The difference of a link or two

Links, links, links.  Everyone talks about them, everyone knows they are important.  Google just changed their algorithm to make it more strict on what counts as a link to Google. As with everything in SEO, when something is found to be important to rankings, black hat SEO professionals find ways to exploit it and then eventually the search engines catch on and either discount it or make it banworthy.
Be careful when choosing an SEO company. There are a lot of good guys out there and a lot of bad guys looking to take money from you. If it seems sketchy, it probably is.  Make them show you evidence that their tactic is considered white hat or ethical.  Especially with links.  Often companies promising hundreds or thousands of links immediately are doing something that will hurt you in the long run.  Only classic people like Link Moses Eric Ward are able to pull these things off and make them actually last that quickly.  Many of these comanies pay for links or offer you links from pages they have set up specifically to link to your pages.  Eventually they will be found out.

When it comes to small business, sometimes it only takes a few links to go from where many of you start, with 0, to being able to compete for some of the less searched but more efficient terms. For example, one of my clients, a hard working mortgage broker, just started a new site, so he is hurting for some factors such as length of time out there, etc.  He of course started with no links, but just by doing a little campaign and gaining a few links he went from unable to compete for just about anything, to really being able to go after some terms that are relevant and will bring him good business.  Small businesses can find those niche keywords that will allow them to compete with a handful of good links, rather than needing hundreds.  This allows them to hire someone like me that specializes in small business SEO to get them that traffic without paying the big firms thousands per month, that they may not be even making themselves as a smaller company starting out.

There are a lot of things small or new sites can do for less than you think.  Learn more at my site, The SEO Helpdesk.com or YouCanBeFound.com

Taking Advantage of Local Search

Internet users are trending toward local search. It is only logical.  If you want to buy a product or service and look it up on the internet, in many cases you are looking for someone that offers what you want close by so that it is convenient for you.  This is where the local small business has the advantage. Your website is built to suit the local market.  As national organizations try harder and harder to show up in the local searches, small businesses don’t know about and aren’t taking advantage of their opportunities.

Using the local search functions of search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask can help you show up for locally themed search terms such as “service your town”.  It also may be wise to target a page of your site after such terms.  An example of how each of these may work is below.

For the search term “SEO freehold nj” Google’s local service has my business pop up with a map. www.TheSEOHelpdesk.com

When looking for organic ranking with local terms, my client Certified Mold Inspections, Inc. shows up first on google for:

“mold testing new jersey”

 As I said, the trend is to move away from basic searches like “mold testing” to searches like “mold testing new jersey” or even more detailed like “mold testing matawan new jersey”.

 Use these tools and strategies to take advantage of these opportunities with your business.  Keep in mind that it is a growing trend and smaller geographies like town names may not have enough searches to make this worthwhile. That is where the search engines free local listings come in handy.  You automatically show up for the relevant local terms closest to your business.  Broader terms like state or city names might be searched more than a town name.  Do your keyword research and take advantage of geographic strengths you may have with your site. Focus on your geographic market for your SEO too.

Checking the Competition by Keyword, Part 2

In my last blog, I touched on how to find the less competitive keyword terms via keyword tools available on the internet. I also gave you a feel for finding the number of links to competitors through some internet tools.  This update will focus on free ways to look at your competition by keyword in even more depth.

Competitor Comparison:

Now you have narrowed your keyword research down to some terms that you would like to pursue based on number of searches and basic competition statistics that a tool like Wordtracker gave you. You need to take a look at the top ten competitors for each of these keywords and see how they have targeted your term on their page. In the last blog we looked at competitive links, which is an important first step. 

 Links:

If the top 10 have many more links than you as seen by google by typing “link:www.competitordomain.com” in to the Google search engine, you may not have a chance at this time to compete.  If you favorably compare with several of them, you may be able to outrank them based on your on-page SEO such as metatags and text.  If you find that you have far fewer links than all of the top ten, you should consider another term.

Basic Metatags (Title, Description, Keywords):

To look at on-page SEO techniques of your competitors, simply go to the page that shows up in the top ten and follow the following steps for Internet Explorer users (the steps are similar in other browsers):

1. Click on the view menu on the toolbar
2. Choose “Source”
3. A notepad version of the site’s source code will show up

Once you open the source, the first thing to look for are the head tags, including the Title tag, the description tag and the keywords tag.

Example:

For a new mold testing client of mine, www.themoldguy.org , we may look to see competitors for the term “southern California mold”.

Title tag:In the top ten sites ranked in google at the time I write this, only two of the top 10 pages have the exact term in their title.

Description: Only one of the top ten sites had the exact term show up in their description.  It was the top ranked site.

Keywords: Only sites ranked first and fourth had the exact term listed in their keywords.

As you can see from the example, if this was well searched and relevant term for your site, it appears from the basic research that if you optimize for this term and your link total is similar, you should be able to rank in the top ten for this term.

There is more to it than these basic metatags, but they give you a clue as to how hard your competitor is focusing on this exact keyword term. It appears the pages ranking here are getting there mostly because no site has really focused on the term for their optimization.  You will find this happening a lot with lesser searched terms.

Now doing this over and over for each term you are considering can be very time consuming, which is why we have tools here at www.TheSEOHelpdesk.com that analyze all these things for us and give us the results.  For help with any of the steps in your SEO process, please call us at 732 462 6019.

We’ll talk more about on-page optimization and the competitors in a future posting.

Checking the Competition by Keyword, Part 1

Keyword Tool:

There are many keyword tools out there on the internet if you search for terms such as keyword tool or free keyword tool. I’ve heard many recommendations and many sources.  I think the most trusted sources would be Google’s adword free tool and WordTracker. Google’s tool does not give you actual counts and can be of little help to small businesses trying to find less searched terms that they can compete for.  WordTracker’s free tool is limited, but if you pay for a week’s use, you can get very good results to target pretty quickly.  I would recommend the WordTracker tool.

You can search out there on the internet though and possibly find something else to use.  The most important information is how often a term is searched over a given time-frame and how many sites are competing for that term. A small business should find a few relevant terms that are searched 2 to 10 times a day and then start doing competitive research on those terms. As your site grows in popularity and links, you can start to focus on more competitive terms.

Competitive Search:

For example, one of my clients is Certified Mold Inspections, Inc. They may have searched a keyword tool and found the following terms fit with their site. “mold nj”, “mold new jersey”, “mold testing nj”. Now, can they compete for these terms?  The easiest way to track this is to do a Google search of the term you are researching. Once you have that, write down the top ten sites showing up for this term.  Now you need to research each of these sites.

Link research:

First, take a look at how many inbound links the site has.  Google webmaster tools can help you with this, or this site does it in a somewhat messy way. You need to only count each different domain linking to you once, and also ignore links from your own domain. 

The different search engines value links differently, and sometimes Google won’t even count links to your site that others will.  They are more strict about what constitutes a true link.  This makes many of those mass campaigns to get links from social sites, etc. somewhat irrelevant for small business. Focus on getting good links from national organizations you may be a part of, or from your own blog, or best yet, from a .edu or .gov site.

If your site compares in count with the others in the top ten, then you have a chance to compete.

 Please find more at www.TheSEOHelpdesk.comor contact me at 732 462 6019. My next blog page will discuss the competition and on page tags such as title, keywords and description.

Hello to small business: I want to help you!

I began this blog to help small business websites compete on the internet.  I went in to business to help these businesses because many companies won’t even take you on as a client unless you spend $5,000 or more per month. There are ways to compete if you do it the right way.  I’m here to show you the way so you can do it yourself or with my help.  I’m also here to help you avoid some of the scams and schemes that are out there that will take money out of your pocket and give you nothing in return.  Two things differentiate me from most search engine optimization (SEO) companies. I am affordable and I actually help you get real results that impact your business.

There was a time when every small business owner knew they had to have an ad in the yellow pages, because that was where people looked to get services. That time is over.  Most people today look to the internet and search engines like Google, Yahoo, and more to research any significant purchase they may make.  Now is the time for your business to show up when they look there.  Many businesses think they can’t compete because the large companies that spend thousands every month on this type of thing, are all over the search engines.  They may be, but there are ways for you to show up as well. I will show you through this blog.

Keyword Scams and Schemes: Avoid paying for what you don’t need

There are a million companies out there offering a range of services for you to spend your money.  Done right, search engine optimization has a very high return on investment. I get phone calls, spam emails, etc. on a daily basis offering to help my site traffic.  Some of these services are legitimate and some are not.  Some of these services give you what they say, but what they are offering doesn’t help you.  They feed on what I discussed in my last post.  They tell you they will give you the most searched terms or will promise you a top ranking. Often these are quick and easy things for a company to do and are more than happy to get a couple hundred bucks from you for something that can be done in five minutes.

Things you should always ask: An SEO company should be able to give you two specific measurable numbers. These numbers can tell you a lot about how useful the terms are for you.

1. A count of how often a term is searched in a certain timeframe (preferably per day)
2. Number of sites competing for that term.

Two common things you will be offered that you don’t need:

1. The most popular terms for your industry: If you read the last blog on Keywords you’ll know why this isn’t helpful. This is one of the easiest things to do for a company with a powerful keyword tool, but the most popular keywords are not the keywords a small business wants to target.  You need to find the less competitive terms to find a niche that you can compete with. If you have a small site and don’t have hundreds of pages and a staff that works on adding pages and content to your site every day, you are not going to compete for the most popular terms.  If anything, you will avoid them.  It is a waste of time and effort. Finding the niche keywords where you can outdo the competition is the way to success. It isn’t easy, but it is the way to actually make a measurable difference.
2. Top Rankings: The other common scheme is to promise a top ranking for your site. It feels nice to type in a term and see your website at the top of the rankings. It looks good, but if nobody searches for the term, it isn’t helping you. Most companies that guarantee top rankings will get you a top ranking for a term nobody is searching for because that is easy. It just doesn’t help you at all.  If someone promises to get you top page rankings, make sure that you get them to promise the term you get ranked for is searched at least a couple times a day in that search engine.

I will go over the specific process of keyword research and how you know if you can compete on future posts. For more information please visit www.TheSEOHelpdesk.com or call 732 462 6019 for help.

Keyword research: It is all about the keywords

Keywords. Keyword phrases. Keyword tails. These are the most important thing when small businesses try to compete in the search engines.  You need to pick terms that you can compete for and that are relevant to your business. Any time you see these terms, it simply refers to the word or group of words that someone types in to the search engine when they are looking for your business.

Often what I find is the first thing that comes to mind when business owners think about search terms is that you want to rank for a specific keyword or the most popular keyword.  Both of these thoughts can lead you in the wrong direction. Many schemes and scams are out there to capitalize on this and offer you the most popular keywords or to promise a top ranking.  You have to be careful with these things.  I will discuss these scams in an upcoming post, but for now I want to lay the basics of what keywords you do want to go after.

You’ve all heard of target marketing.  You need to target the market that you are most suited for competition.  Small businesses typically target a local market or even segments of a local market.  There is no reason for a local garage in New Jersey to spend time and money targeting drivers in California.  It just isn’t worth it. 

In the same light, when going after keywords, the most important thing to do is to find keyword terms you can compete for. I will discuss how to do this research on a future post, but the concept is important in itself and can keep you from wasting money with SEO firms that offer you things you don’t need. The following concepts seem counterintuitive, but are important to remember for small business SEO.

Avoid the most popular keywords: In most cases you can’t compete for the most popular keywords, so don’t pay money to find out what they are. These are the terms that the big boys do spend thousands of dollars to go after and even if by some chance you did rank, you probably couldn’t handle the business that would come from them. You need to target market in your keyword effort. The only thing that these terms can help you with is to tell you not to go after them, or to go after more specific versions of them.

Don’t be impressed by a #1 ranking: This is the opposite side of the spectrum. If you pick a term and are showing up #1 in Google for it, that always makes you feel good and people are often impressed, however it doesn’t mean anything if nobody searches for that term.  You will learn this when you do the keyword research, but just always remember that a #1 ranking means nothing if it isn’t a term that people search for.  It is like getting a great billboard on a popular highway and then turning it around so it faces the woods.  Great that you are there, but nobody is going to see you, so nobody is going to come to your site.

 Remember the keywords that you target are the most important part of your plan and it is important to pick keywords that you can compete for and that people search for. For more information, check out my site at www.TheSEOHelpdesk.com.