Level343 SEO Articles Archive

Meet Dana Lookadoo

Level343 Team — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:00:48 +0000

I met Dana a few years ago during PubCon Las Vegas. Who would have thought there would be so much dynamite in such a small package? Needless to say, she knew ~~almost~~ everyone at this conference. Keeping up with her was a task all in by itself. Aside from being a popular networking diva, running her own agency, speaking at various conferences, I found something genuinely honest and sweet about her. She’s thoughtful, super smart, ethical, professional and most of all cares about sharing the right information with people.

1. What’s your personal elevator pitch? What should we know about who you are and what you do?

Elevator state was the first thing I learned in a computer architecture class in 1995. Oh, wait, you weren’t asking about elevators and computer science… However, understanding an elevator’s on-or-off states as binary, 1 or 0, did set the course for who I am today.

“What do you do?”

When asked that question recently while bicycling, I replied, “I do search marketing.” “What’s that?” was the response. I expanded my answer to “I help companies be found on Google.” “Oh, OK…” One only has a few brief moments to carry on a conversation while bike riding in a group, so that’s where I formed my brief elevator pitch.

Answers vary depending on the audience. Most likely, the Level 343 audience would understand elevator state, binary, and a longer explanation. For them, I would explain that online marketing is my second career after 17 years in the corporate world and that I’m a technologist turned marketer. I help companies understand their needs for online visibility and how to engage with their audiences. The following Venn diagram explains who I am professionally:

My sweet spot is the intersection of those 3 circles!

2. Which area of SEO or online marketing in general do you focus on primarily, and which is the most exciting or most boring to you? Or is there an area that you’d love to dive into more?

Running a boutique SEO agency means we do many things. Maybe it’s easier to explain what we don’t do. We do not go out and build links, and then present clients with a monthly report. We have three types of clients.

SEO and Online Visibility Audits
Ongoing engagements in which we train and equip the team in their SEO and social media efforts.
Consulting gigs in which we help troubleshoot, strategize, and train them with knowledge and skills necessary to go it alone.

I especially like training and equipping clients with information to help them understand and strategize. The smarter they are, the more we can do. The best moments are when clients have that “Ah ha!” moment and get it. Recently, one client was so excited she exclaimed, “Holy Bananas!” THAT excitement pushes my button!

What I’m missing is time to write more, time to develop more content and work on personal marketing passions. I’d like to spend more time in two other areas – conversion optimization and analytics. Give me a little right brain and left brain each day, and I’m happy!

3. We’d love to know more about the personal you (without being too nosy). What area of the world do you live in, or want to live in? What are some of your quirks? What fuels your fire?

Many probably know I’m passionate about cycling, primarily road biking these days. I live in Folsom, California not far from the gorgeous American River and the infamous Folsom Prison that Johnny Cash put on the map. I’ve raced, won a few medals, and now I’m simply trying to find the work-life balance to do some serious training while also working crazy hours. Folsom has 30 miles of paved bike paths. I’ll be taking up swimming this next month, but don’t expect me in any triathlons. There’s absolutely nowhere else I’d rather live!

View from Historic Folsom Bike Trail where Dana Lookadoo rides often

To enjoy more of the outdoors, I’m having to let some of my idiosyncrasies not get the best of me. I prefer the labels in the refrigerator to be facing forward, and lately that OCD issue is not predominant. My spices must be lined up in alphabetic order. I don’t like a lot of “stuff” out and prefer counter & desktops with wide open spaces. (I’ve yet to get my husband to be equally excited about this level or organization.) At work, I keep my file folders named with all lower-case letters and words separated by hyphens.

I have learned that I don’t fit the standard “geek” profile.

I don’t drink coffee or do caffeine.
I try to get 8 hours of sleep a night – by necessity after years of burning the candle at both ends.
I’m not glued to email or my iPhone.
I don’t multi-task well and thrive on batch processing. This means I actually shut down email and social media for hours at a time.
I do focus. When I’m working on a project for a client, I’m in that mode completely for that period of time. It results in a better product and feeling of accomplishment!
I have a voracious appetite for information, self-improvement, and the world of online marketing. I listen to a lot of podcasts and ebooks. I don’t watch many movies or know much about the latest music craze.
My energies are focused on organic gardening and SEO and how to optimize maximum ROI for both!

I’d love to connect with Level 343 readers, so I encourage them to shout out a Yo! or follow me on Twitter at @lookadoo or Google+, and/or @YoYoSEO

Tips for Achieving your Business Goals

Doc Sheldon — Wed, 15 May 2013 07:00:07 +0000

There are a lot of self-improvement tips that focus on helping you achieve your goals. Some of them make some pretty good points, and some of them are just a lot of fluff. I thought I’d share some tips that I know can help in many different areas, because I’ve used them myself.

Have you ever hopped in the car and taken off, intent on getting someplace, without having any idea where you wanted to go? Not likely, and if you did, it probably didn’t work out too well. Achieving a goal is the same way… if you don’t know your destination, you’re not likely to reach it. So the first step is to:

Set your Goal

You need to set a clear goal for yourself – one that is clear and realistic. “Increase brand awareness” isn’t really a goal – it’s too vague. And “control the majority of our market” isn’t realistic for most companies. Set a goal that you can realistically achieve in a reasonable amount of time. Once you think you have a realistic goal, you may want to:

Break it up into Manageable Pieces

Maybe your grand goal is to increase your market share from 10% to 25%. That could take a while, and keeping focused and motivated over the long haul isn’t easy. Break it up into smaller chunks that can show your progress and you may find your progress easier to maintain.

Focusing on gaining .5% or 1.0% per quarter, for instance, will give you mini-goals that seem much more achievable than a 15% increase over 2 or 3 years. As you start implementing the steps to realize your goal, be sure to:

Track EVERYTHING

On the way to any goal, there will be inevitable bumps and potholes, which will sometimes mean we have to make adjustments in order to maintain progress. The sooner we see those problems arise and make the necessary adjustments, the less time, energy and money we’ll waste.

By keeping comprehensive records of any actions taken that might affect the business, you’ll have solid data that can often tell you exactly why you went off course and what adjustments you need to make. For those records to be able to provide real value, of course, you need to:

Measure your Actions and Results

You can’t just record the fact that you launched a new promotional ad or improved production by some percentage… you have to quantify every action and measure and record every result, regardless of how insignificant you might think it is. The reality is that very little goes on in a business that’s totally insignificant.

What was the reach of that new ad? What response rate did you see from it? What step in your production process improved and how? Find exactly what you did, measure it and record it. That information may be invaluable down the road.

Never Pull Up

if you find yourself lagging behind, it shouldn’t be a surprise to hear me say you need to push a little harder. But what if you find yourself surpassing your short-term goals? Maybe you targeted 1% gain in market share for the quarter, but you suddenly realize that you’re going to hit closer to 1.75% gain? Why would you not push on, making every effort to hit 2%?

If instead, you find yourself pulling up, because you already passed the mark you set for the quarter, then you’re admitting that you’re one of those “good enough” people. If you aren’t willing to shoot for excellence when the opportunity is handed to you on a platter, maybe being in business for yourself isn’t the best path for you.

Pulling it All Together

If you set realistic, measurable goals, in manageable chunks, measure and record your actions and results and never stop trying to do better, you’ll find your goals are easier to reach. And with every goal you achieve, the next one will seem less daunting.

Approaching the management of your business from a scientific angle (without losing sight of the human side) can give you an edge on the competition and help you respond faster to the everyday bumps. Remember Pearson’s Law:

That which is measured, will improve.

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Site Redesign: Avoid These Mistakes

Jennifer Horowitz — Mon, 13 May 2013 07:00:08 +0000

Avoid Site Redesign Mistakes

Undertaking a redesign is usually a pretty big project. In addition to the actual design work, there are so many little details related to SEO and marketing that you need to consider.

To help you out, here are some of the common problems you want to avoid:

Don’t forget to add your Analytics code to the new site. You don’t want to lose crucial data by forgetting to add the code. From time to time, Google updates the format of the code/scripting, so ensure you have the most recent code. Use the same account you’ve always used, you don’t want to lose the history.

Most designers use some method of stopping the engines from spidering the work in progress. That is a great idea but it can kill your traffic if you forget to remove it when the site goes live. Check pages for tags blocking the engines and check your robots.txt file.

Keep your server clean

Don’t forget to clean the old files off your server when the new site is live. You don’t want to lose them, so ensure you back it up somewhere. If you are going to leave it on the server, put it all in a sub-directory and ensure the engines do not spider that directory. You don’t want to create duplicate content.

Don’t forget to closely track your Webmaster Tools and Analytics after a redesign. You want to look for 404 errors and you want to keep an eye on your conversion rate. If it plummets after a redesign, you want to catch it quickly and work to restore it. If there is a conversion problem after a redesign, you should look at the pages that aren’t performing as well (Google Analytics should give you that data) and compare the old page to the new. Try to find elements on the old page that you think could have been responsible for the higher rate and implement those elements into the new site. New isn’t always better and sometimes a marriage between new and old is what works best.

Don’t forget to thoroughly test before you go live. Test all links, forms, buttons and scripts. A new look isn’t worth much if your visitors can’t do the things they need to do on your site.

Ensure you create a comprehensive mapping of old pages to new pages if the URLs are changing. You need to set up 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones so you don’t lose traffic.

Before you get started, spend time planning the new site. It’s going to be time well spent, I promise. Why go through all the effort and cost of a redesign if you aren’t going to ensure everything is set up properly? Plan your site structure to ensure you have all the pages you need and to ensure it’s all organized logically and cleanly. This will be beneficial for the engines and for your site visitors. You don’t want anything to be more than 1-2 clicks from the homepage.

Remember, appearance matters but so does content. Most people only think about the visuals when they redesign, but it’s actually a great time to update and refresh your content too.

If your developer was working with any scripting in the design and development process, ensure test pages aren’t left on the server. They create “gaps” in your security that could cause your site to be compromised.

If you are using WordPress, ensure all plugins are current and create a plan to keep them current. Old plugins are a major security risk.

If during the redesign you are cleaning up scripts and moving them to external files, be sure to test all functionality related to the scripting.

Often WordPress has a few different themes sitting in there, even though you are only using one a t time. Unused themes and plugins (inactive plugins) do create serious problems with security and could cause a breach. It’s so easy to add themes and plugins when you need them, so get in the habit of keeping your WP installation clean and add only items you plan to use.

Don’t forget about Terms of Service and privacy pages. They may not be sexy, but they are needed and it’s nice if they match the vibe of the site, so ensure they get redesigned too (or added if you never had them).

Don’t forget social buttons. If your old site didn’t have social buttons implemented yet, you want to ensure you have them added to the new site.

Don’t add content just for the sake of adding content but if you notice in your planning stages that you are not covering information that you should be, it’s a great time to introduce new pages.

If possible, go with search engine friendly file names on the new site.

Don’t forget to include any credibility factors (logos of associations, details on awards and accolades etc).

Avoid “Coming Soon” pages. If the content isn’t ready to go, don’t link to the page yet.

Custom 404 pages are a must!

Create a strong, custom 404 page (that is optimized).

If you address and phone number aren’t prominent (in text format, not images), get that changed. It’s a simple fundamental that should be in place.

Consider mobile when you redesign your site. Even if you don’t have responsive design or a fully mobile version of your site, you can still design it to be more “mobile friendly”.

And lastly, ensure your new site is properly optimized and you have an XML sitemap in place.

If you haven’t done a redesign in a while, it may be time. Don’t stress, just keep a check list of all the items and nothing will slip through the cracks.

Meet Jennifer Evans Cairo

Level343 Team — Fri, 10 May 2013 07:00:52 +0000

Twitter | Google + | Website

Yes, It’s Friday and time for another Top SEO woman nominee. I have to admit I’m thrilled so many women have decided to join our efforts in giving them a platform to share more about themselves. I’ve never met Jennifer but as many on the online SEO world her name is familiar. What’s exciting about sharing these great women with you is how they differ in their approach towards any marketing campaign. After all SEO is not the only tool used for a successful campaign strategy. And now without further ado, let’s meet Jennifer.

1. What’s your personal elevator pitch? What should we know about who you are and what you do?

My elevator pitch: I help companies build and maintain sustainable social media strategies.

Put into slightly longer, “let’s have lunch terms” that means we enjoy working to small to mid size companies who see social media not as something they “have to do” but as something that has the power to help them reach their goals.

When my phone rings and the first thing someone says is “we need to update our Facebook page” I’m happy to talk to them, but I know we’ll probably need to shift their focus. On the other hand, when my phone rings and someone says “we’re launching a new X and we’d like to put together an outreach plan for influencers in the Y community” I know I’ve got a great potential client fit on the line.

2. Which area of SEO or online marketing in general do you focus on primarily?

We are primarily a social media and web analytics firm that also branches out into other areas on an as-needed basis. I find that almost anytime we get involved in web analytics, we’re also going to end up doing a little usability and conversion optimization consulting. At the same time, anytime we start to deal with social media we’re also probably going to be focusing on reputation management, brand messaging and even outright business consulting.

It’s part of why we love working with smaller companies. I’ve tried my hand at the Fortune 500 crowd and the sheer number of levels you have to go through in order to get anything approved makes it darn near impossible to address the issues that often lead to problems in social media. Working with smaller companies where the CEO or business owner is our primary contact gives us the freedom to REALLY dig deep and work through the changes that are needed to take a company to the next level.

Within the microcosm of Social Media, my favorite areas right now are blogging and Pinterest.

I feel like blogging is only just now starting to make its comeback in terms of people truely valuing the marketing potential of blogs. They really do tie social media efforts together in a way that no other channel can, not to mention the boost they give in terms of links and search engine traffic.

As for Pinterest, it’s simply been exciting to see a new type of social media channel come into its own. There are only so many “it’s the next Facebook” and “it’s the next Twitter” channels you can look at before your eyes roll back in your head. It’s the new channels that do something unique (Instagram, Pinterest, etc) that catch my eye and make me willing to give it a fair shake.

I’d been waiting a few years to write my first book, mostly because I didn’t want to say what everyone else had already said. The arrival of Pinterest on the scene gave me the perfect chance to dive deep into the marketing potential of something new and interesting. As such, Pinterest Marketing: An Hour a Day was born.

3. Which is the most exciting or most boring to you?

Changing people’s lives by changing the way they do business. That’s what I revel in. My husband and I run SugarSpun Marketing together and being part of this industry has given us a type of freedom and flexibility that few people get to experience in their work life. If we can help other business owners experience that by increasing profit levels or introducing a more effective marketing channel, I count it as a major win.

It’s the other key reason I adore working with smaller companies. My grandfather was a small business owner and I remember walking to his insurance office after school and stopping in to give him a hug and to get a packet of chicklets from the glass jar on his desk. My grandmother worked in his office as well and though they worked hard, I always remember them having time for us.

I’ve spent almost the entire 15 years I’ve been in this industry working from my home. I’ve trained Fortune 100 execs on webinars from my couch in my pajamas while my toddlers played on the floor in front of me. I’ve been able to be here to put my children on the bus and get them off. And during my years as a single mom, I never had to put them in day care.

This industry, this way of doing business, it offers people an escape from the day to day grind of a desk job at a massive corporation. I adore being able to connect with the people who live that dream. I adore being able to help them make their business even stronger so they can hire other people and expand their businesses in a completely different way than old school companies did.

Being part of this new wild frontier of entrepreneurs and game changers…I LOVE that!

4. Is there an area that you’d love to dive into more?

That’s an excellent question…and I’m not sure if I have an answer to it. Mostly because when things pop up that I want to dive into more, I usually dive into them more. :)

I suppose one area that has intrigued me over the past few years is this idea of remarketing and how social media campaigns and activities can be used as part of that process. While we do manage Facebook campaigns and such for clients, we’re primarily an organic marketing company. I would love to expand that some where down the road to offer more paid search and paid display services to our clients so we could more fully explore some of the newer targeting options beginning to pop up.

5. We’d love to know more about the personal you (without being too nosy). What area of the world do you live in, or want to live in?

Oh, go ahead and be nosy. We live in a social media world, right? :)

My husband and I, plus our three kids, live on a 22 acre farm that has been in his family for a century. It’s been a dormant farm for nearly a decade, but we’re slowly working on plans to bring it back into working order as a hobby farm. We’ve been putting in a small orchard and introduced a flock of chickens this year for egg production. Next year we’re aiming to add apiaries (bees) and to do some renovations on the barns so we can prepare to add some livestock in the years following. It’s our own little slice of heaven, complete with fields, pastures, woods, a stream…even a small waterfall and swimming hole.

I’m a passionate baker…I have two kitchens and they both get used on a regular basis. I make the best cinnamon rolls in the world, (no really, ask around in the industry…I do) and in the past year, I’ve started experimenting with ice cream. Unfortunately you have to balance these things out, so I also do Yoga three times a week and am attempting to join the world of adventure racers this summer. I’m not Tough Mudder material yet, but I’m aiming to pull off a Hero Rush 5 mile obstacle course in July.

6. What are some of your quirks; what fuels your fire?

I love a good challenge. Telling me I can’t do something is one of the fastest ways to get me to do it. Life is an adventure to me, so whether it’s learning new skills and exploring new channels in social media, or figuring out how to build a homestead and care for chickens, bees, pigs and cows…I embrace the chance to try new things.

I think part of the reason I love social media so much is because it’s a landscape in continual flux. Even though we’ve reached a point where we have some solid players we know will be around for the long term (i.e. Facebook, blogging, YouTube…) there are always changes happening WITHIN those channels. This world is anything BUT stagnant, which means there’s always something new to spark that challenge and that passion to keep moving forward.

You can also connect with Jennifer through her Twitter account @JenniferCairo or via her Google + and last but not least, you can contact her directly on her Sugar Spun Marketing website.

New Kid On The Block?

Jennifer Horowitz — Wed, 08 May 2013 07:00:08 +0000

Is Samuru really going to challenge Google? Time will tell! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves; first allow me to introduce Samuru.com

It delivers pretty relevant results, I did some comparisons and the results were pretty different than Google’s, so I did discover some new sites. I didn’t do any in-depth comparison yet but the new sites I discovered via Samuru do seem to be high quality so I think I’m preliminarily pleased with the results. I’m a creature of habit, so I like the Google layout that I’m used to but that’s just me.

Samuru is based on a different technology, called ‘Liquid Helium’ – in the words of the founding company:

“It converts written content into mathematical values and algorithms for predictable analysis, extraction, and manipulation.

Liquid Helium factors information about sentence and paragraph structure, word usage, parts of speech, grammar, writing style, punctuation, and inherent bias through a vast collection of proprietary rules, filters, and custom language libraries. [...]

The ability to extract sentiment, bias, reading level, technical level, formality, urgency, and whether or not content is editorial in nature are just a few of the language scores that can be returned.”

Samuru is very much a work in progress according to the founder of Samuru: “When you are building a technology, you have to isolate and test. We use indicators that are harder to game than inbound links like traffic. But it is a balancing act. We have just shy of 100 score factors we can tweak, and getting them right takes a bit of time.”

In another post on Hacker News, Brandon Wirtz (creator and former SEO) explained:

“Samuru doesn’t use link authority, it analyzes pages and matches what you queried to the types of pages and picks the best matches.

Let me give you an example. You search for “How to Make cupcakes” Google says give me the pages that have the most inbound linkes (over simplification) that contain all those words. The winner is Brandon’s Cupcakes (not really but play along for a minute) because it says, “We know how to make the best cupcakes, because we have been doing it for 25 years”

That is not a useful result. Samuru on the other hand says “how to make cupcakes is a search for instructions” and it looks for pages that match the words, and are written as instructions.

We weigh other factors, like is there an author associated with the article. Do they routinely write about the topic?

We do this for reviews, products and other things as well.

To be a full replacement for Google we need Driving directions, and image search and a lot of things. But in order to do all the other things we are doing we needed a search engine. (related content, analysis, speed testing, building a corpus of words)

Responses get better if you search something someone else has searched or do a second search 30 seconds later. This is because we haven’t deep indexed the entire Internet yet, and so we don’t have all the deep data.”

How will this engine play out over time? We’ll have to see. In the meantime, are you going to try to optimize for it? It should be pretty easy, since they are looking for high quality useful content that establishes the theme of the site, you just need to ensure you have existing high quality content and continue to add more. We’ll know more over time, of course.

Matt Cutts of Google congratulated Wirtz and said he was curious to hear how Brandon feels running an engine after being an SEO for so long. Brandon replied by saying he likes it and said his goal was to create an engine that he, himself could not game.

Stay tuned for more information as Samuru progresses!