Transcript Bootstrap Web Marketing: SEO & Social Media

Bootstrap Web Marketing:
SEO & Social Media
• Who I am
• Disclaimer
• Format of the presentation
SEO
Why SEO Kicks Ass
• Other than effort, it’s free.
• The skillset required for the time intensive
work is relatively inexpensive.
• SEO is the gift that keeps on giving
Why SEO Doesn’t Kick Ass
• SEO is a fast-changing world.
• You live and die by Google.
• It’s delayed gratification (and there’s a
chance of NO gratification)
SEO Ranking Factors –
Markup / Keywords
(most startups do fine here)
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Title Tag
H1 Tag
Body Text
Domain Name
URL
SEO Ranking Factors – Other
Markup
• Popularity within internal linking (very
important for long tail or low competition
keywords)
• Quality of OUTGOING links
• Page updates
SEO Ranking Factors –
Overall Site Popularity
• Global popularity of your site (combination
of link quantity/quality)
• Age of site
• Site performance (time on page,
bookmarks, etc.)
Inbound Links
• Relevance of inbound links
• Anchor text (Google bomb) and adjacent
text.
Negative Factors
• Duplicate Content
– Very Similar Pages
– Identical Page Titles / Meta Info
• Keyword stuffing?
Keyword Research
(most startups suck at this)
How to Evaluate Keywords?
• How many people are searching for a
particular word/phrase?
• How competitive is the landscape for that
word/phrase?
• How relevant is the keyword?
• Actionable keywords? “lowest price wii”
– Measure the conversion!
• Non-bouncing keywords
How do people search?
• # of words
– 28.9% 2 word phrases
– 27.8% 3 word phrases
– 17.1% 4 word phrases
– 11.4% 1 word phrases
• 62% click on the first result
• 21% feel search engines don’t understand
their query
Keyword Research – Have
someone else do it
• http://www.seoresearchlabs.com/ :$99.95
Count, relevance (entered by you) and # of targeted searches per day
Estimated monthly clickthru for 1st, 5th, and 10th position on each major engine.
Competitiveness of each keyword
Keyword Research –
Do It Yourself
Overture Keyword Research
Tool (free)
• Source: Yahoo and Affiliates
• Notes: Doesn’t distinguish singular and
plural
• Not an ideal tool for exact phrases
WordTracker.com ($8/day)
• Source: Dogpile (.6%)and MetaCrawler
(.4%)
(what kinda people use these engines!?)
Adwords Traffic Estimator
(free, req. AdWords account)
• Source: Google
• Notes: Not good for long tail phrases
Other Resources
• Yahoo Search Marketing Tool
• KeywordDiscovery.com
• Google Trends
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Estimated monthly clickthru for 1st, 5th, and 10th position on each major engine.
Best Resource – Pay for It
• Buy an Adwords campaign for a phrase.
Pay enough to get your ad on the first
page. Metrics will show you the number of
ad views.
Spiderability
Can Search Engines Find Every
Page/view on Your Site?
• Create a “sitemap” (HTML and/or XML)
• Be mindful of internal link text
• Remember that internal link popularity is
important (more than 1 link is better than
one link)
– “Related content” buckets are valuable
• Most important for sites with lots of data
hidden behind a search interface
Effective Presentation on
SERPs
• Readable, compelling, objective title (65
characters)
• Readable, compelling, objective meta
description (155 characters)
• Short URLs perform better
• Stuffed titles, descriptions, and URLs look
spammy and don’t get clicks
Title
Meta-Description
URL
Npost Example
Keyword Research: “Tech Startup Jobs”?
Markup for SEO: Title tag, <h1> tag, referring anchor tag
If you were a search spider, what would you click on to
find “seattle rails jobs”?
What about here? No spiderability!
Site Structure for SEO: Keyword targeted pages linked to
(flat site structure). Internal link popularity is important.
SERP Title: For the target phrase “rails jobs seattle”, the title
should lead with “Rails Jobs in Seattle, WA” or somesuch.
Description: meta description should be unique and
compelling.
URL: Short urls perform better
Link Building Campaigns
Anotomy of a Link Building
Campaign
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Links from trusted sites.
Links to “deep” pages in your site.
Links with good anchor text
Links from good pages
– Home pages
– Content pages
• Links from relevant pages
• No JavaScript / no ‘nofollow’!
Value of Building Links
• People click on them!
• Branding
• And, of course, SEO
Anatomy of a Good Link Source
• Search for your top keywords/phrases –
the top 100-150 or so are worth getting
links from.
• Content rich page
• Links deep to the most relevant page
• Anchor text, title tag, h1 tag, etc all match
to the keyword in question
Who to Ask for Links
• Any relevant site
• Good way to find sites to ask are to find
sites that link to your competitions’ sites.
– Linkdomain:mycompetition.com
• Linkdomain:mycompetition.com “my
keywords”
How to Ask for Links
• First, see if there is a standard procedure
for getting links
• Second, see if you (as a user) can post a
link (comments, look for nofollow), forums,
etc. (Be careful of abuse)
• If not, ask for it.
• If necessary (if you can), buy it.
Say Thanks for EVERY Link
That You Can
• Set up a google alert for your business
name
• Any time you get ANY mention, stop by
and say THANKS
• Any time you get criticized, stop by and
respectfully engage in the conversation
(and keep it going!)
Social Media Marketing
(Big linkbuilding Opportunities!)
Linkbait (It’s Easy!)
• Defined as something that people want to link to, blog about, talk
about, digg, vote up, etc. The good news is, baiting web geeks
words.
• Write something
– Useful
– Funny
– Controversial
• Better yet, have your standard content pages be
– Useful
– Funny
– Controversial
• To get a feel for linkbait, head over to popurls.com (list of top digg,
reddit, del.icio.us links)
• Would you bookmark this? Would you email it to your friends?
Headlines/titles Win the Day
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“Who wants [blank]?”
“The Secret of [blank]?”
Little known ways to [blank]?”
Lists – Top 5, Top 10, etc.
(useful, funny, controversial)
Top Social Media Venues
• Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.
• Blogs (all blogs matter, top blogs matter more)
– (check source for nofollow tag / server redirects )
• Forums
– (check source for nofollow tag / server redirects )
• Public Profiles (anywhere)
• Directories
• Design Portals
Go Viral
• Ideally, using your product is an inherently public act that
elicits others to jump on board
• Viral is not a marketing strategy, it’s a product strategy
– "Tell a friend"
– Widget embeds
– Addressbook importing
• (These don’t make your product viral, but they’ll help it if
it is)
• First priority is creating something that is useful, funny,
controversial enough that people want to share it
• Second priority is making it easy