Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ Category

Why You Have to Monitor Your SEO for Long Term Results

in Search Engine Optimization on May 10th, 2013 | No Comments »

For many people, SEO is a simple matter of finding out which keywords rank well for their business, setting them up on a blog or website, and then leaving it. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always work so well. Unless there is practically zero competition, quality SEO requires monitoring and detailed analysis in order to determine what works, what doesn’t, and what can be improved. This can be applied to keyword usage, placement, linking, social media strategies, and more.

seo monitoring

Monitoring Keywords

Keyword monitoring is the most basic part of SEO but it can also be one of the most tedious. For this reason, most people who have a number of keywords tend to hire an SEO company to do the work for them. Keyword monitoring includes the process of keeping track of each keyword for performance, click-through rate, sales rate, SERPS, and competition. Without these factors, a keyword might induce hundreds of clicks that result in bounced or exiting visitors, or even drop in SERPS ranking and stop performing.

Monitoring your keywords helps you to decide which keywords are your best performers so that you can build campaigns around them. Best of all, this same strategy can be moved over to your PPC campaign because it allows you to use your best keywords in a paid ad campaign to support your SEO.

One of the easiest ways to monitor your keywords is to start by creating list of similar keywords and then grouping them together. As some keywords outperform others, you can move them into another group with fewer keywords. This helps you to keep high performing keywords separate from your non-performers so that you can gradually test and replace everything that isn’t working for your site.

Links

Links are becoming increasingly important in any sort of SEO so monitoring them should be even more important. Monitoring links helps you to recognize quality links that are adding value to the site while helping you to notice and remove links that could potentially harm the site. Monitoring for incoming, outgoing, and internal links are all important and should be included. Link monitoring can unfortunately be a little difficult if you aren’t

Competitor Monitoring

While not exactly the ‘nicest’ thing to do, monitoring your competitors is almost essential for any successful business in a competitive market. By keeping track of what your competition is doing with their SEO, you can keep up and stay ahead so that you come up in search. Competitor monitoring typically involves researching on what type of keywords they use, which backlinks they use, and how they manage their SEO. This helps you to understand why your SEO may or may not be working, and in many cases, even helps you to see exactly what customers and demographic your competitors are aiming for.

In final, monitoring is a key element of SEO because it helps you to stay in control. Whether you do your SEO yourself or have an SEO company handle the work for you, monitoring and analyzing each keyword and strategy should be an important part of your daily or weekly routine.

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How A/B Testing Can Help You Improve Your Online Sales

in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing on April 11th, 2013 | No Comments »

Most businesses can benefit from A/B testing. Whether for social, SEO, or even your web design, AB testing can help you to figure out what works and what doesn’t so that you can improve on what you have. Improving means making more sales, converting more traffic, and in some cases, even getting more traffic. So what is A/B testing and how does it work?

A/B Testing

What is AB Testing?

A/B testing or split testing is the process of experimenting with web, social, and marketing content until you achieve the best results. Usually A/B testing uses direct comparisons so for example, two things would be launched at one time and their performance compared. A good example would be in marketing ads, you can launch one ad with a blue background and one with a red background, A/B testing is the process of seeing which gets more clicks. Most A/B testing introduces small changes to previous designs and then directly compares results. You can repeat this process with landing pages, social sites, shares, website color, ads, SEO tactics, and more.

As you can probably guess, A/B testing is an excellent way to improve things because you can make small changes and launch them together so that you can see which works better without hurting your sales by trying something drastically new. Ready to try it out?

Utilizing A/B Testing

The first thing you need is a marketing program, SEO program, or web page you would like to improve. Let’s say you would like to increase your social related purchases. In this case you would simply try different types of posts, measure them against each other, and see which get the most hits, click-through’s and impressions. So post 1. Could be “Check out our fan only sale, now through Saturday’ with a link. Post 2. Could be a photo with ‘Fan only Coupon, get your 25% discount’. While you would obviously have to post these on different days, and maybe even different weeks, you could easily see which option incited more sales.

A/B testing for SEO and website conversions is a little harder, but it does use the same basic idea. You change one small thing and see how it performs against something else. So for example, you could create two different landing pages, each with different text, different colors, and a different call to action, and see how they perform against each other. A smaller change would be to make only the call to action different to see how one tiny part compares.

This form of testing is most commonly used in ads where it is very easy to utilize, but A/B can be used in almost anything. From social posts and tweets to web pages and SEO, you can utilize A/B testing to examine, test, and improve your online sales. In fact, even changing up your descriptions and the photos on any products or services you might have can be considered A/B testing

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Is Your SEO Still on Track with Google?

in Search Engine Optimization on February 20th, 2013 | No Comments »

SEO is a rapidly changing business for international and local Seattle industries. Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines are constantly updating their policies, but Google, which controls more than 70% of traffic, updates most of all. If you haven’t been keeping up with Google’s SEO trends your website might not be on track, which means that you could begin to see your ranking and your traffic drop whenever your website is scanned! Check your Seattle SEO against these recent SEO changes to make sure you are headed in the right direction.

Images No Longer Help With SEO

In the first month of 2013, many website owners saw their traffic soar as Google’s new image search policies directed more and more visitors to properly tagged images. As a result, many SEOs began using targeted photos as a form of SEO. Now, Google has changed their image policy so that the searcher does not actually have to visit your website to get the full size image. This change took place during first week in February and it’s definitely a game changer. While you can still benefit from having keywords as your image title and alt tags, it probably will not increase your SEO.

What about Headers?

Headers are great to include in your blog because they help organize it (and Google loves organization), but they don’t help with your SEO very much. The old rule of putting one keyword in the title and one in a subtitle no longer works because Google isn’t really paying attention. Using the right keywords in your content lets Google know what it is you are talking about without using it in a header. Importantly, your title should include your keyword or a variation of your keyword. However, this is for the readers benefit, not Google’s.

How is Your Social Doing?

If you really want to dominate Google in today’s market, you have to pay attention to your social. New updates are placing even more focus on social responders including how much, and how quickly, you get social shares and likes. While a good post doesn’t necessarily need a lot of attention from social to come up in search, it does help if you have a competitive keyword. Look around, check anyone competing for your Seattle SEO keywords and see how they are doing. If their SEO is as good as yours and you are doing worse than they are, the answer is likely in social. Similarly, if you aren’t participating in Google’s Authorship program, you might want to start because it makes your post larger in search and can help you to get more prominent positions once you start to build your author rank.

Backlinks

You might already know this but now, more than ever, a surge of artificial backlinks can kill your ranking. Google has caught on to spam techniques like automatic link building, link submission, and even mass guest posting on low PR blogs. Now if you want your backlinks to be beneficial to your site, they must publish quality content, not have a history of spam, and usually be at least PR2 or hire. While there are a lot of variables, the moral is that you should choose your backlinks slowly and build to your site from quality links and articles.

Want to know more? Keep following Rory Martin to stay on top of the latest Seattle SEO that will affect your ranking. Google is changing quickly which means that it is important to stay on top of the factors that affect your SEO.

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How to Plan a Link-Building Strategy

in Search Engine Optimization on November 2nd, 2012 | No Comments »

You might have heard the phrase ‘link building’ tossed around when new media marketing professionals talk about search engine optimization,  and to many, it sounds incomprehensible. How can you build a link? Can you pay someone to link to your site, like an advertisement? Or do you create connections with other companies and bloggers, who might then link to you? The answer is: both of these strategies, and more.

Link Building Tools

But let’s start from the beginning. When coming up with a link-building strategy, we need to know what we’re aiming for. Which website linking to yours would be the best for your company’s overall business strategy? Shoot for the stars at this stage, because you really never know who might pick up on your content. Once you have a comprehensive list of all the sites you’d like a link from, highlight the biggest. This doesn’t have to be the site with the most readers, but the one with the most authority in your area of expertise.

Now ask yourself: Why would they want to link to us? The answer is already on their site. What kind of content do they currently publish? What do they usually link to? Are they all about fresh new statistics? Unusual ways to make business connections? Graphics about obscure points of code? Try to find a gap in their current content spread – maybe they haven’t covered JavaScript in a while, or perhaps you recently had an employee attend a stand-up comedy workshop for better confidence when giving presentations. Whatever you choose to write about, make sure that you have as much information as possible on this subject. Remember this piece is going to be seen by hundreds of thousands of people, right?

After bringing all the research together, and creating the content, see if there’s a timely opportunity to publish it. Maybe it’s World Comedy Day or World Code Day. These sorts of events mean that people will be looking for content on these topics, and they will be prepared to share them. On a smaller scale, there will be blogs running carnivals, and blogs curating all the posts on these topics for that day, so seek these out and make sure you get a link on their websites. This will make it easier for the bigger names to find you.

Finally, don’t assume that researches on the big name sites, or in the big name companies, will stumble on your content, and don’t be afraid to directly contact the people who you want to link to you. It’s more acceptable than ever to shoot off a succinct and respectful email asking for a link, or even to Tweet at people who might be interested in your piece.

What do you think of this off page SEO strategy? Have you successfully earned a link from a big name site or company? How did you do it?

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The Dangers of Content For Content’s Sake

in Search Engine Optimization on October 18th, 2012 | No Comments »
The Anxious Type by JD Hancock

The Anxious Type by JD Hancock

Content is king!  The web is all about content!  You must have fresh content if you want to be seen on the new, ever-changing, social web.  A lot of advice regarding social media strategies and blogging suggest creating new content every day, setting a schedule to post within, and not deviating from this. This approach does have its advantages – for example, the idea that people will check back every day, or on certain days, out of habit, whether they have seen a social media update informing them of a new post or not.  Bloggers and businesses alike  promise themselves that they’ll add content to their site as frequently as possible, to keep up the momentum of FRESH!  NEW!  CONTENT! 

However, some content creators, particularly for business, find themselves in danger of creating content without intent – content solely for content’s sake.  Sometimes, there isn’t any news. Sometimes, there isn’t anything in the media which even vaguely relates to your field of expertise. Sometimes, there just isn’t anything to say. So, what happens then?

Content for content’s sake is just noise.  Content without intent is irrelevant.  Content for content’s sake is content that contains very little actual value to readers, and is only there to make your site seem “fresh”, and to beef up your backlinks, or keywords, for SEO purposes. This kind of post seems valuable – fresh content attracts search engines, but it can be off-putting for your audience. Repeat readers will be expecting a post of the usual high quality with relevant, actionable or inspirational information.  To come across a boilerplate piece that’s only posted as a means of sticking to your posting schedule and boosting search engine rankings may make them reconsider your value (and where they spend their time on the ‘net).

Frank Reed of Biznology says:

“Businesses that produce too much information start to appear spammy and scattered. This does not instill confidence in customers and prospects. In fact, it is more likely to confuse them and push them away. Content for content’s sake does not help a business that is trying to be a true influencer in their industry. In fact, it makes you look like the little boy who cried wolf, because when you actually have something important to say, no one will be able to see it through all the other drivel you have produced.”

And it’s true.  Everyone re-Pins.  Everyone re-posts.  Everyone re-Tweets.  Google any one phrase and you’ll see a host of websites with that same message.  What stands out from the masses of repurposed content?  Content that’s relevant, that makes sense, that’s written for humans by humans as a means of conveying facts, knowledge, opinion, and interesting information.  And if you don’t have that?  Don’t post just because you have to keep your site fresh.

A good way of avoiding this type of content is to read over each piece and ask if you would send it to a stranger as a good representation of your website overall. If the answer is no, then don’t publish it! Readers would rather a blogger miss a few days worth of posts than read through half-baked content.  Post when you have something to say – it doesn’t have to be life-altering, but it should be valuable to your reader.

Have you ever skipped a few days of publishing content until you found something worth writing about? How did it affect your website?

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Cultivate Inbound Links by Diversifying your Audience

in Search Engine Optimization on October 4th, 2012 | No Comments »

An important factor in search engine optimization is cultivating in-bound links. Links that come to your site from a well-known, authoritative website increase the likelihood of search engines deciding that your site must also be authoritative.  This is especially true if the linking site uses a keyword for their anchor text that’s something you offer or something that you want to be known for – i.e. ‘great marketing techniques’ or ‘best sauna’.

There are various strategies for encouraging other sites to link to your website, and they all primarily involve offering them something to link to by way of content, but also giving them a reason to do so.

Many company blogs are well-written, frequently updated, factual and interesting, yet still don’t receive as many incoming links as, say, a less-well written or informative piece about social media. This may be related to the fact that there are just fewer sauna-builders or owners with well-kept blogs or a renowned social media presence than there are social media consultants, who live on the internet.

All is not lost however. The answer here is to appeal to a demographic which builds links. A corporate website that sells and builds saunas could write about working from home, for instance, and ask how people move from work-mode into evening-mode without the benefit of a commute. Finally, they can suggest that readers purchase a sauna with the money they save commuting! Many people who work from home make use of social media, or blogging, as a pseudo-office environment and might get involved in a discussion about after-work decompression techniques.

Something else to think about is language use and structure, especially if you want the media to pick up on your site. Would a reporter be able to link to your site to provide further evidence for their piece? This isn’t to say that you should know what a newspaper is about to publish on, but having a clear title and an obvious slant from the first paragraph, as well as accurate and researched facts should increase the likelihood of a piece being linked to – by anyone, not just the media.

The main factor to consider when trying to cultivate more inbound links is to ask what is in it for the people linking to you. One tactic is to run giveaways which require linking to the site, but consider that many people use their blogs in order to appear authoritative on a subject. Being well-read is one way of appearing authoritative, so make your content as helpful, or factual, as possible, and this will encourage people to link to your site in order to look better-educated themselves.

Have you had any success with building inbound links to improve search engine optimization? What is your preferred method of encouraging these relationships?

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Search Engine Optimization for Better Organic Rankings

in Search Engine Optimization on September 26th, 2012 | No Comments »

GreenAre you tired of paying companies for search engine optimization and continuing to find yourself on the third page of results? SEO is about more than throwing money at keywords (although buying your spot can be a part of a well-integrated optimization strategy).  There are plenty of ways to ensure a well-placed organic ranking with search engines and, just like a well-integrated strategy should, they involve good quality content, cultivating inbound links, and having an easily navigable site. At RoryMartin.com, we know how important SEO is to conversions and click-through-rates.  Here are a few things to remember when performing optimization on your site:

When it comes to content, make sure that your keywords are placed in the title of the piece or product page, and also in the headers. H1 tags are great indicators of what a page is about.  Search spiders often crawl these first, and curate pages accordingly.

Some companies go a little overboard in this, and fill their pages with any and all keywords – related or not. This may earn you a penalty from Google; however, if it does lead search engine spiders to your site, it won’t necessarily attract living, breathing human beings.  If you have ‘Toshiba Laptop’ in your title, and a potential customer finds that you only resell MacBooks, your conversions will drop.  Your clients will be very disappointed – and possibly vocally so.

Try to make your content sound as if it was written by humans for humans, and work the keywords in naturally. You can also add a keyword or two into the URL of the page, without it appearing in the title. This will increase the likelihood that you come up in search results for that keyword, without having to force it into the title of a piece.

If you have a large website, or a site with lots of content, such as a frequently updated blog, then your users will want to navigate around it with ease. Search engine spiders are the same. Have you checked your website recently to make sure that all of your links are working, that they all reach the appropriate page, and that they are all tagged or categorized correctly? This is something that should be done frequently, especially if you are constantly adding new content and/or products. Both users and spiders will become frustrated and give up if they can’t easily find what they’re looking for.  404′s, 403′s – they are not your friends.  Keep your links up-to-date.

We know that search engines rank sites according to their authority, which is why incoming links are so important. The more sites that link to your site using keyword-specific anchor text, the higher your site will rank as an authority on this text. Of course, generating links to your website takes a lot of work and relationship-building with other website owners or bloggers (along with producing the sort of content that others will want to link to in the first place).  This off-page SEO is one of the hardest parts of Search Engine Optimization.

If you follow white-hat SEO, your website should naturally rise through the rankings.  The added bonus: fellow website owners and bloggers are now aware of your site, and are more likely to promote it to their followers!

What’s your top tip when it comes to search engine optimization geared towards organic rankings?

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Solve Your Customers’ Problems Through Search Engine Optimization

in Search Engine Optimization on September 25th, 2012 | No Comments »

Search engine optimization is certainly one of the trickier beasts to handle on the internet, which is why we at RoryMartin.com work hard to help you improve your SEO, and implement search enginge optimization strategies which will result in increased customer conversions at your website.

How many times have you, frustratedly, typed a question into a search engine, rather than a search specific keyword? We’re not talking ‘Where are my keys?’ but more, ‘Why is my internet so slow?’ or ‘Why doesn’t this bike pump work with my tires?’ Many companies use their websites as a place to put the information which they want people to read, but only a few companies give a thought to what their customers might actually want to know.

People purchase products or hire services because want solutions to their problems. All good marketing creates an awareness of this problem in the potential customer’s life, and then offers the perfect solution – as far as they’re concerned. Most companies use this tactic in their advertising, but how can this be used for better search engine optimization?

Implementing this is a several stage process. You should already know the most popular search terms through which people arrive at your website, so it’s important to notice if any are of the ‘frustrated question’ type. Firstly, see if is this a question which your business was made to answer. If it is, then check which page this search leads to. Does this page have an explicit answer to this question? If it does, then congratulations! You can expect this person to have a positive view of your website, and your products or services. Hopefully, this will even lead to a conversion.

However, if the page doesn’t have an explicit answer to this question, when it could, then your site will achieve the opposite of the desired effect. The final stage in this implementation process is to either create new pages which directly answer the most common question searches, or to clearly add in the information which most people come to your site searching for.

What do you think of this as an SEO strategy? Have you already implemented something similar?

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How Much do Social Signals Improve Page Rank

in Search Engine Optimization on September 4th, 2012 | No Comments »

At RoryMartin.com we stress the importance of a fully-integrated social media strategy for your company’s branding. Social media improves customer relations, draws in potential new customers, and allows your company to discover where improvements can be made to your business, directly from your customers. Social media increases the trust that your current and potential clients have in your company, and increases the liklihood of positive and immediate referrals from customers to their friends and followers.

However, a recent article on the SEOmoz blog asks the question “Do Improved Social Signals Cause Improved Rankings?” which is clearly a contentious issue for many social media consultants!  The comments range from skepticism, to outrage, to full-on agreement.

The keyword in this question about social signals is ’cause’.  How do you determine the final result of social signals?

Many of you will already be saying to yourselves that you’ve seen your website, or certain pages, go up in page rankings after having a link tweeted by a few influential tweeters, but as the article says – correlation does not equal causation. It’s often true that after a week or so, once people have moved on to the next fresh and exciting piece of content and have stopped tweeting and retweeting your piece, that you see search engine rankings drop once again.

The Freshness Factor

Some social media experts attribute this to a ‘freshness factor’ – the idea that search engines prefer new(er) content. Some say that during the period in which a link is being retweeted, it will also be linked to from websites. This may even be due to people who have their tweets displayed on their website. If they link to you in a tweet, it will appear on their website – but only until their new tweets push yours off.

It’s a complicated piece, and a complicated argument to make! When we see a number of social signals, or see an influential social signal coming into a website, and then see the page rankings shoot up, we want to attribute one to the other – whether this is true or not.

There are a couple of important takeaways from this in-depth research on social signals.

The first is that regardless of how many influential people you can ask to share a link, most people will only share good quality content. It may even be that what causes both the shares and the improved page rank is the quality of the piece. Focus on creating top quality content and your piece will garner a wide range of social signals, and move up the page rankings.

The second takeaway is that whether or not Google follows Twitter or Facebook links and uses them to attribute better page rankings to sites, social signals are still important.  Having an integrated social media strategy means that more people will see your new piece sooner than not. This then leads to, not only social shares, but also links from websites – links which we know do affect SEO. The more people who view the piece, the more people are likely to create SEO-affecting links.

At RoryMartin.com we work to create integrated social media strategies for companies which involve top quality content that is infinitely shareable. What do you think of this research?

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7 Solid Tips to Boost Your SEO from RoryMartin.com

in Search Engine Optimization on August 23rd, 2012 | No Comments »

1. Know your starting statistics

When implementing any strategy, it pays to know where you’re starting from, so that you can easily see if rankings and conversions have improved at any point in your SEO journey. This document can be as simple as you like; even a handwritten notebook will let you immediately spot increases (and decreases) in statistics such as conversions and inbound links.

2. Create solid, good quality content

The perceived Holy Grail of content is to create something which goes viral, but as a long-term strategy it’s better to create solid, good quality content on a regular basis, than occasionally put something extraordinary out there, and bulk up your website with mediocre content in between. Like EdgeRank with Facebook, if you put out something less than great, people aren’t going to be that keen to share and promote it, so in between viral episodes, you’re more likely to lose followers and alienate your audience.

3. Keep an eye on what’s topical

What’s trending on Twitter? What are other people in your field talking about? That viral video, does it have any themes which you could work from? While we don’t suggest you hurry something just to piggyback on the current top trending topic, it’s a good idea to see what’s creating a buzz during the week, and see if anything which you do can relate to that. Stay mindful of your long-term plans and company branding though!

4. Cultivate relationships with other sites

This goes hand-in-hand with tip #3. If your link-builder is out there every day, sourcing websites for links, these bloggers and journalists and website owners are going to prefer to link to a site which is consistently putting out good content. Here is a fantastic piece on why many link-building strategies fail: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-link-building-strategies-fail

5. Check your road map

Once you implement a new idea, or build that relationship link with a site or person, check your statistics to see what the relationship does for you. Are you finding that your traffic is slowly but surely increasing, but you’re not ranking any higher? Find out what’s causing that, and fix it. Remember that the point of SEO isn’t only to boost your rankings, but also to increase conversions. How are these statistics looking?

6. Don’t hang out in bad neighborhoods

Search engines can easily pick up on linkfarms, and other such sites, and blacklist them. There is almost no security or surety in purchasing links from sites like these, as they could be disregarded by search engines, or even cast a negative light on the sites which they are linking too, as well. Stick to building connections and writing good quality content for yourself.

7. Make your actions clear

Once all of this traffic has arrived at your site, you want to convert visits into customers. Make sure that your site is easily navigable so that your newly interested audience can immediately do what you want them to do on the site. Your social media profiles need to be obvious too, so that these visitors can quickly connect with you, and share what a great job you’re doing of being you!

We at RoryMartin.com hope that these seven tips improve your SEO and rankings. If you’d like more advice contact our experts today for a free estimate.

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