Over the years, we have worked with some of the world’s largest online media companies such as Forbes.com and CNET Networks who are widely considered leading sources of information within their respective subject matters. Both entities have achieved “authority” status with the search engines and thus are typically “crawled” deeper and more often than smaller sites with similar information.  Not surprisingly, they also find it much easier than the average Joe to rank for more competitive search terms.

If you think about it, it makes perfect sense for Google to want to be there when Forbes breaks a story on say, a trading scandal… or when CNET breaks a story on the first review of the latest, soon to be released tech gadget.

As a basic rule of thumb, you should only optimize an individual web page for 2-3 search terms.  Depending on the depth of your site, this may be a limiting factor in your ability to gain valuable market share on the search engines.

As you research keywords for your existing web pages you will undoubtedly come across an extraordinary amount of derivative search terms that you simply don’t have the room to accommodate on your current web pages.  Or perhaps you have developed a substantial list of keywords for your paid search initiatives, but again… you lack the pages to implement them into your SEO strategy.  You might also want to purchase access to competitive research applications like Spyfu, Keycompete, or Compete.com to see what terms are referring traffic to your competitors websites.  Whichever way you find the new keywords, the idea is to create a list of relevant keyword phrases that you do not have room to accommodate on your existing pages.

Once you’ve isolated the new keywords, try to group the terms into logical buckets.  From there, use a keyword analysis tool like Wordtracker or Wordbutler to see how many people search for the terms your considering.  Once you’ve completed this step, you can then determine which buckets (and related pages) have the most market potential.  That’s basically it… your off and writing content and on your way toward bigger, better organic search traffic volumes.

With a little creativity and some elbow grease, there are always opportunities to organize and leverage content to increase search engine traffic. There are unique opportunities to leverage vertical market specific content to exponentially increase organic search engine traffic. This is achieved by creating content around specific categories of information that enable you to target a large number of keywords. So go ahead, get outside the box and think long and hard about the content that your target audience is most interested in.  Chances are that the search engines will reward you for your efforts.

When most customers start down the SEO path, with an agency, they don’t have the search engine rankings they desire so they spend time admiring and often studying what their competitors are doing. Months later when firms, like this one, have helped them achieve their rankings they forget that other firms with other clients are just waiting in the wings to knock them off their rankings pedestal.

Maintenance should be the further extension of an already successful SEO campaign. The process of SEO never ends it only matures and reformulates itself into new projects. This concept is very hard for many clients to grasp because they usually have achievable short term goals and once those goals are achieved many businesses are content to try and maintain their success.

However, when proper maintenance is performed, it will reveal new and more often than not, interesting incremental SEO growth opportunities for customers once they begin to grasp the concepts that their specific SEO firm endorses.

SEO and social media have also begun to strongly complement each other in the online marketing world. Performing tasks like reputation management, brand optimization and awareness, and public relations have all become part of many larger SEO maintenance campaigns.

In short, once you get where you want to be with your SEO campaigns, continue to try and figure out what your next steps will be. Maintenance can either be a challenging battle to try and maintain what you have already achieved or it can become a continuous driver for new and future SEO success.

Roderick Ioerger is a fulltime internet marketing consultant and strategist for ioergercreative.com. Roderick resides in ever-sunny Phoenix, AZ with his wife Jillian and their two dogs Snoopy and Grover.

Search Engine Basics:

The relevancy algorithms that determine search engine rankings consider two types of factors in deciding who ranks where; “on page” and “off page” factors. On page factors consider the placement of Keywords within the HTML of your pages including Title Tags, Keywords in Document Text, Meta Keywords, Meta Descriptions, Header tags, etc. The two most heavily weighted “on page” factors include title tags and visible document text. Off page factors are related to quantity and quality of the web pages that link to your site from external sources. For the purpose of this document, we will focus on “on page” factors.

Before You Write Your Article:

Once you’ve determined the subject matter for your article, it may be beneficial to spend some time brainstorming the terms that you feel your readers would be likely to use if they were searching for content related to your article. Create a quick list of terms and visit Wordtracker or Trellian’s Keyword Discovery to determine how many people search for the terms you’ve selected. In addition to providing data regarding the number of searches that took place during the previous month for the selected keyword, the tool also offers suggestions for related terms. Although we do not suggest that you force these terms into the content of your articles, it is crucial to include these terms in your article if you are to rank for the term on the Search Engines.

Title Tags:

The most important and heavily weighted “on page” factor is the title tag. Search Engines use title tags to determine the topic of your page, and weigh this factor heavily in determining the ranking of your page in their search results. The words in the title tag often appear in the clickable link on the search engine results pages.

In HTML code, the title tag specifies the title of your Web page. It is the code which is inserted into the header of your web page that appears in the top bar of your Web browser. Generally, the Meta description and Meta keyword tags follow a title tag although the order in which they appear is not critical.

The HTML code for a title tag looks like this:

Writing Optimized Content for Online Media Publishers

Many Content Management Systems use templates to generate article level pages dynamically. As such, we generally suggest that you use your article titles for your title tags.

Article Content:

Although the title tag is critical to the search engine optimization process, it is not likely that you will create your article title before you write your article. In most cases, you should find all the information you need to write an effective title within the article you’ve just written. Simply choose the most relevant keyword phrases that the copy was based on, and write a compelling title tag accordingly. The optimal approach when writing copy for Search Engines is to think of the main phrases that best reflects your subject matter, and then compose the text around them. When you write your title tag, you simply revisit these same phrases, and compose your keyword-rich title accordingly.

In some cases, it may make sense to incorporate keywords within your title that do not appear within your article. Although the title tag is given a lot of weight in the engines, your changes of ranking will be optimal if the term appears both in the title tag and body content of your article.

Let’s talk keyword rankings for a minute, shall we? There are plenty of software applications on the Internet that can scrape the engines and tell you where you rank for as many keywords you would like (my personal favorite is IBP by Axandra). For obvious reasons, the engines frown on this. In case it’s not obvious, it’s because it skews their search statistics and eats up unnecessary bandwidth. I’m sure there are other reasons, but let’s leave it at that.

So, despite my sometimes obsessive need to measure, I’m really not a big fan of checking rankings all the time and using that as a proxy to determine the overall effectiveness of a search engine optimization campaign. Don’t get me wrong, ranking matter. It’s just that you shouldn’t be obsessed with a ranking to the point that you have a melt down when you go from #2 to #6 for a period of time for a “high value” keyword term. There are literally hundreds of variables to consider as to why that might be the case. Keep in mind Google alone has more than a hundred data centers that display results to different users. It’s quite possible for Mary to see a #2 ranking for keyword X in Maryland while Jim Bob in Texas sees #5 on Google for the same term at exactly the same point in time. Why? Different data centers are displaying results. Or perhaps Jim Bob is logged into his Google account and is seeing personalized search results based on his perceived search preferences.

So, the moral of the story is… just chill man. Slow and steady wins the SEO race. OK, so if I’m saying don’t be so anal on rankings then what would I suggest you focus on to measure the success of your SEO campaign? How about tracking the number of referring search terms that generated traffic to your site on a month to month and year over year basis? How about analyzing trends in organic search engine referrals?

If I had a nickel for every time a client or colleague has come to me with, “Hey man… my rankings are slipping! What should we do about it?” I’d well… I’d still be working, but I’d drive a nicer car. In many of those same instances, I would ask the inquiring mind questions like… “Well, how if your overall overall search engine traffic? Are you seeing any alarming downward trends in overall organic search traffic? How many keywords have referred traffic to your site recently? Any alarming trends there?”

All that said, below is an abbreviated list of things I think you should monitor on a semi-regular basis to make sure your SEO initiatives are on track. Items listed in descending order of importance.

1. Overall Organic Search Engine Traffic (Weekly, Monthly, YoY)
2. Number of Keywords Referring Search Engine Traffic ((Weekly, Monthly, YoY)
3. Number of Pages indexed by Google, Yahoo and MSN (site:mydomain.com) (track monthly)
4. Number of Backlinks according to Yahoo (linkdomain:mydomain.com)
5. Headaches averted by not running daily ranking checks on your top-level keyword targets.
6. If you must, run ranking reports on a monthly basis, but keep in mind that search engines are fluid and dynamic and ranking reports are a snapshot in time.

The concept is a simple one. Whenever someone places an order on your site, ask them to link to you if they own a website. Pretty awesome idea, leveraging your customer base to build links, but one that seo’s don’t consider all that often. At the bottom of your order confirmation page and/or within your order confirmation email, politely ask your customer to link to you if possible.

“Thank you for your order from Widgetco - we strive to ship orders by 4pm each business day.

If you have any comments or suggestions for us, please reply to this email. We value your feedback.

If you happen to have a blog or a website of your own, please consider placing a link to www.widgetco.com - Every link helps!

Thank you again for your order!

Kindest Regards,
The WidgetCo Staff
**********************************

One of Rand’s more diligent commentators added some great value to the post in pointing out that merchants could modify the request to provide an incentive to link back to you.

“If you happen to have a blog or a website of your own, please consider placing a link to. If you do,reply to this email and let us know, and we’ll credit your account a portion of this purchase”

Simple as that folks. Assuming you provide quality products and/or a good service, Who better than your customers to obtain links from. If you follow up orders with phone calls, train your customer service staff to ask customers - at least the happy ones - to link to your site if they can. The link juice and potential referral traffic will be well worth the effort.

If you have any similar head smacking ideas… leave a comment here and we’ll join Rand in his quest to turn his forehead completely red.

Thanks for reading and may your rankings rise rapidly!

I often tell clients that proper on-page optimization should be an ongoing process. We’ll begin with that end in mind, but in this series of posts - yes, there will be others - we’ll start with the beginning stages of the on-page search engine optimization process and how you can leverage analytics to get your SEO project started off on solid footing.

Before you start optimizing your site…

I find it absolutely mind-boggling that most SEO firms head straight to keyword analysis without gaining an understanding of what’s already working on a website. Instead, they map out the site and start performing keyword research to discover which terms are most suitable for each of the web pages they’re analyzing.

Here’s a thought… before you rush to implement the terms that get the most searches while maintaining some threshold of relevancy, why not consider the search terms that are already working? I don’t know about you, but I think it’s pretty damn important to consider keywords that the search engines have already determined are relevant to your web pages and consider enhancing that as well? In other words, shouldn’t you consider keywords that are already ranking and generating traffic as you select appropriate keyword terms for your web pages? If you don’t take this approach, you may very well be taking a giant step backward in your quest to gain more visibility on the engines.

Step 1: Set up or access your Web Analytics

Most companies are using web analytics these days. If you’re not, Google Analytics is free and easy to implement and it provides the basic data you need to gain insight into your website’s performance. For the purpose of this exercise, we’ll assume you have at least 3-6 months of data to work with. If not, implement Google Analytics today so you can leverage this data in a few months. You can work with a shorter date range of data, but obviously the more data you have the more statistically significant your findings will be.

Step 2: Export search data

Most web analytics applications enable users to export data. If you are using Google Analytics… log in >>> select “view reports” >>> select “traffic sources” >>> select “keywords”. This will take you to a screen that shows you the top keywords that have referred traffic to your site in the past 30 days. You can adjust the date range in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Adjust the date range to display data for the past year (or shorter if you don’t have a years worth of data). Under the graph on the left hand side there are three options to view the search data; total (paid and non-paid search traffic), paid, and non-paid. Select “non-paid”. At the bottom of the page you will see a drop down list labeled “Show Rows:”. The default value is 10. Change this to 500. Now, on the upper left hand corner of the page, you’ll notice a button labeled “Export”. Click on the Export button and select the “CSV” option. This will export the data into a format that you can use MSExcel to manipulate. If you have more than 500 keyword terms, simply navigate to the subsequent page(s) of results and repeat the process as necessary.

Step 3: Run a Ranking Report

Now that you’ve extracted your keyword data from your analytics software, simply run a ranking report on all of the terms that have generated organic search engine traffic to your website and note which pages are ranking for which search terms on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Depending on how many search terms you’re dealing with, it may be reasonable to do this manually. In most cases though, it’s probably not a bad idea to invest in ranking software that automates this process. I recommend IBP from Axandra. It will automatically check your rankings on each of the terms you specify and tell you which URLs (if any) on your site are ranking for those terms. You can also export the ranking report data to MSExcel.

Step 4: Compile a Pre-keyword Analysis Report

Armed with this data, you can now create an MSExcel spreadsheet listing each of the URLs that you intend to optimize along with the search terms that the pages are currently ranking for and how much traffic those terms have generated over the date range you specified in your analytics software. Pretty slick, right. You are now in the position to make sure that you (or your SEO firm) are not going to unintentionally overwrite what’s already working for you.

Step 5: Read my next post… Leveraging Analytics for SEO - Part II

In my next post, I will cover other sources of data that can and should be included in the keyword selection process. I hope you found this useful and encourage your feedback if you have questions or something you’d like to contribute to the conversation.

Anyway, the basic premise is that there’s actually a pretty simple process to achieve indented listings… 2 fer 1 style! When you achieve an indented listing, it will roughly double your visitor counts from the search term. Assuming the indented listing is on the first page… you’ll also be blocking out one of your competitors. Not a bad deal in exchange for a little elbow grease.

The gist…

1. select a term that you’re already ranking for on Google.
2. create a new page that’s optimized for the same term of the ranking page.
3. cross-link the pages.

If you site is a blog, just substitute “page” for “post”. Andy also points out that you may have a related tag page that you could use instead of creating a new related page.

I haven’t tried this yet, but I’m convinced that it’s worth trying. Anyone out there tried this yet? Has it worked for you?

The most commonly agreed upon factors are Alexa ranking, Robots.txt excluded page, domain authority (in quality of backlinks), page relevance and the number of links. The most controversial factors are TLD, type of links, domain authority (in PageRank), domain authority (in rankings on irrelevant keywords) and target page location. The most important factors are Robots.txt excluded page, Anchor Text, link is on penalized page, page authority (inbound links), domain authority (in quality of backlinks), amount of outbound links on a page, total amount of links on a page, age of domain, relevant authority (in rankings on relevant keywords) and Javascript link.

Anchor Text:
This is the text that is placed in the hyperlink to your website. Commonly people link to you with your company name or domain name and not necessarily relevant keywords that will help you rank better. It is important to have links to your website with relevant Anchor Text. You do need to be careful though when purchasing links because if you only acquire links with the same Anchor Text it can be detected by the algorithm as being unnatural and it can actually hurt your ability to rank. You want to make sure you are targeting your keyword phrases but using variations of Anchor Text to create a more natural allocation of Anchor Text links pointing to your website. It is also thought that the words that surround the link to your website also create value for that same link.

Age of the Link:
The age of both the link on a website and the age of the website the link is placed on are important. There seems to be a sandbox like effect that prevents a new link from having value after an introductory period and then at some point it starts to gain value again and slowly gains value over time. There is nothing like an old link on a powerful site and there is a reason why it is harder to displace old popular websites. A website doesn’t have to work as hard for their rankings if they have links that are very old. Although, that shouldn’t deter you from competing with them because those types of companies are usually complacent about their linking strategies and it can be easier to sneak up on them and outrank them before they realize that they need to be link building all the time.

Type of Link (Image, Text):
There seems to be differing opinions on the difference in value of a text link from an alt text link in an image. It is agreed that both links have value but more experts believe a text link has more value. I wouldn’t be surprised if they both carried the same value though.

Number of Links:
A common question of the difference between the value of sitewide links and one or a few links from the same domain. Sitewide links don’t carry much value anymore. They can help get your website indexed better in the search engines but they shouldn’t be used to help you rank better specifically.

Location of Link on a Page:
The search engines are able to detect where a link is on a page and have assigned different values based upon this ability. A link located within body content and surrounded by relevant text will always be more powerful than a link in the footer or side bar of the same page.

Reciprocity:
Trading links used to be the most common way to build links to increase your rankings. These days you should only trade links on a limited basis and only with relevant websites. It is natural for websites to link to each other in a specific industry but you don’t want to go overboard though because the more you link out the less powerful your website becomes.

Target Page (where the link points to) Location:
Many websites will only try to get links to their homepage because the homepage is usually where they are trying to rank for the best keyword phrases and the link juice trickles down from there to the rest of the website. You do want links to your homepage but the key is to always create a natural link allocation throughout your website. It is very important to get links to your category, sub-category and product/service level pages. A website without deep links will never reach it’s full potential of search engine rankings.

Page Authority (in inbound links):
This is one of the primary factors that tends to be overlooked. Most people look at the website itself and not the particular page a link is placed on. A page that has many links pointing to it can be very valuable because it is telling the search engines that this page is an authority on the topic. If you get a link from an authority and the content is relevant to yours it will have a tremendous impact on your rankings. There is a little trick to determining what page is most powerful on a website. Just do an indexing search in Yahoo for that domain, so “site:www.thedomainname.com”, and the page that ranks directly below the homepage will be the most powerful. There is also a different level of value for links placed on a homepage or another page of the website. I believe it is much more valuable to get a link from a powerful sub-page than the homepage, even if the homepage has more backlinks.

Amount of Outbound Links on a Page:
Every extra link on a page decreases the value of all the other outgoing links on the page. I would avoid acquiring a link on a page if there are a large amount of outgoing links already present.

Page Authority (in internal links):
There is definitely more value from a link on a page that is linked to from many pages on it’s own website. The more internal and external backlinks the better.

Relevance of Other Outbound Links:
The other outbound links on a page or website will effect the value of your link. It is always better if their outbound links are also relevant to your website. What can be potentially dangerous is who the website is linking to and if they are considered to be part of a good neighborhood of websites. You never want to be associated with a website that spams the web and/or is considered a link farm. The algorithms consider association based upon links between websites and they group websites into neighborhoods and you want to try and stay in a good neighborhood as much as you can. If you can place your website in a neighborhood of authority websites that can have a tremendous impact on your rankings. Although that would require getting links from other authority websites in your industry which can be very difficult.

Page Relevance (contextual relevance):
It is always a good idea to get links from contextually relevant pages but their value is not what it may become in the future. We know Google is considering Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) as a way to determine how contextual content relates to one another but it doesn’t seem to be an important factor of their algorithm at this time. Although in the future everyone expects the search engines to get smarter in this area and it may be a very important factor and as such should certainly be a consideration when building links.

Quality of Other Outbound Links:
Co-citation can be very powerful. It only makes sense that if your link is surrounded by links to authority websites that the algorithm will have to consider your website an authority on the same subject matter. If links to authority websites don’t currently exist on a page that you’re purchasing a link on, it would be a great idea if you included one with your link to be placed next to it.

Page Authority (in PageRank):
There is value in links from a page or website that has high PageRank but it isn’t the most important factor anymore. Determining the actual PageRank can be difficult because the tool to detect PageRank isn’t updated very often and there is always a value associated with a website and page even if the tool doesn’t display one. Also there are many high PR websites that have a history of selling links and they won’t provide value to your linking efforts.

Domain Authority (in quality of backlinks):
The trust of a website related to the quality of it’s backlinks is very important. You always want to look at a websites backlinks to see who is linking to them.

Age of Domain:
If a website has existed for a long time and the content hasn’t drastically changed then links from that website will generally be considered more valuable.

Relevant Authority (in rankings on relevant keywords):
It is not believed that this factor alone influences the power of a link from that website. Although, the ranking of that website for the same keyword you want to target can certainly be an indication that a link from their website will help you rank for that same keyword. The factors are for other reasons rather than their ranking alone though.

Domain Relevance:
It certainly can’t hurt if the website is related to your own website. Although there is no indication that it effects ranking power at this time. This is another area where it may have greater influence on the link juice as the algorithms become more advanced. If anything, the strongest value of domain relevance is in conversion from the link because the users are likely to be your customers as well.

TLD (.com, .edu, etc.):
There seems to be more value in a link from a .edu and a .gov because it is much more difficult to receive those links unless they are very relevant. The algorithm may be smart enough though to eliminate the value of a link from a URL that contains a “~” on a .edu domain. That is a common variable used for personal pages on .edu websites and is much easier to acquire a link from.

Alexa Ranking:
This is one of those things that makes us cringe when a client brings it up. The Alexa ranking can be indicative of the popularity of the website but shouldn’t be something that is closely monitored. The ranking can be very skewed, especially if a website ranks higher than 1,000. Their rankings are only determined by people that use their toolbar and that is something that you should strongly consider when looking at Alexa rank at all.

Robots.txt Excluded Page:
If the algorithm can’t see the link then it obviously won’t help you. Always make sure that the page is indexed within Google and the other engines.

Javascript Link:
If the link can be read than it will carry the same value as any other link on the page.

Paid Link Triggers:
If a TLA code, a PPP code or a phrase such as “sponsored link section” is present then that link will carry less value than it used to. Google has been focusing heavily on this for some time now and it is believed they are now detecting these things and preventing them from helping the websites they are linking to.

These are the major factors that influence the value of a link. They should all be considered during a linking campaign. Many of these factors will always effect the link in the same way and others will change over time. You need to stay on top of the industry to know when changes happen because they will happen and sometimes they will have a major impact on your rankings.

Having a website write about your products or services and link to your website provides the most effective link to increase your rankings. The common method of acquiring a link of this nature is through press release distribution. Unfortunately, this is also the most difficult link to acquire because your product or service needs to be news worthy in order to be written about on a website that is actually worth getting a link from. You also may need to have some that is dedicated to PR at your firm in order to make sure your press release is picked up by the major publishers of the Internet. There are press release distribution services out there but there is nothing like having someone dedicated to this task either in-house or out-sourced from an agency.

There are ways to acquire links by press release distribution that are easier but you will only get links from websites that won’t provide the same type of quality as the major publishers. One of the most common methods is getting links from Blogs. Blog writers are always looking for things to write about and many will write a post about your products or services for a reasonable fee. The quality of the Blog is important though and you should really look at who links to them and how often they link out to commercial websites to determine how effective a link will be from their Blog.

Another excellent method of acquiring backlinks is by turning your website into a resource that people want to link to. The easiest method of doing this is to create a Blog on your website and to Blog often about your industry. You can submit your Blog to many directories that will also push your content out to other websites on the Internet. Make sure you link to other pages of your website in the posts and link to other great resources on the Internet. You can also add valuable content to your website as static pages and not Blog content. There are easier ways of promoting your content through Blog posts but it isn’t necessary because great website content will be found and linked to naturally. The key is to add as much great content to your website as you can and you can’t go wrong.

The best method of Link Building is the tried and true method of finding websites related to your business and having them link to you within their content. This method has been used since Google was created and is still the most important method of acquiring links. The key to this method is finding the right websites to link to you in the most effective manner. You need to search Google and find websites that have content about your industry. The best websites have valuable content that other people link to and you should check to see if what types of backlinks they have. If I find a page that discusses one of my clients products and many people are linking to it, I will pay a significant amount of money for the website to add custom content to the page and link to my clients website with a few different links. The trick is finding this valuable content on a website that will actually be willing to link to you and that is not an easy task, in fact is very time consuming which makes this method of link building difficult. Hiring someone or a company that is very experienced in doing this can go a long way to bring your website to the top of the search engines.