Search Marketing Answers

One of the more challenging aspects of building your web site’s search engine ranking is the process of obtaining enough links back to your site that Google and the other top search engines deem valuable.

Quality vs. Quantity

The more high quality links back to your site from other sites, the more your site is considered important, authoritative, and relevant. Why does it matter how many other people link back to my site? Well let’s say you have a site that has the exact same quality content as your biggest competitor, they were built around the same time, and they’ve both got world class SEO implemented throughout, using identical keyword phrases in all the right ways - how is Google supposed to determine whether your site is more relevant then your competitors?

They do it by looking to see the links back - if there are 1,000 web sites that have links coming back to your competitor’s site but only five coming back to yours, Google sees this as an indication that more people consider your competitor’s site as important and valuable, thus more relevant to someone searching for what you offer.

Even though back-links are not the number one most important criteria for quality results in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), they can have so much weight when achieved properly that some of the on-site SEO work you might have otherwise needed to perform becomes less important.

Unfortunately, it can often take years and countless hours finding ways to get other web site owners to provide a link back to your site. Or your competitor might have an “in” with a really popular web site and can get links back from them but you can’t (and this is a problem then because having one link back from a hugely popular web site can result in much more value than having links back from dozens of less popular web sites!).

Another factor - if you have a link back from CNN.com, that’s worth more than a link back from “Mary’s personal page of links”.  Because CNN.com itself is considered an authoritative site.

Also, if a link comes back from a web site that is related to your site in some significant way (similar market focus, similar keyword phrases) the more weight that link will be than if it comes from a site where the focus is completely different than yours.

So what’s an honest small or mid-size business owner left to do? How do we overcome the time and cost factors?

The Power of PR -The Fastest Way to a potential Plethora of links

Traditional media marketing experts pretty much all agree that good PR is worth ten times its weight in advertising. Public Relations (PR) in the traditional sense, consists of a whole host of methods, strategies and techniques for getting your brand, your offerings in front of your target market. Web PR can be boiled down to just a few key strategies, the most direct and potentially most valuable being Press Releases.

PR for Web 2.0

Press Releases traditionally involve hiring a PR specialist, having a well written release created, and paying them to distribute your release to all the “right” media outlets. Then it’s a matter of sitting back and hoping - waiting and hoping that the powers that be in those media outlets think your story is worthy of their ability to get your release out into the world.

Well, I’ve got news for you! PR is no longer the sacred cow (no offense to anyone who views cows as being sacred) that it once was. Thanks to the evolution of the Internet, there are a number of Press Release distribution services that offer the same or even more powerful services - and the best by far, in my experience, is PRWeb.

PRWeb.com offers four levels of press release submission:

• Standard visibility
• Social Media visibility
• SEO visibility
• Media visibility

Because this blog is about search engine optimization, and because my primary role in consulting with web clients regarding site promotion relates to online marketing as it relates to SEO, I always recommend clients go with either the SEO visibility (currently $200) or Media visibility (currently $360) levels. While you may think $200 - $360 is a lot of money, if you use the PRWeb release submission service and properly seed your release for SEO value, both in accordance with white hat SEO fundamentals as well as through the plethora of SEO related options they offer, within just a couple days of submitting your release you can potentially see hundreds of new links back to your web site!

If you don’t have the time or energy to submit the release yourself and do so while implementing proper SEO techniques, you can pay the PRWeb staff to do the work for you. Personally I always do all the work, but that’s because my clients pay us for our time and expertise.

The Link Building Magic of Press Releases

So how can a press release get you all those links back to your site? Well, at the top Media Visibility level, your release is going to be submitted on your behalf to all the top news services that matter - the AP Wire service, google Alerts, and Yahoo Alerts for example. And just think of how many news related web sites automatically display content that comes from the AP wire service? How many blogs and topic-specific web sites have news feeds built into them that display those press releases? A LOT! So every time a web site pulls news feeds within the topic or topics you designate in the release submission process, it’s going to get your press releases!

Going Stale - Long Term Repetition

While some web sites will retain news feeds indefinitely, many will automatically archive or delete older feeds from time to time. In my experience, I’ve seen the value of a press release maintain itself with the majority of links for several months, then begin to taper off, and ultimately, most of those links will disappear. So it’s important to submit a new press release every few months at the very least

Results will vary

Exactly how many back links you obtain as a result of this method will depend greatly on several factors. How “hot” are the topics or categories you associate to that release? How news worthy is your message? There’s really no way in advance to know exactly how many links you’ll get regardless of the categories (always associate your release with as many categories as you can legitimately do) that your release fits. Yet it’s definitely worth the effort.

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At WebSight Design, Inc., we manage the search engine optimization and search marketing initiatives for many clients, big and small. Quite often we inherit web sites built by someone else, and most of the time when that happens, I almost cringe at the keywords and page titles used. Too often someone didn’t understand the importance of properly selecting the best possible keywords or properly seeding page titles and meta tags for search optimization.

LESSON 1
PAGE TITLES AND META TAGS

Keyword selection is VERY important nowadays - how you choose the keywords, and how you apply them on the site needs to be done in accordance with the current methods by which Google and Yahoo evaluate the importance of those keywords as they relate to the descriptions and the text on the page they are embedded, as all are then related to the actual search phrase used to find the information.

Here’s some very important rules to go by when choosing keywords and implementing them:

1.THE BEST KEYWORD PHRASES
The most frequently searched phrase is not always the best. For example, if 25,000 people searched using the word “map” and only 500 people searched using the words “map of Houston” then you are much better off using “map of Houston” because it’s a more refined qualifier - just getting tens of thousands of site visitors is not the goal - getting qualified visitors is. (See my page on White Hat SEO to learn more about how to choose the best key word phrases.)

2. SEEDING KEYEWORDS IN THE META TAGS AND TITLE

a) PAGE TITLE
the most important “off-page” element is the page title. You should always include the company name in the page title, followed by the top three, four or five keyword phrases FOR THAT PAGE. This is very important to understand - just stuffing any keywords in the title tag is useless if those same phrases are not the primary focus for that page. Never have any single word repeated more than THREE times in the page title. SO if you have Houston Map | Texas Map | Harris County Map then you have the word “Map” three times.

The best way to put a title on a page is to have the company name, followed by the top phrases for that page, separated by the “pipe” symbol like this:
Key Maps, Inc. | Houston Map | Texas Map | Harris County Map

Note how the word Map appears 3 times and the word Maps appears 1 time in my example - this is okay.

The reason we use the pipe symbol is commas and other special characters can confuse some search engines and the pipe symbol gives visual clarity to someone looking at your listing in the search engines.

There are some people who say the Title should never be more than 65 characters long, or less. This is not true, however some search engines will only display the first 65 characters.

For some of my sites, Google displays up to 68 including spaces.

And Yahoo displays up to 118

So the most important phrases are all that should be in the title, but you can go up to 100 characters or more if you need to (the tail end just won’t show up to a search results page).

b) META KEYWORDS FIELD
Google no longer uses this field, but Yahoo and other search engines do! My policy is to just take the exact words in their exact order from the page title, and put that into the Meta keywords field but replace that “pipe” symbol with commas. That’s all there is to it. Never put a comma between two or more words in a single phrase - so the phrase Houston Maps should not be “Houston,Maps” because this tells the search engines that these are two separate phrases!

c) META DESCRIPTION
This should be a descriptive paragraph up to 200 characters including spaces.  Some search engines will only display the first 150 characters so you may want to stick to that limit, or at least get the most important content in that portion.

You can have your keywords for that page in the description, however it is most important to remember what this element is for…

When someone does a search, and they see your listing in the results, you’ll see either that page’s Meta Description field, or just what appears to be some text that’s extracted from the page itself.  If you write a well formatted natural sounding Meta description, it’s more likely that this is what you’ll see on the search results page.  So the best practice here is to write something that will motivate that person to click on your link instead of someone elses…

If you do include any of the keyword phrases in your description, they don’t have to be in the same sequence as the Title tag - again - it’s about what sounds the most natural and enticing, or what you think will draw that click.

(Personal admission - for a long time, I insisted in the practice of getting every phrase into a description field.  And many of my client sites still have those.  Google sometimes shows those, and sometimes not.  Since the description field apparently doesn’t affect our client’s rankings at Google, and those clients all have great click-through rates, I haven’t gone back to change those just for the sake of doing it…)

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