The title of this article is designed to illustrate the point of this article. Today we won't be taking a look at black-hat search engine optimization tactics. Admittedly, I've toyed with them in a "know your enemy" kind of way but I'm no expert on advanced cloaking techniques nor effective link sp@mming tactics. What we're going to cover here are the hidden (i.e. dark) areas of effective optimization strategy.
I've written numerous times in past articles and blog posts that using tricks to rank your site highly is, in the end, ineffective as tricks imply a manipulation of the ranking formula and will eventually become obsolete as the search engines work to advance their algorithms and shut down such possible abuses. But here I'm going to illustrate some of the tricks we use to drive traffic to our site. Is this a conflict? Not really; these "tricks" aren't so much directed at search engines as they are website owners and visitors. These are marketing tricks, not SEO tricks - they just happen to help you with your rankings.
Before we begin let's review an important point about Google. When most people think of Google they think of the dominant search engine (and in that they would be right) HOWEVER if Google was primarily a search engine they would be much smaller than they are now. No, they are an advertising company and the world's largest at that. To this end they need traffic, market share, and clicks. They need you to love Google.com, visit it often, visit their other properties and offerings such as Gmail. If you do this, the odds of you clicking on one of the paid ads increases and their primary function is fulfilled. It is driven by this purpose that Google has developed the most complex search algorithm that has ever existed. Their search is their primary source of traffic. The better their results, the more you will return, the greater the likelihood you will click an ad, the more revenue they generate (thus leading to their continued increases in reported revenue quarter-after-quarter). Why is this important? Because this is the driving force of their current algorithm and will be for the foreseeable future we can assume that any action that increases relevant traffic to your site, increases the stickiness of your site and/or increases the number of links from relevant sites to yours will help your rankings and it will help Google keep their visitors loyal.
Let's also recall the purpose of this article. This is NOT an article about black-hat search engine optimization tactics, it's about the hidden aspects of SEO that are often overlooked. And so, without further ado, let's get down to the meat - what are the dark tactics that you can use to boost your website rankings.
Building A Sticky Site
A point I've made in past articles that I will reinforce here as opposed to "contradicting" will be that of the importance of a sticky site. Of course, monitoring your statistics to assess your visitors' behavior is an important practice for the conversions on your site however it's importance from a search engine optimization perspective is often overlooked. I've mentioned before and I'll mention again, the search engines have the ability to monitor the length of time a visitor spends between visits to that engine. If you are on Google, enter "seo services" into it and visit the Beanstalk site but only spend 5 seconds there before hitting the back button Google can infer that the site was not what you were looking for. If it was 5 or 10 minutes before you returned back to Google they could thus infer that you found content you found useful to your query.
So let's put that more obviously, having a site on which visitors find what they're looking for quickly, easily, and in a visually pleasing way will increase their time on your site which will thus increase the assumption by the search engines that you are relevant for the phrase the searcher has queried. This will reinforce that your site does indeed belong among the top site. As a disclaimer: this works on a mass scale so don't go running off and clicking through to you competitors and quickly hitting the back button. First, it's unethical (like clicking their paid links) and second, it doesn't work like that (how big a hole would THAT be in the algorithm) so it would only be a waste of your time.
The how to of building a sticky site I will leave to designers (being an SEO - my skills lie more in understanding mathematical formula).
Clickability Counts
The engines know when your site appears in a set of search results and they further know how often your site was click on when it appeared. The more often your site is selected when presented in a set of results the more relevant it is assumed to be and thus, the more entrenched it becomes in that set of results (assuming your stickiness issues are dealt with).
What this means is that your title and description matter, not just as part of the classical search engine optimization tactics we've used them for since the 90's but also to draw visitors to your site. Fortunately the end goal of the engines closely matches what your own end goal should be for your site - maximizing traffic. Let's take a look at two example titles that the Beanstalk site could have:
An old-school over-optimized title: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services Company | Beanstalk Search Engine Optimization | SEO Services, Internet Marketing, Link Building, Consulting, Training & Copywriting
Our current title: Expert SEO Services by Beanstalk
Can you see the different? While our title changes periodically as we test new titles for clickthroughs we always keep it short, easily read, and always such that the whole title will appear in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Our clickthroughs are much higher with shorter titles than longer and we have seen the same results with client sites.
The same applies to your description tag but the rules are a bit different. With your description tag you want to make sure to include your targeted keywords and make the copy compelling to a searcher. The reason for this is that when searched keywords are including in your description, is is typically the description that appears in the SERPs. This give you an opportunity to determine how your ad to the world appears. You write your title, you write your description - write both well and your clickthroughs will increase. And when your clickthroughs go up, the implied relevancy the engines will assume your site has to that phrase will increase with it and thus, so too will your rankings for that phrase.
Getting People To Link To You
We're not going to bother discussing reciprocal link building, directory submissions or the other usual suspects. There are countless articles out there on those topics; what we're going to focus on here are the tactics for getting articles picked up widely the resources you want to get them onto (and if you're reading this - you know it works) as well as ways to get the links that both you and the search engines will love the most - the ones you don't ask for or work for outside of creating a great site with useful content. The best part of these links is that they not only work to boost your link popularity but they also tend to drive great traffic to your site. Let's begin with articles.
When you're working to publish an article there are two main audience members: the readers and, more importantly, the editors (I say more importantly as they're the ones that determine if you have any readers at all). There are some tactics for increasing both:
Write a compelling title. This gets back to the point I was making in the first paragraph. Everyone is interested in black hat search engine optimization, even those of us who don't practice it. Readers will be drawn to it as it receives relatively low coverage and editors like to publishing something that they feel may draw some controversy. While this article doesn't get into black hat tactics as some editors may have hoped, it will draw them in and get their attention.
Find quality related resources and get the article published there. I generally use a tool like PR Prowler to find good, quality resources to submit articles to. You can do it manually through a search engine, PR Prowler just speeds up the process so much that after its first use it's paid for itself. You want the places you submit to, to be related to your industry and you want them to provide a link back. If you can setup that link as anchor text instead of your URL - all the better.
Keep a list and add to it. If you're going to publish multiple articles don't start from scratch every time. Keep a list and try to add a few sites to it with each submission. This will keep your list growing and get you more exposure/links as time goes on.
Keep a good relationship with the editors. They are the end-all-be-all of whether this tactic will work or not as a link and traffic building tactic. Make sure you're polite and don't write nasty emails if you get declined. Read what they say and make sure to take it into account with future articles.
But what if you don't want to build links with articles, what if you want to get links the old fashioned way (and I'm talking about the old old old way - you know, before there was any SEO value to it). What if you would like to get people to link to you simply because they like your content (I know, shocking but it actually happens !!!) There are a few different factors that you need to take into account to accomplish this. Here are a few important rules to follow:
You'll need to create content that others will want to link to. This is an art in-and-of-itself. I wrote about some of the basic rules involved with this in a past article "Building Link Bait" and so I won't repeat it here.
Get the bait into social bookmarking sites. This will get people interested in your topic aware of it. If it's good, they may link to it. Don't just focus on Digg and the other majors, look around for some industry-specific bookmarking sites. For example, when this article is complete I'll work to get it into Sphinn, an SEO bookmarking site.
Get the bait into forums and/or blogs. I'm not talking about blog sp@mming here, I'm talking about finding blogs and forums that are RELATED to your topic and who's visitors could be genuinely helped by the tool, information, etc. that you're providing. Don't worry if the blog has rel="nofollow" on the links. The purpose is webmaster awareness, not getting links from the blogs (I'll leave that to a different article).
Promote the bait on your site. Use banners, links, your blog, etc. to build awareness.
Provide the code to link to your bait. The easier you make it for people to link to you, the more of them will. Provide the code with a text and banner option and you'll increase the number of people who will link to you.
Put out a press release. If it's big enough news, put out a press release. If the media grabs it you've won the lottery both in publicity and in high valued links.
If the topic of your bait is searched on the engines, rank it. :)
Conclusion
So these are the darker arts we're talking about. Not black-hat, just overlooked more often than not. Add these to your repertoire of thoughts as you optimize and link building for your site and you've given yourself a one-up over most if not all of your competition.
Tuesday, 25 October 2011
Wednesday, 19 October 2011
Making The Most Of The Holidays
The holidays are fast approaching and with them the short window of vast opportunity for many online retailers. As an SEO we get inundated with panicked requests for rankings before the holidays. Of course that's not going to happen at this point (at least – I wouldn't start organic SEO campaigns now for the holiday season) so what can you do to make the most of what you've got this holiday season? Improve your conversions.
There are of course ways you can increase your traffic flow using PPC and other, more instant traffic strategies (eBay, shopping engine inclusion and placement, etc.) but in this article I'm going to touch on a few very simple resources and tools to help you make the most of your current traffic. Some will cost you – some are free but all these strategies, tools and resources are ones I've used myself or on client sites with great success. So let's begin with the conversion-enhancing tools first and then we'll get into resources:
Trust Symbols & Testimonials
Everyone from conversion expert Tim Ash to your aunt will tell you one of the things they base a buying decision on is trust. Would you buy your new iPhone from the guy standing on the corner? Why not? Trust – that's why. The web is the same – only more-so as the assumption is generally that you are the guy on the corner and it's up to you to prove otherwise. Trust symbols and testimonials can go a long way to helping people feel comfortable with giving you their credit card number, sight unseen.
A common mistake is to place the trust symbols and testimonials below the fold. Let's face facts – you have about 5 seconds to grab somebody's attention when they first visit your site. You have 5 seconds to gain enough trust that they're willing to spend time looking through your site. We're all busy – if you don't have my trust quickly – I'm gone. Place your trust symbols and testimonials where they can be quickly seen. Trust symbols can range from the logos of major brands who've used your services or shopped at your store to the symbols of your security certificate provider, organizations or security seals. Here are some of my favorite trust symbols:
I started using the seal back when it was HackerSafe (who was purchased by McAfee) and I, along with a number of clients, have seen double digit percentage increases in conversions after adding it to our sites. The interesting part is that it's even useful with non-ecommerce sites. Our site for example is not an ecommerce site but our forms filled goes up when the seal is there and the phone rings more often. It's just a matter of trust. Our ecommerce clients have more dramatic results obviously.
Organizational Seals
If you're a member of the Chamber of Commerce, Better Business Bureau or other well-known organization why not show the world? These seals imply an ethics and commitment to certain standards and also give the visitor a feeling that there is a recourse if you treat them incorrectly.
Payment-related Seals
We all recognize the major credit cards, we all recognize Verisign and the other major security certificate providers and we all recognize PayPal. People may not know why these things matter – but they know they do. People may not know what encryption is but they know they don't want to enter their credit card without it. Make sure that at the very least you have these seals clearly on the purchase pages.
Testimonials
Hearing about experiences from past clients can go a long way towards bridging the gap between you as a website and you as a client-conscious human-run business that happens to have a website. So much of the online world is faceless and cold – let your visitors read about the experience of people “just like them” and how you helped those people.
Just Some Other Tips From The Water Cooler
Before we move into some helpful tools and resources you can use to help increase your conversions here are a few other very simple steps I've found can instantly improve conversion rates:
- Put your phone number in your header. Call volumes will increase your sales significantly but your non-call in sales will increase too. Your phone number is a sign of trust. It is a sign that people CAN call you – even if they don't. Even when I'm building affiliate sites I'll often put in the product manufacturers phone number. Yes I'm losing sales from direct call-in orders but I gain more in online sales than I lose. At the end of the day I'm ahead – imagine what happens with sites where you're answering the phone.
- Make it a toll-free number. At Beanstalk we used to have a standard telephone number and had it up on the site. The week we switched to a toll free number the call volumes increased significantly. It's funny as people were about to spend hundreds and thousands on our services and a long distance call these days would have cost them a whopping 50 cents or some such thing but the switch made a sizable impact on inquiries.
- Put links in your copy and draw the eye to them. If you're talking about blue widgets on your site, link to your blue widgets page where they can enter the buying cycle. Sure it's an SEO strategy as well (2 birds, 1 stone … excellent) but more to the point here is to help your visitors get into the buying cycle before they realize they can look elsewhere. “Oh heck, I'm already here and how much could I save looking around really?”
- Don't put up barriers. I've been on a number of sites (and even had a client with one) that have a warning on their shopping pages to the affect, “If you don't trust online shopping give us a call!” Well, they probably trusted online shopping until you told them not to.
- Build information into your site. One of the worst things that can happen is that you have an excellent site, you've displayed your products wonderfully and got the person ready to buy. Unfortunately they just don't know what some term or another means or what they might need to go with it and since you don't have the info on your site – well they're just going to quickly Google it. Oh, there's the info – oh, and that site offers free shipping !!! Ouch.
I don't want to give you too much to work with. Do that and of course one runs the risk of becoming paralyzed with information. If you get through this set and are looking for more little tweaks I recommend reading Tim Ash's “Landing Page Optimization”. To reinforce my earlier point – notice the McAfee logo to the top right of their site. :)
Widgets & Tools
As with virtually every area of Internet Marketing – developers have built tons of widgets and tools – many free – to help you. Generally they're to show you what they can do (sort of a “if we'll give you this free imagine what you can pay for” kind of angle. And sometimes it's just for links (which, since I'll link to them from this article – is working well for them). :)
Here are some of my favorites that can help you over a very short period of time:
Most of us can't afford to have full eyetracking studies done for our sites. To help us out the SiteTuners folks have created a heatmap system that will scan an image of your page and show you a heatmap version of it tracing what they believe the eye will do (based on an algorithm – not human interaction so it's not 100% accurate but it can give you a good idea of where some failing points may well be. They offer a free account so hey – can't beat the price.
As a note – the first time I used it I wasn't thinking and fed in an image of my whole page. The eye was drawn to the footer according to the heatmap. Make sure you only input an image of the portion visible on the most common resolutions of your visitors. If you don't know how make an image of your site – the easiest way is with the Firefox extension Screen Capture Elite.
ClickHeat is a very cool heatmap generator that uses Javascript to track visitor clicks and then will allow you to view your page with a heatmap overlay of the clicks to see what people are REALLY doing on your site and how they're navigating from one place to another. We've found this invaluable in maximizing our real estate but it required high traffic levels to be effective quickly.
A lot of people like to make changes to their website in hopes of increasing conversions but do they test the new pages? Google created Website Optimizer to allow webmasters to test 2 landing pages and get statistics on which page converts better. We tested a new services page and the one I liked most …. lost. Know what I like better than the losing services page? Conversions. If you're planning on applying any of the changes noted above (or others you find elsewhere or just dream up yourself) be sure to do some A/B testing. Website Optimizer is a simple way to do this.
Conclusion:
There are tons more tools and resources out there but there isn't much time left before the holidays. Start now and get to work. And of course – once the holidays are over keep going, no matter how optimized your site is for conversions there's always a weakest point. Keep watching your stats and keep thinking about conversions.
Facebook Beith Not The Devil
Social media is not going away, and nor should it. For all the nay-sayers out there who deem Facebook as the work of the Devil, just remember social media has always existed. Since the beginning of time, in fact. It was called word of mouth. The baker told the butcher about his latest new blend of grains, the butcher told the housemaid, the housemaid told the tailor, the tailor told the constable and gradually everyone knew about the fabulous new compilation the baker was using in his breads. Now, with the evolution of technology social media has become more than just status updates and shared links to videos of cats snuggling with dogs. The business world has finally begun to see the benefit of this techno-word-of-mouth phenomenon that has 500 million (active) users tweeting their every thought. Social media is a marketing tool. On one side of the fence it is a means for the baker to put the word out about his new grain blend. On the other side, it is the opportunity for the butcher, housemaid, tailor and constable to learn of the baker’s activities and pass along the information. Therefore it makes good business sense for companies to use Yelp, Twitter, Facebook et all as their voice to the consumer.
Not long ago there was an article released by the American Pediatric Society warning parents about “Facebook Depression”. Parents were directed to watch their Facebook-friendly children for signs of depression stemming from either too much exposure to social media, or negative interactions taking place there. Undoubtedly there were a lot of parents observing their teen’s behavior a little more closely after that article hit the cables. Alongside the warning was the explained “Fear of Missing Out” or FOMO. Apparently adolescents are glued to their laptops and smartphones 24/7 waiting for the tiniest signal from a social media outlet, just so they don’t miss out on Justin Beiber tickets. What parents seem to be missing the point on is FOMO is natural. What three year old has not had a temper tantrum at bedtime? The teen version of FOMO is just the same, only on steroids. Parents, it’s all part of growing up. Didn’t you ever go way too far on the side of punk and stick a safety pin through your nose? The difference now is technology, and the corporate world has noticed.
The music industry has always paid close attention to the demographics of their followers, but now it is so much easier to obtain and use that information. Your teen is not only drooling at the mouth for tweets from peers, they are also watching for the latest news on celebrities, musicians, fashion icons, gaming news and probably dozens of other subjects parents would shudder to hear of. Young people with after-school jobs have the most disposable income of any demographic, and business executives know that. Your grumpy 15 year old may not be saddled with Facebook Depression, but there is a pretty good chance he or she is probably sulking over not having the latest Toms or missing out on the Halo release. That doesn’t mean every parent needs to confiscate the internet. Nope, in fact let it be. This is a learning experience. Adolescents are moody, demanding, boundary pushing kids still trying to figure out who they are. Let them continue on the journey, they will thank you for it later.
Of course the caveat to all of this is good parenting. We still need to be aware of our children’s activities and who their friends are. The internet, not social media in particular, is acting as a vehicle for speeding up the learning process for kids today – in both good and bad ways. Accept their use of social media as a means of skill building, but it will take a sound parental influence with a good sense of boundaries to know how to spot dangerous behavior.
Social media is not going away. It is here to stay because no other form of communication gets information out to the masses as quickly. And since we are all social beings with an insatiable need for information, social media is our drug. Embrace it. Use it to your advantage. Make Twitter work for you instead of the other way around. Feed your Google+ profile through to Twitter, re-tweet industry related blogs you follow, Bump your contacts to build up your network, Yelp about favorite restaurants. All this in an effort to get traffic with your name pinned to it, flowing. Use social media to be more involved with your teen’s activities. They can hide, but they can’t hide from the web. Their obsession with social media is your ticket to knowing what they are up to. In the end, you will love the fact that social media is not going away.
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