USA SEO Pros: Reporting Industry News

There is no denying the importance of search engine optimization (SEO). You might have the best content ever written, but if no one knows it’s there, it won’t do you or anyone else much good. SEO ensures that your website is presented to searchers so you gain more traffic and more opportunities to turn that traffic into conversions. SEO gives you opportunities, but it’s up to you to make the most of them. That’s where conversion optimization comes in. Your site needs to be optimized not just to bring visitors to it, but also to turn those visitors into paying customers.

Engage Your Visitors

You want to engage your visitors as much as possible. Think of a way to add calls to action on your website. Remember you are in charge of how you want your visitors to search your website, and to ultimately buy from you. Adding graphics, hyperlinks, and even short forms can prompt your visitor to move forward through your website, until they have officially landed on the page you want them to be. If you decide on using forms, try to keep them short and to the point, otherwise your visitor may lose interest and move away from your website, which would be a bad thing. If you have great imagery and solid content then make it easier for your visitors to obtain more information. All of this can lead to interested visitors, which in turn can bring you more business.

Provide Vital Information

Surprisingly enough, many websites do not have the right information on their landing page. If you want your visitors to continue through your website, then you have to offer them the vital information they need, like a phone number. Yes, believe it or not, many companies forget to add their contact information for visitors to find, and this could be a problem. Remember you want to engage your visitors and provide them with easy access and information throughout your website.

Grab Your Visitors’ Attention

Gain your visitors’ interest by providing incentives throughout your website. If you want to gain information from your visitors, like their phone number and email address, then give something away in exchange. People love receiving free stuff, even if they just have to fill out a short form. Taylor your website based on the type of user you expect will visit your site.

SEO can work wonders for your website and for your business. Keep your website updated on a regular basis and optimize it to gain maximum conversions. Transform your website into a well-optimized site for search and for conversions to gain the traffic and business that will make your business a success.

The last few weeks have shown a dramatic decline of community participation in the popular social sharing site, Digg. The demise was noticed when Digg stop receiving over 40 million unique visitors to its site every month after its redesign. Visitors from the US declined by 26% and visitors from the UK by about 34%. Because of this extreme user decline, it currently only takes about 200 Digg users to get a story on the top 10.

Digg is beginning to stabilize the decline and has added many features that its visitors have asked for, but the overall activity level of people still visiting the site is noticeably down as well. What are users looking for, and how can user voting sites like Digg survive?

Continuing Forward

Digg’s redesign took about 18 months to finish and it was only in beta testing for two months. The preparations for the site obviously fell short for what was needed. Digg’s VIP of Product, Keval Desai stated, “We had a game plan, and clearly it did not go smoothly. In hindsight, there are several things that could have been done better.”

The complaints that they received indicated to Digg that they still had passionate users who are loyal to the site and want things to be fixed. Now, how will they regain the users that they once had before this fiasco?

Keeping in mind the average user and how they think and maneuver, Digg and other voting sites must keep up with the demand and trends that users are expecting. Digg is still trying to meet the needs of its users and publishers large and small who make the site what it is. Even though the redesign has caused a lot of upset and backlash, Digg has recently begun to see a slow increase in user activity again. Making changes according to the habits and desires of its users has helped Digg start to gain more traffic again, though slowly.

Changing With the Times

Another voting site, Sphinn.com, has gone in a different direction that may gain better acceptance than the commotion Digg’s redesign caused. Sphinn noticed a trending decrease in voting coupled with a tendency to “game” the voting system. As a solution, instead of letting users vote for the best articles and stories on the site, Sphinn has gotten rid of voting all together. They hope to bring discussions back to the forefront by letting users add comments and suggestions to stories and articles that have been published. This allows the user to have more of a say in what is being published, without forcing the voting model. This concept could be one direction for other voting sites to take.

Concluding Thoughts

With the ever-growing trend of users desiring greater personal expression online, we might see more discussion groups popping up as user participation models continue to evolve. The ability to discuss issues separately from submitting articles has been widely popular and seems to be coming to the forefront to meet the user demands. Perhaps other voting sites might head in this direction by providing users the ability to voice their opinion in different ways other than voting. Only time will tell what will truly happen to these voting sites, and for now, users have different options to choose from to express their opinions.

The Twitter trend is spreading, and many businesses have already jumped aboard. Starting a new Twitter account is easy and can help your business grow. Sharing information and facts about your business can help bring more consumers to your website.

When starting your account, provide the following for consumers:

• A brief summary of your business and highlight your website.
• Think about how you want yourself to appear to your audience and write your bio with much thought and insight.
• Make sure to include your location and URL.

The more details that you offer to your consumer base the better. Your consumers will be able to find your business easier, and they will already know what you have to offer without searching your entire website for answers.

Get Involved and Listen

Before getting involved with your consumers, make sure that your background is designed with your business in mind. Provide a photo of yourself or your company’s logo. Make sure that your image is the right size for every monitor. Not everyone is using the same size or resolution of monitor, so keep that in mind.

Think about the audience that you want to communicate with and target. Start watching and following those with whom you want to communicate to gain an idea of what they want. Read different tweets from the people you want interested in your company, and write your tweets, blogs, and social media accordingly. Provide specific information and links that your targeted audience will be interested in, and pay attention to their response. Knowing your audience is one of the key factors to achieving your goals at business marketing. Keep this in mind when monitoring your audience and competition:

• Keep your tweets, blogs, and all social media current.
• Follow your targeted audience to understand them.
• Make sure that you respond to comments that your audience is making on all of your social media.
• Become familiar with your competition’s social media and learn how your targeted audience is responding to them.
• Gain an idea of what works with the audience you are trying to reach by reviewing their response to your social media and to your competitors.

Updating Is Important

It is a very good idea to keep up with your favorite software, tools, and services on Twitter. Become informed on a daily basis about the latest blog posts, news on upcoming features, and have information on any issues or outages that may have occurred or will occur.

Monitoring is important and so is research for your Twitter page and business. Learn about each contact that you get involved with first, and start providing amazing information that your audience wants to read about. Remember to take it slow and do not rush into it. Sometimes slow and steady wins the race. Keep this in mind when you start your new business marketing with Twitter.

Most importantly, have fun sharing your business information with your targeted audience, friends, and family.

Before you can try to get ranked well in search engines, first you need help finding the right keywords to get ranked for. What are the terms that you want people to type in to find you on the first page of Google, Yahoo and Bing? You’ll probably have some phrases in mind right away, but there are other steps you need to take before you start your work to rank well for those keywords.

Before you begin ranking, make sure the terms you try to rank for a worth your while. While some of the terms (like your brand name) might be obvious, a lot of the terms you work on should be researched to find out if a significant amount of people search for the term and if it’s even possible to rank for. Some of the terms you come up with might not generate any traffic, even if you’re the top spot in all of the search engines. Other keywords might generate traffic if you rank well, but that might be impossibly difficult depending on how much competition there is for the specific key phrase. If it’s obvious a lot of SEOs are already competing for a key phrase, your time might be better spent finding one that is less competitive that you can easily rank better for.

There are some good sources out there to help you find out the information you need to potential key phrases you might want to work one. SEOmoz has posted an excellent article that includes a lot of great information on this subject. Another great tool everyone looking at key phrases should use is the Google AdWords keyword tool, which can give you great insight into how many people are search for the possible key phrase each month. Google will also give you possible alternatives, so you can decide exactly what you want to go after.

Techcrunch’s CrunchUp a few days ago had an interesting panel on real-time search. The panel included SEO heavyweights like Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan and Google’s Matt Cutts. The discussion surrounded what real-time search is, and what companies like USA SEO Pros are striving for it to be.

It’s good to know what the big whigs of search are doing to stay with the times, and while some of the panel members seemed to avoid specific answers, others weren’t afraid to address the issue head-on.

Cutts from Google’s Web spam team was asked what approach Google is taking to attack the real-time search problem, and all he would say is that they’re working on it as they always have. This was very different from the answer Microsoft’s representative gave when he mentioned Bing’s integration of Twitter results, and specified that real-time search is something they are definitely focusing on.

A few other panel members made some good points when the group was discussing the definition of real-time search and exactly what it is. The consensus when defining real-time search seemed to be that it is a collection of the consciousness of the Internet, where as traditional search engines are the Internet’s memory. Where regular search engines will bring up what has happened in the past, real-time search brings up what is happening in the now. Real-time search is what the Internet is thinking, not what it used to think.

Another point that was brought up is that real-time search needs to distance itself from the rankings that traditional search engines use. While filters should be put in place to get rid of spam and the like, there should be no ranking system when it comes to real-time search results. This is obviously  a matter of debate, but as real-time search gains popularity, this debate will no doubt take place where it needs to, and the resolution that companies come to should be interesting.

Check out video of the panel while they were at CrunchUp below:

Indexing and crawling are two concepts you need to learn about if you ever want to rank in search engines. Without crawling, you site can’t be indexed, and without indexing, your site can’t rank. You have to know how to do the first two in order to achieve the third, and the third is the whole point of SEO.

It’s tough to know exactly how search engines work, but there is one outfit that does a good job of coming up with a lot of reasonable assumptions based on testing and experience in the SEO business. SEOmoz seems to be right most of the time when it comes to search engine optimization, they have some good tools to use, and they recently released a video that explains the details behind crawling and indexing pages.

While the information in the video is really just the best guesses that the SEOmoz team has come up with, they make a lot of sense and SEOs can reasonably assume that SEOmoz people know what they’re talking about. While a lot of what’s discussed is common sense, it’s always good to see it laid out on a whiteboard and put in front of you all at once. It shows people exactly what they need to focus on, and how much work has to potentially be put in to it.

Of course, after crawling and indexing, the pages still need to rank well, but you have to walk before you can run. Make sure your pages have the potential to rank before you try to increase their rankings.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Crawling & Indexing from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

If you’re interested in running your own Web site or doing anything involving search engine optimization, it’s a good idea to check out the YouTube videos Matt Cutts hosts. Cutts seems to be the embodiment of the Google algorithm, so anything he says should definitely be looked in to. The videos on this channel involve Cutts answering questions that people have asked concerning ways to get their Web sites ranking better on Google’s search engine.

These videos can be extremely helpful. Some of the stuff is just common sense, but there are dozens of videos, and chances are you’ll find something out you didn’t know before.

Cutts’ job title at Google is “Head of the Web Spam Team,” which doesn’t sound like “SEO Ambassador,” but that ends up being a good chunk of what he does. He can be seen attending most of the large search marketing conferences, and routinely gives presentations on how to properly rank well in search engines. Cutts also gives tips on what not to do while putting together pages on a Web site, since there are a variety of different penalties that can be enforced by engines like Google’s.

Below are a few different videos from the channel you can check out. If the content seems interesting, the link at the beginning of the post will take you to the channel that as all of the different video Matt Cutts has done so far. By the way, he has the same red shirt on in a lot of the videos, because he’ll do a series of videos, then publish one each day.

With the last day of SES Toronto passing on the 10th, there are quite a few things to talk about. One of which is the first keynote speaker of the event, Tara Hunt. She’s the author of “The Whuffie Factor” who is hailed by the founder of Wikipedia and the co-founder of Twitter to be the perfect author for a book about building business via social networks. One of the reasons for the endorsements is because she’s done just that.

Within the first section on their agenda, they jumped right into getting sites internationalized for the companies that targeted a number of countries or markets. Covering everything from technical keyword research to cross-border management issues. Great for the bigger business, but for more localized companies, this session provides little, unless they’re close to hitting it big.

Of day 1, I personally think the two most important sessions were about linkbait and Twitter. With  linkbait, it seems to me that Tara Hunt should have been one of the speakers. The “Beyond Linkbait” session provided major tips on how a company should portray themselves online. Instead of caring a horrendous amount on getting that link, care about how that community or authority takes a look at them. Last thing you want is Biz Stone of Twitter mad at your company. While the publicity would be nice (regardless of the fact that you’re being slammed) wouldn’t you rather they be talking about it in a good sense?

Day two disappointingly started off with paid search coverage. While yes, paid search is a very good way to get that exposure for certain terms, it can end up being quite expensive. Not to mention a good deal of people ignore the paid search results entirely. Analytics coverage seemed like a much better topic to open up with as the analytics to any given site hold the information that shows the owner where people are coming from, what they’re searching for, how often they bounce away, and what pages they’re looking at. Google Webmasters is another incredible tool that should have been mentioned with resources on how to set it up.

Covering social media was also a big topic that everyone was on edge to see. There are an astounding amount of companies that are supposedly big game that are just missing the mark in the area. Also telling you which bits of social media are just falling off the wayside, this session was surely an eye opener to a good deal of attendees.

The last day was helpful to many, since the workshops seemed to be divided between the SEM and SEO aspects. The only problem is that you couldn’t attend both. Unless you had a friend go and take notes in one while you took notes in another. Needless to say, if you missed out on SES, you really did miss out.

It’s now commonly known that having valuable, trusted link-ins do a lot for your site on search engines. SEOBook  put out an article that discussed 101 ways to build link popularity, which was an obvious, but helpful plug to gain more PR. No attempt is made to hide this since the first way they even point out that making a “101 list” as one of those 101 ways!

Number 9 on their list is pay-per-click (PPC), which can be incredibly helpful for big business, but for the individual hosting a fan site for an MMORPG, or a competing club in a city, this proves to be an incredible waste of money. Especially if their competitors know that they can manipulate the PPC system and cost you money.

Links into your site can be very hard earned, yet well worth it if you snag them. Of course, you don’t want to go bugging the site administrator for that link in if they’ve already said no. If they have a community, show that you can indeed be a helpful part of it and make some educated posts. Gaining trust is all part of the game, and the sooner you get it from the domains that have been around a long while, the better off you’ll be.

Gaining link-ins from sites that have nothing to do with yours will gain you little, if any, help in terms of search engine juice. For example, why would you want your site about boxing to be linked to a well ranked knitting site? It doesn’t make much sense for your business, and it doesn’t make much sense to search engines.

Syndication also proves to be a decent help. It’s hard content, it changes often (as often as the source updates), and if coming from a reputable source, will gain you some points. Setting up your own as well as trading syndication also works with others if you can get good trades.

SEOBook provides a lot of good tips and while they did provide warning on going to sue Google for publicity, I don’t think that should have been listed. Someone out there is bound to want to proceed with the same process and waste taxpayer dollars on it. If you win or not in the battle, you certainly will gain publicity in one way or another, but it might not be the publicity you want.

Design as a linking element should have included jquery. It’s visually appealing, requires very little coding, and can give sites an interactive edge against the competitor.

Andy Hagans throwing himself out there for hired help is of course something a businessman has to do. But linking to andyhagans.com four times within the same post is a bit much in my opinion. Yes, I do realize that I threw out his URL yet another time. Least I can do for the article he provided. Woah! Rules 1 and 5 taking effect right here. Well, the desired effect of rule 1 that is.

From SEOmoz and their article concerning tips to get domain diversity if you have any control over this at all, make sure that your link into your site has a valuable (though not cheesy) anchor text. For example, if you’re the ABCD Business that deals with cough drops in Seattle, you would want your link text to have your business name or a combination of “cough”, “drops”, and “Seattle”. Nothing too long, nothing too short. They suggest bit.ly to shorten a URL if you’re going to be posting it in places such as twitter if your link is too long.

Sometimes people will link to you on an article you wrote on a blog (that you should have by now!) and not even use an anchor tag to put a shorter link up for the reader, and instead use the actual URL. Hopefully the blog you’re using shows the title of your post in the URL so that when the anonymous person posts your link in a forum or blog post somewhere, you still get the benefit of those keywords showing up. For example, the blog title of SEOmoz’s  “8-tips-to-get-domain-diversity-with-the-anchor-text-you-want”. All of that is in the URL that will help overall. Finally, SEOmoz does have one cute kitten, which is always good to help you get links if you’re willing to stoop that low.

It’s a joy to be in the changing industry of SEO, and it was very refreshing to see what was going on during the second day of the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Advanced conference. We also covering the first day of SMX yesterday.

At the conference, they covered many things that are good to keep in mind, and touched on good habits that everyone should keep in mind when working on Web sites. There were two things that I got the most joy out of reading, the first was how to better add flash in to a site and not lose out on all the rankings. I am someone that enjoys the look and feel of a good flash site and likes adding audio and video, and I like to learn new things that will allow me to do this and not lose rankings. To add to it, most major search engines are also working hard to index sites that are composed mostly of flash. In my mind this just makes for an all around better web experience, but it is still far from being perfect and not for every site.

The other interesting thing covered at SMX was conducting an SEO Audit and the many sides to consider in doing so. The presentation was very well laid out and gave many tips to consider when performing an audit on a site. Some of the tips included looking at URLs, site navigation and site latency. There is also a great list of tools that were talked about that can help you in your quest of making the most search friendly pages. I would have to say that the key to having a good audit is being able to keep proper track of problems and what actions you tried to do to correct the problem. This will let you see over time what has worked and what effect everything had. Sometimes it will not just be one thing keeping you from getting high rankings, but it will be a few small factors working together that have a negative effect on the site you are working on.

I think that every SEO tech out there can take a little comfort in knowing that most true techs out there are dealing with the same issues. This conference shows just how true that is. I would say if you have been in the business for years or are just starting out, reading the articles at searchmarketingexpo.com are well worth the time. I know I have enjoyed the experience and can’t wait to see what others have to say about it.