Utah Search Engine Optimization | Utah SEO Consultant

I had the pleasure to present locally on SEO and Podcasting at PodcampSLC in Salt Lake City, Utah recently. The presentation strongly focuses on multimedia in general and the importance of enhanced media in Google’s Universal Search.

Unfortunately, I had to run after I presented in the morning so I missed the rest of the event, but I’m sure it was a great success like it has been in the past. Special thanks to Thom Allen for putting together the event.

Below is my presentation as promised to attendees.

I had the pleasure of presenting at SearchFest 2009 in Portland, OR this week with Rick Turcozy and David Wallace.

I spoke a panel called “SEO for Wordpress” and talked about ways of making your new installation of Wordpress SEO friendly and I have posted my presentation slides below:

A friend of mine on Twitter @martinbowling sent me these questions to answer and post on my blog which he is also posting on his blog: Zima

THE QUESTIONS:

1. How long have you been working in and what attracted you to it?

I started off as a web designer/web developer at about the age of 13 or 14. I just really loved it as a hobby and started working as a web designer after high school at an ad agency when I was 18. They were teamed up with this SEO company. This SEO company was called Engine Ready, run by Jason Miller. He taught me a lot of SEO things. That’s how I first got my introduction to SEO. I wasn’t really in love with it at the time. I later worked as a web designer in house for a real estate and mortgage company. They wanted to get their sites ranked. I said, “I know a little bit about it.” They said, “Take two or three weeks, immerse yourself in SEO, and come rank our sites.” So, I did. For those couple weeks, I spent all my time learning all I could. I got their sites ranked and fell in love with SEO. It was a connection ever after that. I went to work for an SEO agency after that, called WI Works. I worked there for about three years and just recently made a shift to Overstock.com as an in house SEO specialist.

2. In your opinion, what’s the measure of a good SEO/PR/Blogging professional?

Passion, knowledge, and experience.

3. Whose Blog do you read the most?

Probably Search Engine Journal. I love @seosmarty’s posts on there.

4. What’s your best “SEO secret” or blogging tactic?

If I told you I’d have to kill you.

5. Search engine algorithms are getting smarter, and a lot of people predict Organic SEO services will become obsolete. How do you plan to adapt?

Thinks will definitely change. I wrote a more in-depth post called The Future of SEO and it discusses how Internet marketers will need to adapt to future changes. We’re already starting to see that SEOs are realizing that they need to be more about marketing than just search engine ranking professionals.

6. Please Describe the biggest challenge you face in your current job.

Red tape.

7. Do you have any advice for someone who is interested in SEO, but doesn’t have a background in it, on how to get started in this field?

Read your blogs, follow your industry leaders and really read what they have to say. Subscribe to their RSS feeds. Read Sphinn. Read Search Engine Land every single day. Expect to spend an hour and a half to three hours, almost daily, keeping up with that stuff. Really read what’s going on. Then, take all that knowledge that you’ve learned and test it. Test your own theories, as well as other people’s theories, and see what works for you. What works for one site or someone else that they blogged about or that you’ve read about, might not work for you. Go ahead and test things. Have some testing grounds; your own blog, your own website or whatever. You can’t always test things on clients’ websites. You have to apply what you already know to clients’ websites. Another thing is just practice. Keep practicing. Keep going at it. Keep testing new things. Eventually you’re going to be very good in SEO.

8. If you could rank for any keyword phrase you don’t currently rank for, what would it be?

Viagra.

9. Assuming you had never gone into SEO, what would you be doing now professionally?

I’d probably be in jail.

10. Do you have any interest in politics?

Yes, I have a huge vested interest in politics. My interests have lead me to roads to deeper things in the political system that my life would make my life better not knowing at all. Many people joke that I’m a conspiracy theorists. I call it conspiracy facts.

Well that’s the end of our interview. Thank you to @MelaniePhung for writing the questions for everyone. Feel free to follow me on Twitter (@utahseopro) if you’d like!

Video SEO

@almacy Digital Strategy Expert
@melaniephung DC SEO Strategist
@martinbowling Zima lover
@utahseopro Utah SEO Consultant
@fairminder Boston Website Design and SEO

@cyandle Google Adwords Professional
@jackleblond VP of Internet Strategy @djpaisley Digital Communications Strategist
@vinceblackham Utah SEO expert
@melanienathan Edmonton SEO expert @researchgoddess Staffing Social Media Specialist
@monicawright Maine SEO expert

Pubcon 2008 was a blast. There was great networking and content all around. I spoke on “Hosting Issues and SEO” while I was there and have included my slides in this post for anyone who missed it.

A lot of what I covered entailed how to handle server response HTTP codes and leverage them for search engine optimization benefit, choosing between dedicated or shared hosting servers, and how to prepare your servers for large quantities of traffic from “the Digg effect” often seen in social media marketing campaigns.

ExactFactor is an search engine optimization campaign tracking tool to add to your SEO tools collection. They provide a free utility to track your search engine result positioning without having to check your position all the time.

While a tool to automate that process is nice, they’re a dime a dozen. This tool is a bit different because not only do they track your site but they track your competitors and send you email alerts when you’ve moved up/down or a competitor has moved up/down.

Email alerts are very handy because you can get instant notification of SERP fluctuation that you can be aware of. Have you ever had an SEO client calling you complaining of a search result fluctuation you haven’t notice because you haven’t checked it in a couple days? I know I have, it’s nice to be able to know what the situation is before the client calls.

Below is a screen shot of inside ExactFactor’s easy to use interface. It’s not hard to figure out and very intuitive. Can’t complain when it’s free. Check it out for your next Internet marketing campaign at www.exactfactor.com.

ExactFactor-SEO-Tool

I wrote a new post over at my company’s site (Search & Social) on link metrics used for judging a link’s value and worth in SEO. More importantly though, it focuses on link analysis through block-level segmentation patents written by search engines. I’ll include the quick summary below but swing by to read about the most overlooked SEO metric: link placement.

Quick Summary

While a Webpage may have two related outgoing links on it, each link is not given the same value depending upon it’s placement in the page. Always, opt for:

• Naturally written anchor text
• Related surround copy
• A link in the body text of the content area of the page
• Higher in the copy area than lower to try to obtain higher CTR to appease behavioral metrics given to links from search engines including things like BrowseRank.

I recently took a day off my honeymoon that went from Utah to San Diego then up to San Jose to present at Search Engine Strategies. The panel I spoke on was Building a Search Engine Friendly Website moderated by Todd Malicoat.

The main focus of this presentation was SEO friendly multimedia (audio, video, flash, etc) incorporated on a Website. My undergraduate was in multimedia communication as well as my current graduate emphasis so this was a perfect fit for me.

Here is the presentation slides including embedded resources. Feel free to contact me with any questions regarding it.

For those who didn’t catch SMX Local Mobile 2008 this year or missed my mobile SEO presentation entitled Cracking the Code: Inside the Blackbox of Mobile & Local Algorithms I have provided my slides here. Feel free to email me with any particular questions or ambiguity the slides my raise with you.

When conducting keyword research for a client it is common for an SEO (or even a general business owner) to turn to a keyword research tool and start looking up search volumes on keyphrases that come to mind. Some may take it a step further and actually evaluate the keyword effectiveness index (KEI) of each keyphrase to determine the competitiveness and feasibility of a term. All too often those two metrics, search volume and KEI, are all the consideration an SEO might take into accountability before making final judgments.

It’s important to take a step back and look at the big picture when conducting keyword research for a search engine optimization campaign. Optimizing a Website for a keyphrase nobody is looking for is obviously something you want to avoid but optimizing a Website for a keyphrase that is irrelevant to your content and/or business model is something often overlooked.

TYPES OF SEARCH QUERIES

The intent of the searcher is imperative to understand when conducting keyword research. Knowing the intent of the search queries that people are finding your content through will allow you to adjust your content, semantic structure, and call-to-action to fit your users needs.

There are three main types of search queries:

• Informational – People researching information for a purchase or for general research.
• Transactional – People searching with intent to take some form of action likely in the form of commerce.
• Navigational – People searching for a particular site or brand.

If you’ve optimized your page for a certain keyphrase but find that most long-tail keyphrases that contain your main keyphrase have completely different intent when visiting your site you may see a high-bounce rate and low conversion. Traffic and rankings are therefore rendered useless at this point if you can’t serve the needs of your visitors.

Microsoft adCenter Labs has a decent tool on detecting commercial intent of a search query.

SEARCH BUYING CYCLE

(thanks to Search Engine Guide for this image)

Capturing searchers in the right part of the buying cycle is a crucial element in deciding which keyphrases to optimize your content, site, information architecture, etc. for.

Typically, searchers go through three phases before deciding to make a purchase online.

1. Interest
2. Research
3. Purchase

At the interest phase, people are using very broad terms to start collecting data on a product or service they may be using or purchasing in the future.

For example, a search on “gaming consoles” will bring up results that will likely be weeded out to find the informational related pages about gaming consoles.

At the research phase, people have refined their searches from the interest phase to search for more specific terms such as “Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 reviews” to find out more information they have learned since their initial interest.

At the purchase phase, people are looking to buy a product or service and will be refining their queries to do so. An example may be “cheap xbox 360″ or “buy xbox 360 in [city]“.

As you can see, ranking #1 for “gaming consoles” is great but if it’s strictly an e-commerce page that’s ranking with intent only to sell gaming consoles then you may have high-traffic but a low conversion rate on your site. Ranking for broad terms doesn’t always provide the best value. It’s the long-tail phrases in the purchase cycle that really drive high conversion and ROI as you can see below:

(thanks to Aaron Wall of SEOBook for this image)

Additionally, website optimization is going to be a key element that take the traffic that you are receiving and turned them into qualified conversions.

CONCLUSION

When conducting keyword research think again before immediately being drawn to phrases with the highest search volume. Consider KEI, the commercial intent, and which part of the buying cycle that keyphrase belongs to.

Cakester recently raised an important question Should Affiliate Managers Run Their Networks’ Campaigns? He goes on to suggest that it’s an “[...] extremely unlikely event that they will lose you as an affiliate if by some miracle you were to find out about it [them stealing your keywords/sharing with other affiliates].

Lucky for you guys, you don’t need to put up with getting your keywords ripped off by a punk affiliate manager – I’m going to show you how to figure out if your AM has a loud mouth that leaks secrets like my uncle Jimbob’s rusty old tugboat.

So maybe I have no uncle named Jimbob, and no uncles with rusty old tugboats. This technique is still pretty fun and the bigshots at Google definitely use it to mess with spammers, so you know it’s effective. Hat tip to 5ubliminal of Tellin Ya Blackhat SEO blog for teaching me that one (can’t find the post, unfortunately). So once you know they’re copying you, it’s up to you what you do with that info.

In short, you provide a dirty keyword dataset to your AM. By dirty, I mean including junk keywords that don’t convert (tested beforehand of course; you don’t want to accidentally give them something good). Ideally, give them something with only 1-2 other competitors.

When you see other people’s ads on these ridiculous keywords, you know that the affiliate manager’s got a big mouth. Then you can go to the network and complain, change networks or whatever.
Some additional, related tips to keeping your campaign keywords private from prying competitors:

For those of you whose attention can only be grabbed by ridiculous headlines, split up your PPC campaigns amongst multiple domains. For the rest of you, you’ll already know this tip from one of my Scratchpad columns.

Use fake whois information and/or private registrations (from the second the domain is registered), so that people can’t figure out your domains easily.

Split up the hosting amongst different servers, and perhaps different hosting companies (not reseller hosts, but original). That way, reverse IP lookups a la ‘my IP neighbors” won’t find all your sites in one fell swoop. Find out competitors’ keywords for free.

– Gab Goldenberg offers SEO services for clients including this template based business card program and is actively involved in affiliate marketing.