Recent studies indicate that search engines continue place a high value on the words in the domain name. Having a domain name like www.HuntsvilleBikeParts.com is far more likely to be found by someone looking for “Bike Parts in Huntsville” than www.bobsbikes.com. Note: If you are in the process of purchasing a domain name, it is recommended that you register several variations, .co, .net, dashed, and non-dashed versions because you don’t want someone taking advantage of your reputation, diverting traffic with an alternate versions of your URL. You should also configure every variation of your domain name resolve (redirect) to the same website (for example typing any of these huntsville-bike-parts.com, huntsvillebikeparts.com, huntsville-bike-parts.net, and huntsvillebikeparts.net would go to www.huntsvillebikeparts.com). In some cases, you may want to consider registering misspelled versions of your domain name.

The Navigational Structure

You want the path and file names to any document to support the searchers’ queries. If you are in Huntsville selling high-performance bicycle parts, you should consider paths like http://www.huntsville-bike-parts.com/lightweight-road-wheels/. The default page in this section would typically be an index of all the racing wheels you carry and might be further subdivided by brand (http://www.huntsville-bike-parts.com/lightweight-road-wheels/campagnolo/), size, etc. The objective is to understand what people are searching for the most and to build pages with paths that “support” the most popular search phrases.

The Page Name

The most important page on your website is the default page that is found when someone just types in your URL. Usually this page will have a name like index.html, but it may have another name or a different extension. The search engines will use this page to categorize your site and determine its relevancy. This page should be rich in textual content and use carefully worded navigational links. If you want the search engines to figure out what your site is about, it is important that the page not be filled with flash images or use images for navigation. Note: Dashes are seen as spaces by search engines and are more effective than underscores in page names.

The Page Title

The “title” of the page is even more important than the page name itself. People used to be very keen on putting the company name in the title, followed by actual title of the page, such as “Bob’s Bike Shop – Road Wheels”. This was a good approach especially if someone bookmarked the page, because the bookmark would read: ”Bob’s Bike Shop”. However, this approach doesn’t yield the best results with search engine algorithms. Page titles should reflect the search terms you would expect to see from someone looking for the information contained on that page. Each page title should be unique. The title for the page in the previous wheel example might be: “Lightweight Campagnolo Racing Wheels “. Again, the objective is to understand what people are searching on the most and to build titles that “support” the most popular search phrases in the order they would most likely appear.

The Page Content

Content is extremely important as it hopefully contains what the searcher is actually trying to find. The body of the page should contain the target search phrase and variations of it. In the bicycle parts example, you might try to create compelling copy that contains the phrases “wheels for bicycles”, “bike wheels”, “lightweight wheels”, “road wheels”, “racing wheels for road bikes”, and so forth. Search engines also pay more attention to tagged text. The H1 tag is believed to have the highest importance, and can help search engines identify the topic of the page, but bolded text and linked text all come into play and should be chosen in a way that will support key search phrases.

In Summary

The following provides a brief checklist with regard to the points you should keep in mind when creating a website:

• Organize Your Content: Display whatever you are selling by category and cross-link to categories that are likely to be used in search (terms such as location, country of origin, brand, etc.).
• Promote / Emphasize Your Site’s Organization: Use folders to support relevant categories; use page titles that reflect the terms people will search for; and use page names and paths that support the title / content of that page. Ensure that all of these aspects of the organization are communicated clearly in your navigation and breadcrumbs.
• Optimize Your Page Descriptions: Create meta-descriptions that contain key phrases from the page and entice the reader to click to discover more.
• Tune Your Copy: Each page should be viewed as a potential entry point for your site. Be sure that each page’s copy commences by explaining the topic in brief so searchers can QUICKLY determine if they have come to the right place. Then expand to explain the topic in more detail with relevant links to related items of interest.
• Fatten Your Content: Reuse key phrases (and use variations on key phrases) to capture as many searches as possible without going so far as to negatively affect the reader.
• Incoming Links Strategy: Search engines will give “credit” to your site based on the number of other sites that link to you, especially sites that are classed as being authoritative. One thing that can help is to register with business directories and use these domain names to have relevant anchor text pointing back to your site.

If you need helping optimizing your content for search – Contact us!

Getting Started / Open an Account

To get started, you will need to set up an account with each of the search engines. It’s painless and there is no initial cash outlay. Many of the hosting companies will give you ad credits for Google or Microsoft as an enticement to sign-up and the major search engines give these away at tradeshows and marketing events. These credits come in the form of a code and – like a coupon – there is a place to enter this code when you sign up.

Find Keywords and Phrases that Relate to Your Business

The first task is to determine an initial list of search words and phrases. Each of the search engine sites has tools to help you refine your list. You type in a word or phrase and the keyword tool will show you popular related words and phrases. Google has a keyword tool you can use without an account. There are also independent tools to do this, such as SEMRush and SpyFu, which will show you how you and your competitors rank for phrases.

In the case of Google and Microsoft, there are three variations on how words and phrases can trigger ads: these are known as “Broad”, “Phrase”, and “Exact” match. “Broad” means that any combination of the words can trigger the ad; “Phrase” means the ad can be triggered anytime all the words appear (in order)’ and “Exact” means the ad will display only the exact phrase is entered without any other words.

Bid Separately for Content

When you set up your campaigns, look for the “bid separately for content” option. Content ads appear on websites by matching the ad to the content of the page. This can be good if your ads are appearing on a page with expert commentary. However, the temptation to generate fraudulent clicks can be very high for these sites. To be safe, you will want to bid separately on content ads and track the results or limit your ads to the search network only.

Create Multiple Ad Groups

Group related phrases or keywords into ad groups. You might group “sale” phrases into one group, and “repair” phrases in another.

Create and Test Multiple Ads

We recommend that you generate multiple ads within each group. The ads should be worded to correspond to the search phrases in each ad group.

For example, if you are using repair phrases “bicycle repair”, “wheel repair”. etc, you will want an ad that says something like:

Huntsville Bike Repair
Locally owned and operated
We service all makes and models
www.huntsville-bikes.com/repairs

By comparison, if you are using “sale” phrases then you will want to have an ad that says something like:

Huntsville Bike Sale
We match internet prices
and offer local service.
www.huntsville-bikes.com/sale

Dynamic Keyword Insertion

There is also something called Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI). DKI lets you dynamically insert the search phrase. For example, if someone enters “cannondale bike” and you have the phrase “Cannondale Bike”, then you can use DKI to generate an ad like this:

Sale on [Cannondale Bike]s
Lowest Prices of the season on
[Cannondale bike] parts and accessories.
www.huntsville-bikes.com/cannondale

DKI can be especially useful when you are trying to deliver custom ads for a large number of items. Using DKI, each ad that is presented has a custom appearance that can be delivered dynamically from your list of phrases and keywords.

Landing Pages

Part of creating any campaign is deciding where the ad should take the searcher. This page is referred to as a “landing page”. While many ads dump the searcher at the front page of the website, it is usually a better idea to create custom pages that match the theme of the ad, orient the searcher to the site, and contain a clear call to action.

Create Conversion Events

A conversion event can be an actual purchase or something as simple as visiting a key page. Microsoft and Bing provide conversions scripts that when a page is visited with in 30days of the initial ad visit will register a conversion that ties back to the phrase and ad that brought the visitor to the site. If you have an eCommerce site, you can even monitor the dollars generated from a sale to determine exactly how much was earned from the amount spent on any given phrase.

Tune for Performance

While most people set up identical campaigns across the engines, the audiences for these search engines is slightly different and should be tuned separately.

Do you need help with PPC campaigns?

If you are trying to drive more traffic to your web site, generate more leads, focus your marketing spending, and convert more of those leads into sales – We Can Help!

Where web designers focus on the creative effort of designing a website that is attractive and making your products a services appeal to buyers. The SEO persons focus is on what it takes to make a website appeal to the search algorithms and understand how to prevent loss of rank when an existing site is replaced.

Where does SEO fit in the design process?

Before you design, Audit.

A Website Audit will evaluate competitors’ sites and your site to determine what is and isn’t working. The Audit will explore the most important words in your industry and develop a strategy and structure to provide the best exposure for those terms to the search engines.

Prior to Launch, Tune.

A pre-launch optimization pass should be made to tune title tags, page titles, page names, and meta-descriptions. This will boost relevancy for your content, improving how your content appears in search results and improve your click through rate (CTR).

Incoming links to your pages should be evaluated and then redirects created that will focus those links on the most appropriate new pages. This will assure that any existing page rank isn’t lost on content that can no longer be found.

Analytics should be installed on the news site. Using the same tracking code as the previous site will make it easy to evaluate the effects of the changes and compare the old site to the new site, month over month and year over year.

When you Launch, Notify.

A new sitemap should be created to be sure search engines can find all your new content. Google should be notified if your domain name is changing and Google Webmaster tools settings made to configure any URL preferences, and set the primary county, if you are not marketing worldwide.

After Launch – Follow up, Maintain, and Tweak.

If you are using a content management system (CMS), it should be kept up date with the latest revisions to reduce the likelihood of being hacked. Google Analytics should be reviewed to measure the effectiveness of paid and organic marketing efforts. Content that converts may merit off-site marketing and content that doesn’t convert re-evaluated.

Google’s Webmaster Tools should be checked routinely to evaluate the effectiveness of the effort. Done correctly, missing page (404) errors should be minimal and errors should fall off dramatically as cached content is flushed from the page cache of the popular search engines.

This has long been a problem on large database driven sites where only a minor difference in the address (URL) of the content (perhaps only a session ID) makes it appear that the same information is on more than one page. However this is also a common problem on Blogs where a Category listing, Tag listing, or Archive listing can present the exact same content, but with differing addresses.

This looks at some ways that duplicate content can occur.

1) True Duplicates – Any page that is 100% identical to another page other than the page’s address (URL).
This could result from that session ID id issue I mentioned:

2) Near Duplicates – Pages that differs only slightly, perhaps only an image or sidebar is different.
This could occur from differing sorts of the same information (category, tag, archive, …):

3) Cross-domain Duplicates -Occurs when two websites share the same piece of content.
This could occur from just shear theft (someone scraping your content) or from syndicating articles:

While the SEO crowd has been preaching the pitfalls of duplicate content for sometime, the farmer or “panda” updates that occurred throughout 2011 have pushed the importance of keeping duplicate content off your site this to the forefront. Peter Meyers covers the topic in more detail here, along with some ways to address these problems.

A good website is more than just a great landing page and some additional media. In fact, a great website should have at the bare minimum:

The Ability to Create a Good First Impression

The look of your website is everything. If the site’s design doesn’t look professional, you can guarantee that potential clients will be quick to hit the back button. To make sure that you capture quick conversions, go the extra mile and pay for a professional design.

Excellent Content

Content is essentially one of the best forms of SEO available, and every website needs to make sure that it is posting relevant articles. Not only does web content need to pertain to the site itself, but it also needs to be interesting and informative. Great content will keep readers coming back, with drive up rankings, and will overall increase business.

Easy Usability

If your site is a pain to navigate through, you will quickly lose business. If users struggle to find the information that they need about your organization or products, they will move on to your competitors. Make sure all information pertinent to your business is easy to get to, if not on the primary landing page.

SEO

Titles and meta titles and descriptions are important when producing a SEO friendly site. Also the phrases used within your content and links to your site are highly important when trying to raise your site’s rank in the search engines. If you are struggling with getting your site to the top, don’t be afraid to hire a professional. In the same way that it is difficult to compete for business against sites that are professionally designed, it is difficult for a business to compete in the search results against sites that have had professional SEO help.

Social Aspects

Every website also needs to have a Facebook and Twitter page, as well as accounts on various other social networking sites, to remain effective. It doesn’t take paid surveys for business owners to know that everyone is chatting through social media, and one of the best ways to drive business to your site is by linking your social media accounts to your business’s primary landing page.

Getting ahead on the web is a bit difficult, but with the right site design, some SEO work, and social media integration, business owners allow themselves the opportunity to get ahead of their competition. If you find that your site is lagging behind, take the above tips and analyze your site. You may find that a few quick tweaks to content or simply signing up for a social networking account was all your business needed to raise its rank on the major search engines.

Highland Hardware had an unhappy customer and despite their best efforts to resolve the issue the customer was still unhappy. However when the customer struck out at them publicly, its owner and founder Chris Bagby took action and sending this letter to his customer base:

I am on their mailing list and have been a customer for more than 20 years. I have only good things to say about them, both from the standpoint of customer service and the quality of the tools they sell. So when I received this letter, I was only too happy to cast my vote. When I did, it was around noon and there were less than 10 total reviews. When I checked about 5 hours later the number had grown to over 300. Every one I read was 4 or 5 star review and completely burring the bad review.

I think there are a couple of things that here that are of note, first the letter from the owner explains in a frank way what had happened. Second, he invites others to leave a review based on their experience. It is clear from the response that Highland Hardware has a track record among its customers of good service and products that its customers were happy to share.

…an easy road to go down, until those chickens come home to roost.