SEO Advices for Beginners

Here is a great clip I just caught from Work Industries blog showing Monique Trottier talking about eMail Marketing newsletters. In the 9-minute segment Monique shares with Leo her top tips for creating an effective email newsletter. And she knows what she’s talking about because she’s the force behind the Underwire newsletter: full support for non-techies. The clip was shot as part of the Lab With Leo Show:

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I am proud to announce the start of a new project for eMarketing 101 that we call QuickLearn (the site is coming). QuickLearn is a training series for business professionals to bring them up to speed in all areas of Internet Marketing. We bring you straight to the point of what you need to know so you can implement sound web strategies with confidence. The first seminar is this month on February 19 in the evening and I hope you can make it. It will be all about Search Marketing 101 and how to drive more traffic to your site. I will be the speaker so listen up. Here is more info about it:

Do you want to attract more visitors to your website? (Of course you do!)

Register Online for the QuickLearn business training series: Search Marketing 101.

Search Marketing 101
Presented by Alexandre Brabant of eMarketing101
Hosted by Monique Trottier of Work Industries

When:
Tuesday, February 19
6:30-8:30 pm
at Work Industries offices, suite 302, 70 East 2nd Ave.
(corner of Main and Quebec)

How Much?
Cost: $120

Search marketing is one of the cheapest, most cost-effective ways to promote your company and drive qualified leads to your website. Most people find search engines to be a mystery. How do I get my website to rank higher in search listings for key phrases related to my business, products or services? Should I consider paying for advertising placement on search engines?

Effective search marketing and optimization is the key component to any successful online presence. If you are unsure of how search works, how to integrate search into your existing promotional campaigns, or why search is important to your business--this is the session for you.

Register Online Today!

For more information or to register in person, contact Monique Trottier at:
(778) 837-9012 or

Feel free to pass around. Thanks!

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Do what I say, not what I do. There is a recurrent idea that keeps coming back to me over the last few months about web marketing geeks preaching everywhere about what to do in the area of corporate blogging, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), social media and so on, but are not following these best practices for their own site. I believe this does not bring much credibility in the long run and we need to clean up our act. Over the last few years, I have been observing how regular business people (non-geek) tend to isolate us in a silo and usually take everything we say with a grain of salt. We are used to see skepticism in discussions with potential clients. Maybe we are partially responsible for this. Potential clients would question our motives since we are not doing for our own sites what we want to do for them. The Association of Internet Marketing & Sales is a very good example.

I was browsing around today and I came across the Association of Internet Marketing & Sales website and notice how bad their page titles are.

Here is why:

Use of the word Home in the page title for their “Home Page” (Home is referred as a stop word)

All page titles are written backwards, with the more specific information & keywords about a page are at the end of the page title

Page titles length not optimized (66 characters)

Choice of keywords for each page title does not increase the likelihood of being found, based on the content of every page

Page titles are the easiest thing you can work on in a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plan. It is also the fastest thing you can change and tweak in order to attract more visitors to your site from organic sources (free traffic). As I pointed out in one of my last posts on the impact of universal search on eye tracking & scanning patterns on a typical SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), it shows how important it is to have the content of any page clearly labeled in the first few words on the vertical axis. That can easily be done by putting the keywords related to any given page of your site in the first few words of your page titles, followed by the common theme of your entire site. It this easy enough? This is the first rule in SEO and I can’t wait to see all web marketing professionals following it. 

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I was a little surprised today when I discovered that the choice of my video titles used on my website (here and there) made a big differences in search results. Everyone knows that Youtube videos are now being indexed in Google but I was not sure if the other providers were, such as Brightcove, our preferred choice. With Dan Beauparlant, my awesome Videographer, we decided to put “Alexandre Brabant, Search Marketing” as the video title, just in case someone would stumble upon it elsewhere than my site. That decision proved to be right.

When I Google myself today, I found the Brightcove link in position #6.

What does this mean to you?
When you make a clip of anything, make sure that the content of the clip is well represented in the title, just like you would do with your site. Use the longest string of words that the video platform allows in order to increase your chances.Your clip then becomes searchable and more likely to be found. A keyword-rich video title can make a big difference in the amount of viewers and therefore generates a positive feedback for your business or anything else you want to promote.

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Eric Lowe, Online Marketing Strategist from the Rick Hansen Foundation sent me an SEO Quiz today. If you think you know a lot about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and consider yourself and expert, please take a few minutes to take the test. It is a serious exam and should be treated as such. If you are looking to hire an SEO specialist, use this as an entry test. I scored 64%. How did you do? Share your results here and learn what you missed.

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Every week, I explain to new potential clients the power behind blogging and its relationship to the ongoing battle of increasing site traffic over time. Blogging has also a strong relationship with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on top of the fact that adding fresh content to your site (ie. Blog) helps improve your rankings. As you know, my Search Marketing Blog is only 6 months old and I am still learning how to do this right. So far so good. I can tell you that the process has been somewhat easier than anticipated but the results are far greater than what I expected. Before I show you the results, you must take note that I have been working on my blog approximately 5 to 10 hours per week. Here is the progression of readers I have had since March 15, 2007:

Not bad, eh? That is the kind of growth curve that I can live with.

And here is what you need to remember if you consider launching a blog, from my own experience:

It pays to have a blog! (real customers looking to buy from you)

It brings in better prospects

It brings awareness to the existence of your business (from those who just stumble upon your site)

It reaches an audience you did not previously have

It increases your potential customer-base

It solidifies your online presence

It raises your professional profile

It helps you becoming a better writer

It keeps you motivated as you evaluate your progress

It takes time

There are a lot of arguments for doing it and very few drawbacks. The ratio, cost (time) vs benefits is outstanding. Fortunately, as everything else online, you can measure your progress over time through Feedburner (owned by Google). Soon enough, we can speculate that the amount of subscribers to your RSS Feed (in this case 53 as of November 5, 2007) will become part of the Google search algorithm and this measure will help Google position your site organically. You can’t avoid it. If you are not sure which CMS (Content Management System) to use to incorporate a blog on your site and how to get this done, feel free to Contact me and I will suggest a few options and people to work with. For a thorough education process on Blogging, please sign up to attend the next Northern Voice Blogging Conference 2008 in Vancouver (BC) Canada (site to be updated soon). 

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Every time Gord Hotchkiss, President of Enquiro based in Kelowna (BC) Canada, write an article, you can be confident that he is going to hit the nail right on the head. In his most recent article on Ad Agencies and Search Marketing, Gord mentions that Ad Agencies are far from “getting” search and follow search marketing best practices. Even when they include search, for as little as they do, they miss the mark by a mile. It is especially dramatic when it comes to budgeting for it. Media plans & budgets are based on arbitrary numbers which are not a reflection of comprehensive business objectives. According to Gord, “Search dollars should be the first ones in, not the last. Take as much search inventory as you can get. Judge your costs per acquisition not against your top performing keywords, but against your other channels, both online and offline. If even the marginal search traffic is generating a lower CPA, beg, borrow and steal as much budget as you can and top up search. Only then should you move from “pull” (prospects holding up their hands to purchase through search) to “push” (trying to persuade latent prospects to purchase). Only put restrictions on your search campaign if you’re absolutely certain that another channel can exceed its effectiveness.”

Gord Hotchkiss, Enquiro

For a review of all the benefits for doing Search Marketing, budgeting for it as well providing a perspective on the utilization of search to reach branding objectives, take a minute to read the article.

If you are still up for it, take a minute to read this: Search And the Digital CPG Shelf. It is about the utilization of Search Marketing for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), an area that has historically never used Search Marketing. The findings of the study are quite revealing and will convince the most skeptics. 

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Marketing Tip: People read from left to right! This may sound obvious but when it comes to writing strong Page Title Tags, which appear prominently in SERPS (Search Engine Result pages), most people are clueless. Since Page Title Tags are considered the most important piece of text on any given page, you should pay attention on how you are doing it.

Web Page Title Tags for Search Engine Optimization & Web Usability

Page Title tags definition: in HTML code, the title tag specifies the title of your Web page. It is code which is inserted into the header of your web page. The World Wide Web Consortium describes the title as a required element in an HTML document: Every HTML document must have a TITLE element in the HEAD section.

Now, here are some tips on how to write effective page title tags:

Page Title Tag Length:
Microsoft’s browser displays the first 95 characters of your title tag
Google shows the first 66 characters of the title tag (crops the rest) - it is not clear if the rest of the sentence is factored in for ranking purposes.
Yahoo shows the first 120 characters
Your page title should be composed of a primary title (Google) and secondary title (for Yahoo) separated by an hyphen (-)

Title Tag SEO Advices:
Make you Title Tags no more than 95 characters in length, even if Yahoo accepts more. The length of the browser bar is more than enough to write something compelling
Every page of your site should have a unique Page Title Tag
Put the most important keywords first at the beginning of the Title Tag (primary title), especially keywords related to the content of that specific page.
Put in your secondary title the information that is relevant for all the pages of the site (site theme)
Consider using Geographically specific keywords, especially if your business is mostly local
2 repetition of the same word is allowed in the Page Title Tag. You can do this twice. Make sure repetition is not side by side. More than this, it is considered spamming.
Capitalize The First Letter of Every Word To Make it Easily Readable.
You Don’t Need to Capitalize *stop* words like: the, of, it etc.
NEVER use the words “welcome” “site” “homepage” “introduction” “bienvenue” as in this example from the Canadian Tourism Commission on its home page
It is not necessary to put your web address in the beginning of the title tag as you can see in this example of bad Page Title Tag

Other examples of unoptimized page title tag usage:
Canadian Tire’s One Word Page title Tag
Starbuck’s Use of the word Homepage on their Page Title Tag
Walmart Canada’s Use of the word Welcome on their Page Title Tag

Here you can find the full description on how to write great Page Title Tags.

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