Writing Search Engine Optimized content can be a lonely chore. Sometimes, you need to reach out and get inspired by the company of other creative folk.

As a Phoenix online marketing consultant, I need to:

Learn: I find creative ideas and solutions all the time by talking to other online folk.
Get Inspired: When I get a little depleted with coming up with new and clever digital marketing ideas…sometimes just bouncing off ideas with other people can get my creative juices going.
Compare Notes and Troubleshoot: Got a troublesome client? A unique niche that needs special handling? I talk to others who have handled the same issue. At the very least, I get some commiseration out it, if not some useful advice.
Finding new clients: Archer SEM gets many of its Arizona online marketing clients through referrals and word-of-mouth …so reaching out to other Phoenix web development firms is important.

I like mixing with other online folk, whether they are:

• developers
• writers
• video artists
• graphic artists
• social media experts

Sure… I do this through my business Facebook account and Twitter, as well as reading discussion boards on Linked In. As a Phoenix social media consultant, I’m all about that.

But… sometimes that FacetoFace contact is what matters.
In Phoenix, October and November are very busy for a lot of local Arizona Search Engine marketing firms.  Consider these events that are coming up:

Phoenix Design Week (Oct 21-25th)
A gathering of local and national graphic leaders. I’m not a designer…but I love to read, see and get inspired by design ideas.
That is soon followed by all the events of Phoenix Geek Week:
Ignite Phoenix 5
Tuesday Nov 3 –(6:00pm – 9:00pm): Tickets are sold out, but check out the streaming media presentations!
Tedx Phoenix
Friday Nov 6 – (6:00pm – 9:00pm) : Get inspired about how technology is being used to make our world a better place.

Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference
Thursday Nov 12 –( 7:30am – 7:00pm): If you have a great business idea but have no idea about how to launch your business — get some great ideas here.
WordCamp Phoenix
Friday Nov 13 – (8:00am – 5:00pm) :  This is the first time that local Phoenix digital marketers, writers and bloggers can get together to learn the latest from WordPress experts.

PodCampAz
Sat-Sun Nov 14 – 15: A great place to learn from other Phoenix social media experts about podcasting, video and other digital marketing and communication methods.

·  Broad match: Allows your ad to show on similar phrases and relevant variations. So for example, if you set a keyword for “Phoenix online marketing business,” with broad match then searches for “online marketing in Phoenix AZ” would show your ad.

·  Phrase match: Allows your ad to show for searches that match the phrase in that particular word order. So for example, if you set the keyword for “Phoenix online marketing firm” with phrase match, then searches for “online marketing PPC firms in Phoenix AZ” would NOT show your ad. But, searches like “Phoenix online marketing firm PPC” WOULD show your ad.
·  Exact match: Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase exclusively. So for example, if you set the keyword for “Phoenix online marketing service” with exact match, then searches for ONLY “Phoenix online marketing service” would get the ad.

So what are the best options? One strategy is to initially put all your keywords into Exact match…then move the best performing ones to Phrase Match. Use different ad groups to keep a close eye on the performance of the Exact and Phrase matching keywords.  This strategy works if you have a tiny budget and have a low conversion rate. Eventually, the best performers are then moved to Broad match and placed in another ad group.

Another strategy that I have used for large volume campaigns with lots of keywords is to first place them in Broad…and then screen out the keywords that are screaming for Phrase match. Use your analytics tools and Google’s search query reports to then find out what the variations are to the broad keywords…and add those as phrase matches. Don’t forget to use LOTs of negative keyword matches with Broad after consulting these reports.

So for example, if you want to attract searchers looking for “video SEO firm”:
•    Run “video SEO firm” as a broad match
•    Run reports and discover that a lot of the queries are more specific for the term “YouTube video SEO services”
•    Add that keyword phrase as a phrase match (at a much cheaper CPC then “video SEO firm”)
•    Cut your bids for the broad phrase “video SEO firm”

With this PPC strategy, you will cover your bases – both getting the broader searches at a cheaper CPC and finding the targeted searchers you want.

Some companies entire yearly profits are made during the day after thanksgiving. For brick and mortar stores it is typically the day after thanksgiving which is a Friday. For digitally driven ecommerce sites like amazon they would typically see a spike during the 4 following “cyber mondays” after black Friday. Interesting studies show a trend in online shopping behavior where individuals buy the products through the internet monday when they come into work. This has created the interesting phenomenon for retailers entering the digital space.

Reports from last years cyber monday state impressive sales numbers for only 1 month of sales. The New York times reported last year an industry wide 15% increase in sales for the month of November. ComScore reported that e-commerce spending on Cyber Monday was $846 million in 2008 which was 15% up from last years sales on the same day. Buyer intent during this time frame has been built into shoppers, baby  boomers, gen X and Y alike” through years of major outlet shopping centers offering “deals”. It is built into our culture, it has been done year over year and become habitual.

So what are you planning for your potential best day or days of sales for the entire year?

Comparison Shopping Marketing = Cyber Monday Success!

For any e-commerce business caring about their sales and exposure will be interested in “Comparison Shopping”. If you have done “PPC” before then you are no stranger to comparison shopping marketing. This model simply places your products/services into popular price bidding/advertising systems like the ones listed below:

• Google Product Search
• Price Grabber
• Shopping.com
• Shopzilla
• Yahoo! Shopping
• MySimon
• NexTag
• Smarter
• PriceLeap
• PriceSaving
• Become.com
• StreetPrices.com
• SortPrice
• Pronto.com
• Amazon Product Ads
• Bing Cashback
• buySAFE Bonded Shopping Network™

The sites above houses your target audience. They are browsing for products based on a cost-leadership business model. Customers browse and find products they wish to purchase typically trying to find the best deal. For you the advertisers, we would upload your product feed and then manage these campaigns across multiple comparison shopping sites. You only pay for the click throughs to  your product and you get instant visibility in front of the people who are buying what you are selling. It is an E-Commerce marketing tactic that is NOT regular PPC through Google Adwords. We are introducing you to a completely new group of buyers.

Image above is a break down of each product and how it performed over just 1 comparison shopping engine.

This tactic performs well however if you cannot enter cost leadership business tactics in your selling then a second recommendation would be to enter into a point of differentiation model. This can also perform well within these types of comparison shopping engines.

If you are looking to expand your Cyber Monday profits, what kind of tactics would others recommend for E-Commerce specific businesses?

So I got to thinking, wouldnt it be great to share with everyone what a well thought out consulting outline would look like along with some things NOT to do along with some things that I think work well during your consulting job.

Below is an example agenda for a consulting meeting at a corporate office that I have been using for a while now. Near the end of this document we start getting into social media marketing consulting however this section can be used for any specific information needed to be conveyed through a consulting job. For this example - the client was going to be producing content for their network of websites and wanted consulting on how to SEO this content, how to get traffic to it and how to have this content work for them once they set it up. The below form can be modified based on what exactly your client needs are but thought it would be a great outline.

Phoenix Arizona SEO consultants Agenda Form

1. Creating SEO friendly web pages

a. Old and outdated techniques

1. Keyword Stuffing
2. Hidden Text
   
3. Other spam techniques

“”"”"Keep urls listed here that you want review”"”"”

B.Ethical and Effective On page SEO techniques

1. Meta tags
2. Htags
3. Content
4. Keyword Density
5. Keyword Proximity
6. Creating a theme
7. Other on page factors

“”"”"Keep urls listed here that you want review”"”"”

C. Writing for the user.. effects on social media.. talk about this more in planning content for the future

“”"”"Keep urls listed here that you want review”"”"”

2. Adding on page dynamic features for your content

a. Adding bookmarking widgets
b. Email to a friend
c. Add sections for client and user interaction
d.Dynamic functionality

1. Print article
2. View related articles
3. Social widgets
4. Send to a friend
5. Google Connect

“”"”"Keep urls listed here that you want review”"”"”

3. Planning content for the future

Utilize hot topics on trends and plan resource guides

a.Tools for finding hot topics and how to leverage them

http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

http://www.google.com/trends

http://technorati.com/

http://www.reddit.com/

http://www.digg.com/

Google Suggest

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2156041

b. Pre-empting holidays and special events

c. Writing and ranking content before its popular

“”"”"Keep urls listed here that you want review”"”"”
4. Creating valuable resource for brand building and link bait

a. How to become an authority in your industry

1. Creating tools
2. Creating content: worlds largest online resource for food nutrition,  weekly original recipes
3. Creating White Papers: research study on the importance of family dinners
4. Creating videos

b. Becoming a re-enforcing authority

c. Linkbait

d. How to blog and what to look for as a hard & soft benchmark

e. Types of links and how to get them

1. One Way links
2. 3 way links
3. 4 way links
4. reciprocal links
5. link exchanges
6. forum links
7. article links
8. blog comments
9. Blog posts
10. directory links
11. add site links
12. press releases
13. Networked links

f. Link QualityEvaluation

g. Spam links

“”"”"Keep urls listed here that you want review”"”"”

5. Internal link architecture

a. What is it

b. NO following

c. Building backlinks to internal pages

d. Scupling rankings and page rank through internal link architecture

“”"”"Keep urls listed here that you want review”"”"”
6. Power of blogging

a. Building a blog community

b. Leveraging social media with blogging

c. Building a rss subscribers

d. Creating a presence online

e. Building social presences while taking into consider Google’s influence rank

open discussion
“”"”"Keep urls listed here that you want review”"”"”

1. Overview on digg.com
a. How to build a power account
b. How to use tools on tool
c. How to work with a social media team like wingman media

2. Writing content for digg

open discussion
“”"”"Keep urls listed here that you want review”"”"”

3. Overview on stumbleupon
a. How to build a power account

b. How to use tools

c. How to work with a social media team like ArcherSEM.com

d. Writing content for stumble upon

open discussion

“”"”"Keep urls listed here that you want review”"”"”

The very foundation of the internet is communication and to give everyone an equal voice and at least the opportunity of equality. This algo shift in many peoples opinion has now made way for a 180 degree turn around from the google we all know and love. I guess you could call it the Commie update put forth by our good friend.

Why the new Google Update?

Speculation regarding an economy boost for these major corporations is one of the first places we might go when we start addressing this. Other ideas could be relevancy targeting for these major brands who have had trouble with their on and off page seo. Obviously we know that Google wants to provide us with more relevant results within their engines and its my feeling that they are attempting to do that through this update.  We also know that “google hand jobs” have been done in the past.  A formal statement from google has not been released as of this post date.

Some theories on how this algo shift is effecting our SEO.

First of all. I am so sick of theories. our SEO industry has to be the 1 and only industry that is full of opinions and theories. Its like A$$wholes… Everyone has them and it creates so much uncertainty, drama, fights, and frustrations which is why I am taking the Bill slawski’s approach and reading patent’s, researching theseis and engineering articles on new algorithms being implemented as to “get the information straigt from the horses mouth”.

One of the most obvious shifts that is apparent with this algorithm update is goin to be an emphasis in search saturation and off page branding - Possibly measured through google’s PPC engine adwords with specific connections to their audio and tv ads.

BTW, Hugo guzman, please never call this the arron walls update again - not funny - guest poster!

Proof of this shift via rankpulse.com:

Numbers that are bold are new rankings that have been catapulted into the first top 10 rankings by google virtually overnight!

What does this mean for us mom and pop sites?

To me it means that overal search saturation, utlizing more branding techniques and combing some off line marketing “trackable” by google will help with your overall SEO. Since our firm deals a lot with video marketing, tv ads, video syndication and radio and podcasting ads, we have seen the cost of these mediums drop dramatically to the point where large corporations are shaking in their boots. Our radio and TV ads go from anywhere between $45 and $300 per ad spot. This is a massive change from the half million dollar budgets typically spent on tv advertising. For mom and pop stores, a local seo package combined with local tv and radio ads is the way of the future. It is good to see google putting in some of these offline marketing techniques and helping facilitate a much needed blend between seo’s, internet marketers and your traditional offline marketing companies.

Yes, I think it is and that is exactly why I think this new tag is so great. Now think of content navigation or pages that have the same paragraph on several pages but unique content down below, now there is a way to tell google the parent page where this content originated. Simply insert this in your pages head section:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish” />

According to web pro world the 3 major search engines have combined forces to recognize this tag to help reduce duplicate content errors on the web.

Although I think its a great idea I still think that utilizing links to the original document will be more powerful as with many link building tactics you do have control over this. However pages that you do have the ability to edit and ad this tag I would absolutly recommend it and it will now be something we do for all of our clients to ensure they are getting the most up to date and cutting edge marketing services performed on their site.

What are your thoughts on this new tag? Is it a bit like the sitemaps protocol that was issued for all robots.txt files? How many people besides us are really using that on a daily basis? Will seo’s pick this up and use it? Do you feel this new code will benefit your clients?

Every client purchasing Search Engine Optimization services should know these laws, so should every SEO provider. To date there is lack of a consorted effort to standardize the service offerings of this industry. This post is to draw the line in the sand and say this is what we stand for!

To be informed on HOW your SEO services that you are paying for work and what you can expect makes YOU a better purchaser. By defining and archiving the Law’s of SEO, will help educate consumers and bring a positive, ethical and trustworthiness back into our industry that is long overdue.

If you are a customer/client who is receiving SEO services then pay attention to this post as it will help keep your marketing firm accountable for the money you are paying them.

Remember, service without results is not marketing that is on target and in today’s economy it is important to have your marketing efforts working hard for you which is our motto!

The Laws of SEO

Law 1. All improvement’s and recommendations to a site are done with the absolute intention of adding value to a clients site.

Law 2. Taking into consideration the varying degrees of SEO. Black hat SEO, Grey hat SEO and White hat SEO. These terms come from the rapidly shifting algorithms over time where techniques used in the early years of SEO are now considered more “spam” like to these engines. Only the use of up to date techniques should be used on a clients site unless there are specific reasons to venture into these other techniques AND your client has full understanding of what they are getting into.

Law 3. Keyword research shall be done with a combination of keyword tools as most keyword research tools are inaccurate. There must be a way to quantify the difficulty of a keyword based on information provided to us by the search engines and there should be set expectations and strategy plans based on this initial keyword research. This is the most crucial point of an SEO campaign and most typically overlooked.

Law 4. Regardless of budgets, all website owners should be allowed the opportunity to work with an SEO firm and get measureable results.

Law 5. On page optimization should always contain these elements unless a specific reason for their exclusion exists. See the elements of on page optimization below:

- Href’s are optmized with Title Tags

- Meta Title optimized with up to 9-11 words depending on lenght and size of each word.

- Meta Description should not exceed 250 charactors, should include the keywords in your title but also include more      supporting keywords.

- Meta Keywords should contain 4-6 keyword phrases that are found within your title and description. This will help insure a properly themed meta section.

- There should be no less then 1 htag per page. The use of h1, h2 and h3 where possible including keywords found within your meta data would be preferable here and shall be executed by your seo team.

- Alt tags shall be optimized according to your pages keyword theme.

- Valueless source code like java script and nonscript lanaguages should be called within external documents or shall be placed near the end of the bottom of the source page.

- The use of table tags is considered web 1.0 code design. It is recommended that all clients upgrade to web 2.0 coding which is xhtml and css based.

- Siloing is the process of filing and archiving like items within your site and then buiding a link bridge back to the catagories main page and drill down links as you get deeper into a given catagory.This process should be done for clients long tail keywords to rank utilizing internal deep pages.

- All internal outgoing links shall be nofollowed except for 2-3 which can be used to pass page rank and link juice which will also boost your internal pages up within the SERP’s.

- All external outgoing links shall be nofollowed except for 2-3 which can be used to pass page rank and link juice which will also boost your internal pages up within the SERP’s.

- Sitemap shall be created in 3 channels. 1 xml, 1 html and 1 txt version and then submitted into yahoo, msn and Google. You shall also verify your sitemaps within Google webmaster central.

- You shall build a robots.txt file that calls your xml sitemap, blocks bad bots, includes god bots and is also a syndication version.

- Your content shall always be seeded with keywords that surround your pages theme. The best way to build content that will truly empower a clients site is to build it with interesting and educational information - adding value to the web.

- Your site should be make into an xml feed as to syndicate your content throughout the web.

Law 6. Linkbuilding is one of the most important aspects of SEO and should be recognized as a driving force behind ranking a keyword. By far, a diversified inbound link reciepe will look more natural to the search engines and should consist of inbound links with varying page rank, link relevancy and varying degrees of overall inbound link quality. Below is a list of link building techniques to stay away from.

- MFA sites - Made for Adsense sites are typically spammy sites plastered with ads from top to bottom. Typical marketing techniques deployed on these sites are less trustworthy and are not a network you would want to be associated with.

- FFA sites - Free For All sites are pages where your link is one of 50-100 links in a long list. You can identify these typically by the lack of relevancy on a page and  how many links are listed on one single page.

Links you do want are as follows:

- Editorial and contextual links within a body of content

- Article links

- Directory links

- Social web 2.0 links

- Blog reviews

- Comment links

- One Way links

- 4 way links

- Press release links

- Syndication links

- Video site links

- Social network links

- Parasitic hosted links

- forum links

Law 7. The Google dance is recognized as the process of robots crawling links, discovering, indexing and rating inbound links to then take back to google in order to stand in line to be processed. This process is widely accepted as the google dance and is an ongoing process making initial results take up to 3-6 month to see accurate sustainable ranking adjustments.

Law 8. A well executive and setup web analytics system is needed for all clients. In order to track progression, benchmark campaigns and visibly see what is happening to a clients site is an absolute necessisity and shall always be integrated and constantly evaluated over the course of a campaign. After all you cannot know where to go unless you know where you currently are.

Law 9. The use of Competitor profiling  on a large scale is not always necessary however the use of competitor profiling when evaluating current serps shall always be taken into consideration taking very special notice of the following areas:

- How many inbound liks a competitors page has

- The value and mix of these links

- The SEO structure of your competitors pages in regards to SEO. I.e. nofollow, meta data, source code ect.

- Current trafic projects

- Age of site/page

- Site root evaluation

- Page Rank

There are more but these are the absolute minimum that should be checked.

Law 10. All SEO firms shall provide cutting edge marketing to all of their clients. Our industry is a rapidly growing one where algorithm shifts happen frequently and the importance of staying up with the industry is crucial to providing the best results to your clients.

These are the current 10 commandments / Laws of SEO that shall be followed and expected of all SEO firms. At ArcherSEM.com we stand behind these laws and in return know that our process is second to known. Our team of leading SEO engineers have devised proprietary methodology in order to stay true to these laws and encourage others to take up the 10 commandments of SEO.

What does that mean to you? Have you ever thought about persuing this marketing channel? Have you already gone through this once before a half a year ago or more? Are you doing this today? Maybe you are if you are a larger corporation, one that has a sufficient financial bumper during these hard times. Or mabye you are a small or medium sized business owner who has been hurt by this economic recession (shooosh don’t say that word). No matter what size buiness you own, taking advantage of the ability to target your customers on a much more impactful and personal level has never been so easily attained by the small and medium sized business world.

PPC & Social Network Advertising revolution

Myspace and facebook have created a portal to make (YOU) their social network advertisers ability to advertise to their members.. Finally! Where myspace use to have minimums on their orders and charged $3-$5 per impression PER IMAGE spot… that day is no more. We are talking about a PPC revolution within the social network advertising spaces. This type of media buying has now become standardized and works well with many types of businesses and is a great addition to a Local Search Package through archersem.com (call for details).

We have been taking advantage of these new low CPC fees and targeted our advertisers with much more accuracy and precision. Sign up for one of our social network advertising packages today.

We also create 3 stunning visual banners at 3 different sizes for your social network advertising that can also be used for your Adwords campaigns as well.

There are several courses that seem to be very interesting. See the agenda here.

We would love to see you there so please keep an eye out for us at the confrence and also keep an eye out for our confrence coverage on the ArcherSEM BLOG!