Why are you doing SEO?

First, determine your goals. Sure, this could take a week, month or be ongoing, but for today establish your 5-minute goal. What is it you want to accomplish this afternoon? Once you decide, establish what metric or dimension you’ll use to measure your success.

At Ethoseo, we are constantly looking for new opportunities and trying new things, so one of our mantras here is “test, test, test.” To help reach our marketing goals here at Ethoseo, we have established a good way of testing what works and what doesn’t. One way we accomplish this is by tagging every link and ad (sans AdWords) we run through Googles URL builder. By using the Google URL Builder, we are able to measure the effectiveness of every dollar we spend. Simple, easy and effective.

SEO goals include:

• Buying a product or service
• Submitting a feedback form
• Downloading a whitepaper
• How long a visitor browses your site A.K.A. time on site
• Average page views per visitor

Keyword Research: Questions, Ideas, & Thoughts

Many businesses and SEO’s for that matter use Google’s keyword tool and expect it to produce a complete keyword list. Unfortunately, this approach typically produces a list of keywords that are deep, but not wide. So what’s the difference between a deep keyword list and a wide keyword list? Deep keywords are phases and key terms that only use your base keyword, whereas a wide keyword list takes into account the synonyms, variations, and variability that searchers use when looking for the same product or service. The example below illustrates a wide vs. deep keyword list:

Deep Keyword List for SEO Services

• SEO Services
• SEO Service Company
• SEO Service Firm
• SEO Service Pricing
• SEO Service Cost

Wide Keyword List for SEO Services

• Web Promotion
• Search Engine Marketing
• How to show up in Google?
• Internet Marketing
• Online Advertising
• Web Marketing
• Search Engine Optimization
• Website Ranking

By starting with a wide keyword list, you’re able to weed out high performing keyword sets from low performing keywords. Then once you have found a few that have high conversions, you can go deep and build out these root keywords. Make sense? Good. Now you can start building out your keyword list, but remember, start wide and then go deep.

Titles: What this page is about distilled into 70 characters or less.

Your webpage title is what users and search engines use to determine what your webpage contains. It’s the blue link you click after searching Google. So it stands to reason it’s one of the most important elements on your website.

Using the keyword research techniques we spoke about above, you should craft a unique title that targets a specific search query per page. If you’re unsure of how to check your titles, you can run your web address through our E-rank on-site SEO tool. E-Rank will run an on-page optimization report, allowing you to see if your title is over the 70-character limit used by popular search engines. Search engines also bold sections of the title when they relate to the users search query. An example of this is seen in the search engine results image below.

Another best practice is including your business name or brand. Doing so, allows your business to differentiate itself within the search results, further reinforcing your brand. Lastly, it’s not always essential to use the full 70 characters. Some of the best titles are substantially shorter than 70 characters and some are just over the 70-character limit. So get creative and make yours unique.

Best title tag practices include:

• Use all Title Case or capitalize the first letter of each word.
• Each page should have a unique title
• Keep important keywords close to the beginning
• Use clear and consistent branding
• Think about the emotional impact and call to action.

Things to avoid in your title:

• Adding to many keywords (i.e. keyword stuffing)
• Egregiously exceeding the 70-character limit

So there you have it, three SEO tips any small business owner can do today.
It’s important to note that while this three-step SEO process is designed to improve your website positioning; it is not a replacement for a comprehensive SEO campaign. Small business SEO can seem complex, but with a little effort you can make drastic improvements. Good luck and happy optimizing.

Now it’s your turn.

What do you think provides the best SEO bang for your buck? Do you have a small business SEO tip or suggestion? Have you tried any other on-site SEO reports? Do you use the Google Keyword Tool exclusively for keyword research? Let us know in the comments below, we’d love to hear from you.

Thanks!

Shortcode generator in the visual editor.

How it works

Simple Donate allows users to insert a donation from the visual editor. Users can also easily label donation levels. This is important because donors will often donate more when presented with predetermined levels and examples of what their money is being used for, (e.g. “$100 will protect 25,000 square feet of Rainforest“). Donations go directly through PayPal, allowing donors to pay with their preexisting accounts, making the donation process as frictionless as possible.

We plan to continue development and look forward to adding useful and requested features. If you have any suggestions on how we can make Simple Donate better, let us know in the comments section below.

Simple Donate can be downloaded through WordPress.org’s Plugin Repository.

Today while searching, we stumbled across a new ad format that we had never seen before – Google Offer Ads. The new ads are enabling businesses that are running a Google Offer to highlight the offer within AdWords. While testing is the norm at Google, this one really caught my eye.

What do the ads look like?

The new ad format uses the entire width of the pink box and surrounds the offer with a simple dashed border, making the ad really stand out among the top three placements. The ad also inserts the promotional text from the Google Offer into the AdWords Ad, giving advertisers an additional line to promote their business. Moreover, the “view offer” button incentivizes the customer to click on the ad to find out more information about the deal you’re running.

Clicking on the “View Offer” Button takes you to the coupon page where you can print the offer or save the deal for later use.

So what do you think? Is this new format going to work? Will you use the new Google Offers Ad for your business?

Let us know in the comment section below.

Welcome to Ethoseo’s new blog! We will be updating this section throughout the year, so check back for the latest in SEO, PPC and social media information.