Q: How many keywords should you generally target per page?
A: 3-5 variations and derivatives of the same term

Q: What is breadcrumb navigation?
A: Breadcrumb Navigation is a way for both users and search spiders to see how they reached the current page of the site they are on. Let’s use Nordstrom as an example: as you shop, you click links HOME>WOMEN>CLOTHING>SHOES>HEELS…this helps keywords on the page and helps the user revert if necessary. Let me know if this makes sense!
(Readers: does this make sense?)

Q: If people are searching for a really oddly phrased keyword that’s hard to directly incorporate into the content, does it really matter how the words are arranged? For instance, a keyword like “tennis shoe red nike”
A: Google picks up derivatives and variations so you shouldn’t worry too much. Make use of the metas, though.

Not really a question, but interesting topic we’re staying on top of:
Q: Google can read text from img, it is still experimental but they are already reading imgs in pdf files. Bruce Clay announced this at last pubcon.
A: Yes, still in beta. Once we find significant data in our research we will be sure to present it on a webinar!

Q: What is “anchor text”?
A: Anchor text is the term in which a hyperlink is embedded. It is the term that is on the page which is highlighted and click-able, and should take you to the respective page.

Q: If you are a local company, is it important to put geographical info (City, state, etc.), or do local and registering with Google local take care of this for you?
A: If your business is geo-specific, yes include those in your terms. Google local will show your business listing, but keep in mind this will NOT help your primary domain rank organically!

Let us know if you have any other questions and/or topics you’d like to discuss further and we’ll be sure to add to this post.

–Barbara | @barbaradizon

JCPenney recently received a penalty from Google for purchasing links on sites all around the web in order to boost their ranks on highly competitive keywords, including “dresses”, “area rugs” and “bedding”. The number of links being built increased drastically during the holiday season and eventually raised some red flags with Google. Matt Cutts’s Google Spam Team went in to investigate, saw blackhat SEO strategies in place, and penalized JCPenney’s rankings—dropping their keywords from the first page down to the sixth and seventh.

What Went Wrong? There were three main problems with JCPenney’s SEO strategy:

1.  Drastically increased rate of link-building during the holiday season. Building so many links at once is what signaled the red flags. Each site has its own natural rate of link-building (i.e. how many links are built to your site without you doing anything), and you don’t want to push too far beyond that. To be safe, we never recommend building more than 50 links a month. Even that is on the high-end if you are building legitimate links to your site.

2.  Built links on irrelevant sites. Tiny links for bridal sets and fashion jewelry tucked into the bottom right corner of a site about cars may not bother a user, but this is a big problem for Google. The irrelevance of the links is a blackhat red flag to Google. Links should only be placed on relevant sites where they make sense and have value to both the search engine as well as the user.

3.  The main website could not be optimized. Surprisingly, the actual URLs that were ranking were not from the main JCPenney website. They were actually from a proxy server. The original site could not be optimized (probably due to backend issues), so a mirror site with cleaner URLs and optimized meta descriptions and keywords was built. Using a proxy server in itself is not a problem. However, it definitely would have been better if the site they wanted to promote was something that could be optimized and rank well on its own.

What should they have done? More than anything, patience is key with SEO. The holiday season may have rushed everything, but in the end it wasn’t worth the SEO campaign backfiring. Real SEO should take months, if not years (depending on how competitive the keyword) to get you onto the first page. If appropriate measures are taken and you abide by Google’s Webmaster policies, you can still ensure great rankings and measurable results.

Cynthia | @cynniebug

]]> http://blog.webmarketing123.com/search-engine-optimization/webinar-recap-jcpenney%e2%80%99s-seo-no-go-what-went-wrong-and-what-you-need-to-do/feed/ 0 http://blog.webmarketing123.com/search-engine-optimization/webinar-recap-powerful-link-building-strategies-that-work/ http://blog.webmarketing123.com/search-engine-optimization/webinar-recap-powerful-link-building-strategies-that-work/#comments Fri, 04 Feb 2011 22:59:31 +0000 Webmarketing123 http://blog.webmarketing123.com/?p=623 In case you missed this week’s webinar with  on Powerful Link Building Strategies That Work, here is a brief overview of why link building is essential for any business and the strategies a business can use to strengthen their link building.

Why is link building important? 3 simple words:  Third Party Validation.  Your site becomes more credible when you have other sites that refer to you.  One way to think about this is in terms of votes.  Each time a site refers to you, it’s a vote for your website as a source of authority on the subject.

Who needs a link building strategy? Every site needs a linking campaign.  Link building is one of the most important components of SEO and if you want your site to be in the top results that searchers see, it is completely necessary.

How can I improve my link building strategy? There are 5 different link building strategies we discussed:

1. Diversify your links: You want to get your links from several different types of websites, including article syndications, press release sites, blogs, forums, paid listings and directories.

2. Set up a directory link: There are several different types of directories that are available.  The first thing you want to do is make sure to Google the directory to make sure it has been crawled, ensuring traffic.  Then you need to submit your website to be indexed. Directories, such as DMOZ, can reject your submission.

3. Creating good links: You preferably want the keyword you are optimizing for to be the anchor text, the clickable link, and it is extremely important to choose good keywords.

4. Link proportioning: Be sure to diversify the links in not only in number, but also the keywords you are targeting and the landing pages of the links.  It is always important to have the landing pages tailored to the specific keyword you are targeting

5. Not all links are created equal: It is important to understand that all links are not equal.  One important change is that reciprocal links (two-way linking) is no longer effective.  You should always get one-way links to your website and target quality links rather than quantity of links.  Linking from sites that have more credibility increases the link value for search engines.  It is also important not to build all your links at once, but try and set up 30-50 quality links a month.

Don’t just focus on one of these strategies, but try and employ all of them in order to see the fastest results.  Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither should your link building campaign.  Although link building requires full-time resources, it is essential to the SEO process.  Link building will increase your site credibility and ranking, which is the best way for your business to increase leads and sales.

-Ami

Disclaimer: These are not actual Web123 Account Managers…but they sure look the part—stoked and suited up!

For the next few months, we’ll be turning the webinars over to our Account Management team. Why? Because they’re the experts—so why not let them present on the topics they deal with every day? These webinars will give you, the attendee, the opportunity to interact directly with our account managers. You have direct responses to your burning questions: How do I stack up against my competitors for Search Engine Optimization strategy? What features are most important when creating an optimal Pay-Per-Click landing page? What the heck kind of metrics do I measure on Social Media? Each webinar will be presented by a different account manager, and your questions will be fielded by additional experts on the Webmarketing123 team.

SEO Account Manager, Cynthia Everson, kicked it off last week with her presentation, SEO and Setting Realistic Goals—thanks to all who attended!

Next up for this month:

Ben Cheng, SEO Account Manager

Danny Ligh, SEO/PPC Account Analyst

Ryan Li, Senior SEO Account Manager

Hope you can attend at least one upcoming webinar–and feel free to tweet us for any specific questions: @Webmarketing123 | #WM123

There were three Online Marketing Objectives discussed:

Goal 1: Increase Visibility on Search Engines

Goal 2: Build Traffic to Site

Goal 3: Maximize the Revenue Opportunity

Increase Visibility on Search Engines:

Studies show that 68% of search engine users only look at the first page of results. In addition, if you’re ranked number one on the first SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), you’re ten times more likely to get a click than someone who is ranked number ten (42 vs. 3% click through rate, respectively).

The first step to getting the most possible sales from SEO is optimizing for the right keywords. That means narrowing down a short list of ideal key phrases that your sales prospects and customers use to find your product.

•        Keyword Expansion Tools: Wordtracker, Wordze, Keywordiscovery, Google’s SK tool

•         Competitive Analysis : Scour competitors sites for missed keyword opportunities

•         Customer Terminology : Talk to your sales team. What terminology do customers actually use?

•         Analyze paid search data: Analytics data, internal site search, web logs

Which keywords bring the best (most qualified) visitors?

•         Stages of Sales Cycle: Evaluate keywords by stage of sales cycle

•         Keyword leverage analysis to determine which keywords are at a critical inflection point

in your rankings

The number of, and competitiveness of your keywords will then help you determine the optimal SEO strategy for your site.

Build Traffic to Site:

Once keywords are selected, they need to be targeted in the site content. Site content is very important because not only do search crawlers read it to index your site, but it is what customers see when they get to your site. For visitors, site content must be informative, engaging and compelling. For search engines, different aspects of site content must signal relevance.

You need to have keyword-rich content on each of your site’s pages, especially your homepage. Keep in mind; if you don’t write about it, you’re not going to rank for it–include essential keywords, keep your message simple and relevant. Most importantly, make sure it makes grammatical sense. Search engines can identify gratuitous keyword placement.

There is a simple way you can see what Google can read on your webpage. The easiest way is to go to the text only version of your cached page. This will bring up all the content that Google can read. You will notice that although your site may be visually appealing, Google can’t read pictures or fancy flash animations. That is why it is so important to have text, targeting your specific keywords in a fashion that makes sense.

Maximize the Revenue Opportunity:

If you have the bandwidth, then this is the ongoing analysis you need to do SEO correctly.

•        Benchmarking in Place

•        Track Spider Crawls

•        Move up in Ranks

•        You should see consistent upward movement on SERPS

•        Tweak the site

•        If you are not seeing that upward movement, then you need to adjust the key areas that we’ve discussed in the “5 pillars”

When measuring the impact of Search Marketing, look at:

•        Organic (Non-Paid) Traffic

Non-paid best represents SEO efforts as all visitors arrive at your site through organic search

•        Non-Branded Traffic
Brings you new customers who do not yet know about your company, but are looking for the products and services you offer

When measuring ROI of your Search Marketing efforts, first define what you consider a conversion. Is it filling out a form, downloading a whitepaper or completing a transaction on your shopping page? Analyze which keywords are leading to the most conversions–utilize those keywords and stop using the ones that are not driving qualified traffic. Also, determine where visitors abandon your site and improve the functionality of that area. By maintain, analyzing and reporting on your customers and qualified leads- you can make an immensely positive impact on your company’s bottom line.

-@SarahShakour

Always keep conversions in mind when optimizing. It doesn’t matter if your site is ranking number one if the user experience is horrible. Evaluate the usability of your website. Ask yourself what you want the user to do when he or she gets to your site, and make sure it’s clear what the next step is. Define what a conversion is (form fill out? direct sale?) and build your site to guide the user towards that goal.

Optimize off-site as well as on-site. Link-building makes up about 50% of SEO, so definitely be on the lookout for opportunities to place a link. Take advantage of social media as well, as more and more evidence is coming out that it affects your organic rankings.

Take advantage of free software to analyze your site. Set up goals in Google Analytics to see how people are using your site. What keywords are they using to get to the page? Where are they dropping off and exiting the site? Make sure always to look at non-paid, non-branded terms in order to most objectively see how your organic efforts are going.

See what your competitors are doing to optimize. One handy way of figuring out who your biggest online competitors are is to check Analytics for your strongest keyword. Then, search that term to see who your organic competitors are. From there, you can use Yahoo’s back-link command to see who is linking to your competitors’ sites. Once you find out who is linking to your competitors, you know where to look for new places to build your own links! You can also use your competitors’ sites to look for more keyword ideas in their meta tags.

Of course, these tips are meant for after you have done all of your on-page optimization. Be sure to optimize all SEO on-page elements: content, meta tags, and URLs, and definitely pick the keywords carefully to bring the most qualified traffic to your site. Here’s to starting 2011 with an optimized site!!

–Cynthia | @cynniebug

Google ‘Content Rank’ Checker – How Relevant is My Content?

With fresh unique content being such an important ranking factor, having a tool that gave us insight into how relevant content on a particular page is for a specific keyword would be helpful.  Similar to Google Page Rank which uses a scale of 1-10, we could have a Google ‘Content Rank’ which would help us understand just how relevant Google found a page for a particular keyword.

The Link Diversity Tool – From What Types of Sites Do I Need More Links?

How great would it be if there was a tool that helped clue us into what types of sites a specific page on our website needed more links from (e.g. Directories, Partnership Sites, Articles, Press Releases, Blogs, Forums)?! Building quality one-way inbound links is enough of a challenge, but trying to figure out the right mix of link sources adds a whole other level of complexity.  Inbound links (one-way links from external websites pointing to your website) have been known for some time to be a very large factor in ranking highly on the SERPs.  However, it’s not just the number of inbound links your site has, or even the pure strength of the individual links, but the diversity of those links sources that also matters.  A site that has great inbound links coming from not just one type of website (e.g. Blogs), but many types of websites (e.g. Blogs, Directories, Articles, Press Releases, Forums) will have much stronger Domain Authority.  So…could we see this development within Google Webmaster Tools ?

A Way To Measure Social Media Authority – How Do I Increase My Author Authority/Social Authority?

With recent confirmation that Twitter and Facebook links influence SEO on Google and Bing (http://bit.ly/f8oTbb), the world of SEO just got a whole lot more complex.  Google is now measuring what is calls ‘Author Authority’ (Bing calls it ‘Social Authority’) and including this as a new ranking factor.  While it may still be a while until Google and Bing divulge too much regarding just how these social media sources affect rankings, having a ‘Social Media Authority’ checker would be extremely insightful.  Ideally this tool would assign not only a scope of how much authority a web page has from social media sources, but also tell us what specific source this authority is coming from, and at what rate.

A Keyword Tool That Forecasts Search Volume – What Keywords Will Be Most Searched In the Coming Months?

Hopefully most of you reading this are familiar with Google’s Keyword Tool (http://bit.ly/9FqW8F) that shows the approximate number of internet searches conducted on a given keyword over the past month.  While that tool is useful for understanding recent search volume trends, what it doesn’t tell you is any predictions of what future search volume on keywords will be.  Right before the release of the iPhone 4, if you were to use Google’s current Keyword Tool to see the number of searches conducted on that keyword over the past month, you would find barely anyone searching on it.  Today, there are well over 2 million global monthly searches conducted on Google.com for the keyword ‘iPhone 4’ on exact match.  That means over 2 million people last month went onto Google.com and entered ‘iPhone 4’ as their search.  How powerful would it be if there was a tool that could predict future search trends for any given keyword – talk about being able to prepare in advance with SEO!

I’m hoping this isn’t all wishful thinking, but that will be determined once 2011 hits. Feel free to share your SEO wishes as well!

–Antonio

]]> http://blog.webmarketing123.com/search-engine-optimization/seo-wishlist-for-2011/feed/ 0 http://blog.webmarketing123.com/search-engine-optimization/social-influence-on-seo/ http://blog.webmarketing123.com/search-engine-optimization/social-influence-on-seo/#comments Fri, 10 Dec 2010 23:28:53 +0000 Webmarketing123 http://blog.webmarketing123.com/?p=581 Yesterday, Ben Cheng, our SEO specialist and Barbara Dizon, our Social Media expert, presented an analysis of the Google and Bing revelation that social media does influence search. The majority of the webinar was spent discussing the different ways social media affects your search rankings, and what Google and Bing take into account when incorporating social media posts into your website’s ranking. Below are some key take-aways you probably won’t find on the slides .

Barbara reminds us that:

• Social media engages with a community, not a specific generation. The point of Twitter, for example, is to give relevant information that will be helpful for your followers.

• To continue the topic of Twitter, it is generally used for specific information and/or as a news filter. When people realize that you are consistently sending them to pages and links that they consider relevant, they start to trust your company.

• Social authority does depend on the quantity of fans and followers you have, but they MUST be relevant and active as well! In other words, having 100,000 followers where 50% of them are irrelevant spammers will do no better than having 1,000 followers that are completely relevant, and actually engage with your content (RT, @ reply, etc.).

• Social Media for B2B is less about marketing and more about thought leadership. The best way to get people on your brand’s bandwagon is to have great content that will make the ride much more pleasant.

Ben reviews:

• The links you share on your Twitter or Facebook have a direct impact on your rankings. Why? Because they can be shared and Re-Tweeted, which impacts the level of authority you have.

• With enough social/author authority, your company will be indexed. Getting your website pages mentioned on Twitter, for example, is synonymous link building.

• Another important component of authority is not just the amount of friends or followers but also how often they visit your site, or ping it!

• Make social waves through Bing and Google’s discussion tab. This allows real time tweets to be in the feed if you are well-followed and connected.

• A product page can be crawled by Google spiders up to three times quicker if it is tweeted (tested in-house at Webmarketing123).

The main point in integrating social and search now lies in your social authority. If you are a trusted authority with decent amount of fans/followers that all repurpose & engage with your relevant content, your rankings will benefit from social media. Repeat after me: trust, repurpose, engage, relevancy, rankings. Therefore, get social to get noticed!

If you would like a copy of the slides from this week’s webinar, e-mail Mark Powers at mark@webmarketing123.com. Ask him to hook it up with that good social/search knowledge—he should know what you’re talking about .

]]> http://blog.webmarketing123.com/search-engine-optimization/social-influence-on-seo/feed/ 0 http://blog.webmarketing123.com/social-media/social-media-wishlist-for-2011/ http://blog.webmarketing123.com/social-media/social-media-wishlist-for-2011/#comments Wed, 08 Dec 2010 19:46:54 +0000 Webmarketing123 http://blog.webmarketing123.com/?p=572 Social media is such an adaptive space, constantly changing in form and functionality—lately we’ve been thinking about a few capabilities that we would like to see included on our various social platforms in 2011:

Better Facebook Analytics. We’re sure Facebook is working hard to improve their insights, but considering how much Facebook Pages has grown in the past year for business use, you’d think they’d get a quicker move on this feature! ‘Impressions’ is a start…

Facebook Video Chat. Recently, Mashable ran an article about how they’ve spotted references to Skype popping up within the coding framework of Facebook. This is definitely one thing that we would like to see from Facebook in the near future—video chat! We’re surprised they haven’t rolled that out already…

Embedded video within Tweets. The same way that you are able to watch videos hosted by Youtube and other such websites, directly from Facebook’s newsfeed/profiles, we would like to see Twitter incorporate this functionality into the display of Tweets that contain video.

‘New ReTweet’ Accommodations. Some 3^rd party Twitter applications (cloud and mobile) don’t display any RTs that use the new button, which might make you miss an opportunity to reach out. Other apps also only allow you to RT with the new button, leaving you no chance to add a comment on RTs *ahem Twitter for Blackberry*

Accurate Facebook Ads. More accurately targeted ads on Facebook’s display network. No, we’re not looking to “Meet Single Christian Girls in your (my) Area,” but thank you anyway.

iFrames—STAT! Not to discuss Facebook too much, but we’re interested to see how the new ‘iFrames’ (rolling out in January 2011) for business pages will compare to the old FBML structure—it’d be great if you didn’t need as much knowledge of web development to create a highly functional, and elegantly designed Facebook application. Anywho, we hope this really does roll out in January 2011.

Twitter Police. Can we find a way to put all the Twitter-using spam artists in check? We wish that people wouldn’t use Twitter to flood the world with, “get rich quick on the internet” schemes, and silly “get a million-billion followers in one month” advertisements—as marketers using social media, we would just like to say to all the spammers out there that what they’re doing isn’t effective, but good effort.

We think that’s it for now. Check back for more additions to our Social Media Wishlist!

–Social Media Team

@coachgoot | @barbaradizon

P.S. We’ve been good this year…

This topic has been in discussion for the past month now, and after keeping up with countless articles, it all comes down to the creative mind. Yes, Google launched a few innovations that haven’t really taken off (e.g. Google Wave), but everything is a learning process. Creativity sparks innovation, but some of the top engineers that left Google for Facebook was due to a struggle with their creativity being hindered.

The most recent article I’ve read still provides insight on former Google employees feeling the liveliness of Facebook compared to Google in getting things done. Though all this talk doesn’t mean Google is going out of business any time soon, this rivalry is interesting to follow, and Facebook is definitely becoming more appealing to those with the most out-of-the-box ideas. As I was searching for a quote to relate, I came across this one, by Brian Graham: “Competition creates better products, alliances create better companies.” We’ve already seen this happen with Yahoo! and Bing, as well as Facebook and Bing, so I’m curious to see how these partnerships will flourish (or fail) in 2011.

Anywho, I’m anxious for what Facebook has in store for 2011, but I’m hoping whatever they release will spark even more innovation—from Google, Bing, whoever can keep with this rapidly moving snowball. Speaking of snowball, it’s that time of the season…hope everyone is enjoying the start of the Holidays!

-@barbaradizon