SEO Basics: Using Keywords for Website SEO

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Tom Sullivan

Last week, we started our SEO Basics series with a look at How to Use Title Tags on Your Website.

As a reminder, SEO stands for search engine optimization, and refers to all the techniques used to help your website and webpages rank well in search engine results.

When telling you how to optimize your Title tags last week, we talked about how it was important to feature the keywords that are most popular to describe your product or service.

The same is true for the content of your webpages: keywords matter.

Here’s what you need to know about keywords:

Ideally, each of the pages on our website should be focused on one keyword (with close variations).
“Keyword” often means multiple words: web hosting service and professional web design are multi-word keywords for EarthLink Web Hosting pages. High speed cable Internet is a keyword for our cable Internet access page.
Use tools such as the Google Keyword tool to find the right keywords.
Generally it’s recommended to shoot for the keywords with the highest volume, though you may decide you’re better able to compete for some more narrow, long-tail keywords with less traffic.
Keep in mind, your product name is typically not your keyword. Your keyword is the more generic term for what your product/service is. Think: what do people call products like mine, in general.
Ideally, keywords should be in the page’s Title tag, URL, page header (H1 tag), and used throughout the body of the page, especially near the top.
Do not stuff the page with keywords. This is a very old and now dangerous technique that is likely to backfire. Use your keyword (and variations) a natural number of times when covering your topic/product.
Vary your keyword on your webpage in natural ways: using singular and plural forms, different word orders for keyword phrases, close synonyms, and natural keyword modifiers.
Use your keywords as links on other pages in your website. Internal linking using keywords is another way that search engines determine what is most important about a page.

Using the simple keyword techniques above should help you get started with SEO and help you generate traffic to your website. Good luck.

AdWords Made Simple: Selecting Keywords and Billing Setup

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Tom Sullivan

To help you start the New Year with more traffic to your business website we’ve been showing you how to get started with Google AdWords. Last week’s AdWords blog post covered:

Creating an Ad Group
Creating text ads

This week we’ll cover the last couple of steps in the process:

Selecting keywords
Entering your billing information

We’ve covered getting started with AdWords in 3 posts, but you may be setting AdWords up all at once. If so, the Keywords section is just below where you created your text ads. If you logged out before setting up your keywords, you can sign back in, click the Keywords tab, and then the green + Add Keywords button.

Number of Keywords

The keywords you add determine which Google searches your ads show up for. Google says most businesses use 5 – 20 keywords per ad group, but there’s no one right number.

You want to cover the terms and phrases people would use to try to find the types of products or services you are promoting in your ad.

The more specific you are, the more likely your ads will show up to the right potential customers, but it will also limit your audience. Using more general or broad keywords will help you reach more people but that group may include people searching for things unrelated to your business.

Keywords Should Match Ad Groups and Ads

The keywords you use should be appropriate for the ad you are running. Using last week’s example, if you are selling 3D glasses and your ad is written to sell 3D glasses, your keywords should relate directly to 3D glasses, perhaps including active 3D glasses, passive 3d glasses, discount 3d glasses, Panasonic 3d glasses. If you also sell 3D movies, you probably don’t want to include 3d movie related keywords in your 3D Glasses Ad Group. If you want to advertise using keywords that don’t apply to your ad, that probably means you need to create a new Ad Group with new ads that can match those keywords. But it’s up to you how specific you want your ad groups.

If you are, lets say, a general contractor, you may want to set up an Ad Group for your services in general, to capture people looking for a contractor in your area (you can either specify in setting that your campaign only run in a certain area or you can use geographic terms in your keywords). But you also may want to set up Ad Groups for the specific services you offer: room additions, kitchen remodeling, bathroom remodeling, floor refinishing, window replacement, etc.

Keyword Match Types

By default, when you enter keywords without any specific match type specified, Google uses a Broad match to decide when to show your keywords. When set to Broad, your keywords will trigger your ad if someone types in any variation of the keyword, including misspellings, plurals, different word order, longer phrases containing your keyword, as well as synonyms of the keyword and related searches.

The Broad match type is the best to capture the most search traffic volume, but it is also most likely to trigger your ads for irrelevant searches. Using the general contractor example above, a Broad match on the term general contractor would trigger your ad when someone searches for best general contractor in Los Angeles but also how to sue your general contractor.

Other match types in addition to broad match are broad match modifier, phrase match, exact match, and negative match.

Broad match modifier: add a plus sign in front of your keywords to trigger this match type, e.g., +general +contractor. This type will trigger your ads for all the searches (misspellings, singular/plural, abbreviations, acronyms, stemmings, etc) that trigger the broad match except synonyms and related searches.
Phrase match: put quotes around your keywords to make them a phrase match, e.g., “tennis shoes”. This match type shows your ad only if the searcher uses your keywords (or close variants) in the order you specify. With a phrase match, there can be words before or after the terms you specify, as in buy tennis shoes or red tennis shoes for women but not variations such as shoes for tennis or tennis sneakers.
Exact match: Exact match gives you the most control but the least volume, since it only triggers your ads when someone searches using your keyword (or very close variants) without any other terms before or after. To specify exact match, put brackets around your keywords, such as [atlanta house painter].

Negative Match

Negative keywords are the exact opposite of your other keywords. All the other keyword types define they keywords that do trigger your ads. Negative keywords are what you specify should not trigger your ads. To create a negative match, use a minus sign (-) before the keywords you want to exclude. Using the tennis shoe example above, you would add the negative keyword - nike if you didn’t sell Nike tennis shoes and didn’t want your ads to show up for searchers looking for that brand.

Negative match can help you filter out irrelevant searches and prevent unwanted clicks, especially if you are using broad match or if you know of totally different types of products that share the same keywords.

On one of our business high-speed internet access AdWords campaigns, we were promoting T1 and T3 internet access. Before we added negative keywords we found lots of irrelevant searches were triggering our ads. There was the Terminator 3 movie, a t3.com gadget website, a t3 spinal nerve, a t3 thyroid hormone, a t3 magazine, a t3 rapper, a t3 “personal transportation vehicle,” Tylenol 3, and others. So we added –movie, -terminator, -gadget, -thyroid, -magazine, etc. to filter out those irrelevant results.

The screenshot above shows an example of different match type keywords, including negatives, entered for one ad group.

When you are finished entering your keywords, click either the Save button or the Save and continue to billing button (depending on where you are in the process).

Set Up Billing

AdWords billing setup is very straightforward. Just follow the prompts to fill out your business information, how you want to pay, and accept the terms and conditions.

One caution: If you want to complete your AdWords setup but you aren’t ready for your ads to start running and generating costs, make sure you go back and pause your campaign. If you complete billing setup with automatic payments set up, your ads may start running immediately.

To pause your campaign, click back to the All online campaigns page and click the drop-down next to the green dot to the left of your campaign name. Green means the campaign is Enabled. Select Paused from the list until you are ready to start running your ads.

We hope this introduction to AdWords has been helpful to you. We encourage you to take advantage of all the additional help resources Google offers in AdWords. And remember to keep monitoring your campaign’s performance and adjusting it as necessary. You may need to change keyword match types, add more negatives, limit the geography your campaign runs in, modify you ads, etc. Google makes it fairly simple to refine your campaign to achieve better results.

15 Ways to Promote Your Website Offline

Posted on November 12, 2012 by Tom Sullivan

EarthLink Web Hosting customers can take advantage of several effective tools to promote their business websites online: EasySiteOptimizer and OneList for website SEO, Announcer Pro for email marketing, and Social Stream for social media marketing.

But don’t forget about marketing your business website offline. Just as online marketing can drive offline business, offline marketing out there in the real world can help support your online presence. Here are 15 ways to do it:

Business Cards: Put your website URL and domain email address on your business cards. You may even be able to show a thumbnail screenshot of your website on the back side of the card (but make sure it looks OK at that reduced size before you print). There are even free business card options available.
Other Printed Items: If you use letterhead or have brochures or other printed items related to your business, make sure your website address is displayed on them prominently and have a plan to distribute these items to promote your website.
Office Signs: If you have a brick-and-mortar store or office that customers visit, use it as an opportunity to cross-promote your website. Ideally, include some motivation for customers to visit the site: an online-only offer, coupons, tips or other valuable information.
Swag/Giveaways: Print your website address on pens, calendars, coffee mugs, and other low cost giveaways; you can also produce some more expensive items to use as contest prizes. Get some ideas for customized promotional merchandise.
T-Shirts: This could be in the swag/giveaways category, but I’m breaking it out because this is one promotion you can do yourself by personally wearing your customized T-shirts (or other shirts, sweatshirts and jackets). It can be especially effective if you are wearing your shirt around likely customers.
Event Sponsorship: Sponsor a local sporting event, school, festival, etc. Make sure you pick one that allows you to promote your website (maybe in an event program or by distributing your giveaways).
Conferences & Conventions: Get out there and go to events like conferences that are relevant to your business. Be social, network, and have plenty of business cards and swag handy to give out to the people you meet.
Teaching: Volunteer to teach a class/seminar at local library, school, or other community location. Ideally, get the venue to print your business website URL when they are promoting the event. And make sure you have business cards, brochures, giveaways, etc. available to distribute to those who attend.
Vehicles: If you have a company car or truck with a logo and or phone number, you can promote your website address there too. Even if you don’t have a company vehicle, there are custom car decals, bumper stickers, and magnets that are easy to apply to your personal car. Or make a really big splash with a full car wrap. Get some vehicle marketing ideas here.
Press Releases: You may need to hire a writer or PR service for this (and you may not get it picked up), but if you’re doing something new or exciting with your business, see if you can get the offline media to pick it up (if they do, you’ll get online promotion too). If you are writing a blog on your website, you may be able to repurpose a blog post for this.
Local Newspapers & Magazines: See if you can get an article or opinion piece in a local publication. Make sure they print your name and website address with the article (a link to your website from the online version of the paper or magazine would be great for SEO too). Again, you may be able to repurpose a blog post for this.
Coupons & Direct Mail: Depending on what you sell, a coupon or other small promotional ad distributed in something like a Valpak may help you promote your website offline. There are many other types of direct mail opportunities as well.
Door Hangers: Print up door hangers and have them distributed in neighborhoods with your target customers (this is easiest and most cost-effective if your website caters to a local audience).
Paid Advertising: You’d have to think about the ROI for this since it may be one of the costliest ideas, but some local radio or newspaper advertising may be cheap enough to make it work for you.
Voicemail & Hold Music: If you have a voicemail system, include your website URL in the outgoing message. If your phone system plays hold music, add some website promotion into the mix.

As always, tell us what you’ve done to market your business website offline. We’d love to know what has worked.

Good luck.

Content Marketing: Step by Step

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Tom Sullivan

Last week we provided an overview of 15 types of content marketing that can help your business website succeed.

Though the specifics of how you get started with each content marketing type will vary depending on what you choose, there will be common general steps or stages you’ll go through during your content marketing efforts. Make sure you are ready for this process before you start and you’ll be more likely to be successful with your content marketing.

Step 1: Set Your Content Marketing Goals

It’s a catchy slogan, but I wouldn’t advise you to “just do it” when it comes to content marketing. Since this does require time and effort, you want to make sure you know what you’re doing it for. Be as specific as you can with your content marketing goals. Are you looking for 2x your incoming links? Do you want to move a product page up from page 2 to page 1 in the SERPs (search engine result pages)? Do you want to increase website traffic by 20%? Increase leads by 25%? Conversions? Think through what your goals because they can shape which efforts you take, your content strategies, and ultimately what you’ll be tracking.

Step 2. Choose Your Content Marketing Mix

After you have your goals, try to choose content marketing tactics that will help you move towards your goals. You will, of course, need to be realistic about which things you will be able to pursue (based on your time, expertise, budget, etc.). And you’ll need to keep your audience in mind. Not all tactics work for all audiences equally. A whitepaper can be an effective business website marketing tool but not for consumer websites. The opposite is true for games. If your customers skew very young, email newsletter may not work since the youngest consumers favor texting and other forms of communication over email.

Step 3: Produce Your Content

Here’s where the rubber meets the road. You need to decide who is doing what (unless you are a solo act) and create an editorial calendar (or more general content production calendar) to map out what will be produced when for the next 3 or 4 months. Think about topics/content ideas that will resonate with your audience. Think about topics that will further your goals. If you are looking for traffic from a blog, do some keyword research to make sure you are blogging about popular topics and using the words your customers use. And remember, if you’re blogging, you want to be able to do it regularly and consistently to be effective. Here are some of our previous posts that may help you with your blog: How to Generate Ideas for your blog, 8 Blogging Tips for Small Business Owners, How to Publish a WordPress Blog on Your Website, Common Blogging Mistakes.

Step 4: Promote Your Content

It’s not just content. Don’t forget to put some marketing in your content marketing. Because if you produce your content and don’t promote it at all, it will be like the proverbial tree that falls in the woods that no one hears. So, think about all the ways you can promote your content.

Social media is a good place to start. You should have a Twitter account, and when you produce some content, send out a tweet about it. It’s OK to send out multiple tweets about the same content, but space them out and vary the tweet a bit so you don’t turn off your Twitter followers. Facebook, Google +, and other social networks are also good to spread the word about your content. Depending on the nature of your business, LinkedIn can also be good, especially if you are in groups there.

But don’t expect social to do all the work. If you are promoting a blog, make sure it’s prominently featured on your website so you get some traffic from current customers. If you send out a regular email to customers, link to your content. And don’t forget about all the traditional marketing ways to drive traffic.

Step 5: Track Your Success

Remember, you started this process with goals. So you want to have a way to confirm that your content marketing achieved its goals or not (in which case you re-evaluate and try again). EarthLink Web Hosting and professional web design customers have website tracking available within their Web Hosting Control Panel. Google Analytics is a free analytics solution you can sign up for. You’ll probably want to monitor traffic, engagement (time on site or on a specific page), return visitors, leads, conversions, and conversions. If your conversions are offline (like by phone) you’ll want to track that as well.