About Thomas Petty

Thomas Petty has been a Master SEO trainer with the Search Engine Academy since 2008. He teaches SEO classes in the San Francisco, California Bay Area, and owns an SEO consulting services company. He is an HFI Certified Usability Analyst™ from Human Factors International.

I Sure Wish Google Would Get It Together with Business Local Search Tools!

May 17, 2013 By 2 Comments

guy so frustrated that he wants to smash the computer with a hammer<rant>

I’ve been a fan of the various Google incarnations for business listings for some time now. First it was Google Maps. That became Google Places. OK fine, same thing, slightly different tune. I had lots of great reviews on Google Maps/Places and was careful to keep my profile fully up to date.

I switched phone companies (long story), which meant I had to change my toll-free number. No big deal, just log in and change it, right?

Nope.

Had to re-verify the business. Of course, I couldn’t do it with a phone call either. I had to go the post card route. OK, whatever. Got that verified, but AAAGH, all my reviews disappeared! I had 18 or 19 five star reviews – all 100% legitimate glowing reviews, mind you (I don’t play games). These were all past students who had attended my class over time, and raved. Very grateful for that, but changing my phone number means they all go away?

*sigh*

Spin forward to this year. I changed my corporate address. No big deal. Just go into Google Places and change it, right? Urgh. Have to re-verify the damn business with another PIN. Of course, it has to be by post card. I had to ask for it FOUR TIMES before I finally got it in the mail today. Verified my business AGAIN and now I get a message that it’s “PENDING” – being reviewed. Huh? Hover over the bubble and it says, “Please allow several weeks.” Reviewed by whom and for what purpose?

google places screen shot showing pending

Waiting for Google To Make Up Its Mind

 

Meanwhile the business isn’t showing up.

Oh yes, that Google+ thing. I was an early G+ user when it was still a by-invitation-only system. But at the time, there was no business listing, only personal. Last year, Google started setting up Google+ business listings. Great!

I thought that Google was converting Google Places pages to Google+ business listings last year. Never happened. So I set up a business listing for myself. Guess what I have to do? Verify the blasted listing. Same address, same phone number, as my Google PLACES page (which by the way, in case you forgot, I will have to wait several weeks for it to be reviewed by someone).

I’ve asked for the verification post card for Google+ now THREE times (yes, by mail – can’t do it by phone). Still nothing in my mailbox.

Wow, Google. What’s up with all these machinations? It sure as hell isn’t this hard to set up a business listing in your competitor, FACEBOOK. Click, click, type, claim your URL, DONE.

</rant>

Yeesh.

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Filed Under: Local Search, Rant Tagged With: , , , ,

SEO Tactics Versus SEO Strategies – Where Do I Begin?

May 12, 2013 By Leave a Comment
woman with a question mark sign

Where do I start with SEO and internet marketing?

Internet marketing is truly a double-edged sword. There are SO many free or nearly free tools out there that allow us to create amazing systems fairly easily. WordPress is one such tool. Download their free software, drop a theme (design) on top, and boom, you’ve got a blog and/or website. Get a free SEO plugin (add-on) that promises to make the Google gods happy.

E-mail marketing tools like Constant Contact give us the tools and templates to create great looking, spam-resistant e-mail newsletters that our customers read and respond to.

Here at the Search Engine Academy, our hands-on workshops teach lots of students from all over the world the tactics they need in order to “do” SEO the correct way:

  • How to do keyword research
  • How to generate great content readers (and the search engines) love
  • How to use all the amazing free (and paid) Google tools like Adwords, Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Authorship, Google+, etc.
  • How to understand all the mechanics of search engine optimization (META tags, links, URLs, etc.)

Once you have even the basics down from reading information online (like in this blog) or even taking a basic SEO class, you can do a reasonable job and get reasonable results. Our advanced SEO training takes students even further with more tactics that they can implement to get even better results.

In my opinion, this is all fantastic stuff. Some people like consuming the plethora of information on their own and trying things out. Others like to get the training in a classroom. I did just that and took John Alexander’s class in 2007.

But honestly, there’s something missing here.

Where Do I Begin?

Just because we have a mechanic’s set of tools in our garage, doesn’t necessarily make us a mechanic. Looking at all the wrenches, screwdrivers, ratchets and power tools, makes it difficult to know where to start. Maybe we know something’s not working right or not quite tuned up with our car, but where do we start?

A seasoned mechanic will know how to diagnose the issues and put together a plan to get things humming again.

Websites can suffer the same fate. Maybe things are working OK, but it’s not the finely tuned machine that we want it to be, and we just don’t know where to begin to figure it out. Some not-so-obvious issues might include any or all of the following independently or in combination:

  • Usability issues (difficulty people finding what they want)
  • Customer capture and conversion issues
  • Coding issues
  • SEO problems
  • Technical problems

Then when you consider all the options for online marketing:

  • Search engine optimization (SEO)
  • Social media
  • E-mail marketing
  • Paid advertising
  • Optimized press releases
  • Blogging
  • Etc.

This can add up to a lot of confusion and churning.

Where do I begin? Truly. Where do I start to make it work?

Internet Marketing Retreat

I’ve been thinking about this for awhile, and while I love teaching the tactics in our workshops, I’m considering having a completely separate internet marketing retreat that focuses on these problems. I want to structure a one-day session for people like you who feel it’s just too overwhelming to try to figure out where to start with your digital marketing efforts. Maybe you’ve already been through our (or another) SEO class. Maybe you just have the basics that you’ve read about here or other places. That’s OK. This won’t be a technical, in-the-weeds session.

Instead, I want to bring it up to a higher level. Participants will walk out of the room at the end of the day with a full internet marketing plan in their hands, ready to implement. It will include:

  • A detailed analysis of your website – usability, flow, client capture tools, and technical
  • A strategy for attracting the types of customers that YOU want
  • A customized plan for your business to implement the strategy that will work for you

However, first things first. I want to find out if you’re interested in this before I put any plans down, but I want to move quickly. If you’d be interested in participating in a customized strategy planning session:

Please send me a blank e-mail to seoretreat [at] aweber [dot] com with the subject “I’m interested in the internet marketing retreat!”

This doesn’t commit you to anything, it just lets me know there’s interest. You’ll hear back from me within the next couple weeks on more details as I put this together.

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Filed Under: News, SEO, SEO Blogging, Workshops Tagged With: , , , , , ,

SEO Bait and Switch Tactics – How to Piss off Potential Buyers

December 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

If you’ve read any of David Meerman Scott’s books or his blog, Web Ink Now, you’ll know that rule number one in getting people to follow you is: “Deliver content your readers love!” Everything else is secondary. Create raving fans of your stuff, and the links and money will follow.

Those of us who do SEO for a living (either teaching it in our SEO workshop or working with our clients) understand the tactics to get a page listed on the search engines. When we “eat our own dog food” and optimize our own content, we know what it takes to get results to show up on the search engines like Google. Unfortunately, that knowledge makes it easy to cross a line that can lead to misuse.

Recently, one of our trainers, Beth Kahlich, came across a page on another site that was optimized for the phrase, “search engine academy reviews”. I’m not going to give them the benefit of a link, but you’ll see it in the Google search engine results page (SERP). Mr. McDonald from JM Internet Group has a page that seemingly provides a review about the Search Engine Academy. I have absolutely no problem with that. We have thousands of very happy customers all over the world.

However, when you read the content on that page, it’s a typical bait-and-switch page. He’s luring a reader to his site with the promise of delivering some valuable information (presumably an unbiased, insider review of the SEA). Once the reader arrives, though, they quickly realize that they’ve been had. It’s unclear how old the page is (there’s no date), but he’s hoping people will come to his site and subsequently do business with him just because he provides some pseudo-advice on “questions to ask” the Search Engine Academy.

Really?

Mr. Scott even had a recent post, “Do you care more about customers or the competition?” that hits the nail on the head. Why else would you optimize a phrase for your competitor’s company name unless you were worried about it and trying to snag some of their customers?

Give Your Readers What They Want – Great Content!

The headline or title of a page (or video or blog post or any other content) is the most important factor in getting people to read your stuff. If your headline sucks, people won’t bother with the content. However, if your content doesn’t deliver what you promised in your headline, you’re just going to piss people off.

If, on the other hand, your content consistently delivers exactly what you’re advertising in the headline, you will enjoy so many benefits:

  • Repeat readers who can’t wait to come back for more
  • Those eager readers will build links to your content from all over the globe (we all know natural links help your rankings!), which further increases readership
  • Social media mentions which increase your readership yet again, which of course increases links
  • Hopefully, some of that turns into sales

But it’s not the traffic or the click from the search engines that’s going to generate the sale. It’s the trust you build with your readers that will generate the sale. I don’t care if your website generates 100,000 visits a day from the search engines. If no one is buying from you, it doesn’t mean anything. Only when you build rapport and trust with your readers, will they then entrust some of their hard-earned money in exchange for something valuable from you.

It’s very simple: “People buy into you before they buy from you.”

It can take a long time to build that trust with your readers, but it only takes a second to tear it down. Consistently deliver the content you promise, and the world is yours. Violate that trust, and well, you’ll hear a lot of crickets.

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Filed Under: Content Marketing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Why Is Keyword Research So Important for SEO and your Business?

October 12, 2012 By 1 Comment

At the Search Engine Academy, whenever we teach an SEO class, the very first thing we cover is keyword research. We don’t talk about HTML. We don’t talk about how to do SEO. We don’t talk about Google Analytics.

Before we talk about anything else, we teach the students how to do keyword research.

I usually tell my students, “If you’re guessing at what keywords to optimize for, you’re probably wrong.”

Most of us who have businesses, are experts in our respective fields. That’s why we have a business. We know all the technical jargon and all the things that we do to make our services and products do what they’re supposed to do and stand out from our competitors. Because of that, it’s really easy to slip into the mistaken idea that we know exactly what our customers are searching for on the search engines like Google.

A classic example is that a lot of web design companies take our class, either for their own business or to provide SEO services for their clients. The first thing web designers typically look for in the keyword research tools are keywords around “web design” or “web designer”. They’re always disappointed when they can’t come up with a good, high scoring keyword phrase.

It may be true that their customers are looking for “web designers”, but often the competition for these types of phrases is so high, that it’s impossible to rank well for them.

Criteria for Good Keyword Phrases

When we do keyword research for our clients or ourselves, we want key phrases that fulfill three basic criteria:

  • They have a lot of searches
  • They have low competition on the search engines
  • They must be relevant to your business

The keyword phrases can be used in your website copy (for organic results on the search engine results pages or SERP) or even used in your paid placement (like pay per click) advertising.

I recently ran across the following example of a keyword phrase that doesn’t have anything to do with the business.

It seems that a lot of people are typing into Google: “Where is my social security check” wondering when they’ll get their check in the mail. One of the top positions in the paid placements is a company that does website security checks. They have nothing to do with social security. I can just imagine the conversations their customer support staff are having every time the phone rings: “No, I’m sorry sir, we don’t know where your check is. We do website security checks.” “What’s that?”

This company has not done their research and is wasting not only money on clicks from people who don’t want their services, they’re wasting valuable employee time on the phone answering these questions over and over again.

Some simple changes in their ad keywords would fix this and stop wasting money.

Management Told Me So

The other classic mistake I hear about is that the marketing department was told by the company’s executive staff what keyword phrases to optimize for or advertise with.

There is no forethought or research into what their customers actually want. Management just “knows” what the customers want or maybe they had a meeting and brainstormed some ideas. This is a great start, but should not be the end.

It’s crucial to do the research to see what your customers really type into Google before even considering SEO or what content to write or what Adwords to create.

If you’re jumping to conclusions or your management is “telling” you what to optimize or advertise with, consider doing the keyword research first and find out what your customers really want. John Alexander has several excellent articles about keyword research.

Put the time in, and I guarantee you’ll be surprised by what you find out.

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Filed Under: SEO Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Why Is Content Marketing Important for Business? SEO Isn’t Everything After All

September 27, 2012 By 3 Comments

Even though we teach it, SEO isn’t everything for online marketing. I was reading an article in Inc. Magazine today, and the CEO of Fab.com, Jason Goldberg’s business goal is as follows, “If we make people smile, lots and lots of money will follow over time.” He recently told his employees that he didn’t care what the exact sales numbers were. Instead, “I care about the brand we’re building and the emotional bond we have with our customers.”

So many of us who do any type of online marketing, spend a lot of misguided time worrying about the “best” magic keyword phrase to put in our title tag, or finding the latest hot SEO technique to bring the masses in droves to our website.

I’m a huge fan of David Meerman Scott’s book, “The New Rules of Marketing and PR“. When you read his book, now in its third edition, you’ll quickly learn that title tags and trying to reverse engineer the Google Panda rules is completely pointless and a wasted effort.

Instead, if we focus on what Goldberg says is his business goal – to deliver what the customer wants and give them a smile in the process – people (our customers) will come to us without having to worry about “doing” SEO.

In reality, isn’t that what Google attempts to deliver to us? The programmers at Google spend a lot of effort (think Panda and Penguin here) to cut out the websites that have artificially inflated rankings, and instead deliver results that have true value to us.

Content Marketing Wins Every Time

So what exactly is content marketing, and what does that have to do with SEO and keyword research?

Just over three years ago, I had a student, Larry Waight, fly up from Belize in Central America and take my SEO workshop in California. He is the Marketing Manager for a Belize eco-resort called Chaa Creek. He had a little web experience, but not really much technical experience. The lesson he learned in the class (among many) is that he has to deliver what people are looking for when they’re searching the internet. By doing the keyword research first, finding out what his customers want, then delivering the content, is so much more powerful.

Larry went back to Belize with a copy of Scott’s book in hand, and spent the last three years building lots of content on his website that his potential customers want to learn about traveling in Belize. In his content, he’s talking about the area and all the wonderful attractions Belize has to offer, not just his resort. He understands that everyone wins if people are coming to Belize to spend money.

Recently, Larry was lucky enough to host David Meerman Scott in a marketing summit in Belize, and when Mr. Scott interviewed him (see video here), Larry said that a whopping 80% of their tourist business comes from the web, because they are delivering the content their customers want to consume. He gets the value to his company and the region, and has essentially stopped all “traditional” advertising efforts because it works so well.

Another company that I’ve worked with, Selling Timeshares, is a vacation timeshare resale business. I had seven of their employees in a private corporate SEO training class, and they’ve spent the last nine months building lots and lots of articles on their website. These articles are designed to draw their ideal customers to their site by giving them real value and information. Their SEO rankings and traffic have steadily increased month over month the more they have put effort into this.

Benefits of Content Marketing

Aside from all that I mention above, content marketing has so many benefits too:

  • The website will be found for many more keyword phrases than you optimize it for
  • It will attract many more natural links to the site, than trying to artificially “build” links
  • Customers will continue to refer to your website as a reference. This builds trust with them and when they are ready to buy, they will remember you

Guess what? We at the Search Engine Academy believe this philosophy to the core too. That’s why we have such an active blog with so many contributors.

Yes, we eat our own dog food too.

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Filed Under: Book Review, Content Marketing, Meta Tags, SEO, SEO Blogging, WordPress Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Setting Up a Mobile Website: Think About Your Customers and SEO Too

September 11, 2012 By 2 Comments

I wanted to relate a couple experiences I had recently, and hopefully this will help you too. It seems that mobile websites are all the rage these days, with WordPress plug-ins and even whole services built around mobile sites. SEO is a considering factor too, but there are other things to think about too.

The idea here that with the explosion of smart phones and tablet computers, stuffing your regular website into the tiny screen isn’t the best experience for the person who hits your site. That’s absolutely true. It’s better to detect the platform the person is using, and serve up different content or a different experience for the smaller form factor.

From a mobile search engine optimization (SEO)  perspective, Google has even come out and said that you can get rewarded for having mobile-friendly content. They want your site to be accessible to all types of equipment, and won’t “penalize” you for having duplicate content. It can even help a little with your internal link building efforts.

Basically, there are three ways you can set up your mobile version after you’ve detected the type of platform and/or form factor:

  • Redirect the browser to a mobile version of the domain (i.e. m.mywebsite.com) and/or pages (i.e. www.mywebsite.com/mobile/content.html)
  • Serve up different HTML/CSS based on the device type
  • Serve up different content based on CSS rules

The last option is what Google prefers that you use.

Why Do You Need a Mobile Website?

But I want to step back a bit from the “how” and look more at the “why”. Why do you need a mobile website? This is where my experiences came into play recently.

Poor example of a mobile web page

Poor example of a mobile web page

My wife and I have a favorite Mexican restaurant in town and we eat there far too often, I’m afraid to say. One day we were out and about, and I wanted to call to put in a reservation. I went to their web page on my iPhone, and was delighted to see that they had actually bothered to put in a mobile version of the website.

Then my delight turned to annoyance. Nowhere on the mobile site had they bothered to put their phone number. Nowhere. In utter amazement and frustration, sitting in my car, they had completely failed to realize what I as a mobile user would most likely want to do – give them a call on my iPhone that I was using to browse their website.

Great example of a mobile web page

Great example of a mobile web page

Spin forward a few weeks, and I had a print order to pick up from my favorite printing company, Acclaim Print and Copy Center. I knew they had moved, and knew approximately where they had moved to. Again, in my car, I got close but couldn’t find their new office.

I pulled over to a safe place, pulled up their website on my iPhone, www.acclaimprint.com, and again, to my delight, they had put in a mobile site. I was thrilled to see that the mobile site had only three buttons on it:

  • A button to Google maps
  • A button to call them directly (no entering a phone number!)
  • A button to send them an e-mail

Wow. My friend, Dan Karas (owner of Acclaim Print) had actually thought about what his customers might want to do on a mobile device and put that in place. Genius. I pushed the button to call, and Dan answered! Yay. He came out and waved me into his office.

What Do Your Mobile Customers Want?

It seems that mobile sites are the latest shiny thing that webmasters are throwing at their customers. Make sure you step back and think about what your customers want before you set up a mobile site.

An electrician client asked me about a mobile site recently. I asked him, “How many of your customers will be driving around in their cars looking at your website?” Hm. He decided that he didn’t need to waste the money. A restaurant? Absolutely they need a mobile version – but done with their customers in mind first:

  • Make it easy for mobile customers to find the information they want – phone number, map, hours, directions, menu choices, etc.
  • Cut the content and site navigation down to a much smaller subset. If they want to see the whole website, give them a link to it, but you don’t have to duplicate all the content over to mobile – they just won’t read it.
  • Remove most of the heavy graphics and use HTML5/CSS3 for any videos (if you absolutely have to have them). Flash videos and objects won’t render on iPads or iPhones.
  • Keep the mobile website in your own domain. Many of the mobile services will set up a subdomain on THEIR domain like, joeelectrician.mobilesite.com. You will lose any SEO benefit from this type of setup.
  • Make sure you keep your branding and color scheme so it still looks similar to the main site, so the customer doesn’t feel lost. Notice how Dan’s mobile site is branded the same (see graphics above), and the restaurant is not.

An example of a site that has this implemented correclty is Innovation Tri-Valley. Browse it with your PC/Mac/laptop and it has lots of good, rich information. Browse it with a mobile device, and you’ll see a pared down mobile version, simplified navigation and minimal auto-resizing graphics. There is a link to the main site at the bottom for people to get back to the main site if they choose.

Think about your customer first when you go after that shiny new mobile website, and your customers will thank you.

So to Dan, I say, “Thanks!”

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Filed Under: 301 Redirects, Duplicate Content, Link Building, Mobile Marketing, SEO Tagged With: , , ,

What Is A 301-Redirect? Where You Can Use 301-Redirects in your Website

July 3, 2012 By 9 Comments

If you’ve done any type of SEO training or read anything about SEO, it’s likely that you’ve come across references to 301-redirects. It’s easily misunderstood so I’m hoping to clear it up in this series of articles. In our next article, we’ll explain how to use .htaccess files and web.config files to set up your 301-redirects properly, but for now, we’ll just cover what they are and why they’re important.

In the most basic sense, a 301-redirect is just telling the browser to go to a different web address (uniform resource locator or “URL”). In other words, if someone clicks a link to a page that no longer exists, you as the web owner can do one of two things:

  • Let them go to an error 404 page (“Page Not Found”), which will likely cause the person to leave
  • Nicely change their browser address to go to the correct or new page URL

In the latter case, the person coming to your site may not even realize that the address has changed, and instead, just got to the place they wanted to go in the first place.

The “301″ part is an error code that you’re telling the browser and more importantly, the search engines, and it’s useful to us. There are many browser error codes, and the “301″ means that you’re telling the search engine or browser that it’s a link that’s been permanently redirected to a new place.

This is helpful to the search engines. Because the redirect is permanent, they will eventually drop the old address and replace it with the new address in their index.

How To Use 301-Redirects

There are many ways that you can use a 301-redirect in your own website. The most common is to redirect a web page from an old address to a new address.

Let’s say that you’ve set up a new website and switched from static html pages to a PHP platform. If the old pages have been indexed by Google, and someone clicks a link to the old page, you don’t want people to go to a dead link.

Instead, by setting up a 301-redirect from the old page to the new, the links in Google’s index will still work. So a link going to www.example.com/page1.html gets automatically redirected to www.example.com/page1.php. Your readers will appreciate that you put the work into setting this up.

It’s absolutely essential to take the time to redirect all the old URLs to a new page addresses. The reason being is that if other websites have linked to your pages, by using a 301-redirect, you’ll still maintain the link quality, even though the physical URL has changed.

Domain Redirects

Another very common redirect is to redirect whole domains. As I wrote in Multiple Domain Names: Do They Help Search Engine Position, you really don’t want to have multiple domain names all resolve into a working website. Instead, you want to redirect all website domains to one single primary domain, or you risk having a problem with duplicate content.

To do that, you can set up www.example.net to redirect to www.example.com. This way you can own multiple domains, they all work, but you don’t get penalized for duplicate content.

Web Address Shorteners

Have you ever used a URL shortener like tinyurl.com, bit.ly or goo.gl? Guess what? They’re a special kind of 301-redirect. The address shorteners create a unique URL that then 301-redirects to a longer web address. Yes, they maintain your link juice too. Unfortunately, most social media links (like Twitter and Facebook) do not carry any link value because by and large, they have the “rel=nofollow” tag on them, which blocks the link value.

Unusual Uses for 301-Redirects

You can get creative with the uses for your 301-redirects. A couple examples we’ve run into include:

  • An e-mail newsletter went out with a critical link to a web page, but the URL was incorrect. We set up a 301-redirect from the incorrect URL to the correct URL so the e-mail newsletter still worked.
  • A client who had an unusual spelling for their company said that they always got complaints from customers who said their website was down. Their website wasn’t really down, but the customers were typing in the wrong URL. Instead, we purchased the misspelled version of the domain and redirected it to the correct domain. That way, customers never experienced the “down” web address.
  • Creating vanity URLs for customers, like www.example.com/payonline can go to a much longer URL for customers to pay their online bill.

You might come up with your own, but these were some that worked well for us and solved a customer’s problem.

Free SEO Webinar on 301-Redirects

Follow-up (July 31): We have the free SEO webinar recording but have had some trouble converting it over to get it posted on the website. We are working to get this fixed or we’ll re-record it so we can post the webinar recording online.

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Filed Under: 301 Redirects, Link Building Tagged With: , ,

How To Measure Social Media Using Google Analytics: Free Webinar

May 18, 2012 By 2 Comments

YouTube Preview ImageHopefully by now, you’ve figured out that you need to have an analytics program like Google Analytics installed on your website and blog to track the traffic coming into your site from:

  • Direct traffic (people typing in your URL)
  • Referral traffic (links from other websites)
  • Search traffic (people searching on Google, Yahoo! and Bing)
  • Advertising traffic (pay per click campaigns)

Assuming that you’ve done so and are measuring your marketing efforts, you’ll soon discover that the links you’re putting out to social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook just don’t give you much data.

Google recently added social media settings in your Analytics settings (look under “Admin”), but that only tracks clicks that come back from YOUR social pages.

What happens if you tweet a great blog post, and someone else retweets it? How about if your article gets posted on Facebook, and shared by others? If you look in Google Analytics under “Referral Traffic”, all the clicks from Facebook will just show “Facebook”. Twitter data will typically be completely missing, because of those blasted link shorteners like bit.ly.

How do bit.ly, ow.ly, goo.gl, and many other link shorteners actually work? In essence, they’re just a fancy 301-redirect. So Google Analytics is going to treat clicks from link shorteners as a direct visit to your website. Link shorteners are great, but they don’t give us marketers any data about where people are coming into our website or more importantly, which specific social marketing campaigns are working for us!

Free SEO Webinar

On May 16 at 10:30 a.m. PST/1:30 p.m. EST, I will be demonstrating some tools you can use to track your social media traffic down to the nth degree.

In the webinar, we also provided you with a free tool that you can download and use for yourself or even your client’s benefit that will help you get under the hood with what’s going on in social media.

Watch the recording of the webinar here »

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Filed Under: 301 Redirects, Events, Google Analytics, News, SEO Tagged With: , ,

Collaborative Blogging Software Platforms – Why They’re Great for SEO

May 9, 2012 By 4 Comments

Here at the Search Engine Academy, we teach people how use proper techniques to search engine optimize their content and get listed on the search engines like Google. None of this is theoretical, it’s what we use in our own work too. Many of us who are instructors also have SEO and web consulting businesses, so we have to “eat our own dogfood” as it were.

Last year, we started using a collaborative bloogging platform from a company called Innogage. Tom Williams is the founder of Innogage, and his philosophy around SEO and blogging meshed so well with what we teach in our classes, that we decided to use his tool for our own work.

What Is Collaborative Blogging?

First of all, though, what is “collaborative blogging”? Many of us started using blogs as a way to post information about our industry or company, and typically it came from one person. This is great. However, it’s so easy to be enthused at the beginning, only to falter and lose steam after a period of time. You run out of ideas, out of time, or just “don’t get around to it”.

Instead, by having a collaborative blogging platform, you may have multiple people from the company or organization that are each providing content. Perhaps each person only posts once per month. That’s not such a big deal, right? So if you have ten people, each writing once per month, that’s approximately 2-1/2 posts per week. Great!

Each person will have a different take on things, a different idea or even different passions. Each of the contributors will start to develop their own followers and readers can subscribe the content that engages them the most.

SEO Your Blog Posts

The next step is to SEO the content for the search engines. How do you get lots of people to properly create well-optimized content without having to send everyone to training and become experts at SEO?

Enter the Innogage tool, called Innoblogs. They have built into their system (which is based on the WordPress platform – something familiar to many of us) a Search Engine Optimizer that automatically scores each post as the person is writing it. It’s on a scale of 0-100, and turns from red to yellow to green when it’s fully optimized. If the writer is stuck and doesn’t know what to do to raise the score, the system tells them exactly how they need to fix it.

Furthermore, the tool builds automated, targeted keyword links within the content that the writer doesn’t even think about. It just happens, helping the entire blog to function as a link building tool.

Today, along with my fellow Master SEO instructor from Washington DC, Nancy Wigal, we’re interviewing Tom Williams to find out more about how this all works. You can register for the free SEO webinar online or watch the recorded webinar after we get it posted on the Search Engine Academy website. I hope you’ll join us!

Let us know in the comments if you have ever collaborated on a blog system and how that worked for you.

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Filed Under: Link Building, SEO, SEO Blogging, WordPress Tagged With: , , ,

Why Blogging Is Vitally Important for Business – Three Reasons You Should Blog Now

November 30, 2011 By 36 Comments

One of the lessons that we discuss at length in our SEO classes is that blogging is so critical for all businesses. I had one of my students tell me last year:

“I don’t see anyone in my industry blogging, so I shouldn’t blog either, right?”

Wow. WRONG. I told him that if no one in his industry is blogging, that this is actually a HUGE opportunity for him to get way ahead of his competition! By the time his competitors figure it out, he’ll be so far down the road that they won’t be able to catch him.

Seize the opportunity now.

Why Blogging Is Vitally Important to Business

Even if your competitors are already blogging, why should you as a business owner consider blogging? There are probably too many reasons to list in a reasonable amount of space, so I’ll focus on three primary reasons.

Engage Online With Customers

Your readers are likely the ones who will become customers and buy from you. I always tell my students and people when I give talks:

“People buy into you before they buy from you.”

In other words, if you haven’t done a good job building trust and authority in your industry, people won’t buy from you, no matter how great your offer is. If you demonstrate through your blog articles that you’re an authority in your particular industry, you’ll prove that you know what you’re talking about.

Furthermore, your readers can respond to your articles by posting responses, asking questions, or otherwise engaging with you online. The more you have these types of online conversations and respond to people’s questions, the more others will get involved in your content.

If you only write an article once per month, people won’t be as engaged. If you produce an article every other day, your readers will eagerly await your next post to find out what other cool stuff you’re going to tell them.

At some point, when they are ready to buy, they’ll engage with you to find out how you can help solve their particular problem (by buying your stuff).

Link Building

We’re all told that we have to have links to our website. I will be writing a series of articles on the correct way to build links. Suffice it to say for now, that blogs are a fantastic source of links. First, you can sculpt your links back to your own website with keyword-rich links and target specific key phrases (see the link at the top of this article?). That’s one great example of how you can build some links.

But blogging goes even further than that. The more you write great content about your particular field of expertise, the more people will read your articles. Guess what? When you write great articles, readers will reference your articles in their posts and link back to it. So great blog content generates great incoming links – or what I call link bait. You post great articles, it attracts links like fish to a baited hook. This is the best way to generate links, bar none. There’s no easy road, it just takes writing good articles.

Quality Content

Your readers love great content, and so do the search engines. The more content you produce, the more the search engines will come back for more. The more frequently you product GOOD content, the more the search engines will learn that they can keep coming back for more content to index. Freshness counts here, and if your content smells a little stale, the search engines won’t come back so soon.

As you build a library of information through great articles, the more Google is going to serve your website up as a good reference for search terms people want to find out about. If you don’t create much content, your competitors will overtake you. But if you generate fresh content every few days, over time, you’ll continue to bubble up to the top of Google without even trying.

There are so many other reasons why blogging is important to your business, but I’ll leave it at these top three for now.

What other benefits have you seen for your own business? Tell us in the comments.

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Filed Under: Link Building, SEO Blogging Tagged With: , , ,