Here are 3 benefits of incorporating SEO into the initial design process:

Your content is ready to rank.
Optimizing your content to incorporate important keywords is one of most important components of onsite SEO. If you create your content with SEO in mind, you’re already a step ahead of the game. As the search engines crawl and index your site, they will know exactly what kind of search queries your site matches, so you can rank well for targeted visitors from the get-go. You can start collecting data on your visitors and their search behavior from the day your site launches and know what keywords are working and what keywords aren’t much sooner than if you waited 6 months to optimize your content.

You can create a strong internal linking structure.
Developing an internal linking structure helps move your visitors along through your site, as well as helps boost the SEO value of internal pages. For most sites, your homepage is going to receive the lion’s share of the links, but the search engines don’t just rank homepages. Your internal products and services pages have the potential to rank as well. By linking from one page to another, you are spreading out the link juice that first page has earned to other pages, making them more important in the eyes of the search engines.

A good internal linking structure can also help increase your conversion rate. You want to lead your visitors down a predetermined path of conversion that keeps distractions at a minimum. By linking related pages together you can provide all the information your visitors need to make a purchasing decision without ever having to leave your site. It also helps keep your visitor focused—too many links and they don’t know where to go next!

You’ll be able to build SEO friendly URLs.
I can’t tell you how many sites I’ve come across that have the worst URL structure! It’ll be a string of numbers, letters and keywords that is far too long and has no SEO value. The problem is that because the URL structure is tied directly to the way the site was built there is no way to optimize them without redesigning the entire site! Save yourself some headaches down the road and build a URL structure you’ll be happy with for the life cycle of your site.

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Scale
The most obvious problem facing many large websites looking to begin their onsite SEO is the sheer size of their website. I can tell you first hand that optimizing a 1,000+ page website is no small feat; the keyword research alone can easily take 40-80 hours of work, while actually optimizing the content (including writing Meta tags, optimizing the URL structure and so forth) can take twice the amount of time, depending on how content heavy the site is. Getting the ball rolling on the onsite SEO is oftentimes the hardest step, especially if your marketing team is already maxed out on time. Where are you going to squeeze an extra 50 hours of work into your work week? Even if you try to spread it out over a month, things come up and your onsite SEO is pushed even further down the priority list. Many enterprise websites outsource their SEO for that very reason, leaving the heavy lifting to someone else.

Leadership
However, just because a large website outsources their SEO, that doesn’t mean the final product is produced any faster than if they had just done it themselves. I’ve seen many enterprise websites drop the SEO ball on their end because they couldn’t designate an internal SEO liaison with their SEO partner. A good SEO provider is not going to start changing your site without getting your approval first, and many larger websites have a huge chain of command that all changes have to work their way through, getting approval each step of the way. Either the SEO liaison either can’t get things moving through the chain of command quickly or there is no liaison to ensure that the work is getting into the right hands for approval. The work may be done, but without the go-ahead from the website’s management, the onsite SEO is stalled.

Segregation
Another common onsite SEO challenge I have seen with many larger websites is that one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing. Just like the SEO liaison is responsible for keeping the momentum moving on their end, they are also the ones who make sure the right people are involved at the right time. For instance, does your IT director really need to be involved in the social media marketing strategy planning session? Should your PR firm have a say in what keywords your onsite SEO should target? Does the CEO need to be involved in meetings about coding issues? Sometimes there are too many cooks in the kitchen, and other times there are too few.

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If you’ve read enough posts here on Search Engine Optimization Journal. You’ll know that there is no silver bullet to high search engine rankings. So if any SEO agency could guarantee top 10 rankings, it’s simply not worth the risk. Which is why Brick Marketing is a huge advocate of quality original content with its SEO infused social media services

http://www.brickmarketing.com/social-media-seo-service

To prove my point why you should obey Google’s Rules:

What would you do if you went to work and noticed that you were no where to be found in the search engines? Plus this was your peak Q4 season that counted for a majority of your ten million dollar plus e-commerce site. Would you start to freak out about how you were going to move a quarter of a million dollars worth of inventory? That had your own personal house assets as collateral.

This is exactly the moment when Ryan Abood the CEO of GourmetGiftBaskets.com wished he would have NOT taken a search ranking short cut by buying a massive amount of text links. Which is a direct violation of Google’s algorithm. Ryan was left begging at the mercy for re inclusion consideration, before peak holiday sales.

Mr. Abood changed his companies SEO strategy to provide value online through viral marketing efforts to earn social media SEO link bait. So Gourmet Gift Baskets went from buying links to winning records from the world’s largest cup cake to coffee mug.

Ryan shared this personal story as a guest speaker to the BostonSEO.org SEO meetup. That Nick from Brick Marketing sponsors and has spoken several times as the featured presenter.

World’s Longest Phone Call

I’m trying to duplicate’s GourmetGiftBaskets.com success, by being the official time keeper and in part sponsor to a Harvard University student group attempt to achieve the world’s longest phone call. I hope to have a great follow up guest post to share my own case story of social media SEO link bait for Search Engine Optimization Journal readers. Learn more at AWorldRecordAttempt.com

Want Attention?

Start thinking about doing something remarkable online! Think about what world record you want to attempt?

About The Author – Brian Hawkins
Brian Hawkins is the assistant organizer for the BostonSEO.org Meetup where Brick Marketing is the official food sponsor. He’s a dot com survivor that went on to work at an SEO agency along side Nick Stimulus. He’s currently the Internet marketing manager for http://www.Pingo.com. A global virtual prepaid calling card service. Follow him at @BrianHawkins

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Here are 3 signs that it’s time to look for greener pastures:

You’re constantly chasing them down.
I take pride in my customer service and do my best to get back to my SEO and consulting clients as quickly as possible. I think that customer service is an important component of the SEO client-provider relationship, and I don’t take that responsibility lightly. As an SEO client, you deserve to work with a nice company! Your SEO partner should actually be your partner and you shouldn’t have to spend two weeks, a dozen emails, five phone calls and a smoke signal to get a hold of someone when you have a question.

It’s a lot of smoke and mirrors.
Some SEO companies might be afraid that if they give too much of their process away, a client might decide they don’t really need that SEO company and will leave. While I understand the reason behind the fear, (who will buy the cow when the milk is free?) your SEO provider should not be hesitant to explain their SEO method and process. A good SEO firm is going to understand that having an involved and educated client is going to make for a much stronger partnership and effective SEO campaign in the long run.

A good SEO campaign relies on the client as much as it does the SEO firm! You understand your business better than anyone else, and while a good SEO provider will take the time to learn your business, you need to provide an outline for them to work with. How will they get that direction from you if they aren’t willing to explain what they are doing or why they need your input?

You’re not seeing results.
I’m not trying to say that if you aren’t seeing the results you wanted inside of three months that you should dump your SEO partner. Remember, SEO is an incredibly long term process and depending on your company’s sales cycle, age of site, competition and other factors, it may take 6 months to a year after launching your SEO campaign before you see big results. What I am saying is that you should see a steady upward progression over time. What you don’t want to see when combing through your analytics is huge peaks and valleys with how many visitors your site is getting—this is a good indication that your SEO provider is employing black hat practices. If that is the case, drop them as fast as you can!

After a few months after implementing your link building campaign, a good SEO provider should be able to show you some tangible products from their efforts. What business profiles have they created? How many blog posts have they written and promoted on social networks? Did they send out any online press releases? Even if you aren’t seeing the numbers in your analytics just yet, a good SEO provider should be able to show you exactly what they’ve done for your company.

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Here are 3 best tips for optimizing your website for local search:

Localize your keywords.
Localizing your keywords takes your keyword research process one step further. First, conduct your keyword research on a national level and select the most appropriate keywords on a page-by-page basis. Once you have your 2-5 keywords per page, you just need to add your location to each keyword to make them more appropriate for local SEO. For instance, I might target “Boston SEO,” “Boston MA SEO” and “Boston, Massachusetts SEO” if I were looking to attract more Boston-area SEO clients that are looking to work with a local SEO company. For a more in-depth look at how to localize your keyword research, check out this blog post.

Blog about local events.
A great way to naturally incorporate those localized keywords into your content is to blog about local events that are related to your business. Let’s go back to our Phoenix plumber. April is National Water Conservation month and let’s assume they decide to host a free workshop teaching homeowners how to check for common leaks in the shower, the toilet or kitchen sink. They can write a blog post announcing the event, as well as a recap post. Those blog posts can target keywords like “plumbing tips for Phoenix AZ homeowners, “free Phoenix plumbing seminar” and so forth. Since blog posts can rank individually, just like pages on your site, these localized posts can help build their online brand.

Get your site listed everywhere!
Bing, Yahoo and Google all have local business listings—get your site published on all three of them. You can also create local business profiles on peer review sites like Yelp and offer incentives (like 10% off their next purchase) to your customers when you ask them to review your business. You can also submit your site to local directories or join local business associations. Many local business associations link from their site to their members, and some will allow their members to submit guest posts or articles to the association’s blog.

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1. Relying too heavily on industry jargon for your main keywords.
This is a common SEO problem in many B2B industries, especially for tech or software companies. You might rely too heavily on industry specific keywords (like “contact reasoning engine”) that don’t mean anything to your target audience. Instead of “contact reasoning engine,” they are searching for “call center analytics.” You have to remember to take user intent into account when conducting B2B SEO keyword research. You might be using industry approved jargon that your top competitors are also targeting, but unless you are taking the time to educate potential clients with your content marketing you can’t assume they know what those keywords mean or are using those them to search.

Obviously you don’t want to forgo all industry keywords, as those are important to building your credibility as an industry expert. However it’s important to incorporate related keywords that the average user might use to find your products/services.

2. Keeping your content on lockdown.
I’ve noticed that a lot of B2B websites keep a large portion of their content behind a login, trying to keep some content accessible only by their customers. While I understand wanting to provide unique and exclusive content for your current customers (as an added incentive), you don’t want to lock all of your content away. Anything that requires a login to be accessed can’t be read and indexed by the search engines; making is useless for your B2B SEO. If you are going to lock a large percentage of your content away, it’s important to balance the content scales by producing similar amounts of content that is crawl-able. A B2B business blog is a great way to consistently produce fresh content that is easily indexed by the search engines and you’re your brand connect with potential customers (they need content too!)

3. Failing to take your sales cycle into account.
You can’t rush your B2B sales cycle any more than you can rush your SEO. Most B2B sales cycles are much longer than the average B2C sales cycle. After all, it only takes 5-10 minutes to decide where you are going for lunch today while it takes 5-10 months to decide to purchase a $50,000 business software solution. Many B2B companies forget to take their sales cycle into account when measuring the success of their SEO campaign. You can’t begin to measure the effectiveness of your SEO until AFTER your normal sales cycle has completed.

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Just yesterday a reader sent me this link from Reddit about a company called Ocean Marketing, with a note saying they thought one of the company’s blog posts looked suspiciously like a post from this blog. I pulled up the two posts side by side.

Search Engine Optimization Journal: Who is Handling Your Social Media Marketing?

Ocean Marketing Blog: Who is Handling Your Social Media Marketing?

Even with just a quick glance it’s pretty obvious that their post is WORD FOR WORD copied from my own post, which went live scarcely a week earlier. There aren’t many hard and fast rules to SEO (that’s why we call them best practice tips) but if there were any rules a website should follow no matter what, it’s that your content must be original! If Ocean Marketing had republished my post and cited me as the original author than it’s no harm no foul. This blog gets a decent inbound link and my name and writing are introduced to Ocean Marketing’s readers.

Apparently I am not the only blogger that Ocean Marketing has been stealing content from either. Examiner.com pointed out that Ocean Marketing has “borrowed” an article from Forbes and claimed it as their own. Even the “About Us” section of the company’s website is apparently plagiarized from SEOP.com!

But this blatant plagiarism isn’t the only reason Ocean Marketing and Paul Christoforo have come under fire from the Internet at large. Just a few days ago an email chain appeared on Penny Arcade between Paul Christoforo and a customer asking about their Avenger Controller purchase. The conversation quickly devolved into one of the best “how to destroy your professional reputation and business overnight” case studies (or “epic douchebaggery” as Examiner.com called it) I have ever seen. Christoforo resorts to insulting and belittling his customer, dropping industry names like they’re candy and even threatening Penny Arcade and PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) founder Mike Krahulik with a smear campaign after he joined in the conversation between Christoforo and the customer.

Going back to plagiarism, when this PR disaster story broke Kotaku.com reached out to Brandon Leidel, (CEO and Director of Operations of The HAND Media, Inc) whom they believed to be the Director of Marketing for the Avenger Controller. Turns out, the response they got DID NOT come from Brandon himself, and Kotaku shows how the email address used to reply as Leidel is actually registered to Christoforo. If that is in fact the case, Christoforo is not only stealing content for his blog and website, but he is trying to “borrow” identities as well!

So what can you learn from Ocean Strategy and Paul Christoforo?

1. Don’t steal content. Ever. Sooner or later someone is going to notice.
2. Always treat your customers with respect, even when they have upset you. You have the power to make the situation better.
3. Own up to your mistakes. If you keep the lines of communication open situations like this are less likely to develop.
4. Everything you say/do/write online has the potential to be seen by the Internet at large. Think twice before you hit send.
5. Don’t claim you are an SEO, PR or Marketing expert, when you have to steal other real experts content. If you are that good, you should be able to write your own REAL content.
6. Don’t piss of the gaming community!

***UPDATE: It seems my post about Ocean Marketing and Paul Christoforo shady plagiarism actually worked and his post that copied my original post is now offline!

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Here are 3 tips to make your blog more SEO friendly:

Optimize the entire post.
You want your blog posts to rank well for related searches. In order for it to rank well, you have to optimize your individual blog posts just like you would a page of your company’s website. Once you’ve written your post, determine what keyword (or keywords) best fit the content and see if there is a way to incorporate that keyword into the post itself. You can try to write it into the main body of the post, but don’t forget about the URL structure and H1 or H2 tags. The key to optimizing a blog post for SEO is to make it natural. If the keyword doesn’t sound right in a particular sentence, don’t force it in.

Link related posts and service pages.
Once a visitor has arrived on your blog, you want to keep them there as long as possible. One way to entice visitors to stick around for a little while longer is to develop an internal linking structure for your blog. Link related posts together to provide your readers with a more in-depth look at a particular topic. Show your audience what an industry expert you are and encourage them to delve deeper into your blog! You should also try to link from your blog posts back to related product/service pages. Use your blog to drive traffic through to your website and focus on converting a well targeted audience.

You don’t want to incorporate so many links in each post that your readers have too many options (keep it simple and focused!), but a few useful links might be just the thing needed to convince them to convert.

Write unique Meta descriptions.
Many site owners don’t bother with Meta descriptions on their site, let alone on their blogs. Yes, Meta descriptions aren’t as important of a ranking factor as they used to be, but that doesn’t mean they can’t help your blog’s SEO! Think of your blog’s Meta descriptions like mini advertisements in the SERP. Those 150 characters have to convince a searcher to choose your blog post over every other listing in the SERP. Take an extra five minutes when writing your blog post and come up with a quick (and optimized!) meta description that will help your blog post stand out.

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Many companies (or at least some members of the management team) just see SEO as another line on their budget. They may think to themselves, “We achieved our objectives, why keep paying? It’s done and done, right?” Unfortunately that’s not how SEO works. For many businesses, whether they realize it or not, SEO is the lifeblood of their online marketing that generates most of their new business. Can your company afford to fall in the SERP? How much traffic would your website lose if your site dropped from the #1 spot to the #5 spot? How many new customers would your site fail to convert?

Companies that are ranked well in the search engines have to realize there is a big, red bull’s-eye painted on their back and the competition is determined to unseat you. Just like you were determined to reach the top of the SERP and reap the benefits of ranking #1, so are they. The only thing in their way is your website. If you stop your SEO campaign and they don’t, how long before their efforts start to overshadow yours?

If your site is positioned well, instead of trimming down your SEO budget, why not repurpose it? Can you pay your SEO provider or hire a freelance SEO copywriter to write more content for your blog and article marketing campaign? Can you devote more of your budget to enhancing your social media presence? Are there extra industry conferences you could sponsor? Rework the existing budget and find new ways to build your online brand?

Now is the time to really ramp up your content marketing and help further cement your website in the top of the SERP. The more content you publish the more inbound links you create, while simultaneously establishing more touch points to engage your target audience with. Since content feeds your social media marketing campaigns, publishing more content also gives your social networks more opportunities to share the content, building your overall social presence and developing social signals that can positively impact your SEO.

Remember—SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. Once you accomplish all your online goals, you still have to work to hold onto them.

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I came across this great post by Kerry Dean on Search Engine Land a few weeks ago that does a great job of explaining the reality of the HTML5 situation and its implications for SEO. I thought I would share a few of his points here:

1. “HTML5 will someday make everything better. But that someday is not here just yet.”
This goes back to the fact that Internet browsers don’t fully support every feature of HTML5. For instance, Safari does support HTML5 video, but not Geolocation API. If you own a local site that relies on local traffic to keep your door open, the ability to identify a user’s position is incredibly important. You might lose that ability if you convert to HMTL5 right now.

2. “HTML5 will do wonders for your website’s ability to drive organic search traffic.”
HTML5 makes it much easier for site owners to organize and identify content components, which helps the search spiders crawl and find valuable information. For instance, < article > (in HTML5) signifies to the search spiders that this piece of content can stand on its own. You could define a blog post or article on your site with < article >, telling the search engines it is more valuable than something written in the < footer >. These new tags allow the search engines to more easily determine the importance and relevance of content on your website.

HTML5 also makes it possible for the search engines to “read” images/animations, something they haven’t been able to do before. For sites that rely heavily on flash, HTML5 can make a huge difference to their SEO.

3. “HTML5 has the ability to transform how users interact with websites.”
HTML5 allows for easier audio and video streaming, so sites that a media heavy (like social networking sites, where over 50% have already moved to HTML5) could see a lot of benefit in converting.

4. “I would recommend HTML5 for other reasons, but not strictly for SEO…”
I definitely agree with Kerry on this one. Google admitted that they weren’t giving any special considerations to sites that were created in HTML5, so there is no rush to convert your site just yet. If you were thinking about redesigning your site in the near future anyway, HTML5 might be worth looking into. However, I wouldn’t recommend redesigning your entire site to HTML5 just because you can if you can’t justify the cost.

What are your thoughts on HTML5?

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