The Vizion Search Engine Optimization Blog
- 2008May22How to Show Your SEO Clients Proof of Your Efforts
One challenge that faces SEO firms is that if you improve organic search traffic for a client, how do you demonstrate how much of the growth you are responsible for?
You could look at the current organic search traffic and compare it to a similar period before you started optimizing the client site. But, that does not take into account the industry-wide trends, economic trends or other underlying trends such as search traffic growth that could be adding to or subtracting from the gains created by your SEO efforts. Also, this method does not take into account any growth trends the client may have been experiencing previously.
So, how do you show your value?
For example, if you are working with a company that sells Widgets and the Widget industry is growing at 4% annually, you might reasonably expect a similar growth in Widget related search terms. However, this is an assumption. New competitors are continually entering the Widget business, including Internet-only companies without inventories or new global competitors. Likewise, existing competitors are investing in their own online marketing efforts to drive organic search traffic growth. In other words, even though the pie is growing, every participant is not guaranteed a slice of [...]
- 2008May21Who is Optimizing YOUR Web Site?
Vizion’s president, Mark Jackson, just wrote a series of articles over at Search Engine Watch entitled “Don’t Hire a Butcher to Do a Baker’s Job” and has been getting a lot of feedback, both positive and negative.Mark’s posts take a look at who it is that companies use to perform their search engine optimization. In some cases, it is the company’s IT team that ‘handles’ the SEO. Many times a company will use a web design firm to create the site in a ’search engine friendly’ manner, but many of these firms have not taken the time to do a full analysis of the needs of the site to help it rank well in the search engines.
Here at Vizion we OFTEN are contacted by companies who have just had a new site designed and want us to come in and ‘optimize’ it for them. What we usually find are many different things in the design and Information Architecture that negatively impact the ability of the site to rank in the search engines.
Check out Mark’s two part talk about this often heated discussion [...]
- 2008May15Sk-rt Social Network Rebrands as Kirtsy, Fails to Follow SEO Best Practices
Sk*rt, the social network geared towards women, has rebranded as Kirtsy. Sk*rt, originally at www.sk-rt.com, is now at www.Kirtsy.com. I suspect that one of the reasons they rebranded was that they were not affiliated in any way with Skirt! Magazine (at www.skirt.com), the “Women’s online resource for opinion, poetry, fashion, resources, fun and irreverence.” I fully applaud the rebranding effort from Sk*rt.com to Kirtsy.com. However, from an SEO (search engine optimization) perspective, they have committed SEO suicide by not redirecting to the new site the right way.
If you go to www.sk-rt.com (or any URL on the old site), you’re going to be greeted with a “splash page” on the sk-rt.com domain telling you that they’ve rebranded as Kirtsy. 5 seconds later you’re redirected to the new URL. The only problem here is that this is not being done properly. A 301 Permanent Redirect needs to be used–I never ever recommend using a meta refresh to redirect visitors. In fact, using a meta refresh to redirect visitors will almost certainly screw up the site’s search engine rankings.
Currently, the [...]- 2008Apr22Websites Celebrating Earth Day 2008
Happy Earth Day 2008. While researching this Earth Day blog post today, I was amazed by the lack of overall participation amongst the search engine marketing community in promoting Earth Day. However, the few that I did find truly did an amazing job of promoting Earth Day 2008. I thought I would point out some of the best Earth Day blog posts as well as the sites that have done something on their site to help promote Earth Day 2008.
Certainly if you’re a search engine marketer or in the search industry and I haven’t mentioned you here feel free to make a comment below to point it out.
Search Engines Promoting Earth Day
My friend Barry (Rusty Brick) and Search Engine Roundtable always does a great job of changing the header of SE Roundtable whenever there’s a holiday or other significant event to promote. That definitely keeps me coming back to their site to see what they’re doing. Earth Day 2008 is no exception, and you need to check out their special header today. I just love their glowing Earth.
SE Roundtable also has a great wrap-up post detailing many of the search [...]- 2008Apr10IAC Launches Rushmore Drive New Black Search Engine
Black Web Enterprises, a company owned by IAC (IAC also owns the Ask.com search engine), has launched Rushmore Drive, a search engine that is the first of its kind to attempt to deliver more relevant search results to the black community.
According to a news release today, Rushmore Drive uses “patent-pending technology, a vertical search algorithm” to deliver search results based on “increased penetration of sites heavily trafficked by the Black community.” It uses technology called SearchPlus, which is apparently technology that combines general search results, news search results, and job search results, with a dynamic layer of Black-targeted search results and user-generated content.I performed a search for “search engine optimization” on Rushmore Drive and was surprised by the search results.
While I am not surprised that SEO Chat is the first result, I’m puzzled as to why a web design and development firm, a Virginia web design firm, and an Atlanta website design firm show up in the top 10 search results for “search engine optimization”. I do like the addition of the “narrow your search” and related news and video results that are displayed, though. [...]- 2008Apr9Advertisers Granted Exception to Google Adwords Display URL Policy
Last week I talked about the new Google AdWords Display URL policy in a blog post titled, “Google AdWords Display URL Policy Reaches Local PPC Advertisers”. In that post, I explained that the policy means “that the URL that shows in your ad absolutely must be the URL that visitors get to when they click on your ad.”
Unbeknownst to many people, the Google AdWords team has granted exceptions to the policy.
Recently, many Google Adwords advertisers, upon logging into your Google AdWords account, see the following message:
The Google AdWords Display URL Policy was to go into effect on April 1, 2008. However, even though Google AdWords advertisers are still receiving these messages upon logging into their Google AdWords accounts, Google apparently is not enforcing this policy that they warned advertisers about. Google even went so far as to say in the Google AdWords “Inside AdWords” blog that “This policy will be strictly enforced regardless of past approvals and will apply to all advertisers, beginning on April 1st.”Well, apparently Google is not enforcing this policy. They’re simply asking advertisers to make the change. And they are granting [...]
- 2008Apr73 Letters That Can Improve Your Social Media Success
Did you know that there are three simple alphabet letters that can make or break your social media campaigns? So many times we overlook these three letters and never realize that they can help improve your social media profiles’ success. In fact, many top social media users use this and often we don’t realize that they’re using these three letters to make them successful.
What are these three letters? RSS. Yes, it is probably not surprising and we’ve all heard it before. Most of the time we associate RSS as being from our own site and our own blog; many blogs automatically create an RSS feed of the content, allowing you to syndicate it on other sites. But did you know that many social media sites (social bookmarking sites) automatically create an RSS feed of everything that you’ve bookmarked?Most likely you’ve spent time promoting the RSS feed of your blog and you’ve tried to get more people to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed. But, how often have you looked at the RSS feed of your social media profiles that are available? Did you know that many social media sites give you an RSS feed [...]
- 2008Apr2Google AdWords Display URL Policy Reaches Local PPC Advertisers
UPDATE – We have received word that ReachLocal is not affected by the new policy
Beginning April 1, 2008, Google has officially changed their display URL policy. In short, what that means is that the URL that shows in your ad absolutely must be the URL that visitors get to when they click on your ad. In most cases, if you have a website and are directly paying Google AdWords to advertise on Google then this should not effect you. After all, when someone clicks on your ad they directly reach your website. If you are paying a third party to manage your pay per click (PPC) advertising, you may have seen an interruption.
The Google AdWords Display URL policy has changed, and the following is a Google AdWords message describing the policy change.
This policy change is in line with other changes that Google has made to their policies, which has typically included a policy to do everything they can to make sure that the URL displayed is going to be the URL that you get to when you click on that URL. This been a goal of Google’s organic [...]- 2008Mar26An Employee’s Lack of Attention to Detail – Is it Culture or a Disorder?
What I am referring to is how people in the search marketing and other fields seem to be ‘not paying attention to paying attention’. Mark Jackson addressed this issue in his latest Search Engine Watch column titled “All SEOs Are Living with Adult ADD“.
Some people think that this lack of attention may be due to a cultural shift in the workforce — younger workers are characterized by their desire for short-term instant gratification and lack the ‘big picture’ focus and spend too much time worrying about the details of a single project — neglecting other items that need addressing. Older workers are characterized by their desire to build a career and may have too much of a ‘big picture’ focus and can often neglect the smaller details. This is not always the case though but it tends to ring true in many businesses.
However, it may not be that culture affects the ability of either generation to focus on multiple tasks and follow through on all fronts of a project. It may actually be that these people have so much going on and just don’t have the ability to [...]
- 2008Feb193 Questions You Must Ask Yourself About Your PPC
No matter if your campaigns spend $500 or $500,000 a month these three questions could save you from wasting your money and almost immediately increase the return of your investment in paid search marketing.
1. How many keywords are you currently bidding on in your paid search campaigns?
2. How many of those keywords have had some type of conversion in the last 6 to 12 months?
3. Why are you still bidding on keywords that have not had any conversions?
This is one of the most common errors I find when our agency begins managing an existing paid search account for a new client. Would you keep betting on a horse if it continuously lost?
If you are not tracking conversions, bookmark this blog and come back in a month after you begin tracking conversions and read this again.
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