The SEO Girl

There’s been a lot of changes happening around me lately, contributing to my lack of posting, but also reminding me so much of the state of the SEO industry. I absolutely cannot imagine an SEO specialist who can’t adapt to change – you’d literally be left for dead while the industry continues to evolve. We do still have that in the form of shadey SEO people who simply submit their client’s sites to tons of spammy directories, or even worse, comment on random blogs for a (meaningless) link. But as SEO becomes more of a tech household word and site owners learn more about what makes SEO tick, we’re all going to need to adapt to the changing times and focus on the big R: “Results”.

Two years ago “Twitter” was just a random mumbling of words, and today even my mom knows what Twitter is. We’ll be seeing this more and more, and we need to accept these changes, weed out the “flash in the pan” sites, and concentrate on using these new strategies to see success, as well as be masters at the foundation of SEO. Have no fear – SEO specialists who are continually moving ahead, while knowing the in’s and out’s of the basics, will prevail.

I’ve been eating out a lot recently, and have wanted to curb my restaurant expenses a bit and more importantly, eat healthier! I’m definitely not one able to just whip up something that tastes great, and needed a little (lots of) guidance. I found Hungry Girl, Lisa Lillien’s very fun healthy eating website and two cookbooks. I’ve heard a lot of buzz about Hungry Girl, and after taking a look at and buying both cookbooks, the recipes are actually healthy and pretty easy to make. I’m excited

Their site could be a bit more SEO-friendly by primarily cutting down the number of images used – it’s pretty image heavy. However, the popularity of  Hungry Girl is a lesson for other food bloggers out there, and the marketing tips encompass much more than SEO, but as we know, having a site or blog people actually want to come to, read, and tell others about and link to, can go a long way in having a very successful SEO campaign.

Timely Topics: Eating healthier is a hot topic right now, and sure, people are still hitting their local fast food joints, but healthy eating is getting more and more of the spotlight. Whether they actually cook the recipes is one thing, but searchers are looking for nutritious recipes, and posting about them is likely to get you a wider audience over time. Be sure to also post a photo and nutritional information for each recipe.

Share Your Recipes: Food blogging is much different than publishing a cookbook. Expect your recipes to be all over the Internet, and encourage your readers to share them. Have “Share This” or “Add To Any” buttons on each post to propel your readers to post your recipes on social sites or their own blog.

Give and You Shall Receive: Rather than allow your readers only a glimpse of your recipes, forcing them to blindly buy your cookbook, have a collection of full recipes available on your site or blog. There’s so many cookbooks out there, and potential buyers want to first do their homework and make sure your recipes are actually good. Post every few days with a new recipe separate from the ones in your book. This will encourage readers to buy your book for an extensive collection, and keep them coming back to your site, as well.

E-mail Marketing: The Hungry Girl has a “Subscribe” button on her site, where you can subscribe to her mailing list and receive even more great-tasting recipes! This again helps keep your blog fresh in people’s minds.

Contests: Want to increase the number of links to your food blog and increase buzz? Sure you do. E-mail your blog readers and post about a contest, such as who can create the best variation of your recipe on their own blog (linking to your blog in the post, as well), who can prepare a recipe of yours in the most entertaining way in a YouTube video, etc. Be sure to have an award for the contest, and more than likely you’ll get some exposure for having the contest.

Know Your Audience – The Hungry Girl’s audience is likely not 50-year old retirees. They know they’re targeting twenty and thirty somethings who want to eat healthy without toiling away at the stove. Select your target demographic, and make sure your cooking style and overall theme of your blog match that demographic.

Feel free to comment away with more food blogger marketing tips. Hmm, I seem a bit hungry all of a sudden, time to break out my Hungry Girl cookbook!

I just wanted to quickly post and apologize for my lack of posting/tweeting lately! I’ve been very busy with SEO clients, and haven’t had much time to dedicate to posting. I’ll definitely be posting this week, and hopefully I’ll have some more time soon It’s just hard when you’re this good (joking! Though, true…)!

Okay, let’s admit – Facebook’s design is a bit blase. Very clean, which is why I love Facebook and denounce the ever-declining Myspace, but still a bit boring. Facebook Business Pages are an excellent way for businesses to represent their brand on Facebook, but it can be difficult to really set your business’s page apart. Or so you may think, Watson.

Facebook Business Pages now allow the use of Facebook’s Markup Language, or FBML, on their business pages. Simply log in to your page, set up a personal profile, and search Facebook for the application “Static FBML”. Add it to your business page, click “edit my page”, and you’ll see it listed among your other applications, such as “Notes” and “Discussions”. It uses simple html, takes a bit of playing around and will display in the “Boxes” tab on the page.

Images are a must in FBML. Create different boxes of varying shapes and sizes with attractive images and your business’s contact information. You want this page to be able to best represent your business’s image and even resemble your website a bit. Once you’re finished, change your settings so visitors land on the “Boxes” tab by default. This ensures everyone sees your very beautiful FBML work rather than your “Wall” or plain “Info” tab.

Becoming a “fan” of a Facebook Business Page typically happens on impulse, so creating an attention-grabbing Boxes tab and having visitors land by default on it can better propel regular visitors into fans, and hopefully into customers. Check out Frigidaire’s Facebook Business Page for an example of a page that uses FBML well. Mmm, now off to open my fridge for some fresh-picked raspberries…

I encountered an issue with a client today where their site’s section pages were in JavaScript – the entire site. Search engines basically ignore JavaScript, so they’re passing over nearly ever single page on the site! Not only that, but they had just gotten a site redesign for all their sites and relied on the programmer/designer to be up on his SEO knowledge, as most site owners would, so they had just paid quite a sum of money for four sites that will barely be indexed/rank. It’s just a shame to see what happens when a programmer knows little about SEO.

There’s tons of programmers out there who are phenomenal at creating an SEO friendly site right from the time the site goes live, and I applaud you. I feel that every programmer and designer should at least know the basics of SEO, consult the Google Webmaster Guidelines, and put those guidelines into practice. Save the more advanced SEO strategies for the SEO specialists, but at least give the site a fighting chance. Same goes for us in the SEO industry – know at least the basics of what goes on behind the scenes of a website and the structural elements that can make or break a site’s SEO.

JavaScript can be a great tool, but use it in moderation, just like everything else in SEO. Think like a human visitor would – say the person wanted to link to my client’s section pages, only to find that they’re not real links – they’d be completely confused. Search engines ultimately want to please real, human searchers, so do what seems logical.

It’s no secret that client retention can be very difficult in SEO. Unlike Pay-Per-Click where clients can see an exact ROI (Return on Investment) figure, SEO has no such metrics. Sure, you can measure keyword rankings, traffic, and revenue, but there’s always the clients who simply don’t see the correlation. These clients are very numbers-oriented and success driven, and there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just very difficult to quantify SEO.

I’d like to hear your take on this – how do you measure SEO ROI? I’m toying with the idea of utilizing the client’s web analytics program to view the non-paid search revenue they made during the months we managed their campaign, versus their SEO management fee. Still not an exact ROI, and works best for sites we started managing as soon as the site went live. How about you?

I passed the IMU certification course, go me!

I’d like to go a bit more niche than “SEO for restaurants” on this one – I’ll cover the larger topic in another post, but this is all about coffee shops. I love coffee and relaxing in coffee shops, drinking americanos and reading a book or doing some work on my laptop. Every successful coffeeshop should have a website, and here’s some ways to not only enhance the site’s SEO, but to keep visitors coming back for more.

Coffee of the Day – Many coffee shops have daily coffee specials, whether it’s a special drink or type of coffee blend. Update the website every day with the special, and you’ll have visitors checking out the site regularly and stepping into your door more often.

Coffee Shop Approved – Chances are you some of your clientele have their own sites and blogs. Put up a sign in the shop and note on your site that you’ll gladly give them some publicity in the shop about their next event, or simply about their site or blog. In exchange, ask that they link to your site, and you may want to supply them with a “Coffee Shop Approved” type of banner. Create a “Local Loves” bulletin board in your shop, and list their website on the board.

Local Chatter – Anyone can read the newspaper, but what piques our interest is what people really think about the stories. Add a blog to the site and post short news bites, and ask people to respond, just as if they’re sitting across from each other sharing a cup of coffee. This will get the news of your site stirring, and can get the online media in your town noticing.

Social media – Social media is perfect for coffee shops. We suggest creating a Facebook Business Page and posting it in your shop. Chances are, your customers are on Facebook, so this gives them just another avenue to find you on!

Newsletters - Every local business should be engaging in e-mail marketing. Send out a weekly email about upcoming events, daily specials, and include a printable coupon for just that week. Include a few sentences asking readers to link to your site from their own site to help keep your local business alive and flourishing!

Hope this perks your coffee shop’s site up a bit (I know, I couldn’t resist the pun).

I apologize for the recent lack of posting – I’ve come down with a bit of a summer cold, and have been mostly resting. In between my Coldeeze and TheraFlu today I came across something fun on SEOmoz in Rand’s “Link Consolidation: The New PageRank Sculpting” post. I do admit I’m getting a bit tired of the PageRank scultping commentary, but the tone of a certain Michael Martinez gets the mozzers quite inflamed, I felt like I was watching the SEO version of Jerry Springer. Oh now, I never thought I’d say SEO and Jerry Springer in the same sentence.

The point behind Michael’s comments, that the success of PageRank sculpting really can’t be measured, is true, in my opinion, however his tone was one of attacking Rand and the others who went up against him. We’re all allowed a bad day, and perhaps he was doing this intentionally for the publicity, but it made me roll my eyes. We’re grown ups here, act professionally – state your opinion, no need to attack. This sort of back and forth attack is what takes professionalism away from the SEO industry. Sure, there’s rarely an absolute in SEO and constructive debating is always welcome in my book, but attacking another is just immature. But hey, that’s me

It may sound a bit cheesy, but I absolutely love the excitement of knowing a holiday is coming up. Outside my window is a gang of warriors shooting off canons in the street (a few 8 year olds with some fire crackers), and everyone just seems to be a bit more excited this week with the 4th of July coming up. I feel the same with the SEO industry – we’ve had a checkered past, filled with spammers, and we’ve now entered the present, where spam is frowned upon and brands with real people behind them who take the time to reach out to their customers are the ones that last.

It’s exciting to imagine the future of SEO – I feel that SEO and social media will continue to integrate, with search engines even giving value to links in social media realms (I know, we’re a long ways off with all the spam still present in social media, but someday!). To all those who say SEO is dead – SEO is constantly changing and evolving, and I read that 75% of searchers click on organic results over paid. If that doesn’t mean SEO has staying power, I don’t know what does.

The old school thinking of SEO as “trumping” the search engines is definitely dead. New school SEO is very much alive and integrates social media elements and knows that the real way to be ranked well these days is by abiding by search engine guidelines and creating a site, and brand identity, that people actually want to talk about and find.

Goodbye, spammy SEO’s, and hello to the new guard. Time to celebrate. Onward!

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