When Google comes to your site to analyze it, it categorizes the words you use and the people who link to you. Your goal is to make sure you know what Google is digesting and that what Google finds is relevant to your customers.

While the tactics of SEO are one plank in a comprehensive marketing plan, the basic strategy of relevancy applies to all aspects of your business. Incorporating this “SEO Thinking” into your business enhances all forms of marketing, customer service, and product development.

Here are five SEO tips to become more visible to your customers with SEO thinking.

SEO Tip #1: Be Relevant

Google’s DNA is relevancy. You know your customers, so give them what they want. The more relevant you are to customers, the more likely you’ll appear high in search results where people can see you.

Relevancy applies not only to website copy, but what you say and do in Social Media and who links to you. It also is the yardstick to measure any other SEO tactics. If JC Penny had used that yardstick, they may not have gotten recently “Google Slapped” for using “Blackhat SEO” Techniques.

SEO Tip #2: Choose Your Words Carefully and Use Them

Choose the words or phrases that describe your business based upon the amount of people who search for them.

Is singular better than plural? Is one word better to describe your product than another? How do you know?

Use the Google Keyword Tool to discover the words and phrases that are both relevant to your business and that drive traffic. (Google “google keyword tool” to find it.) The tool provides the number of searches per month for each keyword you ask it to list.

Start with five words or phrases and use them:
- in your page titles
- on your page
- in links to other pages on your site
- in your URL’s

Use these same words and phrases in all your social media. Be sure to use them in your social media profiles. Many times, a flickr photo or youtube video may appear in the search results before your own website does. Take advantage of that.

Write relevant “description text” to entice people to click on your link.

Repeat.

SEO Tip #3: Make SEO Part of Your Day to Day Marketing Thinking

This idea of using the Google Keyword tool to figure out the better way to say something is easy, quick, and valuable. If you’re writing website copy, a blog post, or captions for a flickr photos, use the Google Keyword tool to find keywords that drive the traffic.

Most writers typically ask themselves, “Is there a better way to say this?” Add to that, “Is there a better way to say this that will drive more traffic?” This simple question, coupled with searching out the answer in the Google Keyword Tool, can mean the difference between being visible or invisible to people looking for you.

This is the real art of seo. Use it to your advantage.

SEO Tip #4: If You’re a New Solution/Category/Idea, Tie Into An Existing Idea

Search engine marketing works because people are searching for you. The marketing conundrum for innovative solutions is that people aren’t looking for you…yet…because they don’t know about you. By definition, innovations are ahead of the curve. What to do?

Tie into an existing trend in the industry. Be topical. People are looking for things that are mentioned in the news. If you’re topical, they’ll find you, too.

For example, if your company has developed Concentrated Solar for the residential market, few people will be looking for you–yet. Instead, write blog posts or marketing copy comparing you to photovoltaics in order to become visible to people looking for the better known technology. Some article titles could be:
- “Concentrated Solar: A Better Photovoltaic?”
- “Go Beyond Photovoltaics with Concentrated Solar.”
- Defense Against Blackouts: Concentrated Solar Provides More Power, Longer Than Photovoltaics.”

SEO Tip #5: Build Links Appropriately

Links to your web pages are the reputation currency of Google. Get other, relevant websites to link to you by:
- creating great content that other people need
- writing articles on well known article websites like Ezinearticles.com
- adding your company into online directories that are relevant to your business or category. You may want to consider paying for inclusion into the Yahoo!, Business.com, or All The Web directories.

Be skeptical of “link exchanges” or companies that will put your links on many different websites. You may sell Concentrated Solar, so a link on a real estate website in Prague may not be relevant. Too many of those links and Google may look at you askance.

How do you get the ball rolling on a new website? Getting one link to your website is all you’ll need for Google to find you. Some people have reported that tweeting your URL will bring Google to your website as well. Once Google discovers you, it will come back regularly as long as it thinks it will find new, relevant information.

So be relevant.

PS: Here’s what I did to drive a little more traffic to this website choosing the right keywords using the Google Keyword Tool
- the terms “seo tip” “seo tips” both have monthly search traffic of 60,500. When I discovered this, I changed the URL to include “seo tips” and added “seo tips to a paragraph. I then changed the simple numbering system to “SEO tip #n”.  I also created a graphic and named it “five-seo-tips.jpg” with alt text “Five SEO Tip for Innovative Startups”.
- “art of seo” drives more traffic than “the art and science of seo” (4,400 searches a month vs. <250), so I added the phrase, but probably not enough to make a real difference.

- I confirmed that “innovative startup” is really long tail and the difference between the singular and plural is negligible.

(Straight Shooter Labs is where I take an interesting web business–who is not a client–and put it through an SEO analysis, much like I do on a client engagement.  All the information I use for the SEO case study is public information.) You can read the other sections of this SEO analysis here:

Curlmart.com SEO Analysis Case Study – Part 1, Overview
Curlmart.com SEO Analysis Case Study – Part 2: Keyword Analysis

“Wen cleansing conditioner”

Now that you’ve gone through the overview and the keyword analysis, let’s take a look at the first page of results that are returned by Google when searching for “wen cleansing conditioner”.  This is our competitive set.  By analyzing what these websites are doing, I’ll be able to develop a strategy for Curlmart.com that will one up the competition and hopefully move them into the top 10 for this keyword.

I break my competitive analysis into three sections I call:

1. Ranking Factors – mainly on-page things that you and your competitors are doing.
2. Technical Factors- doing the right things that keep the search engines indexing your site.  Search engines are like toddlers; they have short attention spans.  So many web pages to index, so little time.  Don’t give them a reason to move on.
3. Linking Factors – how many internal and external links.  Who’s linking to you.

I’ll look at all 10 competitors, plus curlmart.com, in light of the above categories.

Not all the competitors will be doing all the right things.  This gives curlmart.com an opportunity to beat them if they do all the right things, or do many of those things better.

As you’ll see in the data, in general, curlmart.com is doing many of the right things, but they’re not doing all of them, and there are some they could be doing better.

Ranking Factors

Here’s a table comparing the ranking factors of all the competitors, sorted in order as they were returned by Google on 5/18/10. Note that culrmart.com is NOT the 11th position; I just put it there so you and I can compare it to the competition.

All the competitors have unique titles and most have the keywords in the title.  Curlmart.com is doing many of the right things.  Due to what their competitors are doing with Ranking Factors, I’d recommend they get curlmart.com (and all their websites) in The Open Directory Project.  A link from there is valuable in Google’s eyes.  Half their competitors have it, half don’t.

While they have two places in the html code that use the “<h1>” tag, I’d suggest changing the second occurance to an “<h2>” tag the next time they go into the code.  Google uses <h1> tags as a strong hint to what the page is about and having just one is best.  However, this is not a hard and fast rule, as Google’s Matt Cutts explains. HTML 5 seems to be headed in the direction of using one <h2> tag per page, so I lean towards doing so, but don’t see an immediate need to get it done. That’s why I recommend they put it on their developer’s to do list so he or she can take care of it the next time they’re in the code. Designer/Blogger IHENI has a good discussion of the issue, if you want to dig in more.

Technical Factors

Technical factors are the things that make it easier for search engines to index a site. There are some things that curlmart.com can do better and by doing so, they’ll do better than some of their competitors. Let’s go through each of them after the table.

Type www.curlmart.com into your browser.  Now type curlmart.com.  See how culrmart.com automatically adds the “www” to itself so that it automatically goes to www.curlmart.com?  This is a good thing.  Because Google sees curlmart.com and www.curlmart.com as two different websites, the competitors that don’t do this automatic redirection are diluting their link love as people link to them with or without the “www”.  Unfortunately for curlmart.com, because they’re already doing it right, they can’t improve this factor.

How’s their HTML code?  It could be better. I’ve dinged curlmart.com because they have a lot of Javascript in the HTML that search engines could choke on.  I counted 780 lines of Javascript.  That’s 45% of the code!  I’d recommend putting that javascript in external files so the search engines don’t choke on it.

What about things like Flash or iFrames? I gave them a pass because other than the Javascript issue, the code is fairly digestable by search engines.  However, they are using an iFrame, as is their competitor, QVC.  Normally, I ding sites for using iFrames because the content inside iFrames are invisible to search engines and many of the designers that use iFrames do so without understanding the implications.  Not so with curlmart.com nor QVC.  So, it’s important to understand what QVC and curlmart.com are doing.

Both of them are using iFrames to display user ratings and reviews that come from another domain.  QVC uses Bazaarvoice.  Curlmart.com looks like what seems to be a home brew solution.  Both QVC and curlmart.com collect ratings and reviews on one website and then distribute them to their other websites via an iFrame, a common solution for distributing ratings and reviews.  While the SEO goodness doesn’t convey to the web pages that show the review through the iFrame (because content in iFrames is invisible to search engines), it does to the page the reviews are on.  I’d bet QVC and curlmart.com understand the issue, so there’s no need to ding them for using iFrames.

Only three of the competitors have a well thought out 404 page.  That’s the page that gets displayed if the user types a URL that the domain doesn’t understand.  Some don’t even have a custom 404 page of any type, relying on their ISP’s default 404 page.  Why is this important?  Because curlmart.com has an opening to beat their competition with internal links if they design their 404 page appropriately.  They could list out products by category and link to them. Currently, it’s a wasted opportunity that they can capitalize on.

Search engines use robots.txt and sitemap.xml to better index a site. While Curlmart.com has both, they’re not using them appropriately.  The first problem is that the robots.txt file does not reference the sitemap.xml file.  Search engines prefer to find the sitemap files via the robots.txt file, although there are other ways to find them.

But more importantly, the sitemap.xml file hasn’t been updated since 1/17/2007!  Now, curlmart.com may be being indexed just fine because Google has 864 of their pages in their database.  But there are many different, automated sitemap plugins and tools available that make creating automatically updated sitemaps a set and forget experience.  There’s no excuse in 2010 not to have up to date sitemap.xml files. At the very least, they should delete their old file so as not to have any possibility of confusing search engines.

Linking Factors

The most important thing curlmart.com can do is build links to their individual product pages.  Having other people link to them is the best, but internal links can help as well.  I won’t go into great detail into what the competitors are doing because it’ll take more time than I want to get into in this SEO case study, but let me point out that most of the links reported by Google for many of the competitors are actually internal links, meaning, fewer sites than appears at first glance are getting external links.

Let’s talk about increasing internal links, first.  Curlmart.com currently cross links to product pages via their “These products work great with…” section of the product detail page.  This is a good thing.  But being part of the Naturallycurly.com family, they’re missing another valuable opportunity to create internal link love to their SEO benefit.  Specifically, they should link to the product in product reviews when they appear on Naturallycurly.com, the domain upon which they’re created.  It’s not only a frustrating user experience not being able to simply click on a product to buy it when I’m reading a review that has convinced me to buy it, but it’s also a missed SEO opportunity.

To generate external links, curlmart.com faces the same issue that all retailers do:  too many products, too little time. They’re probably not going to do link building outreach for individual products unless they get coop dollars from the manufacturer.  So, they’re going to need to do something that scales.  One solution is an affiliate program like Amazon’s where bloggers display a list of their favorite products from curlmart.com on their own websites.  Then, all those bloggers link back to the individual product pages, generating great link love for those individual products.

I’ll leave this analysis on a final suggestion.  Curlmart.com can generate more internal links by putting their reviews on their own domain and organized them by product category, top rated, etc.  Then, the “review detail” pages can additionally have breadcrumbs, global product categories, and maybe even related products. Doing so creates massive interlinking.  By putting links to the product detail page on curlmart.com from the “review detail” pages on “reviews.naturallycurly.com”, the massive interlinking on reviews.naturallycurly.com will accrue to the product detail pages.  They can increase the number of user ratings and reviews by: 1) running a contest), and 2) asking people to rate the products they buy in followup emails after purchases (which is also great customer service and upsell opportunity.)

Conclusion

Naturally Curly has a large, active community.  They can take additional steps to leverage that community to generate more sales on their curlmart.com store site.

While generally doing a good job there are things they can be doing better.  Here’s a review:

EASY:

• Submit all websites to the Open Directory Project.
• Use one &lt;H1<&gt; tag
• Move Javascript into an external file
• Use robots.txt file appropriately
• Use sitemap.xml file appropriately
• Link to product detail pages from reviews

MORE WORK

• Create a separate reviews website, organized by category, etc. and uses breadcrumbs in order to generate massive interlinking.
• Develop an affiliate program that displays individual products.

Like how I think?  Hire me.  Let’s talk.

This is part two of the Straight Shooter Lab’s SEO series for curlmart.com.  You can read all the analysis here:

Curlmart.com SEO Analysis Case Study – Part 1: Overview
Curlmart.com SEO Analysis Case Study – Part 3, Competitive Analysis & Tactics

Now that we’ve chosen which product for which to optimize (Wen’s Almond Mint Cleansing Conditioner), let’s take a look at the keywords that people may be searching for when searching for this product or category.

I did some keyword exploration based upon the product name, it’s category, and the category the website fits in. I used Google’s keyword tool, which you can find by googling “google external keyword tool”. To get initial ideas, I pointed the tool to curlmart.com, then to Wen’s website, and then to a competitor or two to see what came up. Then, I used the keyword tool to explore concepts that may be related.  This was an iterative process of exploration and one that’s not only fun, but valuable to do with a client.  They know their business and with a good keyword planner’s guidance, can explore the space fairly deeply to find appropriate niches.

If you look at Google’s keyword tool as an interface into a huge database of data on what people are thinking (which it is), then it becomes very interesting very quickly to marketers, no matter their experience in working in search or online media.  You can also argue that the Google search database is also a behavioral database because it captures what people have done–typing in keywords–as well as what they are thinking.  Isn’t that what marketers have always wanted?

The Consideration Set

But on to keyword planning.  Having explored the space a bit, I came up with this list of keywords for my consideration set:

Curlmart.com is already doing a good job with “wen sweet almond mint cleansing conditioner”, “products for curly hair”, “curly hair products”, and “wen conditioner,” all being on the first page of Google’s search results page (SRP). Two phrases are the name of the product and the other two are the website’s category. None of the keywords are the product’s category, nor are they related to the problem the product was designed to solve. In part because of their strategy of using different ISP’s to host their websites (they live within different IP ranges), the Naturally Curly businesses holds three of the top five positions for “curly hair products” and two of the top four positions for “products for curly hair”.

Nice.

But they can do better.

Searches and Competition

In order to determine which of the remaining keywords would be the most lucrative to optimize, we need to know the number of searches and the competition as well. This is what the following table provides:

I’ve sorted the table by competition, that is, the number of pages that contain the term. The lower number of pages, the better chance you have of competing.

The number of searches are the actual number of times people searched on that term. The data’s from the Google keyword tool, which mainly reports last month’s searches. It sometimes reports trending data, but you can also get to that from Google Trends. For this analysis, looking at last month’s search volume is fine, however, there could be seasonal variations for certain products based upon summer beach weather, winter’s effect on curly hair, etc. I’d ask the client about this because they know their business, but for this SEO case study, I’m going to move on.

Narrowing Down the Choices

In the above table, I’ve hilighted my four choices in yellow. I’ve chosen keywords that don’t currently appear on the top 10 in Google.  Here’s my thinking behind each choice:

- wen cleansing conditioner: This keyword phrase has a respectable number of searches, but surprisingly little competition.  This should be relatively straightforward to optimize.  I little more content, a few more links.  With competition of 48,500, Naturally Curly could capitalize on this.

- wen conditioner: OK, so this keyword phrase currently appears in position #10, but there’s so little competition, it seems like it would be cost effective to get it to bump up to a higher position and increase sales.

- cleansing conditioner: While this keyword phrase appears on page 2 of the Google search results, there’s so little competition, it’d be worth it to put the effort in to bump it to page one.

- natural hair products: While the other keyword phrases are the name of the product itself, or the category, I think it’s interesting that Naturally Curly are waaaaaaay back in the search results for “natural hair products”.  A variation of the keyword is in the name of the site, so it makes that it would be more optimized around the “natural” theme.   There’s a nice volume of people looking and the competition is not that stiff.  It may make sense to either optimize the home page of curlmart.com for this keyword, or create a special a page featuring all the “natural” products on the site.  Doing so would snag searchers who feel natural hair products are important.

Picking The Keyword To Optimize

In working with a client, I would have a discussion with them about the consideration set and have us work together to choose the 3-5 keywords that make sense to optimize.  That’s as a start.  Then, when they see success, we do this again for the next product or category.  And so on and so on.

But for this SEO case study, I’m going to optimize on one keyword because the competitive SEO analysis section can be a lot of work.

I’ve chosen to optimize on “wen cleansing conditioner” because:

- it’s product specific and what we do here can be applied to any product.  Indeed, the retailer can go back to the manufacturer and ask for coop dollars for optimization by product if they want to increase sales for each of their products.  In this way, optimization can be an ongoing process that increases sales, with the marketing expense shared (if not totally funded) with the manufacturer.  What a great situation for the retailer!

- There’s a respectable number of searches, with very little competition.  This shouldn’t take too much to optimize, although the competitive analysis will tell us exactly what we’ll need to do.

What’s the ROI?

So, what’s the ROI on optimizing “wen cleansing conditioner?  If we assume there are the same number of searches each month (demand is even), then the 49,500 searches turns into 594,000 searches a year. Let’s make a few assumptions:

- Let’s assume 5% of the searchers click on the link for “wen cleansing conditioner”.  That seems to be the average click distribution of links on the first page for the Google search engine results.  Some researchers have found that the #1 position draws over half the links.  But if the point of going to Google is to go somewhere else, then, if the clicks were evenly distributed on the first page, then each click would get 10% of the searches.  But, we know some people click over to other search results pages and some people abandon their search.  We also know the clicks aren’t evenly distributed, so let’s bring the number down to 5% for the purpose of the SEO case study.

- Let’s then assume 1% of the people who click to curlmart.com actually convert to paid customers.

- Finally, let’s assume “standard markup.” That means, for each sale of this $28 product, the retailer gets $14 as gross revenue.

- I assume they currently have no sales from people searching on this keyword phrase because it appears on page 33 of the search engine results. This assumption may be good for this SEO analysis, but to be sure, I’d ask the client access to their Google Analytics data to review what keywords are currently driving traffic to their sites and see if “wen cleansing conditioner” shows up.

The numbers:

594,000:  total number of searchers looking for “wen cleansing conditioner” on Google.

29,700:  total traffic coming to curlmart.com looking for  ”wen cleansing conditioner” (5% of total searches)

297:  total number of unit sales

$4,158: total gross revenue as a result of optimizing this one keyword

(Straight Shooter Labs is where I take an interesting web business–who is not a client–and put it through an SEO analysis, much like I do on a client engagement.  All the information I use for the SEO case study is public information.) You can read the other sections of this SEO analysis here:

Curlmart.com SEO Analysis Case Study – Part 2: Keyword Analysis

Curlmart.com SEO Analysis Case Study – Part 3: Competitive Analysis & Tactics

Curly hair is huge.  Every woman knows this.  Guys, on the other hand, can be pretty clueless.  So let  me tell you, guys, if you want a great example of an online community that brings people together to talk about a common problem or passion, you can’t do much better than Naturallycurly.com and their store, curlmart.com.

Naturallycurly.com is all about curly hair and how women feel about it, what they do to deal with it, how they look good in it, and what the best products are.  That last part is the intersection between commerce and community.  Women love to talk about hair products that work for them.  Ask any woman you know and they’ll tell you.

Naturallycurly.com was founded by a friend of mine, Michelle Bryer, so I know I am favorably biased towards them.  I recommended the web developer they used to give their site a makeover a number of years ago and I’ve been known to bend their ear on interactive marketing.  Still, they are a great example of social commerce and I’ve used them over the years as an example of a great online community.

So Much Hair, Such a Need to Focus

As a guy, I had no idea how much there is talk to about — and buy — when it comes to curly hair.  So, for this case study, I’m going to focus on curlmart.com, the e-commerce site for products.  (The naturallycurly.com family also has a site specific for hair stylists, curlstylist.com, which would be another interesting case study for SEO.)

On curlmart.com, I’m going to focus even further by choosing one product. If I were consulting with Naturallycurly.com, I would ask them to list their products by profit margin as a means for prioritizing which ones to optimize.  I’d then compare their prioritized list with unit sales and potential traffic based upon searches.  From there, I would provide a reworked, re-prioritized list of products for us to optimize that would drive the most profit for their SEO efforts.  You can’t optimize everything, so you optimize the most profitable.

For this SEO case study, I’m not talking to Naturallycurly.com, so I don’t know for sure what’s most profitable for them.  So, I’ll pick one of their higher priced items under the assumption that it has the highest profit margin (an assumption which may or may not be true).  The product I’ve chosen is Wen Almond Mint Cleansing Conditioner. At $28 for a 16 oz bottle, it’s one of their Best of the Best products, being a winner in their best cleanser category. If their customers like it, then it’s a safe bet that it’s a good seller for them.   If it’s popular on curlmart.com, it’s probably popular with many folks.

This popularity could make for some stiff competition, but also for some interesting niches that the competition may have not already found.  I’ll cover that in the next installment when I go through the keyword analysis.  Join me.

“The web,” he said, “It’s transformed our business.”

Indeed.  He’s been investing in SEO for a number of years because he saw how it drove leads.

A few weeks later, I was at a renewable energy conference walking the tradeshow.  These things are not nearly as glamorous or as exciting as they may seem at a quick glance.  But,  I turned the corner and saw a sign that struck me so much, I had to take a photo of it.

Now, it’s not everyday that you’re looking for a hydroelectric engineering firm.  But if you were, you’d find Sunrise Engineering.  They’re so proud of this fact, that they hilite in their tradeshow booth.

Whether or not it’s easy to dominate your niche, these two datapoints illustrate how search has transformed many different kinds businesses.

You can read the whole Lovemachineinc.com SEO Analysis series here:
Lovemachineinc.com SEO Analysis – Part 1: Overview
Lovemachineinc.com SEO Analysis – Part 2: Keyword Analysis
Lovemachineinc.com SEO Analysis – Part 3: Competitive Analysis

OK, if you’ve made it this far, let’s choose one keyword and analyze the competition. For this case study, I’m going to choose “Virtual Teams”. While it only draws 14,800 searches a month, it is contextually appropriate. Love Machine, Inc. could legitimately own “Virtual Teams,” given what they do and Their history. Even with 14,800 searches a month, if one 1% of the searchers click on it, that’s 148 visitors a month that are fairly qualified. If 1% of them contact the company, that’s 15 visitors a month, every month. Or, 160 qualified visitors a year. Maybe that’s not a lot if you come from a mass marketing background, but if you come from a web, or direct marketing background, you can see the value in optimizing for keywords, especially if you know your cost per acquisition and your lifetime value of a customer.

Also, in reality, you’d optimize on more than one keyword and probably do so continuously throughout the year.  Optimize a little, see results.  Use the results to inform what you optimize next.  Iterate, iterate, iterate.

So, let’s see what Love Machine, Inc. needs to do to rank on the first page of the search results page for the keyword phrase, “Virtual Teams”.

Let’s walk down the list Google displays for “Virtual Teams.” The number one spot is for an article on “Virtual Team” from wikipedia. Wikipedia articles tend to be harder to dislodge than other websites, but there are only 12 links to the page, giving a little hope. One interesting thing learned by reading the description of the page in Google is that Virtual Teams are also known as “geographically dispersed team.” Maybe that could be another interesting keyword.  But, a quick check on the Google Keyword Tool shows that it “Virtual Team” drives 1,000 times more traffic as “geographically dispersed team,” so I’ll stick with “Virtual Teams.”

Let’s take a look at elements that affect ranking comparing the ten top competitors with Love Machine, Inc. websites. This and the following tables list out elements that affect SEO.

First up, elements that affect ranking:

Position	URL	One <h1>	Unique titles?	Keyword in title?	In DMOZ?	Alt Text?
1	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_team	☑	☑	☑	☑	☑
2	http://managementhelp.org/grp_skll/virtual/virtual.htm	☑	☑	☑	☑	☑
3	managementhelp.org/grp_skll/virtual/defntion.pdf	☒	☒	☒	☒	☒
4	www.seanet.com/~daveg/vrteams.htm	☒	☑	☑	☑	☒
5	www.seanet.com/~daveg/ltv.htm	☒	☑	☑	☑	☒
6	www.groupjazz.com/pdf/vteams-toronto.pdf	☒	☒	☒	☒	☒
7	http://www.time-management-guide.com/virtual-team.html	☒	☑	☑	☒	☑
8	http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/articles/2009/summer/50412/how-to-manage-virtual-teams/	☒	☑	☑	☑	☒
9	http://www.netage.com/virtualteams/	☒	☑	☒	☒	☑
10	http://www.amazon.com/Virtual-Teams-Reaching-Organizations-Technology/dp/0471165530	☑	☑	☑	☑	☑
-	www.lovemachineinc.com	☒	☑	☒	☒	☒
-	http://dev.sendlove.us/journal/	☒	☑	☒	☒	☑

Lovemachineinc.com and dev.sendlove.us/journal/ can benefit from:

- using one and only one
< h1 > tag per page, set up in the WordPress template.
- they should use the keyword in a title
- they should submit Lovemachineinc.com in the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org). Because it’s a human edited directory, it’s held in high regard by Google.  Philip Rosedale is in Wikipedia and it’s already pointing to lovemachineinc.com and that’s good, but it takes little effort to submit his new company to dmoz.org to make the link love even better.
- they should be sure to put appropriate keywords in naturally written sentences in image “alt text”.

The next table covers elements that have to do with the ability for search engine spiders to crawl the website.

		Crawlability
Position	URL	HTML Code OK?	No other problems (iframes, flash, etc.)	Thought Through 404 page?	Robots.txt	Sitemap.xml	non www goes to www or vice versa?
1	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_team	☑	☑	☑	☑	☒	n/a
2	http://managementhelp.org/grp_skll/virtual/virtual.htm	☑	☑	☒	☒	☒	☒
3	managementhelp.org/grp_skll/virtual/defntion.pdf	☒	☒	☒	☒	☒
4	www.seanet.com/~daveg/vrteams.htm	☑	☑	☒	☒	☒	☒
5	www.seanet.com/~daveg/ltv.htm	☑	☑	☒	☒	☒	☒
6	www.groupjazz.com/pdf/vteams-toronto.pdf	☒	☒	☒	☒	☒	☒
7	http://www.time-management-guide.com/virtual-team.html	☒	☑	☒	☑	☑	☑
8	http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/articles/2009/summer/50412/how-to-manage-virtual-teams/	☑	☑	☑	☑	☒	☑
9	http://www.netage.com/virtualteams/	☒	☑	☒	☑	☑	☒
10	http://www.amazon.com/Virtual-Teams-Reaching-Organizations-Technology/dp/0471165530	☒	☑	☑	☑	☑	☑
-	www.lovemachineinc.com	☑	☑	☒	☑	☒	☑
-	http://dev.sendlove.us/journal/	☑	☑	☒	☑	☒	☒

Boiling it all down, the crawalability information means:

- both websites could benefit from a well thought out 404 error page that includes links to many web pages on the website.
- both websites could benefit from a sitemap.xml file, a new standard recognized by most search engines. While a robots.txt file tells search engines what directories it can and cannot spider on the server, the sitemap.xml file lists out all the pages with directives on how often the content changes per page. Search engines use this as a hint, but don’t necessarily follow the hint all the time. Still, a sitemap.xml is a good way to make sure every page gets indexed.

What about back links?

		Backlinks
Position	URL	Google	External Links	Internal Links
1	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_team	12	139	75
2	http://managementhelp.org/grp_skll/virtual/virtual.htm	7	4	0
3	managementhelp.org/grp_skll/virtual/defntion.pdf	0	☒	☒
4	www.seanet.com/~daveg/vrteams.htm	1	55	4
5	www.seanet.com/~daveg/ltv.htm	1	32	0
6	www.groupjazz.com/pdf/vteams-toronto.pdf	2	☒	☒
7	http://www.time-management-guide.com/virtual-team.html	1	10	4
8	http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/articles/2009/summer/50412/how-to-manage-virtual-teams/	3	54	2
9	http://www.netage.com/virtualteams/	102	545	1740
10	http://www.amazon.com/Virtual-Teams-Reaching-Organizations-Technology/dp/0471165530	14	4	117
-	www.lovemachineinc.com	23	533	27
-	http://dev.sendlove.us/journal/	1	35	1

Now, here’s the interesting thing. Lovemachineinc.com has a relatively large number of back links.  There’s no reason at all why they shouldn’t be ranking for “Virtual Teams”.  Indeed, because of the links as result of the attention they’re getting from the Second Life community, they have a good shot a ranking for many keywords that would be appropriate.

So why aren’t they?  Primarily because they’re not doing simple things.  None of the items in the above tables are exceptionally hard, except maybe back links, and they’ve got that problem largely licked.  They are not paying attention to keywords that can drive traffic, nor are they using those keyword in post titles, body content, etc.  If they did pay attention and spend a little time optimizing their site for the keyword “Virtual Teams,” they’d see their website float near the top of the search results page for that term.

Want to see my specific action items I’d recommend for Love Machine, Inc?  Then sign up for the Straight Shooter SEO Newsletter.  I’ll send you my specific recommendations.

This Part 2 of a Straight Shooter Labs series. You can read the whole Lovemachineinc.com SEO Analysis series here:
Lovemachineinc.com SEO Analysis – Part 1: Overview
Lovemachineinc.com SEO Analysis – Part 2: Keyword Analysis
Lovemachineinc.com SEO Analysis – Part 3: Competitive Analysis

Without a discussion with the Love Machine, Inc. team, keyword suggestions are incomplete, but let’s take a stab of what could work for this new kind of collaboration software. First of all, typing “LoveMachine,” Love machine,” or “Love machine Inc.,” “sendlove.us,” “sendlove,” and “Send Love”should show them near the top. And indeed, they are #1 for all these keywords except “Sendlove” (position 9), and “Send Love (position 246).

So, what kind of traffic do these words draw?

While the numbers are respectable for “Send Love” and “Love Machine”, do they really make sense for the offering? Love Machine, Inc. could spend time optimizing for “Send Love” to try to move it to the first page. But, I’d argue they should look for keywords that have to do with “workgroup collaboration” as that’s their category for their first offering.

The words I’d explore are:

These words have more to do with their actual business, collaboration software that make teams more effective, than their name. Few customers will be looking for Love Machine, Inc. by name.

Notice how I pivoted from the obvious, their name, to their category.  This is a common occurrence when working with clients.  The first question people ask is, “Why do I need SEO if people can find me already?”  The answer is this: I should hope they find your name.  Names are fairly unique.  Finding your name tells me that the search engines are indexing your site, even a little.  It means you’re not totally hidden. It doesn’t mean you’re well indexed.

Here’s an example. I was on a sales call recently with a small ad agency.  They do good creative work.  You could find them in Google if you knew their name.  However, they were invisible for everything else.  Why?  Because they put their whole site in Flash, effectively making it fairly invisible to search engines.  The search engines picked up the name from the title tag on the one and only HTML page.

What you really want to do is reach people who are looking for your category.  They don’t know you can solve their problem because they don’t know you.  However,  they can discover you with good SEO.  The people who don’t know who you are, but for whom  you can solve their problem, is a larger universe than those who know who already you are.  You want to be in that larger, targeted universe.  Good SEO gets you there.

The “searches” column is the number of searches on the keyword last month (2/10), provided by the Google Keyword Tool. The competition is the number of pages that contain the words in the keyword phrase. As a rough rule of thumb, most keywords returning around 2,500,000 and under competitors have a good chance of having the well optimized web page appear on the first page of search results. Competitive numbers above require a sustained effort of adding relevant content and building backlinks.  KEI is “Keyword Effectiveness Index,” a rough indication of what keywords you should optimize on.  KEI should highlight words that have traffic, but less competition.  Those would be the ones for which to optimize.

OK, back to the keywords for Love Machine, Inc. All keywords have fairly stiff competition, meaning, Love Machine, Inc. is going to have to work at it over time to move up into the first page.  On page SEO by itself is not going to get them were they want to go.  They’re going to need to do on page SEO and extensive link building.  The good news is they’ve got an installed fan base from Second Life, so they can get other’s to do stories on them and link to the them.

Now that we have the keyword candidates, next up is analyzing the competition.  I’ll cover that in Part 3.

You can read the whole Lovemachineinc.com SEO Analysis series here:
Lovemachineinc.com SEO Analysis – Part 1: Overview
Lovemachineinc.com SEO Analysis – Part 2: Keyword Analysis
Lovemachineinc.com SEO Analysis – Part 3: Competitive Analysis

Straight Shooter Labs is where we take a web business and put it through an SEO analysis, much like I do on a client engagement.

Our first analysis is for Love Machine, Inc. and no, it’s not what you think. Ever hear of the 3D virtual world of Second Life? The guy who started it, Philip Rosedale has a new startup, LoveMachine. His first goal is to create work group collaboration software that starts with a unique point of view on what makes teams work together well.

The name comes from decision making software Rosedale made at his company, Linden Lab, to decide what projects should be produced for Second Life. He had the notion that praise should be a good proxy for what needs to be done, so he made software that made visible when someone praised someone else. “Hey Sue, that was a cool solution to the problem.” He called giving praise in his system, “sending love.” The more “love” someone received, the more likely the program they were proposing would be made. He essentially made a reputation system for work.

He’s now creating a new company to make this reputation visible and useful for making decisions.

In terms of SEO, the team has made some good choices so far. For their marketing site, www.lovemachineinc.com, they’re using a content management system that works well for SEO if it’s setup properly: WordPress.

For their actual work site, www.sendlove.us, some pages are available publicly. For example, their public journal. Inspired by IRC, or Twitter (take your pick), it’s a list of people’s comments as the conversation scrolls by. The scrolling pages look embedded in a parent page. To get the scrolling effect, they’re not using Flash, nor are they using dreaded html frames. Instead, they’re using the jquery library which means all the text lives within search engine friendly <div> tags, even if it’s not being shown all at once.

Both domains can serve the same purpose of being visible in search engines: to entice customers near the top of the sales funnel to explore the LoveMachine (I just had to say that ) to see if it fits their collaboration needs. The marketing site is obvious, but sendlove.us is actual tire kicking. Potential customers can see what’s going on in the areas the company wants to make public. For this analysis, I’m assuming they’ll keep portions of sendlove.us public, so I’ll analyze both lovemachineinc.com and sendlove.us.

Coming up in future posts:

• Keyword analysis to determine what drives the most, qualified traffic.
• Competitive analysis. Given the top keyword upon which to optimize, see what their competitors are doing in order to develop a strategy to beat them.

I’ve been following Rosedale since I invited him to speak at an ad agency I use to work at.  We walked around Sixth Street in Austin the night before recording a podcast.  Not just a developer, he had great ideas on how businesses could get the most out of Second Life.  Today, he has great ideas on how to work.  Ideas that have nothing to do with the virutal world and everything to do with the real world.

He and his team don’t have an office.  Like many of us, they work out of coffee, bars, etc. Free wifi is everywhere and there are obvious and not so obvious advantages to not paying rent, especially in San Francisco.  Better use of capital.  Less meetings.  Fun & Inspiring.  Better ability to recall meetings because of how the brain stores information when  you meet in different places.

The Love Machine has made smart SEO choices as well.  As a startup, they need all the advantages they can get to drive traffic and get customers.  By using WordPress as their website’s content management system, they have chosen a free, open source solution that has a robust community of developers improving it every day…and that’s in addition to the core team.

But one of the interesting things they’ve done is how they’ve instituted scrolling in their journal featurewhich is a collaborative timeline visually inspired by Twitter. At first glance, it looked like it could have been created using the SEO killing frameset.  Or, only slightly better, in Flash. However, a quick peak under the hood reveals they’re using a jquery scrolling method.

jquery is an javascript library that ships with WordPress.  Many developers use it create sliders, scrollers, etc.

It works like this:  all the text is in the HTML page, nestled in <div> tags that are easily digestible by search engines.  The CSS and jquery libraries take care of scrolling behind the scenes from the search engine’s point of view.

The Love Machine’s Journal is proof that you can get SEO friendly scrolling with out having to use Flash or, horror, framesets.

Overview

This SEO case study shows how SEO and Social Media can go hand in hand to jumpstart the marketing for an independently produced documentary film.

Client: Three Penny Productions. Haynseville documentary.
Website: www.haynesvillemovie.com
Services: SEO strategy. Social Media Strategy. Data analysis for actionable results.

Interactive Marketing Problem

Haynesville is the story of how three lives were changed by the Haynseville shale natural gas find near Shrevesport, LA. It’s potentially the largest gas field in the world and could power the whole US for 30 years.

Like all documentary films, the goal is to get people to pay to see the film. But most of the money goes into the film, few dollars are left over for marketing. This begs the question, how due you market the film on a shoestring even while it’s still being shot and edited?

How could the film makers bootstrap the marketing to generate a fan base that would spread the word and get people talking, even before the film was finished?

Interactive Marketing Solution

The Straight Shooter SEO worked with the film makers to decide the appropriate use and goals for common social media tools: their website and blog; Twitter, and Facebook. The Straight Shooter SEO:

• Held strategy discussion with Team Haynseville to work through their goals and appropriate use.
• Worked with their web developer to create SEO friendly WordPress templates from scratch.
• Monitored their website to see what was working and what wasn’t.
• Provided linking advice to build their reputation.

The Straight Shooter SEO helped point Team Haynseville in the right direction. Team Haynseville did all the heavy lifting.

Results

Haynsevillemovie.com is #1 for the term “Haynesville,” beating out the city’s own website. For a tearm that draws 40,500 searches a month, this is a potentially valuable keyword that drives people to Haynesvillemovie.com.

Through a lot of hard work tweeting, facebooking, and reaching out to people, Team Haynsville now has:
- almost 2,500 Facebook fans
- almost 2,000 Twitter followers
- 1,500 people in their email database

What this means is that the film makers now have a different conversation than many documentary film makers. The main question they’ve asked themselves is, “What do we do first? Do we go after a distribution deal, or do we book our own venues, do our own marketing, and get butts in seats ourselves?”

The answer is increasingly, “Let’s do it ourselves.” They have a base they can activate to help them spread the word and sell tickets of the cities they book. While not the only marketing they need to do, by executing a successful social media marketing plan, Team Haynesville has choices in how they make money with the film. If they had taken the typical, “Build it and they will come” approach to their website, they might now be dependent on traditional film distribution.

The right social media strategy gave Team Haynseville the freedom to do it themselves.