Recently, a credible SEO firm did something interesting.  They put an ad on a webmaster forum asking for advice about why one of their websites lost rankings. The replies were all over the board, from missing meta keywords to suggestions of improper title tags. All, of course, came with offers to fix the website for a fee. None of the SEO firms that replied actually got the question right.

So how do you, as a business owner, pick out a good SEO firm to help you get to the top of the Google rankings?  There are a lot of things that separate the SEO wheat from the chaff, and I’m going to explain some of the differences (as I see them) below.

Great Independent SEOs are Hard to Find

The really good independent SEOs have plenty of work.  Their reputation precedes them, and there’s no need to ‘put it out there’ that they’re looking for clients. They aren’t trolling webmaster forums, they aren’t running ads on networks, and they definitely aren’t wasting their money on TV or radio.

To find these SEOs, you’re going to need to go offline.  Start visiting business meetups or business conferences.  Sometimes they’re there, networking right along with you.  If so, introduce yourself, do your elevator pitch and ask for a meeting or phone call.  Unless they really are maxed out on clients, or already have a similar client, they’ll be glad to follow up with you.

But many times it’s even harder to find them.  You may need to ask around, see who your business peers think is the best in your area, and then do some research.  Find a Chamber of Commerce or other local business organization that only allows the best from various industries to join and find out who they recommend.

A Great Independent SEO Doesn’t Do Much Else

Every day thousands of web designers and graphic designers are getting asked on a regular basis if they can do SEO.  So these designers are taking a little time to familiarize themselves with SEO basics and lingo, and they’re adding it as an additional service on their website.  In reality, they know very little, but enough that they can convince business owners to pay them.  I can’t begin to tell you how many web design services I come across every week that offer SEO, yet their own site’s rankings are atrocious.  Don’t pay these people.

As an independent, all I do is SEO.  Sure, I know how to build sites, I know how to use twitter and build a Facebook fan page, but I won’t do it for your business.  I focused purely on getting your rankings up, nothing else.

Now, there are bigger agencies out there, with a staff of several (or 50) that can offer and handle all of these types of marketing silos.  There’s nothing wrong with hiring them, as some business owners feel more secure hiring a bigger business.  Just remember – bigger isn’t always better.

A Great SEO Doesn’t Need PPC

I always laugh when I type in something like ‘SEO St Louis’ and see a lot of ads for businesses that can help.  But none of them rank organically.  Maybe it’s just me, but shouldnt a competent SEO firm rank for what they do?  Why would they need to buy their way to the top?  (I’ll tell you why, but you’ve probably already figured it out)

A Great SEO Firm Knows How to Cheat – But Doesn’t

Theres a whole list of things that I could do to your website today that’d have it rankings in short order.  These techniques, called grey hat or black hat, are ways to trick the search engines into believing a website is greater than it actually is.  And they work, for a while at least.  A great SEO is familiar with these techniques, but never ever ever uses them on his own clients websites. Google’s updates painfully bring this to the forefront for many business owners.  They’ve been paying an SEO hundreds or thousands of dollars per month to get to the top – and they were having great success up until the Panda or Penguin update hit.  Ouch.

A Great SEO Doesn’t Spam

Ever get an email from someone who can help you with my rankings?  In most cases, these are automatically generated emails.  They aren’t even looking at your website. Does any good marketing company need to resort to spam in order to get business?  If you’ve received an email from a ‘concerned’ person or agency promising to help you with your rankings, or give you a free report, I recommend you delete it quickly.

A great SEO firm shows real results

If you’re paying a firm to do SEO for you, and you receive ranking reports every week or month, that’s a good start.  But heck, those ranking report programs are cheap and automated.  You could do that yourself. SEO is more than just better rankings.  I fact, in most cases, rankings should not be your end goal – conversions, leads and referrals should be.  Yes, your business should grow because of your rankings, but rankings is just one of the measurements of success.

The same holds true for traffic.  I can get you a million hits tomorrow, if you’d like, but will that really help your business? No. Don’t simply think that more traffic means more revenue.

A great SEO tests, twists and changes your website often

Just like above, if you’re paying an SEO to work his or her magic, and you’re not seeing any changes, you may need to worry.  A great SEO will be changing and testing your website all the time, trying out new things that will, as mentioned above, increase conversions.  Unless they fully understand every single nuance of your customers, testing will always be necessary.

A great SEO won’t take more than one client per industry

This one comes down to character and ethics.  If I take a client, say in the kitchen faucet industry, how could I then take another and rank them for the same keywords? Isn’t that a conflict of interest?  It is to me.

Now, I could take a client that did kitchen faucets and one that sold kitchen tables.   Don’t see a problem there.  But these agencies (and independents) who take several clients in very similar industries just rings unethical to me.

What Did I Miss?

There are a lot of other qualities of a great SEO.  Which did I miss?

No Brainers

Ok, so there are a few things that, despite any Google update, you just shouldn’t do.  These include:

• Hiding text on your page – white text on a white background ain’t foolin’ no one, and especially not the big G
• Tiny text – just like above, the spiders see what you’re up to
• Building doorway pages – these are pages that redirect for us humans, but the spiders see other content.  A big no-no
• Buying links – Google wants a ‘natural growth’ among your links.  If a few thousand links show up overnight, red flags are go a-flyin at the Google HQ
• Keyword stuffing - the experts now say your keyword or keyphrase should only account for around 2-3% of your overall page copy

OOP/Penguin Update Specifics

 I have a feeling that by the end of this post, you’re going to see a common theme.

Direct Match Domains

A direct match domain is a domain that has your target keywords, usually with a .com at the end.  Since Google has always given ‘credit’ to domains with the keywords in them, it was a practice to purchase these types of domains and forward them to your ‘real’ website.  I often get asked, “Will, can’t I buy blue-widgets-st-louis.com and red-widgets-st-louis.com and forward them to my website?”

In short, that’s a big N O.

It’s about time that Google started targeting these types of domains.  Buying a lot of domains and redirecting them is just a bad idea, a waste of money and really clutters up the SERPs.  Businesses that have done this in the past (with intent of driving more traffic) are going to see a decline in their search rankings.

Now, there are businesses with legitimate reasons for having a direct match domain.  These websites are ranking for their main keyword, but also putting out original content on a regular basis, updating their site and climbing the rankings.  Some of these sites got hit, too.  I recently saw a business go from a page one to a page five result simply because of their direct match domain.  But they’ll be back on top in no time.

Why? Because, like I said, they’re producing original content on a normal basis.  They’re not redirecting the domain to some mega-site.  They are following Google’s policies and good Internet Marketing techniques.

Number of Similar Domains Owned

This is related to the penalty above.  If you own a bunch of domains, all with the intent of redirecting or building microsites, you may want to consider changing your tactics.

And, by the way, Google is a registered domain registrar, which means they have access to the ‘domain database in the sky’.  They can see who owns what, where they are and what they’re doing with them.

Thin Content

This is another one I’ve been asked a lot.  ”Can I take an article and put it through an article spinner, then take that ‘original’ content and put it on my site?”

Uhh, sure, if you want an article that sounds like a China-man translated it to Chinese and back to English.  As a business owner, do you want that sort of content on your website? Heck no.

Yet people do it.  Don’t be one of them.  Google is quickly learning grammar, sentence structure and other things (see LSI).

Crazy Spammy Title Tags

Here’s one reason why the penalty was called the Over Optimization Penalty.  Title tags have long been an important part of any SEO strategy.  Getting them right can help your rankings, and now getting them wrong can hurt your rankings.  Here’s an example:

Blue Widgets | Widgets Blue | Blue Colored Widgets | BlueWidgets

So I think it’s pretty obvious that this site would be trying to rank for all-things-blue-widget related, right?  These sort of title tags are just the target of the OOP update.  A better strategy may be to just use…

Blue Widgets | The Nation’s Most Popular Colored Widget Company

…then build links back to that page using that phrase plus a few of the others in the anchor text.

Long Spammy Footers

I just pulled a huge footer like this off of a major financial website this week.  Instead of me explaining, here’s a screenshot of what they were doing:

How crazy is that?  I’m not sure where their (now former) SEO got the idea that this would help them rank, but it won’t.  If you have a large service area, it’s probably a better practice to build content around each of these major areas, maybe some personal stories of work you’ve done in those ‘zones’, and create real page-specific content that matters.

(As an aside, this SEO was also sneaking in keyword targeted links to his own site inside the footer.  This is just low, if you ask me.  Why not just ask the client if you can put a link back to your site? Why be sneaky about it?)

Crappy Backlinks

Backlinks are links from other sites back to yours.  They can be your best friend, or your worst enemy, depending on where they come from.  Unfortunately, this one is a little harder to control.  Afterall, if people link to you, how can you possibly stop them?  But that’s not really what this penalty is about.  We’re talking more along the lines of websites (and SEOs) that are using comment spam, link networks/rings and forum signatures to increase backlinks.

The biggest thing here is that your backlinks are coming from ‘good neighborhoods’.  If you (or your SEO) is building links by leaving comments across thousands of abandoned and unmoderated blogs, that’s a bad thing.  If you are leaving comments across multiple forums, always with the same signature link, you may want to switch it up.  If you’ve joined a ‘link service’ that links to your website from other sites, time to turn it off.

Obviously Bad Internal Cross-Linking

Here’s one you can certainly fix.  If every time you mention the phrase ‘blue widget’ on your website, you link to the same page, it’s time to start switching it up.  These sort of pattern matches are probably doing you more harm than good in the long run.

Check out this post, and the links that go to other posts I’ve written – the words that link to those pages aren’t necessarily hard core anchor phrases.  They words in the link aren’t exactly the same as that pages title.

It’s All About User Experience

In the end, it’s all about user experience.  If you’re creating ugly footers, links to pages that really don’t have great (or spun) information, you’re just doing yourself a big disservice.  As my buddy Russ put it, diversify your marketing efforts.  Write good content, build things that your visitors will find useful, and you’ll make it through this update with flying colors.

Don’t be quick to make big changes, but if you ran an obviously spammy site, start being good.

If You Were Affected

If you’ve noticed a huge drop in rankings since the Penguin update, there is a reinclusion form that you can fill out.  If you fill it out, and your site comes back, please let me know!

The easy answer – Yes.  There are plenty of tools out there that can help you find out all kinds of great information about your website – and most of them are free!  In fact, the search engines want us to track our sites and improve them.  The better our sites perform, the better we rank overall. Let’s take a look at two of them.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google has a terrific tool in their Webmaster Central area.  These Webmaster Tools are terrific for finding links that don’t work and other problems within your website.

First thing you need to do is sign in (with a Google ID) and verify your website.

Once inside, you’ll want to add and verify your website.  There are several ways to verify your site.  They are all listed on the verification page.

One inside, you’ll see all kinds of information about your website, including a full list of links that are broken or otherwise invalid. Find and fix – good stuff.

Xenu Broken Link Checker

Another great tool for finding broken links is the Xenu broken link finder. Install this little program our your PC, run it against your URL, and it will produce a nice little list of broken links for you.

No matter what tool you use to find them, broken links need to be fixed. They aren’t helping your users, and the search engines don’t like that. Get them fixed in short order!

As a small business owner, there are a hundred things you’ve got rattling through your head at any one time.  Along with running your business, you’ve also got to wear the marketing hat – a hat that not many small business owners really enjoy.

While marketing might not be fun, it’s still a necessity.  And I’m hoping to make the job a little easier today with these few search engine optimization tips.

Google Places

Back in November of 2010, Google made a huge change to the way their search results looked for their customers.  Any search that Google deemed to be ‘of local intent’ was immediately treated differently than a more generic ‘research’ related search.

For example – if you were to type in ‘plumber’, chances are you’ll now get a map on the right hand side of the page with dots representing local plumbers.  Google is smart enough to know where you’re searching from, and since most people that are searching for a plumber don’t need one that’s located in Hawaii, they’ve decided to give you local results.

The good news is that getting into this listing of results for your industry is absolutely free.  By simply going to google.com/LBC you can claim or add your business to the local Places listings.

I recommend that you take the time to fill out the listing to the best of your ability.  Use categories that include keywords your customers would use, and upload the full amount of pictures you can.  Try to verify your listing with the phone option and it will be online usually within 48 hours.

Press Releases

The search engines count links from other websites back to yours as votes for your website.  While you may think that there is no way to get links from other sites, there actually are plenty.

One way to do this is to publish a press release.  A well written press release can garner you some nice links back from sites such as Google News, Yahoo News and even the AP.  Exposure for your business in major publications is a sure way to get more traffic, more links, and of course more revenue.

A press release should have value.  In other words, it should not just be an advertisement, but should be news – whether about your business, an event that your taking part in, or an upcoming or innovative product that will help your customers.  In your press release make sure you have your contact information, and make sure you link to your website so that you get the full potential from it.

Call to Action

Lastly I want to say three words to you – call to action.

Over time as your website continues to grow and evolve, you’re going to discover that your home page is not where everyone lands first.  For many websites, the home page is not even the most popular page on the site.  And this is where the call to action comes in.

I want to encourage you to take a minute and look over your website.   Look at each page, navigate around a bit and pretend like you are a visitor that just landed on your website.  Look at the page you’re on and read through the contents.  Look at the navigation and the various message being displayed.  Is there one that sticks out?  Is there one that screams for attention?  Or is there nothing more than a dry, boring message with no further instructions?

A call to action is just what it sounds like – it’s a call for your website visitor to do something – whether that’s to purchase an item, sign up for a newsletter, or download a free report.  Every page on your website needs a call to action – because not everyone is going to land on your home page.

Take a few minutes and look around your website.  See what messages are featured, or what messages are obviously missing.  Fix those and you’ll be on your way to better conversions and more customers.

The Internet is a giant research tool.  Your customers are becoming more and more savvy as each day goes by, researching products, features, benefits and of course prices.  If you aren’t taking advantage of that trend, you’re missing out.

SEO

One of the best ways to build more traffic to your website is to take advantage of search engine optimization.  Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process of optimizing your website for keywords that your customers are using every day when they do their research. 

Optimizing your website design is a good place to start.  Make sure your website is clear and concise, and every visitor understands just where they are (with your branding and logo) and isn’t cluttered with useless boxes or animations.

Each page on your site should target a single keyword or keyphrase.  Make sure you have a nice headline (with your keyword in it, of course) and your copy for that page includes the keyword a few times.

Don’t overdo it, though.  The copy should still be in ‘normal English’ and not marketer-speak.

Content

One of the best things you can do for your website is to add a blog.  And I don’t mean your daily diary of what you eat and how your Mom is doing.  I mean real meaty content – things that are affecting your industry and answer questions that your customers always ask.  The kind of stuff that makes you sound like an expert.

Why?

Because you’ll sound like an expert.  And people love dealing with experts.

There are probably a hundred or a thousand people right now that know what you know about your industry.  But I’d be willing to bet that less than a handful of them are leveraging that expertise online.

There’s a huge harvest of customers out there just looking for a solution to a problem, and you can be the one that solves it for them.  Writing a weekly blog post that answers a question you hear all the time will not only portray you as the expert, but it will also create links from other websites back to yours.  And every link is like a vote.

Video

The last thing that you can do to get more traffic is to start dabbling in the world of video.  Did you know that the number two search engine isn’t Yahoo!, Bing, or AOL?  It’s YouTube.

If I were to ask my kids today to go look something up online, there’s a good chance they’d go to YouTube to start looking.

Nearly 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute of the day.  While that seems like a lot, there is still only a small amount of videos that are actually optimized for certain keywords and keyphrases.  And Google is working hard to optimize those videos with use of voice recognition software.

Between Google’s voice recognition and your brief description of the video when you upload it, you’ll rank in the search engines quick.  And with Google’s new universal search, your video will not only show up as a search result, but it could also potentially push a competitors’ website off the first page – giving you even more traffic.

Summary

The smart use of search engine optimization techniques, creating quality content and video will thrust your website traffic past your competitors in no time.