Yesterday we had another great webinar over at the LunchTime MasterMind. If you are intereseted in listening to an audio recap – head on over to check out SEO For Small Businesses.

Here are the slides we used for the webinar

If you have any questions – jump into the forums or comments to let us know!

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We have teamed up with our internet business podcast parter Doug Mitchell to bring you a Free Small Business SEO webinar…

We’ll be covering everything you need to do to start optimizing your business for search – organic, mobile and social – by creating good content and optimizing your website.

Would you like to join us? Sign Up Here

It’s next Wednesday, March 24 at 12:00 Noon Central Time

Sign Up Now

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1. It’s a LOT of hard work
2. It takes months and years to yield results
3. There are no guarantees (so don’t fall for that from an “SEO” consultant)
4. It’s always changing
5. SEO projects never end – they are iterative -> implement, analyze, repeat

Got anything to add? Leave a comment or jump into the forums!

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A couple of weeks ago we shared with you how comment spam hurts SEO…

We also shared with you that our WordPress sites got hacked because we failed to update the site in time to block some vulnerabilities…

Because of both of these problems – comment spam and getting hacked – the #1 keyword on this very site became “levitra”. Scrolling down, #15 is “viagra”. In case you are wondering – this is not good.

This is a huge problem we’ve since cleaned up and we want to pass on some advice to you on dealing with spam and security.

1. Whatever platform you use – make sure you are running the latest version and take security seriously. If you are using WordPress, start here to learn how to take care of it…

2. As much as it completely sucks to deal with comment spam – deal with it and figure out a system to stop it.

3. Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools NOW. Not only did GWT alert me of malicious content on my site (from getting hacked) it also told me “levitra” and “viagra” were high significant keywords on my site – obviously sounding off a huge alarm pointing at comment spam.

Do you have any questions on dealing with this? Let us know in the forums, @webstrategyshop, or via comment here. You don’t want this to happen to you.

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Google says comment spam may hurt your search engine rankings and offers this advice to avoid spam on your WordPress site…

• Disallow anonymous posting.
• Use CAPTCHAs and other methods to prevent automated comment spamming.
• Turn on comment moderation.
• Use the “nofollow” attribute for links in the comment field.
• Disallow hyperlinks in comments.
• Block comment pages using robots.txt or meta tags.

They also offer some other great advice which we often say here… Most times having a great content strategy is the best SEO technique…

FACT: Having original and useful content and making your site search engine friendly is the best strategy for better ranking. With an appealing site, you’ll be recognized by the web community as a reliable source and links to your site will build naturally.

via Google – Hard facts about comment spam

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These charts from SEOMoz are based on research from Bill Tancer of Hitwise called “Sizing Up The Long Tail Of Search”. The basic idea is that the long tail of search generates exponentially more traffic than the most popular keyword phrases out there. From Bill’s research…

• Top 100 terms: 5.7% of the all search traffic
• Top 500 terms: 8.9% of the all search traffic
• Top 1,000 terms: 10.6% of the all search traffic
• Top 10,000 terms: 18.5% of the all search traffic

This means if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search terms across all search engines (which is impossible), you’d still be missing out on 89.4% of all search traffic. There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend. To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.

Does that make sense? The basic idea is that more people search for obscure, multi-keyword phrases than they do popular keywords. This has a lot to do with search users becoming smarter over the years to where most people search by phrase rather than by keyword – because they’ve been trained this behavior narrows results.

What does this mean for your business? Well you should start targeting long phrase, long tail keywords in both your content and SEO strategies. Using this method you can target multiple long tail keywords and still have a better chance at generating more traffic than optimizing for a single, popular keyword.

Here’s an example… A couple weeks ago I was talking to my good friend TJ about optimizing his e-commerice site RIPTApparel (cool t-shirts by the way). We were discussing keyword targeting. My advice was to quit targeting the keyword “t-shirt” and start targeting long tail, multiple word keywords such as “cool graphic tees” and “limited edition t-shirts”. Not only do you increase your chances of being found by targeting the long tail – there is much less competition for those terms in both organic and paid search results.

So if you find that you aren’t “being found” online, try some long tail and localized keyword targeting to increase your chances… Look at the keywords coming through in your web analytics to see what long tail keywords people are using to find you and start optimizing for those. And if you have any questions at all on targeting keywords – jump into the forums and ask away!

Charts via SEOmoz | Illustrating the Long Tail.

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We’ve talked about using Google Local Business dashboard before but here’s a quick overview in case you have yet to use it. Not only does this give you a huge advantage in local SEO – it helps you manage your business online.

Official Google Blog: The Local Business Center dashboard opens its doors.

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Last week WordStream released a free keyword tool called “The Free Keyword Tool” (great branding) that is extremely simple to use and we recommend checking it out for your initial round of keyword research.

Click To Enlarge

This is one of the most self-explanatory keyword research tools out there and is simple enough for a n00b to jump into.

Step 1: go to http://www.wordstream.com/keywords/

Step 2: enter your keyword phrases, one per line

Step 3: click “Submit Keywords”

After you submit your keywords the tool will show you potentially related keywords that you can add into the results. The results themselves are are ordered by relative volume – which is an estimate on how often people search for that keyword – it’s popularity.

Higher relative volume can be both good and bad. The higher the volume the more people are searching for it = good. But with high volume searches comes more competition in both organic rankings and PPC bidding = bad.

Using this tool you can get an idea on how to better write for SEO and which keywords you should start targeting in your PPC campaigns.

Want to know more about keyword research and PPC? Check out this episode of our internet business podcast.

Do you have any questions on this keyword tool or keyword research in general? Something you would like to add? Let us know in the comments or jump into the forums!

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Over the couple years I have gotten really good at writing for SEO. What’s this mean? It means that when I write a blog post I always have SEO on the back of my mind. How will this post become findable? What are the best keywords to use? What’s a good headline to bring in people from our content outposts? Here are 3 tips that helped me get started writing for SEO.

1. Think About Search

This is the most valuable tip but yet the most basic. When writing a new post, think about what you would search for to find the post you are writing. Condense that to 4 or five words if possible and use that as your post title.

2. Use Keywords

Not only should you sprinkle the keywords you are targeting within your post, use them in your meta data too! Use your keywords in tags, and most importantly for your meta data using an SEO plugin or something similar.  Some SEO’s will say to use a different Page Title than your on page header. In this case you can override the page title using your SEO plugin. This is done because you can target two keyword phrases for two of the highest ranking on page SEO factors.

You should take advantage of a killer plugin from our friends at WordTracker to help you figure out the best keywords to target while your writing your post. This is a firefox extension that you can pop open while you are blogging to help you figure out the best keywords to target. Download it here.

3. Don’t Forget Descriptions

In the world of content outposts descriptions become even more important. Often times the excerpt or meta description travel farther than just your site but to your content outposts as well. The excerpt and meta description travel in your RSS feed and are used by content outposts and aggregators as descriptive text along with the link back to the original blog post. This is important for two reasons.

First, it helps your content outposts to rank in search results. This is important because it creates a scenario where you can rank multiple items on the first page of results for your targeted keyword. Secondly your descriptions help people that are active in your content outposts determine whether or not they will click through to read the full posts. This is also very important.

What tips do you have? Let us know in the comments or jump over to the forum!

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What affect will Google Caffeine have on your website?

Matt Cutts, from Google, explains…

How much of an impact will Caffeine have on results? Matt says there will, hopefully, not be a big difference. Google will integrate Caffeine slowly and take user feedback into consideration.

Matt says, “If we push forward as fast as we can, double down on innovation and try to do the best that we can, [and] do the right thing for users, everything else will work out.”

The crew at WebProNews talks to Matt…

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