Recently a number of our clients have voiced a similar concern. With all the talk of the changing face of SEO, how do we adapt? How do we get those high quality, natural links that will determine if we thrive or die in a future where quality matters more than ever? It’s a challenge not all businesses are equipped to handle, but here’s one dead simple way you can embrace the changes and benefit.

Be Honest – Is Your Business Worth Talking About?

In the last six months, did your business create anything that caused people to turn their heads and take notice? I mean a product, a piece of content, a video series, a service, or anything else at all? If you can’t honestly answer yes, then why would anybody want to link to you? Duke Cannon is a perfect (but crass) example of a company that gets this, and boy are they getting links for it. Forgive me for getting so basic, but we have to get this out of the way. Natural links go to businesses that are making people talk. Do that.

Ok, that’s out of the way.

Go Find The People Talking About You

Assuming you create some kind of buzz with your products or content, you’ll come across people talking about you. If you’re big, invest in social media monitoring like Trackur to see what they’re saying and where they’re saying it. If you’re just getting going, set up a few Google Alerts around your brand name and keywords. Stay on top of what they’re saying because you might want to reach out to one of them (I’ll give you a good example of how to do this in a minute). And also, you should be where they are. If people talk about you on Twitter, you need to be there too.

Contact Those People

When you come across that glowing review of your new product, promptly contact the author. Tell them you’re grateful they wrote the review, and be generous with your praise. They may have even linked to you in their review, but if not, find a nice way to ask them to. They already love what you do, so they’ll probably support you if you tell them how much a link would help you.

How To Get More High Quality, Natural Links is a post by SEO expert Nathan Blair. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Credit to Wisconsin Historical Images

The hairy month of Movember is upon us once again. Continuing the tradition started last year, we manly men of SEO.com have decided to take up the cause by lifting not a blade to our faces over the entire month of November.

There is indeed a worthy cause behind all the fine moustachery that you’ll find at SEO.com over the next month. From the Movember United States website:

The funds raised in the US support prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men. The funds raised are directed to programs run directly by Movember and our men’s health partners, the Prostate Cancer Foundation and LIVESTRONG, the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Together, the three channels work together to ensure that Movember funds are supporting a broad range of innovative, world-class programs in line with our strategic goals in the areas of awareness and education, survivorship and research.

A worthy cause, no doubt.

At signup, each participant receives his (or her) own Mo Space page that serves as a base for requesting and tracking money donations. You can also upload a photo of your neatly groomed mug, post updates, and promote the cause over your social network of choice.

And so, Mo Bros and *Mo Sistas within the sound of my voice, take up the cause and join our Movember team. Or start a team of your own. Or participate as an individual – it really doesn’t matter how you participate, just that you get some hair on that upper lip. At the end of the month, show us your face-grown and hand-brushed mustaches, and be proud.

*Mo Sistas are not expected to grow a mustache (but nobody’s judging). However, they are welcome to support their Mo Bros by donating or promoting.

Movember is for Moustachery is a post by SEO expert Nathan Blair. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

SEO might seem cute and fuzzy on the outside, but when you step into this world of bone-chilling horror, you’ll find the stuff monsters and nightmares are made of.

Buckle up – it’s time for a ride on the terror express.

The Invisible Text

Jim had heard stories of hidden text, but he always dismissed them as mere tales meant to scare little children and dogs. One day in the computer lab at school, Tony motioned for Jim to come over.

“My dad told me that in the old days, people used to make text the same color as the background. They didn’t think they were hurting anybody. Turns out, the bot knew about it.”

“The… BOT …knew?” Jim asked, scared stiff.

“That’s right. But my dad told me that it still happens sometimes. He gave me a URL, and I’m going to see if it’s really as bad as they say.” Jim got up to run, but Tony grabbed his sweater and pulled him back. In what seemed like a whirlwind, Tony typed in the URL, highlighted the big empty space at the bottom of the page, and then….

—–

The screams had faded by the time the principle arrived. But the frozen expressions of terror would remain imprinted in his memory for the remaining years of his life.

The Keyword Tag

It was Anne’s first day on the job at GrayishBlack SEO Company. Despite the pleadings of her friends and family, she took the job, knowing what horrors might lay ahead.

“We don’t waste time around here,” her director shouted from his office. “I need you to get on that site optimization double ASAP. Oh, and I don’t want to scare you on your first day, but the site was built in 1997.”

“Come again?” Anne asked as she turned toward the director, her eyelids opening three times as wide as usual.

She nervously turned on her computer, taking as much time as possible. The checklist on her desk glared at her, for she knew what she’d find as the first to-do. She was assigned to check the dreaded meta keyword tag her loved ones had warned her about. Hoping they were wrong, she viewed the source code.

—–

During police questioning, the director of SEO was visibly shaken. “She just kept screaming and screaming. Over and over, she just kept screaming, ‘Five hundred meta keyword variations! Five hundred meta keyword variations!’”

Farmer Stone

Legend has it, that old and decayed Victorian mansion at the end of Dark Oak Street used to belong to a man they called “Farmer Stone.” Tales of this mysterious old hermit haunted the town for at least 30 years before three foolishly curious boys went exploring one October night.

Dark Oak Street wound for two miles before it ended at Farmer Stone’s place. A 10-foot high, rusted gate stood at the entrance to the grounds. The mansion itself was always dark, except on this night. Our young boys would in later years swear they saw a faint greenish light coming out of the bedroom window. Of course, they would make these claims from their padded rooms in the local insane asylum.

There were no farm animals on Farmer Stone’s property, interestingly enough to the boys. According to legend, they crept slowly up to the mansion, dried leaves crackling underfoot. They called inside but received no answer. The front door creaked loudly and the green light became brighter. Trembling with fear, only each other’s taunts kept them moving forward.

What happened next has struck fear in the heart of even the most hardened soul who has heard this tale. The origin of Farmer Stone’s name became horrifyingly apparent to all three boys as they looked into his bedroom. There was the old man, hunched over in his chair, typing furiously on a computer. The boys screamed.

—–

The final pieces of this puzzle can only be found by visiting the asylum where these boys, now old men, are kept in holding. All three of them, with mind-numbing fury, scribble out two words on their cell walls. Over and over again, they write: LINK FARM. LINK FARM. LINK FARM. LINK FARM. LINK FARM.

The Call

Alvin was a valuable asset to the company. His boss told him the 12-hour days were excessive, but Alvin knew he had the corporate ladder to climb. When his SEO company got that big, coveted contract with the hardest charging company in the city, Alvin was the natural choice to take the reins.

“Now Alvin, I know you like to be thorough on your calls, but I’m just warning you that these guys will keep you on the phone all day if you let them.” The boss knew a little something about the client, so he offered this advice for Alvin’s own good.

“Don’t you worry,” Alvin assured his boss. “I’m not scared of an hour long phone call. You just leave these guys to me.” With those words, and the clock striking 4 O’clock, he picked up the phone and dialed the number.

—–

Alvin’s right hand man was slow getting into the office on the day after a holiday. The receptionist wasn’t there yet, so he started the long walk back to his oversized cubicle.

“Sweet mother of the kraken,” he gasped as he looked down the open space toward Alvin’s desk. There lay the man, telephone cord wrapped around his neck.

—–

After the ambulance was gone, Ned looked at Alvin’s phone records, curious to know what could have prompted this awful event. Time of last call: 15 hours.

Spiders

Anthony never intended it to go this far. He had 10 years of experience in SEO, so industry jargon flowed out of his mouth freely like cool spring water out of an artesian well. Nobody knew why he liked to pound the newbies with jargon until they were so frustrated they couldn’t do their work. It was just his thing, and he wasn’t going to change.

Every employee at SearchMyEngine.com knew it was bad news when Sam got hired. He was one of those guys that became startled at anything. You couldn’t walk up behind the guy without him jumping with fear. Anthony saw a victim and smiled a black-toothed grin.

“Hey Sam! You need to optimalize that hypertext preprocessor I gave you for indexability so the spiders can start crawling the http destination accessibility protocol!”

“S-s-spiders?” Sam tremblingly responded.

“Yeah,” Anthony shot back. “If you don’t fix that site for the search spiders, something bad will happen. Really bad.” Anthony walked away smiling. He knew he really nailed that one.

The rest of the week, Sam worked in a cold sweat. Friday arrived, and he began to think he would escape his first week without any sign of spiders or other crawling insects. From a distance, Anthony watched in eager anticipation as Sam turned on his computer. Black screen to blue. Blue screen to Windows login screen. Login screen to……..black widow desktop wallpaper. A piercing scream filled the office.

—–

Anthony never intended to cause Sam to go into cardiogenic shock. Yet as he stood there above Sam’s helpless body, waiting for the paramedics to arrive, he felt that biting sting of regret. Somewhere behind him, an employee’s face went pale.

“Are those … black widows crawling out of Sam’s ears?”

The Sandbox

Timmy’s dad came home with fury in his eyes. “Those sons o’ b****es at Stoogle banned my site! They sent me to the sandbox!”

“What’s the sandbox?” Timmy innocently inquired.

“It’s a bad, bad place where hobgoblins and witches live. They’ll suck your site in and feast on its bones if you’re not careful!” Timmy walked upstairs to his room, visions of haunted sandboxes swimming in his head.

The next day at school, Timmy’s teacher announced that in an effort to get to know more local businesses, they were taking a field trip to Stoogle headquarters. Timmy raised his hand.

“What about the hobgoblins and witches that live in the sandbox?”

Timmy’s teacher grew impatient. “There’s no such thing as the sandbox. It’s an old wives tale, and it’s never been proven to exist. You’re going to Stoogle, and you’re going to like it!”

Stoogle headquarters was a gigantic place, constructed in the old Romanian architectural style of Dracula’s castle. Timmy carried his red bouncy ball, as always. The tour began, and the children followed their teacher down long, cold hallways. Completely by accident, Timmy’s ball fell from his hand, rolling down a hallway to the right as the field trip turned to the left.

“I need that ball,” Timmy told himself. He turned right, breaking into a run. The ball rolled for a half mile before coming to a halt in front of a huge black door. Timmy put his ear up to the door and heard what could only be described as the groanings of the damned.

Startled at the sound, Timmy backed away and got a better view of the door. Inscribed in blood were the words “BANISHED TO THIS HALL BE THE SITES OF THOSE ACCURSED SPAMMERS, DECEIVERS, LIARS, AND REDIRECTERS”

Timmy looked at his feet and saw sand.

The Articles

This was the last straw. SEO director Gray hired outsourced copywriters to save time, but they had been causing him nothing but problems since day one. He needed a better way to generate content, and fast.

Gray had just hired a new assistant director, Boynton, who was failing miserably. Boynton got wind of this outsourcing fiasco and knew he could redeem himself in Gray’s eyes.

“So, I think I have way to really knock our content generation out of the park.”

“Is that right?” Gray doubtfully said.

“I’ve just been made aware of a piece of content software that will generate 5,000 unique articles from one original. The technology is cutting edge. It practically thinks for itself.” Boynton got Gray’s approval and purchased the software.

—–

Monday morning arrived and Gray parked his Benz in the director’s space. As he came closer to the front door, he thought he heard what sounded like a war movie coming from the SEO floor. A split second later, Boynton came crashing through the front window, shards of glass flying in all directions.“The content generator is self aware! It’s destroying everything in the office!”

Gray ran inside and vomited. Content Generator was chewing on SEO employees. He was heaving computers through windows. All the while, article variations flew out of his printer belly. “Two mmmmillion, nine hundred thousand the thrrrrreee!” Content Generator growled. It was chaos. Pure chaos.

—–

Two weeks later, after the smoke had cleared the the rubble cleaned up, Gray and Boynton sat down at their laptops. Boynton broke the silence.

“Well, I guess the only question now is where are we going to find two-million-three-hundred-thousand directories to submit all this content to?”

Gray lifted his arm and smacked Boynton in the back of the head.

7 Halloween SEO Stories (To Read In The Dark) is a post by SEO expert Nathan Blair. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Eliminate everything on your website that doesn’t contribute to the primary objective.

Every website has one major objective. It could be a purchase, download, contact form submission, or any number of actions. It also has several other less important but necessary objectives; actions that only indirectly result in a sale. A successful website is one where every secondary objective is held accountable to the more important primary goal.

Water Fountains

Let’s say we have a website that sells water fountains. The first thing we would do is set up a goal in Google Analytics that tracks fountain sales. That’s our primary objective. But we also have a page on our site that offers advice on interior decorating with water features. We have another page on the art of water placement in Feng Shui. Finally, we have a page where people can sign up for our monthly newsletter. We have created these pages so people can learn more before they buy a fountain.

But just because the page is there doesn’t mean it’s doing its job.

What we need to do is set up additional goals in analytics that track what happens on these pages. Ideally, people will purchase fountains more often after browsing our informational resources. If lots of people are heading to the purchasing areas after reading, we may be doing a good job. We’d also like to see purchases increase as newsletter subscriptions increase. If that happens, our newsletter might be OK. In our analytics software, we want to see exactly where people go after they hit a given page. That data can be used to determine if our information and newsletter are doing a good job of enticing people to buy.

The important thing here is that secondary objectives can provide small wins on the way to the big win. They can also show losses and force us to change things around. We want to know how every part of our site is behaving so we can keep the good stuff and get rid of the bad. We’ll need to set up tests to determine winners. We want to embark on a journey where our site keeps getting better and better at driving people down the conversion funnel to the purchase.

Recap

To recap, tracking only one major goal (such as purchases) leaves us blind to everything else happening on our site. We have to be aware of how everything is performing so that we make our website an efficient sales or lead producing machine. The way to do that is by setting up goals in our analytics software and tracking how efficiently our pages are guiding people to the primary objective.

Engagement can be a fuzzy term in search marketing, but it’s exactly what we want. A user who converts in our secondary areas is engaged, and engaged users are more likely to buy.

Simplify. Track Goals. Sell More Stuff. is a post by SEO expert Nathan Blair. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

A few days ago, a client expressed a doubt that’s probably all too common. He said, “You guys recommend that I get more involved in social media, but I’m in the (insert boring industry here) industry. What is there to say about the (insert boring industry here) industry?”

Is social media stardom reserved only for the world’s most exciting things like, say, gilded yak shaving?

I think not. Just a few days ago, I watched the people in this office go nuts over a social media campaign about body wash. People around the world have been obsessed with campaigns about blenders, hamburgers, and beef jerky. There are not a lot of inherently exciting things about those products, but they were able to engage users like few things can. If they can do it, you can do it in your boring industry. Here are two things to remember:

1. It’s not about the product

Most consumer products and services are boring, which is why good social media marketing is about emotion and branding instead of the product. Your aim should be to make people laugh, shake their head in disbelief, do a double-take, etc. If you can’t do that with an explanation of your boring product, then it’s time to get creative.

Think about this – if everybody else in your industry is just sitting in front of a webcam, giving dry guarantees about how their product is the best and posting it on YouTube, then you are in a good position to stand out.

2. It’s about strengthening your brand

The goal of all things social is to get people to spend money at your store. When your brand speaks to people at an emotional level, it makes them actually want to spend money at your store. To that end, simply get social and tell people in a creative way why your brand is better than everyone else’s in your industry. At first, they might crack a smile and not think much of it. Gradually, they’ll warm up to the idea and begin to associate your brand with what they want. Now you’re building brand equity. If your industry is boring, then the bar is low and it shouldn’t be too hard to make your brand shine.

So if it’s not really about the boring product, but rather about getting your brand into people’s heads, then that explains why body wash can be so successful at social media. And if the personal hygiene products industry can do it, then the (insert boring industry here) industry can do it. Yes, you’ll need some creative people on your team to make it happen, but it has been done before and you can do it again.

Now get out there and make your boring product the next Internet sensation.

So Your Industry Is Boring – Don’t Let That Keep You Out of Social Media is a post by SEO expert Nathan Blair. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Continuously improving your Web presence to increase ROI should be the goal, right? OK, but how do you get your potential customers to talk to you so you know what to improve? If you are willing to dig into a little data, you can find out how people interact with your site and where the problems are that need attention. Here are a few pieces of Google Analytics data that you can use to interpret what your visitors are trying to tell you.

Bounce Rate

With a high bounce rate, the visitor is saying, “This site isn’t relevant to me – I’m outta here.” The bounce rate number is just the percentage of single page visits, meaning that all those people left your site without looking past the page they landed on. It’s possible that this means your landing page just isn’t interesting. More likely, it means the people landing on your site were led to believe they would find something different when they clicked on your paid advertisement or organic search listing. If you are getting a high bounce rate, look at what your ads are promising. Make sure your landing page fulfills the promise in the ad.

New vs. Returning Visitors

A high number of returning visitors says, “Your site is engaging enough that I think I’ll come back for more.” New visitors are a good indicator that more people are finding your site, but getting them to return is the part that takes work. Ask yourself what you are putting out there that will bring people back again and again. A really good blog is one great way to do this.

Time on Site

A higher time on site tells you your site keeps visitors from leaving. This could mean you offer plenty of things to explore. But be careful. When I logged into analytics on one of my sites this morning, I found most people were staying for three minutes or so. Then there was this one visit that lasted for three hours. I’m guessing that somebody left their browser open on my site while they left the house for a while. So I obviously didn’t give that visit much attention.

Pages Per Visit

This says, “The first point of contact was interesting enough to make me want to look around.” If you have high average page views, you have done a good job of sending the right people to the site and presenting the information in an interesting way. It might also mean you have created a page structure conducive to further exploration.

Traffic Sources

This is very valuable because it shows you the ways customers come to your site. If they are all coming from Google, then your search engine optimization campaign is working. If you see a huge influx of website traffic from a partner site, you could look into ways to increase your visibility on that partner site.

Content

This is where your visitors tell you which content they like best. You are also able to see how they interact with their favorite content by looking at bounce rate, how many of them left the site from that page, etc. If you notice a certain topic always trends to the top, it should probably be a main focus of your content.

The best companies are those that listen to the customer. Google Analytics provides all this wonderful data to help companies do just that. We just have to be willing to dig in a little.

Image courtesy of BigTallGuy

Your Website Visitors Are Talking to You is a post by SEO expert Nathan Blair. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Many companies choose to complement their search marketing campaign with traditional offline methods. For those who use direct mail, radio, TV, or magazines to drive website traffic, care must be taken to ensure the transition from offline to online be as seamless as possible.

If you have ever received a distinct marketing piece that drove you to a webpage where the experience was different, you know why the transition matters. Tight online/offline integration tells the visitor they are at the right place, lends credibility to the offer, and encourages further clicks down the purchasing funnel.

The URL

The first and most obvious thing to remember is the URL on the marketing piece. Since it’s a given to have it present, I’ll just remind you to make sure it’s correct. A former colleague of mine almost lost her job when a very crucial marketing campaign she headed was found to have a URL without an important slash. Most people will probably know what you meant, but don’t take that chance.

Branding Consistency

You have taken a lot of care to make the offline brand visuals just right, so make sure the experience continues to the webpage as exactly as possible. The experience entails everything from color hues and fonts to the offer wording.  Whether you promote online only discounts with your marketing pieces or any other kind of lead-in, take care to implement both sides of the campaign at the same time and with consistency. Details that don’t seem like a big deal to you will reassure a prospect that they are looking at the offer you intended for them to see.

Landing Pages

Since marketing campaigns change frequently, destination webpages should too. Unique landing pages are perfect for marketing campaigns where the aesthetic doesn’t match the company website. Landing pages can be created from scratch specifically to suit the purpose of the campaign, and can be modified as often as you change your marketing message. Keep in mind that your landing page is not the end-all of your Web presence; you want prospects to be familiar with your actual website, so keep the branding of your landing pages generally consistent with your main website.

The Other Half

Once your prospects have crossed that chasm from offline to online, you’ve got a whole new set of challenges to ensure consistency within your website down to the point of purchase. But that’s a topic for another day.

Anytime you ask a prospect to spend money, trust and confidence in your company is required. If your prospect has taken the time to follow a marketing piece to your website or landing page, it’s your job to reduce as much noise as possible to get them to buy. You can do that by creating a consistent branding experience between the offline and online parts of your marketing campaigns. If you reassure your prospects that you’ll deliver the same quality experience every time, no matter the medium, they will come back again and again.

Creating a Consistent Offline to Online Branding Experience is a post by SEO expert Nathan Blair. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

A big part of marketing is putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. Business owners should likewise take a step back occasionally and look at their website from the customer’s perspective. Let’s take a look at the home pages of two websites so you will see exactly what I’m talking about.

As you look at these sites, act like you are the customer and you have no ties to either one. You go looking to buy Widget X online and you find this website listed first:

Exhibit A

How user friendly is this site?  In other words, how easy is it for a customer to look at this website and know exactly what they are supposed to do in a few seconds time?

Now, you return to the search results and you find this website:

Exhibit B

What you see above is a clean, orderly interface. You know exactly what they sell, and they make it easy to buy. The design is excellent, and the checkout process is simple.  I actually went through the process of buying a shirt on this site, and I was done after a few easy steps.

Why you should care

Sometimes website owners get so used to their website that it becomes hard to see past the usability flaws. Before they know it, the site starts looking like Exhibit A when it should look as good as Exhibit B. Hopefully you don’t have a site like the first one up above, but I’m willing to bet yours could still use some improvement. Here are a few areas where your site might be suffering and what you can do about it.

Too much text distracts from the call to action

Don’t get caught in the trap of cramming too much text onto your homepage. Unfortunately, if you try to give readers all the information at once, you risk boring or confusing them. That leads to high bounce rates and less conversions. Bounce rate refers to how many site visitors leave your site from the same page they came from, without exploring any other pages. Obviously, you want to keep your bounce rate as low as possible.

How to do it right

All you need on the homepage is what leads a customer to buy now. If you want them to buy a t-shirt, put up a big picture of a t-shirt. Put the price right underneath it. Then either make it clickable, or put a big bold button to the right of it that says something like “buy now”. If you don’t sell t-shirts, apply this advice to your product. Simplicity will work anywhere.

Make your content to the point

When you have to include text on the homepage, it must be clear and to the point. Consider the what, why, when, where, and how, and answer it as concisely as possible. Test out your site content by getting somebody else to read it. If they get it the first time, and it’s perfectly clear (avoid industry jargon), you’ve got something to go with. Also, don’t forget the navigational text should be simple, too. Avoid having a top menu, left sidebar menu, right sidebar menu, mini menu, bottom menu, etc. Just put it up top or on the left side and be done with it.

Color and size matter

Pick the area on the page where you want to direct the most eyeballs and make it stand out. If it is a “Sign Up” or “Buy Now” button, color it in stark contrast to the background so it’s easy to see. Make your main call to action button larger than your intuition tells you, and put it in a prominent and clean area of the homepage. You have unlimited options, but the concept of bold and obvious remains.

You might need a redesign

Most of you would agree that the red and blue thing at the top of this post needs a website redesign. The hard part is acknowledging that your site needs one too. Moving buttons around, changing colors, and cutting out text is enough for a lot of websites, but some are too far gone. If you’re there, start from scratch with a designer you trust. Just make sure that your designer knows how to design a site that converts into sales.

Conversion is an essential part of search engine marketing because it deals with what happens after the customer has clicked on your search engine listing. Make sure you are balancing your resources between search results and conversion, because nobody will purchase your amazing product if they can’t find it on your site.

*Exhibit B is the totally rad Ugmonk.com. Buy one of their shirts.

Convert More Leads With a Cleaner Website is a post by SEO expert Nathan Blair. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Many businesses don’t think SEO is difficult, and they are right. It’s not rocket science, but it does require applied strategy, testing, and a lot of patience. Faced with the choice of going all out SEO (in or out of house), or putting it into the hands of a few part-timers to cut costs, some choose the latter. They believe the knowledge to rank a website is now mainstream enough that anybody can do it. A couple of interns would have no problem fixing title tags on a website, but unfortunately for that company, search engine marketing has advanced beyond title and description tags.

It is great news that many companies are seeing value in SEO and SEM. It makes it easier for companies like SEO.com to persuade people to let us do what works. But the basic nature of some SEO services has led some to question whether or not the investment is worth it. It is tempting to view SEO as simply a task that once achieved by a first page ranking can be eliminated or at least outsourced for cheap.

So why is this misguided thinking?

SEO has become something much bigger than most people realize. This is why some use the term ‘SEM’ (search engine marketing), or ‘online marketing’, instead of SEO. SEO plays a very important part in what we do, but when you take into account our people who run PPC campaigns for clients, optimize site layouts for better conversion rates, re-design websites for better usability, and whatever else we do, you have something resembling a full-service web marketing firm.

More than building a link or two

Consider the advantage that comes with expertise. For example,did you read Greg Shuey’s post about building links from relevant sites? If you didn’t know any better, you might think all link building was created equal. Turns out, there is a direct correlation between link building and on-page site structure. Go back and read up to find out more.

Or how about Rick Hardman’s discussion about Twitter? As social media continues to evolve, will you have anyone to consult with about its direction? Chances are, what you know about social media’s strategic relation to SEO is already a bit dated. You could study up, but you’ve got a business to run.

Maybe you missed David Malmborg’s post on why you shouldn’t send PPC traffic to your home page. Would you have continued to send all your hot leads to a poorly laid out page if you didn’t know that it was costing you money? Maybe, maybe not. But unless you had somebody on staff that had tested a landing page versus a home page for PPC traffic, you might never even think of something like that.

Pardon me for being a bit sales-pitchy there, but when you understand what SEO/SEM entails, it becomes clear that interns won’t cut it. Because while the business world got web savvy, online marketers were moving ahead. Some simple SEO tasks became commoditized, but web strategy became more complicated as social media, video, etc., gained acceptance. In sum, it takes more now than it ever has before to get the results you want. You could do some link building and content creation yourself, but your resources would be better spent on strategic search engine marketing.

SEO Grows Up, Now More Than Just Links and Tags is a post by SEO expert Nathan Blair. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

We, in the SEO business, usually tell our clients that a good website is made up of two things: on-page optimization and off-page optimization. On-page refers to your titles, descriptions, and so on. Off-page refers to how many links point to you, engagement in social media, and so forth. We can get your site some awesome results by working in these two areas. But there is another area that depends more upon you. It is an area that will make the work we do 100 times more effective.

We count on you to establish a magnetic brand and deliver killer content.

My purpose is to help you understand how a site with great branding will kill the competition every time. I am only partly referring to your logo by itself – the logo is an important component of your brand but is not everything. Your brand is defined by how well you can engage a viewer. It is what they remember about your site that keeps them coming back for more. It’s the experience you offer your viewers.

Think about three websites that really resonate with you. Why do you like them so much? Why do you keep going back? What have they ever done for you? I am willing to bet that your favorite sites really take some time writing content you enjoy. They spend hours on the layout of the site so you will have an easier time finding what you are looking for. They almost always have employed a designer who can create pretty things. Lots of attention is paid to what the customer expects, and not so much what the company’s chief thinks is best.

Now think about your site. What have you consciously done to make viewers remember you? What is that one thing viewers just rave about that keeps them coming back? Is it your unparalleled return policy? Is it your wicked awesome graphics? Is it your uncanny humor? Don’t forget that it’s not what YOU think is your site’s best quality. It’s what customers say is the best quality. What you think doesn’t matter much.

Here’s an easier way to break it down in your mind. Ask yourself these four classic branding questions, and be honest:

1.  Does my brand excel at delivering benefits my customers truly desire?

• You first have to know what your customers truly desire.

2.  Is my brand relevant?

• You must understand current trends to see how you stack up.

3.  Is my brand consistent?

• Your brand experience should never fail deliver on its promises.

4.  Do I understand what my brand means to my customers?

• This is so important! If you don’t understand this, you are the chicken, and you have no head.

I mentioned earlier that a site with a great brand will do better than its competitors.  I hope it is now easy to see why. The branded site not only looks better, it also understands you. It gives you something exciting to read, then allows you to interact and share. It delivers great customers service and doesn’t annoy with advertisements for Viagra. Why? Because it’s all about bringing you back again.

Now is the time for a serious introspective examination into your branding strategy. We understand that you want to get to the top in the search engines. We’ll work our rear ends off to get you there. But you want a great site. You don’t just want the number one position; you want to kill number two.  With our SEO skills and your commitment to a customer-oriented branding strategy, together we will be unstoppable.

Brand Your Competitors Into Irrelevance is a post by SEO expert Nathan Blair. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.