Many Web site owners become so focused on getting rankings for keywords that they begin to lose sight of their most important asset- their target audience. Site owners need to realize that pleasing current customers and maximizing return visitors provides more opportunity for their site. Creating a pleasing site experience will not only increase repeat business, but it will also increase conversion of new visitors. A site that is well laid out, easy to navigate, and that has useful content will increase return customers, increase conversions, AND will help increase rankings in the search engines. It is a wonderful cycle of increased business!

I am surprised to see so many people asking for optimization when their existing site is not ready to handle a large increase in traffic; putting the cart before the horse. Don’t let this happen to you. Make your Web site optimization-ready. Make sure you are already getting decent conversion rates, visitors are spending a decent amount of time on your site (and not leaving after 4 seconds), and that your site is not taking 7 seconds to load, etc.

So you are asking, “How do you do this?”

One word for you… analytics. You should have a program like Google Analytics installed in your site so you can track visitors and see what they like or dislike. Once you understand what pages need work (or even the entire site), get a good development company to or Webmaster to help implement those changes; then monitor the results of that, and make tweaks.

It is critical to have your Search Engine Optimization company consult with you during the development. They can offer their expertise and make sure that the changes are search engine-friendly. Having a bunch of development done, and THEN going to an SEO company and to have them tell you that you need major development changes is enough to throw anyone into fits. There is plenty to do on the development side to increase search engine visibility.

The basic idea is if you work at appeasing “Your” people, or target audience, then you will also end up appeasing search engines and helping your SEO campaign to be more effective as well! At eVisibility we are dedicated to helping our clients increase their conversion, not just their search engine rankings. Please contact us at 877-728-4822 to talk to a consultant about beginning a campaign. Or if you are a current client contact your client manager to discuss ways to increase the effectiveness of your site.

Over and Over again I get approached by people who have signed up with these “performance-based” SEO companies where you only pay if they get placement. Most of the time, these people waited for months and months with little or no payoff. This may sound good on the exterior. I mean come on, these SEO companies are really putting their money where their mouth is, right? Not really.

There are huge problems with this model for the person waiting for placements and almost no downside for the SEO Company that signs you up….crazy am I? Let me explain.

I would say out of 50 companies we talk to, 5 of them are “right on the edge” of good placement. When one of these clients comes aboard, we can do a couple of title tag changes, make a couple of nice site maps, and do about 5 hours of on-page optimization, and we are done. These sites tend to be the older websites that have a strong “natural” campaign. After all, not all sites placed in the top of the search engines were worked on by a search engine optimization company. In fact, I would say that more than half are not. This is because sometimes Google, Yahoo, MSN do their job and rank good sites. What on earth does this have to do with Performance-based contracts? Keep reading….

Now, if you are lucky and you are in the 5% of websites that just need a little “push” then the Performance based SEO Company will give you that slight push, and then you will owe them money for the length of the contract. Not always a bad thing, but it could get expensive.

Now the really bad news. If you are in the 95% of companies that need a lot more of a push, chances are, the Performance only SEO Company will not put the necessary resources in. To implement a first-class search engine optimization campaign costs thousands of dollars in hard cost and I really doubt one of these companies will do what is necessary to get you there.

The overall model of the performance-based SEO model is to essentially throw as many pennies in the air and hope some land face up with little or no effort from their company.

You have a simple choice when evaluating one of these models. Do you want to “hope” to get to the top of the placements to save a couple of bucks? The fact is 95% of the time, SEO takes lots of hard work and dedication and money. Make sure the agreement you are forming with any search engine optimization company spells out how much work they will put into it. It will take 6 months to see if a company is doing a good job or not. Saving a little money up front pales in comparison to the amount of business you will loose as a result of not engaging in a strong SEO campaign.

I know that you are not supposed to give away the answer in the first paragraph but I will anyways, yes and no. Working at a Search Engine Marketing firm, I have fielded numerous questions from clients and employees regarding how is Universal Search going to affect campaigns. So I have decided to address this in a post for the masses.

The first thing that people need to do is perform searches to see what comes up. You will notice that many search terms are relatively, if at all, affected by universal search. As a matter of fact, I have yet to see a product search result show up within the organic results outside of the Onebox. So not even product search has been affected. Where I am seeing the most change is when doing searches on people, places, news events, pop culture stuff, etc. So if you type “Steve Jobs” into Google you will see Google News results, YouTube results, and News Archive results all imbedded within the organic Web results.

So let’s assume that currently Google is showing these Universal results for some of your keywords. If you click on a Video Search result for one of your videos, you can either watch the video right there within the SERP without leaving the page, or you can click to go to YouTube.com to view it. Let’s assume that you click on an Image Search result, it takes you to Google Image Search and a quite awkward looking page. Now try clicking on a News Search result, it takes you to the news site that posted the article. Basically none of these Universal Search results will take visitors to your site, they simply drive the organic traffic to the various Google vertical properties, and of course more Google advertising.

So optimizing for the Universal Search results will not help drive more traffic to, or conversions for, your site. What optimizing for Google Universal Search can do for your business is build branding and hopefully take up valuable page real estate. If you are ranked in the top 5 for any of your search terms, and have an Image of yours ranked for that same term, and have a video ranked for that term, then you have now taken up 4 out of the 10 available organic spots on the page! This is not easy though, and will take a lot of work and dedication. It is not as easy as just optimizing your images and video. The images and video need to be deemed “relevant” to Google, and need to be used in a relevant manner on your site and probably others as well, for the search term. No one is quite yet sure how far Google is going to go with this and how Google is going to determine what search terms are going to get served up vertical results. But at least everyone is now realizing that they need to have their images and video properly optimized for.

Anyone involved in the search industry will know that Google has rolled out “Universal Search” today to the masses. There have been countless articles on this subject in the last few weeks, some of them touting the service and others screaming about what a travesty it is. I hope to clarify a few things.

Google has, for a long time now, had many vertical search properties like Google Maps, Image Search, Product Search, etc. These are places that you can do a search with a specific purpose, like finding directions, looking for someone’s photograph, etc. Google has also been serving up results from its vertical search properties within the default Google Web Search, which is a horizontal search property where you can search for anything and everything. These vertical results were shown within an area called the Onebox. The Onebox is displayed at the top of the organic results and just beneath the top paid results, in prime Google real estate. The problem was that people were not clicking on these One Box results as much as Google would have liked. The reason not many people clicked on Onebox results was that people respond to K.I.S.S. No, not the rock band! K.I.S.S. stands for Keep It Simple Stupid. I mean look at the Google homepage, it does not get any more simple than that.

Google now feels that they need to incorporate all of their vertical search properties right smack dab in the middle of the organic SERP pages in order to gain exposure for them. So now there are results with video, news articles, images, books, etc. within the top ten organic results. That means less Web search results and more vertical search results. There is not even the option to search using only the Web page search. And that means that top organic rankings are even that more important!!!

The Problem

A while back I came across an interesting article that noted some of the odd news sources in Google News. Sites like Boing Boing and Himalayan Times. Yes there are sites like the NY Times and others, but they all have one thing in common. They are all heavy Google Advertisers! So, in essence, Google is using their vertical search property to re-direct traffic to more Google advertising. That is a serious problem because it means that Google can no longer be trusted to provide the best, unbiased, results to the end user. And that is what search is supposed to be all about. But we should have all seen it coming from the day that they went public! A public firm has only ONE purpose, to make money for its shareholders. That was just the beginning of the end for Google organic results.

Now, with Universal Search, Google has the opportunity to direct even more traffic to Adwords and Adsense because these vertical search properties, some of which are laden with Google advertisers, are now integrated into the organic results. This means increasing PPC costs across the board as organic results are going to be at a premium.

The Solution

Now, more than ever, it is going to be important to get your site(s) optimized properly. If you were thinking about engaging in a search engine optimization campaign, or increasing your current campaign, do it! Getting the top positions is going to be even more valuable, and of course even more difficult. If you found yourself on page 1 in the 8, 9, or 10 spots for keywords you could now be bumped to the second page. So by all means, kick it up a notch and GET TO THAT FIRST PAGE! Buy some extra linking, get some more optimized content, if you are that close to the first page you should definitely be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. You just need that last jolt to get you there.

There are two general segments of Search Engine Optimization: On-Page and Off-Page. Off Page factors pertain to activities that are not visible on the website, such as back linking. The majority of the weight search engines gives to a website is in accordance with off-page factors however proper on-page design still does contribute about 20% of the weight. So how should you maximize this 20% for the best possible results? Probably the most important on-page factor is the title tag. It is imperative that this tag includes your website’s most important key phrase. Be sure you do the necessary keyword research to determine a highly relevant phrase for your business that isn’t too competitive among other websites. For example if your website is based in New Jersey and sells car insurance, a highly competitive phrase, you may discover that “Car Insurance in New Jersey” has a good ratio of high search volume and low competition. This would be an ideal term to include in the title tag for this type of website.

On-Page Optimization doesn’t stop there. The next thing you should do would be to incorporate semantically related phrases in the Meta Keyword tag and Meta Description tag. Meta tags have a variable degree of significance in Search Engine Optimization these days. Google doesn’t put to much emphasis on Meta tags as they used too but because it was too easy too spam these tags to trigger multiple keywords on the same page. However Yahoo and MSN still put some significance in these tags. Another important HTML tag is the H1, or header tag. Using an H1 tag can further dictate the relevance of your webpage to search engines. Natural use of H1 tags will produce a larger sized font and may be unattractive to some websites. Fortunately this can be controlled with CSS. You can use a style sheet to format the font size of an H1 tag to 12 point font to blend in with the rest of the body text. Be sure not to use more then one H1 tag per page or you may be penalized by Google for spam.

Metas, Headers and Title Tags will help search engines define the content of your site, but how should you write the copy to your webpage to get the most out of these tags? If we go back to the car insurance example, we can write our body text in way to keep a keyword density of 3-5%. Keyword density is simply the keyword you are targeting divided by number of words on the webpage. If I use the term “car insurance” 5 times on the webpage that has 100 words, then I am keeping a keyword density of 5%. Keyword density if important for SEO purposes because a low percentage may indicate to search engines that your keyword isn’t that relevant to your page and a high keyword density looks like spam for a search engines point of view.

You should always try to target one main keyword per webpage and one smaller term. Each webpage of your site has a specific focus so it is critical to let search engines know how relevant each topic is. The narrower your niche, the better.

Blogs were initially used as a platform to increase credibility and communicate a more personalized voice for a company. While they still have this purpose, blogs are now being used to help with SEO. Search engines like websites with frequently updated content. In many cases, blogs can establish higher search engine rankings faster than a regular website. A blog is easier to publish than a regular website, so you can post content to it more often.

Blogs have evolved into content management systems that can include RSS, trackbacks and comments in order to increase websites’ page rankings within natural search listings. Optimized blog content is a great way to reinforce SEO efforts on your website for a few different reasons such as fresher content, page rankings for long tail phrases and more inbound links.

Blog software makes blogging very easy and more beneficial to your site because it can be used to manage content, archive newsletters, post frequently asked questions and provide frequent product updates. With blog software, a search engine un-friendly site can actually gain great rankings in both regular search engines and blog search engines.

Content is integral to getting traffic to a website, but only if it is optimized. If you can optimize a document and that document gets indexed, categorized and ranked by a search engine, it’s helping your website. For that reason, blogs are one of many platforms that benefit from optimization. Just writing a blog and posting it on your website may help a little bit, but adding links, RSS feeds, etc. to your blog will actually help SEO.

One of the biggest reasons that blogs help SEO is that they provide websites with fresh content on a regular basis. Search engines and readers alike reward fresh content on websites with repeat visits. From a search engine perspective, your site can be crawled more frequently, allowing your new content to become searchable more quickly. Fresh content is also indicative of a more trustworthy and reliable web site.

Blog software provides structured content for your website. Categorizing your content makes it easier for search engine to understand your content, and you have a much better chance of ranking well on the topics that you are blogging about. Blog software also offers a simple URL structure, which makes it fairly easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl blog content.

Blogs that post product or service related information can include internal links to product information or purchase pages deep within the web site. This is very beneficial for page ranking on long tail phrases (obscure key word terms).

Blogs are great for obtaining inbound links because they are much more likely to link to each other than regular websites are. Blogs are a significant source of many posts to social news and social media web sites. Text, audio and video are all easily supported for syndication by blogs; the more media available on your blog, the more likely it will attract inbound links.

Although blogs do help with search engine visibility, you should never blog just for the search engines. You should start a blog for business and communication reasons, but reap the SEO benefits that the blog provides.