E. Poff Consulting » SEO

Do As I Blog For Others – Not As I Blog For Myself

admin — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 20:47:42 +0000

I realized that taking on the job of blogging for others is very satisfying. I get to blog about different topics in areas that aren’t necessarily my expertise but are interesting to me. I like learning new things, researching different topics and helping my customers help their customers. I like helping people with their SEO and there’s really no better way to help your SEO than to blog, and blog often on topics related to your business.
With that said, I realized that I hadn’t blogged for myself in a few weeks. I realized that I don’t practice what I preach. I tell clients to communicate often with their customers, blog frequently, and use twitter and facebook religiously. I believe that too, and then when the day is done, I log into my blog and am too tired to come up with a great article for my readers. How sad is that?

So with that said, I say to you, please keep up your blog if you want to keep your customers interested.

Now, hopefully I will have more content up before three weeks go by again!

All About SEO Site Coming Soon

admin — Tue, 11 May 2010 17:46:02 +0000

So sorry that I’ve not been as active as I should. Hopefully that won’t happen much. Besides the fact that I’ve been trying to pass kidney stones (very painful by the way), I’ve been working on an SEO specific website which I am hoping to launch early this summer.

The SEO specific site is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I have a wonderful repository of facts, opinions, ideas, and websites which I have been wanting to share for a while.

I’m also hoping to conduct some interviews of existing small to medium sized SEO companies to share strategies and thoughts about today’s SEO. If you’d like to be considered for a possible interview, you can email me at contactus@epoff.com with the subject line: SEO Interview. In a sentence or two tell me where you conduct business, an example or two of what you are doing to establish SEO best practices, and anything else you would like to share and why you think you should be interviewed. I will try to respond to all requests but may not conduct the actual interviews for a while.

Cheers for now!

The Top 3 Must Haves for Good SEO!

admin — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:01:05 +0000

After years in web development and spending the past five years trying to understand Google and the Google Dance and Yahoo! and Bing and all of the search engines and why one ranks you number one for all of your keywords and the others won’t even list you, I’ve discovered the secret to great SEO. Here are the top three things you need to make your site rank higher than your competition.

1) Clear mission: This sounds like business-talk and it is. Most good business people will tell you that you must have a clear mission and set of goals before you embark on a successful business. Why should a website be any different? Before starting a website, ask yourself, “What is it that I’m trying to accomplish?” If the answer is “Make Money” you need to start over. All businesses want to make money. You must dig deeper and determine how you will make money. What is going to drive people to your site and why? What will keep people coming back to your site? If your main mission is to make money, you will fail because even if you get people to your site, you won’t keep them and they won’t come back. They’ll see through your tactics. You have to offer something of value. For example, say you found an affiliate that pays you 70% for all referrals. Sounds great, right? You sign up and start selling the product. Have you tried the product? Have you researched and made sure it doesn’t turn people’s urine purple? Seriously, you need to be the expert on that product. Obviously with 70% return, you’ll have a lot of competition and you have to stand out from the crowd. You become the expert and people will come to you. Your mission here is to become the expert on said affiliate product. The result will probably be that you will “make money”.

2) Market that Puppy: Blog, Tweet and By All Means Tell People You Are Out There!: One of my favorite lines is from Field of Dreams where they say over and over, “If you build it they will come!” Well, if we all had an all-star ghost baseball team lined up ready to play for us that might be true, but for those of us trying to make our way ahead of millions of other sites, it’s going to take a little more work. You must let people know that you are there. Some of the easiest ways to do that is by social marketing yourself. Signing up for twitter probably takes 90 seconds and that’s while you’re getting yourself another cup of coffee. Seriously, sign up, write a profile, and add a link to your page. Find some friends. If you start following people and you are a legitimate person or business, chances are they will follow you too. If you start tweeting about things that make sense, are important to people and are interesting, more people will following you, you’ll get retweeted and things will actually start to roll in your favor.

Also you need to blog. If you don’t have a blog on your own site there are plenty of places you can set up shop for free, like blogger.com. If you have a blog, make sure to register it on business specific sites, and sites like technorati.com. Also, go out and start commenting on other people’s blogs. Make a name for yourself. Marketing is a huge topic, but you get the idea.

3) Clean code: I’m going to get a little “techie” on you. The more valid your code is and the more direct, concise and easy it is to read, the better. Why does anyone care what my site looks like on the backside, it works and looks good! ? Well, the less cumbersome your code is on the backside, the easier it is for the bots (Googlebot especially) to find and properly index your site. Less tags and code on the backside make it easier for your keywords to be spotted and keyword density to be noted. Also, the pages will load more quickly and bandwidth will be saved. I highly recommend a tableless design with a separate css page. Sometimes this last step is easier said than done, but if you start cleaning up your code, Google (and others) will reward you for it. I’ve personally optimized two sites with the same area of focus, one with clean code and one without (I did not build the one without – I tried my best to make it better though). Even though the site with the not-so-good code had more backlinks, exposure and a blog, the site with the squeaky clean code actually ended up at the top of the natural search results. Go figure!

A combination of all three of the above must haves will keep people coming back to your site and help your popularity. You must realize that true results require a lot of hard work and dedication. This doesn’t happen overnight. Anyone who tells you they can get you to the top in seven days is either lying or is utilizing “black hat” or inappropriate techniques to help your rank and in the end you will be penalized. Google will find sites that don’t play by the rules. I think this list is actually just common sense. Have a business plan, market yourself and do it well. Easy!

What is SEO?

admin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:35:33 +0000

Often when I tell friends and family what I do, I’ll get a puzzled look as a response. Sometimes, to keep things simple, I just tell people I do “web stuff”. For those more business oriented or for anyone who has a website, the term SEO probably has meaning. When I posted SEO under my Facebook profile I had one friend message me and ask me to explain and another friend wanting me to take a look at his blog to see what could be done about it. One guy knew exactly what SEO was and how important it was to building a lasting presence online.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the “art” of driving organic traffic to your site via search results from a search engine such as Google or Yahoo. I call it an “art” because there is a bit of trial and error and dancing to get things optimized so that your site shows up naturally in the search engine results.

You may be asking, “Why would anyone care about that, can’t you just advertise and get the number one search spot?” SEM, or search engine marketing will get you to the top of the ranks, indeed. This, of course, comes at a price – and a big price at that. Most search engine marketing campaigns run on a cost per click scale. When someone types in your keywords, your ad appears either on the top or on the side of the “natural” listings. In a cost per click setup you only have to pay if someone clicks on your ad and goes to your site. Impressions occur when your ad is seen (i.e. makes an impression on the customer) but is not clicked and these don’t cost you money in a cost per click scenario. The downside to the SEM approach is that it can cost you a fortune. Some ads may only cost a quarter while most competitive ones will run you from $3-12 per click, depending on the competition. SEM is a much bigger topic that will be explored later.

Back to SEO…

A site that is well optimized will return natural search results near the top of the page and you don’t have to pay anything to the search engine for that. It’s free – well sort of! SEO can come at a price. If you have an obscure website with unique content, you may have an easy time getting your site listed at the top of the search results. If you are trying to make your mark on the Las Vegas, Nevada Real Estate search results, you have a lot of work ahead of you and may have to hire a professional to get your site on the organic map!

In the coming weeks I’ll explore some of the basic things you can do to help get your site better suited for the search engines and we will also explore the costs associated with professional SEO and when and if it is worth it for your business.