Monday, September 5, 2011

Blog Optimization: Auditing my own Blog for SEO Best Practices

After reading Google’s own search engine optimization (SEO) audit of its own web site, I was inspired to evaluate my own Blog and see if I was always following common SEO best practices. I was surprised that as a SEO web consultant I was often giving clients SEO advice that I myself wasn’t always following!

Below are some SEO issues that I have identified and am planning to fix in the next couple of months so read quickly!

Use Keyword Phrases in the Headline of Blog Post - I have my website optimized for the primary keyword “website consulting” along with many secondary keywords (eg. web consultant, seo consulting, ppc consultant, etc) but am rarely using these keywords in the actual Blog Headline.

Hyperlink Keyword Phrase to Webpage– Whenever a keyword phrase is used, it should be hyperlinked to the relevant webpage on the site. For example, if I mention a keyword related to ”ppc consulting” I should link it to that page on the site (like I just did here now : )

Use the “TITLE” tag in the Hyperlink – You have the ability to add a “title” tag on the hyperlinks. For example, if I use the keyword “ppc consulting” in the Blog and link it in the HTML source code I should add the Title tag as follows: ppc consulting. I can either use the exact keyword being linked or a very similar one.

Category Labels – You should have a Blog Category strategy laid out based on your SEO keyword research and not just create the Category Labels on the fly every time you post a Blog. For example, my categories might be website consulting (which would include general blog posts), seo consulting, ppc consulting, etc which would include those relevant types of Blog posts. Rotunda’s Blog about scheduling software does this well.

Contact Us - If unique, high quality, optimized Blog copy is being produced and search engines start to rank it highly on certain keyword phrases like “website consulting”, the Blog should start receiving direct traffic from Search Engines. Hence, a Contact Form should be added directly to the page (in the left or right side bar) instead of just having a “Contact Us” link at the top of the page. Make it easy for potential customers to contact you!


Social – The Blog has the ability to share the content to sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc which is great but it is not receiving many comments directly on the posts. Search Engines like Google have confirmed they have started to use social media signals like comments to rank webpages.
See any other Blog SEO best practices that aren’t being used on this Blog? Drop our web consultants a comment on the Blog below. Thank you!

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Wednesday, July 27, 2011

PPC Adwords Optimization with EXACT Phrase Match

As Pay-Per-Click (PPC) web consultants, we often discover clients aren't aware of the significant amount of money they are spending on non-relevant or poorly converting keywords.

Google makes a majority of their income through PPC ads and although they try to provide incentives to advertisers to optimize their PPC campaigns (with good ads, landing pages and keywords being bid on) they adequately fail to provide enough insight into how a small business can lower their monthly budget.

Although, it is important to use the "broad match" types with wide range of keywords at first (in order to "discover" keyword phrases your consumers are using) you will eventually want to evaluate what keywords have a high click-through-rate (CTR) and/or conversation rate.

When using the "broad match" type with a small monthly budget you will most likely hit your daily or monthly spend limits and Google will start suggesting ways to increase your budget but most instances this is the opposite of what you want to do (unless you are using an advanced technique like Google's Conversion Optimizer and are seeing a positive ROI).

After you have a good idea on what are some of your best keyword phrases are (based on conversions, click through, relevancy to the products/services on your landing page) setup a new campaign with extremely focused ad groups set to EXACT match type only. Extremely focused ad groups should met the following criteria:

1. Keyword Phrases - All keyword phrases being bid on should be very similar to each other. For example, the ad group should contain keywords like "men's blue sneakers", "male blue sneakers" "adult male blue sneakers", etc.
2. Ad copy should contain the keyword phrase in the title. Include a keyword variation a second time (in the URL or 3rd line of the ad copy if possible).
3. Landing page – should prominently contain the keyword phrase (eg. in the headline) and variations of the keyword phrase should be used throughout the copy of the page. In addition, put an image of the keyword phrase on the landing page – a men's blue sneaker in our example.

Most importantly setup all your ad groups to EXACT phrase match. This will force Google to only display your ads when consumers search for the exact phrases that you put into your ad group thus lowering your total campaign spend (since Google won’t show your ads on semi-related keyword phrases). In addition, your click-through-rate (CTR) will increase significantly.

A benchmark CTR of between 1-5% percent is considered good in the industry but using the EXACT match bid method described above you will most likely see your CTR’s above 10% and as high as 20%! Best of all, you will be spending less money on the PPC campaign while increasing your CTR’s and most likely your conversion rates at the same time.

Have you tried the tactic above? Did it work for you? Feel free to leave your comments below or contact RWeb Consulting to have one of our PPC web consultants look over your PPC campaign.


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Monday, July 18, 2011

Internal Linking your Blog - Website Best Practices

Website blogs can be used to generate traffic to your site by having individual blogs rank directly in the search engine results pages and/or by increasing the rankings of your main website.

Many blogs have great, unique, keyword rich content but search engines are still not ranking the webpages high for those keywords. This blog is meant to provide you some tips on how to internally link your Blog to your other website pages so search engine "spiders" rank your Blog and website higher for the keyword phrases you are targeting.

Let's assume you have done your keyword research and identified high volume keywords with relative low competition which you want to rank on. If you haven’t done this yet then please subscribe to this Blog since we will discuss "keyword research" in our next blog posting. Note: RWeb Consulting does not receive your email address nor is it used for any other purpose than to delivery monthly Blog updates).

First, all Blog titles should contain a keyword phrase. You'll notice on Rotunda Software the Blog titles contain keywords like "ministry scheduling software", "ministry software" and "volunteer software".

Second, internally link the keyword to the appropriate page on your website within the first paragraph. This will confirm to search engines spiders that the page is highly relevant for that keyword phrase.

Third, use "long tail" keyword phrases related to the primary blog post keyword to link to relevant pages on your website. This will continue to send signals to the search engines that both the blog post and webpage that is being linked to is highly relevant to the keyword phrase.

Lastly, use the title tag in the hyperlink of the keyword. It's not necessarily to use the same primary keyword phrase in each hyperlink's title tag but at least use secondary keyword phrases that you might not be able to naturally incorporate into the copy of the blog.

Additionally, don't forget to use the keyword phrase in the title tag of the webpage you are linking to. For example, in the "Why Invest in Ministry Software" Blog the keyword phrase "ministry software" appears in the title of the blog and several times in the blog copy with the "ministry software" title tag.

Wherever relevant (in this example the first 2 links in the Blog), the primary keyword should link to another page on the website that is optimized the keyword phrase "ministry software".

For additional information on website consulting services contact us or if you have any of your own internal linking blog strategies let us know in the comments below.



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