Rank Magic Blog

Jan/12

Is Your Content Good Enough for SEO?

by Bill under blogs, content, copywriting, links, social media, user experience

Content is the foundation of SEO.

The purpose of an SEO campaign is to drive visitors to your website. But why do you want to do that? So they can see your content, of course.

Without content, you don’t have a website.
With lousy content (visually poor, grammatical errors, keyword stuffing, lack of organization) you have a website that chases people away.
With ineffective content you have a website that fails to convert visitors into paying customers.
With effective content your website becomes a powerful sales tool.

But that’s not the only kind of content that’s important. You may not have realized it, but you have off-site content, too. That’s content in other places that helps promote your brand and direct potential customers to your website. What kind of content is that specifically? How about this:

Articles and white papers posted on other sites.
Online press releases.
An email newsletter. (Sign up for ours!)
Blog posts you write that are syndicated at one or more other blogs.
Twitter mentions.
Mentions at other social media like Facebook, Google+, Delicious, Digg, FriendFeed, StumbleUpon, MerchantCircle, LinkedIn and others.
Mentions and links from other websites related to yours.

Is your content good enough for effective SEO?

How good is the copy on your site? You have to start there because everything else drives people to your on-site copy. Is it unique? Does it provide value by providing non-obvious information and answering questions? Is it interesting to read? Is it literate? Does it funnel visitors toward a buying decision? If not, have you considered hiring a professional copywriter?

Do you have the necessary off-site copy? This is one of the most forgotten factors in SEO. You need a strong presence in as many off-site places as possible to build your link popularity and to drive more visitors to your website.

Once you’ve considered all that, you may decide you need professional help with your SEO. If so, talk to us.

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Jan/12

Google Improves Flash Handling – Is It Enough?

by Bill under content, Google, SEO practices, user experience

The Good News

Google started to improve it’s ability to index Flash content a couple of years ago. Now it can see content within Flash files so it can index that content. And it can follow links within Flash content as well. So Google can now tell what lies within an all-flash website.

The Bad News

This will still not allow all-Flash websites to compete well with HTML web pages. Why? For one thing, Flash is too slow loading, especially for smart phones, tablets and dial-up users. This is especially disadvantageous considering Google’s emphasis on page download speed as an important ranking factor.

With a Flash website there’s still a lack of unique URLs which means no one can link to an internal page in an all-Flash site. Instead everyone has to go through your home page and follow any necessary navigation to get to the content they’re interested in. That conflicts with Google’s current emphasis on user experience as a ranking factor. You also lose many rankings factors associated with individual page titles, link anchor text, site maps and more.

So, What to Do?

Use Flash, but only as individual flash elements on your pages.
Don’t embed navigation to other flash content within your Flash content.
Construct your site with individual HTML pages.
Be sure to take advantage of all the HTML ranking factors available to your HTML pages.

Have questions? Need professional advice? Ask us about Flash and your website’s SEO.

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Jan/12

Good Writing Isn’t Good Enough

by Bill under content, copywriting

Copywriting is a big deal on the web.

The words on your web pages and blog posts are very powerful. They convince people to buy from you. And they convince search engines that your material is worthy to display prominently in search results.

Bad writing compromises all of that “convincing”. Bad writing is very un-convincing. In fact, bad writing is likely to convince people of the wrong things: that you’re not fully literate, that you don’t pay attention to detail, that you’re not very smart, or that you’re not very professional.

So good writing is critical: proper spelling and grammar, effective focus and purpose, good organization in your copy.

But good writing, while essential, isn’t sufficient. You need effective writing.

What’s the difference?

Effective writing grabs the reader’s attention and holds it. Effective writing addresses the reader’s concerns and fears about doing business with you. Effective writing walks the reader right up to the point of sale.

Many of us can (often with a great deal of effort) churn out some good, coherent writing. But making that writing effective so it contributes to your bottom line is a skill of a whole different level. If you’re not sure you’re up to the challenge — or if you’re quite certain you’re not up to the challenge — you need a professional copywriter.

If that’s the case, you could do worse than starting with our list of strategic partners.

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Dec/11

SEO – Not a Sprint but a Marathon

by Bill under Rank Magic, SEO practices

When the challenging economy strikes your business, you may need to revisit your marketing and ramp up your efforts to gain new customers. SEO has about the best ROI of any marketing strategy, but it can’t work miracles … especially not instantly.

SEO needs time to percolate in order to produce results. Here’s why:

On-Page Factors

You can’t just spend some money and find your self perfectly optimized. Keyword research needs to be done so you can choose the important keyword phrases to optimize for. On-page SEO needs to happen next. That involves sometimes extensive copywriting, website architecture and navigation changes, page download speed improvements, writing of page title and description tags, implementation of proper internal linking, and more.

Off-Page Factors – Link Popularity

Those on-page improvements to your website aren’t enough. You need to ensure competitive link popularity, and that means an ongoing link building program has to happen. Any scheme to get you hundreds of inbound links in a hurry is likely to hurt you more than help. You need an ongoing link building program that brings in new links on a steady basis, month after month. That helps your rankings to grow, but it’s a slow process.

Off-Page Factors – Social Media Exposure

You need to generate some buzz as a result of information posted at places like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and so forth. Real-time links from social media are getting increased attention by the search engines.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Your rankings and traffic will typically increase slowly but steadily as your link popularity matures and your on-page optimization takes hold.

At Rank Magic, we include a year of link building on a steady monthly basis as part of a typical SEO project. Depending on the competitiveness of a client’s market niche they may require more intensive link building or a more protracted link building process of an additional year or more.

Beyond that, you need to be prepared to monitor your links, rankings and traffic on an ongoing basis. Changes in the search engine world, changes in your competitive landscape, changes in the focus of your business, and website changes and redesign all have the potential to take a toll on your rankings, and you need to spot that quickly so corrective action can be taken promptly.

When employing SEO it’s important to approach it with the understanding that it’s not sprint, but a marathon. If you expect to win the prize of a rapid increase in customers within a couple of weeks or months you will be disappointed.

Need help? Ask for our free Overview & Pricing Guide.

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Dec/11

Is Keyword Reporting of Google Searches Less Accurate?

by Bill under analytics, Google

Google SSL Many of us rely on website analytics like those from HubSpot, Google Analytics and others to help us understand what keyword phrases are driving visitors to our websites. A recent change at Google is compromising that, at least by a little. If a user is logged into any Google account, Google will now use the secure version of the Google home page (the “SSL-enabled” version) to provide search results.A search done through the secure version of the Google home page protects the user’s search terms, which means your reporting tool can’t see the search term he or she used to find your website.

Google claims that this will affect less than 10% of searchers that find your website. That’s because many people are not logged into a Google account (Google AdWords, Google+, and so forth), and even for those people if they do a search outside of the Google homepage (like from a search box in their browser or on the Google toolbar) they don’t get redirected to the secure Google site for the search.

For those visitors who’ve been redirected to the secure version of Google, you can expect in your website analytics to see a new item in the list of search terms visitors have used: “unknown search” or “unknown keyword”.

So far, it looks as though Google is right: very few searches are being done through their secure website. It remains to be seen, whether that will change over time.

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Dec/11

The Evolution of Search in 6 Minutes

by Bill under Google, search engines

Interesting video from Google on the evolution of search, from Larry Page & Sergey Brin’s initial graduate project at Stanford to where it’s headed in the future.

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Nov/11

Good User Experience is Indispensable

by Bill under content, user experience

Katie Mack wrote about the importance of the user experience in SEO. We couldn’t have said it better:

We firmly believe that the best way to optimize your site for search engines is to optimize it for people. … People will stay longer on your site if they find content engaging and easy to navigate. You also want to encourage users to share your web content, which will naturally drive more traffic to your site from other sources.

She cites a few criteria for an effective user experience. You need content that:

is easy to find
has educational value
is easy to read and understand
invites contribution and sharing

This is especially important for websites that have lost rankings due to Google’s Panda Update earlier this year. That algorithm change gave preference to sites that provide original, relevant content that’s easy to digest and easy to share.

Google wants to highlight high quality websites and the Panda update was largely focused on that goal. Consequently, Google posted (shortly after releasing the Panda update) guidelines on what they think constitutes a high-quality website. They start out by saying:

Our advice for publishers continues to be to focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your websites and not to focus too much on what they think are Google’s current ranking algorithms or signals

We recommend their article.

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Nov/11

Why Did My Google Rankings Drop?

by Bill under Google

Oh, No!!!

A sudden drop in Google rankings is terrifying if you rely on traffic from Google to bring in a significant portion of visitors to your site. When it happens, your traffic almost always takes a proportional hit. And that affects your revenue – very negatively.

What’s most terrifying about this is that you almost never know why it happened — and Google isn’t about to tell you. So how do you know what to fix?

As it turns out, Matt Cutts (The Google Guy) has answered that question in a video. He outlines some concrete steps you can follow to figure out what went wrong so you can fix it.

We hope it never happens to you, but if it does we think Matt’s suggestions will help.

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Nov/11

Is Your Bounce Rate Too High?

by Bill under analytics, content, copywriting

What’s a bounce rate?

It’s the percentage of visitors to your site that bounce. What’s a bounce? It’s a very simple but important concept. When someone arrives at your website, takes one look and leaves without visiting any other pages — that’s a bounce. At a recent symposium, one presenter summed it up like this: “They came, they puked, they left.”

If lots of visitors on your web site bounce away, you’re losing them as customers. Clearly, lots of bounces are visitors who weren’t really looking for you, but for something else. When they bounce, they don’t represent lost sales. But when a real prospective customer bounces, they’re going to do business with one of your competitors. And that’s never good.

How do I tell my bounce rate?

Many hosting companies provide site analytics that display your bounce rate. Failing that, install the free Google Analytics on your site, and you can track the progress of your bounce rate over time very easily.

If your bounce rate is too high, there are wasy to reduce it.

What’s a good bounce rate?

That may depend on your business. Retail websites typically experience about a 20-40% bounce rate. Well optimized content websites normally have a bounce rate in the 40-60% range. If your bounce rate is over 60%, you should be concerned. If it’s over 80%, you have a major problem.

How do I improve my bounce rate?

First, make sure your bounce rates aren’t because people are finding you by searching for stuff you’re not optimized for. If they find you by accident when they’re really looking for something else, those bounces are fine. But if people find you by searching important keywords, those are the bounces you want to improve.

Make sure it’s immediately obvious when someone lands on one of your pages by searching a relevant keyword phrase that the page makes it immediately clear that they’re in the right place. You have no more than 8 seconds to convince them your page is really all about what they searched for. Check your main above-the-fold headline and any other above-the-fold sub-headings.

Then make sure your web page isn’t turning them off. Check the copywriting and make sure you have appealing content. Dierdre Rienzo wrote in the MarketItWrite blog about common writing mistakes that contribute to a high bounce rate and which you need to avoid.

Make those changes and watch your bounce rate. If it doesn’t improve, look for other ways to keep people engaged on your site. Link to related content, use call to action links, and give your visitors what they’re looking for.

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« Older Entries

Google Improves Flash Handling – Is It Enough?

The Good News

The Bad News

So, What to Do?

Have questions? Need professional advice? Ask us about Flash and your website’s SEO.

Good Writing Isn’t Good Enough

Copywriting is a big deal on the web.

What’s the difference?

SEO – Not a Sprint but a Marathon

SEO needs time to percolate in order to produce results. Here’s why:

On-Page Factors

Off-Page Factors – Link Popularity

Off-Page Factors – Social Media Exposure

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Need help? Ask for our free Overview & Pricing Guide.

Is Keyword Reporting of Google Searches Less Accurate?

The Evolution of Search in 6 Minutes

Good User Experience is Indispensable

Why Did My Google Rankings Drop?

Oh, No!!!

Is Your Bounce Rate Too High?

What’s a bounce rate?

How do I tell my bounce rate?

What’s a good bounce rate?

How do I improve my bounce rate?

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