Finally, I’m starting to grasp the depth of SEO and how websites are ranked on Search Engines. Who knew there was so much to it? I knew I had a good grasp and understanding when I came to Beacon but I’ve learned a much deeper side to it that I wasn’t so sure of. There is a ton of information out there and its easy to learn once you dig into it and become familiar with it all.

My knowledge of SEO when I started was on an Intermediate level and now after much research and application with good results, I’m confident to say I’ve stepped up to a Competent/Proficient level. I know not everyone has a deep understanding of SEO and I thought I would take it upon myself to give you a short lesson on Ranking Factors for SEO. I’m going to try and make it as easy as possible to understand but if you have questions, please feel free to leave comments. I love knowing I’ve helped someone learn something new because learning is the key to success. So here we go!

Ranking Factors for SEO:

1. Keywords that you use in title tags – This it thought of as the #1 ranking factor for websites. It needs to say in a few short words what the page is about. The most important keywords should be listed first. For Example: Take Staub Leadership, Here you can tell by looking at the homepage this is company that teaches leadership to people. The Title Tag is what is seen at the top of the tab in firefox.
2. Anchor Text of inbound links – This is the text use to link to a site or in other words it’s the word that is hyperlinked. Example: Look at 1 and Staub Leadership is in blue and underlined. So Staub Leadership is the Anchor text.
3. Global link Authority of a site – this represents the quality and quantity of a site’s links. This just means you want to have links on sites that are relevant and that have good page rank because that page rank is carried on to your site.
4. Link Popularity within a site – This means that pages that have links on all the internal pages of a site show that the page being linked is very popular and important. Having the links on many internal pages of site shows search engines that this page is very important.
5. Topic relevance of inbound links – All this means is that you want to put links on pages that are relevant to the pages you are linking to. For Example: Beacon is creating a link to post on another site for our SEO Management page. In order for the link to be beneficial it needs to be posted on a site that is about SEO management. You wouldn’t want to put the link on a site for Health care because there is no relevance between the two.
6. Link Popularity in linking neighborhood – The more links you have coming to your site from websites that are similar to you show search engines that your site has authority and is reputable as long as they are links from other reputable sites. Links from spamming sites will hurt your website in ranking.
7. Keywords in the Body – Search Engines look at keywords in the body of your website as well as the title tags. The title tag keyword should be repeated in the body as well as synonyms for the keywords used. This helps to show the page is relevant to the topic.

The 7 ways I listed are not the only ways to affect ranking but they are the most common and best practices to start with. So that’s my short lesson for you in SEO Ranking Basics. Hope that helps some and like I said feel free to comment!

Lots of <3,

Ashley

We talk a lot about individual aspects of SEO and PPC, i.e. tactics.  We focus on best practices and offer some tips that we have learned through our own experiences/expertise.  However, to the best of my knowledge, this blog has never discussed the differences in overall strategy that should be taken in using PPC vs. SEO.  That they would be different may make inherent sense, but you will find that many marketers apply the same strategy to these two formats viewing them simply as different channels under the internet umbrella.

While there are exceptions, I typically recommend campaigns for both PPC and SEO to all of my clients.  There are benefits to be found exclusively in each to help the client reach almost any web-based goals.  However, that does not mean that I take the same strategy with both methodologies.  There are some fundamental differences that need to be observed with how each works and who is being targeted that affect how I go about tackling those systems.

For search engine optimization, the over-simplified strategy is to optimize the on-site content so that Google & Bing (and other engines to a lesser degree) will rank the site for terms that customers may be searching.  This includes specific product, service, and category pages – as well as peripheral terms that may be related to that content.  I am often willing to take a “shotgun” approach to SEO by tackling as many phrases that will rank as possible.  Even if this brings in some irrelevant traffic with a lower conversion rate, the raw number of conversions should increase as some users are searching along these lines.  There is no added cost per user beyond the time spent to create the ranking content.  For example, if I want to bring in users who are searching for steel containment tanks, I would like to rank high for the phrase “steel tanks.”  Now, this might also bring many users who are searching for army tanks, but so long as some of the users are searching for holding tanks, I would likely see a positive return on investment.  The tactics taken to achieve good organic results are discussed extensively in a number of SEO related articles on this blog.

For PPC, the strategy needs to be much more targeted.  Each visitor who arrives via PPC costs the provider just a little bit extra.  If PPC ads bring in large quantities of irrelevant/low converting users, this will likely result in a poor return on investment.  Using the previous example, I do not want to target the broad phrase “steel tanks” for PPC ads as they are expensive and a bit of a crapshoot as to how relevant the incoming traffic will be.  Compared to the shotgun for SEO, I want to use more of a sniper rival for PPC.  ROI on PPC can be terrific, but it will always be highest for the most relevant users.  I will want to use phrase (e.g. “steel storage tanks”), exact (e.g. [steel containment tanks]), and negative match (e.g. steel tanks –army) terms to best filter where my ads are shown.  That is not to say that you need to limit volume, only focus on that which is most likely to convert and work from there.  The Beacon blog contains a number of posts to discuss best practices in creating ads and the types of phrases that are most worthy of focus.

While I hate the word “synergy” (it is often used in situations where it is completely unachievable – i.e. business mergers), there is something to be said for PPC and SEO feeding off of each other.  They help create exposure and enhance the user experience to the point where they produce better results together than the sums of what either could achieve alone.  Just take heed to ensure that you are using a strategy specifically tailored for that aspect of web marketing as opposed to just sectioning out the same strategy across different channels.

Well sadly, this is my last blog post at Beacon.  It’s been a great 10 weeks.  I really have enjoyed my time here.  Looking back, I can’t think of anything negative to say about my experience.  I want to take the chance to kind of do a recap of my time here.

When I came in the first day, I will admit that I was pretty nervous.  I hadn’t really had a lot of exposure to the kind of work that Beacon does so well.  I knew what most of the terms were from talking to a friend of mine who has been doing similar work.  However, the WMS team here helped me learn the skills I needed.  Everyone took time to show me how to do certain tasks and helped me with understanding the clients I worked on as well as what needed to be done for each client.  As the weeks have gone by, I have grown more confident in doing SEO work, managing social media campaigns, and working with PPC campaigns.  I know that I still have a lot to learn in these areas, but Beacon has given me a strong foundation on which to build.

I know that people traditionally think of internships as being filled with a lot of grunt work.  Getting coffee, running errands, doing tasks that no one else wants to do themselves.  That is far from the case here at Beacon.  As you can tell if you have been following my blog posts thus far, I have been an equal member of the WMS team.  I have shared the same responsibilities as everyone else.  I’ve done the same tasks for my clients as they did for their clients.  Often times, interns don’t get to offer advice and feedback during meetings as it is intended that they learn by watching.  Again, this is not the case at Beacon.  The WMS team meets weekly to brainstorm ideas for clients as well as share interesting articles or other helpful information and tools.  The leading of the meetings rotates each week and regardless of the fact that I am an intern, I led the meeting twice during my time here.  I also contributed equally with the team as much as possible.  I will admit that I often did sit back and listen during meetings.  I know that I do not have nearly the amount of knowledge or experience in this field, and as such I wanted to try to learn as much as possible when everyone was together sharing ideas.

Looking back, I have gained a lot of valuable experience.  There are several tasks and projects that I was able to work on and contribute to during the 10 weeks.  I can honestly say that anyone who is looking for an internship should consider Beacon.  The atmosphere, company culture, and employees all lend themselves to a great work environment.

Thank you to everyone here!  It’s been a great experience and I have learned a lot from you all.

Yesterday Google made a post about their new +1 project available here http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/06/1-reporting-in-google-webmaster-tools.html and how sometimes these new features don’t really have much impact until you are able to view the data associated with those features.   Well that is what Google wants to make available to website marketers, managers, and owners by providing report data in two separate locations.  The first is in the Google Webmaster Tools account and the second is available in your Google Analytics account.

The first new report in Webmaster Tools is the Search Impact report.    Google provided an example report which you can see below.  The most interesting thing that catches my eye is their primary focus on CTR and how this new feature affects that.    I’ve been saying for some time that Google is placing a lot more weight on the CTR as a factor in determining your search engine position for an organic search.   You can find a relevant post here.   http://blog.beacontechnologies.com/google-seo-factors-2011/

This new report will allow you to measure the change in CTR associated with this feature.   The higher the number of +1s the higher the position, the higher the CTR, the higher quality.  It looks like this new feature is going to play a significant role in Google’s Organic ranking algorithm over the next several years.    For the longest time Google had to rely on other websites “casting their vote” for another website’s authority in the form of links.  This is what the Google algorithm was based on and what made it so successful.   It was also what spawned a new industry of link building and manipulation of the results.

Google appears to be shifting from a website’s vote of importance to more of a personal vote of authority by allowing users themselves to cast their vote in the form of their “+1″.   Their is no doubt that spammers will begin strategies to manipulate this but for the time being it appears that the web is evolving and understands that what people say is important is better than what a set of codes or website says is important.

So how do you make sure you take advantage of this and get a leg up on the competition?    Google provides the information you need in your Google Webmaster tools account.   Once you are logged in, you will need to click on the new Social link in the left navigation and then click on the “add +1 button” at the top of the reports pages.    It’s a simple set of codes that references the primary JS file and the other to actually display the button.

Once you have the +1 button installed and are using it to it’s full potential,  you will want to see how the users who have given you their vote of confidence interact on your website differently.   Do they bounce less, access more pages, convert higher, spend more money, or any of a number of questions you might have?   Well Google Analytics will help you answer these questions by automatically including these statistics in your UI with three new reports.  Their is a social engangement report that segments your social users similar to a custom segment, then there is a social sources and actions report which allows you to see who does what actions from which social network.   And then their is the Page report that allows you to see social metrics associated with pages so you can get specific with your data and tie it to specific content.

And as usual, you can create all kinds of drill down reports by adjusting the dimensions and other report features to create a custom view into your website user’s social behavior.    We don’t currently have a ton of data in these reports yet because they are so new so we are still playing around and seeing what we can discover.  There is surely more to come about this and I will post some updates to new posts as am sure this is going to be a hot topic for some time now.



“Solving for Pattern” is the title to a fascinating essay written by lifelong academic Wendell Berry.  If you have never read it, I highly recommend that you do.  Over-simplified, this essay addresses that our solutions to problems often create new problems in the short or long term.  Its conclusions may seem self-intuitive, but they are obviously not.  As a society, we continually make the same kinds of mistakes it addresses.

Berry asserts that good solutions to problems are much rarer than most people think.  He uses agriculture examples to show where addressing a single problem can lead to bigger peripheral issues.  An example would be cattle penned in a small area helping to build economies of scale, but also creating a situation where disease becomes more common and spreads more quickly.  Narrow vision and/or ignorance can lead to solutions that cause more problems than they solve:

“A bad solution is bad, then, because it acts destructively upon the larger patterns in which it is contained. It acts destructively upon those patterns, most likely, because it is formed in ignorance or disregard of them. A bad solution solves for a single purpose or goal, such as increased production.”

A truly good solution creates positive outcomes throughout the entire system where it is being used.  The often stated, but rarely obtained, business buzz word “synergy” would be applicable here.

While Berry’s essay used the agriculture industry as support for its claims, it also is quite applicable to the world of website creation and web marketing.  It is not uncommon in my line of work to run across ideas or plans to address a single concern that might cannibalize other aspects of a company’s web profile upon implementation.  It is important to maintain big picture thoughts even when making smaller adjustments.  For example, over-targeting for certain high volume key phrases and/or building low quality content to specifically to rank for these phrases can address search engine rankings, but could negatively affect the site’s user experience and performance overall.  This is why a lot of SEO firms who offer high rankings through high volume spam and completely generic landing pages for a select few key phrases should be taken with a grain of salt – their solutions (if they even work for what they are promising) could open up a can of worms elsewhere.

To solve you website for pattern, when making large scale adjustments, keep in mind the following items:

* How will this strategy affect my user’s experience?

* Will this change even address the issue I am concerned about?  Why am I doing this in the first place?

* What are some possible peripheral issues that could arise from this change?

* Test, Test, Test.  Never launch a dramatic change or new site blind.  While you will never know exactly how the web as a whole will react, there are numerous ways (focus testing, A/B tests, etc.) that will give you some idea of what to expect with your results.

The best way to ensure that you are solving for pattern and not creating more problems is to always be focusing on the overall strategy and goals of the website.  Be aware of your site’s & your company’s strengths, opportunities, and limitations.  Solutions and changes to your website should fit easily within your company’s strategy and operations.  If they don’t, then that is a weakness of the organization as a whole and an issue that is likely to be solved by a website tweak.

-EW, follow me on twitter @ejwestksu

This week was a fun week.  I got the opportunity to learn some things that I was not familiar with and then got to put what I learned into practice.  I learned how to create SEO landing pages.  Basically these pages serve the purpose of helping a website rank for keywords that are important to the website.  This is turn helps the page to appear higher in search results.  Making and editing these pages is not the most fun task, but it is a good skill to have.  I think I spent probably around four hours learning how to do this and then actually working on them.  All-in-all, I would say it was a good experience.  I learned some information on effectively creating title tags, meta descriptions, and page content.  These are skills that will help me even outside of SEO work.  I had to think about getting my message across in a short message and efficiently say what I am trying to say in that short message.  This is a valuable skill to have.

Another thing I did this week was to learn a lot about Twitter and how to utilize it.  One of the clients I am working with is focusing a lot on social media and trying to increase its presence and better communicate with whom it is connected.  One of the things fun things with this client is that I am getting to learn more about Twitter and then share that information as well as help manage the Twitter account.  Some of the things I’ve been working on are optimizing whom the client follows as well as helping with communicating to the client’s followers.  I have been looking over some of the tweets that the client sees and retweeting them to the client’s followers as well as a few other related tasks.

Aside from that, there were the usual meetings/brainstorming sessions.  These are great because I get to learn more about SEO and different methods and tools.  Another thing I did this week was start to conceptualize a layout for a monthly newsletter for a client.  I really like to do things like that because it allows me to be more creative.  I don’t really have great drawing talent so it looks pretty rough on the piece of notebook paper that I hashed it out on, but it gets the job done.  I guess the next step is to practice using Photoshop to work on my graphic editing skills and also using Dreamweaver to compile the newsletter since it will be sent out in HTML.

Texas A&M Foundation launched this month. Our objectives were to analyze, design, develop and host the Texas A&M Foundations public blog.  The blog design also needed to closely mimic the public site design. We have worked with TAMF on several other web site projects, including redesigning their public web site twice. The site received lots of comments and traffic on its very first day.

Features and Highlights:
• User manual
• RSS feed
• SEO friendly URLs
• Creation of categories
• Ability to add images and/or video to blog posts
• Contact information for each post author
• Comments allowed and moderated

Thomas Brinegar primarily handled the design and development with periodic assistance from Annette Fowler, Wendy Honeycutt, Justin Klingman and Tiffany May. William Nichols handled all of the administrative duties. Finally, big thanks to Heather Showstead for sound advice and suggestions.

Thanks to all!

I had the opportunity to attend a Google Business webinar last week hosted by Avinash Kaushik. The topic was outcome driven digital marketing. Avinash divided web marketing skill sets into three stages.

Cute Toddler: When web marketers are in this stage they are focused on cost; tracking things like clicks and impressions to figure out the cost per conversion/acquisition. At this level, tracking is implemented like Google Analytics but is only used to see the basics like traffic volume, most visited pages, bounce rates, and conversions.

Rockin’ Teenager: As your web marketing skills grow and develop, you start to focus on revenue instead of just cost. If your site has e-Commerce, this is especially important. At this stage you’re also probably using Pay-Per-Click advertising. Creating advanced segments in Google Analytics will start painting a clearer picture of how your visitors interact with the conversion path. Also, linking your analytics with you Adwords (or other PPC) account allows you to start looking at not only cost-per-click, but revenue-per-click. You can now factor in cost of goods sold to find net profit.

Ninja: After mastering the skills above, you are now in the ninja stage. You understand analytics and know how to calculate revenue but now you’re onto something much bigger…value. Ninjas hunt for what’s beyond the basics and try to unite web marketing with total marketing efforts. In addition to major conversion points like purchases, ninjas track customer value by tracking minor conversions like email submissions, catalog requests, loyalty programs, and social media. Using data gathered from the web and from traditional marketing, ninjas can estimate not only cost and revenue per acquisition/conversion but total value to the company.

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My Thoughts: I was extremely pleased to learn that our Web Marketing team here at Beacon is packed with skilled ninjas. We become partners with each and every client in order to reach the most sophisticated level of understanding and achieve powerful results. If you want the best in Web Marketing, hire the ninjas! 

Recently I have had the opportunity to make really exciting and interactive web pages using jQuery. Before working on these projects I had very little understanding of jQuery and what all it could be used for. So I decided to do some research on what the benefits are of using jQuery over other applications such as conventional JavaScript and wanted to see what all I can build using it. Basically you can do almost anything with jQuery to make effects and animation on your site and still be SEO friendly and cross browser compliant.  But those aren’t the only benefits….

What is jQuery?

“jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.” http://jquery.com/

Benefits of using jQuery:

• Search Engine Optimized – While search engines are getting better at being able to read content within some Flash, everything within jQuery is setup as text. This means it is completely readable to all the search engines, exposing all your keyword rich content.
• Save Time – Five lines of jQuery are equivalent to 25 lines of conventional JavaScript code. This means smaller files and faster loading web pages.
• Plug-ins – There are an abundance of plug-ins on the web that make creating special effects simple and fast for web developers.
• Help? – With an abundance of plug-ins comes with an abundance of help. There is a large helpful support community on the web to help you quickly remedy any bug issues.
• That was easy! – jQuery has easy implementation for web developers in comparison to other applications.
• Cross Browser Friendly – jQuery is currently the most popular JavaScript library and works in all browsers.
• FREE! – free, open source software.
• Mobile Devices – jQuery is supported by any mobile device whose web browser supports JavaScript. A lot of mobile devices like iPads and iPhones don’t run Flash at all.
• Simplifies AJAX
• Wow Factor – Web developers use jQuery to make web pages more exciting, interactive, cleaner, and more user friendly. Make your users go WOW!

jQuery in action! A few examples of jQuery Usage

• Rotating Image Slider
• Interactive Google Map
• Animated Content Menu
• Slide Effects
• Slider Gallery
• Photobar Gallery
• Slideshow Gallery
• Mobile Image Gallery Web App
• Content Slider
• Photo Zoom Out Effect

Coming into this first week, I was not very familiar with web marketing or search engine optimization (SEO).  I had heard of both terms and I could describe what they were on a very basic level.  Basically, if I were asked what they meant, I would have simply defined them as the following:

*Web Marketing – Marketing online through use of websites and social media sites

*SEO – Making your website appear higher in Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and other searches

Over the past two and a half days, I have spent the better part of my 20 hours a week here at Beacon Technologies (Beacon) reading blog after blog on what SEO really is and how it is done.  I had heard of Google Analytics (GA) through a friend of mine, but I had never had any exposure to it nor a reason to research it further than the few discussions we shared.  All I can say about GA is that I am amazed at the simplistic complexity of it.  On the surface, it seems very intuitive.  You can track information regarding visitors to your websites such as if it was their first time visiting or if they were a return visitor.  At the same time, GA allows you to dive much deeper into statistics.  The complexity of GA comes from designing filters and goals to determine exactly what information you are after.  From what I can tell, almost anything you wish to know about visits to your websites is obtainable in GA.  All you have to do is think it and visualize how to find it.

This week, I have also been able to sit in on meetings and brainstorming sessions.  I feel like this is the best part of the week so far.  Coming in with little knowledge of the services Beacon provides is a little unnerving.  However, all the people here have really made an effort to take time to explain things to me as well as treat me as an equal part of the web marketing team.  It’s a comforting feeling to go into something new and know that the people there are ready and willing to help you and guide you along the way.  Also, before I even started, Beacon had already set up everything I needed to integrate with the team.  There was a cube with a computer, phone, and the other essentials already in place for me.  In addition to that, Beacon had already set up all of my internal accounts such as email, network access, and etcetera.

As I am wrapping up week one, I feel confident in what is expected of me as well as how to accomplish the tasks at hand.  Thanks to the large amount of reading and videos I’ve watched on GA, Google AdWords and other resources, I am ready to hit the ground running next week.  It doesn’t hurt that I know that I have several people that I can go to for advice if I get stumped either.