Injimnuity

Google SEO Guide – Understanding SEO in Your Marketing Mix

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 16:32:51 -0700

Think of your business as a chocolate cake. You take a recipe, mix the ingredients, bake, and serve. If you’ve done a good job the people eating the cake will be satisfied. If you’ve done a really good job they’ll ask for more. If you’re savvy, you’ll include a glass of ice cold milk.

Your business is a lot like that chocolate cake. You take a product or service, put a price on it, notify your customer it exists, and persuade them to buy it. If you’ve satisfied your customer they will want more. If you’ve exceeded expectations they’ll tell others about your chocolate cake.

Therefore, the nature of a business enterprise can be summed up as follows: satisfying a target customer in a specific geographical location by meeting a need while turning a profit.

For your customer to know your chocolate cake exists, you must communicate with them, even persuade them. Internet marketing is a part of the “notify your customer it exists” component. The two main types of internet marketing are SEM and SEO. SEM is search engine marketing and usually entails paying for advertising spots such as Google AdWords. SEO is search engine optimization which is designing your website with a structure and content that increases its visibility to search engines.

SEO is often referred to as organic, meaning search engines place your website on search results pages naturally. The paid ads in blue at the top of Google are inorganic, or unnatural, meaning that someone bought the right to be listed on that page. A website must be optimized according to specifications in order to rank naturally within a search engine’s results. They better the optimization, the higher the placement theoretically.

Most importantly, there’s the human SEO factor. It consists of converting visitors to paying customers once they’ve visited your website. That is, they read the words on your website and decide to do business with you. You see, they can’t smell or taste your chocolate cake over the internet (at least not yet). So, your words must convince them you’re the one chocolate cake out of hundreds they should eat.

What is SEO – How to SEO Your Website

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 07:40:58 -0700

What is SEO?

SEO is search engine optimization of your website. That is, your site’s source code – or structure – and content – or readable words – are designed to be search engine friendly. Structural elements are invisible to the website visitor, while content elements are visible to a visitor. Here is a list of some common elements from each category:

Invisible:

HTML <title> tag
HTML <meta name=”description”> tag
HTML <meta name=”keywords”> tag
CSS file and class names
JS or JQuery file names or element IDs

Visible:

Words inside HTML heading tags, such as <h1> - <h6>
Words inside HTML paragraph <p> tags
Words inside HTML menu <ul> tags
Words used in a page URL, such as ../this-is-an-article-on-my-site
Words inside link <href> tags, such as “click here”

There is some debate as to which elements matter most to Google, and in fact some of these may be completely ignored by Google. However, a proper SEO website should contain all of these elements and more in order to have the best chance of ranking well on Google.

What is SEO to you?

Without SEO, it would be difficult for you to find what you’re searching for on Google. Think for a moment of the products or services you search for on Google. The keywords you type into the Google search field produce a set of results that you then scan to determine which best suits your immediate needs. The only reason those particular sites come up in your search is because they contain the keywords you used in your search.

What is SEO to your website?

So consider for a moment what happens to a website that is not properly optimized for a particular set of keywords. When you make a search on Google, typically thousands if not millions of results are returned. Without optimization, a site will either show up toward the bottom of those results, or not show up at all. Many users will not even click past the first few pages of search results, so in this case they would never visit that website.

What is SEO to your business?

SEO means designing your website in order to compete against your competitors on a particular set of search keywords. For example, if you’re a plumbing service company, you may want to compete for “toilet leak repair” business in your local area. By designing both the visible and invisible elements of your website to include these keywords, you have a better shot of capturing potential customers who make such a search on Google.

Injimnuity offers SEO services for existing websites and new websites you want to build.

While this is a fairly simplistic view of SEO and doesn’t describe all of the important factors that make up effective SEO, these elements are critical drivers that form the core of what makes a website SEO. If you would like more information about SEO or SEO services for your website, please visit http://injimnuity.us/tumblr or http://injimnuity.us.

Google SEO Guide: SEO Your Website Before You Build It

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 16:35:28 -0700

If you’re thinking about optimizing your newly built service-business website for search engines, namely Google, then you may already be too late without a major overhaul. To capture customers on the Web, your site needs to compete with millions already out there. If your competitors’ sites are better optimized than yours, they will attract your potential customers.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax”. – Abraham Lincoln

You see, no matter how beautiful your new website, it must place near the top of Google search in order to be effective in terms of organic results. Your site needs to work for your business even while you sleep. That is, it needs to show up on Google search, intrigue prospects with your Google snippet, compel them to decide that you’re the only company to do business with, and call them to action.

The primary goal for your SEO website is to accomplish front-page placement – or near front-page placement – on Google within millions of search results. To do that, your site needs to be optimized for Google algorithm keyword factors such as geographical location, keyword proximity, keyword placement, keyword prominence, keyword density, and keyword format. These factors are then built into the structural elements and content of your site such as its main URL, sub-page URLs, page titles, page descriptions, title headings, paragraph tags, file names, link titles, and image titles.

In order to derive the proper keyword factors, there are a few key questions that need to be answered first. These are critical to your unique website structure and content. Yes, every business is special in its own way, and that difference needs to be drawn out and explicitly stated on your site. The key questions that should be answered are:

What is your target geography?
What is your target customer demographic?
What are your service specialties?
What makes you better suited than your competition?
What is the opportunity cost of hiring someone else?
How do you want your website visitors to engage with you?

Once these important questions are answered your site’s keywords can be planned using Google Insights for Search. With the keywords identified for the overall business and business services areas, content comprised of over 300 words per section must be written for Google to consider your website legitimate. This content will be integrated within your optimized site structure for the best possible chance for success with Google SEO.

Google SEO Tips: Building Quality Backlinks to Your Website

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 11:05:00 -0700

The best way to determine how to increase quality external links to your website is to examine your competitors and see who is linking to them. To do this, perform a simple Google search on a competitor’s URL and view the search results. In these results you should see a number of sites that are linking back to them.

I tested this on the URL slableakfix.com, the consumer service company I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. The search on this address returned 10 pages of results. The most popular external sites listed were as follows:

aboutus.org - Wiki Web directory of small businesses
businessseek.biz - business directory website
manta.com - business directory website
hotfrog.com - business directory website
top20sites.com - business directory website
plumbingvia.com - plumbing-specific web directory
buildzoom.com - contractor-specific web directory
orangecountybizlist.com - location-specific website directory
ezinearticles.com - expert article directory
ebusinesspages.com - business directory website

As you can see, most of these are free listing sites where you can briefly write about your business and easily create backlinks to your site. The standout is ezinearticles.com, where one can write about a topic she is an expert in which lends a business credibility. The one backlink SlabLeakFix does not have is a blog which can also be helpful.

There’s no getting around content. Content, whether it is just a business listing, is quality words that Google notices and indexes. Link farms on the other hand are just lists of links and as such are not considered legitimate. Always ask yourself if the site you’re listing on should have the honor of including your business. If not, then stay away from it and avoid Google penalizing your site for shabby backlinks. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to backlink on a many worthy websites as possible.

Google SEO Tools: The Google Snippet and Deep Sea Fishing

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 08:51:00 -0700

If you take a moment to pause and think about what we’re trying to accomplish with every SEO website we build, the challenge is quite remarkable.

We are attempting to take the one to three search terms entered by a user into Google search; display a 156 character snippet (in addition to the 70 character title and URL) in Google search results; and entice the user to click through to a landing page containing roughly 100 to 300 readable words. If we’re fortunate enough to pop near the top of millions of search results, we’ll have about one second to capture the user’s attention to the snippet, and roughly 30 seconds to get our message across on the landing page. At the end of those 30 seconds, the user may respond to our call-to-action. Here’s what that looks like:

3 terms -> 156 char. snippet (1 sec.) -> 300 word page (30 sec.) -> 5 word call-to-action -> contact.

Let’s think about this with regard to deep sea fishing for a moment. You hop on a 60-foot vessel, cruise out one mile into the 64 million square mile Pacific Ocean, drop in a .36 millimeter line to catch a one pound moving target in oftentimes less than pristine environmental conditions.

Fishing for customers on Google is a lot like deep sea fishing for dinner: every detail matters. This is especially true in the information-overloaded society we live in, where attention spans are clipped to consuming 160-character chunks of words in a fraction of a minute. A snippet must display high enough within Google search results to even have a chance of reaching the user.

In order to test how high a snippet might display on Google, there are a couple of SEO testing tools available that may help, notably the SEOmofo Snippet Optimization Tool at http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html, and the SEOChat Keyword Density Tool at http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/. If there are other tools out there that you recommend, please feel free to share them here.

Google SEO Tips: How Many Keyword Repeats is Too Many?

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 19:01:00 -0700

To begin today’s SEO analysis I pointed my Chrome to Google Insights for Search. I was curious to know the 90-day volume for the term “SEO” in the Los Angeles metro to see what the marketplace is doing. Most importantly, I wanted to see how keyword combinations were trending for that term. My search revealed that “google seo” is the most popular phrase with regard to SEO in my target geography.

Next I conducted a simple Google search for “google seo los angeles” which returned 28 million results. The top organic result belonged to SocialMediaforSEO.com, a media services company on Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles. For the remainder of this post I lift the hood on this website to learn what they’re doing to pop number one on Google for LA SEO.

Here’s the top organic search result snippet for “google seo los angeles:”

Google places SEO - local SEO Los Angeles

www.socialmediaforseo.com/google-places-seo/

Google places SEO, internet marketing for local Los Angeles business entries and enterprise needs to address Google places SEO as a viable commodity of cost…

The number of times each keyword repeats in this search snippet:

“SEO” - 6

“Google” - 4

“Los Angeles” - 2

A list of how many times each keyword and keyword phrase appears in the HTML coding for the “google-places-seo” page:

“SEO” - 156 including title (twice), every link and menu

“Google” - 43 including CSS file name

“Los Angeles” - 19 including title, menu, and links

“Google Places SEO” - 17 including h1, h2, h3, h4, CSS classes, menu

“Local SEO Los Angeles” - 6 including menu

Discussion

Social Media has done their work to include numerous occurrences of the above keywords in their “google-places-seo” page. While that is admirable, are they guilty of keyword stuffing? Google considers a site having crossed the line into keyword stuffing when the number of keywords interfere with the usability of a particular site, or create a “negative user experience” as they put it. Here’s the first sentence of main content from the Social Media website:

“Google places SEO, internet marketing for local Los Angeles business entries and enterprise needs to address Google places SEO as a viable commodity of cost effective search engine marketing internet marketing and advertising.”

At first examination, the word block above appears to be a sentence fragment crammed with keywords. Perhaps it’s just written poorly, but I had a difficult time reading through all the paragraphs on their page. That raises an issue for website designers as well as their clients: website content must be well written to be taken professionally – and seriously – by website visitors, the people clients hope patronize their establishments. If a site is keyword crammed just to pop on Google, it will be obvious to the user and they will most likely move on to the next search result.

Google SEO Tips: Learning from Varied Keyword Search Results

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 01:27:00 -0700

I performed a little experiment. I wanted to examine how Google produces organic search results for a typical consumer service. For this test I chose “leak repair.” Here are my results for variations on this search, which were successively more granular. I discuss my conclusions in the last section of this post. I welcome your comments.

Search #1

Google Location Setting: Orange, CA

Keywords: Leak Repair

Top Organic Result:

<page title> Roof Leak Repair Products & Sealing Tape | EternaBond®

<url> www.eternabond.com/

<page description> EternaBond® roof repair products are perfect for fixing leaking roofs of all types. The revolutionary sealing tape is durable and easy to use.

Search #2

Google Location Setting: Orange, CA

Keywords: Orange Leak Repair

Top Organic Result:

<page title> Slab Leak Detection & Repair – Orange County California

<url> www.slableakfix.com/

<page description> Pipeline Restoration has been providing quality slab leak detection and repair in Orange County, CA for over 30 years.

Search #3

Google Location Setting: Orange, CA

Keywords: Orange Slab Leak Repair

Top Organic Result:

<page title> Slab Leak Detection & Repair – Orange County California

<url> www.slableakfix.com/

<page description> Pipeline Restoration has been providing quality slab leak detection and repair in Orange County, CA for over 30 years.

Results

The search for “leak repair” with the Google location setting configured for “Orange, CA” retuned a leak repair product company. Search number two for “orange leak repair” returned a slab leak repair service company. Search number three for “orange slab leak repair” returned the same slab leak service company.

Conclusions

Specificity in search matters, for both consumers and businesses. If I had a slab leak in my home today, searching for “leak repair” with Google set to “Orange, CA” would get me a roll of tape. Not much help in a panic. If I had a toilet leak, a slab leak repair company wouldn’t be much help either. In order to find the consumer service I’m looking for in the hour of my need, I must be more specific with my search words. In this case “orange slab leak repair” was effective.

If I were a business in Orange, CA providing slab leak repair – or even emergency slab leak repair – the frequency and relevancy of keywords in my website SEO structure would mean more customers. For website designers this means we must design our client’s website page titles, descriptions and even urls to contain multiple specific keywords, such as [city], [type of service], and [service]. SlabLeakFix.com used “orange” twice, “leak” three times, “repair” twice, and “slab” three times in their page title, url and page description.