Manage how your customers view

Their relationship to you.

A relationship is only as strong

As its weakest link, so even if THEY’RE wrong

Apologize, if you want them to stay.

Show how past mistakes have shaped a great today.

Tell your story effectively

Is what you know what others see?

If there’s black and white libel, get it taken all away;

If it has some truth in it, so put out YOUR shade of gray.

When it comes to page quality, be honest:

Does your page have a right to exist?

Take the Panda winners/losers and give them a chance

Against human quality factors; note the variance,

For if your pages are fled back to the SERPs, beware, for – BAM!

Panda may tag your entire site: “Just Above Spam.”

People like their greatness to show

Say they rock; they’ll broadcast you to all they know.

Check if their site has social media clout

Contact after you know them inside out.

In context of the risks in life, is it such a risk to buy?

Aim for 4-6 word phrases to turn conversions high.

If your site niche puts you to sleep, you may have to think

Different target markets for a client than for a link.

Where are your customers? That’s the network that you try.

But you need to be on Google+ – a case of do or die.

Use Facebook Ads Tools, then DM; do it sensitively

And you’ll sell Hawaii vacations to 10,000 instructors of ski.

Thanks Barry Schwartz, Inbal Hotel

And all the speakers – job done well.

Thanks in particular to SMX Israel speakers whose ideas were quoted here! (Can you figure out who said what?): Shira Abel, Jon Sumroy, Eli Feldblum, Dixon Jones, Gil Reich, Michael King, Ofer Dascalu, Menachem Rosenbaum, Miriam Schwab, Marty Weintraub.

SMX Israel 2012 Review – In Rhyme is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

This week's #msmktg chat discussed our top resources for learning SEO, social media, and anything that can be called by the name "internet marketing."

Happy browsing!

Top Internet Marketing Resources is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

When you pick the keywords for your site, how do you come up with the ideas? Think what you would look for? Use the “official name” of the products or services?

If you’re selling children’s toys, that probably works.  What you would call your product is likely to be what your customer would call it.  A doll is a doll is a doll.  If you’re in a technical industry and you’re selling to very technically-oriented customers, that might also work.

Here are some cases where it might not work:

If you’re in a technical industry and you’re selling to not technically-oriented customers – DO NOT TRUST YOUR INTUITION!

• using a keyword that involves “near field communication (NFC),” when all your customers know is that they want a credit card or wallet that will pay at a distance.

If you’re solving a common problem with a unique solution – do not specify the type of solution as your keyword.

• using “flying cars” as your keyword when all your potential customers are thinking about is how they can get to work faster in rush hour traffic. No one realizes you can use a flying car (you didn’t, right?), so they’re not going to look for it. Use keywords relating to decreasing commuting time.

How can you figure this out? Doesn’t your inside knowledge bias you?

Yes.  And that’s why a very important part of picking your keywords is asking real customers. They can be actual current customers, or people who fit into your customer demographic.  Give them the problem your product or service solves, and say: You have this problem. What do you look for on Google? Use that as the basis for your keyword research.

Much success to all on finding the right keywords – for your customers!

Pick Your Keywords for Your Customers – Not For You is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

Three years is a long time in the world of the internet.  Search trends change.  Let’s take an example:

You started a company that markets businesses on the social networks, especially Facebook. When you did your keyword research a few years ago, you checked the keywords “social media marketing” and “facebook marketing” and saw that the search volume was similar.  So you decided to go with “social media marketing”, because it was a broader term, and maybe it would get you more traffic as the space grows.

Let’s see what happened over the past few years in search (this is from Google Insights for Search):

Although they were about the same then, “facebook marketing” has overtaken “social media marketing” by a long stretch, Google says.

Now, true – you don’t know about the competitors.  Maybe competition is a lot stiffer for “facebook marketing” and so if you’re doing decently where you are for “social media marketing” you should stay put and not change a thing.

But it’s worth a look.

Google Insights is only good for search terms that get lots of search, so if you want to look at smaller volume terms, the Adwords Tool is the best way to go.  For more details on keyword research you can check out our step by step guide to keyword research.

I’ll make the point here, as we do in the guide, that we don’t use any kind of mathematical KEI (keyword efficiency index), as many paid tools will give you.  They’re based – usually – on some calculation of the number of people searching a month and the number of results Google will return for that phrase.  Number of people searching – important. Number of results? If there were billions of results but not well optimized compared to what you could do, or 100 results but each of them from a well-optimized, well-linked to page: which would you rather compete for?

If your goal is to be on page one, once you have your keywords organized by relevancy and number of searches, do searches and analyze the top 10 results.  If you *need* to get into the top 5, just look at them.  They’re your competition. Can you compete with them and do one better?  If you can, go for it.  If there’s no way, save your time and effort.  That’s your KEI – number of searches and some human analysis.

Happy keyword re-research!

When Was the Last Time You Updated the Keywords for Your Site? is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

Now for the list – the 6 SEO addons for Firefox and Chrome without which my job would be *so* much harder.

SEOMoz Toolbar – this has to top the list.  SEOMoz does an amazing job of providing helpful information for making SEO decisions. If you use the toolbar on the search engine results pages, it shows you their page strength metrics for the page and the domain, as well as the number of links and linking root domains to the page and the domain and a click takes you to their opensiteexplorer.org where you can find out lots of backlink data. These are some of the primary metrics that I use when making decisions about which keywords to target, or what link to go after. (Note: some metrics are only available if you’re a PRO member. If we did not have a PRO subscription, its value would go down for me.)  On individual pages, it gives you all those numbers and more information about the tags and characteristics of the page.

Fireshot – this used to only work on Firefox. Today, as I was writing this, I double checked that that was still the case – and it wasn’t!  Yay! Fireshot works on Chrome now also!  Why am I so excited?  Fireshot is a free screenshot program that is really powerful – take a screenshot of the entire webpage you’re on (not just the visible screen), and then crop, mark it up with arrows and circles and text, use special effects like blurring – and save it to use as an image in a blog post.  I work on Chrome usually, but whenever I would want to take a screenshot of something, I would go into Firefox and open the page up there.  It’s really, really good.

Google Global – Did you know that no two people get the same Google results, even if they search for the same thing?  Well, maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement, but Google results are so influenced by where you are searching and what you’ve searched for before with that Google account or with that computer that it’s not far from being true.  So let’s say I wanted to know what a search would look like done in a different country, by someone who hadn’t visited sites in that niche before?  Enter Google Global.  Do a Google search. Then with a click you can pick which Google you want to look at (e.g. google.co.uk), in which language and in which country. (You may have to add some yourself if you want beyond the defaults.)  Make sure when you first set it up to go into the settings “Show options” and  check the box that says “de-personalize Google search results.”

(Note: my Google Global sometimes does this strange thing where when I try to see results from a new country, it shows me the results for the search term “f” – which is not what I was searching for.  So then you’ll just have to put your search term, separated by plus signs,into the URL where the “f” is.  Meaning, instead of http://www.google.com/search?q=f&pws=0&gl=US, turn it into http://www.google.com/search?q=seo+addons&pws=0&gl=US and press enter.)

Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Addon – do you ever get really excited about all the new traffic to your site, only to realize that it was… you? Enter this addon (also available for Internet Explorer) which will block any Google Analytics code, whether on your site or anyone else’s, from registering your presence.  It works per browser, remember – so make sure to put it on every browser on every computer you’ll be looking at your site from. (See here for a more detailed overview of ways to exclude yourself from your Google analytics.)

SEOQuake – a pretty standard SEO addon, I don’t use it anymore for link information (I prefer SEOMoz’s – it’s consistently available, as opposed to SEOQuake’s which is based on Yahoo’s and depending how many times you tried to access it, Yahoo will start giving you error messages instead of data).  I do like it for the “Density” tab – which is quick access to all information about the meta-tags and text on the page, as well as the link to the Whois information for that site. If you’re looking to request a link from a site, but you can’t find any contact information on the site, sometimes you can find the right email address in the Whois info.

(Don’t worry – the real thing is bigger.  :)

Web Developer – also thrilled while writing this post to find out that it comes in Chrome! Web Developer, while meant for designers, is good for SEO analyses of sites. You can quickly see all the image alt text on a page, and hide the CSS to make sure there’s no funny business going on like writing keywords in a font color that matches the background.

What are your favorite add-ons?  Share in the comments below!

6 Favorite SEO Addons for Firefox and Chrome is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

What’s a Twitter Chat?

Let’s answer the last one first. A Twitter chat is when people on Twitter agree that they will all be on Twitter at a certain time and talk about a certain topic.  The way that you keep track of the conversation among all the other tweets on your flowing tweetstream is that after every post in the chat you add a hashtag unique to that chat (e.g. #ourchat).

That way you can at least track the conversation by doing a search for that hashtag in Twitter search or in a client like Hootsuite, and at most you can use different programs to track the hashtag for you, view the chat, create a transcript of the chat so people who missed it can read it after, and give you user stats about chat participation.

So you want to know the details now?

First a word of background: after going through a list of hundreds of Twitter chats, and narrowing them down to all the internet marketing related ones, I noticed that they were basically geared towards Eastern standard time.  Which meant that they were at very inconvenient times for me over here (either when I’m giving my daughter supper and putting her to sleep, or at 3 in the morning).

So my options were either: get up at 3 in the morning, or – start our own Twitter chat.  I – not surprisingly – opted for the latter. And I figured it would probably help a lot of people who don’t want to get up at 3 in the morning.

Okay – now the details:

Topic: Professional women talk about internet marketing: SEO, social media and any other internet marketing strategies. Share with and learn from internet marketing specialists and other business owners. Each chat will be focused around a particular topic and questions that will be announced in advance.

Hashtag: #msmktgchat (as in: Ms. Marketing Chat)

Date and Time: Mondays at 11AM-noon GMT+3 (that’s currently, using daylight savings time; during the winter it’ll be GMT+2)

To translate: that’s the time zone of Israel and Eastern European Time; it’s 2 hours ahead of the UK.

We’ll be starting next Monday, September 19th, and we’ll decide then at what frequency the chat will be – weekly, bi-weekly or monthly.

Moderators: Aviva Blumstein (that would be me) @DebiZSEO and Naomi Elbinger – @myparnasa.

This Monday’s topic: What’s the one thing you’ve done that’s improved traffic to your site?  This can be either a short term traffic improvement or a long-term traffic improvements. If you have something to say, fantastic.  We’d love to hear.  If not, come listen and learn from other women professionals like you.

Looking forward to seeing you!

(If you haven’t yet subscribed to our blog, you might want to now to make sure you get the chat topic and questions in advance.)

Announcing New Women’s Internet Marketing Twitter Chat! is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

We human beings tend to be a little egocentric. We think that everyone else sees the world the same way we do – down to a website on their computer screen.

Even leaving iPhones and other teeny devices aside, standard computer resolutions vary in width between 800 and 2000 pixels and in height between 600 and 1200.  That makes a really big difference in how much of a website you can see immediately upon opening it in your browser.

Why is it important how much people can see when your site first flashes onto their screen?  Because people are impatient.  If they can’t see your amazing video when the page first loads, there’s a good chance they will never see it. They may click a link in the menu.  They may decide there’s nothing interesting here and press the back button. They may scroll down and find it – but there’s a good chance they might not.

On the other hand, if your video is staring them in the face when the website loads, they can’t help but see it. And then there’s a much greater chance that they’re actually going to end up watching it.

So how do you step into someone else’s computer’s shoes and see how your website looks in a resolution different than your personal favorite?  That’s what we’ll discuss this week.  Next week we’ll talk about how you can figure out what screen resolution you should be designing for using Google Analytics.

I found a few screen resolution programs, the two best being:

Screen-Resolution.com

Viewlike.us

They seem straightforward enough: type in your URL and then by clicking on the different buttons that specify popular browser sizes, you can see how your URL looks in those browsers. You’ll see where the screen would end, and where you would have to start using the scroll bars, both vertically and horizontally.

But if you try the same resolution on the same URL on both programs, you’ll see that they give significantly different cut-off points.

For example, here’s our site at 1024×768 on screen-resolution.com:

And here’s our site at 1024×768 resolution in viewlike.us:

Why? Why can I see further down in the 1024X768 version on viewlike.us than in the 1024X768 version on screen-resolution.com? Which is correct?

So, they both are – it all depends on how the person with the 1024X768 resolution is viewing your website.

If they’re viewing it in Internet Explorer, then screen-resolution.com is 100% accurate (well, almost.  See caveat below). It actually tells you when you get to the site from another browser that it’s meant to work on Internet Explorer. If you look at the image, you’ll see the toolbars and other information bars above and below the actual webpage, which leaves less room for the page itself to display – as it does in real life on any web browser.

Now take a look at the viewlike.us image.  No toolbars or other bars of any sort. Viewlike.us gives you a view of your site at the given resolution – provided your website is the only thing on the entire screen. But even the most minimalist browsers don’t work that way – and if you have a power user of Firefox with 4 extra toolbars – he’s going to be seeing about half of what viewlike.us shows.

It seems that the majority of people still use Internet Explorer (see two graphs below), although the gap is closing.  Does that mean that screen-resolution.com is the way to go?

From statcounter.com:

From w3counter.com:

Not quite.

Because (as I realized when trying to write this blog post on a different computer than having done all the prep for this blog post on), as you can see above, the above view of Internet Explorer is that of versions IE 8 and below. Why does this make a difference? Because IE 9 doesn’t have all the mandatory toolbars that the older version used to have.  That means that the actual view of the web page starts higher up on the screen – which means that more of the webpage can show before you have to scroll.  So this tool is great for seeing how your Internet Explorer visitors using 8 and below will view your website. (In fact, screen-resolution.com is so connected to IE8 and below that it won’t display properly on IE9.  I had to use the “compatibility view” – the little icon of a broken page next to the refresh icon – to make it work.)

So what do you do?  How do you figure out how people are seeing your site at different screen resolutions?

The above tools – and any tool – are very useful, as long as you’re aware of all the caveats and issues mentioned above.  And as long as you have a decent imagination. Pick whichever tool you want – let’s say screen-resolution.com.  You know off the bat how your site will look in IE8 or below.  Imagine removing about three of those bars (two above and one below) – now how much of your site will show? That’s the view for IE9 and also the one for Chrome. With Firefox – well, Firefox is complicated, considering how the standard toolbars have changed over the different versions (many of which are in active use), and how many toolbars a power user can add to Firefox, reducing the available screen for viewing webpages.  You may have to take a guess there – I would currently use the screen-resolution.com view to estimate Firefox also.

Okay, so now you know how people view your site in different screen resolutions, even on different browsers.  What do you do with that information?  How do you know where on your page you can put that amazing video for maximum exposure?

Stay tuned for next week when we take a look at making a custom report in Google Analytics which will help you apply your newfound information to your site and your visitors – and come out with practical conclusions for design.

If you want to know when our new posts come out, subscribe to our blog via email or subscribe via RSS.  You can also follow us on Twitter or Facebook and get updates that way.  Looking forward to seeing you!

Update: here is Part 2 of Do You Know What Your Website Looks Like to a USR?  Happy reading!

Do You Know What Your Website Looks Like to a USR? is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

It’s also the headline for the page in the Google search results.

If the keyword is in the title, and especially if it is at the beginning of the title, that gives a big boost to your page for that keyword.

The title tag, like most meta-tags, is contained in the header of the page.  If you can go into the HTML of the each page, you can insert the title tag with the title you want.  The tag looks like this:

<title>Your Title Goes Here</title>

But what if you work on WordPress, which doesn’t let you edit the header for an individual page?  Are you doomed to the same title for every page on your site? (Bad news in the eyes of Google.)

Fortunately there are a good number of WordPress plugins that will let you give a title tag to each page individually.  One of the best is All in One SEO Pack.

But while this will let you put in the title for each page, when you put your desired title in the home page All in One SEO Pack field… nothing happens.  On your main list of pages and their title, description and keyword tags, it looks like it has changed for the home page, but if you check the browser tab when the page is open, or check what the headline is for the home page in a Google search – it is not the new title you gave it.

So how do you change the title of the home page on a WordPress site?

The answer’s pretty simple, but hard to find.  So we’ll point you in the right direction.  Go to your WordPress dashboard.  Click on Settings on the side menu.

You’ll be taken to the “General” settings page.

This is where the default home page title comes from.  You could change it here, and it would change the home page title.  But this “Site Title” is also often appended to the end of page or post title tags.  It’s good for branding, but what if you want your home page title to be a specific keyword phrase – something beyond just your brand? And you don’t want that long phrase showing up at the end of the title tag of every post?

Continue down that Settings sub-menu to All in One SEO.

Scroll down past a few ads until you find:

Put in your desired title for the home page.  Scroll down to the bottom and click “Update Options.”

There you go!  Refresh your home page in the browser and check the browser tab.  Is the title you’ve been waiting for there?  You did it!

How Do I Change the Title of My Home Page in WordPress? is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

Here are a number of link building ideas for ecommerce sites:

1. Getting Reviews

People love getting free things.  And bloggers who get free things often blog about them. Search Google for “[your niche] blog” and check all the relevant blogs to see if they have done product reviews in the past. Or search “[your niche] reviews” or “[your product] reviews” and see which relevant blogs come up.  (Even if a blog hasn’t done reviews, there’s no reason why not to ask, but if you’ve seen that they have, the chances are greater that they’ll be interested.)  For example, if you sell t-shirts, just looking for “t-shirt reviews” will give you a whole pile of sites – like http://www.cotygonzales.com/.

Write to the blogger via his email address or contact form. Try to go a little beyond the form letter – actually read a little bit of their blog and make some kind of comment on it. Then you can give your disclaimer about how you’re writing because you work for a company that sells the kind of product they review and you wanted to know if you could send them a sample. Include a link to your website so they can see that you’re a reputable place and aren’t going to do something spammy with their mailing address.

One hint on choosing sites to contact: check that they are still active – some sites I saw haven’t posted any reviews in months.  It still might not hurt to contact them, but concentrate your efforts on sites that people probably look at because they’re updated.  That way you’ll not only get one link, but you’ll get exposure that might give you more.

2. Who Are Your Suppliers?

If you’re a jewelry maker, you probably buy your stones, earring posts, wires from one or more suppliers. Do they have websites? Is there a space for testimonials – or can you offer one? Do they have a place to submit the designs that you’ve made with their products? Take, for example, www.artbeads.com.  On their blog they accept your submissions about the jewelry you’ve made with their products – and in the posts the artists have links to their sites.

Whatever your business is – see if you can give some kind of testimonial with a link after your signature. Happy supplier – and happy you.

3. Current Customers

You make a great product. So your customer is probably very happy when she receives it. That’s the perfect time to gently request a link.  Enclose a little card in the shipping box saying: “Thank you so much for ordering from us. If you enjoy your new _____, please let others know about it by reviewing it on your blog, Facebook or Twitter.” If you have done confirmation via email, instead of the card you can send them an email a few days after they should have received the item. (And you can even easily suggest which URL they should link to when it’s an email.)

For more incentive, you can set up a system where they get discount code if they review you with a link. That may motivate people more, but you have to find a good way to track it.  (If you’re working with email, ask them to tell you where the review is in order to receive their code.)

4. Guest Blogging in Your Niche

You know all those niche bloggers that you found in Step 1 above?  The ones that you didn’t write to about reviews – write to them and ask if they’re interested in a guest post on their blog.  You’re definitely an expert in the field and you probably have something interesting to say. And it’s very acceptable that in your bio you’ll explain your background in the field – and put a link to your site.

Good luck – may your products make many (many, many, many, many people happy!

Get your small business SEO tips delivered right to your email or to your feed reader. Up next week: using Google Shopping to get more exposure for your products.  See you then!

How Do I Get Links to My eCommerce Site? is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

Using Images for SEO: Helping Your Page Rank

One of the primary ways that images can help the page that they’re on is by adding alt text to images: well-written alt text that contains your keywords.  Alt text is the text that a user will see in place of the image if they do not have images enables on their browser. It is also the text that is read by any browser equipped for the vision-impaired. Google reads this text and basically considers it part of the text on the page. Not a long list of keywords, and not the exact same text for your 5 different images on the page – Google itself says that lots and lots of keywords in alt text is a bad idea. The alt text should be describing the image, but it can describe it including a relevant keyword.  On your page about how to make flower arrangements, your gorgeous pictures can have the alt text of “how to make flower arrangements from daisies and tulips” and “how to make flower arrangements from lilies and daffodils.”

How do you put the alt text in?  Many systems used to manage your website (WordPress, for example), will have the option of adding alt text when you upload an image.  (Note: the “Title” is not the “Alt Text”.  The Title is what a visitor will see when they hover their mouse over the image – so you might want to have some text that is explanatory to a visitor – but it has little to no SEO value when it comes to the page the image is on.)

If you don’t have an easy way of adding alt text to images, go into the HTML of the page.  (I know… shiver… don’t worry – it’s not so hard.)  Find your image which will have “img” somewhere in it.  It might look something like this:

<img title=”" src=”http://www.debi-z.com/seosite/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/using-images-for-seo-where-put-alt-text.png” alt=”" width=”454″ height=”223″ />

In between those two quotation marks after the alt= is where you can write your text.  Don’t see an alt=?   Add one in somewhere between those angle brackets (the opening <img and the closing >).

A word to the wise: don’t add too long a description in your alt text – or at least don’t put your important words at the end if you do.  An experiment done by SEOHobo indicates that Google only reads the first 120 characters or so of the alt text.

How do you see if the images on your site have alt text – and what it is?

An easy way to see alt text is to download the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox.  The toolbar looks like this (well, it’s a little longer but it wouldn’t have fit on this page comfortably if I hadn’t cropped it):

Clicking on “Images” will give you this:

Click on “Display Alt Attributes” and all the images that have alt text (or at least an alt tag – alt=”" – even if it’s empty) will appear on your screen.  Here’s an example from one of our previous blog posts which had a number of illustrative screenshots. See all those yellow boxes?

If you see a yellow box that just says “Alt=” with no text, there is an alt=”" tag, but you need to add text.  If you see an obvious image with no yellow box, it doesn’t have an alt tag at all – go and add it, as we explained above.

Using Images for SEO: Helping The Image Rank

Aside from helping the page they’re on rank in Google, images themselves can rank in Google’s image search, and on occasion Google will put image search results into the regular, “Universal” results. Then even if the page didn’t rank, if a searcher clicks on your image, he’ll get to your page.

One of the primary ways to help your image rank is to adding alt text to your images – descriptive alt text with the keyword you want the image to rank for, as we talked about above.

Other important things to do:

• Give the image a descriptive filename, with the keywords. For example: how-to-make-flower-arrangements-from-daisies-and-tulips.jpg. (This may also help in getting the page to rank on Google.)
• Use as much descriptive text as possible around the image – without going overboard.  That means the text surrounding it, captions, image titles – all these things will help Google to know what your image is about. (Some of this text will also help the page – on-page text will, for example, although image titles probably won’t.)

Bonus tip: if you’re a wedding (or other occasions) photographer, see this phenomenal post about optimizing your wedding photography for SEO.  I ran across it today while looking for something for this post and was very impressed.

We wish you success using images for SEO!

How Do I Use Images on My Site for SEO? is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.