Blog updates made easy

Every website needs to have a blog or news update module. A blog is an easy way to create new pages on your website easily and efficiently without hiring a content writer and stressing about what you will say. Ideally, you will use your own customer service policies, schedules, and selling points for your business to update the blog.

Essentially, each blog post is a new page on your website. Each new page is like a raffle ticket that might draw a potential customer into your sales funnel. In addition, it also shows your site visitors that you are an active business that takes the time to stay on top of their website updating. And that similarly, they take care of their business as well as they take care of their website.

If your website looks at all like it is not getting attention, your web visitors will assume that you manage your business in the same way.

And in the worst case, not having a website clearly states that you are not in business or taking your business seriously.

Ok. Back to blog/news posts. Here is a quick list of ways to add blog posts on a calendar that is easy to execute:

10 federal holidays - list your hours of operation, emergency phone numbers if necessary, and let your customers and potential customers know about your availability during holidays. This can actually turn into 20 posts. A week before, announce your schedule. The day before, remind everyone of the schedule and wish them a happy thanksgiving, memorial day, presidents day, etc.

1 promotion per month (12 per year) - offer something each month as an incentive for web visitor to take action and become a customer. It doens't have to be the best deal ever. Just enough for the customer to take the next step with you and for you to build a stronger relationshiop. Usually, this can be set up once per year and it will automatically appear each month on your website.

Tips/Articles/Suggestions once per month (12 per year)- whatever business you are in, surely there is advice that you give customers every day in your business or on the phone. Use this same advice to come up with 1 suggestion or piece of advice each month about your business. Visit other websites, see what others in your industry are doing and use that for inspiration.

Post links to other tips/articles/suggestions (12 per year)- if you don't feel comfortable or dont' have time to write, find a good article from your industry, post the link on your site, and write a 1 or 2 sentence commentary on the article. Make it easy on yourself by using content from other websites!

So with holidays, promotions, and just links to other articles that you don't write, you are looking at 44 updates per year. Almost 1 per week. If you then write a few articles yourself or provide tips, you can get this up to once per week in no time.

Weekly updates to your website would put you ahead of 95% of all businesses on the web.

Social Media Forum Review

Rick Burnes of HubSpot on Inbound Marketing using Social Media

A forum hosted by BTV Social Media Breakfast Club

Twitter account: @rickburnes

Here are my notes (and some elaboration, corrections, and expansions on my part; very little editing or checking was done)

1. Interruption marketing is the old media model
2. Inbound marketing takes time but eventually saves money for a business (Inbound marketing being defined as providing great content, surrounding the content with on and off page search engine optimization, and letting your customers and prospects find you)
   Invite people into your website instead of “interrupting their lives”
3. Rick made a big mistake by declaring unabashedly that ALL traditional media is dead. He got hammered b/c he suggested that all traditional marketing is bad and online is the only way to go
4. Including direct mail and Pay Per click that don't work effectively
5. While I think Rick goes too far to suggest that internet marketing is the only way to go, I wish all my clients had been there to hear how effective and inevitable a content rich web presence is for all businesses if they want to compete in the long term.
6. I suggested to Rick and in my opinion it is more accurate to suggest that it is the effectiveness and ultimately the return on investment of traditional marketing that is diminishing. That on the rise is online marketing which includes providing lots of free content about your industry and business and your specific business approach.
7. I went on to tell him not to trash traditional marketing but talk about the trends in marketing. Traditional marketing still works but the trends all point to a diminishing return on investment. Starting now with online marketing means you'll be a player down the road when the trend lines get more severe.
8. There was a lot of conern in the audience about the quality of writing (the “I can’t write” problem) Writing content for the web does not have to be elegant. Just use the same language you use to sell your services, promote your products, and talk to your customers. Start a conversation about what you know. It does not have to be complicated.
9. As you live your life and business, put yourself into the content mindset.
10. Repurpose every interaction in your business into a content opportunity.
11. Probably the strongest analogy that Rick made was the Lottery Ticket. It's all about content. Each page or article of content from your website that appears in the search engines is a lottery ticket. Would you rather have the same 8 static pages as lottery tickets or a 100 new lottery tickets per year as you write 2 blog posts per week about your business?
12. Every business is different in terms of measuring success of your online presence. What are the metrics for your business? Customers? Subscribers? Diners? Do you make large one time sales? Do you have recurring revenue clients? Set your metrics and then measure them (and he wants you to use HubSpot).
13. Rick finished by giving a relatively subdued pitch for the $250 per month HubSpot online marketing software. $3000 per year might seem steep but if you were able to prove positive ROI (return on investment) on the $3000, it would be worth it.
    
    Questions from the audience:

Question: I use direct mail. It works. Why should I stop?

Rick: Online is better. Which was not a great answer. What he should have said…keep doing direct mail. But put effort into online marketing and continue to measure the return on investment for both channels. Over time, you will probably learn that the online marketing approach will provide much higher rates of return.

And in fact, use direct mail to build your list of email addresses so that you can continue to follow up with your direct mail prospects for almost nothing with email marketing.

Question: Must a business have your own blog on your own domain?

Yes. And I agree with Rick. Absolutely. That doesn’t mean that you might not put the same blog entries (or a shortend version pointing back to your main website) on a blog hosted at blogspot or wordpress. But you want all that wonderful blog content to be credited to your main Domain (aka, website address or URL or URI).

Question: Do I need a website and a blog?

Rick didn't answer this as we ran out of time. However, a blog can in fact act as a website. They can be one and the same. However, the blog format does not always lend itself to providing some of the basic information about your business nor advanced functionality that a full website can offer. Having just a blog is always better than nothing and some blogs are hard to differentiate from full websites! And a blog is always better to have than to have a web site that never gets new content or updates.

That’s all for now. I will surely touch on these topics more in the future. Content is king!

Please contact me if you have any specific questions about these issues.

Use Analytics to measure SEO effectiveness

Google Analytics is a free program which was based on the $500 per month Urchin Live web statistics program. None of our customers could afford this program. But when Google purchased Urchin, they offered their premium service to the world...for free.

While it does take some time to properly set up analytics, with basic HTML skills you could do it yourself. If not, it will take your web people about an hour to set it up right.

What analytics provides you as the site owner is insight into how web surfers are finding your site, what pages they are looking at, how long they spend on the site, what countries they are from, what screen resolution they are using, what internet speed they are using, what internet browser they are using, etc.

The question becomes how can you use Analytics to direct your SEO efforts. Today, we did exactly that for a real estate company. Using their analytics, we discovered that 2 out of their 6 top level navigation points accounted for less than 1/10th of 1% of all of their traffic. What they thought was their primary place to rpovide information to web visitors turned out to be the least visited. And after Property Search (which accounted for over 60% of the traffic), mortgage information was next most popular. And amazingly, all the mortgage information was buried in the 2nd level.

So we are using this information to move the mortgage information pages to the 1st level of navigation and burying the 2 very unused sections of the website. We will then optimize heavily for popular regional mortgage information keywords to capture additional traffic.

Beware SEO firms that gaurantee

I got yet another call from a client today that went something like this "A web design firm just called me and told me that my website is not optimized for search engines. They said they could guarantee me #1 listings in Google for $99. I would like to do the work with you but can you offer me that deal?".

After I have had a chance to calm down, I remind myself and my customer that NO ONE can guarantee listings in Google (without Pay per click that is and then usually not for $99!). No one can buy listings in Google, no one can guarantee. Have I made that clear? No one can guarantee placements. Anyone or any firm that guarantees ranking positions should be avoided like the plague.

Achieving rankings in the search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN representing 95% plus of the market) takes consistent effort and vigilance. Most companies do not have the resources in house in terms of expertise to be able to do this. And to get good rankings in the search engines for the right keywords takes effort and/or monetary resources. Figuring out how much to spend, how much effort to make, always depends on the Return on Investment. If a new customer is worth $100 per year to you as a business, what can you afford to spend to acquire that new customer? $50, $75, $100? It will depend on your renewal rates and how aggressive you want to be.

Any firm or SEO person worth hiring will review your own particular ROI situation and put together a plan accordingly.

Many firms have no way of measuring ROI. Tune in next time to figure out how to measure ROI for your company.

Why do you need Search Engine Optimization?

Why do you need Search Engine Optimization?

I am so convinced about the efficacy of doing search engine optimization for almost any kind of website, that I rarely sit down and ask myself this very question. And well, I haven't asked myself this question...but I did get this question from a prospective client the other day and it has been eating away at me ever since.

I know i shouldn't be emotional about something as seemingly innocuous as getting good rankings in the search engines, but with my need to understand how search engines work, my desire to figure out how they can be used effectively by small and medium businesses (large corporations have whole teams on this kind of thing and still don't get it right) and my seemingly insatiable competitive spirit, I can't help but being a bit passionate about SEO.

Anyway, as I stared down this prospect, I thought to myself, yes, why indeed care about search engine optimization for your business?

While all the craze about the Internet, the web, and the information revolution, is that search engine optimization has become as necessary as having a fax machine, using the telephone, and taking credit cards. It is not only a necessary function for any small or medium sized business, it can and will be a critical and probably dominant marketing sector of this century. I don't exaggerate. Over time, search engines will replace the yellow pages, directory assistance, and most other hard copy forms of information distribution. Why print this information when you can make 2 taps on your iPhone and get the information (or even your 1 cent freebie phone from your local cellular company).

Essentially, search engine optimization is a combination of building your website with the search engines in mind and keeping them happy with new keyword rich content. Building the code so that it can be used effectively by search robots, organizing the navigation, naming the pages, writing the content, optimizing the images, adding some "webmaster" tools like XML site maps, doing some basic submissions, getting backlinks, getting listed in directories, the list goes on...

The bottom line is that for whatever your business niche is; whether it is selling to an international or national audience or selling a product/service/software that is not geographically dependent; or you are just focused on serving your geographic area (for service, retail, or local businesses); your market can be expanded with search engine optimization and if you aren't doing it, your competitors certainly will.

Every day, I find business segments in the search engines that are under-served. Our work with Able Paint and Glass recently demonstrates this. In just a few weeks, we are starting to dominate their local search engine traffic for their website http://www.ablevt.com/. We simply organized the pages, optimized the code on each page, and did some basic submissions and linking. 44 #1 positions for their top keywords on the Big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN).

Once we add hyperlocal blogging to the mix, we plan on increasing all of these numbers!!

In the end, much like paying your website hosting bill, your yellow page advertising, and your local chamber of commerce dues, paying for ongoing search engine optimization with fresh optimized content and keeping up with the every changing world of search engines systems will be more than necessary.

And ultimately, in my opinion, ongoing dedication to SEO will provide a very lucrative return on investment for your business. If there isn't a return, I would never recommend it!

What are Internal Links? - SEO Basics

Internal links are links primarily within the content area (body) of each page that link to other, oftentimes deeper, pages within the same site. Usually, Internal Links can weave into the web page copy in a logical manner that points the visitor to further or deeper information that would logically flow from the page they are already viewing.

Since most Search Engines including Google follow links to other pages, internal linking is a great way to provide users with logical next steps for accessing information from your site and to expose as many of your webpages to the search robots as possible.

Ok, so now you say "internal links provide good additional ways for users to access information they might like but...": Can you drive good web ranking or page rank from Internal Linking? What kind of juice is there with internal links?

By no means does Internal Linking ensure that your website will be well ranked. What internal linking can assist with is guiding the search robots once they have visited your site. Once landing upon an individual page, the search robots will follow other links in the content area. So if your more popular, or better positioned web pages had internal links to deeper pages within your site or pages that get less attention from visitors, you are providing opportunities for these pages through Internal Linking.

Ok, now for some examples of our bad, good, better, best ranking system.

Bad
Linking to dozens of other internal pages from each page on your site with little thought or logical flow to the other pages. You already have (hopefully) a well thought out navigation structure and a site map built into your site so we don't recommend taking Internal Linking to this extreme. For example, on a mortgage company site, having internal links to every loan program offered (there are dozens of combinations) on every page would probably not pass the smell test with the search robots and it will drive the user insane. Why would a website visitor think that there was any difference in a applying for a mortgage in South Burlington, VT versus Burlington, VT? Having 2 separate links to these pages is purely for search engine purposes and could "turn off" a website visitor.

Essentially, you can't stuff internal links just to try and get a boost from the search engines. It lowers your integrity with website visitors and with the search engines.

Good
Providing a link or two within the site content where appropriate. if you reference a program or a webpage that is on your site, go ahead and set up a link to that page.

Better
Not only would you provide the link when mention content or pages that might be of further use to the visitor, you optimize the "anchor text" within each internal link to provide keyword juice to those pages.

Instead of "In order to check out our section on jumbo mortgages, click here: http://www.mortgagecompany.com/loan-programs/jumbo-mortgages", you would write the internal links smoothly within the flow of the sentence: "And from our South Burlington, VT office, you can learn more about our jumbo mortgage programs." The optimized "anchor text" for this link scores points for the jumbo mortgage page and still provides a clear path of action for the website visitor.

Best
To get the most from Internal Linking, work with your website content to make sure that you are able to add at least 3 internal links on every page and use optimized "anchor text" to point the way! (of course, by using keywords from your master keyword list). One part strategy and one part execution will combine to give you, your website visitors, and the search robots an optimized internal linking strategy that works.

Search Engine Opitimzation Basics - Creating a Master Keyword Phrase List

How to build your keyword list?

Oftentimes, we talk with clients who absolutely know what keyword phrases that they want their website to be ranked for in the search engines.

This can be an awkward place to start with a new client. I am a firm believer that individual business owners, marketing folks, communications people, etc within an organization and industry know their marketplace better than we do as the web design, development, and optimization firm. However, we too often spend resources, time and money optimizing a website for keyword phrases that just don't get searched for by web surfers.

As a search engine optimziation firm, it becomes very easy for us to get good rankings for a keyword phrase that is not searched on very much. Clients love us because we meet and exceed their expectations. But we wish that we were focused on the best keyword phrases for a company based on search statistics which we as a firm have access to.

But again, most companies know their industry better than their web design and development firm will.

Therefore, we always ask our clients to create what they consider their master keyword list (see my last post entitled "Keywords versus Keyword Phrases - how are they different?" for the difference between a keyword and a keyword phrase). First, we ask that they start with individual keywords (for example, vermont, web, page, design, development, programming, etc). Then we ask them to use these keywords to create keyword phrases based on those keywords.

Using the client's keyword and keyword phrase list, we then create a "master keyword list" which contains all the keyword phrases that might be possibly and logically be combined for search engine purposes. A keyword phrase list based on a keyword list might contain: vermont web design, vermont programming, VT web development, vermont web page development, vt webpage development, etc...

But it is critical that you do not stop there. You then need to take that keyword phrase master list and make sure that people are in fact using those keyword phrases in the search engines. We do this "keyword analysis" for most clients and find out how many times each of the keyword phrases are searched in a given month. And then we use some of the keyword phrase search engine tools such as Word Tracker (Wordtracker Free Trial) to expand the master keyword phrase list to include keyword phrases that the compnay not have thought of and that do get searched on the major search engines.

Using these search counts, we can then pare down the master list to only include keyword phrases that have solid search traffic counts, and that are attainable (we are not going to go after the keyword "jumbo mortgage" for a local vermont mortgage company as it is too broad and too expensive to go after, but we will go after "vermont jumbo mortgage").

If you are having trouble generating your keyword list on your own, do some searching yourself and the sites that do rank well on the first 1 or 2 pages of Google. Use keyword phrases that you are sure would be used by your potential customers. Start simple like "vermont web design" in our case.

Then look at the "source code" for the page (most browsers, there is a View, Source combination to view the HTML coding for a page) and see what keyword phrases the page is built with (once the source code is opened, do a search for the word "keyword" and you should find the META tag for keywords. It is usally at the top of the page and very plain to see if the code is clean and tight). You can use your competitor's sites and sites that already rank well to target the keywords that will be helpful for your site.

After doing your keyword initial research, combine the keywords into keyword phrases that your potential visitors/customers would use to find your website.

There are many different ways to do this keyword analysis yourself or to use a service or a firm. If you use a service, just make sure that you know what you getting for the money and certainly double check their work using the tools i suggest through these articles.

If content is king...keyword phrases fill the king's coffers.

Keywords versus Keyword Phrases - how are they different?

Keywords and keyword phrases can be a tricky subject. There is a bad habit in the search engine optimization and web development industry in general about using keyword and keyword phrases inappropriately.


To make a point clear: I myself have had a tendency to use "keyword" and "keyword phrase" phrase interchangeably. I try not to but it still happens. I will try to make it very clear when it is important to realize the difference between the two.

But for most part, your keyword list is really your keyword phrase list. For example, Vermont Design Works keywords, technically, are: design, development, vermont, seo, winooski, burlington, graphic, etc.

Keyword phrases are multi word phrases derived from a keyword list but target more appropriately the words that a searcher will actually type into a search engine. I don't necessarily want my company website up on page 1 in Google for the keyword "vermont". That is not my market. But the keyword phrase "vermont web design", I very much want (and we are #1 for this keyword).

One might ask: "why wouldn't you want to be on the first page for the keyword 'design'?" Good question, I might respond...

While design as a single word keyword phrase is searched on quite a bit, the niche it defines is not narrow enough for me to want to expend energy to capture. It is too broad, too unfocused for me to allocate any resources towards getting ranked for it in Google.

In summary, I consider Keywords as individual keywords which will make up the individual words in your master list of keyword phrases.

A subtle but important distinction in terminology for what is considered the heart of search engine optimization (SEO). Make sure to start any SEO campaign, take the time to establish the targeted keyword phrase list that will generate high quality, good return on investment (ROI), website visitors (future customers).

How and why to brand your title tag?

You might be asking "what is a title tag?". The Title tag is a recommended 117 character (including spaces) description of a web page. It is created using an HTML title function. Visually, the tag appears in the blue bar on top of Internet Explorer and describes what a web page is all about. Any decent Content Management System should allow you to edit each page's title tag individually. Or if you are editing or hand coding in HTML yourself, you will need to set this tag for each page.

The title tag also has 2 other main uses. One is for bookmarking (adding to favorites) and the back button drop down list. Bookmarking is critical. When someone bookmarks your site, you want them to be able to tell from the bookmark itself, what a page is all about. Similarly, this page title is used when navigating through a site and using the back button.

Many websites have the same title tag for every page...how infuriating! Imagine bookmarking a website with 3 different products and then looking at your favorites later only to see that the page titles are exactly the same and therefore you have no idea which is which.

The other main use of the title tag is by the search engines and specifically on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Again using Google as the example (currently representing 71% of all searches on the Internet) they use the title tag in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Here is an example of how my company Vermont Design Works writes our title tags for the SERPs (do a search on google for "vermont design" to see the results:

Our title tags tell you a lot about what this page is going to discuss, provides a solid description for the back button or bookmarking, and is keyword driven to optimize rankings in the search engines. This is just one of the reasons why Vermont Design Works is ranked so strongly in Google.

Some webmasters don't pay much attention to page titles (or aren't compensated enough to spend time on customizing page titles or don't know how). Every page ends up being "page" or just the website name or nothing (BAD). Anytime you have tried to use your back button on a browser and pick the page you want to go back to will see the same page title repeated over and over.

Some webmasters set this tag once in an "include" file which means it will have the same format on every page. For example, it will use the page heading (the page heading is the main page heading that appears in the body of the web page) and the website address (BETTER). So the About Us page will have a Page Heading and a Page Title of "About Us".

While this is a step up from a generic title tag on every page (GOOD), doing a truly custom title tag is a BEST technique (the ratings refer to our BAD, GOOD, BETTER, BEST rating system for SEO techniques).

Title tag summary:

• BAD: nonsense, non-existent or meaningless words used for title tag


• GOOD: generic website term used for each page


• BETTER: derivative page titles using page heading or navigation/menu title as title tag


• BEST: custom written keyword driven title tags that fully describe what a page discusses

Human Friendly URLs - good for SEO, good for users

When creating pages for your website (either a brand new website, a redesign, or just adding new pages), most people rely on their web master or web development company (or marketing manager, department head, or communications director) to decide what to call each page of the site. Or worse, they are using some numerical or database driven system.

For example, this page for one of our local Vermont power companies: http://www.velco.com/Templates/default.asp?pageId=3

If I emailed you this page, you would have no idea what this page is about.

So how do you think search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN are supposed to be able to figure out what this page is all about? What the search engines will do is look at the page content, titles, headings, and META structure. However, why not help out not only the search engines but your website users by giving page names meaningful titles that also contain your keywords.

For example, this page from one of our SEO redesign customers with headquarters in Brattleboro Vermont.

http://www.partnershipvolunteers.org/volunteer-in-brazil/

Not only can the search engines determine what this page is about, but if I got this URL emailed to me by a friend, i would have a pretty good idea what this site and page are all about.

Volunteers in Partnership offers programs for people, mostly students, to live abroad for weeks or months at a time and do volunteer work. This page is obviously about their program for volunteering in Brazil. And while a URL can't necessarily give you all the information about a page, the difference between these 2 examples is staggering.

As part of our search engine optimization and website development process at Vermont Design Works, before we even get to design, we put a project plan together that organizes the page titles, URLs and page names, and structure so that we can then build a keyword optimized website at the beginning.

Thinking about what you name each of your web pages with an emphasis on keyword optimization is critical when having a new website built or even doing a redesign of an existing website (or just adding new pages). A little effort as you create each page will pay dividends down the road with your rankings in the the search engines and the ease of use by your site visitors.

Page Titles, META Description, etc and DMOZ - SEO in Vermont

I reported last time about how to use the DMOZ tag that tells Google not to use the DMOZ description in the SERPs. Now i want to share a small insight that if your page titles and META descriptions are exactly the same, Google will use the DMOZ description instead of your META description because it will look silly on teh SERPs. Google's main job is to provide meaningful and helpful SERPs for searchers. If you can't even bother to create different titles, METAs, descriptions, page headings, don't expect google to play along.

So make sure you use customized page titles, headings, descriptions, keywords, abstracts, etc on every page that you want to show good relevant search results.

And of course back this up with optimized, useful, human friendly content on the page discussing your keyword driven topic! Without good keyword driven content, no amount of optimization will work at all.

If you have minimal content, focus on Pay Per Click and optimized landing pages (more on this later).

Thoughts?

DMOZ tag and Google descriptions

Everyone should submit their website to DMOZ, the manually maintained index of websites. It might take a few submissions of your site and make sure you pick your cateogory carefully. Hopefully, someone will review your site and add it to the DMOZ index.

The down side is that unless you specifically exclude the use of the description that appears in DMOZ, Google will use the DMOZ description for the description on every page of your site in the SERPs (search engine results pages). The META tag code that you need to include is called NOODP.

meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOODP"

Use this code and eventually, Google will stop using your DMOZ description in the SERPs.

However, make sure that you have custom descriptions for each of your major pages (ideally all of your pages).

SEO Basics

A few folks have emailed in and asked for some basic information on how a small business should approach Search Engine Optimization. Particularly local SEO on a budget.

There are six basic parts of SEO:

1. Navigation/Sitemap structure
2. Site programming and backend programming
3. Page content optimization
4. Keyword driven back links
5. Site submission
6. And finally….ADD NEW CONTENT!

The web is fundamentally based on having good webpage content (yes, the words that go on each page), the right structure and programming, and some basic promotion.

In my next few posts, I will give more detail on each of these 6 sections.