SEO News: Meta Title Tags are Gold

Meta Title Tags are Gold

By Peter Bowen (c) 2010

Featured Video: State of Search News Roundup

How to Write Compelling Page Titles

From an SEO perspective, the title of the webpage is very important. These are the words that describe what your page is about and are the first words that a search engine sees when it crawls your webpage looking for content to add to its index.

The page title is also what the searcher sees in a search result – so the page title is very important in describing what the page is about and if the title meets the searcher’s criteria, then it is more likely to be clicked on and your page opened…..read more

via SEO News: Meta Title Tags are Gold.

SiteProNews: My Tactics for Getting Those Top 5 Spots in Google

My Tactics for Getting

Those Top 5 Spots in Google

By Titus Hoskins (c) 2010

SiteProNews RSS Feed – Grab the SiteProNews RSS Feed

Video: How to Extend Your Reach with Social Bookmarking

Actually, getting in the #1 spot is best, but I will settle for the top 5 or even anywhere on the first page for very competitive keywords. Obtaining those top rankings for your targeted keywords in Google will obviously be very important to achieving your online goals.

I don’t have some magic formula, just online marketing stuff that works. Very simple stuff that everyone can do to get those top rankings. Here are some of the tactics/things I do……

via SiteProNews: My Tactics for Getting Those Top 5 Spots in Google.

Why You Shouldn’t Pursue the Long Tail – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

Why You Shouldn’t Pursue the Long Tail

Eric Enge | Aug 24, 2010 | 2 Comments

You’re about to build a new site from scratch. You have great content. You have a search engine friendly site architecture. You have plans for a great link building campaign, and you’re ready to get active in social media.

So how long will it take to start getting great traffic from search engines, and, what will that traffic look like? Great question!

The reality is that it takes some time. The time is quite variable, however.

via Why You Shouldn’t Pursue the Long Tail – Search Engine Watch (SEW).

It’s Alive…ALIVE! How To Create Electrifying SEO Content

Syndicated From: Search Engine Journal http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SearchEngineJournal/~3/oTe7Mi3hdco/

Those of us that undertake the daily task of writing for our blog, articles for our clients or newsworthy press releases can sometimes lose the will to live when ideas are sparse. Words are fused together within a weave of conjunctions and contractions that make up an ugly, SEO monster that would terrify even the most experienced reader.

Fortunately, there are ways to become a modern day Frankenstein and create content to make it every bit electrifying as your last creation.

The brains of any content; The Title

As important as a head on shoulders, the title is the brains, the intelligence and determines the success of any SEO content. An attractive title leads the rest of the content and generates exposure online amongst all the other articles, press releases and blog posts out there.

As well as grabbing a reader’s attention, a title spearheads the ideas that will create a piece of writing that will not only establish you as a writer but create exposure and authority for your business. Many writers devise the title last and just write to spill out ideas. Of course, even if it’s a concept, there is still the initial idea that is devised from using six or seven words.

Whether you are passionate about what you’re writing or understand little about a subject, an intriguing and interesting title can give you that burning desire to research and discover more about what you’re expressing to readers, rather than work your fingers to the bone for nothing in return.

Of course, in terms of SEO, the title holds many keys to success. With a clever, key word rich title, the appearance of said text will therefore appear within a search, exposing your business for all it’s worth.

So when creating your content remember, brains over brawn. A snappy, short, intriguing title will turn your writing into something to be admired, not avoided.

Add meat to the bones; the main body

Regardless of how you devise content, writing all starts with a skeleton (idea) that needs padding out with fleshy sentences and muscular description. When it comes to creating the bulk of your article it is better to break down into bite-size chunks rather than sieve through dense ideas.

Neck and torso;

Similar to the head (title), the neck and torso (introduction) hold all of the other ideas together. Whatever is written after this will be a reflection of what was initiated at this stage. How you develop these ideas is up to you, but remember; A limp frame will not be able to support anything that is added on to it causing it to crumble under the weight of under developed ideas. A strong, sturdy start will make for a strong and sturdy article.

SEO is all about gaining exposure making you the best at what you do. Without proving this in everything you do, not only will people not take you seriously, but the search engines aren’t likely to either.

Limbs;

Developing your ideas from what you have set out to discuss in your introduction will make your content far easier to write. If you don’t know where you’re going with your ideas, neither will your readers; resulting in people fleeing in horror.

Keep to the point that you set out to make within the title and introduction. Everything attached to your initial idea should follow through and not leave readers disappointed.

Organs:

Your heart should be in what you are writing. People can tell the difference between content that has been written out of choice and a piece that has been forced. Make all your work, work for you and you will reap the rewards in views, comments and tweets.

Your lungs should breathe fresh air into a topic not create a stale atmosphere with rewritten text. Make sure if content has already being covered that your make it your own and take on an angle that makes you piece stand out against other works.

Skin:

Wrap up your monstrous ideas within your conclusion, making it complete and ready to be sprung into life. The conclusion of any writing project should a pull everything together, completing the final piece and showing it in all its glory. All the bits and pieces used to create something new and interesting should all be finalised, anything left hanging around will not only frustrate your readers, but cause the whole piece to fall apart and seem disjointed.

Bringing Your Article To Life: Switch on the power.

Writing an article that is SEO friendly is all well and good, but sitting on your desktop will do nothing for your listings. It’s time to plug in and switch on and get that creation out there moving across the web. Submitting it to industry specific blogs, categories and exposing it on all forms of social media will make all the work worthwhile.

Don’t forget to link back to your website or blog and let readers know the inventor. If you’ve produced exciting and intriguing content, it will only spur you to keep creating and bringing words on a page to life.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

It’s Alive…ALIVE! How To Create Electrifying SEO Content

Read other posts by this Author: Jenny Pilley

Reversing the SEO Process: The Chocolate Chip Cookie Mistake

Syndicated From: SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/_qcAnjgoLz8/reversing-the-seo-process-the-chocolate-chip-cookie-mistake

Posted by randfish

I’ve had the chance to talk to lots of folks who are just starting out building new web businesses, many of them for the first time and a few with some experience under their belt. What worries me is that a lot of these new businesses are reversing the SEO order of operations; making it 100X more difficult to succeed than need be.

How Do You Bake Chocolate Chip Cookies?

Seriously. I don’t mean a recipe; I mean close your eyes and think about the standard methodology and order of operations you follow. If you’re like me, it looks something like this:

1. Determine what kind of cookies you’re making – crispy, chewy, big, small – and what quantity.
2. Line up your ingredients – flour, eggs, sugar, baking soda/powder, butter, salt, vanilla extract, chocolate chips
3. Mix together ingredients in some relevant order
4. Form dough balls
5. Bake for appropriate time period
6. Remove from oven; eat

Now let’s imagine SEO as a part of your recipe – you’re trying to bake a great web business, and SEO is an essential ingredient. Let’s say for the purposes of our analogy it’s the chocolate chips.

Here’s how many websites bake their SEO-chocolate chip cookies:

1. Mix together some of the ingredients (maybe the butter, sugar, eggs and flour)
2. Form dough balls
3. Bake for appropriate time period*
4. Remove from oven
5. Realize there’s a few missing ingredients – vanilla extract (social media strategy), salt (viral content) and, oh yeah, the chocolate chips (SEO)
6. Sprinkle these on the cookies

Now instead of this:

Courtesy of SavorySweetLife’s excellent post

You’ve got this:

Not quite as appealing.

A website that’s pre-built its content, pre-conceived of its information architecture, pre-envisioned its marketing & communications strategy and already created its underlying code, CMS and functionality without considering SEO impact will always be at a severe disadvantage. And when it comes to links, that disadvantage is even stronger.

We all worry about a poorly built site and whether it will be accessible to spiders, but I see so many SEOs who approach a business or a site that’s got many of the basics right and think, “OK, I just need to get some links.” If instead, we flipped this thinking on its head and said “wait, this website hasn’t established a strategy for link acquisition? Then we need to go back to the drawing board,” the results might be dramatically better.

For every aspect of search engine optimization, there’s a critical need to make it part of the business strategy, particularly as the field gets more competitive. If you’ve put together a remarkable company, solving a tough problem with a great website, you could still lose in search (and social) to the relatively amateurish competitor who asked and answered these critical SEO strategy questions before building their business/site:

• What does my site do for web content creators (Linkerati) that rewards them in such a way that they’ll naturally share my brand and link to my site?
• What content is in demand (or soon will be) that aren’t sites aren’t addressing well (and how do I effectively keyword target that demand)?
• What functionality/organization will make my site more attractive to search engines?
• How do I build ongoing SEO refinement and growth into my business processes?

The site that answered those questions during the brainstorming phase is the one who can overtake the existing market leaders and win the rankings. Those who keep trying to sprinkle chocolate chips onto already-baked cookies will have a painful time trying to keep up.

* Notice my conspicuous lack of a pun about “half-baked” sites. I plan to use this karma on some horrifyingly bad joke in the future.

p.s. Credit for the analogy goes to the same person who bakes me most of my chocolate chip cookies. She’s pretty awesome.

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Read other posts by this Author: randfish

Best SEO Blogs: Top 10 Sources to Stay Up-to-Date

Syndicated From: SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/NjBrNYopCO8/best-seo-blogs-top-10-sources-to-stay-uptodate

Posted by randfish

Like many overly-connected web junkies, I find myself increasingly overwhelmed by information, resources and news. Sorting the signal from the noise is essential to staying sane, but missing an important development can be costly. To balance this conflict, I’ve recently re-arranged my daily reading habits (which I’ve written about several times before) and my Firefox sidebar (a critical feature that keeps me from switching to Chrome).

I’ll start by sharing my top 10 sources in the field of search & SEO, then give you a full link list for those interested in seeing all the resources I use. I’ve whittled the list down to just ten to help maximize value while minimizing time expended (in my less busy days, I’d read 4-5 dozen blogs daily and even more than that each week).

Top 10 Search / SEO Blogs

#1 – Search Engine Land

• Why I Read It: For several years now, SELand has been the fastest, most accurate and well-written news source in the world of search. The news pieces in particular provide deep, useful, interesting coverage of their subjects, and though some of the columns on tactics/strategies are not as high quality, a few are still worth a read. Overall, SELand is the best place to keep up with the overall search/technology industry, and that’s important to anyone operating a business in the field.
• Focus: Search industry and search engine news
• Update Frequency: Multiple times daily

#2 – SEOmoz

• Why I Read It: Obviously, it’s hard not to be biased, but removing the personal interest, the SEOmoz Blog is still my favorite source for tactical & strategic advice, as well as “how-to” content. I’m personally responsible for 1 out of every 4-6 articles, but the other 75%+ almost always give me insight into something new. The comments are also, IMO, often as good or better than the posts – the moz community attracts a lot of talented, open, sharing professionals and that keeps me reading daily.
• Focus: SEO & web marketing tactics & strategies
• Update Frequency: 1-2 posts per weekday

#3 – SEOBook

• Why I Read It: The SEOBook blog occassionally offers some highly useful advice or new tactics, but recently, most of the commentary focuses on the shifting trends in the SEO industry, along with a healthy dose of engine and establishment-critical editorials. These are often quite instructive on their own, and I think more than a few have had substantive impact on changing the direction of players big and small.
• Focus: Inudstry trends as they relate to SEO; Editorials on abuse & manipulation
• Update Frequency: 1-3X per week

#4 – Search Engine Roundtable

• Why I Read It: Barry Schwartz has long maintained this bastion of recaps, roundups and highlights from search-related discussions and forums across the web. The topics are varied, but usually useful and interesting enough to warrant at least a daily browse or two.
• Focus: Roundup of forum topics, industry news, SEO discussions
• Update Frequency: 3-4X Daily

#5 – Search Engine Journal

• Why I Read It: The Journal strikes a nice balance between tactical/strategic articles and industry coverage, and anything SELand misses is often here quite quickly. They also do some nice roundups of tools and resources, which I find useful from an analysis & competitive research perspective.
• Focus: Indsutry News, Tactics, Tools & Resources
• Update Frequency: 2-3X Daily

#6 – Conversation Marketing

• Why I Read It: I think Ian Lurie might be the fastest rising on my list. His blog has gone from ocassionally interesting to nearly indispensable over the last 18 months, as the quality of content, focus on smart web/SEO strategies and witty humor shine through. As far as advice/strategy blogs go in the web marketing field, his is one of my favorites for consistently great quality.
• Focus: Strategic advice, how-to articles and the occassional humorous rant
• Update Frequency: 2-4X weekly

#7 – SEO By the Sea

• Why I Read It: Bill Slawski takes a unique approach to the SEO field, covering patent applications, IR papers, algorithmic search technology and other technically interesting and often useful topics. There’s probably no better analysis source out there for this niche, and Bill’s work will often inspire posts here on SEOmoz (e.g. 17 Ways Search Engines Judge the Value of a Link).
• Focus: IR papers, patents and search technology
• Update Frequency: 1-3X per week

#8 – Blogstorm

• Why I Read It: Although Blogstorm doesn’t update as frequently as some of the others, neraly every post is excellent. In the last 6 months, I’ve been seriously impressed by the uniqueness of the material covered and the insight shown by the writers (mostly Patrick Altoft with occassional other contributors). One of my favorites, for example, was their update to some of the AOL CTR data, which I didn’t see well covered elsewhere.
• Focus: SEO insider analysis, strategies and research coverage
• Update Frequency: 3-5X monthly

#9 – Dave Naylor

• Why I Read It: Dave’s depth of knowledge is legendary and unlike many successful business owners in the field, he’s personally kept himself deeply aware of and involved in SEO campaigns. This acute attention to the goings-on of the search rankings have made his articles priceless (even if the grammar/spelling isn’t always stellar). The staff, who write 50%+ of the content these days, are also impressively knowledgable and maintain a good level of discourse and disclosure.
• Focus: Organic search rankings analysis and macro-industry trends
• Update Frequency: 1-3X weekly

#10 – Marketing Pilgrim

• Why I Read It: A good mix of writers cover the search industry news and some tactical/strategic subjects as well. The writing style is compelling and it’s great to get an alternative perspective. I’ve also noticed that MP will sometimes find a news item that other sites miss and I really appreciate the feeling of comprehensiveness that comes from following them + SELand & SERoundtable.
• Focus: Industry news, tactical advice and a bit of reputation/social management
• Update Frequency: 2-3X daily

Other sites that I’ll read regularly (who only barely missed my top 10) include Distilled, YOUmoz, Performable, Chris Brogan, the Webmaster Central Blog, Eric Enge, Avinash Kaushik, SEWatch, Gil Reich & the eMarketer blog. I also highly recommend skimming through SEO Alltop, as it lets me quickly review anything from the longer tail of SEO sites.

Rand’s Firefox Sidebar

• Social Buzz
  • Hacker News
  • Techmeme
  • Reddit
  • Delicious Popular
  • StumbleUpon: Top Rated
  • Twittersphere
  • PopURLs
  • Sphinn
• Tech / Entrepreneur Blogs
  • A VC
  • Seth Godin
  • Read Write Start
  • Mashable
  • Chris Dixon
  • Mark Suster
  • Sean Ellis
  • On Startups
  • A Smart Bear
  • Andrew Chen
  • Seattle Tech Startups List
  • Steve Blank
• Search / Marketing Blogs
  • SELand
  • SEOmoz Blog
  • SEOBook
  • SERoundtable
  • SEO Alltop
  • SEJournal
  • Conversation Marketing
  • SEO By the Sea
  • Blogstorm
  • Dave Naylor
  • Marketing Pilgrim
  • Distilled
  • YOUmoz
  • Performable
  • Chris Brogan
  • GG WM Central
  • Eric Enge
  • Avinash Kaushik
  • Gil Reich
  • eMarketer
• SEO & Web Tools
  • DomainTools
  • W3C Link Checker
  • DaveN KW Tool
  • GG AdWords Tool
  • SEO Browser
  • GG Insights
  • MS AdCenter Tools
  • GG Trends for Websites
  • Down for Everyone or Just Me?
• Social World
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Quora
• News
  • NYTimes | Most Emailed
  • Slate Magazine
  • BBC News
  • The Stranger (Local Seattle Blog/News)
  • Electoral-Vote
  • National Geographic News
• Free Time
  • Everywhereist (the best part of my day)
  • The Sixty One
  • Drawar
  • MetaCritic
  • Web Boggle
  • Rotten Tomatoes
  • Hulu

Hopefully some kind individual in the comments will build a nice HTML file for those of you who’d like to directly import this list.

p.s. We’ve only got 60 out of 310 seats left for the Seattle Training Seminar (August 30-31) and just opened up a few more spots for the Tools Training (Sept. 1). Hope to see you there.

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Read other posts by this Author: randfish

Using Excel for SEO – the Grand Collection of Tips

Syndicated From: Search Engine Journal http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SearchEngineJournal/~3/uRgIv7pPkZg/

You probably know that I am a big Excel fanatic (though not an expert). To me, Excel has always been the ultimate SEO and productivity tool.

I’ve been collecting Excel tutorials for years and this post lists the most useful (yet, the least geeky) of them: no matter which SEO task you have come across, chances are you’ll find one of the following tutorials handy:

1. Export Any Data to Excel

Any well-known keyword research or traffic analytics tool has the “Export-to-CSV” feature and a CSV file is easy to open in Excel – so converting your data into Excel shouldn’t be a problem.

If you still you need some examples, I did a post quite some time ago listing many ways to export your backlink data to Excel; for instance:

• With Yahoo! SiteExplorer you can export results to TSV file and open it as Excel;
• With Google Analytics you can save the report of referring domains (enhanced with plenty of browsing data per each linking domain: bounce rate, time spent on site; pages per visit, etc).
• You can export any search results that provide RSS feed to Google Spreadsheets using =ImportFeed(“feed URL”) formula and then save as Excel:

2. Excel for Keyword Research: a Pivot Table and a (Conditional) Formatting

1. Create a Pivot Table to easily Re-Arrange the Keywords

This post by Richard Baxter on creating a pivot table and a beautiful chart using Excel offers a step-by-step tutorial on how to re-organize your data to run various types of analysis. In short, the steps are as follows:

• Collect your data and create a Master table (more often than not, so to create your master table, you just need to export the required range of data from the tool you are using and open the file using Excel).
  • If you are using several tools, you may want to combine the data in one table – this post on using VLOOKUP query will save your life!
• Create a Pivot Table on a new sheet: “Insert > PivotTable > PivotChart“ and choose your table to serve the basis of the Pivot table;
• Add axis fields, values, column labels and filters: The PivotTable Field List uses drag and drop functionality to enable you to populate those little white squares with values. As you add values, the table on the left begins to form.

A pivot table feature allows for plenty of data manipulation options that consequently offers a wide range of research types. Here’s another post giving a detailed tutorial on creating a pivot table and using it for keyword research – so if you still have any questions, refer to it to make things even clearer.

2. Use “Find and Replace” Feature to Visualize the Keyword Patterns

While a pivot table lets you re-arrange the data and create cool charts, conditional formatting allows you to visualize the data sets using different colors. I did a post once on finding your most frequent modifiers using Excel, and here are the steps:

• Use CTRL+F (“Find and Replace” feature);
• Click “Find and Replace” tab;
• Type the word you think may be frequently used with your core term,
• Click “Options” button;
• Choose to “replace with” format;
• Click “Patterns” tab;
• Choose the color you want to highlight the cell containing the word:
• Click OK and then “Replace All”;
• You should then see how many times the word was used, plus the cells containing it will be highlighted.

Conditional formatting works the similar way but it can be used to highlight the cells while you are creating the spreadsheet. For example, if you are using Excel to create and track your meta tags, conditional formatting can visualize meta tag character count. Simply use Red/Yellow/Green for good length and warning zones. This keeps you in a quick reference just out of the peripheral.

3. Use =VLOOKUP to compare and combine data exported from different sources:

This post on comparing Google Webmaster Tools Data with Google Analytics Data provides a detailed tutorial on how you can merge any type of statistics data: Keyword Rankings and Keyword Volume, Google Rankings data and Traffic data, Backlinks and Traffic Sources, etc:

3. Excel for Link Building: URL Manipulations

I use Excel for link building process tracking as well as for reporting. The basic “sorting” Excel feature (known by everyone, I guess) makes it much easier to re-arrange the data to find links on the same topic, with the same Google PR, etc.

This section looks at a bit more complex hacks: Excel formulas and tutorials for the URL manipulation.

1. Extract All URLs from the List of Linked Words

It happens very often that you have a list of linked words in Excel and you need to see the full address of each link. Extracting each address one by one is tedious. To automate the task, you will need to create a quick macro – don’t worry, here’s an instruction allowing even a very basic newbie to create one:

1. Open Visual Basic Editor (use ALT + F11 shortcut);
2. Navigate Insert -> Module to adds a module
3. Paste the code below
4. Close the Visual Basic Editor (use ALT + Q)

Sub ExtractHL()
Dim HL As Hyperlink
For Each HL In ActiveSheet.Hyperlinks
HL.Range.Offset(0, 1).Value = HL.Address
Next
End Sub

Now use the macro:

• Navigate Tools -> Macro -> Macros (or use ALT + F8 shortcut);
• Make sure “Extract HL” is chosen and click Run
• You are done! The macro will find each hyperlink in a worksheet, extract each one’s URL, and stick that URL in the cell directly to the right of the hyperlink.

2. Make the List of URLs Active

Another common case is: you export tons of data and end up with hundreds of unlinked URLs. You could go double-clicking on each to activate one by one but this will take too much time. Here’s a quick tutorial on how you can do that:

Repeat steps 1 to 4 from the above tip but use this code:

Sub MakeHyperlinks()
Dim cl As Range
For Each cl In Selection
cl.Hyperlinks.Add Anchor:=cl, Address:=cl.Text
Next cl
End Sub

Select the cells you want to turn into clickable links and Run the “MakeHyperlinks” macro (use the further tutorial from the above part).

Or just use this handy tool by SEOAtomatic: Activate Excel Links

Before:

After:

Any other Excel hacks you are using for SEO? Please share tem in the comments!

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Using Excel for SEO – the Grand Collection of Tips

Read other posts by this Author: Ann Smarty

Don’t Put the Cart Before the SEO Horse

Syndicated From: Search Engine Journal http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SearchEngineJournal/~3/epe8HUE1GWA/

A lot of people like to dive into things without having a plan and strategy in place. SEO and Internet Marketing is no different. There are certain aspects of your web strategy that need to happen first before you can move forward with the other aspects. Depending on what it is, it can make or break your SEO and overall marketing efforts.

Start Spending Money/Resources on SEO Before Identifying Your Goals

Probably the most important and fundamental flaw you can have is to start optimizing your site without identifying your overall site/blog goals. You should be able to answer these questions before spending money and resources on your SEO strategy.

• Who are your primary readers/visitors?
• Where does your target audience live?
• What are your primary keywords?
• Who are the primary competitors?
• How will you delegate roles and responsibilities?
• How will you track your SEO efforts?

Focus on Content Creation Before Your Site is Indexable

Before you start spending lots of your time and resources creating awesome content, you need to make sure that content is properly getting indexed by the search engines. Regardless of how good your content is, if the search engines are not indexing it, you are significantly reducing the changes of your content being found.

• Use a search friendly navigation
• Inter-link your posts
• Submit a XML sitemap regularly
• Deep link your content

Building Links Before Creating Good Content

The foundation to building quality links is and always will be creating awesome content that people would want to link to. If you are trying to gain links to a site and the only thing people can find is “Buy Now”, why would someone link to you. Or if you are trying to build links by submitting to thousands of directories and dropping comments in forums, you are just build spammy and low-value links.

Advertisements Before Traffic

Without having traffic, there is no point in cluttering up your blog with lots of banners and advertisements that will just devalue your blog and its content. When your blog is first starting out, you should be focusing on doing everything you can to build credibility and authority. There is lots of debate about when is the appropriate time is to start adding advertisements to your site. Personally I think there will come a time during the life of your blog/site where people are reaching out to you for advice, asking about advertising opportunities, requesting that you guest blog on their site. Once those things start happening, you will have built the initial credibility with your audience and you can start bringing on advertisers.

Tell Success Stories Without Actually Doing Them First

Especially for SEO companies, if you are making up fake success stories and case studies to win business, your clients will quickly see the true colors of your company and fire you! If your product is suppose to fix a problem someone has, you will have nothing but a lot of angry people, if you don’t know for sure that it does what you say it does.

Newsletter Sign-Up Before Creating Free Content

Of course you can also add a newsletter sign-up to your site, however why should someone sign-up? If you create a free piece of content like a Whitepaper or downloadable Webinar that you can offer in exchange for a newsletter sign-up, you will be able to build a list much faster.

Quit Your Day Job Before Your Blog is Making Money

Before you quit your day job to pursue your true passions, make sure you are making a steady income. You should have established some steady income from multiple revenue streams. The reason why I say multiple revenue streams is because what if you are gaining all of your sales from one organic phrase in Google? Then Google decides to pull the rug out from under you and you are nowhere to be found. There goes your main source of income! If you have various ways of making money from your blog, you won’t have to depend on just one revenue stream.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Don’t Put the Cart Before the SEO Horse

Read other posts by this Author: Mark Thompson

What Makes a Good SEO Proposal?

Syndicated From: Search Engine Journal http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SearchEngineJournal/~3/U1a3Pa_j7b4/

I work as an in-house SEO for a company that has a good-sized website, just over 150,000 pages and growing. I’m one of few people in the company whose job it is to daily review our web stats, and suggest changes we need to implement. But with a site this big, it’s pretty daunting. After swallowing some pride, I was pleased to hear we had a company to consult with on larger projects so I could stay focused on other tasks.

Everything has been going okay so far, but I was curious as to how this particular company was selected. Luckily, in the process of moving offices, my boss stopped by my desk and dropped off a huge folder of files. As any employee would, I look up at him stunned and before I could say anything he said, “These are all the other consulting companies we considered previously. Take a a look at them and tell me what you think.” Eager to finally get a chance to look at how these were prepared, I agreed. After a few hours of sifting through thirty or so SEO Proposals (SEOPs) I was greatly surprised both in a good and bad way at the same time.

The format of the SEOPs was really similar to the request for proposals (RFPs) I would prepare for grants (I worked for a non-profit for a few years to help raise funds). The structure of your typical grant RFP followed the format below:

• Introduction
  • Who are you and what’s your mission statement/purpose?
    • Brief company background info start-up to present.
  • Why are you submitting this RFP?
• The Body
  • What is your plan?
  • How will you implement this?
  • Who is involved?
  • How will it be measured/evaluated?
• Recommendations
  • Any client testimonials?
  • Case studies?
  • Supporting documents?
    • Research papers, etc.
• The Finances
  • What does the budget look like?
  • What costs are involved?
  • Are there any unforeseen items that may affect these numbers?

There maybe a few sections here and there that differ and the order may vary, but surprisingly the two are similar. When I noticed this, I went back through a few of them again and started to separate the good proposals from the not-so-good ones. Here is what I found that tells a good SEOP from a bad one:

The Introduction

The Bad:

These SEOPs started off with explaining what SEO is and how it is useful to websites, which is fine if you’re talking to someone who has never heard of SEO. When it comes to sending a proposal to a company that has reached out to you about using your SEO services, they are already aware of what it is and its usefulness. There is no need to explain what it is to them.

The Good:

These SEOPs explained who the company is, stated their mission and explained their philosophy in regards to SEO. They did not explain SEO, they expressed their own opinions as to how it should be used and implemented. The philosophy of a company is huge to me. If I’m looking to hire a company to help me, our ideals on SEO should be similar. I’m not saying we will agree all the time, but knowing where a company stands on this is a big selling point. Sure, a company could lie just to get the client, but just like when a non-profit lies and the grant is taken away, consulting firms can be fired.

The Body

The Bad:

This is the trickiest part of the proposal for consulting firms. They’ve, hopefully, looked over the site and have some ideas on what to implement but they don’t want to give any “free advice” anyway. This is completely understandable. However, these proposals essentially transcribed a phone conversation. There needs to be some risk with this section. Not to say in detail what to do, but to say here is how your website is currently behaving. These sections were pretty vague, safe and lacked effort. Again I understand why not much detail is given, but if no risk is taken how will the potential client know you’re serious?

As a side note, I do think it is okay to reference articles that explain how certain processes work, i.e. domain changes. But when you do this I’d make sure you aren’t referencing an employee of your competition whose biography and place of employment is included in the article. Essentially you’ve just given a recommendation to a competitor.

The Good:

These companies. took. risk. They actually ran a few keyword ranking reports for terms we wanted to rank for, were ranking for and ones we needed to rank for that hadn’t been discussed. This showed a lot of work on their part and it also showed they were behaving in the manner that we were going to hire them anyway. I also got a sense of their work ethic from these good examples. Going above and beyond when no definitive contract had been signed conveyed they were serious about getting our business. Is it possible to get a client without taking this type of ”risk”? It absolutely is, but without risk the rewards are minimal at best.

Recommendations

The Bad:

If your only quotes from clients say, “They provided great service”, I’d either go look for more quotes or question how great your service really is. This is probably my own preference, but a quote like that is similar to that of a blog comment that says, “Great Post”. A statement like that doesn’t really make me want to call the company back and say “You’re hired!”. On top of that, the “case studies” are really nothing more than a one page document that states, “We did keyword research for client XYZ, analyzed their website and now their traffic has increased.”. Neither of these were really persuading me to want to hire or continue communication with this company.

The Good:

What I really liked wasn’t the fact that real names and companies were used (though that did help), but that the quotes were descriptive and you could tell thought had been put into it. These were quotes that  were memorable and did not blend in with the rest. The case studies provided by these companies explained the condition of the site before hand and provided detail on how they went about analyzing the site. Lastly, rather than comment on the increased amount of traffic, a mention on the increase in conversions/sales was used.

Financials

The Bad:

The only way this section was messed up was when the companies gave no actual dollar amount and were very vague as to what the client would be paying for. Now, I’m not saying your prices should be listed like a menu from Burger King, but you should be able to let people know what they are getting for a rough estimate. If there are any extra services you provide that weren’t discussed list them here as well so everyone is aware. Nothing can taint the relationship like an unknown cost appearing out of nowhere.

The Good:

This section was kept simple and explained what the client was getting and what else was available for an estimated cost.

Overall

The Bad:

These SEOPs seemed pretty cut and paste. I’d imagine if you compared two proposals for different clients in different industries, they would read the same. So my question is, if no two websites are marketed the same why would the proposals be the same? During the initial call there should have been enough time to identify what the client’s concerns were and how they would be addressed.

The Good:

Unique, original and memorable are three words I’d use to describe these proposals. If these were cut and paste, then I was fooled, though I doubt it. To me it was pretty clear these companies took time to listen to the potential clients and tailored the SEOP to fit them. The impressive part was the company’s who not only listed the customer’s wants, but the ones that listed (in a polite manner) what the customer needs were.

There wasn’t a single company that hit every single area perfectly. What I believe it comes down to is the client. It’s about optimizing the SEOP to fit their needs and to persuade them to become a client. Think of it the same way your company optimizes websites. It isn’t about you, it’s about attracting them and getting the conversion.

I’d love to hear some thoughts on this from companies that send out SEOPs and those who have gotten them. What areas are more important to you and which are of least importance? Thanks for reading.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

What Makes a Good SEO Proposal?

Read other posts by this Author: Joshua Titsworth

How Much Should You Spend On SEO?

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It’s a tough question, especially in a bad economy.

The question really begs another question – what is your goal for your site?

If you are operating it as a real business where you hope to either supplement your current income or rely on it as your sole source of income – then you need to be prepared to invest in search (it’s often the foundation of your marketing and a consistent source of regular traffic).

You can invest time or money and in most cases, you usually need to invest both.

I think there is someone out there spreading some erroneous information about starting a business online.  There is a lot of the “build it and they will come” mentality – in other words throw up a site and voila insta-business!

While in many ways, it is easier to do business online because you don’t need to set up physical stores and have a lot of the issues you have with brick and mortars, it is by no means a “sure thing” – you still have to work for your success.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying you shouldn’t start an online business -  I am just saying if you expect your business to grow and treat you well, then you need to treat it like a serious business.

So, yes, it will be necessary for you to invest both time and money into generating traffic.

So back to the question at hand – how much should you spend on SEO?

You need to crunch some numbers and see how many visitors it takes to get a sale and how much a sale is worth to you to really fine-tune your budget – especially if PPC is part of your plans (so many people waste money on PPC that isn’t converting – spend wisely or it can suck you dry!)

For organic SEO you will find everything from $19.99 mass submission (avoid like the plague, you may as well burn your $19.99) to tens of thousands of dollars per month.

Most small to medium sized businesses spend between $300 – $800 per month, although I’ve also heard people say numbers a little higher, like $500 – $1500 per month is the norm.  So somewhere in that range is what you should expect to pay for quality SEO work.

It always amazes me that people are annoyed they have to pay for SEO.  People will pay for a doctor or a mechanic, or even a web designer but they seem to resent having to pay for SEO.  If you have the time and knowledge, then by all means, don’t pay anyone, do it yourself.  However if you don’t have the time or knowledge, it’s a valid, and important expense and not something you should begrudge.  Driving traffic to your site is the foundation and not the area you want to go cheap.

I’m jussayin…think about your goals and think about what you are prepared to do to get there.

Read other posts by this Author: Jennifer Horowitz