Some Tips for Planning your SEO Campaign for the Long Term

Some Tips for Planning your SEO Campaign for the Long Term

Posted by: Rob Sullivan on Sep 21, 2005

At one time you used to be able to perform a one time optimization on your site and reap the benefits for months. In todays competitive landscape, however, that is not the case. This is because your competition is always growing and changing and therefore you have to as well. This article explains what you need to do to plan a long term SEO campaign.

Before Google there was Altavista, and once your got your site into Altavista you didn’t want to change it for fear of a loss in rankings. achieving high rankings was easy enough and without changing anything you could maintain them for months.

But Altavista isn’t the important engine it once was. now you have to optimize for Google, Yahoo! and MSN. The good news is that the three engines generally consider the same factors when ranking your pages. They are: Content, meta tags, links and age of all those factors. Granted no one knows for sure which of these are more important than the others, but in general, content is the most important.

All the engines have realized that the most important aspect to their business is people. In order to keep the people coming back and using their engine, they have to continue to improve on their results.

The results have to be relevant to that person at the time they are searching.

As a website owner, it is imperative that you understand how these search engine changes can affect your site. If you don’t adapt to their changes your site likely will suffer.

Therefore it is imperative that you have some form of ongoing SEO campaign, whether its aggressive as a monthly target of incoming links, or as simple as regularly publishing new site pages, or a combination of these two aspects of SEO.

Therefore, the main considerations for one planning a long term search engine optimization campaign are their budget and how aggressive they want to be.

A site owner who doesn’t have an extensive budget likely can’t compete against a site that can afford to spend thousands per months on link building for example. That is because all the engines use some form of link popularity for ranking sites and generally the site with the most links wins (There is much more to link building than this, but essentially it comes down to volume).

Similarly, a site owner needs to invest in an ongoing content campaign as well. Because you can be sure that your competitors are doing so as well.

Now a content development SEO campaign can be something as simple as setting up a blog on your site and posting regularly, or going so far as to hire professional SEO copywriters to create optimized content for your site.

In either case, the growth is positive, however there are obviously benefits to professionally written pages.

So what should one consider when defining an SEO budget?

There can be many aspects which affect your SEO. Some companies like to perform an in-depth analysis of your current site, making suggestions to improve existing optimization, and remove barriers to search engine indexing, while other firms will swing into action performing keyword analysis and writing meta tags.

Ideally you should receive quotes from many SEO firms and pick the one you feel best suits you. Keep in mind that you do have a budget, and don’t be afraid to negotiate with them. Prices can vary from $50 per hour to many hundreds per hour depending on the caliber of firm you choose. And like most things, you generally get what you pay for.

What should my SEO campaign contain?

Depending on what way you go, I would recommend a key phrase analysis, to help suggest those phrases which accurately represent your site, which you can compete for that will drive traffic to your site. Also, if you can get it, a detailed site analysis outlining the areas of improvement your site needs.

Sometimes the SEO firm can perform these changes for you (at a cost) or you can do them, if you have sufficient skill. If not you can perhaps find a third party to make the changes for you.

Some SEO campaigns will also either contain meta tags to use on your pages, as well as optimization suggestions for those pages, so that the content can be tweaked to match the meta tags. If you don’t receive meta tags you should at least receive guidelines and assistance on optimizing your pages yourself.

Some SEO programs also include some link building, however this can be a time consuming and costly process. The last time I did link building for a client (using some automated gathering and parsing tools) still took me over an hour to find one high quality link. Therefore if you are paying an SEO firm an hourly rate for this, it can get quite expensive.

However, link building is something you can do on your own time, provided you have some guidance from the SEO firm, or you can hire a firm which specializes in link building.

In general a lot of the firms out there have a variety of packages from mostly self serve, with consulting, to full service. It is up to you to decide what you think you can afford.

Some other considerations for an ongoing SEO campaign

Now, you are probably thinking “great I can spend a few hundred (or thousand) and get this work done at once and be done with it.” But I’d have to tell you that you’d be mistaken. SEO is not a one time thing.

I consider it like car maintenance – it’s something that has to be done on a regular basis. If you don’t perform regular oil changes, your car breaks down and repair bills can get very expensive. Similarly, simply performing a one time optimization will only take you so far, and then the site begins to lose in the rankings it once had.

That being said, you can generally find a firm which will do a bunch of optimization initially and then step down to a maintenance package, whereby they provide ongoing consultation and minor changes on a monthly basis to help maintain your rankings.

As such you need to factor this ongoing monthly cost into your “Cost of Doing Business” online. just like you’d have to hire a janitor and repair crews to keep your brick and mortar store clean and functional.

For example, you might have an initial “setup” that can run you a few thousand, and may take a month or 2 to complete, but after that work is done perhaps you can “step down” to a $500 monthly maintenance package including some consulting time, maintenance time and perhaps even some light duty link building.

Why else you should plan for long term SEO?

November 16, 2003 will be a date that many webmasters, site owners and SEO firms will remember. This was the day that the now infamous “Florida” update began on Google. It was at this time that sites which had traditionally owned the top of the SERPs had disappeared altogether while sites that struggled for a top 30 listing moved to the top.

For a long time people complained about how Google could do this to them. We know now this was Google’s first attempt to drastically improve the index. And the results can be felt today – the index is much cleaner and you don’t see the same poor quality sites you used to.

And as an SEO who went through this time I can tell you that of all the clients I deal with on a regular basis, probably less than 10% felt any negative impact. If anything most of my clients benefited from the change. Why?

Well for one, I don’t go for the “quick fix” SEO tactics. Up until the Florida Update all you needed was tons of links. Quality and Relevancy didn’t matter. But I didn’t condone that type of link building. Sure it may have taken me longer to find the relevant authoritative links that I felt my clients needed but in the end they weathered the storm that was the Florida Update.

I also instituted a regular content development program with many of my clients long before Florida. This too helped them weather that storm and the many which have followed since then.

And this is my point to all this – a good SEO firm will not only help you weather such drastic algorithm changes they should in fact be able to predict them to a certain extend and help you develop strategies to help combat them, should your site suffer the effects of a Florida like update.

So just how do you plan a long term SEO campaign?

Well there are two ways you can go about it – the first is the DIY path but this requires significant investments of your time, to learn the proper way to do SEO, as well as time to keep up to date on the current state of search engine affairs. And I have to tell you from experience that this can be very time consuming.

I spend a good part of my job researching SEO tactics so I can develop effective strategies for my clients. It’s not like I have a business to run on top of that. My job is to understand how search engines work so my clients can benefit. That type of understand takes a long time to pick up and maintain.

That being said, if you have the time to devote to this, you can save yourself a lot of money. Perhaps all you need then is a consultant, perhaps, which you can throw ideas at to get their expert opinion.

the second way is to hire a firm to do it for you. Granted this will cost you more, but you will be able to sleep at night knowing you are in good hands, and that the firm you hire should be on top of things and won’t get you banned for unethical tactics.

However you go, you MUST plan for the long term with any SEO campaign, you are no longer able to perform a one time optimization and walk away from the site. Today’s search engine landscape required constant change and innovation because if you don’t do it, I can almost guarantee you that your online competition is.

Effective web copy that is optimized for SEO and converts traffic

Effective web copy that is optimized for SEO and converts traffic

Posted by: Rob Sullivan on Oct 06, 2005

Web copy has evolved from the “early days” of SEO. Back then (3-4 years ago) doorway pages were all the rage because they could be auto generated on the fly and were built to rank highly on the search engines.

The problem was that these pages, while highly ranking, did little to help convert visitors into buyers. In fact more often then not turned people off websites.

Today however search engines put much more stock into the content of page, not just counting occurrences of phrases but actually understanding what the page is about which is why effective web copy is even more important than ever.

Just what is effective?
Trying to balance the need for effective web copy that ranks well, as well as converts traffic is an ongoing task. This is because both the search engines and the site’s visitors change over time. A page you wrote today won’t likely be as effective a year or even six months from now.

In fact I know from experience that page rankings change monthly across most of the engines. A well optimized page that was re-optimized in May is just now starting to show good rankings while pages which haven’t been touched in more than six months are beginning to drop in the rankings. This is the cycle of the search engines. As they find content which they deem more effective they will gradually refresh the index, dumping those pages which aren’t as effective and replacing them with ones that are.

Effective copy is found on pages that both rank highly and helps convert visitors. That means they are written to rank but are compelling enough to encourage users to first click on the listing and then stay and read the page and click through to other pages, hopefully converting in the end.

Now I can’t tell you how to write effective copy but I can give you some tips on how to optimize it so it will rank. Therefore, if you are reading this to learn how to write I’m sorry I can’t help you.

This is because to me writing is just one of those things that come naturally. You can either write or you can’t. Mind you, you can practice and you will get better over time, but I wouldn’t expect that the average person can just sit down in front of the computer and bang out web copy at will. As I said, it takes time, trial and error to learn how to create effective web copy.

That being said, I can give you pointers on optimizing your copy to make it effective from the search engine point of view.

Step 1 – choosing keywords

There are two ways you can go about creating effective copy – the first involves creating content around keywords, while the second involves optimizing content after it is written.

Let’s start with the first type of SEO copy:

Writing Around Keywords

Often, you will have an idea of the keywords you’d like to position your site for, so you just need to have appropriate content to support it. That means writing around the words or phrases you have in mind.

To do this, I like to take a look at a few of the sites currently ranking for those phrases. These sites can give you an idea of the writing style that is used, as well as the approximate word count on the pages. Remember, its a combination of factors which got those pages to the top of the rankings, so analyzing them can help give you an idea of just how they got there.

Once I have a “feel” for what’s required, I begin writing. Sometimes I take a block of text from a ranking site and copy it to a document for reference. For example, if a government site is occupying a top spot and it has statistics relevant to what I’m about to write on, then I copy the stats into a document for later use.

One thing to be careful of is to NEVER EVER COPY directly. It is OK to copy and use as a reference but your pages should never be the same as someone else’s for many reasons including legal. If you are struggling creating your unique content consider hiring someone (I’m always available :) ).

As I said, if you can write, by now you should have a good idea what the tone and style of your writing should be, and you already know what keywords you are using so its a matter of doing it.

Like I said, I can’t tell you how to do it. I don’t even know how I do it. All I know is I can sit in front of a keyboard and the words start to spill out onto the screen via my fingers. Sometimes I can’t type fast enough to keep up with my racing brain.

In the end, though, I get a page there. I don’t always get the important keywords out in the first try, but that is ok. I go back and revise the page as needed. The important thing at this stage is to be sure your page emulates those pages already ranking.

Once the page is created (it could take only a few minutes, or it could take days depending on your creative ability, but don’t let that stop you – practice does make it easier) it is time to optimize it.

As a guideline I like to keep my pages between 400 and 500 words, with 2-3 occurrences of any given phrase. I also like to try and keep my pages to 2 or 3 phrases per page. For more details on the perfectly optimized page, be sure to read my other article on the topic of Perfectly Optimized Web Pages.

Optimizing an existing page

As with creating new content from scratch, you need to keep your keyphrases in mind when optimizing new or existing content.

Using the same guidelines as found in my Perfectly Optimized Web Pages article you can optimize your existing content around your chosen phrases.

Sometimes that means rewriting parts of the text, while other times it could be a matter of changing synonyms to the phrase you want to position for.

If you need to, now is a good time to split up larger pages into that 400-500 word range. This also gives you more pages to optimize for those phrases which helps show your authority status on that keyphrase to the search engines.

Know your audience

While nailing the tone and style of the currently ranking pages is key to helping you achieve rankings, it is equally important to write for your target audience to help them stay on your site, ultimately converting.

That means writing something that is compelling for them. But in order to do this you need to know just who they are.

As I mentioned in a previous article you want to be as detailed as you can in knowing your target customer. That means getting as much realism as you can into your profile. Don’t just settle with the demographics (ie. 30 year old male, 45,000 annual income) but get into the details as well – is he married or single? What kind of car does he drive? Does he own or rent? What does he look like? Answering all these questions to the best of your ability can help you write content that is compelling to this person.

Test your content

Once you’ve chosen your keywords and written and optimized your content it would be a good idea to test it out on some visitors.

What I’d recommend here is talking to your friends and family. If they fit the profile of your target audience then get them to browse through your site, making notes about things they liked and didn’t like as well as any improvement suggestions they have. A lot of the time these people will give you an accurate idea of your average target audience. A warning though, you may have to be a little thick skinned. But keep in mind that all the criticism is good for your site in the end.

The advantage of recruiting friends and family is that you get instant feedback – you don’t have to wait for the engines to re index and re rank the pages. While you could do this, and then monitor your analytics to note any changes, this process could take months.

There you have it – a somewhat brief introduction into effective web copy.

Granted it is difficult for me to tell you what effective is. Really it is up to you, the website owner, to know what is effective and what isn’t. And as I mentioned above, a good way to do that is get someone you know to give you an honest evaluation of your site.

It is also important to write for your target audience. If they prefer highly technical commentary, and lots of details then don’t be afraid to give it to them. If they prefer a story behind every product or service, then give them one.

Let me tell you a little story about effective copy. A while ago I was researching a purchase. I want to buy a big screen TV. My current TV is pretty small and old, so I thought it would be time to upgrade. While I could find tons of generic information on which type to get, when it came to the specifics I needed to help make the final decision on what make and model to buy I found the information greatly lacking.

While there was lots of this type of information out there, I found that the dozen or so sites that I visited had EXACTLY THE SAME INFORMATION. And worst of all, it wasn’t what I wanted. If I were to buy online it wasn’t going to be from one of these sites because they didn’t answer the questions I was asking. If they can’t answer my questions before purchase, what are they going to be like after the purchase?

Whatever you find that your target wants to see should be incorporated in your site. Because this is the only way to get these visitors to stay on your site once they’ve found it in the search engines.

Remember, getting your site found through effective SEO is only part of the equation. The real trick comes in the conversion cycle, and what it will take to turning visitors into buyers. One important element in this cycle is the effectiveness of your content.

5 steps to a perfectly optimized web page

5 steps to a perfectly optimized web page

Posted by: Rob Sullivan on Sep 19, 2005

There is so much talk out there about what the ‘perfect’ web page looks like. In this article we give you tips on what we consider perfectly optimized as well as tips on helping turn the page into a great conversion tool.

Step one – Know who you are targeting
As with any marketing campaign the first step in optimizing ANY web page is to know your target audience. Is your site B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer). This is important because this not only affects the tone of your site, but also the keywords you chose.

It is imperative that you nail who your target is before you do anything else because if you don’t it doesn’t matter how big your site is, or how many pages you have. If you don’t write to the right crowd you aren’t going to get too much business.

The best thing is to write down who you think the target is. Be as detailed as possible. For example, your target may be a 30-45 year old female, in middle management, who drives a mini-van and takes her 3 kids to school before she goes to work. She makes $45,000 per year and has a bachelors degree in finance. This is the type of detail you need. You should be able to picture this person in your mind. Not just the abstract idea of her, but a physical look as well. the better you can picture them in your mind the more successful you will be.

Once you know who you target is the next step is choosing keywords.

Step two – Choosing the right keywords

This may be the most difficult part of your journey, especially if you don’t fit the target profile. That is, picking the keywords they will use to find your site.

You can start by using free tools like Yahoo!s keyword suggestion tool. It gives you a good place to start picking keywords.

Start with a phrase you know your site is about (i.e. if you sell widgets, then simply put “widgets” in the search box). The tool will then not only spit out other related words, but also the search volumes associated with each for the previous month.

A word of caution however: Sometimes, depending on when you use the tool, the search volumes are from a couple months ago. So if your product is seasonal based, the numbers may actually be lower or higher than represented.

Don’t be afraid to get a few hundred words to start. Remember, right now you are just gathering ideas – phrases that could drive traffic to your site. They aren’t all necessarily being used by your target customer.

You can also go to Google’s Adwords site and perform the above steps. Start with a phrase or two which describe your site or product and use Google’s suggestion tool to help expand your list.

At this point you want as many phrases on your list as possible. Don’t worry, you will cull the list pretty quickly.

Once you have a huge list of words, the next place to go is a site like Wordtracker, which has a keyword analysis tool. This tool can be used for a one time fee, or if it’s something you might want to return to you can purchase a subscription. It is a fairly simple tool to use and will give you a good idea of just how likely your site will be able to compete for a phrase.

A warning about Wordtracker: The software uses search volumes from some fairly minor sites such as Dogpile, so the estimates could be a little skewed. But again, unless you deal with an SEO firm that has their own proprietary software, this is about your best alternative.

Also remember as you are culling your words, don’t just focus on the competitive factors. These won’t account for your target audience. Therefore you need to have that picture in your mind of the target as you are selecting phrases that they might use. If you are unsure, you could always as for help from friends and family that fit the target profile.

A good rule of thumb would be to chose about one phrase per page. That doesn’t mean that you will only have one page per phrase, but it gives you a good target. So if your site is 300 pages, consider having a list of 300 phrases.

Step 3 – Write your pages

Now that you have your keywords its time to write, or re-write, your content to make them more appealing to the target audience, inserting the key phrases you’ve selected whenever possible.

Keep in mind that you don’t want to over do it. Also now is a good time to ensure you have proper keyword density’s and page length.

I recommend pages that are 400-500 words long. If they are a little longer or shorter that is fine, however if they are approaching 1000 words or more you should split them up, trying to hit that 400-500 word limit.

On this 400-500 word page you should have 2 or 3 occurrences of a key phrase, and you want to limit the key phrases used to 2 or 3. In other words you could have between 4 and 9 occurrences of all your key phrases per page. This should provide you with optimal keyword density.

Above all, make sure the pages are readable. Don’t optimize for optimization’s sake. If only one key phrase applies to the page, then only use one.

Step 4 – Optimize your Pages

This can be done in conjunction with the writing. In fact it should be done at then to save time. I purposely made this a separate step so that I could outline the finer points of optimization.

Provided that you are following the guidelines found in step 3, your pages should already have good keyword density, now is the time to improve that optimization by adding optimized meta tags and if appropriate, some image alt tags.

First is to write the meta description tag. While many engines will index thousands of characters in your description, I recommend no more than a couple hundred characters. That is about how long this paragraph is.

The meta description should be a readable sentence or two with the same keywords that you wrote the page for. In other words, the same phrases should appear in the meta description as the body. They should also appear as near to the front of the tag as possible however don’t sacrifice readability for this. If the tag doesn’t make sense with them at the front, then reorganize until they do make sense. Be sure to use proper punctuation as well.

Also preferred but not mandatory is a meta keywords tag. While none of the major engines use this tag, other smaller ones, and some specialty engines do use the meta keywords tag. If your target uses one of these engines then it makes sense to have that tag in place.

Also, with the keywords tag there is a lot of debate over using commas or not. Personally I do not use commas. I just combine the phrases and remove duplicate words. For example, if the page is about blue widgets, yellow widgets and red widgets then the keywords tag could be: “blue yellow red widgets.”

Common sense should be used when deciding if you will use image alt tags as well. If your keywords match the image and you can make a compelling image description, then do it. Otherwise don’t.

Step 5 – Write a compelling title tag

I purposely left this as a separate step from meta tags because this is the most important part of your optimization program. Again, it can be done at the same time as the previous two steps, but it’s importance can not be over-emphasized.

This is because the title tag is the tag which is displayed in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). It is the link that people click on, and also the tag which is generally read by the visitor before they decide to visit.

Therefore, if your title tag isn’t compelling, it doesn’t matter how well optimized your page is, it may not get that click.

For this step, you need to look at your competition to determine what they are doing. Perform a search to see what is compelling about their listing? Is there one that stands out? If so what are they doing? For example, if on every other site the keyword is the first phrase on the title, then consider moving your keyword in to the second or third phrase.

This is because, as you will notice, engines like Google bold the search term in the title and snippets or description. One way to make your title stand out is to have the term in a different position than the competition. That way the bolding stands out like this:

key phrase in title tag
key phrase in title tag
title tag with key phrase
key phrase in title tag

Notice how the third one stands out from the rest?

I can not emphasize enough how important that title tag is. As I said, it is the “hook” to get visitors to your site. If the title is ineffective, then it won’t get clicked which means you don’t get the opportunity to woo that client.

Summary

As you can see, optimizing a page has less to do with optimal keyword density and more to do with knowing who it is that will be using that page.

If you don’t know who your target audience is you will never be able to properly optimize your pages. Sure you can optimize it for whatever keywords you choose, but if they aren’t the words that your customer will search for, what’s the point?

In the end, the more you know who your customer is, the better you will be in all your online ventures, from introduction of your product or service, to closing the sale. It is up to you to cater to them, and not force them into a more generic mold. This is because todays web searchers are much more savvy and willing to browse more if a site doesn’t appeal to them.