OK kids, do this and I will see you back here for the next installment of SEO 101

Or do you?

A recent client felt like they were missing some clicks because they weren’t in the sponsored or paid listings for their own brand. Generally this is an area where Google will always show your brand name without fail because most brand names are fairly unique.

I set up an Adwords campaign using their brand name.  It immediately started garnering traffic as I suspected, as my thoughts were, “this is obviously cannibalizing their normal traffic and they are now paying for clicks that would be free otherwise”.

But then something interesting happened, since we had set up funnels and goals for this campaign and could watch and analyze where the traffics came from, some of the traffic started showing up as conversions…. 

What?….   Yep, some of the traffic that came through the Adwords Keywords converted.

Hmmm….  What if I loaded negative keywords like login and some other terms that would dissuade some people who might be coming to sign up anyway?

So what happened?  The conversions increased from a standard conversion rate of 3% historical to 7%. 

Wow.

If I had been correct that the people coming to the site, were  already familiar with your brand and were essentially the Choir and not the folks in the Pews, then it wouldn’t have been converting at the rate it currently is.

I’m beginning to believe….

I will keep you posted on this development

I can only imagine if someone would venture onto an adult entertainment site and have these personalized ads pop up.   Kind of comical really…..  

In the long run, we want links from authoritative web sites. Not only will these links benefit our sites today, but these are links that are defensible against algorithm changes. Links from authority sites will likely benefit our sites far into the future.

Backlinks

Back linking: The first rule of linkbuilding is finding on-topic links. If we have a school site we don’t want links about bicycles.

Authority Sites Rule: The only sites that can really pass PageRank are the ones that have it to begin with. This means that we want to find sites that have a lot of quality backlinks and are viewed as authorities in their topical community. The more PageRank and authority a site has, the better the backlink from that site will be.

Sites that link to crap…. are crap. A site may have a lot of authority and PageRank, but if it is a site that gives out links too easily or sells links too aggressively, it will lose its ability to pass PageRank. Part of Google’s algorithm involves discounting the links that come out of domains that develop a sub par link profile. Look to see what kind of sites are being linked to. If the site in question gives out a lot of links that are off topic, or to sites that are of poor quality, look for links elsewhere.

Research Tactics The first step to finding quality links that meet the criteria above is to do good research. Using the tools that are available can save hours of time, and make researching more efficient. Simply Googling for education-related keywords can help some, but using this tactic alone will become frustrating. When researching our goal is to find sites that have two primary qualities:

1. Reasonable potential for conversion into a live link

2. Passes PageRank

Below are some alternative tactics for finding good links.

Find On Topic Links The first rule of linkbuilding is finding on topic links. If we have a school site we don’t want links about bicycles.

Peer Site Research Find a site that is similar to the one being researched. Similar in both quality, location, and possibly program types. The match doesn’t have to be exact, and if it isn’t, err on the side of schools that are larger than yours.

The tactic simply involves looking up the peer site’s backlinks in Yahoo! in order to find good target sites for links.

A more advanced variant of this strategy is to find 4 or 5 peer sites that are ranking well for a given keyword and look for backlinks that they all share. If a link is shared between these sites it is likely one that is passing PageRank. We know this because all of the sites that have the link or ranking well for our keyword.

DMOZ Research Go to www.dmoz.org and find categories related to your topic. DMOZ is a human edited directory and the links from this directory pass a lot of PageRank to sites. The sites listed in this directory are good SEO candidates for link request since they are probably fairly clean sites.

So, with that thought in mind we build out our SEM and PPC campaigns with the thought that insider terminology, unknown part numbers and old boy relationships do not help you one bit in the Pay Per Click arena.

Hard work, Blood, Sweat, and Tears are the currency here. We spend countless hours testing and tracking keywords and keyword relationships so we can connect the dots from concept to conversions.

Broad match Phrasing is Good for Google, Bad for You. Lets take the term Boston Red Sox for instance. Google will show your ad every time the word Boston is searched, and Red and Sox all individually. So when you get these off topic clicks to your site, your ad budget is getting eroded on useless traffic.

We can help with a more specific and direct approach.

Back in the beginning all you needed was a good site name that had your products in it and the world would beat a path to your door. Then the inevitable happened somebody decided to cheat the system, and down the slippery slope we all slid. SEO and the strategies involved seem to follow a trend as volatile as the virus and anti virus wars.

Every time Google changes the alogorithm (how they look at web sites) to defeat the cheaters they unfortunately penalize all of the honest site owners out there. We are devoted to the SEO craft.

Who wants a handful of negatives search results to show up before your website in Google, Yahoo, or one of the other SE’s. There are stories of company who ignored customer complaints when the issue was just a spark and in no time it became a forest fire. One of the more comical of these is the “United Breaks Guitars” video on Youtube. Go check it out… we’ll be here when you get back…. OK, funny and creative right? But ugga bugga, if that was a video about your company that wouldn’t be funny at all.