Landing pages

Michael Martinez at SEO Theory wrote a great post today about "landing pages". I have always stressed the importance of landing pages, and optimized the pages of my site to rank for particular keywords. The key to landing pages is discovering what are the most important pages of your site that you want customers to find. I hate "about us" pages, and I believe the "about" information should be a blip on the home page, and the "home page" is probably the least important page of any website, unless it is a blog.

Each page on your web site should be optimized for 4 or 5 key phrases, every page targets different search terms. This will give your 5 page site the chance to rank for 20 or 25 different terms. Sales and product pages have to have optimized content on them, not just pictures and prices. Sometimes it is hard to get the client to go for so much text and you may have to do a bit of research and use more creativity, but it will payoff in the end.

Link building should be done site wide, I usually don't try to get many links to my home pages. Switch up your anchor text in comments and link exchanges to accommodate the key words for the target page. Really examine the content on the page your link will be from and choose the page on your web site that would benefit most from the link. If you do gain a lot of links to one page on your web site, make sure you direct some anchor text on that page to a weaker page on the site, don't keep all that juice on one page, optimizing your internal linking structure can dramatically improve your rankings.

Pages with good CTAs are great for landing pages, they bring the user to your site and tell them where to go next. If you bring all of your traffic to your home page, you are relying on the user finding their way to your sales pages, and that is unreliable. I am not saying that your clientele is dumb or lazy, but that it is your job to direct traffic to where you want it most.

As an SEO, it is your job to direct the most qualified traffic to the best page for it, and the 9 out of 10 times the home page is the last place you want someone to start looking to buy something. So optimize your landing pages and watch your sales increase.

Big blogs and there no follow tags

Today Dave Naylor announced he has removed the no follow tags from his blog and replaced them with strict moderation. His blog is one of my favorite sources for SEO news and updates and this is a big deal because so many "authority" blogs wrap their links up tight and keep all their juice to themselves. If this becomes a trend across the board, you may begin to see more quality discussions on these blogs. By his statement alone he should at least triple his traffic from curious SEOs. www.davidnaylor.co.uk is a great source for information, but the best parts of some blogs are the discussions that follow the posts, blogs are meant to be interactive, and I believe he is simply encouraging more user participation.

They say that Web 3.0 will be completely user generated content, and by current blogs encouraging such interaction and participation, this maybe the perfect segway into the next development of the internet. Blogs with only a few pages could soon become giant sites with hundreds of pages of user generated content and quality discussion.

Strict moderation is the key, I have never been one for spammy comments. I much rather participate in the discussion and try to learn something while I gather my links. If you are serious about SEO and link building you should try to become a regular contributer on quality blogs. Genuine, intelligent comments could lead to so much more than just a link from a page that has 50 outbound links.

Thanks Dave.

SEO Quake plugin for Firefox

I am a Safari/Opera kind a guy, I guess I spend so much time making sure my HTML and CSS are valid that I only want browsers that read strict/valid code, but I came across this great Firefox plugin called SEO Quake that gives you a head start on competitive analysis. SEO Quake installs a tool bar in your SERPs that shows the # of pages in the directory for a site, the # of pages indexed on the site, the Google PR, the Alexa rank, the # of inbound links, and so on. Firefox may be slow, but this is a great tome saving tool for SEOs. SEO Quake even shows you the who is for the SEO guys that like to contact the owners for links. Check it out here

SEO: The second 6 months of a SEO contract

My last post was about what you should do in the first 6 months of a SEO contract. The first 6 months is the time when you establish your rankings, you should be able to achieve some decent goals within this time and be on the 1st or second page of the SERPs. If the niche is competitive, the second 6 months is when you start taking on the big guys in the top positions, this is where you need to get creative and even more diligent.

In the first 6 months you established a routine for regular updates, blog posts and content changes. These changes are based on keyword research that you have conducted regularly and use this research to adapt the web site to search trends. You should continue to monitor trends, make blog posts and change the content throughout the second 6 months. I am also a firm believer in redesigning your web site once a year, which is solely for the users, but this is not the job of a SEO.

Quality Link Building
Now that your onsite SEO is well on track and is proving results, you need to worry about gathering quality links to the site. You will need to do a bit of research and gain links from vendors, clients, business partners, other related sites, general directories, specific directories. Write articles regularly about the business the site is in and create press releases about the site, the business and niche news, and submit them to syndication sites. These links will help you with relevancy and will generate more qualified traffic.

Quantity Link Building
Now that you have your quality links it is time to get the sheer numbers you need to stabilize your positions. Quantity links are less reliable because many of them will be temporary, but they will establish the sites rankings once you get the ball rolling.

Social Media Sites: Use sites like Digg and StumbleUpon to develop a large basis of social media links. Submit everything you write to them and become active in their communities, this activity will create more links than anything as long as you work the groups and contribute to things other than your particular niche.
RSS: Develop a strong writing style and stay on top of blog posts to gain subscribers and make sure to syndicate your RSS.
Reciprocal Links: Find a simple reciprocal link code and put it on your site, these can draw links from many different markets, but we are just worried about numbers at this point.
Comment Tags: Become active on other blogs and forums within the nice and put a link to the site in your comments. Remember not to make spammy posts, becoming a valued contributer can lead to bigger things in the future.
Guest Posting: Become a guest poster on the blogs you read, this is your time to shine and double your traffic.

The second six months may sound much simpler than the first, but this is where all the work comes in. If you do wind up in a 6 month contract, you need to multitask an watch your analytics closely to see what is working and what is not, don't waste time on things that don't work.

Once you get the links rolling in you should be set for a stable next few months and you should have reached the positions you wanted. Always remember, don't stop, persistence is the most important aspect of SEO. This strategy should take you throughout the end of the contract and generate satisfying results for both you and your client.

SEO Contracts

Search engine optimization is not something that will just happen overnight, it takes time and many adjustments. When you offer SEO services you need to make it perfectly clear that for best results the client must enter a long term contract of at least 6 months to a year. I don't really like the 6 month option, because that is only enough time to build a strong base optimization, and if the client is satisfied after the first 6 months and wants to stop paying for SEO, then the web sites rankings may drop. If the web site starts to fall, the client will come back to you and want another 6 months, then you will have to build the site back up to the point where it was before you can begin to give additional results. With a 1 year contract, you have enough time to build a good SEO foundation for the web site and you are able to spend more time on link building for the web site.

I have outlined 1 approach to working within a 1 year SEO contract, these are not rules that have been set in stone, but merely a guide to how to get started when optimizing a web site.

The first 6 months
In the first 6 months of the contract you should concentrate on competition research, optimizing the web design's layout, cleaning up the code and optimizing the onsite content through keyword research. This may take a couple of weeks, depending on how large the site is, but this is the most important step.

My first step is competition research, competition research is the fine art of discovering what makes the top ranking web sites in that particular nice so successful. I look at the layout, keyword density, number of pages, internal linking structure, domain age(I swear it doesn't really matter, but it is good to know) and inbound links. I look to see if the competitions web site has any blogs, and if so how active they are. Also during this time I begin conducting keyword research and I start writing content and submitting it to the owner for approval if they ask. Remember, your keyword density should be higher than any site in the nice.

Next I optimize the web design. Study how the spiders crawl and position your keywords accordingly. If the web site was designed by a web design firm that neglects SEO, I may make a few web design changes, but I don't like to undo what has already been paid for. I edit the CSS and create headings 1-6 and implement them with keywords throughout the design of the site. I then replace "text as images" that may be strewn about the site, and work on a strong internal linking structure within the content. Remember to clean the code, many "web design companies" use WYSIWYG web design editors that create gnarly code that needs to be either removed or re-written. If the site is PHP, ASP.net, etc., you will need to clean up a bit more code than a basic HTML or CSS web design.

Now you can begin working the site into your daily routine. Create new, original content for the site on a regular basis, or change the content , this will make the spiders return more regularly and help you see what works and what doesn't without waiting a month for an update. Create a few blogs the web site and make posts regularly. Make sure your blog posts are good link bait so you can begin the begin building links before you begin the link building phase. You will find there are many ways to create new content for the search engines without ever typing any new content.

Once you have established a good routine for both you and the search engines, now you can begin the link building aspect of the SEO campaign. I won't get into link building, because my fingers hurt. While building links, always monitor what people are searching for to find web sites like the one you are optimizing and make the proper adjustments to your content and internal linking structure.

Remember to always keep good analytics for any site you are optimizing.

Next Post: The Second 6 months of a SEO contract

Tool: PR Checker

I really hate when people worry about PR, but I need to start posting some tools on this blog, so here you go. Honestly, page rank has nothing to do with SERPs and comes naturally when SEO is done "right", so don't get all tied up in the "My PR goes up to 11" thing. I believe the only good thing PR is good for is it gives you a good pricing scale when you are selling links(don't tell Google I said that).

Check Page Rank of any web site pages instantly:

This free page rank checking tool is powered by Page Rank Checker service