Tiny Action, Mighty Payoff

Tiny Action Mighty Payoff: Basic SEO Competitive Research

by Russ Henneberry

Basic SEO Competitive Research

Search Engine Optimization is about ranking better than the competition for the money keywords and “long tail” keywords that drive sales in your industry.

This means you need to know what kind of SEO your competition is packing.

Notice that there are a ton of links to other posts in this article, if you don’t know what something is — click on the link for further investigation.

How To Do Basic SEO Competitive Research

Do some keyword research — find the money keywords and “long-tail” keywords in your industry
Enter these keywords into Google
Make a list of the competitors that are consistently ranking in the Top 10 search results for these keywords in a spreadsheet.
Enter the following into the spreadsheet for each competitor
1. Approximate number of words (html text) on the home page
2. Are they making proper use of title tags?
3. Are they making proper use of meta description tags?
4. Are they making proper use of alt text on images?
5. Are their URL’s optimized?
6. Are they making proper use of cross linking?
7. Number of pages indexed by Google
8. Number (and quality) of inbound links on Yahoo or use a stronger tool like Linkscape if you are feeling saucy.
Now enter your own website’s data on the spreadsheet. Be honest.
Determine where your SEO is lacking.
Get to work.

What are your questions about basic SEO competitive research? What would you add to this list?

{ 0 comments }

Tiny Action, Mighty Payoff: Checking The Google Index

by Russ Henneberry

TweetIf I had a nickel for every time someone said to me —

“I don’t think my website is even IN Google.”

— I would have like… $2.65. :)

I think what people mean when they say this is that they don’t believe Google knows they exist — they aren’t finding their website when they do searches for keyword phrases that they think they should be ranking for. They may not even be finding their website when they Google the exact name of their business.

The very first (or at least one of the very first) things I do when someone asks me to look at a website is I will do a “site operator” on Google to check what web pages Google has in its index.

Google (and the other search engines) work this way

A program (commonly called a “spider”) will visit your website,
it will “crawl” your website (essentially reading the content of the pages on your site),
it will then return the contents of the pages that it “crawled” to be categorized in the index.
When a searcher types something in that Google thinks you are appropriate for, it displays your site in the results

IMPORTANT: In order for a web page to be displayed as a Google result, the page must first be indexed.

The Process for Checking the Google Index

Visit Google
Type site:yourdomain.com — no spaces and no www. or http:// prefixes.
Don’t be satisfied to find out that Google does indeed know that you exist — comb through the results for a bit — you will likely learn something about your website and the mysterious ways of Google.

What You Might Find When You are Checking the Google Index

Everything looks kosher — If it looks like Google has all of your pages in the index and nothing looks funky — go buy yourself an ice cream cone — you’re a lucky dog!
Nothing, zero, zilch, nada — You have found that Google does not know that you exist or that you have been banned. This is a problem. Especially if your site is much older than 2 months or so. Your site may have never been indexed by Google or it may be banned. Contact an Internet marketing professional that can have a look under the hood for you.

Here is an example of what Google displays when they literally don’t know you exist —- or they have banned you from their index —

Google does not have some of your pages indexed. This scenario and the next one are the most likely. You will find that there are pages on your site that are not in the index – Start investigating why or contact a professional that can help you.
Google has pages indexed that you don’t want indexed. This is where you see all kinds of screwy things — that run the gamut from old deleted pages that don’t exist anymore to pages that are generated dynamically by a shopping cart. Look for results that look out of place.
SPAM – From time to time, doing a site: will reveal that your website has been hacked by bad people that live in their parents basements and do nothing but eat chinese take-out while trying to figure out how to make our lives hell. They will hack your web server and create havoc by creating new pages that advertise porn, ring tones, mp3′s and other SPAMMY things. First, go make yourself a strong drink and then call a web professional.

What are your questions about checking the Google index? What advice do you have for the rest of us about the Google index?

{ 3 comments }

Tiny Action, Mighty Payoff: How To Check Website Links in Yahoo

by Russ Henneberry

TweetSo — you understand why links are important to your website — now you want to find out how many links you have and from who.

Easy — pop over to Yahoo! and type in the following

You need to replace the yoursite.com with your own website and then click “Web Search”

This will open up Yahoo Site Explorer — you will see two tabs in the upper left hand corner, “Pages” and “Inlinks”

The “Pages” shows you the number of and lists the pages that are in the Yahoo index. The “Inlinks” tab shows you the number of and lists the inbound links that are coming to your site.

When checking website links using Yahoo site explorer there are a few things to know:

These links are not necessarily in any order — although they tend to be strongest first.
You can change the settings (shown in the red box above) to change the query — leave me a comment below if you have questions about these settings.
Some of these links will be “no follows” — no followed links are links that have the rel= “no follow” attribute and don’t pass any “link juice.” In other words, they don’t have the same SEO benefit (if any at all) that a “do follow” link has. Again, leave me a comment below if you have questions about “no follow” and “do follow” links.

I would recommend that you use Yahoo to check website links for yourself and your competitors. Find the “low hanging fruit” links that your competitors have that you could easily get as well.

What about you? What kinds of questions do you have about how to check website links in Yahoo?

{ 4 comments }

Tiny Action, Mighty Payoff: Using The Groundswell Tool

by Russ Henneberry

TweetThis is a nifty tool that can help you get your head around the types of activities your target market undertakes on the social web.

STEP 1: Click on the “Build Profile Now” button on the tool below. Select the age, sex and geography of your market.

STEP 2: Now, look at the categories that are extremely high or extremely low — are they “joiners?” Are they “creators?” etc.

STEP 3: Now, look at the slideshare presentation below the tool and find out what kinds of activities your market tends to participate in.

STEP 4: Now, craft your Internet Marketing strategy appropriately. For instance, if only 13% of U.S. Males are “Collectors” — don’t expect that they will consume your marketing through an RSS feed — that isn’t the way that they use the web.

Take a few minutes to look at this tool and the slides below it — you will learn quite a bit:

Social Technographics Explained

View more presentations from jbernoff.

{ 0 comments }

Tiny Action, Mighty Payoff: How To Use Slideshare For SEO

by Russ Henneberry

TweetIf you are like me, you have half a dozen Powerpoint presentations sitting on your computer that aren’t doing any work for you.

Upload those suckers to Slideshare!

Here is an image that shows you why Slideshare rules for SEO and Internet marketing:

Click on the image and it will open LARGER, view the text below the image for the explanation.

1) Slideshare presentations are extremely shareable — you can see that you can share this slide show via Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, Blogger, WordPress or email.

2) Slideshare presentations are embeddable — you should upload presentations to slideshare and then embed them on your own blog — other people might embed them on their own websites — further spreading your content.

3 & 4 ) Slideshare presentations rank fairly well and they have a YouTube like way of displaying similar presentations — this gets you more views.

5) Slideshare has the ability to have clickable links — this is great because you can drive people back to your own website via your slideshow.

How To Use Slideshare For SEO

Here are a few tips —

1. Name your presentation with SEO keywords — try to find a balance between an interesting title and a keyword rich title.

2. Tag the presentation properly — your tags should be keywords that are contained with the presentation. I use the following tags quite often:

marketing
business
russ henneberry
blogging
etc, etc

3. Write a description that includes your website address and the keywords you are targeting.

4. Include a link to your website in the footer of every slide of the presentation.

Check out Slideshare here and get started!

What are your questions about using Slideshare for SEO? Does anyone have any tips that could help the rest of us?

{ 1 comment }

Tiny Action, Mighty Payoff: Optimizing Website URL’s

by Russ Henneberry

TweetThere’s nothing sexy about talking website URL’s — so I won’t pretend there is.

But — better website rankings, more targeted website traffic and more sales is very SEXY — and optimizing your web pages for search engine traffic can make these things happen.

Your URL file names (believe it or not) can give you a good boost in the search engines when done in combination with things like optimizing the alt text on your images, optimizing title tags and cross linking your website.

What Does An Optimized URL Look Like?

Remember that Google (and the others) is looking for clues about the content of a web page when it “crawls” the page. Using descriptive file names is just one more way to let Google know what the page is about.

Example 1:

http://www.russhenneberry.com/?p=91

This file name doesn’t tell Google anything, zero SEO benefit for this puppy.

Example 2:

http://www.russhenneberry.com/tiny-action-mighty-payoff

This filename is better because it is descriptive, but it doesn’t take an SEO genius to know that very few (if any) people are searching Google for ‘tiny action mighty payoff’

Example 3

A little bit of keyword research will tell you that there is a reasonably high volume of searches for the term ‘optimizing website url’s’

http://www.russhenneberry.com/optimizing-website-urls/

We have a winner!

How To Optimize Website URL’s

If you are using an SEO friendly Content Management System like WordPress, you simply type the file name of the URL that you would like — click OK and move on with your life.

Editing Web Page URL's in WordPress is Easy

If your website is not using an SEO friendly CMS or your website was custom coded — you may need to contact your web professional to find out how to optimize your website URL’s.

IMPORTANT: Optimizing website URL’s that are already on your website is not recommended. There are technical issues that go beyond the scope of this post, but suffice it to say that suddenly changing the URL’s on existing website files could have a damaging effect on your rankings. What IS recommended is optimizing the website pages that you product from this point forward.

If you plan on redesigning your website, be sure that the new designer has a good grasp of SEO.

What questions do you have about optimizing website URL’s? What advice do you have for the rest of us?

{ 0 comments }

Tiny Action, Mighty Pay Off: Optimizing Alt Text On Images

by Russ Henneberry

TweetThe ‘alt’ attribute on an image is intended to inform a website visitor of the subject matter of the image if (for whatever reason) the image doesn’t load or isn’t usable by the searcher.

In other words, it makes sense for the picture of my daughter below to have the alt attribute of ‘Mary Grace on Easter’

If the image doesn’t load (or the searcher doesn’t want it to load) the text Mary Grace On Easter will appear instead.

This is the code for the image of my daughter:

The Importance of Optimizing Alt Text On Images

Search engines, like Google, use the ‘alt’ attribute on your images as yet another clue about the content on that page.

This means you should be including keywords in the ‘alt’ attribute of your images.

So, for instance, I am targeting the term ‘optimizing alt text on images’ with this post. This means that I should use this keyword phrase in the title tag, in the meta description tag, in the URL, in the body copy and in the ‘alt’ attribute of the image on the page.

When I include this keyword phrase in all of these areas, I am telling Google exactly what I think this page should rank well for in their search results. Hopefully they think so too!

How To Optimize Alt Text On Images

If you are using a good Content Management System like WordPress, you can simply type the keyword into the ‘alt’ field when you upload images to your website — and let WordPress write all of that yucky code for you.

But, if you are using a custom website, you will need to contact your web professional to have the ‘alt’ text on your images optimized for search engines.

{ 4 comments }

Tiny Action, Mighty Payoff: Cross Linking Your Website

by Russ Henneberry

TweetGoogle is looking for information on our websites. Our job is to give it to them.

The information Google is seeking is this:

~~~ What keywords (if any) should I display this web page for in my search results?

We give Google this information when we do things like optimize the title tags on our website.

Cross linking is another way we give Google information about which pages WE THINK should be displayed and for which keywords.

What Does Cross Linking Your Website Mean?

Well… the sneaky guy that I am… I just gave you an example above.

Example of Cross Linking Appears Above

Go ahead… click on that link, it takes you to a page on my website that is about “Optimizing Title Tags On Our Website.”

By linking to that page using the words that I did, I am telling Google that this is the page on my website that is most relevant for information about ‘optimizing title tags’

Here is another example: my home page is targeting the term ‘content marketing strategy‘. So, it makes sense to my readers and to Google for me to link to my home page when I use this term on other pages in my website.

Start applying this to your web pages and blog posts, it will increase your Google rankings.

What questions do you have about cross linking your website? Do you have any other pointers you could give us about using cross linking effectively on a website?

{ 0 comments }

Tiny Action, Mighty Payoff: Optimizing Web Page Meta Description Tags

by Russ Henneberry

TweetOptimizing web page meta description tags won’t increase your rankings in the search engines but it will increase your web traffic.

What Is A Web Page Meta-Description Tag?

The search engines will often use the meta description to display under the title tag in the search results.

Optimizing Web Page Meta Description Tags

Red box is surrounding the meta-description of this web page.

Well-written meta description tags will increase the click-through rate of your search results. In other words, the better your meta-description “sells” your page to a searcher, the more clicks you will get.

Where Can I Find My Meta Description Tag?

You will find your meta description tag in the code of your website — follow these steps.

Navigate to a page on your website
Press Ctrl + U in Firefox to view the source code
At the beginning of your source code you should find something that looks like this:

If you don’t find this piece of code on your web page, it means that you don’t have a meta description tag for that page.

How To Add or Edit Your Meta Description Tags

If you are are using a Content Management System (CMS) you will most likely find that there is a way to easily update your meta description tags. Contact the person that build the website and ask them how to add or edit your meta description tags.

In WordPress, you can install Headspace II, once you do you will see a place to edit meta descriptions on every page.

Here are some Meta Description Optimization Tips:

Use the keywords targeted to that page in the meta description
Ensure that the meta description reads well
“Sell” the searcher on clicking on the page
Keep the meta description shorter than 160 characters

What are your questions about optimizing web page meta description tags? What advice do you have?

{ 4 comments }

Tiny Action, Mighty Payoff: Optimizing Web Page Title Tags

by Russ Henneberry

TweetYour title tag is like a huge billboard telling Google (and the others) what each page is about on your website.

The optimization of the title tag is the #1 on-page SEO factor that will determine whether your page or another is displayed for a keyword by a search engine like Google.

How To Find Your Current Title Tags

You can easily see the title tag in your web browser:

In Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, the title tag is in the upper left hand corner.
In Safari, it is in the top center of the web browser.

Here is the title tag for the Hire Russ page on my website as it is displayed in Firefox.

How To Optimize Web Page Title Tags

Here are the most important things to consider when optimizing web page title tags for search engines:

The title tag should contain the keywords you are targeting on that page – learn about doing keyword research here.
Each page should have a unique title tag
Limit your title tag to ~65 characters
The title tag should not just be stuffed with keywords, it should read reasonably well

Point #4 is important because your title tag does not only reside in your browser but also within the search results pages when Google (or the others) decide to display your page.

As you can see in the below screenshot, my title tag is front and center in the Google results — how well it reads will be a huge factor in whether anyone actually clicks on it.

How To Edit Your Web Page Title Tags

The business of editing your title tag will vary depending on the way that your site was built.

If you have built on a search engine friendly Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress, it is as easy as installing a plug-in called Headspace 2, which allows you to type whatever you want as a title and updates the code for you.

If you have built on something less friendly or you have custom coded your website, you may need to contact your webmaster (do you see why I recommend building on WordPress?)

Your turn. What questions do you have about optimizing title tags? Do you have any further advice for those of us optimizing our title tags?

{ 4 comments }

← Previous Entries