A post on John Andrew’s JohnOn blog talks about Advanced SEO. This is spot on:

… as search strategy defines the opportunity pursued by the web publication under consideration.

The web represents a massive increase in the number of people most businesses can reach. And in general business is only scratching the surface of how they can find new customers and convert them online.

Search engines are a major gateway to those people. So figuring out how your business can participate in search is a strategy. Not a tactic. Day to day SEO is tactical, but don’t think that is all it is.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of those important edges where technology meets marketing. A pure technology view isn’t enough, just as a pure marketing view isn’t enough. SEO requires an understanding of both.

If you are a technologist or marketer and don’t use SEO strategically yet, time to start.

Even more so for business owners.

But if you are starting out, learn about keywords first. Then SEO. It will all make sense.

Some of the best resources on search engine optimization come from Aaron Wall’s SEOBook.

Aaron has written a very detailed article about the comparative value of a #1 ranking on Google’s search engine results pages. What is surprising is just how much of a difference #1 is.

How Much is a Top Google Ranking Worth To Your Business

If you want to learn about SEO in detail, then joining Aaron’s SEO community is a good investment. Great online book and tutorials as well as access to an extremely helpful SEO forum.

Had a fascinating meeting with a new client this morning. He has a vineyard and olive farm, and produces wines and extra virgin olive oil of exceptional quality. Talk about lifestyle!

After looking at the objectives for his business online, and reviewing the personas he wants to talk to, we had a really productive discussion about keywords. We all participated in the keyword discussion. And ideas formed in my head about themes.

I have never tried to really explain themes to clients. At one level, it can all sound very technical / very geeky (and on one level, they are). But today was a bit different. I got it into my head I wanted to try and explain themes. Without getting a glazed over a look, or having people think I am geeking out all of a sudden. Because keywords and themes really matter.

To explore this subject, let’s take an example that is very easy to relate to. Let’s imagine for a moment we are going to open a funky cafe.

Naturally we want our funky cafe to have the looks. All of a sudden we are thinking street appeal, ambience, and seeing way cool folk sipping latte. But hang on, we gotta get serious here, what about the three rules that will determine the success of our cafe - Location, location and location! We all know these three rules matter.

This picture here shows a place that lacks street appeal - we could quickly fix that with a refit. But it doesn’t have location - and no amount of money is fixing that!

Ok, so what if the same three rules are important for websites? Location, location and location.

The location of a website isn’t obvious. External appearances? Sure, they are obvious, and anyone with a pulse is qualified to comment on what they consider poor design. With websites, if externals are a problem (and they usually aren’t), a makeover can usually fix them very quickly.

But how do you figure out the location, location, location of a website? And if you happen to be in a bad location, can it be fixed with a simple makeover?

In short, the answer to the location question is that to understand it, you need to understand two concepts:

• Keywords: Lots of people search for stuff, and search depends on keywords. Good keywords are good business because they bring search visitors.
• Themes. Lots of people find stuff on the web by surfing (reading and clicking on to other web pages). What people read is not random, there is a theme to it all. Tapping into good themes is good business because it brings referral visitors.

Keywords and themes are the major factors that will determine the quality and quantity of search and referral visitors to your website. The physical location of a cafe determines the potential for visitors to come through its doors. Bad coffee can turn them away in a good location. But good coffee can’t bring people to a bad location.

Likewise, keywords and themes control the potential number of visitors to a website.

One day it will be obvious where websites are located. And keywords and themes will be the lenses we use to view it. But it isn’t that obvious these days. Understanding how to use Themes in websites is hard (or has been until now!). Understanding keywords isn’t hard, it’s just that most people *think* they get it, when they don’t. It isn’t hard to really get it, but as the saying goes, you don’t know what you don’t know.

So after this morning’s inspirational session on wine and olive oil, I wrote an article called SEO Web Development. While the title is a thinly veiled attempt to tap into a moderately popular keyword (and thinly veiled as it is, it will bring traffic), the core of the article is a diagram explaining Themes and Keywords and how to use these concepts to optimize a business website.

I realise I’m going out on a limb here. Themes and Keywords = Location, Location, Location for websites. And I’m laying out on the table what I believe is a simple approach to use the concepts to structure (or restructure) a website. Or to anchor it in a good location, if you like. Theming is an SEO concept that I’ve never really seen a good explanation of. After doing a lot of work in the area, I have a view on what Themes are (and if this isn’t it, I’ll need to rename my concept, because it is useful).

The article was written primarily to guide my own team and the freelancers who help us prepare online marketing websites for clients. Like many aspects of online marketing however, business owners can benefit from understanding what is involved here. Even if you won’t be developing websites yourself, understanding Themes and Keywords will help you make good business decisions about your online business.

Making good decisions about Keywords and Themes means balancing out a lot of competing factors. Some are highly technical and need SEO knowledge. Some aren’t, but require require business judgement (so a business owner’s input is vital).

What do you think about it all?

Are keywords and themes that important?

If you are not into SEO, does SEO Web Development explain the importance of keywords and themes to the point you would know what sort of questions to ask when planning your website?

If you are into SEO, do you agree with the approach I’ve taken in SEO Web Development? Would a website structured on these principles tend to perform better or worse than most other websites?

Ever feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of ways to build a business online? I do at times.

In the interests of cutting through to simplicity, here are two approaches to using content marketing to build web site traffic. You can start applying them today.

The first content marketing strategy is designed to attract organic search traffic. The second to attract referral traffic.

Keep in mind it is all about quality, not quantity. You want to get more web site traffic that is relevant to your business. Not just any traffic.

How To Get More Organic Search Traffic To Your Web Site

When someone types a phrase into a search engine, they are presented with a list of organic and paid search results. They are great visitors to attract to your site if what they are searching for relates to your business.

1. Research. Each month go to Wordtracker and review one or more of your primary key word families.
2. Plan. Identify useful keyword phrases that have predicted search traffic between 15 and 200. If you find 4 of these, you have one post per week.
3. Do. Write posts to help solve a problem related to those niche keywords. Use the niche keyword in your article title - for most Wordpress sites this should ensure it appears in your post URL and title tag (if not, make sure it does). Link to related posts and pages on your site. Where relevant include a Call to Action, for example, to subscribe to your blog, register to an email list or review a related offer.
4. Review. Check your analytics and see whether these posts are driving traffic to your site. in Google Analytics, check Sources of Traffic to see if they keyword phrases deliver traffic, and check Content to see if your articles are being read. Analyse your effectiveness.

Tip of the hat to Ciaran McKeever - see this post for the full story.

How To Get More Referral Traffic To Your Website

When someone is reading a blog or a website, they may see a link to a related web page. When they click through to that web page, they are called a Referral visitor. If they were reading content about something closely related to your business, they are a great visitor to attract to your site.

In practice, content marketing is the best approach to generating referral visitors. That is because it requires high quality, focussed content to get the attention of the author of the other blog or website.

1. Research. Review the audience you want to publish for. Consider what blogs they are already reading online. Develop a Top 10 list of blogs, and identify the bloggers involved and how they define their audience. What content could you write that would not only solve a problem for your audience, but would also interest the bloggers?
2. Plan. Each month identify blog posts you can write that will solve a problem and interest a blogger. Once again, choose 4 of these and you have one a week. Regularly read the Top 10 blogs and notice any posts that present an opportunity for you to respond with your own post.
3. Do. Write one post every week that includes a link to a Top 10 blog. Think about your audience and the audience of the other blog, and make it as relevant as you can to their interests. Include a link to their post in the body of your post. Find their trackback address if it exists and enter it in the trackback field for your post. Write at least one comment every week on a Top 10 blog.
4. Review. Read the Top 10 blogs and notice if you are attracting interest. Use analytics to review Referral traffic. What is working? Consider asking some of the Top 10 bloggers for advice on how you can improve your blog.

About Social Network Traffic

A blog is also a great tool to help build social network traffic. While social networks can drive a lot of visitors, they are in general not likely to be as interested in your site as search or referral visitors.

Ok, so there are two content marketing approaches to help you get more web site traffic. What do you think are the most effective ways to build traffic?

Small business owners are interested in search engines. Fielding increasing numbers of offers to do SEO on their site, they are wondering … “do I need SEO?” Or increasingly “why isn’t my site search engine friendly?”

If your site isn’t search engine friendly, you are missing an opportunity. Maybe a big one.

I had a question from a prospective client earlier this week.

I am a little confused as a number of sources have now said our site is not SEO friendly yet they have not been able to tell me exactly why…..can you shed some light on it?

Wow. Where to start. I had my own search engine crunch some time ago. When you extend your business onto the web, sooner or later you start to wonder about search engines.

Being a business owner who also has a background in technology, I dived in to find out what I didn’t know. What an eye opener. I read Mike Moran’s excellent Search Engine Marketing Inc. as well as a heap of online SEO material. I tweaked our own sites. It was fair to say our initial sites broke just about all the rules. And fixing them was not easy. But I got the hang of it, and the sites came good. But there is just so much information to absorb.

I’ve published my response to her question below, minus the name of the client and with a few edits for clarity.

Search Engine Friendly

I have published 3 articles that provide an overview of the areas I think are most iimportant:
Introduction to Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization
On Page SEO - Optimising your Posts and Pages for Search Engines
Off Page SEO - Optimization with OM4 and Wordpress

In terms of your own site.

Firstly, I suggest you go to google.com and enter this query:
site:clientsite.com.au

In a separate window, enter this query:
site:undara.com.au

Briefly review the results of these queries - they show you what Google knows about the two sites. Can you understand what content is in your website just by looking at the index? What about Undara? While this is only one view, it is pretty useful to understand.

A few observations I would make about your site and its search engine profile.

Your site has a Google PageRank of 1/10. Page Rank is a measure of how much Google trusts a site. Your main competitor has a ranking of 3/10. … Page Rank is logarithmic in scale. While Page Rank is only an indicator, to me a 1/10 ranking after more than 3 years on the web is indicative of a problem.

Page Titles. Just about all pages indexed for your site have the same <title> tag. Non unique page titles are a problem, unique descriptive titles are better. Page Title is generally considered to be a critical factor in search engine rankings.

Page Meta Descriptions. Most pages have the same meta description. This doesn’t let searchers know what pages are about - unique descriptive text for each page is best. While not affecting your ranking per se, it can affect the number of people who click through to your site if you do appear in the search result pages.

Page URLs are numeric. Your page URLs take the form .. page.php?id=39 I recommend using meaningful permalinks - for example, clientsite.com.au/itinerary rather than clientsite.com.au/page.php?id=24
Keywords in the URL make a difference for ranking.

Indexing. You only have 43 pages of your content indexed, including PDFs and Flash files. So not all pages of your content are indexed. The lack of titles/meta descriptions makes it hard to analyse what is not indexed.

Back Links. It appears you have a very limited number of back links (approx 70). More back links will assist with rankings.

The response worked well for my prospective client, and she decided to migrate onto our platform.

Many thanks again for spending time on our site and taking the time to explain it to me. Despite my limited experience with the technicalities of website building, I am following what you are telling me and the experiment of typing site: clientsite.com.au was indeed useful to clarify further what you are saying.

Expect small business owners to learn a lot more about SEM/SEO than we ever would have thought healthy.

Read this excellent post on Search Marketing is Direct Marketing. It was written by Mike Moran, author of Search Engine Marketing Inc (a big read, but the best way to understand how search really works).

I think search marketing strikes a chord with smaller businesses in particular because it is so direct. Brand marketing is for those with deep pockets and deep faith.

The point Mike makes is that search marketing is even more measurable than direct marketing. So not only does it cost less, because it is so measurable you can tell - quickly - what is working and what isn’t.

I’ve launched a number of search campaigns for clients that have been very effective at driving traffic. And because we can (and do) measure conversions that result, its clear when its time to dial down the search traffic and focus on getting the traffic to convert.

How much harder to do that when you have to prepare brochures, print them, mail them and measure.

We’ve just helped Undara Experience launch their new website. They are our newest OM4Tourism client. This picture shows a Night Tiger (snake) poised to strike at a Microbat emerging from the lava tube. Fantastic image!

One of the first benefits of the site upgrade I have observed is a simple but powerful one - more of their content is now indexed. Their old site had some excellent content - but the Javascript menus made for a great spider trap, so only 23 of their pages were indexed.

Less than a week after going live, almost twice the number of pages were indexed, and in the not too distant future I expect every page and post to be indexed.

If you are going to upgrade your website, it is important that you take into account what the search engines already know about you. If Google has your pages indexed, as the site owner you need to make it your business to ensure that redirects are planned and implemented.

Redirects? Just like setting up postal address redirects if you move office, you need redirects set up for every one of your indexed pages. If you don’t, people may find your page in a search, but not get sent through to the correct page.

If someone has linked to one of your pages, the link will return a ‘Page Not Found’ result, and the link might be removed.

There are a few ways redirects can be established. The best way is to use an Apache 301 redirect that tells search engines the page has been permanently moved.

When a site upgrade is involved that will change the URL of any indexed page:

• get a list of every page indexed by the search engines (e.g. site:youraddress.com in the search box of Google and Yahoo will find their indexed pages)
• for each page indexed, record the old URL and the new URL
• when you upgrade your site, make sure a redirect from the old page to the new page is setup
• when your site changes over, test each of the old page URLs to test the redirects are working

Implementing 301 redirects is quite technical, and I’m not going to try and explain the detail here.

Working with Undara has been rewarding. They appreciate the strategy behind our platform, and are really excited about implementing it.

It was impressive to see Marcus reel off his first post, welcoming Tim Flannery and John Doyle to Undara. Undara have incredible images to work with, and are now starting to prepare video for their site (including coverage of David Attenborough and other famous people visiting Undara).

Mike Moran has written an excellent article about problem marketing. Zip on over for a quick read of Are Your Customers Looking For A Problem? Solutions Are Search Marketing!.

Do you understand your prospect’s problem?

Then you may also understand what they may be thinking about before they know of any solutions.

Understand what these keywords are and include them in your keyword research. Integrate them into your search marketing and content marketing.

Simple and effective.

Who cares?

A lot of people.

The recent Google PageRank updates have caused a stir, with a number of popular blogs dropping significantly in PageRank (PR). Darren Rowse has launched an entertaining PageRank Slam competition, and pointed out an interesting Sydney Morning Herald article on the topic.

Does PageRank matter?

Google PageRank:

• is a 1 to 10 ranking that shows Google’s view of the importance of a web page.
• is not linear in scale, so moving from PR1 to PR2 is a lot easier than moving from PR3 to PR4.
• can be viewed by installing the Google Toolbar for IE or Firefox.

A high PR page suggests a lot of links to it, making it a more trusted page. A link to your page from a high PR page is worth more (from Google’s ranking perspective) than a link from a page with a low PR.

As Google is the major search engine, if you are interested in search marketing then it’s hard to ignore Google’s very public feedback on how it views your site. Google is not the be all and end all of the web, but its influence cannot be ignored. For as long as Google publishes PR, it will matter to a lot of people.

When a small to medium business site launches online, it will have no PR at all. You can move to a PR1 or PR2 with initial efforts, and a PR of 3 or 4 within 12 months is probably an achievable target. Get to a PR of 5 or 6 and you are right up there in the world wide web. You don’t need any PR at all to be able to operate a business online. But it may help increase the perception of your site for some people.

Only Google knows exactly how PageRank is set. In general, if you follow a strategy of publishing good content and attracting links from external websites that focus on your subject area, then your PageRank will improve. While not as important, if you have internal links from your own posts and pages back to your topic related ‘authority’ pages, then your authority pages will improve in PageRank.

If that explanation isn’t detailed enough for you, see this article at WebWorkshop called Google’s PageRank Explained.

This is a brand spanking new site, so we don’t have a PageRank allocated yet. Over at PublicityShip we have a PR4, and I had my fingers crossed for a move to PR5 this round. We didn’t get there. Maybe we were lucky we didn’t go down, as a lot of blogs found it a very tough quarter. [Update: I posted too soon - we did get a PR5 this round.] CopyBlogger dropped to a PR4, which I personally find extraordinary - this is a site with over 26,000 subscribers. So it shows that PR itself needs to be taken with a grain of salt. [Update2: Copyblogger now back up to PR7]

One of our newer blogging clients is Simone Martin at OutfitInspirations. For reasons I can not explain, Simone’s blog didn’t get assigned a PageRank this round, which is mind boggling [Update: once again too soon, Simone debuted with a PR3] (she has amassed more back links in 4 months than we have in over a year).

One of our bloggers who increased PR was Janet Shaw, who went from PR3 to PR4. Good progress in its own right, but even more so considering Janet is blind - congratulations Janet. [Update: Other sites we work with who did well this round included Auspen-Markers.com (debuted at PR 3), Paul & Jenny Geelen (increased to PR4), Jane Genovese at Learning Fundamentals (debuted at PR3), and Ningaloo Blue (up to PR4).]

Enjoy the PageRank for your site as it grows, but don’t obsess about it. Pay the most attention to what your prospective clients are interested in, how to earn their trust, and how to offer products and services they are interested in buying. If your run a site with good traffic that converts well, you won’t be bothering with PR at all.