How Much Is SEO Worth?

Here is the general formula we use to calculate SEO worth for a client:

The calculation relies on the marketing principle that it takes 17 marketing touches (impressions) to convert someone into a paying customer. A touch is any time a prospect sees your brand name, an ad, a website, or gets a referral about your business.

We are going to assume 1 newly acquired website visitor = 1 marketing touch

We are also going to assume that 1 customer will generally do business with you for about a year. This can be modified to your liking, but considering people move, try a competitor, natural attrition etc. - we figure this may be a good rule of thumb for this calculation.

The next part of the equation requires the client to tell you what the average annual revenue contribution 1 customer brings to the business.

The equation becomes:

1 Website Visit = (Average Annual Revenue Contribution of a Customer) / 17

Here is an example. I eat at this BBQ joint next to my office throughout the year. I calculated that my average annual contribution to this store front was around $99. (Basically I spend $99/year eating there). Divide that number by 17 and the value of one website visitor is worth $5.86.

Now I know what you are saying. “Does the average customer spend $99/year there?”. In my case I would venture to say that I do eat there more frequently than the average customer. However, I always eat from their value menu, which keeps the cost down considerably. I’m going to assume that my annual average ticket does not vary much from the other customers. Again, the client should supply this value for you to make the analysis more accurate.

So, if we increase their website traffic by 1000 more visitors a month, we have created $5,086 worth of future business opportunity for them. Pretty handy eh?

Robots Read Everything, Your Visitors Don't

The point here is that most internet users do not read every word on a webpage. They scan the page and look for words and calls to action. Most importantly, all your attempts to heavily market to them will generally fail and they will ignore those marketing messages. Sometimes it can even drive them away.

Generally, your visitors are on your website because they are looking for something, or they are trying to solve a problem. Your goal should not necessarily be to overload them with tons of textual information, but to help solve their problems or help them quickly find what they are looking for.

Now the opposite holds true for the non-human visitors. Who are these non-human visitors? The Search Engines! All they want is text. And tons of it! They love it so much, that the more you provide them with unique text, they end up rewarding you with more visitors.

So where do you draw the line?

It depends on where your website is at in terms of traffic. If you are suffering from not enough traffic, then increase your on page text. Try to make your on page literature as valuable to readers as possible. Don’t just fill up the page with repeated keywords and meaningless text.

WARNING: In some cases you don’t want to provide all your answers in your website copy. Sometimes you want your visitors to have questions. In these cases, generally you want a sales person to take over and speak to them about solving their problems. In this case have a call to action like: Call Now To Find Out More. Or have a chat option available.

Now if you already have enough traffic, then you are golden. The next step is to monetize the traffic. This is the situation where you may reduce the amount of text on your page, and optimize your pages to convert more visitors into actual customer or qualified leads.

A lot of people think that there are some golden internet rules to converting visitors into more business. Some of these myths are bigger buttons, stronger calls to actions, listing bulleted benefits etc. The most important notion to take away from this post is: These myths may work in some cases, but not all. The only way to increase conversions is to test different elements on your page.

Typical On Page Elements To Test:

And of course the list goes on and on…

Conversion testing is very analytical and it takes a lot of patience. But the rewards are phenomenal. If you think your website can greatly improve from conversion optimization, contact us and we’ll make it happen.

SEO Should Be Done With Care

This mindset is usually prominent in more sales driven people. Their interest in SEO is purely from a profit stand point. They know if they rank high on a search engine results page, that will translate into some sort of dollar return. Naturally, these people are the Google Spam Team’s worst enemies.

Let me clarify SEO right now: Search Engine Optimization is not about manipulating search engine rankings. What it is, is the profession of ensuring that a website is search engine friendly. This means that all the content on the website is easily indexed by the search engines and that the website architecture is crafted in a logical format that search engines appreciate.

When people get it in their head that they are going to “trick” the search engines, that’s when websites get banned or penalized. Remember, the people who work at the search engines are probably a lot smarter than you and it will be tough to slip one past them.

Finally, this is the most important part: Think from a search engine’s perspective. They also run a business. And their job is to make sure they provide their users with the best experience possible. Therefore if your site doesn’t deserve to be at the top of the first page of the search engine results, then the search engines will probably not send their users to your site.  And that is exactly what you should think when you design and build content for a website: “Am I providing the best experience I can with regards to the subject matter my site is based on?”.

2. Keyword Stuffing

This is a common newbie mistake. They think their a simple relationship between what the search engine returns when a keyword is queried. That relationship is:  the more you have a specific keyword on your site, the more likely your website will be one of the top ranking selections in the search engine results pages.

Only if it was that easy, right? Well actually, no. Think about it. If the first site a search engine returned was just littered with the same words over and over again, wouldn’t that be a poor result?

Keyword stuffing includes repeating a keyword in any on-page content, in titles, in anchor text (hyperlinks), or on the source code. There is simply no need to repeat keywords ever! Just don’t do it. It’s actually really easy. All you have to do is write your content naturally. Just make sure the keyword you are aiming for is once in the title, once in the heading and at least once on the on-page content. Finally don’t make more than one page based on the same keyword.

3. Link Spamming

This is where the intermediate SEO person makes mistakes. This includes a lot of so called “SEO companies”. They learn that having many links pointing back to your website increases a website’s search engine rankings. This is partially true. However, it’s the quality of links, not necessarily the quantity of links that make a site climb the rankings. And even more important than that is the relevance of those links.

Anyone out there amassing thousands of links from all over the internet using the same keyword anchor text is doing their website a disservice. Any company doing this is liable for getting their client’s website removed from the search engines.

4. Buying Links

This is a touchy one. Once people realize how hard it is to get backlinks to their website, buying links becomes a tempting situation. But in the eyes of the search engines, this is one thing you can do to be banished to the depths of search engine hell. They absolutely hate it when you buy links. Now you may be clever and get away with it, but if you get caught, boy oh boy you are up that famous creek!

And if you don’t believe me read this article on Google’s thoughts on paid links.

5. Keyword Cannibalization

This one is really tricky. The idea is you only want one webpage on your site per topic or keyword. If you have two pages that are basically about the same topic or keyword, then the search engines have a hard time deciding which one to choose. A lot of keyword cannibalization issues can be solved with a good site architecture.

For instance if you write about the same topic all the time, you would want one main page that is optimized for the keyword or topic at hand and then multiple sub pages that support the main topic page. Think of it as building a mini pyramid for that keyword.

6. Hidden Text

This is an interesting mistake because you may think, “I would never do that, because that’s just stupid”. But sometimes your website design is creating hidden text without you knowing it. I think this is less of a problem these days because designers use CSS to do all sorts of image replacements. However, I tell our clients that if you can avoid it, you probably should. There really is no need to hide text because there are plenty of design solutions available.

Why Should You Make Your URLs SEO Friendly?

A lot of people think that having keywords in your URLs helps with search engine rankings. I would say this true for your domain name. But for any part of your URLs after the domain name, the keywords don’t carry much weight (meaning if the search engines were only to rank your site by your URLs alone, keywords after the domain name wouldn’t count for much). However, there are few reasons why you want to keep your URLs “SEO Friendly”…

First off, what are SEO friendly URLs?  Well here is a simple example:

http://www.yourdomain/seo-friendly-urls

The idea is that your URLs don’t have all sorts of weird characters, number and long strings of meaningless junk in them.

Here is an example of an unfriendly URL:

http://www.yourdomain/?&q345adfasdf-asdf–asdfa234432asdkf

Here are 3 reasons I can think of as to why you want SEO friendly URLs:

1. If People Decide To Link To A Certain Page On Your Site

Sometimes when people link to you, they will use the URL as the anchor text in the link. And for that reason alone, one should institute SEO friendly URLs. Chances are if you place keywords in your SEO friendly URL:

http://www.yourdomain.com/here-are-my-keywords

Then at least your keywords will get picked up in the anchor text.  And having keywords in the anchor text of links is one of the biggest drivers in SEO.

2. Aesthetics

I think there is certain trust issue with long, ugly looking URLs. I personally get a weird, warning (like I’m about to get a virus feeling) when I see URLs that look like http://www.yourdomain.com?&dasfasdjk9o8u34oI*Uojoasdfasdfalskdhfulaishdfkla. I think that can be safely assumed for a certain percentage of internet users as well. So why scare them off? Focus on nicely trimmed, easy to read URLs.

3. Copy And Pasting

Finally, we have all seen what happens to URLs that are too long. Someone copy and pastes the URL and tries to send it to you in an email. And for whatever reason, the URL gets broken apart during the transmission or formatting process, and it’s basically a dead link. Why limit your exposure with URLs that can “break down” and are hard to virally spread?

So that’s all I got for SEO friendly URLs. Anyone else having anything to add to this?

Stay Away!!!

These services are attractive to the backlink fiend. Why not get 1000 backlinks for $99? The reason is quite simple: you will gain absolutely no value from these links. In this post we will discuss the four reasons why you want to stay away from these services at all costs.

1. Steroids Get Websites In Trouble Too

The first problem with using a directory submission service is that you will be getting about 700 links within a month. This type of link growth will look very unnatural to the search engines and can cause your site to get flagged or penalized. If you read our last post, you will learn that unnatural link growth is an important thing to keep in mind when link building.

2. Low Page Rank Just Brings You Down

99% of the directories that your website will get submitted to will have very low page rank. Probably more than 50% of them will have a page rank of zero. As of recently, this is one of the biggest ways to devalue a site - by getting lots of backlinks from low page rank, irrelevant websites.

3. Steer Away From The Bermuda Link Triangle

A lot of these directories practice triangular linking. This is where multiple sites all link to each other. This use to be a simple way to build backlinks by simply adding more sites to your arsenal. The search engines caught on to this years ago.

4. Links Farms Are Usually Slaughter Houses

You’ll notice that the types of directories these services submit to are nothing but pages and pages of links. These type of sites are called “link farms”. You never want your website associated with link farms. About four years ago link farms were SEO spamming techniques that were quickly penalized by major search engines.

Conclusion:

A simple word of advice for anyone getting into SEO: the easy way out usually doesn’t work. Tempting SEO offers will be solicited to you here and there, and if you just use common sense you’ll realize that a lot of these offers are too good to be true.

Stop Duplicate Content

If you use a content management system like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal or OsCommerce you may be suffering from duplicate content issues. These can be really difficult problems to solve. Sometimes it requires complicated .htaccess rewrite solutions and endless hours finding links to nofollow. But now there is an easier solution for most of these problems.

The trick here is to use your Google Webmaster Tools account and your robots.txt file.

1. Identify Duplicate Content Issues

One way to see if your site is having duplicate content issues is by going to your Google Webmaster Tools account. Look under Diagnostics ->HTML Suggestions ->and check to see if you have duplicate titles and meta descriptions. If you do, then you may be repeating the same title tag and description content on several pages of your site. However, this may also indicate that your website is creating duplicate webpage content. If your site is replicating the same page over and over again, then obviously your titles and meta descriptions will be the same. In either instance you are going to want to correct this duplication issue.

Another thing to look for are sections of your website like feeds, comments pages, and review page. These pages generally create duplicate content. You do not want the search engines crawling these pages.

2. How To Block Search Engines From Indexing Duplicate Content

Once you have identified the sections of your website that should be blocked from the search engines, create a robots.txt file. These are extremely simple to create, but also incredibly damaging if you make one small mistake. I’m not going to go into how to make a robots.txt file, because http://www.robotstxt.org does a great job of explaining it.

3. How To Attack Difficult Sections Of Your Website

A lot of content management systems like to use URLs that have questions marks and equal signs in them. Luckily, Google allows you to block strings within URLs. Here is an example:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*?page=

This statement will block any URL that has the string ?page= in it. The reason why this is so handy is that most robots.txt examples only show us how to block webpages and directories AND not URLs that have long complicated strings. We just had a case where this little technique came in very handy!

Link building Is A Rollercoaster

One of the most critical SEO efforts is external link building. This simply means getting other websites to link back to your site. But before you go hog wild getting as many backlinks as you can, read our post on how to do this SEO art effectively.

Recently there have been some major shifts in the way Google ranks your sites based on your link building efforts. Every year or so, there are major changes to the way the Google algorithm considers backlinks. This can get to be daunting for people managing websites and SEO campaigns.

We are going to lay out a simple recipe for external link building that should be rather time-independent. Meaning, no matter what Google or the other search engines do in the future, this recipe should be a safe bet from here on out.

1. Think Natural

This is more of a mindset than a “to-do”.  Websites that get a large amount of backlinks in one month, and didn’t get any backlinks the previous months appear to have “unnatural” link growth. Search engines may see this large increase of backlinks and think that your site is up to something suspicious. This type of quick ramp up can hurt your link building efforts. So what is the natural way to link build? The natural progression of websites is that they tend to grow and CONTRACT over the years. Some sites are seasonal, some sites get a popularity spurt for a few months, and a lot of sites just flat line. Think of how your site traffic varies over time and consider your traffic trends while you are link building.

2. What Would Be Your Most Popular Backlink?

Generally, the most common backlinks on the web are just links to a domain name, where the anchor text is the domain name.

For Example: <a href = ” http://www.yourdomain.com ” > yourdomain.com < / a >

With that said, make sure that 50% or more of your backlinks match the above type of backlink.

3. Don’t Put Too Much Focus On One Or Two KeyWord Backlinks

If you really want to rank high for the word “widget”, don’t have 100% of your backlinks pointing to your domain name with the anchor text as “widget”. It’s just looks plain fishy in the eyes of the search engines. It’s OK to have a few backlinks with just one or two word keyword phrases only, but keep this effort to below 25% of your entire backlinking strategy.

4. Make Sure Your Backlinks Point To Some Interal Pages

When people decide to link to your site, they sometimes pick internal pages to link to. This is natural. Create some backlinks for internal pages and even consider using entire sentences as the anchor text.

5. Randomize!

I would venture to say the more random your link building efforts are (by varying your anchor text and corresponding URLs), the more natural it will seem. The thing you need to consider here, is how would the public backlink to you? They would probably pick random pages on your site they found useful and would post the URLS of those pages as backlinks. The point here is really vary your backlink and anchor text distribution.

6. Quality over Quantity

If you try to go for quantity, you are bound to get very low PR (page rank) links, and links from sites that border on the “dark side”. These links can be potentially damaging if their numbers are too high. If you get a few links from bad seeds, it won’t hurt because you have no control over those. But focus on quality. Find reputable sites to get backlinks from with a decent PR.

7.  Ramp Up And Ramp Down Your Link Building

Some months, tone down your backlink numbers. Make your link building effort look “wavy” and “jagged”, and stay away from linear link building.

This is a general guide for link building. The best course is to plan out a “natural” link building worksheet for the future months ahead. Put it all down on paper and see if your course looks natural.

A lot of this advice comes from new Google algorithm changes and some rumblings in the SEO community. This is our attempt at setting a good course for those who are going to begin a link building strategy or are already in the middle of one. We would be more than happy to hear your thoughts and advice on this matter.

Thanks!

OCS

Help Google Find Your Treasure

Since Google is the most popular search engine at this present time, it’s imperative that Google can properly search your website. The only way to know whether or not Google is crawling your site completely is by submitting a Google XML site map through Google Webmaster Tools.

Top Three Reasons Why You Should Use Google Webmaster Tools:

1. You need to know if your website has been completely crawled by Google.
2. You need to know if Google has encountered any problems while crawling your site.
3. You need to know how many duplicate title tags and meta description tags your site has.

The first thing to do is to go to the Google Webmaster Tools start page and sign up:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/start/

Once you have signed up for Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) and your site has been verified, the next step is to create an XML site map file and upload it via GWT. Creating a site map can be slightly difficult. Here are some methods to create a complete, XML compliant site map.

1. www.xml-sitemaps.com

This handy website will crawl through your site and generate a sitemap.xml file for you. Once you download your sitemap.xml file, simply put it in the root directory of your website and notify Google that your site map is ready in GWT.

The only problem with this site map generating service is that if may not find all your webpages (URLs). This could be the result of webpages that are not linked properly, or instances where xml-sitemaps.com times out while generating your .xml file.

2. Using Your Own Sitemap Generating Script.

We highly recommend having an automated script created that will generate the site map file for you. Wordpress has a site map plugin and there are also free online scripts that will crawl your site and spit out a xml site map in your root directory.

The only hard part about having an automated script installed on your site is that you have to verify that the script is actually picking up every URL on your site.  Someone in your organization will have to do a manual check to make sure that the automated site map script works.  Hopefully you don’t have thousands of pages already :).

The best way to do this is to get a report of all the files contained in your website.  We usually just do a complete download of every file and directory from our webserver, then use a program like jedit to copy and paste the file names into excel. Next, we sort the excel spreadsheet to only list .html and .php files (or whatever extensions have content on them). This is a good way to make an inventory of all your website pages.

Finally, we cross reference all the actual webpages on our spreadsheet with what the automated script is listing in terms of webpages. If they both show the same results then we know our script works.

The lesson here is that you can’t always take a script or a services word for it. It can be a costly mistake. Always do sanity check to see if your automated help is providing the results you want.

3. Content Management Systems and Dynamically Created Content

This is where the verification process get tricky. You can never trust that a plugin or script is actually accounting for all your URLs correctly. The only way to be sure if your plugin or script is accounting for all your URLs is to:

1) Test it out on a small set of URLs.

Or

2) Set up an independent test site to see if your plugin or script is working correctly.

This can be a mind racking process depending on how big your site is and what management system you use to contain it. Please comment on what methods you found that work best for you.

Thanks!

Add Youtube To Your Marketing Plan

Youtube is one of the most visited websites on the internet. It’s also a search engine. I suggest you put your business on it.  Although this idea of using Youtube to increase your online presence is an obvious no brainer, it’s not always easy to get videos produced. If you have someone on board who can video edit, you should consider allocating some time for them to produce videos. Otherwise you can find decent videographers in your area who are relatively inexpensive (see craigslist.org). Here are the reason’s why you should go the Youtube route:

1. Youtube Is The Number 3 Most Popular Site On The Internet.

People spend a lot of time on Youtube. People mostly use Youtube for entertainment, but the way Youtube is designed, people will eventually run into your videos. Thanks to Youtube’s related video panel, chances are people will see your video as a possible compliment to the video they have just finished watching. Just be sure to title your video in a seductive manner.

2. Youtube Results Show Up On The Front Page Of Google.

Why not help your search engine presence with some video results as well. In the ongoing battle for search dominance, Youtube video placement is part of the two pronged attack of getting on the first page of Google.  If you don’t get your videos on Google, your competitors will.

3. Video Is A Powerful Communication And Marketing Tool.

Video is attention grabbing. It quickly relays your message to your viewers. The best part is your viewers don’t have to read! In contrast to your website, chances are most of your visitors simply skim over your website textual content. They never read every word (bloggers, this section is meant for more commerce clientele). This doesn’t mean your site should not have many words, it’s just the words are really their to serve the search engine bots. With that said, write for the search engines and produce videos for the humans.

The beauty of video is that it communicates in three synergistic ways that website text alone can’t compete with: sound, images and text. Video is by far the most effective form of communication (read Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud) .

4. Ranking Well In Youtube Is Relatively Easy.

Since Youtube is only a few years old, ranking in Youtube is sort of easy right now. Make sure you title your videos with your favorite keywords and add some useful tags. And take advantage of it now! The web so far has treated early comers better than the stragglers. So when something new hits the web, get on it quickly.

Do you have a resistance force?

This morning I went to Target to pick up an expandable shoe rack. On my way out of the store there was a brand new Ford Mustang parked in the parking lot. It still had the information paper on the passenger side window, listing the fuel economy, engine size, and other features. Someone from Huntington Beach Ford had parked it in the lot of Target to attract eyeballs that would not normally stop by the dealership.

There are a lot of valuable marketing lessons to be learned from this guerrilla marketing tactic.

1. Casting a wider net for free.

In this case, the dealer knows that not everyone driving down the street is going to come by the dealership. By putting a brand new car in a high traffic shopping center helps attract more eyeballs to their inventory and gives more exposure to their dealership. And the best part is, parking the car in the shopping center is free! It’s like having a unique billboard in front of thousands of people that doesn’t cost a cent.

2. Things that seem out a place are great attention grabbers.

The first thing that caught my attention was that this car was out of place. Subconsciously I knew that this car was suppose to be on the dealer’s lot and not in a shopping center parking lot. This caused me to focus in on this out of place object, burning an image of this out of place car into my brain. And when something makes you do a double look, you know they got you.

3. Always increase the number of touches.

This is an often overlooked and really important point. It takes 17 touches before a potential customer actually makes the decision to do business with you*. A touch is any thing that makes the customer aware of your business. The first touch may be a newspaper ad, the second touch may be that they find your website, the third touch may be someone talking about your business to them, the fifth touch could be the customer seeing you ad one more time. As more and more touches interact with your potential customers, the more likely they are going to to do business with you. The Ford Mustang in the shopping center parking lot is just another touch. (Psssst! Some touches are more effective than others.)

*How do I know this? I heard it at marketing training class a few years ago. Sorry I don’t have a good scientific reference, but I believe it

4. When times are tough get creative.

The overall moral of this story is that the Ford Dealership is getting creative. Everyone knows that American car dealerships are hurting right now. In order to get those cars moving off the lot it’s going to take more than the normal marketing approach to stay afloat.  Always invest in creativity. Arm your creative resistance force with the freedom to try different marketing approaches. It’s fun and you will learn a lot about your business and your customers.  Creative marketing tends to have the highest return on investment if done correctly.

I have attached some pictures of some creative guerrilla marketing advertisements:

The Guerilla Marketing Fro Example

The Guerrilla Marketing Mr. Clean Example

The Guerrilla Marketing Escalator Example