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42 Replies Last post: Aug 3, 2008 11:27 AM by traff20

Event: Search Engine Optimization

Mar 12, 2009 11:14 AM

Click to view CommunityTeam's profile sboc CommunityTeam 132 posts since
Jul 27, 2007
Community Members,

Please join us in welcoming Matt Krop to your Small Business Online Community. Matt is here to answer questions on Search Engine Optimization. Today, Matt will be using the screen name SEOGuy.

About Matt
Matt Kropp is the Managing Director of iCrossing's Chicago office. iCrossing is a global digital marketing company providing best-in-class digital marketing services including paid and natural search marketing, Web development, social media, research and analytics. In this role, Matt leverages his 12 years of interactive marketing experience to provide strategic direction and tactical execution of search marketing programs for Fortune 500 clients. His responsibilities include natural search optimization, paid search management, local search optimization & management, content development, tracking and analytics.

To all Community Members
If you have questions for Matt, post it here by simply hitting reply and then refresh your browsers often to view Matt responses. The event will be moderated to queue the questions for our guest. After a question is posted it may be delayed and/or moved into a queue. You do not need to repost. Your question has been received but is in a queue waiting for the guest response. Matt will try to answer as many of your questions as possible. Please note, Matt will first answer the pre-event questions that community members were kind enough to ask in advance.

Remember the community guidelines; stay on topic and be professional.

So, what's your question?
Report as inappropriate
Click to view Bluesuit's profile Mogul Bluesuit 136 posts since
Oct 23, 2007
1. Re: Want your website to be searched? Learn how on June 2. May 15, 2008 11:27 AM
What are the top 3 search optimizations a novice could easily implement on their website themselves?
Click to view MRFINANCE's profile Mogul MRFINANCE 104 posts since
May 11, 2008
2. Re: Want your website to be searched? Learn how on June 2. May 15, 2008 1:41 PM
in response to: Bluesuit
Top 3

I feel like David Letterman!!!

1) Get a catchy DOMAIN NAME easy to remember & short, com. is better than net.

2) Sign up with Yahoo or Google small business and pay per click.

3) Use pertinent KEYWORDS. (short words related to your product)

Get Yahoos pamphlet SMART START.

Good LUCK!

Joe

Richton Funding

www.businessloansfast.net

Click to view CommunityTeam's profile sboc CommunityTeam 132 posts since
Jul 27, 2007
3. Re: Want your website to be searched? Learn how on June 2. May 16, 2008 9:33 AM
We are collecting questions for our search event on June 2. iCrossing will be in SBOC on June 2, 2:00PM - 5:00PM ET. iCrossing will be addressing questions first collected from this thread, so if you want to increase your chances of getting your question answered - ask it now. Otherwise, join us live that day and submit your question.
Click to view NatOnline's profile Mogul NatOnline 670 posts since
Oct 10, 2007
4. Re: Want your website to be searched? Learn how on June 2. May 22, 2008 12:02 PM
I've got a question for Matt.

Everybody said on internet that if you've got some valuable contents, people link to you.
Well that's not excatly true.

We build many articles on our site at: http://www.natural-elements-online.com/ar
ticles-on-natural-hawaiian-skin-care.asp and we've got a lot of visitors reading these articles but not a lot are linking to us.

Visitors love reading our articles but not linking to them, because they are maybe not webmasters. Search engines are ranking pretty well our articles, that's great ,some of our articles have great SERP, people are reading our articles and that's our goal. So our Page Rank is pretty poor, that doesn't mean our articles are. As you know in general webmasters want to link only if you've got a decent Page Rank.

Same thing on page products, who will link to our page products? Some webmasters told me that Search engines love fresh contents, well a product is a product and we cannot change the contents on our products pages. I think it is extremely difficult for an e-commerce to have pages ranking high beside our index.

My question is what would increase our visibility/Page Rank if not a lot people link to our articles, and they are not linking to our product pages?

Thank you
Click to view CommunityTeam's profile sboc CommunityTeam 132 posts since
Jul 27, 2007
5. Re: Want your website to be searched? Learn how on June 2. May 30, 2008 6:03 PM
Remember to join us this coming Monday, June 2! We are still collecting pre-event questions for Matt from iCrossing. Simply hit reply to post your search related question.
Click to view HumanArrow's profile Mogul HumanArrow 45 posts since
May 16, 2008
6. Re: Want your website to be searched? Learn how on June 2. Jun 1, 2008 10:42 PM
Mr. Kropp,

Thanks for taking part in this forum. I am with Human Arrow, an outdoor human directional services company that helps companies increase customer traffic and build brand awareness. My services will be offered in Chicago and Milwaukee.

With my website coming soon, what is the best method for me to attract visitors to my site while targeting the local market and working with a budget of $1000?

Thanks,
Steve
http://www.linkedin.com/in/humanarrow

humanarrow.com
Coming soon!

Click to view SBOCTeam's profile sboc SBOCTeam 328 posts since
Jul 27, 2007
7. Re: Live Now: Search Engine Optimization Jun 2, 2008 2:01 PM
Ok, let's get started. We'll continue to take questions so feel free to submit them to Matt.

Bluesuit asks:

What are the top 3 search optimizations a novice could easily implement on their website themselves?
Click to view SeoGuy's profile EXPERT SeoGuy 18 posts since
Mar 18, 2008
8. Re: Live Now: Search Engine Optimization Jun 2, 2008 2:12 PM
in response to: SBOCTeam

3 things every website should have for natural search visibility include:

~Unique page titles - The <title> tag tells the search engine what the page is about. Using unique titles on each page, with relevant keywords will provide better results
~Meta Descriptions - the <meta description> doesn't factor into rankings as much, but it is usually displayed within the search engine results. This is the first opportunity you have to interact with a customer. Use relevant keywords as they will appear in bold in the results. You can also include a marketing message or call to action to promote a click.
~Site map - make sure your site has a site map. Bots use the site map to crawl all the pages in your stie, Using keyword rich anchor text will increase the relevance in the engines as well as make it easier for spiders to see all the content on your site.
Click to view SBOCTeam's profile sboc SBOCTeam 328 posts since
Jul 27, 2007
9. Re: Live Now: Search Engine Optimization Jun 2, 2008 2:14 PM
Great answer Matt!

Next we have a question from NatOnline:

I've got a question for Matt.

Everybody said on internet that if you've got some valuable contents, people link to you.
Well that's not excatly true.

We build many articles on our site at: http://www.natural-elements-online.com/ar

ticles-on-natural-hawaiian-skin-care.asp and we've got a lot of visitors reading these articles but not a lot are linking to us.

Visitors love reading our articles but not linking to them, because they are maybe not webmasters. Search engines are ranking pretty well our articles, that's great ,some of our articles have great SERP, people are reading our articles and that's our goal. So our Page Rank is pretty poor, that doesn't mean our articles are. As you know in general webmasters want to link only if you've got a decent Page Rank.

Same thing on page products, who will link to our page products? Some webmasters told me that Search engines love fresh contents, well a product is a product and we cannot change the contents on our products pages. I think it is extremely difficult for an e-commerce to have pages ranking high beside our index.

My question is what would increase our visibility/Page Rank if not a lot people link to our articles, and they are not linking to our product pages?

Thank you
Click to view SBOCTeam's profile sboc SBOCTeam 328 posts since
Jul 27, 2007
10. Re: Live Now: Search Engine Optimization Jun 2, 2008 2:18 PM
Community members:

Just a reminder that the event is moderated and all questions will be queued to give our guest a chance to respond. They will be answered in the order they were received.

Thanks,
The SBOC Team
Click to view SeoGuy's profile EXPERT SeoGuy 18 posts since
Mar 18, 2008
11. Re: Live Now: Search Engine Optimization Jun 2, 2008 2:27 PM
in response to: SBOCTeam
My question is what would increase our visibility/Page Rank if not a lot people link to our articles, and they are not linking to our product pages?

If your articles are being displayed in the SERP's (search engines results page) and customers are reading them while on site, I don't know why more people are not linking to them. You can make it easier for the casual user to share the article by incorporating social bookmarking tags on your site. Sites like Delicious (http://del.icio.us/) allow users to store and share bookmarks with everyone. Adding this functionality to your site makes it easy for users to tag the articles as useful.

Tools like "Add This" allow you to add a number of social bookmakring tags at once.
Click to view SBOCTeam's profile sboc SBOCTeam 328 posts since
Jul 27, 2007
12. Re: Live Now: Search Engine Optimization Jun 2, 2008 2:30 PM
Perfect!

Next we have H*umanArrow*:

Mr. Kropp,

Thanks for taking part in this forum. I am with Human Arrow, an outdoor human directional services company that helps companies increase customer traffic and build brand awareness. My services will be offered in Chicago and Milwaukee.

With my website coming soon, what is the best method for me to attract visitors to my site while targeting the local market and working with a budget of $1000?

Thanks,
Steve
http://www.linkedin.com/in/humanarrow

humanarrow.com
Coming soon!
Click to view SeoGuy's profile EXPERT SeoGuy 18 posts since
Mar 18, 2008
13. Re: Live Now: Search Engine Optimization Jun 2, 2008 2:39 PM
in response to: SBOCTeam

To keep focused and get the most out of our time today, I'd like to limit the questions and conversations to Natural Search. Paid search will be discussed in a separate event on June 9^th^.


Simply put, Natural Search listings (or results) are the results on Search Engine Results Page (SERP) that appear on the left hand side of the page, underneath the top 3 Sponsored (or paid search) results. These results are determined and displayed by the engine's algorithm. The algorithm evaluates a number of variables to determine relevance of a web page to the keyword searched.

That being said, you raised a good point in speaking of your service area. Local search (searches done on local directories OR searches on national search engines with a local term included) is increasing by the day. By including your service area within the content of your site, within page titles, including local addresses and local terms in the meta data will help your visibility in SERP's. Ranking high for local terms connects you to users in your area.

Click to view SBOCTeam's profile sboc SBOCTeam 328 posts since
Jul 27, 2007
14. Re: Live Now: Search Engine Optimization Jun 2, 2008 2:41 PM
We have hotschedules up next asking:

Hi Matt! In your opinion, what are the advantages/disadvantages in hiring an outside firm for SEO? Would you recommend doing this in-house?

Thanks!
Ray

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