If you read my SEO blog, or follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed that I’m a huge proponent of honesty and doing things the “right” way. I notice that both in SEO and in life, this commitment to integrity is a perspective I rarely find shared with me by others. Whether you have an opportunity to be honest with the guy who gave you too much change back (as coincidentally, I did today) for your lunch, or to take personal responsibility for an error you made, or to invoice for a reasonable amount even though you know your client has no idea how many hours it will or will not take you to complete their project, your answer to the question, “Would I do this the same way whether or not anyone was looking?” should always be a resounding, “Yes.”

Unfortunately, most of us are keenly aware of the fact that most people cannot honestly say they always do the right thing when no one is looking. I’ve contended before that many search engine optimization “experts” are shady; but, then again, a good amount of people working in almost every specialty field are. Why? Because other people (namely customers) don’t understand the work they do, and hence, these “experts” can get away with overcharging and under-working. Add to the niche/specialty nature of the SEO field variables such as ambiguous search engine algorithms, web jargon like “server side scripting,” and the concept that success is never achieved and done -i.e. you don’t hit a goal and then stop, as with other tactics-  and the average user/consumer of SEO services is lost, uninformed and easily misled.

In my mind, the SEO realm [and those who operate in it] is simply and obviously a microcosm of our society as a whole. A small percentage of people trying their best to make their way while doing good and honest work, while the overwhelming majority sees it a faster, more efficient and worthwhile cause to employ shady tactics and overcharge for work that in the same time, they could actually do well.

What do you think? Do you agree or disagree? Are you frustrated by shady business both in SEO and other fields? Will you share your example with me below?

For those of you out there doing DYI SEO, or serving in web content contributor roles at your organization, you probably often struggle with choosing which keyword(s) to optimize your page(s) for. To be clear, I’m referring to the situations in which your page’s topic may be referred to in several different ways. To use a few examples from recent conversation/consultation: pc repair vs. computer repair, or millennial keynote speaker vs. gen y keynote speaker, or sports medicine expert vs. sports medicine specialist. When narrowing down the core term for which you’re optimizing and thereby, what keyword you’re seeking to rank for, there are a few ways to make sure your decision is a wise and informed one:

Define Your Target Audience and Goals

If you operate a local and/or small business, let’s say a pc repair shop, ranking on the first page of Google results for “pc repair” probably isn’t what you want to be aiming for. Will you generate targeted interest from that ranking? Probably not, and because of that, you also probably wouldn’t remain on the first page of results for very long even if you did get there.

If you’re using your website as a way to generate leads in any form or fashion, you need to define your audience before you can target it. In the example above, if the PC repair company is serving the Easton/Lehigh Valley, PA area, which my awesome friend’s, Ryan Critchett does, then it’s better to optimize for terms around local searches. In other words, Ryan will generate business from ranking for computer repair bethlehem, pa, whereas he is not seeking to repair computers on a national level, so optimizing for the general “PC repair” term is not in his best interest. (Note in the linked example that Ryan has created landing pages for each of his local target markets, a smart move to ensures he ranks for people searching across a variety of areas in his region)

Do Keyword Volume Research

Once you’ve defined your target audience and it’s time to choose between this or that keyword, the first step is to research how people are searching. One of the easiest ways to do this is by using Google’s free Keyword Tool. If you’re already using Google AdWords, you can access it by clicking on Reporting and Tools in the top nav menu, and choosing Keyword Tool. For those of you who aren’t using AdWords, you too can use the Google Keyword Tool. You can put as many variations of your keyword in the box (for step by step instructions, check out my post on using the Google Keyword Tool), and I recommend checking the box that says, “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms.” Google will throw back some suggestions and terms it thinks are related that may or may not shed some light for you on how people are searching. To go back to an example from above, if you put just title search and title examination in that box, you’ll see that 165,000 people are searching in the U.S. per month for title search, whereas 1,900 are searching for title examination.

Taking a hint from the step 1 and determining your goals, you can infer from this data and pattern that if you’re company is providing title searches in Atlanta, you’d want to optimize around more regional metro area terms. If you were a large national title firm with a variety of franchise locations, you would first want to define your goals (i.e. is each location maintaining a website for which you’re wanting to rank? Is your branding initiative a global one that instead funnels potential clients through one site?). If your goals are to funnel leads through one overarching brand website, you’ll want to optimize for the more general terms, and pick the ones that more people ae using.

DISCLAIMER – competition is a piece you should also consider before picking between this or that keyword. There are situations in which you’ll be picking between this or that and will want to choose the less searched for word, so read on…

Evaluate Your Competition

Whether the product or service you’re offering appeals to a niche of a few thousand, or a niche of millions, you must evaluate what your competition is doing from an SEO standpoint. To go back to the pc repair example, pc repair and computer repair are searched for with fairly similar frequency. So in Ryan’s case, if his main local competitor in the computer repair market had an established site and was choosing to optimize for terms like computer repair Lehigh Valley and computer repair easton, Ryan would probably want to opt to optimize for pc repair Lehigh Valley, and pc repair easton, so he can immediately see improvements in search results without havig to compete. And because the volume is comparable, there is no opportunity cost of choosing pc repair as his core term. Should he decide he later wants to rank for computer repair, he will have a foundation of content around a very close derivative term (pc repair) that will make that process a faster and easier one.

Every organization and every SEO strategy is unique. Those differentiators are what will determine what else you add to this list, but these three steps are critical when it comes to keyword selection. Do you have others? What else do you do before deciding between this or that keyword?

The other day I was at a coffee shop, where I intended to get some freelance SEO work done. While usually the set up of this particular coffee shop works out quite well– there’s community style library table seating–on this evening, it did not. Just as I sat down with my latte and cupcake piled 3 inches high with icing, opened my laptop, whipped out my iPad, and plugged up my android phone, I was immediately yanked in as an example in a conversation between two people sitting next to me who claimed to work on the Web.

You could tell that one of them, who later introduced himself as Greg, was actually a pretty bright guy. It was also apparent that he had some form of background in marketing and/or sales, as he immediately sounded like he was selling me a 1977 Volvo before he took his first breath. I’ll spare you the details (there are 2 hours of them..yes, 2 hours) but essentially, what it boiled down to was these two guys were working on websites and at least one of them, if not both, was immediately and noticeably unqualified to be doing so.

Now, to be fair, I’m not your average Web user. I’ve been working in web marketing for years. I spent the first half of my time in the post-college working world as a Marketing Director for a web content management software development company that’s here in Atlanta. I’ve done freelance work, I’ve done contract work, I currently work for one of the biggest companies in Atlanta doing web marketing, and am also building my own web-based application. So when I say noticeably, I mean by me. But since you’re reading this blog, it’s only fair that I share my insights with you so that you too can know how to spot an SEO counterfeit.

First of all, “hats” are not something that’s discussed amongst people who practice good SEO. Since good SEO is, by definition, white hat, it’s assumed that if you’re good at what you do, that’s what you’re doing. If you talk about hats, the people who do SEO will laugh at you, at least on the inside. Unless that is, if you’re criticizing black or grey hat techniques.

Secondly, anyone who talks about buying backlinks or leasing websites is also a shady character. To really do good SEO, you have to also commit to not only the techniques, but the performance and success of the product, website, and company that you’re marketing. How do you do that? By writing good content, managing a well organized, useful, and solid website, and committing to sharing that resource. Time spent on finding shady sites to place links on, which by the way, likely have no value, or creating websites to “lease” would be better spent dedicating yourself to the true success of the product or service you’re marketing and sharing that message using honest tactics on the Web.

That’s exactly why I’m hesitant when I meet someone who does SEO and has no long-term clients. How exactly, are you “doing SEO” then? SEO is not something you just do and walk away from. If you do that, you just don’t do SEO, plain and simple. Furthermore, if you’re willing to “do” this SEO for any number of clients yourself, once again, how exactly are you “doing SEO?” It takes time, it takes commitment, it takes dedication, it takes intelligence. It does not, take shadiness. And that’s exactly what this guy was, an SEO shadester.

It’s also worth noting, this guy’s blog wasn’t even managed within his site. If you clicked “blog” from the top navigation menu, it popped out to a new window with a new domain and a completely different look and feel. (HUGE red flag that I’ll address in a separate post).

So dude, next time you’re trying to get in with people who actually care about clients and web content, don’t talk about hats, leasing, volume of clients, short term gigs, or buying links. Us legit folks are laughing, and it’s not with you.

Whether you’re a single person trying to gain more visibility via search engines for your local retail shop, a firm looking to hire a person for in-house SEO efforts, or a large company hiring an agency to handle SEO, there are several key things to look for in the person(s) you are hiring for SEO.

You may not know the lingo, you may not talk the talk, but below are some things to help guide you in finding the right SEO service:

1. Don’t Believe Anyone Who Tells You SEO is a One-Time Thing

Easy mistake to make, but while being wooed by tales of first page listings and low costs, remind yourself–search engine optimization is NOT a sprint, it’s a marathon.  It requires constant new, fresh content, tweaks to existing content, a strong and continually updated internal linking strategy, and countless other factors, all of which require consistent and focused commitment.

2. Not All Backlinks are Created Equal

When it comes to backlinks (inbound links to your site from other sites) quality is much more important than quantity. Although PageRank is less of a factor now than it was in the past, if you’re ever wondering how strong an inbound link from a particular site is, a good place to start is by checking it’s PageRank. PageRank is measured on a scale from 0-10, 10 being the best (Only a handful of sites (literally) have a PR of 10). Don’t let a vendor fool you into thinking 1,500 backlinks from content farms, scraper sites, and link farms are going to do more for your SEO strategy than 15 high quality links. It’s just not true.

3. Data Can Lie

Numbers can tell any story desired for a person savvy enough with analytics and keyword ranking tools. An increase in traffic doesn’t mean the potential partner’s work was the cause. Any piece of data or parameter you can think of to sort it with is accessible in Google Analytics. If you want to see the sites from which people arrived at yours, you can. If you want to see what keywords they used to find you, you can. If it sounds shady, it probably is. Unfortunately, there is a lot of shadiness in the Web world. There are still enough people who don’t fully understand how the Web’s puzzle pieces fit together, and as long as that’s the case, there will be people out there talking big game and failing to deliver.

4. I’ll Take My Search Results Unpersonalized, Thanks

Don’t be fooled by your potential vendor or employee showing you a Google search in real-time. Search results on Google come personalized, unless specified by the user. What does this mean? If I search 60 or so times for the same term over the course of the month, and click the same result (say, my client’s site) each time, chances are when I conduct my next Google search for that term, that listing will be on my first page. That doesn’t mean it’s the first result for you. When getting a demo of results, request search results be unpersonalized. Ask that they log out of their Google account, and clear their cache. You can also add “&pws=o” (no quotes) to the end of a search query URL to remove personalization.

5. Know Thy Industry

Tactics associated with good search engine optimization are fairly similar regardless of industry. However, if you can get someone on board who is familiar with your industry, related websites, relevant terminology, and who has an understanding of the competitive landscape, your search engine optimization strategy is much more likely to succeed. This is not to say that someone without this knowledge can’t excel. But if you do bring on someone who doesn’t have your-industry-specific knowledge, make sure they have the aptitude to pick up on it and really dedicate and immerse themselves in it.

If you ever have any questions when hiring for SEO, feel free to leave them for me in the comments and I’ll be happy to give some advice!

When I started this blog last year, I thought I would be able to make time to contribute to it daily and watch my own SEO space grow. I was wrong. In the ebb and flow of life, things get chaotic and at times, we lose our ability to focus on things we enjoy and appreciate. For me, sharing my insight and experience with SEO over the years is one of those things, and unfortunately, something that was put on hold. So, how does this relate to the title of this blog post?

In order for any site or blog to perform well from an SEO perspective, it requires constant attention, a steady flow of new content, and consistent updates to existing content. By failing to contribute to my blog space regularly, I have broken the SEO rules. More importantly, I have undone any possible momentum I had achieved when I first began the blog and was posting regularly. As of now, I have more work ahead of me in building this blog presence than I did before I started. It would be easier at this point to start a completely new blog space and push it forward from the start.

I will not take the easy way out. I broke the rules I so avidly preach and will now use this blog space to prove that the damage can be undone. Until next time, friends.

Having worked in search engine optimization (SEO) for large and small companies both on a freelance basis and as part of an organization, I get asked a lot of different questions about SEO. Common to almost every interaction I’ve had around search engine optimization is a question something along the lines of, “We want to accomplish SEO in the next 3 months, how do we do it?”

It should go without saying that not every conversation goes exactly this way or is always a 3 month time line. What’s important here is to understand that no organization just “does” SEO. On the contrary to some marketing tactics such as pay-per-click campaigns or banner ads, SEO is a long term commitment. It is a gradual process that takes time and frequent work and evaluation.

The amount of time it takes to achieve significant search engine results page (SERP) improvement is dependent upon the beginning status of the site, the terms for which you’re optimizing, the effectiveness of the optimization strategy, and the amount of effort put into the the search engine optimization tactics.

Attention to detail such as improving usability through a strong internal linking strategy and use of effective metadata everywhere possible is a critical component in achieving ideal results. In an upcoming post I’ll discuss in more detail the recommended level of detail and optimization frequency for achieving the best results.

I’ve been asked a lot recently by people writing web content where they should most focus their on page SEO and keyword efforts. While it’s important that your core keywords appear throughout your site content and pages, keywords specific to each page should certainly be placed in a few key places. Below, I’ve outlined the most important places in which your keywords should appear on page.

1. Page URL – when infusing URLs with keywords, make sure the words are separated by hyphens. Try to place your keywords in the most upfront location in your URL possible. For example, if your website is www.CompanyABC.com and you offer multiple products, one of which being SEO services, you would want your URL to look something like: www.CompanyABC.com/products/search-engine-optimization. (As a side note – having your keywords in your site’s domain name doesn’t hurt either).
2. Page Title – The core keywords for each page should without question be placed in your page title. Using the example above, the page title could be something like “Search Engine Optimization Services”.
3. First 100 words of body content – make sure that the same keywords you are using in your search-engine friendly URLs and page titles are also placed in the first 100 words of body content. The closer to the start of the first paragraph, the better.
4. Keywords in headers – whether H1, H2, or H3 tags (and so on), including keywords in your page headers is always helpful. Just make sure that your keyword density does not exceed 5% of total page content.

This is a very basic list but a good place to start for web content writers. Please feel free to provide additional ideas and thoughts for on page keyword placement in the comments below.

People often forget to consider how and in what order they are serving up content when dealing with SEO. A logical site hierarchy and a thoughtful folder/sub-folder structure for site content is critical. Use of a strong sitemap, fairly shallow website depth, thoughtful keyword driven folder names, and a good linking strategy (including use of menus and context navigation) will drastically improve SEO and PageRank results. Let’s discuss each of these pieces in a bit more depth.

Sitemaps - Even if your website is one with thousands of pages, making a well-organized sitemap available from each page of your site ensures that every page on your website will be within just a few clicks away. This also means that these pages will be only a few crawling steps away for search engine spiders. In general, it is a best practice to make every page on your site reachable within just a few clicks.

Website Depth - When you run a search for the pages indexed on the Apple.com site by Google you can see there are over 7,000,000 results listed. Even with this immensely large number of pages, Apple does a great job of making every page available within just a few clicks of the mouse. In Apple’s sitemap, there nine available top-level headings under the About heading. However, once you arrive at Apple’s About section, you can see that it is not necessary to drill down further on the page to access anyone of these headings. Furthermore, each subheading under these top-level headings are available within just one additional click (all listed at the bottom of the page). The faster a user can get to each page, the easier it is for search engines to do the same.

Folder Names - For sites that use a content structure that matches their hierarchical folder directory structure ( i.e. – www.companyxyz.com/about/management rather than www.companyxyz.com/management), using keyword driven folder naming conventions is key. This allows for easy navigation of content in hierarchy driven sites. Furthermore, it affords a more keyword infused URL while allowing users to easily identify the location of the content they’re viewing. As a naming convention best practice, when multiple keywords are in any portion of your URL, use hyphens to separate these words rather than underscores.

Linking Strategy - The organization of your site and use of menus such as breadcrumbs will provide a strong internal linking structure. By providing a link to every top level section of your site from the homepage (via a top navigation menu, for example), not only do you pass along PageRank from your homepage to pages beneath it in the hierarchy, but you also provide automatic internal links that help users navigate your site with ease. For pages a bit deeper in your hierarchy, using breadcrumbs that display a backwards path from the current page to the homepage will accomplish this same effect. Wherever possible, use menus to improve site usability and navigation; doing so will automatically afford you some great internal link juice.

These are just a few things to consider when evaluating your site structure and how your organization is serving up its content. We recommend researching each of these pieces in more depth to consider what strategy is best for your organization. Remember, every SEO step you take should benefit your end-user. When you keep your users in mind, your SEO rewards will always follow close behind.

Effective search engine optimization is not achieved in a few days, nor in a few weeks. Good SEO requires ongoing work and dedication and a constant evaluation of site content and usability. Below we’ve outlined a few points to help further your SEO momentum:

• Research – factors that influence SEO are constantly changing and there is a lot of “advice” out there that can be very misleading. Find sources that you trust and subscribe to their feeds. Stay on top of trends and changes in the industry.  We recommend starting with a few key industry leaders, such as SEOmoz, Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, and Search Engine Land.
• Practice – take knowledge you’ve gained through experience and couple that with industry research and best practices. Track changes you’re making to see which are having an effect. Remember that correlation does not always indicate causation. A/B and multivariate testing should be used to determine which content is most effective and which changes are having the most impact. Log your findings somewhere that enables you to keep them top of mind. We recommend synthesizing a list of efforts that are of the most benefit to your SEO strategy and continually implementing changes based on this list.
• Hard work – to maintain SEO momentum and develop a strategy that works for your organization, it requires dedication and hard work. As trite as this may sound, SEO success is dependent upon constant evaluation and targeted changes and updates to your site and strategy. Your competitors may have more money invested in their efforts, but SEO success really boils down to passion, dedication, and hard work. Pick at least one small item a day to evaluate or change, whether that’s your site navigation, number of clicks from point a to b, or tweaks to content.
• Engage your audience – wherever possible, find out what your stakeholders are wanting when they visit your website. Educational resources, better site structure or usability, and more platforms for user generated content and contributions often appear at the top of this list. Listen to your site visitors and give them what they want. Giving users a reason to come to your site and stay engaged is key in any effective SEO strategy. After all, if they’re looking for it, it’s likely that potential prospects that haven’t even found you are looking for it too.

These are just a few tips to help maintain your SEO momentum. Combining these ideas with your own, industry-relevant and innovative practices is certainly a step in the right SEO direction.

People have a tendency to stray away from things they fear. We loathe going to the doctor, even when we don’t feel well, for fear that we may find something wrong. The same is true with analytics data. Many people are scared to face their site’s data for fear that there will be so much work to be done that it’s not even worth a look. However, analytics data, as scary as it may be, provides the most insightful clues into the successes and failures of your current SEO strategy.

For example, if using Google Analytics, “traffic sources” data is extremely useful. Here you are able to analyze where your site traffic is coming from and where these sources can be improved. Let’s say a good majority of those finding your sites from natural search are using your company or product name to do so. While it’s great that you have some brand recognition going on here, generating traffic from people who already know about your company and product is not enough. What you should be focusing your efforts on is garnering traffic from those who haven’t yet heard about you. If you can boost traffic that finds you from natural search terms related to your industry, you’ve jumped a huge SEO hurdle.

Dig deeper into your keyword traffic data and take a look at some of the terminology searchers are using to find your site. Putting yourself in users’ shoes is key. At SEO State of Mind, we like to call this web empathy; and if you’re not familiar with phrases and terms searchers in your industry are using, you’re missing out on a gold mine of web traffic.

Even if only a few people each month are finding your site from a broader industry term, you may be well served by incorporating this term into your content more frequently. Doing so can result in better search rankings for these particular terms, and hence, increased site visits. This also ties back to our previous post on SEO keyword selection and optimization. Where it makes sense to do so, you should use your analytics data to incorporate keywords and phrases into your site content.

We will continue to chip away at pieces of the analytics interface and discuss how you can use this data to improve your current SEO strategy. Stay tuned!