Ranking 10th or better is a must

I spent the first 6 months of an SEO campaign moving a client from outside the top 100 for a phrase to the top 15 (not shown). Since then, I've been working on getting them from 15th to the top 10. I've attached a report below showing the progress and traffic resulting from SEO work. The search engine position is indicated by the blue line, and the search engine traffic is the gray line. As soon as the client hit 10th, you can see the traffic starting to build. And the 4 months of being on page 2, resulted in basically zero traffic.

In case you were wondering, the SEO report above comes from a Raven Tools account synced with Google Analytics. Our SEO clients really love these reports, as you get a clear picture of how search engine rank impacts traffic.

If you have any questions, or are looking for a Utah SEO company, check out our SEO page. Hit us up on twitter: @redolivedesign. Or call our office, located in South Jordan: 801-545-0410.

Ethical SEO Takeaways

- Black hat SEO might work in the short term, but your site will definitely be burned in the long run.

- Search engines provide SEO guidelines/expectations, and as Greg Shuey, VP of Client Services at SEO.com, tweeted:

Google tells us exactly what they expect, but they don't tell what we have to do to rank #SEOethics

— Greg Shuey (@shuey03) March 8, 2012

- As an SEO, keep your self educated in what will harm your client's sites and what what will add SEO value. Be aware that what might have worked last year may not now.

You can find Ash Buckles' full presentation in its entirety here:  slidesha.re/zEpzAU

How to search for old mentions:

First, search your company name in Google. Next click "show search tools." Click "custom range" and enter a date range that is a few years old. Then click "search." This will return places on the web where you were mentioned. You'll need to go through them in order to find the sites that mentioned you, but haven't linked to you.

Why it works!

Vince, our creative director, recently reminded me that having an "in" is a very powerful factor in networking and building relationships. It's one of those things that you know, but you may not be actively applying. So I started integrating this idea into my link building research. I started looking for old mentions of our clients' companies in Google, where a link was never established. I was surprised at how many mentions there were, where no link existed. Within a very short period time, new links were being acquired and they were coming from high quality sites. I also noticed that I usually found a good way to start the conversion, when I found an old company mention. These websites typically had old information or images that needed to be updated. So it provided the opportunity to reach out to them, and help them by providing the new information or assets.

The age of the mention technically doesn't matter, but here a few specific reasons why an old mention might give you a good way to break the ice and initiate a conversation.

• Your old mentions sometimes have outdated information, logos, or images. This gives you an opportunity to help them by providing them with the new assets, while you also ask for a link.
• Old mentions provide the opportunity for you to send a "thank you" email. Thank them for having mentioned you for such a long period of time and explain how they may have helped your business by doing so. Thank them, and again, you could ask if they would consider linking to you.

Looking for links where you have an "in" where people already know you and are already mentioning you on their site, but may not have a link pointed to you, is an efficient way of building links.

I regularly tweet SEO tips for companies, so if you're looking for more, follow me on twitter at @redoliveryan. If you are sick of link building and would like our help, visit the company SEO page on our website.

Red Olive is a Utah SEO company located just off 106th South in South Jordan.

1. Review what other companies are writing on their page. Search for your topic in Google with something like this: intitle:topic .
When you read what 10 of the top rankings sites use as content for your topic, it puts you in a much better position to think of your own strategy. Don't plagiarize, but understand what everyone else is doing, and try to do a better or equal job. You might say this tip is obvious, and it is. But the key here is to not just glance at your competitors page, but study it and carefully review it. Could you cover some of the same areas, but improve upon it? Were they missing anything? Sometimes it's easier to critique than create, and this critiquing process might help you overcome writer's block.

2. What are the core components or features of your product or service?
Simply highlighting the core features of your product or service in a bulleted list will take up some quality room on your page.

3. Ask yourself what makes your product or service X different from other companies. Here are a few questions to ask about your products or services, to generate secondary content for a page:
Are your products made somewhere that is appealing such as locally or in the USA?
Do you have story behind how your product came to be?
Do you have tips on how to use your product?
If you are selling treadmills, could you write up a tutorial on how to set up the treadmill or create a video demonstrating the setup?
If you are selling HVAC services, could you write up some quick tips for air conditioning maintenance?
Ask your customer support reps what some of their commonly asked questions are, and create a Q&A section on the page.

4. Who is your target end user or buyer? Examples of how target customer information might be added to the page:
Say for example, you sell chairs, and a lot of your chairs are purchased by wedding reception centers.
Could you write up something about why wedding reception centers use your chairs?
Could you add photos and descriptions of chairs being used in such venues?
What features of your chairs specifically apply to wedding reception centers?

Not only will this process help your company with web page creation, it will typically lead to improved SEO. By studying what the top ranking companies are doing, you will likely start to subconsciously pick up on SEO. There are a lot of aspects to SEO, but it starts with creating a page that a search engine would want to return for a search query. I hope these tips have helped you with the difficult task of writing website copy. If you have any questions about copywriting or SEO for your company, contact us. We are located in South Jordan, about 5 minutes south of I-15.

Site Development - Communicate with your Developer

When you pick a developer to build a website for your new company, ask them about title tags and meta descriptions. If it doesn't get discussed, this typically leads to 1 or 2 likely outcomes. First, the developer will often duplicate the homepage title tag across all your pages. This can really hinder your website's potential. This would be like a book where each chapter has the same title. Also, Google warns you of duplicate title tags in Web Master Tools. If Google is tracking it, you might want to make sure this isn't happening on your site. The second typical outcome of not asking about title tags, is the developer will likely wing it and write something quickly as they build out your pages. And as you can imagine, with this method, your results will vary.

So ask about title tags, and if the developer isn't going to do them properly, make sure you do some research and write them yourself. To be fair to developers, it takes a considerable amount of time and thought to write title tags and meta descriptions. And you shouldn't expect to have someone spend hours on this without specifically paying for it.

Create a Blog

Start posting to a blog. If you can't afford to pay for hosting or development for an "on-site" blog, create a posterous or tumblr blog. For starters, this helps you to build on your writing and creativity skills. Also, you can use the blog to support your website by writing up blog posts that add something extra to an existing page or topic on your main website. If you have a page on "Running Shoes" do a blog post about "Tips for breaking in Running Shoes." This supportive role of the blog can really help with SEO.

Don't Set it and Forget it

I have been doing SEO for almost 4 years and I will often have to revise the way I lay things out for a website, after the fact. Rarely do websites nail site organization and marketing at first launch. I've seen the addition of a strategically placed "contact" or "rfq" button double conversion rates. Keep finding ways to improve your website and increase conversion.

Example

Search: intitle:Utah SEO
Number of Results: 1,970,000
Population: 2,763,885

So for Utah, there are .71 Google results (that have "Utah" and "SEO" in the title tag) per person. So there are more people in Utah than results targeting "Utah SEO." For New Mexico, it appears there are about 8x more results targeting New Mexico SEO than there are people in the state. The "New Mexico" outlier could be explained by the potential for a large number of sites with title tags that are actually targeting just "Mexico" + "SEO" and perhaps "New" was being used in a different part of the page or title tag so it was flagged and added to the results.

Report Data

This is not a scientific report, as there are likely caveats to this method as some companies have more than 1 page with their state and SEO in the title tag. But you should still consider these potential duplicate pages from a single company as competition, as every page is competing for a top 10 spot in the search results. Another thing to keep in mind is that while some states may have fewer SEO pages per person compared to other states, it is not saying it would be more or less difficult in these states to rank top 10 for local SEO phrases. This report simply shows the number of Google results for the search: "intitle:[state] seo" per person in each state as of 01/17/12 based on 2010 Census data.

State	Population - Census 2010	Google page Results for "intitle:state seo"	# of Results per person in state
alabama	4,779,736	2,040,000	0.43
alaska	710,231	1,370,000	1.93
arizona	6,392,017	2,120,000	0.33
arkansas	2,915,918	1,250,000	0.43
california	37,253,956	14,700,000	0.39
colorado	5,029,196	2,750,000	0.55
connecticut	3,574,097	1,110,000	0.31
delaware	897,934	692,000	0.77
florida	18,801,310	8,850,000	0.47
georgia	9,687,653	3,180,000	0.33
hawaii	1,360,301	1,770,000	1.30
idaho	1,567,582	983,000	0.63
illinois	12,830,632	5,380,000	0.42
indiana	6,483,802	1,900,000	0.29
iowa	3,046,355	1,510,000	0.50
kansas	2,853,118	1,890,000	0.66
kentucky	4,339,367	1,360,000	0.31
louisiana	4,533,372	1,100,000	0.24
maine	1,328,361	1,480,000	1.11
maryland	5,773,552	2,120,000	0.37
massachusetts	6,547,629	2,430,000	0.37
michigan	9,883,640	3,980,000	0.40
minnesota	5,303,925	2,580,000	0.49
mississippi	2,967,297	857,000	0.29
missouri	5,988,927	1,790,000	0.30
montana	989,415	1,570,000	1.59
nebraska	1,826,341	1,030,000	0.56
nevada	2,700,551	1,190,000	0.44
new hampshire	1,316,470	267,000	0.20
new jersey	8,791,894	27,600,000	3.14
new mexico	2,059,179	16,400,000	7.96
new york	19,378,102	41,800,000	2.16
north carolina	9,535,483	4,780,000	0.50
north dakota	672,591	97,900	0.15
ohio	11,536,504	4,360,000	0.38
oklahoma	3,751,351	1,730,000	0.46
oregon	3,831,074	2,050,000	0.54
pennsylvania	12,702,379	2,700,000	0.21
rhode island	1,052,567	38,800	0.04
south carolina	4,625,364	3,470,000	0.75
south dakota	814,180	93,300	0.11
tennessee	6,346,105	1,420,000	0.22
texas	25,145,561	11,800,000	0.47
utah	2,763,885	1,970,000	0.71
vermont	625,741	677,000	1.08
virginia	8,001,024	3,640,000	0.45
washington	6,724,540	7,190,000	1.07
west virginia	1,852,994	2,940,000	1.59
wisconsin	5,686,986	1,610,000	0.28
wyoming	563,626	620,000	1.10

Population data sources

Census and Wikipedia

Title Tag:

Tip: Choose a title tag that best describes the content on the page, while containing keywords or a category element to help search engines categorize your page.
Example: Utah Luxury Hotels | Salt Lake City | Red Olive Hotel
w3schools technical title tag usage information

Meta Description:

Tips: Completely read through your page before writing the meta description so your content is fresh on your mind. This will also help you check for spelling errors or parts of your writing that may not be clear. You might also notice you are too light on keywords. The idea is not to stuff a bunch of keywords in your writing, but rather, to make sure you flat aren't missing keywords and not using them at all. This happens more than you might think.

Go read what other companies in your industry are writing in their meta descriptions. See what you like or don't like about their descriptions, and then use this information to help guide the writing for your meta description. Think about what makes your service or product different from other companies and incorporate this into your meta description. Lastly make sure your meta description is on-topic and uses related words or some of the same words that were used in your title tag and page content. Congruency is good here.
w3schools technical meta description usage information

H1 Tag:

Tip: Reserve the use of 'h' tags for your page headings. Don't use h1 tags for links, buttons, or other elements that are not headings. There is tendency for developers to use h1 for various items across the page while trying to apply font size styles.
w3schools technical h tag usage information

P Tag:

Tip: I prefer to break up content using 'p' tags and not a bunch of 'br' tags. But go with your personal preference.
w3schools technical p tag usage information

A Tag:

Tip: Links and the anchor text for your link. Put 'a' tags around words that help the user quickly get an idea of what type of page or content that link points to. In other words, put 'a' tags around keywords or category phrases. It is also helpful to link call-to-action phrases. Be careful not to have the same word linked twice on a page and then send the user to two different places. This is confusing and probably not helpful for a search engine or user.
w3schools technical a tag usage information

URLs:

Tip: Try to create urls that are organized, contain categories or keywords. Don't create urls that are too simple or way too complex and strung out. Using overly simple urls, such as product.html, can really hurt your site's potential. Creating overly complex urls such as /ti55-red-running-shoes-12345.html aren't so great either. While this is better than the first example, because it includes information about the page, it is still kind of hard for the user to remember. Something like /shoes/red-running-shoes is probably a better start.

Navigation or Nav:

Tip: Don't be overly generic like this: Home, Products, About, Contact. A user should be able to figure out what type of company you are just by reading the text from your navigation.

If you are unfamiliar with what Search Engine Optimization is, it can be summarized by this definition:
Building quality traffic to your website through improved search engine rankings for keywords related to your company or services.

Some of the typical methods to increase search engine rankings include:

• Improving title tags, urls, and website content.
• Improving site coding for things such as decreased load times and creating a better user experience.
• Improving off-site presence by creating content that builds links, social media strategy, and blog participation.

Here are some SEO charts documenting keyword improvements we've made for some Utah companies. For the purposes of this post we have included mostly "Utah" related keywords. However, we do offer SEO for national based phrases, where there isn't a location element to the keyword.

Some work we've done for Utah Home Builders:

For a Utah Dermatologist:

Other Services:

National Phrases (without a local element in the targeted keywords):

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