10 ‘Secrets’ You Really Should Know About Search Engine Marketing

Beverly Sills, the opera singer who died earlier this year, is famously quoted as saying "There are no shortcuts to any place worth going".

As a specialist online marketing professional, I spend a lot of time reading about the latest developments in search engine marketing and how this or that tweak, ploy or shortcut will suddenly change your life and lead to huge amounts of traffic; riches beyond your wildest desires and everlasting happiness. At the risk of sounding something of a cynic (I suppose 8 years in online marketing gives me a right to be!), if not a downright party pooper, I have to say I’m with Beverly Sills on this one. Yes, there are some things that you can do that might give you an edge, but if you are lucky it will only give you an edge for a very short time (before you’re found out). At best you could have just wasted your time, at worst you could be set back significantly and lose far more than you gained.

Background

Before I elaborate, it’s important, in my opinion, to understand, the history and culture of the net and of a lot of the people that have been involved with it. The Internet’s early success was largely promoted by a group of altruistic, non-commercial, caring, sharing and fair minded people, who wanted something to develop that was free and good. After all, this is a community that gave their time and knowledge free to develop Open Source software, in response to what it saw as the commercial dominance of software by certain companies.

The Internet’s now most mighty company, Google, grew up with this altruistic ideology, even having a corporate motto of "Don’t be evil". It embraced these principles to provide a free search engine that allowed people to find what they were looking for on the internet. It continued to develop this engine to become better and better and provide its users with a better and better experience, even though those users didn’t pay a penny for its services. Eventually, it developed so much trust that it was able to start generating revenue by offering paid advertising alongside its free results, however it has continued to invest in making its free service ever better, based on honest, fair & good, "Don’t be evil" principles.

Admittedly Google has had one or two blips along the way but it has developed, generally, a trust amongst its users by delivering what they want and being fair about it. Search Engine optimisation whizzes and website owners who ignore ‘Don’t be evil’, do so at their peril.

The Accidental Search Engine Marketeer

So, if there are no shortcuts and you have to play fair and by the rules, then why "10 ‘secrets’ you really should know about search engine marketing"?

Well, let me tell you another secret, I discovered search engine marketing almost by accident! Ten years ago, when I started out online, search engines were very much in their infancy. In fact, to me, when you typed anything into a search engine, the results reflected what seemed to be the web’s main purpose and preoccupation, sex and pornography!

Back in those days’ people had lots of other ideas how they were going to get visitors to their website, many of them a lot more glamorous than using search engines. Anyway, let’s face it, there were a lot less websites back then.

Being in possession of very few resources (in comparison to the huge amounts of money being thrown about by other start ups in those dot com boom days) and at the time a relatively limited understanding of the internet, I concentrated on simple and, what seemed to me, common sense ideas and business principles to drive visitors to my website.

By employing these, more and more people found my website but not only as a result of all my hard work and efforts, they were also finding the site through search engines because, unwittingly, these same tactics were improving the search engine ranking of the site.

Amazingly today, despite the huge cultural, technological, social and environmental changes (and by that I’m only talking about the search engines!) the same principles still apply, despite the huge volume of different techniques, systems and tricks that have been peddled in the meantime. So what are these ‘secrets’?

The 10 ‘Secrets’ You Should Know About Search Engine Marketing

1. Focus

The internet is a huge ocean. No matter how big a fish you are, you’ll be lost in it. Find yourself a pond. The smaller a fish you are, the smaller a pond you need, but don’t try to be all things to all people: a) it’ll never work, b) you’ll never be found.

2. Differentiate

You need to have a reason why someone visits your website and buys into your product or service. In the offline world it’s often OK to be as good as everyone else and rely on the fact that people like you as the reason they want to buy from you. In the online world, where there is so much competition and, generally, people don’t know you, you need to have sound reasons and differentiating factors.

By all means try to get people to like you (see 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 & 10) but remember they have a lot more choice in a search engine than on a high street, you need to communicate why they should choose you simply, effectively and fast!

If you’re selling motor insurance for disabled lady drivers, yes you have a niche and you’ve completed step 1, but you need to establish the benefits that your customers will enjoy by buying from you and that they will value more than the 237,000 other links they could choose. You then need to communicate these on your web pages and in your Meta Description of your content or Search Advertising Copy, to make it easy for your visitors/customers to establish quickly why they should visit your site when scanning a search page.

3. Build Your Site and Its Contents for Your Customers Not You

In Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), there is a concept that people are led either by their visual senses (what they see), their auditory senses (what they hear) or their kinaesthetic senses (what they feel). When you watch any great auditor speak (Bill Clinton for instance) you’ll see him trying to appeal to all of these senses, so that he communicates with his entire audience - not just a part of it. Your website must do this too.

Search engines like words but don’t fill your pages purely with text, a lot of your visitors will also like to see images. Likewise don’t fill your pages with images because you like them and you think your visitors should too. A lot of your visitors also want to hear what you have to say and feel comfortable with your site.

Search engines like words because they tell them what your site is all about, so you need to write clearly on your pages just this. But it’s important to write these words with your customers in mind, not what you think the search engines want. Your customers have got to understand them and they need to be written in their language.

If you are selling bling jewellery you need to use a whole different vocabulary to that if your offering savings and investment advice to the over 65’s. The reason for this is twofold:-
a) If you do get them to your page but they don’t relate to the content when they get there or it doesn’t make sense, they’ll just click off.
b) The same language your customers want to read is that they’ll use when searching

Search engines now also have clever robots that can read English and will penalise your site if it thinks you’re trying to trick them by writing keyword intense nonsense. In any case, what’s the point of getting people to your site if you lose them immediately because you haven’t written content they can understand or relate to?

4. Write Well Structured Content

I’ve already said it but I’ll say it again, make your pages easy for your visitors and/or customers to understand. Just like you learnt at school, structure your content to make it easy for people to follow. Write a good page title that explains what your page is about, use headings to explain what each section is about, use sub-headings where appropriate, use the words that are important to your visitors and/or customers in the content (though not repeatedly) and stress the important bits either by using headings or putting those words in bold. That’s just common sense writing.

Remember that people read web pages differently to printed pages (they tend to skim read) so write bulleted points, in sharp, concise text with links to greater detail and further information, if the reader requires.

Search engines like a minimum of around 300 words per page (about the quantity of this number 4 section) so that they can accurately gauge the contents of the page. You’ll also find this just about nicely fills a web page with an illustration or two, without going below the fold, i.e. forcing the reader to scroll down the page.

Add a Meta Content Description to explain to the search engine (or rather your visitor/customer who is looking for your page on a search engine) and lo and behold you’ve got a search engine friendly page! Yes, search engines, just like your valued visitors, analyse your pages by the Page Titles, Descriptions, Headings (H1, H2 and H3 in order) the use of Bold or Strong tags and by analysing the content of the page to understand the keywords and what the page is talking about.

5. Update Your Content Regularly

Just like a good shopkeeper changes his shop window and the layout of his store on a regular basis, then so should you change the content and look of your site. Firstly, in most cases, you want repeat visitors and they need to see you’re alive and care about the website (and them). Secondly, the more frequently you update, you’ll find the search engines will more frequently visit or crawl your website.

6. Give Your Users/Customers What They Want

I know this one is a bit radical but it really is one of the most important lessons you can learn. If you give your visitors what they want, when they want it and provide them with more value than they can get from other people/sites, not only will they be happy (and happy users or customers is surely the chief goal of any website or business) but they will return and what’s more they’ll tell their friends!

7. Delight Your Users/Customers and Make Them Your Evangelists

One thing I learnt early on is that going the extra mile to delight your customers really pays off on the internet. Word spreads really fast online and if you give a really good service and/or deliver an exceptional product, not only will your customers keep on returning (which saves you the marketing cost of getting new customers) but they tell their friends (who go on to buy from you and saves you even more marketing cost). The unexpected bonus is that they spread the word about your product or service through forums, blogs, web pages, etc., which talk about your great website and service and put links to your site, which drives more traffic to your site …… and improves your search rankings because of all these relevant (and not paid for) links.

8. Keep Your Website Simple and Working

Just like most processes, you need to build your website for the lowest common denominator. Make it as simple and easy as you possibly can. Rigorously check everything so that your users have no chance of having a bad experience. Always sacrifice sophistication for simplicity, if simple works.

Badly built, over complicated, unfriendly or broken sites not only turn off your potential visitors and/or customers, making them click off straight away (and what’s the point of going to all the trouble of getting visitors if your lose them immediately) but high bounce rates (people clicking off your site quickly because what they saw wasn’t what they wanted) is a big part in the Quality Score used by Google & Yahoo in their paid search algorithm. Furthermore, badly built sites, poor or obsolete code and broken links is something search engines definitely don’t like and you will be penalised for it in your search engine rankings.

9. Build Links with Relevant Sites

As I said earlier, before search engines became such a dominant driver of traffic, you tended to look all over for sources of traffic. Having no money meant paying for advertising listings was out of the question but if you could find relevant sites where a link to your site would benefit visitors and drive traffic, for instance if your site sold beds and you got a link from a site that sold bedding, then it was win-win. Similarly if you did stuff or created news stories that other sites may want to cover, then you could gain coverage and links.

What I wanted was traffic (which I got) but into the bargain I got what were essentially big votes from credible sites about my pages which boosted my search rankings. If you focus on being really good and giving value, you do develop these links and these are what search engines really want, so that they can establish you are a respected and credible site. Search Engines see links as votes of a websites value. If they see lots of paid or traded links these are not really saying the website is any good. What they want is impartial endorsements of your site and it will accord these links much higher value.

Do not trade links, willy-nilly or engage in reciprocal linking as it is sometimes called. In my opinion, the first and only question you should ask is, will this (incoming) link generate traffic/add value. If the site/page is relevant and/or related then the answer is that it probably will. If you are a management consultant and get a link from an adult dating website the chances are it probably won’t. The search engines see it similarly (though they’re not interested in the traffic). If they see a link to a horse race betting site from a site/page that is discussing racing form then they will see it as a credible endorsement or vote for the site and enhance the ranking of the linked to page. They will see the adult dating rank as being of no relevance to the management consultant with the result that the latter’s ranking could actually be negatively affected because the search engine thinks you’re trying to trick it.

10. Communicate With Your Users/Customers

Having got people to your site in the first place and even got them to buy something from you don’t then just ignore them. Work at keeping them on board and getting them to keep coming back. Communicate with your users/customers by giving them advice, information, offers, support, help - not junk but things they will value. Communicate with them in whatever means they prefer (obviously making sure you get their permission to do so), whether it be by email, text, blog, podcast, special pages on your site or whatever is their preferred choice. An established user will use you again more readily, as they (should!) trust you and this will be a lot less costly than trying to find new users. Once again, if your users value this (which if done right they will) you’ll find links appearing which add more weight to your pages and your search rankings.

Summing Up

Well, I told you there were no shortcuts and I also told you these were "10 ‘secrets’ you really should know about search engine marketing". You certainly should know them because they all make common sense. Search engines employ legions of highly intelligent boffins to develop extremely complicated algorithms which are designed to make sure the search engine user gets the best result from their experience with the search engine. How they do that? Remarkably, they follow common sense rules to ensure that this is achieved and try to stop "evil" people from coming up with shortcuts.

If you really want to succeed online you should be doing all of these as a matter of course without evening thinking about search engines and that, remarkably, is what the search engines want you to do. Give your users the best experience you possibly can and you will be rewarded but remember "Don’t be evil"!

Peter van Zelst is the Founder of SpecialistOnlineMarketing.com , a practical online marketing agency. If you want practical help to make your business, website or e-commerce venture fly visit or call http://www.specialistonlinemarketing.com/

How to Improve Your Google Search Rankings

10 Proven Facts About How to Improve Your Google Search Rankings

Over the years I've seen, heard and read lots of stuff about how to improve your Google search rankings, some good, some bad, some misinformed and some downright devious.

I'm sure there are very few people who can genuinely claim to be Google Search Ranking Experts and I certainly do not attempt to assume that mantle. One thing I have learnt, which seems to be a fairly well accepted truth amongst those in the know, is that no-one can guarantee getting a top 10 Google ranking. Nevertheless, here are 10 proven facts about how to improve Your Google Search Rankings that I personally have learnt through years of hard experience.

1. Magic/Quick Fixes/Great New Schemes

Sorry about that folks, but forget quick fixes and avoid anyone who promises to improve your search rankings quickly and/or cheaply. Getting sustainable good rankings through good search engine optimisation is a long, painstaking task where it will take many months for you to see the results of your efforts.

2. The Significance of Keywords

Keywords are the basis of all search engine optimization and so working out the keywords which are most important for your business is vitally important.

Forget going for very general or broad keywords, for instance "insurance" because the competition for those keywords is so intense and, as a result, you will find it difficult to virtually impossible, to reach a top spot in Google.

You need to find specific groups of keywords or phrases which relate directly to what you do or offer. The terminology for these specific keyword phrases is 'long tail keywords'. These phrases obviously have much smaller search volumes, but firstly you will have less competition so it should be easier to reach a top position and secondly people who are searching using long tail keywords are more specific and serious about their requirement, so there is a greater chance that they will click through to your site.

As a case in point, a searcher may start out by looking for 'insurance' and be overwhelmed with response, so they refine their phrase to be more specific to what they are looking for, e.g. 'travel insurance'. They may continue this process until they find exactly what they are looking for, e.g. 'travel insurance for the over 60's', then 'travel insurance for the over 60's with a heart condition', which leads to 'travel insurance for a world cruise for the over 60's with a heart condition' and so on.

Finding keywords

There are lots of great tools out there but the best place to start is in the business itself. Brainstorm to find the keywords that your target customers are likely to use. Review your marketing material, your customers' words to you, your direct competitors websites and marketing material and so on.

Try to be original and think outside the box. Simply following the keywords your competitors are using will mean you end up simply following your competition.

Then use the free keyword tools like Yahoo, Google or, for professionals, the excellent Wordtracker. Yahoo, Google and Wordtracker also have tools to estimate search volumes and
likely competition.

Having established your keywords search them on Google. Firstly, look to see how many results there are. If there are millions of pages, perhaps your keywords are too competitive and you need to reconsider.

If you can spot phrases with 50,000 or less competing pages, then you could have found a 'killer phrase'. Visit your competition. Check out the Page Ranks of the top results for each of your keyword phrases in the search engine results pages, or SERPS to use the jargon. This provides you with an indication of what you need to achieve to get top placement within that phrase. You should also check how many links they have pointing to their website to establish how many links you need to get to the top position. To do this, either in the search box type link: www.competingsite.com and the websites that link to that domain will be displayed or try the Yahoo Site Explorer.

Bear in mind that this only provides an idea, the relevancy of those links and the ranks of those sites are also vitally important in achieving better results.

3. The Impact of Your Message

It's great identifying the keywords that your visitors, users or potential customers may search on to find what you have to offer but, unfortunately, that's not quite enough. You then you have to persuade them to visit your site and look at or buy whatever it is you have to offer.

Put it this way, if you've identified the keyword 'cheap travel insurance' as a potential keyword phrase, but your page description remains 'The best shopping comparison site on the internet for everything from Apple Macs to Xylophones' do you think you'll get a lot of people click through to your link?

The more specific a keyword phrase ('long tail keyword') you use, the more important this becomes. If you're looking for 'the best travel insurance cover for the over 70's' it's a very specific requirement so your message or page description needs to reflect that. Your description needs to show that this page deals specifically with travel insurance cover for the over 70's or the searcher will not click.

Having convinced the searcher to visit your page they will be none too impressed if the landing page then doesn't lead them quickly and directly to exactly what they want, in other words the best travel insurance cover for the over 70's, so your landing page has to be designed specifically for that specific a keyword phrase/long tail keyword, otherwise all your efforts of getting them to your page have been wasted and worse still they probably won't want to come back to your site again if you waste their time like that.

Having considered all that, you then need to think what exactly does 'the best travel insurance cover for the over 70's' mean? Is it the cheapest, the most comprehensive, the least exceptions or exemptions, the highest acceptance rate and so on? In other words you need to test out a variety of messages to find those that are most appropriate to your visitors, users or potential customers.

In other words, it's going to take you a lot of time and thought and which is why we at
Innovative Internet Marketing advocate the use of testing out these specific keyword phrases, alternative messages and landing pages first on Pay Per Click to identify those that are viable
to optimise for natural search. After all, its pointless going to all that effort building a large number of optimised pages for specific phrases that no-one searches for, or where your message isn't appealing to people or what you're offering isn't what they want.

In the short term you can test out these phrases and messages and identify the high volume/high conversion ones as targets for natural search optimisation and then either drop, improve or carry on with PPC activity those lower volume or lower conversion phrases.

4. The Importance of Title Tags on Your Pages

Google sees the title tag as the most important and relevant part of the webpage it retrieves. This is one of the few things you have any control over in Google's search results. The title tag is the underlined header for your result in the SERPS. It also appears at top of your browser window. Keep this descriptive and readable but at the same time include your newly found specific keyword phrases. Google will also highlight the keywords in your title that were included in the search query.

5. The Importance of Your Meta Description Tag

The description tag is the description of the webpage which lives under the title tag in the results. You need to use your keywords in here to reflect the search that the user has undertaken (Google will also highlight the keywords in here that match the search query)
but you also need to consider how you will attract the searcher to visit your page (see The Impact of the Message) and it needs to be descriptive and readable. A string of keywords, like I've seen in many descriptions, is not ever so enticing.

6. The Value of Domain Names & URL's

Where possible try and include your main keywords in your domain name, e.g. www.travelinsurance.com. Google will highlight them when they match the search query. This can give your ranking a little boost because it will show that your website is relevant to the search query. If you can't put those words in your domain try putting those words into the page URL, e.g. www.mywebsite.com/travelinsurance.html

7. How Significant is Content?

Content is vital. If you have ever changing fresh, unique content on your website relevant to your offering, Google will reward you for it and other websites will want to link to you. In return, this will increase your rankings, but surely you should be doing this anyhow? A website without constantly changing content is a dead one. Your content should contain your keywords, but don't fill your content with your keywords (this is called spamming or keyword stuffing). Use them at the start and end of your webpage and sprinkle them in-between. Also use them in your header text (H1, h3 & H3) and even in bold or "strong" tags as this shows Google that these words have greater importance.

8. What's the meaning of a Google Page Rank?

If you install a Google tool bar on your browser you'll see a Google Page Rank attributed to each page you visit. This suggests the relevant importance Google attaches to each page, based significantly on the number and quality of external links to it, and is a figure between 0 and 10.
As an example the Google.co.uk home page currently has a ranking of 8, the bbc.co.uk home page has a 9 and Adobe.com gets a 10. I'll leave you to contemplate why Google considers Adobe more important that the BBC or even itself, but if you haven't worked it out give me a call!

You must consider, however, that the page rank bar can be at least 3 months out of date as Google only updates it in a roughly 3-month cycle. Only Google knows your true page rank which changes all the time. Google regularly analyses (spiders or crawls to use the terminology) your website and scans for new content and links to show the most relevant content in its results. Therefore page rank can be somewhat inaccurate.

The other thing that people get confused about is that it is a rank of a page not a site. It is believed that if your website is assigned a page rank figure then it is distributed through all of your indexed pages, e.g., if your site has a figure of 5, then your home page may get
a page rank of 3 and your other pages a 2 or perhaps a 1 and so on. If these other pages also have links to them, this will increase their own individual page rank.

The chief advantage of the green bar on your Google Toolbar, imho, is for exchanging links. You can establish a basic feeling for a site's ranking and then decide whether or not to exchange links.

9. The Importance of Linking & Directories

Google has got wise to the old practise of link exchanges & link farms, so you should chiefly look for one-way links. However one-way links are consequently much harder to obtain, after all why should anyone put your link on their website without their being a payback? One way around this is by writing articles and submitting them to article websites, social media websites or your own blog. If you do always make sure to add an 'author's bio' block, a piece of text which details your name, business and links to your website.

Reciprocal links are easier to come by, but when you don't have a good page rank they can be more difficult to obtain. I would look for websites with good quality content which are relevant to your own. Firstly, if they are good, interesting, related and relevant to your own subject, they are excellent potential sources of good, quality traffic. Secondly, and this is something you should emboss on your chest, Google Rates Relevancy.

One other thing to consider is that some links can actually damage your search ranking. Google penalises certain links which results in a dropping of your own page rank. Try this great tool to check potential link partners to see if they are linking to bad neighbourhoods which could result in a Google penalty for your site.

The Open Directory (DMOZ)

One Directory you should always submit your site to is DMOZ and do it as soon as you can, because it can take ages to get listed there. Google sometimes uses DMOZ results in its natural or organic results sometimes and many other directory sites use DMOZ results, which in turn may provide you with more one-way links.

10. The Rising Popularity of Blogs

Weblogs or Blogs are basically an online web diary. Their importance has grown substantially as a resource for gathering and assimilating news, understanding special interest or niche subjects and communicating with special audiences, be they members of staff, customers, users, members or whatever. Blogs are often used by journalists as a source of information (in many cases they refer to them in preference to press releases) and they are also loved by Google and the other search engines, as they contain a lot of text and are constantly updated.

There are different schools of thought about where you should blog. One is to start one on your own website, the other is to use a third party site like blogger.com or Wordpress or use the social media sites like Facebook etc.,. There are for's and against's regarding both options so my personal suggestion is to have a blog on your own site and one or a number of different ones (on different themes or target areas) on external sites.

Write and include articles, stories, gossip and anything that's related to your website or business. If you make it interesting you will gain readers who will return to your site and you will also gain links from other sites who want to use your content.

Summary

As you've perhaps seen, I've only skimmed the surface on many subjects. The things you should take away are that improving your Google Search Rankings is not simple, it's hard work and you only get out of it what you put in. You'll also see that the majority of what Google is looking for is common sense and makes good business sense for you and your website. Don't try to trick it or use dubious methods to try to exploit perceived loopholes as it may come back to haunt you. At the very least Google will work out what you're doing and close the hole, at worst it will penalise your site or even ban your site, as it famously did with BMW.

For a common sense approach to getting more from your website and achieving your online objectives through natural search contact Innovative Internet Marketing Now .

Peter van Zelst is the Principle of Inovative Internet Marketing, a practical online marketing company. If you want practical help to make your business or e-commerce venture fly visit http://www.innovative-internet-marketing.com/

Search Marketing is Dangerous

Search Marketing is the largest and fastest growing form of online advertising. Search Marketing allows you to communicate directly with your target customers, wherever they may be, when they are in the market and close to buying your product and service. Search Marketing can eliminate a lot of wasted activity, communication and spend on promoting your products or services to people who don’t want, can’t or won’t buy them and is thus a highly effective and cost-effective form of advertising. So how can it be dangerous?


I like to draw the analogy of search marketing with a highly accurate, highly sophisticated rifle. If you know what your target is, are trained to use your weapon, suitably experienced and take careful aim you can hit anything you want with the minimum of expenditure. But, if you don’t know where or what your target is and/or don’t know what you’re doing, you could be lethal, for all the wrong reasons.


If search marketing is like using a rifle, blanket advertising is like using a machine gun. You’ve got a vague idea where you’re aiming and hopefully some of your bullets should hit the mark. A lot of your bullets will be wasted or hit the wrong targets but, heh, provided you’ve got a big enough budget and aren’t too worried about effectiveness, then it’s great.


Now think of a sniper, he’s only got a handful of bullets. He’s spent years training, is experienced in his profession and with his weapon. He spends a huge amount of time carefully selecting his target, taking pinpoint aim then wallop! He get’s exactly what he wanted for the minimum expenditure of bullets.


Most small to medium sized businesses haven’t got huge sums of money to waste on ineffective advertising and can’t afford huge blanket advertising campaigns. Consequently search marketing offers huge potential for most small to medium sized businesses. But using search marketing without correctly identifying your target market or not using an experienced, trained search marketing professionals to undertake and aim your campaign accordingly is like handing a deadly rifle to an untrained novice.


Put it in the right hands, however, and the only danger you’ll have with search marketing is the unexploded potential of your business.



Peter van Zelst is the Principle of Inovative Internet Marketing, a practical online marketing company. If you want practical help to make your business or e-commerce venture fly visit http://www.innovative-internet-marketing.com/