All the important stuff to check during your SEO website audit.

The first step in tackling an organic search engine optimization (SEO) project is often an SEO website audit. This audit helps lay the foundation for future search success. Properly worked, an audit can be primary reason your site jumps from page 4 to page 1 on the SERPs.

The surprising thing about SEO website audits is how diverse they are. SEO practitioners often have divergent goals and methodologies. This affects which areas are audited on a website. Some audits are backlink-focused, while others focus on more technical on-site aspects. Many are good and usually helpful, however few cover every important area of organic search in 2012.

After reviewing some of the better audits in the industry, we’ve determined these 7 areas should be addressed in any good SEO audit. These are areas which have affected organic results with our clients, coupled with some industry research. Here goes!

1. Business Model & Website

Every organic search engine optimization audit should consider two things: your business model and how your website fits into the model. If you don’t know what you’re aiming for, how do you know if you’re a success?

Your business model determines how a website fits. For instance, if your business sells local plumbing services, your business needs leads. Consequently, your website should be a lead generation machine for plumbing prospects. Knowing the goal helps guide on-site strategy. Creating prominent, short lead forms on important pages – possibly all pages is a great way to improve lead flow. Knowing business goals also helps guide off-site strategy like creating backlink anchor text for “Austin plumber.” Bottom line, a business dependent on leads should have a lead generating website.

Clear, obvious, measurable call to action.

The net result of this step is coming up with actionable, measurable goals for a website. More importantly, these website goals should be driven by the goals of the business.

2. Site Checklist

After understanding how the website fits into the business, the site and domain should be reviewed for any issues. We have found that no matter how well maintained your site, there’s always a chance something is missing on either your domain or website. Here’s the checklist we use:

3. Keyword Research

Keyword (aka key phrase) research is a foundational element to any SEO campaign. Knowing which words to target guides the majority of search optimization efforts. This is why keyword research is so important. If you already have your targeted 5-20 keywords, then skip to #4.

There are many ways to do keyword research. The easiest (free) way is to use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool (we recommend using the tool when you’re logged into your Google AdWords account). This tool pulls industry-relevant keywords based on your website or a supplied keyword.

The quick and easy way to find target keywords for your website during an SEO Website Audit.

If you’re starting from scratch, enter what you think is your most relevant keyword for your business. Going back to the local plumbing company example, enter “Austin plumbing company”. The tool then exports a list of keywords with columns for competition (in AdWords), Global Monthly Searches, & Local Monthly Searches. Ignore Global monthly searches and just focus on the Competition and Local Monthly Searches.

From here, picking keywords turns into an art. You want a good combination of relevance, high search volume (monthly searches) and high competition. Relevance is the most important. By relevance, you can’t pick “plumbing company” since it’s too general. Instead, something like “Austin plumber” works much better. It’s relevant, has high competition, and has 9,900 local monthly searches – that’s a good keyword.

For your short-tail, non-blog SEO strategy, we recommend targeting 5-20 keywords to target. Keyword research can (and should) be more technical than this. But if you’re just getting started, this is a great way to build out your first keyword list. For the audit, you may just want to confirm you’re targeting the right keywords.

The final step in keyword research is keyword tracking. Where does your company rank for the target 5-20 keywords? The best free tool we’ve found is SEO Book’s Rank Checker. Simply input all the keywords and record where they’re ranked in Google, Bing, & Yahoo. Export results to a safe place. Having this benchmark, you’ll be able to see how effective your SEO is in future months as ranks climb (or fall).

4. Content Checklist

After reviewing your target keywords, it’s important to review how these keywords are implemented on your website.

5. Competitive Research

There are two steps to competitive research: identify your competitors and analyze the organic SEO strategy of your competitors.

The first step involves ID’ing who your competition is. Once again, go back to your keywords. Who is currently ranking for your target phrases? Before searching in Google, make sure you “depersonalize” search. That means you want to remove all traces of your computer from the search results. SEO Moz has a great article on how to depersonalize your search results in Google.

After depersonalizing search, look up your top 5 keywords in Google. The websites that consistently come up in the top 5-10 positions for each keyword is your organic SEO competition. Period. You may think that you compete against XYZ Plumbing Company, but if they’re not showing in the top 5 positions, that’s not your organic completion. Let your research determine who your actual competition is.

After identifying your competition, the next thing is to see why they rank so high. The best way to see why a competitor ranks well for keywords is to review the backlink structure of the competitor. What kind of links are pointing to the site? How many domain-unique URLs are pointing to the site? Backlinks are the #1 single factor that determine where sites rank for certain keywords.

The best free tool to see backlinks is Google. Use the search operator “links:yourdomainhere.com” to get a raw number of links that Google is willing to report point back to your homepage. The max number of links Google provides depends on the competitor. In addition, you have to click through multiple pages to see each of these links.

To bypass the tedium, use a paid tool for backlink research. The two we like are Raven Tools & SEO Moz Pro. Both tools include a wealth of data for the serious SEO practitioner. If you want to rank well in the search engines, learn how to research backlink data from your competitors. The audit is designed to show who your competition is and provide actionable backlink data.

6. Social Checklist

There are hundreds of organic SEO ranking factors. The largest growing factor in recent years has been social media. SEO has become more intertwined with social media. This is why any SEO website audit should address your company’s social presence.

7. Next Steps: Recommendations & Future Audits

The final part of any good SEO website audit is getting a list of recommendations. This part is easy when everything above has been addressed. Simply start at the top of the audit and spell-out the issues that were found during the audit. Sometimes you may not know what to do. Talk to a developer or a competent SEO to get help in those areas. If you want to prioritize recommendations, the areas have been listed in order of importance: Business Model, Website Goals, Site Checklist, Keyword Research, Content Checklist, Competitive Research, and Social Checklist.

Unfortunately, SEO changes. Search engines shift algorithms which affects rankings and traffic. That’s why SEO website audits and adjustments should be done periodically – every 1-2 years. The good news is that much that affects rankings is static: quality content, quality backlinks, and positive social interaction will probably always help your SEO. Aim at structuring your website properly, creating quality content, and effectively interacting with your market and there will be less work after your next audit.

Google Display Ad Builder is an easy and free tool you can use to create image and video ads within your AdWords account. You can use Display Ad Builder to create visually engaging ads for your content campaign. Watch these two brief videos for a quick “how-to.”

I thought these videos would be helpful for those non-design pay per click managers out there. If you can’t design, this is a great free option for the times when you need banner ads. Although, I always recommend hiring a graphic designer- if that’s not in you or your clients’ budget, this tool will give you professional results without costing anyone a dime. Enjoy!

XML sitemap generator:

What an XML sitemap generator does is to monitor the web server’s traffic and detects each of the updates to web sites that ensure whenever a user will access a new page on a particular site it is going to be correctly noticed and viewed. Below are some bite size nuggets of XML wisdom.

The primary features of Google XML sitemap generator are the following:

courtesy of CC license wikipedia.org

• They are easy to configure. As soon as you’re done with all the initial configuration, they don’t require any further administration. Should you want to tweak  the settings then you can do so quickly by using various administration tools..

• Calculates metadata automatically like how many changes are made to a website and how frequent they are made.

• Submit sitemaps automatically for simpler search.

• More efficient search results for your site.

• Create your personal sitemaps based on whatever aspects you choose like server visitors, server files and logs.

This is what the code looks like for an XML site map:

Google has released their very first XML sitemap generator before this release they had a Python based tool. Google’s XML sitemaps generator  is the next generation tool that typically relies on different net server filtering and not crawling. This proves to be more efficient and supports diverse sorts of format than the older version.

To begin with google xml sitemap generator you should know some basics of this tool. This tool is actually a server plug in that can be simply installed in different well-known servers like Linux/Apache or Microsoft windows based servers. Just like with any other type of plug in you need to have access to the major and administrative server to install it.

If you are interested in making your own sitemap, you’ll find free sites that will help you get started. A lot of search engines are encouraging web owners to have their own sitemap to enable quicker and easy way of filtering or crawling the sites. Make the search engines happy and your site will be rewarded.

Of course, doesn’t guarantee that your website will rank accordingly to your preference, this tool will only help index your website to their list, and in the long run that is a list you want your site to be on.

Think about it as being a part of the map of Google’s and in each search engine’s world, speaking to them in their distinct language. Your site is will be better recognized and identified and accessed  effortlessly and more rapidly. If you are looking for first place rankings  in different search engines then you most likely will want to do some search engine optimization as well.

XML sitemaps are the first step to great search engine results, but unless you feel you understand how the search engines think, you will probably want to speak with an SEO consultant after you get your sitemap setup.

photo courtesy of rahego

There has been a lot of recent debate amongst SEO’s as to what has resulted from Google’s recent updates. There is one consensus among us, and it’s that Google’s updates hit article marketing sites way below the belt. For those of you who don’t use article marketing in your strategy this could be valuable information as to what not to start implementing now!

While it is true that some of these article sites or “content farms” as they are pejoratively known like Squidoo or Hubpages have seen their traffic slip in the last few months, Squidoo down by 5.66% in the last month and Hubpages down 8.74% , graphs below-It is not true that all of the article sites will become obsolete.

Take for instance, the graph below of a very popular article marketing site  amazines.com. The graph shows them initially down in a big way, at its lowest in August, but you can see that the last couple of months have seen an upward trend in traffic to the tune of 16.66%.

Why has traffic dropped on these very popular sites? Well, I don’t think anyone is 100% sure why Google has allowed some sites back into its graces, while others continue to see poor search engine results- but one thing is clear to all: Google is a business and its business is search engine results. My two cents is, If they give their customers crappy results i.e duplicate content, spun articles, poorly written articles; then their customers (searchers) are going to go somewhere else for their results. So it’s not that “big, bad Google” wants to punish people for bad websites, (well, not really punish them) it’s just that they want to make sure that their users are getting information that is quality and of use to them.

To this end, my conclusions as to what some webmasters have done to fix their drop in traffic to now be trending back upwards are these few things.

Fix The Google “No-No’s On Their Sites

For example Titus Hoskins blogged about this last month and I feel this about sums up the most drastic of measures taken-

“Many of these webmasters quickly started deleting, de-linking or no-following those articles on their sites which could be considered non-unique since these articles also appear on other sites around the web. Some sites like Buzzle, even deleted unique articles which was a little puzzling, to say the least. At the moment, anyone can still submit an article to Buzzle, but you are not allowed a link out – not even in your profile!”

So essentially some of the most drastic actions include, changing do-follow links to no-follow links on certain authors who submit unoriginal content in many places around the web, deleting articles that aren’t original form their sites, stop allowing outbound linking etc…

Only Submit 100% Unique Content to a Handful of Quality Sites

In the past, it was easy to get away with writing one article having it “spun” hundreds of times and sent out to every article directory on the web. I would say this is no longer a valid strategy. Don’t be cheap with your time or money. Sit down and write the article yourself, or if your writing skills aren’t up to par, pay someone to write an article for you. Make sure this person has mastery of their language and are adept at putting concepts into words. Then as part two of this strategy, submit those unique articles to a handful of quality directories some that are still in good standing or trending back up include – Amazines.com, GoArticles.com, ezinearticles.com and Technorati.com; all of these sites are do-follow as well. This is just a partial list, there are of course, many more quality sites to choose from.

Promote Articles Using Social Media

It goes without saying that social media sites have seen a huge surge in relevance in the past years. Sites like Facebook, Twitter and now Google+ all offer ways of promoting your content, your website and ultimately mark you as an authority on your topic. Don’t be shy, tweet it out. Ask for a “like” and make sure your websites have an easy way for people to comment on your content as well as share it with their friends and “follow” you on social media sites. It’s also good for the article directory you choose to send out your social feelers from the directory site itself as that helps those directories be seen as authorities as well.

Find Blog Partners

I base this on personal experience with our clients, if you want to see huge jumps in your search engine results and you are serious about quality, 100% unique articles  – the best bang for your buck will be from getting a link back from a high-PR, high-authority blog in your niche. A bunch of them. Start by doing some research using the search term of your industry plus adding “submit guest post” or “submit an article”  in front. For instance search “submit guest post tax help” a number of blogs should come up that are high PR and that accept content from authors like you. Approach these site owners in a friendly way with a sample of your work, you will be amazed at what this can do for your ranking.

Recently Google CEO, Matt Cutts felt he needed to go on the record again and state that “Google does not consider SEO to be spam.” It is perfectly legitimate to try and make sure your pages are well represented in the search engines.

Below is the original video from YouTube and the 4 top tactics he mentioned in this video and what they mean for your website.

 1. Make Sure Your Website Is Crawlable

This simply means making sure your site is accessible to the largest audience possible. The audience should include people and search engines alike. Some great ways of achieving an easily accessible website are:

• URL Structure:  If all the urls in your site look something like—www.example.com/253738/sfgdghd/wteyeu chances are no one is sharing those links and the search engines can’t find those pages easily enough. Use plain text links formatted with CSS that are clear and easy to read something like: www.example.com/seotopics/seo-is-not-spam
•  Navigation: Make sure you have a text version of your navigation somewhere on your site, so for instance if your main nav is images (not recommended) and a user with a low-speed connection wanted to view your site with images turned off, they would still be able to see a clear way around your site. It’s even a good idea to double up on links that are important i.e. Put your most important pages as text links in the footer of your site.
• Images:  To the point of “turning off images” make sure you use alt text for all your images. This way if a user cannot or chooses not to load the images they can still get the point of what you are trying to show them.

2. Right Keywords

If you want people to understand who you are and what you want them to do, you need to make sure you are writing copy that converts. By this I mean copy that has the words that users were searching for, provides them the information they need and asks them to do something. Like “Downlaod Free MP3” whatever it is that you want them to do, make sure the words are clearly geared to them and not a bunch of industry jargin that no one but your competitors will understand. Hey, those competitors are not your customers right?

3. User-friendly

A user-friendly site is one that is designed with the user in mind. It is not flashy or showy and it clearly separates content from presentation. Our friends over at Just Creative Design have this to say about useability and I think it’s dead on:

“To design an accessible site, one of the most important things you can do is to separate content from presentation. Remember, people are visiting your site for the content. By separating the presentation from the content, you are giving your users the ability to use whatever client is appropriate to access your content, whether it is a screenreader, mobile device, or tablet PC.”- Chad Swaney , Just Creative Design

Content Layer should be organized as HTML with appropriate tags such as <h1>, <ul> and <div> tags. Images should have alt tags. Presentation Layer should not have fixed dimensions since we don’t know what screen size our user might be using, our design could break down in a smaller screen etc. Make sure your color and contrast are appropriate for people with bad vision. For instance, don’t make a whole website black with dark grey text or something crazy like that! Black on white or Black on light grey works just fine.

4. Site Speed

Many people don’t realize this but as Matt Cutts clearly states in the video- site speed is a factor that Google uses to rank your website. So how can we make our site run faster? A lot of what I discussed above will dramatically improve your site speed already but just to over-emphasize the point- make sure your content is separate from your presentation by using HTML and CSS for each respectively. Make sure your jpegs are optimized for web so that they load quickly. If you limit the technology the user encounters on the site, most likely your site will speed up. Lastly, While browser technologies such as Jquery and Javascript make a site dynamic and cool, make sure in your usability testing there is a way to turn these things off with no adverse effect on the content.

I hope these cleared up some of the ideas that Matt Cutts presented in the above video and you will be able to easily integrate them into your site design. As always if you have any questions feel free to email me at danielle@searchtrafficpro.com I do SEO, Austin!

4. URL’s

Better Links Through Relationships

URL’s get longer and longer everyday so people like to use shortening services like TinyURL or Bitly. There was some debate amongst the experts as to if Google gives rank building credit to shortened urls. Most agree, yes, the shortened URL’s don’t function any differently in Google then do the long original ones as long as they are 301′ed (redirected) and the end destination page is indexed. There is an increased exposure benefit however with the shorten urls’s since people tend to pick up and repost these links.

How Can You Stay On Top Of This Strategy?

If you use a shortener when posting your links via social media sites use a service like Bitly which is search engine friendly since it uses a 301 redirect recommended by Google, Bing and Yahoo! As far as strategy goes, this one isn’t something to obsess over but to keep an eye on how these type of links effect your ranking long term since Google is constantly updating its algorithms. Also, there are services that allow you to build your own shortener/personal url for links some of which allow you to add keywords to the link and this goes back to helping with branding as well. I like Media Bistro’s quick and easy steps for getting your personal url or if you’re already running on WordPress, they have a few plugins available, I recommend YOURLS.

5. Linkbuilding for Small Buisness

You’re busy running your business, maybe you’re brick and mortar or use your website to fufill orders for an existing customer base and haven’t thought about online marketing strategy too much. Unfortunately, if that is the case you are way behind your competition. Never fear there are ways to get back on track starting today. Internet marketing is generally a winner take most market, so the harder you work initially to gain momentum, the less you will have to work once its built. If you have an hour a day to devote to linkbuilding you can accomplish more faster; an hour a week? Well, its going to take you a lot longer to see a big difference in rank and customers. Regardless of time constraints here’s what you should focus on:

How Can You Stay On Top Of This Strategy?

• Spend time initially researching and writing quality , sharable content for a blog on your website, if you don’t have the time to do it, pay a freelance writer to do it for you. It will be a wise investment in the long run.
• This goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway so you can see the whole strategy picture-After you have some shareable content, start creating your social profile on the obvious sites- Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, so you can push out content there and build networks. Ping.fm is a good all-in-one place to build out your networks, as it pushes out content to all networks at once, saving you precious time.
• Start a PPC program, since you only have an hour a week, it will take awhile to build rank organically so you want to have other routes helping you along, this will get you better rankings quicker.
• Have a “working lunch” spend that hour that you would normally use to eat, eating and working on your content for the blog! This way you get in an extra hour a week on marketing strategy.

6. What To Avoid In Your Linkbuilding Strategy

There are shortcuts in linkbuilding, but as with any shortcut, its good to be aware of when they can help you and how they may hurt you in the long run. The old adage is true: Anything that seems to good to be true, probably is.

• Too much reciprocal linking- swapping links with a few trusted, authoritative sites is good for business. Trading links with sites that have no content and no value is bad for your overall strategy.
• Press-releases that don’t have any value. Do you really have something to share about your business? Have you gone public? Launched a new web tool? Fired 5,000 people? Probably all newsworthy topics. But if you haven’t made any big news happen recently, you should probably avoid writing the press release about how amazing your office Christmas party was.
• Buying links- this will get you focusing in the wrong direction. Don’t get me wrong, it works for the short-term, but you need to be thinking of long term strategy and putting your efforts there. As one of our experts Roger Montti puts it: “Short-cuts work for the short term.”
• Scrimping on the copywriting. Bad idea. If you can’t write or don’t want to write pay someone to create content for you. Pay them well, this is a long-term strategy that you want to get right.

I hope these tips have helped you get up and running with your online marketing strategy. Check out some of my in content links above for more in-depth processes for each concept. Of course if you have any questions feel free to contact me directly at danielle@searchtrafficpro.com

Thanks to Sugarrae for her interviews and all the experts that took time to answer these questions. You can check out her original post here.

Does Google know your brand?

Recently Rae Hoffman-Dolan over at Sugarrae.com interviewed the best and brightest in SEO today. Through a series of interview questions she aims to get at the answer to the age old question: What is linkbuilding?

If you are new to internet marketing, I’ve pulled out the most important takeaways from these expert sources to help you get started and up and running on them for yourself.

These are the experts who were interviewed for the article in July 2011:

• Aaron Wall of SEO Book and Clientside SEM – @aaronwall
• Dave Snyder, Managing Partner of the Blueglass Agency – @davesnyder
• Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link and the The Link Spiel – @debramastaler
• Eric Ward, Ericward.com Linking Strategies and Chief Link Evangelist at advertising intelligence firm AdGooroo.com – @ericward
• Justilien Gaspard, Link Columnist for SEW and owner of Justilien.com
• Michael Gray of the Graywolf SEO blog – @graywolf
• Rae Hoffman-Dolan, aka Sugarrae, CEO of MFE Interactive – @sugarrae
• Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz – @randfish
• Roger Montti, the founder and owner of martinibuster.com – @martinibuster
• Find the Addendum featuring Todd Malicoat and Jim Boykin here

 

Let’s get started!

 1. What does “Brand” mean for Google?

The Google algorithm is so adept at keeping up with the changes of the web that it has started to pick up on brand “signals.” Brands have obviously been around a long time, but Google is giving them more weight because on the internet brands can be “searched for” instead of simply “found.” For example, if you were searching to buy a computer online you would most likely type “Dell” or “Apple” and not simply “computer.” This lets Google know that you are looked for as a brand which in turn gives your business weight and higher search results.

How Can You Stay On Top Of This Strategy?

Make sure your links are branded! Your links should have anchor text with your brand name when possible, your brand should match your domain name and your social media mentions should mention your brand. Google is starting to push brands to the top of the pages over non-brands, so that the obvious conclusion here is that Google rewards brand names.

Also, If you write articles for your site, your article marketing efforts should always mention your brand name, product and content should be based on your keywords AND brand name.

Building your brand will take “real-world” commitment. Building relationships and making connections with sites that matter to Google. If you’re focusing on local search engine results, your local newspaper is a great place to get a quality back link from. You need those inbound links (partnerships) with authority sites and if you focus on what your brand has to say and say it everywhere you go, the exposure and links will naturally follow.

 2. Social Media: Sharing Content as Link

Adding a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & +1 buttons to your site is a no-brainer. It allows visitors to share your content for you thus giving you an unlimited amount of links in these forums. Visitors can do part of the work for you in a Google friendly way. Google likes these links because they are user-generated which is important as the internet becomes more and more social.

 How Can You Stay On Top Of This Strategy?

If you haven’t done so already make your site shareable by implementing the buttons I mentioned above. Create a Facebook page for your business and keep it active by syndicating your blog content there. Post a link to your newest content on Twitter. Connect with authority sites in your vertical on Twitter, this is much easier to do than becoming an authority yourself, that takes more time.

“Claim” your listings and “optimize” them on every major social site you can think of. Start with Google Places and Yelp. Do your research and keep tabs on comments and reviews about your business.

 3. Panda

I previously blogged about the Panda update to Google. By now you should be aware of it and focusing your efforts on high-quality content for your website. To get hit by the Panda updates means that you would have seen a decrease in pagerank in your site metrics. If you saw such a disaster occur and didn’t know why, well, Google changed its algorithm again and you need to stay up to date on what that means for your website.

 How Can You Stay On Top Of This Strategy?

If you were hit by the Panda update, don’t panic. Your site is still worthy of links. Be realistic. How bad are things really, can it be fixed? If you created a site with mostly rubbish content based around Adsense, it’s going to be a hard and possibly not worth the trouble. If you have a site with good content that just needs some editorial tweeks, then get to it. If your quality is lacking because you’re not the best writer, consider hiring a freelancer to write and produce fresh, quality stuff, I cannot stress this enough!

It makes sense to improve the design of your site as well if that’s needed. Once you get on top of this strategy you can go to town getting people to link to you. Just make sure you have what they will want and value first.

Part Two Coming Soon!

Google's ever-changing algorithms

Unless you’re a search engine marketer you probably haven’t spent too much time worrying about how the Google algorithms changes affect your life. If you are an online business however, you should know what the characteristics of Panda (the latest Google organic ranking updates) are and how they will affect your website.

There are many theory sites that will go into detailed explanations of algorithms; this however is not my focus. I would like to give you a working explanation of Panda so you can implement changes on your website that will keep your website ranking well and ward off the Google red flags.

What is the ‘Panda’?

Panda Technology is essentially a document classifier. What does that mean?

Well, you know how people “tag” stuff on blogs and social sites? Panda, in the most simplest terms, is the technology Google invented to “tag” your website. It classifies your website as a web document, processes information about it, scans it for qualities and relates it to other documents on the web according to its type and differences: this goes “over here” and this “doesn’t.”

For instance, there are “high quality” sites such as Wikipedia or New York Times on Panda’s “good side” and there are “low quality sites” aka “scraper sites” that basically republish content not producing original or high quality content. Panda identifies those “scraper” sites or “content farms”. These sites also are just looking to make money off republished content by ranking highly for keywords but filling their site with affiliate links and advertising and little in the way of quality for the user.

The Panda Bear Is Smarter Than That

So how has the Panda Algorithm been updated to deal with scraper sites and content farms? According to the Official Google Blog:

“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.”

What Does This Mean For Your Website?

If your producing regular, original content that users can interact with, learn from, get value from, you’re doing the right thing as far as Google is concerned. Google is sort of acting as the janitor of the web here; that may be a good thing or not. It really remains to be seen how the algorithms affect everyone.

Right now its only affecting about 12% of US based websites but will be rolled out worldwide in the future. If you have lots of good content and that content is generating traffic and revenues, you will be fine. However, if you are making loads of cash from advertisements/affiliate links crammed into low quality content or scraped content, you may want to rethink your business model – and quick!

Quick Tips To Improve Your Website Based on Algorithm Changes

Put effort into generating high quality content by actually writing original content yourself OR if you are not comfortable doing that, hire a freelance writer or search marketing consultant to write content based around the topics of your blog or business. Then update regularly.

Get rid of any pages that may be viewed by Google as “link farms” pages on your sites that are filled with just links to other peoples content and add nothing original to the topic.

Add places on your site where people can interact with your content via comments, social sharing or if you’re really brave introduce a forum where you can answer questions on a topic and have users do the same. Be ready to do some serious editing there since you will invite a host of spammy contributors. But the organic ranking reward is worth the effort. And good luck!

example search: ppc ads

The term PPC refers to hyper-targeted advertising on the search engines. If you do it right you can make a bundle. If you do it wrong, well then, you might as well have ran a million dollar ad for skinny jeans during the Super Bowl.

These are my 3 quick tips for a PPC ad that will be killer. Use this as a checklist when auditing your copywriting for PPC ads:

#1. Good PPC Ads Stand Out in Click Thrus

Good ads get clicked on while bad ads get ignored. Check your CTR’s or click through rates for each and every phrase that is active in your PPC account.

Review your competitors ad copy. What are they focusing on? If it’s price, beat their price in your ad. What does their URL look like? Is it a nice clean easy on the eyes URL? Do that too. These simple changes may give you the bump you need to get more clicks. Watch what the ads do in measurable numbers in your account. Tweak and re-tweak as needed.Also, you will pay less for each ad when the CTR of your ad is good. Search engines like high CTRs and they will reward you with low cost per click or CPC.

For example:

Ad A Clicks: 2,000 | CTR: 1.2% | CPC: $0.78 | Total cost: $1,560
Ad B Clicks: 2,000 | CTR: 3.1% | CPC: $0.44 | Total cost: $880

(source of example: Search Engine Land)

Both ads sent 2,00 visitors but the second was 43% cheaper because it had a higher CTR being the better more targeted ad

#2. The Right Words = The Right Prospects

Sure it’s nice to get attention, but you don’t want to get the wrong kind of attention either. It’s the same with site visitors-you don’t just want anyone paying attention to you/visiting your site especially if you’re paying for each visitor. You only want the right sorts of visitors to come to your site. In other words, you want to ‘qualify’ your traffic.

One of the best ways to qualify your prospects is by writing information into the ad that is specifically geared towards people who are interested in what you offer. Price is a good piece of qualifying information. For example:

Luxury Couples Vacation
Couples Massage,Romantic Dinner
3-Day Trips Starting at $599!
www.loveandrest.com

By using “3-Day Trips Starting at $599!” in the ad-copy you are attracting visitors who would consider paying $599 for your package. In this way, you’re qualifying your prospects. It doesn’t guarantee qualified visitors, but it certainly encourages them to visit – and keeps out the people looking to spend less.

#3. Bad PPC Ads Are Too General

Check out this strange Amazon ad, why is it there as a result of searching “essentials of ppc” ?

Bad-PPC-Ads

The first ad is relatively specific to my search term but the second ad, huh? Doesn’t match the search term at all.

PPC ads should be specific because they bring you prospects who know they’re interested in your products/services which in turn will increase leads & sales because you’re attracting the right customers.

The importance of the PPC ad cannot be overstated. When done right, ads grab prospects and pull them over to your site. Good ads also keep visitors away from your competitors. Whenever engaging your PPC agency or consultant (or worse, your PPC software), make sure they are adequately addressing the ad copy in your PPC account. It’s one easy way to keep your business open!

BTW – If you’re new to PPC account management, we’ve all been there. It may be a good idea to get someone experienced to help you out. We’ve managed hundreds of PPC campaigns and hundreds of thousands of dollars in pay per click budget. We would love the opportunity to show you what ROI-focused PPC can do for your business. Contact us today for a proposal!

Build Links For Local Search

It isn’t hard to get your site listed and your profile built out on these websites, it’s just a little tedious. That’s why search engine optimization firms charge a lot to do it for you.

If you do it yourself you can save a bunch of money here and utilize their services for more strategic endeavors. It is free to create a business profile on all the sites listed below.

1. Google Places -

First and foremost. Make sure your business profile is here and you are continuously enhancing your profile. For example as you hone in on your keywords and your location based keywords for local search, i.e. insurance agent and insurance agent, Austin, TX; you add these to the descriptions in your listing.

If you’re not sure what kind of profile works on a Google Place Page look at some of your high ranking competitors to see what their page looks like and do just what they do, but do it better! Get more reviews, get more specific locations etc.

2. and 3. Yahoo! Local and Bing -

The same rules that apply to Google Places will also apply to Yahoo! Local and Bing. Make sure you submit your business listing to these very important major search engines and keep growing and perfecting your profiles there.

4. Citysearch -

People have been writing reviews and searching for neighborhood businesses on  Citysearch since before Google and Yahoo! got into the local search game. It’s still hugely important to be listed here and get people to write reviews and discuss your business here. The site’s business listings are divided up into categories here with ratings, reviews and articles in each category. All this user content is relevant to your keywords if your in the right category, and will help you rank competitively if you take time optimizing your listing on Citysearch.

5. Yellowpages -

Its hard to shake old habits and if you were always used to searching for businesses in your local phonebook, your not alone. People still associate the term “yellowpages” or “phone book” with searching for a business, so you better believe it makes good business sense to be listed on the Yellowpages website.

They’ve modernized their image a bit. On their website you get the best of both worlds, the connotation attached to “phonebook” while also getting the newer media value of user generated content, reviews and articles around your category and keywords.

6. Yelp -

Yelp is hugely trendy and important, people go to Yelp to see what their neighbors are saying, location of a business, hours of operation etc. so make sure your info is there and up to date.

7. MerchantCircle -

A rising star in local search. What they’re doing that sets them apart is creating a community forum of questions and answers. All this user generated content is great for your rankings. People love to see reviews before they buy and read discussions about products. Just think what a little community buzz could do for your business!

On a sidenote, Search Traffic Pro has gotten our clients great exposure and increased rankings with these new and noteworthy local search engines below. These listings are all free so go for it!

-Superpages.com

-Brownbook.net

-Manta.com

-Kudzu.com

-Allpages.com

-Insiderpages.com

-DexKnows.com

By the way, if you don’t have the time or energy for linkbuilding or you have no strategy in place, we are a full service search engine optimization firm so contact us today for help with your Local search campaign. We guarantee your satisfaction!