SEO for 2016: The Complete Do-It-Yourself SEO Guide (2015)

Chapter 8. SEO Goals

For most people the goal is simple, outdo what your competition does for the same keywords and beat their rankings. So I guess the chapter is done. Well, maybe it’s not that simple. Maybe I should break it down just a little.

Before we begin, you should have a search engine optimization plan in place. This will help you create your SEO goals. This will help your focus as the purpose of making critical changes to your website for optimization.

Your SEO plan should be updated every 3 months based on what your competition is doing versus what your previous changes have accomplished. In the next chapter, we will look at website analytics which will help you understand where your needs are. It will also help you see where you need to concentrate your efforts at any given time.

Before reading this chapter, however, you should have a good understanding of your trophy keywords and the other keywords you want to focus on. If you don’t, you should visit Chapter 2 and make sure you know the keywords your company needs to use and the competition that is competing for those keywords.

In the beginning, you are most likely going to be focusing your SEO on getting your site listed on all the search engines. For this part, Chapter 3 should be your first stop. If you haven’t done all the steps outlined in Chapter 3, then you should stop now and go back there and make sure that your website’s URL is listed on all the hand submissions and you have your website being submitted through automation to all the other smaller search engines and directories.

By now you should be familiar with the focus of the other chapters. We have already talked about adding your keywords into the content of each page and making each page focused on one subject, getting relevant links to your website, adding keywords to the content of each page, adding Meta tags, adding correct titles with keywords, adding multimedia, adding social media, and providing the correct word density on each page for a focused search engine.

Each one of these components is a must on your website and is all a part of your SEO strategy. These are all a part of your SEO plan and all of these components are an “add it once and forget about it” type of deal. You need to continuously monitor what is working, what is not, what your competition is doing, and make adjustments as necessary to maintain and update the elements of SEO that help you rank well.

The basic rule here is that your efforts will change, but they will never end. You need to plan to continue using, modifying, and updating your website to help your SEO rankings, and changing your strategies based on search engine changes, new internet components, etc.

For instance, last year having Twitter and RSS feeds on your website did virtually nothing for rankings. The year before having a YouTube video on your website did almost nothing for rankings. This year they are an absolute must-have to increase rankings.

This year a major change took place. Bing didn’t even exist last year and our recommendation was to focus your SEO strategies only on Google with Yahoo! as an afterthought. Now because of all the changes, you might actually get more business by optimizing for Bing than your ever realized. Bing has a major market share now. With a majority of the website optimized for Google and not Bing, there is market share to gain by optimizing for Bing, especially in the very competitive keyword arena where the competition is higher than most for a keyword.

Today, every major search engine focuses on many components of a website in ranking a website. Only a few of the smaller search engines focus on a single aspect of a website their rankings. This means that over time, if you are focused only on a single keyword or links for your website, you will find that your SEO efforts will begin to fail quickly.

You have to keep your efforts up and not let down your guard. You can spend a year getting your website’s rankings high and be on the first page for any search with your keywords only to lose everything in a week. The fact is you can spend months getting your rankings up and they can be lost in a fleeting moment if you are not careful.

Let me give you an example. There is a very large software company that I do the SEO for. I spent a year and a half getting them to a Google ranking of 8 out of 10. It was one of my most prized accomplishments and I jumped for joy and bragged to everyone I worked with the day I looked and their website ranking was an 8/10 on Google. Only a month later they were a PageRank of 2.

So what happened?

Someone took over their website development who didn’t have a clue about SEO. The new designer worked with the owner of the company to create a flashy new website without any consultation from me. In fact, my point of contact with the company didn’t even know it was being done. The new website was all Flash and looked great and believe it or not there are still people who learned to develop in Flash that will try and sell you a Flash based website. Of course they will call it something very appealing..

The trouble is that when it was created, none of my SEO work was incorporated into the website. Even worse, the new web designer changed all the page file names for every page that was indexed with the search engines. So when users on the search engines searched on their keywords and clicked on a link to their website, there was no page. Rather, there was an error saying the page didn’t exist. They were now invisible on the internet. Sales dropped to all-time lows in a single month. It was two weeks before someone at my office noticed what was going on and contacted the company. By then it was too late.

When you went to their “About Us” page that used to be named “aboutus.html” it went to an error page because the new web developer named the file “about_us.php”. This happened four months ago and they have reverted back to the old site as the SEO work I needed wouldn’t incorporate into the new site. Search engines don’t like websites that change their URL of their pages and ranking really is based on URL and not actually by website. Each page on your website has its own ranking from Google based on its relevance and all the other items we discuss in this book.

Today, the software company website that was once on the first page of every major search engine for their keywords is on page 3 of Google and has a ranking of 4/10. Their sales went from averaging 150-200 sales per month to only 63 last month. This was a catastrophe for them. They were on an uphill trend adding new employees and growing all because of the SEO work I was doing for them. Today they are four employees fewer and just barely staying in business.

A website needs constant growth and relevant material constantly to maintain its SEO status and keep the site from becoming what is known to search engines as a stale website. (A website where the material never changes.) Those changes, however, need to be looked at from an SEO optimization perspective from every angle. Most outsiders think that every web designer is familiar with SEO. From my experience, very few have any knowledge of it. It is a specialization that most web designers and developers know little or nothing about.

So what should your SEO Plan include? Let’s look at this in the next section.

Time and Effort in an SEO Plan

The first thing your plan needs to include is lots of time. Then add more time to that. This is one of the main reasons that most companies sub out their SEO work. Not only because it takes someone who lives and breathes SEO to keep up on the latest trends and technology, but because of the amount of time involved.

Simply adding new content here and there on your website and changing a Meta tag or two won’t help you increase your rankings on the major search engines.

NOTE: If you are doing the SEO yourself, to keep pace and save some time, you might consider designing your site similar to a blog where content is easily changeable.

Your SEO plan should be considered a dynamic document that changes all the time based on your needs assessed from monitoring not only your website, but the search engines and your competition on the search engines. If you can’t figure out what your competition is doing to one up your SEO work, then you need to call in a professional as soon as you can! The reason? What you do today has virtually no effect on search engines for months. In essence, you are planning today what you want to happen on the search engines 3-6 months from now. An SEO plan will help you stay on track.

Now that you understand how important it is to put time into your website’s SEO, we need to create a clearly defined goal built around your business needs. Virtually every business has different needs and at different levels even when two different company websites are in the same industry.

A small local business would focus only on the local area long-tail keyword searches, whereas a large business selling nationally or in a large geographical area would need to invest time, money, and considerable effort into increasing the exposure of their website to potential customers outside its geographic region on a larger level using more generic shorter keywords.

For example, if you sell sports equipment in Portland Oregon, you would target a local campaign using the keyword of “Portland sports equipment.” If your website sold sports equipment nationally you would target a much harder SEO keyword with more competition such as, “sports equipment”. The fewer the words, the harder it is to get your site listed higher in the search engines. The broader the keyword, the more competition there is for that keyword.

In Portland, Oregon there are probably 40 websites competing for sports equipment and maybe ten percent do any professional website optimization. However, nationwide there are probably thousands vying for first place with those keywords and if only ten percent do website optimization, you have a lot of competition to beat.

Both the smaller company and the larger company need to implement an SEO plan. The larger company that needs to concentrate on a national level with lots of competition will require more than this book can offer (unless you are just starting your website).

If you are trying to do a national campaign with lots of competition, most likely your competition is employing powerhouse professional help. This is not the time to experiment. Your revenue (the money you make from your website) is an important factor. Your SEO plan and goals should not only focus on increasing your website visits, but also on increasing your revenues. You can track revenue by funneling your website visitors through individually targeted sales transaction pages while they are visiting your website.

You should make sure the goals you set are realistic. It’s very easy to become unfocused with your SEO efforts and get discouraged when those efforts don’t meet your goals or expectations. It’s very easy to spend gobs of money on SEO and never accomplish anything.

Your SEO goals and the plan you create must be flexible and grow with your organization.

SEO Plan Details

Now that you have a set of goals in mind for your website, it’s time to create an SEO plan. The SEO plan is the document that you’ll use to help you stay focused as you try to implement your individual SEO strategies.

Keyword Research

Continuous keyword research should be your second line item after your time entry on your SEO plans details. Google Analytics (discussed in the next chapter) has a way of looking to see what keywords were used to find your site. Many times it becomes clear that there are a market of people who find your site that you didn’t even know.

I will give you an example:

My SEO website targets many keywords, but I noticed that several people searching for better website rankings searched using the keyword “search engine help” and found my website way down on the list of a search engine. After a few of these in one month, I added the keyword to my PPC campaign. After getting about 80 hits from that in one month, I optimized a landing page just for that keyword. I now get about 200 hits per month from that term which is business I never would have gotten had I not been analyzing the keywords people were using to access my site.

It was a minor change in the bigger picture. I was already creating content for the site, but by focusing on some of the most logical and well known keywords. I didn’t crawl in the mind of a prospective searcher but Google caught it for me. I just had to interpret the results.

You should never discount the little things. Even minor details, such as refocusing and changing your keyword efforts or modifying the tagging on your pages can have a major impact if it is done right. For every website that I do SEO, I find a little niche on a monthly basis that my clients’ competition never catches and I capitalize on that. Using those little niches in the right places can make a major difference in the amount of traffic that your site receives.

Reputation Management

The next item you should have in your plan is reputation management, which is a critical part of any online business. If you Google anyone of my SEO client’s URL’s, you see nothing but good or neutral press. The top 10 results of a search are usually corporate sites, blogs, press releases and other landing pages I optimized or created for them. This is no accident.

Many clients who do any volume of online sales will get a disgruntled customer or two and sometimes a negative news article or blog entry or other problem can affect their online reputation.

Sometimes this bad press is known when it comes out in a news article that everyone sees and talks about. Sometimes, however, a disgruntled person can place negative information on blogs, as comments, and many other places that can be indexed into the search engines and work to destroy your online presence little by little. If you do not take time to monitor you SERP (Search Engine Results Page), you may miss the reason you are dropping in sales or hits to your website because of the negative that is displayed. In one case I had a customer who owned a large mortgage company.

Their company does about 8,000 loans per year and have to turn down some clients for a loan, often at the last minute because of some unforeseen issue such as the client used a credit card or bought a car and dropped their credit scores, disqualifying them for the loan product for which they had been approved. It was inevitable, like it or not, that those few disturbed clients who posted their comments on blogs managed to fill up four of the top ten spots on a Google search for many of their important keywords.

Then the inevitable happened. The web visits stopped and the phone calls stopped coming. This is a good example of what can happen if you don’t have monitoring your online reputation a part of your SEO plan. You’re probably saying, this is nice to tell me but where do I start if I find negative links or information about my company?

Before this ever happens, you should identify key editorial contacts at industry and business publications, ezines, and press release portals that can help to place positive press in its place. Make a separate page in your plan to log these contacts. You should always be looking for opportunities to post comments on relevant articles and place links to your company’s URL.

Today, you can publish stories in minutes, versus days, weeks or months. So when you do post content, it not only appears on the Website, but on search engines, syndicated content sites, and news search engines as well.

You should always create targeted press releases that can be linked-to from a variety of sources. The press release should also be optimized for the best relevant keyword density so it appears as high as possible in related searches. If you skipped learning about keyword density, there is an index in the back of this book. I would recommend learning about how to use that to your advantage.

Launch your own blog and become friendly with other bloggers, because bloggers are the most publicized arm of social online media. Bloggers are increasing their credibility with the consumer, which means their opinions really do matter. This is somewhat like a “Third Party Endorsement.” Having bloggers post negative comments about you or your brand can spell disaster. Be prepared to get into the conversation by posting comments on blogs with negative content about your product/services and link back to your own press release or blog.

Another very effective tool is the use of sub-domains. Google sees them as separate websites, but they do still carry the authority and trust of the root domain. When you create a sub-domain, you must not simply copy content from your main domain. The content must be different. The new sub-domain must have useful, unique content. It does not need 100 pages; just ten or so pages per sub-domain will do. All you need is two to three well-optimized sub-domains.

Sign up for a Twitter account and place the Twitter Wiki or scrolling plugin on your website, but keep updating it with relevant information about your site. You might also consider Pintrest, Instagram, Facebook, or other social bookmarking network entries. And of course, post links to your press releases using keywords in your text links.

Managing your reputation requires the creation of relative content on your own website, distribution of positive content, as well as strategic participation in online discussions. When you combine these strategies, an integrated search engine reputation management program is in place and ready for action in the event a negative piece of information is indexed about your company or URL.

Ripoff Report Reputation Management

Once your website is listed on Ripoff Report or a smaller website called Scammers, it is virtually impossible to get it removed unless you get a court order. Even though when you search for Ripoff Report, there are plenty of Pay-Per-Click ads saying they can get them removed. They can't! They are scams that are even listed on Ripoff Report.

That being said, I am often asked what to do when a domain or person is listed on Ripoff Report because it ranks so well. Well the reason it ranks so well is that Ripoff Report knows that when you use the person of interests name or website URL over and over again on their listing page it makes for a very keyword dense page and optimizes well.

Since you cannot get it to go away there are many things you can do both to bury the listing on Ripoff Report now and prepare for the future. Many people go on Ripoff Report and do a rebuttal of the article and make things worse. They do this by placing their website URL, their name, their company name over and over again in their rebuttal response making the listing on Ripoff report even more optimized. They just made it worse. Your response should be carefully chosen words with no names, no company names, no URL's and if possible working with a professional like myself.

The proper way to respond with no names or keywords associated with your business. This is an actual response from one of the doctors I work with to a Ripoff Report:

We carefully reviewed this individual's request for a refund. We reviewed what was paid, the many health encounters she received and the clinical outcome achieved over many months. We found the request to be without merit. This posting is also factually incorrect - especially in regard to the claim that there was no improvement in health. In the past we have refunded monies to patients when appropriate. In this circumstance we did not feel it was warranted. We care for the health and financial health of our patients. Currently, we are working to have our valuable services covered by insurance. We see patients who do not do very well with the current medical paradigm. We are proud of our results, innovations and caring staff. This patient is free to return to the practice if she wishes. We may be able to help her seek reimbursement from her health insurer. We can, as a courtesy, provide her our latest innovations in genetic testing as well.

So how do you protect yourself in advance or in the future? Easy. Reputation management should include protecting yourself in advance. You should write articles, web pages, and blog postings that include your domain name, the keywords scam, and fraud in a way that is positive to the reader. If they search for your domain name or the domain name and the words scam or fraud they will eventually see pages of articles that are older and ranked higher for the first couple pages of the search engines.

PPC

Monitoring your PPC account is, of course, important. Whether you use Google AdWords or Bing’s AdCenter or related pay-per-click programs to get your message out there you need to constantly monitor which keywords are working for you and which ones get a lot of clicks but don’t turn into sales. Too broad of a keyword, as we learned in previous chapters, can cost you a lot of money with very little results.

In terms of reputation management, a PPC campaign can help as well. While optimized press releases and related content may take days or weeks to appear high in relevant search results on search engines, paid text ads are virtually instantaneous and provide total control over placement (by keyword) of your message.

Reprioritizing Pages

In the beginning, prioritizing your web pages is easy. Give priority to the pages that focus on each of your keywords, and in the same order that your keywords are in. You should prioritize your efforts on the pages that support those trophy words and draw the most amount of traffic and sales.

These are top-priority pages and visitors should naturally gravitate to those pages. These should be focused landing pages that utilize all the optimization techniques, including social media and keyword density optimization. The content should remain relevant and constantly be updated so it never gets stale.

Pages such as your home landing page or those that will generate the most traffic or revenue should be a road map and included in your SEO plan and goals should be set for your marketing efforts. If four of the web pages on your site are your top priority, those should encompass a majority of your time and efforts in your SEO plan.

Additional Plan Items

After you have prioritized your sites web pages, you should assess where you stand and where you need to be with your current SEO efforts. Make a checklist and dedicate time to assess all the pages in your website. Those that should be checked more frequently are the following:

· Keywords (Focus 1 keyword on each optimized page.)

· Keyword density

· Local Submissions

· Online Reviews

· Title tags

· Social media elements

· Site/page tagging

· Page content relevancy

· Replacement of stale content

· Frequently changed content

· Blogs

· Social media optimization

· Social bookmarking

· Site linking

· Press release writing

· Article submissions

· Video optimization

· RSS Feeds

· Search engine placement

· PPC

Items that can be checked less frequently:

· Site map accuracy

· Longevity of domain registration

· Robots.txt optimization

· Site map

· HTML source code and errors

· Alt tags

· Link development

· Manual link requests to related sites

· Directory listings

· One-way links/two-way links

· HTML design

· ASP. and other coding such as Java and Flash

· Linked URLs

Completing the Plan

At this point you should have collected all the information you need to put into your SEO plan. You should also have a good idea of the priority of each item and what needs to be done frequently and which ones can be done on a less frequent basis to increase or maintain your website’s search engine rankings.

Now it’s time to put all of the information that you’ve gathered into a comprehensive plan comparing your available time and determining the SEO efforts you should be making to best utilize that time. Your SEO plan is more than just a simple picture of what’s included in your website and what’s not. This is the document you should use to help determine your website’s current search engine rankings, reputation management, your needed marketing efforts, capital expenditures, time frames, and how you’re going to keep your website from becoming stale.

The plan should look much like a business plan when you are done. It includes your goals, a work plan, marketing information, how you will grow your business, plans for managing problems, and much more.

Those strategies can include efforts such as manually submitting your site or pages from your site to directories and planning the content you’ll use to draw search engine bots, spiders, and crawlers. It should also outline which pay-per-click programs you plan to use and a time line for the testing and implementation of those efforts, as well as regular follow-ups.

I always recommend that you supplement your SEO with a well-managed PPC campaign. But the goal is to maintain your URL on the first page of a search engine’s search using organic SEO to maximize those naturally occurring elements. When you build on each internal and external element on your website to create a site that will naturally fall near the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs), you achieve high SERPs rankings free — other than the time it takes to implement your SEO plan.

Achieving each ranking point for organic SEO can take anywhere from three to eight months if you implement the right SEO plan. Don’t get upset if you don’t see immediate results from your SEO efforts. Stick to your SEO plan. If you don’t see changes within 3-6 months or your rankings get worse, you should reevaluate your SEO plan or seek professional help.