SEO Lessons

SEO isn’t rocket science – but neither is playing the piano.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that successful SEO is easy. It isn’t. It takes commitment and hard work. This is probably the single biggest mistake that people make – believing that it is easy. But most people that do fall away and those of us that are left know it’s not easy. So what – apart from thinking it’s easy – are the most common SEO mistakes that we make and how can we avoid them?

These are some of the top issues that are most often overlooked. We all make mistakes but if we learn from them they’re not mistakes, they’re lessons.

1. SEO Optimized Domain Name

Just because Google, Apple and WalMart have quirky brand names – it doesn’t mean that your idea for a funky brand will be any use. Incorporating keywords into your domain name is a highly valuable  SEO technique. It’s much easier to rank highly with pizzadelivery.com than it is PapaPizza.com. Papa Pizza might sound like a great name for a Pizza business but it won’t help to get you orders online.

And get your domain suffix right. .com is best if you have a global market, but if your focus on Canada for example, .ca will outrank .com. And don’t be too dismissive of other suffixes either. pizzadeliver.biz is likely to outrank new-pizza-delivery-online.net

Consider the domain name carefully balancing the pros and cons of the keyword you are target, the use of hyphens and the suffix.

2. Content Quality

Sites copied from others, bought content, poorly presented content and non expert content are irrelevant to the reader and the search engines know this. You risk losing rank severely if you adopt these approaches to producing content. There is no substitute for good quality content and no short cuts. It’s best to stick to a niche that you have some expertise in or enthusiasm for. Read SEO Lesson4: Face Up to it. Some People Just Don’t Like You and SEO Lesson 3: Never Mind the Quality – Feel the Width

3. Quality of Backlinks

Backlinks are important but rather than concentrating time and effort on posting in every forum and commenting on as many blog posts as you can find, spend some time being selective and make sure you get links from quality, highly ranked sites. Post in very poor quality sights and you’ll be seen as spammy.

4. Meta Description

You may have heard that the meta tags on your site will have little or no effect on your ranking. You might want to put some keywords there anyway just in case because it can’t do any harm – Right?

Wrong. The meta description of your site is the text that appear in Google Search results. If you don’t have a meta description, Google will present an extract from your page. If you have a well written and compelling meta description, you won’t improve your ranking but you will certainly improve your CTR from the Google.

Page 1 on Google is only useful if people then click on your site. Ranking is of no use if your click through rate (CTR) is poor.

5. Image Tags

Images are grea to enhance content but the search engines can’t read them. Alway ensure that description and alt tags are included that use keyword appropriately.

6. Wrong Anchor Text on Internal Links

“Click Here” is a wasted opportunity. Always use keyword anchor text when linking internally

7. Keyword Ambiguity

This is subtle, but take some time to consider keywords and phrases to understand how they might be used by search engine users. You may want a keyword or phrase that is search very regulalry but be careful in case it is being search for different reasons than you think.

For example: you want to set up a company offering to organize office parties – a kind of mobile DJ set up. You think that “dance in the office” might be a good keyword phrase. Your research tells you that that phrase is used quite often. Perhaps there’s lots of demand for office party DJs. Stop and think about it. Try putting “dance in the office” into Google. When you see Ricky Gervais staring back at you, you realize that, while people often use that phrase in Google, it’s not for what you were thinking.

8. Spend Too Much Time Checking Your Ranking?

Measure your tomato plants every day and feed them once a week and watch them die. Water them once a day and measure them once a week – they’ll thrive. Read SEO Lesson 2: Don’t Count Things That Happen – Make Things Happen That Count

9. Respect the Guidelines

Don’t buy into Black Hat techniques. A Black Hat career will be short lived. You may not be stupid, but compared to the might of Google, Yahoo Bing and the honest internet community – you are. Read SEO Lesson 5: Google is Your Friend

10. Over Ambitious Keyword Choice

Always check the competition for a keyword and never believe that because there are lots of searches on a keyword that you can get a piece of it. You can’t – not unless you have real money to invest. Read Fundamentals of SEO Lesson3: Choose Your Fish and Pond Size

Think about this as a daily routine and see if you recognize it.

Get up early.

Get a coffee and turn the computer on. Go straight to your adsense account and get a quick check to see how many ad impressions and clicks you’ve got. See what’s of interest then go to google analytics to drill down into detail of who been looking at your site and why. What search queries are being used and how close are they to the keywords your concentrating on? Where is the traffic coming from? Go to your affiliate account pages and see what activity there’s been. Express silent disapointment. Look at twitter and check out your facebook messages.

Get another coffee

Now that the trivial meaningless stuff is over, get down to the serious business of internet marketing and check your ranking in Market Samurai. Go to Google Reader and see what’s being said in your niche. Read it all. Get distracted by amusing rants about how Macs are great and PCs are shit.

It’s time for another coffee and probably a bite to eat. You could really do with a break to refresh the brain cells and reflect on achievements so far today.

So what have you achieved so far today? Answer: Nothing!

How long have you been “working”? A couple of hours? And you’ve done zip. What’s more, if your numbers are the same as yesterday, you’ve spent 2 hour confirming your miserable failure and you’ve set yourself up for a non-productive day. If your numbers are great, you’re going to spend the rest of the day congratulating yourself on becoming a complete genius in your sleep. You’ve done the equivalent of spending two hours at the water cooler with the company soothsayers sharing meaningless company gossip. Frankly, you’re an idiot!

But don’t be too hard on yourself. You’re in good company. This is a very natural way to behave. It’s a symptom of enthusiasm and commitment. But daily and thorough scrutiny of your business numbers is worse than pointless.

Suppose you grew a tomato plant from seed. Each day, when it’s a seedling, you’d water it once, maybe twice a day. Then, when you plant it outside, you again water it everyday, feed it once a week perhaps and two or three times a week you’d prick out unproductive stems. If you do this, you are likeley to get a strong healthy plant that will grow a few inches each week and eventiually produce some delicious fruit. You could measure it each week to see that it’s growing healthily and get satisfaction from your efforts.

Now, suppose you did this the other way round. Instead of watering the plant every day and measuring it once a week, you measured it once per day and watered it once a week. What would you see? You’d see no change most days (the daily growth isn’t easily measurable) and over the course of a week you’d see some growth. But not for long because you’d eventually see it whither and die because you hadn’t fed and watered it enough.

The Lesson

Instead of counting things that happen, make things happen that count. Feed and water your websites daily. Measure them weekly.

Changes don’t happen daily, they happen weekly or even monthly. Of course you are going to look at some  things daily, it’s important that you do (see SEO Lesson 1)  but don’t do it at the expense of producing quality content and backlinks. That is the food and water that your websites need to grow.

SEO Lessons

I learned this a long time ago. But I only just re-learned it.

In my early career I was a rep. A rep (company representative) sells company products to other companies – usually retailers or customer facing businesses of one form or another. It was in the insurance industry and we didn’t call ourselves “reps”, preferring pretentious titles like “account executive” but we were reps. Anyway, selling of this sort, like most selling, is a numbers game. The more calls you make, the more quotes you get, the more people you see the more business you get. And every week we’d report to our sales manager about how much business we’d won. Not how many calls we’d done or how many quotes, but how much money we’d made. This is fair enough – we were in business to make money. But I was a little dissatisfied with this and decided to do my own style of sales management.

You need to understand this in context because this was in the early 1990s. People didn’t have PCs at home. The computers people used at work were dumb terminals that performed very specific work related functions. People were not generally computer literate so when I began using a spreadsheet on a handheld Psion 3a, my colleagues and sales manager thought I was just a geek. But what I did was really simple. I recorded the number of calls I made each week, the number of quotations requests I received and the amount of business I got in. Over the course of 4-6 weeks I was able to see a pattern emerge. Approximately  4 weeks after a spike in the number of calls I did, there would be a spike in the number of quotations and I was begining to see the next spike. 1 to 2 weeks after the quotations spike was a business spike.

So I was seeing the confirmation of the adage that it was a numbers game. If I did more calls I’d get more business and I’d know approximately when that would happen. I become motivated to do more calls. I became more self assured and less fearful to report a poor week because I knew exactly why it had happened and could report what I’d done to improve the numbers.

This is all pretty simple stuff. Anyone with any sales or business management experience will be very familiar with this.

I learned this technique 20 years ago – but I wasn’t doing it to measure my web marketing activities. The penny dropped a few weeks ago when I recalled my sales experience and I began to record all of my key measures and as a result, I began to learn why some of my websites were being successful and why some were not.

The Lesson

Measure what you do. Record how much content you create. Record how many interactions you have using social media. Measure the quality of content. (A quick blog post is different from a key word optimized article). Record all activity that you think is important. Compare this activity to you unique visitor count or your sales figures – whatever measures are important to you and your on-line goals. Don’t go over the top to the point where you’re measuring more than doing – that’s what SEO Lesson 2 is about.

You will see trends emerge that will teach you which activities deliver results and it will motivate you to concentrate only on the things that count.