Marketing Podcast Chapter 4: Search Engine Optimization
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Hello and welcome to Tactical Execution, an information series exploring innovative marketing and strategic business positioning for entrepreneurs and small businesses in an increasingly competitive world. My name is Patrick and I’m your host. You can find written versions of these podcasts at TacticalExecution.com and I encourage your candid feedback at the same location. Today, we’ll be talking about search engine optimization so let’s get started.
What puts a website at the top of a Google search? What’s the criterion that determines the ranking? And what can you do to improve that ranking? They call the subject search engine optimization it’s a fascinating subject indeed. And a good place to start is that it’s almost impossible to get to the very top of a Google search result using general search criteria. There are so many websites out there and so many people working hard to achieve the exact same goal that it’s become extremely difficult to get that top spot. But that doesn’t mean the effort is worthless. In fact, all the things we’ll be discussing today will contribute to your online presence in a variety of positive ways, even if you don’t end up on the first page of a Google search. AND, more specific search criteria may very well put you at the top.
The truth is that modern search engine technology has become extremely good at providing the very best results for what people are searching for. It wasn’t always that way. In years past, the algorithms being used to rank different websites allowed creative web designers to manipulate their sites specifically to cater to search engines. The same opportunities still exist but the things you have to do today are much more authentic to the intentions of the searcher than to the tricks being used before. In other words, there were times when you could put the word “mortgage” on your home page 10,000 times, tucked away in a small corner in a tiny font no one could see and that would increase your search ranking. No longer. Today, we’ll be talking about modern search engine technology and how you can improve your online presence in authentic ways.
As of this recording, if you put my full name into a Google search, it comes up about 88,000 times. Now, there are a few listings for another guy who’s a Speech Communication and Behavioral Science Professor at Palomar Community College in southern California but he only accounts for about a dozen of the total listings. The rest is for me. Wild. And each of those listings includes a link back to my beyondtherate.com mortgage-based website. So, there was a time when that website would come up on page 7 of a Google search for the word “mortgage” but Google updated their algorithm and now I’d be surprised if it showed up in the first 100 pages.
Still today, if you put the words “mortgage podcast” into a Google search, an article written about my “Beyond the Rate” podcast series comes up first out of about 2 million listings. That’s a great accomplishment and it remains the primary reason my original podcast series continues to get downloaded as often as it does. This comparison where one strategy now produces poor results while another strategy continues to deliver great results long after it was implemented will serve as a convenient backdrop to our discussion. Fact is; that article was written in May 2006 and it still comes up first more than a year later. Amazing.
Although the specifics of search engine algorithms are generally kept secret, it’s well known that they look for 3 major things: quantity of relevant content on the subject site, number of inbound links from unique sites that also have relevant content and number of links pointing to those referring websites, also coming from sites that contain relevant content. So the algorithm goes 2 steps removed from the subject site to ensure it is considered reputable by other sites that also have relevant content to the search. They also look at outbound links to see the total volume of relevant content available to the searcher once he or she arrives at the site and how many clicks away that content is, even if some of it resides on a different website.
And how do the search engines accumulate all this information? Well, they create little robots – little computer programs – that crawl the internet’s endless network of links, looking at the various sites and looking for certain things. They’re generally referred to as spiders and there are more of them than you can imagine. Many of them are created by search engines. Others are created by people harvesting email address or looking for website vulnerabilities. But they’re out there and the ones coming from search engines index the entire internet according to their own proprietary ranking algorithms.
So let’s look at these algorithms in a bit more detail. The first thing is the quantity of relevant content on the site. There’s a common saying in the world of search engine optimization and that is “go an inch wide and a mile deep”. What that means is that you should pick a narrow topic – something specific – and build a HUGE site around that one tiny specific topic. That’s a major component of search engine results. Pick something quirky and highly focused. North Alaskan fly fishing. Custom Italian violin bows. Retractable truck shells for Toyota pickup trucks. Who knows? The point is you should always try to go more NARROW, not more broad, in your online content.
Think about it. You may as well get as specific as you can when you design your website. If someone is searching for a broader subject, you should still come up and will still provide useful information. But if someone is searching for specifically what you provide, your site is better positioned to cater to that search. And research shows that the more specific the search is, the closer the person is to BUYING something. So narrow your topic down and build a HUGE site around that one specific topic.
This boils down to the comparison between “short string” searches and “long string” searches. A short string search is one where only one or two words were put into the search criteria. In the mortgage business, think about someone who puts the word “mortgage” into a Google search. That’s a short string. And research shows that person is NOT a buyer. That person is just getting their feet wet, trying to learn the basics about the topic. But someone who puts the words “mortgage refinance jumbo California into the search criteria knows EXACTLY what he or she wants. THAT’S a buyer. Again, there have been studies done on this and long string searches are far more likely to end up in a sale than short string searches.
Incidentally, this will come up again when we talk about pay-per-click online advertising so keep it in mind. We’ll talk about it in more detail in a later chapter.
Point is; you want to design your website for the long string. In fact, you should have a few long string searches in mind when you decide on the content you’ll be including and the way the information is being presented. This targeting also needs to be included in your meta tags. Every website has some code right at the top of each web page that tells the search engines and their spiders what the site is about. This code is referred to as the meta tags. You can go to any website, right click somewhere and select “view source” and you should see the meta tags for that particular site. It will include a site description as well as a series of keywords people might use to find that site.
Back in the good old days, you could make a significant difference in your search engine rankings just by manipulating your meta tags but today, they’re only there to provide yet one more identifier for search engines. But that’s not to say you shouldn’t pay attention to them. While they may not make a huge difference, your site description comes up in the search engine results page so you need to ensure it’s consistent with your site’s purpose. And your keywords ARE considered in the algorithms and you should be sure to include the long string word combinations because a 4 or 5-word combination direct match will certainly carry some weight in the results.
Keywords are definitely important. And it’s not just the specific word that might have been included in the search criteria but all the related words that would fit into the same topic. For example, in the mortgage business, you don’t need to stack your website with the word mortgage but you should definitely include as many related words as you can including refinance, purchase, real estate, interest rate, amortization, deed, note, home and payment.
There’s a great website out there called WordTracker.com and it will provide a list of related words for a particular entry. So you could enter the word mortgage and it would kick out a list of related words. Unfortunately, the site isn’t free but the cost is minimal – only about $8 per day. Anyone putting a website together should create a list of keywords and then pay the $8 to get a one-day subscription. Enter all your keywords and print out all the lists of related words it provides. Then include as many of those related words on your website as you can.
Of course, if you’re building a genuine site designed to address a specific topic, this process would happen automatically but it still doesn’t hurt to have the list right there in front of you. We’re talking about $8 here. Spend the money, get the lists and keep them handy when you write content for your website.
And by the way, the easiest way to get ideas for keywords is to do a search you envision your ideal customer doing and then visit all the top search results, right click, view source and steel their meta tags. It’s nothing new. There’s no secret. Everyone knows you can do this sort of stuff so go ahead and get the keywords you need. Between this and the related words on WordTracker.com, you could have the whole project complete within an afternoon and believe me, it’s worth it. For a 3-hour investment along with $8, your website development efforts could be far more efficient.
As I mentioned, the search engines look for the quantity of relevant content and it’s important to keep that content updating all the time. Stale or duplicate information is valued less than new content. That’s one of the advantages of blogging because it keeps a stream of fresh relevant and unique content on your site. In fact, you can easily setup a blog where your website visitors can contribute their own posts to your blog. Some people are hesitant to allow this but it’s a critical component in the new Web 2.0 approach that’s driving internet innovation these days.
We’ll be talking about Web 2.0 in more detail in a later chapter but the point here is that you have to trust your website visitors and let them contribute to your online presence. Fact is; you still have administrative rights and can remove posts that are detrimental to your cause anyway. Think about the upside. If you create an online community where other users are updating your online content for you, that’s not a bad thing. I’m currently planning to include a blog on my TacticalExecution.com site for that very reason. Everybody benefits. The visitors benefit by seeing other people’s contributions to the topic and my website benefits by having continuously updating relevant content.
Inbound links are an interesting effort. There was a time where any inbound link was valued the same so you could quickly and easily get listed on a series of online directories and increase your number of inbound links. The way I got 88,000 inbound links was through publishing articles to online article databases. We’ll be talking about that in a later chapter but the point here is that the search engines caught on to this in a hurry and adjusted their algorithms accordingly.
The primary change was that inbound links coming from content that was duplicated elsewhere on the internet weren’t counted. In my case, I had published 13 articles and they’d ended up on 88,000 different article databases. But since these articles were all the same on these various databases, it was all considered duplicate content and the links were all nullified, dramatically reducing my ranking. Anyway, the effort still generates traffic for me and we’ll talk about that later but the affect on my search engine ranking has completely disappeared.
What actually carries water are inbound links coming from unique sites with their own unique content that is relevant to the search criteria. You see, the logic is that an inbound link from another unique site that also has relevant content is an endorsement from the referring site to the subject site. It’s like a vote. And the assumption is that the more votes you have, the more important your site is. Going a second level to look at the inbound links of the referring sites simply validates further the quality of the primary votes.
Once you have a content-rich site up and running, you can certainly contact other websites and offer to trade links with them and, not surprisingly, there’s a science to this process as well. How you make the request can obviously play a role in your success but the underlying truth is that win-win situation are appreciated by everyone. If you make yourself valuable to these other sites, they will be more open to the arrangement. And if you can get the link to come directly from their homepage or only one click away from their homepage, all the better. Yes, the search engines even look at that.
Understanding modern search engine technology is wonderful but these days, a site specifically designed to provide great relevant content for its target audience will improve its ranking without any tricks at all. By knowing exactly what the search engines are looking for, it will only streamline your efforts to improve your site for your customers. And that’s why I said at the beginning that even if you don’t end up on the first page of a Google search results page, the effort to cater to their ranking criteria can only help you anyway.
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I DO offer workshops, seminars and keynote speeches as well as consulting services so please email me at Patrick [at] TacticalExecution.com for more information. I’m also doing an extensive podcast series on stock market investing, real estate finance and the economy. It’s called Financial Audio and you can find it on iTunes.
Stay tuned. There is a lot more to come. In the meantime, think big, take action and market strategically. Bye for now.
