Real Web Marketing Blog

Handling Negative Search Engine Listings

by John Eberhard

One of the perils of life today is that people can criticize you on the Internet.

So you hand out a business card to someone, or they hear an ad on the radio about your company, or they receive a direct mail piece or email about you. And they want to learn more about you. So they bring up their favorite search engine and enter your name or company name into the search bar.

What are they going to see on page one, two or three about you? Or about your company? Well unfortunately those listings aren’t always going to be what you would most like them to see.

So let’s say that you have a problem. Let’s say that when someone does a search using your name, or the name of your company or organization, page one has a number of listings that are negative about you or your company. Maybe most of them are negative. What can you do?

Well if there are listings that go to web pages that have actually false information about you, i.e. libel or slander, that’s a legal matter. You can legally force those people to take down false or slanderous information. I am not an expert in this area, but a letter from your lawyer to that person will probably go a long way. If this is your scenario, consult a lawyer.

But let’s say that the listings that appear when your name is searched aren’t libelous or slanderous per se, but they’re negative. So what can you do?

The basic handling for this type of situation is to put up lots of content on the web, that will rank highly when someone searches your name or company name. The idea being that these new listings will rise to the top and push all of that garbage down in the listings and off of page one.

The Handling

So here is the “Overwhelm the Garbage” program. Some call this "reputation management."

a. Write press releases and submit them to multiple online PR sites. See my blog or my book for advice on how to write press releases for online PR sites. These sites tend to rank highly on the search engines, so your press releases will tend to appear on pages 1, 2, or 3 when you search your name or company name.

b. Create social media accounts for the entity on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites. On Facebook start a personal profile and if for a business, put up a Facebook fan page. Your listings on these sites tend also to rank highly in the search engines. It also helps if you are putting up status updates on the sites regularly.

c. If it is a local business you can put up listings on Google Places and other local directory type sites like Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Hotfrog, Yelp, Insider Pages, Merchant Circle and others. There are dozens of sites like this and they all tend to rank pretty well.

d. Get videos produced about your company and post them on YourTube.

e. I have gotten good results by putting up multiple web sites, each with specific purposes related to my company. For instance, I have an articles blog on a separate domain, another blog that is just for press releases about my company, and another blog that is for press releases about my clients. I have put up several web sites and blogs for my political commentary.

c. Start multiple blogs and post items to them regularly. Include free blogs like www.blogger.com, www.blog.com, www.posterous.com, and others. When you post things there, include links in the articles linking back to your main site.

d. Write articles and post these to article directory sites. These tend to not rank as highly as some of the items above, but they’re great for volume.

This is a bit of work but it is an extremely effective program. I have done this program for myself and for one client. The client had quite a few negatives and now has none on the first five pages of Google.

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The 800 Pound Gorilla

By John Eberhard

Upon Google’s ascendancy a number of years ago to the number one spot in the search engine wars, they brought with them a new idea in how to measure and rank web sites: your site would be ranked according to how many other web sites linked to yours.

This was a new idea at the time, but has become the dominant factor in how search engines now measure and rank web sites.

Google then cautioned people that they should not try to build up links proactively to their web sites, but should allow a “natural link building pattern” to develop. And they advised people just to put up great content on their sites, and people would naturally link to them.

There’s only one problem with this advice to just put up great content and people will link to you – it doesn’t work! Maybe it works if you are Coca Cola or Fedex. But for small and medium sized businesses, I have seen it too many times that the company put up tons of great content on their sites, articles, advice, etc., and not one thing happened.

I have made analogy in the past that this is like advising a pretty girl to dress up really nice, put on makeup, and then sit in her living room and wait for the phone to ring. Don’t go outside or anything. You can open your front drapes, but that’s it. And for god’s sake don’t make any outgoing calls on that phone.

So the problem with the advice to just put up great content and wait for the links, for a small to medium business, is the same as for the girl waiting in her living room – nothing is going to happen. After 6-12 months of putting up great content you might find you have 100-200 links to your site. And you will find that you do not rank in the top 50 for any keyword except maybe your company name and your site traffic will be poor to non-existent.

But I see in many cases that because Google is the 800 lb. gorilla in the room, that many people just accept what they say as gospel truth and decide to follow their advice unquestioningly. It’s like this propitiating thing, sort of “yes sir, yes sir, great content, whatever you say sir.” I even see this with search engine optimization people, whose job it is to make their clients rank on search engines and should know better.

You may guess by now that I have chosen a different road. I chose to proactively build links to my own and my clients’ sites. I have developed several methods of doing this, including submitting articles to article directory sites, posting press releases on online PR sites, and posting articles and releases on blogs. Using these methods I have built up client links to the tens of thousands.

But Google hates this. They consider that anyone who builds up links to their web site using any method other than people naturally linking because of “great content,” is “gaming” their system.

And they have regularly set out to eliminate any advantage that people might be getting from link building. Several years ago people used to write to web site owners and ask to trade links. This is called reciprocal link building and was the primary link building method used by many people, until Google introduced elements in their algorithm which downgraded the advantage of reciprocal links about 3 years ago.

Then in February of last year Google introduced a new update to their algorithm called Panda. There has been a great deal of talk on the online marketing community since then about Panda, and one of its supposed purposes which was to eliminate the benefits of link building via article directories.

I was concerned of course. But I decided not to abandon my link building program, but to carefully monitor its results.

And how do you monitor the results of a link building campaign? Well let’s backtrack and ask what the purpose is of a link building campaign. You are trying to build up links to your web site, so that it will rank well in the search engine results for the keywords related to your business, so that you will get increased search engine traffic. Sort of indirect, but there you go.

So then the best way to measure a link building program would be to regularly check on:

1. The number of links to the site
2. How high the site ranks for a group of keywords related to the business
3. The amount of traffic coming to the site
4. The amount of traffic coming to the site specifically from search engines

I have kept close tabs on the above statistics for all my clients where I am doing a link building program. Here we are, a year and two months since Panda was released, and I am finding uniformly that all my link building clients are doing very well in terms of the above statistics. I wrote a case history article on one client recently and will be following up with several more in the near future.

Will I need to change my link building program eventually? No doubt. But has this Panda update impacted my clients? Not yet. Are they still benefiting from the link building program? No question.

The moral of this little fable is that young ladies should not just sit in their living room. Or, as we extend that analogy out to small to medium businesses, you have to promote your business, on whatever channels are available.

And when it comes to search engines, it is necessary to build links proactively and not sit passively in your living room. No matter how many grunts come from the gorilla in the corner.

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Three Different Types of Listings on Google

By John Eberhard

Google is always changing things so it is a challenge to keep up with what they are doing. Currently they show three distinctly different types of listings on a search results page.

Google AdWords

The first type of results that we see on a Google search results page is Google AdWords pay per click search results. The first three listings at the top of the left column, highlighted in yellow, are paid search results. These then continue down the thin right hand column.

You can start a Google AdWords account and get your ads to appear there, in response to any set of keywords that you select. So you pick your keywords, and then your ads will appear there whenever someone types in those keywords on Google.

The advantage of having a Google AdWords account is that you can get your ads up there quickly and they will start appearing right away. Exactly where your ad will appear depends on how many other companies there are competing for those keywords. If there are a lot your ad may appear well down the right hand column or even on page two. There are a number of factors that control how far down your ad will appear, but one of the primary factors is how high you are willing to bid. This is the amount you pay every time someone clicks on one of your ads.

But the basic advantage is that to a large degree you are in control of where your ad will appear and how fast it will appear there. The disadvantage is that it is a significant continuing expense. I have written extensively on pay per click advertising so you can refer to those articles if desired.

Organic Results

The next type of results you see on Google are organic listings. These are regular listings that appear lower down in the left column, and are not paid.

It can be a challenging and time consuming process to get your organic listings onto page one of Google for a high competition keyword. In order to do this, it is vital to have search engine optimization done for your web site, then do link building.

Search engine optimization consists of doing keyword research, selecting the best keywords, then writing titles and descriptions that utilize those keywords as much as possible, and inputting that data into the pages of your site. The best keywords are ones that are:

1. Appropriate for the specific page on your web site
2. Have as low competition as possible. This refers to the number of sites that are competing for that keyword. Most keyword research software will give this information.
3. Have as high daily searches as possible.

In doing research for keywords I have seen good keywords with as little as 1 competing site and as many as several million. This is an important factor because with a keyword that has millions of competing sites, you just aren’t going to be able to rank for that keyword.

Once you have your overall list of keywords selected, then you select several for each individual page for your site, then write the title and description for each page, then put those onto the pages. The title is what shows up in blue on a search engine when your listing comes up. The description is the short blurb that appears underneath.

Next you have to build up links to your site coming from other sites. Depending on what industry you are in and how competitive it is, in most cases you will need to build up thousands of links.

Google Maps / Places

Within the last two years Google has introduced a new feature that has completely changed the nature of search for local businesses. When Google is able to determine that your search is local in nature, such as a search for a restaurant, a dentist, or a Starbucks, it will bring up Google Maps (also called Google Places) listings.

Google will display a small map in the right hand column, and 3-8 listings in the left hand column that correspond to the map. These listings will have a gray sort of balloon, that will turn orange when you mouse over it.

If you put up a Google Maps listing, the amount of competition in your industry will determine how high your listing will show up. In some really competitive industries, like dentists for instance, there can be 100 or more listings. You can see just the Google Places listings for a search by, in the far left column, clicking on “more” and then “Places.”

So how do you get your Google Maps listing to move up to page one, especially in a competitive industry? Well first of all you may have to claim your listing on Google, then log in and make the listing as complete as possible, listing your hours, services, and uploading any pictures and videos that you have. Then there are two primary factors in determining where your listing will appear. These are 1) the number of listings you have on other local listings type sites (these are called “citations” in Google-speak, the only time it is good to have lots of citations), and 2) the number of online reviews on your business. There are a number of sites that allow people to post reviews, and Google used to show links to a number of these. But recently they changed to just showing the number of reviews on Google.

So it is important once you set up your Google Places listing, to start creating listings on other sites, and to get lots of positive reviews online. So it’s good to get a program ongoing to increase these.

Good luck in your search engine marketing efforts.

 

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Selecting Keywords Today

Selecting Keywords Today
by John Eberhard

The ways in which keywords are selected has changed a lot over the years. Just in looking back on the articles I have written over the last five years, I was shocked at how much it has changed.

The first thing to do today is to determine how you will be using the keywords. Will it be for pay per click advertising? Will it be for search engine optimization (SEO)? And if for SEO, are you doing SEO for a strictly local business?

SEO Keywords

Let’s say you are selecting keywords for SEO, and first let’s take the scenario that yours is a national business, meaning you have customers all over.

At the beginning of the search cycle, people type in more general keywords, either single words or phrases that describe the whole category of thing they are searching for, such as “MP3 player.” Then after they have done some initial searches and learned a bit about the category, they will then enter more specific phrases, such as “ipod mp3 player.” Then as they are getting ready to buy, they will enter even more specific phrases describing the specific product they want to buy, such as “ipod nano 4GB.” Note that this final, third phase is the time when the person is most likely to BUY. At that point he is usually looking for places where he can buy the product and comparing prices.

Keywords that are from this third phase of the searching cycle, are most descriptive and which tend to be 2-4 words or more are called “long tail” keywords. These keywords are not only usually easier to have your site rank for them, they tend to be the phrases the person types in when he is closest to being ready to buy.

Most people who I talk to who are not trained in these facts tend to think that they want to target keywords that describe the overall category, usually single word keywords, like “golf,” “consulting,” “dentist,” “chiropractor,” “marketing,” “computers,” etc. Although these single word keywords tend to have lots of searches, people typing them in are not usually at the buying point in the whole search cycle, and because of another factor which I’ll describe next, you won’t usually ever be able to rank well for them.

Competition and Number of Searches

When selecting keywords for SEO, one of, if not the primary consideration, is the number of sites that are competing for that keyword. The other primary consideration is the number of people searching for that keyword. The key is to find keywords that have low competing sites, and high search traffic.

When I am doing keyword research, I compile a spreadsheet with the keywords, and then I put the keywords into a software package I use called Market Samurai. This software finds the number of searches for each keyword, and the number of sites that are competing for that keyword. I used to use Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery, both online services where you pay monthly. One advantage to Market Samurai is that you pay once, and it’s a good program.

Once I have the search and competition data, I export the data into a new spreadsheet. Then I sort the list by the competition data, and put the keywords into groups according to the number of competing sites. The reason for this is that if you have a keyword that has 1 million competing sites, you are just not going to be able to rank well for that keyword – period. At least not for a fairly long period of time.

As mentioned above, the key is to find keywords that have low competing sites, and high search traffic.

When I am sorting through the keywords I try to select from my first group, which has the lowest number of competing sites, but select keywords within that group that have high search traffic. And you have to consider the 3 levels of keyword searching and select keywords that are more likely to be used by people who are closest to the buying part of the sales cycle.

Once you select your keywords, the next job is to write titles and descriptions for each of your pages that use those keywords.

Local SEO

When we are talking specifically about local SEO, we are talking about setting up your site to rank well for local keywords. So what’s a local keyword?

By “local keyword” I mean a keyword that mentions your topic and also includes the name of a city or town in your area. Like “dentist Glendale” or “computer repair Los Angeles” or “pizza Sylmar.”

Local keywords tend to be much easier to start ranking well for. But a caution which I have mentioned before: I see a number of supposed SEO experts selling people on how they will get them to rank on page one of Google for their local oriented keywords. And they can. But the point is, how many people are entering those keywords? If you rank on page one of Google for a keyword that has 2 searches per month, what good does it do? I’ll remove any uncertainty and answer – None!

So getting your site to rank well for local keywords is a great idea. But before you spend any money on such a plan, make sure the person tells you, for each of the keywords, how much search traffic they are getting. That way you’ll know if you are investing in something that is worthwhile.

Keywords for Pay Per Click (PPC)

With pay per click advertising on Google AdWords and MSN Ad Center, the rules for selecting keywords are very different.

With pay per click you want keywords that have as many searches as possible. You don’t care as much how many competing sites there are. The number of people that enter your keywords in pay per click is called the number of impressions, and you want high impressions because that will give you more people clicking on your ads.

So in PPC you DO want to use more general keywords, because they will get you more impressions and more clicks.

But, you have to also consider conversions. In PPC a “conversion” is definied as some who came to your site from your PPC advertising and then responded, either by filling out a form or calling you and becoming a lead, or by buying something if you are selling something directly online.

With Google AdWords and MSN Ad Center, there is something called “conversion code” which you put on a certain page of your site, and that sends a message back to the interface telling it that a conversion has occurred.

It is vital in PPC to set up this conversion code on your site. One of the advantages is that your Google or MSN interface will then show which keywords people typed in, that resulted in a conversion. This is important because although it is OK to use general, one word keywords in PPC, you might find after a month or two that you are getting lots of clicks on those general keywords, but no conversions (remember earlier about keywords and the buying cycle). Since the name of the game with PPC is to get lots of conversions, for as little money as possible, in such a case you might want to pause the general keywords and stick with the ones that got you the conversions.

Good luck with keyword selection.

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Google Maps

by John Eberhard

Google is definitely the place to be found online, with 72.11% of all Internet searches, compared to 14.57% for second place Yahoo. And page one is also the place to be, since 83% of all search engine searchers do not go past page one.

But getting onto page one for Google for your top keywords isn’t always easy. Getting onto page one for the regular or organic listings, via search engine optimization (SEO) and link building, can take 6 months or more. And for a really competitive keyword, you may not get onto page one at all.

You can get onto page one via paid ads with Google AdWords, which is great. But it’s also a continuing expense.

Google Maps is a feature of Google whereby when Google perceives through the nature of your search that you are searching for something local, it will bring up a map on page one. The map will have balloons on it showing the location of different vendors, and there will be listings shown to the right of the map.

So the Google Maps feature is a great way to get your business listing onto the elusive page one of Google. And with the graphic, it pulls your attention right to the map, which is partway down the page.

This new feature is great for local businesses like restaurants, home improvement companies, health care practices, dance studios, attorneys, private schools, or any business that services a local area. When you consider that 66% of Americans use the Internet to find local businesses, and 73% of all Internet activity is related to local content, if you have a local business, you need to get onto Google Maps.

The tendency is to think that if your business is listed somewhere in Google, that you will automatically be put onto Google Maps. Not so. You have to go through a whole process to get your listing up there, and the link will click through to sort of a mini web page for your business on Google, with your contact info, a map, description, pictures, and customer reviews.

Part of the process of getting your business on Google Maps involves “claiming” your listing, then putting up all the information, and uploading photos. It also helps your placement of your listing (how close it is to the top) if you also have listings on Yahoo and MSN, and on other sites such as Yelp and Hotfrog.

Once a searcher clicks on “more info” on the map, they will be taken to your Google Maps page, which includes, as mentioned before, customer reviews. As I covered in an article a few weeks ago, with customer reviews, as Don Henley says “This could be heaven or this could be hell,” depending on what kind of reviews you get. A couple bad reviews can have a way of killing online business, and somehow they have a way of going to the top of the review listings and staying there a long time.

My recommendation for local businesses is:

1. Get your company listed on Google Maps. We can do this for you if desired.
2. Put up an autoresponder email system like I described in my article a few weeks ago, whereby you enter the email addresses of happy customers into it, and then the system sends them several emails over the course of a week or two asking them to write an online review for you. The emails also include links to several places where they can write reviews. This allows you to be proactive in getting good reviews that will soon outnumber any bad ones.

Using this system you will get onto page one of Google and hopefully will get you good online reviews that will outnumber the bad ones. I am relatively new on this whole line so I don’t know what the numbers are like, but getting onto page one of Google is always a good thing.

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Checking Your Website’s Ranking on Search Engines

by John Eberhard

How well your website ranks on the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) determines to a large extent how much traffic your website will get. There are other sources of traffic (blogs, social media, sending email) but search engine traffic is one of the biggest ones.

First I should explain that a website does not just rank well or poorly on a search engine. It ranks well or poorly for a given keyword. The sequence of actions to getting good keyword rankings on the major search engines is:

1. Do keyword research to find the gold nuggets, the keywords that have good traffic but not tons of sites competing for them.
2. Do SEO (search engine optimization) on the site to put those keywords onto the site in all appropriate places.
3. Do a link building campaign to build up the number of links to your site coming from other sites. See my last article for specifics on what to do here.

So once you do all that, what now? How do you check whether your campaign is working? It’s all intangible, existing in invisible computer bits and bytes somewhere. How can you see whether you are making progress?

Something I started doing a few years ago for our link building clients, is a monthly report that includes a search engine ranking grid. It looks like this:

Keyword – Monthly Searches	Google June 2010	Yahoo June 2010	MSN June 2010
Keyword #1	15	Not top 500	109
Keyword #2	66	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword #3	63	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword #4	123	25	Not top 500
Keyword #5	20	Not top 500	78
Keyword #6	10	485	115
Keyword #7	261	54	Not top 500
Keyword #8	5	7	2

(Actual keywords have been changed to protect the innocent.)

The point of this is that we can see month to month, how well we are doing in terms of the website’s ranking for the various keywords that we are targeting for the client. Then I do a tally on how many #1 keywords, top ten, etc., we have each month.

I get this information using software called Market Samurai. I don’t enter each keyword by hand and scroll through hundreds of listings.

Keyword Rankings Summary	Mar 2010	Apr 2010	May 2010	June 2010
Keywords with #1 position	4	4	5	8
Top ten keywords including #1s	20	19	19	23
Top 20 keywords including #1s and top tens	30	26	34	32
Top 100 keywords including #1s and top tens	66	62	78	81
Top 500 keywords including #1s, top 10s, top 100s	101	100	115	125

With this information, I can now see how we are doing month to month. If your link building program is working, you should see the number of keywords in each category going up. There will be some fluctuation, but over time they should be going up.

You may wonder why I even care about whether our site is ranking for a keyword at the #485 position. That’s not going to get you any traffic, right? That’s right, it won’t. No one is going to scroll through 48 pages of Google results to get to your listing. In fact, until your site breaks the top 20 in terms of ranking for a keyword, you’re not going to see much traffic from it.

The point is that our SEO and link building actions will start working by getting the site to rank for that keyword, and when it first starts ranking for that keyword it will be in the very deep numbers. Then as you continue working, the rankings will get higher and higher, as that ranking number gets lower and lower and you get closer to the top.

If you only checked whether or not your site was ranking for a keyword down to the #20 position, you could be making progress but you’d never know it.

Does SEO and link building take a while? Sure. Getting great search engine rankings and resulting traffic is not for the impatient or the faint of heart. It’s a 6-12 month or longer program. But by using this system, you can see that progress is being made.

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SEO and Link Building

by John Eberhard

I recently was communicating to a client and realized he had a confusion between the terms "SEO" (search engine optimization) and "Link Building."

This prompted me to write an article recently with various definitions related to Internet marketing, which I thought was going to be dry and boring but I got several positive comments on the article.

I've decided there is a bit more to say about the relationship between these two internet marketing actions. Here are the definitions again:

SEO: Stands for search engine optimization. This is the process of selecting the best keywords, according to high traffic and low competition, and then placing these keywords in the appropriate places on the website. SEO is a one-time action, not something one tinkers with month by month. It should be redone every 2-3 years, as keyword traffic and competition can change significantly.

LinkBuilding: I have observed some people have glommed this activity into SEO and use the term SEO to refer to both SEO and link building. For the purposes of clarity I think it is best to keep them as separate terms. Link building is the action of creating links on other websites linking back to yours. Google states that the number of links to your site from other sites is its primary criteria for deciding the ranking of a site. So link building is a vital activity if you want your site to rank well on search engines and thus get increased traffic.

Some people get the idea that SEO is like some magic wand and all they have to do is get SEO done to their site and watch the traffic flood in. This is not correct. SEO is an action one does to a website that basically makes it possible for the site to rank well for the keywords that you select during the keyword research process.

But in order for the site to really rank well, you have to then do a program of link building. The ideal program is to do SEO, which is a one-time process, then do link building for at least 6-12 months. The best actions I have found for building links are:

1. Article Marketing: You write a 400-500 word article, then submit it to article directories. You include a "bio box" at the end of the article that includes brief info on you, your company and your website address. Each directory then counts as a link back to your site. Great for building quantity of links. Using this method I can build up links to thousands in just a few months.
2. Optimized Press Releases: Write press releases that contain some of your target keywords, and then submit them to online PR sites. Great for building quality links.
3. Blogs: Take both your articles and press releases and put them up on a blog, and take the keywords in the articles and releases and make them into a link pointing back to appropriate pages on your site.

Just as it is not as effective to just do SEO without doing link building, it is not as effective to do just link building without SEO. Why? Because one of the steps of SEO is to do research on keywords and select the best ones. Then you take those selected keywords and utilize them in your articles and press releases.

When doing a full program of SEO and link building, then each month I check the ranking of the website for all of the keywords I’m targeting. I use software called Market Samurai to do this, as it would take forever manually. Then I count up how many #1 keywords I have, how many in the top 10, top 20, top 100, and top 500. As you continue the link building program, you will see the number of your keywords in each of these categories go up month to month.

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What So Important About Keywords?

by John Eberhard

Keywords are an important subject when doing just about any marketing on the Internet. These are words or phrases that people are going to be typing into the various search engines.

You have to know what the best keywords are to use, when you are doing search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, blogging, article marketing, or sending out optimized press releases. Each of these activities is more effective when you have the properly targeted keyword phrases to use.

So it’s important not only to know what keywords to use, but you also have to be aware that the kinds of keywords you need to use will be different for different purposes.

The Big Picture

The first thing to know about keywords is that you have to select keywords or keyword phrases that have a lot of people searching for them. This may seem obvious but I have talked to people who had selected keywords and thought those were the keywords to use but no idea what the traffic was for them. There are several good tools to find out keyword traffic, including online services Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery, and software such as Market Samurai.

The next thing to know is that at the beginning of the search cycle, people type in more general keywords, either single words or phrases that describe the whole category of thing hey are searching for, such as “MP3 player.” Then after they have done some initial searches and learned a bit about the category, they will then enter more specific phrases, such as “ipod mp3 player.” Then as they are getting ready to buy, they will enter even more specific phrases describing the specific product they want to buy, such as “ipod nano 4GB.” Note that this final, third phase is the time when the person is most likely to BUY. At that point he is usually looking for places where he can buy the product and comparing prices.

Keywords that are from this third phase of the searching cycle, are most descriptive and which tend to be 2-4 words or more are called “long tail” keywords. These keywords are not only usually easier to have your site rank for them, they tend to be the phrases the person types in when he is closest to being ready to buy.

Most people who I talk to who are not trained in these facts tend to think that they want to target keywords that describe the overall category, usually single word keywords, like “golf,” “consulting,” “dentist,” “chiropractor,” “marketing,” “computers,” etc. Although these single word keywords tend to have lots of searches, people typing them in are not usually at the buying point in the whole search cycle, and because of another factor which I’ll describe next, you won’t usually ever be able to rank well for them.

Competition

One of the facts of life is that there are usually fewer resources than there are people that want those resources. So it is with keywords. There are lots of companies trying to sell products on the Internet.

For the purposes of search engine optimization (SEO) and link building, you want keywords that don’t have too many sites that are competing for them. If the keyword phrase has too many sites competing for it, you just won’t be able to ever rank well on search engines for that keyword. Most single word keywords have tens of thousands or millions of sites competing for them.

The goal, when looking for keywords for SEO or link building, is to find keywords that have decent numbers of people typing them in, but low competition. I use Market Samurai software to find this information, and I look for keyword phrases that have less than 50,000 competing sites for them, and the lower the better.

Different Uses for Keywords

There are essentially two major uses for keywords, one is SEO and link building on one side, and pay per click advertising on the other.

With SEO and link building, you want to find keywords that have as high traffic as possible, and as low competition as possible. Then with SEO you want to put those keywords into the appropriate places on your website, and with link building, you want to use those keywords in your blog posts, press releases and articles. All of these actions are geared towards getting your site to rank well for those keywords and raise them up onto the first page of search results for those keywords. That gets you traffic from search engines.

For pay per click advertising (PPC), you want to select keywords with high traffic. But here you are not really concerned with how much competition there is for a keyword. And with PPC you want to choose both long tail keywords and more general keywords. PPC is a different animal and if you only choose long tail keywords you will probably not get enough traffic to make it worth your while. There is a lot to know about PPC and I’ve covered that in other articles and will continue to write more in the future.

Good luck with your keyword finding efforts.

Posted via web from Realwebmarketing's posterous

He Said “I Can Guarantee the #1 Position on Google…”

by John Eberhard

Someone called me up recently saying that someone had walked into their office and said he could guarantee them the #1 position on Google for two specific keywords related to his business. My contact wanted to know what I thought of this?

There are a bunch of people out there making this kind of offer to businesses, and I happen to think that most of them are being totally dishonest and preying on the lack of knowledge of most business owners in how this website marketing stuff all works. I have run into quite a few of these guys, who have sold their offer to someone who later became my client. Let’s take a look at some facts regarding all this:

1. First of all, there are two sets of search results on a Google page; the organic results, and the paid or sponsored results. The organic results are the regular results for that search on Google, appearing in the left-hand wide column. The paid results are achieved through setting up a pay per click advertising account on Google AdWords, and these appear in the right-hand narrow column, and usually at the very top, the 1-3 results on the left, highlighted in yellow. Many of these people who make such promises will just put you up with an ad on Google AdWords, bidding high enough to achieve the #1 slot for the keywords they have promised you. There is no trick to this.

1.  Promising someone the #1 spot on Google for specific keywords, even if they achieve this through Google AdWords or other means, doesn’t necessarily mean anything. It all depends on how many people are searching for that keyword. Do you think it would mean anything to have the #1 spot on Google for “blue and purple striped pipe cleaners” if only one person per month searched for that keyword? I’m using a ridiculous example but the concept applies to any business. Owning a keyword that no one searches for is meaningless, and any money you pay to achieve that is pretty much wasted. I remember one home improvement client who had been sold a certain number of keywords at X amount per keyword, with all of them having various city names included in the keyword. Most of those keywords had zero traffic and he was being charged monthly for each one, paying around $2500 per month.

1. Even if this guy who promised you the #1 spot for the keyword “blue and purple striped pipe cleaners” went out and got you that spot using Google AdWords, you probably wouldn’t get any traffic from it. One of the things to consider when setting up a Google AdWords account is getting keywords that have lots of traffic. And the final product of a Google AdWords campaign is supposed to be conversions, i.e. a person who responds to you and becomes either a lead or a sale. The product is NOT having the #1 position on Google. That may sound great and may be a means to an end but it is not the product itself.

1. There is no way that someone can guarantee you the #1 spot on Google for a high traffic keyword in the organic listings. Maybe they can guarantee it for some lousy keyword for which no one is searching, but this is pointless as I said above. The key with search engine optimization is to first do some keyword research and find keywords that a) have decent numbers of people searching them monthly, and b) don’t have a ton of sites competing for those keywords. These are the gold nuggets. Once you find them you embark on a link building campaign to move yourself up in the rankings for those keywords, and this is a several month process.

In summary, I think these guys who guarantee you the #1 spot on Google for specific keywords are, for the most part, being dishonest and ripping people off.

The real way to do this, is:

1. Start a Google AdWords account and select high traffic keywords, set your geography so the ads appear in the geographical locations you want, and put your ads up. Then bid high enough so your ads appear somewhere in the top 5, and set it up correctly so that you start driving traffic to your site. Remember that conversions are the key. Using AdWords you can achieve high rankings quickly, while you are working on the next part.

1. Do keyword research, select keywords that have decent traffic but low number of competing sites. Then optimize your site and put these keywords up on the site. Then start a link building campaign using these selected keywords and stick with it for at least 6-12 months.

If you do “b” above and stick with it and don’t bail too early, you will achieve a good number of keywords in the top 20, top 10 and some #1 positions. And they will be keywords that will be worth something.

Posted via web from Realwebmarketing's posterous

Google Profiles

by John Eberhard

Google has added a new service called "Google Profiles." Here's what they have to say about it on their blog.

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It's no secret that from time to time many of us have searched on Google for our name or someone else's. When searching for yourself to see what others would find, results can be varied and aren't always what you want people to see — whether it's someone else with your name, or the finishing time from that 5K you ran back in 2002. We want to make that better and give you more of a voice.

To give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name, we've begun to show Google profile results at the bottom of U.S. name-query search pages. These results offer abbreviated information from user-created Google profiles and a link to the full profiles. We've also added links so it's easy to search for the same name on MySpace, Facebook, Classmates and LinkedIn.

Don't have a Google profile? Just search for [me] and follow the instructions at the top of the page to create one. In just a few minutes, you can create a public profile that represents you and that appears when people search for your name on Google. Check out www.google.com/profiles to learn more.

Posted by Brian Stoler, Software Engineer

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I posted a Google profile and it now appears at the bottom of the page when you search for "John Eberhard." and while there are a number of other John Eberhards in the world, I am the first with one of these profiles, adding to my visibility.