Definition of Niche…

1. A recess in a wall, as for holding a statue.
2. A cranny, hollow, or crevice, as in a rock.
3. A situation or activity specially suited to
a person’s abilities or character.

Internet Marketing and the importance of
finding your niche:

I think I always knew that choosing the right niche
market was considered essential to business success,
yet for me, as for many professionals, choosing a
niche felt something like the kiss of death.

When we dig in our heels against choosing a niche,
we are probably responding to one of the first two
definitions above. After all, who wants to do business
in a hole in a wall or in a tiny, rocky place, right?

If you believe that defining your niche market means
choosing a hard, cramped, and confining space, it’s no
wonder you resist.

People who bring their heart and soul to their work will
resist niche marketing that tells them they must restrict
the ways in which they offer value to the world.

The good news is that choosing your niche market will do
exactly the opposite: it will free you to be the biggest,
most authentic, and most complete offer possible.

Consider the third definition of niche.

“A situation or activity specially suited to a person’s
abilities or character.”

When you look at niche in this light, you will see that your
perfect niche market is that location or domain in which you
are most readily accessible to the people who are most likely
to benefit from (and thus value) the offer that you are and
in which you are simultaneously most free to exercise your
brilliance and expertise.

Your niche market is the place in which you have a natural
competitive advantage because you occupy exactly the right
place in the right ecosystem.

A good niche market is one in which:

• You are highly visible and easily accessible to the people
  who are most likely to benefit from your work, including
  prospective clients and customers, prospective collaborators
  and partners, and others with whom value-adding activities
  are most likely to be mutually beneficial.
• You can employ the widest range of your talents, skills,
  and training (your offer.)
• There’s a paradox in naming your niche market.

When you give people a category to put your products or
services in, it is easier for them to get a handle on what
you do and to remember it.

It’s also much easier for them to appreciate how you differ
from other professionals in that category. In other words,
by putting yourself in a category, you can also make yourself
stand out because you distinguish yourself from others in
that category. This is best referred to as your unique selling
proposition (USP) or as some might call it, a unique selling
point.

Over 10 years ago, when I first started teaching SEO skills
to small groups of business owners, I had a vision to create
a form of event which would be unlike any of the other more
common SEO seminars or conferences. There were plenty of good
SEO type conferences around, so how would I create my USP?

My thought was that most conferences are big events with dozens
of speakers. Great for the big money type of event, great for
networking too.

But I decided that I wanted to do small groups and do them more
in the form of a hands-on SEO Workshop, over a period of time.
My thought was it could be a place where each student would get
individualized attention to detail, plus actual drilling
and hands on practice. A place where they would be able to learn
“by doing.”

Many big conferences offered upsells and add on services that
aim to extract even more money out of the attendees for things
like coaching or mentoring. Instead, we decided to offer the
benefit of mentoring in the form of a 6 month mentoring program
and include it as part of the training at no extra cost.

There are lots of other things we did differently too, like daily
evaluations to benchmark each student’s progress day by day and
we made it a priority to answer every students question.

So you can see that with all of these USP type things in mind we
started the very first SEO Mastery Workshop back in January 2002
in San Antonio, Texas. Today we have a  network of educators that
are located all over the globe, helping ordinary business owners
to understand SEO, Social Medial and a wide variety of high
performance topics to boost the success of their online business
and enable them to compete and win.

Remember to always consider your own USP carefully and build out
your business in an original way so that you separate yourself
from the crowd in whatever niche that you choose.

Check out our list of upcoming hands-on SEO Mastery Workshop
dates on this page.

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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?

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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Your default is multiple columns, and from what I’m reading, many folks are putting their streams back to a single column. I get that; this is a little overwhelming and is causing me vertigo.  In the upper left of this screen shot, you can see that your cue for new items in your stream(s) is quite different. It’s a little bit like Facebook.You have to click the little blue wheel to see new items in your stream.

If you don’t like it, click on this icon in the upper right hand corner and go back to a single stream:

Did you also notice your profile picture is bigger? Whatever happened to Google saying they want more content above the fold? Sure aren’t following here!

You have some new features for your photos in Google Plus. You have what’s called “auto enhance” and “auto awesome.” Auto enhance lets you improve photo quality by tweaking contrast, brightness and other elements to make your photo better before uploading. The good folks at Google I/O came out with this explanation for you to consider:

Sometimes we’ll create a brand new image based on a set of photos in your library. For example: if you upload a sequence of photos, we’ll try and animate them automatically. Or if you send us a few family portraits, we’ll find everyone’s best smile, and stitch them together into a single shot. Likewise with panoramas, filmstrips, and a whole lot more. We call these kinds of enhancements Auto Awesome.

Google Plus is also adding hash tags that they feel are appropriate to items in your stream. If you click on the hash tag, you can see content related to what you post. I really like this, because I think it represents an opportunity to have your content show up more times. Thank you G+!

There are a few new changes to Google Hangouts that I think are going to improve user experience. If you get an invite or someone from your circles sends you a message about a hangout, you no longer have to accept the request first. Good for Google eliminating one click! Do you use Google Voice? If so, you can now take calls on your Google voice number while you’re in a Hangout, on Gmail, Google Plus and the Hangouts app in Google Chrome.

We’ll be incorporating these new features and benefits in our SEO training on day four of All Things Google.

What do you think of the new Google Plus? Let us know in the comments.

As always, I care about ya, my fellow SEO peep, so keep it between the ditches!

All the best to you,

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SEO changes every day, it seems. It can be challenging to keep up with what’s going on. I usually spend about an hour to two hours each day, combing the blogs and reading about what’s new, hot and happening. All’s you have to do is go dark or get off the grid for about a day, and the next thing you know, SEO processes and strategies you’ve been doing are suddenly black hat SEO or just obsolete, ugh!

So here’s my trusted, preferred sources that keep me up to date on SEO:

• Google Analytics Blog – here’s where you can learn all about the newest features and benefits of Google Analytics. They do a great job of explaining changes and updates, and how to best use them.
• Google Webmaster Central Blog – everything that your Google Webmaster Tools touches upon can be found here. Updates, discussions and new features are posted.
• Google’s Chief Anti-Spam Engineer Matt Cutts – I really like this one. Matt humanizes himself to us by talking about his 30 day challenges he likes to implement in his life, as well as all things anti-spam that are being addressed by Google.
• Search Engine Guide – lots of good stuff about brand building, local SEO, PPC, link building, keywords and more.
• Search Engine Journal – lots of guest writers share their knowledge and information about ranking, Facebook, Google manual penalties, digital marketing strategies and so much more.
• Search Engine Land – my favorite, and probably most every other SEOer’s on the planet. I absolutely trust Danny Sullivan and the guest bloggers who happily give away valuable information, processes and strategies to boost my SEO knowledge on link building, blogging, keyword research and content marketing.
• Search Engine Roundtable – Barry Schwartz is a great, great SEO guy. I depend upon Barry to be the one of the first, if not the first SEOer to break news about Google updates. He’s busy combing webmaster forums and keeps his ear to the ground better than any other SEO writer I follow.
• Search Engine Watch – these guys are great. The guest writers are experts in link building, local SEO, mobile SEO, PPC and so much more SEO news and happenings.
• SEO By The Sea – if you want to keep up with Google patent filings, Bill Slawski is the man. He’s staked out his niche in reporting and analyzing Google patents, as well as basic SEO functions that are timeless. Bill writes in a very easy to understand style.
• SEOMoz – I love this site for their famous “Whiteboard Friday” feature, as well as the interesting news and content about the ups and downs of clients, enterprise SEO, being an in-house SEOer vs. freelance, as well as great posts on content management.
• Webmaster World – from YouTube to code to social to hardware and more, subscribe to these guys and get a well-rounded perspective on things that support your SEO efforts.

So there you have it! What are your favorite SEO blogs or writers that aren’t mentioned here? Let me know in your comments.

Until next time, keep it between the ditches!

Best to you,

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I’ve been running Search Engine Academy Washington DC for over three years now, and I’ve decided to get help with my pay per click campaign management for an upcoming Google Adwords experiment I’m going to run. I’m finally comfortable that I can augment my organic search results with a PPC component.

I thought it would make a great blog post series to record and share my journey with you all as an online diary of sorts. Depending upon how this works out, I may use these posts and articles as a case study by the end of this year.

At any rate, the PPC journey starts with not a single step, but an idea. My wonderful SEO colleague, Steve Chafe, is a PPC expert. I am not, so I have Steve onboard as my SEO PPC consultant to create, implement, test and make a successful Google Adwords campaign. We first starting talking about me hiring him to help me do PPC the right way about two months ago. We bounced some ideas back and forth about the scope, who we would target, and how we would write the ads.

We started out by simply brainstorming what the parameters would be. Initially, we discussed at least three campaigns that target each of the three Search Engine Academy courses – the two day basic, the three day advanced, and the five day master SEO training classes, but we also decided we would segment and display these campaigns according the target audiences I want to hit:

• Marketing/Communications personnel
• Internet/Affiliate marketers
• Career changers

Steve and I talked about the different types of landing pages we would need to create. I see multiples of each course for the different target audiences:

• Marketing and Communications – any of the three courses
• Internet/Affiliate marketers – also any of the three SEO training classes
• Career changers – the five day master SEO course

Steve analyzed my website and sketched out some major changes to my template, which make sense. Up to this point, we’d been corresponding by email or phone.

We finally got our schedules to line up, and did an online meeting. Steve is a great idea partner – in some ways, he’s like the older brother I wished I’d had. We teach a module on creativity and SEO in our two day basic course, and as we had our online meeting, I saw exactly how it works, because we got some new ideas by bouncing some crazy stuff off one another.

I told Steve I have developed some custom SEO training packages for web content writers and PR professionals. Steve got pretty jazzed up and brought up something I hadn’t thought about – the big push towards content marketing. See how creativity works? I was stoked!

Long story short, we are going to develop a mini-site that’s stripped down to offer SEO training and certification for several target audiences. We bought a domain name, moved it to Steve’s server, and discussed Information Architecture and possible wireframes. My homework is to complete the IA and wireframes.

Steve’s going to set up Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. Now, we are going to refine our root keyword list and he’s going to the Adwords keyword research tool and dig out some groups of keyword phrases.

I’ll update you late next week or the week after on my journey. By sharing my own experience with you, I hope you’ll see how doing a lot of upfront work and research can increase your chances of PPC success.

Until next time, keep it between the ditches, umkay?!

All the best to you,

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Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch first reported the Penguin update last week.

Let’s refresh our brains as to what the Google Penguin algorithm feature is all about. When Penguin was released on April 24, 2012, it was mainly designed to penalize sites with spammy linking schemes that consisted of taking a high-traffic keyword, creating thousands and thousands of links with the phrase in the anchor text, then parking those links on hundreds of sites. In other words, keyword stuffing in anchor text link on really scummy, spammy link farms with little domain diversity.

OK, you’re level set on what Penguin is about, and now we know it’s a-coming. Is there anything you can do to get ready? Glad you asked, because yes, there are a few things you can start checking to see if you’re possibly in line to nailed. Let’s go over them quickly, so you can get your butt to work, if need be.

Do a link profile analysis on your sites and your client’s websites. Take whatever tool makes you happy – Open Site Explorer, Xenu, SEO SpyGlass – whichever, and get the inbound back links for each of your sites. Google Webmaster Tools is also a great resource to review them. Dump the results in a spreadsheet, and sort them such that you can see two main things:

• Anchor Text Diversity
• Link Domain Diversity

What do we mean by these? First, make sure your anchor text is predominantly the company, business name and/or branding. Exact keyword phrases should be de-emphasized, and the majority of your anchor text should reflect the company or business name and branding.  Note the percentages and if you need to contact sites to get new, branded anchor text for your links, right now this very minute is the time to start. Seriously.

As far as link domain diversity is concerned, look at the domains. Do you have a lot of links from the same domain, or just a few domains? Do any of them look suspicious or spammy? Does anything really weird or off-kilter stand out to you? If so, make a note of those domains. If you find any, you need to contact the site immediately and get the links removed. If you can’t get a response, you may want to consider the Google Link Disavow tool.

Got it? OK, if need be, get cracking. Good luck! As soon as I hear more, I’ll post another article about it. As RuPaul says, “Good luck, and don’t frog it up!”

Keep it between the ditches and be safe!

All the best to you,

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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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So…What Are The Search Engine Optimization Advantages?

Glad you asked. Here are a few for you ponder while pouring a beer, for example:

• If you apply SEO to your site, you’re conducting due diligence by not leaving search results visibility to chance. You may feel like it’s an exercise in futility, but if you didn’t do it…you’d be on page 347 of search results. Really.
• You’re giving the search engine crawlers the information they need to rank and index your site.
• You’ve crafted really nice, unique meta titles and descriptions to encourage a higher click through rate (CTR), which makes Google happy, because if your CTR for pages increases, you could well end up getting more Google love by being pushed up higher in the SERPs.
• You’ve busted your hind parts writing great, useful, unique content that your competitor didn’t bother with. People would rather read your pages, so take THAT, Mr. Competition!
• You hack away diligently at trying to find good link partners, because you know Google places so much emphasis on links. Sure, it hurts to slog away, but you know the price to pay if you don’t at least TRY.
• You’ve taken the time to map out your site structure, to make it user-friendly and easy for your most important content to be within one or two clicks by your target audience, congratulations!
• As much as you may hate and detest it, you’re blogging. You know the big G (Google, not the U.S. government) loves fresh new content as much as your readers do, so you turn to and crank out blog posts. I’m so with you.
• Because you’re a local business, you’ve taken the extra time and energy to apply local SEO processes and strategies to get better rankings for local search queries.

Since you know a lot about SEO, you also apply it to your social media efforts, like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus and all the others that are floating out there in cyber space.

There are plenty more search engine optimization advantages. I’ve only listed a few that are very obvious. What else do you do for SEO on your site?

Until next time, keep it between the ditches and get home safe!

All the best to you,

Learn about in-person, hands-on SEO workshop with one of our expert trainers!

I also do client work, and I want to share something with you about trying to find link partners for my clients that just leaves my mouth hanging to the floor.

First off, we know that Google Penguin has drastically changed the way we build links. It’s slower than ever, and each link won is like fighting an epic and legendary battle with everything we’ve got in our arsenal.

Doing a careful link analysis and tailoring a very individual request for a link takes more time than ever, and yet, this is the way it’s got to be done in the brave new post-Penguin world. So be it.

Well, when I do all the above, and given everything else I have to do on any given day, if I crank out five requests per day, I feel good about myself and think that I will have a nice shot of single malt during happy hour at my own hacienda, thank you very much.

So I start getting back some replies (most webmasters just ignore my emails, par for the course), and let me tell you, there is something going on out there with web owners who do not thoroughly read or keep up with Google’s SEO recommended best practices and guidelines. Let me share with you a theme that’s developing, one that I find quite disturbing.

I’m getting back replies along the lines of “yeah, no, I don’t want to trade links with you. I heard Google no longer wants anyone to exchange links or ask for them, so I don’t do that anymore.”

When I got this back, you could have knocked me to the floor. Where in the sweet love of almighty Google did THAT come from? I had to read it multiple times to make sure my eyeballs and glasses weren’t showing me something out of a nightmare. After several readings, some of them out loud to my cats, I realized I was seeing some massive, massive mis-interpretation and/or misinformation.

I mulled over what to do. Should I take time that I really don’t have, expend energy that could be used in a more positive manner (like finding more link partners), attempt to educate someone about the truth (I wasn’t feeling it, really), and tell them what Google Penguin is all about?

No. Not my responsibility.

If these folks choose to follow half-baked information sources, or if they develop this theory in their own fevered brain, who am I to disabuse them?

You may think otherwise of me, but I decided to use my precious time, energy and resources to move on and continue searching for complimentary websites, but I just wanted to share this little nugget of intelligence with you, dear gentle SEO reader.

I hope these folks wake up someday and realize they are hurting their own sites by sitting on the sidelines and avoid building links. Granted, link building is hard, hard, HARD, but you gotta try at least every once in awhile, don’t you think?

Until next time, keep it between the ditches comrades!

All the best,

Learn about in-person, hands-on SEO workshop with one of our expert trainers!

The next thing I hear is “well, just exactly how much does SEO matter in the big scheme of things?” I can’t give you a number or percentage; smarter people than me probably have that knowledge on the tip of their tongue, but let’s just say it matters a helluva lot.

Let’s take a look at some fundamental SEO stuff and things that aren’t likely to change anytime soon.

First, doing keyword research – the foundation, the bedrock, the number one step in your SEO journey – is more critical than ever. She who ranks high for multiple keyword phrases shows up higher in SERPs. Besides, if you don’t know the keywords and phrases your target market is plugging into Google, how the hell are you going to show up in their search results?

Creating and optimizing useful, unique meta data – I hope it’s not a news flash to you that taking the time and effort to make butt kicking meta titles and descriptions that match the page content they’re married to is still extremely important. Use your chosen keyword phrase in the title and description tag, try to fit in a call to action, and if local SEO is critical for your business, be sure to include specific geographic information such as a city, state, county, zip code, etc.

Writing high quality, useful, unique, educational content – Google maintains your job is to write for your human reader, not the search engine crawlers. By creating content that stands out and using natural language processing, and taking personalization of search into account, you should stand a good chance of getting good visibility in the SERPs.

Providing a helpful site navigation experience with a user-friendly linking strategy – be sure you sit down and map out your site’s Information Architecture (IA). Make it easy for your target audience to find your most important content quickly. Yes, this is part of SEO.

Provide a site map – I don’t care if your site is only five pages. Make sure the site map is linked on every page. It’s for the human reader and the search engine crawlers.

Even if you’re doing social media, does SEO matter still?

Sure – SEO augments your social media efforts. Can you use a keyword phrase in your social media streams, titles, descriptions or alt tags? Do so!

In particular, if you’re playing around in Google Plus with a personal profile, Google Authorship, Google Community pages and hangouts, it’s to your advantage to use your SEO skills and knowledge to make sure you show up higher in the G+ landscape.

I hope this short diatribe answers the question. I realize there are fads, that strategies come and go, or are turned upside down by algorithm and ranking changes like Google Penguin and Panda, but through all the changes, SEO still comes out on the other side as being necessary.

Until next time, keep it between the ditches, and if you’ve got some basic SEO to do your site, why not go ahead and knock it out, then measure the results?

All the best to you,

Learn about in-person, hands-on SEO workshop with one of our expert trainers!