More SEO Case Histories

by John Eberhard

In my last article I discussed Google and how their Panda update in February 2011 supposedly discounted or even penalized the use of article directories for link building.

I have been submitting articles to article directories as a way of building high quantity links to my own and client web sites for over 6 years. So of course when news began to come out that the Panda update would be penalizing the use of article directories, I was concerned.

But I decided to let the statistics decide. As I mentioned in my last article, with link building 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. The statistics I use that measure the success of link building are:

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 recently wrote an article containing a case history of one of my link building clients. Here are two more:

Case History: Company A
Home Improvement Company

	Jan 2011	July 2011	Jan 2012	March 2012
Links to Website	7,800	12,800	24,100	21,900
Keywords with #1 position	6	4	10	11
Top ten keywords including #1s	22	18	22	39
Top 20 keywords including #1s and top tens	34	35	36	55
Top 100 keywords including #1s and top tens and top 20	68	68	69	106
Total Web Visits	972	1,208	1,307	1,338
Web Visits from search engines	382	319	292	378

We have been engaged upon link building with Company A for over two years, submitting articles to directories, submitting press releases to online PR sites, and blogging.

Note that links to the site will fluctuate up and down over time, even with constant link building activity. Note also that keyword positions are steadily gaining, as are total web visits.

Case History: Company B
Tree Nursery

	June 2011	Jan 2012	March 2012
Links to Website	5,610	27,100	12,600
Keywords with #1 position	3	4	4
Top ten keywords including #1s	15	23	29
Top 20 keywords including #1s and top tens	38	46	64
Top 100 keywords including #1s and top tens and top 20	117	103	158
Total Web Visits	2,077	3,631	5,866
Web Visits from search engines	715	1,628	3,818

We have been engaged in link building for Company B since May of last year. Note that their links hit a peak of 27,100 in January and have fallen off a bit since then, but experience tells me that continued link building will drive it back up again, as that has happened over and over with other clients.

Keyword rankings are steadily building, but the most dramatic change for Company B is a major increase in total web visits, nearly tripling from June 2011 to March 2012, from 2,077 to 5,866. And web visits from search engines have been the biggest part of that, going from 715 to 3,818.

Conclusions

Since they have by far the largest search engine market share, Google’s actions affect everyone doing business on the Internet, whether we like it or not. But if the Panda update supposedly was penalizing the use of article directories for link building, where does that penalty manifest itself with the two case histories above? I don’t see it.

I have seen it suggested by another author that Panda did not really penalize or discount the benefits from using article directories, but that they simply hit certain individual article directories and lowered their status. Who knows? Google plays with all its cards close to the chest.

But I think we are on fairly solid ground in judging matters with statistics, and the statistics show that this link building strategy is still working.

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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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Your Street Address on Your Web Site

By John Eberhard

I came across a really interesting issue this week in regards to how you present the street address of your company on a web site.

A prospect, located in a large suburban city of Los Angeles, was concerned that when searching for their category of business, along with “Los Angeles” in the search field, that their business did not come up at all. In other words, and I’ll change the category to keep things discreet, if you searched for “copper containers Los Angeles” a company whose business is located in Glendale, CA would not come up.

Now Glendale is a major suburb of L.A. and is definitely part of the L.A. metro area and is actually not far from downtown L.A.

In this case we were looking into how to specifically improve the position of this company’s Google Maps/Places listing, which as I mentioned did not come up at all when searching for this category with “Los Angeles” included. Their listing came up first when you searched for their category with the word “Glendale” included. But the thing is that hardly anyone would search for this category of thing with the word “Glendale” included. This particular business is not a neighborhood thing like a dentist. If someone was going to search for them with a city name attached, it would be the name of the metro area, in this case Los Angeles.

In searching myself for this category with the words “Los Angeles” in the search field, I reviewed all the other Google Maps listings of other companies in this category. And I noticed a very interesting thing. Every one of them listed their city as “Los Angeles.” And in going to several of their web sites, they listed their city name on the web site as “Los Angeles,” regardless of whether they were in a suburb of L.A.

This may seem like a stupid minor detail. But consider that handling this one minor point right could mean the difference between your listing coming up and not coming up at all.

So here’s how you decide how to handle this. If your company is a local business that handles customers only from a small part of town, such as in a cluster of 4-5 suburbs (like a health care practice or a retail store), then you should leave your address as the exact suburb that you are in.

But if your business handles customers for an entire metro area, or if your business is regional or national, you should list your company address on your web site, wherever it appears on the site, as the metro city, i.e. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Boston, etc. And your Google Maps listing and all other local listings on other sites should list the metro city too.

Doing this one simple action will significantly improve your online visibility and website marketing.

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Promoting Yourself as an Artist

by John Eberhard

Back in the 1980s I made a living working as a musician, playing in nightclubs around New England.

I didn’t know much about marketing back then, but a fellow musician had told me the formula for getting work in nightclubs. He said you needed to have a good quality demo tape of the band, about 4-8 songs, not whole songs but snippets, an 8x10” glossy photo of the band, and a song list. He said you make up a package with all that in it, locate agents who book the clubs where you want to play, and call them and send them that package.

That formula turned out to be pretty good, as I was able to book bands pretty steadily using it. That was just for booking a cover band working in nightclubs. The formula for getting a band a recording contract would of course be more extensive and more complex.

But the point is this: to be successful in any sector of the arts requires that you not only have your act together artistically, but that you find out what the successful formula is marketing-wise for getting where you want to go. And then market yourself aggressively using that formula.

Back in the day I think I had the idea that if I just was really good at what I did as a musician, then things would work out alright. I didn’t have the idea that I had to aggressively market myself. And certainly I was never taught to market myself, even at Berklee College of Music.

I think that with too many artistic schools today, they place all the emphasis on teaching the artistic technique, and completely forget to include teaching students that to be successful as an artist you have to promote yourself, and have a feel for how the business works. An artist is essentially an entrepreneur. Because let’s not forget, that if you don’t eventually start making money with your art, it will of necessity be relegated to the status of a hobby after a time. Because as you get older, your monetary needs will increase.

Making Money with Art

First of all, realize that your goals need to include getting paid for doing your art. This sometimes requires a reality shift, because so often, musicians, actors, dancers, and other artists are expected and asked to perform their art for free. Artists have to fight this expectation, because it is inherently unfair. So finding ways of getting paid has to be part of your thought process, not only for down the road, but also for right now.

Next, figure out what your eventual goal is, and find other successful artists who have achieved that goal. Ask them what the formula is for promoting yourself as an artist to achieve that goal. Sometimes successful artists will jealously guard the secret of their formula, being afraid of competition. But often, especially in Los Angeles, artists of various types will give seminars on succeeding in the business, or you can find books giving this type of information. Be aware also that that formula will change from time to time, so make sure you have up to date information.

Using the Internet

Regardless of the specific formula needed to achieve your specific goal in your artistic field, there are some universal opportunities afforded by the Internet today for online marketing, and all artists can make use of these.

• Facebook: Set up a personal profile and a fan page on Facebook, then get lots of friends on the personal profile and get lots of people to “like” your fan page. Then start posting status updates regularly (to both), just saying what you are doing as an artist. Don’t just use text, but include photos, links to videos, links to music clips, links to articles, etc. That gives it more impact.
• Blogs: Start a blog, and start posting material to it on a regular basis. This can be similar to what you would post on Facebook, but more extensive. Write articles, write updates on what you are doing as an artist. Post pictures, videos, music clips, etc., whatever is appropriate for your field to show your work. Make sure you send a notification to the blog search engines every time you post something. You can use www.pingomatic.com, or Wordpress blogs do this automatically.
• Twitter: Start an account on Twitter and start following lots of people and get them to follow you back. Try to target people who would potentially be a consumer for your artistic product. With Twitter you can target people in a certain geographical area, you can target people who have certain words or phrases in their bio, or target people who write certain words or phrases in their tweets.
• Ping.fm: This site allows you to start an account, then hook up all your other social media accounts to it. Then you can post status updates from Ping.fm, and they will automatically go out to all your social media accounts and all your friends/followers will see them.
• YouTube: Get some videos made of your work or performances, and post them to YouTube. Then promote the video on all other online media, such as through your blog, Facebook and Twitter, etc.

LinkedIn is generally considered to be a business networking site, so that may or may not be useful to you as an artist. MySpace used to be THE social media site, but has declined severely over the last couple years. Bands still use it.

Summary

In order for you to be successful long term as an artist, you have to exchange your work with the public, and they have to pay you money. Unfortunately our society is not very good about rewarding artists, so you not only have to be good, but you have to market yourself aggressively. And part of that has to include finding the correct formula of promoting yourself to reach the so-called big time.

Good luck with promoting your artistic endeavors.

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Use of Autoresponders

By John Eberhard

An autoresponder is a system that can be set up that sends a person a series of emails. There are a number of useful and important uses for autoresponders.

There are a number of email services available online that include autoresponders, including Aweber, iContact, and Mailchimp, where you pay a monthly fee for the service.

Drip Emails

One of the first ways to use an autoresponder is to create a series of emails that will be sent to someone after they fill out a more-information form on a web site. This is often referred to as a series of “drip emails,” so called because it’s like dripping water on the person’s head, each drip being a communication. Usually these are HTML emails, meaning they can have graphics and links in them like a web page.

Let’s say you have a contact form on your web site for someone who wants more information on your products or services. What I often do is create a series of 3-4 HTML emails. The first one goes out to the person as soon as he hits submit, and will say basically “Thanks for filling out our form, we will get back to you right away or you can call us at ____.”

Then I set it up so the second email goes out say 4 days later after the person filled out the form. This is more of a sales letter and sells the person on the services or products, and urges him to call in. This assumes that he hasn’t been reached yet. But even if he has, no harm done. He has just received more sales text.

Now the third email can go out say 4 days after the second email, or 8 days after the person filled out the form. This can be anything from a longer article about the products or services, to a listing of testimonials, to a link to a video. And depending on what content you have to send, you could also send out a 4th, 5th and 6th email.

Basically the purpose of setting up a drip email system like for sending to people who fill out a form on site, is that you are sending them sales oriented communication. And it can help in cases where you call but fail to reach the person or he doesn’t call you back.

In all cases, when someone fills out a form and it starts the whole drip email system like this, I also add him to the general email list for the company and he will receive all other email communication, such as an email newsletter or other sales oriented emails. If you use one of the online services like Aweber, Mailchimp or iContact, the service will automatically add a link at the bottom for people to opt out of the list. I usually tell the recipient in the first email that he is being added to our general email list and he can opt out at any time.

Offering Free Reports

A very effective technique in terms of collecting names and email addresses is to create some kind of free information property such as a free report or “white paper” (a fancy name for a free report), on a topic related to your products or services. Then you offer that on your web site for free, but the person has to fill in the form and give you his name and email address to get it.

So with this scenario, you create a series of drip emails just like above, but the first one gives a link where the person can download the free report you are offering. You put the report in PDF format, put it online, then link to that in the first email. Then the person clicks on it and the PDF opens in their web browser, and they can save it to their hard disk. In this way you don’t have to be bothered with manually receiving the emails and emailing them the free report, which is especially important if you get a high volume of responses.

In this type of situation I would still create a series of emails, not just the one sending them the link to the free report, as that gives you an opportunity to send them sales oriented material about your products or services.

Pre-Written Articles or Newsletters

I have one client who has written a year’s worth of articles and has his autoresponder set up so that when a person fills in one of his online forms, that starts a series of over 50 articles that are sent to the person. This is a really good idea, especially if you have a lot of content that you’ve already written.

For myself, I write an article and send out a newsletter every week, so people who contact me about services, or who request one of my free reports, all get added to that list and receive my email newsletters. In my case I haven’t written a ton of them in advance but the people just receive the new ones I write every week.

Top of Mind Awareness

The goal with all of this is to get the person to buy something from you right away. But if that doesn’t happen - and some people aren’t ready to buy right away but still could buy later – then you will be creating top of mind awareness. That means that when the person thinks of your product or service category, he will tend to think of you, because you are reminding him of your company on a regular basis.

And don’t forget that any autoresponder email you send out should include your phone number, your physical address (that’s a US law), and links to your web site. The whole point is that you’re trying to make it easy for someone to contact you and buy from you.

Good luck with your email marketing.

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Why You Need to Be Blogging

By John Eberhard

Blogging is something that you can do that doesn’t cost you anything, and it drives traffic. It can drive traffic to a standalone blog or a blog that is part of your main web site.

How does it drive traffic?

There is a network of blog search engines, and every time you post something on your blog, you have to notify these search engines and your new content will be included in those search engines. And people search and find your content and come to your blog.

Wordpress blogs are set up by default to send a notification to all the blog search engines every time you post something new. For Typepad, Blogspot, Posterous or other blogs, you can send a notification (called a “ping”) to these search engines for free at www.pingomatic.com.

If you have a standalone blog, meaning one that is not part of your main site but is on a separate web address, then you have to put things in the sidebars that will get them to come back to your main web site. See one of my blogs to see how I do this:
http://www.realwebmarketingblog.com/

Notice that I have ads in the sidebars promoting my book and a free eBook, as well as links to my other sites and my various services.

I track traffic to my main web site at www.realwebmarketing.net using Google Analytics, and my blogs are the biggest single traffic source to that web site over the last two years (even bigger than Google).

Setting Up a Blog

There are several ways to set up a blog:

• Wordpress: You can set up a hosting account and have Wordpress installed on it. You can also set up a sub-folder under an existing web site and install Wordpress in just that folder, so that the address of the blog would be www.yourmainwebsite.com/blog.
• Typepad: You can set up an account with Typepad who will then host your blog, so you don’t need a separate hosting account. You can use a custom web address that you register.
• Free Blogs: There are several free blogs, including Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Posterous.com, and Blog.com. Note that Wordpress.com is a free blogging system and is different from having a hosting account and installing Wordpress there. I know, it’s pretty confusing. We used to use LiveJournal.com but the site has been broken for some time, and we used to use Tumblr.com, but they got all high and mighty on us and closed down our accounts because we (gasp!) wrote blog posts with links to other sites. Recently Wordpress.com has also started closing down accounts if you write blog posts with links in them to other web sites.

Linking in Your Blog Posts

One of the advantages of blogging is that you can put links inside your blog posts, to pages on your main site. And getting lots of links coming back to your main site helps its search engine rankings.

Putting links into your blog posts is very smart to do and over time will add a fair number of new links to your site. I would put a max of 3 links into each blog post.

As mentioned some of the free blogs are objecting to links from your blog to commercial web sites, which I think is idiotic and symptomatic of the general “anti marketing” bias within the IT community. So my advice is not to use Wordpress.com or Tumblr.com any more.

What to Write About

The next question is what to write about and how often. You should write something new and post it to your blog at least once a month, or more ideally, once a week.

You can write an article for your blog of anywhere between 300 and 1500 words. I’ve heard people say that you should not write anything over 700 words for a blog post but I can’t see any reason for that. Pick some topic related to your industry that has helpful information in it, i.e. it is not just a pitch for people to buy something.

In addition to writing an article, you can also write a short comment about some other content on the web, with a link to that content. You can also post a video from YouTube so that it displays right in the blog. So you can see that you do not have to write a full blown article to be able to post something.

It’s a good idea to include some high traffic keywords in your blog posts, because once that post gets included in the blog search engines, more people will find it due to searching for those keywords.

Good luck with blogging.

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