We want to believe there’s a magic SEO tactic that, if used, will revolutionize our results. On the contrary, a sound, long-term strategy consisting of great content combined with long-term SEO will win out. Below are 6 tips for ensuring long-term SEO success.

1. Build links steadily, not suddenly: We’ve known for years that overly aggressive link building can trigger ranking penalties. If Google sees optimization happening too quickly, they may penalize you for what they consider unnatural link building practices. Even successful link-baiting campaigns can sometimes backfire, resulting in too many links in too short of time. In reality, the safest bet is slowly developing high quality links over a longer period of time.
2. Focus on long tail keywords first, then broaden your approach: Suppose you were trying to rank for the keyword “ipod”. With the competition you face, its unlikely you rank for this word anytime in the next 5 years, even with aggressive SEO. Rather than shooting for the stars and landing on the moon, consider taking a different approach. By starting out optimizing for your primary keyword in addition to a modifier (e.g. color ipod, ipod 60GB, etc), you’re more likely to rank in a reasonable amount of time. Since this modified keyword phrase contains your primary keyword (ipod), you will also slowly start gaining ground on your original target. In a way, you’re shooting for the moon with the intention of gradually working your way to the stars.
3. Diversify your Target Keyphrases: Sure, your top keywords may be performing well today, but what about a few years from now when your competitors catch up, Google changes their algorithm, or some other external factor pops up? Rather than keeping all your eggs in one basket, begin researching now what you’d like to rank for a year or two down the road.
4. Create landing pages before you need them: Ever get an idea for a new keyword, but don’t have time to build a page? You may not have the time to fully create and optimize a page at the time, but why not at least create the page, throw a few internal links at it, and come back and optimize it later? I’ve found that this strategy gets the clock ticking with Google, since they obviously place value on the age of the page itself. Even if you can’t get to it for 3 months, you’re better since the page has now been given time to age in the index.
5. Use Reactive vs. Proactive keyword research: Even the best keyword research will never yield perfect results. That keyword phrase that you thought would be easy to rank for sometimes ends up being more work that its worth. Or worse yet, once you are ranking you discover it isn’t converting to sales. A reactive SEO keyword research method would take a different approach. Rather than doing a perfect job of keyword research upfront, you analyze the traffic you are currently getting and re-optimize your pages accordingly. As I analyze the top keywords bringing traffic to my blog, I’ve realized 90% of the keywords I never intended on optimizing for, it just happened. But once I see it happening, I reoptimize the posts, adding some internal links and on-page tweaks.
6. Content first, SEO second: Yes, it sounds trite, but if you focus on your content good rankings will follow. Quite frequently, potential clients contact me and ask them to review their website, believing they have an SEO problem. On the contrary, they have a content or usability problem, and SEO is the last thing they should be paying for. It’s important to not get caught in an SEO tunnel vision mindset. SEO will help good companies be better. SEO will do nothing for sites that have nothing to offer in the first place.

What advice do you have for long term SEO results? Be sure to leave a comment with your thoughts.

A: I don’t think you need to get links to every product from external sources to do well…most of your competition suffers from the same issues as your ecommerce site does. Ideally you just want to get your brand featured and try to get some links into key products. Affiliate programs are great for building links. So are contests and any social elements to your site – like a company blog.

Q: What type of keyword strategy would you recommend for an online retailer with a large product catalog? Should the focus be on a few, larger volume keywords or a long tail approach?

A: In general if I had to pick one I would say that a long tail is typically a better approach, but you really need to look at sales data and promote what is selling. If you know a certain category is particularly hot then feature it to drive more of your link equity to that part of the site. If another category is low margin and rarely sells then link to it less often.

Q: Many internet retailers struggle to attain good rankings for their individual product pages. With so much competition on the internet in nearly every niche, how does one make their product pages rank higher in light of the competition?

A: The 7 easiest ways to gain traction are:

1. Ensure your on page SEO and site structure are well optimized.
2. Limit your selection and hold sales events. Woot.com does great with this strategy.
3. Offer leading quality editorial reviews and how to guides that help people trust you and want to do business with you.
4. Create wish lists and other widgets that people can spread virally on their websites…give people a reason to feature your brand.
5. Focus your internal PageRank and anchor text to promote the most important items.
6. Build community, contests, and/or an editorial voice that makes people keep coming back to you for the latest product releases.
7. Aggressively engage in public relations and link building.

Q: Many online retailers struggle with getting all of their product or category pages indexed, due to the large number of pages and content deep within the site architecture. What advice would you give to ensure a deep crawl?

A: Focus your crawling priorities on your most important pages. Add tools, gadgets, editorial information, and engage in public relations / link building to help your site get crawled as deeply as possible.

Make sure your domain does not have pagination issues, canonicalization issues, or low information pages that are sucking up PageRank that can flow to more important pages.

Q: Do you have any other recommendations in regards to eCommerce SEO?

A: Promote seasonal offers with internal link authority at least a month early so search engines see a lot of PageRank pointing at those pages.

If you find that your store is a thin listing store (like a yellow pages website) then look at the 2 year performance of RHD and IAR…the value of thin listings are all going to Google. You really need to have interactivity and editorial to have a sustainable strategy.

cheers

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First off, why should you care about having more than one result for your company name? From a branding point of view, it lends great credibility. Multiple results on various web properties conveys that you’re “out there” and actively engaged with your customers in many forms. From a public relations view, it’s a great way to potentially push negative press (customer complaints) off the first page.

By utilizing the hugely popular sites of the day, it’s not impossible to own at least 5 out of the 10 top spots on Google. Here’s my list for the top web properties you should have a presence on.

1. Your Website (duh!) - If you don’t yet rank for your own company or brand name, don’t read any further in this post. You’ll want to first focus on some basic SEO tactics.
   
2. LinkedIn – The most popular business professional networking site. Your profile page should rank highly for your brand name.
3. Press Release Sites – I’ve seen press releases ranking on the first page for years after their initial release. These provide an ongoing source of branding and traffic about previous newsworthy events. PRWeb.com will get you the best results.
   
4. YouTube – Post a short informational video about your company. Google loves YouTube content, so your video may instantly rank first page for your brand.
5. Facebook – Facebook now displays a limited public profile, so it can be indexed by search engines.
   
6. Myspace – Declining in light of Facebook, but still possesses great social networking capabilities. Make sure your profile page contains your brand name prominently.
7. Squidoo – Create a Squidoo hub for your brand and link it up with your RSS feed, YouTube videos, and Flickr images.
   
8. Hubpages – Similar to Squidoo and a Google favorite.
9. Wikipedia – Not every brand is worthy of Wikipedia entry, but it’s worth a try.
   
10. Technorati - Claiming your Technorati space should be the first step after creating a blog.
    

In addition to having a presence on the sites above, try using these tactics to create a Google indented listing.

About Palmer Web Marketing

PWM is a web marketing consulting firm specializing in helping small businesses achieve their online goals with ethical SEO services, email marketing, and web usability consulting. For more information on services, please contact us.

Why Product Pages Get Screwed:

1. Nobody links to them
2. They are buried deep within the site architecture
3. They usually contain crappy, recycled manufacturer product descriptions

In this post, I’ll share the process I use to optimize product pages for long-tail search.

1. Reduce the Number of Clicks from Your Greatest Source of PageRank: First and foremost, if you want your product pages to rank highly, your internal linking structure needs to reflect that desire. If it takes 5 clicks to reach a product, you’re telling crawler bots you don’t think very highly of it. My top recommendation for implementing this is displaying as many products as reasonably possible on your product listing pages. In my experience a/b testing, product category pages with more items always win out. (who wants to click those tiny 2, 3, 4 pagination links anyway?). In addition, it prevents the Googlebot from having to crawl through them as well.
2. Determine Whether the Product is Better Suited for Branded, Non-Branded, or Solution Search: For each product, ask yourself this question: “Will people be searching for this item by brand name, by a generic name, or will it be a solution oriented search?” For example, suppose you were selling running shoes. Here 3 possible target keyword phrases:

Generic	Running Shoes
Branded	Nike MayFly shoes
Solution Oriented	Shoes for running faster

3. Create a Unique Title Tag: Once you’ve completed step #2, place this keyword phrase in the title tag. A heated debate rages regarding where (or even if) the site name should be included in the Title. While I believe there are exceptions to any rule, I strongly believe the site name belongs behind the product’s name and keywords for 2 reasons. First, if a potential customer searches for your target keyphrase, they’ll be looking for that phrase, not your site’s name. Second, odds are search engines consider the order of keywords in the Title when determining the relevance. If all your product page Title start with your site name, it may look slightly boilerplate-ish.
4. Create a Unique Product Description: Too often, product descriptions are a neglected afterthought of online merchandising. Why not just show a few snazzy pics? After all, a picture is worth a thousands words right? While I would never mitigate the importance of good photography, pictures sometimes fall short on communicating specific product details, features, and benefits. If your company has sales people, ask them to write the product descriptions for you, as if they were selling the item face to face with a customer. Getting back to SEO, I don’t generally recommend stuffing keywords in product descriptions. It looks tacky and sounds awkward.
5. Don’t Forget the Meta Tag Keyword & Descriptions: Yes, they still work. Not for endless keyword repetition, but for showing that you took time and effort and care about your product pages. Typically, I will populate the meta keyword tag with the product name, brand, and any other relevant keywords. In the description tag, I simply pull the product description from the database, stripping out any unnecessary html formatting.
6. Display Product Reviews: How do product reviews help you in SEO? Interestingly, customers tend to describe products in ways that you would never think of. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read a customer review and thought, “Heck, I never would have described it that way!”. Sometimes, I even take the customer’s lead and optimize the Title & meta tags around a product review.
7. Display Product Tags: Just as you would tag a blog post or a Flickr image, let customers tag your product with words they find relevant. As mentioned in step #6, you may find they think of keywords you didn’t. Checkout Amazon’s product pages for an example of how tagging works.
8. Don’t Forget the Alt’s: Take every opportunity you have to convey information about the content of your product pages. For the product images, populate the Alt text with product name, brand, or other keywords identified in Step #2.
9. Give Special Attention to Your Top Products: Identify what you consider to be your top products and highlight them on your landing pages with the most PageRank. Create anchor text that points to these product using the keyword phrases you’ve isolated in Step #2.
10. Track the Results: So, how do you know if the steps above are working? Personally, I like to monitor the number of total search visitors to product pages divided by the total number of product pages indexed by Google. Over time, you should see this number increase.

Yes, SEO-ing product pages can be overwhelming. If the thought of individually optimizing hundreds, maybe thousands of items makes you break out in a cold sweat, slow down, and take it one step at a time. Over a period of several weeks or months, this daunting task can be completed. The end result will be worth the effort.

Like the ideas listed above? Get 3 of your own…

About Palmer Web Marketing

Palmer Web Marketing provides modern, effective, & affordable internet marketing consulting services. For personalized Do It Yourself SEO recommendations, checkout MySEOPlan.

I haven’t done a 25 Ways Series post in a while, so I thought I would share my top 25 Tips for optimizing for local (geographically targeted) search traffic.

Get Listed with the Biggies:

1. Google Maps: If you were to only use one of these suggestions, this would be the one. Getting listed with Google Maps requires a simple application process followed by a verification by mail or phone. Once you are verified, you will be listed within 4-6 weeks in the “Local Listings” area of the SERPs.
   
2. Yahoo Local: Similar to Google Maps, minus the verification, Yahoo allows you to create a free business listing. Fortunately, Yahoo’s approves your listing within days rather than weeks.

Get Listed with “Yellow Page” Type Directories:

3. Yellow Book: A popular supplier of hard copy phone books, YellowBook.com also offers internet listings.
4. Yellow Pages:YellowPages.com claims to represent over 100 million local searches per month. They offer a free online listing.
5. Super Pages: Superpages supplies listings to many well known portal sites, including MSN and About.com. They offer a free, yet very basic listing.
6. Regional DMOZ Listings: Getting listed still takes forever, but it’s worth the wait if your site gets approved. Navigate to the regional section of Dmoz, and submit your listing in the proper category.
7. InfoUSA.com: The InfoUSA business directory powers many high traffic local internet directories, so getting your listing here can result in great visibility.
8. Localeze: Another widely used local business data repository, Localeze claims to supply 45 of the top local search sites with business listings.
9. TrueLocal: True Local is a business directory that represents about 14 million US and Canadian business. They offer both free and paid listing options.
10. Yelp: Originally designed for San Fransisco, Yelp now serves most major metropolitan areas with local business listings and ratings. With a focus on customer generated reviews, Yelp is the most Web 2.0 friendly local search property I’ve seen. To add a free listing, navigate to your city, do a search, then click “Add Business”.
11. CitySearch: CitySearch offers pay per click or pay per call advertising programs, ensuring that you only pay for qualified leads.
12. BOTW Regional: For around $250, you can get a highly trusted and relevant regional directory listing from Best of the Web (BOTW.org).

Create Optimized Local Classified Listings:

13. Craigslist: Every business should post an optimized Craigslist ad regularly. Be sure to use your keyword phrases along with your local city and state in the title of the ad. I’ve found that a well optimized Craigslist listing can quickly outrank your own site, so treat it like you would a landing page, with a strong call to action that leads them to your site.
14. USFreeAds: USFreeAds’s free listing isn’t nearly as good as Craigslist, but it’s still a high trafficked and well-ranked classified site.
15. DomesticSale: Another nice little free classified site.

Optimize On Site First:

16. Title Tags: Title tags should contain your target keywords plus your city and state. This is the single most important on page tactic at your disposal.
17. Address on Every Page: Your business address, phone number, and zip code should be included on every single page.
18. Mention other Areas You Serve: You should also mention other cities, counties, or states that you serve. While simply bullet listing every city in your area won’t likely won’t yield good results, mentioning them within the context of your content will.
19. Meta Tags: While localized meta tags aren’t the silver bullet for local SEO, it doesn’t hurt to use them.

Other Tips

20. Get Reviewed: Many believe local search listings and local directories rank results in part on customer reviews. Ask your customers to write reviews for you on these sites.
21. Diversify your Anchor Text: Local SEO is a perfect example of the long tail of search. The most effective strategy will employ a wide variety of anchor text diversification. For example, don’t just optimize for “Los Angeles Flower shop”, also create inbound links for variations such as “Flower shop in Los Angeles”, or “Flower Shops in Los Angeles, California.”
22. Get Links from Important Local Sites: Getting listed on your local chamber of commerce site, Better Business Bureau, or another well trafficked similar site can have huge benefits. To find sites like these, simply do a search for your city name + “business directory” and see what pops up.
23. Add Online Coupons: Google allows you to create online coupons that can display next to your local listing. If a customer has to choose between several business, and you’re offering the coupon, you have an edge.
24. Geo-Target your PPC: By geo-targeting your pay per click ads, you can ensure you ads are displayed even if a searcher from doesn’t enter their city into the actual query.
25. Get Ready for Mobile: Create mobile ad listings with your Google adwords account. Many believe the greatest source of local search growth will come from mobile devices.

Like the tips listed above? Get 3 of your own…

About Palmer Web Marketing

Palmer Web Marketing is a Web Marketing consulting firm, offering local search marketing services. For more information or to ask a question, please contact us.

I was recently reminded of this. While working on a landing page on one of my sites, I carelessly left a link pointing to a page that was irrelevant to the actual anchor text in the link. In other words, the keywords in the anchor text had nothing to do with the actual text of the page. Despite this, Google quickly picked up the page for the target search phrase, replacing the page I intended to optimize for. Despite having at least a dozen good quality, keyword specific external links pointing to the page I intended to optimize, the other page now replaced it in the SERPs because the weight from the 1 internal link trumped all the external links.

This situation reminded me that good SEO starts on-site. In my opinion, you shouldn’t even start link building until you:

1. Build Several Internal Contextual Links: Search engines care immensely how webmasters categorize and label their own content. The best way to do this is with one time occurring links within a body of content. In my opinion, 1 relevant contextual link from your own site can be worth more than 10 good external links. In Sugarrae’s great link building interview, Andy Hagans recommends having at least 5 internal links to every landing page.
2. Mold Your PageRank Flow: SEO Fast Start has a great explanation of using the no-follow tag to sculpt your PageRank. Basically, the idea is to cap off the flow of PageRank using the no-follow tag to pages that are unimportant from a search point of view. For example, while your Privacy policy page may be important to customers already on the site, it’s probably getting little to no action from the SERPs. By capping off PageRank to pages like this, you will increase the relative importance of your product pages and product category pages.
3. Do On Page Optimization of your Landing Pages: Title tags, H1 tags, keyword rich content, alt tags, and even Meta tags should be optimized before worrying about external links.

Since many experts think effective link building tactics are going underground, I believe on page and site wide SEO will become increasingly important.

1. SEO Digger: My top fav right now, this innovative tool allows you to see which search queries you are ranking in the top 20 Google results for. According to the SEO Digger site, here’s how it works: “Seodigger works by building a reverse index. The first 20 SERP results are saved from 60 million search requests. Then, a “backward index” of the search engine is built, linking sites with keywords these sites can be found by.” For me, the tool is useful because it shows me keyword phrases that I haven’t intentionally optimized for, but present a great opportunity for capturing good traffic with a little work.
2. Google AdPreview: A godsend for PPC marketers, this tool allows you to see ads as they appear to the normal Google visitor performing a search. (typically your Adwords ads don’t appear for your own searches when you are logged in). You can also change your geographic location in order to preview local ads as someone would in other part of the world. Thanks to Jeff Novak from 10 Golden Rules for alerting me to this one.
3. SEO Book’s Firefox Plugin: This is the one Firefox plugin I can’t live without. The plugin shows 22 SEO metrics directly on the Google SERP, including incoming links, PageRank, Technorati Rank, Domain age, and more. You can also right click on any webpage and look at these same metrics at a glance.
4. Google Sets: This Google labs tool is a great way of generating related keyword ideas. Basically, you enter a few keywords, and Google generates a list of related search terms. While the regular Google Keyword tool also generates keyword suggestions, Google Sets takes into account more than just one keyword phrase at a time.
5. AdCenter Keyword Mutation Tool: Microsoft AdCenter’s keyword mutation tool is great for finding misspellings. Thanks to Linda Bustos for pointing out this tool as a great way to optimize internal site search.

Have you found any other SEO or SEM tools that are making your job easier? Please drop a comment.

Despite the many SEO blogs I subscribe to, I see very little information posted on global SEO strategies. Out of curiosity, I started researching international SEO tactics. Below are some suggestions that I found.

1. Use Local Domain Extensions: The most effective strategy for international SEO is the most obvious one. If you’re trying to optimize for Google.ca and your domain has a .ca extension, you have a great advantage (though it’s still very possible without one.) In addition to the domain extension, Google probably looks at the IP address location of your server to determine the geographical relevance of your site.
2. Translation Isn’t Enough: Many assume that a word-for-word Google translation of existing website content will result in high rankings on international SERPs. Those of use who’ve ever read a word-for-word translation from another language to English realize this isn’t a good idea. You may get into the SERPs, but your odds of converting the visitor and slim to none.
3. Get Links from international domains: If your site contains a good diversity of incoming links from many domain extensions (.co.uk, .ca, .fr, etc), Google will begin to notice your site on the non-US versions of Google.
4. Links to international domains: While I’m not sure if this will really improve rankings, it at least shows you’re participating in a global community by linking to international sources.
5. Keyword + Country Landing Pages: I’ve found searchers sometimes do a keyword search and append their country name to it. (e.g. “ipods uk”) By optimizing a landing page for this combination, you can begin ranking for the terms.
6. Do International Keyword Research: It doesn’t make sense to get your keyword suggestions and counts from keyword tools only showing US results. Aaron Wall’s International SEO keyword tool allows you to get keyword data from 15 different countries.
7. Know the Local Lingo: Anyone who has traveled to another English speaking country knows there are significant differences in local lingo. For example, one of my clients discovered that “shop” is more frequently used than “store.” in many European countries.
8. Consider Local Search Engines: Google doesn’t exactly rule the entire world of search….yet. While its still the number #1 engine internationally, local engines such as Voila in France, Ansearch in Australia, or Yandex in Russia are very popular. If you’re targeting a certain local audience, it pays to understand the algorithms of other engines besides Google.

For many international brands, global Search engine optimization remains a virtually untapped arena. According to this podcast from Oban Multilingual, 70% of internet search queries are not in English.

About Palmer Web Marketing

Justin Palmer is an eCommerce, SEO, and Web Usability consultant that offers Local SEO consulting and SEO Website reviews for small to medium size e-businesses.

1. Avoid Manufacturer Product Descriptions: It’s tempting to just copy and paste from the manufacturer’s website, but resist the urge. At the very least, re-write the description in some way to make it unique.
2. Create a SEO Keyword Field in Product Database: Just as every product record in your catalog has a name, price, and other attributes, you should also create a SEO keyword field that is displayed in the title tags, meta tags, and preferably the body as well. As you add products to the site, enter commonly search for keywords in this field. Not everyone will search by the brand name or item number, so this will greatly help your product pages rank for long tail searches.
3. Focus on Singular Keywords on Product Page: As a general rule, I try to optimize for plural keywords on the home page or other SEO landing pages. Focus on singular terms on the product pages by using the SEO keyword field mentioned in step 2.
4. Simple Product & Category URLs: Ideally, URLs should consist of keywords, not useless ID’s or other parameters. If you don’t have the option of using URL re-writing software, at least limit the number of variables passed in the URL.
5. All Products 2 or 3 Clicks from the Home Page: Keep your product pages as close as possible to your greatest source of PageRank. Many sites bury part of their product catalog deep within dozens of pages of categories and subcategories. This can be accomplished by using SEO friendly rollovers or increasing the number of products per page.
6. Unique Title Tags: While it’s debatable whether the company name belongs in the beginning of the title tag, most agree you should not include extra keywords that are repeated in every tag. For example, if you company name was XYZ Travel, include only the company name in title tag, not “XYZ Travel Agency and Vacations.” Use as little duplicate content as possible in order to prevent diluting the value of the rest of the text in the title tag.
7. Unique Keyword Meta Tags: Meta tags, including keywords and description, should be entirely unique on every product page. Though meta content likely doesn’t directly affect your ranking, unique tags will prevent duplicate content penalties. In addition, don’t stuff keywords into your meta tags that aren’t relevant to the specific page they are on.
8. Unique Description Meta Tags: Personally, I like putting the same product description that appears on the product page in meta description tag. This will ensure unique content on each product page.
9. Product Reviews: A great strategy for guaranteeing unique content is displaying user generated content from your customers. Allow customers to review products they’ve purchased or comment on one’s they haven’t.
10. Pass PR Wisely: Obviously, not every page on your site deserves the same link juice. While your Return policy page is important, it likely won’t bring in loads of revenue driving traffic from organic search. Make sure your primary SEO pages, (category and products pages) receive most of the PR flow by capping PR flow on less important links. You can accomplish this via Javascript links, form submit links, the no-follow tag, or the robots.txt file.
11. Internal Contextual Links: Site navigation links don’t tell search engines very much information about the page. Within a paragraph of text, link to a relevant page using keyword rich anchor text.
12. Avoid Session IDs in URLs: Many ecommerce software platforms use cookie-less unique session IDs in the site URLs. Unfortunately, this creates an infinite amount of duplicate content for the SE’s to crawl. There are ways to prevent this using an ethical type of cloaking which serves URLs to spiders without the session ID.
13. Create a Product RSS Feed: Create a product feed and submit it to relevant content aggregators. Google Base accepts an XML like product feed and displays your results for Google Base searches. Product feeds can be a great way of picking up free backlinks directly to your product pages.
14. Product Tagging: With the advent of social media, customers have become accustomed with the concept of tagging. Allow your customers to tag products with their own keywords. When you allow users to tag your products, you’ll likely start ranking for slang keywords that you would have never thought of on your own.
15. Page File Names: If possible, use keyword rich page file names. A page files name such as www.yoursite.com/keyword-phrase-here.html tells Googlebot a lot more than a URL such as www.yoursite.com/?ID=1234.



16. Use iframes for Duplicate Content: If you have repetitive content that must appear on every page, or your product descriptions are not unique, consider placing them inside an iframe with an invisible border. Users will not know that they data technically resides on another page search engines will not penalize you for duplicate content.
17. Links in Product Descriptions: Create keyword rich links from within the product descriptions of one product linking to another. I’ve found this is a very effective strategy for targeting long-tail keywords.
18. Crawl-able Navigation: Avoid JavaScript or css based navigation structures that don’t allow spiders through. If you’re stuck with one, at least duplicate your navigation in the footer of every page with normal hyperlinks. In additional, don’t rely on form based navigation such as drop down lists since the SEs can’t follow them.
19. Don’t Stuff Keywords in your Nav: This is useless and very tacky. Keywords that show up universally in the navigation on every page are not as important as they used to be. Instead, use keyword rich anchor text pointing to your important pages within a paragraph of relevant text.
20. Don’t Use “View” or “More”: On your product category pages, make sure you link to the individual product pages with anchor text that contains more than just words like “View” or “See more”. Vague terms such as these tell spiders nothing about your products.
21. Optimize your Images: With images now popping up in the regular SERPs, every image on your site should be optimized. Make sure all your product images contain unique alt text attributes. By simply populating the alt text with the product and brand name, I’ve seen a huge increase in traffic from Google Image search. In addition, you’re making your site more useable for the vision impaired.
22. Optimize your Internal Site Search: This is more of a usability tip, but it applies perfectly within the context of eCommerce SEO. Because your visitor found your site via a search engine, they will likely expect your internal site search to work as well. I’ve found that many first time visitors landing your site from a SERP will search for the exact same term they typed into Google.
23. Create Brand Landing Pages: If your site sells branded products that customers may be searching for, setup a optimized landing page for every brand.
24. Use Title Attributes in Links: For all anchor text on your site, be sure to use appropriate title attributes (e.g. <a href=”page.html” title=”keywords here”>) in order to provide search engines more information about what the page contains. Although not nearly as important as the actual anchor text, title attributes are factored into the ranking algorithm in some way.
25. Track Page Yield: In order to determine the effectiveness of your site as a whole, take the number of unique keywords you are found for during a given time period. Then, divide that by the number pages indexed by Google. This will give you your page yield, a good metric for measuring the length of your “long tail.”

About Palmer Web Marketing

Palmer Web Marketing offers Ethical SEO services and Expert eCommerce consulting for small to medium size businesses. Justin also owns several other websites, including EnjoyinJava.com, offering coffee reviews and coupons.

1. Questions: Try using an intriguing question to spark the interest of the user. Questions leave people hanging, wanting to know more. If you ask the right question, your result will hopefully be clicked. RagePank offers some good thoughts on using questions in your title tag.
2. Keyword Dividers: If your title tag consists of several keywords, consider separating them by something more attention grabbing than commas. I frequently use double colons (::), the vertical bar( | ), or caret symbols ( >> ).
3. Short Titles: If you don’t care about stuffing as many keywords as possible into your title tag, consider shortening your title in order to make it stand out. Short titles are very scan-able
4. Company Name in Tag: The question about whether or not to include your company’s name in the title tag is a topic of much debate. If your brand name is well recognized, you could benefit from the additional trust implicit in the name. If not, you may simply be distracting from more important keywords and wasting valuable real estate.



5. Short URLs: Get Elastic shares some interesting data from Marketing Sherpa that suggests shorter URL’s increase click-through since they do not distract from the more important page title. While there may not be much you can do about the length of your domain (Palmerwebmarketing.com is an unfortunate 18 characters long), you may want to shorten your page files names.
6. Keyword in URL or Page File Names: This tactic is frequently used in Pay Per Click ads. By creating page file names with keywords in them, you make your listing appear more relevant. However, you may want to balance this tactic with the one above by not making unnecessarily long URL’s.
7. Indented Listings: Recently, I posted on creating indented search results. In addition to doubling your SERP real estate, and indented result creates a great visual marker that sets your listing apart.
8. Move higher: This seems like a no-brainer, but often we forget how much more clickable the number 1 spot is over number 2. Moving up a few results can have an exponential effect on your click-through rate.

Not every suggestion here will work for everyone. Be sure to test these tactics on less important pages, and then analyze the results. The key is to stand apart from your competition. If all top positions are using Questions in the title tag, you’re better off doing something else.

So what exactly is an indented result? According to Help Center, “When Google finds multiple results from the same website, the most relevant result is listed first, with other relevant pages from that site indented below it.”

So how to you get an indented Google result? Here’s 3 simple steps:

1. Identify 2nd Highest Ranking Page for your Keyphrase: Simply do a Google search for the keyword phrase you are seeking to obtain an indented result for. If you don’t have another page that ranks, or you don’t like the current page that comes up 2nd, create a new one.
2. Link from the 1st Ranking Page to the 2nd Ranking Page: Using your keyword phrase in the anchor text, link from the first page to the second page. Preferrably, use a contextual link within a body of text rather than a sitewide navigational link.
3. Begin Building Links to the 2nd Page: Depending on the competition for this keyword, you may only need a few good quality backlinks to create the indented result.

Unfortunately, I’ve found that indented results can be somewhat fickle. They are frequently here today, and gone tomorrow. However, with proper link building, you should be able to maintain the result.

About Palmer Web Marketing

Palmer Web Marketing offers Ethical SEO consulting and Local Search Engine Placement for small to medium size companies.

1. Unique keywords: By tracking the number of unique keywords your site is found for, you’ll see a global, birds eye view of how well your site is doing with the long tails. Sure, you want to be found for the important, high volume terms as well, but a healthy site will rank organically for a great diversity of keywords.
2. Organic Visits Per Page: Every page on your site should target a few keywords and draw in traffic for those terms. In other words, what percent of your total unique pages are doing a good job of bringing traffic? If you have 1000 pages, and only 200 unique keyword visits, you’ve got some issues that need to be addressed.
3. Conversion Rate Per Keyword: It’s extremely important to know which keywords outperform others. As a search marketer, your time is very limited. Therefore, you must focus on the terms which return decent ROI.
4. Pages Indexed: The number of pages your site indexed has indexed by Google and Yahoo can give you a rough metric of your site’s crawl-ability. If you find that the number of actual pages you have is much greater than the number of indexed pages, you may have issues with navigation or duplicate content. To view your indexed pages, simply use the “site:” command on Google or Yahoo (e.g. site:www.yoursite.com).



5. Yahoo Backlinks: Unlike Google, Yahoo actually shows you the approximate number of back links pointing to your site by using the link: command.
6. Google Backlinks: Unfortunately, the Google link: command is worthless. In order to see an approximate, although likely outdated count of your external links, login to your Google Webmaster Central account.
7. SERP Rankings for High Volume Keywords: Because web users are becoming more sophisticated and less predictable in their searching habits, I would caution about worrying too much about high volume keywords. However, it’s still important to monitor these keyword positions. SEO software such as WebCEO or WebPositionGold are great timesaver tools.

About Palmer Web Marketing

Justin Palmer is an eCommerce, SEO, and Website Usability consultant that offers Local search consulting services and an SEO Website review for small to medium size e-businesses.

In this quick post, I’ll share what SEO tactics have been working for me in the last few months.

1. Focusing on niche keywords first, High volume keywords later
2. Creating multiple landing pages, each focusing on 3-4 keywords
3. I’ve nearly stopped SEO-ing home pages and focused on niche landing pages instead
4. Greatly diversify link anchor text
5. Focusing on Site-wide SEO including url and linking structure
6. Stopped wasting my time with Web directories (I still use blog directories, however)
7. Dropped all Reciprocal Links Pages. (according to Matt Cutts, linking to certain sites can actually decrease PageRank)

I suppose this post didn’t have much to do with the PageRank update. But I think that supports my point that PageRank is a poor SEO metric. 

So what exactly is a Google sitelink? According to Google:

“…Sitelinks are additional links Google sometimes generates from site contents in order to help users navigate your site. Google generates these sitelinks periodically from your site’s contents…”

While it’s certainly a welcome gesture, I would question whether or not it really “helps users navigate your site.” Upon checking the Sitelinks Google created for C28, a Christian clothing retailer that I do work for, I found links for the following pages:

1. The Links page (partners): This is probably the least important page on the site!
2. 2 Broken links to product category pages (for some reason Google decided to remove the parameters from query string that are supposed to follow the question mark (e.g. productlistings.asp?category1=guys&category2=shirts)
3. Link to the “Kids” clothing category: This is one of the least important product categories with virtually no outbound links pointing to it.
4. Locations Page: Good job Google, this truly is an important page
5. Events Page: Important page
6. About Us Page: Important page

Overall, 3 of the 8 sitelinks were pages that I myself would have included if I had the option.

So what’s the moral of this post? If you have sitelinks for your listing (I’ve noticed they only tend to show up when searching for the company or brand name) make sure they are relevant and work properly. If they don’t, login to Google Webmaster central and exclude them. However, as I write this, I have yet to see the pages I requested be excluded actually removed, and I put in the request 24 hours ago.

In this post, I’ll share some of the tactics I’ve used to improve product page rankings for my clients.

1. Product Reviews: Product reviews are a sure fire way to ensure your pages are rich with unique content that occurs only on your site. Back when we were able to view supplemental results on the Google SERPs, I found that pages that had unique products reviews did not end up as supplemental results. On the contrary, pages without unique descriptions or product reviews did.
2. Keyword Rich URLs: Because most ecommerce sites are linked with a dynamic database, they use ugly url’s which contain at least one number parameter. Convert your category product page URLs into friendly, keywords rich file and folder names. For more info on URL re-writing, check out this Wikipedia article. For IIS users, you might want to consider this software from Isapi Re-write.
3. No Follow Tags: Many sites distribute their internal link juice in such a way that is not favorable to the product detail pages. In order for your pages to rank highly, they need to receive a decent flow of PageRank. I would strongly recommend slapping a no-follow tag on your less important pages from an SEO perspective (e.g. Privacy, security, about us pages). Just be sure to link to them from your sitemap without the no follow. For more info on this tactic, check out this post on the no-follow tag.



4. Avoid Manufacturer Descriptions: Resist the temptation to copy and paste manufacturer provided product descriptions. Why? Because all your competitors use them as well. When Google sees multiple pages with the same content, it will likely favor the site in which the content was published first. In addition, these stock product descriptions often are not the most well written from a sales perspective.
5. Add SEO Keywords to Title Tag: It goes without saying that all your title tags must be unique and contain the product name. However, this is simply not enough. Create an extra field in your product database where you can add alternative SEO keywords. Then have these keywords show up in the Title tag for each product page. For example, while you’ll likely never rank for a high volume keyword search such as “apple ipods”, you may stand a chance at ranking for “discount apple ipods” or “Apple ipod mp3 player” if you add those phrases to the title tag.
6. Internal Contextual Linking: Link to your important product pages internally from a non navigation link. For example, you may want create a keyword rich link in the product description of one product linking to another product page.

I hope you’ll find these suggestions useful. As always, leave a comment if you have any questions or feedback.

1. Identify Your Competitors: Obviously, the easiest way to find your competitors would just be to Google your keywords. Another good way would be Alexa Traffic tool and look at the related sites.
2. Setup Google Keyword Alerts: A great way to monitor your competitors as well as your industry in general is to setup Google Alerts for each of your primary keywords. Every time Google finds a blog post, press release, or article featuring your keywords, you’ll get an email with a link to it. Many times, Google alerts have alerted me to the fact that a competitor was using a less than ethical SEO tactic, such as splogging.
3. Setup Google Company Name Alerts: In addition, setup a Google alert for each of your competitor’s names.
4. Check Your Competitor’s Back links: By using the “link:www.yourcompetitorurl.com” command in Google or Yahoo, you can see where your competitor’s back links are coming from. This is a good way of generating ideas for link building.
5. Check Your Competitor’s On-Site Tactics: What keywords are your competitors targeting on their landing pages? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve discovered keywords on a competing website that I’d never considered.

About

Palmer Web Marketing specializes in helping small businesses achieve their online goals with local Search engine placement, email marketing, and eCommerce web usability consulting. To start your company along the path of internet profits, contact us today.

Why would you want to use this on your site? Well, consider a typical e-commerce site. You’ve got your important pages like top level product categories, and lower level product detail pages. However, the navigation for most websites also includes links to “less important” pages such as your customer service page, return policy, and privacy policy. While these pages are technically still “important”, you don’t necessarily want them to receive the same link juice a category or product page receives, because they are rarely updated.

It’s important to keep in mind that although the Googlebot has the ability to crawl as deep as possible, it rarely will go 5, 6 or 7 levels deep. If it does, it’s a rare occasion and those pages likely don’t rank well.

What’s the solution? Slap the rel=”nofollow” tag on all links in your site navigation that don’t need to be crawled as frequently. If you do this, be sure to link somewhere to them without the nofollow, such as from your physical sitemap.

I believe this strategy can work wonders on getting your site’s pages out of the supplemental index. Be sure to leave a comment if you’ve successfully used this method before, or let me know your results after using it.

I’d like to suggest that the secret to picking the right keywords is finding niche terms that are not too hard to rank for, but will convert well. Time and time again I’ve seen new websites pick terms that are to hard to rank for in a relatively short time. By shooting for the stars, these sites end up missing the mark entirely, and not ranking for anything.

In my opinion, SEOs should always target the more attainable niche keywords first. For example, I’ve been working with a company that is seeking to obtain first page ranking for the term “Christian Music“. However, with Google showing an estimated 85 million results for this query, the odds of ranking in the top ten anytime soon was not promising. With this in mind, we chose to target the keywords “Christian music cds”, “new Christian music”, and “Christian music store” instead. Not only were these keywords easier to rank for, they are more specific and targeted towards my client’s business. Because we chose niche keywords with the term “Christian music” within it, we ended up slowly gaining ground on that term as well.

The moral of this post…. target niche keywords first, and the generic ones will follow. Happy SEOing…

About Palmer Web Marketing

Palmer Web Marketing offers Christian SEO services and SEO Services in Orange County.

“Supplemental Result” – the term no business wants to see next to their website on the search page. Unfortunately though, billions of sites reside in Google’s purgatory, doomed to receive only minimal traffic. Why does the supplemental index exist? How can a website get out of it? The following post will suggest 4 ways to get out of Google’s supplemental results.

Get Rid of Duplicate Content

90% of the time, a website is in the supplemental index because it contains content (usually text), that exists on many other websites. A few examples of this would be manufacturer product descriptions or syndicated content such as news or articles. How do you fix this? Simple, re-write content and make it original to your website.

How do you know if your content is duplicate? Try this duplicate content checker:

Cleanup Nasty, Complicated URLs

Many websites, especially sites that rely on database content, use query strings in the URLs. For example, http://www.url.com/ID=XXX&SOURCE=YYYY. Unfortunately, many search engine spiders don’t like crawling these pages. One reason is that engines consider each url as a unique page, even if it has the same content. So although the page http://www.url.com/ and http://www.url.com/id=123 may have the exact same content, you may incur a duplicate content penalty.

What’s the solution for this? Try to minimize using parameters if possible. While using them for external campaign tracking may be alright, definitely avoid them in the internal linking structure.

Many websites now are re-writing their ugly URL’s with re-writing software. This also has search engine optimization benefits as well. Software such as this is available for both Apache and Windows servers. For more info, checkout this Wikipedia article.

Build Deep Links

While links to the homepage are nice, targeted links to product detail pages within your site will ensure that pages don’t get orphaned and ignored by the spiders. If the crawler always starts at your homepage, it’s likely it will abandon the session before crawling your whole site. Deep linking to content gives spiders a new starting point to find fresh and relevant pages.

1. Don’t use JavaScript or css navigation. The SE’s can’t crawl it.
2. Don’t use session id’s in your URLs. These can create duplicate content problems.
3. Avoid using more than one parameter (or ID) in a url
4. Better yet, eliminate parameters entirely by using static links
5. Submit an XML sitemap to Google sitemaps and Yahoo Site Explorer
6. Create a physical sitemap
7. Create a Robots.txt file that defines your sitemap and lists exclusions
8. Don’t use JavaScript or css navigation. The SE’s can’t crawl it.
9. Don’t stuff keywords in your primary navigation. Site wide links are devalued.
10. Link to your SEO landing pages contextually. In other words, within a decent size body of text.

About Palmer Web Marketing

Justin Palmer is an eCommerce, SEO, and Web Usability consultant that offers Christian Internet Marketing and Christian Search Marketing for businesses and ministries.

Natural (organic) search advantages:

1. It’s free (duh!)
2. Natural search results are trusted more
3. Natural search results are clicked on more

Natural (organic) search disadvantages:

1. It takes time to get results
2. SEO hourly rates can be pricey
3. You can’t possibly rank for every search variation (long tails)

Pay Per Click (PPC) advantages:

1. Instant ranking
2. Ability to rank for any search term (long tails)
3. Ability to test best converting keywords for natural search
4. Ability to send visitors to more targeted landing page

Pay Per Click (PPC) disadvantages:

1. It’s very expensive. In some industries, you can pay several dollars per click
2. Click fraud is prevalent

While each method has it’s pros and cons, I strongly believe that together SEO and PPC have a synergistic effect. For example, appearing in both natural and paid sections increases your visibility. Possibly, and visitor will click on both results and one will resonate more than the other. In addition, I’ve found PPC is a great testing ground for which keywords to optimize naturally for.

Check this post for more Pay per click optimization tips.

I hope it doesn’t come as a surprise to some, but search engines don’t need help finding your site. Back in the day (2-3 years ago that is), it was helpful to submit your site to ensure that it gets noticed by the spiders. However, with the power and complexity today of engines such as Google, it’s no longer necessary. The most effective way to get your site noticed is through backlinks. Rather than wasting time submitting,website owners should be creating links pointing to their pages. The SE’s much prefer finding a site on its own. While many of the major engines still have submission pages, the benefits of using them are likely slim to none. In my experience with clients, I’ve been able to get their site listed within 2-3 days by simply creating a few external links from other sites.

Excessively submitting to search engines looks like spam. Many of these shady paid services offer to re-submit your site at regular times intervals. While it’s not likely that a few submissions will get your site banned, overly submitting it will. Play it safe, and stay away from these services.

The moral of this post: If you are currently paying for Search Engine Submission, stop wasting your money! If you get one of those submittal offers in the mail, throw it in the trash.

1. Buzzle: My personal favorite, Buzzle is the most SPAM free article directory, in my opinion. However, they are also the most difficult to get your articles into. They require you to submit previous work in order to be approved as an author.
2. EzineArticles: A very popular directory, EzineArticles is another great site. They allow you to initially submit 10 articles, and then you must be reviewed again in order to continue submitting (which seems odd to me, but what heck)
3. IdeaMarketers: Offers instant article approval, as well as a generous number of backlinks allowed in the article text and author bio.
4. GoArticles: Not bad, articles are instantly approved. While the author bio only allows one link, you can put several in the body of the article.

Besides the sites listed above, I haven’t found any other worthy directories. Be sure to leave a comment if I’ve missed a good one.

1. Title Tag: Still the single most important on page SEO variable. I’ve seen a single change to the title tag bring in thousands in monthly sales for clients. The key is to use relevant, rankable keywords.
2. H1 Tags: Second to the title tag, an H1 tag is the second most influential onsite variable. In the past, some web designers have disliked using it because it makes the font extremely large. However, with an external style sheet, you can use an H1 tag at with any font size you wish.
3. Contextual Linking: Linking to another page on your site from within the body of text is extremely powerful. Basically, you should create links on your site as if it were an external site. Create a network of pages all linking to each other by different means. Vary the anchor text to create diversity. Avoid keyword stuff links within navigation, as site wide links are very ineffective.
4. Original Content: Don’t expect your pages to rank if you are copying and pasting content from another site or syndicating content. The SE’s love original content.

On page SEO can still be very effective. Leave a comment if you have know any additional strategies that have worked for you.

About Palmer Web Marketing

Justin Palmer is an eCommerce, SEO, and Web Usability consultant that offers Christian Internet Marketing and specializes in SEO for Church websites.

With this change in the way Google displays results, website owners must
place additional focus on optimizing for image results. By taking a quick look
at your log files or analytics software, you might be surprised to see you are
already getting decent traffic from image searches.

The following tips will get you started with optimizing the images that
appear on your site.

Alt Text: Probably the most significant factor in ranking for an image
search is the contents of the image alt property. Basically, the alt text should
contain a brief description of the item as if you were explaining it to a blind
person. After all, the original intention of this property for the vision
impaired.

Surrounding Text: Google will weigh the surrounding text heavily when
in determining what the picture is about. Be sure to place relevant keywords
above and below the image you are optimizing.

Image File Name: Another important factor is whether or not keywords
are in the image file name. For example, if you were trying to optimize for the
word “Christian t-shirt“, you might name the image christian-t-shirt.jpg. Of course, it
always difficult to optimize this way if you are forced to go back and change
the name of existing images. Keep keywords in mind when you are naming them in
the first place.

Anchor Text: Although it’s somewhat uncommon to link directly to an
image that’s not in a web page, you can greatly increase your ranking by using
relevant anchor text in the hyperlink just as if you were optimizing for a
webpage.

As people’s search preferences become more sophisticated, the popularity of
vertical search engines will grow. In addition, Google and other SE’s will
likely continue to mix results from various types of content.

Please leave a comment if you’ve used any other tactic for image SEO or have successfully used any of the above.