I think the most common issue with SEO and for success in any endeavor is how you measure success.  Some of the biggest scams in SEO are related to your search ranking.  Never measure your success in SEO  by your search rankings.  It is the quickest and easiest way to see yourself online, but it can be very misleading.  Though my headline refers to first page rankings not mattering, it isn’t so much that they don’t matter, but when they matter.

In other forms of business we measure results by the bottom line. Why don’t people do this with SEO? I run in to many business owners who feel they are fine with SEO because when people search their business name in Google, they show up on the first page.  This is great, but you are only showing up for people who already know your business name, and most likely, unless you have a very generic business name, you would have a high ranking without even doing significant optimization on your site.

Other owners will say we have a lot of first page rankings and mention some keywords.  This is another situation where they have something that looks good if you just look at rankings, but often times the high rankings they have are for terms that nobody ever really searches for, or their ranking is because they are in the search engines local maps section and has nothing to do with SEO.

How should you measure your SEO results?

Look at the traffic coming to your site.  If you are an online store, measure the conversions that come in from the search engines.  If it isn’t quite as simple as that you can measure your traffic and keep asking your customers where they heard about you.  With a good SEO program, you should see more customers coming to you via the internet and it should be a noticeable difference.  If not, then it isn’t really helping.  Getting new customers is what it is all about right?  Just make sure you are using the right measuring stick.  Rankings are great, if they are for the right keywords, but rankings without actual traffic to your site is really nothing.

1. Local Setup – Get your business set up in Local directories.  There are thousands out there that you can get taken care of with a good SEO company, or here are a few important ones you can reach out to on your own.  Be consistent with your information.  There are a lot of sources feeding a lot of databases out there, so the more consistent you are with your message, the less chance for issues or errors or getting delisted due to inconsistencies. Google, Yahoo and now Bing all have different local setup programs that can get you found on their standard maps that show up in search engines when people search for your given product/service using town names close to where your business is locate. 

The more competitive the industry, the harder to be one of those top listings.  However, it is better to be in there than to not be, and it costs nothing buy your time or a small fee from an agency to get listed. You can pay a little bit and get more featured listings as well.

2. Find your local superpages.com site and get a free listing.  This way you’ll at least show up in their listings for those that search there.  There are so many sites these days offering local services that some search pages are becoming over-run with other sites that just offer another list of local sites.  I don’t think this is a good user experience and rumor has it Google realizes this too and seeing a first page of search loaded with local directories hopefully will become a think of the past. However, for those die hards out there that do only search specific local directories, it can’t hurt to be in there, especially at basically no cost to you.

3. Use Social Media: Create a free blog for yourself, use twitter and facebook.  True, a specialized SEO firm can probably get you more out of these, but for free you can at least have a presence there. When you blog, link to your website.  This helps build strength in the search engines.  Tell your facebook friends and twitter followers when you blog.

4. Show that you know what you are doing: Go to sites like Yahoo answers and find relevant questions that you have an expert answer for. This can help users as well establish you as an authority.  Find Tweets in twitter about a subject you know well and chime in.  Followers will see this and can work their way back to your site.

There are also low cost ways of marketing yourself such as doing a local adwords program based on zip codes or low price SEO if you have the right firm helping you. Be careful with programs like Google Adwords if you aren’t familiar with getting the most out of your budget.  These are great tools if you know what you are doing, but they can also eat up your budget pretty quickly if you aren’t careful with how you set them up. Feel free to contact me if you are interested in more information on some of these tactics.

I hope this helps and I wish you luck getting found on the internet!

Often, rather than paying for a campaign, you can pay to get some targeted keywords for which you can actually get some results, then use those terms for your own press releases or blog postings.  Or for the more advanced, youtube channels, wikipedia articles, yahoo answers posts and more.

As a holiday gift, I wanted to supply some links to readers for some great businesses that I’m working with or have worked with in the past.  Please support these businesses as I know the owners and find them to be highly ethical and very good at what they do.

Waterproofing in New Jersey

Building a Wine Cellar/Wine Cellar Refrigeration

PTFE, PVDF, PFA, MFA, ETFE, and FEP Plastic Tubing

Moving Companies in New Jersey – Lowy’s

A great writer starting a new blog and website – Wes Skillings

Mold Testing in NJ or Mold Testing in LA

Safe spa covers for your inground spa

See my website for more!

Thanks everyone and let’s all grow together in 2009.

Jeremy

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.