One the largest hurdles in getting a website to rank well and make money for a client, can be the client themselves. It is hard to watch a well-meaning client get in their own way and not know it. For that reason I am writing this post to help them understand what they can do (and not do) to make sure that they get the most out of their money when they hire an seo firm.

Choosing the right keywords

One of the most common mistakes that I see clients make when working with an seo company, or doing their own search engine optimization, is picking the wrong keywords. It is easy to become blinded by massive projected traffic numbers instead of focusing on the real number that matters – sales.

I have seen this happen repeatedly. Let me set this up for you. Here is a mock phone conversation after the SEO company has done some keyword research and recommended the appropriate keywords to the client:

Client:  “I would like to target keywords x,y,z.”
SEO Company:  “While the research does show that those will bring traffic, I am not sure those are the right keywords to target for sales.”
Client:  “I know my industry and those are the keywords I need to show up for.”
SEO Company:  “Okay.”

…After months of hard work that has resulted in top rankings for the client’s given keywords:

Client:  “I am not seeing a good enough return on my investment with you to justify continuing. My sales have not increased significantly and it certainly is not enough to cover my contract with you, let alone make money. You have been working on this for several months now and I am not seeing how search engine optimization has helped me at all.”
SEO Company:  “Well, we have gotten the top rankings for the keywords you asked for and your traffic has increased, but perhaps we should look at now optimizing for the other keywords that we recommended.”
Client:  “No, I don’t think that will help.”

The mistake clients make with keywords is demanding that the SEO marketing company target their efforts on broad keywords that will not translate into sales. A better strategy is to start with a list of longer tail keywords to target. These keywords are the ones that will have a much higher conversion rate and they almost always are easier to rank for. You are much more likely to see a positive ROI by using this strategy.

Not making the Recommended Changes To Their Site

There will always need to be changes made to a site for optimization purposes. One of the ways that a client gets in their own way is in their refusal or slow implementation of those changes. It is important that once some recommendations have been made, the changes are made as soon as possible. The longer it takes to make the changes the slower the rankings will come and the longer it will be to see a return on the investment.

Resist Adding Content

In order to get rankings for certain keywords it is necessary to have content that revolves around the keywords that you are trying to rank for. Often there will be recommendations to add or alter content to the site. If content is recommended as part of an SEO campaign, it is important to add it. if some alterations are recommended, then make those. If you are concerned with the recommendation, discuss it and come to some compromise that will work for you and the SEO firm, but do not resist the change all together.

Communication

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate! One of the most frustrating things for an Internet marketing company is to have a client’s campaign slowed or stopped due to a lack of response from a client. Understand that if you are not answering their emails and phone calls, then they are likely at a standstill on your SEO campaign.

On the other hand, some clients are a little too eager to communicate. As a client, you should feel comfortable to call or email them whenever you need to. But remember they only have a certain amount of time each day to do the work, and the more hours they spend on the phone with you or replying to your emails, the less time they will have to get the work done.

Micromanaging

It is important to understand the strategy that your SEO company is using, but if you are a client that must approve every little move, then you are getting in the way. Remember that they are the experts and they have done this more than once.

By micromanaging you may cause delays because they are waiting for your approval. You have a business to run. Do your due diligence before hiring any Internet marketing company and then trust that the company you have hired knows what they are doing and can get you the results that you are seeking. Discuss with them what kinds of things you want to approve and then let them do their job.

I saw a post on twitter the other day that essentially said, “Anyone can do SEO, but most do not”

Though I understood what the intent of the comment was (meaning people just never get around to doing the work) it  hit me like a ton of bricks. In the past, I might have wholeheartedly agreed with that statement, but I do not agree with it now.

That would be the same as saying “anyone can repair their own car, but most do not.” The reality is, physically someone may well be capable of doing it (just like they could in any profession), but the key ingredient is the knowledge. Without the know-how, trying to repair your own car will only get you a car that is more broken than when you started. The same could be said for the website rankings of someone who tried to implement DIY (do-it-yourself) SEO without sound SEO knowledge.

I have spent a lot of time learning how to do search engine optimization and then practiced it by implementing it on my own projects as well as that of the clients I have worked with. While to me much of it seems simple enough, I recognize that it is that way because of the years I have spent learning it. Continual learning is essential in this industry because things change so often and so frequently. Many principles of search engine optimization that I learned when I started are no longer best practices.

At one point I worked as a coach teaching people how to build their own Internet business. From that experience, after coaching thousands of clients, I learned there is some truth to the statement that “…most do not.”  Lack of time and dedication is always the culprit in failed DIY SEO.

That is not to say that everyone should rush out and get an SEO proposal from an SEO firm. DIY SEO can be the best solution for some cases. The question, is it the right choice for you? I will let you make that call, but here are some factors that I would consider when making that decision.

1.    How comfortable are you with your SEO knowledge? Have you ever done SEO successfully? Do you feel confident in your ability to get rankings?

2.    How tough is your competition? Even the best SEO minds recruit help to get all of the work done to get top rankings in those extremely competitive markets. If your competition is fierce, how many resources do you have to help you get everything done?

3.    How much time do you have? As much as business owners want to save money so they can make more money, many of them spread themselves too thin. SEO takes a lot of consistent time and attention. Very few business owners can really do that.

4.    Is it cost effective for you? Even when a business owner is comfortable with search engine optimization and their ability to get high rankings, it does not always make sense from a money standpoint. Each case is different and a business owner should do the math to make sure that the time they will spend doing SEO is the best financial use of their time.

5.    Have you received an SEO proposal before? Every case is different and some SEO companies will provide a customized proposal based on each circumstance. Simply put, do not assume because you know how much someone else is paying a company to do their SEO, that your proposal will be the same. Get the numbers to help you make your decision based on facts, not fiction.

There is a lot of debate about what the best links are, how to get links, what links are not worth the effort and much more. Knowing what to believe and what not to believe can be a bit overwhelming and very confusing. If you want to know for sure, you should test the different link aspects yourself and determine what aspects are the most important. However, that can take a lot of time. A quicker solution is to look at leading seo companies and experts for the best advice. Pay attention to who gets the most links from others in the industry as you study through seo blogs and forums.

There are several factors that influence the value of a link.

1- Is It Internal or External? – It is crucial that your internal link structure is done correctly, but external links are more valuable because they verify what you have already said the page was about by the anchor text you used to link to the different pages.

2- Follow or No Follow? – There is no question that a followed link is more valuable, but that does not mean that a no followed link is not valuable. Remember, not all links are for ranking, but for sales and traffic as well.  If a link will not help you in the rankings, but will bring in valuable traffic and possibly lead to a sale, then that link should also be obtained.

3- Quality or Quantity? – This may seem obvious to most, but its quality, right? Well, if that is the case, why do so many SEO experts look at the quantity of links that the competition has? Truth is it is a combination of both. A link is a link and anytime you can get a link to your site you should. How much effort should be expended to get a link will depend on the quality of the link. No one should be spending a lot of time getting low quality links, but many of them take next to no effort.

4- .edu’s & .gov’s or .com’s – This question comes back to quality aspect. Generally speaking, .edu and .gov links are considered higher quality. Anyone who has attempted to get a link on a domain with this extension knows why they are higher quality. They are tougher to get. Because they are much harder to get, the links are trusted more by search engines and human visitors.

5- Anchor Text – Any careful link campaign will utilize the right keywords for the anchor text and link it to the url it is mapped to from the keyword research. However, this is an area where a lot of Internet marketers can get sloppy and lazy. Take the time to make sure (and then double check) that you are using the right keywords and variations of those keywords to link to the appropriate pages. Using variations of the targeted keyword in the link campaign will help those links look a lot more natural to both the search engines and the human visitors.

6- Page Rank (Authority) - There is no question that a single link from a site with a higher page rank (no, we are not getting into the page rank is dead discussion in this post) will help more than a link from 100 sites with no page rank. However, again there is a balance. Balance is natural and all links should be sought after if the price in time to acquire the link is right.

7- Deep Links or Home Page – There are numerous places where you can put a link to your site where they only allow you to link to the home page, so link to the deep pages whenever you can. If linking to a deep page is an option in a particular link strategy, then you should do it – every time! Save the home page links for those areas where you are forced to do so.

8- Link Diversity – This is perhaps the largest area where link building campaigns go wrong. Too many people get stuck in one or two tactics to build links and they do not build out diversity. If you want some good rankings and you want them to stick, then you need to make sure that you are utilizing many different link building strategies and getting links coming from a lot of different sources.

In the long run the best link building strategy is exactly what Google would suggest. That is to build content, resources and tools, such as this large list of chrome extensions that people will want to naturally link to. This takes a lot more time and effort than most all other link building strategies, but in the end, these are some of the best links you can get. While doing this, you will also build credibility with your target audience; you will build your brand as an industry authority; you will receive more links from various blogs and websites; and people will share your blog post and tools with others in social networks.

why they should be using Twitter

1- Use Twitter to monitor the conversations about your business. Every business owner knows that word-of-mouth can have an impact on a business, good or bad, and the bad can spread like wildfire. This reminds me of a sign that was hanging in my grandparents’ camper. I would go camping once a year growing up, but the saying on that sign has hung with me for all of these years. “When I do something right no one remembers. When I do something wrong, no one forgets.”

This really applies to the word of mouth concept. With Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites, the effects of word-of-mouth grew exponentially. The ability for someone to harm your business overnight is real. However, the benefit is that you can be part of the conversation and nip things quickly, when appropriate. There is a lot of strategy involved with this, but the key is that you login and see what people are saying about your business. Many Twitter apps can help you with this, but to start, you can go to search.twitter.com and type in the name of your business. You may be surprised at what you find.

2- Use Twitter to offer special “inside” deals. The best way to get your customer base to follow you on Twitter is to offer great inside deals that are only available through Twitter. By doing this, you will coax some of your customers onto Twitter that may not otherwise get onto Twitter. Why does this matter? Twitter can give you an unprecedented amount of access to your customers, so that you can get your message to them at anytime. This becomes a bit of the old school, “top-of-mind awareness” aspect. The more they see you, your business name, etc., the more likely they will contact you when they need a service you offer. In addition, with special inside deals, they will often buy something that they were not planning to purchase, but found too hard to pass up. Be careful to not be a twitter spammer by using deceitful practices.

3- Use Twitter to steal customers. This is a little like number one, but in this case you are monitoring the conversations in the industry to see where people are unhappy with your competitors. This allows you to be a hero and assist them. If you can find those opportunities and take advantage of them, you will have customers for life.

4- Use Twitter to keep your customers loyal. Just as you can use Twitter to steal customers from your competitors that are slow to reply, you can use Twitter to keep your customers loyal to you. When they can connect with a brand or a business owner, they feel like they have an open door to bring complaints to when something goes wrong. This fact can keep customers loyal as long as you use Twitter to reply to them and take care of business.

5- Use Twitter to find new customers. In the conversations that are happening on Twitter, you may be able to find circumstances when you can help answer a question. When you see a question that is applicable to your business, then you can respond and strike up a conversation and build a relationship. Because you reach out, you will have a lot of credibility with them that may lead to future business. For example, here is a tweet that would be relevant to businesses that do SEO and social media : “How does social media such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook help your SEO?”

6- Use Twitter to gain key connections. Twitter can be your key to unlock a relationship that you would never have obtained otherwise. Twitter enables you to talk with people who would not become a fan on Facebook, would not answer a phone call from you and would not reply to a letter. When you follow someone, reply to their post and ask questions to them directly, you have a chance to gain a relationship that would otherwise be impossible. Twitter can help you connect with the industry leaders as well as find some up-and-coming people in the industry.

7- Use Twitter to study industry news. Twitter search can be a very powerful tool to study what is going on in your industry. It helps you get a feel of how your peers in the industry feel about current issues. Doing Twitter searches on key industry terms can open your eyes to your industry in a way that you have not seen before.

8- Use Twitter to study trends and hot topics in your industry. By doing Twitter searches you can find out the news in your industry in a hurry, but you can also see what things are trending in the industry and the hot topics that relate to your industry. This will allow you to be ahead of the game and on the cutting edge of your marketplace.

9- Use Twitter to ask opinions. If you are wondering what your customers would like better, choice A or choice B, simply ask them. You never have to guess anymore which they would prefer. You simply ask them on Twitter for some feedback, then when they reply, take note. This will give you the ability to make better purchasing and marketing decisions. Of course, to ensure that you receive replies to your question, you could sweeten things by offering a little something for their time.

10- Use Twitter as a mini press release. While Twitter cannot replace the SEO effectiveness of a full-fledged online press release, it can be a mini press release for anything that you do online. It is a way to announce your most recent blog post, point traffic to your most recent video and even help drive traffic to a press release about you or your company. You may also be able to use your Twitter connections to help spread the word even further. When your followers retweet one of your Twitter posts, it reaches far more people.

Twitter has continued to gain steam. I watched a GACTV show last night in which they asked some of country music’s biggest stars about Twitter at the beginning of 2009. They had no idea what it was and said that no one would like to know what they were doing all of the time. However, those same people are now big Twitter users and have discovered plenty of good business uses for it.

Some business will say that Twitter is a waste of time and not worth two minutes. However, my 2010 prediction is this: Some companies with this attitude will go out-of-business because of what customers will say about them on Twitter. They may never even realize that Twitter was the cause of their demise. Will this be your business?

You are not alone. For a long time it was difficult to say what would help a video rank well in search engines such as Google, but it has become a lot easier than it used to be.

Here are the top 10 SEO tips for videos:

1- If you plan to upload a video to both your site and video distribution sites like YouTube, be sure to post it to your site first. That way you can get links through the embed codes where possible.

2- Make sure that your site has more content than you give the video distribution sites. For example, your site could include a “part 2” to the video or a textual transcription that can’t be had anywhere else. This can entice people to link to your site rather than the video distribution site.

3- Use your targeted keywords in the video’s file name, title, and in the tags where it is appropriate.

4- Build links to the video both internally and externally. Video, like any other content on the Web, will be judged by the same link standards.

5- Create a video sitemap for any videos on your site to make it easier for search engines to find all the video content.

6- Optimize the URL of the page where the video is located by naming the page with the keywords. Only have one video per URL.

7- Tweeting, bookmarking, and mentioning the video on social media sites are great ways to gather links.

8- Cross link your video to other relevant videos that you have done. This will help all of your videos rank better and be more useful for your visitor, which always leads to more views.

9- Create useful content that your visitors will want to link to. This will help to build natural links and encourage comments which also influence search engine rankings.

10- Use a video distribution service such as TubeMogul or Traffic Geyser to spread the video quickly across the Internet. These services can save you a lot of time.

These tips are primarily SEO related. There are a lot of topics about video that need to be discussed to get the most out of a multimedia campaign, but we shall talk about them in another post. Watch for them to come in the future. In the meantime, start recording!

Bonus tip: YouTube will soon let you connect with your friends easier. They are going to suggest people you know by recommending those you have sent videos to via email. Also, if you have connected your Gmail account with your YouTube account, they will suggest people from your contacts that also have a YouTube account.

The idea is to promote subscriptions between friends. One of the key factors in making all of this work is to be sure that your account settings are correct. If you’re not sure, simply go to the privacy settings within your YouTube account. There is a box there that states, “Let others find my channel on YouTube if they have my email address.” Make sure that the box is checked so you can be found and maybe even increase your subscriptions.

I don’t blame you for being skeptical, but it is possible to obtain the #1 listing in Google in a manner of minutes. How? Video.

Video is one of the fastest growing forms of content on the web. Ironically, while the hours that we spend watching video on the web continues to increase, so also are the hours we spend watching TV. This may be one of the reasons that search engines rank videos highly. Search engines have always been about giving the public what they want. Apparently, the public wants video.  As internet marketers, we need to shift our paradigm of search so that we are playing ahead of the game and not behind.

First, before we dive further into online video and why you need it on your site, let me make one thing crystal clear. You do not want to abandon the written word in your internet marketing efforts. I am simply pointing to video as a means of content generation that you cannot afford to ignore, because the snowball is gaining speed as it rolls down the hill.

What should you take away from the fact that although internet video consumption grew over the last several years, so has TV consumption? We are becoming more wired as a society. We are so wired that some people cannot resist the urge to reply to a text message while they are driving. We use our phones to write and check email everywhere we go. How many videos have you seen where someone walks into a pole because they are looking at their phone and not where they are going? We spend a lot of time online while we are in front of the TV. We use any means available to stay connected to every little piece of information that we can get our hands on – ah…wait a second. Maybe that’s it. INFORMATION!

We always talk about being on information overload so why would we possibly want more? Though I could theorize why that may be the case, it is irrelevant for now. The important thing is to understand that the facts all point to a society that wants more information and they want it on their terms.

Understanding this, why wouldn’t you want to give your audience what they desire? Give people a reason to stay longer on your site because you have video. Some of the most successful internet business launches to date have happened through video content. Ask yourself this: “Do more people prefer to watch TV or read a book?” There is no question that we prefer to watch TV. While we are a society that craves information and we are willing to get it however we can, we prefer watching over reading when given a choice.

That being said, you should consider video in your content building strategy. It will not replace all of the text on your website, but it will certainly add value and lengthen site visits. If you market your videos correctly they will likely attract new visitors that will become loyal followers of you and your business.

Now that you understand why you should care about video, you should make sure that you know how to perform SEO for video so that you get the most out of every video you produce. Watch for a follow up post with tips on how to accomplish this.

Do you remember the line full of acronyms used by Robin Williams in the movie, “Good Morning Vietnam”? Every time I see all of the acronyms in the internet marketing world, it reminds me of that line from the movie.

“Seeing as how the V.P. is such a V.I.P. shouldn’t we keep the P.C. on the Q.T. ’cause if it leaks to the V.C. he could become a M.I.A. and then we’d all be put out on K.P.”

However, while I could tell stories and make jokes about the growing number of acronyms in the internet marketing world, I’m not here to discuss internet marketing acronyms. What I do want to talk about is a simple strategy that can save you a world of time and money because you will no longer be chasing after an empty piggy bank.

The Strategy

After conducting keyword research and determining the keywords to target for your SEO efforts, run them through a short PPC campaign. Why take your SEO keywords through a PPC campaign before you do any link building or on page optimization? The reason is simple. SEO takes time and effort. You cannot afford to waste time on keywords that will not deliver results. You need to be confident that the keyword phrases you target will bring the results you desire (in terms of leads, profit, etc.) once you make it to the top of the search engines.

The first step after finding the keywords you would like targeted is to build a landing page as quickly as possible. Make sure that you build the page with conversion in mind rather than SEO. However, while building the page for conversion, do not completely ignore SEO. Be sure to have keywords in the page name, title and content, but do not spend extra time optimizing the page. After the page is finished, I recommend starting a PPC campaign targeting the keywords. This can provide valuable information quickly. After running the campaign for a short time (I would recommend at least 500-1000 unique visitors), you will know if the keyword will convert at an acceptable rate. The question you should be asking is “Can you make money on that keyword phrase?”

By using PPC to test your keywords, you will discover whether the keywords are profitable. Think of it this way. If you spend all the time necessary in SEO to rank well for a keyword, get a ton of traffic but no business, then I say “so what?” That is good for bragging rights at the family party where no one else understands internet marketing, but bragging rights do not help pay the mortgage. I would much rather rank #1 for a keyword phrase that brings 20 unique visitors a day and converts at least 1 person into a sale. Wouldn’t you?

In order to develop a clear understanding for this article, let’s lay down some basic information about internal links. When discussing internal links, I am referring to any and all links within your website and links that stay within the same domain. I make this clarification because some may refer to links across domains, but within sister sites, as internal. For this article we will only refer to links within the same domain as internal links.

To further clarify information you should already know, (but we won’t hold it against you, if you don’t) the clickable text in a link is called “link text“, or “anchor text“. These mean the same thing, so no need to argue which phraseology is correct, right? Anchor text is vitally important in search engine algorithms.

Good. Now that we have ground rules, let’s discuss why internal link structure is the “enemy” for most webmasters. A large portion of webmasters do not take full advantage of the ability to link to themselves using the right anchor text. Many of you are eating, drinking, and sleeping link building. You are dreaming up new ways, reading endless information on the latest link building tactics, and working hard to obtain links with the right anchor text from outside websites. How many link requests have you sent with unsuccessful results? How many hours have you spent building other web pages all in the name of link building?

Now, how many hours have you spent ensuring the links within your own site use the correct anchor text? I can hear all of the excuses already, but before you go there, let me answer the most common questions. If you still have a question, leave a comment and we will address it.

Many webmasters do not use the right anchor text within the links of the navigation bar due to lack of space. I get it and understand. No need to have an ugly site. If you cannot fit the correct anchor text in the navigation bar (top, left, right, or any combination) without the text wrapping or a really wide or tall nav bar, then just use the root word.

Example: keyword = “Easton little league baseball bats”

nav bar link suggestions = “Easton baseball bats”, or “little league bats”.

Do the best you can with the navigation bars. The truth is, they are important, but not the most important internal links you can have.

Many webmasters also overlook the page footer. This space works well for longer keywords, as it allows greater space flexibility without negatively affecting site aesthetics. Check your footer for correct anchor text usage on all relevant links. For larger sites (in terms of pages), it is not recommended to use the footer for every link. If there are too many links, navigation can be messy or difficult for site visitors. Like anything else, this can be abused and a footer stuffed with keyword links is impractical.

Another way to get anchor text is to use the alternative text (commonly misnamed the alt tag) of an image. Search engines count alternative text as the anchor text for a link within an image. Be careful to use alternative text that relates to the image, or there is danger of being labeled a spammer.

The best place for obtaining value from internal links is the content area of your page. Search engines look at this area with more trust. Why? The odds are more likely that a webmaster will place relevant and helpful links in this area, which is what search engines want. I recommend that the text color on these links matches the color of other links within the site, and that links are underlined. (For most sites this would be blue and underlined.) Don’t try to disguise the link because it shows the search engines you are not trying to hide something.

You tell the search engines what each page is about by using anchor text within the site. Search engines use the external links pointing to your site to verify this information. Get your internal links correct, and it will likely take fewer external links to rank well for the keyword phrases you are targeting. Go fix those internal links today to see improved rankings.