Ever wonder if you’ve made “big” SEO (search engine optimization) errors on your website? If left unfixed, these mistakes can keep your website from ever being found by people wanting your stuff!

If you’re as busy as I am, you might find a simple checklist helpful.

Here is a quick 7 point SEO checklist to help you make sure things are in order.

SEO Checklist

Domain name
Page titles
URLs
Content (above the fold)
Useful incoming links
Meta keywords
Meta description

Domain name – #1

Having the right domain name (www.yourcompany.com) can make a big difference. So can having the wrong URL.

For example, a website with very very little content called www[dot]iphoneappmarketing[dot]com ranked ahead of me for quite a while.

The words “iPhone”, “app”, and “marketing” were great descriptive keywords. They didn’t have any new content for months, yet ranked ahead of my content rich site. That shows the power of your domain name. Be sure to put the most important keywords at the front and leave out irrelevant words.

You should do keyword research to understand the words you’ll use.

Page Titles – #2

Here is what you should know about page titles:

• A page title typically shows up at the top of the browser bar
• It tells the user (and the search engine) what the page is about
• It also shows up as the title of the search results in Google.

So it’s got both SEO importance, but also importance in pulling the user into your site. Use it for both!

The page title to this post will be: “Top 7 SEO Tips | Online and iPhone Marketing”.

Choose titles that are not just catchy, but also keyword rich. Make them interesting, readable, and relevant to the content on the page.

URLs – #3

URLs mean a lot to search engines at this point. They should tell the search engine the main focus of the website.

Some things to think about when creating URLs:

• Put the most important keywords at the beginning of the URL
  • For example: http://www.onlinemarketingrant.com/search-engine-optimization-tips
  • Is better than http://www.onlinemarketingrant.com/my-totally-favorite-cool-search-engine-optimization-tips

• Don’t use symbols, numbers, or anything that is not helpful to a search engine
  • For example: http://www.onlinemarketingrant.com/search-engine-optimization-tips
  • Is better than: http://www.onlinemarketingrant.com/content/ID=?15111

Content (above the fold) – #4

Content is absolutely KING when it comes to SEO. You can do all the other 6 things, but without great, relevant, and expanding content you’ll go nowhere.

Here is why content is important:

• Google rates a site by how authoritative it feels it is for a certain search term
• These content attributes make a site “more authoritative” in Google’s eyes
  • Lots of content on a subject
  • Content so great that other sites will link to it
  • Content that is new
  • Relavent keywords in the content near the top of the page
• Sites that are more authoritative get ranked higher

Useful Incoming Links – #5

Pretty simple. A site that other important sites will link to, is a website that Google thinks other people should find in search results.

How do you get great incoming links?

• Write great content
• Offer to guest blog for another like website
• Make a list of websites, blogs, and forums that would find your content help, tell them about it, and ask them to link to it
• Link to and write about other great products and services in your niche (they might just end up contacting you)

What not to do?

• Don’t buy links
• Don’t trade links with sites that have nothing to do with your site
• Don’t link to a bunch of irrelevant sites that ask you to

Meta keywords – #6

Meta keywords used to be a way to tell the search engines what a site was all about.  The problem was you could stuff a bunch of keywords together and rig your ranking even if your content was not that relevant.

More recently search engines like Google have become more sophisticated and don’t use Meta keywords. Some smaller search engines seem to still use them.

Since you are already doing the keyword research for your URL, page titles, content, etc it is very easy to just add 10-15 keywords to your Meta keyword description.

Meta description – #7

The Meta description is still quite important, mainly because it shows up just below the page title in Google search results.

For your main pages, you should know what’s being displayed in your search results.  Just type in your full URL into Google and see what the page title and description look like.  If you are not satisfied update the Meta description to something that’s more keyword rich and user friendly.

In Conclusion

Hope this makes sense and helps you jumpstart your SEO efforts. Good luck!

When I started this blog, I had a fairly good understanding of SEO. 

But building and promoting a blog has given me a much more hands on understanding of what works and what doesn’t work.

Here is a list of things I now focus on with my blog:

1) GREAT Content (for my site & others)
2) Basic SEO Stuff
3) Incoming Links
4) Knowing my Numbers
5) Keeping Inspired (not giving up)!

GREAT Content

What is GREAT content?

To me great content is content that people are:

• Looking for (i.e. searching for in Google) and
• Find really helpful when they get to it

I found that I liked to explain how to market stuff in my posts and those have tended to rank the highest in the search engines. Those are also the posts people email me about the most often.

In order to write great content I had to:

a) Be learning myself and
b) Do some keyword research about how people are searching for in Google

I think this is the cornerstone for blogging SEO. If you don’t have great content, people will not find or come back to your blog.

Basic SEO Stuff

Here are the basic SEO things I do:

• Choose URLs that are search engine friendly like “.com/seo-and-blogging”. Wordpress makes this easy.
• Use keywords in my title, my heading tags, and content. I don’t go crazy here. It’s got to be readable, but I try to use the “key” phrase in the title, the heading tags, and in the content.
• Name my images. Rather than naming the image for this post “image.png”, I name it “SEO-and-blogging.png”.

If you are a Wordpress user I’d suggest you also read this post on SEO for Wordpress Blogs. I found it full of Wordpress specific to dos.

Incoming Links

The more people that link to your site, the more important Google believes your site is.

Here are 3 tactics I used for growing my incoming links:

• Offered to write for other blogs in my niche
• Wrote some really in-depth blog posts that I believed people would link to (called linkbait at times)
• Reviewed other websites, blogs, and tools in my space and linked to them (and in turn they were more willing to link to me)

Knowing My Numbers

I’ve watched a few numbers over the past year to chart my progress.

Here’s what I watch:

• Monthly visitors (from zero to ~ 5k monthly visitors)
• Incoming links (grown from zero to 244)
• Keywords (which keywords do I rank for?)

Keeping Inspired

There are two times when I felt like giving up my blog efforts:

About 4-5 months after launch I hit a wall. Not a lot of visitors. Felt like I was doing a lot of work for nothing.

It wasn’t till month 5 or 6 that I really started to see a big spike in visitors. I just had to keep writing and promoting.  Well around month 6 traffic started to really take off and some of my posts started to get lots of attention. Through research, trial, and error I figured out what kind of things people were searching for.

In Summary

So those are some “keys’ to SEO and blogging. Hope that helps!

Photo credit: Bramus

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) campaigns left to themselves can just bump along.

You should continually try to expand or optimize them. I’ve talked a lot about expanding keyword lists in my keyword research series, so let’s talk about optimization in this post.

For the sake of this post, let’s say we are selling women’s red leather shoes. Our initial list of keywords was ~ 500 words. The campaign has been running for a while and has done well, but needs some cleaning up.

Here are some keywords that drove a lot of clicks:

• red shoe
• red leather shoes
• leather shoes
• women’s shoes
• women’s red leather shoes

The title and description looks like this:

 Six Ways to Optimize an SEM Campaign

 #1 Calculate ROI for categories or keywords

ROI = return on investment.

Do you know how to calculate it?

If you don’t calculate your ROI, you are just throwing money away.

If you spent $3,000 on keyword clicks in the ”red shoes” ad group and tracked 300 orders from that ad group, your cost/sale for that category would be $10. Make sense? Your cost per individual keyword may look something like this below.

 #2 Deal with Poor Performers

In the example above, “leather shoes” and “women’s shoes” are costing me $100 per sale. That’s just too much for me. One of my options is to pause those two keywords. In that case, I’m not showing up for searches on those keywords anymore.

A second option would be to drill down even deeper and find all the actual searches people are making. Google allows you to run a “search query report” that will give you the actual keywords people searched on. You may find that the term ”kids leather shoes” is generating a lot of clicks and you don’t sell any kids shoes! See #3 below for how to add negative keywords to fix that.

A third option is to take those poor performing words and put them in a separate category and use a different title, description, and landing page to try to get a better ROI.

#3 Add Negative Keywords

Another way to deal with poor performing keywords is to use “negative keywords”. If you don’t want to show up for searches of “kids”, you can add “-kids” to your list of keywords in Google.

#4 Create New Ad Groups

Is $10/sale the best you can do? Maybe, maybe not.

An ad group allows you to display different ads to unique sets of keywords.  You could put “red shoe”, “red leather shoes”, and “women’s red leather shoes” in one category, “leather shoes” and similar words in a second ad group, and keywords like ”leather shoes” in a third category.

That way you can tailor the ad to the search term.

#5 Add Match Types

Google, Yahoo, and MSN all allow you to use match types with keywords. Match types allow you to match what type of searches you want your keywords to show up for.  If this is news to you, learn more about Google’s matching options.

So one strategy might look like this:

• Start by using broad match for your keywords
• Run a test with a limited budget
• Run a “search query report” and see what searches you are getting clicks for
• Use negative, phrase, and exact matches to cut out undesirable keywords

Maybe when you run the search query report you see words like:

• red shoe restaurant
• red shoe repair
• red shoes for kids

You don’t want to show up for these searches, so you can either add negative keywords like “-restaurant” or create exact matches for your top keywords like [red shoes]. You’ve got lots of options.

#6 Test Title/Description Combinations

Google gives me 95 characters in the title and two description lines to explain the greatness of my red shoes. One thing new advertisers don’t always realize is that you can use more than one ad with an ad group.

Here is another strategy I might use with my red shoes campaign:

• Create two ads for “red shoes”
• Perhaps one focuses on the attributes of the shoe (i.e. scuff & waterproof) and one on the value (i.e. free shipping & great service)
• Use Google conversion tracking to see which keyword/ad combinations are most effective
• Once you’ve established a winner, pause the “loser” ad
• Create more ads over time to run again your “winner” ad

Conclusion

Don’t leave those paid search campaigns to themselves. Keep working on em!

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.