Posted by Justin Cambria on Tue, Aug 24, 2010
Many businesses today are ready to embrace the tenets of inbound marketing. They want to invest their marketing dollars online. But it's difficult for busy business owners and marketers to learn as much as those of us who work in this world about online marketing practices.
It’s true that link building, or getting good quality links to your site, accounts for 75% of your SEO score and is the foundation of off page SEO. But all links are not created equal. Here’s some of the terms of the trade and a few tips to ensure you are dealing with above-board web marketers. We want to save people from the evil SEO merchants out there! But how?
Black Hat SEO
Since the early days of blog comments, many unscrupulous SEO practitioners have written programs that crawl the web and write SPAM comments on blogs to point back to a site whose ranking they want to improve. This is common practice amongst online pornographers and illegal overseas MP3 sale sites. This practice is one form of black hat SEO, and is usually engaged in with the hope that a goal can be achieved over a short term as the spammers know that the search engines will ban them once their tactics are uncovered.
Spamdexing
I recently listened to a sales demo from a rep at a prominent web marketing firm who showed me a page indexing hundreds of thousands of links allegedly pointing to his site. I looked through some of them and they were trash links from meaningless sites – the horror! I’d come face to face with link SPAM!
SEO best practices encourage legitimate means, like posting great content, tweeting about it, and commenting on other trusted blogs to build links back to your site. Some SEO firms will Spamdex by building lots of buried or invisible pages on a client site because more indexes pages will mean more traffic. They can then demonstrate high numbers of site visits to clients, but that traffic will be meaningless and will never convert to leads.
The ‘NoFollow’ Attribute
It’s also important to be aware of the nofollow attribute. Many directory sites and prominent social networks (Yelp, Facebook, Google Local, etc) utilize this attribute because they don’t want link spammers creating fake directory listings on their sites to influence their SEO score. By using it, these sites ensure that no SEO credit is awarded to links on their site; in other words, google doesn't count a link to your site on Facebook in your SEO score.
Be wary of SEO firms who tell you that they are going to create lots and lots of links for you or submit your site to many directories. Though there can be value in being on these directories because many of them have independent traffic, they do not influence your SEO score.
What to Ask to Protect Yourself
It's competitive out there and is a sad reality that some black hat techniques can produce results over the short term, but any such techniques will be a losing strategy for a legitimate business over the long term. Ask firms you are considering doing business with to send you 3 examples of sites they have worked on and to put you in direct contact with their clients for referrals. Also, ask them:
- What practices do you use to build good off site links? I want to work with a vendor that understands honest link building through great content.
- Are you familiar with the no follow attribute and how it affects off site SEO score? I understand there are some great directories but I want to attract links that will be recognized by the search engines, too.
- What is your opinion on black hat SEO and Spamdexing? I'm in the web marketing gain for the long haul and any short term, dishonest SEO practices hold no appeal for me.
Have you had any encounters with bad SEO or web marketing firms? Please share in the comments!
Posted by Samantha Coren on Thu, Jul 29, 2010
At PullnotPush I get to teach small business owners the ins and outs of inbound marketing. It's refreshing to talk to people who are so dedicated and immersed in every aspect of their business. One thing is for sure though - running your own business can take up quite a bit of time.
The beautiful thing about HubSpot is that it gives the small business owner a one stop shop for managing a web presence and channel for new customers. I was eager to find out how small businesses outside of the ones I currently work with were fairing in the world of inbound marketing with the big orange sprocket.
To quench my curiosity I spoke with the heads of three local businesses from different parts of the US who are involved in different industries. All three of them are current HubSpot customers. Here's what they had to say:
“Prior to HubSpot (April 28th 2010) we practiced traditional advertising that included radio, outdoor (billboards), magazines/programs (professional sports), and a non-structured email campaign. We did absolutely no SEO or Inbound Marketing prior to our launch with HubSpot.
Our landing pages have been an awesome tool to help build our email list and the blog has not only helped with SEO, but after the first 90 days we have over 220 subscribers via email and RSS. We also use the social media tool to engage the community when one of our brand keywords populates and submit all of our articles to the social media outlets that HS provides. Our social media reach has increased by 3000% since becoming a HubSpotter.
By using the Keyword Grader along with the Competitor reports we have been able to target more long tailed keywords” with lower volume that our competitors are not targeting. This has led to 187 of our 583 keywords being ranked in the Top 100 and improved our search traffic by 382% since HS launch.
Our content creation really has been focused on our blog for not only SEO, but to become a “Trust Agent” in our industry and for the city of Nashville. This has also helped with Link Building as we have increased our inbound links from 67 to 364 since June 1st.
HS makes it so easy that we spend less than 5 hours per week on our entire social media and blog campaign and about 2 hours per week with on page and off page SEO."
"360 Signs started in September of 2008. We are a commercial sign company providing design, fabrication, and installation of many type of business signs: lobby signs, directory signs, floor, wall, and window graphics, monument signs, building sign, vehicle wraps, event signs and many more. We sell only in the Austin, TX area and are fortunate to have achieved a great deal of success during our first two years.
We rely on personal networking, networking groups, and the internet to drive our new business and repeat and referral business to come from current clients. We relied on paid search for our first 18 months in business and thought we did quite well with the amount of leads we were getting. Our website has generated over 50% of our business to date.
We have seen a dramatic increase in the number of leads, over 200%, since I started using the HubSpot tools. We have added two sales reps to handle the extra leads. I have been particularly pleased that we have landed some larger accounts off the web, not just small businesses.
We are ahead of many of our competitors in terms of optimizing our website and improving our page ranking for a company our size. We differentiate ourselves on design and service since it is impossible for us to make signs that someone couldn’t get at other sign companies in Austin. The website helps position us properly and attracts customer that value service and quality."
"Test Drive Technologies was
started to help used car & truck buyers to make an informed decision on what they are purchasing. We are the eyes, ears and hands of our clients that find themselves in the automotive market. Before HubSpot we were solely relying on organic search & free classifieds.
There are so many tools on HubSpot that I use every day. I particularly like the social media engagement tool; it is easy to use and monitors the keywords that I find relevant to the automotive industry. This not only keeps me on top of what is going on but also what the consumer base thinks is happening. I also find the CMS at HubSpot very easy to use.
Our blog is what is making us stand out above our competition. We are able to post our findings for each of our inspections right on our blog much like a case study without the particulars of dealer and buyer information. Having these results on our blog will allow our potential clients to see what we do, how we do it and what we find in some vehicles.
Most of our competition is all about pay per click advertising. Our blog is what is bringing in most of our customers which also allows us to pass this savings on to our clients."
Sick of Old Fashioned Marketing? Take HubSpot for a Spin.
 Find out how we can help turn your website into a marketing machine.
Sign up for a HubSpot Demo with PullnotPush.
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Posted by Samantha Coren on Fri, Jul 23, 2010
Why does Google's image search matter to inbound marketing?
Google's image search is one of the most popular image search engines on the web. Even though people might not necessarily be looking for content from your site, they might stumble upon some of your site’s images and find their way to you indirectly through their keyword search terms. Having good on page SEO practices for including images is a pull marketing strategy that can help generate traffic you wouldn’t normally get from your text based content.
Not to be out done by Bing, Google recently decided to update its image search. Here's a rundown on what's new:
New search results layout
Instead of a grid containing information directly under each image such as dimensions and source URL, you now get your results in a minimalistic layout that resembles a digital lightbox. Now users will have to hover over your pictures in image search to find this information. There's also the "show sizes" option on the side bar to show the dimensions on each image result in the lower right corner.
Another thing to note about the new image search results screen is that Google has done away with having separate pages for displaying results. Now, after your initial search, you have the "Show More Results" button at the bottom. Instead of loading another separate page, the additional images will load on the same page allowing you to see everything at once without having to constantly go back and forth.
If you hate change, you can select "Switch to Basic Version" at the bottom of the page to get the good old fashioned image search results view you grew to know and love.
New filters for Colors and Image Type
Google has also given image searchers the option to filter results by image type with the options for "Face", "Photo", "Clip Art", or "Line Drawing". You can also filter your results based on the main color of the images. Or if you're looking for black and white photos, there's even an option now for that. It seems like the search spiders are doing a pretty decent job at identifying colors for searches with a large number of results. Here's what happened when I filtered for Pink images for my search query on Verona:
Reaction to Google's new image search
Speaking as someone who uses Google for finding images frequently, I find these new features to be extremely helpful for those looking for specific images. Being able to quickly compare all the images on the same page will save a lot of time instead of having to load and go back and forth between dozens of separate results pages.
How do the new Google Image Search features affect on page SEO?
It means you might have to get in the habit of creating more detailed alt tags for your images. This way, those searchers who are taking advantage of Google’s filtering features have an increased chance of finding your content. For example, if you have a press page that has versions of your logo for other content creators to use, it might be a good idea to add "Black & White" to the black and white version of your logo in addition to your keywords.
What are your thoughts on Google's new Image Search? Love it? Hate it? We'd love to hear your two cents in the comments!
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Posted by Samantha Coren on Tue, Jul 06, 2010
A lot of local businesses have a tendency to jump head first into the PPC pool to generate targeted traffic to their websites. What's bad about this? Well, buying search traffic isn't exactly cheap. Paid search is not something you want to become dependent on when you're a small business on a tight budget.
So how can you help bring visitors in your community to your site organically and for free? You can start by making sure your pages are properly optimized for search engines to reflect the areas your business serve:
1. Include Your Location in Page Titles and Headers
Make sure each of your pages includes the city you operate out of in the title. Usually [Business Name] | [Type of Business] + [Location] is a popular formatting convention for doing this.
So for example let's say you're a pizza shop in Brockton, Massachusetts and you want to give your "About Us" page an optimized title. Here's one way of optimizing your title tag:
About Joe's Pizza Shack | Pizza Restaurant in Brockton, MA.
Additionally having your H1 header and content echo what you place in your page title can help. Let's say you go with the above title for the about us page. You can have your H1 header be:
About Joe's Pizza Shack in Brockton, MA
2. Submit Your Business to Online Directories
Listing your business on directories as Google Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Local and Yelp! is free and easy. It's also another way for people to find your out about your business through search engines. To quickly check where your business is listed on the web's most popular business directories you can visit getlisted.org.
In some cases you may find your business is already listed on one of these sites without you submitting the listing on your own. If that's the case what you should do is take the proper steps with each site to claim your listing. Why should you claim your listing? So you can make sure the listing info is accurate, complete, and up to date.
Every listing you fill out or claim should include a link to your website so searchers can find their way to your site easily. Certain directories give you the option to add photos, videos, and special coupons which will help generate more interest in your business to searchers. Some of these additional listing features are free on certain directories (Yelp!, Google Places) and others may charge you an additional fee to take advantage of them (Yahoo Local), so be sure to read up on the potential costs of each one.
3. Talk about local happenings in your blog.
Blogging about what's going on in your neighborhood on your company blog is a great way to not only show your visitors you care about your community, but another way of optimizing your pages. This dry cleaner in Birmingham, AL blogs about a music event happening in one of the neighborhoods he provides delivery service to. Not only does he include the town name in the blog title, but he also provides a link to a page he created specifically for this town on his own site.
Do you have a small local business (or know one) who practices good Local SEO? Tell us in the comments!
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Posted by Samantha Coren on Wed, May 12, 2010
When it comes to on page search engine optimization, you've probably heard about the importance of keywords. Today's search engines don't care about how many meta-keywords you cram into a web page's code. But that doesn't mean you should ignore making a solid list of keywords as part of your SEO within website strategy.
For clients who don't already have a website with content, we usually recommend that they work on building a list of a few hundred relevant keywords to their business. This big list of possible search terms should serve as your "go to" guide for content creation if you want people to find you using search engines.
1. Location, Location, Location
Consider adding your city, state, and geographical region in combination with your products or services. This will assist people who want to "buy local" find your business. Take this Boston auto repair shop - their most successful keyword terms combine various makes of cars, an auto repair service, and their location.
2. Key Figures in Your Organization
Writing content around the main figures of your company can help you get found by people searching for their names. It also helps give a more personable image to your business. See what happens when you run a search for PullnotPush's head honcho Dan Ronken.
3. Important Issues That Affect Your Industry
When the war against trans fat broke out a few years ago, fast food restaurants came out in full force to assure the public on their websites that they were no longer using trans fats to cook their food. Think about current events or hotly debated topics related to your business and generate content around them with your stance on the matter. This will guide people researching the general topic at hand toward your site.
4. Questions? Answers.
In the 90's, Ask.com (or Ask Jeeves as itwas known back in the day) rocked the search engine world by offering a searchengine that gave results to queries written in natural sounding questions rather than broken terms. Today's popular search engines now posses that functionality to give searchers results for questions. Think of all the possible who, what, where, why, when and how questions that people might ask that could lead them to your site.
Do you have your own set of tips and tricks for coming up with useful keywords for your site? Let us know in the comments.
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Want to learn how to switch your marketing efforts from interruption to attraction? Learn how to become a lead generating magnet by using Pull Marketing techniques. Download the free whitepaper to discover The 7 Universal Laws you should following on a daily basis to make the most of Pull Marketing.
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