Small Business SEO - Small Business SMO

Social Media is definintely a buzz word. But is it real? I mean does it work for getting out a marketing message? Can it “explode traffic” to your site?

The answer to all of those questions is both yes and no.

In a sense , social media is the premise the internet was built on. To exchange info and meet others with similar interests. It could be defined that all media that allows collaboration and some level of interactivity is a form of social media.

This would mean that American Idol or Pop Idol (across the pond) is a form of social media, since the audience interacts and ultimately decides the outcome.

But where the buzz comes from is these new sites that are super interactive and let groups form and interact and let users share their favorite websites with others.

Wow. Big dealsky.

Well, the big deal is not the applications themselves, but more the content being put on them.

The beauty of Facebook for example is the ability to target your market in ways only dreamed of before.

For example, I can make a ’social ad’  and target it ONLY towards the 20 people who work at my local advertising agency, or all ad agencies, or entire corporations.

That’s targeted advertising. Or it could be everyone between certain ages at a particular college..or neighboorhood…or well, you get the idea. This is done on either a CPM or PPC basis, and is elegant and much cheaper (at least for now) than many other ppc sources who offer know where near the targeting.

I’m sure more targeting options will be available in the future, such as marketing only to parents, etc. The future is wide, and there has been very little buzz about this aspect of things, which could be a good sign.

As far as social bookmarking sites, video sharing sites, etc. They can be a huge boost in popularity and traffic and bottom line, but the key is to have original relevant content being presented, so it’s just a twist on the same issue since the web was invented, content is still king.

If you have good, original content, then yes you will see a boost, sometimes a huge one. If you have tired content, then there is not a technology that will ever be invented that will work the magic you require.

Nuff said.

The reason being is that so many small business owners don’t know what seo is going into developing their first web presence, and so get pushed into a set up by a web designer who doesn’t know seo either, and the business owner gets a pretty website built in ASP that has zero seo functionality.

The web developer feels oh so smart for delivering another quality asp powered site to another happy customer.

Until, the business owner realizes their site gets zero play from the search engines.

This is the hard part: Business owner hires an seo irm, the seo firm looks at the site, sees the .asp and immediately the price goes up.  Or they cringe and maybe decide to take some shortcuts as the business owner won’t know what’s going on anyway. Just send some links, do what we can, and let that be the end of it.

Wrong.

This is where scripts come into play. Rather than shortchange a client, good seo people when faced with asinine web development turn to having custom scripts built to fill the seo needs of the client and keep them from bashing their heads against a wall.

The funny thing is that scripts are often seen as black hat, and are widely looked down upon by the white hat seo community. Why?

If the script is making the search engine’s job in fact easier, since it is helping distinguish content, how is this not a good thing?

What some in the seo community might not want to admit to, but is so true for the majority, is that even amongst them, some of their very best friends are scripts.

So, where did we leave off? Oh, yes now I remember, it was keywords in urls and registration length.

Anyone ever hear of the “bad neighborhood” thing Gooogle has been on about for a while? According to Google, if you are sharing a host with a bunch of spammers, then you will more than likely get wacked as well.

Because your site lives in a”Bad Neighboorhood”.

On the flip side, you could live on the proverbial Friendly Neighbor Lane where it’s going to cost you more but you will get it all back in droves.

The way to do this is to get a dedicated IP address for your site from a reputable host. I don’t always practice what I preach, as this blog is NOT on a dedicated IP, but I’m cheap sometimes and this host is great.

Few business owners know about this, and it is probably one of the last things that cross their minds, but if you’re struggling in the search engines, and you’re doing everything else right, then this maybe something to consider a little deeper.

This is a different take on social media, that I think needs sharing. Interesting, the less is more approach which will probably work best in the end.

http://onlinemarketingbanter.com/social-media-overload/

It’s wild. I read somewhere that Google looks for over 100 criteria when it evaluates a page, and where to put it in its index.

So let’s start with the domain registration process.

How long did you register your domain name? 1 year like most folks? I mean why spend money registering your site for 2-10 years since you may not need it that long from now? This is a question search engines ask, too. Yes, they have that information (at least Google does, since they are an official ICAAN registrar) and they give points to the sites that have a domain name registered for longer than the standard one year.

Here’s one that alot of businesses get hung up on, the keywords in the domain name. Google any term, any term at all. How about, oh I don’t know, let’s say “hoaxes” for example.

(It really doesn’t matter what you search for, is my point. Search for anything, I promise that the main keywords are going to be found in the domain names, but seriously for for kicks and giggles, search for the word “hoaxes”.

Done? Ok, let’s see what you found!

(Play along, guys, I want to see some searching..)

Whoa, how about that? Basically, the keywords being in the url is very important and it’s even better when the domain name itself has the keywords in it.

This tells the search engine “this site is so relevant for this word, I even put it in my domain name, ha!”

Hello. My name is Steve Driskill with Searchengineblueprint.com and Melberg.com, aka Melberg Marketing. And today we are doing some research on the “The Keyword Conundrum: Optimized Keyword Analysis”. This is to really explain the keyword process and the methodology behind keyword analysis and keyword selection.

To start off with, keywords are what search engines look for and use to catalogue your web pages. They don’t catalog your site as a whole, but they catalogue each individual pages based on the keywords.

Keywords occur naturally on every web page, and keywords are there whether you like them or not, whether you want them or not. The search engines naturally grab what they think are keywords and they catalog your web page by those, what it thinks are keywords.

The good news is you have the ultimate choice over what keywords you use on your site. And that gets into another thing. We talk about making a choice: you have good keywords versus bad keywords. There is a very big difference between the two. It’s very important, because after all, keywords are the key to your success on the web.

Good keywords bring both traffic and sales, but good keywords take time and effort to find. However, bad keywords are very easy to come up with, but will ultimately make your site obsolete.

In this diagram, we’re going to show an example of how keywords work between search volume and competition.

Now, competition means the number of pages who are competing for a spot in, say, Google’s index for these keywords. And you have high search volume; you’re also going to have high competition. The sweet spot is when you can find a place between high volume and low competition. Those are the keywords that you want to optimize for.

In this diagram, we’re actually expanding upon that, and we’re going to insert some keywords.

Here you see the very basic, very general “gardening”, with again high search volume, high competition. It gets a little more specific with “indoor hydroponic gardening”, and finally very low search volume, very low search competition for the words “indoor hydroponic gardening sponges”.

Now the sweet spot is “indoor hydroponic gardening”, because there is going to be much lower optimized competition than for the keyword “gardening”.

And also, we’re going to have a decent to fair to really good amount of traffic. Not at much as the keyword “gardening”, but we’re still going to have plenty of traffic in order to optimize for and to actually make sales with.

And after all, sales are what we’re ultimately after. And that brings us to the “keyword conundrum”. Now the keyword conundrum is where you bring in the conversion rate, as opposed to search volume and competition levels.

Now as the keywords get more specific, the easier it is to make a sale. You’re going to have less traffic, but since you have what that person is looking for and there’s also very little competition, you’re going to find it much easier to makes a sale for the keyword “indoor hydroponic gardening sponges” if you in fact sell indoor hydroponic gardening sponges than if you were to try to sell somebody something very general about gardening, for example.

The person searching about gardening, there’s a lot of information out there and a lot of books they can buy in the bookstore, they can buy online, and your competition is tremendous, so the buyer has a lot of choices. However, not many people are competing for the term “indoor hydroponic gardening sponges”, which means if you were to happen to sell that and someone happens to search for that, they’re probably going to buy something from you.

Now, however, to really generate revenue, you’re going to have to have more traffic than what you’re going to be able to generate just by the term “indoor hydroponic gardening sponges”. And so the sweet spot comes back into play with “indoor hydroponic gardening”, because somebody looking for indoor hydroponic gardening sponges is probably looking for other information and products for indoor hydroponic gardening as well. So you can probably sell that person quite a few things. And that’s what makes this truly the sweet spot in the keyword conundrum.

Now let’s go over a few keyword rules. You want to optimize for between one and three keywords per page max. And the keywords that you choose to optimize for must be relevant to the overall theme of your site. You also need to have a keyword density on your page between 2.5 percent and 3.5 percent of your total content.

Remember, we’re looking for keywords with the highest search volume with the lowest optimized competition. And once we have those keywords, we’re going to use them in the page title, in the alt tags, the meta tags, the anchor text of our links, and our headlines and sub-headlines.

That brings us to the “golden rule” of keywords, and really optimization in general, which is do not overdo it. Over-optimizing your site, trying to stuff too many keywords into a page, really being over-aggressive in the keyword aspect, really is going to hurt your site a lot more that it’s going to help it.

Search engines are pretty sophisticated, and they know when someone is trying to manipulate them, and they don’t like it. And so therefore they penalize the pages and the sites that try that. So there is again, a sweet spot with optimization, and that is to know the right amount to optimize without overdoing it.