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As any good search engine optimization company knows, in search, more so than any other medium, you have a very short window of opportunity in which to engage your prospect. The only way to get a solid competitive advantage in this arena is to utilize various techniques in order to make sure that you are giving a prospect exactly what it is that he or she is looking for. Otherwise, your prospect will simply click the back button and visit one of your competitors - a process that only takes seconds.

One way to gain a competitive advantage, of course, is to work on the website itself. Any search engine optimization company worth its salt will also be involved in conversion testing on your website - in other words, making certain that the visitors who arrive on your site are likely to take a point of action that eventually leads to a sale. Split tests, modifications in content, different color schemes, and numerous other variable elements can all have a measurable impact.

There is also another way that a quality search engine optimization company will seek to maximize the value of the prospects that find your website through search engines. In this case, however, it is using your company differentiators in the keyphrases that they target to make sure that the traffic that comes to your site is of a very high quality.

Gaining a Competitive Advantage with Differentiators

As more and more companies turn to organic search to gain a competitive advantage while promoting their products and services, it can be increasingly difficult to achieve high rankings for the generic terms that everyone in your industry is pursuing. While any ranking is ultimately attainable, eventually a search engine optimization company has to decide whether the effort involved is worth it, especially when it recognizes that you can get overall better results from the campaign by making sure that a very high percentage of people that are typing keyphrases into search engines are looking for exactly what you offer.

This is why your search engine optimization company should be able to leverage differentiators in your keyphrases to give you the best competitive advantage available.

What Keyphrases Will Work Best for Your Business?

Suppose that you are in an industry where companies can have a wide array of prices, approaches, customer service levels, and so on. Instead of targeting, from the outset, the general keyphrase that defines the industry (for example “email marketing”), a good search engine optimization company will take the time to help you gain a competitive advantage by realizing what is different about your company in order to a.) attract very highly targeted prospects who know what they are seeking and b.) reduce the competitiveness of the keyphrases they are choosing.

Let’s take a look at a high-end provider of email marketing that has advanced web-based functionality and focuses on the B2B market. This fictional business is seeking a competitive advantage by working with a search engine optimization company. We can safely assume that the percentage of people that type “email marketing” into a search engine who are looking for this exact type of company is anywhere from between 0 and 100%.

By looking into the popularity of other variations, however, we can see that it is nowhere near 100%. Phrases like “cheap email marketing” or “free email marketing” are very popular, demonstrating that many people seeking “email marketing” are not looking for exactly the service that the provider is offering.

Imagine that instead of targeting “email marketing”, a daunting task (that, even if achieved, assures that a high percentage of visitors that come to the site are not looking for the provider’s particular type of solution), the search engine optimization company takes advantage of the provider’s differentiators. In this case, the search engine optimization company would instead target phrases such as “business to business email marketing” and “web-based email marketing”. Suddenly the two objectives have been achieved - the provider knows that a much higher percentage of visitors that are typing these terms are actually looking for the right kind of company and the competitiveness of the phrases has also been reduced, leading to faster and higher rankings.

Using Modifiers to Give You the Edge

There are hundreds of modifiers that can give a competitive advantage by reflecting a company’s differentiators, including words such as “free”, “affordable”, “high-end”, “full service”, “proven”, “turnkey”, etc. The point is that by making use of your unique differentiators in the search terms you target, your search engine optimization company is already setting the table for your prospect before he or she even clicks over to your website. When the message that is seen on your site then supports the keyphrase that was typed, you now have an engaged visitor. This can mean more leads, less site abandonment, and better overall website performance.

Conclusion

Remember, your company is better than the others out there. Ask yourself why, and then tell your search engine optimization company to take advantage of these differences in your keyphrases to give you a competitive advantage in your industry. The subtle addition of a few seemingly minor modifiers can have a huge impact on your bottom line.

(C) Medium Blue 2008

About the Author

Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue, which was named the number one organic search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld in 2006 and 2007. Scott has contributed content to many publications including The Complete Guide to Google Advertising (Brown, 2008), Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DS Waters, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Visit MediumBlue.com to request a custom SEO guarantee based on your goals and your data.

Nearly all search engines utilize spiders (which are also known by their original name, robots) to go out and scour the web looking for web pages. These search engine spiders then bring the data back to be indexed by the engine.

Since roughly 1996, individual meta commands have existed that can be used on individual web pages to modify how these search engine spiders behave. The most useful of these commands are fairly universal and respected by almost all search engines. What follows is a list of some of the more popular spider commands and instances in which you might want to use them.

meta name=”robots” content=”index”

This meta command is one of the most common ones used - and it is also the least necessary. It tells search engine spiders to come on in and put the page in their index. However, all search engines do this by default anyway. Basically, if you want to put it in there for fun, be my guest, but this command is not giving you any special treatment. All search engines are going to index your page, unless you specifically tell them otherwise.

meta name=”robots” content=”follow”

The follow command is different from the index command. It basically requests that the search engine spiders follow the links that are on a particular page. Again, however, this piece of code is completely unnecessary because all search engines are going to follow the links on a page, unless otherwise directed.

meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”

The noindex command, the opposite of the index command, tells search engine spiders not to index the content of a page. It’s important to note however that search engine spiders will still follow the links on a page that uses only this command.

When not used for legitimate purposes, this tag can be dangerous because it can put you at risk for penalization by most, if not all search engines. This is because you can use a noindex tag to hide pages with multiple links that you don’t want visitors to see but that you do want all search engines to index.

There are however some legitimate uses for the noindex command. For example, if you have a dynamic site and you’ve created static pages to replace some of your dynamic pages, which can make them easier for search engine spiders to access, you could put a noindex tag on the dynamic version.

As Google mentions in its Webmaster Help Center:

“Consider creating static copies of dynamic pages. Although the Google index includes dynamic pages, they comprise a small portion of our index. If you suspect that your dynamically generated pages (such as URLs containing question marks) are causing problems for our crawler, you might create static copies of these pages.”

In cases like these, it is acceptable to use the “no index” command on the dynamic version of the page, so that your content will not be treated as duplicate. You are not tricking all search engines, you’re just redirecting them.

meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow”

This tag tells search engine spiders that it’s OK to go ahead and index a page and list it but that they shouldn’t follow any of the links that are on the page. This can be useful if, for example, you had some partners that requested a link on your site that you felt obligated to give, but you wanted to hold onto as much Page Rank as possible. Now this is of course between you and your own personal god, but you would be able to in effect have a partners page, add the nofollow attribute to the meta tags, and basically not pass on any of your Page Rank to any of the sites to which you are linking. The nofollow command in effect tells all search engines that this is the end of the line.

meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”

Obviously, noindex and nofollow are powerful tags - and in combination, they can make a page and the subsequent pages to which it links invisible to nearly all search engines. This combination command tells search engine spiders, “Do not read this page; do not follow any of the links on this page; do not include this page in your index.”

This command has its beneficial uses. For example, it can be placed on pages on a site that have duplicate content for legitimate reasons. A website might have both a page for the United States and a page for England that cover the same product with exactly the same content. However, nearly all search engines would see this as duplicate content and could devalue both pages. So placing this command on one of them means that search engine spiders will walk on by and you won’t be penalized.

meta name=”robots” content=”noarchive”

Finally, almost all search engines today, including Google and Yahoo, offer a cached version of a site alongside its listing that provides a snapshot of what the page used to look like. The noarchive tag, therefore, is available to be used in circumstances where there is content on your website that is of a timely nature and therefore that you might not necessarily want search engine spiders to cache for people to have access to moving forward.

For example, a business might run a one-time special that has a ridiculously low price to drum up some business while things are slow. The business will want to be able to shut that sale down as soon as sales are back up to a solid level. However, it is conceivable that someone could click on the cached version of the business’s site, see the old deal that was out there, and insist on getting it for themselves. By using the noarchive tag, you are telling search engine spiders, in effect, “This page is subject to frequent changes, and I don’t want my visitors to have access to some of this content at a later time.”

Conclusion

The commands discussed above are just a few of the ones in existence, and new ones are being added frequently. While nearly all search engines support these commands, there are still some that don’t. The ones in this article, however, are fairly universally understood by search engine spiders, no matter from where they originate. As more universal commands are introduced, I will write about them in future articles.

(C) Medium Blue 2007

About the Author

Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue, which was recently named the number one search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld. Scott has contributed content to many publications including Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DS Waters, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Visit Mediumblue.com to request a custom SEO guarantee based on your goals and your data.

There are many keyphrase tools out there, but any quality search engine optimization company should know that they are in no way replacements for true market research. When one is embarking on a campaign of marketing on the Internet, it is important to select keyphrases that represent an understanding of one’s audience. In this article, we’ll discuss two crucial aspects of keyphrase research that your search engine optimization company should be taking into consideration: knowing the prospect and knowing the company.

Knowing the Prospect

There are many powerful and specific keyphrases available from which a search engine optimization company can choose to bring traffic to your site. But marketing on the Internet should go beyond traffic for the sake of traffic and instead focus on getting the right traffic. A search engine optimization company can target a phrase that is very popular, but 90 percent of those searching on it will not be true prospects. Or, the company can target a phrase that might be less popular in general but that is more likely to bring in the right types of prospects. Guess which is easier. Guess which is more effective.

For the best results when marketing on the Internet, you can segment your prospects in three ways:

• By geographic region

• By level of service desired
• By place in the buying cycle

By Geographic Region

If your business only offers services in a particular part of the country, then you don’t need to be marketing on the Internet with generic phrases that will bring in people who cannot take advantage of your company. A knowledgeable search engine optimization company will suggest specific phrases with geographic modifiers to bring in the traffic that will be most helpful for you.

For example, the keyphrase “real estate agent” may bring in a great deal of traffic, but if you are in Georgia and the searcher is looking for a home in California, this isn’t helpful. Instead, your search engine optimization company would target “Atlanta real estate agent” and you would see true leads coming to your website.

By Level of Service Desired

Another way to target your keyphrases when marketing on the Internet is by the level of service desired by your customers. For this, your search engine optimization company will want to find out from you (or your sales department) what types of customers you attract.

For example, if you are an email marketer that offers high-level packages and when you are marketing on the Internet you use the phrase “email marketing,” you will again be attracting a large amount of traffic that is not really interested in your services. Your search engine optimization company should instead be targeting a keyphrase like “premium email marketing,” which may be less popular but will still bring in more leads than the generic phrase.

By Place in the Buying Cycle

Your search engine optimization company should be asking you what your goal is for marketing on the Internet. You may want to be the information source when someone is looking for your type of service, or you may instead want to be the destination when a prospect is ready to close the deal - or possibly a combination of both.

So if you are a real estate firm that is marketing on the Internet, you have two directions in which you can go. Your search engine optimization company can target phrases like “Atlanta real estate,” which will bring in prospects that are early in the process and looking for general information about the area. In this case, you would want to make sure you have whitepapers and other informational pages available on your site.

You can also target a phrase like “Atlanta real estate agents,” which is more likely to be searched on by someone who is ready to buy a home in the area. Those searchers will come to your site ready to close the deal. A good search engine optimization company will ask you the right questions before research even begins to find out which of these phrases would work better for your strategy, or to determine whether both types would give you benefits when marketing on the Internet.

Knowing the Company

In much the same way, marketing on the Internet should involve knowing the specific goals of your company. Your search engine optimization company can hone your keyphrases in three ways:

• Those that bring in higher margin business

• Those that boost underperforming business areas
• Those that focus on new services

Those that bring in higher margin business

Your search engine optimization company can focus your marketing on the Internet toward products and services that bring in the highest margin. This is preferable to treating all of your products and services, and therefore all of your keyphrases, equally. For example, you may have two lines of business - one that nets 30 percent and one that nets 70 percent. If your keyphrases focus too heavily on the business that nets 30 percent, the overall effect will be a decrease in margins across the board. Conversely, focusing on the business that nets the larger percentage will bring you an increase.

Those that boost underperforming business areas

Your search engine optimization company can also find out from you which areas of your services or which products haven’t gotten enough attention, and can focus on those. Your strategy of marketing on the Internet could then bring in fresh leads for those areas. For example, you may have a line of business that is underperforming, and it has been made known by the powers-that-be that this lagging area needs improvement. Your search engine optimization company should be aware of this issue, because it can allocate a sizable number of keyphrases to this underperforming sector. If you don’t give your SEO firm this information, whether it asks or you volunteer, your keyphrases may be allocated equally, and you will lose the chance for this boost.

Those that focus on new services

If you let your search engine optimization company know about products or services you have in your pipeline, it can start searching for appropriate keyphrases early on. Then you can start getting traction ahead of time, rather than waiting until your product is already out to start your marketing on the Internet in that area. If your SEO firm asks you what is coming up for your business, let the company know about any initiatives up front.

Conclusion

When you target your prospects while marketing on the Internet, the benefits will become clear very quickly. And when you target specific areas of your business and do not treat all of your keyphrases equally, you will see the results in the places that matter most.
Plus, you will save your sales department a great deal of time because they will no longer be tied up with bad leads from people finding your site for services you do not provide. Instead, the leads will already have been filtered and your sales people can close more deals.

(C) Medium Blue 2007

About the Author

Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue, which was recently named the number one search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld. Scott has contributed content to many publications including Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DS Waters, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Visit MediumBlue.com to request a custom SEO guarantee based on your goals and your data.

It’s an unfortunate fact - no matter how good your search engine optimization company or in-house talent is, brand new websites have a more difficult time achieving search engine success for competitive phrases than their older counterparts, particularly on Google. However, the worst thing that a new site owner can possibly do is presume that they are “too late to the game” and decide not to pursue this marketing channel at all. A good search engine optimization company should be able to effectively work with a new website; setting the foundation for a remarkable success story while still achieving steadily increasing short-term benefit.

The Issues

There are many reasons why new websites face an uphill battle. What follows are only a few of the major stumbling blocks:

The Google Sandbox

There is much debate as to what exactly the Google Sandbox is, and even debate as to whether it actually exists. However, recent patent filings on behalf of Google would seem to confirm that one of the factors that Google will take into consideration when deciding how websites should rank is the age of the domain name. More than one search engine optimization company has noted that there seems to be a penalty assessed to new websites, especially those that seem to gain too many inbound links, too fast. This is all conjecture, but this would make sense. Inbound links factor largely in Google rankings, and therefore many sites that were already popular in Google began selling links from their sites based upon that popularity (a practice that goes against Google’s terms of service). However, text link buying is very hard to police. The Sandbox makes sense in this scenario, because Google seems to be saying “we may not be able to stop people from buying text links, but they are going to pay a pretty penny for them before we’ll give them any ranking boost because of them.” This is more conjecture, of course, but it is a popular theory in numerous search engine optimization forums.

Lack of Links

Unfortunately, here, a new website is faced with the opposite problem. Links to new websites are called into question, but without incoming links, a new website has a slim chance of performing well on Google. This Catch-22 is obviously a sore spot for many owners of new websites.

Trustworthiness

For many years, a common search engine optimization company strategy was to set up numerous new websites all for one company, each geared toward targeting a different search term. This was largely due to the fact that search engines used to place a much higher importance on the home page of a website, rather than interior pages. Over time, search engines caught on to this trick, and as a result new domains are now looked at more skeptically. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that while it is relatively easy and inexpensive to set up a new website that targets a certain term, a website that has been around for much longer and has a breadth of content has much more to lose and is less likely to attempt to “game the system”.

The Solutions

Does this mean that you shouldn’t hire a search engine optimization company to work on your new website? Not at all. In fact, it is in the very beginning of your website planning that a long-term strategy should be put into motion - a strategy that still offers positive results in the short term.

Before You Build

It is important to get your search engine optimization company involved as early as possible before you build your new website. Not only are there many technical issues that you should be aware of before you begin design (such as linking architecture, types of text to use, and balancing your SEO efforts with your brand), but there are also strategies that can be set in motion at the outset that will counteract some of the stumbling blocks listed above. If you involve your search engine optimization company after you have built your new website, much of the work you have done will likely need to be redone with a long term strategy in mind.

Targeting Appropriate Phrases

A good search engine optimization company will tell you that targeting highly competitive phrases with a brand new website can be an exercise in futility. However, this does not mean that you cannot achieve initial success on search engines. The trick is to target less competitive phrases at the outset, and to begin tackling the more competitive phrases later. For instance, let’s assume that your company makes custom widgets, and that “custom widgets” is a very competitive search phrase. A search engine optimization company working on your new site might recommend that you instead target less competitive variations of the term, such as “custom made widgets” or “custom widget manufacturing.” Since these terms are less competitive, you will be more likely to obtain high rankings for them with your new website. You can thus enjoy highly targeted traffic in the beginning of your campaign and eventually target more competitive and popular phrases as your site gains traction, quality inbound links, and a reputation for usefulness.

Make Your Site a Resource

A quality search engine optimization company will encourage you to turn your new site into an industry resource. You can do this by providing educational content about your industry in the form of articles, whitepapers, and other forms of non-biased content. There are many benefits to this approach, one of the primary being that such content attracts inbound links without any effort on your behalf. In addition, such a resource area builds your credibility in the eyes of your potential customers and serves to educate them in all stages of the buying cycle, so that when they are ready to make a purchase, you will likely be first in mind.

Build Links

While making your new site a useful resource is a great way to attract inbound links, this does not mean that you shouldn’t also be seeking them out. Your search engine optimization company should get your site included in many general directories (such as the Yahoo directory and Business.com) but, even more importantly, in directories that are specific to your industry. Not only do these links help to boost your search engine rankings over time, but they are also a quality source of targeted traffic.

Keep Your Content Fresh

A search engine spider will revisit your site frequently if your content continues to increase and evolve frequently. A site that has been optimized for three years with no changes to its content will usually not fare as well as a site that has content which is consistently updated. It’s as if the search engine is saying “Well, this old stuff still looks good, but it certainly isn’t the newest stuff out there about this topic.” This so-called “freshness factor” can have a large impact on rankings, particularly with new websites.

Although it may seem that achieving search engine success with a brand new website can be a daunting prospect, it needn’t be if done properly. Hiring a skilled search engine optimization company is a good first step. There’s little use in lamenting the difficulty before you, or feeling that you have already fallen too far behind to begin. As an old Chinese proverb reminds us, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.”

About the Author

Scott Buresh is the founder and CEO of Medium Blue, which was recently named the number one search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld. Scott’s articles have appeared in numerous publications, including ZDNet, WebProNews, MarketingProfs, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. He was also a contributor to Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004). Medium Blue is an Atlanta search engine optimization company with local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DS Waters, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Download Medium Blue’s latest exclusive whitepaper, “Adding Search to Your Marketing Mix,” for more insight.

Google is by far the most popular search engine available today for both ordinary surfers and webmasters alike. Surfers like it because of the highly relevant results it gives and the speed at which it delivers them. This is due to its complex text matching algorithm and of course the Pagerank® system that this engine uses. More on the Pagerank® system later. Google is popular with webmasters and Internet marketing companies due to the highly workable ranking system it uses. Continue reading »