Microsites, or, How to win at SEO

OK, so stating Microsites are a way to ‘win’ at SEO is a little over the top, but once you read on, you’ll realise the potential of Microsites.

As most people know, ranking a website for a particular key phrase/s that isn’t relevant to your URL is sometimes rather difficult.  It can certainly be done over time, if you remain patient, and continue to follow some basic SEO fundamentals.  But, there is a much better, simpler, and quicker way to drive traffic from the key terms that are competitive in your market.

Microsites

To most SEOs, the term Microsites will not be new.  Here is an example of a microsite, and it’s usage within the highly competitive Electricity Suppliers market.  Most of the players in the electrical suppliers market spend thousands on both SEO and PPC to drive traffic and then sales through their websites.

As an example, we are going to look further into the company called GoSwitch.  GoSwitch is an online portal for people to research a range of utilities providers. In their own words:

GoSwitch.com.au is Australia’s leading price comparison service for electricity and gas.

We brought together some of the leading members of the Internet community to bring transparency to the electricity and gas markets to allow consumers to find a cheaper electricity and gas supplier and switch to it for free

GoSwitch made the decision to invest in a marketing strategy that included web design, SEO, and PPC.  There are numerous key phrases related to electricity suppliers that would be quite valuable, should you obtain a page one ranking in the search engines.  One of those words is ‘connect electricity’.  As you can imagine, connecting electricity is something that occurs regularly around the world on a daily basis, hence the key phrases associated with electricity connections are very competitive in both SEO and PPC.

Now, GoSwitch can certainly choose, or continue, to optimise their current site for ‘connect electricity’, but it’s very competitive, and will take some time to achieve good traffic numbers from a high search engine ranking.

The PPC route is an option, but the term “Connect Electricity” costs around $2.00 per click, so could quickly become very expensive.

So, the most effective and value for money way to capture the 1,500 or so searches each month, was to create a microsite to get to the top of the organic searches.

So, the first step was to secure a domain name, and this was fortunately achieved using the exact term – www.connectelectricity.com.au.  Next step, was to cover of the basics of an SEO content strategy – title tags, meta description, at least 300 words of content on each page containing the term ‘connect electricity’ a few times, and also contained in the H1 tags, bolded in some places in the content, and also H2 tags if they exist.

It’s also important that you include internal links between sections of content, and also content with links back to your main or parent site, as this will give that a boost up the page rankings as well.  You’re then ready to start building back links for the microsite.

This method can be a fast and relatively cheap way of getting ranked quickly on the search engines for quite competitive terms.  If you put in the effort to search for quality terms with available domain names, it will certainly be worth the effort.

11 Questions to ask your SEO Agency – Part 3

Continuing on from Part 2 last week, here is Part 3 of the questions you should be asking a prospective SEO Agency.

Question 8: What’s your link building process?

I’ve covered off the importance of link building in the ranking process in previous posts.  Whilst the strategy sounds easy, the tactics behind the strategy are more difficult.  Simply put, link building is the process of creating back links for your website, where every back link is a vote for the quality of your website.

There are several ways of getting back links.  A good SEO agency will write keyword rich articles and submit them to ezinearticles.com, or some other popular article directory, thus providing good back links to your website.  Your company blog is also a very simple way of getting links back to your main site.  Especially if someone else finds your article and posts it to their website or blog.  The only problem of course is this takes time to implement, and can take two to three months to see the results, but, that’s a fact of SEO.

What you should look out for is the purchasing of a link from “Link Farms”.  They simply sell links just to make money for themselves, and are nothing more than spammers.  If your agency asks for money to purchase links, be very sceptical.

Question 9: Do you utilize ethical or white hat SEO techniques?

If your agency mentions the following terms, RUN!!!

• doorway pages – a doorway page is a page that the consumer will never see, but the search engine spider does
• invisible text – this is where text is hidden from the consumer by matching the text colour the background, or hiding it within the code in a some sort of Javascript
• keyword stuffing – packing, or stuffing, a stack of keywords into your site will get your site penalised by the search engines

Black Hat SEO, as the above techniques are referred to, is very tempting as they actually work.  The issue is, it’s only temporary.  The search engines will ban you, so the long term risk is simply not worth it.

Question 10: Do you work for any of my competitors?

This doesn’t mean that they can’t work for you, but you should be across any potential conflicts of interest.  A good agency should volunteer this information up front, but often they won’t, hence, ask.

Question 11: Will you edit my website’s content? Who owns this content?

Absolutely they should be editing your website content, or at the very least, supplying you with the content to upload yourself.  Second to this, you should always remain the owner of the content on your website.   Ask your agency what becomes of the content should you split from their services.  If there is an indication that they will take the content back, and I’ve said this before, RUN!!.

Well that’s it for this topic.  I certainly hope the questions help.  Good luck.

11 Questions to ask your SEO Agency – Part 2

Continuing on from Part 1 last week, here is Part 2 of the questions you should be asking a prospective SEO Agency.

Question 4: What is your approach to reporting?

Look for an agency who, firstly, will supply you some sample reports, so you can see what you’ll be getting before you sign.  You should be looking for data that covers off the improvements in performance such as keyword rankings, as well  as traffic sources, keyword data, and competitors analysis to name a few.

In my opinion, all results should then be presented to you in a monthly face-to-face meeting.  To me, that makes the SEO accountable for their work.  Have them present the results, and talk through the work they completed the previous month.  It will also be important for you to discuss the strategies in place for the coming month/s.

Question 5: What is your cost structure?

This is an interesting question.  I believe this is where the client must volunteer some information as to their budget.  A good agency will tailor the SEO campaign to suit your budget.  You certainly want to steer clear of agencies that offer a ‘cookie cutter’ payment system eg 10 keywords for $300 per month, or $3,000 upfront.  This simply means all clients get a uniform campaign, with a uniform effort.

Given the variables associated with SEO campaigns, you need to ensure the agency tailors the deliverables specifically to you, and the budget is the start of that.

Question 6: Do you have any testimonials?

A good SEO agency will have nothing to hide as far as past results go.  Ask for testimonials.  If the agency doesn’t have testimonials, ask for case studies.  If they don’t have case studies, ask to speak to at least two of their existing clients.

Question 7: When can I expect results?

A good SEO agency will be able to draw on past experiences, and give you a reasonable estimation as to the timeframe you are likely to see returns in. No doubt some companies will take longer than others, depending on their industry, and a decent agency should not be afraid to explain this.

They should also explain that whilst SEO takes time, there still should be some quick wins, more often around brand terms, or for products and services that are absolutely specific to them as a company.

Part 3 later in the week.

11 Questions to ask your SEO Agency – Part 1

Put SEO into the Google.com.au search query, and you’ll have approximately 27M results to choose from.  So how out of those 27M results are you supposed to pick ONE agency to outsource your SEO to?

To help alleviate some of the frustrations, I’ve put together 11 questions you should be asking an SEO agency before signing with them.  I’ve then expanded on that to cover off the answers they should be giving you.

Question 1: What is your SEO Methodology?

Look for an agency that covers of the fundamentals of a good SEO campaign, as I have previously posted.  Their entire methodology should be around those three areas:

• Technical strategy
• Content Strategy
• Linking strategy

The worst thing you can do is pick an agency who have no interest in fixing the accessibility issues of your site, and who will simply optimise your site for 10 or 15 or 20 keywords.  The technical aspects are the initial priority, and may take up to 4-6 weeks to fix, depending on how deep and complex the issues are.  The content strategy should be ongoing over the course of the campaign, with constant keyword research and creation of content to match.  Optimising your site for a set number of keywords is simply a cookie cutter model, which becomes a cash cow for agencies after the site has been optimised.

Question 2: How Important is Keyword Research and How Do You Do it?

Following on from, and to expand further on the above point on content strategy, Keyword Research is extremely important.  It’s where your agency can find out how and what your customers are searching for on the Search Engines.  Based on this research, you then optimise the Title Tags, and develop content to match these keywords.

There are a range of quality keyword research tools available, with the most obvious being the Google AdWords: Keyword Tool.  These keyword tools will enable your agency to form a baseline on search numbers, and then estimate the traffic it can deliver through to your site for your products and services.  Now, a good SEO agency will go beyond your base level keywords, and start searching for longer tail key phrases (three or more words in a phrase eg seo agency Melbourne vs seo agency), as this is potentially where they can get some quick wins from.

Question 3: Do You Guarantee Results?

If an agency answers Yes, or even mentions the word guarantee, RUN!!  There are simply too many variables from both the Search Engines and your website.

For example, the Google ranking algorithm is typically updated and changed up to 10 times every week.  Not all of the changes are major however, but they will affect rankings.  Your agency can work around this by ensuring they have experienced SEO practitioners who monitor your campaign for any such algorithm affects.

On the flip side, every client an agency has will vary in their budget and in-house resources.  All the quality keyword search and technical recommendations in the world won’t mean a pinch of salt if the client only has a few hundred dollars a month to spend, and lack the resources to produce content.  A great deal also depends on the nature of your business.  For example, keywords such as car insurance, or credit cards, will take longer to move up the rankings than red ballet shoes preston or digital marketing agency melbourne.

Part 2 to follow next week.

SEO Fundamentals

SEO was once simply a matter of adding “meta tags”, but this is no longer the case, as these proved too easy to spam.  A little known fact amongst non-SEO people is that search engines now ignore these tags for search engine rankings.

Search engines now look at a large range of elements of a web site to determine its relevance and rank against certain keywords. These include, but are not limited to:

• Accessibility (Technical Strategy): The site architecture and crawler-friendliness impacts the ability of search engines to access and understand a site.  This includes how the code is written, URL structure, navigation, link structure, dynamic content and the use of Flash and images.

• Content & Keyword Research (Content Strategy): The actual visible and invisible words on the pages of the web site. Optimised content has a significant impact on improving ranking within organic search results. This needs to be presented in search engine friendly format.

• Links (Linking Strategy): Search engines consider every link leading to your website to be a “vote” for your site.  The more high quality links leading to you, the more important you must be, especially if those links come from other important sites.  The words that make up the link are also important.

Unfortunately, the SEO industry is littered with cowboys who steer away from the above, and are all about ‘guaranteed 1^st page rankings’ or ‘search engine submissions’.  Both of which if you hear, you should RUN!  If you have made the decision to outsource your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), make sure you do your homework.   One thing you shouldn’t do is shop only on price.  Shop on ROI for your dollar, and shop on the agencies desire to understand your business and it’s marketing strategy, and their ability to tie the SEO back to that.

My next post will be about the homework I spoke about, or to put it another way, the questions you should ask any potential SEO agency, where the responses will give a you a clear idea of which one to choose.

Australian Digital Marketing Statistics – 2010

There has definitely been staggering growth in the Australian digital space during the 1st 6 months of the year.

With a new financial year upon us I have no doubt that companies in Australia will continue to shift funding from offline to online.  Thus I felt it timely to release a compilation of general digital statistics from the first half of 2010 to assist marketers and agencies alike to build their business case for online marketing initiatives.  Enjoy!

Read More – www.digitalmarketinglab.com.au

Top 25 SEO Tips

There is this classic thought experiment that goes: if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, would it make a sound? A similar question can be raised about your site amidst the forest that is called the Internet: does it really exist if nobody can find it? Having your site appear on the first pages of a search result allows you to avoid this conundrum completely. Here are the top 25 tips for search engine optimisation.

1.        Get your own domain. It is really important for you to get your own domain. Not only will it be easier to remember, but people will associate your site with professionalism.

2.        Use the common TLDs (top level domains) such as com, net, and org.  However, if you know your target market is limited to a certain geography, using country-specific TLDs are better (like mydomain.com.au)

3.        Set a goal and aim for it. If an SEO campaign should increase traffic to your site, give measurable numbers to that increase (10%? 15%? 75%?)

4.        Measure your performance. Tools like Google Analytics can help you determine from which sites your visitor are coming from, how long they stay in your site, how they get out, and other metrics.

5.        Use your own host for better control. There are statistics you can only access if you own the server hosting your site.

6.        Think about doing A B testing where you have two different CSS affecting the layout of a single page. That way you will know which layout sells the most.

7.        Participate in industry related forums. Some of these forums have commercial sections where you can link back to your site.

8.        Start your own blog. Make sure to link back to your own product pages.

9.        Update your blog regularly. Once your blog becomes popular, other people might start Linking to your blog.

10.     Don’t forget about DMOZ, the open directory project. Though not as popular as search engines mainly due to its being edited by humans, the information here is still used by some engines at least for indexing.

11.     Start a contest or a survey that has real prizes at stake. People will link to that.

12.     Be text heavy. Don’t be image heavy if you can avoid it.

13.     If you can’t avoid being image heavy, don’t forget to supply alt tags.

14.     Don’t use too much javascript in your pages as well; complex javascript confuses search engines.

15.     Just like with images and javascript, avoid building your Content in flash.

16.     If you’re unable to avoid flash (a product demonstration for example) try if you can to include a transcription near the video. Not only will you make your site accessible to people with disabilities, it’s a good way to create alternative content.

17.     Find good Keywords. Tools like wordbutler.com can be used to generate good keywords that will drive traffic to your site.

18.     Try putting your keywords at your title, first sentence, and if possible on the URL.

19.     Surround your keywords with relevant words. When a searcher previews a search result, he sees a snippet containing the Keyword and some text around it to give them context. Supply that context.

20.     Put your keywords in bold or emphasised text.

21.     Add headings and subheadings (use keywords here as well)

22.     Avoid keyword stuffing – this can get your site banned or de-listed from search engine indices.

23.     Don’t use doorway pages – you can get banned from search engines as well.

24.     In general, avoid underhanded techniques. They might initially work, but search engines update their algorithms all the time. The risk is simply not worth it.

25.     And as always, content is king. This idea will be repeated as often as is needed to drill it down: without Quality Content, all your SEO efforts are just a scam.

Mistake #1 in SEO keyword research

By Tom Skotidas

When it comes to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), I have to tell you – marketing managers make a lot of mistakes.

I can easily count 20 of them. Of these, there is one mistake that I see over and over again. When this mistake is committed, it can destroy the business value of any SEO project. The mistake I am referring to occurs within SEO Keyword Research.  I call it the High Search Volume Addiction (HSVA).

What is HSVA?

HSVA is the addiction to selecting SEO keywords that show high search demand today, to the exclusion of other key selection factors.

Now I want to make this clear – I get HSVA. I really do. In these busy times, researching and selecting keywords based on search demand alone, is compelling. Especially considering that many keyword selection tools are free, e.g. the Google Keyword Tool.

So you’ve just used a keyword tool, and discovered 3 keywords that produce the highest search volume in their category.  You’re feeling pretty good about investing your SEO dollars in these keywords. All good?

Maybe.

The truth is, search volume is just 1 of 3 factors to consider. You have to cross-check search demand with two other key research and selection tools: trend analysis, and conversion analysis.

View More >

Posted via email from Australian Digital Marketing News

New Facebook ‘like’ feature could aid SEO

Facebook’s recent launch of a new feature that lets users ‘like’ a wide range of organisations and products on the social networking site could benefit search engine optimisation (SEO).

This is according to Idea Taxi SEO director Sam Tilston, who said that while the offering may mean that Google-based SEO holds less value, it also provides new opportunities.

Businesses that take steps to create pages and groups on Facebook and promote them well could see positive results, he explained, adding that online news sites could also play a key role in this.

“As more features such as the ‘like’ button from Facebook get used on newspaper sites this will have a much larger effect and could have a dramatic impact on SEO,” Mr Tilston commented.

Facebook’s new feature also lets users display entities that they have clicked the ‘like’ button for directly on their profile, which Facebook engineer Alex Li said creates a “living map” of connections rather than a static list of interests.

Source – Direct News

Posted via email from Australian Digital Marketing News

Digital Marketing Advice – Pay Per Click Advertising

There are two ways for your business to capture people when they are searching for your products online.  Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), or Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.

SEO is the process of optimising your website via the on page content, title tags, and linking strategy, to ensure your site appears high within the search engine rankings.  Pay-Per-Click (AdWords, Sponsored Links), is where you buy space via an online auction system.  This article is going to focus on the later.

PPC is one of the most effective ways of attracting highly qualified traffic to your website quickly.  Your business, via a short text-based ad and a link to your site, is displayed within the Sponsored Links section of the search engine results pages, or SERPs, when people search for terms related to your products.

Google, Yahoo, and Bing, all provide a paid listings area within their SERPs.  Unless you’re experienced at running a PPC campaign, it’s advisable to start with one, most likely Google given it’s popularity, and then move onto the others once you’ve worked out what you’re doing.

Along with the more often used Sponsored Links ads, ads are available to be placed on Google’s partner sites, or anywhere else someone is willing to pay to have the ads displayed, and this is called AdSense.  Again, I’m going to focus on the Pay Per Click ads.

As a starting point, most small business PPC campaigns can be easily managed within the AdWords interface.  There are a lot of claims from some PPC providers that suggest you need, or should use, PPC software.  That simply isn’t the case.  If your PPC campaign starts to get a little complex, the Google AdWords Editor is free software that is very easy to use, and can be scaled up as your campaign grows.

Before you start your campaign though, there are a few high level areas you need to get a handle on.  Setting up your account will be the easy part, as the online Google interface basically talks you through it step-by-step.

Campaign Architecture – make sure you’re organised.  If you plan to target hundreds of keywords, you need to ensure you can track your spend, and are able to analyse the results easily.  You should sort your keywords into ad groups, that contain as few keywords as possible, so they can target a specific product.  These ad groups should then be sorted into campaigns, to again allow for accurate reporting and tracking.  For example, if you sell Electrical goods, you should have one campaign for a brand, then an ad group for each product.

Be specific – when you bid on your search terms, make sure you’re not just targeting keywords with high traffic volumes.  Why?  Simple really.  These broad terms are the most expensive, and will only serve to drive waves of unqualified traffic to your site.  Eg someone searching for ‘washing machines’, is less likely to buy something than someone searching for ‘best Fisher and Paykel washing machine deals’.

A/B Testing – the purpose of the short ads you’ll have to write for your campaign, is to induce those people searching for your products, into clicking through to your website.  You need to ensure the text ad is alluring to the buyer, and that it stands out from the others.  One way to do this is to test multiple ad copies against each other.  Once you have a large enough sample size, maybe a couple of week’s worth of testing, keep the best performing ad, and then introduce some others.  Over time, you’ll get better at identifying which aspects seem to work the best.

Landing Pages – quite a few people make the mistake of sending all of their AdWords traffic to their websites homepage.  If your ad group is about Fisher & Paykel washing machines, make the landing page your washing machine page, and more specifically, the Fisher & Paykel washing machine page.  This way, you’re showing the potential purchases the products they are looking for, and will therefore increase your conversion rate.  The next most important part of your landing page is the call to action.  Can they buy now?  Then tell them they can.  If they are to call for a quote, tell them that’s what you want them to do by providing the phone number.  Letting them sit and wonder about what to do next means you might lose them as a client.

Seasonality – unlike SEO which has a long lead in time, PPC allows you to take full advantage of the seasons.  Given the ads can be changed in an instant, you are able to advertise special promotions, or change your ads depending on the time of year, or even the day of the week, depending on your clients past buying habits.

Lastly, make sure your website is something your clients are going to want to see.  The last thing you want to do is to spend hundreds on AdWords, only to have thousands of new visitors turned off by a website that doesn’t provide the right information, and is visually poor.  Get some advice if you have to, but trust me, it could mean the difference between a massive failure, and an undoubted success.