Blue Wave Concept's Blog

Scott Gerber is the founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council, a nonprofit organization that promotes youth entrepreneurship as a solution to unemployment and underemployment. The YEC provides young entrepreneurs with access to tools, mentorship, and resources that support each stage of a business’s development and growth.

It goes without saying that entrepreneurs know the importance of search engine optimization, and how to boost their Google search rankings. Right? Or is SEO a foreign language that you haven’t quite mastered?

Google rank is critical to a business’s success in this digital age. Savvy entrepreneurs know that search engine optimization is a necessary part of the marketing toolkit — and it doesn’t have to be difficult.

Instead of letting your Google rank get you down, apply these tips and techniques from a group of successful, young entrepreneurs in order to boost your company’s SEO results.

1. Create Evergreen Content
You’ll want your content to take the top slots for your name and various keywords and phrases, so you’ll want to have high-quality, authoritative content. The best way to make sure your content is seen this way to is create content that is forever useful, not trendy and disposable. Create content that people will be reading 10 years from now, and you’ll be getting linkbacks for a decade.

2. Audit Your Online Profiles
Take a few minutes to login to each of your company’s online profiles. Is the biography up to date? More importantly, is your website’s URL listed somewhere? The incoming links from these profiles may not weigh too much in Google’s mysterious algorithm, but you’ll be surprised what it can do if you have more than a handful of accounts online.

3. Think Like Your Customer Types
Think about what your ideal clients and customers might be typing into Google, and then find out if your hunch is right by looking keywords up in Google’s free Keyword Tool. Keep in mind that 25% of keywords have never been typed in before, but you’ll want to aim for popular keywords with low competition if you can. Then write content around these keywords and learn to optimize.

4. Hire an Expert
I suggest hiring a search engine optimization company or freelance specialist to develop an effective strategy to improve your rankings. The Google Panda updates has made the SEO space even more challenging to produce results, so I suggest outsourcing this task to the professionals. Look for individuals or companies with proven track records, and monitor their bi-weekly reports closely.

5. Guest Post
Start guest posting on tons of relevant blogs. Blogs love fresh content, and for you it’s a great way to build links, which will boost your rankings on Google.

6. Content is King and Links are Queen
Yes, creating good content is very important to make your business rank higher in Google. But links are even more important. Google loves links, especially those from other relevant, authority websites. Join any and all industry associations, guest blog with a link back to your website, and submit your site to any relevant directories to grow your backlink profile and your searches.

7. Bust Out the Camera
Video is such a huge thing now for business owners. Not only does it give your company personality, but it can also be spread across networks while linking back to your site. Create great videos filled with information people can share and then repeat. Now videos can be distributed across multiple platforms from one single platform, causing Google to love you.

8. Colleges and Universities
The biggest SEO secret is that when .edu sites link to your website it gives you a higher Google ranking. Contact college and universities and find a reason for them to link to your site by running a special internship opportunity, for example.

9. Update Your Site Frequently
The more often you update your site, the more important Google thinks it is. If you can publish content to your blog every day, Google will start to recognize you as a great source of information for whatever your keywords are. With every blog post, you have another chance at ranking for new search terms, so each article increases the odds of your site being found.

10. Use the Right Keywords
Two effective ways of increasing your SEO rank are tagging articles and keyword analysis. You want to make sure your headlines are descriptive. You should also choose keywords that people are going to look for — so imagine yourself as a searcher.

11. Move Away From Flash
Many small businesses, especially restaurants and bars, use Flash for their sites because it’s easy to launch, looks good and is fairly cheap. While the sites might look decent, they rank really poorly in Google (without doing some tricks). Change your Flash-based site to WordPress or another platform, and you’ll rocket up the search engine rankings.

12. Have You Taken Advantage of Local Search?
Are you a local business? Have you claimed your listing on Google, Yahoo! and Bing? If not, stop reading this article now and go claim your business listings immediately! I’ve seen a huge jump in traffic for businesses by simply claiming and filling out all the fields on these local profiles. The future of search is personalized local results, and these valuable profiles are often overlooked.

13. Know Exactly What Words People Use to Search
The biggest mistake people make in trying to rank high in Google is having no clue what people are actually typing into search engines to find you. An easy way to find this out is to go to the Google homepage and slowly start typing in your phrases. You’ll notice Google suggested searches come up. Use those exact phrases in your titles. That’s what people want, so give it to them.

7 Reasons to Use Google+

A bulk of the small businesses we spoke with said they feel Google+ is an important social platform because it was developed by Google, one of the Internet’s favorite brands and one of the most influential websites when it comes to site referrals. But small business owners gave a plethora of reasons for being early adopters of the platform. Here are some of the top reasons we heard for using Google+.

1. Get an SEO Boost: Bob Shirilla, director of marketing at Simply Bags, says that his business joined Google+ because he relies on Google search referrals for sales conversions. “Google+ influences search for all the people who have included my business in their circle,” he says. “We have also put a +1 button on each product page. This is a great way to get free promotion from people who like the product to people with similar interests.”

2. Host a Hangout: “Hangouts offer an amazing opportunity for businesses to engage in a highly personal way with clients, customers and industry thought leaders,” says Roger Friedensen, president and CEO of Forge Communications. “Plus, employees in remote locations can hold team meetings to brainstorm with one another from an interface that affords them immediate and easy access to share and collaborate on most of the information materials they might need, such as documents and spreadsheets.”

3. Expand Content Distribution: Phyllis Khare, the social media editorial director of iPhone Life magazine, says that Google+ is a great platform for expanding the publication’s content distribution. “It took us almost a year to get 1,000 Likes on our Facebook Page, and three days on G+ to get that number to Circle us,” she says. “We are gearing up for Hangouts with some of our writers in 2012 to answer iOS questions and a few other fun things with contests and giveaways.”

4. Connect with Early Adopters: If your business falls in the Internet or technology industries, Google+ could be a great place to connect a tech-savvy audience. “The people that are on Google+ already are most likely going to be early adopters of other technologies and marketing channels,” says Jason Pinto, CMO at interlinkONE. “When we look at what defines an ‘ideal customer’ for our products, that criteria is certainly high on our list.”

5. Segment Your Audience: “The obvious benefit of Google+ is that it allows us to share select content with specific audiences,” says Chad Udell, managing director of Float Mobile Learning. Google+ makes it easy for businesses to segment their audiences and share content directly with those certain groups of followers.

6. Use Google+ to Network: David Greenberg, president of Parliament Tutors, says that his business does not have a Google+ page, but that he uses his personal Google+ page to network and gather contact data and research the “personal side” of relevant contacts, such as journalists and potential clients, so that he can better create a connection with them. He adds that the “About” section of a contact’s Google+ profile is usually a great start.

7. Just Explore: Netronic Managing Director Martin Karlowitsch says, “We currently use Google+ for exploratory purposes. It is still a niche platform, but quickly growing and with a platform giant behind it. Knowing the impact that Google has on the way people find relevant information on the web, Google+ soon can become significant by combining social and search. I want to start early using this platform to be prepared when this inflection point arises.”

Old school SEO pros cover your ears, or be prepared to adapt your craft: Search engines are changing, and social media is a huge part of that change.

Bing, Google, and an increasing swath of nimble little search engines like Blekko and DuckDuckGo are incorporating social data into their results. This is potentially great news for new businesses trying to achieve visibility in search. It’s less great news for sites that rely heavily on link buying (illegal, but hard to catch), producing huge volumes of borderline-useless content (long-tail, content farm approach), or just really old domains (previously an SEO trump card).

Both Bing and Google admitted in interviews that their search results are positively affected by social signals, such as tweets, Facebook Likes, and +1s.

“As ideas, thoughts, questions and answers are shared more freely and easily than ever, the increased amount of information from social sources provides great benefits to users,” says a Microsoft spokesperson for Bing (who asked to remain anonymous).

“The links that you build through social media, the references, the authority — all can have an impact in various ways on how you are ranked and listed even in ‘regular’ search results,” says Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, in an email interview. “Social media allows for people to provide more trusted signals.”

Search Engines Adapt to Survive

Since the early Internet days of Excite and Webcrawler, the principal goal of search engines has been to help people find what they’re looking for. Google rose to dominate the industry by tracking better indicators of content quality than anyone else. It developed a complex algorithm that measured which websites were “voting” for others by linking to them.

Essentially, it was social media, but for websites rather than people. If your site had lots of links from relevant sites, your Google rank climbed. Plenty of other factors, like putting keywords into headlines and titles, remained in play (and continually evolved), but the game changer of the last decade was links.

The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry emerged to help webmasters play the “me rank higher” game with Google. On the one hand, website owners attempt to adhere to Google’s standards and prove they are high quality (creating relevant, high quality content and formatting it to Google’s taste). On the other hand, shadier sites try to trick Google’s secret formula, “pretending” to be good content without having to bother with creating useful stuff.

The spammers have done well for themselves. Over the last few years, searchers have increasingly complained about the number of irrelevant or spammy results returned in searches.

The battle to the top of search keeps search engines on their toes. Every so often Google, makes an abrupt change in its algorithm, like the “Panda Update” of early 2011 that wiped out a significant number of content farm results. Periodically, new search engines launch to try to outdo Google. Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, has climbed to 30% market share since its launch in 2009. Blekko, an “anti-spam” search engine, has climbed to a million searches a day since its launch in 2007.

And now, social media is factoring in to make results even better.

Social Media Changes The Game

Social networks produce an immense amount of data about what real people like enough to share with their friends.

Today, people share 30 billion pieces of content on Facebook and over 5 billion tweets — about a quarter of which contain links to content — per month.

In an industry where knowing what humans like is crucial to success, search engines have figured out — and taken to heart — a delightfully simple mantra: If people share your content, it’s probably pretty good.

In a white paper called New Signals To Search Engines, Search Engine Strategies Advisory Board chair Mike Grehan says, “End users who previously couldn’t vote for content via links from web pages are now able to vote for content with their clicks, bookmarks, tags and ratings. These are very strong signals to search engines, and best of all, they don’t rely on the elitism of one website owner linking to another or the often mediocre crawl of a dumb bot.”

We’re already seeing proof of search engines taking social data into account when serving results.

Social Data Is Personalizing Results

Last year, Bing started incorporating Facebook like data into its search results. Results for pages that a searcher’s own friends had liked show up more prominently.

And more recently, Bing announced better results through Facebook data and “collective IQ,” meaning that things popular throughout Facebook (not just among your friends) rank more prominently.

“Search is better when it’s not just based in math and algorithms, but also infused with the opinions of people,” writes the Bing team in a blog post.

Google answered back to the Bing-Facebook deal with its own +1 button, and subsequently Google+. When searching as a logged-in Google user, you now see this social data personalizing your results.

Sullivan recounts how automaker Ford rose in his Google results after he added Ford to his Google+ account. “Ford gets into the top results for cars not because of links, not because of the content on its page, but because I was ‘friends’ with it,” Sullivan says.

Shared Content Now Ranks Higher in Organic Search

Both Google and Bing have added real-time results to their searches, meaning Twitter (and now Google+) results show up prominently above other content.

In addition, several experiments have shown that sharing stories on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ can dramatically affect regular search results as well.

In July this year, Rand Fishkin of search engine authority SEOmoz.org performed a series of experiments to see if 1) social shares affected Google search results, and 2) how quickly those results appeared. (Find the full details on the experiment here.)

Spoiler Alert: In every test Fishkin performed, tweets and Google+ shares dramatically affected the rank of new, previously unindexed content. The results in most cases were nearly instant.

“We’re experimenting with clicks on +1 buttons as just one of the hundreds of signals that influences the ranking and appearance of websites in search results,” says a Google spokesperson (who wished to remain anonymous), via email. “As with any new ranking signal, for +1’s and other social ranking signals, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals are related to quality.”

A Microsoft spokesperson (who also requested anonymity), says via email that tweets and Facebook Likes do indeed positively affect a URL’s ranking in search results on Bing. “To be candid,” she says, “we are experimenting with placements in order to strike a balance between this new social signal and the other signals we have honed to determine relevance.”

“Social signals that say quality are pretty straight forward,” says the Microsoft spokesperson. “Look to things such as likes, re-tweets, shares, etc. Beyond that, watch for the sentiment surrounding the action. Are people sharing your content via Twitter yet flagging it with #fail? If so, it’s a clue they’re displeased.”

When we go to a search engine, we want to find what we’re looking for, immediately and hassle-free. It’s clear that social media is helping search engines deliver more immediacy and more relevant results. In the long run, this will help SEO-directed businesses focus on what they should be doing: creating content people love.

Websites should lead to conversions, but what can enhance your Lead generation, Website ROI website’s ability to have potential customers voluntarily give you their contact information. We’d all love to think that our product or service is incredible and that potential customers are clamoring to have us contact them. The reality is somewhat different.

Let’s say you did everything right with your search engine optimization. With the SEO done, your keywords and links have placed you number one on Google and Bing and Yahoo, and you are now getting a ton of traffic to your website. What’s wrong with this picture? That’s what you wanted, right?

Without ‘conversions’ the traffic to your site is simply that. Traffic. It’s great to get some of these visitors to ‘convert’ – that is, to share their information so that you can open the dialogue and potentially have them as a client.

SO, why aren’t they sharing their contact information. There are some things that you may be doing wrong, that could discourage conversions. Many web developers simply don’t realize that you could be getting more results, and they ‘follow your direction’ without adding their insights. Try taking a look at your website with fresh eyes, and see whether your website may be ‘guilty’ of some of these common issues:

1. No call to action. Without asking for the contact information, its much less likely that you will receive the contact info. Try adding a ‘call-to-action’ to your website. This can be a button or form that offers something in return for contact information.

2. Ask for too much information. Most people do not want to offer their life history to a website, and in fact, would rather skip filling in the form if you ask for too much information. If your form is complicated or you ask for too much information, you have effectively created a barrier and a disincentive for filling in your form.

3. No reason. If you have a form that doesn’t share a reason for people to fill it in, it’s useless. What’s the motivation? Why should someone give you their information? What are you offering?

4. Reason not compelling. Perhaps you’ve done everything right and now you have a reason for people to give you their contact information. However, the reason is just not interesting to your target audience. This will cause your call-to-action to fail, and have low or no conversions. Test your call-to-action by creating two versions and change just one variable. This will help you create more effective reasons for conversions.

5. You’ve buried the form. If your form is at the bottom of the website evaluation free, evaluate website page, or ‘below the fold’, you’ve essentially hidden the form. Also, if the form tastefully blends in with the rest of the page, your visitors may fail to notice it. Make the form bold, make it a different color, and put it above the fold. This way, it will stand out from the rest of the page and increase the likelihood of being noticed.

A website can be an incredible tool to customers finding you, and then enabling you to reach out to them. Starting with an optimized site, then building in the features that encourage interaction are important for creating a site that will ultimately help your business instead of being an economic drain.

(taken from Matt Winn, Online Communications Specialist)

SEO needs to die. Like, now. While at a party, I had three different people ask me about SEO. Not only did the questions kill my buzz, they made me angry.
This is what I endured while I watched the ice melt in my margarita:

“Can you help me be found on Google?”
“What do I do for Google to find my stuff?”
“How do I get ‘Googleized’?”

After hearing ‘Googleized,’ I lost it and screamed, “YOU’RE NOT WRITING FOR GOOGLE!”

Here’s what I mean:

1. The goal of SEO isn’t to be found. It’s to be consumed.

Here’s a news flash: search engines can’t buy from you. They can’t read, nor do they consume products (just your souls).

Remember, a search engine’s job is to provide links that answer a person’s question. Your job as a website owner is to provide content that answers these questions.

Even if ranked highly for a certain keyword, if people come to your page and bounce, you’ve accomplished nothing. Instead, you want readers to stay on your page and consume your information. If people consume your content, your pages will naturally become better ranked. Readers will then trust your brand, trust your product, and hopefully buy something from you.

Take that, SEO.

2. Algorithms change. People’s need for valuable information doesn’t.

Another reason SEO needs to die is because it intentionally ruins our lives.

Every time Google and other search engines change their algorithm, the marketing industry goes into a frenzy. And while we scramble to adjust, search engines laugh at us from their big offices.

In other words, we’ll never, ever know exactly how to get ‘Googleized.’

The good news is, regardless of algorithms, you’ll perform well in search engines by fulfilling customers’ need for helpful information. Start by asking what your readers want. You can also look at other popular blogs and forums to find common questions. Try various forms of content, like videos and webinars.

Whatever the case, stop fearing algorithms and start writing for your audience.

3. Good links are better than good keywords.

SEO also needs to die because it believes it has more power than the people.

While there are lots of things everyone should know about SEO (check out my introductory series on SEO), one important detail is that good links are more important than stuffing keywords in your content. Yes, keywords are helpful, but receiving links to your content is critical.

But guess what? Search engines don’t send links to your site – people do.

By creating good content, you’re going to get a lot more links than just placing a keyword in your title. Good content is inherently shared, whether it’s through social media or direct links. In other words, people have the power to make your pages rank better, not these dastardly search engines.
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Final Thoughts

Do the basic tenets of healthy SEO need to die too? No – you’ll always need to know the fundamentals to succeed. What really needs to shift, however, is the obsession of optimizing for search engines. Instead, let’s focus on optimizing for people.

Watch out, SEO. No one ruins a good margarita and gets away with it.

Search Engine Optimization is a process where a website is designed and positioned to achieve higher rank for selected key words or keyword phrases when a query is made using one of the search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo. There are essentially two components that can be addressed to optimize a website -

1. What you can do on the page and
2. What you can do off the page

This article addresses the second part of SEO, and specifically link building, and the top 5 link building mistakes that can really hurt your website.

Yes, you read that correctly “hurt”.

In the algorithm that evaluates where your website will place when a query is done on Google or Bing or Yahoo, one of the factors is the credibility of your site. Just as in real life, where you are judged by the company that you keep, so it also goes with regard to the links you obtain. If you hang out with low-lifes (and sometimes you find this out too late) then you can expect that others will perceive you that way.

Try to find sites that have authority and credibility and that you are proud to have links with.

With that said, here are 5 ways your link building will hurt your website:

1. Pay for back links. Sometimes in the rush to get a website optimized and showing in search engines quickly, short cuts to organic optimization are made. Buying links or link building services is risky business. Ultimately this tactic can back fire and harm your site because the authority of a preponderance of the links are low. This is the ‘company’ that you are keeping and therefore your site will be held back to the level of these other low-ranking sites.

2. Use bad anchor text. Obviously, if the anchor text is ‘click here’ this provides little help for the search engines to understand what the link is about. Much better to use descriptive text to identify what the linked page is about.

3. Use an image for the link. Search engines don’t ‘see’ pictures, they can only ‘read’ text. If your link is a picture and you haven’t used ‘alt text’ that’s doubly poor optimization.

4. Get irrelevant back links. Obviously back links will help your site, however in the long run, the irrelevant back links will drain your ‘juice’ and pull your site down. It’s along the lines of the company that you are keeping. Irrelevant links may boost your site when your site is new and you have no rank at all, but, if you want to be a serious site and have true authority, slow and sure win over fast every time. (Yes, that’s the turtle and the hare).

5. Get link spam. I’ve been receiving a bunch of comments recently on my blog that are obviously spam. Anything from sneakers to diet aids and more – and yet the comments are glowing about the neat blog I’ve written. The greatest comments are for a blog that doesn’t have any posts yet, which really cracksFree SEO evaluation me up. Don’t fall for this nonsense.

Bottom line, the power and authority of your website are going to be best when you do things the right way. Follow Google best practices, Bing best practices, or Yahoo best practices in order to be sure that you won’t be penalized down the road.

It’s much easier to optimize your website correctly the first time than to attempt to correct penalties caused by black hat practices. Beware of anyone who is associated with Black Hat.

click here to the article.

Google AdWords (those sponsored links that appear alongside search results and web content) can be one of the most cost-effective ways to advertise on the web. Your ads are highly targeted based on keywords, and you don’t pay for anything unless they are clicked.

But often, small businesses set up a campaign and load it with relevant phrases, only to see little traction. Or worse, they get clicks (which cost money) but aren’t converting them into sales.

If you’re struggling to hit pay dirt with Google ads, or you’re interested in signing up but not sure where to start, take some cues from these small business success stories.

Where to Begin:

Before you get started, “know that AdWords is a real commitment, and is likely to be a time drain,” says Chris Conn, founder of MightyNest.com, purveyors of organic and naturally made home wares and accessories. His company uses AdWords to drive potential customers to the online store. “It will take from other activities, so make sure that fits with your priorities.”

In that regard, start small, says Timothy Thomas, a small business consultant who cultivates successful AdWords campaigns for his clients.

“Focus on one campaign, lock your budget and use the tools provided by AdWords to learn how Google does its magic,” Thomas adds. He recommends that companies continue their standard SEO efforts in order to rank high in organic search for free (more on this in a bit), and then optimize an AdWords campaign accordingly. “Don’t buy ads in areas where you are getting a top-five link already. Think about terms that are unique to your offering and try to make the most of those keywords by standing alone in paid search.”

If you’re trying to get the maximum value out of a small AdWords budget, don’t worry about appearing at the top of every search. “Keep your bids as low as you can and edge them up — you do not need to be the number one paid search term, however being in the top three is valuable,” says Thomas. “Being number one in the wrong search will only cost you money.”

When you settle into an AdWords campaign that works for your budget and time, think about using the platform to glean a bit more insight into what your potential customers want.

Conn uses AdWords as a real-time testing and intelligence tool. “If we want to know what messaging works, we launch a quick AdWords campaign to see how customers respond.” Making fine adjustments based on small messaging changes can really hone your ads and give you the most bang for your pay-per-click buck.

AdWords and SEO Go Hand-in-Hand

A theme that held true for all the small businesses we spoke with was the importance of traditional SEO as it relates to AdWords campaigns.

“We find that paid search lifts other traffic channels,” says Conn. “When we increase our paid search, our direct traffic and organic traffic also rise.”

And the tides flow in both directions. Jordan Schaffel, co-founder of Say It Visually, a company that produces animated instructional and demo videos, explained that their existing SEO efforts were crucial to the success of their AdWords campaign.

“When we re-did our site recently, we had AdWords in mind, so we did our homework prior to re-launching,” Schaffel says. “Without the foundational efforts, we would’ve struck out, or at the very least, been behind the eight ball on getting clicks through our AdWords campaigns.”

Schaffels’ strategy included titling and tagging all of their videos to tie in closely with the AdWords campaigns. “If you fail to do one or more of the pieces of the SEO puzzle, you’re hurting yourself exponentially.”

One of those puzzle pieces is knowing when not to pay for search terms that you already own for free. “If Google can match your ad to a search, they are happy to sell a click whether it’s a good one or not. The only valid strategy is to narrow Google’s ability to present your ad,” explains Thomas. Make sure your AdWords keywords are embedded in the HTML of your website, and if you’re already dominating a search term organically, don’t buy it from Google. “You only want to pay for eyeballs that you can’t get in front of organically.”

Optimization

Even if you have a good AdWords campaign that’s producing quality leads, there’s always room for improvement. In some cases, it can be a complicated matter. Thomas says he worked with an engineering company that specializes in LED lighting and testing. Its customers are technically trained engineers, but its ads were being surfaced by consumers looking for Christmas lights, Xbox controllers and LED TVs. In short, the company was spending money on lots of useless impressions and clicks.

“The solution was eliminating ‘broad matching’ criteria,” says Thomas. “We put our keywords into either Phrase Match or Exact Match. Each day we would look at what the company had paid for on the previous day and just started [adding] negative keywords. Words like ‘Christmas,’ ‘automobile,’ ‘rope light,’ ‘Playstation,’ and all the variants for ‘television’ were identified and blocked from matching.”

Thomas adds that “the daily review and elimination of inappropriate search matches is the secret sauce of mastering AdWords. You have to tune AdWords for about 15 minutes every day or it can eat you alive, financially.”

Closing the Deal

Like any good lead-generation tool, it’s how you turn an interested click into a repeat customer that really counts.

“It is important that you build a relationship with the customers you find through AdWords and that a meaningful amount of those relationships are sustainable in the long run,” says Conn. “If not, AdWords can turn into a treadmill.”

In the case of Thomas’ engineering client, most of the potential customers know what they’re looking for by the time they reach the company’s website. Once they’ve clicked through, “we encourage them to approach us by phone so we can really help them find the service or product they need.”

Schaffel’s company takes it a step further by monitoring real-time analytics. “We use Woopra to track people coming to our site from AdWords (and other links), and we see patterns emerge when people are truly interested in creating explanation videos.” Paying attention to traffic patterns like this can help you fine-tune your campaigns and figure out what customers are expecting when they arrive. A sale may hinge on the context of the ad that sent them there, or the appeal of the site itself.

Do you have your own tips for new AdWords users? Share them in the comments.

Selecting keywords is a sophisticated search process. Not only do you want to to select appropriate keywords to draw traffic, the goal is to find keywords that will bring the right kind of traffic to the website.

The key is to evaluate words on the basis of relevance, traffic, competition and commercial appeal.

Optimizing for “number one on Google” is all the rage. What most SEO’s won’t tell you is that 90% of all keywords have insignificant traffic.

That’s a bold statement, but it’s true.

When you are in the midst of creating an optimization plan for your website it’s important to understand the difference between being number one on Google and being in the number two slot in the search.

It’s a big difference.

The latest stats I’ve seen indicate that the difference between number one on Google and number is that #1 gets 42% of the clicks, #2 gets only 12%. The stats go down from there. Number three is roughly 8%, number 4 is 6%, #5 is 5%, 6 is 4% and 7 is 3%.

Obviously it pays to be number one on Google.

But the question begs to be asked… Number one on Google for What?

The keywords you select may be easy to optimize for, with little competition. But even if you win the battle to be number one, no one is searching for those keywords, so what really have you won?

A true analysis of keywords takes into account the competitive landscape for that word – what is the number and level of competitors, as well as the strength of those competitors.

Pick your battles wisely.

Consider also the commercial value of the keyword or keyword phrase. How profitable optimizing for that word winds up to be is dependent upon it’s commercial value.

One way to determine the ‘commercial’ value of a keyword or keyword phrase is to evaluate it using Google’s adwords tool.

Selecting relevant keywords that offer traffic, low competition and which also have commercial appeal is part of crafting an effective website. Remember not only will you need a main theme keyword, you will also require category keywords to bolster your website’s inbound marketing magnetism throughout the phases of the sales funnel.

Remember that is anyone promises to get you to “number one” in Google, you should be suspicious. If the keyword or keyword phrase is worth optimizing for, it’s not going to be something that will happen overnight. Anyone offering “black hat” techniques, should be avoided. If you aren’t sure what that may mean, read about the recent experiences with JC Penney and Overstock. Recuperating after being blacklisted or penalized is a difficult road, so always try to err on the side of using Google Best Practices for organic optimization.

One of the great things about being a Hubspot Certified Partner is that HuDo Hubspot For mebspot does offer great tools to evaluate how the website is performing. Many of our clients are on the Hubspot platform, which helps them to work on their site, and also to monitor the site’s performance.

How do you select keywords for your website? Do you have a method or software tool that seems to work for you? What word density do you aim for, and do you include semantic search terms?

Local search queries— those including a specific geographic location — are becoming immensely important in website marketing.

Not only are local listings gaining valuable real estate on the search results pages, locally focused websites are appearing with more frequency for nonspecific search phrases as well, thanks in part to Google Instant and the real-time nature of today’s Web. So what can you do to leverage this growth?

Hopefully you have already 1) claimed your business listing and/or submitted your website to online services like Google Places and Yelp.com, among the many others (listed here — http://wsm.co/9EgJ6p), 2) promoted your website and brand on social destinations like Facebook and Twitter, and 3) become involved with location-aware applications like Foursquare and Gowalla.

All of these channels present excellent ways of getting local search traffic to your website. But often overlooked are the factors that influence how profile pages from these Web services are returned to users. Actively optimizing local search profiles improves search engine rankings and the chances that your website will appear in the first few positions on local query results.

About Profile Optimization
While not technically a page on your website, claiming and validating local listings on Google, Bing and Yahoo! can drive high-quality, targeted traffic and help your site rank higher within local search results. While unclaimed local listings can sometimes outrank claimed local listings, it is still vital to claim your profiles as it gives you complete control of what is displayed to users and prevents someone else from claiming your listings (and reputation).

Here are the major ranking factors to consider when building your local search engine pages:

Location (Address): Does your business address need to be in the actual city of the search query to rank? For the most part, yes, particularly if you are located in a large city. There are some exceptions for smaller towns — if there are not enough matches then the search engine may take results from neighboring towns. But your business’ physical location is a major ranking factor when it comes to local search. Make sure to include as much information as possible, including longitudinal and latitudinal data.

Business Category: Make sure your business is categorized correctly — if secondary category choices are available, select a few over time to see which ones positively influence your position and traffic.

Business Name: Consider your business name the

Citations: Citations are when your business is mentioned (but not necessarily linked to) elsewhere on the Web. Citations are like links, in that the more you have the better. Citations build trust with the search engines and give you a boost when it comes to ranking, especially with Google Maps. You can see your citations on your Google Places page under “What people are saying about”. Check out the competition and make sure you make an attempt to get citations from the same or related sources.

Reviews and Ratings: Not only will good reviews and ratings have a positive effect on your local listing ranking, it will also help the click-through rate of your listing. Encourage existing clientele to submit reviews and ratings and reward them when they do.

Complete Profiles: Take time to fill out your local business profile pages completely. Add business hours, payment options and craft a well-written description of your business. Even add pictures and videos if you have them. Also, be sure that the information on your local listing pages is consistent across all directories.

Remember to claim and submit your website to the primary local providers (http://wsm.co/9EgJ6p) and test different profile information combinations to see what influences return list position and website traffic. While often tedious to complete and validate (and for some, to create unique landing pages for each business location), these efforts will more than pay for themselves in the form of quality local traffic.