search engine optimization

Getting started: Making your site dynamic.

by Jennifer J. Breazeale on January 15, 2011

So, you’ve created a great website for your business and sent an email out to friends and family letting them know you’re up and running. You’re all done… Just sit back and let the traffic come to you, right?

Not quite.

Your website is only the starting point for building your reputation, creating a community, or expanding your reach. You need to get your message out to and participate in the communities you want to reach, but if you’re not a digital native, this task can be quite daunting.

But, I have a blog (that I actually post to). Isn’t that enough?

Do you offer RSS and email subscriptions? Are you using Feedburner to optimize/publicize/monitize your feed? Are you keeping track of analytics for your feed? Are you using automated services like Twitterfeed (Twitter) or Involver (Facebook) to push your feed to Twitter or Facebook? For corporate types, have you connected your WordPress blog with your LinkedIn profile?

AAAAAAAA!!!!!

Although the list of services can seem overwhelming, the good news is that most of them require just a little bit of initial setup and then you’re done – you focus on creating content for your blog and let these services spread it the web.

A few tips…

  • Start with Feedburner. “Burn” your feed and set it up for email subscriptions.
  • Change the default feed on your website to your Feedburner feed.
    • There are several plugins available for WordPress that will handle this for you, or if you’re using WordPress+Thesis, you can set this up from the Dashboard –> Thesis –> Site Options –> Syndication/Feed URL.
  • Once your feed is setup and you’re ready to expand, I’d recommend starting with a Twitterfeed hookup to Twitter.
    • If you’re new to Twitter, make sure you spend some time familiarizing yourself with the community and general rules of posting etiquette.
    • Wendy Kier has some good advice about giving your Twitter a facelift (I especially liked #4 – Make your Tweets Rare) and you can learn all you ever wanted to know about Twitter (and then some!) from the awesome folks at Pistachio Consulting.

You can, of course, continue the process with Facebook and LinkedIn and, depending on your business, you even may want to get involved in location-based services like Google Places, Foursquare, or Gowalla, or review sites like Yelp.

Still confused? Contact us for help.

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Advanced SEO Tactics (IMU)

by Jennifer J. Breazeale on June 25, 2009

Inbound Marketing UniversityProfessor: Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz

The community guy praised others, the marketing guy told stories, and the SEO guy pounded us with data. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised! Rand’s slideshow (below) is packed with helpful information and I know that I’ll be spending some more time digging into it in depth. In the meantime, here are a few of the highlights:

  • Expert opinion and correlation data both agree that links are still king – around 75% of Google‘s ranking is based around (or affected by) quantity/quality of links.
  • Use keywords in your title tags and as close to the beginning as possible; data shows a linear decline between the position of the keywords in the tag and the impact in search results. For example, “John’s Used Cars” would be better than “John’s dealership and repair shop for used cars.”
  • Although experts recommend including keywords in your H1 tags, the data suggests that this will have little to no impact on your search results.
  • Substantive and unique page content, along with page recency/freshness are some of the most of the important non-link factors.
    • Getting lots of people to link to your substantive and unique content really cranks up your SEO.
    • Static pages (with substantive and unique content, of course) aren’t bad, but they probably won’t be crawled as often (which may or may not affect your rank).
  • Using W3C compliant HTML, another non-link factor, has little to no impact on your search results.
  • The number of unique domains linking to you may be more important than the actual number of links. For example, 500 unique domains that link to you is better than 100 unique domains with 500 links.
  • The fewer number of domains (and subdomains) you use, the better. Example:
    • http://blog.company.com – ok
    • http://company.com/blog – better
  • It’s a good idea to use keywords in your URL and common keywords are probably readable even if you scrunch them all together. For less common keywords, it’s better to use a hyphen than an underscore. Example:
    • http://company.com/healthinsurance.htm – ok
    • http://company.com/health-insurance.htm – better
    • http://company.com/health_insurance.htm – worse

Here’s Rand’s presentation:

#6 IMU: Advanced SEO Tactics: On Beyond Keyword Research (GF401)
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Blogging Basics and SEO Fundamentals (IMU)

June 20, 2009

Inbound Marketing University kicked off with two presentations focusing on the fundamentals: getting started with a blog and SEO basics. Both presentations were excellent introductions to the topic and I know that I’ll be using them as quick reference guides the next time someone asks me “Should I be blogging? How do I get started?” Here’s my summary of these first classes…

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