BradPace.com

Here is a great posting I found from iMedia
1. Choose a few of your most important organic keywords to test. Choose high traffic keywords because you’ll get data more quickly.
2. Take a baseline measurement of the number of organic referrals you receive on those keywords in an average week. Typically, the referrals that you get on those words will come from just one or two URLs on your site. Jot down those URLs.
3. Find some better creative to test than that keyword-stuffed junk you have up there right now. A good place to look is your paid campaign. Take the best performing ads from your paid campaign that map to the keywords you selected for testing.
4. Use paid inclusion to test. If you want results before next year’s Super Bowl, you need to use paid inclusion. It gets your listings in and out of the natural search index quickly and gives you complete control over the copy.
5. Swap out the old creative for the new and check your search referrals against your baseline for the keywords you chose on the URLs you jotted down.
6. Determine a winner. Remember to control for overall site performance when choosing a winner (e.g., if your clicks increase by five percent during the testing period but your total organic referrals also increased by five percent over the same period, don’t declare that a winner). When you find a clear winner, apply the learnings to all your meta tags and repeat the whole process.

The days of over-stuffed, broken-English meta tags are gone. Now they’re ad copy. The truth is, meta tags have the makings of a champion. And once you give them the attention they deserve, they will repay you in kind by drawing the attention of more potential customers viewing them in the search results.

It has been far too long since the part 1 posting. But part 2 in this series is all about on page optimization. After you have removed search engine optimization road blocks you are ready to start on your site. Let’s say SEO (or free traffic) is like a car on the highway. The faster your car is going the more traffic you will get. The road blocks from part 1 will make it impossible to get your SEO car moving. But if you have not roadblocks it does not mean that your car is moving. To get your SEO moving you need to do 2 things. On page optimization which is stuff right on your pages and off page optimization which are items that effect your rankings but that are not on your pages (this is part 3).

For on page optimization, the main thing you have to do here is think like a web bot. As you may know a web bot is a program that runs on a server somewhere. It goes from page to page looking at the web collecting data about your pages. But it does not see what you see in a browser. It sees the code that is sent to your browser. There is a big difference. It then collects the information it thinks is important and saves it to a database for later analysis.

So go to you site and right click on your page and “view page source”. This shows you what the bot will see. There has been a ton of information written about this over the years and there are many theories as to tricks that will help you in the search engine. I will not go into these. I want to talk about general practices that are proven to help you search engine rankings.

Step 1 – Choose your keywords:
By far the hardest part of on page optimization is selecting your keywords. Many companies never really think about this and just optimize for words they choose without any research or planning. It does you no good to optimize for keywords that have little traffic. Also it may be that your keywords may be too competitive and you want to optimize for words that you have a chance of getting some success. Keyword research is key to this process. Use the information that the search engines provide (number of searches, page rank, ect). I also use wordtracker to find out which words have the most searches. Many times phrases that you think would have less searches actually have more. This is how you find those gems that have tons of traffic without much competition.

Every page needs a primary keyword phrase and also a set of secondary keywords. Your primary keyword phrase needs to be 2-3 words (most single keywords are too competative or to general). The secondary words are 5-10 words that are related or subsets of the original phrase. Here is an example. Say I want to optimize a page for “Utah Mortgage”. Some secondary words could be Mortgage utah, utah, mortgage, mortgages, utahs, loan, Utah loan, utah loans, and mortgaged. You will see why the secondary words are so important below. Create a spreadsheet with all your urls with your target primary keywords and your secondary words.

From part 1 I assume that all your pages are easily crawlable. Many companies spend most of their SEO time just making all their content available. If the bots can not find your pages then on page optimization will not matter.

Here are some general rules of thumb that I use in my optimization. Again these are not set in stone and some of this I just my personal preference in what I have seen work. I also tend to be a bit conservative when it comes to SEO. I don’t want to do anything that may jeopardize my existing rankings. Here are a few suggestions for on page SEO.

• Good Meta Tags: Some engines don’t even use these any more. But you still need them. A short title tag that includes your keywords. One short phrase that is 3 to 5 words. Keywords and description should also include your keyword and secondary keyword. I usually only have 5-10 keywords and a short sentence for the description. Your target keyword should be the first thing in your meta tags.
• Keyword theme: The bot should see your keyword theme as it goes through your page. It needs to see your keywords and secondary keywords spread out across your page.
• Image tags: Use your keyword in 1 or 2 image alt tags.
• Headline: Your keyword phrase should be in your page headline in an H tag (H1, H2 ect). It should also be at the beginning of the headline.
• Get an equation: By this I mean you need to determine how many times you want your primary keyword phrase on your page and how many times you want secondary words and phrases to show up. Too many times and you will get penalized for keyword stuffing. Not enough times and your pages will not be seen to relate. This may be different for different industries and keywords. Just figure out what works best for your industry. Start my looking at the current leaders for your keywords. How many times do they have it? This is usually a good starting point. See my equation below.
• Use CSS: One thing we are doing now is to use CSS to remove all the old html code and to only display the real content to the search engines. This is a great option and a good way to organize your content optimized for the search engines.
• Get your content up high on the page: If you have a lot of code in the header or left hand nav your content may not start until half way down the page. One thing we are doing now is to again use CSS and divs to place the content first on the page and the navigation later. This is done with absolute positioning.
• Remove Javascript, includes and other strange code: We talked about this in part one. But it is important you don’t have a ton of javascript or strange code on the page that will confuse the bots.

The general equation I use is to use the primary keyword phrase once in each meta tag, one in the headline and 3 times in the body text. Then I use the secondary keywords 10-15 times throughout the page. I have found this to work well in may different industries.

Once your pages are crawlable with no roadblocks that are also optimized you are about 25% of the way there. I don’t know for sure but I think that on page elements of SEO is about ¼ of your ranking. The other 75% is based on off page elements that I will talk about in part 3.

We are working to get a solid search engine optimization strategy (SEO) for our various sites. We are starting by breaking down the strategy into 3 different areas of focus. I will blog on each of these areas separately over the next few days

1) Remove SEO Road Blocks
The first step in any strategy is to simply remove any existing road blocks. To do this you need to think like a search engine. Road blocks can be on the page or off the page. These are the red flags that can simply kill any hope of getting good search rankings. There are many possible road blocks but her are a few that I spend special attention to:

• Is there any code on the page that will stop the crawlers? How does the actual code look (View Source). Is there a bunch of javascript on the page?
• Are there coding errors on the page? Poor html, javascript or CSS can stop a crawler in it’s tracks. Also it can really mess up what the bot thinks comes first on the page. Broken tables are a perfect example of this.
• Missing meta tags. You must have a title tag and the various meta tags. Some crawlers don’t use these tags publicly, but I believe that they all use them in some manner to at least start the algorithm.
• Duplicate content. This is a real killer. Many sites have content that shows up on every page and often you don’t even think of this as duplicate content. Many sites have landing pages with the exact same content. The content needs to be excluded from the crawlers using the robots.txt file or the content needs to be made unique. Re-write the content if possible. At In2M we had about 10k financial institution pages that where all the same (except for the bank name). We ended up re-writing all 12 paragraphs and then randomizing each of these as well as randomizing the testimonials and images on the page. This made every page unique (or close to it). Go to http://www.mvelopes.com/mvelopes/credit-union-bank/m/mountain-america-credit-union-1494.php and hit refresh and see the page change for yourself. We actually had to un-optimize these pages because we where outranking the actual bank and credit union sites and they where complaining. One problem many companies have is they re-do their site and leave the old pages up and include the same content on the new pages.
• Bad back links. Check your back links and make sure you have no bad links from bad “neighborhoods”. Also make sure that you have backlinks from sites that relate to your site. A few good links is much better than a ton of junk links. Remove the junk first. Also check and make sure that your back links are legitimate (no purchased or bogus links).
• No black hat or questionable seo! It is often tempting to try and get ahead using shady techniques like buying links, bogus link structures or using bad text (same color as background ect). These tactics may be so 2000. But today it is very tempting to build bogus mini sites or doorway pages. Or to use crawled data to auto build sites. Just make sure everything you do is legit and above the table.
• Get any info you can from the search engines themselves. Which pages are already indexed and which ones are missing? Check the cashed version of your pages and see what is there and how old it is. You can learn a lot just by paying attention to the search engine results.
• Make sure you are in good standing with the search engines. Have you been banned by Google? Have your ranking dropped lately? Often you can fix these types of issues by contacting the search engine.
• Get a site map. If you don’t have a site map get one! This makes is much easier for the bots to crawl your site.
• Make sure your site navigation is search engine friendly. I am always supprized by sites that have all their navigation in javacript, flash or some other app that the bots can’t recognize. Then wonder why they don’t have any pages indexed. You can have fancy menues and such, you just need to provide some other simple way for the bots to crawl.
• Use bot friendly urls. This is important and there seems to be some confusion as to exactly what each bot can crawl. But it is so easy to fix using a mod rewrite that I don’t know why you would not do this. Make your data easy to access via a simple URL. The web dev team for World Vital Records did this for all the surnames in our database (this is not live yet). But a simple url with the surname will pull up all the results for that page.

I just realized that I never blogged about this. But last Friday was my last day at In2M as their Directory of Internet Marketing. Over the last 2 months my job has been split into 4 new positions. You read that correctly! That either means I am so amazing that I can do 4 jobs or that I did not do any of them well. Probably a little of both. Here are the 4 new job titles: Director of Internet Marketing (strategy and manager), Web development manager (to manage my team in India), Channel Sales Manager (PPC and affiliate manager), and Channel Marketing Manager (project management). Anyway I was missing the opportunity to wear many hats and to do lots of different things.

So when Paul Allen offered me a position to work with him at Provo Labs I jumped at the chance. Provo Labs is a web incubator located in, well, Provo. My dad asked if that means we hatch and raise spiders. Close! But there are about 10 companies that are owned or partially owned by Provo Labs including LDS Media, LDS Library, LDS Audio, World Vital Records (genealogy site), and the Provo Labs Academy. I won’t go into all of these right now. I will be doing their Internet Marketing. Starting with launching affiliate programs for all these sites. Most of these sites have had little or no marketing so they are primed for successful marketing by me. I am very excited about this.

I just finished my first week and it went very well. I really like everyone I have met so far there. I told my friend Gulshan that they have about 6 months of work just waiting for me. I am sure that I can come in and get things started quickly. It is the perfect environment for me.

I will also continue to do a bit of contract work and to build my affiliate business. I am working on a killer tool that will make it easy to make a million bucks managing my PPC campaigns for my various affiliate programs. I am very excited about this as well.

There seems to be a shortage of good Internet Marketers in Utah. We have 2 openings at In2M for a channel sales manager and channel marketing manager. Both will work in PPC, affiliate and SEO. We have had the openings for almost 2 months and have received very few resumes. I have also seen affiliate manager openings at Affiliate crew, Overstock, Doba, and several other companies in Utah. I have also seen several online sales jobs in Utah county.

I think that as these marketing and sales fields mature that more and more companies will need these types of services. The online marketer needs many skills. One of the problems is that the online marketer needs a combination of technical, marketing, and sales skills. This makes it difficult to find the right person.