Website, SEO, Social Marketing and other tips and tricks

I vividly remember the moment I figured this out – I was sipping my Grande Skinny Vanilla Starbucks Latte trying to figure out how to deal with the latest search engine algorithym change when it hit me:  Google employees are not jerks sitting around thinking up ways to make our life miserable every six weeks by changing the criterea in which we must perform for keyword rankings – they are simply focusing on their business plan!

You’re probably wondering what in the world I’m talking about – but the answer is so freaking simple that it was annoying! 

1. Search Engines all have the same business plan:  To gain/maintain/obtain market share of HUMANS who search the internet for … well, everything.
2. How do they gain market share or maintain it?:  By producing the most relevant results, no matter what odd combination of words we type into the little box.  You know what I’m talking about!  We all have our favorite search engine because it thinks like we do and we don’t have to go through ten pages to find what we’re asking for!
3. Still wondering where I’m going with this?  That means – THINK SMALL.  RANK BIG.  One website can not rank well for every keyword because the Search Engines refuse to allow that – obviously your one site is only going to answer a handful of questions really well – and they want to keep it that way.  One obvious example of how true this is – Quality Scoring on PPC – it doesn’t matter how much you’re willing to pay for a keyword any more – if you are not relevant, your score will be low and you will be at the bottom of the sponsored listings or not listed at all.
4. So how do you relate this revelation to your marketing plan?  Analyze what your current site ranks on well organically and then make a list of keywords that are your goal to rank on well …
5. Then take that list of goal keywords and build microsites that focus directly on that topic.  If you rank well on Branson Vacations, but you want to rank well on Branson Group Vacations – then build a microsite that caters to groups with specific content, photos, video and user interface that addresses that topic.  Your site will rank well quickly with a low bounce rate.
6. This does NOT mean that you get to stop paying attention to the cyber geek blogs that let you know the algorithym changes.  This means that you can stay one step ahead, understand why they are making the changes and be aggressive with your approach to adopting their changes as they occur.

Now that I’ve told you one of the most valuable insights that has ever occured to me over a cup of overpriced java, here’s the rest of my ranting on SEO.

SEO = Silly Excuse to Overreact

Yes, SEO is beyond important…. but so many of you have no idea what this actually means, where to start, who to trust, etc… that you are paying selfish idiots lots of money to do absolutely nothing for you.  How many times a week do you get the email from the infomercial companies that GUARANTEE to get you top placement within six weeks on any keyword?  They lie.  Even more important – they could use “black market” tactics to improve your rankings that if you ever get caught you will be in the pits of hell with the search engines because they will place your site in a black hole that will never see the light of day.   Here’s some things to help get you started:

• Get with your Web Guru and ask them the following questions on a regular basis:  How many pages do we have indexed in each of the search engines?  How many of our pages have duplicate page titles, meta descriptions and tags?  Are any of our pages in “frames”?

The number of pages that the search engines have indexed is very important for your rankings.  If they are missing pages or there are errors in the pages they have indexed, then get on your guru and have them update their site maps.

Page Titles – Each page on your site should have a unique page title that accurately depicts the topic of that page.

Meta Descriptions – This desciption is extremely important and every single page should have a unique description.  This information is the “advertisement” for that page and will be the short description that shows up for your organic search results on each of the different engines.

Meta Tags – Try not to have more than 6 tags per page, but this is an old school way of telling the web crawling spiders the most important topics on your page and the keywords you are trying to rank on.

• Photos/Video – Do all of your photos have alt tags behind them?  Web crawlers are actual programs themselves – they can’t “see” anything, so if you do not have an alt tag on all of your photos then they don’t know that they are there!  Avoid putting alt tags on design elements or graphics – it is a waste of time and users don’t want descriptions popping up all over the page when they are moving their mouse around.  Video – upload your video on Google Videos or YouTube and then Embed using the code provided – this is great for your SEO and makes the process less bulky for the user, they don’t have to download any applications to watch your videos – they can just click and play without any fuss. 
• Internal Links – inside your copy make sure that you are linking in the content to the specific internal pages that are relevant.  Don’t overlink and make your copy hard to read but if you are writing about the fact that the area beaches are fantastic with plenty of things to do then link from the word beach to the page on you site that lists all of the beaches, has photos and references for the activities – make sense?
• External Links – Know how many sites are linking back to your site and what anchor text are they using when they link to you?  Anchor text is what the user actually clicks on in order to get to your site.  For example, if you make the word “beach” link to your website then you are giving relevancy to the word “beach” and your website and the search engines understand this.  Simply letting your advertisers link to you by anchoring with “Click HERE” is unacceptable – especially if you are paying.  Tell them to use the following code to be able to link to your site:

<a href=”http://www.yourwebsiteaddress.com”>The Relevant Keyword that you want them to use as your anchor text</a>