Jed's Blog

Doing good SEO work for your website in part involves creating well-written, useful, and keyword-optimized content for your users. If you make your target audience happy, chances are that search engines will like you, too.

However, there is a lot more to good SEO than just having good content on your site. There are a number of things you can do to make your site more enticing to the search engine “bots” that are constantly cataloging the Internet’s billions of Web pages for their users. One of these things is to create internal links on each page of your site. Internal links are simply links from one page of your website to another.

For the best results, follow these tips when doing internal linking:

1. Keep them relevant: be sure to link to content that actually relates to the content you are linking from.

2. Use anchor text, embedding the links in contextually-relevant keywords.

3. Do not overdo it: you should have a handful of internal links on each page of your site. Inserting too many links can be distracting and take away from a quality user experience.

Following a good internal linking strategy will provide a better user experience – and it should give you a boost in the rankings, as well.

Building good content and updating it frequently may be the single most important thing you can do to promote your website. Good content has to take into account two constituencies:

1. your target content consumers (i.e., the people whom you want to read/view/play with/listen to your stuff)
2. search engines

Of course, merely pandering to search engines like Bing, Google, Ask and Yahoo! is not advisable. To be sure, without good content, there is no reason to give any thought at all to how search engines will view your content. And, content purists will go one step further, telling you that it is “all about the content, damn the search engine results pages.”

However, put simply: those content purists are naive.

You should always take the search-ability of your content into account – once you have gone to the effort of creating good, useful, valuable, readable content. For more on my view of how to do this, check out my article that was published in the Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the ISSS (International Society for the Systems Sciences). It is called: “A Systems Approach to Streamlining the Creation of Web-Based Content.”

Google continues to gain market share. They have long been the leader (by a mile) in terms of search engine site searches (72.17% of all searches, as of May, 2010, according to: Hit Wise). But, they also continue to make headway in terms of total Internet traffic share. The company now represents an average of 6.4 percent of all Internet traffic, according to online security company Arbor Networks. What is significant is that their share of traffic has gone from around 5.3% to 6.4%, meaning they gained 1% of total Internet traffic since the beginning of 2010.

What does this all mean to you? Well, as important as Google remains to the vast majority of website owners in terms of being a potentially-significant traffic source, it is not the only game in town. Here are some take-aways:

1. Do not try to optimize your website solely for Google. This approach can backfire. Instead, just create good content and allow the search engines – Google and the others – to find you. If you create good content and promote it adequately, they WILL come.

2. Yahoo!, Bing and Ask continue to account for a very large portion of Internet searches.

3. There are hundreds of other search engines and directories that, collectively, still drive a lot of traffic to websites like yours.

Bottom line: always keep an eye on what Google is up to, since they are not going away anytime soon. At the same time, however, don’t expend too much effort thinking about this or any other single search engine site. Focus instead on continuing to deliver good content for your users and you will reap the benefits.

Google is well-known for its anti-censorship stance. And, this policy applies when it comes to Google’s search results.

However, in the case of its newly-released Google Instant search function, as well as its long-standing auto-complete feature, the search giant actually does censor certain keywords from showing up in these “instant search results” situations. They do this to protect children and others in order to protect them from viewing instant search results that many might find offensive.

Of course, if you want to search via Google for sites containing these blacklisted words, you can do so; you just have to hit the “Search” button in order to view the results.

I 100% support Google’s blacklisting of certain keywords from Google Instant and auto-complete features. Yet, the notion that they do so highlights the fact that nothing ever can be truly censorship free – even in Internetland. This situation highlights the ongoing balance that Netizens and purveyors of online content alike must constantly strive to strike between the ideal of total freedom and the reality that some things just aren’t fit to print in some contexts.

FYI: for a complete list of Google’s blacklisted words, click here.

Having a website without visitors is like designing and building a custom home but then not allowing anybody to live there or visit: there’s not much point to it.

Moreover, not only do you need visitors to your site, but you need TARGETED visitors who want what you are offering.

Think of it this way: if you have a website that sells high-end baby strollers, you would rather have 50 visitors per day to your site who are the parents of newborns rather than 200 visitors who are members of the general public. Reason: the conversion rate (i.e., the percentage of site visitors who actually make a purchase) would likely be about 10 times higher when your visitors are composed solely of parents of newborns versus if they were members of the general public. Turning this into a numbers-based example:

If you have a conversion rate of 1% for the general public and a conversion rate of 10% for the parents of newborns, then the parent-of-newborn traffic would bring you (50 x 10% =) 5 sales per day in this case, while the general public traffic would bring you just (200 x 1% =) 2 sales per day. The lesson: targeted traffic can bring you more conversions, even with less traffic.

Here are 5 steps to getting more targeted traffic to your site:

1. Understand that every Internet search represents an unfulfilled need: People do not make searches on search engines in a vacuum. Rather, every search is like a small cry out to the inter-networked wilderness – calling out for some need to be fulfilled. That need could be as simple as looking for a moment or two of entertainment. Or, it could be for a certain product or service. In a sense, you can assume that every search performed is driven by the instinct to either increase pleasure or decrease pain.

2. Determine who is the “hungry audience” for your site’s goods and services: When you put those individual searches into categories or buckets, you can see emerge a particular audience or market who is hungry for something. For your site, figure out who they are, what they look like and what motivates them.

3. Find out which keyword search terms that hungry audience you care about is using: Now, use a good keyword research tool to figure out which terms they are looking for when they conduct searches. Create as large a list as you can, including those multi-word, highly-targeted keywords sometimes called long-tail keywords.

4. Build off-site content that has back-links to your site: Next, write articles, blogs, lenses, videos, hubs and other bits of content that link back to your site. Not only will back-links from this content help your rankings, but it will also get you more referral visits to your site.

5. Post that content to as many places as possible: Finally, post that content to as many places as you can using a mass content distribution system like this one. This allows you to spend more time creating new, original content in your topic area or niche and less time propagating it around the Internet.

There is no traffic like highly-targeted traffic.

For many years I have been a big supporter of eZineArticles.com (EZA), which is probably the premier article posting site in the English-speaking world.

I have been a consistent contributor to the site over the years, starting in earnest in mid-2007. As of this week, I am proud to say that my articles have surpassed the “1,000,000 read” mark, along with 51,000+ URL click-throughs. Woo hooo!

Of course, I submit my articles to multiple article sites – not just EZA – but EZA is always my first stop.

Over the years, I have posted over 700 articles on behalf of my clients and in support of my own affiliate marketing efforts (under my own name and the author names of my clients).

Having 1,000,000 reads under my belt is a lot of fun, and I must admit that I do feel a sense of pride at having met this mark. It hasn’t been easy: there has been a whole lot of time, thought and effort put into those articles.

My click-through rate (defined as the # of people who click on the URL link in an article divided by the # of article reads) hovers at around 5.1% over the life of my EZA account. But, I have been honing my skills over the years and these days click-throughs easily reach the 10-20% range for many of our articles. So, that 5.1% average should continue to rise over the next year or so as my skills continue to produce better click-through rates.

The coolest thing is that almost all of the articles I posted as far back as 2007 are still ranking well on search engines and getting regular reads. Now, that’s staying power (and you can’t say the same for pay-per-click advertising, can you?).

Article marketing remains a powerful force as a means to drive well-converting, quality traffic to websites. If you have not yet given article marketing a try for your business, give me a call for some pointers or to have us write some on your behalf to promote your company, product, service or website.

My next goal? 1,000 articles or 2,000,000 reads, whichever comes first!

If you are not already using website analytics software to track visits to your site, you are missing out on a whole lot of very valuable information. In fact, without referring to and using a website analytics package regularly, it is virtually impossible to adequately optimize your website for traffic and conversions.

My frequent readers already know that I am a big proponent of using Google Analytics. It is free, easy to use, and has a ton of extremely useful features.

One of the Google Analytics features that I really like is the Landing Page feature. Simply put, this metric allows you to know which pages on your site are used as “landing pages.” This simple refers to pages that serve as the first page or “point of entry” page when someone first comes to your site.

To understand why this is so important, you need to first understand how traffic gets to a website. Usually, the number one landing page for most websites is of course the home page itself. However, when a site features a lot of pages – each of which is highly-optimized for a different keyword or topic – it is often the case that these “interior pages” of the site will rank much higher on a search engine results page like Bing or Google than the home page (for a given keyword). In other words, they become the point of entry into the site for certain topics, rather than the home page. Similarly, these pages will often receive backlinks directly from other sites who want to inform their visitors about the given topic.

So, let’s say you have spent a lot of time optimizing a given interior page of your site for a particular keyword. Over time, you are going to be curious as to whether you are actually getting more visits to your site from people whose initial point of entry is that particular page. due to your excellent optimization skills. The Landing Page feature will tell you.

Once you have installed Google Analytics on your site, here’s how to access the Landing Page feature:

1. From the Google Analytics Home Page, under Dashboard (on the left), click on Content.
2. Then click on Top Landing Pages in the sub-menu under the Content section.

On the right, you will see listed in order of most-to-least visits those pages of your site are currently serving as landing pages for your visitors. Over time, if you have optimized each page properly and for the right keywords, those visits should increase.

When designing a new web site, you need to keep in mind what I call the “ideal user path,” as I have mentioned in previous posts.

The related concept of “visual paths” in relation to web design is also a very useful concept for designers to understand. Generally speaking, one should design the images on any given page of your site in a way that presents a useful, accessible visual pattern to the eye. What you want to avoid, in essence, is randomly-placed visual information that distracts the eye and causes it to wander or be confused about where to focus.

The archetypal visual paths are the Triangle, S or Z, the Spiral, and Converging Lines. For an excellent article on this topic with visual examples of each archetype, check out this article featured on the iStockPhoto website.

If you are managing a pay-per-click campaign in Google Adwords, you are hopefully doing more than just setting up the campaign and letting it run itself. If you are, it is 100% certain that you are leaving money on the table. Rather, you need to be actively managing the campaign on a regular basis.

Optimizing pay-per-click campaigns is a whole art and science unto itself. There are countless tricks, techniques and strategies for getting the most out of your campaign. Sometimes, it makes sense to learn all of these tricks yourself. Other times, it is best to leave it to a professional PPC campaign manager.

Either way, you will want to make sure the campaign is being optimized properly. But, how can you measure whether this is the case? The most common answer to this question is, “The lower the cost-per-click, the better-optimized the campaign.” Bzzzzzz – sorry, wrong answer! It is not all about cost-per-click, it is all about cost-per-conversion.

As explained in more detail elsewhere in this blog, a conversion is some action taken by the website visitor that the site owner deems desirable. The action could be almost anything, but is typically defined in terms of making a purchase, filling out a web form, or placing a phone call to the number listed on the site.

Once you have defined a conversion action, you need to set up Adwords to track it automatically. Once set up properly, you can login to your account and view your “cost per conversion” data for any given campaign over any given period of time. The key to setting this up is to create a page on your site that comes up after the desired conversion action has happened. For example, if your conversion is defined as a purchase, then you could have a Thank You page pop up on the site. In that page, in the “code” running in the background, you will want to embed a bit of code from Google Adwords. How it works is: when that Thank You page is displayed, it sends a little message to your Adwords campaign, notifying it of the successful conversion and thereby allowing it to calculate how much you had to spend (on average, over a given period of time) to get each such conversion. Pretty cool, eh? Okay, here’s how to set it up:

1. Login to your Adwords account.

2. Go to the green row of tabs at the top and click Reporting, then Conversions.

3. Click “New Conversion.”

4. Give your new conversion a name and select a tracking purpose.

5. If you like, assign an expected revenue value to this conversion (could be an estimate).

6. Click “Save and get code.”

7. Place the code as instructed onto your site on the Thank You page (or whichever relavant page you like).

Now, whenever someone clicks on one of your ads AND completes the conversion action, Adwords will keep track of it.

Managing to conversion is the ONLY way to fly when running an Adwords campaign. Be sure to give it try.

Once you have set up a new pay-per-click campaign, landing page split test, or search engine optimization campaign, you have two main choices: let it sit and hope for the best, or optimize your new project. Obviously, given the amount of competition out there Internet Land, optimization is the only realistic choice.

Optimization, in very broad terms, is simply getting the most bang for your buck. Usually, in the world of online marketing, it refers to decreasing your cost per conversion (i.e., cost per sale, download, inquiry sent, etc.).

Now, there are a ton of ways to optimize any given campaign, depending of course upon the nature of the campaign, the techniques you are using, etc.. The specific ways to optimize for a given campaign is for another post. But, in very general terms, the optimization process goes like this:

a. set up your campaign
b. define some metrics (something you can measure who measurements represent success or failure)
c. establish some baseline metrics (i.e., take initial measurement)
d. make a small change
e. wait a while (to give things time to collect data)
f. measure again
g. compare new measurement to previous set of measurements
h. go back do “d” and repeat

Here’s the biggest pitfall that so many of my clients fall into: they try to test more than one variable at a time. In the world of optimization, here is the golden rule:

Test only ONE variable at a time!

Here’s why: if you test more than one variable at a time, whether the results (see “f” above) are good, bad, or mediocre, it won’t matter, for you will have learned NOTHING about what really worked, what didn’t. In other words: you won’t be able to tell for sure what made the difference! You may as well have not done anything at all.

This is one of those pieces of advice I’ve repeated to customers, colleagues, and random people on the street countless times. Sometimes it sinks in right away, sometimes it takes a while. But, if you think about it, it’s the only way to do optimization that makes sense. So: follow it, use it, live it! (And, happy testing, by the way.)