A First Page of Google in every home!

Common sense strikes back, it seems, as I can’t swish and flick my SEO wand the last couple weeks without hitting someone who’s talking about being on the “first page of Google.”

The first page of Google. Right, yeah seems like common sense, doesn’t it. We all want to be there. “Get on the first page of Google in 30 days.” “First page of Google in two weeks.” “First page of Google 5 minutes ago…just sign here, step right up everyone’s a winner!”

It makes my soul hurt. Here’s the problem with all that: Google doesn’t have a “first page.” Read that one more time.

What people mean when they say “the first page of Google” is page one of search results for a particular query. But that’s one, single search phrase. It’s unique to that phrase. Conclusion: Google has as many first pages as it has search phrases submitted to its system. Where’s the “common” here?

So when someone says “page one of Google” or “the first page of Google,” ask them what specific search phrase they are referring to. Because I guarantee the guy offering to put your wizbang store on top isn’t going to be able to do it for the term “wizbangs.” It’s too general, too competitive. Try “purple wizbang cylinders” and then maybe you have a shot.

But that’s a completely different “first page,” isn’t it?

The First Page of Google is a post from: RSA Blog

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “Common sense isn’t.” I find this to be true more often than not.

In the case of SEO and keywords, many times it seems “common sense” needs to be ignored or thrown out the window entirely. Every person has their own perspective and their own ways of doing things. Search is no different. Ask 10 people to find a single product online, you’ll probably get 7 different keyword searches.

In fact, according to Google’s internal data at the time of this post, 16% of searches each day have never been submitted before.

So where is the “common” here? We all want to optimize our websites for search engines – that’s how we get found these days. Hell, I have clients telling me this now, so I’d say it’s probably common sense. But what does it mean?

What is optimization?

“Optimization” seems to have a reputation for being some magical voodoo concoction we apply to the web server, or a wand we can wave at our screens and Inquisio Optimus! Heh. Not likely, Potter.

Search engine optimization is a very focused, data-driven effort. Like a thin-beam flashlight in a dark room, you can’t focus everywhere at once. You need to find the most relevant area (keywords) to focus on, and then put them on your website in a way that makes sense.

But you can optimize for only so many keywords before you’ve diversified your website’s subject matter into search obscurity. But how do we know what keywords to focus on? It’s actually very simple.

How to Choose Keywords

There are two main figures to focus on here.

Traffic: we need to determine as best we can how much daily traffic a keyword gets. By this I mean to ask how many searches per day, on average, occur for this particular word or phrase?

Competition: we also need to find out how many other websites are indexed for this phrase. This is our competition.

Google has all this data, and they’ve generously shared it with us. Competition is easy, as you just type the term into the search field and see how many total results are returned. That’s your total competition.

To get an idea of average traffic, we use Google’s Keyword Tool (sign in for best results). So let’s say I do woodworking and I want to sell items on my website. I need people to find my website for woodworking related terms. So let’s see what Google has to say.

Woodworking gets a monthly average of 823,000 searches, so a daily average of about 27000. This is fantastic! So let’s look at the competition: 53,300,000. Oh. Alright, so our chances of being ranked well for this keyword…pretty much zero, unless we have millions to spend.

But I don’t just do “woodworking,” do I? How about “custom woodworking?” Google says 403 average daily searches and about 1,820,000 competitors. That’s pretty good search traffic, but the competition is still really stiff. But I don’t do all kinds of woodworking, I specialize in furniture.

For “custom wood furniture” we have 146 average daily searches with 173,000 competitors. Ah, here we are – this is a good keyword phrase. Decent daily traffic that will be relevant, and not too much competition. I have a good chance of being ranked well for this term, given the right effort and enough time.

But this is just one keyphrase – I’ll need a small list of different keywords and phrases for my site. Better get researching!

Onward, upward

So you see the “common sense” approach doesn’t always work. Just guessing about keywords and optimizing for “woodworking,” would disappoint. A strategy based on research, however, will eliminate the guesswork and afford a much better chance at success. Of course there are more factors than just traffic and competition, but this is the starting point.

So let’s get started.

SEO, Keywords, and Common Sense is a post from: RSA Blog

Places

Did you know one in five Google searches is for local information? People of all ages now go online to look for details about local businesses and organizations. That’s why it’s so important for business owners to make sure they manage their web presence – one place to start is your Google Places listing. Are you listed? Have you “claimed” your listing? Updated it with correct phone numbers, addresses, websites, business hours, special deals and promotions, photographs and even videos?

Google creates basic Places pages for many businesses automatically, but the business owner has to “claim” and update it with complete information. Check if you already have a Places page by searching for your business name under Google maps, and clicking on your link when it shows up on the left. If there isn’t a listing for your business, you can create one. If one exists, you’ll have the option to claim it.

When claiming a business, you’ll need to choose a way to verify your listing. Google will either send you a postcard with a PIN number or call you with a PIN number; either way, you will need to type in your unique PIN to verify ownership and complete your Google Places listing.

Your Google Places page comes with a slew of benefits. Not only are the pages free, but they usually appear on the first page of local search results for your business. That’s because Google has given precedence to local searches, and this only helps your overall visibility.

Most importantly, your Google place page is interactive. Your URL, address and phone number are all right there, so a potential customer can go directly to your website, call your business, click on pictures of your business, see your location on a map, and get directions to travel there. All the information is in one place, which makes customers happy – and more likely to visit you.

Is Your Place on Google Places? is a post from: RSA Blog

We’ve come a long way since 2007, with incredible growth in the SEO/social media portion of our business. It didn’t come without a healthy dose of challenges, but that’s what we’re all about and we’re still going strong.

What we do isn’t easy in this changing world of Pandas and Zaarly’s; each new update or piece of technology brings a fresh challenge to our doorstep. Our task is to stay on top of it all *and* bring our clients with us. So we’re always reading, always experimenting, forming new strategies, brainstorming with the rest of RSA, attending seminars, trying to figure out the best approach, the reason for that traffic spike, or how to turn an apparent failure into a success or at least a lesson.

What we hear more and more often from clients themselves are things like, “I know it’s important and I have to do it at some point…,” or, “I noticed a drop in traffic when I stopped SEO,” or, “Every website should be optimized for search engines,” are becoming more common. Business owners and marketers are getting it – an invisible website is an invisible business.

So what’s the hang-up? Usually it’s budget. No one wants to throw thousands of dollars at something they don’t understand the mechanics of – even if SEO seems necessary it can still look like a bunch of voodoo.

That’s why we try to take the mystery out of it all. We tell you exactly what we’re doing and why, and show you the results.

Inside RSA Search & Social is a post from: RSA Blog

website optimization...yes, it's just like this

To a web developer, website optimization* is a worthy goal all by itself. There’s a certain pride in managing to create a site with the fewest lines of code possible, only the most essential element ids and classes, a robust CSS file and nary an unnecessary <img> tag to be found. But this isn’t just web geeks trying to earn more points on our geek cards. There are also some practical advantages to website optimization, and choosing a good web designer will make sure you benefit from them.

Website optimization: Page Load Speed

Do you like waiting for a page to load? Does anybody? Several factors can add to page load times, from extra communication with the web server and lots of user-side scripting to plain ‘ol bloated code. But clean code reduces page load speed because the web browser simply has less to construct before showing you the page. If your web developer isn’t concerned with website optimization, they’re slowing this process down unnecessarily.

Furthermore, search engines know that a slow site negatively impact the user’s experience, so they are now grading on site speed and factoring that into their ranking algorithms. Everything you do to help your site load faster has built-in SEO benefits as well. Bonus!

Website optimization: Browser Issues and Maintenance

Ugly old code tends to make the site look different from browser to browser. Website optimization using tried and true coding methods, in my experience, leads to less surprises when it comes to browser testing. What looks beautiful in Firefox doesn’t always look the same in Internet Explorer, so the less opportunity you give IE to get it wrong, the better.

When it’s time to update a site after launch, the whole process slows way down if you have to dig through piles of code just to get to the content. Website optimization using clean, elegant code from the start means less development time, fewer browser issues and less maintenance after launch.

Website optimization: Bandwidth

“Sorry, this site has exceeded it’s bandwidth requirements.” Ewwww, no one likes to see that message. Granted, a few extraneous lines of code here and there are not going to cause major bandwidth issues, but if your site receives high traffic, each kilobyte adds up. Say a page currently weighs in at 60kb, and in reality, it should only come in at 30kb. A 50% savings each and every time the server loads that page is nothing to gloss over.

Website optimization can be accomplished in many ways, but I’ll save you the geektastic details. The important thing to remember is your site performs better the “lighter” and “cleaner” it is (read: optimized), and this is especially true when viewing on mobile devices where connection speeds may be slower and the user is getting charged by the amount of data transferred.

Summary

Not only does an older website probably need a fresh assessment over content and strategy, there’s also a good chance it could use an overhaul under the hood as well. While this may or may not affect how the site looks, it will for sure affect how the site feels. Users will notice improved performance, the server will be less bogged down and as a positive side effect, search engine visibility may improve.

One final note: the cleanest, most elegantly coded site in the world is still at the mercy of the server it sits on. If the web hosting provider isn’t up to par with its equipment, the site will suffer. Be sure to choose hosting carefully.

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Photo courtesy of Axion23

* Although loosely related, website optimization and SEO are different things.

Website optimization – it’s not just for geeks is a post from: RSA Blog

When the E*TRADE baby made his first appearance (Superbowl 2008), no one imagined he would become one of the most popular figures in advertising to date. Currently, he has over 30,000 Facebook fans and nearly 12,000 Twitter followers (not to mention Youtube views). Etrade.com even devotes an entire page just to display all 25 of the little guy’s commercials.

Click here to view the embedded video.

These days embedding video in websites is commonplace – so why aren’t you doing it? Here are 5 reasons you should.

1. Video is entertaining.

We love video. Look at how much time the average person spends watching TV and movies. Consider that a lot of people who surf the internet instead are watching video there! We love he movement, the activity, seeing and hearing other people. Video is engaging and can be a lot of fun, adding a lot of energy to otherwise still and silent websites.

2. Embedding video is a cost-effective marketing tactic.

Besides being entertaining, web videos are an extremely cost-effective marketing tool. It’s a lesson that many companies are starting to pay attention to—embedding video to attract new business. The process of developing web video is simpler than you think, and its benefits more than outweigh its cost.

Embedding video on the web can reach audiences beyond, and in addition to, television viewers. A company like E*TRADE can make a 30 second television commercial and then post it to YouTube. As the video becomes popular, people can find it online via search, watch it anytime, discuss it with others, share it with friends, embed it to their own blogs, upload it to Facebook, tweet about it, and on and on. The cost to E*TRADE for all this extra exposure? Nothing but a little time.

3. Web video is so easy!

YouTube is one of the easiest ways to embed your video—and it’s free! Businesses get their own channel to display multiple videos, and YouTube servers are designed specifically to host and stream video. Your standard web server isn’t, so you might end up spending a lot more time accommodating that kind of functionality and bandwidth directly on your website.

“If you have several videos on YouTube, they can be embedded as a set on your website,” explains Allan Emerson, designer and web developer at RSA. “Then, if you add a new video to the set on YouTube, it is automatically fed into the player on your website. You can even change the play order to ‘feature’ a different video in the first position if you want.”

4. Video helps with search engine optimization.

Embedding video in a website, especially through YouTube, has another important advantage—it helps search engine optimization (SEO). A video can be “tagged” with certain keywords that can help increases its presence in search results, and therefore bring more traffic to your site.

Further, when peolpe share your video through social media, or link to it from blogs and other websites, you not only get that traffic, but those backlinks to your website as well.

5. Embedding video offers a personal touch.

As our Video Production Manager Jack Sitch says, “Video is such a great addition to any website. It instantly allows you to make more of a personal connection and it can really provide a positive first impression.”

Whether your video is simply a welcome message, a brief introduction, or a specific demonstration of your work or products, it allows viewers to learn about your business. “Even more,” says Jack, “it’s a way to build trust and sincerity. Seeing a face and hearing a voice is the closest thing to making an introduction, as important as that first handshake in person.

Now what?

So how do you make the video in the first place? There are many DIY tools out there, from cheap cameras to free software, and some businesses prefer to go that way. Others use a video production studio or find an advertising agency that produces video for the web. It’s all a matter of what kind of quality you’re willing to publish. After all, the quality of work in any industry can be drastically improved by great tools and long experience.

As it happens, RSA has both. As a full-service marketing and advertising agency, we can handle every aspect of embedding video in a website, from the early planning stages to producing the video and formatting it for the web. RSA can do it all, and for less than you’d think.

“Planning is the most important step in any process,” Jack adds. “After that, we can develop a storyboard and script, line up props and talent, complete ad graphics as necessary, and produce your video in a matter of just days or weeks. The key is to know what goals you want to accomplish and what market the video needs to attract, which is why you want to develop a plan with a marketing professional first. If not RSA, we can sure recommend one for you.”

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5 Ways Embedding Video Helps You is a post from: RSA Blog

[This guest post from Nancy Marshall Communications in Augusta, Maine, was written by Matt Rideout, Internet Account Coordinator and Social Media Strategist, and originally posted on the Alliance of Marketing Communications Agencies blog.]

Ever seen the movie “Hackers”? Computer programmers can be “different” sometimes, and their terminology for computer stuff can reflect that. Today we’ll be looking at different sorts of search engine optimization “hats,” as they are called, specifically black hat and white hat search engine optimization. Call them yin and yang or good vs. evil. Each hat has its own culture of followers, code of ethics, as well as its plusses and minuses.

One of the most important factors affecting the ranking of your website in search engine results is the number of links that point from other websites to your website. The more high quality links pointing to your site, the higher your site will show up in search engine rankings. Google will assume that because all of these websites are linking to you, that your site must be a great authority on its subject. Nancy Marshall likes to say that it’s like a person in real life. If a person has a lot of important and popular friends, then people will assume that person is also important and popular.

Chances are you have seen an advertisement or received an innocent-looking email from someone promising something like “Page 1 Results for only $199 per year!” There are a lot of search engine optimization (SEO) firms out there promising the same results for what seems like an incredible price. Is this too good to be true? Yes and no.

These cheap SEO firms usually need to employ a “black hat” (here we go with the hats again) strategy in order to boost the ranking of your website… And I use the term “firm” loosely; it’s most likely one guy living in his parent’s basement. Black hat techniques are those that are not approved of by search engines as ethical optimization techniques.

The most common form of black hat SEO involves spamming links to your website across thousands of other websites. These are websites that the SEO Company owns or that they have hacked, yes, hacked. Many black hat SEO firms are run by hackers that exploit security flaws in people’s websites (websites that are usually running outdated and insecure software). Hackers fill these websites with machine-generated and keyword-rich content; content that is confusing or useless to people, but still indexed by search engines.

As Google works non-stop to refine their search algorithm and filter out junk and spam, it’s only a matter of time before these backlinks are rendered useless. Thus black hat SEO firms must continuously spam your link or your ranking will start to drop rapidly.

You’ve heard of that old saying, “slow and steady wins the race,” right? It certainly holds true for search engine optimization as well. White hat link building is a slow and steady process of acquiring back links on legitimate websites with contextually relevant content. One or two of these high quality backlinks can be worth more than thousands of low quality spam links. Best of all, these high quality links continue to mature and become worth more over time.

So how do you tell if your current search engine optimization company is providing you with high quality links? Yahoo site explorer is a great tool that will allow you to see all of the inbound links coming to your website, and then you can click and see for yourself what those pages look like. If you own a hotel, are your links coming from a few dozen travel websites and travel blogs? Or are your links coming from hundreds of websites full of garble and random machine generated content like “printable map coupons for your Thanksgiving dishwasher.” Depending on how much you are paying your SEO firm, you may be surprised, or not.

Search Engine Optimization and Hats is a post from: RSA Blog

Analytics? Bounce rate?

What language are they speaking?

I have to admit, I thought I might need a passport and a pocket dictionary on my first day at RSA. That day I attended several meetings with the search engine marketing team, and most of the words buzzing around me sounded like a foreign language.

I’m the first to admit, I’m a search engine marketing (SEM) newbie.

I applied for the interactive marketing specialist job at RSA because writing skill was included in the job description. That sounded ideal, since I love writing and studied journalism in college. Little did I know the job encompassed so much more, and I’d be grasping to understand parts of it.

I’ll let you in on a few of the secrets I’ve learned.

Luckily for me, I’ve discovered that writing is an integral part of what an SEM specialist does. The main goal is helping clients’ websites appear higher in search results when people look for them on Google or Bing.

We help clients improve in search results by writing and distributing press releases and articles that link back to their websites. Making sure the article contains pertinent keywords that people search for doesn’t hurt, either.

However, writing skill is certainly not the only skill require for success.

A significant part of SEM involves analyzing statistics to measure our efforts and recommend a course of action. This process is also known as analytics. After a few days of hearing the term described — and referencing my pocket dictionary — analytics started to click in my completely non-analytic brain.

Analytics measures everything from the number of visits to a website to its top traffic sources. We can tell clients with 99 percent certainty whether someone from Australia visited their site, or if most folks came from right here in South Dakota.

We can even tell clients how long – down to the exact second — a visitor stayed on a website. This is also known in the industry as the bounce rate.

Interestingly, the SEM team can tell when a person decided to leave a client’s website because they’d either found what they were looking for, or left for another reason. Maybe the site’s music was annoying or too many ads popped up. Though we can seldom tell the exact reason a person departed, we can hypothesize – and help a client fix the issue. We’ll do all we can to ensure site visitors find what they are looking for.

Before starting at RSA, I was unaware that so much information could be gleaned about website traffic — and that SEM jargon is indeed its own language. Although I’m still learning the ins and outs of SEM — and still have my RSA passport handy — everything sounds more like English now. I also know that the knowledge I’m gaining is invaluable to our clients.

It’s vital to be able to show them how their efforts are paying off. So much more work and analysis goes into the how than most would ever realize. But hard work leads to great rewards when we type a keyword into Google and see that a client is ranked No. 1.

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Photo courtesy of Danard Vincente

Confessions of an SEM newbie is a post from: RSA Blog

Search Engine Marketing... it's not voodoo

There’s still a lot of confusion out there about what a search engine marketing firm does – and doesn’t do – and I think this confusion is holding businesses back or causing people to waste a lot of money on false expectations.

Put simply, search engine marketing (SEM) is just what it says it is: marketing. It’s not search engine sales, or search engine lead generation, or search engine voodoo…it’s just marketing; bringing your products and services to market.

I can bring your product to someone who is searching for it (that’s the market). I can’t force them buy it, or contact you, or stop them from going to a competitor. We can take measures to influence these decisions, such as improving website usability, but SEM by itself does not do this.

This is why it’s so important to look at your web marketing efforts in a wholistic way: SEM works with site design and usability works with copywriting works with social communication. And it should all work together with your offline marketing efforts, as well.

Still confused? Tell me about it in the comments – I’ll answer any question you might have.

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Photo courtesy of me’nthedogs

Search Engine Marketing Voodoo is a post from: RSA Blog

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), many business owners don’t understand how it works or how to use it – so this week we brought in the big guns to help demystify the process.

The SEO Expert

Woessner, SEO Guru

We had the pleasure of bringing in renowned SEO expert (and one-time RSA intern) Stephen Woessner from the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse to host public workshops and meet with our staff.

Stephen kicked off the week with a seminar for small business owners, sponsored by RSA and AAF Black Hills. More than 40 people turned out to learn Stephen’s 15 simple steps to SEO, and we’ve heard some great feedback from attendees who took home a step-by-step plan for optimizing their sites.

For those of you who missed out, you’re probably wondering what big secrets Stephen revealed. We can’t give you all the details, but Stephen’s book is a great resource for business owners who want to take a stab at doing it themselves. Want to try to do SEO yourself? Here’s what you should know.

Learn SEO

You can learn SEO pretty easily, if you take the time and focus on it. Going through a book like Stephen’s will give you a simple step-by-step tutorial that will have you on your way pretty quickly. There are also vast quantities of resources out on the web on the subject, so there’s really no excuse not to learn SEO if you have the time and it needs to be done.

And even if you don’t do SEO yourself, it’s still a valuable subject to understand, especially when it comes to working with someone else to get your website optimized.

Do SEO Yourself

Yes,  it’s possible to  optimize your own website. The question is how long will it take you to learn SEO, and how much time do you actually have to spend on it? If you are a business owner or in-house marketer,  your schedule is probably already packed.

In order to do SEO yourself, Stephen recommends spending about an hour to an hour and a half per page, per month. So if you own or manage a website of 20 pages or more, you’re talking about more than 20 hours per month of work just to keep it optimized.

Is it worth your time?

In order for your site to reach its full potential, it needs to be optimized. But whether you should do SEO yourself or outsource is ultimately dependent on how much time you have to devote to SEO. It’s possible that your time might be better spent focusing on other aspects of your business or marketing, and hiring someone to take care of the SEO work makes sense. Hey, some people change their own oil – and that’s really cool. But there’s nothing wrong with hiring someone else to do it, either!

Snaps to Stephen

In addition to the AAF seminar, Stephen also hosted a similar seminar for the Black Hills Home Builders Association. We were thrilled to see so many local businesses turn up to learn more about SEO, and a big thank you goes out to all who attended.

Stephen also graciously agreed to spend an entire afternoon letting RSA staff pick his brain for new ideas on maximizing SEO and social media for our clients. Needless to say, we learned a few new things too.

For those of you who attended Stephen’s seminars this week, what did you think? Are you ready to do SEO yourself, or would you rather outsource?

You can do SEO yourself is a post from: RSA Blog