SEO Tools Part III

OK, here is the final free SEO tool that you’ll need to get started – Google Analytics. What you do, is when you build your site, just go to analytics.google.com, set up a free account, and they will give you a piece of tracking code (just a little snippet of javascript code that you’ll never have to worry about again). Drop it at the bottom of every page on your site, and within 24 hours, you’ll be rockin’ and collecting data. Many people don’t understand what analytics is, so I’ll give you a little rundown.

What Does Analytics Do?

Possibly you remember many years back when the thing to do was put a hit counter on your website. This was a little box at the bottom of your website that displayed to the public the number of visitors your website has had since it was originally placed there. This is nice to know, but really it tells you nothing. With analytics software, the information is not broadcast on your website – it is available only to you, and anyone that you directly specify. Here are some other awesome metrics that analytics shows you:

• Visitors by date range – it tells you more if you can see when these visitors came.
• Number of Unique Visitors – It’s nice to know how many of those visitors were people who come back vs how many came once, and never showed up again.
• Keywords – Find out easily exactly which keyword the user typed into a search engine to click on your site. (Remember back to the first SEO tools lesson when we talked about discovering keywords? This helps in two ways: Find out which keywords you are ranking on search engines for, and find out about keywords that are relevant to your site, but that you hadn’t thought of. Brilliant!)
• Visitor Sources – Find out where your visitors came from. This is crazy helpful. If you see all of your visitors coming from the Yahoo Organic search, you know you have some work to do to show up on Google or MSN. Find out which percentage of visitors you are paying to get, and which you get for free.
• Track Purchases – with a small tweak in implementation, you can use analytics to track purchases. Find out which visitors purchase the most, and where they come from. Find out which of your keywords are converting visitors to leads or purchases the best. Awesome SEO tool because it tells you where to spend your time, and shows you the bottom line – how much money your site is making you.
• Running Reports – Easily get any data you want for any period of time by running a report. Save these reports, put them into spreadsheets, catalog them, or do whatever you want to with them.

So now you can understand how powerful of an SEO tool Google Analytics is – all that powerful information for free. Take a look around the SEO tools, get comfortable with them, and then start using them to make money! More to come!

SEO Tools (Part II)

Today I’ll be going over the next SEO tool featured in my previous post. These SEO tools are:

• Google’s Website Optimizer

Google Website Optimizer as an SEO Tool

First of all, Website Optimizer is awesome. It provides awesome functionality, and is a Google product (read free). Let’s go into some detail.
What you need to know is that search engine optimization is more than just showing up higher on google’s SERPs (search engine results pages). SEO is about getting increased visitors, getting them to do what you want them to do, and making more money.
Once you have built your site (Don’t be worried if you haven’t built your site yet. I have plenty more tips in all areas to post about to help you along the way.) according to SEO best practices with the other SEO tools, you will begin getting increased website traffic. More people will be landing on your website, and hopefully buying your product, submitting a lead, or viewing your advertisements. There are an unlimited number of variations of how you can display the pages on your website. Some feel nice, but don’t elicit a customer response, some appear cluttered, but somehow make the visitor accomplish our goals, and sometimes you have to make trade-offs. The real point is that you can’t tell without data what visitors are going to like more.
This SEO tool allows you to direct visitors through a series of tests (completely unknown to the visitor). There are two kinds of tests:

• A-B Testing
• Multivariate Testing

A-B Test

An AB-Test is simply sending half of your visitors to one version of a page, and sending the other half to another. Usually you will want keep a control group like an already existing page, but you can do any A-B test you want. You are the captain of the website. You can A-B test pictures, headlines, text, whatever you think will improve the conversion of your visitors to your goals. When you are done, Google will spit out the differences in user behavior between both versions of the page, and this will tell you what elements to keep or change.

Multivariate Test

Multivariate tests are awesome. First of all you need to have over about 1,000 visitors per week to make it timely and helpful. The idea behind a multivariate test is that you can put 8 page elements into the test, and it will display the elements in different portions of the page to the visitors, and using a complicated algorithm, it will tell you the best of 16 possible page configurations for the best conversion rate. Remember that increasing your conversion rate from 2% to 3% is the difference of a lot of money depending on your visitors and order value, so a multivariate test is very worthwhile to get the best conversion rate.

So there you go. Check out Website Optimizer, and start thinking of A-B tests you can start doing. Join me next time for my SEO tools overview of Google Analytics.

SEO Tools

In order to better perform search engine optimization, you will need a few SEO tools to get you started. There are many more advanced SEO tools (both paid and unpaid), but I will cover the basics:

• Google’s keyword tool
• A spreadsheet program
• Google’s Website Optimizer
• Google Analytics

For the interest of time, I will cover the first two.

Google’s Keyword SEO Tool

This is the first SEO tool in anyone’s arsenal. Not only is it quite dependable, it is also free. You can find it by going to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, or at anytime just googling the word, “keyword”.
First, begin by searching for terms relevant to your website. If you are beginning with a site about vitamins, type in words like vitamin supplements, and oral vitamins.
Open up your spreadsheet program (most use Excel, but OpenOffice.org’s free spreadsheet works great too. Export the list of keywords, and save the average number of searches, and delete the rest of the columns. Then delete the rows for the keywords that are irrelevant, or you wouldn’t consider using.

Who Knew Google Itself Could Be an SEO Tool?

Title the next column over ‘Results’. For each keyword on the list, go into Google, and search for it. Take note of the number of results, and type that into the column. This shows you the amount of competition for that keyword. This will take a while to search for every keyword, but it’s worth it.

The R/S Ratio

Once both columns have numbers in them, do a formula in a free column of the number of Results (competing pages) over the number of user Searches (from the adwords keyword tool). This is your R/S ratio. The lower the number on your RS ratio, the higher the searches and the lower the amount of competition.
The words with the lowest R/S Ratio are ideally the best to choose, but consider the overall number of searches as well. If the lowest R/S ratio is 39, but it only gets 39 searches, that wouldn’t be enough to make optimizing a page worthwhile.

Join Us For The Next SEO Tools

That concludes our introduction of the keyword SEO tool and the keyword research SEO tool. More SEO tools later!

How to Find an SEO Job

The best way to get experience, and get an SEO job is to find a website to practice on. Here is what you should do to start early, and get lightyears ahead of your future SEO job competition:

• Talk to friends, relatives, family, and find someone that owns a website, and that doesn’t have any SEO.
• Set a baseline with them on how many monthly leads/sales they currently receive.
• Set up a deal where they pay you a percentage on any more sales/leads that you can generate through SEO.

This will do several things for you. It will give you:

1. An SEO Job
2. Experience in the field
3. A paycheck
4. Huge upside potential

You will take an already active site, and optimize it for search engines, and get mounds of visitors coming there. You will have found an SEO job. You will have experience to hearken back to during interviews. You will also have a happy customer. Since your pay is based off of your own performance, as you make the site owner pay you more, they are also making more, so win-win! Possibly even better than that, you will get paid for results, so you will put more time, effort, and practice into further optimizing the site. You have created the perfect motivation to keep learning – direct performance-based work. Work as much or as little as you want, and it directly affects your paycheck.

If you follow these steps early, you will have experience to get an SEO job as soon as you graduate or enter the job market, and you will hit the ground running. You will find yourself many years younger than your supervisors and bosses, and you will make a name for yourself. People always tie expert behavior at a young age with genius. Your employer at your SEO job will realize they need to keep a genius on board. Go out there and make it happen. More to come!

Black Hat SEO – Where Do You Draw The Line?

Before you ever think about doing any SEO work, you should be aware that there are ethical and unethical SEO practices, also called white hat SEO and black hat SEO. You should make a decision before you start to stay away from black hat SEO. Here are a few reasons:

1. The consequences of getting nailed for black hat SEO tactics are being blacklisted by Google and the other engines. It is VERY difficult to get your rankings back after being blacklisted, and you lose all of your search traffic for that period of time.
2. If you are managing the SEO for someone’s site, that is someone’s livelihood, and you should not risk costing your boss money that can be avoided.
3. Google’s search algorithm changes many times per year. This is because Google hates black hat SEO. If you find some black hat technique that works, rest assured that in the near future, Google will patch its algorithm to shut it down. Always better to play by Google’s rules to make sure you don’t waste your time.

Black Hat SEO Explained

How do you know whether a technique is considered black hat SEO or not? I don’t know what other SEO professionals consider black hat SEO techniques, but I like to use this rule of thumb: Is my technique aimed to enhance the user’s experience? Or is it an effort to trick the search engines?

By following this simple rule of thumb regarding black hat SEO, you can keep your stress levels down, and your time investment safe.

Start Learning SEO

You may be asking yourself, “How do I start learning SEO?” Let’s run through some basics.

In my mind, there are two branches of SEO – on-site and off-site.  On-site deals with the way the page is constructed and how search engines can view it, and off-site deals with the perceived popularity of the page to the search engines.

Learn On-Site SEO

Learning SEO on the website requires knowledge of HTML.  For those without HTML experience, it is really simple.  You are simply putting page content between opening and closing tags that look like this:

<p>Text here goes in its own paragraph</p> and <h1>Text here will appear as a headline in large, bold text</h1>

There are lots of free resources out there for learning HTML, and it doesn’t take long, and is easy to learn on your own computer.

Once you learn HTML, learning on-site SEO is just a matter of incorporating best practices.

Learning Off-Site SEO

When Google is ranking sites to show up in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), doesn’t it make sense that the more people talk about a site, the more popular it is?  Of course it does!  The search engine method of determining what people are talking about is to trace links, and find out which sites are sending people to which other sites.

There are lots of ways to incorporate links into pages other than yours: Comment on blogs and leave a link, leave comments in forums, publish press releases, publish articles, etc.

Learning SEO Now

Start learning SEO now!  You can read all the blogs in the world about them, but you need experience. Find a friend that owns a website who has not done any SEO. Maybe a family friend. If you don’t know anyone like that, start your own blog or website. Following my information, as well as other popular SEO blogs will have you learning SEO and seeing results in no time!

More to come!

Learn SEO Early

This blog is for high school students, college students, or just plain motivated people who want to learn SEO.

I am an SEO professional who has been in the field of Internet marketing for about two years. I have a passion for breaking through the competition, and I want to help anyone motivated, especially young students, to learn SEO early, and learn SEO right.

What Is SEO?

I guess in order to learn SEO, you need to know what it is…

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, or Search Engine Optimizer as a title. Putting all complicated definitions aside, SEO is simply making sure that relevant pages get shown to searchers.

Start Learning SEO Early

Once I started to learn SEO, I felt like my eyes were opened! I wanted so badly to learn all I possibly could, as fast as possible. Then it started to dawn on me… If I had started learning this stuff back in high school, I would certainly be a millionaire many times over by now. That is why I want to help you learn SEO early, so that you can have real marketable skills before any of your peers.

Imagine your high school reunion. Do you want to drive up in your Ferrari and spend the evening being spoken of by all of your envious past classmates? The opposite could also be true. It is all about getting ahead. If you are motivated to get ahead, you can certainly learn SEO!