A lot of people have been asking us why we're sharing all this information on how to perform Search Engine Optimization, if that's the business we're in. We get paid to have knowledge and expertise in this area, so why are we giving it away? There are a few reasons.
1. It's good Karma. A lot of what we know we've learned from others. Many things we've figured out on our own, or learned through years of trial-and-error experience. It's good to give a little back.
2. It's good for business. If we share valuable information then people will link to us, and others will hire us to help them get the word out about their products and services, and that's good for everyone.
3. Not everyone can afford an expert SEO consultant. Entrepreneurs must wear many hats and learn to do many jobs themselves. We have people approach us almost daily saying they need our help to grow their business's online presence, but they have very limited budgets. We're glad to help by providing tips to get started growing a business, and later when they are in a position to invest we'll be glad to help get them to the next level.
On behalf of the SEOBOLD team I hope you enjoy reading this blog and learn a lot from it.
The reason we all work so hard to become experts on how to get good search engine visibility on Google is because of Google's massive market share. Since almost everyone does their searches on Google, why bother putting energy into marketing on other search engines?
Well, here is some data on search engine market share that might surprise you. According to a report by Hitwise (which is owned by Experian, those people that track your personal credit score) published last week (Feb 10, 2010),15% of searchers are using Yahoo!? More than 9% of searchers are using Bing. Here is the search engine market share report.
Even more interesting is the trend. Right now Bing is the fastest growing search engine. They put a deal in place that makes them the default search engine for Verizon Blackberry users and even pushed a Bing search app onto customer phones. They also made a deal with Yahoo! so soon Yahoo! search will actually be powered by Bing. Here's the press release on that from Yahoo!. Google market share dropped 1% and Yahoo by 2%. If you follow the math you'll realize that if Google loses 1% of market share that's a lot more people than the 4% gain Ask.com got. Think about it like this: If you have one dollar and I give you another dollar, you now have 100% more money thanks to my dollar. However, if you had 100 dollars and I gave you 50 dollars, you only have 50% more money even though you have 50 more dollars. Bing picked up 5% in January from December.
What does this mean for your business? According to the Hitwise report, Bing is growing really fast at sending customers to businesses. For example, in the automotive industry, bing sent 89% more customers to businesses than the previous year, compared to Yahoo decreasing by 10% and Google growing by 16%. For shopping, Google gained 13% from the previous year, Yahoo lost 13%, but Bing picked up 84%, probably in part due to Bing's awesome cashback system (I like to stack a 5% Bing cashback reward on top of a 5% cash back discount from Discover card rewards shopping. I'm not getting anything for plugging this stuff by the way and I saved a lot on a great Sony video recorder).
Another important SEO trend: People are learning to use search engines better by making more specific queries. A phrase like boat insurance could mean the searcher wants to get information on making a claim, the reputation of a firm, she may want to find out if she needs to buy boat insurance by law, or she may be seeking to buy affordable boat insurance. When people enter a more specific query like "buy boat insurance" they're going to get more accurate results. This also makes an SEO's job easier. Remember our rule #1 for SEO is to make your content relevant to what searchers are looking for. So, this trend makes our method even more effective.
Our opinion: Here at SEO Bold we think these trends are a good thing.
Competition is always good for the consumer, no one search engine
should dominate too much. We love Yahoo! because they provide great
tools for internet marketers and provide free, easy to use APIs and
good documentation. We love Bing because, well, we love those awesome
pictures on the home page, but more importantly, Bing is really easy to
optimize for and makes a lot of sense to us. Bing also shows results
from SEO efforts faster than Google. At this point Google is playing
catch up trying to replicate some of Bing's features. If you haven't
tried it, I suggest committing to one week of Bing use to see how you
like it. Use the right tool for the right job.
The Lesson:
Pay attention to Bing, and master it. Focus your efforts there as in 2010 - 2011 they're really going to pay off. We're focusing a lot of SEO energy into knowing everything we can about Bing as part of our strategy going into the new year.
Google sitelinks sometimes appear under a website in Google's search results. When you do a search Google doesn't know what you are looking for. If you search for "boston chicken" are you looking for a menu, hours of operation, or something else? Google may show you BostonChicken.com with links underneath for menu, operating hours, contact us, or something else.
Google sitelinks are important for many reasons. Here are a few:
Sitelinks imply validation, in other words, Google thinks you are important enough to show extra links to your site, so I'm probably better off clicking there;
Sitelinks make it easier for searchers to find the content they are seeking by going to your site instead of someone else's;
Sitelinks take up space on the screen and push your competitors down further "beneath the fold";
The more links in search engine results that point to your page as a percentage of all links on the page, the higher the probability people will click on a link to your site. This is why we always recommend a pay-per-click campaign in addition to search engine optimization.
So how EXACTLY do you get sitelinks? Well, the answer is top secret, only Google knows for sure and for sure they aren't telling. However, a lot of people have been putting effort into figuring it out and we know some definite DO's and things that will improve your chances. Here are some things you should be doing to increase the odds that you'll get sitelinks.
Create links in your home page. Make sure to have 5-8 links on your home page that point directly to the content you want to show up in site links. Keep these links having brief anchor text, like "download", or "menu", or "hours of operation". Sitelinks are generated from links in your home page.
Put the links in <ul> tags. Here's a personal observation: I looked at a lot of sites that had site links and searched the source code to their pages. It's no guarantee, but putting your links in an unordered list seems to make a big difference, and this makes sense. A lot of websites make their navigation by using CSS combined with ul tags to make menus. If I were a Google programmer trying to figure out which links on the page were pointing to the top level, most important pages of a site, I'd look in here too.
Have a sitemap. Make sure the pages linked to from step 1 are included in a sitemap and are indexed. If the pages they link to aren't indexed then they won't get sitelinks.
Get good search engine placement. You won't get sitelinks unless your site shows up on the top of the results page. If Google doesn't think you're important then you're not likely to get sitelinks. Also, as search engine placement varies over time, your sitelinks may appear, disappear, and reappear.
Be patient. Anything you do is going to take time to have an effect. The general consensus in the SEO community is that there is a software job that updates sitelinks, so you'll have to wait until that completes before you can show up in sitelinks. Not only that but sitelinks generally do not appear for sites that are new. In general Google offers some preference for sites that have been around a while.
Don't delete them. When you get sitelinks, you can edit them somewhat using Google webmaster tools. You can delete them, but you can't replace them. If you don't like the sitelinks Google generates for you, do a permanent redirect on the old pages to a new URL.
Here are some links with great information on sitelinks and I recommend them for additional reading if you'd like to learn more on this subject:
Google Webmaster Central Help: Sitelinks the first authority on Google is Google, so always start by reading their online help. In this case, it's not THAT helpful but as a rule of thumb lets always start at the source.
The guiding principles of SEO here at SEOBOLD that guide everything we do are:
Create valuable content
Make pages that are specific to a particular topic
Make it easy for search engines to determine what that topic is
If you make pages with valuable content, people will link to it. If
your pages are structured well, then it should be easy for search
engines to understand what the page is about, and show you in search
results accordingly.
Search Engine Optimization is about helping people find valuable information on a particular subject that the searcher is interested in. If you are good at this then you'll be rewarded by good search engine visibility. These principles are in alignment with everyone's interests:
- Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! want to be able to display relevant content sought after by the searcher; Make that easy for Google by creating valuable content that is easy for the search engines to identify.
- Searchers who find your valuable content will spread the word, creating more links, enhanced reputation for your site, and even better search engine visibility.
If you read the articles linked to in this post you'll get a great start on what you need to know about effective link building, and you'll discover a lot of great resources along the way.
The guiding principles of SEO here at SEOBOLD that guide everything we do are:
Create valuable content
Make pages that are specific to a particular topic
Make it easy for search engines to determine what that topic is
If you make pages with valuable content, people will link to it. If
your pages are structured well, then it should be easy for search
engines to understand what the page is about, and show you in search
results accordingly.
Jim Boykin is an expert SEO and he's shared some interesting articles on link building do's and don'ts. Link building is all about building reputation for your website. If you follow this link Jim writes about which of his many articles on link building he thinks are the most important to read.
Here's the summary:
- If your website has a good reputation, and is trusted, then you'll get good visibility in search engines
- If the links pointing to you aren't from trusted sources, it won't help you
- If you have lots of links from sources that are known for being exploited for irrelevant link building, it will hurt your search engine visibility.
According to Jim, his six most important articles that you should read on link building are:
SEOBold.com's Search Engine Optimization team recently took on a client that wants to increase traffic to their website, PolicyDog.com. We met them through a personal referral. The owners of the site are a great group of people and we're highly motivated to get them great results.
This site presents some challenges:
The site offers a range of products, which are totally different. For example, collector car insurance is totally different from motorcycle insurance, which is also different from boat insurance. They may seem similar because they are all insurance products, but we want to help searchers find the right product.
"Insurance" is too broad, it's not likely that someone who searches for "Insurance" wants "boat insurance". We treat each product as it's own web site.
The insurance business requires domain specific knowledge that we needed to acquire. In order to do a good job making pages that are highly relevant to the needs of PolicyDog.com's customers, we need to understand their business, products, and the needs of their customers.
PolicyDog.com's website has a proprietary content management system, which makes installing content easy but organizing it how we want challenging.
Getting Started
To get started, we had an initial phone call with the customer side project owner and the lead web developer. We listened and learned a lot about the insurance business and PolicyDog.com's commitment to providing quality insurance policies to their customers. We took notes, and then we spent some time explaining the SEO process and what to expect. It's important to make the process transparent so that our customer can feel comfortable and confident in our service. The next step was to set some goals, target some specific customer needs, and put together a statement of work that reflects the client's strategic goals.
Content Creation
SEO shouldn't involve trickery. It's all about creating content that is relevant to what users are searching for. Once we understood what PolicyDog.com's customers were looking for, we were able to create content to effectively explain what the various products are. We wanted to make sure that the customers understood that:
For each product, we created custom content to communicate these key points to site visitors.
Call to action - increasing the conversion rates
There's no point in drawing visitors to a web site unless you want them to do something. The site had forms to enable users to get an online quote for various products, but the content management system didn't allow us to integrate those custom forms into the optimized product. That means extra clicks for site visitors, which is annoying and costs the client business. Their content management system was amazing for managing products, but it needed some additional features for the marketing needs. Each require click means fewer sales. We went on site to meet with PolicyDog's web development team so they could update the site code to accommodate the marketing needs.
Reporting - That which gets measured gets managed
If management can't see what visitors are doing on the site, then we can't work with them to increase sales. One of the first things we do when we setup a site is install an analytics package. The management team now gets a report on the first of every month showing current traffic, sales conversion rates, and compares website performance to the prior month. Each month we review the report to identify opportunities for improvement.
Registration with search engines
Once the site was done, we created search engine facing site maps to help Google, Bing and Yahoo! find all the pages in the site for effective indexing. If your page isn't indexed, then it can't show up in search engine listings. Most major search engines support mechanisms for detecting site maps, and also support site map submission.
In addition to registering the site with search engines, we also register the website with online directories to create links to the site. Links make a huge difference in search engine results.
Subscribe to this RSS feed to stay tuned as we follow PolicyDog.com's progress and evaluate the results. We look forward to seeing their business grow!
This blog will be used to talk about how we work our magic: Increasing the business driven to your website. We'll provide tutorials on how to do your own search engine optimization, and case studies how how we're helping our clients. We hope you find it insightful!
