Internet Building Codes Blog

I actually had several people this morning all inquiring about the same issue so I thought I’d add a blog post on an effective blogging strategy for SEO purposes.  Here’s what I wrote:

You want to shoot for consistency in the Title, Headline, Description and Keywords.  You can use slight rewording but I’d focus on a hypothetical phrase like “green lawn fertilizer” for one set of posts and then focus on a variation like “lawn fertilizer” for another set of posts.  By sets, I mean this:

1. Write blog post #1 about something like “green lawn fertilizer.”  Put NO hyperlinks in this one because it’s going to be your money page that we’re trying to rank.
2. Write blog post #2 about something related to lawns.  Put 1 hyperlink in the body of the first paragraph that says “green lawn fertilizer” and link it to post #1.
3. Write blog post #3 about something related to lawns.  Put 1 hyperlink in the body of the first paragraph that says “green lawn fertilizer” and link it to post #1.
4. Write blog post #4 about something related to lawns.  Put 1 hyperlink in the body of the first paragraph that says “green lawn fertilizer” and link it to post #1.
5. Write blog post #5 about something related to lawns.  Put 1 hyperlink in the body of the first paragraph that says “green lawn fertilizer” and link it to post #1.
6. Write blog post #6 about something related to lawns.  Put 1 hyperlink in the body of the first paragraph that says “green lawn fertilizer” and link it to post #1.
7. Write blog post #7 about something related to lawns.  Put 1 hyperlink in the body of the first paragraph that says “green lawn fertilizer” and link it to post #1.
8. Write blog post #8 about something related to lawns.  Put 1 hyperlink in the body of the first paragraph that says “green lawn fertilizer” and link it to post #1.
9. Write blog post #9 about something related to lawns.  Put 1 hyperlink in the body of the first paragraph that says “green lawn fertilizer” and link it to post #1.

After you’ve written a number of posts on one terms, switch it up and change to another phrase.

When you write the description, just write it as an advertisement to get people to want to read the post.  It’s the 2-line description found in Google so make it sound enticing.  Don’t worry too much about optimization of the description.  It doesn’t carry much weight in Google’s algorithm.

I hope that helps.

I ask people all the time, what are the two most important things in weight loss.  Of course, we all know the answer.  They say diet and exercise.  That’s obvious.  But then I ask them the most important part of diet and exercise.  Then they look a little puzzled.  Reluctantly, someone usually raises their hand and says, “diet?”  I say, “nope.”  Then everyone in unison says, “exercise” as if they confidently know the answer.  I say, “nope.”

What?  If it’s not diet and it’s not exercise, then what is it?

It’s the word “and.”  Diet and exercise.  You have to do both, simultaneously.

How many times have you failed to lose weight?  If you think back you’ll probably see that you neglected to exercise and watch your diet at the same time.  Many people go one diets.  But if you’ve ever tried it, it’s tough to cut your calories and exercise.  Every time you exercise, you burn calories and you get more hungry.  You eat a ton and get discouraged with your results.

Here’s another common scenario.  You work out like a mad man so you can still enjoy all of your favorite foods.  Do you think you’re actually going to shed those pounds if you’re still drinking the soda pop and munching on those chips?  Of course not.  You can’t just exercise and not watch your diet.  You have to do both, simultaneously.

There are a million scenarios.  But it’s been proven time and time again that if you can stick to a low calorie diet and exercise a few times a week, you’ll lose weight.

So what’s all of this have to do with SEO?  Well, I see people all the time struggling to get first page search rankings.  They are madly blogging and building tons of links but they ignore the other important aspects of good SEO.  Or they have built thousands of links into their site but they haven’t had the time to add any new content to their site in months because they’ve been so wound up with the link-building campaign.

It’s just like weight loss.   You have to look at the best practices and then do them simultaneously.  There are dozens of tactics that most search engineers employ, but in reality, you have to work on the top 3 or 4 ranking criteria simultaneously.  Get those right and you’ll get better results than any focused effort that ignores the other tactics.

Hope that helps.

Chadd Bryant

David Letterman just said that New York City is the #1 tourist destination in the U.S.  That made me think about a post I did last week where I was discussing how you’d need to optimize a site for the phase, “New York City Vacations.”  I was discussing how an inexperienced search engineer would link to that page using a phrase like, “Things to do in New York” rather than linking to that page with the phrase, “New York City Vacations.”

In addition to that alignment, it’s also wise to consistently use that phase in your external and reciprocal link-building campaigns.  Rather than getting other web masters to link to your site using your domain name or worse yet, “click here,” use the optimized phrase.

So not only have you created an optimized page, you’ve aligned your on-page SEO strategy with your linking strategy.  There are dozens of other small ways that you can align your strategies so be cognizant of your site’s alignment when you’re implementing them.

Chadd Bryant

SEO isn’t rocket science, although some SEO firms want you to believe that.  After all, if they keep you in the dark and make you believe that they know something that’s so difficult and so complex then you’ll be willing to pay extraordinary prices.  But the fact is, SEO isn’t that difficult.  Sure, it requires knowledge and diligence, but none of it is something that a high-school kid can’t do.  If they can take chemistry and calculus, they can most certainly handle SEO.  It’s just a matter of following the rules, or best practices.  So next time, an SEO agency or a search engineer tries to convince you that they’re working magic behind the scenes, don’t fall for it.  They may try to confuse you with complicated math (yes Google uses a complicated algorithm) but to get a site ranked at the top of Google doesn’t require you to even understand anything beyond 6th grade math.

Beware of folks who try to confuse you.  That’s a common sales ploy.  If you can’t get your head around it, then you’ll be more willing to pay high prices.  But if you can arm yourself with a basic understanding of SEO, you’ll be educated and won’t fall for their schemes.  Education is power.  And we’re here to give you power.

Last time we were talking about the recipe for SEO success and I equated SEO to a great chocolate chip recipe. Like a chocolate chip recipe, you can’t expect to get the same results if you forget to add all of the right ingredients. As I was pondering the similarities, I thought of another one. Many times, people think that you can do SEO a little at a time. But how would it work if you made a batch of cookies with the eggs and figured you’d add them later if the cookies tasted a little odd? Of course that wouldn’t work. You can’t just add eggs to a baked cookie. And there are some things that are fundamental to a great SEO recipe and can’t just be added later if things don’t taste right.

I know, many of you are thinking that the web is dynamic and can be changed at any time. Sure that’s true, but it’s much more difficult to improve a page’s validity with Google than it is to just do it right from the beginning. Once Google has tasted your recipe, they are less likely to believe that you’ve suddenly become a great cook (or SEO engineer in this case.)

Here’s a quick example. If you have a number of pages in your site, it’s likely that they weren’t all created on the same day. Google picks up on your pages as you create them, provided you’ve developed a site that’s regularly spidered by Google. If you want to see which pages Google has spidered, search Google for site:yourdomain.com. You’ll immediately see a list of all the pages that Google knows exist in your site. Some of the older ones will have link that says “cached.” Click one of those links. That will tell you in a box at the top the last time Google bothered to read through that page. I’m sure you’ll be surprised. While you may be thinking that Google loves your site and reads through it every hour, you may be surprised to see that Google is only bothering to read the pages that have changed regularly. Take your blog for instance. If you have developed a pattern of frequently changing your blog, Google may visit your site every hour or more to see if you have new content. But the other pages on your site that have not changed are not read again by Google. So might it be difficult to go back and try to fix them, to try and add eggs now. You could, but Google wouldn’t necessarily know you made any changes.

So how do you get Google to notice your changes so that your updated pages will be indexed again? We’ll get to that one later. Until then.

Chadd Bryant

The key to SEO has been a hotly contested topic in certain circles for years now.  Some people have speculated that the key is linking.  Others claim that it’s keyword research.  Others will fight to the death for meta tags.  The truth is, there isn’t a single magical key to SEO.

There are many ingredients in a successful SEO campaign and without combining them, most SEO efforts will not succeed.  Think of SEO like a cookie recipe.  Many people know how to make a batch of cookies.  And in order to make a great batch of chocolate chip cookies, you have to mix flour, salt, eggs, chocolate chips, butter etc.  Have you ever made a batch of cookies and when they came out of the oven, something just didn’t taste right?  Something was missing.  Maybe it was the sugar?  Or maybe the eggs?  You could do everything right.  Measure all of the ingredients precisely, preheat the oven to the perfect temperature, bake them for 14 minutes but something still tasted funny.  Cookies just don’t taste right if you get 95% of the recipe correct.  You have to get it 100% correct in order for them to taste great.

The same is true of SEO and unfortunately, the majority of all websites taste a little funny because all of the ingredients aren’t included.  SEO just doesn’t taste right when you leave out one of the vital ingredients.  You can research your keywords, build optimized pages that have the perfect keyword density, link your pages together to make the most of each page’s PageRank but if you forget to include the external links, the end result may not work.  Or do everything else but neglect to reinforce your SEO with internal links, the end result may not work.

There are literally dozens of ingredients in a delicious SEO recipe.  Sure some are more important than others but the point is, don’t expect to get great results from your SEO campaign if you’re just combining one or two ingredients.  Just writing a great headline, a keyword-loaded title and uploading it doesn’t
mean that you’ll see top search engine position.

Until tomorrow.

Chadd Bryant.

For those of you who don’t know who Matt Cutts is, he’s probably the most-respected search expert in the industry not only because of his intelligence, but also because of his insider knowledge as an employee of Google. So here’s a link to a great article summarizing Matt’s most important revelations: http://sn.im/mattcuttstips.

Google just loves websites that are updated frequently. They’re in the business of organizing the information on the Internet and they like sites that provide good content that’s ever-changing. Not only will they reward your site for frequently changed content, they’ll also add the new content to their site more quickly.

Here’s what I mean. Did you ever wonder how news sites like CNN or MSNBC can get their headlines listed on Google within minutes of when they’re posted? Google visited their site and realized that there was new content since the last time they came so they came back again, but this time sooner than the last time. If the first time they read through the site, they found new stuff, they’d come back again in 30 days. If they find new stuff again, they’ll come back again in let’s say 15 days. New stuff again? Maybe they’ll check out the site again in a week. And so forth, until they visit the site every couple minutes looking for new content.

So, if you’re wanting your site to be spidered more frequently, you just have to post content more frequently. Eventually, your site will reach the point where you can post new content and find it on Google within minutes.

So what’s the best way to do this? Why not add a blog. There’s a reason why the word blog has become known as an acronym for Better Listings On Google. Google loves blogs because they typically change more frequently than standard static pages. You don’t have to use a blog though. I you use new articles on your site, that’s fine too as long as you have new content added to your site on a fairly regular basis. Just make sure that you use all of the same SEO techniques that you’d use in any other page of your site. I see so many sites that waste their time blogging about a topic that’s irrelevant to their overall business objectives. For instance, I just read a blog post that was teaching people how to optimize their sites. Instead of actually using a phrase that was related to their business, they chose to use “red sports cars” as the example. They must have mentioned the phrase 30 times in the blog post. I wouldn’t doubt if they’re found at the top of Google for phrases like “red sports cars” rather than things that actually help their business, like “website design.”

Hope that helps.

Chadd Bryant

Text to code ratios are becoming more and more important in the all-important SEO race to the top of Google’s organic listings.  Simply put, a text to code ratio is a measurement that shows how much of your page is code is compared to the amount of visible text you have on your pages.  A page with lots of code and just a little content will have a low text to code ratio, a number like 3%.  A page with clean, well-written code and lots of great content will have a higher ratio, like 40%.  Google has shown preference for sites with higher text to code ratios simply because they have lots of great content.  But notice that just having lots of content won’t give you a great text to code ratio.  You also have to have clean code.  If you’re a programmer that writes bloated code, like Dreamweaver does, then you’re likely to offset any gain you see by increasing your content because while adding more content, you also add more code to display it.  So you have to use clean code AND longer content to increase your text to code ration.

How do you do that?  The best way is to avoid the use of tables for your layouts.  CSS can position your images and format your content with limited code so relative to programming with tables, your code will be cleaner.  Google can look at your code and easily find the content.  They’re in the business of finding your content, not your code so if they have to week through thousands of lines of code just to get to a couple lines of content, they’re likely to leave and stop reading through all of the pages in your site.  But if you have a page of code that’s only 50 lines long with 25 lines of content, Google will reward you.

Hope that helps.

Chadd Bryant

As the ecomomy seems to worsen, more and more people are turning to SEO for their marketing efforts.  SEO has proven time and time again to provide the highest ROI compared to any other form of marketing because of the global exposure that can be gained when a site is found in the search engines.  But search engine optimization isn’t always inexpensive.  In fact, many SEO companies are charging tens of thousands of dollars every month to help position their clients’ sites at the top of the SERPs.  So how can something so expensive provide the best ROI?  Simply because the return is proportionate to the amount spent.  Sure you might spend a small fortune, but if your business model is designed correctly and your margins are sufficient, you should profit from the exposure.  So how do you avoid spending too much?

Let’s take a look at a basic example to figure out how much is too much for SEO.

Let’s say you sell something that’s a pretty popular item, like iPods.  There were 24,900,000 searches last month for that phrase.  I suppose if you captured just a small portion of those people you’d be happy, right.  So let’s assume that you spent $100,000 on SEO to get your site ranked at the top of Google when someone searches for ipods.  If you could get half of the people searching to click on your listing that would mean that you’d get about 12 million visitors/month to your site.  Not everyone is going to buy an iPod from your site so let’s shoot really low and assume that only 1 out of every 500 people buy from you.  That’s 24,000 sales.  Even if you only make $10 on each iPod, that’s $240,000 profit/month or $2.8 million/year.  Don’t you think that the $100,000 spent on SEO would have been a good investment?

Let’s look at another example and see if the formula always works out.

In this case, you’re selling a map of the Denver metro area.  Sure tourists might like it but only 1000 people per month are searching for maps of Denver and frankly, most of those people are getting their maps for free from the Internet.   So if you were to spend a chunk of change to get your site listed at the top of Google when tourists are searching for “Denver maps” would you be able to make money.  If you could get even 500 of those 1000 people to visit your site and even if 1 out of every 5 bought a map, you’d only sell 100 maps/month.  Let’s say they sell for $12 each.  That’s $1200 per month or $14400 per year.  When you consider your costs for printing the maps you may only make $3000.  Looks like you can’t spend much on marketing in order to sell your maps.  When you have a small niche like maps in Denver, in order to profit, you also have to have an extremely high sales conversion rate.  No amount of SEO can make more people search for your product so you’re stuck.  You have a fixed number of people searching for your product.  You have little control over that.  Unless you have limitless marketing budgets, creating demand for a product is difficult at best.  We always say that you can’t make a market.  But you can serve an already existing market.  Keep that in mind when you’re looking for opportunities.  First find a market that’s underserved, and then find a way to fix their problem.