zevWorks

Not very often does someone put out one viral marketing campaign that propels them into instant web success. It takes consistency and hard work along with a dedicated schedule of events that are continuously hitting the pages of the internet. Repetition in front of your audience is what it takes to get people to notice you and what you are doing in your industry.

Here are ways to be consistent with your web marketing efforts:

1. Link Building: Don’t just shoot from the hip with your efforts. Put a strategy together for either 6 or 12 months and stick to it. Feel free to add and make changes as you go along but stick to a schedule for your link building. A schedule is really the only way your efforts are really going to work how they are supposed to.

2. Social Media Marketing: You don’t want to leave big gaps in your frequency of activity. People need repetition in the social networks. Your audience needs to see your brand and logo consistently for them to take you seriously as a company. It is all about burning the image of your brand into the minds of those around you. This can only happen if you are active on a regular basis. Put a plan together of where and when you will take part in your social activity, this will keep you a bit more focused. It is easy to get lost in the sea of social chatter.

3. Email Marketing: You don’t want to send a newsletter once every six months because it will not have the same effects than if you sent it twice per month. Applying the consistency rule and scheduling at least one newsletter campaign per/month will have a much more substantial impact on your branding efforts. If you could find a way to bump that up to 2 newsletters per month you will without a doubt see an increase in traffic and sales.

Everything about web marketing is about consistency. You have to be persistent and repetitious about everything you do online and over time your brand will grow. Make a schedule of efforts and events and stick to it.

Developing a crawlable infrastructure

Speaker: Michael Motherwell, SEO Rainmaker – MMIT Consulting

The session started with Michael Motherwell and his presentation on developing a crawlable infrastructure. The most important points included the following:

a) Content – Create unique and valuable content. Avoid duplicate content, most common errors are caused by session ids, tracking codes, capitalization (www.example.com.au vs www.Example.com.au), sorted list, etc. The solution is to use a 301 redirect, canonical tag or chose a good tracking system (for duplicated content caused by tracking URLs parameters)

b) HTTPS status code is important – 200 Ok pages are good. Avoid using 200 for error pages (you need to use a 404 errors status). Customise your 404 errors page (e.g. Apple)

c) Your pages indexed might depend on page rendering speed, page rank and how often a page is updated (fresh content)

d) Have an XML & HTML sitemap

e) Hierarchy is important – organise your hierarchy to make your most important pages on the top of the hierarchy

f) Fix your broken links

g) Tools available: Xenu (to crawl your site), Webbug (to check what it’s sent to a Web Server and, when the response is received and to check what the Web Server sends), Selenium (testing tool)

Rich Applications – considerations when developing rich internet applications, including technologies such as Flash, Silverlight, and AJAX.

Speaker: Danny Dover, SEO Consultant – SEOmoz.org

Danny presentation was about rich applications. The most important points included the following:
a) HTML – This is still the most popular and search engine friendly code, it’s very straight forward and was initially designed for academic papers.

b) Flash- This is very useful, however it is not SE friendly. sIFR is an alternative and recommended by Google. Google is attempting to crawl flash, but it is not great at this.
iPhone does not support Flash. Apple says that the reason behind this is because ,any system crashes are caused by Flash.

c) Ajax – This is a JS technique. Google is still working to make Ajax crawlable “Proposal for making Ajax crawlable “

d) Silverlight – Microsoft version of Flash technology. It’s new and not adopted by Google, and not supported by the iPhone. This is not recommended for SEO.

The main recommendation is to find a compromise. Build pages that are SEO and people friendly. But go nuts and use Flash or Ajax for pages that you don’t want to be indexed and are only used for usability. Use HTML 5, this has new tags to make rich applications.

Danny also mentioned about CSS image replacement, a technique used for example for serving an image of flash replacement through CSS styling. This technique is commonly used by spammers so be careful.

URL rewriting, redirection & canonicalisation
Speaker: Greg Boser, Founder – 3 Dog Media

Greg defined himself as a marketing person not a developer. His session was about URL rewriting and canonicalization. The most important points included the following:

a) URL rewrite is good for click-through, not for SEO
b) Keywords in URL – beneficial in Google regardless whether in the filename/directory names or variable values in query strings
c) Hyphen in URL – it’s the preferred way but don’t overdo it
d) 3 approaches to rewrite unfriendly URLs:
- URL rewriting server module such as mod_rewrite for Apache
- Recode your scripts
- Proxy based solution – not the best solution
e) If you are on Microsoft IIS server, use ISAP rewrite 3.0
f) Regular expressions for Mod_Rewrite – good to handle rewrites, easy to find on the web
g) Canonicalisation: rewrite is only the first step, make sure any piece of valuable content has only one URL . Prevent to index duplicate pages. Methods used include:
Conditional redirection: Most effective but somewhat complicated, results for an SEO perspective are the same

Canonical tag: good enough but not as good as the 301 redirect. Initially the canonical tag worked only across single domain, now Google allows it across different domains (cross domain canonical). This might become a good tool for syndicated content.

It seems like a funny question to me, but it gets asked a lot.  “Where should the SEO copy go on my Web page?”  That question gets asked so much because there are several pieces of out-of-date information, rumors and myths with regard to text placement, when writing SEO copy.

For instance, many absolutely swear that the copy has to be as high up on the page as possible for the search engines to find it.  Not true.  The spiders will find the text regardless of where it is on your page.  Others say all your text has to be in one block.  Also not true.  The spiders will find the text regardless of where it is on your page.

Other statements I’ve heard regarding text placement include:

·    Your headline must appear at the very top of the page.

·    Copy placed inside tables throws the search engines off.

·    Copy must be positioned above the fold to be found by the spiders.

None of these are true.  The spiders will find the text regardless of where it is on your page.  (Or did I already say that… twice?)  This is true in 99.9% of the cases, with only some very rare exceptions.

So where is the best place to put SEO copy on your Web page?  Wherever it makes sense to the site visitor!

Spiders will find your text regardless of where it falls on the page.  Want proof?  Here’s a test.  Go to Google and type in any working URL.  When the result comes up for that site, click on: “Show Google’s Cache of…”  In the box that appears at the top of the next page, click on this option: “This cached page may reference images which are no longer available. Click here for the cached text only.”  What do you see?

You see exactly what the search engine sees.  If the text appears in this text-only cache, that means Google’s spider can read it and index it.

Put Copy Where It Is Most Beneficial to Your Visitors

Since the engines will find your text regardless of where it falls on the page, your focus should be placed on the site visitor.  This is where your focus should always be.  The people who have the money come first; the search engines come second. 

If it makes sense for your visitors to see your headline as the first thing on the page, then put it first.  If a graphic design element makes more sense, then put that first.  If you use photos or other images, include captions so your visitors understand what these photos mean and how they relate to the sales message.

If you have an ecommerce site, create pages for each category of products you offer in order to help guide the visitors’ steps.  Then add short copy segments that quickly describe what is offered for each specific product.  Even though the copy is scattered all about the page, the engines WILL find it.

When it comes to copy placement on your Web pages, don’t agonize over what the engines want you to do.  Give 100% of your consideration to what would be most useful for your visitors and place your copy in those areas.  The spiders will find it with no trouble at all.

What would happen if…?  I’m a person to always ask that question.  I love testing and tracking to see what factors can improve or worsen a situation.  So, it was only natural for me to track the moves of a little experiment I did involving SEO copywriting recently.  I’ll gladly share my findings with you.

Before I do, however, I want to make a couple of things very clear.  The outcome of this experiment will not be the same for every keyphrase on every page of every site.  There are too many unknown factors at play in the overall SEO equation.  Not to mention, all keyphrases are not the same, and all sites are not the same.  In addition, this experiment takes no account of link popularity, which is a huge factor in achieving high rankings.  With that said, let me show you how I took the home page of one of my sites – that didn’t even rank in the top 50 – and caused it to rank in the top 10.

First of all, I’m not a big fan of checking rankings on a regular basis.  I don’t run ranking reports for all my sites to be sure they are all in the positions I want them in for every given keyphrase.  I’ll do it from time to time just to satisfy my own occasional curiosity.  This experiment began when I noticed the home page of one of my sites was ranking highly for a keyphrase that didn’t seem to appear anywhere in the text.  Upon further investigation, I saw that the keyphrase was included in the ALT tags (a.k.a. image attribute tags) and that it was also included in the title tag.

I knew ALT tags previously carried a lot of weight with the engines, but had been downgraded in importance because site owners had badly abused the tag.  Had ALT tags been reinstated in their level of importance?  I decided to find out.

Keyword #1 was currently in the ALT tags and the title tag, so I decided to eliminate the keyword in the title tag.  This would let me see if the ALT tags alone could hold the position in the search engine results pages (SERPs).  To make things more interesting, I also decided to research and find a keyword that was a little more competitive and insert it into the title tag.  On the same day I removed Keyword #1 from the title tag, I inserted Keyword #2.  My home page was not ranked in the top 50 at that time for Keyword #2.

A few days later, the Googlebot came by and boosted my home page to position #18 for Keyword #2.  Not bad!  The page fell one spot (from #17 to #18) for Keyword #1 since the removal of the phrase from the title tag.

Keep in mind, these are not the most competitive keywords ever known.  They each got between 100 to 200 searches a day.  Also, the home page of this particular site had been (and still is) well ranked for years for other keyphrases and had a positive legacy with Google.

Five days later, Keyword #2 was moved up three notches to a ranking of #14 while Keyword #1 stayed the same.  Things remained in their status quo for roughly 10 days and then began to shift again.  Keyword #1, the original that was previously in both the ALT tags and the title tag, vanished completely.  It was not found in the top 50.  Keyword #2, that was only found in the title tag and nowhere else, dropped to position #25.

Four days later, Keyword #2 was back up in the rankings and was now at #16. To see if I could improve rankings further, I began to make small tweaks to the page attributes.  I added Keyword #2 to the ALT tags (taking the places where Keyword #1 had once been), and I also added Keyword #2 to the body copy.   The keyphrase was added to one, bold sub-headline and at three places within the body copy: none of which were above the fold.  It was not added to any primary headlines that used <H> tags, and no keyword density formula was followed for the body copy.  No other pages on my site used this term as anchor text in links pointing to the home page.  That gave the page keyword placement in the:

·    Title tag

·    ALT tags

·    Body copy

Seven days later, the home page hit the top 10 for Keyword #2!

So, what does all this mean?  Simple.  There is no single primary factor in search engine rankings.  It takes balance, testing and tracking to find out what works for your particular pages.  Your best bet is to do exactly what I did… begin one step at a time and track your progress.  Did something cause a positive movement?  Keep it.  If something causes a negative shift, take it out.

I’m not finished with this page yet.  I’ll keep trying different things from time to time just to see what happens.  Maybe I’ll add anchor text links from the internal pages to the home page.  I might try writing articles with keyword-rich anchor text links to help boost the rankings more.  There are many acceptable practices I can implement for this page (or any page) that will allow me to observe the shifts in ranking.  As the old saying goes, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”  A diversified approach to SEO copywriting that includes tags, copy and links is always a wise start down the road to top 10 rankings.