Search Engine Marketing made simple with Tendenci

 

Please read this Search Engine Marketing (SEM) article on Schipul.com to learn about the importance of unique content and link backs:

 

 

This article helps you understand the value that search engines place on unique content and links to your Web site. The article also reinforces the importance of creating valuable content for your site visitors. 

 

To improve your Web site content, or increase what we call “exactness of speech,” Schipul provides the following list of resource links for our clients. The Tendenci SEM tools are divided into three (3) main categories:

 

1)      Tools to evaluate your Web site content

2)      Tools to understand how others search the Web

3)      Tools to check for cheating or technical problems with your site

 

It also is helpful to note that search engines are actually three distinct programs:

 

1)      A spider or robot that reads your site

2)      An index or database that stores information about your site and

3)      A query tool that interfaces with users looking for information and provides answers to queries.

 

The bigger picture is that search engines are a subset of information retrieval with social software aspects. There is a science to it.  The search engines care if you are articulate.  They care about your age; valuing both youth and age at the same time. And they definitely care about what other people say about you (others vote for you with links to your site!).

 

The first step in search engine optimization is to provide unique content.  A subtle awareness of the concepts of exactness of speech helps here.  With that in mind…

 

The first Tendenci SEM tool is called a keyword density analyzer.  It looks at the text on your site from a search engine perspective. It looks for words and word pairs to determine how frequently they are used in the text.  The keyword density analyzer reports on the percentage of the total text the phrase represents. 

 

Remember that the goal of the search engines is to report back to the user the most relevant response to their query.  So we would humbly submit that if your content doesn’t make the cut, it doesn’t deserve it.  On the other hand, we also feel that increasing your awareness that using pronouns or acronyms to refer to your main topic dooms you to page 9999 in the search engines if that phrase only shows up one time (as searched) on the page.  To that end the keyword density analyzer is great to create content topic transparency.

 

For example, in the phrase:

 

Schipul – The Web Marketing Company

 

The two word phrase “web marketing” represents 2 of 5 words or 40% of the text.  That is far too dense and if that was the only text on the page you would look like a spammer (someone who cheats in the search engines is called a spammer – yuck).  But if that is the name of the company and it is included with other relevant text, perhaps with a density of 5 to 10% at a maximum, you will be fine.

 

The results from the keyword density analyzer show one to three columns depending on the one being used.  They show the density of that phrase as a percentage of total text.  The more advanced analyzers omit “stop words” - words like “and” and “the” that the search engines typically ignore. 

 

The results look similar to this three word pair example from abcnews.com

 

3 Word Phrases: 21
Occurrences : 46
Count	Word	Density
4	complete list scroll	8.7%
4	view complete list	8.7%
2	airline calendar girls	4.35%
2	cancer survivors problems	4.35%
2	child cancer survivors	4.35%
2	ghraib abuse counts	4.35%
2	good morning america	4.35%
2	guides stroke patients	4.35%
2	guilty ghraib abuse	4.35%
2	harman guilty ghraib	4.35%
2	hurricane season predicted	4.35%
2	iraqis killed bodies	4.35%
2	latest market details	4.35%
2	magazine deadly mistake	4.35%
2	newsweek retracts story	4.35%
2	retracts story quran	4.35%
2	robot guides stroke	4.35%
2	story quran abuse	4.35%
2	stroke patients recovery	4.35%
2	subscribe alerts subscribe	4.35%
2	white house warning	4.35%

 

This is a snapshot from www.abcnews.com taken in May of 2005.  My bet is the executives at ABC don’t realize that they are using poor communication skills and have made the three word phrase “scroll complete list” the most popular term on the page.  OK, that may not seem fair, but search engines are just programs and they can only work with what they are given.  If you tell them that your site is about list scrolling then what exactly are they supposed to do?

 

To close out the discussion of keyword density, your goal is a healthy balance that reflects the value of your content.  Remember that white text on a white background to get a 99% density for your target term does NOT work.  And even if it did it wouldn’t be right.  Don’t obsess about keyword density.  Do check the quality of your writing with this tool.  Read your text out loud to see if it makes sense and use common sense.

 

The second tool we recommend is the search engine spider simulator.  This tool looks at your site from the perspective of a search engine.  All it sees is text.  No images, no flash, perhaps an ALT tag but for the most part only text.

 

Things to look for with the search engine spider simulator are:

 

1)      Be aware of your title tag (it is labeled TITLE TAG in the display).  The TITLE tag is the single most important tag in HTML from a search engine perspective.  The contents of the TITLE tag should clearly state the topic of the page.  No less and no more. Read about the keyword suggestions for more on this topic.

2)      The META DESCRIPTION and META KEYWORD tags.  These are search engine specific tags that state the topic of the page.  The downside is that these tags are abused so much they are close to worthless.  Yes they should be accurate but it is our opinion that you are almost as well off deleting them.  In practice we do post META tag info because otherwise others who haven’t done their homework criticize you, so go for it, but the big rule is do NOT abuse them as while they may not help they definitely WILL hurt if you go overboard.

3)      The visible text.  This should be congruent with the TITLE tag.  The most important concepts of the text, those dense keywords should appear in relevant positions in the text.

 

What we like about the search engine spider simulators is they explain to our clients in very simple terms how the search engines “consume” your content.  So while we can argue against flash intros all day, there is nothing quite like showing a blank simulator run on an intro page compared to an optimized competitor to get the attention of a client.  What that means to you as a business person is that your page is executing poorly – much like babbling incoherently does not impress a prospective suitor on a first date.  The sim spider does not solve the problem but it does highlight the communication break down.

 

The third tool we recommend is the keyword suggestion tool.  There are several with the most popular tool being Yahoo/Overture’s free keyword suggestion tool prompting phrases based on what the user enters.  They do a good job of “stemming” or suggesting related words based on root words.  So if I enter “New York Advertising Agency” it returns the following list with word counts showing how many times it was searched the previous month.

 

Searches done in March 2005
Count	Search Term
2299	advertising agency new york
185	new york city advertising agency
152	advertising agency in new york
88	advertising agency rochester new york
75	advertising agency in new york city
32	advertising agency albany new york

 

Using the keyword suggestion tool on overture, or wordtracker, can give you new ideas on how to write new and better content.  So instead of saying “we offer advertising services in new york” perhaps this is revised to say “An Advertising Agency in New York city serving NYC, Rochester, Albany …” or similar.  Both say similar things but the later include the words Rochester and Albany which may mean the difference between the sale and a lost opportunity.

 

The single best use of the keyword suggestion tool it so get a better understanding of how THEY think about YOU.  So it helps you realize that if you are a specialist in “Albany” your entire market potential is 32 people a month.  On the other hand if you focus on “New York Advertising Agency” your potential is almost 2300 people a month.  How do you want to describe your business?

 

The fourth tool is the link back calculator.  A link back is a link from another site that is indexed in the search engines that has a link to your site. 

 

The premise of valuing link backs is very democratic – the more sites that link to your site then the more likely it is that your site is important.  The logic of valuing link backs is simple; all other things considered if two pages appear to have the same content, the site with 1000 link backs is likely more important than the site with 1 link back.  So if both sites have a decent rating for a specific key word then the site with more links back to it will show up higher in the rankings. 

 

When using a link back calculator there are millions of variables so please try not to jump to conclusions.  The search engines are pretty smart and are good at valuing links from credible sites and actually penalizing sites with links to disreputable sites.

 

The actionable point on links is do *NOT* accept offers for link exchanges.  My rule of thumb is to only link to people you know on a first name basis and you have had lunch with them.  Or if the sites you are linking to are clearly credible like the New York Times.  Perhaps we are conservative in this approach with linking, but we don’t have to worry about being banned for linking to Viagra-is-cool-453211.com or similar.

Another question that comes up when discussing links is if “tacky” sites that link to you will hurt your ranking.  For the most part links from junk sites won’t hurt unless you link back to them. 

 

To increase your link backs consider purchasing directory listings or submitting to free directories like www.dmoz.org. 

 

The overall goal is to create content so compelling, so helpful to others that people spontaneously link to you.  You don’t have to ask for links – you are a creator of great content and people naturally link to you.  Have you ever gotten an e-mail from Yahoo asking for a reciprocal link?  Of course not.  Focus on great content.

 

The fifth tool in the Tendenci SEM tool set is the self focus, or “we-we” calculator from Future Now Inc.  At first this doesn’t seem like a search engine tool, but our theory, and no we can’t prove it, but our theory is that IR technology and search engines are smart enough to understand customer focused text.  So if the text on your site is focused on the site visitor, yet still has relevant terms and links, it should score well in the search engines.  Perhaps better than a self-serving site with nothing but self references. 

 

Even if our theory of well written visitor focused text is incorrect, given how much well written customer focused text affects your conversion rate this is still a valuable tool to use.

 

Example results below…

Your Customer Focus Rate: 60.87%
You have 28 instances of customer-focused words.

Your Self Focus Rate: 39.13%
You have 15 instances of self-focused words.
You have 3 instances of the Company Name.

 

This result of course looks great!  Very customer focused at over 60%.  And of course it did not look that good until we started to think seriously about how much the text on our site focused on us versus the needs of our visitor.  Focusing on the needs of your visitor increases your conversion rate which has a dramatic affect on the results of your search engine marketing.

 

To repeat, if you keep the same traffic but double your conversion rate isn’t that like doubling your search engine traffic?  Please consider the we-we calculator a reality check on your content.  You can thank us later.

 

The sixth Tendenci SEM tool is a Search Engine Spam Detector.  We should not need to include this tool but at times people inherit problems from others who recently departed (perhaps fired with cause?) who cheated in the search engines. This tool is a quick way to demonstrate that cheating can and will be detected by the search engines and you will be banned or removed from the index.  In English this means you are losing money.

 

The first thing to understand about the spam detector is that as people become aware of keyword density and the importance of links, the temptation is to keyword stuff words into your copy and to ask for links from everyone to increase your search engine rank.  Or perhaps even create a farm of pages linking back to your site.

 

When considering search engine spam remember that Google and Yahoo are billion dollar businesses dedicated to providing the searcher with the most relevant results.  The search engines do not want to give searchers a bunch of junky listings.  If they do they stand to lose millions of dollars.  So if you think you have thought of a trick to get around their detection of SE spam please realize it is just a matter of time.

 

To that end the spam detector allows you to quickly analyze the content of a page and check if they are cheating.

 

 

The Tendenci SEM links continues with additional helpful links. Feel free to explore.

 

If we can leave you with one thought on creating great search engine copy; it is that your content needs to be so valuable that people create links to you without asking.

Want to know more about Schipul's Search Engine Marketing Services?

Visit the following pages for more SEM services offered by Schipul:

• Search Engine Marketing
• Search Engine Optimization
• Pay-Per-Click
  

If you're interested in talking to someone about our search engine marketing services please contact:

Katie Thoreson
Director of Search Engine Marketing
kthoreson@schipul.com
281.497.6567 x 523