The SEO Girl

It’s time for this SEO Girl to get a bit mushy With Thanksgiving just a few days, I’ve started to think about all the things in my life I’m thankful for. I don’t have a perfect life (nor want one!), but my thankful list is quite long! In addition to being thankful for all the great people in my life, I’m so happy to be a part of the SEO industry, and all the people who helped take me from a copywriter to motivating me to learn the in’s and out’s of SEO. If you work in SEO, especially with clients, you know how stressful it is. Not only are you juggling the many client personalities, but you’re working to implement creative and successful SEO techniques for their sites, usually on less time than you really need! Yet, tackling SEO challenges and succeeding, working with clients no matter the stress levels sometimes, and being able to meet so many intelligent and interesting people makes me so thankful to be in this industry.

We’re in an industry that’s continually changing, with a growing emphasis on a more purer form of SEO and social media that works to engage your audience, rather than game search engines. To anyone reading this, thank you so much for reading, indulging me, and motivating me to keep posting!

How about you? What makes you thankful to be part of the SEO industry?

If you’ve met me in real life, you’ve probably seen me whip out a tube of berry Yes To Carrots lip balm (several hundred times) or heard me talk about their sister brand, Yes To Tomatoes, and how much I love it. I’ve been to the Yes To Carrots website, Twitter, and Facebook, many many times, and like any SEO worth her salt, there’s some things we notice a bit differently about a website. Yes To Carrots has an exceptional social marketing campaign and overall brand personality, and they’re definitely a brand to keep an eye on! (Fellow SEO girls – you must check out their body butter, so wonderful.)

Homepage Image: The first thing you’ll notice about the site is the very attractive homepage. The second thing: it’s all an image, oh no! A search engine is basically glossing over this page as they can’t read images. Ideally, the page should be balanced with an adequate amount of SEO-friendly text and images. Plus, visitors utilizing screen-readers to access the page will be able to identify what’s actually on the Yes To Carrots page.

The homepage does include image alt tags, which is great, but be sure they’re in a consistent format. Some read “Body Butter”, while others read “hand_and_elbow_cream”. A very small point, but great for consistency and having a clean website.

Page Title: Check out my previous post, “Ask The SEO Girl: Should My Page Title Include My Website’s Name?”, about adding your brand name to each page title on your website, along with a keyword phrase you’d like to rank for. Their homepage page title includes the Yes To Carrots brand name, but their interior pages lack it. Go for consistency and branding and add that brand name in!

Twitter.com/YesToCarrots: This is an example of a company Twitter page done so right. They’ve identified a brand personality of embracing a refreshing, healthy lifestyle, with an optimistic outlook. From their own tweets to the posts they decide to retweet, their Twitter posts reflect this personality. They don’t just tweet to tweet – they do it with a purpose, and they do it well.

Facebook.com/YesToCarrots: They convey that same vibrant personality on Facebook. We’d like to see them have different posts on Twitter and Facebook, but we applaud them for keeping their page updated, posting new status messages, adding photos, and posting new discussion topics. Their loyal fan base has responded back by embracing how active they are on social platforms and interacting with them.

Yes To Carrots is an exciting brand with products that meet and way exceed what’s said in their marketing messages. They can benefit from some SEO improvements, but their social media campaign sets the bar, and sets it high, for what a successful social campaign should be. Now time to re-apply my berry lip balm and get started on more SEO copy!

Yes, yes, and a thousand more yes’s to this question! The page title, or meta title, are the words in the blue bar at the top of your Internet browser, or the words engulfed by <title> in the source code for a website. Including one or two keyword phrases that are relevant for your site in your page title is a common SEO best practice, and as long as it’s not abused, actually does contribute quite well to a website being ranked for those keyword phrases, particularly the keywords in the homepage page title.

I recently heard an SEO say that they prefer not to put the site’s name in the page title. I strongly disagree – creating a page title similar in structure to: Keyword Phrase 1 and Keyword Phrase 2: Site.com, is a must for the following reasons:

• Reinforce Branding – In an age where searchers want to find the lowest price product, and want to find it fast, you need to do everything possible to instill your brand name in their minds. Adding it to your page title keeps it right in front of their eyes as they flip through your website.

• Search Result Listings – A search engine will typically pull your site’s page title as the title of a search engine results page listing. Imagine seeing a slew of search results, all with relatively generic, keyword-rich titles. Then, you spot one that includes keyword phrases, but also has the site’s brand name. Wouldn’t you be more inclined to click on the one with the brand name?

• Bookmarking – Whether it’s social bookmarking or simply bookmarking a site to your Internet browser, the bookmarked listing for a site usually is pulled from the site’s page title. Once again, branding is everything, and when the person who just bookmarked 10 relatively similar sites goes back to look at their list, their eye, and mouse, is going to be attracted to the one that has a brand name listed.

Including your website’s brand name in your site’s page title is a practice that only makes sense. When you’re at the mall, do the stores have “Clothing Store”, “Clothing Store 2″, “Bath Store”, “Bath Store 2″, and “Shoe Store” on their marquees? Nope. They distinguish themselves from each other by highlighting their brand names wherever they can, and that’s what sticks in our minds and has us stepping into their stores again and again.

I’ve been such a delinquent blogger lately! First it was end of the month busy-ness at work, and now I’ve come down with quite the nasty cold. A few weeks ago I co-presented a session on blogging best practices, emphasizing the need to blog regularly, at least once per week. It’s so true – it establishes your credibility and keeps readers coming back and your name in their minds. I quickly realized I’m simply terrible lately with blogging regularly, I’m either tired from my always interesting but stressful SEO job, or spending time chatting with friends about SEO and social media, or just living. I’m hoping to blog at least once a week now, and stick with it! I love writing about SEO and social media, so I just need to start dedicating more of my time to it.

Will be writing more soon!

- Your favorite SEO girl