In this part, I’m going to introduce you to perhaps the simplest of link building techniques…

Blog Comments

By far, the easiest thing you can do right now to build backlinks is to go leave comments on blogs. Most blogs allow comments on the articles, and most of those blogs also allow a link back to a website of the commenter’s choice.

Here’s a comment from our blog…notice the commentator’s name is red (the color of links on our blog). That name links back to the commentator’s website (although it could be any website the commentator specifies when entering her comment – more on that later).

Sample blog comment from our blog

So on this particular link, the anchor text is “Sandro;” probably not the most useful anchor text unless this person is trying to rank for the term “Sandro.” We’ll get into more detail about that shortly.

How to leave blog comments

It’s pretty easy. Find a blog about any topic you want to comment on. Don’t know how to find blogs? Try Technorati’s blog directory.

Obviously if you comment on an article, you should make it a relevant comment…there’s nothing bloggers hate more than people leaving unrelated or gibberish comments just to get a link.

When you go to leave a blog comment, you’ll see a form that looks like this:

Standard blog comment form

The thing people don’t realize about this is that when you submit your blog comment, the name and website are combined to form the link. So, the name becomes the anchor text and the website is where that link will point to. So, let’s say I wanted a link to our company Facebook page, with the anchor text “RLM”. I’d put “RLM” in the name field and “http://www.facebook.com/rlmseo” in the website field. Pretty simple.

Blog Ettiquette

So, some of you may be wondering why the commentator on our blog pictured above chose to use “Sandro” as the anchor text. Many blogs, including ours, have policies that keywords should not be used for the comment name. The reason for that is any blog owner will tell you the vast majority of comments are left exclusively to get a link and don’t add any value to the conversation. So, if you try to comment on one of those blogs using a keyword instead of a name, the comment will likely get thrown out. So, in those cases, it’s best to use a name. It’s not as good as a keyword, but it’s better than nothing.

Many blogs are no-followed

Another thing to keep in mind about blog commenting is that most blogs add the rel=nofollow attribute to their blog comments. This is another step to combat blog comment spam. If links are nofollowed, commentators looking for a quick link are inclined to look elsewhere, whereas commentators interested in genuinely adding the article won’t care too much that the link is nofollowed.

But wait, didn’t I say Google doesn’t pay attention to nofollow links? I did and that was mostly true. What I didn’t tell you is that part of building a natural link profile includes building nofollow links. Think about it…if you’re commenting on blogs because you’re genuinely interested in the topic, you’re going to have mostly nofollow links on those comments and maybe a few dofollow links from blogs who don’t nofollow their comments. Google knows this and, while you don’t have to match that profile exactly, you do want to add plenty of nofollow blog comments into the mix.

Do-Follow Blogs

The good news is there are plenty of blogs out there that, for one reason or another, do not nofollow their blog comment links; these are known as “dofollow blogs” and you can find plenty of them to comment on by searching Google for dofollow blogs, dofollow blog directory, or some variation of that.

Why blog commenting sucks

First of all, blog commenting is super easy so that’s great; anybody can start doing it fairly quickly. The downside is that it’s boring, tedious, and not super effective. I mean, let’s face it, we all know even most of the good blog comments out there are only dropped to get a link and I’d be lying if I said I cared about every article I’ve ever commented on.

The best strategy

When it comes to blog commenting, the best approach is to commit to leaving 10 – 15 comments per week at first. Just take 5 – 10 minutes a day and leave a comment or two. Get a good mix of do-follow and no-follow links and stick with it. It’s not going to get you to page 1 by itself – although it might if there’s very little competition for your keywords – but it will give you a solid base of links and move you up in the rankings a bit. Not to mention the fact that if you leave good comments on high traffic blogs you can get direct traffic from other readers clicking your link.

Hire us or just give us a call to chat!

If you have any questions or would like to find out how we can help you get ranked much faster and without all the boring blog commenting request a quote or give us a call at 513-549-7355.

Starting in this third part, I’m going to explain how to get these all-important backlinks. This is an incredibly in-depth topic, however, so I’m going to break this up into several parts.

We’ll start with the basics, but today, it’s important to understand a very important concept.

Not all backlinks are created equal

There are literally thousands of different methods to build backlinks, but no two methods will result in the same benefit. First, let’s remember that the entire purpose of building backlinks is to get your website ranked at the top of the search engines. Second, let me use a dramatically simplified example to explain the idea that all backlinks have different values in helping you acheive this goal of getting ranked…

Let’s say you’re currently ranked #30 for the keyword “Cincinnati Landscapers.” Then, one day you build a single backlink using one of the methods we’ll discuss later. Depending on the link, your rank may rise to #29, or it could rise all the way to #5, or it could actually drop to #50. I’m just making these numbers up for the sake of demonstration. The point is, Google views each and every backlink differently depending on certain characteristics. In order to understand why backlinks are treated differently and how to recognize good backlinks, we need to understand what those characteristics are.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the actual text found within the link. Here’s a screenshot of a snippet of a random article I found online with a link in it:

Anchor text screenshot

It should be obvious that the blue, underlined text is the link. In this case, the anchor text is “Freebase, a service that Google Owns.” Likewise, here’s a screenshot from a comment on that same article:

Another anchor text screenshot

In this case, the anchor text is “http://Imgtfy.com/?q=http%3A%2…”. So, the anchor text can be any text at all…in fact, anchor text can even be an image, in which case the term “anchor text” is a little misleading and the term “link anchor” would more appropriately apply (the logo at the top of this email links to our site…that’s a perfect example of a link with an image anchor).

So what’s so special about anchor text? Well, Google uses the anchor text to determine what keywords you should rank for. So, in the example above where the anchor text is “Freebase, a service that Google owns,” that anchor text will help the linked web page rank for the exact phrase “Freebase, a service that Google owns.” It will also help the linked site rank for any terms contained within the anchor text, but to a lesser extend. So, the linked site above would rank a bit higher for “Freebase” or “Google” as well as the full phrase.

So, to summarize, the important things to remember about anchor text are:

• Google uses the anchor text to determine what keywords you should rank for
• A link with the anchor text “Cincinnati Landscapers” will help you rank for any searches for “Cincinnati Landscapers.”
• That same link will help you rank for the term “Cincinnati” and the term “Landscapers,” but both to a lesser extent then the exact phrase “Cincinnati Landscapers.”

So, the goal when building links to your site is to get the anchor text to match the keyword you want to rank for exactly. The closer it matches, the more that link will push you up the rankings for that term.

PageRank

PageRank is a number Google assigns to all pages it reviews (PageRank is abbreviated “PR”). Remember in Part 2 when we discussed how Google looks at links as “votes” for a website? Well, Google also adds up the relative values of all those links and the resulting number is called the PageRank. It’s on a scale of 0 – 10 and is a measure of the overall importance of a particular web page; the higher the number, the more “votes” that site has, and the more important Google thinks that site is. Facebook, for example, has a PageRank 10, CNN.com has a PageRank 9, our site has a PageRank 6, and a new site has a PageRank 0. The vast majority of websites on the internet have PageRank in the range of 0 to 3.

So why does PageRank (PR) matter? Because a link from a PR 10 website is significantly more valuable than a link from a PR 0 website; the higher the PR of the site where your backlink is, the more that link will push you up the search results. In fact, a single link from a PR 6 website, with exact-match anchor text, can be enough to get you to the first page for a particular keyword if there isn’t too much competition. It may take 200 links from PR 0 websites to have the same effect.

Incidentally, PR can be checked using a browser addon. If you’re using Firefox, try this. And if you’re using Chrome, try this. If you’re using another browser, just do a Google search for a PageRank browser addon for your web browser…they’re available for most browsers.

So, the goal when building links to your site is to get the anchor text to match the keyword you want to rank for, AND to get links on the web pages with the highest PageRank you can.

This tends to be the trickiest part for most link builders. The reason being, sites with high PageRank know their links are extremely valuable and don’t just give them away willy-nilly. It generally takes a lot of work to get even a single link on a high PR site. We’ve developed a few tricks over the years to make it much easier, but this is no doubt a challenging thing to do for most people.

Do-Follow / No-Follow

This is another important characteristic Google considers when determining that value of a link. In the code of a web page, a link looks like this: <a href=”http://some-site.com”>Some anchor</a>. In this case, the link is pointing to “some-site.com” with the anchor text “Some anchor.” However, because Google puts so much weight on backlinks, people started gaming the system and writing software to automate the creation of backlinks en masse. To combat this, Google announced it would start looking for a particular bit of code in the link that the website owner could use to tell Google whether or not it should pay attention to that link or mostly just ignore it altogether. That bit of code is called the nofollow attribute and is in use on most big sites that allow users to post links.

Here’s what that link above looks like with the nofollow attribute added: <a href=”http://some-site.com” rel=”nofollow”>Some anchor</a>. What this does is tell Google to, for the most part, ignore that link when determining search engine rankings (it’s a little more complicated than that but that’s the gist of it).

Like I mentioned, many of the bigger sites that allow users to post links make use of the nofollow attribute; Twitter and Facebook are just a few examples of such sites. Here’s a screenshot of a link someone posted on Twitter:

Actual Twitter link with nofollow attribute

Wow, obviously links can include quite a lot of information and be really complicated, but I outlined the important part in red that says ‘rel=”nofollow”‘. That little, seemingly insignificant bit of code means that this link will not help the target site rank at all.

So, the goal when building links to your site is to 1) get the anchor text to match the keyword you want to rank for, 2) get links on web pages with the highest PageRank you can, AND 3) get links that DO NOT have the nofollow attribute (also known as “dofollow” links).

Conclusion

So these are the 3 major characteristics that determine a link’s value. It’s important to remember that this topic is significantly more involved than I’ve detailed here; in fact there are quite a few books written on the subject. There are also quite a few more link characteristics Google considers, but these are the most important.

Future parts…

Obviously, link building is a complex subject. In addition to everything we’ve discussed here, Google is constantly adding, removing, and tweaking the weight of all the factors that make up it’s ranking algorithms so it takes a lot of expertise to be able to build links most effectively.

We took a bit of a sidebar in this part to cover the 3 major link characteristics Google looks at, but it’s important that you understand these ideas before we continue in Part 4 to introduce the different methods to build links.

This was the third part in our series educating businesses about internet marketing. If you have any questions or would like to discuss how RLM can help you generate more business online, feel free request a quote or give us a call at 513-549-7355.

In this second part, I’m going discuss backlinks in a little more detail because they are probably the single most important factor in getting ranked at the top.

What are backlinks?

If you’re asking this question, you’re going to be hitting yourself when you realize how simple this is. To some extent, the internet was built upon the concept of links. Links are like the “citations” you see in a book. One website writes about a particular subject, then adds a link to another website that also talks about that subject or perhaps covers it from a different angle or in more detail. Links are literally EVERYWHERE.

And they don’t have to be links to other websites. If I’m a landscape designer and I have a web page on my site about caring for your lawn in the winter, I may link to another page on my site about caring for your lawn in the summer. Links are the backbone of the internet because they allow you to jump around from page to page and from site to site.

If you’re still not getting it, here’s a picture…it’s worth 1,000 words. This is a screenshot I took of a Wikipedia article on SEO; I circled the links. The standard web color for links is blue, but the website operator can change that to whatever he or she wants.

In the case of Wikipedia, most of their links point to other Wikipedia articles. So if I were to click “Analytics” in the above screenshot, I’d be taken to the Wikipedia article on “Analytics.” Wikipedia usually has citations at the bottom of every article where they link out to other websites on the topic. The point is, links can point anywhere….to another page on the same site, or a page on another website.

Just to drive this point home, here’s a screenshot of Google’s search results for the term “Cincinnati SEO.”

You can see here that Google’s search results are absolutely packed with links. You can also see that the colors are different…some are blue, some are purple. Google uses the standard colors for their links. Blue represent links you have not clicked on before, purple represents links you have clicked on before. It’s important to note that the website operator can choose any color for links so you obviously won’t always see them in blue, but they’re usually called out from the rest of the text on the page with some color that makes them pop.

Why are links important?

So now that I’ve beaten that dead horse hard enough and we know what links are, why are they important? To understand that question, we need to understand why Google has become so successful.

The (Brief) Story of Google

Google really started to take off around 2001 (seems like a lot further back than that) because they realized something none of the other search engines at the time fully understood.

Back in the day, search engines were using all kinds of factors to determine where a website should rank in the search results. Most of those factors had to do with the content on the website itself. There’s an inherent problem with this.

Relevance

Let’s say I have a website about Dogs where I talk about my dog Jacky Boy. Now, what if I woke up one day and decided, “You know what? I think I want to rank at the top of the search engines for ‘Insurance’ because people looking for insurance might want to read about my Jacky Boy…I mean who wouldn’t want to read about Jacky Boy?”

So, being a huge web nerd, I decide that instead of writing about insurance, I’m just going to stuff a bunch of insurance-related words into the footer of my site. I’ll make those words white to blend in with the background so my visitors don’t see the words, but the search engines will find them.

After a few days, the search engine bots come roaming through my site, read all these insurance-related terms and decide my site must also be about insurance. And the word “insurance” appears like 200 times so it must really be about insurance. So the search engines start ranking me really high for “insurance.”

Well, what happens when you decide to go looking online for insurance? You find my site at the top, you click the link and you find nothing about insurance at all; instead it’s all about some mangy mutt named “Jacky Boy.” What the hell? If this happens enough you may start looking for a new search engine.

What Google realized is that if they wanted to be the biggest search engine in the world and make all that internet money they had to give their users what they wanted. And what they wanted was to find sites that were as closely related to whatever they searched for as possible. This is called relevance.

Well that’s obvious, right? Obviously people want to find what they’re looking for. The problem is, how do you give it to them? How can a computer program read a website and accurately determine what it’s about? In spite of all the advances over the years, computers are still really dumb.

This is where Google made it’s money. They realized that instead of relying on the content on the website itself to determine where that site should rank, they would rely on other websites to determine where it should rank. Google basically created a referral system for determining rankings. They realized that the most effective way to determine where a site should rank is simply by “asking” other websites where it should rank. In practice that means the Googlebot started visiting other websites and counting up the number of links to every other website on the internet. The sites with the most links ranked the highest.

This dramatically improved the relevance of the search results. If we consider my website about Jacky Boy using this method, we’ll see it’ll never rank for insurance-related terms because no other insurance-related website is going to link to it because, as far as those insurance website operators can tell, it’s not about insurance, it’s about my dog.

This incredibly simple idea and the PageRank patent is the foundation on which the entire empire that is Google was built upon.

Fast Forward to Today

Nowadays you’d be hard-pressed to find any traditional search engine that doesn’t rank websites this way. They all realized that was, by far, the best way for a computer to determine where a website should rank in the search results and so they all do something very similar.

And now you understand why links are so important

So now it should make sense why links are so important. Because search engines are all about relevancy, and to show the most relevant results for any particular search, they all consider links to the website as a huge measure of where a site should rank.

So when we work to rank a client’s website at the top of the search engines, we target Google first because it’s generally the toughest. Once you’re #1 in Google, if you’re still not #1 in Yahoo and Bing, we’ll do some extra work specifically targeted toward those search engines.

Future issues…

I hope this was all clear, but if you have any questions, feel free to respond…I love talking about this stuff .

The big question a lot of people always have about links are how do you get them? Obviously they’re important, but how the heck do you get other websites to link to yours? We’ll cover that in part 3 so stay tuned!

This was the second part in our series educating businesses about internet marketing. If you have any questions or would like to discuss how RLM can help you generate more business online, feel free to reply or give me, John Crenshaw, a call at 513-549-7355.

Google, Yahoo, and Bing are pretty much all the same

One thing to remember is that all 3 of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) all rank websites the same way. There are tiny little differences between the 3, but the general principals are the same across the board.

Rank in one, rank in the rest

In practice this means that when you rank in Google, you generally rank in Yahoo and Bing, although the positions may be slightly different. You may end up at #1 in Google, #3 in Yahoo, and #2 in Bing; but if you rank high in one, you generally rank high in all three.

So when we work to rank a client’s website at the top of the search engines, we target Google first because it’s generally the toughest. Once you’re #1 in Google, if you’re still not #1 in Yahoo and Bing, we’ll do some extra work specifically targeted toward those search engines.

How Search Engines Work, in General

All the search engines rank sites automatically. Meaning they don’t have a group of employees deciding where a site should rank, rather they use and “algorithm,” which is nothing more than a big collection of computer code that automatically browses your website, tries to figure out what the topic of each page is, and then checks to see what other sites are linking to yours. The algorithm then calculates where you should rank compared to your competition based on a number of factors. All the search engine algorithms are programmed to consider, for the most part, the same set of factors, which is why once you rank in one search engine you tend to rank in the others. What differs is how those factors are weighted; each search engines weights certain factors a bit differently. Let’s illustrate this with an example…

An example

Let’s say you’re a dentist in Cincinnati and trying to rank for “Cincinnati Dentist.” All the search engines will count the number of times the phrase “Cincinnati Dentist” appears on your website. They’ll also apply a filter that will ding you if that phrase appears too many times. So Google might prefer to see exactly 1% of all words on the page to be “Cincinnati Dentist,” whereas Yahoo might prefer to see exactly 1.2%. As you move away from that “preferred” percentage, you’ll be less likely to rank for that phrase. It gets a lot more complicated than that, but that’s the gist of it.

On Site vs. Off Site

The number of times a particular phrase appears on your website is considered an “on-site” ranking factor; because, you guessed it, it’s on your site. Search engines also consider off-site factors, which include:

• Do you have a Facebook page linking back to your site?
• Do you have a YouTube videos linking back to your site?
• ** Are other sites across the web linking back to your site? **<– this is big!!
• …and many others

I put the words “linking back to your site” in bold because when it comes down to it, the only off-site factor that really matters are links. Without a link from your Facebook page, how will Google know it is, in fact, your Facebook page?

Links (or “Backlinks”)

Backlinks are the single most important ranking factor. You can do everything else wrong and still rank if you have enough links. Likewise, you can do everything right and not rank if you don’t have any links. Think about links as “votes” for your website. When the search engines find a bunch of “votes” for your website on other websites, they assume your website must be a good one and deserve to rank higher than the rest. Obviously this is a dramatic oversimplification of the process, but it should give you a basic understanding.

Future issues…

We’ll dig deeper into all these details a bit more in future issues, so I hope you found this interesting and continue to read our future issues.

This was the first part in our series educating businesses about internet marketing. If you have any questions or would like to discuss how RLM can help you generate more business online, feel free to reply or give me, John Crenshaw, a call at 513-549-7355.

This videos covers how SEO (Search Engine Optimization) works – website marketing tips.

Learn more about our website marketing, SEO, PPC, and web design in Cincinnati and around the country.

It’s targeted toward small, local businesses, and in post I’ll introduce you to AdWords Express and talk about whether or not it’s good or bad for small businesses as well as AdWords agencies.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Google Places Advertisement

If you’re a business owner with a local company – by that I mean a company with a local market – Google Local Business Listings (also known as Google places, or Google maps) can get you ranked near the top of Google without as much time and effort as standard organic rankings.

One of the factors Google considers in determining your business listing ranking is the number of customer reviews. Because of this, one of the first things we have clients do when working on improving rankings of a Local Business page is contact past customers and ask for reviews. Sometimes those customers need instructions, so here’s a little step-by-step to help you out.

Get your Google Local Business Listing URL:

In order to ask for reviews, you have to have a URL to send to customers where they can leave the review, right? Right. Here’s how to get that.

1. Find your Google places page. The easiest way to do this is to go to maps.google.com and search for your company name. You may need to add the city to the search. If you don’t have a business listing yet, you probably won’t show up in this search, so you’ll want to set that up first.
2. Once you’ve found your business, click the “more info” link next to the title of the listing. That will take you to your listing.
3. From there, in the top right of the page you’ll see a link that says, approrpiately, “Link,” with a little icon of a chain link next to it.
4. Click that and copy the URL that pops up
5. Paste that URL into your browser’s address bar and hit enter
   • There is a lot of extra information provided in the link Google gives you here that you don’t really need. If you have trouble following the next steps, just send your past customers the link you just copied. Otherwise, if you want to shorten that URL a bit, keep reading.
6. The URL should look something like this: http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=XXXXXXXXXXXX, followed by a bunch of other stuff. Delete everything after the cid=XXXXXXXXXX part. (The X’s are actually numbers representing your unique listing ID).
7. Copy what’s remaining and paste that into your browser’s address bar again to check that it works. Hit enter.
8. If your listing pops up again, you’ve got the right URL.

Instructions for your Customers to Leave Reviews

1. Follow the link you just copied.
2. Once there, scroll down a bit until you see the heading, “Reviews by Google users.”
3. You must have a Google account to do this, so if already logged in, they’ll see a link that says “Been here? Rate and review”
4. Click on “Rate and review”
5. If not logged in, they’ll see a link that says “Been here? Sign in to rate”
6. Click “Sign in to rate”
7. If they have a Google account already, they can login and then they’ll be forwarded to a page where they can leave a review.
8. If they don’t yet have a Google account, they’ll need to click the button that says “Create an account now,” and follow the instructions to create the account. Once created, go back to the Business Listing page and click on “Rate and review” to leave a review.

That’s all there is to it. The only tripping up points are going to be if you’re customer isn’t very internet savvy and/or doesn’t yet have a Google account. But Google makes creating a new account pretty easy, so with a little assistance, they shouldn’t have any trouble leaving a review.

Hope this helps a few people out. If you’ve got questions, leave them in the comments.

One of the first things small business owners find out about when researching SEO are blogs. One of the most common questions we get is, “should I add a blog to my site?”

Blogs have gained a reputation as having the potential to boost your SEO rankings, but it’s important to understand what a blog does and why it helps, as well as when it wouldn’t help.

What is a blog, exactly?

A blog is nothing more than a collection of articles, generally appearing on a website in reverse chronological order — meaning the newest posts show up first. The key phrase there is “nothing more than a collection of articles.” That’s right, a blog is not some magical thing that will score you all kinds of love from Google; it’s nothing more than a collection of articles.

What that means is, if you really wanted to, you could create your own mock blog just by publishing articles as standard html pages on your website, then publishing another page with links to all those articles. In it’s most basic form, that’s really all a blog is.

So why does everyone say blogging helps SEO?

The simple answer is that SEO is a complicated subject. Because it’s complicated, two things end up happening:

1. Companies selling SEO services say “Blogs help SEO,” because it’s a thousand times easier than explaining why blogs help SEO, or that some blogging platforms will actually hurt your SEO, or that the same can be accomplished in Dreamweaver or another web publishing platform (albeit not as efficiently). When it comes to selling, keeping it simple helps.
2. Companies who take the blogging plunge tend to notice their traffic increases. Because SEO is a complicated subject, the easiest explanation is that the blog did it. Then, when you talk to employees in those companies, they tell you how much of an impact blogging made on their business…and the legend grows.

So…Will a Blog Help with SEO or Not?

Yes and no. It’s not the blog itself that will help with SEO. Remember, a blog is nothing more than a collection of articles. What tends to help with SEO are all the secondary things a blog does for you that you might not even be thinking about. A well-designed blog facilitates SEO best practices, by accomplishing the following:

1. If you have a blog, you should be publishing on it. Anytime you add text-rich pages to your website, you’re giving Google more content to index. More content means your website will show up for more searches. You’re casting a wider net, which tends to catch more prospects.
2. Most bloggers use WordPress. When setup properly, WordPress does a lot of stuff behind the scenes that is good for SEO. Now, don’t think I’m suggesting WordPress will always help your SEO behind the scenes. WordPress can very easily be setup in such a way that it won’t do you much good at all, and that’s entirely up to the author of your theme…or your designer/developer if you had a WordPress theme custom made.
3. However, even a perfectly setup WordPress theme won’t do you any good if you don’t follow some SEO best practices. Thankfully, WordPress makes it easier for you to follow these best practices. And we know the easier something is, the more likely we are to do it. Some of the tasks WordPress can simplify are:
   1. Adjusting meta tags (title, description, keywords)
   2. Linking to other pages on your site directly
   3. Linking blog posts together using tags, categories, and archives
   4. Proper formatting (heading tags, bold and italicized text, etc)
   5. SEO-friendly URLs (WordPress calls these “Permalinks”)
   6. In addition to these, WordPress has a huge list of plugins that can add functionality to do just about anything else you could want

What to consider before you add a blog to your site

Now it’s time for a reality check. I’ve shown that just adding a blog to your site is not going to magically get you more business. However, undertaken properly, blogging can significantly enhance your visibility online. In addition to showing up for more searches, enhanced visibility means you’ll be seen more as an authority in your industry and it will help you build your contact network with potential clients, business and advertising partners, and even “old media” contacts like newspaper and television reporters.

I’ve seen blogging do amazing things for small and large companies alike. I’ve also seen a lot of businesses fail to reap any benefits from blogging at all. Here are some important things to consider before you decide to start a blog:

1. Who will be responsible for getting blog posts published? Someone in your organization has to be committed to keeping the blog updated. This same person doesn’t have to be the one writing the blog posts…you could have anyone handle that, or you could even outsource that entirely. But one person in your organization needs to be responsible for getting posts published on time. That person should have the authority to “motivate” people to get the job done. This will be your blog editor and the responsibility for publishing blog posts rests entirely on his or her shoulders.
2. When will blog posts be published? You should set a posting schedule of once or twice per week and be consistent about it. The more consistent you are, the better off you’ll be. I’d recommend setting a day and time when posts will be published and not missing those publication deadlines. Treat your blog like a newspaper…no matter what it takes, get something published on time.
3. Who will train your people? Do yourself a favor and get some basic SEO training for your people. If funds are tight, you could just have the blog editor trained on basic SEO. If you’re able, train your writers too. There are plenty of SEO companies out there that can help you with this, including us. Just a couple hours of training will make a world of difference.
4. Which blogging platform will you use? I can’t think of any reason to use anything besides WordPress. It’s just so much farther along than any other blogging platform and it’s so widely used that if you need to expand it’s functionality in some way, there’s probably already a plugin out there that will do it for you.
5. Who will design your blog? When I say “design,” I mean design, develop, program…all of the above. If you decide to use one of the thousands of free WordPress themes, make sure it was created with SEO in mind. If you have a custom theme developed, make sure the developer is familiar with maximizing the SEO benefit of WordPress. Don’t skimp on this…if you can’t afford to pay $1500 or more for a custom WordPress theme, use a free one. You can always have a custom theme designed later, but if you skimp on a cheap custom theme, you’ll be stuck with something that may not help your SEO like it should.
6. How will you come up with post ideas?Most people find it incredibly challenging to come up with something to write about once or twice a week. If you’re one of those people, I’m here to tell you to stop over thinking it. Your blog posts don’t have to be mind-blowing insights into your industry. Sure, if you can throw in some amazing content occasionally, it’ll help tremendously, but on the whole, remember you’re writing a blog, not a New York Times best seller. It’s far more important that you publish consistently. As you continue to blog, you’ll get better at it, you’ll come up with better post ideas, and you’ll see what your readers like to read about and what they don’t like so much. Still need some help? Here’s a quick and dirty step-by-step:
   1. Publish posts on Mondays and Fridays at 7am.
   2. Write those posts a week in advance and use WordPress’ post scheduling feature to have them automatically published on the right day/time
   3. Schedule a brief Wednesday morning brainstorming session with your blogging crew (30 minutes max.)
   4. Tell everyone to have 3 post ideas ready for the Wed. morning meeting each week
   5. In the meeting, everyone shares their post ideas
   6. Pick the top 2 and assign a writer or outsource it
   7. Publish
   8. Repeat

Conclusion

If you’re reading this post, I assume you’re either considering blogging or are already doing it. Good for you! Just remember, that a little bit of preparation and understanding of the process can go a long way to ensure you reap the maximum benefit. Obviously, blogging isn’t a magical cure-all for your SEO woes, but done properly, blogging can have a significant impact on your bottom line. Now get out there and start writing!

Now, you may or may not have an Analytics account setup already so this will cover you either way.

If you DO NOT believe you have an Analytics account setup already, do this:

1. Log in to Google AdWords at http://adwords.google.com
2. Once there, click “Reporting and Tools,” then “Google Analytics”
3. You’ll see a screen like Figure 1 below that will ask if you want to link an existing Analytics account or create a new Analytics account to be linked.
   

   Figure 1 - Link AdWords and Analytics Account - Click to Enlarge

4. This is where things can get hairy. Whether you think you have an analytics account or not, you’ll probably want to start by selecting “I already have a Google Analytics account. Please link it to this AdWords account”
   • So why do it this way? Because at some point in the past, you or another web developer or someone else may have already setup an Analytics account that is tracking this site. We see this all the time (sometimes setup of Analytics is included in the services rendered by a previous developer, so even though you don’t think one was setup, it may have been anyway).
   • If you want to be absolutely sure, view the source for your site and check for existing analytics code
   • Why not just setup a new account anyway? You could, but then you wouldn’t have access to all of that valuable data collected in the old analytics account without logging in separately. That data is valuable, and you want to preserve it if possible, even if you haven’t used it up until now.
5. So, click “Continue” and AdWords will pull up a list of all Analytics accounts managed under the current user.
6. Have a quick look at the dropdown box labeled “Existing Google Analytics Account” to find out if an account already exists and, if it does, select it and press “Link my account.” Now the accounts are linked and you’re all finished.
7. If you don’t see an existing account in the dropdown, select “Cancel” and continue the instructions
8. Now you can select “Create my free Google Analytics account” and click continue
9. Follow the instructions on the next page and Google will provide you with the code you’ll need to add to your site in order to begin tracking
10. Have your developer install the code, or have us do it for you
11. All done.

If you already have an Analytics account but it’s not the same as your AdWords account, do this:

In this case, you’ll want to preserve that Analytics account with all it’s juicy historical data, so you’ll need to add your AdWords account as a user to your Analytics account in order to link the two. Here’s how:

1. Login to your Analytics account at http://analytics.google.com…You should see something like the following:
   

   Figure 2 - Google Analytics Dashboard - Click to Enlarge

2. Once there, click the “User Manager>>” link toward the bottom-middle of the page and you’ll be presented with the following Figure 3:
   

   Figure 3 - Google Analytics User Manager - Click to Enlarge

3. Click the “+ Add User” link toward the top right of that table in Figure 3
4. Now you’re presented with the following Figure 4:
   

   Figure 4 - Add User to Google Analytics - Click to Enlarge

5. In the “Email Address” field, enter the email address of your AdWords user (read that again, it’s important to get this right)
6. In the “Access Type” dropdown, make sure you choose “Account Administrator” (otherwise you won’t be able to link the accounts)
7. Click “Save Changes”
8. Now log out of Analytics
9. Log back into AdWords at http://adwords.google.com
10. Click “Reporting and Tools” tab, then “Google Analytics”
11. Now you’re presented with Figure 1 above
12. Select “I already have a Google Analytics account. Please link it to this AdWords account”
13. Click “Continue”
14. Now, in the dropdown box labeled “Existing Google Analytics Account,” select the account you just added the user to in the previous steps
    • Note: because you added your AdWords user as an Administrator on your Analytics account, you’ll now be able to link the two
15. Click “Link my account”
16. That’s it.

Hopefully these instructions will help the vast majority of AdWords-Analytics users out there. If you find you’re still having trouble, why not spend $75 with us to get up and running within a day?

Happy Holidays everybody! Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Poinsettia Day, Winter Solstice, Festivus, and any others I might have forgot! Have a great new year as well everyone!

There are literally hundreds of local search engines and directories hungry for websites to fill their indexes. Whether you’re a local, national, or global company, this will help get more traffic to your site.

You’ll no doubt want to start off at Google Places. Once you’ve posted your listing there, try this list of local search engines and directories for more.

2. Fix your meta title tags

Meta title tags are what you see in the title bar of your browser when you visit a web page. Take a look at the top of your browser window and you’ll see the title of this article. In the HTML markup, the meta title for a given page can be found between the <title></title> tags. If you edit your own site, you should have no trouble with this. If you have a developer manage your site, create a list of adjustments and have them done for you.

You want to make sure the keyword you’re targeting on a particular page appears in that title tag. Not targeting specific keywords on each page of your site? Better get on that.

Also, the keyword should appear as close to the beginning of the meta title tag as possible…of course keep in mind humans still have to understand the title so you’ll have to get creative with ways to adjust your title tags while keeping them understandable. And this leads us to our next tip…

3. Move keywords to the front of article titles

The same rule applies to article titles. Search engines place more weight on keywords appearing at the beginning of a title than those appearing toward the end. So, to get the most bang for your writing buck you should always try to get those keywords to appear toward the beginning of any meta title tags and page titles on your web pages.

If you’re blogging on WordPress, in most cases your article title will automatically be inserted into your meta title tag so you can kill two birds with one stone here. If not, adjust those page titles so the keywords are closer toward the beginning of the title.

I realize this may not be totally clear for some people, so how about an example? Let’s say you’re a Dentist in Cincinnati and you’re going after the term Cincinnati Dentist. You have a blog post entitled “How to find a stellar Dentist in Cincinnati.” Unfortunately for you, your keywords are at the very end of that title; we want to move the words Cincinnati and Dentist as close to the beginning of the title as possible to improve our rankings for those terms. So how about changing the title to “Cincinnati Dentist: How to find the best.” It took me 2 seconds to come up with that example, so it could obviously be improved to entice people to read it, but I think I’ve made my point.

4. Adjust your keyword density

Keyword Density is the ratio of the number of times your keyword appears on a page to the total number of words on that page. It’s a metric the search engines use to help determine how to rank any given page on your site. The theory being that on a page about Cincinnati Dentists, the words Cincinnati and dentist will appear more often than any other keywords.

So does this mean you have to count every word on your page? Hell no. Let a computer do it for you; there are plenty of free tools online that will calculate keyword density for you. You can start by using this tool. You can enter your URL, a competitor’s URL, a keyword and it’ll give you a detailed comparison of the keyword densities of the two URLs.

So what’s the right keyword density to shoot for? Well, that depends on the niche. But you can get a pretty good target by running that keyword tool on the top ranked sites for your keywords. Then use their keyword densities as a target when adjusting your web pages.

If you’re blogging with WordPress, you can use Wordtracker’s SEO Blogger tool to quickly check the keyword density of a blog post as you type.

For a small to medium site, you should be able to get most of these steps done in a day or less. As always, if you need some assistance with general SEO or SEO for a WordPress site, hire us!.

We have a number of smaller clients taking advantage of the lower traffic numbers on Yahoo! and Bing to run profitable PPC campaigns where they couldn’t show a profit on Google due to crazy competition running up CPCs.

Unfortunately, when Yahoo! completes the transition on the paid search side, the combined market share will be 20-30%. I have no doubt this will result in a lot more competition on Bing/Yahoo! as larger advertisers begin spending more time and money targeting the estimated 62% larger search volume and that will consequently drive up CPCs. Hopefully things won’t get too crazy, but if there was ever a time to optimize your Bing campaign, it’s now.

Have you added the rel=”nofollow” attribute to your WordPress tag cloud? Here’s a YouTube video from Matt Cutts talking about the need to add the attribute to tag clouds, where he explains that passing PageRank through the tag cloud links is probably not the most efficient way to do things.

Unfortunately, the WordPress tag cloud is generated via a function call to wp_tag_cloud and, as a result, you cannot simply add the rel=”nofollow” attribute like you would a traditional link.

So, I did a bit of searching and stumbled across a nofollow tag plugin at SmartBlogTips.com that will take care of this for you.

That said, I’m not big on adding plugins if it’s just a few lines of code. So, for those of you interested in doing this without the plugin, you can add the following lines of code to your functions.php file:

function add_nofollow_tag($sLink) {
return str_replace('<a href=', '<a rel="nofollow" href=', $sLink);
}
add_filter('wp_tag_cloud', 'add_nofollow_tag');

That’s it. Your WordPress tag cloud should now use the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

Thanks SmartBlogTips.com for the simple plugin!

SEO is a broad topic and as technology changes, it’s becoming an increasingly large field. SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization and, according to Dictionary.com, SEO is “the process of adjusting the content, structure, etc, of a website so that it will be displayed prominently by a search engine.”

That’s a pretty clear definition, but it only covers one part of SEO, what we’d call On-Site SEO. There is another, much larger part of SEO and that is Off-Site SEO. So what’s the difference between the two and which, if either, is more important?

On-Site SEO

On-Site SEO covers exactly what the Dictionary.com definition suggests. Any work done on the site itself is on-site SEO. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, the following:

• Adjusting meta tags to more effectively target particular keywords
• Adjusting keyword density, or the number of times a keyword appears on a page, of page body copy
• Adjusting image alt tags to clearly and concisely describe an image
• Linking together pages on a website using keywords as anchor text (internal linking)
• Linking to relevant, external resources in page body copy (external linking)
• Adjusting the overall organization of pages into a clear, often hierarchical structure
• Adjusting website code to ensure search engines don’t run into any dead ends when crawling your site (i.e. JavaScript navigation is bad)
• Adding sitemaps to help search engines easily index all pages on the site

On-site SEO tends to be more technical in nature when compared to off-site SEO. When conducting on-site SEO, you’re optimizing for a machine – a search engine bot – and so there are some concrete guidelines to follow to ensure a search bot is able to easily find all pages on your site and easily determine the topic of all the pages, as well as your site as a whole.

However, clear guidelines don’t make on-site SEO easy. The key challenge in on-site SEO is balancing optimizing for search engines and optimizing for human beings. You can never forget that the primary goal of your site is to convert visitors into customers, so it’s important to find a balance. Focus too much on the search engines and your site will read like an encyclopedia. Focus too much on humans and you may not get the rankings you need to sustain your business.

Think of on-site SEO as the concrete foundation of your website. A house with a solid foundation is a great starting point, and without a solid foundation, the rest of the house could come crumbling down. But try selling a house with nothing but the foundation…it ain’t gonna happen.

Off-Site SEO

If on-site SEO is the foundation, off-site SEO is the hardwood floors and granite counter tops of search engine rankings. It’s what really determines where you end up amongst your competitors. While on-site SEO is important, it generally won’t help you rank all by itself.

While the search engines use your website content to automatically determine what keywords you have the potential to rank for, they use other websites to determine where you should rank. Google’s success was, in large part, built upon their realization that on-site content is not enough to determine the quality of a website; they needed another concrete measure of website quality that even a robot could understand.

So, what to do? Well, when you’re in a situation where you have very limited information with which to make a decision, what do you do? If you’re like me, you seek out the advice of others; you ask for recommendations. That’s exactly what Google did to solve it’s problem. Google started looking for recommendations to determine the quality of a website. And in the online world, a link from one site to another is a pretty good indication that the former is recommending the latter in some way. Now, of course a link is not always a recommendation, but it’s a concrete, efficient metric that a search engine bot can understand and, perhaps more importantly, it was better than any other method of determining quality at the time.

And when it comes to recommendations, everyone knows they aren’t all created equal. A recommendation on a reliable car is going to hold more weight coming from your mechanic than it is coming from the girl you struck up a conversation with in the supermarket checkout line. Likewise, Google gives more weight to recommendations (links) from other sites if those sites have more and higher quality recommendations (links) themselves.

PageRank is the name Google gave it’s method of determining web page quality based on the number and quality of links pointing to that web page and it’s the primary reason Google is the dominant search engine today. Other search engines took a queue from Google and have been factoring links into their ranking algorithms for some time, but Google had a big head start and, arguably, still does it better.

So now that we understand the way search engines rank web pages, we can understand the purpose of off-site SEO, and that is, primarily, to generate links.

Off-site SEO encompasses an enormous array of tasks; here are just a few of those:

• Publishing quality content: Quality content could be an interesting article like the one you’re reading now, or it could be a free tool like Wordtracker’s SEO Blogger tool. It could be on your site or published elsewhere, and since quality content is the starting point for off-site SEO, I’ve included it here. Anything that people find genuinely useful will fall into this category. Unfortunately, in the beginning, you run into the chicken or the egg dilemma. If you don’t rank well for any search terms, nobody will find your site. But if nobody finds your site, they can’t link to your quality content and so you can’t rank well for any search terms. So the rest of off-site SEO involves getting eyeballs to your website.
• Commenting on related blogs: Once you’ve got great content, people have to find it. Comments on related blogs will be clicked on, leading those visitors to discover your quality content.
• Commenting in related forums: Same idea as commenting on blogs.
• Social networking and bookmarking: Sites like Facebook and Digg.com offer other avenues for web surfers to find your site.
• Ask for links: A lot of people are afraid to do this, but if you have something genuinely useful to offer, other website operators and bloggers will be glad to share it with their readers.
• Guest Blogging: Many bloggers are receptive to you submitting blog posts for publication on their sites. This one takes a lot of work. You might spend a few hours or more writing a quality post for another blog, but it’s a great way to get very high quality links from websites that might not otherwise link to you at first as well as bringing in traffic and potential customers from the other blog.

What is SEO to you?

Some may argue that SEO encompasses a much wider variety of tasks that just those mentioned above. What do you think? What is SEO to you? Does it include posting to Twitter and Facebook? What about offline tasks like speaking with reporters or publishing articles in your local newspaper? Could these also be considered SEO?

Unfortunately if you want to have a client test a WordPress site before it goes live you have to do a search and replace on the SQL file to change all occurrences of the client’s domain with the domain/IP for your staging server. In my experience though, that can end up being one big hassle and may not work as easily as you want it to…especially when plugins come into the picture.

Another option is to have the client edit his own Windows hosts file to point the domain at your staging server. That solves the problem of having to edit the database away from, and back to the production host name before launch. But then again, some clients don’t have the computer savvy to get this done easily…even if you walk them through it step by step.

Introducing Windows Hosts File Editor

After spending 30 minutes on the phone with a client to help him edit his Windows hosts file I thought to myself, “There has got to be a better way!” So I went searching and stumbled on a great little freeware app called Windows Hosts File Editor.

Have your client download and install this app and instead of guiding them through painful telephone tutorials on how to find the hosts file and how to show hidden files and folders, they can run the program, paste a line you send them via email into the text editor and voila, hosts file edited.

Sure it’s totally overkill for someone who can edit the hosts file himself, but never underestimate the power of simplifying tasks when working with clients. It’ll help make your job easier and you’ll look more professional.