How I Took a Brand New Site to a Top 10 Organic Google Ranking in Less than One Week

With nearly 150 million domain name websites registered (source: NetCraft) and a phenomenon known as the Google Sandbox, where new sites are placed into a moratorium of sorts until they have proven to be legitimate sites, getting a new site to quickly appear within search engine results is an enormous challenge all webmasters and site owners face when launching a new site. According to Nielsen Netratings, there were approximately 8 billion search queries performed in the month of October 2007 which means search engines are a popular tool to discover websites. Based on the total US population of 303.5 million (US Census), that equates to 26 searches for every single person in the US in October alone.

Leading organic search engine optimization firms suggest that it can take anywhere from three to six months to achieve a top 30 ranking in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN dependent on the competitive online search landscape. Additional statistics from NetCraft indicate there have been over 40 million new sites in 2007 so the search ranking challenge is becoming greater and greater each month.

Recently, I developed a new site (http://radio.smbconsultinginc.com) dedicated to my marketing internet radio show as a sub-domain off of our main company site (http://smbconsultinginc.com). The site went live on Sunday, December 2, 2007 and was indexed by Google and Yahoo within five days. Furthermore, the site ranked within the top 20 search results for “marketing radio show” according to Google (#9) and Yahoo (#16) on December 7, 2007. Taking into consideration the number of competing pages within Google (5.48 million) and Yahoo (112 million) for that particular phrase, this is an accomplishment that many webmasters and site owners would like to duplicate so let’s take a look at how it was achieved.

• Special attention was paid to the title and description tags for each page of the site with the main page getting the lion’s share of keyword focus. The keyword tag wasn’t even utilized for this site as a test to verify its dwindling importance to search engines.

• A link to the new site was placed on our main established website homepage which gets indexed regularly by all crawler based search engines.

• Placing strategic comments on very popular and heavily linked to blogs improved the odds of the site being indexed and created a little awareness.

• Signing up for a directory submission service that submitted the site to nearly 500 online directories for around $100 saved tremendous time. This ploy was implemented to speed up the indexing process while also creating permanent links back to the site which focus on targeted keyword phrases.

• A sitemap was created next and submitted directly to Google in order to improve the odds of getting more pages indexed once their crawler discovered the new site through one of the strategically placed links from any number of sites targeted in the first few steps.

• Since the site’s true purpose is to focus attention on the great guests featured on the show, an e-mail was sent to each guest to alert them of the site and encourage them to promote their own individual page in any way they deemed appropriate.

• The content generated for the site will lend itself well to naturally attracting links as time goes on which will further improve the site’s rankings for various keyword phrases.

Now that the site ranks well for a few keyword phrases within the search engines’ organic rankings, show popularity and guest awareness will increase which help all parties involved better attract their desired target audience which is one of the key values of organic search engine optimization.

The next time you produce a new website and want to improve the odds of your site getting indexed quickly, follow the steps outlined above and hopefully your site will rank well in the process.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roger Bauer is founder and CEO of SMB Consulting, Inc., a nationally recognized sales and marketing consulting firm specializing in revenue growth programs, search engine optimization and strategic initiatives. To learn more, point your browser to http://smbconsultinginc.com or e-mail info@smbconsultinginc.com

11/29 Radio Show Preview: Rand Fishkin

This Thursday, Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz.org, will be my guest on the Bauer Pauer Hauer.

As most of you already know, search engine optimization is one of the hottest marketing techniques out there today. Whereas old school advertising and interruptive marketing methodologies blast out a message in hopes that someone receives it and eventually takes action, SEO helps you strategically go where you anticipate your desired target audience to be in order to market to them in a fashion that suits THEM best.

Wouldn’t it be neat if we could dictate when and how we wanted to be marketed to? Well, SEO is one way to achieve that.

Obviously since my firm helps clients achieve higher rankings in Google, Yahoo, and MSN via search engine optimization, having today’s guest on the show is quite an honor since he is one of the “rock stars” of this particular industry.

Rand Fishkin is founder and CEO of SEOmoz.org, a search engine optimization organization and online community which is a Seattle-based SEO company that serves as a hub for search marketers worldwide, providing education, tools, resources and paid services.

SEOmoz’s vast community comprises more than 30,000 registered users interested in the search marketing field.

I hope you’ll join Rand and me this Thursday at 2 PM ET for another edition of “The Bauer Pauer Hauer” on VoiceAmerica.com.

The SEO Rip Off

I have decided to write this article as a result of numerous emails. It seems more and more people are falling victim to bad SEO. The main complaint is that they are paying entirely too much for little or no results. Additionally, many fall prey to bad SEO practices. If you plan to hire an SEO pro in the future, I suggest you use this article as a set of guidelines.

Before going with any SEO firm or individual, do the following:

A) Find out how established and experienced an SEO firm is before you negotiate.
Do they have a sizeable client list under their belt? Are they published?

B) Scrutinize their portfolio.
What kind of results have they achieved?
Contact a few of their clients. Were they satisfied with the work performed?

C) Consider and confirm their methods?
How will they optimize your site to reach your keywords?
Do they use organic methods? Some individuals or companies use doorway pages, hide text in the background, utilize re-directs and other blacklisted methods. Stay away from these.

D) Get a least three proposals from different SEO firms.
Look at each one carefully. Are there similarities? Proposals will help you see which companies are honest and which are trying to sell you something you don’t need.
What is the cost? The cheapest isn’t always the best, however, the highest price may not be attached to a comprehensive and viable course of action. Try to find find an individual or organization that will give you what you want within your SEO budget.

E) Contract, Contract, Contract.
Get everything in writing. Look over the document carefully. Be sure it covers everything you have discussed, including methods of achieving your desired results. Have the copies signed by both parties. If the job is a large one you may want to consult a lawyer.

F) Clearly state the terms of payment.
While most SEO firms will not do any work for free or agree to a results based pay scale, many competant SEO professionals will not shy away from a base plus performance incentive package. I am not a firm believer in prepaid contracts.. Most SEO professionals will abide by the 50% up front, 50% upon completion standard. Make sure all financial terms are as clearly defined in your contract as the actual scope of work. This will protect all parties involved in the event that expectations are not met.

All in all, try to do your best to educate yourself on SEO. Have a basic understanding of SEO terminology and SEO methodology. Anyone offering SEO services should not have a problem explaining how they intend to get you results. If they fail gain your confidence or raise a red flag for any reason whatsoever, keep searching. You will eventually find someone who will help you reach your goals for a fair price. Happy hunting.

To read more articles on SEO read Joe’s blog http://mr-seo.blogspot.com/ His SEO services can be found at http://www.mr-seo.com For affordable web design visit http://www.jnb-design.com

SEO Teleseminar Series

Just a quick note to let you know I’m in the process of developing a weekly one hour SEO teleseminar series with some of the industry heavyweights that should begin sometime in August. Stay tuned for the lineup and sign-up information. This promises to be a doozy! If you are one of the lucky ones to get signed up and attend the entire series, the knowledge you’ll gain will be tremendous and extremely profitable. I hope to “see” you on the calls as they progress.

If there are burning SEO questions you’d like answered, please submit them below in the comments section. We’ll be sure to address them pronto!

More to come . . .

PS–I’m also working on some SEO training videos to compliment the book used in the recent training seminars. These will eventually be available for purchase on a site yet to be determined. If you’d be interested in becoming a beta tester for the videos, let me know in the comments section below.

Business Dilemma: Can You Help Me?

First off, I would like to apologize for not posting much of late. I’ve got a LOT of coals in the fire at the moment, but that’s no excuse not to share something worthwhile every now and again.

Here’s the thing: as many of you know, I’ve been teaching SEO classes here in Louisville while trying to attract some students in other locales, and the feedback has been great thus far. I am in the process of taking the book I wrote for the classes and turning it into an e-book to possibly sell online. I’m at a little crossroads as to how to best go about that in order to:

1) Gain the most exposure for the consulting firm
2) Educate people to the point they could do their own SEO campaign if they so desired or help them realize that SEO is not a one time event or an easy process (it’s very time consuming!)
3) Encourage people to spread the word about the book and the firm while also not shorting the consulting firm’s long term viability (i.e. don’t give away the milk in order to sell the cow)

In order to achieve those objectives, I’ve been wrestling with the following scenarios:
A) Give the book away and encourage people to pass it around because that would generate the most buzz and increase awareness of the firm rather quickly

B) Develop and/or obtain videos, podcasts, and other material to include with the book to sell online at various price points (each package would be a little different). Currently, I’m thinking price points of:

• $67 for just the book and one or two other related e-books
• $97 for the book and several other related e-books
• $197 for the book, videos, podcasts, and other related e-books

There might be a ten day introductory period at launch for each package where each is $20 off to gain some momentum, but then everything would settle into the price points outlined. If the response is great enough, those price points may increase, too.

It’s tough for me NOT to charge something due to the fact that I’m giving away “trade secrets” so to speak. Yes, there are a lot of SEO books sprinkled throughout the market, and some of them are free (even some good ones), but I believe this is a little different from the other stuff out there (it’s very hands on and specific about what to do to be successful).

One theory suggests that if you give something of great value away, you get it back two fold. Another theory suggests that it is unlikely the people who would be buying one of the e-book packages would subscribe to one of the SEO subscription packages offered by my firm as they are more interested in doing everything themselves. I see both sides of the coin, and the business side of me says “you HAVE to sell the thing for money somehow,” while there is another part of me that says “you’ll make more in the long run if you give it away, and the firm will be recognized as a viable resource for many years to come.”

My question to you is: what would you do and why?

Please let me know by commenting below or e-mailing info@smbconsultinginc.com, and no reply is a bad reply–I’ll share some of the best responses in a week or so and again as the time gets closer to sell or give the book away. I’m going to stew on this for the next month or so. I appreciate your input in advance.

Quick Hit SEO to Do List

Many potential Search Engine Optimization (SEO) clients come to me stating they don’t have the financial resources to contract my firm for services yet they’d like to get started with the promotion of their site within the search engine sphere. Below I’ve attempted to outline the first steps I might take if I had a new website to promote from the ground up.

Submit Your Site to Directories

Directory submissions are an integral part of basic SEO, and directory listings help to form a foundation of links pointing to your site that generally won’t go anywhere unless the directory disappears or is shutdown for some reason. Many directories such as DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory feed search engine results and carry a lot of “weight” with major search engines such as Google, MSN/Live, and Yahoo!

There are hundreds of free directories out there, and my recommendation is to subcontract this service out to an inexpensive submission service (do a search for “directory submission service”). For as little as $30, you can have your website submitted to hundreds of directories in little time. Manually doing this could take countless hours, and it’s very tedious work. One note of caution: directories don’t get indexed overnight. It will take some time for your site to get “credit” for being listed in a lot of the online directories.

Write and Submit Articles about Your Business or Industry

Promoting your business via articles about your industry or the business itself are a great way to build awareness without being over the top or in someone’s face. The more articles you write and submit to online e-zines or article directories, the more your name circulates. Think about it, when you read an informative article that helps you solve a problem, perform a task better, or recaps an event, your guard isn’t as high as it is when you come across an all out advertisement is it?

Be sure to include a byline at the end containing a link to your site along with brief information about you and your company. This will not only generate awareness, it will also help your search engine optimization campaign by building “natural” links back to your website as the article circulates the online community.

Engage in a Free PR Campaign

While print media isn’t as popular as it once was, people still read newspapers, trade journals, and magazines. Local newspapers are always looking for interesting stories on local people to write about in order to increase their readership. Magazines are a bit different in that your story needs to be very compelling and unique in some fashion, but your website and business can get a big jolt if you can land a story in a print publication of some sort. One word of caution: don’t go shooting for the New York Times or Inc. Magazine right out of the chute unless you’re truly prepared to handle a huge influx of site visits, e-mails, phone calls, and unrelated requests about your business.

Involve Yourself in the Blogosphere

Blogs are a great way to show a more human side to a company, and their popularity continues to increase. My advice is to start a blog about your company, industry, or niche that is a sub-domain off of your main website. A sub-domain may look like this: subdomain.domain.com to where your blog may utilize a scheme similar to blog.yourdomain.com. This is a great way to build unique content for your domain while also helping your customers or clients get to know the human side of your business. There are several free blog generators out there that will even host your blog for free, and two of the more popular ones can be found at blogger.com or wordpress.com.

If starting your own blog is too tall a task, visit others’ blogs related to your industry and join in the conversation by posting comments and interacting with the blog owner. Many blog comments are indexed by the name you enter in the name field of the comment form so you can build links to your site this way. One note of caution: there is a lot of debate whether no-follow links such as the ones on most blogs provide any search optimization value, and I have found that they do provided the blog itself ranks well and has a large following.

Promote Your Site Everywhere

Offline optimization is just as important as it is online as you’re simply trying to generate interest in your business or website, right? Consider promoting your website offline just as you would your business. Nobody will know about your site unless you tell them, but you don’t want to be a hound about it either so be subtle. The traffic you generate may result in a huge sale that puts your business on the map.

Basic SEO isn’t that difficult if you think about it in a common sense manner. Promoting your site online is very similar to how you’d promote your business offline—it’s all about positive exposure. Being heavily involved online as well as off is a solid strategy to building awareness for your business and its website.

Whether DNC or RNC, Political Candidates need SEO

Another great post over at SEOMoz.org by Scott. This discusses how political candidates need SEO. I couldn’t agree more, and I was contacted by a couple of candidates just before the KY gubernatorial primaries went to the polls. It was too late (one or two months isn’t enough time for a good SEO Campaign in a political race), but I would strongly suggest the survivors consider SEO as part of their marketing campaign if they haven’t incorporated it already.

Whether DNC or RNC, Political Candidates need SEO

By scott@seomoz.org

Posted by great scott!

Due to the first round of Presidential Candidate pre-primary debates occuring recently, I decided to have a poke around and see what the State of the SERPs is like for the major 2008 Presidential hopefuls. I was surprised to find that, despite Howard Dean’s major success with online fundraising in 2004, and the vast popularity of political blogs and web-centric PACs like MoveOn.org, many of the 2008 Candidates are committing huge SEO blunders.

I know SEO is a fairly young industry and not everyone is hip to optimization techniques, but considering the reach and importance of the internet to young, vocal, passionate voters, writers and opinion leaders, one would think the masterminds behind these multi-million dollar marketing schemes campaigns would know of and appreciate the importance of search marketing.

Take the mind-boggling case of John McCain, a likely GOP front-runner: McCain’s active campaign site currently ranks #68 at Google for “john mccain” and just as abysmally for other terms and iterations of his name. How could this be? Well, behind his senate.gov profile page (which he can’t use for campaigning) and his Wikipedia entry, we find www.straighttalkamerica.com, Mr. McCain’s campaign site from the 2000 primary.

As you’ll notice, the Title Tag directs us to go to his new site, but, since it doesn’t rank, we can’t click through to it from the same SERP. If we go to his old site, we’re not 301’d, but rather instructed to click through to his new site. If ever (EVER!) there was a case for 301-ing a domain, this is it. Granted, McCain’s new site has its own problems, most glaring is that every single page uses the same title and meta description tags, and navigation is primarily via drop-down java script menus. As such, most of his pages are likely ending up in the Supplemental Index making his internal links worthless. Let me also point out that even the search “john mccain 2008” puts his new site #3 behind www.stopjohnmccain2008.com and his Wikipedia page. He does, however, have AdWords for his new site on the SERPs for every imaginable incarnation of his name.

On the flip side of this equation is Barack Obama’s site which is a redesign of his domain from his 2004 Senate bid. Nicely designed and fairly well optimized, he is the only candidate that ranks for such lofty keywords as “ending iraq war” (#10 on Google) and “2008 election” (#11) [Update: as of this morning, 5/10, Google is showing Dennis Kucinich at #8 for “ending iraq war”]. However, for these and other campaign specific keywords such as “candidate,” “2008 election,” “united states presidential election,” and “democratic candidates” or “republican candidates,” none of the current contenders are even in the top 50 at Google. Two notable exceptions are Hillary Clinton and Dennis Kucinich (possibly carrying links and domain strength from his ’04 run) who both rank in the top 15 for the term “president“.

Fine, it’s early, maybe people are still looking for candidates by name only. After all, dark horse candidate Ron Paul (R) and Mike Gravel (D) have gotten tons of attention on the social media sites lately. Unfortunately, the data just doesn’t back it up. Despite 12 stories on Digg featuring Ron Paul in the headline, each receiving more than 1000 diggs, since he announced his candidacy on March 12, 2007–Mike Gravel’s been featured in nine 1000+ digg stories since announcing on March 9th–the search queries for his name pale in comparison to the big players who, oddly enough, get almost no love from Digg (Obama’s headlined in only two 1000+ digg stories since March 9th, same with Clinton).

While “Hillary Clinton” and “Barack Obama” get significant daily numbers as search terms (Clinton currently getting about 50% more volume than Obama), the rest of the candidates don’t get much love at all. John Edwards gets about 1/3rd of Clinton’s search volume, as does McCain. Even social media darlings Paul and Gravel are averaging only a relative handful of name searches daily. As far as traffic goes, things are pretty much the same, with the exception of a distinct inversion between Obama and Clinton. The chart below shows the relative search volumes for the names of the major candidates (data from Keyword Discovery) as well as their relative Alexa Traffic Rank (3 mos. avg.) to their official campaign sites.

Granted, the search numbers aren’t huge for the more general, campaign-related terms, but in most cases they’re more popular than candidate names and have a much longer tail.

So what’s it come down to? It seems the vast majority of candidates have little to no idea of the importance of keyword research, keyword targeting or even basic, on-page SEO practices. I strongly believe that the Internet is going to play a huge role in the 2008 election. I also believe, after examining the current offerings by the major players, that the candidate that attacks the SERPs now, and positions themselves to rank for campaign-related and issue-related keywords will have a huge advantage in disseminating their beliefs and dominating the conversation.

UPDATE: Jonah Stein has published a great follow-up to this article, Political Search Marketing: Electronic Grass Roots, over at Alchemist Media. He offers an excellent analysis of how political campaigns and operatives could and should use the power of SEO/SEM to market their campaigns, marshal grassroots support and inform voters. Perhaps more importantly, he discusses how the campaigns, the engines, and the public need to be vigilant to avoid the potential for unscrupulous use that could make the internet the most effective catapult for political mudslinging and disinformation.

How to Market a Website on a Budget

I found this via SEOMoz.org which directed me to the following on SEOish.com by Patrick Sexton. It’s a great article/interview to take into consideration if you’re new to SEO or web marketing. Enjoy!

Visit the article here: SEOish.com