Steve Spencer's Archive
Aug
13
This is my third post in a series on how to do a good, and effective blog. Much of this series will be focusing on the SEO aspects of blogging. Obviously there are many other reasons than SEO to blog. Rather that reiterate them in each step in the series, please feel free to take a look at:
How to do a Good blog Step 1
which touches on several reasons to blog, and also focuses on choice of the domain name for your blog.
For this post however, the issue is: Links.
This may come as a shock to some people, but no matter how good, or how pretty, or how relevant your blogs is, it might no become successful. There are some very few people who grow their readership organically enough to get the momentum to every really get any good rankings on the search engines. Most blogs have to “play the game” a bit in order to get a jump start and get readership and rankings.
The biggest way to get rankings on the search engines, more so than anything else we have discussed in this series, is inbound links. That is to say, websites out there linking to you. We’ll look a bit at the relevance and value of various links in a moment.
But before we go into inbound links, I want to touch briefly on “internal links”, and outbound links. Internal, or inner links are links from one page on your blog to another page on your blog. Outbound links are links from your blog to somewhere else on the Internet. In the case of both of these, the most important thing is that if the text that someone clicks is “click here”, you should be slapped (okay, maybe you didn’t know better, but a slap can help wake you up and make you alert for this next part, so go ahead anyway.)
When you link to another post on your blog, or to another site on the Internet, you should use descriptive text, just as we did in the article “How to do a good blog Step 2: URL structure” when deciding what to use as the subject line of our posts. If you look at the two links in this article, they are descriptive of the content that they are sending you to, rather than stating:
To Read Step 2 of good blog Creation, click here.
Don’t be afraid to link to your own content (as we have done in this article), in fact do it often… it earns you Google juice. Use this same link text logic when linking to other sites, wiki articles, pictures, or YouTube videos.
But now comes the harder part: inbound links. How do you get people to link to your content? Well for starters, realize that you are one of those “people”. Put links to you blog in all of the social media platforms you use. Have a link in facebook, twitter, linked in, and any others.
As we go over this, I want to point out in a little more detail what I mean: Have a look at the previous paragraph. It points to my twitter, linked in, and facebook pages. This has created inbound links to those pages. As such, it has made those pages more credible in Google’s eyes. Due to that, anything I point to from those pages gets even more credit. Additionally, google looks at those links in this article, and believes that due to the fact that I have links out to sites using the words “facebook” “twitter” and “linked in”, that my blog must be about those subjects (among other things.) As such, I am now more likely to show up for searches if someone is looking for how to use those social media tools in conjunction wit their blogs. Pretty cool, huh? It all becomes very synergistic… one things feeds another, which feeds another.
The next step on your quest for inbound links: create other pages. Squidoo and Hubpages are great places to do this.
Next?
Stop being upset about those you think you are competing against. One of the cool things about blogs is that those who you perceive as competition can actually become link sources, as well as lead flow for you. Go find out who the top blogs are on the subject you are writing about. Chime in on the threads. Comment intelligently. This creates links back to your site. It also makes people who might not have found you otherwise think, “Wow… this person is really sharp on this subject. I need to go see who they are.”
Next on the list: Directories. Go find any directories you can and submit yourself to them.
Another tool I will mention, but I will say proceed with caution, is shotgun link building campaigns. All of the items we have mentioned above are link building strategies. Others that are very effective if carefully managed are asking bloggers to review your product. Another, very effective method is the shotgun link build. This consists of having someone go submit you to literally hundreds of sites, directories, etc. This links provide value. But only as part of an overall link building strategy. If all of your links are “garbage” links from such a campaign, it can actually hurt you. If managed closely however, and enhanced with high value links, this is a very effective method.
Posted in Events
Jul
30
This is my second post in a series on how to do a good, and effective blog. Much of this series will be focusing on the SEO aspects of blogging. Obviously there are many other reasons than SEO to blog. Rather that reiterate them in each step in the series, please feel free to take a look at:
How to do a Good blog Step 1
which touches on several reasons to blog, and also focuses on choice of the domain name for your blog.
In this post I want to focus on what is perhaps the most common problem that I see companies make on their blogs, and even on their websites in general: URL structure.
Let me make the point on URL structure in this way: Have a look at the URL below, and tell me what this article is likely about:
http://mycompany.com/?p=123
Have no idea? Neither does anyone else. Neither does Google.
How about this one:
http://www.myblog.com/recipes/?p=123
Well, it’s probably some sort of recipe. But I seldom Google for “recipe.” I would be much more likely to Google “Desert recipes”, or even more likely “Pecan pie recipe.”
So why do so many people keep this level of information from one of the most powerful SEO drivers on their site: the URL? If you’re running a blog this is pretty easy to fix. On wordpress specifically click on “Settings”, then “Permalinks.” This will open up a screen that allows you to change you URL structure.
Here’s a hint for you: The “Default” setting is the worst one. I would choose one of the settings that have “sample-post” in them. This alone should help your “Google Juice” a ton.
This step makes it so that the subject of your post is now par of the URL. But that’s just one step. Now you must be sure to use phrases that people use to search for your product or services in your subjects. Don’t have a subject like “Recipe of the day for Thursday”, when it is so much better to say “Amazing pecan pie recipe.”
All of this also holds true in your website. If you have URLs that remain the same as the site is navigated, or show meaningless variables and numbers, then you are holding yourself back.
One thing I have commonly seen is companies who work with an agency, using that agency’s CMS, and are told that URL structure is meaningless. I am stunned at how much I encounter this. I cannot say this strongly enough: If your agency is telling you that URL structure is not important, they are knowingly lying to you. That may seem very harsh to say, but it is shocking how common of a problem this still is.
So that’s it for now. Step 2 of how to do a good blog. Step 3 hopefully sometime next week.
Posted in Events
Jul
13
There are a lot of reasons to have a blog.
A blog can make your large business, or individuals in your business seem more personal… more “real”, and people like to do business wit people they feel they know.
A blog can drive communication and feedback (though this happens less often that a lot of bloggers might have you believe.)
A blog can be a really easy way to get your small business on the web. It can make you seem bigger.
It can be a spot to speak your mind on your hobbies, interests or gripes.
More often than not however, people tend to use a blog to drive more traffic. This might happen due to a combination of the reasons stated above. But it also likely includes a plan for SEO.
Blogs are very powerful for SEO for a couple of key reasons. They first reason is that blog content is very conversational in tone. It uses a lot of words you may never use in your marketing web site. This provides for a “Long Tail.”
Here’s the concept of the Long Tail:
Imagine you sell a diet pills that increases energy.
You make a web site that ways “More energy” “Lose weight”, and thins like that. You start to get traffic for these phrases (but a LOT of people are competing for them.)
Then you start to blog about successful customers. You write about “Susan”, who was heavy, and highly depressed. You write about how the product changed her life. Guess what happens… A few months later you are shocked to find that 7% of the traffic to your site is people coming in because they were looking for ways to deal with “depression.”
The Long tail means that if you can get enough of these types of people for phrases like “depression”, or other similar topics, that that traffic can actually combine, and begin to eclipse the traffic for “weight loss.”
But the Long Tail is only one aspect of SEO. Blogs are great for SEO for lots of other reasons. Over the next several days I am going to be writing several of these reasons, and steps to do them right. But today we start with step 1: Your Domain Name.
Domain names:
Unless you are a huge brand like Nike or Starbucks, people are probably not searching for your comapny name. They are likely searcing for the product or service you provide (sports shoes, or coffee.)
One of the most important pieces of good SEO is your domain name. You need to ask yourself when you start our blog, “Will people search for my company, or my product or service?” Also, what will the customer really be searching for? Sometimes we choose very generic phrases like “Fitness Gym”, when a customer will never find what they want if the look for that… they will need to look for “Utah Fitness Gym”, or “Orem Fitness Gym.”
Once you decide what people will likely look for, seriously consider having your blog use that domain name, rather than your company name. UtahFitnessGymBlog.com will rank much better than blog.Fitnesscorp.com for a search for “Utah Fitness Gym.”
Also, think about how you and others search when deciding what you want to rank well for. Most people type a search in to google and get too many results. So they refine the search by adding a word or two. Then a bit more, and a bit more. It’s on that 3-5th search that ou have narrowed things enough to be useful. So who is your target customer, and what do they look for on that third, fourth, or fifth search?
Get a domain name that fits with that.
Posted in Events
Jan
3
Lately we have been talking to a lot of companies about how to get more bang for their buck from their website. One of the easiest ways to do this (assuming your website is in a state that you actually WANT to drive traffic to it) is some simple SEO. In doing a brief overview of many, many websites, there has been one thread that is so overwhelmingly pervasive, that I wanted to share it here. That is the issue of URL structure.
If you want to make sure that people find what you have on your site, make the URL tell them what it is. For example, if you have a recipe for Pecan Pie, don’t put it on your http://www.mycompany.com/daily_recipe location. Put it on http://www.mycompany.com/recipe/pecan_pie. Have an article on improving battery life? Put in in a URL that has improve_battery_life as part of it and you will see far more hits. It’s amazing how easy this is to do, and yet it is by far the most common mistake I have seen on sites.
Posted in Marketing, Steve Spencer
Oct
18
Okay, so you’re going to have to forgive me for tooting my own horn here, but I am awfully excited. As many of you who know me well know, although we are increasingly involved in the community here in Utah, we also are extremely active in Nevada as well. So the fact that yesterday the Technology Business Alliance of Nevada announced Twelve Horses as the “2007 Technology Company of the Year” had me pretty jazzed.
Other exciting news: We are moving at the end of this month out to Draper. Our office size space will be roughly doubling, which should be nice. We’ll be sure to have you all out for an “office warming” party.
Posted in Events
Aug
20
What do people find when they look for you? You would hope that they find you. Heck, you would hope that they find you even when they don’t know they’re looking for you… that you match their needs. You would be surprised how often, and how badly this can be out of whack.
I met a with a company just last week… and of course, before the meeting I do a little homework on them. The matches I find? I found a company that had its assets frozen due to illegal activities. The company was a different company entirely. But at first blush it wasn’t clear.
That’s why I am so excited to be able to announce the following (for the full details on our SEO/SEM expansion in Utah click here):
Salt Lake City, Utah (August 20, 2007) Twelve Horses is actively expanding its search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) division. The most recent addition is veteran search engine marketing expert, Eric Morgan who has more than eight years of web experience accelerating businesses’ search engine rankings and website traffic.
Posted in Company News
Aug
17
One of the most important aspects of marketing for a business is building your brand. Making sure that when people think about your products or services, that the appropriate mental, and even emotional tie-ins pop into their minds.
When discussing branding however, it is important to also recognize the value of “personal branding” and how closely tied it is to corporate branding. So much of business is based on relationships. How many of the companies that you deal with deal with you because of who you are, not just because of who your company is?
In building your personal brand, Social tools, social networking sites, social marketing, and the like can be of huge value. But if you’re not careful they can also be a huge waste of time. Twitter may be great for the types of relationships you maintain, or it could just be a nuisance. The same can be said of MySpace, Facebook (although with the API for Facebook now we should be seeing some really interesting things develop), and a plethora of others (heck, there are even applications now that let you drag and drop components to create your own social networking applications in just minutes.)
A couple of social applications that have gain a lot of traction with business professionals, but are just lacking in too many features for the more aggressive social networker are Plaxo and Linked-In. Linked in is great for finding people, and leveraging personal networks to find skill-sets and ask some questions. Plaxo is nice for keeping my address book up to date. But these ponies are going to have to learn some new tricks to stay relevant in comparison to the newer, cooler tools out there.
Enter Plaxo Pulse. I read a wonderful, very detailed writeup today about Pulse. It looks like Plaxo has made some real strides forward:
- Â Allows you to store information about the contacts, rather than just what they provide (unlike linked-in)
- Categories (Family, Friends, Co-workers, People to keep track of so I can avoid them, etc)
- Can sync with your linked in data
- Ability to comment on other people’s updates “congrats on the promotion,” etc.
And lots, lots more. Go read the full post by Dan Sweet to see even more exciting features, as well as a few short comings you should be aware of.
Posted in Advertising, Marketing
Jul
30
I like the commercials being put out by Apple. I like them well enough that I watch them rather than changing channels. I’m not in the market for a Mac. But due to the fact that I am willing to watch their commercials, it is more likely that I will hear something at some point that is compelling to me.
So how do you ensure that I hear a message about your product when I need to? By being sure that I am willing to listen to your message even when I don’t need it.
Want to know some sites that I read regularly, and derive value from? Well, let me through out some of the less obvious ones:
Jason Alba at Jibber Jobber
Rob Merrill at UtahTechJobs
Yahoo
There are lots of others, but I wanted to throw these three out. Looking at these you might ask yourself why I am interested in help finding a job… I’m not. But that’s the key… I am reading the sites because I derive value and enjoyment from them… even though I am not in the market for their products or services. Both Jibber Jobber and Utah Tech Jobs talk about relationships, and their importance, and say it in unique ways that resonate.
What about Yahoo? Everyone is all about Google now. Don’t get me wrong, I love google, and I use Google… but everyone now and then I like to search on Yahoo because it shows me other cool stuff. I derive other value than just searching.
That’s the key to keep people coming back again and again. Sure, you want them to hear you or see you when they are looking for exactly the value proposition that you are calling out. But give them more than that. Build relationships with people, even if they are not your target. One day they might be, or they might know someone who is.
This is true in every industry. If you develop materials use to build buildings, then put on free events once or twice a year where local builders can come and hear all of the cool news tips/tricks/products about building. Make it an event that people will want to come to even if they are not in the market for your product. Give them value and they will keep coming back. Then, they will already be there, and know you when they are in the market for what you offer.
Marketing need to do more than just shove their value points down my throat. They need to make me smile, or think. Otherwise I have already hit another webpage, deleted the email, or changed channels.
Posted in Advertising, Marketing
Jul
26
I Just HAD to pass along this tidbit from the main Twelve Horses Blog:
This hilarious parody, entitled “The Couple”, pokes fun at the disconnect that currently exists between traditional advertising and today’s consumers.
There is definitely a need for change within the industry as advertisers continue to view their audience as a statistic or dollar opportunity instead of forging meaningful relationships that will benefit all those involved.
“You’re saying you love me but you’re not behaving like you love me. It’s not genuine.”
The world needs more genuine advertising.
Posted in Events
Jul
23
When putting together Marketing content, the brass ring we all reach for is the real connection. Something that grabs the reader/watcher/consumer, and sucks them in. One of the hardest parts of trying to do this can be realizing what you are really selling.
That may sound odd, but think for a moment. What do Mountain Dew commercials sell? If your answer was soda pop you would be wrong. The commercials are selling hip, and young, and edgy. They are selling risk taking. you will never see a Mountain Dew commercial do a taste test against another soda because they are not selling great taste. They know that their consumer wants to feel a little cooler, a little freer, and when they grab a Dew instead of a Sprite they do.
Similarly, if your product is high quality pasta dinners in freezer bags that you can pull out and warm up in minutes you have to ask yourself what you are really selling. It’s not pasta, peas or baby carrots. The real reasons people buy, the real deliverable is a happy family, a happy spouse, the appearance of being on top of things. That is the message your adds and pictures should convey.
Don’t be too wordy in your message. Make the pictures, the colors, the flow, and the mood of your add invoke an empathic response from the consumer as much as you can.
Ask yourself the normal marketing questions: What are my key value propositions; what differentiates me from my competitors; but also ask yourself: What does the consumer of this content like to believe about them self. If you have a product for sales and marketing people make it look professional if appropriate, but also make it look aggressive, edgy, hip, energetic. Sales and Marketing people love to believe this about themselves. It’s what they want to feel, what they want to convey.
Who is your market? What are you really selling? What should your customers feel like after they benefit from you and what you have to offer?
Posted in Advertising, Marketing
