remarkable communication

Unlock the Secret Art of SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) has a reputation as some kind of mystical black art, with all kinds of arcane divinations needed to placate the great and mysterious Google.

Some folks believe that you need to pay giant dollars to a specialized wizard consultant to burn the right kind of incense and play the right kind of games that will put you on page one of Google. Conveniently for these wizards consultants, Google changes its rules constantly, so a good wizard consultant spends a lot of his time casting runes and squinting into Magic 8 Balls to see what the rules look like today.

Other folks will tell you that SEO is all snake oil. There's no such thing as effective SEO, you just live with a pure heart and noble intentions, and Google will find you. In this worldview, Google is so smart that they will always learn to pick out the spam from the real stuff. If you have real stuff, you will be bathed in eternal Google love and go on to live happily ever after.

Both of these camps are dangerously wrong.

Content comes first

We all know it, but it bears repeating (and repeating). If you want to do well in the search engines, it is a very smart idea to pull together some really good content.

Your content has to be useful. It has to be relevant to what people are looking for. And you probably have to have a bunch of it. (It also helps if you update it frequently.)

Google likes Baby Bear, in other words. But Baby Bear alone doesn't necessarily rise to the top without a little technique.

SEO is just a set of techniques

Not magic beans. Not games. Not super secret tricks you have to spend thousands of dollars to learn. Just some straightforward techniques that put you in the best light and that let the search engines know what you're doing.

Playing games with Google is like playing games with the IRS.* If that's your idea of a good time, ok, but I'm a little more risk-averse than that.

But the right kind of SEO is just like maximizing legitimate tax deductions. Play by the rules, play within the system, but don't be a damned chump about it. Fortunately, there's a lot of simple white-hat SEO (that's SEO that doesn't depend on spammer tactics) that is about 10,000 times easier than finding out how much childcare you actually get to deduct this year.

(8/9/08 edit: SEO School is no longer available, but I'll keep the post up in case it gets reinstated one of these days.)

My friend Naomi Dunford over at Ittybiz figured out that there was a lack of simple, straightforward SEO advice out there, so she put together an eBook. It's written for normal people--you don't have to be a techie or a marketing geek. And it's full of advice you can act on right away.

You can find out more about it on Ittybiz, or you can go right to the order page. It's pretty cheap, and it looks like if you enter the coupon code "MovingDay" before July 1st, you get it even cheaper.

No Magic 8 Ball required.

* For my readers who don't live in the U.S., the IRS is our beloved national tax agency.

A Simple Technique to Capture and Keep Search Engine Traffic

Patrick Meninga, who has a great blog on overcoming addiction, asked a question over at the Authority Blogger forum about how to make his blog stickier for readers who found him on search engines. He's getting a good amount of search engine traffic, but they don't stick around.

This was a simple tactic I proposed to him, and it struck me that the rest of you might find it useful as well.

Capturing the search engine reader
Let's say your blog (or Web site or Squidoo lens or whatever) ranks pretty well for the search term, "How to make organic dog food." When the people who search on that term find you, do they stick around and make themselves comfortable, or do they hit the back button and try to find something more relevant?

If you're getting a lot of the latter, try this. Create a post called How to Make Organic Dog Food and then provide a simple, clear and reasonably complete answer as the body of your post.

Your only goal with this post is to answer the question the reader had when she typed the term into Google. Don't comment on why people might want to make organic dog food. Don't summarize the state of the organic dog food community. Don't tell cute stories about your dog. Just answer the question.

You may, of course, want to provide some links to other resources, if that helps provide a better answer. For this use, if for no other, I recommend that you use a _blank tag to open those links in a new window. The point here is to keep some traffic for yourself, not to turn yourself into a portal for organic dog food makers.

For extra credit, I might juice that post up with a tiny bit of easy SEO, something like a Squidoo lens or a short ezine article.

Finally, add links to other posts on your blog that organic dog food makers might find interesting and useful. And while you're at it, go back to the older posts that originally ranked well for the term, and add a link to the new post you've created. I'd add that link to the top of the old posts, not the bottom, so the search engine user immediately sees a link to the answer she's looking for.

Why it works
What you've done is created a post that is highly search-engine optimized and that answers the question your searcher is looking for, but that also introduces your searcher to the wonderful world of content that is your blog. And you've done it without any spammy tricks or manipulation--just by making yourself useful and creating a single, highly focused page that answers a common question.

I won't claim this is a dazzlingly innovative tactic, but I don't see it used very often. If you try it, will you leave a comment and let me know how it works for you? I think I will give this one a shot myself.

Beyond Google page one--10 ways to maximize your click-through

A lot of folks are obsessed with making page one of Google. People who think Twitter is what birds do want to be number one on Google.

I have a friend who does marketing for small law firms, some of whom have been known to ask her to get them on page one of Google even though they have no Web site. She is very nice about it.

Depending on what you do, this is usually either easy or almost impossible. (Sometimes it's just hard, which is when things get interesting.) If you've defined your customer's needs and your own unique offering well enough, there's usually some phrase or collection of phrases that you can organically create a Google page-one result for.

There's another piece that you have to get right, though.

Page one is not enough
Think about your own searches. You type in a phrase and you get a page of results.

If you're searching on a topic covered by Wikipedia, it will be the first item. You either want Wikipedia or you don't. If you don't, notice how easily you tune it out to look for something that will help you.

Without thinking about it, you filter search results based on what you think will solve your problem. Looks kinda spammy? Discarded before you even think about it. Amazon results? Discarded--if you wanted a book on the topic, you would have searched Amazon in the first place. An e-commerce site? Discarded unless your question is "where can I buy this?"

In a split second, you unconsciously filter based on your own mental question, "What do I need and want?"

I have a number of phrases that I'm on page one of Google for, but it's almost never at the #1 or #2 spot. I'm often below the fold (that is, below the bottom of the screen), but hundreds of people click through to me anyway.

Why? Because I've learned how to set up my content to be the one site that attracts searcher after searcher to my listing.

How to get users to click through
Users will click through on a given search result anywhere from 10-100 times more often if you answer that question--"What do I need and want?"--in an effective and compelling way.

Google and other search engines exist to help people find information. All other things being equal (which they never are), if you answer the question, "how can I find out more about . . . " you'll attract the interest of the greatest number of searchers.

If those searchers click through to your site and find a nifty product to buy, nonprofit to contribute to, or organization to join, that's fine too. But you bring them through the door by promising to help them find out more.

You have a headline and about a sentence and a half to do this work, so keep it focused. Every character counts. Writing effective headlines is an art in itself. Brian Clark at Copyblogger has several excellent tutorial articles (here's one to get you started) on writing better headlines.

10 techniques to attract attention and draw users to your site
Remember, use these in your headline and in your first sentence or two to get the most impact. It's fine to combine them--in fact, it's smart.

1. Offer a benefit, like Problogger does in its page title: "Blog tips to help you make money blogging"
2. Propose a question your target searcher might ask, like "Want to know how to get on page one of Google?"
3. Use "how to" in your headline or first sentence, like How to create symbols on your blog, Web site or Squidoo lens
4. Spell out the information you're offering in ridiculously straightforward terms, like "Easy knitting patterns--tips for the beginning knitter
5. Point to a potential problem. For the easy knitting patterns article above, the first few lines are "We all know that it's smart to start with easy knitting patterns when you're a beginner. But, frankly, how excited can you get about knitting acrylic potholders?"
6. Suggest something that most searchers will want to do, like Encourage your preschooler to be a lifelong reader
7. Offer a goodie, especially one tied to a benefit, like How to transform content and yourself into a profitable business: a free report
8. Capitalize on insecurity, like Five grammatical errors that make you look dumb
9. Be interesting. The first two sentences of Money for Entrepreneurs--the best of the Web are "Let’s talk about money, shall we? I mean, we’ve been doing that all week, but let’s get dirty about it." Would you click through to that? I would.
10. Create a title that's a list of numbered items (like 10 ways to maximize your click-through). Everyone does it because it works.

(By the way, sometimes Google will point a user to a spot lower down on your page. Every time you use a header tag (H1s, H2s and H3s), ask yourself if you can use one of these techniques.)

101 ways to get more traffic

This is a good example of linkbait—101 ways to get more traffic. Don't you want to click through right this instant and start getting some useful ideas?

My favorites are #20 ("do not be boring"), #89 ("break a record or shoot to be in the Guinness world records for something"), and #84 because a profanity filter put asterisks in the word arsenal.

Tumblr and the Thirty Day Slap

Apparently some interesting events at Thirty Day Challenge over the weekend. The 30DC is a well-publicized free Internet marketing training program run by an Australian marketer named Ed Dale, and from what I've seen of it, it does provide sound methodology and solid advice on Web 2.0 marketing strategy.

But as every educator knows, there's a gap between what is taught and what is learned. A big group of hopeful potential entrepreneurs (and perhaps a few ethically-challenged people who were looking for advice on becoming more effective spammers), inspired by 30DC, created hundred-person gangs on Facebook to promote each other's pages with minimal or crappy content. Tumblr, (which looks to me a bit like a blog version of Squidoo), gave a "Thirty Day Slap" (I think that's how long it's going to take for the marks to go away) and deleted a lot of 30DC-er content. The odds that some decent content was deleted are pretty good.

There's a concept in criminal justice of a known associate. If you hang out with criminals, even if no one has actually caught you committing crimes, you become suspect yourself. We all remember the great line from Casablanca, "round up the usual suspects." If you participate in a Facebook group that exists to bookmark content that may be complete crap, even if you yourself aren't being indiscriminate, you'll find yourself blacklisted from useful sites like Tumblr or others.

Don't promote crap.
I want to be very clear about this. Trying to pump Google, Stumble or De.licio.us steroids into unbaked or bad content is wrong. You're stealing attention from content that is worthwhile. You're stealing time from readers who don't have enough of it. You're stealing energy from the employees of companies like Squidoo and Tumblr that are trying to provide quality content, and who have to waste time cleaning up your garbage.

You're trying to take something that you have not earned. It is bad behavior, and when it's discovered, it gets slapped, and deservedly so.

More interesting lessons
To tell you the truth, I caught 30DC out of the corner of my eye in early August and decided not to participate because it looked like a workshop on spam techniques. From the follow up I'm doing, that wasn't what it was, but the marketing had a puffy "this will blow you away" quality and no details.

Because there is so much spammy and scuzzy content out there, you probably have to assume that any competently run Internet marketing campaign will meet with skepticism. What might have worked better for me would have been along the lines of, "if you're a spammer and you don't want to work, stay home. We have no interest in you and if we find you we will kick you out." That would have caught my attention.

There's another interesting lesson, though. My attention was drawn back to 30DC after I'd dismissed it when I got an email from Dale this weekend. Ed Dale did excellent crisis management on this—he sent me the bad news before I saw it elsewhere, and when I clicked through, he had a robust piece created that presented his point of view. Not his excuse for what happened, but his philosophy on correct "white hat" techniques for creating value and marketing organically. You could do worse than study this for the next time the shit hits the fan for your own business.

Here's a good video (badly produced in a rather endearing way, with quality advice and info) from Dale on appropriate uses of social bookmarking and some examples of bad practices that will get you slapped.

I'll end with a quote from Ed Dale that closes the video above:

Here's the great thing about Web 2.0, folks, you don't have to game it. . . . Just use it how it's designed to be used naturally, and do it with great content, and it will do the work for you. . . . You only need a little push, not a big shove off a cliff.

Pretty decent advice. I'm planning on checking out the rest of 30DC. If you see me going off on a wild hair and participating in something silly, slap me, will ya?

doing the happy dance

My business site, remarcom.com, is on page one of Google today (and reasonably high up on the page) for "Denver copywriter"! I've been pursuing this competitive keyword pair for maybe six weeks, and I'm very jazzed to have progressed so quickly.

My guess (since the ways of Google, much like the universal unconscious, are unknowable) is it's about 90% due to the Squidoo lenses and 10% due to creating the backlink from this blog. I haven't driven much traffic here yet, so this link isn't yet as valuable as it will become.

If you have any doubt that you can rate decently on Google without a lot of spam, trickery, or highly technical knowledge, remove that doubt from your mind. I did it the old-fashioned way, by creating high-quality content in a plain brown HTML/CSS wrapper, and so can you.