Five Steps to Effective Keyword Research

There’s no getting around it. Keyword research is a vitally important aspect of your search engine optimization campaign. If your site is targeting the wrong keywords, the search engines and your customers may never find you, resulting in lost dollars and meaningless rankings. By targeting the wrong keywords, you not only put valuable advertising dollars at risk, you are also throwing away all the time and energy you put into getting your site to rank for those terms to begin with. If you want to stay competitive, you can’t afford to do that.

The keyword research process can be broken down into the following phases:

Phase 0 - Demolishing Misconceptions
Phase 1 - Creating the list and checking it twice
Phase 2 - Befriending the keyword research tool
Phase 3 - Finalizing your list
Phase 4 - Plan your Attack
Phase 5 - Rinse, Wash Repeat

Phase 0 - Demolishing Misconceptions

Over the years, we’ve had the opportunity to work with a wide array of wonderful clients. And as different and diverse as their sites and the individuals running them may have been, many had one thing in common: they were self-proclaimed keyword research mavens right out of the gate.

Or so they thought.

One of the most common misconceptions about conducting keyword research for a search engine optimization campaign is the belief that you already know which terms a customer would use to find your site. You don’t. Not without first doing some research anyway. You may know what your site is about and how you, the site owner, would find it, but it’s difficult to predict how a paying customer would go about looking for it.

This is due to site owners evaluating their site through too narrow of a lens, causing them to come up with words that read like industry jargon, not viable keywords. Remember, your customer probably doesn’t work in the same industry that you do. If they did, they wouldn’t need you. When describing your site or product, break away from industry speak. Your customers aren’t searching that way and if you center your site on these terms, they’ll never find you.

Another misconception is that generic or “big dollar” terms are the most important for rankings, even if the term you’re going after has nothing to do with your site. Imagine a women’s clothing store trying to rank for the term “google”. Sure, thousands of searchers probably type that word into their search bar daily, but they’re not doing it looking for you. They’re looking for Google. Being ranked number one for a term no one would associate with your site is a waste of time and money (and it may get you in trouble!). Your site may see a lot of traffic, but customers won’t stick around.

Phase 1 - Creating the list and checking it twice

The initial idea of keyword research can be daunting. Trying to come up with the perfect combination of words to drive customers to your site, rev up your conversion rate and allow the engines to see you as an expert would easily give anyone a tension headache.

The trick is to start slowly.

The first step in this process is to create a list of potential keywords. Brainstorm all the words you think a customer would type into their search box when trying to find you. This includes thinking of phrases that are broad and targeted, buying and research-oriented, and single and multi-word. What is your site hoping to do or promote? Come up with enough words to cover all the services your site offers. Avoid overly generic terms like ’shoes’ or ‘clothes’. These words are incredibly difficult to rank for and won’t drive qualified traffic to your site. Focus on words that are relevant, but not overly used.

If you need help brainstorming ideas, ask friends, colleagues or past customers for help. Sometimes they are able to see your site differently than the way you yourself see it. Also, don’t be afraid to take a peek at your competitor’s Meta Keyword tag. What words are they targeting? How can you expand on their keyword list to make yours better? It’s okay to get a little sneaky here. All’s fair in love and search engine rankings.

Phase 2 - Befriend the keyword research tool

Now that you have your list, your next step is to determine the activity for each of your proposed keywords. You want to narrow your list to only include highly attainable, sought-after phrases that will bring the most qualified traffic to your site.

In the early days of SEO, measuring the “popularity” of your search terms was done by performing a search for that phrase in one of the various engines and seeing how many results it turned up. As you can imagine, this was a tedious and ineffective method of keyword research. Luckily, times have changes and we now have tools to do the hard part for us.

By inputting your proposed keywords into a keyword research tool, you can quickly learn how many users are conducting searches for that term every day, how many of those searches actually converted, and other important analytical information. It may also tune you in to words you had previously forgotten or synonyms you weren’t aware of.

There are lots of great tools out there to help you determine how much activity your keywords are receiving. Here’s a few of our personal favorites:

Overture Keyword Selector Tool: Overture’s Keyword Selector tools shows you how many searches have been conducted over the last month for a particular phrase and lists alternative search terms you may have forgotten about. Our only complaint with Overture is that they lump singular and plural word forms into one phrase. For example, “boots” and “boot” would appear under one category of “boot”. This can sometimes cause problems.

Wordtracker: Wordtracker is a paid-use tool that lets you look up popular keyword phrases to determine their activity and popularity among competitors. Their top 1000 report lists the most frequently searched for terms, while their Competition Search option provides valuable information to determine the competitiveness of each phrase. This is very useful for figuring out how difficult it will be to rank for a given term. It may also highlight hidden gems that have low competition-rates, but high relevancy.

Trellian Keyword Discovery tool: This is a fee-based tool where users can ascertain the market share value for a given search term, see how many users search for it daily, identify common spellings and misspellings, and discover which terms are impacted by seasonal trends (mostly useful for PPC).

Google AdWords Keyword Tool: Google’s keyword PPC tool doesn’t provide actual search numbers for keywords. Instead, it displays a colored bar, giving users only an approximation. Still, it may be useful.

Google Suggest: Google Suggest is a great way to find synonyms and related word suggestions that may help you expand your original list.

Thesaurus.com: Again, another way to locate synonyms you may have forgotten.

If those don’t tickle your fancy, we’d also suggest Bruce Clay’s Check Traffic tool, which estimates the number of queries per day for that search term across the major search engines.

Keep in mind that you’re not only checking to see if enough people are searching for a particular word, you’re also trying to determine how competitive that phrase is in terms of rankings.

Understanding the competition tells you how much effort you will need to invest in order to rank well for that term. There are two things to pay attention to when making this decision: how many other sites are competing for the same word and how strong are those sites’ rankings (i.e. how many other sites link to them, how many pages do they have indexed)? Basically, is that word or phrase even worth your time? If it’s not, move on.

While you’re testing your new terms, you may want to do a little housekeeping and test the activity for keywords your site is already targeting. Keep the ones that are converting and drop the losers.

Phase 3 - Finalizing your list

Now that you have your initial list of words and have tested their activity, it’s time to narrow down the field and decide which terms will make it into your coveted final keyword list.

We recommend creating a spreadsheet or some other visual that will allow you to easily see each word’s conversion rate, search volume and competition rate (as given to you by the tools mentioned above). These three figures will allow you to calculate how viable that term is for your site and will be a great aid as you try and narrow down your focus.

The first step in narrowing down your list is to go through and highlight the terms that most closely target the subject and theme of your web site. These are the terms you want to hold on to. Kill all words that are not relevant to your site or that you don’t have sufficient content to support (unless you’re willing to write some). You can’t optimize for words that you don’t have content for.

Create a mix of both broad and targeted keywords. You’ll need both to rank well. Broad terms are important because they describe what your web site does; however, they won’t increase the level of qualified traffic coming into your site.

For example, say you are a company that specializes in cowboy boots. It may be natural for your site to focus on the broad search terms “boots” and “cowboy boots”. These words are important because they tell the search engines what you do and may increase your visitors, but the traffic you receive will be largely unqualified. Customers will arrive on your site still unsure of what kind of boots you sell. Do you offer traditional cowboy boots, stiletto cowboy boots, toddler cowboy boots, suede cowboy boots or women’s cowboy boots? By only targeting broad terms, customers won’t know what you offer until they land on your site.

Targeted terms are often easier to rank for and help bring qualified traffic. They also make you a subject matter expert to the search engines, since the targeted terms strengthen the theme created with the broader phrases. Sticking with our example, targeted terms for your cowboy boots site may be “men’s cowboy boots”, “blue suede cowboy boots”, “extra-wide women’s cowboy boots”, etc. Broad search terms may bring you the higher levels of traffic, but it’s targeted, buying-oriented terms like these that will maximize conversions.

Phase 4 - Plan your attack

So you made your list of about 10-20 highly focused keywords, now what do you do with them? You prepare them for launch!

Chances are, if you did your keyword research right, at least some of the words on your list already appear in your site content, but some of them may not. Start thinking about how many pages you’ll need to create to support these new words, and how and where your keyword phrases will be used.

We typically recommend only going after three or four related keywords per page (five if you can balance them properly). Any more than that and you run the risk of diluting your page to the point where you rank for nothing. Make sure to naturally work the keywords into your content and avoid over-repetition that may be interpreted as spamming. Your content should never sound forced.

Your on-page content isn’t the only place where you can insert keywords. Keywords should also be used in several other elements on your site:

• Title Tag
• Meta Description Tags
• Meta Keywords Tag
• Headings
• Alt text
• Anchor Text/ Navigational Links

You’ve spent a lot of time molding your keywords; make sure you use them in all the appropriate fields to get the maximum benefit.

Phase 5 - Rinse, Wash Repeat.

Congratulations. Your initial keyword research process is behind you. You’ve created your list, checked it twice, made friends with the keyword research tools and are now off to go plan your attack. You’re done, right?

Unfortunately, no. As your customer’s and your site’s needs change over time, so will your keywords. It’s important to keep monitoring your keywords and make tweaks as necessary. Doing so will allow you to stay ahead of your competition and keep moving forward.

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by : Lisa Barone is a Sr. Writer at Bruce Clay Inc.

Cascade Style Sheet Basics

There are only three parts to Cascade Style Sheets (CSS), and once we understand what they are and how to use them, CSS becomes very easy and exciting to use. One of the best parts of CSS is that you can create an external Cascade Style Sheet which you can use for all web pages on your website. You can also have one CSS for all of your articles and a different one for all of your press releases. Making one change in your CSS, you are able to effect changes to a few web pages or to hundreds of web pages without ever touching any of the different web pages themselves.

Below I am going to break out each one of the parts of CSS and explain them in non-techie terms:

1. Selector 2. Property 3. Value

This is what these three parts will look like when they are all put to together:

selector { property: value }

The first part is the selector. In techie terms, a selector is the (x)HTML element that you want to style. Now what does this really mean to the person who doesn’t know about (x)html code and really doesn’t want to learn it, but does want to make changes to their own websites. Absolutely nothing, right? It just went over your head and now you are at a loss (oh how well I know that feeling!). Well, let me show you what some of the most common selectors are, and I know that you will begin to feel more comfortable with selectors.

The first selector that you come across in all web pages is the body, next might be h1, or the p. In (x)html the code is going to look like this:

<> your web page content goes here< /body>: or, <> Your headline text goes here< /h1> ; or, <> your paragraph text goes here< /p> .

For the first example, let’s start with the body. Here is the main thing that you will likely do with this simple but important piece of code. Let’s say you want the main background color of your website to blue or #0000ff (which is the hex code for blue). It will look like this:

body {background-color: #0000ff}

OK, what does all that mean? It is saying that the “background-color”, which is the property, is going to be blue, which is the value of that property. In simple terms, it means the main background color of your website is going to blue. It is easy to change the background color of your website now just by changing the hex code (#0000ff) to a different color, say red, which would look like this: #ff0000.

Now let’s look at the selector h1:

h1 { font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 22pt; font-weight: bold; text-align: center; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; }

Here we are defining what h1, or the text inside of our header 1 tags, is going to look like. The first line in the property is the font-family, and the value is Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, and sans-serif. So, in plain English, what we are saying is the font that we want to use for all of our h1 headers is going to be Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, or sans-serif.

You might be asking if we want the main font to be Verdana, why are we also using Arial, Helvetica, and sans-serif as fonts? The reason for this is not all computers are going to have Verdana font loaded on them. If they don’t, then the default font becomes Arial. The same thing holds true for the Arial font, which then defaults to Helvetica and, finally, to what is called a system font or screen font that all computers have on them, which is sans-serif.

Now for the next line, which is font-size: 22pt. The property is font-size and the value of that is 22pt. 22pt is the easiest to use because we all know about 10 pitch, 12 pitch, 14 pitch fonts when we are using our word processors. There are several other different ways to express the size of the font, one of which is small, medium, and large, and is much more complex than just entering the pitch size.

Next we come to the font-weight which is a real easy way to bold all of the text in your header without using any other code to do it. Following along with what we already know, font-weight is going to be the property and bold is going to be the value of the font weight. If you choose not to bold all the text, all you need to do is change the word “bold” to “normal” and you are all done.

The text-align is just that: by changing the word “center” to “left”, you can align your text to the left margin instead of centering it all. I am sure that you are beginning to get the hang of this by now, but just follow through, “text-align” is the property and “center” is the value.

The color of your font or text is going to be the hex code color #000000, or black. If you want to change the color of the font, find the hex code for the color that you want it to be and replace #000000 with it.

The last one here is the background color, which is behind the header text. This background color is different from the body background color in that this color is going to be directly related just to the text in between the header tags or the h1 tags. In our example, “background-color” is the property and “#ffffff” is the value. You can change the background color to any color you like just by replacing the hex code #ffffff, which is white, with the hex color code of your choosing.

In our next article we begin with the paragraph tags and show just how easy it is to get rid of a ton out dated code.

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by Copyright 2006, Larry Lang

Are You Confusing Search Engine Bots ?

There are two primary factors to getting a page ranked - discovery and relevancy. By and large, search engines are clever creatures, but the very best webmasters will always send out the right signals to gently guide the search engines, and in return receive great rankings for their content.

Search engines discover content using their bots (or ‘crawlers’), and determine relevancy (and by extension ranking) using advanced algorithms.
Discovery

The golden rule of SEO is that search engines cant rank a page they don’t know about. This is what makes discovery is so important. The most natural way for a search engine to discover a new resource is by crawling a link pointing at that content. So to get any new resource crawled quickly you should get a few links from other sites that are crawled regularly. (The major search engines have a sitemap initiative, but remember that without a solitary link Google will not index your content regardless of sitemap).
Relevancy

Getting your page crawled is less than half the battle. Now comes the hard part - ranking well. The second factor that determines whether your page ranks well is relevancy. Relevancy is determined by search engine algorithms which decide the order to display results to searchers. A number of on-site and off-site factors are incorporated into the relevancy determination which I’ll look at in a moment. (Trust could be also be dropped into the mix here, but I’m assuming that away for the moment).

How can you guide the search engines?
Webmasters actually have the greatest say in signalling for both discovery and relevancy. I use the term signalling because that’s really what SEO is all about - sending the right signal to the search engines.
To explain more about signals I’m going to have a look at another of the Irish Blog Award nominee sites which availed of the free site review offer.

First Partners
I met Paul Browne at the Irish Blog Awards a few weeks back. Paul writes regularly on his technology-themed First Partners blog:

Back to relevancy
The page title is probably one of the most important on-page elements used by search engines to determine the relevancy of your web pages. By and large you should target 1-3 keyword phrases, and bear in mind that most searches are around 3 words in length.
In the case of Paul’s blog homepage I notice that he is using dynamic titles which include the title of the most recent post. This in my view is a mistake - the homepage page title is about as sacred as it gets, and you don’t want it changing every day or so. I think Paul should concentrate on the main focus of his blog, whatever niche that might be, and use that in his blog homepage title.

The canonical URL problem (again)
I’m probably beginning to sound like a broken record. The canonical URL problem is a condition where your site or page is accessible by typing either of the following into your browser:
www.mysite.com or mysite.com : (notice this second case drops the www)
If you can reach your page via either URL AND the URL in the address bar does not change your site is suffering from the canonical URL problem.
In Paul’s case his site is accessible via both the www and non-www URLs. To fix this problem you need to redirect one URL to the other with a 301 redirect.

Don’t use 302 redirects for your homepage
When checking Paul’s blog I noticed that the FirstPartners.net homepage had a Toolbar PR0. This is odd given that the blog has PageRank 5. Then I noticed that the root page is redirecting to firstpartners.ie/rp/:

http://www.firstpartners.net/

GET / HTTP/1.1

Host: www.firstpartners.net

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3

Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,[... ]png,*/*;q=0.5

Accept-Language: en,en-us;q=0.5

Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate

Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7

Keep-Alive: 300

Connection: keep-alive

Cookie: __utma=67859462.28111[... ]__utmc=67859462

HTTP/1.x 302 Found

Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2007 16:35:35 GMT

Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)

Location: http://www.firstpartners.net/rp/

Content-Length: 304

Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100

Connection: Keep-Alive

Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

X-Pad: avoid browser bug

If the homepage is going to stay there then I suggest changing that to a 301 redirect. The most probable reason why the temporary homepage is currently PageRank 0 is that it has few if any backlinks. The backlinks Paul has accumulated point at www.firstpartners.net rather than www.firstpartners.net/rp/, and Google doesn’t realise that /rp/ is now the homepage. No 301 = No transferral of links and trust

And some advice for the blog?
I had a few ideas when I looked at Paul’s blog. I found that the page weight was a little too beefy, with the blog homepage weighing in at 800KB+ on one occasion last week. I also thought that Paul could cut the number of posts published per page to a more manageable number. And I even considered whether NOFOLLOWing some of the internal links (e.g. the cloud) might help.
But I can safely scrap all that advice for one simple suggestion: give each and every blog post a unique META description.
When I looked at all the pages in the supplemental index it was instantly apparent that Paul wasn’t using META descriptions:

You can see that Google is picking up boilerplate content for every snippet. I’d be willing to bet that at least some of the 265 pages in supplemental will pop out if they have a unique description META.
I did spend a short amount of time looking at the backlink profile for the blog and the majority of links use the anchor “Paul Browne - Technology in plain English”. I reckon Paul probably ranks well for his name (he had a thread about his on-line doppleganger but I couldn’t find it). I think some diversification of the link anchor could pay off - non-diverse backlink anchors may actually raise a flag that could damage your site.
So find that niche and push it in your titles and anchors. In Paul’s case that niche should be highly relevant to his company’s products and services. I’ll leave the idea generation to Paul.

So to recap my advice
1. Fix the blog homepage title

2. Sort the canonical URL

3. Change the root page 302 redirect

4. Assign unique META descriptions to each blog post

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by Richard Hearne is the founder of Red Cardinal,

Top 5 Benefits of SES NY

The eighth SES New York conference is coming up pretty quickly and as one of the last “Danny” programmed events, it should be a great one. I’ve been blogging SES shows for several years now and have advanced both knowledge and industry contacts tremendously by doing so. Barry, Chris and Ben have also done a bang up job in the past with triple and sometimes quadruple coverage of the event.

Whether you are an old hand SEO and online marketer or a noob, large conferences like Search Engine Strategies offer a number of excellent benefits. Here are my top five:

1. Mix of content. With a big show, there’s pretty much something for everyone whether your a PPC marketer, an in house SEO or work for an interactive marketing agency. SES conferences bring in a variety of speakers and topics. The New York show in particular has an agency slant that should appeal to all the East coast interactive, ad agency, pr firms, web dev shops as well as the abundance of in-house marketers. In fact, here is a list of the four star rated topics for SES that will be a part of the SES NYC programming:

• Video Search Optimization
• Mobile Search Optimization
• Benchmarking An SEM Campaign
• Getting Traffic From Contextual Ads
• SEO Through Blogs & Feeds
• Social Search Overview
• SMO: Social Media Optimization
• Wikipedia & SEO
• Retailer Forum
• Search and Regulated Industries

2. Interest specific tracks. Along with a variety of content to pick from, SES provides tracks to give you a sort of iterative sequence of sessions, that can build upon each other. The tracks offered at SES New York include:

• Fundamentals
• Multimedia & Mobile
• Advanced Advertising
• In House
• Click Z Network

3. Networking. There are tons of networking opportunities at SES conferences. Networking with peers, competition (keep your friends close but your enemies closer) as well as prospects. Connecting with 2-3 or 20-30 new people at a single event like SES can help you create any number of new business relationships for recruiting new staff, outsourcing work, referring work and finding new prospects.

On top of all that, networking with other like-minded professionals can help you build that mastermind group to bounce ideas off of and share tactics, insights and what becomes the “real” learning opportunity. Search marketers produce an overwhelming amount of content with a significant signal to noise ratio. Befriending other smart marketers can go a long way towards zeroing in on the signal that comes out of sessions, after hours networking and after conference communications.

4. Sourcing content. If you’re a search marketing blogger, attending a conference presents a goldmine of content opportunities. Take notes from the sessions and write up articles. Take your camera and do some informal video interviews. Make Rebecca style comics or use cool tools like VoiceThread to present your photos. Here are a few tips for really milking the value out of content gained from search marketing conferences like SES;

• Take notes from sessions and use them to create 200-300 word blog posts
• Expand those notes into articles and submit the articles to one or some of the following: WebProNews.com, ISEDB.com, SearchEngineGuide.com
• Use the content outline from articles to create a PowerPoint presentation for: internal company training, client training or for use when speaking at an event. This can work the other way around too. Write an article, break it up into smaller blog posts. Or take your PowerPoint presentation and break it up into blog posts and/or articles.

• Interview other SEO/PPC attendees at the conference. Try a different angle than just the “popular” SEO/PPC rockstars. Possibly a series of subject specific interviews. Or interviews with uber talented, but not self-promotional SEO and PPC experts.
• Use photos and videos for your own social media promotion of your blog and company’s services
• There’s a lot more, but people pay us for that.

5. C’mon it’s New York! I don’t know about you, but whatever excuse I can get to visit New York again, I’m going to take advantage of. The problem is, it can be a bit difficult rationalizing the time away and expense to your manager or business owner using that reason, so stick with suggestions 1-4 above and you should be fine.

The early bird discount ends Friday March 23rd, so you’d better get more information on SES New York here or get registered ASAP.

For even more great insight, read Jim and Todd’s excellent advice on how to make the most out of search marketing conferences.

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by Lee Odden is President of TopRank Online Marketing

Search Ranking Influencers - SEOMoz Study Released

Rand Fishkin and Jeff Pollard from SEOMoz.org have released a 2007 Search Engine Ranking Factors Guide. Built on the collaborative wisdom of 36 search marketing experts, the guide references various elements or techniques found within five general areas of SEO knowledge.

The guide lists the 10 most positive and 10 most controversial ranking factors, adding a shorter list of the Top 5 negative factors. Contributors were asked to rate positive and negative SEO factor on a scale of 1-5 (with 5 being strongest). An added feature measures the level of agreement between all respondents. Comments from contributors can be found beside each factor.

According to the 36 experts, the Top 10 Positive SEO Factors are:

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Global Link Popularity of Site
3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
4. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
5. Age of Site
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Communities
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site

The Top 5 Negative Factors are:

1. Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
2. Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index
3. External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
4. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages
5. Overuse of Targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming)

SEOMoz did a similar (though smaller) study in 2005. Back then, the Top 10 Positive Factors were:

1. Title Tag - 4.57
2. Anchor Text of Links - 4.46
3. Keyword Use in Document Text - 4.38
4. Accessibility of Document - 4.3
5. Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages - 4.15
6. Primary Subject Matter of Site - 4.00
7. External Links to Linking Pages - 3.92
8. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community - 3.77
9. Global Link Popularity of Site - 3.69
10. Keyword Spamming - 3.69

At the end of the guide is a bonus section where respondents were asked four questions specifically about Google. While there was very little disagreement between the experts in the main part of the survey, there was quite a bit more when it came to questions about Google.

When asked an opinion on the controversial Google Sandbox effect, 38% said it was more prevalent than it was 6 – 12 months ago while 32% said the Sandbox Effect has never existed. A further 21% said it does exist but is less prevalent than it was 6 – 12 months ago while 9% said there was little change in the past 6 – 12 months.

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By Jim Hedger

SEO Companies are Like Sextuplets

10+ tips to help with RFPs and picking the right search partner.

Hiring an SEO company these days is like being a judge in a beauty pageant where the final participants are sextuplets. Everything on the surface looks the exact same. Same goes with SEOs - you won’t know if one company can get you a top 10 for a competitive term until you get to work with them for a while.

I have received NUMEROUS RFPs lately and as I read them I can tell that the people writing them spend some MAJOR time assembling them. I almost feel bad for them, as you can just tell that they really spent time trying to ask just the right questions, only to get back responses that must sound so similar.

These are some typical questions we see in RFPs:

• How many people are in your firm?
• Give examples of terms you have optimized for.
• Provide references of previous clients.
• What is your process?
• How do you bill for services?
• Do you offer guarantees?

While most of these questions don’t matter much, let’s break down a few.

How many people? The SEO firms that I think are the best are smaller. If I couldn’t do SEO anymore and I had to ask someone to do it for me, I could name three or four smaller shops, each with under 10 people on staff (I think). I would at least ask these firms for a reference. I wouldn’t go to iProspect, iCrossing, 360i, or any of the other big I’s. It’s nothing against them, but I think I would get better service and more passion from the smaller shops.

Terms, Rankings and References
These questions can be a big farce. Any SEO can get a good ranking for SOME term. The questions should revolve around what the RIGHT terms are. The right ones lead to ROI.

There are other factors to think about as well. If a term is TOO competitive for an entry level or mid level SEO, are they going to target it for you, knowing that they may only get in the 40’s or 50’s? How much patience do you have while they keep trying to get you up there? Are you willing to wait 6, 9, 12, 18, 24 months? Or will they not include overly competitive terms just so they can point to the success of only getting rankings for really easy terms?
References – We’ve all got some. Most of them will say good things about us. It is worth calling references to do your due diligence, but we all have a few good ones. It might be wise to ask for several.
Guarantees – Oh the Catch 22! We sometimes offer certain guarantees only because we don’t want people’s money if we can’t produce tangible ROI. But sometimes the ROI is out of our hands.
What if your product stinks, your prices are too high, or your site doesn’t connect with customers?
Many guarantees are about rankings (i.e. Guaranteed to have a top 10 in 2 months) Does that guarantee cover terms that are going to drive traffic, sales and leads? When looking at SEO firms, make sure a guarantee connects with how you will be judged by your managers, and it may not just be rankings.
At the end of the day, when hiring an SEO company you have a group of people all saying basically the same things, all of which probably sound like the adults in Charlie Brown’s life… Wah, Wah, Wah!!!
So what are you to do? You need a SEO now you are having a hard time picking!
Most companies are behind square one when it comes to differentiating between SEO vendors. They all look the same and say the same things. What SEO Company is going to answer an RFP without positive references and some rankings to show? What about those guarantees?
So you need to be pretty savvy to pick the right company to employ. Don’t fall glitz and glamour alone. Here are 5 quick tips:
1) If they have rankings for web sites where the keyword is in the domain, then don’t be so impressed with rankings. Domain names can be powerful SEO tools so a Top10 under the same keywords as found in the domain might not be indicative of a well earned placement.

2) Use Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, Google AdWords Sandbox, and the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool (when it is working) to see if the keywords associated with rankings they tout for themselves or previous clients actually get good search volume. You can check the competitiveness of keywords using the keyword difficulty tool at SEOmoz.

3) Look at the web site they optimized, is it butchered to achieve those high rankings or does it still read well and connect with users? Getting a first place ranking for a term, but butchering a site to do it is the desired result for the SEO, and certainly not your desired outcome.

4) Get an idea if they know how much traffic, leads and/or sales result from their rankings.

5) Talk to representatives from each SEO firm on the phone or in person to get a better sense of who they are as people and what their firm’s ethical stances might be.

6) GO WITH YOUR GUT! If your stomach gauge says something is wrong, it probably is. There are plenty of other SEO firms working the Internet.
Where does this leave you, the person needing to select a SEO company?
To be honest, most people don’t have the background knowledge to properly judge a search marketing firm. There are too many factors and usually a wide information gap. Ultimately it comes down to gut…while we don’t mean the sappy “You complete me” gut feeling, there must be a “Vibe” with the SEO. They have to have a good sense about what kind of business you operate, your business model, and your revenue model. The SEO firm you select should consider itself your representative.
Here are a few things to consider while talking with a SEO firms.
• Do they seem to be fair people who won’t hold you to contracts if things don’t work out well?

• Do they have a passion for the job?

• Do they analyze impact down to page views, leads, sales, etc?

• Are they so big that getting anything done is going to be painful and require a contract review every time by layers of management?

• Will delays on their end affect your business?

• Are they so small that you can’t get things done if certain people aren’t in the office to take a call?
None of these questions are standard RFP questions, and most of them you’ll only find out after working with a company for a while.
6 Ways to protect yourself from a bad SEO:

The tough part is that you won’t know who’s good and who’s not until after 6 months or so. 6 months is a long time to wait just to find out that you’ve made the wrong decision. Here are some tips:

• Google them, see what others are saying about them

• Check other sources as well such as Technorati, Digg, or any of the search engine forums

• Do they make some buzz in the industry? The SEO industry is a fairly tight group. Most good SEOs are known by others. Does the firm in question make a LOT of buzz, very little buzz, or none at all?

• Put some kind of mutually agreed upon milestones in place so that you have recourse if things aren’t working as planned to re-evaluate the relationship. A good SEO won’t hold you hostage if things aren’t working as planned. Six months is a good basic milestone.

• See if they are willing to put a little flesh in the game, putting their money where their mouth is. Some SEOs will work solely on commission, getting paid only for top placements. (please note, these SEOs tend to charge a great deal for their services)

• Give an SEO an uncompetitive term that gets little search volume (use one of the tools above), and see if they are honest enough to come back and say, “There just isn’t enough search volume to warrant a full scale SEO campaign.” If someone comes back with a quote for a poorly performing keyword or term, be wary.

• SEO is definitely a diminishing returns kind of business so many jobs won’t need an ongoing retainer or maintenance after the initial contract term has expired. If it does make sure you have critical key metrics in place to ensure ROI for you is still there.

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By Wil Reynolds

PPC vs. Organic SEO

Why do more netizens and internet newbies utilize Google to search for products, services, images, information, news, or anything else under the proverbial internet superhighway sun? Well, Google’s search technology has been proven smarter (in the minds of the average web surfer) than the rest in regards to returning relevant, valuable, and fast results for any given search query - this would explain the almost 50% market share that Google now commands for online search.

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin bet the farm on the quality of their search, and it has paid off marvelously in stock options and an almost inconceivable market capitalization (142.58 as of April 1, 2007) for a company that has been in existence for less than a decade. Google’s immense market cap is partially a product of its revenue stream, but where in fact does Google actually generate the bulk of their proceeds from?

Gmail, website analytics, images, web searches, all can be performed for free (provided you are among the over 1 billion humans who have access to an internet connection and a PC). The answer is advertising. And not just any old type of advertising - Google generates up to 95% of its revenue from what is known as Pay Per Click advertising; specifically it is the Google Adwords and Adsense suite of programs.

Google Adwords enables businesses, young and old alike, to infuse their advertising message to the masses. Adwords works like a standard auction. Businesses bid on keywords that are relevant to their industry. The highest bidders, who also maintain a high advertisement Click Through Rate (CTR), appear towards the top of the screen when conducting a search. Lower bidders get the lower valued placement real estate as web surfers’ eyes scroll down the browser window. Google monitors the ads, but it is the business owner who chooses what amount he or she is willing to pay per click. Once your ad is clicked by a user, your business is charged a certain amount relating to your bid price. You, the business owner essentially choose where your advertisement is displayed and for what keyword or keyword phrases to be included.
Who Controls What I See When I Conduct A Google Search?
Now, this brings up my initial, yet critical point. I will say it again. Businesses (and individuals) have the power to place their unique message or advertisement on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPS). What is the big deal about that? Well, internet surfers tend to have difficulty discerning between advertisements and actually search engine listing results. Try it for yourself. Go to Google and conduct a search for “AT&T cordless phone.” The first three listings you see are not listings at all- they are Google Adwords results - Google typically shades these “sponsored” results to help differentiate them from the actual organic or natural search engine listings, but they are still shown in similar formats. Even this advertisement shading in the last few weeks however, has slowly been supplanted by a crystal clear background which makes the advertisements and listings almost indistinguishable. Besides the shading and the conspicuously grayed out and small “sponsored results” text the two “listings” and “advertisements” look very similar. In other words, most web surfers could confuse an advertisement for an actual and factual ultra-democratic Google certified search result. The more web surfers that click on Google Adwords advertisements, the more money Google generates, keeping the board of directors and stock holders sleeping soundly tucked in Egyptian cotton.

Isn’t that directly contrary to Google’s mantra that its “mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful?” The answer is yes, but don’t tear down the walls of the kingdom just yet. Most of the businesses that advertise on Google are legitimate - the point is that when you click on a PPC link, the quality of the site cannot be vouched for by Google. When you click on the first organic search engine listing from a Google query, you are implicitly getting Google’s stamp of approval that this site is the best result as per your associated search based on their algorithm or rules. The push vs. pull reasoning that I have read in various search engine forums and articles may be completely off base. If you don’t know that you are clicking on an advertisement then you are not being pushed to take an action. So, what does all this mean?
Educated Web Surfers Or Buyers Know The Difference Between A Pay Per Click Advertising And A Natural Search Engine Listing.
I have found that educated internet users tend to utilize the organic search engine listings more than the pay per click results (both Adwords and Yahoo’s Overture - now Yahoo Search Marketing). They do so because they understand that the sponsored results are all businesses that have chosen to be listed among the SERPS. Organic results are also different because a lower percentage of these are actual businesses selling goods or services. Google and Yahoo organic results give precedent to valuable web pages - pages that give information, tools, or news to web surfers. There is no guarantee that your search for “AT&T cordless phone” would bring up anything more than a website with a schematic of transistors and speed dial features. Educated buyers comprehend that the first few organic results that are in fact businesses providing what they need will most likely be the most reputable companies around. This fact is indeed more consistent with the Google corporate philosophy. As we have just seen, Pay Per Click “PPC” advertisements and natural results do put forth two conflicting messages - click on the listing because it is relevant, or click on the advertisement because Google has to pay its utility bills.
What Does All This Have To Do With My Business?
I’ve looked at hundreds of Overture and Adwords reports; I usually see an average PPC advertisement click through rate of between 1- 4% (although inter-industry numbers vary dramatically). I also study statistics (often from the analytical tool called Google Analytics) that shows me the number of visitors a site gets for both PPC and natural search engine listings. My findings show that organic listings on the average drive more traffic than PPC ads. This isn’t always the case, but it is the trend I have seen when analyzing the data. If educated surfers are more likely to click on natural search engine listings, it also seems logical to think that the website conversion rates would also be higher. My look at the numbers do suggest that this is true more times than not. Does Google publicize the click through rate or conversion rate for typical organic search queries? No way - that may encourage businesses to utilize natural Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies as opposed to PPC advertising programs. That wouldn’t be so good for Page, Brin, or Dr. Eric Schmidt (Google CEO).
Does That Make Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing Definitively Bad?
Now, I own stocks, bonds, CDs - and an occasional mutual fund - my financial portfolio is diversified. Diversifying your business’s advertising is something that I also advocate. If PPC advertising is reaping a profit for you, then by all means, continue to utilize this valuable service. What I am suggesting is that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. If a search engine rule or algorithm changes, your organic search engine rankings may drop, costing you revenue and potential profit. If a new player enters your industry and decides to outbid your PPC advertisements, you will also be pushed down in the search engine shuffle - again affecting your business’s bottom line. I don’t recommend having an undiversified financial portfolio, nor do I recommend obtaining all your search engine traffic from the same source. Experiment with Overture or Adwords, and talk to an ethical search engine optimization firm to find out if organic optimization makes sense for your organization.

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by Brian Ortiz is the CEO of SEOMatrix: Ethical Search Engine Optimization.