Whether you are creating your first website or have one that is not working as well as you hoped, it’s time to ensure you have key elements in your website that will not only please your visitors, but search engines as well.

One of the biggest mistakes I see website owners make is to create a site that is about them rather than catering to what their visitors want. Whenever possible, try to put yourself in your potential customer’s shoes and provide them with all of the information they need to make a decision to buy your products or services.

1. Pricing

Many people don’t include the prices of their products or services because they fear their competitors will find out how much they charge or their customers will think the prices are too high and not buy from them.

But guess what? If your competitor wants to know how much you charge for your products, they can simply call you and ask.

As for potential customers thinking you are more expensive than others … you may be right. Your prices may be higher than others’ but that’s OK.  Simply explain why your products/services cost as much as they do.  Add value to what you are offering and show customers you provide exceptional customer service.

You may be surprised to know that very few people place high importance on getting the cheapest product/service.  Most customers are happy to pay a higher price, but only if they know they are getting a quality product backed up by a money-back guarantee and great customer service.

Sometimes having the cheapest price can actually work against you, as people will question your expertise or the quality of your products.

Remember, when people are ready to buy online, they want the information right there. If they don’t get it, they will simply go somewhere else.

2. Social Media Interaction

A few years ago, social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube did not play a big role in how your website ranked in search engines.  But all of that has changed.  Search engines, such as Google, pay close attention to how much your customers interact on your social media networks.  The more people, who comment, share or respond to your posts the better.

Although Facebook is one of the top social networks, it may not work for your industry.  However, there are hundreds and possibly thousands of other networks, which may be more suited for your business.  Check out the following: LinkedIn, Twitter, Technoratimedia, Digg, Upcoming, Yelp,Pinterest, Google+, CafeMom, Orkut, DeviantArt, Meetup and Mylife.

3. Frequently Asked Questions

When people visit your website, more often than not, they will simply skim through the information, instead of reading it word for word. They are at your website looking for answers to questions, so why not make it easy for them and provide them with a list of frequently asked questions, which will allow them to make an informed decision to buy your products and services.  Remember, if you don’t answer their questions, someone else will.

4. Credibility Boosters

Proving your credibility online should be one of your top priorities since many customers are still cautious when it comes to dealing with online businesses.  Some ways to show your visitors you are reliable and trustworthy include:

• Testimonials from happy customers;
• Before and after shots of problems your product/service has solved;
• Awards your business or staff have won;
• Money-back guarantee, the longer the better;
• Memberships to reputable associations;
• Details of media appearances including TV, radio, print or online.

5. Keywords

This one is mainly for the search engines. Make sure you research keywords and keyphrases people might be using to find your business and then use them in your website’s:

• Title;
• Headings;
• Copy;
• Page URL (website address);
• Alt tags (image tags);
• Navigation bar;
• Meta description.

Even if you are not sure what some of these are, speak to your website designer — he or she will be able to include them in all of the important areas of your website.

There are many tools that can help you research keywords. Some of these include:  Google Keyword Suggestion Tool, Wordtracker or Webfire.

6. Blog

Blogs continue to be an important tool used by website owners, because they allow you to quickly and easily post news, specials, tips and tricks for your business.  If they are installed as part of your website, they offer fresh content and customer interaction, which search engines love. If they are hosted externally, they offer backlinks to your site, which search engines also like to see. The main players are Blogger.com  and WordPress.

You don’t need a web developer to set up a blog for you.  Both Blogger and WordPress have step-by-step instructions, which take you through the set-up process. There is also plenty of online help in the form of tutorials and YouTube videos that show you how to make the most of blogging.

7. Contact Details
Be sure to include your contact details in as many places on your website as possible.  Remember visitors will not always arrive at your website via your homepage, so have your information at the bottom of each page, on a special “Contact Us” page as well as in a call to action section of your homepage.

Include your phone number, fax number, street address, postal address, e-mail address, contact form, Skype name, social network details and any other way, your customers can get in touch with you.  Remember, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to communicate with you.

Creating a great website doesn’t need to be difficult if you know what your customers want to see.  Once you are aware of what they are looking for, it’s simply a matter of providing it to them.

Your website is not about you, it’s about what you can do for your visitors and also for the search engines.  Tweak your website as your business grows and evolves and as your customers need change and you will be miles ahead of your competitors.

The post Key Elements Every Website Should Include appeared first on SEO PRO.

Starting a website is much cheaper than building and maintaining a brick-and-mortar store. There is no need to look for a good location, pay the lease, take into account overhead expenses, etc.

You can reach a much wider audience not limited by time or any borders, making market expansion much easier and opening up more room for growth. You also get to showcase your products, as well as important information about your business to customers, establishing your credibility while making it convenient for your target audience.

Social Media as a Conduit
Of course, there are still some truths in promoting an “offline” business that apply to the online world. Merely having a website does not guarantee profitability. You need to be able to show your expertise and uniqueness in the industry, and you need to establish a good relationship with your customers. The best way of pursuing these goals is through leveraging the power of social media.

Creating accounts for your business for social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter is good, but these are just channels to your main website. Social media is simply a way for people to connect to your website to consume your content and eventually make purchases. You just have to make sure that your website has good social media integration.

Here are five ways to seamlessly incorporate both assets:

Killer Content
“Content is king” is a phrase that will never get old because content is exactly what people are looking for online, especially in social media. People are constantly sharing with their huge networks of family and friends all sorts of content that they deem interesting, whether it’s a news article, an opinion piece, a funny picture, or an inspiring video. Their connections, in turn, share it with their own networks, and so on. The number of people you can reach with killer content is astounding.

Therefore, you need to create content that will make the rounds within these social media channels through shares, retweets, pins, etc., and you need to be able to do it in a regular fashion. There is no guaranteed way to achieve this, but the best way is to simply create great content.

Social Content
Social media platforms are built with connecting people in mind, but you can follow their template with your website by allowing for some level of interaction with your website’s visitors. This can be done through a blog with a comments section, a forum where they can discuss your products/services, or a customer review feature where you let people send in their critiques of your business’ offerings. You can even let visitors leave comments on your content using their Facebook accounts for fuller integration.

By giving your customers a way to express their opinions, you also give them a sense of belonging with your company. They will feel that you care about what your customers think, establishing a stronger relationship in the process.

Eye-Catching Titles and Images
Some truly great content doesn’t reach its full potential, because of poor titles that don’t immediately grab people’s attention when browsing through their feeds. Other great content that tackles technical and/or multiple subjects are not being read, because of the lack of compelling pictures that break up the monotony of text.

• For titles, you want something that addresses a concern while being straight to the point. It has to fix your target audience’s gaze when they’re quickly scanning on their Smartphones or computers.

• For images, you want something that explains your points in a clearer fashion while maintaining the tone of your content, and more importantly, your brand is known for. You can actually just focus on creating content that is purely image-based (e.g. infographics) to simplify complex concepts and highlight important facts.

Social Buttons
Due to the fast-paced nature of today’s Information Age, people now expect a good level of convenience when surfing the Web. They want to be able to share things they like through their multiple social media accounts without having to deal with the relative hassle of opening up new windows or tabs and copying and pasting URLs. Social buttons are the answer to that problem, making it much easier for people to show their interest in a piece of content to the rest of the world.

These social buttons can also work in your favor, because they usually show the number of people who have expressed positive sentiments about particular content. Once these numbers climb, it can be even easier for people to take notice, because they will think the content is worth checking out, attributing it to the number of people who already did.

RSS Feeds
Rich Site Summary or RSS is nothing new, but it is a tool that has found even more use now that there is so much more content being produced and shared throughout the Internet. Use it to syndicate relevant content you have on your main website to microsites targeting more concentrated niches. This way, you don’t have to be publishing the same content on multiple sites.

Conclusion
While an official website serves as a foundation for creating an online presence, social media allows for even wider coverage for your business, and gets you even closer to your target audience. By integrating it with your website, you realize the full potential of doing business online.

The post How to Effectively Make Your Site Social Media-Friendly appeared first on SEO PRO.

Is the traditional call to action really as effective as we think it is? Are consumers really as simple-minded as we think they are? Is there a better, more data-driven way to validate (or invalidate) our blind faith in the Call to Action?

In an age of character constrained ad messages (95 for Google/Bing, 140 for Twitter, even fewer for Facebook), something as simple as “Buy Now!” still requires 8 characters, while something longer and nearly as meaningless such as ‘Shop and Save at Target.com’ requires more than 20!

You know what else requires just 8 characters? Flexible, Boot Cut, Near LAX, 0.9% APR, or 1 Day Sale. These are all the things you could be saying about your products and services to provide relevant information and to better qualify your customer.

Do your consumers relate better to points of interest? Are they more concerned about the cut of the jean vs. the color? Is APR a driving factor in whether they’ll submit a lead?

These are all questions you could answer instead of “Does ‘buy’ work better than ‘shop’?” If that is indeed the question, this is a great piece on how to get to the heart of that matter.

As search marketers we need to be able to succinctly highlight to consumers what we have that deserves their attention. If you give consumers the right reasons to buy now or shop today, they’ll arrive at that conclusion themselves.

Collecting data about which reasons are the right reason should be the focus of ad tests. Calls to action in PPC ads can often seem spammy, lazy – desperate even.

Now that our data collection and processing abilities enable very granular analysis on how nuances in ad construction impacts results, our focus should be on improving the overall message we’re delivering. We have an opportunity to relate, rather than just advertise, to consumers.

The post A Call To Action For Calls To Action appeared first on SEO PRO.

On one hand, the goal is to create a website that wows visitors and is engaging. On the other hand, you want to make sure the site is properly optimized. Design-heavy sites don’t always leave much room for on-page optimization, so it’s necessary to find the right balance.

Here are seven helpful tips to make it work:

Tip 1: Keep the layout simple 
Make sure the navigation links can be followed by the search engines. Keep the layout simple and clean but packed with design. Trying to accomplish too much can work for the search engine spiders but will ultimately discourage visitors from browsing your site.

Tip 2: Manipulate text with CSS 
One of the biggest issues designers face is using plain text (such as the h1 tag) when graphical text is far more attractive.

The solution is to use CSS to manipulate how plain text looks so the search engines will be able to pick up the content. It will never look good as graphical text, but it will be a huge improvement over plain text.

Tip 3: Use mouse-overs on images 
If the site is image-heavy and needs text, using mouse-overs will be the perfect solution. If this is set up correctly, it can turn an image-heavy site into one that is full of content.

To the visitor’s eye, an image will mouse-over to written text. To the search engine spiders, the text will be crawlable and seen as real content.

Tip 4: Experiment with different fonts 
There are many fonts that look like graphical text but are actually regular text. This means that the search engines will be able to read the text. Try experimenting with different fonts and consider buying font packs. This will allow you to avoid using images and keep your design simple.

Tip 5: Create a mobile alternative and format it
More people are using mobile devices to browse the Internet.

That’s why it’s important to build a site meant to be viewed in mobile format and optimize it for search engines. In addition to creating this site, it is necessary to test how it appears on different devices and platforms so it is formatted correctly.

Tip 6: Design is good but loading time is bad 
Too much design can slow down the loading time of a site. When that happens, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to reduce downloads. Many things can affect loading time from font downloads to plugins for SEO to high-resolution images to scripts.

Tip 7: Conversion is king 
Creating a well-designed site can give you a lot of pride. However, the one thing that matters most is conversion. Try out different designs and see which result in more action whether it is e-mail sign-ups, social media shares, or sales. After all, your sales numbers are what matter the most.

Finding the balance between optimization and great design isn’t always easy, but these solid tips will help you to win with SEO website design. There will be many times where it will be necessary to go back and forth until all the technical problems are solved and the overall design is engaging.

The post Seven Tips For Winning With SEO Website Design appeared first on SEO PRO.

Keywords are such a critical component to being found online that e-commerce expert Gerry McGovern, in his book ‘Killer Web Content: Make the Sale, Deliver the Service, Build the Brand,’ christened them “customer care words.” These care words represent the things your customers care about, and they turn to the Web to the find the answers they seek. If your keywords match their ‘care words,’ your website is more likely to be found, and far more likely to be relevant to the person doing the search.

Competition, however, is stiff in the big cyber world. While a decade ago you would have stood a decent chance of being found using the term ‘dog training,’ today there are 124 million people vying to be found using that same phrase.

Narrow Your Niche By Using Long-Tail Keywords
So how do you stay afloat in the tumultuous seas of search engine competition? Simply put: long-tail keywords. Instead of using ‘dog training,’ use a few more detailed and descriptive words that will help whittle away the competition. By using long-tail keywords like ‘clicker dog training’ (2,240,000 searches) or ‘gentle dog training’ (2,970,000), you’ll drastically reduce your competition while narrowing the scope and focus of your message while increasing relevancy to your target audience.

Long-Tail Keywords: Drill Deep
Adding another word or two to convert from a simple keyword phrase to a targeted long-tail keyword phrase helps you narrow your keyword funnel. But to really increase your odds, (while using laser-like focus so your target market can find you) don’t just drill deep, drill deeper still.

Adding still another word to your phrase reduces your competition even more. ‘Clicker dog training methods’ takes you down to 474,000 and ‘gentle dog training for pit bulls’ takes you down to 257,000.

Build Your Brand and Your Rank
Now that you’ve drilled deep, you can begin to cast a wider net by segmenting your market. Just as ‘gentle dog training for pit bulls’ reduced competition, you can add a page to your site for a variety of breeds which will help you attract a broad swath of people seeking breed-specific advice for their dog.

Even though the clicker training methods may be the same for every breed of dog, by having a page addressing specific breeds (i.e., ‘gentle dog training for terriers’, ‘gentle dog training for poodles’, etc.) you’ll greatly expand your reach across the clicker training market.

Web masters commonly use geo-targeting to take a niche and break it down via market segmentation. ‘Dallas plumber’ will gain you some exposure; smart Web masters take it several steps further by adding pages for ‘Fort Worth plumber,’ ‘Arlington plumber,’ ‘Garland plumber,’ etc.

Using market segmentation will ensure you catch as many leads as possible – ones that are keenly interested in what you are offering because you are addressing something very specific to their needs and wants.

The Last Word in Long-Tail Keywords
So get cracking and start using long-tail keywords on your website and in your business marketing. By using long-tail keywords, you’ll not only reduce your competition, but be highly relevant to those who find you through their search.

The post Long Tail Keywords: How to Narrow Your Niche While Increasing Your Rank appeared first on SEO PRO.

Let’s start with the first phase of the International SEO process:

Although during the first SEER International SEO Q+A most of the questions we had about International SEO were about specific tactics or implementation doubts, these are usually the result of an International SEO strategy that hasn’t been well established at the beginning.

Unfortunately some of the most common issues with international Websites happen because they’re implemented and optimized without real planning and research, just by extrapolating the content and structure of the main site version without taking into consideration that each of the languages or countries targeted have a specific audience, competition and industry behavior:

• The top products or services for other languages or countries won’t necessarily be the same than the ones of your main language or country version.
• The products or services in other languages or countries won’t be searched necessarily with the exact same “translated” phrases or terms.
• The sector or industry seasonality might be different in each country or language, with specific cultural or geographic influenced festivities.
• The competitors in different countries or languages won’t necessarily be the same, neither their unique selling proposition nor the offering that you will need to compete with.
• The search volume and potential organic traffic in other languages or countries will be different.
• There might be local search engines in some countries that are more important that Google and you will need to optimize and rank for them to be where your audience is (for example, in Russia is Yandex and in China is Baidu).

Therefore, when you develop and start optimizing for other languages or countries you cannot simply extrapolate what you already have in your current site. Of course, this will be used as an input but you cannot obviate the specific characteristics of each one of the countries and language audiences that you will target: You need to take them into consideration to establish an effective Web presence and SEO strategy.

The first step to set your international SEO strategy is to identify your online business opportunities based on:

2.1. Your online business model and operations

How does your online business work? What’s your online business model? What’s your online business goal? Is it completely based on your site or do you provide local services or products? How do you deliver them? Do you have the capacity to provide them in any country and in any language? Which are the existent restrictions and how high would be the additional costs?

Unfortunately is not always feasible or beneficial to deliver your products or provide your services in any country. Maybe you sell some type of food and you need complex permissions to obtain. Or you can send your small products worldwide but there are important delivery costs and timings that you need to take into consideration.

Make sure to identify the implications of going international from the start, otherwise you might end-up wasting your time and resources afterwards since you will discover too late that there’s no way your sales are going to be as high to compensate the needed International investment.

2.2. Your current visitors demographics and behavior

Verify the language and countries of your current audience with your Web analytics systems. If you use Google Analytics you can go to the “Audience > Demographics” reports and check which are your current visitors languages and locations:

Once you identify the most important languages and countries you can start digging deeper to discover the behavior of these visitors:

• Which keywords they used and which pages they visited?
• Which services or products they ended-up buying?
• How high is the conversion volume and their conversion rate compared to your main country or language?

Apply an organic traffic segment and specifically identify this information for it to compare.

Finally, remember to check the general and organic traffic sources per language and country. Which are the most important search engines and sites, in general, referring you traffic per country and language?

Once you’ve internally analyzed your present traffic volume, behavior and conversions from other countries and languages you will have a much better vision about which are those that you should take into consideration and further research their market potential.

2.3. Your industry international potential

The next step is to start the research for potential organic traffic volume, its behavior, keywords and competitors in these international markets so at this point if you don’t speak the language it’s important to have a local native to support you with this activity. Don’t worry, it shouldn’t be that complicated if you keep some good practices I shared in this article into consideration.

Start always by validating with services such as Alexa’s top sites per country andStatCounter which are the most popular search engines in those countries you’ve already identified as potential markets for your international expansion.

If Google is not the main local player keep in mind that you will need to research which are the most important ranking factors in these other search engines and develop your local search market research with them. Local search engines will offer an alternative to do keyword research, for example, you have Baidu Index for China and Yandex Keywords Stats for Russia and CIS Countries.

In the case it’s Google, you can start with its Keywords Tool by selecting the appropriate location and language and begin the research with the main keywords that you have already identified from those countries and languages in Google Analytics:

With these keywords suggestions, especially those for keywords with high search volume you can use tools such as  Ubersuggest that also supports other languages to identify more keywords opportunities.

Additionally, to obtain more information about each keyword per country, you can use SEMrush and Search Metrics Essentials:

Using these same tools It’s also important to verify which sites are already ranking for these keywords since they would become your competitors, check how they’re structured, the type of content they’re featuring, their link profile and social activity:

And with Google Trends verify the seasonality and behavior over time for the most important keywords per country, identifying which are the top and rising related terms for them:

Google has also a tool called Global Market Finder, to help you identify international opportunities, but use it with care and better directly validate the suggested keywords as I described before, since as Andy Atkins pointed out in this post, it doesn’t always work as you would expect.

2.4. Wrapping Up your International Analysis

By identifying your potential new languages and country markets, initially with internal information and then by researching each market information you will be able to validate if the countries and languages you had initially identified with potential from your current site activity really provide a high search volume and positive trend, with reasonable competition to make them attractive and potentially beneficial to target.

The next step is to identify how you would target your international audience taking into consideration the information you’ve identified before in the research and in dependence on your online business characteristics and model: If it’s better to target all the global audience speaking a specific language (no matter where they are) or specifically target a geographically focused audience, speaking a language (or a set of specific languages):

3.1. Language Targeting

A language targeted approach for your international presence is suitable when the location of the user is not a factor that influence the Website goals, content, service and product offerings.

This alternative will be suitable, for example, when you have identified in your analysis that you already attract visits that are highly distributed over many countries speaking the same language and in the research you have also verified the potential to attract new organic traffic and conversions is equally distributed with very similar terms, not specifically focused on one country.

This means that if you approach this situation with a specific version for each country you would end-up with a high amount of sites that won’t compensate the effort and having many specific site versions won’t have a high impact over the type of service or product you provide for these audiences.

A site can also start with a language targeted approach and evolve towards a country targeted one when it identifies it has enough activity from one specific country, with particular characteristics that will compensate to create a specific site targeting them with a unique product, service or content offering.

The website organization for a language targeted approach can be of sub-directories or sub-domains under the main generic top level domain, as it can be in the following graphic:

For example, Scribd and Shutterstock are both language targeted, but the first uses subdomains and the second uses subdirectories:

When you have a language targeted approach the best is not to feature a specific flag along the language, since you’re really targeting all of the audience speaking the language that sometimes is not specifically located in one country and you might upset some of your visitors that won’t be represented with the flag.

3.2. Country Targeting

A country targeted approach for your international presence is the best alternative when the location is a factor towards your online business model, goals and offering and you have enough country related search traffic potential to compensate the investment of building a site version targeting a specific country.

The website organization for a country targeted approach can be of ccTLDs (country code top-level domains), sub-directories or sub-domains depending on the main generic top-level domain, as it can be seen in the following graphic:

Additionally, you may reach a point in a mature market, where the audience in a specific country you’re targeting speak many languages and you identify that you might be losing business opportunities with the audience based in specific regions where another local language is spoken.

In this situation you may want to run an additional research to identify the potential with this additional language and if it compensates create an additional  language version with it, inside the same country site structure, that could be organized with any of the following alternatives:

For example, Amazon is country targeted and uses ccTLDs. On the other hand, Microsoft is country targeted, with many additional languages for some of the countries and uses subdirectories:

I will comment more about this in the next post of the International series –that will be focused on the execution of the International SEO process–, but since I know is one of the most frequent questions about this topic, I will advance a bit. From my experience the best approach to refer users from one country version to another –just in case they end-up in this situation (which should be a not so frequent situation if you correctly implement some geotargeting configuration through Google Webmaster Tools and Hreflang)– is to friendly suggest the relevant version targeting their specific language or country, as Amazon does, and avoiding any automatic redirect based on the IP or browser language, that might be intrusive and sometimes complex to implement:

3.3. Wrapping Up International Targeting 

All of the site organization alternatives –especially for the country targeted scenario, with ccTLDs, sub-directories and sub-domains–, have pros and cons as it can be seen in the following table I developed some time ago for this International SEO structure post at State of Search:

As you have seen, with all of the previous options of international organization structures, you will always have pros and cons and you will need to identify which is the best alternative for your own present and potentially future situation, depending on your own characteristics, strengths, resources and how you expect to grow in the future, to make sure it’s a scalable configuration. Nonetheless, from my experience:

• For a language targeted site, if you don’t have a high amount of technical resources to invest by managing different sub-domains, which will also end-up needing more maintenance and independent popularity signals, the most straight forward structure at the beginning is the sub-directories one.
• For a country targeted site, the ideal situation is to have a ccTLD –the one that offers more and better geolocalization signals, branding experience and less URL organization complexity-. Nonetheless it’s suitable if you have enough resources to maintain the related costs and build authority signals for each one of the country versions –ideally also having a local country IP–. This is usually the best for already well established sites that are looking to expand their business internationally. If this is not the case then starting with a sub-directory structure that will at some point be migrated to its specific ccTLD would be the alternative.

What you definitely want to avoid is having a “mixed” organization, which will be potentially more complex to manage and also confusing for users, for example using subdomains for both language and countries:

This is why it’s so important to analyze and plan well from the start and assess all the different alternatives, to have a consistent organization that will work well not only at the start but also in the future.

The following step is to verify that you have the technical and content related resources to implement the best site structure according to your situation (using the criteria mentioned before).

As you can see your technical resources will be a very important factor to facilitate –or not– the launching of a new language or country version of your site: Does it allow to set the previously described organization structures? Is it scalable?

More specifically, not only from a technical perspective but also from your content support capacity, you will need to verify you can configure and optimize the following aspects for the pages of your language or country versions: (1) unique titles and descriptions in the relevant language, effectively localized to the relevant geographic area, (2) localized contact and support information, (3) visible and crawlable currency and language switching options, (4) navigational elements in the relevant language, (5) localized headings in the relevant language, (6) localized information of the page in the relevant language, (7) reviews and comments in the relevant language, as it can be seen in the following image:

This might sound simple right? Sometimes it can be more complex than it seems because of the amount of content and pages. Always keep into consideration you will need to make sure to have not only the capacity to initially optimize but also support the language in a day-to-day basis, since you will need to verify the UGC, reply to your visitors questions, create assets and write a blog in the language to attract links and visibility, manage your international community in that language, do outreach to identify and create relationships with potential collaborators in your industry, etc.

As you can see even some big sites don’t follow these good practices:

• Zara does not give the option to switch from one country to another (just language, usually English and the local one) once you have selected it on the home page and enter to the specific site:

• Skype language menu is non-crawlable:

• Tripadvisor URLs are not in the relevant site version language:

After having analyzed and identified all of the internal situation, external potential, besides the content, business and technically related aspects and and what you will need to have the best site structure in your situation, you will be able to assess: Will it be beneficial for your online business to expand with another language or country version? Will the related costs to have a new language or country versions covered by the potential organic traffic and conversions they will obtain?

If the numbers still don’t convince you, you can also test the market and maintain the costs as low as possible at the beginning, by starting just with your most important product or service offerings for the language or country market with the highest potential -keeping the new site version structure small- and see if it has the traction and behavior you had identified for that area during your research and analysis, before launching a full site.

It’s fundamental that you set specific SEO “SMART” Goals (related to your online business goals of course) for your new language or country versions. As you can see, although this analysis and assessing might take some time, by doing this you will make sure that your international SEO process is well structured and planned, with realistic goals and the most suitable structure in your case and will have much more chances to be successful.

In the next post I’m going to share how the best practices and consideration to take during the International SEO Process implementation. If you have any questions about this first phase of the process though, please leave a comment!

The post Establishing your International SEO Strategy: How to Start your International Web Presence. appeared first on SEO PRO.

Or here:

From a starting point like this:

Or even this:

When you’re getting started with building a community around your business, you aren’t really starting from nothing. You can leverage the people, blogs, knowledge sources, and communities that already exist and that are relevant to your business and your industry.

Start with what’s already been built and go from there.

Once you’ve gone through this process, you’ll have a manageable list of quality knowledge sources (mainly blogs and people) that you will read, follow on social media, and engage with in order to actually build your community.

Before you begin your journey of identifying community, there’s a few things you might want to know:

1. If you’re looking to build a quality following, it does in fact take a lot of time and effort
2. It’s not all about the numbers
3. It’s an ongoing process (a more manual, human-type process)

So, where the heck do you start?

Who are you and what do you want to build?

Before you even get started doing the work to identify your online community, get very clear about why you’re even in business in the first place. Why do you matter? What are your values? What do you have to offer? How are you unique? Why should your customers care?

You’re going to build online community by being a great brand and providing something of value. But you’re also going to build community by identifying and attracting the right group of people.

Ask yourself what type of community you want to build. Who do you want in your audience?

Ideally, your community will be an audience of people who have chosen to be part of what you’re doing. Whether you’re acting as an individual or a brand, when you’re building followers, you’re building relationships. It’s not that every member of your community needs to engage or participate regularly (they won’t) but you want this group of people to care about what you do and what you stand for. You need to have some common ground.

In my experience, communities that thrive aren’t just in it for themselves. They don’t just self-promote and talk at their customers all day long. In real life, nobody wants to be around those people and that doesn’t change just because you’re hanging out online.

What kind of people do you want to be around in the real world? People who provide valuable and relevant information. People who welcome feedback (good and bad). People who listen. When you’re building a community (whether virtual or otherwise), you’re looking for live humans who, in some sense of the word, contribute to the conversation and the process. Thriving communities are full of people who want and who choose to be there. You can’t just gather a bunch of numbers to make up a ginormous group of followers and call it a community.

As in real life, you may not be able to hand-select every single person who belongs to your community. That said, you most certainly can be very clear about what you stand for so that your community is a match for your values. That way, as you build a community around your brand, it is a direct reflection of who you are and what you believe as a company.

Don’t just focus on the numbers

When identifying a community, it is important to focus on quality and not just quantity. Identifying a community is the start of building relationships with people who will support and help you grow your company. It starts with just a few key people and places (blogs and forums). If you’ve done your job to qualify these well, and do the hard work of generating and sharing value and being an authentic person (and company), then naturally, over time, your community (and your business) will grow.

This process I’m about to guide you through is not a circle-and-friend-and-follow-everyone-you-possibly-can-on-Google+-Facebook-and-Twitter-so-that-you’ll-have-a-humungo-community-kind of a thing. I’m advocating quality in quantity.

Your goal in identifying community is to come out of this with a list of people, companies, and knowledge sources that will serve as your roadmap for growing your online community. It’s a lot likeoutreach. Once you’ve identified your base, you will foster these relationships, build value in your business (i.e. meaningful content and resources that your customers need), and from there you will be led to additional people and places where you will discover even more pockets of opportunity.

Get clear on your business goals

Keep in mind that social media is a vehicle, not a strategy. Ideally, you want to determine exactly what it is you’re trying to accomplish in your business, and then you can figure out if it’s social media, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, PPC, or even a combination of a whole lot of other things that will actually get you there.

Are you working to increase brand awareness? Humanize your company? Help your support guys spend less time on the phone?

Whatever it is, if you’re clear on what it is you’re trying to accomplish for your company as a whole, it makes it a whole lot easier to identify and determine the online community you’d like to build. Over time, and as your community grows, you can evolve these objectives and really make it work for your business.

Once you have clarity on who you are as a company, what you have to offer, what you’d like to accomplish, and you’re ready to put in the work to grow your business online, start by identifying your community.

Start with some seeds

There are a few different ways to get your seeds in this process of identifying community. You can answer some simple questions, do some social media digging, sift through blogs, and also use search strings. Let’s start with the simple questions.

If you’re working on identifying community for your own company, then you will already have the answers to these questions. If you’re working on behalf of a client, put together a data collection document and ask them to answer the questions for you:

1. Who is your target demographic?
2. What specific industries do you cater to?
3. Who are your partners and colleagues?
4. Who are your competitors?
5. Who do you respect in the industry (people and companies)?
6. What organizations are you a part of?
7. What industry blogs do you currently read?
8. Who do you follow on social media (people, companies)?
9. What events do you attend?

Identify community with social media

You’ll want to determine where your target audience lives online so that you know exactly where to look your community. There are certainly any number of starting points for the hunt: Facebook, Google+, or any other social media outlet that’s appropriate for your customers. But just so that we have an example to work with, we’re going to use a company called Accent Branding Solutions (who is, of course, just getting started out building their online community), and we’re going to start with Twitter.

1. Go to Followerwonk 

   Visit https://followerwonk.com/ and click on Search Twitter Bios.

   

2. Enter in your search words
   In the search field, enter the words that describe just one of your target audiences. For Accent, they’re targeting groups like the directors of marketing departments, admins of organizations or universities, associations, and marketing agencies. We’ll start with the group [marketing director] and, to narrow it down a bit, also specify their home town location of [Colorado].

   

3. Do some filtering

   You’re going to want to filter a bit initially as you go, and then once more when get down to your final picks of people who you think may be good to follow and cultivate as possible community members, influencers, or just great knowledge sources.

   

   You can see that I don’t have too many people to sift through since I limited my search location to Colorado. If I don’t get a ton of prospects, I may considering removing that qualifier (though these look pretty decent at first glance).

   When filtering at a high level, I’d recommend looking at number of followers and number of tweets. Number of followers shows that they have some sort of a community built around themselves already and quantity of tweets shows their activity level.

 Once you’ve qualified at the high level and you want to start checking through individuals on the list, consider:

   1. Frequency and activity
      What is the frequency of their posts? Are they on social media enough to even bother? Or do they post, like, every 6 months?
   2. Quality and relevance

      What kinds of stuff do they post about? Is it valuable? Relevant? Or do they just talk about themselves all day long? Are they sharing things that would be relevant for your customers (or your client’s customers)?
   3. Gut check
      It all comes down to the human element. Is this person a fit for your company’s purpose, goals, and what you’re trying to accomplish with your community? You don’t have to be super picky, but don’t just put them on the follow list because you need warm bodies. This is definitely an ongoing process (you’re going to need to take these people for a test drive, evaluate, and then revise), but take the time for quality now.
   4. Following and followers

      For the people who are looking like pretty good prospects, who are they following? Who’s on their list of followers?
   5. A mix of the little and the big guys

      When it’s all said and done, you’re looking for a mix of people who are both obtainable (the little guys) and out of reach (the thought leaders). You want people who have a lot of followers and have some influence on them, but who would also notice when you share their content or interact with them (that’s the next step). 

If you look at the first page of Accent’s results on Followerwonk, you can see that even the top guy only has 1,700 followers.

      
      If I click through and check out his profile on Twitter I can see that he’s pretty active (averages a few tweets a day) and has some decent stuff to share. If I click through to his first post, he’s leading an active user group on LinkedIn so I can see that there may be a few easy ways to eventually make a connection with him.

      

      On the other hand, if I take the [Colorado] location qualifier off of my search in Followerwonk, I get a much larger set of results for [marketing director] who have a much larger following (which isn’t always a good thing; sometimes it’s just more).

      
      Certainly we would need to do a lot more qualifying for Accent on this group of results, but let’s say they wanted to target Lil B (assuming, as the first rapper ever to write and publish a book at 19, that he’s part of our target group). He has 622,220 followers. If Accent wanted to get in front of this guy, we’d have our work cut out for us. Not to say that Lil B doesn’t have value to offer and that Accent may want to follow him as a knowledge source, but the chances of attracting Lil B to their community may be a little bit far reaching at this stage in the game.

      Basically – and especially when you’re just starting to build your community – you want to look for a mix of both the little guys and the big guys. Focus on people who you could possibly talk to in person at trade shows, meetups, or at conferences. People who have the time to get to know you and would appreciate the value you’re going to share or the contributions that you’re making to the industry. Not to say that influencers and thought leaders don’t care about what you’re doing, it’s just that they have less time to take notice. So make sure you shoot for the big guys but that you also combine that with some peeps who have less on their plate.

   6. Organize

      Using what we call a Super Fancy Spreadsheet (where we track all the things), organize and keep track of all the good stuff you’re discovering. As you identify prospects that you think would be good to include in your community, enter their data. We like to track things like: name, type (person, company, affiliation, association, competitor), twitter handle, blog URL, website URL, domain authority, target audience, industry, level of activity, and notes. You can customize this for what you want to know as you’re identifying community.

      

   7. Set aside blogs

      As you’re prospecting in the social media realm, you’re going to find blogs that look decent and that may be a good fit. As you discover those, set them aside (maybe even pull it over into a new window and keep stacking them up there). We’ll get to those next.

Identify Community with Blogs

Once you’ve got a pretty good list of social media seeds going, move on to blogs. In general, you’re looking for blogs that can serve as knowledge sources, places to engage, or reveal possibilities of new people to connect with and possibly attract into your own community.

While you’re filtering blogs, you’ll probably also find more people you’re going to want to check out on social media. Go back and add them to your Super Fancy Spreadsheet as necessary.

Also, you can certainly filter the blogs you’re looking at at a high level (and at quick glance) by using domain authority (more on this below), but ideally you’ll want to hand check these suckers.

Again, using your Super Fancy Spreadsheet, you’re going to:

1. Set aside blogs discovered during the social media hunt
   Check and see if the people you’ve qualified so far on social media have blogs. If so, set them aside.
2. Check out other blogs

   Look back at the seed questions that you or your client have answered. Look up competitors, partners, distributors, associations, or anyone else in their industry who may have blogs. If you find some, set those aside.
3. Use search strings
   A lot of times we feel like we’ve exhausted all of the above and still don’t have any solid blog recommendations to make. So we go to search strings like [service/product offering/or target audience intitle:blog] or [service/product offering/or target audience inurl:blog].

   

Hopefully by now you’ve got a list of a few blogs or so, go ahead and filter through them:

1. Domain authority

   Use the SEOmoz toolbar to get a quick look at DA. Keep in mind that there are some very good blogs out there that don’t yet have a strong DA but would be an ideal community fit. Always look for potential and quality in addition to authority.

 More often than not, if a blog has a low DA (say, less than 10), it’s probably not very active. However, there are some blogs that have great knowledge to share but don’t quite have the outreach thing down. Those are perfect opportunities for joining forces and figuring out how you can partner to bring awareness to the strong content and value they’re providing.
2. Quality and relevance

   Is the content worth reading? Would you share this stuff? Would your customers (or your client’s customers) want to read this? Would you want to engage on this blog? Does it spark your (or your client’s customers’) interest?
3. Activity and engagement

   Are people sharing the posts on social media? Who is sharing these posts (those could be prospects as well) and how often? Are there any comments?

   We’re kind of spoiled in that most of the blogs we’re used to in the marketing industry have strong DA, a ton of social activity, and lots of engagement. Most of the blogs in more detailed niches or specialty industries won’t have any engagement at all. If the blog you’re considering has solid content and posts new stuff fairly frequently, it has potential. Blogs like this are a great place to engage because they’re listening. They would probably be pretty excited to have someone to engage with. Once you start sharing their stuff and become an active member of their community, they’re going to take notice and probably join yours as well.

Now what? Surrendering to the process

Just like building community, identifying community never really ends. As you continue to grow, you will continue to identify people and places that you may want to be a part of, and vice-versa. This is a more manual process, but it’s one that we have found to deliver quality results.

After all of this, if you were fortunate enough to come up with a ton of great people and places to start, you’ll probably want to prioritize and just pick five or ten relevant blogs, and also a group of about 5-10 people that you’re eventually (in the next stage of building community) going to commit to following and engaging with. You’ll want to start slow. This is a lot of (consistent) effort and you don’t want to burn out too quickly.

Whether you’ve identified community for your business or you’re working with a client, make sure you understand that this initial qualified list is just a start. Keep in mind that some of these seeds are going to suck (even when you thought they were going to be a gold mine). Yet even the bad seed can lead you to new places, people, and niches that will help to expand the base of the community that you’re building.

Okay, one more thing. If you’re working with a client, once they start working with their list, encourage open communication about how it’s going. Make sure that you’re consistently touching base about whether what you’ve delivered is a fit for them. If they provide you negative feedback about a specific blog, ask them what they don’t like about it. What’s not a match? Maybe the contrast will help them to better identify what they are looking for and then you can help them find it.

A few (more) things to remember

As if this post isn’t long enough (have you met me?), there’s just a few more things for you to remember:

This is just the first step
Identifying community (i.e. prospective knowledge sources and people to follow) is just the first step in building an online community. To do this right, you’ll want to develop a strategy that will guide this and your other online marketing efforts.

This will (eventually) help your rankings
Building a community is a supplement to search. Remember that all of this building community stuff has to do with helping you bring more value to your customers and more visibility to your business. All of the efforts that you make when growing a community will not only build value in your business, it will help your rankings.

The benefit of going this route is that it’s sustainable. If you understand by now that it’s important that you’re not just chasing algorithms and want to invest in something that will weather the changes, this is probably a pretty good way to go.

I call BS on boring (or non-existing) niches

Communities don’t build themselves. Even the big brands had to start somewhere. But complaining about the fact that there is nothing there is just an excuse for not doing the work.

We work with all kinds of clients who start from scratch which means, when they begin, there is (wait for it) nothing. All that means is that you’ve got some hard work to do and one stellar opportunity in front of you. So hunker down and get to it.

Using this process of identifying community has helped our clients to get over their misconceptions about social media and discover niches and verticals that they didn’t realize existed to help them grow their business. The possibility is there, but you’ve got to do the work and quit making excuses.

Don’t give up
Like anything that’s worth having, the reward is worth the wait. There isn’t a magic pill. It just takes time and consistent effort. A lot of it. For a while you’re going to feel like, ‘what’s the point?’ But remember that this is just a stage.

After you’ve identified your community, you’re ready to start building it. The one thing that I want you to remember going forward is this: your purpose is providing value, not making it all about you. Be the kind of community member you’re looking for: generous, knowledgeable, and engaged. And, while your community should support and foster your business, it is primarily a means to provide better service, knowledge, and support to your customers.

As always, give it a shot, and let me know how it goes.

The post How to Identify an Online Community for Your Business appeared first on SEO PRO.

That’s why we’re sharing our plan to tackle SEO ethically in the year ahead. We hope you’ll enjoy our advice:

1. Your Client is a Part of Your Strategy

It sounds obvious enough, right? But it’s easy to get stuck in the mindset where “I’m the SEO, I’m the expert, and this client has no idea what they’re talking about.”

Obviously, our jobs would be pointless if clients knew everything there was to know about SEO and had the internal resources to make it happen. And sometimes we may even catch ourselves trying to guard our secrets so that clients don’t get too informed.

But we’re consultants. Let’s inform our clients and get them involved.

Nothing is going to attract links better than your client’s proprietary data. Nobody understands where the influencers are and where the customers are better than your client does. You will see far better results when your client is involved in the strategy. We guarantee it.

2. Ethics

It’s almost a dirty word in some circles, isn’t it?

Here’s why it matters:

• Bad ethics will eventually result in bad reputation, no matter how good you think you are at covering your tracks
• Customers strongly prefer to buy from brands that share their values, according to research published in the Journal of Marketing. This is crucial if you care about customer retention.
• It has also long been known that the ethics of a business are deeply connected to employee morale. An employee who feels their employer doesn’t have good ethics doesn’t feel committed to them, and results suffer.

This isn’t a question of “black hats” being evil or any similar nonsense. It’s a question of whether you, your employees, your clients, and their customers share a similar set of values. This is a strategic question, as much as some people would like to think that strategy and ethics are bizzarly unrelated.

If these groups do not share a similar set of values, then these relationships cannot be expected to last for the long term, and that’s bad for business.

3. Transparency

This has really become a crucial part of a successful SEO strategy. Ideally, it’s something that you should be seeking from your clients as well. Here’s why:

• Transparency gets attention. It is the source of new information that has a knack for getting linked to and shared across the web.
• If you aren’t transparent with your client, they won’t understand the process and can’t offer value.
• If your client isn’t transparent with you, you will struggle with branding them properly and they will be frustrated with the results.
• If your client isn’t transparent with its customers, they will grow suspicious, and they will look bad if they backpeddle in the wake of a leak and a PR disaster.
• If you aren’t transparent with the SEO community, you will fail to say anything new that the online community will find valuable, and thus will not attract attention.

4. Stay One Step Ahead

Success in the year ahead is going to require an understanding of where the search engines, technology, your client’s industry, and society at large are headed. For example:

• Google’s technology is improving, making behaviors that go against their terms of service increasingly obsolete.
• Mobile is already mainstream and makes up half the online audience, and will only continue to grow.
• Social media is so mainstream that it has already peaked. It absolutely has to be a part of your strategy at this point.
• Google is expanding its commercial presence with Google Shopping and other properties, and it has incentives to weed commercial results out of the organic SERPs.
• Online consumer research has shifted away from Google and toward Amazon.
• Apps like Siri and so forth are displacing some of the value of search.
• Some are speculating that Google is moving in the direction of a digital assistant as much as a search engine.

These changes shouldn’t frighten people out of SEO, but they should inform our strategies and encourage diversification.

5. Build Solid Relationships

It’s not like you haven’t heard this before, but all too often online marketers neglect the value of relationships. I’ll try to avoid getting to redundant with this except to say:

• Invest in high quality, influential relationships, not in a large number of relationships
• Make your influential relationships public and take advantage of the implication that you are noteworthy
• Stay involved in conversations even when you don’t have something you need.

6. Short Term Strategies Never Fulfill Long Term Visions

We’re not just talking about automated comment links and forum spam here. We’re talking about all short term strategies. Short term goals should always be a stepping stone toward long term success, never goals in and of themselves.

One example? Guest posting! It’s hot right now, but is your guest posting strategy justifiable as a long term marketing strategy? Does it send referrals and increase viral opportunities? Does it increase your audience size and your social media reach? If it only offers search engine benefit, are you at least investing the profits in a more sustainable strategy?

7. Just Say NO to CHEAP Clients

CHEAP stands for:

Combative – Fighting you at every turn because all long term strategies are too expensive.

Helpless – Nothing you do will work for them and they will only resent you for trying.

Expensive – Cheap clients are expensive because you will waste resources on them when you could be earning money for and from other clients.

Apathetic – They have no real faith in SEO and are apathetic to the strategy.

Pointless – You won’t earn results, experience, notoriety, or anything from the relationship.

SEO takes time and resources. If you’re going to do SEO for next to nothing, do it for a nonprofit organization, where the non-financial benefits are much higher.

8. Be a Partner, Not a Vendor

This goes hand in hand with “involve your client,” but it’s worth emphasizing this particular point. Vendors sell a product, like “5000 links.” Partners need to show results, so they invest in long term success. And, of course, partners have a much higher earning potential.

9. Be an Advisor

Your client will have the best chances for success if you advise them on strategy in areas that you don’t have direct control over. SEO is not separated from the core activities of a business. Non-SEO and even offline business activities can have an impact on rankings and other things that an SEO is directly responsible for, so offer your input when it makes sense.

10. Quality, Not Quantity

Cliche? Yes. True? Also yes.

Emphasize quality over quantity in nearly all of your efforts, whether it be content, links, or relationships. More than anything else, the key to making this happen is investment. You can’t afford to throw small resources at a big problem.

11. Remember Panda and Penguin

Okay, to be fair, who could forget? But we need to stay on our toes and realize that these were not and will not be the last algorithm updates. Google is constantly upgrading itself in an effort to improve search quality and, let’s not forget, to line its own pockets. When your entire business model rests on the actions of a virtual monopoly in your industry, that’s a precarious position. Investments in SEO should also be justifiable as marketing efforts.

12. Let’s Face it, Rankings Aren’t Everything

The skills that we as SEOs have learned give us marketing opportunities that go far beyond where we happen to show up in the search results. We’ve learned relationship building skills, conversions, social networking, customer targeting, inbound marketing, content marketing/production, rich snippets, web design, and so much more. Let’s take advantage of those skills and put them to use where they are most useful.

13. SEO and Social Media are 2 Sides of the Same Coin

Both SEO and social media marketing are fundamentally about the same thing: grabbing attention online and encouraging people to spread the word on your behalf. Social media is also a huge part of building relationships useful for link building.

14. Speak the Language of ROI

We SEOs love reporting, but many of us don’t speak the same language as the rest of the business community. When we aren’t careful, we measure “ROI” in terms of domain authority, number of links, search traffic, and so on. We need to start speaking in terms of dollars and hours. It’s harder, but it wins the best clients.

15. Transform Link Building Into Brand Building

Some will argue that, once you do this, it’s not SEO anymore. We disagree. Brand building with a focus on search is an entirely different animal. We’re talking about not just building a brand identity, but leveraging that identity to position yourself where people will find you through the tool they use most. The intersection between search and branding is a powerful place to be.

Conclusion

We are entering an age when SEO can’t be considered separate from online marketing in general. Instead, SEO has become an online branding effort with an emphasis on search, requiring many of the general marketing skills that other online marketers take advantage of.

Unlike, say, PPC, we don’t have the option of specializing on a small and specific set of skills. Link building, social media, keyword research, branding, conversions, content production, relationship building, viral marketing, and rich snippets: it’s all a part of SEO. This is the year to let our clients know that we are comprehensive internet marketing experts with the skills to bring them long term success and opportunities!

If you share our take on this or appreciated the advice, we’d love it if you passed it along. If you have any questions or something to add, please let me know in the comments.

The post Let’s Make the SEO Industry Crystal Clear and Ethical in the Year Ahead! appeared first on SEO PRO.

Website creators have to put navigation together on their own, gathering bits and pieces from different articles around the web. So, I’ve put all the tidbits together, creating a guide to building site navigation that’s optimal for search engines (and visitors, too, never forget your visitors!).

Universal Navigation

When visitors come to your site, you want them to figure out how to navigate quickly. Most websites have a navigation strip at the top of every page that stays the same, with links to the major sections of the site. (Some sites like Amazon and Smashing Magazine have this on the left.) Distilled’s looks like this:

(Alternatively, you could just look at the top of this page.)

To search engines, this looks like every page on your site is linking to those top level pages. Internal linking shows the importance of different pages within your site, so pages in the universal navigation will rank better than pages further down in the navigational structure.

The mistake I see most often is sites building their universal navigation like a table of contents. If they have a site structure like this:

They’ll create a universal navigation that looks like this:

Products | Locations | Contact

Remember, every link in the universal navigation will have a backlink from every page on your site. These links should point to your highest level, most important pages. For example, Amazon’s universal navigation links to their top departments:

How to Build Your Universal Navigation

1. Identify why visitors come to your site. You probably have a pretty good idea of what people want already, but check your web analytics:
   1. What search terms do visitors use before they get to your site? Keywords used by incoming visitors tell you what your visitors were looking for before they clicked through to your site. Follow up to see which pages they visited – did they find what they were looking for?
   2. If you’re tracking internal site search, what search terms do visitors use once they’re on your site? On average, only 10% of visitors use site search. So, it’s safe to assume that most people only use site search if they have a hard time finding what they want with your navigation. What terms are visitors searching for? Do you have that page? Is it hidden?
   3. What pages on your site get the most traffic? If those are the pages that you want to get the most traffic, keep those in mind as you build your navigational structure to make sure they’re easy for visitors to find. If they aren’t particularly high conversion pages, what’s a similar page that you can steer those visitors to?
   4. What are your top exit pages? If they’re locations or external contact information, that’s probably something a lot of your visitors are looking for. You should include that in your top navigation.
2. Divide your products/key pages into categories.
   1. Usability experts recommend “card sorting”: put your products on cards, lay them out on a flat surface so you can see them all, and cluster similar items together. There are also a few websites out there that will let you sort cards without taking up so much floor space:http://www.optimalworkshop.com/optimalsort.htm andhttp://uxpunk.com/websort/
   2. Keep in mind that a product can be in two categories at once.
3. Come up with names for those categories.
   1. Use Google AdWords Keyword Tool or the keyword tool of your choice and see how popular those categories are
   2. Enable SEOmoz’s toolbar and search for those keywords. Look at your potential competition.
   3. Find the happy medium between keyword popularity and competition: there are your categories.
4. Put those categories in the universal navigation. If it runs across the top, the rule of thumb is to keep it under seven links. If it’s on the left, you can probably have more, although I wouldn’t go over twenty (Amazon uses 16).

Drop Down Menus – Do or Don’t?

Drop down menus are fairly common around the web, but many websites build them so they’re difficult for search engines or certain visitors to use them. If you choose to use drop downs, keep in mind:

1. Drop down menus must be in the HTML. Otherwise, search engines probably can’t read them. You can use CSS or JavaScript to hide the drop downs once the page is loaded.
2. Allow visitors to navigate the site without drop downs. If you don’t, they won’t be accessible for tablet users or anyone trying to get by without their mouse on Windows 8. Or anyone who has a hard time keeping drop downs activated as they move their mouse around.
3. Don’t list too many links. Remember, everything in the universal navigation is a link off every page on your site. SEOmoz recommends 100 links per page max.

Navigation Pages

Earlier, I told you to choose category pages based on keyword popularity and competition. Navigation pages are the best place to target those broader keywords that you can’t target on an individual product page. To best target a keyword on a navigation page:

1. Use the keyword in the page title
2. Use the keyword in the header
3. Include a 150 – 200 word paragraph at the top, explaining what you’re offering on the page (after all, you’re trying to make this a landing page, right?). Use the keyword in that paragraph.
4. Use the keyword in links to the actual products/converting pages. (But, only if that doesn’t look too ridiculous. If it does, don’t keyword stuff. Use your best judgment.)

Filters

If you have more than 20 products on a navigation page, it will be difficult for users to read through without a filter, which you should usually put at the top or on the left of the page. The tricky part is building the URLs. Often, developers will attach filter parameters to the URL as visitors use them. That creates duplicate content, as ?size=medium&price=sale will display the same selection of products as ?price=sale&size=medium. You really have two options for how to optimally build filters:

1. Give filters an order. Say that you set the filter “size” to always display first, then “price.” If someone filters by products on sale first, the URL will change to ?price=sale. Then, if the visitor adds a filter for medium sized clothes, the filter will change to ?size=medium&price=sale.
   1. Pro: Filtered pages will be indexed, and you won’t create duplicate pages.
   2. Con: Depending on how many filters you have, you could be creating thousands of navigation pages, which may display different product selections, but they’ll all have that same intro paragraph.
2. Don’t index filters. The best way to do that is to put a hashtag (#) before the parameters. Search engines only look at URL text before the hashtag, so any traffic to www.modcloth.com/shop/dresses#?size=M,6,8&price=13,523&sort=newest&page=1 will be seen as pointing towww.modcloth.com/shop/dresses. You can have the same result by disabling these filter parameters in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools.
   1. Pro: Links pointing to the filtered or unfiltered version of the navigation page will count towards the Page Authority of the unfiltered navigation page only, making it more likely to rank.
   2. Con: Your filtered pages won’t be indexed, so they can’t rank. Then again, if you want your filtered pages to rank, you probably should give them their own category page.

Product Pages

Navigation doesn’t stop at category pages. On a product/conversion page, you want your visitors to be able to go back to the navigation page they were on before they got to this product page (vertical linking) and hop around to similar product pages (horizontal linking).

Vertical Linking: Breadcrumbs

If the navigational structure on a site is good, breadcrumbs aren’t often used by visitors, since they tend to be tucked away in between the top navigation and the content on a product page. But breadcrumbs are the easiest way to show visitors and search engines where this product page fits into your site architecture as a whole. As a bonus, Google will sometimes display your breadcrumbs rather than your URL, which looks cleaner and gives visitors a peak at your site structure on the search engine results page. (You can learn more about how to mark up your breadcrumbs as breadcrumbs here).

When breadcrumbs are implemented, they’re usually between the top navigation and the product details:

Breadcrumbs don’t have to look like breadcrumbs, though. Product pages will often reiterate the categories they’re in on the product page: you can turn those in to links to navigation pages for more natural breadcrumbs. For example, Balsam Hill’s Christmas tree pages all list what collection they’re in at the top of the page. The collection is a link to the collection’s navigation page:

Breadcrumbs hidden as links like this won’t be seen by search engines as breadcrumbs, but they will increase the backlinks to navigation pages, which will support the site hierarchy.

Horizontal Linking: Links to Related Products

How often has YouTube tempted you to keep watching videos with their related videos sidebar? How many products have you bought because Amazon recommended them? Beyond your ability to upsell, horizontal links allow products to share their Page Authority with other products, rather than pointing all internal links towards your navigation pages.

Whatever You Do, TEST

After following these or other SEO recommendations about navigation, always make sure that you run usability tests to make sure that your visitors can find what they need, and check your site’s indexation in Google Webmaster Tools to make sure that Googlebot can crawl your navigation. We can spout off generalized advice for sites all day, but what really matters is what works for your site, so keep testing!

The post An SEO Guide to Site Navigation appeared first on SEO PRO.

Over the course of an hour, he shared insights, case studies and processes to help marketers optimize their content and build strategies that attract, engage, and ultimately convert audiences.

Content Marketing is King – SEO Has Changed Forever

More than two-thirds of client-side respondents (70 percent) to a new report from Econsultancy stated that their companies will increase the amount spent on content marketing this year. Odden also cited another Econsultancy/Outbrain Content Marketing Survey Report, in which 90 percent of respondents said this discipline will become more important over the next 12 months.

In parallel, we have seen a significant shift in the way marketers approach SEO. Panda and Penguin have changed SEO forever and while many SEOs suffered as a result, most content marketers saw it as an awesome and welcome change.

There is now a mass rush to content marketing. With this change comes lots of crap content, Odden noted. As marketers look to capitalize on the content marketing gold rush, it’s important to distinguish the good content from the bad.

Content Marketing Myths – Busted

A great way to help sort the content marketing “wheat from the chaff,” according to Odden, is by busting a few content marketing myths:

Myth 1: Content marketing simply means creating more content.

Busted: Creating quality content is key. Simply creating more content and crap content is worthless.

Myth 2: Quality content isn’t sustainable.

Busted: Build sustainable, evergreen content such as reports and guides. See more on the different types of content to assist in this strategy below.

Myth 3: A content object only has one life.

Busted: Content can be repurposed, re-used and utilized a number of times and in different formats (video, text, images, viral).

Examples of Great Quality Content

Creating content is a great first step, but optimizing and socializing that content takes it to the next level.

“Great content isn’t really great until it is found, consumed, and shared,” Odden said.

In this section of the session, Odden highlighted a number of creative content examples, such as Tom Fishburne, who started drawing cartoons on the backs of Harvard Business School cases. His cartoons have grown by word of mouth to reach 100,000 business readers each week and have been featured by the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Forbes, and the New York Times.

The Innocent drinks “Tweet & Eat Cheap” campaign was mentioned as a great example of socializing content. The campaign involved a promotion offering discounts on vegetable pots. The size of the discount depended on the number of people who tweeted the hashtag #tweetandeat. Customers without a Twitter account could participate via Innocent’s Facebook page.

The Cornerstone of Content Marketing

Successful creative content marketing strategies can be broken down into three distinct phases:

Discover: How does your audience find content?
Consume: What type of media helps you optimize for that experience?
Act: What will inspire your audience to take action? How do you want people to feel when they consume content? People act on emotion.

5 Creative Content Sourcing Ideas

Odden shared fantastic takeaways for participants who may struggle with the creative aspect of content marketing. Inspiring people to share and socialize can happen in a number of ways and the more creative you are (within reason), the better the chance of success.

Visualize Trends: Export data on trends such as SEMrush, Google’s Keyword Tool, Majestic SEO, and Ubersuggest. Visualize these trends so content is easier to consume. Tools like Wordle and TweetCloud are great for this.
Your site: Source content from your site such as onsite search (logged queries in Google Analytics), form text area analysis, queries in analytics and data from Google Webmaster Tools. You can also create content by analyzing inbound link text
Frontline staff: Utilize your human capital and assets to create content across sales, customer service, and marketing departments.
Become a publisher: Think like a publisher, act like a publisher, become a publisher. Source content from magazines (recurring features, themes, short form and long form) newspapers (timely, objective, sensational) and television (storytelling, recaps, previews)
Customer Journey: Map, produce and optimize content based on your customers journey and pain points as they move through the buying cycle.
4 Types of Content You Need to Know

When building your content plan and mapping your content marketing strategy, keep in mind these different content types. Each is unique and has its own merit; together, they form a balanced, optimized content mix.

Evergreen: Original, unique to the publisher, timeless, and always relevant.
Repurposed: Used in a number of different formats such as uploading video to YouTube, embedded content in WordPress, posting screen shots from video to Flickr and uploading images and text as a story in PowerPoint on SlideShare or Scribd.
Curated: Aggregated from multiple sources. Smartbrief is a great example of adding value to news that other people are sharing.
Co-created: This strategy makes each piece of content a magical thing, as social promotion is built right into it.
The Winning Formula: Get Optimal Content Marketing Results

Content marketing requires these three components, at an absolute minimum:

Brand leadership
Customer empathy
Storytelling & creativity

Building successful content marketing campaigns requires optimized planning and a 360 degree approach to search, social and content. It is vital to view search, social and content holistically and optimize everywhere.

This includes marketing and PR, B2B or B2C, SME or LE. As part of this process, research, auditing and listening are of key importance. By doing this, you can set goals and create a robust creative content marketing roadmap like that laid out in Odden’s presentation in London.

The post Creative Content Marketing: Winning Hearts, Minds & Wallets appeared first on SEO PRO.