Over the past few years, we have all been lured in by the siren call of Search Engine Optimization. But somehow, the art of writing to engage an audience has gotten lost in the race to capture the highest search ranking. We may brush this off as a necessary evil to increase brand awareness, but have content marketers gone too far? We think yes, and apparently so does Google, who just made another round of major algorithmic changes in its process to thwart those who rely solely on keyword stuffing to pump up their rankings.

We all know that a better way to improve the effectiveness of your blog marketing strategy is to increase the number of links to your blog. But this should be done by motivating more people to read what you’ve written, so they start to tell others about it, too. The preferred way to achieve this, of course, is to have such great content that people will flock to it through online word of mouth. Which is why you must make it easy for others to link to your content by providing the buttons for them to add it to their Facebook, Twitter, Google +1, LinkedIn or other social media sites.

Beyond that, the best way to get links is to use social media the way its name implies – for social engagement. There are two approaches to achieving this.

1. Contacting those you feel would be interested in what you have to say and trying to motivate them to include a link. This can be a slow and non-productive process, but it may gain you a few responses.
2. Actually engage in two-way conversations with thought leaders and their networks. I guarantee that this takes more work and time, but it is an effective content marketing strategy.

Start by thinking about who you would like to reach – who is your target audience, and what problems of theirs can you solve? What questions do they have that you can answer? Be helpful, be a resource, and be genuine. Then find people who are already talking to your target group in some way and identify those influencers that could be a good fit for you. There are software products available on the market that can help you zero in on these people, or you can do the research yourself, depending on your bandwidth. Find out what social media networks they’re using and follow them to learn how they interact with their audience.

Engage in the conversation, give people a chance to know you, and they’ll use the social currency of links to help spread the word about you.

Finally, it’s time to get social and begin the engagement phase. Start by commenting on their blog or LinkedIn update, linking to them on your own blog, posting a link in Twitter, or including them on your Facebook page. Don’t get overeager and start asking for links right away. By slowly and steadily building a knowledgeable presence, you’ll become recognized in that sphere of influence and people will start looking for more insights from you. They might start linking on their own or, as time goes on, you can drop in statements that draw them back to your site. Because you’ve done your upfront research on choosing where to add to the conversation, the people you make connections with will be far more likely to respond to what you’re saying.

Engage in the conversation, give people a chance to know you, and they’ll use the social currency of links to help spread the word about you.

Everyone wants a highly visible website. Otherwise, what’s the purpose of even having one? You’re in business to be seen, and you didn’t get where you are today by not placing yourself directly in the path of people you thought would find the goods you sell or the services you offer to be worthwhile. Why stop short of doing the same for your website?

Aha, the million dollar question. Or maybe it’s just the quarter million dollar question at this point (all things considered, including our collective economic woes and a presently limping economy). Either way, I’ll take the quarter million and so should you. The answer to that question – why would anyone stop short of ensuring peak visibility for their website, in case my digression threw you – is simple: people aren’t quite sure how to accomplish that. Enter the experts. But short of paying a third party company to optimize your website for prime visibility, which actually isn’t a bad idea, there is something you can do on your own.

If it seems like a bit too much information to make heads or tails out of, you’re not alone.

But you’re going to have to do an audit of your website. Are you still with me? If that sentence didn’t chase you away screaming, you may just have what it takes to pull it off on your own. At very least, you’ve got moxie, which means you should be able to pull it off. Here are some of the most important things to look for in your review of your website, which can directly impact is visibility.

• Select the search engine of your choice. Then make sure it’s Google. Simply put, Google is leading the way in search engine dynamics and everyone’s following in suit. So even if you prefer Bing as a search engine, you really should be using Google for all of your search engine duties with respect to site audit.

• Once you’re on Google, run a search of your company’s name and take a look at the results. The first returned search result should be your website’s home page – unless, of course, you share part of your company name with a much bigger, more wildly popular entity (for example Amazon Housecleaning Services), in which case you might also end up sharing space with Amazon.com on the search results page. If your home page isn’t showing up as the very first search result for your company, this is indication that your site’s architecture needs a bit of an overhaul and that there could be issues with your internal linking.

• Review your website’s content. You’ve probably read a lot about the importance of content, and if you’re looking to hear any different you’ve come to the wrong place. Content not only brings people coming back for more, but it also plays a big part in your Google search results ranking. Make sure that your home page has at least a paragraph of relevant content with appropriate keywords, but don’t keyword stuff. It just looks ugly. Your landing pages should also contain content, and there should always be more content on your site than advertisements. As a rule, check to make sure that the formatting of your content is uniform, easy to read, and that there’s plenty of white space. A cluttered page is hard on the eyes.

• Make sure there’s no duplicate content on your website. If you’ve written a really cool article about how to grow peppers in your garden (and if you did, you’re hopefully a horticulturist and not an online CD ordering company, otherwise you’re really going to confuse your site visitors with lack of focus) make sure it only appears once on your website. Google looks for duplicate content and can penalize your search engine ranking for it.

• Go after scrapers who lift your content and place it on other URLs to drive traffic for pay-per-click advertisements. You can do this by copying and pasting a unique sentence from each page of your website and pasting it into Google (in quotes) and searching. If you do come across content from your site that’s been scraped and is appearing elsewhere, you can sick the Google dogs on them and have it removed. It’s yours, after all, whether you wrote it yourself of paid someone to do it for you.

• Check all navigation links to make sure they work. There are few things worse than offering a link on one of your website’s pages that doesn’t work. Your viewers will hold this against you, and why shouldn’t they? Think about it. It’s like opening an empty box on your birthday. In other words, a major letdown.

• Ensure you don’t have too many links on any given page. The general rule is no more than 100 maximum, but even then if you have that many you have to ask yourself what the deal is. Links are important to search result placement, but don’t go overboard.

• Look at your meta tags. Every page of your website should have a meta tag that’s unique and different from the next, and that’s relevant to the content of that particular page.

If you’re still up to the challenge of auditing your own site, bravo. That moxie we talked about earlier? It’s there. What you’ve read above is a list of some of the high points that you should be looking at to try to drive up your website’s visibility in search engines. If it seems like a bit too much information to make heads or tails out of, you’re not alone. Neither are you out in the cold. There are a good number of third party SEO gurus out there who can do the heavy lifting for you, leaving you to get back to doing what it is that you do best. Whether that’s horticulture or CD sales makes no difference as long as you don’t mix the two. Just remember: “Focus.”

Here’s something you probably aren’t going to want to hear, but you should – especially if you run a company with an online presence and you’re trying to gain search engine visibility to boost sales. Generic keyword analytics aren’t as effective as you’ve been led to believe.

Okay, maybe you haven’t been lead to believe anything. Maybe you’re one of the few that “gets” that there’s a big difference between chasing keywords and chasing conversions. And that performing analysis based on search engine ranking is really nothing more than making an educated guess that you hope will be accurate. But with as many online marketers missing the mark as there are, the odds are that you’re probably not on the bullseye side… yet. That doesn’t mean you can’t be. You just need to tweak your approach, and re-aim.

In a recent blog post, SEO mastermind/guru/insert-your-favorite-buzz-noun-here Michael Gray points out the fact that a lot of online marketers are taking the wrong approach to finding the kind of effective keyword solutions that’ll actually turn into sales. Instead, they’re only succeeding at boosting their rankings on the likes of Google and Bing. Not that high search engine placement is a bad thing. It just doesn’t usually translate to green and it smacks of the vanity of seeing your brand name at the top of the search results page. Maybe this makes you feel like a million bucks, but it certainly won’t earn you a million bucks.  There is a big difference between qualified traffic, and massive traffic with skyrocketing bounce rates.  I casually mentioned targeting traffic in my last post, and thought it a good idea to flesh it out a little.

A big part of greasing that wheel starts with taking steps to determine what’s bringing in website visitors with the intention to buy.

If you’ve got a company that does business online, the bottom line is always going to be sales. A big part of greasing that wheel starts with taking steps to determine what’s bringing in website visitors with the intention to buy. The trick to doing that? Well, it’s not really a trick. It’s more of an adjustment.

You begin by taking a custom approach to your analysis. Track the keyword or key phrase that led an actual, bona fide paying customer to your website. With a little bit of fiddling around, you can eventually get to the point where you’re running reports based on actual results and not just the bigheaded, feelgood notions that accompany seeing your company’s name on page one of Google’s search results. This is what’s known as creating a data-driven shopping cart, and there’s no surer way to drive sales than by doing that.

So now it’s time to sit yourself down in front of a mirror (or just close your eyes and do a bit of visualization if you don’t want people you work with to think you’ve got a Narcissus complex) and ask your reflection the following questions:

“Who’s the most visible of them all?”

…and…

“Who’s the richest of them all?”

Now see which one of those two questions sits better with you. Hopefully, for your sake, it’ll be the latter.

For anyone out there with an interest in SEO—or anyone that runs a website—it is important to know what tools are available to track and analyze your site. A couple of weeks ago, I posted about some nifty tools that provide you with real-time feedback—something that Google Analytics can’t provide. What I didn’t mention is all of the amazing things that Google Analytics can provide for SEO specialists, small business owners, and even content providers.

Identifying your traffic. It is important to know if, after all the hard work developing your site, tweaking your pages, and producing quality content, you are actually attracting your target demographic to the pages you want them to visit. Imagine a captain attempting to navigate the sea with no indicators of current location, speed, or direction. This is you without the traffic information that Google Analytics can provide.

Quality content matters when building an SEO-optimized site. It pretty much matters all the time.

Tracking your conversions. Google Analytics can help you track and differentiate the visitors that ended in conversions for your site and visitors that decided to leave immediately. This information can aid in creating better content that’s specifically designed to help convert site visitors.

Monitoring your content. When you produce new content it is important to see how it is performing—how many people are reading your content? how long are they staying to read it? Quality content matters when building an SEO-optimized site. It pretty much matters all the time.

Catching HTML issues. In my experience, nothing is a complete catch-all in the medium of building and maintaining a well optimized site. However, Google Analytics will catch duplicate content. It will notice a missing or included “ / “ or extraneous capitalization. It’s an effective last line of defense to go back and fix these problems, making sure that you have uniformity in the URL implementation.

When it comes to finding out how well your website is doing, the best solution for website analytics is obviously Google Analytics, right? After all, they tell you everything you need to know to help improve your website’s effectiveness and it’s free, so what could be better? But before leaping headfirst into the gaggle of Google fans, maybe it’s best to see if there are any Google Analytics alternatives that might be more suited to your particular needs.

Maybe you can’t afford to be using something that’s free. One of the biggest knocks is that Google doesn’t provide real-time information. Clients paying big money want to know quickly how their investment is doing; they don’t want to wait around until Google decides to deliver. And Google decides what reports you get, not you. Some people also worry that their data is stored on Google servers, not theirs. Others are concerned about integrating website results with mobile and social media to get a full picture of their marketing effectiveness.

So what alternatives do you have? Although we all seem to be in love with Google, don’t forget there are other players in town. Yahoo!, for example, also has a free, full-featured enterprise analytics solution at http://web.analytics.yahoo.com/. Rob Diana offers a great list of 25 Free Google Analytics Alternatives on his blog post at Regular Geek.

For the more technologically advanced, Piwik is a name that came up often in my research as an open source alternative to Google Analytics. It promises real-time web analytics reports, ownership of your web analytics data, easy User Interface, and the ability to build your own web analytics plugins.

If it’s crucial that you immediately know what’s going on at your site, Chartbeat has a real-time dashboard that allows you to closely monitor site visits so you can make revisions on the go. It starts with a free 30-day trial, and then it costs from $10 per month and up, depending on the level of service.

Clicky offers real-time stats, but it promises that its data provides a clear and easy-to-understand picture of what’s happening on your site right now. It also monitors your Twitter follower count and has an iPhone version available. It’s free for sites with less than 3,000 daily page-views.

Believe it or not, there is actually an organization that focuses on this very topic—the Web Analytics Association in Wakefield, MA. This organization offers articles, events, networking and education for those who really want to build their skills in this area.

So, you can take the easy route and use what everyone else is using with Google Analytics, or you can analyze your choices and possibly find an alternative that works better for you. If your website is small or doesn’t get a lot of traffic, you might be fine just using Google Analytics to find adaptations you can make to increase its effectiveness and help it grow. But, if you’ve working on a larger site, a retail site, or one that is getting a lot of traffic, you might need to look at an alternative to provide you with more data in a faster fashion.

In order to create a successful content marketing strategy that increases your brand awareness, reaches your target customers, and earns you top listing positions, you need to utilize a number of different content assets. So we’ve decided to create a series of blog posts that focus on optimizing specific content assets. Here is Part 3 in this series! Enjoy.

You’re sure you’ve written and produced the greatest YouTube video ever. But, when you’re competing against hysterical babies and adorable puppies, it’s going to take more than just great production values to make sure your video gets seen. There are a number of video SEO tools you can use to help viewers find your video among the over 35 hours of content that are uploaded every minute.

First, you’ve got to make sure your video gets found on YouTube itself. If they can find you there, odds are you’ll also show up on Google and other search engines. When a visitor types a topic into the YouTube search box, their search function is going to be looking for keywords you’ve provided that match what their visitor wants. The ever-helpful people at YouTube have even developed a Keyword Suggestion Tool.

YouTube advises that there are three areas where keywords are important – titles, tags and descriptions. The title has to both attract attention and aid in the search function, all in 120 characters or less. If you want to include your brand name, it should always go last. You have up to 5,000 characters for a good description. Be as detailed as possible without repeating your script. Include URLs (with http:// so it can be turned into a hyperlink) to other videos, playlists, or your website. Then you have up to 120 characters to add detailed tags. They should include your brand, city and topics.

As with any video, the first eight seconds are crucial in capturing a viewer’s attention…

Finally, you’ve got to make sure your video gets viewed and recommended. As with any video, the first eight seconds are crucial in capturing a viewer’s attention, but in YouTube it also counts as having your video “viewed,” so make sure you start with a bang. When you increase YouTube views, your video get moved up the YouTube rankings. If it really is as good as you think it is, viewer ratings will also help move it up.

Panelists Gregory Markel, Greg Jarboe, and Steve Espinosa covered this very topic at a Video Search Engine Optimization session for the Search Engine Strategies Chicago conference and Expo.  In their discussion they provide tips on optimizing your video campaign by taking advantage of YouTube SEO, YouTube’s algorithms, popularity, conversion, and tracking strategies.

For interesting reading, be sure to check out this blog about an experiment in video optimization. The author recounts step-by-step actions he took to increase his video’s ranking, and then provides tips at a basic, intermediate and expert level. But, if you’re looking for real insider information on video optimization, you can always search in YouTube for “YouTube Optimization” and watch the video!

We all know by now that SEO is a vital part of a company’s web marketing campaign. Having a website, blog, or published articles on the web is great—but if no one can find your content in the search engines, then the material is useless. For years, optimizing a page was as easy as including your targeted keywords many times throughout the content and including them in your meta keywords tag. But now all those tactics are for the birds.

We thought it would helpful to compile a quick content optimization checklist of the fundamental methods of optimizing page content for a website. There are numerous on-page ranking factors that the major search engines take into consideration when determining how relevant a given page is for a specific search query. While some of these factors may be more significant than others, it is important to utilize as many as possible to gain a competitive advantage in the search engines. Enjoy!

·         The page content needs to be unique and present quality information that is useful for the VISITOR. Google has made it very clear that a web page should be build for visitors/actual users as opposed to search engine spiders.

·         Each unique page should only target one or two primary keywords. If you are targeting more and the information you are presenting is worthy of its own page then do it! This allows you to hyper focus each page toward ranking well for specific searches.

·         The page title must include the targeted keyword. Also, the closer the keyword appears towards the front of the title, the better.

·         Your targeted keywords should be scattered naturally throughout the article. Do not force the keyword into your content as your ranking can actually be penalized for attempting to keyword stuff your content.

·         Include variations of the targeted keyword (here at ideaLaunch we refer to them as secondary keywords) throughout the content.

·         Include the targeted keywords in the url

·         Use the targeted keyword in your header tags—most notably H1.

·         For any image on the page, be sure to include keyword-rich alt tags

·         Name your files with keywords in mind

·         Use the <bold> or <strong> tag for your keywords

In order to create a successful content marketing strategy that increases your brand awareness, reaches your target customers, and earns you top listing positions, you need to utilize a number of different content assets. So we’ve decided to create a series of blog posts that focus on optimizing specific content assets. Here is Part 2 in this series! Enjoy.

Clients want content optimization at every turn. You can’t just write page copy that sizzles now; you also have to have videos, podcasts, blogs, resource centers, and more that are all optimized for the search engines. If you think business podcast optimization means just blabbing about your industry and services, think again. There is more to making a podcast successful – you have to make sure it gets heard and you have to make sure it works.

It’s great if you’ve already got subscribers that eagerly await your every word. But, if you want to get others involved, you’ve got to get involved in podcast optimization. To help listeners find podcasts with your content, you first need to create a search-worthy, keyword rich title and filename. This could mean it turns out less creative than you think it should be, but your creativity doesn’t matter if nobody can find your podcast. Sure, “Ten Top Taco Tips” looks good on paper. But will people be searching for that as often as the less creative “Low-Fat Tacos on a Low-Cost Budget?”

Next, pay attention to what is listed in your ID3 tags. Information about your podcast is stored here. iTunes and Windows Media Player use these tags to organize files for listeners and you want to be sure they can find your file. Include the basic information, but also relevant keywords that are going to bring your podcast to the top of the list.

The piece will have to be motivational, educational and creative to keep listeners tuned in despite all the other potential distractions going on around them.

Another useful tactic you want to be sure to do is create a RSS feed as well as submit your content to popular podcast search engine databases. Offering your audio file in a number of different formats across several different platforms will help improve your content asset’s potential customer reach.

Some searching is based on the opening and closing of your podcast, so you’ll want to make that relevant, too. Going against your creativity, you might just want to lead again with something as dull as “Welcome to Low-Fact Tacos on a Low-Cost Budget” and conclude with something similar. Those scans that only search the beginning and end of your podcast will now have two good searchable statements.

Now, finally, you can think about your actual content. Be aware that even though the listener has chosen to download your podcast, he or she can easily turn fickle and switch it off quickly if it doesn’t seem to be of interest. This is where your real content skills come into play. The piece will have to be motivational, educational and creative to keep listeners tuned in despite all the other potential distractions going on around them.

As always, you want to optimize the landing page where your business podcast will be located. This means creating relevant title tags, enticing meta descriptions, and using targeted keywords appropriately throughout the page. Much like video optimization, you should always include a transcript or brief summary of the podcast. Since search engine spiders cannot listen to your content, a transcript allows them to crawl and index the page containing your file.

Highlight your most important features and benefits right up front, and then reinforce them as your podcast moves along. Make it memorable and easy to follow. This is where listing your “ten tips” can come into play. You might also try using shorter sentences, and action words that keep the topic moving. Plan your business podcast as though you are talking directly to your customers and imagine when their attention might begin to wander, so you can bring them back.

Remember, the keys to a successful podcast marketing strategy is to allow your content asset to reach as large an audience as possible, and provide them with unique, useful content that will keep them coming back for more. By doing a little more planning, you can make sure that the content you provide for podcasts is not just great, it’s also heard.

In order to create a successful content marketing strategy that increases your brand awareness, reaches your target customers, and earns you top listing positions, you need to utilize a number of different content assets. So we’ve decided to create a series of blog posts that focus on optimizing specific content assets. Here is Part 1 in this series! Enjoy.

Pictures Really Are Worth a Thousand Words.

Articles are a great way to convey information to your web visitors, but page after page of black text on a white background (or white text on a black background, purple on green or orange on brown, you get the point) gets boring after a while. And if you are explaining something that’s technical or statistic-heavy (Read: BORING!), that just adds to the yawn factor.

If your visitors are yawning while they’re reading, they will soon be clicking away in search of something more interesting, and that’s a bad thing.

So, how can you present information in an interesting way that will attract organic links and help boost your search engine traffic? Try creating infographics.

Don’t know what that is?

Sure you do — it’s those really cool poster-looking graphics you see on websites and blog posts that pass along interesting tidbits of information. One particularly popular website that uses infographics is The Oatmeal. An explanation about the history of coffee that would have required a double-shot of espresso just to read, is made very interesting and amusing with the use of colorful graphics and captions. This will help make your information more interesting and easy to understand to your readers.

Remember, creating a well crafted infographic will naturally attract links and social mentions due to it being unique, quality content presented in a visually attractive and user friendly way.

OK — so at this point, you understand that creating infographics can help keep readers interested in your site and attract a lot of excellent inbound links, but the burning question now is, how do I let people know about the infographics on my site? SEO for print pages is a simple tie-in between keywords on important sections of the webpage, but how do you perform infographic optimization?

There are a few simple methods that can help optimize your infographic for the search engines. We recommend optimizing it in the same manner as you would do for a PDF; incorporate your keywords in the document title, throughout the content, and save it with a keyword rich file name.

Finally, promote your infographic using the same social media methods you use for your website or blog. List the graphic on StumbleUpon and Digg. Tweet about it. (But say something cool about it, like, “Everything you never wanted to know about the Three-toed Sloth!), and post it on your Facebook page.

Remember, creating a well crafted infographic will naturally attract links and social mentions due to it being unique, quality content presented in a visually attractive and user friendly way. So, the next time you’ve got some boring information that you just have to share with your readers, put it in an infographic. Your readers will thank you!

Ever since the New York Times broke the story on J.C. Penney’s use of black hat marketing tactics, many businesses have found themselves on a nervous ledge about whether the SEO consultants they have contracted are using questionable SEO tactics. When you hire professional consultants, you don’t expect to have to check up on them—if you have to intensely follow someone else’s work, you may as well just do it yourself, right? Checking up on your SEO specialists’ strategies is some of the initial backlash affecting small business owners who rely heavily on an Internet marketing platform and trust with the professionals they have hired, particularly post-J.C. Penney scandal. Initially finding an organic SEO company that will follow legal and honorable tactics is well worth it, and it will not require constant supervision.

J.C. Penney was either negligent in not knowing what the SEO firm was up to, or they were complicit in the illicit black hat techniques.

In order that your business doesn’t suffer a J.C. Penney-esque shock and backlash, you must do some concentrated research before you hire a company. You must realize that the business is granting the SEO consultant permission to be part of the public profile of your enterprise. They can promote your brands, but can do great damage to your reputation. Look for a statement of ethics on the site or ask the SEO specialists how closely they follow best practices guides.

There are a few tips that will help you be on your way to having confidence in the SEO consultant that you decide to use.

Know the SEO Rules
This is a basic enough “strategy,” but it is one that many marketing managers don’t find time to do, expecting the company they hire to be the experts. Like anything, you’re ahead of the game if you know the rules yourself. If you go to take your car to get repaired, but know little about cars, you could get taken for a ride, so to speak, without even knowing. When you go take your car in for repairs, if you don’t know much about cars, you generally take someone with you who does, or make sure you can really trust the mechanic, right? The same can be done with hiring an SEO company. However, getting the basics down of SEO tactics isn’t as difficult as mastering automotive technology, so with just a few tips of your own, you should be able to successfully hire a legitimate company that will meet your marketing needs. Google also has fairly lengthy guidelines for their SEO rules—you can simply look these up yourself to get a feel for what is and is not “kosher.”

Ask!
Yes—that’s right—just ask your prospective company what they are up to, how they conduct business and what their policies are. Kevin M. Ryan, who is the CEO, strategic consulting and project management for firm Motivity Marketing thinks it is unlikely that J.C. Penney had no idea what its search firm had been doing. “Most search marketers are highly intelligent, ethical people, not idolaters scurrying around looking for scraps of knowledge from their virtual parent figure.”
There are three categories of search engine optimization firms that you need to be aware of, Ryan goes on to explain. “White hats that obey all the rules, black hats that break the rules and gray hats that play somewhere in the middle.”

J.C. Penney was either negligent in not knowing what the SEO firm was up to, or they were complicit in the illicit black hat techniques.

References
Ask the SEO firm for references in past clients. Most SEO companies proudly display links to success stories and most of their customers. It won’t hurt to shoot an email to someone at those companies to get the 411 on your prospective SEO consultant.