Messing with a Good Thing - Good SEO Requires Constant Addition

Don’t mess with a good thing.

Out in the so-called “real world”, that’s usually pretty good advice.  When it comes to SEO, however, it’s an absolutely horrible outlook.  If you aren’t “messing” with that good thing by adding new content and making adjustments, you’re going to find it a lot harder to secure a top slot in the SERPs.

That can be hard to do.  If you’ve finally managed to get your “blue widgets” page to rank #1 for the term, the temptation is to keep your hands off.  Why try to fix something that isn’t broken right?  Wrong.

Here’s the deal.  Your competition isn’t quitting.  Whoever is in the #2 slot is ready, willing and able to do what you’ve done, plus one.  That little addition may very well be in the form of content, which means you better be adding to your site to stay ahead of the Joneses.

Additionally, the search engines have repeatedly demonstrated their undying and eteral love for new content.  If you thik the blogging exploded in popularity with previously non-journaliing webmasters because it was fun, you’ve got another thing coming.  People discovered that the reason blogs were consistently outranking static sites was because they featured new, updated content.  Keep adding content!

Finally, you don’t want to trust the search engines.  What works today may be out the window tomorrow.  That measn your primary focus must always be on doing the kind of things that should help a site to grow even in the face of most algorithmic tweaks.  What has the one constant of SEO been since the very beginning?  Content.  Adding new materials is a good way to strengthen your site for the long haul.

If you want to celebrate your SEO success by marveling at your newfound SERP position, that’s find.  After a few minutes of admiring your handiwork, however, you should be back at work.  Continue to add to your sites to protect and improve SEO performance.

Go Regional for SEO - Regional and Local Directories Offer a Great Opportunity

While a consensus is developing that Google is giving a little less love than they once did to directory links, there’s still room to make SEO progress by listing your site in the right places.  That means not wasting as much energy on inner-page links on weak or new directories and instead focusing on regional and local directory options.

The search engines may not be that interested in the latest .info directory created by a webmaster looking for a few easy Adsense bucks, but they do still seem to have an affection for local and regional directories.

Why?

There are a few good reasons.  First, these more localized directories offer a unique opportunity to the search engines to serve up better geo-targeted search results, which is becoming increasingly important to the engines.

Second, these directories tend to be human-edited–and those particular humans tend to be a little more selective than those who run other directory sites.

Third, regional and local directories, for the most part, aren’t overran by site submissions.  

So, which directories should you submit your site to?  Obviously, if you can find country-, state-, region-, city-, or even neighborhood-specific directories that meet your site’s specs, you can feel pretty good submitting there.  Do the usual homework, though.  If the directory appears to have limited, if nonexistent SEO potential you can skip it.

Many webmasters will undoubtedly consider cheating.  If you find a great regional directory in terms of SEO value but you aren’t really located or targeting that region should you submit there?  This is primarily an ethical question individuals will have to face alone.  However, it worth mentioning that (a) if everyone behaved that way it would decrease the value of the directories and/or increase the workload for those maintaining them and (b) it’s likely that the overall value of the listing will mean less to you if you’re not really part of the area under consideration.

More Hints for Successful RSS Use

In our last post we talked about five ways you could use RSS feeds to increase your backlink totals and to improve your SEO efforts.  This time, let’s discuss a few extra details that can make the process even more successful.

First, when you do submit your feeds (from your own properties and any hybrid feeds you might “blend” on your own), make sure you include a link back to the primary page you’re trying to promote in the feed description.  Many of the aggregators and directories will allow you to have live links in there, so it only makes sense to take advantage of the opportunity.

Second, remember that active feeds outperform inactive ones.  It’s just like “pinging” and blogs.  If you’re content isn’t turning over, you aren’t getting the most out of the opportunity.  That means making a commitment to the publication of new content on a regular basis.  

Third, keep your eyes open for new developments and creative applications of RSS technology.  RSS2HTML is a perfect example of the kind of thing that might be able to help your SEO efforts by using existing RSS feeds.  This free service will convert any feed into an HTML-based page.  That means you’re going to have a shot of creating another page that contains all of those backlinks to your site.  It’s hard to tell how well this strategy is working (one person hasn’t seen a difference yet), but it underlines the fact that people are coming up with new ways to use RSS every day.

RSS feeds seemed like a techy mess for most webmasters, marketers and bloggers only a few years ago.  Now, they’re becoming a great tool that anyone can use to increase their backlink totals and SEO performance.  Take advantage of the opportunity!

Feed Me! How RSS Use Can Boost Your SEO Efforts

RSS feeds are a great way to boost your SEO efforts.  With a little planning and effort, you can use feeds to collect backlinks.  Here are a few ways to harness the power of your sites’ RSS feeds.

First, make sure you have an easily-accessible way for people to find and to subscribe to your feed.  Not only does this increase your chance of direct “feed to site” traffic, it also makes it easier for people to nab your feed as part of their syndication efforts.  Loads of webmasters use the feeds of others to keep their sites “fresh” and that increases your backlink opportunities.

Second, use your own feeds on your web properties.  Do you regularly contribute articles to a popular directory?  That directory probably has an author’s feed.  Do you have a blog in support of your site?  It has a feed.  Squidoo lenses?  Same deal.  Now, ask yourself if your Squidoo lenses feature that author’s feed.  Is your blog making use of the Squidoo feeds?  You get the idea.  You can give yourself a little link love.

Third, don’t think that your non-blog site must be feed-less.  With a little coding you can create a feed for a traditional “static” site that will update every time you add new content or make adjustments.  

Fourth, submit your feeds to RSS feed aggregators.  This is just like submitting your site to directories, but the shine hasn’t worn off of the RSS world with the search engines as much as it has with directories.

And here’s a bonus fifth tip.  You can create unique feeds by mixing multiple feeds together.  You can use a tool like FeedMix.  Why is this valuable?  Suppose you come up with a “few” different ways to combine your existing feeds and you submit those hybrids to feed directories and aggregators…  Are you seeing the backlink possibilities?  Thought so!

RSS feeds can be a great way to boost your inbound link totals.  If you aren’t using them, it’s an oversight you should correct.

SEO Advice Straight from the Horse’s Mouth

Wrestling with Google in an effort to secure a top spot in the rankings can get tedious sometimes.  Wouldn’t it be nice if the folks in Mountain View would just send you a handy PDF that told you exactly what you needed to do in order to succeed in Google?

Fat chance, right?  Those guys aren’t about to tell you how to crack the code.

Or are they?

Many people don’t realize it, but there actually is a handy-dandy guide to SEO basics that comes straight from Google.  That’s right, the Big G has actually assembled a little instruction manual that you can use as you build your site.

If you haven’t read it, you should grab a copy of Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide right away.  It makes sense to get direction straight from the horse’s mouth.  The latest version (as of this post) is dated November, 2008.

Now, don’t get too excited.  This is definitely a starter guide.  It’s basic and it isn’t going to give you a lot of insight about the details of truly effective SEO.  Obviously, it isn’t going to contain any tricks or algorithmic loopholes to exploit, either.  It’s the kind of thing that’s indispensable to a newbie and that can even help more advanced users with the basics of SEO, though.

It also sheds a lot of light on Google’s overall attitude toward SEO and where they draw the lines that separate “legitimate” activities from those upon which they frown.  Even more expert SEOs can benefit from the guide if they’re willing and able to “read between the lines”.

If you’ve been wondering how to stay on Google’s good side with your SEO efforts or you need a nice, solid basic guide to SEO, this is a great starting point.  It should certainly be on the reading list of any webmaster who isn’t an SEO expert and it should be on the skim list of those who are.

Writing the Best Possible PPC Ad - Focus on Benefits

If you want to get the highest possible CTR from your pay per click ads (and who doesn’t?), you should be applying a lesson that copywriters use in virtually every other field.  They write ads that focus on benefits.

There’s a distinction between benefits and features.  Features are aspects of the product you’re selling.  A feature of a cordless screwdriver, for instance, may be the fact that it can hold a charge for up to three solid hours.  That’s a great fact about the product, but it isn’t the kind of thing you should be writing about.  Instead, you want to look for the benefits of owning that screwdriver–what it could really mean for potential customers.  Instead of extolling the virtues of it’s long battery life, you’d want to hammer home the fact that it makes household repairs and assembly fast, fun and easy.  Instead of talking about the fact that it can use either straight or Phillips heads (another feature), you should be talking about the way it saves the user from bloody knuckles, offering a comfortable solution.

Focusing on benefits has been a hallmark of successful marketing for as long as people have been putting pen to paper.  However, many in the SEM world aren’t necessarily experienced copywriters.  Thus, they apply a sort of logical approach to ad writing.  They emphasize, naturally, what the product has instead of painting a picture of how its use will positively change the life of the buyer.  That’s a mistake.

Are your PPC ads focusing on benefits?  If they aren’t (or if you’re not sure), it’s time to revisit them.  Adjust them to fall into line with this time-tested approach to successful copywriting.  You’ll undoubtedly start to see a differenece as your CTR increases.

Are You Paying Enough Attention to Your PPC Landing Page?

Most of the tips you’ll find for successful pay per click advertising will focus on things related to keyword selection.  If you’re targeting the right keywords in the right way, they say, you’ll start getting the kind of results you want from your PPC efforts.  Some will give you a few recommendations about the actual writing of your ads, too.  A prperly written ad can, after all, improve your CTR and resutls.

One thing that’s often overlooked, however, may be the most critical aspect of effective PPC campaign management.  And has nothing to do with adjustments you can make within your Adwords account.  It’s not about how you’re getting traffic, it’s about where you’re sending it.

If you aren’t thinking about your landing page as much as you’re thinking about your keyword selection, you’re making a big mistake.  

The quality of your landing page is going to be the prime determinor of your profits, obviously.  If you’re landing page is a dud that doesn’t produce conversions, all of the successfully gathered traffic in the world isn’t going to save you.

But it goes deeper than that.  The quality of your landing page is also going to have a massive inmpact on the price you’re paying for ad clicks.  Google assesses keyword pricing based, in large part, on your landing page quality score.  Thus, even a “perfect” campaign in terms of ad structure and keyword bidding may be wildly overpriced simply because you’re landing page doesn’t meet Google’s expectations (which, by the way, appear to be inching higher and higher with each passing day).

Pay close attention to your keywords.  Right your ads the right way.  But don’t forget where all of that purchased traffic is going after the ads are clikced.  The quality and ability of your landing page to produce conversions must always be at the forefront of your planning.

Three Rapid Indexing Techniques - Get the Googlebots to Your Site Fast!

If a tree falls int he forest and no one is there, does it make a sound?

We can leave that argument to the Zen masters.  There is a corollary, however, for those who do business on the Internet and who want to rely on search engine traffic.  

If a site doesn’t appear in Google, does it get any attention?

The answer to that one is a resounding “NO!”  

You need Google to index your site–and the sooner it’s been scoured by the Googlebots the sooner you can expect to see traffic.

Getting indexed, fortunately, isn’t that tough.  Here are three rapid ways to attract a little attention from those Mountain View spiders.

Digg It.  Submit your pages to Digg.  You’re not worried about getting on the first page and any traffic you secure is icing on the indexing cake.  The goal is to get that link to your site up and running at Digg.  The spiders will follow.

Get Social.  If you aren’t doing the social bookmarking thing, you’re missing out.  Create a little link love for your site by getting those live links up on a variety of social bookmarking sites.  This can produce fast results.

The Big Link.  If you have another web property that has a little bit of heft with Google, use it to your advantage.  Get links up to your new pages for the purpose of hitting the index.  You don’t need to make them a permanent feature, but they can be a good way to get the ball rolling.

You want Google to take notice of your site and you want them to do it quickly.  Every day wasted is another day without traffic, after all.  Any of these three techniques can get your new material into the index quickly.

Get Free Sitewide Links the Easy Way

Much of successful SEO is a matter of developing inbound links to your sites.  As such, you can imagine just how powerful a sitewide link from a reguarly-visited, high-PR site can be to your SEO efforts.

Well, it’s possible to get those sitewide links without spending a dime and the process is actually incredibly easy.  If you’re ready to make a handful of blog comments, you can create a powerhouse set of sitewide links quickly.

It all starts with a popular plug-in that many bloggers use.  It’s a “top commenters” blogger and it was designed to encourage people to participate via comments with a blog.  It creates a list on the blog’s sidebar that features the “names” of those who’ve commented on the blog with the greatest frequency.

So, you need to find blogs that use this plug-in and assess how much effort it will take to break into the list of top commenters.  Then, you simply write enough comments to get on the list.  Boom.  Your “name” (which in many cases can actually be your preferred anchor text) with a live link will appear on every single post and page on the entire blog! 

Here are a few hints to get you started…

Don’t try to move to the number one slot right away.  Build your comments over a period of days or weeks.  If you suddenly dump 20 comments on a blog, it’s going to raise some suspicions that you’re merely trying to game the system.

Do write good comments.  ”I love this post!” isn’t going to cut the mustard.  If Askimet doens’t capture that as spam, the webmaster probably will.

Do check regularly.  You don’t want to fall of the list, so keep an eye on the blog to make sure that you’re not in danger of losing your slot.

This is an easy way to get a sitewide link and it’s amazing how little work it actually takes in so many cases.  Improve your SEO efforts today.  Start by using a Google search (keyword +”TopCommenter”) to find blogs in your niche that you can comment upon for to your advantage.

Why You Should be Using Free Blogs as Part of Your SEO Efforts (Part Two)

Last time out, we covered a few of the reasons why you should be using free blogs like those you can set up at Wordpress.com and Blogspot.com to energize your SEO efforts.  They’re a good way to build backlinks to your other web properties and they’re too often overlooked by experienced webmasters.  

Let’s look at a few more reasons why it makes good sense to set up those free blog.

Different IPs and IP Ranges.  If you set up a series of blogs for SEO on your on hosting package, you’re going to have a set of blogs sharing the same IP range.  The search engines aren’t stupid.  They’ll pick up on this and they’ll immediately recognize that there’s a strong likelihood that these blogs belong to you and are an interlinked part of your SEO efforts.  How much love do you think Google will give those backlinks?  Compare that to a series of links that come from different IP ranges–links that look like they’re emanating from an unrelated third party…  Hmm, they might see those as the famed “votes of confidence” that constitute a valuable link.

Maximum Flexibility.  Unlike other link sources, you have 10)% flexibility in terms of presentation and structure when you’re putting them on your own free blogs.  You choose the location.  You choose the tags.  You choose the anchor text.  And you can adjust them whenever you feel the need to do so.  Compare that to all of the linking plans that you can set but never revisit and that have limitations in terms of structure.  It’s another strong reason to consider utilization of free blogs to improve your SEO.

You aren’t going to snag the top slot for a hyper-competitive keyword because you created a fistful of free blogs.  However, you can give your efforts an extra boost–and a relatively powerful one relative to the amount of effort required to make it happen–by creating a few powerful free blogs.

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