by Wordtracker
1. Headers defined
by Sage Lewis
Sage sports a new studio for the new year. He’s added a white board, art-work, a drum set (yes, you heard me!) and even a camera man. 2009 promises to be full of great new videos. This week, we learn that even though traffic was up, online holiday sales were down 3%, but the big story comes out of Canada where we learn about a Twitter address security scam that goes “fishing” for your Twitter information.
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More:
Twitter’s Gone Fishin’. . . For Trouble
by Stoney deGeyter
Many businesses owners focusing on SEO for the first time, especially those with limited budgets, can often find themselves caught like a deer in the headlights wondering just where and how to begin. SEO, even for smaller sites, can often be a big project, especially if you’re trying to run the business at the same time.
The question becomes, how many hours a week can you afford to invest (or pay for,) and what should you do first with the limited time on hand? There are several aspects to the SEO process and each one is important in it’s own right. It’s not always easy to say “do this first” until a site evaluation has been performed, as each site’s needs are different. But you have to start somewhere, right?
While I can’t put together a definitive path that you can use to work through your own SEO process, I will provide a general order of importance of different areas. This can be used as a guideline for analysis to determine where you do need to begin the optimization campaign.
If the architecture if your website is messed up or has significant issues, then the overall performance of your site will be limited. You can focus on links, keyword targeting, content, etc, but if the architecture isn’t right then all of those efforts will be far less effective than they otherwise would be. Think of architecture as the foundation that the rest of the site needs to be built upon. If the foundation is crumbling, it’ll create a whole mess of other problems, despite how much effort is put into other areas of performance.
The primary focus of the initial architectural check should be on search engine spiderability of the site. Can the engines navigate properly from page to page? Are the right pages given correct level of importance via hierarchy? Is there anything preventing the search engines from getting to all of the content? These are important questions that must be asked and answered.
Once you know your site is “search engine friendly” and the ability of your site to perform is in check, you can then focus on other areas to help improve actual performance.
It’s hard to say if keyword research should come before or after you address certain site architectural needs. For the most part, keyword research should come first because you will use what you uncover to build a proper architectural platform. However, there are many architectural issues that can and should be fixed immediately so your site can get properly indexed by the search engines. Keyword research can take a bit of time so fixing the most important architectural issues first will be to your benefit.
Once the most important architectural issues are addressed, start digging into your keyword research. Before you can do any focused optimization or marketing of your site, you really do have to know what keywords are most important, and how they should be implemented across your site. While the actual keyword optimization process can, and usually does, take time, the research will help you define a clear path in moving forward.
Usability is often overlooked in the implementation of the SEO campaign, mostly because SEO can often conflict with the site’s overall usability performance. That doesn’t need to be so and usability and SEO can, and should, work hand in hand. In fact, usability should trump SEO in nearly all cases. While it’s important to get people to your site via search engines, the engines are not the only way visitors find you. So when usability takes a back seat to SEO you’re forcing your visitors who come to your site through other means to view your site through optimization eyes.
When usability trumps SEO, every visitor that comes to your site, regardless of how they got there, has the best experience possible. Instead of finding a site that’s clunky, they find a site that gives them what they need as seamlessly as possible. Any usability improvements will help you increase conversion rates and the number of value of each sale made. As traffic increases, via on-page optimization and other marketing efforts, your sales numbers will rise at a rate greater than if usability wasn’t factored in, making your optimization efforts far more valuable.
It seems somewhat odd that an article about SEO shows actual keyword optimization as the second to least important. That’s not to say that the on-page optimization isn’t important; it is! But it’s only valuable once the issues above have been properly addressed. Focusing on optimization before you have fully researched your keywords leads to improper targeting and poorer performing campaigns. Same with usability and site architecture, these things must come first if you want the optimization to be effective.
There are a number of ways you can go about optimizing your site: 1) You can focus on one page at a time, starting with your most important pages and keywords first. 2) you can do a quick run-through of the entire site hitting key elements first, then go through again hitting the secondary and then tertiary elements, 3) you can focus on product pages hitting very specific keywords, then working your way back to the broader, more highly searched but less targeted keywords.
It doesn’t matter how you move forward, so long as you are aware of the short and long-term success potential of any approach.
Link building should not be overlooked, or considered less important. Often sites can perform strongly on link building campaigns alone. However, such campaigns are far more effective once the keyword strategy has been laid out (if not yet fully implemented). This aligns the keyword targeting efforts both on and off the page, making both far more successful overall.
Also keep in mind that generic link building campaigns can begin in the very early stages of the SEO process, but you’ll do better saving the more specific keyword targeting efforts for once you have a solid idea where keywords will be targeted on the site.
As each site is different and has different needs, so the path above needs to be flexible. Many of these areas overlap and can be performed simultaneously. Some can be done in stages leaving room to begin stages of another area as needed. But overall, this is a good framework allowing you to see where you can begin with your optimization and analyzation efforts, and help you get a better feel for how to progress with your optimization campaign.
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Read more from the original source:
Big Project/Small Budget: Where to Begin Your SEO Campaign
by Jennifer Laycock
There’s just something about the anonymity of sitting behind a computer screen that makes people do stupid things. Few but the boldest sales person would walk into a class reunion and try to close a sale with the alumni at their table, even fewer would walk up to a stranger’s table at a restaurant to start shilling their offerings. Nonetheless this very thing happens every single day in the realm of social media. People walk smack dab into the middle of conversations and start hocking their wares without a second thought.
That brings me to the third lesson in this series: Don’t be a social media jackass.
In this six part series, I’ll be exploring six valuable lessons you can learn from the classic story of Pinocchio and offering up some input on how to apply it to your own marketing plans. If you are just joining the series, catch up on past articles:
Six Lessons from a Wooden Boy: Part One: Search Engines Want to be Real Boys
Six Lessons from a Wooden Boy: Part Two: Online Reputation Means Straight Talk
Life Has Rules and So Does Social Media
In the story of Pinocchio, the wooden boy eventually finds his way to Pleasure Island and makes friends with a boy named Lampwick. On Pleasure Island, little boys break all the normal rules of society. They drink, they smoke, they swear and they gamble. Of course there’s a price for these actions; over time, the boys gradually turn into donkeys. It’s not until Lampwick transforms into a donkey and Pinocchio sprouts a donkey tail and ears that he makes the choice to leave the island with Jiminy Cricket.
The world of social media really isn’t so different. Social media has rules of engagement just like society. In fact, the rules of social media very carefully mimic the rules of real life interactions. Social Media users are expected to be polite, to listen more than they talk, to offer more than they take and to generally, behave themselves in an upright, pleasant and professional manner.
Unfortunately, one too many businesses takes a look at the perceived party atmosphere and dives in head first without giving second thought to the consequences of their actions. They hear about how many companies are increasing profits via social media and they run in with both guns blazing and no second thought to how to engage their audience. They throw the rules of society out the window and focus on doing what they think will most benefit them.
Like Pinocchio and Lampwick in a land without rules, they often end up making asses of themselves.
Find Your Balance
While doing business in the land of social media really isn’t that different from doing business anywhere else, the stakes can be a little higher. Make a bad impression by pushing too hard at a Chamber of Commerce meeting and you’re likely only going to offend a few local business owners. Do it on Twitter or LinkedIn and the ripple effect could extend around your industry and around the world.
That said, there are four simple things you can focus on that will help you navigate the sometimes choppy social media waters.
1. Listen: Make Sure You Don’t Dominate the Conversation
The absolute biggest, most unbreakable rule of social media is to listen. If you do absolutely nothing else in social media, it should be this. Why? Because the biggest value in social media is the insight you can gain from getting to know your customers.
You can listen to your target audience talk about your company, your competitors and even just about the problems they face in every day life and the solutions they’ve found for them. You can ask questions and listen to the feedback. You can ask for ideas and suggestions.
You’ll notice how often the world listen got used in this section…there’s a reason for that. Listen. Listen two to three times more than you talk. It will pay off, I promise.
2. Connect: Make New Friends and Keep the Old
The second biggest benefit to building a social media presence is your ability to connect with people. Social media can provide an avenue to build a stronger relationship with the casual acquaintances you already have in the industry and the social side of it can help you daisy chain those relationships to get introductions to other people you might like to connect with as well.
Listening in to the conversation is great (and highly useful) but it’s not until you begin interacting and building relationships that you really start reaping the full reward.
Of course the key points there are “connecting” and “building relationships.” You can’t simply hone in on a few people and start talking at them, you need to find the people who have similar interests and begin finding ways to build those friendships and business relationships. Doing that takes time and taking the time to do it the right way “protects” you from accidentally breaking the rules and looking like a common fool.
3. Add Value: Find Unique and Genuine Ways to Help
Once you’ve taken the time to listen to the conversation and find ways to begin building relationships, the next step is to add value. Social media is about the collective sharing and spreading and development of knowledge. It’s about building resources and becoming resources.
Like many other areas of life, the people who work the hardest to help others often reap the greatest rewards. Those who spend time lazing around and leeching off of others enjoy brief moments of success before finding themselves in a heap of trouble, often doing more work than they needed to in the first place. (Much like the boys who turned into donkeys and were hauled off to work the salt mines in Pinocchio.)
By the time you’ve reached point three, you really should have spent enough time listening and building relationships to have some idea of what your online community needs. Sit down and figure out how to meet those needs and you’ll start building the type of reputation that builds your bottom line.
4. Measure: Know What You Want to Get from the Experience
Finally, you need to have some idea of what you are looking to get from the experience. There’s no sense investing your time in social media without some type of goal. Keep in mind, your goal doesn’t have to be sales related…it may be as simple as establishing at least one new industry contact a week or building a network you can gather feedback from for future product launches.
Whatever your goal is, make sure you identity if before you begin building your social media strategy. Your goals will heavily influence the strategy you put together and finding ways to track your results will hold you accountable for the time you are investing.
Up Next
Pinocchio may have found it fun to hang out on Pleasure Island soaking up bad living and doing whatever he pleased…but it didn’t take long before he began to see the consequences of those actions. Life in social media is similar. Spend too much time ignoring the “rules” of society and you’ll end up looking like a jackass.
In the next lesson in the series, we’ll take a look at what Jiminy Cricket has to do with online marketing.
Images courtesy of creative commons license from Flickr users Carbon NYC, Eric Schipul, Ed Yourdon and Aussiegall.
Check out our small business news site.
Six Lessons from a Wooden Boy: Lesson Three: Don’t be a Social Media Jackass