. If you state “Sitemasher wins an award,” it is too vague and it will limit your exposure throughout the web that picks up releases via tags (also known as “categorization” and “key word” queries). By contrast, if you state “Sitemasher wins Microsoft Canada Blue Sky Award,” you have more potential key words, which means the release can be picked up for any tags under “Microsoft” and “Blue Sky Award.” Also, if people search for this exact phrase in Google, they will probably find your release at their first attempt. I actually saw this work just a few hours after we sent out our release. It was listed in second place in the Google search results, and was picked up by Yahoo and Google news, as well as some top aggregators and financial aggregator sites that pull through all Microsoft’s feeds.
   


3. Optimize: use links, one for each 100 words. Try to follow a rule of one hyperlink per 100 key words. Some SEO experts believe that if you do more than that, then the release can be over-optimized (also viewed as spam from the search engines) and possibly get penalized, whereby it will show up lower down in the search engine results. To take it even further, make sure that you add hyperlinks to the important key word phrases (and never something such as “click here”). This helps raise the ranking of the release (and possibly your website if the link is to any of your web pages) in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for that particular key word or key word string.
   
   


4. Optimize, use alt tags. In the same way as defining key words, this tactic can also tell the search engines what is important and raise your release within the search engine rankings. So if you can label particular pictures with your important key words, make sure you take advantage of it.
   
   


5. Optimize: add anchor text. This is an advanced tactic and sometimes a little confusing or hard to find the instructions within PRweb.com. However, the formulas are simple, and with a little practice (and by following a few simple rules), adding anchor text to your press release is quite straightforward.
   
   Plain anchor link: http://www.sitemasher.com/cmssolution.htm [Sitemasher]. This will result in a link with the text “Sitemasher” pointing to “www.sitemasher.com/cmssolution.htm,” or whatever you substitute.
   
   Anchor with Title tag: http://www.sitemasher.com/csssolution.htm [Sitemasher __title__ Sitemasher is a cms platform and more]. This is the same as the above except that if a reader hovers a mouse over the link, the text “title text” (or whatever you substitute) will appear.
   
   Note: There’s a space before and after the underscore, which is a prerequisite.



6. Interact and optimize. Use images, audio, video, and PDFs to take things up a notch and make it a multimedia news release. This may attract attention, as some aggregators like to rank multimedia pieces higher up on the page. It also gives other bloggers additional pieces to pull through to their sites if they wish. If you are pulling in a YouTube video, make sure you also tag it with important key words within YouTube, which will help your most important key words in the search engine results. Also, within the news distribution service, you should be able to label and tag any images and PDFs with key words to increase your odds of getting even more exposure.



7. Optimize: take the time to tag the release itself. Services like PRWeb have an additional feature that lets you can define Technorati tags. Technorati looks at tags that authors have placed on their websites or news releases. These tags help categorize search results, with recent results coming first. If you overlook this feature and don’t use it, you can miss out on thousands of readers who may subscribe to Technorati, or directories and aggregators that pull through feeds from these tags. PRWeb allows you to tag your release with multiple tags, so I always choose the most important tags.
   


8. Optimize: run a key word density check. Some services such as PRWeb may have an analysis tool that gives you feedback on key word density and key word locations. Try to make sure you have at least two to three of the most important key words in the title, in the short description, and within a hyperlink and its anchor test. If the analysis indicates that your release is weak or lacks important key words in some areas, go back and tweak it.
   


9. Have a strong call-to-action and landing page on your site. Depending on your message, I’m sure that you can incorporate some sort of call-to-action or incentive to read more on a special landing page. Maybe it’s as simple as asking interested parties to sign up to your newsletter, read more on your company blog, sign up for a webinar, download a white paper, or sign up to qualify for substantial discounts on purchases. If you have a unique landing page for this release, you can also track how many people clicked through by viewing your site analytics.
   
   


10. Provide good content. Last, but by no means least, make sure that you add meaningful content. Keep it short and get rid of adjectives – “the first,” “the best,” “the paradigm-shifts,” “world famous,” and all manner of other trend-setting verbiage and numerous quotes. For website owners and SEOs, this may be a matter of educating and retraining you or your writer to move away from traditional news release writing (hyperbole) that used to talk to media and journalists only. Releases via the web are being picked up by other bloggers, and pulled through and aggregated on other sites, so it’s more important to get straight to the meaty stuff!
    
    If you’re looking to do your press release yourself, here are some good tips on how to write it, along with information about the anatomy of a news release:
    

• News Releases 101: Best Practices
• Formatting Your News Release
• News Release Template
• Quick Tips for News Releases
• Editorial Guidelines

Want to learn more about online PR and marketing? A recent book I read is called “The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly” – I highly recommend it!

Or would you rather hire a firm to help you with your SEO and PR? Recently, I talked with Deborah Collins at a BCAIMS Seminar from Soya Marketing (www. soyamarketing.com ). She is an online marketing PR and social media expert. We had a great discussion on how PR and SEO have merged. Debbie advises her clients to be very careful when choosing a PR firm, as not all PR firms (especially traditional ones) understand or have invested in the time to learn SEO and online PR and how they work together.

Do you have a specific question about online marketing? Send an e-mail to shannon@sitemasher.com , and we'll try to post a blog on the topic in the future (and possibly do the research for you, if we don't know.) If you want to share similar experiences on this topic, I encourage you to leave a comment.

How to Discover Key Words for Search Engine Optimization

First let’s understand why we need to research key words.

It is commonly known that many businesses try to improve the key word density within their website. They are optimizing their site for the search engines. In the end, they expect to get more site traffic and customer conversions.

From my experience, you cannot assume or guess how people search for your product or service, and leave it at that. If you do, I am sure your website traffic will be limited and you may have a hard time growing site traffic and your customer base. The most surprising key words can actually get you site visitors who convert to customers. Each business is unique. I have been through the key word discovery process a lot and have constantly been surprised at some of the key word strings that can bring website visitors. Once you discover some search strings, you can ultimately optimize one page within your site and receive even more customers.

The trend is that people don’t really search by one key word anymore. The focus should be on multi-word key words – which are also known as key word strings. For example, who would think that someone would be looking for an anti-aging skincare product by the search term “How to Treat Hyperpigmentation?” A few years ago, people new to the net would likely search by one key word. Now we understand search better and we are aware that if we type in a more focused search string (multi-words), the more likely we will get relevant search results on the first try.

These key words will ultimately help you with your search engine optimization and in the end your website will receive more relevant traffic that may convert into a customer or give you the desired results you are looking for from your website visitors.

How to discover key words:
The following are great starting points to discover and validate key words that you can focus on:

• Use your existing key words in your sales collateral, website or press release as a starting point.
• Run searches for alternates and plurals in key word tools online (like Wordtracker, Google Keyword Tool or Webmaster Toolkit to discover alternates that you may not have known.
• Check out competitors’ websites
  o Read their website body copy.
  o View source and check out their title tags, meta key words and descriptions within each of the main pages.
  o Run a key word analysis report on your competitors site.
• Ask your customers how they’d search for you on the net (what key words).
• Review your website analytics under the “Referrals” area, it can tell you some key words that are leading people to your site.

So, what the heck do I do with these key words?
So you have a large list of key words – what the heck do you do with them now? Below are some best practices for implementing key words. If you follow some of these rules and processes, it will be easier for you to implement and understand how to optimize a site for search engines. You will also start seeing increased traffic and potentially more customers within a month because you are following some of the things that the search engines love about the so-called key-word-dense sites.

• Try to use Excel spreadsheet and sort key words by themes and then match up each set to every page on your site that is appropriate to the messaging for each page.
• Focus on a small set of key words for each individual page. These small sets of key words should be theme-based or complementary to the message that is in the body of the particular page you are optimizing. Don’t ever try to insert all possible key words within an inside page or even your home page. Try to focus on three to six key words or one to three key word strings max for each page.
• Implement these key word sets within all elements of your chosen page including your title tag (shows up in the browser title), meta tag description (hidden text that is usually the search results description), meta tag key words (hidden text), image alt tags (hidden text – but can see it when you roll over an image) as well as the content writing of the body (the visible text).
• Choose the theme set of key words that are most important for your company and try to use them for your home page.
• Each page should have a good mix of matching key words within the body text, hidden tags, title and image alt tags. Do not stuff key words within the title that are not within the page content – trust me, that will most likely not bring you traffic!
• If you choose a small set of key words for each page – you are optimizing that page for the search results, so make sure the meta description sums up the description for that page.
• If you found that some very important key words are not implemented within the content writing of the page, try to incorporate it or suggest it to your boss or your content writer to do so.
• Try to link any key words or key word sets within your site to the relevant page (hyperlink and cross-link pages within your site – Google gives you more brownie points for this).
• Try to incorporate key words within any outside links to your website.
• Don’t try to focus on one general key word for a page – if it is too general, everyone else is most likely going after it.

Key word density is one of many search engine strategies. Read more on “What is Search Engine Optimization,” if you implement a few strategies, they will all help with growing your website traffic.

Do you have a specific question about online marketing? Send an e-mail to shannon@sitemasher.com , and we'll try to post a blog on the topic in the future (and possibly do the research for you, if we don't know.)

If you want to share similar experiences on this topic, I encourage you to leave a comment!

Comparing Website Optimization to Search Engine Optimization

It is important to note that website optimization is different than search engine optimization. I sometimes hear people interchange them - thinking they are the same thing. If you search on the net for website optimization, you will also get results that equate it to SEO. Guess what? I think they are wrong! Many larger online retailers know the difference between the two, and it was clearly dissected for me at last year’s Internet Retailer Conference in San Jose. I really think all website owners have a lot to learn from multi-channel merchants online as they already have this down to a science.

Search engine optimization is a strategy to get more site traffic by having more exposure on the search results; website optimization is a strategy to enhance your website experience to avoid that traffic from abandoning your site. For website optimization, it is all about raising your conversion rate (your desired reaction, like a sale or interaction) once visitors are on your site.

My definition of search engine optimization (aka SEO):
In most simplistic terms, search engine optimization (SEO) is a combination of tactics to make your website show up in the search engine results pages (and for the most part the first page or top 10 organic results) This process is to raise your website traffic with relevant visitors who may convert into customers or give you the desired interaction with your website or with your business. For a snapshot of some strategies for SEO, read more on my blog “What is Search Engine Optimization?”

My definition of website optimization (aka WSO):
It is making your site better once you have the site visitor. It is the little changes and tweaks to landing and inside pages, usability considerations and overall site architecture that make the site visitor to most likely convert better.

Website owners spend so much time and investment on website visitor acquisitions (SEO and SEM) and barely any efforts on optimizing conversions and retention. If you had a website with 10,000 visitors per month and 1.5 percent of the traffic actually converted into a sale or a lead form, would you spend more time to double your traffic? You’d probably answer yes. But what if you had some way to double your conversion with the same traffic? Which way would be more effective in the long term and give you a higher return on investment?

I learned some tips and best practices about website usability at the Internet Retailer Conference on website optimization. I wanted to test this theory and did some minor enhancements to an online store I managed. Before the changes, the site had a consistent 1.8 percent conversion rate that became orders online (compared to overall site visitors). I implemented some usability tweaks to optimize the website like incorporating bread crumbs (navigation hints), location hints for the checkout, toll-free and guarantee blurb on every page. Believe it or not, we watched the conversion rate increase to 3 percent the very next month! We could have doubled our pay-per-click budget to make more money, and we didn’t. But these minor website optimization changes allowed us to get more money from the existing traffic. We have now doubled our sales without putting any more budgets into online advertising or SEO. These combined enhancements lowered our shopping cart abandonment because it enhanced the user experience during the shopping experience.

Website optimization can include a mix of the following:

• Enhancing website performance: Sometimes websites are slow and the site visitors will bounce off the site if they experience it. You can use online tools to measure how fast your website reacts to requests (I use http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/index.html ). Switching hosting providers can solve this issue. Making sure you are not on a shared server with other sites that can slow your website down. A decent hosting company will have burstable solution where you are not capped or affected. Or there are software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies that have a great scalable solution, like Sitemasher has. (Disclaimer: I work at Sitemasher as the Online Marketing Manager). Also, make sure that your website is built on a good platform (online store, or Content Management System that is scalable and does not have issues with bloated databases that will hog the server memory) or find out how to clean up your databases to make your site run faster, if that is the case.


• Advertising to and linking to relevant landing pages: Making sure whatever pages you are linking to from external campaigns on directories or banner ads are relevant and have the same messaging. Don’t direct all campaigns to your home page. If you have a banner ad for widgets, then link it to the widget page and not your home page. The more you leave your site visitors to hunt for the info, the more likely the drop-off will happen. Tim Ash, author of “Landing Page Optimization” is a huge advocate of optimizing your website landing pages. He delves really deep into this one strategy and articulates this practice so well that you will be sold that this alone is one of the best strategies and something that you should work on every day.


• Tweaking usability and design: Look at the tiny details and try to get into your customers’ minds to determine what they want on your site. Learn what others have learned. Incorporate best practices for usability, for example: the checkout button is on top right and search bar on every page. Don’t try to be “different” or “cool” and let the site visitor guess at how to interact with your website. Keep the common-sense stuff consistent.
  
• Enhancing experience and navigation: Help your site visitors find information and navigate back and forth. Use bread crumbs stating how deep the site visitors are in the site and give them ability to go back to first level with one click (non-linear), add hints to where they are on checkout (i.e. “you are on step 1 of 4”) and also have a sitemap link and search on every page.
  
• Encouraging interaction for help: Have multiple points of contact available for your users for support. Online chat is a good one (like HelpOnClick or LivePerson). People want answers and support instantly, and will most likely not want to wait for an e-mail response later or the next day. Have a phone number, help topics and e-mail contact as backup. Having multiple help and support mediums might save you from losing a customer. I have found that for some small online stores, may have first-timers calling in orders or asking live chat questions – they only want to check out if you respond and are actually legit. In those cases, they will probably not ask for support the second time, as they may trust you from the first experience. Also, inquiries and concerns from such customers can actually give you ideas how to optimize your website further, so welcome every one of them. Some will most likely be issues you never even thought of!

There are many more ways and best practices to optimize your website and above are some good starting points. The important thing is that you start to analyze your website metrics and review the small changes as you go to see if they have made an impact. I would not recommend doing many changes at once, and if something does not have beneficial impact, you can change it back. Your website can and should get better when you understand the impact – it is an evolving process!

Do you have a specific question about online marketing? Send an e-mail to shannon@sitemasher.com , and we'll try to post a blog on the topic in the future (and possibly do the research for you, if we don't know.)

If you want to share similar experiences on this topic, I encourage you to leave a comment!

What is Search Engine Optimization

In most simplistic terms, search engine optimization (SEO) is a combination of tactics to make your website show up in the search engine results pages (and for the most part the first page or top 10 organic results). This process is to increase your website traffic with relevant visitors who may convert into customers or give you the desired interaction.

Those visitors will use certain key word strings (two to three words and most likely not your company name, unless you’re Nike or Sephora). You will need to somehow figure out what those key word strings are and tweak your SEO strategies constantly to get the desired effect.

Sounds vague to you, right?

You are not the only one! The reason it is vague is that there are many search engine optimization strategies and tactics, and they are constantly evolving; because the heavyweights like Google and Yahoo change the rules and will not share the formula with you. The reason they keep it all a secret is because they want to bump out the spammers and black hats (online marketers who try to trick the system). Remember the days when you typed in “Britney Spears” and you got directed to a sex site? Google now serves relevant pages for search terms, and it is all because its algorithms are more complex. Algorithms are basically a mix of variables that is hard to count for one factor being the result.

I like how William Flaiz articulated SEO in his blog: Standards? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Standards!

"The goal of SEO is to increase the search rankings of a client for specific terms. No matter how you rationalize it, whether you think you're increasing a pages relevancy, optimizing a site to search engine standards, or ’building connections,’ we're manipulating search results. The point of a search engine is to provide the most algorithmically relevant pages to a user. "

“SEO is a discipline of balance, and careful mixture of human and algorithmic input is necessary to create truly helpful listings. "

SEO strategies that help your business grow online:
The following are just a few samples of different search engine optimization (SEO) strategies that make your website search engine friendly and that, in the end, increase relevant traffic to your site:

• Key word discovery and enhancements: Using tools and competitors’ websites to find out what key word strings to focus on. Also using your analytics or even your pay-per-click campaigns (if you are doing any) for some key word ideas. Looking at each page as an opportunity to focus on a theme of a few key words. This strategy can always be tweaked and enhanced as you learn more about your target audience and how they arrive at your site.


• Content-rich copy: Writing your web copy with key word strings that your potential customer or site visitor will search for you.


• Making sure site architecture is crawlable: Having html pages that can be read by the search engine robots (not a Flash site), having pages that are not dynamic (choosing the right CMS or e-commerce platform), having navigation links that are readable from home page, constantly tweaking and cross-linking pages throughout your site. Linking to sitemap from your pages, and having a robots follow in header (not a “no follow”).
  
• Posting fresh content on a continual basis: If you have a website that has fresh content, the search engines will come back and index your site more in the results pages. Also more new content means you will also have more key word strings and potentially more traffic. Having a blog is a great way to add fresh content, and the search engines love how crawlable they are.
  
• Rolling out the red carpet for the search engines: Includes having a robots.txt and a sitemap.xml with all your pages listed and ranks. The search engines also need you to pay attention to and label every inside web page with unique title tag, meta description, key word tags, image alt tags that match or complement the content within that page. Read my blog on “Why Use Google Sitemaps.” (also, check out Danny Dover's SEO Cheat Sheet - I think it is quite handy!)
  
• Link building: Have complementary sites link to your site. The more relevant and complementary key words the linking site has to your business, the more it will so-call lift your rankings.
  
• Social media tagging: Get your site listed by tagging (which is kind of like getting yourself categorized by key words in directories). This can include digg, del.icio.us etc.
  
• Universal search: Optimizing and labeling/tagging images, video and news with key words. More and more you will see these popping up in the results page versus just text links.
  
• Local search listings: Getting your company listed in local search, also making sure you put your full address with zip/postal code in text in the footer of your pages or contact page, Google picks that up as well.
  
• Using website statistics: Analyzing, interpreting and looking for opportunities and ongoing tweaks for key words.
  
• Avoiding black-hat strategies: This is a bad-guy strategy. Avoid using duplicate doorway pages, cloaking multiple sites with same content, stuffing key words in same color as your background and in invisible Div’s. You can maybe trick Google for a short while, and it would be very hard to get relisted in the index, if they find out and penalize you for it. Follow rules stated in Google Webmasters area and you should be fine.

Each of the tactics above warrants further explanation in separate blogs and you can really invest more time dissecting individual areas and tactics. The more you work on SEO best practices, the more likely it will grow your website traffic. I also like to term SEO as a full-circle process and not linear – you can learn from one SEO tactic that can further help another. SEO is all about research, analyzing, interpreting and tweaking - definitely not a one-time project!

Complementary to search engine optimization (SEO) is search engine marketing (SEM) strategies and for the most part are online marketing campaigns that may have some hard costs (outside of someone’s time to implement). For example: pay-per-click advertising, cost-per-acquisition initiatives, paid directories, banner advertising, e-mail marketing. Read my blog on “Multidimensional Online Marketing Tips” – it will give you some ideas on having a mix of SEO and SEM strategies.

Do you have a specific question about online marketing? Send an e-mail to shannon@sitemasher.com , and we'll try to post a blog on the topic in the future (and possibly do the research for you, if we don't know.)

If you want to share similar experiences on this topic, I encourage you to leave a comment!