Pimp My Keywords

Focus On What Won't Change

I've been reading "Rework" by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson, founders of 37signals. It's a quick - but good - read on starting a new business, etc.

However, these words really fly off the page:

"Focus on what won't change. A lot of companies focus on the next big thing. They latch on to what's hot and new."

Kind of like social media.

There are some 50,000 local social media "experts" in every town throwing around big words like "brand" and "image" and "analytics" while checking in via Foursquare at Starbucks with 10 others followed by a "Tweet" and a "Follow Friday" and a "Re-Tweet." 

Boring - and, frankly, a complete waste of time.

It doesn't matter what you're saying if no one's listening.

Note: Some social media "experts" can't go through a day without giving everyone a traffic update; raindrop count; checking in at every restaurant and bathroom in town, followed by details of everything in between including indigestion, puppy updates and what Johnny did at school today. It's all worthless crap that's adding to the noise that's been generated.

At Purple Trout, we focus on one thing: search engine optimization.

SEO is the practice by which we help our clients earn higher rankings in Google, Bing and other search engines.

We do a little bit of of our own social media (very little) and, while we do help some clients with social media, our work is directly connected with our clients' SEO efforts.

Does social media work? Sometimes, but it's not for every business.

Yes, Facebook's still hot. That's it. You don't need to hire an "expert" to start a Facebook Page.

It's still all about getting found. Don't forget that.

Keep working on your website. Write a Blog. Improve your content. Work on earning inbound links. These elements help earn higher rankings in Google and other search engines.

Your potential customers could care less that you're the mayor of Subway.

Quit chasing your tail with the latest social media gimmick and quit listening to the social media "experts."

P & G and Bedbugs: Cincinnati Leads The Way in Search Numbers

It seems bedbugs and Procter & Gamble have been in the local headlines quite a bit lately, so I was curious to find out how many consumers have been searching for the pesky bastards (meaning bedbugs) and P&G.

According to the Google Traffic Estimator, 550,000 searches are conducted monthly for the term "p & g" as compared to 201,000 searches per month for the keyword phrase "procter and gamble".

• p & g - 550,000 local monthly searches
• procter and gamble - 201,000
• procter & gamble - 110,000
• p&g - 60,500

For bedbugs, the numbers are also impressive with 301,000 searches conducted each month for the term "bedbugs" and 165,000 searches for "bedbug".

Taking a look at Google Trends, reveals some more interesting results.

For the search team "p & g":

• The top three regions are Pakistan, Singapore and India.
• The top three cities are Cincinnati, Mumbai and Singapore.
• The top three languages are Indonesian, English and Vietnamese.

For the search term, "bedbugs":

The top three regions are Canada, United States and Australia.
The top three cities are Cincinnati, New York and Winnipeg.
The top three languages are English, Dutch and German.

Notice a trend?

The top city searches for both "P&G" and "bedbugs" is Cincinnati. 

Nasty.

I checked the term "baseball" to see if the city of Cincinnati is one of the top cities searching for the term. After all, the Cincinnati Reds are currently leading the NL Central is hopes of a pennant title and a spot in the upcoming playoffs.

Nope.

The top three cities searching for the term "baseball" are St. Louis, Minneapolis and Chicago. Cincinnati's not even in the Top 10.

How about the term "NFL" with the new season upon us? Hopes are high for the Cincinnati Bengals with the duo of Chad Ochocinco and Terrell Owens.

Fortunately, Cincinnati is No. 3 in Google Trends in cities searching for "NFL" behind Waterloo, Canada and San Diego.

Overall, with "Cincinnati" keywords, users are searching more for "Cincinnati" than any other local keyword. In fact, according to Google, there are over 4 millions searches per month for the keyword "Cincinnati".

On a more local level, there are approximately 450,000 monthly searches for "Cincinnati Ohio" followed by "Cincinnati University" at 165,000 searches and "Cincinnati Enquirer" at 110,000 searches.

Rank & Link Checking Tools We Like

As you know, true and effective search engine optimization never ends. It's an ongoing process of updates, strong and fresh content, tweaks and adjustments... not to mention building an effective inbound link program.

However, as you continuously work to increase search engine presence and traffic to your website, you'll always want to check your progress along the way.

Here are a few of our favorite tools to check your website's search engine rankings and track inbound links.Try these tools to check your search engine rankings:

• By far, we like SEOBook's Rank Checker Tool. Although it's a Firefox tool, it's easy to use and runs quickly off the Firefox status Bar. A single click opens the Rank Checker window and allows you to check a domain on a single keyword in Google, Yahoo and Bing. Multiple keywords can be added as well. Once the report is finished, it can be exported to a CSV file for import into an Excel spreadsheet.

• Site Report Card is another popular tool for checking website rankings. It's web-based, and doesn't require any installation. Site Report Card allows you to check rankings in Google, Yahoo and Bing. Users can also compare their website's position on targeted keywords against three competitors.

• The Search Engine Keyword Tracker and Keyword Ranking Tools by Digital Point is also a web-based tool which takes checking your website's rankings one step further. Users can set up a free account and take advantage of Digital Points' ability to maintain an historical record of your keyword rankings in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

• At iWebTool, users can do a quick ranking check in Google only. Not a bad call since Google's search share has reach 71% of the total searching market, according to Hitwise.com

To check and track inbound links pointing to your website, try these tools:

• The best and easiest way to check inbound link counts is to use the Yahoo search engine. Yahoo will show more results than Google and offers a more accurate count of inbound links.

Within Yahoo, simply use this search string:

link:www.yourwebsite.com (replacing "yourwebsite" with the real domain name)

Once the search results appear, use filtering tools to eliminate internal website links.

From the Show Inlinks menu, choose "Except from This domain." The results will now show all inbound links pointing to your website and not internal links. Users can also export search results.

• At Link Diagnosis, users can install a Firefox Extension to check link counts on the fly. Or, if you prefer not to install add-ons and other programs, the Backlink Checker website analyzes up to 1,000 inbound links pointing to a domain or specific page.

For checking links, we suggest using 2or 3 different tools as results may vary slightly.

Taking Your Online Efforts To The Next Level

There are probably several reasons why your competition is kicking your butt online.

Never give up the battle. Get better. Start by doing some research:

• Search Google for some of your targeted keywords. Can you find your business in the Top 10 search results? Top 20? Top 30? If not, your website is not optimized for search engines. Yes, your website developer said "you're good to go" but it's not that easy.
  
• Check Google Maps and other online mapping websites. Is your website listed there?
  
• How about setting up and maintaining an online Pay Per Click presence? If you're advertising in the newspaper, then why aren't you advertising online where your customers are searching for you every day?
  
• Are you still ignoring Facebook? There are 400 million accounts in Facebook and your business still isn't participating in conversations about your industry? Seriously? What's your competition doing? Find out by searching Facebook.
  
• What about LinkedIn? And Twitter?

If your business is still focusing on cold calling, telephone book directories, newspaper advertising, television and radio, you're falling behind. The economy may not be the reason why your sales are down. You're missing out on major online opportunities.

It's time to get going. Now.

SEO Tactics, Tips & Helpful Advice - No. 95

With local search opportunities, you'll want to participate and create accounts in "mapping" services and websites (such as Google Maps) as well as review websites (such as City Search).

No, do not set up fake accounts and pad these sites with false reviews. Consumers are too smart and they're always suspicious, especially of your 20 raving reviews - all with perfect 5-star rankings.

Creating your accounts allows you to verify accuracy of your business name, address, telephone number, website URL, keywords and business category.

Google and other search engines are "pulling" reviews from many review websites (especially City Search), so be sure to monitor any posted reviews about your business, services and products.

If needed - and proceed cautiously into this area - you can respond to any negative or bad posts. Think before you post an emotion response to a negative review.

A few sites to consider for your business listings:

• Google, Yahoo and Bing (maps)
• City Search
• Yelp
• Judy's Book
• Trip Advisor
• Insider Pages
• Yahoo Travel
• View Points
• Also: Merchant Circle, Super Pages, Yellow Pages, Yellow Book, etc.

Google Announces Real-Time Search

We knew it was only a matter of time, real-time that is, before Google started indexing Twitter and other social media messages for its search results.

Today, Google made it a reality.

"Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before," Google posted on its blog.

"When they are relevant, we'll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page."

Imagine that...real-time Google search results for posts in Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. Of course, Bing beat Google to the punch a few weeks ago.

Which social media posts will appear in search results?

According to Google's Amit Singhal, Google's real-time search offers not just a stream of data, but an organized stream filtered of spam and other irrelevant information. The key to keeping the updates relevant is that Google judges “author quality,” “probability of relevance” and “query hotness,” according to Singhal. “That’s what real-time search is all about,” he said.

How many are finally going to jump on the social media bandwagon now?

According to Google, users can click on "Latest results" or select "Latest" from the search options menu to view a full page of live tweets, blogs, news and other web content scrolling right on Google.

Also, you can filter results to see only "Updates" from micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and others. Latest results and the new search options are also designed for iPhone and Android devices.

In addition, Google added "hot topics" to Google Trends to show the most common topics people are publishing to the web in real-time. With this improvement and a series of other interface enhancements, Google Trends is graduating from Labs.

The new features will be rolling out in the next few days and will be available globally in English.

You can try them out today by visiting Google Trends and clicking on a "hot topic," which in most cases will bring you to a search results page with the new real-time feature.

Checking Inbound Links In Yahoo No Longer Valid

If you're using Yahoo's search engine to check your inbound link count, you better start thinking of other ways to track the information.

You see, when the Bing/Yahoo deal happened, Yahoo decided to get out of the search engine biz. Therefore, some of the link data recorded by Yahoo will probably get dropped soon (if not already).

The coolest trick was to use Yahoo and search for link:www.yourwebsite.com to reveal a close-to-accurate picture of inbound links to your website (although no search engine will show you everything).

For now, try http://www.linkpopularity.com/ to check your inbound links.

More to come on Bing and other search opportunities.

Oh, by the way, Google now owns 70% of the search engine market with Yahoo/Bing at 26% leaving 4% for the remaining buzzards.

When Customers Are Ready, They'll Use A Search Engine

"Whether you use catalogs, direct mail, call centers or broadcast media, today's Web-savvy customers are more likely to use search engines when they're ready to buy than ever before."

Did you catch that?

...customers are more likely to use search engines when they're ready to buy than ever before.

Author Jeff Molander, CEO of Molander & Associates, Inc., offered some other insights into search engines in the December 2008 issue of Target Marketing. For instance:

• The fastest way to test a content-based strategy is to partner with other bloggers who need content. This is a great opportunity for free PR, but it also creates link building back to your website, blog, etc.
• Become the expert in your industry with your blog, content and advice.
• Leverage your content across marketing strategies.
• Measure your success. Create goals and measure your traffic, leads and conversions.
• Install the Google Toolbar and keep an eye on your Web page "page rank" score.
• Subscribe to Google Alerts.

While none of the above ideas represent a silver bullet in SEO, they should all be considered as part of your ongoing optimization efforts.

Why Your Website Rankings Dropped

While we can list ALL of the reasons why your website is ranked higher (or should be) in Google, there are a few reasons why your website rankings have dropped:

1. You changed your website. If you recently applied big changes to your website, that can actually hurt your rankings.
2. Links (or a lack thereof). Once a client of ours changed their domain name. Guess what? They had over 50 links pointing to their old website. Yikes! Sometimes, your links fad away because site ownership and design of other sites (that contain your links) change. Keep an eye on your links.
3. Black hat. If you are using black hat techniques such as hidden text, doorway pages, etc., it will eventually catch up with you and your rankings will drop.
4. Other websites are now better. Face it, your competition would like to be ranked higher than you, so they might be applying more - and better - SEO techniques to pass you in Google rankings.
5. Search engines change. Algorithms change...all the time. When a search engine scorecard changes, then your rankings may go up or they may go down.
6. Other SEO factors such as lack of fresh content; low keyword density; broken links; poor anchor text links.

True search engine optimization never ends. You don't turn it off when your website earns Top 10 rankings in Google and then turn it back on again when you drop to No. 100.

Top Cincinnati Searches

The top "Cincinnati" keyword searches (according to Nichebot) over the past 100 days are:

                1. Cincinnati Enquirer
                2. John from Cincinnati
                3. Cincinnati
                4. Cincinnati Reds
                5. Cincinnati Bengals
                6. University of Cincinnati
                7. Channel Cincinnati
                8. Cincinnati Bell
                9. Cincinnati Ohio
                10. Cincinnati airport