Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

I posted links to FREE software here:

https://www.marketingprofs.com/ea/qst_question.asp?qstID=21727


SEO is only one part of the game. Like the old proverb says: man with open mouth sit long time waiting for duck to fly in. Sitting and waiting for search engines to bring you lots of customers should not be your only strategy. Yes, search is important, but only IF people are searcing for your products and services.

You must be proactive and get out there and shale the money tree. Drive folks to your web site to buy. Get their contact information so you can email them in a few months time, and see if they've consumed or used up all you sold them because it would be a good time to sell them again (its all about repeat sales). Selling means getting out and chasing those sales. Make sure your web site can stand on its own and sell.

Its a push and pull world. Push folks to the site to buy. Pull folks in with search tools. Get the best of both worlds.

Darcy Moen

You probably do need an expert if this is really important to you. SEO is truly a science that some have mastered and most have not.

There's a really good PDF white paper on the subject you should download and read. It is a little self-serving, but the basic content is excellent. You can find it here.

Search optimization is an art based on shifting sands. Everyone is trying to optimize their site based on algorithms for search engines that are constantly being tweaked to prevent "gaming".

First, a simple book to read: Search Engine Optimization for Dummies (Peter Kent).

What's changing in the SEO scene is the area of social search marketing. Before, if you wanted to find something, you went to the big search engines and did an "impartial" search. What's hot now is asking your "community" for recommendations, in the same way you'd find a local plumber. The social search scene is very young, and SEO experts are trying to figure out how to "game" it as well.

My suggestions is to focus on your site first. Make sure it has top-quality information, so that when you do get traffic, people immediately "get" what you're selling, see your expertise, and convert into customers. Once you've got your site "good enough" (don't get into the paralysis of trying to make it perfect from the get-go), then open the traffic doors. Yes, do the keyword optimization. Yes, understand how people who want your products/services would try to find you, and make sure you're listed "there". And finally, your website is an island unless you build bridges from other websites (backlinks). Find other sites that you can "partner" with. Contribute articles on your expertise to article banks.

Hi Juliet,

hope you're having a great day but more importantly a wonderful life.

There is fairly accurate information entered in every post above. But I have a friend who has offered me some fairly interesting information on the matter and the truth is this area of work is very Scientific. But I've found through my own experience and listening to quite a few of my friends who make a living strictly through online websites that there are way too many different approaches to receiving the same results.

I have several webpages and websites where I hold #1 ranking and I'll be the first to tell you it's not because I have the greatest website designs either. Some of these where this is the case have as few as a couple hundred searches and others have more than a few million.

In every case where I do dominate the top rankings I believe it's because it's an area where I have intentionally directed web traffic to these sites through a series of well crafted strategies and their all based around word usage and a great deal of repetition.

As Darcy said it's more than just SEO strategies and I'll go as far as saying it's a whole lot more than traditional SEO strategies that have gotten me those high results too.

I've used several combinations of things that through trail and error I've discovered work for me. While my method is Scientific it also includes some freedom of expression that allows me to go outside of the normal structures most people use to generate their #1 Ranking.

Now a days the internet is linked and cross linked with so many websites and keywords that there are unlimited possibilities and diverse ways of achieving the same results. Juliet while I won't reveal how I've achieved huge successful results in the rankings I'll be more than happy to help you for a small fee. There are some who have a different philosophy and some of those same people say Traditional SEO approaches are dead. They also say people pay tens of thousands of dollars and others hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a #1 SEO Ranking.

Randall you're absolutely right. I recieve online emailings and newsletters from SEO gurus whose work doesn't even appear in the top 10 even under their own name or web page. If you'd like to email you some of these souces for free I will. And I'm in no way endorsing them or their products so please don't buy anything and come back to me if you don't like how it goes...lol.

REMEMBER... our only real problem in life is our failure to be "MORE Creative" than we’ve ever been. If you “Invent” your opportunity YOU WILL most definitely create your future. I'm only an email away from you if you need further guidance, direction or you'd just like to talk more about it. You see I love it when my customers are happy. Are you happy yet? Is this information helping you? Is there anything else I can do for you?

Your Servant,

Lovingly Deremiah *CPE (Customer Passion Evangelist)

It seems we're all trying to sell you something. ;-)

After 7 years of ecommerce and SEO/Web Consulting I'll offer you my advice as an entrepreneur rather than a salesperson.

1. Ugly sites typically outperform beautiful sites. You should focus on your message, not how perfect your site is. I would not let one day go by without marketing your site. Even if your site was designed by a two year old you can do a lot which will benefit you over the long haul regardless of what you do with the site to improve it. A site is a living thing. If you wait for it to be "right" before you do any marketing you'll be very old before you become successful. Granted, having excellent content, title and meta description tags is extremely helpful, I've seen blank pages outperform good sites.

2. You have a lot to learn. If you do not have the budget and you have plenty of time then you should learn SEO practices and implement them. If you have no time and plenty of resources you should still learn them but you'll find, as I state in the next paragraph, that you'll be better off farming it out.

3. SEO consultants outperform inside SEO by a factor of 3:1. As I transitioned to offering SEO services to my clients I can see why. Most entrepreneurs, webmasters, IT and marketing staff wear too many hats to focus exclusively on SEO. Too many distractions occur in a day.

4. SEO is not voodo or rocket science. A good SEO is however, part techie and part marketer. The required knowledge is highly specialized and therefore is not fully understood by those who are highly specialized in other areas. We kind of fit in between other departments. Not quite in IT, not quite in marketing, etc.

5. A good starter book is SEO Book. You won't be an SEO after you've read it but it is by far the best source of SEO information out there and it'll really help you when you're attempting to source SEO. Aaron Wall has a great mind.

6. Links are good. Unless they're from bad sources.

7.

"But it seems to me...and, admittedly, I am not too bright in this area...shouldn't every SEO Consultant be in the top 10?"

Why bother? Most SEOs, myself included, are spending their day working on client sites and have no time or interest in marketing their own. If you do a google search for "SEO" you'll find the top ranking sites are larger firms that have full-time staff promoting their site and have larger market budgets. They get great rankings but their clients are paying for it.

I get 100% of my business through referrals. So, from my perspective, I'm not motivated to put great effort into our site. I know I should. But, like the plumber with leaky pipes, I'd rather do my best work for my clients and have some time to answer questions on MarketingProfs.

Best of luck on the new business.

Regards,

Greg Hill
Trinity | Search Engine Marketing

Juliet - i recommend posting your advice request on the Gooruze community (www.gooruze.com).

There are several very experienced SEO and online marketing people in there (the likes of Andy Beal, Brian Chappell, Matt McGee, Stoney DeGeyter etc) and more importantly - they are all willing to share their knowledge....and help out other community members.

If you want to learn SEO then you can buy the Seobook offered by Araon Wall at https://www.seobook.com/. I hear only good things about it and his blog is really popular. However, you can find a lot of seo tips from just doing a google search and gather all the information for free but it is more time consuming.

If you start making a blog, you can experiment seo and learn from there. Usually you need to keep repeating the same words (try to make it look natural) to get better SERP. If a particular page has been linked a lot from other websites, that will boost your SERP for that page. Make use of h1 and h2 tags and as well as meta keywords.

Hope this helped!

Juliet

I think one of the most fundamental issues with SEO is that nobody can make your site Number One in any particular category. That's far too wide a claim and you should be suspicious of anyone who makes it.

All an SEO expert can do, is make your site Number One for a particular search term. And then with some limitations.

The thing about SEO is you have you know (try at first to GUESS) what search terms your prospective customers are using when they are searching the solution you could provide.

Sure, there are reports available on what people are searching for, but are they ever going to be your customers?

Of course, what we really need are reports of buying terms. Buying, not 'just looking' would be far more useful information. And that information is something you need a website designer to help you figure out by monitoring site visitation and passge through your conversion process.

You can't please all the people, all the time. And so it is with SEO.

To succeed you need a very focused definition of who you are hoping to attract and what they are looking for.

And then you need to ensure your site can convert them to a sale. What's your conversion rate now? 1%? 5%? It's probably easier to increase conversion by 10-15% than to increase visitation by 1000%.

And it would be a better business strategy to become more focused so your website is more effective, than simply to increase visitation without increasing sales. Think of a real-world store: Increased traffic simply wears out the carpet.

ChrisB

This seems to be another of those ridiculous "SEO dosn't work" theories. Does advertising work?

"I think one of the most fundamental issues with SEO is that nobody can make your site Number One in any particular category. That's far too wide a claim and you should be suspicious of anyone who makes it."

I have seen a page rank #1 out of 300,000,000 competing pages through Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) where the queried keyword phrase does not exist on the page. So, to say that SEO works only on an optimized keyword is just not true. Search is no longer about single phrases. It's about themes.

All an SEO expert can do, is make your site Number One for a particular search term. And then with some limitations."

The goal is to find a number of keyword phrases that will bring in qualified visitors. If you don't need qualified visitors then you don't need SEO.

"The thing about SEO is you have you know (try at first to GUESS) what search terms your prospective customers are using when they are searching the solution you could provide.

"Sure, there are reports available on what people are searching for, but are they ever going to be your customers?

All marketing is a guess. The question is how educated is your guess. A lot of SEOs are good at making very good "guesses", if you will, at what should work. Then they test. Just like in every other medium. It's like saying an ad agency doesn't know how to write a good ad. This could be true. It may not be. Depends upon the agency.

"Of course, what we really need are reports of buying terms. Buying, not 'just looking' would be far more useful information."

While I agree that having the proper metrics is a survival necessity I disagree at how useful "buying terms would be".

If your "buying term", say keyword 1, was converting at 2%, under your theory you'd expand upon that term. But what if keyword 2 would convert at 5%? What if keyword 2 wasn't on your radar? What if the site hasn't sold a single thing or had results which were not statistically significant?

"And that information is something you need a website designer to help you figure out by monitoring site visitation and passge through your conversion process."

Web designers to a lot of great work but it is extremely rare to find one that truly has SEO knowledge. They talk about it because clients expect it but more often than not, they are spending their energies on design and not SEO.

I spend most of my day correcting major mistakes made by large small web design firms. Being able to package content and make it attractive is extremely useful. But there is more to it than that. Design is one component just as SEO is another.

"You can't please all the people, all the time. And so it is with SEO."

Agreed.

"To succeed you need a very focused definition of who you are hoping to attract and what they are looking for."

Agreed.

And then you need to ensure your site can convert them to a sale. What's your conversion rate now? 1%? 5%? It's probably easier to increase conversion by 10-15% than to increase visitation by 1000%.

Agreed. I find that this is a bigger problem for most sites than traffic. You could bring a million visitors to some sites and they couldn't convert one customer. In my consultancy I spend perhaps 50% of my time on conversion optimization.

"And it would be a better business strategy to become more focused so your website is more effective, than simply to increase visitation without increasing sales."

Good advice.

"Think of a real-world store: Increased traffic simply wears out the carpet."

Agreed. Qualified traffic is what sites should be hunting for. There are all sorts of direct costs associated with increased traffic. You increase bandwidth costs, support, bookkeeping, etc etc. There are opportunity costs as well. Customers is what we want. If traffic is converting and is profitable then scale it to the moon. If not, well, the model needs to be changed.