Step Wice SEO

Let’s say you want a great car wash, one that gets up close and personal with your car’s curves and addresses its individual problem areas.

You wouldn’t trust a gas station car wash-you’d do it yourself! Likewise, the SEO plan in this book presents a method that can be applied to a wide range of SEO efforts.

But you have to customize it for your particular business and website. This article gives you a great head start.

It’s Your SEO Plan
As you read this article, you may have had one of two reactions. Maybe you thought, “Great! A quick and easy SEO plan that I can follow!” Or maybe you thought, “Uh-oh! An oversimplified approach to something complex.”

Both of these reactions are perfectly reasonable. A simple approach is important, but you should be wary of anything that promises a one-size-fits-all SEO solution.

So let’s make one thing clear: there’s nothing cookie Cutter about your SEO plan. And since nobody knows your organization and website like you do, guess who’s in charge of the fine-tuning?) You!

Small and large companies, brick-and-mortars, nonprofits, and bloggers-each type has its own set of needs, advantages, and challenges.

Your assignment: Identify which categories your company is in, read our tips and guidelines for those categories, and think about how you can apply the customization to your own SEO efforts.

This is a “check all that apply” chapter-your company may fall into multiple categories. For example, let’s say you run an independent toy store in Des Moines, Iowa.

You would want to read at least three of the categories in this article: brick-and-mortar, B2C, and small organization.

If you’re the world leader in granulators for the plastics industry, you’d want to read B2B and large organization.

Read what applies to you, but also consider reading what may not seem to. After all, part of being an SEO expert is knowing the breadth of what the Web offers.

You never know where you might find something interesting and useful for your own site!

B2B
B2B sites run the gamut from the little guys selling restaurant-grade deli slicers to the huge corporation selling enterprise-level software and services.

Large and small B2Bs have a lot in common when it comes to the advantages and challenges of SEO.

Advantage: Niche Target Audience Because your business depends on it, you probably already know your customer well.

Your customer fits into a particular niche: restaurant owner, plant manager, candlestick maker, and so on.

While your customers may not all hang out at the same bar after work, it’s a good bet that they’re frequenting some of the same websites.

And if you don’t know what these sites are, it only takes a little bit of time and creative thought to find them.

If you already know what magazines your customer; subscribe to, what trade shows they attend, and what organizations they belong to, you’re well on your way to finding analogous sites on the Web that speak to them.

Challenge: Difficulty Gaining Links You may have heard that getting relevant, high-quality links, to your website is an important SEO endeavor, because it can improve your ranks, and traffic.

This is going to be a challenge for you. You’re not a big entertainment site or a fun blog with a cult following, and unless you’re a giant in your industry, your activities are not automatically newsworthy.

While you may have the respect of your customers, building a self-sustaining “buzz” is not the kind of thing that comes easily to a B2B website.

After all, your site probably isn’t built for buzz; chances are you’re offering straight-up product information, corporate bios, and white papers.

You’ll need to move forward with a view toward increasing your site’s linkability with noncommercial content.

Advantage: High-Value Conversions SEO is very appealing to B2Bs, for a good reason. Because each new customer or lead is very valuable to your business, your SEO campaign can make a quick and measurable difference to your bottom line by bringing in just a few conversions.

Don’t skimp on tracking-you’ll want your SEO campaign to get credit for these high-value conversions.

Challenge: A Slow SEO Life Cycle You know why scientists love that little fruit fly called drosophila:

The reason is that the drosophila has such a short life span that many generations of them can be studied in a relatively short amount of time.

In a similar way, an SEO campaign can be studied and improved in a relatively short amount of time if you have lots and lots of visitors coming through and either converting or not.

For a B2B, however, this is probably not the case. You will have a smaller, more targeted audience and will likely have a longer conversion life cycle.

That means less information, and a slower evolution, for your ongoing SEO campaign.
Advantage: Text-Heavy Content Got FAQs? How about product specifications and mission statements?

As a B2B, you probably have lots of text on your site, which the search engines love. While some site owners will be scratching their heads looking for ways to fit text into their design, you will probably have tons of text on which to focus your optimization efforts.

And if not, you may have marketing materials such as white papers and PDFs ready for quick and easy appropriation onto your site.

B2C
B2C is such a huge category that we almost hesitate to lump you all together. B2C ranges from big flower vendors making a killing on Mother’s Day to one-person operations selling homemade soaps.

You may have a local, national, or international customer base, and you may have anything from a phone number or a Yahoo! store to a complex, media-rich e-commerce experience.

However, there are some key elements that you have in common when you perform SEO. (Don’t worry about seeing so many, challenges here. You can look for advantages in the other category or categories that apply to you.)

Challenge: Less-Web-Savvy Audience The people who are searching for your product or service may not be as knowledgeable about the Web as you are, and certainly not as knowledgeable as you hope they are.

So, even though the Web is chock full of niche shopping sites that are worth looking into, it makes sense to give your attention first to how your site looks in the search engine mainstays: Google, AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves).

And, while you may have the benefit of marketing research and brand differentiation, your potential audience may be frustratingly unaware of your preferred labels for your own product or service.

Are you selling “the finest micro-techno-fiber all-weather apparel”? That’s great, but your general user base is probably- searching for “blue raincoats.”

In addition, they may be misspelling Your product or-the borror-your brand name. Careful keyword research can help you tremendously.

Challenge: Unexpected Search Competition As your audience is potentially very large and diverse, so too is your competition. We mean your search competition, of course.

You may know exactly who your top five competitors are in the “real world,” but when you get down to identifying your top-priority keywords in your SEO plan, you’re likely to be amazed by the sites that are clogging up the top ranks.

They might be competitors you’ve never heard of, or they might be individual consumers talking about how much they hate your products.

Or, as we often see, they may not be related to your industry at all. Did you know there’s a band called “The Blue Raincoats”?

Well, there is, and last we checked, it had the top nine spots in Google for the term “blue raincoats.”

Challenge: Page View Conversions If, like many B2C websites, your measure of conversion is a page view-for example, if you’re using traffic data to sell ad space on your site, or if your main goal is brand awareness-get ready for an exciting ride.

Simply going by the traffic numbers can have you shouting from the top of the parking garage one day and weeping into your latte the next.

This next bit of advice may be hard for a slick up-and-comer like you to swallow, but we’re telling you because we like you: Accept that you have less control than you think you do.

The Google gods are fickle. An algorithm change, or a search engine marriage or divorce, may be all it takes to sink your traffic.

Large Organization
If you’re about to embark on SEO for your large organization, brace yourself, this is going to sting a little:

In fact, your SEO campaign is likely to be challenged by your bulk, both in terms of your website and your organizational structure.

Challenge: Internal Bureaucracy From an organizational perspective, your SEO challenges are often a result of “too much.”

Too much in that your site is likely to be run by committee: designers, IT department, copywriters, and coders not to mention the executives who, with a single comment, can have you all scrambling in different directions.

We know how pressed you are for time, how many different people in your organization are all putting their dirty fingers in the pie that is your website, and we know what a struggle it can be to get any changes made on your site.

Here are some very common SEO tasks; see if you can get through this list without cringing about how many individuals you’ll need to complete them:

• Convert graphics to HTML text.

• Edit elements of the HTML code on every page of the site.

• Remove or reduce the use of Flash.

• Create a specialized text file called robots.txt and have it placed in the root directory of the site.

• Set up a web page redirect.

• Rewrite page text to reflect more commonly searched terms.

The takeaway here is that you’ll be putting a lot of extra time into internal communication and organization.

You need to know your team and get them in your corner if you want to succeed at SEO. In other words: Get your team on board.

Challenge: Brand Maintenance Another “too much” challenge for you lies in the need to keep your brand current.

You have probably – already witnessed several major changes to your site, steered either by real market forces or by the perceptions of your marketing department.

May be you have a redesign every six months, frequent new products or product updates, or new branding guidelines to implement.

Structurally, you may also have multiple subdomains, more than one URL leading to your home page, and lots of fragmented bits of old version, of your site floating around out there.

(Think you don’t, Cheek again. We can honestly say we haven’t met one large website that didn’t have something old and out-of-date live and available on the search engines.)

Maybe you have all of the above, multiple times over, because you have different reams responsible for different portions of your website.

Because of all these factors, the large organization has a special need to keep its “calling cards” on the Web consistent with the current state of its site.

Cleaning up old and dead links and making sure your listings talk about your current products and services should be two of your highest priorities.

Advantage: Budget and Existing Infrastructure Of course, “too much” works to your advantage too.

You may have a larger budget, which means that you can probably afford to buy some of the many helpful tracking and keyword tools that we will suggest in this book.

And your company probably has existing marketing data about your customers, their behaviors and habits, and their budgets, which your SEO campaign can tap into.

Advantage: Lots of Landing Pages Large sites often have a wealth of opportunities for landing pages.

Go deep, or more appropriately, go shallow-wide: think beyond your home page and main section pages when determining which pages to optimize.

This shallow-wide approach-driving site visitors to a large number of unique pages on your site-can help you compensate for some of the other challenges we’ve discussed.

Challenge: Pay-per-Click Pitfalls Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns can help you accomplish your shallow-wide goals, and your average PPC campaign is much cheaper on a per-visit basis than any form of offline marketing.

But PPC campaigns for large organizations have the potential to be large and unwieldy. Even with the built-in management tools that make your PPC campaign a fairly user-friendly, experience, the sheer magnitude of a hundred plus or thousand-plus keyword campaign can be very, time-consuming.

PPC campaigns are an unlikely mix of the creative (word choice, campaign strategy) and the tedious (daily budget caps, maximum click price).

The danger for the large company is that it’s very easy to shift your attention away from the important details such as clarity of message and appropriateness of keyword choice and get distracted by the data.

Advantage: PPC Assistance Luckily, your larger budget may qualify you for helpful hand-holding services directly from the PPC engines-services where actual humans talk to you and manage the more tedious aspects of your accounts.

These services are worth looking into, but always remember: nobody knows your company and brand like you do!

Whether you manage the campaign yourself or hire someone else to do it, make sure someone with marketing sense and excellent writing skills is keeping an eye on it.

Advantage: Making News Last but not least, being large might mean that just about everything you do is automatically newsworthy-which translates into incoming links on the Web. That’s great news for your SEO potential!

Small Organization
Did you read the section about the large organizations and find yourself feeling a bit envious of all that money and manpower?

Don’t be. SEO can be the field-leveler you need to compete with larger companies, whereas competition in offline advertising venues would be much too expensive for you.

And, being smaller, your team, your site-and your SEO campaign-can benefit from a more centralized approach.

Advantage: Less Bureaucracy A busy small organization is often too tapped for resources to work on bettering its own marketing message or position-everybody else’s project seems to come first.

Your company doesn’t have room for large teams of marketing writers and strategists. So you may be the one person who is the gatekeeper for all of these activities.

Sure, it’s more work for you, but on the positive side, it means you won’t have to go through a huge bureaucracy every time you need to change your website. You have the power to make a real difference.

Challenge: Lack of Time If your business is doing well; your biggest SEO challenge is going to be a shortage of time.

You might even be sweating out the notion of finding your hour a day for SEO tasks. The great news is, SEO gives back what you put into it.

Advantage: A Friendlier Reception For any site, asking other sites for links is one of those lower-return tasks: very time-consuming, unpredictable results.

But being small can give you a real advantage in the area of “personal touch.” Do you have a really cool new product: Are You offering a discount for a particular group?

Tell a blogger who might be interested in telling the world. Or you may want to reach out to satisfied customers who have websites.

Even though link building might not be on the hot burner, if you chip away at this activity, you can probably increase your inbound links in a meaningful way.

Challenge: Small Budget Your time is right, and your budget is modest. Probably the smartest investment you can make, in our opinion, is a pay-per-click campaign.
Surprised? It actually makes a lot of sense. If you manage it closely, your PPC campaign gives you almost-instant feedback.

Is your message compelling enough? Are you targeting viable keywords? Is your conversion page doing its job?

With PPC, you can tweak to your heart’s content for pennies on the dollar compared to other advertising methods.

Advantage: Tools to Level the Playing Field Of course you know your product or service inside and out, and your customers may seem like close, personal friends.

But you might not be very well versed in your customers’ Web habits and searching behavior.

You may have little or no actual experience in marketing. Luckily, you don’t need to be a pro-or a big business-to excel in SEO.

You are big business for the search engines, and therefore, keyword research tools, directory listings, traffic analysis software, and the like are all often within the price range of the small business.

Even with a small budget, you can pick up an advantage by studying your competitors. Get ideas and insight from their websites and PPC campaigns, and use their resources to your best advantage!

You may get as much out of your do-it-yourself competitive analysis as you would get from an expensive marketing study.

If you’ve got the time and some natural curiosity, it doesn’t cost you anything to look at the companies ranking in the top 10 for your desired keywords and figure out what they’re doing right.

Advantage: Starting from Zero It may be that you have given no thought to SEO. Don’t let that discourage you!

But, think carefully about your plan of attack. With a small staff, it is possible to go from famine to feast more quickly than you may be comfortable with.

So, if each conversion on your site creates work for you, you may want to take it slowly.

Challenge: Seductive Quick-and-Dirty SEO Schemes Don’t be tempted, as some smaller businesses are, to put your money or energy into quickie link schemes or questionable practices such as cloaking (showing the search engines one page while showing your users another)

Or creating doorway pages (pages that have no real content and just exist to link to another page), which are likely to backfire.

Please, remember that the message on your site is what will bring you conversions. If your pages are stuffed with keywords and filled with awkward text aimed at getting rankings, your business is likely to suffer in the long run.

Keep your SEO campaign squeaky- clean!

Brick-and-Mortar
If you had the chance to put one thing in front of your customers, you’d probably give them your street address, not your web address, and that’s the way it should be.

Your site plays second fiddle to your day-to-day business. After all, the best way to turn browsers into customers is to get them to walk through your door.

You may not even be sure why you have a website, except that everyone else is doing it. So let’s talk about how to make your site do its job of playing the supporting role.

Advantage: An Achievable Goal If  you’re not selling your product online, then the best use of your site is probably to help people find your physical location.

Your SEO campaign begins with a simple goal: you want to be found when your company name is entered in the search engines.

You’ll focus your SEO campaign on variations of your business name and location. You’re likely to get the results you are hoping for because you won’t run up against too much competition for such tightly targeted keywords.

Advantage: Local Search And speaking of location, welcome to one of the hottest areas of SEO today: local search. It picks up where the local Yellow Pages left off in the last century.

Who wants to waste time slogging through nationwide search results when you’re looking for the sandwich shop around the corner?

If you’re a mechanic in Glendale, California, you can put yourself directly in front of someone searching for “mechanic Glendale CA.”

Talk about a targeted audience! But there are a couple of things to keep in mind: First, people using local search are probably more search savvy than your average Web user.

That’s because local search is still relatively new, and it takes a while for the rank and file to adopt new search technology.

Second, local search is changing fast, so you’ll need to stay on top of it. When you implement your monthly SEO reporting, (we’ll show you how in Part III) you may want to use some of it to keep track of shape-shifting results and to check the search-related blogs for developments in local search.
 

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