Canadian SEO blog with tips and information from industry leaders.

Now that your business has survived the much-hyped “end of the world,” handling your online marketing should be a piece of cake, right? But just in case you need some help, here’s a list of 10 do’s and 10 don’ts to keep your online presence on the right track in 2013.

Don’t: Use blanket “Like Us” messages to drive people to your social media pages.

Do: Give consumers a reason to like you, follow you, circle you, or whatever other action they need to take when promoting your social pages in emails, blogs, or your website. Highlight unique benefits they get by joining your social community—exclusive offers, contests, entertaining or informative content—to show that you understand what they want.

Don’t: Set up social profiles and leave them virtual ghost towns.

Do: Show off your business on social media by posting relevant, useful, and sharable content. Engaging polls, fun videos of new products or services, or fan/follower-only deals, specials, or events are great places to start. And if you’re not sure what to post, go directly to the source and ask current fans and followers what they’d like to see.

Do: Claim your business listings on Google+ Local, Yelp, and any other industry-specific local directories. By claiming your business listings in these places, you can always make sure that your information is current and accurate. Plus, by optimizing your listings for search engines, you boost the chances that local consumers find you when they search online.

Don’t: Leave consumers guessing about how to contact you.

Do: Display your business name, address, phone number email address and other information noticeably on your website, listings, social media profiles, and any other online space that you own. It’s also a great idea to double-check that information, along with items like your address and hours of operation, for accuracy and consistency across your online presence. Doing so can help search engines recognize and better rank your business in local search.

Don’t: Assume reviews don’t matter.

Do: Create a plan for monitoring and managing your online reputation. Set up notifications, like Google Alerts, so that you are always aware of what consumers are saying about you online. Also, follow up with any negative comments in a timely and professional manner, and thank reviewers who leave positive feedback.

Don’t: Forget that happy customers are your best advocates.

Do: Ask some of your best customers to share their positive reviews, whether written or via video, to use on your social media pages, company blog, and website to establish credibility for your business. Also, since consumers may be prone to sharing negative feedback online, make sure you are prone to providing excellent customer service.

What additional steps are you taking in 2013 to boost your online presence?

New keyword research from WordStream (my company) suggests that buffalo chicken dip—apparently a dip made to taste like buffalo chicken wings—owes virtually its entire existence to Super Bowl Sunday and the NFL season.

We conducted extensive research into the seasonality and trends of keyword searches on Google corresponding to chicken wings and hundreds of other popular Super Bowl snacks, including the following: guacamole, chili, nachos, pulled pork, pigs in a blanket, doritos, and seven layer dip.

The study found a near perfect correlation between the demand for chicken wings and buffalo chicken dip with the NFL season.

For the last nine consecutive years, search volume for buffalo chicken dip increased significantly in September (which corresponds to the start of the NFL season), then peaked in December (corresponding to end of the regular season), and peaked again in February, corresponding to the Super Bowl:

Google estimates that Americans search for “Chicken Wings” approximately 550,000 times per month, on average.

Other Chicken Snacks Also Super Bowl Favorites

Other, similar keyword searches corresponding to chicken snacks exhibited similar trends, including for the following keyword searches: buffalo dip recipe, buffalo chicken recipe, chicken dip recipe, chicken dip recipes, chicken wing dip, and buffalo wing dip.

We can therefore conclude that in the event of an NFL lockout, the chicken economy would be in trouble!

What’s Your Industry’s Chicken Dip?

Every industry has its version of “buffalo chicken dip,” a product or concept with big seasonal peaks. By carefully anticipating those keyword trends and having your search marketing campaigns at the ready, you could hatch the same kind of profits as chicken farms do on Super Bowl Sunday.

Four Seasonal Keyword Research Tips

1. Use Google Trends. Google Trends is a great free tool for discovering trending and emerging keywords. Look for historical trends on keywords that have a link to your industry so you can drive seasonal traffic that’s still relevant to your business. Use the forecast feature to anticipate future search volumes.
2. Adjust PPC budgets accordingly: Increase campaign budgets for seasonal keyword campaigns in advance of peak volume to ensure maximum exposure and to beat the competition. To avoid overpaying, adjust back down when the season is over. Use the Google Traffic Estimator Tool (requires log-in) to get detailed estimates on impressions, clicks, cost per click, and total cost for a particular keyword, based on your budget, max bid amount, and other targeting options such as your location settings—to help you determine how much to raise or lower your budget.
3. Build in plenty of lead time for SEO content. When attacking a seasonal trend via content marketing, start planning your content and outreach/PR plan at least several weeks in advance. If you wait until the Super Bowl weekend to write about the Super Bowl, you’ll be too late to capture much traffic.
4. Check out trending topics: If you’re still struggling to find seasonal news topics, check out the trending topics page on YouTube or Twitter. On Twitter, you can check for local trends—for example, you can see what’s trending just in your city, as opposed to around the country or worldwide.

Tweet

Want traffic to the new online store you just built? It’s simple! Just find the keywords your customers use to search for your business and weave them into the content on your Web store.

There’s no guarantee about how much traffic this will earn you, but doing this is absolutely worth your time. In this part of our Build Your Own Online Store series, we look at search engine optimization and driving traffic to your store.

Start with the best keyword tools

One of the most useful tools for finding the keywords you should target is not a keyword tool. It’s a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel.

Almost all keyword tools and analytics programs, including Google Analytics, allow you to download keyword data in the form of spreadsheets

Almost all keyword tools and analytics programs, including Google Analytics, allow you to download keyword data in the form of spreadsheets. If you do not have Microsoft Excel on your computer, you can get a free spreadsheet program at openoffice.org.

Being able to sift through spreadsheets is useful in keyword research and ecommerce in general. If you need to beef up your skills, you can find free lessons on how to use Excel on Excel is Fun.

Google keyword research tips

One of the most popular keyword tools is the one provided for Google AdWords, which is free and is the first result when you type in “keyword tool” in Google.

Getting to the tool via Google search is fast and free, but the results are not as robust as accessing the keyword tool through an AdWords account. Another thing to keep in mind is that the tool will slow you down with requests for captcha codes that are sometimes hard to read if you don’t access it through an AdWords account, so you may want to open one.

There is no minimum you must spend to use the keyword tool, so just having the account gives you access.

What to know about the free keyword tool in AdWords

You will need to check the box next to “Exact Match” when you use this research tool to only see how many people entered a term exactly as you have it

The keyword tool in AdWords was meant for AdWords ads. It wasn’t meant to gather data on organic traffic.

Keep in mind that the default search volume is set for a broad match. This represents any combination of search terms that would trigger an ad if you placed it in your AdWords account.

A simple one- or two-word broad match could generate hundreds of combinations of search terms, so you will need to check the box next to “Exact Match” when you use this research tool to only see how many people entered a term exactly as you have it.

You will know that you are looking at exact match results when you see brackets around the keywords. As you look at the results, you’ll notice high, medium and low competition rankings next to them. Don’t rely on these too much. Those rankings are for the competition levels in AdWords and do not have a high correlation to competition for organic rankings.

Most paid keyword tools created for organic keyword research offer indicators that help gauge the level of competition. All of those indicators would be more reliable than using the competition level AdWords provides.

Include keywords in your title and navigation

It’s important to determine the level of competition and value of your keyword because your Web space is real estate, and you want to put the most useful keywords in the right places.

The best real estate on your Web page is your title and navigation. Ideally, these should include keywords that have the highest search volume

The best real estate on your Web page is your title and navigation. Ideally, these should include keywords that have the highest search volume and will attract the visitors to your website who are the most likely to buy.

When I say “navigation,” I’m referring to the links on the top and sides of your Web store that lead to other pages on your site. Many site owners make design and uniformity a priority over SEO. In some cases, especially when the site receives much of its traffic from non-SEO related activities, that is a good choice.

But if you are getting little or no traffic from other than organic sources, you could gain lots of traffic by adding three- or four-word keyword combinations as the display text for your navigation links.

Now I will admit that, aesthetically, top-bar navigation with more than three words is offensive—even three is bad from a design perspective. But from an SEO perspective, the longer the search term, the lower the competition—and the more likely your term and your site are to show up in the results.

Meta titles are also important

The next most important area in which to include keywords is the meta title, which is best kept to less than 65 characters. You see, Google displays only the first 65 characters in search results.

Don’t try to fit every keyword that applies into your title in the meta title, though. It’s more important that you write a title that attracts people. A captivating title with one or two keywords is better than a ho-hum title that accommodates three or four keywords.

A captivating title with one or two keywords is better than a ho-hum title that accommodates three or four keywords

Next you have the meta description, which is best kept to less than 160 characters. That’s all that will display under your title as two lines in your listing on Google.

Again, quality is more important than quantity. You want to convince the person doing the search that you have what they are looking for in those two lines instead of loading them up with keywords.

The difference between ‘easy’ and ‘awesome’

Keyword research and placement in your website is absolutely the best way to attract free traffic to your site.

Your success depends on using the keyword tool correctly to gather the most relevant keywords and making sure the important keywords are in the title and within the content of your store pages. It’s best to target only one or two keywords per page and create content that serves the people who are searching for those keywords.

Once you start doing it you will be amazed at how easy the process is. But never forget that there is a difference between easy and awesome. Finding the right keywords and putting them in the right places is easy. Including them in clever, compelling copy that serves the visitor and sells your product is awesome.

– By Tamara Weintraub

With all the things you need to do to keep your business successful both offline and online, there are bound to be a few things that fall through the cracks. Many small businesses focus on one specific marketing strategy like search engine advertising – in fact, paid search spending was up 18 percent in the last year.

But that doesn’t mean you should let other aspects of your Web presence suffer. Here are a few easy things you can do to keep your small business website and social media pages in tip-top shape.

Small Business Web Optimization Tips

1. Complete Your Google+ Local Page

Having an optimized Google+ Local Page is vital to your business in 2013, especially now that the Google Maps app is back on iPhone operating systems. Your Google+ Local page features basic business information, photos and videos, reviews from your customers, and more, so it should be top of mind for your small business marketing efforts.

To begin, ensure that your page is 100 percent complete and owner-verified. Owner-verifying your page establishes that all the information listed on your page is current and valid. Next, populate your page with keyword-rich business information, content and photos. This will help your map listing to show up in the organic search results for your top keywords.

2. Eliminate Old Information

Now is a great time to browse through your website, blog and social media pages to find any old or obsolete information. Get rid of information about old services or products, former employees that no longer work for your business, expired offers or specials, and any copy that’s no longer relevant.

3. Give Your Website a Facelift

Now that you’ve cleared out the clutter, it’s time to give the visual content across your website and social media pages a full facelift. Adding new photos of your staff, interesting videos and customer quotes are great ways to keep your website visually appealing. You can also take this time to update assets like your business logo, landing pages, or your online ads.

Keep in mind you should always maintain brand consistency across all your ads and pages, so make sure that any changes you make are streamlined across your website, blogs and social media accounts. Also, if you have recently added any new products or services, locations or team members, be sure to add them to your sites as well.

4.  Nurture Relationships with Your Fan Base

Your company’s Facebook fans and Twitter followers can have a huge influence on your online presence. Social media engagement such as likes, comments, tweets, retweets, and shares, can drive online word-of-mouth, social discovery and organic search. It’s important to nurture these existing relationships by showing appreciation to your current fans and followers while making sure that the new ones feel welcome and recognized. Here are a few quick and easy things you can do:

• Create personal posts that mention individual consumers and thank them for their business
• Post photos of your customers to your social sites (with permission from the subjects, of course) and tag them so they are encouraged to comment, like, and share the posts
• Create a special offer for fans and followers to promote the brand loyalty and sharing that attracts new customers

5.  Ask For Reviews – and You Shall Receive

After a holiday season full of sales and service, your interactions with many of your customers may still be fresh in their minds, which makes it the perfect time to ask your best customers for a review. Send them a personalized email or create a flyer for new customers asking them to review your product or service on sites like Yelp or Google+ Local after a good experience. This can boost your online reputation while keeping customers engaged with your business.

As your business grows and changes, so must your online presence. Even though many of these items might fall at bottom of your priority list right now, remember that your online pages are live and viewable to anybody at any time, so it’s important to keep them in the best shape possible.  

Tamara Weintraub is the content marketing manager for ReachLocal, where she educates small businesses about local online marketing. You can connect with her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Viral-Ready Video Tips

Your company might be focusing too hard on ranking on Google. YouTube, the world’s 2nd-largest search engine, shows no signs of stopping. The latest statistics report that over 800 million unique visitors search for content on the site each day, and over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month. If your organization isn’t actively creating visual content and working to achieve a high ranking on YouTube, it’s high time to get started. There’s a unique set of best practices for ranking well on the network, and we’ve curated some of our favorite tips to help you dominate your niche:

1. Choose the Right Keywords

Sorry, you’re never going to get the top ranking on YouTube for “Chocolate Rain” or “Gangnam Style.” The keywords you pick and ultimately use in the title of your video and description will help determine how much organic search you receive.

Whether you’re doing research on keywords through HubSpot Marketing automation software or an alternative tool, the long-tail keywords that boast low competition and high search volume will likely also be the low-hanging fruit on YouTube.

2. Rename Your Video Title

SEO experts believe that search engines place a low value on the file title when ranking and categorizing content. If you’re blogging, using an image that’s titled “Marketing in Nashville” instead of “ID-10010101” will probably have some influence on your ultimate ranking. Some YouTube experts believe that the video file name also affects how the network picks related videos. Titling your file “LandingPages101” can ensure your prospects see high-quality related videos as opposed to content that’s trending.

3. Use a Keyword Rich Title

Remember the early days of SEO, when you’d find search results that were painfully obvious in their attempt to use a long tail keyword? Fortunately, Google and YouTube hate content called “10 Tips to Earned Money in House” as much as you do. As search engines become much more adept at searching context, the need to use a keyword exactly in a content title has diminished. If you need to modify the word order of your long tail keyword in the title slightly, it probably won’t hurt.

4. Describe Videos Thoroughly

Use your YouTube video description field to its full advantage, filling it with keywords and links to relevant content on your organization’s YouTube channel or company website. Amanda Dhalla of Video Commerce recommends adding links in the description to high-value points and sections of the video if it’s more than a minute or two long.

5. Optimize Tags

Many YouTube SEO experts question whether tags have much value to how video content is ranked and indexed by other major search engines, such as Google and Bing. There’s certainly no harm in fully optimizing this section. Be sure and add common variations of your long tail keyword: if you’re writing about lead conversion, use “lead capture,” “landing pages,” and so on.

6. Add an Interactive Transcription File

YouTube users have the option of uploading a video transcription file with their video. It’s not mandatory, and if you don’t generate your own text transcription YouTube will do the work for you. However, experts caution that their automatic transcription is notoriously ineffective and results in a whole bunch of gibberish, which simply doesn’t capture your keywords in a way that’s relevant to the way your prospects search.

Transcribing your videos is time-consuming and difficult, but it can make a significant difference in how your content is ranked. Even better, since your transcription will translate much better into closed captioning than YouTube’s, it improves the chances that your content will be watched and enjoyed by an international audience. 70% of YouTube views originate outside the US! If you’re curious about transcribing, we recommend Rick Eberhart of Create Better Content’s tutorial.

7. Promote Immediately and Aggressively

Getting lots of views as soon as your video is uploaded can help drive your content to the top of the first page, as it helps the YouTube algorithm believe your video is filled with high-value information.

8. Encourage Comments

Actively encourage comments on your video while you promote through social media channels. YouTube algorithm experts believe that an active community within your video can have a positive effect on your ranking.

9. Ratings

If your video receives quite a few dislikes, you could find that your ranking drops significantly and your content is designated as Spam. Encourage your social media followers to leave positive feedback. While you can’t control whether your video gets into the hands of trolls, you can ensure your title, description and tags are an accurate reflection of your video content to ensure you don’t leave any viewers disappointed.

10. Build Inbound Links

Videos which earn inbound links from other websites through being embedded in a blog can improve ranking significantly. Offer your video content with original text analysis to other bloggers as a guest post to generate more views and shares.

 image credit: ftc web consulting

This article originally appeared on Inbound Marketing Blog and has been republished with permission.

Find out how to syndicate your content with Business 2 Community.

Bid management is arguably one of the most mundane activities that a PPC manager is tasked with. But it is essential to the health and performance of your campaigns.

So here is a question: How are you managing your bids? By this I mean literally – how are bids being changed? Not necessarily the strategy behind those changes. The “how” can have a major impact on time management and in some cases the effectiveness of those changes.

This is something of a back-to-basics article. Novice advertisers stand to learn something new. Experienced advertisers may get a needed refresh or even pick up something new.

Regardless, every PPC manager should be aware of the range of features and methods for managing bids efficiently and effectively. Here is a breakdown of the different ways you can manage your bids and the pros and cons of each.

Manual Bid Management (Basic)

These are the most basic methods for managing bids – and typically the starting point for every new PPC advertiser.

Native Interface – Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.

Pros:

• Log in and go at it.
• Edit bids in-line with data and filters.

Cons:

• Lends itself to knee-jerk changes.
• While bulk changes can be made, you can’t apply logic (percentage changes, set dollar amount changes, etc.).

Desktop Tools – AdWords Editor, Bing Ads Editor, Facebook Power Editor

Pros:

• Manage in bulk with filters and in-line with data.
• Flexibility of navigating and managing in a desktop style format.

Cons:

• With larger accounts, campaign and performance data downloads can take considerable time.
• Limitations in filters applied to bulk changes.

Manual Bid Management (Advanced)

Building on the foundation of the basic methods for managing PPC bids, these advanced methods up the ante – and your ability to make effective changes.

Desktop Tools – Using Logic (percentage changes, set dollar amount changes, etc.)

Pros:

• Manage in bulk with filters, in-line with data and with logic.

Cons:

• Same as before – download times can be long and filters are limited.

Spreadsheets – Microsoft Excel, Google Docs, etc.

Pros:

• Data filters and applied logic are only limited by your knowledge of spreadsheets.
• Using spreadsheet formulas allow you to make massive bulk changes based on any combination of filters and logic – unlike the PPC desktop tools.

Cons:

• As mentioned above, spreadsheets require some know-how. There is a learning curve.
• Large accounts can be cumbersome to manage in spreadsheets and difficult to navigate.

Automated Bid Management

Enter the robots! Automated bid management uses scientific algorithms to filter and apply logic – ultimately making changes to your keywords and ad group bids.

Bid automation allows for the most efficient use of your time and resources to manage bids, but it comes with some risk. You must consistently review your rules and the history of any automated changes to ensure they are making the right changes for your campaigns.

Google AdWords Conversion Optimizer

Pros:

• Let Google automatically adjust keyword bids to hit a target or maximum cost-per-acquisition.
• Easy to set up and manage – adjust CPA bid at the ad group level.
• Can be quite effective at helping you to hit your CPA goals.

Cons:

• Lack of control. Bids are managed at the ad group level.
• Can be fickle. Performance can degrade over time requiring a manual reset (turning Conversion Optimizer OFF, running on CPC bids for a time then turning Conversion Optimizer back ON).

Google AdWords Bulk Operations Automated Rules

Pros:

• Create detailed rules to adjust bids or pause keywords based on most performance metrics in AdWords.
• Rules are easy to create and easy to access within AdWords.

Cons:

• These rules only apply to AdWords! Will have no impact on other PPC channels.

Google AdWords Bulk Operations Scripts 

Pros:

• Create bid rules based on data outside of AdWords (conversions, inventory, etc.).
• Create layered rules that can affect not only keyword bids, but simultaneously adjust other elements (budgets, status, etc.).

Cons:

• Requires knowledge of JavaScript – learning curve.
• These rules only apply to AdWords! Will have no impact on other PPC channels.

3rd Party Tools – Acquisio, Marin, Kenshoo, etc.

Pros:

• Allows you to create rules for most of your PPC channels (AdWords, Bing Ads, Facebook, etc.).
• Rules can be based on multiple layers of data – native reports, Google Analytics, platform specific reports, etc.

Cons:

• Due to the multitude of options, there can be a learning curve for some advertisers.

Facebook Optimized CPM

Pros:

• This bidding method allows you to set maximum bid levels for Actions, Reach, Social Impressions and CPC. Facebook will optimize your bids to reach these goals.
• You can dictate which actions Facebook should optimize for (likes, image views, shares, etc.).

Cons:

• Only applies to Facebook ads that direct visitors to Facebook Pages.
• This isn’t exactly bid optimization. The optimized CPM is a series of “values.” What an action or click is worth to you, the advertiser.

That’s the rundown of PPC bid management features, folks. For many of you, this is just a refresher on the available options. For those of you still learning the PPC ropes, hopefully you picked up some new methods to give a try!

How do you prefer to manage your PPC bids? Leave me a comment!

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They say the devil is in the details. When it comes to search engine optimization, those details include some important quirks you need to know about.

• Conforming to search engine behavior
• Keeping-up with changes in search engine behavior
• Playing well with other websites to protect your SEO
• Avoiding common practices that obstruct SEO

Here are nine examples of what I call SEO quirks. See how many you know about.

1. In Subfolder File Names, Use Dashes, Not Underscores

• Good: http://www.domain.com/sub-folder/file-name.htm
• Bad: http://www.domain.com/sub_folder/file_name.htm

Many developers favor separating words in file names with underscores (_) instead of hyphens (-). They are conditioned to this behavior because some programming languages reserve the hyphen, for example, as the subtraction infix operator.

On the other hand, Google was written for nerds by nerds; the search engine tends to see underscores as concatenation, or joiners, so technical terms like FTP_BINARY will appear on search results pages.

• If you are creating a new website, use hyphens.
• If you have a small website without a lot of inboud links, change existing URLs to hyphens and 301 redirect old URLs to new URLs.
• If you have an enterprise site that uses underscores, keep your old URLs and CMS rules, but switch from underscores to hyphens as the naming convention for all new file names.

A word of caution, keep the number of words and hyphens to a reasonable amount. On category name or topic level pages, I suggest short and sweet, one or two hyphens. When you create file names for articles, you have a lot more leeway; try not to go to town or stuff keywords.

2.  Avoid Dashes In Domain Names

Select a domain that is your brand or represents your business in a concise, professional manner without dashes. Do not worry about keywords. While I do not know of any technical reason not to use dashes in domain names, from a practical perspective, they look cheap and compromising. That may raise a caution flag when you reach out for links and citations.

One of the primary reasons people select hyphenated domains is to insert keywords. Last year Google updated its algorithms to dampen the exact match domain benefit. However, long before this, the success of numerous brand name domains, many verging on the ludicrous, proved you do not need a keyword rich domain to succeed.

3.  In Subfolder File Names, Use Only Lower Case Letters, Numbers Hyphens

Google and Bing are both terrific at handing complex URLS with spaces and non-standard or encoded characters. Where the problem lies is when other websites link to your documents. If you do not encode special characters, the content management systems of those websites that link to your documents may encode them.

For example, spaces become . If those websites use different character sets than what your site uses, they may not translate special characters correctly. The safest thing to do is keep it simple by using only a to z and 0 to 9 and hyphens.

According to the technical standard, URLs are case sensitive. Most content management systems handle mixed case addresses by rewriting them to lower case, but check yours and do not assume this.

Also, some analytics and SEO tools are case sensitive and will report different versions of the same URLs separately. The safest path is to make sure all your internal links are lower case and make lower case the style standard for all copywriters and coders.

4.  The Great Subfolders Vs. Subdomains Debate

It used to be that search engines treated subdomains somewhat like different websites. Today, they are roughly equivalent. In fact, it has been this way for some time. This is good because most third-party applications, like hosted shopping carts, must be in a subdomain.

Search engines are pretty proficient at telling whether subdomains are related or not. For example, Tumblr, Blogspot, and WordPress.com subdomains are not related, while www.domain.com and store.domain.com are related.

If you use subdomains, do not isolate them. Make certain the navigation links between your primary domain and subdomains are well integrated. I have seen applications inside subdomains that will only link to the primary website’s homepage or employ nofollow links.

5.  Be Careful With Parameters

Parameters are variables in URLs. The standard method for creating parameters is to end the address with a question mark, then list parameter names and values.

For example:

http://www.domain.com?category=billiardsgame=nineballarticle=how+to+rack+the+balls

Your content management system may rewrite this into a user- and SEO-friendly format,

http://www.domain.com/billiards/nineball/how-to-rack-the-balls

Both of the above URLs are fine. I prefer the second example as it is easy to read and removes unnecessary words and characters.

You definitely want to avoid missing or non-standard delimiters,

• http://www.domain.com?nineball (no parameters)
• http://www.domain.com,billiards,nineball (non-standard parameters)

I have seen some wacky delimiter schemes.

Be careful of user identification parameters like uid=142536 where each visitor gets a different number or tracking parameters like source=xyz where xyz is different for each referring document. These create duplicate content issues.

Your choices include:

• get rid of them; use cookies instead
• use the rel=”canonical” tag to tell search engines which URL to index and credit with links and citations
• tell search engines to ignore the parameters using webmaster tools (Google, Bing)

Another trick is to put parameters that do not affect page content after a #. Search engines almost always ignore everything after the # character in URLs, the exception being the AJAX hash bang.

6. Use Flash Or Silverlight To Insert Multimedia Elements, Not For All Content

While search engines tout their ability to crawl Flash and other rich media, they still do a poor job of it. Flash is great for inserting multimedia — like a video, animation, presentation, or sound file — into an HTML page.

Do not use an all Flash or all Silverlight website. Flash sites are particularly popular among artists, musicians, and photographers, which is a shame because these are people who could benefit from organic search. Keep in mind, Apple’s iDevices do not support Flash, so its popularity is waning anyway.

7.  Pick Only One Per Page, HTTP: Or HTTPS:

Google does not care if you use http: or https: — not!

While Google welcomes both http: and https:, on a URL-by-URL basis, pick one and stick with it. Let us say you have a shopping cart with secure https: checkout. If your crawler-friendly catalog pages resolve to both http: and https: versions, you could be in for a world of trouble.

I have seen websites where all the offsite links go to http: addresses and Google indexes the http: URLS. Then, all of a sudden, the addresses in the Google index change to https: for no apparent reason, and the website’s rankings disappear.

The simplest way to avoid this is with canonical tags that force http: or https:, whichever is the version you want indexed.

8.  Make Sure The Markup Visible Text Matches

When the text in HTML markup does not match what users see, search engines call it cloaking. Sometimes, cloaking is unintentional. One example I saw occurred in a shopping cart where all the links to all the product categories and subcategories were included in the markup of every page. Visitors only saw links to the subcategories of the category they were viewing. The content management system hid the other subcategory links via CSS.

I do not want to get into a debate about white hat vs. black hat cloaking here, especially since Google engineers seem loathe to discuss specific cloaking techniques. Probably because they do not want to give people ideas. The two exceptions, ones they use for demonstration purposes, are serving different content based on user agents and using CSS to position text off the screen (-999 pixels).

They are always quick to say there are no good reasons for cloaking and that they have special detection algorithms that ring the red alert phone. The bottom line for this quirks article is avoid unintentional cloaking.

9.  Using The Vertical Bar In Title Tags

Search for long winding road, long – winding road, long — winding road, and long | winding road. Notice how Google ignores the dashes but not the vertical bar? That bar separates long and winding, not just visually, but in the Google algorithm. If your website uses the vertical bar, experiment by replacing it with a dash and see what happens.

If you knew all nine of my SEO quirks, good for you. It is not easy to maintain a current, comprehensive knowledge of all things Google and Bing SEO. Do you have any SEO quirks of your own? Share them in the comments.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: All Things SEO

While newer social networks such as Pinterest and Google Plus may be growing in popularity, marketing on Twitter is still an effective way for many organizations to reach their marketing objectives. In fact, 32% of all Internet users are on Twitter (source: MarketingLand), and 34% of marketers have generated leads using Twitter (source: Digital Buzz Blog).

In advance of the online workshop I am teaching today, January 31 on Twitter marketing (learn more about the interactive workshop here), I put together 3 ways you can improve your Twitter marketing in 2013.

1. Interact and Engage with Your Audience

This may sound obvious, but it’s easy for marketers to fall into the trap of simply tweeting thought leadership content and promotions. Sharing content is helpful, to be sure, but the real value in using Twitter is the opportunity to develop relationships with your audience. So interact with people, reply to their tweets, ask questions, and start building new relationships.

Example: How Zappos Can Improve Their Efforts

Follow and engage with happy customers who Tweet about your product—these people are already promoting your product, for FREE.

For example, let’s say you are Zappos and one of your goals for marketing on Twitter is increase sales by strengthening relationships with your current customers. You can setup an alert for whenever someone Tweets with a combination of the keywords “received”, “Zappos”, and “order”. (SproutSocial is my personal favorite solution for monitoring conversations like this.) Then, you’ll see when your customers Tweet about your orders, and be able to thank and acknowledge them. See tip 2 below for advice on keyword monitoring.

Monitor Customer Tweets

To demonstrate this, I did a quick search on Twitter for those exact keywords, and came up with a reasonable number of Tweets, from both happy and dissatisfied customers. This is an incredible opportunity for Zappos to build deeper relationships with their satisfied customers, and also handle complaints from unhappy customers.

Engage with Satisfied Customers

Don’t ignore customer complaints on Twitter—use them to create a better relationship with your customers.

For the positive Tweets from happy customers, Zappos could reply with something simple like “We’re thrilled you received the order. Let us know how you like the shoes”, and add that customer to a list that they can engage with in the future. The more they acknowledge customers Tweeting about them, the more likely they those customers will be to Tweet about them in the future, as well. Make it easy for them to promote your brand.

Acknowledge Unhappy Customers (and Turn Them into Raving Fans)

As for the Tweets from unhappy customers, there is no better way to turn an unhappy customer into an evangelist than by acknowledging complaints publicly. Based on the activity in the Zappos Twitter accounts, I don’t see them spending too much time on it, but at the least, they could allocate 1 hour a day replying to customer Tweets. Even without the hard data, I know the ROI for engaging with and acknowledging your customers for 1 hour a day is there, especially if you are solving complaints from customers that would otherwise use customer service resources, or never purchase from you again.

2. Monitor Conversations and Relevant Keywords

Monitoring keywords is a great (and easy!) way to find targeted people to follow, offer timely advice, and stay on top of industry trends. Get started by monitoring the following types of keywords, in order of priority:

Brand Mentions

Monitor brand mentions, including Tweets with the domain of your website

Start by monitoring mentions of your company and brand, including @mentions and Tweets with your brand and product name(s). For example, Cisco would want to monitor mentions of the Cisco brand and Twitter handle, in addition to variations of individual products, such as “WebEx”. I consider monitoring brand mentions critical, regardless of resources and priorities.

If you are a larger organization with an unmanageable amount of mentions, tools such as Salesforce/Radian6 can help you filter through the noise and focus your efforts on the most important Tweets.

Links to Your Site

Make sure to monitor when people tweet links to your website, even if they don’t mention your brand name or Twitter handle—you can do this by simply setting up a search for the domain of your website. For example, at OMI, we monitor when people Tweet the keyword “onlinemarketinginstitute”, because that is the domain of our website.

Pain Points

Monitor conversations directly related to the solution your problem solves—use the jargon they use to describe your need. For example, if you are an email marketing vendor, you can monitor when people Tweet with keywords such as “improve open rates” or “improve deliverability”.

Related Businesses and Competitors

Expand your efforts by monitoring conversations related to complementary businesses and competitors. For example, at OMI, we monitor when people Tweet about Marketo and ExactTarget, because they are solutions that are target audience uses, and people we could potentially engage with.

You can also monitor people Tweet about your competitors, and follow them as well. This will provide great insight into your industry and business, and may even allow you to engage in a conversation when it is relevant (but not creepy).

Interests of Your Target Audience

Finally, once you’re successfully monitoring the above keywords and need to grow your efforts, start monitoring conversations about your industry and topics your target audience is interested in. For example, an email marketing vendor could monitor conversations related to events that their audience would attend such as the Online Marketing Summit, or publications that their audience reads, such as the OMI blog or ClickZ. They could also monitor conversations about social media or digital marketing in general, because a marketer that would purchase an email solution would likely be interested in those topics, as well.

3. Grow Your Audience

Unfortunately, fake Twitter accounts usually don’t have budget for your product or service (or know anyone that does, either).

Now that you’re engaging with people and monitoring conversations, start to find new and interesting people to follow to increase your reach. Focus on building a community of potential customers, partners, influencers, and evangelists. Don’t pay for followers or automate the process of growing your audience unless fake Twitter accounts actually buy your product or service (or know someone that will).

Find New People to Follow

To start growing your audience, find and target new and influential people to follow. You can find these users by 1) monitoring keywords and conversations 2) reviewing the followers of people and businesses in your industry and 3) reviewing lists that other related Twitter accounts have created. Don’t worry about only following people that are potential customers—what you want to do is focusing on building a relevant Twitter community. This includes social media partners, related businesses, evangelists, influencers, and of course, your target audience. Even if many of these people may never buy your product or service, they can still help you amplify your message and achieve your marketing goals.

Add These Twitter Users to Lists

Once you start finding new people to follow, I recommend adding those accounts to a segmented list within your social media management tool. For instance, if you identify 20 key influencers or 20 potential customers and add them to a list, you can easily focus on consistently engaging with just those users over a certain period of time.

More Activity Leads to More Followers

As a general rule, the more you Tweet, the more followers you’ll have, the more you engage with the people you follow, the more likely they will be to follow you back. Effective Twitter marketing takes time—you can’t automate it. And you won’t achieve your goals by simply Tweeting once a day or once a week (in fact, inactivity can do more damage than good). But with a solid plan and effort, Twitter may prove to be on of your most effective marketing channels.

Join me Thursday, January 31 at 2pm ET for a virtual workshop on effective Twitter marketing. I will share proven ways to improve the ROI of your Twitter marketing, and will conduct live reviews of submitted campaigns as well. If Twitter is part of your 2013 digital marketing plan, you can’t afford to miss this event. Register now.

This article originally appeared on OMI Blog and has been republished with permission.

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Small business internet marketers were happy to say goodbye to 2012. Those infamous Google Updates, Panda and Penguin, had every small business SEO ducking for cover. Thousands of small businesses may never recover fully from the drop in rankings. Ever the resilient profession, ambitious SEO’s started “link removal” practices they desperately hoped would fix the SEO mistakes that led to their downfall. In a hurry to undo the damage, some businesses actually paid to remove links that only months before they had paid to create! Adding salt to the wounds, small businesses also had to figure out what to do with social media newcomers, the monster that is Google+ and that other one…Pinterest, while still fumbling around with Facebook and Twitter.

If 2012 made you want to throw in the towel, the following stats will make you want to think again:

• In 2011, Google had more than 1.7 trillion searches. Source: Google Official History
• 92% of internet users use search engines (59% on a daily basis), 71% purchase products online and over 80% research products/services online before buying. Source: ComScore qSearch

So let’s leave 2012 behind and turn our attention to these tips that will help you filter out the hype and focus on sustainable SEO tactics.

Get Better SEO Metrics

Before I spend even one minute or a single dollar on a new project, I define goals and a measure of success. I recommend you do the same using these metrics:

1. Non-branded organic visits – SEO is not about creating brand awareness, it’s about capturing existing demand for your products/services via industry keyword searches, NOT your brand keywords. Brand keywords refer to words that people use who already know your business (i.e., Albert Moving). Non-brand keywords are the keywords that refer to your category (i.e., moving companies). When evaluating your SEO campaign, you want to exclude those people who use your brand name when they search.

First, set up your Google Analytics account. Once the data starts coming in, keep an eye on your organic non-paid search traffic. Log in to analytics and on the left side of the screen, select Traffic Sources ? Sources? Search ? Organic.

Then, select Advanced Segments ? Non Paid Search Traffic.

Now, look at the non-branded keywords and you’ll see the number of visits per keyword. Use the Analytics calendar feature to compare the numbers to the previous month. Track the changes each month and you’ll know how well your SEO campaign is working.

2. Comparative Ranking Scores – At my company, we developed our own webgrader with which you can compare your organic traffic to your competitor. Every business and industry will have different scores. The important thing to track is where you stand in relation to your competitors. Once you have that critical piece of information, you’ll know where you fall short on your link building efforts for your targeted keywords. We produced this tutorial to explain exactly how the webgrader works.

3. Phone Call Tracking – You don’t have an accurate measure of your SEO and online marketing campaign performance if you’re not tracking the source of your phone calls. Once you start tracking calls, you may find that some or all of your campaigns are more successful than you think! There are many call tracking tools available through companies such as calltrackingmetrics.com and www.callrail.com.

Your business name, address and phone number (or NAP) is the core information that makes up your basic online listing identity. Properly installed, most call tracking numbers do not interfere with the search engines’ indexing of your actual phone number. Most phone tracking scripts use a cookie and a javascript rewrite to determine the source of the call and show the website visitor the phone number that’s been assigned to the particular campaign. For example:

• 888-555-5000 is your actual phone number.
• Your website visitor clicks a link from a Google Adwords ad.
• The tracking script replaces (or overwrites) your actual phone number with a trackable replacement number like 888-555-9999. Upon landing on your website, the visitor that originated from that Adwords ad sees the tracking number, 888-555-9999. When the visitor calls the tracking number, the call tracking system reroutes the call to ring to your actual number.

Execute Your Content Marketing

Content marketing emphasizes the creation of useful and compelling content that educates and informs. It doesn’t sell or push; it draws people in. To guide your writing, think about the problems people encounter that are related to your industry. For example, a furniture store owner could write about how to repair or conceal furniture scratches. A dry cleaner could write about how to care for delicate fabrics so they last longer. Face it, no one wants to link to content that is all about you and your business. Content marketing is a solid, long-term SEO strategy because it makes information shareable and link-worthy.

Content marketing is part strategy and part tactic. A well-executed content marketing program includes:

• Good researchers and writers to develop content that is useful to your target audience, but also related to your targeted keywords.
• Content that is published to other websites through guest blogging, social media, videos/webinars, infographics and so on.
• Content on your website that people will want to share on social networks.

Quality over Quantity

2012 taught us that more links aren’t always better. Most small business websites that I look at have a few hundred links. Yet many SEO agencies are still selling programs that promise thousands of links in a month. In 2013, ask some questions about where those links will be placed. Go for quality over quantity. Keep these SEO tips in mind:

• Focus on root domain links – don’t get caught up with lots of links on the same domain. Get one link and move on. When you find a site that gives you an unlimited number of links by merely commenting on their content, you may feel like you’re making progress, but you’re not. Don’t waste your time.
• Look at domain authority of linking domains – that content you’ve written is a precious commodity. Don’t waste it! Make sure you look at the domain authority of the website before placing your content. Check the open site explorer tool on SEOmoz to get the data. The higher the domain authority, the better.
• Look at the website – Is it littered with ads and poor quality or even tawdry content? If you don’t feel comfortable associating your business with the content on a website, don’t.

Bonus: Social Signals and Rich Snippets

2012 showed us that Google will continue to give us carrots like social signals and rich snippets in the search results for Authorship, Ratings, and Videos. Right now, you should:

• Set up Google+ authorship so you can link content you publish on your website to your Google+ profile. This can help you stand out in the search results.
• Use schema.org to markup any local, video, product and address information. When you use schema.org, search engines get structured information that helps improve search result quality.
• Increase social media activity. At the very least, keep your Google+, Facebook and Twitter pages updated and active. Reportedly, Google+ pages appear in search results for 30% of brand term searches for brands with G+ pages, up from 5% in February 2012.

Always take advantage of these valuable (and free) SEO incentives and keep on the lookout for more in 2013.

Follow these tips to get your 2013 SEO off to the right start.

Being a highly spiritual person, I now strongly believe in the art of love, forgiveness and gratitude. The hardest things to say to anyone are, “I love you,” “I’m sorry” and “I forgive you.” These statements are all things that involve the vibration of divine energy and compassion; it is a relief to one’s soul to purely love, forgive and to be forgiven. It all gives the most amazing feeling, pure and natural love. It is not hard to reach out to one another to embrace all, for their talents and shortcomings, because together we can form oneness and are closer to Enlightenment. Begin to open your arms and receive the help of one another. When we share this sense of compassion, instead of judging, life simply, will be a miraculous place.