seobridges.com

I got curious about Google Instant’s impact thus far, so I did a comparison.  Since Google Instant (GI) launched, it’s made things much harder on SEO; however, Google Instant was made for the person searching the Web not for the person who owns the website.  This comparison looks at the two months before Google Instant (7/8/10-9/7/10) and the two months since Google Instant (9/8/10-11/7/10), according to my site.

The numbers since GI launched:

Visits  +18.58% Page Views -26.69% (total of all visitors) Page/Visit -38.18%

Bounce Rate +6.74% Avg time on site -47.57% New Visits +1.95%

New visits since GI launched

New visits +21.38% (Considering new visits as all visits) Page Views -9.82%(total of all visitors) Page/Visit -25.71%

Bounce Rate +2.98% Time on site -37.6%

Since we’re talking about how Google Instant has affected people’s searches, let’s look specifically at Google.

Visits +78% Page/Visit -12.10%

Bounce Rate -11.93% Avg time on site -59.33% New visits -1.37%

Hey, world!  I love you all, but my focus is on the U.S.  So, let’s look at how GI has affected how people find me in the U.S coming from search engines.

U.S. visits +65.38% U.S.Pages/Visit -33.49% Avg time on site -66.96%

New visits +4.44% Bounce rate -0.41%

The numbers that have gone up and down have done so in all three categories (with the exception of my bounce rate going up overall, but down in more specific categories).  I know, we all want all of our numbers to increase, except for our bounce rate.  I look at it this way, I am receiving more U.S. and new visitors from Google.  They may not stick around as long, but that’s because Google Instant is doing its job and taking people directly to the pages they want.  Google is sending less and less people to my home page, and more and more people to pages more specified to their searches.  Whether you’re a Web master or a searcher or both, how’s GI working for you?

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Before getting too far into the process of SEO, you want to make sure you have a Google Analytics (GA) and a Google Webmasters (GW) account.  Even if you target Yahoo or Bing, you’ll still want those two accounts.

GA is a great way to monitor activity on your site, such as user click behavior, which pages rank well, what keywords bring users to your site, and various other SEO metrics.  If you don’t already have an account, you can sign in with your Google account or you can create a new account.

For those who want to monitor how users interact with the sites via social media, many social media monitoring services integrate with GA.  And people with a WordPress site can integrate GA onto their site using a plug-in.

GW is a great resource for Webmasters of all levels to learn and share.  You can search through a plethora of questions, answers and blogs for the best and most up-to-date information on just about any Web and/or SEO related question you might have.

To search for answers to your questions, once you have an account, sign in and go to Google 101.  Type in the keyword(s) of your question (use quotes for phrases) and click go.  It will bring up everything from Google’s blog and forum.

You’ll also want to add your site to Google Webmaster Tools, using the button on the left that says “Adding a site.”  After you’ve added your site, Google wants to know that you own the site, so all the way to the right there’s a button to verify you’re site.  Click on that, choose one of the four ways to verify your site, and follow the directions.

Those are the basics of getting started with SEO on your site.  Tomorrow, we’ll go back to looking at the most important stories in social media marketing.   Come back to find out if Steve Jobs is considering a Facebook buyout.  I’ve heard rumors.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Yesterday, I went over to a friend’s house to help her with some questions she had about SEO content.  She uses a service that gave her the tools to learn how to do everything she needed to theoretically do to get her site ranked first on Google and other search engines.  The service seemed good, her site was well designed, and she had enough tools and tutorials to keep her busy.  She just didn’t know where to start.

If you want to do your own SEO, start with a keyword tool that gives you suggestions of words to put on your site.  Just take two or three of your initial keywords, plug them into a keyword finder, and press enter or start or whatever the go button reads.

The Web service she used came with a came keyword tool, so I decided to give it a spin.  It suggested dozens of words, and next to each word was a number that indicated how many times that word was used in four of the major search engines.  Though, it did not tell her how many times a certain word was used in a specific search engine.

What’s the point?  Be specific in your SEO strategy.  As much as you want to target certain customers, you also want to target certain search engines.  The same word that has high value on Google may not have the same value on Bing.  I suggest using Google’s Keyword Tool.  The more target a specific search engine in your SEO strategy, the easier it will be to rank high on that search engines.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

#social#media#marketing #social#networking #Web#content #Internet#Marketing #Twitter #SEO #SMM

One of the greatest inventions in the history of entertainment is the deck of cards. There are an inexhaustible number of things you can do with a deck of cards. There are countless games you can play, tricks you can perform, and things you can build (house of cards) with a deck of cards. I see writing Web content and doing social media marketing like performing with a deck of cards.

The purpose of a game of cards is to increase your probability, while decreasing your opponent’s probability. The purpose of SEO content and social media marketing is to increase your visibility while decreasing your opponent’s visibility. To do that, you must first know what deck of cards you’re playing with (Web content/Social Media/Internet Marketing/Other). You must also know which game you’re playing. You should know whether you’re playing to get the most followers you can or to get the most value out of your followers.

When it comes to Twitter, if you’re playing to get the most followers, you’ll want to use an automatic Twitter follower and other automatic tools. At SEO Bridges, we don’t use those, so we don’t know which ones are out there. We believe that just as the best SEO practice is to write organic content, the best SMM practice is to build your audience organically. If you want to find the followers with the most value, you must focus on your message. And follow those people whose messages you’ll benefit from the most. If you offer the same quality message to them they offer you, chances are they’ll follow you in return. We’ll talk about this more tomorrow, so come back.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

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SEO content is like a martial arts duel.

Here’s some rules martial artists fight by:

1.     Be aware of your surroundings

2.     Adapt to changes within those surroundings

3.     Use what is available to you in those surroundings

4.     Recognize your opponent’s strengths and weaknesses

5.     Use your strengths to exploit your opponent’s weaknesses

There are more rules, but those five apply best to writing Web content.  How?  Let’s review the rules again and apply them to your efforts to rank well in the search engines.

1.     Be aware of your surroundings.

Search Engine Application: Check your rankings in the search engine’s

2.     Adapt to changes within those surroundings

Search Engine Application: When search engines introduce a new innovation like Google Instant, adapt your SEO strategy to those changes.

3.     Use what is available to you in those surroundings

Search Engine Application: This is where you need to go viral by blogging, using social media, and learning what does and does not work.

4.     Recognize your opponent’s strengths and weaknesses

Search Engine Application: Know who your opponent is, watch them in the search engines, watch them on the social Web, and adjust your strategy if need be.

5.     Use your strengths to exploit your opponent’s weaknesses

Search Engine Application: If your opponent doesn’t have a Facebook profile, make sure you launch one.  If your opponent only Tweets twice a day, Tweet five times a day.

Check out this fight between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris.  Notice how Bruce Lee changes his fighting style to use these rules.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

So, let’s get a little deeper into this conversation about what kinds of words you should optimize your site for.  It’s great that you want to optimize your site for the word ‘burger,’ but you will have to compete with 38,300,000 other pages (according to Google at the time of this post).  You could try ‘hamburger,’ but you’d still have to compete with  16,900,000 people.

If your site is about hamburgers, your audience wants to know what you want to say about hamburgers.  Do you want to tell them about hamburger recipes?  Tell them about those, and you’ll only need to compete with 1,730,000 sites.

Remember the old saying, ‘There’s more than one way to grill a hamburger’?  Okay, so the saying’s actually about cats.  Let’s say you want to tell people about great ‘hamburger recipes for the grill,’ then tell them about those.  And while doing so, you’ll only have 602,000 Web pages to compete with.

A word like ‘hamburger’ is a short-tail keyword, and a term like ‘hamburger recipes for the grill’ is a long-tail keyword.  More websites and Web pages will always compete for short-tail keywords, so start off by optimizing for long-tail keywords.  You won’t have to compete as many Web pages to get to the top.

Now, there is a downside to using long-tail keywords.  The longer the keyword, the less chance someone will enter it into a search engine.  Though, don’t fret.  This is for those of you who are just getting started with SEO content.  Start off by optimizing your site for long-tail keywords and then worry about short-tail keywords.

Think of writing Web content as exercise.  Using long tail keywords is the warm up that gets you ready for the heavy lifting.  If you try to use the weights without stretching, you could injure yourself.  And if you try to optimize your site for short-tail keywords without spending time learning the art of SEO with long-tail keywords, you could injure your chances of optimizing for those short-tail keywords.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

After you choose three to five main keywords for your site and use a tool like Google Keyword finder to find related keywords and then decide which pages on your site those keywords fit best on, you’re SEO content woes are over.  Right?  Wrong.  You need to monitor your keywords and your position within the search engines.

It’s important to stay as close to the top of the rankings as you can.  Think of your search through search engines as looking across the ocean.  Those sites in the search engine results pages (SERPs) are what you see as you look out toward the horizon.  The closer to page one of the SERPs your site is, the higher the probability is that a potential customer will see your site.

There is no one rule, but we consider the horizon page ten of the SERPs.  The further your site is from that very first position the less of a chance there is that your potential customer will go to your site.  If your site is on page ten of the SERPs, that is like a ship floating along the horizon.  There is almost no chance that a potential customer will go back to page ten of the SERPs.  Even if a potential customer does go all the way to page ten, there is less of a chance that person will go to your site.  I know the analogy falls apart, but all analogies fall apart at some level.  So, I hope you understand the spirit in which I intend it.

At SEO Bridges, we know it’s tiring to monitor your positions in the search engines, especially when you’re monitoring for several keywords.  We can monitor your keywords in a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the cost you can.  Trust me, the ROI of allowing us to monitor your position in the search engines will payoff.  If you don’t believe me, send us a note with a list of ten to 15 keywords you want to optimize your site for.  For only $50.00, as long as they’re within the first ten pages, we’ll tell you where your site’s positioned using those keywords.  If we’re wrong, we’ll refund your money no questions asked.  And the great part is you can check our work right from your computer.  You have nothing to lose.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

If you want to optimize your site, choose keywords you want to optimize for.  It’s tempting to want to choose 50 or more keywords to embed on your site and place them all over the place, but that’s the worse thing you can do.  Choose three to five keywords that you want to optimize your site for.  No, you’re not going to use all of those words on every single page, because search engines don’t want to see words on pages that have nothing to do with that page.  In other words, don’t put information about your scuba diving products on pages of your site where you sell dog sleds.

Once you have those three to five words, use a tool Google Keyword tool to find keywords Google suggests for you to use throughout your site.  If you don’t want to optimize for Google, you can also use another tool like Wordtracker.  Even though the Google Keyword tool only suggests words for Google, it’s a more powerful and gives more suggestions, so let’s look at the best way to use that tool.

Depending on the words you put in, and how popular those searches were in the last month, Google will suggest up to 800 keywords to use throughout your site.  Whatever you do, don’t use all 800 words.  On the left side of the screen, you will see links that allow you to categorize your words.  You can go through all 800 keywords, but I’m sure you have better things to do with your time.  Choose the selection that fits your industry, peruse those words, and use the words that fit best.  If there aren’t enough, use a couple of the words from your results to find new words.  If the site you want to optimize for doesn’t fit into any of the industries, filter the keywords you want to use from that list of 800 words.

After you select your keywords, decide which words work best on which pages.  Make sure to keep your Web content conversational.  That’s what search engines want to see.  If you follow these simple steps you’ll find yourself content with your content.  And if you need help with the writing process, just send us a note.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

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We’ve focused on making connections with potential clients, our website’s recent redesign, adding content to our static pages, and other side projects.  Now, we want to focus on getting more content on our dynamic pages, so we’re blogging Mondays through Fridays.

Yesterday, I talked about considering your customer base in your social media marketing efforts.  Now, the question is how do you do that when writing SEO content?  It’s simple.  Okay, it’s not simple, but it is vital.

We’re all about integrating our clients’ social media campaigns with the content on their websites.  We’re also big proponents of writing content that reflects the design of the website. Integrating your site’s design, content, and social media marketing will allow you to create Web strategies that reach your customer base.

One of our clients recently wanted to optimize for a particular word.  We optimized for that word, except for one page that had no products specific to that keyword.  We told the Web designer and the website owner the reason we wouldn’t optimize for that keyword.

Search engines dislike it when websites use words on pages that have nothing to do with those pages.  Our SEO content strategies play according to the rules of search engines’ algorithms, because without search engines there would be no such thing as SEO content.  Be leery of any content writer who wants to put content on your website’s pages that doesn’t reflect what that page offers. They either don’t understand this concept, or they’re using black hat SEO practices.

I’d love to hear your comments.

Erick