It seems that in the current economic climate you are better off selling exceptional quality rather than luxury.
That is the message from Johnathan Fields over on the Small Business Trends website in his post When Luxury Becomes a Four Letter Word.
The SmallBizTrends website is run by Anita Campbell, and is a constant source of relevant information for those interested in marketing a small business online.
A ‘search engine friendly’ friendly website means your website is easily accessed by search engine spiders (bots) and that you (dear website owner) have control over important aspects of your content such as page titles and page descriptions.
Recently I came across the phrase Google Friendly websites in Does Your Site Meet These 4 Online Publishing Criteria.
It shouldn’t be this way, but for a smaller business ‘search engines’ now means Google. With limited time to focus on search, getting it right for Google is the #1 priority.
Google’s own keyword research tool shows search engine friendly is for now the more popular term. But I can’t see it staying this way.
Stand by for Google friendly websites.
In search engine optimization, the only constant is change. You can get sort of comfortable with that, because small changes aren’t that hard to deal with, really.
But Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com is making a call that Google’s Ranking Variables are going to change – big time.
Read his post. There are big implications for business online. Try this:
The future of SEO, therefore, will be increasingly about engaging people. The search engines will be measuring the signals users send. In the past, it’s all been about the signals webmasters send i.e. links and marked up content … [but] you’ll also need to think about the users – and the signals they send – in order to future proof your site.
It is hard not to feel frustrated that the rules can change on such a fundamental level.
A lot of business owners are just starting to get their head around relevant content and good links. Those will still matter. But as Aaron points out, the signals users send will matter even more.
Oh well, nothing to do but roll up the sleeves and help find the tools and services that help business do what they need. A time of major change represents both challenge and opportunity.
Trellian – who own the excellent keyword tool Keyword Discovery – sent me a good promotional email today.
Now Keyword Discovery is a good tool, I’ve subscribed to it before.
But I wasn’t really paying attention to what they were saying. It didn’t matter that much, as Google’s keyword tool is comprehensive, accurate and free.
Life must be really hard for Keyword Discovery since Google unleashed the economics of free on the keyword research market.
Online marketing is a field with enormous amounts of information available.
The sheer volume of concepts is a real challenge if you are coming at it for the first time. And things keep changing all the time, just to add to the complexity.
For this reason, good summaries and lists are very useful. SEOmoz have put together a very good collection of resources called the Internet Marketing Handbook.
This link building article – referred to from the Handbook – is definitely worth looking at if you are wanting more links (and who doesn’t): Link Building Notes of a SEO Kindergartner.
Learning about online marketing is a good idea. But don’t get stuck in learning mode and neglect doing. Take the link building PDF linked to above. Take notes as you read it and take action on 3 link building tactics this week. Integrate your learning with your online marketing activity.
(Found this list thanks to Copyblogger and 10 Cool Links for Bloggers and Copywriters)
There have been a lot of new options emerge for keyword research recently.
If you are are doing keyword research for yourself, check out these three tools from Google:
Discussing how and when you might use these tools is the topic of a longer article.
Earning quality links for your website builds the authority of your site. And the more authority you have, the higher you will rank.
But link building is hard work.
I recently came across LinkDiagnosis – if link building is something you are working on and you don’t mind a relatively technical interface, this is a handy tool to use.
LinkDiagnosis will analyse all the links to a particular website. So if you do this analysis for sites related to yours, it might give you ideas on where you might try and earn links from next. But you should also use it to look at your own website to understand your own link profile.
Not all links are equal, and LinkDiagnosis makes it really easy to see which links are the strongest (the strength of a link is related to the PageRank of the page it comes from, along with how many other links there are from that page).
The tool also makes it clear the anchor text that people are using to link to you. If the anchor text for links to your site includes specific keywords, your rankings for those keywords will be higher.
I didn’t understand all the concepts that were being used at first. For example one column in the report is linktype. But just hover over the column heading to get an explanation of what information is being reported.
LinkDiagnosis was mentioned in an online presentation by Wil Reynolds called My 5 Favourite SEO Strategies. A very good presentation in its own right.
Following up on my last post on keywords, once you understand what keywords are most important for your business, then comes the question of how to make use of them.
Having a search engine friendly website is vital, because if you don’t, all your hard work won’t help if you can’t even get indexed. But assuming you have a search engine friendly website, and know your keywords, what do you do with that knowledge?
I’ve written a set of articles in our How To section that talk about on-page and off-page search engine optimization.
A detailed – and pretty technical – article from the Keyword Discovery manual is also useful: Implementing Keywords into a Website. If you are using one of our sites, make sure you read the How To articles first, as we have made it easy to access the tags mentioned in the KD article from your Dashboard – no programming required.
We use Wordtracker a lot because our clients can keep on using the free keyword discovery tool themselves even if they don’t have a full subscription. Keyword Discovery costs more, and doesn’t have a free version. As their free trial is heavily neutered, it isn’t easy to get a flavour for it.
Jane interviewed Wendy Payne from Seahorse Sanctuary recently on OM4Tourism.com, and Wendy said something that I liked a lot:
Jane: What aspects of a website are most important for a business owner interested in marketing online?
Wendy: Definitely the overall professional image of the website design, but more importantly, the keyword search. If you don’t have this – you don’t have a website. It’s a bit embarrassing really, as we’ve had a website for 5 years, but it was really mostly being found by people that were looking for us specifically by name. The new website is helping so very much to gain business from people who’ve never heard of us. That’s very powerful!
(my emphasis). Thanks Wendy for expressing this so clearly.
By ‘the keyword search’, Wendy is referring to the fact that her site has a keyword plan and is search engine friendly. So popular keywords are now visible to the search engines, and the search engines now send visitors to her site she wasn’t getting before.
Most of the time I talk to business owners about keywords, they are pretty sure they understand them. They know they want to be #1 on Google. But the keywords they are interested in are almost always based on common sense and intuition.
Once they get the keywords concept, there is an ‘aha’ moment. Because you don’t need to guess as much.
As Wendy puts it, keywords help you get found by people who have never heard of you before. And that is pretty cool.
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.
