When you link to a web page you are using anchor text – how you use that link is up to you. When you reference an internal/external site be sure to use the text wisely. An example would be:
Driven Media Group specializes in content management system WordPress – click here for details
vs.
Driven Media Group specializes in content management system WordPress.
Notice the cleanliness – well, so does the search engines. As I was going over my RSS Reader I found the below video which sponsored the below tweet along with this overall post idea.
Anchor Text Your Competitors
When you look over who is linking to your competitors website you also need to review HOW they are linking.
Keyword research: done. Analyzing data: done. Content creation: In Progress
After you’ve done your research and now have a better understanding of what direction to go in then prepping the content is up. You have all these keywords and now you need to figure out just how you are going to lay them out.
Step One: Pick Top Keywords
Going back to the previous SEO Step you now have the top keywords you want to use so the idea is use those words within the content. However, there is a fine line between using those keywords and spamming.
Remember to write for the audience – not for the web
If you can keep this in mind and still get your point across to the audience then you’ll just fine.
Step Two: Implement Keywords
If you recall I was going to write about the NBA history for the NBA page and found some great keyword ideas for the long tail effect. When you are inserting the keywords there are several ways to do this:
Headings: H1/H2/H3/etc…then do a great write-up describing that heading
Links|Links|Links: This is a topic that I will cover later on but this is an option to use those keywords to link to show the importance of
Bold / Italicize / Underline: Make the content stand out – it’s important right? Readers know this – make sure the web does as well
List: Create a list (bulleted or numbered) – another way to have the content stand out
Step Three: Write for Readers
I wrote this already but this is a HUGE factor – while I have been focusing on straight keywords and web crawlers the biggest payoff is the actual readers. They are the ones who share the content and not the web crawlers.
Robots.txt can be your best friend or your worst enemy – how it turns out is your decision.
How to Find Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a text document you upload to your root directory of your website – it is NOT an html file. It is extremely EASY to create not to mention find. All you have to do to find out if a website has this file just enter in the domain file with a “.com/robots.txt” ex. http://www.drivenmg.com/robots.txt. Now, since I use wordpress there is a standard text file that I use. Here is an example:
It shouldn’t be too hard to understand what exactly is in the file:
User-agent speaks to the specific crawler
Disallow is exactly what it means. It disallows what you want the web crawlers to search in. If you don’t have the text file everything is open to search engines.
SEO and Robots.txt
Part of the checklist for SEO’ers is a robots.txt file – it ensures that dublicate content is not crawled. The last thing you want to be viewed by search engines is a spammer.
In person its easy to see if someone is being genuine – so how does a business become genuine online?
I was looking over at Seth’s Blog latest post entitled Five rules for your About page. I want to go a little further since I lean more on the social media side which I will be posting five rules for your social media page hopefully later this week.
The top and most important is that of being genuine. To have a genuine touch means more to customers/consumers/clients/etc – whatever the word of the week is. People CRAVE live people – they want to be treated as a human being. Yet, some companies find this reality difficult to grasp.
Next time you come across someone slamming your brand find out about their experience. Learn from and apologize online - publicly. If your company dropped the ball admit and move forward. The last thing you want is to ignore the issue until it becomes a situation.
Determining how to handle complains about your business online can be very tricky. You don’t want to come across defense but at the same time you need to reach out to those negative comments to fix them. Opening up the channel of communication to the consumers doesn’t just allow the positive remarks for to be ‘thankful’ for but to try and understand all views of the customers.
When Tony Bosco saw mostly negative reviews about the restaurant Wow Bao, he Tweeted: “Going to ‘business’ dinner (at)Wow Bao. Can any1 tell me if it’s going to suck as much reviews suggest.”
And almost immediately he got a response from an unexpected source — BaoMouth, the official Twitter feed of Wow Bao, an upscale fast food place in Chicago. The restaurant offered him a coupon to find out for himself, on the house.
Wow Bao sent Bosco two $15 gift cards via an iPhone app, and Bosco went the next night, posting pictures of the food on Twitter.
So, can your business afford to do this – it can become quite costly yet Wow Bao has a terrific outlook on it:
Geoff Alexander, managing partner of Wow Bao, explained his company’s Twitter commitment like this: If somebody has 1,000 followers and writes a negative Tweet about Wow Bao, then 1,000 people could think the restaurant is bad. But if Wow Bao publicly responds to that Tweet, 1,000 people may see the issue is being handled.
The question of the day is: How is your business using social media when it comes to negative reviews/comments? Are you going to be silent or active?
Keyword research is thee MOST important step in search engine optimization and can be the most annoying at the same time.
As I mentioned last week in the SEO Journey I was going to show you exactly step-by-step instructions on how to get your SEO game up by using one of my websites. Sport Intro is an introduction to sports: history / rules / leagues / etc.
Step One: Keyword Research
This is the part where you have a website in mind and you can visualize it but how do you want to bring in the traffic with organic content? There are hundreds (thousands) of tools out there for you to use.
I will be optimizing the NBA page – the idea is to not talk about the history of the sport (as that’s already done) rather the history of the NBA. So, I will start searching for “NBA History”
This step is where you basically combine EVERYTHING you found on your keywords from all the various tools/sites.
*A side note: if you are going to be in SEO you better be proficient in some type of Excel program so you can organize all your data*
Once all the information is combined then you need to analyze it. “NBA History” is the term I started with but that is pretty generic. If you click on the picture above I have organize the data from lowest to highest (long tail terms to short tail).
You never…NEVER really want to go after those short term keywords unless you are generating thousands of in-bound links and are leading site in the niche. The long tail keywords, if optimized correctly, will get you not only generate you good quality traffic but will keep the traffic consistent for long periods of time.
Step Three: Prep Your Data
It’s one thing to have the data and know exactly what keywords you are going to go after – it is another to actually start that process. As you already see I’ve started from “NBA History” to the franchise history and top players in the league and so on.
Coming up will be the implementation to the content
I have helped clients and personal projects climb the ranks of Google – now get ready to see it FIRST HAND!
I have a site called Sport Intro that I haven’t had time to develop. The premise of the project is to be the one stop spot for information on sports. Now, I don’t plan on trying to out rank ESPN or anything – far from it. The idea is that Sport Intro is your introduction to sports. It is the place to understand what the difference is between American League and National League – the history of Basketball – etc.
The Beginning Analytics
As you can tell I am not generating ANY traffic to the site, minus myself pretty much. I will take you through my very own SEO process for this project. The outline is the same but the process is different for each and every project I work on.
I will show you how I do keyword research – implement them into the content for each.and.every.page. I will then even show you how I implement a social media marketing campaign for this.
I have had the outline for this for about 6 months so it shouldn’t take long and from my calendar their should be an increase in traffic within the next 3-4 months.
This morning the infamous Twitter site was hacked yet all 3rd party apps were protected due to the API. How did it happen? Over at David Naylor they break down just how twitter…well, broke.
A simple version is that when you moused over (on twitters website) a link – an automatic update on your account was sent out. What is troubling is no clicking had to be done for this hack to occur.
Nonetheless, a simple error and was fixed within a few hours by the twitter team but the question remains. Is Google next? Google, alongside many other search engine companies, have wanted to purchase the micro-blogging site for the past few years.
In recent Twitter news they broke ground on images and video as they roll it out to selected users. The question I have is how is this going to affect those ever so popular 3rd party apps: Tweetdeck / Hootsuite / etc because in reality how many users are using the actual website?
If you haven’t googled anything recently then you haven’t been online PERIOD. Google recently released something new to web surfers called “Google Instant”. The premise is that as soon as you start typing in character (letters) results start to appear. If you can head over to Google and start typing “Google Instant Sucks” - no results, until you hit enter. Thank you Gaberial for the heads up on this.
Google Instant ADD
As you can tell I am not a huge fan of Google Instant. However, there are some benefits when it comes to SEO…kinda. Still in its development stage Google Instant from a SEO’er perspective gives you quick keywords/phrases. Head on over to Digital Peas and Carrots where @WebSuccessDivabroke down just How Google Instant Will Affect Business.
While the debate is still up on the true benefits of Google Instant as it is suppose to increase performance results according to Google. However, waiting less than 4 seconds on my results isn’t truly life or death.
I’m wondering if this is to get the topic off Google Wave being cancelled?
One of the things I love to do is examine web design companies who have their link on their clients websites (businesses). One thing I will never understand is WHY this happens but that’s not the point of the post. The bottom line is going to these web design companies to check out their portfolio. What do I see?
Get Your Business Right
That’s right it is a 404. One of the WORST things that can happen in a web design company.
You are in the business of creating websites and yet can’t take care of your own?
Not only that but not even a custom 404 page which would HELP viewers see that maybe the url string isn’t right, maybe ‘they’ clicked on something incorrect. Yet, nothing.
I blocked out the name of the company just for the sake of hoping they fix this in the next few weeks/months. I will probably check back and if not fixed I’ll probably put them on blast because this is truly important.
Which brings me to my question: How do you sell your products and services on/offline without a product/portfolio page?
Is it possible in todays technology advanced world?
