The event is New Media in the New Year and Eric will be one of four panelists discussing SEO, Web Design, Web Development, and Social Media.

The event’s headline reads: “Searching for that perfect tool to make your business’s engine roar, but not sure if you should redesign your website, get linked into social media, or find another way to keep your company’s face in the game?”

We see this all the time, most often when we’re on the phone with a client who is not here in Batimore, where our SEO company is located. We’ve been talking with clients in Chicago or Lauderdale, for example and ask them to do a search to show off the results of our SEO work, only to hear them say, “that’s not what I see…”

We often find ourselves having to explain that search engines base their results of course on relevancy, but also on hundreds of other small factors like browser type, searcher’s location or search history, website language or page rank. The list goes on. Here are the three factors we’ve noticed to be the most important.

First the search engines update their rankings throughout the day. Learn more about how Google indexes the web.

Second, if you’re logged in to Google, Bing, or Yahoo, your personal search history and profile information is being used to serve up more targeted results. I’ve seen this referred to as “search personalization.” Read these links for more information:

• Search Engine Land article on Search Personalization
• Techcrunch article on Search Personalization

Third, if you are searching from one location, and someone else from another location, you may be hitting different datacenters. Rankings can vary from one datacenter to the next.

• Here’s a tool that will show you results for the same search performed in different datacenters.

Why Does A periscopeUP Website Generate More Leads?

On sales calls, Eric-our-sales-guy often gets asked why the websites we build are able to generate so many leads. It’s not a simple question to answer to prospects who don’t understand interactive lead generation or technical website bable, plus there’s A LOT that goes into a website to get it to perform. Without giving away our secret sauce, here’s what we make sure to cover on every website build.

Website Planning Stage is Thorough and Effective

• Competitive analysis
• Research your prospect’s search behavior
• Keyword strategy for every page
• Test different messages to see which is more effective

Website Content Is More Than Brochureware

• Effective sales copy – a website should talk like your sales team
• Strong calls to action. Give me a reason to call
• Features & benefits selling, including your Unique Selling Proposition (why should I buy from you?)
• Optimized to get you high in search engines
• Compels people to take action. How will you help the customer sleep at night? (It’s about them, stupid!)

Designs That Drive Leads, Not Just Build Brands

• Prominent phone number in header
• Unique designs that draw attention to the unique selling proposition
• Our proprietary design process makes it easy to capture your vision
• Easy to use and navigate architecture – KISS
• Optimized to get people to take action

Technology Gets Rewarded by Search Engines

• XML Sitemaps notify search engines every time you update content
• HTML coding optimized for Search Engines
• W3C and 501(3)c compliant code
• Optimized for speed – fast loading sites

Consulting Helps You Get The Most From Your Website

• Monthly review of statistics & user behavior
• Help you gain understanding of your market and potential for more leads
• Increase monthly traffic with inbound links & fresh content
• Increase monthly leads with testing and website updates

Free Consultation

If you want to learn more about how we can drive leads and sales from your website, call us for a free consultation: (866) 446-1972 or fill out the form to the right.

When optimizing a local business website, there’s a few additional things we do to ensure the site will do well. Our checklist for local SEO is below.

We define local search as either a search with the town name (“seo baltimore”) or any search that returns a pin map with local results.

Our checklist for local search engine optimization

Please note, we do these items in addition to our regular SEO checklist.

On page local optimization

• City & state in title tag
• Address in footer
• hCard microformat on contact us page

Off page local optimization

Create a neighborhood (geographic or thematic) with links and citations about your website.

• Links & Citations
  • Chamber of Commerce
  • Local Business Directories (search your city+directory)
  • Dominate Yelp
  • Other Websites in/about your city
  • Links from local businesses, clients, organizations, schools, speakers, etc.
  • Reviews. Start with happy customers, partners, and vendors.
• Review current listings for accuracy: phone, address, links, etc.
• Include your best search terms in the company name and description fields of your Google Maps account.

One note, with Google’s release of Caffeine, we’ve been reading more and more about the importance of citations (references to your business even if a link is not) included.

More information on Local Search Optimization

• http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/01/seo-trends-to-watch-for-in-2010.html
• http://searchenginewatch.com/3627073

Our friend Joe has a personal website (www.joemillman.com) and blog (http://blog.joemillman.com).  Here’s our free advice to him and anyone with a personal website who wants to get high on Google — our tips for personal promotion with SEO. 

1. Get a Google Webmaster Account

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Add the following as “sites”:

• www.joemillman.com
• http://joemillman.com
• http://blog.joemillman.com

a. Verify your website(s) according to the instructions. Under settings, make www.joemillman.com the preferred domain for all your personal websites. This will make sure Google doesn’t treat http://joemillman.com and www.joemillman.com as different sites. You’re telling Google they’re the same site.

b. Check on who’s linking to you. In the world of personal promotion, a link is like a vote. A link from a industry-relevant, a trustworthy or a popular partner will be worth more than some guy blogging in his underwear.

c. The Google webmaster tool will also tell you if Google’s having trouble indexing your site.

d. With this same login info, Create a local business listing on Google Maps:

http://www.google.com/local/add

The terms you put in the site title and description should be your best search terms, as the search engines will pick up the terms in these fields when displaying local search results. In other words, use your search keywords IN your title and description.

How do you know the “best” keywords for personal promotion?

Good question, I’m glad you asked…

2. Understand the keyword terms that you want to go after.

When promoting personal and small websites, remember that when you’re starting out, people search on the services they’re after, not your brand or name.

This is the number one personal promotion tip, EVER…

Place yourself in front of people by understanding the terms that they use to describe your services, NOT the terms you think describe your services.

a. Where are you already doing well? Login to the webmaster tool above and go to “Top Search Queries” > More. The “Impressions” column will tell you what terms you rank in the top 30. “Queries” will tell you which terms people are clicking on.

b. What terms do you want to go after? Find your target keywords with this tool:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Because you shouldn’t be competing with the big boys in your industry, you should identify “long tail” keywords with search volumes less than 3,000 per month.

This is the best SEO strategy for personal websites. Go after low volume (but not too low) terms first with new content (explained next) and links (also explained below). Then, once you’ve ranked on some of the three and four keyword terms, go after ones with higher search volume.

3. Write your blog posts and pages to target those terms.

a. Use one target term in the post or page header and content.

b. Make a spreadsheet, which you can use as a tracking tool to remember which terms you target.

4. Add Google Analytics to both your site and blog. Analyze your stats monthly. Get to know your users and traffic.

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Be sure to set up goals, to track the number of conversions.

5. Set up Yahoo Explorer for your personal website and blog

• http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

a. Verify the sites.

b. Check the inbound links from elsewhere on the web to your sites.

6. Submit your personal website and blog to Bing.

http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

7. Get a Bing Webmaster Account and verify both your personal site and blog.

http://www.bing.com/webmaster

8. Submit your site and blog to the DMOZ.

Go to www.dmoz.org and find the right category and top right, click on “Suggest URL.”

Many websites and search engines get their info from this grandaddy of all directories.

9. Find other relevant directories to place your listing.

Start here: http://www.directorycritic.com

Pay only for links that have a Page Rank of 3 or better, and have high traffic volume (compared to others you find in your industry).

• Check Page Rank here
• Check traffic volume here

10. Get some link love.

Find other bloggers, trade publications, and related websites and ask them to link to you. Request that the link text be your target keywords (call me if you don’t understand this). Go after only sites with higher relative traffic and Page Rank using the tools above.

a. When requesting a link, offer to link to them in your blog or on your site. Keep a tracking sheet. Here’s a huge secret to optimizing links. If you can get the text of the link to be the term you’re going after. Great! If you can get that link to go deep into your site, directly to the page that is optimized for that term. Even better.

Here’s an example of a great link: Finding the right blog keyword. (The text is my target keyword and it links deep into the site to a page that targets that keyword).

b. Join forums or social sites in your niche and post thoughtful comments. Add links back to your sites.

That’s it for personal promotion with SEO. Go Joe and get high on Google!

If you want some help implementing some of these suggestions, contact us and ask about our personal promotion SEO services.

We use Basecamp to manage all our SEO and web development projects. One of our favorite features is the synch with Google Calendar, which we are able to share across our office or with clients.

Here are instructions on synching Basecamp with Google Calendar.

At the end, we provide a productivity tip.

1. In Basecamp, go to the project’s milestone tab.

2. On the right column in Basecamp, click on Subscribe to iCalendar.

3. Copy link.

4. Switch to Google Calendar. On the left, under “Other Calendars” click “Add,” then “Add By URL.” (You may need to show calendars in the settings tab, if you don’t see the “Other Calendars” on the left.)

Click on screenshot # 1 to enlarge:

Basecamp Google Calendar Screenshot #1

5. Paste the link from Basecamp into the dialogue box to add the Basecamp RSS feed to Google Calendar.

6. The new Google Calendar will be added, but unfortunately, the name of the calendar is the link you just entered. Confusing.

To make this calendar name more identifiable, select the triangle next to the newly added calendar and chose “Calendar Settings.”

Click on screenshot #2 to enlarge:

Basecamp Google Calendar Screenshot #2

7. Replace the calendar name with the project name.

That’s it for synching Basecamp with Google Calendar.

Note! This Google calendar will only sync with Basecamp Milestones, not tasks. Also, the Basecamp milestones won’t appear in your regular calendar, but above it (where other calendars are displayed).

Click on screenshot #3 to enlarge:

Basecamp Google Calendar Screenshot #3

Here’s a tip: On all milestones in Basecamp, start the milestone name with an abbreviation of the project, so when it appears in Google Calendar, you can differentiate your projects at a glance. For example, I would use “pUP – Keyword Research” or “LMC – Verify Site” as milestone names.

Good luck and let me know if these instructions were clear by commenting below.

One important change is Google will be giving more results based on up-to-the-minute breaking events, to compete with Twitter and Facebook’s real time search initiatives.

We appreciate Google holding off on making this change, to put webmasters at ease that no rankings will change until after the holiday shopping season.

More resources:

• Matt Cutts’ announcement
• Mashable’s tests of the release (including notes about keyword relevancy)
• Test Caffeine on the Google Sandbox
• Fun conspiracy reading

How do we chose a keyword for our blog posts?

If you want people to read your blogs, you need a strategy for every blog post to get found in search engines. In other words, you should SEO your individual blog posts. This starts, like any SEO project, with good keyword research.

Our approach is to fish where the big fish are. We’ll chose a blog post topic AFTER THE KEYWORD RESEARCH! This post for example, started as an idea about Blog SEO, but after researching what people are searching on, we decided there was too much competition on the term “Blog SEO”  (40,500 searches last month) and narrowed the scope to “blog keyword” (2,400 searches last month) as part of our long tail strategy. And hey, you found us!

Tip: A search on the plural of a word or phrase is not the same as a search on the singular. In the above example, there were only 1,000 searches last month for “blog keywords” so we went with “blog keyword” which had 2,400.

So how do I chose the right blog keyword?

At periscopeUP, we use the same three factors we would for finding the right keyword for a web page:

• Search volume
• Competition
• Return on Investment (ROI)

We don’t have a formula to weigh the three factors, but try to find a balance. For example, the higher search volume or competition, the tougher it will be to rank on page one, but if from our analytics we know a certain keyword will provide a better ROI, we may want to go after it anyway, even if it will take us several months to rank well. For this post, our goal was page one quickly, not high search traffic.

Determining Blog Keyword Search Volume

We like the old standby, the Google External Keyword Tool. It will give you both global search and local search volume.

Be careful here, because the use of the word “local” is misleading. According to Google, it means search volume “specific to your targeted country” as opposed to global search volume which “includes traffic in all countries and languages.” We’ve suggested to Google that they make local search volume available as a radius from your city or town. To us, this would be more valuable “local” information.

Determining Competition

There are a few ways we determine competition for a keyword. The first is the number of results for a specific search. Search Google, and on the top right, you’ll see the number of results returned for that term, or the number of pages that are “competing” for this term.

Here’s what it looks like:

Blog Keyword Selection

The other way we judge competition is by spying. Use a site like compete.com (paid) or spyfu.com (free) to see what you’re competition is up to.

Tip: log into your Adwords account when you research search volume, and you’ll get the Cost Per Click of what people are paying to bid on terms. This will also give you an indication of competition in the marketplace.

Determining ROI

You can only determine if a keyword phrase will provide a good return on investment if conversion tracking set up on your analytics tool. It’s best to have several months of data, but the idea is to determine which keywords lead to the most cost effective leads, your cost per conversion. This is an involved topic, subject to another post, but if you setup Google Analytics, for example, to track conversion goals, you should be able to run reports and determine which terms produce and which do not, and at what cost.

Conclusion

The fastest way to get a blog post high on search is to select your topic and write your post AFTER you select your keyword term(s).

Your next step after selecting your blog keyword would be to write the post and optimize it for that keyword. Don’t forget to track your SERPs and build optimized links directly to your posts to push your blog post up the search engine results.

periscopeUP today announced it will provide Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services to Eastern Floatation Systems, Inc. (EFS).

EFS is the exclusive manufacturer of the Pro-Float® pontoons, a patented floating concrete pier system. Based in Baltimore, EFS distributes their product world-wide.

periscopeUP will optimize www.profloat.com for search engines and for people, including keyword research, on-page optimization, website writing, website development, submission to search engines & directories, conversion tracking, and web analytics analysis.

periscopeUP’s proven SEO process will help ProFloat.com rank higher in Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and other search engines for terms related to ProFloat’s products and services.

Click here to read the press release.