Build Me A Fab Website » SEO Articles & Tips

FREE SEO Software Review Traffic Travis!

Abigail Andrews — Mon, 23 May 2011 10:14:56 +0000

The BEST FREE SEO Software Around!

If you don’t know anything about Traffic Travis and if you never used it before I strongly recommend you go ahead and download Traffic Travis for FREE to improve your Search Engine Rankings. Traffic Travis is designed to provide you with a one-stop-shop for all of your search engine optimization needs. This makes everything much easier as you don’t need to rely to multiple tools and/or resources.

Traffic Travis comes in both FREE and PRO versions. I assume many will wonder what the difference is and you do have a great comparison chart that will help you compare the two but I will mention the key differences for you:

Number of projects: The free version is restricted to 5 projects.
Data caps: The free version has lower data caps on some tools.
Print and save reports: The free version doesn’t support this feature.

I don’t see much point for me to get into each and every module of Traffic Travis, mainly because you get it for FREE and you can and should try it out. Also, a great thing I love about Traffic Travis is that for every module you open, a video tutorial will pop-up and will show you exactly what that module is about and how to make full use of it. This is a really great feature and I wish more tools will integrate the instructional videos inside the tool itself just as Traffic Travis does. Regardless below is a summary of features for your digestion.

Traffic Travis Features List

Ultimately all you want to know is what Traffic Travis can do for you so here is a list of features, some of which are limited in the free version but download the free software to try it out then decide if you need the extra functionality before you purchase.

Website Analysis: It is just like having a SEO expert at hand telling you exactly how to improve your websites SEO very quickly. At a glance you can see what is right and what is wrong on any of your pages. The best bit is this tools also gives you tips and solutions to improve your websites search engine perfoming easily!
Website Rankings: Track search engine performing daily,weekly or monthly. Track unlimited websites and keywords on all major search engines.
Keyword Research: Easily compile a huge list of relevant keywords.
Keyword sorter: Easily sort your keywords to generate highly targeted keyword lists.
Top sites for keywords: Take a look at your competition and find all the top sites for any keyword.
Link and SEO Analysis: Where are your backlinks? What anchor text are your competition using? What pagerank are your competitors? Traffic Travis, saves so much time with all this at the click of a mouse button.
PPC Keyword Analysis: Easily find out how many advertisers are using a specific keyword and how profitable it really is!
Top sites for keywords: Who are your strongest competitors? Which keywords are they using? Again all at the click of a mouse button.

Traffic Travis offers much much more so simply give it a try for FREE then BUY it if you like it! I use it for all my website for all my clients. It has been a major time saver and fantastic find for me!

For all of you that never have used such a keyword tool before, belief me, it saves you hours of work, while it brings much better results!

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Seven Must Have WordPress Plugins You Need to be Using

Graham Jones — Fri, 06 May 2011 20:01:29 +0000

Author: Wendy Moore

WordPress has become one of the most preferred website and blog platforms for business owners, publishers and authors when it comes to building their own slice of cyberspace.

One of the main reasons WordPress is so popular, is the ease with which you can build and update your website or blog, so that it plays nicely with others without you needing a lot of technical “know how”.

Over the recent holiday break, I rebuilt one of my websites, SavvyWebWomen.com entirely, using the WordPress platform. This enabled me to have a real look “under the covers” and discover some really cool plugins that make the whole experience much more enjoyable – both on the front end for visitors and also, behind the scenes for the website or blog owner.

Plugins are functionality created by innovative people and are yet one more reason why WordPress continues to improve. There are literally thousands of plugins available these days to enhance the functionality and look of your website or blog. Most of them are automated making them super easy and very convenient for authors, bloggers and webmasters.

Having just built a brand new site, I thought I’d share my favourite plugins that I have personally installed and am currently using on my Savvy Web Women website.

Over the next few articles, I’ll share with you WordPress plugins you should consider adding to your website or blog and why.

Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin’s job is to generate XML sitemaps for search engines to easily find your blog. The search engine then records your sitemap in their databases. The result is faster search results for your blog and articles.

Facebook Like
With this plugin, readers can just click on the Facebook like button on your post and share that action on Facebook. You can add this on top of your post or after the post. And since this is hosted by Facebook itself, people visiting your blog need not log into their Facebook account.

WP Greet Box
There’s nothing like visiting a blog or website and being greeted by the owner or publisher. The good news is you can create a personal greeting on your site using the WP Greet Box plugin. It lets you create and show a greeting message on top or bottom of every post. Providing a personalized greeting or suggestion is a good way to establish rapport with your readers and improves your exposure.

All in 1 SEO Pack
This one is search-engine friendly. It allows you to optimise your site so search engines can easily find your blog or website. To use this to your advantage, you need to provide a Meta Title and Meta Description for your posts and pages. You may also use its advanced settings if you wish.

Yet Another Related Post
This plugin gives a list of posts related to the one displayed on the blog page where the reader is currently at. This is a good way of encouraging them to click on other posts on your site that might interest them. You can find this list at the bottom of each article.

Digg Digg
This is the plugin that will allow you to post social icons on each of your blog posts. Being a floating style, it lets your readers easily share your post with social media sites such as Twitter without having to scroll up back to the top of your write up.

WP Stats
This plugin lets you have simple and accurate stats without putting more load on the server. With this plugin, you can gather information on your page views, the most popular posts and pages, where traffic is coming from and what people click through when they leave your site. What makes this easy to use is it adds a link to your dashboard so you can see the stats is just one page.

These are only the first seven plugins that work wonders for any WordPress blog. I’ll be sharing more in another article so bookmark this page to find out when our next WordPress plugin article will be shared.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/seven-must-have-wordpress-plugins-you-need-to-be-using-4456771.html

About the Author

Wendy Moore is a sought-after speaker, author and educator who is passionate about showing business owners and entrepreneurs how to better understand the internet to build a highly responsive, targeted list of clients specific to their business niche.

To receive your FREE. Special Report, “How to Build a Customer List and Get Clients” plus subscribe to receive our weekly how-to articles to expand your online internet toolkit, visit www.savvywebwomen.com.

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How Google segments the contents of a web page

Graham Jones — Tue, 03 May 2011 19:44:11 +0000

Last week, Google was granted a patent that describes how Google might segment the content of a web page. Depending on the location of the content, a web page will get higher or lower rankings.

Why is it important to segment a web page into different parts?

The average web page consists of several parts: a header, a footer, the website navigation, the main content, ads, etc.

Not all parts of the page are equally important. To determine the position of a web page in the search results, text that appears in the main content of a web page is more important than text that appears in the footer or in ads.

How does Google analyze the content of a web page?

According to the patent text, Google looks at the HTML of the page. Google also tries to simulate the display of a web page in a web browser to understand the location and the purpose of different parts of the page.

What exactly does Google analyze in the different parts of a web page?

The patent lists several “modules” that are used to analyze a web page:

1. Link analysis

Links found in different semantically distinct regions may be assigned different weights. That means that the influence of a link in the main part of a web page is probably higher than the influence of a link in the footer.

2. Text analysis

The importance of text on a web page is rated by location. For example, if a keyword appears in the main content area of a web page or in the title, then this page will rank higher than a page that has the keyword in the footer.

3. Image captioning

Text found near an image is more relevant to the image than text further away from it. This module can be used to rank a picture in image search.

4. Snippet construction

Google usually does not use the meta description tag for the snippet that is displayed on the search result page. According to the patent, Google creates the snippet based on the text in the web page section that is the most relevant to the keyword.

If you want to get high rankings on Google, you must make sure that your web pages contain the right keywords in the right elements of your web pages. IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer analyzes all elements of your web page and it will tell you how you have to change them so that your website gets top 10 rankings for your keywords.

Copyright Axandra.com – Web site promotion software

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What if my competitor is cheating at SEO?

Searh Engine Guide — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 19:26:41 +0000

by Mike Moran

It’s a question that comes up all the time, but there hasn’t been a good answer to it. There are painstaking ways that you can analyze your competitor’s Web site for signs of elementary cheating, such as hidden text, keyword stuffing, and other simple forms of search spam, but don’t bother. The search engines do a reasonably good job of sniffing those out themselves nowadays. But what about the big time search spammer? What about someone who has set up an elaborate network of linking sites all designed to rank his site higher and your site lower? How can you catch someone like that in the act of cheating at SEO? If it is your competitor engaging in such tricks, it is a burning question.

My friend Ted Ulle pointed me to an announcement last month that might help answer that question, where a partnership was announced between search tool vendor BrightEdge and the search engine blekko to combat search spam.

Image via Wikipedia

Not many details emerged from that press release, so we’ll have to wait and see if this is real progress, but it is a start. I can think of several things that such a tool might be able to do:

Identify link farms. If blekko can use link analysis techniques to spot unusual link patterns coming from sites that don’t make sense, they can alert you as to what your competitor is doing. They might not be able to algorithmically detect a sure spamming incident, but they might be able to identify something for you to analyze on your own.
Identify paid link manipulation. Just as with link farms, competitors who buy links masquerading as free links violate the search engines’ rules and are benefiting from higher rankings if undiscovered. If blekko can clue you in to suspicious patterns, you might find that where there is smoke, there is fire.
Uncovering negative SEO. You might be guessing that the search engines themselves work very hard to uncover the first two abuses, which leads to an even more insidious trick. What if your competitor is setting up these spammy techniques, but pointing them at your site to get you penalized? It happens, and blekko might be able to uncover suspicious patterns to alert you.

If you’re thinking to yourself, don’t Google and Bing try to catch all of these things? Yes, they do. But they are doing it with algorithms only—the cases that are most egregious are the only ones that get spit out for human analysts to review. They can’t look at everything and the algorithms are not foolproof. If blekko’s algorithms are any good, the human analysis of these possible spam problems can be “outsourced” to people willing to do it for free.

It is yet to be seen exactly what BrightEdge has implemented here and just how magical the blekko algorithms are at uncovering search shenanigans. And it isn’t clear how Google and Bing will respond when provided reports on bad behavior. It’s possible that they will take them seriously and investigate, but it’s equally likely that so many bogus reports could be generated by people using such a tool that they will be largely ignored. You can imagine a situation where anyone runs a check and then send whatever is spit out to Google, rather than using that as a jumping off point for real investigation.

If we marketers use these tools to cry wolf, don’t be surprised if Google and Bing quickly ignore our cries. That would be a real shame, to me, because I think this is a great idea. It’s the social approach to spam. Give people the tools to police their competitors and there is a more level playing field for everyone.

Regardless, I will be quite interested in what is delivered here. I’d love it if those who start using the tool would post their experiences here. And if anyone has deeper information than the intriguing press release, please post that, too. I can’t help but think that this is a new front in the war on spam that Google and Bing overlooked: crowdsourcing. We’ll see if it works.

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How to get 50% more customers with a simple change

Graham Jones — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 21:58:33 +0000

Would you say “no thanks” if someone offered you an easy way to get 50% more visitors to your website? Probably not. However, that’s exactly what most webmasters are doing. There’s a simple thing that you can do to drive many more visitors to your site.

The Internet is not just Google

Last week, research company Experian Hitwise published the search engine market shares for March 2011. Google accounted for 64.42 percent of all U.S. searches, Bing-powered search comprised 30.01 percent of searches for the month.

Most webmasters focus on Google and ignore all other search engines when it comes to search engine optimization. Ignoring Bing is a mistake. A market share of 30% is huge and there are several reasons why you should include Bing in your SEO activities.

Three reasons why it makes sense to optimize your website for Bing

1. There’s less competition on Bing

Most webmasters concentrate on Google. It is easier to get high rankings on Bing because fewer people compete aggressively for the same keywords.

2. Millions of searchers will find your site

As mentioned above, Bing currently has a market share of 30%. That’s just half of the market share that Google has but that’s still millions of people who might be interested in your website.

If you have just focused on Google then you can increase the number of website visitors by 50% just by adding Bing to your search engine optimization activities.

3. Bing searches deliver more click-throughs

According to the Hitwise data, Bing powered search engines achieved the highest success rate in March 2011. More than 80 percent of searches executed resulted in a visit to a website.

Google achieved a success rate of 66 percent. It might be that the search results snippets in Bing are more attractive or the results in Bing are simply more relevant.

How to optimize your website for Bing

Google and Bing return different websites for the same search query. That means that they use different ranking algorithms and that it is difficult to optimize the same page for both Google and Bing.

If you want to get the best possible results, optimize some pages of your website for Google and other pages of your website for Bing. The more pages of your website you optimize, the better.

Use IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer to get detailed instructions on how to optimize your web pages for Bing. IBP works with Bing.com, Bing.co.uk, Bing.com.au, Bing.de and many other local Bing variations. Of course, IBP also helps you to optimize your web pages for Google.com and many local Google variations.

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Google Rank Checker – find out where your website ranks on Google

Niki Pilkington — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 20:32:38 +0000

We’ve been working on it for a while, and there have been a fair few headaches but at last it’s here

Google Rank / Position Checker

The Google Rank Checker checks your position in Google, Bing and Yahoo. Find out whether your SEO is working, what keyphrases you’re ranking for, and how to get help if you’re not!

Things to note

The Google Rank Checker checks the .com versions of the search engines
It checks your position using the API of each search engine
It checks your ranking as if it were someone NOT LOGGED IN TO YOUR GOOGLE ACCOUNT
If you search manually while logged into a Google account, you may see different results
It’s FREE, which means support is minimal, although I’m always happy to help if you catch me on Twitter @nikkipilkington or by email to nikki@nikkipilkington.com
Yes, there’s a sales message once the report has run – did I mention it was free?
You can have the report sent to your email once it has run
I’m working on allowing people to sign up to have the report sent every week – this will also be FREE
It’s free

Nip over to the Google Rank Checker now!

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Dear Client: I Love You, But Will You PLEASE Stop Obsessing Over Your Search Engine Rankings?

Searh Engine Guide — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 19:59:05 +0000

by Stoney deGeyter

Dear Client:

I love you. I really do! But please, for the love of all that is good and holy, will you stop obsessing over search engine rankings?

I get it, you hired me to perform Search Engine Optimization on your website. Why do we optimize for search engines? For rankings, right? Well, no, not anymore. It’s been almost a decade since the SEO industry began it’s turn toward a fuller website marking experience, looking beyond search engine rankings as a metric of success, and instead looking at business growth, conversion rates, and return on investment.

Rankings are a traffic delivery mechanism. Traffic can be hit or miss. Not all traffic is targeted. We see it all the time, clients like you are looking for rankings for your industry terms. But, quite often the time and effort needed to rank these favorite phrases holds no value compared to the conversions it delivers. That means, the ROI just isn’t there.

Instead of focusing on these “pet” terms, and potentially wasting thousands of dollars in the process, I could be focused on building exposure through some other relevant terms that have a better conversion rate and give you a much higher return on investment.

I understand where you’re coming from: You need rankings to get traffic, and you need traffic to get conversions. But, would you be happy if I could help you get more traffic and conversions, even if your favorite keywords were not ranking? Would you trust me if I told you that not all the keywords you care about are valuable?

I hope you hear what I’m saying. I totally understand that you need exposure on the search engines to get the traffic and the conversions you need. But, rankings for certain high-traffic, low value keywords isn’t going to give you both. Oh, you’ll get traffic, but you’ll see your conversion rates plummet.

My question to you is, who will you blame when you see conversion rates go down? Is it the design team, the usability team, the marketing team, the SEO team? It may not be anybody’s fault, except that you’re ranking well for very poor converting keywords.

Finding Keywords that Deliver

In an ideal world, EVERY industry related keyword would bring you quality, converting traffic. But, a few minutes looking at the keyword research data will tell you otherwise. Every industry has thousands of terms that are not relevant for any particular site within that very industry. It’s true for your competitors, just as it’s true for you.

Good optimization is all about finding the right keywords. Not just industry terms, but terms which match the searcher’s intent for the product, service, or information you offer. Sometimes the searcher’s intent is clear in the search phrase. Many times, it’s not. If the intent isn’t clear, you can do two things: Guess or test.

Guessing at the intent means you either assume it is a valuable keyword or it isn’t. In SEO, this can be a huge gamble. Guess wrong, either way, and you are either potentially wasting a ton of time, or you’re losing out on a lot of potential conversions.

The better option is to test. The best way to do that is via PPC. Throw up some ads using your testing keywords, and see what happens. If the keyword converts at a rate comparable to other keywords, then you have yourself a winner. If not, you just saved yourself from wasting a bunch of resources on optimizing a loser.

Rankings Don’t Always Matter

If you know all your keywords are winners, you still have to be careful about measuring rankings over results. There is a lot more to a good conversion than ranking for your best terms.

Did you know that in some circumstances you can actually get more traffic by ranking lower in the results? It happens all the time. Why? Because your title and description tag are written to drive the click and conversion more so than to get rankings.

You can tweak your title to improve clicks and conversions, and that may cost yourself some ranking positions. But, if you tweak it for rankings, you may lose both clicks and conversions. It’s not always win/lose, sometimes you can win-win, but the better win is the conversion.

Yes, We Know a Thing or Two About Conversions

Searcher expectations play a significant role in the ability of your site to convert visitors to customers. Quite frequently, you, dear client, have rejected our usability recommendations. I know, you just want rankings, what do we know about usability? Well, quite a bit, actually.

Remember earlier when I said SEO has moved into online marketing rather than just rankings? Well, this is what we mean. We understand that, for what you’re paying us, if you have a bunch of top rankings and no business, we’d lose you as a client. You can’t sustain a business that doesn’t grow. So it’s in our best interest to help you grow your business.

That means, we have to look beyond search engine rankings. Our goal is to help you deliver the most qualified traffic, and make sure that it isn’t wasted. If you have a qualified lead, your ability to convert that lead is only as good as how good your sales person (or website) is. Well, we don’t just bring people to your door, we want to help you sell them as well.

That means we have to know a thing or two about website usability. This goes hand-in-hand with SEO. We can optimize a page for certain keywords, and we can get that page to rank, but we also have to make sure that the page delivers the message required for that visitor. Put simply, we have to make sure the optimization meets the visitor’s expectations!

Did you know that the search engines know when someone spends time on your site or quickly exits and goes back to the search pages? You can bet that this data is important to them. If too many people are “bouncing” off your site and choosing another in the search results, this is an indicator that the site did not meet their expectations. This means, no matter how well optimized and ranked, the page is a dud and will be very difficult to rank.

Not only did the visitor not find what they wanted on that page, but they weren’t even interested in looking further on your site. That’s bad news.

We Want You To Succeed

It all comes down to this: Why pay us to drive 10,000 visitors to your site if you are only able to convert .05%? Wouldn’t it be more lucrative to drive only 5,000 visitors while improving your conversion rate to 3%?

Absolutely!

The goal is to increase conversion rates AND traffic. But, more often than not, improving your conversion rates will produce the better ROI. That doesn’t mean you ignore search engine rankings, but it does mean that you make sure that you’re not just looking at rankings as the end game result.

Rankings are a great way to generate traffic, and they should not be ignored. But, they also should not be obsessed over. It’s time to start looking at the bigger picture. Look beyond which keyword is ranking where and dive into your analytics to find out where your conversions are coming from and what you can do to improve those.

That may mean focusing on some new keywords. That may mean increasing rankings for others. That also may mean ignoring the very keywords that you’re obsessing over.

Search engine rankings are, and always will be, important. Though, with social, local, and personalized results being mixed in, the value of a ranking has been greatly diminished. Just because you see a keyword ranking great, doesn’t mean your audience is.

Which is just yet another reason why you should stop obsessing over rankings and start obsessing with us over your business’ online success!

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Google changes its search methods so often businesses can’t keep up

Graham Jones — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 20:20:04 +0000

Your website needs Google. True, you can get traffic using all sorts of other methods – like offline marketing, emails, links on other sites and so on – but Google does bring significant numbers of visitors to websites. The whole notion of “search engine optimisation” centres around getting your website to “number one on Google”. It is a fruitless task, to be honest, because being “number one” is worthless if people do not then engage with your website and buy something or recommend you. Conversion rates are much more important than being at the top of the list, yet many business owners are still focused on that dream, often being pushed that way by the heavy promotion of SEO companies.

But in an interview with AFP, the French national news agency, a senior executive from Google has revealed two important facts for website owners. Scott Huffman, who heads the Search Evaluation Team at Google, said that in the past year Google made 500 changes to its algorithm from its list of 6,000 internally derived suggestions. He added that typically, the Google search algorithm gets changed twice a day.

In addition, Mr Huffman revealed that what Google was trying to do was understand the context of what we type into a search engine. The example he gave was people typing in the single word “Japan” in the past few weeks. Many of those people would have been trying to find out information about the earthquake or tsunami and would not just be people thinking about holidays or the history of the nation. In other words, Google takes into account what else is going on in the world at any particular moment in time so it can contextualise the search phrases we type.

So, let’s imagine you pay a search marketing specialist to get you to the top of Google. They spend three weeks doing the job for you and show you that you are at the coveted top of the shop position for your target keywords. But in the three weeks since they started your SEO project, Google will have moved the goalposts around 60 times. That’s great news for SEO companies, because, things will slide, the competition will get in on the act and hey-presto you need your SEO doing all over again. Once on the SEO treadmill you can’t get off.

But take another look at what Google are saying in this interview with AFP. “People are not just expecting a search engine to return every document that has most of the words typed in a query box,” said Mr Huffman. In other words, Google’s algorithm team is not adjusting things to match specific keyword searches (which much of SEO is focused on). Instead, it is concentrating all of its work on context.

And how does Google judge context? Timing of a search query is important, where it is coming from is also a consideration – but in returning the results what else is on the site is a factor. What Mr Huffman’s team is focusing on is ranking quality sites that demonstrate they fit the context. High content sites will win in the Google world.

So how does Google recommend you do that? Well, check their Webmaster Help and you fill find a clear answer – prepare web pages for people, not search engines.Just write loads of stuff for human beings, all on one subject area and your site will do well – no matter how Google fiddles with its mathematics.

No matter what the changes Google makes to its algorithm, or how often, that advice will always work. Write for people, write regularly and write well and your website will always satisfy the ever changing algorithm. And that is precisely what the best SEO companies will tell you – if you company says anything different, try another firm.

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Google has released a major ranking algorithm update

Graham Jones — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 17:02:37 +0000

Last week, Google released one of the biggest ranking algorithms updates of the last months. The change noticeably impacts 11.8% of all queries on Google. How does this affect the rankings of your website on Google?

What has Google changed?

Google has announced that they made a major change in their ranking algorithm:

“We launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking [...] This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.

At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

This is an addition to the scraper spam update that Google released earlier this month.

This is a noticeable update that affects about 12% of all queries and the search result pages can change a lot:

“We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. [...] It is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.”

Which websites will be affected by this update?

Although Google does not officially confirm it, this algorithm update tries to remove so-called content-farms from the search results. Content farms are websites that invest as little time and money as possible to generate a large amount of content created by authors who are usually not familiar with the topic they write about.

Content farms try to get visitors through high rankings for as many different keywords as possible. These visitors should click on the ads that are displayed on the content farm sites.

It seems like websites such as ezinearticles.com, hubpages.com, articlesbase.com, findarticles.com and answerbag.com have lost thousands of high rankings.

How will this change affect your own website?

Google’s anti-spam team is serious about eliminating spam from the search results. They announced that the are working on “many more updates that we believe will substantially improve the quality of the pages in our results“.

If you have used any shady tactics to improve the position of your website on Google, you should stop this right now! It’s very risky to use dubious methods on Google.

If you don’t want to risk your online business, use search engine optimization methods that are safe to use with Google.

Google announced that the new algorithm will be available in the U.S. only at this time. Other countries will get the new algorithm within the next months.

Copyright Axandra.com – Web site promotion software

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The World Does Not Begin and End With SEO

RSSFeed — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 21:15:33 +0000

by Jennifer Laycock

Ever notice how when someone finds a solution to a problem they’re having, it suddenly becomes the solution to everyone else’s problem as well? People who love their chiropractor tell you how much seeing one would help your sore back/sinus problem/shin splints/etc. People who have lost and kept weight off with a specific diet suggest how well it will work for you. People who experience success trying a marketing tactic tell you what a difference it will make for your company if you do it too.

This is fine and dandy. It’s called word of mouth and it’s a very effective way to influence decisions. The problem comes when the love of the solution supersedes the common sense needed to apply it properly. That chiropractor likely isn’t going to fix your blocked heart valve and that special diet probably won’t heal your broken ankle. In the same way, we need to remember as search engine marketers that just because something can help search results doesn’t make it a good mainstream marketing strategy.

Debra Mastaler pinged me this morning to point out a post that’s a good demonstration of a strategic search marketing ideas being pushed past the point of common sense. In a post over at SEOMoz, Rand Fishkin encourages marketers to replace the standard “visit us at domain.com” with “search for “company name” on Google” in their offline ads. His reasoning is that personalized search has now become the default option on engines like Google and driving consumers to the engine to search for and click on your listing is a good way to increase your relevancy in Google’s eyes so you’ll stand a better chance of ranking for other searches later.

Here’s how it would work…

Superbowl Ad – A big company, let’s say Coke runs a Superbowl ad and closes it with “visit www.google.com and search for “Coke,” instead of simply giving consumers the company’s URL.
Consumer Action – Joe Soda drinks the kool-aid…er, I mean cola…and heads to Google after the game. He searches for Coke, which will clearly pop up www.coke.com as a top result, clicks it and visits the site.
Search Engine Action – Google makes note that Joe Soda clicked through to the coke.com domain and increases the relevancy of that domain for Joe Soda’s future searches.
Consumer Action – Joe Soda is thirsty, but he’s tired of all those calories. He heads back to Google to find a new alternative and searches for “no calorie cola made with Splenda.” The hope here is that the past search will increase the relevancy for Coke.com enough to increase it’s chances of ranking well for that related search.

Now that’s fine and dandy in theory and I don’t doubt at all that there may be some positive impact by getting a bunch of people to search for and click on your domain name.

But Here’s the Big Gaping Hole in this Theory

You’ve just increased the barrier for your consumer and you’ve done it to benefit your own search rankings.

What I mean by that is you’ve made the consumer take an extra step to find your site and your product. You could have simply told them to visit you at www.coke.com but no, you got greedy. You knew it would be a benefit to your company’s search rankings to make them take that extra step to actually FIND you. It has nothing to do with what’s best or easy or convenient for the consumer, it has everything to do with your search engine optimization efforts.

Now let’s take a little detour into conversion optimization 101.

Less steps = more success.

It’s a very simple equation. Let’s look at it again…

Less steps = more success.

That’s right folks, the LESS things you ask a customer to do, the more likely they are to do it.

Now clearly we live in an enlightened enough world that most people can guess www.coke.com even if Coke is brazen enough to hide that info and direct users to go run a search instead. But what if you aren’t a big brand name like Coke? What if you’re a little beauty salon called Curl Up and Dye in Wisconsin? Are you really going to tell your customers to go and search for you in your TV, radio and newspaper ads? Heck no, you’re going to give them your URL and phone number to make it as easy as possible for them to find you. Otherwise, they’re going to go find someone else.

Optimize Your Own Dang Site

It’s not the job of consumers to optimize our web sites. It’s not their job to take on MORE work in their daily activities so we stand a better chance of showing up for related searches down the road. Now I’m not saying there aren’t innovative ways to impact these things. A great example of this is a comment on the original post saying they’ve sent out direct mail pieces with specific instructions to search for a discount. This gives the customer something of value in exchange for their extra work and still offers the benefits of the original idea.

The problem I see repeatedly is a severe case of cranial rectal inversion. Our industry spends so much time talking algorithms and social sites and deep links and site wide links and blah blah blah that we forget to see things from the perspective of the everyday consumer. The average American watching the Superbowl doesn’t have the Google toolbar installed. They have no idea what Google Chrome or Google Wave are and they don’t know personalized search results are even being delivered to them. They just want to get to the information they want and need the fastest way possible. They don’t know, nor do they care, about the inner workings or latest and greatest features offered in the world of search.

So whether you’re part of the industry or you’re a small business owner, I’d ask you to remember to place common sense at the top of your marketing strategy arsenal. Stop thinking about what will benefit you or your rankings and start asking yourself in all honesty if this approach is going to benefit your users. If the answer is no, you need to move on to a new idea.

This post was generated by an RSS Feed from Search Engine GuideYou may also like to read:

The World Does Not Begin and End With SEO is a post from: Build Me A Fab Website