Search Engine Tigers

Having read many posts by Lyndon on the topic of getting the right title for your posts / articles, I found the recent post on SEO2.0 challenging Lyndon’s skills both interesting and amusing. Then I came across this article in the Guardian about the actress Leslie Ash and her recent compensation award. This post screamed out for a better headline than

“Actor Ash gets £5m payout over hospital superbug“

or the headline that was used when the story was submitted to DIGG

“£5m Hospital Bug Payout For Leslie Ash“

So based on the article, I thought I’d give it a go:

“How falling out of bed during sex can net you $10 million”

“Get paid 5 million quid for sex with your spouse” (do colloquialisms such as ‘quid’ work?)

“Sex, pain, bugs and $10 million”

“Sex, Bugs and lots of dough”

“Superbug sexcapade victim gets $10 million”

“Rough sex leads to $10 million payout”

“5 million reasons to stay out of NHS hospitals”

“Leslie Ash becomes Leslie Ca$h after superbug infection“

Can you think of some better ones? I’m sure you can.

N.B. Obviously this exercise is not meant to trivialize the problems that this woman is going to have to deal with for the rest of her life, which are terrible.

Following on from Jim Boykin’s “Wallclocks for links” strategy, Search Marketing Standard magazine has decided to appeal to the stomach with “Foodbait“, or more specifically “Exotic Chocolate Bar Bait“.

The Summer ‘07 issue was mailed out a few weeks ago. We would absolutely LOVE to hear what you have to say about it and we promise that every comment will be read and responded to. Send your feedback to the Publisher, Boris Mordkovich. And if you post a review of the magazine on your blog or website, we’ll even send you an exotic chocolate bar!

If only my copy had arrived… ah well, hopefully it’ll show up in the next few weeks. Then you can watch for a review posted here, as I have to find out exactly what’s exotic about the choccy.

There are several ways that people do this. Some challenge their readers with outlandish statements, expecting them to post rebuttals on their blogs (I’m not linking to any of the proponents of this, even with a nofollow). Others run contests, offering a variety of prizes for a winner. Jim Boykin just blatently comes out and offers a free wall clock for anyone that links to one particular post on his site by 5pm EDT on Friday (yep, there’s also a contest element too, where you can win $720 in free ads for your site, along with some handy, dandy rubber throwing stars to sate your inner ninja).

So why would anyone link to this post? Is the, sight unseen, wall clock really enough of an enticement to link to a post on linking to him? Well, maybe, if it’s a nice wall clock, free is a nice price to pay.  But freebies aside, the post itself does have links to the newest additions to “The Best Of Jim’s Posts”, and those are some good posts on Links, SEO, and the Supplemental Index in this post that are really worth a read, or even a re-read, although for some reason his political posts didn’t quite make the list (sorry Jim).   

Now Jim, if you read this, let me just say…

Hey mr Boykin,

First thanks for your site which I frequently visit, at {url}. Your articles, stories and tips have helped me a lot, which has resulted in more profits at the bottom line. So an incredible thanks for you great site, keep up the good work!

So you want to put a website up for your business, or you already have one up, and you know enough to know that to make your website work for you, you have to do some Search Engine Marketing. But where do you start? Well, I’ve put together some links below to resources that will at least explain what you didn’t know you didn’t know, and get you moving in the right direction. These links are not the be-all and end all of information on these topics out there, but they’re good enough to get you thinking and point you in the right direction, too many links may make you feel overwhelmed.

Education

The first step is Education. Before you start running, you need to know how many legs you have. Attending a conference, reading a good book, and taking certification courses all help. The link here is a poll, which gives you an idea of how some of these courses and conferences rank, but it also gives you links to their websites.

Best Conferences and Certification Courses

Keyword Research

Keyword research is vital for your site. If you don’t do it correctly you have no idea as to whether your site is visible to as many potential customers as possible. The right keyword research can lower costs for pay per click, and just generally increase your sales. The article linked here has a full discussion on keyword research from Lisa (“The Lisa”) Barone at Bruce Clay.

The 5 steps of Keyword Research

Page Optimization

So now you know what to target, the next question is how to target. If you can incorporate them into your URL i.e. nashvillebuggywhips.com, then that’s great, but more likely than not you’ll want to go with your brand as the name. So what’s the first element on your website that you want to target? The title tag. This article describes everything you want to know about the title tag.

All about Title Tags

Next you want to work with your meta tags. Remembering that while these elements may not have the power they once had, they’re still worth looking at and getting right (especially the ROBOTS tag, which can impact indexing on your whole site).

The Meta Tag primer

Next, you want to make sure that you have good content on your site. The search engines love good, unique, relevant content. If you have plenty to say about your company and it’s products / services, do it. While you want to weave the keywords into your content, just remember that all of the text on the page will be indexed and so you may pick up searches for a long tail search such as “premier buggy whip supplier in nashville”. These searches don’t happen too often, but they’re much more likely to convert into a sale for your company. This next article talks about using your content to help your site

Content is King

Link Building
Now that you have your site up, the next step is to make sure that people know about it. Just building a site and optimizing it does not mean that it will rank well in the Search Engines. Their current algorithms are based largely on trust, and one of the ways that that trust is generated is through links to your site. The more high quality, relevant links that come to your site, the better. How do you get links? Well there are several ways. You can contact other site owners and get them to link to you (you may have to link back to them though), there are directories, both free and paid that accept links, there are paid linking services, and then there is linkbaiting, where you write an article / put out a video / do something different, that spreads virally, and results in them linking to the site. There are many companies out there now that specialize in linkbaiting services, especially to the relatively new phenomenon of Social Media sites such as Digg. The first link below is to a running section of SearchEngineLand that deals specifically with link building topics. The second is an example of a linkbaiting campaign from SEOmoz.

Link Week

The Super Digg

Analytics & Reporting
So you have a site, it has incoming links, the search engines have indexed it. How do you know how well it’s doing? You need to have an analytics solution in place. Are they expensive? Well, it depends on the level of analysis, and whether you need real time analysis, or you can afford to wait until the next day. The link below discusses six packages that can provide analytics data for your site without costing you a penny.

Analytics on the cheap – six free stats packages

Alternatives

What else might you want to look into? Well, there’s blogging, podcasting, and social media sites, the number of which seems to grow fairly regularly. Here are the final 2 links, the first addresses how you may want to use podcasting in promoting your business, and gives you a list of resources, the other describes using one off the social media sites – Flickr.

Podcasting for small businesses

Marketing on Flickr

One of the easiest places to get links to your site with a decent page rank is from your own profile pages on different sites. Maybe you signed up for MySpace to show your kids that you were hip, then never went back? Maybe you jumped on the recent MyBlogLog fad? Maybe as a professional you’re on LinkedIn? What about when you put those pictures up on Flickr? Maybe you’ve been a member of a forum or two that have profile pages? Maybe you signed up for an authentication service so you could post a comment on another persons blog? There are many different sites where you can have a profile page that allows you to have a link to your site / sites. Quite a few of these sites will generate a decent page rank, given the authority of the sites that they reside on. For instance, I had completely forgotten that I’d signed up for the TypeKey service, when I found my profile page it was at a PR of 4, not a bad little link to throw at myself. Of course, some of these sites either ‘no-follow‘ the profile pages or don’t allow links, making them just plain text, but in the case of the former you can still get traffic from a good site, and in the case of the latter, it can’t hurt.

So what should you do to take advantage of this? For those sites that you can remember signing up for, go out there and add the links to your site(s). For those that you can’t, do a search on your name or your nom de plume and see what you find, there may be some decent profile pages that you forgot all about that you can quickly and easily link to your site(s), and pass the ‘link love’ on to them.