Archive for August, 2008

Keyword cannibalization is an important topic with any website.  It typically becomes a problem when over zealous website owners and designers decide they want to choose 1 primary search term that they want to rank for.

Definition of Keyword Cannibalization:

“The act of placing the same keywords or phrases on multiple pages of a website in titles and content in order improve ranking in the search engines… leading to confusion with search engines on which page to rank in the results.”

This is extremely important to the general health of websites.  I see people so often trying to rank well for certain keyword phrases using this technique.  But unfortunately, their efforts are misguided.  Placing the same keyword in every title, every page, and every piece of content you create is a very bad idea.  The common misguided notion goes something like this:

“Well… I really want to rank well for the keyword “Las Vegas Real Estate”, so I’m going to place that phrase in every title and every piece of content I create.  After all, Google loves keywords, and the more I use it, the better chance I’ll have of ranking.”

Let’s explore why this doesn’t work:

Google ranks each page of a website independently of each other

You may have a home page, and 10 articles that all include the same keyword phrase in the title and body… but guess what?  Only one (possibly 2) of those pages are ever going to rank in the search engines for that specific keyword phrase.

Using the same keyword doesn’t help gain extra relevance

Creating multiple pages with the exact same keyword phrase in the title and content does not force the search engine spider to interpret the site as being more relevant for that same keyword phrase.  All it does is force the spider to choose which page is the best.  One page will rank, and the others won’t show up at all.

The quality of your content will suffer

If you are using the keyword “Las Vegas Real Estate” in every title of every article, what are you readers going to think?  Need I say more???

You are severely limiting your search engine traffic potential

Many of you probably understand the concept of the long tail by now.  It works.  Don’t get me wrong, “Las Vegas Real Estate” is a great keyword.  But do you really want to put all your eggs in one basket when there are literally thousands of variations of that phrase that could do just as good or better?  Why waste your time trying to get every page of your site ranking for the same term when there are so many others out there waiting to be ranked for?  Think about it.

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Meta tag titles are typically the biggest problem with keyword cannibalization.  Not only on the home page, but on sub pages and article pages as well.  Each page needs to have it’s own unique title.  This will give you the most likelihood of ranking for many different keywords and give you the most traffic potential.

Probably the most common place for keyword cannibalization is in blogs.  People will create blog post titles that are often very similar to each other, and this becomes a problem because most blogs are set up by default to make the article title the meta tag title.  Thus creating the keyword cannibalization effect with multiple articles.

Tips on Avoiding Cannibalization

1. Write unique Meta tag titles for your home page and sub pages.  Use specific words that describe that page.  If you can’t think of anything besides “Las Vegas Real Estate”… seek professional help.  Or try this keyword suggestion tool.
2. If you have a blog, make sure your article titles are unique to what you are writing about.  Using variations of a keyword are fine: “Las Vegas Condos”, “Las Vegas Real Estate Agent”, but don’t over do it.  Try to appeal to your readers first, and to the search engines second!
3. Choose which pages are the best candidates for certain keywords, and send internal links with the anchor text of those keywords to that page.
4. Start broad on your links, and build out.  Your home page and top level pages probably have the most potential for ranking with more competitive broader terms.  Make sure you target those tougher terms on your top level pages (shallow pages), and work on the more specific long tail keywords with articles, and blog posts (deep pages).

~ Secret Tip ~

If you are really struggling with how to title pages, and can’t think of any more good keyword phrases to use, try using a good keyword research tool.  Google Keyword Suggestions, SEO Book’s Keyword Research Tool, or even Wordtracker or Nichebot.  Start by searching for a broad term, and use the results to find the most relevant, and the most popular keywords for your page.  You may just find that the keyword you wanted to use in the first place doesn’t get as many searches as you thought… and that there was a related phrase you should have been using all along.  Hint: I do this every time I write a new article…

So go get to work!  Remove all those duplicate Meta tag titles.  Do some keyword research.  I think you’ll find that with a little work, you’ll see a much bigger return on your investment with broader search traffic.

Social Media is one of the most exciting aspects of SEO/SEM, I love it! This entry will just cover a few of the basics about Blogging and publishing. If you are not involved at least at some level, join us!  We have several helpful topics on Blogging, Social Bookmarking and Social Media and will continue to follow it closely.

Social Networking and Social Media are powerful tools in your Internet Marketing, Brand Awareness and Public Relations strategies. This entry may be elementary for some and new for others but equally as important.

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last 48 months or so, you know what a Blog is, you may know of a few highly visible blogs, and if you’re really with it, you own a Blog and update if frequently! Whether you own a business, handle PR in a corporate setting, hate this country, the elections, the war, meat eaters, the climate or republicans, the truth is, Blogging is like publishing your own newspaper from your home in your underwear. Its a great way to be heard regardless of what you write about!

“Freedom of speech and expression has never been so widly exercised by so many, so enhanced by technology, and so effective until the dawn of Social Media and all that it encompasses.”

To make this article relatively short and concise, if you are the owner of a business and you want to increase your public visibility, create multiple portals to your company and create open communication lines between your clients or potential clients; build a Blog, update it regularly, write useful and compelling content, and then promote it!

Where To Start Blogging:

1. Wordpress (Best Blogging Platform by far in my opinion)

2. Blogger

3. TypePad

These are just a few I would recommend. However, you can check out several, click this link to see how others rated various Blogging platforms. A lot of it is preference and usability but we think in terms of SEO with nearly everything and Wordpress has proven to be very good if not the best for SEO purposes. It seems to have a faster indexing time across the board than other Blogging platforms.

All right, sounds easy enough right? Well, the act of blogging is simple in its self but just like promoting anything else on the Web your Blog should be submitted to directories, optimized, and establish some authority before others will find it. Especially if its a stand-alone and not linked to your main website.

Social Media…how do you make the connections to your Blog and major Social Media sites and how is this going to help you?

Simply put, what ever you write on your Blog you are going to want to publish a snippet of each article and its URL and syndicate it across the web. Here is a great tool to help you do so…http://www.socialmarker.com. Simply select what articles you want to bookmark and publish on major sites and follow the interface instructions. You can select the “top sites” option to cut down on wasted effort.

This is time consuming at first, but once you get the hang of it you’ll love it and results can be very substantial.

Check back soon I’m going to continue to write about Social Media in greater detail. Maybe one article per site.
Have Fun!

The opportunities for Internet business branding on search engines has really come as a revelation to me in the last couple of years.  It’s such a simple concept, but one that many SEO practitioners and companies don’t understand.  This concept of branding has brought me so much enlightenment in the area of search engine marketing, and helped me to understand my overall purpose as an internet marketer.

Here are a couple of brief definitions of branding just for reference:

“in marketing, the sum total of a company’s value, including products, services, people, advertising, positioning, and culture”

“in marketing, the use of logos, symbols, or product design to promote consumer awareness of goods and services”

We all know the classic branding examples: Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Etc…

But what about branding online? To some extent, we see the same branding efforts online from many of the big companies.  This usually comes in the form of banners, text ads, video sponsorships, etc.  That’s all fine and good.  I don’t question the supreme wisdom of Madison Avenue in this regard.  But what are companies doing to brand on the search engines?

This is obviously an important question as search engines command such a huge amount of traffic and eyeballs.  It would seem like such an obvious place to build brand awareness through higher visibility in search results.  But sadly, so many marketers skip this step and go straight towards the “SEO drug” that so many people are hooked on these days: higher ranking.

I’m full aware of the temptation of purely going after higher rankings, it looks good, it boosts your ego, it’s impressive to show to clients… but it doesn’t always translate into more success in the long run.  SEO is so much more than simply achieving higher rankings.  And I want to point out some of the reasons why that is the case.

Search Engine Branding With Meta Tags

This is talked about quite often in the SEO space, but it is hugely important, and I want to spend some time covering it.  Meta titles and descriptions are very important here.  When you include company names and even tag lines in your Meta tags, you are maximizing your branding potential because that is what people see on the search engines.

Here’s an example for a “Car Insurance” search on Google:

What’s wrong with this picture? Everyone on the page has branded properly in their meta titles and descriptions except for autoinsuranceremedy.com  Have you ever heard of them?  I haven’t.  But I have heard of all the other companies on the page.  Coincidence?… or just poor branding?

Let’s take another example for a local real estate search:

Imagine this as a scenario:  a first time home buyer is considering a purchase 6 months down the road.  They have no idea what to do, and they have been researching for properties in their price range, good real estate agents, and information about the local area.  They happen to use Google on a regular basis, and are doing multiple real estate related searches.  This is where branding can make all the difference in the world. Take a look at the above results.  Who is branding and who isn’t…   Just because a title says La Jolla Real Estate, (which was the search term) doesn’t mean people are going to click it… and even if they do are they ever going to remember who you are?  Of course, you may get lucky, and they might like your site and bookmark it for later.  But the more likely scenario is that they will go right back to Google the next time, and the sites that displayed their brands in the results through meta tags will gain the mind/brand share.

Meta tags play a huge role in this online branding process because that is what people see in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages).

So what did we learn here? Place your name, company name, or site name in your titles and descriptions.  Here are a couple of examples of good use:

You can see that placement tends to be different based on preference.  I personally prefer to have the brand in the front of the title tags on my top level pages and money pages.  And move it to the back on deeper level pages like articles, and product pages.  The point is that you are building brand awareness with every search result that you appear in by placing the brand in the titles and descriptions.

Not Convinced Yet? Ok, here are a couple studies that prove my point:

A report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Nielsen NetRatings suggest that “27 percent (of survey respondents) were more likely to name a specific brand if it was in the top spot of the search results page.” (Sponsored Listings Effectiveness Study, July, 2004).

And again, a report by the Dieringer Resource Group, which surveyed 3,000 respondents regarding their online purchasing habits, found that 60% of the respondents’ brand opinions were changed or enhanced as a result of online research (American Interactive Consumer Survey, June, 2004).

The problem that I’ve found with many SEO consultants is that they don’t come from a marketing background, but from a technical background.  Thus, they can fall into the trap of trying purely to acheive that higher ranking, but not pay as much attention to effective search marketing in terms of results.

I admit that I am still learning how to be a good marketer first, and an SEO second… but understanding how to brand in the search engines has definitely opened my eyes to see a deeper purpose in my SEO efforts.

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Just had the pleasure of interviewing Andrew Shotland, a local search engine optimization expert, and had the opportunity to ask him some local SEO questions. Click the podcast button for the audio version, or read below for the transcript.

 

 Andrew Shotland Podcast Interview: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Hi this is Justin from Searching Solutions, and I have Andrew Shotland on the line with me. He’s a local SEO expert, and I was hoping he could answer a few questions for us. Thank you Andrew for joining us today. If you wouldn’t mind just letting people know what your background is, and what you’re doing right now.

I’ve been in the internet business since the beginning in the mid 90’s. I launched Showtime network’s first website, and I worked for NBC for many years and worked for NBC.com for a while. For the last several years, I’ve been doing search engine optimization consulting, and I worked for a local startup called Insiderpages.com where I did a lot of local search engine optimization. So I worked for some big media companies, a lot of startups and a lot of small businesses who were looking for local search help.

What would you say your percentage of clients are that are more focused on localized search… I know your blog is pretty much all local SEO.

I’d say it’s probably about 50/50, but more and more even big media clients are sort of getting it. For example, right now I’m doing a project for a lot of big television stations, and they think of themselves as local, but they never really thought of themselves as candidates for local search, and now that we’re having these conversations with them, it’s opening up their eyes to all this local traffic that they’ve ignored.

So their thinking more in terms of building a national brand awareness, and things like that? Instead of localized searches basically?

They’re thinking of very specific local searches. There not as much interested in national awareness. They have all this content and programming on their site, but they never think to try to rank for keywords like ‘Oprah’. They are really focused on news, traffic, weather, and classifieds. They’ve never thought until recently that there was traffic outside of those things. Be it Yellowpages, event searches, restaurant reviews, etc. A lot of these companies have very authoritative and trusted websites, and don’t really need to do a lot to rank well for these niche terms.

You have unique experience coming from Insiderpages.com. One of the questions I had was: You constantly see in localized searches these big authoritative directory type websites like Superpages.com, Yellowpages.com, etc. What are you finding that it takes for the smaller guy that’s trying to rank well in those local searches? What is it typically taking to rank well above those?

It’s not as hard as you’d think. I’m constantly amazed when I see some startup kicking a$$ over the yellowpages.com or superpages.com type of websites. Those sites have a lot of trust, but they haven’t been especially good at getting people to generate content. They’ve gotten better with their architecture, but they’re still very slow moving in adding new stuff. For example, when I was at Insiderpages, we talked to Superpages a lot about “hey, can we share reviews with you” We wanted to share our reviews all over the place. They kept saying, we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it, but it took 2 years to just add reviews because they had so many mine fields to navigate before they did that. But if you look at a site like Yellowbot, which came out of nowhere last year, they were able to quickly launch a generic IYP (Internet Yellow Pages) and use some really creative architecture mostly around the idea of niche local tagging to start getting all these crazy niche local searches which … you know… sites like Yellowpages.com, they’re just not there. So I’ve seen a lot of start ups be able to instantly dominate these big IYPs because they’re more flexible, they’re faster, and they’re more focused. So for example, You have a site in… where are you located?

Castle Rock Colorado, just below Denver

Ok, so if you wanted to create a Denver local search site, I can pretty much guarantee, if you just work at it for a couple months, you could start to outrank DEX for a lot of searches. Because you’ll focus. You’ll get a lot of people in Denver linking to you, you’ll get a lot of content created, whereas, they’re trying to do 20 million different things.

Yeah, I’ve definitely seen that in our local market. I was just curious to see what your perspective was on it because that seems like some of the primary competition. Especially for your medium sized markets… between 50,000 - 100,000 residents. There’s not a lot of competition there, but the main competition seems to be these big authoritative type hubs.

Yeah, if you wanted to create a local search product, for small towns all over the place, it could do really well. Even just… think about architecturally, a yellowpages.com or superpages, they need to focus on the biggest markets. So if you focused on instead of the top 50 markets, the bottom 50 markets, you’d have all those markets prioritized in your architecture.

I wanted to talk about the long tail just for a minute. You know it’s a very common term in the SEO industry… but moving it over to localized search, for the small business owner… Most of the small business owners I talk to… you know, you have a local plumber that’s in the Denver area, and they’re just thinking in terms of trying to rank for phrases like ” Denver Colorado Plumber”. And they’re totally not thinking about long tail type searches, and they’re just not even considering the possibility. Do you think there’s value for small businesses to move in that direction and work on some of these long tail phrases? Keeping mind that there’s not a lot of search volume for those types of phrases, but do you think there is some value there?

Oh for sure. First off, to get back to your previous question, I think the small business owner has the biggest advantage when it comes to competing and ranking in these pages. Because ultimately that’s the content that Google wants to show you. The guy that can actually do your plumbing, not the page that aggregates 20 people who can do your plumbing. Which is just kind of a repeat of Google’s search results. I think for small local companies, just focus on SEO a bit, and you will see dramatic results. Because, they are so much more favored. They have a lot more relevant links to them usually, and they just have a lot more interesting relevant content created.

So I think, in your plumber example, I think they can get a lot of bang out of long tail because many times, long tail keywords are much more qualified people. I’d rather have someone for me, looking for… let’s say… “leaky toilet in Denver”, then “Denver plumber”. Because it’s just a much more qualified searcher, and they certainly know what they want. It definitely couldn’t hurt. This is always the challenge, it takes a little bit of work and research to just figure this stuff out, and figure out where is the relevant search volume in the market, and can I first rank for that, meaning I have to create content for it and build links to it, and then, can I service it and turn it into a lead. But I think that the smart local guy will do the same things that the big sites are doing just on a smaller scale.

One more quick question before I let you go. If you could speak directly to that local business owner. Everyone knows the economy is tighter, and business budgets are pretty tight, but what would be a couple real practical tips you’d give to the business owner that may not be the most technically savvy type of a person, where they could really improve their rankings without too much of an investment.

A lot of it’s the basics. Look at your title tags first. That’s always the first thing, and best thing to do. And make sure you get content on the page that targets specific terms you want to rank for. Make sure that you have your phone number on every page. And that’s not for SEO, that’s for getting people to call you. And it couldn’t hurt to have email me, or a contact form on every page as well in big letters… so many companies don’t do that. Certainly try to get local links from your local chamber of commerce, and friends, partners, things like that.

But the thing that I’ve found that is the biggest bang for the buck is looking in your analytics, and most web packages, even cheap ones, have some kind of analytics that they can get access to, and most businesses don’t really look at these things, but if you can get access to your charts… here’s how many people you’ve got this month from Google, or Yahoo, and here are the keywords they used to get to you. If you take a look at that, And look at the keywords that are sending traffic, then go to Google and search for them and see where you rank, getting an approximation of where you rank… and if you rank let’s say, at the bottom of page one or page two, That’s a sign that that keyword is pretty good for you if you’re getting traffic for it. So I would recommend figuring out which page is sending that traffic for that keyword, and boost your internal links to that page for that keyword, with the keyword as the anchor text. I’ve found that it works for big sites, small sites, and it works really fast, which is great.

That’s a great tip. Thank you so much, and thank you for taking the time to give this interview.

For more information about Andrew Shotland you can view his page on Local Search Optimization at LocalSEOGuide.com

Thanks again Andrew!

Just got finished with a podcast interview with Drew Myers from Zillow. Check it out:

If you have ever done any searches for SEO related terms, you have probably seen seobook.com at one time or another. It is a great website with volumes of information on search engine marketing and optimization. One of things Aaron has spent so much time on, and one of the most popular features of the site are his SEO tools. If you’ve never been introduced to these tools, you’re missing out…

Here is a brief rundown.

http://tools.seobook.com

First, visit the above address to check out some of what he has to offer. Currently, the best tools are the Keyword Suggestion Tool, SEO For Firefox, and Rank Checker.

Keyword Suggestion Tool

There is no other place on the internet that pools the data like Aaron’s tool does. And that is why I like it so much. Sure, I have a wordtracker and keyword discovery account, and they are helpful in their own ways, but I always use this tool first when doing preliminary searches. Make sure to check it out!

SEO Firefox

This 2nd tool called SEO for Firefox is one of my favorite tools of all time. It is super easy to use, and provides great data.

As you can see from the example, it integrates data directly into your results. Most notably, it shows how many links are coming in to the page, and some other valuable data like domain age, PR, DMOZ links, and more. If you use Firefox as your primary browser, I highly suggest this tool.

Rank Checker

This last tool is the latest invention from seobook. It’s another Firefox add-on that checks the ranking for certain URLs and keeps track of historical data. I haven’t had alot of experience with it yet as it didn’t work at all on one of my computers (Google ranking always refused to show up), but overall it’s worked great. For whatever reason, I have never found a great ranking tool that gives historical data, and is easy to use. There are many out there, and this tool comes pretty close, but I remain on my quest to find that perfect rank checking tool.

So, I hope you’re able to check out some of these great tools. You don’t have to be an expert to get your feet wet in SEO, and some of these tools from http://tools.seobook.com can definitely help. Have Fun!

Search Marketing Regulations

The search marketing industry, in large, doesn’t necessarily function according to a certain list of regulations or enforced standards. Sure if you are blatantly violating Google’s standards by spamming, cloaking, sneaky redirects or any other “black-hat” SEO method, watch out, there could be penalties!

But, on the home front, this industry is relatively new and evolving so quickly that there are no official “codes of conduct” being strictly enforced or regulated at this time. To implement any type of regulatory agency would call for a massive effort by many and could take a long time before any real results became evident.

However, SEO’s and others are under the shadow of the search engine giants, they set the standards and regulate to some extent, what takes place in the SEO world. Tick someone off at Google and good luck!

Do standards need to be implemented?

Here at Searching Solutions we hold a strong view that Search Marketing shouldn’t be a heavily regulated industry. Why? First of all, Searching Solutions is a “real” business that operates on core sets of business values which supersede any standards out there! Even if there were strong regulations out there, just like any other business there will always be those who violate them!

Furthermore, SEO and Internet Marketing is so vast, so intricate so much more like an art form than a practice, it would be extremely difficult to regulate. As a result, your market would become like a Government agency and take months to see results if strong standards were introduced.

How We Operate

Searching Solutions strives to win consumer trust and achieve real results. We do this by working directly with businesses; we get to know your business inside and out! We are locally based in Colorado and if at all feasible, we will come to you and meet face-to-face! That would be a little difficult for those based in India or elsewhere.

Our Credentials

Who can offer professional SEO credentials? As of now, nobody! Don’t be fooled. As a business, our goals are consumer trust, real results and satisfaction always! If we can’t achieve these we may as well shut the doors. We avoid “cookie cutter” methods because every business is different so don’t expect a “package deal” with us, you deserve a deeper strategy than that. In short, we base our degree of professionalism and credentials on real results! Check out our case studies and see for yourself!