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.

Need to set up a Google Adwords campaign? Not exactly sure where to get started?

The “I’ll throw something up and just hope” approach is not a good one when it comes to paid search marketing.   

Here is a list of paid search marketing best practices:

• Create Different Groups for Keywords
• In Depth Keyword Research
• Tracking a Must
• Start Small
• Test, Test, and Retest
• Grow the Long Tail
• Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Metrics

Create Different Groups for Keywords

A common SEM (search engine marketing) mistake is to create a list of initial keywords and put them all into the same Google Adwords campaign.

By first creating simple categories of keywords, you can see how these different groups perform. Spending an hour coming up with the “right” groups might just make all the difference.

In Depth Keyword Research

Keyword research is a very crucial component of any search engine marketing campaign. It’s important to use creativity, research tools, experience, and organizational skills when doing keyword research.

If you really want to dig into this, read my keyword research posts.

Tracking a Must

Being able to track at various levels is essential to creating and optimizing search engine campaigns.

Never start a Google Adwords test before tracking is in place.

Tracking should be in place by:

• Search engine (i.e. Google versus Yahoo)
• Campaign (different groups of words)
• Keyword level (i.e. “red car” vs. “blue car”)

Start Small

At first launch as small a campaign as possible.  Collect just enough data to understand how that test did, so you’ll be ready to start the process of optimizing and growing the campaign.

Example: I have a client that spent over $20k in Google Adwords (previous to working with me!) before stopping to realize that the set of keywords was far too broad.

Test, Test, and Retest

Paid search campaigns are not meant to be set up and left on auto pilot.

Here are just a few things you’ll want to test:

• Different search engines
• Groups of keywords
• Individual keywords
• Ad text
• Landing pages

Grow the Long Tail

Another common error paid search marketers make is to focus on too few words that are too expense.

Words like: “car” may have tremendous search volume, but may or may not be too broad and costly.

Phrases like: “how to buy a car” may have far less search volume, but will likely have higher conversion rates and be more cost effective.

Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Metrics

Every search engine campaign should be monitored on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

Here are a few of the metrics that should be carefully watched:

• Spend
• Clicks
• Sales
• Cost/Sale

In Summary

Going forward I hope you’ll a) waste less time and b) spend money more effectively on search campaigns!

photo credit: Danard Vicente