SEO SEM SERVICES

Improving exact match and phrase match

When people search for your products or services, they probably misspell a word every so often. In mid-May, we’re making improvements to our exact and phrase matching options so your ad will be eligible to show when people search for close variants — yes, that includes misspellings — of your keywords. In addition to misspellings, [...]

New matching behavior for phrase and exact match keywords

Stop Paying for Stupid Clicks: Negative Keywords for Positive ROI

One of my guilty pleasures is looking through the search query reports (SQR) of an AdWords campaign for the cringe-worthy search queries that led to someone clicking on a PPC ad. Really Google? You felt thatgoat transportation cost was related to my keyword of freight costs? Or that a babe cam search should show my [...]

7 ways to Increase Sales by creating Trust

The key to conversing a visitor into a client is the creation of trust. Your product can be the greatest thing on earth or the dullest office supply ever, both can be sold online when your visitor knows you are the best supplier for that product or service. We often advise on how to gain [...]

Top 10 PPC Campaign Mistakes

10. Not Using Geographical Targeting Whether you’re an international conglomerate or a localized small business, geographical targeting is tremendously important. Avoid wasted spend by only targeting the areas that offer maximum ROI. For small businesses, maximum return might only occur within — say — a 20 mile radius. Also, companies selling higher-end services can benefit [...]

Perfecting On-Page Optimization for Ecommerce Websites

May 17th, 2012

admin

Back in 2009 (was it really that long ago?!) Rand wrote a post titled Perfecting Keyword Targeting and On-Page Optimization, which is one of the most popular blog posts on SEOmoz. It is still referenced as much today as it was back in 2009. The core principles haven’t changed that much, but there are some new additions to an SEO’s toolkit when it comes to on-page optimization. Today I want to focus on what these new additions are in relation to eCommerce websites.

Elements of the page you should work on

I made the following mockup to try and visualise clearly all the elements of an eCommerce product page that are important for on-page optimization.

Let’s get into more detail on each of these elements and see what we can do to take advantage and optimise for them, starting with the new additions since Rand’s post in 2009. I’ve related the numbers in the mockups to the sections below; some sections do not have numbers because they are not visible on the page, for example META description.

Customer Reviews

If you run an eCommerce website and are not collecting customer reviews, you are seriously missing out. Not only is this great feedback that you need to have to improve your business, but it is also an amazing source of unique content. Better yet, it is very scalable across large websites, which means you can get lots of content onto lots of pages.

Quick tips for collecting and using customer reviews:

Build or buy a system to automatically email customers a few weeks after purchasing and ask for a review
When getting off the ground and trying to get volume, offer incentives such as a discount on their next purchase in exchange for a review
Don’t worry about publishing negative reviews, customers aren’t silly and can tell when reviews are a bit too positive

Also, if you are worried about things like this having a negative effect on conversion rates:

See if you can customise your review system to not show this message on products that do not have reviews. Set a threshold so that when a couple of reviews are received, reviews are shown on the product page.

Added benefit: microdata

You also need to make sure you are marking up these reviews with relevant microdata. This will give Google more context about your content, as well as giving you the chance to improve click-through-rates from search results like what we see in this example:

The use of review microformats is increasing all the time so there is an argument that you are not standing out anymore if all the other results have the same type of markup. You could even argue that to stand out you should take them away

Product Videos

I’ll admit that this is a tough one to execute, but it is one that I feel is very worthwhile for eCommerce sites. There are many websites already adding videos to their product pages, but they are not always doing it in the most optimal way. A great example of the right way to do this is Zappos who now have over 50,000 product videos.

There are a few benefits to having videos on a product page. One of which is helping make your product pages more link worthy and rich in content. Good quality videos demonstrating use cases of products could also help conversion rates (particularly for high-end, technical products) but I can’t provide evidence for that unfortunately.

Another added benefit as you’ll see from the screenshot above is how your search results for product pages can stand out from competitors. I’ve seen loads of eCommerce stores who have videos on the page but are not embedding or marking them up in the correct way.

By far the best system I know to embed and optimise your videos properly is Wistia, which SEOmoz use for Whiteboard Fridays. These guys have a great system and are always improving how things work and adding new features. We’ve used them on a test site or two at Distilled and got video snippets showing very quickly.

I could talk more about using videos to aid SEO but Phil did a great post that covers pretty much everythingyou need to know here. He also did a presentation on video SEO and you can see the slides over onSlideshare.

Rel="next", Rel="prev" and view all

One of the problems that always crops up on large eCommerce sites is how to efficiently deal with pagination. You can have product categories that contain thousands of products that span many pages. You want to make sure that all of these products are indexed and regularly crawled, but at the same time you don’t care too much about the paginated pages ranking or having too much link equity.

Since Rand’s post of 2009, we’ve been given an additional way of handling pagination. Namely the rel="next", rel="prev" and "view all" attributes. This markup can help Google better understand pagination and pass link equity to key pages. Google gave some good instructions on how to implement these attributes here andhere which you can take a look at.

There are a few other ways to handle pagination, which Adam Audette explains very well in this post onSearch Engine Land.

Microdata markup and Schema.org

Another new tool that is available to us now is the use of microdata and the support of the Schema.org vocabulary by the major search engines. That announcement back in June 2011 was quite exciting but didn’t really live up to expectations and Google seemed pretty slow in showing this support in their search results. However this seems to have changed and we are seeing more and more examples of Google using this data now.

Bringing this back to eCommerce, there are a few types of markup you can use on a product page which you can see documentation on here. This page also contains details of review markup that I talked about above. Not all of the properties on this page will be applicable to you, but here are some tips on how to use this:

Only choose the properties that are relevant to the product attributes you have
Take development time to integrate these properties into templated elements of your page, so that when you add new products, they are automatically marked up
Add notes to your analytics package when you put these changes live so you can monitor any improvements

Q&A Content

Another big opportunity for eCommerce websites is the integration of question and answer content focused on products. As mentioned above, eCommerce websites have always had the problem of getting unique content onto product pages on scale. Question and answer content can help solve this problem and gives you great scope to get user generated content onto lots of your product pages.

There are a few benefits to integrating this type of system:

Scalable, user-generated content published onto product pages
Improving ranking for long-tail terms and question driven keywords if the content is crawlable
Possible improvement in conversion rate if customer concerns are addressed in the answers
Possibility of encouraging brand evangelists and even bringing in some gamification principles to help motivate users

Here is a live example from Jessops:

I personally feel like there is an opportunity for Quora here if they wanted to explore this space. Many retailers will be looking for this type of system and Quora may be able to offer something that helps them reach the critical mass of content they’d need.

Social sharing buttons

I’m a little skeptical about whether social sharing buttons on product pages are a good idea. The goal of a product page is to get someone to buy, not to get them to tweet or like the page. Sure these social signals can help, but personally I’d rather not distract people from buying my product. For me, social sharing should be encouraged at different points in the buying process:

After the point of purchase on a thank you / confirmation type page
Email follow up and correspondence – follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook etc
After a review has been published – give the reviewer the option to share their review

There is an alternative use of social buttons, which I haven’t seen or been able to test on a client site yet. But I wanted to share it anyway. It builds upon the code that Tom Anthony talked about here which allows you to detect if a user is logged into Twitter, Facebook or Google+ whilst they are viewing your website.

If you can use the code that Tom created to detect if a user is logged into Facebook for example, you could show that user a custom message. This could be anything you want but it could be something as simple as encouraging them to like your page in exchange for a discount. This not only gets you the like but also increases the chances of the user converting after giving them a discount.

Tom quickly tested this theory on a test site which you can see a screenshot from here:

You can put whatever message you want in here, this is to demonstrate what could be done if you think a little out of the box and not just put social share buttons on a page because that is what everyone else does.

Page Speed

Again, this is something that has become more of a focus since Rand’s blog post. Speed has always been important but SEOs sat up and took a lot more notice when Google confirmed it was a factor in the algorithm, albeit a small one.

For me, an eCommerce site should care about site speed because of its effect on conversion rate rather than rankings. A user is not going to hang around waiting for your product pages to load and there have been some good studies that show the positive effect a fast loading page has on conversion rates.

Bottom line is that you should care about site speed for your users rather than SEO. Here is a good guide for improving site speed written by Craig at Distilled.

Open graph tags

Another new addition that you can add to your eCommerce pages is the open graph tags. These tags allow you to be much more specific with how your content is shared on Facebook. As Facebook is such a huge platform with a lot of potential for traffic, you need to make sure that you are doing all you can to optimise for it and specify how your content should be shared.

They are also pretty easy for you or a developer to setup and put live. The tags sit inside your header so you will need a flexible CMS or a good developer to make these additions for you. On an eCommerce site with lots of products you’ll probably need a developer to setup the tags so they scale across all of your products and use the correct elements of the page.

Here are some more articles that help with the use and optimisation of the open graph tags:

Search options

Ideally, a user should never need to use a search box on your website because they will be able to find their way around using your navigation. But there are going to be times when this doesn’t happen and there are users who will just prefer to search. I think that a search box on an eCommerce website is essential and you should use the data that it gives you to improve your website and customer experience.

Here are some tips for using a search box:

Make sure you are tracking searches using your CMS or this feature of Google Analytics
Monitor how many people who search and then leave the site straight away – try to lower this number
Check your search results actually return good results
Make sure your search function still works when you try singular and plural keywords – particularly with an eCommerce site this is important
Pull in special offers and discounts related to the searched for keyword
Pull in product images next to search results, I like how Apple do this:

Clear call to action

Essential for any eCommerce website. Your ultimate goal is to sell a product so you need to make the call to action as clear as possible. Make sure you are running experiments on your product pages to test and improve conversion rates. Many eCommerce stores focus a bit too much on getting more traffic via SEO and PPC, whilst a quicker way to get more revenue is to get more out of the traffic you already have by improving conversion rates.

Even if you are not actively doing conversion rate optimisation, you should at least be measuring as much data as you can from your site, in particular your product pages which are ultimately the most important pages for an eCommerce website.

Tools you can use to measure and improve calls to action:

Just get one or two of these tools setup and start gathering the data, once you start gathering the data, you are in a much better position to start caring about it and setting targets against it.

Trust signals

You are asking people to enter their credit card details on your website. They need to be able to trust that you are a genuine company and that their personal details are secure. You can do this on the product page and enforce it again throughout the checkout process. These are the types of trust signals you should be trying to incorporate into your product pages:

Also make sure these link to secure certificates where possible so that users can go and verify what you are saying. Be sure to check regularly that these links still work – the last thing you want is this link being broken or expired!

Breadcrumbs

These are underestimated in my opinion, both in terms of customer experience and with SEO. They can be a great way of helping the customer navigate around your website and really help your internal linking.

On an eCommerce site, breadcrumbs can be a bit complicated because there are often multiple ways of getting to the same product page. So the potential breadcrumb trail on a product page could look different depending on which categories and sub-categories you navigate through. For me, the benefits of doing anything too fancy are not big enough to warrant the time. So I’d recommend using one breadcrumb trail and sticking to it. If you are concerned about user experience, you could make the users breadcrumb trail cookie based. But this isn’t always worth the development time so you should assess how valuable it is for your customer experience.

Images

Crisp, clean, high quality images are necessary for any eCommerce website. The users engage with what they can see and will often be put off if the images are very bad. Here is a great post from Kissmetrics that gives some examples of how to optimise images for conversion.

Something I’d highly recommend for an eCommerce website is showing use cases of the product within the images and not just the product itself against a plan background. As much as I like IKEA, I don’t like the plainness of their images sometimes:

I’d much prefer to see products like this shown how I may use them if I buy them and in the setting of a living room for example.

From a pure SEO perspective, you’ll want to make sure you are doing basic image optimization to capture traffic from Google image search where possible. Here are a few tips for this:

If possible, use descriptive filename e.g. wooden-oak-table-12345.png instead of 12345.png
Add ALT text to all product images – it is quite easy to make ALT text the same as the product name automatically in the CMS
Create and submit an image sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools

META Title

I shouldn’t have to go into much detail here as to the importance of this. Something to bear in mind for eCommerce websites is that you are generating META titles for potentially thousands of product pages. It just isn’t feasible to customise each and every one of these, so you should have these auto-generated by your developers based on a template that you give them. For product pages, this is probably just going to be the product name followed by a small call to action or USP. For example including something like "Free Delivery" could work well for improving click-throughs from search. The key really is to try and avoid masses of duplicate META data.

Top tip - an eCommerce website is usually driven by some kind of database which will have various attributes (fields) for each product. A good developer will be able to use these fields to populate other parts of the page dynamically, for example a META title or description. Bear this in mind when writing your META data templates and use these fields if they are available to you.

META Description

Whilst the META description has minimal effect on rankings, you should be optimising this for improving click-throughs from search results. Ecommerce sites are in the perfect position to include lots of information, calls to actions and USPs into the META description. As mentioned above, the META description could be auto-generated based on a template that you provide to a developer. This could include database fields such as categories and sub-categories.

Product description

In a post-Panda world, it is very important to make your product descriptions unique. Taking descriptions straight from manufacturers or product feeds does not differentiate you at all from the hundreds of other retailers who sell the same product. Spend the time and resource making these unique and engaging and make sure you include the USPs of your offering – such as free delivery or lowest prices.

Page URL

Again, this is pretty basic SEO but there is one key thing to remember with eCommerce sites. You should not include categories or sub-categories in product URLs, especially if there is more than one way to find a product, for example if it is in more than one category. This can lead to duplicate product pages. You can fix this with rel="canonical" tags but it isn’t really ideal.

Best practice is to just use product name and a code as the URL, for example – www.example.com/product-name-12345. The reason for the addition of a number in the URL is to cover yourself against similar product names – not usually a problem but worth trying to prevent.

H1 tags

It is debatable how much H1 tags matter anymore and some studies from SEOmoz have shown that they do not have a lot of impact on rankings. However I feel that for the time it takes to optimise this, it is worth doing and certainly isn’t going to hurt you. It is also good to have clean markup of the page so that if for some reason someone browses a page with CSS turned off, the page still has a logical structure.

For an eCommerce product page, I’d recommend coding your page template so that the product name automatically becomes the default H1 tag for a page. This should help to eliminate duplicate H1 tags across the website and will automatically optimise each page you publish.

Phone number

If you can provide a phone number, do it. Not only to help in terms of customer support, but also as another trust signal. If we think back to what Panda was trying to achieve, one of the questions was "would you trust this website with your credit card?" and one factor that certainly helps inspire trust is a phone number.

A pro tip here for eCommerce websites – if you have a customer support team. Keep track of your abandoned baskets in the checkout process and if you have captured the customer’s phone number, take some time to get your support team to phone and see if they can see what went wrong. This not only gives you a chance to get the sale, but you can also get feedback on your checkout process and see what barriers to conversion there may be.

Company details

Particularly relevant for companies who target local markets, giving Google more signals of your location can help rankings for those types of keywords. You can also use a few bits of Schema.org markup to give some extra context to the content. It is also another trust signal for Google and users to look at.

Conclusion

Well that is about it, I hope that has given you enough to work on to try and improve your eCommerce product pages. To wrap up, here are some more great articles on eCommerce SEO, many of which are from this curated list of eCommerce resources by Everett Sizemore:

As always, I’d love to hear your comments and feedback or ping me on Twitter to ask more questions.

May 17th, 2012

admin

Some of the greatest challenges my previous ecommerce clients have faced have revolved around developing a cohesive and long-term content/link building strategy. They’ve done all the changes they can on the technical backend of the site, incorporated keywords on the site, created a crawlable internal linking structure, and have paid for PR releases, submitted directory submissions, and written the occasional blog post. Now they ask, what’s next?

The latest Census Report indicates that ecommerce retail revenues are still rising quarter after quarter, meaning there is still boundless potential for the future of ecommerce. In addition, it’s also an exciting time to be involved in SEO as we’ve begun to realize that now is the time to focus on content marketing, as this is what will distinguish your site from others in the long-term.

Census Graph

The purpose of this post is to outline content and link building ideas, provide information on how your site could go about developing this type of strategy, and real-life examples of ecommerce brands that have implemented these tactics.

Creative Category Pages

Category pages are the money pages for ecommerce sites. Getting links to these pages is a major win because these are the pages that will be ranking for key head and mid-tail terms. Furthermore, even as products are rotated or as the site undergoes a redesign, the category pages will still remain a part of the site architecture and are the pages least likely to be impacted. However, it’s also a major challenge to garner links to these pages. Who wants to link to a page full of products?

Start thinking about how you can redesign your category pages to make them more than just another page. For instance, Hema’s category page was designed to become a wacky Rube Goldberg device. This page has gotten 20,826 links from 2,686 linking root domains.

Hema Category Pages

Using Products as Linkbait

Often times, it can be challenging to revamp or redesign category pages, so that valuable, unique content can be added. If that’s the case, selling interesting products on your site can become an effective form oflinkbait.

Threadless sells creative t-shirts. After the homepage, their second most linked to page is this product page. This product page received 5,065 links from 686 linking root domains, 3,068 Facebook Shares, and 1,167 Facebook Likes. It has received links from high authority sites, such as Wired and Boing Boing.

Threadless Spoiler Shirt

Other examples include:

A robot tea infuser from ModCloth. The page received 789 total links from 201 linking root domains from sites, such as Uncrate and The Next Web.
Tactical duty kilt from 5.11. Although this product started off as an April Fool’s Joke, 5.11 ended up making them because of the demand, while also receiving links from sites, such as Alltop.

Leveraging Sales/Deals Pages

Another linkbuilding tactic is to build and maintain a deals/sales page on the site that fulfills SEO requirements, such as having crawlable, indexable content, static URL, incorporating targeted keywords on the page etc… Then keep the same URL and revamp it every time you have a new deal or sale.

For example, let’s say that your site is giving away really amazing Black Friday or Cyber Monday deals. Target mommy bloggers and coupon deal sites and let them know about it. When bloggers report this sale to their readers, they inevitably have to link back to that page. Once the sale is over, keep the page and revamp it whenever new sales/deals come up. Overtime, the link equity on that page can become significant as it garners more and more links.

Sephora has a weekly specials page (that could use a bit more SEO). However, if you take a look at its backlink profile using Open Site Explorer, you’ll notice that the page has received backlinks from different mommy blogger channels.

Sephora Deals Page Backlink Profile

Personalized Product Giveaways

Think about what makes people feel special. Everyone appreciates personalized gifts. With Mother’s Day just around the corner, why not create a care package to the top 50 most passionate moms within your community with a personalized thank you from you and your team? It doesn’t have to be expensive to show that you care. Now take the surprise of the care package, combine this with people’s insatiable desire to share via Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook, and they’ve just published and pinned beautiful photos of this sincere gift to their network for the world to see.

Kotex Pinned Gift

Kotex recently did something similar titled "Women’s Inspiration Day". From this campaign, Kotex received an incredible response with almost 100% of the 50 women they sent this gift to posting and pinning this user generated content online, resulting in 2,284 interactions and 694,953 total impressions. This example just goes to show you that sincerity, great execution, and placing something of value perceived value in the hands of your passionate users can pay dividends.

Link-worthy Contests

If personalized product giveaways aren’t possible, consider running effective contests in conjunction withidentifying influential individuals on channels using tools, like Followerwonk. This would allow you to systematically target the type of audience and sites you want involved (while also expanding your brand awareness). You need to give something away that people would actually want, especially your target audience. It’s also worth having a little fun with it and seeing if you could come up with some creative tactics that would require contest submissions to link back to your site.

Some possible ideas include:

Fashion/clothing ecommerce sites: Does your boyfriend need a $500 fashion makeover? Send pictures and write a post on the products you would purchase.
Tools/home improvement sites: Shopping spree competition – Does a room in your house need a makeover? How would you spend the money using products from our site?

Value of High-Quality Photos

Who doesn’t like looking at pretty pictures all day? We’re all visually stimulated by beautiful images and so really, it’s worth the effort to incorporate large, high-resolution photos on your site. Not to mention as anecommerce site, your website is the main vehicle for visitors to take a closer look at the products you offer. If I can’t see the product clearly, why should I buy it from your site? How can I even trust it?

Pictures are also an effective linkbuilding tactic. Fab’s 4th most linked to page on their site is the Fab Inspiration wall. It’s a social mood board so that the community can share inspirational designs with each other. Although the impetus for the creation was to incorporate social sharing on the website, its design speaks volumes about the impact of bold, high-quality photos. Not to mention, the page has received links from Elle and Cool Hunting.

Fab High Quality Photos

Leveraging Anticipation

There’s something to be said about building anticipation before a product actually hits the market. People are naturally inquisitive and want to be the first to be granted access and try out a product. Think about the huge lines that were outside of Apple stores the day the iPad 3 was released or the anticipation surrounding the release of Diablo 3.

Startup Visual.ly released a teaser preview video about their product before people were allowed to sign up for public beta. When they finally opened the site up, it inspired 60,000 people to sign up for invites and resulted in 8,500 people following their Twitter account.

Visually Beta Signup and Video

An ecommerce store that also successfully leveraged anticipation was Bonobos, who are in the business of selling better fitting men’s products. They recently launched a denim line, which expanded their product line from just chinos and cotton pants. The company built a micro site for individuals who wanted to be the first to be notified when the denim product line became live, as well as released a promo video. It was so successful that they ran out of invites! This new product launch received links from Esquire and Dappered, as well as coverage in the WSJ.

Link Building with Anticipation

Widening Your Audience

Sometimes we become so entrenched in trying to attract our target audience (What’s their persona? Who do they follow? How can I build a relationship with them?), that we can lose sight of all the other potential opportunities that are out there. Brainstorm all the cool things that you’re doing as a company and what your next initiatives are. Can you make any of these into a story? If you can’t think of any, then think outside your site and your target audience and write a blog post that speaks to them.

Often times, companies use their company blog as a way to promote their products. That’s not the purpose of the blog (unless, perhaps, you’re Apple). People aren’t interested that your site has gone through two iterations of redesigns unless it directly affects them. Most don’t care that your new product is now renamed product 2.0 because it went through a minor change and even if they were interested, would they link to it? People want quality, interesting content that makes them go “Wow, that’s kind of neat. I want to share that!” or “(Name of person) would really enjoy this article. I’m going to send it to them now.”

Let’s say your site sells car brakes. Expand your scope, so that your site speaks to not just people who are interested in buying brakes, but into racing or race cars. There are likely more race car aficionados than brake ones. Use tools like Google Insights for Search and Google Alerts to figure out what are some hot trends in racing. Check out forums and learn more about what they’re interested in. Entrench yourself in these conversations by providing value.

This year, Codecademy launched Code Year, an initiative targeted towards individuals who want to learn to code and have made it their New Year’s Resolution. Each week, people who sign up receive a new coding lesson free. It was a massive success as over 400k individuals have signed up to receive these lessons. The designer who designed the Code Year landing page wrote a phenomenal post on how he designed the page in 1 hour. The purpose of the post probably isn’t targeted towards the 400k individuals who signed up, even though they helped make the site a success. I’d like to think it was targeted towards designers or entrepreneurs currently working on their own startup. The blog post received 671 links from 141 linking root domains from sites like Hacker News, Tech Meme, and Reddit.

Think about anything even semi-related to your industry-inspiring buzz or creating amazing products and write really quality content surrounding it (also use this post as a reference) on your site or blog.

If your site doesn’t have its own blog, consider securing guest blog post opportunities, which is still a valuable medium for link prospecting and link building (especially for building links to deeper pages, like category pages). Blog posting also offers opportunities to reach an audience that has not yet heard of your brand. There are tons of outstanding resources available that already provide in-depth detail on how to go about approaching bloggers for guest blog post opportunities.

Comprehensive Guide to Guest Blogging
Posts about writing effective outreach emails here and here
Lists of 500 sites that accept guest blog posts
List of 100 sites that accept guest blog posts

Using Personal Stories

The new online marketing landscape offers new opportunities for storytelling and adds a human element to the type of stories that we share. The Coca Cola content initiative demonstrates that content marketing is growing and becoming a vital part of online marketing. There are several other brands that also utilize storytelling as a channel, such as Nike’s story on how running reunited a long-distance relationship.

From an SEO perspective, storytelling attracts links. This video that told the story about a modern dayknifemaker who makes his knives by hand attracted links from the NY Times, FastCoDesign, Huffington Post, and Gizmodo to his business site, Cut Brooklyn.

The Knife Maker

This fantastic video link bait slideshare shows how you can incorporate video into your link building strategy for around $1500. Furthermore, having video instead of just plain text will almost triple the average number of linking root domains.

Taking a Risk and Creating Amazing Content on a Budget

Let’s say you have a limited marketing budget and aren’t sure that you have the resources to create linkbaitcontent. Having such constraints for marketing is normal, but being creative, bold, and taking a risk can still pay off. Take the Dollar Shave Club as an example. With less than $5,000 budget, Dollar Shave Club was able to create a Old Spice like video about their product that led to over 4.5 million views on YouTube, 27,000 Facebook Shares, and over 2,000 tweets. This LA-based startup combined razors, a monthly subscription model, and a video introducing their company to the world with humor as their way to break into the space. Creating content like this isn’t without its risks, but when it pays off and is aligned with your core offering, there are many added benefits (brand awareness, growth in revenue, and word-of-mouth).

Dollar Shave Club

Audio Content Marketing

Here is another great example of how something as random as a late night Facebook comment manifested itself into a No. 1 Amazon.com selling book almost overnight. Adam Mansbach, author of the children’s book for adults titled (kids, cover your ears for this one) "Go the F**k to Sleep" quickly garnered the attention of celebrity Samuel L Jackson to do the narrative once he heard there would be an Audible.com version of the book. It was this combination of interesting, yet unique content narrated by a recognizable voice that transformed Audible.com’s sales page into one of the domains top linked, most socially shared, and highest reviewed pages on their site.

Quick stats about this audible page.. It has 8,053 user reviews, received links from 351 linking root domains. The page also received a total of 1,092 Links, 21,900 Facebook Shares, 21,124 Facebook Likes, and 1,902 Tweets.

Go The F to Sleep

Utilizing Pinterest

Pinterest has experienced rapid growth over the past 6 months with over 10 million registered users. The power of Pinterest is in its ability to drive referral traffic to your ecommerce site. This type of platform presents an opportunity for ecommerce sites to use Pinterest’s user base as a way to effectively engagetargeted users by creating content that is relevant to them, and make its products more visible to the right audience. Ideally, the strategy should be to create compelling and valuable content so that users want to click on the pins and land on various product pages. Colby Almond of 97th Floor has created a Viral Guide toPinterest Marketing, as well as written additional blog posts that introduce how to effectively build yourPinterest following and create the right type of content for this medium.

Some brands, such as Whole Foods have launched its own Pinterest initiative (which has 28k followers) and use it as a social media channel to represent their core values. They’ve even launched contests, like this “Pins for Mom” one from their account.

Other ecommerce sites, such as Everlane view Pinterest as an opportunity to have its products pinned on different boards. As a result, they’ve incorporated Pinterest’s Pin It functionality on their product pages.

As far as direct SEO benefits are concerned, links from pins and repins are nofollow, as are links that appear in the description.

Everlane Product Page

Lessons Learned When SEO Isn’t a Consideration – Honda

Everybody loves a Rube Goldberg machine. They are fun, smart, interesting, and super darn creative. Hondacreated a Rube Goldberg device crafted out of their car parts called “The Cog”. You know what made this video less cool? The fact that still, to this day, this content is nowhere to be found on any of Honda’s websites or YouTube channels. Guess who this did bode well for? A car enthusiast channel known as Web Rides TV with over 3.7 million views and counting. This URL also received links from 582 linking root domains.

Just imagine the lost opportunity Honda had here to capture the links, social mentions, and brand attention to their website and YouTube Channel. When you begin to think creatively and outside the box on how to more effectively leverage different marketing channels (television in this case), don’t forget to make SEO a KPI for your campaign and get that link equity flowing back to your website – self-host that video content on your website, post it on your YouTube channel, and do a focused PR push around your campaign that includes a link back to your site page. Finally, don’t leave room for others to be the de facto page that comes up when they search for your amazing work and always incorporate SEO within all of your marketing campaigns.

Honda The Cog

It’s Hard Work, But Keep at It

Link building is hard work and results often don’t appear until months after you’ve invested an incredible amount of time and resources. However, these case studies show that it works and even though results appear minimal at the beginning of the curve, results will grow exponentially at the end of the curve. It’s all about constantly pushing the flywheel, working really hard until you get even a hint of momentum, and then continuing to build upon that tiny amount of momentum until it starts to ease up and pushing through becomes easier. Just keep iterating and don’t give up!

Additional Resources on Link Building for Ecommerce Sites

About Stephanie Chang — SEO Consultant at the Distilled NYC office. Former science teacher. Passionate about teaching & learning. Contact me at @stephpchang

May 14th, 2012

admin

Taking full advantage of LinkedIn for business using the company profile feature is a great way for B2Bs to reach their target audience. Last time, we looked at how to optimize the “overview” tab on the LinkedIn company profile. Today, we’ll take a closer look into the “products and services” tab, offering some very cool functions for highlighting your goods and also for segmenting content by audience. There are lots of possibilities to market within this tab; let’s have a look.

Product and Services Tab

First, for editing purposes, always be on the tab you want to edit and select Admin tools > edit. Same goes for editing individual products and services, you must select one first, then edit.

Product and Services Overview

The product and services description is a great place to give an overview of your offerings. You can drill down into individual services and products later in the page. Here, you have 2,000 characters with spaces to introduce what your company has to offer. Note: the character cutoff before the “more” link is 291 with spaces.

Think of this “real estate” the same way you would any type of promotion within a limited space; you want to highlight and entice your users with the most important key terms and takeaways up front. So how will you best optimize the title of your products and services overview as well as the body content?

For the title, think about using words related to what your business does, versus just a generic “welcome” message. Same goes for the body text – what company specialties did you add in the overview tab? Not a bad idea to include those in the copy here as well.

In the body text, you can do some light customization to layout, like bullets points and bold font – nothing fancy. But you may want to consider using bold on key terms that you want to stand out. People are used to seeing their keywords bold in the SERPs, so this could be a familiar way for people to scan and collect information quickly.

The body text condenses itself when you publish, so don’t bother trying to make separate paragraphs with hard returns. This is where you’ll want to put a little thought into how the information is presented so it’s not overwhelming, especially if you have a lot of text. Bullet points might be your best bet.

Product and Service Spotlight

Here, you can upload up to three custom banners that link out to any Web property you’d like, whether it be quote forms, marketing campaign landing pages, pages within your site or somewhere else you want to drive the LinkedIn community to.

What’s awesome about this section is the ability to show different products and services to different audience segments – but we’ll get to that later.

The banner images can’t exceed 2MB and can be PNG, JPEG, or GIF. They will automatically be resized to 640 x 220 pixels, so you may want to size them accordingly before loading so they aren’t warped once resized.

LinkedIn states it creates a rotating banner for you out of those images, but the user actually has to manually press the arrow to be presented with the next one; you might want to consider placing your most important banner first, in case a user does not manually rotate them.

Don’t forget to add a URL to each banner to the page you want to drive traffic to.

Individual Products and Services

Scrolling down the page, you see there’s a products and services section where you can add up to five products or services, and highlight them individually on their own tab. LinkedIn gives a great step-by-step guide on how to get started with products and services section, so I’ll leave that to them. But here’s some tips and things to think about:

Outside of individual products and services you offer, what other things can you promote? If you have a blog, newsletter, ebook or other type of content you’re promoting, you can do this here.
LinkedIn has recommended in several instances to add as much content as you can surrounding your products and services, so try to use every field available to you in the editing mode. You can upload a logo, add a video and add key contacts for the service. Administrators for the company page need to be personally connected on LinkedIn to any person they want to add in as a point of contact for a service.
You have up to 2,000 characters with spaces to talk about your individual products and services. Apply the same discretion and marketing savvy here as you did in the product and services overview. Use key terms to describe your service or product and make it compelling. Here, you’ll be able to do a little more formatting of the text by breaking it up in paragraphs. When you list your number, in many cases it converts it to a click-to-call format.
In the “list of key features” area, you have 10 fields to add in text that will create a bulleted list about the products and services. LinkedIn tells us to use this space “to list the key benefits or use cases of your product or service,” rather than key terms you want to be found for. It certainly can’t hurt to use a mix of both, if it comes naturally, for each bullet point.
Anywhere that you can use key terms related to your business, do it. Don’t keyword stuff, but make sure that your business is well represented with the words you use throughout the titles and descriptions in this section.

Solicit Recommendations

Unlike Yelp, LinkedIn supports and promotes going out there and asking people to endorse you, your products and your services. The recommendations feature allows you to gather and feature endorsements on individual products and services in this section of your company profile.

You need to be connected personally to these people, however, in order to ask them for a recommendation. So start connecting with people using that database of names and companies you have on file. Make it a habit of connecting with new leads on LinkedIn, so the request for a recommendation comes more naturally and not right after you connect with them.

LinkedIn tells us the recommendations show up not only on the products and services section of your company page, but also on the profile of the person who recommended you. Though I had a hard time finding the recommendations myself on a person’s profile, they are easily viewable on the products themselves.

The stats LinkedIn provides shows you how many times the recommendation for that product has been viewed organically, and the impression per reviewer. Think about how those who have more optimized profiles and higher follower counts could affect the impressions of these recommendations. This is where quality over quantity could be more valuable.

Segment by Audience

How cool is this: You can serve up an entirely different product and service pages depending on the audience that’s visiting you. If you have several products and services that cater to different types of clients, this feature is for you.

The features that are customizable for this function is the product and service spotlight (the banners) and the individual products and services (up to five for each segment). Think of the possibilities. You can have varying promotions, content offerings and more that cater to each type of audience.

If a user doesn’t fall into the audience criteria you’ve defined, they are led to the default segment. So have something more broad for that particular audience that highlights your most important – or all – of your services.

Take a look at your followers list to get an idea of the type of audience that’s interested in your business already. Also check out your page statistics for more insight. Use that data plus what you know about the people who buy particular products or services you offer to help you define segments.

May 14th, 2012

admin

You’ve heard it all before: If you’re a B2B and you’re not using LinkedIn for business, you’re missing out. With the LinkedIn community, B2Bs can present their companies to the decision makers most valuable to their services. If you haven’t taken full advantage of your LinkedIn company page and you’re not sure how to optimize it, this series on LinkedIn for business is for you.

Today, we’re going to start with the company profile “overview tab,” where you’re going to enter in crucial information about your company that will help it be found within the network, and also how to take advantage of features that can build an active and engaged LinkedIn community.

Before we dig into features, if you need to create a LinkedIn company profile, go do that. It’s a simple process to get started. And to access the editing function of the Overview page, select the Admin button > Edit while in the overview tab.

The LinkedIn Company Profile Overview Page

Use Status Updates to Create an Active, Engaging Profile

Just like Facebook, status updates are a way to keep your community engaged, expand your network and provide valuable information to your followers. LinkedIn states the best practices for updates are to make them “authentic, relevant and short,” and that posts that feel spammy will not be shared (wish they could say the same for company profiles in their search results, but we’ll get to that later).

Here’s a brief tutorial on how company status updates work and spread:

From LinkedIn:

You can see impressions and engagement information on visible updates, but we don’t have the functionality for you to view old posts or the metrics related to those posts.

Up to 20 updates will appear on the Overview tab and the most recent one will be at the top.

Posts can be up to 500 characters (including spaces). Shared link titles and descriptions can be up to 250 characters each.

If you already have a LinkedIn share button enabled on your site, when your content is shared through that button, it’s entered into the LinkedIn ecosystem and shown to targeted users. But you can give that content an added boost by showing it to your followers through a status update.

Remember, people who follow your company are likely subscribing to your status updates and may even have a digest that is delivered to them into their email boxes.

But don’t stop with content from your site or blog. Experiment with different types of status updates — text only, images and videos — just like you might in your Facebook community. The cool thing about LinkedIn is, you can see detailed information about who your followers are. Select the follower count button and dig into the types of people who are following you.

Along with the engagement data LinkedIn provides on your live updates, you can use the type of audience you have to drive the message (note: you can access more info about this in your page stats in LinkedIn, too). Here’s an example of the engagement stats LinkedIn provides:

Take this data and compare it with other metrics, like the metrics you’re tracking in yourGoogle Social Analytics reports for LinkedIn. This can give a bigger picture of how content that’s shared on LinkedIn is contributing to your goals.

Also keep in mind that users can control what types of notifications they receive about the companies they follow, including things like employees leaving or joining the company, new job opps and profile updates. So you want to make the posts meaningful and you’ll also want to experiment with the frequency of the posts, too.

People likely don’t want to be inundated with too much information in their updates about your company.

Optimize Your Company Description and Specialties

You have about 1,487 characters with spaces to create your company description. You can use this opportunity to provide important information about your company and optimize it with keywords.

As far as rankings go for results within LinkedIn, the company has made it clear that there is no single rank for LinkedIn search and that relevance is based on a variety of factors that changes from search to search, user to user.

LinkedIn gives little detail as to how it ranks company profile pages, but in a short video, it does allude to the fact that keywords and strength of network connections of the searcher to the company is a factor.

LinkedIn has also recommended you order the keywords that describe your company starting with the most important in the “specialties” list. The specialties list is offers 2at the bottom of the company description and gives 20 fields and up to 256 characters to input the keywords related to what your company does. Use the keywords here that you want to be found for in LinkedIn.

I did a quick analysis myself of the results returned to me in a company search using the keywords “SEO” and “search engine optimization”, and found that keyword usage and placement does seem to matter. I should note the results I examined were the default — all industries, all locations. Anyone can drill down to refine the results based on that criteria and more.

Of the top-ranked results for those key terms, the company size, location and followers varied, but they all had something in common: they had the keyword phrase in both the company description and down in the “specialties” area.

Here’s a snapshot of the term “search engine optimization” showing in both the company description and specialties area.

In every case, the keyword showed up before the cutoff “more” link that expands to give the full description about the company (about 300 characters in). Whether or not that has anything to do with the ranking algorithm, I don’t know. But it is a good practice to have all your important terms up front so when users scan the content, they can make quick assessments of your company and its services.

Also, in every case except one, the keyword was placed first among the list of specialties – just as LinkedIn had advised to do.

Back to LinkedIn’s statement about strength of network affecting the results. It’s notable that for the top 10 results for the keywords “SEO” and “search engine optimization”, three out of 20 of the company profiles returned were in my network, the rest were not. And the company profiles in my network had more natural company descriptions than the rest of the results.

All the other results in the top 10 that weren’t in my network were either blatant spam (see below) or had company descriptions with a higher keyword density: between 4 percent and 8 percent (excluding the keywords in the specialties area). Here’s an example of the spam that shows up in the company search results. This ranks No. 1 for the term “SEO”:

Crazy, right? Obviously, these profiles provide no value to the LinkedIn community, so it’s not as if they’re snatching up business from top-rated brands, but it’s still pretty lame they’re ranking.

General Information on LinkedIn

You can add up to five locations for a business. If you have more than five, choose the locations wisely. LinkedIn users can search for companies by location, and LinkedIn has stated its company directory is automatically generated by company pages that have the most activity per industry and location. So choose those locations that are the most crucial to your products or services if you have more than five to list.

When choosing your industry, if it’s a toss up between two or more, you might find you’ll need to do some research on what people search for when looking for your products or services. See what your competitors have listed as their industry as well.

Use this data backed by your own wisdom on how your clients would categorize your company to make the appropriate choice. If you’re not sure, try testing. See if it affects your search results in LinkedIn or try to track if one drives more users to your profile than the other using the page statistics.

Have an Active Community of Company Employees

A guest post late last year on Search Engine Land talked about the potential power ofinbound links from LinkedIn, and how certain factors could affect the power of those links.

In his post, author George Aspland gives tips on how to boost the authority of a LinkedIn company profile; this includes the number of employees associated with the company page, the activity of those employees on LinkedIn, the optimization of their profiles and more.

So, it’s not a bad idea to make sure all your company employees on LinkedIn are affiliated with your company profile, are active and are building strong profiles and networks of their own.

Enable Your Blog RSS Feed

In the edit function, scroll down to the “company blog RSS feed” field and simply copy and paste the URL for your feed. We use Feedburner but recently noticed it doesn’t keep our feed current. So make sure you’re monitoring your feed to ensure your content isn’t stale on your LinkedIn page.

Having this stream of posts doesn’t mean you should completely ignore sharing the most important content you have in your status updates; it’s not guaranteed people will be following the feed list just because it’s there.

And as an FYI, the company activity shown towards the bottom of the overview tab is automatically generated, and is a combination of activity surrounding company employees, status updates from the company page and more.

May 14th, 2012

admin

In this post, we’ll explore LinkedIn plugins that increase visibility, ideas for cross-promotion, tracking the success of your company page and its content, and growing your company’s network on LinkedIn.

Use Plugins to Make Your Profile More Visible

The LinkedIn Developers site has lots of goodies for driving promotion and engagement for LinkedIn. Grab plugins that create buttons you can embed in your site or other collateral so people can:

Apply through LinkedIn for jobs your company offers.
Share your Web content on LinkedIn.
View individual LinkedIn profiles of you and your employees, right in your website.
View common connections on LinkedIn related to your company’s employees, see new hire information and more.
View your LinkedIn company profile at-a-glance along with the follow button.
View full member profiles.
Recommend your company’s products and services directly.
See jobs users may be interested in, personalized to them. This can be either the jobs at your company or top jobs on LinkedIn.
Follow your company directly from the plugin.
Streamline their experience through a LinkedIn sign in button.

Think about the different ways you can reach people using these plugins:

The share button has been reported to have slightly more traffic on average than a Facebook Like button. In a BusinessInsider post, reports showed LinkedIn drove an average of 1.5 clicks back to the publisher; better than the average across other social networks at 1.1 clicks.
Do you have product and service pages on your site? Consider adding the recommend button on those pages. You can show how many people on LinkedIn have recommended them so far, and visitors can recommend on LinkedIn with a click of a mouse. Think about other places you might want to include this button, like additional communications channels.
If you have a share button enabled on your primary content platform, such as your blog, consider adding the “follow company” plugin as a main staple on other pages throughout your site. This way, users can follow your company page directly from the button.

And don’t forget to cross-promote your company profile presence on all your other social media networks and content products.

Grow Your Engagement and Community on LinkedIn

If you’re already enabling the sharing of your content through plugins, that’s a great start. There are a couple other ways you can have that content spread deeper and also ways to increase engagement with your audience.

Monitoring and Engaging on LinkedIn

Always respond to comments and discussion. This may sound like a “duh” point. But some companies may not have built LinkedIn monitoring into their daily social activity. Just like any other social network, if people are engaging with your company status updates, always show them you appreciate it by engaging back.

And you can also do searches for your company in the search bar in LinkedIn to see who might be talking about your business, and then reach out to that person, add them to your network. For example, use the drop-down menu to select the “Updates” search, then type in your company name:

And voilà:

Expanding Content Reach on LinkedIn

LinkedIn Today is the social network’s content aggregator, and there are ways to go about optimizing for the service so that your business content is more visible across LinkedIn. Along with the many ways you can optimize for LinkedIn Today (<– check out that article by Greg Finn on Search Engine Land for goodies), don’t be shy aboutreaching out to LinkedIn to become a featured content source, so that your company is added to a list of publishers people can follow directly.

Creating a LinkedIn Group

LinkedIn groups are a great way to allow people to further engage with your brand and to grow your network. You can invite people to join your group through a personal connection on LinkedIn or if you have their email address. If you already have followers on your company page or a list of subscribers to your newsletter, you could start there, since you’ve already got a captive audience, so to speak.

But remember, the group started on behalf of your company is created by an individual member profile acting on behalf of your company, not your company page; whether it’s you or the person who handles your social media, ownership can be transferred and roles can be assigned at any time.

When considering what the focus of your group will be, think about whether it will be a broad reach of topics related to your industry or company, or more targeted by product or service if they tend to draw a different crowd with different needs. You’ll need resources to manage multiple groups.

Don’t forget to optimize your group’s information with the keywords you want to be found for when someone does a search for groups in LinkedIn. Also, late last year, the LinkedIn blog featured an interesting post worth checking out which details how it ranks group discussions so that the most interesting are at the top.

LinkedIn gives additional tips for promoting groups here.

Measure Results to Drive Strategy

Use the data that’s available through LinkedIn’s company profile page stats to get a better understanding of page views on individual tabs in your company profile by month, unique visitors, visitor demographics by industry, function and company, and total conversions on your products and services page by clicks.

Although the page stats are fairly basic right now (you can’t drill down into things like page views per day or conversions by individual products), it does offer a good snapshot of the activity on your company profile. Here’s an example of the page views chart:

Just like Facebook, number of followers shouldn’t be the only thing you measure. That’s when this graph comes in handy. Do a quick analysis of follower count against page views. What’s your page views per month divided by your followers?

The page visitor demographics for “company” is a little confusing to me:

… Haven’t had much success with finding out exactly what this piece of data represents. If you happen to know, would you drop me a line in the comments?

Now that you have a snapshot of your company page stats, pair this with the statistics LinkedIn offer for its status updates (see Part 1 of this series for info on status updates) and other analytics info, like Google’s Social Analytics, to form hypotheses on what’s driving traffic and engagement and what content is performing.

Check out an in-depth article I wrote on how you can use Google’s Social Analytics reporting to get a better understanding of how users of individual social networks engage with your content and your site.

For example, you can find out what a user’s behavior was on your site when he or she followed a link to your blog from LinkedIn. You can also find out how LinkedIn traffic fares against Twitter and Facebook, track conversion from LinkedIn, measure the performance of your LinkedIn share buttons and much more.

Use the data you uncover through the LinkedIn page statistics, the status update data and the Google social reports to get a big picture of how LinkedIn is performing as a social medium for your business.

You can also compare what you’ve found out about LinkedIn with analytics from your other social networks to better understand how it fits into your social media portfolio. You might find your engagement level is higher than your Facebook, even when you aren’t trying as hard.

April 30th, 2012

admin

Although their relative importance is likely to decrease over time, citations – defined as “mentions” of your business — are still the bread and butter of local SEO. In David Mihm’s comprehensive list of Local Search Ranking Factors, citations come in at number four, surpassed only by having a physical address in the city of search, manually verifying your Google Places page, and designating proper category associations. Needless to say, most agencies that provide local search services offer citation submission and cleanup as a regular part of their solutions package, and, for better or worse, it seems as though an entire industry has sprung up around the concept of “bulk citation submission”.

In this post, I wanted to highlight three tools that have the potential to significantly simplify the process of finding and managing local citations for your own business and/or that of your client. Two of the three include a paid upgrade option for expanded functionality, but it’s far from necessary; the tools work just fine without it!

Yext Local Search Scorecard – Yext is a New York-based startup that’s been around since 2006. The company has partnerships with 36 different local directory sites like Yelp, Foursquare, and Superpages, and aims to make it easier to maintain consistent business listings across all of these directories. The actual submission and maintenance service costs money, but as part of its service offerings, Yext also provides a free Local Search Scorecard. Just enter your business name, address, phone number, and zip code to get a report of whether your business is listed in each of the directories that are a part of Yext’s network. The report card also indicates whether the profile includes a link back to your website, whether there’s an accompanying description of your business, etc. My preferred use of Yext is to check to make sure that all of my locations are consistent, i.e. they all use the exact same business name, address, and phone number.

GetListed.org – very similar to the Yext Local Search Scorecard. It only checks whether you have listings in 11 directories (as opposed to Yext’s 36), but many of the directories on this list are notin the Yext Scorecard, so it’s good to use these two services in conjunction.

Local Citation Finder – a popular tool from the fine folks over at whitespark. This app works a bit differently than Yext’s Scorecard or GetListed. Rather than cross checking whether you have listings in a pre-defined set of local directories, this tool asks you to enter a keyphrase relevant to your business (e.g. “dentist”) along with a location. The app then returns a list of suggested directories where you should claim a listing based on its analysis of directories that are already appearing in search results for the phrase that you specified.

That about wraps it up, folks! If there are any similar tools which you use that I haven’t mentioned here, be sure to discuss them in the comments section below.

Lukas Pleva is an SEO intern at Webhead Interactive, a full-service online marketing firm based in Tampa, Florida. When he’s not a student at The University of Chicago, he likes to dabble in SEO, social media marketing, and web design. He currently oversees marketing campaigns forSt. Pete Bagel Co., an online merchant specializing in the sale of mail order bagels, bialys, and high-end coffee.

April 30th, 2012

admin

Even though SEO is a synergy of different practices, not all of them are equally important for higher rankings. And, because SEO’s are normally pressed-for-time individuals, it’s essential for them to know what SEO tasks should be their priority.

Speaking of on-page and off-page SEO (many SEO’s also consider keyword research a separate aspect), I’d like to say that, quite often, on-page SEO does not get the attention it should. This is because, in general, it takes less time than link building and often plays second fiddle to off-page SEO when an emergency rankings boost is required.

However, there are certain on-page SEO factors, leveraging which can work miracles for your site, and it’s important to know how much impact each of them carries. So, let’s talk about these factors.

Lay a Foundation for Higher Rankings

Any construction work begins with laying a foundation for the future building. Likewise, on-page SEO begins with creating a certain carcass for the site’s content. What’s important SEO-wise is that this carcass gets ‘A’ grades from the search engines. In other words, search engines should find it easily crawlable and non-confusing.

Here are the checkpoints that should be covered when running an on-page SEO audit. They are arranged starting with the most important ones:

of utmost importance highly important very important

quite important of minimum importance.

Use the above information to understand how important the follow factors below are.

HTTP response code errors

A reliable hosting provider is crucial to your website’s success in the SERPs. If the server your site is hosted on is often unavailable or takes a long time to respond, the search engines won’t hold much for your Web resource.

Not to mention that, if your site is unavailable, the users will simply not be able to access it. Therefore, we consider this factor to be of utmost importance.

Site speed

It’s all about the user experience these days, and the search engines have gotten even pickier when it comes to site speed. Over a year ago, Google confirmed that site load speed was an important ranking factor.

Internal links pointing to the page

When the webpages of your site are interlinked, it helps both users and the search engines navigate it. Internal links with appropriate anchor texts have a big impact on a page’s position in the SERPs. However, be careful not to overdo – your internal links should look natural to the search engines.

Correct rel=”canonical” Use

Canonical tags help one eliminate duplicate content WITHIN their own site. Let’s say you have several versions of your URL indexed (for instance, www.example.com, example.com andwww.example.com/home.htlm), in which case Google may treat them as different pages with duplicate content on them. So, using the rel=”canonical” attribute would solve the problem.

Absence of Broken Links

Search engine bots crawl not only the page they arrive at, but the links they find on it. If any of those links are broken, the overall impression of your page is spoiled.

At the same time, it’s understandable that you can barely be responsible for what is happening on third-party sites you provide links to. Hence, it’s not a HUGE ranking factor in the eyes of the search engines, even though a fairly important one. The best practice would be to check your site for broken links from time to time.

Perfect HTML Code

Although the quality of your markup is not an insanely important factor, sloppy HTML code does diminish your chances to rank higher in the search engines. It’s best to make sure there are no errors on your webpages using the W3C HTML and markup validator. Besides, there are on-page SEO tools (like our WebSite Auditor) that come with a built-in markup validator as well.

Valid CSS

Just like perfect HTML, valid CSS is not a must, but rather an additional asset to one’s recipe for successful SEO. Besides, you’d want to pay more attention to your CSS if you’re optimizing for the mobile Web and using special mobile style sheets for mobile users.

And, as W3C offers a CSS validation service as well, you can use it to check for CSS errors and warnings.

Now we are talking CONTENT

Once the infrastructure for your site’s content has been taken care of, it’s time to optimize the content. A site’s content sends the search engines certain signals, using which they determine how relevant the site is for a particular query.

The more signals there are and the stronger they are, the more likely a search engine is to deem your site relevant. However, too strong of a signal could be suspicious, right? So, keep that in mind.

In respect to content, what matters for rankings is:

Keyword-related factors

Keyword in URL

Everybody in the SEO industry knows that exact match domains tend to perform extremely well in the SERPs. If so, why doesn’t everyone just buy a domain name that also happens to be their keyword and hit Google’s top?

Well, there certain cons here. First, the desired domain name is often taken. Second, for branding purposes, it is better to go for a brand name as your domain name. And, third, we believe that the impact that exact match domain names have on rankings will most likely decrease in the future.

Keyword in Page Title

Unlike in the case with domain names, it’s much easier to stick your keyword in a page title. Just make sure that your titles also look natural, since real people are going to see them in the search results. For example, out of the two page titles

Holiday Gifts New York|Gifts Brooklyn|Free Delivery|Gifts
Holiday Gifts for All Occasions – Brooklyn New York – Free Delivery

The second one is definitely more attractive.

Keywords in Internal Anchor Texts

As I said earlier, internal linking is important for higher rankings. However, simply linking to your landing page from other pages of your site won’t do much. To attain the desired effect, use your keywords in the anchor texts. Also, make them [anchor texts] vary. Links with identical anchors will look unnatural to the search engines and may be ignored.

Keyword in H1 Text

H1 is an HTML tag normally used to mark headings. When your keywords stand in H1 tags, they carry more weight, so to say, and have a bigger effect on your site rankings.

Keyword in Image Alt Text

Image alt text is what gets displayed instead of your image when it cannot be loaded, or when certain functions responsible for rendering images are disabled in a person’s browser. If image alt texts reflect the rest of your page’s semantics, this sends the search engines a signal that your page is relevant to the search query, and they rank it higher.

Keyword Frequency (body text)

Needless to say, you keywords should be present in your page copy as well. However, the exact number of keywords that helps you achieve top rankings would depend on the niche, the search engine, etc. So, there is no ideal keyword density that’ll work for any site.

The general rules that apply here are: it’s best to use your keywords more towards the beginning of your page and to avoid keyword stuffing.

Keyword in Bold/Italic

Keywords in bold/italic do have a bit more significance in the eyes of the search engines, but, please, remember that the user comes first and use formatting wisely.

Keyword in Meta Description

If your meta description contains keywords irrelevant to the overall theme of your webpage, this will do little to improve your rankings, and the search engine may even choose not to display the description you specify.

However, if your meta description is semantically in line with the rest of the page’s content, this can give your site rankings a boost.

Content quality-related factors

Content Uniqueness

Did you know that, if you copy content from another site on the Web and post it on a webpage, the page may not even turn up in the search results? Google sometimes treats pages with identical content as versions of one and the same page, determines which one of them appears to be the most trustworthy and filters out the rest of the pages from its search results.

So, if you’re striving for higher rankings, the content on your page must be as unique as possible.

Content Freshness

In general, the more often you update your content, the better. Fresh content is especially important for Web 2.0 sites, news portals, etc. Besides, many SEO professionals say that, in the future, the query deserves freshness (QDF) mechanism in Google’s algorithm will be triggered more and more often, so, fresh content will become even more important.

The Amount of Content Above the Fold

In the light of the recent Google’s algo update, having sufficient content ‘above the fold’ becomes more important than ever. ‘Above the fold’ is the part of the page users see immediately upon arriving at your site, without having to scroll down. Hence, make sure that enough meaningful content is right away visible.

Content Density (thin content)

The overall content density of your site is also important. Google’s Panda update series targeted websites with ‘thin content’, among other things. Well, looks like owners of minimalist sites now have something to ponder.

The use of Visual Content

The search engines also look at whether you’re using any visual aids, such as images or videos on your website. It’s not a crucial on-page SEO factor, but still can win you a tiny fraction of Google’s affection, since it serves to indicate that your site is more likely to provide a decent user experience.

Conclusion

If not done properly, on-page SEO can really become a stumbling stone for your site on its way to Google’s top. Hence, it is just as important to take care of it as it is to do link building.

And, when performing on-page SEO, identify your priorities to save yourself time and move your site up the ladder of success with minimum effort. The above provided list of on-page SEO factor will help you do just that.

April 30th, 2012

admin

With our improved exact matching and phrase matching, you can better target your ads, helping to improve your clicks and impressions.

Improvements to exact match and phrase match

With our improved exact and phrase matching, we’ll also show your ad when someone searches for close variants of your exact match and phrase match keyword. This means you can broaden your reach to customers who search for close variants of your keywords, while still having more precise control over which search terms trigger your ads.

Example

Exact match keyword

Ads may show on searches for

Ads won’t show on searches for

[tennis shoes]

tennis shoes

tenis shoe

red tennis shoes

buy tennis shoes

Phrase match keyword

Ads may show on searches for

Ads won’t show on searches for

"tennis shoes"

red tennis shoes

red tenis shoes

shoes for tennis

tennis sneakers

Note

We’ll use your exact keyword, and not close variants, to determine your Quality Scoreand first page bid estimate. This means that when a close variant of your exact match keyword shows your ad, it won’t affect your Quality Score or first page bid estima

April 21st, 2012

admin

Over the past 30 years, California Closet Company has grown from the brainchild of a college student organizing his dorm room closet to a successful business with more than 77 franchise locations. To reach customers across the U.S. and internationally, the company centered their digital marketing strategy on creating locally relevant campaigns.

It’s no surprise that local campaigns are a focus for many businesses–from finding directions to looking up a phone number, more people are going online to find local information. In fact, more than 20% of searches on Google are related to location, and people often act quickly on local searches. Research shows that using smartphones, 88% of people who search for local information take action within a day.

To help you organize your local ad campaigns this spring, we’re introducing three new features in AdWords to help you create ads that are more relevant to local customers.

Target customers by zip code

If you customize your direct mail, outdoor ads, or newspaper ads at a postal code level, you now can easily do the same in AdWords in the US. We are introducing the ability to target more than 30,000 US ZIP Codes with your AdWords campaigns.

You will be able to add up to 1,000 postal codes at a time to your search ad campaigns with AdWords Location Targeting. Plus, you can get feedback on the performance of your local campaigns by viewing campaign performance statistics at the postal code level.

"Location targeting within AdWords helped us double lead volume and cut the cost to acquire new customers in half,” said Lois Erbay, Director of Marketing, California Closet Company. “We plan on building on that success by using ZIP Code targeting to create even more locally relevant campaigns for our customers.”

More locally relevant ads in less time

To help you easily create a custom ad title, text, display URL, and/or destination URL for all of your locations at scale, we’ve developed location insertion for location extensions. You’ll no longer need to create multiple ads for multiple locations–this new feature automatically inserts the city, phone number, or zip code of your local business into your ad text.

For example, if your ad text says: “Find a {lb.city:Local} Store or Shop Online,” a user viewing your ad in Chicago would see: “Find a Chicago Store or Shop Online.” This new feature cuts out all the work to building out ad text featuring local information for all your locations.

Ad with location insertion in the text and display URL

“We’ve had amazing success manually customizing our creative with local information for our top markets, which shows us that customers want locally-relevant results when it comes to a service like storage,” said Chris Laczi, Advertising Director, Uncle Bob’s Self Storage. “That’s why we’re very excited about location insertion. It will simplify the task of creating locally customized ads for our 400+ locations, and we expect it will greatly enhance conversion rate of our ads.”

You must have location extensions set up and running in order to enable location insertion. Location insertion will work even if your location extensions don’t show because of other extensions. We detect location based on where your customer is physically located or by the geographic locations she may have shown interest in.

Find out more about location insertion and location extensions.

Better clarity and control

When we launched advanced location targeting in March 2011, we provided you with more control over how you geographically target your ads. Based on advertiser feedback, we’re implementing four additional enhancements that will make location targeting options clearer and more powerful. Read more about these enhancements in the Help Center and in this blog post.

There is significant opportunity for businesses to reach local customers online and win moments that matter by delivering the right ad in the right context. Stay tuned for more information on how ZIP Code targeting can help you grow your business.

We want to hear from you about your success in getting local with AdWords–share your story here and we might reach out to you to participate in our upcoming blog posts.

Posted by Richard Holden, Product Management Director

April 21st, 2012

admin

Consider these three exact and phrase match keywords in AdWords.
[waterproof sunblock]     "bollard cover"     [single serving coffee maker]
Now have a look at these two rows of search queries.
1. waterproof sunblock     buy bollard cover     single serving coffee maker
2. waterpoof sunblock      buy bollard covers    single serve coffee maker
Today, only the search queries in the upper row (1) are considered a match and allowed to trigger an ad that can appear in the results. The close variants in the bottom row (2) are not considered a match by AdWords, despite the similarity in user intent.
This will change soon. Starting in mid-May, phrase and exact match keywords will match close variants, including misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemmings, accents and abbreviations. Based on our research and testing, we believe these changes will be broadly beneficial for users and advertisers.
Focusing on user intent
People aren’t perfect spellers or typists. At least 7% of search queries contain a misspelling, and the longer the query, the higher the rate.
Even with perfect spelling, two people searching for the same thing often use slightly different variations, such as “kid scooters” and “kid’s scooter” or “bamboo floor” and “bamboo flooring.”
Google’s organic search systems detect and compensate for misspellings and close variants.

We know users are happier when they get search results that reflect their intent and help them achieve their desired action, even if it’s not a precise match for what they’ve typed. So we’re extending this behavior to ads.
Benefits for many advertisers, control for all
Our early experiments looked at the impact on advertisers getting a third or more of their clicks from phrase or exact match. On average, the new matching behavior increased AdWords search clicks by 3%, with comparable CPCs. Keep in mind that results may vary by advertiser.
We’ve been testing this new improvement with advertisers, and participants have seen positive results. “Previously we spent a lot of time making sure to include hundreds of versions of brand misspellings and to include plural forms of all our keywords,” said Dana Freund, Senior SEM Manager at GameDuell. “With the improvements to exact and phrase match we don’t have to worry about these keywords anymore. We get more relevant impressions for a smaller number of keywords, and it’s been a significant time saver for us.”
If you don’t want the potential for more clicks and prefer to maintain the current matching behavior in your campaign, you’ll still have that option. In the coming weeks, we’ll begin rolling out controls which will allow you to adjust your keyword matching options. Once they’re live, log in to AdWords and select the campaign settings tab. Under “Advanced settings” select Keyword matching options:

Again, these controls will begin rolling out in the coming weeks to all AdWords accounts. But, to be clear, the new matching behavior won’t actually start until mid-May.
For more details on keyword matching behavior, reporting changes, and other frequently asked questions, please visit theAdWords Help Center.

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