SEO
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10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing
Archived Posts from this Category
Posted by John Jones on 06 Apr 2008 | Tagged as: SEO, Q & A
On March 21st Aaron Wall of SEOBook posted a blog titled, “May I Write a Post for Your Blog?“. I decided to take him up on this offer and promptly commented on the post with the topic I’d like to see him cover. A day or two later I received an e-mail from Aaron asking me for a few more details on the topic at hand and before I knew it I had a Q & A style interview with Aaron Wall. The following are Aaron’s answers to my questions.
Q: Many people have their own definition of long tail keywords. Some people believe this to be really long search quarries such as, “San Diego luxury waterfront real estate” while others might base their definition off of estimated search volume and still others have completely different opinions. What would you consider to be long tail keywords?
A: I typically consider long tail keywords to be the ones that do not show up on the keyword tools, or those that only get a few searches a month. It is entirely dependant on category as well. In some celebrity categories some of the longtail keywords may still get hundreds of searches a month. For a niche local real estate site maybe a few searches a month is longtail.
Q: I’ve read somewhere a long while ago that before you came into the picture that the term, “SEO Book” wasn’t a keyword that was searched all that much. Would you have back then considered “SEO Book” to have been a long tail search term or how would you have classified it years ago? How do you classify the term today?
A: Since it had almost no search volume at all it could certainly be considered a longtail keyword at the time. After I branded it the term became a strong keyword with significant search volume. The growth of the industry while I was marketing my brand aggressively helped as well. Other industry keywords that were not even on the map, like SEO training, have appeared as powerful keywords as well.
I think part of doing well with search is identifying growing trends and getting in early such that you can ride out the growth. If you track the conversations closely and are actively involved in the community you get to see the trends before most competitors do. That is how I picked up blackhatseo.com and whitehatseo.com for $8 each. I am sorta wasting them, but if a good idea strikes I can use them more aggressively for marketing.
Q: A couple of weeks ago I was speaking to one of my clients who questioned the value of more specific search terms which are highly competitive and harder to rank well for. To be more specific the articular terms we chewed over were, “Austin real estate” and “Austin Realtor“.
We both readily agreed that Austin real estate is the most searched keyword but what we couldn’t decide on right away is which of the two would be a better keyword to rank for. Our argument is that if someone was searching for real estate that they may not be ready for a Realtor. However if they were searching for a Realtor then they may already have a property in mind and are ready to speak to a Realtor. So my question to you is which is better to have good rankings for; a highly searched broad keyword that is harder to rank for or several dozen or hundreds of long tail search terms that are easier to rank well for right away?
A: I think ranking for a wide array of low volume keywords is a lower risk strategy. But in the above example, as you noted, both terms are related to different points in the sales cycle. The later term (realtor) should convert better, but you want exposure for the early term as well, as many people likely end up trusting and sticking with whoever they found earlier in the sales cycle.
If you are trying to compare the relative volume and values of a wide array of keywords you can use a keyword tool and a keyword list generator to create a list of keywords and bid on them via PPC. Use analytics to track which ones work best for your business.
Q: Do you currently or have you spent a considerable amount of time reviewing analytics data to find keywords that you may not have thought of in the past in order to guide your decisions on what you end up writing your own blog posts? Would you consider the majority of those gathered terms long tail?
A: Yes. I find common keyword modifiers and keyword phrases in analytics data, and then use that data to refine my keyword strategy. Many of those keywords tend to be longtail keywords but sometimes there are high volume terms that you forget to target but accidentally rank for. If you rank well for something you did not intentionally target then you should be able to rank really well when you target it. And beyond creating new pages that target the keywords, sometimes I also sprinkle the keywords in throughout page copy of established pages. This strategy can really extend your traffic for high authority pages. My keyword tool has an FAQ section to offer usage tips AND to allow that page to rank for a much wider variety of keywords.
John Jones
- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing
Posted by John Jones on 30 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: SEO, Google, Website Usability, Link Building
Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, Susan Moskwa informed us in the Q & A section of last weeks phone conference that even if a page is blocked by Robots.txt that it still can have PageRank passed to it from pages that are linking to it unless you use nofollow within the link.
Let’s say that you don’t care rather or not your Policy & Procedures page is indexed by Google or not so you decide to add the page to your Robots.txt file. This will effectively tell search engines that abide by the rules set fourth within Robots.txt to not index that particular page.
Let’s say that you have a footer link to your Policy & Procedures page as well as a link to this page immediately below your order form or other forms found through out your website. If these links are not property created with the nofollow tag then you are going to be passing PageRank to your Policy & Procedures page that doesn’t even have the privilege of being indexed by Google.
This goes to show us that taking the time to make sure something is done right is going to be far better then having to go back and fix things later. If your website is leaking PageRank then that can affect how well certain pages of your site performs within Google SERPs.
John Jones
- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing
Posted by John Jones on 30 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: SEO, Google, Internet Marketing
What are they? How do you obtain them? How do you find them once you obtain them?
I’ve had many clients ask about them and I’ve seen other Internet marketers ask about them on forums, webmaster related chat rooms, blogs and even the most recent Google phone conference last week (March 28th 2008).
What Are Sitelinks?
So what exactly are Sitelinks? Well first off they allow people who might be searching for your website to pick and choose which page of your site that they might be looking for. At this time Google decides which of your internal pages are displayed… if any.
This is one example of what Sitelinks look like when they show up for someone searching.

News, Games, People and places and so on in the above image are considered Sitelinks. At this time you can have a maximum of eight Sitelinks. Keep in mind though that if within your Webmaster Tools your site is only displaying three or fewer Sitelinks then Google will not show Sitelinks for your website.
Speaking of Google Webmaster Tools, you can find what pages Google has identified for Sitelinks by going to Links and then to Sitelinks.

If Google has declared any Sitelinks for your website then you’ll see something that looks like this inside Google Webmaster Tools.

How Do You Obtain Them?
I’ve already mentioned that Google decides which of your internal pages are displayed. However the decision isn’t entirely out of our hands. Like anything else with search engine optimization, there are things that can be done to help Google along.
For example, if you want your contact page to show up then make sure you have one or more of the following on site optimization techniques covered (preferably more than one).
You’d obviously want to repeat the above steps for other pages that you want to stand out a little more than others do.
How Do You Find Them?
Google displays Sitelinks based on what the searcher has searched for. Google will return the most useful and relevant results. If Google thinks that some of your pages listed within Webmaster Tools are relevant then they will display.
Above I showed you an example of five Sitelinks that can possibly show up for my wife’s tutoring company in Southern California. However I have not yet conducted a search within Google that has caused the Sitelinks for that site to show up. Others on the other hand may have done so and seen completely different results than I have due to the types of searches i’ve performed and they have performed.
If you’d like to see a live version of Sitelinks simply search for MSN on Google and you’ll get some results.
Sitelinks Management
There are some pages within a website that just shouldn’t be displayed as a Sitelink yet alone indexed by a search engine. Removing a specific page from Googles index is a completely other post but you can choose to block a page from showing up in Sitelinks. Notice the third image above? Simply select Block next to the URL you don’t want displayed and Google will take it out for 90 days. Of course 90 days comes and goes pretty fast so you’ll want to make sure that you are purposefully MANAGING SITELINKS.
In Conclusion
Sitelinks have been around for some time now. They help increase your advertising space within Googles SERPs and help potential clients locate exactly which page of your website they are looking for if you take the time to help Google determine what should and shouldn’t be considered a Sitelink. You won’t always see them when conducting searches and just because Webmaster Tools shows that you have them doesn’t mean they will always display.
For more information on Sitelinks directly from the horses mouth, I’d consider this Google page titled, "How does Google compile the list of links shown below some search results?"
John Jones
- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing
Posted by John Jones on 28 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: SEO, Website Usability, Internet Marketing
Blogs have an uncanny advantage over most static websites on the web today. Here are just a few of those advantages:
However while all that might be impressive and certainly many reasons why you should have a blog; it may not be worth all it is made out to be. Consider the following scenario:
You write a post targeted to reach a particular audience. Let’s say that post is all about foreclosures in your area. You then spend your time promoting that post through different social media sites, forums, maybe a press release and other types of marketing venues.
Sure you’ll get targeted traffic for this and you might even pick up a customer or two and a few really good rankings in Google in a matter of days. While this all sounds good here is what happens next in this scenario:
The housing market is no longer in trouble and our economy is stabilizing out. The banks and lending companies are just about back to normal with foreclosures in your area and new homes are priced so well that this is the latest buzz.
You write a post targeted to reach people interested in new homes and since foreclosures typically indicate a formally inhabited home, you decide to stay clear away from mentioning foreclosures except maybe in a brief passing. You then spend your time promoting like you did before.
Now you’ll get a whole new group of targeted traffic. However you are still getting traffic from your foreclosure post and that particular targeted audience is now seeing a post on new homes. This creates for a potential increase in bounce rate and lost business.
Not only does a Blogger have to find a creative balance when making sure not to alienate one target audience or another but they also have to worry about maintaining rankings for older posts as well.
Every time a Blogger posts a new post on a different topic, closely related or not, they are giving search engines the idea that their topic of interest has changes which then begins a slow and steady rank decline for past targeted keywords you’ve spent time and money targeting.
How about tried and true static websites? Do they have advantages? Absolutely and I have a few advantages to point out about them as well. They are:
Clearly there are advantages and drawbacks to both methods. One shouldn’t replace the other though at this stage of the game.
Final Thought: While you are constantly posting new posts to your blog you should be spending equal amounts of time building onto your plain old static websites.
John Jones
- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing
Posted by John Jones on 07 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: SEO, Google, Randomness, Internet Marketing
For many months now a group of friends and co-workers of mine have had this little ranking game going on with a particular keyword in Google. The objective was to out rank one another and stay at the top of Google’s SERPs for as long as
possible.
Good old Matt Cutts rocked our world on Thursday when we discovered one of his posts sitting at the top of our little competition. Our little side competition suddenly became much more interesting. Now instead of out performing one another we will have to set our scope on beating Matt Cutts in a game he robably doesn’t even know he has interrupted at the time of this posts writing.
I’ll be the first to admit that not all of our tactics to game one another have been all that kosher but at least in my case I figured it was a harmless term that very few people actually search for.
From blog category names to creative usage of titles and even creating the post with a keyword rich name and then renaming it so it wouldn’t be so obvious at first; we have pretty much done it all just to game one another.
All four of us involved in this little content writing competition have had our fair jokes about how Aaron Wall virtually made the term “SEO Book” popular. Before he came into the picture I think I read somewhere that it wasn’t a widely searched term. (If anyone reading this knows a link to an article that talks about that i’d appreciate you letting me know so I can reference it). Our little posse of small time bloggers figured that just maybe we’d make our term a big success like Aaron has. Well Matt; it looks like we now have a lot to work to do.
As far as I know only two of us have seen Matt show up at the top for our term so this post is somewhat of a head start for me but I think I will be giving the advice that we all should work not only towards out ranking one another but that each of us should work on pushing Matt down just for the added thrill… That is IF Matt allows us to have our fun without getting creative with his Super human Google Powers.
By now I’ve probably triggered a few Google Alerts. Somewhat purposeful and somewhat accidental I assure you. However it is what it is and I’m sure that Aaron Wall and Matt Cutts have probably browsed this post by now or at least have been informed that their names were brought up in one way or another.
Let me introduce the game players so that everyone knows who all might be involved in this little game of ours that has taken a serious interesting turn of events.
Zak Nicola - Zak happens to have some of the most interesting posts out of all of us simply because they aren’t all related to Internet Marketing or SEO related topics. He has a page or two on the ever so popular cat frenzy that seems to keep everyone occupied and let’s not forget Zak in drag! This very sexy picture of Zak Nicola got us laughing and smiling for a long time.
Jeremy Rivera - Jeremy is to blame for this competition. He is fairly new to Internet marketing in general and prior to that he was a Customer Support Supervisor. He got nosey and started asking questions one day and never stopped. It was a surprise to us all when the company we all work for decided that Jeremy deserved to be the Marketing Manager.
Jeremy originally ranked for this keyword term prior to his promotion. We all thought that it would be funny (and easy) to push his blog down on our targeted keyword so set out to write a lot of content (some useful, some not) around the topic. So the game began and has gone on for several months now.
Shirley Tipsy - Many people might recall Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2006. There were two ladies who attended the conference that wore “Matt Cutts is a God” and “Matt Cutts Makes Me Google” T-shirts. Needless to say; to this day Shirley Tipsy still Googles over Matt Cutts. I was unfortunately not brave enough to wear any of those shirts during that trip so I didn’t go down as the guy wearing a “Matt Cutts Loves Me” T-shirt or whatever Shirley had planned for me.
Shirley Tipsy is also known as Audrey and she is our former Marketing Manager. She still works for the same company but now she is in charge of our company site and not our client sites. She has been involved in this game since the beginning but has been an even bigger game player in the SEO industry for many many years.

(Compliments of http://www.webuildpages.com/)
John Jones - That’s me! Jeremy first showed off his new blog to me via instant message at work one day. Later that evening at home he sent me another instant message letting me know that he was ranking for a keyword that looked rather impressive at first.
It is always easier to write about other people yet it is always easier to speak highly of oneself; why is that? I’m not exactly sure what to say except that I’ve been honored to work with the people I’ve worked with. I’m also very happy to have been contacted by people like Rand Fishkin and Rebecca Kelley for very small and non important issues all the way up to Barry Schwartz aka Rustybrick
over at Search Engine Round Table right around the time that Google launched their Adwords Print Campaign capability.
So now that I’ve introduced the players of this game I’ll tell you that the targeted keyword is “Content Writing Advice“. Many posts and many links have been purposefully established just to target and rank for this keyword term.
Zak probably has one of the best posts out of the four of us while my original post is probably the absolute worse out of the bunch. Now that Matt and others may be taking a small interest in this little game of ours though I hope that we will all be able to step it up a notch and show that we really truly deserve those top positions instead of Matt’s post on, “SEO Advice: Writing useful articles that readers will love“.
John Jones
- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing
Update 3/7/08 4:18am: For the record, Matt has always had a ranking
for this keyword term; he simply has never been number one for it. I should have
taken periodic screenshots and certainly a screenshot for last night. This morning
my obsessive compulsive self checked CWA (Content Writing Advice) and Matt is
no longer at the top again. Possible Google fluke last night or maybe this morning
but I still think this will be a fun addition to our competition to follow through
on.
Posted by John Jones on 01 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: SEO, Link Building
There are undoubtedly dozens if not a few hundred methods of obtaining links to your website or blog.
Last night I came across Stephen Dean’s Copywriting blog while doing a Google blog search for additional content writing advice that might help me with my own writing and to give additional advice from a sales pitch point of view.
I revisited his blog this morning and read another post that I skipped over last night. Stephen mentioned that some guy named James Brausch is offering a free copy of his newsletter to review.
I figure it couldn’t hurt since it was free so I hopped over to his website and the first thing that caught my eye was the criteria required to get the newsletter. This is part of what James wrote:
“1. Post your request on your blog with a link to this post on my blog. I’ll see the link or the trackback.”
James made that offer on February 29th and he has already had 10 trackbacks… 10 people linking to his blog and now 11.
James - please send me a copy to info@ this domain. Thank you sir!
John Jones
- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing
Posted by John Jones on 25 Nov 2007 | Tagged as: SEO
When was the last time you bought a car, a new computer or booked a trip? Regardless what you’ve recently purchased or have plans to purchase for this Christmas season, a large number of people will do what consumers do best… look for the best offers.
Ranking number one for a desired keyword is always flattering to your visitor statistics but being number one doesn’t always guarantee the lead or sale. It is my opinion that most people won’t end their search on the number one result in Google. Instead they are most likely to check other websites under that same keyword or redefine their search and start all over again in their hunt for only the best.
This morning I found myself looking for Garmin GPS systems and ended up looking at prices at four different websites including Best Buy, Circuit City, Wal-Mart and Tiger Direct. All four websites are well built however I still didn’t stop at the first one, I was certain I could find a better deal at one of the other large companies.
I don’t think it matters how perfect your site or price might be. Consumers will always take a look at several websites before making any decision to buy on line. Adding to that opinion I’ll also go as far to say that most consumers do a lot of their research in allotted blocks of time. Here are just a few:
I’d estimate that no more than an hour at a time is spent doing research on a product at any one sitting. Unfortunately it turns out that a website owner has to compete with other websites regardless where they rank simply due to the comparison shoppers most consumers are. So out of the entire hour that is dedicated to research you probably have 10 minutes of a visitor’s time before they are off somewhere else.
If you are ranking number one for the search term that a searcher searched for then you’ll most likely get a lot of traffic but it probably isn’t the prime location to convert a visitor into a conversion.
If you rank position number four or five for the search term then you risk a visitor running out of time before they have to leave for work, finish their lunch break, make dinner or get to bed.
In my opinion it is far better to rank for any given keyword term in positions two or three. I say this because I believe these positions have a higher conversion ratio then the other positions. Most people are satisfied after two or three different opinions of just about anything.
Posted by John Jones on 24 Nov 2007 | Tagged as: SEO, Randomness, Internet Marketing
I am employed by a large company offering marketing packages for their clients. For the most part I’d like to think that I am fairly successful at what I do. 78% of the keywords that I track for all of my clients are ranking within the first page of Google during the month of September.
A lot of what I do for each and every client I have is customized to their own specific needs. Some clients simply want more eyeballs on their website which means higher rankings on many related keyword terms. Others like the traffic and leads that their website generates for them while others still are perfectly fine with 1,000 visitors and a high lead capture ratio. Regardless their needs, I do my best to oblige them.
I must admit though that a lot of what I do or instruct my clients to do is pretty much Cookie Cutter SEO. If something worked for one client in Florida then the same concept might work for another client in California or anywhere else. Should I not doctor up an existing e-mail that was previously written by me for one client and send it off to another client?
Some of these things are as simple as adding keywords within the content, updating meta tags, anchor text links, cleaning up the source and I’ll even go as far as suggesting the same kind of lead capture idea’s to one client that I’ve already suggested to another client.
The suggestions or practices may be Cookie Cutter SEO but the end results are all different and unique to each and every client.
I don’t always agree with Cookie Cutter SEO. I don’t believe that you can sit down and write out a years worth of suggestions if you are a consultant and upon obtaining a new client set them up on an e-mail drip campaign. Many things could have changed since you wrote your suggestions out and you could be causing more harm than good for your new client.
If you are primarily a consultant, which means you tell your client what to do instead of doing it for them, make sure that if you are going to use
something that you’ve sent someone else that you rewrite it some to be unique to that specific client. I’ve made the mistake in the past by simply forgetting to change the name after ‘Dear..’. Whoops!
I write most of my proposals or suggested modifications to a website in Word. I save those in a folder called TEMPLATES and I’ll occasionally pull bits and pieces or all of the information from a specific file to send to one or more clients. A habit I’ve developed is to make anything variable within the document bold and red. You might try implementing some strategy like this as well if you start to manage dozens of clients on a regular basis.
- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing
Posted by John Jones on 24 Oct 2007 | Tagged as: SEO
I know it has been about two weeks since I’ve last posted. With my wife and I expecting our first child and my desire to not be glued to the computer for more than 12 - 13 hours a day, you’ll probably find that my posts will be done once a week with an occasional burst of energy that may result in more than one a week.
So today I am writing because I read an article from Axandra on Tuesday morning titled, “How long does it take until a new site ranks in Google, Yahoo and MSN?“. Being someone who is always looking for the facts; I decided to give this article a once over.
The reason I am writing this blog post is to add on a very LARGE disclaimer that I feel wasn’t covered enough when they wrote:
“If you target very competitive keywords, then it will take much longer until your website is listed in the top 10 rankings.”
The article talks about a test that was used to determine how long it takes to rank for a keyword across G.Y.M. (Google, Yahoo & MSN). The keyword phrase they were targeting for this test was, “Follow the Drinking Gourd” which according to Overture is searched across the Yahoo network a total of 1,574 times in a month. While the data may be network specific and outdated (January) it is still an OK metric for this article.
We each have our own targeted keywords. “Follow the Drinking Gourd” was used in this test and in my opinion isn’t a very competitive keyword term. Competitive is defined by how many other websites or Internet marketers are actively targeting the term which is usually decided by some sort of search metric like Overture. The more people targeting the term the harder your job is going to be. On the other side of the coin though, the fewer people targeting the term the easier your job is going to be.
If this test was targeted around a more competitive keyword term like “Sweet Child of Mine” you’ll find that the test results would probably be quite a bit different since the search volume reports this keyword phrase getting 4,302 searches a month. The term is receiving almost three times the amount of traffic and this may result in more people targeting this phrase.
One other example might be, “The Sweet Escape” which is another song name like the other two. Its search volume was 49,352 times which means it is a lot harder to rank for this term and would most definitely take a lot more work and longer than 10 weeks like the article from Axandra reports.
The LARGE disclaimer is simple enough… There really isn’t any specific time frame that is magical with keywords you may be targeting for your website(s). It might take you just a few weeks, a few months or maybe a year or longer but regardless how long it takes; if you keep working at it then eventually it should happen for you.
Posted by John Jones on 19 Sep 2007 | Tagged as: SEO
I’ve just returned from a trip to Las Vegas where my wife and I stayed at the Westin, gambled with high ambitions and watched several shows on the strip. We were living the high life on a limited and planned budget. Needless to say, I didn’t leave town as the next lucky millionaire; how sad and unexpected!
This blog is about 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing. It isn’t meant to be too personal so coming up with a post that let people know why I haven’t posted in about a week was a challenge. How do I tell people I’ve been in Las Vegas and talk about Search Engine Optimization at the same time…?
Well who would have thought that it would only take me 10 minutes to think of a tie in? I’m going to share my views as to why Internet Marketing in general IS a gamble and it ISN’T a quick route to success.
The Gamble
If you’ve spent any amount of time working as the marketing specialist or even with a marketing specialist you’ve probably come to realize that some things work for some people and some things don’t work for some people. You’ll also know that, in one way or another, everything you do or don’t do will play a role with your success or failure with your Internet Marketing.
Another gamble with Search Engine Optimization in particular is finding a company that offers a guarantee. Marketing firms may have fantastic track records and incredible recommendations from current and previous clients but not even these companies can guarantee organic rankings. You can call, write or e-mail 10 other Internet Marketing companies and you’ll find that none of them can offer a guarantee when it comes to organic rankings within the search engines.
Note: Since most of my readers are fellow SEOers, I might suggest reading an earlier post found in my archives titled, “SEO Money-Back Guarantee”. This will give you some ways to address the guarantee question without offending the potential client.
The Quick Route to Success
I’ve marketed plenty of real estate agents over the last two years and one common theme I see with most of them is that they often think it is a one time push and that is all it takes. If that was the case I’d be able to take care of so many more clients and have a HUGE client base to use in my portfolio.
The truth is that there is a lot of research involved and then a game plan that has to be ironed out followed by the actual implementation of that game plan. Once all that is said and done we then have to monitor to some degree or another our rankings, conversion ratio, pages that cause a visitor to leave and even what our competitors are doing. If you think that isn’t time consuming enough then also consider in that if you are relying completely off of search engine optimization that you’ll have to monitor how the search engines are evolving. Since they are always adapting and changing the way they look at our websites this means that there is no quick route to success on the Internet.
The Winning Hand
Having the ability to reach potential customers on a national and global scale with a reasonable amount of investment involved is going to give you better odds then Las Vegas will when it comes to the success of your online business.