Online article marketing can effectively improve organic search results in a number of ways: Improve visibility for your target keyword phrases Obtain traffic for additional (long tail) keyword searches Assist in building awareness and reputation Increase targeted traffic from other quality related websites Helps attract more incoming links to your site Helps make your website more unique and useful Google’s Panda update showed once again, that it’s important to have high quality, unique content. We recently evaluated a large ecommerce website that was stung by the Panda [...]

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Previously in How To Increase Organic Keyword Conversions, we covered how to use Google Analytics to determine the entrance pages people are landing on after clicking through from organic keyword listings in search engines. We showed you how to look for typical issues with entrance pages that hurt conversions such as files with no navigation, old webpages still live with broken images and links, pages that have been moved or deleted resulting in Page Not Found errors, and entrance pages that are not the best place for people to enter a site after searching on a specific keyword. Here, w [...]

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My kids and I really enjoy watching the MAKE Magazine video podcasts together. It's one of those rare and happy things that a ten-year-old girl, an eight-year-old boy, and an adult can watch together and find interesting. Inspired by these podcasts, I thought it would be a good idea to create a do-it-yourself SEO project. So today, we'll make a Google Spreadsheet that checks a web page for various on-page factors that can affect SEO. Getting Started What you need: A Google Account for logging into Google Spreadsheets A URL that you want to check. In this article, I'll be chec [...]

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In the world of SEO, there are big updates like Panda, Mayday, Vincent, Florida, but there are also smaller internal issues that can creep up on you leading to traffic and revenue loss. The ability to identify and prevent self inflicted nicks and cuts along the way is key to a successful SEO program for online retailers. When dealing with large, product-driven sites, automation and templates, things are bound to fray and break over time. Getting alerted and identifying the issue is half the battle. Dashboards are a great way of staying on top of internal issues, as well as competitor and [...]

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Is your website’s URL structure based on the perceived logic of your boss’ teenage son? Or even worse, a software engineer? Search-engine friendly labeling systems are critical for long-term search engine visibility.

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Once your website starts getting at least some traffic from organic search queries, you can help increase conversions (inquiries, signups, purchases, phone calls etc) by investigating what happens once people reach your website from the search results. You can use Google Analytics to choose what keywords to focus on and to check the entrance pages (landing pages) for issues hurting conversions. How To Choose Which Organic Keywords To Focus On Most websites have hundreds or thousands of keywords bringing visitors to their website so it’s ideal to have an easy way to select which keywords [...]

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It's a great time to start a company. Incubator labs are springing up all over the place, sponsored by venture capitalists and universities. Universities are teaching entrepreneurial skill, and have programs to sponsor student startups. Massive layoffs over the past two years have forced new college graduates, and experienced former employees to strike out on their own. The emergence of social media and mobile platforms are providing thousands of start-up opportunities, and you can see them showcased at "network and launch" events such as the Web Innovators Group and Mass Innovation Nights. [...]

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For my last round, I was supposed to share the results from that 300% sales explosion on the leather dog collar with nameplate page, but the folks at Google decided otherwise with the Panda update targeting content farms. Panda bit a few ecommerce sites pretty hard, so I've been helping out some new client-folk sort out the mess. So, today we're getting the Retail Smarts column back on track. In my first installment, I told you about how I spent less than thirty minutes optimizing a single product page, which resulted in a 300% explosion in sales on that SKU. That column pressed the righ [...]

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Many website owners obsess over organic keyword rankings. Our clients often tell us, "We have to improve our rankings for "keyword X!". However, focusing on rankings as the primarily goal of SEO will not likely deliver the results most site owners want which is to increase business from their websites. In this example, we  will use a client’s Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to choose the best keywords to focus on first, those bringing searchers to the website who are converting into leads. Improving Rankings May Not Lead To Increased Click-Throughs A past client, a media pl [...]

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There are so many reasons to make your website faster:  Higher conversion rates, lower bandwidth costs and yes, higher rankings in organic search. Frankly, I’m stunned how often web teams resist doing it. Here’s a list from easy to not-so-easy, of 29 ways you can get things running faster on your website: Put your images on a separate domain. Services like Amazon S3 make this very easy. Open an S3 account. Point a subdomain like ‘blah.yoursite.com’ at the S3 storage. Put your images there. Web browsers can load from multiple domains simultaneously, creating the impression [...]

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A decades-old dispute involving Libya remains unresolved. How do news organizations spell the name of Libya's leader, Muammar Gaddafi? The exact spelling has a bigger impact these days, where people search for news. Use the wrong spelling, and your story might go missing. Can search tell us the "right" one? More below. Google News: A Copy Editor's Nightmare Consider this page from Google News, the "Muammar al-Gaddafi" page that pulls in headlines from all over the world about the leader: That page would give any newspaper copy editor fits, given that there are at least four different [...]

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An amazing amount of great information came out of SMX West this week. Below is a summary of some of what I found to be the most actionable and useful. Google's Own Words About the Farmer/Panda Update Google's Matt Cutts said that while the change isn't 100% perfect, searcher feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. He noted that the change is completely algorithmic with no manual exceptions. Blocking "Low Quality" Content Matt reiterated that enough low quality content on a site could reduce rankings for that site as a whole. Improving the quality of the pages or removing the pages alto [...]

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I'm sure everyone has read about Google's recent algorithm change to penalize content farms by now. There's been lots of reports on who the biggest losers have been in terms of traffic loss, but for everyone who's lost – someone else has won! So looking at this from the alternative point of view, how can you benefit? Well firstly, it's important to look at where the content farm style of websites went wrong. Quite clearly, one of the common signs is that they created not just thousands, but in many cases millions of pages containing low-quality content. All with the primary intention o [...]

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I’ve lived by this rule since 1997: If you name your products using the keywords customers search for to find and buy what you sell, you’ll do better selling online than if you use the manufacturer's name or industry jargon for your product names. I’ve been working on product pages on online stores for a long time, and I don’t get too excited about new techniques or tricks for boosting sales by optimizing product pages. I think I’ve near ‘bout tried everything I’ve read about or seen online. We’re always testing stuff, and trying new things, but every once in awhile s [...]

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Following these simple steps could help improve the immediate impact on search results for a new website, and help avoid the often significant reduction in search traffic after a website is re-launched. Website owners often wait until after their site is redesigned and launched before getting a SEO expert involved. Unfortunately, this can lead to expensive site design changes that could have been easily implemented during the design process. Sometimes, it's difficult or impossible to correct issues after a website is launched without essentially rebuilding the site again. In addition, [...]

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One of the major obstacles marketers face, particularly with B2B search engine marketing, is the availability of content to support keyword initiatives. While we realize the importance of new content, the demand for time and resources will always be tested. The key to success: don't try to reinvent the wheel every time new content is required. In this article, we'll explore several areas of content creation and distribution which can assist in creating effective B2B content marketing strategies and support search engine optimization initiatives. The Core Foundation: Value Extraction Many [...]

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Pierre Far from Google wrote a blog post on how to design mobile friendly websites while considering Google's webmaster guidelines and best practices. I've pulled out the key points from this post in bullet format: Google differentiates between traditional mobile phones and smartphones. Google has two bots: Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. Googlebot crawls desktop-browser type of webpages and content embedded in them and Googlebot-Mobile crawls mobile content. Currently only traditional phones are supported with special useragent strings within Googlebot-Mobile, not smartphones (this [...]

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Having a search engine friendly website, a site with no barriers to the search engines is critical to success within "organic" search engine results. Here are some relatively simple SEO Site Review/Audit steps that should help you flush out the most important site wide issues within a small to mid size website. A SEO site review or audit should be conducted periodically; for example, a few weeks to months after a website is redesigned or after a major update, to allow enough time for the site to be fully re-indexed. Anytime organic search engine traffic takes a significant drop a SEO [...]

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When I tell a client/friend/colleague they need to add X pages of interesting content to their site, I typically hear one of three answers: 3% of the time: "No problem, I'm on it." 75% of the time: "But I don't have anything to write about." 22% of the time: "No one wants to hear about my product/service. It's boring." I'll ignore the obvious replies, like "If it's so boring, why does anyone buy it?" or "Then why can you talk about your product for 2 hours at a party?" I understand how tough it can be to come up with material. When you spend all your time working in your business, d [...]

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Last year, Google published an SEO Report Card of 100 Google properties. In it, they rated themselves on how well the sites were optimized for search. Google's Matt Cutts presented the results at SMX West 2010 in Ignite format. He noted that not every Googler is an expert in search and search engine optimization. Googlers who don't work in search don't get preferential treatment from those who do and just like any site on the internet, sometimes things aren't implemented correctly. Just because a site is owned by Google doesn't mean it's the best example of what to do in terms of SEO. This [...]

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