Search Engine Strategies For Lead
Generation Websites Transcript
Part 1: Introduction – 17 minutes
Welcome to the Marketing Results Search Engine Strategies For Lead Generation Websites audio program. My name is Will Swayne and I am the founder and director of Marketing
Results, which is located at www.marketing-results.com.au.
Before this audio program is over, you will understand how to get your website onto the top
page of search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN for profitable search phrases. We
will be covering actual strategies that I’ve tested with great results both for my own website and the websites of clients.
One point of housekeeping is that this program comes with a transcript that will contain further examples, links and code samples. If you find any of this audio content difficult to follow or you don’t quite hear a link or website name, consult the transcript and I’m sure you’ll find it much easier.
By way of a quick introduction, let me tell you briefly about Marketing Results and what we do.
Marketing Results are Australia’s leading website conversion and Internet lead generation
experts. We use cutting edge analytical techniques to precisely understand how your
prospects and clients are engaging with the website to generate 30-800% more revenue and profits from your online marketing channel at significantly lower cost.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is one important strategy or tool that we use to drive increased lead generation results from a website. You no doubt use search engines such as Google almost daily, but you may not know why or how websites appear where they do in search engine results; or even what the implications and benefits are of getting high rankings.
So let me share with you a couple of case studies from personal experience and tell you why this topic could be important to you and your business. First of all, my own website
www.marketing-results.com.au has high rankings for a number of competitive and profitable search terms on the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. For example, terms like: Marketing consultants, marketing consultant, Internet marketing
consultants and a host of other more specialized terms.
These free search engine rankings alone probably generate in excess of $300,000 revenue per year, and the truth is they can generate a lot more if our capacity to service the demand were larger.
What this essentially means for us is that the cost of our incoming lead generation is zero and most of our business either comes from search engines or client referrals. So that is a nice place to be and there is absolutely no reason why you can’t be in the same position, or at least generate a sizeable chunk of business from free search engines.
Another example is the website for the online proofreading and editing service called Better Edit. That website is www.BetterEdit.com. Better Edit dominates the search engines certainly in Australia, but also internationally, for a lot of proofreading and editing related terms. So that search engine exposure has allowed Better Edit to reduce the amount of labor intensive postering that they do (in other words putting up posters on University campuses and that sort of thing), and it has also allowed them to attract business from all over the world for thesis proofreading and essay proofreading jobs.
So, increased search engine rankings and visibility have meant at least a 50% increase in business for Better Edit. It actually allows them to generate traffic from the Internet in a way that their competitors cannot because, of course, free search engine rankings are free.
The other way to generate traffic from search engines is via Pay Per Click advertising,
which is a service run by Google, Yahoo and MSN, where you actually have to pay to get traffic to your site. Because the average editing job is perhaps only a couple of hundred dollars, it is very difficult to make Pay Per Click profitable in this niche. So Better Edit is able to attract traffic from search engines at no cost, while their competitors who don’t have those rankings have to pay probably so much that it is not very profitable for them to perform the service.
I’ll give you one more example. We have been working with a pest control company. They specialize in pest and termite control obviously just in their home city. Their existing website actually generates at least $200,000 per year in additional business via Pay Per Click
advertising. Now they are actually climbing up the ranks of the top page of Google and the additional business generated by free search engine traffic over the next year should
conservatively add up to another $200,000-$400,000 in revenue.
So this search engine stuff can be pretty profitable! Even if you operate within your local area, you are not national and you are not international. Even if you think Internet marketing won’t work in your industry because people, and you probably find yourself, are now using search engines to search for all types of products and services either to perform pre-purchase research or to actually proceed with a purchase or an enquiry.
Now you’ll notice that the title of this program is Search Engine Strategies for Lead Generation
Websites – in other words, websites that are primarily aimed at generating qualified enquiries
and expressions of interest for product and service businesses. This is an area that has not been covered in other SEO programs and there are some tricks and strategies that relate specifically to lead generation situations. Things such as the kinds of terms you should optimise for; greater focus on “local SEO” (plant nurseries Brisbane) rather than non-geographical terms, and typically greater focus on fewer product and service categories, rather than potentially hundreds or thousands of individual products, as you might do for an ecommerce site or online shop.
And another thing I should mention – you’ve probably heard that latest advertising statistics confirm that companies are continuing to spend a larger proportion of their marketing budget online because of the enhanced measurability and accountability of online marketing. It’s imperative that you’re armed with the right information to ensure that you’re ready to handle increased competition online.
Those are just a few examples of the types of results that you can achieve and in this audio seminar series you are going to learn a detailed process for getting top search engine rankings to generate new business for your offline product or service business. Of course, the same strategies can also be used by online or web based businesses, but what I find is this: most purely online businesses are already aware of search engines and their role in generating traffic. Someone running an online business will typically have acquired knowledge about
search engine optimization. In many online industries such as web hosting or certain types of software the competition in search engines for certain key phrases is absolutely intense. On the other hand, in most “offline” style industries (I’m talking just normal product and service industries) the competition on the Internet is not as fierce. So if you are an accountant in Sydney or a scuba diving operator in Perth and you want to get to the top of the search engines and put another $100,000 or $200,000 in your pocket over the next year it is actually not that hard. Because your competitors aren’t there in force and if they are it is pretty likely that they don’t really know what they are doing and they are just there by default. There are exceptions, but that is certainly the case in most situations.
And I have to say, the competition is getting more intense, month by month, as business owners come to understand that SEO is profitable, there is a science behind it that can be replicated, and that search engine rankings aren’t an “added extra” any more – they are a critical part of your web strategy.
I also find that most offline business owners severely underestimate the potential returns
from being ranked well in search engines. So they might have an impression that being
ranked well in search engines will be worth $5,000 or $10,000 to them over a year. But in fact the figures can very often be much larger even up to the millions depending on the industry. So, I’ve talked a little bit about how the offline space is not as competitive as the online space. And as I mentioned before, this is changing rapidly. Three or four years ago many, many industries were absolutely wide open on the search engines. Now I’m starting to find that in many niches there might be four or five companies who are either employing a search engine optimization service, or obviously doing some kind of structured SEO activities in order to get their website up in the rankings. So people are starting to really realize that this is profitable and they are starting to take action. So if you only have one or two competitors in your space that is obviously not too much of a problem. But when you start to get five, six or even more competitors it really becomes an arms race. That is sort of what we are heading towards so you need the right methodology, the right information, and more importantly the right process and we’ll be covering all of that in this series.
or not it is worth your time to pursue this, or whether or not it is worth your time to get someone else to deal with this aspect of your business.
So that being said, let’s get underway!
I’ll start with the general and move to the specific. And please bear in mind that the aim of
this program is to acquaint you with proven search engine strategies that have worked in the past, are working now, and are likely to continue working in future. We’re not going to cover anything speculative or experimental. The aim here is to save you from tens or hundreds of hours of trial and error and just plug you straight into what works so you can get results as soon as possible.
So just with a couple of very general points, the major search engines obviously are Google, Yahoo and MSN, and in Australia that is www.Google.com.au, www.Yahoo.com.au and www.ninemsn.com.au. But in reality Google is the dominant player by far. Google actually
has a 90% share of search engine traffic in Australia and much of the traffic to Yahoo and
MSN is driven by their alliances with Channel 7 and Channel 9, respectively. But when people come to actually do a search more often than not they go with Google.
Now let’s look at a general overview of how search engines rank websites. All of the big three search engines essentially work the same with some differences. I’ll concentrate mainly on
Google because it is the most important. As you know they have 90% of the search market.
I’d like to point out firstly that natural search or free search engine rankings are entirely
independent of Pay Per Click advertising. So in Google sometimes at the top of the screen
and on the right of the screen you will see like little classified ads called Google Adwords. Those are people advertising and they pay every time someone clicks to their website.
On the main left content area, is the free search engine results. Those are what we are talking about today. Some people are under the impression that there is a relationship between Pay Per Click and natural search engine rankings. That is not correct. They are entirely
independent of each other. So, as I said, we will be focusing on the SEO side of things or search engine optimization. How do get free search engine traffic.
Above: Free search engine results appear on the left side of the screen. Paid search results appear on the right
hand column.
Another important point is that search engines rank web pages, not websites. So each page in your website can actually be ranked for a specific search phrase. What happens on your home page in terms of rankings is not necessarily what will happen on other sub-pages of your website. So that is an important point to understand.
Also, search engines rank websites for specific search phrases. This sounds obvious, but I hear quite a lot people saying, “Oh, I’m number one in the search engines” and you’ll enquire for what particular phrase are they number one. They might answer with their company name. So if the company name is XYZ Industries they will say they are number one for XYZ
Industries. That’s great. But, if people are typing in XYZ Industries they already know you. The
type of search traffic that you want to attract is people searching for a generic solution and
for your website to appear as the solution to their problem. So instead of searching for XYZ
Industries you want to attract people searching for whatever XYZ Industries does, which might
The next point I’ll note is about how search engines go about ranking web pages. We’ll start with something very general. Basically search engines work out the rankings of web pages by looking at two broad areas.
The first area is known as on-page factors. On-page factors include everything to do with your website, website content and your server (where your website is located). So this includes the content on your web pages and also some content behind the scenes, and other factors such as where your web hosting server is located and a few other things we’ll talk about later. That is number one; on-page factors. You can control them relatively easily
and relatively quickly because you have access to your own website and you decide where it
is hosted.
The second section or area that websites consider in order to rank web pages are the off-page
factors. Off-page factors are the things that happen on other websites that influence the way
that your website is ranked for a particular key phrase.
Specifically I’m talking about linking. There are three areas: How many websites link to you, how important those websites are, and what the text in those links says.
So, off-page factors are extremely important, especially in the case of Google, and we’ll be talking in more detail about them later on.
So to get good search engine rankings, in most cases you have to address both the on-page
factors and the off-page factors. If you are in a pretty uncompetitive market in terms of
online rankings then you may be able to get some good results using only on-page methods. But that is the exception rather than the rule and off-page link generation has to be a big part of it as well.
There is another myth that I hear quite often which is related to how to get basically get your website higher in the search rankings. That myth is in order to get good rankings all you have to do is put a few keywords into your web pages, or sometimes you might have heard words like your keyword meta tags and things like this. If you have the right keywords then you’ll appear in search engine rankings. That is just not true. The keyword meta tag is something we will be talking about, but as I said on-page factors (which is what that is) is just one part of the story and in most industries you also need some off-page link generation to actually rank well in search engines, particularly Google.
That is the very general overview, and we’ll start getting into greater detail. At certain times I may refer to www.BetterEdit.com to illustrate some of the examples, and you have also been provided with an exhibits document which contains relevant information and screen shots to illustrate some of these points.
Part 2: Keyword Research – 20 minutes
So far I’ve provided a general overview of search engine optimization, what it is and isn’t, and also talked about some of the general factors that search engines take into account when ranking web pages.
The following section is about keyword research.
Before you start doing any SEO techniques, you need to start with your keyword research. That means deciding what keywords or key phrases you want to target in the search engines. It is possible for a key phrase to be both very competitive and difficult to obtain, and also not necessarily a huge revenue earner for your business.
For example, if you are a carpet cleaner and you come up number one in the search engines for the keyword carpet, that won’t necessarily translate into business for your carpet cleaning business. Furthermore, a very general keyword such as carpet probably has millions of
competitive pages and is therefore very competitive.
Conversely, our carpet cleaner might find that there are some quite specific key phrases that are not necessarily very competitive and also quite profitable. An example might be carpet
cleaners Melbourne. So you need a framework to understand what phrases to go for and that
is what we will cover in this next section.
Firstly, you want to find out which keywords actually convert into profitable business and
sales. You can do this using the conversion tracking function within Google Adwords. Google
Adwords is the Pay Per Click service operated by Google. That is the one where you can place your ads for any keyword you choose on the right hand side of the screen (sometimes at the top) and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
Google Adwords has a very useful tool within it called conversion tracking. Conversion
tracking allows you to understand which keywords are actually leading to sales or enquiries via your website.
The first step is to set up a Google Adwords account and include all the different keywords that you think might possibly result in profitable traffic for your website. You can use some keyword research tools to do this. One of the best free tools is the Google keyword tool. There are also a number of paid services which offer a lot more functionality but also come with a price tag. For example, www.wordtracker.com or www.hexatrack.com.au. Okay, so you have put a lot of keywords into Google Adwords and then you track which keywords are actually converting into enquiries or sales via your website. I’ll just briefly explain how that happens.
You take a small piece of code that is supplied by the Google Adwords system and you place it into the “Thank You” page following an enquiry or a sale. So someone inquires on your
website, they normally go to a “Thank You” page saying “Thank you for your enquiry.” You put this small piece of code called a conversion tracking code onto that page and Google knows they made the enquiry and they know which keyword they came from. Then you can start to find out which keywords are actually resulting in new business.
[Addition: Google Analytics (free) offers additional functionality, allowing you to track multiple conversion goals and glean further information on the behaviour of your website visitors]
This will tell you what search phrases actually result in sales or conversions on your website and it is critical that you know this information. Otherwise you can spend a ton of energy
optimizing your site for the wrong search phrases that you think are profitable but are not
necessarily going to make you money.
In the case of our proofreading and editing business, www.BetterEdit.com, some possible search phrases that we might want to rank well on the search engines for are: essay editing,
essay editor, essay editors, essay proofreading, essay proofreader, essay proofreaders. Now I’ve
just taken six phrases out of the blue and you will notice that each is slightly different. Each will have a different search volume. Each will have a different conversion rate once they actually get to the website. Each will have a different level of competition. It pays to know what you are up against before you start so that you can start to monetize this process as soon as possible. I’ll show you how that is done.
For things like the total search volume and the conversion rate of key phrases, the Google Adwords system will tell you that. You know how many times each keyword is being searched and you also know what percentage of times that search is resulting in an enquiry on your website. By the way if you are not familiar with Google Adwords, you can start a free account by going to www.adwords.google.com.au.
To learn about setting up and optimizing Google accounts, I highly recommend Perry Marshall’s five day free e-course on the subject. He also has some “How To” guides in that area which are excellent and which you should not be without. You can actually access that five day e-course via www.marketing-results.com.au/adwords. If you type that into your browser, you can access that free 5-day course.
Above: Google Adwords Adgroup report. In the far right column is “cost per conversion”, one of your most
important metrics. This report can be drilled down further to the keyword level. Knowing keyword volume and conversion stats enables you to precisely target the same keywords in your natural SEO efforts.
Okay, so you have an impression using Google Adwords about search volumes and also how successful different keywords are at converting. The next step is to get a broad brush view of the competitive landscape. In other words how competitive each search phrase is. It is all very well to have a high volume search phrase or one that converts quite well, but if it is very, very competitive that makes it harder for your monetize that or convert that into sales.
In order to get a broad brush view of how difficult or easy it might be to do that, here is a quick and fairly accurate way to go about it. To do this, you will need a free tool called the SEO For
other time saving tools, watch the bonus screen capture video that come with this program on “SEO tools”.
One of the features of the SEO For Firefox add on that we will be talking about is the
PageRank Indicator and the SEO info that you can generate for your own or competitors’
websites, simply by conducting a search on Google and I’ll make sure a screenshot goes into the transcript so you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Above: This is what search engine results look like with SEO for Firefox switched on. It presents a summary of
key SEO metrics for you – useful for assessing competitive intensity.
I mentioned the term PageRank and I’ll tell you a little bit about that. PageRank is a system that Google has come up with for indicating the approximate rank or authority of a web page. I stress the word approximate. PageRank is a scale between 0-10 and Google itself is a 10. There are 30 or 40 other websites in the world which are a 10 and everything else is less than that.
Another point is that it is a logarithmic scale and it is somewhere around base eight. So that means that a PR3 web page, or PageRank 3 web page, is about eight times more powerful or authoritative than a PR2. A PR4 is about eight times more authoritative than a PR3. So you can see there is a huge amount of difference between a PR2 and a PR6.
Bear in mind this is a rough guide. What really matters more than your PR is your actual
search engine position for a specific term. PageRank is a useful tool for understanding the
What you do is you install the SEO For Firefox add on and then you do a search for the term that you want to check out and see what comes up.
So you perform a search for the type of phrase that you want to rank well for and you take a look at what the top ranked sites are.
On the top page of Google for a specific phrase if there are a lot of PR5’s and 6’s or even higher, then it is a very competitive term. If there are a lot of 2’s and 3’s, it is not particularly competitive. Obviously it is a continuum just to give you an idea. You can also see how many incoming links linking into each of those web pages and that is useful to know because the more incoming links a website has potentially the more difficult it will be to displace from the search rankings.
In general, the PageRank score, plus the number of incoming links will give you an approximate idea of the competition you’re dealing with for a particular term.
We will be going into the details of that further on when we talk in detail about off-page optimization strategies. So the above formula is very much a rough guide, but it is certainly better than nothing and it doesn’t take very long to do.
So if you go through this process you’ll now know how many people are searching for a
particular key phrase, how much of that traffic is converting, and you can tell those two things by using Google Adwords and conversion tracking, and also roughly how competitive a
particular key phrase is. So now you are starting to get a picture of what key phrases you should start targeting for natural search.
How do you determine the potential profit that obtaining good natural search rankings for a particular phrase would bring into your business?
I use a simple formula. Studies show that users click on natural search results around 2 1/2 times more than they click on the Google Ads. You can use the Google Adwords stats to look at how many conversions are coming through from a particular key phrase and work out what that is worth to you in revenue and profit, then double that to work out the additional business that would conservatively be generated if you had strong natural search rankings for the same key phrase or keyword. By strong I mean certainly a top page result, but probably somewhere in the top three results. If your Pay Per Click results are generating 200 conversions a year and you know that each conversion is worth $1,000 to your business, then that equals $200,000 in
revenue. So all you would do is roughly double that result. I believe that is a pretty
conservative multiple and you can pretty much estimate that natural search engine results for the same keyword phrase would generate something in the region of 400 conversions or $400,000.
One trend that I am starting to observe is that natural search traffic may not attract the multiple it once did, but that it often converts at a significantly higher percentage than paid traffic. The metrics for each site appear to be different. We encourage you to verify for yourself.
A question that I’m asked quite frequently is, “Once you achieve top rankings in search engines for natural search, should you continue to run the Pay Per Click ads?” The “obvious” answer, I suppose, is “no”. You should shut them off and save money.
But potentially, the answer could be “yes”, because running Pay Per Click ads can give you another space on the page so you will generate more traffic if you run both Pay Per Click and have good search engine rankings. It is relatively easy to work out once you look at the stats whether it is worthwhile continuing to run both, or whether the increase in business provided by the Pay Per Click ads is not sufficient to continue running them. That is a nice choice to have once you get there.
To finish off this section on keyword research I will just make a few additional points about this subject. The first is about general keywords versus specific keywords. Let’s consider three keyword phrases for our proofreading and editing business, Better Edit.
Proofreading
Proofreading services
Proofreading services Brisbane
You’ll notice that the phrases are getting more specific. If we look at each of these phrases and think about what type of information the user might be looking for.
Firstly, proofreading. Someone searching for proofreading might be looking for general information about how to do it. They might be looking for proofreading jobs or proofreading techniques, or they might be looking for the service. But obviously it is very general.
The second phrase is proofreading services…now it is getting more specific. It is much more likely that they are looking for someone to do their proofreading for them. They might be a competitor looking for other proofreading services. They might be looking to locate
proofreading services in order to get a job with them if they are a proofreader. But it is certainly getting much more specific.
Now when you get down to number three, which is proofreading services Brisbane, it is much more likely that someone is looking to actually have some proofreading work done and some of the other reasons for number two could also apply.
So here is a rule of thumb for you. General keywords are normally not high converting. They could have a high volume, but the percentage of the searches that actually convert into an enquiry or sale is quite low.
Here is an example that illustrates that intuitively. Compare a search for ipods with a search for buy apple 16GB ipod. Which one is more likely to be high converting? Obviously the specific search. If the keyword you really want is very competitive, then start by aiming for something specific that you know is profitable and that you know you can obtain.
So in the proofreading example, a reasonably specific and potentially profitable keyword is
proofreading services, but you might start by going for the key phrase proofreading services Brisbane in the search engines, obtaining strong rankings for that keyword and then
continuing to optimize to also obtain rankings for the more general term.
So again, the process I have outlined above regarding checking Google Adwords and
conversion stats is a pretty useful process for determining what the potential returns are and what you should aim for.
The next point is that different forms of a word are viewed by search engines as separate keywords. There is likely to be some overlap and similarity in your rankings for each, but it is only partial. I’ll give you an example that can illustrate this point. Consider the keywords:
Copywriting Copywriter Copywriters
Now a copywriter, of course, is someone who writes the words in an advertisement or web page. This is a market that I used to optimize my website for. Let’s consider these three key phrases.
First of all copywriting. Someone searching for copywriting might be looking for any number of things. Copywriting tips. Copywriting examples. Copywriting courses. All sorts of
different things. So that is a very competitive phrase and it has quite high volume, but it is not very high converting.
Then consider the word copywriter. That is much higher converting because it is much more likely to be someone searching for someone to do their copywriting for them or searching for a copywriter.
Similarly copywriters is a common search to use a plural as well. So of those three, copywriter or copywriters would seem to be the ones to go for. Having done some keyword analysis it turned out that copywriters was a little bit higher converting than copywriter and also less competitive. The search volume was not quite as much, but on balance that was the low hanging fruit to go for. So we started optimizing our website and before too long we were ranked number one in Australia, for the key phrase or keyword copywriters. That’s no longer a phrase we’re targeting, but it illustrates the point nicely.
So that indicates some of the differences and different forms of a keyword. I would
recommend that you optimize for keywords that actually refer to what people are likely to be searching on when they are looking for your service. So instead of plumbing you’ll want
Furthermore, if you are operating in a specific geographic location just add the name of the location in which you are located. If you are an accountant in Sydney, the type of key phrase you would probably end up going for is accountants Sydney. Bear in mind that accountants
Sydney is not the same as Sydney accountants. But more often than not once you get one you
will be ranked reasonably well for the other and it is only a matter of time until you rank well for both.
The third point is about the long tail. We’ve been talking about discrete keyword phrases, but we know that search phrases can be highly unique. In any one topic area, say marketing, there is a huge range of possible search phrases that could potentially lead to new business for a marketing consultant. At the very general end we have marketing. Getting more specific we have search terms like marketing consultants and marketing expert. Getting more specific still are terms like marketing consultants Brisbane or retail marketing consultant. Getting even more specific still are terms such as develop marketing plan for transport company or help for
marketing plan or any number of very specific search phrases.
Together these search phrases form a large volume of related searches, some of which have reasonable volume but many of which are highly unique. At a recent presentation by Google
I heard a statistic that around 20-25% of Google searches have never ever been searched
before. That gives you an idea of the number of highly unique phrases that might be
appearing. This is not just about being ranked well for one particular key phrase. It is about setting your website up in such a way that you attract all sorts of related search traffic to you. Even stuff that you can’t predict and we’ll talk about how to do that more in the section on on-page optimization strategies.
To recap:
1. Find out which keywords are converting using Google Adwords and conversion tracking.
2. Assess which key phrases will be most profitable to target.
3. Assess how competitive your target phrases are and work from more specific attainable key phrases toward broader, more competitive phrases.
Part 3: On-Page Factors – 29 minutes
In this section we are going to talk about on-page search optimization factors and basically give you a checklist of things you need to be aware of and look at in order to achieve high search engine rankings for your chosen phrases.
By way of introduction, let me stress that search engines index HTML text. In other words, search engines read the text on your website. So if your website has a lot of image content, or should I say image text (in other words headings and different things written into the image rather than just written as just HTML text), or if you use a lot of Flash animation or other types of flash videos, your website may not be easily readable to search engines. Any page that
you want indexed by search engines needs to contain HTML text. We recommend at least
150 words, but more is often better.
The first factor we will talk about is your domain name. Putting your target keywords into your domain name is a very good idea. Your keywords can be separated by hyphens if the non-hyphenated version is not available, but in general I would suggest finding something that is non-hyphenated. I rather like the URL www.betteredit.com because it contains one of the important keywords, which is edit, but also it has a nice cadence and a good ring about it. Remember that your domain name does not have to be the same as your company name. So if your company name is Acme Industries and you are a plant nursery in Brisbane, it is probably a better idea to get the domain name www.BrisbanePlants.com (or .com.au) rather than www.AcmeIndustries.com. The former domain name obviously is much more keyword rich. If you already have an established domain, don’t worry. Domain name is just one factor. But if your domain and your website presence is not highly established, then you could consider transferring your website onto a more keyword rich domain name.
The next factor is your title tag. This is one of the most important on-page factors. Your title tag is the text that appears in the blue bar at the top of your browser. We’ll have a screen shot to show you what that looks like. The title tag content also appears in the links of the search engine results. For example in Google. Search engines use the title tag as one of the
going into the code of the website. You might not be a website coder, but any person who knows how to put content into a website will know what the title tag is.
<title>Internet Marketing Consultants – Sales Lead Generation – Marketing Consultant</title>
Above: the blue bar at the top of your web browser shows your title tag. Below the graphic is the actual code that
will appears within the HTML code of this webpage.
So let’s talk about how to construct it from an SEO point of view. My first suggestion is to get
your main key phrase up the front. So if you are optimizing your website for essay editors or
essay proofreaders, then it is a good idea to get those terms toward the front. So in the case of
Better Edit, their title tag is
Student Essay Editors and Thesis Proofreaders
So you can see that most of the words in that title tag, with the exception of and are actually targeted keywords. You will sometimes see people use title tags that say something like “Welcome to Acme Industries” or “Acme Industries Homepage.” This is a total waste of a title tag.
You can also separate key phrases in your title tag using a hyphen or some other type of separator such as a colon or the “pipe” symbol ( | ) So another way to construct the Better Edit title tag would be to say
Student Essay Editors – Thesis Proofreaders – Essay Editing
You’ll notice that there was some repetition in that, and repetition a couple of times is okay and in some cases beneficial, but you should avoid the temptation to have an incredibly long title tag with your keywords over and over again. Certainly no more than three times, but even more than twice is probably pushing it. Search engines can look at aspects of your page and if it appears that you have tried to manipulate the search engines by, for example,
Another tip is to get the title tags right at the front of your HTML code. This is more of a technical factor. You have some latitude as to where your title tag goes. So if you put them right at the front of your code [i.e. immediately after the <head> tag], it makes it as easy as possible for search engines to read.
Title tags are also relatively easy to test because search engines can actually re-index your title tag in as little as two to three days. You can watch your search engine rankings change as a result.
The next factor we’ll talk about is your description meta tag. A meta tag is a piece of code that doesn’t actually appear to the user of a web page, but it describes something about the content of the web page. Description meta tags are both human readable and search engine readable. So, for example in Google in the search engine rankings, normally the title tag will be the blue link and below the title tag is a few lines of text. Often that text will be taken from your description tag. Not always, but often.
So to construct a description meta tag, you should make complete sentences while including different versions of your key phrases. Now they don’t have to be perfect English because they are not headlines, but they should at least be intelligible so that when people read them as part of search results they make sense. The Better Edit description tag is
Student essay editing and thesis proofreading service. Better Edit offers professional proofreaders and editors for academic assignments, essays, theses and dissertations.
So again you’ll notice that a number of the keywords appear but it still creates a relatively intelligible sentence or couple of sentences.
<meta name="description" content="Student essay editing and thesis proofreading service. BetterEdit are professional proofreaders and editors for academic assignments, essays, theses and dissertations."/>
The next factor that we’ll talk about is your keyword meta tag. The keyword meta tag is a piece of code that allows you to enter keywords regarding what is actually in your page. The keyword meta tag used to be an important ranking factor, but it has since been superseded.
<meta name="keywords" content="essay editors, thesis editors, thesis proofreaders, essay proofreaders, academic editing service, proof readers, proof reading, proof read, proofread, proofreading"/>
Another point I don’t think I’ve dealt with yet is the importance of using related keywords and
synonyms of your target phrases, whatever they may be. So in our Better Edit example, we
have used a variety of different key phrases. Essay editing, thesis proofreading, thesis editing and other terms related to editing and proofreading. You don’t actually want to stuff the same phrase over and over again into your web page. For one reason, users are probably searching for a variety of related phrases not just that one key phrase and also search engines have some ability to understand the meaning of your search phrases and so they can tell when the same phrase has been used in multiple instances, which can indicate manipulation.
The next factor we’ll talk about are your headings. In HTML these are normally rendered as H1 tags, H2 tags, H3 tags, right down to H6 if you were to use them. I strongly recommend that you actually use H1, H2 and H3 tags and you can attach a style sheet to those tags to make them look any way you like (colors, fonts, styles and that sort of thing).
There are certain ways that you can code a web page so that the headings look the same to the user, but they don’t actually use these H1 or H2 tags. Search engines know that these tags indicate headings and headings are often an indicator of content so you should use these tags and if possible in your headlines or other subheadings insert your key phrases as well.
This becomes a bit of a challenge sometimes when you are trying to write compelling headlines for marketing and copywriting purposes and you also have to include your key phrases as well.
The next factor we’ll talk about is keyword prominence. Keyword prominence refers to the initial content on the page or within a page or a tag. So when we talked about putting your keywords at the front of your title tag, that is an example of keyword prominence. If you put keywords at the front of your web page, search engines will see that content as being more important than other content.
So if you look back the Better Edit example, you’ll notice that at the top of the web page there is a blue bar and in that blue bar there is a phrase student editing and proofreading. Then you’ll notice that in the content area there is a headline that says “Students: Get Better Grades” and the first sentence or sub-header that says “our professional essay editing and thesis editing
service makes your essay or thesis easy to read, easy to understand, more accurate, more polished.” So you’ll notice that there are a few keywords there and that they have been
brought up to the front of the page.
Above: screenshot of BetterEdit homepage.
The next factor that we’ll talk about is keyword density. Keyword density is simply the percentage that your keywords appear on your page or within a tag. So we’ve talked about using synonyms and related phrases as well, which can help you to reach long tail traffic and generally make the text more natural and probably easier to read for the user as well. There is a tool available at www.ranks.nl which allows you to measure keyword density and
benchmark it against your competitors in the search engines. This is an interesting tool, but really you often don’t have a need to use this if you just use your key phrases sensibly and within natural paragraphs and headings and don’t go overboard with repeating them too many times.
The next point we’ll cover is about emphases. Bolded text and italic text. Search engines probably give some credence to words that are bolded or italicized because those emphases indicate that the keywords are probably important in terms of the content. Again this isn’t a big factor and some people comment that doing too much of this makes their web page look a bit like a ransom note, but some minor use of emphases in this way is recommended.
The next factor is to make sure that you have a site map. A site map is basically a page with a link to every page on your website. This basically ensures that the search engines are aware of each page of your website as they crawl through the site map and follow all the links and the more pages you have indexed by search engines the more chances you have of different pages appearing in the rankings for different keyword phrases.
On the subject of sitemaps – a slightly more technical piece of advice is to submit your sitemap in Google’s Webmaster Tools. Just do a search for that phrase “Google Webmaster Tools”, and you can log in and take a look around. Submitting your, what we call “XML sitemap” to Google has been shown to have some search engine benefits.
The next factor is your internal link text. Internal links are obviously links in your website that lead to other pages in your website. In other words they don’t go to an external site. It is a very good idea to use keywords in your internal link text and there appears to be a benefit both to the page containing the link text and the page to which the link points.
So let’s look at an example here with Better Edit. In the first sub-header it says “our
professional essay editing and thesis editing service makes your essay or thesis…” So “essay
editing” and “thesis editing” are both links. Now if search engines see a page like this they
will see these key phrases are marked as links, therefore if a user goes to these pages they will probably find some information about these topics fairly easily. So if someone is searching essay editing or thesis editing, they are likely to find this page useful. Therefore the search engines will rank this page well for those terms.
Similarly if you click on the essay editing link, it leads to the essay editing page. Again, if a website has a lot of links coming into it and the link text of those links refers to a particular key phrase or subject, then the search engines will say well, obviously this page deals with this particular subject and all other things being equal you are likely to go up in the rankings.
Still on the subject of internal link text, I recommend that you have what we call a link-rich
footer that links to your key content pages. Now, a footer is just a section below at the
bottom of your web page much like you would have on a letterhead and this is a good chance basically for you to point a lot of links at certain key content pages. In the case of Better Edit, you will see a number of links provided at the bottom in orange and they say things like essay
editing, thesis editing, article library and other such terms. So these are relatively keyword rich
terms and it gives you a chance again to point a lot of keyword rich links at your key pages.
One thing I’d also like to point out, we’ve referred to proximity at the top of the page and if we go back to the blue bar at the top of the Better Edit website, you’ll see some white text that says “student essay editing and proofreading” if you roll over that text you’ll notice that essay
editing and proofreading is in fact a link and that it points to the homepage of the website. So
in terms of a usability point of view this is probably not great because if people come to the website and they find this and they recognize it is a link and they click on it, they are going to stay on the same page as they started, which is a bit confusing. However, graphically we’ve tried not to highlight it as a link.
Now what this does is basically gets a lot of links, a lot of pages within this website, points them all at the homepage with the link text essay editing and proofreading.
So again that is pushing rankings for those particular terms onto the homepage. I’d recommend that you don’t go overboard with this technique because this can appear unnatural to search engines such as Google. If too many internal links pointing to your
homepage all say something keyword rich and there are no links that say home, index, or any of those other keywords. So again, you should apply these rules reasonably liberally but don’t go overboard.
Another more advanced tip that undoubtedly works is to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute to push your search engine rankings on to key pages and control to a large extent how search engines rank key parts of your website.
<a href=”http://www.marketing-results.com.au/link-points-here.php” title=”Put a keyword rich title in here” rel=”nofollow”>
Whenever you place rel=”nofollow” in an anchor tag, that tells the search engines NOT to follow that link. What that allows you to do is “conserve” whatever rankings your site has in certain key pages. Rather than push a lot of internal search engine rankings to your minor page such as your contact page or about page, you can push more rank toward your key service pages. You simply do this by having normal internal links pointing to your service pages, and using the rel=”nofollow” attribute on some or all of the links pointing to minor pages.
This strategy is something I recommend you implement – it works well.
Another factor that you might want to be aware of is link stability. The stability of links over time. Don’t churn and change links on a greater frequency than you have to, because Google views aged links as being more valuable and relevant than new links. Again, when you are talking internal links this is probably not as important as external links coming to your website. Okay, the next factor we’ll talk about is your folder names and your file names. These should obviously be keyword rich and you can have up to two hyphens. If you are changing your folder names, file names or page names, make sure you set up a “301 redirect” on the original page. This tells search engines that the content has moved permanently. Now, your web designer or technical person can lookup “301 redirect” in search engines if they don’t know what these are, and they will be able to find instructions on what to do to change them. So let’s just review what the folder names and file names actually are. On the Better Edit website I’m going to click on “services – essay editing” and you’ll notice that the file name in your browser at the top is www.betteredit.com/essay-editing.shtml. So instead of calling it page 1, page 2 and page 3, we’ve called the pages essay-editing, thesis-editing, etc. Some websites also have folders, so it might be
www.betteredit.com/editing-services/proofreading.shtml.
The next factor we’ll talk about are the ALT and “title” attributes within image (img) tags. These are small pieces of code that allow you to describe the content of an image. These do have some search engine footprint, but don’t go overboard and stuff keywords in or do anything that doesn’t describe the image accurately.
<img src="http://www.betteredit.com/images/logo.gif" alt="Better Edit – Essay and Thesis Editors" title=”Better Edit proofreading logo”/>
Still on the subject of image optimisation – Google is now featuring images in the “standard” search engine results. So if you have images on your site, ensure they feature keyword rich ALT tags and titles, and I also recommend that you go into Google Webmaster Tools and under the “Settings” tab, tick the box that says “Include my site in Google Image Labeler”. This appears to have a positive effect on image search results so your site appears more times in the free search engine rankings.
A few other on-page factors we’ll look at. One is the location of your web host server. In other words where the content of your website is stored. We recommend Australian based hosts for Australian websites and so on. Search engines know where a server is located, so most of the cheap hosting is based in the States, but if you have an Australian based website we recommend you pay a little bit extra to get Australian based hosting and there is a search engine benefit there for you.
Another factor is the age of your domain, so if you set up a domain name six months ago that is not going to be viewed as nearly as important as something that was set up five years or ten years ago. The expiry date of your domain name is also another factor. In Australia, .com.au domain names are only available for two years at a time. But for a .com domain name, you can register domain names for one year, two years, five years, ten years, however long you like. The longer you register the more that search engines think you are serious about your domain name and your business or your website and there is a small benefit there for you. Again, if you’ve just set up a website, this is something you can’t necessarily control. Keep in mind that is just one factor and that your website will age like a good wine.
Another factor is to use good clean code, for which the technical terms are HTML and CSS. CSS is just the “style sheets” or the appearance of your website. So if your code is clean,
search engines find it easier to index your website and the easier they find it the better for you.
File size is another factor. You don’t want a lot of very large pages. If possible, you want to
The next factor we’ll talk about is your domain name class. Different domain names have different endings, such as .com, .com.au, .gov.au, .edu.au, .org.au. Of those, .gov and .edu are undoubtedly valuable and viable. In Australia, if you have the choice of getting a .com or .com.au, I would recommend getting both and using the .com.au as your main website. One reason for this is that .com.au domain names actually have criteria that you have to fulfill to get them, whereas .com are available to everyone. .com.au domain names will tend to rank better for Australian-originated searches.
So a few final points in this section. First of all, don’t over-optimize your website for one key phrase. Mix it up. If you over-optimize the one key phrase by putting it in the title tag, the description, the keywords, the headings, in text, in the ALT text, in the links and all over the place, search engines can pick up on this and it may trigger a penalty because you are
obviously manipulating the search engines. You can go reasonably far with these strategies, but really what I’m saying is don’t be stupid and don’t go overboard to a point where it is obviously starting to look unnatural.
The next point is to make your code [i.e. website pages] accessible to search engine
spiders. So this means limiting flash, image text, frames and dynamic scripted pages.
Basically have as much simple HTML text as possible and a good site map to reveal all of your pages to search engines.
The next point is to optimize each page separately for a different key phrase, so you can take all of the above rules and apply them to each specific page. So your homepage might be optimized for one major key phrase, for example essay editing. And the services page might be optimized for essay proofreading. Another services page might be optimized for thesis
editing. Another page can be optimized for different terms. Ensure each page on your website
has a unique title and description.
Now, we talked about the long tail briefly in a previous section. You have to remember that only a relatively small proportion of total search engine traffic is for major keywords. There are lots of tiny little niche phrases that people are searching on that have low search volume, but are quite relevant to what you are offering.
There are various strategies you can use to make your website appear for these phrases. One way, for example, is to have an “Articles” section, or better still, a blog, with a number of
articles dealing with different topics within your niche or your industry. Each of these pages can be optimized for specific search terms.
Blogging is something that has taken off in recent years as well, and installing a blog on your website which you regularly update with industry news, tips, case studies or other relevant articles is one of the most search engine friendly ways to get your long tail content onto the web.
The key here is to update your blog regularly with high-quality content, built around specific keywords or key phrases.
You don’t have to be blogging every day, but if you can commit to one article per week, or even one article per fortnight, the effect will be much more profound than if you put up a few blog posts then forget about your blog for 6 months.
There are also other ways. On the Better Edit website, the owner has received a lot of
valuable traffic via the testimonials page. You’ll notice that there are a number of testimonials on this website. If a user types in a term like thesis proofreading Newcastle, the chances that one of these testimonials will actually be from someone from Newcastle, or someone from Sydney, or someone from Queensland and different areas. So this page actually picks up quite a bit of search engine traffic for terms such as essay proofreading Queensland or Thesis
editing Toronto. So this is just an example of lots of long tail content that picks up tighter niche
phrases beyond your core essay editing type phrases. Again, you can use an article section, blog or resource section to do the same thing.
The final comment I’d make would be to monitor your rankings on an ongoing basis and we have provided some tools in the resources section that will allow you to do this. You can do it by looking up the rankings of your website in search engines, but it is somewhat easier to do it using an automated tool.
That concludes the section on on-page SEO factors. The next section will be on off-page optimization, or link building.
Part 4: Off-Page Factors – 31 minutes
Now it’s time to talk about off-page search engine optimization strategies. Off-page
strategies are basically all the incoming links that link from external websites to your website. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN give a lot of credence to the links coming into your website when they decide how to rank your website.
Often a lot of attention is paid to what happens on your page such as meta tags and different site content, when the reality is that if you are in a niche or an industry that is even remotely competitive you will definitely need incoming links in order to achieve high rankings. So in this section we’ll talk about the specific factors of incoming links that make a difference and then discuss a number of strategies for actually getting links to your website.
So let’s get started.
Firstly, there are five main aspects to your links that are very important. There are other important factors as well, but we’ll cover the top five as a starting point. Firstly is the number
of links that come into your website. Obviously it is better to have 500 websites linking to you
than it is to have five.
Secondly is the authority of those links. Are those websites important websites that have been established for a long time and have a lot of links coming into them? Are they
recognized by other important websites as being authorities in their field? Or are they little sites that have just been established three weeks ago that have no links coming in? That is quite a complex subject, but basically we talked about PageRank before and it is a very rough guide, but a high PageRank website is likely to be more authoritative than a low PageRank website.
The third factor is the link text. So if you are a law firm in Sydney, ideally you would want a number of links coming into your site that say Sydney law firm or law firm Sydney or some combination of those keywords. It is not necessarily a good thing from a search engine optimization point of view to have a lot of links coming into your website that, for example, refer to your company name.
Having said that, you also don’t want every single link coming into your website to be full of the major keyword phrases that you are targeting. So basically, as with other aspects of
search engine optimization, you are looking to strike a balance to have a linking structure that appears relatively natural to search engines, but in which you have had some hand in creating based on what will get you to the top of the search engines.
The fourth factor is the topic of the page and the domain that is linking to your site. The more closely aligned the topic, the more valuable the link will be. A link from the most prominent chocolate website to your legal firm website may not be as valuable as a link from your regional law society website.
The fifth and final factor is “domain trust” or “domain authority”. Search engines, particularly Google, are moving away from a relatively simplistic view of individual links, to considering how “authoritative” certain domains are within a given topic area. You can make this discussion as highly technical as you like, but operationally, it means that it is harder to “cheat” and get high credit for incoming links that aren’t legitimate. It also means that your overarching goal should be to become an authority in your niche or industry, by providing top-quality content that serves your market well. There are no easy shortcuts.
So those are the five main factors: 1. Number of links.
2. Authority of the links. 3. The link text.
4. Topic of linking page/site 5. Authority/trust of linking site
Of those five, the link text is extremely important. Authority is also very important. If you have no authority links coming into your website, then it is effectively impossible to rank well for highly competitive terms.
Number of links is certainly a factor, but again if you have hundreds of very low ranked links, they are not necessarily going to have an effect for you if your keywords that you are going for are very competitive.
Okay, so those are the main factors. Now let’s talk about strategies for actually generating links to your website.
Now I have to warn you that generating links into your website is often a slow process. It often requires a bit of grunt work and it can also require some creativity and using your brain to devise strategies to accelerate the process.
So let’s go through a range of link building strategies. The first strategy is reciprocal linking. Reciprocal linking is where you link to a website and they link back to you. Some people maintain that reciprocal links are viewed as being almost useless by the search engines. But my take on this is that reciprocal links are a natural linking pattern provided that a very large proportion of your links are not reciprocal. So if 10% are reciprocal, that’s probably okay. The advantage of reciprocal links is that they are relatively easy to build and that you normally have some control over what the link text says. So basically to build a reciprocal link you can contact a supplier, customer or friend and basically request that you exchange links. Normally the process is fairly easy because the other person gets something out of it and so do you. Sometimes if you have to explain the search engine benefits it is a bit laborious, but
nevertheless it is a fairly easy type of link to build.
At this stage, I should point out the subtle but important difference between a “reciprocal link” and a “partner link”. A typical reciprocal links page invites all-comers to contact you with their link so you can exchange links, purely for the search engine benefit.
A “partner link” is where you link to a site of value, and they link back to you. The two may seem identical, but what I’m basically getting at here is that partner links are more considered – they have potential to actually give value to the user. Having a bulk “reciprocal link” page is just a strategy, and one that Google is increasingly frowning upon.
One of the most common environments where you will see partner links is on blogs, where it is common for a blogger to refer to another blogger, and the other blogger to refer back at either the same time or a later date.
There are also services that will actually build reciprocal links for you or contact people for you. Many of these services are based in low-cost countries such as India which can make it more cost effective than actually doing it yourself. One service that I have used in the past with
good results is called Directory Submission at www.directory-submission.net and they also build one-way links.
By doing a search in Google for link building services, you may be able to find other providers. I recommend that you test any provider in a small way to start off with and then ramp up any business that you do with them as you see results.
The next category of link is the one-way link. As the name implies, a one-way link is where another website links to your website and you don’t necessarily link back. One-way links are viewed as being more valuable by search engines than reciprocal links. So we’ll talk about a range of ways to generate one-way links.
First of all you can find out who is linking to your competitors. There are a number of ways to do this. In the resources that you have been supplied with we detailed some different search queries to help you do this within search engines, so I won’t go into the details right here. But you can do a simple search within search engines such as Yahoo and they will tell you which websites are linking to your competitors, so all you have to do is visit those websites and find out why they are linking to your competitors. Sometimes they will be in the same industry. Sometimes it will be a directory of websites in your industry. Sometimes they might be selling advertising. They might have related articles.
[Use Yahoo! Site Explorer to find out who is linking to a particular website]
So by doing this you can basically see who is linking to your competitors and more often than not you can encourage them to give a link to you as well. So that is one easy strategy. Sometimes you can get one-way links from customers and suppliers. Sometimes they don’t have to be reciprocal. I mentioned link building services before. They can build not only reciprocal, but also one-way links for you using normally networks of directories and different things like this.
You need to be fairly circumspect when you use any link building service that you are not
getting into a link farm, which is basically a large network of links that is often automated using software and Google and other search engines frown on this type of linking quite severely and you can actually be banned from the search engines.
rather than robot generated. When I say that the links have to be on topic, every single link doesn’t have to be on topic, but if you have all different types of websites linking to you that is not necessarily a great benefit for search engines. It may not hinder you, but it probably won’t help you as much as it could either.
The next category of link building that we will discuss is directories. Now you might have seen advertisements around the Internet about being listed in 65,000 directories for $49.00. Those services are basically useless. But there are a number of directories that are viewed by search engines as being authority directories. I’ve provided you with a list of some of these
directories. Normally the authority directories involve some type of payment, or they have some sort of editorial control over which sites go into the directories. We’ve provided a list in the resources section so I won’t go into each directory in detail.
Sometimes you will find that a directory page actually appears in the search engine results for your targeted key phrase. Let’s say you are a florist in Melbourne and you have searched for
florists Melbourne. Sometimes a directory listing will actually appear on the first page of the
results, so it is often a good idea to investigate those directories and look at the costs and perhaps sign up because you get two sources of traffic. The first is the fact that the actual directory appears in the first page of results and that people who are looking for a florist in Melbourne and might be clicking on it and going to your website. The second is that directory may have some search engine benefit for your own site.
Local directories can also be very good. You can do a search in Google for [your location] +
business directory, or [your location] + [your industry]. This is often an easy way to find a local
directory that is on topic and may actually have people visiting it from your area who are looking for your product or service.
Similarly, many other organizations have directories such as Chambers of Commerce or business and social clubs such as the Rotary. Listing your site in a number of different
directories is a good way to add to your search engine footprint and pick up some useful links. The key point to remember is that minor directories basically carry no search engine weight at all, so you are either looking for something authoritative or something that is very relevant to your website.
For local lead generation websites, you also want links from websites in your local area so any local association websites can help in this regard.
