The SEO Girl

Hi there! I must admit I’m feeling a little frustrated today. It was suggested today that SEO should be more of a “boxed” approach, where you give a site owner a set amount of content, a set amount of paid links (bad as they are!), directory submissions (because it’s so 2001!), all without much customer support and minimal reporting. It’s a production line approach, and I’m simply not down with it. I feel that SEO and social media is an art – you work with the client on a unique, creative strategy that can help set them apart from the pack, and then continually tweak that stategy as you go along.

The emphasis in SEO should be on Innovation. I understand that the core SEO tactics, like SEO content and quality links, apply to most any site. But the methods of actually making SEO content and links successful varies so dramatically from site to site. SEO content doesn’t have to just meet SEO content best practices – it can, and should, be written creatively to also be link bait. Paid text links are in my opinion a complete waste. Besides the potential for being penalized by search engines, no one’s going to see your site’s tiny text link on another site. Taking the time to network with blogs and sites in your industry and giving them an actual reason to link to you will not only help your rankings, but most likely your site will also receive traffic from them.

This sort of boxed approach honestly makes me worry about the SEO industry. Yes, SEO companies want to make money, but the companies that are going to last are the ones who create custom SEO campaigns and know that every client should have a unique strategy.

<Pulls hair out>

You probably wouldn’t think a simply 404 error page could have much impact on an SEO campaign. Ideally, it would be nice if both search engine spiders and visitors to your site didn’t hit on one at all. But let’s face it – some things in life are just destiny.

Optimize Your 404 Pages
Everything else on your site is optimized, so why not capitalize on the advantages of optimizing your 404 error page? Ah, but you ask, it’s not like that page is accessible via your homepage, nor do you want to exactly promote an error page. But what’s an site owner to do when a visitor slams into the bland brick wall that is a 404 page, such as the awful Barnes and Noble 404 Error Page and only slightly better Boston Red Sox 404 Error Page? (But I’d love to score some tix!)

Customize It, That’s What!
Customizing your 404 page is extremely helpful for decreasing bounce rate for both human visitors and spiders. Here’s some guidelines to follow to ensure your 404 Page is both people friendly and SEO friendly:

• Carry the same shell, or template, as the rest of your site.
• Include a search box so visitors can easily find what they’re looking for.
• Include links to popular section pages, as well as a link to your sitemap. That way, search engine spiders can navigate back into your site through these links.
• Be nice to your visitors. Apologize for the error page, and offer them a coupon code for 5% off their total page. Not only will they stay on your site – they’ll order, too!

TheSEOGirl applauds well done, well done to these 404 error pages:

• http://whitehouseblackmarket.com/seogirl.html : Includes links to Customer Service, FAQ, has a search box, carries template, and links to major product categories
• http://starbucks.com/seogirl.html : Suggestions for better browsing, link to homepage, carries template
• http://www.vegas.com/seogirl.html : Carries template, ability to choose new travel dates/itinerary directly from the error page. (Yes, I need a vacation!).
  

Anyone have more ideas for ways to optimize your 404 Error Page? Leave a comment. If you’d like some tips on customizing your own 404 page, email me at theseogirl@gmail.com.

If you’re reading this, you hopefully like search engine optimizaton. But every SEO Specialist is bound to re-think SEO as a career path every once in awhile. Here’s the reasons why my bumper sticker reads “I Heart SEO”.

• Determination - If you’re going to excel in the SEO world, you need to have determination. You may see your keywords rise to the top of Google one month and see them fall to page 4 the next. SEO isn’t Pay-Per-Click, you must have the persistence to see your SEO campaign through. Keywords rise, and keywords fall. Don’t let one bad month deter you from excelling in SEO in the future.
• Continous Training - Sign up for all the SEO newsletters at sites like SEO Chat, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, and SEOmoz. Read their blogs daily to get insight and tips. Be sure to read the blog of your favorite SEO Girl too! It’s imperative to stay up to date on the latest SEO trends, this is a career path that can at times change every week.
• Broad Skill Set - Are words your specialty, but have no ideal what html stands for? Team up with a developer and you’re good to go. SEO Specialists bring many different skills to the table, and you need to have people who can write and others who are more tech-savvy. Partner the two together and you’re golden.
• Be Friendly - The Search Engine Optimization world is competitive, but it also has a certain camraderie that many industries lack. SEO is the future, and I predict there will be great demand for SEO Specialists in a few years. Don’t be afraid to share your knowledge. Attend conferences, network, and schmooze with the big wigs. Maybe you’ll even spot me
• Experience is Everything - There’s no Bachelor’s degree in SEO. Learn the techniques, read the blogs, and apply it to your SEO campaign. You’re bound to screw up, but learn from your mistakes and figure out where you went wrong.

If your SEO campaign doesn’t seem to be paying off, hang in there kid. There’s no sense in throwing in the towel just yet. The SEO community is extraordinarly welcoming to newbies, so leave a comment on the SEO Chat message boards or on one of my posts, and someone’s bound to help you out. We’re always ready to give you a hand.

Eric Ward posted an article on Search Engine Land today on how to write link request emails. Link building is the bane of many an SEO Specialists’s existence. I’m here to offer you some suggestions for your link request emails so you can breathe a little easier and maximize the value of your link building campaign.

1. Subject of the email – Stay away from the “Link Request” subject line, it probably won’t do you any good. Choose a more descriptive line that reflects something you like about their site.

2. State your case – Don’t beat around the bush. Tell them who you are and what you’d like from them. Flatter them and their site – tell them specific things or articles you like on their site. Remember, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. They’re doing you a favor, so put on that smile.

3. Give them an incentive – Why do they need to add your link? If your site has a PageRank, include it in the email. If it doesn’t, talk about the design of your site or the great resources you have on your site. Give them reasons why visitors from their site would ever want to go to yours. A great incentive is offering a free article or blog post for their site.

4. Link Text - What do you want your link to say? Give them the html code and exact text for your link so all they have to do is copy and paste it from the email into their site. People like ease.

5. Reader-friendly – No one wants to read a huge block of text. Break it up into bullet points or numbers. It’ll be easier to read, and they’ll love you for it.

6. No attachments, please - Include an attachment, and your email is going straight to the junk folder!

Link building can be frustrating and difficult, but the payoffs are enormous. Once the replies roll in, you’ll be able to develop a relationship with site owners that can have huge rewards. Treat them well and they will do the same to your link.

- Happy linking!

You might be a link building whiz kid or an SMO expert, but both search engines and visitors to your site want content. These SEO content writing tips and tricks won’t turn you into Shakespeare, but if you listen up they might just make writing a little easier.

Free Information
Think of content as your opportunity to provide “free information”. For example, pretend you have a site selling high heels. Be sure to have extensive product descriptions of each shoe, but also create articles. Write articles on proper foot care, what styles are in right now, and what kinds of shoes you’d wear to see mom or go to the club in.

Web-Friendly Copy
Notice how I broke this post up into small paragraphs with subheads in bold. Do the same in your SEO copy. It can be difficult to read online, but creating bulleted lists and including lots of white space will make your visitors love your site. Remember that content isn’t just for search engines. Having a high ranking site doesn’t take the place of happy customers.

Go With The Flow
Make sure your content flows. Read it outloud and see if it makes sense. Avoid run-on sentences and long paragraphs. Use spell-check and grab a dictionary. There’s no reason to use a “dollar” word where a “penny” word is just fine.

Meta what?
Search engines don’t reward meta tags like they used to, but it’s still helpful to add a meta-title, meta-keywords, and meta-description to your site. Writing your own meta-description gives you better control over the summary of your site that will display in the SERPs. Write unique meta tags for every page, or at least every section page, on your site.

HTML Knowledge
If you’re uploading the content yourself, be sure to have a working knowledge of HTML. You can download basic HTML editing software like Nvu for free.

Happy writing!

- your darling seo girl!

If you want to talk the talk, you need to first know the buzzwords that will turn you into an SEO expert (or at least sound like one). Here’s the lowdown on Search Engine Optimization lingo:

• Organic/Natural – Organic, or natural, refers to the 1-10 search results in search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. They are the unpaid, not sponsored, results that you will be targeting in your SEO campaign.
• Paid Listings – Paid listings, or sponsored results, are ads that people buy to market their products online. They usually appear alongside the organic results.
• SERP – SERP stands for “Search Engine Results Page”, or the list of organic results that comes up in a search engine like Google.
• SMO – SMO is Social Media Optimization, the latest SEO technique. SMO involves getting your site and fresh content noticed by social media sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.
• White Hat/Black Hat – White Hat SEO refers to SEO that typically plays nice and doesn’t violate Google’s webmaster guidelines. Black Hat specialists aren’t donning devil horns, but they know how to beat the system. Yet, there’s a chance of being penalized by the search engines for black hat techniques.
• Keywords – When you type a term into that little white box on Google, the words you’re typing in are called “keywords” in SEO land. SEO specialists optimize sites for specific keywords.
• Long Tail Keywords – These are keywords that came out of the womb with an extra appendage. Joking. Long Tail Keywords are usually keywords that are more than three words long. These keywords are usually easier to rank for than short 1-2 word keywords. Many SEO specialists who promise results will optimize your site for long tail keywords because the competition isn’t as great for these words. Yet, few people may be searching for these terms, so be careful if an SEO specialist does this.
• Link Building – The part of your SEO campaign that will most likely cause you the most frustration. Think of getting your site ranked with Google as an election that you want to win. Every relevant site that links to you is a vote. The more votes you have from reputable sites, the more likely you are to “win” by getting your site ranked higher.
• One-Way Links - Google is now thought to reward “one-way links” rather than reciprocal links. One way links occur when a site links to your site without you first linking to them.
• PageRank – When looking for relevant links, looks for sites that have a high PageRank. PageRank is Google’s system for determining how much weight a site has. Great sites have a PageRank of 7 or higher. Download the Google Toolbar to see the PageRank for all the sites you visit.
• WTF?! – The cry of a frustrated SEO specialist. *Pat on the back.* It’ll be okay.

This is only a handful of SEO lingo. Leave a comment to post your own!

I like long walks on the beach, watching the sunset, and – oh, sorry, wrong website! All jokes aside, The SEO Girl is a place where I can share my views and insight into the wonderful world of Search Engine Optimization with all of you. I encourage you to contribute your thoughts and opinions on each post I write, I welcome intelligent discussions, witty comments, and anything else you can throw at me (no tomatoes, please!).

I live and breathe Search Engine Optimization every day. SEO is changing every minute, and it’s our job to keep up with it.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at theseogirl @ gmail.com (remove the spaces around the “@” symbol when sending).

- your favorite seo girl

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