Judge a (web) Page By It’s Title?

The TITLE tag is one of the most important part of any webpage. That is what tells your browser to put up at the top of the screen between the BluE and ‘- Internet Explorer’ or the Firefox logo and ‘-Mozilla Firefox’ or after the compass in Apple Safari . It is even in a distinct color from the rest of the browser.  This is what gets listed in the tabs of your browser to help your visitor get back to your site while switching between the others sites competing for your attention. The TITLE tag is also a trusted part of what Google determines your webpage is about.

But most importantly, this is the underlined, Bold and Blue text that shows up in Google’s’ results page (SERP) – This is where you get to 1st sell your potiential visitor that they need to click on the link and come visit YOU!  This text is your best chance to get a person to decide what that your site will meet their desires better then the 9 or 99 other pages listed next to it. This is where if you fail, it is pretty clear it is your fault for not meeting the needs of your potiental visitor.

So how to get your potential visitor to choose you?

1. Don’t waste it.  Don’t use ‘generic’ titles that are written from the perspective of the website – Home, About, Contact. There are 4.2, 4.1, 2.6 Billion pages you are competing against respectively compared to 436 Million for Fire, or 126 Million for Pizza (95% easier to rank at the top of).
2. Don’t be too specific. If people are searching for your business name – ‘Smith’s Itailan Bar and Grill’, then use that. But usually they are not, they are searching for a restaurant.  You potential customer probably does not know he is looking for you specifically, but what solution as a good or service that you provide. List that good or service from the customers perspective. If they know your restaurant’s name, they are a different kind of prospect. They deserve a separate page with ‘their’ own Title. That may well be the ‘Contact page’.
3. Don’t be too general, there are 327 Million restaurants sites listed on Google. Of course they are all over the world, and all types of quality and cost. Some of the sites are not even about specific restaurants, but related to restaurants – including goods and services for restaurants. If your customers are looking for you, they won’t be looking for your vendors selling your restaurant cleaning supplies. Typically this is where you want to get geographical – Naperville Restaurant limits the selection to 1.7 million pages. Again, another reduction by 95% in competition. But you may need to limit yourself down some more – Naperville Pizza Restaurant – cuts the pages down to 63,000 – again cutting your competition by another 95%. Balancing 2 and 3 can be a challenge – the key is to look at how your visitor will look for you. The perspective is from your visitor’s search box, not from your business or web design
4. Sell your site.  This is where the advertising industry earned their living for decades. How to write quick headlines that attracted you to read their ad further, in a short compelling fashion. If you had the following titles which would you click on:

• Joe’s Bar And Grill, Downers Grove
• Downers Grove’s restaurant for dining-Joe’s Bar and Grill
• Downers Grove’s best restaurant for casual dining-Joe’s Bar and Grill with nightly chicken dinner specials ranked by Zagat’s review

The third one tells a story like any good headline should, while at the same time giving the search engine the information it needs to place it well for your visitors search terms on Google.

Now that you are on the right track on how to craft a TITLE tag, perform some searches from a visitors perspective for your site. Look at the different Titles and see what catches your eye as well as what communicates that the page is what you are looking for. Search similar topics on Google and Bing to see how effective Title tags are constructed.  Take some time to learn what is most effective at drawing you to click on a link. This will help you learn how others are looking at your Title tag.

When you are crafting your Title tag, take some time and even consider soliciting some feedback as to what best attracts someone to your site.

Once you have crafted your Title tag to meet these criteria, consider testing – try different titles every 2-4 weeks and see what creates the most traffic based on your Google Analytics (free) or whatever tool you use to track your sites traffic.

How did you craft your Title tags and what did you learn along the way?

Quick list of SEO tips

In browsing around I ran across a quick list of SEO Tips – 5 SEO Tips For Bloggers

As with most good tips they are focused on -

1. Making it easy for humans to read and understand your ideas (quickly).
2. Making it easy for Google and Bing to understand what is important (oh, and for humans to understand what is important)
3. Be unique to your own voice.

These tips are geared for blogging in particular, but can be very useful for a traditional website. In fact, the advice is probably best applied to normal websites since ‘normal blogging’ will more naturally use these styles compared to most website authors who want to get ’stilted’ in their prose rather than focusing on clear communication with an honest voice.

I had not read Aaron’s book before, but I have seen his material elsewhere (or at least his logo) and it stands out as worthy of study.

What is the best tool for creating Keywords?

One of the steps in a good search engine optimization strategy is to create a list of keyword phrases to focus on. While it might seem you want to rank well in everything, it actually can generate a lot of waste (you really don’t want someone calling you who is not a real prospect).  Additionally, it is impossible to rank well in everything. So the next step is to determine what you do want to rank well in.  How to determine your list of keyword phrases? Read Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” which discusses focusing on more complete phrases rather than a single keyword.  There are a lot of articles that explore that in depth, but in the world of automation, computers can be a great help.

It is not the best, but certainly the place to start – Google’s keyword tool. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool – it’s integration into itself for knowing what to really focus on, and use for and AdWord campaigns make it a logical 1st stop for most. Of course, for many clients the price is also useful – FREE.

Another tool that has been around since the last millennium is Wordtracker – they have a free 7 day trial. I have used them on and off over the years, and have not been disappointed.

This still requires you to come up with some initial phrases and if you miss entire areas, the tool may not recommend them.  For example, if do not mention any geography in your phrases, more than likely the tools won’t. If you only use industry jargon, then it may not recommend lay versions of the term. So be sensitive to how your audience will be looking for you. Not how you would look for yourself.  As always it is about the customer not about you.

What tools have you used and tried?

Google continuing to grow

I just heard that Google has reclaimed its marketshare that Bing lost while Microsoft was spending tons to launch its new revamping of its search engine.

It seems that many people checked out Bing and decided to stick with Google. Keep this in mind as you dedicate your resources on optimizing your sites for the search engines.

How Do I Get Bad Stories About Me Off Google? Part 3

Continuing on with our list of ways to improve your search results from Part 2 of How Do I Get Bad Stories About Me Off Google:

• Consider posting on Answers.yahoo.com. When you write a post and sign your name to it, you increase the number of positive results associated with you. You can also add a link to your website or blog, which also increases the number of positive returns and gives you a better ranking.
• Consider posting on askville.amazon.com
• Consider posting on Directories
  • Justia.com
  • Yellow pages – There are many of them
  • Superpages.com
  • Local.google.com – you can post your Regis or HQ addresses as additional locations for your business if you have temporary office space.
• Consider posting on:
  • Encyclopedia.com
  • Answers.com
  • Dictionary.com
• Try to get your alumni or other .EDU to link to your site and to post your biography.
• Post videos of yourself
  • YouTube.com
  • Google.com
  • Yahoo.com
• Create books and self-publish on Amazon.com
• Post reviews with your name on Amazon.com
• Post your information on ZoomInfo.com and set to public
• Post your information on Classmates.com and set to public
• Post your information on MySpace.com and set to public
• Put different content on each location – do NOT just copy and paste- customize to some extent. Google will penalize you and your sites for cloning information.
• Don’t just repost content
• Link to different spots, not all the same.  Links can be to different pages on your blog(s), good articles or other positive content.
• Link to what is linking to other good content.  In other words, if Sue’s blog has links to the positive articles about you, then link to Sue’s blog, especially her article that has links to the articles about you.
• Ask others for links to you and your good sites.
  • Create a template email. Ideally you would give a phone call before hand to explain the situation.
  • Ask others to visit the good links, especially from Google searches
  • Ask that they add content (comments) and links to your site.
• Set up a Twitter account to allow for more posting
• Set your home page to Google with the search of keyword phrase set. Then open tabs of the ‘good’ links on a regular basis.
• Create SlideDecks of information with links and reference to yourself.
• Create PodCasts with information about yourself
• Create a resources page on your website – link to other articles
  • Safe ‘free’ resources
  • How to choose a firm in your industry
  • When to use your profession
• Post Articles on others sites with your name and links back to your site - http://help.helium.com/earn-money-helium
• Consider outsourcing parts of this to virtual assistant or e-lance. You may also want to consider a virtual business manager to most effectively manage a project like this.
• There are tools for monitoring your reputation.  These range from free to high-cost.  The more they can do automatically, the less they will be able to foresee the place that you did not expect to have an issue.
• Google alerts is a great place to start – set up alerts to let you know when ever your search keyword phrases show up in Google’s search engine.  You can also set up customized news pages that provide all the occurrences of your keyword phrases as well. These are easy to do, but look to find someone who knows how to look at the situation with fairly objective views, to get all the different variations of the keyword phrases that may be in use.

You can also use Google news as a feed for your website to keep your content fresh. But of course be aware, this may post good and bad.

• http://www.theappgap.com/top-web-reputation-tracking-providers-from-mashable.html
• http://mashable.com/2008/12/29/brand-reputation-monitoring-tools/
• http://www.internet-reputation-management.com/?gclid=CIakxp69-5sCFSIhDQod4VeH-A

So there you have it, lots of different ways to get bad Google stories about you off the top of the list in search returns.  No one stop shop for free, but a list of specific steps to get results.

Have you ever had a search engine reputation issue? What did you do about it?

Different Search Engines give Different Results

The number of search engine results can vary depending on the search engine that you use. One would think that a search is a search, and you would get the same number of results no matter which search engine that you use. I found this to be untrue. When putting in a search for ‘about’ (as in the ‘about page’ on a website), Google returned 9 billion in Firefox, while Safari only returned 600 million.

This is something to consider when you are either doing a search yourself, and when you are trying to optimize your site for better ranking. You need to be clear on whose rankings you are going after.

While Google remains the dominent player in the search engine market, it is only about 70% of the market – so just a quick note that not everyone sees the same results when doing a search.

How Do I Get Bad Stories About Me Off Google? Part 2

Continuing on with our discussion from Part 1 of How Do I Get Bad Stories About Me Off Google…

Google will also change it results based on what it learns about the web. That is changing second by second as its ‘bots (computer programs running day and night reading and analyzing website pages) return each second with new information. Those ‘bots are busy looking at:

• What sites are out there,
• what sites do they link to,
• what sites are most popular
• how the pages are optimized?

Search Engine Reputation Management

So what to do?  Here is a starter list of steps for improving your search engine reputation:

• Get your story out there – create a website and promote it on the search engines. Like any website, you need to follow the basics –
  • Buy the domain name for at least 2 years – get your full name as the domain name or whatever keyword phrase is causing you the most grief. The reason for buying your name as a domain name is that if someone is writing a negative story about Ebenezer Pumpkin, (which is your name), then when someone else puts in a Google search for Ebenezer Pumpkin, they are directed first to your website, not the negative press story. The reasoning for buying a domain name for keyword phrases is the same. Consider getting a few domains based on your top keyword phrases. Ideally, you want to have the websites active, and not just by the domain name and lock it up. The more active a website is, the better it is for search returns. When you buy and lock up the names for the websites, you do actually have to do something with them, not just let them sit there unused.
  • Fill out your meta tags especially the ‘description’ – make sure your name and top keyword phrase is in the description. If you can not edit the code directly (such as if you are using a site template that generates your site, look for a place to create a description.
  • Put effort into the 1^st 70 characters of the ‘Title’ tag – again include your name and primary keyword phrase.
  • Use header tags in your content (H1, H2, H3) to alert Google what is really important about your content.

• Put your photos and images on the site with ALT tags.  The reason this is important is that Google searches for things in different ways. Google searches by video and picture in a different program, so its important to cover that base as well. The more you can get your name out there referenced in a positive way, the better off you are. These ALT tags need to have your name in them.  Google has a separate search engine just for images. This is your opportunity to directly ‘feed’ it what it is looking for.  These should also have your name in them as part of the file name.  In other words not picture1.jpg but barackobamastanding.jpg or johnmccainmad.jpg If your site creation or your abilities allow, create captions that match the images and the ALT tags.

This lets you more easily dominate one whole search engine aspect (images) which is often one of the key links on ‘normal’ text links.  But it also lets you ‘prove’ your content on another part of Google’s search.

• Visit your content from the search terms in Google.  Google looks at what you (and everyone else) visits when you put searches into the search. If you visit your results, then it feels that those results were relevant to the search terms you entered. If your friends do the same, all the better. Do an intentional search on your website to see what it pulls up. Google does keep track of the number of times you do this, so you can’t use it forever to drive up your search engine results.
• Create a WordPress blog about something you are passionate about.  Plan on creating at least 10 entries – they don’t have to be long treatises; plan on 400-800 words each.  Make sure you put your name, and post some more photos. Make sure it is good content. Don’t just put up garbage, or things you’re not interested in, just to have content up on a blog.
• Make a list of all the search keyword phrases that you are trying to shift your image. This list may be as short as 5-10, but probably should be as long as 50-100.  Do a search on the terms You can use Google keyword phrase generator and many other tools as discussed in other posts. This is where you can keep an eye out for the hidden spots that you are gaining a reputation that you do not desire.
• You can also considering having free cartoon versions of your image made for free at befunky.com – the key is to create different images of you that are well indexed by Google.  Rather than just having one photo of yourself on your site copied across all the pages, have different photos of yourself, with ALT tags on them, so that Google will pick up your name more often, and in a good sense. You can repurpose a photo and have it made into a cartoon version of you, rather than just having different regular photos of yourself. Google will think its a different photo of you, even if  you see it as the same photo of you, just in cartoon form.  Also post these on your other sites -
• Create accounts on the social networking sites – you may want to be conservative in how much others are allowed to post content related to you, but you can use this to put your version of the story.  If you limit the responses that others can make, you can control to some degree your image.  Most of these are not create and forget types of efforts. You will need to keep adding content to the accounts to show they are active.  Again you can use your images here as well links to positive stories.
  • Facebook
  • Linkedin
  • Myspace
  • Zoominfo
  • Plaxo
• Post content on a regular basis on sites with links to your site.
• Post content on Craigslist with your keyword terms. Even though Craigslist is primarily a classified  ad market, you can also post a message about yourself, your services and jobs. This is shorter term, and will probably need to be reposted every couple of weeks as Craigslist takes down the ads after a couple of weeks.
  • You can use tools to make reposting easier such as Craigslist Bot Pro – I have not personally used this yet, but have read many good things about it.
• Ask your network to social bookmark your preferred sites and stories. This includes sites like digg.com, Mixx, delicious, reddit, metafilter. This lets others see your ‘good’ content over the ‘bad’ content, as well as letting Google know your ‘good’ content is better then the ‘bad’ content.
• Write press releases and submit to PRNEWSWIRE and other newswire services. These are great sites as far as reputation with Google and other search engines.  Of course these need to be properly written to include your keyword phrases and related phrases frequently throughout the release. Include links back to yourself at least 2 times.
• Review your content for your keyword phrases and related terms.  If you are not being explicit in your descriptions, don’t expect Google to know what you are thinking and where you want to be ranked as well.
• Consider tools for managing your efforts – WebPosition is one that I have used over 12 years. Many of its best strengths are no longer relevant but, it can still be helpful for a variety of tasks.
• Optimize your website including creating a page specific for the keyword phrase.
• Link to good articles ranked rather than bad articles. You want to make sure that when you do a Google search, the number of good articles and references about you comes up higher in the results list than the number of bad items.
• Create a personal link for your Facebook page
• Create a Wikipedia page – Be careful with this. Be ready to manage this page. It is open to anyone to edit, and there are people who put many hours towards making sure all discussions are complete, as well as balanced.  You may need manage the updates on an ongoing basis.  Ignoring this option of course does not prevent someone else creating a negative page about you.  So at least start thinking what you would want on your Wikipedia page. In the meantime look to see if you are listed anywhere on the site as well.  Also look how other biography pages are formatted and what is listed.
• Create a (at least one) blog. You can create multiple blogs on each site about different topics.
  • Create on
    • WordPress
    • Typepad
    • blogspot
  • Use tags on your different postings
  • Use categories in your postings
  • Link to individual pages from posts or comments on other sites. These links improve the reputation of your content, by linking to your site.
  • Link to other pages that you like from posts on other sites.
  • Link to ‘good’ articles that are ranking well on Google about your reputation.
  • Link to other social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace especially your personalized URL.
  • Keep updating your content. Google assumes newer content is ‘better’ and more relevant then older content. Sites that are updated regularly are more relevant to ‘stale’ sites. This becomes key when going against news sites that continue to update on other pages, even though your ‘bad’ pages may never change.
  • Consider using RSS feeds to auto update your blog or website.

To be continued in Part 3 of How Do I Get Bad Stories About Me Off Google…

How Do I Get Bad Stories About Me Off Of Google, Part 1 of 3

Search Engine Reputation Management or SERM

A client who had some smear stories written about him, recently asked – how do I get bad stories about me off of Google? Or more accurately, when someone else has written a story about you online which presents you in a negative light, how do you get that story pushed further down in the return results of a Google search? You want to preserve your good online reputation. You want your reputation online to be as positive as possible. When someone does a Google search on you, you want favorable stories and results which put you in a good light. And when someone writes and posts a story about you, right or wrong, accurate information or made up, inaccurate fabrications, those stories come up in a Google search. You can’t control what others write about you. So when they write about you and it is negative, what do you do, and how do you get your good reputation back?

Rather than fight the story at the source, and demand a retraction, it is easier and better just to optimize your site for searches. By going to the original source which wrote the negative story and asking them to remove or retract their story – you risk waking the ‘ sleeping giant’. That could backfire on you and create even worse press for you. The other possibility is there is more than one negative story about you, so you would end up chasing way too many people to get them to take their stories off, which they may not. It would be far more effective for you to ignore  the source, and manage the search return results a different way.

As it turned out, my client was a lightning rod of feelings – Good and Bad.  And while the saying all press is good press, in his case, it was not working to his benefit. It was costing him jobs and he seemed to have this other issue – the truth and wanting others to see the truth over the lies.

With that in mind, I figured I would outline how to improve your online reputation.

• This area of Internet presence management is labeled Search Engine Reputation Management or SERM. It is a subset of SEO, and contains many skills – including an understanding of crisis management.  Many of the solutions will not be quick, like much of SEO – but results will vary, like your mileage and situation.
• Understand that Google results change – 1^st of all not everyone gets the same results at the same minute.  Two different people can do a Google search at the same time, using the same search words, and one person will have the same entry ranked higher than the other search return will give the other person. One person can have ‘peas’ returned as the third listing, while another person can have ‘peas’ returned as item number 5, using the very same search words. Google is trying to improve the results for everyone.  So it will create different results based on what you have searched before and what is in your other Google account including:
  • Gmail – Google will try to customize your search results based on what is in your GMail emails,
  • Customized news on Google News – If you follow Cricket over Candian Football, your search results will lean that way as well. Follow McCain over Clinton – your results are different.
  • Google Docs – What you store helps Google understand what you are focused on.
  • Google alerts
  • YouTube – Also owned by Google, so watch Oberman clips more then Beck or Cute Kitties – your results also reflect the shift.
  • Previous Google searches

This assumes of course, that you have a Google account, which not everyone does. Using  a Google account can be to your benefit, because Google keeps track of what you have searched for, what you have looked at in the returned results, how long you were there, and what you did from there. It keeps track of this, so that when you do another search, it in effect thinks, well, they were interested in x before, so based on that, I will return things more likely to be like x, since that is what they seem to be interested in.

You can choose to have it optimize its results for you on your Google account.

Follow the discussion on Part 2 of How Do I Get Bad Stories About Me Off Google…

Google Image Searches

Another way to rank your site and push it up is to have photo and image content on your site and pages. Using ALT tags on your photos can get your name (or the name you want to push up) noticed more.  The more you have text, captions, ALT tags and file names that match your name, the better chance Google will interpret your images as being about you.

Its helpful to do a Google image search and see what kind of images come up. Some of them may be rather unexpected and not related to you at all. Or maybe remotely related to you. I did an image search recently, and someone else’s photo came up under a search of my name. Different gender and all. So its a good idea to check and see what will come up for you when you search. You may need to address it or not, but at least you will know what is being pulled up and associated with you and your site.

Of course if your photo is used in more places that have your name, the more likely the image will have your name in it.

Neuro Web Design

What is Neuro Web Design? And why is is so important?

Neuro Web Design is based on a book written by Dr. Susan Weinschenk. In an interview of Dr. Weinschenk by Joe Vitale, they discussed what makes people click. You can also see Dr. Weinschenk’s work on her website, http://neurowebbook.com/

The parts of your brain – did you know you have 3 parts?

Most people design their websites based on logic and rational thinking. This is important, but its only part of the equation. The brain is made up of 3 parts, the old brain, the middle brain and the new brain. And all 3 must be engaged and addressed for a website to really work well.

The new brain focuses on what we say, how to clearly say it, and the organization bar in the designing of the webpage. This is good as far as it goes, but it won’t get people to do what you want.

The old brain is concerned with 3 questions, Can I eat it, Can I have sex with it, and Will it kill me? One of the more powerful things the old brain is concerned with is the fear of losing something. That fear is more powerful even than the fear of not having something. This is why ‘free’ on a website is so powerful. If it’s free, the brain isn’t concerned about losing it. That’s why its better to have free on the website, instead of buy one get the second for half off.

The middle brain is the emotional involvement. It is really important to get the emotional involvement. When the emotions are aroused, and this can mean any emotion, from fear, sadness, excitement and joy, the brain remembers things more. To get your reader on your page to do something,  get their emotions involved.

This also engages a feeling of trust, the feeling of safety and security. They will want to come back to your site more if they trust you.

The old and middle brains run more on an unconscious level. This is not a bad thing, but something to be aware of. The brain receives 11 million bits of sensory data coming in at a time, but can only process 40 at a time. You don’t need to be consciously aware of all 11 million, but you do need to be aware of them on some level. The unconscious mind is very powerful. In fact, most of the mental processing is done on an unconscious level. This has been determined by FMRIs, or Functional MRIs.

Stories engage the brain more than facts and figures do, so if you want to engage someone, tell them a story. The word ‘you’ is also very powerful in engaging people. Stories with basic archetypes are powerful, rite of passage, the hero story, rags to riches stories.

Limiting choices is also a better way to sell. People want more choices, but if they have too many choices, then they won’t buy. A study was done in a grocery store where they had 6 different jars of jam on one table, and 24 jars on another table. On the table with 6 jars, 40% of the people stopped by. On the table with 24 jars, 60% of the people stopped by. But, and here is the key, at the 24 jar table, only 3% of the people bought. At the 6 jar table, 30% of the people bought.

To summarize what you need to do to get someone to do what you want them to do on your webpage:

• First be very clear on each page what it is you want them to do, click this button, buy that product, etc.
• Then use the more powerful ways to get people to do what you want on the webpage, tell a  story, use old brain triggers, (sex, food, danger, fear of loss, free).
• Don’t have too many choices.
• Limit the length of text on the page. Don’t write in big long blocks of text.
• Give them something before you ask for something. (Give them good content before you ask for their name and email information).  If they have to give you something first, they are not indebted to you, and don’t feel any obligation to give you anything. But if you give them good content first, then they will want to reciprocate and give you something back.

When you engage all 3 parts of the brain of your visitors brain, you will be more likely to get them to do what you want them to do. And when you do, they will come to your site, do what you want them to do, which will let the search engines know that this is a really important site, and it will rank higher.