Here are what I consider to be the essential readings and tools for learning SEO, in order of value:

Free Resources

SEOMoz Beginner’s Guide to SEO

My first boss had me read this guide several times before I was allowed to work on even the smallest site elements. Though written several years ago, SEOmoz has kept this one up to date. You can stick to perusing the guide online, or request a downloadable copy to be printed and read at your leisure.

After I read the guide above, I was expected to read the featured Moz blog post every day. After a week or two I was expected to be able to partake in commenting and discussing the latest with the authors and other community members.

The White Board Friday video posts are fun.

Among most digital marketing professionals I’ve spoken with, SEOmoz can do little wrong in the industry. I feel that the love for Moz stems from their open-book treatment of SEO strategy. They give away a lot of tactics that agencies might keep to themselves and openly strive to promote white-hat tactics.

Geoff Kenyon’s Technical Site Audit Checklist

This is a great tool checklist to use when performing site audits, or even just keeping track of best-practice tasks that need to continue through the life of a site. When I was freelancing, I might have used this in a white labeled format to present to clients my findings regarding the overall health of their sites.

w3schools HTML Tutorial

I consider this to be my favorite resource for html for those who are learning or need a refresher. Many SEOs today seem to have to learn HTML as they go, rather than have an understanding of it before they take on positions in digital departments. This is a great tutorial and will also provide a bunch of easy-to-reference “cheat sheets.” This particular link is for HTML basics, but w3schools has guides for all web design.

Screaming Frog

I used Screaming Frog and another similar tool, Xenu Link Sleuth, to create reports and benchmarks before I had access to other paid software and services. Now there are some enterprise level tools that do most of the scans and diagnostic checks automatically, but I still use Screaming Frog to manually dig through crawl errors, title tags, and other essential pieces of my sites.

TIP: Screaming Frog is a great resource for a beginner to do a single scan of a site and save it for reference. Use the results of this one scan to provide contextual reference when you learn new SEO terminology. When you are studying how to write better titles and descriptions, make sure to reference the scan of the property you are working on so you have a frame of reference in regard to what you are learning.

I say a single scan because if you make the rookie mistake of scanning a sight too many times in quick succession, it’s possible to set off security protocols that bog down your site’s performance — even trigger a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) on your own site.

Google Adwords Tool

Sure, this is designed to build keyword lists for PPC, but can also be a great quick easy tool for some top-level keyword research for SEO. Adwords keyword tool can help you gain relevant data relating to the amount of searches for a given term, as well as how many sites are targeting it.

Paid Resources

Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules by Mike Moran

This was one of the first print resources I purchased on the subject of digital marketing. It provides a great high-level look at the function of all the pieces of digital marketing(SEO, Paid Search, Social Media) and how they interplay. It also provides a great frame of mind in how to cope with successes and failures, learning from both in the process, and moving forward.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Secrets by Danny Dover and Erik Dafforn

This one is a fantastic guide written by SEOmoz former lead SEO. It’s easily accessible to beginners, but also provides some great know-how for the intermediate, or even expert, SEO.

With every profession, the key is always continuing your education. If you’re a beginner SEO, then start your education with this great set of resources to study and make use of while you work and learn.

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What is the Difference between Google Places and Google Plus?

Google has been fairly confusing during the changes that it made to how local businesses are listed in its Maps and Search that rolled out last year, and it has not made things easy or clear for local businesses.

Originally, a local business could create a listing for themselves on Google Maps by using Google Places. After the creation of Google Plus, Google also made it possible for businesses to create social pages on Google Plus, called Google Plus for Business — similar to Facebook pages for businesses.

Google’s ultimate goal has been to combine the map listings of the Google Places pages with the social aspect of the Google Plus pages. The first step in this process was to upgrade the look and feel of a Google Places page so that it looks more like a Google Plus page. With the redesign also came a new name: Google Plus Local. Totally not confusing at all, right?

Some months later, Google rolled out a process by which you can combine your Google Places (Google Plus Local) page and your Google Plus for Business page into one complete page that is both listed on Google Maps and has social features. Take a note here: before you run to go do that, it might not always be a good idea, depending on what type of business you are. See the “Combining” section below.

How to Set Up your Google Places and Google Plus Pages

Important things to note about setting up your pages:

• Fill out as much information as possible. Business name, address, and phone number aren’t enough. Fill out hours, fill out your business category, add a description and pictures and videos. Note: if it’s a Google Places page, any videos you add won’t be displayed. Those must be added to a Google Plus page or a combined page.
• Your address should appear on your Google Pages exactly as it appears on your website. Google has its own standard way of displaying addresses, so if Google displays your address differently once you enter it into your Google page, you should change the address on your website. Google is more likely to rank you higher if all of your addresses everywhere on the web all match exactly.
• Don’t use a P.O. Box or a UPS Store as your address. Google will delete you. If you can’t receive mail at your address, Google does have some guidelines about what to do.
• If you are a Service Area Business, or a business that only serves customers at their location (such as a locksmith or a cleaning service), you must hide your address by checking a small box that says “Do not show customers my address.” The reasoning behind this is that the reason customers want an address would be so they can come to your place of business, and if you don’t serve any customers at your place of business, Google doesn’t want to confuse people by showing them an address. This little requirement also means that you should not have a “local business” Google + page since the address cannot be hidden, and you should not merge your Google Places page and your Google Plus page (see below).
• In general, the name that you put as your business name on either your Places or Plus page should match the signs that you have outside your business and the business name that you use when you answer the phone. Google moderators may check your street signs on Street View, or they may call your business to double check your information. Unless everything matches, they may delete your listing.
• If you have time, familiarize yourself with the Google Guidelines for these types of pages. If you violate Google’s guidelines, you may be subject to removal. Most of the guidelines are pretty straightforward, but there are some exceptions depending on what type of business you are, such as service area businesses.

Combining Your Google Places Page and Google Plus Page

Tired of managing and updating two separate pages? Google has made it possible to combine your Google Places page and your Google Plus page. However, you should only do this if you fit these specific criteria:

• You don’t use the Bulk Uploads feature
• You are not a Service Area Business that only serves people at their homes
• If your Google+ page is not listed as a Local Business
• You have a Google+ page
• You can receive verification postcards
• Your business’s Google Places listing and Google+ page were claimed by the same email address

If you fit all the above criteria, merging your Places listing and Plus page should be possible. However, merging the pages will not necessarily help your SEO in any way. Benefits to doing this mostly include ease of managing pages.

Where to Get Help

The first place to get help is to look through Google’s Places Help pages and Google’s Plus Help pages. In addition to articles about common problems, there are also ways to troubleshoot and report issues and receive support from Google.

In addition, Google also provides the Google and Your Business Forum where business owners can ask questions and get answers from other knowledgeable people and Google employees.

For even more good information on this, see the dedicated, well-researched information on local search — primarily Google, but information about improving your business across all local search platforms in general.

The post Google Places and Google Plus Pages Explained appeared first on 435 Digital.

Carolyn Shelby, Director of SEO

Paid Search

First to present was PPC Specialist, Rich Funk. Here are the four main topics he covered:

Effective Keyword Lists
Keywords are the most important to your account because that is how you choose where your ad is seen. Having the wrong keyword list is usually worse than having no keyword list; consider it a better investment to throw money down the drain.

Advanced Targeting
The people you target and where they are can be just as important as your keyword list. Efficiency is key here. Putting your ad in front of people in the wrong place or the wrong time can be wasteful. Effective geographic targeting is important to the campaign.

Proper Account Structure
Make it easy on yourself. If you have an account that is messy and disorganized, any changes you make will take longer and work less effectively. Being organized will help you make quick changes to your campaigns and give you more time to optimize.

Effective Ad Copy
Your ad copy is how you present yourself to your potential customers. If you have the wrong message you could alienate potential clients. Ad copy testing will help determine the most effective messaging. You can do this by creating A/B tests on a regular basis.

Search Engine Optimization (Organic)

Here’s what Director of SEO, Carolyn Shelby, covered:

What Search Engines Do
Search engines want to refer each user to websites most relevant to the user’s search query. This relevancy is determined by a number of factors – all designed to ensure authenticity. Search engines do not support underhanded tactics and tricks to get to the top.

Multichannel Optimization
We can’t always control what types of results appear (blended/universal, news, images, video, etc.), so we need to optimize all of our digital assets. We also need to keep our messaging (the voice and style of our brands) unified across all channels (social media channels, web, print, broadcast, etc.). Every time a consumer is exposed to our brand, we want that exposure to reinforce our message. Unified messaging builds and reinforces branding and helps train the customers to search for you by the terms YOU want to be found under.

Business Considerations
Before getting submerged in SEO, your business needs to determine its goals on the web and make sure your web development/marketing team understands your business model. The most important question (that everyone on the team should be able to answer is): How do we make money? Do we sell impressions? Do we only make money on conversions? How do we define a conversion? Who are our customers?

Build out the right type of website functionality and content to suit your business needs.

On-Page SEO Best Practices
Many factors go into SEO and their value collectively can improve your search rankings. Carolyn discussed metadata, good and bad coding, how to brainstorm for keywords, and the importance of developing quality content for your website.

Whoa, that’s a lot to cover in one session!

Yes, there was a lot of information covered in the Intro to Digital Marketing seminar. If you were unable to attend, we hope you will join us at an upcoming seminar in April. We will be covering Social Media, Advanced PPC, and Advanced SEO. So whether your business is just getting started in digital marketing or your team has successful experience, we are here to provide the most recent updates and strategies for success.

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In this edition of What’s Your KPI?, we will discuss search results rankings.

This article discusses in depth what a ranking is, how rankings work, and the aspects of an SEO campaign that rankings can and cannot measure. If you don’t want to read the whole article, the short and sweet version can be found at the end in the Bullet Points for Review section.

What Are Rankings?

Before we start, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page about terminology. For the purposes of this blog post, and generally when SEOs talk about “rankings,” they mean “How high one of your website’s pages appears when someone searches for a specific keyword.” For example, if you own a hardware store, someone searches Google for “local hardware stores,” and the front page of your website appears in the third spot on the search results page, you might say that your homepage ranks third for the term “local hardware stores.”

Tools like Google Webmaster Tools will also give you a list of keywords that have a number next to them, this number tells you (on average) how high that page of your website ranks for certain search phrases. As you can see from the image, Google Webmaster Tools calls this number “Average Position,” but it means the same thing as “ranking.”

A lot of people get really excited about rankings when they first get into the world of SEO. In theory, rankings are the perfect measure of how well your business' SEO campaign is going. Search results are a big scoreboard, and when you search for your keyword phrases, you can tell right away where you stand, both overall and compared to your competitors. That's why it's called a "ranking," right?

Unfortunately, that's not how rankings actually work.

Let's dig a little deeper into exactly how Google (and other search engines) come up with search results so we can better understand what, exactly, a ranking is and what it is not.

How Rankings Work

Pretend that your friend has just asked you for a movie recommendation. It might be easy to just give them a list of your three favorite movies, but if you want to make sure you are helpful to them — you’re a good friend — you would ask them some questions to help clarify what might interest them.

• What genre of movie do they have in mind?
• Are they going to be watching the movie by themselves?
• Will they watch it on a date?
• With a bunch of friends?
• With their family?

Depending on the answers to those questions, you might recommend entirely different movies.

Search engines are similar. When someone searches for something in a search engine, “good movies” might be the words they type, but the search engine will try to figure out as much as they can about the person searching so that they can give them better search results.

Google is well-known for personalizing its search results. Google places a cookie in your browser that tracks the websites you visit. That way it can figure out what kinds of content you like (long articles or funny videos?), what you normally look for, and what seem to be your favorite websites. This has become even more personalized since the recent launch of Search Plus Your World, where if you search for something through Google while you are logged into Google+, it will use information from your profile, your search history, and your friends on Google+ to try to bring you more personalized results.

Even if you are completely logged out of every Google product, have cleared your web history, browser cache, cookies, and are browsing in “safe mode,” Google can still figure out what kind of computer or mobile device you’re using, what browser you’re using, your internet speed, and most importantly, your location.

Sound a bit creepy? Maybe. However, personalized search results do usually deliver on their promise to make search results more useful for the user. For example, if you search for “local hardware stores” while you are physically in Tampa, Florida, don’t you want to get different search results than someone searching for “local hardware stores” who is physically in Redmond, Washington?

The bottom line of this customization is that no two people have the same search results. Let me say that again. No two people get the same search results. A more in-depth article about this can be found here. This means that, unlike a scoreboard, where each website would always be third or tenth across the board, a business’ website may show up much higher or lower in the search results for different people searching in different locations on different computers at different times.

So if websites never show up at the same place in the search results, how can you have one solid number that’s considered your “ranking” for a keyword?

The “rank” numbers available from tools like Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are more like an average. If your rank is “8″ for a certain term, that means that on average, your website is showing up eighth in the search results for that term.

Why “Rankings” Aren’t a Good KPI

Not Really a Score: Now that you know that nobody sees the same search results, it’s easier to understand why rankings can’t be a hard-and-fast measure of SEO success. It’s great to have a higher ranking than your competitors, but that doesn’t mean you will always show up higher in every search result set just because you have a higher ranking. Even if you have a higher ranking, your competitors may sometimes show up higher than you. Conversely, even if you have a lower ranking, you may show up higher than your competitors. It all depends on who is searching.

Depends on Good Keywords: I’ve hinted at it several times throughout this article, but I’ll say it explicitly: There is no “one” rank for your entire website for every keyword. Certain pages of your website will have a rank for a specific keyword. For example your home page may have a ranking of “5″ for “local hardware store,” but it might not even rank in the top 10 for “stores that sell nails.” The reason this is important is because if you are trying to rank for the wrong keywords, you may never have true “success” in the form of customers who want to buy your products. As a hardware store, ranking in the top 5 for the word “tools” feels really good, but accomplishing that top ranking won’t necessarily bring in the kind of people who are looking to buy your products from you.

It’s Getting Harder To Track: There used to be several tools where you could enter in a keyword or phrase that you were trying to rank for, and then you could track week-to-week or month-to-month whether your rank for that term was rising or falling. Unfortunately, due to some updates in Google’s policies, there are few, if any, tools that do that anymore. The only places to get information about your site’s rank are through Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics, and neither of those tools have the functionality or present the information as well. This makes it difficult to track whether or not your rankings for specific keywords are changing.

So What Are Rankings Good For?

Essentially, the only thing that rankings are good for is that they can give you an idea of, on average, how visible a page of your website is in the search results for a certain keyword phrase. That’s it. Sorry folks.

Bullet Points For Review:

• “Rankings” are how high your website appears in the search results for a specific keyword.
• Search engines personalize everyone’s search results, so no two people ever have the same results.
• A “ranking” is really an average number, meaning sometimes you will show up higher than your ranking, sometimes lower, depending on who’s searching.
• This makes it hard to use as a comparison or as a definite measure of success. At best, it can tell you generally where you are, but not much else.

The post What’s Your KPI: Search Rankings are a Terrible Performance Indicator appeared first on 435 Digital.

There are many published reasons for going mobile. One that is not mentioned as frequently is the clear benefit you get from simply having one website that lives under one domain name. All the searches that people have done in the past and all the bookmarks and backlinks will still be valid and will count towards your website’s ranking power in search engines. With the focus you’ll need to pour into good mobile design and determinations about how to display content on smaller device screens, you can at least be assured that your entire history of your site will continue to be valuable.

8 Ways Responsive Design is Good for Business and Good for SEO

1. You keep your current domain name, and your entire site continues at the same URL.
2. You do not purchase additional domain names or add subdomains.
3. All SEO value you currently have will continue; you will not have to start over.
4. You’ll have just one site you’re promoting.
5. Using CSS, HTML5, and perhaps javascript, your website will flexibly respond to every user’s screen size, regardless of whether it’s a desktop, tablet, or smartphone.
6. Users will have a better experience with your site, and will like your business better for that.
7. When users share links or bookmark pages on your site, those links will always work – with anyone on any device.
8. If your current desktop site has links from other sites, blogs, Facebook posts, tweets, Google+, and more, those will all continue to work, as well.



The benefits are clear. Maintain the SEO quality of your site even while you go mobile by using responsive design. So don’t wait on either improving SEO or going mobile.

435 Digital’s SEO Director, Carolyn Shelby, is presenting all the SEO basics in the 312 Digital Marketing Class on January 22, 2013. Start the new year by improving your SEO, and go mobile while retaining all of your SEO efforts. It’s a win-win.

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]]> http://435digital.com/blog/2013/01/02/responsive-design-is-good-seo/feed/ 0 http://435digital.com/blog/2012/12/28/introduction-digital-marketing-class/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=introduction-digital-marketing-class http://435digital.com/blog/2012/12/28/introduction-digital-marketing-class/#comments Fri, 28 Dec 2012 15:08:54 +0000 Sarah Reid http://435digital.com/?p=15916 If you’ve been looking ahead to next year’s marketing goals and think that it’s probably time that you focused some energy on digital marketing (hint: It’s been time for several years now), we have some good news for you. 435 Digital’s SEO Director, Carolyn Shelby, will be teaching the Search Engine Optimization portion of an upcoming

The post Introduction to Digital Marketing Class appeared first on 435 Digital.

]]> If you’ve been looking ahead to next year’s marketing goals and think that it’s probably time that you focused some energy on digital marketing (hint: It’s been time for several years now), we have some good news for you. 435 Digital’s SEO Director, Carolyn Shelby, will be teaching the Search Engine Optimization portion of an upcoming class entitled “Introduction to Digital Marketing” for 312 Digital on January 22nd, 2013.

About the Introduction to Digital Marketing Class

This 312 Digital course will be taught at the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce offices at 200 E. Randolph Street in Downtown Chicago. Each of the class sections will last for 2 hours, with 90 minutes going toward lecturing about the topics from the experts. The other 30 minutes is spent in small groups, where you can talk about how to apply what you’ve learned to your business specifically.

The experts will be covering the following topics:

• Digital Marketing First Steps: Discussing content strategy and keyword research.
• Search Engine Optimization: Introducing SEO, discussing domains, and covering on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
• Social Media: Learning how to fit a social media plan into your day, find the right audience, go beyond a like, and capitalizing on results.
• Marketing Analytics: Introducing analytics, webmaster tools, analytics set up, how to benchmark metrics, and creating a dashboard to organize your data.

This “Introduction to Digital Marketing” class is perfect for anyone wanting to learn more about the various branches of digital marketing. Whether you’re a small business owner, an employee charged with running your company’s online marketing efforts, or a college student who wants to be more competitive in the job marketing with additional digital marketing knowledge, there is valuable info to be gathered from this class taught by industry experts.

Special Savings and Advanced Registration Rates

While you may have missed out on early bird registration, you still have time to catch the advance registration price by January 5th, 2013.

Use the promo code “435Digital” to save $100 off the registration price. Visit 312 Digital’s Eventbrite page to register today.

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]]> http://435digital.com/blog/2012/12/28/introduction-digital-marketing-class/feed/ 0 http://435digital.com/blog/2012/12/18/seo-your-content/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=seo-your-content http://435digital.com/blog/2012/12/18/seo-your-content/#comments Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:55:19 +0000 Christy Grant http://435digital.com/?p=15724 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for any website content involves many factors beyond the words on the site. There are coding standards, tags, the architecture of the site, navigation, and page titles — many components. Yet when it’s time for you to write a piece for your site — whether it’s a blog post, an update

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]]> Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for any website content involves many factors beyond the words on the site. There are coding standards, tags, the architecture of the site, navigation, and page titles — many components. Yet when it’s time for you to write a piece for your site — whether it’s a blog post, an update to the About Us page, or any other collection of words — you need to know how to SEO your content so that people will find you.



7 SEO Tips To Improve Your Website’s Search Engine Ranking

1. Original Content

   The number one important thing is to write unique and relevant content. Put the most important content near the beginning. Remember that your words sometimes appear out of context, so be specific. For example, instead of writing “snow shovels,” say “North Pole Gear snow shovels.” That helps search engines identify you and helps people know you.

   Also, be sure not to duplicate content from other pages of your site or from any other site. Google is highly suspicious of duplication and will penalize your site for this. Always write something original and valuable. Search engine optimization helps people find your content. Providing something of value keeps people on your site.

2. Keywords

   This part goes into the content that you write. After doing your keyword research, use your chosen keyword throughout your content as it naturally fits. You can vary it to use singular and plural versions of the words, use acronyms or abbreviations. Just use it as relevant and as it fits. Those keywords will help Google find your page and display it in the search results, and it will help people click through to your page when they see you have the subject they’re searching.

3. Page Title

   This is the title that the search engines read and that people see when searching a relevant subject. Most likely, you are using a content management system and a portion of the page title will be automatically created. As long as it sounds good, frontload your page title with your keyword or keyword phrase. The page title should be a max of 66 characters, including spaces. Be sure to write it so that it sounds like a title written by a person, rather than a machine-generated string of words.

4. Meta Page Descriptions

   This is the brief description that appears with the page title in search results and helps people decide whether to click the link to your page. It’s a great idea to include keywords, but more importantly, it needs to be compelling. The max length should be 156 characters — or slightly longer than a tweet — with no quotes or non-alpha characters since Google removes those. So write a slightly long tweet and include information not already in the page title.

5. Article Title – H1 Tag

   This is the title of the actual piece you write. This is your heading to alert people to the main subject matter of your article. Be sure it is brief and clearly conveys the main point of your writing. Use your keyword one time within the header and be sure this is in the H1 tag in your page code.

6. Internal Page Linking

   This is your chance to take advantage of all the other content you have on your site, to share relevant information, keep users on your site, and show search engines that your relevancy is strong. It is a great opportunity for users to explore other areas of your site, so definitely offer that.

   Be sure to use real and relevant words as the actual links. The words “click here” are generic and not relevant to your subject matter. See the links in this post as examples of relevant words to use as the links to other relevant content. All you need to do is link a phrase that is naturally part of your writing.



7. Images

   Almost all content benefits from having images along with it. Just be sure to always include alt attributes within the image tags. Search engines read alt attributes, and anyone who uses a screen reader can hear the alt text.

   Image names are also valuable for having your images — and therefore, your site — found in image searches. Accurately describe each image in the file name and alt attribute. Use a keyword if at all relevant. Use dashes between words, rather than underscores. And do not use non-alpha characters.

SEO Your Content: In Conclusion

So go write about what you know. Write unique content. Be compelling and provide value. With the tips above, you can include the pieces that help search engines show your excellent content to the world, helping people find it and choose to read it.

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]]> http://435digital.com/blog/2012/12/18/seo-your-content/feed/ 0 http://435digital.com/blog/2012/12/06/seo-terminology-explained-keyword-research/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=seo-terminology-explained-keyword-research http://435digital.com/blog/2012/12/06/seo-terminology-explained-keyword-research/#comments Thu, 06 Dec 2012 19:25:49 +0000 Alex Bruner http://435digital.com/?p=15659 Keyword research is the study of the search queries that are most beneficial for a given business to rank for on search engine results pages.(“Rank for” means that when someone searches for a given phrase in Google, your website is the first result a user sees.) Keyword research takes into account the amount of times

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]]>

Keyword research

is the study of the search queries that are most beneficial for a given business to rank for on search engine results pages.(“Rank for” means that when someone searches for a given phrase in Google, your website is the first result a user sees.)

Keyword research takes into account the amount of times people search for a keyword or phrase, the amount of competition vying for the top rankings, and the relevance to the keyphaase to the business.

For example, Alex’s Pizzeria wants to find out which search terms would help them sell the most pizzas. They start off by compiling some basic ideas: pizza, pizza delivery, chicago pizza.

Once this preliminary keyword research is complete, the terms that have been compiled can be researched using a number of tools, one of my favorites being the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Once you input the keyphrases you’ve compiled, the tools will help provide you with an understanding of the amount of traffic a given phrase gets and a general understanding of how much competition there is.

Over the course of their keyword research, Alex’s Pizzeria finds out that though there are 246,000 searches for “Chicago Pizza” there are also 98,000,000 results for this phrase. As Alex’s Pizzeria only delivers within a 5-mile radius, there are even fewer searches of those 246,000 that are likely to be sales for their Michigan Avenue shop.

In this example, a term that is more geographically relevant would be the way to go, since most of the business of the pizzeria is walk in traffic. A term like “Michigan Avenue Pizza” would be a great one, since it is geographically relevant to the company.

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]]> http://435digital.com/blog/2012/12/06/seo-terminology-explained-keyword-research/feed/ 0 http://435digital.com/blog/2012/11/29/seo-terminology-explained-serp/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=seo-terminology-explained-serp http://435digital.com/blog/2012/11/29/seo-terminology-explained-serp/#comments Thu, 29 Nov 2012 21:06:01 +0000 Alex Bruner http://435digital.com/?p=15576 SERP, or SERPS, stands for Search Engine Results Page or Pages. Essentially, a SERP is the web page that is displayed when you search for something in Google your favorite search engine. These results pages typically consist of at least 2 types of results, typically paid search results, and organic results. Here is a beautifully

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]]> SERP, or SERPS, stands for Search Engine Results Page or Pages. Essentially, a SERP is the web page that is displayed when you search for something in Google your favorite search engine.

These results pages typically consist of at least 2 types of results, typically paid search results, and organic results.

Here is a beautifully designed graphical representation of a SERP, followed by some quick descriptions of what we are looking at.



1


Search Phrase

This is the phrase whose results are being displayed currently. There are 1,190,000,000 or so results for the example term “Chicago”.

2


Paid Search Results

These results are where Google makes a major portion of its billions every year. More than 75% of Googles profits are generated selling paid listings like these. Users can identify the paid listings on the SERPs because they are typically displayed with a colored background at the top of the page, though there are also adverts that will display along the right hand side of the page.

3


Organic Results

This is where the results are returned that are derived from Googles organic search algorithm. These results will often show local results as well, which are displayed when the searcher adds a local modifier to the search query. In this case, if the searcher had searched for “Chicago Sushi” instead of just “Chicago” they would have likely had a series of Google Local results before the normal organic results. These are easily indentified by their having a pin next to them, and the address where the business can be found.

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]]> http://435digital.com/blog/2012/11/29/seo-terminology-explained-serp/feed/ 0 http://435digital.com/blog/2012/11/26/ses-2012-meaningful-seo-performance-metrics/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ses-2012-meaningful-seo-performance-metrics http://435digital.com/blog/2012/11/26/ses-2012-meaningful-seo-performance-metrics/#comments Mon, 26 Nov 2012 15:39:50 +0000 Dario Civinelli http://435digital.com/?p=15441 Aaron Friedman, SEO Manager for Spark moderated this panel featuring Ryan Jones, SEO Manager of Sapient and Chris Keating, VP, SEO and Conversion Optimization at Performics. Ryan talked about the importance of goals. He suggested measuring what makes sense, not just things that are measurable. He defined the following as viable SEO goals: Sales Leads

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]]> Aaron Friedman, SEO Manager for Spark moderated this panel featuring Ryan Jones, SEO Manager of Sapient and Chris Keating, VP, SEO and Conversion Optimization at Performics.

Ryan talked about the importance of goals. He suggested measuring what makes sense, not just things that are measurable. He defined the following as viable SEO goals:

• Sales
• Leads
• KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
• LFAs (Lower Funnel Activities)

The following are not valid SEO goals:

• Keyword Rankings
• Visits
• Video Views
• Facebook Likes
• Twitter Followers

Reporting vs. Analytics

These two are different. Reporting shows what the number is. Analytics tells why and what to do about it. Goals should be actionable. If what you’re doing doesn’t offer actions or insights, it’s reporting, not analytics.

Ryan also mentioned to familiarize yourself with Google’s Webmaster Tools, because pretty soon it will be the only natural search data we have.

Chris stressed the importance of your client’s goals, and how your SEO goals should align with them. You client most likely doesn’t care about indexation metrics, number of backlinks, and they might not even care about traffic. Your job is to know what they care about.

Chris also discussed a number of “trap” metrics: he advised caution when migrating from one analytics program to another. He also advised against using traffic as a success metric. He also warned against the rankings trap fail, and advised that in this day and age “there is no one single objective ranking.”

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