Website Optimization - SEO in 2017

When it comes to Optimizing one's website, there is optimized design, optimized content and post-production promotion.

Promotion, or the act of marketing your website, will be discussed in this subsequent post - How to Promote Your Website in 2017

In this post, we will focus on the two slightly conflictory goals in website design and optimized website content creation.

Simply, our website needs to please both human visitors and search engines, and we have two 'target audiences' for our marketing efforts. Striking the right balance with the focus of your onsite content is not easy.

As we look forward to 2017, the trend is clearly that these two needs will eventually become one. The search engines are getting better at understanding your content, and are increasingly giving higher ranking for websites that provide the best user experience.  

It is still measured in terms a robot would understand, like page depth, time on site, load time, bounce rate, etc. But those factors are being more heavily weighed by Google moving forward.

Lets break this down a bit..

The strategies you use to please a search engine are often compatible with strategies to please humans - great UX (user experience), great SEO. But this is only half the story to ranking well. 

A good way to address this challenge is to identify where the conflicts are, where the strategies do not align. 

Go about pleasing the human visitor with design and content. Then, move your attention to solving each of these conflicts you have identified. 

For example, It is always a good idea to network with your potential clients, so social media links should be prominently placed at the top of the website. Search engines happen to love social indicators, so we are all good, get it done.

On the other hand, people tend to hate language that is even remotely stuffed with repetitive keywords, so getting the right terms into the front-end content of your site is not easy. 

Optimizing the front-end verbiage with keywords for search engines while keeping the connection to the audience, maintaining the chosen 'tone' of your writing, is not easy. 

So, identify this specific challenge, and approach one page at a time with a compromise. 

In the back-end of the site, we have more flexibility to directly please the search engines, as much of the back-end metadata is invisible to the human visitor. However, it is crucial for the search engines to understand what your site is about in order to reward you with higher position in search results. 

The back-end data that is visible to the user, the url or schema markup for example, needs to be handled like front-end content.

Here is a short list of some of the most important SERP ranking factors for web design in 2017.

General Search Engine Optimization:

• Have a fast, dedicated server
• Fast load times, under three seconds for all pages
• Low bounce rate, with a goal of under 10%
• Page depth of three pages or more
• Time on site over five minutes per visit
• No Flash, frames, too much java, or other designs incompatible with search engine behavior.
• Have verified sitemaps for both pages and images
• Have google analytics installed and register with WMT (web master tools)
• Have a verified robot.txt file
• Have no broken links or redirection issues
• Have links to social media, owned properties (ie off site blog) and content distribution network
• Have mostly original content, no plagiarism 
• Don't have too much duplicate content
• Don't have toxic links to your site
• Don't over do your keyword optimization.
• Include enough front end text to please the search engines.
• Include exact google business profile info on the front-end, as well as in the back-end metadata
• Be optimized for any screen size, mobile, tablet, large desktops, etc. 
• On mobile, have simple navigation and fast load times under two seconds
• Have correctly formatted Schema markup (twitter cards, structured data, knowledge graphs, etc.)
• Register your URL five years into the future

Front-end keyword optimization for search engines, in order of impact on search result position (Depending on the complexity of your site, you will probably want to optimize each page for only a small set of terms.):

Keywords should be included in..

• URL
• H1 to H3 headings
• First few words of the first sentence of the first paragraph
• Internal links with keyword rich hyperlinks in first paragraph
• Internal links with keyword rich hyperlinks in body of text
• First sentence of first paragraph
• First sentence of any paragraph
• Bolded text in first paragraph
• Repetition to as close as possible to 5% saturation for most important singular word
• Repetition of two-word keywords
• Inclusion of long tail keywords
• Bolded text throughout
• Image captions
• External links with keyword rich hyperlinks to topically accurate owned properties
• Embedded in Schema Markup 

Back-end keyword optimization for search engines: Keywords should be included in.. 

• Title tag
• Meta decryption
• Keywords as H1 - H3 headings
• Image metadata

There are seemingly endless ways to optimize your site, but at some point, you are chasing your long tail.. You should see a majority of your improvement with the adjustments above. You can, and should measure how well this all is working for you, and continually adjust to get the best impact for your optimizing efforts.

Next up, we will discuss how to go about promoting this beautiful site of yours, once you have it generally optimized.

Tony Sternad
HabaneroMarketing@gmail.com
510-545-2054

Content Marketing Tips for 2017 - SEO

Can we finally stick a fork in the term "Content is King"?

Well, not exactly. Content is still King, but there
are more granular expectations on what Google considers effective content in 2017. Content is the gasoline that drives the fancy automobile of a marketing program you have. No gas, the car sits in the garage.

And in 2017, our competition is becoming more sophisticated as well, so we must step up our game to rank.

Before we get into the specific types of content, and how to optimize them, lets look at marketing content in general and apply some basic principles.

Content should quickly communicate:

• specific value to the consumer (beautiful, interesting, emotive, fun)
• how you can create and or specifically satisfy an existing consumer need 
• your specific marketing goal: ie your competitive advantage, brand message, eliciting interaction, etc. 
• brand and contact information
• a concept or idea that creates interaction

 In general, there is Text, Image and Video.

Text: 

• Comments on forums or on other's content
• Microblogging (twitter, reddit, etc)
• Image and Video title and metadata
• Blogging
• Website text optimization front and back end
• Social media posts that index
• Article submission
• Reviews
• Ebook or Pdf downloads
• Newsletter and Email blasts

Text is very powerful. Although an image is worth a thousand words, you can draw someone into reading a 2000 word post, telling a complete story creating brand loyalty. You can also get very specific with your message to drive interaction, calls to action and the like. 

In the end, there is text optimized for humans to read, and text optimized for the google robots. It is really important to understand what audience you are writing for and when. 

Humans struggle with keyword optimized text, and it can affect the tone of your piece, and the emotive connection your reader might have to it. 

Google struggles to understand the content of images and video, so the success of all your content depends on the text used within the content, to describe or tag it. 

Keyword research is highly important, and here is a nice guide for you to get started with the process. 10 keys to keyword research

When creating copy, you should always think about the motivation to enact the action you desire, out of your piece of content. Bob Bly has the definitive book about writing copy for the internet, I highly recommend it. 

Choosing the right tone for your text can be very important. It is crucial you dont build walls between you and your audience by using too formal of a tone. 

Images: 

• Images on theWebsite
• Images on blogs
• Image posting on Image sites (instagram, imgur, flickr etc) 
• Image posting to social media
• Images in newsletter and email blasts   
• Infographics
• Profile and header images
• Image advertisements 
• Favicons

This is often done with a combination of choosing the right image, tagging it with your brand and contact information, and linking it to your owned content.

Different images have different uses, and each should be designed for the marketing channel where it will be used, and the consumer action you are trying to create.

For example, you can optimize certain images to show up in an image search, including a 'tease phrase' in bold letters, large enough to be read when the image is displayed in miniature along with a gallery of image search results. Other images may be viewed at full size, and a smaller brand message or downsized content information is appropriate.

Images of specific sizes and resolutions should be carefully chosen to match how the image will be used. This will not only ensure the right experience for the consumer, but will increase how often it is shared.

Video: 

• Website
• Blog
• Facebook
• Snapshat
• Youtube
• Vimeo
• Webinars
• Live Hangout discussions 
• Live demonstration
• Video interviews
• Video Advertisements
• GIF's marketed as text 

Whether you are selling B to B, or B to C, Video is highly valuable to most businesses these days. Most can benefit from a robust video marketing effort if they an afford it. However, each and every business should have at least one professionally developed five minute video about your business.

That said, production value is not nearly as important as the content of the video, the message you convey and how the video is optimized. Low production value video is commonly acceptable, for the most part.

However, you do want to shoot and upload your video in HD, optimize for format and length for the given channel, and optimize the associated text (url, title, description, keyword tags, CC upload, etc.)

For the most part, we have left optimization and marketing amplification out of the discussion, but we will cover this in future posts.

In general, this process of content marketing should consider the entire lifespan of the given piece of content in both design and dissemination, in order to take full advantage of the opportunity to market this piece of content.

We will do a future post about 'How to amplify your content' and cover some rather sophisticated methods of promoting your content to increase it's effectiveness.

Having fun yet?

Tony Sternad
HabaneroMarketing@gmail.com
(510) 545-2054

Social Media Marketing Tips for 2017

With the season wrapping up, it is time to start thinking about the lessons of the last year and how we can adjust and grow our marketing strategy for 2017.

Staying on top of the rapid changes in Website optimization, Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing and off-line integration can be the competitive advantage you are looking for.

Let us take break it down over the next few posts here, starting with the changes in

• Social Media Marketing
• Structured Data
• Mobile Content Consumption

With respect to Social Media Marketing, two major developments have emerged recently; mobile phone usage, and a growth in the number of marketing channels specific to demographics.

Mobile continues to be huge, and there is still high growth in the use of mobile devices for research, comparison and shopping. Certainly, social media has a big play on mobile, and large changes are in the works.

There is the growth on the consumer side - unlimited data plans, bigger phones, cheaper tablets, more comprehensive cell phone networks, intuitive search, device trust and familiarity.

There is growth on the producer side - mobile optimized websites, intuitive search and structured data search results, in particular.
We are seeing rapid adoption of an array of social media applications, with early adoption by younger demographics. We are also seeing the socialization of what have been content distribution channels, like youtube and pinterest, for example.

With the near exponential growth in the number of social media channels that are actually being used by our potential clients, moving foward, I suggest these three strategies:

1) have the biggest play on the social channel(s) that best match your target demographics, and the channel(s) that are most likely to drive either brand awareness or direct sales. I would also have a play on every social channel you see becoming popular, in case one grows unexpectedly - you want to stake out your claim early in the game.

2) Prepare marketing properties such as website, blogs, pieces of content, and social media posts so they are easily shared cross-platform - easily and effectively 'postable' to any number of social outlets.

3) Drive the creation of third-party content: reviews, press, social mentions and links that index (can be found on the internet through a search engine of any kind)

We are now seeing the emergence of engagement the main ranking factor for the value of social media content, and with the social engagement on what have traditionally been content sharing services, has opened the door to having a conversation with your clients on many different platforms across the web.

It is very important to create and drive engagement, and an effective content marketing strategy should have a clear process of creation, dissemination and promotion in the framework of creating interaction.

Because engagement is so important to SERP (search engine results page) position, social media is now a place you have to attend to on a daily basis, for customer service, sales, business development, growth of brand awareness, as well as growth of you social networks themselves.

You can and should set up a system of notification when important actions happen on your social media channels in order to respond and engage in a timely fashion. But there is nothing like participating in the community of a specific platform to drive engagement and sales. Its a matter of being proactive, or reactionary.. it depends on what you can afford, and what lends the best ROI.

There is also high growth in the delivery of information directly from Google, without navigating to a website, piece of content or social media site. Socially Optimizing snipits and structured data; Optimizing both social and business listings (ie knowledge graph) to reach a searcher directly with your social links. This will become more important as time goes on.

Finally, the consumption and use of content is changing, and adjustments should be made to the Content creation, delivery, and promotional activities through your social channels to match these changes in consumer behavior.

Easily shareable content is more important than ever, with the largest change being how quickly people share information that they do not actually consume themselves. A long blog post, for example, may never be read but is simply shared because of a good image or title, creating brand awareness and/or direct conversion (creating sales directly.)

Understanding the psychology of sharing is important. In general, people share for the following reasons:

• To gain admiration from their peers
• To support a cause they care about
• To inform others about something they think they might need or want
• To feel engaged in the world 

More important than ever, it is important to create content that is accurately shareable, quickly communicates the value of your brand, provides contact information and satisfies one of the above needs.

This is a nice segue to the discussion of the changes in Content Marketing for 2017, the next post in this series.

Hope that helps, and hope we all have a prosperous 2017.

Tony Sternad
HabaneroMarketing@gmail.com
510-545-2054

Marketing Program Development for outstanding ROI

With all the opportunity to market ourselves these days, the sheer volume of choices to promote one's business can quickly become overwhelming.

When defining a marketing program, you are essentially trying to find the intersection of three systems: the action of providing your product or service, the action of marketing those products or services, and the action your potential clients take in satisfying the needs your products and services fulfil.

The intersection of these systems. is when a potential customer contacts you, or you contact a qualified potential customer. 

The development process goes as follows:

• Define your capabilities to produce what is determined by the demand of the marketplace
• Define your potential customers and what needs you can satisfy with what you can produce
• Define how can we reach these potential customers and how can they find us. 

Designing a marketing system that tightly fits this small window of unification, the more efficient your marketing spend will be.

With data analysis and marketing program adjustment, one can get more and more efficient as time goes on, as long as you stays on top of the changes in the marketplace related to competition, potential changes in customer behavior or demand. Yes, it is not easy, but definitely a lot easier than it used to be.

Let's dive into this a bit and blow it up so we can take a look at the components.

The first question is "What can we produce":

With respect to capabilities and capacities, there is the scope of possible products and services you can provide for sale given your financial resources to scale, the ability to hire and retain talent, and your ability to develop new products or services.

So, the process goes something like this..



We make buckets, we need to determine our ability to produce what is needed in the marketplace, and our ability to make a superior bucket vs our competition. We need to determine how many buckets we can produce at a price that will sell.  We need to determine our capacity to develop new products the marketplace might demand that can be produced with the current in-house equipment and expertise.

The second questions is, "What do people need that we can produce"

Determine the demand for the kind of buckets you produce at the given price. Determine what other demand for products you can produce with the equipment, resources and experience you currently have. Determine the target demographics for what you can produce and determine their shopping/purchasing behavior.

 The third question is "How can I inform potential clients that we have what they want at the right price, and how can I make myself available to be found by potential clients who desire what I sell.

The question is specifically, how can my marketing efforts efficiently match potential client's behavior, locating and informing them of the match, as well as being able to be found by a potential client's method of shopping.

This is also a question of capacity, regarding your ability to market your business, and your ability to accurately determine your target demographic's behavior.

So, in the bucket maker example: The demographic's demand and behavior being determined as best as possible, marketing efforts are designed to match potential clients behavior, meeting them with the right message at the right time. Within our capability, new products or services are developed and marketed to the potential clients that demand them.

Paying attention to marketing efficiencies from the start of your marketing program development, you can have a much better chance of as large a return on your marketing spend possible.

Tony Sternad
HabaneroMarketing@gmail.com
510-545-2054

How to Keyword Optimize Blog Posts

Keyword Optimizing Your Blog:

Now that we have completed the task of Keyword List Development, we can now turn to the task of actually ranking for these terms.

The Keyword list is a list of targets, now its a matter of us hitting them with the sling of digital marketing, and climbing the SERP ranking with diligent focus on the promotion of these terms.

These Keywords should be divided into different lists, depending on how and when they will be used. For instance, if you have a seasonal product, and a time of year to market this product, your priority keyword list will include the right terms at the right month.

This is so you can have time to create the content, or buzz around these terms at the right time to sell your product. This is important because keyword marketing is temporal, and ephemeral - a week long marketing push behind a term may get you two or three months of play at best, depending on the competitive landscape. So, you need to hit the right terms at the right time, and if you want to always rank for a term, you will have to continually go after it if your industry demands it.



There are several ways to promote your Keyword List, through your website, your social media work, and your content marketing program (text, image, video), in general.

In this post, lets cover one of the elements of Text-based Content Marketing.

Content Marketing with Text can include Mico-blogging (twitter, tumblr, reddit,) Blogging, Article submission / Guest blogging, Email promotions (with newletters, ebooks, pdf's, interactive content that links to the web), text on the front and back end of a website.

You can also include the text descriptions for content such as social media posts, all public profile information, image and video content metadata as a part of your text marketing strategy.



Ok, How To Use Keywords to Optimize a Blog Post !! :

There are several important areas to include your keywords in a blog post. The following is a list of what I believe to be the most impactful listed first, with respect to impact on SERP position.

1) In the URL
2) In the Title of the post
3) In the H1 tag
4) In the back-end metadata
5) As a Hyperlink within the first sentence of the first paragraph.
6) As a Hyperlink within any part of the post
7) As the first word, or phrase in the first paragraph
8) As the first word, or first sentence of subsequent paragraphs
9) In the metadata of embedded images or video
10) Repeated naturally throughout the post to a saturation of more than 5% if possible.
11) As bolded text within the post, with more power in the first paragraph.

Blog post should always be written for people, because the longer people read, the better play you will get for your keywords. Also, social indicators are big, so motivating your readers to share these posts, specifically the keyword rich links to these posts, is a key to multiplying your keyword marketing impact.

Hope that helps!

Tony@Habaneromarketing.com

510-545-2054

10 Keys to Keyword List Development - Search Engine Optimization

There are certain SEO struggles most all businesses go through today, with varying degrees of success. Keyword Optimization has become an essential part of business, and it remains a difficult challenge for both owners, and the website designer they employ.

Like a right of passage, the spoils go to those who can pass, but the development of a keyword list is just the start of a process of continually testing and refining the list to yield the most sales.

The good news is, the proper use of keyword optimization is highly effective in generating business, and a solid strategy is well worth developing.



Every business interested in ranking on a Google search engine results page (SERP) tries to determine exactly which search terms are most important to their business.

Do my customers search for "car wash near me", or do they simply search for "auto detailing"?

To answer this critical question, the world of internet marketing has brought us a series of sophisticated ways to determine this list. We have various tools available that will help us find out what exact terms create the most traffic, and convert into the most business for a given company.

We can also see what terms work on a specific device, more easily optimizing keyword efforts for both desktop and mobile searches.

For example, "car wash near me", more mobile focus than "auto detailing" for instance, so you can optimize your locally optimized pages for these terms that are searched for through google maps.

So, lets get into the step by step procedure to your personal keyword mapping success story..

1) Brainstorm

There is a reason it took humanity up to 1997 to develop Deep Blue who beat chess champion Kasparov. so use your intellect, your intuition and knowledge about the industry to develop what you think is an exhaustive list of important keywords, both short and long-tail.

Although this sound simple, most stumble here and answer the wrong question.. the right question is not 'what we sell and how do we sell it', but rather 'how do people search the internet to find what we can offer"

So, develop a 'comprehensive' list of keywords you think people use to find your company in a google search. Include single words, two, three, up to six-word phrases, calling each a "keyword"

You will be surprised at how poorly you will be able to guess, and how inaccurate this will be when compared to the actual terms people use, but this is necessary work, as the goal is to find the few words that may be highly valuable, but missed by the automated process to follow.

2) Suggested and Related Keywords

In general, determine keywords related to the terms on your list with various tools available online.
I enter terms into a google search and look for the auto-suggested search terms that are most common, use ubersuggest Semrush's related keywords tool to add terms to the list.

There are many keyword tools available, and many being developed as we speak. Some free tools are all that most businesses need to do some solid research. Check out tools like https://serps.com/tools/keyword-research/



3) Keyword Traffic Volume - External Sources

There are various applications and services online to generate search volume for a given keyword, the favored one has probably changed since this post was written. I use a combination of Adwords Keyword Planner and SemRush. Use this data as one of the priority ranking factors.



4) Keyword Prioritization

This has several components to it, but in general, there are a few main factors: estimated search volume, estimated ability to rank for said term and cost of doing so, the importance of a given term for our company for competitive reasons, the seasonality of a term, the value of a term due to it's ability to drive an action, like a phone call, website purchase, or click on a contact us page for example.

This is not a static list, but a list that continually adjusts to what drives business, how and when, as well as prioritizing terms that may be a part of some future marketing effort, or future goal of the company.

5) Long-tail Keyword Development:

Google Auto Suggest can be helpful here, but there are several other long-tail generating tools available online as well (keywordtool.io for example). I then use Google Analytics, SemRush and a few other Analytics tools to determine what actual terms people use to find your site, will yield some nice results to add to your list.



6) Track Actual Searches:

Set up several tracking programs to log which keywords people use to find your site. Be sure to measure the direct traffic to all of your important landing pages. I use Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and SemRush for this, but there are several alternatives available. Add Social analytics tools as well, to determine search patterns there, and dont forget searches through your own website search function. Take these terms and run them back through the process starting at number one.. brainstorm on related terms to one you might discover here and so on.

Webmaster Tools

7) Determine Your Content Distribution System

Determine what Marketing channels you will be using to disseminate these keywords (website, blog, social media, etc.,) there may be some insights into the demographics of certain channels, and some keyword opportunities in the vernacular of a group of people, for instance. Break your keyword prioritization list up for the given channels where they will be posted. Again, run these back through the process.

8) Track What Terms Convert into Sales:

Setting up conversion tracking with Google Analytics, recording what terms are generating the most clicks on the "contact us" page, or "call now" button on a mobile device, for instance, bumping up these terms on the keyword priority list.

9) Website Keyword Mapping

Assigning to each important page on our website, specific keywords to be used to optimize each page. These terms will be used in the front and back end of website to optimize the specific page for those specific terms.

Starting with optimizing the most important pages for the most important terms, and working your way down to less important pages.

This can also be done with any digital asset with a url, like a blog post out on some off-site service like blogger for example, and map out specific posts to rank for specific terms related to just that post. As in all links, the closer the resulting content matches the search term, the better you will rank for that term.

10) Measure, Test and Refine:

Measure the success you are having in optimizing your pages for given terms, see how your online visibility, your social mentions or activity, your SERP position changes, what terms are converting more than others. And all this is vs the competition, how well they are ranking, their position in the marketplace vs you, what terms they are going after, etc.

Continually adjust the master keyword list, the priority keyword list, and the keyword map to achieve super stardom.

Keyword list dev is like making arrows.. you have also make a bow, learn how to shoot, and wait for just the right time to bag game.

In this analogy, the bow is the content distribution system, learning how to shoot is learning how to use keywords to improve SERP position, and waiting for the right time: hitting the content push at the right time of day, day of week, and/or month of the year.

Subsequent posts will cover some of the steps to actually rank in a SERP for this beautiful list you have created.

Tony@habaneromarketing.com

510-545-2054

"dont panic, there is always a way out, keep working and stay positive" - Jack Ma

SEO lessons learned - field tested Digital Marketing

Its very nice to be back writing to you after a long stint as the Director of Marketing for a local manufacturing firm.

I thought it would be fun to share some SEO - Content Marketing - Social Media lessons learned from the experience. We can use this as a case study on how to develop a Marketing Plan for your business.

What Digital Marketing Priorities should my business have in 2017? .. you may ask..

In the next series of post on The Marketing Lunchbox, I will cover an effective, step by step strategy to develop a winning Marketing Program for your business.

I had the great pleasure of designing and implementing a Marketing Program for a company of 25 employees over the last year. It is a high ticket manufacturing facility with no outside sales, dependent on Branding and Digital Marketing to drive sales.

Although the company had a solid position, both in SERP Ranking and Market Share for two of it's main verticals, it was encountering significant competitive pressure related to aggressive pricing pressure and innovative competitor positioning that was siphoning revenue.

It was also lagging far behind a significant player in a new verticle related to the quickly growing agricultural industry. That alone, presented a unique challenge, in that I couldn't use the 'bully factor' of brand inertia, market position and economies of scale to compete.


This presented a unique opportunity to essentially create three different marketing plans to go after the three main verticals, implement and run them over a long enough period to test the results of the plan.

The results? Overwhelmingly positive on all three fronts, achieving a 66% percent growth in non-bounced, geo-significant traffic to the website, and an increase in qualified leads by 75% over the duration of the project.

How did we do it? = the subject of subsequent posts

In general, Website SEO, Content Marketing (text, image, video), and Social Media Marketing.

In the next chapter, we will cover how to efficiently design a Marketing Game Plan. We will cover the general decisions one makes to configure a Marketing Strategy to fit your company goals and resources; often to include a Digital Marketing Mix and a custom plan of implementation.

Tony@HabaneroMarketing.com

510-545-2054