On Wednesday, we covered some great tips that you needed BEFORE you started on your website. So what does your website need AFTER you covered those basics?

Some basic search engine optimization tips can help your website push higher on the page rankings. Yes, you may think you know basic SEO, but we all need reminders of how important it is to our business success. There may be some wonderful tips you may have forgotten or you may not have ever learned… like using the page numbers on web pages.  It surprises me that some websites still use the page number instead of name, yet it still happens.

And while you’re busy doing all the SEO work on the website, it becomes really easy to forget that search engines rank the pages individually as well. These little things may not be much by themselves, but together they add up to results that can really help your search engine ranking.

All these pieces come together like a puzzle to create your search engine ranking and create a site that helps visitors know you have what they want. When you combine a good ranking with multiple pages that offer visitor-related materials, you will have a much greater chance of converting them to consumers.

Lee Collins
Managing Director
StomperNet, LLC

“SEO is not rocket science (or anywhere close to it). But it certainly can get as technical and detailed as you want to make it.”

~ John I. Jerkovic ~
SEO Warrior

LAST DAY!

It’s finally here…and you don’t want to miss this sale!

SEO Basic Factors

While you may think SEO is important for your website, ranking is important for each individual page.  Each page has its own rank in the search engines, the whole website is only a part of the factor.

Based on experience the three strongest elements to a page are its Domain Name, Title Tag and Back Links, and depending on the level of competition for your search phrase, an adjustment to any of these can increase your page anywhere from few up to hundreds of spots.

There are some other elements as well, that I will also cover in this article.

Domain Name

Include keywords, if possible; however, don’t make it “spammy” with too much hyphenation! My personal rule of thumb is no more than 2 hyphens. If your niche is wedding favors, and all the “good” domain names are taken, you could consider beautiful-wedding-favors.com, but I wouldn’t recommend the-very-best-wedding-favors-ever.com. Get the picture?

The Title Tag

I think of it like the mullet hairstyle: business in the front, party in the back. Your most important keywords should be in the front, and it should be followed with a compelling reason to click the link:

Beautiful Wedding Favors: We ship your Wedding Favors for Free

Beach Wedding Favors: Free Shipping on all Beach Theme Favors

You don’t have to “stuff” the title tag, and in the search results it is the most prominent, clickable element. You want to design it to help you rank higher AND get more clicks than the other folks.

Back Links

It has been said that enough back links can solve any ranking problem, and that’s probably true, but you do want to make them work well for you. Remember, anchor text matters! Your best links will include keyword rich words and phrases, not your URL. For example:

Buy beautiful beach wedding favors from my-great-sites.com

…is MUCH better than…

Buy beautiful beach wedding favors from my-great-sites.com.

Hint: Your links should look NATURAL. In other words, they shouldn’t all say exactly the same thing. Immediately having 10,000 back links to a site that’s been online 2 days, with all the same exact links just doesn’t “feel” right.

ALSO … Remember that you want to get links DEEP into your site, not just the home page. It has been suggested in the past that no more than 50% of your links should point to the home page, so be sure to get links to categories and even product level pages (if you’re in eCommerce)!

The next element that I work diligently on to make keyword rich is the actual page name. Consider the keywords that are targeted for the page, and name the pages accordingly – even in eCommerce and database driven sites.

Page Names

Do you have a generic domain, or a custom domain? (www.mydomain.com/seo-expert-tips.html vs. www.mydomain.com/?3z42.php)

Your pages should be themed based on relevance. If the page is about beach wedding favors, keep the content relevant. Don’t stray and add extra content about wedding shoes and the dress – unless it’s appropriate.

Meta Description

The Meta Description should NOT be ignored. While it will not affect the search results, it can alter the results of the search and drive a higher click through rate. This is the second feature anyone will notice about your site, BEFORE they ever arrive on the page. So use keyword rich content with compelling text to encourage them to click on that search engine listing to visit your site. I have seen occasions on our own site where we were getting higher click throughs at #2 than the listing at #1, and our only conclusion is that our meta description copy was more compelling to the user.

Meta Keywords

Meta Keywords are certainly not used for ranking, but I add them to each page so that I can keep track of what the page theme is ranking for. Some folks are concerned that using them this way would allow others to “steal” your keywords, but frankly there are so many other tools out there that they don’t have to view my meta keywords to find out what I am trying to rank that page for.

These are just the basics that can help your page rank better.  There are additional factors that you may want to add depending on your site.

By Michelle Chance-Sangthong

Michelle has proven her ability to transform lackluster websites into dynamic profit-generators. Through her company, Red Hawk Strategies , Michelle is now offering consultations, workshops, and seminars that will help you increase your company’s marketing efficiency by making your website a beacon for your target audience. Contact her at michellechancesangthong@gmail.com

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Secret Sauce Checklist

The Strongest SEO Elements:

• Domain Name: Include keywords, if possible. Don’t OVER HYPHENATE
• Title Tag: The tag should be targeted AND clickable
• Back Links

Also Consider these SEO Basics

• Pages Names:  Named according to the page content
• Meta Description: What people see on the Search Engine Results and can get you better click-through
• Meta Keywords:  While Search engines don’t use these, you can use for tracking purposes

Stomper Buzz

Next Week’s Focus: Monetizing Your Site

Upcoming StomperNet Public Webinars

THURSDAY December 8, 2011 ~ 2 pm Eastern

“Crowdfunding: Intro & Update” with StomperNet Moderator Lee Vance

Join Lee and learn how you can use Crowdfunding to get funding to market and develop some of those awesome product and development ideas.

You’ll discover:

• What it is
• How it works
• Pitfalls to avoid
• How to get accepted
• How to get your business going!

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We know everyone has questions about their business or  different stumbling blocks. Well we invite you to bring them to the  table during our Open Forum. With the combined training and experience  of our Coaches you will get the direction you need to get you back on  your road to success!

The next StomperNet Open Forum Call with our Professional Coaches happens next Friday at 11am EDT and we  hope to see you there! These calls are intended to be live Q&A  sessions and playback will not be available.

Let us know your thoughts on today’s issue.

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Stompernet Blog

By Michelle Chance-Sangthong

Greetings, Stompers! Let’s talk ‘pre-SEO’ strategies today, shall we? For many of you website owners, redesigning a website simply means putting a “new brand” on an existing site. You know, changing the colors, updating style and in the end, it looks new, but you really haven’t “changed” the site; you’ve simply improved its look.

In this article, we are not focusing on a site re-brand, we are going to re-visit specific “challenges” I’ve encountered on clients’ websites, and I will teach you a variety of ways you can avoid treacherous pitfalls in creating an SEO plan for an expired domain name or an existing website makeover.

When you’re beginning with a brand new site and brand new domain name, there is really nowhere to go but up. When you are redesigning a website, you could make some choices that may actually cause you to lose ranking if you don’t know that to look out for.

There are 3 simple goals when creating an SEO plan for existing websites or domain names:

- Preserve Site PR and Backlinks

- Protect Individual Page Rankings

- Increase Targeted Traffic

The “Used” Domain Name …

Recently, I had a client come to me very excited about finally acquiring the domain name that matched their corporate name exactly, AFTER they had already built a new website – on a new platform – with this “new to them” domain name.

I checked out the Page Rank and backlinks and quickly discovered that the thousands of backlinks had anchor text that was completely unrelated to my client’s services. And they were not reusing the pages that had the lion share of the “link love”. So, while the domain had “age” and “Page Rank”, it had NO REPUTATION even remotely related to my client’s services.

In other words, the domain was good for branding, but was not going to give them the instant SEO boost they had hoped for in their own market. This meant we actually had to do MORE link building to overcome the domain’s “old reputation” as we established a new one for them.

The Point: Get the history on a website before you buy an old domain name if you plan on using it for a “money site”. Knowing the full history of a domain name or website can help you leverage the page rank and reputation for faster success.

The Baseline …

One of the most important things you can do BEFORE starting any SEO plan is to have a baseline for the analytics. Know what’s ranking and how much traffic is being driven to the website. Think about it like this: you’d never start a diet without establishing what you were measuring. Some folks measure in weight, others in inches, and others in how certain clothes fit.

In short, you have got to know where you started to successfully measure your progress. In fact, I no longer start SEO activities right out of the gate if the website does not have Google Analytics, Google Webmaster code, and Google AdWords properly setup, installed, verified AND containing a reasonable quantity of data available.

In this scenario everything seemed right. Both Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools were verified, the site was receiving traffic and we created “starting” reports based on organic (non-paid) keywords and visitors.

The client “did their own” Google AdWords campaign and did not want us involved, so we ran our reports with non-paid results, to be sure we weren’t giving ourselves credit for the AdWords / Pay Per Click visitors. A few months passed and we were getting only mediocre organic SEO results. A conversation with my client helped me to discover that he in fact had been continuing to purchase AdWords, although the Google Analytics showed that all of our visitors were coming from NON-PAID traffic.

Note: Inside Google Analytics you can choose between total, paid, or non-paid traffic.

After receiving the clients’ permission, I investigated the Google AdWords account and discovered that his AdWords and Analytics were properly connected; however, there was one setting that was preventing Analytics from properly reporting AdWords (paid) traffic. The client had UNCHECKED Auto Tagging, which means that none of the traffic that was sent from AdWords was labeled as PAID traffic! This led us to discover that our Baseline reports were inaccurate AND that our subsequent reports were inaccurate, as well.

To re-establish the baseline traffic we used the traffic reports in Google AdWords, and we painstakingly went month by month and adjusted our prior reports to get the most accurate baseline and ongoing reporting we could. It turned out that much of the initial traffic on the site was Pay Per Click and not organic search traffic at all.

After re-evaluating the data, the work we had done for the client had generated a 700% lift in ORGANIC (non-paid) traffic to his website. We believe that he could not see the difference in his business because as he got “busier,” he was letting his AdWord spend decrease.

The Point : Make sure you have all your ducks in a row; you can’t accurately improve if you’re not measuring!

The Platform Shift …

In the past the actual redesign may have been as simple as changing the site colors and slapping on a new logo, but we have seen the advent of many new, SEO friendly platforms where the redesign is really a full reformat of the website, including category structures and page names: think Magento, Joomla, WordPress, Drupal and others.

In this last scenario, our client is moving from a web-based drag-and-drop editor to WordPress, and to make it more exciting, the client was doing pretty well in the SERPS (search engine results page). With the platform change the page names would have to change though. In this instance we had an opportunity to give their site better page names.

And because of this online editor many of their pages were named with simply numbers like http://www.sample.com/567456.html instead of a domain name with words like http://www.sample.com/great-keyword-for-a-page-name.html.

What is important to track? The Current Page Name, Title Tag, Meta Description and Keywords of the current pages AND the FUTURE page name that it will be on the NEW platform. Why does that matter? Because you’ll need to establish a 301 Redirect for EVERY SINGLE ONE of your pages on the OLD site to correspond with their replacement on the NEW site.

For instance, the old page may be http://www.sample.com/services.html, but with WordPress it may become http://www.sample.com/services/. (Stomper side tip : In WordPress there is a specific plug-in you can use to easily manage the redirects called Redirection from Urban Giraffe found here: http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/ .)

Once the redesign is complete (on a development server) and you’re certain that all the pages have been re-created and the appropriate redirects have been completed, it’s time to go live long and prosper!

Regardless of the platform, you need to create an inventory of the pages on the website so that you don’t lose your “ranking” results. You can use an online tool like XML-Sitemaps.com to generate a crawl of all the pages on the website, and then download a text file that you can open with Excel or other spreadsheet program to establish the tracking check list for the pages.

Throughout the years I’ve had the privilege of managing my own websites, and I’ve also earned the trust from my clients to work with them through their SEO planning and redesign. So remember: when you are creating your SEO plan for a new design on an old domain name, or when it’s time to upgrade to a great new platform, these simple steps should help you avoid a few of the pitfalls that can really hamper SEO success.

Going through the necessary ‘pre-SEO’ motions ahead of time can really save you a noticeable amount of time, money, and stress when you’re ready to really modify your campaign. Stomping the search engines is an involved process, but with a little practice, you’ll be an SEO wizard!

Michelle Chance-Sangthong has proven her ability to transform lackluster websites into dynamic profit-generators. Through her company, Red Hawk Strategies , Michelle is now offering consultations, workshops, and seminars that will help you increase your company’s marketing efficiency by making your website a beacon for your target audience. Contact her at michellechancesangthong@gmail.com .

SEO for Service Professionals:

by Darrin Mish

FLV / MOV

Stompernet Blog

Everyone wants top results on search engines.  This is the big thing that I heard while at SEO Pro with Joel McDonald and our other experts.  It may be you or your clients.  The trick is getting the best results without getting banned.

You may have clients who want a site full of their favorite keywords, they don’t realize this is exactly how you get booted off search engine results.  Search engines have penalized over-optimized sites for years.  Thus your goal is to find that happy medium between the over-optimization and not enough keywords or “throw away” keywords.

You may ask “How do I find that keyword balance?”

Fortunately, Joel is going to explain how to find the right blend of keywords for you to build natural organic links and traffic.  Fortunately it is not as hard as it sounds, creating that right blend that will help you build links and search engine rankings.

Check out his “Scientifically Natural Keyword Building” you will learn how to find the keywords that bring in money making traffic.

Lee Collins
Managing Director
StomperNet, LLC

“You can have the best product or service in the world, but if people don’t buy – it’s worthless. So in reality it doesn’t matter how wonderful your new product or service is. The real question is – will they buy it?”
~ Noel Peebles ~

Scientifically Natural Keyword Building

I get into discussions all the time about “natural link-building” with SEO. Natural link building, by the way, is referring to building links in a way that appears organic. In other words, if you’re trying to rank for “Blue Widgets”, you’ll get penalized if you drive too many links towards your site with anchor text of “blue widgets”. The idea here is to mix it up with other “random” links that make it appear like your links were acquired “naturally”. The best way to do that is to include links with varying anchor-text like “discount blue widgets”, “blue widgets online”, and even your website; BobsPretendBlueWidgetStore.com.

I couldn’t agree more that the best way to avoid over-optimizing for a certain keyword is to make your link-structure appears “natural” but by no means does that mean that you should waste keywords with junk that won’t make you money.

Your Plan to Manufacture “Natural” Looking Links:

Here is a relatively cheap, scientific way of determining the best keywords you can use to avoid an over-optimization penalty. By applying this plan, you will not only make sure to build links with a naturally varied link structure, but you’ll make sure that every single keyword that you “naturally” rank for is a keyword that has already proven itself as a keyword that can make you money as well.

1) Set up an AdWords account.

I know, I know – you’re thinking, “Wait a minute! Joel was talking about organic SEO!” I don’t want to turn this into a topic on the importance of doing your research before jumping into a link, but suffice it to say without doing at least a little bit of research, you could be targeting the wrong terms. The best way to avoid that is to first buy traffic for the terms you want to target. Only after they’ve proven themselves, do you start to optimize for these terms.

2) Generate a Conversion Code.

Under the “reports” tab in your AdWords account, you’ll be able to generate a conversion code that should be placed on the “thank you” page of your website. Whether you have a product for sale or are simply collecting emails to build a list, by placing this conversion code on the confirmation page of your site, you’ll enable AdWords to keep track of exactly how many conversions each keyword generates for you. Knowing that information is priceless.

3) Bid on Keywords.

After doing a little research in your market, bid on 10 to 50 keywords you think would be solid keywords. Then drive those keywords at the most relevant page on your website. The important thing is to bid on the search network only (disable the display network) and bid on exact match only. The best way to do this is to simply place [brackets] around the keywords when uploading them into the AdWords system. (If you’re using AdWords Editor, just check the “exact match only” checkbox.) Broad match and phrase match are great, but those are to get you traffic from keywords you didn’t think of, that’s not the traffic you want when doing your SEO research.

4) Decide on best keywords.

Here’s the hard part . . . after bidding on your keywords, you have to wait until you have enough traffic to decide on what 5 or 6 keywords get you the most business. This can be really hard to do, but it’s extremely important.  What you need to know is exactly which keywords are generating the most sales for you, and broad match, phrase match or display network traffic won’t do that for you nearly as cost effectively as exact match in the search network.

5) Wait.

How long you should wait depends on how much traffic your keywords get. It could be a day — it could be a month, but it will be worth the wait. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and the keywords you thought would be your best ones end up generating the most sales for you. Sometimes, however, you’ll be surprised at what keywords generate sales for you. It’s this research that will make sure you squeeze every ounce of profit out of your keywords as possible.

After you’ve found your 5 or 6 optimal keywords, it’s now your time to start building links and start implementing your organic SEO plan. If you had just jumped in and picked a bunch of random keywords, you’d certainly keep the search engines happy by “being natural”, but you might not be happy with the sales those “naturally varied” keywords generate for your business.  Adding this simple plan can double, triple, or even quintuple your sales once your carefully selected “random” keywords start to rank on the search engines. Good luck, and happy stomping!

Joel McDonald is a StomperNet Faculty Member and an AdWords Consultant with 2020ppc.com.

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Secret Sauce Checklist

Tips on how to get the best keywords for your business

• Get an Adwords account.
• Use a conversion code to track your results.
• Research your market.
• Using exact match bid on keywords in the search network only
• You want the right keywords, so wait for results.
• Study your results and choose the best keywords.

This Week’s Hot Forum Topic

Stomper Buzz

Next Week’s Focus: Outsourcing

FACULTY OFFICE HOURS NEXT WEEK:

TUESDAY October 4, 2011 ~ 2:00 pm Eastern

“How Can I Possibly Do All This Myself? A Guide To Successful Outsourcing” with Andrea Warner

As an online marketer you have to wear many hats. You get to be sales, marketing, run the PPC campaigns, answer the phones, take orders, write the sales pages, answer customer emails, write articles…WAIT!!! Can you really do it ALL?? Maybe. But can you do it all well?!?  Join Andrea Warner as she takes you through her Guide to Successful Outsourcing.  StomperNet Members: Register Now

FREE LIVE WEBINARS NEXT WEEK:

TUESDAY October 4, 2011 ~ 8:00 pm Eastern

“Creating $250k Unsecured, Zero-Interest, Tax Free Cash!” with Georgia Gotthardt & Ari Page

Would you like to have unsecured business credit, available as cash to help fund your business quick,fast and easy? Join Georgia and Ari as they show you how getting funding can be fun, fast and easy and how It’s YOUR Tax dollar money givento the banks – so that they must lend it to you! Register Now

WEDNESDAY October 5, 2011 ~ 12:30 pm Eastern

“How to Crush Your Competition Online Using Market Me Suite In Only 30 Minutes A Day!” with Tammy Kahn Fennell

Last week MarketMeSuite gave away 5000 licenses and the first question we received was “Great. Now how do I use it”. Tammy Fennell, the CEO or MarketMe Suite has agreed to do a webinar to help you use this new tool to the utmost extreme. She will get you set up managing your social media so you can learn to crush your competition with as little as 30 minutes a day.

You still have until Tuesday to download your free MarketMe Suite license. There are still a couple 100 left. But they are going FAST. Register Now

*NEW* “StomperNet Open Forum” Fridays at 11EDT

We know everyone has questions about their business or different stumbling blocks. Well we invite you to bring them to the table during our Open Forum. With the combined training and experience of our Coaches you will get the direction you need to get you back on your road to success!

The next StomperNet Open Forum Call with our Professional Coaches happens next Friday at 11am EDT and we hope to see you there! These calls are intended to be live Q&A sessions and playback will not be available.

Let us know your thoughts on today’s issue.

Post Your Comments Here

Stompernet Blog

By Joel McDonald

So you’ve identified your top keyword, and have outlined an SEO strategy so you can start ranking for that phrase… Great! Depending on the competitiveness of your keyword you can expect to get it to the first page of Google 3 to 12 months from now. Good luck!

Instead of putting all your eggs in one basket, what about a strategy that can start getting you profitable traffic as early as next week? It’s not going to be high volumes of traffic, but at least you don’t have to wait months and months before seeing a dime. You could, however, start seeing small profits from your efforts by next week. It’s called the “long tail” approach, and I’m going to show you how to accomplish this!

For those of you thinking low-volume search phrases aren’t worth the trouble, here is a little story about two blogging Realtors. It is inspired by an old favorite show of mine – “Newhart”.

Meet Darryl and his brother Darryl.

Both are Realtors, and both work separately in the same market (which we’ll call “BIG CITY”).  They both started a blog at the same time, and both learned the same SEO strategies about search engine marketing.

Fast Forward 1 month:

Fast Forward 3 months:

Fast Forward 6 months:

Fast Forward 1 year:

Darryl 1 eventually sold his website to Darryl 2 and now works at the Waybury Inn.
OK, OK — I realize that is a bit of an exaggeration, but there are a few lessons here:

1. Anyone can write, and it doesn’t have to be earth-shattering journalism. The important thing is that it is written with the reader’s benefit in mind.  Optimize for the right long-tail topic and you’ll get  good search engine rankings (and highly qualified traffic) with     almost no effort at all.
2. Cumulative traffic from dozens of long tail phrases with low search volumes can easily equal (or surpass) the traffic of one heavily searched     phrase, and it’s usually far easier to obtain.
3. By definition,     long tail traffic converts at a much higher rate than highly searched for terms, so even if it doesn’t have as much traffic as your more competitive phrases, 1000 visits for long tail phrases could possibly generate more traffic than 10,000 or even 100,000 visits for more common, but less targeted phrases.

In summary:

Whether selling real estate, consulting services, or cameras — the same rules apply…

You can spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on the hope of getting to the first page for “Canon Camera” and get tons and tons of traffic a few months from now, or you could spend a few hours – and little to no money – to get to the first page for “Canon Rebel EOS xsi”, and start earning money by next week!

Long Tail Keywords Can Grow Your Business!

PS – All of the above assumes you’ve done your homework and first verified that you can actually sell something on your website before lifting a finger on any SEO efforts. You’ve done that by driving PPC traffic to your site for your desired keywords… Right?

Joel McDonald

Stomper Faculty member Joel McDonald has been self-employed all his life and has generated over a billion dollars in sales for his online companies. In addition to being in charge of online revenues for his own companies, he does AdWords consulting for companies such as Mars Botanicals (a division of Mars® Incorporated), REMAX®, Disney® Resellers, as well as several Stompernet Faculty members.

Joel uses AdWords as the foundation of every single business he has ever owned or consulted for, and regularly shares all of his tips and tricks with you as a valued Stompernet member.

Mapping Keywords to Content

Flv

Stompernet Blog

It’s a simple fact that search engine rankings can make or break your online business. The higher you are in the search engines, the more clicks you’ll get to your site, and the better chance you have to bring in revenue. And we’re all in this to bring in some revenue right?!?

But the golden question is…HOW DO I GET HIGHER IN THE SEARCH ENGINES?!?

If there was an easy answer…everyone would be doing it! But of course Google likes to keep things interesting and keep us on our toes and change things up for us from “time to time”.

There are, however, some key factors that everyone should be aware of. Most of the “veterans” know these things…but even veterans lose site of the basics occasionally and it’s good to get a reminder.

So for today’s Intelligence Report, we are keeping with our them of week- SEO Basics – and cover Anatomy of Search Engine Rankings – On Page Factors.

Lee Collins
Managing Director
StomperNet, LLC

“SEO is a noun, verb, and adjective.”
-Todd Malicoat, Stuntdubl

Anatomy Of A Search Engine Ranking:

How The Search Engines Decide Which Pages Get Ranked At The Top!

“On page factors” refer to the parts of your site that you control. They are the elements of your site itself: the way your page is structured, the words you use, etc.

Some key things you can do to improve your site’s rankings from using on-page factors include:

Use text, not pictures as your main communications tool:

This is often a fault of artist-designed pages. Because they want to control the typefaces, placement and appearance of their pages, artists oftentimes build entire sites using pictures of words, not the words themselves. Although the design of the site is important, using too many images is bad, very bad, because the search engines can’t see words that are contained in pictures, they can only see actual text.

To test this, go to your site, place your cursor at the bottom right corner of your site, left click and drag your cursor to the left and up the page. Any words that turn blue character by character are coded as text (that’s good!)

Any words that turn blue all at once (usually this will happen with large amounts of text at the same time) are pictures of words, (that’s bad!) Generally you want to have any keywords you want to rank on in the search engines as text on your pages, not as pictures of text.

Use keyword rich title tags:

Title tags are shown only in the line at the very top of your browser (the one with the X in the corner to close out the browser) and are included in the header of your page’s code proceeded by the tag . This is an important tag, because only 64 characters are actually displayed. They should be succinct, and include the keywords you are targeting with that specific page.

Don’t make the mistake of leaving the title tag blank (it will appear as Untitled), having it be only your company name (presumably the search engines will get that your site is from your company and index it under that term, so unless you have a very well-known company, leave your company name out of your title tag and instead have it tell them exactly what this page is about), and being the same on every page of your site. Also, remember that the title tag is generally what appears as the first line of your listing on the search engines, so it should also encourage people to click by grabbing attention, creating curiosity, and clearly indicating what that page is about.

Selectively use bolds, italics and larger sized type:

Search engines tend to give higher weight to content that is coded to stand out. Be careful, though, about not overusing this technique as it is popular with spammers and you will receive penalties for overuse!

Link within your site:

Many people ignore the power of properly linking within their site. For example, you may want to link to other pages within your site as resources, to create definitive guides which you link to from other pages on your site, and link to specific blog posts. As always, don’t go overboard with this. Make sure that these links are within the body of the page, not just in the side and bottom navigation bars!

Build larger sites, rather than small individual sites

Evidence shows that larger sites (greater than 100 pages of content) tend to do better in the search engines than smaller sites. While part of this may also be that larger sites tend to be older than smaller sites, it appears that it is better to add additional content to an existing, related site, rather than creating a new site targeting specific keywords.

Now, pay special attention to this next point – we saved the most important point for the last:

Add new content to your site daily (yes, daily!)

Search engines like frequently updated sites, and new content generates more and more food for the search engine spiders to consume and index. A strategy of daily creation of at least one new high-quality content page, which targets a specific keyword, and is linked to with a text link from within your site, could be one of the best SEO tools you could possibly practice! I know it’s hard, but it is definitely worth it! These can be articles, blog posts, new products, how-to information, whatever. The key is something new and good every single day.

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We offer ¼ page, ½ page and full page full color ads. We also offer business card ads and 10 word to 50 word classified ads.

Watch for more information next week. In the meantime, contact The Net Effect Managing Editor Suzanne Roese-McGee with any questions at: stompersuz@gmail.com

SEO Secret Sauce

1. Use text, not pictures as your main communications tool
2. Use keyword rich title tags
3. Selectively use bolds, italics and larger sized type
4. Link within your site
5. Build larger sites, rather than small individual sites
6. Add new content to your site daily (yes, daily!)

The STOMPER Buzz

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Stompernet Blog

Due to the many changes in the search environment, some things that worked yesterday are no longer working when it comes to SEO.

Directories are old school when it comes to the Internet, and there’s been some questions about them. Are they still valid? Should you bother? What directories are good/bad or don’t matter?

If you’ve been wondering… We’ve got some thoughts…

Lee Collins
Managing Director
StomperNet, LLC

“The five essential entrepreneurial skills for success are concentration, discrimination, organization, innovation and communication.” ~ Michael Faraday

Are Link Directories Still Relevant?

When the Internet was still fairly new, the best known site for typing keywords that applied to what you were looking for was Yahoo.com. It was organized into different categories, and you could either pick a category that you were interested in learning more about or type a search term in to find different category listings.

Though it had a search element, Yahoo didn’t move to crawler-based results until around 2002. Before that, it was most definitely more directory than search engine.

That was in the mid-90s and since the inception of Yahoo, many other directories have popped up on the Web, both good and bad.

Five years ago, it was cool to add your link to any directory that existed. All backlinks — free or paid — were good links, and no matter where they came from, they boosted your place in the SERPs.

Fast forward to 2011, and things have changed. Though Yahoo is still a well-respected force online, and Google isn’t the ONE big dog that it used to be, it’s still making heavy ripples throughout the Web — when something happens there, everyone still pays attention.

With recent changes, we have reason to wonder — are link directories so yesterday, or do they even matter?

Google did one thing with the recent Panda update, and that was to make low-quality, poor content sites targets for devaluation. But even some of the big dogs were howling. We saw respected sites like Ezine Articles, Mahalo, and HubPages suffering severe ranking and traffic damage. And we know that the issues that these sites faced was the duplicate content issue.

But other sites, which Google considers to be “low-quality,” suffered from lack of content of any kind — the scrapers, the squeeze pages (which never really ranked anyway), and maybe… online link directories?

How are they stacking up? You’d think that since they have little content, aside from site descriptions, that they might have been impacted negatively. For some of them, that’s true, but for others, their traffic actually increased dramatically. Panda loved them! Check out these stats, recently gathered from SEMRush.com:

Apparently, Google found value in some directories and not in others. The traffic differences before and after were astounding!

Notice that its own DMOZ.org dropped almost 300,000 visitors after Panda, whereas Yahoo improved by more than 45.5 million! Other directories fared in differing amounts of traffic, up and down, across the board.

But the shakeout is not over. In April, Business.com dropped like a stone to around 99K visitors, a mere 1/10 of the traffic the site was getting.

So, what happened?

We can only guess. However, directories returning lots of 404 links would definitely not be viewed favorably. Sites offering sitewide linking was another consideration, which has always been something Google frowned upon, even when buying links hadn’t been demonized by the search giant a few years ago..

It’s easy to sit back and make assumptions, but the fact is that directories that improved in traffic are the type you’ll want to target if part of your SEO strategy is to include them in your backlinking process. But if you’re just going for potential traffic, remember that things have changed. Entering your site could be a total waste of time these days.

So, how do you decide whether to bother at all, and if you do want to add your site to any of the online directories, what criteria should you follow before shelling out any amount of cash?

Here are three tips for making sure your one-way backlink is valuable:

1. Find only human-edited directories. If the directory is a paid option and says that sites are reviewed, be sure that the sites it has registered are quality sites and that they really are looking for sites with great content to improve the Web. Also check their refund policy if your site is rejected. Some of them do refund partial or entire fees paid.
2. Make sure that there aren’t too many ads running on the site. If there are, it’s a sure bet that if it hasn’t happened already, the site will lose impact over time.
3. Can you find a category that is 100% relevant to your site? Make sure that a local directory listing category is in line your niche, too. Don’t just submit to be included without evaluating the value of doing so first.

Gaining one-way links from quality directories is still a great start-up strategy for getting a new site going. Solid directory backlinks are still valued by all of the search engines and are a good basis to build upon. However, if you don’t continue to gather backlinks for a page, the effect will decrease over time, so if you’re in it for the long haul, create a system to keep the backlinks flowing.

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SEO SECRET SAUCE

Now that you know how directories can still be beneficial, here are some tips about what NOT to do when considering your options:

1. Do not use the same anchor text in every directory link. Make things look more natural, as if other people are recommending or “voting” for your site.
2. Remember that Yahoo or DMOZ can be worth 20 of the lower echelon links combined.
3. This backlinking strategy tends to work best with Yahoo and Bing in terms of it having a SERPs impact, but you can still get directory traffic from Google if your site is listed in a highly visible directory.
4. Regularly updated and respected blogs in your niche will tend to drive more traffic, if that’s what you’re looking for, so guest posting would be a better way to go than paying for a $300 listing that has minimal traffic itself. Check Alexa rankings and other indicators of overall site traffic to find out.
5. Most directories online are nothing more than link spam. Be very careful about the directories you choose. Just because a site is free and seems like a good deal doesn’t mean that it won’t hurt your SEO more than help.

THE STOMPER BUZZ

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Otto Collins

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Stompernet Blog

Our story starts in February, when Danny Sullivan saw that something had changed at Google. I mean, we heard something was in the wind when Matt Cutts mentioned that Google planned to take action against “content farms” shortly before, so it wasn’t like what happened was any big surprise.

And it wasn’t just Danny noticing. SEOs from all over the Web had seen significant changes to their organic traffic, but this important algorithm shift had no label until Danny called it the “Farmer” update in his SearchEngineLand.com blog.

Yet, when Google admitted to the update (which affected nearly 12% of all pages in the U. S.), they decided that they’d rather call it “Panda,” because it was more “friendly” and because they didn’t want people to think that they were specifically targeting content farms.

But they were targeting content farms and more. And thousands of websites immediately lost their traffic and were scrambling to figure things out.

Some major sites were affected by Panda, too. Suite101.com, for example, lost 94% and EzineArticles.com lost 90% of their organic traffic. There was no doubt that the devastation was a crushing blow to sites using only “duplicate” rather than the original content that Google wants to see.

That’s not to say that your site will be penalized if it holds some duplicate content. But if it’s ALL duplicate content or content “scraped” from other sites, you’ll want to pay close attention…

If your site was affected, you may have noticed a significant drop in organic traffic since the end of February. You can also check your positions in Google Webmaster Tools, and see if keyword positions have radically changed over the past 30 days.

But if your investigation proves that the Panda has bitten you, don’t worry. You can get your rankings back. Here are five things you can do to improve your image with Google:

1. Remove any pages with “scraped” content.

Content that you didn’t create yourself, such as article reprints or blog “excerpt” posts with no original content added to back those up. Even very large sites with just a few such pages are feeling the bite, so if you think your site is too big to be bothered, you may want to think again.

2. Keep outside advertising to a minimum.

It’s OK to have one or two ads on a page with a significant amount of content, but if you have a site where the ads outweigh the content or your site looks like a used car lot with streamers, banners, and blinking ads everywhere, get rid of that stuff! It’s going to hurt you.

3. Be sure that your customers have a way to contact a human being.

If you’re writing a blog, be sure to respond to your comments. If your site is an e-commerce site, a membership site, or a stand-alone website, be sure that people have a way to contact you or at least your support department by mail, email, and telephone. Live chat isn’t a bad idea, either. Google wants to see human interaction or at least the potential for it.

4. Do everything you can to get traffic.

Send social media outlets to your blog or web page, use paid media buys, do whatever it takes to get people interested in your site because Google wants to see some traffic coming in and they are counting your “authority” in social arenas, too.

5. Get quality backlinks. Don’t buy them — ever.

Google hates that. But you can guest post on other blogs in your niche, or submit to quality directories like DMOZ, Yahoo, or JoeAnt.com, for example. (Just be sure that the directory is human edited or it won’t count.)

Though Google ins’t the only search engine on the block, it still gets the most traffic and will give you the best results if you optimize for it. Take some time now to figure out whether the Panda has bitten you, and then follow the steps above.

The bottom line is… Give Google the quality, unique content that it wants because there’s nothing more valuable than the bucket loads of targeted, free, converting traffic that Google supplies.

Take care of Google and it will most definitely take care of you.

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SEO SECRET SAUCE

Still worried about Panda?

Here are more steps you can take to can improve your rankings, whether or not your site was bitten by the bear:

1) Care about your visitors –

The overall user experience is important, not just to Google but to your customers. Be sure that your site design and usability are set to “easy,” keep ad-to-content ratio low, and work on brand perception. Keep your brand in their minds and on your pages. If you’re already there… Great! You’re doing the right things.

2) Are you concentrating on awareness?

After ensuring all content on your site is high quality, be sure to consider your engagement with customers through social media channels. Promote your brand awareness with Facebook pages and Twitter. Work toward achieving “authority” in social media sites by getting as many Retweets and Likes as possible. Focus on your customers’ experience interacting with your company. Let them know that there are real people behind it.

3) Have one kind of advertising, not several…

If you have a site or blog running AdSense, Kontera (or other link advertising), and banners, choose one form of advertising and stick to that. Too many forms just ring Google’s bell and could hurt your chances for higher rankings.

And if you’re already doing these things? Celebrate! You have appeased the ghods of Google.

Is your site up to snuff or what can you do to improve it?

Let us know with your comments below!

Stompernet Blog

By Michelle Chance-Sangthong

The art of Search Engine Optimization hasn’t evolved as much as everyone wants to believe.  Yes, algorithms are updated and many sites feel a pinch when they do, but the core SEO strategies still hold true.

Don’t misunderstand: there are many different tactics and methods for getting links, using web 2.0 properties, article marketing and the like, but ultimately, when you’re looking at on site search engine optimization, you have to begin with the basics!

These basics include: Domain Name, Title Tag, Page Name, Design Elements, Content, Frequency, Popularity, Reputation and Back Links. These – along with more than 200 other factors – make up the “formula” for how the search engines rank our pages. Yes, pages. Each page has its own rank in the search engines; it’s not just about the web site, but the individual page.

Based on experience the three strongest elements to a page are its Domain Name, Title Tag and Back Links, and depending on the level of competition for your search phrase, an adjustment to any of these can increase your page anywhere from few up to hundreds of spots.

Domain Name:

Include keywords, if possible; however, don’t make it “spammy” with too much hyphenation!  My personal rule of thumb is no more than 2 hyphens. If your niche is wedding favors, and all the “good” domain names are taken, you could consider beautiful-wedding-favors.com, but I wouldn’t recommend the-very-best-wedding-favors-ever.com.  Get the picture?

The Title Tag:

I think of it like the mullet hairstyle: business in the front, party in the back.  Your most important keywords should be in the front, and it should be followed with a compelling reason to click the link:

Beautiful Wedding Favors: We ship your Wedding Favors for Free

Beach Wedding Favors: Free Shipping on all Beach Theme Favors

You don’t have to “stuff” the title tag, and in the search results it is the most prominent, clickable element.  You want to design it to help you rank higher AND get more clicks than the other folks.

Back Links:

It has been said that enough back links can solve any ranking problem, and that’s probably true, but you do want to make them work well for you.  Remember, anchor text matters!  Your best links will include keyword rich words and phrases, not your URL.  For example:

Buy beautiful beach wedding favors from my-great-sites.com

…is MUCH better than…

Buy beautiful beach wedding favors from my-great-sites.com.

Hint: Your links should look NATURAL.  In other words, they shouldn’t all say exactly the same thing. Immediately having 10,000 back links to a site that’s been online 2 days, with all the same exact links just doesn’t “feel” right.

ALSO … Remember that you want to get links DEEP into your site, not just the home page. It has been suggested in the past that no more than 50% of your links should point to the home page, so be sure to get links to categories and even product level pages (if you’re in eCommerce)!

The Strongest Elements:

• Domain Name: Include keywords, if possible.  Don’t SUPER DUPER HYPHENATE (EX: the-very-best-wedding-favors-ever.com)

• Title Tag: Like A Mullet (Business in the Front, Party In The Back!).  The tag should be targeted AND clickable.

• Back Links

The next element that I work diligently on to make keyword rich is the actual page name. Consider the keywords that are targeted for the page, and name the pages accordingly – even in ecommerce and database driven sites.

Page Names: Do you have a generic domain, or a custom domain?   (www.mydomain.com/seo-expert-tips.html vs. www.mydomain.com/?3z42.php)

The design elements can help emphasize the “theme” of a page and you should incorporate them in ways that make sense.  Use your H1 tag properly, with 1 per page.  The H2 and H3 tags can be used if you have multiple sub topics on a page.

Using the <strong> tags for your keywords provide emphasis to the reader.

Your pages should be themed based on relevance. If the page is about beach wedding favors, keep the content relevant.  Don’t stray and add extra content about wedding shoes and the dress – unless it’s appropriate.

The Meta Description should NOT be ignored. While it will not affect the search results, it can alter the results of the search and drive a higher click through rate.  This is the second feature anyone will notice about your site, BEFORE they ever arrive on the page.  So use keyword rich content with compelling text to encourage them to click on that search engine listing to visit your site. I have seen occasions on our own site where we were getting higher click throughs at #2 than the listing at #1, and our only conclusion is that our meta description copy was more compelling to the user.

Meta Keywords are certainly not used for ranking, but I add them to each page so that I can keep track of what the page theme is ranking for. Some folks are concerned that using them this way would allow others to “steal” your keywords, but frankly there are so many other tools out there that they don’t have to view my meta keywords to find out what I am trying to rank that page for.

Design Elements:

• H1 Content – 1 per page
• H2, H3
• Strong
• Relevance
• Meta Data (Probably NOT used for ranking, but gives visitor a REASON to click you instead of the others.)
• Meta Keywords (NOT Used – But serves as a reminder as to the focused keywords for a page.)

All this talk about the page leads us to the actual content of the words used on a page. Make it laser-focused and relevant to the topic! Consider the rule of at least 200 words, but probably not more than 500 or so words. People just won’t keep reading past a minute or two. If you find that the topic is worthy of 1,500 or more words, split it up into separate topics or a series of articles. Also, this content on your own site should be unique.  Do not use duplicate content that you’ve placed on another site!  I am not theorizing over a duplicate content penalty. The search engines will simply rank the best page of duplicate content, and simply exclude the others to provide the BEST results to users.  So if your information is unique, you increase your chances of ranking!

Content should always be:

• Laser Focused
• Between 200 – 500 words
• Distinguished as indexable
• Unique (and never duplicated) content

The idea of popularity has been debated on again and again, but consider this idea, especially with personalized search: Google (and others) know which links are clicked, and can determine when a link is clicked and how quickly the back button is pushed.

Longer stays could indicate that the page served IS providing a keyword content match to the searched phrase, where as a quick back button clicks could indicate that the page is not providing the best “match” for the keywords.  Over time, it would feasible for the search engines to “improve” the listings based on the sites that folks tend to stay on and “reduce” the listings that get quick back clicks.

Popularity:

• Debated – But Makes Sense
• Quick Click Backs May Hurt
• Click Throughs Help
• Personalized Search Changed Things

Consider the reputation of your site, as well. The server it lives on, the markets it serves, etc. A random article about gun holsters on a website about prom makeup doesn’t really make much sense. If you are guest posting or accepting guest posts, they should blend in with your site. If you’re not sure of your site’s “category”, take a look at DMOZ.org for some indicators!

Reputation:

• Market Matching
• Vertical Reputation
• Think DMOZ Categories

Now for some final tips… Get your site listed in the BIG directories like DMOZ, Yahoo and others.  It’s simply that important!

Want more links? Write great content, amazing information and compelling content.  Users will naturally want to link to your information!

Use SEO-friendly press releases. Tip: Make sure you have your most important keyword phrase linked in the first paragraph. Sites like http://onlineprnews.com have made it incredibly affordable.

Writing Articles. It’s a great way to build your own reputation and get your information shared across the web when other websites syndicate those articles. As a reminder: don’t recycle the same article on your own sites that you submit to the article directories.

Blog Comments. Many are NO FOLLOW.  That really is not as important, so use blog comments to engage and create an opportunity to attract actual human visitors to your website.

Links. It bears repeating: enough quality links with relevant keyword-rich anchor text can solve just about any ranking problem.

Relevance. Be relevant, not random!

Anchor Text. Don’t use phrases like CLICK HERE to see the latest gear. You don’t want your page to rank for CLICK HERE … you want it to rank for your keywords – use them.

Important Tips About Links:

• Try for BIG Directories like DMOZ, Yahoo, etc.

• Link Bait – Natural Links

• Press Releases

• Articles

• Blog Comments

• Links can overcome many obstacles

• Relevance

• Anchor Text Matters

More on getting back links. Make your linking campaigns natural, and use an appropriate mix of back link anchor text.   Make sure the name you use at the top of your site includes the keywords for which you want links – as many folks will link based on those words. Do not get links for yourself with your domain name only – if you can help it- because sometimes anchor text isn’t possible on some websites. Don’t get too many links, too fast. If you have more links than you’ve had visitors to your site, it really doesn’t make mathematical sense, does it?

Finally, if you have to choose between 100 poor links from 100 random places or 10 great ones, I would pick the 10 great links first.

Consider:

• Natural, mix of words
• Site Name
• Not www.thisismysite.com
• Not TOO MANY, TOO FAST
• DEBATABLE
• 10 from 10 great sources over 100 junk links

Search engine optimization is not about impressing the search engines; it is about getting your website in front of users, making your listing click worthy, and then using the right information on your site to help them make an informed decision to do business with you.  Follow these proven tips, and you can’t go wrong! Good luck!

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Michelle Chance-Sangthong has proven her ability to transform lackluster websites into dynamic profit generators. Through her company, Red Hawk Strategies, Michelle is now offering consultations, workshops, and seminars that will help you increase your company’s marketing efficiency by making your website a beacon for your target audience.  Contact her at michellechancesangthong@gmail.com.

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Stompernet Blog

Hey everyone,

Believe it or not, it’s actually chilly in Orlando this week! Outside the Caribe Royale, that is.

Inside at SEO Pro, though, day 2 was HOT, HOT, HOT!

Nicole Munoz led off the day talking about how she and her husband manage to juggle full-time missions work in Mexico, seven kids, AND a thriving SEO consulting business. How? With a top-notch outsourcing team. Her strategies for getting the most out of outsourcers made her topic one of the most popular so far.

Next there was Scott Kublin on developing an online marketing mindset and why doing so is critical for long-term success. And Michelle Chance-Sangthong showed attendees how to create concise SEO client reports that deliver value and instill trust with clients.

One of the most anticipated talks was by Scott Gallagher on Google Places. And Scott knocked it out of the park by showing attendees real cutting edge strategies for maximizing Google’s local search in a way 99% of other marketers have no clue about.

Batting clean-up was power-hitter Glenn Dietzel, who laid out his personal – and replicable – system for creating and selling high-end information products.

And finally, Nicole Munoz closed things out with a surprise bonus workshop on nuts and bolts SEO tactics attendees can use to help their clients rank higher and faster.

By the end of the day, attendees had been given enough tools and strategies to find, sell, and keep real clients willing to invest in their businesses.

And we still have two days to go!

Check back tomorrow for a recap of day three and…

Happy Stomping!

The StomperNet Team

Stompernet Blog

Hey Everyone,

SEO Pro in Orlando is underway and the first day is in the books. So far, the feedback from veteran attendees has been awesome.  In fact many have said they’re blown away by how good this year’s SEO Pro is shaping up  to be.

Pretty high praise.

Our CEO, Brad Fallon, kicked us off with a motivational talk on selling and the power of questions.

He was followed by Howard Tiano, a.k.a. “The Outsourcerer.” Howard gave a complete soup-to-nuts blueprint on outsourcing that was a huge hit.

Then SEO consultant Bryan Dulaney took the stage and showed the attendees exactly how he consistently lands $3000 to $5000 a month clients and the lead systems he uses.

And finally, corporate sales star Brian Ridgway walked everyone through the same system he’s used to close more than $11 million in sales.

Friday is our first full day and is loaded with the nuts and bolts of actually running an SEO business, such as managing your virtual team, creating client reports, understanding Google Places, and more.

Stay tuned tomorrow for another recap – and maybe even a hot tip or two.

The StomperNet Team

Stompernet Blog