Undertsanding the Basics of Good SEO and Search Marketing Practices

The following are what I consider to be the most important issues when it comes to building a web presence. If not understood, they become the primary reasons why people are unsuccessful at creating a profitable online business.  Many times they have never been made aware of, or don't understand the basic concepts of how search engines work and their importance to a website, or they'll fail to follow a few basic principles of content building, navigational structure, and page architecture.

This list is by no means complete when it comes to SEO and Search Engine Marketing but it is a very good start.

1) Have Patience and Don't Give Up

The web isn't static, it's constantly changing and your ability to change with it to meet new goals and adjusting to those changes will be an important part of your success.  Results might not be seen for days, weeks, or months and you'll need to have the patience to deal with these delays. Rarely  is there instant gratification when it comes to search marketing and SEO.  Frustration isn't in short supply either and there will be plenty of disappointment in the process of building up an online business. Developing the knowledge you'll need to make proper marketing decisions will replace these bad experiences with positive ones. Have patience, don't give up and stick with your business plan.

2) Learn Your Market

Marketing is a competition between you and the other guys that are also trying to court the same customer base. Every client you gain is one less that your competition will have and vise versa. The more "Happy Customers" you can make the more word of mouth will spread and this should snowball into your market share.  Do your homework, learn your industry and apply that knowledge to your marketing ventures.  You'll need to gain a firm understanding of your industry, competition, product lines and customer base to target your niche effectively and to be successful at building your market share.

3) Plan

Building a successful business requires planning first and foremost. In many cases the planning phase of a project may take longer than the building of the project itself.  If you sincerely intend to be a success, creating a detailed business plan is unavoidable. By dotting the I's and crossing the T's you'll have a better chance at avoiding nasty little surprises that can suck the life out of your business (and bank accounts).

4) Discover and Imitate Your Top Competitors

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. When it comes to marketing "imitation is the fastest way to improving results". Knowing your competitions business practices is a fundamental rule to a good business plan.  I'm sure you've heard terms like "Corporate Spying" or "Corporate Espionage", companies have historically used tactics to spy on their competitors. These tactics are for the single purpose of learning the other companies marketing, R&D, and industrial secrets. If you understand your competition better than they know you, you could have a decided edge on them.  There isn't a time in history when spying on another company has been easier. Every time a new website goes online it's like handing out the keys to the office. There's simply no excuse for you to not know who the top 5-10 players in your industry or niche are, I'll bet you a dollar they do.

5) Research and Apply

Discovering keywords and keyword phrases, PPC/PPI advertising costs, competitors advertising practices, competitors use of keywords, competitors content layout, search results positions for targeted phrases, and a host of other statistics is an absolute necessity.  If you are to compete for web position then you'll need to understand how you are going to drive traffic to your site, how much it will cost, how your competition succeeds or fails at it, which terms are searched and which terms aren't, where the hotspots are on your pages, how to optimize each page to correctly take advantage of changing content, which terms are possible to rank with as well as those terms you'll never be able to rank well with. Research is an endless process that will help you to succeed in the long run.

6) Choosing the Right Domain Name

Are you already running an established business? A domain named after an existing business is probably the way to go. You can also consider a name that might include a part of a slogan or catch phrase if it's available and makes sense. Graphical location has become the latest "fad" in domain naming and with good reason. The internet was first a national and then global phenomenon, however with time you'd have to expect that as the web grows it will become more GEO Targeted by nature. This is the natural progression of such a beast.

EXP: Lets say our ficticious jewlery store is located in San Francisco, a good geographical domain might be "SFJewelers.com" or Sanfranciscojewelry.com" which plays on both location and industry directly. Most jewelers won't be competing on an international level but they can certainly grab the bulk of organic searches for any geo-locale.

The parts of a domain name that should be considered are;

Keywords - When and if possible try to use a domain name that includes a primary search term used in a grammatically correct fashion. Don't choose a domain name simply because it includes a keyword anywhere in the name. EXP: jewelrydeals.com is much better than dealsjewelry.com simply because a natural search would be for jewelry deals rather than the other way around.

Length - The shorter the better, if it's easy to type it's easy to get to.

Syllables - You should keep the syllables to 4 or less, anything more and your running a risk of losing memorability. The one caveat is if the phrase is a widely used term such as Cheap Auto Insurance, Commercial Insurance, Criminal Defense Lawyer... etc. 

Dashes - This has to be one of the biggest mistakes from both sides of the SEO aisle. A dash does NOT HURT a domain name. Google strips the dash so any dash delimited domain could be a bargain. If you can get a two keyword domain separated by a single dash like jewelry-store.com then you should jump on it.  This domain would jump right to the top of the results on a search for "jewelry store".  There are still very good domain names available using a single dash, but not for long.  People have gotten wise to this fact and they are starting to gobble up all of the strong 2 keyword phrases right now. 

Memorability - How easy is your domain to remember the first time someone reads it? Unless you have the cash to buy a short single dictionary term then your domain will need to be creative and memorable. Single keyword domains are very expensive because of the built in advantage they have for search. FUND.com recently sold for $8m, Vodka.com sold for $4m, Bank of America purchased LOAN.com nearly 10 years ago for over $1m.

Market Demographics: Does the domain name target a huge, large, medium or small market? Small markets are fine if you can grab the lions share of that market. Huge markets carry the risk of dilusion which might make it an uphill battle for you. Would you open a hardware store next to a Home Depot? Weigh the risks with the benefits of the market you'll be targeting.

Note: Do try to get a .com extension but don't let that be a requirement. Some experts conclude that extentions outside the .com, .org and .net are spammy or unusable. A single keyword .net, .biz, or .info extension will have much better results than a poor .com would. 

Some wannabe SEO pseudo guru is right now shaking his head and saying no way. Just for you, I present Arron Wall of SEOBook fame as my primary example. Please take a look at this. Anyone in the industry knows of Arron Wall (or should) and his little PR5 .info WITH A DASH is proof that extensions are only a barrier of the mind, not the internet. So suck it up and find a 2nd tier extension if it means the difference between a crappy domain name and a killer keyword rich name. (I hope Arron appreciates this free tout, as if he needs one!)

Choosing a domain name that has no keyword value but that is short and easy to remember could be a brandable name. Building a brandable domain name is always an option, but it will require additional marketing and probably a larger budget to do it right. Be prepared to pay for additional advertising costs when branding a site.

7) Content Management

Once you have all of the above figured out you'll need a way to easily manage and publish your information. A good Content Management System or CMS should be a priority on your list of to do's, but where to start? Keep in mind that you'll most likely be married to whichever CMS you decide to use and the last thing you'll want is to find out is that the software won't do exactly what you need it to do, especially after spending days or weeks setting it up.

OPEN SOURCE CMS - If you are on a tight budget then I would suggest Joomla or Mambo as a starting point. The support is second to none with a history of security updates, active user forums and a top CMS status. There are literally thousands of 3rd party extensions and plugins that give Joomla unlimited potential and expandability. Wordpress is another very popular blog style CMS that also has a huge following and offers many 3rd party templates, plugins, widgets and active support forums making it a good choice.

Commercial or Custom CMS - Buying a commercial CMS offers a number of advantages which include commercial support and service level agreements. A commercial CMS may already exist for your needs and will likely be faster to implement than an open source CMS. Documentation and training are usually much stronger than for an open source product. The drawback will most certainly be the expense of the software itself. You pay for what you get and sometimes you'll pay quite a bit just to find that it may not be exactly what you need.  Never purchase any software without a test drive or access to a demo site including back end (admin) access. You must do your homework and investigate the company as well as their platform. What do other customers think of their product and are there good reviews of the company and the software?  Make sure that they offer a level of support that meets your needs and are made aware of any added charges or annual fee's for continued support.

The CMS you decide on should be able to implement the MOD_REWRITE function to create search engine friendly paths. Whatever CMS you choose must be able to apply the following steps to be of any use to you in your marketing and optimization plans:

8) Titles, Descriptions and Keywords

You'll need the ability to edit and modify any pages Title, Description and the Keywords separately. These three items of a website are either "abused" or "not used" by designers and webmasters.  It is so simple to create a good title yet better than 50% of the websites out there hack this tag by throwing in "HOME", "INDEX" or "MY PAGE",  or worse yet they'll place the URL in the title as if people don't already know where they are once they get there. Each page has its own unique content and the title, description and keyword tags should all be designed with that particular pages content in mind. Having the same tags on all pages of a site is like a candy company putting the same wrapper on all of it's different candy bars.  Would you buy a Snickers bar if you didnt know there was actually a Snickers bar inside?

Titles and descriptions from the human perspective. You need to look at your Title and Description as a single ad unit which is divided into two parts.  You'll want to create a title that is compelling and include a keyword or two inside it. The closer to beginning of the title that you can place your keyowrd the better but dont just stuff 4 keywords in there and call it a title. It needs to make sense to the reader otherwise they wont be inspired to click on your listing.  The title should grab attention and then lead the reader into a description that makes them want to click on the listing.  Clean and Simple advertising in its purest form.

9) Content Layout

Take a look at your top competitors websites and figure out what they're doing to propel their sites to the top of the SERPs. What are the search engines looking at within the content of those pages. Follow their lead by implementing similar (NOT EXACT) methods to compete on their level. Use header and alt tags properly to reinforce content. The search engines love seeing keyword content spread over different areas of your pages but you'll need to understand what constitutes keyword spamming and why, and how to use keyword percentages to build perfect pages.  Navigation of a site should be intuitive and easy to follow.

10) Plan Your Paths

Care should be taken to design your paths to be strong to content just as content is made strong to keywords and phrases. By naming categories, directories and files to be keyword rich you reinforce the search engines perception of content strength.

Using our ficticous Jewelry site that sells silver chains as our example lets see how path naming can be done in a way to optimize content for "silver rope chains";

Good> ://jewelrysite.com/silver-chains/rope-chains.html

Bad> ://jewelrysite.com/silver-deals/rope.html

While it is true that tons of people may search for "rope", I doubt we'll be seeing the kind of traffic that "rope chains" should receive.  It's a very easy task to design and create SEO friendly paths that will be optimization for search.

11) Alt Tags

Allowing authors to specify alternate text to serve as content when the element cannot be rendered normally. Specifying alternate text assists users without graphic display terminals, users whose browsers don't support forms, visually impaired users, those who use speech synthesizers, those who have configured their graphical user agents not to display images, etc.  By using alternate text to build and reinforce content you can radically improve a websites SERP.  Also, by creating pages that text to speech readers and speech synthesizers can understand, you'll be widening your target market to include the visually impaired.  Google is now giving extra weight to websites that build T2S compliant pages.

12) Understand The Costs and Benefits of Different Advertising Channels

Getting the best bang for the buck is the bottom line here. Let's talk about Google since they provide about 62% of all search referrals. Google's advertising program (ADWORDS) consists of keyword bidding on the Google search engine, Google Partners network and content placements. Create your free Adwords account and choose Standard edition with the post payment option. Once you've created your Adwords account, DO NOT start by choosing every keyword in your Adwords manager.  Starting a keyword spending spree is known as "Bleeding Adwords" and many website owners bleed to death much to the delight of their Google account manager.  I really shouldn't say that, because in all honesty it is the advertisers ignorance of how the Adwords program works which leads to the bulk of wasted advertising dollars. Google can be your best friend or your worst nightmare and depends on how well you understand the workings of the Adwords program. Your ability to choose the proper keywords and the ad content for those keywords will determin how well the marriage of organic content to paid traffic will ultimately become.

As time permits, I'll be providing tutorials in the advanced SEO section that explains how to use all of the tools available in the Adwords manager. I will also touch on Yahoo advertising and other smaller programs, but if you understand Google's Adwords, you'll likely understand the fundamentals of most PPC/PPI bidding programs.

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