SEQFAQ - SEO Frequently Asked Questions

So this is something new here at WDYGU, it’s a series of articles that I’d like to help use as a reference.  Somewhere to tell a current or potential client… “Hey you know what?  I’ve got a perfect place for you to find an answer for that………. my blog!”

I think that I’m going to call it SEOFAQ.  Why?  Because I think I’m witty, that’s why.   Any given day, I might be asked any of a myriad of questions that pertain to SEO.  A great number of these questions can be asked a great number of ways and can be asked a great number of times.  It’s not that I get tired answering them.  Honestly, I really enjoy talking SEO.  Just ask my wife, her friends, my family, or random people I meet on the street.  I’d just like to have somewhere that I can send them to get the rundown without having to hear me speak at length and in semi-pleasing metaphors.

So since this is the first post I think that it’s prudent to begin with the most oft posed question that myself or any SEO firm is asked by a client.  “How long is it going to take me to rank?”

I love this question.  When I’m asked this question I am instantly queued into a number of factors about the person who has posed it.   Firstly, I know that they are interested in SEO, that they have goals in mind, and that they actually need my services.  Secondly, I know that they don’t have enough SEO knowledge to do their business or website any justice.  And lastly, I know that they’re looking to me to help them out.  When this question is posed during a “pitch”, my mouth begins to water as the prospect of the sale.  This is the area where really earn my keep.  As I told Todd the other day, “I could sell a Ketchup Popsicle to a woman wearing white gloves in the middle of August.”  But PLEASE don’t get me wrong here; I’m not Alec Baldwin in “Glengarry Glennross.”  I’m only interested in making the sale if what I’m doing can honestly help me improve a client’s bottom line.

For the rest of this article, I am going to pull a Mr. Rogers here and play pretend.  I’m going to talk directly to you, faithful reader, as if you are my perspective client and I’m shooting straight from the hip.  So here goes.

You’ve asked me ‘how long is it going to take you to rank?’  The answer is that there is no answer.  I don’t know how long it’s going to take you to rank.  I’m not being coy here.

I get it.  You’re looking at potentially spending thousands of dollars a month with me and I can’t tell you how long it will be until you get to where you want.  But let me tell you this.  If you show me an SEO who will give you a concrete time frame, I’ll show you an SEO who is full of shit.  Pardon my French.  But that’s the truth.  I’m speaking from experience here.  I’ve worked with clients targeting GLOBALLY COMPETITIVE phrases and seen No. 1 rankings in less than 8 weeks, and I’ve worked with Mom and Pop local sites in non-competitive industries work for months to show up on the front SERP page.  And the reason for this is the reason that I make a good living… SEO is neither quick nor simple.  It’s a complex process, always evolving with literally hundreds of factors that go in to how you will rank.  But trust me when I tell you that we understand them all.

I’m not going to look you in the face and tell you what you want to hear so you’ll sign on the bottom line.  What does that accomplish?  I get your money for a few months, and then you’re left with a bad taste in your mouth and our brand suffers when we don’t hit a goal that we never should have given you.  That’s not the way that we operate.

But I understand that you want some sort of answer, something to make you feel better about giving me your hard earned money.  I’ll say it this way.  We’ll get you there in the quickest way as is reasonably possible.  We’ll use every single tool in the book.  We’ll take a long hard look at your site and give you the most earnest assessment that we can.  Do you need to change your title tags?  We’ll let you know.  Do you have zero backlinks?  We’ll get you a bunch of good ones.  Can using Social Media work for you?  We’ll give you an honest answer.  We’ll do what it takes to get you to the top of your best phrases in the quickest time possible and we’re going to do it in a way that is going to keep Google happy and greatly piss off your competitors.

We want you to be happy.  If you’re happy, then you’ll stay with us.  What’s more, you’ll tell your friends about us.  Our job is to get you where you want to be, and to do it in a fashion and at a speed that you are happy with.  How long that is going to take is a question that I cannot and will not reasonably answer today.  But if you sign with me, and you stick with us… you’ll get your answer shortly enough.  I’m willing to bet that it’s an answer that’s going to make your wallet fatter.

Getting other webmasters to link to your web site isn’t easy, but if you’re not doing everything you can to make your site attractive to the linking web, you’ll find it downright frustrating.  In marketing, the goal is to make your business attractive to targeted consumers, but for link building, you need to think of it as marketing to webmasters.  And believe me, webmasters are a much more difficult group to impress.

So before you start a long link building campaign, you need to take a good look at your site from a slightly different perspective.  The good news is: most of the same marketing principles apply, but this time, the emphasis becomes: “would I link to this” instead of “would I buy this”.

I broke the checklist down to three major categories:  SEO, Design, and Content.  Using the cliché pyramid diagram concept, SEO is the base.  It’s the strategy, the reason you’re link building in the first place, and foundation for making the most of the links for rankings. Design falls in the middle section.  This covers the subliminal trust cues and little nuances that can either make or break a link deal. Finally, content sits at the tip of this completely unattractive shape.  It’s your hook, or the ‘reason’ webmasters link to your web site.

Below is an outlined checklist of the areas you should re-visit before you begin link building, with a link to the corresponding description.

Click on the topic to see the description below:

SEO

• Keyword research
• Target Page Strategy
• Internal Linking
• On-Page SEO

Design

• Usability/Find-ability
• Compelling design
• Trust Cues

Content

• Link worthy content
• Area for regular content
• Brush up your offering!

SEO – Making the most of your back links for SEO benefit is crucial. Building links to a web site with poorly executed SEO may not only make achieving rankings difficult, it could end up causing more work for you (or your SEO) in the long-run.  Getting this part right from the beginning is (I’ll say it again) crucial.

Keyword research – Choosing the right keywords for your SEO campaign is the very first step and probably the most important.  It’s not always about how often a search phrase is used, however.  What it comes down to, is choosing the phrases consumers are searching for when they’re looking for the specific product or service you offer.

This isn’t only important for your on-page SEO, either.  Keyword rich anchor-text is one of the most important ranking factors for back links.  Trust me: if you take the time to get this part right, you’ll thank yourself later.

Target Page Strategy – Once you have your keywords, you need to lay out how your site is/will be structured in order to target each phrase.  While a single page can rank for multiple keywords, your homepage probably can’t cover them all.  Take your keyword list and create mock site-map with a natural categorical hierarchy that makes sense to your users.  Don’t be afraid to group synonyms on the same page.  Having variations for anchor text is important so make sure you have more than 1 keyword per page, but try and limit it to around 3-4.

Internal Linking – Once you have your page strategy in place, now you need to create a internal link navigation so that users (and search engines) can find these pages.  As a general rule: the more important the keyword phrase, the more internal links you’ll want pointing to that keyword’s page.  In other words: if your homepage targets your top keyword phrases (as it usually should) you will want every page of your site linking back to the homepage.

Internal anchor text (text used as the link) can be important too.  Using targeted keyword phrases to point to the respective page is a good way to tell the search engines what the page is about.  Don’t over-do this, however: use variations!  If every internal link points to a page with the same anchor text as every back link to that page, you’ll ‘over-optimize’ and actually start seeing rankings drop.

On-Page SEO – This is the part where you put keywords in the title tags, meta description, and meta keywords right?  Well, yes…but first, what’s on the page?  If it’s just a picture of your product with the same description that can be found on about 1000 other websites, don’t waste your time.  Unique text is what SEO’s sometimes call “spider food”.  The search engines eat it up; and without it, your page may end up in google’s supplemental results and consequently rank for nothing.

Oh yeah, and having keywords in: the title tag, meta description, meta keywords, image alt text, image title, content, H1, H2, H3, bold, and italicized…may or may not help you.  Consult your SEO.

Design – Is design really important for link building?  Yes.  It is.  It’s not that a poorly designed web site can’t get links; it’s that a site with the right design should project trust and authority and simply be MORE LIKELY to get that link.  Remember, we’re marketing to webmasters, here.  They can be picky about small design features like target=“_blank”, for example.  I’ve actually lost a link because a client used target=“_blank” for all external links.  On the other side of the coin, however, I’ve seen plenty of links purely on the basis of a great design.  So: Yes, it’s very important.

Usability/Find-ability – I love the word find-ability.  I believe it should be the goal of any webmaster to have users find what their looking for on their web site.  So while most web savvy people may be smart enough to figure out your complicated navigation, if at any point they become frustrated, they’ll leave quicker than you can say “heat map testing”.  Consequently, this will lose you both customers AND links.  Usability testing is so important yet so largely ignored…and I bet most people don’t know it could help them build more links!

Compelling design – Whenever I see the default version of the wordpress theme, I instinctively hit the back button.  You lost me.  It’s not that it’s ugly, or wrong.  It just tells me that you took as little time with the design of your site as you could, and your content probably reflects that.  You don’t have to spend ten thousand dollars developing a website to attract links; but the design is your face, and a beautiful clean design is much more attractive to the linking web than that free-css-template you just downloaded.

Trust Cues – This is a phrase I like to use when describing why design and usability are important for attracting links, but there’s more you can do; and not do for that matter.  Adding awards, certifications, trusted affiliations, and recommendations will add to the trust and authority that your site projects.  Adding these trust cues will not only improve your conversion rate, but it will also (say it with me!) help attract more links.

What not to do?  You will detract from your site’s trust by adding too much advertising or simply trying to be too forceful with your call to action.  Not every sentence needs to be a sales pitch.  Keep information: information, and sales copy: sales copy.

Content – The real trick to attracting links comes down to what’s on your site.  What are you offering that’s so worthy of having other webmasters willingly link to you?  What are you doing to improve and add to it?  The bottom line: you need to have something to offer webmasters or they’re probably not going to give you that link you asked for.

Link worthy content – I mentioned hooks before, and it’s a very good way to describe the “angle” of your content (call it link bait).  Do you provide information?  News? Resources?  Entertainment?  A new perspective?  Or were you thinking people would just willingly link to your e-commerce store?

More important than the hook type, however, is the quality of your content.  Paying $5 per article from someone who speaks English as a second language probably isn’t going to do much for attracting links.  Your content needs to be remarkable.  Not just good.  Remarkable.

Area for regular content – Yes, a blog will do nicely.  It doesn’t necessarily NEED to be a “blog” but you get the idea.  If you don’t have a section on your site that’s dedicated to both reaching out to new and regular users & adding fresh and new link worthy content, add one today!  You can have a working wordpress blog running in less than 5 minutes, so you have no excuse.

Brush up your offering! – How does an SEO tell their client or manager, the product or service, (or even the price) you offer is hurting their rankings?  How dare they!  Webmasters are a smart bunch and I have a great story about how this is actually possible:

A link ninja once came into my office and said,

“Todd, we have a small problem.  I asked this guy for a link and he did it, but meanwhile he sorta trashed the company…”

When I went to the page, it seems he had done some price comparison and found that our client had such bad prices, it made sense to him to do a bash post on his blog about it.  We got the link, but also created an ORM problem (to no fault of the link ninja) for the client.  So while this specific instance didn’t ‘hurt’ their SEO, you can imagine how many links it potentially lost them.  Since then, the client updated their service and prices to compete with the current market, and the links started to come much easier…go figure.

If you liked this article, subscribe to our RSS feed.  Next week I’ll be getting into some more specific ways to target your content for links.

Welcome to our website and blog! We are officially open for business and ready to take on the world of SEO and Social Media!

For those of you who don’t know us, we are two former link ninjas & SEO specialists: Todd Heim and Shawn Rosko. We’d worked at WeBuildPages with Jim Boykin for about 3 years a piece; and now (after a brief 3 month hiatus) we’re ready to start taking on clients of our own.

Ok, I know what you’re thinking: “Yet another WBP ’spin-off’ company. And this time the name is even cheesier than the original!” And, yes, we have a LOT to live up to. Being in the company of: Todd Malicoat (aka Stuntdubl), Rhea Drysdale & Lisa Barone of Outspoken Media, Christina Gleason (fka QualityGal), Patrick Sexton, and Justilien Gaspard leaves very little room for error. But we’re up to the challenge!

We’ve been honing our skills for the past 3 months and have some very interesting new linking strategies that are already showing promise. Shawn, meanwhile has been killing it on social media. His brand new blog will probably see around 100k visitors this month while he networks in the social arenas.

There’s so much we want to share, and this blog will be our portal! Make sure you stay tuned (that means subscribe to our RSS feed)…2009 is going to be a very good year!