Use language that sells

Use compelling language in the snippet where possible, by placing sales-orientated text near the first occurrence of the target phrase. For example, in the screenshot below (and overlooking any brand loyalty that people may have to Amazon or Game), the idea that a Wii Remote has free delivery is more compelling than knowing it can be used as a sword AND a paintbrush.

If you’ve got a strong brand, use it

Remember that sometimes there’s no competition for clicks when the user has their destination in mind before seeing the results. For instance, a user may know they want to go to Wikipedia when they search for “The Shirehorses” and head there despite it ranking at #3.

A very similar thing is likely to happen for product / shopping searches, where the searcher has brand loyalty to a particular retailer. I imagine that Amazon receives a similar amount of traffic (if not more) than Canon does for the search ‘canon 400d’ – this might still be a destinational search.

However, in this situation Canon could get the clicks from people who are researching the product as well as those about to buy if they manipulated their snippet to say something like, “See full details for the Canon EOS 400D, and buy it direct for the best online price.”

Prove that your site is going to be useful

Get listed in Google Local, and get a map and reviews next to your branded search results. OK: you’d hope not to ever lose clicks from your branded search, but a result like that below gives real trust to the visitor.

Cover all the bases for organic DKI

Fake your way into using dynamic keyword insertion for organic search. Although Google still prefers to use the meta description of a page as the snippet when possible, in a search of more than a couple of words, it often needs to pull a quote from the page in order to show text relevant to the search. By using the exact match of popular variants of your search terms (particularly ones with valuable searcher intent) within your text, you can have the search terms highlighted in your snippet in order to demonstrate high relevancy. (Of course, you should be doing this anyway if you want to target those particular terms.)

The example below shows three of the UK results for ‘choose an engagement ring‘. The user doesn’t want to know how to buy one, doesn’t want to know the etiquette, but wants help choosing one – the third link is likely to get the click.

Don’t give everything away too early

Let’s say a searcher needs to know the height of Mount Everest in inches, or can’t remember the order of parameters in PHP’s strrchr command. They might see the following results in Google:

There’s no need for them to click through to the results. Using a variation of the earlier advice, make sure the ‘answer’ on the page isn’t right next to the first mention of the search term if you want to get people to actually visit your page. These similar examples (‘height of mount everest in yards‘ and ‘str_replace‘) don’t spill the beans too early.

If you’ve being using similar techniques, or have seen sites that you think should be getting more clicks from their search results, please do share them in the comments.

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Rank High In Google in just 15 minutes.

1. Write complete unique article on required keyword for which u want to rank., with good keyword density in Microsoft word document.

2. Submit this article to Scribd.com, then add all required description, tags, and keywords etc to get good score.

3. After it is uploaded, share it and post the link to Digg and Reddit.com. Those are the only 2 I have used and using those two and a short 1 paragraph article got me ranked number 7 with over 2 mil. SERPS

4. Anyways this method is still in testing but I have consistently gotten ranked in the first and second page every time. Please tweak and make this method better and share your results because I have shared my findings with you.

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Ok, so you’ve all read about The Best Spam Submission Ever which was illustrated ever so eloquently (and if you haven’t read it, please read it now… uhm well ok after you read this – it’s awesomely funny!). As the post mentions, we sift through many YOUmoz entries every day determining which ones to post to the site. Most spam is easily detected; such as the body of the post only consists of 1 or 2 sentences, or the title is obviously nothing related to online marketing (buy gold and silver online!). However every now and then, there is a spark of spam brilliance that makes its way through.
The other day I ran across this entry that had an odd title, but it actually seemed to have real potential. I opened the entry and at first glance, I thought “YAY! I have a good contender.” There were multiple paragraphs, headings and even bullet points… this had to be legit, right? Not so much. I found myself reading the entire entry because I was so dumbfounded by the sheer brilliance of the whole thing. If this person had posted to a blog that automatically checks for spam entries, and auto-posts, this one probably would have made it through.
So the idea is quite simple. Take an excerpt of a book (or anything written I suppose), and add keyword rich links throughout! Essentially, make the post look as authentic as possible, without having to spend time writing a blog post. I’ve taken the idea and put together an example for you below. It’s not perfect, but it is damn simple!

Her name is Esther; she is a war correspondent who has just returned from Iraq because of the imminent invasion of that country; she is thirty years old, married, without children. He is an unidentified male, between twenty-three and twenty-five years old, with dark, Mongolian features. The two were last seen in a café on the Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré. He was reading: Buy Gold jewelry and diamonds direct.

Just the beginning
The police were told that they had met before, although no one knew how often: Esther had always said that the man — who concealed his true identity behind the name Mikhail — was someone very important, although she had never explained whether he was important for her career as a journalist or for her as a woman.

The police began a formal investigation. Various theories were put forward — kidnapping, blackmail, a kidnapping that had ended in murder — none of which were beyond the bounds of possibility given that, in her search for information, her work brought her into frequent contact with people who had links with terrorist cells. They discovered that, women love gold necklaces and jewelry in the weeks prior to her disappearance, regular sums of money had been withdrawn from her bank account: those in charge of the investigation felt that these could have been payments made for information. She had taken no change of clothes with her, but, oddly enough, her passport was nowhere to be found.

He is a stranger, very young, with no police record, with no clue as to his identity.
She is Esther, thirty years old, the winner of two international prizes for journalism, and married.
My wife.
Next steps
I immediately come under suspicion and am detained because I refuse to say where I was on the day she disappeared. However, a prison officer has just opened the door of my cell, saying that I’m a free man. A man who reads Silver and Gold Jewelry.
And why am I a free man? Because nowadays, everyone knows everything about everyone; you just have to ask and the information is there: where you’ve used your credit card, where you spend your time, whom you’ve slept with. In my case, it was even easier: a woman, another journalist, a friend of my wife, and divorced — which is why she doesn’t mind revealing that she slept with me — came forward as a witness in my favor when she heard that I had been detained. She provided concrete proof that I was with her and with gold necklaces on the day and the night of Esther’s disappearance.

I talk to the chief inspector, who returns my belongings and offers his apologies, adding that my rapid detention was entirely within the law, and that I have no grounds on which to accuse or sue the state. I say that I haven’t the slightest intention of doing either of those things, that I am perfectly aware that we are all under constant suspicion and under twenty-four-hour surveillance, even when we have committed no crime.

“You’re free to go,” he says, echoing the words of the prison officer.

Conclusion
I ask: Isn’t it possible that something buy gold direct and diamonds really has happened to my wife? She had said to me once that — understandably given her vast network of contacts in the terrorist underworld — she occasionally got the feeling she was being followed.

The inspector changes the subject. I insist, but he says nothing.
I ask if she would be able to travel on her passport, and he says, of course, since she has committed no crime. Why shouldn’t she leave and enter the country freely?
“So she may no longer be in France?”
“Do you think she left you because of that woman you’ve been sleeping with?”
That’s none of your business, I reply.

Creative! Right? But, just think about this… if these spammers took a few minutes to actually think through and write a relevant post, they would have not only received exposure but they would have some SWEET links from SEOmoz as well. Plus, if the post is well-written and is quickly getting popular (thumbs up), you may even get promoted to the main blog… talk about exposure! I encourage you all to submit well thought out, relevant posts to YOUmoz. Submit entries you will be proud of showing to the rest of the community, and make sure the content is unique.

Every day we receive many spam entries for YOUmoz, which slows down the process of publishing the real, legitimate ones. This is a reminder for all our spammers out there: Real people read and publish these posts! You can stop spamming us, because at least for now, we’re smarter than you are. With that, I’d love to hear some of your best spam submissions!

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The inspiration for this blog post came to me when I was lying on my sofa reading the Guardian newspaper over the weekend. I was at home and so didn’t have any of the following to hand:

• iphone
• pen
• regular phone
• internet

Now, you might think they’re not really essential tools for reading a newspaper but you’d be wrong. While reading the paper I was struck, time and time again, by the use of TinyURL to encode long links into a newsprint format. Of course, not having any of the above tools, I had no way of either visiting the URL or noting it down for me to visit later.

Being a kind of lazy person (it was Sunday afternoon, give me a break!), rather than look up the tinyurl online or noting it down for later reference, I just shrugged my shoulders, decided I wasn’t THAT interested in visiting the link anyway, and moved on to the next article. For me, this is a huge wasted opportunity for the paper and also a frustrating experience for the reader. So what’s the solution? Well, before I dive into the solution, let me explain the problem a little more clearly.

Why do newspapers use TinyURL at the moment?

The overriding reason I can see for newspapers to use TinyURL at the moment is that it’s short. Printing tinyurls saves valuable space which otherwise might be wasted. Printing a URL like this:

http://tinyurl.com/55mp6b

Takes up much less space than printing a URL like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

And even less than a URL like this:

http://shop.ebay.co.uk/items/__rock-roll_W0QQ_nkwZrockQ20rollQ20QQ_cqrZtrueQQ_nkwuscZrickroll?_rdc=1

What’s wrong with newspapers using TinyURL?

I touched on some of the reasons why they don’t work that well above in my heart-rending tale of an internet marketer too lazy to move off the sofa, but here’s the complete list:

1. You can’t remember them. “Oh great, an article about quantum physics, that looks really interesting. I must remember to check out tinyurl slash x x 2 3 5 h j next time I’m at a computer.” This makes them difficult to use unless you physically take your paper to your computer or you happen to have a photographic memory. (I know that these days you can now choose a custom alias for your tinyurls, but none of the newspapers use them.)
   
2. There’s no branding. When you see a tinyurl you are effectively clicking blind – you have no idea what kind of site you’re being taken to and there’s no trace of the site you’ve come from.
3. No tracking! Tracking, tracking ,tracking. The mantra of everything you do online has been lost when you use TinyURL – you don’t know how many people clicked the link, you don’t know if for some reason one of your TinyURLs was copied and pasted into an email to 1000s of people. You just don’t know. (I know that some services offer pretty neat tracking services, especially bit.ly, but that doesn’t negate the other points listed here.)
4. No control over the URL shortening service. Do you trust TinyURL? How long might they be around for? What happens if they have a massive data outage tomorrow and all your URLs 404? Think that’s farfetched? Check out zi.ma – this used to be a URL shortening service and now all the URLs 404. Over 67,000 links to the zi.ma domain!
   

What should they do instead?

Build their own URL shortening service for use exclusively by their journalists! To a technophobe like myself this seems like a lot of work, but I’m assured that it really rather simple to build a service like this – Rob knocked up Twadl, a URL shortening service in a weekend (not to belittle your achievements, Rob!).

What advantages would this have?

Well imagine that instead of using a TinyURL the Guardian used a URL like this:

links.guardian.co.uk/apr/12

or

links.guardian.co.uk/rickroll

This would then allow them to get around most of the downsides listed above: short URLs that they have control over, are able to track and are stamped with the Guardian’s brand. There’s one problem though that this doesn’t solve…

What about the problem of remembering these short URLs?

So using either of the two formats above (one being date & numerical based and the other being alias-based), they’re still not that memorable, so how do you get around this? How about creating a links page on the newspaper site which lists all the recent short-links that have been used and a brief, twitter-like description of what the link is? That way, not only do you know where to go when you forget a short link, but that page becomes like an editorial Digg or Reddit page which can demand a high volume of traffic in its own right. After all, the external links that are being dropped into the paper every day are a valuable commodity – people are always on the lookout for interesting thing to click on, and that’s exactly what that page offers.

Examples from the wild

Two examples from the UK press, one doing it well and one doing it badly:

The good – The Metro use short redirect URLs quite regularly to direct traffic; for example, check outwww.metro.co.uk/cats, which 301 redirects to a metro blog post.

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We’ve all been bored to tears (or driven to madness) by the PageRank Sculping debate that’s arisen since Google’s June announcement. But, behind the scenes, a lot of smart SEOs have been working on ways to provide the same benefits that were thought to be conferred by PR sculpting with nofollow through alternate methods. Out of the few that have emerged, the one I believe has the most promise and best opportunity is “Link Consolidation.”

Let’s, briefly, frame the issue and then I’ll dive into how this solution works.

#1 – Google is now “evaporating” link juice through nofollow’d links (see image below)

#3 – Doing good things for SEO shouldn’t get in the way of a good user experience (thus we can’t just go willy-nilly excluding links to pages that engines might not care about but visitors do)

At SEOmoz, we had a long talk about we’re going to handle the nofollow/sculpting issue, both with regards to our own site (where we’d like to maximize the juice flowing to good, useful places) and to those of our clients and PRO members who ask for help via Q+A. A few issues arose:

Hiding/redirecting links with javascript is both a dev pain, and it excludes approx. 4% of our visitors who don’t have javascript enabled (as well as hurting mobile users with less robust browser experiences)
Hiding links inside Flash files likewise excludes about 7% of our users
Cloaking links could get us into trouble with search engine guidelines
One solution that emerged here (and, from my talks with other SEOs in the community, found widespread appeal) is “Link Consolidation.” Put simply, consolidation is the practice of minimizing the number of pages that are linked to by consolidating content onto fewer pages. This graphic explains far better than words can:

As with any technique, there are lots of caveats around user experience, when to apply, etc. However, the basic tenant – moving from linking to 6 URLs on every page to 1 achieves many of the goals that classic nofollow link sculpting attempted. There are lots of areas where we’ve traditionally used nofollows that this makes sense:

• Login/Register Pages – why not make a single page for both those seeking to register and login?
• Terms of Service / Privacy / Legal Disclaimer – a single page with internal anchors works very well and puts all the attorney goodness in one spot.
• About/Bios/Contact/Press – even if you have detail pages you want to link to with specifics, a single page where users can see the overview and make a simple choice of where to go is sensible.
• Comment/User Links in UGC – many systems already apply this methodology, but again, it’s possible to consolidate user information onto a single URL rather than having multiple pages about a single user (there’s lots of other UGC applications for this as well).
• Pagination – although technically it’s not the same as the other examples, many sites use AJAX to reload pages with hash tag data, and this can work here too.

The user experience, in most cases, won’t degrade because visitors can still link to, bookmark and share the URLs. The engines see fewer links per page, so they can pass more juice to the places that matter most. And, finally, your developers don’t have to code up a lot of fancy material just to prevent PageRank leaks.

Granted, this solution is not universal, and in fact is not quite as clean as the nofollow sculpting process (given the choice, I wish we could back to using nofollow). However, by getting creative and applying this process intelligently (don’t forget about the user!), you can achieve many of the same benefits with very little drawback.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

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#1 – Relative Search Volume from 3 Sources

There are three sources on the web that I’ve found to work best for comparative numbers research. These are:

1. Google Ad-words: Keyword Tool - enter any term or phrase and get back data about both the average search volume and the volume from the previous month.
2. MSN Ad-Center: Research Keywords Tool - you need to be logged in to use this, but the data is solid and shows actual counts.
3. Word-tracker: Keyword Tool - although the numbers Wordtracker shows are frequently less accurate than the two above, they are reasonably decent for estimating comparative search volume. Unfortunately, due to the declining share of Wordtracker’s data sources (the Infospace owned search engines – Metacrawler, Dogpile, DoGreatGood, etc.), niche and long tail term volume estimates can be way off.

Here’s why I don’t use Yahoo!:

From there, rather than build a spreadsheet just showing raw numbers, I like to work in comparative sizes (the real numbers rarely prove accurate anyway). Thus, rather than having a graph of data like this:

I can have one like this:

Note how, in this view, I’m showing the relative volume percentage of the demand for keyword “SEO” made up by “seo services” and “seo tools.” This graph tells me that while Google thinks “seo tools” and “seo services” are tiny fractions of the volume that comes in for the broad term, “SEO,” Microsoft & Wordtracker both say these phrases make up a more substantive percentage. Since keyword targeting is really about choosing one keyword over another and much less about trying to estimate exact traffic, the latter system makes much more sense to me.

#2 – Temporal Fluctuations

When are your queries in highest demand? Knowing the answer can help you predict when competition may ramp up and additional SEO efforts are needed as well as provide insight into your market overall (if demand has been dropping steadily over the last few years, you might want to target some different terms, or even shift product focus). Two sources of data are solid on this front:

#3 – Top Ranking Domains

In order to get a full understanding of the competitive landscape, it’s essential to know who’s ranking for the terms you’re targeting. A basic query is a great start, but I like to append those with a bit of extra data, as I’ve visualized below:

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We’ve heard a lot of speculation lately about the future of rankings – the SERPs are clearly evolving, and what was once a simple list of 10 results has gradually become personalized, localized, and wikified. It begs the question: As the SERPs diversify, do rankings matter as much as they used to? Recently, I had an opportunity to collect some data on this question. Earlier this year, a client suffered a ranking drop for their primary keyword (likely connected to Google’s alleged brand-related changes), which has recently recovered. So, I decided to run some numbers to see how that ranking drop and subsequent recovery affected search traffic.

1. Direct Keyword Traffic

The graph on the left (I) shows the client’s rankings, observed weekly, for their primary keyword over a period of about 7 months. The right-hand graph (II) shows weekly search traffic for that same keyword:

A couple of notes: (1) this is a one-word keyword, (2) it’s relatively common/popular, and (3) rankings over the 7 months fluctuated from 1st to 5th (I’ve inverted the graph to show 1st at the top). I’m a big believer in eyeballing data first, and I think the graphs show some degree of connection between ranking and direct traffic. The visual is a bit more compelling than the correlation (r = -0.31), although there is some relationship. The negative correlation is expected and reflects the fact that a low ranking is better (1 > 5, value-wise).

2. Long-tail Organic Traffic

From a broader SEO standpoint, though, how did the ranking of the client’s most important keyword affect their overall search traffic? I’ve repeated the ranking graph (I) below, but added a graph (III) of weekly traffic from Google organic results over the 7 months:

Here, the relationship seems to fall apart (r = 0.21). Other than a late-summer dip, overall organic traffic from Google actually grew as their primary keyword rankings were falling.

What Does It All Mean?

So, do rankings matter or don’t they? Well, in terms of direct traffic for the specific keyword that suffered the ranking drop, there’s certainly some effect. Studies have shown pretty reliably that search visitors focus (and click) most on the Top 3 results, with #1 getting the lion’s share. Outside of the single-keyword view, though, the situation gets a lot more complex. While the client’s primary keyword is an obvious choice for their industry and is fairly competitive, the traffic for that keyword accounted for only 1.3% of their total organic traffic from Google over the 7 months. If we had chosen to take a very narrow view, and obsessed over their primary keyword, we would have neglected over 98% of their SEO results.

Of course, I’m not saying rankings are irrelevant, just that you need to take a broader view, including:

Tracking diverse, long-tail phrases
Tracking search phrases actually used by visitors (not what you think they use)
Measuring search analytics, such as total traffic from search
While the phrase “long tail” may feel like it’s been beaten to death, the impact of the long tail is becoming more relevant every day. Over the 7 months in this case study, Google visitors used over 250,000 unique phrases to reach the client’s site. Over 80% of those phrases didn’t contain any variation of the primary keyword at all. So, while rankings obviously still matter on a keyword-by-keyword basis, being #1 for your top keyword (or even your top few keywords) is no longer good enough – if that’s all you’re measuring, then you’re missing the big picture.

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1.Be the News

Because news is such an inherently link-worthy content archetype, and one that attracts lots of link attention, I like it as a content strategy. But, while reporting on the news is valuable, making the news is better. If you can “create” – literally craft – the event, media or topic that’s headline worthy, you’re in a very good spot. Being first to break the news doesn’t always get you the scoop on the web (unless you’re already an authority), but being the source does.

2.Aggregate Interesting Data

Does your company have access to proprietary information about a market, a service, a group of people or an event? If so, you’ve got the opportunity to slice and dice that information and present it in ways that will draw the web’s interest. The more compelling your data deconstruction and analysis, and the prettier your visualizations, the more links and attention you’ll earn.

3.Visualize Someone Else’s Data

OK, so you don’t have access to some incredibly cool information source that will bring in the links. Never fear! You don’t need to own the data to earn links and mentions from analysis and visualization. There are literally millions of data sources publicly available on the web, and in many industries, there may even be opportunities to scrape data (legally) or barter/trade/buy data from the organization that does control it.

4.Make Your Niche Social

Even though it may seem that the Web2.0 era is maturing, there’s still a ton of opportunity to create a mouthpiece or UGC platform in arenas that are currently missing them. You don’t need to be the next Digg or Reddit or Facebook for your industry; in fact, you might even benefit from thinking smaller and more niche. What about becoming a catalog of simple votes on issues affecting your world or providing a micro-feedback or rating system for brands, services, companies or people in your ecosystem? The beauty of UGC is that all those people who contribute will be more likely to share your platform once they have – it’s an inherent human trait to want to show off anything you’ve contributed to, and UGC is no different.

5.Host the Controversy

Many brand are afraid of creating controversy for links, and for good reason. But, you don’t need to be the source of controversy to benefit from it. Take two opposing sides in your niche and let them duke it out – on your blog/site. Highlight the different viewpoints without taking sides (or do take sides once it’s over, if you’re willing) and you can become the “media outlet” that earns all the links from the attention others are creating for you.

6.Track Your Ecosphere

Are there dozens of blogs and sites already competing for attention in your space? If so, you might benefit greatly by becoming the signal to noise filter for your industry. Instead of worrying about generating the content, just take what everyone else is saying (either manually or using intelligent, automated collection and filtering system a la Techmeme) and become the single, “best” outlet for what’s being produced. Becoming a leader in the attention filtering space has tremendous opportunity and it’s something I think we’re going to see more and more of in the web’s future.

Any favorite “great content” tactics you like to use to build value?

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One thing that you’ll hear over and over again in the SEO industry is “make sure that you embed SEO in your business”. I know I’ve said it a lot at conferences and in client meetings but what does it actually mean? Well this post is chock full of tips to help you actually embed SEO in your business.

If you don’t have an online business but instead work for an SEO agency then be sure to skip straight to the part where I talk about how to sell SEO services which help your clients embed SEO in their business.

How to Embed SEO in your business…

…if you have an ecommerce website

Make sure you add friendly reminders (otherwise known as calls to action) to link to your site in your thankyou emails. Rand wrote a great post on this over here. (By the way, while googling for that post from Rand I came across this which is also a nice read on order confirmation emails.)
Keep keyphrase research in mind when naming both product categories and products themselves. Things have an annoying habit of ranking for their own name (e.g. wikipedia) and this is also true for the little guys so next time you’re going to release the awesome-o-matic-1200 spend a little time thinking if it might not make more sense to call it the awesome-curtain-rail-o-matic-1200 (assuming you’re selling curtain rails that is….). This can apply to many many different industries, think about which one of these is going to rank better in Google for [hotel in Seattle]; “The Westin Seattle” or “The Mayflower Park”
Last but not least, check out this super-awesome post (that Sam also linked to in his round-up but it’s just so relevant here that I’m linking to it again): Surviving and Thriving as an Ecommerce SEO
…if you have a content website

Motivate your content writers with analytics so that they get excited about writing content which gets lots of pageviews/SEO traffic.Brent is world class at this and has achieved some astonishing results with the Tribune and one of the major things he did was to educate and excite journalists about SEO so that they both understood and craved page views.Brent talks about the process he used in more depth in this amazing interview.

…if you have a physical presence
Engage in the local community. This might not sound like SEO advice but there are plenty of links you can get from local newspapers, local directories and local radio stations if you just play your (seo) cards right.
If you have shops in shopping centres or offices in business parks then get links from their websites. You’d be surprised what has a website these days!

…if you have UGC on your site
Build your systems in such a way that the data inputs from your users structure your data in an SEO friendly way. I might write a blog post on this another time but in a nutshell think about the kinds of subtle ‘nudges’ you can provide your users such as “recommended tags” or “user also tagged this content with …”. These kinds of calls to action can really help your SEO.
Ensure that your community manager (or whoever moderates and engages with your community) understands the importance of linkbuilding and SEO in general. The contacts and relationships that your community manager builds up can be invaluable for spreading linkbait, launching competitions, writing blog posts and getting links!

…if you have a PR agency
Ensure that the PR they’re generating gets you links! Especially since newspaper sites are so dreadful at linking out it’s crucial to educate them about the importance of linking so that the work they’re doing anyway can get you more links.
If your PR agency isn’t focused on getting you links then make sure someone follows up with any places which mention you but don’t link. A classic example of this was when a client of ours recently appeared in the Daily Mail website of the week column – there’s a link there now but when the article was first published there was no link!

…if you are doing PPC or conversion rate optimisation
Don’t leave your PPC or CRO guys locked up in a dark room separate to your SEO team, instead make sure they talk to each other. Your PPC guys will have tons of data about which kinds of headlines work, which search phrases people use as well as which keyphrases convert. Feed that back into your on-site optimisation for higher CTR in the SERPs and nice keyphrase optimisation.
Sweet. Bullet points ftw. But what about if you’re an SEO agency/consultant as I know many of you are? How do you get it into the heads of your clients that they should be integrating SEO into their business?

How to help clients embed SEO in their business as an SEO agency

I can only speak from personal experience at Distilled but we’re constantly looking to improve our processes and systems and here are a few tips that have helped us when managing client projects to aid them in integrating SEO into their whole business.
Allow your SEO team to be agile and flexible in the work they deliver. If you’re selling a specific SEO deliverable it’s often almost impossible ahead of time to understand the impact of the recommendations on the client’s business. When you dig into their site you might find evidence of paid links, or you might find that they license exact copies of their content to other sites to use. The solutions to these problems might not fall directly within the scope of what the client thinks they want, but it’s certainly going to bring benefit to look at and fix them. We’ve found the key to making this work efficiently is regular client contact and quality project management.
Educate your clients. It’s no use delivering a bunch of recommendations if the client doesn’t have the tools, skills or resources to implement them. By educating the client on the WHY of the SEO recommendations you’re making you can help them sell the changes necessary either to their boss internally or to other internal departments.

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#1 – Target Content at Those Who Can Help Spread It

Whether you call them “Sneezers” (Seth Godin), “Connectors” (Malcolm Gladwell) or “Linkerati” (yours truly), there is clearly a subset of individuals on the web who are responsible for helping to push content into the collective consciousness. Making your Mom happy is nice, but it won’t bring the results you desire – if you want links and tweets, you need to go to the source.

Making this crowd appreciate your work requires research. You need to know what they like, what they talk about and what they spread. Having your finger on the pulse of sites like Reddit, Techmeme, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Tweetmeme can provide that insight, but it’s not enough by itself. You’ll want a good few weeks or months of paying careful attention before you can “get the feel” of what the Linkerati have on the brain.

#2 – Reward Those Who Share

People are, by nature, selfish, and the mindset of most bloggers, tweeters and social media junkies is to build up their own network – they want more followers, more attention, a higher ranking – give it to them. Content that makes those who tweet it and link to it seem smarter, funnier, more interesting and more plugged-in than their comrades will bring great success. As you create, think “Would I retweet/blog this if I saw it?” When the answer is an unequivocal “absolutely!”, you’re on the right track.

You can go one step further and directly reward your sharers with trackbacks, tweets to them or even a personal email followup. This can help set the stage for next time, so long as it’s well intentioned & discreet. Twitter is especially good for this, as you might bring that re-tweeter a few extra followers if you tweet @ them.

#3 – Choose a Subject That Readers Can Relate To

If your subject matter is something that readers have experienced or felt, even if (and perhaps especially if) they’ve never put it into words, you’ve got a great opportunity to induce virality. As anyone who’s ever tried linkbaiting before knows, It’s far easier to reach out with content that discusses dating, sex, news, politics, or popular culture than it is to espouse the virtues of frequently replacing your hydraulic pumps for maximum performance.

#4 – Write Exceptionally Well

It’s hard. I know.  Even Ernest Hemingway once famously told F. Scott Fitzgerald:

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

Great writing, though elusive, boosts readership, compels thorough examination of your work and greatly increases virality. Just see what this survey from Vizu had to say on the subject:

When it comes to writing better blog posts, there are far more talented instructors than I – check out Brian Clark’s Ultimate Blogger Writing Guide.

#5 – Author an Attention-Grabbing Title

The title of your post can make or break its success in the viral process. While a short, compelling title that raises eyebrows and sparks interest will bring troves of visitors to investigate, a boring, flaccid headline can sink a piece faster than Digg’s bury brigade. Darren has four key elements every title must achieve:

Simplify
Communicate
Employ Keywords
Grab Attention
That’s the perfect combination not just for everyday blogging, but for crafting your “pitch” to the social web, and make no mistake, your title will appear in tweets and feeds and bloated social news lists without context or character, so the headline needs to stand on its own. Another good resource to embrace is Brian Clark’s “How to Write Headlines that Work.”

#6 – Use Illustrations/Graphics Above the Fold

Graphics are fantastic opportunities to keep those busy, attention-deprived, glance-and-go visitors on your site just a few seconds longer, and that’s often all it takes to hook them. A common mistake, however, is to place your eye-catching comic or cleverly laid out diagram a scroll or two away. Don’t do it – get that first graphic top of page and top of mind. Just don’t think that a stock photo or bland image is going to be enough – you want something that enhances the content, tells a story and entices visitors to read the rest of your piece.

#7 – Don’t Just Present Information; Spark a Discussion

Active social web users browse a lot of content on a daily basis, and sometimes, even if your blog post is phenomenally interesting or useful, it will be passed up as a potential link target because you haven’t created an incentive for other bloggers and tweeters. Interesting is great, but controversial content – that which demands a response and interaction – can often achieve even greater success.

#8 – Use Bullet Points & Short Paragraphs

This is a simple one – use formats that get parsed easily and quickly on the web. Leave the long paragraphs to your creative writing classes. Bullet points, numbered lists and short, punchy sentences are excellent for both usability & shareability. You’re reading this, aren’t you?

#9 – Don’t Make the Post Too Long (Unless…)

Easy to read typically means short and digestible. However, it can sometimes pay to be exhaustive. Just look at the success of posts like Danny Sullivan’s recent deep analysis of URL Shortening Services or Aaron Wall’s 101 Link Building Tips. The rule here is be as short as you can be without omitting critical information that adds value for your readers.

#10 – Get Your Social Media Comrades to Seed the Story

Generally, it’s unwise to submit your own posts to Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, etc. but there’s nothing that says you shouldn’t have a trusted friend do it for you. This is a wise practice because, particularly if you expect to have a blog post go “viral,” you want to control how the submission is crafted. The right title and description can make or break your success. This is also true with Twitter – blow your own horn and you’re a selfish bastard, but retweet someone else’s kind mention and you’re just spreading the word.

#11 – Publish at an Ideal Time

Dan Zarella did some excellent research into when to Tweet and request Retweets:

#12 – Do Your Keyword Research

There’s no reason not to use a simple keyword research tool like Google’s to check if the title/description and keywords you’re including could use a bit of tweaking. Not only is this good for future traffic from search engine referrals (and with the fresh content boost, it can bring instant visibility and even help spawn a viral campaign), it’s also useful to find out how web users think about your subject matter.

#13 – Reference Blogs & Sites You Want to Link to You

If you’re getting lots of traffic, you’re almost certainly inspiring lots of clicks from your content out to the pages you’ve listed in your post. Employ strategically and recognize that if a fellow blogger or site owner starts seeing referral traffic spike, they’re likely to at least read your reference about them, and oftentimes provide a link (or at least a tweet). The obsession with social recognition and reputation monitoring is real – use it to your advantage.

#14 – Keep Your URL Short

Short URLs are easier to:

copy & paste
link to
tweet
share via email
If you have to go long, do what smart bloggers targeting Twitter have started doing and provide a shortened version of the URL right in the post.

#15 – Be Non-Commercial

Social media addicts despise ads, overlays and obtrusive commercial messages. They also hate being manipulated into linking to a site/brand they don’t support. You can fight this by removing your more obstructive advertising, refraining from using affiliate links and completely rejecting commercial messaging in the body of your post. Yes, you’re building a business on your blog and you need the income, but now isn’t the time – attract first, market to later.

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