This is a guest post from Sagar Jani, Digital Strategist at Station X Communications.

Google's recent algorithm updates, which fully integrate and prioritize Google + into its search results, have spurred a wave of debate and criticism, and it’s quite clear that the search engine giant is losing out in the arena of public opinion. No stranger to controversy, however, Google has made other questionable moves in the past, including Google Wave or the Buzz for example. They have also been involved in suspect deals, including one where they profited from online Canadian pharmacies running illegal ads, a deal which proved to be a $500 million mistake.
 
Despite this, Google’s core business, the search engine responsible for the majority of its revenue and traffic, has remained largely secure. However, Bing has been plugging away over time, becoming the number 2 search engine, and this recent move has inadvertently helped Bing gain popularity.

The reception to this change has been all but warm: Gizmodo has labeled Bing as the better of the 2 search engines, and Dave Winer at Scripting News stated that "Google's search is getting cluttered with pointless crap", concluding that he’ll stay with Bing as long as it continues to outperform Google.

Google has indicated that this change will deliver more personalized results, but some have seen these results skewed more towards Google services than anything else (Google+, Picasa, YouTube, for instance). Take the following scenario: when you search for a restaurant, you're now presented with Google Plus results before Yelp results, where there are generally a large number of useful restaurant reviews. As you can imagine, this doesn't strike a positive chord with many users. Adding to this discontent, SearchEngineland has compiled several damaging examples of the ways in which Google's new interface promotes Plus over relevancy. 

Of course, Google has an incredibly strong global brand presence, with millions of loyal followers, and it remains to be seen what kind of effect these changes will have on the mass of searchers. With two more influential Web sites moving over to Bing's side this week, others may follow. Microsoft might be pulling its "build a competitor, then wait for the rivals to crumble" strategy as it did with Netscape, AOL,  and Sony. We will keep a close eye on the ComScore search reports over next few months, when we can fully assess the impact of Google’s recent move. In the meantime, Microsoft adCenter may see an upswing in popularity, as it already displays ads to 30% of the market.

Many of you have heard of Google's recent
update to its search algorithm.
The search algorithm change has caused
quite a stir in the SEO space, and many marketers (some of which are undoubtedly
daunted by the mere mention of the word 'algorithm') are still trying to figure out
what exactly the update means for their business.

We're joined today by Dan Biggs, Digital Strategist at Station X Communications. Dan, the ever-talented (but always humble!) SEO expert will take us through the ins and outs of Google's search algorithm updates.

M: There has been a lot of buzz lately around Google’s change to its search algorithm – Dan, can you explain what is involved in the update?

D: The first recent change was called "Panda" and was rolled out around the world in April 2011. The main target of the Panda update was to try to reduce what they consider "webspam" - an entire team at Google is focused on this, because relevancy of their search results is of utmost importance. It's true, in my opinion, that their results were becoming bogged down with less-than valuable results. The algorithm change tries to get rid of sites that are considered "content farms", sites that use various methods to post tons of content and flood the results -using scrapers, distributed editorial teams and all sorts of other strategies. Huffington Post, Demand Media and sites like that are well known ones. Here's a video that illustrates their technique: http://youtu.be/s6q7np6cya0.

The most recent update in the Panda saga took place on November 18, and it could be argued that while it's not as fundamental a change as the one back in April, it has more significant impact as it affects about 35% of searches. Google has indicated that they've given more value to pages covering hot topics and very recent events. Basically, sites that provide the most up-to-date information about any topic will get more prominence. Of course this only applies to sites that pay the cost of entry by being considered "high-quality" by the Google algorithm which means that content farms would theoretically be disqualified from manipulating this. This isn't that new, because Google's had what they call QDF or Query Deserved Freshness for a few years now, so this update is working to refine that and place more importance on freshness.

M: How might this update have an impact on marketers?

D: It's a pretty exciting time right now in the SEO world, and things are changing very fast with social search, Bing's growing market share, Google's algorithm updates and lots of other developments. If a marketer is serious about SEO, they're going to already be well aware that fresher is better when it comes to anything on the web. Googlebot loves shiny objects. It's been the case for years that if you update your site more often, Googlebot will visit you more often. Nothing has changed there, except maybe now Googlebot will be visiting a bit more often. I think this is definitely going to have a negative impact on marketers that aren't working to develop fresh and interesting content. Their SEO may have suffered before, but it's going to be much worse now.

M: Could you provide some quick tips and tactics that marketers can use to update their SEO/content strategies to leverage the update for their benefit?

D: I'd start by getting a solid content strategy and some sort of owned media platform if you don't already have one, whether it's a news section or a blog on your site. Nobody with a static site that doesn't get updated at least once a day is going to benefit from this update.

M: If there’s one piece of advice you could leave with our readers, what would it be?

D: Google built their vast market share because of one thing - relevancy. If your site is frequently pushing out high value content that's relevant to your business, Google will reward you by sending Googlebot to your site to spider it. They'll continue to punish sites for being lazy, scraping and churning content from other sources on the web. My advice is to build a content strategy, and get fresh and relevant content flowing. There's a great little book by Erin Kissane that I recommend reading - it's called The Elements of Content Strategy.

M: Thanks for the insight, Dan! Any closing thoughts?

D: If you want to learn about SEO and stay current with Google's search tools and algorithms, you should also subscribe to the Google Search Team blog.

As today's Marqui webinar "How to Build a Long-Term SEO Strategy" went considerably overtime, we promised to answer any questions that were submitted via the blog. So, here are the questions and answers!

Q: My site is on a content management system but the site pages load slowly. Is this going to have an impact on SEO?

A: Yes, it's likely that this would have a detrimental impact on your SEO program, Google released an update in April 2010 that gave lower rankings to slower loading sites. You can read more on the official Google Blog post here. You may consider using a different CMS platform similar to Marqui, which renders complete HTML files instead of querying a database every time a page loads.


Q: Any tips on training staff to do SEO?

A: There are lots of super valuable, free resources through Google and Bing's Webmaster Tools help documents. Here is Google's and here is Bing's  If you're into books, there is a great book called The Art of SEO by Eric Enge, et al., which is great for the fundamentals. SEO changes so fast though that online resources are usually the best. I like WebmasterWorld.com's forums the best, it's very focused on SEO and SEM in general and is worth the subscription cost.

Q: How do you avoid keyword stuffing?
A: First of all, if you write naturally, it's not likely that your keyword would appear even close to enough to be able to be considered stuffing, so that's not a big concern. If the intention is to build on keyword relevance on a page, or you're working on producing optimized content for preferred content pages, I recommend using tools like WebCEO to analyze your pages before publishing them.

Q: Can you overdo SEO activities up front and do more harm than good?

A: You can't really do too many ethical, healthy SEO activities like the ones that I recommended in the webinar, but on the other hand quality should take precedence over quantity in whatever you do. I would not recommend generating content en masse to try to build the amount of content that's on the site unless it's really great stuff. You can't optimize the code or site structure enough, so if you've covered off all the SEO best practice activities that you know about, I recommend checking out a site like WebmasterWorld.com to get some new ideas!

Thanks for your questions, we hope to see you on the next Marqui Webinar.

A new Chrome extension was released by Google on Monday and it aims to help the search engine detect content farms by having users give “explicit feedback” on shallow, low-quality content. Essentially the extension allows users to block websites with poor content from their search results. Once a user blocks a site, a notification is sent to Google allowing them to, “study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for search results.” The extension also allows users to manage blocked sites, and unblock them at any time.

It seems like the goal of the extension is to utilize user feedback to locate the worst content offenders, and to then use that information to adjust search results, limiting the undesirable websites that end up ranking for users’ search queries. It’s an interesting concept, and while it will give users a little more control over which websites appear and their results and which won’t, it does have some weaknesses.

What are the problems with this kind of approach?

• People have to take the time to search out and download the extension
• People have to be using Chrome
• People have to continuously edit their results to keep data relevant
• Content farms can sabotage each other using the system

A similar process was recently adopted by a competitor search engine, Blekko, where they block the 20 most spam-filled sites from their results entirely based on user feedback.

If you want to download the extension and give it a try you can do so here.

What do you think? Do you think that using crowdsourcing techniques to develop effective content farm-detecting algorithms will be a successful approach?

It’s not often that a major news publication takes an interest in one organization’s SEO tactics, but that’s exactly what happened when The New York Times did a little investigative research into J.C. Penney’s link building strategy and the findings (published this past weekend) showed that the company was implementing some frowned-upon black hat SEO practices to help boost their rankings in Google search results.

The article which is called, “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search” addresses some of the ways in which J.C. Penney and other organizations can manipulate their ranking in results with poor link building practices. Basically what The New York Times discovered is that the company was using a link building scheme through which they left links on over 2,000 websites, most of which were defunct and had little to do with any of J.C. Penney’s products in an attempt to increase their back links and help their page rank.

After their research came back showing this extensive usage of black hat tactics, the publication contacted Matt Cutts, Google’s Webspam team lead who stated that, despite J.C. Penney’s denial of knowledge of the scam, that this was actually the third infraction of this type by the organization and that Google”absolutely [will]” be, “tak[ing] strong correction action.”

According to their research over the last few months the company had been repeatedly ranking first for a surprising range and number of keywords, despite their competition. A search done today for the same search terms doesn’t show J.C. Penny anywhere in sight in some cases dropping from the number one spot to as low as the 60th or 70th result.

What does this teach us? As we’ve said before, black hat SEO may have a high initial pay off, but in the long run it can be extremely detrimental to your company’s SEO strategy and website’s overall performance in search engine results. While white hat link building is a long and sometimes tedious process, in the long run, it will help your company to be more successful online. If you want to learn more about white hat link building strategies, take a look at our recent webinar, “How to Find Link Love.”

We just finished today's SEO webinar on link building and as usual afterwards we give a quick recap of the main highlights of the webinar here. If you'd like to view our How to Find Link Love webinar you can see it and our other web marketing webinars on-demand in our resource section.

Why are links important?

• A link is like a vote for your website, it shows search engines that your content is relevant and worthwhile to searchers
• links  increases your website's visibility and drives website traffic 

What are the characteristics of a quality link?

• The link is from a reputable, high authority website
• The link has relevant anchor text
• The link is a one-way link vs. a reciprocal one
• The link doesn't have a "nofollow" tag on it

What are some common link building strategies?

• Social Media
• Link Baiting
• Directories and Listings
• Content syndication

What are some common link building scams?

• Link Farms
• Links from networked websites
• Link building proposals and outsourcing
• Links from websites with a low reputation
• Link exchange requests and paid link exchange offers

This is just a brief roundup of the topics covered in the presentation, If you want more detail on these topics you'll just have to download the webinar!

What is SEO?
Some of you might be rolling your eyes at this one, but is actually still an enormous number of organizations that know little or nothing about SEO and the come to us to find out what it is and how it can help them.  SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is used to describe the ways that website owners manipulate their website information so that it achieves better rankings in search engine results. The higher your website ranks in search engine results, the more traffic your website will get and continually using SEO techniques can help your website to be successful.

Is SEO worth my time?
That depends entirely on who’s doing your SEO for you. SEO is a consistently changing industry and because of that it’s good to find specialists with a strong background in SEO who are up to date on the most recent best practices, but it will also depend on the keywords you’re targeting and your industry.  When your SEO is done correctly by a knowledgeable expert it can be highly effective in increasing website traffic but SEO done incorrectly will mostly be just a waste of time and resources. Our Advice? Make sure you choose your SEO consultant with care.

Why is my website ranking poorly?
SEO is a constant process because the rules for it are constantly changing. If you haven’t kept up with current best practices or aren’t using SEO techniques properly, you may not be ranking as well as you could be. Here are some of the main reasons why websites rank poorly:

• Missing or incorrectly used Title Tags
• Keyword stuffing (overusing your keywords excessively)
• No Alt Tags on your images 
• Poorly written content that is missing naturally occurring keywords
• Very few pages or content that isn’t regularly updated
• Not enough relevant backlinks

What makes a link relevant?
Links are one of the most important aspects of SEO because they act like a “vote” for your website. Links from credible websites (ones that search engines deem reliable and authoritative) that have relevant anchor text (the text in the hyperlink confirms what your page is about) will help you to rank better because it proves to search engine crawlers what your website or page is actually about. There are many scams that claim to help you get relevant links, but please, for us, don’t get sucked in. These link “farms” or “exchanges” can lead to heavy penalties in search engines which will actually erode your rankings.

What is duplicate content and how can I avoid it?
You have duplicate content when you have multiple pages on your website that contain a significant amount of similar content to other pages and search engines will penalize for this just like for link farming. This is actually very simple to avoid: just write new content for each page! If your pages are relevant to specific topics and you’re writing according to what your page is about, it shouldn’t be too difficult to avoid this penalty.

Why is content important for SEO?
Your website’s content (blog posts, webpage copy, resources etc) is one of the best tools that you have to help improve your search engine rankings because it allows you to emphasize your keywords, build links and supplement your demand generation initiatives, but remember: you can’t just have any old content. Your content needs to be valuable to your audience for it to help you build links and bring traffic to your website.

What is an XML sitemap?
An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the URLs on your website. This type of sitemap is used to inform search engines about the URLs on your website that are available for crawling so that they get included in the search engine’s database.

How many keywords/Keyword phrases should I target?
That is going to depend on your website and your audience because your keyword choices should be derived from the terms that your users are utilizing to find your website. It will also depend on the size of your website and what products or services your company or organization provides to your audience. Having said that, the best practice is usually considered to be 2-5 keywords per page.

How can I figure out which keywords to target? Choosing your keywords carefully is on the most important steps when determining your SEO strategy and there are several different tactics for narrowing down the best ones. Brainstorming is a good way to get started, but after that there are plenty of free and paid online tools to help you generate keywords and determine which ones you should choose. You’re analytics are a good place to start as well (if you have them set up). Understanding what people are already using to find your website is a good way to narrow down your keyword strategy. Make sure when you choose your keywords you choose based on relevance and achievability. Just because a keyword is relevant for your website doesn’t mean you will necessarily rank for it. The more popular the keyword is, the less likely you will rank highly for it.

What is black hat SEO?
Pretty much everything we’ve already mentioned not to do is considered black hat SEO. Basically using black hat SEO techniques means that you’re doing things that break search engine rules to try and get higher rankings and are generally considered to be cheating and unethical (keyword stuffing is a good example).

Image by Dom Dada on Flickr.

According to Wikipedia, HTML5 is the, “next major revision of the HTML standard. Like its immediate predecessors, HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1, HTML5 is a standard for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web.”

What does that really mean? HTML5 is the newest update of HTML and it has some new features that hope to address the biggest problems associated with HTML 4.01. The biggest change is that HTML5 adds many new syntax elements which will help with the, “semantic-richness” or documents and the inclusion of multimedia and graphic content.

How does affect your SEO?

The ability to mark your content with more specific tags will certainly help search engines more effectively determine the type of content that is going to be displayed and the new tags incorporated in HTML5 will help search engines understand more accurately the actual content of your web pages. Improving the way that search engine crawlers interact with your web content will help web developers and marketers to improve and optimize their search engine rankings. Basically, HTML5 helps improve page segmentation and crawlability and allows websites to have more search-engine friendly functionality and multi-media content.

What do some of these new elements look like?

<section> tag. The new <section> tag can be used to segment a page into different sections with their own separate HTML heading.

<article> tag. The new <article> tag is one of the most important additions from a SEO standpoint. This tag is where you will place the majority of the content on your page and it lets developers mark separate entities on your page (a blog for example) and reduces the need for <div> tags, cleaning up the code so it’s easier for both humans and search engines to read. A single page can hold several <article> tags and each article may contain several <section> tags. All of these tags will help better structure pages for easier understanding.

<header> tag. This new tag helps to give developers much more flexibility in terms of headings. The tag is a lot like the <h1> tag but it can contain a whole different set of header tags (so you can create headers within headers) or even hard coded links, an important part of your SEO.

<footer> tag.  This tag is fairly similar to the heading tag in that they can both be used multiple times on a single page. The footer tag will show up at the end of a section and is useful for items like blog posts where you have recurring page elements. Neither the header or footer tag have to sit within the standard header or footer of a page, making both of them ideal for repeating elements.

<nav> tag. This tag can be used to identify a collection of links to other pages (your internal navigation links). It is important when it comes to defining page rank distribution through your links and will help search engines understand the structure of your website more accurately.

These new tags are directly related to the standard structure of a page, but each one how has its own tag. There are many more new tags than these most importantly ones surrounding multimedia and graphics (<audio>, <video> etc) and will help with further segmentation and categorization of content.

The adoption of HTML5 is continuing at a rapid pace and the success developers are having is a hot topic, especially since with the release of Internet Explorer 9, all of the major web browsers now support it.  Are you using HTML5 to develop websites? We’d love to hear your opinions about HTML5 and it’s adoption.

Image by bioxid on Flickr.

Today's recap post from our webinar, "SEO Basics - Closing the Loop from Design to Build to Marketing"  will cover the questions we didn't have time to answer during the course of the presentation.

If you were unable to attend our presentation today, as always, you can view the webinar on-demand here.

Can you explain the difference between an HTML and a XML sitemap?

An HTML sitemap is a list of all the hyperlinks for different sections and pages of your website and is used to help your visitors navigate your website and find information more easily.

XML sitemap lists the URLs  for your website in a special format which is designed to be read by search engines rather than humans. Submitting a XML sitemap to different search engines helps your website's indexing by making it quicker and more efficient and can help increase your website's visibility in search engines.

Our CMS automatically generates dynamic URLs for our webpages. Are these URLs optimized for search engines?

This depends on the way in which the URLs are generated. If they are automatically generated using the page's keywords then yes, they are optimized, if they are dynamically generated using miscellaneous numbers then they aren't.
 
Is there a way to automate the link building process?

The best way to "automate" your link building is to create content that people want to link to. Now that answer may seem oversimplified, but that's really the best way to receive quality inbound links for your website. This isn't a quick process and it takes a lot of time an effort, but consistently updating your website with fresh, relevant content that appeals to you audience will encourage linking all on its own.

Can you explain what "long tail" search is?

The term long tail was first used by Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, who originally used it as a way to describe how people search for products on big ecommerce websites. This theory was that popular items on these websites (the head) get a high volume of traffic while the niche products (the tail ) get low volume.

Anderson said that as websites develop more products (and by association, grow their long tail) the proportion of business from the many small, niche markets that don’t individually sell well will help rival that popular retail channels.

We hope you all enjoyed today's webinar. You can view the webinar in our resource section and you can register for our next webinar, "9 Social Media Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them," here.

When you’re writing your website copy with your SEO strategy at the forefront of your mind, it’s important to take a step back and make sure that you’re still writing with your customers’ needs and wants at heart. When it comes to writing SEO-friendly website copy, you need to make sure you know the difference between well-written optimized copy, and keyword-stuffed garbage. Sometimes it’s important to remember that while you want your website to do well in search engines you should ultimately be writing your copy for your customers, not (search engine) spiders.

Sure, stuffing your content with copious instances of your target keywords may help you rank high in search engine results quickly, but have you thought about what you’re doing to your chance at getting lasting, loyal subscribers? It doesn’t matter if your page ranks well if the visitors that arrive there instantly click away in disgust from your keyword-ridden un-engaging copy.

Sadly, there are still many marketers out there who think that optimizing their site in this manner is a good tactic. Unfortunately, those people seem to have forgotten the fact that getting quality links to this kind of content is virtually impossible (who wants to link to that?) and getting repeat visitors is highly unlikely.
Optimizing your website (or blog) in this manner is a short-term option with few (if any) long-term successes. Remember, if your content doesn’t provide some kind of inherent value to your website visitors then they will have no reason to return in the future, and, having lost a subscriber’s good opinion once, it is extremely difficult to gain it back.

Building a strong SEO strategy that gets results is a long-term, ongoing process. There are no (successful) quick fixes to get your website the rankings you want. The best thing you can do is to ensure that your strategy is built on a strong foundation and this begins with excellent, informative, fresh content. If you write for your visitors (and we’re not talking about the crawling kind) then you start to build a loyal following, which become subscribers and encourage linking, and, hopefully, word of mouth marketing for your brand. 

How can you write copy with your customers in mind?

1. Be careful about overusing your keywords. Like we said above, keyword stuffing is the enemy of the compelling, customer-centric copy. It takes away from the flow and tone of your copy, and makes your optimization efforts look desperate at best.
2. Focus on their pain points. Your copy shouldn’t be all about you. Your website visitors have most likely arrived at your website because they are looking for a solution to a problem. By addressing their difficulties from the get-go you can position your products or services as the best solution. 
3. Write conversationally. People aren’t looking for complicated web copy filled with industry-specific jargon. Your visitors want to feel like you’re speaking to them, in the language and tone they understand. 
4. Keep it short, and to the point. People want to find one their looking for quickly and easily. Every company has enormous amounts of information they CAN share with their audience, but that’s not what their visitors are really looking for. Keeping your copy minimal, skimmable and easy to navigate usually makes for a much better customer experience.

Image by sankax on Flickr.

Here at Marqui, we get tons of requests from people who need or want help with their Search Engine Optimization. Some people have a pretty good idea of what they should be doing and just want a little bit of advice on how they can make the appropriate change. On the other hand, we also get a few people who come to us for help who either have very little idea of what they should be doing, or, are doing things actively wrong.

SEO can be tricky if you don’t know where to get started and it seems to be a fairly common issue among many of the people who turn to us for help. There are so many different aspects to an optimized SEO strategy and for many people the concept of developing an SEO process seems daunting to say the least.

While there are many things you can do that will help you get on the right track for better rankings, there are also quite a few things you can do that will almost immediately have a negative effect on them.

Today, instead of going over the things you can do right, we thought it might be helpful to try looking at SEO from another angle and telling you all the things you definitely shouldn't  do. That way, even if you’re confused about what you can to do improve, you can hopefully say with assurance you’re not making any of these mistakes.

So--without further ado--here’s our list of the best ways not  to do SEO.

1. Optimizing your website for the wrong keywords and ignoring long tail opportunities. This is definitely one of the most common mistakes that we see people make when they’re getting started with SEO. If you’re optimizing your website for common (and really popular) keywords, then it’s highly unlikely that you will ever rank for them. Remember, the keywords that you choose are the foundation of your SEO strategy and if they’re weak the chances that your SEO strategy won’t be are pretty slim. The second part of this point is to not ignore the opportunities for long tail search when you’re doing your keyword research. Long tail search is an important aspect of your SEO strategy because it allows you to rank highly for a large volume of highly specific keywords. 


2. Using generic URLs. If you don’t have a CMS that allows you to control and change the URLs that are produced when you create a page, then you need to get one. Your URLs are an important way for search engines to tell what your page is about and they should be dynamic and contain your keywords. 


3. Developing your SEO strategy after your website is already built. For some reason, a lot of people seem to believe that SEO is a process that should begin once a website is already up and running, when this is in fact that opposite of what should really be taking place. Would you go on a trip before you pack? Would you wait until you were sun burnt before applying sunscreen? Well, maybe you would, but I think we can both agree it would be a poor decision. The same goes for SEO. 


4. Repeating, ignoring or not optimizing title tags. You’re Title Tags are one of the most important on-page SEO elements you have when creating a web page. Make sure that you’re choosing unique keyword phrases that are relevant to each page and give a good description of what that specific page is about.  


5. Relying on stale content. This is the easiest and quickest fix for your website’s SEO. People get overwhelmed with the other on-page and off-page SEO factors, but if you want to get your SEO strategy on the way to being optimized fast, the best thing you can do is start creating fresh, unique content on a regular basis. Not only do search engines like new content, but it’s one of the best ways to make your website a popular resource for internet users. 


6. Employ keyword stuffing tactics. While it’s important that you have your targeted keywords in the right places, over-filling your website copy with multiple instances of them to try and rank higher is a bad tactic. Not only does this make your copy read poorly (which won’t encourage repeat visitors) but search engines will also start to actually degrade your content because of the abundance of keywords. 


7. Forgetting about social media. Social media and SEO are very intricately connected, although many people don’t realize to what extent. Social media has an enormous effect on your SEO because it helps drive targeted, relevant traffic to your website and whether you like it or not, it’s going to be around for a while. If your company isn’t currently incorporating social media into its online strategy it may be missing out on a large SEO opportunity.

Image by Archeoastonomia on Flickr

As a follow up to yesterday’s post on what long tail keywords are and why they’re important,  today’s post will give you some of our tips on how you can choose your long tail keywords and how you can leverage them to help your overall web marketing strategy.

How can you choose which long tail keywords to target?

There are many great free tools that you can use to help you choose your keywords, but today we’ll focus on Google’s Keyword Tool because it’s easy to use and feature-rich.

The best way to get started is to open up the keyword tool and start by either searching the few words that you have in mind or you can enter the URL of your website to start bringing up relevant keyword suggestions.

You can choose your advanced options to help target the results that will appear and you can choose either show results for, “Ideas containing my search terms” or “All keyword ideas” to get some other keyword phrases that may be worth considering.

Analyze the results and you’ll be able to see the long tail in action. Some keywords will be searched for much more frequently and because of this will be highly competitive. On the other hand, there are certainly some keywords that are less competitive (you’ll have a better chance of ranking) that are still relevant for your business that still get a fair amount of traffic and there are some that get much too little traffic to bother targeting. Choose your keywords carefully based on these results and you’re on your way to getting started with successful long tail keywords.



How can you leverage your chosen long tail keywords?

There are lots of ways that long tail keywords can be used to help your overall web marketing strategy, but today we’re just going to focus on two important ones.

1. Create lots of content and syndicate it. The more content you create and the wider the variety of the topics, the better your website will rank in search engines. Having a wide range of content helps you improve your chances for ranking for the long tail keywords contained in that content. The second part of this point is to make sure that you’re pushing your content through the many web marketing channels available to you. The more available your content is, the more likely it is to rank well for long tail keywords.
2. Optimize your site for lots of keywords. You don’t have to optimize your website for just a few keywords. While some keywords should have more relevance on your website and in your copy than others, making sure that your website is optimized for long tail keywords can be an important way to drive more traffic to your website. A good way to do this is to use your website’s SEO strategy for your popular keywords and then to use channels like PPC and social media (some social media results now show up in popular search engines) to drive targeted traffic to your website through long tail keywords.

Image by Tureturillo on Flickr.

We’ve written many posts in the past on SEO and how you can effectively target keywords to drive organic traffic to your website. However there is an important aspect to keyword research that is often forgotten, long tail keywords, and today's post will help to explain the ways marketers can use long tail keywords to improve their targeted website traffic.

What are long tail keywords?

The term long tail was first used by Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, who originally used it as a way to describe how people search for products on big ecommerce websites. This theory was that popular items on these websites (the head on the graph below) get a high volume of traffic while the niche products (the tail on the graph below) get low volume.

Anderson said that as websites develop more products (and by association, grow their long tail) the proportion business from the many small, niche markets that don’t individually sell well will help rival that popular retain channels. The image below is from Chris’ blog, “The Long Tail.”



Essentially, the left hand side of the graph shows the keywords that people search for a lot. The graph shows that there aren’t that many of these keywords and then the level of organic search drops dramatically. The word “long tail” actually refers to the way that the popularity of search terms slowly fades (creating the long, thin “tail” in the graph). The graph may not show this accurately, but what it is meant to depict is that even though the popular keywords get more traffic, the high volume of keywords in the long tail often makes up for their lower search popularity and, often, account for much more traffic overall than the popular search terms.

So why is long tail so important?

While the majority of B2B organizations are working to rank well for the popular keywords on the left (with only a select few succeeding) if you understand the long tail, and leverage its possibilities driving traffic to your site, you have the potential to gain much more traffic (and subsequently conversions) than websites  that focus solely on the popular keywords.  If you let other people compete for the popular keywords, you can focus on ranking highly in search engines for the less popular ones.
Make sure you come back to read part II of this post, which will focus on how you can choose your long tail keywords and how you can leverage them to improve your overall web marketing strategy.

Proper search engine optimization (SEO) is a key aspect of every web marketing strategy (or it should be) but many times optimizing a website is seen as an afterthought to design when a company is trying to revamp its website. When it comes to designing a website that will be optimized from the get-go, it is essential that your company’s marketing team be involved from conceptualization straight through to launch. Why is this? Well that’s where we come to of  part 1 our biggest website redesign mistake with regards to SEO.

Part 1: Leaving your website’s SEO until the website is already designed.

For some reason, a lot of people seem to believe that SEO is a process that should begin once a website is already up and running, when this is in fact that opposite of what should really be taking place. Would you go on a trip before you pack? Would you wait until you were sunburnt before applying sunscreen? Well, maybe you would, but I think we can both agree it would be a poor decision. The same goes for trying to implement SEO once your website has alrady been designed and built.

When your SEO is done properly, it helps you to determine the type of content that should be present on your site to help it rank well in search engines from the time it launches onwards, and, realistically, you shouldn’t be designing a website if you don’t know what content will be on it, right? Now, we’re not saying that you should design your website specifically around the keywords you’ve determined it will be easier to rank for during keyword research. What we’re saying is that determining how  your customers find you and what they are looking for on websites in your industry is an important step in determining what content will be present on your website, and, depending on what kind of content your site needs to appeal to your target audience, your design will probably change to reflect that. This might sound like a relatively straight forward idea, you might even think this is a no-brainer, but you have no idea how many times we’ve seen companies come to us looking for some SEO consulting help, only for us to realize that they’ve built their entire website without once taking SEO into consideration. They have essentially built their website on a weak foundation. In addition, there is always the danger that if your website designer has no experience with SEO, then they won’t have designed or built your site in such a way that you can implement optimization tactics successfully without paying them for further development.

Part 2: Having your design firm do your SEO for you.

In an ever diversifying web design market there are many design firms that have marketing consultants or even designers with a strong SEO background on their teams who can successfully implement your SEO strategy. What I mean by this isn't that a design firm can't implement an SEO strategy for you, Marqui for instance designs and builds sites, but we also have a full consulting team to ensure that your website is SEO ready from the beginning, and we can even do your SEO continually for you if that’s what you want. What I'm saying is that since your SEO should be an ongoing process, it's important that it doesn't end with your site being launched. Whether your website design team has the experience or not, having them implement your SEO for you is only the beginning and it’s important that your internal web team knows that, which is one of the main reasons we suggest having marketing involved from the start of your redesign project.


Image by Freek Van Den Bergh on Flickr

What is Google Caffeine?

Caffeine is Google’s new system for web indexing (see the announcement on Google’s Blog here). Google started testing Caffeine in August 2009, and the final product was finally released on June 8th, 2010 and is now being used for all Google searches. According to Google, Caffeine provides “50% fresher results for web searches than [their] previous index” and it is the largest collection of web content they have ever offered. Caffeine allows Google to update their search index much faster so that as new information is found, it is immediately updated within their index so that, “You can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.”

So How Does it Work?

Google’s old index consisted of multiple layers, some of which were updated faster than others (this updating could sometimes take a couple of weeks). This process meant that content wasn’t added to Google’s search index until a layer was updated, so there was a significant delay between content being published and the content actually appearing in the search results.

Caffeine on the other hand, analyzes the web in small portions continuously so that instead of having to refresh an entire layer, Google can just add new pages directly to the search index as they are published, which means that the published content will appear in Google’s search index faster than ever before.

Some Quick Facts About Caffeine According to Google:

• Every second Caffeine processes thousands of pages in parallel (if this were a pile of paper, it would grow three miles taller every second)
• The new Caffeine index takes up to 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database
• Caffeine adds hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of data per day

What Does Caffeine Mean for Your Search Engine Optimization?

No one can really say for sure what affects Caffeine will have on a website’s rankings since the new indexing system is still so new, but quite a few SEO experts are already coming out with their theories. While this new indexing system isn’t a change of Google's ranking algorithms (meaning that Caffeine won’t change how  Google ranks your page) it could, and most likely will, still have an effect on your site’s SEO. Updates and changes like this make it obvious that it is crucial to have an effective content management strategy and system in place. While we don't know the exact effects that Caffeine will have, using tools like a content management system  and having a good content creation and management infrastructure in place can help to mitigate the negative effects that could be caused by the new indexing system.

For now, the best way to see how Caffeine will affect your rankings is to test it and monitor how you perform in Google search results. If you want to do a comparison of how your site ranks in old Google and new Google you should try the site “Compare Google Caffeine” which provides the search results for both indexing systems and can give you an idea of how your site is affected.

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill is an enormous tragedy that is affecting millions and for British Petroleum (BP), the company responsible for the spill, it is a brand reputation disaster. While there are many ways that a company can protect their brand reputation and do some serious damage control, BP decided to take a surprising approach. They purchased all available keywords connected with the oil spill on search engines like Google, and Yahoo so that the first result  that appears in these search engines directs people looking for information to BP's official website. For instance, when someone searched a term like "gulf oil spill" the results came back looking something like this:

So what was BP's reasoning behind this? According to a spokesperson for the company, they purchased these terms in order to “make the information on the spill more accessible to the public.” 

Since implementing this strategy BP has come under some harsh criticism for their tactics, and many critics feel that their choice was unethical. Many search engine marketers are questioning whether trying to control what the public finds when they search for information on the oil spill is just a reputation damage control tactic, rather than a way to inform the public about the oil spill itself, especially since many non-technical web users may not realize the difference between paid listings and actual organic news results. 

As of this morning, the ads seem to have been taken down (see below). Does this mean that BP has decided they no longer want to “make the information on the spill more accessible” or are they merely crumbling under the pressure they are receiving for their questionable methods?

No matter what their reasons for buying the ads in the first place (or taking them down) it seems pretty obvious that their latest venture has done little or nothing to improve the public’s opinion of their brand. 

Personally, we think that BP should start taking the advice of their fake BP PR Twitter account which has already garnered over 100,000 followers.

If you'd like to read some articles on this subject we suggest you look at the resources below:

Fox News - BP Manipulating Search Results on Google, Critics Accuse 

ABC News - BP Buys 'Oil' Search Terms to Redirect Users to Official Company Website

By now, pretty much everyone who has a website knows that search engine optimization (SEO) is important. Search engines account for the majority of website traffic and using SEO properly can help you ensure a solid return on your website efforts. There are a lot of factors involved in creating a SEO strategy that can help your new website rank higher in search results.

So—where do you start?

Target your keywords.

The first step to any successful SEO strategy is to define the keywords which you want your website to rank for in search engines. Try to pick words based on relevance, traffic volume and achievability.  There are some great free tools to help you pick your keywords, we suggest you try Free Wordtracker, and Google Adwords because they are feature-rich and not to complicated for beginners. If you want to learn more about targeting keywords take a look at one of our webinars on SEO.

Okay, so now you’ve chosen your keywords, what are the next essential elements to your SEO?

• Title Tags. Title tags tell search engines what your webpage is about. It is important that your title tags are descriptive of your webpage, use your keywords and follow a consistent format.
• Headings. A heading is an H1, H2, or H3 tag which is placed within your website’s HTML and helps search engines: denote page structure, define which information on the page is most important, define what is in the content of each section on a page, and builds relevance for your keywords.

• Meta Descriptions. Meta descriptions set the blurb in the search engine results and act as a kind of “teaser” for your visitors. It’s best to keep the description to 155-160 characters and to put your keyword in and especially to make sure that it accurately describes the content of your page.

• Alt Tags. An alt tag tells a search engine what your pictures are about. This is helpful for SEO, and is important for the accessibility of your site. For your visitors with a disability, or those that use screen readers, alt tags are an essential way for them to interact with the content on your page. 
• Keyword Density. Keyword density is the number of times a keyword occurs on the a webpage in proportion with the other words on the page. This is an important step in your SEO strategy because it helps you build relevance around your keywords, it re-affirms that what you say in your headings and title tags is actually what your page content is about. In general, it's best to keep your keyword to about 2-7% of any given page’s content.

• Anchor text. Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink and it tells search engines what the next page is about. This is an important way to improve your clickthrough rates (informing a user about what’s on the next page encourages confidence for them to click).

We know it seems complicated, but SEO is an important way to ensure that your website redesign is successful. If you redesign your site, but don’t put any SEO tactics to work, it is unlikely that you’ll see much of ROI for your website and don't forget, one of the best ways to tell if your new SEO strategy is working, is to measure the results. Two free tools we recommend for this are Google Webmaster tools. If you want to learn more about how to measure the success of your SEO take a look at our post on “Getting Started with Web Analytics.”

We just finished this week's web marketing webinar on SEO and we received some great feedback and quite a few  questions. We were unable to get to all the questions during the course of the webinar so for those of you who didn't get your question answered, we've chosen the most frequently asked to answer below:

1. How long should your meta description be? A meta description should ideally be between 155-160 characters in length.
2. How does having a blog help with SEO? Blogging is a great way to aid your SEO efforts because it is based on frequently updated content. Blogging on a regular basis encourages inbound links and the large amount of relevant or niche content created means you're able to target more keywords at once.
3. If my H1, H2 and H3 tags are in the CSS style sheet are they still being picked up by search engines? The answer to that is yes, you can style your headings however you would like as long as the still appear in your website's HTML.
4. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of enhancing website elements in order to achieve higher rankings on major search engines. SEO provides an inexpensive long term solution for increased traffic to your website which can ultimately be converted to sales. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)  on the other hand, is broader than SEO. It includes SEO and other areas to improve a site's visibility in search engines' results pages, like paid listings and paid inclusions.
5. What role does social media play in SEO? Social media is an important way to promote inbound links to your site through content syndication.
   

If you want to see the whole webinar, you can view it in our resource section now.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the best opportunities that companies have to generate high quality leads for their sales teams. Unfortunately, many organizations are committing one (or many) of these common mistakes without even realizing it.

1. Not using keywords that are relevant to your target audience. Many marketers, when choosing keywords, make the mistake of optimizing their website based on keywords they think are important, and not looking at keywords from their customers’ perspective. Your website visitors are the ones searching for your site; make sure your website is optimized for the keywords they will be using.
2. Content isn’t reachable by search engines. Sometimes websites rank poorly because their content can’t be crawled by search engines. This often happens when websites focus on design elements, rather than website usability. For instance, we often find websites that use flash for navigation elements a method that search engines can't read, which makes it difficult for search engines to index elements and pages of  your website.
3. Not keeping your content fresh. Continually adding new content, gives both search engines, and potential customers a reason to return to your website. Having a business blog is a great way to do this. A company blog can help to ensure you are generating fresh content on a regular basis and can help with your long-tail SEO strategy as well. 
4. Making search engines happy before your customers. While it is important to have your relevant keywords prominent in the body copy of each page, don’t let your overall message suffer as a result. Having overly high keyword density (often called keyword stuffing) on your pages can make your copy seem mechanical and can discourage readers who are looking for interesting, compelling content. 
5. Not optimizing your content and anchor text with keywords. Remember, the way people find your site is by search for keywords and phrases that are relevant to them. You need to be sure you’re optimizing your website with title tags, headings, paragraph titles, body copy, anchor text for links and image alt text that have your keywords in them. 
6. Not monitoring popular content. Tracking the interactions that your visitors have with your content is a crucial aspect of a SEO-friendly content strategy because it can give you insight into which content is searched and found most frequently. When you use this information it can help you to adjust your optimization methods for the best results.
7. Using generic URLs. If you’re using a web content management system (WCMS), it should give you the capability to create SEO-friendly URLs that include the keywords which you’ve determined are relevant to your web page. If your WCMS is automatically generating URLs then you are missing out on a great SEO opportunity.
8. Ignoring meta tags. While meta tags may not hold the same relevance that they once did in the SEO industry, they are still an important aspect of your strategy because they inform web crawlers about the content of your web page.

If you want to learn more about how you can improve your current SEO strategies, attend our upcoming webinar, "The Marketer's Guide to SEO Success," on Thursday May 27th at 10:30 am Pacific. You can register for the webinar here.

We got some great feedback from our last search engine optimization (SEO) webinar, "Live Website Assessment" so we decided to present another webinar on SEO basics and bring Jeff Hall, one of our marketing consultants back to present again.

The webinar, "The Marketer's Guide to SEO Success" will be held on May 27th at 10:30 am Pacific / 1:30 pm Eastern and will cover:

• How to target the right keywords for your website
• What on-page SEO essentials will increase your search engine visibility
• Marqui's approach to quality link building
• How to measure the success of your SEO

Hopefully we'll see everyone who enjoyed our last webinar on this topic there, and anyone else who wants to hear us share our thoughts on the essentials of SEO.

You can register for the webinar here.