YouTube and SEO

Many people are surprised to learn that YouTube is the second-largest search engine. Yep, it’s bigger than Yahoo and bigger than Bing, according to comScore. Therefore it is a shock to many search marketing professionals that clients, including large brands, neglect to formulate or act on strategies for YouTube optimization.

Of course, YouTube isn’t a perfect fit for every company, but anybody who does business online should consider taking advantage of the huge opportunities for brand impressions available on YouTube. Even if the product or service you sell might be considered dry or boring, think about creating a series of funny or interesting videos that relates indirectly to your core business.

For example, if you sell construction equipment, you could produce videos of stunt drivers doing freestyle tricks in a Bobcat. Or perhaps a clothing company could create video fashion shows of embarrassing styles that were once popular. You don’t have to create traditional TV commercials to get people talking about your brand.

Optimizing YouTube pages requires you to follow the same rules as any other search engine optimization (SEO) project, and all SEO can be broken down into three disciplines: content, linking, and architecture. Since YouTube is going to dictate how the page is built architecturally, that leaves you with opportunities to improve the on-page content that boosts the link popularity of the page. We’ll leave the linking discussion for another day, and of course the video itself needs to be good enough for people to actually want to watch it. The following tips are designed to help you optimize your YouTube pages in a way that makes them as easy to find as possible. Therefore, we will primarily be talking about what to put on the page and where to put it.

Considering that YouTube streams more than 1.2 billion videos every day, it’s easy to write it off as oversaturated and move on. But most of the content is garbage, and few people take the time to properly optimize their submissions.

There are primarily two places you can rank well for your target keywords. The first place is on YouTube itself. For example, if I type “Dwayne Johnson” into the search bar, the results are my choice of “All,” “Channels,” and “Playlists,” with the default view being “All.” It is possible to sort the results a number of different ways, but the default sorting method is “Relevance,” so the way you see results on a YouTube page is similar to how you might see them on other search engines.

The other place your videos can rank well is on the search engines themselves. Remember that every video on YouTube has its own page, called a view page, that can be optimized the same as any other page on the web.

The most important thing to remember about optimizing for YouTube is that the videos themselves are invisible to search engines. YouTube converts the video files you upload into Flash, and search engines have a difficult time understanding what’s inside a Flash file, especially a video. If you need proof, simply view Google’s cached version of any YouTube page and you’ll see only the text that accompanies the video, not the video itself. This exercise demonstrates how important the surrounding content is to the page’s potential ability to rank for your target keywords.

YouTube automatically generates meta tags for every view page. The name of the video becomes the title tag, the description (found in the “more info” section) becomes the meta description tag, and the YouTube tags become the content of the page’s meta keywords tag. Of course, Google has publicly stated that its search engine ignores the meta keywords tag, so this feature of YouTube doesn’t make lots of sense – but nobody’s perfect.

There are two types of YouTube channels: brand channels and user channels. Brand channels are given out to advertisers who spend a lot of money on YouTube, and these have some distinct advantages over user channels, including auto-play when a user lands on the view page, multiple sub-channels, a 960×150 banner, a 300×250 side column image, a branding box, contest module support, support for YouTube’s Carousel, Video Walls, custom gadgets, a larger background image, and support for Google Analytics. But since most of us will be stuck with plain old user channels, the following tips are written for the average user. Additionally, YouTube has great help files for customizing your user channel. Google’s YouTube help page is a good place to start.

Quick tips for optimization

• Include links in profile pages wherever possible. First decide where you want to drive the traffic from your channel/profile page, and then include links to those pages as much as possible. Ideally, you will be linking to other social media profiles like Facebook and Twitter in order to extend the social media experience, but you also might want to drive clicks to a customized landing page. There are many more opportunities to place clickable links than there appear to be at first glance.
• Include appropriate keywords in the name of the video, and use the word “video” when appropriate. The title is the most important piece of information that the search engines have about your video, and considering that most searchers include the word “video” when searching for a video, this inclusion boosts the relevance of your page as a search result.
• For each video, write a unique, keyword-rich description that includes a URL. Put the URL at the beginning. This way, even when the “more info” option is collapsed, the user will still see the link. Also, a video’s description is the next-best indicator to search engines of the video’s content, right behind the title. Use this space to place relevant keywords when appropriate.
• Provide video transcripts if possible. Until the technology improves, YouTube and other online videos are practically invisible to most search engines. Therefore, the search engines are only guessing about the content of your video based on the information they parse from the title, description, and tags. But if you have a full transcript of your video placed in the description, the search engines will fully understand the video.
• Take advantage of YouTube’s captions and annotation features. You can add notes, subtitles, descriptions, and links directly over the top of the video. Currently only links to other YouTube pages are clickable, but try this: You remembered to add a link at the top of your description, right? Place a call to action over the video that says, “Click here to become a fan of our Facebook page.”

• Tag your videos with keywords. Along with the title and the description, tags help the search engines identify the video’s content. If you have relevant keywords, place them here.
• Encourage participation. For each video, there are options for “Broadcasting and Sharing.” It’s best to open commenting and embedding as much as possible, but remember that you will need to monitor your videos for spam and naughty comments. Also consider posting your videos as responses to other popular videos. This is a good way to piggyback on the success of someone else’s video and divert some of those eyes to your own content.
• Watermark your videos. It’s easy with most video editing software to place a small translucent logo in a corner of the video. It’s your video after all, so take ownership.
• YouTube pulls thumbnails from the one quarter, half, and three quarters marks of every video. You can then choose which thumbnail is displayed. If it’s not disruptive to do so, try to manipulate your video so that a compelling image appears at one of these points. Thumbnails have a large impact in a video’s click-through.
• Take advantage of YouTube Insights. This analytics feature of YouTube is robust compared to other video sites and can provide information such as demographics and when people abandoned viewing specific videos. This data can help you improve future submissions.

Who did it great:

College Humor
College Humor has done a good job with its channel design. In the description box, it provides links to other social media profiles. The company also lists the people involved with the production of the videos and links to several awards it has received.

Coca-Cola
This video from Coke does an excellent job of using the description box, not to provide a verbatim transcript of the video (because there is no dialogue), but rather to describe exactly what is happening in the video.

Mistakes to avoid:
Most YouTube videos and channels are not properly optimized, even by big brands. Therefore, there is still tremendous opportunity to rank well on search results pages for many competitive keywords. Perhaps the biggest potential mistake is to close your videos off to sharing. It is vital to let users interact and embed your videos.

Also, resign yourself to the fact that no matter how good your videos are, people are going to say nasty things. As long as comments aren’t profane, negative feedback is good. A mix of negative and positive comments makes the user experience more authentic.

Drew Hubbard is director of promotions and social media at The Search Agency.

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• Google Analytics Features

Things change so quickly on the web. When I started working at software firm Urchin in 1996, web analytics was a niche product, important to (and understood by) perhaps a handful of people at an organisation.

When Google bought Urchin in June 2005 and launched Google Analytics later that autumn, the industry was moving away from expensive, complex tools in favour of free, easy-to-use ones, and these are quickly becoming more capable than those of the previous generation.

Analytics has also expanded to encompass a larger tool set and conversion process. It includes offline data sources and multivariate testing solutions. Perhaps the largest shift is that virtually everyone is now aware of and able to afford a quality web analytics and multivariate testing platform.

Getting started

You can sign up for Google Analytics at google.com/analytics. From there, you can create a new, free account. If you advertise on Google’s AdWords system, you can also sign up for Analytics from within your AdWords account. Google Analytics has been closely integrated into your AdWords account under the new Analytics tab: click the tab and follow the instructions to start tracking AdWords campaign data and ROI information.

The Tracking Instructions page that appears contains the tracking code that you’ll need to paste into each page of your site. Before doing so, you might want to complete a couple more steps to make sure Google Analytics collects the most relevant data for your site. You can configure your profile by clicking Edit in the Website Profile table.

Set the default (or index) page of your site. This will allow Google Analytics to reconcile log entries for www.example.com and www.example.com/index.html, for instance. These are in fact the same page, but are reported as two distinct pages until the Default Page setting has been configured.

Does your site use dynamic session or user identifiers? You can tell Google Analytics to ignore these variables and not count them as unique pages. Enter any query parameters you wish to be excluded, separated with commas.

To enable ecommerce reporting and the Ecommerce Analysis report set, select Yes. If your website is designed to drive visitors to a particular page, such as a purchase or email sign-up page, you can track the number of successful conversions using ‘goals’ and ‘funnels’ in Google Analytics. A goal is a website page a visitor reaches once they have made a purchase or completed another desired action, such as a registration or download. A funnel represents the path that you expect visitors to take in order to reach their goal.

Defining these pages enables you to see how frequently visitors abandon goals (and where they go instead) and the value of the goal. Each profile can have up to four goals, with a defined funnel for each. You can begin defining goals and funnels by selecting a profile and clicking Edit from the Analytics Settings page.

Hearts and minds

Google Analytics is not only a way to learn about customer behaviour, it can reveal something that’s even more important: customer intent. Analytics data provides a peek into the hearts and minds of your customers and their needs and wants.

How did your visitors arrive at your site? For those who came through a search-engine query, a list of search terms will tell you what they were seeking. For example, shoe shoppers may be looking for Nikes but not Uggs; Clarks but not Donna Karan. You may therefore discover that part of your site is on target for visitors’ needs, while the other half isn’t. Similarly, Google Analytics can give you a list of ‘referring URLs’, websites that send you traffic. You can infer, for instance, that visitors coming from happycoupons.co.uk will have a different goal (making savings) than those coming from a manufacturer’s retail link page (finding out about product features).

What are visitors looking for? Your checkout page tells you only where you’ve succeeded – not where you’ve missed an opportunity. Consider Best Buy’s experience stocking a portable refrigerator to chill beer in the US. At first, they stocked it only during the Super Bowl. But search keywords reports revealed that shoppers still looked for the product code well into the baseball season – yet they couldn’t find anything on the site.

Other key data that goes beyond conversions is the ‘cart abandonment’ rate: the percentage of customers who put items in the cart but leave your site before checking out. This crucial metric of your site’s ability to close sales may indicate that something’s amiss with your checkout process.

Where are your visitors landing, bouncing, and viewing? It’s often assumed user experience begins on the homepage, and this misconception drives many an ecommerce site to waste hours of design work in the wrong place. Search engines dig deeper into ecommerce sites, bringing visitors to not just ‘electronics’, but also televisions, MP3 players or sat navs. Analytics data will tell you where your real ‘homepages’ reside, so you can focus your design work there. Curious? Just take a look at the ‘Top Landing Pages’ or ‘Top Entry Pages’ report in your Web Analytics tool.

Conversely, analytics will tell you which landing pages have the highest bounce rate – ie on which did people land, look around and quickly leave? This data tells you which of your pages are letting your customers down, and can also help with your redesign, since you can infer intent through the list of keywords and referring sites.

Web analytics can also show you the top viewed pages: information that’s often overlooked. While you may consider yourself in the business of selling products, most of your hits could represent people reading customer reviews. Or perhaps you’re selling 10 lines of products, but two of them show especially high traffic. Knowing what interests your customers will help you design a site that better meets expectations.

Analytics can help you understand what drives performance up or down. Earning $15,000 in the last 24 hours is good; knowing what drove that surge is even better. Ecommerce tracking shows the number of orders placed, the value of those orders, and more, by hour, day, week and month. By segmenting your data over different time lines, you can see both seasonal trends and more subtle buying habits that could otherwise go unnoticed.

Putting this information into practice takes not just creativity, but also a willingness to experiment. This spirit of adventure comes through on some of the most successful retail sites. Crutchfield (crutchfield.com) has taken the unorthodox approach of putting its checkout cart on the left side of the screen. Is that a good idea? Analytics reports have confirmed that it is – at least for them. Wal-Mart commonly puts products on its website that are unavailable in its stores. When those zebra- patterned bed sheets prove they have a following, the company understands the demographics enough to place them in targeted store locations.

Recent changes

Earlier this year we redesigned the Google Analytics site. The goal was to make it easier to discover information relationships via navigation and visualisations. We created a customisable dashboard and introduced sparklines. We developed new graphing tools and a new type of date slider, which make it easy to see spikes and dips in traffic as you set date ranges. And one of the most popular new features is one of the simplest: the ability to email reports and schedule these emails so that information can be easily shared with key stakeholders in your organisation.

New visualisations have been among the most popular features. You can now view many reports by hour or day and graph data by day, week or month. And we’ve made it easier to compare visits to conversions. You can also graph two metrics against each other over time so, for example, you can compare the number of visitors and the bounce rate for a certain week, or see if visitors who come to a site through AdWords spend more or less time on your site than visitors overall.

We’ve also added a new ga.js tracking code. This pagetag allows for more flexibility and customisation. It’s just as easy to install as the old code, but enables more seasoned users to track ecommerce transactions in a more readable way and make use of advanced tracking features. We’ve also added a Google Analytics codesite (code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/) to help you take advantage of documented customisations that have been made to the tracking code.

If you have content behind a security firewall, an intranet or an internal network that prevents you from using Google Analytics, you may also want to consider Urchin software. You can configure it to fit your own requirements and process/reprocess log files as frequently as you wish. Urchin is also great for intranets, since it allows the analysis of firewall-protected content, such as corporate intranets, without any outside internet connection. You can even track your site with Urchin and Google Analytics combined.

One of the coolest things we’ve recently added is industry benchmarking. Still in beta, it enables you to see how your site’s data compares to others’. For example, if you have a travel website and you get a spike in traffic on Mondays, you may want to know whether other travel sites get that same spike. We don’t share individual data with competitors, but bucket data into industry verticals and then anonymise and aggregate it.

Finally, Website Optimizer is a free tool that complements the functionality of Google Analytics to hone your site further. You can create different versions of your web pages, and Google then splits your traffic automatically, so your visitors tell you which version they like best. Things you might consider changing include images (bigger, smaller, colour, black and white, with models, no models); headlines (questions, shorter ones, emphasising different points); calls to action (different button designs and copy) and layouts (three columns, two columns, one long scrolling column).

Test a few big changes, not several small ones. A good rule of thumb is one page variation for every 100 conversions. So if you get 300 conversions per month, test up to three variations, including your current page. Run your test for at least two weeks. Don’t jump to conclusions: make sure the data has an opportunity to normalise.

Make testing an ongoing process. Once you find a winner, keep trying to beat it. Remember that not finding a winner can be helpful, too, since you learn what doesn’t work and you protect yourself from making changes that could have permanently harmed your site’s performance.

By Brett Crosby

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Increase Website Traffic

1. Thoroughly examine the features of your website. Ask yourself if some things are totally necessary, and if there is anything that might be missing. More importantly, is your website user-friendly? Imagine yourself a user visiting the website for the first time. Is navigation easy? Can you find what you are looking for quickly? It’s understandable that you might be proud of your website and object to making any changes, but at the same time, ego should never stand in the way of progress.

2. Keep information fresh, concise, and interesting. Visitors to your site don’t want to wade through several paragraphs of information to find the one key element they might be searching for. Cut out the fluff and give them exactly what they want.

Additionally, maintain an area of your site to provide interesting, industry-related news, expanded product information, or articles and press releases. This type of rich, informative content is what keeps users coming back, and also serves to increase brand awareness. It also reinforces your image as an authority in your relative industry.

3. Analyze the best and the worst of your site, and make any necessary changes. Utilize your in-house website technician or an outside source if necessary to analyze your site for things like broken links, pages that display incorrectly, pages that load slowly because they might contain too many pictures, movies, music, etc., and other factors that may annoy and frustrate visitors.

Additionally, analyze what areas of your site appear to be the most popular: which pages are users visiting the most, which pages do they spend most of their time on, and perhaps most important, how are they discovering and arriving to your site. Knowing these things can give you greater insight into what paths to take to ensure your website traffic remains consistent, and what steps you might take to keep it growing.

4. Build a community. Whether you utilize the advantages of social networking, or pass out business cards at a tradeshow, or even if you start a conversation with someone in passing on the street, there is potential to build your community. Consider everyone you meet, speak to, email or connect with a potential visitor to your site. Remain active in your community. Engage, interact, ask and answer questions, send out newsletters, start a blog, leave comments on other blogs (with a signature linking back to your site), etc. There are endless possibilities enabling you to build and expand your community.

5. Repeat steps 1-4. Regardless at how successful your efforts might be to increase traffic and improve your website, there is likely still always room for improvement. Set dedicated intervals to refocus your efforts on the above steps. The Internet is constantly changing, and competition is always active, possibly engaged in the same thorough examination, analysis, and community building as you. You must remain ever vigilant to ensure that your website traffic does not decline as you lose visitors to the competition or as a result of other factors, such as outdated information or lack of contact with the community.

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Learn SEO

Every business wants to be found. Figuring out how to get your business to show up in the rankings when a potential customer uses a search engine is an art form.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is fast becoming a must-have body of knowledge for business owners. Nearly 91 percent of all Internet users resort to a search engine to find information, according to a recent survey by the non-profit Pew Internet and American Life Project. The question is: how easily can they find your business?

You already could be making costly mistakes, such as a home page that is almost all images and little text, causing your site to have unnecessarily low rankings and little traffic. Or worse, you could be using hidden text and winding up with an every more onerous problem because some search engines ban sites that use tricks to improve rankings.

Whether you are a do-it-yourselfer or you use an outside SEO firm, the more you know the more effective and successful your business can be online. I’ve assembled the five best categories of resources for business owners to learn about SEO and search marketing. To help with this article, I interviewed Jennifer Laycock, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Guide, a website designed specifically for business owners and entrepreneurs.

Conferences and seminars

Attending search engine conferences is the fastest way to learn because it immerses you in the subject. When you are starting out, choose events designed to give well-rounded instruction in basic principles, such as Jill Whalen’s High Rankings seminars.

Don’t go to advanced events intended for industry experts until you first learn the basics — trust me, you will just feel frustrated.  However, there is one good reason for a newbie to attend events targeting industry professionals, such as Search Engine Strategies conferences.  That’s to find and interview SEO vendors.  At no other venue will you find so many search professionals in one place at one time.

Books

There are a few excellent eBooks — downloadable PDF documents — suitable for beginners.  The best eBooks typically come with a package of extras, such as lifetime updates, private forums, sometimes even money-back guarantees.

Aaron Wall’s SEO Book is widely acknowledged as one of the best.

Laycock’s own Small Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing is another I would recommend, because it focuses on SEO from the perspective of a business owner who is not a search expert.

Printed books, another possibility, are less expensive ($15 -$30 for printed books versus $75 – $100 for eBooks). The disadvantage is that printed books can get out of date quickly because search constantly changes. Tactics accepted several years ago, such as doorway pages, today may get your site dropped by search engines. If you opt for a printed book, make sure it is reasonably recent.

Newsletters and blogs

One of the great things about the Web today is that we are lucky to have so many excellent free newsletters and blogs on search.  Among newsletters, Jill Whalen’s High Rankings is notable, because she answers real-life questions from readers.

Among blogs designed for business owners, a particularly helpful one is Small Business SEM.  Carston Cumbrowski also has a helpful page of resources for SEO beginners.

Search Engine Land featuring search guru Danny Sullivan, is a good one to add to your reading list later on as your knowledge builds. It is industry focused, but has the advantage of experts who write on specific topics such as link-building and contextual advertising — not to mention its excellent blogroll of search sites to explore.

Discussion forums

As you begin to learn some of the basics of SEO, you will have questions.  Head to discussion forums to get answers.  Discussion forums are excellent sounding boards to bounce ideas off of others. Try Webmaster World and Digital Point Forums.

When you first approach a new discussion forum, read and observe for a while before jumping in to participate.  Every forum has a “personality” all its own — make sure you feel comfortable.  Observing also helps you learn which participants’ advice to trust. Some participants are more knowledgeable than others.

Interactive tools

No article on search for newbies would be complete without mentioning some of the excellent free or low-cost tools available.  I have learned a great deal simply through using tools such as:

• WordTracker keyword tool — Using relevant keywords in your site content and when purchasing search ads can make all the difference in attracting visitors who actually buy. You may already know the obvious keywords, but WordTracker helps you broaden your choices to identify non-obvious terms. A free trial or a single day’s subscription costs around $8.
• Analytics programs — These help you understand which parts of your site visitors use most, such as which navigation links they click on most. Armed with that knowledge, you can make changes to your site to emphasize the most important elements to increase sales and newsletter signups. Google Analytics is a robust free analytics tool.  For those who run Google AdWords campaigns and do not like the idea of giving sensitive site data to the same company you purchase ads from, ClickTracks is an alternative.  ClickTracks offers a free version called ClickTracks Appetizer.
• SEO Moz page strength tool — This interactive tool gives you a quick snapshot of some of the factors search engines consider when determining site rankings.  Don’t take it as the complete word on ranking factors, but do have fun with it.

Anita Campbell is a writer, speaker and radio talk show host who closely follows trends in the small business market at her site, Small Business Trends.

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Search for Blogs

Blogs can be effective tools for raising the profile of your product or service — but only if your target audience find them. Search engine optimization (SEO) can be effective for raising the profile of your blog.

Printable Promotions has only had a blog on its site for a month or so. But it’s already made an impact on the company’s search engine rankings. “I did a Google search on ‘reusable folding grocery bag,’” says Stacie Long, the company’s operations manager. “The YouTube video of our product that we posted on our blog came up third or fourth.”

For many small business leaders, blogging can engender feelings of envy and frustration — envy over legendary blogs that draw thousands of daily page views and frustration from the sneaking suspicion that no one out there is reading their own postings. Search engine optimization (SEO) can change that.

“Blogging is a great way to drive users to a site,” says Kelly Cutler, CEO of Internet marketing firm Marcel Media. “It can also help with stickiness, which is an important goal these days. It’s too easy for users to bounce away from your site before they’ve done something valuable like sign up for your newsletter or fill out a form.”

How can you improve your blog’s ranking on search engines? SEO is a complex science, but here are some principles that will help:

Make it crawler-friendly

Search engines dispatch software called crawlers (or sometimes “spiders”) to roam the World Wide Web in search of sites that might be of interest to searchers. One important SEO strategy is to have your blog be easy for the crawlers to find.

“Make sure the software is set up so that posts don’t get buried ten levels deep in your site,” advises Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings, an SEO service. “They should be easy to reach so search engines can crawl them.” Whalen also advises using SEO-friendly blog software. “WordPress is probably one of the best for that,” she says.

It’s also smart idea to include links in your posts, both to your own website’s product pages or other information, and to outside websites as well. Why? It’s links to your site, not from your site, that drive search engine rankings — but, Whalen notes, one often begets the other. “It’s a good way to get linking back and forth,” she says. “Other site owners usually check who’s linking to them, so they get to know who you are.” When linking to outside sites, make sure the links open in a new window or tab so that users don’t automatically leave your site whenever they click on a link.

To keyword or not to keyword

Since all searches start with keywords, it seems obvious that including the pertinent keyword as many times as you can in a blog entry should help bring traffic. Not so fast, experts say. “Don’t force keywords into content where they wouldn’t normally be,” Cutler cautions. “That creates a bad user experience, which means people won’t use your blog, and then Google won’t index your blog.” In fact, Marcel Media usually refrains from even telling client bloggers what the top keywords are for their sites. “Blogs are usually better done without that kind of research in mind,” Cutler says.

Instead, she tries to identify blog topics where preferred terms come up naturally. “One of our clients is a hospital and we’ve identified specific areas they want to focus on. We’ve invited doctors who specialize in those areas to participate in blogging. We’re not trying to build content around keywords, but because those doctors work in those areas, we know the keywords will be used.”

If you do decide to do keyword research, Whalen recommends Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker to find what keywords your customers are searching. She also notes that Google’s AdWords offers information on keyword searches that is free to use, even if you’re not an AdWords customer.

But, she advises, don’t just go for the top terms. “Very competitive phrases probably have many sites optimizing for them,” she says. “So you want a phrase that’s less competitive, but still has some people searching it.” If that phrase is specific to your business’s unique value proposition, optimizing on it can be a very powerful tool.

Content is king

“A mistake I’ve seen a lot is that companies think Web 2.0 is like regular advertising space,” Long says. “They treat it like a billboard.”

Instead, make sure you’re providing content that will entertain, amuse, or inform your readers. One way to build traffic is to comment or react to the news of the day as it affects your particular business. “If you’re a bookseller, you might blog about the current lawsuit by J.K. Rowling to block publication of a Harry Potter Lexicon,” Cutler says. If you use this strategy, she adds, “Keep it short, to the point, and keep it opinionated. Don’t just republish news.”

Understanding the connection between blogging and search rankings can inspire busy executives to take the time to blog, Cutler notes. “What I like about blogging is that it stays in the spirit of the Internet, but lets you accomplish SEO goals in the background,” she says. “Content and linking are two of the most powerful Internet marketing tools –and blogging lets you use both in a non-advertising way.”

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Find and SEO Consultant

Companies that can’t afford a full-time SEO specialist can hire a part-time consultant — but finding one that’s a good fit takes time and effort.

In four and a half years since Sarah Shaoul started a website for BlackWagon, her children’s boutique in Portland, Oregon’s trendy Mississippi Avenue neighborhood, she’s worked with four search-engine optimization consultants. Believe her when she says a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist that’s a good fit for a small business is hard to find.

The first SEO expert Shaoul used was her business partner at the time and didn’t know as much as he claimed. The second SEO consultant did some great work but never really grasped her store’s high-end business concept, and after he raised his rates she couldn’t afford him any more anyway. Then there was the guy who stopped returning phone calls — he checked in eventually to say he’d changed his business’ direction and no longer did SEO work.

Shaoul is happy with her current SEO advisor, but only because they spent considerable time up front hammering out exactly what the specialist was going to do. Says Shaoul: “Every time we hire someone we gain a little more insight.”

According to Internet marketing experts, Shaoul’s experience is par for the course for small businesses looking to hire outside SEO help to promote an online store or just improve their standing in Google searches.

In many cases, small businesses don’t know where to look for SEO specialists, or once they find candidates, don’t ask the right questions to separate the good from the bad. “A lot of people approach it like it’s magic,” says Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land, an SEO industry news website. “But really it’s like finding a dentist or plumber. You’re hiring another service professional, someone to do a very specific job.”

Where to find SEO candidates

Small businesses like Shaoul’s are barraged by cold calls or e-mails from consultants promising to improve their rankings in organic or paid searches. “99.9 percent of the time you should ignore them,” Sullivan says. “Those kinds of pitches tend to be from low-cost, low-quality people.” Good people are too busy working they don’t need to make cold calls, he says. Instead:

• Ask business acquaintances who they use, or get referrals from your professional network on LinkedIn, Sullivan says.
• If they recommend someone who’s too busy or pricey, ask that person to recommend someone. “They may know someone who’s starting to build a client base” who’d be willing to work for less, he says.
• Look up SEO consultants through a local or national SEO trade group, such as theSearch Engine Marketing Professional Organization. The national group has a searchable database of members on its Website that can be used to find SEO contractors by their specialty.

Once you’ve identified prospective candidates, check out testimonials or case studies on their website. If there aren’t any or if they’re very old, stay away, says Kent Lewis, president at Anvil Media, a Portland, Ore. interactive marketing agency. Ask for three references, then ask for three more to get an even broader perspective, Lewis says.

Proposals and fees

When you find someone who clicks, work up a proposal. SEO and search engine marketing specialists offer a broad range of services, everything from performing website assessments to optimizing sites for keyword searches to undertaking an extensive paid search campaign. It also helps to have a budget in mind going into negotiations, Sullivan says. Being as specific as possible about both will help an advisor come up with a game plan, he says.

While overall SEO fees depend on the kind of work that’s done, fee structures can be all over the map. SEO professionals may charge by the website page, hour or project, or ask for a set monthly retainer to cover a pre-determined amount of work. Some even take a small percentage of whatever revenues are generated from their work, according to Lewis, the Anvil Media executive.

Other advice from the pros:

• Beware of guarantees — Anyone who guarantees your website’s position in paid or unpaid search engine keyword rankings. If they make guarantees, they may be using “black hat” methods to bend or break generally accepted SEO practices to get those results, methods businesses should steer clear of, Lewis says. Guarantees “are smoke and mirrors and most of the time if they don’t make it they won’t make good on their promise,” he says.
• Use a local — Hiring a hometown SEO specialist could be helpful if it makes you comfortable, but it’s not necessary, according to SEO experts. Regardless of where they’re located, it’s smart to check with the Better Business Bureau in the consultant’s home town to see if they’ve received any complaints.
• Find someone who understands your business – Share what you’ve accomplished so they’re not suggesting things you’ve already done, says BlackWagon’s Shaoul, who learned those lessons the hard way. Have your company’s Webmaster or Website developer sit in on meetings with the SEO consultant to translate jargon, Shaoul says, “so you can focus on what you do well.”

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While often very complex in their calculations and data processing, the critical operations performed by the major search engines in order to rank websites isn’t as lengthy as one might think. The processes they use to provide relevant results when a web search is undergone can best be described in the following four steps.

1. Send out the Web Crawlers
Search engines use invisible “bots” or “spiders,” which are really programs or automated scripts, that browse (or “crawl”) the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Search engines use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. This type of technology is necessary because the rate at which people create new Internet documents greatly exceeds any manual indexing capacity. In fact, an estimated 20 billion web pages exist, and search engines have crawled about half of them.
2. Index the Pages
After a spider crawls a web page, it makes a copy of it and adds it to its database. This process is known as indexing. With so many search queries submitted each minute, it is very important that search engines are steadfast in their index management so that they can search and sort billions of documents in fractions of a second.
3. Process Queries
Search engines process hundreds of millions of search queries every day. When someone keys in a search term and clicks “Search,” the engine retrieves from its index all of the documents that match the query. It determines a match by finding the same terms or phrase entered into the search bar. Entering a multi-word phrase by itself can return literally millions of results, but entering that same phrase in quotes can greatly narrow the results, giving the user a more accurate listing of websites that relate to their particular search.
4. Rank Pages
A very closely guarded mathematical equation, called an algorithm, is employed by each search engine to determine how to sort and rank search query results. This algorithm allows the engine to rank the most relevant web pages first, and the rest in descending order of importance to the user.

What You Can Do for Your Website: Avoid Speed Bumps & Walls

You may not know it, but you could be hindering or preventing your website from being crawled by search engine spiders. As spiders crawl the web, they rely on the architecture of hyperlinks to find new web pages and revisit those that may have changed. Complex links and deep site structures with little unique content may act as “speed bumps” in the process by slowing down the spiders. Even worse, data that cannot be accessed by web crawlers are really like “walls” in that they completely prevent your web pages from being ranked.

Beware of the Following “Speed Bumps”:

* URLs with 2+ dynamic parameters; i.e. http://www.url.com/page.php?id=4&CK=34rr&User=%Tom% (spiders may be reluctant to crawl complex URLs like this because they often result in errors with non-human visitors)
* Pages with more than 100 unique links to other pages on the site (spiders may not follow each one)
* Pages buried more than 3 clicks/links from the home page of a website (unless there are many other external links pointing to the site, spiders will often ignore deep pages)
* Pages requiring a “Session ID” or Cookie to enable navigation (spiders may not be able to retain these elements as a browser user can)
* Pages that are split into “frames” can hinder crawling and cause confusion about which pages to rank in the results.

Beware of the Following “Walls”:

* Pages accessible only via a select form and submit button
* Pages requiring a drop down menu (HTML attribute) to access them
* Documents accessible only via a search box
* Documents blocked purposefully (via a robot meta tag or robots.txt file)
* Pages requiring a login
* Pages that re-direct before showing content (search engines call this cloaking or bait-and-switch and may actually ban sites that use this tactic)

In order to avoid the above pitfalls and ensure that your website’s contents are fully crawlable, be sure to provide direct, HTML links to each page you want the search engine spiders to index. Remember to make every page of your site accessible from the home page, since the home page is usually the place spiders begin their crawl. It’s also a good idea to add a sitemap to your website in order to increase its navigation.

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Advertising ROI

Google Analytics Tracking Adwords

Cross Channel and Multimedia Tracking

Cross Channel and Multimedia Tracking

Customized Reporting

Sharing and Communicating

Visualizing Data

Google Funnels

Motion Charts

Motion Charts add sophisticated multi-dimensional analysis to most Google Analytics reports. Select metrics for the x-axis, y-axis, bubble size, and bubble color and view how these metrics interact over time. Choose the metrics you want to compare and expose data relationships that would be difficult to see in traditional reports. Watch video.

Geo Targeting

Identify your most lucrative geographic markets.

Google Integration and Reliability

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SEO for Small Business

It seems like times are always tough for small businesses, but no time is worse than during a recession. During a recession, many businesses try to cut back on as much as possible, but when does cutting back start to hurt the company? One of the places this question is most often applied is to the question of SEO. Should a small business pay for SEO when money is tight?

Unfortunately, many small businesses axe their advertising budget first. While this can be a good place to save a little bit of money, if businesses completely cut their advertising, they will not be able to attract new clients. Without new clients, there’s little they can do to make more money. While word of mouth may help somewhat, it’s not as effective as a marketing blitz.

While web marketing is cheaper than doing offline marketing, there are still costs involved. However, you may get a much higher return on your investment since you’re able to more deeply analyze how well your marketing is doing. Since websites allow users to track where their traffic comes from, it’s easier to identify and cut any online marketing that is not working. To this end, small businesses should not immediately cut their SEO budget when times get tight.

Some small businesses may not have even invested in SEO yet, and these businesses may be asking why they should spend the money. However, those small business owners may not recognize just how great a return they can get on their SEO. A huge return on investment is everything in a recession, and doing SEO is ranked as one of the top ROI solutions.

By selecting specific keywords and phrases, you’re very specifically targeting your audience. While ads in magazines may get a lot of attention, you never really know if your target audience is viewing the ad or if it is being viewed by someone who will never purchase your product. SEO, however, makes certain your website is being viewed by those who are looking for what you offer. It brings in more than just quantity; it brings in quality visitors and provides them with information about your website right away.

When it comes to dealing with SEO, small businesses have a few choices. They can either handle the SEO themselves or they can hire a professional SEO company. The first is obviously the most budget-friendly; however, if you and your employees don’t understand the basics of doing SEO, you may end up wasting your time. Fortunately, you can learn the basics of SEO fairly quickly.

Paying a company to do SEO, especially if the company is thorough and completely redesigns your website from the ground up to be fully optimized, may be out of your price range. Many small businesses simply can’t afford this. However, having an expert in SEO look at your pages can be helpful. Outsourcing only part of the SEO process can be helpful. For example, you may want to hire a professional SEO writer to create content for your website after you determine the keywords yourself.

SEOSapien is a SEO Company. Find all our Services and SEO Pricing at http://www.seosapien.com.

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Social Media Networks

If your online marketing agency has advised you to have a blog, a Facebook fan page, or a Twitter account so that you can get more content just to attain additional search engine rankings, you might want to stop and ask why. Many online marketing companies suggest these tactics to gain yet another ranking in the search engine results. While this tactic works at first, eventually, if your content isn’t seen as valuable, you’ll lose that search engine ranking.

Even if you manage to attain some higher rankings by implementing some of these online marketing tactics, it ultimately will do you no good if the person clicking on the link sees your content as totally irrelevant and not valuable. All you will have managed to do is align the term “worthless” to your search engine ranking and your site for that particular keyword you’ve implemented the SEO tactics for.

Value is one of the most important things to keep in mind when creating great content that will get audiences in social media communities to interact and engage with you. Without the value to the audience, you will get the inevitable “so what?”

Getting that “so what” means that you really aren’t engaging or even piquing the audience’s interest. Basically, you’re just another marketer attempting to sell another bill of goods to the community you’re trying to engage — or worse, you’re just another SEO trying to scam the search engine rankings to beat the competitor by using social media.

You Don’t Decide the Value, Your Audience Does

The people who read your blog, engage with you on a forum or message board, watch your video, or look at photos in your photo group on Flickr are the people who deem whether that content is valuable to them. You can possibly influence their decision; however, you can’t make that decision for them.

Mistakenly, marketers assume a lot about their audience in social media communities, so this is where companies must be extra diligent. Don’t assume their need or their pain point can be influenced by your own pain points and needs. This is why it’s vital to do the research around the communities you want to engage in and create content for.

Take the ShamWow, for example. The ShamWow is a chamois/towel that supposedly has super absorbent features that makes it superior to all other chamois on the market today. As their spokesman Vince tells in their video on YouTube, “it’s made by Germans and you always know they make great stuff.”

Their site touts this, and their literature and marketing all touts this, but I don’t understand why they find that valuable to mention. As a U.S. consumer, I could care less who makes it (aliens could make it for all I care!) or how great they claim it is (everyone claims their product is awesome).

Show me how it’s going to add value to my life. What pain point will it ease?

What I find of most value about the ShamWow is the part of the video where Vince pours the soda on the carpet and the ShamWow soaks it all up, including down into the carpet padding. That’s value because that hits a pain point with me, having spilled many liquids on my carpet. The fact that the ShamWow even removes the brown color of the soda from the carpet is another pain point that is eased and viewers could find of value.

It could do the same thing for a glass of wine spilled on carpet. Imagine ShamWow doing a whole video about how their product picks up wine stains off of white carpets. Blush wines, zinfandel wines, port wines, cabernet sauvignon wines — all of the “colorful” wines that can leave a huge mess behind if spilled can be effectively cleaned up by the ShamWow. Now if they sent that hypothetical video off to a few wine bloggers, they probably could have a hit because it would provide value by easing a pain point for people who love to drink wine.

What You Deem Valuable Could be Worthless to Your Audience

You may think that PDF spec sheet of the 10 best of features for your product or service is the best marketing slick ever. You’ve spent hours designing the marketing look and feel around it, you want to make sure that it’s on your Web site and it’s put into every sales packet. You believe this is the most valuable piece of content there is to sell your product.

Unfortunately, you aren’t thinking from the end user’s perspective.

A list of specs of features doesn’t do the end user a bit of good if they can’t even figure out how to use your products or services. Many times, companies mistakenly believe that adding more bells and whistles to their products is what customers find valuable. Customers use the product the way it gives them value. Most of the time, the bells and whistles don’t give the value.

Listening to your audience talk about what the best features are of your product in social media communities should give you insight into how to provide them with valuable content. It can also help you improve your marketing efforts to reach and engage more people. Utilizing this kind of knowledge can help your marketing efforts in social media reach new engagement levels.

Content Isn’t Just Text Anymore

Content can take many forms that your audience can find valuable. A simple video showing how to use the basic features of your product can become an invaluable resource to a new customer. In turn, they tell their friends how easy it is to use once your watch the video, which they share with their friends. Then, once those friends see the video, they realize, “Oh yeah, it is easy” and also end up buying your product.

Audio can be just as compelling. Sometimes your audience might not have the time to sit and read your blog or watch a video, but they might have time to download a podcast and listen to it on their drive to or from work. Podcasts can become a valuable resource to an audience that is short on time during the day to sit down and read, but yet has time on their commute to listen to an interview with an expert about the latest research in your related field.

While you may think what you provide your audience or customers is valuable, it would behoove you to take the time out to listen to them in social media communities. Be prepared, though, if you come from a traditional marketing background where slick ad pieces or literature was your way of communicating. You’ll find that those don’t work or aren’t welcomed in social media communities and they’ll let you know that right up front.

Audiences aren’t afraid to tell you if the content you’re putting out is just plain crap or is truly the best thing since sliced bread.

Meet Liana Evans at SES Chicago on December 7-11. Now in its 11th year, the only major Search Marketing Conference and Expo in the Midwest will be packed with 70+ sessions covering PPC management, keyword research, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, video optimization and usability, while offering high-level strategy, keynotes, an exhibit floor, networking events and more.

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